Sick Days Are God's Way of Telling You to Work Less and Blog More
I got home from a late Saturday night in NYC (Prokofiev opera, see below) and was at about the same time (3 AM) mugged by a sudden cold, which has mostly passed by today but still made it a better idea to sleep for another four hours this morning rather than to walk to work.
I was expecting to spend the entirety of Sunday watching football from the couch anyway, so I didn't miss out on much by being sick. We were all expecting a heavy winter storm yesterday, but it never really materialized. Some sleet, that's it. On undisturbed ground there's a couple of inches of snow sealed with a layer of ice, which is strikingly smooth & shiny in the afternoon light today. On the roads & sidewalks it's all slush. The city has not done a particularly good job plowing, despite all the snow & ice being expected in advance.
So, Prokofiev's setting of War and Peace is up at the Met this week, with a huge cast (60 singing roles, huge chorus), conducted by Valery Gergiev. Including intermissions it's about 4 hours long, but it doesn't bog down. Musically it's robust and effective, in a similar but more lyrical vein as Prokofiev's 5th Symphony; dramatically it moves well enough, though the plot lines from the prewar Part I are subsumed under the war scenes in Part II. I haven't read War and Peace, so I can't really judge what was lost in translation; Prokofiev's tack was apparently to select a dozen or so scenes out of the book, setting them at a reasonable dramatic pace, rather than try to compress everything to fit.
From the nosebleed seats, at least, it's not actually that much of a spectacle to see that many singers onstage. (Oh, and a horse. Sure, why not.) The production otherwise is attractively lean, with a small number of abstracted scenery-pieces descending for each scene onto the set floor, which also features a large circular platform set in motion at key moments.
Everything sounded great, to my ears. I'm still no opera-voice connoisseur, but all of the leads sounded firm and seemed to be living in their roles well, especially Irina Mataeva, the legitimately youthful lead soprano, and renowned bass-baritone Samuel Ramey, here playing the role of Field Marshal Kutuzov. The orchestra sounded fantastic; as for Gergiev, this is exactly the sort of thing that's given him the kind of worldwide stature he's got.
There's one very large, very hard-to-ignore issue with this opera: most of Part II sounds like Soviet propaganda, with titantic choruses (composed mid-WWII, remember) extolling the strength of the Russian people and their ability to turn invaders out. This is no mistake, obviously; the Soviet cultural authorities had requested that Prokofiev highlight the "dramatic and heroic aspect" of the story (according to the Met's program notes) after he completed the first piano score. Still, it feels odd to applaud for this, and it corrupts the epic sensibility of the story and stifles any possible sense of universality.
Worth hopping back on the Metro North at 1:15 AM for, anyway. (I missed the 12:25 by a few minutes. I bought some consolation junk food and read some more.) Getting to the opera was harder, since I lost track of the time while eating dinner with a couple of NYC friends at an Indian restaurant at 76th and Columbus, and found myself jogging several blocks to Lincoln Center in the 30-degree evening to get there on time. This is not much fun when you're full of Indian food.
Earlier in the day I'd taken care of some other characteristic New York things: spending an hour in the Jewish Museum with Mandy, taking in an exhibit on New Yorker cartoonist & children's book writer William Steig; reading for a bit at a bagel shop, savoring a coffee and a toasted onion bagel with whitefish salad; impulse-buying myself a much needed new pair of work shoes at a Filene's Basement close to the Indian restaurant.
Pete stopped up in New Haven on Friday evening, so we had beers & pizza and then watched Yefim Bronfman play a fairly magnificent recital on campus: Beethoven's "Quasi una fantasia" sonata and Schumann's C-Major Fantasy, both executed with an impressionistic sense of harmonic color and textural substance; then Ravel's quietly pyrotechnic "Gaspard de la Nuit" and a naively oriental barnburner called "Islamey" by Mily Balakirev. Bronfman is staggeringly good. His unidentified second encore, a peculiarly bluesy three-minute onrush of hammering rhythms and nervous energy, turned out to be (as someone we overheard while leaving the hall knew) the last movement of Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, which was in fact written around the same time he was finishing War and Peace. (Listen to a snippet of it from Bronfman's 1990 recording.) Now this is the kind of war-vintage Prokofiev I can get behind whole-heartedly: the kind that sounds like it's describing an out-of-control streetcar.
I was expecting to spend the entirety of Sunday watching football from the couch anyway, so I didn't miss out on much by being sick. We were all expecting a heavy winter storm yesterday, but it never really materialized. Some sleet, that's it. On undisturbed ground there's a couple of inches of snow sealed with a layer of ice, which is strikingly smooth & shiny in the afternoon light today. On the roads & sidewalks it's all slush. The city has not done a particularly good job plowing, despite all the snow & ice being expected in advance.
So, Prokofiev's setting of War and Peace is up at the Met this week, with a huge cast (60 singing roles, huge chorus), conducted by Valery Gergiev. Including intermissions it's about 4 hours long, but it doesn't bog down. Musically it's robust and effective, in a similar but more lyrical vein as Prokofiev's 5th Symphony; dramatically it moves well enough, though the plot lines from the prewar Part I are subsumed under the war scenes in Part II. I haven't read War and Peace, so I can't really judge what was lost in translation; Prokofiev's tack was apparently to select a dozen or so scenes out of the book, setting them at a reasonable dramatic pace, rather than try to compress everything to fit.
From the nosebleed seats, at least, it's not actually that much of a spectacle to see that many singers onstage. (Oh, and a horse. Sure, why not.) The production otherwise is attractively lean, with a small number of abstracted scenery-pieces descending for each scene onto the set floor, which also features a large circular platform set in motion at key moments.
Everything sounded great, to my ears. I'm still no opera-voice connoisseur, but all of the leads sounded firm and seemed to be living in their roles well, especially Irina Mataeva, the legitimately youthful lead soprano, and renowned bass-baritone Samuel Ramey, here playing the role of Field Marshal Kutuzov. The orchestra sounded fantastic; as for Gergiev, this is exactly the sort of thing that's given him the kind of worldwide stature he's got.
There's one very large, very hard-to-ignore issue with this opera: most of Part II sounds like Soviet propaganda, with titantic choruses (composed mid-WWII, remember) extolling the strength of the Russian people and their ability to turn invaders out. This is no mistake, obviously; the Soviet cultural authorities had requested that Prokofiev highlight the "dramatic and heroic aspect" of the story (according to the Met's program notes) after he completed the first piano score. Still, it feels odd to applaud for this, and it corrupts the epic sensibility of the story and stifles any possible sense of universality.
Worth hopping back on the Metro North at 1:15 AM for, anyway. (I missed the 12:25 by a few minutes. I bought some consolation junk food and read some more.) Getting to the opera was harder, since I lost track of the time while eating dinner with a couple of NYC friends at an Indian restaurant at 76th and Columbus, and found myself jogging several blocks to Lincoln Center in the 30-degree evening to get there on time. This is not much fun when you're full of Indian food.
Earlier in the day I'd taken care of some other characteristic New York things: spending an hour in the Jewish Museum with Mandy, taking in an exhibit on New Yorker cartoonist & children's book writer William Steig; reading for a bit at a bagel shop, savoring a coffee and a toasted onion bagel with whitefish salad; impulse-buying myself a much needed new pair of work shoes at a Filene's Basement close to the Indian restaurant.
Pete stopped up in New Haven on Friday evening, so we had beers & pizza and then watched Yefim Bronfman play a fairly magnificent recital on campus: Beethoven's "Quasi una fantasia" sonata and Schumann's C-Major Fantasy, both executed with an impressionistic sense of harmonic color and textural substance; then Ravel's quietly pyrotechnic "Gaspard de la Nuit" and a naively oriental barnburner called "Islamey" by Mily Balakirev. Bronfman is staggeringly good. His unidentified second encore, a peculiarly bluesy three-minute onrush of hammering rhythms and nervous energy, turned out to be (as someone we overheard while leaving the hall knew) the last movement of Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, which was in fact written around the same time he was finishing War and Peace. (Listen to a snippet of it from Bronfman's 1990 recording.) Now this is the kind of war-vintage Prokofiev I can get behind whole-heartedly: the kind that sounds like it's describing an out-of-control streetcar.
1 Comments:
I just saw War & Peace last night, and found myself think about similar things as you. The unironic pro-Russia stuff is a bit too much to ignore, or really get into, I guess, especially given the unspectacular spectacle of the second half of the opera. Worth seeing though. The Met orchestra seems to be one of the better ensembles in the States at this point. Ramey did quite well in his role, I agree, but its one of those things where the part sounds like its designed to be easily made to sound impressive - another aspect of the propagandistic aspects of the opera as a whole, in my reading.
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