“Man is an abyss. It makes one dizzy to look into it.” So utters Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, repeating what was also a recurring motif in the playwright’s own letters.
National Opera Company of the Rhine has marked this year’s Benjamin Britten celebration with a remarkably compelling, often gripping new production of the seldom-seen Owen Wingrave.
Productions of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto can serve as a vehicle for individual singers to make a strong impression and become afterward associated with specific roles in the opera.
Just in case we were not aware that the evening’s programme was ‘themed’, the Britten Sinfonia designed a visual accompaniment to their musical exploration of night, sleep and dreams.
Is it possible to upstage Jonas Kaufmann? Kaufmann was brilliant in this Verdi Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House, London, but the rest of the cast was so good that he was but first among equals. Don Carlo is a vehicle for stars, but this time the stars were everyone on stage and in the pit. Even the solo arias, glorious as they are, grow organically out of perfect ensemble. This was a performance that brought out the true beauty of Verdi's music.
The big names were absent: Duparc, D’Indy, Debussy, Ravel … and while Fauré, Chausson, Roussel and several members of Les Six put in an appearance, in less than familiar guises, this survey of French song of the early 20th century and interwar years deliberately took us on a journey through infrequently travelled terrain.
Composed between 1718 and 1720, Handel’s Esther is sometimes described as the ‘first English Oratorio’, but is in fact a hybrid form, mixing elements of oratorio, masque, pastoral and opera.
Hector Berlioz's légende dramatique, La Damnation de Faust, exists somewhere between cantata and opera. Berlioz's flexible attitude to dramatic form made the piece unworkable on the stages of early 19th century Paris and his music is so vivid that you wonder whether the piece needs staging at all.
St. John’s Smith Square was the site of Elizabeth Connell’s final London concert, intended as a farewell to London on her moving to Australia. It was rendered ultimately final by her unexpected death.
With the building of the Suez Canal, Egypt became more interesting to Western Europeans. Khedive Ismail Pasha wanted a hymn by Verdi for the opening of a new opera house in Cairo, but the composer said he did not write occasional pieces.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro has a libretto by Lorenzo daPonte based on the French play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day or the Marriage of Figaro) by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799).
For its world class Easter Festival, Baden-Baden mounted a Die Zauberflöte that owed more to the grey penitential doldrums of Lent than to the unbridled jubilance of re-birth.
Once Berkeley Opera, renamed West Edge Opera, this enterprising company offers the Bay Area’s only serious alternative to corporate opera, to wit Bonjour M. Gauguin.
In the first of pianist Julius Drake’s three-part series,
‘Perspectives’, our gaze was directed at Gustav Mahler’s eclectic musical
responses to human experiences: from the trauma and distress of anguished love
to the sweet contentment of true friendship, from the agonised introspection of
the artist to the diverse dramas of human interaction.
The Los Angeles opera company marketed its spring production of Rossini's La Cenerentola as Cinderella though there is no opera by that name. The libretto of La Cenerentola is not the Cinderella story we know.
This is an opera written with a cannon and a feather. There is sensory
overload—an overload of sensory overload: lights that shine into your face in
the manner of an ophthalmologist scanning your retina; eerie, too-loud sounds
that invade you from every direction; dancing patterns of light that may
resolve into huge words or huge faces; a great chandelier-harp that sometimes
descends to be played, a strumming like the sounds of the sirens in Plato’s
parable of the concentric crystalline spheres.
Tod Machover: Death and the Powers
Simon Powers: James Maddalena; Evvy: Emily Albrink, Patricia Risley (Monaco Premiere); Miranda: Sara Heaton, Joélle Harvey (Monaco Premiere); Nicholas: Hal Cazalet. The United Way: Doug Dodson, Frank Kelley (Monaco Premiere); The United Nations: David Kravitz; The Administration: Tom McNichols, Daniel Cole (September 2009 Workshop). Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Conductor: Gil Rose. Principal Keyboard: John McDonald. Second Keyboard: Linda Osborn-Blaschke, Simone Ovsey (September 2009 Workshop). Director: Diane Paulus. Production Designer: Alex Mcdowell. Choreographer: Karole Armitage. MIT Media Lab.
But there are also moments of
fragile lyricism, pretty melodies that sing of the old values of love and
touch. The opera vacillates between the loud future of silicon and solenoid,
and the quietly humane past.
Tod Machover
Like certain other short operas, such as Rachmaninov’s Francesca da
Rimini, this is an opera in the past tense: the prologue shows us robots
in a post-organic world, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the nonsensical
word death. (There is something too cute about these robots, who look like the
sly agile desk lamps in the old Pixar animation, and who sound like the
apotheosis of R2D2.) The robots put on a skit—the opera itself—about the
transformation of the human into the post-human: a billionaire named Simon
Powers decides to abandon his dying body and place his consciousness, his
identity, into The System, a motile all-encompassing electrical structure that
is slowly replacing a dematerializing world. In this quest he is aided by
Nicholas, a young assistant with a prosthetic arm, and resisted, at least
partly, by his third wife Evvie and his daughter Miranda.
The name Miranda of course brings to mind Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, and makes us wonder whether Powers is just another name for
Prospero. In Dryden’s adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero never
forswears magic and retains his mastery over the elements; and Simon Powers is
a magician who keeps his power, although he may be a wizard lost in his own
labyrinth. Nicholas, who dances and prances around the stage, and climbs up the
grid of lights, is his affable Ariel.
Robert Pinsky’s text is more clumsy that one would expect from a
distinguished poet, full of lame puns and overextended parallels: he keeps
hitting you over the head with quotations from Yeats’s “Sailing to
Byzantium” (a poem about an old man who muses on his possible transfiguration
into a mechanical bird) and with plugs for poetry itself as something Important
to the Human Soul. But the text does have the virtue of a certain moral
ambiguity: it would have been easy to deplore the robots and to uphold the
grand old human world of tears and joy; but Pinsky refuses this easy simple
conflict, and makes The System a seductive place with at least partially real
delights, and makes the human world a place of evil as well as good. At one
point the delegates from the United Way, the United Nations, and the United
States (the last a superb bass, Tom McNichols, maybe the best singer in the
cast) visit the virtualized Simon to plead with him not to ruin the global
economy. But these are not figures of pathos, but officious fools, somewhat
like the Jews in Strauss’s Salome. And when the starving multitudes
thrust themselves onto the stage toward the end of the opera, they seem like a
bloodthirsty mob about to tear Miranda limb from limb. Only Miranda and Evvie
place the warm world of sorrow and devotion in a favorable light; and Evvie, at
least, herself decides to enter The System. In his interesting program note,
Pinsky implicitly compares his text to “a robot that performs the work of
meaning and emotion…the robots [in the opera] are in a sense returning the
favor of creation”; and intelligence and sensitivity of robots constitute an
important theme here.
Rendering of Operabots interacting with each other
It is an odd opera in that there is little romantic love, and little
conflict beyond the cerebral pondering of robot vs. human cerebration. In this
way it resembles Das Rheingold, another opera with little romantic
love, and a good deal of thinking about the values of the wet old healthy
elemental world vs. the values of a futuristic society built by robots (or, as
Wagner called them, giants). In the scene where Simon gloats over his
successful assimilation into The System, Machover bases the music on a
triumphalist Naturthema not out of place in Wagner; and the sustained roar of
certain episodes near the end might call to mind another great moment of
sensory overload, the final bars of Das Rheingold.
The singing was satisfactory and evidently accurate, but unremarkable. James
Maddalena, the Simon, was not in excellent voice, but his forceful baritone
made for a potent stage presence—Alberich the billionaire, invisible in his
Tarnhelm but dominating the world.
![Sara Heaton as Miranda [Photo: http://opera.media.mit.edu/projects/deathandthepowers/gallery.php]](http://www.operatoday.com/Machover_miranda_sara.gif)
