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December 23, 2005What're them fat women yelling about?
Ashley and I had a very operatic 48 hours last Saturday and Sunday--two operas in as many days. It was great fun.
First up was a Saturday matinee performance of "Parsifal". I didn't realize that Placido Domingo was slated to perform the title character until he got on the PA a few minutes before the show to explain (rather apologetically) that he was too sick to do it that afternoon. I also didn't realize that "Parsifal" was going to be a five-hour experience until the second act ended with so much left unresolved and we were getting up for our second intermission.
We had rescheduled our tickets from an earlier weekend. In the process, we got moved up to the fifth row from the stage. Our seats were awesome--too awesome, perhaps, for that particular staging of that particular opera in that there simply wasn't much to see. They gave it a very "modern" feel--odd, austere costumes, minimal/abstract props and set pieces, and barely any discernable emotion in the characters' body language and blocking.
One of my friends from my group voice class days was singing in the chorus, but I couldn't spot him on stage. In his own defense, he did warn us all in his e-mail that it'd be tough finding him. What he failed to mention was that he’d be wearing this wicker-basket burkha getup--told you it was modern. Finding him wouldn't have been "tough" so much as a damn miracle. Still, I'm proud as punch of him.
The singing and the music were great, but I felt like it really dropped the ball as a visual spectacle. And I do think that people ignore that facet of mounting an opera at their own peril. In a way, "Parsifal" reminded me a lot of Noh theater. But I was in the mood for Kabuki.
I got my opera-as-Kabuki fix the next afternoon, with the much more traditionally-staged "Tosca". And our seats, while not as close as the afternoon before, were better for it. As Ashley pointed out, if we were sitting in the middle of that row, we’d have the best seats in the house for being able to see everything all at once.
They got on the horn to announce that Samuel Ramey wouldn't be singing Scarpia. That bummed me out, as I'd been specifically looking forward to his performance. I've seen him twice--once in concert, and once playing leads in a "Gianni Schicchi" / "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" double-header.
(Amazingly enough, I only left one letter out of "Gianni Schicchi" when I typed it above.)
Ramey's understudy had a fine voice and all, but he wasn't nearly evil enough. And he was a bit on the quiet side--any time he had to sing against anybody else (especially Tosca) he'd get lost in the shuffle.
Posted by patrick at December 23, 2005 11:39 AM
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