Opera and Kids, Version 20.11

First this breaking story: Yes! A breaking opera story! Who knew? And you read it here first!

Jacoba Barber-Rozema, a very young Toronto opera singer, whom I interviewed for this post, and hoped to be able to follow in her future performances, has just won the role of The Shepherd Boy, in Tosca, to be performed by the Canadian Opera Company early in 2012! This is so exciting! Can't wait to see her. Or should I say hear her! Keep reading this post to find my interview with her after her first outing on the COC stage this past spring.

And now back to our regular programming:

My plan has finally paid off! Choosing artful, beautiful opera performances to share with my kids, in order to let them be open to opera as a source of pleasure in life, has worked!

One of my kids has most willingly gone to the opera the last few times, but this summer my kid generated the idea of selecting something to see at the Rossini Opera Festival, which takes place in the town where we vacation. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, literally. We chose Mosè in Egitto, for the story, showing at the decommissioned sports arena. The day after we bought tickets, it was revealed in the local paper that the young(ish) socialist, English, stage director, Graham Vick, had decided to use the opera as a metaphor for the displaced people and freedom fighters of our day, complete with land mines, and machine guns and burqas. Many people found the idea distasteful, we thought it might be frightening, and we heard later that it was not well-enjoyed by the audience, usually composed of long-time festival fans. Luckily we were allowed to change our tickets for something else. We had heard that the scenography of Adelaide di Borgogna, featured video, while the costumes and props were in period, so we thought it would be the right choice to engage a kid, and it was.


Adelaide, an opera based on a true story about a strong and influential woman of 1000 years ago (the wife of Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor), seen from an old-fashioned box, in a theatre built during his lifetime in Rossini's home town, was a smash hit, at least in our family! I always love the ROF for making it possible to see the lesser-known, if not unknown, Rossini works. The singers are often specialized in this beautiful bel canto repertoire and I have to say most of the performances were really thrilling. Especially fabulous was Daniela Barcellona as Ottone (Italian for Otto). She is beloved for pants roles in Rossini operas at the festival, and for good reason. And in this case, I have to leave the music comments at that, because it was director Pier'Alli's multiple video screen backdrop that made the whole thing notable. It was pretty fun, if not exactly perfect.

photo: Elio Crociani

There were endless raindrops falling in puddles, artful pathetic fallacy, but also giving a sense of the time of year and the life of a soldier in a camp in the plain of the Po River at the time (ie the year 950!)

photo: Elio Crociani

For much of the opera, the look was sort of Battleship Potemkin, maybe kind of an homage to Eisenstein?

photo: Elio Crociani

Strangely, at the end, we got into floating umbrellas alla Magritte and a royal coach, all early 20th century - rather awfully out of period - but as James Ehnes said when I (sort of) interviewed him for another post on this blog, art comes from commitment, and I certainly would rather see a failed reach for the stars than an easy sure thing, so I was good with the attempt.

The enthusiasm of my bigger kid left my littler kid saying "Isn't there an opera I can see?" and we had to say "Sorry, that was the last night of the festival! Next time."

I think this success was built on our other opera outing of the year,  the Canadian Opera Company's Ensemble Family Performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute this past spring. That was a wonderful evening. The tickets were at the right price to allow for a rustling and restless audience filled with children, and even to leave early if need be.

Of course, The Magic Flute is not only sensational musically, with quite a few parts familiar to many kids, but also has a brilliant story and the surtitles had everyone laughing at jokes we could not have understood otherwise.

photo courtesy of the Canadian Opera Company

As well, and here is the connection, it also benefited from great scenography and innovative rethinking of the staging, and fabulous costumes. I mean, punk-viking girls with glasses! Does it get any cooler? And the idea of a play being performed at a garden party within the opera, the small stage slowly taking over the larger, was really well executed.

The whole effort absolutely showed the comedic sense of pre-romantic opera, rather than the tragic of the romantic and post-romantic tradition. (I want to say baroque rather than pre-romantic, but I don't want to get into another argument about it. I am still working on a post on my own theory as to what should constitute the end of the baroque period, and why the "classical" period is really just transition from baroque to romantic, and doesn't deserve to be considered a separate period, and that Mozart actually bridged over the end of the baroque into the "classical", crossing paths with Beethoven who took up "classical" and pushed it into romantic and...wait...take a deep breath...I'm supposed to be saving this idea and my research for another post.)

photo of Nicola Smith, First Spirit; Emily Brown Gibson, Second Spirit; and
Jacoba Barber-Rozema, Third Spirit;  photo courtesy of Jacoba Barber-Rozema

In any case, the killer feature of The Magic Flute for us was that a girl from my kids' school had a big role, as the Third Spirit. Her performance was SENSATIONAL and we will be hoping to follow her career as the first members of her fan club. She managed to dig up for me a picture of the spirits crossing the stage, pedaling slowly, but traveling very VERY slowly on their enormous tricycles, while singing ethereally. The effect was amazing, and audience members of all ages loved it. The spirits are really major, spending quite a bit of time onstage through-out the opera, so it really went a long way towards the overall success of the performance that they were so effective and so effectively staged. The kids I was with found it incredible that a schoolmate was such a star.

And...it's not every day that you can ask a very young opera singer what they are all about, so I found a mutual friend who helped me ask her some questions, and I got back some very interesting answers.

Nervous Marigold: Do you want to be an opera singer, or is this a way of rounding out your experience, or testing opera as a future career? Or other?

Jacoba Barber-Rozema: I saw my first and "fell in love" (I guess you could say) with opera when I was 8, and knew I wanted to be an opera singer since I was 10. Being in Flute and seeing more and more of what the professional life is like, makes me want to do it even more. But it's definitely not the easiest career! You said you saw the Ensemble show? Unfortunately, I didn't spend very much time with that cast, which I would have loved to do. It gave me a more realistic look at first cracking into the business and it was a completely different energy - much more excited. I'm fifteen now and my dream still hasn't changed, but who knows what the future holds.

NM: Was it weird doing a pants role? Do you sing in your adult voice, or is that still to change? Are you a soprano now, and what will you be in the future if it is different?

J B-R: You know, doing a pants role was actually a lot of fun! At the very beginning, at the audition, there was kind of a competition to see who can look the most like a boy, but I'm very good friends with the other girls who were chosen, so that soon faded. The lovely Isabel Bayrakdarian, who sang Pamina, once called us "bearded ladies", which we found very funny. I am a mezzo, but I sang the third spirit in flute. I think my voice is still yet to change, yes, but probably not too drastically from what it is now.

NM: What is your favourite opera (and maybe why)?

J B-R: My favourite opera is Madama Butterfly. I got to see it at the Met a few years ago and it moved me to tears. I love the contrast of Puccini's light music in an opera with such dark themes. [It was my first opera, too. - ed.]

NM: What is your favourite current song? (Do you have Bieber fever, like Emily [our mutual friend - ed.])? OK - this is a bit banal, but it's so fun to know.

J B-R: That's too hard! I think I may have Beatles fever, if there is such a thing. I know every song, so that and other sixties music is mainly what I listen to. As for contemporary music, some of my current favourites are Regina Spektor and Ingrid Michaelson. It's been SO strange not rehearsing or hearing music from The Magic Flute, so I've been listening to a lot of that lately. I ate, slept and breathed Flute for almost a year and suddenly it's completely gone. Sometimes I have dreams about it - the pre-show adrenaline, listening to the overture while watching from backstage and waiting for the curtain to come up. I hope my future opera experiences are even half as amazing as The Magic Flute was.


What a clever and interesting person, in addition to being a gifted performer! How rare! How inspiring! What a great role model for arty kids!

La Clemenza di Tito, photo: Opera Atelier

Finally, and related, although not thru the kid connection, this spring I saw my beloved Opera Atelier with no kids, (thank-you, Diana!) as usual doing their utmost to specialize in the obscure, performing La Clemenza di Tito, an opera seria by Mozart. I noticed that I had seen the cast before in Idomeneo in 2008, that is, fabulous soprano Measha Brueggergosman and exotic male soprano Michael Maniaci and the amazing tenor Krešimir Špicer and others. And in fact, at the performance I learned that, very delightfully, OA had promised this cast to bring them back for Tito.

Idomeneo is considered Mozart's most successful opera seria (a HIGH BAROQUE form - notice this, James Ehnes - most often used to praise or flatter a monarch or noble). I really loved it when I saw it, and here is my review from that performance.

Tito had everything in place - but somehow was less of a thrill, just as historical critical opinion would have it. Luckily we were told in artistic director Marshall Pynkoski's usual on-stage opening remarks about the personal commitment of the performers to doing the opera. I think it gave everyone a warm fuzzy open-ness to the production. He explained that that the story was well known to audience's of Mozart's period. The program illustrated the point on the cover, using this quotation from Racine's play Berenice, instead of a picture: Pity my rank. Lord of the world, I guide its destiny. I can make kings and unsceptre them, yet I cannot give my heart to whom I choose. WOW! The opera tells the true story of the Roman emperor Titus. He was renowned for both his love for his Judaean mistress Berenice, whom he sent away, realizing he could never allow himself to marry her, and his clemency toward a couple of traitors, refusing to have them executed, and in fact sharing an inspection with them at the arena. It is marvelous to think of things that were once so well-known and admired, that are now so completely gone from culture.  I know, I know, like "opera", right?

On the other hand, although the music was lovely, and the performance was fine (despite a funny scene-changing error, requiring a hot two-girl kiss scene to be repeated while they finally made the change), but somehow no thrill. Won't stop me from going to Don Giovanni, which they are remounting this fall. [ed. note: just about now] The 2004 performance of Don Giovanni was my introduction to Opera Atelier, and I have had a crush on the company ever since.

Don Giovanni, photo: Opera Atelier

As to the idea of everything connecting...well...I guess within opera everything does connect somehow, but...

To start with, Tito was written by Mozart as a commission for the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold II and Mozart wrote it at the same time as he was working on The Magic Flute.  Cool. More interestingly still, (to me) is that Adelaide in Borgogna felt like opera seria to me, about pair of monarchs of high honour and personal bravery. When I was looking for a connection, I saw that Rossini was called "the little German" because of his admiration of Mozart. He was born in 1792, a year after Mozart's death, and apparently he attempted to revive the baroque-leaning opera seria style. But for whom? During this period he worked for an Italian princess, for Charles X of France, and for Charles's father- or grandfather-in-law Ferdinand IV of Naples. Although it seems he wrote Adelaide for one of the commercial opera houses of Rome, Charles and the Ferdinands were important Bourbons with the royal family's strength based in Burgundy. I wonder if it was just on his mind, or if it was a hopeful attempt to flatter? I wonder if the truth is out there?


Now the marigold is wondering nervously if it is possible not to kill this fragile bud of kid-interest with over-enthusiastic adult encouragement. Perhaps I should start discouraging interest in the opera, to get them really going? Or is that too much of a game? Plus, why are there so many editorial comments in this piece? Who is that nosy editor, anyway?

Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,

My Month of Mozart

Mozart was marketed heavily in the 250th anniversary of his birth. The Mozart Project was launched - a huge meta-website with so much traffic in its first few days that it crashed their servers. Opera and symphony seasons were planned around Mozart. Radio stations ran "your favourite Mozart piece" contests. In my group of friends we chose his Requiem as our favourite. (Actually, I collect requia, because I love sad music. Mozart's is one my favourites among these, too.)

Now, Mozart's birthday was January 27th, 1756.  He just passed 255. There seems to be an upwelling around him again. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra spent a week or so honouring Mozart. One of their guests was the brilliant and adorable violinist James Ehnes. (I have added a link to his home page.)

I heard from Julie Nesrallah, who does the morning classical show on CBC Radio 2, (I have added a link to her Twitter feed), that Ehnes and Mozart HAVE THE SAME BIRTHDAY! Meaningful? I kind of hope so.  I got to see the concert because my friend K, the violinist, got us tickets. It was an amazing performance.


A door has opened for me with this friend. I have been doing pretty well on opera. I have always been a piano aficionado. The violin - I know nothing. In listening to the two Mozart concerti played together by same violinist, we recognized what I looked up to be the "cadenza" a part in a concerto where the soloist may improvise. The way Ehnes played the two cadenzas sounded similar and quite modern, with discord and superfast fingering. (Ehnes also famously plays Paganini - one of the first guys reputed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical ability.) On the other hand, when I started to look into it a bit, it seems that Mozart, who wrote all his violin concerti in the early part of his career, when he emphasized the violin rather than the keyboard as his own performance instrument, is one of the first composers to have written out the cadenza parts, rather than leaving them to the violinist. Hmmm, A mystery that needs more work. Maybe I should send an email and ask Ehnes himself? And maybe I should check with the also-adorable Tom Allen, the host of the afternoon classical program on CBC Radio 2. He knows everything. I'll do that later. (I have also added a link to his Twitter feed.) Oh! And I'll ask some music teachers.

There is another mystery here, too. I love the sound of a baroque orchestra. I have always mentally located the different sound of the instruments in the strings, and some of it is the gut stringing.

But, as Wikipedia says: A baroque violin is, in common usage, any violin whose neck, fingerboard, bridge, and tailpiece are of the type used during the baroque period. Such an instrument may be an original built during the baroque and never changed to modern form; or a modern replica built as a baroque violin; or an older instrument which has been converted (or re-converted) to baroque form [my emphasis - modernized and then unmodernized]. And there is also this, from the History of the Violin on Wikipedia: the fingerboard was made a little longer to be able to play even the highest notes; the fingerboard was tilted a little more, to produce even more volume as larger and larger orchestras became popular: nearly all old instruments were modified, including lengthening of the neck by one centimeter, in response to the raising of pitch that occurred in the 19th century. (In the photo the modern is on the right - you can see it is longer, with a longer throat.)



However, my friend also instructed me that the playing technique favoured now also varies from the technique favoured during the baroque. For one thing, more bow pressure also produces louder sounds - and the corollary is that part of the popularity of baroque music is that it still falls within humanist dimensions - smaller number of instruments, less dynamic range, less pitch or tonal range. There is a great chart that shows the human voice as the standard range against which all other instruments are compared that shows this beautifully. You can see the baroque instruments lined up under the top line in the middle, which is the human voice.

Modern technology pushes all of these out past the limit of the human body to produce or even appreciate. There have also been changes in bowing technique - in particular the addition of vibrato. I learned this between the two concerti, and I realized in watching the second one that in every longer note, all the violins and violas (and possibly the other strings too, but I couldn't see them as clearly) used vibrato. Here Wikipedia says: Vibrato is a technique of the left hand and arm in which the pitch of a note varies in a pulsating rhythm. While various parts of the hand or arm may be involved in the motion, the end result is a movement of the fingertip bringing about a slight change in vibrating string length. Some violinists oscillate backwards, or lower in pitch from the actual note when using vibrato, since it is believed that perception favors the highest pitch in a varying sound.  I have not yet figured out the when where why and who of vibrato. I'm going to have to dig deeper to understand it.

What I really don't get is that here is Ehnes, who uses a Stradivarius violin from 1715, playing baroque music written between 1770 and 1780, in the modern way - ie with a baroque instrument converted to the modern style and favouring (I imagine, among other modern techniques) vibrato. (Just to be sure it's clear: Mozart is considered to be a composer who came out of the baroque and pushed music into the "classical" period. By comparison, Beethoven came out of the "classical" period and pushed music into the romantic. Beethoven actually studied for a while with Mozart. )

How did it get to be that the received way to play this music on this instrument is with modern updates in technology and technique? How did these qualities acquire their value to the extent that they pushed out the original intentions of the creator? This will come up again in a couple of paragraphs, if you can stand it.

 Now, on with Mozart. I always go on and on about kids and opera, and I was really interested when I saw that the Canadian Opera Company was offering a family performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute this month. It is performed by the ensemble instead of the company, the seats are super-cheap, and the entire audience will be filled with rustling and wriggling kids. What a great way to let them start to see opera! I have often thought of trying this opera with my kids, but as a regular performance it seemed a bit challenging.

Once again, I give props (insert hand gesture here) to the Classical Kids CD series (of Beethoven Lives Upstairs fame). They give Mozart two different stories on CD, and one is Mozart's Magic Fantasy, focusing on the music and story of the magic flute. It is completely delightful, and a perfect intro. In fact thanks to Mozart's Magic Fantasy, the first time I ever checked out YouTube was on a rainy Sunday, stuck at home. I sat with my kids and we looked up different performances of the Queen of the Night, from The Magic Flute, and compared them. From there we went on to the Commendatore scene from Mozart's Don Giovanni. Fantastic or what?

Staying with the idea of Mozart, the first baroque opera I ever saw was a performance of Don Giovanni by Opera Atelier - Toronto's specialist baroque opera company. They took pains to inform the audience that they would perform it baroque style, not romantic. Cool! Faster and lighter in every way. I fell in love with Opera Atelier then and there. It is a theory of mine that we are still using the "romantic" paradigm for the arts, and I guess that I am saying that very thing about the Ehnes performance - the orchestration was romantic, because that sounds "right" to modern listeners, even thought the music was created for something different.

AND...to finalize this month of Mozart, I was able to get tickets for Opera Atelier's upcoming performance of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito. No kids for this one. I know nothing about it. Must look up story.  Must look up music.

I have seen Measha Brueggergosman and Michael Maniaci together in OA's Idomeneo a couple of years ago. He is about the world's only male soprano (a true voice) and I can't wait to see them again. (You can find a post about it under my tag "opera".)

PS What better way to spend a snow day than listening to, thinking about and writing to my friends about music!

Now the marigold is wondering nervously: Have I written too much? Should I have also included what I learned about Rondo form? Should I have included the link to Vladimir Ahskenazy playing Mozart's darkish Rondo in A Minor? What about Rondo alla Turca? What about the general Turkish/Masonic connections of Mozart that show in all kinds of Mozart music, including The Magic Flute? Should I do a separate post on that? What do you think?

Responses from the Future

What a lot of cool conversations I have had as a result of my last post.

First cool thing: I was out with a friend who is an iphone adept. This is the person who sort of lobbied for me to get an iphone, and finally convinced me to get one by showing me the birding app possibilities. Not a birder, but someone knows how to connect with my buttons. We were walking in a park, and I stopped to listen to a bird, whose song I could not recognize. I was saying how someone thought I had been describing a birding app that worked like Shazam: you let it hear the bird, and it identifies it. That would be WAY cool, but sadly I know of no such app. I had only been talking about the birding app having recordings that you can play to identify or even call birds. Cool enough.  "Why don't you just record this one?" this friend said. "Doh!" I said.  I never thought of holding out the phone to record a birdsong, and then playing it next to my birdsong identification CDs. What an awesome idea! What an opportunity missed that day! (Bonus: you can save recordings to Evernote (see my sidebar to check out this super cool shareware program with an on-line+mobile app. I could put them right in my Evernote nature journal. OMG.) (Also: feel free to develop such an app, or to tell me about one if it exists.)

Second cool thing: a visual artist and teacher that I am friends with told me she loves dance and music more even than visual art. She also told me she plays tennis HARD. Then my thoughts came around to the practice of art as a kinetic activity, too. I love the idea of "the gesture of the artist", and consider it one way of defining something as art. Of course, as she pointed out, ballet is an archaic form (like opera). She proposed Cirque du Soleil as the newest form of dance. What a provocative thought that was! I had had vague thoughts in that general area, like about figure skating, but never actually managed to define it so clearly. It makes perfect sense. Cirque has taken out many of the circus-y parts, and kept the physical parts and the music. Some related thoughts: there is a continuum of athletic activity that runs from dance to, shall we say, football. In my view, anything where there is a judgment of artistic merit - leave it outside competition. Scores or times are the hallmarks of the athletic activities suitable for competition; artistic merit is for the arts - all about personal response. So despite an identical level of athletic demand on the body, I think gymnastics and figure skating do not belong in the Olympics any more than ballet does. To come back to the starting point, figure skating is hugely popular in a way ballet is not - really it is another new dance form, too.  More thought required. (PS I am interested in the current, but I love the archaic.)

Third cool thing: I have been thinking about how my friends act as a digest for the internet, previewing content, and sending me the most interesting stuff. So much better than me trolling around for hours getting tangled in the marginally interesting, and then one of my friends sent me this link to Seth Godin's blog entry "Are you an Elite?" Now here's a guy who understands me, and my friends, and my blog-readers. We just have fun exploring ideas and technology and information and culture, and we love to share that, and just as Seth says, there is a remarkable modern ability for us to access each other and all that stuff we love. The other point he makes that strikes me as key is this:

"The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that  engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from."

Selfishly, I want organizations to build platforms that engage me, (hello iphone) but I also want that for my kids to enjoy and for the happy future of humankind on planet earth.

He also wrote a blog post about post-secondary education and what it means now and going forward, an article we have discussed in our family quite a bit, called THE COMING MELT-DOWN IN HIGHER EDUCATION which is a very clear statement of something I worry about for when my children get there. Here is the key point he gets to on this:

"The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference... "

Read: allows them to access organizations with platforms that engage them as elites. He refers his readers on to a book: DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz. This is a book to get on for the Kindle reader app on my iphone, for sure. Yours too? If you  haven't read it already, it is also time for you to read A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. You can search my blog for my review of the book, or use the hot link under Links to Writers in my sidebar. Seth Godin and Anya Kamenetz are there now too.


Now the marigold wonders nervously:
What about the negative side of the technology that allows us to live in the future? That calls for another post.

Music for the Future

Lately two exquisite pieces of music have come to my attention, harbingers of the future of music, but built on the history of music.

The first I'll mention is Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir performing his work Lux Arumque, a choir recruited, and taught over the Internet, and then recorded by their own webcams and edited into a performance. Stunning to look at, stunning to hear, and doesn't it sound like Allegri's Miserere? (I have provided the link a performance by the King's College Cambridge, who seem to own the bragging rights for their performance. If you look down the comments, someone has provided the [awesome] text in Latin.) Props to the Beethoven Lives Upstairs series. I first heard Allegri's music on my kids' Mozart's Magnificent Voyage disc, and I fell in love with it immediately. I even bought it from itunes to have on my iphone. I often get a chance to recommend this series and I do so by saying any music lover of any age or expertise can learn something they didn't know about the music or the composer by paying attention to these stories.

And then there are Felix's Machines, by a young guy called Felix Thorn, who cannibalizes his family's piano, adds some household objects, and drives the resulting instruments by his computer. He says in Wired UK "I look at the advantages of what machines can do. People must realize you can extract emotion from them, and enjoy the music they produce." The music is delightful. Yes - and emotional.

Meanwhile,  I had a chance to be a guest with some friends at a fundraiser for a project that also mixes past and future: Paola Marino  is a video director using the medium to interpret opera arias in a trilogy of short videos. While the videos are pretty cool, but what is really exciting is standing in a small room while an opera singer sings. The power is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck, and that is the level of musical thrill that I am always hoping for. I am guessing that Paola's goal roughly fits in what with I am always on about in having opera work in the 21st century: Use what is universal about opera, in this case choosing as a theme for her series "Desire". Integrate it with modern technology, in this case video (manga works too - see my tags). Add a dash of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies: "Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify", and you have cool 21st century opera. (See Fun, Cool, Funny on my sidebar to use an Oblique Strategy to problem-solve for yourself.)

The young opera singer who features in this trilogy can also be seen in another version of Carmen, a performance she did at a benefit to attract young people to the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Watch Lauren Seagal  exploiting her gifts.

But there's more: digital video and YouTube are providing a brave new world of interesting music experiences.

I heard about this one at the music school I attend. By this I mean listening whenever I can to the CBC Radio 2 program Shift, with my radio-hero, host Tom Allen. He has a twitter feed - the first one on planet earth that almost interests me - and a blog where this clip is also featured, although I can't figure out quite where. He also happens to be a trombonist. This is a little homemade video by a Russian bass-trombonist FEATURING the trombone part of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, quite possibly the best-known piece of classical music written in the 20th century, and that's exactly what makes it effective. Music you can hum along to, with just one instrument pulled out. I don't play in an orchestra, and probably neither do you. OK, well I know some of you do, but...how else would I ever get this perspective? And it sounds great! Only in a world where a guy can set up his camera (or phone?) in an orchestra pit, and then post it to YouTube could this ever be possible. I LOVE the future of music.

Then, of course, I had to show my kids the video and tell them my favourite Rachmaninoff story - that although he wrote and performed this music, at a certain point he decided that the new young guys could play it BETTER THAN HIM and he stopped performing it. So, we looked up Rachmaninoff on YouTube, and he is there. Sadly it seems he was too early for there even to be film-to-video performance clips, but there was an audio recording of him performing his 2nd piano concerto from 1929 by RCA Victor with his favorite orchestra: the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, and what do you know - the part he pulled out of the music sounded very much like the trombone pattern! Unbelievable, and would we have even really noticed that if he we hadn't watched the trombone part first? Incidentally, there are video clips of Van Cliburn playing this concerto, and his is the performance I grew up listening to and loving, plus performances by Kissin and Lugansky, two current Russian pianists filling these big emotional shoes. Love them, too.

Then...glancing at the other suggestions on YouTube, we noticed a video labelled Rachmaninoff had big hands. Just watch it.

Rereading Hallowe'en

I recently felt the urge to re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray, probably because I wanted Oscar Wilde's story topmost in my mind before the irresistible onslaught of movie promo. I was surprised to discover that it was his only long prose fiction. I was further surprised to find so many of the aphorisms which I thought Wilde himself had delivered at parties and such, to be delivered by one of the main characters in this book, a man whose relentlessly aphoristic style sounds affected to a modern ear. Nonetheless, the sayings which have stood the test of time...uh... stand the test of time: I cannot accept your invitation due to a subsequent engagement, and so on.

So, I remembered the book being thrilling, un-put-down-able. This time it took a long while for me to reach that feeling, but then when it started it literally left me breathless. How many BOOKS can really do that? Am I even talking about reading? The story is so awesome, that I think it quite possible that translated into the modern vernacular in every way (by this I even mean from book to movie) that it will be quite artistically successful. I hope so.

Then, I started free-associating over to Edgar Allan Poe. Hmmm. Not really contemporaries, but still...a couple of stories to re-read there too, in light of (my) current scholarship. Murder in the Rue Morgue, (and The Purloined Letter for that matter): Poe was acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle to have created the prototype of a detective before the word existed. Plus, somehow, I had a must-read recommendation for The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. I can't remember who, and I can't figure it out, either. The first two thirds are a horror/sailing story (an unusual but not unknown category). However, the final third is science fiction - also a prototype. Jules Verne and and HG Wells feel to us like the pioneers of explorer science fiction. Yet Verne was born 20 years later than Poe, and actually wrote a sequel to Gordon Pym (!), and Wells wasn't born until 1866, more than 15 years after Poe's death and likewise credited him with the invention of the category.

Here the observation seems to be that Poe is quite under-rated. He is taken as a novelty act, but he was truly creative and courageous. I even saw, when I was confirming his dates on Wikipedia, that he was the first American writer to try to live on the income from his writing alone. The guy was full of ideas. I have to say that when I come across his poetry now, I put it in the special category with Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein - producers of poetry with both distinctively creative rhymes and yet also natural-sounding scansion. I think these writers offer the best possible way to learn the intricacies of English pronunciation when it is not your mother tongue. I love them all for it.

(Note to self: send a suggestion to the BadAss guy about Poe. I'm pretty sure he was one. Meanwhile, gentle reader: run, don't walk, to http://www.badassoftheweek.com. There you will find a mixture of real historical figures, fictional characters, writers, scientists, etc, etc, whose bad-ass-iness is meticulously and HILARIOUSLY documented. I am actually going to subscribe to the RSS feed, so I don't miss out.)

I also must send a shout-out to Adam Rex here, who brilliantly spoofed The Raven, without any disrespect at all, apart from the obvious, ironic and rhyming disrespect in his version. It is a part of a poetry collection for kids - no that sounds all wrong, like, very, like, smarmy - it is a part of a kids' book, in rhyme, so funny that is almost wasted on kids. That book is called Frankenstein takes the Cake and it is actually a sequel to Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, which we have never seen. My kids and I love his The True Meaning of Smekday, too. See link to his homepage under "writers"

And...big news! In case you were wondering, I discovered, with a couple of Grade 2 kids, that there actually are stories about women were-wolves! In fact there doesn't seem to be an actual term for them and most of the sites about them won't open because of the school's internet filters! Anyway, who but a Grade 2 kid and/or a poster of R-rated internet material would ever have asked such a question? Lets you know who is capable of thinking outside the box these days.

Should I also mention spooky, scary, Coraline? Loved Neil Gaiman's original book. LOVED Henry Selick's movie - a separate and original work of art (especially the opening title sequence, which is one of the most beautiful pieces of animation ever). LOVED the soundtrack, by composer Bruno Coulais in an imaginary language (how perfect is that?) and bought it and use one song as a ring tone on my mobile. And loved the graphic version by P Craig Russell (whom I already love for his graphic versions of opera. Actually - maybe I should check his work for female wolf-men - no term, remember? - as he is capable of thinking outside the box). See link under "fun, cool funny".

The marigold wonders nervously: Did you see how re-reading intersected with Hallowe'en just now? Were you wondering? Is it kewl?

Days you can only have in a small Italian town

photo by souci photo

Well, we have had another of them:

One day we went to look at a local archeological site, Colombarone, unusual even anywhere in Italy. It is history in layers, starting with a Roman villa of the 4th century, which lasted until the 6th century, then was squatted in as a ruin for a while. Then in about the 7th century, the foundations and building materials were re-used for a basilica, which fell into disuse about the 11th century, but were re-used again for a parish church in the 12th century, which also gradually fell into ruin, leaving behind what became a chiesola or little church, which led to the discovery and partial excavation of the site in the 18th century. Over the last 25 years the site has been excavated and researched extensively, and put on display under a canopy. We spent about an hour there, had a personal tour guide, and bought the kids' and the adults' books about the site. It can give you shivers, this stuff.

Then we had to rush to an appointment with a young local ceramicist, Annalisa Speziali, who wanted to teach the kids about ceramics by letting them glaze prepared bodies. Ceramics is one of the historical arts of this region, and as a way of life and art it is dying. They all enjoyed it so much, that she subsequently had them in to her shop to form a body each, which are now drying out, and which she will let them glaze, and then fire in her kiln. Before we leave, we plan to go see her laboratorio with its kiln, out in the country. I guess we will be packing a handful of ceramic pieces in our luggage to bring back. (Check out her props under Art Links, to the right)

THEN we had to rush to meet family friends, a star of the Rossini Opera Festival and his wife and daughter, who happen to be from Rochester. We became friends with them a couple of years ago when we overheard them speaking and recognized their American accents from our part of the world. We had aperitivi with them (Aperol spritzes, natch) at one of our mutual favourite local bars, the bar El Cid. The kids like it because they can bike around in the park, instead of sitting at a table. Sadly, it was not karaoke night, as we had all hoped to enjoy a bit of over-kill together. As it was, musically speaking, we had to content ourselves with the tenor's Bel Canto Concerto a few days later, about which more another day. Suffice it to say it was not a hardship. (See the link to tenor Gregory Kunde's home page under music links, to the right. Greg and his wife Linda are also active in music in Rochester. I have given the link to their chorale as well. We plan to make the trip to see them sing close to home, too. I guess we are joining the legion of fans who follow Greg around the world.)

Side note here: A couple of years ago, we met some family friends from home for a day in Florence (instead of meeting them at the park with our Starbucks coffee, as usual). Just before splitting up to go our separate ways, we decided to buy the kids t-shirts on the ponte vecchio. We chose a booth and stopped at it and started shopping. The guy in the booth recognized the Pesaro accents and asked. Why yes! We had come from Pesaro. He used to work there. Really? Where? At a bar near the Palla di Pomodoro (a really fabulous public sculpture in the park near the sea). Really? We hang around that area. Which one? The Bar El Cid! Well, we'll say hi to Ivan for you. Now that's a small town and a small world.

How places in the world offer such a smorgasbord of cultural options, so casually, so easily, so delightfully? The mix seems impossible for one life to encompass, let alone one day.

The marigold wonders nervously:
This is as valid as summer camp, right?

Summering in Italy IS worthwhile!

Well, I have been waiting to write something interesting about our time here in Italy. Every day, all there has been to say is that we woke up late, ate lunch after doing some dishes and laundry. Then we went to the beach, then we went for dinner, a bike ride and then bed. Delightful, but not exactly “woo-hoo!”

However, finally we have had an unforgettable sequence of activities that make us feel that our choice to spend summer here has been worthwhile.

Here’s how it started: Pesaro has begun an initiative to keep the stores open after dinner, combined with little public entertainments like craft markets or street performers or concerts. We turned a corner one night early in our vacation, following the sound of music, and found a choir singing.

The smallness of the town came into play as one of the sopranos turned out to be a baby-sitter we shared a summer with a number of years ago. We have run into her here and there over the years, but this was special. Her choir specializes in ancient English music (of all things). They have a full program over the summer, and she particularly recommended one of their upcoming performances. It was an adaptation of Purcell’s mezz-opera The Fairy Queen, which is taken from Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. By coincidence, our younger child performed the play this year to close Grade One, so even the kids knew the story quite well. It wasn’t too long or too late or too expensive. It all added up to be worth considering.

After the usual afternoon at the beach, that particular evening came. I had the wrong town in mind, but we figured out our mistake before we headed out. We drove off with the right town in mind, but in the wrong direction. We corrected that mistake, too, feeling more and more like we were dragging the kids, late, to some obscure and difficult grown-up entertainment.

Instead, it was true dream on a mid-summer night. We arrived in time. The performance was in an outdoor amphitheatre, part of a beautifully restored villa complex in a village in the hills above Pesaro. The moon was shining, the crickets were chirping in the pines, the moths were fluttering and a fountain was flowing. The music was old and exquisite. (I know Purcell’s Dido and Aeneus to be pretty, but still, you never know.) The instruments were so old that at every pause, they were re-tuned. In addition to the choir, there was a soprano with a slightly odd, but compelling, voice and a “sopranista”: a male soprano, singing in same register, but with a completely different tone. That’s something that sounds old-fashioned, I can tell you. There were beautiful Italian ballet dancers, with their long hair and summer tans, dancing as all the fairies in the story. It was an enchanted hour. We all loved it. Just to give it a perfect local feeling, at the table offering local wine and snacks after the show, we ran into a couple we have known (slightly) at the beach for several years.

The next night , after our afternoon at the beach, we went straight to eat at our favorite beach-side restaurant, and then we all biked down to go roller-skating at the beach-side, outdoor roller rink. The kids tried it last year, but it was my first time on old-fashioned roller-skates. Super-fun. The other end of local culture.

Oh. I also should mention that the Aperol Spritz aperitivo habit is still going strong. This year, we have discovered that the bar at the beach stand next to ours makes them, so we can enjoy them under our umbrellas, in our bathing suits, with whichever friends are still around, just before heading home from the beach in the evening.

If you ask me, vacations don't get much better than this.

More about opera manga (Yeah, more!)

P Craig Russell has beautifully captured The Magic Flute in his graphic version. The work exceeded my expectations, doing such things as giving a sense of the overture in graphic format and remaining true to the traditional costuming ideas associated with the characters. I am now lending it around to my opera-buff friends, but I look forward to getting it back to rummage around in again. Naturally my kids were curious and have peeked in and around it, too, but it is a bit long and forbidding to sit down and read, even for me, I must admit.

In contrast, the manga version of La Bohéme was short and simple. Better as a synopsis perhaps, than a traditional synopsis, but not without fault. I was sorry to see my favourite part of the story overlooked in this version - when the friends sell the last of their meagre possessions to try and buy medicine for Mimi when it is already too late - and there was a grammatical error, but the drawings were sweet and the text rang true to the words of the opera. Bravo Vancouver Opera! It is the way forward, for sure.

Opera Manga - Awesome updates

Well...here's a cool thing. The Vancouver Opera publishes on-line manga mini-versions of their opera season! I was so thrilled to see La Boheme in their line-up because my kids watched the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast version last spring. I can't wait to put it in their hands, but not before I read it over.

The mangas can be found on the delightful Vancouver Opera blog: the link is at the top of my music links list. Go to "read" and look at the bottom of the roll-out links. The blog itself is fun and loose with lots of manga and other pop culture references. Where opera absolutely can and must go to stay with us in our time. The blogger sent me a note to say that they will soon be publishing their opera mangas in a collection, and I am already lining up to get it.

From the Vancouver Opera blog I was led to the Opera Chic blog, which pretty much says it all. (It's the next item on the music links list.) There is a current way to talk about opera, and to position it. It's just that very few opera companies are very agile with it. Not to mention that everything costs money. The Catch-22 is that you have raise money to develop these media to generate revenue to attract people in order raise money and pay for the media you are developing to attract people...

I gave up searching bookstores for P Craig Russell's The Magic Flute and finally ordered it. It is way cool, too. Not only is interesting to me, but my kids pick it up and riffle through the pages looking for the parts that they recognize. They don't really know that opera is meant to be old-fashioned and uncool. They know it to be contemporary and fun.

It's amazingly satisfying to have a place to muse and wonder and have answers generated through the ether in such a direct way.

The marigold wonders nervously:
Is it actually magic?

Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival

What a thrill!

At first, the look of this year’s production of Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival reminded me of a couture fashion show – distressed white set, stark black, red or white costumes, in the form of uniforms with boots and evening gowns. Not, however, the usual fascist reworking, but abstracted and symbolic. As I thought about it, it came to me that this story is a tiny sliver of Greek myth, which, if not completely unknown in our time, is just about.* In a way, an attempt to show the story as history would be unnecessarily confusing. It reminded me of looking at history paintings: sure we can identify that there are people with well-known names in life-like settings, but we have no context, and we can attach no meaning. In fact, the natural language of our time is comic-book-style abstraction. We can make sense of black, red and white used to indicate good versus evil, rage versus control, confusion versus order, and most importantly in this case, manipulators versus manipulated.

This opera was not performed for 150 years because it was considered too dark! Maybe so, until now, but darkness is the natural tenor of our times. Ermione, especially treated in this way, is contextualized perfectly within the world of Sin City, 300 and Batman, not to mention real-life terrorism, torture and ethnic cleansing.

Then, there was the music and the singing. As with Il Turco in Italia that I saw at last year’s Rossini Opera Festival, the music was delicious: spellbinding for hours. I think my favourite moment was the end of the first act with everyone on stage, screaming their power and rage and disappointment and fear, beautifully, at full volume. I felt my hair blowing back with the sheer power of it, like in the old Maxell ad.

To be complete I have to say that the performances were awesome, and the audience went wild several times. For me it was especially exciting as I have come to know one of the performers a little, and to see his everyday gestures forming part of his characterization was a kind of like having an extra-sensory experience.

At the end, I am left asking why these operas are so obscure, so far from the standard repertoire? Step aside La Bohéme; step aside Madama Butterfly; you old-fashioned weaklings. Ermione – time for you to step up to the plate! You can bring the 21st century crowd to the opera!

*Funnily enough, this sliver of the story is linked to that of Idomeneo which I saw performed by the Opera Atelier earlier this year. Each features a Greek returning with a slave from the Trojan war, plus Idomeneo has Elettra (Electra) while Ermione (Hermione) involves her brother, Oreste (Orestes). Love those Greek myths. I like to say that I would rather be offended than bored, and this material never fails to qualify.

Opera-Manga Lives! It Lives!

A comment left for my first post about Shakespeare-manga, from someone at Classical Comics (see link), has led to a conversation, and she led me further to someone who is actually doing graphic versions of operas! Hurray!

It is P. Craig Russell. I am adding a link to him too. None of the operas I was thinking of, like La Traviata and La Boheme, but instead he has produced versions of The Magic Flute and The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal and Pelleas and Melisande.

The cool thing here is that my children know The Magic Flute quite well, in part because it features in Mozart's Magic Fantasy, one of the Classical Kids' series that started with Beethoven Lives Upstairs, that they have been falling asleep to for years. I cannot recommend these disks highly enough. They do correspond with known biographical facts about the composers, they work around short excerpts from many of a composer's pieces and they contextualize these composers in their times, while entertaining with a story. I feel they can be forgiven for the odd anachronism, or language slip, as the value in laying down a ground of really good music is so high.

In a related note, something we look to You-Tube for is opera arias. We once spent a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday judging the merits of various performances of the Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute and Il Commendatore from Don Giovanni. WAY cooler than Hannah Montana. I don't think that even the most disinterested person could fail to be reached by these two arias. (Mozart's awesome Requiem does not stand up so well on You-Tube - better to just close your eyes and listen to a recording. Except for the Princess Tutu video, q.v..)

And The Magic Flute is also part of the Metropolitan Opera's offerings that we hope to find on DVD.

It seems like a no-brainer that my kids will want to peek into a graphic version of The Magic Flute. And, if they don't, who cares? I will.

Incidentally, about a year ago, I bought a Wagner's The Best of The Ring CD-set from Philips, and the book Wagner Without Fear by William Berger. I felt like it was ignorant to know nothing (duh!) and be afraid. In fact, Wagner writes the most lush romantic music possible. I often amuse myself when listening to the radio by trying to work out the composer, and I figured out that if I am saying to myself, "Beethoven? No. Tchaikovsky? No. Beethoven? No. Tchaikovsky? No." it is actually Wagner. Not at all threatening, really! Time to try The Ring of the Nibelung, graphic version.

Back to P Craig: even I had heard of Hellboy, one of his major creations. He has also worked with Neil Gaiman on some Sandman stories. I'll have a check at the couple of volumes of Sandman I have, and if I am missing P Craig's, I'll get them.

Now I have to get to a bookstore and get out my wallet for:
Classical Comics Macbeth at least, and we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of their Frankenstein, too;
and The Magic Flute, and The Ring of the Nibelung, for starters, illustrated by P Craig Russell;
and any Gaiman/Russell that I do not have.

The marigold asks nervously:
It is one thing to be able to buy or borrow all the books that are interesting, but will I have enough time to read them? And listen to the music? And share?

The Triumph of the Delivery Modes II

I am proud of my kids capacities and abilities, and I want to show them everything, from ballet to baseball, but nevertheless I don't want them to be out of step with current kid-culture. Yet, I have to admit that after our Shakespeare-manga moment, we had another cool new-delivery-mode experience, this time with opera. We had an arrangement to go with a couple of other grown-ups and another kid to the HD re-broadcast of La Boheme from The Metropolitan Opera. I had hoped that the opera I consider to be THE introductory opera, in a movie theatre with popcorn, at a $20 ticket price, would work as a starting point for a lifetime of pleasure in opera, but...I was prepared to leave if they got bored or really didn't like it, or couldn't sit still. On the contrary, it was the little one who wanted get a membership to The Met so we would have first access to tickets for future shows, and the big one wants to rent or buy other operas from The Met on DVD to try at home! (For interest I'll note that La Fille du Regiment and the Barber of Seville are at the top of the list, not to mention La Boheme again. Opera-movie party, anyone?)

Now, the Met is one of the best opera companies on the planet, and their staging and production values were perfect. (Which is not to say the broadcast was without flaw - the colour was improperly adjusted in our theatre for the first half of the transmission.) The "extra features" like interviews about the staging, and with the stars, and with the adorable conductor Nicola Luisotti, were delightful. The movie audience got to see a bit of back-stage business, including Ainhoa Arteta, as Musetta, actually wiping her eyes behind the curtain before the curtain calls.

In its own way, the combination of the best opera company available at the movies, is as suitable as Shakespeare available in manga. Of course it works. It is a bold and up-to-date idea from a world known to be as stodgy as they come. The Met is also flying with their success in this initiative: last season they gave six broadcasts, this season they gave eight, next season they are planning for ten. In the extensive program they say their transmissions reach one million viewers! That's a lot of people watching opera. I think the new General Manager, Peter Gelb, is responsible. I read about his plans a few months ago in The New Yorker.

I have been out of the opera-loop for nearly ten years. (See: The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer on how this works.) I know longer know all the names. I did know of Angela Gheorghiu, who sang Mimi, and she debuted professionally in that role more that fifteen years ago. Her voice was awesome. First the good: the final act was wonderful. It often requires such suspension of disbelief to fit together an opera singer, healthy (robust) in body and voice with a dying consumptive, but she did it! Here it is tempting to say that it was filming that allowed her to hold back her power, but, of course, this was recorded during a live performance, filling an opera house. How do dey do dat? Unfortunately, the filming made the first act hard to believe. Gheorghiu had to vamp her young seamstress to communicate the character, and meanwhile her not-young face was in close-up. Opera has been an art at a distance until now. I guess the new stars will be (are?) as young and telegenic as most writers are now: made for TV. I had not heard of Ramón Vargas, but I loved him in the role. He was emotional and believable. His high notes were effortless and lovely. His closing cry of "Mimi!" made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I was talking with the most musically qualified among us about that note. Is it a slight discord? It sounds unresolved to me, and that would be appropriate. I'll try to look at the sheet music. Or should I write to The Met and ask them?

Kids or not, depending on the work, I really plan and hope to see more of these. Suddenly I have seen a few different opera things lately, and I am thinking opera traditions are changing. Why would people choose a quite-good but terribly expensive, local performance of standard repertoire, over, on one side, an affordable, digital broadcast of the best in the world, or, on the other, a specialized festival (ie the Rossini Opera Festival), or a company that devotes itself to non-standard repertoire performed at a high level (ie Opera Atelier) or...what else is coming down the pike? I think that, similarly to retail, the middle will die away and only the top and bottom will be left. Interesting. I'll be watching.

The marigold asks nervously:
Will opera movies work at home, or does the mystique of even a movie theatre provide some necessary seriousness? Will I kill my kids' enthusiasm by trying this at home?

PS This morning we are watching SpongeBob, so I guess they're still OK. Whew.