Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Saw the Met's 2008 production of Salome at the Summer HD Festival last night. Really wanted to hear it after reading about the rapturous response of the audience to the opera's premiere in Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise , and after loving The Rosenkavelier heard at another Summer HD Festival. Karita Mattila was an electrifying Salome. She was no girl, but her girlish manner was very much a part of her interpretation of the daughter of Herodias. In her depiction, Salome was a spoiled and wilful child of privilege, a seductress already confident of her alluring power over men. All of which made her attraction to Jochanaan, the desert prophet, so much more unlikely and yet inevitable. She must have what she could not have. Compared to the indecisive Herod (Kim Begley) and her washed-up mother (Ildikó Komlósi), Salome was unstoppable because she was willing to die to get what she wanted. As she sang, the mystery of love is stronger than the mystery of death. Juha Uusi...

Just enjoyed an evening of odd, wonderful Gertrude Stein. Singing Stein is Encompass New Opera Theatre's contribution to Gertrude's Paris Festival at Symphony Space. The program note, written by Encompass Artistic Director Nancy Rhodes, describes the background and the works: Tonight you will see Virgil Thomson's Capital Capitals , the first musical stage piece he set to Stein's words in 1927. Thomson turned the text that Stein wrote in 1923 using demographic field reports and statistics into a competitive musical conversation, a joust for four gentlemen.... During World War I, Gertrude drove an ambulance in the South of France, and became intrigued with the sunny cities of Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Avignon and Les Baux. In Capital Capitals , she fashioned a garrulous discussion among four men who represent those cities. Capturing her wit, Thomson employs a panoply of rhythmic variety, using some of his Missouri plainchant, C majorish ditties, and undulant Spanish rh...

Watched Gypsy in school last Thursday. A very engaging student production. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents. Mother Rose was hungry for stardom for her daughters. When the older one June eloped, the younger one Louise bore the brunt of maternal attention until she gained fame as a stripper and renamed herself Gypsy Rose Lee. The musical also bore witness to the fall of vaudeville and the rise of burlesque. Then on Sunday, with TB I watched The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess , directed by alumnus Diane Paulus, and adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre Murray from the original folk opera by George Gershwin, DuBose, Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Crippled Porgy took Bess in after her man Crown killed someone and had to flee. Crown returned to claim his woman, and Porgy killed him after a struggle. I have not watched the original, but was told by a colleague that the adaptation cut a few of Porgy's arias, and so shifted the attention to...

Bluebird , directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, and written by Simon Stephens, at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2 this afternoon. Strong performance by Simon Russell Beale as a London cab driver whose reticence elicits life-stories from his fares. He reveals at the end that he has a harrowing story of his own. LW and I ran into the actor at the Grey Dog Cafe after the show. He was very pleasant when LW told him how fantastic he was in the play. Then I watched John Adams's opera Nixon in China on HD screen at Lincoln Center Plaza tonight.  Act 3, in which the Americans get roped into the story of the Communist Revolution is engagingly dramatic. The other acts are a little weird for my taste. The libretto seemed to be a patchwork of pseudo-philosophical statements and banal facts. The music with its minimalist repetitions is slightly more interesting. The opera has a kind of crude boldness that is more American than Chinese.

Last night, with LW and AG, watched Iphigénie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck. On the big screen, as it was, a part of the Met Opera’s annual HD Summer Festival. The plot reworks a play by Euripides, in which Iphigénie is not sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, but is rescued by Diana. Held captive by the Scythians, she (a passionate Susan Graham) is forced to conduct their human sacrifices as a high priestess. The drama really begins when the Scythians capture her brother Orestes (Plácido Domingo), still fleeing from the Furies unleashed by his killing of his mother in revenge for her murder of his father and her husband. A terribly ironic cycle would be complete if Iphigénie kills her brother as a Scythian sacrifice to the gods. The seemingly inevitable tragic ending is complicated and delayed by Pylades (marvelous Paul Groves), Orestes’ companion in his flight, who loves Orestes enough to die for him. He is the only guiltless one, unlike the House of Atreus. ...

Freely adapted by Peter Brook, Franck Krawczyk, and Marie-Hélène Estienne from Mozart's opera, "A Magic Flute" stripped away all superfluities of staging to focus on the singers' relationship to the music. The score was played expressively by Franck Krawczyk on solo piano at stage right. A cluster of upright canes served as forest, prison, and Masonic temple. It is interesting, however, that the simple staging drew attention to its own ingenuity. It did not help when the singers knocked down the canes. Throughout the evening at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, a small part of my mind kept wondering when the next cane would fall. The two actors who played incidental parts in the action were an inelegant solution to the problem of scene change. The singers were exposed by the lack of spectacle. Adrian Strooper who sang the heroic and lovesick Tamino on July 5, when I watched the production with TB, came through beautifully. So did his lover Pamina, sang by...

With LW, I watched on Monday Robert Lepage's Met production of Die Walküre , with James Levine in the conductor stand. My first Wagner music drama. Act One was gripping. Siegmund and Sieglinde, sung affectingly by Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek, fell in love as fate decreed for the long-lost brother and sister. Act Two suffered from too much exposition, exposing Wagner's weakness as a dramatist. Bryn Terfel sang Wotan and Deborah Voigt sang Brünnhilde but neither could save the narrative pace from sagging badly. Stephanie Blythe was a compelling Fricka, Wotan's wife who forced him to keep the sanctity of marriage, and so withdraw his protection from the adulterous (and incestuous) Siegmund when he fought against Sieglinde's husband, Hunding (Hans-Peter König). Act Three opened with the famous "Flight of the Valkyries." The war goddesses provoked laughter instead of awe, when they rode the cumbersome planks of the rotating platform. The scene looked...

Last night, GH and I watched the bohemians live it up in their garret, in the opera loosely based on  Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger. I thought the plot was a little wonky in the middle, and then learned from Wikipedia that Puccini decided not to put to music a missing scene by the librettists. Rodolfo the poet fell in love with Mimi the seamstress, but she died in the end of sickness. Rodolfo's comrade Marcello, a painter, was in love with Musetta, a singer, but she wanted independence and wealth, both of which Marcello could not give her. She turned out to possess a heart of gold when she helped the dying Mimi return to Rodolfo's garret, and bought the dying woman the hand muffs she had always wanted. The plot was even more sentimental than what one would expect of opera. It lacked the philosophical sweetness of Der Rosenkavalier and the psychological complexity of Les contes d'Hoffman . I don't have the program with me, and I cannot remember the na...

Eric's poem for me has been published by Q Review, a queer journal based around Columbia College in Chicago. Congrats, Eric! * "Planetary system" is a good description of the set, and the world, of the Met's screening of John Adams's Doctor Atomic last night. Designed by Julian Crouch, the Los Alamos lab on stage was a peculiarly isolated and isolating landscape. In the background, cloths were draped over structures to appear like sharp mountains, over which the bomb, a hideous wired sphere, hung. Everyone constrained to his own compartment, the scientists and staff of the lab stood in the upright grid of a huge box. The marital bed was a scene of disunion. The Native Americans who stood in the top row of the grid in Act II was a constant reminder of a lost world. It was brave to try to fit scientific and bureaucratic language into the operatic idiom. Much of the libretto came from declassified government documents and communications. The singing at these ...

I am planning to receive a free education in Western opera by attending the Met's Summer HD Festival. Ten of the most popular productions from its Live in HD series are shown this week on a giant screen on the front of the opera house. I missed Tosca on Saturday, and The Magic Flute on Sunday, but watched Richard Strauss's comic masterpiece last night. Act I was a sheer delight. Lyrical and philosophical in its meditations on love (who are we when we love?), the opera switched to the comedy of the Marschallin's morning audience, before returning to the elegiac note when the Marschallin (Renée Fleming) lamented the loss of her youth, and the inevitable future loss of the love of young Count Octavian (Susan Graham). The curtains came down on Fleming stroking her own mouth tenderly with a real rose.  Act II, which took place in Faninal's palatial town house, was broader in its humor. Kristinn Sigmundsson was appropriately crude as the ignoble Baron Ochs, while Thomas...

It's a mouthful of a name, but the singing was wonderful, to these untrained ears at least. The Finalists, winners of regionals, came from all over the country. They are all doing graduate work or apprenticeship with opera companies. Appearing at the Met was the result of years of hard work; it was also potentially the launch of a brilliant career.  Thomas Hampson, a past winner at these Grand Finals, hosted. Each of the eight Finalists sang two works, one before, and one after the intermission. Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor from Durham, North Carolina, sang Handel's "Rompo i lacci" from Flavio  and "Stille amare" from Tolomeo . Noah A. Baetge, a tenor from Seattle, sang "Fra poco a me ricovero" from Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti) and "Pourquoi me reveiller" from Werther (Massenet). Kiri Dyan Deonarine, a soprano from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, sang "Piangero la sorte mia" from Giulio Cesare , and an English piece "T...

A friend Conrad Chu is conducting the Brooklyn Repertory Opera in its performance of "Hansel and Gretel," and I heard the opera (in English) for the first time this afternoon. I enjoyed it very much. The orchestration was lush and dramatic. It included set pieces like folk songs, dances, and prayers. Wikipedia says that the opera was originally composed as a Singspiel, consisting of a play with 16 songs and piano accompaniment. Based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the opera depicts the harshness of poverty, temptations conjured up by our needs, metaphysical loneliness, and victory over death. Mother, played by Kahtleen Keske, rose to tragic heights when she sang of not being able to feed the children. Played by a terrific Mathew Yohn, Father was a drunken figure from comedy ("Tra-la-la-la-la!"), who brought food home in triumph only to find out from his wife she had sent the children into the woods to gather their supper. The music in Act II was enchantin...