What to show for a week?

[muckefuck]

Well, Action Boy gave way to Sloth Boy all to easily this week. Sunday, I was frustrated in my attempts to sleep off the pleasant, drunken exhaustion of the barbecue, but I couldn't motivate myself to do anything on the house either. I summoned monshu in the hope he'd get me moving, but he was so drowsy that he almost immediately hit the futon himself. In the end, we didn't get much done beyond a tiny bit of touch-up work and assembling the basket tower for my closet system. We only made one significant error in our bleary, post-siestal state, which I consider a damn good show.

Monday night, I visited Nuphy. He's doing and sounding awfully well considering he's bedridden again and looking at several more weeks before he can go home. Tuesday I managed--quite against my will--to drag myself to the paint store just in time to pick up some sandpaper sheets before they closed. They sat in my bag until this morning, when I made a limp attempt to sand down some of the bigger mistakes on my poly-stain job. Why was I home? The men were coming to take away the Montreal Mistake and I needed to recover from a night at the opera.

It was my first opera this season. I've gone without Nuphy before, but this was the first time he was absent due to infirmity rather than preference. It made more of a difference than I'd expected. I found myself dourly musing what I would do about my subscription if couldn't or wouldn't continue it. Finding someone else to go with could be difficult, given that monshu isn't up for late nights on weekdays.

All in all, an acceptable production. My expectations were low since I've already seen Le nozze di Figaro with essentially my dream cast and I'd only heard of one of the performers, Swenson, in this production. She was the best thing about it. Our hot young Italian Figaro got sick and his replacement didn't seem to have the energy or voice that the staging was designed for. Our Susanna was good, but the other singers were merely decent at best. The less said about the acting, the better; I was flabbergasted to discover that the director founded the RSC. Either he phoned in his direction or he got stuck with a cast of complete bucketheads.

Fortunately, it's Figaro and if Beaumarchais' machinations or Da Ponte's wit doesn't carry you through, Mozart's music will. Nevertheless, my eyes were closed for essentially all of Act Four. (I didn't miss much, since the staging was about as traditional as it could be without actually using vintage costumes and sets.)

Comments

A NIght at the Opera

[currawong.livejournal.com]

All over the world, audiences have become more discerning and demanding. Once people would never have demanded ACTING. Acting standards in Oz Opera are now fairly uniformly high but not so long ago, things were so different.

A dramatic soprano with a huge (if sometimes harsh) voice, was Rita Hunter. She was hugely obese . Someone once described her, togged out in her customary muu-muus, as a "bedouin encampment".

Well, Rita was playing the part of Abigail. She sat on a chair at the side of the stage throughout the evening, stuggling to her feet once or twice to deliver an aria before settling back into the very sturdy chair. Everyone else was reduced to sort of capering about her. She was eventually fired from the company, and complained bitterly of discrimination.

In the early days of the company, I remember a Senta leaping from the cliff and reappearing as she bounced.

Can belto

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Nuphy and I often speak derisively of the "stand and sing" school of performance. Like me, he recognises that the better operas were written to work as dramas, not just as musical recitals. Other older fans chide me for it, but I'm really tired of hearing that an otherwise lackluster performer "sang beautifully". Sometimes, the part doesn't demand beauty. The most moving performances for me were ones in which the singers deliberately came off as strained or shaky in order to give dramatic impact to their delivery. It showed that they understood the text and weren't just robotically reproducing syllables.

One of my friends gave up on a promising opera career because it made him feel like a "trained dog". He didn't find just singing itself that challenging; some of his coaches told him not to sweat enunciation because American audiences can't understand the language anyway and he flatly disagreed. He simply didn't think it was that hard to remember all the words, pronounced them correctly, hit all the notes, and make the appropriate motions. In fact, his classmates told me that the chief difficulty in becoming an opera singer was putting up with all the bullshit. One estimated this at two-thirds of the effort necessary to achieve success.