I love Philip Glass music. I don't really know why, I've just arrived at the point where I do, having started at the same point most people do with his stuff, a kind of "Jesus, what the hell was that?" after watching a clip from "Koyaanisqatsi". It's repetitive, not just within a given piece but across huge swathes of his work, to the point where most people can identify "Glass" but honestly couldn't tell you which of fifty albums it comes from. He doesn't really use a huge palette of sounds. He doesn't really do "tunes". For the first few years of his compositional career, in the 60s, he wrote basically tedious conceptual rubbish; yes, you can play closed or open, potentially infinite sequences of notes... whatever. But after a while there's some interesting stuff ("Music In Twelve Parts") and then he got into composing operas, and that's where it really takes off. The two major threads of his work have been movie scores and operas, although there's a bunch of symphonies in there too.
In movie terms, we're looking at the "Qatsi" trilogy - "Koyaanisqatsi", "Powwaqatsi", and "Naqoyqatsi", which are three allegedly non-narrative documentaries showing off epic cinematography of the industrial world at work, juxtaposed against the beautiful emptiness and simplicity of the natural world, and soundtracked by this gorgeous rolling developing Glass music... I say 'allegedly non-narrative' because there's clearly a story being told, and I'm not wholly on the storytellers' side, but they make for compelling viewing. Thence, he's gone on to score numerous, more mainstream movies, including "The Hours", the two "Candyman" movies (I know!) - and, most famously I reckon, he contributed some music to "The Truman Show", where, in the coolest cameo ever, he appears in the studio performing "Truman Sleeps" at the piano while we watch Jim Carrey resting. It's a sublime, evocative two-minute piece, and is one of my handful of go-to tracks when I'm in a particularly introspective mood. (Along with Kristin Hersh's album "Hips And Makers", and The Stranglers' "The Man They Love To Hate", since you ask.)
Meanwhile, his first opera was "Einstein On The Beach" in 1975, and he went on to complete a trilogy of "portrait operas", covering Einstein, Gandhi, and Akhatnen, three men of science, politics, and religion whom he and his collaborators found fascinating. I'm sketchy about the philosophical content of the other two, and I just don't find the music from "Satyagraha", the Gandhi opera, as compelling - although why not check for yourself later this year, the Met is broadcasting it - but Akhnaten really is fascinating, by far my favourite of the three. Here's a man who attempted to turn Egyptian culture upside-down, to break the stranglehold of the priesthood, to reform the religion, to update traditional artistic styles, to build a new capital city... it didn't go well, suffice to say, and he and his wife were swept away by a priestly rebellion, stricken from and nameless in Egyptian history, the updates reverted within a few years. Sorry, spoilers, obviously, but that's history.
So, you might wonder how something like that gets presented in an opera, and Glass's approach, as hinted at by these being 'portrait operas', is that he doesn't tell a detailed story with a fabulous narrative libretto, but he does present key images from the character's life and deeds, sometimes as epic tableaux for us to admire, sometimes by presenting and watching related characters, sometimes by large-scale visual reference. It depends a lot who's directing it. All these operas were conceived in cooperation with a specific director, and I gather that Glass and co. make videos of their operas and release two versions for production: one which must exactly copy the version they did, and one which basically mustn't. So I'm guessing, given the fancy tech in use at the Long Beach Opera "Akhaten", that they were using the latter version, implementing their own vision for the music.
And it was really very fancy. It seemed to be something that could scan the entire stage looking for movement, or presence of any kind, and turn it into an image which could then be projected onto the stage, either on a translucent front curtain or onto the performers and backdrop. It wasn't used for traditional image-projection; it did things like create sand-like patterns of dots which responded to the arm movements of dancers proceeding across the stage, or creating huge vertical lines above everyone's heads, or showing an aerial projection of the wall being built by the chorus... various cool effects, which to their credit can't easily be described textually, so I'll just say this was an ambitious use of technology, and it seemed to work.
But unfortunately, just when you get all this ambition and technology organized to present a major modern opera for two performances only, disaster strikes! The role of Akhnaten himself is sung by a counter-tenor, which essentially means a man with a woman's voice. There aren't many counter-tenors in the world these days, as the effect used to be achieved through castration. It makes Akhnaten seem strikingly different from the three overtly masculine priests who sing in other numbers, and it represents the strangeness of Akhnaten's physicality as seen in his portraits and statuary - was he a hermaphrodite? did he have an unusual body condition? In the absence of Aida-style Egyptian costuming, and the epic gnarly bodysuit they made the guy wear in the first production in 1984, the choice of voice is a nice way to handle it. Unfortunately, it means when your counter-tenor gets a sore throat, frankly, buddy-boy, you're a bit fucked. Fortunately, they flew in another counter-tenor to sing the part. Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to learn the staging. Fortunately, the first counter-tenor was able to do that. Unfortunately, for some reason, at one point they put the second counter-tenor on stage as well, and you could see him singing from his music and turning the pages. OK, fair enough, this is a major undertaking and I wouldn't expect him to be off-book with a week's notice, but did he have to be onstage at all? Strange choice.
And then there was the far bigger problem with the start of the opera at least, which distressed me enough that I sat there with a very stern and distant look on my face for half an hour. One of my favourite parts of the opera is the funeral sequence for Akhnaten's father, which comes near the start and which features a tremendous ruckus, intended to wake up the gods so that they would pay attention to the funeral and be alert to the journey of the dead Pharaoh's spirit to Heaven. In the soundtrack, this is represented by a hefty percussion section. In the opera house, this was represented by a kettle-drummer who so completely overpowered the orchestra that at all points when he was playing you simply couldn't hear the rest of the music, and the singers were kinda submerged too. It was infuriating, desperately ill-judged, and the single worst piece of live sound-balancing I've ever heard, given the money we'd paid for those tickets and the gorgeous acoustics in play at all other times. Fuck you, LBO, I was thinking as I grumpily observed the ten-minute funeral scene. The band wasn't very together in a few other places, too. If this had been in Vancouver I would have left, like we did at "Lilian Ailing". Opera is not immune to the Panda's insistence upon being entertained and refusal to stick around for the second act if the first has been in any way perfunctory or under-par. I am reminded of James Agate attending a performance by his idol Rachel in Paris; as she blah'ed her way through her role to a half-empty summer audience, he sent a note backstage informing her that he had come a long way to see the finest actress in the world, and had not found her. She acted up a storm in the second act, and later asserted that she had been reminded of a valuable lesson: every show is someone's first, and they will judge you based on it, not on your reputation.
As it is, we decided to stay, and Sarah - not being so attached to the music (and particularly the sonically fugazi'ed funeral scene) - was the first to suggest that the problem was only that the production's reach exceeded its grasp; it failed in places, but it kinda failed magnificently. And I can't argue that the music and singing was generally extremely good - i.e. it sounded exactly like the soundtrack. So the question became for me: did I have trouble with it because I turn out not to like the visual presentation of opera? Because the visuals didn't add enough to the soundtrack to make me consider it value for money? Because grand but slowly-developing tableaux aren't what I want to see, MTV boy that I am? I did find some of the scenes boring. The overall visuals were reasonably striking, although very low-key in colour terms. The director had said up front that he wasn't using traditional Aida-style Egyptian costumes because he thought they would be silly, and I was fine with that; the outfits they'd chosen were simple, very linear, not quite monchromatic... they worked fine. I thought there was an attempt to attach a commentary on the Kennedys to the proceedings, from how they'd dressed Nefertiti and her mother, and that was interesting... but in the end, I dunno, man... it was nearly three hours long... that's a long time to be watching something without an explicit traditional narrative. Still, having fifteen-minute scenes ensures that you have plenty of time to assess and analyze what might be going on, and there's a kind of narration by a "Scribe" which hints at events in magnificent language.
It might've been nice if the plot, as such, hadn't been totally spoiled during a pre-opera discussion featuring an actual Egyptologist, the function of which chat seemed to be to ensure the audience wouldn't get confused by the Art. This annoyed me a lot, actually, especially since there's a clever and nominally quite moving epilogue - "which features THIS, and means THIS", the director and expert gleefully informed us. Thanks.
The other interesting thing about this opera was the demographics of the audience. I think Sarah was about the fourth youngest person, and I may have been the fifth, out of the several hundred who showed up for the pre-show talk. Oh, and there was a special line for Groupon ticketholders - and guess what? There were all the younger people after all...
In the end it was an artistic event which I wanted to see and it was a definite "experience". But was it worth the ticket price? After all, if I want to see Satyagraha later this year, I can fly to New York and see it live with expensive tickets, or I can pay a tenner and see it in the cinema. The question here is, what is a viable markup to pay for (a) the experience, live, on a big stage, surrounded by the sound and spectacle, and enjoying being part of an elite sharing that experience, and (b) investing in and enabling that experience, and paying into the profit pool which allows culture to take subsequent risks, having myself profited in the past from people doing exactly that? I'm a believer in progressive taxes and costs; as someone with money and (if you ask enough people) apparently with taste, isn't it right that I ought to ante up for the high culture, rather than get away with paying Groupon rates or watching it on the screen? I guess - although it's a sadly expensive principle, and I wish I had enjoyed the specific show as much as I was hoping to... but then, that was a lot, and I expect I should be pleased I enjoyed it as much as I did. It's just a touch disappointing that it wasn't the most excellent experience of the last however-many years, and perhaps it's a reason not to listen too excessively to a soundtrack (in this case, nearly fifteen years) before seeing a show. And yet, Sarah had been waiting for nineteen years to see "Falsettos", and when we saw it it was practically perfect. As usual, my attempts to find a poignant and absolute truth just in time for the final paragraph get nowhere fast. Drat it.
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