a fool in the forest

Let's All Vogue Like Die Vögel Vogue["I Kissed a Bird and I Liked It"]

Some once-popular artists simply drift into obscurity. Others have obscurity thrust upon them.  The German composer Walter Braunfels is one of the latter.  Well known, popular, and highly thought of in the period between the two World Wars, he was unceremoniously stripped of his teaching positions and booted in to internal exile by the Nazi government in part because he was a half Jewish convert to Catholicism and in part because he had roundly snubbed the Nazi Party when it sought to have him write a party anthem in the 1920s.  At war's end Braunfels found that while he was out the musical world had largely passed him by, embracing serialism and electronic experimentation and disdaining those who still adhered as he did to the more melodic models of The Two Richards, Wagner and Strauss.

For this season's installment of conductor James Conlon's ongoing "Recovered Voices" initiative, devoted to the rediscovery of composers whose creative lives were in one way or another opposed or obstructed by the Nazi regime, Los Angeles Opera has revived Braunfels' Die Vögel (The Birds).  Written in the period before and after World War I, in which Braunfels served and from which he returned in a more dour and depressed frame of mind than he had left, Die Vögel was an immense success when it premiered in 1920, performed some 50 times in Munich and staged in many another opera house across Europe.  Fame is fleeting, however, and Die Vögel fell from the repertoire quickly once Braunfels was denounced with other composers of degenerate, "entartete musik" in 1933.  While his musical career never really recovered, Braunfels at least was still alive at the end of the war, unlike many others on that list.

Although it strays far from the original, Braunfels took his inspiration from Aristophanes' satirical drama, The Birds.  As in the Greek original, two humans dissatisfied with their lives in the City make their way to the kingdom of the birds.  They persuade the birds to fortify themselves so that, by preventing the smoke of sacrifice from reaching Olympus, they can rule over the gods.  Unlike Aristophanes, however, Braunfels does not permit the birds and their human comrades to prevail.  Although warned by a visit from Prometheus, himself no stranger to the consequences of thwarting Zeus, the birds persist in their rebellion, whereupon their great city is literally blown to the four winds.  Duly cowed, the birds sing a hymn to the greatness of Zeus and the humans set out to return among their own kind.  As a subplot, and as an excuse for some rapturous music in Act II, Braunfels adds a romantic mystical bonding between the Nightingale and the younger more sensitive human ("Good Hope") who carries a yearning in his heart as he sets out to rejoin the world of men.

Braunfels wrote the first act of Die Vögel before the first World War and the second upon his return from the front, and it shows.  Act I is a lighter, more jovial piece, closer to the mocking tone of its Athenian forebear.  Act II is almost a different opera, nearly twice as long as Act I and steeped in the heavier tones of Wagner and Strauss: the curious union of Good Hope and the Nightingale is pure Tristan and the warning lecture of Prometheus echoes the ominous pronouncements of Jochanaan in Salome.  Braunfels was a very talented composer in veins pioneered by others, but he was not an innovator.  Die Vögel even includes an old-fashioned second-act ballet, a feature against which Wagner himself famously rebelled when the Paris Opera insisted he include one in Lohengrin.

Other than the temple architecture adopted by the birds for their city, the design of the Los Angeles Opera production is more influenced by 1920s Europe than by the Greeks.  The costumes of the humans are drawn from that period, and those of the birds echo Art Deco à la Erté. Only Prometheus fails to fit in: he resembles no one more than Hagrid in the Harry Potter films.  The amusing ballet, celebrating the nuptials of a pigeon and dove and the arrival of their first clutch of eggs, would fit well in a Hollywood spectacle of the same era.  Other than the dance episodes, the staging is relatively static.  This may be a matter of safety and necessity, since the production shares the extremely steep raked stage being used for the LA Opera Ring and greater movement would likely risk the limbs and necks of the singers.

The review excerpts running in the print ads for Die Vögel all single out Conlon and the orchestra for praise, which is only right. In his chosen style, Braunfels devised large swaths of top drawer late Romantic music, and the Opera orchestra plays it as well, I think, as it can be played.  The big Act II set pieces in particular -- Good Hope and Nightingale's meeting by moonlight and the warning of Prometheus -- strike home.  The birds' closing grovel to Zeus is a bit turgid, but that is Braunfels' fault and not the orchestra's.

Die Vögel is more deserving of its obscurity than Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg), which was revived in last season's "Recovered Voices" production, but it does not deserve to disappear altogether.  Musically, it has genuine merit and the LA Opera production demonstrates that it warrants at least occasional revival for reasons that go beyond historical curiosity.

Two performances remain -- April 23 and 26 -- and there are numerous tickets available at half-price through Los Angeles Opera itself (here) or through the Goldstar service (here), so anyone with even a remote fondness for German high Romantic opera, or for singing birds, should give it a go.  Why, with those half-price offers, it's cheaper than a trip to Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room!

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Photos: Robert Millard, via Los Angeles Opera.

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Motezuma:Date Night at the Museum

By rights, opera should never work and that goes doubly, triply perhaps, for Baroque opera seria with its alternating recitatives and showcase arias, its absurdly elaborate plots of which it is just too easy to make fun, all of that vocal decoration for its own sake, and on and on.  And yet, and yet ... time and again it somehow does work.  It worked splendidly on Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica in the second, final performance of Long Beach Opera's production of Antonio Vivaldi's 1733 Motezuma, albeit on terms that would largely baffle the opera's original creators.

The premise of the Long Beach production is not a new one: a group of people, for psychological or supernatural reasons, find themselves compelled to act out events from the distant past.  Here, the group is attending a private reception in a museum or high-priced gallery exhibiting artifacts associated with the Aztecs and Montezuma.  The exhibition's title -- "Motezuma: A Pre-Columbian Aesthetic for a Post-Modern World" -- is projected on a large screen at the rear; that screen later provides a running visual commentary on the action in the form of wittily chosen archival film footage, as well as a convenient place to project the supertitle translations of the Italian arias.  

Chief among the Champagne-swozzling guests is a blonde starlet engaged in a happily torrid lesbian relationship with the artist/designer behind the installation; the jolly pair is modeled for no particular reason on Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson, right down to Ronson's penchant for menswear and her distinctive hat.  Also in attendance are the actress' disapproving father, her sympathetic and long suffering mother, the officious and sharply groomed curator or gallery owner, and a busy personal assistant.  

These "normal" identities are established during the overture.  Once the singing start, each in turn assumes a character from Vivaldi's opera with the aid of various period props conveniently on display in the exhibition, the transformation becoming more or less complete with each character's first aria.  The father and mother become Montezuma and his queen, Mitrina.  The actress becomes their daughter Teutile (pronounced with four syllables, Te-u-ti-le, a la Tenochtitlan).  The curatorial countertenor becomes Cortez ("Fernando" in the libretto), while the artist/designer becomes Cortez' brother Rodrigo, the [male] lover of Teutile.  The executive assistant is the last to transform, leaving her Blackberry behind for feathers, facepaint and spear as she becomes the Aztec general, Asprano.  Four waiters and a security guard serve as supernumerary warriors, soldiers, skull-masked sacrificial priests, and the occasional bit of architecture.   At the opera's conclusion, much like the mortals emerging from the wood in Midsummer Night's Dream, the players' identities are restored and all ends happily in a wedding celebration that is gay in every available sense.

It is entirely ridiculous, the logic of it wouldn't outlive a mayfly, and it was marvelously entertaining.  

Much of the credit belongs, as is so often the case with Long Beach Opera, to an able and committed cast of singing actors.  Special praise goes to the two women playing male characters.  The conflicted Rodrigo, torn between duty to brother and country and his love for Teutile, was sung by Peabody Southwell, who was also the raffish male Fox in LBO's Cunning Little Vixen in January.  She delivered the full range of necessary serious emotion in Rodrigo's arias while bringing a fine comic physicality in the recitatives and in her Ronsonesque "real world" segments.  I hope we will see and hear more of her soon.  LBO veteran Caroline Worra's giddily courageous functionary-turned-cutthroat Asprano was the clear favorite of the sold out crowd, especially in the wake of her final, roof-raising aria. 

Courtney Huffman's Teutile was a bit caught up in the physical mannerisms of the actress character in the early going, but came into her own with power and point after intermission.  Countertenor Charles Maxwell's turn in the castrato role of Fernando took some getting used to, but succeeded ultimately as a slightly campy portrait of an effete petty tyrant.  Who knew a conquistador could shimmy like that?

As history, Motezuma is less reliable than Mr. Peabody or Bill & Ted: it comes complete with a happy ending, Aztecs and Spaniards united in matrimony and good feeling. The obvious post-modern tack would be to posture it as a commentary on colonialism and genocide.  David Schweizer's production, thankfully, spared us that.  It had serious fun with the Baroque conventions and the absurdities of the plot -- "I escaped through a secret passage known only to me" Motezuma improbably explains at one point -- but never mocked the music or shortchanged the emotional stake of Vivaldi's characters. The audience, like the characters in the contemporary frame story, wasn't entirely sure what had just happened to them, but left feeling fine about whatever it was.

Long Beach Opera's final production of the season, a double bill to be staged somewhere deep within the hull of the Queen Mary, is nearly sold out, but tickets to an added midday performance on May 17 are still available at this writing.  You should go, if you can.

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Long Beach Opera photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, via the OC Register.  Jorge Pardo's pre-Columbian art installation at LACMA, photo by the blogger.

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Ave Atque Walhall Los Angeles Opera Isn't Making This Up, You Know

I listened closely during the curtain calls at Sunday's matinee performance of Das Rheingold, and I did not hear any of the booing that has been reported by some other correspondents.  Which is as it should be. 

Los Angeles Opera's first venture in to Wagner's Ring is certainly not perfect -- no staging of the Ring ever is -- but for all its eccentricities, it is unquestionably the Real Thing.  Brazenly theatrical and strongly marked by its director's particular stylistic tics, the LAOpera Rheingold nevertheless stays true to the task at hand: telling the story that Wagner actually wrote, letting the work speak for itself and not imposing some external idea of what it means or, in the director's mind, "should" mean.

As has been said again and again, Wagner conceived his enormous Ring des Nibelung not as a mere series of "operas" but as a Gesamtkunstwerk, roughly a total artistic expression of a fundamental mythic story presented through a unity of music, poetry, movement, and the visual arts, each element spectacular not for the sake of spectacle but in the service of the total tale.  Such a thing is ultimately impossible to achieve in practice, but Wagner himself pressed the technology of his time about as far as it could go in his effort to accomplish it.  (Because of the time necessarily involved in moving elaborate scenery and effects about, Wagner was occasionally obliged to write extra music, most famously in Parsifal, to fill what he intended to be seamless transformations between scenes, turning a bug into a feature.)

Achim Freyer, directing the Ring for the first time, imposes himself in matters of style in this production, but not in matters of substance.  It looks like an Achim Freyer production from beginning to end, but Freyer is directing the work that Wagner actually created, not some entirely different work that he wishes Wagner had created.  Because the tale is set in a distant and supernatural world, the unusual appearance of objects and characters makes more sense than it would in a more "realistic" work such as, say, Eugene Onegin.  The gods are gods, the dwarfs are dwarfs, the giants are giants, and magic is magic.  The Tarnhelm -- the magic helmet that allows its wearer invisibility or transformation in to creatures large and small -- looks like a golden top hat here, but it is still a magic helmet.  The Ring itself is easy to follow around the stage, as it is represented by a glowing orb.  Let's take a look, shall we?

Here we see Wotan, chief among the gods, holding the Ring aloft as he debates with himself whether to take the advice just given him by the earth goddess Erda (not seen here because she has descended, with her many arms, back into the depths of the planet) to rid himself of the (literally) cursed thing.  With him are his wife Fricka, with her perpetually yearning/clinging/pleading arms, and her brother gods, Froh and Donner.  The Tarnhelm floats atop the pile of gold at the rear.  The pile is being measured (hence the large ruler) to see how it stacks up compared to the goddess Freia, who stand before it and will be returned to the other gods by the giants Fasolt and Fafnir if only Wotan will add the Ring to that pile of gold (which he will eventually do).  The giants have taken Freia as collateral for the unpaid construction loan on Wotan's new godly fortress Walhall.  The other gods would like her back, because only Freia supplies the golden apples that keep them all young.  They are dressed in black here, as they have been since they began rapidly aging in Freia's absence.  When Freia is returned to them shortly, it will immediately improve their condition and they and their costumes will become both brighter and, in some cases, larger.   (A photo of Freia after her return, with an appearance by the aforementioned giants, is in the extended portion of this post.)

You may ask, "What is that on Wotan's head, a bishop's mitre or a parrot cage?"  Actually, that is his head, or a framework mask representing his head.  Wotan has only one eye, having sacrificed the other before the opening chords in order to win wisdom and Fricka.  His mask-head also has only one eye, as does the head of the much larger version of Wotan in which the singer is sometimes encased.  Masks and puppetry are a large part of Achim Freyer's stagecraft, much as they were for Julie Taymor in Los Angeles Opera's Grendel.  The gods are portrayed by only one singer each, but there are sometimes multiple representations of each character on stage simultaneously. 

In addition to those centuries-old theatrical tools, Freyer uses the most contemporary technology: the entire production is staged behind a scrim, which serves as a screen on which high definition video effects are projected.  Perhaps the most effective use of video comes near the conclusion when the gods walk over their rainbow bridge to Walhall: the rainbow's spectrum is projected on the scrim to create the illusion that the entire stage space has been suffused with mist, tangible light, and color.  Next slide, please.

Here, we return to the opening scene, in which the dwarf [Nibelung] Alberich is attempting in vain to win the affections at least one the three Rhinemaidens in the depths of their river.  The watery ambience is a combination of stage lighting and a blue video tinting of the scrim, with the Maidens partially obscured by rippling cloth being shaken by hands in the wings.  The upright Maidens are the three singers performing the parts, with their inverted "reflections" provided by three of the dozen or so dancer-mimes who round out the Company.  Not yet revealed here is the Rhinegold itself, which is represented by very bright handheld lights -- all right, flashlights -- underneath the fabric "river," which allows the gold to move magically about like a phosphorescent school of fish.  Forswearing love in favor of the gold's promise of ultimate power, Alberich clambers beneath the fabric himself and emerges with a large glowing Ring-colored lump, soon to be forged into the large glowing Ring we have already seen.

One more photo, featuring a character not yet discussed: the sly trickster fire god, Loge.

Loge is referred to but never actually appears in the remaining three parts of the Ring, although there is at least one photo from design rehearsals suggesting he will have a non-singing manifestation when the time comes to surround Brunnhilde with magic fire in Die Walkure.  (If so, he will probably recur at the conclusion of Episode 4: Gotterdammerung, when Literally Everything goes up in flames.) 

The character is so engagingly written that a well-performed Loge -- which Los Angeles emphatically has in the person of Arnold Bezuyen --  often steals the show in Rheingold.  As designed by Freyer and sung by Bezuyen, Loge is flame, devil and fast-talking lawyer-salesman all in one plaid zoot-suited package.  (Wotan only entered into the Freia-swapping contract with the giants on advice of counsel: Loge assured him there would be a way out of the deal later.)  Loge here has at least four arms and one hand seems always at his breast, because you know you can trust him, eh?

While Bezuyen's Loge received the most enthusiastic applause for any of the singers, the loudest ovation of all was reserved for conductor James Conlon and the orchestra.  (The musicians were hidden beneath the stage throughout and never seen; for the curtain call, a camera panned across the pit and the orchestra was projected on to the scrim to receive the crowd's huzzahs.)  I am not qualified to judge where Conlon and the Los Angeles players fall in the pecking order of properly Wagnerian playing, but I can say that the musical elements of this production were as compelling and effective as one could reasonably ask.  As he demonstrated in last season's remounting of the David Hockney Tristan, Maestro Conlon loves his Wagner, and his desire to do well by the composer shines through.

In summary, then: Freyer's approach to the Ring is by no means literal, but is genuinely honorable in its intention to present Wagner at Freyer's expense and not vice versa.  It is absolutely not boring and no matter how off kilter its surfaces may appear it is no betrayal of the work.  Beyond Bezuyen's terrific Loge, and Graham Clark's splendidly put upon Mime, the singers are entirely sufficient but not stunning.  I suspect that Vitalij Kowaljow's Wotan and Michelle De Young's Fricka will both be more compelling as those characters' complexities play out in Walkure next month and in the complete cycles next year.  The orchestra under James Conlon is better than sufficient and also likely only to get better.  Los Angeles can rightly claim that it has an authentic Ring to it.

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Elsewhere:

A.C. Douglas' Sounds & Fury serves as a one-stop depositary for other's reviews of the L.A. Ring, to which I can add Fine Arts LA's report, which went up at about the same time as my own.

All photos by Monika Rittershaus via Los Angeles Opera.  Ms. Rittershaus is not the usual Los Angeles Opera photographer, but is instead an associate of Achim Freyer.  Her photos of other Freyer performances can be seen on the site of the Freyer Ensemble.

Post title derived in part from Anna Russell's much beloved explanations of the Ring:

• Part 1 [most of Rheingold]; 
• Part 2 [remainder of Rheingold through Walkure through the first half of Siegfried]; 
• Part 3 [remainder of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, including la Russell's famous catchphrase]. 

Love, Death, and the Foxy Lady

There is a strand of genuine affection running through the local print reviews of Long Beach Opera's production of Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, and at yesterday's second, sadly final, performance, it was easy to see why.  This was just the sort of thing they do well in Long Beach: a work at least slightly off the beaten track, presented so as to make us wonder why we haven't seen it before or don't see it more often, and all on a budget that wouldn't keep the lights on for a week in the prop shop of a larger, more mainstream company.  Even when they put on something really difficult -- Vixen doesn't count on that score -- Long Beach Opera is California's, and one of the nation's, most endearing cultural institutions.

I know what you're thinking: he spent a few hours with some singing fuzzy animals and now he's gone fuzzy himself.  Not so.  Vixen Sharp Ears and her woodland compatriots are certainly lovable, but Janáček was never one for easy sentimentality and his natural world is red in tooth and claw.  Chickens are slaughtered without compunction.  A cute li'l bunny is torn in two for a lovers' picnic (the lovers being foxes, naturally).  The presence of humans doesn't help: Sharp Ears in the end is shot by a poacher, ending as a muff for his fiancee.

The humans themselves grow old and tired and disappointed and regretful.  The famously late-blooming composer, who achieved success in his sixties and after, leaves us with the aging Forester steeped in wistful memory of the vixen he adopted, lost, once tried to kill himself, and now misses, rounded off with the partial comfort that the life of the forest and the world somehow cycles on.  Here, the Forester is surely a surrogate for Janáček and Janáček a surrogate for all.

While the opera ends in a bittersweet vein, it is plenty lively in getting there, and the Long Beach Opera production was happy to play up the vigor and earthy humor of the tale.  The company cannot afford the superpremium international casting that marks, say, Los Angeles Opera's recent Magic Flute.  It compensates by skewing toward younger, highly promising singing actors, with often gratifying results. 

(A digression: LBO's use of younger singers, in combination with its commitment to placing drama on an equal footing with the music in music drama, also produces another benefit: Long Beach rarely succumbs to "Fat Lady Syndrome," the condition of casting singers for their undeniably splendid voices and talents despite the singer's age and/or physique being at odds with those of the character.  FLS affects the casting of men as well as women: see, e.g., Placido Domingo's late career ventures in to Wagner, yielding a Parsifal who sounds wonderful but is clearly old enough to be the character's great grandfather.  End of digression.)  

Vixen Sharp Ears has a short, sweet life, and Ani Maldjian took her from infancy to independent young vixenhood to too-brief marital and maternal bliss with nuance and a deft comic touch.  Peabody Southwell shone in the trouser role (more of a brown overall role in this case) of the Fox who wins Sharp Ears' affections; I am pleased to see that Ms. Southwell will be returning in both of LBO's remaining productions this season.  In the animal ensemble of insects, birds, and mammals, I will single out the grasshopper and cricket of Melissa Simpson and Laura Parker, if only because it was a pleasure to banter with them when creatures began to invade the auditorium prior to the overture.  Among the humans Michael Chioldi, with rather more experience behind him than most of the cast, stood out singing splendidly as the Forester, and bringing all of the necessary acceptance and pathos to his closing revery.

Small company that it is, LBO only offers two performances of each of its productions.  Thanks to the vagaries of my own schedule, I will be seeing the final performance of each, so that my recommendation after the fact can do you no practical good.  Accept, then, my recommendation before the fact.  Vixen was essentially a sellout, and it is to be hoped the remaining performances this season -- Vivaldi's rediscovered Motezuma and, somewhere deep within the hull of the Queen Mary, an Ullman/Orff double bill -- will achieve the same success.  Do not delay if you want to be in that number when the next set of favorable notices comes marching in.

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A pair of those affectionate print reviews I mentioned: 

Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times:  "[L]eave it to this modest but resourceful and quick-witted company to somehow come back from what appeared near death just as its larger neighbor to south, Opera Pacific, bites the dust and its giant neighbor to the north, Los Angeles Opera, battens down the financial hatches for hard times."

Timothy Mangan in the OC Register: "[T]his is the company's hallmark: Looking into operas that others neglect, and mounting them in innovative productions."

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Photo (top): "Urban Vixen" by Flickr user Steve Punter, used under Creative Commons license.

Photo (not quite top): Ani Maldjian in/as The Cunning Little Vixen.  Credit: Ken Hively.

Photo (not quite bottom): The Vixen company of creatures.  Long Beach Opera photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

Photo (bottom): Peabody Southwell as the Fox, with Ani Maldjian.  Long Beach Opera photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.

Weasels at the Wake

Someone asked me what my work was ‘about.’  I replied with no thought at all and merely to frustrate this line of inquiry: ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’  That was a great mistake.  Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns.  It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful observation about my work.  But for me the remark meant precisely nothing. . . .  What am I writing about?  Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet . . .  I can sum up none of my plays.  I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened.  That is what they said.  That is what they did.

-- Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008)

If only because of his Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter will be most remembered as a writer, but it bears emphasis that he was an all-round man of the theater: an extraordinary writer, yes, but also a director and, from the outset of his career, a gifted actor, as he demonstrates in the short pieces embedded below.

Pinter was strongly influenced by Samuel Beckett.  His core accomplishment, particularly in the plays that made his name, may have been to bring Beckett's world in to ours: neither Beckett's nor Pinter's plays are "realistic" in the standard sense, but Pinter took Beckett's bleak and frightful attitude, his darkest of the dark humor, and his precision with language that seems to say so little but carries so much, and imported them in to settings and human conversations that in other hands could be the stuff of old fashioned drama of the "kitchen sink"/"angry young man" school.  Even though people don't actually speak to one another as they do in Pinter, it is easy to believe they do, and the shifts and thrusts and dangers in characters' relations to one another are always clear, even when they lie hidden in the infamous Pinter pauses or beneath such mundane actions as moving a knick-knack or tearing strips of newspaper.

Here is a Beckett-Pinter linkage made manifest.  This clip presents, in its entirety, Beckett's late short piece "Catastrophe," in which Pinter plays The Director, Rebecca Pigeon is The Assistant, and John Gielgud, a few weeks prior to his own death, is the silent Protagonist.  David Mamet, who knows a few things himself about precise and freighted language, directed this version for the Beckett on Film project.

Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett [2000] with Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pigeon and John Gielgud, directed by David Mamet

Via the BBC, here are Pinter and Rupert Graves in 2006 having a run at Pinter's own very brief but pitch perfect sketch, "Apart From That," which derives in part from the author's laudable aversion to mobile telephones:

("Apart From That" comes at the very end of a June 2006 BBC Newsnight Review interview, viewable in full here.  The discussion of mobile phones begins at around 25:10.)

Some of the best writing about Pinter in the past several years has appeared on the weblogs (Superfluities and now Superfluities Redux) of New York playwright George Hunka.  His memorial post features a photo of Pinter in the title role in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, and emphasizes the links between the two Nobel winners.  The archived Pinter posts on Superfluities also deserve your time.

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Previously:

• Pinter Patter (October 2005, on the occasion of Pinter's Nobel)

• "Is the Number 846 Necessary or Possible?" (December 2006, concerning The Birthday Party)

• It is the Best of Times, It is the Versed of Times (A miscellany post from December 2005, the last item of which features "Horrid Planet," the Star Wars sequel Pinter could have written, but didn't.)

Scary Mouche, Scary Mouche!(Will You Do the Fandango?)

The world premiere of composer Howard Shore's opera adaptation of B-movie horror classic The Fly is set for July 2 at the Théâtre du Chatelet, Paris.  The libretto is by David Henry Hwang.  David Cronenberg will direct, with physical design being handled by much of the production team that collaborated on Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the film, for which Shore composed the score.  Placido Domingo conducts -- which is not necessarily the first choice on the list of things you want Placido Domingo to do, but by golly it's a free country.

Los Angeles Opera co-commissioned the work and will present the U.S. premiere in a series of performances beginning on September 7.  I am given to understand that the original plan was for Los Angeles to have had the World Premiere, this past season.  This did not occur.  You know how these things are.  Let's move on.

The production now boasts a stand-alone web presence at www.theflytheopera.com, including a promotional video -- with an actual MPAA "PG " rating attached, because parental guidance is so important in opera -- with plenty of commentary by Mr. Shore, smatterings of the music, glimpses of sinister scientific equipment of which no good can come, and the lead baritone or his equivalent doing some serious wire work, clambering about upside down and getting in touch with his inner insect. 

(There is a good quality streaming/podcast version of the same video at the Théâtre du Chatelet site as well, but some French person keeps talking over Howard Shore's explanations, for the better understanding of his fellow French persons who are not so fluent in English as they would have you believe.  Truth be told, the singers seem to be singing in French as well, in all versions of this video, even though the Los Angeles production will be in English.  It is all quite confusing, really.  It is, I submit, a good thing that Music is an International Language.)

This could be quite interesting, or an utter fiasco, or just "meh."  Time will tell me and, when the time is right, I will tell you.  Bzzz.

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Photo: "Enter: the Fly" by Flickr! user Lawrence Whittemore, used under Creative Commons license.

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Related in Name Only: Two years ago, I posted an MP3 of The Singleman Affair covering Tim Buckley's "Buzzin' Fly."   It's still here, and it's still good.

"Theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party."

George Hunka makes a persuasive case for connecting the dots between Wagner and Beckett, with particular reference to the Met's recent production of Tristan und Isolde.

Here, the unexpected bond between Waiting for Godot and the endless Act II love duet in Tristan: 

As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech.  Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

The entire piece is worth reading if you fancy either Tristan or Godot or, as in my case, both.

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For further reading:  No Beckett content included, but the related topic of how Time operates in Wagner came up just yesterday on Sounds & Fury.

A slightly shorter version of George Hunka's post also appeared on April 1 in the Guardian.  No joke.

It's a Gift

Si j'étais un homme, sans doute je ferais les choses que vous me dites, mais les pauvres bêtes qui veulent prouver leur amour ne savent que se coucher par terre et mourir.

[If I were a man, I would do the things that you say [and live], but the poor beasts who want to prove their love can only lie down on the ground and die.]

    --La Bête, La Belle et la Bête

Most men, confronted with their true selves, run away screaming!

    --Professor Engywook, The NeverEnding Story

The Infanta (Mary Dunleavy) and the Dwarf (Rodrick Dixon), amid choristers and courtiers.  (Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.)

Having no particular interest in the remaining productions -- Tosca and La Rondine -- my own Los Angeles Opera season ended this past Saturday evening, and ended well, with the double bill of Viktor Ullmann's The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug) and Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg).  There is one remaining performance of these paired productions (Saturday evening, March 8), and I will offer one word of advice for anyone with a remotely serious interest in music drama: Go!

This is the first fully-staged offering in music director James Conlon's "Recovered Voices" project, a multi-year initiative to rescue from obscurity works by composers who were directly affected by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.  (The recent Opera News article on Conlon and "Recovered Voices" is reproduced on the LA Opera site.)  Both of the composers on this bill came out of the fertile musical hothouse of Vienna.  Ullmann, living in Prague when (as Conlon put it in his pre-performance talk) "it was presented as a gift to Hitler," spent two years interned at Terezín, continuing to write, before his death at Auschwitz in 1944.  Zemlinsky -- friend and compatriot of Mahler, teacher and brother-in-law of Schoenberg, first lover of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (née Schindler) -- was able to emigrate with his family to New York following the German entry into Austria, but died there in 1942.

The Broken Jug is a 45-minute comic piece in which a corrupt provincial judge with a roving eye is unmasked by the testimony in his own courtroom.  Enjoyable to be sure, but ultimately no more than a lovely trifle.  The best part of the LA Opera production is probably the shadow play that goes on during the opera's overture, some of which can be seen of which can be seen at the outset of the video clip posted here.

The Dwarf is something else again, a sad and beautiful work of high musical and dramatic quality that deserves to have a place in the standard repertoire.  The opera is adapted from a story by Oscar Wilde, "The Birthday of the Infanta."  In both Wilde's story and the libretto by Georg Klaren, the Infanta of Spain is presented with a dwarf on her birthday.  The dwarf has no idea that he is misshapen or an object of mockery: he has never seen himself, and believes that the laughter that follows him everywhere is an expression of joy and pleasure at his presence, his singing and his dancing.  When he is stripped of his illusion and shown himself in a mirror by the unfeeling Infanta, he dies of heartbreak. 

Both the story and the opera are rich in themes typical of Wilde: beauty as a double-edged sword, the disjunction between appearance and inner reality, decadence and innocence.  Klaren's text takes several liberties that actually serve to heighten the Wildean quality of the piece.  The Infanta of the story is only twelve while her operatic incarnation is turning eighteen.  Wilde's dwarf is younger too, a sort of "wild child" found by shepherds in a forest; Zemlinsky and Klaren make him more of a sophisticate, a genuinely talented singer with a mature and yearning soul, captured and kept by the captain of a Spanish ship for ten years before being sold to a Sultan, whose gift to the Infanta he becomes.  In consequence, the Infanta of the opera is more knowingly cruel than her prose counterpart, especially when she spurns the sensitive dwarf's pleas for love and reassurance, to fatal effect.

Zemlinsky's music is in the lush, intelligent late Romantic idiom of Richard Strauss.  (Zemlinsky conducted the Vienna premiere of Strauss's Wilde opera, Salome.)  There is enough dissonance sprinkled about to let us know we are dealing with a 20th century piece, but color, melody and emotional punch are the orders of the day.  It is as smart, elegant and dramatically effective as the best of Strauss.

The LA Opera production is all that Zemlinsky might have wished.  The look of the production is inspired, as was Wilde's story, by Velazquez's great Las Meninas, and the action plays out in an opulent palace room lined with sliding mirrored doors, which inevitably surround the sorrowful dwarf with the truth of how others see him.  (The set's initial resemblance to a really swanky hotel elevator lobby was quickly forgotten once the drama began to unfold.)  The Spanish court is in blacks, whites and grays, with red and pink trim for the cyanide layer cake that is the Infanta.  The Dwarf is in rich orange and gold, like the blood-orange of which he sings.

The singers are all, thank goodness, strong singing actors who do not succumb to the curse of "park and bark."  As he should, Rodrick Dixon as the Dwarf dominates from the moment he emerges from his gilt gift box.  Susan B. Anthony is touching, and was enthusiastically received, as the ineffectual Ghita, the Infanta's maid who protests against the cruel trick her mistress proposes.  Called upon to glitter and be gay while calmly destroying her new "toy," Mary Dunleavy glittered gaily as the Infanta.

The Dwarf is easily one of the two finest productions LA Opera has offered this season, essentially tied in my mind with the company's tremendous, under-attended, Jenufa.  There were a number of cameras at work around the Pavilion Saturday night, which suggests this production may see release on video.  Better yet, one hopes that some old bel canto warhorse can be kept in the stable in a season or two, so that the poor Dwarf, like Tinkerbell, can return to the stage revived by well-earned applause.

O Tell, Otello: Verdi'd It All Go Wrong?

Ian Storey as Otello, Mark Delavan as Iago; Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.

Los Angeles Opera's new production of Verdi's Otello has drawn responses ranging from lukewarm to actively hostile.  Mark Swed's view of opening night for the Los Angeles Times was decidedly mixed:

For all the company had accomplished by producing its first Otello out of nothing [21 years ago], the orchestra and chorus back then could hardly approach the sheer visceral power of this opening chorus, one of the most dramatic in all opera.  Swept away by it all, I was ready to believe we had entered a new era.  Then I opened my eyes.  And, shortly thereafter, my ears.

Health problems meant the company was obliged to trot out a substitute Desdemona for the opening.  When the intended lead returned, so did Swed, and felt an eensy bit better about it though his praise was still faint:

There is still lots wrong, even embarrassing, with this Otello, but thanks to [Chilean soprano Cristina]Gallardo-Domâs it is no longer a disaster.

Elsewhere, Christian Chensvold complained of "the combination of a beauty-deprived score by Verdi, unexciting production values, and an emotionless portrayal of the tragic hero by Ian Storey . . ."  (He had more positive things to say in that same post about the concurrent "Recovered Voices" double bill, on which I will be better able to report after I see it next Saturday.)

I caught up with Otello last night and, really, it is not nearly so bad as all that.  In fact, its virtues, which are largely musical, overcome its most glaring weaknesses, which are largely scenic.

Where lies the scene?  Cyprus, ostensibly -- Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito dropped Shakespeare's Act 1 altogether, so we never get to spend any time in Venice -- but a Cyprus that is oddly, and literally, off kilter.  Designer Johan Engels has devised a strange and troublesome curved and canted stage floor with a pair of large boxy tunnels for entrances and exits at right and left.  The inspiration seems to be a ship's keel, drawing on Otello's storm-wracked arrival by sea as the opera opens, but the sandy color scheme and the Cypriots' desert-ready apparel combine with the arc of the floor and an odd blue neon rear wall (representing the sun-sparked Mediterranean, perhaps?) to produce the impression that Otello has been dispatched by the Doge to oversee an abandoned skateboard park on Tatooine.  Alan Rich declared it "an authentic visual plague" and I suspect it may account singlehandedly for an increase in the company's workers' compensation premiums as singers and choristers struggle to get through the run without falling over.

The star of the evening is the orchestra and music director James Conlon, delivering an account of Verdi's score that is stirring and propulsive but also remarkable for transparency of tone and attention to detail.  That means, as I suspect Maestro Conlon might protest, that the star was actually Giuseppe Verdi, whose score does just about all that can be done while still being an Italian opera.  The thunderous bits were properly thunderous, but the quiet beauties of the Act 1 love duet and the achingly sad pre-murder meditations in Act 4 were most memorable.

Among the singing performers, this production belongs solidly to Mark Delavan's Iago, an utterly unapologetic and gleeful villain.  Boito provided Iago with an explanatory speech denied him by Shakespeare: Iago is a proto-Nietzschean nihilist who ruins lives because he can and because "death is the end and Heaven is a lie."  And while he is going about his nefarious business, he has a darned good time, thank you very much. 

Desdemona is a smaller, more reactive role, but I am hard put to imagine how Cristina Gallardo-Domâs' performance of it could be improved upon.  I am generally reluctant to go mooning about over sopranos, but it is tempting to make an exception in this case.  Ms. Gallardo-Domâs sang Cio-Cio San in the Met's new production of Madama Butterfly earlier this year.  Although I am on record with the view that seeing Butterfly once in one lifetime is entirely sufficient, I would make an exception if she were to venture that role here.

And what of Ian Storey's Otello?  Frequently more than adequate, but not dominant in the greater scheme of things, perhaps because of the strengths of Iago and Desdemona.  Otellos in general are so easily played upon by Iago that the character always risks coming off as something of a dupe, and for much of the evening Storey fell prey to that risk.  It must be said that he finished well, however, and that this Moor's last sigh when all became clear was moving and effective.

Last night's performance was in competition with the Academy Awards -- which, before the advent of the Kodak Theater, were frequently distributed in the very Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where we sat.  Oscar did not seem to have diminished the audience by much, and I was pleased to note that the average age of the attendees appeared to skew rather younger than is usual for opera.  Statistical fluke or hopeful sign?  Only time will tell.

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Of Related Interest:

Out West Arts has not written up Otello yet, but did spend time with James Conlon over the weekend as the Maestro did double or triple duty by conducting not only the Opera orchestra but the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well.  This very positive post -- "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" -- does a good job of highlighting just how important Conlon has become to this burg:

The really unexpected part is this – in this town that Salonen built where anxiety is widespread over his pending departure despite all the big promises of a Dudamel-filled future, Conlon has stepped in and quietly become the next major driving force in the musical life of this community.  In less than two years he has developed a beloved following from both local audiences and (I’m told) the musicians playing under his leadership.  He has laid out an agenda that he has so far delivered on with fairly good results across the board programming both more Wagner and overlooked German repertory for LAO.  He is truly excited about what he is doing and is eager to share it with audiences here personally. For example, he’s been doing most of the pre-opera talks of the projects he’s involved with himself and he’s as likely as not to make comments from the stage before his Philharmonic appearances. . . .  He attacks everything with gusto and I for one am thrilled about what he’s done so far.  We are lucky to have Conlon here right now.

The list of folks who are thrilled with what Maestro Conlon is up to is a long one, and you can count me in on it.  For all that he is obliged by management and market forces to pile on the Standard Repertoire each year, he has a demonstrated interest in obscured/less frequently mounted works.  Now, will someone please take his hints -- I've heard him drop them in it least two of his pre-performance talks now -- and let the man conduct a production of Pelleas & Melisande around here?  Please?

Someone's in the Kitchen with Donna, Strummin' on the Ol' Don Gio

Much as bees communicate information by means of a specialized dance, termites communicate by means of a primitive form of opera.

-- From Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation

If Hamlet is the tragedy of a reflective man, of the man who "cannot make up his mind," Don Giovanni is the tragedy, to the extent that it is a tragedy at all, of a man with no power of reflection whatever.  Don Giovanni is all action and appetite.  He is at the end of his tether, but he does not know it.  From the outset of the opera, things go consistently wrong for him, but he never notices or acknowledges the slightest difficulty -- though in the end it perhaps dawns on him too late that he may have made a tactical error in shaking the hand of his last unearthly guest. 

Mozart's librettist Da Ponte scatters the action of the opera over an uncertain period of what seems to be several days -- between beginning and end, there has been ample time to inter the Commendatore and to erect the fateful statue -- but with its focus on the Don's comeuppance, one could imagine a more concentrated telling of the story observing the classical unities of time and place.  (Perhaps someone has?)

LA Opera has revived its 2003 production of Don Giovanni, with Erwin Schrott in the title role.  There are a half dozen more performances between now and December 15; I caught up with it on Friday evening.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed did not particularly like the production, although he had general praise for the performers:

When L.A. Opera first presented this production in June 2003, it was a "Don" of desperation.  The company's plans for an ambitious cycle of Mozart operas by a noted director (Achim Freyer was held out as an intriguing possibility; Robert Wilson's name was also bandied about) had fallen through.  Early in the 2002-03 season, a director or full cast had not been announced.  With the clock (or hourglass) running out, the company pounced on a flashy copycat Freyer and Wilson production from Warsaw by a Polish film and theater director, Mariusz Trelinski.

There were in 2003 two saving graces.  One was the company debut of Schrott, who is a wonderfully physical singer.  The other was the meaningful conducting of then music director Kent Nagano.  The rest of the cast was OK, which was good enough, given that everyone on stage was treated like a caricature anyway.

For this revival, being promoted in part for its good-looking cast, most on stage are better than OK, which is now a problem, given that they still aren't allowed much room to wiggle beyond caricature.  Meanwhile, the conductor is Hartmut Haenchen, a German who recently completed 13 years as music director of Netherlands Opera, one of the most venturesome companies on the continent.  He has to know better, which may be why he seemed somewhat uninvolved Saturday.

Trelinski's production is nothing if not interesting to look at, and it doesn't come freighted with any obvious misguided political agenda, but it succumbs to that other pitfall of contemporary opera direction: moment by moment the stage pictures are often striking, but they frequently have no content apart from their own Coolness.

The costuming choices are particularly bothersome.  The overall look is of a color-saturated carnivale or commedia.  Everyone is color coded: the Don is hot pink or vivid black and white; Leporello is various shiny shades of spiderweb gray and, with his snippy comments, bald pate and sometimes lurching movements bears, an unfortunate resemblance to Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff; Donna Anna and Don Ottavio are upholstered in sumptuous forest greens, Donna Elvira in rich blues, and poor Masetto and Zerlina are a glowing yellow Harlequin and Columbine.  The women are all equipped with over-wide hoop skirts as broad as a sidewalk, and are obliged to make most of their exits walking sideways.  There are dancing trees, dancing nuns, crawling partygoers, smoke, mirrors, trapdoors, flying rigs, and a silent masked dancer heavily freighted with symbolism who resembles an undead Velazquez infanta.

The singers and players do well despite the distractions.  Uruguayan baritone Erwin Schrott is a very fine Giovanni, brimming with charm, self-regard and utterly thoughtless power.  He has embraced the role as his own and is booked to portray the Don in a variety of productions through 2012; a half dozen examples of the range of Schrott's Giovanni looks, most involving taking his shirt off, can be found here.  I have it on good authority that not only is Mr. Schrott a gifted performer, but he is also a really nice fellow to work with.

All of the other principal men in this staging are very good as well, with James Creswell in particular overcoming the obstacle of his costume to bring genuine moral heft to poor put-upon Masetto.  Among the women, I am at odds with Mark Swed: I found Alexandra Deshorties unduly shrill at several points as Donna Anna, while Maria Kanyova's Donna Elvira was affecting in her misguided pursuit of the errant Don.

As Mark Swed's review mentioned, LA Opera is selling this production in large part on the basis of the "good-looking cast."  The notices quoted in the ad running in today's LA Times, for instance, are all about Erwin Schrott's hotness.  The Times itself is abetting the plan, as in this rather gushy article ("Opera stage is new hot spot") by staff writer David Ng:

Opera is often called the highest of all art forms.  These days, it might also be called the sexiest.  Gorgeous young singers are drawing attention around the world, helping to rejuvenate the genre.  Starting this week, Los Angeles Opera plays host to some of that smoldering talent. . . .

The abundance of pulchritude is enough to melt the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's chandeliers.  In person, however, the singers are refreshingly unpretentious.  They talk about everything from their favorite movie stars to their exercise routines.  No prima donnas here -- these performers make opera feel modern and accessible.

Urgh.

The chandeliers are in no actual danger: they are located in the foyer and not likely to be melted from within the auditorium.  Ng's article is as much as anything a breathless discourse on the hunky physical charms of Erwin Schrott, with Pulitzer-worthy insights such as: "To stay fit, Schrott hits the gym."  Who'd ha' thunk it? 

The Schrott aura is also on display in the interview and quick excerpts from the production included in the latest LA Opera video Podcast.  In addition to Schrott's Giovanni, the excerpts include appearances by bubble-headed Zerlina and the ghostly infanta mentioned above.  Beware of spoilers, however: the final performance sequence gives away the ending.

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Los Angeles Opera photos by Robert Millard.