richard53dog

Well, maybe there is the distinction here that Kaiser knows theoretically what an arts organization should be doing in terms of creativity but also knows what has to be done to balance the books and keep the finances healthy. To paraphrase what some other posters have already stated, there are some cultural institutions in the US; the Met Opera for example that have multiple audiences. These aren't discreet segments, there is a considerable amount of overlap. There are the visitors, tourists and other temporary groups, that are looking for entertainment; spectacle is important here much is it in in many Broadway shows. There is the audience that want's to see their favorite pieces over and over and often their choices are in a fairly narrow section of the repertory (i.e. Verdi/Verismo, or Wagner). There are also the audiences who want to see something "edgy" for instance repertory that is new (or new to them) and often favor heavy directorial influence. Where it gets tricky is in the overlaping segments. The group that will buy tickets to From the House of the Dead will most likely lap up a production where the director is a heavy influence but a lot of the audience that buys ticket to , let's say, Aida would object to this. Going back to booing, which has been an interwoven theme in this thread, and the unwillingness of a lot of the audience to have "the boat rocked", the MEt premiere of their Aida revival Friday night came in for some booing. Not the physical production, which is very traditional, a twenty year old "Zeffirelli lite" group of sets and costumes, not the singers, but the conducting. And Daniele Gatti didn't conduct a sloppy or incompetent performance, but it was one approached from the view of a symphonic conductor. He stressed the textures in the orchestration and favored some unusual tempi. And a segment of the audience was unhappy with this and booed (not as much as the opening Tosca, but enough to be heard on the live broadcast) To sum up, I think the administrator of an arts institution needs to understand their audience(s), decide how to relate to them, and then not waffle and end up with muddled compromised direction.

It absolutely stuns me that there are those who would still question that what Polanski did with Geimer was wrong. Stuns, stuns, stuns. The flight thing is a little less certain in my mind, there is some question as to the way the plea deal was handled. But even there, Polanski thought he was going to get away with the 42 days he spent in a psychiatric facility as his jail time? Come on.

I was a bit surprised at this. I would have said that Whoopi certainly has a lot of common sense but her "RAPE, rape" thing gave me pause In general , I think the film community is doing more harm than good . They seem to be actually generating bad will.

The Met Opera's revival of Verdi's Aida opens tomorrow night, Oct 2. According to the production credits on the Met website, Alexei Ratmansky is part of the production team, choreographing the dances. Evidently he's in town anyway for his upcoming Scarlatti ballet with ABT and I guess he's multitasking. I heard from a report on the dress rehearsal yesterday that Roberto Bolle led the dances in Aida but so far the Met hasn't listed dancer casting. I guess we will have to wait for reports from the premiere tomorrow for that. Note to HD fans, Aida will be shown in movie theaters Oct 24 with an encore performance on Nov 11. The encore in Canada is listed for Nov 21. .

In a nutshell, this is how I feel about this issue. You never know when you will encounter the next great performance and it helps to be open minded enough to meet it.

I find I refer to the ballerinagallery and the ABT library a LOT. Thanks for the links!

No, I don't think so either. That's a poor argument to make to make a case that the current actions are unreasonable. And I'll say again, to go along with your comment, that the guy who digs holes in the road wouldn't have to money to flee and hire a legal army. I can well understand that Polanski has some truly terrible demons. He's gone through tragedies, really awful ones. But he close to work and live in the US, those that live here HAVE to abide by the US legal system, as flawed as it often it. Without it, we would all be worse off as a society, more like a Third World dictatorship where justice is truly arbitrary.

We really ought to try to use accurate words when discussing a sensitive issue like this. Whether you accept it or not, Polanski was charged with "unlawful sexual intercourse".....not any other crime. You can't now use vigilanty tactics to charge him for crimes beyond those he was charged with. Sandy, Polanski was charged on six counts, including statutory rape. He supplied the girl with champagne and quaaludes and performed various sexual acts on her over her protests. He was allowed to plead quilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse" as part of a plea bargain but he was originally charged with more serious counts. It sounds to me that the judge then reneged on the deal that was struck with Polanski at which point he got (rightfully) concerned. I won't comment on Polanski's supposed flight except to say that the correct legal solution would have been to fight the judge's about-face in the US courts. And having sex with a 13 year old that has been plied with chemicals but was still protesting has really no parallel with Romeo and Juliet or any other teenage romantic episodes. That description is part of the public record.

And the drama didn't end with opening night either. George Gagnidze, who sang Scarpia at the premiere was a replacement for the Finnish bass Juha Uusitalo who was replaced in rehearsals about a week before opening night because of illness. Gagnidze himself was unwell for the second performance and sang Act 1 but only acted in Act 2 while the season's third Scarpia, Carlo Guelfi sang in street clothes from the side of the stage. But this wasn't all, Music Director James Levine, who conducted the premiere was suffering from a back ailment and turned over the baton for the second performance to Joseph Colaneri. Colaneri conducted the third performance, last night, with Gagnidze out and Guelfi singing the whole role of Scarpia in costume and on stage. Today the Met announced that Levine was out of the rest of the Fall Tosca performances (as well as a Rosenkavalier revival with Renee Fleming) to undergo back surgery. Hmmm, there is the HD performance coming up a week from Saturday. Let's see if Peter Gelb can do some magic and settle things down or maybe even throw in a wild card as he has done in past HD performances. The HD's are strong candidates for release as DVD/ Blue-Ray and need to look as attractive and star filled as possible.

It's my understanding also that the "fugitive" aspect is driving the current actions. I have to say that what would this case look like if the person who committed the actions WASN'T wealthy and didn't have the financial resources to disappear before sentencing. It sort of gives meaning to the term "flight risk", doesn't it?

I'm glad to read that she'll be back with ABT next year. I had asked her on her website last summer if she was planning to come to NYC with ABT in 2010 and she never posted a reply. But maybe it was too early to answer and now negotiations have moved along. She also advises that she will post more details re her New York/ABT plans in December and that she will dance with the MT in DC in February.

Yes, that's true; the individual seller sets the price. Wow, I thought the price for this DVD @ $150 was a lot when I was looking for it about 5 years ago! But $525. Yikes. This has been out of circulation for years now. A little advice, keep checking back, I've noticed this DVD for as low as about $50 on amazon marketplace during the last few years. Also check Ebay from time to time, copies turn up

Ross made a lot of sense though with a lot of what he wrote. And although the tone of the review WAS pretty mixed, he ended on a (fairly) positive note. Or at least I'd say it was constructive..... "Opera being a delightfully paradoxical medium, this whole debacle left me in an upbeat mood. The Met is refusing to repeat itself and is seeking, by trial and error, a new theatrical identity. One or two meetings might be in order to determine how things went awry, and once Bondy is safely on the plane back home it should be relatively easy to devise new stage business to replace his lamer notions. The audience was, at least, paying attention. If I’m not mistaken, someone shouted “Vergogna!”—“Shame!”—when the production team shuffled onstage to face the firing squad. I doubt that mass revulsion is part of Gelb’s marketing plan, but a scandal has its uses: the Met made the evening news."

The Met's site has a photo gallery up of last week's Tosca premiere: http://www.metoperafamily.org//metopera/ne...ry.aspx?id=9704 Note that it's quite a mixture of shots, it was the opening night of the season so there are a lot of red carpet shots. Included is a photo of Licia Albanese, one of the Met's Toscas from the last century as well as an opening night regular, who celebrated her 96th birthday last month .And the collections also includes pics from the large screen presentations on Lincoln Center Plaza as well as Times Square.

I have a questions for listeners of KING FM. This is going somewhat off topic I guess, but it's still related. I've heard angry reports that KING adds in "marker" tones (likes beeps I guess) to some of their live broadcasts. In particular to broadcasts from the Seattle Opera with the purpose of discouraging people to make off the air or off the web recordings. Have any regular listeners heard this kind of "effect". Or are the reports just so much hot air? If so will the broadcasts from PNB be marked? Thanks for any comments!

How about SOME Assembly Required?????

Of course, maybe I'm being perverse here but I do think this production is a good fit for the opera. Strauss's score is oozing with decadence almost to the point of having a whiff of something rotten about it. Also the score and the libretto are absolutely cluttered with characters going on and on about all kinds of things. It's true, the production is over the top and mirrors the over the top quality of the opera itself. Is this the ONLY way to do Salome? Of course not. And the problem with this kind of production (like the Bondy Tosca) is that they don't age well. Once the original director is gone, revivals are blocked out by house stage directors. The physical properties often don't mesh very well with the modified (it's never exactly the same, even when the production book is used) staging. I saw the Flimm Salome when it was new in 2004 and the revival from last season on TV . It lost some sharpness and focus even with the same singer in the title role. The only change for the better was that the revival had Patrick Summer's sort of ok conducting over Gergiev's almost incompetent version.

Yes, this is an important point. I've seen many minimalist opera productions and quite a few have worked for me, including going all the way back to the 70s, the Dexter Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Met. I've already mentioned a few others. But I think you are right, it does require a lot of skill, you can't just take away, you have to add. As a rule I find the ones that I respond to most have a very strong sense of ensemble with all the characters carefully meshed together . Some operas take to this better than others of course. And often they are reset in different time periods from the original. Sometimes this works and other times it's a pretty messy fit. I have a much harder time with "regie", or "concept" productions which often include all kinds of stage business that I can't fathom what the connection is to the work itself.

Hans, my thought is that the way they were filmed dwelled on the settings themselves. A film camera isn't like the human eye in a live performance, the eye can focus on what it wants to focus on but a film camera forces the issue. I'm out on a limb here because I too just saw this once (and never had much curiosity to see it again) and it was now quite a few years ago and my memory isn't all that detailed after all that time. But I remember all these long shots framing the, well they weren't really sets, were they? Rather than focusing on the opera I got the feeling that the director wanted the viewer to be impressed by the grandeur and presence of the physical settings, and the time settings too. It was almost as if it was a hybrid opera performance/ historical documentary film. And the focus was split so you got half of one and half of the other. With a hint of what we would now recognize as a dramatic reconstruction of one of those programs on the History Channel. I tend to focus on the singing and the drama at the opera and I want to get caught up in the performance. The sets themselves aren't that important to me unless they are tied in directly with the production. Also Malfitano, Domingo, and Raimondi in a Tosca performance didn't strike me as a barn burner. But , hey that's me, and I'm comfortable with my criteria and I also know that there are people with look at a performance in a way similar to the way I do and there are others who really want to focus on different aspects and I'm real comfortable with that too.

Yes, I remember this. The scenery more or less overshadowed things, including the drama, so theatrically, it became almost inert. And I don't remember the singing being all that overwhelming to buck the tide. Traditional vs Minimalistic vs Regie opera productions? I'm not all that particular as long as the piece comes vibrantly alive. Actually, I feel in this day and age minimalism can work pretty well. I'd list Wernicke's Frau ohne Schatten, the Carsen Eugene Onegin, and the Wilson Lohengrin as three Met productions in the last decade that really struck a chord with me. Zeffirelli is a bit of a sore point with me, he was an incredibly innovative and creative director when he made his name but he seems to have had not much to say for many years now and seems to mostly concentrate on managing spectacle, which doesn't do much for me. His Tosca , Traviata, and the hideously gaudy Turandot could be replaced and I wouldn't shed a tear. Other than Falstaff, his "productions" now consist of only the original sets, mostly original costumes with very generic staging done by the house stage management team. Bring on the Chereau production of Janacek's House of the Dead!!!! (Later in this season at the MEt opera)

Ain't it just so!?!?

I listened (didn't see it thought!) Monday night and heard a little booing after Act 2 and then an avalanche of booing for the production team at the end. For all those intrigued, remember this is the first of the HD events of the current MET seasons and that it will be shown live in movie theaters on Oct 10 and then as an encore on Oct 28 with a Canadian encore on Halloween. I'm guessing some details of the production will be gone by the time of the HD, that's been fairly standard practice at the MET lately, to continue to groom the productions after the premiere. So effects like the Tosca (mannekin) suspended in space at the very end may be replaced by a more conventional leap for Tosca off the parapet. (Although a writer for the NYT arts blog liked this effect : see link just below) http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/...-the-masses/?hp

I thought the Kavanagh's bio got bogged down in too much detail, not just TMI on the bedroom stuff. Lots of detail, more than I wanted on dinners, menus etc. All that being said, I was amazed at how vivid some of her recreations were. I was just starting with ballet as a teenage in the late 60s. I was a backstage fan, the whole thing. And that scene was just amazing. The stage door atmosphere was electric, there was a sort of group hysteria floating around waiting for Fonteyn and Nureyev to leave the Met at the stage door. Kavanagh captures that very vividly, it brought it all back to me, even Louis Perez hawking his photos. So maybe some of the other scenes where also faithful recreations. But taken as a whole, it just seemed like too much detail to me. I agree that maybe Kavanagh maybe ended up not liking Nureyev all that much. One of the risks I guess.

Hmm.... I'm not sure that you can say the Balanchine is the most performed version or not. The other contender is another version I'm also really fond of by Ashton, titled The Dream Here's a sample, the complete performance of this was also filmed, like the PNB Midsummer Night's Dream a number of years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVK-khxaK7Y I love both pieces and it would be a difficult call which one is more performed. But if I had to I would guess the Balanchine.

Well best of luck to you with your novel, I love the idea that a novelist would be going into detail as a part of their work. I can see why you might want to use Balanchine rather than a more vanilla ballet example and I love this clip. Balanchine though can be pretty complex with a great number of different steps all laid out rather quickly in a sequence and this might get you bogged down a bit into a lot of detail, even if you are selective and don't try to list all the steps. I'm not ballet trained and my knowledge of the vocabulary is sort of hit or miss so I can't be too much help with the specifics of this clip. Here's a link that may help you a bit. The catch is that it may be in the reverse direction of what you are looking for. Once you know the name of the step, it gives you a definition, but more wonderfully, often a short video clip of a dancer performing the step. I've filled in my own vocabulary quite a bit from it. http://abt.org/education/dictionary/index.html All the best of luck with your work!!!!!