Here's an interesting contemporary opera--maybe the most contemporary I've ever seen. It takes place definitively in the here and now, and it takes advantage of technology to drive that home.
But what's it about? Well...that's a vexed question. It's about the titular violinist, Martin, who is having some sort of life crisis: he's supposed to be practicing and performing, but instead, he just ignores all his voice mails and messes around on his phone and drinks (that's one thing that doesn't ring quite true--who the heck is leaving voicemails in 2017?). He exchanges messages with a woman on a dating site (the opera makes heavy use of a big screen in the background to show what's on his phone). There are...jumps in time? Apparently? And a murder? Probably? Martin's obsessed with the late Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who murdered his wife and her lover, which may be a hint about something (Quoth wikipedia: "Due to his status as a nobleman, the Gran Corte della Vicaria found that Gesualdo had not committed a crime." Plus ça change...).
The music is tense and unnerving and I sort of tensed up at the climax even though I wasn't totally sure why. But if the above doesn't make it clear: I basically found the story totally impenetrable (this is an Operavision production that's long been taken down). I am absolutely one hundred percent positive that there is in fact a there there, but whether it's just too abstruse to get after a single viewing (at least for a dumb guy like me), or whether the production wasn't filmed entirely clearly--hard to say. Very probably both.
Still, I don't know. This is a sort of story that you don't see often in opera, and I enjoy being challenged and I enjoy the fact that contemporary opera is a vibrant thing. I feel like it's like Disney comics in that it's totally unknown to outsiders ("what, they still make those things?), but I am a cool ninja who appreciates such things. End of story.
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