"That whole third act has got to go..."
Apr. 26th, 2007 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothLast night was Satyagraha at ENO.
Philip Glass has done lots of good work. His obsession with triplets means that if you play me some, I can go 'oh, that's Glass' but also means, with a few exceptions, I can't say which piece.
For me, Satyagraha is not his best opera, because it's too uneven.
Act one is a B, act two is A with the first scene ('Confrontation and Rescue', AKA - by me at least - 'ah-ha-ha') A+, but act three is D at best (the 'ba-ba-ba' section I'm not sure has a proper name) and most of it is E ('here's a scale I like a lot, look, it goes up and down, up and down, up and down...')
So, especially as it was being directed by Improbable, I had to see it, but did I have to see all of it?
And the answer is.. yes.
Improbable have done it again. The puppetry and paper play were drawing admiring comments (not all during the interval, grrr) but the only two problems for me were the casting of his rescuer (she had the weakest voice of any of the female leads) and the fact that the translation of the words (taken from the Bhagavad Gita, the entire thing is sung in Sanskrit for added pretention) wasn't visible from where I was. Fortunately, they're not particularly important.
But overall, much better than the Stuttgart Opera production which I saw about twenty years ago.
Act three is still by far the weakest of the three, but I don't regret not slipping out an hour early. (Despite the moron with the mobile phone that kept going off. It was on silent, but you could still hear the buzzing of the vibrate.)
Three more shows: tonight and next Monday and Tuesday. I wonder if I can get in without a ticket for the second act on Tuesday...
Philip Glass has done lots of good work. His obsession with triplets means that if you play me some, I can go 'oh, that's Glass' but also means, with a few exceptions, I can't say which piece.
For me, Satyagraha is not his best opera, because it's too uneven.
Act one is a B, act two is A with the first scene ('Confrontation and Rescue', AKA - by me at least - 'ah-ha-ha') A+, but act three is D at best (the 'ba-ba-ba' section I'm not sure has a proper name) and most of it is E ('here's a scale I like a lot, look, it goes up and down, up and down, up and down...')
So, especially as it was being directed by Improbable, I had to see it, but did I have to see all of it?
And the answer is.. yes.
Improbable have done it again. The puppetry and paper play were drawing admiring comments (not all during the interval, grrr) but the only two problems for me were the casting of his rescuer (she had the weakest voice of any of the female leads) and the fact that the translation of the words (taken from the Bhagavad Gita, the entire thing is sung in Sanskrit for added pretention) wasn't visible from where I was. Fortunately, they're not particularly important.
But overall, much better than the Stuttgart Opera production which I saw about twenty years ago.
Act three is still by far the weakest of the three, but I don't regret not slipping out an hour early. (Despite the moron with the mobile phone that kept going off. It was on silent, but you could still hear the buzzing of the vibrate.)
Three more shows: tonight and next Monday and Tuesday. I wonder if I can get in without a ticket for the second act on Tuesday...
