Listeners’ Box
On Key
Regarding Anatole Leikin’s piece on Sergei Prokofiev, “Keying on Prokofiev”[June 26, 2007]: Terrific article. Thanks so much for presenting, once again, such a high and insightful level of analysis!
Thank you for Anatole Leikin’s article. Very informative and well written.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Regarding Kathryn Miller’s review of the San Francisco Opera’s performace of Iphigénie en Tauride, “An Iphigenia for Today” [June 19, 2007]: I would have liked it if Kathryn Miller had addressed the issue of language. (Except for commenting that Bo Skovhus’ “diction could have been clearer,” she barely mentions it.) The music was splendid, and the production had tremendous dramatic impact. But with the exception of Susan Graham, the diction was dreadful. I have rarely heard French sung so mushily. I am bilingual — French was my first language — yet, I could understand very little of what was sung, not even the recitatives. Most of the time I couldn’t even tell that the opera was being sung in French.
Susan Graham always sings French beautifully. Bo Skovhus, the one singer Miller singled out for criticism, was actually intelligible from time to time. The rest of the cast, mostly not. Especially in the case of Gluck, a composer who sought, like Wagner, to integrate words and music into a dramatic whole, it is sad that no better results could have been produced by an organization such as the San Francisco Opera. Thank you for your attention.
I am grateful for Kathryn Miller’s thoughtful review of Iphigénie en Tauride.A few mildly critical remarks: I heard the same performance as she and would not characterize Paul Groves’ voice as “light” by any stretch of the imagination … or ears. It sounded to me (from the balcony circle) like a robust voice, no less warm than she found it, but full, clear, and incisive. True, it is not a heroic tenor, but somehow “light” does not convey for me the full character of this marvelous voice.Secondly, though it took me a few minutes to realize that the chorus was in the pit and not onstage, I don’t agree that it would have been more telling if the singing and the dancing had been done by the same people. As it was, the dancers onstage were free to move their bodies in ways that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for singers singing — the singers, stationary and invisible, were free to function more or less as a powerful Greek chorus. This is altogether fitting as Gluck attempted to get away from Italian filigree and back to the direct declamation of the first operas, which themselves were trying to approach the dramatic impact of Greek drama.
There’s No Music Without the Musicians
Regarding Ben Frandzel’s review of the San Francisco Symphony, “Multilayered Mahler” [June 12, 2007]: Excellent. Detailed and illuminating. A marvelous performance!
Addendum
I’d like to make a small addendum to my review in the last issue of the June 17 San Francisco Symphony concert featuring excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
In the program notes for this week’s SFS performance of Prokofiev’s Cinderella, Michael Steinberg writes that Prokofiev “had had to coarsen the orchestration of Romeo and Juliet at the insistence of the dancers and staff conductors at the Kirov, and he always preferred the more transparent orchestration fo the Romeo and Juliet concert suites.”
I was aware from recordings that the orchestration of the complete ballet differs at points from that of the suites, but I did not know the history of or the authority for those differences, and I did not have the chance to compare full scores to see the extent of the changes or confirm that they were made by Prokofiev and not by the conductor of the recording.
So I omitted mentioning that, although the concert featured excerpts from the ballet and not the suites, it sounded as if the Symphony was using the orchestration of the suites, or possibly the original ballet score before Prokofiev coarsened it. But now that I am more fully informed, I would like to record that this seemed to be the case.