Iphigenia in Tauris

[sabotabby]

I scarfed a whole load of cold medication and went to see the COC's production of Iphigenia in Tauris yesterday with zingerella. It was the second time I'd seen the opera—two years ago, Opera Atelier put it on, and I went with the kiddies.

This production was essentially the opposite of the other one that I saw, which had awesome staging and good music. The music in the COC's production was exquisite. Susan Graham sang Iphigenia and she was breathtaking. The staging, alas, left something to be desired. They went uber-minimalist with it—the set consisted of bare walls, with scene changes marked by chalk and water, and everyone was in black. I think it might have worked up close, maybe, but from the fifth ring, all you could see were bare legs and floating heads.

It doesn't help that the opera itself is a) transitional, with gorgeous, tragic arias and oddly upbeat choruses, and b) lulzy in the way of Greek drama. I think the concept behind the staging was to bring some of those contradictions to the forefront, especially in the last scene, which, as zingerella put it, looked a bit like the end of Hamlet with dead bodies lying all over the stage, and sounded like a triumphal march. I think it would have worked in a different setting, but at the Four Seasons, not so much.



Agememnon: I need favourable winds so that my ships might invade Troy. Clearly, the way to bring this about is to sacrifice my daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Diana.

Diana: I have secretly replaced Iphigenia with a stag. Let's see if Agememnon notices!

Agememnon: *does not notice*

Clytemnestra: You killed my daughter! Prepare to die!

Orestes: You killed my father! Prepare to die!

Iphigenia: *is whisked off to Tauris, away from her crazy family*

Thoas, King of Tauris: AWESOME. Here's a knife. Sacrifice any stranger who appears on these shores.

Backstory: Not in the opera, unfortunately.

Act I

[18 years and many human sacrifices later]

Iphigenia: Woe is me, for I am emo. And I keep dreaming about my crazy family murdering each other. I wish I was dead.

Thoas: Hell of a storm out there. If only I had a human sacrifice to appease the gods.

Scythians: By an incredible coincidence, two Greeks just washed up on shore and one really, really wants to die.

Thoas: Iphigenia, kill these two guys. I'll be back in Act IV to see how it went.

Act II

Orestes: I love you!

Pylades: I love you more!

The program: Insists that this is in no way homoerotic, in case you were worried.

Orestes: I want to die because it's my fault that you're going to be sacrificed.

Pylades: Cheer up, emo kid. At least we'll die together.

Scythians: *separate them for no apparent reason*

Orestes: WOE!

Iphigenia: Hey, who are you and where are you from?

Orestes: Mycenae, you?

Iphigenia: Also Mycenae. How's the King?

Orestes: Dead.

Iphigenia: And the Queen?

Orestes: Also dead.

Iphigenia: And Orestes?

Orestes: Dead.

Iphigenia: WOE!

Orestes: You know, you look kind of familiar.

Act III

Iphigenia: I can probably get one of you out of here alive. I choose the guy who is clearly not my brother even though he is around the same age and looks very similar. Go on, get out of here, and deliver a message to Electra, who is clearly not my sister.

Orestes: I should be the one who dies, given that I'm already being pursued by Furies and all.

Pylades: But I love you.

Orestes: Iphigenia, if you sacrifice him instead of me, I'll kill myself.

Iphigenia: WOE!

Pylades: *reluctantly flounces*

Act IV

Iphigenia: You know, I really don't want to go through with this sacrifice.

Orestes: It's okay, I'm totally cool with it. Hell, it's how my sister Iphigenia died.

Iphigenia: What?

Orestes: What?

Iphigenia: You don't think you might have said something earlier?

Thoas: Why isn't this guy sacrificed already?

Pylades: *suddenly has a posse*

Everyone: *turns on Thoas*

The stage: *is covered with dead bodies, with the exception of Iphigenia, Orestes, and Pylades*

Orestes: Well, this could have turned out better.

Diana ex Machina: Don't sweat it. I've had enough blood now. Go on and enjoy your incredibly dysfunctional lives.

Pylades: WTF just happened?

Dead bodies: *sing a happy chorus about how the gods are no longer angry at them*

So, yes, I quite enjoyed it. Rigoletto tomorrow with chickenfeet2003 and lemur_catta. There is an awful lot of opera this week, considering that I have the plague.

Comments

[sabotabby]

I will enjoy Rigoletto even more thanks to that translation you found.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Oh god. I think I know exactly what that is--one of the Duke's lines in the quartet.

[cupric-acetate.livejournal.com]

You should totally start going to the Live From the Met operas with me. I saw Iphengenie en Tauride last season and from the sound of it, it was staged better.

I hope you enjoy Rigoletto. Verdi is my absolute favourite when it comes to opera.

[sabotabby]

I keep meaning to go to a Live From the Met opera. Let me know when you're going!

[cupric-acetate.livejournal.com]

The only ones I'm definitely going to are Siegfried (Nov 5), Götterdämmerung (Feb 11), and La Traviata (Apr 14 or May 26). Although, I was considering seeing Donizetti’s Anna Bolena or Mozart’s Don Giovanni next month.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Its an interesting experience. It's not like being in the opera house and some productions work better than others. I've reviewed a slew of them over the last three or four years on LJ. If you like go to my LJ and use the MetHD tag. It will give you some idea of the pros and cons.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Actually "pastiche" has a long tradition going back to the 18th century so it's not too bizarre. The Met has a genuine problem with baroque. Can you really do Handel, Rameau etc in a 4000 seat theatre with a big modern orchestra?

[sabotabby]

I'd be up for any of those, though October is already filling up. (See my comment to chickenfeet2003.) Basically I just dig going to the opera.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

The lemur and I go to most of them at the Scotiabank. First up is Anna Bolena on Oct 15th.

[sabotabby]

There's a high probability that this will either be the secret opening of the documentary, or a work-related party. *SIGH*

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

After that it's Don Giovanni on the 29th and Siegfried on 5th November.

[sabotabby]

I mean, the staging was conceptually cool. It just didn't work from a distance.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

It more didn't work from a Great Height, you know?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

So will we be better off from the orchestra ring?

[sabotabby]

Quite likely. I don't know how it was for those lower down. Let me know!

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I will. Ring 5 is interesting. It's a hell of a way from the stage but the sound is still really good.

[sabotabby]

The sound was perfect. God, I love the acoustics at the Four Seasons. I've had worse seats, too, but the nature of this production didn't lend itself well to the nosebleeds.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

For Iphigenia? Yes. It looks like the set for Rigoletto is quite elaborate; I imagine it would suffer less from being viewed from the cheap seats than Iphigenia did. But you'll probably get a nice treat in the orchestra seats.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Personally I thought the Met Iphigenie contained about the standard amount of Met processed pig products. I've seen bits of the Carsen production on YuTube and thought it was way better than the Met but i guess I'll know better after next Friday when I see it live.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

The Met has exactly one Carsen production and they're retiring it. It makes me sad. He's more interesting than a lot of the other directors Gelb is getting and keeping.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

That would be the Onegin I'm guessing. It's one of the best opera productions I've seen. Gelb is a wimp. He favours mainstream American directors because they won't upset his comfortably rich donor base. That said, I've seen one or two nteresting productions. Minghella's Butterfly is efective or example. I love the work Carsen did in Paris. Both his Rusalka and his Capriccio are stunning.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Onegin, yes, and it's one of my favorite productions at the Met. It's the first thing I saw at the house (1996 or something, Jesus) and I've seen it twice since.

Gelb is, well...a source of mixed feelings. He's at least doing a lot of new productions. And some are great, like Butterfly, though the great ones tend to be borrowed from elsewhere. Some are pretty good like the Trovatore and the Lucia. And then a lot of them suck. The sad example is The Ring, which isn't conservative at all, and LePage's other production at the Met (Damnation of Faust) was quite beautiful and non-traditional. The Ring, though, is so far a gigantic, expensive dud.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

The Trovatore originated at Covent Garden I think. I likedthe Faust but thought the Lucia was a case of moving time period for no obvious gain and considerable loss of essential context. I think the Ring is traditional. It uses a lot of technology but it doesn't otherwise depart from what Schenk or Wagner himself would do. I think if Wagner had had Lepage's technical resources it's likely what he would have done.

There are way too many intellectually lazy productions at the Met. "Theatre within a theatre" unless one has a really new angle is so tired but Sher and Zimmerman haven't quite worked that out,

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big Lucia fan so basically my reaction was "it's pretty and not a conceptual trainwreck like Sonnambula. I'm in!" And I thought the photo-op staging of the sextet was sort of a smart solution for allowing stand-and-sing in a production that doesn't have the right aesthetic for "and now everyone will approach the footlights and sing."

And yeah, Sher's a problem. There is just nothing going on there. One never has the feeling he sits around daydreaming about opera. I wonder how much he had attended/listened to before he became an opera director at arguably the world's preeminent opera house.

I suppose you're right that the Ring is in fact conservative. In my head, I had it classified as not, because people who love the stuffy old Schenk ring hate it as much as I do. I'm hesitant to speculate about what Wagner would do because I associate that line of thinking with entrenched resistance to anything but the most literal productions.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I think you would fit right in with the House of Atreus

[sabotabby]

Hey, even my family is not that dysfunctional!

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Just think of the blogging opportunities if it were!

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

You know, I've never liked Susan Graham but I loved her in that role. I also had a very fancy time of it, got to go with a critic from the local paper, nice seats, seated near Baryzhnikov and Isacc Mizrahi. Made me feel very la di da for an evening.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

This was the first time I'd heard Susan Graham live, and yeah, I think she nailed the role. I've liked her in recordings, well enough, but not like this. What is it about her singing that doesn't work for you? (Just curious).

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Generally I find her signing technically proficient and lacking in poetry. For a while the Met used her and Suzanne Mentzer, who sing similar roles, but Graham became the house lyric mezzo. It always bugged me because Mentzer is much more of an artist. Also, and I'm sure I haven't factored this out, though I try to remind myself that you can't really care about this stuff or you won't like most artists, she's said to be a republican, and she certainly sang at the Bush inauguration.

[sabotabby]

she's said to be a republican, and she certainly sang at the Bush inauguration.

I'm glad I found this out after last night. Now it can't be un-known.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know it for a fact but I've heard it plenty and she did sing at the inauguration.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't know about her politics but she's certainly fairly conservative when it comes to productions. She spoke at Opera 101 a couple of weeks ago and her distaste for Regietheater/Eurotrash was very evident.

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I once got to insult Susan Graham accidentally, to her (virtual) face. I'm fb friends and vaguely lifebook friends with the guy who hosts the radio broadcasts and he, in turn, is fb friends with all kinds of singers. I just sort of wasn't thinking about that fact when he posted something about the last Rosenkavalier revival and I responded "I'm just not very enthusiastic about the cast" to which Susan Graham, the Oktavian, responded, "I think it's quite a good cast" or something. Supposedly she really rocked it but it's exactly the kind of thing I've never liked her in.

I get sort of over-posty about opera. Apologies to Sabs.

[sabotabby]

When have I ever complained about too much opera discussion on LJ?

[sabotabby]

Your comment fills me with the happiest kind of jealousy.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

You win at program notes. The COC should TOTALLY hire you to write them.

[sabotabby]

I would do it! That would be the best job ever.