le grand macabre
belinsky
GMT on BBC Radio 3 (also online) Details here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nt9fy
ben
Mark Stratford
> Ligeti's opera, :Le Grand Macabre to be broadcast this Saturday 18:00
Hi Ben - so did you hear it ? What did you think?
belinsky
> > Ligeti's opera, :Le Grand Macabre to be broadcast this Saturday 18:00
>
> Hi Ben - so did you hear it ? What did you think?
Impressed. Very impressed. I've heard clips before like the coloratura
soprano aria for the chief of secret police (see youtube...) but to
hear the whole thing was impressive. Also very frustrating as the
music seems to fit the action so well like a Tom and Jerry cartoon and
just to hear it is not enough.
Musically it makes its own universe, all the Ligeti techniques - even
the wash of sound that we know and love from Atmospheres - are there.
Moments of real textural/melodic beauty and then shattered by comic
book silliness. Just like life.
I've been a fan of theatre of the absurd since I was a teenager and
this fitted right in with that. Takes you into the dark and shows you
the absurdity of it all. And then a happy ending, the apocalypse
doesn't happen (it would have been some kind of solution...)
Anyone else?
ben
Steven Cranfield
news:6c01b21b-743a-40ca...@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com...
This was a recording of the co-production when it was at La Monnaie, wasn't
it? I saw the same production when it came to ENO recently.
Of the three stagings I've seen I'd say this one (by Fura dels Baus) was by
far and away the best. It certainly eradicated memories of the first
lacklustre ENO staging in the 1980s by Elija Moshinsky. Indeed, I think this
production sold out in London largely on the basis of people's interest in
the Fura's eschatological staging. There are clips of it on YouTube. Though
I doubt these include the final video of a woman taking a dump and pulling
the toilet chain! Entirely in the spirit of the piece though I am not sure
that the ever fussy Ligeti would have approved. It got a nervous laugh from
the audience at the end of the opera, which I suppose is how it should be.
I thought the singing was respectable but Nekrotzar didn't quite have enough
gravitas and the Chief of Police, though game enough, didn't really give you
that frisson that you expect from this fiendishly difficult coloratura part.
And I couldn't make out Piet the Pot's English half the time.
I think it's a pity that recent productions have all been sung in English,
as it sounds and works so much better in the original German, in my view.
Ligeti inititally stipulated that it should be sung in the host country's
language but he seems to have subsequently changed his mind and asked for it
be sung for preference in English. I didn't hear the BBC transmission but I
assume the Brussels production was in English too.
I also think it's a pity that Ligeti revised the final passacaglia to turn
it from triumphant to bleak. Both the available recordings are of the
revised version.
I've always been very fond of this piece but for the first time I found it
dragging, especially during the third scene. And I say this as someone who
also warms to the Theatre of the Absurd, as old-fashioned as that's now
deemed to be. The music seems to be trying too hard to inject madcap energy
into an otherwise thin idea. I found myself reluctantly seeing Roger
Scruton's criticism of the piece, to the effect that the frenetic activity
in the orchestra pit frustratingly forbids any kind of identification with
the characters and the action. While you might say that's precisely the
point Ligeti intended, sustaining that point over an entire evening is
perhaps not realistic. I tend to find myself going back to the 60-minute
'Scenes and Interludes' version that Ligeti created, and which he took out
of circulation when the full length opera started to get more productions
internationally. This was available in vinyl on WERGO in an excellent
recording, which also has the original ending.
Steve Cranfield