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This was a really busy weekend for me.  I went to 4 performances in 3 days.

1. Manon in San Francisco on Thursday


2. Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill at Sac State on Friday


3. The Exterminating Angel on Saturday morning


4. Sacramento Philharmonic on Saturday night

So if my reviews seem scattered, that's my excuse.  Berlin to Broadway was a student offering that made of Kurt Weill's songs a sort of biography by presenting 25 different songs in chronological order.  Some were familiar, some were not.  I love Weill and found this fun.  Everything was sung in English, including this one.




I reviewed Manon.  It's hard to direct opera because there are usually so many people on the stage.  It needs to be easy to pick out the main characters and to show how they relate to one another.

I ended up with ambiguity in my reaction to The Exterminating Angel.  I think the content is fascinating.  An HD performance is directed on two levels:  the listed stage director and the camera director.  The first might well have shown who each character is and who they came in with while the camera director might have cut too many people out of the picture to leave much meaning.

I liked the idea of it more than the reality.  I did not like the super high notes--highest ever heard on the stage of the Metropolitan.  Maybe you never heard it because it's hideous.  Get rid of that and I'll think it over.  The ending I liked. This gives an idea.



The Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera presented a concert of Gioachino Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart called "A Night at the Opera."  There was singing by Alyssa Martin, mezzo soprano, and Steven LaBrie, baritone.   They sang bits from Barber of Seville, Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni.

Rossini was represented by an arrangement by Benjamin Britten called Soirées musicales.  Mozart was represented by the Prague Symphony.  The philharmonic is playing well now. The guest conductor was Sameer Patel.  I would have preferred more singing.

The Exterminating Angel

Conductor...............Thomas Adès
Production..............Tom Cairns

Edmundo De Nobile, host.......Joseph Kaiser
Lucía De Nobile, hostess......Amanda Echalaz

Guests
Leticia Maynar, guest of honor... Audrey Luna
Leonora Palma, flirts with Doctor Conde.....Alice Coote
Silvia De Ávila, sister of Francisco.........Sally Matthews
Francisco De Ávila, countertenor, brother of Silvia......Iestyn Davies
Blanca Delgado, pianist......Christine Rice
Alberto Roc, conductor.............Rod Gilfry
Beatriz, engaged to Eduardo..........Sophie Bevan
Eduardo, engaged to Beatriz..........David Portillo
Raúl Yebenes, explorer............Frédéric Antoun
Colonel Álvaro Gómez, Lucia's lover....David Adam Moore
Señor Russell...........Kevin Burdette
Doctor Carlos Conde.....John Tomlinson

Servants
Julio, stays behind.....Christian Van Horn
Lucas...................John Irvin
Enrique.................Ian Koziara
Pablo...................Paul Corona
Meni....................Mary Dunleavy
Camila..................Catherine Cook
Servant.................Andrea Coleman
Servant.................Marc Persing

Padre Sansón............Jeff Mattsey
Yoli, child.................Lucas Mann

The Metropolitan Opera live streamed The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. The opera is based on the 1962 film by Luis Buñuel which I have never seen.  In the 60s there was a global movement in art movies of which this is a representative.

I didn't prepare for this opera, and that turned out to be fortuitous.  When the ending came, I was pleasingly surprised.  Many of the cast were in the premiere at Salzburg in 2016.

Some guests have been to a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor and are invited to an after party.  One of the guests, Leticia, performed Lucia in the opera.  Right away the servants begin to flee.  No explanation is offered.  Then after the dinner the guests find they cannot leave.  Again no explanation is offered.

Apparently Adès has been obsessed with this subject for some years and finally received permission.  He is a composer in the modernist style with screeching sopranos and jumpy melodic lines.  I don't find it particularly attractive.  I did enjoy seeing and hearing the Ondes Martenot which was shown in closeup being played.  There was a lot of drumming.  At times it seemed like a comedy.  It wasn't as grotesque as I had imagined.

Over the course of the opera Russell and Beatriz die.  The guests dig a hole in the floor and water comes up.  The brother and sister seem to be romantically attracted to each other.  An unknown amount of time passes.  There were live sheep at the beginning which were eaten when everyone was starving.  There was someone hovering in the air above one of the women who might have been the exterminating angel himself.

For no apparent reason everyone decided to repeat exactly what they did when they arrived, and this seemed to break the spell.  They could then leave as though nothing had happened.

This is supposed to be a great opera but there are far too many characters.  It did make me curious to see the movie.  Alice Coote thought it was a parable on life which is also entirely without explanation.  We are here.  We cannot leave.  We don't know why.  Forgive me if I have misquoted her intentions.

I am not likely to ever be a fan of Thomas Adès.  For me opera is about singing which never became interesting.  People admire his orchestration and that is both the virtue and the fault of this piece.  Instead of composing for singers, he has simply orchestrated them.  At least in The Tempest there was the charming music for Ariel, but I heard nothing here that I would wish to ever hear again.  I would advise any high soprano to refuse any offers to sing this.  It can't possibly be good for your voice.
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Powder her Face

Photo by Cory Weaver. 

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Music Director and Conductor: Mary Chun
Stage Director: Elkhanah Pulitzer

The Duchess: Laura Bohn
The Maid, and other characters: Emma McNairy
The Duke and other characters: Hadleigh Adams
The Electrician and other characters: Jonathan Blalock

One of the operas for the summer festival of  West Edge Opera is Thomas Adès' Powder her Face, a purportedly biographical opera about Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. The composer waited until her death in 1993 to dig up all this old dirt--the opera dates from 1995.  Perhaps it's necessary to be British to fully enjoy this.  Everyone but the duchess had very light blond hair.

I'm going to call this as I see it.  This was like two different operas:  the serious, intensely emotional performance of Laura Bohn, something I might possibly call a masterpiece, and everything else.  Let's just say I don't normally watch porn.

Fake sex is only marginally interesting.  I tried to figure out what about the opera suggested the sex.  The judge comes out and says, "Order, Silence, Justice."  Then he says a bunch of other stuff, and then repeats the first three words.  The first time he says them they are drawn out and kind of wavy, but the second time he just says them.  So the first time the wavy music is used to express someone doing fellatio on him under his judge's robes.  So fioratura is sexual.  This goes with the Lucia I saw recently.  Ho hum.

I don't think I would want to see this opera again, but I'm sort of a fuddy-duddy.

Laura Bohn was magnificent.

Alex Ross

I read Alex Ross on the staging of The Tempest and Un Ballo in Maschera, and he had some interesting points.

I was interested in the idea that the productions last year looked better in the simulcast than they did in house.  A film of an opera is often very different from the impression it makes in house.  For one thing, directors often put things on the side of the stage that are not visible in the film.  In the Munich Lohengrin the hero sleeps off camera for an extended period, visible to the in house audience but not to the film.  Filming focuses on the important details and often ignores the bigger picture.

I don't know which of last season's productions he is referring to.  I liked Flute and Enchanted Island on the screen.  I have seen Ernani, Satyagraha and Walkure both on the screen and in the house and thought they worked about equally well in both places.  Walkure is just pictures in a foreshortened space both on the screen and in the house.

If I have 9 windows arranged in three rows, such as is the case in Don Giovanni, on the screen I will see each window one at a time in close-up with occasional wide shots of the full set.  In the house I will see all 9 windows all the time.  Perhaps in the house one prefers that the sets are in motion.

Ross talks about claustrophobia when the sets are close in and shorten the depth of the stage, such as in the Lepage Ring and Ballo.  Singers tend to love this because they can feel their voices reflecting out into the audience instead of disappearing into the flies.  The illusion for the Ring worked better on the screen because you could not see the pictures projected on the actors' faces which were obvious in the house.

I thought that the production for The Tempest made for some interesting pictures but did nothing to clarify the plot.

I was fascinated by the picture that accompanied Ross' article in the New Yorker.  It showed Zajick as Ulrica in an aqua blue dress such as a relatively lower-class woman might wear while Blythe in our version was dressed in upper-middle-class black.  She also pulled different things out of her purse.  Hmm.  Perhaps the other version makes more sense.  After all, she is reading the fortunes for sailors on leave, and not just upper-class women like Amelia.

His complaints about Dmitri are the same for anything he does.  Renée Fleming in Onegin brought him out of himself, but this is a rare event.  He is a sharp contrast to Marcello.

I liked the flamboyance of the production for Ballo, the subdued palate combined with the outrageous Oscar, the sophisticated Ulrica with her skull, the king's disguises where he always still looked like Marcello Alvarez, the radical changes of mood from scene to scene.  In fact I felt these mood changes clarified the plot as never before.  This is what matters most to me in a production.

Perhaps I should go back to reading Alex Ross.

The Tempest

Conductor...............Thomas Adès
Production..............Robert Lepage

Prospero................Simon Keenlyside
Miranda.................Isabel Leonard
Ariel...................Audrey Luna
Caliban.................Alan Oke
Ferdinand...............Alek Shrader
Stefano.................Kevin Burdette
Trinculo................Iestyn Davies
Antonio.................Toby Spence
Sebastian...............Christopher Feigum
Gonzalo.................John Del Carlo
King of Naples..........William Burden

Today was the simulcast of Thomas Adès's The Tempest from the Metropolitan Opera.  This opera lies much closer to Shakespeare's play of the same name than did The Enchanted Island, which we all loved very much.  It's modern, generally like the clip in the previous post and the one above.

There is Prospero, well sung by a tattooed Simon Keenlyside, who is a bitter old man who has been living on an island for 12 years with his books on magic, his daughter Miranda, sung by Isabel Leonard, his slave spirit Ariel, sung by Audrey Luna, and the former King of the island Caliban, sung by Alan Oke.  They are a pathetic group.  Caliban is an ugly monster who stalks Miranda and hopes to marry her.  Ariel is a slave to Prospero and has been promised freedom at some point.

That's two baritones, a mezzo-soprano and a coloratura soprano.  A very strange coloratura soprano.  Ms Luna has an incredible whistle register which is where the part of Ariel mostly lies.  The Queen of the Night in Flute just has her occasional leaps to high F's, but Ariel's part goes to a high G and hangs around above a high C for extended stretches.  I've never heard anything like it.  It was well and enthusiastically done, but gee.  In one spot she sings "Bow wow, bow wow."  Ariel is made of air.  Perhaps it makes an odd kind of sense.  This is the only thing about the opera that draws your attention to the singing. 

Prospero has received news that those who banished him to this island, the King of Naples and Prospero's brother Antonio, are passing by in a ship.  His sources are presumed to be magical.  He commands Ariel to sink their boat and bring them to the island.  Prospero has his revenge and everyone is happy at the end.  In their miserable, sniveling ways.  Except his precious daughter Miranda has fallen in love with the King's son Ferdinand.

The music is all like the sample.  Played by the fabulous Metropolitan Opera orchestra, it makes a different impression than my previous encounter.  The general impression is of disintegrated fragments of harmony and phrase.  There isn't much in the way of flow.  However, it has its own distinctive sound.

The text is almost Shakespeare, but not.  We hear Miranda declare "O brave new world" in the right place.  But why couldn't they have used:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

instead of the prose version?  As part of Prospero's revenge, Ferdinand, sung by Alek Shrader, is told that his father has died in the shipwreck.  We get something more modern sounding and not at all poetical, though it generally rhymes.  How does one manage that?  There is no antique vocabulary.

Robert Lepage was more suited to producing The Tempest than he had been for The Ring, perhaps because as a modern opera it could be performed by young people capable of swinging from chandeliers and falling through holes in the floor.  It didn't always make sense, but it looked good, worked fine and made the performances more interesting.

We got to the end and felt little enthusiasm, either in our theater or in the Met audience.  I managed a bravo for Keenlyside who was really quite good.
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Most Adorable

The most adorable on stage couple award has to go to:

Alek Shrader as Ferdinand and Isabel Leonard as Miranda in The Tempest from the Metropolitan Opera.

And here's a clip of them singing.

Isabel's all smiles Miranda is such a contrast to her all serious Costanza in Griselda that it is hard to imagine they are the same person.

Adès' The Tempest

I used to write long essays giving advice to composers wanting to compose opera. One sentence was "Your job is to make the singers sound good." I sort of gave up because it became apparent that no one was listening. None of the singers in Thomas Adès' The Tempest sound good at all.

Review previous essays:
Composing Opera
Advice to Composers

It's a good subject for an opera but very painful to listen to. This is based on a DVD from House of Opera from the ROH production. I would describe the style as neo-second Viennese school, but entirely without Berg's lyricism.

I will repeat my most basic advice here: If you never go to the opera and don't really like singing, do not repeat DO NOT write an opera.