Birthdays, brides, and a satisfied customer
Happy Birthday to the Doctor (sort of) and Clara (in at least two incarnations)! And Happy Birch Moon!
I keep thinking I need to report on Opera North week at the Lowry, but I find that last year I merely alluded to the two operas I saw while posting about other things, so maybe I don't. I actually saw all three on offer this year; the one I was most keen to attend was The Coronation of Poppea, because I saw it on television years ago (I think Maria Ewing was Poppea) and was terribly impressed by the intelligence of the libretto, but I also decided I might as well go to The Bartered Bride, because I'd never seen it and we used to sing the opening chorus at school, and then the review of La Traviata said it was a really good one, so I thought I might as well do the lot.
The Bartered Bride had been updated to post-Prague Spring, so had a lot of extra political satire. I think the plot would be stronger were it less bloomin' obvious who Jenik is from the start... but I'm pleased to have seen it at last, even if two ladies next to me left at the interval. La Traviata took the tuberculosis theme very seriously - there were a lot of projections of the TB bacillus; I had a sobbing fit in the final act, which I think was partly about losing Tabitha and partly about my grandfather's first wife Lucy dying of TB in 1894 (we haven't got over it yet).
But I think Poppea was most rewarding, though I was disappointed that they didn't give us surtitles, which we had for the other two (TBB was also sung in English). The musical director said it was so that we could "experience the text directly" and that "very little text in Poppea is repeated, so the neck movements required to read the text from surtitles would be exhausting". But personally I find I can absorb the written word a lot more quickly than the sung word. In fact, the singers mostly did a good job on enunciation, and I could understand quite a lot of it, but there were a few points where I couldn't make it out at all (including Arnalta's song for the sleeping Poppea, which I remember as one of my favourites - not sure why, as I could follow Arnalta's final number about how everyone would suck up to her now she was an Empress's confidante). So I think Busenello, whose authorship of the text is apparently more certain than Monteverdi's of the music, was sold short, because from what I could hear of the translation the libretto was as good as I remembered. I liked the suggestion that the amorality of the storyline, in which the moderately good characters die and the wicked couple Poppea and Nerone triumph in a ravishing love duet, was influenced by Venetian scorn for the ways of seventeenth-century Rome.
That was more than I expected to say about the operas...
Meanwhile, Rosie has accepted the new armchair.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.
I keep thinking I need to report on Opera North week at the Lowry, but I find that last year I merely alluded to the two operas I saw while posting about other things, so maybe I don't. I actually saw all three on offer this year; the one I was most keen to attend was The Coronation of Poppea, because I saw it on television years ago (I think Maria Ewing was Poppea) and was terribly impressed by the intelligence of the libretto, but I also decided I might as well go to The Bartered Bride, because I'd never seen it and we used to sing the opening chorus at school, and then the review of La Traviata said it was a really good one, so I thought I might as well do the lot.
The Bartered Bride had been updated to post-Prague Spring, so had a lot of extra political satire. I think the plot would be stronger were it less bloomin' obvious who Jenik is from the start... but I'm pleased to have seen it at last, even if two ladies next to me left at the interval. La Traviata took the tuberculosis theme very seriously - there were a lot of projections of the TB bacillus; I had a sobbing fit in the final act, which I think was partly about losing Tabitha and partly about my grandfather's first wife Lucy dying of TB in 1894 (we haven't got over it yet).
But I think Poppea was most rewarding, though I was disappointed that they didn't give us surtitles, which we had for the other two (TBB was also sung in English). The musical director said it was so that we could "experience the text directly" and that "very little text in Poppea is repeated, so the neck movements required to read the text from surtitles would be exhausting". But personally I find I can absorb the written word a lot more quickly than the sung word. In fact, the singers mostly did a good job on enunciation, and I could understand quite a lot of it, but there were a few points where I couldn't make it out at all (including Arnalta's song for the sleeping Poppea, which I remember as one of my favourites - not sure why, as I could follow Arnalta's final number about how everyone would suck up to her now she was an Empress's confidante). So I think Busenello, whose authorship of the text is apparently more certain than Monteverdi's of the music, was sold short, because from what I could hear of the translation the libretto was as good as I remembered. I liked the suggestion that the amorality of the storyline, in which the moderately good characters die and the wicked couple Poppea and Nerone triumph in a ravishing love duet, was influenced by Venetian scorn for the ways of seventeenth-century Rome.
That was more than I expected to say about the operas...
Meanwhile, Rosie has accepted the new armchair.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.