Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear
rich...@gmail.com
and media, yes, but they all have a funny way of obscuring talent in
the arts sometimes, don't they ? - but if you take yourself to
Brooklyn this weekend or next, you will find that indeed, Brooklyn's
got plenty of talent in a wonderfully vivid performance of Cavalli's
La Calisto given by Vertical Player Repertory. A bit about the
Company's production is here
Brooklyn, for those who don't know, is kind of the Afghanistan of New
York, although all you need is a subway pass to get there, not a Nobel
Prize. (and folks, it's just a 40 minute trip from Manhattan - just
take the D to the R to Union Street and walk two blocks. Interesting
neighborhood, and the opera is given on the premises of Proteus
Gowanus, a fascinating little alternative bookstore/artshop with a
great library about Brooklyn and the Gowanus Canal, and some wonderful
original edition art and poetry books and lovely jewelry. They all
speak English, really, and I didn't hear the words 'dese' or 'dose'
once. Those Peace Corps workers really earn their pay.)
The work is among Cavalli's greatest operas. Cavalli is the generation
after Monteverdi, and so he is imho at the very height of the phase in
which you had an extraordinarily sophisticated literary tradition and
first-hand love of the classics combined with the most sophisticated
dramaturgy and word settting (some of us might say it's been downhill
since then), and with music that flows in beautifuly melodies, duets
and ensembles almost seemlessly connected by accompanied recit. I have
often thought of Cavalli, when he works with his best collaborators,
as having an almost Shakespearean quality - his characters are all
quite individual and they seem, over a gap of 350 years, as 'modern'
in their dilemmas, as we are (or like to think we are). The guy was
obviously no stranger to jealousy and sexual complication; I'm sure
he'd have been a big fan of Jacqueline Susann (more than Truman
Capote) and he'd have been reading People Magazine in the john if he
were alive today, between episodes of reading from the Loeb Classical
Library with his hand over those crappy translations, and that's what
his best music is like. He combines an incredibly sexy and indeed
sensuous melodic gift - it really is 'hot', here I'm not kidding -
with a very deep and humane sense of individual people caught in
painful and yet absurd situations. He is really in opera the first
'modernist', much more so than the remnants we have of Monteverdi
(over 40 of Cavalli's operas survive). Monteverdi (whom I worship,
have no doubt) seems to have had very much a classicizing and self-
conscious quality to his art (we know that historically), but Cavalli
was Cecila Bartoli to Monteverdi's Janet Baker. Are there any other
enemies I can make today?
All of this is to say that you can go and listen, and stop thinking
"Oh, I can't listen to Baroque music today, I didn't wash my hair and
put on my sports jacket" He is as immediate and communicative (and has
as purdy tunes) as anything you are used to hearing when you turn on
the radio. The 'story' takes as its ground Jupiter's thwarted love for
Calisto after the destruction of the world (so it's really sci-fi). Of
course, Jupiter and Don Giovanni have a lot in common - they brag far
more than they score - and at the end, Calisto gets the normal Greek
consolation prize for women, and is made into a constellation of a
bear - no more nookie; this wouldn't have happened if she'd been a
hunky guy, I promise you. Within this frame, you have all kinds of
plots and stories of thwarted love, hoi polloi vrs the elite (oh,
Cavalli, was definitely a young Republican) and wonderful moments of
gender f--k - Jupiter turns himself into a false Diana, and so you are
listening to the 'real' Diana sing, acting as if she is the false
Diana and is really a guy. It's kind of a REALLY bent version of
Jersey Shore, and if you see Joe Hill, the excellent and sexy Young
Satyr, you'll believe me (even with the tatoo on his shoulder).
This production uses Cavalli's fair score, in his wife's hand, and is
done virtually complete (which you don't hear often) and without so
many of the bowlderizings that seem to have tempted so many, and with,
essentially, Cavalli's original instrumentation: four strings and a
harpsichord (the score indicates two keyboards and a very slightly
different distribution of strings) and the evening of three hours
passes VERY quickly, not least because you are getting the opera as
Cavalli intended it and without lots of emendations and
reorchestrations which always purport to modernize a work but really
end up eviscerating the drama and making it harder to get into.
Basically, you don't need to condescend to great artists, though it
seems a fault many performers can't avoid.
What I found so wonderful about the staging and acting was how sincere
it was. The pitfall with all the Cavalli I know is that he usually
combines very elevated themes with a kind of comic quality - this
really is the source of semi-seria, which Monteverdi is not - and most
productions fail because they don't trust an audience, and give far
too great a weight to the comic elements, reaching into pandering and
slap stick. I don't think Cavalli's sensibility comes easily to us
now, but I am sure that he wasn't writing for the Jackie Gleason Show
(even if he was a young Republican) and the music is generally so
elevated that you HAVE to keep a very careful balance. It is a drama
giocoso, in essence. This, Vertical has realized brilliantly, so that
you get some really funny moments but they are in a context of real
human struggle with our own aspirations, and not a denial of them.
I thought the singing was a fine as anything one could hope for.
Everyone articulated the words so clearly, critical in the music of
this period, and without which you don't have opera, EVER. You also
had some really fine voices here. I would pick out, and it's simply a
matter of taste, Holly Gash, our Calisto, who is now singing all over,
not just in Baroque repertoire, and has a lovely instrument which I
suspect we will soon hear much more in 'mainstream' opera, Marcy
Richardson (Diana) with a bright and focused soprano and a geat
capacity to characterize, Nick Tamagna as Pan (he just won the Nico
Castel competition, and sings everything from Giulio Cesare to Ulrica)
and the bass Nathan Baer, who has a lovely resinous quality to his
bass, but you might very well chose other singers, and be just as
happy and justified. The orchestra was conducted from the keyboard
wonderfully by Jennifer Peterson, who was responsible for the entire
musical evening and really made this sing and dance.
At evening's end, Calisto, to whom Jove has earlier shown the empyrean
heavens, is told by to return to earth and live out her final days as
a bear and with the chorus gathered, they bid each other farewell and
the audience walks out of the courtyard, to see a half-moon rising
over New York. Just how much better than that can it really get?