The Turn of the Screw at City Opera

Britten with Star Wars

I went to see The Turn of the Screw at the New York City Opera and I wrote about it for Bachtrack:

Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw is a sensible choice for the New York City Opera: its chamber orchestration and emotional intimacy make it unsuitable for production by the Met Opera (against which every other company in town must define itself), and its claustrophobia would seem to offer a great opportunity for one of the company’s more innovative directors to create something creepy and unexpected. It also enjoys the name recognition to fill seats – which has, unfortunately, been an issue for the company’s more adventurous recent efforts. But while this production, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday afternoon, offers a step forward in musical values from some of the company’s other recent efforts, it doesn’t really do this striking work justice.

Click here to read the whole thing.

It was good to see this opera being performed in the right kind of space, and it was good to hear the City Opera return to thoroughly professional musical values (some of their efforts last season left me in doubt), but the production is, er, screwed up.

The best voice and best performance in the cast belonged to Sara Jakubiak as the Governess. Note to Germans: she'll be singing in Dresden soon (Rosalinde) and is in the ensemble at Frankfurt starting next season.

I am sorry to have missed City Opera's production of Powder Her Face, but the scheduling was impossible for me.

The Turn of the Screw runs through March 2.

Photo copyright Richard Termine.

Parsifal: the Met's knights to remember

The most enthralling section of Met’s new production of Parsifal is a portion that, in most productions, is the most dreaded: the first two-thirds of Act 3. Too often it's a bore, but here it’s hypnotic, sinking the audience deeply into the ritualistic and the very slow, from the music to the movements onstage. It is drama like this--grave and mysterious--that this production does best.

In many ways this performance was a big win for the Met. This is a musically outstanding Parsifal with great performances that balance the human and the mythic. There are many disturbing and sad things in it. The production is beautiful and has some striking visual moments. But these moments aren’t quite enough to make an interpretation, and I was left moved but with some big questions.

[Tenor] + Wagner

It's Wagner Year. In case you did not remember that the composer was born in 1813, two very prominent German tenors would like to remind you with their new CDs. (It's Verdi Year too, but he'll have to wait.)

A Parsifal Leitmotiv guide

they left out the Ni-Motiv.

The Met's new production of Parsifal, premiering on February 15, is one of the most-anticipated events of the season in New York. (For me, at least. See also.) In my continuing quest to be useful, and as a sequel to my Ring Leitmotiv guide of last year, here is a guide to the motives and other recurring themes of Parsifal for your reference and appreciation. This one I did not make myself, it is from an old public domain piano-vocal edition of the score. Not all the terms and associations are really up with current thinking on this piece, but if you're just getting started it should suit you fine. After the jump you can find it as an embedded PDF (which you can download here as well), with my translations of the German terms following.