Opera 101—The Gondoliers

Oh, 'tis a glorious thing, I ween,

To be a regular Royal Queen!

No half-and-half affair, I mean,

No half-and-half affair,

But a right-down regular,

Regular, regular,

Regular Royal Queen!

—“Then one of us will be a Queen,” The Gondoliers

Oh, philosophers may sing

Of the troubles of a King,

But of pleasures there are many and of worries there are none;

And the culminating pleasure

That we treasure beyond measure

Is the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done!

—“Rising early in the morning,” The Gondoliers

I feel a little bit like a broken record saying it, but last night I saw another marvelous production by the Lamplighters. This time, they added the brilliant touch of reading the opening announcements in Italian (except for key phrases such as “cell phone” and “emergency exit”).

The cast of The Gondoliers. Photo by Beau Saunders.

The Gondoliers (or The King of Barataria) was one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s final Savoy Operas and their last real success. Although the subject and songs are light and the plot involves the typical topsy-turvy element of babies switched at birth, somehow I find it to be one of the most realistic of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

The first act takes place in Venice, where two gondoliers are about to pick their brides from a group of young maidens. As they are getting married, the Duke of Plaza-Toro (Count Matadoro, Baron Picadoro) arrives from Spain with his wife and daughter Casilda to seek out the long-lost son of the King of Barataria, whom his daughter married as an infant. Hidden in Venice due to insurrection in his home country, the future (now) king was raised along with the son of a gondolier, but the Grand Inquisitor who arranged the escape doesn’t know which is which. It is decided that both men should rule Barataria* until the nurse who can identify them is found. This is not very pleasing to their new brides who must stay behind, but it is a relief to Casilda, who is in love with her father’s attendant, Luiz. The second act takes place in Barataria where the gondoliers decide to rule according to their republican values and “all shall equal be.”

Speaking of equals, one of the enjoyable things about The Gondoliers is that there are many large parts rather than the standard three or four leads backed up by the chorus. There is no true patter song, but a number of patter-like songs that leave you humming. In fact, The Gondoliers has the longest vocal score of any Savoy Opera. I particularly enjoyed the songs quoted above, as well as “In the Enterprise of Martial Kind” and “I Stole the Prince.”

Once again I felt the singing was strong overall, but Robert Vann as Marco stood out for me. I was also happy to see Amy Foote, who made a superb Elsie in The Yeomen of the Guard last year, return as Marco’s wife, Gianetta. Elise Marie Kennedy certainly held her own in her Lamplighters debut as Casilda and I thoroughly enjoyed John Brown as her father, the Duke of Plaza-Toro.

John Brown as the Duke of Plaza-Toro.
Photo by Beau Saunders.

Last night, I was particularly struck by how old the audience is for these shows. These performances are always such fun and of such good quality, it's really a shame that the audience is not more diverse. If you can, try to catch one of the remaining performances tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 2pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, or next weekend in Walnut Creek.

Note: The Gondoliers is the Lamplighters’ second production of the 2011-2012 season. They will close out the season with a singalong Pirates of Penzance in March.

*You may recognize the name Barataria as the fictional insula that Sancho Panza is granted in Don Quixote, which I’m sure is completely intentional on Gilbert’s part.

Opera 101—The Opera Strikes Back*

In honor of the San Francisco Opera’s gala opening tonight, I thought I should present a quick preview of my own fall season. This is my second season exploring the world of opera after years of restricting myself to symphony and ballet subscriptions, so I’m still learning about this incredible art form (hence the “Opera 101” in the titles of these posts).

Last year, La Maratonista and I saw The Marriage of Figaro, Aida, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Madama Butterfly. This year, we are again mostly sticking with the popular classics (Turandot, Don Giovanni, Carmen), although our subscription also includes tickets for one star turn (Renée Fleming in Lucrezia Borgia) as well as Nixon in China in the summer season. I would have loved to include The Magic Flute instead, but, unfortunately, this season’s production is in English—I’m no fan of German, but that’s just wrong like a wrong thing.

 Renée Fleming in Lucrezia Borgia. Photo by Karin Cooper.

I’m really looking forward to all of our selections, although, trolling the opera website for photos, I especially loved the sets for Don Giovanni; however, since it’s a new production, I’m not sure that’s what we’ll be seeing.

The graveyard set for Don Giovanni

Carmen is the only one of these operas that I know well, but, as usual, I will be obsessively listening to all of them beforehand, except for Lucrezia Borgia, which was not available at either the library or Netflix. So, I guess that will be another experiment in going into an opera cold. At least with Cyrano de Bergerac, I really knew the story. And it was in French.

Kate Aldrich in the Met's production of Carmen

By the way, if you are local, but can’t get out to the War Memorial Opera House, you can also experience the San Francisco Opera in high definition on Thursdays on KQED (channel 9). Earlier this month was La Bohème and last night was Lucia di Lammermoor. Still to come are Tosca and L’Elisir d’amore. Of course, watching these only makes me wish I had started doing this when I first moved here!

*Despite Lucasfilm now being a client, I am not contractually obligated to periodically reference Star Wars movies in my blogs. I just do it anyway because they’re awesome. 

So You Think You Can Dance Season 8 Mixtape

"Koop Island Blues" by Koop featuring Ane Brun

In reflecting on my recent posts about So You Think You Can Dance, it struck me how much my reactions to the dances on this show are influenced by the music. Mandy Moore and her love of 80s music aside, this show has actually introduced me to a number of songs and artists I wouldn’t know otherwise, whether through Wade Robson’s love of Róisín Murphy or Mia Michaels’ incredible choices, including introducing me to Adele back in Season 4 with “Hometown Glory” and her choreography set to “Koop Island Blues” in Season 5.

"Hometown Glory" by Adele

This season, it seemed that choices were a little more mainstream, or at least by artists more familiar to me. There were many older tunes, some refreshing (“Another One Bites the Dust,” “Precious Things”) and others quite tired (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”), but overall there wasn’t much to get me excited. While it confirmed my love of Florence + the Machine (“Heavy in Your Arms”) and The Civil Wars (“Poison & Wine”), I didn’t find myself downloading much new stuff, just “Pop Drop & Roll” by Chonique Sneed, “Skin & Bones” by David J. Roch, and “In This Shirt” by The Irrepressibles, which blew me away so much when I first heard it that I was sad it wasn’t immediately available for purchase. I would love to get Damien Rice’s “Prague,” but it is only part of a much longer bonus track on iTunes. If anyone knows where I could get a legal copy of something close to single length, let me know.

"Prague" by Damien Rice

How about you, are there any songs from this season that made you sit up and take notice?

Opera 101—H.M.S. Pinafore

I am the monarch of the sea,
The ruler of the Queen’s Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants.
(And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!)

When at anchor here I ride,
My bosom swells with pride,
And I snap my fingers at a foeman’s taunts;
(And so do his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!)

But when the breezes blow,
I generally go below,
And seek the seclusion that a cabin grants;
(And so do his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!)

Last night, I saw yet another marvelous production by the Lamplighters.

Michael Belle as Ralph and F. Lawrence Ewing as Sir Joseph Porter.
Photo by Lucas Buxman, 2011.

H.M.S. Pinafore (or The Lass That Loved a Sailor) was Gilbert and Sullivan’s first real success and remains one of the most popular of the Savoy Operas. Really, with its infectious melodies, it’s hard not to like Pinafore—after all, even a modern Major-General can “whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.” One of the highlights of last night was the joy of the elderly couple in front of me who couldn’t resist bopping along to the music.

Overall, the cast was uniformly strong and confirmed the wisdom of my decision to commit to a subscription this year. F. Lawrence Ewing and Behrend Eilers, who I loved as Jack Point and Wilfred Shadbolt in The Yeomen of the Guard this past February, were fabulous as Sir Joseph Porter and Captain Corcoran respectively. Another Yeomen veteran, Robby Stafford, really made the most out of Dick Deadeye, one of my least favorite roles in the canon.

Bill Bobstay (Chris Uzelac) and Dick Deadeye (Robby Stafford).
Photo by David Allen, 2011.

While not my image of Ralph Rackstraw, I certainly hope to see more of Michael Belle, a newcomer to the Lamplighters with a terrific operatic voice. Another impressive Lamplighters debut was that of Lindsay Thompson Roush, who played Josephine.

Lindsay Thompson Roush as Josephine. Photo by Lucas Buxman, 2011.

If you can, try to catch one of the remaining performances tonight at 8pm or tomorrow at 2pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, or next weekend in Mountain View.

Note: Pinafore is the Lamplighters first production of the 2011-2012 season. They will continue with their annual champagne gala and auction in November (which, had I known was titled It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Amazing Race Around the World in 79½ Days!, I might have added to my subscription), The Gondoliers (or The King of Barataria) in January, and a singalong Pirates of Penzance in March.

The Battles Are Over But the War Goes On

Now that the battle rounds are over, I figured that it was time to revisit the teams on The Voice.

In reviewing the four rounds together, I think that for the most part the correct decisions were made, but I’m not sold on the battle format. Even though I loved comparing competitors singing the same song at the same time (especially when one singer did surprisingly better than I thought they would), inevitably it meant that promising people who we had barely heard were eliminated, including Niki Dawson (Team Cee Lo), Justin Grennan (Team Christina), and Tim Mahoney (Team Adam).

Also, and this was no fault of the format, some of the song choices were just flat-out crazy, including all of Blake’s choices (“Hunk of Burning Love,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “I’ll Stand By You”).

Some other opinions…

Favorite Song Choice: “F*ckin’ Perfect” (Cee Lo)

Least Favorite Song Choice: “Hunk of Burning Love” (Blake)

Oddest Song Choice That Actually Worked: “Baba O’Riley” (Christina)

Favorite Duet/Battle: Rebecca Loebe & Devon Barley on “Creep” (Team Adam)

Most Egregious Elimination, Part I (because he was so much better): Tyler Robinson (Blake)

Most Egregious Elimination, Part II (because her competition was so bad): Kelsey Rey (Cee Lo)

Toughest Battle to Call: Emily Valentine & Curtis Grimes on “Need You Now” (Team Cee Lo)

Favorite Expression: Cee Lo’s face when Emily Valentine & Curtis Grimes kissed at the end of their duet

Most Pleasantly Surprising Team Pick: Jared Blake (Blake)

Top Five Six I’m Rooting For: Devon Barley (Team Adam), Javier Colon (Team Adam), Jeff Jenkins (Team Adam), Vicci Martinez (Team Adam), Beverly McClellan (Team Christina), Nakia (Team Cee Lo)

Contestant I'm Most Rooting For to Get Her Act Together After a Dismal Battle Round: Xenia (Team Blake)

Eliminated Contestant I’d Love to See on American Idol: Rebecca Loebe

Strongest Team: Team Adam (Devon Barley, Javier Colon, Jeff Jenkins, Casey Weston)

Weakest Team: Team Christina (Raquel Castro, Frenchie Davis, Lily Elise, Beverly McClellan). Seriously, I’m pretty sure a team made up of Adam’s rejects (Casey Desmond, Rebecca Loebe, Tim Mahoney, Angela Wolff) would beat this team.

If Each Team Could Pick an Additional Wild Card: Casey Desmond (Team Adam), Cherie Oakley (Team Christina), Tyler Robinson (Team Blake), Emily Valentine (Team Cee Lo). I’d love to see any of these singers again.

I’m not sure exactly how the live rounds are going to work, but I like a lot of these singers and I’m very interested to see what happens in the coming weeks.

Back to Reality: The Voice

Last fall I wrote about how I was supremely bored with reality television and had stopped watching many of my favorites, including my beloved The Amazing Race. That may be changing, as I am absolutely giddy about The Voice. It remains to be seen whether this love will blossom or fizzle, but I’m eager to see what happens tonight.

The singing competition is an import from Holland and has a few innovative features. Instead of judges, there are four coaches: Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine, and Blake Shelton. In the first round, the coaches pick teams that will then compete in later rounds. The auditions in this phase are blind. The coaches, sitting on rotating chairs, hear the contestants perform and decide if they like them enough to press a button and turn around during the performance. If only one judge turns, the singer joins their team. If more than one judge turns, the singer gets to pick which coach they prefer to work with. If no one turns, the contestant does not move on.

Throughout the competition, the coaches will work with the singers to develop their talent, eventually sending only the best to compete against the other teams. In the (final) live performance phase, the television audience will vote to save one contestant on each team, leaving the coach to decide who they want to save and who will not move on. Finally, one contestant from each coach’s team will compete in the finale.

Really, they had me at blind auditions. I loved the concept from the first I heard of it. One of the biggest flaws in the judging of American Idol was both Simon’s and Paula’s tendency to be swayed by a contestant’s looks. I also love that the coaches can’t just give bland positive feedback; they have to actually commit to the singers. And, unlike American Idol, these contestants have actually been screened for talent, so there are no “bad” auditions.

What has been really interesting is watching the judges during the auditions and seeing the decision play across their face. Does this person really have a unique talent? Does it make sense for me to work with them? If I don’t turn, will I be sorry? If I do, will I be sorry?

And, of course, one gets to play along: What would make me turn? Why are they taking so long? Who is Blake Shelton and why have I never known about this man? Why is Christina Aguilera ending up with such a bad team? What the hell is Carson Daly doing on this show?

These and other questions may be answered tonight (Tuesday) at 9pm on NBC.

John Marcher, I hope you are watching this.

Berlioz and Being the Ball

“I’m going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.”

What does Caddyshack have to do with a night at the symphony? Everything, apparently, when the conductor is Charles Dutoit. Although one might think I was at Davies Symphony Hall to watch the sexy French man (see below) on cello, it was Dutoit who held my attention as he conducted the Symphonie fantastique without a score, literally becoming the music in front of our eyes. Since Dutoit is known for his recordings of Berlioz and Ravel, this was not surprising, but it was an amazing experience to watch him throughout the piece, with every note written in his powerful but fluid movements as if on a score.

La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830, Musée du Louvre

The Symphonie fantastique is such an important work in the canon that it was delightful to see it in such good hands. Groundbreaking in and of itself, it premiered during a seminal moment in the arts and literature of France: 1830 witnessed not only the political July Revolution, but also its artistic depiction in Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple, as well as the publication of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir and the première of Victor Hugo’s Hernani amidst public riots heralding the downfall of classicism. Yet this symphony is also one of the easiest to understand and follow, as it is essentially one long tone poem about the artist’s obsessive and unrequited love. It will always be one of my favorites, despite its use in Sleeping with the Enemy.

Gautier Capuçon

Unfortunately, the cello concerto at the beginning of the bill (Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain) was less interesting, despite the presence of Gautier Capuçon. While the piece requires extreme and impressive ranges of sound from the instrument, and Capuçon achieved them, the work as a whole just never captured and held my interest. To me, it sounded like the soundtrack of some sort of creepy neo-noir from the 1980s or 90s trying to be avant-garde.

Maybe that’s what they should have used in Sleeping with the Enemy?

Ballet 101—Coppélia

What do you see

You people gazing at me

You see a doll on a music box

That’s wound by a key

How can you tell

I'm under a spell

I'm waiting for love's first kiss

You cannot see

How much I long to be free

Turning around on this music box

That’s wound by a key...

From the automatons of Daedalus in Greek mythology to Collodi’s Le avventure di Pinocchio to April in the “I Was Made to Love You” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, authors and artists have been fascinated with the idea of animating the inanimate. The story of Coppélia is one of the most popular incarnations of this idea. Based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816) with music by Léo Delibes, Coppélia is the story of a mysterious inventor, Coppélius, the life-like doll he creates, a young buck, Frantz, and the girl he loves, Swanilda. [Side note: What is with these ballet names? French being arguably one of the most beautiful languages in the world, second only to Italian and maybe Russian, you would think that classical ballet could come up with better names for its heroines than Swanilda, Giselle, and Odette, no?]

If you are a close follower of this blog, you may be thinking, didn’t she say she couldn’t attend this ballet when she was raving about Giselle? And you would be right. I was extremely disappointed that visiting my family in Paris would mean missing one of the few story ballets that the San Francisco Ballet produces each year. But then the gods decided to smile on me and it turned out that Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris was putting on the very same ballet at the same time.

Or, sort of.

While Coppélia is generally considered one of the most comic ballets, Patrice Bart’s take on the story is much darker than usual. He abandons much of the original choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon and changes the story radically, choosing instead to emphasize the role of Coppélius as seducer of Swanilda and rival of Frantz, which leads to some unique and interesting choreography for the inventor (danced splendidly by étoile Benjamin Pech) but leaves Swanilda (here played by première danseuse Mélanie Hurel) pretty much out in the cold. It seemed so deliberate (with all her best moves coming between obvious applause points) that I actually wondered what was going on at the École de Danse in 1996.

More importantly, Bart pretty much abandons the idea of the doll, Coppélia, that Frantz falls in love with (much to the dismay of Swanilda). So, while danced extremely well, and the orchestra was in fine form, I left a bit disappointed because I thought the doll was sort of the point of the whole thing.

Or maybe I just have too-fond memories of endless viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the “Doll in the Music Box” number...

Opera 101—Trial by Jury

Hark, the hour of ten is sounding;

Hearts with anxious fears are bounding,

Hall of Justice crowds surrounding,

      Breathing hope and fear –

For today in this arena,

Summoned by a stern subpoena,

Edwin, sued by Angelina,

      Shortly will appear.

I almost missed this one. For some reason, I hadn’t noticed it showing up on Goldstar (maybe it didn’t) until the Lamplighters added an extra performance on Sunday night. Plus, it was raining and I had no one to go with. But my Lenten vow made me get over my laziness and head out to the theater. I wasn’t disappointed.

Jonathan Spencer and Jennifer Ashworth in Trial by Jury

Photo by David Allen and Joanne Kay, 2011

Trial by Jury is Gilbert & Sullivan’s earliest work that is still performed today. While only one act and therefore quite short, it has all the qualities I love about Gilbert & Sullivan operas: fun patter songs, light arias, and, most importantly, the mocking of British institutions, in this case the legal system. Usually paired with another opera (often H. M. S. Pinafore), the Lamplighters chose instead to present this story of a jilted bride suing her former fiancé for breach of promise with an abridged version of Engaged, a play by W. S. Gilbert about a man who is engaged to three women at the same time. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to see both, so thank goodness they presented Engaged first, otherwise I might have left and missed it. Supposedly it was an influence on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and I can totally see that. The heavy Scottish accents in the beginning were a bit tiring, but they were played for great fun and at times the play was downright hilarious. One thing I love about the Lamplighters is that they obviously take enormous pleasure in their performances and their joy is infectious.

Rose Frazier, Lauren Kivowitz, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, and Chris Uzelac in Engaged

Photo by David Allen and Joanne Kay, 2011

So, mark your calendars for the 2011-2012 season, which starts in August at the Yerba Buena Center and will include both H.M.S. Pinafore (or The Lass That Loved a Sailor) and The Gondoliers (or The King of Barataria), as well as a sing-a-long The Pirates of Penzance (or The Slave of Duty). I really don’t want to miss any of their performances so I may just buy season tickets this time.

Opera 101—The Yeomen of the Guard

I have a song to sing, O

Sing me your song, O

It is sung to the moon by a love-lorn loon

Who fled from the mocking throng-o

It's the song of a merry man moping mum

Whose soul was sad and his glance was glum

Who sipped no sup and who craved no crumb

As he sighed for the love of a lady

Hey-di, hey-di, misery me, lack-a-day-de

He sipped no sup and he craved no crumb

As he sighed for the love of a lady

Last night, I saw an excellent production of The Yeomen of the Guard (or The Merryman and His Maid) by the Lamplighters Music Theatre. I am a big Gilbert & Sullivan fan and am always happy to see their works performed live (except for Jonathan Miller’s Mikado, which I really, really would love to erase from my memory à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

While Yeomen is certainly not the most popular of the Savoy Operas, it was the favorite of both W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, a pair who famously agreed on very little. It is also considered to be their most “operatic” work, both in terms of its score and its sentiment, which is darker than their usual topsy-turvy stories. In fact, it is from this opera that Gilbert chose the words for Sullivan’s memorial next to the Savoy Theatre.

Is life a boon?

If so, it must befall

That Death, whene’er he call

Must call too soon.

The Lamplighters brought out the lighter touches in the relatively serious subject, but I was happy to see that their singing did the work justice. I particularly enjoyed Amy Foote as Elsie Maynard and F. Lawrence Ewing as Jack Point, who had the daunting task of singing one of the most beloved duets in the Gilbert & Sullivan repertoire (quoted above). Behrend Eilers as Wilfred Shadbolt also stood out for me. Really, there was no weak link, although perhaps Kathryn Schumacher as Dame Carruthers lacked a bit of gravitas in her voice. I can’t remember who played Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance this past summer, but I remember thinking her voice was a bit too deep, so I would have happily switched them. In any case, this performance really cemented my good opinion of this company and I look forward to finally being able to see productions that for years I have only been able to listen to.

Yeomen is the Lamplighters second production of the 2010-2011 season, the first being The Pirates of Penzance (or The Slave of Duty), which I saw in August before starting this blog. They will close their season with the little-known Trial by Jury, the earliest existing Gilbert & Sullivan collaboration, on a double bill with the W.S. Gilbert play Engaged. The 2011-2012 season will include both H.M.S. Pinafore (or The Lass That Loved A Sailor) and The Gondoliers (or The King of Barataria).

Ballet 101—Giselle

This weekend, I took a break from the endless process of setting up my new computer and watching Oscar hopefuls to attend the opening night of Giselle at the San Francisco Ballet. Although I have long appreciated the music, I had never seen the actual ballet live.

After being relatively disappointed with my last outing to the Nutcracker, I was glad to see the San Francisco Ballet kick it up a notch and deliver a stellar performance all around, particularly Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role. Apparently, the company is using multiple pairings throughout the run, so I’m glad we went to opening night and were able to see her. Giselle is such a demanding role, both technically (requiring exquisite balance and difficult footwork) and expressively (with the lead moving from naïve peasant girl, to someone driven mad by love, to a mature adult in the netherworld of the Wilis) that it is essential to have an experienced dancer.

One of the reasons I first sought out the ballet is that it was co-written by one of my favorite nineteenth-century authors, Théophile Gautier. Virtually unknown here in the States, Gautier is a jack-of-all-cultural-trades: painter, critic, poet, novelist, and dramatist. His most famous legacy is probably his espousal of the phrase “l’art pour l’art,” that is, art for art’s sake, or, as adapted for MGM’s Leo the Lion logo, Ars gratia artis. I love him for his supernatural short stories involving vampires, mummies, and all manner of ghostly appearances, which is probably why he was so attracted to the legend of the vengeful ghost-like Wilis.

The music helps enormously in telling the story, with a heavy use of leitmotif to heighten the drama. While not as overtly dramatic as something like Swan Lake, for me, Giselle is one of the strongest ballets in conveying the story through music. This may be because its composer, Adolphe Adam, was primarily a composer of operas. However, he did compose another ballet in the repertoire, Le Corsaire (ballet with pirates!), which I was lucky enough to see at Lincoln Center some years ago. Perhaps more familiar to readers, he was also the composer of the ultimate French Christmas carol, “Minuit, chrétiens” (“O Holy Night”). Léo Delibes, who composed Coppélia, the next story ballet in the San Francisco Ballet’s 2011 season, was his pupil. And, after this amazing performance, I’m very sad I won’t be able to see it.

Opera 101—The Modern World and the Underworld

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to dip my toe into the pool of contemporary opera when I attended Ensemble Parallèle’s preview of their production of Philip Glass’s Orphée, which will be performed on February 26-27 at the Herbst Theater here in San Francisco. While postwar concert music is not really my thing, and my knowledge of Philip Glass is limited to my brother’s repeated playing of the Koyaanisqatsi* soundtrack in high school, I was intrigued by the Orphée part of the equation, as the Jean Cocteau film was one of the first I studied in graduate school.

The film itself is a modern, surrealist spin on the Greek myth of Orpheus, whose main claim to fame was travelling to the underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, killed on the day of their wedding. Orpheus persuades the gods through the power of his song to be allowed to bring his wife back from Hades, but only on the condition that he not look back at her until reaching the land of the living; however, like Lot’s wife, he fails to resist the temptation, losing her forever.

Cocteau updates the setting to postwar France, where Orpheus is a famous poet, hated by rivals, but adored by the public (only in France, people). In this version, Death falls in love with Orpheus, which complicates matters with his one true love just a bit. But how can one resist when Death is played by Maria Casares with steely determination and killer outfits? Although the special effects are laughable by today’s standards, the film remains extremely poetic, if a tad bizarre at times. I can totally see why it would appeal to a modern composer like Philip Glass, although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that he pretty much lifted the libretto straight from the film.

Surprisingly, I quite liked the music we heard and the singers, especially Eugene Brancoveau playing the lead, did an excellent job with it. This production is also adding a circus element to the depiction of the underworld, which I found to be a really interesting idea and totally in keeping with the spirit of the film. I particularly loved that the motorcyclist henchmen would be played by people in Roue Cyr. I was less convinced by some of the other design elements, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt based on what I saw.

As a side note, it was lovely to meet so many bloggers who have taught me so much about the San Francisco music scene these past months including SFMike (albeit briefly), The Opera Tattler, and Axel Feldheim, who I was thrilled to discover really isn’t a scary German. A big thank you to John Marcher for the invitation.

*As my New England town only had a 99-cent movie theater that played movies very late in their run, we would sometimes drive quite a ways to see something semi-interesting. However, these weren’t exactly “family nights” at the movies, since typically we all arrived together but then almost inevitably chose different theaters. The night my brother saw Koyaanisqatsi, my father and I saw the re-release of Rear Window, and my mother saw some Italian film, The Night of the Shooting Stars, maybe?

It'll Turn into an Oscar Blitz

There’s little I love more than the Oscars. It’s the one dinner party I can be counted on to throw every year, complete with betting pool. Even while living in Paris, I continued the tradition through a variety of strategies—one year having my cousin hook up a cable descrambler and staying up all night to watch live, and another year hosting a party the following night while holding a news embargo throughout the day. One of the great fringe benefits about now living on the West Coast is being able to have people over without being up until all hours of the night.

I generally try to see all the nominations in the major categories, but, as time goes on and I go out to fewer and fewer movies, my annual Oscar blitz becomes more and more difficult, especially now that the ceremony is a month earlier than it used to be. This year, I saw more foreign films in the theaters than usual, but not much else, although I did manage to catch both Leonardo DiCaprio movies (I swear that was not intentional). While Shutter Island is unlikely to get any nominations, at the very least, Inception should garner nods in art direction and music.

So that means netflixing The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right, and Winter’s Bone, and getting out to see The Fighter, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Blue Valentine, and eventually maybe Rabbit Hole. I’m boycotting 127 Hours on principle since I generally can’t watch any bodily incisions whatsoever, let alone one performed at the bottom of a canyon (which is why you’ll never hear me talk about any television shows set in hospitals, or those involving the initials C, S, or I).

This weekend I saw The Town and Black Swan. I enjoyed one a lot more than I thought I would and the other a lot less. The Town was a fun, if unexceptional, little film. I continue to be impressed by Jeremy Renner as well as Ben Affleck’s turn to directing—it will be interesting to see where he goes with it. Black Swan was a bit of a mess. The performances were great, but the story had more holes than the bodies in The Town. Of course, from the moment we were hit over the head with the “story” of the ballet, and that story was wrong, I knew it was going to be a difficult ride. And that was before all the self-mutilation. Not even Tchaikovsky can make up for that.

While I love Swan Lake as much as anyone, if you really want to watch a movie based around one of Tchaikovsky’s most technically demanding works to perform, I’d suggest instead the feel-good French film of the year (how often do I get to say that?), The Concert, based around the sublime Violin Concerto in D major and starring the equally sublime Mélanie Laurent, last seen on this side of the pond in Quentin Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds.

In the meantime, any Oscar contenders you recommend? What are you going to see between now and February 27th?

Santa Makes the Baby Jesus Cry

Let me start off by saying that I am not at all religious and these days pretty much regard Christmas as a secular holiday. However, when it comes to music, I like to keep the Christ in Christmas. So, when I say I love Christmas music, I generally don’t mean anything that uses the words rock or bells (although exceptions can be made in the case of music recorded before I was born). The fact that I have relegated all my Santa-related music to a playlist called “Get Behind Me, Santa” basically tells you all you need to know.

Along with opera, Christmas music is really the only thing I buy on CD these days and I recently added a few new favorites to my collection that I wanted to share. The first two albums are by The Cambridge Singers, conducted by John Rutter—Christmas Night: Carols of the Nativity and The Cambridge Singers Christmas Album. I can’t believe this group escaped my notice for so long. Both of these albums are fabulous collections of traditional European carols, and, although I’d give a slight edge to the selection on Christmas Album (“Somerset Wassail”; “Still, Still, Still”; “Gabriel’s Message”; “In dulci jubilo”), Christmas Night has “The Cherry Tree Carol,” which is one of my all-time favorites.

Also out of England is a collection from the early 1990s, A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection by The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers. These carols are probably a bit more familiar to your ears than those of The Cambridge Singers, but still remain fairly traditional, similar to the selections of the Robert Shaw Chorale, which is an old standby, along with Now Is the Caroling Season by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, a favorite from my childhood.

Lost in Translation

Since our Russian Roulette book salon, I’ve been thinking a lot about the art of translation. More than one person said they loved to read Russian authors because of the language. But whose language? Having taken on a few freelance translating jobs in my time, I know that it is an extremely difficult task even in its most basic form. And, when it comes to literature, there can be vast differences in language between different translators.

I had done some investigating into translation when I read Don Quixote earlier this year, settling on Edith Grossman’s version primarily because of library availability. It had an introduction by Harold Bloom, so it had to be decent right?

“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.”—Don Quixote (Cervantes, trans. Grossman)

When I decided to tackle War and Peace, I had a few more options. Although I had to wait for it, and despite the controversy surrounded their methods (apparently they break the cardinal rule of translation, which is to translate into your native language), I selected the Pevear/Volokhonsky version. Normally, based on what I had read about it, I wouldn’t have, but their edition is the only one I found that left the French portions intact—most English editions leave only a few French phrases strewn about, like an English mystery novel, when in fact there are large chunks of discourse in French as well as entire letters. Since I had to wait a bit for the actual book, I decided to experiment with another translation, the classic version that most people have read, by the Victorian-era translator Constance Garnett, which the library had on audio. Admittedly, I also thought listening to it first would make the reading go more quickly, which it did. It also highlighted how different two versions can be. If you don’t care about the French issue, I’d recommend Garnett.

If you are wondering just how different translations can be, consider what I read earlier this week while attending a performance of Carmina Burana. The San Francisco symphony thoughtfully provided the Latin text and English translation in their program. Not knowing if they would do this, and wanting to follow along, I had brought the booklet from my CD, which used both English and French.

Here is an example from the “Swaz hie gat umbe” chorus at the end of the “Spring” section.

San Francisco Symphony translation:

They who here go dancing round

Are young maidens all

Who will go without a man

This whole summer long.

Mehta English translation:

Those who go round and round,

are all maidens

they want to do without a man

all summer long.

Mehta French translation (translation mine):

Those who go round and round there

are young maidens

They think they can go the whole summer

without a lover.

Call me crazy, but there’s a whole world of difference between going without a man, wanting to do without a man, and thinking you can go without a man for an extended period of time. But maybe that’s just me.

By the way, I love Carmina Burana in all its cheesy, overused glory and this was a very fun performance, particularly the “roasted swan” song, which was sung with more passion and personality than I have ever heard before.