drag jesus meets mrs. softee
This photo by Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times illustrates a review of Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger, a production that even Tony Tommasini thought was just too gay.
Perhaps the cher public have ideas for an alternative caption for this photo?
Glad to see that Sally Rand’s fans are still out there.
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(btw…I was at this show, at Bard…and would like to some-day hear a well conducted rendition of this beautiful score….)
If you don’t have it already, get this CD, I think it’s the best performance on records and only a pirate I have of Dutoit conducting it at the Chatelet in the 90′s is better, IMO. Hopefully, Gerard Mortier will import the Paris Opera production that’s being done in 5/09 to NYCO at some point.
*Sigh* I’m heading to NY for the Saturday/Sunday performances, the reports have been tepid; I chose this over a Saariaho Adriana Mater and barihunk Teddy Rhodes in Billy Budd in Santa Fe weekend.
I just got out of the July 31st performance and I think the orchestral playing must have tightened up a bit since opening night. The score is rhapsodically beautiful.
The problem with the production is not that it’s post-modern or regietheatre but that it’s perilously close to stand and deliver. The entire first act features the cast essentially fixed in place and singing out to the audience as if doing an oratorio. But the Polish singers (and chorus) are very good and parts of the production make more sense in context than the isolated stills would have you believe–the big white feathery thing being a major exception, however.
But what gorgeous music!
I saw this on opening night. The playing was a little incoherent, the singing was fine, but my 12-year-old son is singing in the children’s chorus on stage and he’s loved it every bit every night – which is the first time he’s said that about any music except, maybe, Lordi and Alizee and this Ukrainian polka band from Toronto. (He’s also pretty sceptical about Mrs. Softee thing.)
Me, I just closed my eyes and imagined it staged more like the libretto describes and used Botstein as a cue sheet to what it might sound like. That’s just my reactionary nature, I guess, as many of our colleagues seem less and less interested in that, even less interested in the music and how it’s performed.
In the Times article about the current Bayreuth “Parsifal:”
“A German critic.., reflecting the general view among his native colleagues, waved off reservations about the inchoate parts of this ‘Parsifal’ by remarking that novelty gives him something to write about and is obligatory in the German opera world today, where directors are the headliners.”
If it weren’t novel, what would he have to say?
Once, at a Kenny Burrell concert, two girls in front of me got bored and walked out in the middle of the set. The guy next to me jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs, “What’s the matter, you got shit in your ears?”
Lot of that going around….
I’m interested in this production primarily because Cori raved about the music on Facebook.
And Cori doesn’t fuck around.
I know only the fine Hampson recording.
Why is everyone doing King Roger all of a sudden?
I wished Tommasini could be this engaged in a review of a MET performance, this is was a good critique.
His reviews are usually superficial and untrue.
I was at the (last) performance yesterday and have to agree that the music is gorgeous, if challenging to perform. As far as the production goes, meh … I’ve seen worse (Robert Wilson comes to mind); although the Mr. Softee wig was heinous. The worst element was the bare-chested (naturally) male dancers langurously waving their arms from behind the feather bed. I guess they were supposed to be part of the shepherd’s seductive charisma? Re Tommasini, if he managed to refrain from his trademark “strapping”, he did use “rapturous” twice in the same review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/arts/music/28roge.html. Doesn’t he have editors?
Dr. Pretorius says: “I have made you a bride in your own image so you would no longer be alone.”