Category Archives: Performance review – MetHD

They shoot horses don’t they?

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Just back from the HD broadcast of the Met’s Götterdãmmerung.

Musically, I was really quite impressed. I thought Luisi’s take on the score was original, valid and enjoyable. His tempi were generally quite quick and there was a taut, sinewy quality to the strings that really brought out the shape of the music. No romantic wallowing here! I really liked the Gibichungs; Wendy Bryn Harmer as Gutrune, Iain Paterson’s Gunther and, especially, Hans-Peter König’s Hagen. All were well sung and characterful. Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried and Deb Voigt as Brünnhilde were really exciting in the Act 1 love duet and Deb nailed the Immolation scene, almost managing to overcome the staging. So much for the music, what about the production?

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Disenchanted Island

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The temptation to review this afternoon’s MetHD broadcast of The Enchanted Island in McGonagallesque (or perhaps more accurately, Samsesque) doggerel is strong but I think I’ve had enough of it for one day and do you really want to read stuff like:

Ten great singers get to sing trash
‘Cos Peter Gelb wants lots of cash
Jeremy Sams goes for broke
Which almost rhymes with baroque
For real baroque would too jazzy
for the New York bourgeoisie

Unfortunately that’s about as good as the libretto gets most of the time.

There are a few moments when one half suspects an opera is about to break out. The lovers’s quartet in Act 1 set to “Endless pleasure” is pretty good and Act 2 starts well with strong arias from Hermia (Liz deShong) and Sycorax (Joyce diDonato). Throughout the excellent cast sing and act with technical excellence and great commitment but the overall effect is still of the Royal Shakespeare Company doing panto with the funny bits left out.

It’s perfectly possible to do baroque in a way that is funny, engaging and accessible. The Glyndebourne production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Salzburg’s hilarious and subversive production of Purcell’s King Arthur show what can be done. The Enchanted Island doesn’t cut it, being one more proof that the Met’s formula of throwing lots of money at a bad idea doesn’t work.

Camera work and sound quality were no better than usual.

If you feel the need to read a proper review Olivia Giovetti’s is very good.

Faust – 10/10 for trying

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After all the negatives about McAnuff Faust my expectations for this afternoon’s HD broadcast were pretty low. I was pleasantly surprised. I don’t think the production is perfect but I don’t think it’s incoherent let alone dull. It also made me think a lot about the opera and the characters and that’s a good thing. Overall, it’s the sort of production I’d like to see more of. Far better a production that slightly over reaches than dull mediocrity.

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Siegfried ex Machina

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I had very mixed feelings about today’s HD broadcast of Siegfried from the Metropolitan Opera. Early reviews and comments by friends had been largely negative about the staging and there was a widespread view that “the machine” was intrusively noisy. As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised. For once Gary Halvorson’s relentless close ups were a boon. From what little we could see of them, the first and second act sets were both uninteresting and gimmicky. The 3D leaf scattering, the crudely pixellated woodbird and the laughable Wurm were just among the sillier features. To be fair , the beginning of the third act made effective use of the set but that was the only place that it did work well. So focussing on the singers made a lot of sense.

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Anna Bolena – MetHD broadcast

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Today’s Metropolitan Opera “Live in HD” broadcast was Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. I was not overly impressed although whether this was a result of issues associated with the broadcast or what was happening in the house I’m not entirely sure. One issue was that, again, the cinema was forcing its sound system well past the point at which it could consistently and accurately reproduce music. It may be OK for car chases and explosions but they need to throttle the volume back for the opera broadcasts. I’m guessing that they could drop the sound 6dB and still be louder than it would sound in the house. Driving the speakers and amps at 25% of the pressure level they are currently flogging them at would surely reduce the harmonic distortion. This was particularly an issue because this was very “heavy” Donizetti. I don’t know the work well enough to know whether it has to be done this way but the Met cast large voices in almost all the major roles and Marco Amiliato in the pit seemed to be demanding a very loud and strident sound from the orchestra. It was quite dramatic but emphatically not bel canto; more like forte shouto really. The only singer who sounded idiomatic to me was Tamara Mumford as the page, Smeaton. It did get better after the interval and the big duet between Anna (Anna Netrebko) and Giovanna Seymour (Ekaterina Gubanova) was really quite affecting. Also as far as I could tell Netrebko was singing really well in the “mad scene” (which really isn’t all that mad as these things go) but unfortunately the person in the seat behind me was having extremely audible “gastric distress” and both the lemur and I were having the hardest time not dissolving into giggles during perhaps the most solemn part of the opera. And I thought the coughing at the Four Seasons Centre was bad.

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Die Walküre

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Once in a while an opera performance really blows you away and it becomes quite hard to write about, especially when the work is as long and dense as Die Walküre because even with a great performance one is in overload by the end. Yesterday’s broadcast from the Met was one of those experiences. Here’s what I think I saw!

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Il Trovatore

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Il Trovatore has gypsies, burning at the stake, dead babies, mistaken identity, poison, love, hate, revenge and enough plot holes to sink the Titanic. It also has some very effective dramatic moments and some utterly fabulous music. The biggest snag is probably that the utterly fantastic music needs a quartet of soloists who can deal with fiendishly difficult parts that require a combination of flawless bel canto technique coupled to Puccinian power and stamina. The power and stamina requirement being especially high in a barn like the Met. It also has a dramatical problem in that it consists if a sequence of fairly short scenes which means a production runs the risk of being chopped up by the changes of set.

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Capriccio

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Yesterday’s Met Live in HD transmission was Richard Strauss’ last opera Capriccio. It’s a curious work and I suspect how one thinks about it seriously affects how one reacts to it emotionally. On the surface it’s a sophisticated meta opera about opera with some side splittingly funny gags about unstageable production concepts accompanied by pastiche Wagner. Taken on that level it’s funny but perhaps, ultimately heartless. When one realises that the opera was written in 1941/2 it adds a new dimension. Why has Strauss set this opera in Enlightenment Paris? Where else could be more symbolic of everything the regime he is writing under is not? This work premiered a few weeks before the German defeat at Stalingrad. Does Strauss sense that german is losing the war? Is this less an affectionate farewell to the form from an elderly composer or an elegy for an artform that may not survive the destruction of European civilization which most would have thought the inevitable consequence of a Russo-American victory (who’s to say they weren’t right?). Any way these were the thoughts that were going through my head as I watched yesterday’s broadcast and no doubt helped give the work, for me, a greater emotional intensity.

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Le Comte Ory

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Rossini’s Le Comte Ory is a very silly opera about the wicked count and his equally randy page scheming to get into the pants of the virtuous, more or less, Countess Adele while all the local men, including the countess’ brother are off at the crusades. To this end in Act 1 the count appears disguised as a hermit and in Act 2 as a nun. Add to the silliness a fiendishly difficult set of vocal parts and you have a sort of bel canto comedy extreme. To up the ante, today’s Comte, Juan-Diego Florez had been up all night waiting for his wife to pop a pup which she did 35 minutes before curtain.

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