(no subject)
Black Panther dir. Ryan Coogler
Um... It was pretty great. I'm mostly a lot of SHUUUUUUUUUURI, predictably. I loved that in addition to just being the back office gadget maker, she had her own political agenda that she was pushing. She wasn't just "That weird geek who makes gadgets," she was "That weird geeks who makes gadgets because she believes Wakanda needs to modernize and stop being self-satisfied with its current vibranium tech." That was a lovely and unexpected bonus. And her very engineer-y feelings about clothing needing to be functional and therefore beautiful, and not driven by some other aesthetic agenda.
Semiramide at the Met, by Rossini
This was kind of delightfully batshit, as Rossini often is. As opera often is, and Rossini is just such a great examplar of traditional grand opera at its technical best. It was also really confusing, because of the batshit.
It's an ahistorical adaptation of the life of Babylonian queen Semiramide, who according to history ruled for several years after her husband died while her son was a minor. Nothing else from history has been adapted into this opera. The rest is just batshit pulled from folk legends, in which Semiramide poisoned her husband and then tried to marry her son. With her son played as a trouser role for a mezzo, the opera came out queer and incesty and fanficcy in all sorts of other ways.
ghost_lingering and I spent fifteen minutes arguing after the final curtain just trying to understand the plot. We think we mostly follow it now, but we're not sure. There are a lot of timeline issues that don't quite work, and a lot of decisionmaking that's just really questionable and out of nowhere. We were laughing a lot during parts of the opera that weren't laugh moments, or we weren't sure if they were laugh moments, because it was so absurd. The moment when Arsace realizes that Semiramide is his mother, a third of the audience started laughing, because the moment was so telegraphed and so over the top and ridiculous.
ghost_lingering afterward: There's such a thing as a tragicomedy... This was maybe a comic tragedy?
The music was also, as is typical for Rossini, lovely and interesting. There was a lot of really fascinating continuo/orchestration under the recitative that was halfway between ornamentation and harmonization and served as one of Rossini's major tools for character building. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it anywhere else, but surely it stands as some sort of significant bridge toward Verdi and Wagner. My one complaint was that the arias didn't have the kind of emotional motion in them that I like to see- Ideally a character starts an aria in one place and ends up in another, and I've seen Rossini pull this off in the best of his operas, but here the arias were just lucid, straightforward explorations of the current headspace a character was in, without that emotional journey. They worked, but they weren't what opera can be at its best.
The opera is rarely staged at the Met, and this was the opening night of a revival of a production not seen since 1993- they literally unmothballed the costumes and sets, surveyed the damage, and repaired whatever needed repairing to match the originals, per a fascinating article in the playbill. On the train afterward, we were standing next to two women who'd seen the '93 production and were trying to pull foggy memories out of their head to compare Angela Meade to Marilyn Horne (!). "Be grateful for what you saw," one said, "You might not see it again for twenty eight years." "I can live with that," I answered.
This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/241071.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
Um... It was pretty great. I'm mostly a lot of SHUUUUUUUUUURI, predictably. I loved that in addition to just being the back office gadget maker, she had her own political agenda that she was pushing. She wasn't just "That weird geek who makes gadgets," she was "That weird geeks who makes gadgets because she believes Wakanda needs to modernize and stop being self-satisfied with its current vibranium tech." That was a lovely and unexpected bonus. And her very engineer-y feelings about clothing needing to be functional and therefore beautiful, and not driven by some other aesthetic agenda.
Semiramide at the Met, by Rossini
This was kind of delightfully batshit, as Rossini often is. As opera often is, and Rossini is just such a great examplar of traditional grand opera at its technical best. It was also really confusing, because of the batshit.
It's an ahistorical adaptation of the life of Babylonian queen Semiramide, who according to history ruled for several years after her husband died while her son was a minor. Nothing else from history has been adapted into this opera. The rest is just batshit pulled from folk legends, in which Semiramide poisoned her husband and then tried to marry her son. With her son played as a trouser role for a mezzo, the opera came out queer and incesty and fanficcy in all sorts of other ways.
ghost_lingering and I spent fifteen minutes arguing after the final curtain just trying to understand the plot. We think we mostly follow it now, but we're not sure. There are a lot of timeline issues that don't quite work, and a lot of decisionmaking that's just really questionable and out of nowhere. We were laughing a lot during parts of the opera that weren't laugh moments, or we weren't sure if they were laugh moments, because it was so absurd. The moment when Arsace realizes that Semiramide is his mother, a third of the audience started laughing, because the moment was so telegraphed and so over the top and ridiculous.
ghost_lingering afterward: There's such a thing as a tragicomedy... This was maybe a comic tragedy?
The music was also, as is typical for Rossini, lovely and interesting. There was a lot of really fascinating continuo/orchestration under the recitative that was halfway between ornamentation and harmonization and served as one of Rossini's major tools for character building. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it anywhere else, but surely it stands as some sort of significant bridge toward Verdi and Wagner. My one complaint was that the arias didn't have the kind of emotional motion in them that I like to see- Ideally a character starts an aria in one place and ends up in another, and I've seen Rossini pull this off in the best of his operas, but here the arias were just lucid, straightforward explorations of the current headspace a character was in, without that emotional journey. They worked, but they weren't what opera can be at its best.
The opera is rarely staged at the Met, and this was the opening night of a revival of a production not seen since 1993- they literally unmothballed the costumes and sets, surveyed the damage, and repaired whatever needed repairing to match the originals, per a fascinating article in the playbill. On the train afterward, we were standing next to two women who'd seen the '93 production and were trying to pull foggy memories out of their head to compare Angela Meade to Marilyn Horne (!). "Be grateful for what you saw," one said, "You might not see it again for twenty eight years." "I can live with that," I answered.
This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/241071.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.