View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (March 1999, week 3) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 01:58:50 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Higglety Pigglety Pop!/Where the Wild Things Are, QEH, 17Mar99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There must be more to life Jennie Cynthia Buchan Plant/Baby/Mother Goose Lisa Saffer Rhoda/Baby's Mother Rosemary Hardy Cat/Ash tree Christopher Gillett Pig/Ash tree David Wilson-Johnson Lion Stephen Richardson Where the Wild Things Are Max Lisa Saffer Mama/Tzippy Rosemary Hardy Goat/Beard Christopher Gillett Horns Quentin Hayes Rooster David Wilson-Johnson Bull Stephen Richardson Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak's double bill of fantastic operas, based on Sendak's picture stories, amazingly transfer much of the stories' rich visual and emotional appeal into music and language. Like the books, they are straightforward enough for youngish children, with plenty of simple jokes and funny noises. But they are serious and resonant enough to fascinate adults as well as delight them. Higglety is a mysterious, elegaic picaresque tale starring Jennie, a Sealyham Terrier who likes to eat. Sendak wrote the book as a farewell to and mourning for the original Jennie, who died aged fourteen just after the opera was published in 1967. Jennie has everything at home (in a black bag) but wants to know what is outside over there. She eats the potted plant that tells her to stay put, takes her bag and goes out into the world. A pig tells her that the World Mother Goose Theatre is looking for a leading lady with experience, so (guided by a cat whose milk cart she trashes from inside) she takes on the challenge of getting a baby to eat. To return the baby to its parents, who are at the Castle Yonder, Jennie puts it (magically shrunk) into her bag, which it in turn trashes. (This must be great on stage for small children.) She has to say the baby's name to stop a lion eating it, apparently fails, and, having lost everything, falls asleep under a discontented ash tree. She is woken by the cast of the World Mother Goose Theatre, who welcome her as their new leading lady in the opera Higglety Pigglety Pop!. Instead of being transformed into a constellation, as in the earliest operas, Jennie is immortalized in an infectious nursery rhyme, with the melodic shape of Three blind mice and the rhythm of Hickory Dickory Dock. And gets to eat a mop made of salami every night and twice on Saturdays. With a single-minded dog as its hero, Higglety has a touch of the classical (Cynic inspired) satire, which offers a comic commentary on human appetites. To me, it also has a baroque feel, with overtones of Calderon's Il gran theatro del mundo, El Buscon, and particularly Cervantes' Coloquio des los perros, which has a powerful sense of another world that we desire in the same way as, and need as much as, food or sex, but which we can only get at through the confusion and occasional pain of this life. Knussen, however, seems to pick up on Sendak's use of, maybe, Rowlandson and earlier Enlightenment styles. He inserts fragments of The magic flute (Ein Maedchen oder ein Weibchen with chimes in the second interlude and a brief Mozartian overture to the opera within the opera) to create a still comical but uplifting journey of initiation. The baby in Higglety is a screaming monster who turns out to be Mother Goose herself, the onlie begetter of the opera. Max in Wild Things is also a screaming monster, directing his own personal theatre in which he puts on his wolf suit, murders his toys and is sent to bed without supper. But he can't initially direct the dream which takes him into a forest and over the sea to the island where the Wild Things are. Although he finds his wolf cry scares them, and they make him their king, he also learns to play with them. But he eventually gets lonely and returns home, where his mother has left him a bowl of his favorite soup, lovely and hot. Max, unlike Jennie, returns from a land of the imagination to find reality more comfortable than he expected. The shape, and some of the music, of Wild Things, recalls L'enfant et les sortileges, but the music and language is also pure fun. Knussen finds in childhood music by Mussorgsky and Debussy the equivalent of the Arthur Rackham illustrations that lie behind Sendak's Wild Things. The Wild Things sing Yiddish-based gibberish and make expressive noises (yawns, grunts). The wild rumpus dance in which all join is a hoot, a completely graceless waltz/marurka. The London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, were splendid, as ever, and many of the players seemed to be having great fun as well. The singers were all first-rate modern music specialists. They stood behind the orchestra and used mikes, to variously deletrious effect but none fatally. Lisa Saffer was technically impressive in the two difficult high soprano roles, but she had a fight with her mike in Higglety and really didn't get the traumatic soprano blast in the baby's screams. She was a bit more forceful as Max, but still better in his lyrical arias. Cynthia Buchan was announced as having a bad cold, and delivered some unscored barks and growls that were fine for a Sealyham but must have been distressing for a singer. She still gave a generally musical performance full of comic character. Rosemary Hardy was also very funny as both Rhoda the maid and the posh mother on the phone at Castle Yonder. Christopher Gillett still has quite a beatiful voice, and acted suitably feline. Stephen Richardson was roaring both as the lion and the bull Wild Thing. David Wilson-Johnson is by way of being a national treasure. He's almost as good, maybe only lacking such an intense vocal focus, as Stanford Sylvan, who I think is the Anglophone answer to DFD. He does difficult modern music in style, and he can also do a jolly Anglican-style Handel role, or an operetta buffoon. He was both porcine and hammy as the theatrical pig. I can see why Knussen wanted to do the Wild Things. He looks quite a bit like one of them, and also seems to be a sweet old thing. Who will dare to set the dank, sweet melancholy of Fungus the Bogeyman to music? Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.