I am not a hit
The world needs a lot of things: health care, happiness, homo marriages, peace, prosperity and butterflies. What it doesn’t need is a mediocre “budget” recording of a contemporary opera already satisfactorily recorded with the original cast
A new revelatory, superbly cast recording of the simultaneously fascinating and boring Nixon in China would probably be happily snapped up by those who are more of a fan of this opera than I am. The new CD on Naxos is so not that recording.
For some reason Nixon in China tempts its interpreters to bellow and declaim. Since all productions are amplified and the lines are relatively sympathetically written for the voice this vocal distorion seems unnecessary. I’m willing to bet that Marc Heller (who “sings” Mao Tse-tung) is actually pretty fierce: he sounds like he can make some noise and his credits are impressive. Unfortunately, here he just screams and pushes his voice until pitches are unrecognizable. Or maybe Adams is just not his forte.
The same could be said of Chen-Ye Yuan as Chou En-lai. It’s obviously an interesting instrument but is not shown at an advantage in this ungrateful role. Tracy Dahl makes some impressive sounds in the extreme top of Madame Mao’s music but whenever she sings around an A natural (which is often) her vibrato loosens dangerously close to a wobble. I also couldn’t understand one damn word she sang.
The Opera Colorado Chorus tries their best but this is not a world-class ensemble and the choral music in this opera is not easy.
It’s not that this recording is completely awful. There are strengths. Marin Aslop knows her way around American music, and her reading is taut and inspired. She moves the action along (as much as Adams’s music allows) and keeps excitement bubbling (again, as much as the music allows).
Pat and Dick are both interesting here. Maria Kanyova, as Pat, is the only singer who sings like this is opera. Her other roles include Butterfly and Violetta and it shows. The voice is fluid, beautiful and ballsy. She’s also the only singer that phrases beautifully. “This is prophetic” is easily the highlight of the recording. Kick-ass singing.
Robert Orth manages to be charismatic and idiomatic as Nixon while singing with grainy, unsupported tone. It’s a believable and truly interesting portrayal. It’s just hard to listen to.
All of this begs the question of Naxos- what was the point of this recording? Just Aslop and Kanyova? They’re great, but it’s not enough to warrant a $25 price tag. If I were you I’d say bump both recordings and watch the broadcast of the original production on Youtube for free. But hey, if you love a good arpeggiated chord and have money to burn then by all means, skip on over to Amazon
Madame Mao’s stage name was LAN PING (blue apple)…didn’t you have a blue wig la Cieca?
I haven’t heard this recording, but I had high hopes, as Nixon is a work I like and it’s always interesting to hear a different take on something, to not let it be defined only by one recording. I’ll probably pass on it for now.
The strange thing is that at Amazon.com you can buy it used for more than anyone is asking for a new copy. There must be something very special about that particular used CD.
Poor Opera Colorado. Oh well, they had a better chance of marketing a successfully selling recording with this than they would have with La Traviata or Madame Butterfly (both of which they do fairly regularly).
I’ve heard quite good things about this recording, so if anything I’m more curious now.
ha! bravo! nice review (whoever you are)!
special lullz for “if you like a good arpeggiated chord…”
Not to be all about me n stuff, but my earlier post’s claim that the new Bartoli album is a “vanity project” took a bit of flack. I would say this one is too. Hell, all recording nowadays is in some way just a publicity stunt! It’s like renting Carnegie Hall. The recent Alsop albums on Naxos are all vanity projects for her and for the Baltimore Symphony. The recent Naxos rec of Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience was a vanity project for U of Michigan and for Mr Bolcom (at Leonard Slakin’s gracious expense).
One thing is for sure, they didn’t make this CD because of wild public demand to hear them tackle it! And Adams’s operas are so grossly overrated anyway.
(Ducks for cover)
Hell, all recording nowadays is in some way just a publicity stunt!
Squirrel, may all your winter nuts go rancid!
Isn’t it Alsop, not Aslop? (OK, I see squirrel has it right)
cruz, what in tarnation did I do to deserve that? are you from Bertelsmann? No holiday pecans for yoU!
One should note that the conductor’s name is ALSOP (as Squirrel corrects without comment), not Aslop. This production was scheduled specifically (and probably solely) to coincide with Denver’s inaugural hosting of the biennial National Performing Arts Conference. I’m not sure how well thought out the concept was ahead of time, and it also took place during the period when Peter Russell was planning to leave as head of Opera Colorado and no clear successor had yet been selected. In a way I’m sorry I turned down tickets to see it here in Denver, but I really dislike Adams as a composer and couldn’t set that feeling aside sufficiently to sit through a performance.
squirrel, I still prefer to believe (or, if you’d rather, I “cling to the belief”) that many recordings are produced because some producer, singer, or conductor somewhere is still passionate about the music.
As a gay man I can’t understand gays wanting so desperately to be part of a sinking ship, I don’t mean the New York City Opera, I mean marriage. Unless there’s some commercial or legal value in entering a contract for some people, marriage (like openly serving in the military) is an idiocy. It’s a failed and reactionary institution. It saddens me to see gays trying to turn two fascist, right-wing conservative hot topics (marriage and the military) as their own two main causes. Who wants to be an openly gay contract killer in the US military? And who wants to get legally married? When someone is viciously murdered 90% of the times their spouses are behind it. Numbers don’t lie. Gays should embrace peace, justice and economic equality for all, not just for themselves. Please fags, don’t be selfish and support Nazi issues like marriage and the military anymore.
Anyway, this is not the reason I came on Parterre. I’m utterly shocked that we have posts on Nixon in China (and Sancia di Castiglia on Opera L of all operas!!! a Donizetti score I absolutely adore by the way) but not one single word that I could find about Guleghina’s wretched Turandot last night, which was on Sirius.
Is Gelb really serious about allowing her to do the HD? A 5 yo. can tell she can’t sing the notes from the very first bars. Is the whole entire world going INSANE?
cruz, you have a nice attitude – I envy you!
(dorion – the answer to your last question is….)
The aria “I am the wife of Mao Zedong” is actually as catchy as “Questa o quella”. Seriously, I have always remembered the melody from the first time I saw the original telecast:
httpv://www.youtube.com/user/musicvideoing#p/u/27/LpMQeJmKK2w
oops, I always forget that mighty “v”
httpv://www.youtube.com/user/musicvideoing#p/u/27/LpMQeJmKK2w
Dorion – I have some leftover Percaset from a recent knee replacement. I think you may need a few.
No, the problem is that the video must be independant of the poster’s page of all their videos:
yes, who IS this singer?
dorion,
in answer to your penultimate question, he may have to let her; but if he gets to choose, he might make her “sick” at the last minute, with lindstrom waiting in the antechamber
And Adams’s operas are so grossly overrated anyway.
I thought the 1st act of Nixon when I saw it at IU was fabulous. The 2nd act was just a total bore I fell asleep.
I still don’t know why or how has it not gone through some serious revisions. I think the opera would be best reassembled as a biopic on Nixon, trash all that China stuff and include an act on Watergate and a final scene with Nixon leaving the White House.
If the trip to china must be staged, let’s make a scene one of act 2 and move right along.
Amazon.com states that Thomas Hampson is in the Original cast recording of Nixon in China. Is this true?
No he wasn’t. But I wouldn’t put Amazon past mistaking Sanford Sylvan (who sang Chou En-Lai on that recording) for Hampson.
These days I pity Amazon.com. They are too big and they do not haved the right people for the job. I did a search for recordings in their Opera section and the search results included Empire brass, Christopher Parkening and the 1812 overture
Empire brass? Sounds like a nickname for one of the Vicar’s favorites.
Bass Thomas HAMMONS sings Kissinger on that recording, I think.
Love the opening line of this review!
If one defines “vanity project” as broadly as squirrel chooses to, then yes — I suppose any new recording can be defined as one, the better to be sneered at. Never mind the many of us who had been desperately hoping for decades to get a recording of Songs of Innocence and of Experience; we don’t exist, and Bolcom has not earned any interest in his work (from, for instance, Slatkin, who’s been desperate to record it for years). Anything that doesn’t serve the largest possible consumer base (like, well, all classical music now)? pfft, vanity project.
Since “Aslop” has been attended to, I’ll mention “begs the question” when “raises the question” was intended.
I think there are Vanity projects and there ARE vanity projects. I think the line between them is how much they are of service to the greater good.
For example, RF’s Verismo is a vanity project. That being said, besides her fans and those gullible enough to buy into the whole “La Voce bull, who would want to spend hours upon hours listening to this singer do stuff that Scotto, Olivero and even Freni did better? Make no mistake, I thought the recording was decent, great, for what I expected of her, but beyond the excerpts from Zaza, the original Sola Perduta and the arias from Leoncavallo’s Boheme, much of what I heard can be heard better sung elsewhere.
Then there’s every vanity project that Cecilia Bartoli has put together for the past decade: Salieri, Vivaldi, Prohibita, Malibran and Sacrificium; hell, even the Sonnambula. Those vanity projects have allowed us to discover music that has remained largely unrecorded, forgotten and ignored for many years. Is it a vanity project? Absolutely, just as much as RF’s, but if it had not been for those vanity projects, we would not know how wonderful a composer Malibran could be, or how utterly delicious Salieri could be, or about the music that the Popes forbade people to listen to, or those arias written for castratos whose name WAS NOT Farinelli.
Let’s not dis all vanity projects as unnecessary. Thanks to some vanity projects we have enriched our knowledge of the repertoire.
The “vanity project” discussion makes me look at the current state of the recording industry.
There are comparatively few CDs recorded and released by the big companies today and I think the market for audio-only is not so large as it was say 30 years ago.
So for the most part it takes a lot of marketing input to make a recording and usually some big name and/or a
concept. Many of these releases are going to seem like vanity projects and to an extent they are.
The vacuum left by the fewer cd releases seems to have been filled by the DVD releases, which seem to include many more releases of a general repertory nature. There are some “vanity project” type items here to , to be sure but they are blended in with less carefully marketed items.
Nr. 18: Who is this? She’s amazing!
Lindoro, you have a point! I didn’t mean to dismiss all vanity projects out of hand, and there are shades of vanity too. Rare is the CD completely financed by the artist. You are right that some are of greater value than others.
The case of the Nixon in China, which I have not heard, is according to our reviewer perhaps an example of a less valuable contribution to the catalog.
Bartoli does very good work, I think, and I wasn’t all that hard on her in my review. The programming certainly brings a level of class to the top-10 opera charts that we rarely see.
No. 18: This soprano is Cristina Piperno, in the Arena di Verona production of “Turandot”, August, 2009. She sang the same role with Palm Beach Opera in December, 2007.
I reject this whole vanity recording idea.
They do it because it’s part of their job, not out of vanity. Some singers have recording contracts to fill, you know?
Like Ceci shows up for work at the recording study for an 8-5 shift and gets her assignment for the day….
Record three vivaldi arias 8-10 AM, 15 minute coffee break, two Salieri pieces between 10:15-12:30, 45 minute
lunch…..
Somehow I don’t think so. The few singers that record CDs
these days have hightly complex negotiations for each project. And becoming more and more the trend is a concert tour following the recording/release. Ceci, Placi, Renee, JDF, Angie, Joycie etc.
I don’t believe that most recordings are vanity projects in the purest sense in that Sony , i.e., says to Renee, what would you like to record dear, anything is fine with us. But they are more towards that end of the spectrum than the “Joyce, report to studio 3, pick up your music in the office on the way” end of the spectrum.
32 -- No. It’s Alessandra Argentieri (”student of Antonietta Stella”!) http://www.opera3000.net/drago.html
Has anyone heard Mariana Svetkova sing Turandot? i understand she just sang it in Japan and i am looking for recordings with her.
javier @33 says “I reject this whole vanity recording idea.”
Completely agree.
This phrase is being ‘re-purposed’ to mean “Any recording I don’t like.”
Don’t like baroque music? Vanity project
Don’t like Renee Fleming? Vanity project
Don’t like John Adams? Vanity project
Please — like the world was crying out for the endless recordings of Butterfly, Boheme, Carmen which were cranked out at the height of the LP era.
There is probably more of an enduring place for “Sacrificium” than most of those projects.
#27 (Orlando Furioso) Your prayers are answered!
http://www.amazon.com/William-Bolcom-Innocence-Experience-University/dp/B000641YZK
That latest “vanity” project by Bartoli probably sold more copies as pre-orders that 99% of classical recordings will ever sell … I don’t call that vanity, I call it good business.
In some way, every solo-arias disc is a vanity project, isn’t it? I don’t find that to be a helpful descriptive terms.
I don’t buy Bartoli’s recordings myself but the woman is constantly exploring new repertoire and then recording it with a palpable joy and enthusiam. And people love it and buy the CD in (relatively) large numbers. So, what is wrong with that? She is one of the few artists out there who can still make a case for viable classical recording projects.