This is the musicAeterna version of Verdi's Requiem performed in The Shed. I seldom review these productions, apart from perhaps a quick yea of delight or nay, mostly because I've a coterie of seasoned opera/concert reviewers around me that do a far more thorough job of this than I have time for. But this has provoked my ire, to an extent that I must let rip. Quickly, the conceit here is the audience is captive to an endless-streaming video by Jonas Mekas, broadcast in duplicate upon the the white screens above the Chorus. Beginning with scenes of California wildfires, Tsunamis, etc., the video strangely moves on to endless pictures of flowers and and nature, something you might get in a Spring seed catalogue, shot in a strange shaky hand, something like what early cell-phone videos were like. Ah, so you think - ecological relevance of the Mass, the coming Dies Irae, etc. Ok. These are interrupted with awkward translations of the Kyrie, etc. which should be entirely unnecessary. Vapid, banal, obvious, but well, nothing to get excited about. What comes next? Images of dying Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, their last desecration used by this 'artist' to somehow deepen his concept? (Mekas may not have made the leap that their last scrap of identity is perhaps not best honored by a Mass, however splendid.). Not enough: starving children in Eritrea, victims of vicious violence in street demonstrations, heaps of skulls in Cambodia. And now back to twenty minutes of flower catalogue. As a production, musically, there's lots good here. Clementine Margaine (Last season's splendid Carmen at the Met) was absolutely compelling - one section of her part was marred by a strange electric snap that went through her mike. (yea this thing is miked, opera fans...) The bass section of this chorus was something memorable, a thing of stirring beauty. A shame that the degrading rubbish being pumped out above should distract from the remarkable artistry of the rest of the soloists, including Zarina Abaeva, etc.
This is the musicAeterna version of Verdi's Requiem performed in The Shed. I seldom review these productions, apart from perhaps a quick yea of delight or nay, mostly because I've a coterie of seasoned opera/concert reviewers around me that do a far more thorough job of this than I have time for. But this has provoked my ire, to an extent that I must let rip. Quickly, the conceit here is the audience is captive to an endless-streaming video by Jonas Mekas, broadcast in duplicate upon the the white screens above the Chorus. Beginning with scenes of California wildfires, Tsunamis, etc., the video strangely moves on to endless pictures of flowers and and nature, something you might get in a Spring seed catalogue, shot in a strange shaky hand, something like what early cell-phone videos were like. Ah, so you think - ecological relevance of the Mass, the coming Dies Irae, etc. Ok. These are interrupted with awkward translations of the Kyrie, etc. which should be entirely unnecessary. Vapid, banal, obvious, but well, nothing to get excited about. What comes next? Images of dying Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, their last desecration used by this 'artist' to somehow deepen his concept? (Mekas may not have made the leap that their last scrap of identity is perhaps not best honored by a Mass, however splendid.). Not enough: starving children in Eritrea, victims of vicious violence in street demonstrations, heaps of skulls in Cambodia. And now back to twenty minutes of flower catalogue. As a production, musically, there's lots good here. Clementine Margaine (Last season's splendid Carmen at the Met) was absolutely compelling - one section of her part was marred by a strange electric snap that went through her mike. (yea this thing is miked, opera fans...) The bass section of this chorus was something memorable, a thing of stirring beauty. A shame that the degrading rubbish being pumped out above should distract from the remarkable artistry of the rest of the soloists, including Zarina Abaeva, etc.
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