View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (August 1998, 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: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 23:37:40 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Proms and Frogs (15-16Jul98) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Another works outing yesterday, to the choral day at the Proms. This was a mixed (in every sense) bag of choral works, all unaccompanied or with very small instrumental ensembles, ending with a massed choir performance of Carmina Burana with four pianos and percush. The high point was for me Ex Cathedra's performance of Le reniement de St Pierre by M-A Charpentier. Ex Cathedra is a chamber group based in the Birmingham Oratory. Their repertoire is mainly seventeenth century Latin oratorios and related works, including Monteverdi's madgrigals adapted with sacred texts, which formed the other part of their programme. The Charpentier isn't Bach, but it's elegant and reflective. The low point was the Huddersfield Choral Society's performance of Elgar's Tedium. The evening performance of Carmina Burana was mainly loud, but impressively controlled. John Graham-Hall was grotesquely funny as the roast swan, and Judith Howarth had plenty of brio, and a voice that delivered throughout the hall. I'm afraid I can't say the same for Rodney Gilfrey, who might not have known what he was getting into. He's certainly got a pleasant voice, maybe more, but he sang almost all the time looking at the music in his hands, and didn't even start to project into the hall, either dramatically or vocally. Tonight's prom, by the City of London Symphonia under Richard Hickox, included Dunkelhvide Manestraler, a setting by Diana Burrell of two poems in Danish by Tove Ditlevson. Ditlevson is up there with Karyotakis as Europe's most funereal serious poet (and he had the excuse of living in Preveza). The first poem, Vinternat, is an ecstatic vision of death on a clear, starlit winter night, the second, Laengsel mod Someren, a yearning for death and oblivion in nature in the beauty of spring. Burrell's setting, for mezzo, cor anglais and chamber orchestra, was evocative of the harshness and brutality of nature rather than of the transcendence that seems to be implied in the poems, though Catherine Wyn-Rogers made the vocal line rich and fluid, if not particularly expressive. Nicholas Daniel managed to make the cor anglais part of cruel nature, which is impressive in a strange way. The other vocal work was John Tavener's The hidden face, which has transcendence in plenty. It is a dialogue between a solo oboe, Nicholas Daniel again, and counter tenor, Michael Chance, with an ostinato string ensemble. I found it hypnotic and moving in the darkened hall. Michael Chance might not have carried throughout the hall, but he seemed fully engaged and delivered some awesome pianissimos. Also today, an extreme rarity, Sondheim and Shevelove's version of Aristophanes' Frogs, in the Lost Musicals series at the Barbican. This series of concert performances, repeated on three or four successive Sunday afternoons, presents American musicals which deserve to be less forgotten. I think this is the first time The Frogs has been performed since its initial performance in 1974, in a swimming pool by students from Yale Drama School, including famously Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. I'm not quite sure what Sondheim and Shevelove were trying to do. My initial thought was that they were going for a repeat of A funny thing happened... Shevelove had adapted The Frogs previously without music, though, and must have known that less of it could be reworked as burlesque, or any other modern genre. The result is a fairly faithful, musically eclectic, translation of the original. The only substantive difference is that Dionysos (turned into Dionysis, perhaps for reasons of euphony) goes to Hades to get G.B Shaw, and comes back with Will Shakespeare. Aristophanes set up a contest between Euripides' cleverness and Aeschylus' traditional literary and moral values in advising the city. Sondheim and Shevelove have Shaw and Shakespeare exchange lines on men and women, life and death. Shakespeare wins the contest with a strangely effective setting of Fear no more the heat of sun, from Cymbeline. It's mostly talk, but there's an amusing if over-long patter introduction in which Dionysos instructs the audience in correct behaviour in the theatre (Please do not fart/The space is small and this is art), and some virtuoso choruses, including the eponymous one and the parabasis, in which the chorus leader makes a direct-to-audience plea for real passion in the theatre, and the chorus comment ironically in close harmony that it's only a play. Somehow, Shaw doesn't have the immediacy that Euripides must have had to the original audience, and Shakespeare is even more remote. But the contrast between satire and realism in Shaw and poetic truth to human experience in Shakespeare works surprisingly well. Opera? Not really, except opera is the true descendent of the overloaded, culturally central performances of Greek tragedy. From time to time it deals with full emotional force with the big questions, and we need to ask what it's for. I can imagine a modern Dionysos going looking for Puccini and coming back with Verdi. Or looking for Rossini and coming back with Handel. Or looking for Brecht and coming back with Sondheim. 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 CUNY LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU. [Powered by LISTSERV(R)]