Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Marnie: An Opera In Two Acts

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at the Metropolitan Opera, New York
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman   

Nico Muhly, Composer; Nicholas Wright, Librettist; Directed by Michael Mayer; Conductor, Robert Spano. 

The Metropolitan Opera in New York, to its credit, has become a steadfast supporter of new operas, engaging in patronage and risk in the name of the advancement of young composers and the establishment of new repertoire, an obvious investment in the art’s future relevance and endurance. This is certainly how things should be. Last season saw the Met premier of Thomas Adès’ TheExterminating Angel. Several seasons earlier Adès’ The Tempest, based on Shakespeare, saw its debut at the Met. In the greater narrative of contemporary culture, it’s easy to forget that opera began as a popular art form, and that the rock stars of an earlier day were the composers and vocalists of the opera world. It remains a mere cultural stereotype that opera should be regarded as an elite art for intellectuals and people with money. We need think only of the likes of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for example, to find everything a popular art is and should be, an opera whose musical entertainment value and dramatic power brings us to the core of the popular and sublime all at once. [Read more…]

Riot At The Astor Place Opera House

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by Steven Rosenthal

My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read more…]

Elektra, An Opera In One Act

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by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman  

Pity the legendary royal families of ancient Greece. Their stories, so incredibly complex, rarely end well. Blood feuds abound, and seldom are they fully resolved. Richard Strauss’ and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera, Elektra, debuted in Dresden in 1909, bringing Sophocles’ account of the Argive house of Agamemnon to a modern iteration. In ancient Athens, everyone would have known the story of Electra before they’d even seen Sophocles’ telling of it. [Read more…]

The Exterminating Angel: An Opera In Three Acts

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at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Hailing from Salzburg and London, Thomas Adès’ opera The Exterminating Angel made its much anticipated New York debut on October 26th at the Metropolitan Opera. Adès himself conducted, and the opening night audience greeted him, the opera, and its superlative vocalists with considerable enthusiasm. The opera is based on the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel of the same name, featuring an elegant after-opera dinner party attended by upper-crust denizens of Francisco Franco’s Spain. It should be noted that Adès and director Tom Cairns eschew the deeply ironic and grim conclusion found in Luis Buñuel’s film in their opera. Instead they opt for a more ambiguous outcome and fate for their characters. This marks a significant alteration to the filmic source, and it invites alternative interpretations to the original tale. [Read more…]