Came across a review of the Royal Opera's production of "Tosca" at Covent Garden in the UK's Telegraph. I get a kick out of reading these reviews. Most of them have a distinctly snooty tone, which makes them all the more fun. We laugh at Harold Duckett's reviews of KO productions, thinking them less reviews and more synopses, but I guess he's not any worse than some of these supposedly more sophisticated reviewers that work for more sophisticated newspapers and review more sophisticated opera companies/productions.
The nerve of this guy (Rupert Christiansen)! He's reviewing one of the world's top opera companies at one of the world's top performance venues, and he has the gall to complain about this and that! Yes, I know. That is the definition of "critic," after all. And were he to gush on and on about every production (compare his review to this), things would get boring very quickly. But, as it were, it's not necessarily a "panning" of the performance. He does put some positive spin on things. First, he says that this revival is better than the first in the summer of 2006 in terms of set preparation, stage management, and lighting. And then he picks his favorite singers of the evening to gush on about, sometimes throwing out rather presumptuous superlatives: "[Tenor Jonas Kaufmann] is without doubt the most persuasive Cavaradossi since Domingo's heyday." Yikes! Talk about the performance pressure! "You could be the next Domingo!" Well, I guess every tenor would die to hear something like that. Plus, it makes a great blurb for your bio. My favorite quote from the review is the superlatives aimed at Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia while simultaneously backhanding the Tosca, Micaela Carosi. I quote the paragraph here in its entirety:
I particularly love the "old-school Italian diva with a line of traffic-cop gestures." It kind of says it all.
It reminds me of a rather-well-known aging soprano that gave a master class and performance at UT when I was a graduate student there. In the master class, the very first thing she did after being introduced and sitting down was to throw up an admonishing finger at us and declaring, "Do not anger the singer!" She went on to recount some instance in which James Levine (James Levine!) did something to upset her and "I walked off the stage!" I knew we were in for a "treat," of sorts, and that the master class was going to be anything but boring. Things got worse that evening when she presented an amalgam of scenes from various operas under the moniker "Le Jardin d'Amour" (the garden of love) using the KOC apprentices to fill out needed characters. Suffice it to say that she had the "traffic-cop gestures" down pat, and that, combined with her horribly trite staging, her far-gone aging voice, and the most outrageous costumes imaginable turned it into an absolute riot of campiness and theater of the absurd. It was so bad, so incredibly, hilariously bad, that our director of opera at the time and the husband of a well-known UT voice teacher had to give up on holding in their laughter, dispensing with any decorum, and and just rolling in the aisles. So you can only imagine what we students were doing.
So, yeah, maybe we need critics. They allow us to put things in perspective and not believe the little worlds we create around ourselves and our performing groups... which is not to say I won't be guffawing at the next Duckett review.
The nerve of this guy (Rupert Christiansen)! He's reviewing one of the world's top opera companies at one of the world's top performance venues, and he has the gall to complain about this and that! Yes, I know. That is the definition of "critic," after all. And were he to gush on and on about every production (compare his review to this), things would get boring very quickly. But, as it were, it's not necessarily a "panning" of the performance. He does put some positive spin on things. First, he says that this revival is better than the first in the summer of 2006 in terms of set preparation, stage management, and lighting. And then he picks his favorite singers of the evening to gush on about, sometimes throwing out rather presumptuous superlatives: "[Tenor Jonas Kaufmann] is without doubt the most persuasive Cavaradossi since Domingo's heyday." Yikes! Talk about the performance pressure! "You could be the next Domingo!" Well, I guess every tenor would die to hear something like that. Plus, it makes a great blurb for your bio. My favorite quote from the review is the superlatives aimed at Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia while simultaneously backhanding the Tosca, Micaela Carosi. I quote the paragraph here in its entirety:
Gavanelli makes an insidiously vile Scarpia, quietly sadistic but utterly ruthless in pursuit of his perverted appetite. If only he had been up against a rather more subtle Tosca than Micaela Carosi, an old-school Italian diva with a line in traffic-cop gestures and a sizeable and effective but rough-edged dramatic soprano which paid little heed to the nuances of the text.
I particularly love the "old-school Italian diva with a line of traffic-cop gestures." It kind of says it all.
It reminds me of a rather-well-known aging soprano that gave a master class and performance at UT when I was a graduate student there. In the master class, the very first thing she did after being introduced and sitting down was to throw up an admonishing finger at us and declaring, "Do not anger the singer!" She went on to recount some instance in which James Levine (James Levine!) did something to upset her and "I walked off the stage!" I knew we were in for a "treat," of sorts, and that the master class was going to be anything but boring. Things got worse that evening when she presented an amalgam of scenes from various operas under the moniker "Le Jardin d'Amour" (the garden of love) using the KOC apprentices to fill out needed characters. Suffice it to say that she had the "traffic-cop gestures" down pat, and that, combined with her horribly trite staging, her far-gone aging voice, and the most outrageous costumes imaginable turned it into an absolute riot of campiness and theater of the absurd. It was so bad, so incredibly, hilariously bad, that our director of opera at the time and the husband of a well-known UT voice teacher had to give up on holding in their laughter, dispensing with any decorum, and and just rolling in the aisles. So you can only imagine what we students were doing.
So, yeah, maybe we need critics. They allow us to put things in perspective and not believe the little worlds we create around ourselves and our performing groups... which is not to say I won't be guffawing at the next Duckett review.
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