weird stuff, opera.
Sunday, 7 May 2006 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtI love opera dearly: it satisfies not only my low, reprehensible passion for unashamedly emotional music, but my equally low, reprehensible passion for stylised narrative and symbolic wossnames. Last night's La Boheme was unfortunately a rather scrappy production, dogged by a chorus all over the place, a leading lady with the body language of a scoop of mashed potatoes, a subtitle machine which apparently succumbed to the Windows Blue Screen Of Death halfway through the first act, and a general orchestra/singer balance problem which caused exactly the same problem I experience in local live band music, viz. a desire to hunt down the sound mixer, slay the operator by bashing him to death with a handy Goth, and stage a major intervention to get the bloody instrument/voice balance right, dammit. Opera singers should know how to project their voices, but there was a weird acoustic on the stage which rendered the orchestra's performance at volume 10 and the singers' at 5. Especially the tenor, who was a curiously undynamic stage presence despite overall acting competence and a lovely voice.
And you know what? It didn't really matter. Regardless of the irritations of the production, there were still moments, many of them, where the sheer beauty of the music and the voices of the singers transcended the minor irritations of the production. Part of this is Puccini's music, which is at times soaring, sensitive and unashamedly emotional, the perfect companion to a libretto mostly about feeling and very little about action. What the music does, though, is to pull in not only the audience, but the singers, so that the overall scrappiness of the production would, for a minute or two, suddenly and magically cohere. I forgive absolutely everything, even the solecisms of the on-stage trumpeter who lost it in a shower of squawks halfway through a fanfare, because of the last five minutes, the musically beautiful and tragic death of Mimi, when the singers suddenly woke up to the emotional import of the scene and became inspired. Opera isn't opera unless it's milking the music for all it's worth in order to grab your guts in both hands and twist.
Other than scoring a random opera attendance courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
starmadeshadow and her parents, it's been a somewhat irritating weekend. It's been raining buckets, off and on, and while driving on Friday night I managed to plough through an unexpected puddle deep enough to have done something 'orrible to the engine - my poor little Mermaid currently refuses to start, turning over gamely but making a curious gasping noise instead of catching. I diagnose water in the wossnames. I should have expected something drastic when the electric gate stopped working earlier in the week. Damned techno-jinx.
And you know what? It didn't really matter. Regardless of the irritations of the production, there were still moments, many of them, where the sheer beauty of the music and the voices of the singers transcended the minor irritations of the production. Part of this is Puccini's music, which is at times soaring, sensitive and unashamedly emotional, the perfect companion to a libretto mostly about feeling and very little about action. What the music does, though, is to pull in not only the audience, but the singers, so that the overall scrappiness of the production would, for a minute or two, suddenly and magically cohere. I forgive absolutely everything, even the solecisms of the on-stage trumpeter who lost it in a shower of squawks halfway through a fanfare, because of the last five minutes, the musically beautiful and tragic death of Mimi, when the singers suddenly woke up to the emotional import of the scene and became inspired. Opera isn't opera unless it's milking the music for all it's worth in order to grab your guts in both hands and twist.
Other than scoring a random opera attendance courtesy of
starmadeshadow and her parents, it's been a somewhat irritating weekend. It's been raining buckets, off and on, and while driving on Friday night I managed to plough through an unexpected puddle deep enough to have done something 'orrible to the engine - my poor little Mermaid currently refuses to start, turning over gamely but making a curious gasping noise instead of catching. I diagnose water in the wossnames. I should have expected something drastic when the electric gate stopped working earlier in the week. Damned techno-jinx.
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Mermaid butter
Date: Monday, 8 May 2006 01:05 pm (UTC)Re: Mermaid butter
Date: Tuesday, 9 May 2006 08:46 am (UTC)Seeing as extemp was coming to our house, I'd rather she *did* come again, but perhaps not on days when it's flooding...
Re: Mermaid butter
Date: Tuesday, 9 May 2006 08:49 am (UTC)Re: Mermaid butter
Date: Wednesday, 10 May 2006 09:11 am (UTC)Car is now fixed. There was water not only in the distributor cap, but in the carburettor too. The nice mechanic man said it must have been quite a puddle. (It was. I'm not sure there wasn't a lost civilisation or two down there. And Deep Ones).