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...

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. ...

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...

KM joined me last night for Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes D'Hoffman , and both of us enjoyed the tales of Hoffman very much. The poet compared Stella, the singer he was unhappily in love with, to three past loves: an innocent, an artist and a prostitute, and told the tavern guests the stories of these loves. The innocent turned out to be a mechanical doll named Olympia. Putting on a pair of magic glasses, sold to him by the villain Coppelius, Hoffman fell in love with her. He was horrified to learn the truth when the glasses broke. Kathleen Kim who sang as Olympia was virtuosic in her aria. It took some art to sing all technique, completely artlessly. Alan Held, who sang as Coppelius, also sang as the other three villains. In the second story, Hoffman was in love with the singer Antonia who, unknown to herself, had too weak a heart to sing. But the evil Dr. Miracle persuaded her that her dead singer-mother would have her sing. She fell for the trick, and sang to her death....

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...