New York note

Dumb picture, making the seats look much more partial-view than they actually were. Metropolitan Opera waiting for the 11:00 curtain of Götterdämmerung, the final part of the Ring des Nibelungen, which I've been watching on Saturdays over a lengthy (two-month) iteration of the cycle. Overheard a gent saying "Wagner's the only opera where the line's longer for the men's room than the ladies' room", which while not actually true is meaningful in some way—I guess in it's really more lines oriented to preparing for the future (Act I of this one is two hours long, as is Act III of Meistersinger) than dealing with the present.

Anyway the fact is that it got out at five but I'm still kind of wrecked and beginning to recognize I may not put out a post before midnight, so just saying hi.


I've heard four different Brünnhildes live, believe it or not, all in New York of course and all of them very good, but this one, Christina Goerke, an American who used to be an early music specialist singing Händel before her voice went nuts in her 30s, is by far the most what-you-need with a voice of extraordinary beauty that makes it over the gigantic orchestra without straining and the deep emotional engagement you can hear and see in this little excerpt—she's a real actor—and even a real trill, something hardly any Wagner soprano achieves, kept from her Händel days for the "Hojotoho" in Walkure. I can't begin to tell you how great she sounded today, but take my word for it.



And sexy Siegfried finale! Though the tenor's voice is a little tired.

Bristolnacht

Image via Crime Scene Kansas City.

"Bristolnacht" is Tengrain's name for the Spilla in Wasilla, when the Clan of the Palins betook them in their limo to beat the shit out of everybody they saw and then retired in confusion on all sides, and I realized that's what it would be called if it was a German opera, which it really should be. And this is what it would look like, approximately:

Happy news

Jeremy Lin Meme. From JerseyChaser.

Jeremy Lin—Linsomnia! Lintoxication!—and the newly competent Knicks won their sixth game in a row, the first one with Amar'e Stoudemire back from his brother's funeral. Welcome back Amar'e! I couldn't watch the game on the television since my cable company and their network are having one of those greed competitions, but I saw the extraordinarily dramatic last couple of minutes over my son's shoulder on his computer. I also got to hear the Tweets celebrated on ESPN:

Dave McMenamin, Lakers Beat Writer
The Lakers’ players lounge just erupted when Lin hit that big 3. World Peace emerged and ran through the locker room yelling ‘Linsanity!!’

Preoccupied as I was with car bombings, I totally forgot that World Peace was not world peace at all but merely Metta World Peace, that is the Artest formerly known as Ron, and so got the impression that Lin's feat was even more consequential than it actually was, though I couldn't have said why world peace would choose the Lakers' players lounge as the venue for its appearance anyway.

The Jeremy Lin of Wagner singing (calm, modest, extremely hard-working, and then out of nowhere spectacular beyond reason), Jay Hunter Morris, brought the two-year unfolding of the Met's and Robert Lepage's new Ring cycle to a close with his Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. At the close, world peace actually did emerge on stage, although that was written into the orchestral score and had little to do with the singing.

Morris did have a couple of moments of vocal weakness, one unfortunately at the heartbreaking moment when Siegfried dies in a preposterously difficult sotto voce head tone. Deborah Voigt, who I was worried about a year or so ago when her Brünnhilde voice in Walküre sounded a little dry to me, did not seem to have any weakness at all. Happy Valentine's Day, Debbie! Watching them "live in HD" at the old Ziegfeld on 54th Street, and seeing their faces closer than the folks in the $300 seats, I have been impressed through the whole series (unlike this guy) by the quality of the acting, which sometimes achieves a depth that you really don't imagine coming from singers (especially Iain Paterson as Gunther and Hans-Peter König as Hagen).

From act 2 of Walkure.