• Home
  • About
    • Chloe Veltman
    • lies like truth
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

lies like truth

Chloe Veltman: how culture will save the world

Girl Crush

October 14, 2012 by Chloe Veltman

When Bellini wrote The Capulets and the Montagues in 1830, trouser roles  were on their way out. Romeo was the last major role of this kind in Italian opera.

To see Joyce DiDonato play Romeo in San Francisco Opera’s mesmerizing current production of the work though, is to yearn for more of these cross-dressed parts in twentieth and twenty-first century operas.

Despite the fact that most of the opera sounds like a jaunty triumphal march — which is somewhat disconcerting when the performers on stage are singing lines like “Death to the Montagues!” and “Prepare yourself for a massacre!” — DiDonato’s fierceness and force of will makes the music and text seem like they are perfectly in alignment.

Dressed in costume designer Christian Lacroix’s modish, Victorian-street-urchin-meets-biker-boy garb, the performer oozes virile masculinity. I wouldn’t be surprised if nearly every woman and man in the house, regardless of their sexual orientation, secretly fantasizes about playing Juliet to DiDonato’s Romeo.

The flexibility and fluidity of the performer’s voice is such that she can make even the most feminine-sounding run at the very top of her range sound testosterone-laced in this production. At times, DiDonato’s vocal power makes her come across as sounding more like a countertenor (or perhaps even a castrato, if I may hazard a guess as what this kind of singer sounded like) than a mezzo soprano. And there’s also a softness at the edges of her voice which makes the character seem entirely vulnerable.

There are many things to recommend this production, including Lacroix’s costumes, the San Francisco Opera orchestra’s emotional yet punctilious playing, Guido Levi’s mood-contorting lights and Vincent Lemaire’s expressionistic set design, not to mention a stellar cast, which besides DiDonato, features Nicole Cabell as Juliet, Saimir Pirgu as Tybalt, Eric Owens as Juliet’s father, Capulet, and Ao Li and Lorenzo, the Capulets’ physician.

DiDonato, however, is worth the price of admission alone.

Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on Reddit
Reddit
Email this to someone
email

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Comments

  1. william osborne says

    October 17, 2012 at 9:46 am

    Perhaps we could think of Joyce DiDonato as a master of transformation, gendered or otherwise. I like the fact that she was born as Joyce Flaherty in Prairie Village, Kansas to a large Irish-American family and studied at Wichita State University. Most prosaic. She still uses the family name of her first husband. Opera is always much more earthy and populist than we want to admit – hence the oozing sexuality of husky Kansas girls – though I’m not sure where the cross-dressing fits in. Or wait, this was in San Francisco…

Chloe Veltman

...is the Senior Arts Editor at KQED (www.kqed.org), one of the U.S.'s most prominent public media organizations. Chloe returns to the Bay Area following two years as Arts Editor at Colorado Public Radio (www.cpr.org), where she was tapped to launch and lead the state-wide public media organization's first ever multimedia culture bureau. A former John S. Knight Journalism Fellow (2011-2012) and Humanities Center Fellow (2012-2013) at Stanford University, Chloe has contributed reporting and criticism to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BBC Classical Music Magazine, American Theatre Magazine, WQXR and many other media outlets. Chloe was also the host and executive producer of VoiceBox, a syndicated, weekly public radio and podcast series all about the art of the human voice (www.voicebox-media.org), which ran for four years between 2009 and 2013. Her study about the evolution of singing culture in the U.S. is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Check out Chloe's website at www.chloeveltman.com and connect with her on Twitter via @chloeveltman. [Read More …]

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]

Archives

Recent Comments

  • william osborne on When A Critic Abstains from Coverage for Ethnicity Reasons: “Several years ago you wrote a blog about African-American science fiction that was very informative. Until then I hadn’t realized…” Jun 29, 22:30
  • Kerri Hoffman on Thoughts on Public Media’s Potential Role in Podcasting: “Thanks for writing - I don't think we have enough of these conversations. As distributors to public…” May 31, 12:59
  • william osborne on What do cactuses sound like?: “I've heard that orchestra musicians have to deal with a lot of pricks...” May 18, 00:36
  • swiss on What do cactuses sound like?: “pretty sure Renga is not about vacuous nothingness...quite the contrary” May 17, 19:43
  • Ken on Thoughts as I start a new professional chapter: “Welcome back to the Bay Area Chloe! We are lucky to have you.” May 13, 16:57

Blogroll

  • About Last Night
  • Artful Manager
  • Audience Wanted
  • Bitter Lemons
  • blog riley
  • Clyde Fitch Report
  • Cool As Hell Theatre
  • Cultural Weekly
  • Dewey 21C
  • diacritical
  • Did He Like It?
  • Engaging Matters
  • Guardian Theatre Blog
  • Independent Theater Bloggers Association
  • Josh Kornbluth
  • Jumper
  • Lies Like Truth
  • Life's a Pitch
  • Mind the Gap
  • New Beans
  • Oakland Theater Examiner
  • Producer's Perspective
  • Real Clear Arts
  • San Francisco Classical Voice
  • Speaker
  • State of the Art
  • Straight Up
  • Superfluities
  • Texas, a Concept
  • Theater Dogs
  • Theatre Bay Area's Chatterbox
  • Theatreforte
  • Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire
Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2018 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in