I've seen four operas with exclamation points in the titles. It's sort of harder to determine with other punctuation marks, because it's so often just a matter of how you want to stylize the title. But one thing we can say for sure is that this is the first dang opera I've seen with a question mark in there. So...there you go.
So there are these people standing around after a car crash, five adults and a kid. They're dazed and can't remember what happened or what they were doing (it would obviously occur to you that they're meant to be dead or at least that this is meant to be ambiguous, but I truly can't tell whether that's supposed to be the case). They stagger around and argue about where they were going and what they were doing in a kind of absurdist way. This goes on for forty-five minutes. They wander off. And that's about all you have.
Carter was, says wikipedia, "one of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century," and this was his only opera. This cachet is presumably why this performance is conducted by James Goddamn Levine. And yet, I have to say, I was extremely underwhelmed. I like a lot of contemporary opera, but you have to admit, there's this image of it as consisting of this sort of subdued music with mild stabs at atonalism but mostly tonal that doesn't really do much, with no arias or duets or any operatic things like that, that completely exits your brain as soon as the performance is over. And as far as I'm concerned, that's this to a T. And combine that with a very unengaging libretto and...you're not left with much. Was conducting this really an edifying experience for Levine? Maybe I lack discernment, but I knows what I knows. Carter was ninety when he wrote this, which is certainly impressive regardless of anything else, but I say, BLAH.
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