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...

For slightly-more-than-casual opera goers, Arrigo Boito is maybe the third-best-known opera librettist, after Metastasio and Da Ponte. (This is not counting, for completely arbitrary reasons, W.S. Gilbert, who since the decline of opera seria  is the only opera librettist to regularly have his name listed before  the composer, as well as Richard Wagner, who, of course, wrote his own libretti.) Boito is best known for his work with Giuseppe Verdi. They collaborated on Otello  and Falstaff , both generally regarded to be masterpieces, and Boito also worked on the revised version of Simon Boccanegra , which is as underrated an opera as there ever was. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Mefistofele , the one complete extant opera for which Boito wrote both text and music, should have as well-constructed a libretto as you could hope for. And it does. The biting question is, does the music match up? A scene from Boito's Mefistofele Photo by Karen Almond ...

The Met announced their  2018-19  season yesterday. I did plug it into the  spreadsheet , and it popped out a score of 0.2481. Which is not only more daring than any of the remarkably close past four seasons, but also the most daring of any season in the past seven years, with the 2013-14 season being next at 0.2489. So it looks like what I found in my last post was just a neat coincidence. There are two major things bringing this number down. The first is the Ring Cycle. The Ring Cycle is always a special event, and draws in a crowd. The reason it scores so low is because it's difficult to pull off, and so companies don't attempt it that often. But when you do pull it of, it's not exactly an obscure thing that no one's going to see. This is a marked flaw that my algorithm doesn't account for. I expect that's also why Aida scores surprisingly low. It's just a technically difficult show, so it's done less often, but that doesn't mean it's any le...

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...