Opera streaming

[cahn]

Everyone knows the Met and other opera companies are streaming opera free right now, right?

Tonight the Met is streaming Eugene Onegin, so everyone should watch it and then report back to me :)

(In two weeks the Met will be streaming their Don Carlo. Just Saying :P )

Comments

[zdenka]

I did! :D

[cahn]

:D Did you see the Trovatore or the Traviata? I missed them that night but I have Met on Demand at present and I'm currently (slowly) watching the Trovatore. Hvorostovsky hasn't shown up yet but Anna Netrebko has, and wowowowow she is amazing.

[zdenka]

I had time to watch most of the Trovatore before they took it down. Performers very good, a few direction things that annoyed me, set ugly. C'mon, they're the Met! They have the budget to make that ridiculous staircase at least look like a stone staircase instead of a concrete staircase.

/has strong feelings about staircases, apparently

[kore]

Scenery definitely matters in opera! (I grew up in Santa Fe and that Opera definitely made some....um, choices in the eighties.)

[zdenka]

It does! Not every opera company can afford to get fancy with the scenery and I totally respect that, but if the Met has an ugly concrete staircase on their stage, I know it's intentional!

[kore]

I think the worst opera staircase I ever saw was the Magic Flute at SFO and (IIRC) there was a giant sort of stone-looking staircase on one side of the stage that was just....there. It didn't lead anywhere, there wasn't any door at the top or the bottom, it was too fragile for the singers to ascend. It looked sort of like half a papier-mache ziggurat. The people singing onstage were drowned out by everyone in the audience whispering to their seatmate, "Why isn't that staircase going anywhere, Martha?" (What is it about opera and staircases? Really old school eighties opera productions seemed to have them every time.)

I think for Worst Fucking Taped Production I have ever seen it has to be that Don Giovanni where the Don is wearing a Burger King crown and they have Leporello with a boombox for the onstage orchestra playing the opera arias. I couldn't even focus on the singing, I was just like WHY. WHY YOU DO THIS.

Aha it was this one! (Found a description: "The setting is eerily surrealistic and includes sudden appearances of ropes, a bus-stop and a car. Don Giovanni is mortally wounded in the fight with the commendatore and the opera takes place during the last three hours of his life as he is slowly dying. Or perhaps it is just drug-induced hallucinations of him and Leporello, both intravenous drug users, in the wood?") Salzburg 2008.

[zdenka]

Noooooo, why? D: Once an opera production is described as "surrealistic" I'm pretty certain not to like it.

[kore]

WHY INDEED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEujPMgH2I (the singing is great! altho Erwin Schrott is singing an octave above his lowest notes. But DOROTHEA ROSCHMANN! -- BUT WHY is Leporello handing him a can of malt liquor? at "Eccellente marzimino"??)

I'm old school so I blame Joseph Papp. Well, my parents lived in NYC about when he started his re-imaginings of Shakespeare (my dad was involved in the production of Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody) so they blamed Joseph Papp.

[kore]

AAAGH GOOGLING TOOK ME TO THE BAD PLACE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF7ocNl6nXo


....'competently sung yet bizarrely staged Don Giovannis' seems to be an actual category on UTU, at least it's taking my mind off the plague

https://youtu.be/Hnd5ULYG2no?t=8870

[cahn]

OMG

LOL I've actually seen that clip before as Thomas Hampson is one of my favorite singers Ever and for a while I was watching any youtube clip with him in it. Bless his heart you can see him really putting his whole heart into selling the concept but OMG THAT STAGING MY EYES THEY BURN

ngl I would still watch that for Hampson and D'Arcangelo but probably laugh a lot at totally inappropriate times

Another totally WTF staging I have sat through for the sake of Thomas Hampson is this Macbeth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta5ziv_Ax18
(if you want to mostly spare your eyes, and who can blame you, I have screenshots here: https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/139772.html)

[kore]

The singing is so good! But it's just like WHY, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, WHY WOULD ANYONE GIVE YOU MONEY TO DO THAT, WHY DID THE AUDIENCE JUST NOT THROW TOMATOES AT THE SCENERY. I mean just think of all the people that staging had to go through -- the designer, the carpenters, the painters, the choreographer, whoever -- and NOBODY said "WTF are you doing?"

....GREEN GOO, OH MY GOD.

-- okay I watched more and I think that production actually out-WTFs Polanski's terrible movie version which is impressive in a really horrible direction

[cahn]

ahahaha, right?? And the thing is... like, I'm pretty sure I have a much higher tolerance for weird regie staging than you or zdenka. There have been regie stagings that I absolutely adore (even though I understand why other people wouldn't like them), and even that Hampson-D'Arcangelo Salzburg Don Giovanni, even though it definitely has more than its fair share of WTF, I do get that they're going for a particular effect and there are a lot of things I think are fascinating about that (and like I said I'd probably watch it, too).

And then there's that Macbeth, where I have NO IDEA what the director was trying to go for. Like, if he had been going for Alien Duncan/MacDuff it would be super weird but at least it would be a unifying concept! But honestly I think the director was like "green goo sounds like it would be coooool and shock the audience! Gold Duncan? WHY NOT." *facepalm*

(I still watched it for Hampson, though :) he's So Good)

[kore]

And the thing is... like, I'm pretty sure I have a much higher tolerance for weird regie staging than you or [personal profile] zdenka

Ahaha I have no doubt! And yet....GREEN GOO! Maybe he saw too much Star Trek at a formative age?

[cahn]

IDK! But I did get two awesome Yuletide stories out of it!

Favor for Ruin
So Green and Pale

[kore]

Wow and apparently SFO continues to make bad scenery choies re DZ: https://www.santafeopera.org/ticketing-and-operas/the-magic-flute Tim Albery’s reverent but imaginative production supports, enriches, and clarifies Mozart’s immortal tale, freely mixing time periods and cultural references to underline the opera’s universal themes. Uh.

[zdenka]

I appreciate your sacrifice, but just to let you know I'm not going to watch any of these links. Because they would just make me mad and I would hate them. :P But feel free to keep posting them for the amused horror of cahn and others!

[kore]

LOL I admire your self-restraint! I was raised by wolves musicians, so "Terrible Productions" was like a family Jeopardy category.

[cahn]

tbh I have no self-restraint when it comes to Terrible Opera productions, so feel free to continue to link them and I shall point and laugh :D

[cahn]

...I don't see any of the scenery? Though "mixing time periods" doesn't sound promising At All. I guess though that the ROH I like so much mixed two time periods, but I think that's about all you can mix without going a little insane.

[cahn]

lolololol! Staircases are important, I guess!

I'll ask you about the direction things when I've watched a little more (I'm not very far in at all yet)

I am in love with everything about the Onegin, I hope you get a chance to watch some of it :D

[zdenka]

:P

I might not remember all of them--I've been really tired. But I'll tell you if I remember.

I'll see if I have the time and brain to watch Onegin tomorrow-technically-today. I don't know Russian opera in general nearly as well as I'd like.