After having spent a couple of days painstakingly updating the 2003-4 sugarpoet.com opera calendar (
http://calendar.sugarpoet.com), I feel empowered (or at least entitled) to make a few recommendations. Included in the calendar are not only the complete seasons for both The Met and City Opera (even The Ring Cycle...egads!), but events at Juilliard, BAM, DiCapo, and anything else I could find. The only companies missing are Amato Opera, because they use recorded accompaniment and that just isn't any fun, and
Henry Street Chamber Opera (now known as Gotham Chamber Opera), because they have not appointed the dates or hours yet for their next production, Die schwarze Spinne.
New York City Opera's Carmen and Butterfly were quite excellent and I would recommend them particularly if you are using the NYCO Diva or Duet program. Among productions that I have not seen at City Opera, "
Alcina," a Handel work, and "
Lucia de Lammermoor" (a NYCO perennial), look fabulous. They have reset the
Mikado on the British shore around 1900, so we'll have to see how that plays. They are doing "Of Mice and Men" from Carlysle Floyd but I have to say that I have been singularly unimpressed with the American Operas at City (wincingly remembering "The Mother of Us All" and "Little Women"). In the spring, NYCO is doing a rendition of Sondheim's "
Sweeney Todd" which is sure to be a sell-out (Sondheim always is) so get tickets early. "
Mourning Becomes Electra" could be excellent, could be a disaster - though Laura Flanigan's voice is usually solid, presentation of literary classics in operatic form is not always. "
Xerxes" and "
Ermione" also look promising.
The Met is opening with "La Traviata" which is one of the loveliest and most poignant operas of all time - of course, if you can catch Renee Fleming as Violetta, you should, you should. In the new productions, "
La Juive," a Czech opera I think, looks quite interesting though it is four hours. "Salome" is a great story and Strauss's composition is flawless but the German is always a detraction. "
Benvenuto Cellini" from Berlioz could be very nice though I am not familiar with any of the principals performing. As for the Repertory, The Met's "Tosca" is incomparable, and their "Butterfly" and "Rigoletto" are surely brilliant. Since I am not a fan of German opera (particularly Wagner) nor of Mozart (at least "Figaro," "Magic Flute" and "Don Giovanni"), I won't speak to those repertory pieces. I do have my eye on "
Barbers of Seville," "
Nabucco," and "
The Merry Widow" from the great classics. "
Stravinsky" and "
Boris Gudonov" could shape up to be modern Russian gems. "
The Queen of Spades" is an excellent fable and from the web pictures, appears to have some very slick staging.
I have never seen anything at
Dicapo, a smaller opera theatre up on the Upper East Side, but "
La Perichole" looks charming and "
Faust" is always a winner. BAM has two operatic works this year, but is only really staging one (
Ainadamar). And don't forget about Juilliard's performance of "
Oreste."
Sadly, the two big houses in town are not staging any new work. Not one single opera is premiering on their stages this season. I can't say whether this is because they feel like new work is too risky in this economic climate or if they believe there is no new work available worth presenting. Last year both houses had sell-out seasons so I feel like their risk aversion is unnecessary and will weaken the vitality of opera in this country. Of course, several different operas every day of the week, even without new blood, is still some kind of miracle.
Weekend before last, I visited MoMA QNS to peruse the (relatively) latest exhibits of Ansel Adams and Max Beckmann works. The latter is a glittering and (literally) sharply outlined display of subversive social and political commentary in the form of paintings. The former is a chilly, lifeless assembly line of landscape dreck. Since the Adams exhibit received so much praise and studied ardor from its viewers while I was at MoMA, I will attempt, however trivial the effect, to right the balance by focusing solely on the Beckmann retrospective.
Max Beckmann's work "defies categorization" but is no subtle fusion of the various movements afoot in Europe at the time. Instead, Beckmann created a kind of aberration and in doing so, crafted a unique voice that belonged to no group of ideologues or aesthetes. Beckmann's wartime experience informed this voice, making him an even more harsh critic of European society during the 20's and 30's and a harbinger of the scourge to come. Fighting in World War I, according to the exhibit's curator, Robert Storr, "instilled in him a sense of the universe as oscillating between apocalyptic confusion and harrowing existential emptiness." Over and over from his earlier (but still famous) work using crowded scenes of secular allegory to his later and steller triptychs, Beckmann delivers cruel lessons with heavy lines and queasy arrangements.
The first paintings of the exhibit pay homage to realism and romanticism - he contemplates the sweeping tableau of Delacroix and harsh light of Courbet while dabbling in Fauvist coloration. In the mid to late 20's, his paintings veer toward the frank and unsmiling reality of post-war Germany - his edges thicken, his characters harden. The architecture of these works investigates an increasingly fractured world. With arms and legs akimbo, objects and elongated human appendages become swords dividing the canvas into warring plains. The theme of vaudeville and the circus appears more creepy, even raunchy, than pleasurable in the arrangement of Carnival (1925) and Aerial Acrobats (1928). Even the simple act of bathing, as in The Bath (1930) becomes topsy-turvy in Beckmann's new world.
In the quintessential The Night (1918), a gruesome tale of brutality and repression, Beckmann hits a fevered pitch of angles and shapes. The upturned hat in the bottom center of the painting tells us that he likens the scene to a witch-hunt but the political identity of the torturers is ambiguous, leaving the viewer to assume the indictment is meant for all totalitarian/authoritarian regimes. A work familiar to you if you have a paperback copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Family Portrait (1920) is less chaotic but disturbing nonetheless in its timeless portrayal of the claustrophobic nature of domestic life. The plant looms like a spider, the ceiling droops, the figures nearly fill the space yet they are miserably remote. Recurring symbols and characters, like the puppet king in the top right corner, and Beckmann with a horn (symbolizing his perhaps arrogant belief that he is a messenger to be heeded) appear.
Much of the work during the 20's and early 30's depicts a sneering absurdity in the guise of theatricality. Even so, the Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) appears to have both a reverence for and at the same time, an embarassment about the costume of the cultural elite. The Portrait of NM Zeretelli (1927) is similarly amibiguous - the actor is positively ludicrous in his cartoon-like blue suit and white makeup but at the same time, he is seated in a royal's chair and wears the expression of a bemused cynic. According to a Leon Golub, an American painter who studied Beckmann, "There is often an aspect of self-parody in Beckmann, even a clownishness...instead of bringing order to the situation [of Germany in the 1920's], he kicks it around and gives it a disorder all his own. "
Next up...the infamous tryptichs of Max Beckmann...
