Richard Sasanow - Page 7

Richard Strauss’s ELEKTRA is simply overwhelming--particularly when you have Nina Stemme and, especially, Lise Davidsen, as the title character and her sister Chrysothemis, ably abetted by Greer Grimsley as their brother, Orest, and an incredible supporting cast top to bottom.

I couldn’t help thinking of a new science fiction-comedy series on Amazon during the local premiere of UPLOAD, the opera by Michel van der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday. Both had the same name. Both explore a near future where technology controls everything, including the afterlife, as a person can choose to “upload” its consciousness to continue living digitally. Both pose questions, though in different ways, about humanity, technology, consumerism, and so on.

Can you imagine the Met--or any other major opera house--cutting the length of a new opera so commuters could make the last train? That’s what baritone Etienne Dupuis told me about the world premiere in Paris of Verdi’s DON CARLOS (1867). Dupuis is starring as Don Rodrigue, Marquis de Posa, at the Met these days, in the new David McVicar production of the Verdi opera.

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of composer/librettist Huang Ruo (music influenced by Chinese folk melody, Western avant-garde and other styles, but unlike anything else you’ve heard) and director/designer puppeteer Basil Twist (a MacArthur “genius grant” winner in 2015). The four tales included in the piece, which Huang describes as “abstract and eternal,” kept the audience in its thrall for 80 minutes.

If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola Haym. With ornamentation galore and da capo arias that strung phrases along one time after another (and a plot to make your head spin), it set challenges for everyone on stage, both musically and dramatically. And they were certainly up to it.

The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety. They were willing and able to sit through the cockamamie book and story Arthur Laurents concocted to hear the wonderful score by the late and very lamented Stephen Sondheim. And, believe me, Ted Sperling, leading the orchestra and big chorus, with a couple of strong guest performers, showed how good much of this score can be.

I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. She was altogether divine.

DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night. And about as long (though for once it ended earlier than expected)--Verdi's longest opera.

When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs. Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, under the auspices of HERE, one of New York’s major downtown arts organizations, based in Tribeca, decided to, uh, hang around.

It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share. Thanks to the efforts of Heartbeat Opera, which performed its revised version at New York’s Met Museum this past weekend (before a short tour), we can see the forest for the trees, with many of the work’s problems dealt with in a surprisingly effective way and the story brought up to date without destroying its integrity.

INTIMATE APPAREL appeared this week at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, directed adroitly by Bartlett Sher, with a thoughtful libretto by Lynn Nottage based on her award-winning play and a ragtime-inflected score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon.

It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1” than it did for the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden to kick off the first program in its current concert series, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within”. But it was a fitting opening for the evening, which featured countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (the Phil's current James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence) and cabaret diva Justin Vivian Bond--not only exciting in the piece itself but for what lay ahead in the evening.

Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani. The film version, by Vittorio De Sica, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1970, running half the time of the opera. Still, it is the novel that excited them all.

Can we talk—about live opera in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast in the coming months?

When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead. Combined with Verdi’s great score, it seemed bound for success. What followed was disappointing, despite some creditable singing and smooth, involved orchestral playing under Daniele Rustioni, with much blame I thought, going to the Sher production.

What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou for the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, without sacrificing its impact. It has a gorgeous score, but for a grand opera, it is also quite intimate, with the action mainly revolving around three characters who carry their emotions on their sleeves and interact like their lives depend on it.

Talk about ‘spoiler alerts,’ there was a big one for me early in the opera, EURYDICE, by Matthew Aucoin to a libretto that he and Sarah Ruhl fashioned from her play of the same name, which had its Met premiere last night. Eurydice tells Orpheus “Don’t look at me,” which to me mirrored the scene at the end of the piece in the Underworld when Hades tells him that he can take her back to the land of the living if he doesn’t look back at her…which, of course, he does.

In Rossi's L'ORFEO at Juilliard, but director Birnbaum explores the idea that “destiny happens to you whether you like it or not, and no matter how much humans try to have control over their environment and future.” Or, as the popular expression goes, “Man makes plans and God laughs.”

Every time I head to a performance of Puccini’s LA BOHEME, I can’t help but think of Bette Davis’s famous line from “All About Eve”: “I detest cheap sentiment.” But then I actually get there and, more likely than not, I feel genuinely moved, swept away by the mood that the composer and his librettists (Illica and Giacosa) have conceived through what seems like an endless array of gorgeous melodies in the Franco Zeffirelli production.

There are so many things to like about the season’s revival of Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS, which was new in the 2019-2020 season, before Covid became the “song” that no one wanted to hear. PORGY on the other hand, is the music that everybody can take a liking to, with its fluid combination of opera, Broadway musical and versions of spirituals and Gullah folk music that nobody ever heard before. It has been best known for its songs, which have become “standards” in the Broadway songbook. The stylistic shifts in the complex, yearning, comic score are handled mightily by the Met’s game orchestra under David Robinson.