Damnation Redux - Friday, November 14, 2008

Some comments on Sam Shirakawa's squib on the Met's new production of The Damnation of Faust, based on my own observations at Friday evening's performance:

G and I sat near the back of the Family Circle, but off to one side. I was not aware of the whirring of the projectors from the lighting booth above the Family Circle, so I suspect Sam heard the racket because he was sitting closer to the center of the Family Circle. Since Opening Night, the Met may also have worked to dampen the noise.

I agree with Sam about the the two-dimensionality of the production. This was especially obvious in the dance sequences where the dancers all moved laterally to and fro across the stage, but the stretches of stage they had to work with amounted to wider than normal catwalks.

Some of the video effects were striking - one of the more arresting images came late in the second act: as Méphistophélès stalks Faust to seek his signature on the deed, one by one the trees with their fall foliage wither as Méphistophélès advances across the stage towards his quarry - chilling and effective.

As for the singing, Susan Graham was wonderful throughout, perhaps the best I had ever heard her, with warm and plangent tone, long-breathed phrasing and generally good diction. Patrick Carfizzi, as the drunkard, Brander, made the most of his aria, with admirably clear diction. I have always loved Carfizzi's voice and presence and wonder why he has not been given meatier roles (I suspect he could handle Méphistophélès with more panache than John Relyea did tonight).

Relyea looked smashing in his red leather suit and feathered cap, but I wish his singing had more of the French suavity required for the role. His serenade in Part III passed without note (or applause). After such a promising beginning as a young singer, his singing has become more throaty and constricted over the last few seasons. Marcello Giordani's singing was coarse and unstylish all evening, and his diction was unintelligible.

Sam is right about James Levine's conducting, and I also agree with Sam that it was distracting to watch the reflection of him conducting in the onstage screens all evening. I am sure no one in the production staff ever went upstairs to see if there would be reflection problems for those sitting in the gods....

Altogether a mixed bag - Berlioz's music and his orchestrations are constantly dazzling, and the ending was sublime, but the singing was more disappointing that one might wish. Still I wouldn't want to have missed this extraordinary event.

Digital Damnation - Metropolitan Opera / November 7, 2008

Sam Shirakawa attended the Opening Night of the Met's new production of La Damnation de Faust. Here is his squib:

If you were sitting in the uppermost tier (Balcony/Family Circle) of the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, you could both see and hear the much vaunted computer-driven settings that are flashed onto the stage in the new production of Berlioz' Le Damnation de Faust -- the composer's discursive take on Goethe's epic.

See AND hear?

The whirring motors driving/cooling the projectors in the booth protruding from the ceiling were so loud, that you were hard put to hear anything from the stage or pit registering below mezzo-forte--which was often.

The complexities of Robert Lepage's pretty and pretty interactive production are outlined in Daniel Wakin's New York Times article, so I won't rehash them here.

But...

The mammoth five-level grid that Lepage imposes on the proscenium is so shallow that the stage becomes a giant computer screen on which singers and dancers move up, down and across, but never to and fro. It's all in your face, oddly two-dimensional, and somehow heartless. You get some sense of depth from the reflector scrims at the rear of the grid, but they also mirror (irritatingly, I might add) the lights on the music stands in the orchestra pit, as well as James Levine sawing away on the podium.

So shallow a stage space, however, turned out to be a boon for the singers trying to project over the augmented orchestra and the droning projector motors, lest we forget that opera is primarily about singing. The title role is a killer, but Marcello Giordano seemed to have no problems scaling its heights on Friday night. John Relyea cut an imposing figure as Mephistopheles and cut through dense orchestral thickets without effort. Susan Graham may be listed on the roster as a mezzo-soprano, but her as-usual flawless portrayal of Marguerite smacked more of Schwarzkopf than of Suzanne Danco. (I can't say anything about her rendition of " D'Amour l'ardente flamme" because she was no match for the projector motors going full tilt.) The chorus--also augmented--seemed muffled throughout the performance, especially in the penultimate pandemonium, where literally all hell breaks loose.

It's easy to take James Levine for granted, because he almost always makes everything work. Berlioz more often than not requires a traffic cop on the podium rather than a conductor, and Levine steered the orchestra, chorus and cast through choppy straits with his customary elan.

For all the high falutin' digital decor in this production, poor Susan Graham sicut Marguerite had to ascend to Heaven the old-fashioned analogue way -- schlepping step by step up a frail ladder into the flies. But maybe that's LaPage's ultimate point: Paradise awaits at the top of a five-story walk-up.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

BERLIOZ Romeo et Juliette

Another squib from Sam Shirakawa --

Philadelphia Orchestra 16 October 2008

I never have understood why Berlioz composed Romeo et Juliette. I know, I know. It's a paean to the British actress who eventually became his wife. I understand too that he apparently was looking for a means of expressing transcendent longing by transcending every means he was using to express it.

Ah the French! Never tiring of searching for a way to say "fuck me" without actually saying it.

As a result, Beau Berlioz ended up with an entity that's never quite an adequate substitute for the actual sensation. Romeo et Juliette is frequently operatic but it is not an opera, it is short of a cantata but much too long on cant, it aspires to be a kind of a symphony but it remains bereft of... You get the idea: It's a mishmash. But it's a mishmash that left a searing impression on what Balzac called the "brains of Paris" at its wildly successful first performances in the autumn of 1839.

Love, as mentioned already, played a huge role in its composition: the composer's adoration of Shakespeare and the bard's play, as well as his passion for Harriet Smithson, the English actress with whom he fell in love, while witnessing her portrayal (in English) at the Odeon. All this made more remarkable by the realization that Berlioz' command of languages excluded English.

Odd too is the composer's use of a text by Emile Duchamps. Much of it is derived from a version of Romeo and Juliet that was popular at the time by the English actor and entrepreneur David Garrick. No matter how much sauce béchamel you may ladle on to it, Duchamps' text is trop liquide compared to the ambrosial verbal harmonies of the source material.

While the hot 'n' heavy passion Berlioz poured into what he called a "Dramatic Symphony" (what symphony should not be dramatic?) remains unmistakable in the score even today, it takes inspiration of a special sort to pull it off in performance -- the kind of oomph that Leopold Stokowski and even Eugene Ormandy were able to conjure up virtually at will when they were on the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where the work now is in the midst of a four-performance run in the City of Brotherly Love. For good or ill, the Orchestra has changed beyond recognition, and its current Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit is more intent upon laying wreaths in memory of Berlioz than on reviving the spirit of the music at its creation.

So the net-net impression left by the first performance in the current series of R & J at Verizon Hall was one of admiration rather than epiphany. Dutoit revealed the contours of this odd work efficiently, drawing some nice performances from the vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, but without uncorking the magic that palpably intoxicated its first audiences.

Berlioz assigned the bulk of the solo vocal line to the bass role of Friar Laurence, who appears toward the end of the work to exhort (at some length) the warring Capulets and Montagues to bury their hatchets. British baritone David Wilson-Johnson carried out his duty flawlessly, spinning out a fine cantilena, where there often was little melody to latch onto. Papa Laurence is a thankless role; I hope Wilson-Johnson received merit pay for flying in to do it.

I wondered if Rumanian mezzo-soprano Roxana Denose and American tenor Gregory Kunde (making his Orchestra debut) would be as good at story-telling if they had to speak their brief lines, instead of singing them. Churlish as it might be to say it, these parts offer these gifted artists little to chew on. I also wondered why Berlioz used these vocal parts for telling what happened rather than for enacting what took place. There are no soaring lines to speak of, no invocations to l'amour, no protracted expressions of longing. Some of that is left to the Philadelphia Singers Chorale under the direction of David Hayes, the rest is left to the Orchestra, both of which performed satisfactorily on 16 October.

I must admit I longed for Stoki's ghost to stoke some fire into the proceedings. There was hélas no sign of him, possibly because he never conducted the work with the Orchestra. In a few weeks one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century is set to conduct Wagner with the Philadelphians. Stokowski, Ormandy et le auteur will surely be listening...

Performances of Romeo et Juliette continue on tonight and 21 October in Philadelphia.

Sam H. Shirakawa