Regie, or Not Regie?: Daniel Okulitch

Showing posts with label Daniel Okulitch. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Brokeback Mountain – Part 2: Two Drafts and a Princess Phone

So I guess I made my point yesterday that the music of Brokeback Mountain – The Opera just isn’t that engaging. In fact, it's so unengaging, that early in the performance, I started focusing on the surroundings, right down to tiny details that shouldn’t matter.

The sets ranged from non-existent to claustrophobic: two household sets are squeezed onto the stage, making it look like a used furniture warehouse. Maybe that’s the point: the men are suffocating under the constrained, traditional lives they’ve built to deny their true natures. But if the set is going for ultra-realism (sometimes—the homes anyway) it’d help to use period props.

Brokeback Mountain – Part 1: A Missed Opportunity

Charles Wuorinen’s compositional style is not operatic; and he seems to shy away from emotion. I am not sure why he bothered to write an opera. At the moment I cannot think of a less operatic composer. And I don’t mean that everything has to be neo-romantic and diatonic and pretty. Wuorinen’s style is 12-tone and (usually) serial—not styles that lend themselves to lyricism. On the other hand, Alban Berg managed to write very lyrical (still dissonant, but still lyrical) music using 12-tone serialism, and so have other composers.

Wuorinien and Proulx added some extra scenes to flesh out the women’s characters, apparently feeling that too much male voice singing would wear on the listener. In reality, however, it’s the music itself that’s wearing. Britten and Janacek made all-male textures work beautifully and dramatically.