richard53dog

Just to add a little to what Drew wrote, I'd agree that Vishneva is , to me, one of the outstanding Giselles dancing the role today. But I also agree that this comes down to a matter of taste and also a matter of which attributes a viewer prizes most. Vishneva is technically quite strong and well schooled. And she doesn't have the slightly brittle and floppy quality some of her contemporaries, particularly at the MT, have. She dances most of act 2 in a virtuoso manner with a lot of power and sweep. And she's very expressive as a dancer too, an attribute that is very important to me. Her take on Giselle is a bit different than some of the ones often seen. Her Giselle is a quiet, serious young lady in act 1 who turns into a rather powerful and determined wraith in act 2. Of course Giselle IS the most powerful character in act 2, but this Giselle seems motivated by a lot of anger as well as the more customary love of Albrecht. As far as the practical concerns, it's too early to buy single tickets, ABT is still selling subscriptions and will be doing so for some months now. I think single tickets for the Met season go on sale late March/early April, I believe someone actually posted the date on the thread concerning the ABT Met season. But ABT's casting is pretty reliable as far as it can be. And Vishneva is a reliable performer. She's pretty much shown up for me except for 2 years ago where she had a pretty serious injury that sidelined her for many months. She's also pretty good about logging her schedule on her website. It's too soon for dates so far out but I would guess her ABT dates will show up early in the new year on the schedule shown on her site. http://vishneva.ru/eng/index.htm

Wow, kudos to La Scala!

Her diction was much clearer in the earliest preserved recorded materials from different BBC concerts from the 50s. The mushiness seemed to be the thickest during the 60s and this was constantly commented on by reviewers. Then as the 70s wore on, the clouds lifted a bit and her diction was again a little less recessed. I agree the mostly likely source of the problem was the way she produced her sound. Something that always bothered me a bit as well as the limited range of dynamics she used, she did very little really quiet singing. But again her way of producing her sound seems pretty complicated and it may have made it impossible to do a lot of really soft singing. Here'a an early example I found on youtube. I think is is about 1960, I looked for something earlier but couldn't find anything. It seems to me here that her voice is more streamlined sounding in this clip not only is there less of the mushiness, but the singing is a bit less "droopy", another persistent comment on her singing. I can make out a reasonable amount of the Italian here, her diction is clearer than it was later, but her pronunciation unfortunately doesn't sound very accurate!

Who knows how this may be connected to other events but this seems to me one more sign that there is some kind of artistic unease inside the MT Ballet. Perhaps it's not so unfortunate that their visit to NYC for next summer has been cancelled. Let's hope for some new, brighter artistic direction which will lead the company back to a place where it is more in line with their traditional reputation. Right now I would say there is quite a gap between the company's day in and day out performances and the much more positive historical/traditional reputation that they have in the minds of many ballet goers.

Well, I don't think any of the "afters" are really all that pertinent here. Particularly since Lidewij modified his/her original post to refer also to stagings. That seems to me to exclude all the things, like Fille for instance that passed through several hands. Those things are like snowballs rolling down a hill, they pick up ALL KINDS of things on the way, and in general end up looking very different when they reach the bottom of the hill than they did on the top. Maybe some of the Fokine pieces that have had modern revivals carefully patterned after the originals. I thinking perhaps of the MT stagings of Sheherazade, Petroushka, and Spectre del la Rose which were revived with settings patterned after the originals. Also along these lines I guess would be the reconstructions which the MT did and then seemed to ditch. And I would guess the reconstructions now being done by the Bolshoi.

That's too bad, I would really have loved to see the new Little Humpbacked Horse. But I guess some other time.... In DC, they're putting on Giselle this winter, that's not too bad a trip for me but I don't think I can trek down to DC for their Giselle, I'm not all that happy with the overall performance level the company seems to be presenting. I'd go for a novelty but not one of their older productions. A bit too routine, if it was in NY , I might go, but not down to DC. I suspect the NY ticket prices would have been Ardani Exorbitant so perhaps I can use the cash for other things. Isn't the Danish Royal touring the US next year?

I'd love to see her in Coppelia!!!! I'm actually hoping for Cojocaru in Giselle rather than Osipova.

Ah, this can become habit forming.... My favorite of all the recordings Decca released with Sutherland was a 2LP recital set called French Opera Gala (in the US.... in England it was called something similar) This was made around 1970, the end of Sutherland's absolute peak, although she sang very well into the late 70s. She still has almost all the dazzling quality that made her famous but in this set she sounded like she was just really enjoying herself. It was mid 19th French opera and operetta; Thomas, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Auber, Offenbach, and so forth. Very effervescent stuff and sung with a great deal of charm and wit. Here's one of my favorites from the set, a little ditty from Offenbach's Robinson Crusoe. It's a fun little tune and Sutherland sings it with a lot of panache, but listen to the swell she makes @2:55 and then how she completes the cadenza when by rights her breath should have given out. This whole set was just wonderful and I love to remember her this way, she was a charming lady with a great sense of humor in addition to having a dazzling voice.

How about the Salzburg Festival? Here's some shots of Don Giovanni http://operachic.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c83e69e200e553db04118834-500wi http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRv4AnPIcdIBvGzAQTIgdKQkcUiGyGI-7IiKg451cpD7lixobU&t=1&usg=__MUChu7mqPybjdRqDgHsn-5FM0UI= It's not easy to "rank" opera houses to determine which is the "very biggest" but how about ticket price? I think Salzburg is about the most expensive ticket you can buy. At least for general seating, some house now "package" special premium tickets at astronomical prices, similar to what's done at big stadium events and that skews the "most expensive" threshold. But Salzburg Festival prices are very, very high. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of what Sutherland was complaining about is seen quite commonly in European opera productions. And certainly in "mainstream" opera houses.

Yes, the audiences in the US are far more conservative in terms of opera productions than in Europe, particularly in the German and Swiss houses, and increasingly in Spain. The MEt and Lyric Opera of Chicago are perhaps the most conservative of all. An element of the MEt audience has lately been booing any new production that isn't strictly traditional, although this has sporadically been going on for years, it's been getting more extreme. If it's a nontraditional opera, all bests are off, the director can do whatever he/she chooses and it may be excepted. But don't mess with Tosca! There is an audience in the US for more edgy takes on even the most traditional works but often it's at war with the conservative factions. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Gerard Mortier had actually taken over NYCO. He has a long history of presenting very modern, concept driven opera stagings. Perhaps he would have even brought Calixto Bieito to NYC to stage something. And NYCO has/had(?) a more adventuresome audience than the MEt anyway, but even there I think extreme elements such as those of a scatalogical nature would have not been accepted.

There are probably a number of reasons young singers bobble up and then a year or so later disappear. One is that the singers are noticed with a remarkable natural talent. Sometimes this "gift" is safely harnessed to a technique that enables the singer to use it without wrecking it. Other times, sadly, what came from nature is just used in a way that quickly dissipates it and what caused the notice in the first place has just vanished, or turned into something much less remarkable and more ordinary. It's a variation on the old "sing on the interest not the capital" thing. Regarding Sutherland and Horne, Marilyn Horne is an extremely intelligent and very realistic woman. I believe Horne was at loose ends artistically and vocally when she came to Sutherland's (and Bonynge's) attention. They met when Sutherland was making her New York debut in a concert performance of Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda. Horne had had some early success in Los Angeles, dubbing Dorothy Dandridge in the film of Carmen Jones (when Horne was only 20) as well as other film work (King and I, etc) She also had a very busy career doing anonymous versions of hit parade standards. Someone like Kay Starr would have a big hit record and there would immediately appear no name knockoff's on cheap supermarket labels of the the same songs (with a bit of imitation of the original singer's style and approach). Horne admitted to supporting herself for a number of years with this kind of work but it really wasn't what she wanted to do. So she sang for a number of years as a less than stellar soprano, doing everything from Wozzeck, to Musetta, to Marie in Daughter of the Regiment to NEdda in Pagliacci, making not much of a name for herself (recordings of some of these outings exist). And probably she was going the route of the singer who popped up as a young voice and then disappeared. Horne sweated through the soprano role in Beatrice di Tenda in NYC and the Bonynge's made some gentle suggestions that perhaps Horne's best approach would be to abandon the soprano route and adopt instead some of the heroic bel canto repertory that was suitable for voices set a bit lower than average. Over the next few years Horne occasionally appeared opposite Sutherland but in the more successful mezzo roles of Arsace to Sutherland's Semiramide and Adalgisa to Sutherland's Norma. Horne finally committed to a change in career tactics in the mid 60s. She was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall in the title role of Lucrezia Borgia, but became pregnant and cancelled the performance. Her replacement, a Spanish soprano named Montserrat Caballe had a huge success that night. But I think Horne had made an important decision at that point, believing, with the encouragement of Sutherland , that her could paradoxically make a bigger name for herself in the right roles for what the Italians called Donna Seconda (all those virtuoso bel canto roles that can be done by a lower voice partnering a higher soprano voice) than struggling along as an increasingly strangled soprano. She got a lot of help and support (and bookings!) through the help of Sutherland and her husband and within a few years Horne had become a big star. So it was a big risk that she took but it worked out and not a little bit because of the Bonynges. Horne also claimed she was unable to trill but the Bonynges work with her until she had mastered this feat. Now this kind of situation doesn't always work out in the long run. Jealousies crop out, feeling get hurt, and resentments arise and what was once a good partnership turns sour. But Horne, as I've suggested is very intelligent. As soon as it was practical, she unhitched her wagon from the Sutherland/Bonynge power train, but in a very smart and sensitive manner. After 1970 this "great pair" rarely appeared together, except on recordings and very high profile concerts. No feelings were hurt, the Bonynges sponsored other young singers and both the Bonynges and Horne went on to very long successful careers. So I think a lot of Horne's take on this situation was that her relationship with Sutherland was a huge turning point in her career. And of course on a professional level the two worked together very well and there was a lot of mutual respect and admiration. Sutherland may never have become "Sutherland" with the guidance and prodding of her husband. But similarly, I wonder if Marilyn Horne would have ever become "Marilyn Horne" without Joan Sutherland. And circling back to the original opening of my (very long!) post , there is the sad case of the young singer with a great natural talent and without the right technique will wear away what nature has given, but then there is an important next step, that being having the right doors opened and the right opportunities being offered to start making those steps toward success and not falling back into the mists. After the young singer gets their vocal house in order, a helping hand towards opportunities makes a huge difference. I'm guessing a lot of thoughts along these lines are part of the emotions Horne is going through with her old friend and partner's passing.

Not sure how the ballet companies got into this thread..... but Barcelona (a house Sutherland certainly did sing in), Berlin, Stuttgart, and Madrid , just to pick a few examples , are all "mainstream" opera houses. And that's just for Bieito productions. Here's a photo of the London Masked Ball with the guys on the toilets. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/kenton_02ball3.jpg No, not every production has these pornographic or scatalogical elements. But they are quite common in the European Opera Houses, and the big ones too. This is the basis for Sutherland's comments and certainly she's from a different era but I for one could see clearly where her comments were coming from. She's certainly not picking needles from remote, 4th tier operatic haystacks; she was commenting on a fairly common phenomenon in European opera houses

I've never seen an opera perfomance with these type of elements but they absolutely do exist. Just not in the US. But they are common in many of the European house, especially the German and Spanish ones. Just for one example, Calixto Bieito, the Catalonian opera director has staged Ballo in Maschera with the opening scene set in a communal latrine, with the mens chorus all sitting on toilets, Abduction from the Seraglio with the female characters having their nipples sliced off, Don Giovanni with Anna and Octavio having sex on a barstool during Non Mi Dir, and the list goes on and on. It's quite common for director to shock their audiences in Europe thes days. So Sutherland could paraphrase Anna Russell here..."I'm not making this up, you know..." Here's one example Want more details? Pornographic and Scatalogical opera performances absolutely do exist, just not much in the US

It's very interesting to watch her coach the young Darci Kistler in La Sonnambula in that wonderful documentary Dancing for Mr B. But she is a fascinating to watch in general in that film. Even in the sections where she is reminiscing she comes off personally as a bit "off-kilter" and "eccentric" in a very charming way. So I think that was part of her own personality she used for the roles Bart lists. Actually, it's somewhat but one of the big appeals of that documentary for me is how vibrantly the personalities of the six dancers comes accross.

I know that she lived a long, full life and that at 83 she had become somewhat frail, but I can't help but feel sad at this news. She was one of the really great singers I've been lucky enough to hear; I heard her quite a few times from 1970 til 1987, when she last sang a the Met. RIP, Joanie.

Well, that would be a question to pose to Gergiev, no? I wonder what his answer would be. I'm not really cetain of this but perhaps because of all the touring the opera troupe of the theater does and all the outside conducting dates Gergiev has, (he's in NYC right now conducting a new Met production of Boris which opens tonight) he has to parcel out his personal attention carefully in tiny doses and is content to leave major issues with subordinates as long as there are no disasters. This is very much the kind of complaint that has been increasingly lodged with the Domingo machine with regards to his very hands off management of the Los Angeles Opera and Washington National Opera. There are constant cries that he simply can't be reached to make decisions and it's left to his deputies to solve (or ignore) problems. With the reorganization at Kennedy Center in DC, he has announced his resignation. His contract at LAO has been renewed in spite of an unheard of situation some months ago where the company almost shut down because of a cash flow problem. Only an emergency loan of 14 million from the county government kept the day to day operation running. One has to ask here if anyone is responsible for such basic functions as cash flow. Similarly, the Boston Symphony has been making a lot of noise over the unavailability of James Levine, mostly because of his absences (in this case due to health issues). Comments on the same issue are occasionally raised at the Met, but much less noisily. He is still really loved there. So perhaps as long as the foreign bookings come in for the MT ballet troupe, and there is no persistent criticism at home, and as I understand it the Russian press is still very much muzzled, Gergiev may take the position things are "just fine". All this is just some conjecture on my part but certainly I see a lot of administration by performing arts organizations where a charismatic name is head of multiple organizations and is effectively spread very thin.

Well a few points. Generally the Met has very good acoustics in general, although there are some areas where they are spotty. But the two largest areas of seats, the center portion of the orchestra (just short of the overhand)and the Balcony/Family Circle have very fine acoustics. I've been in the cheapest , highest seats, the Family Circle, and voices travel all the way up there sensationally. And this is from many, many performances I've attended, going all the way back to the second season the house was open. As I noted, there are areas that are not so good. The back of the orchestra which is under the overhang is somewhat muffled. Some of the side seats have an odd balance. The Birgit Nilsson comment came perhaps from a joke. When the house was completed, but not open, the subject of the acoustics was very, very touchy and a subject of great concern to Rudolf Bing and his staff. After some test student matinees in early 1966, the whole management team was very relieved. And so a joke went around. One member of the staff would ask another "Could you hear Nilsson and Corelli from where you sat?" The context was of course that you could hear these two singers from almost anywhere in almost any quality acoustic. The joke was repeated all Spring and Summer during 1966 until the opening drew near and all kinds of disasters with stage machinery made the prospect of the opening a not so joking matter. My own experience is that any singer that has a reasonable technique and is projecting well can be heard pretty much anywhere except unless the conductor is really leading an unbalanced blend of orchestra and voices. Ms Tekanawa is not the best example of a singer who projected well. It was often a sore point that she was almost marking many performances. It was a lovely sound but not always backed by much energy. Sometimes she was fine but other times, one wanted to yell out "Sing OUT Kiri". I have heard a few singers who didn't carry well but generally they were voices that weren't focused or very, very soft grained, or singers that were performing under stressed conditions. A few conductors seemed intent on drowning out singers, mostly recently the Australian Simone Young, for reasons only known to them. And if that was there intent, it was possible to have a performance where the singers were hard to hear through the dense texture of the orchestra. The Met is enormous, true, but really the main problem is not the acoustics per se, but more the scale of the auditorium. So many works, Mozart, Handel, all the early 19th Century works suffer from the size of the house in terms of scale of the performance. It can all be heard, but the balance would be better in a smaller auditorium.

I've heard Von Rensberg do some very impressive , lovely singing, most particularly in the Met's Rodelinda. It's not really a small voice at all. I wonder if current audiences don't have unrealistic expectations regarding how singers sound *live*, in an opera house. There have been recordings for decades but all in all we live in an age where audio-video media dominates us with videos, movies, television, all supplemented with hefty doses of youtube. All that is actually quite wonderful BUT it doesn't really prepare audiences for the actual balance of voice vs all the other elements of an actual operatic performance. Not all singers automatically block out the orchestra in a performance the way they can seem to do in a recorded example. I think it really requires an adjustment that the listener has to make in an actual performance setting but a lot of today's audience don't realize that they can develop an ability to do that. If they are not absolutely "hammered" with a singer's sound, the term "inaudible" pops up.

Really, Alberich and Loge drive the plot, don't they? I listened (but didn't see) the performance and I was most impressed with Owens and Richard Croft among the singers. Neither barked or huffed and both had very pointed and effective delivery of the text. But evidently, as Helene notes, the mikes tend to even out the playing field volume wise. From some comments I've read by those that were in the house for one of the performances, Richard Croft's very beautifully sung Loge counted for much less as his voice didn't project very well. Actually Croft was the target of a bit of booing in the curtain call, I'm guessing because the booer was disappointed in Croft's decibel level. My other comment from the broadcast I heard (opening night) was how much more swiftly moving and almost effervescent the pace of the performance was, as compared from Levine's earlier practice of rather slower tempi. I liked this a lot, there is a bit of a tendency among conductors after Furtwangler, Klemperer, and Knappertsbusch to equate slow tempos in Wagner's music with gravity and eloquence. But sometimes "slow" is just ...."slow" and not much else. Kudos to Jimmy L for rethinking his approach at this stage of his career.

This is a terrific deal for someone who is looking for this video but has been put off by some of the high prices it's gone fopr in the past. this isn't even an auction, it's a flat $7.99 with three bucks for shipping. Of course you need a VCR.....

Well, a little more evidence to support the statement made by Mashinka here: http://ballettalk.invisionzone.com/index.php?/topic/28922-the-features-of-each-ballet-company/page__pid__276030#entry276030 "The Bolshoi is on a roll whereas the Kirov is on the slide. " Indeed!

Wow, there has been some major photoshopping work done here. Her supporting foot and leg have especially been altered; the foot to resemble the depictions of Romantic dancers on the tiniest of pointes and the leg to straighten out the sunken knee cap. But all in all this image suggests an appropriate vocation for Ms Somova; she would be perfect as the ballerina who rotates when the lid of a music box has been lifted.

I would love to either see the production in the house or see the HD, but neither seem feasible for me this fall. I did hear the opening night broadcast which I enjoyed very much so I'd also love to hear the reports from folks who get to the HD

You ARE cheating but that's not a bad combination! Actually I find Cranko's sense of creating a dramatic flow stronger than MacMillan's but I do like MacMillan's third act a lot. So I might go to a performance of your concoction.

The Bolshoi is on a roll whereas the Kirov is on the slide. touche!