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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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 Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 8:30 pm |
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Did the Queen of Night's actress hit all the right notes during "Der Holle Rache Kocht in meinen Herzen"? That piece brings a goddamn tear to my eye.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 9:16 pm |
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| luvcraft wrote: |
| You know, looking around at other performances of "Der Holle Rache", I would say that she technically did it very well, but it was presented like some kind of party trick, as opposed to, say, this awesome performance of it, where she treats it like hysterics and actually does some ACTING. |
I would be a little forgiving of the actress in the simulcast if, as you wrote, the acting was very underplayed through the whole piece. That's more than likely the director's decision.
I worked with the Julliard Opera Company at Brevard Music Center for a summer, and I got to work on most technical aspects of an opera production. This also put me in the proximity of a whooooooole lot of off-stage drama. The directors tend to have reckonable egos, and many of the singers have reckonable egos.
In fact, I recall one of the career tech crew's jokes about opera singers.
Q: What's the difference between a baritone and a tubist?
A: The tubist has to leave his instrument in one place.
The joke here being, a bit obscurely, that opera singers are halfway damnable because they can't be divorced from their (to them) glorious gift except in very cold weather. It turns out being more true than not.
I don't know what the current scene's like at The Met right now, but I would guess, based on personal experience, that there was a directorial decision that had calcified some of the on-stage passions.
| luvcraft wrote: |
| I went to see a simulcast |
This might actually have helped the performance suck balls. I've found myself unable to stay to a screen or a radio during a broadcast opera, but I've always been riveted (except this one time in Moscow when I fell asleep, embarrassingly) whenever watching opera in a live theater. It's much more engaging and intimate. The players' mistakes and their hits are more keenly felt.
Opera's this weird Cthulhu of Western arts... stage, chamber music, vocal work, and even architecture. A building's ability to resonate sounds makes it an integral part of the performance.
It's also somehow significant to me that the sounds I'm hearing are the literal air molecules shaken in chain reaction by the performers' vocal cords, rather than the repeatable reverberations of treble and bass in my speakers. It gives the music a more fleeting, precious quality.
I'm very curious to know why you didn't like the story, luvcraft!
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:46 pm |
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| luvcraft wrote: |
| well, it was actually the whole production I had issues with, not just that one singer. |
Fair enough! I didn't see the performance, so I've got no frame of reference from which to defend the cast, crew, and production staff.
| luvcraft wrote: |
| It was just very very very contrived and moronic, and honestly felt like it was written for mentally handicapped little children. |
It's been a long time since I've seen the opera performed in English or looked at a translation of it. I remember liking it, though, for its comedy and the fantastic elements of the story. I thought it used high myth in the same way that something like Shakespeare's Tempest had, and I enjoyed how Mozart developed the story out of those elements.
| luvcraft wrote: |
| Granted, the version I saw was an abridged, English-language version, |
This will really affect how the performance comes across. It's like getting a lite version of Hamlet. However, since (again) I didn't see that production, I can't say.
| SuperWes wrote: |
| I didn't see this comment and I haven't said anything yet, but I'm almost positive that actually did see the Magic Flute in Japanese while I was in Japan. It was terrible. |
I … I have a very hard time imagining opera translated well into Japanese! The natural rhythms of Japanese and most European languages are so different, I would suspect that much of the binding relationship between the words and the music got lost.
I recently watched an MST3K episode where they riffed an English-language Deutschland television production of Hamlet, and I couldn't put my finger on why the delivery sounded so off. Sure, the accents were German, but that alone wasn't enough to make the delivery so half-wooden.
I think it was the fact that the verbal rhythm Shakespeare uses (iambic pentameter yo) works more naturally given the spoken rhythm of English, whereas Germanic languages almost always (I think) put vocal stress on the first syllable of their words. The woodenness I perceived was the actors' frequent emphasis on each word's first syllable (and strong stress on monosyllables), when an English delivery would have balanced hard sounds with soft sounds.
So I have a harder time imagining that the musicality of the language would translate into Japanese, which doesn't really use rhythm in the same way as either English or German for communication. And the rhythm is so important in opera!
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