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The Met Saturday Morning Broadcasts are back.....

17K views 384 replies 25 participants last post by  Woodduck 
#1 ·
Starting this Saturday at 10 pst, 1:00 est
Opening broadcast.....


December 10, 2022
Kevin Puts’ The Hours

New Production/Met Premiere
Yannick Nézet-Séguin; Renée Fleming (Clarissa Vaughan), Kelli O’Hara (Laura Brown), Joyce DiDonato (Virginia Woolf), Kathleen Kim (Barbara / Mrs. Latch), Sylvia D’Eramo (Kitty / Vanessa), Denyce Graves (Sally), John Holiday (Man Under the Arch / Hotel Clerk), William Burden (Louis), Sean Panikkar (Leonard Woolf), Kyle Ketelsen (Richard), Brandon Cedel (Dan Brown)

Discuss them here :)
 
#313 ·
Next up.............
Mozart’s Don Giovanni – New Production
Nathalie Stutzmann; Federica Lombardi (Donna Anna), Ana María Martínez (Donna Elvira), Ying Fang (Zerlina), Ben Bliss (Don Ottavio), Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), Adam Plachetka (Leporello), Alfred Walker (Masetto), Alexander Tsymbalyuk (The Commendatore)
 
#314 ·
Are we ready for the Don? :)
 
#323 ·
I had mixed feelings about Donald G. today and only listened halfway through. That means I missed the part of the opera I really like - the spooky part - but I just got tired of the endless, formulaic recitatives, the too-close microphones (as MAS and I just mentioned), and an unglamorous cast.

Peter Mattei has a peculiar voice: it has a pleasant sound, but it doesn't seem powerful, brilliant, dark, sensual, or anything else exciting. His vibrato is extremely subtle, and he employs a lot of straight tone. The result is that he projects, vocally at least, none of the machismo or charisma Donnie needs to make him the semi-mythical center of the opera we've always thought he was. Apparently this Met offering is a "contemporary" production, very grim and gray, and I have no doubt that the point of it is to deglamorize old Don - to transform the traditional roguish libertine into a garden-variety rapist. "Unfortunately - or fortunately" (to quote an even more loathsome Donald in his recent self-convicting testimony) - it didn't work for me, since I couldn't watch but could only listen to Mozart's music, which is anything but grim and gray.

None of the other voices were especially interesting, although none were bad. Don's sidekick was OK but his voice wasn't flattered by the mic. Ana Maria Martinez was a manic and, apparently, funny Elvira (she sometimes rolled her Rs in a comical way), Federica Lombardi seemed a small-voiced but enthusiastic Anna, and Ben Bliss was a pleasant, generic Ottavio. When the Met does Mozart we tend to be spared most of the wobbles that now come packaged with Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss. But for my tastes Mozart isn't very rewarding unless the singing is A+ (you know, Pinza, Rethberg, Grummer, Schwarzkopf and the like). Good luck with that. It also helps to trim the recitatives back to an absolute minimum necessary to carry the plot. Sorry, Da Ponte! It was mentioned that today the recitatives were accompanied in part by a theorbo, which is a gigantic lute. Is that authentic for the late 1800s?

I should put in a good word for Nathalie Stutzmann, who gave me a tense, exciting overture that aroused greater expectations than the opera could fulfill.
 
#324 ·
Like @Woodduck, I found the singing unexceptional, a collection of somewhat anonymous voices and, surprisingly, almost free of wobbles. And entirely free of glamor (to my ears). So that was a theorbo? It sounded like a piano continuo to me, but sometimes I’ve a hard time identifying instruments.

I missed part of act I (shower and morning ablutions) and act II (turned it off - see previous post re:sound).
 
#325 ·
Like @Woodduck, I found the singing unexceptional, a collection of somewhat anonymous voices and, surprisingly, almost free of wobbles. And entirely free of glamor (to my ears). So that was a theorbo? It sounded like a piano continuo to me, but sometimes I’ve a hard time identifying instruments.

I missed part of act I (shower and morning ablutions) and act II (turned it off - see previous post re:sound).
Consulting Wiki, I read that "In France, theorbos were appreciated and used in orchestral or chamber music until the second half of the 18th century. Court orchestras at Vienna, Bayreuth and Berlin still employed theorbo players after 1750." Don Giovanni premiered in Prague in 1787, so I guess a lute-type instrument could be authentic. Maybe Nathalie Stutzmann, with her Baroque music background, had a say in the decision to use it. Certainly there was a choice of continuo instruments in Mozart's day, including various keyboard instruments, and I see no reason not to choose freely now. Of course we could just eliminate the recitatives... :devilish:
 
#327 ·
I laugh (above), but the longueurs in Mozart operas are entirely due to the recitativi, in my view - they are necessary to move the plot along, sure, but they can be deadly if you don’t have a cast, or even one singer, who can’t say them with every and meaning.
My favorite Magic Flute for years was Klemperer's. Just the fantastic music, with some great singers. Hell, we know the plot.
 
#336 ·
Next up......................
May 27, 2023
Terence Blanchard’s Champion
New Production/Met Premiere

Performance from April 29, 2023
Yannick Nézet-Séguin; Ryan Speedo Green (Young Emile Griffith), Eric Owens (Emile Griffith), Latonia Moore (Emelda Griffith), Stephanie Blythe (Kathy Hagen), Paul Groves (Howie Albert), Eric Greene (Benny “Kid” Paret)


Uh oh :rolleyes:
 
#337 ·
Some of the Youtube excerpts (of Champion) either sound like a musical or modern dissonant music. Or the singers seems to talk/shout more than sing. Why do everyone has to write that kind of music today? Where are the composers with beautiful melody like in the old times?
 
#348 · (Edited)
It must be hard to be an opera critic these days. Nobody (not the average body, anyway) wants to give the debut of a new opera a barely qualified thumbs down. Terence Blanchard is obviously a talented musician, and there are arresting musical ideas in Champion, the subject matter of which seems to me excellent material for a piece of musical theater. As theater, I suspect the opera worked better than it did as a purely aural experience. At times I liked the blend of classical and jazz elements in the score, which was pretty varied and never boring, but Blanchard often sent his orchestra off on prolonged, energetic, jazzy riffs against which he tried to set dialogue and stage business. I can't say how this worked in the theater, but listening at home I couldn't make out much of the dialogue during these loud and rhythmically frantic episodes. Maybe there was dancing onstage.

The opera's central character is boxer Emile Griffith, played by two singers at different stages of life (three, if you count the brief bit by the boy soprano). Young man Griffith was sung by Ryan Speedo Green, and elderly Griffith by Eric Owens. No doubt both are effective actors, and they look great in photos, but their singing gave me no pleasure. In an opera largely devoid of arias or even graspable, memorable vocal phrases, it's terribly important to have clean, wobble-free voices so that the vocal writing doesn't sound like a lot tuneless ranting. Today, unfortunately we got tuneless ranting much of the time. I was constantly wondering what the music would sound like if only I could hear it better. Veteran Owens is particularly unlistenable. Latonia Moore, who played Griffith's mother and has an actual aria in Act 2, provided the best vocal moment of the performance.

We shouldn't underestimate the artistic problems involved in composing an opera, which requires that a composer create convincing musical structures wedded to action and dialogue which make their own demands. It was easier in the days when the action moved along mainly in recitative and the characters could stop and express their feelings in clearly constructed arias. Contemporary composers struggle to create convincing musical-dramatic arcs at a time when music has no stylistic boundaries and the past is a smorgasbord of ideas, choosing among which more easily leads to indigestion than to nutrition. I haven't heard a recent opera that constitutes a successful attempt at perpetuating the art form from the standpoint of the music listener.

An opera by a black composer about a famous real-life black sports figure, with music that makes attractive use of energetic, syncopated jazzy rhythms, has several things going for it at this moment in time. That it also presents a sympathetic portrait of an elderly black man with dementia must make it practically obligatory. The Met audience clearly enjoyed it.
 
#349 ·
Next up....................
June 3, 2023
Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte

New Production
Nathalie Stutzmann; Lawrence Brownlee (Tamino), Erin Morley (Pamina), Thomas Oliemans (Papageno), Stephen Milling (Sarastro), Kathryn Lewek (Queen of the Night), Brenton Ryan (Monostatos), Alan Held (Sprecher)
 
#350 ·
Are we ready for the Zauberflote?
 
#363 ·
How do you listen to the broadcasts? Streaming on the internet, FM broadcast, or ...? I suspect that most of the options involve some form of data compression which inevitably introduces some undesirable artifacts (I mean the sound, not some of the singers!)
 
#369 ·
Next up and last of this season...........
June 10, 2023
Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer

Thomas Guggeis; Tomasz Konieczny (Holländer), Elza van den Heever (Senta), Dmitry Belosselskiy (Daland), Eric Cutler (Erik), Richard Trey Smagur (Steuermann)

Looking forward to this one :)
 
#374 ·
Are we ready for The Dutchman? :)
 
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