Much to my surprise, I wanted to create a new "bridge" to friends and fans and even the occasional ones who don't get me. The many singers who have asked advice, here is place to come talk to me.
All my Facebook "friends" and my Operavision followers, I invite you to come tell me when you feel strongly about a performance of an opera... Come tell me about your thoughts, your opinions. Opera is very much alive, and I am always feel more alive around it.
What I ask is politeness. To each other, and to me. We are all in this together. At some point or another..... something I do or something you do adds to the tapestry of the modern cloth of culture. Energy and emotion feeds it.
Come tell me your thoughts on how opera is adapting to current trends. Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
I am someone who is madly in love with this mode of expression. The human voice conveys emotions without even words.... and then....the words clarify. Heaven.
FIRST Question:
What makes Ballet so faithful to its traditions, and why are those that feel opera can be so tampered with? Does Gilda in the back of a trunk instead of the inside of a burlap sack really offend, and if so,
why?
Dear Aprile, thanks for creating this blog. First of all let me tell you how much I absolutely adore your singing. As a young aspiring baritone, I think the way you sing, shape a phrase and communicate the drama and the character are a lesson for everyone in every voice type. All this amazing musicality wrapped in an immeasurably beautiful golden ringing sound make you one of my favourite singers of all time.
ReplyDeleteNow, as for your question. Being in my "in between" years where I've already finished College and am working my way up the ranks, I'm at that point when I have to take all the work I can without harming myself. This means that I don't have a chance when it comes to a stage director. Fortunately, I have worked with some amazing people who while not necessarily keeping the opera in its original setting/background, keep the relationships between characters and social conventions intact. I think this is more important that the setting itself because, in my humble opinion, the drama emerges not so much from a specific background but from the mindset of the protagonists and their inter relationships.
Personally, I don't hold anything against Rigoletto set in Vegas or Traviata with a bare scenery: if the singers are well directed and the relationships between the characters preserved, it can be just as or even more poignant than a period production.
The biggest problem nowadays in my opinion and also in my experience, is that many stage directors try to outsmart the librettist and the composer. Just the other day I read an interview of a stage director pointing out that Violetta's sacrifice is a weak point in the libretto and that it makes no sense she gives in so easy. This reveals, in my opinion, a complete lack of sensibility and awareness to the music. The music for Violetta in act 2 of traviata is everything but peaceful: all the pain and struggle of her decision may not be put down to words, but Verdi made sure they were present in the music.
Many stage directors nowadays coming from spoken theatre aren't trained to hear the subtleties of an orchestration or the way a melody develops, so they never go past the reading of a libretto and fail to understand that in opera you can't simply isolate the text from the music.
I hope this made some sense!
Ricardo