Goal for the Summer

Ok. Note to self: Goal for this summer is to work out!

Exercises:
Tuesday: Trapeze
Thursday: Elliptical
Friday: Bike/Tennis
Saturday: Climb
Sunday: Bike/Tennis

I haven’t really done much in the past month. I don’t know if it’s the inactivity, coupled with the stress of sitting hunched over at the desk for hours on end everyday that has caused my shoulders to feel so unbelievably sore. I finally went to get a massage last Friday. The massage therapist spent the entire hour just trying to work most of the kinks out of my shoulders. She managed to relieve the worst of the pain for a few days, but by yesterday I was in pain again. Had to ice my left shoulder last night. Unbelievable.

Snatch Thief of the CTA

Wow, it’s the second time I’ve been ‘mugged’ and escaped unscathed, with my belongings returned in their pristine condition.

Note to self: Never to use the phone while standing by the door of the train. I was on the CTA this afternoon, going uptown for an appointment, when, at the Addison stop, someone grabbed the phone from my hands just as the doors were about to close. For a split instant, I thought it was someone I knew, by way of saying hello. But then the fog cleared and I was like wtf!

So I jumped off the train, screaming at the guy – a burly black man in dreadlocks, a white t-shirt and jeans – and hoping someone would help me grab him. No one did, although they did sort of block his path as he attempted to run down the escalators. But I managed to reach out and grab his arm. In his panic, he turned back and threw down my phone on the ground.

I was much too relieved to get my phone back in one working piece and too focused to make it to my appointment on time that I let the matter go then. I’ve no idea where the dude ran off to, but I do know that someone must have reported the incident to the staff manning the station, because shortly after a lady came up and asked if everything was ok. Man. I know it happened to R in Europe, but that was Europe I thought! WTF.

Goosefoot

Recently, Jeff surprised me by taking me out to dinner. At Goosefoot! Only the restaurant I had been trying unsuccessfully to make reservations for (they are fully booked through August, the maximum date you can currently make reservations for).

Turns out, it was to celebrate our fourth anniversary, which had completely slipped my mind. Oops.

Goosefoot is touted as one of the latest best BYOB restaurants in the city, so we brought along the bottle of Seresin Rachel that we had lugged back from New Zealand. After hearing rave reviews from friends, our expectations were high.

As it turns out, the food, while solidly good, was not mind blowing. We had 8 on the menu courses (plus three more amuse bouche and dessert), so the portions were a tad larger than say Graham Elliot or El Ideas. I.e., we had an actual bowl of soup, not just served in a teeny tiny cup.

While some people appreciate a theme that runs through the courses, I got a little bored by the ubiquitous presence of goosefoot and truffle. In that regard, I felt that Chef Chris Nugent wasn’t quite as innovative.

But all in all, it was a delicious meal, with great company.

NYTimes: Bad Opera News Is No News

Wow, this is just off. Even the Singaporean in me balks at this level of censorship… NYTime’s latest report on the Met:

Latest Met Aria: Bad Opera News Is No News

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: May 21, 2012

Opera News, 76 years old and one of the leading classical music magazines in the country, said on Monday that it would stop reviewing the Metropolitan Opera, a policy prompted by the Met’s dissatisfaction over negative critiques.

The decision by the magazine, which is published by a Met fund-raising affiliate, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and which freely reviews companies around the world, troubles some opera experts. It is also the latest sign of sensitivity from the Met under its general manager, Peter Gelb, in the face of criticism over its productions. The move came after a review in April took aim at the Met’s new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle — a hallmark of Mr. Gelb’s tenure that has led to a firestorm — and after a top Opera News editor criticized the Met’s direction in a scathing essay in the May issue.

Mr. Gelb said in an interview on Monday that the decision was made “in collaboration with the guild” but that he never liked the idea that an organization created to support the Met had a publication passing judgment on its productions. Worse yet, he said, is a publication that “continuously rips into” an institution that its parent is supposed to help.

Last month Mr. Gelb protested to WQXR over a blog posting that called his leadership into question. It was immediately pulled. Last year the Met asked a blogger to stop revealing programming choices for future seasons before the official announcement. The blogger complied.

The newest subject of wrath is Opera News. Citing a circulation of 100,000, the largest for a classical music magazine in the country, it provides information on Met casts and broadcasts and glossy profiles of star singers. Along with features on other opera houses, performers of past eras and festivals, it also publishes critiques of performances around the world by knowledgeable and respected reviewers. They have included professional musicians, academics and local newspaper critics.

“As of the June 2012 issue, Opera News is not reviewing Metropolitan Opera productions,” F. Paul Driscoll, the magazine’s editor in chief, said in a terse telephone interview. He declined to elaborate but acknowledged that no other opera company had been banished from its pages.

During Mr. Gelb’s tenure, the Met has tightened the reins on the guild.

The company’s assistant manager for operations, Stewart Pearce, was made managing director of the guild, and the Met plays a stronger role in its educational programs. Three guild board members also have ex officio positions on the Met board, and donors solicited by the Met receive a subscription to the magazine as a perquisite. Slightly fewer than half the subscribers receive it that way.

Mr. Gelb may have reason to be more sensitive these days. He is under enormous pressure to raise money for the Met’s voracious seasons, which command budgets in excess of $300 million. Mr. Gelb has also been a tireless promoter of theatrically innovative productions and the importance of replacing old productions with new ones. Both leave him open to fire from critics and traditionalists.

Opera News has reviewed Met productions continuously since at least the mid-1970s, Mr. Driscoll said. While not frequent, negative notices have periodically made their way in, to the discomfiture of previous Met administrations. But no ban was imposed, at least in recent decades.

In the April issue, a review by Fred Cohn criticized the staging of Götterdämmerung, the final work in the “Ring” cycle. The productions of the four operas, which finished their run this month and were directed by Robert Lepage, were the subject of much critical scorn, although they had many fans too. Mr. Lepage’s huge piece of machinery used for all the operas functioned as a lightning rod.

“The physical scale of Robert Lepage’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ may have been immense, but its ambitions seemed puny,” Mr. Cohn wrote.

An essay in the May issue by Brian Kellow, the features editor, may have spelled the end. It read, “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them.”

Mr. Gelb singled out the line in Monday’s interview. Such negative comments from a publication that is part of a Met support organization “certainly would not be in the best interests of the Met,” he said.

One prominent opera supporter saw the ban as something else: censorship.

“It is irrational and interferes with the business of presenting artistic events,” said Nathalie Wagner, president of the Wagner Society of New York and a longtime Opera News subscriber. “Censorship doesn’t work in other countries, and it should not exist here. We think Opera News does an excellent and a vital job in covering opera.”

David J. Levin, a professor at the University of Chicago and the editor of the academic journal Opera Quarterly, also criticized the decision. “It’s inconceivable to me that the Met wouldn’t welcome nuanced and challenging criticism,” he said. If the Met is serious about presenting innovative productions and repertory, he added, they should not be met with a “rubber stamp.”

Update: Not 24 hours later, the Met reverses itself. Whew. What were they thinking in the first place?!?! Perhaps the better question to ask is, how objective can Opera News be if it’s run by the Met? Perhaps it’s time for a spin-off?

Met Reverses Itself on Reviews Ban by Opera News

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: May 22, 2012

The Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday backed away from its decision to bar reviews of its productions in Opera News, its affiliated magazine and the leading opera publication in the country.

The Met said an “outpouring of reaction” from opera fans on the Internet caused it to change course a day after The New York Times reported that Met officials and the publishers of Opera News had decided to stop reviewing Met shows.

“I think I made a mistake,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The Metropolitan Opera only exists with the good will of the public. Clearly the public would miss Opera News not being able to review the Met, and we are responding to that,” he added, referring to a “groundswell of disappointment.”

Opera News is published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, an organization set up in the 1930s to provide financial support for the Met. It is now a close auxiliary, run by a Met assistant manager.

Mr. Gelb had originally said it made no sense for Opera News to review performances by a company the Guild existed to support, especially when those reviews were negative.

A review of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” in the April issue was highly critical, and an essay in the May issue was scathing about the Met’s direction. “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them,” it read.

Along with nuts-and-bolts information about Met productions, Opera News, with a circulation of 100,000, features articles about singers and other opera houses, and includes reviews of recordings and performances from around the world.

While the magazine, founded in 1936, is closely linked to the Met, opera lovers look to it as a source of information about the field.

Many of those fans took to the digital barricades after hearing that the magazine was ceasing to publish reviews of the Met. The word “censorship” was frequently mentioned, and fans said the lack of critical debate was a loss to the opera world. Some said they would halt contributions or subscriptions to the Met.

“Shame on you, Mr. Gelb,” wrote a reader, CNR from Boynton Beach, Fla., on nytimes.com. “I sincerely hope you will reconsider this hasty decision, possibly made in a moment of anger.”

Others said the Met was well within its rights in pushing for the ban, especially after the May essay.

Yay for online radio opera broadcasts

Studying is made so much more palatable on a rainy day, with the online radio stations tuned into performances of Tales of Hoffman (Lyric Opera’s 2012 performance on WFMT) and Das Rheingold (Bavarian State Opera Orchestra on WQXR). Hehe.

And although I can’t watch visually, I’m at least familiar enough with these pieces now that I can comfortably follow the action by the music alone. Yay.

Hark a beautiful summer in Chicago

The weather has been startlingly beautiful these past few days. Alas, I haven’t had the leisure to spend much time outdoors, but the cool late spring air, the lush bursts of green trees that soften the sidewalks, the cloudless brilliant blue skies, all conspire to tear me away from the harsh artificial light indoors.

Two and a half more weeks before the CFA. I wish I had completed it a few years before, but I know full well why I didn’t – it’s so hard to force yourself to stay inside hunched over the books when spring is so glorious. Oh well. It’s too late for regrets anyway. Just hope the effort I’ve put in will be enough.

And then it’ll be time to pick up the regular routine again: trapeze, sailing, reading for leisure, bike rides, climbing, traveling. Also on the projects for this summer: house hunting. Would like to see if we could possibly pick something up before the market heats up.

Poor Gelb

It’s kind of sad – all the critics and online opera blogs that I read seem to enjoy slamming Metropolitan Opera’s Peter Gelb and the director of the “witless” Ring cycle, Robert Lepage. They make many valid complaints, and Lepage’s recent NYTimes article seems so defensive, it’s kind of funny.

Gelb seems unpopular in the community, what with his insistence on the “revolutionary” Lepage Ring and his hiring of non-opera directors to direct tepidly-received productions, and his latest gaffe of asking WQRX to pull an unflattering article about him has only stoked the flames.

But whatever his failings are, the guy’s done a phenomenal job of bringing Live in HD performances around the world! I don’t care that critics contend that watching opera on the screen is a poor experience of the real deal – the fact is, I get to watch so many more performances and artists that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. For that, I like the guy.

Tom and Jerry Conduct Carmen

Wahaha, this made me chuckle:

 

Massenet’s Manon

I caught the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming of Massenet’s Manon Lescaut on Wednesday. It’s a long, and at times, glacially moving opera – 4 hours long, with plenty of (in my opinion) redundant “grand opera”-like scenes, but the music more than makes up for it.

Essentially, Massenet’s Manon (so defined because Puccini wrote an opera by the same name and plot in 1893, just 9 years after Massenet’s) is a dressed up La Traviata, with a lengthier plot, more love interests, and more complicated characters. Where one easily sympathizes  with Traviata’s heroine, Violetta, it’s much harder to empathize with the ultimate fall of the willful and materialistic and Manon.

I think it’s hard to beat the on-stage charisma and intensity of Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon (hopefully they’ll sing together again one day, and soon), but it was still thrilling to watch Netrebko and tenor Piotr Beczala perform together. They lent a realism to their earnest love for each other, looking into each other’s eyes as they sang their love arias (too often, singers without chemistry just stare off into the distance when they’re supposedly singing about how passionately in love they are with the other person… I believe staged opera shouldn’t just be about the music, but the acting is important too… otherwise, I could easily just stay home and listen to the radio broadcasts, or concert performances). Beczala’s performance of “En fermant les yuex” was easily the most stirring and beautifully sung aria of the evening; gorgeous pianissimos! I also particularly enjoyed bass-baritone David Pittsinger’s singing (he played the senior de Grieux); he had a strong and robust voice and lent much gravitas to his role.

The staging itself was uneven. I liked the skeleton of the loft used in Act II, and thought that the askew floors and miniature houses and street lamps in the background brilliant for evoking scale and distance in the final act. I was less impressed with the scene in Act 3 however, which is set on the promenade of the Cours-la-Reine in Paris. That set was dominated by zig-zag ramps that the singers and choruses have to clumsily navigate around. That was also the scene I thought could have been cut much shorter. Heh.

Overall though, it was a most enjoyable opera; the plot’s dumb (but I think the updated plot by Puccini is even more ludicrous) but the music is simply sublime. Bought the Netrebko-Villazon performance on DVD; excited to watch it and compare!

Sake Tasting

Monthly tasting at work – the theme this month was sake, and was most educational. We learnt how to read the label on a sake bottle, about the grade of the sake is partly determined by the percentage of rice left over after polishing (it’s amusing how the Japanese tend to downplay the grade of their sake, while winemakers try their utmost to upsell), about how sake isn’t meant to be aged (presumably because there used to be a law that taxed the sake once fermentation started), etc. Apparently, there isn’t too much literature out there (relative to wine) describing sake, and Bill SJ, the really awesome guy who leads our tasting, exhorted us to help him describe the tastes of the four different sakes we sampled (maybe not quite the correct word, since we got generous pours of that stuff; dangerous!).