Operatic Vengeance

Good news, no one, it is now easily obtained without cursing love! Das Rheingold, LA Opera, 3/1/09

I have two questions for Achim Freyer: 1. What does he have against dogs, and 2. When did he become the slightly less gullible man’s Robert Wilson? You get more bang for your buck with Freyer than with Wilson, who just drags out that one white man’s dress, that one maroon dress for the slutty character, a ton of electrical tape, and a bunch of kids dipped in Wite-out and flour (incidentally, what is the collective term for a group of children? A tantrum?). With both Freyer and Wilson, though, there's the same forcing of different material to fit one artistic vision, like a series of overweight, middle-aged European men trying to wedge their junk into the same tiny pair of Speedos. Bollocks aplenty! Achim Freyer is Robert Wilson after licking a few toads and watching a bunch of old Tool videos, and to commemorate his entry into the Overrated Douchebag Directors Club, Wilson has apparently given Freyer full access to his collection of light-sabers, because there were plenty of them in Das Rheingold. Therefore, the $32 million that Los Angeles Opera has sunk into Freyer’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle is feeling distinctly like a rip-off. $32 million for 17 hours of Eurotrash crap? That dog won’t hunt, monsignor.

You’ll be shocked, shocked! to know that my biggest gripe about L.A. Opera’s production of Das Rheingold is Freyer’s entire staging -- the costumes, direction, sets, etc. So let me cover the good to not completely disruptive parts first. The orchestra played well under James Conlon’s direction (and I really wish he’d limit himself to conducting; his meandering pre-opera lecture was condescending and filled with more tortured metaphors and faulty analogies than a love scene in Tristan und Isolde. Rheinmaidens are like dogs? Really? We all know you can't trust a man what's made of gas!), though they were a little muffled and so lacked the usual overwhelming Wagnerian sound. In a way, though, it worked, because the orchestra didn’t drown out the singers for a change, which often happens in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I still don’t quite get Wagner’s music. Some of it is beautiful, but all the big deal made over his leitmotifs becomes a little tiresome. It gets to the point where all the leitmotifs get kind of stitched together, like a garish patchwork quilt, and to the untrained ear, like mine, they just sound like any repeated theme in music rather than being all loaded with meaning or something.

Since this is my first experience with Das Rheingold, I don't really have anything to compare the singers to, but they ranged from excellent to good, to my ears. Some of them didn't have the usual heavy Wagnerian sound, but with the orchestra muffled, they could easily be heard. It was also difficult to judge their acting ability, since so many of them were hampered by their costumes. Vitalij Kowaljow as Wotan didn't seemed to have the vocal immensity or dark voice that I would associate with the role, but he was also singing from inside a giant pimp coat half the time, so that could be why. Michelle deYoung's Fricke sounded lovely, but was immobilized by her costume and was often represented on stage by a body double in a costume seemingly inspired by Terry Jones's "Oh, tell me where that fish did go" character, with light-up hands left over from an Electric Six video. Ellie Dehn as Freia had a beautiful, sweet voice that made her alluring, but her costume was ridiculous -- she had a cardboard false-front of a body with multiple crimson-gashed mouths that she could slot her head into the chest of, among some things that looked like eggs but were supposed to be golden apples or, possibly, tits. Also, I hope that Freia did plenty of yoga before being taken away by the giants Fafner and Fasolt. Jill Grove as Erda seemed to lack the vocal richness and enormity that the role would seem to call for, but her Diana Ross goes to Studio 54 dressed as a giant cacao bean costume gave her physical largesse, at least.

Gordon Hawkins was a pleasant-sounding Alberich, though Alberich shouldn't be pleasant-sounding. Maybe he would've seemed more malevolent if we could've actually seen Hawkins's face instead of just the fake head he had to wear that looked like a cross between a partially deflated Sontaran and the little claymation guy from Tool's "Sober" video. It's probably wrong that I ended up sympathizing with Alberich. I know my reaction to being universally rejected by the opposite sex has usually been to wish that I controlled the world, either because power is an aphrodisiac or because I could use my absolute power to control people. It does corrupt absolutely, you know.

The three Rheinmaidens, sung by Stacey Tappan, Lauren McNeese, and Beth Clayton, were vocally alluring but visually kind of disturbing. Freyer seems to have some bizarre obsession with the Black Dahlia, because, like Freia, the Rheinmaidens had a red slashes for mouths. I was waiting for them to ask Alberich why he was so serious. Having body doubles hung upside down beneath them made for an interesting reflection effect, but it also brought to mind the whole Black Dahlia torso thing. It was a bit hard to hear Morris Robinson and Eric Halfvarson as the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, because they were shoved all the way at the back of the stage. Beau Gibson and Wayne Tigges as Froh and Donner were fine, but they must've gotten bored just standing at the back of the stage for hours on end. Though Graham Clark is supposedly one of the best Loges at the moment, I'm glad he played the smaller role of Mime instead, because I'm just not fond of high, whiny, almost sobbing style of tenor. It fit Mime, though, and Clark 's physical acting provided some characterization in spite of the mask that covered his entire head.

The most interesting character, in my opinion, was Arnold Bezuyen's Loge, whose voice had the ring of a tenor's but with a more baritonal tinge that kept it listenable to my tenor-tolerating ears. Loge was the only one who could move around the stage with any kind of ease and who didn't have a mask on, which probably helped characterization matters. Loge is basically a made-up German name for the trickster god Loki, and Bezuyen was every bit the trickster -- it was clear how much enjoyment Loge was getting out of screwing with everyone.

So, the production itself. First of all, it seems that Freyer has discovered re-SIGH-cling? [/confused Mr. Burns voice], because Loge's costume was exactly the same as Méphistophélès's in his 2003 production of La Damnation de Faust, right down to the red Converse, Puddy-takes-Elaine-to-a-New-Jersey-Devils-game makeup, and Wolverine meets the Heat Miser hairstyle. The only difference was that Loge had a few extra arms, so is Freyer trying to tell us that Loge is the Devil, just with extra hands (they're very good hands), or is he just being a cheap asshole by re-using the costume and should therefore expect the shittiest portion? In fact, the whole thing looked remarkably similar to the La Damnation de Faust, which I have to put down to a lack of creativity, because the two operas have little in common apart from being written in the 19th century and both kind of involving metaphorical deals with the Devil (and in La Damnation de Faust, by metaphorical I mean "Get your coat.") Both productions were predominantly done in a black, white, and red color scheme, both had over-sized papier-mâché heads, pimp coats, and creepy red gash mouths, and both, bafflingly, had dog things as representations of evil, though instead of an Evil Black Standard Poodle of Death, Das Rheingold had an emaciated Dalmatian in a red top hat of Death.

Therein lies another problem with Freyer: If it wasn’t for fake-profundity, Achim Freyer wouldn’t have no profundity at all. Either his symbols are meaningless like the dogs or Froh’s dumb anachronistic airplane, they're tangentially related but pointless (like the glowing eye that represented Wotan's lost eye), or they work on one level and aren't clever or insightful. For example, why does Fricke have super-long arms? Because she's clingy. Why does Wotan wear a pimp coat covered in keys that looks like the Wizard of Swinging’s robe? Because he's pimped Freia to the giants in exchange for construction. That's right, construction scams didn't start with the Mafia. They've been going on since the world was just a basic E-flat major triad chord.

The Ring Cycle is supposedly one of the most complex pieces of art ever created, so I can't help but think that Freyer's childish, school-art-project, Michel-Gondry-with-less-talent approach is a little... incongruous. The billowing red mist and Rhine River were pretty, and the way the stage opened up to reveal Nibelheim was effective, but other effects were silly and ramshackle. When Alberich transformed into a dragon, instead of matching the grandeur of the music, he just looked like a less impressive version of the claymation snake thing from Beetlejuice. It would've been better (and more frightening) if Alberich had turned into Mrs. Garrett's bosom, complete with the sun spots on the right can. More impressive than a dwarf with a giant striped tube sock attached to him anyway. Why was the Tarnhelm a golden top hat? I think Gimli, son of Gloin, or Glod Glodsson would find such asshaberdashery beneath their dwarfly dignity. Is Alberich really Columbia from Rocky Horror Picture Show? Is he going to put on a cabaret act? Instead of a rainbow bridge to Valhalla, we got Froh playing with his rainbow squeezebox and an airplane that looked that it had been drawn by a child piloted by what appeared to be a mummified blow-up doll holding an artist’s palette. Because rainbows are colorful, do you see? That was the moment when I pinched my eyebrows in a Stan Marshian fashion and couldn’t suppress a sigh. Where’s the grandeur? The solemnity? The piercing psychological drama?

The relatively monochromatic color scheme is also Wilsonian, though Freyer does spice it up a little bit with touches of red. In La Damnation de Faust, the red, black, and white scheme worked, because it’s associated with the Holy Trinity, but I don’t see what it had to do with Norse mythology or a fantastical vision of pre-human Earth. There were some occasional splashes of yellow, green, and blue, but they weren’t used to any effect. Most annoyingly, the ring – the object that the whole damn cycle is supposed to revolve around – wasn’t even gold. It’s right there in the title, for crap's sake. Das RheinGOLD. The other gold that was stolen from Alberich was actually gold, but the ring itself was more of a white illuminated ball.

Freyer also played with the scale of things, which is clever, in a way, but it's been done (and better, for obvious reasons) by Peter Jackson in the Lord of the Rings films, so when attempted on stage with lame cardboard puppets, the concept suffers. Many characters had body doubles or even triples (some of which, like Loge’s, would nonsensically appear at the same time). Most of the time, Fafner and Fasolt were just giant heads at the back of the stage, looking like those Metool things from Megaman or Navibot Petpets, with the singers serving as the noses for the bigger heads. Hey, fellas, don’t scratch up them heads, OK? Sometimes, though, they’d hold up big silver discs, supposedly to enlarge their features, even though from the balcony it just looked like they’d won Ladies’ Wimbledon and were showing off their plate trophies. When collecting the hoard, the giants were represented by giant hands sweeping across the stage, which just reminded me of the Eyerok from Mario 64 and made me wonder why Wotan didn’t just hit the eye in their palms with a green shell. Maybe because he doesn’t have good depth perception? At the end, though, when the giants had their final battle, they were slightly taller than average men with tiny little heads on top, one of which was knocked off by the other, in a seeming homage to the part in the Mighty Boosh episode “Mutants” when the mutant with the little mouse-like head is break-dancing and his head falls off. As a bonus bit of stupidity, in the scene where the hoard is being measured against Freia, Captain Obvious Freyer decided that we also needed an over-sized measuring tape next to Freia, just to be absolutely sure the audience knew what was going on, since “Then Freia's form shall be the measure” is so unclear and mysterious.

In his pre-opera blather, James Conlon said that Das Rheingold is about love. Maybe he really meant the whole Ring Cycle, because there was very little love in Das Rheingold, unless you can say that an opera about the renunciation of love is about love. In a way, I guess it is… the way the renunciation of eating Twinkies is kind of about Twinkies. There was also very little to love about this production of Das Rheingold, apart from some accomplished singing. Just as Loge is tempted at the end of the opera to destroy all the gods because he’s so over all their godly bullshit, so am I tempted to give up on the Freyer version of the Ring Cycle. It can’t and won’t end well, and I’m not just saying that because the last part is called “The Twilight of the Gods.”

Labels: achim freyer, das rheingold, los angeles, ring cycle, Wagner

posted by Astrafiammante @ 10:43 AM 3 Comments

The Why of the Fly

If the primary element is The Fly and the secondary element is opera, but the result is not FlyOpera, what is the tertiary element? Probably a whole heap of bullshit! The best thing about FlyOperaShit is that at least it's not an operatic adaptation of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. An aria about a trifurcate hoo-ha would've been a fridge too far, especially if it were entitled "Do you have the key to my three doorways?" But back to FlyOperaShit -- oddly, if the secondary element (i.e. opera) had been taken out of the creative telepod system that mushed the three together, the tertiary element might have been different after all, because as a piece of stagecraft, The Fly is actually well-done... if you take away the wallpaper music provided by Howard Shore, the often ridiculous libretto by David Henry Hwang, and all the singing. Which basically just leaves you with David Cronenberg's film The Fly, only in a more slapdash, retro version.

The most confusing thing is that Cronenberg, Hwang, and the composer Howard Shore have all taken part in the making of films, often to acclaim, and yet here they failed to realize that, like film, opera is a visual art. Yes, the aural part of it is more important, but still, stuff happens onstage, stuff that the audience can, you know, see. So why does Hwang feel it necessary to have the characters describe what's happening rather than showing it and having them tell the audience how what's happening makes them feel. That's pretty much the whole function of an aria -- to give insight into the character's state of mind because the audience can't break out their home-trephination kits and peek inside. If BrundleFly is dropping body parts all over the place, don't have the computer chorus tell us, show the body parts falling off and then have Brundle tell us how he feels about oozing gunk from his fingertips. I've never personally oozed gunk from my fingertips, so I'd like to know what it's like. If Veronica is having a dream about giving birth to a flybaby and you take the trouble of putting poor Ruxandra Donose in stirrups, don't tell us that the dream maggot-spawn is "new flesh shooting like a bullet" across the floor, show it. It might be gross, but I doubt it could be any more nauseating than the image of something shooting like a bullet from a woman's snatch.

Part of what made The Fly so info-dumpy was the framing device that Hwang used -- the opera starts at the end, after the BrundleFly has been swatted and Veronica is being questioned by an improbably understanding policewoman. Because of this narrative device, Hwang was able to have the characters come on, stand stationary in the spotlight, and describe events that were happening. Sometimes these events were acted out, which made the info-dumping pointless, and sometimes they weren't, which was just boring. The solos rarely offered insight into the characters, and by the time they did, it felt like too little, too late. If I had known a little more about Brundle before he turned into a fly, maybe his "Insect Politics" aria would've been a little more telling. The part about wishing to get past the limits of the flesh was kind of interesting, since many's the time I've wished to become a ball of pure energy, but that's not really what Brundle's telepods did -- well, what their original intention was, anyway. They theoretically would've set man free from the limits of physical travel, but they weren't intended to fundamentally change mankind, so why all the "New Flesh" blather (as an aside, is there any word more disgusting than "flesh"? Maybe "moist"?). My car gets me from place to place faster than my legs can, but I don't get out of it every morning and proclaim that it has given me new flesh, allowing me to be born unto new worlds, using the flesh as my key. I felt more for the Milking Machine at the end of The Joke: The Musical than I did for BrundleFly. At least the Milking Machine was telling me how he was feeling, as well as making an apt commentary on the state of mankind. Why can't people keep their willies out of holes?

The framing device was also inconsistent -- if the libretto is Veronica recounting events to the policewoman, then why do we get into the heads of Stathis, her boss and ex, or Marky the bar-yokel? I can understand a little breakage of the point of view to include Brundle's thoughts, because he's the title character and all, but having Stathis's desk wheeled out on stage every once in a while so he could sing the equivalent of "And now I must be off to have my doctor check this cough!" was pointless, interrupted the narrative flow, and was a lot of fanny-dangle. Maybe Stathis was supposed to represent Veronica's conscience? If so, her conscience is faintly slimy and looks like if Rip Torn circa The Man Who Fell to Earth and James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio were shoved into some telepods and fused at a molecular-genetic level.

Also disconcerting was the libretto, which couldn't decide if it was serious or not. The music would say yes, it wuz seriuz bizness, super-super-serial, but then there'd be something goofy like the scientists singing about their "smarty party" (I got that the geek jokes were funny, but "smarty party" just made me think of "Marty Farty threw a party" from Mr. Show. Incidentally for your edification, that's a good way of making it through a painful operatic experience -- sitting back and thinking of Mr. Show.) or Seth Brundle playing the random keyboard on his computer's control panel like he was the star of the world's geekiest production of Phantom of the Opera. And did we really need to know about Seth horking in Veronica's car on the way back from the smarty party? Not really, plus it was delivered in a spoken aside to the audience, which is awfully jokey. There's nothing wrong with a combination of humor and seriousness, but when the audience isn't sure which is which, it's a problem. My brain was telling me to laugh at such drivel as "drink not from the plasma spring", but the unrelenting dourness of the music said I should put on some new, more grown-up flesh.

The worst failure of the libretto, in my opinion, was in the bar scene. First, there was an incredibly silly chorus of bar-flies (hur hur hur) singing about their dead-end jobs and how all of their dreams ended in high school. Not only was it unintentionally funny, it also didn't really suit the mood of the music at all. Plus, who are these people and why should we care what they think? It was very Stephen Kingish of Hwang to tell us the histories of people who have little to no importance to the story, and in an opera where words are at a premium, it was a waste. Then Marky, Lord of the Barflies, took over and described his pathetic, stereotypically blue-collar life and how one day some geek came into the bar, challenged him to an arm wrestle for the poontang privileges to Marky's girlfriend Tawny, and then snapped his arm in half. When the arm snapped, Marky didn't scream in pain or have any reaction toward Brundle; he just sang some nonsensical and out-of-character crap about bones bleaching in the winds of time or something and hobbled away, never to be seen again until the curtain calls. Good thing all of his backstory was dull and clichéd, otherwise I might've been invested in his character *cough*.

The singers were all decent acting-wise, but were more problematic vocally. Part of the blame lies with the vocal writing -- there seemed to be no melodic line to the vocal parts, so everything was very declarative and all on one level. Ruxandra Donose's voice seemed under-powered and often got lost in the dull strains of Shore's music, and her diction was terrible, especially when she had to hit higher notes. This isn't because she's a non-native English speaker, though, because her spoken lines were fairly understandable. Her Veronica is a fairly likable, quick-witted character, though I question both her willingness to screw a guy who's just turned a baboon inside out and her seeming inability to remove her black stiletto heels during said screwing.

Daniel Okulitch as Seth Brundle was physically well-suited to the role (no, not because he's an actual fly), and I got the feeling that he was cast because he would look good naked and simulating sex vigorously and often. Any comparisons (and they do bafflingly exist) to Simon Keenlyside are apt only in that they've both gone nude onstage and sung while hanging from the ceiling. That's where the comparison ends. Okulitch has a pleasant but generic voice, but he didn't even try to polish the turd of the libretto with any vocal coloring. Because of this, Brundle's decision to transport himelf wasn't very convincing; he just seemed kind of butt-hurt that Veronica wasn't around to celebrate with him. Brundle's motivation is the same in the film, and yet Jeff Goldblum managed to sell it. Maybe one of those invisible things he always seems to be plucking out of the air turned out to be a helpful acting note? With Okulitch, I wondered why he didn't just cut a hole in the fresh mozzarella he was so proud of finding and have some "romance" with that.

Gary Lehman as Stathis Borans was audible. That's really all I have to say. I was kind of disappointed that Stathis in the opera didn't get partially digested by BrundleFly hork, but that's only because it would've been interesting. Nothing will break a boring music-induced coma like some pre-digestive vomit! The rest of the cast was all adequate, though it's not like they were given much to work with. The off-stage chorus that served as the voice of the Exposition Device computer sounded like if Stephen Hawking got bored and reprogrammed his speech computer to sing, so I guess they did a good job. It gave me flashbacks to the "icosahedron"-spouting chorus in Dr. Atomic, though.

The less said of Howard Shore's music, the better. The only thing to recommend it is that he didn't fall into the usual modern composer's trap of ripping off Stravinsky. Other than that, it was very dull and didn't seem to have anything to do with what was happening on the stage or to the characters, which is odd considering Shore's experience in writing film soundtracks. At least Shore is certain to have a job composing the score for The Hobbit movie.

While the music was probably the worst part of The Fly, the sets and staging were probably the best. Since the story was set in the 1950s, the telepods and computer equipment that dominated the set were all very '50s sci-fi movie retro. The telepods themselves looked kind of like Awesome-O versions of a futuristic refrigerator, i.e. they looked like the cardboard box a refrigerator would come in with an Apple IIe monitor glued to the top of it. The effects were also quite good, especially the little magic trick of getting naked Daniel Okulitch from one telepod into another. I know he just crept out the back and ran backstage and climbed into the other pod, but the image of a naked guy hauling ass while a Stephen Hawking chorus sings is pretty hilarious. The progression of Brundle's monstritis was also very well done. In fact, the only bad piece of set/special effects were the horrifically bad "baboon" puppets that looked like the snow monsters in Disneyland's Matterhorn ride put through some sort of Debigulator. Or, since they were kind of rhythmically twitching, if the snow monsters escaped from the Matterhorn and mated with the creepy child puppets from It's A Small World.

Hiring Hollywood directors to direct operas has worked for LA Opera in the past (and seems to be working in Il Trittico right now), but I fear they're leaning too heavily on the town's main industry. Remaking a 22 year-old movie as an opera isn't going to attract any more young people than rehashing La Bohème every year (not that I recommend doing La Bohème every year, though LAO seems determined to do it), especially if said operatic rehash has sleep-inducing music, a silly libretto, and irregular pacing. Throwing a naked guy into the mix might help a bit, but those are a dime a dozen on the Internet. There seems to be little point in adapting one visual medium from another, especially when no new insight is added in the adaptation. Back to the drawing board and not the screening room, LA Opera.

Labels: los angeles, the fly

posted by Astrafiammante @ 11:25 AM 0 Comments

The Love That Wouldn't Stop Speaking Its Name: Tristan und Isolde at LA Opera, 2/10/08

Tristan und Isolde is like cilantro. No, not because fans of “California Cuisine” like to sprinkle it all over everything, but because some people just seem to be immune to its charms. Most people think that cilantro is delicious, while others can only taste a strange, soapy flavor when they eat it. Many opera-lovers think that Tristan und Isolde is the best opera of the 19th century, and possibly the best EVER. While I do enjoy a bit of cilantro now and then, Tristan und Isolde just left me thinking “Well, the music was nice, but...” Now, I’m willing to admit that part of that is because I have the attention span of a kitten that’s had a shot of espresso and been left in a room full of yarn and shiny keys and part of it is LA Opera’s “Up with Mediocrity!” stance, but Tristan und Isolde definitely wasn’t the “ode to sexual ecstasy” that LA Opera’s website would have us believe. There was nary a boob to be seen! Oh, and the music, while lovely, wasn’t erotic until the very, very end. Four and a half hours of foreplay might be OK for, I don’t know, Sting, but for anyone else, it’s maddening and causes chafing.

My main beef with Wagner is that, in my opinion, he doesn’t live up to his own hype. He was all about creating a complete work, a Gesamtkunstwerk that encompassed music, theater, and visual arts, and contained what he considered quality drama. Well, if a bunch of people standing around and babbling repetitively to each other is Wagner’s idea of “quality drama”, somebody dig up his corpse and set it in front of the SOAP network. According to James “Verbal Diarrhea” Conlon’s program notes, Wagner wrote more poetry than any other composer because he wrote his own libretti. Eh, well, I guess it’s poetry in the sense that it’s not prose, but that’s where the similarity ends. It’s mostly just Wagner saying, “My deep understanding of Schopenhauer, let me show you it.” As usual, Wagner loves the sound of his music being played and his voice coming out of other people so much that the characters repeat the same idea back and forth to each other so much that I wanted to Fry-QD: “Stop! You’re just going around in circles!” It just makes me think of Wagner wanking over his own genius onto his libretto pages until they stick together. Well, that's... love, isn't it? Load of old wank. Also, the line "Day is my bitterest foe" was just laughable in its lameness. Incidentally for your edification, "the gloaming" is my bitterest enemy, mostly because it can't fucking decide if it's night or day and because of its stupid name. Anyway, some of that time-of-day rage might just be the translation, true, but the whole night and day omgit'scalledadichotomy! stuff got to be a little much. Instead of complaining about the day, make the most of the night. Happy love might be boring dramatically, but it probably wouldn't be as tiresome either.

Act II is supposed to be the most erotic piece of music ever written, but it never made me pop my monocle at the sheer sexuality of it. Tristan and Isolde having the world’s most pointless argument about who hates the day more and talking about themselves in third person didn’t help much either. Why are they wasting precious very sensual boot-knocking time with that? Even though Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is pretty sugary and schlocky in comparison to Tristan und Isolde, at least you got the feeling that the characters really wanted to touch each other in places. Of course, that’s simplifying eroticism and love to being just about sex, but when you’re throwing around words like “orgasmic” to describe something, sex has got to enter into it. Also, the demands of Wagner’s music make it necessary for singers with a certain type of voice to be cast, and that type of voice isn’t particularly pretty, sexy, or even youthful (which I’m guessing the protagonists are supposed to be). A singer’s physical appearance can easily be overlooked if they sound the part, but the idea of two ecstatic lovers bellowing at each other isn’t romantic at all. It just makes the audience think that one of them is going to maul the other with their fearsome gonad.

Of course, not all of this is Wagner and his crappy writing’s fault; some of the blame rests on the shoulders of the director and the singers. Conlon mentioned in the program notes that Tristan und Isolde is one of the most static operas in the repertoire, so what did the director do? He made the characters hardly move at all! The only way the opera could’ve been more static would be if the singers had all been encased in carbonite like a bunch of be-veloured Han Solos. There was some minimal hugging here and there, but in the second act, Isolde just sat on a tree stump and stroked Tristan’s hideous wig as if she were checking him for nits. It was easily the least erotic thing ever, and that includes the painfully awkward “Gobble gobble” scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which at least had the benefit of some actual touching going on. Hell, it was even less erotic than Bill O’Reilly’s Middle Eastern food-fueled phone sex fantasies. OK, maybe not. Worst of all was the bizarre choice to make Isolde sing the famous Liebestod concert-style, standing still in the cage of a white spotlight. To make things even more baffling, Tristan got up at the end and gave her a hug from behind straight out of an Asian drama.

The production aside from the shitty direction was also kind of lackluster, in my opinion. The scenery and costumes should support the music without competing with it, and this scenery was practically running a 100-meter dash against the music. It was luridly bright, somewhat cartoonish, and full of lame “Celtic” touches like Celtic knots instead of leaves on the trees. That’s about as Celtic as Celtic Woman. Many of the reviews I read were like, “Oh, the scenery is soooo LA because it was designed by David Hockney, and we all know how well he paints naked guys climbing out of pools, which is also soooo LA!” I know Hockney has lived here for years and all, but if he thinks that bright red, green, and purple have anything to do with LA, he’s wrong. The light here bleaches out color; it doesn’t make it look all bright and scary like a sitcom acid trip. The costumes were similarly hideous and made it seem that there had been a fire sale at the Velour Warehouse. Velvet muumuus, caftan, and sacks abounded. If one were using Zapp Brannigan logic, that would enhance the erotic feel of the opera, but though there was some velour petting, no one just let themselves go. The men carried “swords” that looked like the plastic “Master of the Universe” ones they sold in the 80s. Maybe if Tristan had invoked the power of Greyskull, he could’ve beaten Melot instead of awkwardly grabbing Melot’s sword and guiding it into his stomach. The other props were equally lame, especially Isolde’s chest full of magical butt-plugs and the love potion that looked like a bottle of Heineken. Nothing says “eternal love” like skunky Dutch beer, though, right?

In addition to being an over-priced pale lager, the love potion also apparently makes men’s balls swell, which is the only explanation I can find for John Treleaven standing with his legs wide-apart all the time, as if Tristan was expecting Isolde to measure his in-seam with her tongue. That was the least of Treleaven’s missteps (or misstands) as Tristan, though. To be fair, I don’t think Laurence Olivier could act his way out from under the hideous wig they clapped on Treleaven. It was like a Tyra Banks wet dream in its ghetto-y plasticness; she would’ve killed to slap that monstrosity onto the scalp of one of her wannabe models. In this case, Tyra would’ve told Tristan that he was reading more Tiny Tim than legendary lover. But bad hairpieces are no excuse for bad singing, and Treleaven’s singing was, well, bad. At some points, he sounded like Plàcido Domingo -- Plàcido Domingo at 67, nursing a snot-fountaining head cold. He could almost always be heard, at least, in spite of the enormous orchestra and the bad acoustics, but we really didn’t want him to be. Treleaven’s acting was so bad that I felt like giggling with glee when he fell down (on purpose!) and rolled the length of the stage, ending up face-down with his legginged ass showing, instead of thinking, “Oh noes, Tristan is going to die and he’s never even banged Isolde as far as I know!” Yes, bad acting turns me into a sadist. You really don’t want to know what I get up to when I watch a Scarlett Johansson movie.

Unfortunately for the audience, Act III is pretty much all Tristan, all the time, and it was so painful that I felt like I’d been stabbed by Melot too, only in the brain, eyes, and ears. It was mostly just Tristan blabbering about how death awaits us all with nasty big pointy teeth, etc., and how seagulls had plucked out his eyes and he’s a fly trapped in a bottle of SHADOWS! Every once in a while, he’d heap abuse on his faithful servant Kurwenal for his sudden yet inevitable betrayal, only to turn around and say how true Kurwenal is. I guess that was the gangrenous wound talking, and Kurwenal did deserve some abuse for propping the wounded Tristan up against a boulder on a grassy knoll instead of keeping him inside like a normal person. To make things even more regrettable, Treleaven jerked and seized as if he were being moved by a series of servos, and to be honest, the mechanical whirring sound of servos would be preferable to Treleaven’s squalling. I was beginning to think that he was going to sing for the time it would actually take for Isolde to sail from Cornwall to Brittany.

Linda Watson's Isolde was better vocally than her Tristan, but some of her acting choices were just as head-scratching. When Tristan's betrayal of Marke was revealed, instead of looking panicked, Watson's Isolde just calmly walked toward the castle at the side of the stage with a bland, blank look on her face. Neither Watson nor Treleaven were convincing lovers, not least because they hardly looked at each other during their love scenes. Then again, maybe Watson was afraid she'd crack up if she looked at Treleaven's wig. Her voice seemed equal enough to the role, but the sound of it wasn't particularly unique, and she didn't do much acting with it. Every once in a while, she'd sing a softer, lower passage, and almost sound like someone desperately, passionately in love, but those moments were few.

Isolde’s interactions with her servant Brangäne were more shrill than touching, which is odd, considering that those passages are often cited as great moments of female-bonding in opera. Instead of being like watching rom-coms in their pajamas and eating ice cream or like two ovaries swimming in a pink sea of crotch-sweat collected at Lilith Fair (dated reference ahoy!), Watson’s Isolde and Lioba Braun’s Brangäne’s duets were more like a badger in a gaudy blonde wig growling at a mouse with a funny hat.

In spite of that, Braun’s Brangäne was one of the more pleasant singers to listen to, maybe because she couldn’t really be heard. Her voice seemed softer than it was in last season’s Tannhäuser, and she was definitely the best, most sensitive actress on the stage. Then again, a bust of Keanu Reeves carved from Velveeta would be a most sensitive actor than John Treleaven.

Eric Halfvarson was sonorous and stern as King Marke, though in his aria about the pain of being betrayed by his nephew and his wife, he genuinely showed the audience that he’d been hurt deep down, where he’s soft like a woman, or soft like his giant velour robe. King Marke as a character seemed somewhat flimsy; I couldn’t help but compare him to King Philip from Verdi’s Don Carlos, who is truly multi-faceted (even if several of those facets are complete bastards) and so well-realized that you really feel for him when he sings “Elle ne m’aime pas”. That’s the librettist’s fault, though, not Wagner’s… oh wait.

Juha Uusitalo was fine as the loyal Kurwenal, though he didn’t really have much to do other than stand around in regrettable turquoise suede boots.

It must take one egoist to do justice to another, because the ever-loquacious James Conlon led the orchestra nicely (and loudly) through Wagner’s gorgeous music. Conlon doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s acoustics (or lack thereof), because the orchestra often (mercifully) drowned out the singers. On the other hand, Conlon probably just doesn’t care. What I’d really like to know is why so many people in the audience feel the need to lean forward and pop out of their seats like so many Whack-a-Moles every time the orchestra starts to play. The orchestra always pretty much looks the same; it’s not they’re going to come back from the intermission dressed like Gwar or something.

Just as someone with stupid tastebuds will never appreciate the fresh zestiness of cilantro biting through the fatty richness of an avocado in guacamole, so will I never understand the supposed wonder that is Tristan und Isolde. Even during the Liebestod, which is the one genuinely erotic piece of music in the whole thing, I just kept thinking how much more enjoyable it would’ve been as a tone poem, without the singing, without the stupid words. Yeah, it would tear Zombie Wagner away from re-runs of Passions to demand what we’d done with all his wonderful words, but in the end, I would leave thinking him much more of a genius than I did on Sunday.

Labels: los angeles, tristan und isolde, Wagner

posted by Astrafiammante @ 7:45 PM 10 Comments

It’s Fairly Bursting with Adequatulence! Jenufa at LA Opera, 10/13/07

Let me start by warning that this review probably won’t be funny. Jenufa is partly about a murdered baby, there’s nothing funny about that. So, here’s a joke to make up for the lack of humor in the review:

Q: What’s blue and taps on the ice?

A: Jenufa’s baby!

OK, that’s the only dead baby joke I know, so now it’s out of the way, let’s be serious (though not cat macro serious).

I was having a serious think earlier (complete with finger-to-temple pose) about whether or not Jenufa is a great opera or not. At first, I leaned toward “not”, simply because I can’t really remember that much of the music at all, even though some of it was very lovely. It’s also not great in the traditional operatic sense--Jenufa is about peasants, just regular peasants who don’t turn out to be incestuous, half-god, long-lost twins or princes in disguise or Albanians. There aren’t any fancy parties in Jenufa, or battles, or parades with elephants. In fact, LA Opera couldn’t even find a place to wedge in a silly walks or a superfluous tribute to West Side Story. Finally, Jenufa is rarely performed, which must be some reflection on its greatness, right?

But then I said to myself, “Aha, Self, you think you’re so clever! Aren’t some of the greatest novels about peasants? Aren’t most people in the world, in fact, closer to peasants than to royalty? Isn’t that a reflection of Janacek’s desire to get back to the folk roots of Czech music?” Fair enough. On top of that, the characters in Jenufa are quite well-rounded for operatic characters—they all (except maybe Steva, who I wouldn’t consider a main character anyway) change and deepen over the course of the opera. As for the not-often-performed concern, that seems to be more of Czech being a difficult language to master and a lack of sopranos who can handle the role of Jenufa than any statement about its greatness. Aida is performed far more often than, say, MacBeth or even Don Carlo, but is it a better opera? NO.

So why doesn’t Jenufa strike me as being a great opera? Maybe because it isn’t supposed to. That’s part of what makes it both so subversive and so effective. Simple, god-fearing peasant folk aren’t supposed to get knocked up or murder their stepdaughters’ babies. That’s what wicked city people do so the simple country folk can shake their heads and cluck to themselves about what’s to be done with those wicked city people. (The answer is that God will sort them out, apparently. I’ve always liked the idea of God as a high-speed centrifuge.) Jenufa is a quiet opera (not volume-wise, in this case, my bleeding eardrums thank you, Mr. Conlon), more character-driven than plot-driven, and I think its greatness lies in its quietness.

LA Opera for once had the sense to honor the spirit of a work and not try to drama it up with jazz hands and real!life!cars! and pole-dancing. The staging was simple, relying heavily on triangles of wood (I guess to show that Jenufa and her family are the white-trash of the Czech countryside, what with all those redwood decks?), some naturalistic scenery (that was reminiscent of model train landscaping—so.much.preserved.sheet.moss!)... and a fucking huge rock. The costumes were also muted, mostly in neutral shades with a splash of dull blue or faded lilac thrown in. The dull costumes really fit well in an opera where being “looked at” (or not) is so important. The only time I felt slightly annoyed by the costuming was in the second act, when Kostelnicka, having murdered Jenufa’s baby to clear the way for her to marry Laca, forced Laca and Jenufa to join hands. Kostelnicka was all in black, as is the wont of the child murderer, I guess; Laca, who, though he was a stand-up guy in Act II, slashed Jenufa’s face in Act I, was in gray; and Jenufa, who is pretty much a saint aside from her ability to say “no” to the drunken fumblings of her frat-boy-style boyfriend, wore a flowing white nightgown. I could practically feel the elbow of the costume designer digging into my ribs as if to say, “See what I did there?”

But most obvious of all was the rock. Oh, the rock. The huge lump of fake rock around which the entire staging was based. The stone elephant-in-the-room that was the symbol du jour (aka the anvil which was dropped on our heads). Frank Philipp Schlössmann, the set designer, apparently was inspired to create the rock by one line in the opera, in which Jenufa is having a nightmare about being crushed by a huge stone. What Frank Philipp Schlössmann for some reason didn’t foresee is that people might think it’s kind of funny to hear Jenufa crying out about being crushed by a stone when there’s a ginormous hunk of rock in her living room! To make matters worse (or possibly better?), the symbol was somewhat ambiguous, if something so obvious could be said to be ambiguous too. Did the rock symbolize Jenufa and Kostelnicka’s embarrassment about Jenufa’s pregnancy, i.e. it was barely showing in the first act; then dominating their home in the second, after Jenufa had given birth; and finally broken apart in the third act, when Jenufa is about to be married to Laca, her respectability nearly intact. Or did it symbolize the barrier between Jenufa and Laca? Or do Czech people really just have monoliths in their homes? Like George Carlin, I’ll leave symbols to the symbol-minded, but the easiest answer (and therefore, knowing most production designers, the right answer) is that the stone symbolized oppression. It did come in awfully handy for the potential stoning of Jenufa and Kostelnicka, though. If a symbol is going to be ambiguous, the least it can do is double as the means of a painful execution. It certainly worked for the audience anyway; I felt like I was dead from obvious at the end.

Rising above the workhorselike adequisivity [tm Bill McNeal] of the production was the cast, specifically Karita Mattila, who, in spite of what the idiots at KUSC would have you believe, is Finnish, not Czech. I’ve liked Mattila since seeing her in the 1997 Chatêlet recording of Don Carlos; back then, her voice had a glassy, silvery quality, like winter sunlight on a Scandinavian lake. Ten years later, her voice seems slightly darker, with a mezzoish edge to it, but her acting ability is still tremendous, and when it’s necessary, she can still produce gleaming, heavenly sounds that are eerie in their beauty. I don’t know how people can point to Renée “I’ve never heard a note that I couldn’t swing up to” Fleming or Anna “Is this the right note? How about now? Now? Oh, forget it, just look at my tits” Netrebko as the best sopranos in the world when Mattila is performing.

At 47, Mattila can still convincingly portray a teenager by simply altering her posture and her gestures rather than by flopping her limbs around à la Elizabeth Futral or spontaneously breaking into a dorky dance like the woman who played Hansel last season. Jenufa as a character is practically a Mary Sue in that her only faults are the aforementioned thigh muscle slackness around a certain drunken lout, her twu wuv for said lout, and her complete inability to understand the fundamental rule of playground courtship, i.e. if a boy teases you, it means he likes you. Then again, Laca takes his teasing to a symbolic level by poisoning the rosemary plant that he thinks represents Jenufa’s love for his rival Steva, so you can’t really blame her for not getting it.

In the second act, Mattila’s Jenufa was a pathetic creature, made ill by childbirth and broken by Steva’s abandonment of her. The act could’ve degenerated into an inappropriate Lucia-style mad scene (since apparently wearing a nightgown=madness in opera), but instead Mattila made it hauntingly beautiful; her Jenufa was clearly deranged by illness and heartbreak, but at the bottom, she was still a lost young girl. By the end of the opera, though, that young girl is gone, and in her place is a dignified, if troubled, woman who is ready to forgive the woman who murdered her child and love the man who slashed her face (and she never once clutched her scar and said, “It throbs whenever he’s near!” either).

Eva Urbanova’s Kostelnicka wasn’t quite what I expected, but her interpretation was satisfying nonetheless. Kostelnicka, in the brief clips I’ve seen of other productions, seems too flatly evil, the stereotypical wicked stepmother. The libretto proves that this is not the case, that Kostelnicka loves Jenufa in her own odd way and is genuinely trying to protect the girl... while, more importantly, protecting her own reputation. Urbanova’s portrayal made Kostelnicka softer in a way; her love for Jenufa was more clear, and her obviously self-serving motives for killing the baby were, well, less obvious. Part of this was probably due to the warmth in Urbanova’s voice, which is quite different from the more steely-toned Kostelnicka’s I’ve heard before. She never seemed threatening in my opinion, just somewhat strict.

The same is true of Kim Begley’s Laca. I’d thought that Laca would be somewhat of a villain, since he slashes Jenufa’s face and permanently maims her, but Begley’s portrayal was simply that of a man frustrated by his love of a woman who won’t love him back. In the first act, when Laca is at his most malevolent, Begley seemed like a young man who was trying to be bad to make everyone hate him so that he wouldn’t have to care what they thought of him; his teasing of Jenufa and his destruction of her beloved rosemary plant seemed more like the actions of someone who wants to be a badass but is too inherently good to know what badasses do. Begley’s singing was strong throughout, though I can’t say I’m partial to his brand of fine piercing tenor. That type of thing is better put to use for singing songs about penguins.

Jorma Silvasti’s Steva was a drunken frat-boy oaf who just wanted to pound a few brews and bang some hot peasant chicks. His voice was pleasant enough, and though his interpretation of Steva was unremarkable, it made sense, since Steva isn’t a remarkable person. A remarkable douchebag, maybe, with a cheek fetish. Elizabeth Bishop sang well as Jenufa’s grandmother, but I wish she hadn’t been told to stumble around the stage waving her arm in front of her blindly. The rock is the big symbol in this opera, Grandma, not your blindness. It was silly for tense dramatic situations to be going on between Jenufa and Laca downstage, while the grandmother was upstage groping at the air like Jeff Goldblum.

James Conlon conducted the orchestra nicely but very, very loudly. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is such a huge barn that it’s often difficult to hear the singers (though not in this production; Mattila cut through quite nicely) even when the orchestra isn’t playing at full-blast. It seems like yet another symptom of his pompous enjoyment of his own voice, whether it’s spoken, written, or played by an orchestra. He’s undoubtedly a talented and thoughtful artist, but I wish he’d share that talent more with his chosen art and less with his rambling gasbaggery. During the pre-opera lecture, between Conlon and the legendary hot-air-expelliunit Duff Murphy, the air was practically blue with smug.

However, in spite of my reservations about James Conlon, I will admit that I’m feeling quite proud of LA Opera this year. Yes, La Boheme, Tosca, and those tired productions of La Rondine and Don Giovanni will probably wear away some of my goodwill, but I think it’s a step in the right direction to start a season with relatively rare, serious, non-empty-pageantry-filled productions like Fidelio and Jenufa. Sure, Boheme gets asses in seats, but they’re not usually the asses of music-lovers. They’re the asses of people on dates who think that they should wear ballgowns and opera-length gloves to sit in the balcony. They’re not going to subscribe, and they’ll probably only come back for Carmen. By giving us productions with great singers like Mattila, Vogt, Kampe, and Urbanova, it feels like LA Opera is finally realizing that opera is about the music, not avant-garde staging or over-hyped warhorses.

Labels: jenufa, los angeles, Mattila

posted by Astrafiammante @ 9:00 PM 1 Comments

Fidelio at Los Angeles Opera, 9/29/07

Back in the day when Beethoven was just a little tyke with a tiny white-man ‘fro, his abusive, alcoholic daddy had high hopes of making his son into the next Mozart, i.e. he wanted to milk his son’s talent for bloody great wadges of cash. So Beethoven kind of lived in the shadow of Mozart the child prodigy. Then when he grew up to cranky adulthood and was a great composer in his own right, he went through a period where his work was kind of derivative of that of Mozart and Haydn, who had been his idols. Even after plunging straight into Romanticism and becoming well-known for that Beethoven sound, the pressure to measure up to Mozart must have remained, though. If Beethoven were a cat macro, he would say, “Opra iz seriuz bizness. I iz seriuz kumpozer. I must 2 be kumpozing an opra!” OK, no more cat macro Beethoven. Anyway, Beethoven was probably thinking, “I’ll never be as great as Mozart unless I compose an opera!”, all the while trying to stuff his crazy hair under a white wig, so he could look like Mozart too.

The problem is that opera is usually about people, and Beethoven just wasn’t that interested in people. (Wagner didn’t seem to be particularly interested in people either, but that’s probably why most of his characters are gods.) Beethoven was a famous crank. Check out his portrait (see below); he looks like he’s trying to figure out if his conductor’s baton is strong enough to double as a shank. Dude was played by Gary "Crazy" Oldman, for god’s sake. Anyway, Beethoven is interested in ideas, which is great for symphonies, but opera needs people. So how did Beethoven work out this delicate conundrum? By writing faux-Zart. There’s very little music in the final version of Fidelio that would make you say, “Oh hai, Beethoven!”, but there is plenty of very Mozartean froth and brightness. The most Beethovenish bit is probably the Leonore no. 3 piece that is nowadays kind of awkwardly wedged into the second act because it’s just too gorgeous to cut out. Originally, this was one of the four overtures that Beethoven wrote (three of which he obviously discarded); Leonore no. 3 ended up being passed over because Beethoven decided it was too damn good to be an overture. The result is that Fidelio is full of beautiful music, but it’s not angry, Romantic, crashy, straight-from-the-loins Beethoven, and that’s just wrong. I like my soda cold, my pie hot, and my Romantics wangsting, damn it!

In a rare show of subtlety (? Or creativity?), the LA Opera production of Fidelio almost seemed to capitalize on this faux-Zartean flavor. The very first scene was like a perverse Marriage of Figaro with the working-class Marzelline and Jacquino going about their domestic duties and bickering… only instead of ironing the Countess’s frilly underpants in a palatial manor, Marzelline was folding sheets for prisoners on a rack. In another Mozartean touch, Anja Kampe’s Fidelio/Leonore was disconcertingly Cherubino-like at times, which was probably a combination of the costuming and Kampe’s attempts at seeming boy-like.

One interesting aspect of Fidelio is that the viewer is kind of thrown into it in media res. The events of the opera unfold over a 24-hour period, but Florestan has been imprisoned for years, and Leonore must’ve been masquerading as Fidelio for at least a few months, since Marzelline is already in love with her/him when the opera begins (though it’s equally likely that Marzelline is easy or that Leonore has some kind of cross-dressing juju magic.) I don’t think that there’s even any sign that Fidelio is a woman (outside of the program notes) until she starts singing about her husband. Of course, audiences today would hopefully be aware (especially if they had the misfortune to sit through one of conductor James Conlon’s meandering pre-opera lectures; the man needs his own personal Tim Bisley to tell him to “skip to the end.”). Knowing that Fidelio is actually a woman led to some good times during the parts where Marzelline was singing about marrying Fidelio—it was so easy to mistake the sadness on Leonore’s face for her thinking “I mean, really I don't even understand how two women can make love, unless they just kind of scissor or something.” (2:10 in the linked video.)

The singing was pretty strong throughout, especially from the two main characters. Rebekah Camm looked and sounded much older than her headshot would indicate that she is. Rather than being sweet-sounding and soubrettish like other Marzellines I’ve seen, she seemed more like a pathetic middle-aged harpy who wanted to make a human s’more with Fidelio’s face as the chocolate between her marshmallowy mams. Her clucking voice made it difficult to be that interested in her character, though it was funny at the end when she saw Leonore (who she knew as her would-be husband Fidelio) holding hands with Florestan—“Fidelio, you two are…good friends? But I thought we would be good friends. Well, let’s see how friendly you get when you’re sharing a prison cell!” OK, maybe it was just funny to insane Futurama fans like me. Greg Fedderly as Jacquino was capable; his voice is nothing special, but he’s the operatic equivalent of the Anything People on Sesame Street--he’s just there’s to make Bert and Ernie (or Leonore and Florestan) look good.

Matti Salminen was an enormous, fatherly Rocco, and his voice was resonant enough to overcome James Conlon’s crushing orchestra. Eike Wilm Schulte’s villainous Pizarro wasn’t as lucky, and he would’ve been a lot scarier if he had been audible. As it was, he was basically just a boring, cardboard villain who looked like the hypothetical love-child of Monstromurk from the ‘80s Rainbow Brite movie The Mighty Monstromurk Menace and the Roger Delgado-era Master on Doctor Who.

Speaking of hypothetical love-children, Klaus Florian Vogt (Florestan) looked like the product of an unholy mating between Brian “My Upper Body Is a Perfect Square” Dennehy and figure-skating gold medalist Alexei Yagudin. In spite of that, it was good to see him not completely painted gray, Robert Wilson. Vogt has a gorgeous voice, which I don’t often say about tenors. There’s a fair amount of Tamino-ness to it, but during one of Florestan and Leonore’s duets, I realized that the music that his voice was meant to sing was the tenor part from Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. The mere thought is making my ears drool. Florestan’s first vocal appearance took place while the stage was still black, so all the audience heard was this beautiful, disembodied voice singing, “Gott!” in a seemingly never-ending arc of sound. While Vogt didn’t have much to do acting-wise, his voice blended nicely with Kampe’s and could be heard throughout the hall and over the chorus in spite of its lightness.

Anja Kampe as Leonore/Fidelio reminded me a little of Waltraud Meier, only with about 25% of Meier’s stage presence. That isn’t a knock on Kampe, though—Meier is just that good. Kampe’s voice was warm, dark, and billowing, more mezzo-like than soprano-like. Her portrayal of Leonore wasn’t quite complete yet, but I almost have to wonder if that’s a fault of the libretto, rather than the singer, since all the characters were a bit two-dimensional and seemed more like symbols than people. Of course, I was the one giggling to myself during Leonore’s aria about giving Florestan “sweet consolation” because I knew she really meant “poon”, so what do I know? Aw, don’t worry about him too much, Leonore, I’m sure he’s already found some sweet consolation in the form of prison turlet sangria.

The chorus of prisoners, as well as the two soloists (Robert MacNeil and James Creswell), performed well vocally, but their acting was a little one-note. All of them staggered around the stage, clutching one of their arms with the opposite hand like a bunch of adolescent girls who felt fat, to the point that I began to wonder if the prison specialized in some kind of bizarre arm torture. In spite of Pizarro’s concerns that the prisoners would go ape-shit and start tearing up the place, they didn’t seem to have much of a hankering for some shankering. Maybe they just aren’t watching enough of MSNBC’s Lockup series.

No performance at the Music Center would be complete without some nonsensical stage direction, though, and Fidelio had a few laughers. When Florestan and Leonore were reunited, they sang “You, in my arms once more”… while standing across the room from each other. Maybe Florestan is actually Jimmy the Reach? Also unintentionally hilarious was when Pizarro was sentenced to pain by a drill team made up of escapees from a Hats Throughout the Ages exhibit, who then declared to the be-beanied prisoners that the long, dark night of the skullcap was over and the long lame day of the top hat had begun. LA Opera also pretty much abstained from their usual Ministry of Silly Walks shenanigans, except during the march of the soldiers. The choreographers that LA Opera hires have yet to hear a march that they couldn’t set a funny walk to.

The sets were all appropriately prison drab and spare. One interesting innovation was the use of filmed computer-generated sequences projected on a screen instead of scenery. It looked a little too much like a video game at some points, but it was a good idea and a better use of money than papier-mâché pig heads or flashlights. I kind of expected Leonore to break out dual magnums like Lara Croft and start taking out wolves, or Rocco to announce that he was a 12th Level Prison Warden and was going to Kalimdor to battle Orcs. The only time the filmed footage became a bit baffling was during the Leonore No. 3 intermezzo in Act II, when it seemed to be a Travelocity virtual tour of the dungeon that ended in a Stargate. I guess after suffering at the hands of the Goa’uld (and Richard Dean Anderson’s acting), prison doesn’t really seem that bad.

The orchestra played fairly well under the direction of James Conlon, apart from a few weird slip-ups in the horn section during the overture. They were especially good during Leonore No. 3, which was beautiful but also seemed a bit like the musical equivalent of James Conlon’s interview answers, i.e. kind of pointless. Gustav Mahler introduced the idea of playing that piece as a kind of scene break during Act II, and it supposedly is a reflection of the exciting rescue scene that happens before it, but I almost had to wonder if, like the bloviating interview answers, playing the piece in this production wasn’t just an ego-stroke for Conlon. Still, it’s the most Beethoven-y music in the opera, and that’s a good thing.

I can only imagine what an opera by Beethoven, writing as Beethoven, would’ve been like, but at the same time, I know it would’ve been ultimately unsatisfying, just as Fidelio was. Conductor William Furtwängler said that Beethoven is not “a musician for the theater or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary,” and it’s true. While Beethoven didn’t have the power to tell isolated stories of people’s lives (and portray universal truths in that manner), he was a master of tapping into something much larger, something much more immediate and essential, of illustrating in music the idea of being human. It might not make for an evening’s light-hearted entertainment, but damn if it isn’t powerful.

Photo copyright Robert Millard

Labels: Fidelio, los angeles

posted by Astrafiammante @ 10:09 PM 1 Comments

And now for something tangentially related...

I've decided that I'd like Elliot Goldenthal to disappear, to pack up his composing toys and go home. Permanently. Yeah, I'm sure Julie Taymor and anyone in the market for a workmanlike yet predictable soundtrack for a movie will miss him, but the classical music world certainly won't.

Here's my beef with Mr. Goldenthal: He sucks. OK, Grendel was like the curate's egg of operas--it was good in parts, but what made it out of the ordinary was the singers and Taymor's production, not Goldenthal's music. That was bland as bland could be, for the most part. If Grendel and random movie soundtracks were the only examples of Goldenthal's music I ever heard, we could peacefully coexist. But last weekend I heard the music he wrote for a ballet of Othello, and I've decided that this planet just isn't big enough for the both of us. Goldenthal has crossed a line--a line from blandness into inappropriately imitative hackery.

Grendel was peppered with such imitation; Stravinsky was especially cribbed from, and Othello is the same way. I generally enjoy it when a composer is inspired by the setting of his work, and either Goldenthal doesn't know where the hell Venice and Cyprus are, or he just decided to stick his fingers in his ears and say "La la la, I can't hear, you Venetian musical traditions!" The majority of the act set in Venice sounded like it was written by George Gershwin and an extremely drunk Igor Stravinsky doing a soundtrack for a film about Peter Griffin riding on a bus. Basically, it was bustling, squawking, and totally inappropriate. Then, in the pas de deux with Othello and Iago, Goldenthal decided to transplant them from Cyprus to the streets of Leonard Bernstein's New York, for a drunken night of shore leave with some classy dames. There were enough wa-wa-wa-ing saxophones in that scene to make it sound like a Charlie Brown Adult Chorus was singing along backstage. The other sincerest form of flattering that I noticed was in the last act, when Goldenthal threw in the same chords (probably the wrong musical term) from Mélisande's death scene in Pelléas et Mélisande. Yeah, Debussy isn't the captain of those chords or anything, but it was just too much of an homage, and it was misused dramatically too.

Goldenthal wasn't the only person ignoring traditional Italian styles, though. Set designer George Tsypin created a spare set (makes sense, otherwise the dancers would be crashing into things), often decorated only by a glass throne, and, in the last act, a pile of giant microscope slides and a bunch of shards. The glass was supposed to recall Venetian glass, but really it bore as much resemblance to Venetian glass as Goldenthal's music did to Venetian music. It just looked like George Tsypin was a giant child making furniture for his Barbie dolls out of household items.

Since I know next to nothing about ballet, I won't comment much on the dancing. Well, I will a little, because I can't resist a bit of mocking. Apparently, Lar Lubovitch mainly choreographs modern pieces, and he should stick to that rather than getting modern dance in ballet and making it look like crap. There was a lot of rolling around on the floor and flexed feet. A lot of the choreography felt too self-consciously symbolic; we were back in the realm of the Red Dragon "DO YOU SEE?!" nonsense. One touch that I did like was Iago's strange, oddly jerky and angular dancing. The most effective part of it was that when he was around other people, he danced like everyone else, but as soon as no one was looking, he'd go back to his weird, asymmetrical arm movements. In general, though, I felt that most of the choreography relied too heavily on upper body movements. It was like Emo Drill Team! If I wanted to watch dancers flail their arms around and roll their heads back and forth melodramatically, I'd watch So You Think You Can Dance. Also, I didn't realize that Muslims vogue like Madonna when they're praying. Because Othello was practically wearing a pointy bra, he was Voguing so hard. And then, to finish off his prayer, he'd crouch down on all fours, lower his head, and shake it around, like a dog digging in to an especially tasty meal.

Of the main dancers, Julie Kent as Desdemona stuck out the most to my untrained eye. Her first move, a pas de bourée couru downstage to Othello was beautifully fluid; it looked like she was on a track or something. Her choreography seemed the most traditionally balletic of the principal characters, which is maybe why I responded to it the most. Marcelo Gomes looked very beefy as Othello, though his tights matched his skin color so closely that I wondered why Othello never wore pants. Apparently, Lubovitch had made a point of keeping Othello "tethered to the ground", as a contrast for Desdemona's ethereal, airy movements, but this didn't really allow Gomes to show off much. He was either Emo Drill Teaming on the floor or he was partnering Desdemona or Iago. I'm told Gomes is an exceptional partner, but it would've been nice to see him let loose a little. Sascha Radetsky looked like Dave Navarro from far away, which added to his air of pint-sized evil. I liked his pas de deux with Othello even if the LA Times reviewer thought they were trite. Yeah, in a piece with music written by Elliot Goldenthal, the choreography is trite. Sure.

I very much doubt that I'll ever love ballet the way I love opera, and I'm not sure why. Though I know a little more about opera, I'm not that knowledgeable about either one. Maybe it's because opera, though sung, is still dependent on words, whereas ballet is all body. Words, I can understand, but bodies and movement, uh, not really. It could be simply a question of learning how to understand how certain movements add to the characterization. In opera, you can hear the emotion, even if you don't understand the language in which they're sung, but with ballet, it's hard to tell if a certain gesture or movement means anything or what it says about the character. I could see that Iago was evil because he had a beard and wore black, but while his movements told me that he was out of sync with the music of the spheres (which is a sign of evil in itself, according to Michael Hackett, who is quite the little rug-cutter in his own right), they didn't tell me anything else about him.

Photo copyright Gene Schiavone

Labels: american ballet theatre, ballet, goldenthal, los angeles

posted by Astrafiammante @ 10:56 AM 0 Comments

Debooshy!

This is almost certainly silly. But silliness never deterred me from posting something before, so here it goes--my treatise on why Pelléas et Mélisande reminded me of The Mighty Boosh, or why I'm not really crazy, honest.

Labels: debussy, pelleas et melisande, the mighty boosh

posted by Astrafiammante @ 7:08 PM 1 Comments