They Prefer to Be Called Bocca-Americans

A while ago, following the premiere of The Enchanted Island at the Met, I screwed my tongue into my cheek and named the top 10 roles Plácido Domingo should take on next for WQXR’s Operavore. Predictably, he’s singing Germont next year at the Met. Unpredictably, he made an appearance on last night’s Colbert Report, perhaps signaling his eighth career as a faux-pundit?

       

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Further to my post last week about the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s woefully misguided subscribers-only run of A Streetcar Named Desire, some numbers:

An anonymous opera company on a similar footing to LOC had a recent season where single ticket buyers made up for a percentage of ticketholders that ranged between roughly 30% and 70%. Their total capacity of ticket buyers, single tickets or subscriptions, ranged from about 50% to 80%. Most opera companies operating with the amount of repertory offered by a company such as LOC account for certain productions being more equal than others, and hope to bundle up less-popular works with subscription packages to guarantee attendance (or at least sales). For this reason, the least popular opera of the season we’re looking at is unsurprisingly also the lowest single-ticket show—though just under 1/3 of the house was still filled by single tickets, which is not a pitiful sum. There’s a handful of productions in this Harder Sell category, with single ticket buyers making up a similar percentage of the total sales.

The Undying 1600s

Thanks to new recordings and deeper research pockets, some more 17th-century operas have cropped up on the Opera Project list, going back to the 1640s and touching back on the 50s and 80s before we go back to the 90s. I’ll tidy up those lacunae this week, hopefully finding time for Staden’s Seelewig, Cesti’s Orontea and Charpentier’s David et Jonathas over the next seven days. Almost four years later and this inaugural century of opera is barreling (hopefully) towards the good stuff in Handel and Verdi and more.

Pat the Bunny

Sigh. A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Really? Fine, let’s just get this over wi––humping bunies!!(??)

Thank heaven for William Christie. Even though it’s Jonathan Kent’s direction, I still will forever associate watching rabbits bonk with the Les Arts Florissants maestro, who led this Glyndebourne production (which later docked at BAM) from the pit and on Opus Arte DVD. Not for nothing are the first sung words of the semi-opera “Come, come, come, come.” This is Purcell after dark, baby…

Actually, Midsummer and its inherent bawdiness, wife swapping and sexual rompage suits itself well to Purcell’s music and to this opera. Even though I hate the play almost as much as I hate its corresponding Yankee Candle scent, The Fairy Queen is still really enjoyable. One of the best things it has going for it is that it doesn’t set Shakespeare’s text outright, much like Thomas Adès would do centuries later with The Tempest (another Shakespeare play I’m none too keen on…ironically both Midsummer and Tempest collided for the Met’s Enchanted Island earlier this winter, also conducted by Christie and, were it not for the maddening libretto, would have eliminated all of the suck from both). It leaves the music less beholden to the text, and it’s some of Purcell’s most Italianate work—warming up the White Cliffs of Dover with some sun-baked peaks from somewhere around Sorrento. It’s unlikely that Vivaldi ever became acquainted with Purcell’s works, but his own operas (tantalizingly on the horizon) owe much to choruses like “Come, all ye songsters of the sky.”

Well I Didn’t Vote For You

Purcell’s King Arthur!Let’s do this skit.

I’m actually a huge fan of Medieval art. I just went to Paris last month and obsessed over the Cluny Museum. My fav part of the Met is the Cloisters. And a big part of all that culture comes from Arthurian legend and lore. The reading list that comes with the territory is mammoth: Le Morte d’Arthur, Arthurian Romances, Idylls of the King… it’s all very Round Table ’round midnight.

Purcell wrote King Arthur for another king, King Charles II, for the 25th anniversary of Charles’s Restoration which, among other things, would spawn the Tumblr F uck Yeah, Restoration England. It also brought us lots and lots and lots of dogs running around the Upper W/E(a)st sides. Charles II, you may remember from eons ago, was also instrumental in bringing the first opera to England’s shores.

PUPPIES!!!!!!!!!!

So there’s already a lot for me to like about King Arthur. I dig the humanistic touch in the overture, more warm than Dioclesian and less dour than Dido and Aeneas. There’s yet another Bachian chaconne with a Goldberg–like theme and variations, capped off by an infectious bass line that flows into an earworm of a fugue. It infiltrates each section of the orchestra, much like the Saxons invading England during Arthur’s time.

Oh, Snappeth

Then-contemporary criticism lobbied against Purcell’s Dioclesian/The Prophetess (1690):

“How ridiculous is it in that Scene in the Prophetess, where the great Action of the Drama stops, and the chief Officers of the Army stand still with their Swords drawn to hear a Fellow Sing ‘Let the soldiers rejoice’ – faith in my mind ’tis as unreasonable as if a Man shou’d call for a Pipe of Tobacco just when the Priest and his Bride are waiting for him at the Altar.”

The assessment actually holds up pretty well to my ears as I Spotify’d the skit out of Dioclesian this rainy, post-VD morning. The music starts off strongly, a blend of cynicism and bombast, over the course of several overtures and instrumental preludes spent curled up on the sofa with a warm blanket and…Christ, where’s my French press?

Perhaps the slow pace is deliberate. Curtis Price writes that “the subdued music perfectly captures the idea of ‘the king is dead, long live the king,’” which is allegorical enough for the plot (summed up below). There are touches of Macbeth-ian irony in fates bound in riddles, with Diocles (later to rechristen himself Diocletian) is told he’ll become the next Roman emperor after killing a boar. That boar turns out to be the nickname of the assassin he quickly does kill.

But the dramatic shortcomings of Dioclesian come from the fact that it’s a semi-opera, told episodically and with less of a unifying arc than Purcell’s previous work, Dido and Aeneas. There are similar musical threads—Dido’s chorus “Fear no danger to ensue” is reflected here in “Let all mankind the pleasure share,” and both make use of the chaconne. This reminds me of one of those early, B-list Disney movies. Essential for the development of animation, but not something you’d watch for a riveting Friday night movie.

All Together Now

For you Valentine’s Day refuseniks, it’s Cavalli’s birthday. And for me, it’s time to go back to Lully for a recently-unearthed opera by that gangrenous bastard released on recording earlier last year following its (implausible) 2010 world premiere. Sigh. Thanks, Christoph Rousset for being all Baroquely geek-chic and photographing so damn well.

Actually, my admiration for Lully was heightened last fall when I finally got to see a Lully opera live and in person. In fact, Les Arts Florissants’s revival of Atys at BAM was one of the best things I’ve seen in the nearly 10 years I’ve lived in New York (don’t believe me? Read my rave review here). Like most operas, and especially operas further back on the chronological scale, a strong case is best made by a titanium-caliber orchestra, conductor and cast, and Christie—unsurprisingly—brought that in spades, along with a production that de-moth-balled what could be a pretty stale story.

In tandem with his Talens Lyriques, Rousset’s account of Lully’s Bellérophon (1679) is another such performance to crack open the hard shell of antiquated Baroque styles and make the music seem vitally relevant. In fact, I was struck by how many references and presentiments floated around in this score. The “Fear No Danger” chorus in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas planting roots in the chorus of Amazons and Act III’s ensemble number “Assez des pleurs” (the latter a striking calm after a considerable vocal storm). The entry of the Egyptians sounds like something straight out of the rustic bandes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, especially the final movement of “Spring,” full of pastoral flavor in its use of instruments.

A chorus in the Prologue is equally exquisite, for its motet-like construction that sounds like something out of JS Bach’s sketchbooks—more Germanic in its execution than French, as you can see from the rhythmic unison contrasted with varying vocal and orchestral lines below (I spliced this together from two images taken from the score, pardon the skewedness of the lines. It’s a seamless melody).

For a composer given to Versailles-style excess, that’s some stark, stunning simplicity right there. The resulting sound is borderline beatific, entirely appropriate to Lully’s church—the opera.

But one of the most interesting connections that wouldn’t leave my head was the runaway overture, a prelude whose B-section rhythmically resembles Beethoven’s Große fugue, Op. 133. It’s considered to be one of Beethoven’s more daring works, derided upon its premiere as “repellent,” “incomprehensible, like Chinese” and “a confusion of Babel.” Stravinsky later called it “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever.”

They sound similar, but they’re not written that way. There are few audio samples I can pull of this overture (obviously), and some interpretations on YouTube play it as straight eighth notes, as written out in the score (see below in a much cleaner copy):

I Want a Limited Amount of Magic

The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s season has been announced for quite some time, but apropos of “I’ve-just-noticed-this,” the catch to their four productions of Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, starring LOC Creative Consultant and original Blanche Renée Fleming, is that the tickets will only be made available to subscribers.

You can see where they thought they’d be canny: Surely this will sell out, and surely it will bring in new subscribers who want to see the jewel in the LOC’s 2012-13 crown. But we are no longer in a “Subscribe Now!” culture. According to a study published last year by Theatre Communications Group (and, aptly enough, referenced through the Chicago Tribune), the American theatrical subscription rate has dropped 15.1% between 2006 and 2010, which roughly coincides with the original apex of the digital media and social networking age. We no longer want to plan out our theatre- or opera-going over a year in advance—we want to consumer our culture in short bursts of 140-character Tweets and LivingSocial details that dictate our nights, and occasionally weeks, ahead. There’s still a lot to be said for advanced ticket purchases, particularly among the average opera audience age in America, but that’s why companies start selling their seasons months in advance. The TCG overall attendance rate drop of only 3.6% speaks to that correlation. People are still going, they just aren’t as interested in subscriptions.

And who can blame them? Casts change, life happens and while LOC offers flexibility in their subscription packages as a benefit, you may just not be able to trade your seats around. What’s more, the baseline subscription cost for LOC is still over $100. We make a big deal about cheap seats in the opera, but those of us who know these houses know that those seats, while often the best acoustic places, are still on K2 compared to the plusher preferred places on the orchestra or parterre level.

A Streetcar Named Desire has a lot going for it at LOC. It stars one of the most instantly-recognizable names in American opera today, it’s a familiar plot that even total operatic neophytes will recognize and it’s an American opera receiving one of those crucial additional performances to get it out of being a one-time occurrence to a greater integration into the contemporary canon. Regardless of whether or not you actually like the work, it is a more daring addition than another Tosca or Traviata. This is one of those works that should pull newcomers in. Instead what LOC is asking such newcomers to do is invest in not one but at least four performances at their opera house, and for those who would have spent $120 on a single ticket to the work but not $500 to four performances, you’re saying that they have to take the prime seat they would have bought and split it up among four seats in Siberia. Do the math and get with the program.: Single ticket buyers rose 3% between 2006 and 2010, subscription buyers dropped by over 15%.

Where There’s Smoke…

I totally missed Mario Batali in the party scene of La Traviata today at BAM/NYCO, but it did get me revisiting an old topic of mindless but fun conversation, aided and abetted (but initiated long before) recent English release The Opera Cooks. If Batali were an opera singer, he’d be Bryn Terfel.

 

And I’ve often described Renée Fleming as the Rachel Ray of the opera world.

Which leaves a whole host of other meta opera-cook combinations… (Click past the jump for a full roundup.)

Does That Make Alberich a Countertenor?

Via Alex Ross on Twitter, who said it all when he wrote “The Met’s Ring gets interesting.” Original story here.