Saint Peter
La Cieca hears that for coming seasons at the Met, Peter Gelb plans to mix a little religion in with the opera, or non-opera as the case may be. A couple of projects reportedly in the hopper for circa 2015-16 are the company premiere of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, to be directed by Robert Lepage, and a staged version of Handel’s Messiah, probably in the Deborah Warner production seen at the English National Opera in 2009.
For once the Met is the right size for the Messiaen Saint Francois. Someone mentioned Huguenots -well yes, if it were a Stefan Herheim or Calixto Bieito production.
Holy cr*p … was the SF Saint Francois really a decade ago!?! My husband is OLD!!!
I’ll be there if the Met really does put on St. Francois. I’m a Messiaen fan, but must say that I came out of the SF production looking stunned -- not in a good way -- and all I could say was that it made Parsifal look like Die Fledermaus.
Exactly. There are livelier Buxtehude cantatas.
Hahahaha, you had the same look after the LAO Die Gezeichneten.
That was largely from having already been to Alex Ross’s 10 a.m. talk in SF and flying to LA, though, not because Gezeichneten was particularly….extreme.
i am happy that thirdlady enjoyed the Madrid St. Francois. But not everyone present shared her rapture. To quote one reviewer:
“The unsuited Madrid Arena started out at perhaps three quarters available capacity. (Compare this to Munich, where scores of ticket seekers and press had to be turned away). After Act I it had cleared out to about two thirds of capacity, with the outward trickle continuing all through the second act. Early in the third act about half the auditorium still had bums on the seats, and when it was all over, after five hours and 52 minutes, not even that many. But those who stayed were the hardened, appreciative core and they gave a five minute-long, very warm reception, especially to conductor, orchestra, and Camilla Tilling.”
I think it’s fair to say that an opera that drives away a third (or more) of its audience over the course of an evening is not building a constituency.
sorry, but the performance i attended had nothing like that sort of exodus. and please bear in mind that the capacity of the arena is around 12,000.
NO ONE has mentioned the staged Messiah (tee hee). Here is the trailer from ENO:
It looks pretty but could it possibly be as wonderful, campy and thought provoking as Guth’s Easter production?
On the other hand, it’s been on the tubes forever and released on Blu-Ray, etc. Sort of like the Glyndebourne Giulio Cesare.
thanks for the clips.
maybe the met will use it as their special holiday production — nothing says “happy christmas” like a bunch of dour faces at a protestant funeral!!!
yes, dour faces at a funeral definitely make for a better “Happy Easter.”
did the ENO production use a countertenor in the alto “role”?
“alto Catherine Wyn-Rogers”
never mind.
it’s a thought, though …
A staged Messiah, St. Francois…
… are they gonna go all in and do Death in Venice, too?
I’d hitchhike to NYC if they did the Deborah Warner production of DiV from ENO that’s been at La Scala and will be in Amsterdam in June 2013. It was last at the Met in 1994, I loved it: Anthony Rolfe Johnson (RIP) as Aschenbach, Thomas Allen in the baritone roles and Jeffrey Gall as the voice of Apollo.
When heroes have flourished, eros has flourished too…….
“It was last at the Met” = DiV, not the Warner production.
Let’s also remember that 2013-2014 will probably also see a new production of “The Death of Klinghoffer” in the very successful ENO staging (the programme book there said it a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, so we should expect to see it here very soon!)