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Spotify's "play similar artists when the album finishes" feature kicked me straight from Krenek string quartets to the Aladdin soundtrack. Curse you normies!
Classical Music Thread
- Thread starter Golly
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"Possente Spirto" (Powerful spirit), a song by which Orpheus persuades (in vain) Charon to let him cross the river Styx, is the centerpiece of Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo. The interleaving of expressive instrumental passages (ritornellos) between sung verses bespeaks an older musical practice, yet the elaborate vocal trills presage bel canto singing 200 years later.
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- Dec 12, 2022
As a child, I would listen to this on the ride to the camping spot with my family. After we had gotten settled, I would head off into the woods with my axe and hatchet and pretend I was on an adventure. This would play in my head as I took swings at the limbs of dead trees and threw my hatchet at their withered stumps. I can't recall having another piece of music ignite my imagination in such a way.
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- Apr 28, 2021
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The first opera by Thomas Adès, Powder Her Face, was universally hailed by critics, who praised Adès for his resourcefulness in using the chamber ensemble. I'm much less enthusiastic about it than most people. For one thing, a story about a slutty socialite who married into nobility is never going to be plumbing pathos (a problem shared by Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole). What's more is that even Adès seems ambivalent about the subject matter: the gossipers who made the Duchess's life hell have more life and more fun than the Duchess herself. In the very last scene Adès attempted to humanize his protagonist, by giving her a monologue in which the Duchess remembers her childhood, but it all came too little, too late.
Adès adapts Shakespeare's The Tempest as his second opera. And like Powder Her Face, it is packed with unusual musical choices: some of them enhances the drama, but many distract the audience away from it. Adès put his expressionist foot forward. After an appropriately stormy overture we are greeted with some equally stormy word-setting, as Prospero recounts to his daughter Miranda how he was banished from his dukedom by his brother. Prospero is understandingly full of rage, so the dissonant music is apposite -- but this Miranda too is positively hysteric; she reminds me more of Mozart's Donna Anna.
The most experimental aspect of Adès's Tempest is the role of Ariel. Adès sets it to an extremely high soprano who needs to do all sorts of vocal acrobatic at the very apex of the human vocal range. If you think Olympia, you are only half-right. The model of Ariel seems to be Gepopo in Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, but while Gepopo only have two insane "arias" to sing, Ariel is there in most scenes. Here is her "Five Fathom Deep" aria -- shouldn't that be "Full Fathom Five"? Who cares if you can't even hear the words!
Equally head-turning -- but to me ultimately successful -- is the casting of tenor Ian Bostridge as Caliban. Who would envision Bostridge, the very embodiment of literary cultivation, as a brute? But then Caliban is more than just a cursing, lust-filled brute; he is a visionary too, as Bostridge so beautifully demonstrates in his "This Isle is Full of Noises" aria.
We would wish lyrical moment like this to last longer. Indeed after so much aural onslaught by Ariel, it is a good moment to pause the drama and be lulled into a dream with Caliban. This brings me to a big problem in this opera: Adès doesn't seems to do enough justice to the word setting. Meredith Oakes’s adaptation of Shakespeare into verses is a pure pleasure to read, and one would hope Adès would make every word register. Unfortunately the words often got lost in the expressionist muck.
The opera is most successful in its more traditional moments, as is in this love duet between Miranda and Ferdinand that closes Act II...
...and the reconciliation at the very end of the opera (when even Ariel sings in a more "human" range). Adès successes in moving hearts by not trying to be a Bad Boy In New Music.
Adès adapts Shakespeare's The Tempest as his second opera. And like Powder Her Face, it is packed with unusual musical choices: some of them enhances the drama, but many distract the audience away from it. Adès put his expressionist foot forward. After an appropriately stormy overture we are greeted with some equally stormy word-setting, as Prospero recounts to his daughter Miranda how he was banished from his dukedom by his brother. Prospero is understandingly full of rage, so the dissonant music is apposite -- but this Miranda too is positively hysteric; she reminds me more of Mozart's Donna Anna.
The most experimental aspect of Adès's Tempest is the role of Ariel. Adès sets it to an extremely high soprano who needs to do all sorts of vocal acrobatic at the very apex of the human vocal range. If you think Olympia, you are only half-right. The model of Ariel seems to be Gepopo in Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, but while Gepopo only have two insane "arias" to sing, Ariel is there in most scenes. Here is her "Five Fathom Deep" aria -- shouldn't that be "Full Fathom Five"? Who cares if you can't even hear the words!
Equally head-turning -- but to me ultimately successful -- is the casting of tenor Ian Bostridge as Caliban. Who would envision Bostridge, the very embodiment of literary cultivation, as a brute? But then Caliban is more than just a cursing, lust-filled brute; he is a visionary too, as Bostridge so beautifully demonstrates in his "This Isle is Full of Noises" aria.
The opera is most successful in its more traditional moments, as is in this love duet between Miranda and Ferdinand that closes Act II...
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