Time for the latest installment in the decreasingly frequent mash-up diary series of the opera diaries tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-casts, originally started by past DK’er Demi Moaned, with SNLC. Thus, the standard variation on today’s opener goes:
Anyone see the Met’s HD-cast of The Exterminating Angel today?
Of late, relatively few DK’ers see the Met HD-casts (or at least bother to respond if they glance by), and discussion itself on the opera in question has been very modest, to put it one way. If memory serves, DK chit-chat about a given opera was greater during DMs curatorship of this opera diary series. However, if this diary this past Monday is anything to go by, there might be slightly more DK interest than usual in this particular opera. This is most probably because composer Thomas Adès and librettist Tom Cairns (who is also the stage director of this production) adapted the opera from the classic 1962 film by Luis Buñuel, where it’s statistically more likely that people in general have heard of the film.
The other big interest generally in this opera is that The Exterminating Angel is that rare bird at the Metropolitan Opera (or at any major opera house), an opera by a living composer. Per 3CM’s usual (loserly) protocol, some linky goodness from the Met Opera itself to get you up to speed (ish) on the opera includes their plot synopsis and a pdf link of today’s actual program booklet. You’ll note that Adès, a Brit born in 1971, is also on the podium to conduct all the performances in NYC, which mark the first North American production of the opera. He did the same at the premiere production in Salzburg in July/August 2016, and at the 2nd production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden earlier this year, in April & May. Thus it’s that much rarer an event these days to have the composer conducting his own opera.
That interest reflects in a relative plethora of articles in the NYT on the opera, which cynics might dismiss as so much free PR for the Met, except that the articles are good reading, IMHO. Those articles include discussion of:
* Zachary Woolfe, NYT, 10/20/17, general preview
* Michael Cooper, NYT, 10/24/17, use of unusual instruments (e.g. smaller violins, ondes martenot). BTW, a related video feature by Jean-Yves Chainon and Tim Chaffee from the NYT’s website is here.
Again per self the loser’s SOP for this series, some reviews of this production are as follows, starting with standard media outlets:
* Anthony Tommasini, NYT
* Justin Davidson, New York magazine
* John Rockwell, Financial Times
* David Patrick Stearns, WQXR
Getting away from standard media outlets, here are a few blogosphere reviews:
* Eric C. Simpson, New York Classical Review
* James Jorden, Observer
In fact, there’s even post-first night follow-up articles, namely:
* Seth Colter Walls and Glenn Kenny, NYT, 11/1/17, more from a discussion of relating the movie to the opera
* Zachary Woolfe, NYT, 11/7/17, on what is allegedly the highest note ever sung at the Met, the A above high C
BTW, from across the pond, so to speak, you can check out this video c/o YT from the Royal Opera House that also previews the opera:
From this side of the pond, the Metropolitan Opera posted this separate video filmed at the Guggenheim Museum, with Met Opera general director Peter Gelb, Adès, and Cairns, as well as performers in the production:
If you click through to the reviews (and even if you don’t), the critical reaction is pretty sharply divided. 3 are quite favorable (AT, JD, ECS), 1 is pretty favorable (JR), and 2 loathe the opera (DPS, JJ). Tommasini seems to be back in his “rah-rah” mode for being nice to the Met, even down to his closing line:
“In a timid Met season very heavy on the staples, The Exterminating Angel is the company’s one bold offering. If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.”
As much like advertising as that line sounds, Tommasini does state a fair bit of truth there, in one aspect. The Exterminating Angel is the only contemporary opera in the Met Opera’s repertoire this season, which is par at best most seasons, and generally is one above par in a given season. To put this in context, the next most recent opera to The Exterminating Angel in this season’s Met Opera repertoire is from just about 90 years earlier, Puccini’s Turandot. In the Met’s repertoire this season, you get 4 Puccini operas, 3 Mozart, and mostly familiar stuff among the rest, with a few slightly off the wall choices (e.g. Rossini’s Semiramide, Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon and Thaïs) here and there. Unlike on Broadway, where you’re much more likely to see a new or at least recent play or musical, it’s mostly old, old, old works at opera houses, pretty much anywhere (even in Europe). You get the idea.
So it does take some moxie and risk to stage a contemporary opera these days at the very risk-averse Met, and an opera that’s not even 2 years old at that. They do have a bit of a track record with Adès, as the Met staged his 2004 opera of The Tempest in 2012. The Met is one of the 4 opera houses that co-commissioned the work, with the Royal Danish Opera as the 4th company with an “investment” in the work, so to speak. In terms of finances, this is actually pretty smart practice, for multiple companies to share the expenses and thus dilute the risk, in terms of putting up the commissioning fees for the composer and librettist. It also guarantees that those opera houses will stage the work, as opposed to more of a “one and done” risk if only one opera house has commissioned a new opera. (Whether this opera is “four and done” is another question, given its large ensemble cast and instrumentation demands, of which more in a bit.)
All that aside, on to the matter at hand, the opera itself, namely: how good is The Exterminating Angel, and how was the performance? Given that this is the next-to-last performance, one would have advance expectations that the singers and orchestra would have well settled into the work by this time. This expectation becomes the more so when you know that 6 of the singers have sung their particular roles in all 3 productions so far.
Also, since this is new opera, and as I’ve also seen The Tempest both Memorex (the 2012 HD-cast) and live (2006 in Santa Fe), as well as heard several works of Adès on CD and via teh interwebs (e.g. BBC Radio 3 and the Proms), I had a general expectation that I wasn’t going to get big tunes or arias. As long as my ears were engaged, that would suffice, and fundamentally, that’s the most important general criterion for me.
On that last point, my general evaluation was “meh”, which seems pretty par for the course for contemporary music. Part of it was due to the feeling that the pace of the story seemed a bit leaden, if only for the obvious musico-dramatic reason that it takes longer to sing lines than to speak them. I also felt that rhythmically, the music seemed somewhat galumphing in overall pace. In fairness, Adès does lighten the textures in several places, even to the point of just having either a guitar or a piano playing alone. Perhaps the most viscerally exciting passage was the drum interlude between Acts I and II, which Adès noted in his intermission chit-chat with HD-host Susan Graham as coming from Buñuel’s hometown (or thereabouts). I also wonder if a different conductor with a lighter rhythmic touch might present things differently, but that’ll have to wait for the time of the opera’s 5th staging, once done at the Royal Danish Opera (scheduled production # 4).
Paradoxically, though, since this is opera, after all, when things started to get out of control, with the characters unable to exit the room and starting to freak out, the characters freak out correspondingly pretty fast. Maybe even a bit too fast, even by the relatively slow dramatic standards of opera, which seems in contradiction to what I said about the pacing of the music above. My understanding of the movie (which loser I have never seen, BTW) is that the movie is a lot more deadpan in the presentation of the characters, and the ensuing chaos is more of a slow burn.
Dramatically, though, I have to credit Adès and Cairns with the climax of the opera, when Leticia (Audrey Luna, the singer of that highest-note-ever @ the Met) comes up with the idea that leads to their liberation from the room, when, as the synopsis says:
“She realizes that, at this moment, each of them is in exactly the same place as when their strange captivity began. With her encouragement, the others hesitantly repeat their actions from that first night.”
But then one action changes from the repeat of the earlier events. This leads to Leticia launching into what struck me as the one true solo aria of the whole work, with a somewhat high-flown text that actually fits exactly what one subconsciously expects in an opera. The other characters on stage become her audience, as we are in the movie house and the Met Opera-goers are there in NYC, and the HD-cameras captured that sense of the other characters becoming enthralled at that moment. I actually found this aria from Luna dramatically inspired, and perhaps the single most touching moment in the whole work. She thinks that she has the solution, and we all want it to work, as do the characters on stage. It was a long while to get to that emotional payoff. But for me, at least, that payoff moment worked.
Overall, the HD-transmission itself went OK, with maybe one threatened bit of satellite fuzziness and a very camera-out-of-focus moments. The sound palette seemed somewhat compressed, sort of grey-ish, although I don’t know how much of that might have been due to Adès himself, i.e. his orchestration. Of course, hearing unamplified music live in the opera house or concert hall is supposed always to be better than any recording, no matter how impressive. So the frequency range should be wider in person, i.e. the highs are brighter, and the lows rumble deeper. However, in terms of nit-picky details, one mistake in the subtitles was when Raul asks Blanca to play a work by “Hades”, where the actual line is “something by Adès, I implore you”. Just a tiny bit of self-reference there, but with the mistranslation, 3CM the loser wonders how many people missed the in-joke.
Given that the cast includes 15 (count ‘em) principal singers, it’s obviously impossible to interview all 15 for the HD intermission features. So the choices fell to 4 of them, Alice Coote (Leonora) and Sir John Tomlinson (Doctor Conde) in the first of them at the start of the intermission, and Iestyn Davies (Francisco) and Sally Matthews (Silvia) in the second of them towards the end. When asked the perhaps-inevitable question of the challenges learning these new parts in such difficult music, AC and SJT each took care to express how well Adès wrote for each of the roles, particularly Tomlinson, who is one of the singers who has been in all 3 productions so far (as are Davies and Matthews). For somewhat comic effect, both Davies and Matthews put on very grim looks, perhaps to “get into character” for Act III, at the start of their chit-chat with Susan Graham. Also, when Graham asked about the not-quite-right relationship between the characters of Francisco and Silvia, Matthews forthrightly said the i-word. Matthews noted that the Met’s production had 6 new singers compared to the first two productions, which she noted as giving fresh energy to the production. Davies himself commented that obviously the audiences differed as well in the different cities, where he heard a lot more audience laughs in NYC than elsewhere.
Fittingly, Graham spent a part of the intermission with the ondes marteniste, Cynthia Millar, right after speaking with Coote and Tomlinson. The HD-cast showed several overhead shots of Millar working her magic on the ondes martenot, and CM explained how one actually plays it. Even though it has a keyboard, one doesn’t actually play those keys like a piano. Her right hand slides along the wire, while her left works various buttons and such. Graham posited the none-too-subtle idea that the ondes martenot itself is “the exterminating angel”, which may be obvious, but actually kind of works as a concept. CM certainly didn’t contradict SG there. I vaguely recall an on-line comment somewhere that Millar deserved a solo bow on stage of her own. I agree with that sentiment.
The last interview during intermission, just before Adès went back into the pit to conduct, was with Adès himself. He doesn’t seem to be the most comfortable or at ease interview subject, as he held the mike extremely close to his mouth the whole time. I understand that for a long time, Adès actually didn’t give any media interviews at all. I guess that he realizes that in this day and age, with opera and classical music so much on the cultural margins, opera and classical music artists need to engage with the public. In some fairness, I have seen Adès speak once in a pre-concert talk at Carnegie Hall with Carnegie Hall artistic staff on stage, obviously without the pressure of movie cameras.
In terms of other stage business, the very opening of the HD-transmission showed both Susan Graham and the 3 live sheep in the background, although when one actually did see the 3 sheep on stage in Act III, they just pretty much stand there. For the record, in terms of what happens next in the plot regarding the sheep, no sheep were harmed or offed in the making of this opera. Also, at the very end, as in Salzburg (and presumably London), all 15 principal singers took their bows together in a single line, holding hands.
So even with the mixed reviews, and my own mixed feelings about the work, I’m glad that the Met is staging this opera and putting its full weight behind it, to the point of including it in the Met HD-cast calendar this season. The whole afternoon experience, with intermission, was 2 hours and 45 minutes, even if the music sometimes made things feel longer than that. But the larger point is that new work is getting a chance at the Met, finally, and audiences can make their own judgments on it. As long as you have seen it to give it honest judgment, then it’s OK if you hate it. And if you like it based on seeing it, that’s great. One heartening sign is that even in stuck-in-the-heartland STL, most of the movie house where I saw it this afternoon was pretty full, except for the very front row. For Mozart, Puccini, or Verdi, a full movie house would be pretty much normal now. For a contemporary opera, a near-full house is a very good sign of initial open-mindedness.
(BTW, if anyone wants to see the encore presentation, it will be on Nov. 29, the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, not the standard very next Wednesday after the live HD-cast as is standard practice, for the obvious reason of the Thanksgiving holiday next week.)
As noted earlier, one meta-irony of this diary is that 3CM the loser has actually never seen the original movie of The Exterminating Angel. In that sense, I went to the HD-cast with an open (or empty) mind as to the story, even though I knew its gist from everything that I’d heard about it. So one of these days I’ll have to see the film. Of course, I’ll do so with subliminal memories of the having seen the opera (or at least the HD-cast of the opera) first ahead of the movie, rather than the other way around.
With that, you can now:
*Discuss the HD-cast (or, heck, even the original movie), or:
*Observe the standard loser-story-of-the-week SNLC protocol.
Or you can do both, since the two options are far from mutually exclusive :) .
(PS: Will be back later this evening, so I most likely won’t respond to any comments quickly, but will certainly catch up later in the evening.)