Artillery Magazine

Tag: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  • Strangers On A Train – The Abduction From the Seraglio

    Strangers On A Train – The Abduction From the Seraglio

    The Los Angeles Opera’s co-production of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), which closed February 19th, updated the action of this singspiel from its original mid- to late-18th century Ottoman Turkish setting, when the Ottoman Empire had reached its greatest extent in central Europe (pressing into Hungary and even to the margins of Vienna itself) to the 1920s when post-World War I Turkey was in transition from its corrupt imperial legacy to a modern republican state, both (by necessity) more self-contained and of distinctly Turkish identity. The action was also shifted from the stationary setting of a pasha’s country estate to a moving train – more specifically, the luxurious Istanbul-Paris-London Orient Express – really the only train fit for a pasha). (Even the title, pasha, would have been an Ottoman legacy by this time – more or less the equivalent of an English baronetcy, though it persisted well into the 20th century.)

    The production matched that legendary train in its splendor – it was easily one of the most handsome productions I’ve ever seen mounted at the L.A. Opera. This was actually a co-production of five opera companies (including Houston, Kansas City, Boston and Minnesota companies) and shows what can be accomplished when companies pool their resources for especially challenging or elaborate productions. Still more outstanding was that the cast matched the splendor of its backdrop, featuring the superb English soprano Sally Matthews in the role of the abducted yet doted-upon Konstanze; So Young Park, who more than held her own to that star-power as Konstanze’s abducted servant Blonde; and bass Morris Robinson whose powerful vocal performance easily matched the theatrics both comical and intimidating in his role of Osmin, the Pasha Selim’s overbearing servant. Robinson plays him as if he were a major domo; and – beautifully counter-poised by So Young Park’s brilliant singing and considerably drier comedy – the performance gives the production a vocal signature parallel to Matthews’ lead. 

    Apart from the outstanding singing (and I thought it stood up well to some of the great recordings I’ve heard of the opera), the production conveyed a psychological dimension not always accessed by singers and musicians. In all probability early productions played this element as straight farcical romance (not to discount the subtleties available in the music itself or for that matter the talents of Mozart’s librettist, Christoph Bretzner). But what I thought the cast and production captured was the sense of suspense and captivity, both physical and emotional, ironically emphasized by the ‘moving’ train. In the interplay of the performers, we saw the psychological chemistry in full – the survival strategies of both captives and the seraglio itself; the manipulative gaming of penalties and rewards; the role-playing and and the larger symbiosis of hostages and hostage-takers.

    But, whether a matter of coincidence or conscious emphasis, I thought the production also made for a sly commentary at this politically and culturally fraught moment on the hostage state we seem to have become. The current occupant of the Oval Office may be distinguished from the Pasha of Abduction by his singular fusion of bullying and cowardice; but like the Pasha, he’d like nothing more than his blue state ‘captives’ to set aside their most prized principles and values and surrender themselves entirely to, not simply his personal and political prerogatives, but sheer adoration and adulation. ‘Love’ might be too much of a stretch, since that would require a measure of trust he clearly finds unattainable – which, by now it may in fact be. In Abduction, Osmin is the voice of this cynical absence of trust. His only real trust is for the Pasha himself, under whom we see through his comic bluster that he feels empowered far beyond his overseer status. Yet ultimately his trust is overthrown; he reverts to the isolation of the seraglio.

    The troubling afterthought in the here and now (and two weeks after the production closed) is that it is not simply the ‘Osmins” and ‘overseers’ returned to a place of diminished status and relative isolation, but an entire trainload of passengers. Also – not unlike this production’s transmigration – we’re captives on a moving vessel; and it’s not going to wait for the rewards, pardons or apologies of pashas and overseers alike.

  • Cry the Occupied Country – Figaro’s Dance and A Countess’s Lament

    Cry the Occupied Country – Figaro’s Dance and A Countess’s Lament

    Do you ever wonder what happened to the Occupy moment?  We can’t really call it a movement because it had no coherent program, plan or organization, no well defined or articulated policy (or revolutionary) objectives; and its only concrete target was a somewhat vaguely defined index of commercial and investment banks, securities brokerages, insurance exchanges, private equity and hedge funds.  I’m not even sure if any of the principal instigators knew what they really wanted.  Break-up of the ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial entities seemed to be pretty high on the agenda.  But did anyone really have any clue how this might be accomplished in a political environment that had shifted from steady rightward drift into wholesale paralysis?  (It’s as if our national governmental organizations have gone into deep freeze over the last several years or so in direct proportion to the planet’s climate warming – with similarly disastrous results.)

    The vagueness of Occupy’s objectives, along with the complete absence of a rigorously programmatic, practical and truly radical agenda and strategy doomed the movement almost before the tents were cleared from Zucotti Park and (here in L.A.) the City Hall lawn.  But the political psychology is pretty clear.  We’re an occupied country here; and the essential changes that will be required are mostly not going to come from the existing political structures – nor from the private and corporate interests that are doing most of the occupying.  The changes come from a community’s cultural life, which may reflect both Establishment and Dis-Establishment interests.  The Los Angeles Opera has joined this ‘battle royal’ over the last couple of months with one lavish original production and two older productions spruced up and recharged by electric performances.        

    I don’t think L.A. audiences really needed much of an argument to interpose John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles in place of the actual third play in the Beaumarchais Figaro trilogy, La mère coupable (The Guilty Mother).  Ghosts presents us with a visceral connection with the living tissues of history and inexorable ravages of time and physical forces beyond our control – and their resonance with the crises of the current historical moment.  (There is in fact an opera based directly on La mère coupable by Darius Milhaud, with the libretto by his wife, Madeleine.)  What I loved about the current production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, which just opened this past Saturday evening, was an uncanny capacity, not merely to suggest the possibilities that unfold in La mère coupable, but to subtly articulate and underscore some of the unresolved conflicts both in the original Beaumarchais dramatic foundations and in the entire thematic notion of ‘Figaro Unbound.’ 

    If there was ever a figure that defied the social and political boundaries of his time, it was the original Figaro himself, Beaumarchais.  But, as Susanna and the Countess remind us in different ways through Mozart’s opera, such legerdemain is not so easily procured by the 99 percent (and still more emphatically, its feminine half).  The current production is essentially the same production I saw in 2006 – with the same deliberately anachronistic set decoration and costuming.  Whether or not (given the opera’s farcical parade of characters) an argument could be made for it, I found it creakily annoying the first time around.  This time, I was happy to completely forget about it and could almost be amused by the Countess’s first appearance in her 1930s-ish bedroom with its 1950s-ish telephone.  I’m as easily annoyed as ever (as readers of this blog are only too aware).  The difference – for the entire production – can be summed up in three words:  casting, choreography, and chemistry.  The program credits the original director Ian Judge and choreographer, Sergio Trujillo, with additional credit given to choreographer Chad Everett Allen.  I can’t pinpoint exactly where Allen has interposed changes to the characters’ movements and interactions; and there are a few moments where the stage blocking or character line-ups still seem a bit stiff – but whatever he changed or added and wherever he did it brought a fluidity and grace notably absent from the 2006 production. 

    Did I mention the casting?  It’s the old cliché of film and theatre direction and it applies no less here:  the secret of good direction is great casting.  The spotlight in recent weeks has been on the return of Pretty Yende to the L.A. Opera stage in the role of Susanna after her triumphs at the Met and Carnegie Hall – and she was great, though the role doesn’t really offer a scope in full measure with her vocal power.  The surprise was that pretty much everyone in the cast rose to the same level.  It was as if we were constantly echoing the Countess’s second act compliment to Cherubino, “Che bella voce.”  Certainly that included the Countess herself, Guanqun Yu, whose exquisite voice shone through some difficult bedroom maneuvers (suggesting an aristo Maggie the Cat) in the same act and throughout the opera in what may be its most challenging role.  Roberto Tagliavini (Figaro) and Ryan McKinney (the Count) were both commanding in their respective roles, a constant reminder of the power of great musicianship wedded to stage charisma.   Nozze-Fig-Tagliavini-McKinney

    The stage chemistry was particularly strong in scenes featuring Yende, Tagliavini, McKinney, and Yu; and the subtle emotional articulation was evident in their most brisk recitatives; the political implications of their dark double entendres foregrounded as much as the sexual.  In various scenes throughout the opera, you felt a foreshadowing not only of Beaumarchais’ Guilty Mother, but so many other treatments of these themes and motives, from Strauss (e.g., Der Rosenkavalier) to Sondheim (A Little Night Music). 

    The Countess’s gracious magnanimity lights up the darker recesses (key to any staging of this opera) of Beaumarchais’ original farce.  But even as the fireworks (live pyrotechnics in this staging) lit the characters’ way to the nuptial revelries, even as Figaro leaps away ‘unbound,’ we’re acutely aware of the chains (not just jewels) that keep these strong women tethered to their places.  It’s far more explicitly underscored in the play in Susanna’s (or Suzanne’s) final speech: 

    Qu’un mari sa foi trahisse,
    Il s’en vante, et chacun rit:
    Que sa femme ait un caprice,
    S’il l’accuse, on la punit.
    De cette absurde injustice
    Faut-il dire le pourquoi?
    Les plus forts ont fait la loi.

    Let a husband break his vows,

    It’s just a joke the world allows –
    But should a wife like freedom take,
    The world will punish her mistake.
    The strong it is for all they say
    Who in the end will have their way.

    That’s from the John Wood (Penguin edition) translation, by the way.  The original French is actually a bit more harsh.  ‘Is it really necessary to question this absurd injustice?  The stronger make their own law.’  They’re still making it.  (It’s as if the entire point of their Congress is to not make any laws that complicate the economic ‘laws’ their financial maneuvers and machinations dictate.)  “Se mi salvo da questa tempesta, / Piu non avvi naufragio per me,” Susanna and the Countess sing as they watch Figaro try to dodge the Count’s wrath in his mad third act jig on Cherubino’s behalf.  “If I survive this storm / I’ll fear no further shipwreck.”  Two hundred thirty years later, that sounds awfully familiar.

  • Figaro “Unbound”—but undocumented: ¡Figaro! (90210)

    Figaro “Unbound”—but undocumented: ¡Figaro! (90210)

    It’s been said that The Marriage of Figaro (or, more precisely, The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro, as it was originally titled) was one of the first nails in the coffin of the ancien régime.  Its author, the playwright, musician, watch-maker (and inventor), social intriguer (and climber), arms merchant, speculator and all-around adventurer, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, would have been the last to claim this distinction, since for the better part of his life, he would have been delighted with a hereditary title and the property and income that usually went with it.  Beaumarchais was himself a kind of precursor to the French Revolution.  He was supernally ambitious, ingenious, and outlandish.  His career would be too much for the maddest play; it’s the stuff of a picaresque novel and almost inconceivable before the 18th century.  He epitomized the post-Revolutionary man before anyone had the slightest idea the French royal house was in enough trouble (and debt) to create conditions ripe for the upending of the feudal order. 

    Well, ‘plus ca change,… ,’ as they say.  In the narcissistic, celebrity-obsessed 21st century Beaumarchais would fit right in as a kind of chameleon, opportunistic and hyper-talented post-Vanity Fair man.  Although the droit de seigneur, the right of a lord to bed a servant of his estate prior to the consummation of her marriage, was one of the first institutions of the feudal state to be eliminated by the first French National Assembly, the political and economic inequalities of a plutocratic U.S. have effectively imposed a different set of droits de seigneur on a number of eccentrically intersecting underclasses.  (Literally in some instances:  what do the egregious restrictions on abortion in better than half the states in this country amount to, but simply another form of the droit de seigneur, with l’etat—the State—taking the place of the lord?) 

    For undocumented immigrants who, caught between perfect storms of political and economic circumstances in their home countries the U.S. has contributed to creating which force them to leave, and economic disparities which put them in demand as low-wage workers in the U.S. itself while seducing them to stay with (usually false) promises, outmaneuvering both their new masters and renegade federal agencies like I.C.E., is a daunting obstacle course, full of lethal traps.  It would take a character as resourceful as Figaro to successfully negotiate his way through this shiny neon jungle; and for his Susanna—whatever the disclaimers of her betrothed—we know the path would be doubly hazardous.  Welcome to the new feudalism, Beverly Hills style (‘swimming pools; movie stars;’ and now undocumented wage slaves).  Such is the world writer/librettist Vid Guerrerio has reimagined for Figaro in the early 21st century in ¡Figaro! (90210).  The Count (Almaviva in the Beaumarchais/Mozart/DaPonte original) here has become Mr. Conti, a real estate magnate (of course—no doubt we’ve seen his estate in the week-end real estate supplement); Mrs. Conti, an aging actress (perhaps infusing a Down and Out in Beverly Hills flavor).  The always randy Cherubino is here reimagined as an Afro-American rapper, ‘L’il B-Man.’ 

    After a workshop run in New York, the Los Angeles Opera has taken on this fresh and wildly imaginative adaptation of the Mozart opera (which manages to be remarkably faithful to the original Mozart score, right down to the recitatives) as part of its “Off-Grand” opera series, presented fully staged (directed by Melissa Crespo) at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Barnsdall Park this week-end.  The L.A. Opera will be presenting another, period-appropriate production this coming April; but I can’t think of a better apéritif than this freshly recontextualized staging.  As in Mozart’s original, ¡Figaro! (90210) ends in peace and contentment all around—a situation we’re not likely to see for some time, given our (new again!) near-feudal social-political realities.  Enjoy it while you can.   

    [through Sunday, January 18th – performances at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., tickets $21-37, Barnsdall Gallery Theatre (Barnsdall Art Park), 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90027; (213) 972-8001, (323) 644-6275]
  • Some Enchanted Evening – Così fan tutte

    Some Enchanted Evening – Così fan tutte

    Mozart, like other great artists before and since, offers us a topological mirror in which to test and tease our perspectives on the universe and our fragile foothold in it.  The evocative power of his greatest work is a sublime irony, felt all the more acutely as the civilization in which it blossomed has devolved into a death star.  You feel it most poignantly in moments like the E major trio at the end of the second scene of Così fan tutte, “Soave sia il vento…. Ed ogni elemento benigno rispona ai nostri desir.”  (“May the winds be gentle…. And every element respond benignly to our wishes.”), where the voices of the sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and the ‘philosopher’ buffo classico, Don Alfonso, rise and sway over the rolling thirds. 

    I have had the opportunity to hear and/or see many productions of Così over the last few decades – staged, filmed, radio broadcast, and recorded; but few have matched the symbolic power, wit and elegance of last night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic production (by Christopher Alden, in collaboration with Zaha Hadid, with costumes by Hussein Chalayan) at Disney Hall, the third in the Philharmonic’s three-year Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy project.  Although the vocal performances came nowhere close to eclipsing the very best (Schwarzkopf, Ludwig, Fleming, von Otter, Lott, and some of the gifted baritones that have sung Alfonso and Guglielmo, set a very high bar), the principals – all well-experienced in the roles and Mozart opera generally – were all superb; and Rod Gilfry (Don Alfonso), Philippe Sly (Guglielmo), and Rosemary Joshua (Despina) were particularly outstanding.  It didn’t hurt that Miah Persson (Fiordiligi) and Roxana Constantinescu (Dorabella) are both gorgeous and carried the Chalayan costumes beautifully.  The Philharmonic was in gorgeous voice, too (even with Maestro Dudamel and Bradley Moore, on harpisichord continuo, dragooned into the drama by Alfonso’s stage antics – they coped beautifully). 

    It’s hard to say whether it’s an eye-of-the-hurricane notion of calm amid chaos underlying the concept of the Alden-Hadid production (Hadid’s set design was supervised by Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu), or a more abstracted notion of radical contingency in which personal orbits are alternately at odd tangents with one another or in seemingly parallel universes.  (A ‘circling the drain’ metaphor occurred to me, too.)  The torqued ellipsoid spiral in what looked (under the shifting lights) at one moment like concrete, and like some pearlescent laminate at another, owed something (I thought) to Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses (the Toruses, too), but also to the torqued and shifting planes of Gehry’s Disney Hall itself – the whole of it seeming to echo those ‘gentle winds’ – and the Philharmonic’s gorgeous woodwinds, rarely more beautifully displayed.  Whether the eye of a hurricane, an umbilicus tethering its hapless lovers, or a death spiral, the set (which spilled out into the orchestral space with yet another elliptical curve pooling flat onto the stage) beautifully supported the deceptively cynical Da Ponte farce that Mozart’s music somehow manages to make transcendently magical.          

    Alden moves the characters almost like tokens or mathematical markers in a table game.  They seem to rotate around the curving set, as if by some remote control as much as under their own power, emerging or disappearing at one end of the spiral or another as if in a labyrinth.  Hewing closer to an ‘umbilicus’ scheme, Chalayan dresses the lovers in what look like summer camp clothes.  The men in shorts and butter yellow and blue chambray shirts, the women in schoolgirl pleated gray and white skirts and chalky Egyptian blue and salmon camp shirts.  Don Alfonso and Despina, by contrast, are all business – stylishly booted and dressed in squarish black jacket and pants.  Alfonso and Despina are always the hidden magic in this show and Alden (facilitated by Chalayan’s costuming) underscores this aspect, making of Alfonso a dissolutely capricious Oberon, and Despina into an extremely capable Puck.  They’re also a lot less hidden:  Alfonso/Gilfry commands every part of the stage (including a part of Dudamel’s podium at a couple points, breaking an interior fourth wall) and a seat just over the curving wall of the set (where he props up his legs and sprawls across a raised pedestal or console, munching from a bucket of popcorn); Despina/Joshua commands the spotlit center stage for her lecture on the fickleness of men and the pointlessness of fidelity, “In uomini…”  It’s not surprising, given their blistering vocal and acting talents, that they practically steal the show.  (I’ve always thought the character’s name is far from coincidental – between sea and (under)world; of the spine/undercarriage and the world of the dead.)  It should be emphasized, though, that all of the singers move with exceptional grace – and on steeply raked and banked surfaces that can’t be easy to negotiate, especially in boots or heels.  I almost wonder if Alden had some assistance choreographing the show.  

    The costumes morph as the opera progresses – ‘summer camp’ clothes giving way to ‘trench (warfare?) and frock coats’; and the set itself morphing and even ‘respiring’ by way of Adam Silverman’s genius chiaroscuro play of light and shadow moving across the set like storm clouds.  (Many a museum show might profit from this design magic.)  I think there may be some hydraulics beneath those embankments, too; but the rising and falling curves did not distract from the music.  For all the Minimalist, post-Beckett look of the production, it did not (eat your heart out, Robert Wilson) feel minimalist.  Set, choreography and overall production supported an idea of continuous curvilinear, rotational movement:  the tricks space play on our minds and the circuitous tricks our minds and perceptions play on us.  In this rendering of Da Ponte’s libretto, betrayal is simply one point on fidelity’s funhouse slide.  (“So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, / I am most faithless when I most am true,” was the way St. Vincent Millay put it.) 

    The universe is not a particularly hospitable place, and we almost take solace in its sublime indifference to human fates.  (“A philosopher laughs while others are weeping.”  The Phil’s translation of (I think) “Quel che suole altrui far piangere fia per lui cagion di riso….”)  After the solace and exhilaration of Friday evening’s Philharmonic performance, though, I couldn’t help thinking that a universe bereft of Mozart might be an order of cosmic betrayal even the universe might not be ready to endure.