Les Troyens (The Trojans) can be relied on to be a headache for anyone who opts to take it on. It represented Hector Berlioz's bid for operatic immortality, but in reality it contains long stretches of considerable boredom. He conceived it on a massive scale, but only the last three of its five acts were performed during his lifetime, and heavily cut at that. New York's Metropolitan Opera decided to mount it to open their centennial season in 1983, but even this was a re-staging of their production 10 years earlier. It's this version that finally arrives in DVD format from Deutsche Grammophon this month.
The opera retells the story told in Books Two and Four of Virgil's Aeneid - the fall of Troy and Aeneas's subsequent love affair with Dido, Queen of Carthage. You begin with dazed Trojans celebrating the departure of the Greeks, and wondering what that bizarre wooden horse they've left behind is all about; and you finish with Dido stabbing herself on her funeral pyre as Aeneas, leaving her loveless and middle-aged, sails away to found Rome.
Jessye Norman sings Cassandra, the young clairvoyant who's the only Trojan to foresee what's about to happen and the dominant character in the first two acts. Tatiana Troyanos takes on Dido, singing at the end what Berlioz called the saddest music he'd ever written. As for the youthful Placido Domingo, he reportedly tried to persuade the Met to find somebody else to sing Aeneas after studying the part and finding it impossibly high. As one wag remarked, they probably didn't try very hard.
The result is a mixed bag at best. The ballet sequences are truly awful, with dancing that was old-fashioned even in the 1980s, though not inappropriate to the unimaginative production style. In addition, the director expects the audience to be satisfied with a mere horse's head to represent the wooden horse (for which the Met's vast stage would have had plenty of room) and the royal hunt, during which Aeneas and Dido first become lovers, is left un-staged and simply a musical interlude.
Even so, there are some fine things. Jessye Norman, in her Met debut, is outstanding. The final 45 minutes, too, are very strong - Domingo trembling at the prospect of the inevitable goodbye scene, and Troyanos utterly convincing as she moves towards her final moments.
But Les Troyens as a work is uneven at best, and Berlioz was no match for Wagner (who some believe he was trying to emulate). If you want great opera, this doesn't really make the grade. Nevertheless, if you genuinely want Berlioz's largest-scale assault on eternal fame featuring internationally-known names, you'll have to consider this version.
It's well-known that Glenn Gould recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations twice, once in 1955 when he was 23, then again in 1981, a year before he died. The first version made his name, while the second provided a yardstick to assess how far this by now strange, reclusive odd-ball had traveled.
A DVD from Sony Classical shows him playing the whole set in the latter year. You begin by seeing him chat with the filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon, but most of the DVD has him simply playing in close-up - beating the rhythm in the air whenever one hand is unoccupied on the keyboard, singing quietly (or not so quietly) to himself, and the whole time in a kind of trance.
The whole film lasts an hour, and is a good introduction (if that's what you need) to J.S. Bach, Glenn Gould, and maybe, too, what it's like to be a genius who has no alternative but to dedicate his life to the service of an extraordinary talent.
Well Go USA in Taiwan continues to commemorate the passing of Pavarotti by promoting a DVD called The Impossible Dream which shows arrangements of the first Three Tenors concert in 1990. You watch them rehearsing to piano accompaniment, hanging around backstage at the ancient Roman baths at Caracalla where the event was staged, conferring with the conductor Zubin Mehta (who had to manage the forces of two combined orchestras), and generally priming themselves for the occasion. There are better memorials to Pavarotti, but, if you haven't seen this one before, it remains of genuine interest.
Apparent impossibility overcome appears again with Yo-Yo Ma's (馬友友) latest CD New Impossibilities. It's the third CD containing material from his Silk Road Chicago project, a year of concerts and improvised sessions that ended in June. Seventeen musicians from, among other places, Lebanon, Iran, India and China combined with Ma and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to expand boundaries and unite different musical traditions. So you hear tablas and violins, pipas and cellos, a caxixi and a double bass, all played by masters in their field.
However old Ma gets (he's now 52), he doesn't stop bringing disparate people together through his performances. In Chicago, he won extensive praise for his continuing optimism and energy. For him, the Silk Road is a symbol of continuing inter-connectedness, which is still as valid today as it was 2,000 years and more ago.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and