Word: operas
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...title of the opera refers to the transcendent and reconciliatory power of the human voice, whether scared or profane. However, in the ears of critics at the French dailies, the experiment has proved to be less than pitch-perfect. Le Figaro, for example, declared Welcome to the Voice "rock and opera's wedding gone wrong," slipping into "platitudes." Meanwhile, the daily Liberation, criticized the libretto's "naivete...
...delivering milk early mornings with his father in the coal mining and shipbuilding town of Wallsend, England, those themes of class struggle drew him to his character. "There's the Dionysos archetype from Greek mythology, and then there's this communist steelworker who falls in love with the opera - that's the story I'm telling really," he says. "I know what it's like to be an outsider, I know what it's like to be working class and entering the halls of the bourgeois. It's our story really...
...tenets of tragic opera would naturally hold a dire fate for lovers from disparate worlds like Dionysos and Lily. But when the ghosts of Carmen, Butterfly and Norma visit Dionysos in his sleep singing "Opera always kills its lovers," Dionysos brushes off their calls for a proper opero-tragic suicide. "He doesn't want anything to do with that Valhalla tradition celebrating tragedy, pain and death," says Teodori. "And neither do I." It's one of the opera's more effective conceits, and Nieve's arias shine with what one applauding critic called "a true musicologist's reflection...
Directed by Wolfgang Doerner, the production is self-assuredly modern - not by strident atonalism, but rather through the fertile mixing of jazz, opera, rock and electronica, punctuated by moving, ethereal intermezzos by onstage jazz instrumentalists improvising over the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. While Le Monde had little appetite for this musical "soup", the Journal de Dimanche was eager for more. "In the breach between rock-pop and opera, [Nieve] invented something new," said the paper's critic. "Despite its faults, this innovation, far superior to all the musical comedies in the works, deserves to be saluted...
...Being in the box is never really interesting - I like to step outside of it, even at the risk of personal failure." The French critics may not agree, but with its easy juxtaposition of styles and obstinately hopeful narrative, Welcome to the Voice does make for a decidedly modern opera. And judging from the packed houses and endless ovations during its five-night Paris run, it seems the vox populi, at least, has declared it a success...