Popera

Despite Steve Smith's prediction to the contrary (not, mind you, that I blame him), Sunday's New York premiere of Ainadamar was most definitely amplified. Not only for effects and emphasis, but some poor soul seemed to be riding the gain on all principals from start to end, lest -- horribile dictu -- the audience inadvertently hear a true piano. I've no idea who (assuming, as I understand it [UPDATE: apparently incorrectly, see below], that the work was originally staged sans mikes) decided on this, but it shows a depressing lack of musical understanding. Even -- particuarly! -- if it was the skilled, well-educated Osvaldo Golijov himself.

But that's not fair: Golijov understands quite well what he's after. That just happens to be, instrumentation notwithstanding, the popular musical aesthetic. Composers have flirted with this before, of course, whether in a libretto or certain stylistic borrowings or whatnot. But such popular elements usually sit uneasily with the more classically high-cultural* parts of the whole. Not here: if Ainadamar was ever done unmiked, it was because the piece had not yet become truly what it is.

[*Not necessarily used to denote value, but, I think, an accurate description of the difference in vantage between the two aesthetics.]

It is no accident that popular music exploded in popularity with the advent of the microphone. Athletic and remarkably well-trained as any particular one may be, the live voice is a limitation: it (with its sibling, the physical stage presence of one body) ensures that characters in opera remain at a recognizably human scale even as they're kings or heroes -- or gods. This fits naturally with the aesthetic of high culture, which characteristically explores the (tragic or amusing) limitedness of individual man, his inability to throw off mortal bonds from even the highest point. (Even Wotan has such problems.) But popular art, which indulges such fantastic desires for the put-upon mass, is less happy in a natural breath. It's become immeasurably more effective as technology's let it scale to not one individual facing his destiny but to the mass audience itself, source and place of its intoxicating energy.

David Henry Hwang's libretto hits the familiar pop-story notes: oppression, freedom, the impermanence of death, oppression, revolution, the long-suffering "people", the glorious future to come, etc. The designated oppressor-figure is, of course, onstage for most of the action but gets not a single word (just menacing gestures with a rifle). After a seemingly-endless death scene, one main character promptly gets back up and sings himself into transcendence. The whole thing is -- like the script of, say, Braveheart -- fairly heady to one caught up by it and entirely ridiculous to one who's not. In either case, it's a purely populist confection.

Of Golijov's music, one bit seemed to call for actual classical performance (minus mikes and gain-riding) -- Lorca's invocation of Mariana Pineda at the first segment's end. The rest? The composer's note states his desire to make a reapproachement between "popular and serious":

Popular is serious on the continent where I was born and raised, where first acts of dictators when seizing power included cutting the fingers of popular guitarists, imprisoning singers, and sending songwriters into exile, among other acts of fear that were answered by some of the most tender and long-lasting music created in the last century.

In that, he's been successful: Ainadamar is popular. It's also serious. But it's not opera.

(And I'd been hoping to hear one of my favorite bloggers in one of those...)

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This isn't to say that an opera can't put electronic resources to a high-cultural end. The classic modernist use has been to expand the sonic palette with more alien, denatured tones. But that's very far away here -- for all talk of new emotion or experience, pretty much all one makes out is the roar of an incited crowd.

Cyrano

The Met brings this not meritless Domingo vanity vehicle back to the house next week. My guess is anyone reading this blog has already found out by email or some other contact, but please note that Monday's dress rehearsal has been moved from 2:30PM back to the usual time of 11AM. My desire to see one of these absent the bizarre spectacle of well-off adult patrons squabbling over lunch seats like grade schoolers at a cafeteria -- mind you, the actual schoolkids at rehearsals are quite well-behaved -- won't, it seems, yet be sated.

I probably won't attend an official, reviewable performance, but the principals remain the same as last year's.

Manrico: lover or momma's boy?

Geoff Riggs has an interesting analysis at his all-too-infrequently updated blog.

Artificially-flavored opera product II

In a recent interview, new San Francisco Opera director David Gockley mentions some of the innovations -- already, it seems, in use in Houston -- he intends to introduce to the house.

Q Will you install those giant plasma screens in the balconies?

A Yup. Soon. We're scoping out locations. We have deals to be made with our unions, which I don't see any real problem with. And we've got to get some technology in our disposal. But there will be a lot of that during my time here, a lot of outdoor casts, OperaVision in the theater, Webcasts, iPod casts. The like. We're going to move into the 21st century of high definition, audio-video technology.

Technological replication and dissemination certainly extracts something from an operatic performance, often something valuable -- how bizarrely fortunate are we to have a (watery) fragment of Muzio's Tosca from the very opening of the War Memorial Opera House? To have webcasts and podcasts from all major houses is long overdue.

But the unique quality of opera -- what, I believe, guarantees its market life as a niche luxury for as long as companies remain true thereto -- is what can't be so reproduced and extended: the costly, laborious, and very human live presentness of operatic performance. To substitute some technological facsimile for this presentness -- because I very much doubt that the screens will be unobtrusive enough to ignore -- subtracts essential value from those balcony seats affected. People therein will, it's true, hear the unmediated sound and remain within the dramatic circle of feedback, but the visual (and visual-dramatic) element will be substantially denatured -- much more than by the distant addition of a supertitle screen. It is important we see a person at risk, not a mere glow on glass.

The experience in the more expensive seats won't, I'm sure, change. Until, perhaps, audiences selected by and accustomed to video assistance decide those expensive seats aren't so good without it...

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But maybe someone who's actually sat in Houston nosebleed can tell what it's actually like. The venture makes me wonder if Gockley much did himself.

The year of Levine

Looking over my notices from the two half-seasons since the Met began its last winter break, one thing stands out. As the house conducting roster has been infused with more interesting young blood than it's seen in decades (meanwhile -- Rizzi, Santi, et al.: not missed) and as a massive overhaul of a long-underperforming symphony orchestra was supposed to eat into his energy, James Levine had a great 2005 here. From the Met Orchestra's terrific Das Lied von der Erde last January to the high points (Berg and Wagner) of their hit-and-miss latest Carnegie Hall afternoon, a remarkable proportion of the company's twelve-months' successes have been his.

He still presides for more evenings than anyone else, of course, and deserves credit even when not for building the remarkable orchestra. But by my count, three of the five annual local operatic highlights were such because of -- not merely with -- his conducting: Clemenza, Falstaff, and -- and I'm with Maury in reckoning this the event of the past year -- as great a performance of Cosi as I may ever see. (Sans Levine came Don Carlo and An American Tragedy.) Nor did any visiting conductor show off the Met Orchestra in some novel and remarkable glory, as Christian Thielemann so memorably did in 2001's Die Frau Ohne Schatten. (The much-praised Fabio Luisi I found too unsympathetic to the singers and unwilling to let the orchestra phrase; perhaps he'll show better after the long rehearsal of a new production.)

Levine has of course been conducting these three operas for decades. Has he changed?

Without a vertical comparison of broadcasts and in-house tapes, I don't think I can give anything like a complete answer. But it seems to me that while Levine has remained, in essence, who he is -- a conductor first interested in regularity and quality of sound, and therefore endlessly frustrating to listeners mostly listening for something else (dramatic effect, the ebb and flow of time, romantic refinement of gesture, and/or whatever) -- his maturity has, as it's done for many, allowed him to incorporate some amount of other, antithetical qualities into his work as well. The top-down architectural view he likes to take has come to embrace more and more life-giving detail and phrasing, making him, among other things, a great Mozartean. -- I now wish I hadn't skipped last February's unexcitingly-cast Figaros.

The recent New York Magazine profile of Levine doesn't, I think, shed much new light on him or his development, but it touches on both the recent Clemenza and Falstaff as well as more general matters. It's worth a read.

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I'm sure it reflects on my taste and manner of experiencing opera that the most memorable singers' performances of the year came on nights that I wouldn't count among an overall top five. Nevertheless I shouldn't let this sort of post go by without mentioning Marcelo Alvarez in Manon, Sondra Radvanovsky in Cyrano (which returns this month), and Giuseppe Filianoti in Lucia. They themselves were easily worth the price of a ticket.

One of those meme-type things

This one (via Alarming News) is pretty funny:

What they said

There's a long post-review on Renee Fleming's career itching to be written, but not today. Meanwhile I'm in more or less entire agreement with Maury and the Wellsung Alex about yesterday's concert.

Fleming's always been good in Berg, though -- her Seven Early Songs with the Met Orchestra some years ago were delicious. I think his inherent trickiness prevents her from getting in her own way.

UPDATE (4:15PM): Forgot to mention -- I was a bit disappointed that oboist Elaine Douvas, whose expressive phrasing highlighted the Met's last full performances of Onegin, only played the second half of the program. Eugene Izotov -- who incidentally is leaving next season for the Chicago Symphony -- was, to these ears, less soulful in the letter scene.

Ringlet

A reader and fellow blogger has asked me to help plug this event, which seems interesting enough:

Long Beach Opera will be doing Jonathan Dove and Graham Vick's reduction of the Ring (into 10 hours over two evenings) the next two weekends. At least one of the cast seems to have had a recent local success as Parsifal...

California-based readers may wish to check it out.

Eureka

The secret, apparently, to getting comments is to stop posting.

Hmm.

Ah, no. Posts will resume soon.

Artificially-flavored opera product

The New York Times' Anthony Tommasini seems to be getting a fair amount of stick these days -- some of it warranted, but do you folks remember his predecessors!? -- but this article returns to one of his most admirable moments: the long crusade against City Opera's electronic "enhancement".

As he originally predicted, miking has slowly gotten more obvious and widespread since that first crack of the door. (Most notable here: that loved-by-theater-critics, trashed-by-opera-folks (amplified) run of Luhrmann's Boheme.)

What he doesn't mention this time, though the article appears in IHT, is that it's not just an American issue: a growing number of European venues has been using electronic sound sweetener as well, including the Berlin State Opera. Does the local press there even mention this sort of thing?

In my New York experience, City Opera's sound system is often the least of its problems, though use sometimes verges on the abusive, while BAM abuses its version quite a lot. The Met, of course, remains fairly purist -- though a pessimist might wonder what Gelb has in store.


UPDATE (1:45AM): It appears the Met isn't always purist enough. Perhaps they've been taking too much advice from Barbara Cook?

UPDATE 2 (3AM): This wouldn't be a bad place for FTC or its state equivalents to mandate full (or at least pretty substantial) disclosure. Any consumer advocate types out there? (Perhaps throwing in pop lipsynching disclosure would get the ball moving...)

On applause

A year ago I posted a taxonomy of opera experience, primarily as a tool for understanding how others might strongly approve -- or disapprove -- of a performance one does not. For sometimes it's disagreement about a specific thing, but as often we talk past each other, each looking to parts of the evening the other discounts.

A post months later picked up that thread a little, beginning to examine live performance v. transmission/recording in light of this taxonomy. But continuing seemed a bit redundant, as simply listing the aspects of operatic experience previously noted pretty much makes the distinctions, trivial and not, apparent:

(1) Opera is a sensual art.
(2) Opera is a dramatic art.
(3) Opera illuminates the world, and one's experience in it.
(4) Opera illuminates its own world: the history, present, and future of opera.
(5) Operagoing is a social activity, beyond and around the sitting-in-the-dark-as-an-audience part.

Really I have no patience for systems, even my own.

But those mikes at a non-broadcast performance of American Tragedy got me thinking about this again. Was that evening particularly focused because (and again, I was just speculating as to why the mikes were there) the event was to be recorded? Such things happen. Performers improve, or tighten up, or something with such a prospect. And it's odd: the dynamic among performers and audience -- the dramatic element of theater, in this case opera -- is changed by listeners who, not being in fact present (or in some cases even yet existing), cannot physically affect the show in any way, whether by breathing, squirming, coughing, rustling, talking, clapping, cheering, booing, or sitting blessedly still. Their presence in performers' minds seems sufficient.

Yet for the home listener, much of the drama is washed out -- secondhand. Sound and video may preserve some of the energy exchanged and transformed there among those present, but even then they offer no personal way in. The presence of the distant audience was a collective one, its individual parts hardly differentiated in that sea of (at best) invisible imagined reaction. Did that in-house audience imagine this remote listener too? Sit rapt, cheer, or boo on his behalf? He himself is impossibly distant, and can't.

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Of these missing interjections, applause is the key. It's the consummation of performance-as-drama, the Dionysian end of the rite. (And those who would "encourage" it in the guise of opposing classical "stuffiness" bark up entirely the wrong tree.) Each listener there (heretofore officially passive) has a share of the revels, perhaps some share of the performers themselves... But the solitary listener at home does not. His circle doesn't close so neatly; any energy and tension and approval and resentment aroused in the event isn't so easily dissipated. (Fortunately, then, these usually aren't as great.)

What, then? Why -- words. Talk, online chat, IM exchanges, review missives to electronic fora, "best of" lists, fan sites, and, yes, sometimes blog posts and blog comments. Reading and writing both.

Of course, I say this on a blog mostly inspired by local live performance...

Reception

The December 16 performance of An American Tragedy had another interesting novelty to it: large visible mikes at the foot of the stage. Usually (I think) these are only present for broadcasts, and I wonder if this means an official audio recording will be forthcoming. (There were no official cameras.) With the apparently universal technical glitches in Saturday's broadcast Act 2 -- not to mention widespread preemption in favor of dull Christmas-music specials -- a cleaner official document would be welcome. It could also, if the approval ratio of Opera-L commenters is any indication, help tap a strong potential audience.

As for the broadcast itself, I heard only Act 1 -- though I very much wish I'd caught the artists' roundtable. Still, as each time before, Picker's music insinuated itself into my brain, replaying in fragments afterwards late into the night and prompting an itch to be heard, in flesh, again. That, I suppose, is the bottom line of my piecemeal takes on his contribution, and not the worst way to conclude them.

Unwrapping

My friend and blogdaughter Victoria seems to have given me the neatest Christmas present: a graphic (non-representational, mind you) and bit of ad space on her blog. Thanks, Vic. And welcome to any and all of her readers who are now dropping by.

And to all my readers, old and new -- merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and all that.

Three takes

I spent three consecutive weeks (Friday, Thursday, Friday) at performances of An American Tragedy; each showed the piece as a different thing. Opening night was remarkable, but perhaps the best evening was last Friday's. Star Susan Graham was indisposed, replaced by her cover Kirsten Chavez, but that was little problem on the whole. Chavez has a smoother, less punchy top, a meltingly appealing lower register, and a more straightforwardly youthful stage demeanor than her predecessor. In Chavez's body Sondra Finchley is more Clyde Griffiths' eager co-dreamer than an ideal, composed focus of desire -- but that works too, and perhaps put attention more comfortably on the protagonist. Even in today's sea of excellent mezzos, I'd like to hear her again.

Meanwhile Nathan Gunn, I think, has gotten bad press. His voice actually shows well in the part: the only thing he lacks are the climactic high notes called for in the car aria. Unfortunately, these stick out.

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Perhaps closest kin to Clyde as an operatic protagonist is Lulu: each navigates a social rise and fall, bisected by murder. Lulu inspires desire while Clyde is its agent, but the effect of each on others reveals society and drives the plot.

Tobias Picker acknowledges it early, beginning the first latter-day scene with a nod to Berg's most beautiful of all operas, both orchestrally and in the difficult (and oddly maligned) vocal line of small-time seductress Hortense. But then all sorts of other stuff rushes in -- each character, as the official interview noted, gets not a leitmotif but a characteristic style -- adding up to a more heterogenous whole than Lulu's beauty-plus-corruption-plus-death. Is it, I wonder, the fracturing of this equation that's bothered critics? The loveliness of Lulu's sound must, no less than her person's, be paid with violence. Conlon's Friday account happily brought this element of An American Tragedy out more than before, but there's nothing in the score that approximates the violence of, say, Berg's central interlude. Instead -- everything else. And then savaging -- in ink.

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Noted: two music-journalism professionals who've admitted to liking the new piece are blog proprietors. Meanwhile, the local doyen of opera criticism offers yet another by-the-book trashing of Picker's work.

Don't ask me what that means, though.

Quiet

After an amazingly hectic weekend that kept me from hearing the season's first broadcast, I'm off to an opera-free zone until the new year. I've another report on An American Tragedy planned, but I'll miss upcoming New York events in those weeks.

I hope to finish some reflective posts instead, but such things aren't always predictable. Please bear with me.