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Mar. 14th, 2006 02:52 pm
C'est moi qui l'ai tuée!
Last night at the opera, we had two outstanding singers: An extremely good baritone and a phenomenal soprano.
Unfortunately, the opera was Carmen.
Lord, was it a mess. Hungarian mezzo Viktoria Vizin has a good body for vamping Carmen and sings as voluptuously as she looks, but she doesn't project well--and that goes for projectiles as well as for her voice. There was unintentional hilarity in the first act when the flower she's supposed to strike Don Jose with sailed offstage. As a result, La Scola (our Don Jose) ended up singing "elle me l'a lancée, cette fleur" to some random blossom dropped by a tobacco factory girl that he'd plucked off the stage--which almost worked, since you could do worse than to establish early in the production that he's about a bright as a bull's testicle.
Despite his can-belto tendancies, we didn't give up on La Scola until his entrance in the second act. Back me up on this,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
off_coloratura, but if you can't sing a capella without ending up flatter than an anorexic flounder, then you have no business on a major opera stage, do you? Even local jack-of-all-trades Cangelosi--usually money in the bank--disappointed us as Le Dancaïre. By the second intermission, we were all fighting boredom. When Nuphy's neighbour confessed to it, he begged her not to judge Carmen by this performance.
Patricia Racette ended up saving the day. Before the end of the first stanza of Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante, we were all hers. Nuphy turned to the woman on his left and told her that this was how it should've been all along. Not that Mark Doss hadn't perked things up in the second act--he was our Escomillo last time as well, but they had him so far upstage that it just killed his voice (a mistake that they fixed this time around)--but Racette had me near tears (for all the right reasons). That she had the further distinction of being the only one to actually sing in French (and she's American, so it's not like she has some sort of home field advantage) was only icing. God knows what language the others--particularly La Scola--thought they were singing; Galego? Esperanto? Mauritian Creole?
Ironically, what we thought was going to be the worst element--Davis' conducting--turned out to be the least of our worries as he kept it moving along pretty well (although he seemed to have given up entirely on trying to keep the singers together). The sets were decent (more banana republic than Sevillan gothic), but the less I say about the stage direction, the better. I was resigned to repeated senseless withdrawals and invasions by the chorus, but Nuphy had made the mistake of watching the Zeffirelli production a couple nights earlier, so all he saw was an endless string of missed opportunities.
All in all, probably only the fourth worst opera we saw this season at Lyric. How sad is that?
Unfortunately, the opera was Carmen.
Lord, was it a mess. Hungarian mezzo Viktoria Vizin has a good body for vamping Carmen and sings as voluptuously as she looks, but she doesn't project well--and that goes for projectiles as well as for her voice. There was unintentional hilarity in the first act when the flower she's supposed to strike Don Jose with sailed offstage. As a result, La Scola (our Don Jose) ended up singing "elle me l'a lancée, cette fleur" to some random blossom dropped by a tobacco factory girl that he'd plucked off the stage--which almost worked, since you could do worse than to establish early in the production that he's about a bright as a bull's testicle.
Despite his can-belto tendancies, we didn't give up on La Scola until his entrance in the second act. Back me up on this,
off_coloratura, but if you can't sing a capella without ending up flatter than an anorexic flounder, then you have no business on a major opera stage, do you? Even local jack-of-all-trades Cangelosi--usually money in the bank--disappointed us as Le Dancaïre. By the second intermission, we were all fighting boredom. When Nuphy's neighbour confessed to it, he begged her not to judge Carmen by this performance.Patricia Racette ended up saving the day. Before the end of the first stanza of Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante, we were all hers. Nuphy turned to the woman on his left and told her that this was how it should've been all along. Not that Mark Doss hadn't perked things up in the second act--he was our Escomillo last time as well, but they had him so far upstage that it just killed his voice (a mistake that they fixed this time around)--but Racette had me near tears (for all the right reasons). That she had the further distinction of being the only one to actually sing in French (and she's American, so it's not like she has some sort of home field advantage) was only icing. God knows what language the others--particularly La Scola--thought they were singing; Galego? Esperanto? Mauritian Creole?
Ironically, what we thought was going to be the worst element--Davis' conducting--turned out to be the least of our worries as he kept it moving along pretty well (although he seemed to have given up entirely on trying to keep the singers together). The sets were decent (more banana republic than Sevillan gothic), but the less I say about the stage direction, the better. I was resigned to repeated senseless withdrawals and invasions by the chorus, but Nuphy had made the mistake of watching the Zeffirelli production a couple nights earlier, so all he saw was an endless string of missed opportunities.
All in all, probably only the fourth worst opera we saw this season at Lyric. How sad is that?