Time for the latest mash-up of SNLC with the occasional opera series started by DK'er Demi Moaned, centered around the Metropolitan Operas HD-casts. Thus the standard start-question for this edition:
Anyone see the Met's HD-cast of Iolantha and Bluebeard's Castle today?
There's actually a very reasonable political reason to pass on this double bill today, if it was even on your radar, because of the presence in the production of two notable "Putin poodles", soprano Anna Netrebko & conductor Valery Gergiev. However, that's a separate topic on its own. Plus, since 3CM is a loser, he 'sold out' and did see this double bill @ the movies, in order to be able to write this diary in the 1st place, but also because I've never seen or heard Iolantha in any form, even a recording. To complicate things further, precisely because this HD-cast was a double-bill, the length of this diary threatens to spiral even more than usual out of control. So more (too much?) below the flip....
First, per the standard protocol, some reviews of the production, from the first night, which has a story all its own beyond the scope of this diary (namely, that a massive East Coast snow storm cancelled the original first night, and on the actual first night, a protestor managed to get on stage and unfurl a banner in protest at Netrebko and Gergiev):
(a) Anthony Tommasini, NYT
(b) David Patrick Stearns, WQXR Operavore Blog
(c) Anne Midgette, WaPo
(d) Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News
The Met's synopsis of the two operas is here. If nothing else, scheduling the HD-cast of this double bill on Valentine's Day would seem to prove that someone at the Met has a mildly warped sense of humor, given the rather odd takes on love and relationships that each of these operas has. I suppose that, in a way, the two operas are riffs on the idea that 'Love is blind'. Tommasini takes on this idea, a bit, when he cites director Mariusz Trelinski:
"For Mr. Trelinski, as he explained recently, both operas depict controlling relationships. In one, an imperious father is convinced that he is protecting his daughter by keeping her unaware of her own condition; in the other, a woman abjectly loses herself through obsessive devotion to a troubled man. And both operas deal with a yearning to see deeply into others."
Midgette, however, raises doubts on the idea of this pairing, at least in musical rather than dramatic terms:
"That Trelinski tried to make these into matched pendants signals one of the problems with his concept: he was looking more at the story lines than at the music. In a dark, 1930s-era frame, intermittently illuminated by video projections or pops of color from the protagonists' dresses (costumes; Marek Adamski), he told two stories of women and vision: Iolanta is about the willful obstruction of vision, a move from blindness to sight, and Bluebeard is about a woman who sees too much. Juxtaposing these works certainly underlines a disturbing view of women being treated as objects who must be controlled, but that, in fairness, lies with the operas rather than the director."
In a pre-recorded interview feature between Trelinski, Met Opera general director Peter Gelb, mezzo-soprano Nadja Michael (Judith) and bass-baritone Mikhail Petrenko (Duke Bluebeard), Trelinski actually acknowledged that in terms of musical style and vocabulary, the two operas don't really go together as such. Strangely, though, at least to me, once one accepts how different these operas are, the contrast of the double bill actually kind of worked in the end, even if the oppressive feel of the Bartok pretty much wiped out all memory of the Tchaikovsky. Perhaps that was because the mood of the Bartok was more consistent and of a piece throughout, besides the fact that its ending is much more of a psychological downer compared to the Tchaikovsky. Bartok's score is also from the time of his ultra-lush, romantic period, rather than his more refined and angular later style, so the distance from Tchaikovsky isn't quite as far as one might think from hearing the name Bartok.
In the first opera, Tchaikovsky's Iolantha, the idea of "Love is blind" applies almost literally, since the Princess Iolantha (Netrebko) was born blind, and her father, King René (Ilya Bannik), has set things up so that she has been raised unaware of even the idea of sight. Of course, how long can the façade last? Hence the plot of this opera, where the knight Vaudémont (Piotr Bezcala) falls for Iolantha, naturally, but she has no idea what he (or anything) looks like. The irony, of course, is that King René is the blind one, in a sense, for thinking that not telling his daughter about her condition from the start was a good thing. It's not that he doesn’t love his daughter, but his love leads to those decisions to keep his daughter in a state of willful ignorance, which Vaudémont shatters when he inadvertently speaks (OK, sings) of sensations related to sight.
Bannik seems a bit young-looking to be Netrebko's father, but sang and acted his part of the King well enough. One subtle point of the opera is that the doctor Ibin Hakia (Elchin Azizov) whom the King has brought in to try to restore his daughters sight is a Moor, and therefore is Muslim. So you do see at one point in the subtitles the phrase "Allah is great". If nothing else, given current events, you have a sympathetic Muslim character portrayed on an opera stage.
The story of Iolantha is a rather intimate one, also including the modest scurrying about that Iolantha does, since she is blind (even if the singer in the role isn't blind – at least physically, if not politically). So it rather lends itself well to the HD-treatment, given the generally intimate scenes and lack of grandeur. It has to be said, though, that the rather grim forest setting contradicts the occasionally sung line about that part of the forest being like Paradise. On the plus side, the scenario does catch the shock of Iolantha suddenly being able to see, and not being quite prepared for the resulting sensory overload. (Brian Friel's play Molly Sweeney takes the same idea much further, and into much darker [no pun intended] territory.)
Interestingly, in his evaluation of the two operas, Stearns concluded:
"Iolanta was less successful, production-wise, perhaps because there's less drama to work with."
Given how little dramatic action happens in the Bartok opera, that does seem like a curious conclusion. But in both operas, you can argue that the drama is more psychological and internal, rather than external.
Bartok's one-act two-hander Bluebeard's Castle (if you really want to impress your friends, the Hungarian is A kékszakállú herceg vára - try saying it 3 times quickly) covers the 'Love is blind' idea in a way more fitting with that statement, since Judith, Duke Bluebeard's wife, insists on learning the secrets of his life and his castle, all the while assuring him that no matter what she sees or learns, she loves him. There are seven rooms with the doors locked to each of them, each hiding something about Bluebeard and his realm, and Judith demands the keys to open the doors to each room. Bluebeard seems reluctant, but assents each time. Of course, as she opens each door, the mood and revelations get darker and darker.
One notable aspect of this performance is that it includes the spoken prologue, which not all performances contain, since Hungarian speakers outside of Hungary who have dramatic reading skills aren't the easiest people to find. (The New York Philharmonic concert performance that I saw several years back omitted the prologue.) But it does set the mood, even if it obviously doesn't give much away. FYI, Midgette got a bit of a roasting for forgetting about the prologue in her review, which she acknowledged on-line, but obviously too late for print.
Another aspect was that certain transitional moments seemed to sound a bit dragged out, which Stearns noted, and which affected the singers:
"One of many sleights of hand had the singer seeming to be teleported to various locations around the castle via computer-generated settings. Making that happen, though, meant stretching Bartok's transitional passages – far, far beyond their intended length. Tempos were languid. I didn't know this opera could be so long.
…..[Michael and Petrenko's] interpretive details tended to be trumped by all that was swirling around them onstage and in the various ways in which they had to respond to it. All too often, Petrenko was heard offstage, behind one of his castle doors or in otherwise voice-obscuring situations. Michael had the most stage business, including a nude bathtub scene. I hate to sound ungrateful for the production: It's likely to have a permanent impact on one's view of Bluebeard's Castle. But truly clever directors figure out solutions to music-elongating problems."
Granted, in the movie house, being at one remove can lead to correction of those imbalances, via the sound transmission engineers. (Plus, while the camera is discreet about the bathtub scene with Judith that Stearns mentioned, in the final scene, with Nadja Michael in close-up and her slightly soaked silk skirt hugging her figure, one can note just how well she seems to take care of herself, to put it one way.) Also, while it may have been partly the sound system, the orchestra sounded rather louder than normal in the movie house, although the voices could still be heard. In the live performance, Midgette noted this phenomenon in passing:
"However strong the video projections by Bartek Macias (among the most evocative parts of the evening), you need to address the score more thoughtfully than simply having Valery Gergiev make the superb Met Orchestra play very, very loud. Score, here, was reduced to glorified soundtrack - something only emphasized when Trelinski began cutting up Bluebeard to intersperse the music with interpolated recordings of the castle creaking and groaning."
Those overlaid sounds were one aspect that I thought was unnecessary, namely to have sound effects that represented the opening of each door. Bartok's music already contains music to represent the opening of the doors, not to mention Judith's reaction at each opening. And granted, Trelinski's production wasn't constructed with something like a single wall with 7 doors, so that Judith could simply walk down and open each one. The idea of Bluebeard's castle as this vast, almost metaphysical realm rather than necessarily a 100% literal castle made sense in that regard. As far as the orchestra being very loud goes, it was ironic to hear Gergiev talking in the intermission banter about how important it was for the singers to hear the orchestral rehearsals, and for the orchestra to hear the singers, so that the operas would be presented not at the expense of drowning the singers with the orchestra.
So, a mixed bag of an HD-cast, but at least one with relatively unfamiliar fare on it, and lots of stuff to talk about precisely because neither is 'top 100' opera fare. On the last point, I should note that the movie house was far from full for this performance (unlike The Merry Widow a month ago), though whether that was due to political principles, cold weather, or simply that this isn't a crowd-pleasing familiar selection for a double bill wasn't clear. Also, at the curtain calls, no disruptions from protestors directed either towards Netrebko or Gergiev, as presumably the Met upped their in-house security after the protest on the first night. Likewise, during the intermission banter, hostess Joyce Di Donato (not Eric Owens, if you read the pdf and saw his name as host) stayed a million miles away from any political questions with both Netrebko and Gergiev. In fact, it was a bit curious to note how up-front the Met was in presenting both Netrebko and Gergiev to talk about the opera during the intermission, as opposed to shying away from it, given the recent political guilt-by-associations of them with respect to Czar Vladimir. No one in the movie house booed, although others may have chosen to hit the lobby early. Rather amusingly, Netrebko even noted in the banter how odd this double bill was, or at least the Bartok portion of it, on Valentine's Day, perhaps to convey again the message that "hey, I'm a perfectly normal person" (if you ignore the political baggage, that is).
So with that, you can either:
(a) Talk about this double bill, or
(b) Observe the standard SNLC protocol.
No reason one can't do both, of course ;) .