Monday
Apr282014
OperaNow! #213: Joan's Other Land
Monday, April 28, 2014 at 10:04AM 
San Diego Opera Give Themselves Until May 19th...Ian Campbell placed on paid leave...Ben Heppner says "So Long, Eh?"...Javier Camarena receives rare encore in Cenerentola at The Met...Jonathan Pell stepping down from Dalls Opera...Canadian Music Festival Takes Down "Questionable" Billboard...Dave Mustaine of Megadeath shreds Wagner in San Diego.
In the final installment of Così, Oliver's Corner illustrates why you should never hire a sassy chamber maid if you want to live the Seria lifestyle.
Plus the answer to last weeks OPERABUSTERS! and Guess Who Died?
This week features Michael, The OC, Doug Dodson and listener on the show Chris Ternes.
Reader Comments (8)
In my zeal to stay focused and keep the momentum of OCorner going, I forgot to credit the performances sampled.
Here they are:
•Un'aura amorosa "A" section: Leopold Simoneau from the Karakan/EMI recording. As many of you know, Simoneau is one of my first loves -a singer I started admiring she I was still on college. I remember going to Tower Records with Michael, Kevin, and Brian (all former panelists). I drove. We all came away with many recordings to relish, and each of us took turns sampling a new disc on our drive back to Evanston. The other guys played Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill and Lawrence Tibbett (I am not sure of this, but I probably remembered one of those right) and they had a jolly time, the way guys horse around in the locker room. When it was finally my turn, I played Simoneau singing Tamino and got ZERO response from my hetero pals. And I was ashamed, like I had played a Barbara Streisand recording for them. Almost 20 years later, I still love my sweet, feminine sounding Simoneau. He is like the Fred Astaire of Mozart operas.
•Mi tradi +Ah lo veggio. Karita Mattila on the Neville Marriner recording for Phillips, and Frank Lopardo on the live concert recording under Solti for Decca/London. I bring up Mattila mainly because I listened to the entire Cosi under the same conductor on the same label. KM has some unique difficulties in the role, but musters up very poignant singing in the 2nd act. And the sister duets with ASVO are RAVISHING. Check it out on Spotify. Most of you know that I am a huge fan of Lopardo in his Mozart/Rossini days. His first act aria as Ferrando is consistently flat, and it is a huge disappointment. But he more than makes up for it in his ensemble singing, his secco recitatives, and in both of his 2nd act arias suffused with palpable drama.
•Tradito: récit was Lopardo. aria Jerry Hadley. So sad that JH took his own life. What a waste. Michael told a story a few years ago that he bumped into Mr Hadley on the street and would have said to him how much he admired his artistry if he had thought that hearing a compliment would have in anyway helped.
•The Magic Moment in the Ferrando/Fiordiligi duet
1) Lopardo: you should have been able to guess this by now. What AMAZING and intelligent phrasing! I have never heard it sung with more risk and sense of vulnerability. The first two sixteenths on the word "Volgi" are slightly out of time and out of tune. Admittedly, they are the hardest two notes to place in the entire opera. When the entire orchestra is waiting for you to set a new tempo, and how you articulate a subdivision of a beat will determine the tempo of a the most important movement of the opera, THAT can be nerve wracking, so I forgive him. The rest was magic.
2) Michael knows me so well. Earlier in the segment he cited Francisco Araiza as a different type of Mozart singer, slightly more athletic. He had no idea that I would be playing them side by side to illustrate just that point. Araiza is more technically secure in this highly exposed passage, but as a result, a little too confident in what he is saying, which in my opinion should sound as vulnerable as a teenager confessing love for the first time. This is from the same Neville Marriner recording mentioned above.
3) John Aler from the Haitink recording from a Glyndebourne production in the late 80's. Aler is a frustrating singer to listen to. Sometimes he musters up something ethereal like in the sample here. But more often than not, he telegraphs his technique so you know EXACTLY how he negotiating a tricky phrase. Simoneau and he sound very alike, but both Simoneau and Lopardo are better at tricking the audience even though all three are probably using the same approach.
4) Topi Lehtipuu. I have not gotten on the Topi bandwagon like a lot of my Early Music friends have, but I must acknowledge that he has a beautiful tone and is a very SMART singer. He uses the rhetoric as well as anyone can in Mozart, and the subsequent allegretto section is appropriately passionate. I found this one on YouTube from a live production marred by the Fiordiligi.
•Un'aura "B section to the end" - Matthew Polenzani from the recent Met HD/Radio broadcast. Thanks to OperaTeen for the audio file. I have known Matthew since he was working side by side with me at the Verdi and Puccini Opera Cafe in Evanston, IL in the 90's. He is such a nice guy and for STYLE is one of my favorite singers on the scene right now. Last year I played a clip of him singing the aria from Faust. If you know me, you understand that when I compliment someone on their stye, it is high praise. If you were sitting next to me at the movie theater last Saturday, you would have thought that I had just put my dog to sleep after Matthew finished this aria.
-OC
What you said about the oboe really made sense. When you think about it, this association continues into the 19th century, because Tchaikovsky (who was himself a HUGE Mozart fan, particularly of Don Giovanni) uses the oboe for the now-ubiquitous love theme in Romeo and Juliet.
Also Michael should do more oboe scat singing.
As for the billboard.... to me the difference is the context. If something is said between friends who all understand what they mean by certain terms, and know that none of them will be offended, that's fine. But when you put something out into the public domain, where anyone could potentially see it, without knowing your intentions, and without some kind of tacit, pre-existing understanding about your meaning, then it's a different matter. It's different for the same reason that saying something offensive on TV or in print is different to saying something in private to a friend. I think there's also the question of authorship - the person making the potentially offensive remark may not belong to the group which it offends, even if it comes from an environement which is, on the whole, friendly to that group. Therefore, they don't necessarily have any right to use the term in such a casual way. Plus, the people who might see the message have no way of knowing who the author is - it's an anonymous, faceless statement put out by an institution, and can't necessarily be attributed to a single individual. I also don't think that the author's intentions are necessarily the be-all-and-end-all of interpretation. The meaning that people *receiving* a message take away from it may be just as valid, if not more so, than the person who wrote it.
Something like this podcast sits somewhere in the grey area between "conversation amongst friends" and "public domain". You have to actively choose to listen to this podcast, whereas something on TV, or in a newspaper, or on a billboard, could be stumbled across by anyone.
That said, I think it would be fairly obvious to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of opera and the kinds of audiences it attracts that this particular billboard was not meant to be hurtful or demeaning. Then again, while lots of people who like opera are gay, I'm sure there are lots of people who are gay but don't like opera. So not everyone who is the butt of this joke will feel like they are in on it, they might feel like a victim of it instead. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't strike me as being *so* bad, but I also think marketing people should think a little bit more before they try to be edgy, and not assume that jokes will translate from the private, slightly cloistered world of opera into the larger public domain.
*how you articulate a subdivision of a beat will determine the tempo of the most important passage of the opera
I was typing way too fast.
-OC
Another great podcast. I'm glad to see the power of Opera Now. Just a couple of days after Michael Mayes demands that Karen Cohn be replaced by Carol Lazier, so it came to pass.
And I'm just starting to listen to your live show from Santa Barbara...can't wait to hear what Marilyn Horne has to say to you guys!
cheers, Tam
Oliver's Corner:
Oliver, as a novice, I really appreciated the Cosi series for Oliver's Corner. Very astute and observable points that I could both follow and appreciate. Thanks much for that!
Fairies on A Billboard:
As for the Billboard, there are very general rules for sensitivity and inclusiveness that generally apply:
-Just because a member of that community uses that term doesn't make it right. While an Af-Am might use the N-word, or a gay person might use the F-word (not fairy, the other F word)...they are perpetuating the normalization of that word and doing a disservice to their community. While it would be unlikely or awkward for a non-Af-Am or non-gay person to confront them about being offended by their use of the term, there are other members within those communities who do confront them.
-Withn artistic expression there is far more latitude given; but advertising is not artistic expression.
-On a billboard? No go. Primarily becuase 90% of the people who see the billboard are not going to have the opera knowledge, context knowledge, awareness of intent, etc.. to be able to discern that it's not intended derogatorily. And, it would be unsafe to automatically assume that we know that there was no homophobic intent behind it even though we give them the benefit of the doubt as operaphiles.
-We wouldn't find it acceptable to advertise for Porgy and Bess with a Billboard that says we've got more "N-words" than....; We wouldn't find it acceptable to advertise West Side Story with a Billboard that says the Crips and got nothing on us, etc.... no matter how humorous stereotypes and derogatory slang have no place outside of the artistic application.
-Now I'm not quite sure what would be acceptable on a Billboard for White Dad Problems...that's a conundrum. Would a Billboard that states "White Dad Problems...More White Men Than A Hillary Clinton Campaign Rally" ..be offensive? Hmm...probably still offensive, even if it were true.
The Opera Busters clue should have been.. Not Her Northern Property = Southern Land - Sutherland
I know, I know, all a couple of years late... but I've got time space displacement syndrome soooo...
Still enjoying every episode!