Summer hodgepodge
Summer is here, so one of the things I’ve been doing is watching non-live streams from European opera festivals in my non-air-conditioned living room.
One of the strangest things I watched was the Aix-en-Provence Tosca, directed by Christophe Honoré, which was a wacky, campy, disjointed fantasia on diva worship. It featured the 71-year-old Catherine Malfitano, a legendary Tosca in her day, essentially playing herself in the role of the Prima Donna (invented for this production). The gist is that the Prima Donna, an aging diva, invites some young opera singers to her house for a rehearsal of Tosca, and becomes envious and disturbed when confronted with the up-and-coming soprano star (sung by Angel Blue). The staging had some darkly funny, sharp moments: At the end of Act I, fans and paparazzi sing the Te Deum to an old poster of Catherine Malfitano as Tosca, and at the end of Act II, the Prima Donna takes candlesticks from her own cupboard and arranges them around herself to form the classic Scarpia death tableau. In the final act, the orchestra moves to the stage for a “concert performance,” during which the Prima Donna ominously climbs the scaffolding. As Tosca exclaims “Ecco un artista!”, the Prima Donna slits her wrists, completely upstaging Tosca’s own subsequent dramatic suicide onstage.
This production was sort of about the boundaries between art and real life, and between the worshipped diva and the actual woman. Tosca lived for art; the Prima Donna died for…something. Truthfully, I experienced this staging primarily as a series of striking images, references, and impressions created for a self-aware opera queen audience, where musical or dramatic substance was somewhat beside the point. And that was the real point all along, I guess.
I actually did manage to make it “out of town,” to see the newish opera Acquanetta at the Bard SummerScape festival. This opera, with music by Michael Gordon and a libretto by Deborah Artman, was inspired by the making of a 1940s horror B film called Captive Wild Woman. In the film, a doctor transforms an ape into a woman, played by an actress named Acquanetta; the actress herself, born Mildred Davenport, had gone through a series of transformations to become the exotic Acquanetta, nicknamed the “Venezuelan Volcano” despite her reported Native American ancestry. In the opera, Acquanetta’s first aria begins, “Conceal me, disguise me, obscure me, exchange me. Obliterate me, reword me, imagine me. Shield me, mask me, shroud me, blind me, screen me, veil me.” This is an opera all about transformations, events where something is destroyed so that something else can be created.
One of the funniest and most unsettling parts of the opera is the aria sung by a character known only as the “Brainy Woman,” who is an actress playing a nurse whose brain is harvested for the ape experiment. “Please don’t take my brain!” she pleads repeatedly, over a droning electric guitar ostinato and various campy horror movie soundtrack effects. “I could play a real woman,” she continues, no longer the sweet, frightened nurse in the laboratory but the actress in the studio. Her protests are ignored, her brain is harvested, and Acquanetta’s character, the beautiful ex-ape woman, is born.
A video projected on a screen made up the majority of the visuals, and it was revealed only near the end that we were watching a live stream from an onstage sealed box, the movie studio in which everything took place. Acquanetta sat on a rotating rig in the center, largely immobile, and most of the shots were closeups of her face or of absurd and gruesome scenes on set. This was all very cool, and I’d be happy if every opera production with projections used them in such a well-integrated and intelligent way.
There’s a recording of this opera with many of the same performers I heard live (including the inimitable and inescapable Trinity Wall Street choir), which I listened to at home because I liked the opera so much, and which I’d recommend to all of you.
In a personal act of diva worship, I attended Mitsuko Uchida’s Carnegie Hall recital in June, where she played three of Schubert’s piano sonatas (D. 568, D. 784, and D. 959). There was a lot to be impressed by in her playing, but the most memorable parts of the recital for me were her slow movements, which tended to be spare and unsentimental, and sounded almost static at times but inexorably gathered a sense of quiet ecstasy. The Carnegie Hall audience, often rustly, was rapt during those movements, which is a sign that things were good (although someone’s watch did beep a few times).
I also heard A Far Cry, a Boston-based conductorless chamber orchestra, perform as part of the concert series at the Central Park bandshell, although the concert was relocated indoors due to bandshell renovations. The program selections were weird and uneven, but the highlight was certainly Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte arranged for chamber orchestra, which reminded me of her music for Roomful of Teeth with its sprinkling of extended techniques. The worst piece on the program was a 25-minute work that started with a very literal imitation of birdsong and devolved into vaguely “natural”-sounding noodling, though it was played admirably. My friend and I disagreed on whether it would have sounded better in Central Park.
I’ve been reading Richard Taruskin’s The Danger of Music, which is a fascinating and extremely annoying book that I hope to finish by the next time I write one of these. See you soon!