Archive for opera
Last-minute romance
Posted by: | CommentsNo video is yet available of Ballet Arizona’s Sleeping Beauty. Above, to give a taste of the company’s excellence: Natalia Magnicaballi in Ballet Arizona’s La Sylphide a few years back.
I’ll let the print media tell you, as I assume they will, about Ballet Arizona’s lush and energetic production of The Sleeping Beauty; about how Ginger Smith danced Aurora Thursday night like a sunbeam lighting up a landscape; about Roman Zavarov’s astonishing knack for staying aloft at the exact height of a jump; about how Natalia Magnicaballi’s Lilac Fairy owned the stage at Symphony Hall by dint of her seemingly easy musicality and presence. Certainly they’ll tell you that, and if they don’t, well, I just did.
That’s the good news: Phoenix has a production of this treasured, damned-difficult-to-produce ballet to rival that of any city our size and a good many considerably bigger.
The bad news: You waited too long to get those ever-so-romantic tickets to the Valentine’s Day performance of The Sleeping Beauty and now it’s SOLD OUT! (You might be able to catch a couple tickets for the performance tonight, Feb. 13.)
Luckily for you, there are about a gazillion other Valentine’s Day-appropriate events where you can take your sweetie to curry the intimacy you so desire. Okay, Sleeping Beauty would have been No. 1 to that end, but you blew it, so make the best of your situation and choose from the following:
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change (Mesa)
The title says it all. This Off-Broadway musical hit explores the craziness of relationships, ca. Now. The Valley perennial is in its fourth production.
Gypsy (Peoria)
There’s life in the old girl, and more romance than you might recall if all you know is the movie version. Oh yeah, and there’s stripping – not exactly romantic, but in the right direction.
Madama Butterfly (downtown Phoenix)
If tragic love somehow fulfills your emotional need and gets her or him in the right mood, you can’t do better than Puccini’s classic about love to die for.
The Play About the Naked Guy (Phoenix)
Here’s a wild card: Stray Cat’s production of a play that pits commerce against art. Commerce wins, I guess, since the play is marketed partly on the basis of the very nudity-as-sales-device it satirizes. Not your traditional Valentine’s Day date, but who said we have to be traditional?
Emotion-packed opera from Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss
Posted by: | Comments“It’s like he tried to fit three hours of opera into an hour and forty minutes,” says Arizona Opera artistic director Joel Revzen, talking of Richard Strauss’ Salome.
And he succeeded. In Salome (1905), his breakthrough opera score, Strauss put such explosive gestures into so compact a space that experiencing Salome feels like is like being part of some earth-shaking event unfolding before you. The Biblical story of the young temptress who asked Herod for the head of John the Baptist was first a play by Oscar Wilde before Strauss musicalized it.
At under two hours, in one long act without intermission, Salome fits the timing expectations of movie audiences perfectly. Even opera audiences don’t need more.
“The audience for Salome really feels it has had a whole evening of opera,” Revzen says. “At the end, they are emotionally drained.”
Revzen conducts Arizona opera’s current production, which plays Phoenix Symphony Hall today through Sunday. Though he has conducted other Strauss operas, including Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, Revzen has never before essayed the dense labyrinths of the more harmonically adventurous Salome.
“It’s a brilliant score, and so challenging technically for the orchestra. I must say they have risen to the challenge extremely well,” Revzen says.
Arizona Opera is alone in the nation in servicing two cities: Tucson, where the company was founded in 1971, and Phoenix. The company’s business offices are in Phoenix, but its set-building studio is in Tucson, and most productions start their run in the Old Pueblo before heading north.
Coming from Tucson to Phoenix with an opera presents unique challenges:
“When we get into Phoenix Symphony Hall, there won’t be time for an acoustic rehearsal. We’ll have to make the adjustments to a new hall very quickly.”
Salome is known for its Dance of the Seven Veils, in which the title character performs opera’s best-known strip tease. The most sensuous – and last explicit – version available on the Internet is linked above.
But that’s not the killer scene for Revzen:
“The nudity at the end of the dance” – when there is any – “lasts only about six seconds. What is riveting is the final scene, when Salome talks to the severed head of the Baptist.”
Sex and violence – the very stuff of opera.
Phoenix Opera: From Egypt to Spain
Posted by: | CommentsAbove: a scene from Aida, in Phoenix Opera’s production of last fall. For information on Phoenix Opera’s Carmen at the Orpheum Theatre tomorrow, go here.
So Are They All
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Arizona Opera’s Cosi fan tutte
The title of Mozart’s opera, Cosi fan tutte, is notoriously difficult to translate from the Italian. Roughly, it means “It’s All the Same,” or perhaps, “So Are They All.” What’s all the same? Relationships. Girlfriends, boyfriends. You know: dating. Love is one thing, unique to the person you love. But (and you may not wish to hear this) that person could just as easily love another – it’s all the same. And that makes commitment a thorny issue. Don’t take my word for it: See Cosi, as produced by Arizona Opera, this weekend.
Arizona Opera’s YouTube channel doesn’t allow us to pick up its videos, so you’ll have to go to their site to see excerpts from the production.
Women in Opera: Same as real life (sort of)
Posted by: | CommentsTeresa Stratas does the Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss’ Salome.
Arizona Opera docent Cynthia Rhys will lecture Wednesday night at Phoenix Art Museum on the subject of women in opera. I bet she’ll have plenty of fun with at least two of the ladies onstage this season at Arizona Opera: the consumptive Mimi in Puccini’s La Boheme, and the title seductress of Strauss’ Salome. Mimi is the quintessential helpless victim, Salome the definition of sexual power. Mimi embraces love, only to see her life slip away. Salome, a little girl in a young woman’s body, lusts for something she cannot have, and instigates disaster. Heart-grabbing, scintillating stuff. The kind of thing that gives opera its reputation for ribaldry and tears.
But whatever will Rhys say about the women of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, which begins the season? Dorabella and Fiordiligi are neither tragic victims like Mimi nor amibitious strippers like Salome. They are the most ordinary women imaginable, just as their suitors Guglielmo and Ferrando are the most everyday of men. Perhaps this is because Cosi, the third and last of Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, addresses that most ordinary of all subjects: relationships. You don’t have to be consumptive or a vamp to find yourself involved with one man but tempted to become involved with another. It’s as common as a cold.
The earlier Mozart/da Ponte operas had focused on the role of pure sexuality in relationship (Don Giovanni) and on the social aspects of committed relationship, i.e., marriage (The Marriage of Figaro). Cosi is at the crux of the matter. Between sexual spark and death-do-us-part is an awful lot of decision-making, second guessing, wondering why, wondering why not, and just plain confusion. It’s all there in this amazing musical drama.
A program note I wrote for last year’s Arizona Opera production of Don Giovanni addresses further the ideas of sex/relationship/marriage in these operas. You can read it at my abandoned-yet-still-online personal blog.
