Archives for 2008

From one of my wife Anne Midgette's terrific pieces on Christoph Eschenbach in the Washington Post: He has long ago discarded the standard tailsuit in favor of a crisp Nehru jacket; at the Orchestre de Paris, where he is music director...a fashion house was brought in to design an alternative to the players' traditional formal dress.So it can be done, unless the players and audience in Paris just hate what they're wearing now. Any word on that?(Anne's other Eschenbach piece is here.)Added later: I searched online in vain for photos of the … [Read more...]

Followup to my post about the language of Italian opera, and how it's never rendered properly in opera-house translations.I was listening again to Il Trovatore, and came to the moment when the baritone realizes that the gypsy he's captured is not only the woman who burned his infant brother alive, but is also his hated rival's mother. The rival is named Manrico, and, as I listened, I heard the baritone labelling the gypsy with these words: "Di Manrico genitrice."Which is very fancy, to the point of silliness. First, it's backwards poetic … [Read more...]

My Wall Street Journal piece about the Don Rosenberg fiasco ran today. The link will take you to it.I said that the Cleveland Orchestra is in a bad position. Many people think they instigated Don's demotion at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, because his reviews of their music director weren't favorable. Feeding that perception is what looks like a conflict of interest -- the Plain Dealer's publisher sits on their board. They've been denying involvement, even in comments on blog posts, but each time they deny it, they seem weaker and less … [Read more...]

I'll have a piece in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow -- Saturday -- about the mess in Cleveland. Most of us know about it, I'd think. Don Rosenberg, for 16 years the very good classical music critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been demoted, presumably because his reviews of the Cleveland Orchestra weren't favorable enough.Not that my piece breaks new ground. The New York Times wrote a story, after Tim Smith, classical critic of the Baltimore Sun, admirably broke the news in his blog. The comments he's gotten, many from Cleveland, are … [Read more...]

...one of the world's top opera singers sings La Gioconda at the Met, and gets just polite applause for her big killer aria. But that's what happened to Deborah Voigt last night. What went wrong?She's not a strong presence onstage. She keeps leaning forward, which makes her look weak. And she's not a diva. When she first comes onstage, you don't even notice her. In the old days, when a star Gioconda made her first entrance, not singing a note, a shockwave went through the opera house, and the crowd would go wild. Voigt might think she's an … [Read more...]

OK, I can't resist. Just a few notes about the very blah show onstage at the Met Opera opening.Renée Fleming. No heat onstage at all, either in her singing, or her presence. Occasionally an emphatic moment in her acting, but none of the acting was sustained. She doesn't (to my ear) act through her voice in crucial long legato passages, like "Dite alla giovane" in the big Traviata scene with Thomas Hampson. But above all -- no heat! If this is our reigning prima donna, than opera isn't what it used to be, or what I want it to be. And one vocal … [Read more...]

It's a new delight for me. I used to think fashion was frivolous, not anything (God help me!) serious people should care about.Then I started watching Project Runway. And got hooked. Of all reality shows (at least in my experience), it's the fairest. To viewers, I mean. You can see the fashions the contestants design, just as well as the judges on the show can. You can see who does well, and who does badly. You can develop your eye, as I did. You can learn to see how fashion can be art. You can hear the judges -- expereinced fashion people, … [Read more...]

I went to the Metropolitan Opera season opening last night, and didn't see much glamour, in the audience or on the stage. And since we've been talking about clothes here, let me stress something that hit me very strongly. A man in black tie doesn't look dressy any more, at least not to my eye, and certainly doesn't look fancy or glamorous. I saw a few men in tuxes, and the effect was blah, no more striking than a man in a business suit. And why? Because fashion has moved beyond that. Fashion designers -- along with plain old non-designer people … [Read more...]

I've said before that I don't love English titles onscreen or in the opera house when an opera is sung in English. (Scroll down to the section on Britten's Peter Grimes if you follow the link.) They seem geeky, to say the least, and only reinforce the notion that opera is -- by nature -- remote and unfathomable. (Even while they make it accessible. There's a paradox there.) Well, late in July, I saw Britten's Billy Budd in a quite good production at the Santa Fe Opera. Of course there were titles, but I was also able to understand most of the … [Read more...]

On the heels of Joan Tower's 70th birthday concert at Merkin Hall -- where Joan presented music written by some of the musicians who've played her own work -- comes another triumph of participation. On October 2, Bang on a Can's office staff will offer their own performances, at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. They call their music, variously, nouveau-bluegrass, smarty-pants avant;skronk, neo-indie-classicism, baroque noir (I like that one), and boogie-down anachronism-funk, while happily telling us that "such ludicrous descriptive categories … [Read more...]

When I was younger, into the 1960s, the president of the US never appeared in public without a suit and tie. Or at least a jacket and tie. Then late in the '70s Jimmy Carter went on TV wearing a sweater. That was the beginning of a huge change. Now it's routine to see presidents and presidential candidates in shirtsleeves. Our society, in other words, has gotten lots less formal. So why shouldn't classical music follow suit? And if the might and majesty of the U.S. government now doesn't have to be represented by a gentleman in business … [Read more...]

(A portion of a famous photograph by Weegee, showing society women on their way to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season in 1943. Yet another example of formal dress of a kind we just don't see anymore in real life.)First, the new comment system -- I love it, love it. Comments go online without waiting for my approval. So they go up fast, many of you comment on the comments, conversations start. And I don't have to do anything at all. I don't have to take time to approve each one, and I'm freed from the temptation of adding my own … [Read more...]

In response to DJA -- thanks for alerting me to check whether the new comments process really does work. Apparently it does, with just one glitch. All comments are posting automatically, as they're supposed to. Except for one, a comment on my formal dress post, which somehow landed in my inbox, marked "unapproved." I have no idea why that happened. Maybe there's a delay, sometimes or always, before comments appear, but with the one exception I've noted (and which I don't understand), everything you all post is getting on the site.If any more … [Read more...]

While I was away, I had many thoughts I could have posted in the blog. Here's one of them: This photo was taken in 1937. It shows two boys from Eton, one of England's leading public schools (we'd call them prep schools in the USA). They're visiting London -- not to go to the opera, or meet the king, but to attend a cricket match, with Eton's rival, Harrow. Working-class boys are gawking at them.The photo ran in the Guardian, the British paper, at the end of August. They used it to illustrate a piece on continuing inequality in British … [Read more...]

Singing in the shower this morning. "Il balen," the baritone aria from Il Trovatore, a good exercise for breath support. And as I sang, I suddenly heard the words I was singing:Il balen del tuo sorrisoD'una stella vince il raggioThe light of your smileOf a star outshines the raysStilted, no? I had to laugh. "Balen," also, is a poetic or obsolete shortening of the current word, "baleno." So how often, when we're reading titles in the opera house, are Italian operas translated in their full archaic glory? Hardly ever, I'd think, maybe never. The … [Read more...]