I had a more positive experience, but then I am one of Cura's earliest and
nosiest supporters. I do agree with some of Bob's opposition to "visuals,"
and, at any rate, I always find his reviews of interest.
Hearing Is Believing
By Robert Commanday, www.sfcv.org
What a difference a verb can make, the distinction for example,
between hearing music and listening to it. People say, offhandedly,
that they went to see a concert, the Symphony, when presumably they
didn't mean they went to look at it but rather that they attended
it. Fair enough, usage "corrects" the usual meaning of a word or
gives it an alternate meaning.
But, increasingly in this visually-oriented era, many people do go
to look at the Symphony or this or that recitalist. A few, I notice,
even take along field glasses and scan the performer(s) close-up.
Is it the performer or the performing they're watching? Both I suppose,
the vigor or intensity or grace involved in the playing as well as
the facial expressions. We can set aside the question of how close
one needs to focus on that and whether producing and focusing the
binoculars doesn't distract the presumed listener from the music.
The nature of the visual experience at a musical performance is still
a matter of interest.
Quite likely, the sight of a violinist's bowing, a singer's breathing
and gesturing, a pianist's back/arm/hand movements corresponding to
the music's rhythm and character acts as a suggestive guide. More
significant than dance choreography, the musicians' actions are
actually leading, controlling the music itself, a connection in real
time. I'm not so sure about facial expressions into which viewers
can read more meaning than is meaningful, expressions which performers
can feign simply to give an impression that should be evident in the
music being produced, the humor, the sorrow, the intensity, whatever.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, no mean actress in recital herself and
always prone to underline her interpretations, as a teacher, was
highly critical of young singers who, while singing, shook their
heads slowly to denote "seriousness," "sincerity." In her master
classes, she insisted that the head remain steady. She was right to
catch young singers up on this. They were imitating TV entertainers,
whose metier and style has little to do with the art of the art song
recital.
Yet audience members do look for visual clues, even though there's
always the possibility of being misled, of reading meaning into
grimace or grin that might really signify something as irrelevant
as gas pain, or annoyance at a missed note, at an errant colleague,
at coughing in the hall. Further, being in a form of show business
after all, performers may play up the visual thing to help "sell"
the "product." It's often hard to tell in the performance of as
admired and skilled a singer as Thomas Hampson how much in the visual
and vocal presentation is his ingenuous, spontaneous, or even considered
response to the music and text and how much is acting, replaying a
much-practiced rendition.
It's important to understand the difference or to be aware that there
is a difference. Sometimes, it is enough to be openly receptive and
let one's own responses be convinced by the musical performance, not
by the singer's gestures and expressions. Often, I will look away
and not see the performance, relying on the listening to convince
me. Definitely I do that when the performer is showboating. I don't
want that to prejudice me against what might be a musically fine
experience.
In the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th, solo
pianists and to a somewhat lesser degree, violinists, indulged in
extravagant playing styles that became part of their reputations,
that amplified psychologically the real dazzling feats of virtuosity.
By the 1940s, the slam-bang, knock-himself-out kind of keyboard
punisher (I can't think of women pianists who did this) became a
caricature, identified in movies as The Classical Virtuoso.
The fad ceased as recordings became more important and artists accepted
the reality that flinging oneself about, singing along, and all the
rest of it, threw them out of physical balance and centering, the
equipoise on which the most efficient and best controlled performance
depends. I recall Rudolf Serkin, who in 1946 was a most physically
hyperactive performer, pounding the pedal with his foot, audibly
singing, and in general letting it all out. (This was in a performance
of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with an orchestra in which I happened
to be playing, dumbfounded at his energy and intensity). At some
point not long after, Serkin learned to control that, and of course
his greatness never stopped ascending thereafter, with no loss to
the listening/viewing public.
Conductors, aware that the audience's eyes are fixed on them, do
develop gestural devices for the benefit of the viewers, not of the
players or the conduct of the performance. Pointing dramatically to
the percussion or brass, or to heaven at the very instant of their
entrance, is more often a signal to the audience than to the musicians.
They are properly helped by a cue when it occurs a fraction of a
second before the entrance. But people do enjoy watching the conductor
and can derive from that some navigational help through the music,
being visually directed to a change in intensity or source of the
sound..
That's fine. The live experience of a concert entails and invites
perception of the entire drama, visual as well as auditory. It's a
question of degree after all, your choice whether you allow the visual
experience to overwhelm or distract from the aural, if you are not
willing to rely on your ears to hear music.
Sunday night's TV performance for PBS of the Italian production, La
Traviata in Paris was as good a demonstration as any of the treachery
of the visual. Any reasonably opera-schooled viewer who was really
attending with his ears had to recognize in short order the mediocrity
of the effort. The Violetta, a Russian lyric soprano we have not
heard out here, Eteri Gvazava, was attractive, sang appealingly with
an even, smooth voice, and was even a fair actress. Jose Cura, the
Argentine tenor, singing in a rough, inflexible, surely not lyric
voice, was an adequate Alfredo, no more. The veteran Rolando Panerai
was a disaster as Giorgio Germont, barking and shouting everything,
even "Di Provenza il mar," unmusical and thoroughly unsympathetic,
even in the death scene.
The comprimario singers were poor, even by the standards of provincial
opera. The fact that the RAI orchestra and Zubin Mehta's conducting
were the only consistently rewarding musical element does not let
Mehta off the hook. He was the musical director. He accepted this
casting and is responsibility for the musical poverty of the production.
Clearly, producer Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and director Andrea Andermann,
thought viewers would be so bedazzled by the cinematography and the
shooting On Location!!, in Paris at the luxurious Hotel Boisgelin,
in Marie Antoinette's hamlet at Versailles, at the Petit Palais and
on the Nle de St. Louis, that they wouldn't notice that it was
vocally ordinary, even substandard. Never mind that some of the
settings were effective. They were overruled by the silliness of
many scenes: Violetta and Alfredo meeting like children at play,
under the banquet table in Scene 2, for a covert kiss; Germont chasing
the distraught Violetta all over the gardens of Versailles, shouting
at her the whole while; Alfredo chasing her through the marble
corridors of the Petit Palais. It was just dumb, only distracting
from an already bankrupt experience.
Opera has always had to face its age-old dilemma-- which comes first,
the music or the words? In our era, it's the opera or the spectacle.
For any conscientious lover of opera and of music, the ears have it.
[log in to unmask], SF
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