Rich Is Rare

A rare creature it is today within the professional classical music critical fraternity who can do well-informed snark with eloquence and style in a classical music or opera review, and possesses the courage to commit it to print.

Case in point:

MAGDA DOES JOAN: La Rondine is with us again, Puccini’s elegant snore, with Marta Domingo’s tinkerings in place to confuse what is already inadequate in the dramatic resolution and with Michael Scott’s Coney Island Merry-Go-Round of an Act-Two stage set to cheapen and vulgarize even further what is already wrong-headed and simply clumsy in Signora Domingo’s "conception and direction." Speculations, however cynical, as to why impresario Plácido tosses this directorial bone to his wife from time to time don’t work this time, since Plácido is also in town, conducting the last few performances of Tosca.

Marta’s most blatant tinkering is to allow her heroine — mere moments after her Ruggero, having discovered the seedy details of her past, throws a hissy fit of the sort that any exuberant loverboy might throw from time to time and recover from an hour later — to hook onto a passing tsunami and disappear, Joan Crawford style, into the billowing wave. The dramatic timing is completely wrong; a suicide scene in any other Puccini opera — Madama Butterfly for one — takes up a fair proportion of the act; this one goes wham-o, with music Marta has dug up from somewhere. Granted, the opera’s ending as composed (and laboriously revised) by Puccini is hardly thrilling: the heroine Magda bathed in melancholy resignation; at least the timing is right. Marta Domingo’s evasive justification for the suicide, as printed in the program, is so much baloney. And that placid expanse of ocean in Michael Scott’s set design looks as capable of churning up a tsunami as my backyard fishpond.

We rest our case.

RTWT here.