For only the second time in its history, San Francisco Opera presented Giuseppe Verdi’s ninth opera, Attila. The previous time was in 1991, with Samuel Ramey in the title role. Ramey was back for this second production, this time in the minor role of Leone—the renamed Pope Leo I, to keep the censors happy.
Attila comprises a prologue and three acts, but it’s short enough that it was presented with only one intermission, with a “pause, please remain at your seat” between Prologue and Act 1, and again between Acts 2 and 3. Verdi’s message was Italian unification and rejection of Austrian rule; the director’s message was to decry the destruction of theaters. To that end, the Prologue and Act 1 featured the ruins of a stone amphitheater, with stones that had been displaced and a fluted column that had fallen over. Attila made his entrance by coming through an archway at the top of the theater. (The 1991 production, with Attila being carried in astride a platform held by four men, was much more impressive.) When Attila met with the Roman general Ezio, a great swath of brightly-colored fabric, hung on a bar in a manner to created semicircular folds, was dropped to stage level. Also attached to the bar was a gigantic golden emblem depicting a wreath, spears, and fasces (see the back of a dime). Act 1 retained the amphitheater but added a very large branch from a very large oak tree, suspended high above the stage. It made me think of Norma.
In Act 2, the amphitheater remained stage left; on stage right there now appeared a portion of the kind of Italian opera house in which Attila might have received its premiere, with three rows of boxes. The right-hand side of each level was broken off as though it had been hit by a bomb. For Act 3 the director brought us to the present time, adding to the amphitheater on the right and opera house on the left a movie theater in the middle. There were tall upholstered chairs that had seen better days; in the back, a dirty gray fabric was suspended from a triangulated metal support. A movie, presumably a movie about Attila from the 1930s, played (silently) on the fabric. At first the movie was quite distracting, but as the act progressed, the contrast in the moving images decreased, making it easier to ignore. According to the program notes, the director’s “concept” was to call our attention to the destruction of historically important performing theaters to replace them with movie theaters.
Our cast:
Attila: Ferruccio Furlanetto
Uldino: Nathaniel Peake
Odabella: Lucrecia Garcia
Ezio: Quinn Kelsey
Foresto: Diego Torre
Leone (Pope Leo I): Samuel Ramey
Conductor: Nicola Luisotti
Director: Gabriele Lavia
Most everyone sang very well. The standout performer was Lucrecia Garcia as Odabella, who handled her difficult role with apparent ease. Diego Torre (Foresto) started his first scena with a recitative that sounded as though he hadn’t completely warmed up, but by the time he reached the cabaletta he was up to full speed. The sole disappointment (and not surprising, given his lackluster Boris Godunov of 2008) was Samuel Ramey, who is simply past his prime with a pronounced wobble in his voice. Nevertheless he got a rousing ovation at curtain call time, which was more of a “lifetime achievement” recognition than kudos for this particular afternoon. He mouthed a message to the audience, the first two words of which were obviously “Thank you,” and I can imagine that the complete message was “Thank you for your support all these years.” I wonder whether we’ll see him again.
While the orchestral playing wasn’t as sharp and clear as it had been a week ago for The Magic Flute, it was obvious that Luisotti loved the music and was a firmly committed conductor. It was the great singing that made it a solid beta. I hope we get to hear Lucrecia Garcia again.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
The Magic Flute, San Francisco Opera, June 24 2012
This time it really was The Magic Flute and not Die Zauberflöte, as the singspiel was presented in an English translation by San Francisco Opera’s general director, David Gockley. Certain liberties were taken with the text, sometimes to good effect. After the Queen of the Night’s first aria, Tamino wondered, incredulously, “Was that for real?” Papageno did not carry the traditional birdcage on his back; rather he carried a loose wicker frame that held various sizes of white eggs with black speckles, and he explained to Tamino that he practiced sustainable bird-catching. But for the words that were sung, the English translation just didn’t seem to fit the music as well as the original German.
The production was designed by Jun Kaneko, who gave us lots of projections. During the overture, we saw a white surface with many black speckles; as the music progressed, numerous colored lines were drawn across the background, mostly horizontal and vertical. This theme of horizontal and vertical lines continued throughout the performance, except when a large number of ellipses appeared to be generated down low to the rear of the stage, and draw nearer as they moved to the front and top of the stage. It reminded me of an opening scene from Star Wars, in which an immense space ship floats by, directly overhead. The effect was more distracting than offensive, but it added nothing to the music—aside from the Trial by Fire and Trial by Water. Here, projections of wriggling vertical red lines and wiggling horizontal blue lines adequately solved what I imagine is a difficult problem. The most delightful part of the production was the “Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa” duet for Pagageno and Papagena. Half a dozen young children came out, costumed like very young chicks, with very round bodies and tiny little wings that flapped a bit.
Our cast:
Tamino: Alek Shrader
Pamina: Heidi Stober
Papageno: Nathan Gunn
Papagena: Nadine Sierra
Queen of the Night: Albina Shagimuratova
Sarastro: Kristinn Sigmundsson
Monostatos: Greg Fedderly
Conductor: Rory Macdonald
Director: Harry Silverstein
Much buzz surrounded Shagimuratova as Queen of the Night; she did sing superbly but I was most impressed by the Monostatos of Greg Fedderly, who sang strongly, clearly, and simply, without attempting to add a veneer of evil to his voice. Heidi Stober made a fine Pamina; Nathan Gunn acted his role very well, though I found nothing special in his singing. I’ve heard Kristinn Sigmundsson sing better than he did this time. During the overture and orchestral interludes, the orchestra sounded magnificent. I’ll have to list the set design and the translation as detractors, and rate the experience somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
The production was designed by Jun Kaneko, who gave us lots of projections. During the overture, we saw a white surface with many black speckles; as the music progressed, numerous colored lines were drawn across the background, mostly horizontal and vertical. This theme of horizontal and vertical lines continued throughout the performance, except when a large number of ellipses appeared to be generated down low to the rear of the stage, and draw nearer as they moved to the front and top of the stage. It reminded me of an opening scene from Star Wars, in which an immense space ship floats by, directly overhead. The effect was more distracting than offensive, but it added nothing to the music—aside from the Trial by Fire and Trial by Water. Here, projections of wriggling vertical red lines and wiggling horizontal blue lines adequately solved what I imagine is a difficult problem. The most delightful part of the production was the “Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa” duet for Pagageno and Papagena. Half a dozen young children came out, costumed like very young chicks, with very round bodies and tiny little wings that flapped a bit.
Our cast:
Tamino: Alek Shrader
Pamina: Heidi Stober
Papageno: Nathan Gunn
Papagena: Nadine Sierra
Queen of the Night: Albina Shagimuratova
Sarastro: Kristinn Sigmundsson
Monostatos: Greg Fedderly
Conductor: Rory Macdonald
Director: Harry Silverstein
Much buzz surrounded Shagimuratova as Queen of the Night; she did sing superbly but I was most impressed by the Monostatos of Greg Fedderly, who sang strongly, clearly, and simply, without attempting to add a veneer of evil to his voice. Heidi Stober made a fine Pamina; Nathan Gunn acted his role very well, though I found nothing special in his singing. I’ve heard Kristinn Sigmundsson sing better than he did this time. During the overture and orchestral interludes, the orchestra sounded magnificent. I’ll have to list the set design and the translation as detractors, and rate the experience somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Duke Bluebeard's Castle, San Francisco Symphony, June 23 2012
Little did I know that Bela Bartok (1881-1945) had written an opera. It’s a dark tale in which Judith, the Duke’s fourth wife, visits his castle for the first time. There are seven doors to seven rooms hiding the Duke’s secrets, which Judith persuades him to open, one by one. Behind the first door is a torture chamber; behind the second, the armory; and so on. Behind the seventh and last door are his first three wives, still alive.
It’s a one-act opera, with only two singing roles, for bass-baritone and mezzo-soprano, with a spoken introduction. It lasts about an hour. There is not much action; all that needs to happen is for the Duke and Judith to open the seven doors, and so it was appropriate for the San Francisco Symphony to present it as a semi-staged performance. Much publicity was made of the semi-sets, which were underwhelming. The orchestral players were in their usual positions on stage. To the left and right of the orchestra, and behind, were the walls of the castle: light-gray expanses of fabric, punctuated by buttresses. Well, sort of buttresses. These buttresses were flush with the castle wall at the bottom, extending farther out from the wall with increasing height. The sides of the buttresses to the right and left of the orchestra were therefore acute right triangles, with the smallest angle at floor level. On these triangular surfaces were projected various nondescript images, though I could identify water droplets and roses at various times. The entire wall behind the orchestra was also used for projections. Suspended above the orchestra were four (non-regular) tetrahedrons,stacked one in back of the other, though toward the end they were moved apart. They also served as surfaces for projections.
Our cast:
Duke Bluebeard: Alan Held
Judith: Michelle deYoung
Speaker: Ken Ruta
Conductor: Michael Tilson Thomas
Director: Nick Hillel
I attended the performance somewhat reluctantly, since the name “Bartok” conveys to me “modern music,” only some of which I can accept. But a friend’s rave review persuaded to see what sort of ticket might be available, and when I saw the opportunity to sit in the third row of orchestra center, I jumped. I need not have worried about the music. The pre-performance lecturer mentioned the recurring (dissonant) interval of the second, signifying “blood,” but in context it worked just fine. The music was not at all difficult to appreciate. None of it was particularly “memorable,” but the same can be said for Palestrina. What made the biggest impression on me was the music, loud and glorious, for the opening of the fifth door, the door to the Duke’s entire kingdom (dukedom?).
The singers performed (and they performed, not just sang as in a concert performance) behind the orchestra, slightly raised above their level, but my third row vantage point meant that they were often obscured by the conductor and the downstage players. Nevertheless, Alan Held made a magnificent Bluebeard; Michelle deYoung was adequate to her role of Judith. And the orchestra sounded wonderful. (The piano in the Liszt Concerto #1 that came before intermission sounded rather harsh from the third row.) I’m glad I went, glad to have added this opera to my repertoire, but rather disappointed in the staging. It’s somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
It’s a one-act opera, with only two singing roles, for bass-baritone and mezzo-soprano, with a spoken introduction. It lasts about an hour. There is not much action; all that needs to happen is for the Duke and Judith to open the seven doors, and so it was appropriate for the San Francisco Symphony to present it as a semi-staged performance. Much publicity was made of the semi-sets, which were underwhelming. The orchestral players were in their usual positions on stage. To the left and right of the orchestra, and behind, were the walls of the castle: light-gray expanses of fabric, punctuated by buttresses. Well, sort of buttresses. These buttresses were flush with the castle wall at the bottom, extending farther out from the wall with increasing height. The sides of the buttresses to the right and left of the orchestra were therefore acute right triangles, with the smallest angle at floor level. On these triangular surfaces were projected various nondescript images, though I could identify water droplets and roses at various times. The entire wall behind the orchestra was also used for projections. Suspended above the orchestra were four (non-regular) tetrahedrons,stacked one in back of the other, though toward the end they were moved apart. They also served as surfaces for projections.
Our cast:
Duke Bluebeard: Alan Held
Judith: Michelle deYoung
Speaker: Ken Ruta
Conductor: Michael Tilson Thomas
Director: Nick Hillel
I attended the performance somewhat reluctantly, since the name “Bartok” conveys to me “modern music,” only some of which I can accept. But a friend’s rave review persuaded to see what sort of ticket might be available, and when I saw the opportunity to sit in the third row of orchestra center, I jumped. I need not have worried about the music. The pre-performance lecturer mentioned the recurring (dissonant) interval of the second, signifying “blood,” but in context it worked just fine. The music was not at all difficult to appreciate. None of it was particularly “memorable,” but the same can be said for Palestrina. What made the biggest impression on me was the music, loud and glorious, for the opening of the fifth door, the door to the Duke’s entire kingdom (dukedom?).
The singers performed (and they performed, not just sang as in a concert performance) behind the orchestra, slightly raised above their level, but my third row vantage point meant that they were often obscured by the conductor and the downstage players. Nevertheless, Alan Held made a magnificent Bluebeard; Michelle deYoung was adequate to her role of Judith. And the orchestra sounded wonderful. (The piano in the Liszt Concerto #1 that came before intermission sounded rather harsh from the third row.) I’m glad I went, glad to have added this opera to my repertoire, but rather disappointed in the staging. It’s somewhere between a gamma and a beta.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Nixon in China, San Francisco Opera, June 17 2012
As promised earlier, today it was back to the War Memorial Opera House for my third Nixon in China, having already seen the dress rehearsal and a performance that I traded my wife’s ticket for. The staging was of course the same, there were no substitutions in the cast, and the performance went just like the previous one.
I did notice two things that I hadn’t before: in the first act, Chairman Mao gets to demonstrate his heldentenor voice with a note held for a loooooooong time. The word? Duraaaaaaaaation. Some sort of pun, perhaps? And I found another sentence to add to my collection of insipid lines from opera in English. To “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose) and “I’ll have to give you a geography lesson,” (Heart of a Soldier), I can add “Where’s the toilet?” sung by Henry Kissinger in act 3. After Chou En-lai tells him “Through the door,” Kissinger replies “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment,” and that’s the last we hear from him. He does return (he can be seen zipping up his trousers) and wanders around and winds up standing underneath his photo, but we don’t hear him again. The librettist must have had some sort of bone to pick with Kissinger, because his character is treated quite shabbily.
So, after trying to do my due diligence with three performances, I’m still left wondering what all the fuss is about. It will probably be a long time before I feel obliged to see this opera again, which is just fine. It’s still a gamma.
I did notice two things that I hadn’t before: in the first act, Chairman Mao gets to demonstrate his heldentenor voice with a note held for a loooooooong time. The word? Duraaaaaaaaation. Some sort of pun, perhaps? And I found another sentence to add to my collection of insipid lines from opera in English. To “Who was that on the telephone?” (Angle of Repose) and “I’ll have to give you a geography lesson,” (Heart of a Soldier), I can add “Where’s the toilet?” sung by Henry Kissinger in act 3. After Chou En-lai tells him “Through the door,” Kissinger replies “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment,” and that’s the last we hear from him. He does return (he can be seen zipping up his trousers) and wanders around and winds up standing underneath his photo, but we don’t hear him again. The librettist must have had some sort of bone to pick with Kissinger, because his character is treated quite shabbily.
So, after trying to do my due diligence with three performances, I’m still left wondering what all the fuss is about. It will probably be a long time before I feel obliged to see this opera again, which is just fine. It’s still a gamma.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Nixon in China, San Francisco Opera, June 14 2012
25 years have passed since John Adams’s Nixon in China premiered in Houston, having been commissioned by the then-general director of Houston Grand Opera, David Gockley. Mr. Gockley is now the general director of San Francisco Opera, and he has brought Nixon in China to its first performances at this company. Although a number of operatic luminaries consider it to be one of the finest operas of the 20th century, it would be OK with me if San Francisco waits another 25 years before doing it again.
The opera is based on Nixon’s historic trip to China Feb. 21-28, 1972. I can’t quite say “tells the story of” because there is little story line—i.e., no plot. The opera comprises a series of vignettes of the trip:
Act 1: Nixon’s arrival, meeting Chairman Mao, the banquet
Act 2: Pat Nixon’s visit to several venues, the ballet “The Red Detachment of Women”
Act 3: The principals reflect on their lives
As I mentioned in my review of the Met HD broadcast of Nixon in China, no one falls in love, no one dies, so what makes this an opera? Well, it does have many of the trappings of opera: a title reminiscent of such works as The Italian Girl in Algiers and Iphegenie in Tauride; it has a prelude, choruses, arias, and a ballet; and it has an ensemble finale of the sort that Mozart used frequently. But as for drama—well, there’s not much of that.
I can’t resist a couple of juicy quotes from contemporary reviews:
“Nixon in China works to redefine the concept of boredom.” (Donal Henahan)
“There are only three things wrong with Nixon in China. One, the libretto; two, the music; three, the direction. Outside of that, it's perfect.” (Marvin Kitman)
Nevertheless, given the level of critical acclaim for the opera, I tried my best to see what I (and others) are missing. I attended three lectures on the opera. I attended the dress rehearsal and today’s performance, and will attend another performance shortly. (I did not purchase a recording, nor did I read “John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives” by Timothy Johnson.)
The staging of the beginning of Act 1 was quite effective. At first we saw just a projection of a cloudy mist drifting by, then an image of Air Force 1 (a Boeing 707) emerged. The projection grew larger, and a single window was illuminated to show Nixon in his seat. The plane then banked to the right, and the viewpoint shifted to the head of the runway in Peking. The plane passed overhead and touched down, complete with puffs of smoke from the wheels. The projection changed again to show the nose of the plane swinging around to its final position, then the scrim was raised to reveal a cutout of the nose, wing, and an engine. A stairway was rolled up to the plane and Nixon descended to ground level and was greeted by Chou En-lai.
Act 1 scene 2 portrayed the meeting with Chairman Mao, who was old (78) and unstable on his feet. The set consisted of not much more than some straight-backed chairs and a round table. Scene 3 was the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, with a number of round tables with chairs, and waiters scurrying back and forth. There was also a very tall lectern, probably 12 feet in height, from which first Chou En-lai and then Nixon delivered short arias.
In Act 2 scene 1, Pat Nixon visited various points of interest: a glass factory, where she was presented with a small elephant figurine; a health clinic; a pig farm; a schoolyard; the Ming Tombs. Here the chorus carried placards on poles, with Chinese characters (no subtitles!) on one side and blank on the other side. When the blank sides were turned to the audience, images of glass elephants, injections, pigs, and schoolchildren were projected on them.
One of my lecturers mentioned the difficulty of the music: “there’s never more than 5 seconds where the music stays in the same time signature.” Well, that’s not something that I hear, but I grasped the difficulty of the pig farm scene. The chorus sang “pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig” very rapidly, and my mouth gets tired just thinking about it.
Act 2 scene 2 was the ballet The Red Detachment of Women. There were three or four rows of bleachers, with the principals sitting in the first row and the chorus behind them. In the background was a large hammer and sickle; the image separated at one point to show a large image of Chairman Mao. One lecturer pointed out that this was where the opera devolved into fantasy, “from which it never recovers.” Henry Kissinger left his seat to walk on stage and paw at the prima ballerina; he then ran off stage and returned dressed in the same costume as the landowner (?), and gave the order “whip her to death!” Ultimately Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao) held a pistol to his head and shot him; he wound up with his head resting against the prompter’s box. I was unable to make any sense of Kissinger’s involvement in the on-stage action, or of the Nixons’ sympathetic involvement with the same prima ballerina.
Act 3 opened with many of the props from the earlier acts on stage: the airport stairway, the 12-foot lectern, bicycles from Act 2 scene 1, chairs and serving tables from the banquet. Gradually they were cleared away and replaced by six triangular towers, with black-and-white photographs of the actual historic characters (Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Ch’ing, Chou En-lai) on two sides of the triangle. There was no chorus in this act, just the principals wandering on and off stage, singing reminiscences of the Long March or Nixon’s WWII experience. Chou En-lai got the last word, wondering “whether what we did was good,” and the act closed with each principal standing at the base of his or her tower.
Our cast:
Chou En-lai: Chen-Ye Yuan
Richard Nixon: Brian Mulligan
Henry Kissinger: Patrick Carfizzi
Mao Tse-Tung: Simon O’Neill
Pat Nixon: Maria Kanyova
Chiang Ch’ing: Hye Jung Lee
Conductor: Lawrence Renes
Director: Michael Cavanagh
All of the singers had studied their characters well, and were proficient in imitating their mannerisms. The outstanding singer was Hye Jung Lee as Chiang Ch’ing; she had a “barn burner” of an aria in Act 2 scene 2, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung,” which I have heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s arias in Die Zauberflöte. According to the composer’s directions, all of the principals were miked, but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been told.
The orchestral music was quite fine. John Adams rejected the precepts of most “modern music” and wrote music that people could actually tolerate listening to. I heard many echoes of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (which I love); at one point in the ballet there is a section that sounded like very lush Richard Strauss or maybe even Rachmaninoff; the opera ended with music that reminded me of “Neptune the Mystic” from The Planets by Gustav Holst. And the vocal lines were lyrical, rather than jumping vast distances from one note to the next. The staging was decidedly superior to that seen earlier in the Met HD broadcast. But the libretto, such as it is, still leaves me wondering “Huh? What’s that about? What sense does that make? What’s the point?” I’ll give this one a gamma, and will go again, not so much because I want to see it again but rather I want to continue trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
The opera is based on Nixon’s historic trip to China Feb. 21-28, 1972. I can’t quite say “tells the story of” because there is little story line—i.e., no plot. The opera comprises a series of vignettes of the trip:
Act 1: Nixon’s arrival, meeting Chairman Mao, the banquet
Act 2: Pat Nixon’s visit to several venues, the ballet “The Red Detachment of Women”
Act 3: The principals reflect on their lives
As I mentioned in my review of the Met HD broadcast of Nixon in China, no one falls in love, no one dies, so what makes this an opera? Well, it does have many of the trappings of opera: a title reminiscent of such works as The Italian Girl in Algiers and Iphegenie in Tauride; it has a prelude, choruses, arias, and a ballet; and it has an ensemble finale of the sort that Mozart used frequently. But as for drama—well, there’s not much of that.
I can’t resist a couple of juicy quotes from contemporary reviews:
“Nixon in China works to redefine the concept of boredom.” (Donal Henahan)
“There are only three things wrong with Nixon in China. One, the libretto; two, the music; three, the direction. Outside of that, it's perfect.” (Marvin Kitman)
Nevertheless, given the level of critical acclaim for the opera, I tried my best to see what I (and others) are missing. I attended three lectures on the opera. I attended the dress rehearsal and today’s performance, and will attend another performance shortly. (I did not purchase a recording, nor did I read “John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives” by Timothy Johnson.)
The staging of the beginning of Act 1 was quite effective. At first we saw just a projection of a cloudy mist drifting by, then an image of Air Force 1 (a Boeing 707) emerged. The projection grew larger, and a single window was illuminated to show Nixon in his seat. The plane then banked to the right, and the viewpoint shifted to the head of the runway in Peking. The plane passed overhead and touched down, complete with puffs of smoke from the wheels. The projection changed again to show the nose of the plane swinging around to its final position, then the scrim was raised to reveal a cutout of the nose, wing, and an engine. A stairway was rolled up to the plane and Nixon descended to ground level and was greeted by Chou En-lai.
Act 1 scene 2 portrayed the meeting with Chairman Mao, who was old (78) and unstable on his feet. The set consisted of not much more than some straight-backed chairs and a round table. Scene 3 was the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, with a number of round tables with chairs, and waiters scurrying back and forth. There was also a very tall lectern, probably 12 feet in height, from which first Chou En-lai and then Nixon delivered short arias.
In Act 2 scene 1, Pat Nixon visited various points of interest: a glass factory, where she was presented with a small elephant figurine; a health clinic; a pig farm; a schoolyard; the Ming Tombs. Here the chorus carried placards on poles, with Chinese characters (no subtitles!) on one side and blank on the other side. When the blank sides were turned to the audience, images of glass elephants, injections, pigs, and schoolchildren were projected on them.
One of my lecturers mentioned the difficulty of the music: “there’s never more than 5 seconds where the music stays in the same time signature.” Well, that’s not something that I hear, but I grasped the difficulty of the pig farm scene. The chorus sang “pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig-pig” very rapidly, and my mouth gets tired just thinking about it.
Act 2 scene 2 was the ballet The Red Detachment of Women. There were three or four rows of bleachers, with the principals sitting in the first row and the chorus behind them. In the background was a large hammer and sickle; the image separated at one point to show a large image of Chairman Mao. One lecturer pointed out that this was where the opera devolved into fantasy, “from which it never recovers.” Henry Kissinger left his seat to walk on stage and paw at the prima ballerina; he then ran off stage and returned dressed in the same costume as the landowner (?), and gave the order “whip her to death!” Ultimately Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao) held a pistol to his head and shot him; he wound up with his head resting against the prompter’s box. I was unable to make any sense of Kissinger’s involvement in the on-stage action, or of the Nixons’ sympathetic involvement with the same prima ballerina.
Act 3 opened with many of the props from the earlier acts on stage: the airport stairway, the 12-foot lectern, bicycles from Act 2 scene 1, chairs and serving tables from the banquet. Gradually they were cleared away and replaced by six triangular towers, with black-and-white photographs of the actual historic characters (Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Ch’ing, Chou En-lai) on two sides of the triangle. There was no chorus in this act, just the principals wandering on and off stage, singing reminiscences of the Long March or Nixon’s WWII experience. Chou En-lai got the last word, wondering “whether what we did was good,” and the act closed with each principal standing at the base of his or her tower.
Our cast:
Chou En-lai: Chen-Ye Yuan
Richard Nixon: Brian Mulligan
Henry Kissinger: Patrick Carfizzi
Mao Tse-Tung: Simon O’Neill
Pat Nixon: Maria Kanyova
Chiang Ch’ing: Hye Jung Lee
Conductor: Lawrence Renes
Director: Michael Cavanagh
All of the singers had studied their characters well, and were proficient in imitating their mannerisms. The outstanding singer was Hye Jung Lee as Chiang Ch’ing; she had a “barn burner” of an aria in Act 2 scene 2, “I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung,” which I have heard compared to the Queen of the Night’s arias in Die Zauberflöte. According to the composer’s directions, all of the principals were miked, but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been told.
The orchestral music was quite fine. John Adams rejected the precepts of most “modern music” and wrote music that people could actually tolerate listening to. I heard many echoes of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (which I love); at one point in the ballet there is a section that sounded like very lush Richard Strauss or maybe even Rachmaninoff; the opera ended with music that reminded me of “Neptune the Mystic” from The Planets by Gustav Holst. And the vocal lines were lyrical, rather than jumping vast distances from one note to the next. The staging was decidedly superior to that seen earlier in the Met HD broadcast. But the libretto, such as it is, still leaves me wondering “Huh? What’s that about? What sense does that make? What’s the point?” I’ll give this one a gamma, and will go again, not so much because I want to see it again but rather I want to continue trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Faust, Opera San Jose, May 1 2012
Back to San Jose a couple of days later to see the “other” cast from the one seen earlier. The sets were the same, of course, and Mephistopheles still garroted Faust in the finale.
Our cast:
Faust: Alexander Boyer
Mephistopheles: Branch Fields
Marguerite: Jasmina Halimic
Valentin: Krassen Karagiozov
Marthe: Tori Grayum
Siebel: Cathleen Candia
Wagner (no relation): Jo Vincent Parks
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Director: Brad Dalton
Alexander Boyer sang strongly, though in the first act I was distracted by his eyes, which kept moving from here to there to somewhere else. Branch Fields lacked the power that Silas Elash had brought to the earlier performance, but he moved around the stage with greater alacrity and agility. Jasmina Halimic made a delightful Marguerite, and Krassen Karagiozov sang a fine Valentin. Not as many goosebumps as the previous evening, but nevertheless a very satisfying performance. Definitely a beta.
Our cast:
Faust: Alexander Boyer
Mephistopheles: Branch Fields
Marguerite: Jasmina Halimic
Valentin: Krassen Karagiozov
Marthe: Tori Grayum
Siebel: Cathleen Candia
Wagner (no relation): Jo Vincent Parks
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Director: Brad Dalton
Alexander Boyer sang strongly, though in the first act I was distracted by his eyes, which kept moving from here to there to somewhere else. Branch Fields lacked the power that Silas Elash had brought to the earlier performance, but he moved around the stage with greater alacrity and agility. Jasmina Halimic made a delightful Marguerite, and Krassen Karagiozov sang a fine Valentin. Not as many goosebumps as the previous evening, but nevertheless a very satisfying performance. Definitely a beta.
Faust, Opera San Jose, April 29 2012
Faust, performed so often in the 19th century that one New York critic dubbed the old Met as the “Faustspielhaus” (“the house where they play Faust,” punning on Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth), doesn’t have quite the currency that it used to—this was the first Faust since 2002, and the first in the California Theatre, The company had made a practice of omitting the Soldiers’ Chorus in the fourth act because of time constraints and the inability to put a decent-sized battalion of soldiers on the stage of the Montgomery Theater. One of the arguments for investing in the move to the California Theatre was that it would now be possible to include the Soldiers’ Chorus. I’m pleased to report that they did.
For Act 1, the curtain went up on the aged scholar Faust in his study, surrounded by piles of old books. Behind him was a gigantic painting of a blackboard on which were written various inscrutable mathematical formulae. There seemed to be a bunch of trigonometry, perhaps alluding to the fact that Goethe, on whose Faust the opera was indirectly based, had written a Theory of Colors. There were also astrological symbols, alluding to the historical Johann Georg Faust’s interest in astrology as well as in alchemy and magic. This set was an instance of the pervading theme of the production: a 6-inch-high black platform occupying most of the stage, with a large painting in front of the back wall. It looked to me like a very effective low-budget production, but Irene Dalis herself corrected me, letting me know that the cost of this production was in line with the others. Such large paintings required a lot of work, and simple sets call for complex lighting.
Act 2 continued the theme with a large painting of partying villagers that looked to be straight out of Brueghel, executed with a bit of Thomas Hart Benton’s sharply defined figures. Tables and chairs on top of the platform offered places for the partying chorus to sit and drink. In Act 3, Marguerite’s home was a large landscape painting of a pastoral landscape with couple of thatched-roof houses in the middle distance and a church steeple in the far distance. The effect reminded me of Thomas Kinkade. There was a well-disguised door in the painting, from which Marguerite could emerge. On the platform were four square boxes of flowers, behind which Faust and Mephistopheles could hide and from which Siebel could pluck his flowers. In the last part of the act, the large painting was hoisted away, to be replaced with tall and narrow floral paintings dropped behind each of the flower boxes. Marguerite’s balcony was a simple rolling steel staircase.
In Act 4, the church scene, the painting was in fact four paintings, each separated from its left-right and up-down neighbors by about a foot of space, thereby forming a cross in the negative space. If put together, the paintings looked a lot like Hieronymous Bosch’s vision of hell. The chorus of demons, which became a holy chorus when the singers turned their hymnals 180° so that the cross was right side up, had a number of wooden chairs to sit in. The Soldiers’ Chorus takes place in the street in front of Marguerite’s house, and the Kinkade-esque painting was back, as were the tables and chairs of Act 2. They did not stint on the use of the theater’s organ during the church scene—this scene gets my prize for “the most effective use of an organ in all of opera.” The opening of act 5, in Marguerite’s prison cell, was bare: just the platform and a black back wall. When Marguerite made her plea to the angels to take her soul, a radiant sunburst painting, in two sections, dropped from on high, then split to the left and right so that a metal ramp could be projected between them. The ending was not like anything I had seen before. Mephistopheles garroted Faust with the necklace that he had given him in the first act, then both Marguerite and Faust rose from the dead and ascended the ramp. History gives us a large number of variations on the story of Faust; the director seems to have taken the opportunity to impose his own ending on this one.
Our cast:
Faust: Michael Dailey
Mephistopheles: Silas Elash
Marguerite: Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste
Valentin: Evan Brummel
Marthe: Heather Clemens
Siebel: Betany Coffland
Wagner (no relation): Sepp Hammer
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Director: Brad Dalton
Silas Elash was outstanding as Mephistopheles, with a deep, sonorous bass voice. Although in real life he doesn’t look at all like my imagination of Mephistopheles, the makeup department did wonders. Betany Coffland made a fine Siebel. The chorus sang exceptionally well, and the orchestra played magnificently. They raised goosebumps for me on several occasions. A beta.
For Act 1, the curtain went up on the aged scholar Faust in his study, surrounded by piles of old books. Behind him was a gigantic painting of a blackboard on which were written various inscrutable mathematical formulae. There seemed to be a bunch of trigonometry, perhaps alluding to the fact that Goethe, on whose Faust the opera was indirectly based, had written a Theory of Colors. There were also astrological symbols, alluding to the historical Johann Georg Faust’s interest in astrology as well as in alchemy and magic. This set was an instance of the pervading theme of the production: a 6-inch-high black platform occupying most of the stage, with a large painting in front of the back wall. It looked to me like a very effective low-budget production, but Irene Dalis herself corrected me, letting me know that the cost of this production was in line with the others. Such large paintings required a lot of work, and simple sets call for complex lighting.
Act 2 continued the theme with a large painting of partying villagers that looked to be straight out of Brueghel, executed with a bit of Thomas Hart Benton’s sharply defined figures. Tables and chairs on top of the platform offered places for the partying chorus to sit and drink. In Act 3, Marguerite’s home was a large landscape painting of a pastoral landscape with couple of thatched-roof houses in the middle distance and a church steeple in the far distance. The effect reminded me of Thomas Kinkade. There was a well-disguised door in the painting, from which Marguerite could emerge. On the platform were four square boxes of flowers, behind which Faust and Mephistopheles could hide and from which Siebel could pluck his flowers. In the last part of the act, the large painting was hoisted away, to be replaced with tall and narrow floral paintings dropped behind each of the flower boxes. Marguerite’s balcony was a simple rolling steel staircase.
In Act 4, the church scene, the painting was in fact four paintings, each separated from its left-right and up-down neighbors by about a foot of space, thereby forming a cross in the negative space. If put together, the paintings looked a lot like Hieronymous Bosch’s vision of hell. The chorus of demons, which became a holy chorus when the singers turned their hymnals 180° so that the cross was right side up, had a number of wooden chairs to sit in. The Soldiers’ Chorus takes place in the street in front of Marguerite’s house, and the Kinkade-esque painting was back, as were the tables and chairs of Act 2. They did not stint on the use of the theater’s organ during the church scene—this scene gets my prize for “the most effective use of an organ in all of opera.” The opening of act 5, in Marguerite’s prison cell, was bare: just the platform and a black back wall. When Marguerite made her plea to the angels to take her soul, a radiant sunburst painting, in two sections, dropped from on high, then split to the left and right so that a metal ramp could be projected between them. The ending was not like anything I had seen before. Mephistopheles garroted Faust with the necklace that he had given him in the first act, then both Marguerite and Faust rose from the dead and ascended the ramp. History gives us a large number of variations on the story of Faust; the director seems to have taken the opportunity to impose his own ending on this one.
Our cast:
Faust: Michael Dailey
Mephistopheles: Silas Elash
Marguerite: Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste
Valentin: Evan Brummel
Marthe: Heather Clemens
Siebel: Betany Coffland
Wagner (no relation): Sepp Hammer
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Director: Brad Dalton
Silas Elash was outstanding as Mephistopheles, with a deep, sonorous bass voice. Although in real life he doesn’t look at all like my imagination of Mephistopheles, the makeup department did wonders. Betany Coffland made a fine Siebel. The chorus sang exceptionally well, and the orchestra played magnificently. They raised goosebumps for me on several occasions. A beta.
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