In the scripted introductory segment to the Met Live-in-HD transmission of Verdi's Ernani, host Joyce DiDonato described its plot as "convoluted." Anthony Tommasini's review began with the idea that "even with several strong contenders for the title, 'Ernani' may have the most implausible plot of any Verdi opera." And Met commentator William Berger wrote in his book on Verdi operas that the story "is a trial to modern patience."
The problem? It is not. Not necessarily.
With strong performances by Ferruccio Furlanetto as Silva and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Carlos, and a sudden plot twist at the ending, this production forged some new possibilities and insights.
Hvorostovsky brought an elegance to the self-reflective arias of Carlos. He revealed subtle clashes of style in adjacent passages of the music by altering vowel shadings and placements. In the Act II aria "Lo vedremo, veglio audace," Hvorostovsky contrasted bluesy bel canto phrases with singing that seemed to absorb the military sounding trumpet that occasionally doubled the vocal part. There was more wry humor in the music for Carlos than I realized.
Furlanetto channeled pure evil and made total destruction seem a natural consequence. He made Ernani respond to his vortex; it was the musical force of Silva's singing and not the exercise of an honor code that led to Ernani's suicide.
And in a great twist at the end, Angela Meade as Elvira grabbed the knife from Ernani after he stabbed himself and plunged it into her own heart. Both of them fell to the stage floor to sing the final duet as they both died. It was music that seemed as tense and eerie as the key of G major could ever sound. The opera closed in this tonality that seemed as distant and cold as the single figure left alone on the stage: Furlanetto.
This production was entertaining in the cinema. The camera angles helped to create subtle movement onscreen even when the characters themselves were standing still. The filming created impulse that was not distracting but rather seemed to add to the development of the music and the plot.
We also got to hang out with Stephen Diaz, the Met's master carpenter. During the amazing set change between scene 1 and 2 of Act I and between Act 3 and 4 his voice was transmitted continuously into the theater. He issued the most unlikely commands like "don't trap the foliage." Gotta love it.
So from here on out let's agree that any reference to the plot of Ernani as being convoluted or implausible is trite. Why create extra barriers to distance ourselves from it?
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Thoughts on The Tristan & Isolde Fantasy by Franz Waxman
The Tristan & Isolde Fantasy (for Solo Violin, Solo Piano and Orchestra) was written by Franz Waxman in 1947. Like many talented musicians and composers, Franz Waxman fled pre-war Germany and came to settle near Hollywood. Trained in Dresden and Berlin, Waxman briefly travelled to France after the Nazis came into power and was acclaimed for his film score to Fritz Lang's movie called “Liliom.”
The blossoming film industry needed composers who were both musically flexible and who could work quickly, and Waxman’s first American success came with his score for the “Bride of Frankenstein.” During his long film career, Waxman collaborated four times with Alfred Hitchcock, but is best known for his score to “Sunset Boulevard” which won an Academy Award in 1950.
Anyone who has seen the movie “Jaws” quickly learns to identify the presence of the shark through purely musical means. The score to that movie, written by John Williams, was inspired by Richard Wagner’s use of leitmotifs.
Wagner used leitmotifs as a web of developed and altered musical signals for everything from emotional states to objects. Scholars have labeled more than 45 leitmotifs in Wagner’s opera Tristan & Isolde. Imagine the density in a movie like Jaws if in addition to the “shark” motive there were forty-four other significant musical gestures, each of which could be altered or developed throughout the film.
The communicative qualities of the leitmotifs in Tristan & Isolde are compelling. Once one absorbs them it is tempting to want to further extend and develop the ideas inherent in them. In his Fantasie Franz Waxman used a technique idiomatic within the film industry—the splice—to create new associations among a collection of leitmotifs.
The work opens with seven notes in the bass drawn from the transition between the Prelude and Act I during which the curtain opens on the drama itself. Both the solo violin and solo piano that are used characteristically in this work are introduced when they play the “desire” motive in a long splice from the prelude that is simultaneously familiar and changed. The splice concludes a famous and often analyzed passage of the prelude, but neither solo instrument is used by Wagner in Tristan & Isolde, and we enter the passage midway—as if we had just tuned into a radio program. Several other ideas from the prelude are then spliced into this opening section, including motives with colorful names like “glance,” “deliverance by death,” and the “magic casket.”
With a sudden shift into D-flat major, the violin and piano soloists begin to work through ideas from Act II of the opera. Beginning with the “ardor” motive that marks the sense of anticipation before the secret meeting of the lovers. Waxman then explores an extensive collection of splices from the famous duet between Tristan and Isolde: “O sink hernieder, nacht der liebe (Descend upon us, night of passion).”
Waxman’s final collection of splices flow from the “Liebestod” by that ends the opera. This section is introduced by four-note arpeggiated figures in the solo piano while the tune begins to sound in the orchestra. From the time that the solo violin takes the tune, Waxman’s music opens and gradually breaks free from splicing. He expands upon the glorious climatic writing of the Liebestod and guides it gracefully back to quiet textures that recall Wagner’s ending—a splice that recalls the opening of the prelude.
The blossoming film industry needed composers who were both musically flexible and who could work quickly, and Waxman’s first American success came with his score for the “Bride of Frankenstein.” During his long film career, Waxman collaborated four times with Alfred Hitchcock, but is best known for his score to “Sunset Boulevard” which won an Academy Award in 1950.
Anyone who has seen the movie “Jaws” quickly learns to identify the presence of the shark through purely musical means. The score to that movie, written by John Williams, was inspired by Richard Wagner’s use of leitmotifs.
Wagner used leitmotifs as a web of developed and altered musical signals for everything from emotional states to objects. Scholars have labeled more than 45 leitmotifs in Wagner’s opera Tristan & Isolde. Imagine the density in a movie like Jaws if in addition to the “shark” motive there were forty-four other significant musical gestures, each of which could be altered or developed throughout the film.
The communicative qualities of the leitmotifs in Tristan & Isolde are compelling. Once one absorbs them it is tempting to want to further extend and develop the ideas inherent in them. In his Fantasie Franz Waxman used a technique idiomatic within the film industry—the splice—to create new associations among a collection of leitmotifs.
The work opens with seven notes in the bass drawn from the transition between the Prelude and Act I during which the curtain opens on the drama itself. Both the solo violin and solo piano that are used characteristically in this work are introduced when they play the “desire” motive in a long splice from the prelude that is simultaneously familiar and changed. The splice concludes a famous and often analyzed passage of the prelude, but neither solo instrument is used by Wagner in Tristan & Isolde, and we enter the passage midway—as if we had just tuned into a radio program. Several other ideas from the prelude are then spliced into this opening section, including motives with colorful names like “glance,” “deliverance by death,” and the “magic casket.”
With a sudden shift into D-flat major, the violin and piano soloists begin to work through ideas from Act II of the opera. Beginning with the “ardor” motive that marks the sense of anticipation before the secret meeting of the lovers. Waxman then explores an extensive collection of splices from the famous duet between Tristan and Isolde: “O sink hernieder, nacht der liebe (Descend upon us, night of passion).”
Waxman’s final collection of splices flow from the “Liebestod” by that ends the opera. This section is introduced by four-note arpeggiated figures in the solo piano while the tune begins to sound in the orchestra. From the time that the solo violin takes the tune, Waxman’s music opens and gradually breaks free from splicing. He expands upon the glorious climatic writing of the Liebestod and guides it gracefully back to quiet textures that recall Wagner’s ending—a splice that recalls the opening of the prelude.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
The Union of Two Families; a Review of Mahler 8 on LAPhil Live-in-HD
Mahler's massive Symphony No. 8 was a work engineered to make an impression.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela joined together on the same stage in Caracas, Venezuela to close the Mahler Project undertaken by conductor Gustavo Dudamel with a massive performance of Mahler 8 that was transmitted as part of the LAPhil Live-in-HD series.
During the preconcert documentary, Dudamel called the endeavor "the union of two families."
It was an orchestra of more than 200 players and more than 1,000 choristers, and the sound was big. Really big. But the event itself had a significance that transcended its massiveness.
The National Youth Choir of Venezuela was grouped in front, and one could hear gradations of older singers behind them that seemed to stretch in every direction. Some camera angles that revealed the vast number of singers present were simply amazing. The musicians of the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and the singers documented the range of ages and experiences from the entire system of musical education called "el Sistema." It was a sounding index of miraculous successes. It was inspiring.
Mahler 8 has a significant chamber music side that was infrequently captured in this performance, and it was hard to gauge the balances of the soloists in the cinema--particularly in the solo ensembles. There were so many singers that there was no room for benches. The singers stood throughout the performance. This caused noticeable fatigue by the end. But the sweep of the symphony was still delivered intact.
A dramatic touch was created when the Mater Gloriosa came into position on the balcony just after the Doctor Marianus episode with the choral line "Dir, der Unberührbaren (To you, the immaculate)." The presence of the Mater Gloriosa this early in the second movement helped us to properly place her significance. Kiera Duffy sang this brief but structural music with tenderness and fire. I first reviewed Duffy in 2006 at Tanglewood as Rose in Carter's "What Next" and the next season as Despina in Ira Siff's production of Così.
Dudamel was superb in his preconcert discussions of the music. However, because this work consists of two huge panels of complicated music, it would have been better to have even more narrative around the kind of listening strategies he advocated. There was a 20-minute intermission just before the concert started and then both movements were played without break. The design felt strange at first but it worked, even though we did not need a full 20-minute break.
The cinema in which I watched the event had a solid audience. Bring these events with more regularity and this following will expand. The only other announced event will not be a live transmission but a screening of the LAPhil season opening Gershwin concert featuring Herbie Hancock. That event will be in cinemas on March 18.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela joined together on the same stage in Caracas, Venezuela to close the Mahler Project undertaken by conductor Gustavo Dudamel with a massive performance of Mahler 8 that was transmitted as part of the LAPhil Live-in-HD series.
During the preconcert documentary, Dudamel called the endeavor "the union of two families."
It was an orchestra of more than 200 players and more than 1,000 choristers, and the sound was big. Really big. But the event itself had a significance that transcended its massiveness.
The National Youth Choir of Venezuela was grouped in front, and one could hear gradations of older singers behind them that seemed to stretch in every direction. Some camera angles that revealed the vast number of singers present were simply amazing. The musicians of the Símon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and the singers documented the range of ages and experiences from the entire system of musical education called "el Sistema." It was a sounding index of miraculous successes. It was inspiring.
Mahler 8 has a significant chamber music side that was infrequently captured in this performance, and it was hard to gauge the balances of the soloists in the cinema--particularly in the solo ensembles. There were so many singers that there was no room for benches. The singers stood throughout the performance. This caused noticeable fatigue by the end. But the sweep of the symphony was still delivered intact.
A dramatic touch was created when the Mater Gloriosa came into position on the balcony just after the Doctor Marianus episode with the choral line "Dir, der Unberührbaren (To you, the immaculate)." The presence of the Mater Gloriosa this early in the second movement helped us to properly place her significance. Kiera Duffy sang this brief but structural music with tenderness and fire. I first reviewed Duffy in 2006 at Tanglewood as Rose in Carter's "What Next" and the next season as Despina in Ira Siff's production of Così.
Dudamel was superb in his preconcert discussions of the music. However, because this work consists of two huge panels of complicated music, it would have been better to have even more narrative around the kind of listening strategies he advocated. There was a 20-minute intermission just before the concert started and then both movements were played without break. The design felt strange at first but it worked, even though we did not need a full 20-minute break.
The cinema in which I watched the event had a solid audience. Bring these events with more regularity and this following will expand. The only other announced event will not be a live transmission but a screening of the LAPhil season opening Gershwin concert featuring Herbie Hancock. That event will be in cinemas on March 18.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Six Hours in the Mall; Thinking about Götterdämmerung Live in HD
In 1980 a film crew came to Bayreuth to capture Wagner's Ring cycle at the close of the infamous centenary production by Patrice Chéreau. The Chéreau Ring opened amidst controversy and outrage and divided the public in debates that spread over years. In a documentary about that filming the point is driven home that filming the complete ring cycle for television would bring this music to a new audience. They did not film in front of a live audience but did capture each act from start to finish without stopping. Looking back at the Chéreau production, the use of media as a form of documentation was part of its visionary appeal.
A new audience was exposed to Wagner's Ring Cycle through the Met's Live in HD technology, and though we have grown accustomed to the technology, it remains a miraculous system worth pausing to consider. The complexities of transmitting these operas as live events was significant, but a new and much wider audience has been able to understand the amazing physicality of these works; qualities that can be disguised through the editing of recordings.
Anyone emerging from the six hour event found themselves in a cinema, and would have discovered when they walked into the lobby how strange it is when the mythological is incongruously juxtaposed against the ordinarily commercial.
Listening to Wagner requires a special kind of meditation. One must be able to follow his arc into motions that are almost completely still. The 21st century asks that we do this in cinemas and shopping malls. And we did.
The Lepage production, like the Chéreau before it, has generated new conversation. Though its use of technology has been fairly criticized, it is worth remembering that the technology was not only "the machine" itself, but was also the inclusiveness of the transmission and the context in which we shared these events.
This production of Götterdämmerung opened with the norns weaving ropes suspended from planks that resembled part of a bifurcation fractal. The ropes seemed to extend as they twisted and to even become braids of hair. The prolog of the opera sets a diabolically referential musical language against alliterative refrains and a structure (3 norns each speaking in turn 3 times) derived from the oral tradition. The machine was dazzling as this scene was introduced, and then just as importantly, it became still so that we could absorb the rest without distraction.
But the Immolation scene was a disappointment. It was THE place where we would have expected the most remarkable fantasy of which "the machine" is capable. In the cinema it looked like Deborah Voigt rode a merry-go-round horse to a Barbecue.
The singing in this production, as in all three other operas, sustained interest. One of the unexpected treats was to hear the German soprano Waltraud Meier as the Valkyrie Waltraute. Her vocal presence gave immediate credibility to one of the most important, and easily overlooked exchanges in Götterdämmerung. Han-Peter König sang a resonant and chilling Hagen, and Wendy Bryn Harmer impressed as Gutrune.
It was amazing to observe how quickly tenor Jay Hunter Morris has become a fixture at the Met. He brought a welcome sense of humor to the role, and gave us a reason to rethink all stereotypes of the the heldentenor sound. Imagine what he will do next.
The Met orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi, made a deep impression with consistently clear textures powerful rhythmic drive. Sometimes lost in the conversation about technology is the simple reality that old-school virtuosity speaks for itself.
A new audience was exposed to Wagner's Ring Cycle through the Met's Live in HD technology, and though we have grown accustomed to the technology, it remains a miraculous system worth pausing to consider. The complexities of transmitting these operas as live events was significant, but a new and much wider audience has been able to understand the amazing physicality of these works; qualities that can be disguised through the editing of recordings.
Anyone emerging from the six hour event found themselves in a cinema, and would have discovered when they walked into the lobby how strange it is when the mythological is incongruously juxtaposed against the ordinarily commercial.
Listening to Wagner requires a special kind of meditation. One must be able to follow his arc into motions that are almost completely still. The 21st century asks that we do this in cinemas and shopping malls. And we did.
The Lepage production, like the Chéreau before it, has generated new conversation. Though its use of technology has been fairly criticized, it is worth remembering that the technology was not only "the machine" itself, but was also the inclusiveness of the transmission and the context in which we shared these events.
This production of Götterdämmerung opened with the norns weaving ropes suspended from planks that resembled part of a bifurcation fractal. The ropes seemed to extend as they twisted and to even become braids of hair. The prolog of the opera sets a diabolically referential musical language against alliterative refrains and a structure (3 norns each speaking in turn 3 times) derived from the oral tradition. The machine was dazzling as this scene was introduced, and then just as importantly, it became still so that we could absorb the rest without distraction.
But the Immolation scene was a disappointment. It was THE place where we would have expected the most remarkable fantasy of which "the machine" is capable. In the cinema it looked like Deborah Voigt rode a merry-go-round horse to a Barbecue.
The singing in this production, as in all three other operas, sustained interest. One of the unexpected treats was to hear the German soprano Waltraud Meier as the Valkyrie Waltraute. Her vocal presence gave immediate credibility to one of the most important, and easily overlooked exchanges in Götterdämmerung. Han-Peter König sang a resonant and chilling Hagen, and Wendy Bryn Harmer impressed as Gutrune.
It was amazing to observe how quickly tenor Jay Hunter Morris has become a fixture at the Met. He brought a welcome sense of humor to the role, and gave us a reason to rethink all stereotypes of the the heldentenor sound. Imagine what he will do next.
The Met orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi, made a deep impression with consistently clear textures powerful rhythmic drive. Sometimes lost in the conversation about technology is the simple reality that old-school virtuosity speaks for itself.
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