onStage Pittsburgh: Last evening, Pittsburgh Opera gave its first performance of a Richard Wagner music-drama in twenty years. The work was, of course, Der fliegende Holländer, and it was an excellent performance indeed. But why not Tannhäuser? Lohengrin? Maybe one of the better known, stand alone “Ring” music-dramas, such as Die Walküre? Never heard locally in years and sure to pull in Wagnerian devotees from the tri-state area and/or beyond, any of these masterpieces, given with the right cast, conductor and director, notwithstanding financial and managerial trepidation, would thrill, and the novelty of any of Wagner’s works would test the Benedum’s seating capacity for all four performances.
2 comments:
I actually got to see this production on Tuesday and was quite impressed overall. I agree with the review overall that musically, the opera was superb. However, since Dick Block has banged into my head how important masking is, the fact that the doors onto the stage were completely unmasked and I could see all the way backstage kinda irked me. SPOILERS AHEAD Another thing that irked me was at the end when Senta jumps off the ship to show the dutchman how she was/is “faithful unto death”, you see her jump off the back of the raked platform onto the stage deck, I think she’s supposed to crawl offstage or something, however that did not happen and you just see her stand up and walk off stage. To me it’s a little confusing because the Dutchman also jumped off the back of the platform, but unlike Senta you don’t actually see him exit. Despite that, I really, really enjoyed this production and besides my petty quibbles, it was quite good.
I actually saw this show last sunday. I’m a huge Wagner fan so of course I went to go and see it. The singing was amazing and the orchestra was beautiful. I loved it. I didn’t love the projections. It felt like they were just throwing random stock images over the wall and it didn’t really make sense. I felt as though it distracted from the rest of the production. I also was very confused by the german translations. They chose to have translations that focused very much on getting the general meaning across but not a lot of the poetry. It’s a valid choice and makes sense because people have to read the captions pretty quickly. I went to the show with the sign language interpreter and when I heard they were there I was honestly a bit confused. I knew there were captions so I didn’t understand why someone would need a sign language interpreter. However within a minute of the show starting I saw why. This interpreter was amazing. She was able to capture the feeling of the music perfectly. Her facial expressions and such were amazing. It was a really amazing experience to watch her.
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