in other news

Indomitable hunts those damned mounseers all the way to Brooklyn: Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne Billy Budd drops anchor on Lafayette Ave for four performances only (!) in February.

Closer to now, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music students tackle Werther, with live videocasts tomorrow (Oct 25) and Saturday (Oct 26) at 8pm here.

Oh hey, a Mahler 2! The Boston Symphony with Camilla Tilling and Sarah Connolly, from a couple of weeks ago (audio only):

Guardian @ Glyndebourne 2013

The Guardian has posted its Glyndebourne video webcasting schedule here. Three previously recorded, three live, all starting with Ariadne auf Naxos live on June 4. As in previous summers, performances are archived for a week for those of us with lives / day jobs / problematic time zones.

dueling

Just a quick post to point out that if you can imagine nothing more fabulous than listening to Don Giovanni all day long, today's your day!  You have the Met's, at noon ET, with

Conductor: Andrew Davis
Donna Anna: Marina Rebeka
Donna Elvira: Ellie Dehn
Zerlina: Isabel Leonard
Don Ottavio: Matthew Polenzani
Don Giovanni: Gerald Finley
Leporello: Bryn Terfel
Masetto: Shenyang
The Commendatore: James Morris

and then, barring Met technical calamity, a reasonable supper break,

and then at 6pm(-ish) ET via NPR World of Opera, La Scala's season opener DG, with

Daniel Barenboim, conductor
Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni); Anna Netrebko (Donna Anna); Barbara Frittoli (Donna Elvira); Bryn Terfel (Leporello); Giuseppe Filianoti (Don Ottavio); Anna Prohaska (Zerlina); Stefan Kocan (Masetto); Kwangchul Youn (Commendatore)

Thank you, operacast.com.

how fleeting is the pleasure

The things we did we'd do again:

Pelleas & Melisande @ MET: Having a soft spot for insane polymaths, I suppose I'm one of those people who tend to like Jonathan Miller productions, even in their variability. And I love this production. And I loved this cast.

Diary of a Madman @ BAM: Geoffrey Rush in anything, and this was quite something.

King Lear @ BAM: Under Michael Grandage's direction, and done the Donmar way, which is to say as bare-bones as possible and still have sets and costumes. Derek Jacobi was all the focus but Ron Cook's Fool was the first one I've seen that ever made sense, and that alone was worth the trek.

Niobe @ BEMF Boston: Philippe Jaroussky and Amanda Forsythe, an insanely complicated plot, feather volcano hats, Beethoven Medusa shields and, I've said it before but I'll say it again, sparkly glow-swords. Every production should have them.

Acis & Galatea @ BEMF Great Barrington: The conceit is a masque at Cannons, the forty million dollar trophy mansion of Handel's patron the Duke of Chandos, and Handel has shown up with his librettist homies to put on a show. Duke and Duchess get to play the leads. John Gay gets to be the Monster Polypheme. Poor Handel gets to be Damon and sing "How fleeting is the pleasure that flatters our hopes in pursuit of the fair..." wistfully at his, alas, totally hetero boss. 'Twas very sad. But beautifully sung, and I wanted everybody's clothes.

The Winter's Tale @ RSC Armory: What Othello has a whole play to do, Leontes has to manage in the space of one set speech. Greg Hicks, he's yer man.

Atys @ BAM: Long-awaited, unexpected, perfect.

If there could be only one? Probably The Winter's Tale. It was that good.

sundry items

From the Noise Ministry: Sumi Jo talks Mozart on The Strand. 

Also, Arte's got a Beethoven 9 with Matthias Goerne, Sally Matthews, Steve Davislim and Karen Cargill, who was pretty excellent in the Mahler 3 rehearsal I caught at Tanglewood summer before last (and here with Runnicles/BBCSSO), and whose Met debut will be the last Waltraute of this year's run of Götterdämmerung, whereupon maybe they will figure out that she can hack it and give her more fun stuff to do.

From the Ministry of Histrionics: sterling yet in England, Donmar Warehouse Richard II reviews here, here, and here.

From the Ministry of Ranting, Office of Buzz-Mumbling, commentary on Amazon's bold new app for market monopolization here and here.  As a former bricks n' mortar record store employee who had at least one former customer apologize to me about my job "but, you know, Amazon just had better prices", my only question is what's taken them so long?  But consider, o Christmas shoppers, what Amazon is doing is not just beating the competition but actively moving to obliterate it, even as they sell their proprietary e-reader and make direct deals to cut out publishers altogether. My job fell to a variety of market forces, but all that means is it's a lot harder to find some stuff Former Customer could once have relied on us to have.  We shrug. We live. She gets to find something else to listen to.  But seriously, not to be paranoid or anything, but all the above taken in the aggregate, do you really want the likes of Jeff Bezos determining what's worth reading and how you read it, and keeping a record of it all the while?  Kinda looks like fascism to me.

Redefining the Omelet: Don Giovanni @ OperaMall Millionplex 11.16.11

First allow me to disqualify myself from any valid opinions about Don Giovanni by confessing that I really liked Francisco Negrin's 2003 Glimmerglass production.  It was ugly and depressive.  The Catalogue Aria was a case study in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder illustrated by a tour through the Collected Underwear.  The revenant Commendatore was a ruse conceived by Don Ottavio to push a psychologically unstable Don Giovanni over the edge, and his manifestation in the penultimate scene was a marching, sign-waving, anti-Giovanni Occupy Seville.  As the orchestra ratcheted up the tension, our anti-hero, standing in a coffin, slashed his wrists in both defiance and despair. None of it was pretty.  Everybody hated it.

I was with an opera neophyte. I had a lot of explaining to do.

Last night, by chance, I was sitting next to another opera neophyte. I could tell she was new to all this, not just because she was telling her friend she'd never been to the opera, but because she spent the whole second act munching popcorn. People who have been to the opera, I find, generally skip the popcorn at the HDs.  Or at least they'll be likely to put it aside for the duration of Il mio tesoro. No such luck here, alas.  But she seemed nice, so while we were waiting at the end to exit our row, I turned to her and said "Did you enjoy the performance?"   "Oh yes!" she said, with genuine enthusiasm. "But are they all that long?" (Two for two! If someone says it again at Siegfried, I reserve the right to yell "Bingo!" in a crowded theater.)

Here is Michael Grandage's ideal audience member, as stated in what passes for his directorial manifesto vis a vis this production.  She's never seen it before. She had a good time. She didn't need anything explained. Win. On her right was her friend, from what I could gather also a neophyte. She also had a good time. She also didn't need anything explained. Win. On her left was some thirty years of opera experience. I've done a lot of explaining to neophytes. Here I didn't have to explain anything to anyone. Win.

 I've seen stagings that were luminous and performances that were brilliant.  I've seen workmanlike stagings and performances both.  I've seen things that were perplexing, and things that were wrong-headed and infuriating.  I've seen things that were openly disrespectful of the material they were supposed to be presenting (Mark Lamos, I'm talking to you). Like everyone else who's parked themselves in an opera house with any regularity, I've done a lot of armchair directing in my time.  Apart from a weak Commendatore -- and Commendatores are weak nine times out of ten -- and a Donna Anna who wasn't in nearly as much of a twist as she should have been, I didn't have the impulse to do any here. That was kind of refreshing. Win.

Michael Grandage hasn't, in Deborah Warner's parlance, smashed the Fabergé. That isn't what he does.  To the best of my knowledge, it has never been what he does.  Neither, in the fashion of Regietheater, has he taken the piece and used it to his own ends, plastering a concept onto it with complete disengagement from authorial intent.  As he has said elsewhere, "I'm not the kind of director who enjoys immediately looking at a time and a place set by a writer and then going 'Let's not do that.'... It's always been of interest to me to use their starting point as my starting point." Not the manifesto of a theatrical radical. Unless, of course, the scene is already full of theatrical radicals.

Grandage's modus operandi has tended to favor interiority. Not that he's only ever worked in tiny spaces but most of his work in the past ten years (Frost/Nixon, Red, Hamlet, King Lear, Luise Miller, et cetera) has been at London's Donmar Warehouse, the directorship of which he took over from Sam Mendes in 2002.  Unlike the Met's slightly-shy-of-4000-seat enormity, Donmar Warehouse is 250 seats. Its stage could fit comfortably inside the Rad Cave and still leave room for the bar.  Interiority is a luxury it can afford.  The Met, not so much.  So what's he doing there?

By now we've all read James Jorden's piece, here, where

a) he lauds Peter Gelb for innovations like the HD series, but then
b) takes him to task for enabling the dumbing down of productions by hiring directors for the sparkly shiny that the words Tony Award Winner attaches to their name.  Then he
c) gives Grandage a shelling for suggesting that there might be a preponderance of Met audience members who have never seen Don Giovanni. And of course Mr. Jorden is right...for the actual Met audience inside the actual Met building, that would be a rare demographic indeed.

But here's the thing, the same is not necessarily true of a 250 seat theater at the OperaMall Millionplex. Which brings us back to Neophyte A, and her having a really good time, and all she needed was lots of close-ups from cameras way closer to the singers than even the first row of the orchestra. Close enough to see that those were military oak leaves on the Commendatore's greatcoat, not his zombie-like exposed ribcage. Close enough to see the expressions on people's faces and the looks in their eyes and the minute gestures that will never read from the foie gras seats, let alone the chicken seats.

And this is really where Peter Gelb either is or is not a fucking genius, to use the tags of JJ's alter ego, because Grandage of the 250 seat theater plays great to 250 seat theaters full of opera neophytes, who get their opera on Hollywood terms, sung well-amplified by the thin and attractive, with popcorn and Twizzlers and half-gallon Cokes.  Who's the Met audience now?

punito

So the delegation has been to see the Don G encore. Seriously, y'all went a little Lord of the Flies over this thing. Not ground-breaking, no, but you want to see a performance really gel into a wad of spackling, remember the production it replaced? I will belabor the point as soon as I don't have to be up again in five hours.

Donmar Lear revisited

So the last report on Donmar Warehouse's King Lear was way back here, from the local arthouse HDcast.  Same cast, almost the same barren set for the production's transfer to BAM, but the Harvey is a bigger space than tiny Donmar Warehouse, so we were curious to see how it would translate, both to a bigger theater and to flesh and blood.

Whether it was the effect of less time in the role, or just the camera leaching out a performance, Jacobi's Lear at BAM was more defined than came across on screen.  There's a supremely childish edge to this elderly king, and in his elder daughters' interactions with him we can see this isn't anything to do with the onset of old age and wavering cognition -- he has always treated them this way, resorting to juvenile mockery when other modes of manipulation fail.  Once the varnish of flattery and gain is scraped away, the fact that this has been the whole of their relationship with him is evident in both the seething impatience they each exhibit, and in the way it boils over.  "I gave you all," says Lear. "And in good time you gave it," Regan (Justine Mitchell) replies.  The audience gasps at her audacity, but we can understand, too, what motivates such a bald-faced outburst, because they've had to hold their tongues so long, no matter what the old man's treatment of them.  "The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash," says Goneril (Gina McKee), describing the "imperfections of a long-ingraff'd condition".  We'd probably want to strangle him too, and his reaction to their ultimate rebellion is as non-plussed as that of the man who habitually beats his dog and finds one day it turns and bites him.

Not that one would side with them of course...because, really, Edmund?  Seriously?

Among the other things lost in the shuffle between stage and small screen was the Fool as he is elbowed out of Lear's life by the Madman.  I'm not sure whether that fell victim to camera editing, or if I just missed it, but on stage it proved a really effective way of explaining the Fool's disappearance from the action, as well as underscoring the descent from purpose-serving lunacy to the abandonment of all purpose.  As the King his companion is gradually wrenched from his grasp, the Fool sits splayed against the wall like a disused toy.  The whiteface makeup he wears serves both to obscure his features and heighten the horror on them as he watches it all spiral out of control, the face he begins to wipe off as he watches Mad Tom lead the King away to a fate he can no longer share.

Oh and the last thing, also missed in the HD (no surprise, but really, people, what is Hi-Def for?): the sound of Gloucester's gouged-out eyeball hitting the wall when Cornwall flings it.  It left a red splotch on the off-white paint as a reminder for the rest of the performance, and there was speculation all the way home on what they had actually used, an as yet unsolved question. Harder than a grape -- it bounced and rolled. Ew.