Back to the Future

Akhnaten

I saw the 2000 Boston Lyric Opera production of Akhnaten and loved it. So we eagerly anticipated this opera at the Met. In view of some recent new stagings — Traviata, Samson, to name a couple, underwhelming to say the least — we didn’t know what to expect.

We attended the HD transmission on Saturday, Nov. 23. (I also went to to the encore on Dec. 4. I even looked into taking a quick trip to NYC for a live performance but they were all sold out.)

The visuals, the stage action, the sets, the costumes, and of course the voices and orchestra, all blended into a kind of lavish extravaganza of constant motion. We were skeptical about the jugglers — seriously? But they were perfect. The “skills ensemble” as they are listed on the program, propelled the opera through the acts making the whole …… The music is so driving, the repetitive actions of the juggling figures complemented the flow. Now I’m thinking more operas should have jugglers, or maybe just the Egyptian ones — Aida, Thais??

The sets were fairly simple: a staircase (that looks to make a repeat appearance in Agrippina), a huge hanging disk that shifts color throughout.

Costumes were another matter — some way over the top, like the doll’s head gown that Akhnaten wears, some were downright austere, like the flowy robes worn by the emperor and his consort, devoid of any accessories, manage to fill the stage with red.

The central figure of Akhnaten is a man overcome with religious zeal, a down-home family guy, who is however clueless about his people. As a countertenor, the male role is in a higher range than his mezzo-soprano wife, Nefertiti. The other main characters are Queen Tye, Ahknaten’s mother and Akhnaten’s dead father who acts a a sort of stage manager, à la Our Town, telling us what’s happening.

Glass is described at “minimalist.” I don’t know how that translates to what we saw on the screen, but Akhnaten doesn’t sound like any other opera I’m familiar with. Tosca it is not. On the other hand, I’m not sure this is the future of opera. I’d read somewhere that Akh is already out-of-date. As a music drama, I can’t see many others following this example. The repetitive music, the abstract characterizations set up a distance, from the audience so that there was a lack of emotion throughout. The set of daughters wore identical blue wigs and white gowns, and they are just tha, a set, no individual personalities.

Notes

• Zachary James is our new bass-barihiunk.
• We knew that the nudie tableau of the emperor descending the staircase was going to be sanitized for the HD audience. If they hadn’t dressed him in tidy-whities it might have been more effective as a scene rather than a protest.
• Joyce DiDonato hosted for the HD movie. She was wonderful and we all love her.
• Backstage at intermission, we watched jugglers hanging around, tossing multiple balls in the air as you and I would fiddle with our coat buttons.

• Akhnaten: Anthony Roth Costanzo
• Queen Tye: Akhnaten’s mother: Dísella Lárusdóttir
• Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife: J’Nai Bridges
• Amenhotep III: Zachary James DEBUT
• Conductor: Karen Kamensek DEBUT
• Production: Phelim McDermott
• Set and Projection Designer: Tom Pye
• Costume Designer: Kevin Pollard
• Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet
• Choreographer: Sean Gandini

Afterword

Might I add here how disgusted I am at our local PBS station WGBH for not broadcasting the Great Performances show of this opera. To date (29 April 2020) I have seen no notice of its being shown on WGBH or WGBX.

Quarantine Black Bean

So we are making soup to while away the indoor hours (don’t get me started . . .).

This is the “Best Black Bean Soup” from the New York Times recipe collection. I had a broth made from prosciutto ends and vegetables (leek, potato, carrot, bay leaf, celery).

Note: I use it for making soup, but otherwise I really don’t like celery. So I throw a lot of it away (in the trash, not down the disposal, of course). As an experiment, I froze the last leftover fresh celery I had — chunked it and put into a plastic bag and into the freezer. Seemed to work fine for soup, as it just gets all wilty anyway.

I halved the recipe and followed it mostly. The chipotle in adobo was very hot so I was judicious in including it — just a few pieces and some of the adobo juice. I did not process it so just chopped/mashed it on the cutting board. Added a bit more as it was cooking.

I did make the garnishes they suggested — red onion laced with lemon juice (no lime on hand) and salt, chopped cilantro, sliced avocado, sour cream. They all added a nice zest to it all. And I processed the soup a little with the immersion blender, to get a mix of bean pieces and bean slurry.

The soup is filling; I made a cornbread from a mix (did I mention I have a lot of time at home) as an accompaniment. It was good, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best black bean soup I’ve made.

Opera Manqué, 2020 Edition

Week 2

From Opera Wire, 3 April 2020

A Comprehensive List of All Opera Companies Offering Free Streaming Services Right Now

---

Some of the opera venues that are now closed (indefinitely — how is this all going to end?) are now providing streaming productions on their websites. (You might have to register.) I bought a HDM1 cable to connect my computer to the TV.

Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro, Italy

The Rossini Opera Festival Launches Daily Live Streams From Its Opera Archives

In questi giorni in cui è fortemente consigliabile restare a casa, il Rossini Opera Festival vuole tenere compagnia ai propri fan.

Link to the list

Be sure to ACCETO the cookies.

Metropolitan Opera, NYC

Met to Launch “Nightly Met Opera Streams”

Leaving the Met after Dutchman, 6 March 2020

A free series of encore Live in HD presentations streamed on the company website during the coronavirus closure

Link to the list

Berlin Philharmonic

The Digital Concert Hall now free for everyone

The [Berlin] Philharmonie is closed – so we will come to you!

The Digital Concert Hall now free for everyone
The Philharmonie is closed – so we will come to you!

Redeem the voucher code BERLINPHIL by 31 March and receive free access to all concerts and films in the Digital Concert Hall.

Link to the list

Wiener Staatsoper

Live at home

Link to the list

A few others just in from Opera Wire

Teatro Regio di Torino Streams 

Teatro Massimo di Palermo Daily Streams

Bayerische Staatsoper Streams

Staatsoper unter den Linden

And here’s a site that lists them all

Your Guide to Free Opera Streaming This Month

The Trip to Glimmerglass

From the Archive
August 2016

Sweeney Todd and The Crucible

Anticipation . . .

One of the continuing attractions of Glimmerglass is that we get to look forward to it for months and months. Tickets to the operas are easy enough to get, but accommodations in Cooperstown are another matter. Must be the baseball connection.

This time we opted for a hotel right in town with a plush lobby and a veranda overlooking the lake where we could hang out. This proved to be a lifesaver because it was, like, 110 degrees, with about 2000% humidity the whole time we were there. So I hung out in the AC most of the time.

Sweeney Todd

The first performance was Sweeney Todd. I would never have chosen to attend Sweeney Todd . . .

[Not crazy about Sondheim — I thought he should have stopped after West Side Story.

I’ve read critics rhapsodizing about him. I read that the song in Sweeney, “She Was Beautiful,” is sublime beyond belief, and I just don’t get it. I am prepared to admit that I’m not sophisticated enough to appreciate the music.]

. . . but for Greer Grimsley in the title role. And he did not disappoint.

With no familiarity with previous productions, all I knew was the premise — the demon barber of Fleet Street. Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou (currently in Blue Bloods) in the Broadway production, and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter  in the Tim Burton movie. [HBC has played great characters in some of my favorite movies — Lady Jane Gray, Queen Elizabeth, the innkeeper in Les Miz, and could there have been a better Bellatrix??] But hadn’t seen either of these

Chatting in the elevator after the show, some of our fellow hotel guests didn’t get the point at all, and I could understand that. If you were expecting My Fair Lady you might have been unhappy.

They modernized the settings and that was OK with me. But it seemed the production sanitized the action somewhat. After the financial boon afforded by her newfound prosperity, the Mrs. Lovett character (played, I later learned, by Grimsley’s wife, Luretta Bybee) looked positively respectable.

About the experience

That was the night of the killer thunderstorms. New York state wasn’t experiencing the drought that Boston had that summer (2016) and there were some exciting thunderstorms most days we were there — late afternoon and evenings. We could watch the heavy thunderclouds and the rain as they swept down the lake.

At the evening performance, the hall lost power for a while before the start. It did come back on and the show wasn’t affected. But the rain had started up again by the time it was over, and was coming down pretty heavily as we all moved to the parking lot, which was basically a mud pit. I recalled my recurrent nightmare of not being able to find my car.

On the drive back — a long line of cars snaking along a 2-lane road back to town  — at times all I could see was the car in front of us. So we followed, slowly but surely.

The Crucible

This one was intense. Lots of sound and fury.

Based on the Arthur Miller play that in turn allegorizes the McCarthy hearings that were happening at the time, the 1960s.

The Proctors were sung by Jamie Barton as Elizabeth and Brian Mulligan as John. Although our draw was Jay Hunter Morris as the Judge, that was a small role. Barton and Mulligan were brilliant.

According to Wikipedia, The Crucible is an English language opera written by Robert Ward based on the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. It won both the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Circle Citation. The libretto was lightly adapted from Miller’s text by Bernard Stambler.

We had listened to a CD of Crucible it in the car on the trip out — very dramatic with a high level of drama which translates as lots of loud music. Just as the original play had nothing to do with the reality of the Salem witch trials, so this opera isn’t a historic document. It mostly tugs at the human element of people caught up in events.

When Proctor is hanged in the final scene, it was chilling.

Odyssey Opera, 2019-2020

We are thrilled to see that this season’s theme is the Tudors — Henry VIII, Lady Jane Gray, Elizabeth I, and the like — with the tagline “Lose your head over great opera!”

The whole schedule is on the OO website. The 6 operas range from fully staged, semi-staged, and 2 concert performances. These are not the Donizetti trio [Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, Roberto Devereux] but less-well known works albeit by some composers we know.

I’m listening to Henry VIII right now on YouTube by Camille Saint Saens. OK, Samson et Dalila it’s not — doesn’t have the dripping sensuousness or even the pretty tunes — but I’m dying to see it all the same.

The rest of the season is just as enticing, including a world premier co-production with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project — The Chronicle of Nine by Arnold Rosner about the 9-day reign of Lady Jane Gray , and a concert performance of Britten’s Gloriana.

Il Trittico

December 2018

We had to travel to NYC as Trittico wasn’t on the HD schedule. Suor Angelica is one of my favorites and not often performed. We were all excited because we’d be there on about the 100th anniversary of its premier, December 1918 (time and place, because it opened at the Met).

After we had bought the tickets we learned that Placido Domingo was cast as Gianni Schicchi, like a bonus track. Evidently there was a big to-do about his 50th anniversary at the Met with a celebration on stage opening night. By the time of this performance some of the hoopla had died down. So imagine the collective gasp in the audience when a woman in civvies comes onto the stage at the beginning of Schicchi. We all held our breath as she announced that Mr. Domingo had a slight cold, but would be singing anyway. Hooray!!

We listened to the Met Opera Guild podcast about the trilogy on the drive down. The presenters stated that Trittico is 3 seemingly unrelated operas that Puccini composed as one and intended to be performed as a unit. Apparently the impetus was for each to have a different ambience — dramatic, spiritual, and comic. (I think they’re all in real time too, like Tosca.) Even better, 3 totally different settings — tugboats on the Seine, a sequestered religious community, and a medieval comedy/drama.

But they are related by desire in different manifestations — people in these operas all want something they don’t have. The duet in Tabarro drips with longing; the relatives in Schicci give new meaning to avarice; the nuns even have a discussion about it.

The Monitor: We’re not allowed Even in life, to nurture vain desires.
Sister Genevieve: Even though light, and candid and unselfish? Do you not ever wish for things?
The Monitor: Not I.
Another Sister: The same with me. Nor I.
A Novice (Timidly): Nor I.
Sister Genevieve: I do. I will confess it now….

True Grit

Il Tabarro

Question: In what opera does the mezzo-soprano sing a song about her cat?

Li merita! Vedessi!
He truly is deserving.
È il più bel gatto e il mio più bel romanzo
The dearest cat and my most fond romance;
Quando il mio Talpa è fuori,
When my husband is out
il soriano mi tiene compagnia.
Caporale, good boy, stays home with me.

If I were casting this I’d put the strongest singers in Tabarro, as it seems to be the least popular. And what I love about this opera is it’s soaring melodies contrasted with the coarseness of the setting. This production dates from 2007 by Tony Award–winning director Jack O’Brien. After the totally overwrought new productions of Samson et Dalilia and La Traviata (IMO) this was a breath of fresh air.

This picture from Tabarro is off the Met’s website. It’s odd because that’s not the view I had of the set. We were way up in the cheap seats and the view was decidedly from above, looking down on the boat and its characters.

For this Wednesday night performance, Amber Wagner, whom we saw in Der Fliegende Holländer in 2017, did not sing Giorgetta. Instead we heard Tatiana Melnychenko.

Sister Act

Suor Angelica

Then there’s Suor Angelica, a totally BTFL opera with all female voices. Spiritual melodrama, with lovely tunes. Other audiences of this Suor run heard Kristine Opolais in the title role, but the Wednesday evening featured Elena Stikhina. We all thought she was wonderful. And now I look forward to her Norma next season with the BLO.

OTOH, Stephanie Blythe commands the stage when she’s on it. As la Princess, she swoops in, breaks Angelica’s heart, then strides out without so much as a look back.

Family Plot

Gianni Schicchi

In case we all didn’t know, Gianni Schicchi was a character in Canto XXX of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was a real Florentine who shows up among the prevaricators in Inferno for impersonating the dying Busoni and dictating a false will.

ZITA
Who would ever have said
that when Buoso went to the grave
we would be weeping in earnest!

In the opera GS does the same as in Inferno — impersonate the dying man in order to falsify his will and leave the goods to his scheming relatives. But he tricks the rapacious relations and grabs most of the treasure for himself. Happy end is that the young couple, Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta and her babbino Rinuccio, can now marry on Mayday, as planned.

Beef Bone Broth

I have to say, my mother made the best beef broth. We all loved it and we had beef soup with little bits of meat, vegetables, and she used ditalini. Yum!

So we made the beef bone broth from the New York Times with a couple of variations. Whole Foods didn’t have beef knuckle, shank, oxtail, or even shin bones, so I used all bone-in short ribs. The trick was to smear the beef with tomato paste and olive oil and roast it for half hour or so.

Then make the broth with the roasted meat, adding the usual carrots, celery, onion. I added a leek. This recipe also calls for parsley, garlic — I put in a handful of peeled garlic— peppercorns, and cider vinegar. I did not put in the vinegar. It asked for dried shitake mushrooms, but I used some porcini.

The recipe also does not call for salt, but I added some.

This soup has been cooking off and on over the past week. In the off times it’s been frozen on the back porch (we’ve been below 20ºF all week).

I’ve finally strained it and I have one big container of broth to freeze.

So here’s the recipe. [The New York Times recipe]

In the Garden of Good and Evil

From the Archive
September 2015; presented by Opera Hub

La Hija de Rappaccini

By Daniel Catán; Libretto by Juan Tovar; after Octavio Paz and Nathaniel Hawthorne

An opera based on Hawthorne and Paz — how great will that be? “Rappaccini’s  Daughter” is one of my favorite stories by one of my favorite writers. Hawthorne’s predilection for dark tales of evil and sin, in this case the union of love and poison, run through the filter of Octavio Paz seems perfect for opera. (Now that I think of it, maybe someone should make an opera out of “Young Goodman Brown,” or “The Birthmark.”)

Dr. Rappaccini-Andrew Miller; Giovanni-Jonas Budris; Beatriz-Chelsea Beatty

Here’s the first paragraph of Hawthorne’s story. If this doesn’t make you want to read the whole, I don’t know what will.

A YOUNG man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice, which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heart-break natural to a young man for the first time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily, as he looked around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.

What Giovanni finds in Padua is Dr. Rappaccini, cultivator of a lush arboretum of poisonous plants, and the scientist’s daughter, Beatrice. His “high and gloomy chamber” looks down on the courtyard garden. Beatrice has been raised amidst the toxic herbs and is immune to their ill effects, but in turn she has become deadly to others. Giovanni falls in love with her and starts to fall ill in proximity to her. He attempts to administer an antidote to her, but she dies.

Cut to the opera . . .

This was a warm September evening in the downtown circus that is Boston’s South End, where parking is always an adventure. The Plaza Theater, part of the Boston Center for the Arts is a kind of basement arena theatre, thankfully, air conditioned.

The staging was no-frills, but imaginative. In this case the “ill-furnished apartment” was fashioned as a weird 19th century laboratory — Frankenstein meets the Container Store.

We read a little about the composer, Daniel Catan, in the program. He was Mexican, largely educated in England and the U.S.; he died in 2011 at 62 yoa. And we realized during the performance that listening to an opera in Spanish was a new experience. Surtitles were projected onto the wall. [Since then, New York City Opera, in its rejuvenated incarnation, performed another of Catan’s works, Florencia en el Amazonas.]

I loved the music — pretty tunes and lots of ensemble singing. One part when the protagonist is singing with the three spirits — or maybe they were flowers — was totally BTFL.

And apparently the reduced accompaniment necessary in this small venue was written by Catan himself, as an alternative to full orchestration — 2 pianos, harp, timpani, and miscellaneous percussion. Also really pretty.

About Opera Hub

Opera Hub is a small, grassroots opera company in Boston. They perform mostly unconventional works in small, intimate venues and almost always for free.

This is their mission statement from the website.

OperaHub is dedicated to creating high-quality, unified musical/dramatic experiences through collaboration with local performing and design artists, focusing on innovation and experimentation in all aspects of opera production. We believe that opera performed in an intimate setting gains vibrancy and depth, and that affordable, accessible performance of opera should also be exciting, beautiful, and fresh. We take pride in presenting small, non-standard works and chamber arrangements of standard repertoire.

Can’t argue with that. In 2016, they did El Gato con Botas, a version of Puss in Boots. (Let’s have more operas about cats.) Their posters are good too. Here’s one for a 2014 production of Der Vampyr which, unfortunately, I missed.

But the group appears to be “on haitus.” I do hope they return.

Snowy Night in Somerville

From the archive
18 March 2013

Dead Man Walking

Opera by Jake Heggie; libretto by Terence McNally; based on the book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean.

Fresh off the totally spectacular HD production of Parsifal at the Met, I learned about this on the radio the day of its last performance, a Monday. Snow was forecast but I decided to brave the elements and see an opera that might never come around again. Got to the theatre just in time, grabbed something to eat and got a seat.

This was my first experience with the Boston Opera Collaborative, which group I encourage everyone to check out.

We tell compelling and resonant stories through opera, performed in spaces where audiences are in close contact with the power of the human voice. We provide singers with opportunities for artistic growth and development of entrepreneurial skills by engaging these emerging artists in the operation and management of the company.

This particular evening there were lots of younger folks in the audience, a good mix of ages, and a pretty full house — encouraging for the future of the art form. The composer had been present at some of the earlier shows. For this last performance, Sister Prejean addressed the audience. Ok, she did tend to go on and on . . . but her being there was a coup.

This opera is based on the 1993 non-fiction book, which was also made into a movie in 1995. Susan Sarandon won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Sr. Prejean. The film had 3 other Oscar nominations: Sean Penn for Best Actor, Tim Robbins — Sarandon’s then-paramour— for Best Director, and Bruce Springsteen for the Best Song (good song too).

The story depicts the relationship that developed between the nun and a man who was condemned to death for the murder of a teenage couple. She insists that his life has value because God loves him. So there are deep philosophical issues at play here — justice, the value of human life, revenge, facing death. And that mostly comes out in the opera.

There might have been some problems with the libretto IMHO. In places where the dialog is simple and matter-of-fact, the music soars. Seemed incongruous to me. Just sayin’ . . .

The opera is the first one that I know of by Jake Heggie. He has since written an operatic version of Moby Dick. Our hero Jay Hunter Morris sang in both these early productions.

According to San Francisco Travel, when Heggie heard the pared-down orchestration created for the BOC stagings he liked it and asked to use it somewhere else.

La Traviata

From the archive

Boston Lyric Opera
Sunday, 19 October 2014

It’s taken me a while to write about this production — a Sunday matinee, the first production of the 2014-15 season from Boston Lyric Opera. All excited to be seeing live opera after many months of deprivation, and one of Verdi’s greatest hits at that. This season I got tickets to all four operas — the first time I’ve done that.

Getting there was an adventure. Because of the Head of the Charles Regatta, we knew some of the exits off Storrow would be closed. We did arrive and as I’ve already complained about the BLO venue (see Asparagus Soup and Rosenkavalier — not that BLO has produced Rosenkavalier in all the time I can remember, but that’s another topic) I won’t do so here. [Further reading on the local theatre topic, see: Boston overdue for a proper opera house in the Boston Globe. It’s not just me.]

But I didnt’ LOVE it. The opera, that is.

Dare I say the production was oddly deflated? The big festive scenes seemed . . . what’s the opposite of scintillating? . . . dull? Not as euphonic a word, but I guess it makes sense. One party scene, with a big cake in the middle of the stage, was kind of forced and not at all celebratory. Not even decadent. The Globe called it “comfortable,” which is not a word you want associated with what’s supposed to be Paris’s lascivious underbelly.

But let’s take this opportunity to mention opera heroines and their deaths. It’s easy to become desensitized to all this onstage mortality. How many times can we watch Cio Cio San slash her own throat, really? Or Brunnhilde ride Grane into the funeral pyre? (I could go on, but maybe another time.)

Traviata is like that. It wasn’t until I saw Natalie Dessay on TV in the Met’s “clock” production that Violetta’s dying seemed truly tragic. She was so alone on the stage, so bereft, that one actually mourned her passing. At least I did. In this BLO production (remember, that’s our current topic) it might have been the flannel nightgown that killed the mood.

This time I had my sister with me who knows for singing. While I can maybe tell if the tenor cracks, or if the soprano wobbles like a drunken Wallenda [see Opera Fail!], sis can tell me when the singer is calling on all his/her reserves to get to the note. At one concert, she elbowed me when the singer entered after the instrumental intro, “She just slowed that WAY down.” I wouldn’t perceive something like that. Suffice it to say, we both thought the production lacked verve.

But I love opera and I’m glad we saw it. And I’m looking forward to the upcoming Kátya Kabanová.