Running late...

I’m sorry, all, for not posting yesterday, but things were a little nuts. Well, maybe not nuts, but it was one of those days where things just kept running behind. First I overslept, then an afternoon meeting I was required to attend but had no reason to be at ran late, which meant I was cutting it close for the train I was going to take home. I decided to take the El for part of my way to the Metra station, but it took forever for me to catch an El train, so I missed the earlier Metra. The Metra train I did catch ended up being delayed and getting to my station about 15-18 minutes late. I had a meeting last night at German club, which also ran later than expected. I’m glad it’s a new day and things are starting off running on time!

I was going to write yesterday that I was so impressed that Trey’d already gotten his opera review up. This time, however, I’m afraid that this time we don’t differ all that much in how we felt about the show. My take on it...Il Trovatore is considered to be one of the truly great Italian operas (by Verdi, who is the Italian opera composer of probably the entire life of the art form up until now) but really has never done a lot for me. There are plenty of insanely difficult vocal passages for all 6 of the main characters, which I can certainly appreciate. The story is also fantastic – crazy gypsy lady avenging her mother’s death by burning at the stake by stealing some count’s kid and throwing it into the first, but then realizing she threw her own kid into the fire instead (for a story, visit the www.metopera.org and type “Stories of the operas” into the search bar – you’ll get to the Met’s archive of synopses). Even so, I’ve never cared for it much, which may have something to do with the fact that the story seems to progress more slowly than a lot of other operas, at least to me.

So, with that bias being taken into account, I liked this production even less than others I’ve seen. Trey mentioned two of the lead women and how much we did not like them. The soprano’s diction was in fact terrible – had I been her, singing with an Italian conductor who was celebrating his 50th anniversary with the Lyric with this production, I would have been too embarrassed to leave my dressing room. The mezzo who played her sidekick really didn’t have a pleasing tone, and had almost an American accent to her Italian. The 3rd female lead, the crazy gypsy, was almost too much of a mezzo, with not a smooth enough transition between her upper mezzo and lower, more contralto-like, ranges.

That being said, the men were pretty good. The bass who sings the opening of the opera, a very demanding vocal line despite the fact that he’s not technically one of the ‘major’ characters, was really incredible. I’d really like to see him a lot more around here. The baritone, Count di Luna, surprised me as well – I’ve never really liked the guy who sang the role, but he really did a nice job this time around. The tenor was nothing special from an acting standpoint, and even his tone wasn’t the absolute best I’ve ever heard, but his high C kicked some ass!

As for the rest of the production – the set was really neat, but the costumes bothered me. The gypsies didn’t look like gypsies, they looked more like Spanish missionaries. Lighting was nice and very effective. Finally, one of the technical directors had one of the most interesting headshots ever – he looked like he was stoned. I’d love to put his picture up here, but someone would probably find it and I’d get sued for making fun of it. :-)

Ok, enough for now – more tomorrow, I promise!