Her coat is amaaaaaaaazing, and she wears it very well -- during the backstage interview, she said she took some of her inspiration from Marlene Dietrich, and it shows.
Having not watched Act 2, I can't vouch for its boring-ness, but the staging was extremely plain and minimalist -- I think it's basically just a piano onstage and people standing around. But this performance had Olympia pulling off Hoffman's glasses, which gives her agency in a way him falling down and breaking them does not, plus I got some interestingly ominous vibes off Niklausse-Muse, which is where the short story may come from.
Which Meistersinger did you watch?
I think it was the 2014 staging with Michael Volle as Hans Sachs. I can believe it would go better if delivered as an all-day thing rather than five straight hours on the couch; with more intermissions, I would have had time to refresh my brain.
But yes, that's Wagner for you. I opted not to watch the entirety of the Ring Cycle the week they made those available, though a part of me almost wishes I'd watched Siegfried just for its tenor. They had to get him as an emergency replacement after something happened to their intended male lead, so he was doing all of this with almost no rehearsal time -- but more to the point, said tenor was Jay Hunter Morris. I saw the featurette on that production, where you get to watch him singing heroically in German and then coming offstage and saying in the thickest Texan accent I've heard in years, "man, that's tough!" To which my reaction is basically <3.
I hadn't heard of Dream of the Red Chamber. What went wrong?
I was new enough to opera at the time that mostly all I can say was "it was boring." Visually it was pretty enough, but the music was an undistinguished non-melodic smear the whole way through, which my sister tells me is partly because there were such long stretches with only sopranos -- and while on the one hand an opera that's focused on women is interesting in its own way, aurally, it means you're only hearing one range for extended periods of time (since I guess the composer didn't make much use of contraltos or even mezzo-sopranos). And that contrasts distinctly with L'amour de loin, which basically only has three characters + occasional chorus, but those three are a baritone, a soprano, and a mezzo whose part spends way more time in her lower range than is common for opera (enough so that the singer remarked upon it). So you got way more variety in that one, even though its music was also very non-melodic. (I always want to say "atonal," but I think I'm using that term in a casual rather than technical sense. Either way, it's not something I often enjoy.)
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Having not watched Act 2, I can't vouch for its boring-ness, but the staging was extremely plain and minimalist -- I think it's basically just a piano onstage and people standing around. But this performance had Olympia pulling off Hoffman's glasses, which gives her agency in a way him falling down and breaking them does not, plus I got some interestingly ominous vibes off Niklausse-Muse, which is where the short story may come from.
Which Meistersinger did you watch?
I think it was the 2014 staging with Michael Volle as Hans Sachs. I can believe it would go better if delivered as an all-day thing rather than five straight hours on the couch; with more intermissions, I would have had time to refresh my brain.
But yes, that's Wagner for you. I opted not to watch the entirety of the Ring Cycle the week they made those available, though a part of me almost wishes I'd watched Siegfried just for its tenor. They had to get him as an emergency replacement after something happened to their intended male lead, so he was doing all of this with almost no rehearsal time -- but more to the point, said tenor was Jay Hunter Morris. I saw the featurette on that production, where you get to watch him singing heroically in German and then coming offstage and saying in the thickest Texan accent I've heard in years, "man, that's tough!" To which my reaction is basically <3.
I hadn't heard of Dream of the Red Chamber. What went wrong?
I was new enough to opera at the time that mostly all I can say was "it was boring." Visually it was pretty enough, but the music was an undistinguished non-melodic smear the whole way through, which my sister tells me is partly because there were such long stretches with only sopranos -- and while on the one hand an opera that's focused on women is interesting in its own way, aurally, it means you're only hearing one range for extended periods of time (since I guess the composer didn't make much use of contraltos or even mezzo-sopranos). And that contrasts distinctly with L'amour de loin, which basically only has three characters + occasional chorus, but those three are a baritone, a soprano, and a mezzo whose part spends way more time in her lower range than is common for opera (enough so that the singer remarked upon it). So you got way more variety in that one, even though its music was also very non-melodic. (I always want to say "atonal," but I think I'm using that term in a casual rather than technical sense. Either way, it's not something I often enjoy.)