Helene

I almost forgot: The reflective background -- it was there on all levels, and it looked to me like I saw across the top of the orchestra as well as saw the conductor on the bottom level. I don't think it was just a monitor, since the performers looked straight out at the conductor throughout.

I catalogued the books I have that aren't in storage, 72 in total, and the top three books that match other members -- a fluid number -- now are "Rebecca", the new translation of "The Magic Mountain", and "Lies My Teacher Told Me". For a while, it looked like Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon" was going to be, but it's now in 7th place. 20, or over 25%, have no matches at all, and they're not all that obscure

Many thanks, innopac! I've just signed up, and will start to create my library tonight.

Where did you see this? Sadly, I didn't see this, but heard it over the radio, both on the Saturday broadcast and again on Sirius Metropolitan Opera Radio, which broadcasts 3-4 live performances a week during the Met season (including the Saturday broadcast, once it starts up for the season). I LOVED her in it. In Seattle, the passion for me came from Polegato and Burden, as Orest and Pylade, but I wasn't knocked over by either gold or silver cast Iphigenie. Graham was the missing piece of the puzzle in this co-production with the Met. It's really great to be able to hear several live broadcasts of the same opera, usually in a two-three week period, and sometimes broken up like the season is for some operas: a few performances in the fall and then another few in the spring. It's not great if, for example, you never want to hear "Tosca" again for the rest of your life -- then you skip it for a few weeks. The issue being on the West Coast is that the operas usually start between 7-8, which is 4-5pm PT. Apart from that, it's the standard argument over whether the voices are correctly represented in broadcasts. But I don't really care, because I judge what I hear in whatever medium, and I listen for others to describe what they heard in the other medium, if I can't experience both for myself. For example, whether a voice is big or small or carries and can be heard in the house, when that same voice carries well when miked from above the stage. If I hear that a singer doesn't carry, or is often covered by the orchestra, or is drowned out by his/her colleagues, I won't travel to see him/her, but will enjoy him/her on the radio, or will try to hear him/her with colleagues who have the same sized voices or in concert or in a hall that has better acoustics or is a better size for that singer. There are also voices, like Giordani's, that to me sound better and fuller live, although he's no slouch over the radio. (And I heard a brilliant "Benevenuto Cellini", also Berlioz, with him on Sirius this afternoon, from 2003.) It's like judging dancers from video. I've almost never been impressed by Margot Fonteyn on video, but enough people have told me that video doesn't do her justice, so I conclude I'm seeing a different performer on film than on stage, and accept that I missed my chance to "get it", having seen her live only when she was at the end of her career, performances on which I know I can't judge her career. As much as I've been impressed by Maria Tallchief on video, I've been told by those who've seen her live that I couldn't begin to know the energy she brought to the stage from video. That gives me context for the video. Likewise, I loved Lopatkina on the recent "Swan Lake" video, and she bored me to tears live as Lilac Fairy. I wouldn't fly to another city to see Lopatkina live based on my experience, where I would for Alexandrova of the Bolshoi, or other Mariinsky dancers, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the "Swan Lake" video.

It sounds like a drinking game: a shot or beer every time he does. Or, in the corporate world, "Buzzword Bingo".

I sent you a PM with details.

Sadly, none that I know of. There are opera list serve groups, like Opera-L.

Many thanks, Natalia!

Not to mention that children in the cast bring in paying ticket-buyers in the form of friends of the performers, friends of the family, grandparents, aunts, neighbors, and anyone else who sold the child performer's family a ticket to their school fundraiser, peewee hockey team fundraiser, Boy/Girl Scout trip fundraiser, etc. "Nutcracker" is payback time.

I'm on a stealth visit to NYC, to see a close friend, to earn enough United miles for elite status, and to see the last performance "The Damnation of Faust". I bought the ticket before the HD broadcast, mainly to hear Susan Graham, who blew me away as Iphigenie last year, and I was lucky I did, since two days after the broadcast, only a few of the most expensive seats were left, and by tonight it was sold out. I found the physical experience in the theater richer and deeper, while the broadcast experience was more exciting and urgent, which was not unexpected, since the sweep and, in some scenes, majesty of the whole stage picture is impossible to capture on film without sticking to long shots. (I sat in the front row of the Balcony, the last tier up, but much closer than the Family Circle, the top most section of the last tier.) The projections with architectural details, like the Inn scene, where above the grid the building was projected, were difficult to absorb in the film. I've read complaints that the LePage staging is too vertical and does not take advantage of the depth of the Metropolitan Opera stage. While it did not go deep, often on Met Opera sets, the performers look like ants when they do, and rarely does anyone take advantage of the vertical space, although this year there's a trifecta, with "Dr. Atomic" and "Orfeo ed Euridice" and, from all descriptions, "Tristan und Isolde". By using the vertical space to full advantage and a reflective background, the stage always looked full with half the number of performers. The dancers/sprites looked particularly fine with the muted mirror effect, which in an almost etherial effect hinted at the underwater projections. The male aerialist creatures looked a lot more natural and less stylized in their pas de deux with the sprites in the theater from a distance. There is one image that I didn't notice in the film and couldn't identify for sure on stage. As Mephisto tempts Faust with a vision of Marguerite, there were swaying white blade-like things. I wasn't sure if they were tentacles, a very literal take on the scene although visually beautiful, or if they were some kind of algae, or none of the above. What I also couldn't see on the film was how these morphed into long blades of grass in water, like rice paddies, and after the aerialist/soliders climbed the wall, when the were shot/bayonetted and descended on their lines, the projections of water and grass were pushed away as they floated down, which was a stunning effect. There were two things that I thought worked better on film: the underwater images were more immediate in the film version, and might have looked the same from the Grand Tier (tier 1) or the Dress Circle (tier 2); I may have been sitting a little to high to get their full impact. The other was the backward march of the soldiers and women across the tiers. By focusing on one or two soldiers at a time, the fact that they were out of synch, or fading after the 75th repetition, or did not have matching leg line didn't register, which it did on stage, where it just looked sloppy instead of sharp, like the film. The flames during the first half of Marguerite's "D'amour l'ardente flamme" were just as tacky onstage as on film (almost ), I think because they were contained within their grid . Midway through, though, there was a huge "whoosh!!!!" and the projection had the glow of a raging forest fire, with I think a stylized silouette of Faust in the flames, and a blurry version of Marguerite. THAT was a fire, and film didn't capture it. The image of the conductor that Sandy identified from the last scene was actually visible throughout most, if not all of the opera, as the mirrored part of the lowest level of the grid reflected the conductor and top of the orchestra. There was a pre-curtain announcement that John Relyea, Mephisto, had a cold, and begged our indulgence, etc. Except for an occasional rumble, he sounded as good as I've heard him live. Susan Graham has a magnificent voice, secure and beautiful in all registers and at all volumes, and it was a pleasure to hear her live. I have very mixed feelings about Marcelo Giordano's performance. I think his voice is much more beautiful live than in broadcasts. Some voices bloom with a second or two delay and the house acoustics, while they sound drier miked relatively up close, but even in the house, each register at each volume sounded like a different voice. It is clear how he was trying to shape the performance, and the change in voice could be taken as the conflict in the character, one who while he has the body and enthusiasm of a young man, still is an older person in that body, but, unfortunately, he was covered by the orchestra too much. I think his interpretation was too subtle, especially for a fevered aria like "Nature immense"; until the end there was no Romanticism in it. His approach would have been better suited to "Pelleas et Melisande". The chorus was fabulous, changing character from one scene to another. Kudos to Donald Palombo and his chorus! The orchestra was conducted by Derrick Inoue, and except for a little sour brass in the begining, the orchestra sounded very fine. Special mention to the percussion and brass in the Hell Scene with the male chorus which was fantastic!

[Admin Beanie On] Somova's promotion is a polarizing topic, but please avoid speculation about it. [/Admin Beanie Off]

Many thanks, naomikage, for the links, and we very much look forward to reading your reports about the Tokyo performances. A heads up: there are five pages of wonderful photographs in the blog. Scroll down to the very bottom of the screen to go to the next page.

I remember talking to an acquaintance from Barcelona about the reconstructed Liceu and about the difficulty in raising funds. He told me that prestigious and wealthy families had once owned boxes on the equivalent of the Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera, and that they decorated the family box. I may be mis-remembering this, and I can't find a seating chart on the Internet, but I believe he told me that they were not reconstructed, so that the house would appear more democratic. I half-joked that I thought that the government should have "sold" the boxes to corporations for them to decorate as they saw fit, and that perhaps Banesto could buy one to display one of Miguel Indurain's bicycles. He was not amused. The trick with sports is that the naming rights only last a limited period of time, usually a decade. After that, the teams can bid out for a new name. Generally, buildings only get renamed for another entity is when new companies acquire them. After they're named for one person, that's usually it, until a new venue is built. I believe Mr. Koch has a lock on this one, as long as it stands. I'm glad you liked the performance, flo!

Kristen Scott Thomas gave a superb performance in this movie, but I found it disappointing overall. There is a secret in the movie, but it was predictable enough that I figured it out about halfway through, and I never figure these things out unless I'm watching a Lifetime movie, which this resembled more than a bit. (Example:the contrast between the sister's husband and Thomas' character's love interest.) I expect a little more distance in French movies.

The recent controversy over Vishneva was whether the Mariinsky should allow her to remain with the company while spending so much time away from it, guesting.

Roslyn Sulcas gave a rave review to "Infra" in Friday's The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/arts/dan....html?ref=dance

This topic has swerved from a thread on the Opening Night Benefit performance to a critique of Koch and again to a critique of New York State Theater architecture, and the civility factor has gotten a bit battered intermittently along the way. It would be great to get this back on track. Did anyone see the performance? Was there dancing in it?

There wasn't anything more I could find about Ballet BC, and given what may happen, maybe no news is better news. The great thing about the sets for both Tatyana's childhood room and her receiving room was that the sets created much smaller and more intimate spaces, and there wasn't a lot of room for the singers to fling themselves around. The final scene had a little more physical melodrama, with Onegin on his knees next to Tatyana on her sofa, but the only part that was a little over the top was when Onegin ran out at the end, knocking over a chair. Polegato made it seem deliberate, but that may have been a great save.

Many thanks, Cristian! I love Kristen Scott Thomas -- I just saw her in "Tell No One" ("Ne le dis a personne") -- and I'm glad to have a recommendation to put at the top of my list when it opens here this weekend.

Last Saturday I saw the magical Robert Lepage (& team) production of "Le Damnation de Faust" in an HD broadcast, a production that took a non-opera of scenes and mold them into a coherent whole in many non-conventional and creative ways. For that I was somewhat prepared, having read the advanced articles and publicity, as well as the vitriol of many opera goers who posted their own reviews outside the mainstream medium. I was not prepared, however, to knocked aground by a conventional production of "Eugene Onegin" by Vancouver Opera Tuesday night. In the program notes, musician Nicolas Krusek wrote, Based on the productions I'd seen before this, and most recordings I've heard, I did not recognize this description of the opera. If anything, I'd found the singing and the approach almost over-the-top in passion, and experienced passion (the exception being the mostly youthful cast I heard in 2005 at the Bolshoi), to the point of nearly bursting in the final scene, the epitome being the Galina Vishnevskaya/Georg Ots recording. To my shock Vancouver Opera's production fit Krusek's description of it, and if I had one word to describe it, I'd call it Canadian in temperament. I don't know of any Russian opera lovers who would have found it recognizable, apart from, maybe St. Petersburg native and clear audience favorite Oleg Balashov's Lensky, and then only in the second act. Like in Wagner, the dialogue and the arias blended; it was difficult to tell where to applaud, and the entire production was, with the exception of the party/crowd scenes, conversational and intimate. The young characters were young. In a directorial miss in the Party Scene, Onegin and Lensky go after each other after the duel challenge, only to be separated by other party guests, like hockey players by refs. (I don't believe that Onegin, a city sophisticate, would have participated in a fist fight.) Rhoslyn Jones' Tatyana didn't at the snap of a finger break into full-bodied passion in the letter scene. Yes, Onegin lit her flame, but her expression was of a girl who, deep in her books and thoughts, had never articulated these feelings before, and was trying them out and listening to herself voice them for the first time. Her voice has a sweetness that was poignant, and she showed the intelligence and native grace that would allow Tatyana to made a successful marriage in the city and to learn to become a princess, while all the while maintaining a freshness that made Prince Gremin recount his lucky stars in his beautiful third act aria. Lensky is equally naive, although as a male, he is convinced that his adolescent feelings and rigid classifications are gospel. Lovely as his great aria "Kuda, kuda" is, I sympathize with Olga's attempt to teach him a lesson, and want to slap him and tell him to grow up. Jeesh. Norine Burgess' Madame Larina was not the usual country dumpling; instead she had a lot of stature in the Act II ball scene. At first, I thought she was, in her own way, a role model for Tatyana as princess, but Jones showed little of her bearing in Act III. Brett Polegato has a beautiful, articulate voice with little vibrato. Although if he competed at Cardiff in 1995, he must be at least in his mid-30's, he was a convincing 26-year-old. My dilemma two days later is that I'm not sure if this was a good thing. If in no other place but the final act, I always expect pull-out-the-stops vocal fireworks, and neither he, until his final line, nor Jones did this. Polegato's Onegin in the final scene was a bit of a broken puppy, and it reminded me of Gelsey Kirkland's description of how Baryshnikov went into sad-boy-away-from-home-whose-mother-killed-himself mode as a seduction tactic. I know he can do passion: he wrenched more of it out of Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride" -- as Orest, and he was heart-breaking -- than he did out of Tchaikovsky. Jonathan Darling's conducting was fantastic through the first two acts, taking the music at a relatively fast pace, with a lot of brightness in the orchestra, and with a driving pulse. In the Act III Palace Scene, a number of things went south. While he may have been attempting to depict the boredom and superficiality of St. Petersburg society by taking the color out of the orchestra and having it drag, the scene, with the exception of Gremin's aria, sung with warmth and resonant low notes by Peter Volpe -- a highlight -- was enervated. Dramatically, the act suffered from the transition from the duel scene to the ball scene -- the intermission was after the Act II Scene I party/confrontation scene and the Act II Scene 2 duel scene -- in which the trees lifted from the bare stage, replaced by the columns of Gremin's palace as Onegin walked upstage, where two servants helped him change his tail coat and dress for the ball. This is the one place in the opera where there were supposed to be years between the scenes, and the direction made it look like Onegin walked off from the duel, had himself dusted off, and went straight to a party, bypassing years of self-recrimination and wandering. The scene also included two of my least favorite things in opera productions: freezing the chorus into tableaus while the leads sing and murky lighting, in direct contrast to the fantastic lighting for the rest of the opera. The sets by Neil Patel were superb, with autumnal trees in the opening and closing scenes in Act I and an intimate room for Tatyana in the Letter Scene, and a larger, but still intimate room for the final scene, inset into the stage. The lighting, which indicated time of day beautifully, was wonderful in all but the Palace Scene. The costumes by Patel were generally lovely, with a complementary color palate that was soothing to the eye, but the exception of the one that really mattered: while the fabric actually may have cost a fortune, Tatyana's dress in the Palace Scene, which should show her to glorious advantage, looked cheap and nouveau with it's sparkly, glittery, dance catalog texture, a dark blue miss with black satin opera gloves and a bright red hat (noted in the sung text). The dance segments, danced by four couples, blended into the action, and all of the lead characters joined them in more dancing than is usually seen or expected of lead singers. The acting was fantastic throughout, with special kudos to Allyson McHardy, who can dance, as well as act and sing. I'm still not sure what I think of the overall interpretation, but this production has me thinking still. --- Two more performances, tonight and Saturday night at 7:30 According to the intro notes in the program, for next year's 50th anniversary season, Vancouver Opera will perform John Adams' "Nixon in China" ("in an exciting new production that will be part of the Cultural Olympiad"), and in October 2010, the world premiere of "Lillian Alling", with John Corigliano's "Ghosts of Versailles" scheduled for 2011-12; the Metropolitan Opera has canceled its revival of the opera for next season.

I just saw "Tell No One", and there are two actresses who should be in the movie: Kristin Scott Thomas -- another option for LeClerq Nathalie Baye -- maybe Tallchief? She certainly can play gutsy. I don't have a sense of Geva to know if she'd be right for it. Christine Ricci is an alternative for Allegra Kent. I figured Baye was maybe mid-40's tops in the movie, but according to her bio, she was 58 when it was released. Unbelievable. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000882/ We need actresses with charm for Danilova and Verdy, and my mind is drawing blanks.

I took a 3-day seminar at Jacob's Pillow the summer of 1986 for people interested in arts management for dance, and one of the first things that Sam Miller, then General Manager for Pilobolous, later head of Jacob's Pillow, said to us was that the big money for the arts comes from oil and tobacco, and if we had a problem with wjere money comes from, we shouldn't consider a career in arts management. Presumably Mr. Koch will come through with the money; Mr. Vilar didn't.

Not that long ago, these would be names from reviews, but between YouTube and the now-frequent tours by both the Bolshoi and Mariinsky -- however this has impacted them artistically -- many of us can see the names and kvell, having seen them perform.

I enjoyed reading your review, bart, and I, too, am glad that the dancers are growing and that the company is getting more solid and consistent artistically. It's an exciting and important time in a company's growth when younger dancers grow into roles that were once danced only by established stars.

If only I've never seen an usher interfere with anyone during a performance in four decades, and I used to go to student performances at the Met (although I've been told it happens). It was in Bregenz, so chances are there would have been shushing; in other parts of the world, an audience is polite if they don't make outgoing phone calls during the performance. I think the dialogue was spread out, intermittent, and short enough to raise the hackles of neaby audience members, but stop before the "shush" phase. What wasn't credible is that no one around them glared at all. But that was the least of the improbable in this movie.