« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
Those wacky Brits at English National Opera have set The Coronation of Poppea on a cruise ship, reports mighty Jessica Duchen.
When it comes to retro-nostalgia for krappy TV from the 1970s, we still think that Opera Chic's staging for L'elisir D'Amore (it's perfectly ready, available to opera houses and/or agents, e-mail in the front page "about" link) set in the 1970s with a Magnum-P.I.-like Nemorino is vastly superior. And it's more of teh funnay than Monteverdi anyway.
We revisited the Lennie love @ Hotel Sacher, and were pleased to remember Lennie as both "Dracula Lennie" in full black cape, and "Oktoberfest Lennie" in his red corduroy ensemble -- the dual awesomeness of the supercool conductor/composer/TV guy & one of our favorite hotels ev4r is just too tasty a thought to entertain.
Hallway of Sacher Hotel, Vienna
Dracula Lennie
omg red corduroy. so lenny.
normal Lennie. "With my warm thanks for your tender care." --Lennie B. 196-?
And when I think about it now it's terrible to say, because the piano used to come out of the floor and people would be hanging around like they do in nightclubs—two, three in the morning—and they'd ask him for a little melody.… So now I feel like I was living with Frédéric Chopin going, 'Hey, Frédéric, you've got to go home.' I used to wrench him from the piano and tell people to stop giving him drinks, because they'd give him drinks and he'd give them drinks and it was never-ending until four o'clock in the morning."
Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lulu Gainsbourg, Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau, Bambou remember that major composer of the 20th Century, Monsieur Gainsbourg; OPera Chic non plus.
For Opera Chic's "Those Krazy Direktors" series, issue # 3,441: in Naples, Thomas Ostermeier is staging a post-Planet-of-the-Apes production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where, well, things go bananas pretty quick as you can see in the images: male strippers, oral secks with masks, a gang rape, and various s and m activites.
Less secksyly, the dour Mario Martone is instead staging a Falstaff with a cast of inmates from a Naples juvenile prison.
A Wagner opera.
In a German open-air theatre built by Hitler for the Berlin Olympics.
Performed by an orchestra made up of Jews and Muslims.
Conducted by a Jew.
(The joke would of course be funnier if Bayreuth had already been turned into a Holocaust Museum, as Opera Chic has argued in the past).
Anna bananna apparition on a Vienna newsstand:
http://www.guj.de/index_en.php4?/en/produkte/zeitschrift/zeitschriftentitel/gala_r.php4
Love the crazy earring.
Everyone in Vienna was out pimpin Decca's Pavarotti Forever October release, and we're gonna do it, too. That's right. With this post.
still didn't buy it tho' *ppppthttththhtt*
In addition to the comprehensive music stores that litter Vienna's Kärntnerstrasse (like the dizzying EMI store) and the Ringstrasse, we kicked around the miniature Wiener Philharmoniker store that tempted with exclusive Wiener recordings. We had tried to visit during our first trip to Vienna last year, but they were closed for inventory or something. We <3 it because they even have their own Walk of Fame star smack in front of the store. Let's hope Walmart doesn't buy out the property one day.
In addition to CDs and DVDs, a smattering of Wiener Philharmoniker souvenirs becon. However, at €50 (USD $70), we balked at the purchase of an exclusive WP optical mouse. I mean, it's all sorts of rad, but dang...optical is kinda jumpy, and you can get one neways for 30 bucks.
But no joke. I'd be big pimpin with that optical mouse. true dat. after some kickball in the park, i'd pull off my leggings and oversized thrift store t-shirt, crack open a PBR, pop in some Decemberists, stream the screener of The Darjeeling Limited, and fire-up the Wiener optical mouse. Cuz im twee like dat.
Anyway OC could not resist and did buy a box of Clemens Krauss's throat lozenges because the weather was chilly, a Wilhelm Furtwaengler beanie hat for her little cousin, Karajan's penguin pajamas for her dad, but she could not bring herself to buy one of those creepy Hans Knappertbusch rubber mask/a$$chaps combos.
Now that teh gr8 *~*OC*~* has returned from Vienna and downloaded the images from all her various cameras and phones, she's ready to share with you the awesome things that she saw in the city. Viennarrific.
OC thought it was proper to pay her respects last week in Vienna @ Der Wiener Zentralfriedhof, Vienna's largest cemetery. Boarding the tram #71 out of Schwarzenbergplatz, we were treated to a panorama of some of Vienna's undercover boutiques and bars, running a 25 minute stretch from downtown. Destination: A gray and labyrinthish cememtery of gigantic tombstones. Here you find the graves of [cut&paste lol @ wikipaedia] Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Carl Czerny, Christoph Gluck, Lotte Lehmann, György Ligeti, Léonie Rysanek, Antonio Salieri, Franz Schmidt, Arnold Schönberg, Franz Schubert, the entire Strauss clan, Hugo Wolf, and Alexander von Zemlinsky. Among others, and a lame memorial to Mozart (his estimated grave actually stands in the now deconsecrated St. Marx-Friedhof @ Leberstrasse 6-8), the cemetery makes our own Cimitero Monumentale look like Washington Square Park (minus the drug dealers and skeevy old guys taking pictures of NYU students' feet).
Arnold Schönberg has one of the kewlest stones, simply a stylized & modern white cube perched precariously over his plot. We dropped an OE 40 @ the OG's grave. If you visit, make sure you stop @ the little office kiosk and buy a map for 20 euro cents because that sheet is off tah hook. Even with the map, it's difficult to navigate because of its ginormity. Luckily, most of the repositioned graves of our most beloved composers are found in partition 32A, marked with signage "Musiker" (see below).
You can go online and find the actual images of the notable graves, but OC won't do the pleasure 'cause it's not her thang.
«I took it as a sign from God.» «Tonight, I have finally put away the ghosts of Milan that have haunted me,» he said during a midnight interview in his dressing room.
Roberto Alagna sings Radames in NYC (no loggionisti need apply), talks nonsense afterwards; our merciless big sister La Cieca posts a review from reader Gualtier Malde.
Dear OpéraBouffe from Rome (Italian language link) gives a well-deserved shoutout to the half-forgotten greatness of Ottorino Respighi, that giant of the twentieth century, by far the greatest Italian composer of "il Novecento": OpéraBouffe is raving about I Pini di Roma and Le Fontane di Roma in the awesome Pappano version (and we join her also in the cheering for the talented Signor Tony who, we hope, one fine day will be hired by la Scala as much-needed music director): Opera Chic obviously holds dear to her heart the Respighi illuminated by Riccardo Muti's and Philly's talent, and we also heard Muti conduct Respighi in NYC last winter (and how cool that maestro Chailly just exported Respighi to the US during his recent US/Canada tour with Filarmonica della Scala).
But Respighi's greatest work is without a doubt his Impressioni Brasiliane, "Brazilian Impressions", a deeply unsettling and astonishingly modern work worthy (as it is often the case with Respighi) of a Richard Strauss, a 1928 travelogue in three parts that includes a chilling section inspired by a visit to a snake-breeding farm (and the snakes make the deathly sound of the Dies Irae, you can read more about that here): the best version of IB -- a version that, we fear, won't be surpassed for a long time, if at all -- is the one conducted by another forgotten giant of the 20th century, Oswald Kabasta, and the CD is predictably out of print.
Let's hear it from maestro Lopez-Cobos:
Of course, the tradition in Italy was opera. Consequently, Italian opera overshadowed the work of other Italian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries who deserved much more attention. Because of the operatic tradition in Italy, Italian composers became much more talented in bringing out the colours in orchestral music. You always observe in their music an inclination to imitate the human voice. This is especially the case with Martucci and Respighi.
Martucci, of course, the author of the Notturno that is clearly one of the major works of the 20th century, is one of Toscanini's and Muti's (and, heh, Opera Chic's) musical fetishes. But we'll write about him some other time because right now we're about to crank Kabasta's Impressioni really loud on the sound system.
Never mind the -- however impressive -- Bjork blurb: Opera Chic has exclusively interviewed some of the twentieth century's greatest minds and has obtained some awesome The Rest Is Noise quotes.
Now, all jokes aside, our maddest props to signor Ross for his accomplishment: the book officially comes out today.
Advice to our readers: buy it, don't download it!
San Juan showed some <3 for Netrebko & Schrott a few nights ago during "una noche de amor y pasion" @ Centro de Bellas Artes de Puerto Rico. La Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, conducted by Plácido Domingo, led Erwin Schrott (for an indisposed Rolando) and Netrebko as part of the CulturArte de Puerto Rico festival.
While we were in Vienna scarfing loads of Einspänner & Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Anna was in NYC downing truckloads of Hebrew Nationals & Starbucks fraps. Ain't no shame in the game. OC goes on a Hostess/Betty Crocker/Aunt Jemimie/Welsh Grape Sody binge for the first 24 hours whenever she's back in the US&A. j/k. After eating all this belli freschi Italian food, that American crap is srsly like omg poison! Go Anna Go. We still <3 u with those sweet curves (and extensions).
Clickie click.
Marcello Giordani as Roméo (singing for an ill Joseph Kaiser) to Anna Netrebko's Juliette last week at the NYC Metropolitan Opera's production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette...packin some heat under those turquoise pyjammies. marcello whar do u live i want to come say hello 2u.
Good to see that Roburto is gaining back some much-needed confidence
(AP/Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)
One of Opera Chic's favorite pastimes in Vienna is to visit the Arnold Schönberg Center (they're so 1337 that they have a YouTube page full of videos and a fantastic MySpace page as well): Arnie, the greatest Austrian ever to move to California, gets lots of l0ve there from scholars, tourists tired of the usual visits to Schonbrunn and the Belvedere, and simple hangers-on (check out the library to see the cute very serious looking young aspiring composers who hang out there spying all those scores and wondering how they can make their stuff sound NOT like a wheezing washing machine).
There was a lovely exhibit re: young Arnie, with lots of memorabilia and manuscripts.
So here's Opera Chic's field trip report.
Arnie & BFF Alex Zemlinsky: beer and the destruction of tonality.
A humongous map of Arnie's Vienna.
L'homme du train.
The dorkiest revolutionary in history.
The New York Times, confused as always when confronted by new things, greets the exile with the not so flattering headline, "The Enigma Of Modern Music Arrives" -- like, beware of Jews carrying atonality.
The maestro's study on North Rockingham, a few houses down the street from the place where OJ Simpson's wife and a friend committed suicide in that most unusual of fashions in 1994, has been shipped off to Vienna after his passing and recreated in the center. We loved the fat pencils and the customized pencil cases.
This is the life I chose or rather the life that chose me
If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black
Esa Pekka "I have learned to work even at night, when traveling, in airports" Salonen, who is and remains teh mang (besides being the second-greatest Finn ever), is bustin' a cap in the a$$ of his old dislike for the greatest Finn who ever lived, Jean Sibelius, and, as friend of OC Tim Mangan reports, E-Pek is rawking a Sibelius festival that sounds really really tasty.
(not to mention, whenever E-Pek leaves town, he hands over the keys to the LAPhil to this French boy who pretends to be 21 (to drink in bars, we assume) when, fake IDs notwithstanding, doesn't look a month older than 14.
Now Opera Chic understands that with her Vienna trip and all she'll now have to pull a Jack Bauer to go back to posting in her usual post-machina fashion, but over this weekend of -- finally -- unpacking back at her Milan headquarters she was delighted to discover that, as she was listening to Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato teaching a lesson to those stuffy Austrians about how you should sing Manon Lescaut, that same night in Parma, Maestro Muti had shown the delightful Parma audience how you should conduct Verdi's Requiem (with Barbara Frittoli among the soloists!!!).
Muti, "the world's hottest maestro", always the man of solemn, theatrical gestures, interrupted the thunderous applause that washed over the theater at the end of the concert with a decisive gesture of his hand, and finally said: "This applause is for Maestro Verdi". heh.
This, in Parma -- "Verdi Country".
Obviously, the crowd lost its collective peWp, and a huge stadium-sized ovation rumbled through the hall.
re: the Chicago Tribune's sweet editorial ("It's time for CSO to offer maestro Muti the podium"), we still don't think he'll accept, as flattered as he obviously is by all the Chicago love that's been raining down upon him.
Showing to a perplexingly lukewarm Viennese audience at the Wiener Staatsoper last tonight, Puccini's Manon Lescaut was a pure delight stemming from the warm, rich, practiced voices of leads Fabio Armiliato (Renato Des Grieux) and Daniela Dessi (Manon Lescaut). In all honesty, OC passed half the performance with her eyes half-closed, bathing in the fabio-lus duets of Fabiela Dessabio, and relegating Carsen's chaotic direction as an abstract turkey leftover to the overstuffed, graying audience. We do love Carsen, a man-child filled with such polished, retro, big-spender ideas, but when he's bad, he gets it all wrong. And this Carsen production is all sorts of wrong. He steam-rolled over the libretto and infused the direction in his own lofty, updated, modern visions, while leaving the poetic corset to flounder hopelessly on stage. The most glaring detraction was setting the majority of action not in a public square, but instead in a half covered luxury mall, gleaming windows displaying retro ladies evening wear.
By Act IV, when Manon is supposedly dying in the desert, it just doesn't make any sense as she begs Des Grieux to find water sprawled on the faux marble floor in front of the opulent window displays. I mean, break into Applebees or CVS or something...or better yet, drag your dying a$$ over to Starbucks and get a frap. whatevs. it was too difficult to suspend belief, and it just didn't work. Carsen was so far from the libretto and mainstream conceptions that I almost thought again he had liberally altered the libretto himself to suit the new action as he did with Lenny's Candide at La Scala earlier this year.
Act I opened with the chorus mercilessly pruned of any members over 30, dressed as rejects from those GAP commercials that ran a few years ago and loitering about the half-covered mall area. A homeless man loitered in the back on his makeshift cardboard bed, and trash littered the marbled pavement. Des Grieux swaggered out in a black leather coat and a hoodie underneath. ick. Armiliato's supreme skillz thankfully made the costume melt beneath his creamy voice, and his wardrobe thankfully wasn't a gigantic detraction. "Donna non vidi mai" was exceptional, a clear and powerful delivery.
Manon entered in a blue trench, a platinum blond wig in a tight braid down her back. Dessi slammed the role, as always pumping out the exact notes in perfect control and poise, sweet color and effortless grace. And btw, although her natural brown hair suits her just fine, she looked smoking in platinum gold. I was all like damn. daayyum! When Des Grieux and Manon absconded, they did so in a Benz that was literally backed onto the stage. As two students (bearing the likeness of Manon and Des Grieux) reinacted the scene before Lescaut and Geronte, piles of money were emptied from a suitcase onto the body of a writhing Manon, swiftly changing the narrative of Manon from heroine to gold-digging slut. Carsen, like Puccini had been accused, cannot help pervade a tinge of mysogony that is unappealing and overt. Carsen falls into, once again, an underlying objectification of women, and the narrative turns from that of a courageous woman to one dependant on her man and his wealth.
Act II called for a costume and set change, and Manon appeared in a black silk chemise, surrounded by attendees and hang-ons, Mistress Barbie in full effect. Instead of window displays, they were in a luxury, minimalist penthouse apartment overlooking a not-Paris city center, with the only furniture appearing as large, flat couches dropped in the middle of the stage and a pile of cushions in the corner. Dessi's "L'ora, o Tirsi, è vaga e bella" was gorgeous and touching, but the overstuffed audience was all like yea ok MOAR.
When Geronte showed-off the hawtness of Manon to his friends, Carsen decided on staging a photoshoot, with four identical flappers in magenta bobbed wigs dancing behind her, awash in a sea of magenta light. um, what? And again, the whole rapz0rs scene at the end of the act was super lame. As Geronte's Matrix-Stormtroopers emptied Manon's packed suitcases, they spilled the booty of jewels and money all over the ground, which remained on stage throughout the rest of the evening.
Act III spun further out of control, arias sung while fondling jewels and a chorus dressed in evening ewar, culminating with a parade of Manon with a dozen other incarcerated prisons participating in an evening-wear fashion show, flash bulbs popping throughout the whole moronic scene in a seizure-inducing pattern. ok, Carsen, we get it. Capitalism, his favorite pet flogging boy, is again beaten like a dead horse. WE GET IT OK? The entire event distracted insanely from the excellent singing (and original libretto), and was embarrassingly ridiculous. The only thing that saved it was the meaty duets among Dessi and Armiliato, leaving OC almost breathless at the absolute harmony between teh two onstage-offstage lovers. Their chemistry was under perfect control and gauge, scope and credibility.
Act IV was the most ridiculous of all, the desert represented as the same covered mall from Act I (and II & III). How Dessi was able to act herself through that direction was a miracle, and props to her for putting on such a professional face. Her acting was so pristine, that it was almost too much for Carsen's perplexing direction, and came off as incongruent to the coldness of his sets. "Sola, perduta, abbandonata" from Dessi was off the hook, but again, she suffused so much emotion into the aria, while the scenery and direction was so careless and jibing.
The audience last night was cooly detacted and blase, barely breaking into applause after the most stellar duets and arias by Dessi. OC was somewhat incredulous, and thought back to the thunderous Adriana Lecouvreur that she saw last April at La Scala, where the loggioni flipped out -- and rightfully so -- after the supa-powa duo wonder twins Dessi & Armiliato rocked the Piermarini casbah. Last night, Armiliato and Dessi sang their big hearts away, and intertwined their techniques so flawlessly, but barely any shouts of brava peppered the audience. In fact, one of the only applauses inserted spontaneously into the opera last night was after the Act III intermezzo. HA! Also: Jeff Koons. His monstrosity of a curtain "Geisha" -- a cross between Basquiat & Murakami -- hanging over the stage comes from a larger body of work called "Hulk Elvis" (the big green monstah is in teh haus in all his horrorsome fearfulness). Enough for now...more on his curtain later.
Other thoughts? The Wiener Staatsoper is a gigantic arena, feeling more vacuous than The Metropolitan Opera house, and decorated less than a high school auditorium. wtf? Filled to the brim with grey old ladies and tourists (Americans in Vienna is at like saturation point this week, thanks to Columbus Day which must have insured enough vacation days for international travel), everyone was stuffed with too much knoedel and sacher torte to lift a hand for applause. The ghost of Puccini himself could have been conjured on the stage tonight, and the audience would have still sat back and farted. Applause was pitiful and not on the level that was deserved. At all. Yeah, the La Scala loggionisti are annoying and sometimes super lame and they may not always be in good faith, but I am thankful that they are a reliable barometer of talent, and was awakened to the mystique of Fabiela Dessabio, who are revered as sacred in their thorny hands.
Before Opera Chic decyphers her notes (hastily written in the back of a seriously chocolate-stained napkin from Demel), just a quick roundup – the review is coming later – on tonight’s production of Manon Lescaut at Vienna’s Staatsoper. We’ll write extensively tomorrow about the awesomeness of Fabio Armiliato’s and Daniela Dessì’s voices, but tonight we want to explain how, well, impressively not good the ideas Robert Carsen had for this staging, his second Manon Lescaut already, were.
We consider Carsen – together with David McVicar, Graham Vick, Nigel Lowery and a very few brilliant others who are mercifully under 70-years-old – the great hope for opera fans who hope to watch – and not just to listen – to some great shows in the future decades – Carsen is one of the kids whose responsibility it is to allow us not to go to the opera house wearing sleep masks to block out the sheer stupidity of the staging.
But, tonight we really wished we had kept one of those sweet green Alitalia sleep masks we wore last week coming back from the US (and not only because Alitalia’s imminent going out of business will turn them into cool retro memorabilia pretty soon).
Because Carsen is like one of those TV cops with a bad attitude and a lot of street smarts: all instincts and chutzpah, and when they get it right they crack the case before the next commercials appear; when they’re wrong, they’re like totally sending an innocent man to the chair because they’ve made themselves certain that he’s guilty, even when he’s clearly not.
Because when Carsen gets it the kicks major a$$ the way he did with his ethereal Dialogues des Carmelites and his otherworldly Iphigenie, to name just two, that are among the best productions we have ever seen; when he gets it wrong he either hammers already delicate material like Bernstein’s Candide into submission turning into something else and really damaging the piece in the process, or he simply ruins a perfectly good opera the way he did tonight with Manon Lescaut.
A first act where the students are dressed up in contemporary, GAP-style lam4r clothes and dance just like in one of those old GAP ads, only not as well, in a clap-ur-hands-say-yea fashion; where the action takes place in a mall where the women’s fashion is from the 1950s and the big props are shopping bags from Chanel and Gucci (big Puccini message: shopping bad, clapping hands like a moron good); Manon is decked out in a man’s shirt and navy trench coat just like those big stars from the DDR realist films from the 1950s (a sin especially unforgivable when the soprano is as milfatuation-worthy as Daniela Dessì, who’d really deserve better from her director and costume designer). Des Grieux instead wears an appalling black fake-leather coat over a sleeveless greenish hoodie (and good luck with that when the tenor isn’t as tall and slender and young-looking as Fabio Armiliato).
In the second act all hell breaks loose – it starts with Manon dressed out badly even as a rich woman, in a shapeless long black nightie that’s supposed to be a dress, we fear, underneath a premaman-like loose flowing purple jacket – evidently all the shopping didn’t help much since she’s made to look like a tree trunk, a good idea when the soprano weighs more than 200 pounds, a major sin when you have a soprano as attractive as Dessì. Impromptu photo shoots (with horribly stereotypical gay makeup artists prancing in various teapot stances and stealing Manon’s makeup in ways that make those black porters and maids from 1930s Hollywood movies look like models of sensitivity) follow; Manon and her chambermaids end the act gang-raped by Geronte and a bunch of soldiers dressed as the bad guys in the Matrix.
The third act’s best idea is a perp-walk of models that turns into a fashion show’s catwalk, with Paris Hilton-style celebrity justice and paparazzi shooting their flashlights like crazy, over and over, as the singers try to go on with the opera Puccini went to the trouble of writing.
In the final act, well, the desert is that same mall, with used-up shopping bags everywhere, and tons of money thrown everywhere (all the money in the world won’t buy you water, get it? Get it?? Get IT????).
In all this chaos, Dessi’s and Armiliato's singing was the usual wonder, as always, as if their voices come out of their throats already filtered and equalized and corrected by a sound engineer – they sound better live than most opera singers in studio recordings.
When in doubt, if they’re up on stage and the director is losing his pewp the way Carsen did tonight, just close your eyes. Or purchase score desk, partial view seats. (They’ll certainly beat our 70-dollars a pop seats at the Staatsoper – the least you see, the better in this case. Just listen, and dream.
OC, reporting °rite now° from a chilly & crisp Vienna, stumbled onto a new Mozart novelty while shopping in the disastrously crappy and equally exhilarating Mariahilfer Strasse. In Vienna, one can predictably find Mozart's idealized visage almost everywhere, from t-shirts to mugs, umbrellas to chocolates, scarves to toilet paper. Why no one has mentioned the more creative exploitations of the Austrian idol is beyond me, so imma bring it 2u raw.
At Vienna°s Secks World Spartacus (dont be a prude, Prudey McPrudePants), you can tickle your fancy with certain phallic delights inspired by revered composers. Yah thats rite. Here you can dream of a model called "The Mighty Mozart" or one called "The Teasing Tchaikovsky". omg löööööllllllllll.
From "The Teasing Tchaikovsky", the manufacturer boasts:
"Compose your greatest s3xual symphony, for a sensational org4$mic opus" (...) "sure to reach your high G notes" (...) "an orchestral org4$m" (...) "Rapturous Raunchy Rhythms."
We °heart° whoever wrote the super cheesy copy, and wish we could be so bold as to appropriate it as our own. In the meantime, insert joke about batons °rite here°.
Moar 2morrow...specifically this.
Check out this pictury goodness. All photos from Yuri Temirkanov's conducting of Verdi's La Traviata in Parma, Saturday, October 6, 2007 on occassion of Festival Verdi 2007 @ Teatro Regio di Parma ^.^
(Above: This is what you see when you enter Parma and then turn around in your tracks. Noticed the VerdiFest 2007 poster? Of course you did.)
(Above: the building on the right is the facade of the Teatro Regio di Parma.)
(Above: VerdiFest 2007 and main street Parma.)
(Above: La Trav)
(Above: La Trav)
(Above: An outdoor exhibition on the opera of Verdi.)
(Above: Close-up of said exhibition. "Ah! Un altro bacio..." from Otello).
(Above: Many of the stores in Parma were displaying, in the front windows, props and costumes from past Teatro Regio Verdi productions.)
(Above: Another store makes a display of costumes from a past Verdi production.)
(Above: And again.)
(Above: Composite view of Teatro Regio di Parma. It's purdy.)
(Above: Curtain call of La Traviata.)
(Above: Homage to Svetla Vassileva's gray socks, which made the act III dying Violetta kinda cozy.)
Very few things in life one cannot refuse no matter how tired one feels -- a trip through a Manhattan snowstorm to get to the FedEx office to pick up that pristine vintage scarf from Balenciaga one's friend in Paris has found at the Puces in Saint Ouen, a daytrip to the Prada Outlet in Tuscany no matter how hellish the traffic back to Milan on the Autostrada Del Sole will be, crashing a NFL Madden-style line of defense made up of tourists to get to see for the 114th time the Cenacolo @ Santa Maria delle Grazie (or, as an American tourist enlightened us once, "the Dan Brown painting").
A Traviata in Parma's Teatro Regio is one of those things you just cannot miss.
No matter if the Goyard vintage luggage lies still untouched in the hallway, and the crushing jetlag is the kind stylish Oscar-winning films set in Japan are made of: we're so there.
We'll write about the gigantic lunch @ signora Miriam in Trattoria La Buca next week -- we get fat just thinking about it, we need a break -- so here's the play-by-play account of our night at the opera.
Back in April, we got excited by the idea of that subtle, most elegant of conductors, Yuri Temirkanov , in charge of Traviata, possibly OC's most beloved opera. We got worried instead by the thought of the Herrmann team (not Bernard, that major American composer of the 20th Century), Karl-Ernst and his wife Ursel, directing the piece. Because after bleeding all the Mozart awesomeness out of too many masterpieces (a sterile Così Fan Tutte, a lamely wacky Clemenza Di Tito that had Riccardo Muti rightly appalled, and he ended leaving the Salzburg production in the early 1990s, a geometrically boring Idomeneo) they got us all like, wtf.
(^^^^^^THE DIREKTORS)
We were obviously worried about the German couple's treatment of the piece -- not that we like our Traviata to be necessarily oldskool like the b0ringest Traviata we saw last July in Milan, mind you, we love that wonderful man of Graham Vick's amazing take on it and we're eagerly waiting for an opera house to hire Nigel Lowery to tackle Traviata -- but we were afraid of seeing just another punk Violetta OD with a huge needle in her arm as a Rocky Horrorrific procession of space trannies danced some weird tribal dance.
Instead the Herrmanns gave a very beautiful -- if sometimes pleasantly, slightly kitschy -- account of that greatest of love stories: the big fat dining room painted a Barneyish throbbing shade of purple, the huge oval table in the first act with a Madonna-circa-1985-ultraskanky-Material Girl-Violetta (tho' a really skanky-secksy Svetla Vassileva showing off some really nice legs) dancing on it, straddling -- long legs akimbo -- various lucky guests, their top hats flying everywhere, sparklers planted inside big pineapples, plates happily crashing on the floor. The vista of frozen lake out of the huge floor to ceiling windows in Act II, ice and snow enveloping the action -- the frostiness of separation, of the interruption of love, of paternal deceit. And the genius touch of Germont (a very solid Vladimir Stoyanov, with the right degree of the scared bourgeois' cold blood and with a very very good clear cut Italian diction) singing the heartbreaking "Di Provenza" as Alfredo noisily bawls his out in a fetal position on the floor, unable to even move or to stop crying -- a not so small touch, with a really strong effect on the audience.
And then the crazy party with the gypsies on a stage within the stage, a guy in a lobster mask (don't ask), the croupier cheerfully dealing bad cards, money flying again, Violetta falling down on the floor and her beautiful virginal white dress becomes a broken flower seen from above, her torso its stem; and she sings, "Alfredo, Alfredo di questo core" while lying face down on the floor, basically singing into the floor -- a difficult feat Svetla accomplished beautifully.
The third act, the most conventional part of the staging, had one thing that had poor ol' romantic Opera Chic (Traviata turns us into mush, deal wit it) in stitches: "Parigi, o cara" was sung with Alfredo and Violetta giving their backs to each other -- a lie that you're uncapable of delivering while looking at the loved one in the face. A small idea, but a very good one.
THE SINGERS
Vassileva started out bad in the first -- not because she missed any notes, she was spot-on all night -- but because she employed that huge voice of hers with really good centri but with the tops really really ugly, a voice that's too harsh up there and the more she pushes the more she gets it out of control -- not my thang at all. She got better and better, more confident, pushing less, and reaching into those beautiful middles she has, and even the lack of chemistry with Alfredo in act I, a perfectly correct if somewhat uninspiring Massimo Giordano, was replaced by a nice warmth as the opera progressed. It just didn't work at the party -- I mean, he's already smitten, OK; but she was just being a bYotch, not REALLY giving away one inch, and her interest for the boi totally approached zero; unhelped by really heavy makeup and those legs in black tights very visible all the time, she just looked like a very nasty skank, not one of the most complex heroines in the history of everything.
She thankfully recovered, stealing the show from the boi. We have already said that Stoyanov as Germont gave a really dignified appearence to that awful man's hypocrisy, and his Di Provenza was really good.
TEH UNCLE SOLLY
Yuri Temirkanov, our dear Uncle Solly, did something very special and unique (and was cheered as a hero by the Parma Verdi ultrasnobs): as we wrote last night, in Act I a few times the voices, and in one instance the orchestra, couldn't really match his intentions and the voices lagged slightly behind and the orchestra ran the risk of giving that appalling ooompah-ooompah beat that Verdi gets whenever things in the pit collapse on themselves -- Temirkanov's quicksilver tempi were the fastest we've heard this side of young Muti (still our fave conducting in any Traviata), the pacing that required lighting-fast change of colors -- then the production really took off, and it all made sense: the understated lean/mean Traviata of the first act was in fact as flirtatious with the listeners as Violetta's own attitude -- became in Act II, with the separation of the lovers, a brooding race toward their frantic reunion; then the horrible sadness of Act III, Violetta's death hitting you as hard as a slap across the face, the dark colors of Act II having become very clear and delicate in Act III -- Temirkanov conducting with a merciless eye toward the text, toward what's happening onstage -- a stroke of genius that made the audience perplexed at first, then when it became clear what he was doing, well, somebody even screamed "Bravo Maestro!" right after the preludio of Act III, igniting more applause from the audience, and you should have been there to hear the cheering, the "Grazie Maestro!" screamed from the usually cruel loggionisti, and Temirkanov shyly climbing onstage as the orchestra happily stomped their feet on the pit's wooden floor, beating their bows on their music stands, and Temirkanov was kissed twice by his Violetta and he shyly pointed his index finger toward his cheek -- requesting a third kiss, Russian style, bringing down teh haus even more.
PS:: A quick note to fans of the too-famous Violettas who think that it's all about them, period: whenever Vassileva came out on stage to enjoy her many calls, she pointed to the orchestra pit, and clapped her hands, asking the audience to give it up for the kids who had played so well such an unusual reading of Traviata. She knew that without their great work, and had the grace to share the massive cheering with them.
