Metropolitan Opera Free Dress Rehearsals
WALLS This is one of the better hurdles for a artisan aggravating to acclimate Buñuel: defining in music article that originally had little of it. Mr. Adès responds to the claiming with a crazily assorted score. His beforehand works accept apparent some agnate traits; his 1995 opera “Powder Her Face” is abounding of self-consciously abandoned winking.
["436.5"]But his sounds actuality are drifter and funnier. He emphasizes the situation’s surrealism with his best of instruments, like the ondes Martenot and its ethereal, aerial tones. Miniature violins and a bloom basin are included.
The Metropolitan Opera’s achievement of Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” appearance awful abnormal instruments, from tiny violins to slamming doors.
The orchestra’s “regular” instruments additionally get in on the fun. There’s a lot of antagonism in some of the ensemble scenes — but additionally some absent flit pulses that are agreeable for the would-be-elegant way they aberrate in from nowhere. What did you accomplish of the music?
["436.5"]KENNY Even admitting there’s little music in the film, “The Exterminating Angel” is about bodies accessory a banquet affair afterwards an opera — Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” — and the blur is steeped in music appreciation. One of the guests, Blanca, entertains anybody on the piano, and there’s allocution of pizzicato and sonatas. The best admirable woman in the group, Leticia, is mockingly accustomed the Wagnerian appellation “Valkyrie.”
It’s admirable that Mr. Adès doesn’t booty these specific classical-music allusions as a cue for apathetic pastiche. Back Leticia’s appellation is aboriginal mentioned, a Wagnerian burden does not follow. That’s not to say that Mr. Adès isn’t referential. Like abounding of our best abreast composers, he’s got an all-embracing command of agreeable idioms. I heard bang like that of Calanda, the boondocks area Buñuel was from; flamenco; Wagner by way of Bernard Herrmann.
WALLS During intermission, you reminded me that Buñuel acclimated the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” twice, in “Un Chien Andalou” and “L’Age d’Or,” appropriate at the alpha of his career.
["436.5"]KENNY The “Liebestod” was a allotment of music Buñuel was fatigued to about as abundant as he was to the drums of Calanda. He additionally uses it in a rarity, his 1953 Mexican adjustment of “Wuthering Heights.” For him the “Liebestod” is the ultimate agreeable announcement of affair fou, the surrealist ideal of agrarian adventurous love, an cutting annihilative force adjoin common values.
WALLS It’s bright that he enjoyed music and that he additionally abhorred the aloof attitudes that can ruin our acquaintance of it. In “The Exterminating Angel,” the characters assume to become affected in their acute allurement appropriate afterwards the pianist’s performance, back a aqueduct in the accumulation agonizingly corrects addition bedfellow who uses the amiss terminology. It’s as if that accidental elitist animality is dispatch Buñuel on.
KENNY That’s an absorbing apprehend on it. About invariably, Buñuel’s films, back they characterize the bourgeoisie, characterize armament at assignment to abash or abuse it. This theme, and its accurate appliance today, may be why artists are afresh fatigued to “The Exterminating Angel.” There’s Mr. Adès and Stephen Sondheim, who’s at assignment on a agreeable that merges the adventure with “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” addition blur about an aloof banquet affair gone afield that Buñuel fabricated 10 years later.
["436.5"]But I accept never looked at the alien situations in agreement of account and effect. I consistently see Buñuel as a deadpan presenter of outsize existential quandaries with no rational explanation.
WALLS Back I glanced over some of Buñuel’s writings, I begin abounding references to music. In a abbreviate 1922 piece, “Orchestration,” he came up with appearance sketches for instruments. About the cello: “Murmurs of sea and woods. Serenity. Deep eyes. They accept the confidence and amplitude of Jesus’s sermons in the desert.” Regarding the timpani: “Skins abounding with olives.”
By the time he wrote his autobiography, “My Aftermost Sigh,” he was adversity from deafness. Yet his agreeable anamnesis was still crisp: He recalled aggravating to abstract André Breton into opera fandom. It didn’t booty back the production, of Charpentier’s “Louise,” was bad abundant to drive anybody from the theater.
["425.83"]KENNY That aftermost affiliate of “My Aftermost Sigh,” in which he describes his alertness for death, is sad and funny at already — and never added agitating than back he complains that his deafness has fabricated it absurd for him to accept to music.
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