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Opera 2023
Jan. 2nd, 2024 09:41 pmGuys, the Met is actually doing it! I saw three operas this fall, one which premiered in 1989, one in 2000, and the third in 1996. Welcome to a new kind of Metropolitan Opera. We'll see how long it lasts, but for the moment I am delighted.
I also made the decision this fall that I was going to start wearing a tuxedo to the Met. I've long been a "I'm there for the music, not the social scene, so if I show up in jeans it's fine" person, but it seemed like fun to dress up and so I'm dressing up. I was talking to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gingerrose and she suggested it was in some way a response to the pandemic, like now when we go out in public we feel the need to be Out in Public in a way we didn't before. Anyway, a used former rental tux was only about $50 on ebay, which is less than a rental would have cost, and I've been having a lot of fun with bow ties.
Also, because I'm a Troll, I toyed for a bit with not warning Lee that I'd be showing up in a tux, but it definitely was more fun for us to both be dressed up. Also, because I'm a Troll, Lee was about a third-convinced that I would in fact show up dressed down to make him look silly, which, fair enough.
Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie, at the Met
Seen with R. This was really intense, with beautiful gospel-infused music and a bleak story about a murderous man on death row and the naive but brave nun who tries to save his soul. It was uncomfortably Catholic in places, perhaps most egregiously when I detected what I thought was a Pieta motif with the murderer in the Jesus role. But all in all I really liked it and Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham were amazing as usual.
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X by Anthony Davis, at the Met
Seen with Lee. The music was fascinatingly diverse, with a lot of bebop and other jazz idiom intermixing both with Modernist classical (a composer's note cites Berg as an influence) and a variety of world music ideas and techniques. The staging had some excellent dancing, taking hip hop moves and making something more expansive out of them, and some interesting visual conceits. But the narrative was very weak. The opera took you passively through a range of settings and experiences throughout Malcolm X's life, but rarely was there much conflict in any particular scene. They were just experiences in his life to be experienced visually and sonically, to build up to an imagistic sense of how he became the man he was. And I think also, possibly more significantly, to build up an imagistic sense of how the world around him changed the way people understood Malcolm X. I felt like the opera was more about 'the times' of Malcolm X than it was about 'the life', to riff on the show's subtitle.
Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catan, at the Met
Seen with Talia. I really loved Catan's "La Hija de Rappaccini", when it was staged at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens a number of years ago. This was, likewise, a story very much infused with setting and an interest in the intersection of the natural and human worlds, in this case a boat going down the Amazon amid all of the wildlife of the rainforest. There were dancers in astonishingly beautiful costumes, as butterflies or piranhas or a host of other Amazonian wildlife making their way up and down the river.
The costumes and set were the most striking part of the show, but the music was also very good, an interesting mixture of a modern musical register with an early 20th century Puccini vibe as inhabited by the main character, an aging diva returning from Europe to make one final performance in her native Brazil. I need to hear more of Catan's music.
The spring will bring more modernity in Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut up in My Bones, as well as some new-to-me classics in Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.
I also made the decision this fall that I was going to start wearing a tuxedo to the Met. I've long been a "I'm there for the music, not the social scene, so if I show up in jeans it's fine" person, but it seemed like fun to dress up and so I'm dressing up. I was talking to
gingerrose and she suggested it was in some way a response to the pandemic, like now when we go out in public we feel the need to be Out in Public in a way we didn't before. Anyway, a used former rental tux was only about $50 on ebay, which is less than a rental would have cost, and I've been having a lot of fun with bow ties.Also, because I'm a Troll, I toyed for a bit with not warning Lee that I'd be showing up in a tux, but it definitely was more fun for us to both be dressed up. Also, because I'm a Troll, Lee was about a third-convinced that I would in fact show up dressed down to make him look silly, which, fair enough.
Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie, at the Met
Seen with R. This was really intense, with beautiful gospel-infused music and a bleak story about a murderous man on death row and the naive but brave nun who tries to save his soul. It was uncomfortably Catholic in places, perhaps most egregiously when I detected what I thought was a Pieta motif with the murderer in the Jesus role. But all in all I really liked it and Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham were amazing as usual.
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X by Anthony Davis, at the Met
Seen with Lee. The music was fascinatingly diverse, with a lot of bebop and other jazz idiom intermixing both with Modernist classical (a composer's note cites Berg as an influence) and a variety of world music ideas and techniques. The staging had some excellent dancing, taking hip hop moves and making something more expansive out of them, and some interesting visual conceits. But the narrative was very weak. The opera took you passively through a range of settings and experiences throughout Malcolm X's life, but rarely was there much conflict in any particular scene. They were just experiences in his life to be experienced visually and sonically, to build up to an imagistic sense of how he became the man he was. And I think also, possibly more significantly, to build up an imagistic sense of how the world around him changed the way people understood Malcolm X. I felt like the opera was more about 'the times' of Malcolm X than it was about 'the life', to riff on the show's subtitle.
Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catan, at the Met
Seen with Talia. I really loved Catan's "La Hija de Rappaccini", when it was staged at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens a number of years ago. This was, likewise, a story very much infused with setting and an interest in the intersection of the natural and human worlds, in this case a boat going down the Amazon amid all of the wildlife of the rainforest. There were dancers in astonishingly beautiful costumes, as butterflies or piranhas or a host of other Amazonian wildlife making their way up and down the river.
The costumes and set were the most striking part of the show, but the music was also very good, an interesting mixture of a modern musical register with an early 20th century Puccini vibe as inhabited by the main character, an aging diva returning from Europe to make one final performance in her native Brazil. I need to hear more of Catan's music.
The spring will bring more modernity in Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut up in My Bones, as well as some new-to-me classics in Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.