Opera

What is Mindulful Awareness?  And how do you do it?

Right now my brain thinking of a way to describe this new-age, medical concept while sending signals to the muscles in my fingers in order to type out, letter by letter, the words and eventual sentences to communicate this notion to an imagined, future audience.  Oh, and I’m hungry.  That’s Mindful Awareness: the “moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”

To hear more specific information about the proven health benefits of such exercises, as well as how to do them, head to the Hammer Museum at 12:30 PM this Thursday for their free weekly “drop in” session.  Leading the discussion is the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston, alongside Dr. Marvin Belzer, an expert practitioner of Mindful Awareness.

What is Gesamtkunstwerk?  And how do you sing it?

Well, Gesamtkunstwerk, pronounced ‘guess-amt-kunst-verk,’ is a term made famous by German composer, conductor, director, anti-Semite, and writer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and it’s usually translated to mean “total artwork.”  Wagner, in all his “Ride of the Valkyries” gusto, had a vision of a kind of ‘future art,’  in which the end-result would be a synthesis for every art-form known to man (i.e. music, performance, drama, architecture, poetry, etc.).  It’s debatable whether or not Wagner actually achieved a true Gesamtkunstwerk in his work, but his deep influence and brilliance as a composer/writer of opera is hard to match, let alone perform.

At 7:00 PM on Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, Wagnerian singers Linda Watson and John Treleavan of the on-going Ring Festival LA (an enormous cultural compilation of lectures, exhibitions, shows, and conferences revolving around the first-ever Los Angeles performance of Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung) will discuss the intricacies of belting out complex tonal and chromatic changes, while still remaining a simple piece of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk.

What is the connection?  And why would you attend both lectures?

Besides the obvious similarity in setting, there does seem to be a thematic crossover between these two programs.  Both attempt to explain the whole in terms of its parts, and those parts in terms of their smaller parts, and so on.  This mode of thinking assumes there’s a greater organism at work, spinning wheels inside wheels, and what better way to get lost inside these rotations than to spend a day at the Hammer?  Either that, or write an opera.

“Mindful Awareness” starts at 12:30 PM on Thursday, March 11.  “Ring Festival: The Challenges of Singing Wagner” begins at 7:00 PM.  Both programs are free of admission, and take place at The Hammer Museum, located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd.  For more information, please call (310) 433-7000, or visit hammer.ucla.edu.

The last time the Dirty Projectors played in Los Angeles was on Halloween at the Jensen Recreation Center in Echo Park, where frontman David Longstreth wore a ten-gallon foam cowboy hat and his upside-down guitar with the confidence of a newly minted visionary. Fans of the Projectors’ odd, brilliant, shimmering music had been waiting for the band to play at Disney Hall since November, anticipating their breakout hit, 2009’s Bitte Orca, amplified by a lush string section.

But on Saturday night, Longstreth looked small and befuddled on the Disney Hall stage, fiddling with the tuning of his guitars for a half an hour during intermission. Longstreth is 28, with the refractory brain of a brilliant twelve-year-old with attention deficit disorder and the composing abilities of Mozart on mushrooms in Africa. After Saturday night, the audience learned his musical influences include Ligeti, Wagner, Ravel, and Don Henley.

Don Henley might seem like an odd choice. The program notes include an earnest letter Longstreth sent Henley in 2005, accompanying a free copy of The Getty Address, Longstreth’s 2005 opera about materialism, the homogenization of FM radio, and Sacagewea, or something like that. “I have included a copy of it here for you,” Longstreth wrote to Henley. “The album examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways, once Manifest Destiny has no place to go- but in the end it is a love story.” Clearly, this makes sense to only one person: Longstreth himself.

The program was divided into three parts: the Philharmonic playing alone, the Projectors playing The Getty Address along with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and the Projectors playing alone. The program began with selections Longstreth hand-picked for the Philharmonic. Highlights included Ligeti’s Etude No. 13, played by gray-haired John Orge, who lingered on the piano keys after the last high notes for a long, indulgent silence, and Ravel’s beautifully orchestrated Mother Goose Suite. After a long intermission, the Projectors emerged, wearing color-coordinated hooded jackets, to play The Getty Address in its entirety. And here is where the problems began.

Truthfully, the opera is an indulgent college project from a very, very talented student, with glimpses of the Projectors’ current, much more successful musical incarnation nestled in like raisins studded into a very wobbly gray oatmeal. In the first song (er, movement), “I Sit on the Ridge at Dusk,” the beat kicked in, and the Projectorettes (Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, and Angel Deradoorian) wailed “got a world of trouble on my mind,” in an indistinct language, moving very slightly from side to side, like shy sirens. But momentum was lost on the second song, and the album is so complex, the time signatures so twisted, it seemed that no amount of practice could have nailed it down. It didn’t help that Alarm Will Sound had some spotty synchronicity and tuning moments. The long, drifting passages on “But in the Headlights” and “Gilt Gold Scabs” sounded misguided and naked, as though a player were missing. Some members played on wine bottles, and a base flute was involved, as well as lots of gratuitous hand-clapping, which sounded messy at times, perhaps on purpose. Many in the audience began to get restless, but the ensemble soldiered on to no avail.

After the opera finally ended, the Projectors (minus their drummer) took the stage for three songs: a very slow cover of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” as well as their own “Temecula Sunrise” and “Cannibal Resource” from Bitte Orca. They sounded good, and Longstreth’s singing sounded much more comfortable, but the band would have sounded much better with a whole orchestra backing them up. None of the women got to sing lead on any song, though Angel Deradoorian singing “Two Doves” would have sounded lovely in this acoustic setting.

All in all, the event demonstrated what the Projectors are capable of musically. It also showed that some misguided musical experiments are better laid to rest, no matter how brilliant their 23-year-old composer may be. As the Eagles said, “And I don’t want to hear any more/ No, no, baby/ I don’t want to hear any more.” Here’s hoping the Projectors stick to Bitte Orca from now on.

By Cassandra McGrath of CWG Magazine

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles.  For more information on upcoming shows, please call (213) 972-7211, or visit www.laphil.com.

American composer Robert Kurka’s only opera, Good Soldier Schweik, began life in 1956 as a six movement suite based on characters from the popular Czech antiwar novel of the same name, by Jaroslav Hask. New York City Opera became interested in turning the suite into an opera and Kurka expanded the orchestra from his original scoring for 7 woodwinds, to 16, plus brass and percussion, and began working with librettist Lewis Allan – a songwriter known for the celebrated anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” and the Frank Sinatra hit, “The House I Live In,” but chiefly, as the adoptive father of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons after the couple had been convicted of espionage and executed.

Kurka died in 1957 at the age of 35, four months before the opera’s successful NYCO premiere. Within the next 40 years, Good Soldier Schweik had seen over one hundred productions throughout the world, and been translated into 12 languages.

The work combines elements of American musical theatre, jazz, and Czech folk music, to underscore an explicitly anti-war story. The Long Beach Opera company’s cast of singing and dancing actors – led by tenor Matthew DiBattista in a powerhouse performance – delivered the goods in director Ken Roht’s dazzling multi-media production at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica. The orchestra – well, band, in this case – played with stylish pizzazz under Conductor/Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek.

Ably realized through Dan Weingarten’s inspired lighting and Justin Jorgensen’s novel set design, the production utilized scrims, projections, choreography, and outlandish props to whisk the plot from scene to scene at a breakneck pace, so that the audience was as disoriented as Schweik by the experience.

The house – mostly all long-time Long Beach Opera fans, and mostly very elderly – was packed, attesting to their pleasure at not having to endure a schlep to Long Beach. This brings me to my only gripe with this enterprise: somehow, LBO’s marketing missed the mark, hugely. Where was the large, 20-to-30-something demographic that would have been enraptured – and captured – by this stunning example of what opera has become in the 21st century?

- By Penny Orloff

To see Long Beach Opera’s full calendar, please click here.

This week marked an emergency situation for LA Opera – they needed a $14 million bailout from the city on Tuesday in order to even stay afloat through the middle of next year.  Stephen Rountree (CEO of both LA Opera and Music Center), as reported by the LA Times said the company is “$20 million in debt,” and since LA Opera is “by far the most important tenant at the Dorothy Chandler, its failure could set off a chain of events that takes down the Music Center.”  Disaster was narrowly averted when the city agreed to loan the money, which will be repaid in one lump sum in January 2013.  It’s not hard to imagine that this debt largely came from LA Opera’s somewhat controversial decision to stage an avante-garde and severely expensive production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – both the individual productions during the last and current seasons as well as the full Ring Cycle Festival, set to include over 100 artists and institutions next summer.  They’ve spent $32 million staging the Ring Cycle.  County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said, rightly, that the LA Opera is a significantly important artistic organization for LA county continuing to say, “For all they have built up… this is almost no price for us to pay… we’ll save the opera.”  [LA Times]

Given how rare it is to hear of money being given to artists in non-emergency situations, you’ll be glad to hear that a new prize awarding $100,000 to artists under 35 has been announced by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.  A Ukrainian billionaire and art collector, Victor Pinchuk will present his Future Generation Art Prize every two years to artists who can apply online and artists that have been nominated by professionals in the art world.  The international jury set to decide the winner is said to include Elton John, Miuccia Prada, and in some small way, the public.  Winners can’t have just made one great piece and then run off with the money, however – the New York Times reports that “$40,000 of the purse must go into the production of art.”  General Director of the Pinchuk Art Center Eckhard Schneider said, “We also wanted to make sure that an older generation of artists helps the younger.” [NY Times]

Figaro had a life before he got married, you know.  He was the kind of man that men wanted to be and that ladies wanted to be with – a barber to the stars, if you will, roaming around Seville singing his own praises.  In Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, on now at LA Opera, Figaro happens upon Count Almaviva who’s cleverness has been trumped only by his hopeless love for Rosina, who is the ward of the tyrannical Doctor Bartolo.  Almaviva convinces Figaro, with the promise of “gold in abundance” to help him win his heart’s affection.

What follows is a phenomenally witty opera filled with comic nuances that are only enhanced by this production’s stellar cast.  Nathan Gunn returns to LA Opera as the arrogant, but not without reason, Figaro – his polka dot vest and coiffed brown locks both proof of his status as premiere “barihunk.”  Renowned tenor Juan Diego Florez makes his LA Opera debut as the love-struck, earnest Count Almaviva.  These two have a George-Clooney-and-Brad-Pitt-in-Ocean’s-Eleven dynamic right from the start; their planning and plotting makes for fantastic comic fodder and both men go far beyond impressing the audience with their abundant solos.  Where Gunn’s clear, skillful baritone strikes just the right note in Act I’s “Largo al Factotum,” Florez’ sweet songs in Act II captivated and held the audience with his strong and multifaceted voice.

It’s quite clear why Florez’ Count Almaviva is so enamored with Rosina.  Played by Joyce DiDonato, it almost seemed like the audience wanted to clamor up on stage and serenade her themselves.  When she sang, I believe no one in the audience could even fidget – she has such control over her voice that her girly, giggling, and somehow manipulative character still left room to hear a masterful performance.  The three of them together, Florez, Gunn, and DiDonato, make for a powerful trio – their wily chemistry on stage was not only hysterical, but beautiful.

The rest of the cast is certainly not to be overlooked.  The genius of Don Basilio, played by the overwhelmingly large and deep voiced Andrea Silvestrelli, is matched perfectly with the bumbling, gullible, and simply cruel Doctor Bartolo, played by Bruno Pratico.  Both of their voices are suited so well to their roles it’s hard to imagine them playing anyone else.

I can’t say enough about the set design – it starts out in an entirely white and black palate only to be transformed in the second act to a striking (and typical to Seville) set of fantastic colors.  And that includes the costumes – Florez’ all hot pink suit at the end of Act II is nothing short of a miracle.  From the Overture, you may be surprised as to how recognizable this music is – if you’ve never listened to The Barber of Seville on purpose, you definitely have without knowing it.  And it’s always an added treat to attend the opera when you’re familiar with the music.

I only wish there was a more eloquent way of saying: see this opera.  Doesn’t matter where you sit, just go.

The Barber of Seville is playing at LA Opera through December 19, 2009.  Please call (213) 972-8001 or click here for more information.

Listen to “Una Voce Poco Fa” (Rosina’s famous aria) here:

There’s something a little scary about experiencing the best of something.  First, there are expectations you’re worried won’t be met, then you realize that you’ll doubtfully be satiated by anything less from that moment on, and finally it’s scary to think of how much work went into anything being that great – some start to feel inadequate.

Time to face your fears.  Renee Fleming is making a one-night-only appearance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and to make this even more of a pulse-quickening event, she’ll be signing copies of her new CD Verismo after the performance.  Fleming is, in case you haven’t thrown her name around in an opera conversation before, one of the most widely acclaimed and loved sopranos of recent memory.  In terms of international status, think Maria Callas without the notorious temper and in terms of voice, well, she’s not like anyone.

Saturday, December 12 at 7:30pm, lucky ticket holders will be treated to songs by Richard Strauss, Olivier Messiaen, Henri Dutileux’s Le temps l’horloge, which was written specifically for her, as well as selections from her latest CD.  It will be difficult to listen to anything less from December 13th on.

Luckily, Nathan Gunn is performing in LA Opera’s The Barber of Seville through December 19.  After that? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Renee Fleming will perform on December 12, 2009 at 7:30pm at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  For more information, please call (213) 972-8001 or click here.

Before you go, have a listen:

Opera lovers tend to fall in a number of different camps.  There are staunch Wagner lovers who sit for three hours just to get to “Leibestod,” the final aria from Tristan und Isolde.  There are those who swear by Puccini for life and who don’t speak Italian, but can say, “Yes, they call me Mimi, but my real name is Lucia” with a perfect accent. Everyone can agree, however, that love triangles, revenge plots, and small vials of poison will never go out of style – especially not at the opera.  We can also agree that opera singers all have this thrilling ability to steal you from your everyday and throw you into a world of daggers and betrothals.

Baroque composer extraordinaire George Handel’s Tamerlano is in good company. A three-act opera in Italian that follows the story of Bajazet, his daughter Asteria, the evil Emperor Tamerlano, love-struck Andronico, and the confused Irene; it’s more than just a love triangle.

LA Opera’s Tamerlano, which opens November 21, will feature General Director Placido Domingo in the role of Turkish Sultan Bajazet – the gallant father trying to prevent his daughter’s marriage to the malicious Tamerlano. Audiences will undoubtedly be listening for every note that leaves Placido’s famous lips – he has bridged the gap between famous opera singer and household name.  The title character will be played by countertenor Bejun Mehta who has performed at the Royal Opera House in London, the Opera National de Paris, and who marks his return to LA Opera with this role.  Asteria, played by Sarah Coburn, is a part that features some of opera’s most enticing, electric, and technically challenging singing.

While Bajazet sits in chains in Tamerlano’s court, the emperor devises a plan to marry Asteria – he asks Andronico (also in love with Asteria) to relay his message to Bajazet: give me your daughter’s hand in marriage in return for your freedom.  He sweetens the deal by promising his own fiancée, Irene, to Andronico for his trouble.  When Tamerlano reveals his scheme to Asteria, she is shocked and dismayed – mostly by Andronico’s seeming betrayal.  What follows is an operatic series of suicide notes, changes of mind and heart, and a healthy amount of poison.  Handel proves again that it’s not the Italian that can trip you up at the opera, it’s the story itself!

LA Opera’s Tamerlano runs November 21 through December 1.  We recommend getting your tickets early – Placido’s in this one, it will sell out!  Please call (213) 972-8001 or click here for more information.

Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love makes light of the fact that sometimes love comes easier with a little liquid courage.  Known best for Lucia di Lamermoor, Donizetti was one of the most highly regarded bel canto opera composers.  Literally meaning “beautiful singing,” bel canto is a somewhat ambiguous term that refers to a style of singing developed in 18th century Italy.  Originally the term defined the coveted sound of a gorgeous vocalist singing a beautiful melody.  It then took on a more technical meaning that is widely accepted today, referring to those singers who are able to create smooth transitions and a balance of tone when shifting from one melody to the next.  With this in mind, LA Opera’s casting department deserves a gold star for their work in bringing together a collection of singers who, many making their LA Opera debut, would have made Donizetti proud.

An opera whose music and story are simple, witty, and beautiful, Elixir is a charming start to LA Opera’s 2009/2010 season.  Any operagoer intimidated by the Wagner-heavy season will find solace in this production – the sets and costumes are modest, but there is no lack of talent on stage.  Unlike those of Puccini and Verdi, none of Donizetti’s characters die for lack of love, nobody is exiled, and nobody drinks anything heavier than a bottle of wine, or should I say elixir. 

When Nemorino, played by Giuseppe Filianoti, sings Donizetti’s famed aria “Una Furtiva Lagrima,” you figure that any man who can sing like that shouldn’t need any elixir to make a woman fall for him.  Making his LA Opera debut, Filianoti is known for his bel canto technique and has performed Elixir with various opera companies throughout the world.  Popular (and handsome) American vocalist Nathan Gunn plays the arrogant ladies’ man Sergeant Belcore, but is appropriately upstaged by his rival Nemorino both vocally and within the narrative. 

Equal only to Filianoti is his love interest, Adina, who is played by yet another vocalist performing with LA Opera for the first time: Nino Machaidze.  Hailing from Georgia (the country, not the state), she’s made quite an opera world splash with debuts traversing the globe.  In the past year alone, she’s debuted at the Teatro Regio in Parma, the Teatre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels, and will perform as Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna.

One character, essential to the story’s twists and turns (manageable though they are), is il Dottore Dulcamara.  A sincerely funny and conniving Giorgio Caoduro, who also makes his first appearance with LA Opera, plays Dulcamara, a traveling doctor who acts more like a salesman than a PhD.  He provides Nemorino with an “elixir” that will make him irresistible to women and to one in particular, Nemorino’s one and only – Adina.

Claiming to the hard working peasants that his “elixir” will cure any ill from clearing wrinkles to spicing up your love life, Dulcamara sells off as many bottles of Bordeaux as he and his assistant can carry.  After the opera, I took a page from his book and enjoyed a glass – just in case he was right!

LA Opera’s The Elixir of Love is playing at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through September 30, 2009.   For more information, please call (213) 972-8001 or click here.  

Inspired by my envy of those people who recently enjoyed the Venice Biennale and who are now all moving, in a collective jet setter’s fantasy, to Switzerland for Art Basel, the following is a dream itinerary.  We present a calendar of the most enticing festivals around the world – a suggestion, perhaps, for what you might do with all the extra cash just wasting away in your savings account.

These fairs and festivals cover music, art, dance, cinema, architecture, and theatre and provide patrons with a number of things, not least of which are bragging rights and a good look at emerging artists and current art trends.  Since we’re already halfway through 2009, we’ll start with the Venice Biennale and work our way through the calendar year. 

The Venice Biennale, which has brought contemporary arts fans roaring into Venice since 1895, has long been a beacon for forward thinking, modern artists and their works in fields that include art, architecture, dance, cinema, music, and theatre.  Their festival runs all summer ending with the Venice International Film Festival in September. 

Starting June 10 in Switzerland is Art Basel.  An incredible event to be sure, it’s chock full of people who sometimes use esoteric words in the wrong way.  That said, this four-day festival focuses on modern and contemporary art with displays installed by leading galleries from around the world.  Its American counterpart happens in Miami every December.  It is the premium schmooze fest in all aspects, with gallerists, collectors, curators in full attendance deciding what’s what in the art world.

Opera fans unite annually at Glyndebourne in the UK for a four-month long festival of opera.  Running from May through August, this year’s lineup includes Verdi’s Falstaff, Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Dvorak’s Rusalka, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde among others.  Since 1934, Glyndebourne has been the launching pad for such illustrious talents as Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, and Monserrat Caballe. 

If you’re craving more of an open calendar for your summer music festival rather than just opera, Australia’s your choice with the Queensland Music Festival.  In July and August, this festival presents nearly every style of music invented thus far – from classical and opera to alternative and beat box.  

Laying low until October might be a good way to replenish all you’ve spent so far.  It’s very difficult to maintain a budget in Venice and Switzerland, after all!  October brings us to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park in London.  It features some of the world’s most avant-garde and contemporary art galleries as well as Frieze Film (created by artists and presented on YouTube) and panel discussions over the course of four days. 

Of course for New Years Eve, you’ll be heading to Vienna’s Imperial Ball, but we didn’t need to remind you of that.   Then in 2010 before you jet off to South Africa for the World Cup in June and July, you might consider the White Nights Festival in May in Russia or Art Cologne in April in Germany.  Your flights have to layover in Europe on the way to South Africa anyway – it’s so convenient just to touch base with all your newfound fair friends!  

In high school, relationships can feel incredibly passionate, melodramatic, and life changing.  Hello Gossip Girl!  The dramas innate in dating someone else whose hormones are just as out of whack as yours can feel serious and potentially catastrophic.  To all the high schoolers out there who think that grownups just don’t understand – Giuseppe Verdi is your man.  One of the grand authors of melodrama in love, Verdi’s La Traviata, being performed by LA Opera through June 21, is practically an ode to the death-defying nature of falling in and out of love. 

Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge might serve as a modern-day counterpart to Verdi’s La Traviata as it revolves around a beautiful courtesan with a heart, Violetta, who falls in love with a penniless sitar player.  Okay, so he’s not a sitar player; in La Traviata the love interest is Alfredo, a penniless young nobleman.  When he tells her he loves her, she retorts that she’s not the type of woman he should fall truly in love with.  As she sings those words, however, she feels a stirring in her own heart and ponders if perhaps he’s really the one.  

She experiments with true love by shacking up with Alfredo in the second act.  Their love blooms, yet he feels ashamed that she is forced to sell her personal belongings to fund their life together.  A dying courtesan can’t just fall in love, however, and the conflict arrives in the form of Alfredo’s father who is grieving his daughter’s inability to secure an advantageous marriage due to his son’s scandalous affair with a courtesan. 

This production is not a new one for LA Opera as Marta Domingo returns to direct the version she staged for LA Opera’s 2006/2007 season.  La Traviata is one of the most performed operas around the world and will close LA Opera’s 2008/2009 season with a bang.  Clearly, courtesans from France, Italy, and beyond have made a lasting impression on us.  They were sexually confident, educated, well dressed, and influential women who were smart enough to use what they had to their advantage.  They were loved, hated, envied, and gossiped about in their time… and still are in ours. 

LA Opera’s production of La Traviata runs now through June 21 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center.  For more information, please visit their website or call (213) 972-8001.