Ivory Dome

For anyone who knows me, either personally or through my posts at Ivory Dome, it’s no secret that I’m a big opera fan.  Here in Amarillo, we have a really great opera company with a world-class performing arts center at its disposal.  But with only two productions each season, I have to look elsewhere to feed my opera appetite.  I used to attend at least one performance at the Santa Fe Opera each summer, but gas prices have been making that option less and less attractive.

Enter the Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD.  Beginning in the 2006-2007 season, selected Saturday matinees have been simulcast on the big screen in High Defintion at participating theaters.  During the first season, the closest theater was in Colorado Springs, even more remote than Santa Fe.  But this season, the Hollywood 16 on I-27 in Amarillo joined the Met network. 

The first two operas I attended (Gounod’s Roméo et Julliette and Britten’s Peter Grimes) didn’t really grab me.  The quality of both performances was excellent, but I just wasn’t that familiar with either opera.  It’s been my experience that the better I know an opera, the more I can enjoy the performance on all levels: sets, costumes, and acting, as well as the music.  In addition, attendence in Amarillo was not very impressive – about a dozen at each performance.

But this Saturday’s opera was Puccinni’s La Bohème.  Not only is this one of my personal favorites, it’s one of the most popular in the entire opera repetoire.  This was reflected in attendence; I estimated 30 to 40 in the audience.  The story is fairly simple:  four young bohemians (an artist, a poet, a musician, and a philosopher) share a garret apartment in Paris.  Rodolfo (the poet) meets and falls in love with Mimì, a seamstress who’s dying of consumption.  They break up, but in the end Mimì returns to Rodolfo in order to die with him at her side.  There’s a sub-plot involving a tempestuous relationship between Marcello (the artist) and Musetta, a real coquette if ever there was one.  But the main story is about Mimì.

Richard Wagner referred to opera as Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of music, drama and design (both costume and set) that is greater than the sum of its parts.  This production of Bohème was a great example of this.  The sets, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, are legendary for their realism,  the costumes were authentic for the period,  the cast members were believable actors as well as superb singers, and the orchestra was brilliant.

Mimì was played by the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu.  From her first entrance in Act I, I was stricken.  The character of Mimì is so lovable, and Ms. Gheorghiu played it beautifully, both musically and dramatically.  I’m always deeply affected at the end of the opera when Mimì dies, but I found myself emotionally invested from her first entrance, and certainly through Acts III and IV as her pending death becomes more and more inevitable.  Whether it was Ms. Gheorghiu’s performance, my love of the character Mimì, or the fact that this was my first Bohème since facing my own mortality last May, this was the most memorable of the many performances of this opera that I’ve experienced over the years.

There’s one more opera this season, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment featuring French soprano Natalie Dessay on April 26. I probably won’t attend this performance, because I’m afraid after the La Bohème, it might be anticlimatic.  There’s also a live performance of Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree that evening, and I don’t know if I can handle that much opera in one day.  But even so, there will be 10 more operas next season, with the schedule to be announced this month.  At $22 a ticket, it’s well worth the money.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.