The capper to the KC Lyric Opera’s 2023-2024 season is the home-grown project, Journey to Valhalla. This KCLO exclusive is a compendium or Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung adapted by music director Michael Christie. In this arrangement each of the four individual Ring operas distilled down to one act apiece, each act running around 45 minutes.

I have always loved the idea of Karlheinz Stockhausen. That there was such a person. Someone who challenged assumptions about what 20th Century music could be, and masterminded intriguing concepts of performance and presentation.

The grind of listening to Stockhausen’s music or watching his performances is another thing altogether, and that thing is something I usually do not love.

In this season’s KC Lyric Opera catalog, there was an entry that looked unique and interesting – a youth opera called The Haberdasher Prince. I like the fact that the Lyric puts on special programs for young people and in a setting that is casual and unintimidating.

With a son that desperately needed to get away from his maddeningly persistent gaming, the family set out for a Saturday at the opera!

I just installed a TV in my upstairs man cave lair today. And what better way to break it in than to frantically search for my user/pass combo to gain entry into The Metropolitan Opera’s streaming app and watch some real he-man programming: Jazz composer Terence Blanchard’s boxing themed opus – his second opera, Champion.

After chronicling many operas on streaming and other media through the Covid era, I finally finally go to the opera for real to see the KC Lyric Opera‘s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Kauffman Center in downtown Kansas City. For my sacrifices in the service of high musical culture, I actually got awarded a press pass to attend and write about it. We’re getting posh here.

Today I clicked on the little heart that bought up my wish list on The Metropolitan Opera’s streaming app, and decided it was time to experience the John Adams opera Nixon in China.

When I became aware of this work many years ago, my first thought was: What kind of person would pay to sit through an opera about Richard Nixon?

As we settle into the holiday season, I thought it would be nice to immerse myself into the Kevin Puts / Mark Campbell opera Silent Night. The opera is based on Christian Carion’s screenplay for the 2005 French war film Joyeux Noël, and concerns an actual incident that occurred in the first year of World War I where soldiers of the opposing sides of the conflict declared a temporary truce in order to celebrate Christmas together.

Up in the wee hours this morning to screen a new-ish opera that sounded intriguing. From the mind of Croatian composer Ivo Josipović comes Lennon – a surrealist fantasy about 20th Century pop icon John Lennon that focuses on his post-assassination travel through purgatory.

These wacky 21st Century composers. They’re always up to some devilment or other!

Checking out The Metropolitan Opera’s east-west crossover opera, The First Emperor. Composed by Tan Dun, the film composer for landmark Chinese films of historical fantasy such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, those special effects-laden martial arts epics featuring actors jumping 12 feet in the air to kick someone in the face before disappearing over rooftops with long ribbons flying artfully after. 

As a big fan of Kevin Puts’ symphonic works I was looking forward to seeing this presentation from The Met of his 2022 opera, The Hours. The compositional mind of Puts can’t fail to please, so I’m happy to see me some streaming opera while not risking subjugation to some modern barbarian of a composer laying out rope after rope of barbed wire tone rows which will make a ruin of my patience and nervous system.

On the enthusiastic instruction of my viola teacher, I checked in with the Psappha Ensemble’s video of the UK premiere of Penelope by Sarah Kirkland Snider (music) and Ellen McLaughlin (lyrics). My viola guru wanted me to see this piece to give me a clue about others like myself who are composing in crossover pop/classical forms. 

Retro time at The Met again! This time it’s sistas going wild during France’s reign of terror in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. I have to say that for me, dramatic properties built around religious figures are usually box office poison. But this production defied my expectations.

Looking in on The Metropolitan Opera’s Marnie today. With music by Nico Muhly and libretto by Nicholas Wright,  the production is from 2018, following on the heels of the world premiere of the work in 2017 by the English National Opera. It is Muhly’s second opera, his first effort being 2005’s ‘Two Boys’.

It was San Francisco about 25 years ago. I was in town for the weekend and had a line on tickets for the San Francisco Opera’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that a friend of a friend was trying to find a buyer for at the 11th hour. It was to be the high point of a fine weekend escape from Los Angeles.

Another one from the archives – more Puccini, this time from 2009. A light remembrance of a night at the State Opera House in Budapest.

Puccini’s Turandot, staged by the Hungarian State Opera at one of the world’s most beautiful venues for opera. Yes. With seats in the 11th row going for approximately $60 each, it was too good to pass up.

Today I spent the afternoon with The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Brett Dean’s Hamlet cued up on their streaming app. Three hours of big big big big opera based on the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays in a contemporary setting. 

This cultural excursion did not go well. I’ll try to tell you why with as much brevity as I can muster because I want to spend as little time as possible reliving it. Here are the lowlights…

Going retro this afternoon with The Metropolitan Opera’s 1982 Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a two-hour plus affair taken from Walter Scott’s novel of madness and tragedy among the Scottish nobility. I have it on good authority that this is one of the finest renditions of this opera documented on video, mostly because of a legendary performance by Joan Sutherland who was said to have made this role her own.

Last minute tickets for Tosca at the Prague State Opera. I’m so there. 

I loved my experience seeing Madama Butterfly in Budapest, so I couldn’t resist going to the box office when I heard there were a few good seats left. Didn’t get the catbird seat this time but got one on the main floor with good sight lines.

After becoming fed up with scrounging around YouTube looking for modern operas, I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to The Metropolitan Opera’s TV app. Now I have lots of crazy excruciating performances to thrill to and pen saucy observations about. And the first on my list is one that I’ve been wanting to see for some time now, as it’s atop the lists of many critics’ “greatest 21st century operas” lists: Thomas Adés’ The Exterminating Angel. 

In this nutty, overcrowded world, do you ever have an urge for real solitude? Somewhere so remote the world will leave you in peace?

I have found such a place. It’s right here in my studio. Listening to The Bell Tower, the 1957 one-act opera by Austrian composer Ernst Krenek. While experiencing it I was overcome with the realization that I was the only person on earth listening to it.

Think of it. THE… ONLY… PERSON… ON… EARTH!

If you know anything about the work of Dmitri Shostakovich there are some adjectives that will come to mind to describe his canon, and probably none of them are these: 

Ebullient.
Sparkling.
Lighthearted.
Fun.

This is why I am fascinated by his foray into scoring for musical theater called Cheryomushki (“Cherry Town”).

There have been many “rock operas” produced for major label release, but there is none that come close to Quadrophenia in design, complexity, and brilliance of execution. And no other music group or crew of session players charged with producing a rock opera project had three of the most dynamic musicians of their generation – Keith Moon, John Entwistle, and Roger Daltrey – at their disposal to assist in fusing the vision of multi-instrumentalist author/composer Townshend to tracks so exploding with kinetic energy that the music threatens to come off the rails at any moment. 

On the face of it, as opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is an overly geeked-out concept. But it really is a grand story. A tale of the massive power of computing and communications put in the hands of all humanity, of technological transformation and behavioral shift that has no precedent in human civilization.

So why was I digging in my heels at the thought of actually sitting through this goddamn thing? 

Today I was listening to the one-act opera Lord Byron’s Love Letter by Raffaello de Banfield and libretto by Tennessee Williams. Reader, have you heard of this creation? I didn’t think so.

I only have a copy myself because one fine afternoon ages ago I found myself scrounging among the used bins in Amoeba Hollywood looking for something strange with a brand new Visa card in my wallet. So I will tell you about this little operatic oddity.

A funny short film “All the Great Operas in 10 Minutes” from Kim Thompson.

As the host of this channel says, it won’t even take you 10 minutes. And as a bonus the film is narrated in a cute Canadian accent  🙂

I’m way behind the times. Since I discovered ‘Hadrian’, I find myself still saying to myself: “Rufus Wainwright? Wrote an opera?”

But Wainwright’s been at it for some time now, and he’s gotten quite good at it. The story is full-on grand opera with a deeply passionate May-October love affair between Hadrian and a young hunter, Antonius, as its centerpiece.

Sir Michael Tippett’s The Ice Break is one of those good old cultural boundary-pushers the the fine arts were infested with in the 1970s. Think: Bernstein’s Mass, Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre, Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and others of that ilk.

It’s a pretty broad ilk, defined by the urge of aging establishment enfants terribles who were feeling so challenged by the excesses of cutting edge rock/punk/street culture.

Today I was checking out The Metropolitan Opera’s archival video of their 2008 production of John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ Doctor Atomic. This opera focuses on the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist OB-GYN who brought the demon spawn of nuclear weaponry into the world, and the timeline of his time as head of the Manhattan Project.

Rummaging through my archives this week I rediscovered a post from my Budapest blog where I wrote about my first opera experience. In 2006. Some late bloomer! 

Since my writing from those times has been offline for many years it seems like a fit to reprint here.