Secco Recit

In the 1760s, teetering on the edge between the Baroque and Classical eras, Christoph Willibald Gluck felt that opera had become too self-indulgent. Too much time was wasted on giving the singers all the best florid lines to sing, and text was repeated so often it became meaningless. Operas in this time could run near four hours long and still convey very little story at all. Gluck worked with librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi to come up with a list of reforms to bring opera back to basics, where the music focuses on conveying the drama as simply and directly as possible. Orfeo ed Euridice  clocks in at around ninety minutes. A nice little chestnut of an opera that's over and done with without an intermission. Hei-Kyung Hong and Jamie Barton in Orfeo ed Euridice Photo by Ken Howard Today the Metropolitan Opera opened a revival of Mark Morris' 2007 production of Orfeo ed Euridice , and at first it seems the director has taken Gluck's reforms to their logical ...

It is one thing to mount a competent production of a widely-beloved opera to general acclaim. It is quite another to breathe new life into an oft-maligned opera in such a way that none attending could imagine why it was ever unpopular. This was accomplished (without, I hasten to add, changing the time or place in which the opera was set) by David McVicar in his ninth, and possibly best, production with the Metropolitan Opera, of Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur . This production was broadcast as part of the Met's Live in HD series to cinemas around the world yesterday, and I happily attended, knowing the opera's reputation, being as familiar with it as I thought I needed to be to guess how I would leave feeling. I thought I would enjoy some wonderful vocal performances of some lovely music, while being vaguely entertained by the absurd plot and gawking at the breathtaking scenery and costumes I've come to expect of the designers McVicar tends to work with. Inste...

Yesterday was the Metropolitan Opera Live In HD broadcast of Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright's new opera, Marnie . It was also the last performance in the opera's run, so this review is pretty pointless. But when has that ever stopped me? Isabel Leonard (center) and the so-called "Shadow Marnies." Photo by Ken Howard Marnie  is based on a film by Alfred Hitchcock. (Well, technically it's based on the book by Winston Graham, which Muhly explained was easier to get the rights to. I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but I gather the opera contains elements of both.) A Hitchcock film is in some ways an odd choice for an opera, because much of Hitchcock's skill is in the camera work, which does not translate to a live performance in a 4,000-seat opera house with a fifty-foot proscenium. But it does translate to a cinema broadcast, and several of the shots struck me as something that worked really well in the cinema, but probably didn't p...

I don't understand why the character of Idreno in Semiramide  exists. I mean, I get why  he exists. Rossini needed to write a starring role for whatever tenor. Probably that's the reason, or something like that. But surely he could have been given some bearing on the actual plot? Idreno's role is essentially that of one of the extra suitors in any fairy tale about a princess who has to marry one of three people, and they go in order to face some sort of riddle or challenge, and only the hero of the story will succeed and win the princess' hand. Arsace is the hero. Idreno is one of the other guys. Is it a problem that he exists? Not especially. Rule of three more or less dictates that someone  has to be there, and it may as well be a tenor. What bothers me more is that the opera spends half an hour and two major arias on him. Semiramide herself only has one solo aria. If you cut Idreno's arias, and reduce him to an extra body on stage with a few lines, nothing fund...

In an  interview  last month, David McVicar, the director of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Tosca , talked about how, when talking about productions of operas, people confuse "traditional" with "period." Peter Gelb took over as the Met's general manager in 2006, and since then, most of the company's standard repertory has been replaced with new productions, most of which in turn could be said to be "non-traditional." In general, productions can be non-traditional in one of two ways. They can either be set in a time or place apart from what the libretto specifies, or the choices made could be more artistic, with unrealistic sets and stylized costumes and whatnot. It's easy to spot a non-period production simply by looking for anachronisms. And the Met's had their share, from Michael Mayer's infamous Vegas-set Rigoletto , to ones that more or less flew under the radar, like Deborah Warner's Eugene Onegin,  or Richa...

The Metropolitan Opera's current production of Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour De Loin  marks the second time in two consecutive seasons that the Met has mounted a new production of a not-hugely-popular French opera about three characters entangled in a rather minimalistic plot, in which all three characters tend not to appear on stage at the same time, and about which the director has said that there is, in fact, an important fourth character, that character being the abstract concept of the sea itself, despite the fact that the opera does, in fact, have an actual fourth character, even if only for a handful of lines, but who should still probably be credited above the abstract concept of the sea in the program. Well, I liked  The Pearl Fishers , so why shouldn't I like L'Amour De Loin ? To director Robert Lepage's credit, the sea in this production, portrayed by strings of multicolored LED lights strung across the stage and over the orchestra, did succeed in hogg...