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February 19, 2013

New Approaches to Themes Sacred and Sexual | Parsifal | Powder Her Face | Opera Reviews by Heidi Waleson - WSJ.com 3/2/13 12:44 PM

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OPERA February 19, 2013, 6:00 p.m. ET New Approaches to Themes Sacred and Sexual

By HEIDI WALESON

Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera Director François Girard transports Wagner's final opera to a postapocalyptic period.

New York

In an imaginative new production of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" that is perfectly suited to the music, François Girard successfully transforms the opera, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, from a faux-Christian rite into a timeless story about a beleaguered community that is held together—barely—by a sacred ritual that is itself under threat. Arresting, consistently absorbing stage pictures expertly follow the mournful flow of this slow-moving epic, while a powerhouse cast of singers and the Met Orchestra under the sure direction of Daniele Gatti

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ensure that the evening has both gravity and momentum.

In Wagner's libretto, the Holy Grail is protected by an order of knights. Their leader, Amfortas, suffers horribly from a wound that will not heal, and can be cured only by a holy fool who is "enlightened by compassion." Mr. Girard moves "Parsifal" into a postapocalyptic time. In Acts I and III, Michael Levine's striking set is a parched, treeless landscape bisected by a stream which flows with blood, a symbol of the wound that divides the community. The knights, in modern white shirts and black trousers (the costumes are by Thibault Vancraenenbroeck), huddle in a circle on one side of it. On the other is a silent, excluded group of women, an indication that Mr. Girard isn't going along with the libretto's premise that forbidden sexual desire is the root of all evil; rather, it is a symbol of a fractured society.

In Act II Parsifal, the "holy fool," descends into the wound itself—the Met stage is covered with a pool of "blood." Ghostly flower maidens with long black hair and white dresses tempt him in Carolyn Choa's creepy, seductive choreography. He resists them and the seductress Kundry, whose white dress and bed grow red with the blood as she splashes around in it. He recovers the lost Grail spear, kills the sorcerer Klingsor, and returns to the knights to heal Amfortas's wound and become their leader.

David Finn's sensitive lighting dramatizes the deterioration of the knights' home between Acts I and Act III, and Peter Flaherty's video designs are eloquent, stylized abstractions—clouds, planets, landscape and even women's bodies—that enhance the drama of the transformation scenes and the Grail ritual.

Ritual remains a central feature of this production. Yet Mr. Girard also builds a poignantly human story through the principal singers. As Gurnemanz, the éminence grise of the grail knights, bass René Pape was magisterial and warm, with a penetrating delivery that enlivened his long monologues. Baritone Peter Mattei seemed to be living the agony of Amfortas, both in the fierceness of his singing and his halting, excruciating attempts to walk. Jonas Kaufmann made Parsifal complicated and vivid, from the adolescent shrug with which he conveyed his initial lack of understanding to the pure, messianic authority of his final transformation. Evgeny Nikitin was a properly brutal, slashing Klingsor, and Katarina Dalayman brought controlled passion to Kundry, expertly crafting the seduction scene. Mr. Girard has her lift the Grail for the final ritual, as the women and the men mix together onstage for the first time. Wagner might not have approved, but the gesture of reconciliation, overriding the libretto's misogyny and obsession with male purity, fit the music and completed Mr. Girard's moving, modern vision.

*** Brooklyn, N.Y.

Misogyny is certainly a central theme in Thomas Adès's debut opera, "Powder Her Face" (1995), presented by the New York City Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last weekend. Based on the true story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose reportedly insatiable sexual appetite was a tabloid scandal during her 1963 divorce proceedings, "Powder Her Face" is an oddly chilly affair, though Jay Scheib's ingenious production worked hard to generate some heat.

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The opera (Philip Hensher wrote the libretto) is constructed in eight scenes, beginning and ending in 1990, as the Duchess is about to be evicted from her hotel room for unpaid bills and is being mocked by an electrician and her maid. In between, flashbacks show key episodes in her life. Marsha Ginsberg's powder-blue set mutated quickly—shifting walls, beds and tables to create different venues. Act I was a chaotic carnival of licentiousness, its jittery, often lewd-sounding orchestrations and quick changes of mood mirrored by real-time video of what was happening both onstage and behind the scenes (cocaine-snorting in a mirrored bathroom, for example). For the scene in which the Duchess seduces a room-service waiter, in an aria that is mostly gulps and gurgles, 24 naked men, just a few of her many conquests, wandered about onstage. Like the video, and the sudden, disturbing camera flashes throughout the production, their presence made the audience complicit in the general debauchery by turning us into voyeurs.

Act II slowed things down for longer set pieces: the divorce-trial judge's puritanical summation (while he was being serviced under the table) and the Duchess's wistful aria about lack of real love in her life. Still, one could never quite warm to the Duchess. The score is clever and well constructed, with echoes of Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten and Alban Berg, but it is finally superficial, without the pathos or the horror of that other opera about a female sexual monster, "Lulu."

Mezzo Allison Cook was remarkably dignified as the indomitable Duchess, and she looked splendid in Alba Clemente's striking costumes, which included some very skimpy lingerie. Nili Riemer ably navigated the high soprano flights of the Maid and other roles (she got some of the best tunes; Mr. Adès would go even wilder with this tessitura for Ariel in "The Tempest"). Tenor William Ferguson was callously bright-voiced as the Electrician and the Duchess's other tormenters, and bass Matt Boehler brought simian flexibility to the grotesque leaps of the Judge's aria and a cavernous voice of doom to the Hotel Manager. Conductor Jonathan Stockhammer skillfully kept everything together, yet slightly off balance at the same time.

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared February 20, 2013, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: New Approaches to Themes Sacred and Sexual.

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February 19, 2013

New York City Opera Can -- and Should BNewy Jam Yorkes Jor dCityen Opera Can and Should MusicalAmerica.com FByeb rJamesuary 1 Jorden9, 2013

NEWNEW YYORKORK - --- W What’shat’s th thee d idifferencefference b ebetweentween t hthee MMetropolitanetropolitan O Operapera a andnd tthehe NNewew YYorkork C Cityity O Opera?pera? W ell, one hWell,as a 3one0-w haseek a s 30-weekeason of seasona 28-o pofer a 28-operarepertory repertory and the o ther dandoes the 16 otherperfo rdoesman c16es performances of four works .of T hfourat’s works.quantit yThat’s. But there’s another criterion that, if it’s not strictly “quality,” is imquantity.portant .But there’s another criterion that, if it’s not strictly “quality,” is important. On the opening night of the Met’s vapid new production of ROnigo ltheetto opening a few w enighteks aofg othe, th Met’se curt avapidin we nnewt up production on the last act tofo r Rigolettoeveal a to ap lfewess weekspole d aago,nce rthe laz curtainily writh wenting in up Sp onara thefuc ile’s dlastisre pactut atob lreveale esta bal itoplessshmen tpole. The dancer audien lazilyce bo writhingoed and ginu fSparafucile’sfawed. disreputable establishment. The audience booed and guffawed. In contrast, toward the end of the first act of Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face as performed by NInY Ccontrast,O at the toward Brookl ythen A endcad eofm they o ffirst Mu sactic’s of O pThomasera Ho uAdès’sse Feb Powder. 17, the Her Duc Facehess oasf Argyll (Allison Cook) performed oral sex on a room service waiter as two dozen male extras performed by NYCO at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Opera House Feb. 17, the swarmed over the stage, dorsal and frontal nudity in brightly lit full view. Duchess of Argyll (Allison Cook) performed oral sex on a room service waiter as two Tdozenhe au dmaleienc eex htrasard lswarmedy chuckle dover. the stage, dorsal and frontal nudity in brightly lit full view. Now, this says something about the relative abilities of directors Jay Scheib (virtuosic at NTheYCO audience) and Mi chardlyhael M chuckled.ayer (flou ndering at the Met), but it also points to what NYCO can, and it seems, should do: i.e., push hard to extend the limits of New York’s opera-going public. Now, this says something about the relative abilities of directors Jay Scheib (virtuosic at TNYCO)he para dande o Michaelf pecs, p oMayersterio r(flounderings, and penis eats theis o Met),nly on bue ot fit a alsomul tpointsitude o tof s whattrikin gNYCO image s Scan,che iband ha its dseems,evised should to jolt tdo:he Ni.e.,ew push York hardCity toOp extendera’s b therief limitsspring of se Newason York’s to a siz zling start last wopera-goingeekend. public.

There was a lot going on, at times arguably too much, so the scathing score--the history of WTheest eparadern mu sofic pecs,from 1posteriors,900 to 19 5and0 ru penisesn throu gish only a Cu oneisin aofrt -a- smultitudeometimes of re strikingceded i nimagesto sScheiboundtr ahasck mdevisedusic. to jolt the New York City Opera’s brief spring season to a sizzling start last weekend. But that didn’t happen often, thanks to the razor-sharp conducting of Jonathan Stockhammer. TTherehe tex wasture sa wlote rgoinge so c on,lean at a timesnd pre arguablysent that tooI gr much,ew sus sopic theiou sscathing and sca score--thenned the phistoryrogram for a sofou Westernnd-desig nmusic cred ifromt. Bu t1900 no, itto’s 1950all do runne a throughcoustica all yCuisinart--sometimes, and it sounds sublim recedede. into soundtrack music. What’s perhaps most attractive about this score is its lack of self-regard, or rather of the failed aButttem thatpt a didn’tt profu happenndity th aoften,t bog sthanks down toth ethe co razor-sharpmposer’s se conductingcond opera of, T Jonathanhe Tempe st. It’s a wildly eStockhammer.clectic mix of c Thehees texturesy tango swere, tink lsoing clean pop sandong presents, and tthathe g Ir egrewates tsuspicious hits of Rav andel, scanned Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Alban Berg, orchestrated with a musical theater sensibility. the program for a sound-design credit. But no, it’s all done acoustically, and it sounds Asublime. band of 18 players double, triple, and quadruple on a forest of woodwinds and a hardware shop of exotic noisemakers: “[T]emple blocks, three brake drums, tambourine, triangle, tam- taWhat’sm, vibr perhapsaslap, w mostashb oattractiveard, caba aboutça, la rthisge fscoreishing is re itsel, lackwhip of, l ioself-regard,n's roar, po orpg ratherun, sc ofra pthe m etal, efailedlectric attemptbell” – aatn dprofundity that’s just thatthe ebogsnd o fdown the li sthet o fcomposer’s the first pe rsecondcussion opera,ist’s a pThepar aTempest.tus. It’s a wildly eclectic mix of cheesy tangos, tinkling pop songs, and the greatest hits of When I first heard this piece back in 1998 (semi-staged in the smaller BAM Harvey theater), I www.musicalamerica.com/news/printarticle.cfm?sid=29067&cid=4&arc=0 1/3

February 19, 2013 Ravel, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Alban Berg, orchestrated with a musical theater sensibility.

A band of 18 players double, triple, and quadruple on a forest of woodwinds and a hardware shop of exotic noisemakers: “[T]emple blocks, three brake drums, tambourine, triangle, tam- tam, vibraslap, washboard, cabaça, large fishing reel, whip, lion's roar, popgun, scrap metal, electric bell” – and that’s just the end of the list of the first percussionist’s apparatus.

When I first heard this piece back in 1998 (semi-staged in the smaller BAM Harvey theater), I thought it was a sort of bratty goof, but I’m happy to say I’ve revised my opinion since then. In an opera about a woman who is apparently all surface, gliding through an artificial and shallow society, Adès’s magpie borrowings and glassy textures are just right--holding, as it were, the mirror up to the mirror crack’d.

But there’s more than just brilliance here, as the less extravagant second half of the piece allows the listener to get a little under the skin of the bizarre heroine. Her vocal lines exhibit an unremitting slow vehemence that indicates the enormous effort the Duchess must exert just to stay in place—or, as Cook’s fearlessly intense performance suggested, just to remain this side of madness.

She not only pumped out her bombastic Gluckian recitatives in a rich, rangy mezzo, but she looked the part to an almost frightening degree: anorexically modish, made up and wigged so completely and severely as to look more like a mannequin than a human being. Yet even in her raunchiest moment she kept up something of the façade: the Duchess saw herself as a great lady only playing at being a tart, in on the joke. (The tragedy, of course, is that she never grasped the larger joke that she was no lady at all, let alone great.)

The other three singers proved adept multitaskers in their various roles of servants, onlookers, and authority figures, acing rhythmically intricate vocal lines while bouncing on beds, wrestling in underwear, or snorting cocaine in a mirrored bathroom. (The one moment of overreach I thought was interpolating an under-the-bench blowjob for the hypocritical Judge: Adès’s grotesque music and Philip Hensher’s pompous text already makes the jurist sufficiently a buffoon.)

Soprano Nili Riemer giggled the coloratura flights of the Duchess’s maid precisely and, more to the point, nonchalantly, without any seeming effort. Bass Matt Boehler plumbed the subterranean depths of Judge’s aria and intoned the portentous phrases of the Hotel Manager with equal gravitas.

Bravest of all was tenor William Ferguson, who sounded clear and fresh whether flouncing about in drag, stripped to the buff, or tiptoeing through an ambiguously gay foxtrot with actor/acrobat Jon Morris’s scruffy Waiter.

Morris, an eyeful himself with his overalls down around his ankles, later took the lead in performing what might be called a physical leitmotif in Scheib’s staging, a number of

February 19, 2013 gestures repeated over and over without successful completion. For example, he did a couple of spontaneous-looking back flips off the rear fender of an automobile parked upstage, landing both times in a pratfall.

Other subtler manifestations of this motif included Riemer slapping Ferguson after a clumsy grope, and the packing and unpacking of moving crates by another character Scheib added, a Nurse played by the cool, statuesque actress Kaneza Schaal.

Lord knows City Opera has its problems, but this Powder Her Face demonstrates the company is not flailing artistically as it has been for the last couple of seasons. A whole season of productions on this level (if, as and when) I think would point to a bright future for NYCO, not merely surviving, but thriving.

Further performances Feb. 21 and 23. http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyID=29067&cate goryID=4

Ades' 'Powder Her Face' opens NY City Opera season

February 17, 2013, 1:35 p.m. ET

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Thomas Ades wanted to be provocative in his first opera, "Powder Her Face," when he composed a scene in which he musically depicts a sex act between the Duchess of Argyll and a waiter.

Not enough for director Jay Scheib, who turns the tawdry tale into a numbing night of decadence by adding two dozen naked men standing, stumbling and slumbering around a hotel room in New York City Opera's new production that opened Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House.

The 1995 work by the then 24-year-old composer started the company's second straight abbreviated season following its departure from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

With glistening music and a poetic libretto by Philip Hensher portraying the libertine lives of the Duchess and Duke, a socialite proclaimed "wholly immoral" and "a Don Juan among women" by Lord Wheatley in his 1963 divorce ruling, Ades revels in the licentiousness that spilled into the British tabloids.

The pleasure-above-all nature of the Duchess, the former Ethel Margaret Whigham, is fueled by cocaine, alcohol, callousness and disregard for boundaries, while Ades searches for a modern musical idiom that would become more mature in his 2004 composition "The Tempest," given its Metropolitan Opera premiere last October.

There are hints of show tunes along with 20th-century giants, such as Berg, Satie and Strauss. The Duchess commands attention like a meteor burning across the sky.

"I was beautiful. I was famous. I was young. I was rich," the Electrician, disguised as the Duchess, sings during the first of nine stream-of-consciousness scenes that start and end in 1990 and stretch back to the 1950s and 1930s. The Duchess comes off as molten and cool at the same time, mixtures of heroines unable to cope with the acquisition and loss of money and attention.

1 She was the life of the party every night, an out-of-control, look-at-me Lohan, Kardashian and Hilton of the pre-television, pre-paparazzi age. She dabbed herself with the perfume "Joy" and tried to imbue the scent and sentiment into all around her.

But the scene moved on. Decades later she was evicted from her luxury hotel, disgraced and unable to pay her numerous bills.

Scampering about in expensive-looking dresses and lingerie, mezzo-soprano Allison Cook had a bit of a Wallis Simpson look and created an uninhibited portrait of the Duchess, her voice soaring, choking and snickering.

Soprano Nili Riemer was the Maid, who transformed into a rubbernecker at the trial and a journalist. She provided spunk and spark — and must have been exhausted by the end of the night from repeatedly bouncing on a bed as if it were a trampoline.

Bass Matt Boehler sang the Hotel Manager, who also becomes the Duke and a rubbernecker and the stiff-and- shocked judge, injecting a sense of gravitas. And tenor William Ferguson sang the Electrician, who becomes the somewhat but not-so-shocked Waiter.

Scheib's production features simple furniture by Marsha Ginsburg on an airy set, with trees interspersed during the latter scenes. There were fashionable costumes by Alba Clemente, and the staging made prominent use of projections by Josh Higgason and video shot on stage by Chelsey Blackmon.

And there were the 22 nude men, billed as a "Corps of Lovers," at least one of whom did a handstand.

The opening at BAM, where "Powder" received a semi-staged U.S. premiere in 1998 at what now is called the Harvey Theater, was part of a run of four performances through Feb. 23, and NYCO's season continues with Britten's "The Turn of the Screw" at BAM from Feb. 24-March 2. The company then returns to City Center in Manhattan, its home from 1944-65, to conclude its 16- performance season with Rossini's "Mose in Egitto (Moses in Egypt)" (April 14-20) and Offenbach's "La Perichole" (April 21-27).

For dauntlessness, it will be hard to top "Powder."

"Could you not have pity for me?" the Duchess sings just before the final note. At the final curtain, after all the nudity and debauchery, the audience seemed dazed before giving warm applause to the cast, conductor Jonathan Stockhammer and the composer. http://www.nycopera.com/

2 New York City Opera: Powder Her Face | Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera House | Opera review 3/2/13 12:56 PM

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New York City Opera's Powder Her Face at BAM is a must-see

Friday Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera Powder Her Face 15-Feb-13 House, New York City, NY (Adès) 19:30 New York City Opera: Powder Her Face New York City Opera More info... Jonathan Stockhammer, Conductor Reviews... Jay Scheib, Stage Director Allison Cook, Soprano: Duchess Nili Riemer, Soprano: Maid William Ferguson, Tenor: Electrician Matt Boehler, Bass: Hotel Manager

The chamber opera Powder Her Face has acquired a reputation as a “Don Giovanni for the Monica Lewinsky generation”, a tagline of which I was initially quite skeptical. In college I took a semester- long “Don Giovanni class” that was devoted in its entirety to Bachtrack Mozart’s opera, which inspired countless essays, criticisms, racy productions for both film and the stage, and even a 1987 spin-off opera by Elodie Lauten. How could an opera so legendary that Kierkegaard wrote extensively about it really compare with an opera composed in the 1990s by a 24- year-old?

Thomas Adès’s controversial work tells the story of the real-life Duchess of Argyll, who was publicly accused of 88 extramarital affairs. Powder Her Face is in fact astutely comparable to Don Giovanni, whose mythical title character documents thousands of conquests rattled off by Giovanni’s servant during the famous “catalogue aria”. Giovanni, who might be diagnosed with narcissism or sex addiction by a modern psychologist, is ultimately incinerated by the fires of damnation, but not because he slept with every woman he laid eyes upon,

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Off-Broadway Review 'Powder Her Face' Is Witty, Stylish, and Moving

By Clifford Lee Johnson III | Posted Feb. 16, 2013, 5:32 p.m. Brooklyn Academy of Music Share: New York City Opera Powder Her Face theater Thomas Adès

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'Switched At Birth' Photo Source: Carol Rosegg Actors Talk TV's First If, like me, you are not an opera buff, and you can’t bear listening to heavily dissonant music, you All-Sign Language might dismiss New York City Opera’s “Powder Her Face,” composer Thomas Adès' work at Episode and Roles For Brooklyn Academy of Music, as not worth seeing. That would be a mistake. A witty score, a brace Deaf Actors of brave performances, and plenty of stylish directing make it a satisfying theatrical experience that will both tickle and challenge you. A nonsinging chorus of 25 naked men doesn’t impede its watchability either. 5 Ways to Give a Great Interview Based on the sensationalized 1963 divorce trial of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, “Powder Her Face” explores themes of sexuality, gender, class, betrayal, and hypocrisy. While its characters are two-dimensional, and its plot is choppy and undramatic, Adès’ music, discordant http://www.backstage.com/review/ny-theater/off-broadway/powder-her-face-new-york-city-opera-bam-thomas-ades/ Page 1 of 4 'Powder Her Face' Is Witty, Stylish, and Moving 3/2/13 1:00 PM

as it is, gives the piece a surprising depth of feeling. His vain, shallow, slightly bigoted duchess is not a tragic heroine by any means, but by the end of the opera we ache for her, because the score A Director's Dos and plucks at our own gut feelings of despair. Don'ts For Working in Television The libretto, by Philip Hensher, is serious without being pretentious, and it’s peppered with jokes. The scene in which the duchess tries desperately to order a beef sandwich from room service while surrounded by a herd of naked men is delicious. The end of that scene, which calls for the duchess to perform onstage fellatio, has drawn outpourings of outrage and shock, but as to a large degree the opera is about our collective attraction to and shame over sexuality, I find it both CASTING & JOBS: crucial and brilliant. With our new submission process, applying “Powder Her Face” spans six decades. The action begins in 1990 at the hotel where the duchess has never been easier! lives. As she thinks back over her life, she recalls first meeting the duke in the 1930s. Her party- filled life back then was so empty that she began to take lovers to relieve the boredom. Then comes the divorce, caused by the duke discovering a hoard of photographs of her having sex with film various lovers. Back in 1990, the hotel manager evicts the now penniless duchess, leaving her to 'ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND CONTINUES' shuffle out of her room as empty as her bottle of personal perfume, Joy. Catrett Locke Casting is seeking Atlanta-area talent for this long- Director Jay Scheib provides a welcome comic touch and inventive staging, making smart use of awaited sequel starring Will Ferrell an onstage video camera that literally allows us to see what’s going on behind the scenes. Conductor Jonathan Stockhammer brings lightness to Adès’ jangling, multifarious orchestrations. tv As the duchess, Allison Cook is beautiful in voice and person, and her acting in the fellatio scene 'HOSTAGES' is brave and heartrending. Nili Riemer scores as the duke’s scheming mistress, Matt Boehler gives Central Casting is seeking high scool us a pitiable duke and a buffoonish judge, and William Ferguson renders a strong-voiced, slightly lacrosse players for the pilot episode feral waiter. of Jerry Bruckheimer's new CBS drama starring Toni Collette, Dylan If opera were to move along the path blazed by “Powder Her Face” and deliver additional sexy, McDermott, and Tate Donovan funny, fresh, surprising, and youthful works—in other words, use buff operas to create opera buffs —it might have a bright and vital future. film Presented by New York City Opera at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y. Feb. 15–23. (718) 636-4100 or www.bam.org. 'MEMETIC' Phenomenon Media is casting leading roles in this thriller about a young tech Critic’s Score: B+ researcher who makes unnerving connections while struggling to regain her memory after a car accident

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systematically destroying their lives with his vague, commitophobic promises of marriage – always left unfulfilled when he scurried from their bedrooms as soon as any hint of boredom set in. No, Giovanni roasts in hell for second-degree murder – that’s right, he killed a man during the first scene. The Duchess of Argyll, on the other hand, is condemned for being “a woman unfit for marriage” and “a Don Juan among women” (by a judge who, in one of many satirical twists, is receiving a surreptitious blowjob underneath the table).

The opera achieves the perfect balance between hilarity and keen social commentary in its depiction of a woman who was described in her own obituary in 1993 as possessing a “debased sexual appetite”. Like Don Giovanni, the Duchess was mostly just bored – with, as a maid sings at one point, “too much money and nothing to do”. The scenes of her life are populated by champagne and cocaine and a string of interchangeable characters – cleverly illustrated by the other actors shifting seamlessly between multiple roles. Her husband, also engaged in an extramarital affair, is pardoned for making a mistake anybody could make, i.e. marrying incorrectly, while the Duchess gets painted by the media as a perverse woman who wasn’t satisfied with “normal” sexual relations. In fact, the scene in which the Duchess seduces a waiter and then performs fellatio on him, all while surrounded by dozens of silent nude men, turns the tables on not only the Don Juan myth but the myth that women are not supposed to enjoy sex. How refreshing to see men objectified in an entertainment culture that for the most part still treats women as objects!

In her role as the Duchess, the talented Allison Cook propelled through a slew of musical and physical gymnastics while maintaining an unmatched expressiveness. She was often followed closely by a “cameraman” whose film was projected in real time onto a large screen occupying different parts of the stage during different scenes; I was impressed by the range not only of her voice but of emotion displayed on her face during these close-ups. She suffused the banter of Philip Hensher’s libretto with enough human quality to remind us that the Duchess, unlike Don Giovanni, was a real person. And this libretto was a brilliant match for Adès’s music, even more so than the debatably “annoying” rhyme scheme of The Tempest, Adès’s excellent second opera.

Thomas Adès’s unique sound world was the perfect backdrop for a sex scandal. The orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, navigated the score with spirited versatility. Like the actors, the musicians had to tackle multiple roles throughout the opera: a harp doubling electric bell and fishing reel, clarinets doubling bass clarinet and saxophone and swanee whistle, button accordion doubling electric bell, and so on. The brass instruments and hollow percussive textures punctuated the jazzy, smoldering harmonies and melodies like commas and periods in the newspaper stories circulating about the Duchess’s trial. At times the music flashed and dazzled like the ever-present paparazzi cameras; at others the descending wind passages dripped from the instruments like champagne from the glasses the Duchess was constantly smashing against the walls. The music was never predictable: dissonant enough to keep things interesting, but never discordant with the characters or the antics occurring onstage.

It’s hard to say if Powder Her Face will spark the same level of discourse that Mozart’s Don Giovanni incited over 200 years ago. At any rate, the combined efforts of director Jay Scheib, the set and costume designers, and the incredible performers creates a rare and surreal experience. Last year, Michael Grandage’s lackluster production of Don Giovanni put me to sleep; during Powder Her Face I was perched on the edge of my seat, hoping the story of the Dirty Duchess would never end.

Submitted by Rebecca Lentjes on 18th February 2013

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February 2013

Bed-Bouncing Opera Thomas Adès's Powder Her Face at New York City Opera tells "dirty duchess" stories

By Michael Feingold Wednesday, Feb 20 2013

Onstage and off, the pleasures of sex have always played a major role in opera. While the lurid love lives of superstar divas kept the gossips busy, the even more lurid lives of the characters they embodied—from Monteverdi's Poppaea to Berg's Lulu—kept audiences riveted to their seats. Presumably, the contemporary British composer Thomas Adès and his librettist, Philip Hensher had this tradition in mind when they cooked up their chatter-causing 1995 chamber opera, Powder Her Face, currently receiving its first full production locally, as part of New York City Opera's BAM season, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer and staged by Obie-winning director Jay Scheib.

Though full of eyebrow-raising sex talk and sexual events, including what must surely rank as the only onstage act of vocalized fellatio in musical-theater history, Powder Her Face turns out to be, if you will pardon the expression, a curiously flaccid work. Hensher's libretto, limply structured and uncertain in tone, is loosely inspired by the notorious life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (1912-1993), the so-called "dirty duchess" whose two divorces and numerous, well-documented extramarital affairs made her, for decades, a darling of Britain's tabloids.

The opera shifts hazily back and forth in time, utilizing an awkward conceit: Employees at the hotel where an unnamed duchess (Allison Cook) has been spending her impoverished later years become figures from or commentators on her earlier life. Its view of its heroine veers with seeming randomness from sympathy to snide contempt. Adès's score, often imaginatively textured but rarely compelling, illustrates these ungainly shifts of time, place, and attitude with a wide range of musical tactics, including bursts of yelping staccato coloratura for the duchess's maid (Nili Riemer) that prefigure the strings of hiccuping high notes he provided for Ariel in his later opera, The Tempest, which premiered at the Met last fall.

Though impressively resourceful, Adès's music, like the libretto, never coalesces to convey any overall purpose, as if Adès and Hensher had wanted to write an opera, had seized on the recently deceased Duchess of Argyll's life as a suitably "hot" topic, and had then simply plowed ahead without much thought over what the addition of topic to form would equal. Evocations of predecessor works abound: A lot of the vocal writing suggests Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire; a final solo for the Duchess recalls the pensive closing scene of Strauss's Capriccio; a late burst of tango suggesting that the score has been hijacked in its last moments by Ástor Piazzolla. The ultimate effect is not tragic, satiric, or shocking, but strangely desultory.

The opera's lack of definition inevitably provokes a vagueness of response, making it a work to chat about over drinks rather than one to cherish. The haziness leaves Powder Her Face's central character a blur—rather a disservice to the remarkable woman on whose startling life it's ostensibly based. Zachary Woolfe, previewing the opera in a feature for The New York Times, erroneously referred to the historical Duchess of Argyll as "fame- and money-hungry," which is quite the opposite of the truth. Ethel Margaret Whigham was born into a world of wealth and society-page glamor. Her father was a Scottish millionaire, chairman of the Celanese Corporation; she arrived in adulthood as "Debutante of the Year." Her wedding at age 21, to an American named Charles Sweeny (for whom she had jilted an earl), drew such crowds that it blocked traffic in Knightsbridge for several hours.

"They wrote songs about me," the opera's duchess declares, and her real-life counterpart's celebrity did in fact extend to one mention in a popular "list" song: P.G. Wodehouse, emending Cole Porter's "You're the Top" for the first London production of Anything Goes, rhymed "Mrs. Sweeny" with "Mussolini." Till 1943, a well-publicized series of alleged romantic flings kept her in the gossip columns. Then came a news-making tragic accident, unmentioned in the opera: her near-fatal fall down an elevator shaft in 1943. (Even this had a glamorous setting; it occurred while she was leaving a chiropodist's office on Bond Street.)

The fall seems to have jarred loose Mrs. Sweeny's moral sense. She and Sweeny divorced in 1947; she married Argyll in 1951. It was in those years that her already healthy libido moved into the excessive phase that led the Duke, in 1963, to file for divorce. The vast number of affairs alleged in his suit, some with photographs as evidence (including one of the duchess fellating an unidentified man variously alleged to have been a movie star and a cabinet minister), supplied the scandal-sheet fodder that transformed her from "debutante of the year" into "the dirty duchess." The ex-Duchess of Argyll outlived her scandalous second divorce to remain, at least in her own mind, a quintessential image of bygone elegance and class privilege, flickeringly in the public eye, for the next three decades. She published a memoir and, less probably, a book purporting to instruct the young in beauty secrets and social graces. She saw no irony in her bemoaning, when she granted a rare interview in her old age, the contemporary decline in manners.

City Opera's production animated Adès's quirky work in ways that displayed its fine qualities without concealing its patent limitations. Stockhammer's orchestra illuminated the score's multitude of details with passionate, nuanced exactitude. Riemer handled her difficult, ultimately unrewarding vocal tasks with aplomb. She and tenor William Ferguson (as a hotel electrician who, like the Duchess's maid, embodies a variety of roles) managed to sing lustrously even while bouncing or rolling on a variety of beds. Baritone Matt Boehler, as the hotel manager and other authority figures, sang less attractively but imbued his multiple roles with an even stronger acting presence. Cook invested the opera's strangely wan portrait of the duchess with elegant stature, both musically and physically, seizing the work's one genuinely dramatic passage (the post- divorce aria, "So that is all") with a fervor that made you wish the whole thing had been that rich.

Scheib's staging, recalling repeated-motion works by Richard Foreman and others, populated Marsha Ginsberg's panoramic set (painted an eerie institutional green) with additional silent figures, including the gymnast Jon Morris as a mute and highly flexible waiter. At one point, a covey of naked men emerged from all directions, a visual summation of the duchess's promiscuity. But their seemingly aimless drift across the stage only reinforced the opera's overall aimlessness. The wide range of visual tactics Scheib employed included film sequences and live- action video; he keyed the characters' gestures, sharply and sensitively, to shifts in the music. The production looked, and felt, like a strong overall statement; only the underlying work's weakness made the statement lack weight.

2 In My Lady’s Crowded Chamber by Geoffrey O'Brien | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books 3/2/13 12:58 PM

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NYRblog : Roving thoughts and provocations from our writers In My Lady’s Crowded Chamber

Geoffrey O’Brien

Pavel Antonov Allison Cook in Powder Her Face

“Even horrible people are tragic.” With this widely quoted phrase Thomas Adès summed up the gist of his 1995 opera Powder Her Face. The horrible person in question is Ethel Margaret Whigham, the fashionable debutante who became the Duchess of Argyll by her second marriage in 1951, and was divorced twelve years later following a trial that evidently handed the London tabloids almost more material than they knew what do with— a variety of sometimes well-documented affairs with some eighty-eight lovers of high and low degree—and more than the opera in its two-hour-and-twenty-minute running time can do much beyond hint at. Adès and his librettist Philip Hensher telescoped the Duchess’s affairs into a single call to room service, culminating notoriously in the first operatic aria sung by a character engaged in performing fellatio—a composition of muffled hums and cries, ending in an orgasmic crash, that is perfectly at home in the opera’s constantly

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disrupted sonic texture, where no style or tone or mood can persist for long without being shoved out of the way by another.

The horribleness of the Duchess is summed up by the judge in her divorce proceedings who (while, in the City Opera production, being sexually serviced himself by an unseen male) declares her “a woman unfit for marriage… a woman unfit to hold an ancient and honorable title.” As framed by Adès and Hensher the Duchess’s horribleness has more to do with her insatiable vanity and assumption of aristocratic privilege, her mental imprisonment in a bubble world in which “the only people who were ever good to me were paid for it”: a tragic fate that unfolds within a brutally farcical sex comedy, whose protagonist’s defects are more than matched by the exploitative, servile, caddish, voyeuristic, and hypocritically moralizing cast of characters surrounding her.

“Enough.” “Or too much.” These are the final words sung in the opera, just as the disgraced and now impoverished duchess is ejected, in her eighties, from her long-time residence in the Dorchester Hotel, for failing to pay rent. It sounds almost like a question Adès may have asked himself as he composed the work, at age twenty-four. One could see it as an attempt to test how many modes and textures—how many possible viewpoints and emotional readings, slapstick or embittered or pathetic—could be crammed into a work of such brevity, as if he might never have the chance again.

The set-up is ostensibly minimal: a hotel room and four singers. But in this jack-in-the-box chamber opera, the chamber mutates into a succession of other spaces, from a country house to a courtroom, and three of the four singers take on enough roles to fill out a much grander work. The extreme compression of musical forms and associations—Adès drags in tango and 1930s pop music and 1950s jukebox percussion along with inescapable echoes of Berg, Janacek, and Stravinsky—is matched by a radical compacting together of roles and decades. Serving as punctuation at every turn are those precise expressions of class distinction that constantly inflect each character’s response to the goings-on—from the Duchess’s “I like to have my usual maid” to the courtroom rubbernecker’s “From what I’ve heard they’ve their own code,” the words inflected by varying shades of haughtiness or deference, open envy or repressed mockery—and that make this so utterly English an opera even when it doesn’t sound like one.

What’s extraordinary about Adès’s score is how the disparate pieces of it mysteriously cohere. At one point, a 1930s lounge lizard (played by the tenor William Ferguson, who doubles as the electrician) launches into a perfectly tailored Jack Buchanan-style pop song

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—“There’s nothing in all the world / Like being curled around your little finger”— and the elements of drawing-room operetta come together magically for a stanza or so (Ferguson for a moment incarnating soft-shoe aplomb) before melting back seamlessly into their unstable surroundings.

Enough, or too much, might also be the question raised by Jay Scheib’s New York City Opera production of the work, which has just opened at BAM. Scheib has doubled down on the opera’s compression by adding a multitude of other elements. It is the busiest production imaginable, instilling something of a circus atmosphere, with an anonymous tumbler somersaulting over beds and a succession of broad sight gags, chairs pulled out from under, a collapsing stack of cardboard boxes, not to mention the twenty-five nude men who in the fourth scene emerge from beds, closets, bathrooms, and every other available point of ingress to represent at least a sampling of the duchess’s many lovers. There might be another way to do this opera, a darker, more anguished and decay-ridden way, but Scheib can hardly be faulted for the constant bright exuberance he has brought out, since the effect is to demonstrate what a dramatically resilient work this is. No doubt there are many more ways to do it as yet untried.

Scheib’s devices sometimes can clutter the precision of the work’s lines. That horde of nude men, for instance, comically emerging to fill most of the available space in the duchess’s bedchamber, lounging around to watch the TV, where a video of her husband having sex with a housemaid is showing, get in the way of our sense of the duchess’s fevered solitude and blur the effect of the room service scene that immediately follows. But absence of solitude becomes a running motif here, right up to the point in the last scene when the duchess (here played by Allison Cook) will finally find herself completely alone in the room from which she is about to be evicted. Not only does she have no place of her own; she does not even have herself: upstaged right from the start, she makes her first appearance not in person but as a derisory send-up in drag, as the electrician who has come to mend her tea tray dons her fur coat and does a campy and obscene take-off of the aging grande dame to the hysterical (and meticulously orchestrated) laughter of the hotel maid. By the time she makes her actual entrance, her reputation has preceded her.

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Carol Rosegg Jon Morris, Nili Riemer, Allison Cook, Chelsey Blackmon, Kaneza Schaal in Powder Her Face

This initial doubling is extended in Scheib’s staging by a proliferation of double images. Even before the curtain goes up we are watching a simultaneous video feed of what is happening in the hotel room, and throughout the early scenes, thanks to both hidden cameras and an on-stage camera operator stalking the characters, we are continually given a choice of watching the action on stage or the blown-up video images that occupy shifting portions of the visual field, images that either enlarge that action or display altogether different scenes taking place around the corner or in the adjacent hallway. We are caught up, as it were, in the same world of images by which the duchess and those around her are perpetually distracted. When the maid, laying out the food for a garden party, launches into her aria “Fancy being rich”—an oddly lovely and delicate passage, especially as sung by Nili Riemer, to shimmering Ravelian accompaniment—her evocations of “cut fruit in aspic… fish swimming in aspic” become the soundtrack for a grotesque commercial as the camera swoops down for immense close-ups of the luncheon goodies.

The opera gathers power as it goes along. The trial scene comes energetically into focus with a Monty Python-ish duet of onlookers from the general public followed by the judge’s cacophonous call for silence, which leads into his condemnatory speech—a piece of opera buffa grotesquerie. Things could not get much more comical; and at just that moment the duchess takes the stand and cuts through with a tone of austere defiance that has the effect, musically, of rolling over everything that has gone before: “So that is all. I am judged. I do not care. And that was all. There are worse things in life.”

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Here, and throughout, Allison Cook is able to capture every jagged shift of the Duchess’s characterization. If Powder Her Face survives in the repertoire it will be above all because it creates an irresistible operatic role, a one-woman hall of mirrors whose force pulls together the whirl of fragments out of which the opera’s world is constructed. Even as the deluded and vampiric representative of a fading class, even in denial and decay—a decay which, it must be said, Cook’s vibrant presence could do little to suggest—she does finally stand in for a force that gives a glimmering half-life, even as she acknowledges that “there’s nothing in all the world,” to what would otherwise be a hollow puppet show. Her final duet with the hotel manager who comes to throw her out—a basso role, forcefully sung by Matt Boehler, summoning up some deathly figure, Charon or Hades, from a baroque opera—sweeps away the detritus of tea parties and scandal sheets at the edge of a room about to emptied.

The New York City Opera production of Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through February 23

February 19, 2013, 4:07 p.m.

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February 13, 2013

British Opera Pro Allison Cook on the Royals and Her New Unusual Act by REBECCA MILZOFF

British mezzo soprano Allison Cook has an opera resume full of notorious women— Carmen, Dulcinea, and Salome, for starters— but none quite measure up to the starring role she’s about to take on. In the New York City Opera’s new production of composer Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, Cook plays Margaret Campbell, who was known as the “Dirty Duchess” in 1960s Britain. When Campbell split from her husband, the Duke of Argyll, there were 11 days of dirty divorce proceedings, and the tabloids pounced on the juicy details of her alleged promiscuity. Her diary was exposed describing the sordid details of her numerous love affairs and a Polaroid photo surfaced of Campbell, wearing nothing but three strands of pearls, in a compromising position with a man whose head wasn’t visible (he’d become known as The Headless Man).

In the end, though she was accused of taking 88 men as lovers, Campbell was only found guilty of having three. Throughout the opera, Cook is called upon to perform all sorts of decidedly non-diva-like acts. She spoke with ELLE.com about the opera’s odd timeliness (after all, even the Duchess of Cambridge has dealt with leaked topless photos), her sympathy for Kate Middleton, and more racy subjects.

February 13, 2013 ELLE: How did you go about researching such a colorful character?

Allison Cook: I read her biography and her autobiography, and they are completely different readings. In her autobiography, I can tell what she wanted people to know about her: She was pure as the driven snow, she thinks these terrible things happened to her, that people took advantage of her. The biography is a bit more rounded! She had a colorful life.

ELLE: Did you learn anything particularly surprising about her?

AC: I felt sorry for her in a way—she had a very privileged life, but it had to be a lonely life. She had a stammer, which she said was brought on by the fact that she was left handed but her parents wouldn’t let her write with her left hand—which was quite common in the day. It was seen as lower class. I’m glad Jay Scheib, our director, has brought up the possibility that we can feel sorry for her; that she’s not just this grotesque caricature.

ELLE: It amazes me that such a fuss could be made over a woman’s sexual behavior in the swinging '60s. Why do you think that was?

AC: I think it was just because she married into a dukedom, that there was that kind of breeding involved. If a man had slept with so many women, would it have been so scandalous? It’s not at all something I’d thought about until I arrived in New York, but wow—it was '63 when the duke took her to court for adultery, and in the '60s people were doing all kinds of things! This was just a woman who allegedly had a lot of sex. I think it says an awful lot about the society then, which is very similar to society now; we just like a good story, really.

ELLE: It does seem very timely in that way—we’re still so obsessed with dirty pictures of, not only celebrities, but royals, too.

AC: It’s like Prince Harry—the pictures of him naked. People wouldn’t be interested in photographs of just any young man if he wasn’t a royal. I think there always will be a love in society of famous people becoming improper. We’ve got a lot of satirical writing in Britain, but every country I think has a version of Hello! magazine. It’s always the usual suspects in all these magazines, and I guess she was one of the famous usual

February 13, 2013 suspects of her day. Everyone was attracted to her, what she wore, what she did next, and, of course, who she slept with.

ELLE: There are shocking elements to this production. What should a viewer be prepared for?

AC: There is nudity. Well, there are quite a few naked men in the production in one scene. I don’t want to give too much away, but they’re there to represent some—not [all] 88—but some of the people from her past that she’d slept with. Nothing is lewd, though; it’s all very logical, actually, and done for a reason. If you’re going to be shocked though, great, because this mirrors the shock of the day, I think.

ELLE: It’s also a very unusually physical role, right?

AC: I don’t think there are many positions I don’t sing in. It’s very natural, the staging; it’s not stylized. No one’s making grand opera gestures. People talk the way people talk and react the way you would react to things. I have to sing lying on my back and bending over, and I am on all fours at one point. I smash a lot of things up, which is really nice.

Powder Her Face opens at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House on February 15; seenycopera.com for ticket info.

http://www.elle.com/news/culture/allison-cook-interview-powder-her-face

February 11, 2013

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