![]() “Opera is the most beautiful and total of art forms, and it sparks every fiber of your being as well as provokes all of your thoughts and fantasies,” he said. But the new “Lucia” is uncharted territory for the Met, and a test for traditionalists. And Peter Sellars directed distinctly American contemporary takes on Mozart in the 1980s. Where the opera’s libretto depicts a decaying and desperate aristocracy in the Scotland of centuries ago, Stone has found contemporary resonances and turned the Met stage into something of a graveyard of the American dream - a landscape of opioid abuse, economic hardship and the last, dangerous gasp of white male power.īoth Stone and Sierra are veterans of European houses, where a production like this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for example, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has a similar look in David Bösch’s 2016 staging, with a group of older men exerting outsize control over their economically depressed community. While my MA Directory deadline has yet to make me that harried, I did wonder at first if the Berg had been dropped when I was preparing my portion of the MA Web site’s Annotated Calendar.As Sierra slowly made her way down the fire escape, she was surrounded by fragments of a faded postindustrial town: a drab motel, a pawnshop, a liquor store with an A.T.M. people know that pressure-prone editors tend to glance only at the release headlines. This Saturday night is one of his most thoughtful: Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, conducted by Juanjo Meno. Is it my imagination, or is the press department trying to hide the less popular Berg work? In all its e-mailed announcements the Strauss and Mahler works have been emblazoned in large, bold-faced display type, but the Berg is mentioned only in the body of the release. All p.r. James Levine may have had to cancel his performances at Tanglewood this summer, but his programs remain. Who will take the lead in condemning this unbecoming nip-performers, impresarios, critics? In the good old days there were people who nixed such artistic missteps. Especially when his poor Desdemona was singing her “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria.” Te Kanawa, who maintained her composure and singing throughout that appalling spectacle, deserved a “Trouper of the Year” award. Often when he wasn’t singing or drinking he draped a white towel over his face, leaning back in his chair, breathing heavily. Georg Solti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on April 16, 1991. ( l eft to right) Kiri Te Kanawa (Desdemona) struggles to hold the stage in Verdi’s Otello while Luciano Pavarotti (Otello) steals the limelight with his shenanigans. He sat through much of the performance I heard, and next to him was a table of waters and what looked like bottles of But he couldn’t cancel because a live recording was being made. Luciano Pavarotti was singing his first (and last) Otellos with Kiri Te Kanawa as Desdemona and the Chicago Symphony under Georg Solti. ![]() The worst example within memory was at Carnegie Hall in April, 1991. No matter how discreet, they are calling attention to themselves and away from the music.” “They are leaning down to pick up the bottle, unscrewing the top, leaning their heads back to take a drink, screwing the top back on, and leaning down again to put it on the floor. “It’s a distraction for both the audience and fellow performers,” she insists. Today’s singers should discard this crutch-like and ugly habit.”) My wife always sees red when singers indulge themselves. From time immemorial, singers managed without bottles of water at their feet, and on their lips. ![]() City Arts music critic Jay Nordlinger took after one of the soloists in the New York Philharmonic’s recent Missa solemnis (“This is gross. But a plastic, labeled vessel looks tacky. ![]() On occasion we used to see a glass of water placed under a presumably ailing soloist’s chair for a sip. Obviously it began when plastic water bottles became a whole generation’s blue blanket. (I do remember him unaccountably disappearing mid-scene a couple of times in the Met’s Macbeth 38 years ago, the only time I saw him live.) I’ve yet to see a singer whip out a Poland Spring or Evian at the Met, but I suppose it would be okay in a Gen X staging of West Side Story. When did this unseemly swig become acceptable? It was said that Franco Corelli would wander offstage for refreshment between arias. It’s time to say “no” to water bottles on the concert stage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |