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Sep. 25th, 2024 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretMitridate by Mozart at the Boston Lyric Opera
My first show on my new subscription at the Boston Lyric Opera! Apparently Mozart wrote this when he was 14, so I wasn't really expecting too much, and I wasn't disappointed. It's very Baroque, I don't think there's a duet until an hour in, just straight da capo arias one after another, but with maybe a more classical approach to the instrumental music. Nowhere near as exciting and interesting as the Mozart operas we're all familiar with, but even 14 year old Mozart had a genius for melody and harmony.
Mitridate is about a weird incestuous love pentangle where the king Mitridate's two children are alternately trying to seduce the king's coerced bride to be, while one is fending off his own bride to be.
BLO decided to modernize it by making one of the brothers a sister and giving her a lesbian love story, which, OK, perfectly legit way to handle a castrato role. But the problem was that all of the love pentangle stuff was so convoluted and over the top that the BLO also decided to not take it seriously. They spent the whole first act making fun of the various courtships with broad comic moves, so that when the rubber meets the road in the final act and they want you to feel the agony of the separated lovers and the estranged family, it really requires you to stretch yourself emotionally to forget what came before. And yet... with some great vocal performances, particularly Lawrence Brownlee's Mitridate and Brenda Rae's Aspasia, they got me a couple of times in the conclusion. I got caught up in it, in spite of myself! I'm not too proud to admit it.
Anyway, not perfect but not a bad introduction to opera in Boston.
My first show on my new subscription at the Boston Lyric Opera! Apparently Mozart wrote this when he was 14, so I wasn't really expecting too much, and I wasn't disappointed. It's very Baroque, I don't think there's a duet until an hour in, just straight da capo arias one after another, but with maybe a more classical approach to the instrumental music. Nowhere near as exciting and interesting as the Mozart operas we're all familiar with, but even 14 year old Mozart had a genius for melody and harmony.
Mitridate is about a weird incestuous love pentangle where the king Mitridate's two children are alternately trying to seduce the king's coerced bride to be, while one is fending off his own bride to be.
BLO decided to modernize it by making one of the brothers a sister and giving her a lesbian love story, which, OK, perfectly legit way to handle a castrato role. But the problem was that all of the love pentangle stuff was so convoluted and over the top that the BLO also decided to not take it seriously. They spent the whole first act making fun of the various courtships with broad comic moves, so that when the rubber meets the road in the final act and they want you to feel the agony of the separated lovers and the estranged family, it really requires you to stretch yourself emotionally to forget what came before. And yet... with some great vocal performances, particularly Lawrence Brownlee's Mitridate and Brenda Rae's Aspasia, they got me a couple of times in the conclusion. I got caught up in it, in spite of myself! I'm not too proud to admit it.
Anyway, not perfect but not a bad introduction to opera in Boston.
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Date: 2024-09-26 03:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-26 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-26 02:43 pm (UTC)