Popcorn at the Opera

It's Rigoletto on the menu again; you know that tubular pasta with a red sauce?  After a hearty plateful this afternoon, I am on an opera high.  It goes like this:  for months now I have been anticipating the Metropolitan Opera live broadcast of Rigoletto at a neighborhood movie theatre.  A cultural pinnacle as this is a mere 6 minute car drive away; 2.45 miles and costs only $22.  I can wear sweat clothes, no makeup, and slouch in the seats.  I can binge on a big bag of buttery popcorn while taking in a world class production.  Definitely puts the pop in the opera!

                        

The Duke (Piotr Beczala) doing his opening lounge act

Set Designer - Christine Jones

Choreographer - Steven Hoggett

I settle in to watch a Rigoletto first shown in 1851 Venice, time-warped to 60's Las Vegas and I am swept away and on for the ride. Director Michael Mayer believably brings the past to present with the Duke presiding over a casino and living in a palatial penthouse. He is the head of a rat pack and surrounded by show girls and an entourage.  Rigoletto is his funnyman. Yikes!

Rigoletto (Zeljko Lucic) crooning in a fashionable sweater of the times

Costume Designer - Susan Hilferty

As is often the case at these operas, I see absolutely no one that I know and although no spring chicken myself, everyone seems REALLY old.  Where are the young singers?  At the first intermission, Styrofoam containers of hot dogs and such disgusting foodstuffs appear, along with big gulps, providing vivid contrast to the televised Met intermission of well-dressed attendees sipping from stemware. However, the Esquire has a nice and informal ambiance and it is lunchtime, after all!

Intermission at the Metropolitan Opera House

I take the opportunity to move to a better seat and make a new friend with a seat-mate who is ingesting a double decker portabella sandwich with onions and pickles...His bravas, bravos, and bellissimas make the experience all the more fun and he applauds the screen.  Although not a singer, he offers me a recitation of Shakespeare's Sonnet #116. I'm overdosing with high culture! There are all sorts of opportunities and good things that can happen if you go to events alone and strike up conversations with strangers.

  

Act III - Gilda (Diana Damrau) and Rigoletto in the neon rain

Lighting design by Kevin Adams

One of my favorite parts in this Sin City rendition is Act III.  Neon lights arc above the stage, simulating the lightening and impending storm, and are synchronized with the music.  Alas, it's over too soon, at 3 hours and 31 minutes, two intermissions.

Esquire Theatre - seating for an intimate 221 - not a bad seat in the house

The music is changed to some pop pap as ushers pick up the trash...As always, I was the last to arrive and the last to leave.

The Met seats 3,800

Meanwhile, at the Met, the crew waxes the slanted stage floor...Farewell, till when I return in 2 weeks for Parsifal; find me in orchestra seating, row 10 center.  I'll share my popcorn with you!

A World Without Rigoletto

What gets me going in the morning more than a platter of Rigoletto? No, I'm not talking about a plate of pasta. Rigatoni is the tubular, ribbed noodle that comes in varying lengths and diameters and is sometimes curved. Served with a white or red sauce, or simply with butter, herbs and garlic, it is delicious.   

But much as I love Italian pasta, I love Italian opera even more!  And  I was talking about platters as slang for vinyl records.  I have a collection of records that I like to play when I exercise in the morning, and lately it's been the Rigoletto that gets me going. Just when I might come up with some excuse not to engage in weight-lifting and work-outs, I think, well, the time will go by quickly if I get to enjoy some beautiful music.  The recording that I am playing is with Richard Tucker as the Duke, Gianna D'Angelo as Gilda,  and Renato Capecchi as Rigoletto. 

Teatro Mantua

Rigoletto awaits me, and will awaken you, too, from your slumber.  If you have not had the pleasure of making this acquaintance, written by none other than Joe Green, aka as Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901), you are in for a treat.  Last fall, just by sheer chance while channel surfing, I happened upon the BBC  and RAI production filmed on location in Mantua.   A star casting included Zubin Mehta as director,  Placido Domingo as Rigoletto, Vittorio Grigolo as the Duke, Julia Novikova as Gilda, and Ruggero Raimondi-Magdelene as Sparafucile.  

This opera has been a blockbuster since it was first performed in 1851. It had an international stage within five years, being seen in Venice, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Budapest, Brunn, Milan, Graz, Stuttgart, Prague, St. Petersburg, London, Warsaw, Bologna, Madrid, Athens, Lisbon, Constantinople, Tiflis, New York, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro.  This was when entertainment was about art and talent. I think that if I had been alive then, I might have been a Verdi groupie. As the playbill shown here for the Syracuse Opera describes: "This grand tragedy has seduction, an assassin, kidnappers and murder.  But the corpse of Rigoletto's daughter, Gilda is about the only thing that's stiff." Based on a play by Victor Hugo, Le roi s'amuse, it was bound to be tragic and heart-rending, as Hugo always tends to be.

A snippet of "Quanto dolor", one of many hit duets in the opera:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=p67TSWEI2Oo

In the BBC production, the duke was played by the not-too-hard-on-the-eyes Vittorio Grigolo.  He is the the quintessentially imperious scoundrel.

All three acts were filmed in Mantua, at the actual times of the day and night. The splendor of the Palazzo Ducale brings the opera to life in the most realistic and sumptuous way possible.  Costuming was equally opulent, as it always is in opera.

I had no fault with Placido Domingo advancing from his years as a tenor and singing the duke's  baritone role of Rigoletto. He is a great stage actor and has admitted that Rigoletto is such a powerfully complex and emotional piece that it still brings him to tears with its beauty. That the camera can zoom in from different angles provides a very intense and personal experience that  is bound to result in frequent reaching for the tissues. 

Act III.  The depressing mood is set with this outside-of-town tower.  It is a tragedy waiting to happen amidst misfortune, miscommunication, and mayhem. 

EVERYONE has to be familiar with this aria sung by the lecherous duke.  It became a big hit when first heard and was the most popular song of the season.

Rigoletto - put it on your bucket list, or it will be be a tragedy indeed that you have not truly lived before you die!  A world without Rigoletto - I can't imagine!

Song Singing

A few years ago, I attended a Fetes de la Musique event hosted by the Alliance Francaise.  It was inspired by the annual  "day of music" when anyone and everyone who can sing or play an instrument takes to the streets all across France.  Our St. Louis contingent enjoyed an evening of piano, violin and voice.  I was enthralled by the sopranos and recalled how I loved to sing as a young girl.  After the concert, over wine and cheese, I asked one of the singers if it was too late for me to study voice.  She replied, not at all, but that a woman's voice matures at the age of 65...so there was time after all!   

My piano teacher Kathi Kurtzman and I always like to joke that playing the piano is far more difficult than voice, and that singers don't have to practice nearly as hard and long.  However, a great artist always makes anything appear easier than it actually is. Evenso,  I like this quote by Jerome Hines:

"Opera is an excessive art form populated by excessive people.  We make it more excessive than necessary.  Singing is really a very simple thing". 

And that is what makes it so darn hard.  My teacher Merry Keller says that it should take no more effort than talking.  I'm trying and looking forward to trilling like a bird one of these days, if I stick with it!

My father, a professional musician and long deceased, said that I was a coloratura soprano.  I guess that I have a childlike desire to want to please him and have him be proud of me.  And you never know when you might need to belt out an aria.

 Merry Keller et moi.

My teacher Merry lives on Tulane Avenue, which seems coincidental given that I used to have an apartment on Tulane, and my daughter Emily went to Tulane.  When I arrived for my first lesson with her,  I was amused that we both had on shirts like the staphs on a sheet of music; the notes were only waiting to be sung!  Lieder lovers, unite!  

A Night at the Opera

Achille Lauro

Still from the film The Death of Klinghoffer directed by Penny Woolcock

It was a privilege to experience a magnificent production of  John Adams' "The Death of Klinghoffer" by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis this past week.  Though the world premiere took place in Brussels twenty years ago, performances have been rare due to its controversial subject. The opera tells the 1985 story of the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly Jewish wheel chair-bound American, by Palestinian terrorists who had taken over the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. The time when this tragedy took place seems so long ago.  Sadly, given the never-ending Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, things seem not to have improved at all.  This moving opera raises an opportunity for civic dialogue by presenting both sides of the story. The set by Allen Moyer was particularly  powerful in support of the music.  I highly recommend that you see it!