I remember my first time at the opera. It was Mephistofele. And I loved it.

Last week, I had the pleasure of taking my piano student, Naomi (age 11) to her first opera: La Traviata. I asked her ahead of time if she was okay with a tragic opera being her first, and she was cool with it (I think the death added to the appeal, actually). I really wasn’t sure if she’d like it-rock music is more her thing-but she loved it.

Here’s Naomi’s favorites:

• The ballet dancers. They had gorgeous costumes. And castanets. What more could you want?
• The set. Lavish, detailed, and realistic in at 1870s style, complete with macabre tombstones and a funeral urn, and a huge candelabra that looked circular when viewed by the audience but was really a squashed oval. 
• We saw this oval candelabra while back stage…my mom never meets a stranger, and at a previous opera, she met the stage crew manager (Gary Kidney) and had a great conversation with him about the lighting. We ran into him again this evening, and he offered to show us around backstage. We looked the sets and props, saw the off-stage musicians, the control stations…it was just amazing. And so huge. Three cheers for my mom who meets cool people!

I’m not sure if the music had any impact on Naomi at all. It’s quite a stretch from rock to opera.

Some of the musical highlights were:

• Eglise Gutiérrez, who sang the role of Violetta
• Richard Leech as Alfredo Germont
• Philippe Rouillon as Giorgia Germont
• the supporting cast was very good as well

This opera was produced in conjuction with the Florida Grand Opera. They’re doing their production of it this fall, and it would be worth going to if only to see the set.

I can get pretty involved with music. Hence, my career path. But sometimes, music makes me say “hmmm” and shrug my shoulders. That’s the case with Florencia en el Amazonas. The Cincinnati Opera performed that several weeks ago. It was nice. But just nice. Cool set, good singing, but….. Frankly, I enjoyed the intermission chatter with the folk around me more than the actual opera. (Granted, they were rather cool.) So I decided to write no long post about the opera.

Performance practice is a tricky issue: instead of WWJD, it’s more a questions of “what would Bach do” (or Brahms or Couperin). There are two general schools of thought about performance practice.

First, the militaristic approach to performance practice. It says: play-it-exactly-as-prescribed-or-you-will-be-shot (or at least, have points docked from your score). And no whining either. 

Second, the slightly more genial, creative approach. It says (in the words of my friend Crawford Wiley): ”Let’s assume that Bach (or whoever) played like we do – and if he didn’t, who cares?” 

That’s all you really need to know about performance practice. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the first approach, in which case, I’d suggest heading to the library right now. And plan on staying for a very long time.

Last Thursday I went to see Lucie de Lammermoor (not Lucia de Lammermoor-more on that later) at the Cincinnati Opera. This time, my mom and I succeeded in bringing two more people with us: one of my brothers and a friend who was visiting us from Georgia. My youngest brother still wouldn’t join us because of the “too sad” hang-up. 

Admittedly, Lucie is a super sad opera. The heroine (Lucie) dies of opera disease (broken heart maybe?). The hero (Edgard) kills himself. And Lucie kills her husband of a couple hours, Arthur. Talk about dysfunctional relationships. Lucie’s bad-guy brother (Henri) and his henchman, Gilbert, are the only ones left to tell the tale.

 Yeah, it’s sad.

 But forgetting the sad stuff, the opera was amazing. Here are some highlights: 

• Sarah Coburn, who played Lucie. She is, by far, the most enjoyable soprano I’ve ever seen in an opera. She has not only a great voice, but is a great actor as well. She sang at the Cincinnati Opera in 2006, and the folks there liked her so much, they asked her what opera she want to do. She said “Lucie” (as opposed to Lucia), so Lucie they did. She collaborated with the conductor, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, and principle flutist, Randolph Bowman, to create a new cadenza for the mad scene. It was beautiful—and scarily high.
• The other members of the cast were very good as well, although Sarah Coburn, as the title character, certainly stole the show:

                 Jeremy Cady as Gilbert

                 Gaétan Laperrière as Henri

                 John McVeigh as Arthur

                 Mark T. Panuccio as Edgard

                 Alain Coulombe as Raymond

• Colors. Excepting a gold dress worn by Lucie, the only colors on stage were red, white/off-white, and black. This simplicity made the action pop.
• Set. Inky black panels along the sides and back of the stage (and, occasionally, in the middle). The panels were printed (or painted?) with clouds. The uneven floor (black ramps) allowed for a great range of motion and height without being distracting.
• Dancing. In a parallel to Lucie and Edgard’s fatally doomed relationship, Kristi Capps and Selahattin Erkan played a doe and buck wary of the hunters but eventually killed. Pretty cool.

 Not sure how I feel about the: 

• Lighting. Mostly it was very good (I love how the cloud images on the set changed with the light), but the red lights against the red dresses of the female chorus members made them look like they were in a cheap restaurant. Or, a red light district. Also, the suspended lights at the wedding celebration were a bit weird.
• Flower petals. At first, they were cool: falling from the sky on Lucy, they looked like so many butterflies. But when Edgard stabbed himself and the red petals spilled out, I heard a number of chuckles from people around me. It looked somewhat ludicrous.  

 Lowlights:

• The headgear on the female chorus members. It made them look like they were in the middle of chemo and had no hair.
• The short fight scene during the wedding party. In one word: lame. In two words: really lame.
• The balance between singers and orchestra was frequently not balanced.

 About the Lucie vs. Lucia thing: When Donizetti wrote Lucia in 1835, it premiered in Naples in, duh, Italian. This Italian version is the one usually heard and includes a maid for Lucia (Alisa) as well as a greater role for Raymond (Raimondo in Lucia). Donizetti wanted to make a splash with the Parisian audience and crafted the translation to suit them. The huntsman Normanno of Lucia becomes uber-double-crosser Gilbert (who, incidentally, is really the only comic-relief of the opera). Also Lucie loses the moral support found in Alisa and Raymond. Poor Lucie.

Poor Lucie aside, it was a wonderful performance. And Sarah Coburn’s singing rocks.

I am not a piano teacher. I have no illusions.

However, I’ve taught piano to a number of people and currently teach piano to Naomi, a middle-schooler who lives in my neighborhood. I have tried (earnestly) to persuade her dad to find Naomi a better, more experienced teacher, but he insists that Naomi and I have great chemistry (this is true).

Perhaps because I’m not really “qualified” to teach and hence don’t know the rules, or perhaps because I think children are quite the brightest people on the street, Naomi is learning the whys of music:

• why technique is important (you don’t want carpel tunnel, honey)
• why to linger on a V7 chord (to make the listener ache for it to resolve, subconsciously of course)
• why fingering–this exact fingering–is the best (so your fingers aren’t like so many crickets jumping around the keyboard)
• why, even, to learn Hanon exercises (which takes more than a half-sentence to explain)

No pabulum here.

Naomi’s also learning to improvise: just a simple arpeggiation of the block chords found in her early-intermediate lesson book. That small departure from the written page signals the beginning of creation and, in Naomi’s case, is a springboard for something new to her: composition.

At her last lesson, I wrote a limerick for her on some clean staff paper, and asked for a tune. I admit this was partially motivated by my wish that my piano teachers would have given me assignments like that. But it’s more primarily motivated my desire that Naomi create. I want her to love creation. To love making something herself. To get away from using her eyes and learn to trust her ears. To become a musician.

I am not a piano teacher at heart. I have no illusions.

But in spite of that, or maybe because of that, Naomi is becoming a musician, not just a player of pianos. 

While at the opera last week, I chatted with an older lady sitting a few seats away. She’s been going to the opera for years, and she told me exactly what she thought of Mozart’s operas. 

“You could faint and die before you get out of there,” she said.

Not that I agree, but I do wish I could say things like that about demigods with impunity.

This past Friday, my mom and I went to the Cincinnati Opera’s production of Madame Butterfly (I tried to rope my younger brothers into coming, but they insisted it was “too sad”). We sat in super nice seats for only $10 apiece–yay for student rates.

Cons (I always think the bad should come first so it can be gotten over as soon as possible):

• The set was not so exciting (bland and reminiscent of last year’s Cosi Fan Tutte). 
• The costumes were not very pretty (in fact, some were just ugly). However, the costumes for Sharpless (sung by John Hancock) fitted him well and added to his dignified presence. Also, The Bonze’s wig was amazing. It stood out about 8 inches from the back of his head and went down to his knees. Like a sick variantion on a Barbie-doll-esque theme.
• Worst of all, B. F. Pinkerton (sung nicely by Frank Lopardo) had two major faux pas regarding his military uniform: while “outside,” he took off his hat and fanned himself, and, horror of horrors, unbuttoned the top few buttons of his jacket. This did not go over well with my military-minded mother.

 The last point is interesting. Was it simply a blunder on the part of the director? Or, was this outward disregard of military regulations an indication of his inner lack of ethics…and a foreshadowing of his future betrayal of Madame Butterfly’s trust?

Pros:

• Madame Butterfly (Cio-Cio-San) was beautifully sang by Shu-Ying Li (here is an interview with her). What a wonderful performance–I would have liked to go back again just to hear (and see) her.
• Tyler Backer (the small boy who played Sorrow, Madame Butterfly’s son) is a cutie–and did well acting. I can’t imagine being so young (maybe 5 years old) and staying calm with such a large audience watching.
• While this is my first Madame Butterfly production to see, I’ve read that Madame Butterfly typically stabs herself before Pinkerton comes into the house. In this performance, she dies just as he opens the door and sees her. This kept my attention on high because I knew she was going to kill herself and yet she didn’t ’til much later than I expected.
• The orchestra (conducted by Edoardo Müller). Enough said.
• Good acting all around. No thoughts of “yeah, he sings well, but can’t act worth diddly.”
• The Bonze’s wig.

All in all, it was a fun evening and worth the drive. I’m excited about the Cincinnati Opera’s other productions this summer.

music=pleasure

writing=pleasure

writing about music=pleasure

hence this blog

enjoy