If the answer to revitalizing old operas is to stage updated productions with charismatic, not to say sexy, soloists in the main roles, then the new Manon from Deutsche Grammophon is a model of exactly how it should be done.
Massenet’s five-act opera, though famous in its day, has been out of fashion even among operagoers for years. But this stunning 2007 production starring Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon, with Daniel Barenboim conducting, could scarcely be bettered. It sizzles, soars and then goes on to make you laugh and cry at all the right moments.
It’s directed by Vincent Paterson, previously a Hollywood director more used to working with Madonna than with French 19th-century opera. But the result is stupendous. He updates the story of the tragic love of a serious young man (Des Grieux) and a slightly sluttish but highly characterful girl (Manon) to the 1950s, and the costume and set designers, clearly allowed a generous budget, have a whale of a time as a result.
There are bedroom scenes (clearly not envisaged when the opera was premiered in 1884, based on the Abbe Prevost’s 18th-century story) and street scenes, with party scenes to link them. But most important of all, musically this is really glorious. Anna Nebretko has fought hard to persuade the more serious-minded critics that her glamorous style also goes with a top-ranking voice, and these days she’s succeeded. She’s an ideal Manon, dazzling both visually and musically. Her opposite, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon, is hardly less exciting.
These two DVDs are consequently very highly recommended. They could convert you to opera, and if you’re already converted, they might just convert you to Massenet’s music as well.
Dostoyevsky wrote From the House of the Dead about his prison experiences in Siberia, where he’d been sent as an imagined revolutionary. The fact that he came back an ardent monarchist didn’t blunt his frank portrayal of prison conditions, however. But what he did most memorably was provide insights into the personalities and psychology of his fellow inmates, albeit in a series of rather fragmentary sketches.
Janacek used this book as the basis of his final opera, first performed in 1930, two years after his death. He wrote the libretto himself, using almost exclusively words and phrases from Dostoyevsky’s original. His music is repetitive, rhythmic and insistent, and brilliantly colored as played on a new DVD by the small Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
What attracted critics was that the project marked the collaboration, 30 years after their ground-breaking centenary Ring at Bayreuth, of conductor Pierre Boulez and director Patrice Chereau. The result is intensely memorable, a piece of clownishly violent sung theater accompanied by this unstoppably destabilizing music. In the last analysis it’s not Chereau’s direction (less radical than for his famous Ring) nor the performances of the soloists, strong though they frequently are, but the music itself that proves so unforgettable.
If Manon might convert you to opera if you enjoy glitz and glamour, this might do so if you think opera is bound to be overemotional and old-fashioned. Nothing could be less of either than this stark, brutal, primitive and curiously unnerving work.
No one is ever totally naked in The Full Monteverdi, though the title is an obvious pun on The Full Monte and some of the singers and actors involved do get pretty close. It’s a film in which the UK six-member vocal ensemble I Fagiolini pair up with an identical number of actors and actresses and lip-synch through their recording of Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals, dating from 1604. The lyrics of these ancient songs focus on the pains of love, and filmmaker John La Bouchardiere has concocted a series of interlinked modern stories of broken hearts and shattered relationships to go with them.
The setting is contemporary London, and the participants are yuppie business types, mostly in their 30s. They’re first seen drinking white wine in a bleakly chic restaurant, then in various stages of splitting up, already well-advanced when the hour-long film begins. The result is beautiful to listen to but depressing to watch. Even so, it’s an important first — making Renaissance madrigals accessible through dramatizing them in a sleek contemporary setting.
Last month I praised Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s 1985 version of Bach’s Johannes Passion [Taipei Times, Aug. 27, 2008, Page 14]. So I thought I’d look at a DVD version of the Matthaus Passion, universally considered the greater work. The one I got hold of was by the Choir of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, UK, issued in Taiwan on the Brilliant Classics label. What a disappointment it has proved!
Firstly, there are no subtitles at all. Instead, a booklet provides the original German text, without translation — as good as useless as far as I’m concerned. Second, the performance is tweely androgynous, to an extent beyond belief. I was well aware of how fey English Anglicanism can be, but nothing prepared me for this pious letdown. Harnoncourt’s strong, extrovert rendering couldn’t be further removed from this self-approving display from England’s academic elite and their minions.
Paradoxically, only soprano Emma Kirby strives to save something of Bach’s native masculine vigor, but the combined efforts of the English epicenes proves too much even for her.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would