1/ I’ve fessed up in recent opera posts that I’ve made out like a bandit (Ernani? Dick Johnson? Johnson, for me) during the virus bc of these free webcasts, getting to know operas I didn’t already know and might not have been motivated to go to the local Bijou and...
2/ plunk down $20 for, per me disgrazia. One of these is Rossini’s comedy LE COMTE ORY. He spent his later years in Paris and some of his operas, both comedy and “seria,” are in French. I have reason to believe ORY is a about a naughty nobleman, not to different in that...
3/ regard from last night’s FALSTAFF, except that whereas Falstaff sought his happy hunting grounds among bourgeois married ladies, Ory does so among aristocratic ladies awaiting their husbands’ return from a crusade. He too gets his comeuppance.
4/ No lib, Rossini had written an opera 3 yrs earlier to celebrate the coronation of France’s Charles X: IL VIAGGIO A RHEIMS. Then he borrowed material from VIAGGIO for COMTE D’ORY. The prolific composers of the Bel Canto era cd do that.
4/ This production, from 2011, was the Met premiere of this work, 183 years after its world premiere in Paris. I was present at the “Virginia premiere” prodns of DIE WALKÜRE, TRISTAN, and ELEKTRA: they had long b4 then been performed in DC, but never b4 in the Старие Государство,
4c/ as we sometimes call the Old Dominion!
5/ Tenor Juan Diego Flórez, as Ory, is greatly helped here, tho not nec in his other roles, by his phenomenal resemblance to Sasha Baron Cohen.

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More from @david_m_wagner

26 Oct
1/ Otto Edelmann, noted 1950s exponent of Baron Ochs, DER ROSENKAVALIER’s comic villain, was once asked whether you have to be as coarse as Ochs to play him. He said “No, you just have to be Viennese: it’s our [munipical] nation anthem!”
2/ ROSENKAVALIER (title translated, if at all, as The Knight of the Silver Rose) is about toney Viennese ppl (+ Ochs: Viennese but not toney) with “naughtiness... high in the catalogue of grave sins” (Brideshead to the rescue, again) yet endearing in spite of that.
3/ About the hero, 17yo Count Octavian Rofrano, usually sung as here by a mezzo (sometimes even by a soprano), an envious person cd ask just how much action one young Count can get under the Imperial Nookie Equity Act (that’s in Justinian, rt?), since the Act 1 curtain rises...
Read 6 tweets
24 Oct
#opera
1/ #YouKeepUsingThatWord “production,” what does it mean? Operas, like movies and plays, need directors and set designers. They can be same person, as when Zeffirelli directed opera, or a team, like @MetOpera’s great Nat Merrill/Bob O’Hearn.
2/ Director ≠ conductor. Latter is responsible for the orchestra. When Wieland Wagner (composer’s grandson), as director, developed the “neo-Bayreuth” style at that Festival in ‘50s, some said his austere stage pictures and tight, Greek-drama-style character movements were....
3/ out of step with the yearning romantic style of Bayreuth’s conductors if that era (all of whom btw inexplicably had surnames that started with K). Well, director & conductor can have diff esthetics; that’s ok. But maybe this is why, when Bayreuth planned....
Read 13 tweets
23 Oct
1/ Same production as was shown during Bel Canto week, but an earlier iteration. Elina Haranča was an excellent Cenerentola but Cecilia Baroli is perfect, and she doesn’t mess things up here, unlike in NOZZE DI FIGARO, for three reasons:
2/ Cenerentola, unlike Susanna, is a mezzo part, and she’s a mezzo, so that’s sorted; she doesn’t swap in any unfamiliar “alternative” arias, or if she does it doesn’t matter bc tbh not many fans rly know CENERENTOLA the way they know NOZZE; and her tendency to make faces, ...
3/ out of place amid the jewel-like achievement of NOZZE, is just fine in Rossini comedy. I mean right now she’s making googly eyes at the Prince-in-disguise, and he’s making moogly eyes at her, and it’s all really cute. - Forgot to note, this is the Cinderella story, except...
Read 4 tweets
21 Oct
1/ Or COSÌ TOOT FANNY, as we used the call the aftermath of a bean-intensive dinner w lots of little boys at home. Yeah this is COSÌ, but not only updated to C18 Naples to C20 Coney Island, but accompanied by carny action whose relevance to the action is debatable at best.
I’m tentatively labeling this *bad* Regie, qualifying it for entry in the Castorf Crocodile Competition, or, World Cup of Bad Productions. OTOH Amanda Majeski, who ruled absolutely as the Countess in MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, shd be a good Fiordiligi.
Ok gonna revise my estimation of this production upward. The carny stuff does not interrupt the main action. What we’ve got is a defensible updating: from C18 Naoles w two independent sisters whose honeybuns, on a bet, disguised themselves as “Albanians” (actually Turks)...
Read 8 tweets
23 Sep
1/ THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST! Just listen to the Act 1 prelude - ~70 seconds - it’s your emo-man Puccini bringin the swoon-tune but also the rootnest, tootnest, shoot-em-firstiest, doggone-worstiest six-shooter that ever sat on the hip of any girl in the Gold Rush West -
2/ - that’d be Minnie, booze-pourin & Bible teachin, ain’t got time for “il sheriffo” Jack Rance, but maybe she’ll find true love w this stranger, got a dark secret but calls hisself Dick Johnson so....
3/ Any y’all remember Scarpia, the corrupt and priapic police chief in TOSCA? I think Rance is Puccini trying to re-do Scarpia w a softer touch. Oh he’ll hang’em outlaws high as Haman, Rance will, & he’ll drink and gamble - even over the fate of an outlaw. But not rape, nossir...
Read 4 tweets
19 Sep
Appropriate for this evening, since it’s about reconciliation of political enemies mediated by a woman’s love for a guy in the other side. Granted, she’s a very young woman whose sanity goes and returns depending on whether bubelah has been condemned to death or reprieved....
2/ but her Mad Scene - a beloved device of bel canto composers and sopranos - is what compels her uncle to tell the rejected suitor “You must save your rival,” leading to the greatest baritone-bass duet in Italian opera, “Suoni le trombe,” “Let the trumpets sound”; cf....
3/ cf. Hampson/Ramey duet album, “No Tenors Allowed.” - Star is Anna Netrebko, to whom we wish quick recovery: she recently got a pos ‘rona test while rehearsing DON CARLO at the Bolshoi. Elvira in PURITANI was a long-ago role for her, but it shows off her voice well....
Read 4 tweets

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