sein wir wieder coot
That bloggeress La Cieca likes to think of as “like a young me,” OperaChic, is currently and brilliantly following up on the controversy sparked by Lorin Maazel’s grumpy condemnation of those darn newfangled stage directors who won’t get out of his yard. Consarn it. Joining Maazel in tying an onion to his belt is the doyen of operatic media whores, Franco Zeffirelli. And now the young ‘uns are answering back, more in sorrow than in anger
Scaramuccio is right although McVicar, Jones and Carsen have “off” days too.
No director is perfect. For example, look at Carsen. On one hand you have his striking met ONEGIN, on the other his ridiculous “American” Candide, which I found not only stupid but insulting. To be clear, I don’t find his two-fisted attack on American life insulting, but rather his pushing and shoving CANDIDE into something it isn’t. He deleated all the satire for upfront mockery, he tore the plot (what there is) to shreds and he turned one of the most beautiful and uplifting endings in musical theater history into a sardonic commentary of pollution. I hated it, even with one of my all-time favorite tenors, William Burden, in the lead. But that being said…I do love his Onegin.
Agreed, Regina: McVicar is very erratic, and sometimes there’s nothing going on for stretches (viz his Tosca, Rigoletto, etc). But I can forgive him all that for the genius of his Rosenkavalier and Agrippina. Carsen’s Rosenkav from Salzburg I hated to begin with, but have come to respect the interaction he gets from the singers (the end, though, with the mass death of the Austrian army, has to be a stinker). I loved certain things about the Candide, but I wonder if the piece is workable; I haven’t seen a production that convinced me it could, though folk say the London National Theatre show kept it lively throughout. Here one felt that forty minutes could have been sliced away without anyone really noticing or caring.
So the “parallels†between this production and the O.J. Simpson case, though obviously striking, were surely accidental
Yes, I know it wasn’t the prima for that production –I’m sure the bit where LAPD officers beat the crap out of some homeless people that happened outside the Malibu beach house was unique to Los Angeles– and yes, singers are booked months/years/decades in advance, but it was one of those things where it all worked out and happened at the right place and right time, which was my point.
I remember going up to San Francisco a few years after the Sellars/OJ convergance for Pelleas with…wait for it…Willard White and Flicka. Not the same jolt, by any stretch, but still a wonderful performance with a young Simon Keenlyside an almost ideal Pelleas and typically gauzy production.
I love Debussy’s opera, I think it’s a blazing masterpiece, but I can understand why some find it such a trial. At the Tower Records in West Hollywood, when it was still open, they sold a little book called Opera Plots Made Easy and the one for Pelleas was a gem of concision: “Nothing happens and Melisande dies”.
Richard Jones summed it up as the usual operatic triangle: ‘two men, half-brothers, fall in love with the same woman, with disastrous results’.
Stanislas Nordey’s production, which I saw at Covent Garden, was panned, but many of us found it spellbinding: the auditorium becomes the forces of nature, so that the singers all addressed us downstage. Helps with co-ordination between pit and singers, especially in a larger house than this intimate piece should normally be seen in (Glyndebourne is the ideal size).
Mary Garden has quit the stage? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
I’m amused to see your Google ad for the risible Maazel 1984 on DVD. Where would that have been without the hard work of a (perhaps less than radical) Robert Lepage (not to mention the thankless dedication of the singers)? Even then, I never want to have to sit through a work more derivative and empty even than anything by Lloyd Webber (and less fun).
Would Maazel make Lepage an honourable exception to his ludicrous blanket dismissal? Or would he rather have had Great Franco’s view of Orwell, I wonder?
Maazel is, himself, a rather eccentric music maker — sometimes it works, often it does not, and never does his opera (and my god! he’s writing another one), work.
SOOOoooooo…..why don’g you regiequeens show him more respect? I thought you liked the off-beat
I happen to think he is quite right about regie-kookdirectors. Fuck ‘em.
Beito & Co. are twisted jerks, and all shame on the Germans, Swiss and Spanish (the main offenders), whose federal coffers fund this dreck. The regie-craze is an insult to all serious directors and musicians and singers involved in opera – yes, even the celebrated Americans, Il due Aldini; the lot of them should be turned out of the temple.
It’s basically a kind of political matter, and fads come and go — and in the end, of course, money rules. So I think we know where this is ultimately headed. To regie-lovers I say, Grow Up! For the rest of us I say, Be Strong. Never never give into them! In the end we will prevail!
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