Operatically Inclined

readings: a John Simon article; director's theater; 20th century fact and fiction; links and critics

I must take a break as my vacation approaches. If I don't have access to a computer while I'm in New York State, I hope to have some pictures and notes to post later. (After staying in the Finger Lakes region, I'm heading for Szymanowski's "Krol Roger" at Bard College.)

Meanwhile, I'm getting some decent reading done on and off line. I've barely dipped into the August Opera News, but be aware that there's an article by John Simon: "The Right Words." He was asked to list his ten favorite librettos, and he treats us to a dozen. Simon limits himself to 20th century opera, and it's also interesting to see his list of modern composers he wanted to avoid. He also makes a case for some almost unknown operas by Nino Rota and Xavier Montsalvatge. These I want to investigate in addition to some that I've read about but not heard yet (Prokofiev's "The Fiery Angel" among them).

There is also an article by Matt Wolf on the twin brothers and directors, David and Christopher Alden. Provocative reading here, whether you agree with their approach or not. David Alden's design for "Jenufa" at ENO is the same one which we saw in Washington in the 2006-07 season. That one I admired very much, but I don't think I would have liked the same director's notorious chainsaw "Mazeppa." (According to the Penguin Guide, that production ruined the reputation of Tchaikovsky's "Mazeppa" for a while, but we were lucky enough to see a traditional staging by the Kirov at the Kennedy a few years ago.)

I'm getting to the end of "The Rest is Noise." There have been some distractions (sorry), but when I get into it the history is absorbing, even if Ross sometimes gets too musically technical for my comprehension. I'm in the middle of the chapter about Britten. That and the one about Sibelius have been my favorite parts of the book, but there is much more of the 20th century that I must hear. On the fiction side, I just started reading Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five." It's about time I did. It's another book which I've heard about all my life, and it's fiction with a disturbing basis in fact.

There are a couple of new blogs in my blog roll. Notice a young conductor named Young, who has been working with Marin Alsop. Also, after detecting some rumblings in the blogosphere, I included a special link to Tim Smith's music column. Smith is the music critic for the Baltimore Sun, and even though his column is linked on the Critical Mass blog also in my blog roll, I thought I might check his column more often if it had its own link in the list.

Smith's latest column entry is about the operatic performances at Artscape and a recital at An die Musik. If I follow the column correctly, Smith saw Opera Vivente's 5:00pm show on Sunday, then he headed down Charles Street to catch the viola and piano recital by Baltimore Symphony members at An die Musik at 7!

(Sorry that I didn't make it to Opera Vivente's Sunday performance, and thanks to Director John Bowen for posting a comment and listing performers' names on my Artscape post.)

@ Artscape

The Ferris wheel in front of the Meyerhoff Concert Hall (home to the Baltimore SO) captures the spirit of Baltimore's giant Artscape festival. I walked around a little yesterday, but my main destination was the Brown Center to see Baltimore Opera's "L'Heure espagnole" by Ravel. They sang it in English with the BO's James Harp accompanying on piano. The young cast was very funny to watch, especially baritone Paul Corujo as Don Ramiro. I began to wonder how far the stages of his undressing each time he returned from the unseen bedroom would go. (Corujo sang the part of the husband in the Peabody's "The Yellow Wallpaper" earlier this year.) Patrick Toomey sang Torquemada; Jessica Renfro was his wife, Concepcion; David Kirkwood was Gonzalve, Concepcion's lover; and Jason Widney was Don Inigo Gomez.

I had hoped to get up to Artscape again today to hear Opera Vivente's baroque show, but I might not make it there. I'll mention this, though: There is a baritone in Vivente's cast who I've read and heard much about, and I've been wanting to hear him. I'm missing the chance today, but maybe some time this coming season I can hear him finally.

Some of us who go to opera regularly in Baltimore, and not just at the Baltimore Opera, will recognize a certain senior gentleman among the audience members. I've chatted with him before, and I finally got his name yesterday before L'Heure. I look forward to seeing him around and hearing his views in future.

Definitely dress for the summer weather, not the opera, for Artscape. I have to insert a tone of bitterness, too: The pay parking lots along Charles Street doubled their fees for Artscape weekend, and this is one of the reasons I'm not in a hurry to return today. There are other parking and access options listed on Artscape's site....

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On another personal note: I almost didn't make it to Artscape this weekend, and I hope I don't have to cancel the vacation to upstate NY which I've been harping about recently. What apparently is tendonitis to the side and just above my right knee has been giving me a lot of trouble, but I'm making a second visit to the doctor soon. Meanwhile, a double dose of Advil seems to be staving off the worst pain. Trust me, when it happens, it feels like something is ripping the muscle off the bone!

Any more cancelled opera trips, and I'll have to change the blog title to "Operatically Disinclined."

Late Notices of Early Music at Artscape

I just received the following note on the e-mail list run by Peabody Institute's Mark Cudek. This might be on the Artscape site in my links, but it could be easy to miss.

Sorry for the late notice but I wanted to let you all know that the 
Peabody Consort is performing on the Exotic/Hypnotic series at 
Artscape this Saturday at 5:00 at the U of Baltimore Student Center 
Theatre at the intersection of Maryland and Mt. Royal.  Soprano 
Elizabeth Hungerford and instrumentalists Andrew Arceci (bass viol), 
John Armato (lute), Jeffrey Grabelle (treble viol), and myself 
(cittern & Renaissance guitar) will perform a program of 16thc. 
English & Italian music.  If you're at Artscape come and join us and 
get out of the heat (or the rain) and enjoy an hour of great music.

warm regards,
Mark

Wait, there's more. Director John Bowen has revealed that the period ensemble for Opera Vivente's baroque double feature on Sunday will be the one and only Harmonious Blacksmith. The "operas" are Handel's "Apollo and Dafne" and Monteclair's "Pyramus and Thisbe."

On Saturday, Baltimore Opera gives us Ravel's "L'heure espagnole."

Here's the just-opera schedule from the Artscape site. Clicking on the categories at the top of the site's page takes you to other performances.

Critic Tim Smith has more details about the operas at Artscape.

Attaining Citizenship; Doodlebugs and Flying Machines

My mother turned 70 this year. She grew up in a small village in Bedfordshire, England, and met my father, a fireman in the US Air Force, at the local air base in the late 1950's. Dad passed away some years ago, but Mom has remained in her husband's Carolina home town to be close to children and grandchildren. A subject of the crown all this time, Mom decided to pursue US citizenship a couple of years ago and hopes to finally gain it later this year.

I have seen the house where my mother and her two sisters grew up, and I remember visiting it while my grandparents still lived in it during the 1960's. It stands out from the village on a country lane, and the property is actually a small farmstead. I've walked by it as an adult during a visit to England, and we've found it on Google Earth. They had to allow soldiers to quarter in the barn at the bottom of the property during World War II. There was also an air raid shelter somewhere back there, but this I never knew until more recently when Mom told me about it. The village lay under the path of Nazi bombers and flying bombs on their way to London. The flying bombs were unmanned aircraft loaded with explosives and in some manner aimed and flown from Europe to a general target area in England. Doodlebugs were something very similar or the same thing. Not quite as accurate as a missile, a flying bomb would ultimately descend and drop onto whatever lay in its path. People lucky enough to be passed over could hear these things up in the sky. After hearing a few of them, as my mother explained it, you could tell the difference between a manned bomber and an unmanned flying bomb.

Although they were a couple of hours out of London, sometimes my grandparents and their three girls did have to go down into the shelter. Everybody had to put on gas masks -- except the baby. For a baby still small enough to be held in a grown-up's arms there was a contraption like a bag made of the same stuff as a gas mask. Parents would have to zip up a baby inside this thing. It must have seemed more like a body bag for infants, and it likely was made of the same smelly rubber as the masks worn by the older folk. Mom tells me that Grandma could not bear to seal up her youngest inside the bag. While everyone else in the shelter sat with gas masks in place, the baby was safe in her mother's lap or arms with no contraption covering her.

Years later in happier times, in the same area the villagers could watch the vintage airplanes flying overhead during the filming of "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines."

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Later: I must acknowledge my mother for scanning and e-mailing the picture of her childhood home. (Yes, she is on the cutting edge with the Internet now, more so than I am, it seems.) The house was built for the family shortly before the War broke out and passed into other hands some time in the late 1960's. Mom was very young during the war and isn't sure how many times they had to use the shelter, but she knows they went into it at least once. Some of the other details were related to her by her mother when she was older.

cinematically inclined

I've been raiding the bargain DVD bins at Borders again. Also not to be overlooked are the DVD bins at Daedalus Books here in Columbia. Some movies I've seen recently, another eclectic selection:

~ The 2003 Norwegian-Swedish film directed by Bent Hamer, "Kitchen Stories." This might have been the rage in the arthouses a few years ago, but I missed it then. It's a quiet comedy with a lot going on under the surface. Very briefly: A Swedish researcher observes his Norwegian farmer subject's dietary habits as part of a larger research program. The fabric of the cosmos gets gradually ripped asunder as researcher and subject befriend each other and foil the scientific method. A bouncy Scandinavian pop song, heard mostly on the radio, provides much of the musical background.

~ "49th Parallel" (1941). As a wartime propaganda film (and exciting story, well-filmed), maybe this could be considered part of a trio with Olivier's "Henry V" and Errol Flynn's "The Sea Hawk." Olivier is also in 49th, and this movie also had a great composer to provide the score: Ralph Vaughan Williams. (This DVD is on the pricey art film Criterion label, and I don't think that ever gets put in the bargain bins.)

~ "The Brother From Another Planet" (1984). I know that I saw this one when it was first released. I'd forgotten much of it, but it was all the better to rediscover. There are a few familiar black actors from the 1970s and 80s here, but I was straining to remember the name of one of the actors playing the two white aliens. End credits revealed him to be the young David Strathairn. The film's director, John Sayles, plays the other alien joining him to recapture the escaped black alien, played sympathetically by a silent Joe Morton. Sayles and Strathairn are wonderfully weird as Morton's pursuers in Harlem. The interesting score includes Caribbean steel drums played a little differently from the way I've heard them before.

~ "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (instead of "Hellboy II"!). This Walt Disney wonder from 1959 must have had another theatrical release, for I remember seeing it at the cinema in the late 1960s. The Disney movie wizards achieved some atmospheric images and scary moments that have stuck with me since then. Albert Sharpe's Darby seemed fresh in my memory, but I never realized before that this was one of the first screen appearances by Sean Connery. You even get to hear him sing, but not too much. He apparently was bashful about doing that scene, but he doesn't sound bad. The Technicolor film looks painterly and does justice to a land of leprechauns and banshees.

P.S. While on the subject of movies with Irish settings: I gave "Into the West" another viewing a while ago. That's another foray into Irish lore, albeit with a more serious edge than the Disney movie. The two young brothers are played perfectly naturally by the child actors, and that magic horse is a superb actor, too. Quite a different movie set in the same country is "Breakfast on Pluto." I saw it in an arthouse cinema in DC on its release, and it's waiting near my DVD player now.

"Alcina" links

The Washington Post's Anne Midgette reviews Handel's "Alcina" at Wolf Trap Opera.

WTO Director Kim Witman posts a photo essay of a frightfully busy but presumably exciting long day.

Charles Downey's review at Ionarts

(As lamented in my preceding post, I made it to Wolf Trap but not to the opera.)

Wolf Trap: partially successful expedition

"Alcina" was sold out today. I admit that driving out to Wolf Trap without reserving a ticket in advance was taking a chance, and maybe I was assuming far too much. I thought I would make the most of the trip and buy a ticket for the Sunday matinee of "Ariadne auf Naxos" on August 17 -- also sold out! This is good news for the Wolf Trap Opera Company, of course. Next summer, I will consider getting a summer subscription or buying selected tickets well in advance. The few production photos which I've seen on line all look so handsome, by the way.

This was as much an exploratory trip to get oriented to visiting Wolf Trap Farm Park again, because I've only been there once many years ago. For future reference: The Barns, the smaller, fully enclosed theater where most of WTO's season takes place, is on the other side of the Dulles Access Road from the main Filene Center, but if you're coming from the direction of the Beltway, you have to exit as if going to the Filene and make a U-turn to go back across to get to the Barns. That said, it seems this time of year, the Barns box office is likely to be closed, and you have to buy at the Filene box office any way -- if tickets are available.

It was hot, humid and a little hazy today, but the hill where the Filene Center is situated was getting some very nice breezes. The Filene itself looks like a massive wooden ark for the performing arts. I did stop and stare and reminisce about my one visit in the past to see "Mlada." As for Handel's "Alcina," I saw Opera Vivente's own wonderful production in Baltimore last fall (updated to a 1960's psychedelic setting), but it wasn't too soon to hear this gorgeous opera again.

operatic expeditions

I'm planning to drive around the DC Beltway today, hoping to see Wolf Trap Opera's "Alcina." I haven't been able to view the company's site (thanks to my computer's limitations, not theirs), but what I've been able to glean from Director Kim Witman's blog and some performers' blogs (just added to my blog roll) has been enticing. Until now, my only visit ever to Wolf Trap Park was back around 1991, when I went to see Boris Pokrovsky's production of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Mlada." (I must acknowledge the side bar calendar of events on the Ionarts site for keeping me aware of performance times, too.)

Next weekend: Artscape! During the festival, Baltimore Opera offers Ravel's "L'Heure espagnole" on Saturday and Opera Vivente has a baroque double feature with period ensemble on Sunday. Both performances are free and will be given twice each in the afternoons. I want to make it there on both days, if I can, and my restaurant group friends are also meeting in the neighborhood that weekend.

Vacation plans are falling into place. On my way to the Hudson Valley and Szymanowski at Bard College at the end of this month, I will spend some time in the Finger Lakes region, lodging in Ithaca.

A Message from a Mezzo-Soprano

(I'm still having e-mail issues -- can receive but not send on my home computer, but I can send if I log on at the library or some other place. I probably won't fix this situation until after my vacation at the end of this month.)

On a Monday evening in April 2007 (2006?), I heard a fabulous recital by a team of student singers at the Peabody Institute: "Treasures of Russian Opera," part of a course in singing in Russian taught by Vera Danchenko-Stern. I've long since deleted the blog where I wrote a post about this recital, but I still have the program. I just heard from mezzo-soprano Ruth Carver, who sang Lyubava's Aria from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Sadko." I realize that since then, I heard Ms. Carver in Peabody's "The Rape of Lucretia" as Bianca last year, too. (Is there a misprint on the Russian program? The recital seems to have been a couple of years ago, but 2007 is printed in the program -- April 30, 2007.)

Ruth Carver's new site is now linked on the Singers' Page of this blog. (Thanks for contacting me!) She is on her way to Europe, where, among other things, she will sing the Witch in "Hansel and Gretel" at Schloss Henfenfeld in Germany.

(I'm still restoring links and working on the Singers' Page.)

addenda: Britten's film music; "The Fly"; music for dinosaurs

Afterthoughts to recent posts

I can't find my source for the observation on Britten's experience as a film score composer contributing to his prowess in opera scores, but I recall reading this somewhere. (I was checking John Simon's "On Music" collection of essays first.) A first look on the Internet reveals that Britten's score for a 1930s film, "Love From a Stranger," was published recently.

Photos of the Chatelet production of "The Fly" provided me with more entertainment than fireworks over the Independence Day weekend. Amusing and astonishing as they were, they aroused curiosity about Howard Shore's music for the opera. Some comments on the other blogs give positive impressions of Shore's score and the singers' performances.

My reflections on sci-fi as opera brought up what was intended as a humorous suggestion of turning the 1969 movie, "The Valley of Gwangi," into an opera (thanks to a list of familiar operatic elements). If you yearn to watch cowboys wrangling dinosaurs, I beieve Gwangi is the only movie in which you can see that happen (and you'll recognize at least one scene that inspired the special effects people for "Jurassic Park"). Incidentally, Gwangi already has a great score by film composer Jerome Moross. Some of it calls Elmer Bernstein's music for "The Magnificent Seven" to mind. Moross specialized in westerns and wrote the music for "The Big Country" and the old TV series, "Gunsmoke." He was friend, colleague and orchestrator for some other notable film composers, Bernard Hermann among them (as learned from a film music site -- maybe I'll hunt down a link later).