I know I usually have some kind of image to go along with these posts, usually the program book, but I'm not feeling like going to the trouble at this point. It's already been, like, a month (way more, now, actually) since we saw this, so I'm going to be doing good just to get some words out. Speaking of getting some words out, this is actually the second production we've seen of The Marriage of Figaro so, theoretically, I should have another post reviewing the previous production we saw... but, well, I can't find it. Not that I went back through my posts one by one or anything, but I did do several searches for it, including on google, and came up with nothing. Maybe I didn't review it when we saw it a few years ago? That doesn't seem right. At least, I was pretty sure I'd reviewed each opera we saw, but maybe I didn't start doing that right away. Except it wouldn't have been right away, because it wasn't one of our first operas.
Oh, well, a mystery probably not worth solving, but it does make me wonder.
I'm also wondering how I'm even going to review this considering how long it's been since we saw it, which was back in October. Look, things have been busy.
I suppose the most important thing to say is that this is a great opera. It's Mozart, one of his comedies (Mozart at his best), and one of the top 10 most performed operas each year. It has a famous scene in it where there are seven (or eight?) people on stage singing at once, all singing something different -- nothing like this had ever been done before -- and, yet, it works and blends perfectly. But, then, it's Mozart, so of course it does.
The Marriage of Figaro is the middle opera of a trilogy which begins with The Barber of Seville. The most famous version of Barber is not by Mozart, though I think he has his own version of that one, too. I haven't seen the third of this trilogy, yet (and can't remember the name of it, right off hand), but I really want to. See, each of this first two operas are quite outstanding as individual operas but, when you roll the plots together, they become so much more.
Let me explain:
In The Barber of Seville, there's this guy who wants to marry this girl, but she's promised to someone else, someone she doesn't want to marry, of course, but he has money, so her father wants her to go with old-money-guy rather than the guy she's in love with. In steps Figaro, the barber of Seville and quite famous, to help the love birds get together. Which he does through quite a few hi-jinks.
Which brings us to Marriage. Well, you know, the love birds get married, but I was speaking of the opera. The young woman in Barber is titled, so the couple is now Count and Countess, and Figaro works for them. Marriage is set about a year after Barber, and Figaro is, himself, about to get married to the Countess' handmaid. Except...
Except that the Count is hot for Figaro's bride-to-be and doing all he can to bed her, including gifting Figaro and Susanna with the best room in the mansion (aside from his, I suppose) as a wedding present because... yeah, it's very close to his room, so, you know, he'll have easy access to the new bride after the wedding. Yeah, this is the same guy whom Figaro just helped to marry his "soulmate." Or whatever. Real stand-up guy.
At any rate, it's a comedy and full hi-jinks, including mistaken identities and people falling out of windows. The production at SFO was wonderful. But I'm probably biased.
Showing posts with label Marriage of Figaro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marriage of Figaro. Show all posts
Friday, December 6, 2019
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
SFO (an opera house opera review post)
Over the past few years, opera and going to the opera have become rather significant things in my life. My wife's life, too, probably, but I'm not going to speak for her as to how significant. I know it's an important thing for her and the fulfillment of a lifelong love, but I'm not going to put those words in her mouth. In short, we love the opera and going to the opera and SFO in particular. Therefore, it pains me to have to talk about some ways that SFO is really missing the high notes lately.
Some of this stuff is not new. I mentioned toward the end of last season's opera run that Matthew Shilvock, the general director of SFO, seems rather on the traditional side of things in how he's running the San Francisco Opera. I mean, he's British; it's probably in his DNA or something. And maybe it's not fair of me to speculate -- because what I'm saying is speculation -- buy that's how it feels to me (and I'm generally pretty good at intuitive conclusions). It feels like SFO is attempting to appear new and fresh by reaching back and putting on traditional productions of obscure or rarely performed operas, like the just reviewed Billy Budd and the soon to be reviewed Romeo & Juliet (yes, R&J isn't much performed, probably because it's a French opera and they're not really in style these days). However, that doesn't make something cutting edge; it means it's going harder and faster at being traditional. Like I said, the performance of Billy Budd we attended was the lowest attendance of any opera we've been to.
Here's what I'm going to say about the entire discussion I could have here (because I don't want to spend this entire post talking about all of the things that SFO could be doing to pull in new people): Hamilton is an opera, and it's insanely popular. One of those events that changes the public. SFO is doing nothing to approach what Hamilton has done. They're not looking at what works but trying to find ways to keep doing what they've been doing in a way that seems new when it's really the "same old thing."
And, look, I have nothing against "traditional" opera, as should be apparent from all of the opera review posts that I do. I like exploring all of these classic operas but, let's face it, there hasn't been a significant opera composer since Puccini (by significant, I mean popular with the masses and performed constantly). I want to make one thing very clear about Puccini: He wrote for the masses and frequently re-worked pieces after seeing the audience reaction to early performances of his works. I think opera has lost its way in appealing to the "common man," or however you want to say that. But it doesn't have to be that way!
The thing is is that it wouldn't really matter if SFO was making money. When you're turning a profit, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want, even if that means doing the same old thing over and over again. However, SFO seems to be suffering financially, at least somewhat due to a lack of attendance (probably mostly due to a lack of attendance judging from Billy Budd).
Here's how we found out:
SFO has, for years, offered something called operavision. You know how when you go to a concert there are often huge screens behind the stage which show the musicians performing so that people in the wayback can see what's going on rather than just seeing ants on stage? Opervision is kind of like that, except that it's smaller screens that come down out of the ceiling so that people in the balcony can see closeups of the performance and not be forced to use opera glasses. The screens also contained the supertitles, making them easier for people in the balcony to read. And just as an aside, if you're in the balcony and using opera glasses to see the performers, you can't also read the supertitles while doing that.
My wife loves opervision, and we always buy the season tickets that include operavision (because, actually, they would only offer that on one or two performances of any given production). Oh, and opervision nights cost more. So we went to see Billy Budd and... no operavision. There were, we thought, only two real possibilities of why there was no opervision: 1. My wife accidentally purchased the incorrect package. 2. They sent us tickets to the wrong performance.
During the intermission, my wife checked to see if the error had been hers because that would mean we would need to see if we could fix our tickets for the rest of the season.
The mistake was not hers. SFO had just failed to inform us that, even though they let us purchase the operavision package, opervision had been discontinued. Due to the expense. They couldn't afford to offer it any longer. There was a long list of reasons, none of which are really that important other than the underlying message that SFO is struggling financially right now.
This was further backed up when I called about the whole operavision thing and whether we had been charged for it. Oh, but wait! No, they had not charged us for it, but they also had not honored our seating choice (the cheap seats up in the top balcony) for some of the operas. For Romeo & Juliet and next month's The Marriage of Figaro, they had given us more expensive seats. And charged us for that, instead, which was quite a bit more than our cheap seats with operavision. I still am failing to understand the thought process that went into this decision.
Yeah, I was a little upset.
But, you know, we'd already paid for all of this and, sure, I could have known sooner if I had looked carefully at our tickets when they arrived in the mail but, hey, we'd never had any problems before with the seats being wrong, so it didn't occur to me check the tickets for every performance ahead of time, not until I saw that our tickets for R&J were for seats in a more expensive section. This is where I expressed my concern to the woman I was speaking to that all of this had been done without ever communicating with us about it. And, hey, I even stayed calm through this whole discussion. So, not only had they failed to inform us that operavision had been discontinued, but they also charged us for upgraded seats without asking us.
The woman got my point, at which point she gave us upgraded seats (to some of the really expensive seats) for the rest of our season! So, yeah, I'm not complaining because the new seats are quite nice, but it underscores that SFO is having some... issues... right now.
The other thing I brought up was their opera cd. Ever since we started buying season tickets, at the beginning of the season we would get a cd with an introduction to each opera on it. Our tradition has been to listen to the portion for any given opera we were seeing on the ride down to that opera. This year we didn't receive a cd. Guess what. They discontinued that, too. Why? They needed to cut costs. That's what she told me. So I got it straight from someone there.
And, you know, fine. We don't have to have the cd, but it is something that they actually advertised as part of buying season tickets.
Clearly, they made all of these cost-cutting decisions after printing all of their materials with all of the season information from which people purchase tickets, but they really need to be better at communicating if they're going to make changes like that. And, actually, I feel like if they sold season tickets with operavision included then they need to honor that. But maybe that's just me.
They're also only doing eight productions this season instead of the usual nine, and there's some speculation that they couldn't afford to do more than eight. I wouldn't know if that particular thing is true or not.
Now, I'm not going to go so far as to say that Matthew Shilvock should be replaced as general director; I don't know enough details of the problem or how long it's been going on to make that kind of statement. What I do know, though, is that someone needs to be working on how to make the opera more appealing to the masses rather than trying to convince the masses that they need to like the opera the way it is. That's a recipe for disaster that will end the opera rather than people coming to see something they don't want to see.
And we love the opera and we love SFO, and we don't want to see SFO shut it doors due to a lack of funding.
Some of this stuff is not new. I mentioned toward the end of last season's opera run that Matthew Shilvock, the general director of SFO, seems rather on the traditional side of things in how he's running the San Francisco Opera. I mean, he's British; it's probably in his DNA or something. And maybe it's not fair of me to speculate -- because what I'm saying is speculation -- buy that's how it feels to me (and I'm generally pretty good at intuitive conclusions). It feels like SFO is attempting to appear new and fresh by reaching back and putting on traditional productions of obscure or rarely performed operas, like the just reviewed Billy Budd and the soon to be reviewed Romeo & Juliet (yes, R&J isn't much performed, probably because it's a French opera and they're not really in style these days). However, that doesn't make something cutting edge; it means it's going harder and faster at being traditional. Like I said, the performance of Billy Budd we attended was the lowest attendance of any opera we've been to.
Here's what I'm going to say about the entire discussion I could have here (because I don't want to spend this entire post talking about all of the things that SFO could be doing to pull in new people): Hamilton is an opera, and it's insanely popular. One of those events that changes the public. SFO is doing nothing to approach what Hamilton has done. They're not looking at what works but trying to find ways to keep doing what they've been doing in a way that seems new when it's really the "same old thing."
And, look, I have nothing against "traditional" opera, as should be apparent from all of the opera review posts that I do. I like exploring all of these classic operas but, let's face it, there hasn't been a significant opera composer since Puccini (by significant, I mean popular with the masses and performed constantly). I want to make one thing very clear about Puccini: He wrote for the masses and frequently re-worked pieces after seeing the audience reaction to early performances of his works. I think opera has lost its way in appealing to the "common man," or however you want to say that. But it doesn't have to be that way!
The thing is is that it wouldn't really matter if SFO was making money. When you're turning a profit, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want, even if that means doing the same old thing over and over again. However, SFO seems to be suffering financially, at least somewhat due to a lack of attendance (probably mostly due to a lack of attendance judging from Billy Budd).
Here's how we found out:
SFO has, for years, offered something called operavision. You know how when you go to a concert there are often huge screens behind the stage which show the musicians performing so that people in the wayback can see what's going on rather than just seeing ants on stage? Opervision is kind of like that, except that it's smaller screens that come down out of the ceiling so that people in the balcony can see closeups of the performance and not be forced to use opera glasses. The screens also contained the supertitles, making them easier for people in the balcony to read. And just as an aside, if you're in the balcony and using opera glasses to see the performers, you can't also read the supertitles while doing that.
My wife loves opervision, and we always buy the season tickets that include operavision (because, actually, they would only offer that on one or two performances of any given production). Oh, and opervision nights cost more. So we went to see Billy Budd and... no operavision. There were, we thought, only two real possibilities of why there was no opervision: 1. My wife accidentally purchased the incorrect package. 2. They sent us tickets to the wrong performance.
During the intermission, my wife checked to see if the error had been hers because that would mean we would need to see if we could fix our tickets for the rest of the season.
The mistake was not hers. SFO had just failed to inform us that, even though they let us purchase the operavision package, opervision had been discontinued. Due to the expense. They couldn't afford to offer it any longer. There was a long list of reasons, none of which are really that important other than the underlying message that SFO is struggling financially right now.
This was further backed up when I called about the whole operavision thing and whether we had been charged for it. Oh, but wait! No, they had not charged us for it, but they also had not honored our seating choice (the cheap seats up in the top balcony) for some of the operas. For Romeo & Juliet and next month's The Marriage of Figaro, they had given us more expensive seats. And charged us for that, instead, which was quite a bit more than our cheap seats with operavision. I still am failing to understand the thought process that went into this decision.
Yeah, I was a little upset.
But, you know, we'd already paid for all of this and, sure, I could have known sooner if I had looked carefully at our tickets when they arrived in the mail but, hey, we'd never had any problems before with the seats being wrong, so it didn't occur to me check the tickets for every performance ahead of time, not until I saw that our tickets for R&J were for seats in a more expensive section. This is where I expressed my concern to the woman I was speaking to that all of this had been done without ever communicating with us about it. And, hey, I even stayed calm through this whole discussion. So, not only had they failed to inform us that operavision had been discontinued, but they also charged us for upgraded seats without asking us.
The woman got my point, at which point she gave us upgraded seats (to some of the really expensive seats) for the rest of our season! So, yeah, I'm not complaining because the new seats are quite nice, but it underscores that SFO is having some... issues... right now.
The other thing I brought up was their opera cd. Ever since we started buying season tickets, at the beginning of the season we would get a cd with an introduction to each opera on it. Our tradition has been to listen to the portion for any given opera we were seeing on the ride down to that opera. This year we didn't receive a cd. Guess what. They discontinued that, too. Why? They needed to cut costs. That's what she told me. So I got it straight from someone there.
And, you know, fine. We don't have to have the cd, but it is something that they actually advertised as part of buying season tickets.
Clearly, they made all of these cost-cutting decisions after printing all of their materials with all of the season information from which people purchase tickets, but they really need to be better at communicating if they're going to make changes like that. And, actually, I feel like if they sold season tickets with operavision included then they need to honor that. But maybe that's just me.
They're also only doing eight productions this season instead of the usual nine, and there's some speculation that they couldn't afford to do more than eight. I wouldn't know if that particular thing is true or not.
Now, I'm not going to go so far as to say that Matthew Shilvock should be replaced as general director; I don't know enough details of the problem or how long it's been going on to make that kind of statement. What I do know, though, is that someone needs to be working on how to make the opera more appealing to the masses rather than trying to convince the masses that they need to like the opera the way it is. That's a recipe for disaster that will end the opera rather than people coming to see something they don't want to see.
And we love the opera and we love SFO, and we don't want to see SFO shut it doors due to a lack of funding.
Monday, December 21, 2015
The Barber of Seville (an opera review post)
The opera is by Gioachino Rossini, based on a play by Pierre Beaumarchais. You might remember that I mentioned that name back in my post about The Magic Flute. The Barber of Seville is the first play in the trilogy that continues with The Marriage of Figaro, which Mozart composed as an opera 30 years earlier. No, Mozart didn't just decide to start in the middle. In actuality, Barber had several operatic interpretations before Mozart did Marriage, so Rossini wasn't doing something that hadn't already been done. He just did it better than all of the earlier versions, and his opera has become the operatic interpretation of The Barber of Seville just like Mozart's version of The Marriage of Figaro is the version of that play.
All of that to say that the recent production of The Barber of Seville by the San Francisco Opera was amazing. Brilliant, even. Look, let me put it like this: This opera was not sung in English and, yet, I found myself getting so lost in the action and music of the play that I would forget to keep up with the translations. I would have these, "Oh, wait!" moments where I would have to look back to the screen with the English on it. This is what opera was and is meant to be.
All of the performers were extraordinary. There was no just standing around and singing in this one. Lucas Meachem, as Figaro, was commanding. He brought all of the necessary flair to the performance of a character who is larger-than-life. Rene Barbera and Daniela Mack were great as the lovesick couple. Allessandro Corbelli was spectacular as Rosina's father. And Efrain Solis (who played Papageno in The Magic Flute) was amazing in his non-speaking (singing) role.
There was great comedy, great singing, and great acting. It was so good, in fact, that, if it hadn't already been 10:30 pm, I would have walked right back in to see it again. Unfortunately, it was already at the end of its run when we went to see it or I would have tried to go again. Seriously, this was a great performance. If you're going to try out opera, this is the kind of production you want to start with.
This is us just before going to see Barber:
Friday, December 4, 2015
The Magic Flute (an opera review post)
But The Magic Flute is not The Marriage of Figaro and not as widely performed. I'm assuming that's because it's not as good, though it was very enjoyable. [I'll have more to say about Figaro in the next opera post.] Actually, there are parts of it that are downright hilarious, although it does have issues with the ending.
Basically, The Magic Flute is an allegory about the Freemasons (of which Mozart was one) and the Catholic church, represented in the opera as The Queen of the Night (now, if that doesn't tell you anything about how Mozart feels about the Catholic church, I don't know what will). The protagonist, Tamino, is initially aligned with The Queen of the Night but quickly switches sides once he discovers the reason and logic of Sarastro and the brotherhood he belongs to.
On the surface, it's a very cliche love story: young prince sees a picture of a beautiful princess, falls in love, and goes off to rescue her. The princess hears that a prince is coming to rescue her and immediately falls in love with the prince, sight unseen. There are places where it seems that Mozart recognizes the ludicrousness of the plot, but he uses the familiar trope to tell his allegory.
And that's all I'm going to tell you about the story. It's all online; you can look it up. I will say, though, that the ending -- which is one of those "everything inexplicably turns out okay in the end" kinds -- is what I would say is the weakness of the story. I'm sure it could be debated how it relates to the allegory of the opera, but I'm not going to have that debate in relation to the story itself, which I think suffers.
As I mentioned in my last opera post, one of the things opera can suffer from is performers who just stand and sing, and this performance had issues with that as well, though not as bad as in Lucia di Lammermoor. Sarastro tends in this direction though, with him, it could be on purpose as he's supposed to be a very serious and solemn character. That said, the lead Paul Appleby, as Tamino, also tended to just stand and sing. I have to say that he was quiet boring as the male lead.
However, in the performance we saw, the female lead was played by Nadine Sierra (you might remember from the first opera post that she was fabulous as Lucia in that opera), and she was, again, brilliant. She's definitely someone I'm going to be keeping my eye on.
The true gem of this show, though, was Efrain Solis as Papageno, the Queen's bird catcher. No, I don't know why he's a bird catcher.
That's Papageno on the left and NOT Nadine Sierra as Pamina.
What I do know is that he was hilarious. Completely. Papageno is the comic character of the piece as The Magic Flute is a comedy, and Solis pulled it off perfectly. He is not a stand-and-sing kind of guy. I would go back to see this again just for his performance.
One other thing: this was actually performed in English, which my wife and I didn't know going in, so that was a pleasant surprise. Of course, we went to a performance that had translations happening (basically subtitles), so they actually became distracting since we didn't need them.
I liked this one better than Lucia, and I liked Lucia, so that's saying something. Next up:
The Barber of Seville
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