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Friday, September 24, 2004
Atlanta Opera’s ‘Carmen’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OPERA REVIEW. Through Sept. 26.
The Atlanta Opera’s ice-cold “Carmen” is among the company’s most disappointing productions in recent years.
This confused take on Georges Bizet’s masterpiece opened Thursday at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center. It flops — and that’s not an unfair word — because stage director Marc Verzatt and the production team at best skim the surface plot and never address anything deeper. The penalties of freedom? The source of passion? The juggernaut of lust, sex, rejection and low self-esteem? How about a simple story about people who matter?
In Verzatt’s incoherent direction, no one matters. Not one singer on stage has a sharply etched personality. Intimate exchanges between lovers feel clumsy, insincere. What’s more, the crowds move in unnatural configurations and — this is all Direction 101 stuff — moments of special significance pass without notice.
The score (and tradition) dictates that Carmen, a live-free-or-die Gypsy, makes a grand entrance. Here she meekly enters unnoticed. Don Jose, a soldier who is torn between his mamma’s-boy upbringing and his adult cravings for Carmen, is almost invisible on stage, his persona utterly nebulous. And so on.
Singing in a 4,500-seat venue isn’t flattering to any vocalist, and the cast was adrift. Start with the Carmen. Emily Golden is a veteran of the role. The mezzo has sung the celebrated seductress in 300 performances over several decades. Despite this experience, her vocal characterization was bland, her acting ditto. Golden has the pipes to fill the civic center, but her voice has lost its luster, her top notes are out of reach, the vibrato is wide and wobbly and she rushed her vocal entrances. Can any “Carmen” work without a passable Carmen? Probably not.
As Carmen’s photo-negative opposite, soprano Jacqueline Venable sang the innocent village girl Micaela in bitter tones, forcing her voice open to be heard over the orchestra but with a loss of control.
The men faired no better. Tenor Adam Klein wasn’t up to singing Jose, and you heard a lot of strain. As Escamillo, a macho cartoon character, Oziel Garza-Ornelas delivered his toreador song with panache and a not-unattractive voice.
Even the rental sets, designed by John Conklin for a 1980 Houston Grand Opera production, contribute to the numbing impression. Conklin’s sets typically show a society in decay, where once-handsome buildings are starting to crumble. Here the Seville plaza for act one is grimy and bleak, the brick bullring in the finale is fit to be condemned.
That left the evening’s pleasures to a few smaller roles — Ryan Taylor’s Morales, Matthew Lau’s Zuniga, Kitt Reuter-Foss’ Mercedes — and to the chorus and children’s choir.
In truth, the show belonged to William Fred Scott, who conducted the opera at a sleepwalker’s pace, and is also the company’s artistic director. He cast these singers, hired this stage director and rehearsed them all. The product is his.
If Scott has put himself in an impossible situation — running an opera in a venue too large to accommodate the human voice — it nevertheless has been his responsibility to make it succeed.
At opera’s end, however, the audience told the story. They gave mostly respectful, if tepid, applause but did not sustain it through even one curtain call. For the listeners, it was an exhausting night.
The Atlanta Opera’s “Carmen.” Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center www.atlantaopera.org Sept. 23 at 8 p.m. Sept. 25 at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 at 3 p.m.
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Wilco plays the Fox
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
POP MUSIC REVIEW
Near the end of its set Thursday evening at the Fox Theatre, the Chicago art-rock band Wilco played a simple version of a simple song, “Passenger Side,� from its 1995 debut album, “A.M.�
With its acoustic base and ordinary shape, the song served as a reminder of how far this band has come in the last nine years. The rest of the show paralleled the rest of this band’s career — it was a searching, turbulent journey that seemed obsessed with finding order in chaos.
For much of the show, Wilco’s six members stood in a near-perfect rectangle. Their music, too, was geometric. Melodic lines traveled diagonally, then veered off at right angles. There were no smudges or smears; the parts were precise and distinct. Even when unleashing waves of distortion, the musicians exhibited a near-clinical control.
The central point in all of this was singer and guitarist Jeff Tweedy, the bandleader with the cigarette-stained voice and the restless sensibility. Tweedy’s band has undergone a comical series of lineup changes over the years, but he is a constant, and in his newest incarnation of Wilco he has found five other men capable of executing his vision.
Lasting just under two hours, the Fox show mostly dwelled on Wilco’s 2004 album, “A Ghost Is Born,� and on its prior release, 2002’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,� the CD that replaced the band’s early roots-rock affectations with white noise and space.
“Spiders (Kidsmoke),� a long song from the new record, alternated between crunchy electric guitar riffs and panicky stabs of distortion. The taut rocker “I’m A Wheel� came in a great rushing whoosh. “Jesus, etc,� a bouncy tune from “Yankee,� addressed the title subject as “honey,� revealing a playful side of Tweedy too often overlooked.
Elsewhere, Tweedy and his sidemen got serious about the noise. One favorite tactic was to let a conventional rock song disintegrate into a wash of dissonance. This was occasionally fascinating and occasionally frustrating. The musicians seemed to find it liberating, but Wilco mustn’t forget that even avant-garde moves, if repeated often enough, can become their own kind of cliché.
For visual accompaniment throughout the performance, the band relied upon a large video screen, upon which rolled images of various animals, including birds and, especially, insects. Though Wilco can at times seem inscrutable, the bugs seemed particularly appropriate metaphors for a multidimensional band that has come to view music through a compound eye.
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