parterre box

53 comments

• Henry Holland says:

  NEDA -DER RUF, by Nader Mashayekhi. Have you heard/seen it?

  Never heard of it or the composer! [looks at Wikipedia] Ah, has a good pedigree in new music circles, he’s had his stuff done at Klangforum Wien, Wien Modern, the usual places. Where did you get it?

  So far, my reaction has been most of the head-scratching kind, not the outrage kind. But I don’t doubt that I’ve been lucky

  Yeah, the stuff in the Regie Contests is silly. It was similar to a production I saw of Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang at the Staatsoper Berlin where the director pretty much ignored the story, had these mimes doing stuff all over the place and worst of all, re-wrote the ending so that the tenor wasn’t even on the stage, his place taken by a minor baritone character.

  That stuff sucks, of course, but then Peter Sellars has taken liberties and some of his stuff works. One of the best opera productions I’ve ever seen was his Pelleas et Melisande here in Los Angeles, it was a unit set on 5 levels, set at a beach house in Malibu. There was some stupid moments –the scene with Yniold spying on P&M was particularly dumb because the way the set was arranged, but overall it worked.

  Mortier might not be able to get away with anything that would show up on a Regie Quiz in Madrid, earlier this year there were mass walkouts at the Lulu. Apparently, the people in Madrid didn’t appreciate that they paid for an opera that didn’t sound like Rigoletto.

  It is just patronizing S.O.B! Adjust to ‘what’?

  Well, in San Francisco, there was adjusting to be done after Lotfi Mansouri left and Pamela Rosenberg started her ill-fated tenure. Mansouri loved a kind of dated 60′s realism, lots of scrims and soft lights and so on, forests of one-dimensional trees descending from the ceiling etc. Rosenberg, of course, was very much in to the same stuff that Mortier is and we all know how Ms. Rosenberg’s tenure went.

  on March 25, 2010 at 12:18 PM
• CruzSF says:

  HH@41: Rosenberg ran the company when I first became interested in opera. If I can survive her … Actually, the productions I attended weren’t outrageous (I went only twice a season in those days). Some stagings worked, some were a bit on the boring side because of the minimalist sets (although at other times, the bare sets focused attention on the music/singing). Billy Budd worked especially well for me (my companion walked out at the first intermission but I stayed until the end). Forza del Destino was ruined for me. I hope to see another production some day.

  on March 25, 2010 at 12:38 PM
• SF Guy says:

  As an audience member, I had mixed feelings about Rosenberg. In her defense, none of the regie-oriented productions she brough in were any worse than the Andrei Serban Puritani we had in ’93 during Mansouri’s reign, and I was grateful for the opportunity to see excellent stagings of The Mother of Us All (which to my surprise, I loved) and Saint Francoise d’Assise. But on the other hand…

  She brought in many of her favorite singers from Europe, whose genuine talents were not heard to best advantage in a house our size (if you could hear them at all). She came in with the attitude that she was finally bringing a progressive perspective to San Francisco, when under Adler’s regime we had been getting a healthy dose of Janacek long before the Met discovered him, just to give one example. (My first season in ’77 included Elizabeth Soederstrom in Katya Kabanova, which I believe was its first major staging in the US.) Adler also gave us the US debuts of many major stars–the list is too long to go into here–and was an early champion of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (strange to think that his productions once were considered controversial and cutting edge…), my point being that we weren’t exactly a hick town when Rosenberg showed up, though she sometimes seemed to believe otherwise.

  In any case, the stagehands despised her. She was used to working with heavily subsidized European companies, and had no concept of how to run a company on the nuts-and-bolts level. She would schedule large productions simultaneously, running up large and unnecessary overtime costs as huge set pieces were shuffled in and out. She would turn designers loose and unsupervised, resulting in poorly-worked out concepts that had to be modified after the sets were already being built. And she didn’t the technical expertise to tell the designers “No, that won’t work on our stage. And by the way, here’s your budget. Stick to it.” She didn’t have a clear idea of exactly what has to happen to turn sketches into reality, and the dozens and dozens of people whose technical contributions along the way make it happen.

  Anyway, David Gockley is pretty much the opposite, my sources tell me, a hand-on guy who knows everyone’s name and what they’re up to, whether it’s dry-cleaning the costumes or organizing the props, and they love (or at least respect) him. Plus, he brought Netrebko back (admittedly in a less-than-ideal production of Traviata), so I’m a happy camper.

  on March 25, 2010 at 1:48 PM
• CruzSF says:

  SF Guy@43: Interesting backstage info I didn’t know before. Thanks for sharing it.

  on March 25, 2010 at 2:00 PM
• SF Guy says:

  CruzSF–By the way, I’ve done a couple private backstage tours at SFO, and as a video junkie, I was particularly fascinated by the room where they coordinate the Operavision telecasts we see from the balcony at some performances. All camera-feeds and audio-feeds from each of these performances are preserved for possible re-editing and commercial release, either in theaters, DVDs, or on our own eventual version of Met Player. Gockley is thinking ahead here, though the Met seems to have the market pretty well locked up for now.

  on March 25, 2010 at 2:40 PM
• rapt says:

  What a fine, illuminating post, SFGuy–offering evidence, defined terms, nuanced response. While there may be a certain charm to invective that slams it out of the park, for me a post like this is what I find most rewarding at parterre.

  on March 25, 2010 at 2:42 PM
• SF Guy says:

  rapt–Many thanks for your kind words (and for not noticing my occasional misspellings and dropped words–I really must improve my proofreading skills). I certainly plan to keep my postings limited to subjects I feel qualified to comment upon (detailed musical expertise is not my forte, I’m afraid), and relevant to the general discussion. (It looks to me that the Olivero tribute has suddenly gone wa-a-ay off topic…)

  on March 25, 2010 at 3:13 PM
• Will says:

  M. Mortier could, if he had the desire, combine his idea of highlighting the Spanish/Arab historical connection AND some bel canto by producing Cherubini’s Gli Abenceragi (Les Abencerages) of 1813. The plot involves characters both historical and fictional, set in the late days of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada. There’s a pirate complete with Anita Cerquetti, and recordings of the big tenor aria by both Georges Thill and Roberto Alagna among some others.

  on March 25, 2010 at 4:50 PM
• jatm2063 says:

  Well now that repertoire has been announced, it sounds pretty usual for him. Every work in the list is something that he can have a director and/or designer fuck around with in the fashion they endured for a decade in Salzburg. In fact, except for the premiere by Jurado, there is probably a regie production of each of those works already out there waiting to be rented. He could rent the MET’s new Tosca. And the year after that, their new Tales of Hoffmann, and the year after that, their new Attila, and after that (for the bel canto enthusiasts), they can do the MET’s new Armida, with Renee Fleming.

  Buwahahahahahahahahahaha!

  on March 25, 2010 at 8:23 PM
• Sanford says:

  queen amahelli, you so funny, grrrl.

  Mentioning Brokeback Mountain and then asking if we were not going to get it in the end. Mwahahaha. Which brings me back to Penetrating Wagner’s Ring.

  on March 25, 2010 at 10:45 PM