is that a gun in your regie, or are you just glad to see me?
Since the new Bayreuth Parsifal was so easily recognizable and the all barechested barihunk all the time Don Giovanni from Salzburg not particularly challenging, La Cieca offers a bonus Regie quiz for the first week of August. Blurting out the answer (as in “I saw this production last week: it’s [title]” or “I saw these photos in Opera News: it’s [title]“) will result in suspension of commenting privileges. (La Cieca hates to crack the whip, but she does want her cher public to have a good time!)
It looks like Don Giovanni, but I can’t imagine that it would be another tired old Don Giovanni.
If it is Simone Kermes, it could be a Handel opera, or something by Vivaldi. If it is Handel, I would think Rinaldo, with Armida in all three pictures, the guy with the gun being Rinaldo, the other lady Almirena and the other guy that evil sorcerer whose name escapes me. If not, I’ll opt for a violent regie-interpretation of Bernsteins Candide (pictured are: the Old Lady, Candide, Pangloss and Cunegonde).
Idomeneo.
Flying Dutchwoman?
Donna Giovanna?
Woeps,
I have not seen the production, but…
Buster (74) might have guessed right with Donna Giovanna…
But I can tell you, the woman is not Eva-Maria Westbroek. And she is fabulous indeed. Just saw her a couple days ago doing Chrysotemis in Munich. She will sing Sieglinde at the new MET production in 2011 alongside Jonas Kaufman!
Cheers,
Leonardo
OK, we get it. You don’t like Regie productions. But what, exactly, is the point of posting three or four cherry-picked pics? Are you purposely trying to use extreme examples to prove your point?
I guess I am just not up with the times when it comes to opera. I do not like updates AT ALL. I despise them. There are loads of operas from 1950 to present, so why do we have to have costuming and staging for modern times with an older opera as well? Experiencing the time period of the opera is half of the experience (or we would just sit home and listen to a CD.)
Well, La Cieca’s banner suggests Mae West, so La Fanciulla del Mae West?
Roberto, La Cieca thinks you have misjudged her. In fact, La Cieca is very much in favor of nontraditional and restudied productions. The point of the quiz is primarily to have fun, but it’s also a bit of a mental exercise — to try to match the situations and characters of more or less familiar operas with photos from productions that deliberately avoid using standard imagery. Obviously a lot of the guesses are going to be jokey, but at least some of the fun here is in fact the challenge of making the connection between our knowledge of opera and a particular director’s unorthodox visual representation. If we make this connection in even a casual way, I think it’s helpful in understanding that these productions are not always (or even generally) arbitrarily “strange,” but that the directors have more or less consistent dramatic values whey wish to convey through their choice of imagery. (The argument can of course be extended to a debate over whether the director really understood the work, or whether perhaps he has revealed some aspect of the work that we have previously not considered.
Now that the title has been revealed (in today’s new post), is it allowed to talk about it? Like others here, I’ve seen this production (just last weekend), and it is in fact not that outlandish, even for an old fogy like me. Granted the initial time-shift, it tells the story intelligibly.