Dec. 10, 2016; noon matinee.
A big part of the reason I started listening to 20th Century classical music two years ago was a conscious attempt to regain or at least retain what’s left of my attention span. Listening to pieces that run upwards of 20 or 30 minutes – where time is pretty much a natural entity and not a restraint – is not easy for me. I am used to three minute songs – Motown, the Ramones, the Beatles – with occasional 8-minute arty numbers. Sometimes it is easy to follow a longer piece over the course of its voyage – rarely returning to anything familiar that isn’t at least disguised or transmogrified. Sometimes it isn’t. I’m afraid that that may go for the writing on this blog. My good-as-I-can seems half-assed to me now, at least relative to what I wrote, or how I approached writing, when I was a young man. Unlike people in my kids’ age range – twenty-somethings who grew up in the Ninja Turtle/Hanna Montana milieu – people my age once knew how to pay attention.
At some point in the late ’90s to mid aughts my attention span was violently assaulted, anally raped while its head was slammed repeatedly into a cement curb, and then left to lie there shattered, barely alive, slipping in and out of consciousness. Maybe the exact date was 9-11. Or maybe it was the day that Kanye swiped that award out of Taylor Swift’s hands. It was definitely gone long before Obama created – literally, created – ISIS. Finally, pieced together like a toppled vase and “returned to action”, my current attention span functions in a cloddish diminished fashion, not even a shadow of its old self. My attention span used to read books for an hour or two at a time, for fuck’s sake, and spend entire nights just listening to records. Now, it works the gears into a burned-oil smell to focus on anything for longer than two minutes. It would have been better, I sometimes think, to have grown up without an attention span at all, like people my kids’ age.
Do you know what I mean?
I should say the Trump election has not helped my ability to focus on anything. Trump’s approach, to OVERWHELM – with volume, with audacity, with utter amorality and utter lack of coherence – is TOO MUCH AT ONCE. I feel drugged or beaten on a symbolic level when I visit news sites since the election. It’s not Trump himself but what he means that is disorienting. The president is only a symbol – I understand that. This is a country that carpet-bombed Vietnam, there’s nothing benign about it. Trump’s election, I suppose, merely removes any illusion of a kind or wise Uncle Sam in the picture, a set of ideals to aspire to. Obliterates the illusion. My one solace is that it’s ultimately good to shatter illusions. At least I know I, personally, am better off not believing in Santa Claus, or God*. Though it is fun to remember what the illusion felt like.
I mention Trump because he had been president-elect for almost exactly one month when I went to the cineplex on the five-lane highway ten miles south of downtown to see L’Amour de loin, Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera. (When my daughter heard that I was going to watch an opera at a movie theater, her first thought was senior citizen… which I embrace), and the election has colored everything that I have thought about since. I certainly had not left the shadow of November 9 (another 9-11 if you write your dates the Euro way!) a mere month later, I guarantee you, so it was inside my head as I watched and listened. My bullshit detector goes off at the slightest stirring these days. It goes off for imagined things, sounds in parallel dimensions even.
And I mention attention span because L’Amour de loin, I knew going in, was three hours long and had just three characters and a single set – dozens of parallel rows of LED lights and a robotic crane. I was not sure I could handle it. I struggle to read books anymore but still do, in fits and starts, and I’ve pretty much quit watching movies because I can’t do 90 minutes. I should note, too, that the stakes were somewhat high: It cost $25 to get in (though I had a $5 off gift card from donating blood), which is about a tenth of my weekly income if things are going well. It was not the sort of challenge I would have issued a younger version of myself, when I skydove and walked on building ledges in self-dares, but I am an old man now – 18 months from the senior citizen discount for real – and this seemed like a challenge I’d survive.
Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer I play on my Orchestral Maneuvers radio show all the time. She will be all over CC Mixtape #4, by the way, which will draw from Scandinavia. It seems most people who closely follow this sort of music would agree that if she’s not the greatest living producing composer at this point, she’s at least in the top 2 or 3. As a young woman in the ’70s, she had been among a circle of brash and experimental Finns – composers and conductors who pushed boundaries and wove electronics and tapes into their music . Sort of as with David Bowie’s work as he aged, you still hear very noticeably the aesthetic vigor in Saariaho’s present-century work (despite contradictory claims by some detractors who feel she’s gotten predictable…) I’ve come to love her music in much the same way I love the music of her countryman Einojuhani Rautavaara (RIP, 2016) and the Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti – it’s capable of violent jolts and intense beauty at the same time, ideas sometimes going off like unexpected fireworks in a house fire. L’Amour de loin (“Love From Afar” is the the translation – despite four years of French in high school, my first thought was it was about a lion and would involve animal costumes) made its Metropolitan Opera debut on December 1, 2016. On Dec. 10 it was broadcast live via closed circuit stream to movie theaters around the world. It was a significant event in its own right – a still fairly vital (born ’52) composer getting the big stage – but significant also due to the fact it was the first opera written by a woman to be performed at the Met in over a century (1903, and then as one-half of a double bill.) And Saariaho’s opera was conducted by a woman, Susanna Mälkki, likewise a Finn and recently established music director of the formidable Helsinki PO. All that’s cool. I like women.
Still, I had my doubts regarding my attention span. I was, moreover, unsure as to whether or not I should smoke marijuana before I went in, in case the idea of sitting among a bunch of white-haired people on a sunny Saturday morning might prompt a quiet, self-contained hysteria once I was in my seat… I took one small puff finally, which was good. I was not bored for one second once the show got going. In fact I was surprised the intermission and end came as soon as they seemed to have.
The whole story aspect of the opera takes place either in a boat crossing the Mediterranean or on balconies overlooking the Mediterranean. The lights were constantly shifting, often to create the illusion of moon- or sunlight, or the reflection of a nighttime port, on water. They achieved a sort of an uncanny super-reality in this respect. It felt like three hours on the sea. But for significant stretches, too, the lights were abstract arrangements of carefully-programmed and shimmering colors – blurs and smears of screeching pink, black-light-poster deep indigo and glowing yellows. The effect of the LED lights in combination with the obliquely beautiful and iridescent shrouds of sound Kaariajo has come to perfect represented the best light show I have ever seen (and I did see the Led Zeppelin laser show at the Columbus Museum of Science and Industry).
The plot itself (the libretto is by Amin Maalouf) is a love story reduced to its barest essence, really, with two strangers and an intermediary, a voyage and a death. The story could be told effectively on stage in a half hour, so the action was not packed and there was a lot of repeated dialogue, a lot of repeated ideas. A lot of repeated dialogue. And a lot of repeated ideas. This contributed to the sort of hypnotic effect the set design and music already achieved. Ultimately, the whole of the production felt like a James Turrell installation, at least what I’d imagine one to feel like based upon pictures in magazines.
All three actors/singers were staggeringly good, and despite my praise for Robert Lepage’s direction and Michael Curry’s set design, that’s the main reason L’Amour de loin was brilliant when all was said and done. No matter what the set looks like or the music sounds like, a weak character in a three-person cast would have sunk it like a cinder block in a diving pool. (There was a sort of Greek chorus that popped up out of the waves from time to time, but they did not constitute a character.) The princess was played by a woman, Susanna Gilbert, who escaped from Alabama and had attended the premiere of the opera in Salzburg with her Mississippian grandmother, and she brought genuine young woman sensuality to the role, sort of in a Kate Bush way. The boatsman was an androgynous character, played here by a woman, who looked sort of like Isabella Rosselini in Blue Velvet. I Google-Imaged her – Tamara Mumford – to see what she looks like normally and it is nothing like her character. The male lead, Eric Owens, suggested an African American Bert Lahr, and he totally sold his character’s foolish – and fatal – longing for a woman he’s only heard of. The brilliant acting of these three – both full-body and facial, owing to the closeup cameras – while simultaneously singing the ridiculously complicated parts seemed, as this music so often does, like a feat of magic to me.
Over the three hours I was periodically reminded it was a live event, experiencing a mild vertiginous awareness each time. The closed circuit cameras used for the broadcast went out every fifteen minutes or so, digitally evaporating into a gray screen with a dot matrix message in the corner, and this reinforced the live event factor in a tension-building way, since you could never be certain if the whole program would cut out.
The theater I saw it in, moreover, was the kind of suburban cineplex where you can see three or four sloshed soft drinks stained onto the screen when a solid color is projected, which continually reminded me I was in a cineplex in North Carolina.
The live factor and the size of the screen (as opposed to that of a laptop, which is how I’d have seen it otherwise) made the price of admission worthwhile. I don’t know if I’ll ever go to another Metropolitan Opera simulcast, mainly because they do not do modern-period works as a rule. There are some 20th C. operas I would pay $25 to see – Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Janacek’s House of the Dead, and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk come immediately to mind – but the Met usually sticks with the stand-by’s, at least if this year’s schedule is indicative of the near future. I don’t really like the music in, say, Wagner or Rossini or Verdi operas too much, just as I don’t really enjoy 19th century and prior symphonic music. But this was $25 well spent.
There is no CD of the L’Amour de loin available for sale, though there is one from Harmonia Mundi available by downloading… 30 tracks at $.89 each or $17.49 for the whole LP on Amazon… I don’t THINK so. I hope someone has the clarity of mind to release this Met production. A live recording would be fine. You can watch a performance on DVD, issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 2005, which features disco-looking sets by Peter Sellars, but I would say, after seeing the Met version, DON’T. You can probably watch the version I saw on the Met site somewhere or other.
One final note: A friend pointed out to me that Saariaho is married to Jean-Baptiste Barriere, a radical electronic composer who began releasing records in the late ’70s and scored a “props opera” by Peter Greenway in ’97. I am listening to an album of his on Youtube right now and it is insane. He and Saariaho have two kids, who must be among the coolest people in the room at any given moment. Youtube, as I often say on my radio show, is a fantastic way to listen to obscure music. It represents the best aspects of the internet, I think. It’s a good way to hear music from Saariaho as well, much of which is out of print or rare and very expensive on Amazon.
I will include links to Alex Ross’s review of the opera from the New Yorker and to the New York Times’ preview of the production, which has information on all the principals.
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Concentration Camp 
Interesting review and congrats on having your Met Opera cherry popped! FYI, Great Performances at the Met on PBS reliably broadcasts these HD performances about 6 months or so after the initial broadcast. I’d expect L’amour de Loin to show up on the schedule sometime in late spring or summer. Note that since going digital, many PBS stations now put their arts programming on a separate channel (usually the “.2” station on the digital spectrum). They usually run them starting on Thursday evenings and repeat them 3 or 4 times until Friday afternoon so you have several chances to watch/record them.
This production was a big deal for the Met, I expect a DVD will be out in a year or two. The Met also offers a streaming subscription service to pretty much their entire library of recordings (something like 600 different performances). It costs about $150 for a year but you can also buy a month for around $15 or rent individual operas for $5. There’s a great performance of Shostakovich’s The Nose done a couple of years ago, devastating productions of Berg’s Lulu and Strauss’ Elektra from last year, and a BRUTAL interpretation of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (they paired it with a beautiful but incredibly sappy Tchaikovsky one-act called Iolanta and did the broadcast on Valentine’s Day! It was a brilliant and unsettling combo.) All of these show up on the Great Performances at the Met broadcasts I mentioned above, so keep your eye out if you are interested.
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