Two Fridays, two performances. First the Knoxville Symphony and second, the Knoxville Opera. I preferred the former to the latter, but perhaps it is time to deconstruct.
Last spring I asked myself if I seek out performances to attend simply to avoid being home alone too often in the evenings. Perhaps I do. But even when I was not alone, George and I struggled with this same problem, finding the balance between wanting nothing more than a quiet evening home alone, and loving art and music and wanting to hear more and more. This fall, I added another question, namely how many of my choices are simply habit and do I need to both push myself and let go?
And so I have made a point of branching out. I have purchased a subscription to a theater series, which I have so far enjoyed. I enjoyed performances before, but I was not so likely to push myself to go out, and even tired, I am a better person for simply going. I went to hear Candide twice, and loved it, even though I went into it knowing that I really think Candide is Bernstein's least appealing work, pushing myself out of my own far too serious shell. I have subscribed to Knoxville's Marble City Opera, a company that focuses on smaller, more intimate works, often contemporary, often in non-traditional venues. I have thoroughly enjoyed the performances I have attended in the past, but again, without pushing myself I won't go out. I need to go out and I need to work on my own biases and barriers. This busyness, this going out more, doesn't directly address the first question, but I am sure that all of this struggle with too much vs too little will sort itself out in time.
When a friend pointed out Knoxville Opera's comic double-billing of Mozart's The Impressario and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, I bought a ticket. I knew it would be a push for me, for as much as I have loved many opera performances, I have also struggled with equally many, prompting those same questions about expectation and familiarity. I know that I struggled with Knoxville Opera's performance of Aida last May. I know I struggled with whether or not I was biased by some unrealistic sense of expectation, wishing to recreate the magic of my first opera performance, which was also Aida. At the time I hopefully decided to blame most of my disappointment on the venue, the Knoxville Civic Auditorium, which has horrible acoustics, so bad that, in my opinion the place is only suited to loud over-amped popular extravaganzas where the performance is in fact not as much about the music as it is about shared memory and expectation. To my ears, that venue sucks the soul out of the music and leaves nothing but a barren shell.
I was therefore interested in hearing the Knoxville Opera in a more amenable venue, and the Tennessee Theater fit the bill. I have to confess to a falsehood however. I told acquaintances that it was my first Knoxville Opera performance, which it was obviously not, reference Aida mentioned above. At that moment I had forgotten Aida, which I only attended because my son-in-law was singing in the chorus. Nearly six months later I remember the Knoxville Choral Society's portion of the performance more than I remember the rest of the opera. Sad state that.
I didn't actually remember having attended Aida until after the intermission, during the performance of Gianni Schicchi, which is much more traditionally operatic than was the performance of The Impressario. I actually thought The Impressario was well done. The work itself was intended as a parody, and the musical score is short, I would guess less than 30 minutes. It is also my understanding that the spoken portion and the setting is commonly reimagined to suit the audience and the locale, which I think is important. In that sense the production was good: a self-mocking reflection on a Knoxville opera company attempting to put on a production of Gianni Schicchi, filled with inside jokes and vaudevillian humor. The Mozart meets Gilbert and Sullivan mash-up worked, and the audience, at least the audience around me, enjoyed that sense of being on the inside of the joke. It wasn't opera, as I think of opera, but it was fun, light-hearted musical-theater, and a perfect example of knowing and connecting with one's audience, or at least a part of one's audience, as attendance seemed light.
I was less thrilled with the second half of the program. And here I don't know if my head just gets in the way. The acting was fine, humorous and entertaining even, and the singing was fine. Much of my enjoyment of opera revolves around the way sets and acting and music all intertwine. The production itself was smooth, quickly moving and thoroughly entertaining. And yet I was unmoved. I felt that there was perhaps too much emphasis on comic relief at the expense of the story. Perhaps I just don't understand the story. Perhaps all those memories of being called too serious are true, and I don't "get" comedy. But what I found lacking was balance. My understanding of the music itself is that there is a balance, a contrasting play of themes between the comic and the solemn, a contrast that emphasizes the comic aspects of the story over the tragic, and it is this very contrast that elevates the comedy. This contrasting balancing of themes centers around Lauretta's solo O Mio Babbino Caro, which provides this perfect moment of lyricism and beauty, after which the give and take, the jockeying between comedy and tragedy resumes. Except that I felt the performance was unbalanced, geared more to slapstick, with the more solemn moments minimized, and I felt that Lauretta's solo, although beautiful, did not provide that moment of perfect repose that elevates the emotions; that it somehow remained disconnected from what came before and after. In short I was disappointed. But I don't know if my disappointment was reasonable or unreasonable.
Perhaps it is simply a question of exposure. Perhaps I simply need to attend more opera performances. I'm not sure that I will however.
I will continue going to the symphony. I thoroughly enjoyed the previous Friday's symphony performance which revolved around Tchaikovsky's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, in a rather interesting program which opened with Beethoven's Egmont Overture, which was beautifully performed. I continue to think thet the KSO's performances of Beethoven have been consistently improving. But what most intrigued me was Arem Demirjian's comments prior to the concert. He discussed the Beethoven piece, explaining the story and illustrating how it played out in the work. I think this was a good approach, even though we often neglect explanations of Beethoven, assuming familiarity. He pointed out that Beethoven was a champion of political freedom and talked about how this played out in the concert choices for the evening, but I do not recall that he said much about the Tchaikovsky. Perhaps he should have said more, for although for although themes of fighting oppression, supporting the underdog, and freedom certainly apply to Shostakovich's fifth symphony, and were well explained by Demirjian, I don't recall him saying much about the Violin Concerto. But of course it fit in the same theme. Perhaps I missed it.
The performance was stunning. Robyn Bollinger gave an incredible performance of a difficult work, and neither soloist or orchestra gave in to the excess romanticism, which occasionally mars a performance. Aside from the technical brilliance of this work, I think it might have helped to remind audiences that it was written at a difficult time in Tchaikovsky's life; that he was struggling with a difficult marriage and a love that could never be; and that this work was not at all well received at the time — even though today it is one of the classics. Illustrating this may have been helpful. Or it may not have mattered given the thunderous applause at the end of the first movement, which tends to happen when this work is performed, but which did seem a bit protracted to me. But I also remember listening to some girls after the concert, talking about how the talks affected their understanding of the music, and how entranced they were, how they lost track of time, except for the Tchaikovsky, which they felt went on and on. I wonder about education and music, about what we expect and what we hear, and although I have never been a fan of talks before performances, Demirjian, who does this very well, is changing my mind, almost as if he is letting the listener in on a secret, connecting them to the performance they are about to hear.
This was particularly well done with the Shostakovich. Certainly what he said about the work, the musical examples that were used to highlight meanings and themes, all meshed with the performance we heard, and it was enlightening, even for these jaded ears. But then I sometimes think every performance I have hard of the 5th symphony has been different: sometimes it is beautifully performed but bland, sometimes emphasizing the surface veneer of nationalism, the part that I assume Stalin heard and approved, and yet at other times emphasizing the disharmony. I attended one performance that was so emotionally overwrought, so harrowing, that I felt completely drained after the performance, like a husk, with all humanity beaten out. But I don't believe that was Shostakovich's goal.
The Knoxville Symphony's performance was somewhere in between these extremes. I think Demirjian's exploration of the music for the audience, and the performance itself captured the dichotomy of this work beautifully, the strong undercurrent of bitterness and pain lurking beneath a surface gloss of normalcy and expectation. One could hear the hints of brash satire and wicked humor that are often contrasted in later symphonies, the grief tempered by hope, the sense that the spirit remains, subdued but unabashed. It was a bold and beautiful performance, and I suppose my sentiments align with those two young ladies — "it went by so fast….I was entranced….I want to hear more.."