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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46750 is a reply to message #46749 ] |
Sat, 03 December 2011 21:06   |
 b_twin_1
Messages: 2620
Registered: September 2008
Location: Victoria, Australia |
Senior Member
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She goes to bed with her EARRINGS on?? No wonder she sleeps badly. Never mind the business of being chained to her bed by the evil usurper who having (probably) despatched her husband is now trying to marry her to consolidate his claim to the throne.
LOL Sounds like 99% of soap opera of today...! (obviously some people have a difficult time being creative.)
Oh, and my purling is coming along nicely.
Hooray!
^ There is kissing in SHADOWS. Just by the way.
Woohoo! *a little fond of kissing scenes*
I had Pooka out and was texting to a Baroque-music-loving friend during the intermissions.
*giggle*
I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel ~ Blackadder
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46751 is a reply to message #46749 ] |
Sat, 03 December 2011 22:52 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Thanks to our MESSIAH rehearsal going overtime (by a fair amount), I got to hear (on the local classical station) only part of Rodelinda, including (yay!) the second act duet, while driving home, the sound occasionally covered (because my car radio's volume control is whonky and unreliable) by sounds of traffic, rain, and other things.
I'm wondering if the sound transmitted to the movie theaters was different than the sound I heard on the radio broadcast, because whatsisface (Bertie? Bertarido?) didn't sound underpowered and in fact could be easily heard over the road noise at a setting that wasn't all that loud (I couldn't turn the frelling thing up. Trying to turn it up made it go down.) That wouldn't explain why he seemed "paler" than the other singers in the theater version, though. Presumably they'd use the same audio for both, wouldn't they?
Just hearing the voices, with no other distraction than idiots cutting in on a wet road where I wasn't really thrilled about stamping on the brakes, I thought it was beautiful. But then...we'd had a hellish rehearsal and having someone singing Handel well and at a tempo that wasn't frenetic was soothing all by itself.
E
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46752 is a reply to message #46751 ] |
Sat, 03 December 2011 22:53 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Oh--of course I had my knitting along. I was early so knitted before the rehearsal, and then knitted afterwards to calm down until all the other cars had left the parking garage. It did help.
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46755 is a reply to message #46749 ] |
Sun, 04 December 2011 01:08 |
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Diane in MN
Messages: 2756
Registered: October 2008
Location: Twin Cities, MN, USA |
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I'm glad you made it to Rodelinda, and I'm not too surprised by your comments. Andrew Ross in The New Yorker had not a full review but a mention of R. when it opened, and he noted that Scholl doesn't have a big-enough voice for the house and that Fleming's coloratura technique is not her brightest asset. (Although I agree with Emoon--I was listening on the radio and did not get the sense that Scholl was underpowered, so maybe the sound engineers were doing something with the radio broadcast.)
Overall, I liked the production too, and since distracting and unnecessary stage business is a non-issue on the radio, didn't have that particular irritant. (And a major irritant it is, to me at least. We had a perfectly godawful production of Semiramide here some years ago in which the director felt he had to juice up the (non)action with imbecile stage business and irrelevant projections. People walked out at intermission. I didn't, because the singers were terrific. I just closed my eyes.)
About Stephanie Blythe--I've only ever SEEN her in the current Ring cycle. Did you see Walkure? I thought she made a hell of a Fricka.
"The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough . . . " Louise Erdrich
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46756 is a reply to message #46749 ] |
Sun, 04 December 2011 12:07 |
AnguaLupin
Messages: 11
Registered: May 2011 |
Junior Member |
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Ha! It's nice to see my views on this Rodelinde production match up almost exactly with someone else's.
I love Baroque music, and I love, love, love Handel, but I had never seen a Baroque opera before, and I found it did take some getting used to. The A-B-A formula that works so well in choral pieces and masses requires a little more patience when there is supposed to be, you know, a plot going on. I found I had to apply the Wagner Protocol: you watch what is going on long enough to figure out what the next aria is going to be about -- "ok, he's going to be singing about how he plans to take over the kingdom for the next seven minutes" -- and then close your eyes and just enjoy the music. Because I still love Handel, I just didn't need to read the same line over and over and over again in the subtitles.
The romantic lead being a countertenor also took some getting used to. One of the reasons why I love Baroque music is because I love the countertenor voice, but again, I found it required a bit of an adjustment to accept that the big romantic/heroic figure on the stage was going to be singing considerably higher than usual; we're just not used to that any more. (Also, because I am a horrible person, I kept making castrati jokes under my breath during the romantic scenes. I know, I know. I have no appreciation for good music.)
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Well, you heard them tonight too, but they were kind of soft and fuzzy around the edges, which is not what you want. The acoustic? Maybe. I don’t know, and my ear isn’t that good anyway. But he’s barely frelling audible. If anyone as asking me—which they clearly are not—he’s not an operatic singer.
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I agree completely! I liked his voice, but it was a bit fuzzy, and nowhere near as powerful as you need for an opera. I know getting the kind of power required for opera is near impossible for a countertenor -- power is one big advantage those castrati had -- and that that is a major reason why Baroque operas aren't generally done in big venues like the Met, but at the very least I expect the countertenor to make up for the lack of power with an absolute purity of voice. The kind of purity of voice that Handel writes for. And, even more frustratingly, the kind of purity of voice that Countertenor #2 (Unulfo) actually had. I thought he was brilliant.
I also agree on the tenor. I wasn't overly thrilled with him in Cappricio, but I didn't know whether that was because I wasn't overly thrilled with him as a tenor or because I just don't like Cappricio. Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter. He brought a lot of emotion to a role that's on the absurd end of the already absurd opera character spectrum. I also liked the evil baritone, although he was even more constrained by his character: "Please convince the audience that you are evil by singing about how evil you are. Repeatedly. And then kind of stand there. But in an evil way." He wasn't really abl
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46758 is a reply to message #46749 ] |
Sun, 04 December 2011 15:54 |
harpergray
Messages: 87
Registered: March 2011
Location: Sweden |
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Whew! Just back from seeing the Sunday-afternoon-reprise. On the whole I quite enjoyed it, though my favourite by far had to be Iestyn Davies. The ABA style didn't bother me, though I was half fearing it would; most of the performers coloured the repeats well enough that I felt they really did build on themselves.
I mostly liked the production too, although in a laudable attempt at distracting the 21st century sound-byte audience from the long unspooling of A-B-A-with-twiddles there was perhaps at times too much stage business. LEAVE THE FRELLING FLOWERS ALONE FOR PITY’S SAKE.
Teehee. Yes, some of the stage business certainly did become a wee bit silly. Did anyone else think that the son seemed to get poked and prodded quite a bit when someone needed to do something with their hands?
And the horse. The horse. I will begrudge no one a horse on stage, but besides the fact that they were standing in front of a stable it sort of seemed to come from...well, nowhere.
Opera generally gets a lot of stick for the absurdity of its plots, and Handel may get more than most. I’m probably the wrong person to ask because I’m tired of defending my hero Verdi, who wasn’t always well-served by his librettists, okay? I know. I still love the operas.
I have to admit, unless the plots are absurd beyond belief I've sort of ceased to make myself particularly kerfluffled about rigid adherence to sense or logic in an operatic plot. Growing up on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas sort of prepared me for a musical world in which things don't always make as much sense as one might expect them to. But then, the absurdity of the plot also seems to me to be part of the point of an opera: if the plot followed all sense and logic, it usually wouldn't be as exciting. 
Edited to add that I'm happy to hear the purling is going better! 
[Updated on: Sun, 04 December 2011 15:57]
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| Re: Rodelinda [message #46863 is a reply to message #46758 ] |
Sat, 10 December 2011 14:17 |
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equus_peduus
Messages: 437
Registered: September 2009
Location: France |
Senior Member |
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| harpergray wrote on Sun, 04 December 2011 12:54 |
And the horse. The horse. I will begrudge no one a horse on stage, but besides the fact that they were standing in front of a stable it sort of seemed to come from...well, nowhere.
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A few years ago, I played for some Mozartian comic opera or other (right now I can't think of the name) that was put on by a local group. I don't remember much at all, actually, except for two things:
Among other things, they changed the story to be placed in frontier Texas.
We had not only a horse (well, miniature horse) on stage, but also a sheep, a goat and a calf.
The benefits of having the clarinetist (who also, when necessary, plays bass clarinet and bassoon, and builds stage sets) be on the staff at the vet school (he's a parasitologist), is that he can talk vet school professors (in this case, an anatomy prof) into bringing their pet farm animals to music productions.
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