[Dixielandjazz] Uniforms? Appearance? or Performance? Band Dress Redux

[Stephen Barbone]

In past, we've often debated "uniforms or not", "on stage presentation"
or just what it is that rules a band's performance appeal. Below is the
subject from the perspective of "Opera". Not OKOM to all of us, however
some interesting thoughts about how performers "should" look. Ears or
Dress? You decide.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

PS. Reminds me of the magic of the radio program "Let's Pretend" on
Saturday's more than half a century ago. How eagerly I awaited that show
each week and how clearly I still hear the theme song.

May 26, 2004 - NY Times

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK  By BERNARD HOLLAND

Letting Ears Paint a Picture in the Mind's Eye

       CLEVELAND, May 24 — In opera, suspension of disbelief comes in
several sizes. The perfect fit is rarely in stock: performers who look
like their characters and sound like them too. Elsewhere the ear battles
the eye's incredulity and in the happiest cases wins, with performers
who don't resemble their characters at all, but sing divinely.

There is another situation, close to the one demonstrated by the
Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall here on Sunday: an opera
performance of Strauss's "Elektra" in an orchestra space. No props or
costumes, little acting, just Strauss's giant orchestra and a handful of
singers. There was not much to see and a lot of work for the
imagination.

As to disbelief, the perfect fit provides only short-term comfort.
Nature's timing is perverse in this respect, for it is only with the
years that singers grow physically comfortable in Strauss's big soprano
roles. The voice, in other words, has ripened, but so too have other
body parts. Recent opera history is strewn with remains of the handsome
and the promising, burned out by 35.

So it is a loving tribute to the faith of opera devotees that the
60-year-old swain can be happily accepted so long as his tenor still
throbs in the listener's ears. Consumptives (Mimi) and barely pubescent
teenagers (Cio-Cio San) are regularly played by 180-pound sopranos; ears
simply open that much wider while scarcely an eye is batted. The recent
failure of Deborah Voigt to properly inhabit a little black cocktail
dress to the
satisfaction of a Covent Garden director in London simply updated a
conflict of opposing interests that has been going on for a long time.

The Cleveland approach was more honest and less so. Laid out free of
impediment and distraction was the opulent savagery of Strauss's
orchestra part. If the visual terror and madness of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal's literary take on Sophocles went missing, the impact of
instruments — especially in the hands of the Cleveland players and their
music director Franz Welser-Möst — was shattering in a way no
performance from an opera pit could ever be.

This was too strong a cast to be completely engulfed. A platform
elevated the singers above the stage, allowing better projection into
the audience, but again, this was orchestra sound first and voices
second. In person none of the singers remotely resembled Sophocles'
bloodthirsty and dysfunctional family members. Again, it didn't matter.
One listened as if reading a novel without illustrations, when readers
construct their own pictures.

Felicity Palmer's Klytemnestra was a firestorm of desperation and
hysteria. Alan Held (Orest) and Volker Vogel (Aegisth) were splendid in
the men's parts. Christine Brewer might never convince a theater
audience of Chrysothemis's retiring nature, but here her soprano was in
excellent shape.

The interesting discovery was Lisa Gasteen in the title role, one she
sang last year at Covent Garden. Ms. Gasteen is an Australian with a
big, true, good-sounding and passionately directed soprano; she competed
well with the astonishing orchestra playing in front of her. One heard
the flexibility for Mozart and the promise of Wagner to come. The
Cleveland audience literally shrieked in approval.