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 ...

As I've mentioned before , the German Reed Entertainments are a curious little lot. A series of short "musical entertainments" produced and performed by Thomas German Reed, his wife Priscilla, and assorted others, from about 1855 to 1895. These were, for the most part, not grand spectacles of great significance, and little care was taken to preserve most of them. Today, they are all but forgotten. All but six, that is. A half-dozen which retain historical interest, because their libretti were created by William Schwenk Gilbert, who has gained enough fame and historical regard that even his less significant works are considered worth preserving, if only for the sake of maintaining a complete archive. It is certainly interesting, years after the fact, to read through these musical entertainments to see how Gilbert began to explore the themes and devices he would later more fully develop. Our Island Home  would give way to H.M.S. Pinafore  and The Pirates Of Penzance . Ele...

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 ...

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 give a bit of background information about  Haddon Hall  and its major dramatic issues at the beginning. If you're just here for the production review, you can skip down a few paragraphs. *** The actual Haddon Hall *** The 1892 Sullivan and Grundy opera  Haddon Hall  is sort of like  H.M.S. Pinafore , but on land. Dorothy Vernon is to be engaged to her cousin Rupert, in a generally advantageous match. George Vernon, Dorothy's father, is the Lord of Haddon Hall, and wants the estate to stay in the family. (Rupert, meanwhile, wants the hall all to himself.) But Dorothy is in love with John Manners, a royalist. Rupert shows up, Dorothy refuses him. Dorothy makes plans to elope with Manners. Dorothy elopes with Manners. Parliament grants Rupert lordship over Haddon Hall. Charles II is reinstated to the throne, making Haddon Hall property of the crown, and, at the last second, Manners swoops in with an order from the king restoring George Vernon as the...

I was going to begin this blog post by complaining about the lyric "Up with which below can't compare with." It's a lyric that's bugged me since I first listened to  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever , not least because it's such an easy fix. Just get rid of the first "with." Well, it turns out that in the stage show, Mark Bruckner actually calls Daisy Gamble out on this line right after she sings it. I've checked this with the vocal score, and this is indeed what Alan Jay Lerner wrote. I'm not wholly convinced that Lerner didn't just like the rhythm of the line and added in the dialogue to justify, but justify it he has, so I can't reasonably complain. I  can  however, complain about how he rhymes "azalea" with "failure" in the very same song. (Pronouncing the latter "failya.") As far as I could tell, this lyric was rewritten for the movie to rhyme "least a" with "Easter," which ha...

I saw the City Center Encores! Off Center production of A New Brain  yesterday. A New Brain , by William Finn and James Lapine, seems on the face of it a fairly simple concept. Composer-lyricist Gordon Schwinn is stuck writing for a kids' show, a job which he hates, and then he suffers a... brain thing, and has to undergo high-risk surgery, causing him to reevaluate his life, and emerge with a new appreciation for singing frogs. (This is  based on a real event in William Finn's life; apparently James Lapine would urge him in the hospital to take notes.) The musical also concerns how this situation is handled by the other people in Gordon's life, including his mother, his boyfriend Roger, his colleague and friend Rhoda, and a homeless lady. I suppose I should give a review. (Look at that! My first review!) This review I should preface by saying I absolutely loved the show and all of its elements. I will, however, be trying to give an honest critique of the show. Whatever...