38 posts tagged “opera”
We went to the closing performance of Seattle Opera's Aida last night (our regular subscription night); we had also gone opening night because we were pretty sure this was a production we'd want to see twice (it was).
Aida is an opera that I hadn't had much exposure to previously in terms of its background and history. But before production opened, it was clear that there was some kind of urban legend surrounding Aida and the use of live elephants. (SO General Director) Speight Jenkins says he has been to close to a 100 performances of Aida and never once saw any live elephants. Yet, when he was waiting to go into surgery recently, a fellow patient recognized him and said that he saw Aida at Seattle Opera in the 60s with live elephants (this never happened; Speight later double-checked the history just to be 100% sure).
When we attended opening night, I ran into a friend at intermission. One of the first things his companion said to me after we were introduced was "I saw Aida in Vienna with live elephants!"
Then, last night, the guy that sits behind us in our subscription performances told his wife "you know, I've actually seen this opera with live elephants!" I immediately started poking Drake, but he didn't hear the comment.
When I got home last night, I did a search on Aida elephants to see if I could find any actual evidence (a photo) of a production with live elephants. Zippo. Nada.
So, the Aida elephants mystery continues...
Update: Today, Drake sent an email to an old college buddy and mentioned that we had seen Aida last night. His buddy's response: "And I saw Aida once. Even had live elephants. However, I must admit, not one of my favorites..." I am seriously mystified by the apparently huge number of people convinced they have seen this opera with elephants.
Update 2: OK, not to beat a dead... elephant... but here is the interesting response from Drake's friend, who actually called someone in the chorus of the Aida production he saw:
Funny.
Before you said it could have been delusional, I never thought about
whether I really saw the elephant... I just called a friend of mine who was in the chorus of that
show, which was performed in 1986 at a concert hall in downtown Denver,
and he said there was no elephant. Wow..... perhaps HP is right: There is a mass delusion regarding
elephants in Aida and I'm a victim.......
While most people were probably at home watching that other international competition, Drake and I were at Seattle Opera's Second International Wagner Competition. The first competition was 2 years ago, which had been somewhat hurriedly put together in order to inject some Wagner into an otherwise Wagner-less opera season (SO is known as a company specializing in Wagner).
General Director Speight Jenkins had said he thought the quality of the finalists for this year were stronger than the first competition and I'd agree. I felt the performances this time were more uniformly matched.
In the first half, Peter Lobert (a bass) gave a downright chilling performance of Hagen's Watch from Gotterdammerung. I think this guy as Hagen could give small children nightmares. Very unusual bass voice.
The other standout (for me) in the first half was Nadine Weissmann singing from Das Rheingold. It's interesting how some performers have a presence that comes out and grabs you. And she was wearing a fantastic deep red velvet dress (the clothes don't count of course but still).
During the intermission, the opera house was abuzz with discussions about the singers. The audience gets to vote, so people were formulating their opinions.
The second half, as last time, the singers loosened up and seemed to take more risks with their performances. Elza ven de Heever gave a strong, nuanced performance from Lohengrin - oddly enough Elza doing Elsa. And boy, I just loved what Nadine Weissman did with Waultraute's Narrative. It was enough to seal my vote for Nadine.
In the end, one of judge's pick was I felt a surprise. Eliza van de Heever won the audience vote; Nadine Weissmann won the orchestra's vote. Interestingly enough, five of us fairly serious opera goers were chatting during the voting break and we had all voted for Nadine.
But Nadine wasn't a judges pick. Eliza van de Heever won as did Michael Weinius, which for me came out of the blue. His second half performance was very good, but felt his first half was somewhat weak - fading at times under the orchestra. We caught up with one opera friend after the event and she was also surprised by Michael Weinius as the judge's pick.
But, so it goes. I think these folks will all get a career boost from being finalists - and I am definitely going to keep my eye on the career of Nadine Weissman.
August is a big opera month for us - we're seeing the Seattle Opera production of Aida (twice), a recital with Ben Heppner, and the International Wagner Competition.
Last night we were at home listening to the SO live broadcast of the second Saturday Aida performance. When we went to opening night performance, there was an awful, obvious goof by a solo trumpet in the triumphal scene.
I'll be darned if the trumpeter didn't make the same mistake last night in the broadcast. It made me think about an article I read a week or so ago in the NY Times about target panic in archers, which is similar to the yips in golf. We attend a lot of music performances and obvious gaffs are very unusual. (The most recent was at the symphony - a mis-start - due to an instrument malfunction.) It made we wonder if the opera's trumpeter has a musician's version of the yips. You can bet we will be holding our breath when we attend the third Saturday performance.
The first production of Aida I saw (with my mom) was Seattle Opera's somewhat infamous 1992 production. Infamous because the staging was not the grand opera spectacle that people expect - it was a minimalist production that placed a series of statuettes on the stage to represent the triumphal march (normally an elaborate march of real people). At that point in my opera-going career I didn't know any better, having never seen it, but my mom was clearly puzzled by it. She was not alone in that. General Director Speight Jenkins got a TON of complaint mail about the production. And so this time around, 16 years later, he (jokingly) promised a production that was "loathsomely Egyptian." And Egyptian it was.
Palombi set the tone from the very first with the opening aria Celeste Aida - which elicited many shouts of "bravo" from the audience on its conclusion. (Side note: Palombi's experience with Ramades includes walking on stage in street clothes at La Scala to step in for Roberto Alagna, who stormed off the stage in response to some booing.)
We don't normally go opening night (our regular subscription tickets are the third Saturday performance), but it's fun to go to the opening once in a while. It's always very festive and true to Seattle you see everything from the tux-and-gown crowd to the shorts-and-birkenstocks folks. And it was a beautiful summer night to boot. Just a wonderful evening.
Juan Diego Florez got quite a bit of mainstream media attention when he nailed the nine high C's of Fille du Regiment not once but twice (the second time in a near unheard-of encore of the aria).
Last night at Seattle Opera we experienced something that I think is equally amazing:
Lawrence Brownlee took a high F (that's 3 notes above a high C) in full chest voice. He sang the note so strongly that I could literally feel it hit me (physically).
Not even Pavarotti could sing that note in chest voice - he sang it using head voice (falsetto).
Not to reduce Brownlee's performance to a single high note. He's got the total package - an absolutely amazing voice for the bel canto repertoire. It makes it seem so effortless.
I was vaguely aware that there was a marionette company in Seattle that did an opera production each year. And when it crossed my consciousness I would think, "well that would be interesting to attend sometime."
This year, we did it. And boy am I sorry we didn't take advantage of this sooner. First of all, the production is not for children. But, I wasn't sure who might show up at a marionette opera-- opera people? early music people? (a number of notable early music musicians were performing) -- puppet people? I'm still not sure. It was an older crowd - older even than the symphony crowd - but there wasn't anyone we recognized. We go to enough music in Seattle that we are familiar with a set of "usual suspects" that show up to various types of classical performance.
The opera was Don Giovanni, done in its entirety, with only very minor cuts. Rather than sing the recitative, it was spoken, in English, much of it quite funny (and adult -- again this was not for kids). The English dialog helped move the drama along. But the marionettes were amazing dramatically. It's hard to explain how expressive they were--both in the spoken dialog and the aria singing. The singers (local favorites, including a couple from the Tudor Choir) were accompanied by a string quartet plus flute. They were seated, dressed in black, in front of the stage. The experience was so intimate--it felt like you were in someone's salon. It was an incredible theater experience.
They announced next year's opera, which is Don Quixote. Marionette opera is clearly something we're going to be looking forward to each year. Marionettes have a very interesting history in theater--particularly in Italy--which you can read about here.
Ladies and gentleman, I given you Juan Diego Flórez and his phenomenal high C's.
More about the performance (and his encore) here.
Last night, the Met finished it ill-fated run of Tristan and Isolde, whose whole reason for being was to bring together the two leading Wagnerian singers of the day, Ben Heppner and Deborah Voight. The only problem: due to illness Ben missed 5 of the 6 performances and Deborah missed 2. (Ben writes about his illness, which required hospitalization, here.)
Last night was the last performance of the run--and the only performance where the two actually sang together.
The Met decided to broadcast the audio of the performance via their web site. So, last night Drake and I huddled around the computer and listened in. Sound quality-wise, it was somewhat like listening to Tristan on an old transistor radio, but it was still worth listening to. Lucky dogs in the theater who had purchased tickets to the last performance. They won the opera lottery there. Alex Ross wrote a brief review of the evening. Sigh.
The run has some implications for Seattle, as Janice Baird, who replaced Voight, will be signing in the Seattle Opera 2009 Ring. She got a lot of publicity from stepping in, particularly since in the first performance she covered, she stepped in mid-performance when Voight's illness cause her to run off the stage mid-aria. Baird made a very respectable Met debut and I think this will be a huge boost for her career (and will have a related effect on ticket sales for the Ring, which are scheduled for some donors/subscribers in the next month.)
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Tonight, we are off to the a Seattle Young Artists production, something we enjoy every year since it gives us the change to hear opera in a more intimate setting.
Ten more minutes and really... I'll start packing. We leave tomorrow for Chicago--a mix of personal (family) and business. We are also going to catch (the dreamy) Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the role of Eugine Onegin at Lyric Opera.
But enough goofing around...
We went to our regular subscriber performance last night. This production was even more affecting from our subscriber seats - Main Floor Row P - we're quite close (by preference) to the stage. Many wonderful subtleties in the staging that I missed the first time around. But wow, the whole evening just packed a major emotional punch.
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It's been all Pagliacci, all the time for us: our neighborhood pizza place is Pagliacci. And Pagliacci the pizza place couldn't resist doing a little cross-promotion with Seattle Opera's Pagliacci, thus this pizza box from our Friday night pizza:
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