It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas; it was a time of beautiful music, it was a time of headache inducing screeching....
Over the past two weeks or so I went to see two operas. One was a 4-part, 20 hour epic from the 19th century, and the other a 40 minute sliver from the 21st. Well, as they say, they don't write em like they used to.
The first opera (or maybe set of operas) was the Kirov's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. I don't think anything needs to be said about the brilliant music but on stage. I will say that both the orchestra (conducted by Valery Gergiev) and all of the singers sounded really marvelous. I had seen the Met's production a few years ago, and I think the Kirov's singer's may have actually been even better than the Met's - especially for the men, who I recall as being a bit weak. The oh so controversial sets from George Tsypin were... um... well, they sort of grew on me over the course of the operas. Some scenes worked well (the dancers who played the river Rhine, and the flaming around Brunhilde's rock were quite nice) and other parts were kind of embarrassing (the two giants were they giant rock-men who had arms that looks like the kind on those old plastic boxing figures where when one of the toys was hit the head would pop up, and the drag... well, wasn't - there were just some glowing green figures and a red section in the middle someone where the singer was hidden - I guess that was the heart). The costumes were also a mixed bag - Brunhilde looked a bit like Lily Munster, and the Valkyrie headdresses were just a bunch of black feathers. But some of the others, while not particularly remarkable, were at least not too offensive.
The second opera was the apparently new great masterpiece of the 21st century, George Benjamin's "Into the Little Hill," an adaptation of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" with libretto by playwright Martin Crimp. Since the opera was so short, the creators decided to give the audience a taste of what was to come by presenting two of the composer's previous pieces (one was for two violins, the other for a viola). If you've ever heard a middle school student who just took up the violin, and is trying to practice, but just isn't very good - well that's about what the two pieces sounded like. I wonder a bit what the sheet music for the pieces looked like (of course, all three musicians happened to have their parts memorized) because I wonder whether the notes they were playing could actually be written on sheet music - I think they invented notes not normally designed to be heard by the human ear (I think I heard some dogs howling in the background though...). So that gave me a nice little headache leading up to the opera. Always the optimist, I figured maybe that was just some of his earlier work - surely the opera would offer a little bit of melody. Or not. I think had the libretto been read instead of sung, with the orchestral part serving as background music, I may have actually enjoyed it. I don't mean to say the two singers (one a soprano, the other a contralto) weren't talented - it's just that the music they were given to sing not only wasn't "pretty" - I can deal with ugly music if it serves a purpose, something like ugly music to fit an ugly story, but even when the mother was singing about how she missed her daughter, there was just nothing musically interesting for my brain to latch on to. It was really just too dense and pretentious for my taste. Thank goodness it was only 40 minutes long. I'm not damning all modern opera to the garbage heap, but I don't know what those British critics were thinking when raving and hoot and hollering over this.
Maybe I'm just lazy and I like my music easy and spoon fed, but I'll take good ol long-winded 'why say it in two minutes when you can take a half hour' Wagner, over one of 40 minute George Benjamin headache any day.
