Georges Bizet, Don Procopio (1859)

Bizet makin' a stab at popularity with his third opera, the plot of which is more or less a knock-off of Donizetti's Don Pasquale (though possibly less so than that hearing that would make you think).  It didn't work, though, as, for reasons that the wikipedia entry does not specify, it remained unperformed until 1906, well after Bizet's death.  It remains very rarely performed, so I was super-psyched to have an opportunity https://www.youtube.com/c/PacificOperaProject/videos to see it (I really don't understand the POP approach; as you'll see, there are a bunch of different videos.  Also, don't be fooled by the fact that they're three hours each; for some OTHER inexplicable reason, each one consist of two back-to-back performances, or copies of the same performance.  WEIRD.

Anyway, Don Andronico wants her daughter to marry an old rich guy, but she has her own preferred partner, so, along with her brother and aunt, she cooks up a scheme to make him think that she just wants his money, so as to drive him off.  Yup.  That's about it.  The biggest difference from Donizetti is that the title character feels much less central to the proceedings--he just runs off after being alienated, and we don't see him again--and also somewhat more self-aware/less clueless: he's skeptical about marriage in general and this marriage in particular from the the beginning; getting rid of him seems extremely...easy.  I don't think it took much effort.

Still, that's neither here nor there, as the music is quite delightful and fun, and there's really no reason this shouldn't be performed more often.  I do have some complaints about this particular production, however.  The first and probably most important isn't actually the performers' fault, but it's recorded at WAY too low a volume.  I turned the TV volume up to the max--one hundred--which I had never done before, and hope never to do again, and even like that it was barely adequate.  It's a good thing I remembered to turn it back down after; that could have resulted in disaster.

Second, this uses a stripped-down chamber version of the score.  It's okay, I guess, I'm not complaining too much, but boy would I ever have preferred a full orchestra.  And third, I hated to say it, but most of the cast, to one degree or another, is not quite ready for primetime.  The woman who plays Bettina, the heroine, is particularly egregious.  Again, not that I didn't enjoy it, but I would've enjoyed it more with a higher-caliber cast.

Oh, and also, I guess I should mention the ostriches: this performance's conceit is that Don Andronico has an ostrich farm, and that's where all the action takes place.  There are stuffed ostriches and a couple people in intentionally chintzy ostrich costumes.  It seems a bit excessively "LOL random" for me, but I'm not necessarily opposed to it.  I just feel that it's not done super-well here.  Not nearly as amusing as intended.  A for effort, I guess, but...

Antonio Cesti, La Dori (1657)

I'd heard about Cesti: he was extremely popular in his day, and he's notable for being a prolific composer most of whose operas survive, which is pretty unusual for the era.  But I'd never had a chane to actually sample his work until this disc, which was released late last year.

The plot's kind of baggy--as is many another opera from this area--but basically, you have Dori, an Egyptian princess.  She and Oronte, the heir to the Persian throne (and son of our ol' friend Artaserse, who is also a character), are in love, but unfortunately, through picaresque circumstances, she ends up disguising herself as a man, Alì; she's kidnapped by pirates and sold to slavers and ends up being the slave of Princess Arsione of Nicaea and becomes friends with her, which creates a conflict of interest, as Arsione is in love with Oronte (who likewise remains in love with Dori but thinks her dead) and the two of them are meant to be married.  Also, Asione's maid, Celinda, is actually a disguised Egyptian prince (and Dori's brother) Tolomeo; he is secretly in love with her (how he got into this position is not even hinted at by the libretto).  There's also a dude, Erasto, who's in love with Celinda, but that's a minor thing that could be cut out without affecting anything.  What am I forgetting?  Right, there's also Dirce, the obligatory horny old skirt-role nurse (this was the funniest goddamn concept imaginable to people in the seventeenth century).  In the end, there's some last-minute mistaken identity stuff--it turns out that Dori is actually Arsinoe's sister rather than Tolomeo's; why this is included, since it doesn't seem to change anything, is unclear.  But be that as it may, everyone is now happy.

The wikipedia goes on and on about how complicated the plot is, but honestly, I found it pretty straightforward.  Maybe I'm getting used to decoding complex stories, maybe not, but I definitely feel like I've seen worse.  That weird twist at the end did confuse me, though: what does it matter whether Dori is Arsinoe's sister or Tolomeo's?  She's a princess either way, and it's not like there was some potential incest that gets skirted by the change.  But thinking about it, I realized that it's probably because if she's Arsinoe's, Oronte can marry her and it's basically the same thing, thus not screwing up whatever strategic alliance this marriage was meant to cement.  I mean, the libretto doesn't even vaguely hint at this kind of realpolitik, but what else could it be?

In any event, the fact is, the music here fucking bangs.  Really great stuff.  You never know with these early operas, but we have here a bunch of early arias and duets along with the arioso, drama, comedy, you name it--a real garden of earthly delights, here.  On the strength of this, I'd say that Cesti's work deserves to be revived all over the place.

Mukan Tulebaev, Birzhan and Sara (1946)

Excellent! This is both my first Kazakh opera and my first opera from a -stan country. How many people have seen operas in more languages than I have, I wonder? Probably not that many, I bet. Still, I'd like to meet them. They could probably give me some good tips.

There are several performances online; you can easily find them. The wikipedia entry's plot synopsis is thin, but there's a fuller one (albeit somewhat syntactically odd) here, from when the Mariinsky was putting it on. Look, let's cut to the chase: the title characters are singers. They're in love, but unfortunately, Sara is supposed to be married to Zhetysu, the chief Zhanbota's hunchbacked brother. And there's also Altynai, another woman, who is unrequitedly in love with Birzhan.

Well, the marriage ceremony is going to proceed; what can one do? Birzhan appears on the scene to try to stop it, but the jealous Altynai alerts the guards and Birzhan is captured. What happens next isn't one hundred percent clear. The wikipedia entry claims that Altynai stabs Sara, leaving Birzhan bereft, but then asserts that "under different variants, Birzhan might die instead of Sara. The one that I saw must be a different variant, in that case: here, we see Birzhan's allies overpower the guard and rescue him, but then, he dies. Just because, it looks like. Where is Sara in all this? Unclear.

At least in the version I saw, the drama seems a little mushy (should I complain about an unsubtitled piece where I don't speak the language? "Should" got nothing to do with it). This Altynai character: she may stab Sara in the original version, but here she doesn't do much of anything. I'll be generous and just assume that the libretto states that she calls the guards, because it's not apparent from the action, but even if she does do that, it's all she does: after that she just vanishes. Apparently there's a thing earlier where she lies to Sara and tells her that Birzhan's gone mad, but that's not really anything, since he just appears soon enough anyway to instantly debunk that. It just seems like she should be doing more than she does. Same for the two Z-villains.

I do like the music though, quite a lot. In particular, there are some country dances for the planned wedding that bang really hard. Definitely better than many an opera that I see just for the novelty of the language. Anyway, my quest to see one from every former Soviet Socialist Republic seems to be not on hold: I've got Russia (obviously), Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and now Kazakhstan. Also, I saw that Romanian Puss in Boots, and Romanian is the same language as Moldovan, but I feel it's really not fair to count it if it's not actual from Moldova, dangit. Still, time will tell! I'll bet I'll be able to check off some more soon enough.

Desert in, Episodes Seven & Eight (2021)

Before every episode, there's a warning that "this series contains strong language, some nudity and strong sexual content" (I would've used an Oxford comma there, myself).  To me, this seems a relic of the time when gay stuff was considered automatically judged more harshly than straight, because seriously, this is PG-13 at most.  It's a little suggestive in parts, I guess, but there's very little nudity and no full frontal, and not much in the way of "strong language" either.  Well, okay, there are a few f-bombs.  WHATEVER.  HMPH.

Episode Seven, "The Sun Also Rises"

Nico Muhly

Huh.  Nico Muhly.  I know that guy!  I mean, not super-well, and I wouldn't exactly call myself a fanboy, but his Marnie was on the Met's Live in HD, and as I think about it, I'm pretty sure that was my first contemporary opera (I've also seen his short piece called The Glitch).  I don't remember being overly in love with it, but I wasn't very good at watching opera at that time, so you can't take much from that.  And even if it wasn't that great, that may be due more to the source material being kinda bad than anything else.  For copyright reasons, it's based on the book that the Hitchcock movie was based on rather than the movie itself, but either way, it's a kind of unpleasantly misogynistic story.  Not a fan, me.  But that is neither here nor there.

The music is about the same thing as ever, really, more or less.  It's fine!  But the story doesn't leave me much the wiser, and makes me reeeeaally wonder how they're going to end this thing (I'm writing this without having watched the final episode).  We open with voiceover from Ion's dead lover Rufus, setting him free and directing him to do his thing.  Then we see Cass and Sunny, who are arguing.  Sunny feels she has been betrayed by...whatever it is that Cass is doing with this inn and all.  Hard to say.  Then it's Ion and Federico; he orders Ion to leave, because regardless of his feelings, he doesn't feel able or willing to betray Sunny and Cass, and again, I don't know what that betrayal would entail.  Bentrail.  Well, we'll see what happens, but after seeing this, I really don't feel I know any more about what's going on that I did before; it seems like something you could just cut out without really losing anything.  That's not great; every episode should contribute something.

Episode Eight, "Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us"

Michael Abels

Well...yes.  This episode DOES feature the return of the Lounge Singer, who definitely shakes things up in a fun way.  After a little voiceover from her, we have Federico, who tells Ion that he had some sort of "crash" (which is presumably where he lost his leg), and Cass took him in: he's not really Sunny's sister; the whole thing is a lie.  I guess Cass, like, implanted a memory in his head?  We ALSO learn that Sunny either doesn't exist or at least isn't here: Cass is, apparently, in the same situation as her customers.  Ion offers to give her...something, which she allegedly wants, and whatever it is, it's visualized as his room key.  But she doesn't want it, and he runs off into the desert.  There are voiceovers of that old guy, Derek, who apparently died, as well as Sunny; all playing over Cass in her darkroom.  Derek wants to stay to see his dead girlfriend again (even though earlier it was his son).  Um...right.  And the last scene is a new guy at the inn, begging her to do the magic thing to let him see his dead boyfriend.  And that...is all.

Is this ending satisfying?  Well...not hugely.  I guess I sort of have an idea of what's happening, but it just kind of stops.  Not much in the way of closure.  Still, there are a lot of interesting ideas here, and some musically striking moments.  Probably I should watch the whole thing again before making any final judgments; this is definitely not your average opera, and maybe you need to learn how to watch it.  This coming Wednesday, there's going to be an online livechat with the producers.  I'll probably check that out and if I get any notable insight, report back here.  Or not!  It remains to be seen.

Aribert Reimann, Lear (1978)

Reimann is a composer I'd been meaning to check out, and this is freely available from the Bavarian State Opera until the end of the month, so of course I had to watch it.

It is King Lear.  I don't know what else to tell you about it, plotwise.  It's a perfectly reasonable adaptation of the story.  Unlike Sallinen's Kuningas Lear, it includes Kent.  It's an innately powerful story, so you'd have to work hard to fuck it up, and Reimann does not do that.  I'd go further, in fact, and say that this is in the short list of operas by living composers that ought to find a place in the repertoire; it's very good.  Sometimes subdued, almost ambient, it also launches into blasts of atonal noise to punctuate lines of dialogue.  It's very exciting; it seems to me that if Berg is a bit much for you, this might be a good entryway into that kind of music.  I do think this is better than the Sallinen (which I also liked!), although Matti Salminen in that one definitely makes more of an impression in the title role.

And yet, overall this didn't have the same emotional impact on me that that one did.  And you want to know why?  Well, the fact that this performance worked at all is a testament to how good the opera itself is, and is entirely in spite of the production itself, which only sabotages it.  The question emerges: is it possible for a production of an opera by a living composer to be Regietheater?  Reimann himself presumably signed off on this, so does it make any sense to complain?  Well, I am.  Complaining, that is.  The action is set in a museum.  Characters climb into display cases at various points.  People ride dollies on stage.  Here are Lear and Cordelia reunited near the end:

...okay.  And here are Edgar and Edmund:

...seriously, what are you DOING?  And check this one out; try to figure out what scene it is:

This is Lear on the heath.  The Fool is off-camera but on-stage; here we also see Gloucester, Kent, Edgar, and Inexplicable Bemulleted Curator Guy (whom we see at the very beginning guiding tourists around the room in French) who has a lot of stage time for no clear reason.  Seriously, man.  As I say, the opera is good enough that I like it anyway, but this could be SO MUCH BETTER.  Wanna see Gloucester with his eyes removed?

...yes, they have been replaced with cartoon googly eyes.  I cannot EVEN.  Here's the Fool:

...actually, fair play: that's not bad.  A striking interpretation that works for me.  But overall, man, what a train wreck.  There's a different production available on DVD, and without having seen it, I feel fairly confident in saying that that's the version you should seek out if you want to experience this opera, as you should.

Arthur Sullivan, The Rose of Persia (1899)

Sullivan's reputation suffered because of all his work on comic operas (though he also did other material), which people felt couldn't be as artistically great or "important" as serious stuff.  It's a totally crazy prejudice--would anybody really want to question the artistic merit of Le nozze di Figaro?--but at the same time, it IS kind of understandable: not to question their verbal facility, but Gilbert's libretti are just so light and frivolous that it's just a little hard to think of their operas in a serious way.  What can I say?  

Sullivan himself was chafing a bit having to keep writing music to these extremely silly words.  Gilbert tried to compromise with The Yeoman of the Guard, which includes some more serious elements.  Sullivan liked it, but the resulting work is very strange: the protagonist ends up heartbroken and alone, which is certainly an unexpected twist, but aside from that, the tone is exactly the usual thing, which creates a most peculiar dissonance.  

In the 1890s, the Savoy was really thrashing around looking for some kind of new success.  G&S had broken up, their two reunion operas weren't big successes, and no one else seemed able to replicate their popularity.  For this one, Sullivan was paired with a librettist named Basil Hood, very explicitly trying to imitate that classic G&S style.  And hey, this time it actually worked, at least public-success-wise.  The two of them were set to do a follow-up, The Emerald Isle, but Sullivan died before completing the score.  

I don't know; I wanted to see this as an interesting novelty: Gilbert and Sullivan minus Gilbert isn't something you hear most days.  So I found this, from 1995.  It's mostly pretty easy to understand the words, but there are places (including the opening chorus) when you'll be glad to have the libretto.

The plot really is flimsy as anything.  One hesitates to even try to describe it, lest it blow away.  There's this rich guy in Persia (do you imagine for a moment that Hood understood the differences between Persian and Arabic cultures?), Hassan (don't think that's a Persian name).  He has twenty-five wives, no more no less.  Anyway, some stuff happens, I don't need to go through it all, and he ends up claiming to be the sultan and being tricked by the actual sultan.  Also, the sultana and two of her slaves sneak out and end up at Hassan's place, and one of the slaves falls in love with this storyteller, Yussuf.  Anyway, there's some mistaken identity stuff, some threatened executions, and everything resolves itself.  There you go.

I did like it, for all its silliness.  Hood may not be up to Gilbert's standards...or actually, he may be; I don't think I'm really up enough on his oeuvre to judge.  But either way, he's a reasonable replacement, capable of a decent turn of phrase.  As usually with operetta, my complaint is that I want some real emotional resonance, dammit.  But that's okay.  What's slightly less okay is that if you follow along with a libretto, you will notice that this production cuts A LOT of music: entire numbers axed, others brutally cut down--what's wrong with you people?  Do you even like this stuff?  Do better!

Anyway.  What I really want to see is Sullivan's Ivanhoe, which was a success when first put on but quickly disappeared after.  I would lament the impossibility of this ever come to pass, but at this point I've seen enough rarities to know not to rule out anything.

Sergei Prokofiev, The Story of a Real Man (1948)

Well hey, wouldja lookit this?  It actually was easier to see than I had thought: this recording has dual-language subs in Russian and English even!  Nice!

So Aleksey (a real guy) is a Russian fighter pilot during World War II who is shot down and badly injured by the Germans.  He makes it to a Russian village where he's taken care of; there, he meets one of his military compatriots and is transferred to a hospital, where he stays with other highly patriotic soldiers.  Unfortunately, it is necessary to amputate his legs.  This bums him out, but he is determined to continue flying (with prosthetic legs).  Unfortunately, the military authorities disapprove of this dangerous and wildly irresponsible idea.  However, the doctors like his moxie and they help him make his dream happen.  Later, after he's been involved in some sort of aerial battle, everyone thinks he's been killed, but no!  And he shot down some Germans, too!  And yes he was a real guy who really did have military success as an amputee and then survived the war; that really doesn't make the whole thing seem like a less-bad idea.  Anyway, at the end it turns out that his much-missed fiancée Olga has also joined the Red Army!  So now they can be patriotic together!  Whoo!

I mean, obviously, we're all glad that the Russians defeated the Germans (less so that they murdered Raoul Wallenberg), but that doesn't mean that this libretto (based on a novel) isn't leaden propaganda.  Semyon Kotko seems like a dynamic and independent-minded piece of work, comparatively.  Still, never mind that, or not too much; it also demonstrates Prokofiev's range rather effectively: we've got our dramatic crescendos, our lively folk dances, and a certain amount of "zany" music for comic numbers (which do feel kind of incongruous in this kind of story, but never mind).  So I enjoyed it more than not.  Prokofiev may not be one of my all-time favorites, but he's kinda grown on me.

Anyway, here's this, from wikipedia:

The opera received its premiere on 3 December 1948 at the Kirov Theatre, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg). The audience was made up of Soviet cultural officials who gave the work a poor reception. This was a great disappointment to the composer who had intended the opera to rehabilitate his reputation with the Communist authorities after he had been accused of "formalism" earlier in the year. As a result, performances of The Story of a Real Man were forbidden to the general public until after Prokofiev's death. It received its public premiere on 7 October 1960 at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow.

Flipping heck, man: you just CANNOT WIN with the goddamn Soviet cultural officers.  I say, if you were going to write operas in that time and place, don't worry about what these people want: their whims are inscrutable and you cannot win.  No matter how craven your propaganda, it will not help you!  Of course, that's easy for me to say, and I realize that the consequences could be even worse for you if you didn't at least make an effort.  Still, we're lucky that he persisted in writing operas at all, given the oppressive artistic atmosphere.  Compare to Shostakovich, who prudently (but to our cultural detriment) gave up the practice.

Desert in, Episodes Five & Six (2021)

Rargh!  Let's DO THIS THING!

Episode Five, "I Miss You more than I Remember You"

Wang Lu

Man, this one is VERY short--just twelve minutes not counting the credits.  I feel somehow cheated.  

Apparently, Federico was supposed to be surveying Ion to see if he's a threat (a threat of what? Wholly unclear.)  Kind of into Ion at this point he lies (is it a lie?  I'm just going by the plot description) and says nah, he's fine.  There is apparently some connection between this betrayal (is it a betrayal?), causing the inn's neon sign to go out.  Meanwhile, Sunny is having problems with her memory.  We learn that Federico is actually her brother (or maybe we learned it earlier and I was too dumb to pick up on it), and when he comes in she doesn't recognize him.

This was fine, I liked it, but I really AM irked by the length.  Is this really going to be long enough to pay off in a satisfying way?  Well, we'll find out next week.

Episode Six, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"

Shelley Washington

Well okay, this one is more than fifteen minutes, so an improvement.  This is a dumb thing to be keeping track of.  I will say I want to read the novel that this title comes from; it seems cool to me.  But will I?  Maybe!

Okay, so apparently Sunny forgetting her brother wasn't a momentary thing, as he's trying to convince her of it as this starts.  He declares that this is "your wife. You know what she is.  She erased your memory of me."  Considering that they apparently work together, I have no idea what the utility of this would be.  At any rate, he asks her to go into the pool, which apparently has some sort of psychic power or something.  Then he, with Ion,  takes her to Room 8, a darkroom, where we see numerous pictures from the characters' lives (we actually saw Cass in here at the start of the previous episode).  Ion plays a VHS tape which is...well, hard to describe: it seems like old-timey commercials, only with characters from the series, including Derek, the old guy from episode three who died.  She sees that SOMETHING is up.  She does go to the pool, and we get a lot of fragmentary images that, again, are hard to make sense of, but for sure create a sense of unease.  At the end, we get narration of how she first met Cass: apparently they were both repressed, closeted housewives until something or other happened.

Really, I like this a lot.  Very intriguing story.  But again, I just can't help feeling very dubious about it ending well.  Maybe I'm just a cynic!  I look forward to finding out, at any rate.

Marc-André Dalbavie, Le soulier de satin (2021)

Contemporary operas tend to be on the short-ish side, no doubt due to the way film has altered our perceptions of how long an audiovisual narrative "should" be.  But all the opera I've watched has changed my own: now when I hear people talk about a two-hour film being excessively long, I think, huh.  That's actually kind of on the short side if anything.  Nevertheless, I do have my limits, and Dalbavie's decision to write, in 2021, the longest opera I've ever seen (at four hours and fifty-one minutes) is both impressive and slightly intimidating.  But!  Apparently the Paul Claudel play on which this is based runs over ten hours when performed in its entirety, so I guess we must simultaneously applaud the composer for his ambition and his restraint.

The title means "the satin slipper," but zero slippers of any sort are seen or alluded to.  So...okay!  What is this about?  Good question.  It takes place in Spain in the 1600s, which milieu will never not make me think of Carlos Fuentes' gigantic Terra Nostra.  But, also like Terra Nostra, it may be difficult for me to describe the intricacies of the plot in any detail.  There's Rodrigue, some kind of conquistador, and Doña Prouhèze, a married woman he's in love with.  They may have a child together, or may not, it's sort of hard to tell, and then we skip ahead ten years and she's dead and their alleged daughter wants to help liberate North Africa from the Moors.  But also, there are A LOT of other characters, many of whom seem like they're going to play a big part in the proceedings before just disappearing--like an apparently-Amerindian woman; and one named Doña Musique, whose name makes her seem like she should be some sort of allegory; and Rodrigue's Chinese squire/servant/something.  I dunno--maybe you need the full ten hours to tell this story adequately.

In spite of not really getting it, I actually sort of liked it.  I do enjoy the overall atmosphere.  It feels like one of those things where they basically set a play to music without really making that many concessions to it being, like, an opera.  The music is mostly fairly unobtrusive, though there are parts where it comes in bigger.  I think it's overall pretty subtle and interesting stuff.  There are no arias, as I may have indicated, but somehow the whole thing has a bit of a hypnotic appeal.  Oh yeah, and it features an almost unrecognizable Luca Pisaroni as Rodrigue, so that's fun.  One does have to note a contradiction, though: if the opera's too short to support the story, it make also somehow be too long to support ANY drama as well as it could.  I was not super-sad when it was over, though I certainly didn't hate it.

You can watch it on Opéra de Paris.  For how long?  Not specified.  Kind of hard to imagine it finding a place in the repertoire, but you could do worse!  Or better!  You decide!  What am I, your mom?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, La finta semplice (1768)

Twelve-year-old Mozart does his thing!  Whoo.

You know the music here is good.  What else could I possibly have to say about Mozart's music at this point?  I mean, unless I were more musically literate.  That's neither here nor there.  But it's great, really; I have the unsupported feeling that it might be better than some of his later (but still early) work.

And yet, there's always the matter of the libretto, and here's the thing: I saw this about a week ago, and right now, the actual action of the opera is more or less a blank.  It involves two girls, Giacinta and Ninetta, who want to  mary Fracasso and Simone, but they need their brothers' okay, and their brothers are kind of douchebags.  But a plan!  Fracasso's sister Rosina will pretend to be an innocent (as per the title) and make the brothers fall in love with her so they'll have to give their consent to their sisters.  I sort of remember that now, but only after cribbing heavily from wikipedia.  It's really quite vague, with very muddily characterized characters and opaque action.  If not for the music, this wouldn't be very interesting.  But there IS the music, so there you go.

Here's a thing I found interesting: the subtitle choices are Italian, English, or Japanese.  Really?  Nothing against it, but sticking Japanese in there seems a bit arbitrary.  But then I thought: is this a personal courtesy to Chishiho Hirakawa, the Japanese soprano who plays Rosina,  so so she could show the DVD to friends and family back home?  Maybe; maybe not.  Either way, there they are!

Desert in, Episodes Three & Four (2021)

I find myself wondering: to what point will I have understood this whole shindig when I get to the end? The answer is far from clear at this time. I realize that I didn't even link to it last time, or note that it's a co-production of Boston Lyric and Long Beach Operas. In a sense it's unnecessary; you could easily google it if you cared. But in a sense, none of this is necessary! Is it necessary that I should have blogs? Well, I DO. And you can't stop me, probably. So let's go.

Episode Three, "Someday you'll know...they're calling to you too"

Ellen Reid and Vijay Iyer

As indicated above, I am working hard to suss out what is happening here. We have this older guy, Derek, at the inn. It soon transpires that he's there not for a romantic partner, but for his son: to keep him alive. Ion is unclear about what's happening, what's going on, but the Cass tells him that he must "let the old man die." Either him, or Rufus. Choose! Is "letting someone die" the same as killing them? Unsure. But there's a ritual of some sort on the beach around a firepit with dancing (Cass dressed as a witch, which somehow seems a bit on-the-nose), and he dies, seemingly. It is not clear to me what Ion actually had to do with this, or why he had to do something like this if he did. You can say, oh, a sacrifice to keep things going, but I thought the point was that everyone was PAYING to be here. Why do we need this other thing? But! What IS clear to me is that I really, really like the music. Really getting into it, especially this really great torch song (that's the part by Vijay Iyer) sung by the trans woman known only as "the lounge singer" (Justin Vivian Bond). Sounds like a Marc Almond song, sort of. Would be worth the price of admission alone, but it's not alone. Whether or not I understand this, I definitely like it.

Episode Four, "A Single Man"

Emma O'Halloran

It opens with Sunny angry at Cass over Derek's death: he was family, she says. Cass disagrees. Federico looks on ambiguously. He and Ion meet; "I was impressed that you tried to save his life," he remarks, and I am SUPER not certain how. Also according to Federico. Derek wasn't really even close to his son: they had been estranged, and this whole thing was based on fabricated memories. Which certainly raises questions about everyone else. He suggests that Ion could begin to forget Rufus, and then their relationship would become similar--it wouldn't be based on their actual lives. But it may actually end sooner than that, as the episode ends with Ion and Federico hooking up, as sinisterly watched by Cass on the CC TV. What of poor Rufus? Well, I guess we'll find out, but the main thing is probably that he's dead. It's hard not to think of this in terms of Freud's idea of melancholia: when you lose a loved one, you need to be able to process your grief so that you can eventually move forward. But some people get stuck in a melancholic state, where they just relive the grief over and over in an unproductive way. That certainly seems to be what the Desert Inn is facilitating. How will it all shake out? No idea, but I'm super-keen to find out.

Mikhail Raukhverger, Little Red Riding Hood (1949)

Worst-case scenario: you wake up one day and realize, HOLY SHIT, I've only watched ONE Russian opera about Little Red Riding Hood!  Well, I'm here to tell you, that is no longer a risk for me.  It was really just happenstance that this came up on OperaonVideo recently, and I thought, heh, it would be funny to see another Russian LRRH opera.  Let's do it!  It's probably basically the same plot!

Well...not really.  What the bulk of this consists of is various animals--the most prominent being a rabbit, a bear, a boar, a fox, what I think are a pair of squirrels, and a chorus of birds.  What are they going on about?  No clue.  The sort of through-line of the plot does come through, but it feels very secondary--as, honestly, does the protagonist herself.  She's not there for a long time.  But anyway, in the end the wolf gets arrested and taken away.  So there you go.

The problem is that you can really find basically no information about this online.  After searching around and not even being able to find out when the dang thing was composed, I hied myself to Russian wikipedia.  I WAS able to get the year, but not much more, and just looking around the Russian internet in general, I swear, there's NOTHING.  Definitely one of the biggest obscurities I've seen.

Still, it's not bad!  Some infectious music.  I think I prefer the Cui, but honestly, it's not fair to compare them sans subtitles.  The action here could be super-sparkling, or it could be unbelievably dull and tedious.  We shall never know!  But the music's good enough that the piece justifies itself in any case.

Anyway, that's enough of Little Red Riding Hood.  How about a B.B. Hood opera?!?  

Come on, people!

Theophrastos Sakellaridis, Sataneries (1930)

The time had come for me to have seen six hundred operas, and now we live in a world where that happened.  I've given up trying to mark these whole numbers with anything "important"--it's hard to know how to define that at this point--but hey, at least I saw one in a new language.  I've searched for Greek opera in the past, but it's hard to find, and most of what you find is just operas based on Greek mythology.  But this operetta--by a guy who pioneered the form in Greece, I'm told--is...one of them.  I saw this here (I probably should've checked the Greek National Opera before now).  I made it a priority because I misread the description and thought it was just streaming for two days, as opposed to a full month, until June fifteenth.  So there's plenty of time for you to get in there if you want!  It's got English subtitles'n'everything.

We've got a cheerfully blasphemous plot here: Andreas, a government functionary, is getting old and despairing: he's drowning in debt which is starting to come due, and having been honest for his whole career doesn't feel like it's worked out for him.  But then: enter, Satan (to an aria which musically quotes "Le veau d'or est toujours debout").  A Lady Satan here.  She offers him the usual Faustian bargain, and with nothing to lose, he accepts.  She takes him to see Heaven first, but it turns out it's pretty boring: people just read the Bible and occasionally listen to angels sing hymns of praise.  No food, no liquor, no movie theaters, no nothing.  So when Andreas offers to take them to Hell instead, they're all in.  Hell is a fun party place, with lots of food and drugs and women.  Andreas, having gone ahead and embezzled some money as per Satan's advice, has cheered up considerably, and is going to continue enjoying life.  Everyone else is happy in Hell.  The end.

Yup.  You kind of think that the other shoe is going to drop and we'll learn the terrible truth about Hell, or at least that some sort of moderation will be preached, but nope!  Heaven sucks; Hell fucking rules.  That is the only message here.  You remember that old Chick Tract about how the dreaded Heavy Metal Music makes kids want to commit suicide by convincing them that Hell is a cool party place where all their friends will be?  Well, whoever wrote that (Jack himself?) hadn't seen nothin'.  I mean, obviously, it's being intentionally transgressive and isn't meant to be taken altogether seriously, but it is what it is!

Yeah, man, I liked it a lot.  That plot description might make it sound as though there's more plot than their actually is.  Or, it might not.  But the point is, there actually isn't much; there are a lot of little episode that I skimmed over that don't really go anywhere ultimately.  I'm not sure if it's an all-time classic, but the music is generally fun, sometimes hella fun, and I would definitely recommend it.  

César Cui, Little Red Riding Hood (1911) and Puss in Boots (1913)

After watching A Feast in the Time of Plague, I checked to see if I could find any more Cui operas on video.  Yes!  But as far as I can tell, only these two children's operas.  And these are both recent performances, put on in pandemic times.  A year ago, none of them were, and now we're up to three!  An impressive leap, and I hope the trend continues.  Also, let it be noted, before I forget: Little Red Riding Hood was both my fortieth Russian-language opera and my two hundredth twentieth-century opera.  Whoo!

You can find them here.  I'm not linking to them individually!  You think I'm MADE of time?!?  Neither is subtitled, but I figured, heck, I basically know these stories, and anywhere, there's a short wikipedia summary for the Riding Hood one.  It is indeed the usual stuff, though of course there were passages that I could not follow.  The main difference between the familiar story is that the wolf doesn't die horribly, or at all; he gets sewn up and let go if he promises to stop being bad.  Which he does in a very circumspect way, to judge from the action.  The music's fun, bouncy stuff, and I can see how it would be a good opera for kids.  The production is also very colorful and cool, and the woman playing the title role is very sprightly and appealing.  It's being performed in St Petersburg, but not the Mariinsky: it's at the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera.  How great would it be to live in a city with at least two great opera companies?  Crikey.

Yes, well, Puss in Boots is also the usual thing; I found it a bit less impressive in general--it doesn't have a strong lead to anchor it, for one thing--but I'm not complaining.  It DOES have a really good ballet sequence at the king's court, so that's cool.

I've said about all I want to say, but I am happy to have had the chance to see more Cui, who seems like a capable composer worthy or our attention.  I hope to see more of his work (which is voluminous) in the future. 

Desert in, Episodes One & Two (2021)

Here we have a new thing, and the new thing is this: an operatic miniseries. It's going to be eight episodes, with two new ones available each Friday in June. Of course, you think, huh, a miniseries? That's different. And it is, but possibly less than you'd think. Each episode is sitcom-length (I mean, I assume that will continue to hold), and since that's only sixteen-seventeen minutes minus the credits, we're really talking about a total of less than three hours. Nothing unusual, length-wise.

Episode One, "This House Is Now"

Ellen Reid

Neither of these exactly has much narrative thrust: we start with a man named Ion addressing his dead lover, Rufus (is "Ion" a non-standard spelling of "Ian?" I've never seen it before). Then we switch to this establishment known as the Desert Inn (in spite of which, the title is "in" with one 'n'--it may be polysemic, though it's not clear how at this point). It's managed by a woman named Sunny and her wife, Cass (who, it is repeatedly emphasized, are about to celebrate their twentieth anniversary--I'm sure that'll come to something or other). And as we learn, this is no ordinary inn: no, this is a Magical Realism Inn, or possible a Science Fiction Inn, depending how things go: here, you can reunite with your dead lover. At first when you see Ion with Rufus, you think it must be a flashback, but by the end, you realize what's going on. Anyway, that's about it for this episode. You can't really tell where it's going, but it intrigues. Do Cass and Sunny have good intentions? And what's with this possibly-sinister dude named Federico with a prosthetic leg who keeps appearing but doesn't do much? We may find out!

Episode Two, "Love Is like the Sea"

Nathalie Joachim

Well, we may, but we don't hear: this is even less plot-oriented than the first episode. We start with a little promo spot for the Desert Inn, as narrated by the inn's transgender lounge singer. "The Desert Inn, where all of your dreams can come true for eternity--or until your credit runs out!" Not exactly subtle. Anyway, after that, the rest of the episode consists of everyone at a pool party. Ion and Rufus have a little argument about their memories of what happened. We are still left with more questions than answers. Well, all questions, no answers, might be a better way of putting it. Stay tuned.

One thing you might ask: why does this exclusively involve gay couples? Is it some kind of AIDS allegory? Well, it so, they're playing it close to the chest so far. There are no allusions to the disease, and if this is meant to be set in the eighties, it's not immediately apparent (and actually, the sign says "wifi," so I think we can count out that possibility). We can probably assume that this inn is No Good, though. Or maybe it's just surreal. The whole thing does a bit remind me of Bruno Schultz' "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass," and if you haven't read that, what are you even doing?  Get it together.

Ah yes, the music. Duh. Well, as you can see, every episode looks like it's fixin' to have a different composer, but these first two definitely feel of a piece: neo-romantic music with tension waiting to spill over. "Love Is like the Sea" has a lot of sort of island-ish rhythms which you'd associate with a vacation gettaway. It's all good. The cast is one of those things that feels slightly unbalanced owing to the inclusion of one singer massively more famous than all the others: here, you probably don't know most of these people, but bam, Isabel Leonard as Cass. Go figure.

Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing how this tale unspools.

Philip Glass, Circus Days and Nights (2021)

A new Glass opera?  Don't mind if I do; do mind if I don't.  It's cool that he's still active in his mid-eighties.

This was comissioned by Malmö Opera and produced in partnership with Circus Cirkör, a Swedish circus company.  The libretto is based on a poetry cycle by the poet Robert Lax.  During the forties, Lax travelled around for a while with various circuses, and he wrote it based on his experiences with the Cristiani Family. As you'd expect, there's not really a plot here: we follow the building and performing and unbuilding of the circus.  Lax (represented here at two ages, as a young soprano and an older baritone) narrates and asks questions; the performers muse about their art.  And the whole thing is some sort of metaphor for the life cycle, apparently.

Whether or not it's super-profound, it's certainly entertaining.  The music is Philip Glass; no huge surprises, except that the prominent use of an accordion suggests a circus atmosphere (I think it would've been interesting to lean further in on that--stick a Wurlitzer and a calliope in there!).  And, as noted, also circus performers: jugglers, tumblers, acrobats, trapeze artists, even a human cannonball, doing real tricks, sometimes-hair-raising.  A pretty high barrier to entry if you wanted to put this on, and surely a claims adjuster's nightmare, but really cool.  A lot of people think circuses are lame, but as a counterpoint, I would point out that circuses are actually great when well-done.  I mean, aside from the animal abuse, but I think that's been more or less completely phased out these days.

If you want to see this, you can, but it requires you to actually plan.  It's being streamed online until the thirteenth, but as it if were a live show--you have to choose a date, and you have to watch it in real-time.  I do not typically watch operas at one in the afternoon (although, to be fair, that's the Met in HD also), but it was worth it.  And as mildly inconvenient as it is, I do have to admit that there's a certain je ne sais quoi to knowing that you're watching live.

César Cui, A Feast in the Time of Plague (1900)

Cui was sort of a big deal; he was a member of the group of five Russian composers known, creatively, as The Five who wanted to create a characteristically Russian style of music.  The others were Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mily Balakirev (who didn't write opera and so is less familiar to me).  This is the first time I've had a chance to see a Cui opera, however.  

It may shock you to learn that this is based on a Pushkin play.  Specifically, it's based on one of his four "little tragedies," the others being The Stone Guest, The Miserly Knight, and Mozart and Salieri.  So now I've seen operas based on all four.  Boom!

Simple plot: there's a plague.  And four friends--a tenor, baritone, soprano, and mezzo-soprano--are having a feast.  Talking about the situation.  Reminders of the grimness keep impinging on their celebration.  A priest appears and chastises them for their frivolousness.  They blow him off, but then feel pensive.  And that's about it; it's just a one-act, half-hour thing.

It seems obvious why this would have resonated in 2020.  And this is even a production from Brazil, where the situation has been even more grim than most places.  It's clearly socially distanced; the singers may allegedly be in the same room, but they're clearly apart, in a Zoom-type way.  I do admire everyone involved for setting up a production under such circumstances, and the singers, none of whom I know, are all very good.  As is the opera itself: low-key profundity, with the libretto apparently verbatim Pushkin and some memorable songs thrown in.  Ya might as well watch it; that's what I say!