Opera updates

[cahn]

-I have watched Il Trovatore now! So this was one where it actively Did Not Help to listen to the Opera in English version first (which I usually do), because it made me dislike all the characters. (In general I have noticed the Opera in English just doesn't quite get the appeal of the opera across, perhaps because Verdi ties his music so much in with the language? Don Carlos was an exception where I really liked the Opera in English version, I think not least because the Italian version is already a translation from French, so it was already sort of crafted to be a translation?)

Then I watched the ROH 2009 (Cura, Hvorostovsky, Villarroel) and my wibbly feelings on that are basically summed up in two words: DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY. I mean. He was born to play di Luna (and also Onegin). He does angry-shading-into-devastated pining so well. Anyway... it's got a bonkers story and Leonora should totally ditch both Manrico (who has the lame RAGE!jealousy thing going on and also isn't as hot as Dima anyway) and di Luna (who... is kind of a stalker) but it's got such SUCH beautiful music and Hvorostovsky makes me feel So Bad for di Luna :P (At the ending, he sort of cradles Manrico in his arms... :( ) and now I love it.

-There's no Opera in English recording of I Vespri Siciliani, so I listened to the (Italian) recording (Arroyo, Domingo, Milnes) (thanks zdenka!) which gave me All The Feelings -- family relationships! the angst between private relationships and public duty! Good things (here, patriotic sentiment) gone horribly wrong! -- everything I like! -- and then I watched I Vespri (Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Dunn, Luchetti, Nucci) and my feelings on that are basically "what a waste of Leo Nucci!" And probably the other singers too (who as far as I can tell were making the best of a bad situation), but I don't know them; and I'd just watched Nucci in Ballo and concurrently watched about half of L'elisir d'amore (I haven't finished not because it's not brilliant, which it is, but I started watching it to make sure Nucci really was as good an actor as I remembered him being, which he is (and he can do comic too!!), and then I got my Met on Demand subscription back and, er, I haven't gotten back to it yet), and he's so so good in both, and here they've just made him (and the other singers) park and bark, it's really terrible. The singing was good? Nucci, despite being totally boring in a stand-in-one-place kind of way, still totally sold his paternal drama to me.

-Then I watched Les contes d'Hoffman (Met 2015), and my takeaway from that was that Kate Lindsey (who was playing the Muse/Nicklausse) Is Awesome. And they had it staged so Thomas Hampson (whose voice is honestly a little worn from his prime, but who was totally awesome as usual and was clearly having a lot of fun <3), who was playing the Four Villians, and Lindsey were always giving each other Significant Looks, and of course I found that extremely fascinating. and of course I was very interested in Dapertutto's diamond, which I found entirely satisfactory as a shiny prop And all the women were excellent. But man, that's a weird opera.

-La Clemenza di Tito (Met 2012) can be summed up as "I now have an Extreme and Total Crush on both Elīna Garanča and Kate Lindsey." I absolutely adored it for SO SO MANY of the same reasons I adore Don Carlo(s). All these super super strong loyalty and friendship and romantic relationships conflicting with each other! People struggling between their private emotional feelings and public duty! Duets where people profess their not-necessarily-romantic) love and adoration and BFF-ness for each other! (although, okay, in this production Tito/Sesto had clear romantic undertones, and yes, I have All The Feelings about that too)

Only Clemenza is the happy-ending version, if all these very very strong relationships ended up strengthening each other instead of crashing into tragic pieces. Which, I gotta say, after mainlining a bunch of Verdi I totally appreciate EVERYONE EMBRACING THE BETTER HALVES OF THEMSELVES AND NO ONE DYING. If this were a Verdi opera Annio would have kicked it ¾ of the through and Tito would have condemned a bunch of people to death by the end.

Also, I was interested to realize that apparently my inability to tell white boys apart (I was really really confused during the first LOTR movie when, from my point of view, Boromir went after the Ring twice, because I couldn't tell Boromir and Aragorn apart shut up) is... apparently strongly gender-based. When I was trying to tell Annio and Sesto apart and coding them as males, I could never figure out which was which. When I coded them as women in my brain, then suddenly I was able to tell them apart.

Comments

[justplainsavannahd]

Glad you're enjoying your opera quest! :)
As for Vespri, yeah, I've seen that production too; it's...bland. There's a 1989 production from La Scala that's better IMO (although it doesn't have Nucci, but this baritone is also excellent). It moves the action to the time of composition; I can message you a link if you want (the video has Italian and Spanish subs, by the way).

I love reading your posts as you react to different operas- keep 'em coming! ;)

[cahn]

:D I am enjoying it! I think that's all the major Verdi now, except for Aida... I think I may wait for this season's Met Aida to hit Met on Demand, because I love Netrebko. I'm sad about running out of Verdi, but there are a lot of French and German operas out there I need to get caught up on, not to mention trying to make up for years of thinking I hated bel canto :)

That Vespri *is* SO BLAND and I don't even understand it because so many exciting things happen in it!! Hm, I may ask you for that at some point! I need to watch Huguenots first, though :D

[justplainsavannahd]

No problem! I think you'll have a lot of fun watching Huguenots. I don't get why that Vespri was so bland- it just was, you know?

Happy exploring! Opera is a lifelong journey, I feel like, and I think we've all got a long way to go :)

[cahn]

I've realized that I need actual action onstage to actually like a performance -- if everyone just stands still (LIKE THEY DID IN THAT VESPRI) I just have a really hard time with it no matter how great the singing.

Yes, I'm excited as to how much there is! :)

[seekingferret]

You and reconditarmonia can talk about your Kate Lindsey in Contes D'Hoffman feels.

(c.f. https://seekingferret.livejournal.com/91417.html )

Meanwhile I'm all "BUT DID YOU SEE THE ROBOT GIRL WITH HER EMOTIONS??!!??"

[alcanis_ivennil]

Italian opera in English is just nope in general. Bilingual libretto solves everything. That's how I picked up a lot of Italian without ever studying it.

Dima as di Luna was simply perfection. He's so beautiful and even though he's the bad guy, there is a certain vulnerability to him. Also, those amazing legatos. (The London production also has the best staged ending I have seen. Nowadays it's not uncommon to kill the tenor onstage but that reaction? The feels.)

[cahn]

Olympia was so good!! (Like, how hard must it be to be a person playing a robot playing a person!!) Hilariously, the only thing I knew about Contes going in was that there was a robot girl, which... made me expect something entirely different than what the opera actually is. (I also conflated it a bit with Nutcracker, which I have also never seen but have osmosed, so I was expecting it to be a kid's-level bizarre fantasy where the robot fell in love with a rat king, and... yeah, no.)

[cahn]

The weird thing is, I've been listening to comic Donizetti in Opera in English and it's actually... really good?? Like, I suddenly understand why comic Donizetti is a thing and people like it, which I have never gotten from the Italian even with bilingual libretto and/or subtitles. I think it's because whoever is the translator is brilliant and has successfully been able to pull over the sparkling rhymes that make it work. (The comic Mozart, like Nozze and Cosi, also work really well, although I can't listen to Nozze in English because I know it too well in Italian and I get severe cognitive dissonance.)

But Verdi doesn't work so well that way, I think maybe because Verdi does a different kind of thing where the music and the words are meant to go together and match really precisely. Except of course for Don Carlo which is a translation itself :P (They didn't do Vespri but I really wonder if doing that one in English would also work better, for the same reason.)

Ahhhhh Dima was amazing. He does that sort of pining vulnerability so well. I love that staging of the ending and I refuse to believe it can be staged any other way :)

[seekingferret]

Yeah... no. It's very much Hoffman for grownups.

Offenbach had a complicated relationship with his Judaism. He was not at all observant, but he was involved in the social circle of secular Jewish Paris with people like the Halevy clan, and I think he was somewhat more open about his Jewish heritage than many other Jewish artists of the era as a result of that community. freeradical42 once wrote a draft of a Jewish!Kleinzach story that suggested that Kleinzach's presence in the opera as a crypto-Jewish dwarf in some way reflected Offenbach's mixed feelings about his sublimated Jewish identity.