Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with intelligent psychological insights. While Joey Becker may lack the complexity of, for example, Madame Bovary (although parallels between the two women undeniably exist), overall she is a very well-developed character. Ultimately the juxtaposition of melodrama and intellect give her work the air of a very sophisticated soap opera...
...reads that infamous line from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly, the story of an American naval officer, Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Pinkerton, who abandons his Japanese wife, Cio-Cio San (Butterfly). The story, based on John Luther Longs novella, has been retold, again and again, in such productions as Broadways Miss Saigon and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Most recently, BSO takes on a fully staged concert version of Puccini's opera at Symphony Hall, with the last and final performance this coming Saturday...
This is particularly difficult in opera, which,by its nature, is sung by experienced, maturevoices. One possible means of counteracting thedifficulty in accurately portraying Butterfly'sage is to choose a voice that is not only able toinduce extreme amounts of pathos, but alsoindividualistic enough to specify the story into abelievable context. That is to say, a voice thatis unique enough in sound to invoke sympathy fromthe audience while also lying somewhere between alyric and a forced soprano in tone...
...most significant aspects of BSO'sperformance was the readily apparent emphasis onorchestration. Unlike most stagings of opera,where the orchestra sits in the pit, the membersof BSO were on stage, only slightly below theelevated set. Most definitely this was because ofSymphony Hallãs architecture, which was built toaccommodate orchestral events, but something stillhas to be said for the decision to perform theopera in that setting. The result was of mixedbenefits. Although the BSO sounded the best that Ihad ever heard them, the orchestra tended, attimes, to drown out the vocalists...
...perhaps the greatest disappointmentwas the inability to clearly discern the wordsbeing sung, which, even if a person doesn'tunderstand a word of Italian is vital to the fullenjoyment of the opera and perhaps even moreimportant in that scenario. Although an equalquality of clarity in comparison to CD studioversions cannot be justly expected, it was shownthat certain voices were more fully comprehendiblethan others. Unfortunately, the lead roles ofButterfly (Paula Delligatti) and Pinkerton (LuisLima) were more adept at singing passages drivenby emotive tendencies than they were at filling inall those passages of recitative (sung speech ordialogue). Recitative was a significant portion ofthe...