7 January 2007, Leeds
Fast forward a month or so (are blogs supposed to be updated every day or so? I've never written one before, but I have a sneaking suspicion they are...). I've had my first couple of rehearsal days of the First Great Opera Ever Written and am enjoying my first day off, a quiet Sunday spent entirely in the posh flat arranged for me by Jane Bonner, the resourceful Lord High Everything Else of Opera North. I asked for something glamorous, so she automatically put me in the flat which Phyllida Lloyd recently occupied during the "Grimes" rehearsal period. Hopefully some of the mega-hit vibes of that show still linger. I awoke late this morning after hanging out drinking last night after a viewing of the new (I guess it's not so new anymore) James Bond film. The film's got some beautiful things in it, and they're not all named Daniel Craig. The dreamy and rather disturbing sequence where the leading lady drowns in the sunken Venetian palazzo was particularly inspiring to this Orpheus-obsessed movie-goer. She had "Euridice" written all over her when, earlier, Bond declared his love for her and tendered his resignation to Dame Judy Dench so that he could spend the rest of his life in her arms. You knew there was no way he was going to retire. You knew she was a goner, only there so she could die gorgeously. Which brings me (as what doesn't these days?) to "Orfeo"...
I did manage to put in the necessary study time last month, between decorating the Xmas tree, obsessing about Mozart, Gluck and Verdi and just enjoying being home for the holidays. Study basically consisted of re-reading various books (among them Robert Donington's "Opera and Its Symbols", Peter Conrad's "A Song of Love and Death" and the Cambridge Opera Handbooks "Orfeo" volume) and listening to the aforementioned CD a number of times to re-absorb the piece into my system. I first studied Monteverdi's "Orfeo" in 1967 in an "Introduction to Opera" course in my first undergraduate year at the University of Pennsylvania, so I've lived with it for 40 years now. I staged it once before, in 1993, at the Long Beach Opera, the gutsy Southern California company where I had carte blanche to experiment and really find my voice as a director in the 80's and 90's. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, taking it apart and putting it together again over the past year or so in my work with Paul Steinberg and Doey Luethi, the set and costume designers for this Opera North production. The show we’ve imagined is utterly different from the one I did fifteen or so years back – not surprising considering how the world has changed, how I have changed since then.
First day of rehearsal – I gave the Konzeptionsgesprach. Did that word scare you? It might have scared the cast a bit too, cause it’s the talk where I lay out the ideas of the production! Actually, they seemed to take it all in stride, not surprising since they seem like a gaggle of hip young operatic performers who are conversant with the ways of directors like me. The Euridice, Anna Stephany, didn’t bat an eyelash when told about being masking-taped to the wall and hanging there for a half hour. “Oh, yeah, I did that in ‘Rosenkavalier’ in Linz a couple of years back”, she was probably thinking.
Second day of rehearsal – It’s a Saturday, so there is only one three-hour rehearsal before the weekend break. I begin by chatting some more with the cast – this time, it’s more informal and I encourage them to contribute to the discussion. Mostly we talk about the milieu in which this production floats, a setting somewhat reminiscent of the art-friendly Ducal Palace in Mantua in 1607, somewhat like the Warhol scene in the 70’s. Jess Walker, who plays the Ninfa among other roles, tells us about accompanying her father, a 60’s rocker, to a re-enactment of a psychedelic party at the ICA in London. When a bowl filled with little red dots was passed around, she declined one, saying she didn’t do drugs. She felt like a bit of a jerk when everyone took the dots and stuck them on their foreheads. After an hour or so, we began working on the first scene, where La Musica gets things going. Amy Freston was sensational from the get-go, her work with Claire Glaskin already kicking in. By the end of the morning, I had a sense of what the other twelve singers in the cast were capable of too. The last thing I said before sending them off was, “Christine Chibnall promised me a cast chosen not just because of their voices but also because of their intelligence and potential to be engaged by some challenging weeks of work. She seems to have kept her promise.”
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