Labour relations more popular than naked soprano

Posted on July 27, 2014 by operaramblings

Something rather extraordinary happened around here yesterday. The state of the Met produced a completely unprecedented amount of traffic. This year traffic has been running around 6000-8000 hits/month. It’s been steadily growing since I started in August 2011 but not wildly. Yesterday saw 5916 hits; most of them on the Met piece. It was 17 months before I got that many hits in a month. In less than 24 hours the piece became the most read thing I have posted eclipsing the previous “best seller” which was, oddly enough, a review of the 1992 ROH Salome with Maria Ewing. This has been steadily garnering traffic for two and a half years mostly, it appears, from people who Google variants of “maria ewing nude”. It appears that even a naked Lady Hall can’t compete with labour relations at the Met.

The state of the Met

Posted on July 25, 2014 by operaramblings

This is the first time I’ve posted about the current labour negotiations at the metropolitan Opera though I’ve been following the story closely. I have rather a lot of experience of contract and grievance negotiations and I think I can spot bad faith bargaining at some distance. Good faith bargaining typically occurs when both sides want to reach a settlement. The opposite when one side is more interested in ramming home some “point of principle”. This last was often a starting point on the union side in the bad old days ,especially in the UK and Australia but has become much less common. Nowadays bad faith is much more likely to come from the employer’s side, usually when they are bent on some principle like the “right” to hire and fire at will.

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Another classic re-release

Posted on July 25, 2014 by operaramblings

For the longest time the classic 1995 Glyndebourne recording of Janáček’s Věk Makropulos was the only video option. It’s now been re-released on DVD and Blu-ray in a completely remastered version. I watched the Blu-ray and it’s as well restored as the companion recording of Peter Sellars’ equally classic Theodora. As it’s drawn from a Channel 4 broadcast the picture is 4:3 and it’s presented here formatted for wide screens in what is, apparently, called “pillarbox” mode in the UK. At any event, the picture is excellent; certainly the equal of many more recent recordings, if not quite of the best HD quality. The sound, stereo only, is decent but a bit “boxed in” and the voices often seem to balanced a long way back.

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WTF SRSLY!

Posted on July 25, 2014 by operaramblings

The latest offering from Loose Tea Theatre is a show called AuroCorrect Operas. Basically it’s Mozart’s Bastien et Bastienne and Stravinsky’s Mavra updated for the internet age. I seem to have seen a lot of internet themed opera recently ranging from cyberbullying to screaming goats. Perhaps it’s a meme? The show runs August 21st to 24th at the Navillus Gallery on Davenport. Loose Tea’s previous effort; La tragédie de Carmen, was well worth seeing so this is probably one to see.

More details and tickets here.

LibLab reading

Posted on July 24, 2014 by operaramblings

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Tapestry LibLab; a structured creative collaboration between composers and librettists. Yesterday we got a preview of the results. Twelve works created in this year’s programme were given a run through by the previously announced performers plus singer/dance Eva Tavares. The works will form the basis of this year’s Tapestry Briefs show in November when they will be fully staged.

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TSMF begins

Posted on July 23, 2014 by operaramblings

The Toronto Summer Music Festival kicked off last night with a concert by the venerable and renowned Emerson Quartet. The theme for the festival is “The Modern Age”; explained to us by the festival director as meaning the many threads and styles that emerged in the opening years of the 20th century. It might seem a bit odd then that the Emersons chose a programme of Beethoven, Britten and Schubert but in fact the rest of the programming doesn’t seem much closer to the tree with Bach, Haydn and Brahms all featured in upcoming concerts.

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Woman on the edge

Posted on July 20, 2014 by operaramblings

A few weeks ago I reviewed Phillippe Béziat’s documentary traviata et nous, about the making of the 2011 Aix festival La traviata. I’ve now had a chance to watch the DVD of the finished product and it’s superb. Forget those Traviatas in which a star soprano simpers vacuously across an overstuffed set, this is compelling drama. François Sivadier’s production is dark, dangerous and incredibly moving. Natalie Dessay’s Violetta is a terrifyingly intense portrait of a woman who knows from the beginning she is dying in “this desert which is known to men as Paris”. There is no further need for heavy symbolism to remind us of the centrality of death to the piece which makes an interesting contrast with Willy Decker’s famous production.

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Ben out, Tracy in

Posted on July 15, 2014 by operaramblings

If you have been wondering who would replace recently retired Ben Heppner in Westben’s annual Sunday Afternoon at the Opera, to be held this year on July 20th at 2:00 pm, the wait is over. It will be veteran coloratura soprano Tracy Dahl, last seen in Toronto as Despina. She’ll be accompanied by Ensemble Studio head honcho Liz Upchurch. Tickets available at www.westben.ca

Not a mezzo in sight

Posted on July 13, 2014 by operaramblings

Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse is in many ways it’s a classic opera seria. The good guy roles are written for castrati but the baddies here too go to high voices; a castrato and a tenor. But what sets this apart is that it was written for Rome where it premiered in 1730. At that time women were not allowed on stage in the Papal States so the two female roles were played by castrati en travesti. In recreating it in 2012, l’opéra national de Lorraine chose to cast all five castrati roles with countertenors, producing a cast like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard.

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Christian Chaudet’s Le Rossignol

Posted on July 13, 2014 by operaramblings

Christian Chaudet’s film of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol started life as a 1999 studio sound recording of the piece conducted by James Conlon. Chaudet became somewhat obsessed with the recording and decided to turn it into a film, recruiting the original singers as part of the project. It’s an ambitious film which mixes live action, animation and a series of special effects to create something really rather weird and wonderful. It frames the Hans Christian Anderson tale in a modern setting involving a mobile phone, a weird internet cafe and a reality talent show. He throws in some Gilliamesque animation and a live nightingale for good measure.

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