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LISTENERS' BOX Opera Logistics; The State of Contemporary Music November 23, 2004
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When, oh when, is the production team at SF Opera going to learn to check the view of the stage from seats other than in the orchestra? From our location in the last row of the upper balcony [at a performance of the current production of Wagner's Flying Dutchman], the white searchlight that heralded the arrival of the Dutchman from the back of the stage managed to painfully blind the audience for the duration of his first lengthy aria. This made seeing what was happening on stage an impossiblility. According to friends who were seated in the Grand Tier, the problem of the blinding light tortured people in that location too.
It is too bad that so much of the wonderful Finnish base-baritone's voice was lost on the orchestra level, at least so I gather from various reviews. Up in the gods, where we choose to sit, his voice was strong and melodious and virile. Stage directors need to learn that singers have to be placed near the front of the stage to prevent their sound from being absorbed by the cavernous space above the stage.
____Stephanie Smith
(Our review of the SF Opera Flying Dutchman may be found
here — Ed.)
I have been enjoying SFCV and look forward to reading it every week. I don't respond because the days go by too fast, and before I know it, a week has passed.
I just want to make an observation. I actually feel so lost with music. I heard John Adams say a couple of days ago on a radio program that classical music was a "no-brainer." Is there something wrong with those of us who still love Brahms or Stravinsky or Mozart? A few days earlier on the same program, I heard a rock reviewer from the NY Times comment that rock is the only music that is going anywhere. He had a person on (whose name I wasn't interested in knowing) who said that he plays his music loud to let people know how he feels! To me it is just loud and ugly. I feel as though I am crazy or in a time warp.
Then there were these people who are "clever" and do what they call composing, "sampled music," and use all these gadgets. He was telling us to listen to how clever these players were on this CD because they used every gadget they could find even if it was banging on a garbage can. Are you a creative person if you put together bits of other people's music and call it your own? The objective: anything and everything goes, and it should be heard like anything else. I get very depressed when I think that is this the way music is headed. Does it have to go that way, or is it due to the people who are producing the CDs and the DVDs?
Maybe I've just become an old fuddy-duddy . . . but if this is what young people are taught to listen to, no wonder the symphony orchestras in the US are suffering.
____A Real Music Lover, New York City
(SFCV welcomes reader commentary)
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