Thoughts on the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD series 2012/13

The Metropolitan Opera has announced the HD broadcast line up for next season.  Here it is with my entirely objective and unbiased comments.

Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore New Production – October 13, 2012
Cond – Maurizio Benini, Dir – Bartlett Sher, Cast – Anna Netrebko, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecien, Ambrogio Maestri

Bartlett Sher?  Again?  Clearly Gelb’s “Broadway show of the year” (one of them, anyway).  Probably worth seeing for the cast who are capable of being funny in the drabbest production.

Verdi’s Otello – October 27, 2012
Cond – Semyon Bychkov, Dir – Elijah Moshinsky, Cast – Johan Botha, Renée Fleming

Well we are not going to see much acting here.  Probably one to stay home and listen to on the radio,

Adès’s The Tempest Met Premiere – November 10, 2012
Cond – Thomas Adès, Dir – Robert Lepage, Cast – Simon Keenlyside

Probably the highlight of the season.  A must see.

Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito - December 1, 2012
Cond – Harry Bicket, Dir – Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Cast – Elīna Garanča, Giuseppe Filianoti, Barbara Frittoli

Is this production any good?  I’ll probably go but I’m not as excited about this as I am about seeing Michael Schade in Christopher Alden’s production in February.

Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera New Production – December 8, 2012
Cond – Fabio Luisi, Dir – David Alden, Cast – Marcelo Álvarez, Karita Mattila, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Kathleen Kim, Stephanie Blythe

This looks promising.  On the list.

Verdi’s Aida – December 15, 2012
Cond – Fabio Luisi, Dir – Sonja Frisell, Cast – Liudmyla Monastyrska, Roberto Alagna, Olga Borodina

I’d quite like to see Monastyrka but I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a spork then watch this dreadful old production again.  Thank you CBC Radio.

Berlioz’s Les Troyens - January 5, 2013
Cond – Fabio Luisi, Dir – Francesca Zambello, Cast – Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, Marcello Giordani, Dwayne Croft

I have my doubts about Debbie as Cassandra but this is definitely worth a look.

Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda Met Premiere – January 19, 2013
Cond – Maurizio Benini, Dir – David McVicar, Cast – Joyce DiDonato, Elza van den Heever

Can McVicar raise his game to a higher level than his rather dismal Anna Bolena?  Worth going to see probably.

Verdi’s Rigoletto New Production – February 16, 2013
Cond – Michele Mariotti, Dir – Michael Mayer, Cast – Piotr Beczala, Željko Lucic, Diana Damrau

Another of Gelb’s Broadway buddies takes a crack at opera.  It’s been such a successful strategy after all.  The bland leading the bland?

Wagner’s Parsifal New Production – March 2, 2013
Cond – Daniele Gatti, Dir – François Girard, Cast – Jonas Kaufmann, Katarina Dalayman, Peter Mattei, Evgeny Nikitin, René Pape

Fabulous cast!  This is a co-pro with Opéra de Lyon and the COC so (a) the reviews from Lyon will be in before we have to decide and (b) I’ll eventually get to see it in Toronto.  Still, that cast…

Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini - March 16, 2013
Cond – Marco Armiliato, Dir – Piero Faggioni, Cast – Eva-Maria Westbroek, Marcello Giordani are the doomed lovers.

This is a new piece for me.  Curiosity calls.

Handel’s Giulio Cesare New Production – April 27, 2013
Cond – Harry Bicket, Dir – David McVicar, Cast – David Daniels, Natalie Dessay

New production?  This is the Glyndebourne production set in 19th century British occupied Egypt complete with red coats, kilts etc.  It’s available on Blu-ray and DVD with a stronger cast (Connolly/de Niese) and period instruments. The Blu-ray has better production values than any MetHD broadcast I’ve ever seen so go buy that instead.

Bottom LIne

Yes: The Tempest, Un Ballo in Maschera, Les Troyens, Maria Stuarda, Parsifal, Francesca da Rimini

Maybe: L’Elisir d’Amore, La Clemenza di Tito

Not a chance: Otello, Aida, Rigoletto (is there a pattern here?), Giulio Cesare

Will the Met’s Live in HD series significantly affect live opera?

I’ve been giving far too much thought to a range of issues surrounding the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcasts to cinemas. They have attracted a wide audience and are much talked about, both as performances and as to their impact on live opera; the so-called HD Generation. That said, I’ve seen little analysis of what the broadcasts really are or of their audience or of how and why the HD audience reacts to them the way it does. I want to explore those questions and then go on to look at whether and how the HD broadcasts might influence the practice of live opera. Some of this will be speculative as I am certainly not privy to the kind of data about the audience and its reaction that I would need to do what I want to do well. Some of it will be coloured, perhaps highly coloured, by my own experiences with live music, electronically reproduced music and the tricky relationship between them.

Siegfried ex Machina

I had very mixed feelings about today’s HD broadcast of Siegfried from the Metropolitan Opera. Early reviews and comments by friends had been largely negative about the staging and there was a widespread view that “the machine” was intrusively noisy. As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised. For once Gary Halvorson’s relentless close ups were a boon. From what little we could see of them, the first and second act sets were both uninteresting and gimmicky. The 3D leaf scattering, the crudely pixellated woodbird and the laughable Wurm were just among the sillier features. To be fair , the beginning of the third act made effective use of the set but that was the only place that it did work well. So focussing on the singers made a lot of sense.

Fortunately musical values were such that it was pretty much possible to ignore the staging. Singing across the board was excellent with both Bryn Terfel as Wanderer and Jay Hunter-Morris in the title being very effective. I didn’t detect any insecurity or lack of power in Deb Voigt’s Brünnhilde. Of course it’s quite possible that the sound team balanced the singers well forward in the broadcast to disguise a lack of power but that’s not something the audience needed to worry about. Actually I don’t think that’s what happened. I suspect the singing was more lyrical and less heavy than some Wagner productions but it was matched by some superbly transparent work from the orchestra so I imagine it sounded fine in the house too. In fact Fabio Luisi’s handling of the orchestral texture and the relationship between orchestra and singers was very good indeed. It was Wagner as I’m not accustomed to hearing it but I was instantly converted. The only place where it all seemed to get a bit congested again was in the final duet but that could as easily have been fatigue on my part as anything else. Certainly the sound in the cinema for me was much better reproduced than has often been the case for these broadcasts with very little THD even in very loud passages.

All in all, much better than Anna Bolena or Don Giovanni.

Don Giovanni by numbers

Perhaps the best bit of today’s Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Don Giovanni was Renée Fleming’s interval interview with Mariusz Kwiecien.  As best I recall it went:

RF: What do you like best about this production?

MK: There’s nothing new in it so we get to do what we always do.

And that is very much the truth.  British Wunderkind Michael Grandage gave us a production that I thought  averagely dull for the Met until the interval and  worse afterwards.  The set consists basically of an “advent calendar” (I owe this brilliant terminology to Zerbinetta at Likely Impossibilities) of shuttered cells in “collapsed barn” brown and grey.  For once I was grateful for a virtually continuous sequence of close ups which meant I didn’t need to look at the set.  Costumes are traditional and blocking is pretty ordinary.  The only point where there seems to be much of a directorial idea is in the final scene where Grandage goes McVicar on us.  Don Giovanni is carousing with about ten cheap prostitutes though, it being the Met, they keep more of their clothes on than the average whore.  It makes no sense.  He’s an indiscriminate womaniser but there’s no suggestion that he has to buy his pleasures.  We also get the advent calendar populated by statues of monks and some pretty ordinary pyrotechnics.  It doesn’t work.

The production is a shame because the singing is consistently good and some of the acting is very decent.  The star is Luca Pisaroni’s Leporello.  He’s excellent all round. I also like Mojca Erdmann’s Zerlina which, I think is a bit less sappy than some I’ve seen.  She definitely tops from the bottom in Batti, batti.  Joshua Bloom’s Masetto is pretty good too helped by the fact that he isn’t twice as big as Kwiecien as so many Masettos seem to be.

No complaints about the conducting (Fabio Luisi) or orchestral playing though it’s a heavier sound than I prefer for Mozart but that’s what you get in a big house.

Ho hum.

Anna Bolena – MetHD broadcast

Today’s Metropolitan Opera “Live in HD” broadcast was Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. I was not overly impressed although whether this was a result of issues associated with the broadcast or what was happening in the house I’m not entirely sure. One issue was that, again, the cinema was forcing its sound system well past the point at which it could consistently and accurately reproduce music. It may be OK for car chases and explosions but they need to throttle the volume back for the opera broadcasts. I’m guessing that they could drop the sound 6dB and still be louder than it would sound in the house. Driving the speakers and amps at 25% of the pressure level they are currently flogging them at would surely reduce the harmonic distortion. This was particularly an issue because this was very “heavy” Donizetti. I don’t know the work well enough to know whether it has to be done this way but the Met cast large voices in almost all the major roles and Marco Amiliato in the pit seemed to be demanding a very loud and strident sound from the orchestra. It was quite dramatic but emphatically not bel canto; more like forte shouto really. The only singer who sounded idiomatic to me was Tamara Mumford as the page, Smeaton. It did get better after the interval and the big duet between Anna (Anna Netrebko) and Giovanna Seymour (Ekaterina Gubanova) was really quite affecting. Also as far as I could tell Netrebko was singing really well in the “mad scene” (which really isn’t all that mad as these things go) but unfortunately the person in the seat behind me was having extremely audible “gastric distress” and both the lemur and I were having the hardest time not dissolving into giggles during perhaps the most solemn part of the opera. And I thought the coughing at the Four Seasons Centre was bad.

The staging was literal and dull. I expected rather more from David McVicar. At the very least he’s usually good for some sex and violence. All we got here was Enrico (Ildar Abdrazakov) copping a feel of Giovanna in the first act and a bloody Smeaton who looked like he’d had a run in with Dick Cheney in the second. We even got gratuitous wolfhounds in the hunting scene. Has the Met negotiated a quota with Animals Equity? If so, we demand more wombats and platypuses rather than type casting dogs and horses.(1) The lighting was really dark much of the time which may have been effective in the house but was problematic on the cinecast. Digital video cameras respond to low light levels by amplifying what “signal” they are getting to produce a grainy, ghosting picture so, far from getting a consistent HD picture, it was fluctuating from crystal clear to what could have come from an old VHS tape.

From the applause in New York I got the impression the audience in the house were lapping this up. I felt more like I’d just spent four hours in a canning factory without ear protectors.

(1)Anybody who gets this reference wins a small, virtual prize for extreme cleverness.

Upcoming HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera

The Met HD 2011/12 season went on sale to Friends of the Met and, in Canada, for holders of Scene cards; the loyalty card for the chain that does the Met broadcasts up here. I just got my order in. The lemur and I go to the Scotiabank Theatre at Richmond and John for these things. They use two auditoria; the roughly 500 seat Theatre 1 and the roughly 300 seat Theatre 13, for the Met broadcasts. By 1pm today when I was choosing seats roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the seats in Theatre 1 had already gone and a fair chunk of 13 was sold too.

For the record, we decided to see only six of the eleven shows this season. We’ll be seeing Anna Bolena, Don Giovanni, Siegfried, Faust, Enchanted Island and Gotterdammerung. If any of the others get rave reviews we might catch the encore performance.

Die Walküre

Once in a while an opera performance really blows you away and it becomes quite hard to write about, especially when the work is as long and dense as Die Walküre because even with a great performance one is in overload by the end. Yesterday’s broadcast from the Met was one of those experiences. Here’s what I think I saw!

The show started forty minutes late, which is not good news for a show scheduled to run five and a half hours anyway. There was no explanation of the delay until the first interval prompting speculation about Maestro Levine dropping out again or a stagehand being crushed by The Machine. It turned out to be a relatively prosaic component fault on The Machine(1).

The first act was terrific. Jonas Kauffman was a completely convincing Siegmund who combined power with beauty of tone. Eva Maria Westbroek was a Sieglinde with a genuine touch of vulnerability and Hans-Peter Kõnig was perfectly solid as Hunding. The chemistry was there though I may have seen more ecstatic conclusions to the act. The Machine was mostly used to represent a forest with characters passing in and out of the trees in quite a convincing manner. It was a very strong act.

Act 2 was also pretty strong. The confrontation between Stephanie Blythe’s Fricka and Bryn Terfel’s Wotan was epic. The chemistry between Wotan and Deb Voigt’s Brünnhilde was amazing. At the bottom of this is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the production (The Machine aside), Deb’s interpretation of Wotan’s warrior daughter. Hers is a very young, tomboyish Valkyrie. It’s far from the majesty of, say, Birgitt Nilsson but it gives room for the character to develop through the next two operas to that most devastating of all operatic climaxes. Her singing matched the take on the character being somewhat lighter than perhaps the norm. Is that deliberate for now or a limitation in the voice? Ultimately we’ll see in Götterdämmerung. The final scene of the act with Siegmund and Sieglinde was excellent. Deb steeled up into the implacable warrior goddess before melting again in the face of Siegmund’s love. Really well done. In this act, The Machine functioned alternately as a rocky landscape for the first two scenes and a forest for the last. Spare but reasonably effective and nobody lost their footing.

Act 3 starts with the “Ride of the Valkyries” and now The Machine came into it’s own. Eaxh Valkyrie rode a “plank” as if a horse with the planks bucking wildly until each in turn dipped to the stage allowing the singer to slide down the plank and onto the stage. It worked. I have to be honest I was getting tired by this point and I think my critical faculties were waning but the singing and acting seemed to be sustained at a high level through Wotan’s confrontation with Brünnhilde. Again here, the youngness/immaturity of Deb’s Brünnhilde added to the drama. The final fire scene was another triumph for The Machine with Brünnhilde ending up suspended upside down, high above the stage with the flames flickering around her as a distraught Wotan watches from stage level and the curtain comes down.

The conducting and orchestral playing was quite wonderful. Watching Jimmy Levine hauling himself awkwardly and painfully into his chair in the pit one wondered what was going to happen. Then from first chord to last the orchestra produced a gorgeous and thrilling flood of sound and there is nothing on earth like Wagner played this well.

Small, local bonus; Leonardo Vordoni, who conducted La Cenerentola that we saw last night was in the cinema (again) and I was able to ask him about Levine and how he does it. He waved his hand about and said “it’s less about this, than (pointing to his heart) this”. Long may Maestro Levine’s heart keep going.

(1) The Machine is the 45 tonne multi-million dollar contraption around which Robert LePage’s vision of The Ring (literally) revolves. Some critics regard it as a soulless (and boring) infatuation with technology and a way of avoiding thinking about “meaning” in the work. Some think it’s a valid attempt to present the cycle as Wagner might have done if he had access to the technology. My own view is that I think Wagner would have loved it but that’s no excuse for ignoring the psychological aspects of the tetrology. After Das Rheingold I was worried that we were going to get technology and just technology. Now I’m more optimistic. And honestly, with singing and playing as good as yesterday I could shut my eyes and still get my money’s worth.

I am concerned though about the reliability of the thing. Two performances out of about twenty have now been affected by major issues with the machine. The odds of a major failure are about on a par with an Angela Gheorghiu no show and that’s not good enough.

Il Trovatore

Il Trovatore has gypsies, burning at the stake, dead babies, mistaken identity, poison, love, hate, revenge and enough plot holes to sink the Titanic. It also has some very effective dramatic moments and some utterly fabulous music. The biggest snag is probably that the utterly fantastic music needs a quartet of soloists who can deal with fiendishly difficult parts that require a combination of flawless bel canto technique coupled to Puccinian power and stamina. The power and stamina requirement being especially high in a barn like the Met. It also has a dramatical problem in that it consists if a sequence of fairly short scenes which means a production runs the risk of being chopped up by the changes of set.

The current Met production by David McVicar (broadcast in HD today) avoided the scene change problem by using a rotating set that made shifts virtually seamless. Beyond that the sets and costumes were fairly unremarkable but for a looming crucifixion scene in the background which set the appropriate tone. Blocking was fairly straightforward but effective and the fight scenes were well choreographed. All in all it provided a perfectly adequate setting for what was very much a singers’ performance.

The four principals were all utterly fantastic. I can’t single out any one of them. So Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Sandra Radvanovsky, Dolores Zajick and Marcelo Alvarez, bravi a tutti! The supporting cast were excellent too, especially Stefan Kocan as captain of the Guard. Praise due too to orchestra, chorus and conductor (Marco Armiliato). All in all, this was, musically, one of the best Met performances I have seen in HD.

The usual reservations about the direction for HD and the cinema sound quality but they couldn’t spoil a rather special afternoon at the opera.

Capriccio

Yesterday’s Met Live in HD transmission was Richard Strauss’ last opera Capriccio. It’s a curious work and I suspect how one thinks about it seriously affects how one reacts to it emotionally. On the surface it’s a sophisticated meta opera about opera with some side splittingly funny gags about unstageable production concepts accompanied by pastiche Wagner. Taken on that level it’s funny but perhaps, ultimately heartless. When one realises that the opera was written in 1941/2 it adds a new dimension. Why has Strauss set this opera in Enlightenment Paris? Where else could be more symbolic of everything the regime he is writing under is not? This work premiered a few weeks before the German defeat at Stalingrad. Does Strauss sense that german is losing the war? Is this less an affectionate farewell to the form from an elderly composer or an elegy for an artform that may not survive the destruction of European civilization which most would have thought the inevitable consequence of a Russo-American victory (who’s to say they weren’t right?). Any way these were the thoughts that were going through my head as I watched yesterday’s broadcast and no doubt helped give the work, for me, a greater emotional intensity.

The Met production is opulently simple. The period setting is the 1920s/30s for no apparent reason but it doesn’t really jar. Everything takes place in a drawing room and it’s played in one act avoiding annoyingly long scene changes. It all looks very pretty and expensive. The relatively compact set and lack of much action mean that the usual HD close ups are less annoying, perhaps even a positive.

The performances were uniformly strong. My preconception, based on Renee Fleming performing the last scene as a concert piece, was that this would be a one woman show. It wasn’t. The first two scenes are very much ensemble pieces and require excellent individual and ensemble skills. This we got. All the roles; major and minor, were sung and acted extremely well. I think Peter Rose, as the impresario La Roche, perhaps was the pick of the lot but Renee Fleming’s Madelaine, Joseph Kaiser’s Flamand, Russell Braun’s Olivier and Sarah Connolly’s Clairon were all excellent. Sir Andrew Davis conducted and I really look forward to his Ariadne in Toronto next month.

The usual cinema sound problems were only a problem during the deliberately somewhat cacophonic ensemble in the second scene. I’d really like to hear that music in a setting where I can tease out the threads without being assaulted by absurd levels of harmonic distortion. In quieter passages things were fine and the orchestra sounded really good.

Overall, I found this one of the most satisfying met broadcasts I have seen but, for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph, your mileage might vary.

Le Comte Ory

Rossini’s Le Comte Ory is a very silly opera about the wicked count and his equally randy page scheming to get into the pants of the virtuous, more or less, Countess Adele while all the local men, including the countess’ brother are off at the crusades. To this end in Act 1 the count appears disguised as a hermit and in Act 2 as a nun. Add to the silliness a fiendishly difficult set of vocal parts and you have a sort of bel canto comedy extreme. To up the ante, today’s Comte, Juan-Diego Florez had been up all night waiting for his wife to pop a pup which she did 35 minutes before curtain.

It was fun. It is silly and funny and musically engaging and all the principal singers were quite excellent in both singing and acting departments. The detailed direction of the acting was very effective too. First place among the cast perhaps goes to Diana Damrau as the countess. She sang as well as I’ve heard anyone in quite a while with fabulous control and great comic timing but that’s not to take anything away from the other principals. The highlight was probably the trio where the countess, the count and the page Isolier (Joyce diDonato) are in bed together and thoroughly enjoying the multiple gender bending opportunities.

The production concept and design wasn’t so convincing. The idea was that it was being staged in Rossini’s time using the resources that a modest company of the day might have used. This turned out to be a lot of old fashioned stage machinery operated by derelicts in grubby pink footman outfits, including at one point crawling around waving cat toys. Costumes were intended to be what an early 19th century opera company could rustle up to suggest France in 1200. This mostly meant generic fairy tale with a dose of 15th century armour, at least in Act 1. The unifying concept seemed to be heaving bosoms. Act 2 got slightly weirder with the “ladies” of the castle in a mix of fairy tale, BBC Jane Austen and Yonge Street adult novelty store wear. All in all, not especially inspired.

I’m not really sure about the orchestral playing as for the most part the voices were balanced so far forward it was hard to hear much of the band. Technically, the sound was so-so with muddy ensembles and a few drop outs. Direction was, as ever, over fond of super close ups and silly angles. This got especially silly in the nuns’ drinking chorus where the solidity of the bottles’ contents was very apparent. (FWIW glass bottles in France in 1200 – also windows… OK it’s Rossini).

In the last analysis though the singing and acting more than made up for the silly concept and sloppy design and overall it was very enjoyable.

On a personal note I got to chat with Lawrence Brownlee (at some length) and Leonardo Vordoni (briefly) in the interval. They are in town rehearsing the COC’s La Cenerentola which I’ll see on May 13.