Live Broadcasts for Dead Audiences

This Met Tristan backstage (and onstage!) drama has me so excited. I wonder if somebody is out there working out some kind of chart or graph of every configuration of Debbie Voigt and Ben Heppner and Gary Lehman and John Mac Master and Robert Dean Smith and Richard Dean Anderson (pictured) that has been onstage in the course of this run. I think Peter Gelb wanted to make history with this show, putting Voigt and Heppner onstage together—and he has made history, albeit not the sort he intended. Boos! Vomit! Head trauma! Oh, yeah, and apparently some frickin' excellent singing, some of it from relative unknowns. I'm awfully jealous of everybody who's caught one of these performances—reading Maury's report on Heppner actually made my heart beat a little faster. (And not just because I made a meme!!!) Which means I'm jealous of JoJo, who made it to the Met HD broadcast of the Voigt/Smith Tristan (Voigt/Smith? Have I got that right? I lost my scorecard). These new theatrical opera broadcasts are a dazzling experience. I was a bit skeptical until I actually saw Hänsel at the Mall of the Victor Valley in Victorville, CA with my mom on New Year's Day. All the musical goosebump-moments came off, the production was visually splendid, the acting was gripping and true (except for the Witch—sorry, Langridge), and my mom finally knows who Christine Schäfer is. I've had less intimate and exhilarating moments in the actual house—and unlike watching the broadcasts on a little TV set in an empty living room, there was an audience there with me, old folks and parents with children, granted not a BIG audience (this was Victorville, CA), but when the curtain came down I heard a half-dozen pairs of tiny hands applauding, little kids who had come to see their first opera and loved it. They loved it! I saw them smiling and laughing afterwards, after that grim conceptual opera production! My other HD broadcast adventure was the new Peter Grimes, which I saw in nearby Branford, CT. This time, the auditorium was PACKED. "You're the only people here under fifty!" one audience member said to our party, and it was dismayingly close to the truth. Again, it was a phenomenal experience: the camerawork was great, as it was in Hänsel—and as I am told it was NOT in Tristan—which may have actually been the best way to experience the gratingly monotonous set design and choral blocking of this new production. But that's a relatively minor complaint, since the singing, acting, and playing all knocked me out. I was literally in tears by the first Sea Interlude. I finally understand what everybody's going on about when they go on about Peter Grimes. I only wished that I'd seen more people my own age there. God knows I love all these damned indie rock, R&B, electro, whatever albums that the kids are listening to these days. So how come they're all so resistant to any music written more than ten years before they were born? What will it take to get their asses in these seats? I don't know, but I'm thinking Gelb is on the right track. Look how this HD thing is catching on—after hearing me & Mom rave about Hänsel, after seeing the broadcast repeated on TV, this morning my dad went to hear La Traviata rebroadcast from La Scala. He went to see it here, at the new movie theater in Apple Valley, CA. Okay, it's not actually on that map, since like I said it's a pretty new theater, but you get the idea: it's in the middle of fucking nowhere. Note the trailer park directly southeast. This is how you get people's attention, is by sending important productions—a beautiful Hänsel, a world-class Grimes, a historic Tristan, directly to communities who might otherwise lack the resources or even the inclination to seek out this kind of event on their own. (Oddly, the La Scala broadcasts cannot be seen anywhere in Connecticut.) On the wrong track? San Francisco Opera. When I griped to a Friscan friend of mine about Pamela Rosenberg's departure, he pointed out that she fulfilled only one half of a world-class opera company's dual mission: to serve and expand the global opera audience (check) and to serve the existing, local audience of opera lovers and supporters (uh oh). So, fair enough. But David Gockley is making the opposite mistake. In place of Rosenberg's pioneering new-music repertoire (Adams, Ligeti, Messiaen) and adventurous new productions, he's giving listeners an uninterrupted diet of more of the usual. And having gotten his prestige commission (Glass's Appomattox) out of the way, the only new opera he's offering out of San Francisco is the American Tonal Melodrama (Heggie, Wallace) that's always served up to mollify local subscribers—even as his expensive new HD editing suite makes the opera's global mission that much more important. Most heinously, the HD broadcast of Appomattox? Dropped. Now the only twentieth-century opera on the schedule is La Rondine. And that doesn't count.

Go Here Now, Buy This Thing

Meaning here. Meaning this thing. I just saw an ad for Buywell.com, an Australian classical retail site, in the back of Gramophone magazine, and their catalog boasts some very hot releases on Universal's Australian Eloquence budget series—notably the never-on-CD Final Alice, David Del Tredici's magnum opus (maybe—so few of his large-scale works are available, it's hard to say for sure) and the Peter Pears/Osian Ellis Britten's folk songs with harp, also (astonishingly!) making its debut on CD. Note that these prices, even with shipping to the US, are pretty reasonable. (Full disclosure: my brother studied with David Del Tredici, who said some very nice things about my writing. Also, now that I think of it, I think Final Alice did technically come out on CD in Japan for a short while. That doesn't count.)

Let's Not and Say We Did

Geez, I've been watching a lot of opera on DVD lately. Don Giovanni, directed by Peter Sellars, is as great as you might expect, which is to say it might make you sick to your stomach. I felt that way about his Così fan tutte, which doesn't even have any raping in it. Boris Godunov, conducted by Gergiev (again), in the Andrei Tarkovsky production, is really sublime theatre. Even Inferno by Dario Argento has a little bit of opera in it, but that's a whole 'nother post. Anyways, all of this is at least worth watching, at best great. One video NOT to watch is the Peter Weigl DVD of Let's Make an Opera by Benjamin Britten. Anyone who has seen Weigl's somewhat crappy videos of The Turn of the Screw or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk might have suspected that Weigl had the potential to accomplish something profoundly wretched. His Let's Make an Opera is not only worse than Mtsensk, worse than Screw, it is--I say this totally without hyperbole--worse than murder. Seriously, it is worse than a human body lying facedown in a ditch. Now, I'm not one to be over-critical of opera DVDs. I reallyh tend to be thankful for whatever I can get. But I'm sad to say that the video adaptation of Let's Make an Opera is far worse than no adaptation at all. The piece itself is a wonder of concision, with a tiny cast, brief action, and an "orchestra" made up of just a string quartet plus two pianists and percussionist. (How tiny is the cast? So tiny that the audience has to double as the chorus--the opera's second part doubles as their rehearsal for the finale. See? Concision!) Confronted with the problem of how to translate near-perfect economy to the small screen, Weigl has devised a brilliant solution: lard it up with a bunch of totally irrelevant bullshit. Watch this.

Discerning viewers may have noticed that the above has absolutely nothing to do with Let's Make an Opera by Benjamin Britten. Almost none of the characters are from the original piece, none of the action is in the original stage directions, and most horrifyingly, none of the music is from the original score. Which wouldn't be quite so offensive if it weren't so bad. It's as if Weigl realized just before filming that the piece was too short for feature-length treatment and hurriedly engaged the cast and crew of the Bel Ami production filming next door--hairless Czech beefcake, cheap synths, and ludicrously asynchronous lip-synching of the spoken dialogue. And people, there is SO MUCH MORE of this garbage on the DVD. I've posted only half of the prologue above, and literally every other scene in the video is one more embarrassing, cobbled-together interpolation.

Avoid at all costs.