Mock Turtle

Fireworks!

Foomp!

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Although I suspect it won’t be here for much longer, contrary to what I told TB yesterday it looks like The Lives of Others is going to be in the theatres at least for the weekend.

We finally got around to seeing this movie after J. saw the Globe review maybe two months ago. It’s set in pre-Glasnost East Germany, circa 1984, in the days when virtually everyone was either a employee, a informer, or a target of the secret police. It’s a memorable film and well worth your time, if you get a chance to see it before it leaves town.

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While I’m at it, by comparison Luisa Miller isn’t half bad. The production suffers from indifferent (and occasionally bizarre) sets and costumes, but whatever, all these things cost big money and we don’t seem to have that kind of money around here. (By far the best sets this year were Lady MacBeth, and those were funded with a special gift from the estate of Bud Sugarman.) But hey, the director has figured out he has a story to tell, even it’s not exactly the most subtle thing ever written, and manages to do so in a way where you get a sense of connection with the characters–especially Luisa in her interactions with her father (Miller), the bad guy Wurm (effectively portrayed as quite the incarnation of evil), and her rival Federica.

Not that I’m recommending that anyone rush out and buy tickets for either of the Verdis on offer right now. But from a dramatic point of view, Luisa is middling with occasional moments of more-than-middling, whereas unless you want to go, close your eyes, and treat it as an extended Verdi recital (hint if you are tempted: CDs are cheaper than live opera), Traviata is really a complete write-off.

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We went to the COC Traviata this evening with a sense of foreboding, since Kenneth Winters wrote a thoroughly negative review in the Globe a few days ago. Unfortunately I have to agree with him. There’s really nothing whatsoever wrong with the music–the singers are all quite good, the orchestra plays very well etc.–but the 1999 production that the COC decided to revive this year is as close as I’ve ever seen to an act of on-stage butchery.

You’d think it would be really hard to mess up an opera like this–the story is relatively straightforward, lots of great music, etc., etc. But somehow the director has managed to transform Verdi’s music into something resembling nothing so much as a soundtrack for a bizarre attempt to make a PG-rated triple-X movie. It’s not as though I have an issue with sexuality in opera or even (where reasonably appropriate vis-a-vis the plot) for fairly explicit sexuality. But here we have reached the point where it’s become gratuitous and in several scenes has in effect become a substitute for an attempt to tell the story. You shouldn’t be able to walk away from an opera like La Traviata feeling no emotional connection with what’s going on onstage. But somehow they’ve accomplished this with this production.

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…and I’m going to drop $16 and go, because really, a whole lecture on paperweights? For the 7th year running? I’m deeply curious about this.

It’s only an hour, so if it’s boring at least it won’t go on forever, and however it goes I’m sure it’ll make for at least one decent blog post. Anyone want to join me?

I mean come on. You know you’ll regret it forever if you miss this one.

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I tried. But after 15 minutes I started yelling at my cat so I turned off the radio.

Laurie Brown sounds like a high-school girl with half a brain, and the music sounds like something a high-school girl who thinks she is cool would play on her iPod.

We don’t need state funding for such trash. If CBC ever takes Saturday Afternoon at the Opera off the air, I will take matter into my own hands and end its misery with a cluster bomb.

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First impressions:

• I am really pissed that they cut the half-hour news. Malloch informed us that the news at 6 will be only 3 minutes from now on, but the full version is still available on Radio One. The listener will have a choice, she said, and she hopes that we will choose to listen to music instead, since music can tell us about reality in a way the news cannot (I swear to God she really did say that, I did not make it up).

• I will eat my hat if this stuff is really jazz. Okay, maybe 10-20% of it is jazz. The rest is elevator music.

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It’s been almost a month since we saw Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites (in Chicago) in the same week.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District is an early-ish work by Shostakovich, the cause of his first denunciation by Stalin and so one of the last works he composed without any consciousness of the Communist Party looking over his shoulder. I don’t usually buy opera on CD (unlike J.) so despite being a longtime Shostakovich fan I’d never heard the music to this piece before. It’s a very effective work, and was persuasively brought off by the COC. The plot is a rather amoral and cynical satirical take on provincial Russian life. The title character (Katerina Izmailova) murders her father-in-law and then her husband when they get between her and her lover. She and her lover are caught (it seems through her own foolishness in confessing the crimes to a police force not really interested in investigating them) and they are both sent off to Siberia. Her lover betrays her with another woman, and the opera ends with Katerina throwing herself and her rival to their deaths in a Siberian river. It’s not the sort of piece where one develops any kind of sympathy for any of the characters–they are all pretty nasty pieces of work–though Katerina is portrayed sympathetically up to a point as a victim of the oppressive conditions of provincial Russian life.

Poulenc’s Dialogues, written some two decades later, is an altogether different kind of work. The opera derives its story from a fictionalized account of the martyrdom of the members of a real Carmelite order during the French Revolution. It’s a study of the half-dozen main characters (the remaining Carmelite nuns are chorus), exploring the psychology of religious vocation and of martyrdom in complex ways that focus more on the human element than on intricacies of doctrine. Despite the undeniable effectiveness of the Shostakovich piece, it is this opera that lingers after the event.

We have the Met opera Faust on in the background as I write this. The music is indeed very likeable.

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We tuned in for the last day of old CBC evening programming last night–we tend to have “Music for a while” on over dinner most evenings and J. is a huge “After Hours” fan. “In Performance” had its last show on Thurs. but we left the Friday version on mainly out of inertia (it’s a world music take on the same idea) . They had the hosts for the new shows in for a few minutes in each slot to promote their spots. It’s hard to get any sense of personality for any of the shows–the Jazz show is supposed to jazzy but not *too* jazzy (we don’t want to get into any musical “boxes”), the live performance show is being taken over by the Toronto CBC Radio afternoon host who still sounds like he’s not sure how the heck he ended up there, and the the late show host seemed to be unenthusiastically parrotting some kind of marketing copy about how the design of her show is modelled along an iPod–a bit of everything, no boundaries, etc., etc.

The whole thing seems focus-grouped to death, no sense of personality, musical integrity, or individual taste to any of it. I hope the hosts are more enthusiastic about their shows than about the marketing spiels they’ve been given to sell them with, or it’s all going to be very depressing.

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CBC Radio 2 is radically revamping their evening and night schedule starting next Monday. The thrust seems to be in the direction of projecting a more populist-middlebow, soft-nationalist image for the evening lineup, consistent with a trend that started many years ago (in 1985(!), according to the web site) with Jurgen Gothe’s Disc Drive as the afternoon commuting show. The jazz show has been moved from the 10-midnight to the 6-8 dinner slot, and the 8-10 slot, which has pretty much forever been more-or-less dedicated to broadcasts of live classical music concerts (“In Performance”), has been transformed into Canada Live, a general broadcast of live music concerts of all kinds from across the country. Inhabiting the 10-12 slot previously occupied by the jazz show is The Signal, a sort of “contemporary music” program (I’m really not sure what that is supposed to mean).

I have mixed feelings about all this. I see where the CBC is coming from. I’m a fairly serious classical fan but I relatively rarely listened to In Performance (J. had it on much more frequently). It could well be that many people who are serious fans tend to have collections and as a result tend put on what they feel like listening to when they feel like it, as opposed to tuning in at 8:00 every evening to see what the CBC has on offer. So the CBC ends up catering more to the market of people who mainly want to have something on the radio in the background, and who find a steady diet of classical too stodgy, un-hip or whatever (the marketing copy linked to above seems to be written with an obvious eye to hipness factor). This is the approach that has worked so well for over 20 years for DiscDrive. (Interestingly, the CBC isn’t messing with the morning and midday schedules, and the morning schedule in particular is still dominated by traditional classical.)

Despite my rather haphazard radio listening habits, I caught In Performance often enough to appreciate that it was a great show with a great series of hosts (most recently Andrew Craig). I’ll be sorry to see it go.

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