Lisa Hirsch's Classical Music Blog. The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.
Berce mollement sur ton sein sublime
Ô puissante mer, l’enfant de Dindyme!
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Fallout, Part the 98th
Alex Wellsung has some well-considered thoughts about Doctor Atomic. The thing to know about the amplification is that Adams doesn't like or trust operatic singing.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Sorry, but, no, they were stupid and small-minded thoughts. He seems to have no capability of getting past his own preconceptions of what the thing should be in order to see what it actually is. It's the old trap of "if I wrote this, it'd go like thus-and-so". About the only point of agreement I have with him is that the Rukeyser poetry is a miscalculation and becomes mostly gibberish in this setting. Oh, yeah, and the tone for the Indian maid is off (but not nearly as awful as he suggests).
I'll stick with well-considered. I had doubts of my own about the libretto and dramatic structure when I saw the piece at San Francisco. I liked it more than Alex, but his criticisms look like expansions of my own doubts.
2 comments:
Sorry, but, no, they were stupid and small-minded thoughts. He seems to have no capability of getting past his own preconceptions of what the thing should be in order to see what it actually is. It's the old trap of "if I wrote this, it'd go like thus-and-so". About the only point of agreement I have with him is that the Rukeyser poetry is a miscalculation and becomes mostly gibberish in this setting. Oh, yeah, and the tone for the Indian maid is off (but not nearly as awful as he suggests).
I'll stick with well-considered. I had doubts of my own about the libretto and dramatic structure when I saw the piece at San Francisco. I liked it more than Alex, but his criticisms look like expansions of my own doubts.
Post a Comment