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May. 8th, 2018 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI discovered that the Philadelphia Opera had a Sunday matinee and the Curtis Opera had a Sunday evening double bill. So I could see three operas in one day!!! It was really fun.
Carmen by Bizet at Philadelphia Opera
I've never seen Carmen before! Of course I well know the music, from a million places including particularly Sarasate's Carmen Fantasie. The music, throughout, is crowdpleasingly melodic and lushly orchestrated. It's worth seeing Carmen for the music.
The opera, storywise, is pretty bog standard 19th century opera, part of the meatgrinder turning heroines into corpses. Carmen herself is a fascinating, contradictory creation, but there aren't a lot of other interesting characters in the opera the way the best meatgrinder operas have. Escamillo is a cartoonish ball of ego, Frasquita and Mercedes are just sassy shadow-Carmens, Zuniga is just a tool. Micaela gets one interesting moment, "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante", in Act III, and otherwise there just isn't enough of her to feel fully realized. And Jose? I'm sure some find his descent from guard to pathetic ex-brigand compelling, but since it's just the trajectory to becoming the jealous killer of his ex-lover, it's impossible to find it a sympathetic journey.
The production by Paul Curran set the opera in the 1950s in 'a nonspecific Hispanic place similar to Havana, Miami, or Seville itself'. Which is too much for me to unpack, honestly. It's an opera version of the '50s, with jeans and leather jackets and motorcycles everywhere. Mostly the production design got out of the way, providing a few good visuals and not adding much to a show where the music and the singing and the dancing do the heavy lifting.
Mahagonny Songspiel by Kurt Weill at Curtis Opera
As expected, this was tremendously weird, though it was weird in different directions than the version I saw several years back at Gotham Chamber Opera, as part of a staging of the original Baden triple bill from 1927 when the Songspiel premiered. With its young cast of students, and with the discourse having advanced five years, I felt like it was interested in a very up-to-the-moment set of questions about identity and hypocrisy. Putting on and removing wigs and dresses was a consistent part of the production's genderplay in a song cycle that is very strongly and deliberately gendered. And there was a moment when the female singers literally LEANED IN, pushing and pushing on the male singers until they were forced to get out of the way.
The production also had some interesting metatheatrics, with the curtain being rapidly raised and lowered multiple times, so the audience had no great sense of when the show began or ended. This was used to spectacular effect in the intermissionless transition from the Songspiel to...
The Medium by Giancarlo Menotti at Curtis Opera
The costume changes into the new opera were carried out as several of the many costume changes that were part of the Songspiel, and all of the figures from the Songspiel who didn't have singing roles in the new opera stayed on stage in their weird Weill costumes as the apparitions that Madame Flora may or may not be seeing in Menotti's fascinating tragedy of the immigrant experience in America.
Flora is a poor European immigrant in post-War New York with two teenage children, at least one adopted. Trying to survive, she has recreated herself as a spirit channeler confronting death on behalf of deeply in-denial upper crust New York elite couples, with her children enmeshed in the complicated lies she uses to trick her clients. She is perpetually drunk, and she is clearly trying to hide from the sadness of her past, but she cannot escape the ghosts that haunt her.
The integration between the two works was surprising and effective at least in large part because it was surprising. Weill's fabulous Weimar anti-verismo and Menotti's prickly post-verismo shouldn't align, and they often don't, and the intersections between them create a dramatic landscape that's impossible to pin down or ever feel comfortable with. And that made both works more interesting than they would be on their own.
Carmen by Bizet at Philadelphia Opera
I've never seen Carmen before! Of course I well know the music, from a million places including particularly Sarasate's Carmen Fantasie. The music, throughout, is crowdpleasingly melodic and lushly orchestrated. It's worth seeing Carmen for the music.
The opera, storywise, is pretty bog standard 19th century opera, part of the meatgrinder turning heroines into corpses. Carmen herself is a fascinating, contradictory creation, but there aren't a lot of other interesting characters in the opera the way the best meatgrinder operas have. Escamillo is a cartoonish ball of ego, Frasquita and Mercedes are just sassy shadow-Carmens, Zuniga is just a tool. Micaela gets one interesting moment, "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante", in Act III, and otherwise there just isn't enough of her to feel fully realized. And Jose? I'm sure some find his descent from guard to pathetic ex-brigand compelling, but since it's just the trajectory to becoming the jealous killer of his ex-lover, it's impossible to find it a sympathetic journey.
The production by Paul Curran set the opera in the 1950s in 'a nonspecific Hispanic place similar to Havana, Miami, or Seville itself'. Which is too much for me to unpack, honestly. It's an opera version of the '50s, with jeans and leather jackets and motorcycles everywhere. Mostly the production design got out of the way, providing a few good visuals and not adding much to a show where the music and the singing and the dancing do the heavy lifting.
Mahagonny Songspiel by Kurt Weill at Curtis Opera
As expected, this was tremendously weird, though it was weird in different directions than the version I saw several years back at Gotham Chamber Opera, as part of a staging of the original Baden triple bill from 1927 when the Songspiel premiered. With its young cast of students, and with the discourse having advanced five years, I felt like it was interested in a very up-to-the-moment set of questions about identity and hypocrisy. Putting on and removing wigs and dresses was a consistent part of the production's genderplay in a song cycle that is very strongly and deliberately gendered. And there was a moment when the female singers literally LEANED IN, pushing and pushing on the male singers until they were forced to get out of the way.
The production also had some interesting metatheatrics, with the curtain being rapidly raised and lowered multiple times, so the audience had no great sense of when the show began or ended. This was used to spectacular effect in the intermissionless transition from the Songspiel to...
The Medium by Giancarlo Menotti at Curtis Opera
The costume changes into the new opera were carried out as several of the many costume changes that were part of the Songspiel, and all of the figures from the Songspiel who didn't have singing roles in the new opera stayed on stage in their weird Weill costumes as the apparitions that Madame Flora may or may not be seeing in Menotti's fascinating tragedy of the immigrant experience in America.
Flora is a poor European immigrant in post-War New York with two teenage children, at least one adopted. Trying to survive, she has recreated herself as a spirit channeler confronting death on behalf of deeply in-denial upper crust New York elite couples, with her children enmeshed in the complicated lies she uses to trick her clients. She is perpetually drunk, and she is clearly trying to hide from the sadness of her past, but she cannot escape the ghosts that haunt her.
The integration between the two works was surprising and effective at least in large part because it was surprising. Weill's fabulous Weimar anti-verismo and Menotti's prickly post-verismo shouldn't align, and they often don't, and the intersections between them create a dramatic landscape that's impossible to pin down or ever feel comfortable with. And that made both works more interesting than they would be on their own.
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Date: 2018-05-08 08:08 pm (UTC)it's funny because it's true! I wonder if this is why I've never actually sought out Carmen (despite loving the music -- Carmen Suite was pretty standard orchestra repertoire when I was a small orchestra player and I loved it). With Verdi (who until I actually started watching him was definitely slotted in my head as one of those heroine->corpse composers), you can tell that he's really super interested in all the other characters and relationships besides the Dying Heroine... anyway. I'm sure I'll see it one day, one way or another.
The Weill and Menotti sound interesting too! I have heard bits and pieces of the Menotti.