Your Music Is Bad and You Should Feel Bad! – The 2006 Phlegming Awards
Ah, now this is the fun part for me, because I’m all about tearing down. I’m like Shiva or something. Also, it allows me to crack open a bottle of tasty, tasty Schadenfreude. Mmm…more shameful joy and less filling.
Worst Performance by a Male Singer in a Supporting Role: Lado Ataneli as Rodrigo in LA Opera’s Don Carlo. Yeah, he didn’t hit any bad notes or anything, but he made me not give a rat’s ass about a character I usually love, and he didn’t even make up for it by running around like he had shitty drawers. Runner-up: John Relyea (or the person who constructed and programmed the Relyea-Bot) as Garibaldo in the Met’s Rodelinda. Like Ataneli, Relyea was technically fine, but he didn’t change his performance at all in the three shows I saw, and he sang at an unmodulated, unrelieved forte volume all the time. Also, flared nostrils and pointy eyebrows do not a villain make. If they did, then Mr. Spock would’ve turned evil every time Scotty ate too much haggis and started popping them off.
Worst Costumes: I would choose Robert Wilson for his costumes in the Met’s Lohengrin (though he didn’t design them, one of his lackeys did), simply because I’m convinced he’s embezzling money by charging opera companies for the costumes and then re-using old ones. He also deserves a slap on the wrist for not giving Karita Mattila a bra. No, the worst costumes of the year were without a doubt the horrendously ugly Ashes to Ashes, funk to funky, we know Optimus Prime's a junkie, strung out in Munchkinland, hitting an all-time low Pierrot costumes from the Salzburg Festival’s production of Pelléas et Mélisande. They made the cast look like the Widettes. Awful.
Worst Cancellation of the Year, aka The Dwaynie: Simon Keenlyside pulling out of Chicago’s Iphigénie en Tauride, opening the door for that little smacktalker Mucus Leechem, er, Lucas Meachem. Now, I talk as much shit as anyone about opera singers, but I don’t think I can actually sing or anything, and I’ll never have to work with any of them the way he will. Here’s some shit-talk now: Lucas Meachem is a self-important, potato-faced little weasel. Runner-up: Gerald Finley cancelling his Golaud in Salzburg. Laurent Naouri was a decent replacement, but with Finley, it would’ve been good enough for me to overlook those butt-ugly costumes, which is saying something.
Worst Performance by a Female Singer in a Supporting Role: Luana DeVol’s Ortrud at the Met would’ve been a contender in this category, since her voice started coming apart during the opera, but it actually seemed to fit the character and the situation, so she’s not even a runner-up. The clear winner in this category is Frederica von Stade as Ottavia in LA’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. She sounded like a cow being raped by a goose. I think Our Friend Flicka needs to ride off into the sunset.
Most Self-Satisfied Performer: It seems kind of counterproductive to give an award to someone who clearly already thinks very much of himself, but I just had to give this one to Dmitri Hvorostovsky. As I said last year in my review of his LA recital: “The man is so full of himself that I fear he'll soon collapse under the weight of his own self-importance and become some sort of extremely smug white dwarf. If cities could be run on an overinflated sense of self-satisfaction, I'd say hook Hvorostovsky up to a generator by his nipples and let him power the entire West Coast.”
Worst Audience: No question, the audience at LA Opera’s Manon. They arrived late, they clomped around and talked during the music, they ate, and they got as giddy as little schoolgirls when Anna Netrebko pole-danced or put things on her crotch. Grow up and shut up!
Worst Stage-Kiss: Most opera kisses are fairly unconvincing, but the kisses shared by Rodelinda and Bertarido in the Met’s Rodelinda were particularly bad. It looked like he was kissing his mommy. Also, to quote Blackadder, Renée Fleming is wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume (in the weak, too-effeminate sense of the word), so I expected her to squish a bit like an over-filled sponge.
Worst Death: Again, I find myself torn between the moronic direction of Robert Wilson and that of Stanislas Nordey. Telramund’s slow-motion crumple to the floor after being “struck” with an invisible sword in Lohengrin was ridiculous, but at least it was clear what had happened. In Pelléas, the only sign the audience had that Mélisande had died (until the singers told us) was that she slowly raised her arm and then drew it down in front of her face. Yes, I think that is the universal symbol for death, now that I think of it [/sarcasm]. Runner-up: Lado Ataneli’s “Ow, my back is going out!” Herky-Jerky Dance of Impending Death in Don Carlo.
Worst Note: Or should I say “notes”, for there were several. Renée Fleming’s botched run of coloratura in her last aria of Rodelinda wins this category easily. She hit one clunker and instead of cutting her losses and leaving it at that, she went on and followed one bad note up with another and crowned the whole thing with a screeched high note that was like the snot syrup on the poo sundae. Runner-up: Anna Netrebko’s horribly missed note in Manon, which she inexplicably held and held. It was like a rectal thermometer were being jammed into my ear canal and then tapped even further into my head with a ballpeen hammer.
The “winners” in the last category segue nicely into the next two:
Worst Performance by a Female Singer in a Lead Role: Renée Fleming as Rodelinda at the Met. Aside from that bungled bit of coloratura, her voice was just not at all suited to the Baroque music. The much talked-of “creaminess” in her voice seemed more like phlegminess; it had a cottony, sock-in-the-throat thickness to it. She also scooped and swooped up to most of her notes. To make matters worse, Fleming’s acting was, well, short of saying “shitastic”, lackluster. She didn’t have any of the fire that a good Rodelinda should have, and she just wandered around the stage like a kicked dog looking for someone to scratch its ears.
Most Overrated Singer: Anna Netrebko. She’s a fine singer, even though I don’t think she’s very good in some of the roles she chooses, but far too much fuss is made over her. The reason? Have you seen how pretty she is?! OMGSQUEE! A pretty, skinny girl in opera!! It’s like seeing a unicorn! Who cares if she can’t sing bel canto and makes very little effort to change that fact? She’s so pretty!
Worst Set: Stanislas Nordey’s Pelléas production strikes again. His rotating box-with-a-surprise-inside concept was tiresome almost immediately, and only got worse after the items in the box had less and less connection the opera. Then, bafflingly, he ditched the boxes completely in the second half (three acts too late, if you ask me). Also, he used lifelike mannequins *shudder*.
Biggest Douchebag: Robert Wilson. A thousand times Robert Wilson. In defiance of natural law, he both sucks and blows. I sat out his Madama Butterfly at LA Opera, after being sickened and annoyed by it in 2004, and I almost inserted a red-hot skewer into my eye after finding out that Lohengrin at the Met was going to be his production. True to form, it was utter crap. He's destroyed every opera he's directed. He is the least creative person in the world, or else he's the most delusionally self-confident one, if he thinks his ridiculous vision can encompass everything from Mozart to Tom Waits.
Worst Opera Show Host: I should probably feel lucky that LA even has an opera show, but it’s difficult to count my blessings in that respect when that opera show is tainted by the verbal diarrhea of the loathsome Duff Murphy. He is the biggest moron that ever moroned. He often screws up the names and plots of the operas as he explains them, and he insists on saying that Athanael in Thais is Thais’s father, completely oblivious to the fact that Athanael wants to get into Thais’s pants at the end of the opera and that Thais is calling him “Père” because he’s a monk. Well, in true Duffesque style, I’m probably not explaining that right, but Athanael definitely isn’t Thais’s dad. Murphy also has his little pet singers that he always plays. Part of their allure for him appears to be in the pronunciation of their names, which he clearly relishes: “Bryn TAIR-vel” and “Dmitri VOHR-o-stovsky.” Another one of his many gaffes came in a show devoted to his favorites in which he proclaimed that they’re both lyric baritones with a dramatic quality in their voices or something. Wrong and wrong, assclown.
My Duff Murphy rage is mostly inspired by his insistence on overlooking three of the best singers in the world. During his last show (on the penultimate day of the year—that means “second to last”, as Murphy will inform his listeners), he played a block of Schubert lieder. But did he play two of the best lieder interpreters in the world, i.e. Simon Keenlyside and Gerald Finley? Of course not. When he plays excerpts from Billy Budd, does he ever use the Keenlyside recording? Don’t be silly. Playing the best Billy Budd in the last twenty-five years, now that’s just crazy talk.
Worst Performance by a Male Singer in a Lead Role: No one really stands out to me as being particularly awful, since I didn’t see Franco “I have the biggest man-boobies here” Farina this year. I guess I’ll go with Licitra in Don Carlo, simply because he didn’t act much and he didn’t sing very well, and he looked like a wombat with a mullet.
Sadly, there is no Phlegming Award for Worst Overall Production of the Year. The closest I can come would be LA’s La Traviata for being so utterly stupid and forgettable. Even Robert Wilson’s production of Lohengrin had redeeming qualities—the singers, of course. And really, isn’t mediocrity the worst sin of all?
Happy New Year!
Labels: Fleming, netrebko, nordey, Robert Wilson, von Stade, Worst of 2006
Vagina Junction, What's Your Function? - Manon at LA Opera
According to the
Futurama episode “I Dated A Robot”, all civilization is just an effort to impress the opposite sex. Yes, fire was discovered, the Great Pyramids were built, the light bulb was invented, all in the neverending quest for poon. Not the Parthenon, though, or the Pythagorean Theorem, or any of that good Greek stuff that forms the cornerstone of Western civilization, since all that stuff was invented by the Greeks of old…you know the ones I mean. Anyway, I guess there’s no reason why Massenet’s opera
Manon (and the novel that it’s based on) should be any different, but I wish LA Opera’s production of it had been a little more subtle about it. As it is, however, the whole thing is should just be called “The Quest for Vag” or, more accurately, “The Quest for Anna Netrebko’s Vag.”
The best way I can describe the plot is this: it’s
La Traviata, only all the characters are assholes. Well, kind of. It’s the same basic thing, only it starts earlier on—we see the girl’s transformation into a courtesan—and since all the characters are assholes, they tend to behave in opposite ways from the characters in
La Traviata. Instead of DesGrieux’s father trying to convince Manon to give up his son for his son’s sake, he just has DesGrieux kidnapped (at least I
think that’s what happened; a lot of cuts were made, so things were kind of odd and sudden.). Instead of Manon sacrificing her love for DesGrieux for his own good, she basically dumps him for a rich guy and then, after hearing that he’s become a priest, she heads straight for the abbey and dives headlong into his crotch. Instead of trying to win Manon back, DesGrieux goes all pussified and heads for the priesthood. I could go on. Basically, because everyone is an asshole, I didn’t care about any of them at all.
Massenet’s music is very nice; it’s more complex than he’s probably given credit for. Listening to the excerpts in the pre-performance lecture, I was excited to hear it. Unfortunately, Placido Domingo conducts with very little subtlety, so most of what the lecturer had told us to listen for was no longer there because it was being drowned out by louder instruments. The St. Sulpice duet wasn’t particularly erotic or ecstatic (the lecturer had made it sound practically X-rated), and the love theme wasn’t all that, well, lovely.
As a completely random aside, I want my own Leitmotif. And I want it to sound like the theme song from
Sanford and Son.
Lack of a light touch marred just about everything though. That’s no surprise really, since the production was directed by Vincent Paterson, who used to choreograph for Madonna and Michael Jackson. The setting was nonsensically updated to the 1950s, which made the whole joining the priesthood and being sent to a convent for liking pleasure parts a little far-fetched (the pole-dancing was anachronistic as well, but in the other direction of time.). There was the usual tweaking of the supertitles to match the updated setting, but it didn’t really matter anyway, since Netrebko’s French (and sometimes Villazon’s) was so mushy that I couldn’t understand any of her spoken dialogue and only a tiny bit of her singing. The street scene was quite pretty, with the floaty pastel dresses, and some of the scenes were just blandly inoffensive (albeit stolen from a production of
Don Carlo, in the case of the St. Sulpice scene), but others were garish,
Moulin Rouge-with-a-Marilyn-Monroe-wig disasters. Particularly awful was the Casino Transylvania set, which should’ve been called “Casino Giantess’s Vagina”, since the back wall was a huge painted pair of red high heels, with the stupid stripper pole between them (not to mention a lit-up Eiffel Tower poking up as well). Yeah, yeah, yeah, phallic symbols, blah, blah. I think whoever designed the production were going for a Hollywood glamour type thing, right down to the ridiculous sunset over dark, silhouetted hills at the end, but it just didn’t work. In fact, since I was in the upper balcony, I could see all the fluorescent tape on the stage floor, mistook them for lights put there intentionally to look like city lights seen from far away, and thought “Aha! I knew being dead was the same as living in Phoenix!”
One trend at LA Opera that I’d really like to see done away with if the lame-ass pantomiming during the overture. In
La Traviata last year, they did the “You stole my suitcase, therefore I must blow you” thing at the beginning, and in
Manon, they wheeled Netrebko out on a reproduction of a train compartment and showed her putting on lipstick and then baring her leg to the thigh for no reason. It looked like maybe she was tweezing her leg hairs, which is a very inefficient method of depilation. But yeah, loss of innocence, etc.
It felt like this production was really all about objectifying Anna Netrebko; arguably
Manon is about objectifying Manon, but there wasn’t a stripper pole in Prévost’s novel. It was like they’d held a contest to see how many people could think of something for her to rub her crotch on. In Act II, DesGrieux was reading a letter he’d written to his father about her, and Manon grabbed the letter and put it on her crotch, forcing DesGrieux to read it at fuzzy clam level. Great, Manon, how is he supposed to send it to his father when it’s covered in your cooter juice? Anyway, of course that perv Mark Swed mentioned that part in his review, and the audience was practically giddy over it. The guy in front of me (who had gotten there at the beginning of the second act) laughed way too loud and bounced in his seat. During the pole dances (Netrebko’s and the dancer’s), all the men around me had their binoculars glued to their eyes. Really, fellas, you can get better for much less than the price of an opera ticket down on Sunset. Apparently, Manon also tried to give DesGrieux a handjob through his priest’s cassock in the St. Sulpice scene, but I missed that part somehow. Hmm…maybe that “Love Theme” should really be called “Sex Theme”.
The biographical notes for Netrebko declared her a “miracle” as a singer and an actress, and unless “miracle” is being thrown around the way that “awesome” is (“A hot dog?! It’s a miracle!”), she’s not. She’s very pretty, true, and she’s young and thin, and she can sing pretty well and act in a way that’s gotten Scarlett Johansson plenty of work, but that’s about it. It’s her beauty that gets everyone in such a lather over her. If she were plain, she’d just be another soprano. But I could write a manifesto about the rimjobs given to the attractive, so I’ll stop. Her voice is surprisingly dark, and it really only sounds pretty in a very specific part of her range. The highs tend to be quite shrill, when they’re not being completely blown. During the climactic high note during Act III, Scene 1, she was totally flat and basically invented a non-existent note. It was painful. Bafflingly, she held it and held it, maybe hoping that someone would go back in time, add “Zuh?” to the Do-Re-Mi scale, and magically make it the right note. Too bad, Miss Netrebko. The laws of time and space be a harsh mistress. The singers were also miked to catch the spoken dialogue, but it seemed like Netrebko’s was on the entire time; she was much louder than usual, louder than all the other singers, and her voice had the flat,dimensionless quality that microphones can give to operatic voice.
I’m beginning to think that the magical duo of Netrebko and Villazon is pure invention, a magical beast that runs on hype. Everyone thinks they’re the best romantic duo since Batman and Robin just because they’re told to think so. Yeah, I guess they work well together; they must, considering how many bodily fluids they exchange over the course of an evening, but they don’t sound particularly good together, and neither of them have incredibly special voices. Villazon sounds a lot like Placido Domingo, only it’s the bad aspects of Domingo’s voice—the nasality, the choked-off high notes. There’s no softness to Villazon’s voice, and in my opinion, very little character or beauty; it’s not pleasant for me to listen too. It seemed like he was singing at the back of his throat a lot, so he sounded like the vocal love-child of Placido Domingo, a sheep, and Kermit the Frog. Since he wasn’t singing “It’s Not Easy Being Granada” in a musical production of Babe, it wasn’t so great. He’s a good actor and tends to be more involved than Netrebko, but he was reverting back to his
Gianni Schicchi-era comic capering in the first act. Someone needs to tell opera singers and directors that youth != goof. It can, sure, but would a young girl really find a spaz with eyebrows that you’d have to use Agent Orange to thin hot? I don’t think so. In the gambling scene, Villazon was supposed to look all James Bondesque in his white dinner jacket, but it was more
Johnny English than Bond. Overall, he did a better job than Netrebko, but he still couldn’t succeed in making me care about his character.
The supporting cast was pretty strong vocally. David Pittsinger sounded strong and fatherly as DesGrieux’s father, but it was hard to get a good read on him as a character. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or if he was a dick. Kudos to Pittsinger for finally being able to rock his bald head onstage instead of having to wear a wig. (Good lord, did I just use “rock” in that way? I wasn’t being serious, I swear!) Ryland Davies was at first comical and then kind of slimily fiendish as the Alcindoro-like Guillot. I’m not sure if parts were cut out again, because it seemed like Manon had been involved with Guillot, as well as de Bretigny. Also, I wasn’t paying much attention. Hyung Yun’s voice appeals to me for some reason, but his acting as Lescaut made him the engineer of the Obvious Train. Dale Travis didn’t make deBretigny’s fawning lines quite swoony enough, and from far away, he looked like the old guy from the original
Battlestar Galactica stuck in an old puce suit. Unfortunately, deBretigny didn’t re-enact the best.death.scene.ever at the end.
LA Opera really made a point of pushing the sexual aspects (mostly of their own invention) of
Manon, right down to the rehearsal video on their website called “Sex and the Opera”. I guess sex does get asses in seats, but is sex really that engrossing of a subject for an opera? All the focus on sex and humping inanimate objects made the title of the essay in the program—“The Eternal Feminine: Massenet’s
Manon”—a little disturbing to me. There’s definitely nothing wrong with a woman enjoying sex, and she shouldn’t be branded as a whore for doing so, but there’s a difference between liking sex and banging old guys for money. The way the opera was directed, it seemed like Manon became nothing but a singing vagina with a taste for fancy clothes, not a real person with feelings and thoughts. The final scene made her slightly more human, but at that point, it was already too late. So yes, the hall was full, but did the audience come away with anything beyond “That Anna Netrebko’s got some sweet ass, doesn’t she?”? I don’t think so.
ETA: The audience was the worst I've ever seen. I think most of them weren't regulars and been lured by the promise of onstage crotch-rubbing. The ushers are partly to blame for the fiasco, because they're fucking retards. There are plaques right on the doors to the auditorium "No Late Seating", and yet as soon as there's an applause break (after an aria or something), the doors open and a bunch of people come tromping in and fumble around in the dark trying to find their seats. It was so distracting that I could barely pay attention to the beginning of the second act. People try to blame their lateness on the LA traffic, but really they're just assholes. It's a weekend, why not come a few hours early, get some dinner at the Music Center and make a day of it? Don't think that you're going to be able to leave your house in West LA a half-hour before curtain and expect to make it to the Music Center ontime. No one is that stupid, so I'll just have to put it down to self-centeredness. I don't know why the ushers don't make them wait outside until the intermission like they're supposed to; I mean, it's not like the patrons can ask for their money back (well, they can, but they won't get it.). On top of all the latecomers, the people around us were just being total dicks. Someone was whispering constantly, which I blame on our cellphone society that makes people think that they have to talk all the fucking time. Someone else kept unwrapping food. It's not a movie theater; it's an operahouse. You can't bring a supply of snack food to eat during the performance, and you can't just get up and go to the bathroom whenever you want. Gah! The people who sit next to us always bring a little boy with them, which is just stupid, and the kid was hacking up a lung and bubbling his snot through the whole thing. I was about to have a coronary, I was so pissed off. One of these days, I'm just going to completely lose my shit and start screaming at people.
Labels: los angeles, Manon, netrebko, villazon
O nuit kind of divine... Roméo et Juliette at Los Angeles Opera
If Charles Gounod were alive today, I think he would either be a filmmaker or a soundtrack composer. There is something quite cinematic about his operas and his music; I get a feeling of shallowness in it—there is certainly often beauty in the music, but there aren’t any other ideas at play, and the music can often become bombastic or too sugary. Gounod’s main aim, it seems, was to accompany the action onstage as best he could musically, and that is all. Certainly there are times in
Roméo et Juliette when the music tells us things that the words are not, but there is very little layering or subtlety behind it. Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette is very similar to Thomas’s
Hamlet in that it can be incredible if performed by the right kind of singing actors who can bring the necessary Shakespearean nuance to the characters while singing the sometimes facile music. Simon Keenlyside, for example, can overcome the silliness of Thomas’s
Hamlet-with-the-happy-ending, because he seems to keep Shakespeare’s
Hamlet in mind even as he sings an out-of-place drinking song in the opera. This is music not necessarily to enlighten or transform, and it is certainly entertaining and even beautiful when performed by the right singers and the right musicians, but the responsibility for taking the performance to that next level rests almost entirely on the singers’ acting abilities.
Rolando Villazon and Anna Netrebko are both capable actors, and more than capable singers, but only Villazon seemed to have any sense of the Shakespearean version of his character. Though he looks like the unholy spawn of Rowan Atkinson and a particularly hirsute bullfrog, onstage, he is a slim, active Roméo, with curly, black hair and wide, expressive dark eyes. His Roméo was impulsive in every way, as quick to embrace Frère Laurent or Mercutio as he was to strike Tybalt for calling him a coward. Vocally, he sounded like a young Placido Domingo, with better French but without that bright, trumpet-like edge to the voice. His high notes seemed easy and were often pleasant to the ear, but at other times, it seemed as if there were a door in his throat that was closed, only allowing the sound to seep around and under it. My main objection with his performance was how he sang “Va, répose en paix”. I have only ever seen one other Roméo, Roberto Alagna, and Alagna sang that piece more as a lullaby or a serenade, very softly and sweetly, with an ethereally floating last note that seemed to dissipate into the air like fading perfume. Villazon chose to sing the piece more as a standard aria, more loudly and stridently than I thought was necessary.
Anna Netrebko was less successful as Juliette. She seemed to have no concept of the character of Juliette, and her interpretation seemed pieced together from other operatic characters she has played. Juliette’s first appearance at the ball was more like our first glimpse of Violetta in
La Traviata, with Netrebko resplendent in a white confection of a gown that made it look as if she had stepped into a gigantic wedding cake. Her “Juliette’s Waltz” was coy and flirtatious, rather than girlish, as she wove her way among a line of suitors. It was more like Musetta’s Waltz than Juliette’s. When Frère Laurent gave her the potion to simulate death, Netrebko began throwing herself around the stage and writhing around on the floor in an inappropriate repetition of her performance of
Lucia di Lammermoor last season. Most importantly, she never seemed like a 14 year-old girl, and that didn’t fit with the character of Juliette or Juliet or even with the libretto. She appeared too comfortable at the ball, too worldly on her wedding night with Roméo. Netrebko’s voice also added to the maturity of her Juliette. Everything she did was technically perfect, but it seemed that there was a veil drawn over her voice that kept it from really breaking through into any lightness, youth, or uniqueness. During the wedding night scene, she sounded almost like a mezzo.
Villazon and Netrebko interacted well, although he is a much less self-conscious actor than she. One reviewer said that there was a lack of chemistry because Netrebko is too full of herself, but I think the problem actually is that she’s not a natural actress and is following the stage direction so closely that everything she does seems calculated and contrived. Though their voices are similar—both are fairly dark and lack a true cutting edge—it didn’t seem that their voices blended very well. Other parts of their anatomy seemed to blend better, much to the delight of all the perverts in the audience.
The rest of the cast was fine. Suzanna Guzman fulfilled her role as comic relief as the Nurse; she always does well in roles where character is more important than vocal beauty. Simone Alberghini yelled his way through the role of Capulet (and it must have been uncomfortable to play the father of the woman he is dating in real life). Reinhard Hagen was an imposing but kind Frère Laurent, and Anna Maria Panzarella sang her aria as Stephano well. Marc Barrard’s Mercutio got through his Queen Mab aria with an astonishing lack of charisma, and without the sprightly, golden spark and wit that Simon Keenlyside brings to the part and that Shakespeare intended the character to have.
The staging was one of the more impressive that I’ve seen at LA Opera. At first I thought it would be silly, since it look kind of like a Victorian train station, all metal stairs and balustrades and railings. These pieces moved around to form different scenes, and other props were added to suggest Juliette’s bedroom, Frère Laurent’s cell, a ballroom, Juliette’s tomb, or the garden. The only faults with the sets were that they were moved during the muscial interludes, which could get kind of noisy, and they seemed to absorb a lot of the sound. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is already inhospitable enough to opera without having a set that doesn’t bounce the sound back out to the audience.
Some other refreshing changes were that all the costumes appeared to be from the same period, in this case rather Dickensian, Victorian costumes, and that the production was refreshingly free of the ridiculous Peggy Hickey choreography we saw in
Aïda.
West Side Story style was kept to an extreme minimum, and the fights looked like actual violence instead of just messy pirouetting. The only hint of silly choreography was when Roméo was singing “Ange adorable” to Juliette, and their movements were mimed by three other couples in the background. One other low point was the bizarre choice to add a subplot with Lady Capulet and Tybalt. In the ballroom scene, Tybalt kisses Lady Capulet’s hand and appears to flirt with her, before Capulet drags her off, scolding her. After Tybalt dies, Lady Capulet weeps dramatically over his corpse until Capulet violently pushes her away. It seemed that the director was hinting that Lady Capulet and Tybalt were having an affair, and that just didn’t make any sense and has no basis either in the libretto or in Shakespeare.
Even though the douchebag behind me ruined the whole thing for me by saying before the opera started that Roméo and Juliette both die *rolls eyes*, I would say that
Roméo et Juliette is my second-favorite performance of the LA Opera season so far, coming only after
Bohème. And if Roberto Alagna hadn't been in
Bohème, Roméo et Juliette would have been my hands-down favorite of the year. I especially liked Gounod’s love music; it’s very sensual without being saccharine as he sometimes can be. The only parts I didn’t care for were the waltzes, which seemed over-the-top and out-of-place in the context of the play, but since this production was updated to an era where waltzing was popular, it didn’t seem quite so anachronistic. Though now I wonder what a
Romeo and Juliet opera would be like set to Elizabethan-style lute music. With Andreas Scholl as Romeo.
Or Simon Keenlyside as Romeo and Andreas Scholl as Juliet. Nevermind.
Labels: los angeles, netrebko, romeo, villazon
Lucia di Lammermoor, Los Angeles Opera
I went to see
Lucia di Lammermoor on Sunday. It was OK. I find I don’t like bel canto operas very much. Not sure why. I also feel that they blew most of their budget to get Anna Netrebko, who is apparently the new “It” girl in the opera world, and had to use a bunch of pretty third-rate talent for the rest of the cast. Anna Netrebko was good, but she wasn’t amazing. It seems like she’s made more of just because she’s pretty. Her voice seemed kind of gritty when she had to sustain a high tessitura (is that the right word?), but when she only had to hit single high notes, they were quite lovely and full. She was the only one who acted too, even though it was kind of overblown, vaguely-Winona-Ryderish acting. One thing I learned is that crazy people move very quickly and like to lay on the floor a lot, particularly under furniture. So I guess that means that my uncle is crazy because he has the propensity, on holidays, to find large pieces of furniture to lie under and have a nap. I also think that Lucia wouldn't have gone so bat-shit crazy if that damned flautist would’ve stopped egging her on.
Kresimir Spicer, who I loved as the Narrator Guy in
Il Combatimentio di Tancredi e Clorinda last year, was a good Arturo. Arturo is a very Hugh Bonneville role, which worked out nicely because Spicer looks a lot like Hugh Bonneville. The Raimondo guy was OK, but the character is kind of useless; he's like Signore Expositione. The Edgardo was awful; his voice was pinched, nasal, and worn-out, with that ghastly, chugging vibrato. His acting also consisted of the opera “Oh my god, what the fuck?” gesture, which is basically just a single fist clench, followed by a quick turn of the head to stare in horrified anger at the newly clenched fist. The guy who played Enrico looked like a hobbit. An EVIL hobbit.
The costumes were kind of all over the place too. The opening scene had a chorus of Zorros (with really cute Irish wolfhounds). Lucia’s costumes were OK, kind of era-less but pretty, but her wedding gown was almost Elizabethan. The men were dressed late-Victorian/early Edwardian, except for Normanno, who was kind of Henry Vish. The women were all kind of mid-19th century. I wish they would’ve just picked a fucking time period and stuck with it. Oh, and finally, when Arturo arrived to marry Lucia, the chorus did this extremely dorky drill-team routine to welcome him. WhatEVER. My mom said that the director did that as a “Scottish” touch, to which I replied, “If they wanted Scottish touches, they should’ve put all the men in kilts and had them play tennis with a blancmange.” She looked at me like I was crazy, so I had to explain almost an entire Monty Python episode to her. Sigh.
Labels: lucia, netrebko
