ADHD Entry

I think I've mentioned on occasion that I suffer from attention-deficit disorder. So, in honor of that, I submit today's "all over the map" entry.

"Drive" for Dallas Opera

Just a note about Dallas Opera's fiscal success this year. And building a new performing arts center to boot!

I suppose that, given all the oil money that floats around that town, you should take some (very) small consolation that you are helping the world of opera the next time you fill up your tank.

Do we really need to see that?

An article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald (Would that be our today or their yesterday?) refutes the rumor that Opera Australia demanded that German director Elke Neidhardt clean up an apparent "Full Monte" scene planned for her production of Don Giovanni. Nevertheless, Hungarian bass Gabor Bretz will be wearing a G-string when he steps out of a shower on stage. Neidhardt does seem a little flustered about that addition to the costume budget, and gives, uh... "ample" (?) examples of recent on-stage nudity in European productions. (Supports my recent monologue on German opera trends.) I tried to Google (insert own risqué joke here) the English National Opera production she referenced, but couldn't find it. But this article appears to support the hypothesis that, by East Tennessee's admittedly Bible-belt standards, the ENO has no problem with, um... ah... "progressive" attitudes on staging.

Puccini... Reconstructred

Everyone wonders how "Turandot" might have sounded had Puccini completed it in toto before his death. But some are more interested in the first performances of what we today consider "finished" works.

Case in point: Puccini's "Edgar," which was so ill-received at its premiere in 1889 that Puccini undertook an extensive revision of the work to make it more audience friendly. That sounds a bit ominous, given what Hollywood writers regularly do to great literary works to make their movie adaptations more "audience friendly.", i.e., dumb them down, change scenes, endings, characters, etc. But, in the case of "Edgar," at least, someone has seen fit to attempt to un-revise Puccini's work back to its original form. The editor/re-reviser, Linda Fairtile, head of the University of Richmond (Virginia) Parsons Music Library, undertook the project as a labor of love with Puccini's publisher, Ricordi, and was surprised to find that the Puccini family was very interested in it also, contributing missing pieces of the original manuscript. The revision of performed last Wednesday in Turino, Italy, with Ms. Fairtile in attendance.

Carmen Smuggler Trail Found!

Check out this video! (Acrophobics be warned!) Bizet could not have known of this trail when he was writing Carmen, (the opera premiered in 1875; the walkway wasn't built until 1901) but I'll bet he was imagining something of the sort. As luck would have it, it is in the very gypsy region of Andalusia in Spain. Prends garde de faire un faux pas! Prends garde!

If that doesn't get your jollies on, I found this link last year about a trail in China that makes the Camino del Rey trail above look like the Cades Cove loop (in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park)!

Now, the next time you complain about lax safety regulations in the U.S....

Those Crazy Germans... and Swiss

It never fails: Every time I'm over at the KO office, some issue of Opera News will catch my eye with a cover featuring outrageous sets or costumes that make you wonder, "Which opera could that be?" (Note: I don't get Opera News, myself, so I rely on the KO's office copies to keep me informed.)

Almost invariably, the outrageous cover will be a production from a European company, and usually from Germany or Switzerland. After all, Europeans are far more, uh... "continental" than we folk from "the colonies." They've had opera over there for over 500 years, so the old stage adage that "everything's been done" is probably the watchword of any company doing a new production that wants to be noticed. (After all, it got my attention on the Opera News cover.) My all-time favorite Opera News cover was one of a couple of characters singing in front of a giant, green Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur. It was so shocking, as a matter of fact, that I can't remember what opera it was, but I do remember it was done by some German house.

Now, I'm no expert by any means, but I can't think of any opera, ancient or modern, that calls for "giant green T. Rex situated upstage left." What? Are they doing an operatic version of the Saturday morning TV serial, Land of the Lost? "Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition..." Heaven forbid! Nobody get the idea to do this! I hated that show! Dear Don, should some idiot ever write an opera based on LOTL--let's face it, when Jerry Springer is fair game, all bets are off!--and by some incredibly improbable circumstance the KO decides to do it, count me out! I'll not be seen on stage as a Sleestak singing "Sssssssss sssssssssss." (And, lest anyone ask, yes, I do know they're working on a movie adaptation. Yet another indelible sign of the eminent Apocalypse!)

Anyway, it was no surprise when my trolling of opera news on Google turned up this review of Zurich Opera's production of Handel's Rinaldo set not during the First Crusade but in an airport.

Yes, that's right, an airport. Why yes, of course! Why didn't I see the similarities between the goings-on at a busy aiport like Logan International in Boston and the eleventh-century siege of Jerusalem? It's so obvious!

Not! As if! Poor Handel. It's bad enough that his Messiah is almost invariably reduced to a single chorus sung during Christmas and Easter by choirs that have no tenors good enough to sing the high A on "And he shall reign for ever and ev---er" and a soprano section that can only dream of holding top-line F# for 9½ beats, little alone the following Gs. It's bad enough that modern performers cut recit after recit and maybe a few da capo arias from his operas and oratoria... when you can find modern performers even doing oratoria. No! Companies have bent and twisted his plots into creations that little pay homage to the original. (I'm pretty sure that the aforementioned dinosaur opera was a Handel opera, BTW.) Heaven forbid that a modern society that worships Wii and Xbox360--and, of course, golden circle ticket holders can afford PS3s--should have to sit through "long" productions (over an hour) of a bunch of old music--not a Les Paul in sight, even. We'd much rather get things over with so we can get home and watch our Tivo-ed episodes of Grey's Anatomy or Big Brother. Besides, the live human voice is neither live nor human anymore thanks to Cher and Ashlee Simpson. And even before Janet Jackson had her "wardrobe malfunction," networks regularly built delays from several seconds to minutes into their broadcasts of live events so that even "live" events aren't really live on TV anymore.

So we, as performers, as opera performers, have a problem: How to keep the attention of a public that sees ADHD manifestations to be at epidemic proportions alert and entertained for at least 2½ hours or more. Maybe we should only wear costumes of bright primary colors. Maybe we should learn staging that would exhaust Carroll Freeman. Maybe we should forego paying the big bucks for quality principals and focus on gee-whiz sets that are so complex they would give Bill Cheverton a migraine. (As a tech-lover, I have to say that all the stuff that the Zurich Opera's set does--from escalators and elevators to rotating scenes and opening scenery--would certainly keep me entertained.)

Or maybe we should try what Brian is doing by showing Pag alone, with no Cav next year: do really, really short operas. Menotti and Barber would love that; Phillip Glass wouldn't. Or, what about this? Do a Peter Jackson and chop long operas into originals and sequels. Will Scarpia rape Tosca? Will Rudolfo and Mimi live happily ever after? Look for Tosca II and Boheme: The Winter Comes in February!

Hey! I might have something there! People throw their whole lives away to watch the entire series of American Idol. They'll put off major surgeries, schedule early birthing, and tell the boss wanting them to work over on a project where to go. (I wonder if Don would admit that some chorister had turned him down because they just had to watch Idol lol!) And if we picked the right operas, we might be able to go through a whole season with just one, uhh... "production"? Save money on sets, costumes, and other things.

Or, perhaps, we should all pay our dues and join the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

"Who are you?"

"A twelfth-century North Umberland knight. What are you?"

"A seventeenth-century French opera singer."

"Dude, how esoteric!"

Oh well, in ZO's defense, they did pick da man to conduct. William Christie is a great early music conductor. I've got some Rameau choral stuff that just rocks! thanks to him. And, who knows, maybe the Met will someday "resurrect the seminal and wildly successful Zurich Opera production of Rinaldo from the mid-2000s."

In the meantime, Don, do you know where Brian can get a giant inflatable T. Rex for the opening scene of Rigoletto?

"Being there" for opera: a necessity?

An article in the Contra Costa (San Francisco area) Times caught my eye today. Sue Gilmore, the reviewer, gives a brief synopsis of some of the concerts around the City by the Bay that she has seen recently and a note about another event upcoming:

1. She was a newly resurrected mass by Renaissance composer Alessandro Striggio, noteworthy in that it required a force of 40 and 60 (separate) voices (five choirs), period brass at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. (She neglects to mention that the mass was performed as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival sponsored by Early Music America.)


2. She saw Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, performed by Alexander Barantschik, principal of the San Francisco Symphony, performed at Davies Hall.


3. Next Tuesday night's premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor, with Natalie Dessay in the title role, performed by San Francisco Opera.
   

Gilmore gushes on and on about the first two performances and opines about how they could only be experienced live and in person; a recording just wouldn't have the same impact. Speaking as an early music aficionado, I can vouch for the difficulty in capturing adequate performances of Renaissance choral works for many-numbered voices. Masses of that period were written to be performed and, thus, experienced within the voluminous cathedrals of Europe where space for performers and natural reverberation created an ideal atmosphere for the melding of great walls of sound. As for the Prokofiev, Gilmore says that half the thrill of the performance was watching Barantschik "bowing so dangerously close to the bridge, with such vigor and whiplash ferocity in the Scherzo, that you feared he'd saw off the pinkie of his string-stopping hand."

But, alas, when she gets to the SFO's Lucia production, she says that she will eschew the premiere at War Memorial Opera House on Tuesday night for a live simulcast of Friday night's performance broadcast on the 103-foot-wide "jumbotron" scoreboard at AT&T Park (stadium), home of SF Giants baseball.

What makes her flip-flop on the opera performance? She says, alliteratively, that it's the "dynamite, digitally delivered sound" which is every bit as good as that of the opera house and the fact that her viewing pleasure has been decided in advanced by a producer and videographer. The camera, she argues, can zoom in on a suitably perturbed character at their moment of truth and that the action on stage can be followed much more clearly by the multiple views cameras bring. As defense against "purists," she cites the recent success of the hi-def Met performances that have been delivered to digital theaters around the country which purportedly have amassed an audience of some 920,000.

But there's something else here that she hasn't mentioned, I think, that is the ultimate reason for her preference when it comes to operas. When describing Tuesday's premiere, she says that "when the bejewelled and well-heeled troop into War Memorial Opera House..." she will not be there. That description, to me, conjures up images of Margaret Dumont in the old classic Marx Brothers' comedies: stuffy, snobbish, removed from reality, every bit the socialite who carries on polite superficial prattle with other socialites whom she, secretly, cannot stand. Gilmore contrasts that image with the AT&T Park performances, where she says she's "happy to be rubbing elbows with folks in non-designer non-finery who are drawn by curiosity or determined love of opera itself. She also makes a point of mentioning that the simulcasts are free and open to the public, saying she's "thoroughly heartened by the decidedly democratic atmosphere of the free outdoor events..."

So, no pretentiousness, eh? I'll bet! To her, I'm guessing "non-designer non-finery" means Gap jeans and Aeropostale top. I'm sure she'd hardly associate with someone wearing generic J.C. Penney jeans and a well-weathered Giant's sweatshirt, especially when she mentions watching the SFO's big-screen simulcast production of Rigoletto downtown last fall while "sipping brandy-laced coffee... as the moon rose above the copper dome of City Hall." What, Ms. Gilmore? No Coors Light? And she fails to mention the party of five behind her that was almost surely there, talking and laughing so loudly as to nearly drown out her precious digital sound. Hey, girl! There's a reason it takes 100,000 watts of amplifiers and speakers--not to mention a plethora of digital equalizers, delays, companders, feedback squelchers, and a gigantic 64-channel control board--to deliver sound at a level to be heard over thousands of impolite boors! Not to say that something like that wouldn't happen in the theater, but at least the behavior of the vast majority of the audience would cause them to be, hopefully, slightly more circumspect.

So, what can we learn from this review?

First of all, the picture of aged biddies in furs and ill-fitting sequin dresses stepping out of their limos--or, for the poorer ones, Beamers--to go to the opera needs to be done away with... and with good reason. The idea that it takes a refined demeanor (memorize Amy Vanderbilt) and an aloof sensibility to appreciate opera is just shear poppycock. Wasn't Pavarotti produced from a family of humble bakers? Didn't Jessye Norman get her start singing gospel music at little Mount Calvary Baptist in Augusta? Yeah, highfalutin upbringings, they had. And isn't it odd that an opera chorus is almost always made up of a comprehensive range of people? Everything from poor students--not necessarily music majors--to heavy equipment salesmen and engineers to doctors and professors? Ridiculous! Opera is music; music is a key to the soul; all human beings have souls.

I, myself, though born from a musical background on one side of the family, was hardly groomed to be an opera lover. Oh, I remember on Saturday nights, dad would fire up his hi-fi (yes, long before stereo) and play an instrumental selection from Gotterdämerrung (I seriously doubt he even knew that it was an opera), but then would put on one of his favorite groups, Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang, followed, at my brother's and my insistence, that he play one of our favorite fairy tale albums or something from Disney. Nobody laid any big guilt trip on me to go into music. As a matter of fact, my mom (whose side of the family was the musical one), if anything, discouraged it, having seen her brother go through tough times as a trumpet player. And yet, here I am.

Second, while I appreciate Ms. Gilmore's appreciation of opera as it is, I think she needs to come down off her high horse. The only reason that the SFO has such a snooty audience is because there are few of her generation (as she admits "child of the video generation") and younger that buy tickets and go to the opera. True, tickets are sometimes seem expensive, but don't kids plop down $40 or more to see Britney Spears? Wait! Bad example! Kanye West? I can't remember what the face value of Bonnaroo tickets, but I know that they sell from scalpers online for up to $1,000. Don't talk to me about tickets being too expensive! You won't see Pearl Jam giving free simulcast concerts anytime in this century, by the way!

I can't fault Ms. Gilmore too much. I mean, I absolutely love to listen to Devo, but I'm not sure that I, in my "advanced" age, would ever want to go to one of their concerts. (Of course, they're even older than I am!) That being said, I can't stand to watch any classical music on TV; I just feel like I'm missing most of the experience of the music. `A chaqu'un son gôut! But get your butt to live performances whenever you can. The very reason there are festivals like Bonnaroo is that there is nothing like what happens musically, socially, when a perform develops a rapport with the audience in front of him. It's a phenomenon.

Operas KO Should Do (Again)

So, what's missing from recent KO lineups? What have we missed? Are there any popular operas that we could make a buck on? Are there any we've done minimally previously that would be good now? Here's my list... again, my opinion, nothing else. Plus, some dreaming, and some things that, financially, would be right out.

1. Così fan tutte. Of course, Carroll Freeman and the UT Opera Theater covered this one last year for the Rossini Festival, but the last time the KO did it was in 1995--and, as I recall, that was done in English. One of the courses was translated as the rather saccharine "Friendly breezes bear the message..." Yech. It would be nice to do it in Italian. Yes, I know: tons of recit., which was one of my complaints about Figaro. Still, we've done Figaro, and Barber; we ought to finish the light-hearted trio with Cosi. I doubt we could do better than a story of biker dudes and chicks, but we could give it a shot.
2. Turandot. Yes, big, lavish, long, expensive... all major complaints of some of the operas I blacklisted previously. But Turandot is, arguably, the very pinnacle of Puccini's genius. I mean, really! The music at the top of the Third Act, even before "Nessun dorma," is just an amazing passage! It conveys so clearly the sense of chaos and terror that has enveloped Peking and adds a certain dimension of helplessness and hopelessness. And what opera starts off with more of a dynamite blast than Turandot? "Moya! Si! Moya! Noi vogliam il carnifice! Presto! Presto! Moya! Moya!"
3. Rigoletto. Rigoletto. I included this one even though we are actually doing it next spring. Our last production was 2000/2001. The "Zitti, zitti" chorus for the men is just a great chorus and shows a very different side of Verdi, one that isn't always about singing loud. With Rigoletto,, novice opera-goers actually get to hear "La donna è mobile" in context and not as part of a TV commercial (and discover it's not the be all, end all tenor aria, but just a trifling little ditty). Easy show for the ladies! Fifteen minutes (tops!) and you're done for the night. The guys gotta stay... not like that's anything unusual. Which reminds me...
   
4. Dialogues of the Carmelites. I know I'm expressing an opinion, but this is way down on my list of operas I would want to see again. UT did it in the mid 90s, I think, and I went to see it then. I was curious as, being a choral and church musician, I have enjoyed Poulenc's works in the choral and organ genre. Alas, I was much disappointed. I mean, it was Poulenc, but it was Poulenc at his most depressing. (Actually, I admire UT Opera for doing what I think most would agree is not an easily accessible work.) Though the opera is about an order of nuns, it treats religion in a kind of mid-20th-century existentialist way. So, why do I include it here if I don't care for it? Simple: It's an easy show for the men... for a change!
5. Salome. Yes, I know, another dog. Probably the only opera KO has ever done where there were, potentially, more people on stage and in the pit than were in the audience. That being said, the music is amazing! Not easily-accessible for the average opera-goer, but in having the opportunity to sing a role and, therefore, study the score, Strauss' sturdy command of melodic motives and harmonic atmospheres captivated me. The argument of the five Jews, in the form of a very odd fugue, is genius. Plus, it's a pretty sicko story: Slutty chick has hots for prophet boyfriend but is rejected, gets naked for the king, has said boyfriend killed, and makes love to his head for the last half hour of the opera. Weird instrumentation, too! It was the first musical piece to use the heckelphone. and you won't find too many operas calling for contrabassoon, either.
6. Faust. While we're on the subject of, shall we say, the devilish pursuits of man, we have to mention this opera, as we would if we were talking about terrific chorus shows. There's a ton of 'em: the Kirmesse ("Vin où bierre? Bierre où vin? "Le veaux d'or" ("Et Satan conduit le balle! conduit le balle! conduit le balle!"), and what has got to be one of the bestest, most greatestest men's choruses in all of operadom, the Soldier's Chorus ("Gloire Immortelle"). In trying to memorize it, get the French right, all the verses, etc. I studied it almost constantly, at work, at school, at night, for about two months; to this day, I can sing just about all of it (well, the tenor I part) by memory. Alas! Faust is pretty long and drawn-out, meant for a time before 30-minute sitcoms and 90-minute super hero movies when spending an entire evening at the opera was no biggie. If we could ever find a way to do it again, it would be fab! Heck, let's at least do the Soldier's Chorus on some concert, Brian! It rocks!
   
7. Flying Dutchman. Yes, probably the only Wagner opera we've ever done, and probably the one and only we'll ever do. It's a good chorus show, that's for sure. Even the women get their little sewing circle scene. And of chorus... I mean, course, we ol' salts always singing of the sea and making fun of the steuermann (steersman, navigator), getting drunk, fighting off demons, trying not to listen to off-key offstage brass choirs, and putting up with temperamental German conductors. You have to admit, as hard as the ghost ship scene is, it's an impressive moment both stage- and music-wise.
8. Any Baroque Chamber Opera. C'mon! Just once! Do a Handel or a Purcell, or a Charpentier. There's a special place in my heart for Baroque operas. I aver that some Baroque operas are every bit as good as anything Puccini or Verdi wrote, maybe even better. I must admit to a great fondness for Baroque (and before) music, so I'm a bit biased. Plus, I had the opportunity to see Luigi Rossi's Orfeo performed by some the greatest early music experts in the world at the Boston Early Music Festival in '97. Who's to say that a Knoxville audience wouldn't enjoy one? People know about Handel (that guy that wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus" that everybody has to do at Christmas and Easter), and they probably would recognize some of the choruses from their usage in (even more) TV commercials. Dare I say, even do one that has no chorus! Save a ton of money on costumes, time, etc. (We are quite a draw, though. One wonders how our productions would sell were it not for the hundreds of people that each of us chorus members "recruit" to come to the performances.) Anyway, there. I've put my $0.02 in in plugging early music.
   

In looking over my choices, I realize that my dreams tend toward the more grandiose. And, who knows? It may be possible, sometime in the future, to do some of the more, uh... "involved" (read "expensive") operas. Hey, Brian's worked some pretty good miracles so far! And perhaps, by doing some different operas, we might broaden the horizons of our audience further, allowing us to delve even deeper into the opera genre. Akhnaten, anyone?

Operas KO Shouldn't Do

Bloggers have a great tradition of creating endless lists. "Best sci-fi movies," "greatest moments in web history," "things not to do on a date," "most boring lectures in UT Engineering," etc. The technique is an easy "out" for the regular blogger and is somewhat self organizing. Plus, given the blog's primary purpose--expressing opinion--it's a shoe in.

Since we're here in the doldrums of summer (already double-digit days of 90-degree weather here in K-town), it's a time to look back and reflect on the previous opera season as well as anticipate the productions of this coming season. So, guess what? A list of operas that the KO needs to lay off for awhile. Thanks to Jeff Koehler's excellent record keeping, we have a list of recent history of KO opera performances (reproduced gratefully on my kocpics.com website) and can make some quantitative and qualitative analysis thereof. Though the list on the website is not quite up-to-date (#497 on my to-do list), I've accounted for the missing data. Again, this is just my opinion and not any sort of suggestion or gripe or condescension of anyone. Also, it stands to reason that some of the most popular works in the genre are included here, just because they're so well-known and are such crowd pleasers, particularly in a smaller market like Knoxvegas that has a cash-strapped company always looking for sell-outs.

1. Carmen. Right. Like you were real shocked about that one. By my count, we've done three in my tenure with the company (ca. 1990). Not too bad. And, to be fair, since we did it in 2007, we're probably not going to be seeing the smuggler's chorus anytime soon (especially given the experience, which will become lore of KO choristers). Still, it's probably one of the most well-known of the operas, no thanks to Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal, and, of late, Billy Bob Thornton. Add to that the fact that it requires quite a few sets and a larger group of performers (imagine a chorus of ten smugglers or townfolk--see what I mean?), and you just can't afford to throw it up on the stage but every six or seven years.
   
2. La Bohème. Another gimme. Another popular opera. And, like Carmen and so many of the ones on this list, a seminal work of the genre. It's a great chorus show with its spectacular Act Two, which makes it particularly attractive to a company that wishes to keep a consistent core of easily-distracted choristers on the payroll. But, again, you gotta have a good sized chorus, some kind of banda of gala-like proportions, plus beaucoup of extras to run around and fill the stage. And even the occasional opera-goer who loves its familiar tunes must say, "They're doing Bohème again?! They just got through doing that."
   
3. Marriage of Figaro. Yes, it's Mozart; yes, it's a work of a genius; yes, it's funny. Nevertheless, outta here! Too long, too complicated for a modern audience used to attempting to comprehend 30-second commercials. Also, probably seen as a bit silly by modern eyes... eyes that, oddly enough, may have rented Dumb and Dumber from Blockbuster last week. And I wonder how many well-versed opera lovers even in the chorus can say they have an appreciation for recitativo secco? Get on with the arias, for godsake!
   
4. Madame Butterfly. I hate to list this one, I really do. As wonderful as Bohème is, Butterfly is on another level. Puccini knew Paris well, as did most of his audience, so he had no problem recreating the look and feel of it for his operas. But, ah! The Orient! Strangeness! That was something that had to be conveyed in the music! He went one better later on in Turandot, both in musical intensity and conveyance of setting. Alas! Again we've done it at least three times in my tenure. And since we've also recently cycled through a production, it should be awhile before we see it back, anyway. Not a great chorus show by any means, except to say that Puccini (as in many of his operas) uses us most effectively.
   
5. Magic Flute. Given the controversy surrounding our last production, I wouldn't expect to see this one back on stage any time soon. Add to that the fact that this is a singspiel, an opera form not well understood by Knoxville operagoers simply because Flute is about the only singspiel we've done. Then there's that German language thing, which drives singers well-versed in the "pure" Italianate sounds crazy. Oh, yes, we could do it in English (and have), but the translations are always horrible. You either attempt to be true to the German meaning and lose all the wonderful poetry of the German, or attempt to rhyme the English and send the Germanic meaning to its grave, all the while sounding exceptionally silly. And nobody in Knoxville is going to come hear anyone recite German verse on stage as part of a play, especially given the complexities of the usual Mozart opera stories. Then there's all those complex deus-ex-machina sets, the myriad and grandiose costumes, and trying to find three child singers that can sing in tune and not freak out while hanging from wire rope thirty feet off the ground in front of 800 people. I have to admit some favor for this one, though, as it was the first opera that so engrossed me that i actually sat down and watched it (on PBS) beginning to end. Still, too complex and expensive to produce very often at all, even using sets that weren't designed by world famous artists.
   
6. Aida. Money, space, time, singers, animals, sets: These are four things that the KO doesn't have enough of to produce this massive spectacle. And it certainly is the only opera we've ever done that has required a local wildlife agent to sit in the rafters and point his gun at us on stage.
   
7. Barber of Seville. This has just been over-performed in K-town due to its accessibility, the fact that it's by Rossini, and has a good distribution of characters that makes it easy to perform with both students and pros.
   

Surprisingly enough, I found that (counting this coming season) we've performed Pagliacci four times since the early 90s, but I'm leaving it out of this list, as it's short, not particularly well-known (unless you're a Godfather or Kevin Costner/Sean Connery fan), and easy to put up on stage. Also, I suspect that, after this fall's performance, that I, personally, will be pretty over Student Prince. It's just not that memorable a piece. That being said, if we can keep doing it (on the cheap, as we have been) and people still come and see it time and time again, I can probably hold my mustard about it.

So, what's next? Operas we ought to be doing. Stay tuned.

When do we get all the cool stuff?

Anybody who spends about five minutes talking to me knows that I'm a tech nut. I blame my parents: my father, in particular. Though both of them only managed a few post-secondary night school classes in their education, they ended up working in one of the world's centers of high technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), aka "X-10" (in olden days, along with the "Y-12" weapons facility and the "K-25" gaseous diffusion plant), or just "the Plant." Granted, they were only a secretary and a graphics designer, but they brought a lot of scientific wonderment home to their sons, the oldest of whom would listen to them, enthralled. So, no big surprise, by the age of five I knew what a computer was and how it was going to change the world, and how I wanted in on that.

Of course, back in the 60s, the Cold War space race was driving innovation and even the sky was not, literally, the limit. We'd be on Mars by the mid 70s, they told us, and then we'd mine the asteroids after that. Nobody thought much about "What if our budget dries up or the technology is just too complex for us to master given our current level of knowledge?" Or "What if we get involved in a war and can't get out of it?" (Sounds vaguely familiar...) Reality has a funny way of changing the future.But, regardless, I bought into the biggest dreams back then, hook, line, and sinker. And, quite frankly, I'm still smitten by what the future holds: nanotechnology, quantum computing, gene therapy and cloning, "green" technology to sustain, maintain, and restore our environment.

But then, here's this opera thing that I do. Invented in the 16th century, performing works at least a hundred years old, using instruments that haven't changed in hundreds, even thousands (in the case of the human voice) of years, in a 80+-year-old theater. Quite a dichotomy. Oh, I can marvel at the theater rigging and the automated lighting controls, but those are about as cool as things get backstage.

At least, in Knoxville. A review in the San Jose Mercury News touts San Francisco Opera's new production (with Washington National Opera) of the first opera of the Ring series as "'Das Rheingold' Goes Hollywood," replete with "[George] Lucas" reference. The production apparently is very high-tech. No surprise. After all, the San Fran area is near "Silicon Valley," where the level of technological development is so high and fast-paced, a computer ordered from one of the companies in its environs will be obsolete by the time UPS gets it to your door. ("Oh, 4.5-nanometer processor technology. How absolutely quaint, darling! Are you going to tell me next that its transistors are doped with hafnium? Are you into antiquing? Ha-ha. ")

According to the review, this production uses some very high-tech scenery, including huge video projection screens, to tell the story. Even the story (as if purists out there aren't already howling) has been changed: Wotan is now a 1920s-era American business tycoon, Valhalla a skyscraper, and the giants steelworkers.

"Sigh." I wish that we could do some cool production like that in K-town. We can wistfully remember our brief engagement backing up the Kronos Quartet a couple of years ago, but that's about as far out as we've ever gotten in terms of a real "techie" production. (Granted, that was pretty far out.) Simply by its size, our last Aida in the Civic Coliseum could certainly be counted as high tech, I suppose. Could we count our last Flute, too? The set was designed by a modern artist... and we had those cool Plexiglas and laser pointer flashlights. And we did that a-Strauss-opera-that-wasn't-Fledermaus before Aida. That was pretty far out, musically.

But, other than that, we can count sets that were built in the past five years as being "high tech" as far as we're concerned. Costumes that could not have been worn by Pavarotti when he was first starting out would be pretty progressive for us, too. But, such is our lot in life. The costs of doing really progressive and/or high tech productions are expensive; likewise, the return-on-investment we get for even a tame production of Tosca tells us we can't afford to be too innovative.

I guess there's something to be said for "same ol' same ol'." There are some things that we have in this day and age that are counter intuitive to opera. TV has conditioned us to take in the world in 30-second bites. The Mercury's reviewer, Richard Schein does complain about SFO's Rheingold being too long at 2¹/₂ hours. Even with all the "gee whiz" of the production, the 21st-century attention span makes longer works seem tedious; a century ago, folk would not have minded so much. (I salute the SFO and conductor Donald Runnicles, though, for having the guts to do it sans intermission, no matter how many people I'm sure whined about it.)

And, as I get older, old, familiar things seem more and more, uh... "familiar." My laptop is four years old (Pentium 4 Celeron at 2.4 megahertz [MHz]); my desktop is six or seven (Pentium 4 maxed out to 3.06 MHz). I have recently switched to using Ubuntu Linux (8.04, "Hardy Heron" release) as my primary operating system, though I do still keep Windows XP in dual-boot on my desktop. And I was the first one on my block to get a cable modem.

All these supposed ancient and/or unrefined technologies do what I want them to, albeit slower than an overclocked Core 2 Quad (i.e., 4 processing cores) Q9450 "Nahalem" 2.66 MHz processor with Windows Vista SP2 and two SLI-linked graphics processors with oodles of DDR3 memory connected to Verizon fiber-optic network, all for pwning World of Warcraft newbies, doing HDTV animation compiling, or calculating billions of Mandelbrot sets that... No? Don't see me doing that stuff? OK, uh... I mean, balancing my checkbook every month.

I guess that's what we have with KO: It does everything local music fans want, it balances the budget every month... well, mostly every month, and it plugs along with its 80+-year-old theater, 1,000-year-old voices, 10-year-old rented props/set/costumes, and 16th-century art form realized by at least 100-year-old operas/composers.