The Opera Platform - free live online opera transmissions

[doversoul1]

Up to circa 1960, it was generally thought that Baroque Opera 'could not be staged', mainly, I suppose, because of the DC Aria format. Then Anthony Lewis, Raymond Leppard and others did it to huge acclaim with artists such as Janet Baker and Maureen Lehane. The 'static' production style of these early re-stagings, far from being boring, held audiences (well, certainly me anyway) transfixed. Any views?

There seems to be two types of Baroque opera audiences:

I managed to watch this Alcina on youtube before it was deleted

http://bachtrack.com/review-alcina-dutch-national-opera-february-2105

In this uncluttered staging, without any props, except for a single chair, and with the horizontal lighting that enhances all gestures and facial expressions, every singer on stage is totally exposed. There is little that distracts the audience from their performances in those long, sometimes very long, da capo arias. The admirably intricate direction does of course go some way in conveying the emotion but really, most has to come from the singing... and the singing on Wednesday night was just phenomenal.


…and this is one of the reviews of Alcina we saw on Friday (I think this is only a blog, i.e. unedited)

http://jameskarasreviews.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/alcina-review-of-aix-en-provence.html

The 67thedition of the Aix-en-Provence Festival opened with Katie Mitchell’s production of Alcina.The production is worthy of many superlatives but I prefer to grant it the ultimate accolade and say it has the touch of genius. I choose the word with care and do not toss it carelessly as it is done in some media.
Mitchell has gone beyond a brilliant recreation of a baroque opera. She has taken a huge leap of the imagination and added a level to Handel’s work that few directors could have conceived and even fewer executed.

The first type of audience goes to listen to the opera performed, and the second type enjoys a new drama created by the director. I suppose you can say that it is a matter of taste or preference, but is it? Does Kate Mitchell’s ‘brilliant recreation’ makes us imagine anything very much beyond what we saw? Or is our imagination and thoughts about the tale (interpretation, if you like) not called for? And how important is the libretto to which the music is set?

[ed.] my question is, can a work of Baroque opera be performed without imposing / creating a new drama and can still offer something new? As I am still very new to opera, I’d be interested in hearing the views of long –standing opera enthusiasts. I suppose, later works that have solid storylines may be a different matter.

[aeolium]

[ed.] my question is, can a work of Baroque opera be performed without imposing / creating a new drama and can still offer something new? As I am still very new to opera, I’d be interested in hearing the views of long –standing opera enthusiasts. I suppose, later works that have solid storylines may be a different matter.

It's an interesting question, ds. For my own part, I would love to see productions of Baroque operas in which an imaginative representation by the director also required an imaginative effort on the part of the audience. Many, perhaps most, Baroque operas have plots which are essentially fables or myths with large elements of fantasy. Alcina, which is just one of the many operas deriving from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (which I started a thread on here), has all kinds of magical and fantastical qualities in its plot, but it is rarely that we see this side portrayed in Alcina or indeed any similar opera.

I think there are many examples in the literature and visual art of the last two centuries in which fable and fantasy have been used powerfully - the Grimm tales, Andersen's stories, closer to our own time Pratchett, Miyazaki and the many different forms of graphic media, e.g. manga. These often resemble the plots of Baroque operas in the sense that they depict the fates of realistic people in wholly unrealistic situations. The worst approach here, imv, is to try and make the setting more realistic and to load the work with the heavy layers of meaning that perhaps suit the presentation of C20 operas like Lulu or Duke Bluebeard's Castle. The setting should be, if anything, more fantastic, not less. I would love to see a Baroque opera directed by Terry Gilliam (who I thought did a fine job with Benvenuto Cellini), or Hockney, or - yes - Miyazaki, someone with a powerful visual imagination not fettered to the gritty and rather tedious realism so often found. The emotional force will always come from the singing, not the dramatic setting.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

my question is, can a work of Baroque opera be performed without imposing / creating a new drama and can still offer something new?

Yes.

I'm not sure what you mean by "new drama" - but the answer to most such "can an Art do this?-type questions is (to quote Robert Simpson) "All things are possible in Art, given the necessary genius". I have seen Operas staged "traditionally", "radically" and "semi"/"concert performances" with examples from each which have astonished me with their presentations and exasperated me by their absence of consideration of what's going on on stage. Indeed, some concert performances have given a better representation of a(n imagined) staging than some with costumes, sets, lighting and movement.

[doversoul1]

aeolium #17
Many thanks for your thoughts. As for Orlando Furioso, inspired by your thread, I bought the book and thoroughly enjoyed it (I confess, it’s a modern English translation in prose). It is interesting to think that, for Ariosto’s original readers, these tales were fantastic but not unreal or make-belief. The reviewer of the Poppea (I think) BaL said that some directors believed modern audience was incapable of accepting (or did not like) supernatural forces intervening human fate (or to that effect). If this is the case, showing Alcina’s magic as what looks like something borrowed from cheap science fiction may be the matter of ‘give them what they want’. I hope there are still many directors who believe otherwise.

What I don’t like is being shown something that makes me feel as if I am expected to write up what it means there and then. I think setting Baroque opera in a specific, modern setting often has this effect (on me).

ferneyhoughgeliebte #18
By ‘new drama, I mean something like making the opera’s setting specific which then requires additional to or different details from what is in the libretto about the characters and their actions, or the narrative development itself.

I’d be very interested in hearing about some of the examples, good and bad, with your thoughts if/when you get round to talk about it.

By the way, why do you think it is that, if a work of literature (the work itself and not a new work based on a classic) were updated into a modern setting, it wouldn’t be taken seriously whereas operas are constantly updated?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

By the way, why do you think it is that, if a work of literature (the work itself and not a new work based on a classic) were updated into a modern setting, it wouldn’t be taken seriously whereas operas are constantly updated?

I can answer that more quickly and easily than the previous sentence, dovers (which will need a little more time).

First, works of literature are frequently re-positioned in different times from those the writers intended (Shakespeare, Greek drama ... the older the text, the better it can be so relocated it seems).

But there's also the point that such works of literature are great works of art in their own right - opera libretti (with very few exceptions) aren't: they're the source of vowels and speech rhythms that spark the composer's imagination. Beaumarchais' Barber of Sevile would be worth watching, Sterbini's (stripped of Rossini's Music) wouldn't - not to even consider whether Petrosellini's is worth the time even with Paisiello's Music!

[ardcarp]

The following is probably a banal and obvious comment. Baroque opera was not a 'popular' art form. It was funded by the wealthy/aristocracy and was attended by the cognoscenti. The latter would have been well aware of the mythical tales upon which the operas were based, and for them the dazzling virtuosity of the singers would have been the primary attraction. Costly costume and elaborate scenery (and machinery) were the icing on the cake.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes - I'm not sure about whether the "icing" would have been seen as such; spectacle was as important as "special effects" in a modern cinema blockbuster, and as such possibly more entertaining to many of the aristocratic audience than all that "tedious" recitative that they'd chatter through. And of course, when Louis XIV appeared on stage, everyone would have shut up and paid attention!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I’d be very interested in hearing about some of the examples, good and bad, with your thoughts if/when you get round to talk about it.

My experience of Baroque opera productions is painfully limited, so I'll illustrate my thoughts with two productions of Mozart operas, both directed by Peter Sellars.

Don Giovanni was re-set in contemporary New York - with flick knives instead of swordfights and gorging on fast food burgers in the banquet scene (the grotesque blending of slapstick and brutality here revealing the tragicomic aspect of Mozart and Da Ponte's work exceptionally well). The new images worked extremely well for me - taking away the trappings of the original in order to reveal the bestial nature behind the supposed aristocratic Don. The vocal and dramatic potential of using twin brothers as Don G and Leporello added incidental psychological insights suggested by - if not embedded in - the libretto and (importantly) the Music (the scene where Leporello is forced to pretend to be the Don has never worked as well) and Mozart's careful orchestration of swordplay in the opening scene (lost when modern productions use guns or clubs) was observed in the knife fight.

It was a production, in other words, where the producer knew the score meticulously and responded to that score reproducing it in a starkly contemporary setting that demonstrated not so much that the work is "still relevant" (of course it's still relevant - that doesn't need illustrating) but that played between the two hundred years between the creation of the work and its staging to get to the point that humans are humans still - that they cover themselves in different clothes and follow different fashions of behaviour, but at source, little about our species alters.

Sellars' Cosi fan Tutte by contrast, didn't work for me. I felt that its unremitting display of deprived vanity and reckless seeking instant gratification by its bored, rich characters missed the warmth and humanity of Mozart's Music that simultaneously points out the foibles of human nature (in a way unsurpassed on the stage since A Midsummernight's Dream) and expresses sympathy with them - and points at us with critical affection. Despina's magnet has never fallen so flat in my experience.

I felt the production kept getting between me and Mozart & Da Ponte's work like an annoying kid on a train when you're trying to read a book - whereas the Don Giovanni refreshed my appreciation of what they'd achieved.

[doversoul1]

ferneyhoughgeliebte #23
Thank you again for your insightful comments. I have a long list of questions I would like to ask you but most of them will probably disappear when I have more experience in opera viewing. But do please post your comments on what you see/saw either here or on the Opera Production thread. I’d be very interested in reading them. I have an awful lot to learn.

Re: the difference between works of literature and opera libretti. Why didn’t I think about it?

However, (sorry just one more question), I assume most operas are based on existing novels, tales or historical (even vaguely) characters and events. Isn’t it this original source that inspired composers? And if so, by shifting the context (updating the setting), does it not disconnect the music from what inspired it?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

However, (sorry just one more question), I assume most operas are based on existing novels, tales or historical (even vaguely) characters and events. Isn’t it this original source that inspired composers? And if so, by shifting the context (updating the setting), does it not disconnect the music from what inspired it?

The first Operas were an attempt at re-creating the original conditions of Greek drama - so a lot of recitative as an hypothesis of how the plays were delivered: not as speech, but chant. So many early operas were based on 17th Century ideas of Greek myths (striking how many settings of the Orpheus myth there were - before Monteverdi's "The Fable of Orpheus set to Music", there were early operatic treatments by Peri [in 1600] and Carissimi [1602]). These 17th Century ideas differ very differently from current thinking, so there is already a set of choices for a modern director - present the operas as the myths were thought of in the 17th (& 18th) Century; present them in line with current ideas about how Greek drama was presented; present them as a "contemporary" drama; present them in an "out-of-specific-time" drama (dispense with sets and/or costume and use neutral clothes and lighting effects to create an "abstract", spare performance space in which the Music and Drama unfolds). As long as the Music motivates the production, it's not been my experience that any shifting of the original context necessarily disconnects the drama from the Music - nor would I imagine it guaranteed that trying to reproduce 17th/18th Century staging traditions necessarily creates a strong "connection" between text and score.

There is, indeed, the danger that such an approach might merely lead to an historical/"museum piece" experience rather than an Artistic one. What we know of mime and stylised movement in 17th Century stage performance might need so much explanation in the Programme, that the audience would spend as much time reading about what is meant when a character slaps his/her left temple with the palm of his/her hand as opposed to slapping the right temple - or the left with the fingertips. The Artistic experience might get lost in the details!

I think that it's not unlike setting Shakespeare in more recent settings - when it works well, the "timing" becomes forgotten in the power of Shakespeare's language and the way this creates the interaction of the characters in electrifying ways. The clothes they wear isn't that important - we can play around with these - what matters is Shakespeare's text, which generates the audience response - change that, and you dilute the experience. In Opera, the equivalent to Shakespeare's language is the composer's Music: that is what creates the electricity - that is what cannot be altered. Other things can be (they don't have to be, but they can) altered provided these alterations have their source in the composer's Music - and that, for me, includes the words that fired his Music, and the sounds and rhythms of those words. (Personally, I am far more disturbed by an English translation of a non-English text, than I am by, say,the appearance on stage of a rubber shark - although that feature was just downright silly.)

[doversoul1]

ferneyhoughgeliebte

Thank you so very much for answering my question, which leads me to dozens more questions. But for now, I’ll continue to enjoy and learn about this amazing form of Art that I discovered only a few years ago.

Once again, many thanks for your kind effort to explain (I assume very basic) things to a novice.

[ardcarp]

Thanks from me too Ferney. I take your point about the balance to be struck between 'a museum piece' and an artistic re-interpretation. A so-called museum piece could of course be thought of more positively, i.e. as a HIP. Artistic re-interpretations are fine, provided they don't do silly things for the sake of it...which I regret they sometimes do.

[doversoul1]

Just in case anyone is interested. Alcina in minimalist stage setting. Not sure how long it is available.

http://www.lamonnaie.be/en/mymm/media/2235/Alcina---George-Frideric-Handel/

Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset (Conductor)
Sandrine Piau (Alcina)
Maité Beaumont (Ruggiero)
Angélique Noldus (Bradamante)
Sabina Puértolas (Morgana)
Chloé Briot (Oberto)
Daniel Behle (Oronte)
Giovanni Furlanetto (Melisso)
Live from the Théâtre de La Monnaie / De Munt, Brussels

[aeolium]

A rather belated alert that there is a (free) live transmission on the EU opera platform of Moniuszko's Straszny Dwór (The Haunted Manor) tonight at 1855 Central European Time so presumably 1755 GMT:

http://www.theoperaplatform.eu/en

I know almost nothing of Moniuszko's music so will be interested to check this out. He seems to be one of those composers whose work is little known outside his own country, though highly valued there.

There is more information about the work and the composer here, including a brief interview with David Pountney who is the director of this production:

http://www.theoperaplatform.eu/en/opera/moniuszko-straszny-dwor

[aeolium]

For those who don't mind watching opera streamed live to computer, there is another performance in the EU Opera Platform later today, Massenet's Cendrillon in a live broadcast from La Monnaie in Brussels (1700 CET so 1600 GMT):

http://www.theoperaplatform.eu/en/opera/massenet-cendrillon

No subtitles though!