Carmen in Central PA: Kate Aldrich recital

Kate Aldrich giving a recital at a small college 3 miles from where I now live struck me as a miracle of the universe, an event against the laws of natural scheduling, a visitation which I was undisposed to question. I regret to say that, despite the recital's advertisement in symphony playbills and elsewhere, the residents of greater Harrisburg did not turn out in force. Aldrich, however, gave a generous and richly varied program, and engaged the small audience with great warmth. Not having heard Aldrich since her 2010 Met Carmen, I was pleased to get a sense both of the bel canto works she's been recently exploring, and the French romanticism into which, it seems, she is moving. And in one thing the provinces could give the audiences of New York an education: not once was there applause before the end of a set, nor did a single cell phone make itself heard. [Note: this recital took place on February 4th (sic!) and being unusually under academic deadlines, I neglected to give it its finishing touches till now. Gentle Readers, I beg your indulgence.]

Carmen: NYCO woos an audience

Bryant Park, now featuring opera

New York is a city I still think of as home, and not least among the many things I miss about it is its operatic ecosystem. So it was a special pleasure, on my latest visit, to find opera right in my academic backyard. The much-tried NYCO is currently trying out free outdoor opera. The large, diverse, and multigenerational audience that gathered last evening in Bryant Park would seem to confirm the wisdom of the strategy. I was encouraged to see how ready such an audience was to devote part of a summer evening to opera. The offered Carmen turned out to be a much-reduced version of Bizet's big, brutal, beautiful work. In scarcely more than an hour we were through, famous excerpts having been strung together with summarizing narrative. I expect that the next planned park opera, Pagliacci, will be much more successful in offering a taste of opera, since the company will be able to offer the whole work. And of all the scores to put in piano reduction, that of Carmen is surely one of those that must suffer the most from losing its color, its noise, and its vital pacing. I still enjoyed the opportunity to hear more of NYC's singers.

U-Carmen: Bizet in South Africa

The vibrant, award-winning film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was released in 2005, but it was a recent and welcome discovery to me (through Netflix's streaming services, of all things.) Directed by Mark Dornford-May, the film is adapted (or, better, transladapted) from Bizet's Carmen, reconfiguring the drama and the music to provide, as Bizet did, a gripping tale that balances between exoticism and realism, mixing gritty quotidian detail with gestures of startling romanticism. The fateful events play out in a suburb of Cape Town, where Carmen enjoys solidarity with the community of cigarette-rollers and marketplace traders, where she can easily disappear in dirt lanes between tin-sided houses to escape the pursuit of the urban police. The setting of urban and suburban South Africa in the late twentieth century is given far more specificity than Bizet's Seville was. Although occasionally self-conscious and semi-guilty about my fascination with the camera's dwelling on unfamiliar landscapes--long stretches of highway through near-desert, bright fabrics on laundry lines--I enjoyed frankly the sensitive delineation of social and religious dynamics in the community where the narrative unfolds.

Orientale: Orientalism goes meta with Monteverdi

Gotham Chamber Opera's advertisement of "an evening of music at the intersection of East and West" had me concerned as well as intrigued. Who would be constructing whom, through what? Would Edward Said be horrified? In the event, the evening at Le Poisson Rouge was both entertaining and provocative. By rejecting an ordering according to chronology or the origin of the composers, the program highlighted the artificiality of the atemporal "Orient." Moreover, the costuming (Zane Pihlstrom) and choreography (Austin McCormick) placed exaggerated emphasis on the abandoned sensuality and transgressive sexuality which have, historically, flourished as characteristics of the imagined Orient. The dancers of Company XIV wore fantastical costumes mixing men's and women's, Near Eastern and European articles of clothing, and adding elements of contemporary burlesque for good measure. There were moments where I wondered uneasily if the audience was aware of where all these ideas were coming from and why they appeared in the form they did, but I was fairly certain the artists were.* Opening with Lully's "Marche pour le cérémonie des Turcs" followed by the Armenian piece "Asparani Bar" gave a good aural introduction to the musical languages of the evening. The Maya trio contributed several Armenian pieces throughout the evening, playing with considerable beauty and spirit. Their expressive range was impressive, and their rich, dynamic playing carried an implicit challenge to a Western audience's aural habit of associating certain minor harmonies and lilting rhythms with a range of dramatic and emotional values limited by Orientalist constructs.

"Clorinda dies in Tancred's arms,"
Bernardo Castello

Fitting centerpiece of the evening was Monteverdi's Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, that gorgeous Venetian creation--complex, compact, and indubitably sexy--based on Tasso's magnificent epic, Gerusalemme Liberata (I really like this translation.) Race, sex, gender, and religion are all hot topics in this excerpt, where the Norman warrior Tancred and the Ethiopian (but blonde... it's a long story) warrior Clorinda fight to the death, in the dark, Monteverdi and Tasso protesting a little too much that these fierce and breathless embraces are not at all like those of lovers. (And the deadly foes are in love with each other; the accidental incognito of darkness is their undoing.) All of this is chronicled in full-blooded verse thrillingly set;Gotham's early instrument ensemble contributed exciting work. Michael Kelly, as the narrator, sang with a bright and flexible baritone, making his figure's powerless compassion truly poignant. His sensitivity to text was also admirable, and crucial, as Monteverdi's vivid writing encompasses lyrical emotional expression and urgent onomatopoeic syllables. The roles of the warrior-lovers were sung by Maeve Höglund and Zachary Altman, and danced with furious intensity--and passion bordering on the obscene--by Sean Gannon and Cailan Orn. If it didn't seem like unutterable presumption, I could wish Monteverdi had set more stanzas. Rounding out the evening were selections familiar and unfamiliar.

From Monteverdi's eighth book of madrigals, Kelly and Altman gave "Se vittore sì belle," celebrating the piece's (homo)eroticism. (Altman's rendering of the Schumann lied "Aus den östlichen Rosen" was disappointing, its sense lost in strange vowels.) An account of Delibes' very familiar "Sous le dôme épais" was pleasingly langorous and tender, mezzo Naomi O'Connell accompanying Höglund. Höglund replaced the indisposed Jennifer Rivera in Bizet's slightly less famous "Adieux de l'hôtesse arabe" as she had done in the Monteverdi, with a warm, shimmery tone. Laura Careless danced the piece with an eroticism so flagrant as to seem a defiance to the beholder. Szymanowski's "Allah, Akbar, Alla" from Piesni muezina szalonego was an intriguing discovery, piano and soprano intertwining in a manner both ecstatic and dreamy. Embracing the nebulous quality of dreams was John Hadfield's world premiere, oniric [sic; oneiric.] The percussion was played by the composer; Marisol Cabrera danced flamenco. Spain: the other Orient! The inclusion of this was, I thought, an interesting way of highlighting how Europe has created its "others." The mood of the evening, however, remained resolutely ludic, concluding with Rameau's exuberant "Regnez, plaisirs et jeux!"

The program will be performed again on October 3.

*Note: Unless I misheard his introductory spiel, though, Neal Goren collectively identified the pieces as a "celebration of the music of the East by Western composers." Um... celebration is hardly the word, surely. Appropriating? Refashioning? Making up out of whole cloth? And Karol Szymanowski, incidentally, did not identify as a Western composer (his writings on nationalism, internationalism, and identity in music are fascinating, and some of them may be found in translation here.)

Operatic duels, showdowns and face-offs

As even I was compelled to notice, there was a sporting event this past weekend which involved many of my neighbors (not to say much of the country) in passionate partisanship. I observed this so far as to take a break from working for the sake of compiling a list of epic operatic confrontations.

Sometimes La Forza del Destino seems to be little more than a string of confrontations, but Verdi saves the most intense for last, when the revenge-breathing baritone tracks down our unfortunate hero.  He's out for blood, and means to have it. Alvaro begs him to be resigned to the misfortune that has pursued them both, but the baritone insults him for a good five minutes, and it all ends with vows of mutual destruction, which Corelli and Bastianini manage to make exciting and menacing despite being planted motionless and not looking at each other:



Verdi's convention of mutual insults culminating in an off-stage duel appears again at the finale of Il Trovatore's first act. The director of this Covent Garden decided to make the duel with steel coincide with the vocal one. This fits the music, but makes the singers have to worry about footwork and ripostes at the same time as some rather demanding music. (Manrico has a mullet, and the smooth-voiced Di Luna seems to be in better physical shape than his gypsy rival... does anyone know if this production was trying to invert the usual audience sympathies?)