Inaugurated the great Mozart Opera listen-through project this morning. Quite by accident, as it turned out. I'd finished playing a bit of VW and was wondering what to turn to next when it occurred to me that after listening to my box-set of the big 7 operas helmed by John Eliot Gardiner (the Archiv set) some time in the distant past I'd hardly played anything from them again. The thing is that operas have this way of demanding you play them all through and follow the words and action, which is a pretty big demand in terms of time. I had no intention of (or time for) listening to the whole of Idomeneo, but I thought I'd sample a bit - which turned out to be Act 1 and the interlude that follows. And having had a thoroughly good time I decided that this would be my approach to the full set: one act, or the rough equivalent, at a time.
The thing that very much took me by surprise was that somehow I managed to adjust to the fact that the male lead is sung by a woman (which seems to have been an opera seria convention of the period.) I recalled the first time I played the disc when Anne Sofie von Otter's singing of the role of Idomeneo's son Idamante completely threw me, especially when duetting with his love interest, Ilia, given voice by Sylvia McNair. The first time through I honestly was unable to distinguish between them - whilst this time the difference was so obvious I was baffled as to what got in my way the first time round.
I suppose it was an inability to accept the convention such that I was unable to enter even the highly accessible sound world on offer. But what makes this convention any more strange than a soliloquy in Shakespeare? I suppose we're so used to being deceived by the apparent realism of acting on the tv and film that we've forgotten how to forget. It's useful to be reminded just how much we must learn to play false in order to render something like truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment