Night After Night

Writing, a blog, and a newsletter. By Steve Smith.

Alice in my fantasies.

If you, like me, are feeling more than a little bit jealous after reading glowing accounts of Unsuk Chin’s new opera Alice in Wonderland from Alex Ross, Mark Swed and Alan Rich, then I’ll leave it to you to decide whether to go to this page on the Munich Opera Festival website, where you can stream a short video featuring excerpts from the production. (The link is at the bottom of the page.) It’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, what I see and hear echoes the wonderful things those three keen witnesses reported. On the other, now I’m even more sorry that I couldn’t attend.

Mark notes that Alice will return to the company in November (the 15th, 17th, 20th and 23rd, according to Boosey), and will also be issued on DVD. Both he and Alan suggest that the Los Angeles Opera — which originally commissioned this work, then dumped it during a budget crisis (yet kept the turgid Grendel with its lavish, dysfunctional set) — may yet stage the work.

Meanwhile, over on this page, you can stream excerpts from the other works mentioned in Alex’s essay: Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Gehege and the William Friedkin production of Salome, the latter complete with not-safe-for-work footage from what appears to be a determinedly unsexy Dance of the Seven Veils.

Playlist:

Gaetano Donizetti – Lucie di Lammermoor – Natalie Dessay, Roberto Alagna, Ludovic Tézier, Lyon Opera Chorus and Orchestra/Evelino Pidò (Virgin)

Roger Sessions – Symphonies 6, 7 & 9 – American Composers Orchestra/Dennis Russell Davies (Argo)

Richard Strauss – Complete Songs 2 – Anne Schwanewilms, Roger Vignoles (Hyperion)

Bela Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra – Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel (Deutsche Grammophon download via iTunes)

Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 5 – Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela/Gustavo Dudamel (Deutsche Grammophon, due Aug. 20)

Philip Glass – Music in 12 Parts, Part 7 – Philip Glass Ensemble (Orange Mountain Music download via iTunes)

John Coltrane – Crescent (Impulse!)

Weather Report – Forecast: Tomorrow – CD 1 (Columbia/Legacy)

Björk – Homogenic (Elektra)

Pandit Pran Nath (with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Terry Riley) – Raga Cycle, Palace Theatre, June 1972 (Sri Moonshine)

Philip Glass – Satyagraha – New York City Opera/Christopher Keene (CBS Masterworks)

Steve Smith

8 responses to “Alice in my fantasies.”

  1. walto Avatar
    walto

    Wow, that Chin opera does look fun, doesn’t it?
    Best,
    W

    Reply
  2. Marc Geelhoed Avatar
    Marc Geelhoed

    Maybe not safe for where you work…

    Reply
  3. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    The German reviews of Chin’s “Alice In Wonderland” were pretty dismissive. Further, all of the German reviews addressed, at great length, the extraordinary amount of booing at the premiere.
    I could not find any French reviews (I only performed a very quick search) and I could locate only one British review, in the Guardian. The Guardian review was very, very brief, but largely positive, as I recall.
    I have two musician friends in Munich who attended the premiere performance, and they said that the premiere was quite a disaster. Over half of the parquet audience departed at the “pause” and, at opera’s end, the composer, the stage director and the conductor were roundly booed. Only the singers gained any applause, but the applause was short-lived, as the house cleared immediately, in the midst of the singers’ bows. It was not a happy night in the theater.
    My friends in Munich heard that there was less booing at the two subsequent performances, but they also heard that the applause at the two subsequent performances was pretty feeble, too, at least by Munich standards.
    Reading the German reviews, and then reading the American reviews, makes me wonder whether two entirely different works had been presented and reviewed.
    At least Alan Rich mentioned the booing—but how could he possibly have complained about the food in Munich, one of the world’s great dining cities?—and a couple of other American reviews, too, mentioned the booing.
    However, my Munich friends were dumbfounded at the Rich, Ross and Swed reviews. In jest, they questioned whether those three writers had even genuinely been present, to hear the score, and to see the staging, and to witness the poor reception by audiences and critics alike.
    The opera was hardly considered a triumph in Munich.

    Reply
  4. Alex Ross Avatar
    Alex Ross

    I heard about the booing at the premiere; as I understand it, the gala opening-night audience was expecting something more festive. I heard no booing at the July 7 performance. The applause I would characterize as warm and vigorous if not wildly enthusiastic. There was nothing sufficiently remarkable about the audience reaction one way or another to merit mention in my review. I certainly didn’t say that the opera was a “triumph” with the Munich public. Possibly these Munich friends of Andrew’s read my review a little hastily? The “frenetic applause” I mention at the end happened the following night. For my part, I found some of the reactions of the Austrian and German critics to be unaccountably bizarre. One said, if I remember correctly, that Chin’s music was fit for “an American crime film.” That would be a film I’d pay to see!

    Reply
  5. Alex Ross Avatar
    Alex Ross

    That should “previous night,” not “following night.”

    Reply
  6. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    Having attended the July 4 performance (at which I saw Mark Swed and can personally confirm his presence), I can attest that the audience reaction on the second night was neither exceptionally negative nor incredibly ecstatic. I heard little booing and the drop off rate at intermission was low. There were as many curtain calls that evening as there were for the following nights’ Salome and Roberto Devereux. Interestingly, Unsuk Chin did not appear on stage that night until almost the final curtain call which may have signaled some anxiety on her part following the histrionics of the opening night crowd.
    It would seem to me from my admittedly not vast experiences with contemporary German opera audiences that reporting about booing and excessively negative reactions are a bit of a favorite pastime for the German press. German opera director presents something “shocking” on stage, opening night audience boos, media widely reports negativity, cycle repeats.
    Public arts funding arguments aside, somebody must be getting something out of this pattern or it likely wouldn’t continue. I suspect that all of the excessive negative reaction of the public to Alice is as overstated as virtually 95% of everything everybody writes about opera. (At least the German media is writing something about opera which puts them 100% ahead of the American media.

    Reply
  7. Alex Ross Avatar
    Alex Ross

    Agreed to the above. Almost every opera premiere I’ve attended in Central Europe has been accompanied by booing of one kind or another. Usually it’s a more conservative faction booing a “progressive” production concept, although in some cases you may have progressives booing a conservative concept. When the booing becomes as intense as it did at, say, the Bayreuth “Parsifal” in 2004, it certainly demands to be reported. But, in general, my mission as a visiting critic is not to attempt to divine the attitudes of local listeners or journalists but to describe the opera itself and to give my own honest reaction. And I think “Alice in Wonderland” was a very significant achievement.

    Reply
  8. Henry Holland Avatar
    Henry Holland

    Thank you for the link to the film of the opera. Now I can see why the Los Angeles Opera went with the much safer choice of “Film composer + Director of Lion King do opera based on oldest story in the English language” over this when they had to choose between them due to a budget crunch. NOTE: I wrote “film composer” not as a pejorative against the very talented people who work in that field, but in terms of name recognition. Though, to be fair, Elliot Goldenthal might not want the two Batman movies he did mentioned in publicity!
    Ms. Chin’s opera seems very interesting. I look forward to the DVD for a chance to hear the complete work.
    Please add comments to The Rest Is Noise, Mr. Ross. Please?

    Reply

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