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May. 7th, 2019 11:13 amLa Boheme composed by Giacomo Puccini, staged by Opera Philadelphia
Actually the first time I've seen a staged La Boheme live- I'd previously only seen it live in a concert performance by the New York Philharmonic in the park. It wasn't high on my list of ways to spend my time, but it's Puccini's least objectionable opera and it was part of this year's three-opera day alignment, where Opera Philadelphia has a Sunday matinee and Curtis Opera has a double bill of short operas highlighting a variety of their student performers, so I went.
And, like, it's definitely Puccini's least objectionable opera?
Rodolfo is terrible, but that's okay, he loves Mimi and Mimi loves him, and so it's all kind of sweetly terrible. Musetta and Marcello are locked in a terrible game together, but they most give as good as they get. There is no rape whatsoever that the narrative tries to convince us isn't really rape, so... definitely the least objectionable Puccini. Although I could've done without Marcello's little fits of domestic violence in this staging. Very textually unnecessary. I super-cringed when Marcello threw a shoe at Musetta, after previously hurling her to the ground in a fit of jealousy, and the audience laughed.
Philadelphia Opera's unique contribution to the opera was a set-dressing based on animations of famous Impressionist paintings, some of which Marcello is ostensibly actually painting. He waves his hand in front of the video screen and the painting comes together, stroke by stroke.
The idea seemed to be to remind the audience that the Impressionist masterpieces that have so suffused our culture today were at their time the work of avant garde artistic revolutionaries, much like the characters portrayed in La Boheme. It's a bold strategy, trying to convince us that Rodolfo and Marcello actually were artistic geniuses suffering for their genius, rather than simply romantic fools suffering for their 'art'. It does change how you read their stories, to some degree, but it also felt kind of silly.
Riders to the Sea composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams after the Synge play, staged by Curtis Opera
A very striking piece. There's no aria whatsoever, and it makes use almost entirely of Synge's original text, notably the heavy Irish dialect. The music sits underneath, largely warm but foreboding legato strings. The language is so important to this work, in a way that I'm usually not able to access in foreign-language opera. Curtis's singers did more or less creditable jobs of singing with the required accent.
It's a tragedy, but not in the classical sense. It's not a story about agency and human failing. Instead, it's a fatalist tragedy, a doom foretold seen inexorably to its crushing end. Poor Maurya lives with her two daughters and a son in a sea-side hovel in rural Ireland. She has lost four sons, a husband, and a father in law to the sea, and as the opera begins, a fifth son is rumored to have also drowned. Maurya sees her son's ghost, and knows that it foretells the death of her last son, leaving her all alone with her daughters and no way of managing the family farm. It's brutal, but there's an austere beauty in the story's unrelenting brutality, and in the way it speaks of love and our ability to survive it.
Empty the House composed by Rene Orth, staged by Curtis Opera
A new opera, and a local one- Orth is presently composer in residence at Opera Philadelphia, and she composed this opera while a student at Curtis several years ago.
Orth sets the story in 1990s suburban Houston, and it was staged as vividly in its specific setting as Riders to the Sea was. It's a two and a half hander between a conservative Christian mother and her rebellious daughter, and the ghost of a son whose memory stands between them. (The program note connected Empty the House to Riders to the Sea by asserting that they are both in their fashion ghost stories, as well as stories about mothers connecting with daughters.)
Orth's music is for electro-acoustic orchestra, an at times stunning mixture of strings and winds with drum machines, synths, and samples. A recording of water dripping from a leaky sink motif recurs, taken up in later passages and improvised on as an electronic fantasia. The rhythms from the drums were particularly striking and percussive in many places.
I read the synopsis in the program beforehand, as I usually do when approaching opera, and was uncertain how much certain things were supposed to be taken as 'twists'. It's revealed most of the way through that the ghostly son was a gay man who had died of AIDS in the mid eighties on his sister's couch, as his mother refused to help him. But up to this point, they had only spoken of him in the past tense, so it was unclear to me if it was supposed to be a surprise to us that he was a ghost.
Actually the first time I've seen a staged La Boheme live- I'd previously only seen it live in a concert performance by the New York Philharmonic in the park. It wasn't high on my list of ways to spend my time, but it's Puccini's least objectionable opera and it was part of this year's three-opera day alignment, where Opera Philadelphia has a Sunday matinee and Curtis Opera has a double bill of short operas highlighting a variety of their student performers, so I went.
And, like, it's definitely Puccini's least objectionable opera?
Rodolfo is terrible, but that's okay, he loves Mimi and Mimi loves him, and so it's all kind of sweetly terrible. Musetta and Marcello are locked in a terrible game together, but they most give as good as they get. There is no rape whatsoever that the narrative tries to convince us isn't really rape, so... definitely the least objectionable Puccini. Although I could've done without Marcello's little fits of domestic violence in this staging. Very textually unnecessary. I super-cringed when Marcello threw a shoe at Musetta, after previously hurling her to the ground in a fit of jealousy, and the audience laughed.
Philadelphia Opera's unique contribution to the opera was a set-dressing based on animations of famous Impressionist paintings, some of which Marcello is ostensibly actually painting. He waves his hand in front of the video screen and the painting comes together, stroke by stroke.
The idea seemed to be to remind the audience that the Impressionist masterpieces that have so suffused our culture today were at their time the work of avant garde artistic revolutionaries, much like the characters portrayed in La Boheme. It's a bold strategy, trying to convince us that Rodolfo and Marcello actually were artistic geniuses suffering for their genius, rather than simply romantic fools suffering for their 'art'. It does change how you read their stories, to some degree, but it also felt kind of silly.
Riders to the Sea composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams after the Synge play, staged by Curtis Opera
A very striking piece. There's no aria whatsoever, and it makes use almost entirely of Synge's original text, notably the heavy Irish dialect. The music sits underneath, largely warm but foreboding legato strings. The language is so important to this work, in a way that I'm usually not able to access in foreign-language opera. Curtis's singers did more or less creditable jobs of singing with the required accent.
It's a tragedy, but not in the classical sense. It's not a story about agency and human failing. Instead, it's a fatalist tragedy, a doom foretold seen inexorably to its crushing end. Poor Maurya lives with her two daughters and a son in a sea-side hovel in rural Ireland. She has lost four sons, a husband, and a father in law to the sea, and as the opera begins, a fifth son is rumored to have also drowned. Maurya sees her son's ghost, and knows that it foretells the death of her last son, leaving her all alone with her daughters and no way of managing the family farm. It's brutal, but there's an austere beauty in the story's unrelenting brutality, and in the way it speaks of love and our ability to survive it.
Empty the House composed by Rene Orth, staged by Curtis Opera
A new opera, and a local one- Orth is presently composer in residence at Opera Philadelphia, and she composed this opera while a student at Curtis several years ago.
Orth sets the story in 1990s suburban Houston, and it was staged as vividly in its specific setting as Riders to the Sea was. It's a two and a half hander between a conservative Christian mother and her rebellious daughter, and the ghost of a son whose memory stands between them. (The program note connected Empty the House to Riders to the Sea by asserting that they are both in their fashion ghost stories, as well as stories about mothers connecting with daughters.)
Orth's music is for electro-acoustic orchestra, an at times stunning mixture of strings and winds with drum machines, synths, and samples. A recording of water dripping from a leaky sink motif recurs, taken up in later passages and improvised on as an electronic fantasia. The rhythms from the drums were particularly striking and percussive in many places.
I read the synopsis in the program beforehand, as I usually do when approaching opera, and was uncertain how much certain things were supposed to be taken as 'twists'. It's revealed most of the way through that the ghostly son was a gay man who had died of AIDS in the mid eighties on his sister's couch, as his mother refused to help him. But up to this point, they had only spoken of him in the past tense, so it was unclear to me if it was supposed to be a surprise to us that he was a ghost.