After one of my recent postings on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, artist Andrea Way e-mailed me and told me she had spent last year doing a painting a day, and during the month of September she had listened to LHL while painting. You can check out the fabulous results here. This project reminded me of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play-a-day-for-a-year, some of which I saw at The Cutting Ball (by the way, you still have a couple of weeks to see their latest production, Ionesco’s Victims of Duty, which I highly recommend and hope to write about, oh, soonish; and The America Play by Parks is next up at Thick House Theater). I find the whole “one artistic product per day for a year” idea fascinating. I’ve thought about doing it with haiku, but that always seems too easy to me – I mean, five-seven-five, it’s not that difficult, people – but I’ve occasionally exchanged haiku with co-workers as if we were Heian aristocrats and not cubicle monkeys, and apparently it’s more difficult than I think, judging from the unnatural elisions and other blunders I would see. Maybe I will do that.
Many years ago I was associated with a high-school science textbook that ended up never being published, and one of the suggested (not by me) student activities was to “illustrate the concept of osmosis by performing an interpretive dance.” I found this absolutely hilarious, partly because the target audience probably knew as much about interpretive dance as about osmosis and partly because I could imagine the high-school students who would do this, what it would look like, and how stunned their captive audience would be. Well, damned if an idea that seems silly can't really work: check out Jolene’s lovely choreographed version of her Ph.D. thesis over at Saturday Matinee. See, it's frequently said that life is like high school, but sometimes instead art, science, and athletics can all come together, instead of sitting at separate tables in the cafeteria.
15 November 2008
Seven, They Are Seven
I’ve been meme-tagged twice, first by Susan-being-kept-awake-by-opera and next by the Opera Tattler, so I guess I’d better cowboy up. This meme kind of threw me because you have to come up with seven random or weird facts about yourself, but, you know, you don’t want them to be too random, and definitely not too weird. So first I’m supposed to list the rules:
1) Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog. Done and doing!
2) Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3) Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4) Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5) If you don't have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers.
Shouldn't there be 7 rules? I find this a little strange.
Seven facts, or at least factoids, or at least things I'm not too ashamed to reveal:
1) My first complete sentence was, “Go away.” What a winsome child!
2) I won’t eat spaghetti, beets, mayonnaise (OK, sometimes in a dressing in small amounts), or meat that isn’t well-done. I can’t drink coffee since it upsets my stomach, but I like coffee ice cream. I drink tea copiously, but I have to put milk in it or it upsets my stomach too. I like goat cheese but don’t eat it because, somewhat mysteriously, it gives me terrible migraines.
3) I’ve always thought Pamina and Papageno should get together – Tamino’s kind of a drip, isn’t he?
4) I love doing laundry, but I don’t particularly like ironing. I once heard some guy going on about “buying your first car – that’s freedom, man!” and I thought, uh, no, because if you have a car you need a steady supply of money for gas, insurance, and repairs, not to mention for the places the car might take you, and for a steady supply of money you need a job, which means you have to be at a certain place at a certain time day after day – a car is merely the illusion of freedom. But having your own washer and drier – that is freedom!
5) I don’t drive. I know one pedal makes the car go faster and another makes it stop, but I’m a little vague on which is which. The world is just better without having me behind the wheel. Ms S of DC once pointed out that I get road rage as a pedestrian. I also have fairly poor depth perception which got much worse after my eye surgery (detaching retina) eighteen years ago. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I love Japanese woodblock prints, Matisse, and Russian icons so much: flat decorated surfaces.
6) I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare. I always start with Twelfth Night and end with Hamlet, partly because I did it that way the first time and partly because that way I make sure I have something really good at the end: you don’t want the Merry Wives of Windsor just hanging over your head like that.
7) V taught me how to quilt. I’ve completed three and I’ve started the fourth, which I’m making out of old shirts I can’t wear to work any longer because the collars and cuffs are too frayed and the armpits have gotten the way armpits get. I can also chop down (and chop up) a fairly sizable tree. I was kind of surprised how much I liked chopping wood: if I didn't love trees even more, I'd be on a bare lot by now. I like to know how to do these semi-practical things at times. It makes me feel I could survive on the winter prairies, though I probably really couldn't.
Now I’m supposed to tag seven others: well, V, CMB, and MBB. That’s three. Hmmm. Four more? OK, to continue with the random and weird, the Pacifica Quartet because I’m eager to hear them playing all of Elliott Carter’s string quartets in a few weeks.
1) Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog. Done and doing!
2) Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3) Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4) Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5) If you don't have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers.
Shouldn't there be 7 rules? I find this a little strange.
Seven facts, or at least factoids, or at least things I'm not too ashamed to reveal:
1) My first complete sentence was, “Go away.” What a winsome child!
2) I won’t eat spaghetti, beets, mayonnaise (OK, sometimes in a dressing in small amounts), or meat that isn’t well-done. I can’t drink coffee since it upsets my stomach, but I like coffee ice cream. I drink tea copiously, but I have to put milk in it or it upsets my stomach too. I like goat cheese but don’t eat it because, somewhat mysteriously, it gives me terrible migraines.
3) I’ve always thought Pamina and Papageno should get together – Tamino’s kind of a drip, isn’t he?
4) I love doing laundry, but I don’t particularly like ironing. I once heard some guy going on about “buying your first car – that’s freedom, man!” and I thought, uh, no, because if you have a car you need a steady supply of money for gas, insurance, and repairs, not to mention for the places the car might take you, and for a steady supply of money you need a job, which means you have to be at a certain place at a certain time day after day – a car is merely the illusion of freedom. But having your own washer and drier – that is freedom!
5) I don’t drive. I know one pedal makes the car go faster and another makes it stop, but I’m a little vague on which is which. The world is just better without having me behind the wheel. Ms S of DC once pointed out that I get road rage as a pedestrian. I also have fairly poor depth perception which got much worse after my eye surgery (detaching retina) eighteen years ago. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I love Japanese woodblock prints, Matisse, and Russian icons so much: flat decorated surfaces.
6) I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare. I always start with Twelfth Night and end with Hamlet, partly because I did it that way the first time and partly because that way I make sure I have something really good at the end: you don’t want the Merry Wives of Windsor just hanging over your head like that.
7) V taught me how to quilt. I’ve completed three and I’ve started the fourth, which I’m making out of old shirts I can’t wear to work any longer because the collars and cuffs are too frayed and the armpits have gotten the way armpits get. I can also chop down (and chop up) a fairly sizable tree. I was kind of surprised how much I liked chopping wood: if I didn't love trees even more, I'd be on a bare lot by now. I like to know how to do these semi-practical things at times. It makes me feel I could survive on the winter prairies, though I probably really couldn't.
Now I’m supposed to tag seven others: well, V, CMB, and MBB. That’s three. Hmmm. Four more? OK, to continue with the random and weird, the Pacifica Quartet because I’m eager to hear them playing all of Elliott Carter’s string quartets in a few weeks.
03 November 2008
silent, upon a peak in Darien
I had been dimly aware of Meredith Monk for years, but only as an occasional comet I would read about streaking through distant avant-garde skies. I had never heard a note of her music until last March, when I heard her live. I had been following with interest the intrepid musical explorations of M. C- as part of the M6 ensemble, dedicated to preserving a performance tradition of her music, so I was curious to hear her.
The concert was at a Unitarian church and sponsored by some sort of holistic healing institute that seemed such an unlikely patron for this sort of thing that when I started getting postcards and e-mails from them several weeks afterwards it took me a while to realize they'd gotten my home and e-mail addresses from me and not from one of the many weird mailing lists I'm on. The Unitarian Church was packed that evening (surely an opening that would pique anyone's interest! I offer it gratis to any writers of thrillers out there). sfmike posted on the concert with the speed of which he is justifiably proud. I'd provide a link but there's a picture of me making a goofy face in there so I'll forego the pleasure. I'd be nice about the audience if they were a nice audience, but given the excessive whispering, especially in the second half, I feel free to vent some of my free-flowing rage on them. Most of the crowd looked like rejects from a roadside company chorus for Il Trovatore – bangles, amulets, shawls, string upon string of glittering necklaces wherever I looked, and lots and lots of overacting. And there were a few sturdy and drab souls who looked like – well, they looked like people who would be at a Unitarian Church on just about any Friday night.
Nonetheless I was dazzled by Monk's performance and vocal agility and imagination. There's a children's story – it's probably someplace obvious like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but you can supply the research if you wish – that describes a type of hard candy that changes flavors from minute to minute. Her music changed colors like that. I finally listened last night to the CD I bought back then and I ended up playing it three times in a row. I think what has struck me the most in the months since, as I've thought about that concert, is just gratitude to Monk for presenting a certain type of Americanness that has seem crushed out of the country, especially in the past eight years – the sense of someone who felt free and brave and open enough to strike out on her own path, and generously welcomed the rest of us to follow along if we wished. It might be eccentricity, it might be self-indulgent or weird, or it might be something that feeds your soul and speaks to you in a way nothing else has, and there's room for all that. It’s been an encouraging thing over the last few depressing months to see that there is still an alternative. I was very grateful to M. C- not only for bringing me to an artist I hadn’t known, but also for getting her to sign my CD, which she inscribed “with deepest thanks,” which sort of abashed me – ah, no, Meredith – thank you.
The concert was at a Unitarian church and sponsored by some sort of holistic healing institute that seemed such an unlikely patron for this sort of thing that when I started getting postcards and e-mails from them several weeks afterwards it took me a while to realize they'd gotten my home and e-mail addresses from me and not from one of the many weird mailing lists I'm on. The Unitarian Church was packed that evening (surely an opening that would pique anyone's interest! I offer it gratis to any writers of thrillers out there). sfmike posted on the concert with the speed of which he is justifiably proud. I'd provide a link but there's a picture of me making a goofy face in there so I'll forego the pleasure. I'd be nice about the audience if they were a nice audience, but given the excessive whispering, especially in the second half, I feel free to vent some of my free-flowing rage on them. Most of the crowd looked like rejects from a roadside company chorus for Il Trovatore – bangles, amulets, shawls, string upon string of glittering necklaces wherever I looked, and lots and lots of overacting. And there were a few sturdy and drab souls who looked like – well, they looked like people who would be at a Unitarian Church on just about any Friday night.
Nonetheless I was dazzled by Monk's performance and vocal agility and imagination. There's a children's story – it's probably someplace obvious like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but you can supply the research if you wish – that describes a type of hard candy that changes flavors from minute to minute. Her music changed colors like that. I finally listened last night to the CD I bought back then and I ended up playing it three times in a row. I think what has struck me the most in the months since, as I've thought about that concert, is just gratitude to Monk for presenting a certain type of Americanness that has seem crushed out of the country, especially in the past eight years – the sense of someone who felt free and brave and open enough to strike out on her own path, and generously welcomed the rest of us to follow along if we wished. It might be eccentricity, it might be self-indulgent or weird, or it might be something that feeds your soul and speaks to you in a way nothing else has, and there's room for all that. It’s been an encouraging thing over the last few depressing months to see that there is still an alternative. I was very grateful to M. C- not only for bringing me to an artist I hadn’t known, but also for getting her to sign my CD, which she inscribed “with deepest thanks,” which sort of abashed me – ah, no, Meredith – thank you.
02 November 2008
that I should love a bright particular star
Astonishingly, it was only by a chance visit to ArkivMusic.com, and only because they happened to feature it on their home page when I visited, that I discovered that a Lorraine Hunt Lieberson recital new to CD was coming out in about a week. Such is the shifting-sands nature of home pages that there was no trace of it when I went back, and I had to hunt through their user-unfriendly search system to make sure that I hadn’t dreamed it. You’d think there might be a little more publicity at this point, but perhaps the explanation is just that it’s from Wigmore Hall Live, which is a new and high-quality but I assume fairly small label, rather than a major recording company, if any of those are still around. You can find it here, as you no doubt will want to, since this is self-recommending.
It’s a different recital from the one Wigmore released earlier, which itself had been released even earlier by the BBC. The Wigmore release includes Hunt Lieberson’s spoken introduction to the aria from Ashoka’s Dream, and has an attractive picture of her on the booklet cover and more extensive documentation inside, including the astonishing information that she once sang Deep River in the party scene of Die Fledermaus at the Met on New Year’s Eve. I have heard that it’s usual during this scene for celebrity guests to do a number, though I don’t think that happened during the San Francisco Opera performance a couple of years ago. I think I would have remembered it if anyone had sung about anything at all besides how much they all loved champagne.
Normally I would discourage anything that might make Fledermaus even longer than it already is, but obviously I’d make an exception here. Imagine the Met party crowd on New Year’s Eve hearing this woman step out and sing Deep River. That would sure burn a hole in the evening, and I mean that in the best way possible. But there’s the history of opera as an art form right there: on the one hand, frivolity, luxury, and wealth; and on the other, a capsizing moment of burning truth and beauty.
It’s a different recital from the one Wigmore released earlier, which itself had been released even earlier by the BBC. The Wigmore release includes Hunt Lieberson’s spoken introduction to the aria from Ashoka’s Dream, and has an attractive picture of her on the booklet cover and more extensive documentation inside, including the astonishing information that she once sang Deep River in the party scene of Die Fledermaus at the Met on New Year’s Eve. I have heard that it’s usual during this scene for celebrity guests to do a number, though I don’t think that happened during the San Francisco Opera performance a couple of years ago. I think I would have remembered it if anyone had sung about anything at all besides how much they all loved champagne.
Normally I would discourage anything that might make Fledermaus even longer than it already is, but obviously I’d make an exception here. Imagine the Met party crowd on New Year’s Eve hearing this woman step out and sing Deep River. That would sure burn a hole in the evening, and I mean that in the best way possible. But there’s the history of opera as an art form right there: on the one hand, frivolity, luxury, and wealth; and on the other, a capsizing moment of burning truth and beauty.
01 November 2008
housekeeping
You will notice a little different look here. I switched to a glam new template, and one unintended result was that I lost the former blogroll. I have re-created it as best I could, but feel free to send me your blog address if you want me to add it; omissions are accidents. I couldn't find some of the URLs when I decided I'd already spent too much time redecorating the blog rather than actually posting in it. Though I have no doubt I will play with the fonts some more, since I like that sort of thing.
And I disclaim any responsibility for blogger's use of begining articles in alphabetizing. If anyone knows how to get around that, please let me know.
And I disclaim any responsibility for blogger's use of begining articles in alphabetizing. If anyone knows how to get around that, please let me know.
07 October 2008
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
from the Met e-mail touting the upcoming New York premiere of Dr Atomic:
the text "draws from . . . the poetry of John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Baudelaire."
Go ahead and nod off in the middle. . . .
the text "draws from . . . the poetry of John Donne, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Baudelaire."
Go ahead and nod off in the middle. . . .
30 September 2008
upcoming
I guess watching dancers do their thing night after night has taken its toll on me: I’m attributing my latest back outage to artistic sympathy pains. In between wincing and whining, I’m self-medicating plus limping picturesquely around, looking for a place to do the stretches I’ve obviously neglected too much. In other words, the entries I was going to post are postponed until I can sit upright and think of something besides my lower back.
But I should be recovered enough by this Sunday afternoon (October 5) to make my first visit to the Castro Valley Center for the Arts, which replaced my high school’s cafeteria as my hometown’s center for the performing arts. We may not be getting Nixon, but his boss is at hand: we’re getting the world premiere of the Eisenhower Farewell Address for orchestra and orator by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. You can check him out on IMDB or on his own website.
Funny – in an sadly ironic, not a ha-ha, way – to think that back when I attended that high school, Eisenhower’s reputation was, shall we say, not high? And now his prescient warning about the military-industrial complex makes him look positively Lincolnesque compared to the spokeschimp for the plutocracy currently soiling the Oval Office.
Anyway, Dubowsky, whom I should point out I’ve never met, e-mailed me last summer and invited me to attend. He also sent a CD, which I have to admit I probably put off listening to longer than I should have because – well, years ago a co-worker of mine invited me to come see him in a play, and though the play itself wasn’t much, I remember my feeling of utter relief that he was a good actor. So, yeah, I also enjoyed the CD, which has kind of a contemporary jazzy sound, and I was thinking of how to describe it further when I saw that the composer had saved me the trouble: “Abstract, calm, spacious, free form, transcendental, contemporary, electronic acoustic mystical psychedelia from classical and film composer.” Some of those words (electronic and psychedelia, basically) would normally scare me off, but I enjoyed the disc and am looking forward to the performance.
The CV Center for the Arts is on 19501 Redwood Road, about a 20-minute walk from the Castro Valley BART station. You also get to hear the Jupiter Symphony. Check it out!
But I should be recovered enough by this Sunday afternoon (October 5) to make my first visit to the Castro Valley Center for the Arts, which replaced my high school’s cafeteria as my hometown’s center for the performing arts. We may not be getting Nixon, but his boss is at hand: we’re getting the world premiere of the Eisenhower Farewell Address for orchestra and orator by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. You can check him out on IMDB or on his own website.
Funny – in an sadly ironic, not a ha-ha, way – to think that back when I attended that high school, Eisenhower’s reputation was, shall we say, not high? And now his prescient warning about the military-industrial complex makes him look positively Lincolnesque compared to the spokeschimp for the plutocracy currently soiling the Oval Office.
Anyway, Dubowsky, whom I should point out I’ve never met, e-mailed me last summer and invited me to attend. He also sent a CD, which I have to admit I probably put off listening to longer than I should have because – well, years ago a co-worker of mine invited me to come see him in a play, and though the play itself wasn’t much, I remember my feeling of utter relief that he was a good actor. So, yeah, I also enjoyed the CD, which has kind of a contemporary jazzy sound, and I was thinking of how to describe it further when I saw that the composer had saved me the trouble: “Abstract, calm, spacious, free form, transcendental, contemporary, electronic acoustic mystical psychedelia from classical and film composer.” Some of those words (electronic and psychedelia, basically) would normally scare me off, but I enjoyed the disc and am looking forward to the performance.
The CV Center for the Arts is on 19501 Redwood Road, about a 20-minute walk from the Castro Valley BART station. You also get to hear the Jupiter Symphony. Check it out!
22 September 2008
Fiesco to fiasco
What a whiplash beginning to the fall season. First a beautifully sung and profound Simon Boccanegra in an unexciting staging followed by a completely amplified and meretricious Bonesetter’s Daughter in a razzle-dazzle production (though unlike the magician’s sleight-of-hand, it doesn’t quite distract you from what’s really going on, which is really too bad); and at the Symphony, a wonderful evening of Ligeti, Poulenc, and Prokofiev followed by a completely mishmashed Bernstein tribute. No wonder I’m already dizzy and perhaps a bit cranky.
I take about as little pleasure in trashing the Bonesetter’s Daughter as I did in experiencing it; as someone who is constantly complaining about limited repertory and unimaginative productions, it’s the sort of thing I am really rooting for. But I have never felt any need to check my brain at the opera house door, and I can’t condescend to the art form by pretending that the libretto is “good enough for opera,” because opera plots do not have to be incoherent and simplistic or silly. (I’m still wondering why Chang the Coffinmaker, after being so eager to marry LuLing, suddenly decides not only to rape her instead, but to chase her down to Hong Kong in order to do so. Is he just trying to get away from his three or four other wives? More romance-novel self-indulgence, I fear: of course he is obsessed with me! Who wouldn’t be? And I keep reading that Precious Auntie is “disfigured” – again, since she is never disfigured on stage at any point, you would only know this by reading what’s supposed to be happening, not by watching what is actually happening. People, please note: incoherence is different from ambiguity.)
So much money, and so much effort by so many more or less talented people. . . . What’s really irritating me now, besides having dug myself even further into horrendous debt so I could see the sparkly new opera, is that I can already hear the PR machine clanking up to claim that Bonesetter’s Daughter is “controversial” or “thought-provoking,” qualities conspicuously lacking these days over there at The House of Easy Weeping (well, I'd cry too if I'd spent the rumored figure of 1.5 million and didn't even get a coherent storyline), or that it has “gotten people talking about opera” – for the record, What the fuck? is not the kind of conversation you want to be inspiring.
Every performance has a certain appeal to the senses, but once that immediate sensation fades into memory the intellectual underpinnings of a work become more obvious, and when they fail, you can end up feeling more frustrated and angry than you were at first.
After noting just a few entries ago that I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw performing in the same kind of hodgepodge concert as Gheorghiu, look at what Dawn goes and does in the Symphony's big Bernstein-o-rama! Ah, Dawn, keep the boys guessing! If I’d known she was going to be amplified in the second half, though, I definitely would have exchanged my ticket for something or maybe anything else. As previously noted, I am not of the cult of Lennie, except for Candide, which was completely omitted from what was sort of a survey of Bernstein’s theatrical works. My metaphorical mind was thinking that the concert was like having to sit through a birthday party for someone to whom I’m indifferent. Then I realized that was literally true: the concert was a tribute on the occasion of Bernstein’s 90th birthday. It’s being taken to Carnegie Hall as part of a festival of some sort. I hope it seems a little more coherent in that context. I hate to fall into that whole “it’s New York City!” thing, but I can’t imagine why the Symphony thought this was the right calling card for Carnegie. Message to New York: you missed some fine Ligeti!
The evening opened with a plush account of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and, not to get anyone in trouble, but the string section looked as tired of shouting “Mambo!” as I was of hearing it. They should have dumped this and had more songs. Tilson Thomas didn’t even bother to give a little intro to that piece, but he did for the two excerpts from A Quiet Place that followed. They were nicely sung by Quinn Kelsey and Dawn Upshaw, but I don’t think they work that well out of context, especially the first one, an aria about being angry. Is the anger justified? Or is there some situational irony that enriches the aria (like actually hearing Everything’s Coming Up Roses in context and realizing how desperately delusional the song is meant to be)?
After intermission Tilson Thomas informed us that it was a “gala” evening, which I guess explains why it didn’t make much musical sense. The program book implied that the intent was to show Bernstein’s range as a theatrical composer, but the actual effect was a weird hitting-the-tennis-ball-back-and-forth quality, with the overly familiar and comic slamming into the mournful obscurities. It reminded me of the passage in Oliver Twist when Dickens describes certain novelists who alternate between tragedy and comedy like the alternating streaks of meat and fat in bacon. Uh, but I really enjoy bacon, which shows you how metaphors can break down.
I’m sounding too harsh, I think. But it was a very strange concert. Stephanie Harwood came out and belted I Can Cook Too. The audience reacted with the enthusiasm of those who have never heard a Red-Hot Mama before, but immediately we had Peter Wyrick playing Meditation No 1 from Mass (the program made a case for Mass as well as Songfest as theatrical works). It’s an interesting piece – I kept thinking it would soar off into the sweetness of something like the Meditation from Thais, but it kept swerving in pricklier directions – but despite Wyrick’s skill I don’t think we were hearing it under optimum circumstances, what with the audience all revved up from the sashaying and whatnot.
(Here's my prior experience with Mass: I saw the PBS broadcast back in the 1970s when it was new. All I remember is that at what would be the consecration the Celebrant has some sort of hissy fit and I think smashes something. My mother looked up from her crocheting, said in a very drily sarcastic tone, "Was that the consecration? Oh my." And then she resumed her crocheting.)
Then an amplified Dawn Upshaw sang What a Movie from Trouble in Tahiti. Why is Dawn Upshaw being amplified? Beautiful performance, switching between rapture and cynicism, but she blasted my eardrums. I was sitting way too close. I usually like to sit close, partly I will admit so that I have less of a sense of being surrounded by people, but I should probably rethink my seating preference when it comes to the symphony.
Then Quinn Kelsey sang with tenderness and sensitivity the setting of Whitman’s To What You Said from Songfest (unamplified, fortunately). There were lots of individually fine performances, but the evening seemed random rather than cumulative. Then the Danzon from Fancy Free (enough with that one, too!). Then five guys from ACT’s student program (Nick Gabriel, Phil Mills, Kyle Schaefer, Christopher Tocco, and Weston Wilson) came out and did a high-energy Officer Krupke, and I’ve never seen a peppier, more charming and adorable street gang, which proves once again the superiority of art, or least musical theater, over life. I honestly don’t mean to sneer at those guys, who really were talented and fun, but it just sort of comes with performing that material. Can I make up for it by saying I’d love to see them in something else, preferably something without amplification?
The finale was a big sing-along to Ya Got Me from On the Town, in which Tilson Thomas had a solo (possibly unamplified – I can’t even remember at this point). People seemed to have fun, I should say. I was wishing I’d switched the ticket and gotten some rest, since the exhaustion of repeated late nights at the theater tends to accumulate in my system. I mean, I'm open to stuff: this could have been the evening that converted me to Lenny. But all I really wanted to hear at the end of the evening was Candide's final solo: Was it for this, nothing more than this? (Incidentally, some versions omit this number, which I think is a big mistake; it’s the psychological lynchpin of the ending.) Again, all those people working so hard. . . . I heard raves about the previous week’s Beethoven 9, which I missed. I was saving it up for you, Dawn. And then you went and got amplified like you didn't care about me at all. Boys, don't go givin' your hearts to no sopranos.
I take about as little pleasure in trashing the Bonesetter’s Daughter as I did in experiencing it; as someone who is constantly complaining about limited repertory and unimaginative productions, it’s the sort of thing I am really rooting for. But I have never felt any need to check my brain at the opera house door, and I can’t condescend to the art form by pretending that the libretto is “good enough for opera,” because opera plots do not have to be incoherent and simplistic or silly. (I’m still wondering why Chang the Coffinmaker, after being so eager to marry LuLing, suddenly decides not only to rape her instead, but to chase her down to Hong Kong in order to do so. Is he just trying to get away from his three or four other wives? More romance-novel self-indulgence, I fear: of course he is obsessed with me! Who wouldn’t be? And I keep reading that Precious Auntie is “disfigured” – again, since she is never disfigured on stage at any point, you would only know this by reading what’s supposed to be happening, not by watching what is actually happening. People, please note: incoherence is different from ambiguity.)
So much money, and so much effort by so many more or less talented people. . . . What’s really irritating me now, besides having dug myself even further into horrendous debt so I could see the sparkly new opera, is that I can already hear the PR machine clanking up to claim that Bonesetter’s Daughter is “controversial” or “thought-provoking,” qualities conspicuously lacking these days over there at The House of Easy Weeping (well, I'd cry too if I'd spent the rumored figure of 1.5 million and didn't even get a coherent storyline), or that it has “gotten people talking about opera” – for the record, What the fuck? is not the kind of conversation you want to be inspiring.
Every performance has a certain appeal to the senses, but once that immediate sensation fades into memory the intellectual underpinnings of a work become more obvious, and when they fail, you can end up feeling more frustrated and angry than you were at first.
After noting just a few entries ago that I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw performing in the same kind of hodgepodge concert as Gheorghiu, look at what Dawn goes and does in the Symphony's big Bernstein-o-rama! Ah, Dawn, keep the boys guessing! If I’d known she was going to be amplified in the second half, though, I definitely would have exchanged my ticket for something or maybe anything else. As previously noted, I am not of the cult of Lennie, except for Candide, which was completely omitted from what was sort of a survey of Bernstein’s theatrical works. My metaphorical mind was thinking that the concert was like having to sit through a birthday party for someone to whom I’m indifferent. Then I realized that was literally true: the concert was a tribute on the occasion of Bernstein’s 90th birthday. It’s being taken to Carnegie Hall as part of a festival of some sort. I hope it seems a little more coherent in that context. I hate to fall into that whole “it’s New York City!” thing, but I can’t imagine why the Symphony thought this was the right calling card for Carnegie. Message to New York: you missed some fine Ligeti!
The evening opened with a plush account of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and, not to get anyone in trouble, but the string section looked as tired of shouting “Mambo!” as I was of hearing it. They should have dumped this and had more songs. Tilson Thomas didn’t even bother to give a little intro to that piece, but he did for the two excerpts from A Quiet Place that followed. They were nicely sung by Quinn Kelsey and Dawn Upshaw, but I don’t think they work that well out of context, especially the first one, an aria about being angry. Is the anger justified? Or is there some situational irony that enriches the aria (like actually hearing Everything’s Coming Up Roses in context and realizing how desperately delusional the song is meant to be)?
After intermission Tilson Thomas informed us that it was a “gala” evening, which I guess explains why it didn’t make much musical sense. The program book implied that the intent was to show Bernstein’s range as a theatrical composer, but the actual effect was a weird hitting-the-tennis-ball-back-and-forth quality, with the overly familiar and comic slamming into the mournful obscurities. It reminded me of the passage in Oliver Twist when Dickens describes certain novelists who alternate between tragedy and comedy like the alternating streaks of meat and fat in bacon. Uh, but I really enjoy bacon, which shows you how metaphors can break down.
I’m sounding too harsh, I think. But it was a very strange concert. Stephanie Harwood came out and belted I Can Cook Too. The audience reacted with the enthusiasm of those who have never heard a Red-Hot Mama before, but immediately we had Peter Wyrick playing Meditation No 1 from Mass (the program made a case for Mass as well as Songfest as theatrical works). It’s an interesting piece – I kept thinking it would soar off into the sweetness of something like the Meditation from Thais, but it kept swerving in pricklier directions – but despite Wyrick’s skill I don’t think we were hearing it under optimum circumstances, what with the audience all revved up from the sashaying and whatnot.
(Here's my prior experience with Mass: I saw the PBS broadcast back in the 1970s when it was new. All I remember is that at what would be the consecration the Celebrant has some sort of hissy fit and I think smashes something. My mother looked up from her crocheting, said in a very drily sarcastic tone, "Was that the consecration? Oh my." And then she resumed her crocheting.)
Then an amplified Dawn Upshaw sang What a Movie from Trouble in Tahiti. Why is Dawn Upshaw being amplified? Beautiful performance, switching between rapture and cynicism, but she blasted my eardrums. I was sitting way too close. I usually like to sit close, partly I will admit so that I have less of a sense of being surrounded by people, but I should probably rethink my seating preference when it comes to the symphony.
Then Quinn Kelsey sang with tenderness and sensitivity the setting of Whitman’s To What You Said from Songfest (unamplified, fortunately). There were lots of individually fine performances, but the evening seemed random rather than cumulative. Then the Danzon from Fancy Free (enough with that one, too!). Then five guys from ACT’s student program (Nick Gabriel, Phil Mills, Kyle Schaefer, Christopher Tocco, and Weston Wilson) came out and did a high-energy Officer Krupke, and I’ve never seen a peppier, more charming and adorable street gang, which proves once again the superiority of art, or least musical theater, over life. I honestly don’t mean to sneer at those guys, who really were talented and fun, but it just sort of comes with performing that material. Can I make up for it by saying I’d love to see them in something else, preferably something without amplification?
The finale was a big sing-along to Ya Got Me from On the Town, in which Tilson Thomas had a solo (possibly unamplified – I can’t even remember at this point). People seemed to have fun, I should say. I was wishing I’d switched the ticket and gotten some rest, since the exhaustion of repeated late nights at the theater tends to accumulate in my system. I mean, I'm open to stuff: this could have been the evening that converted me to Lenny. But all I really wanted to hear at the end of the evening was Candide's final solo: Was it for this, nothing more than this? (Incidentally, some versions omit this number, which I think is a big mistake; it’s the psychological lynchpin of the ending.) Again, all those people working so hard. . . . I heard raves about the previous week’s Beethoven 9, which I missed. I was saving it up for you, Dawn. And then you went and got amplified like you didn't care about me at all. Boys, don't go givin' your hearts to no sopranos.
17 September 2008
as tough as a bone, with a will of her own (shadows of forgotten ancestors)
Last night I saw the second performance of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, the world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, with mostly pleasant music by Stewart Wallace and a naïve and clumsy libretto by Amy Tan, based on her novel. It’s a bit of an expensive disaster, and as it slowly sank, I half wondered if the evening would end with a transcription for suona of Nearer, My God, to Thee.
Not that I didn’t like the music; the somber chorus of refugees in Hong Kong that opens Act 2, and the dreamy undulations of the letter-writing scene that follows, are particularly beautiful. But Stewart’s strength seems to be in this sort of meditative music, and meditation isn’t really that effective theatrically; the big confrontations fall flat musically (as well as dramatically) and it all starts to seem too similar and too even (the big percussion moments seem to be at the same volume as every other moment; I have the impression of a very mezzoforte evening). And every singer is amplified, with ugly and distracting microphones attached near their mouths. The disembodied, somewhat flattened sound that results might have been effective if restricted to Precious Auntie, who is a ghost, but as it is, it just looks as if Wallace doesn’t know how to write for voice and orchestra.
Years ago I read an interview with James Levine in which he was asked about the Met’s failure to commission more new operas during his tenure. His somewhat defensive reply was that, while the Met may not have hosted many world premieres, he had expanded their repertory to include twentieth-century masterpieces by Shostakovich, Berg, Schoenberg, and Janacek, and regular exposure to these works was ultimately more effective in broadening musical taste than having a splashy one-off that then disappears. The Bonesetter’s Daughter was obviously extremely expensive to produce (trips to China! returns from China, laden with percussionists! acrobats! son et lumiere!), and I’ve wondered if the extremely dull and conventional programming at the opera this season was in the hopes of reliable cash cows to offset the Bonesetter money pit. And what is the future for this work? The things that make the performance somewhat interesting (the Chinese instruments, the elaborate production with aerialists and jugglers) are what make it too specialized and expensive for smaller houses.
Because this opera is not going to be effective without all the distractions provided by the staging. At the very basic level of storytelling, it simply doesn’t make sense, and some scenes drag on while others are confusingly truncated. I haven’t read the novel (or any of Tan’s novels) and I only read the synopsis after the show. I did that deliberately, so that I was bringing in as little outside plot knowledge as possible. And what I saw on stage was apparently not what I was supposed to be seeing.
After a brief prelude featuring lots of fun but irrelevant aerialists and a trio for Precious Auntie (the exquisite Qian Yi, a specialist in the kunju tradition of Chinese opera), her daughter LuLing as an old woman (the powerful Ning Liang), and LuLing’s daughter Ruth Young Kamen (Zheng Cao, who valiantly gives her considerable best, and also plays the young LuLing in the flashbacks), there’s a drawn-out scene in a Chinese restaurant, meant to establish that Ruth’s mother is difficult and her mind is going. But I can’t say I blame the poor woman, considering what she has to put up with: the Kamens, her daughter’s in-laws (Valery Portnov and Catherine Cook) rudely decline the food and with even greater rudeness criticize the mink coat Ruth gives her mother (at least we’re told it’s mink – the actual coat on stage is a particularly garish shade of pink, which is not the color of actual mink, and it appears to be made up of lots of woven material and satin rags rather than fur).
Ruth gets to sing about how buying the coat means she appreciates what her mother did for her (there’s another lengthy aria of mother love during the flashback to China, and like this one it’s about how much the mother has suffered, so the child should be grateful – do the kids still call this guilt-tripping?). Throughout the dinner, her two adolescent stepdaughters behave with astonishing rudeness, ridiculing the special foods, speaking disrespectfully to Ruth and her mother, using their cellphones at the table, and so forth. Their father seems to think there is nothing to do in the face of this behavior but look sympathetically and helplessly at his wife while she’s insulted. I realize it’s ridiculous to give advice to people, particularly when those people are imaginary, but I have to say it: Dude, grow a pair. I almost walked on stage to slap those girls myself. This jellyfish is played by James Maddalena, in a role that adds no luster to his distinguished career.
(He is one of the few performers, though, who can consistently be understood without reference to the surtitles, a difficulty which holds for the native speakers of English and not just those whose native language is Chinese. I assume the problem has to do with the vocal lines and Wallace’s problems with voice and orchestra. They should have just had the China sections sung in Chinese, and made things a little easier for those poor women, since you have to read most of the words anyway – though I should also say that occasionally the surtitles didn't match the words I could make out.)
Then the ghost of Precious Auntie changes Ruth into the younger version of her mother and takes her from the Chinese restaurant back to 1930s China. Maybe I should issue a spoiler alert here, but does it count as a spoiler if you watched the opera attentively and it still doesn’t quite make sense? Precious Auntie, daughter of the village’s late bonesetter, seems to be practically a slave to Wang Tai-Tai the Inkmaker (Catherine Cook again). She seems to be despised more than the other young women laboring there, I don’t know why. Her daughter LuLing Liu works with her. The villain of the piece, Chang the Coffinmaker (Hao Jiang Tian), who has raped Precious Auntie and killed her father, lusts after LuLing and decides to marry her.
I’m figuring there’s a good chance that she’s his daughter, so it’s not making a lot of sense to me that no one is raising a fuss besides Precious Auntie, and it’s not making sense why Precious Auntie, who seems to control her daughter in other ways, can’t forbid this marriage. There does turn out to be a reason: all these relationships are supposed to be shrouded in mystery at this point. As I discovered only by reading the synopsis later, Precious Auntie had always claimed that she found the infant LuLing in an icy gutter and saved her (which would certainly explain why a daughter is calling her mother Precious Auntie), and has never told her who her parents were.
Chang proves his perfidy by wearing white to the wedding even though he is not the bride (seriously, isn’t white the color of mourning in most Asian countries? Why is he wearing it to a wedding?). Precious Auntie bursts in and delivers a curse on Chang. She is high overhead (director Chen Shi-Zheng uses this technique several times, literally distancing one antagonist from those she should be confronting, which lowers the dramatic temperature). Videotaped flames fill the background, though it’s not made entirely clear on stage that she has set herself and the building on fire. Well, someone noticed how effective the end of Gotterdammerung is, but it’s only effective if you know what’s going on. There’s no actual fire here, and no particular reason to assume that these projections are suddenly real, unlike the sharks and stars and whatnot we’ve seen earlier.
After the intermission we see LuLing in Hong Kong, writing letters for other refugee women, a fairly extraneous scene that exists only for the thematic point that all these women speak for or as others, something not as uncommon, or even as psychologically warping, as the libretto seems to think. It’s unclear how someone previously seen as a slave girl in an ink factory acquired calligraphic skills beyond that of the other refugee women, some of whom were presumably not teenage slaves. LuLing is hoping to find a husband to take her to America, but when Chang shows up, even though she was eager to marry him earlier to escape the misery of her situation, she now doesn’t want to, and he either rapes or tries to rape her.
The ghost of Precious Auntie then appears with convenient rage and reveals the family relationships, which I thought everyone already knew. She forces Chang to confess also that he killed her father the bonesetter to gain the dragon bone that would make him immortal, which is something else I thought everyone already knew. Precious Auntie then uses the dragon bone to castrate Chang, though again, it’s a little vague if killing him is a separate act or a result of removing what he whimsically calls “little brother.” The synopsis, which incidentally was written by Tan, isn’t much help here, delicately declining to spell out exactly what happens, which I would have thought might be the actual purpose of a synopsis: “she throws him to the ground, tortures him with the dragon bone, and extracts his confession” – well, at least she’s admitting it’s torture. The validity of confessions under torture seems to be official US policy now, so I guess there’s nothing troubling there; and indeed according to the synopsis this is a moment “in which three generations broken by pain have become whole again, unified and inseparable in their understanding.”
Well, that’s nice for everyone. That really does seem to be the naïve psychology operating here: if Something Really Bad happens to someone, it can make them difficult, until they talk about it, at which point they are healed. (What LuLing and Ruth really need is not this group hug so much as a family with better manners). I suspect that maybe some bad things happened a bit further back in the family tree as well, since life tends to be made up of lots of bad things, but the possibility isn’t raised. And definitely no one seems to have considered asking Chang the Coffinmaker if maybe his own grandfather was also the victim of Something Really Bad.
Again, my objection here is not that the men (in effect, there are only two, Chang and Ruth’s husband; the occasional priest or waiter or father-in-law is too negligible to count, and the titular bonesetter himself simply doesn’t exist, except as a name) are either castrated or might as well have been. My objection is not that the men are either weak or villainous (in case you’re missing the point about Chang the Coffinmaker, let me repeat it: he makes coffins. You know, where they put people without life). My objection is not that the opera is all about the women. My objection is that there’s a double standard: if victimization by the powerful, or by historical forces, can explain and justify the women, why isn’t there any effort to examine the circumstances that shaped the men? Motiveless malignancy, like dream sequences, can be very effective, but only when used carefully. There seems to be no driving force behind the cartoonlike relentlessness of Chang’s villainy – he bribes! he kills! he steals! he rapes! He pees publicly! – except that he has a dick. My dick and I have certain problems with this view.
But then the farther you go from the character of Ruth, the less sympathy and understanding you get. I personally am far too sophisticated to assume that Ruth equals Amy Tan, or even equals a social or literary construct we call “Amy Tan,” but apparently neither the opera company nor Tan herself suffer the burden of any such sophistication. She coyly dances in interviews around the question of how much of this “is really her.” The opera company has assured us, almost as often as they’ve declared this opera “eagerly awaited,” that it is deeply personal, which I find deeply embarrassing. But then I’m mostly interested in art, not gossip.
Tan and Stewart have repeatedly declared that this is an American, and not a Chinese, opera, and despite the copious application of glittering chinoiserie and exotic bric-a-brac, they are absolutely correct: we’re dealing with a heroine who is so self-absorbed, so unaware of the larger world around her, that even in middle age she requires supernatural intervention before she figures out that maybe her mother grew up having a few problems of her own, and maybe even an existence separate from her daughter’s.
We’re dealing with a heroine for whom foreign cultures are simply magical lands like Oz. (About that dragon bone – I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that maybe it’s not really the bone of a dragon, and even that eating it in powdered form would not actually make you immortal. This possibility is never really raised during the opera. And the murder of Chang is not staged so that you might think it was actually done by LuLing, aided by the thought of her mother – the murder is actually committed by the ghost. Apparently the laws of ordinary science do not apply to colorful far-off lands.)
We’re dealing with a heroine convinced that only personal relationships and emotional trauma matter (her mother’s erratic behavior is due to The Awful Things Men Did to Her, rather than to, say, an aberrant chemical in her brain).
We’re dealing with a heroine whose sense of history can only extend back to her grandmother, and who thinks simplistically that what happens to people is more important than how they react to what happens. Yep, it’s all sounding pretty much like a fairly privileged American in the therapeutic age.
One of the problems with deeply personal work is that there often isn’t enough emotional distance from the author’s stand-in for the appropriate insight, irony, balance, and judgment (this, incidentally, is why all the Lisa-centered episodes of the Simpsons are almost invariably weak – she’s just too similar to the writers). In the restaurant scene at the beginning, you have to wonder why Ruth, who presumably has known her in-laws for some time, would order shellfish, which they can’t eat (it’s a little unclear if this is due to personal preference, digestive problems, or Jewish dietary law), or why she would order “food that looks like what it was” (that is, has a head or tail), after her husband had warned her his daughters wouldn’t like it (not that that justifies their rude reactions). You have to wonder why she hasn’t explained the cultural significance of the foods they’re about to eat (they symbolize a happy family, and I know she didn’t explain this because I had to read the synopsis to find out).
I think we’re meant to see Ruth as well-meaning and caught between conflicting cultures. I couldn’t help feeling that she’s someone who manipulates her way into having others reject what she’s offering so that she can feel sorry for herself, because after all she means so well. But that’s obviously not the intention, because you can’t make someone like that the sympathetic heroine of an opera.
In the final scene, her dying mother begs Ruth to forgive her, which she tearfully does, but I really wasn’t clear what exactly there was to forgive. Having a difficult life? Trying her best to raise her? Giving her constant advice, most of which – don’t talk back; be polite; don’t run around in the street, it’s dangerous – seems to be good old-fashioned common sense? So I have to ask: Is this really a scene of radiant reconciliation and forgiveness? Or is it actually a vindictive fantasy about getting the upper hand over those who have some power over you? It’s not only the men who are humiliated for not being Ruth/Amy. I don’t get the glow I get from the forgiveness scene at the end of Nozze di Figaro. There’s an ugly will to power, an unwillingness to accept the reality of other people the farther away they get from oneself, under Ruth’s sense of befuddled victimhood. This opera is a labor of self-love gone wrong.
Not that I didn’t like the music; the somber chorus of refugees in Hong Kong that opens Act 2, and the dreamy undulations of the letter-writing scene that follows, are particularly beautiful. But Stewart’s strength seems to be in this sort of meditative music, and meditation isn’t really that effective theatrically; the big confrontations fall flat musically (as well as dramatically) and it all starts to seem too similar and too even (the big percussion moments seem to be at the same volume as every other moment; I have the impression of a very mezzoforte evening). And every singer is amplified, with ugly and distracting microphones attached near their mouths. The disembodied, somewhat flattened sound that results might have been effective if restricted to Precious Auntie, who is a ghost, but as it is, it just looks as if Wallace doesn’t know how to write for voice and orchestra.
Years ago I read an interview with James Levine in which he was asked about the Met’s failure to commission more new operas during his tenure. His somewhat defensive reply was that, while the Met may not have hosted many world premieres, he had expanded their repertory to include twentieth-century masterpieces by Shostakovich, Berg, Schoenberg, and Janacek, and regular exposure to these works was ultimately more effective in broadening musical taste than having a splashy one-off that then disappears. The Bonesetter’s Daughter was obviously extremely expensive to produce (trips to China! returns from China, laden with percussionists! acrobats! son et lumiere!), and I’ve wondered if the extremely dull and conventional programming at the opera this season was in the hopes of reliable cash cows to offset the Bonesetter money pit. And what is the future for this work? The things that make the performance somewhat interesting (the Chinese instruments, the elaborate production with aerialists and jugglers) are what make it too specialized and expensive for smaller houses.
Because this opera is not going to be effective without all the distractions provided by the staging. At the very basic level of storytelling, it simply doesn’t make sense, and some scenes drag on while others are confusingly truncated. I haven’t read the novel (or any of Tan’s novels) and I only read the synopsis after the show. I did that deliberately, so that I was bringing in as little outside plot knowledge as possible. And what I saw on stage was apparently not what I was supposed to be seeing.
After a brief prelude featuring lots of fun but irrelevant aerialists and a trio for Precious Auntie (the exquisite Qian Yi, a specialist in the kunju tradition of Chinese opera), her daughter LuLing as an old woman (the powerful Ning Liang), and LuLing’s daughter Ruth Young Kamen (Zheng Cao, who valiantly gives her considerable best, and also plays the young LuLing in the flashbacks), there’s a drawn-out scene in a Chinese restaurant, meant to establish that Ruth’s mother is difficult and her mind is going. But I can’t say I blame the poor woman, considering what she has to put up with: the Kamens, her daughter’s in-laws (Valery Portnov and Catherine Cook) rudely decline the food and with even greater rudeness criticize the mink coat Ruth gives her mother (at least we’re told it’s mink – the actual coat on stage is a particularly garish shade of pink, which is not the color of actual mink, and it appears to be made up of lots of woven material and satin rags rather than fur).
Ruth gets to sing about how buying the coat means she appreciates what her mother did for her (there’s another lengthy aria of mother love during the flashback to China, and like this one it’s about how much the mother has suffered, so the child should be grateful – do the kids still call this guilt-tripping?). Throughout the dinner, her two adolescent stepdaughters behave with astonishing rudeness, ridiculing the special foods, speaking disrespectfully to Ruth and her mother, using their cellphones at the table, and so forth. Their father seems to think there is nothing to do in the face of this behavior but look sympathetically and helplessly at his wife while she’s insulted. I realize it’s ridiculous to give advice to people, particularly when those people are imaginary, but I have to say it: Dude, grow a pair. I almost walked on stage to slap those girls myself. This jellyfish is played by James Maddalena, in a role that adds no luster to his distinguished career.
(He is one of the few performers, though, who can consistently be understood without reference to the surtitles, a difficulty which holds for the native speakers of English and not just those whose native language is Chinese. I assume the problem has to do with the vocal lines and Wallace’s problems with voice and orchestra. They should have just had the China sections sung in Chinese, and made things a little easier for those poor women, since you have to read most of the words anyway – though I should also say that occasionally the surtitles didn't match the words I could make out.)
Then the ghost of Precious Auntie changes Ruth into the younger version of her mother and takes her from the Chinese restaurant back to 1930s China. Maybe I should issue a spoiler alert here, but does it count as a spoiler if you watched the opera attentively and it still doesn’t quite make sense? Precious Auntie, daughter of the village’s late bonesetter, seems to be practically a slave to Wang Tai-Tai the Inkmaker (Catherine Cook again). She seems to be despised more than the other young women laboring there, I don’t know why. Her daughter LuLing Liu works with her. The villain of the piece, Chang the Coffinmaker (Hao Jiang Tian), who has raped Precious Auntie and killed her father, lusts after LuLing and decides to marry her.
I’m figuring there’s a good chance that she’s his daughter, so it’s not making a lot of sense to me that no one is raising a fuss besides Precious Auntie, and it’s not making sense why Precious Auntie, who seems to control her daughter in other ways, can’t forbid this marriage. There does turn out to be a reason: all these relationships are supposed to be shrouded in mystery at this point. As I discovered only by reading the synopsis later, Precious Auntie had always claimed that she found the infant LuLing in an icy gutter and saved her (which would certainly explain why a daughter is calling her mother Precious Auntie), and has never told her who her parents were.
Chang proves his perfidy by wearing white to the wedding even though he is not the bride (seriously, isn’t white the color of mourning in most Asian countries? Why is he wearing it to a wedding?). Precious Auntie bursts in and delivers a curse on Chang. She is high overhead (director Chen Shi-Zheng uses this technique several times, literally distancing one antagonist from those she should be confronting, which lowers the dramatic temperature). Videotaped flames fill the background, though it’s not made entirely clear on stage that she has set herself and the building on fire. Well, someone noticed how effective the end of Gotterdammerung is, but it’s only effective if you know what’s going on. There’s no actual fire here, and no particular reason to assume that these projections are suddenly real, unlike the sharks and stars and whatnot we’ve seen earlier.
After the intermission we see LuLing in Hong Kong, writing letters for other refugee women, a fairly extraneous scene that exists only for the thematic point that all these women speak for or as others, something not as uncommon, or even as psychologically warping, as the libretto seems to think. It’s unclear how someone previously seen as a slave girl in an ink factory acquired calligraphic skills beyond that of the other refugee women, some of whom were presumably not teenage slaves. LuLing is hoping to find a husband to take her to America, but when Chang shows up, even though she was eager to marry him earlier to escape the misery of her situation, she now doesn’t want to, and he either rapes or tries to rape her.
The ghost of Precious Auntie then appears with convenient rage and reveals the family relationships, which I thought everyone already knew. She forces Chang to confess also that he killed her father the bonesetter to gain the dragon bone that would make him immortal, which is something else I thought everyone already knew. Precious Auntie then uses the dragon bone to castrate Chang, though again, it’s a little vague if killing him is a separate act or a result of removing what he whimsically calls “little brother.” The synopsis, which incidentally was written by Tan, isn’t much help here, delicately declining to spell out exactly what happens, which I would have thought might be the actual purpose of a synopsis: “she throws him to the ground, tortures him with the dragon bone, and extracts his confession” – well, at least she’s admitting it’s torture. The validity of confessions under torture seems to be official US policy now, so I guess there’s nothing troubling there; and indeed according to the synopsis this is a moment “in which three generations broken by pain have become whole again, unified and inseparable in their understanding.”
Well, that’s nice for everyone. That really does seem to be the naïve psychology operating here: if Something Really Bad happens to someone, it can make them difficult, until they talk about it, at which point they are healed. (What LuLing and Ruth really need is not this group hug so much as a family with better manners). I suspect that maybe some bad things happened a bit further back in the family tree as well, since life tends to be made up of lots of bad things, but the possibility isn’t raised. And definitely no one seems to have considered asking Chang the Coffinmaker if maybe his own grandfather was also the victim of Something Really Bad.
Again, my objection here is not that the men (in effect, there are only two, Chang and Ruth’s husband; the occasional priest or waiter or father-in-law is too negligible to count, and the titular bonesetter himself simply doesn’t exist, except as a name) are either castrated or might as well have been. My objection is not that the men are either weak or villainous (in case you’re missing the point about Chang the Coffinmaker, let me repeat it: he makes coffins. You know, where they put people without life). My objection is not that the opera is all about the women. My objection is that there’s a double standard: if victimization by the powerful, or by historical forces, can explain and justify the women, why isn’t there any effort to examine the circumstances that shaped the men? Motiveless malignancy, like dream sequences, can be very effective, but only when used carefully. There seems to be no driving force behind the cartoonlike relentlessness of Chang’s villainy – he bribes! he kills! he steals! he rapes! He pees publicly! – except that he has a dick. My dick and I have certain problems with this view.
But then the farther you go from the character of Ruth, the less sympathy and understanding you get. I personally am far too sophisticated to assume that Ruth equals Amy Tan, or even equals a social or literary construct we call “Amy Tan,” but apparently neither the opera company nor Tan herself suffer the burden of any such sophistication. She coyly dances in interviews around the question of how much of this “is really her.” The opera company has assured us, almost as often as they’ve declared this opera “eagerly awaited,” that it is deeply personal, which I find deeply embarrassing. But then I’m mostly interested in art, not gossip.
Tan and Stewart have repeatedly declared that this is an American, and not a Chinese, opera, and despite the copious application of glittering chinoiserie and exotic bric-a-brac, they are absolutely correct: we’re dealing with a heroine who is so self-absorbed, so unaware of the larger world around her, that even in middle age she requires supernatural intervention before she figures out that maybe her mother grew up having a few problems of her own, and maybe even an existence separate from her daughter’s.
We’re dealing with a heroine for whom foreign cultures are simply magical lands like Oz. (About that dragon bone – I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that maybe it’s not really the bone of a dragon, and even that eating it in powdered form would not actually make you immortal. This possibility is never really raised during the opera. And the murder of Chang is not staged so that you might think it was actually done by LuLing, aided by the thought of her mother – the murder is actually committed by the ghost. Apparently the laws of ordinary science do not apply to colorful far-off lands.)
We’re dealing with a heroine convinced that only personal relationships and emotional trauma matter (her mother’s erratic behavior is due to The Awful Things Men Did to Her, rather than to, say, an aberrant chemical in her brain).
We’re dealing with a heroine whose sense of history can only extend back to her grandmother, and who thinks simplistically that what happens to people is more important than how they react to what happens. Yep, it’s all sounding pretty much like a fairly privileged American in the therapeutic age.
One of the problems with deeply personal work is that there often isn’t enough emotional distance from the author’s stand-in for the appropriate insight, irony, balance, and judgment (this, incidentally, is why all the Lisa-centered episodes of the Simpsons are almost invariably weak – she’s just too similar to the writers). In the restaurant scene at the beginning, you have to wonder why Ruth, who presumably has known her in-laws for some time, would order shellfish, which they can’t eat (it’s a little unclear if this is due to personal preference, digestive problems, or Jewish dietary law), or why she would order “food that looks like what it was” (that is, has a head or tail), after her husband had warned her his daughters wouldn’t like it (not that that justifies their rude reactions). You have to wonder why she hasn’t explained the cultural significance of the foods they’re about to eat (they symbolize a happy family, and I know she didn’t explain this because I had to read the synopsis to find out).
I think we’re meant to see Ruth as well-meaning and caught between conflicting cultures. I couldn’t help feeling that she’s someone who manipulates her way into having others reject what she’s offering so that she can feel sorry for herself, because after all she means so well. But that’s obviously not the intention, because you can’t make someone like that the sympathetic heroine of an opera.
In the final scene, her dying mother begs Ruth to forgive her, which she tearfully does, but I really wasn’t clear what exactly there was to forgive. Having a difficult life? Trying her best to raise her? Giving her constant advice, most of which – don’t talk back; be polite; don’t run around in the street, it’s dangerous – seems to be good old-fashioned common sense? So I have to ask: Is this really a scene of radiant reconciliation and forgiveness? Or is it actually a vindictive fantasy about getting the upper hand over those who have some power over you? It’s not only the men who are humiliated for not being Ruth/Amy. I don’t get the glow I get from the forgiveness scene at the end of Nozze di Figaro. There’s an ugly will to power, an unwillingness to accept the reality of other people the farther away they get from oneself, under Ruth’s sense of befuddled victimhood. This opera is a labor of self-love gone wrong.
14 September 2008
I'll sit and watch the sea, Till you come back to me
My truncated-by-choice season at San Francisco Opera got off to a good start last Tuesday with Simon Boccanegra, but then I figured any chance to see this opera would be a good start, and this production is better than solid.
While reading the program beforehand, I noted that the Message from the Chairman of the Board and President of the SF Opera Association claimed that this season “exemplifies the vitality and spirit of innovation at the core of San Francisco Opera.” What the hell are they drinking over there, and will they share it with the rest of us? If a season almost half of which is made up of L’Elisir d’Amore, Tosca, Boheme, and Traviata exemplifies innovation, I can’t even imagine what we will get if reaction sets in. I’d just like to point out, once again, that you shouldn’t put old wine in new skins, and technological innovation is not the same thing as artistic innovation.
This production of Boccanegra had been seen here before; shorn of a few oddities (like having Verdi wander solo and inexplicably across the stage before the action started) it is a sturdy if not particularly daring or illuminating production. I thought this go-round was more consistent than the last one. Of course, last time, I saw the performance in which Boccanegra had to drop out at intermission due to vocal difficulties, and one of his enemies now became him, and someone else had to be bumped up to that now vacant role, which couldn’t have helped anyone having trouble following the famously convoluted plot.
As for the plot, several weeks ago I took Budden on Boccanegra down from the shelf where all three volumes are patiently waiting to be read, but haven’t had a chance to read it. I understand it clears up a lot of the background of what happens and why. I do feel, though, that an attentive viewer (that would be me, in case you were wondering) should be able to wander in blank and follow the proceedings. And as with the libretto of The Mother of Us All, it all makes sense if you pay close attention to the dialogue; you can find the line or two that will explain away whatever confusion is vexing you. But if there’s one that explains why Boccanegra and his rediscovered daughter persist in keeping their relationship a secret with dire consequences, then I missed it, so Budden on Boccanegra is not going back on the shelf until I can read it and see if I missed something.
As with baroque opera or film noir, the action – on stage if not on the page – is actually pretty easy to follow, and the murkiness may be the point. It’s not the plot mechanics themselves that are of paramount importance, but the mood and characterization, and that’s why a huge mystery or gap in motivation is a greater obstacle than the complicated familial and political relationships. But the complexity of the plot has become a received notion, which means audiences are filled with those who feel the need to make little jokes or observations about the plot during the performance, to show that they are conversant with the howling complexities. There wasn’t an excessive amount of that at my performance, but a little is still too much. Though I had been warned that the Tuesday audiences were dead, and I was relieved to find that to be somewhat true.
I liked Dimitri Hvorostovsky in the lead quite a lot, though I did feel that there were some moments, including part of the Council Chamber scene, where he lacked power and volume (there was also some clumsily slow crowd fights in this scene that should be sharpened). But as I noticed when he performed Don Giovanni here a few years back, he excels at saturnine brooding and melancholy. My disappointment at missing Barbara Frittoli’s debut was mitigated by my pleasure in hearing Ana Maria Martinez again after her memorable Micaela a few seasons back. She had some choppy lines in her opening aria (but then I hear so did Frittoli, and so do most other Amelias) but soon got over her nerves or breathe problems or whatever and sang with beauty of line and total commitment for the rest of the night. During the intermission the man next to me asked which of the Amelias we were hearing. He and his wife had been discussing this, although the two sopranos don’t really look alike. I told him it was Martinez and pointed out that her name on the cast page listed the dates she was singing. He thanked me and said he thought she was excellent. I agreed and pointed out that she also looked the part, which always helps. “Yes,” he said, “and she has great eyebrows.” Since I know someone else with an eyebrow thing, this amused me.
The whole cast was pretty consistent, I thought, with the disturbingly ratlike Paolo of Patrick Carfizzi contrasting nicely with his tall and handsome co-conspirator, Kenneth Kellogg; Vitalij Kowaljow was a somber Fiesco and brought emotional gravitas to what could be a one-dimensionally heavy role; Marcus Haddock was the ardent Garbriele Adorno, which is a bit of a thankless role, since the main love affair is clearly that of the father and his long-lost daughter. I thought the applause at the end was a bit subdued considering that this performance was apparently and unsurprisingly superior to Opening Night (check here for a link to Lisa Hirsch’s review; she also links to Joshua Kosman’s in the Chronicle and sfmike’s at Civic Center), but the eyebrow man next to me said, “Wow! Not bad for a Tuesday night!” So I guess the audience was appropriately appreciative after all, in its own fashion.
Every time I encounter this opera I have a deeper impression of its greatness. One of the things that struck me this time is how Shakespearean it is, which might be the ultimate compliment; not only in its complexity of characterization and its intermingling of the personal and the political, and its contempt for mobs, but in the way that Verdi, just like Shakespeare in some of his late plays, revisits themes that have appeared earlier in his work: the abducted daughter, the accusation of infidelity which is emotionally if not technically true, the betrayal by trusted subordinates. You feel an artist revisiting past terrain as he makes ready to move forward.
While reading the program beforehand, I noted that the Message from the Chairman of the Board and President of the SF Opera Association claimed that this season “exemplifies the vitality and spirit of innovation at the core of San Francisco Opera.” What the hell are they drinking over there, and will they share it with the rest of us? If a season almost half of which is made up of L’Elisir d’Amore, Tosca, Boheme, and Traviata exemplifies innovation, I can’t even imagine what we will get if reaction sets in. I’d just like to point out, once again, that you shouldn’t put old wine in new skins, and technological innovation is not the same thing as artistic innovation.
This production of Boccanegra had been seen here before; shorn of a few oddities (like having Verdi wander solo and inexplicably across the stage before the action started) it is a sturdy if not particularly daring or illuminating production. I thought this go-round was more consistent than the last one. Of course, last time, I saw the performance in which Boccanegra had to drop out at intermission due to vocal difficulties, and one of his enemies now became him, and someone else had to be bumped up to that now vacant role, which couldn’t have helped anyone having trouble following the famously convoluted plot.
As for the plot, several weeks ago I took Budden on Boccanegra down from the shelf where all three volumes are patiently waiting to be read, but haven’t had a chance to read it. I understand it clears up a lot of the background of what happens and why. I do feel, though, that an attentive viewer (that would be me, in case you were wondering) should be able to wander in blank and follow the proceedings. And as with the libretto of The Mother of Us All, it all makes sense if you pay close attention to the dialogue; you can find the line or two that will explain away whatever confusion is vexing you. But if there’s one that explains why Boccanegra and his rediscovered daughter persist in keeping their relationship a secret with dire consequences, then I missed it, so Budden on Boccanegra is not going back on the shelf until I can read it and see if I missed something.
As with baroque opera or film noir, the action – on stage if not on the page – is actually pretty easy to follow, and the murkiness may be the point. It’s not the plot mechanics themselves that are of paramount importance, but the mood and characterization, and that’s why a huge mystery or gap in motivation is a greater obstacle than the complicated familial and political relationships. But the complexity of the plot has become a received notion, which means audiences are filled with those who feel the need to make little jokes or observations about the plot during the performance, to show that they are conversant with the howling complexities. There wasn’t an excessive amount of that at my performance, but a little is still too much. Though I had been warned that the Tuesday audiences were dead, and I was relieved to find that to be somewhat true.
I liked Dimitri Hvorostovsky in the lead quite a lot, though I did feel that there were some moments, including part of the Council Chamber scene, where he lacked power and volume (there was also some clumsily slow crowd fights in this scene that should be sharpened). But as I noticed when he performed Don Giovanni here a few years back, he excels at saturnine brooding and melancholy. My disappointment at missing Barbara Frittoli’s debut was mitigated by my pleasure in hearing Ana Maria Martinez again after her memorable Micaela a few seasons back. She had some choppy lines in her opening aria (but then I hear so did Frittoli, and so do most other Amelias) but soon got over her nerves or breathe problems or whatever and sang with beauty of line and total commitment for the rest of the night. During the intermission the man next to me asked which of the Amelias we were hearing. He and his wife had been discussing this, although the two sopranos don’t really look alike. I told him it was Martinez and pointed out that her name on the cast page listed the dates she was singing. He thanked me and said he thought she was excellent. I agreed and pointed out that she also looked the part, which always helps. “Yes,” he said, “and she has great eyebrows.” Since I know someone else with an eyebrow thing, this amused me.
The whole cast was pretty consistent, I thought, with the disturbingly ratlike Paolo of Patrick Carfizzi contrasting nicely with his tall and handsome co-conspirator, Kenneth Kellogg; Vitalij Kowaljow was a somber Fiesco and brought emotional gravitas to what could be a one-dimensionally heavy role; Marcus Haddock was the ardent Garbriele Adorno, which is a bit of a thankless role, since the main love affair is clearly that of the father and his long-lost daughter. I thought the applause at the end was a bit subdued considering that this performance was apparently and unsurprisingly superior to Opening Night (check here for a link to Lisa Hirsch’s review; she also links to Joshua Kosman’s in the Chronicle and sfmike’s at Civic Center), but the eyebrow man next to me said, “Wow! Not bad for a Tuesday night!” So I guess the audience was appropriately appreciative after all, in its own fashion.
Every time I encounter this opera I have a deeper impression of its greatness. One of the things that struck me this time is how Shakespearean it is, which might be the ultimate compliment; not only in its complexity of characterization and its intermingling of the personal and the political, and its contempt for mobs, but in the way that Verdi, just like Shakespeare in some of his late plays, revisits themes that have appeared earlier in his work: the abducted daughter, the accusation of infidelity which is emotionally if not technically true, the betrayal by trusted subordinates. You feel an artist revisiting past terrain as he makes ready to move forward.
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