Operas on stage and screen
Detailed information about this year’s Met movie broadcast season is finally up. There are two venues in Philly, including one I can readily get to in University City. Whoopee!
Oh, and Rigoletto at the Academy of Music was great — they did an especially good job casting the three principals (Chen Reiss wowed us all as Gilda), and the production as a whole had a kind of tight, suspenseful energy to it, even for an audience knowing exactly how it turns out. It’s in some ways a really startling opera: as the program notes reminded us, the censors insisted on changing a fair number of plot points, but it still manages to be really scathing about the corrosive effects of unbridled power on everyone who comes into contact with it.
And speaking of stage and screen, I think I’ve settled on the Opera Person’s Movie Guide as my website design project topic. I’m now catching up on a few relevant DVDs; last night’s, in a neat transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, was the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. I suspect the sentence "You’ll never hear the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore quite the same way again" will find its way into my movie guide.
Hurrah for that list finally going up! Now I just have to figure out whether I want to go and see Tristan und Isolde as a live broadcast, which means it starts at 9:30 a.m. — even I’m not sure about the whole Wagner for Breakfast thing…
Opera Person’s Movie Guide sounds like scads of fun. When I taught music appreciation to unappreciative college freshmen, I’d introduce opera by showing clips from popular movies whose soundtrack or scene had some sort of operatic reference. I always caught them with Pretty Woman. At least the girls anyway…
Oh, yes, Pretty Woman is definitely getting a mention — along with Moonstruck, the other “it’s true love if you take your date to the opera and she cries during Act 3” movie.
And “Wagner for Breakfast” creates the weirdest mental pictures: Liebestod with a side of bacon, eggs, pancakes, and syrup!