Orfeo ed Euridice - the Metropolitan Opera Screening

The Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting live opera performances from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York City to movie houses around the country. On January 17th, I attended a screening of Orfeo ed Euridice at the Mountain View Cinemas 16, which is about  7 miles from my house. I'm singing in the chorus of West Bay Opera's upcoming production of Orfeo. The usual 11:00 AM music rehearsal was delayed a couple hours so we could take this in.  

I had not tried this before, so was a little worried about (1) attending opera at a movie house and (2) attending opera at 10:00 AM! It worked out great though. Cinemas 16 serves a reasonable cup of coffee and the movie house venue was fine - no problems at all with the audience, and we didn't have to sit through a bunch of silly ads or trailers. I got there about 20 minutes early, and walked into the theater to the sound of the orchestra warming up.  The movie screen showed scenes from the opera house - orchestra members in the pit, the audience slowly filling the hall, shots of the concert hall, the chandeliers, curtained stage etc. The show's introduction was emceed by  mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (now that's luxury casting!). She introduced the opera and conducted short and fluffy interviews with music director James Levine and stage director Mark Morris. Then it was on to the overture.

The opera is based on a Greek myth about Orpheus, the greatest musician of his era, and chronicles his journey to the underworld to retrieve his beloved wife, Euridice. The amazing mezzo soprano Stephanie Blythe covered the title role. Euridice, Orfeo's wife, was sung by soprano Danielle de Niese, and Heidi Grant Murphy was Amor, the god of love. They were accompanied by a corps of dancers, and were backed up - literally - by the Met's opera chorus, almost 100 strong, arranged in three tiers behind them. It was performed as one 90 minute act.

  

The music and singing were terrific. I loved Stephanie Blythe's sound - a powerful luscious mezzo. She's a fine actress and made a heroic Orfeo. The filming adds close-ups of the stage, which adds another dimension.  There were a couple times in the first scene where I found Ms. Blythe weirdly oblivious of others on the stage, but that's a nit - it could be that was because her focus was mostly (and appropriately) out to the audience. Danielle de Niese was superb, stunning even in a less than successful gown, singing beautifully and acting up a storm. Heidi Grant Murphy was immensely cute as Amor in her khakis, pink polo shirt and glittery heart stickers - lending a sort of Jiminy Cricket feel to the character.

The staging was not particularly successful. There wasn't much dramatically connected movement at all. I really felt sorry for the chorus - they were elaborately costumed as individual figures from history - Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln, John Lennon, Joan of Arc etc., so they looked great, and they sounded wonderful, but they were caged up in those three tiers for the entire opera (They also had some rather silly unison hand and head gestures that they delivered with a notable lack of enthusiasm - talk about unmotivated...). There was a lot of dancing, which was well enough, but it seemed pretty disconnected from the story and music.  Ms. Blythe and Ms. de Niese did a beautiful job in dramatic third act as Orfeo desperately begs Euridice to please follow him home with no questions and Euridice just as desperately begs Orfeo to look at her, but not much more than their heads were visible in the dark and rocky set.

Well, you can't have everything all the time, even from the Met.  It was an enjoyable Saturday morning.  

Below photo of the Metropolitan Opera House from this link.

San Francisco Symphony Concert - January 17th

Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the concert, and the featured pianist was Garrick Ohlsson. A nice add-on to the evening was an "Off the Podium" session after the show - fifteen minutes of question and answer with Maestro Tilson Thomas and Mr. Ohlsson.

This year, I'm listening to recordings of the music I'm hearing live before the actual performance. This was the first concert that I've tried with this new regime, and the results were quite interesting. The first piece, Street Song for Symphonic Brass, by Michael Tilson Thomas, is for four French horns, three trumpets and flugelhorn, two trombones, bass trombone, and tuba. It's a re-work of a brass quintet by the same name. There is no recording of the symphonic brass version, but I did find a recording of the quintet by the Center City Brass Quintet.  Street Song is lovely, beautifully showcasing the range of colors and moods that brass can evoke, and the performance on the CD is terrific. The ensemble is wonderfully fleet and tight, and the group's "turn-on-a-dime" dynamic, tone color and mood shifts are just delightful. I listened to the piece three or four times, growing fonder with each run-through.

The SFO performance, alas, was disappointing. Attacks were tentative, tempos a bit slow, the ensemble in many spots wasn't crisp, and it seemed low energy. No clams - a major accomplishment in this obviously difficult piece - but there was a carefulness to the playing that interfered with forward momentum and overall energy. It is nearly impossible to get to quintet tightness with a conducted ensemble, but I've been listening to this group long enough (almost 15 years now) to know it could have been a lot better. It could be lack of rehearsal and not enough time for the piece to settle in, or, it could have just been an off night. Street Song is on their West Coast tour, so they get a few more shots at it. Now I have to go back and listen to the recording again to make sure I still like it as much as I think I do!

The Prokofiev Piano Concerto Number 5 was the opposite experience. I didn't like the recording I got at all, and was not looking forward to the performance - but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. This is wacky music. The structure is bizarre - four scherzo-type things surrounding a lyrical larghetto movement. The opening sounded like the pianist and orchestra frantically searching for tunes they could both agree on - and that impression never let up.  Garrick Ohlsson and the orchestra gave a wonderful account - beautifully precise, lots of deadpan humor (my concert companion was stifling giggles through the whole thing) - and made a good case for the piece's demented (but eventually evident) internal logic.  Now I want to listen to the recording again to see if I like it any better.

I love the way MTT and San Francisco Symphony play Tchaikovsky. Their rendition of the Symphony #5 was totally satisfying. Robert Ward played the second movement horn solo with plangent eloquence. Before the concert, I'd listened to a version recorded around 1970, by the USSR Symphony, conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. Reasonable recording, very nice playing, but the SFO version was a lot better - sweeter and more fluid, with equivalent passion. MTT's moment-to-moment focus provided visual cues as to what to focus on in the music, which always leads to a deeper experience.  

The evening was capped off with an "Off the Podium" session with Tilson Thomas and Ohlsson. They appeared about 20 minutes after the concert, sans tuxes (MTT looking especially suave in color-coordinated blue-gray sports jacket and running shoes), to field questions from the audience. Some highlights - Garrick Ohlsson pre-answered a question he always gets asked "How do you memorize all those note?" He claimed memorizing the notes is the easy part, it's playing them correctly that's hard! MTT was asked how he decides whether to use a score or not during a performance (he'd conducted the Tchaikovsky without one). He said it depended on a on how sharp he was feeling at the time and and how close he was to knowing a piece "by heart". The Tchaikovsky is a "heart" piece for him. He likened his experience with it to "revisiting a national park", which I thought was a wonderful analogy. My favorite question was from a woman near the back - she asked MTT how he keeps the orchestra together. "Do you gesture before, and then they come in or what? I couldn't tell from where I was sitting". He answered that determining when "now" is  - and also what kind of "now" is happening - is a conductor's main job. This may not have answered the woman's question (it sounded like she was more interested in the mechanics of it) but I loved the answer.    

Music January 2009

 

This month is a heavy schedule. I'll be rehearsing Zoltan Kodaly's Missa Brevis and (if we get the parts on time) Joji Yuasa's Cosmic Solitude with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus. Rehearsals also start for the chorus in West Bay Opera's Palo Alto premiere of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. I'm attending a January 17th San Francisco Symphony concert with the program of Michael Tilson Thomas' Street Song for Symphonic Brass, Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 5  and Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Garrick Ohlsson is the piano soloist, and Michael Tilson Thomas conducts. Voice lessons continue. I'm working on The Crucifixion by Samuel Barber/Howard Mumford Jones, Stride la Vampa from the opera Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi / Leone Emanuele Bardare and Salvatore Cammarano (my voice teacher is an optimist), and the delightful Song With the Violins by John Bucchino. 

So quite the mash-up. I'm singing Latin, Italian, English and maybe German. I've got music spanning two centuries  - Orfeo, which premiered in Vienna in 1794 to Cosmic Solitude, written in 1997.  I've got a mass, a crucifixion, a witch burning, someone with severe relationship anxiety and a heavily modified Greek myth about a musician's journey to the underworld to retrieve his wife.  Singing isn't one of your relaxing hobbies.