Manon Lescaut (an opera review post)

Yeah, yeah, I have no image for you for this one, either. I'm just not excited about the cover of the opera book enough to want to go to the trouble of getting a picture of it. Visualize this: a strand of pearls on a glossy, black tabletop with a few scattered pearls lying around it.
There you go. If you can get that picture in your head, you have the cover of the program.

The opera is much better than the program cover but, then, it is Puccini.

Manon Lescaut is based on the French novel L'Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut published in 1731. It's one of two operas based on this work, the other being Manon by Messenet, and both are still popular and rotation today. Without having seen the other one, I'm going to say that the Puccini one is better. Hey, it's Puccini!

Here's what I found amusing from this opera:
Part of the opera takes place in the wastelands of Louisiana. Wait, let me make that more clear: It takes place in the desert wastelands of Louisiana. Of course, having grown up in Louisiana, when I heard this, it made me laugh and wonder what the heck Puccini was thinking. I mean, he wrote Lescaut in 1890; everyone knew there were no deserts in Louisiana in 1890. It was kind of like, what the heck?

Then, I realized that it was based on a novel from the early 1700s, and Louisiana was a huge territory in the 1700s. Something like 1/3 of the total area of what is now the United States. When the novel was written, there were wastelands in Louisiana, and the opera is set during the same time period as the novel, so the it all suddenly made sense. Still, it was funny, and that's going to be the thing that most sticks with me about this opera.

The next thing is that Manon was much abused. She was an incredible beauty that her parents were sending off to a nunnery, which means the character is probably somewhere in the 14-16 year old range. The opera opens with a rich old white guy attempting to kidnap her to take her away to be his sex slave. It ends, as with all Puccini operas, in tragedy. In tragedy in the wastelands of Louisiana.

This production was good. It's not the best Puccini I've seen, but it might be the one with the most complexities and nuance, including a scene of prostitute branding which was quite horrific.

Brian Jagde, whom I have mentioned many times before, played des Grieux and was as good as always. Lianna Haroutounian was Manon and was a good match. The only real issue with the production was the death scene at the end, which I'm not going to try to explain, but I'm sure was a directing problem. Beyond that, though, it was a great production with great performances.

Madame Butterfly (an opera review post)

Unfortunately, this will be the last opera review for a while. Performances don't start again until June. However... what an opera to end on!

I'm gonna have to lead with with the fact that the set was crap. It was, in fact, almost non-existent, consisting mostly of concentric circles on the stage and a sliding screen. Granted, you don't really need anything of consequence for Madame Butterfly since it all takes place in the same location, a small Japanese home near a cliff, but I think I would have preferred a bare stage to the circles on the floor, which seemed to have been used for nothing more than to lay out the circular patterns the servants moved in.

Also, the costumes were crap. As with Aida, they brought in an outside artist to do set and costume design, in this case Jun Kaneko. Don't get me wrong, Kaneko's art is definitely interesting -- I especially like his sculpture work -- but his style would have fit more with the movie Dick Tracy -- being largely composed of bright, primary colors done in odd block patterns -- than it did here. The costumes distracted from the performance rather than enhancing it, and that's always a problem.

Aside:
In our opera viewing, I've come to break down the performances into four categories: sets, costumes, visual performance (acting), and vocal performance. As you can see, half of my categories for this opera have already received horrible marks.

That said, this was my wife's favorite opera of the season (so far (since we have three more in JUNE)), and she agrees with me about the set and the costumes (though my wording is probably a bit more harsh than how she would say it). The singing was so amazing, especially from Lianna Haroutounian (Butterfly), though, that it completely overshadowed and made up for the lack of any real set and the gaudy, distracting costumes. I'm going with Don Pasquale as my favorite so far because it gets better overall scores, and, if I was going to watch one over again, that's the one I would choose. Butterfly comes in a close second, though, and, if I was just going to listen to one, I would choose it.

So, yes, Haroutounian was amazing. You could say that her singing in this performance went to 11. Or, maybe better, "to infinity and beyond."

Vincenzo Costanzo was also very good as Pinkerton. He was a believable asshole. I hope it was the acting and not just his personality coming through. I kid! Okay, well, I don't kid; I do hope that, but I'm not trying to imply that I think that... Oh, never mind! He was great in his role.

And I really enjoyed Julius Ahn as Goro.

As a contrast to what I was talking about in my review of Aida, I want to point out that Butterfly had a very diverse cast. It was good.

This production of Madame Butterfly, even with the set and costume issues, was well worth seeing. I sort of feel like I should talk some about Puccini because he's a very interesting character himself, but it really doesn't have anything to do with this production. Anyway, his opera is powerful, and I appreciate the symbolism of the long musical interlude even if it is difficult to sit through. And, see, that's the thing: this production had a lot of what I would consider to be serious issues, and it was still amazing.