Met RHEINGOLD round-up

Heidi Whaleson in the WSJ: "a high-tech extravaganza oddly married to an old-fashioned stand-and-sing aesthetic." To me, that's basically praise.

Stage-machinery malfunction at very end meant gods had to shuffle off to Buffalo instead of entering Valhalla. But hey, the history of RING productions is a history of prop malfunctions. See my Dad's book, "Prima Donnas & Other Wild Beasts," for the section on anvils that split *before* Siegfried strikes them. You deal with it.

Philly says "flawed," which tells you a lot about Philly.

My longtime friend Martin Bernheimer (writing for The Financial Times) is the world's greatest opera critic, and perhaps the last of the truly learned ones. But he's mighty hard to please in RING productions. He railed endlessly against the Met's previous, ultra-realistic one, but does he like this new, more abstract one? Ha! Oh, Martin: Neo-Bayreuth has been done, Chereau has been done, you didn't like Schenck (tho' I did), and the less said about European "Regie," the less said the better. This is something really new yet really committed to telling Wagner's story, not the director's.

Claire Prentice in The Daily Telegraph: "a triumph...Lepage treated the audience to a mesmerising display of virtual magic...Images projected on to the set evoke the depths of the Rhine, the mountaintops of the gods and the underground realm of the Nibelungen....Wearing costumes inspired by early productionsthe singers move around a stage bathed in infrared light. Computers pick up their movements and envelop them in projected pictures that move with their voices and the score. Wherever the god Loge goes, a flaming aura follows...."

Oo! Oo! A quick video about the production, narrated by director Lepage! (Ignore the opening: it's Baroque, but don't fix it.)

First reaction I've heard from tonight's premiere of RHEINGOLD (and therefore of the entire Lepage RING): "Es lebt Richard Wagner!" Sounds encouraging, no?

Berg, who was so much more than just Schoenberg! Plus Schreker, and more! Alex Ross writes about a festival at Bard this past summer:

Berg, who was born in Vienna in 1885, is classified in most music histories as an epigone of Arnold Schoenberg. Although Berg followed Schoenberg in abandoning conventional tonal harmony and, later, in adopting twelve-tone composition, his works reverberate with echoes of Wagner, Strauss, and, especially, Mahler. If Schoenberg always seemed to be marching in a straight line, Berg moved in majestic loops. In that spirit, the “Berg and His World” festival presented a dizzying mélange of early twentieth-century styles: the late-Romantic outpourings of Mahler, the gilt-edged impressionism of Schreker, the Brucknerian bombast of Franz Schmidt, the brittle sonorities of Paul Hindemith...

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2010/09/13/100913crmu_music_ross#ixzz0zSr3mJli

Today on the 'Net (actually, on a networking site called Who-Hub) I encountered the following interview question: Do you think video games, chat rooms, etc. have a dangerous addictive effect on teenagers?

Here's my answer:

No. -- Well, maybe than can, but I think the word "addiction" has become drastically overused. There are some things that some people like to do a lot, while other people aren't that into them. Nothing wrong with that -- until the latter start to label the former "addicted" and start to medicalize their situation.

Do many teenagers today spend too much time with videogames and other online diversions, displacing both human interaction and other forms of education? Yes, maybe they do. When I was a teenager, I spent long hours under my headphones listening to various forms of classical music, mainly Wagnerian opera. Did I spend too much time with that, displacing both human interaction and other forms of education? Yes, maybe. Do I care? No.

And any educational specialists who came around theorizing that my Wagnerian opera-listening might have a dangerous addictive effect on me would have gotten Wotan's spear right through their interfering little hides.

You know what? I think the tendency to label other people's cultural passions as "dangerously addictive" has a dangerously addictive effect on educational theorists, psychologists, Euro-parliamentarians, and other types we could use less of. I think we should do something about it.

Pianist Stephen Hough blogs in London's Daily Telegraph about the Welsh National Opera's production of MEISTERSINGER. Most interesting! (And yt has a comment)

Giuseppe Taddei, RIP

A baritone as remarkable for his versatility as for his longevity on the stage. Not many singers succeed, at much the same periods in their careers, in relatively light baritone roles like Marcello, and in roles usually thought of as more in the bass-baritone line, such as Mozart's Figaro, and also Leporello, which is sufficiently bass territory to have been in Kipnis's repertory (though, yes, also in Evans's and Terfel's). Taddei performed and recorded all these roles -- and also the uber-dramatic roles of the Italian rep, such as Rigoletto and Scarpia (the latter famously recorded under Karajan with Price and diStefano.)

The New York Times's obit concentrated on the longevity angle, since the Met -- due to Bing's famous ham hands with singers' egos -- failed to secure his services until he was 69! (And what was Jimmy -- who usually handles singers so much better -- thinking of when he offered this titan a role like Fra Melitone as a Met debut role? I guess he was thinking cameo; but even at 69 Taddei was not yet old enough to be doing cameos!)

Currently listening to RING on endless-loop basis, as needed, to get the grading of exams done. Just finished Bohm '67 Bayreuth cycle. Even as late as that, Josef Greindl blew away the competition as Hagen, and Windgassen had breath for the entire Act III narrative.

As for Bohm -- well, I'm from the Kna-Goodall school, but Bohm shows one that exciting need not mean slow.