[Dixielandjazz] DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - LONG, NOT ABOUT OKOM UNLESS YOU CAN READ BETWEEN THE LINES. IT IS
HOWEVER ABOUT WHAT A MUSICAL ILLITERATE CAN ACCOMPLISH.

SOME WILL LOVE IT, SOME WILL HATE IT SO DELETE NOW OR READ, DEPENDING UPON
WHO YOU ARE.

Interesting that Roger Waters, who cannot read music, a rocker, etc., (all
the musical things many of us disparage) is able to do what this article
credits him with. 

Golly gee, imagine what we music literati could do if we would only set our
"superior" minds to it. :-) VBG.

Cheers,
Steve 


Do You Hear the People Sing? Isn't That Puccini? Or Pink Floyd?

By ALAN RIDING - NY TIMES - November 21, 2005

ROME, Nov. 18 - Aging rockers don't fade away; nor, apparently, do their
followers. So two decades after Roger Waters broke with Pink Floyd, as
bassist, lead singer and composer, fans flew here from across Europe to hear
his latest creation. And it seemed to matter little that he had written a
19th-century-style opera called "Ça Ira," or "There Is Hope."

Before the semistaged concert premiere began on Thursday in Renzo Piano's
new Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Mr. Waters was received with whoops and
cheers as he welcomed the public in halting Italian. Then, at the
intermission and the curtain call, there was more enthusiastic applause for
the cast as well as for the composer, at 62 still a striking figure with
flowing gray locks.

True, one young Englishwoman wondered, "I don't understand why an opera
about the French Revolution is being sung in English in Rome." But she
quickly added, "You can hear lots of Pink Floyd in it: the children's choir,
the bird sounds."

Well, perhaps. Still, if Mr. Waters can draw young audiences to an opera -
one far more mainstream than Pink Floyd's quasi-operatic album, "The Wall" -
he is already achieving more than most contemporary composers. By his own
admission, he leaned on Brahms, Puccini and Prokofiev for inspiration.

The work is written for full orchestra and chorus, and if staged, it would
require 12 solo singers. In a Sony Classical recording released in
September, the baritone Bryn Terfel, the tenor Paul Groves and the soprano
Ying Huang each sang several roles. Here John Relyea and Keel Watson
replaced Mr. Terfel, and Mr. Groves and Ms. Huang were joined by five other
singers.

How Mr. Waters came to write this opera dates back to the 200th anniversary
of the French Revolution in 1989, when a friend, the French lyricist Étienne
Roda-Gil, showed him a libretto, illustrated with drawings by Mr. Roda-Gil's
wife, Nadine. It covered the period from early 1789 to Marie Antoinette's
execution in 1793.

"I fell in love with the original manuscript in French," Mr. Waters said in
an interview in Paris some weeks before the premiere. "I spoke enough French
to get it. I liked the idea embodied in it, that 200 years ago, people sat
around and decided not only that the ancient régime had had its day but that
people should have rights - but not just the French, people everywhere."

Mr. Waters promptly prepared a short demonstration tape, which, he said,
President François Mitterrand of France heard and liked. Then nothing
happened, and the project was shelved for almost a decade. Eventually, Mr.
Waters and Mr. Roda-Gil resumed work and recorded a section with an
orchestra. That won over Sony, which, however, insisted on an
English-language version as well as the French one.

What made this project doubly unusual was that Mr. Waters could not read
music when he began writing "Ça Ira." In his Pink Floyd days, he composed by
singing and improvising with instruments. But here he could count on
computer programs that enabled him to write the score. Rick Wentworth, a
British musicologist who conducted the Roma Sinfonietta on Thursday, helped
him with orchestration.

"So I didn't need to be able to sit down at a piano with a pencil and a
piece of manuscript," Mr. Waters said. "I don't sight-read. If you sit me
down with a piece for the piano, I can't play it, but I can now tell you
what the notes are."

The libretto, which Mr. Waters expanded and adapted to English, inevitably
shapes the score, since it imagines the story being recounted and re-enacted
in a circus. The Ringmaster provides the principal narrative, and different
players, notably Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, either watch events unfold
from a box or enter the arena themselves.

But because the libretto is trying to cover so much ground, from the hungry
masses and the gluttonous court before Bastille Day to the guillotining of
first king, then queen, the narrative imposes a kind of declamatory
recitative that leaves little room for soaring arias or even catchy duets
and trios. Only occasionally do the chorus and orchestra slow the pace.

And since Mr. Waters and Mr. Roda-Gil, who died last year, both appear
consumed by the ideals contested in the Revolution, the opera's characters
are more symbolic than real: not least, Marie Marianne, sung here by Ms.
Huang, as the personification of the French Republic. So this is an opera
without a love story, and as operagoers know, that can be a problem.

The music certainly has echoes of Puccini ("Tosca" is Mr. Waters's favorite
opera) and Prokofiev (Mr. Waters said he had had in mind Prokofiev's score
for Eisenstein's movie "Ivan the Terrible"). Reviewing the Sony recording in
The New York Times, Allan Kozinn said he was reminded of Claude-Michel
Schönberg's music for "Les Misérables," and some Italian critics drew a
parallel with the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

A full staging of the opera would no doubt add raucous scenes and rich
costumes, but images projected onto a large screen above the chorus helped
give context to the story here. Some were historical paintings and drawings;
others, recent photographs evoking a circus and using actors to depict Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette.

"We're pretending we're projecting photographs of a production," Mr. Waters
said, "a visual representation of my idea of a production."

But for the moment, a staging remains an idea. More likely, Mr. Waters said,
are fresh concert versions in other cities. Why did Rome come first? "It was
simple," Mr. Waters said. "Flavio Severini, the artistic adviser of the
Musica per Roma Foundation, has always been a fan of my work. He wanted to
do it. We did the sums, and it worked out."