In brief
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Mozart – Le Nozze di Figargo / L. A. Philharmonic 5-17-13
I am not sure that I formed a coherent picture of this production as a musical performance, because I was sitting behind the stage, so while I could see most of what was going on, the orchestra had a weird reversed quality and usually the singers had their backs to me. On the other hand, remember how they had to issue me and several other people different tickets because they had to put a thing where we were originally seated? Well, turns out that the thing was the chorus. Half on one side of the hall, half on the other, in the last rows of seats. They were directly behind me. Never have I heard the women’s chorus parts in such, ah, brutal detail. Sort of fun, though.
Fear
Do you ever have those moments of worry right before a concert, that somehow you’ve come on the wrong day, or it was an afternoon performance and you thought it was an evening concert, or they’ll scan your ticket and the reader will reject it, or the line for the women’s bathroom will turn into a sort of time vortex that will cause you to miss the first act, or the performance was actually scheduled in such and such theater’s auxiliary performance space across town and you’ll never make it?
Early weekend
I’m in Los Angeles and dead tired. Perhaps my brain will be working by tomorrow. I certainly hope it is, because I hear there’s an opera on . . . .
Handel – Tamerlano / Handel-Festspiele Halle, 2001 (2)
(Previous section here.)
Pushee is the only countertenor in this operation – the role of Tamorlano is sung by mezzo Monica Bacelli, sporting a false mustache. (I guess if you’re a mezzo or an alto, false mustaches are just one of those things you have to get used to. Does anyone know: do false mustaches come in little separate pieces, like one for each side, or is it generally one unit? Or does it depend on the mustache?)
Clearly height is not everything
I’m taller than Schubert, Beethoven AND Ravel. And if I wore heels, I could look Wagner in the eye.
Tamerlano to be continued at a later date . . .
Because my house was burgled and they took my computer. They left me my stereo, though.
The above is my kicked-in front door. Bummer.
Fortunately they took only small tech items, did no damage except for the door, and all my music was backed up on my work computer.
Handel – Tamerlano / Handel-Festspiele Halle, 2001 (1)
Handel’s Tamerlano is not as well known as some of his other operas. The title character, Tamerlano, is Emperor of the Tartars. He has defeated and taken prisoner the Turkish sultan Bajazet, who has a daughter named Asteria. Asteria is in love with a Greek prince, Andronico, who is in Turkey for reasons I was unable to determine.
The downside to listening to Verdi while cooking
Sometimes you get distracted by the orchestral writing and end up grating your knuckle rather than the parmesan.
Weekend 5-11-13
Well, looks like it’s Tamerlano or nothing. (I have successfully evaded, once more, that dubbed version of Maria Stuarda.) I also have another, newer, CD of Rachel Podger playing Vivaldi, but it’s a different set of concertos. I am not an insane Vivaldi completist; it just turned out that way.
I wonder what wax moth opera fans are like?
Apparently wax moths can hear very well. We probably should not even venture into the topic of bat sopranos.
Deep thoughts about Wagner
So I have been listening to the performance of Tristan and Isolde that the BBC broadcast last week (thanks to Rob for the tip.) The conductor is Donald Runnicles, and it is a testament to my deep and abiding immaturity that to me the word “Runnicles” sounds like something you might catch via contaminated water in Jamestown in 1610 or so. If you survived, you would emerge from the ordeal a bit crusty and extremely dehydrated.
But it’s a very enjoyable performance.
Ugh.
I remember taking one of those career aptitude tests as a student – remember those? Based on my results, I was told that I ought to be a historian . . . or a banker. Sometimes I wonder what Earworm the Banker would have been like. I suspect she would enjoy the figure-out-the-system aspect of banking. And she would not have to fail nearly half the students in her survey course, which Actual Earworm the History Professor will soon have to do, based on the results of the final exam. How do you teach people to retain information and think about the connections between things while also not lapsing into fuzzy generalities? (Then again, if I knew how to teach people to think both abstractly and precisely, I’d probably be making more than most bankers I am making now.)
Gluck – Orfeo ed Euridice / ROH 1991 (2)
(Previous section here.)
But Orfeo has not found a possum. I was thinking about this question a little more, and it occurs to me that Orfeo’s possum is probably related to the way the production often gives him a double, or has him switch costumes in such a way as to indicate that whatever it is he’s experiencing is not necessarily real.
Gluck – Orfeo ed Euridice / ROH 1991 (1)
I wish I could give whoever manages our DVD collection about $5000 and a brain implant, because then we would have some fun as far as acquisitions are concerned. We would, for example, soon have a bright shiny new copy of that other version of this that has Kasarova in the title role. That said, the Orfeo here, Jochen Kowalski, is well worth hearing. His voice doesn’t have that hooty quality I sometimes dislike in countertenors – it’s intense, expressive, technically very impressive singing. (And it inspired, on the part of one Amazon reviewer, a sentence that is still making me scratch my head: “this opera is all about Orfeo, and Kowolski sings with not a hint of pandering (he is, after all, a countertenor) and with searing intensity.” Are counter-tenors particularly known for not pandering? Is there a countertenor marching song, like the Marine Corps anthem, but instead of the “shores of Tripoli” it’s something about not pandering?)
Weekend 5-4-13
Gluck or Handel . . . but definitely one of the two. Or both. (Tamerlano and Orfeo ed Euridice.)
It hasn’t happened yet, but I think I will soon be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of the opera collection at the library. (It’s a pretty small barrel.) There is a lip-synched movie version of Maria Stuarda that I have been studiously ignoring – but based on the astigmatic gleam of its little plastic box whenever I roll open the DVD shelf, I think it knows that I will come for it eventually.
The thing is, I vacuum barefoot all the time.
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Missing Pieces
I had one of the marches from Die Zauberflöte stuck in my head for forever yesterday afternoon – and the really frustrating thing was that it was just a snippet, a few bars, and I could not remember what it was. I knew it was Mozart, but that was all. So I just had to wait until I could connect it to something else that reminded me of where it came from. It’s sort of like the inverted musical version of not being able to think of the precise word you’re looking for.
This is quite possibly the most interesting thing that has happened to me all week.
Because when in doubt . . . Boccherini
It is one of the minor musical embarrassments of my life that it took me ages to realize that his name was spelled “Boccherini” and not “Bacherini.” (Luigi Bacherini, son of the infamous Bacherino Bacherini, banditto and castanet virtuoso, master of the steel-edged flying castanets of Andalusia . . . distantly related to the more famous Bach family of Germany?)
New Horizons in Musical Appreciation
My car has been in the shop this past week (someone backed their bumper into it in a parking lot – minor damage to side of car, no damage to any people) and I very foolishly left all my various device connector cords in it when I dropped it off for repair, so I have been listening to the radio in my rental car on the way to and from work. The options in terms of radio stations around here are country, classic country, contemporary country, christian pop, christian country, contemporary christian country, gospel, and classic rock. I have elected to go with classic rock.
