#yuval sharon

[guy60660]

Yuval Sharon | Detroit Opera | Sylvia Jarrus | Financial Times

[desimonewayland]

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte Staatsoper Berlin, 2019

Director: Yuval Sharon / Set designer: Mimi Lien assisted by Mark Löhrer / Costume designer: Walter Van Beirendonck / Lighting designer: Reinhard Traub / Video designer: Hannah Wasileski

Via: Planet Hugill

The creative team working on Die Zauberflöte proved a brilliant and enterprising crew. Mimi Lien’s colourful and abstract-looking sets and Belgian avant-garde fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck’s costumes mirrored Salzburg marionettes and the Bauhaus-era ballets of Oskar Schlemmer while Reinhard Traub’s extremely effective lighting and Hannah Wasileski contrasting video sequences would take some beating.

Yuval Sharon’s wildly innovative stagings, already celebrated in Berlin and Los Angeles, reach new heights in Michigan.

[parmandil]

Christine Goerke, Kaswanna Kanyinda, Avery Boettcher, Marsha Music, and Morris Robinson in Twilight: Gods, Yuval Sharon's "drive-thru opera" adaptation of Wagner's Götterdämmerung at the Michigan Opera Theatre, Detroit, 2020. (Photo: Mitty Carter)

[pipesdrumsfiddles]

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music

We asked some of our favorite artists to tell us about the sounds they cherish. Listen to their choices.

I really do love this! There are so many great excerpts - and I’m always pumped when Unsuk Chin gets a shout-out. Plus, I’ve never heard of Jessie Montgomery, but now I probably should go check out her work. The piece that Caroline Shaw endorsed is quite impressive. And of course, Yuval Sharon, LA experimental opera director extraordinaire, has the best and most on-brand suggestion.

[never-sated]

"Recordings encourage the subconscious substitute of a second object for the music itself, and while I treasure them as testaments of great artistry, they have cultivated a kind of listening that easily leads to conservatism. For the last century, we have possessed the ability to sever the voice from the body: we can play and replay and replay a piece of vocal music until we've learned to anticipate what will happen rather than actually listen."

- A New Philosophy of Opera by Yuval Sharon

[nathanabhaltersmith-shelf]

[artmutt]

LA Philharmonic Centennial

My chief reason for a frenzied 4-day visit to L.A. this fall was to hear some of the music being performed as part of the 100th anniversary of the L.A. Philharmonic. I became a fan of this orchestra during the tenure of Esa-Pekka Salonen, when concerts were still happening in Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I waited anxiously for the completion of Disney Hall, the Frank Gehry building that now houses the orchestra. And Gustavo Dudamel was giving a series of programs with the Chicago Symphony the week they announced that he would become the next Music Director of the Phil. Call me a fan.

Of course, it’s a little intimidating to try to write about the programs I heard, when Alex Ross has already done so, eloquently, in The New Yorker (November 26, 2018 issue). I’m sorry to have missed the premiere of Andrew Norman’s new work, and I wish I’d been able to hear the new Steve Reich premiere. Oh well...I was able to attend Susanna Mälkki’s performances of Sibelius’s music for The Tempest, and the remarkable realization of John Cage’s Europeras I & II.

Outside Disney Hall, on our way to Mälkki’s concert, we caught a performance of George Brecht’s Drip Music, happening outside the hall. I’m sorry I didn’t get the name of the handsome, nerdy guy who gave what I considered a rather radical version of Brecht’s piece. I mean, some of the crucial components were there (music was poured from a smaller container to a larger one), but the drips and pouring had been amplified, looped, and audio-processed into something much more like “music” in a conventional sense than most of the performances of this work than I have previously experienced (or participated in). This was part of the orchestra’s “Fluxus Festival,” a daring component to this centennial celebration, given that so much Fluxus “music” is, in fact, a critique and deconstruction of the conventions of classical musical performances.

Inside the hall, things were deconstructed, too. For this was not just a performance of Sibelius’s music for The Tempest. This was a full-fledged performance of Shakespeare’s play, with Sibelius music placed in the appropriate spots in the action. The stage of Disney Hall had been transformed with a set, with the orchestra (and chorus) placed behind these objects. A fair number of Hollywood actors were in the audience: we nearly bumped into Mariette Hartley on our way to our seats.

All this seemed fairly brilliant and daring, and The Tempest is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Alas, Disney Concert Hall was not really designed to be especially conducive to the spoken word. Indeed, and large resonant space like this is great for music, adding warmth and natural reverb to instrumental parts, but it swallowed up words the way my cats swallow up tuna. We were in the third row, close enough to practically smell the actors, and even with microphones, vast stretches of Shakespeare’s beautiful words got sucked into the acoustic void and lost. (I’m blaming the acoustics; American actors enunciating Shakespeare were also to blame.)

Sibelius’s music, under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, on the other hand, was dark and profound or delicate and ethereal, as needed by the text. I thought that the music was particularly lovely, and only wish that I could have heard it in the proper context of Shakespeare’s often profound words. Alas, this brave new world did not have a lot of comprehensible speech in it.

Comprehensibility was not the issue the next evening, when John Cage’s Europeras I & II were performed. In response to a commission for an opera, Cage responded by subjecting the components (both vocal and instrumental) of approximately 113 operas to chance operations. The stage was turned into a grid, and subjected to further chance processes in terms of lighting, stage movement, and set components. Musicians watched large clocks, set up behind the audience, to time their contributions to the piece. The result - where singers sometimes performed arias in near darkness, while a space on the other side of the stage was brightly lit with nothing happening, only to have a flat descend in front of the singer mid-aria, with an orchestra playing things completely unrelated to what was being sung - was something you either got into, or took strong opposition to, depending on your point of view. (Audience members began fleeing after about 15 minutes of Europera I, and a fair number did not return after intermission for Europera II.)

I. on the other hand, who knew what to expect and was prepared for an evening of non-sequiturs and discontinuity, was both periodically bored and periodically delighted, much as when I see a conventional opera performance. The production was directed by Yuval Sharon, a much-admired figure in L.A.’s experimental theatre community, who clearly understood and respected Cage’s aesthetic, and supported it, rather than fighting with it. The whole production felt surprisingly affectionate.

This performance did not take place in Disney Hall, but at Sony Pictures Studios, which used to be the old MGM lot out in Culver City. This is where The Wizard of Oz was shot, along with a bunch of the MGM musicals. Sharon was given free access to the Studio’s archive of backdrops, costumes, etc., which worked brilliantly in Los Angeles. Flats that descended while we listened to an aria from Mozart were straight out of some Gene Kelly or Judy Garland movie, while the costumes suggested other famous films. All jumbled together, and competing with each other, much the way they are in our collective, unreliable memories. In calling his work Europeras, Cage noted that he wanted to give back to Europe a work made up of the heritage of European operas. But in Los Angeles, the pun struck home more: these were Your Operas too: and by extension, the musical theater tradition in the U.S., which was enabled by the movies, could embrace its origins in European operas. of the 19th century. 

Europera I - at 90 minutes - felt a touch too long for the material. But Europera II, at 45 minutes, was perfect, filled with humor and occasionally pathos, and endless surprise. We laughed, we cried, it became a part of us. Oh, and we loved the work of the six dancers, who helped further confuse and clarify the chaotic mise-en-scene of this delightfully randomized work.

[tgreiving]

Meet the theater illusionists conjuring a red rainstorm inside Disney Hall

For Mahler’s "Song of the Earth," the L.A. Phil is collaborating with the Chilean avante-garde theater company Teatrocinema, whose visual creations lend a new dimension to the music.