Met Opera movie theater broadcasts, 2008-2009

[Wanderer]

That is how it is going to look like, I believe:

I'll have the Moreau, thanks.

[Sarastro]

orgy
sex

Whereas it could probably be historically true, I do not think it is necessary to show orgies or nudity onstage. I am more concerned about the vocal image a singer portrays than claptrap effects. I am old-fashioned, I know.

[knight66]

As far as I am concerned, opera is about rather more than the sounds. If not, then move it into the concert repertoire. To the extent that any of these productions have artistic insight, then they should be left to show it. If it is crap, then taking the camera elsewhere will not show up the vacuity if there is merely a sensationalist approach.

We are not really looking at historical accuracy. We are looking at an art form that his heavily filtered and used history towards its own creative ends and I have no argument with that. I don't go to the opera for a history lesson. I do however go to get a rounded theatrical experience. I hope in any grownup opera to find out about the psychology of the characters, whether we can find relevance there to mirror our own society or highlight how it is different from our behaviour and mores now. Also, the music has to be great, or I just don't bother.

I have been asked to go and watch Wolf Ferrari's Jewels of the Madonna in February; an unacknowledged masterpiece? I doubt it. But as well as the above, I will occasionally stick my toes into the arcane and hope for the best.

Mike

[knight66]

Salome: I've been, I saw, I was not conquered. Sarastro's friend was right...so so. Though I still enjoyed the experience and will go to more relays.

It is not remotely like going to the opera, despite which some in the cinema audience applauded; which made me think they were only allowed out for the day. Here the sound is in your lap, the visuals are down the larynx. I have no idea what the balance would have been in the theatre, but as broadcast it was up close at all times. Even when Kim Begley sang from the back of the stage, he was right in my ear. So the sound perspectives were completely flattened. This robs the feeling of space and the excitement of watching someone pit their voice against the wall of sound Strauss often devises.

The orchestra sounded generally loud, even during passages that are delicate. The pacing was not altogether to my taste. I felt the score came across as episodic, especially in the dance itself. Moreover, it wound down in the last 20 minutes, which were often just too slow. Nor was the conductor able to pull off that miracle at the end, once Salome has had her way with the head, the soundworld goes cold, when the moon silvers the score.

I was content with most of the production. A 1960s James Bond baddie's palace on the edge of a stylised desert with an incongruous miner's cage topped with scaffolding....of which more anon.

There seemed to be some marginal reference to modern conflicts, as Islamic black dressed angles gathered in numbers and stood stock still surveying the disintegration of the Court. Herodias was played as a lush declining into alcoholic disinterest. There were really no dynamics between Herod and Salome, they occupied a shared space, but we were told nothing beyond, him wanting her to dance, she manipulating him to get her way. I saw no subtext to this production, no exposure of the psychology of the characters. Salome was played as a spoilt bored teenager with morbid tastes and a good deal of determination.

The singing was first rate all round, the acting was another story.

Mattila is famous for this part, she was accorded a standing ovation. She sings up a storm and has all the notes. Just before Jochanaan is executed, she forced her voice and suddenly it was occluded; but her tone cleared for the final scene, which she played and sang to the hilt.

Here, I assume distance lent enchantment. The constant right up the nose camera angles exposed her mid forties age mercilessly and her coyness and teenage temper tantrums were almost as grisly as her dancing. She may be supple, but she is far from being an elegant mover and I felt inclined to watch her dance through my fingers. Squirmingly embarrassing, the woman galumphs. There was a woeful attempt at pole-dancing using the scaffolding. The clothes she was put into formed good grounds for suing the management, she could hardly have been less advantageously dressed. If her face was to convey ecstasy, then up close, it looked like a painful kind of eroticism.

All the bit-part women were like social X-Rays, which pointed up her spare pounds, absurd really, as she is not fat, just not slim. Up close her mother looked like her sister and frankly a good deal more appetising.

Kim Begley as the Tertrach sang well, no shouting, but as an actor, he was channelling a slightly testy Father Christmas. He was not in the least neurotic or lascivious, there was nothing decadent about his manner. When asked for the Head of the Baptist, he pursed his lips....a disconcerting administrative problem had come his way. Also, he bounces on the balls of his feet when singing....a jaunty Tertrach then.

The Jochanaan of Juha Uusitalo was a massive presence with a wonderful full, dark voice only slightly weak right at the bottom. There were titters around me when prone, taking up a fair acreage of the stage and looking like he had been rolled in mud, Salome sings of his wasted body like an ivory pillar, but then finding such a singer would be like discovering hen's teeth.

I am sure this will read just like a long list of carps. But I was swept up in it all, there were genuinely thrilling moments and I think a lot of what I disliked revolved around the closeup style of the camera work.

One final carp....we were treated to some backstage moments where Deborah Voigt knocks on Mattila's door and tries to draw her out and get some comments from her; I hope that scene reaches YouTube, what a hoot; as was the subsequent camera tracking, preceding Matilla, a member of the management and her very own dead ringer for Ugly Betty all the way through the backstage and onto the set. What was all that about?

Roll on Damnation de Faust in November. I will be there and perhaps will get the hang of this kind of IMAX style of presentation; though I do wonder what it will do to Stephanie Blyth's Orfeo later in the season. I may just keep my eyes shut for that one.

Mike

[scarpia]

That is exactly what has been running through my mind ever since yesterday, when I found out they are going to cut away during the nude scene.  And "scene" is almost inaccurate, since she's nude for barely two seconds.

I wonder if the DVD release will be similarly censored?

[knight66]

They already have a performance in the can from an earlier season. This has been promised for a long time with the issue dates passing without the product appearing.

A several years younger Mattila might be an advantage for repeated viewing.

Mike

[Sarastro]

Thanks for the report, Mike. I have something to say, but later, it is already too late here.

[Brünnhilde forever]

That DVD of an earlier, uncensored, Salome with Mattila probably won't ever be released because Gelb and his Met Society crowd are pushing the movie theater presentations; to hell with us world wide opera lovers not within driving distance to one of those theaters.   

[knight66]

Lis, It is something of a mystery, but it seems unlikely that worldwide sales would be shelved in favour of a few thousand cinema tickets. But if that was the reason, perhaps a release will now happen. The Peter Grimes has been released.

Mike

[Wendell_E]

Lis, It is something of a mystery, but it seems unlikely that worldwide sales would be shelved in favour of a few thousand cinema tickets. But if that was the reason, perhaps a release will now happen. The Peter Grimes has been released.

Mike

Gelb (or maybe it was Volpe?) addressed the unreleased Salome a year or so ago.  Something about the union agreement at the time would make it too expensive.  He said it would never be telecast or released.  The same applies to the recorded, but never televised or released performances of Wozzeck (from 2001, with Struckman and Dalayman, Levine conducting) and Ariadne auf Naxos (2003, with Voigt, Dessay, Marginson, Dessay, Levine).  Don't know if I really buy that explanation (you think they could work something out), but that's what he said, according to someone who was there.

[Brünnhilde forever]

Yes, Wendell, I too read the union explanation. And then there was the one stating Matilla's wish it not to be released, which of course would not explain the moldering in the basement all those other performances. 

[Siedler]

This season we've got the Met broadcasts to here in Finland too but the ticket prices are outrageous! 30 euros for one opera screening! What the heck? The cheapest tickets for the Finnish National Opera are 14 euros (yes, nosebleed seats but the sound up there is wonderful). I think the actual DVDs of the Met broadcasts cost less, something like 15-20 euros. 

[Anne]

This season we've got the Met broadcasts to here in Finland too but the ticket prices are outrageous! 30 euros for one opera screening! What the heck? The cheapest tickets for the Finnish National Opera are 14 euros (yes, nosebleed seats but the sound up there is wonderful). I think the actual DVDs of the Met broadcasts cost less, something like 15-20 euros. 

Last year at one of these HD Met showings I overheard 2 men talking.  One said he would like to charge more money per ticket.  The other one said that the Met forbids that as it is trying to increase the number of opera lovers.  Our USA price
is $22 with $20 for seniors.

[Wendell_E]

Last year at one of these HD Met showings I overheard 2 men talking.  One said he would like to charge more money per ticket.  The other one said that the Met forbids that as it is trying to increase the number of opera lovers.  Our USA price
is $22 with $20 for seniors.

Greedy, aren't they?  These things last up to 3½ hours, with intermissions, so they may have patrons hitting the snack bar, where the real money's made, two or three times.

[Anne]

    You're right.  They are greedy.

[Sarastro]

As far as I am concerned, opera is about rather more than the sounds.

I know you are right, but again, at my point of view, the artistry of the singer is in singing, in the sounds he produces. Just watching Netrebko makes me jerk thinking nowadays opera is faaar more than the sounds. Too far.

[knight66]

I have my tickets for tomorrow's Damnation of Faust; is anyone else going?

Mike

[knight66]

It was a funny sort of day, the chaotic timing of things meant that I ended up sitting waiting for the start of Faust while gobbing a hot-dog. The oddness continued when the cinema broadcast started without sound; clearly someone somewhere tried frantically to sort things out. This involved a couple of quick glimpses of a black gospal choir in full flood. However, right as Levine entered the pit, the sound came through.

It is not the fault of Berlioz that people decide to stage music he designed for the concert hall. He wrote 'scenes' from Faust; these parachute you into moments along the way; most of the story lies in between these scenes. So, how do you stage Faust and Mephistopheles flying over the planes of Hungary, as the famous march is played? I doubt if the solution is to have soldiers march backwards slowly across the set. This I felt was the one jarring note in an imaginative, highly theatrical evening.  One that solved many of the problems of translating the concert to the opera house. One where it was clear the cinema audience became increasingly absorbed as the opera unfolded in front of us.

The set consisted of a four level walkway, gauze in front, perspex back walls to it. Then the surfaces were used to project behind and in front with the singers being the filling in the sandwich. Back to front the acting area would only have been about 15 feet, but the full width and height of the proscenium was busily used. Apart from those multilevel backward marching soldiers, the stage was filled with fantastic images. The set could be at once transformed from a church with kaleidoscopic stained glass windows, with living Christs on crosses, to a storm tossed woodland where, as Mephistopheles walked across the set, the branches above him writhed and shed their leaves leaving starkness and ruin.

The skills of members of the Cirque Du Soleil were deployed to provide soldiers who marched up the wall of the set at 90 degrees to it, then fell pieta like into the arms of their womenfolk below, to resurrect and go off to war again, then die again. It was an arresting imaging to go with the music. The same men ran up and down all over the surface of the set, dressed as devils to seduce the female Sylph dancers.

But what of the music? Levine paced it well, no gear changes, no odd speeds and he aided and abetted Berlioz who is the master of the passionate rush, when the lovers are almost discovered. Again, as with the Salome, I thought the orchestral sound picture was flattened. The blend again submerged the woodwind; especially annoying in Berlioz and echoing the same complaint I had with a much older Met recording by Levine of The Trojans. Also, here we have the large, lush international sound. There is not the French sound that for instance Elliott Gardiner achieves in his recording. But the pacing and sound was dramatic, passionate and in the delicate music, layered.

Graham was superb as Marguerite. She looks her age, again the camera close-ups do not permit you to suspend your disbelief, but she was the tragic heart of the evening. Marcello Giordani in the title role sounds too Italianate to me, he has most of the notes. But Berlioz writes cruelly high lines for the part and a French tenor of the kind that presently seems to be extinct would be preferable. Like most tenors, his acting is rough and ready, he is eager to please, but is fairly much a lump of wood. The third in the trio, John Relyea was at the other extreme in terms of agility and acting. It was a pantomime villain version and played superbly to the hilt. He has a beautiful dark voice, all the range and colouring there and he used it all. Dressed in a burnished red leather suit; he dominated the stage just as he needed to.

The chorus was superb, what a body of singers. A particular highlight musically and visually was the passage from the seductive 'Voici des roses' through to the end of the Ballet of the Sylphes. Here the chorus sang in a graduated tone with delicacy and they almost equaled the best version of this passage I know of, on the Gardiner discs. Visually, having punted across the first floor of the set, now a canal, the boat tipped Faust into the water, immediately the projections showed a spectacular underwater Faust swirling round and round, bubbles rising to the surface. A real visual coup.

The ride to the abyss was imaginatively handled on stage, though as so often, I wished the TV director would have allowed us more full-stage views, the stage production, by Robert Lepage surely will win prizes for being innovative and exciting. Perhaps in the theatre, it distracted from the music. But I went home happy and looking forward to Thais on the 20th December.

One thing I wish they would drop; the backstage comings and goings. It breaks the spell; especially with Ugly-Betty again tramping about after the diva, each handing the water bottle back and forth between them. With such magic on display, why do I have to watch the chorus walking off and chatting quietly to one another in between scenes?




Mike

[Brünnhilde forever]

My thanks, Luv! I can see, smell and hear the enthusiasm emerging more and more as the performance proceeded. Cirque du Soleil doing the fly-on-the-wall act? Faust in the water? How did all this manage to get on to the habitually staid and conservative NY Met stage?

And what's a hot-dog doing in England? Ran out of Banger-n-Mash?

[knight66]

Cirque du Soleil doing the fly-on-the-wall act? Faust in the water? How did all this manage to get on to the habitually staid and conservative NY Met stage?

And what's a hot-dog doing in England? Ran out of Banger-n-Mash?

Bangers and mash in the cinema would be a rare treat. Jane and I were amongst the youngest there. It would be good to see a better cross section of people. I think the next broadcast is Thais on 20th Dec. I have the discs, but somehow the music does not make an impression on my memory. Perhaps seeing it will help.


All this innovation at the Met! I admit, it also surprised me. Perhaps the wind of change will be blowing. There is going to be less sponsorship coming their way I guess; so a pared down house style might be needed.

Mike