What do these two have in common? Well...they're both operas. They're both about forty-five minutes long. And I saw them both on the same day. Other than that, not much. But I'm sticking them together anyway.
Poulenc is best-known for his opera Dialogues des Carmélites, about a group of Carmelite nuns who are martyred during the Terror. I never wrote about it here, probably because I was having trouble wrapping my head around it. It's obviously a profound piece that I should revisit, but I didn't know if I had a lot to say about it at the time.
I may have the same problem with this one, honestly. It's based on a play by Jean Cocteau, and the only character is a soprano who is having a conversation over the phone with her former lover. She tries to act normal, but then reveals that she had tried to commit suicide over him. The ending is ambiguous; she may or may not die then and there. I say let her live: why does everything have to be a whole big thing, anyway?
It's certainly impressive for a single singer to carry an entire opera. There are a fair few versions on youtube, but I watched this one, I think mainly just because it includes English subs. It was fine, although the woman is not talking into an actual phone until the very end, which makes her look kind of insane. Of course, that could be a valid way to play it, but I'm not sure if it was intentional or not. The singer, Amy Burton, was fine.
Not sure what I think about this, honestly. I kind of liked the premise, but I also--I hate to admit it--got a little bit bored. See, that's my dark secret: I can act like I like highbrow art, and I do a lot of the time, but if it's not engaging me I can easily zone out and start to think about other unrelated things. There may have been a bit of that here. Still, it's short, so watching it again in another version and seeing how it strikes me might not be a bad idea.
RIGHT, now onto more Finnish stuff. This is the last Rautavaara opera that's currently available in video form, so don't expect to see any more by him for a while here! Apparently, I'm a Rautavaara completist. What a weird thing to be, especially given that I'm not a super-huge fan.
Well, certainly the plot here is calculated to appeal to an English-speaking audience more than the others I've seen. And you know that's what the producers of this DVD were going for, inasmuch as it has burnt-in English subtitles. Sheesh. I mean, not that I was planning to watch it without, but is there ever a good reason to have those on a disc, other than perhaps in certain documentaries. Whatever!
Anyway, you know what it's about: it's Christmastime and he sells his heirloom watch to buy her a set of tortoiseshell combs and she sells her hair to buy him a platinum chain for his watch. What a coupla buffoons!
It's...not bad. Not terrible, anyway. Some nice, Christmas-y music, and even though the story is admittedly slightly, I think it's fundamentally strong enough to make this work. There is a..."subplot" might be giving it too much credit...a few scenes about the couple's mean landlord who--the opera is surprisingly and somewhat jarringly graphic about this--is willing to accept sex in lieu of rent money, and there's this one slutty tenant who, we presume, has taken him up on that. I have no idea what this is doing here, and the landlord looks altogether too much like an anti-Semitic stereotypes...so yeah, someone in this process fucked things up pretty badly. Under the circumstances, I don't know if I'd recommend it or not.
This concludes my overview of the two short operas that I saw back-to-back. As you were.
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