Yet another sign of the apocalypse... appropriately enough

Thanks to Knoxville blog Cup of Joe Powell I found this story on the movie news site Cinematical about--and I'm not kidding about this (see other sources below)--Al Gore's award-winning 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth being made into an opera!

Yep! I was skeptical, too... until I ran it through Google and found numerous--and more august sources than a Hollywood movie fansite--references to it:

• Yesterday's edition of UK's Guardian
• The Associated Press (via Yahoo)
  
• And, for you whacked-out, right-wing, gun-toting, Creationist Republicans out there, Fox News... although, I wouldn't exactly go as far as to call Fox News "august."

"OK," I can hear you saying, "it's probably some obscure opera professor/composer at Indiana U. trying to make a name for him/herself. It will be performed by the opera theater there with an audience of a couple of local newspaper reviewers and parents of the performers." Don't we wish?! Nope. It is being composed by Italian Giorgio Battistelli, who has composed a list of operas for various European opera houses (e.g., Strasbourg, Rome, Munich, and London) running all the way back to 1981; his scores are even published by Ricordi. (From what I've seen, Brian uses Ricordi editions an awful lot for our operas.) I just have to note just for the humor of it alone, his opera Frau Frankenstein was performed by Berlin Opera in 1993.

But Berlin did not commission An Inconvenient Truth (that's Una verità inopportuna in Italian.) No, no! It was commissioned by and is slated for its premier in 2011 at La Scala, no less!

The Guardian article goes on to say that Battistelli was recently composer-in-residence at Deutsche Opera in Rhein, Germany. Since the commission so new, there's no idea (from anyone, including composer) as to how Truth will play out, whether it will be directly about global warming or a biographical treatment of Al Gore's life or something entirely different.

Regardless, it's going to be an odd book-to-movie operatic adaptation, I'm sure. But, then again, when Jerry Springer: The Opera has attracted rave reviews and famous stars like Harvey Keitel, you should pretty much be prepared for anything in this business. As Cinematical points out, this story has all the makings of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

So, I'm looking forward to the Knoxville Opera's premier of Iron Man or Sex in the City in the mid 2010s, let's say. Or, if we want to stick with the docu-drama genre, we could go with some of Michael Moore's stuff, like Bowling for Columbine or Sicko. Surely we could get some serious financial consideration from Regal Theaters for any of these!

A Remembrance of Things Past

In digging around in the archives at my parents' house, I found an old picture of my high school concert band taken in 1980, when I was a junior. That's me way in the back in the middle with a tuba. Yes, it was 1980s, but obviously the style back then was still heavily reliant on what we'd probably call now "70s kitsch": Note the ruffles everywhere, on the dresses and on the director's (right side) tux shirt. The ties are pretty wide, too, though it's hard to tell in the photo.

I knew mom had kept a bunch of school photos of my brother and I--regular school photos, band photos, football photos (my brother, not me). But she had a habit of storing them away where we couldn't find them. I guess she thought that if we kept them she'd never see them again. And she was probably right about that. But she also had the annoying habit of forgetting where she had put things, especially little-used items like old high school photos. (Yes, she did have some pictures of dad, my brother, and myself displayed strategically throughout the house. And yes, they were hopelessly out of date.) To be fair, though, she did it with her own photos, too.

We were just never the type of family to crack open the old photo albums and look through them all together. In the (very) early years, my dad had an 8-mm camera, and we would break out the projector for those and have "movie night." But then the camera messed up, the projector bulb blew, and that was the end of that. But dad did have several 35-mm still cameras, as well as a real 70(?) mm box camera, that he would take pictures and have made into slides. (Thank goodness he did that! I'm already on my third medium-size "albums, photos, and slides" packing box out at the house. If he'd had prints made, I would've had to have rented one of those storage pods, I'm afraid!) Occasionally, we'd drag the slide projector out to look at things, but not very often. We just liked to remember things in our heads. I suspect that my grandmother's views on mementos may have had an effect on mom. She probably thought of family photographs and the like as frivolousness. She was very much into the "denying ourselves and helping others" thing, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with that, I think occasionally she took it a bit too far in neglecting her family.

But here Alex and I are, neck deep in slides, photos, and 8-mm film rolls that we have no idea about the who, what, where, why of any of them. It may take years of research with relatives and friends to find out what all the unidentifiable ones are, if we identify them at all. I am planning on getting everything digitized, though, which will make things hopefully a little simpler. There are some very good photo organizing software programs out there. Despite the hassle of all these items, it is fun to see instances in your life that you'd forgotten or put aside. A trip down memory lane never hurt anyone, and by looking at the pics, you can often better discern where that memory lane is coming from. There are surprises--"My hair wasn't that long back then"--and lots of "Oh yeah! I remember this! We were..."

And so we come back to the photo of the band. Since I was a band geek in high school (I was a choir geek only at church), this photo means a lot to me. Lots of faces that I'd forgotten; some I remembered, but differently; some I'm absolutely elated to see, e.g., some of the hot (in 70s parlance, "foxy") flute players in the front row there that were hot majorettes in fall marching band. (Y'all go dream about your cheerleaders. I'll stick with the majorettes, thank you... they generally wear less!)

I've spent three or four hours the past few weeks puzzling out faces and attempting to attach names to them. The more I get, the more I remember. It's like some huge Kim's game. "I think her name was Natalie. Oh, and she had a friend, Paula... that's her right there... and they used to tease us tuba players. And one time at band camp"--spare me the "American Pie" references, please--"we got mad and decided to play a prank on them by..." So, even if I knew all these peoples' names, it takes forever just because of the flood of memories flowing back. And then Alex will chime in with someone's name he knows and it's off again.

It is tremendously gratifying to "see" these people again. If it weren't for my church choir and school band directors and all the friends I made in those organizations, I wouldn't be the musician, wouldn't be the person I am today. And, let's face it, high school is an amazing time in a person's life.

But perhaps the most shocking part about looking at this old picture is seeing that tuba player in the center in the back and trying to remember, "What was that guy like?"

Where's Brad Pitt when you need him?

Rules for when you're in Warsaw:

Rule #1: You don't talk about opera club.
Rule #2: You don't talk about opera club.

Happy Friday, everyone.

And you thought KO's production of Tosca was opulent

An article in the L.A. Times says that the L.A. Opera's current production of Tosca, which premiered last week, is using the original jewelry worn by Maria Callas in her Met debut of the title role in 1956.

The jewels--a tiara, a necklace, and earrings--are made of 200 tear-shaped crystals and were created by renowned Milan designer Atelier Marangoni. They are currently owned by Swarovski, a company based in Austria, who is letting the LAO use them, gratis, in order to publicize its travelling exhibition of jewelry worn by Callas in over 18 of her productions, including La Gioconda, Tristan und Isolde, and La Traviata. The exhibit is scheduled to "play" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in May 2009.

The jewels' value is judged to be about $85,000! Before anyone gets any ideas, the jewels will be stored in a safe under armed guard at the Music Center. They will be removed from the safe by armed guards and brought to the stage moments before Tosca, sung by Adrianne Pieczonka, makes her Act 2 entrance. I'd bet the guards would have no reservations about making their operatic debut should anyone in the audience--or on stage or back stage--get any funny ideas during the production.

Hmm... I wonder... What does Mary Costa have in her jewelry boxes? If LAO can use a gimick like this, why couldn't the KO? Someone check and see what Mary wore for Traviata which was the innaugural performance of the KO(C) in the mid-70s.

Tosca at Covent Garden

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:

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.

The rich man's Rocky Horror Picture Show?

An Associated Press article chronicles Zurich Opera's problems with their current production of Fledermaus. Its general director, Franz Wesler-Möst, who is also music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, has refused to conduct the last two performances on May 17 and June 20 because of "artistic reasons." Apparently, Wesler-Möst is unhappy with vein of the stage director, Michael Sturminger's production, mainly, that the he has chosen to infuse the opera with vampires, complete with Dracula's castle.

Well, after all, it is called Die Fledermaus ("the bat"). lol! I guess the modern trend of juxtaposing operas against weird places and time periods goes against Wesler-Möst's staid, prude sensibilities. And one might see how he might think that. The thing that has always bothered me about Fledermaus is the lack of a direct connection of the story with the title. Those familiar with the story know that "the bat" has very little to do with the opera. The plot is based on Falke's scheme to seek revenge on his dear, old friend, Eisenstein, for leaving him passed out and dressed in a bat outfit one night when they were bar-hopping. So, really, there is no "bat" in the opera itself, just in the backstory. The opera story is based on the tried-and-true Mozartian plot of mistaken identities, character substitutions, and a big finale where all is revealed and all are forgiven.

Now, how Sturminger was able to bring his "vampirical" vision into the plot remains to be seen, unless you happened to have gone to the previous two performances, which Wesler-Möst conducted. Ironically, in one of those twists that Mozart's librettists would have been intrigued by, W-M's (I'm sick of typing "Wesler-Möst"--do you know how hard it is to generate an umlauted "o"?) performances will be seen by more people, as the two performances he did conduct will be edited for release on DVD in a few months. So... he won't conduct the remaining two live performances but will be forever perpetuated as the conductor of that production on a digital format likely to last for the next 25-30 years.

Of course, the production could turn out to be a hit, a tour de force destined to be brought up whenever opera cognisceti talk of Fledermaus or mentioned on some future, mutated version of Dan Berry's "Echoes of a Golden Age" radio program on WUOT... but, judging from the Vienna Times (Wiener Zeitung) review of it (or, rather, Babelfish.com's machine translation thereof), that doesn't appear to be the case. The review is generally lukewarm, which is what the review says of the production: run-of-the-mill, humdrum, "phoned in." (BTW, Orlofsky turns out to be the Dracula, I think.) So maybe W-M's rep is safe.

Maybe the Zurich will forgive him, or those that have seen the production, sympathize with him. He's due to direct Carmen this summer and Rosenkavalier, Figaro, and Così next year. One would think that those would be tame productions. (Though, with Carmen, we KOans can speak from experience on outré performances.) I guess if some stage director was off his/her rocker, they might have a red-painted horse and rider (naked?) on stage for Rosenkavalier. After all, those northern European houses are well-known for their bizarre productions. Considering that, a few years ago, I was reading in Opera Digest about a Handel opera at... maybe Vienna State Opera?... and looked down to find a picture of a giant dinosaur on the stage, a Dracula in Fledermaus wouldn't be quite so odd.

The Future of Opera?

Happened to catch this story in the British paper The Guardian. The Royal Opera House is looking for talented film-makers to produce a version of Romeo and Juliet. The catch: The film can only be 40-seconds long! It's true! The short, which can be filmed with camcorder or--get this!--cell phone camera can be uploaded to the Royal Opera House's YouTube site and voted on. The most popular entry will be featured all over England in a set of advertisements promoting the Royal Ballet's production of R&J.

I mean, there's the popular Complete Abridged Works of William Shakespeare play, but this is a whole 'nother level! This is like The Inquirer's version of the Reader's Digest version of R&J as edited by producers from MTV! How comprehensive can you be in 40 seconds? Sorry, that's "up to 40 seconds." It could be shorter!

I think I can give a shot at the script. Feel free to borrow and adapt this for your entry. I'm not entering. I never can hold my cameraphone steady enough.

----------

Romeo (to Juliet): You looked really sexy in your nightie on that balcony.

Juliet: You're kind of Studville yourself in those tights. Is that a sword in your pocket? Or...

Romeo (interrupting): But our families hate each other.

Juliet: Yeah, and you killed my bro, dude.

Romeo: Sorry 'bout that. Let's run off together.

Juliet: Great idea!

Lord Capulet (to Juliet): As if! You're marrying Paris!

Juliet: I'd just as soon fake my own suicide.

Friar Lawrence (to Juliet): Seriously? Here, drink this.

Juliet: I'm sleepy.... (nods off).

Romeo: Did you say you were dying? Then I'll die, too! (Takes poison, dies.)

Juliet (rousing herself): What? Romeo's dead. Alas! (Stabs herself, dies.)

Capulets, and Montagues: How sad. Let's not fight anymore.

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Yeah, you're probably right. Too long for the contest and the YouTube generation. But, maybe, if I get LonelyGirl15 and the "Leave Britney alone!" guy to play the leads...

Postlude

Hard to believe that the Tosca is already over, much less the whole season. You just get in the "habit" of seeing everybody every couple of months during the year, and then at the end, bam! Gone for the whole summer. Of course, some we won't see again. Graduations, new jobs--either a new one here that will require a greater amount of time or one in another city far away--marriages, and other of what my tax preparation software calls "life events" will contribute to the attrition.

Of course, Jennifer and Aaron, long-time (long-suffering?) members of the KO chorus, who have paid no attention to that snotty "You'll never get anywhere if you sing in the chorus" attitude that a few nameless students at UT have, are graduating and moving on to the University of Wisconsin to pursue higher degrees of learning... that is, after they get married up in Buffalo. I didn't hear honeymoon plans, but, then again, I'm a guy, and we guys don't ask those kinds of "touchy-feely" questions very often. Of course, it's common nowadays for college kids who get married to put off the honeymoon for awhile, either due to financial or time constraints, so that might be the case with J&A. And they'll certainly have lots of places to explore once they get up to Madison. We wish them the best. A quick check of the web tells me that Madison has a city opera company. They're doing Butterfly, Così, and Faust next year, so it sounds like a fun season if the happy couple decides to pursue continued opera chorus (or better!) membership. And the university opera program presents two major works and many one-acts and opera nights.

Every year at this time we say, "We ought to get together and do something this summer," but we rarely do. It's rather ironic that summers, historically looked upon as a season of relaxation and leisure, have become one of the busiest times of the year. We try to cram everything that we've been missing out on throughout the year into three months of nonstop action. Apparently, there is a congratulatory party for Jennifer and Aaron's wedding scheduled sometime in July, so that will be one opportunity. Another, and one I certainly hope can happen (Oh, Lawsy! I hope can happen!) is that my brother and I are planning on throwing a grand bash to celebrate the completion of the renovation of our house. One hopes we have enough money left over to do so! Stay tuned, either for that announcement or for news of my commitment to Lakeshore Mental Health Facility. ("I don't know, doctor. He just wigged out and starting yelling something about cabinets not coming in on time or something.") One or the other will happen, I fear.

Well, I was planning on doing some kind of synopsis of the year, but that will have to wait for another day. I have a very large, furry, black kitty at my feet currently that is demanding her Fancy Feast Grilled Chicken Feast ASAP. TTYL!

Here We Go Again

So, Monday night's the big night! The first evening of staging... and, knowing the speed at which David Bamberger works, probably the last. Certainly, Carroll Freeman I admire for coming into staging completely prepared, but David takes it to another level. He comes in knowing exactly how he wants things to be staged. Not only that, but he also has figured out each character's inner dialog. (Sometimes it's as simple as "You've finished singing and so you go off stage.") I imagine that Carroll will get to that level when he's as old as David.

Not that there's much staging to do or learn. The sops and tens probably get the most complex staging in the sacristy scene. We'll probably need to dart back and forth, yadda-yadda. Certainly, with the kids on stage, there will be enough pandemonium to get the point across. The Te Deum is pretty much park-and-bark. We might get to process in during the initial intonation of the Te Deum, but I'm betting that'll pretty much be it.

Pregnant with Art

Since last week, I'd wanted to write a bit on Verdi's recitatives, but I couldn't think of enough to say. I'm working on a fairly difficult Bach recit and aria right now for church, so I was kind of attuned to the recits in Forza. However, performance practice is one of those long-winded topics that requires copious research and long references to obscure articles written in in the 1930s. Believe it or not, it's something hat I find not all that unpleasant; nevertheless, I wrote all the research papers I'm going to write getting my Masters. Plus, I'm not sure I had a solid point to make with it, except that Bach and Handel wrote recits, and Mozart, and Verdi. How they were related was where I began running into problems.

So, here we are in production week already. Everybody's happy-go-lucky mood has turned to dour and dim. Trying to remember new staging, you forget the new dynamics; trying to remember the dynamics, you forget the words; trying to remember the words, you forget to carry your prop on stage; trying to remember to get your prop, you forget your staging. It's a vicious cycle--a vicious cycle that you hope will get better in the two rehearsals we have left. But you're so frustrated by things, you just get "over it," "it" meaning everything that you've been working on for about two-and-a-half months total, not counting the holiday break. You're saying to yourself, "Let's just get this over. Tonight's and tomorrow's rehearsals I can just plow through. Then I'll have a glorious evening off--except for making something for the cast party--and then I can survive Friday night, have a little fun at the party, then enjoy Saturday and plow through the last performance on Sunday to enjoy going to dinner or (dare I say!) going home to bed."

To be honest, I get that way nearly every production. Maybe if I wasn't struggling with some problems with my vocal technique, maybe if I had a body that fell inside the bell-curve of sizes of costumes that Malabar has to offer, maybe if I was a better dancer, maybe if my years of experience with stage makeup meant I was getting better at it, maybe if I paid better attention... It goes on from there. Eventually, I get to the point where I wonder why am I still doing this if it's such a frustrating experience.

I mean, are we making a difference? Are we affecting people's lives with our art? There are people out there in East Tennessee that don't even know that Knoxville has an opera company. Heck! There are downtown Knoxvillians that don't know it! Will John (or Jane) Q. Public, who's still thinking about Tuesday night's "American Idol" and wondering what the praise choruses will be at church on Sunday morning care if "La Vergine's" dynamics are off... or will he even know it. It used to be you could almost bet that, at some point in a person's childhood, they would have had to take piano lessons; used to be at some point a person learned about singing in some choir somewhere; used to be people would listen in every Saturday afternoon for the Met broadcasts.

That's all in the past. Our lovely education system has failed to create an art-wise public. Yes, the three Rs are important, and, yes, it is important that we teach our children well enough to be competitive in the global market and changing technologies. It's also important that we teach them the value of exercise, the tenets of good sportsmanship, and the variety of activities, from football to table tennis, that allow us to burn off stress and have a little fun.

But it's also important to teach the history of art. Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? What was Mozart dealing with when he wrote his Requiem? Who's Twyla Tharp? Why did Beethoven only write one opera? How did others in the past express themselves? Over all, these questions amount to the question "How can I express myself in a way that is unique and says something about me?" Isn't that art? Shouldn't that be important? Wouldn't it make the world a better place for people to write, draw, dance, or paint their feelings of angst rather than expressing them with a gun?

Wouldn't it be great if, at some point on Friday night or Sunday afternoon, that one person in the audience be inspired with Verdi's story? Or touched by the tragedy of his characters in Forza? "How am I like Alvaro?" "Poor Leonora! I feel for her! I know what it's like to lose a loved one under tragic circumstances." "What a silly vendetta! ... But, you know that big fight I had with my sister last year? We haven't spoken since. I should call her."

So, here we are, back with ill-fitting costumes, a stage setup that wasn't really designed for acoustic music, ten-year-old-makeup, and a shoestring budget that gets thinner by the minute, not to mention whatever "baggage" each of us brings to the theater from our "real" lives. How in the world are we going to reach those people out there in the audience?

Maybe that's the truly greatest art: Creating art when you don't think or feel like you can. Art is not a sure thing. Sometimes something we strive to create just doesn't turn out as well as we'd imagined it. But, then again, is it our job to decide that? Sure, we are educated in all the aspects of what it takes to make "good art," and we certainly wish for something that satisfies our own idea of what "good art" is. But, ultimately, it's not up to us. We'd like that control, but it's the opera-goer that has the final say.

Recently, in remodeling our parents' house, my brother and I had to move our dad's paintings. Dad was a graphic artist by trade, but enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time. (My brother inherited Dad's ability to draw and, assumedly, paint. Mom's side of the family was the musical one; I got that.) When we started pulling his paintings out of storage, we realized that he had done many paintings that no one else had ever seen before--not even immediate family! All told, there were about 60 paintings, maybe a dozen or so that were new to us. He'd just painted them, taken a look at them, said "Nah, that's not too good." and put them away. And yet they were beautiful! When we donated them to our home church to be auctioned off to raise money for missions programs, people went absolutely nuts! "Oh! Your dad was so talented. I have seen several of his landscapes, but I had no idea he had done seascapes. And this portrait of an old Native American woman is just wonderful." Dad hadn't been satisfied with his output, but the people that mattered, those that saw his art, that consumed it, certainly were.

So bide that jacket that doesn't fit too well, try to keep the dynamics down during the monastery scenes, don't worry too much about how well you can move your feet, and so what if you can't sing that high G absolutely perfectly, you are creating art! And someone out there is listening!