A lot of places are putting free opera streams online lately to help people pass the time, including this new production of Glass's piece (which is available until Sunday). Hmm, I thought. Am I really up for this? Honestly, if it weren't time-sensitive, or if I had been able to download it, I probably would've just filed it away for possible future investigation and then forgotten about it. But since it was now or never, I decided, okay, now. Four more hours of avant-garde anti-opera. Why not? I'm sure you could give me a long numbered list.
I'm a little bit confused, because this is really so different it almost might as well not have the same name. Given the fact that there's no story or anything dictated by the music, there's no reason you can't put any ol' visuals up there, but I was under the impression that Robert Wilson's production was considered an integral part of the piece. But no, this is totally different, right from the beginning. In the other version I saw, you have two women reciting a series of numbers. Here, there's just one woman, who is later joined on stage by Einstein himself, who recites most of the disconnected phrases. In that other one, there's a woman dressed as Einstein playing the violin; here, the violin is played by a non-dressed-as-Einstein woman. So it seems that you can do what you want with this music; I suppose there'd be nothing stopping someone from making a completely non-Einstein version. If they wanted.
The whole thing is still totally inscrutable, don't get me wrong, but in a totally different way. There's an extensive use of video and silhouettes. There are a bunch of people dressed as toreadors. At one point Einstein is, literally, on the beach, with people playing badminton and a guy being attacked by a crab. That's kind of funny. Which one is better? Well...that's gonna be a very individual question. I feel I probably liked the first one I saw better; I thought, maybe, that it brings the inchoate themes through better. But you might completely disagree! That's fine. They're both well-made.
One thing about the new version is that it's a half hour shorter. That might be reason enough for some people to choose that one. I can't say why that's true for the most part, but one thing I did notice: when I watched the (in?)famous "prematurely air-conditioned supermarket" section, I thought, huh. That felt a lot shorter than it did before. So I went back and checked the DVD, and sure enough, while that one is a full thirteen minutes, this is only half of that. Not sure why. This isn't something that you would edit down for space concerns.
I do have to say, though: I know a lot of people, including myself, discovered Glass with the Met in HD production of Akhnaten, and even if you really love that one, this might be a heavy lift. It's interesting in its own right, but, as much as I hate to give into convention in anyway, I think having some sort of story to hang the opera on is extremely beneficial for the evocative music. There's probably a reason that--as far as I know--Glass has never tried to be quite this willfully experimental since.
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