Doing Our Best to Make Things Jolly

I went to see the live matinee HD broadcast of Renee Fleming and Dmitry Hvorostovsky in the Met’s Eugene Onegin at my local movie theater.

It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.  If I hadn’t already decided earlier this year that I was pretty interested in opera, this definitely would have made it happen.  Hvorostovsky has been, only through recordings, my favorite singer and vocal idol, and I was excited for a chance to see him actually perform a role.  Various reviews I’ve read say things like, “this is the role he was born to play,” which sounds pretty plausible to me.  He was vocally as incredible as I would have hoped (and wow, he really just does have some ridiculously amazing breath support), but I didn’t know he would be as dramatically phenomenal as he was.  There’s a stereotype of opera singers as unable to act, and sometimes I can see why — the Met Puritani (Netrebko excepted) comes to mind — but this production exhibited truly phenomenal acting as well as singing.  As in, literally among the best acting I’ve ever seen in any medium.  I don’t know how you’d make it better.

I know (barely) enough about the opera world at this point to know that Renee Fleming is something of a controversial performer, and that at least a significant minority (maybe more?) of fans and critics don’t care for her.  This was my first time seeing her (assuming television Mormon Christmas specials don’t count), but I thought she was superb.  I took a little while to warm up to her, and there was a minute about halfway through her letter-wring aria when I was bored.  I’m surprised at myself for that minute now, in retrospect — I suspect my mind just wandered.  By the end of the aria I realized that it was amazing.  Her final scene with Onegin seemed to me to be perfection.
The other thing that really struck me about this Onegin was just how powerful a story it is.  I didn’t feel at all like what seems to be the prototype in non-comic opera.  People aren’t killing lovers in fits of rage, or slowly and inevitably dying while savoring last moments of love.  This was just a realistic and sad and excellent love story, where we relate to all the characters, and all the decisions, and see how they lead to the very sad, but not tragic, ending.  Tchaikovsky (I spelled it right on my first try!  Rule!) adapted the opera from a verse novel, which I’m sure was superb.

At this moment, Eugene Onegin is my favorite opera. But I know that I was lucky enough to see a phenomenal production of it, and also that there is so very, very much left for me to explore and discover.

My friend Lauren is a musicology student at Yale; she invited me to see the Yale Opera production of Puccini’s La Boheme. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

I was surprised when I looked at the cast list and saw Sara Jakubiak’s name for Mimi. I knew Sara back in Midland; we were in a production of H.M.S. Pinafore together in 2000. (Once I have that particular bit of archive up I’ll link to it here!) She was excellent back then; I’m pleased to see that her singing career is taking off. Sadly, I didn’t see her in this production, which was dual-cast; I saw the other Mimi.

Caroline, my friend from college, was playing the violin in the pit.
Here are pictures from the program. I particularly like the program cover.

EDIT: My scanner is being tempermental; here is just the cover and my ticket stub; I’ll include a few more pages, including the cast list, later.

The second of what I hope will be many, many lifetime trips to the Met was to see Verdi’s La Traviata. It was conducted by Carlo Rizzi, and featured soprano Mary Dunleavy and tenor Wookyung Kim. I found it to be an awesome experience. The world of opera is still very new to me, and I don’t yet feel expert enough to offer much by way of useful opinion, either about the productions themselves or about the singers. I think I can feel my taste gradually cultivating, but I’m not there yet. I hope that eventually, I’ll come home from the opera and write in-depth reviews, the way I do when I come home from seeing some Gilbert & Sullivan. There is so much to learn and know! It is exciting.

But I meant to be talking about this production of La Traviata. Like most Americans, I’ve been peripherally exposed to many of the famous opera themes in various out-of-contexts, including television commercials and Bugs Bunny cartoons. I didn’t realize how many of the familiar tunes come from Traviata.

I knew that Moulin Rouge was based on Traviata, but I didn’t realize how closely it remained; I pretty much recognized scene by scene.

I feel like I should have more to say about this, but nothing’s coming out right now. Maybe later. In the meantime, here are some pictures.

I went to see the Met’s I Puritani at my local movie theater. However, there were weird technical difficulties, and my friend and I ended up leaving late in the first Act and getting a refund. The screen blanked on us for ten minutes or so, and they had to start it up about half an hour earlier from where we’d been, and we just didn’t want to sit through that duplicate material to wait for the rest of the opera; it was a long evening anyway.

In the 45 minutes or so that I saw, though, I did get a few impressions. Anna Netrebko, singing Elvira, pretty much ruled. I thought she was phenomenal. She also appeared to be the only member of the cast who was doing any acting; that was weird. I felt bad for her; she was emoting like crazy to her tenor, who never even made eye contact with her. I guess you can get away with that when you’re performing at the Met; people can’t see your eyes. But when you’re being broadcast around the world in hi-def, it’s pretty glaringly noticable.

God, some of the staging was horrific. Slow, stationary, and unmotivated. I get the idea of the music being the highest priority, but still. There’s a reason this is a staged opera; I can listen to it on my ipod at home. Which, incidentally, I’m doing right now. Some of the music is very fine.

I am sorry I missed the rest of it; the last thing I saw was the duel between Riccardo and Talbot. But seriously: how cool is it that you can tell just by the names which one is the heroic tenor and which one is the dastardly baritone?

The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society has a concert at each of its monthly meetings; in February 2007, I participated in my third Society concert, Haddon Hall. This is a late Sullivan work, with a libretto by Sydney Grundy. Here is the G&S archive page. This was my first experience with it; it is really a rather charming piece, with some very nice and interesting music, and some pretty nice sentimental bits. It’s not particularly funny — and it feels not much like G&S, although Sullivan is still recognizable.

The cast for this group was excellent. It was:

DOROTHY VERNON - Katie Holler
LADY VERNON- Megan Friar
DORCAS - Irma Obal Lucca
NANCE - Frances Yasprica

JOHN MANNERS - David Root
OSWALD - Paul Sigrist
RUPERT - Jonathan Ichikawa
SIR GEORGE VERNON - Richard Holmes
McCRANKIE - Philip Sternenberg

Megan, Richard, David, and Paul are professionals; I’d seen David’s Fairfax and Paul’s Physician with NYGASP the previous month (both excellent). And Richard has been on my short list of performing heros since I first saw his Captain Corcoron in Buxton in 2004. So it was an honor (and an intimidation!) to be singing with these fine people.

In the end, I felt that things came together reasonably well. The chorus bits were the weakest, because they are hardest to coordinate on minimal rehearsal. But I think that we got the piece across reasonably well. Richard says that Haddon Hall is more opera than operetta; I’m inclined to agree. One of my favorite moments of the evening was his duet with Megan, “Alone, alone!…Bride of my youth”. It was really beautiful and touching.

My character, Rupert, was something of an odd one, but I really enjoyed it. Some of his music suited me pretty well, I think — I will save his first patter song for the inevitable G&S audition that wants something that isn’t G&S.

Here are the excellent program notes, provided by our expert pianist and co-organizer (with M.D. Dan Kravitz):

HADDON HALL is a manor house located near Bakewell in Derbyshire, England in the Peak District, about 14 miles from Buxton. The house sits on a rock outcropping and is privy to gorgeous vistas. Portions of it date back to the 12th Century, but more date to the Tudor period. The house stood vacant for nearly 200 years, from the 1700s until the 1920s, and thus escaped the destructive remodeling many other older structures endured in the 18th and 19th centuries; it is one of the finest extant examples of medieval and Tudor construction. It was carefully restored in the 20th Century. Haddon Hall belongs to the Manners family; the current holder is Edward, Duke of Rutland. (At the time of the opera, the hereditary rank was Earl of Rutland.) [There was also a picture of the house on the cover.]

THE OPERA is based on a real incident, the elopement of Dorothy Vernon, actually the second daughter of Sir George and Lady Vernon, then the owners of Haddon Hall, with John Manners, in 1563. (Several architectural features of the house bear her name, most notably the door through which she left when she eloped.) In constructing the libretto, Grundy took considerable liberties with history, such as inventing a dead son for the Vernons and leaving Dorothy as their only child, but most notably moving the action forward in time by a century so that he could include the Puritans and Roundheads of that era for broad comedic effect and utilize the restoration of the monarchy to help resolve his plot. By this time in theatrical history (1892), light operas were vying for audience with the emergent musical comedy genre that would come to dominate the 20th Century stage, and there was quite a bit of cross-pollination. The inclusion of the completely extraneous comedic Scottish character, McCrankie, is an example of this. Various ethnic types would be a low-comedy feature of musical theatre as well as vaudeville and music hall until the middle of the 20th Century and the advent of modern “PC” thinking.

SULLIVAN CHRONOLOGY:

Produced in 1892, Haddon Hall was written after The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), and the infamous Carpet Quarrel that divided G&S, but before they reunited—“or more or less, but rather less than more”—for Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896). Sullivan’s one grand opera, Ivanhoe, had been produced the previous year (1891). Three of the other major “SWOGs” (Sullivans-without-Gilbert) were still in the future: The Beauty Stone (1898), The Rose of Persia (1899), and The Emerald Isle (1901). While some of the individual pieces in Haddon Hall bear a strong resemblance to Sullivan’s parlour songs, overall the music is typical of the later period of Sullivan’s writing, rich in chromaticism and more complex in construction than his works of the late 1870s and early to mid-1880s. Piano accompaniment cannot do this score true justice, as Sullivan was at the height of his powers as an evocative orchestrator and quite a bit of the power and beauty of the score are lost in the translation to piano, especially the storm effects. The recording by Prince Consort, available from The Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, is recommended for the full flavor.

–ASR