{"id":353,"date":"2010-03-25T11:20:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T15:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/2010\/03\/the_nose_the_trojans_and_issue\/"},"modified":"2010-03-25T11:20:12","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T15:20:12","slug":"the_nose_the_trojans_and_issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2010\/03\/the_nose_the_trojans_and_issue.html","title":{"rendered":"The Nose, The Trojans, and Issues of Popularity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leaving aside the problem that William Kentridge’s spectacular production of The Nose <\/em>at the Metropolitan Opera overwhelms Shostakovich’s 1928 chamber opera, leaving aside that one departs the house with the questionable sensation of having seen inspired stagecraft inflicted on a weak work, I merely wish to observe a series of paradoxes.
\nThe Nose <\/em>at the Met, with six performances, is such a hot show you can’t buy a ticket. An even greater surprise, alas, is that there were swaths of empty seats at Carnegie Hall earlier this month when Valery Gergiev (who also conducted The Nose<\/em>) led his Kirov forces in a gripping two-night traversal of Berlioz’s underperformed masterpiece The Trojans<\/em>. Gergiev’s transporting rendition of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet <\/em>at Carnegie in February also failed to fill the house. Neither The Trojans <\/em>nor Romeo<\/em> was staged. (Cf. my Trojans<\/em> blog of March 14.)
\nLast season the Met gave us Robert LePage’s staging of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust <\/em>– a production festooned with magic tricks and yet innocent of Faust’s torments (my review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement<\/a>.) Around the same time, Gergiev led the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky <\/em>at Fisher Hall – a performance so right in timbre, so intense in feeling and projection, so searing in affect as to eclipse all memory of the Eisenstein film.
\nNext season the Met gives us the first two installments of a Lepage Ring<\/em>. The most eager expectations of this heralded event are the most disturbing – Lepage’s Nibelheim, Lepage’s dragon, Lepage’s Ride of the Valkyries, Lepage’s Magic Fire. It would be a gauche understatement to suggest that the Ring is no more about those than The Damnation of Faust <\/em>is about its Ride to the Abyss; unlike Berlioz, unlike Shostakovich, Wagner is a psychologist of genius.
\nNot long ago Gergiev toured a Kirov Ring<\/em> whose inept staging diminished musical and psychological impact both. Those performances would have been stronger in concert. A friend who admires The Nose <\/em>listened at the Met with his eyes shut. With his brain.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leaving aside the problem that William Kentridge’s spectacular production of The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera overwhelms Shostakovich’s 1928 chamber opera, leaving aside that one departs the house with the questionable sensation of having seen inspired stagecraft inflicted on a weak work, I merely wish to observe a series of paradoxes. The Nose at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-5H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}