First Prize: Matilde di Shabran (Rossini)

Who the hell has ever heard of Matilde di Shabran?  Sounds like a desert, I guess, like a story about thin dogs and mud huts and ill people searching for water.

Rossini slipped this one in after Donna del Lago and then moved on to Semiramide.  They played it a few times in the big cities, and then it disappeared for a century and a half.  Just four productions since 1990 – three of them at the Rossini Festival.

Some in the audience had a problem with it, I guess, because right after the opening in Rome, the supporters and detractors duked it out in the street.

I would have fought viciously on the side that enjoyed the performance.

At the Lyric, I couldn’t even stir up a shoving match after Carmen, back in February.  Not the style any more, even in Chicago.

Here you have more than 3½ hours of iconic Rossini tunes: lively, complicated, multiple songs going on at once.  You have an early quartet of tenors and basses; you have a sextet in the second act.  The write-up says there’s an octet in the first act, but I watched that part again and only seven people were singing.

It’s like an extended concert of exciting music – some of this has you jumping out of your chair, and later, overcome with sorrow that Gioaco is not still out there whipping up more for us to listen to.

At the Rossini Festival, all three shows had Juan Diego Florez as the angry combative loner with a castle.  He’s great, but you could tell that he appreciated the Rossinian humor of the thing, even while he glowered through his Fu Manchu and his fierce black fighting clothes.

It’s not obvious why half the 1821 audience would dislike it, but here are some guesses.

One is, this plot is just above juvenile.  This doesn’t normally knock out an opera, of course, but I could see their point, if that was it.

Here’s the plot:  The mean guy hates women; won’t have them around, no use for them, rather be out battling his enemies than look at a female.  Absolutely no women.  Got it.  Next, a lovely and tenacious young woman must stay at his castle for a while.  Enough – you know how it ends.  Yup.

Anyway, they had this Russian named Olga Peretyatko doing the soprano work, and she sings like a spring robin on uppers.  Shockingly good.  Also stunningly good-looking.  After the 2012 Rossini Festival, where they filmed the one I watched, she married the orchestra’s conductor. 

Maybe less important in 1821, but the second reason to back off, to go make more popcorn, was that this performance had the single most ugly young man pants role mezzo that has ever stepped onto a stage. 

Good lord.  The poor woman started out OK (and sang beautifully), probably looking like Christina Ricci, but then she had a wide messy mustache and a huge scraggly beard.  Oh man.  That’s a rough looking dude, and actually it’s a woman.  After the Rossini Festival, even the orchestra’s double-bass guy wouldn’t have married her.

So with Matilde, if you can find a recording, you could easily just listen to the music while you exercise, or put together another jigsaw puzzle.  Fabulous.

Contributing Reporter:  X. Iqbiza (Malaga)

Second Prize: La Sonnambula (Bellini)

OK, the one I just watched was a free video on OperaVision, easy to use and supported by the European Union.

They have a mostly blue/purple set and costumes, and not a lot of action takes place.  But what they do have is constant Bellini bel canto extended phrasing and exceptional melodies.

This New Zealand soprano’s voice and skill are up there with the Russian OIga’s (in Matilde), with both an incredible range and flexibility, and I guess it’s good that she has a prominent vibrato in every single note she sings, no matter how short.  Where do these people hide?  Wow.  Stacey Alleaume.

A Uruguayan tenor was the main man – excellent also.  But who teaches singing in Uruguay?

Big role for the Düsseldorf chorus, here, because they kept them on stage for nearly every scene.  Oddly, with feathery big hats, mismatched costume themes, happy swaying dancing even at the sad parts – not sure what they were trying for, there.

But don’t worry; this music is so good you could easily just listen to the sound track alone while you put another coat of stain on the barn, or try to fix your plumbing.

By the way, this performance in no way reminded me of the Met’s video with Natalie Dessay.  There, the cast was seen preparing a stage show (the unpopular play-within-a-play style), and Natalie was talking on a cell phone. 

I don’t know how much of that New York dialog matched up with what Bellini and Romani had in mind – probably all of it – but it seemed to me like a different opera.  This newer one is way better.

Contributing Reporters: Soprani Sfogati (Milan)

Third Prize: Boris Gudonov (Mussorgsky)

So the sad thing here is that this title and this composer may suggest to you that this is dense, unhappy, and Russian, and that is actually all true, but it is not nearly as difficult to watch as that Russian thing about the Nose.

There was an actual Tsar named Boris G, and he had a hard time of it.  He descended from the Tartars, not standard Russians, and he might have killed the rightful heir to the Tsar throne, and so he felt guilty and undeserving throughout his reign.  History records him as a good tsar, but sadly a Tartar, not a star tsar.

The Russians are sad.  Their economy has slowly collapsed, and they are all unattractive people, with sad faces and stringy hair and patchy clothing.

They pick Boris as the new Tsar when the time comes, but that does not make him happy, so he is sad, too.  And, his hair looks like a damn bird’s nest.

There’s a crazy guy in a bedsheet who keeps hopping and rolling around in most scenes, and that is kind of sad also, and uncomfortable.

A young monk abandons his duty to take over for the sad aged other monk – the young guy heads toward Lithuania, but they don’t say why.  He might be the leader of the upstarts who wants to dump Boris, and maybe they should if Boris killed the heir.  He might himself be the heir, not dead. I could not tell for sure.

Boris’ kids are OK; his son is a little pants role gal who’s chipper no matter how bad the potato crop is this year.  Feodor the 2nd.

There is constant music, with evident patterns in it, but it is not much fun to listen to.  More sadness.

As the rebels approach from Lithuania, Boris needs to rally the troops, but he announces that he will die instead.  He hands off the entire Russian empire, sad as it is, to his bouncy little son (passing over his daughter, who seemed smarter to me, and with a cooler name: Xenia).

Sad music.  Sad images.  Boris has a sad dream, tells his son that running Russia is going to be tough for a century or two, and dies.

But for young Feodor the 2nd, the economic challenges don’t matter, because in Wikipedia it says that 30 days later, the rebels from Lithuania strangled the son and mother, and took over.  Very sad.  Xenia went off to become a nun – probably a sad one.

This music, you could play for yourself if you felt that your self-confidence and general world outlook were getting a little too positive, and you wanted to slow things down a touch.  Or you could play this music at someone you don’t care for.

Contributing Reporter: Stagnantum Cryptch (Nipz)

No Prize: Der Rosenkavalier (R. Strauss)

Listen, I should get a prize for trying to watch yet a fourth Strauss opera.  I couldn’t tolerate more than 10 minutes of this stuff.  I was in a hotel, so I clicked it off and went back to Seinfeld reruns.

Why is this popular?  Maybe there’s a book or a class, that can explain why people would expend so many dollars and hours to see this kind of performance.

It’s not an opera, as I would define it.  It’s an opera like a grade-schooler would define it: they put on a play, and instead of saying their lines, they sing them.  That’s it.

The story looks kind of funny!  The word and phrase selection is said to reflect a variety of places and social statuses in old Germany.  I would like to read the story, or watch the stage play!

But don’t put seemingly random pitches and durations on all your syllables.  Just do the play.

Right, so they paid Renee Fleming enough to work through this version wearing a nightie.  Then, on top of her, they had the otherwise respectable Susan Graham, rolling and fondling and making suggestive comments. 

Girls: Strauss had some kind of problem; we know this already, so just stay away.  There was no practical reason in 1910 to script a pants role.  Strauss was a bit of a kink.

Tell you what, Susan.  If it’s getting that sparse for you, I’ll spot you for dinner at the Kwik Stop & Deli (and maybe write up a little story about our encounter).  She sings Berlioz and Debussy in French; she’s goddess-like in Les Troyens.  What’s this sexy stuff with Renee?  Shame.

So what could you do with this kind of music?  Well, I went to a psychologist once, whose office building had little one-off off-white white-noise noise-makers on the floor, outside every closed door.  You need some kind of sound, like clean fill, to make sure no one can overhear sordid family secrets; this will work. 

Contributing Reporter: Leeres Tremolo (Dresden)