I cannot recommend this series highly enough. You feel like you're at the Met with better than box seats, and you also get rare views behind the scenes and interviews with leading participants. This is a great way to see opera.
But some contexts serve this approach -- opera as film -- better than others. Today we saw Strauss' Salome, which didn't work as well as film for me. The reason? The casting. Karita Mattila is fantastic as Salome except for one thing: she is too old for the part. On CD, in a traditional setting with the audience distant from the actors, this would not matter. But in film closeups, when you see a daughter that looks older than her mother, well, it ruined my suspension of disbelief. When she did the famous dance of the veils, I didn't see an erotic daughter dancing (Isolt at 16, according to the composer), I saw a middle-aged stripper in a downtown dive still having to dance to make rent. H didn't have this problem, so maybe it's a male thing. But Salome as middle-aged simply didn't work for me.
All the same, two parts of the opera, the rabbis arguing about religion and the ending with Salome's long aria to a severed head, worked well in an opera that isn't a favorite of mine anyway.
Next up, which I'm really looking forward to, is Adams' Doctor Atomic on November 11th.
We'll see over a dozen operas this year!
P.S. We estimated that about 90% of the audience was ... over 60! You'd think music students would take advantage of this. I suppose 10 a.m. is too early for them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment