Secco Recit

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...