Naps

Two operas, two naps. *Sigh.*

Yesterday I finally watched the Robert Ashley installment of Peter Greenaway's 4 American Composers series. It had been sitting on the counter for almost an entire week, Ashley's face looking at me each time I walked by. "You watched Meredith right away. You watched her tape twice, the first night you rented it. Why aren't you watching me?", he seemed to say. Last night I ran out of excuses, so I settled down with the cats (since Tiny, as we know, has a fondness for contemporary opera) and put the tape in.

Greenaway did four one-hour films in the early '80s about Philip Glass, John Cage, Meredith Monk, and Robert Ashley. Monk's piece was fascinating: the footage of Turtle Dreams especially was beautiful and disturbing and entrancing, completely beyond the pedestrian world of verbal description (as so much of her work is). Ashley's film focused on the making of Perfect Lives, one of his operas for television.

I haven't completely abandoned hope; I can imagine maybe one day getting into this piece. But last night, all it took was was Ashley intoning, "These are stories about the Corn Belt, and the people in it... or ON IT," and I was out. Then I'd open my eyes 10 minutes later and see people with Pat Benatar make-up and Ric Ocasek glasses, and Ashley would come on again and say, "These are stories about the Corn...." and I'd be out again.

*Sigh.*

~~~~~~

And then there was Saturday's Norma. I showed up at the box office in the morning planning to have an operatic marathon day: Forza at noon, Norma at 8. But I wussed out in the end (7 hours of standing while watching opera is too much even for me) and settled on just Norma.

OK, before we even get to the performance, can I just say: how stupid are these druids, that they still don't know that Norma has two kids??? "You sure are looking mighty heavy these days, Norma—better lay off those berries!"

Anyway, we had Catherine Nagelstad as Norma, Irina Mishura as Adalgisa, and Zoran Todorovich as Pollione. They were all fine, I suppose. If you judge them as Nick does, sing or suck, yea or nay, I would have to say they sucked. But I have a hard time unequivocally saying that someone sucked, so I'll just say they were fine. ZORAN SURE IS LOUD!!!.

But somewhere around Oroveso's blathering in Act II, I suddenly got very sleepy... Maybe it was just the cushy chair I claimed during intermission. And then GONG! (oh, what was that? where am i?) GONG! (oh, Norma's ringing the gong, except really it looks like a sheet of ravioli and nothing like a gong) GONG! (and she's not even ringing it, she's just miming, and on the last swing she accidentally nicked it, making this pathetic clinking sound, how lame.) And that's when I got to thinking, you know, it really is a shame that I spent the whole last week listening to Callas and Joanie and Jackie, because honestly, what chance did anyone have against performances like those?

Perhaps the most telling thing about Saturday's performance is that the most memorable part of the evening took place before the curtain went up: (...speaking of which, the curtain got caught on the way down as Norma and Pollione sauntered up towards the pyre, so Catherine and ZORAN!!! were stuck standing there in silence watching the yule logs burn while the audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats...) The pre-performance lecture was delivered by a grandly fabulous Mme Ron G-, who treated us to a, uh, surprising and stunning one-man dramatic reading of the scene where Norma discovers that Pollione's a dog.

But even more bizarre was his insistence on saying AdalGHEEEEEEsa, with a hard G. He said it repeatedly, consistently. Once (whilst he was in the ecstatic throes of his dramatic reading) Adalgisa slipped out, but then he quickly corrected himself and went back to his own special pronunciation. He said it with such conviction that I started to question myself: perhaps there's some rarefied community in which she exists as Adalgheeeeesa? So of course I turned to the great Sieglinde for enlightenment, to which she simply responded, "Did you ask her which galaxy she's from?"

*Sigh.*

Sieglinde gewidmet. You stay away from my steel fence, now.

Comments

[Lisa Hirsch]

Regarding "how stupid are these druids, that they still don't know that Norma has two kids???", very seriously, it's not so hard to conceal a pregnancy, especially if your culture is given to wearing drapery, and especially if, say, you're built more like Jane Eaglen or Christine Brewer than like Catherine Nagelstad. And I'm sure you've seen newspaper stories about teenaged girls giving birth in their high school bathroom or their own bedrooms and their parents and friends never knew they were pregnant.

[Nick]

Oh, nooooo! This means you've seen Meredith Monk's bush?!!? I mean, actually, Join the Club.

[Joshua Kosman]

That curtain's on a roll. It did the same thing twice on opening night of Forza. Someone's messing with the stage marks, or something...

[sfmike]

Your account of the soporific "Norma" along with the foolish "arts lecturer" queen acting out the story is classic. And you're right, the singers are "fine," they don't suck but they're not much better than that, though if you think Zoran was loud on Saturday night you should have heard him wildly oversinging in the previous four performances.

Glad the phony gong woke you up. We all have fingers in our ears backstage while standing next to the REAL gong before rushing onstage. And "Catherine and ZORAN!!! were stuck standing there in silence watching the yule logs burn" really gave me the giggles.

[Lisa Hirsch]

Can someone explain why Nagelstad isn't hitting a real gong? Do they think a soprano can't count well enough, or that it'll be so loud she'll miss her next cue, or....?

Anyway. I'm seeing it Sunday. It's got to be better than the last SFO go-round, which was so miserably sung the only soloist I wanted to hear any more of was Gary Rideout, who sang Flavio.

[Sieglinde]

You stay off my steel fence; I will stay off yours. So did you figure anything else out regarding the AdalGHEEEEEsa character, or is it really just an intergalactic confusion.

In other news, I'm the number one google search for "Filianoti gay". Someone from Italy actually searched for that phrase, and came upon my number one ranked site.

Hmmmm .....

[cedichou]

That was a silly gong. Lisa: she turns her back on the conductor/monitors at the time, so would not see a cue, if that thing could actually produce a sound. The set design and the lighting was dreadful, this was just the cherry at the end. But who cares about gongs when you got thongs!

[Lisa Hirsch]

Sigh.

[Maury D'Annato]

My guess about the gong is that...remember the scene in All About Eve where Eve is carrying the dress to be laundered and Birdie says to Margo "ever heard of a union?" Maybe it's in the percussionists' contract that if there's a gong to be, uh, gung, they'll be the ones to do it.
I'll never quite cleanse my brain of Todorovich's Rodolfo with Gauci in 1999 in SF. The most pedestrian Boheme imaginable.

[Lisa Hirsch]

Gauci's Butterfly at SFO was fantastic; I hate the opera and she managed to leave me a limp little mop by the end of it. Todorovich, aaargh.

I saw Norma today and, well, I will be posting rather sharply about it on my blog. Jeez.

[Lisa Hirsch]

Oh, and in case I forget to mention it: my companion reached exactly the same conclusion as you about the difficulty of concealing the preganancies and the two kids.

[M. C-]

I mean, really. "Norma, you sure look tired these days—aren't you sleeping well?" "Norma, what are all those noises coming from your grove?" "Norma, you sure are hoarding a lot of a food for a single gal!" "Norma, I didn't expect to see you here at a Wiggles concert!"

As for the gong ringing, I would much rather a percussionist do it, to tell you the truth. I heard the most pathetic gong rings at Santa Fe's Turandot this summer. I think on one of Calaf's hits, the gong swung back and struck the mallet again on the rebound. *Sigh*