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Nirvana covering an aria from an 1875 opera
01.04.2019
08:04 am
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Nirvana 1
 
Wait, Nirvana covered an aria from an opera?! That was my reaction when I learned that it indeed happened, and on more than one occasion. Often unrecognized and misidentified on circulating recordings, since fans of Nirvana—and I include myself in this group—generally aren’t into 19th century classical works. But apparently the band was.

“L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle” or simply “Habanera,” is an aria in Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen. The piece comes in act 1, and functions as an introduction to the Carmen character. The English translation of “L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle” is “Love is a Rebellious Bird,” and the lyrics address the wild, untamed nature of love.

An interpretation by legendary vocalist Maria Callas recently gained some attention, as it was featured during a scene in the popular biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody.
 

 
Nirvana played “L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle” now and then, with a just a handful of identified airings (no studio recording exists, as far as we know). It was something they’d jam on, usually acting as a kind of informal show opener. And, no, Kurt Cobain didn’t get his Pavarotti on—it was performed instrumentally.

Carmen is one of the most popular operas, but it’s unclear how the song came into the band’s orbit, exactly.
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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01.04.2019
08:04 am
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Eccentric Italian opera diva Ernesto Tomasini has but ‘One Life to Live’: A Dangerous Minds premiere
01.26.2018
06:21 pm
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As someone who has spent much of my life seeking out and befriending eccentric people, I’m always delighted to meet a new one. In One Life to Live filmmaker Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky‘s short film on Ernesto Tomasini, I was introduced to the fascinating opera singer who has worked with Coil, Antony and the Johnsons and the great mime artist Lindsay Kemp:

At 15, Ernesto Tomasini won a scholarship to draw for Disney and worked on The Fox and The Hound. Al Pacino took a break from filming The Godfather Part III to see Ernesto perform when he was just 19. Described by Spanish radio as “Maria Callas possessed by Satan,” the “man with the voice of a woman” is currently singing with Shackleton and has previously performed with Antony and the Johnsons, Lindsay Kemp, Coil, Marc Almond, Ron Athey, Bruce LaBruce, and for Oscar-winning film director Alfonso Cuarón in his Children of Men, all whilst starring in operas and musicals the world over. At the end of 2016, he was made an Italian “Sir” and received the keys to his home town of Palermo in Sicily.

One Life to Live gives rare access to Tomasini’s world, where he collaborates with concert pianists and composers Konstantin Lapshin and Othon Mataragas, has daily skype calls with legendary US producer Man Parrish and attends orgies—which he hates—purely as a matter of principle. “It’s keeping balance in the moral compass. The world needs sexual deviance!” agrees Ernesto’s friend Lupe.

The film begins with Ernesto’s masterclass at RADA but becomes “something else.” Films are organisms that spawn an atmosphere of their own.

 

 
In December director Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky‘s latest film On the Ground at Grenfell was screened in Parliament to over 100 MPs, and her work has been featured on the Channel 4 News, ITV News, DAZED, The Fader, The Independent, and The Guardian. Her new documentary was called “‘an astonishing film” by Naomi Wolf and won “Best Film” in the Portobello Film Festival. Nendie has previously worked with Marc Almond and Holly Johnson and her feature film Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance shot in Japan, has premiered in Australia, Chile and Colombia alongside work by David Lynch and Wim Wenders.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.26.2018
06:21 pm
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‘It’s All True’: Experimental opera based on Fugazi’s live tapes?
07.28.2017
09:46 am
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Photo of Object Collective by Henrik Beck
 
Object Collection, an experimental performance outfit from Brooklyn, has recorded an “opera-in-suspension” based on the Fugazi Live Series. Like a more pretentious “Having Fun on Stage with Fugazi,” all of the opera’s musical and verbal material comes from between-song ephemera:

Grounded upon the Live Archive series of the Washington DC outfit, composer Travis Just and writer/director Kara Feely’s work uses only the incidental music, text and sounds, none of Fugazi’s actual songs. An obsessive leap into 1500 hours of gig detritus spanning shows from 1987 to 2002, and encompassing random feedback, aimless drum noodling, pre-show activist speeches, audience hecklers, and the police breaking up gigs. All of this material is the foundation of an ear-body-and-mind-flossing 100 minutes for 4 voices/performers, 4 electric guitars/basses and 2 percussionists.

The press release describes It’s All True as “a radical incitement to action,” which sounds like a euphemism for massive audience walkouts during the first five minutes. But the members of Fugazi have given the production their blessing. Guy Picciotto says:

All of us were both blown away and disoriented by the work – it was well beyond anything we had anticipated when agreeing to Travis’ early request. We feel moved by Object Collection’s engagement with our archive material and salute everyone involved for their hard work and patience and for wrestling with such integrity with our sounds and words.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.28.2017
09:46 am
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The opera based on Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’
04.12.2017
03:05 pm
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Last year the Minnesota Opera showcased the world premiere of a new opera based on Stephen King’s famous novel The Shining, the starting point for an unsettling adaptation by Stanley Kubrick starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. 

The operatic version was composed by Paul Moravec with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Moravec won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004 for his work Tempest Fantasy.

The opera is an adaptation not of Kubrick’s movie but of King’s book—although the movie, firmly embedded in the minds of virtually everyone in the audience, will surely have an effect. As an example, the famous words “Here’s Johnny!,” shouted by Nicholson’s Jack Torrance in a moment of frenzy, is not in the novel and thus does not appear in the opera either. King has never had any affection for Kubrick’s version of his novel, so it’s noteworthy that the prolific author “maintained libretto approval and gave Campbell the green light 24 hours after receiving the final version.”

The Shining capped off the Minnesota Opera’s 2015-2016 season, with the premiere taking place on May 7, 2016.

The reviews have been respectful to more than respectful. In the magazine Opera News, Joshua Rosenblum was effusive about the production, saying that “Moravec proves to be a masterful musical dramatist.” He added that “Brian Mulligan does the seemingly impossible—he actually makes you forget Jack Nicholson” and that “watching Vega’s Danny step slowly toward the bathtub with the drawn curtain in the forbidden room 217 was as riveting as anything I’ve ever seen in a theater. “

Fun fact: Rosenblum did not mistype Room 237, nor did the librettist commit a flub—in King’s novel the locus of dread is actually Room 217.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.12.2017
03:05 pm
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‘Wow’: Milli Vanilli, the opera
08.22.2014
10:11 am
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Opera is renowned for its receptivity to the most intensely dramatic moments, which may be why there has lately been something of a trend in the world of modern opera to turn to celebrity headlines and reality TV for fodder—witness the mid-2000s phenomenon of Jerry Springer: The Opera as well as the more recent opera Anna Nicole, about the curtailed life of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, which had its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last September. (At the New York City debut of Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall in 2008, Harvey Keitel played the role of Jerry Springer—I sure wish I had seen that.) Last November DM reported on the existence of a Toronto production of Rob Ford: The Opera.

So it may not be so terribly surprising that the brief and controversial career of Milli Vanilli would eventually become the inspiration for a serious opera. To recap for the uninitiated, Milli Vanilli consisted of Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, who under the guidance of producer Frank Farian became a German R&B pop duo responsible for several hits, most particularly “Girl You Know It’s True.” “Rob and Fab” didn’t have the best command of English, which prompted some observers to wonder about their verbal fluency on their songs.
 

 
As Wikipedia tells it,
 

The first public sign that the group was lip-synching came on July 21, 1989 during a live performance on MTV at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut. As they performed onstage live in front of an audience, the recording of the song “Girl You Know It’s True” played and began to skip, repeating the partial line “Girl, you know it’s…” over and over on the speakers. They continued to pretend to sing and dance onstage for a few more moments, then they both ran offstage. According to the episode of VH1’s Behind the Music which profiled Milli Vanilli, Downtown Julie Brown stated that fans attending the concert seemed neither to care nor even to notice, and the concert continued as if nothing unusual had happened. In a March 1990 issue of Time magazine, Pilatus was quoted proclaiming himself to be “the new Elvis”, reasoning that by the duo’s success they were musically more talented than Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger.

 
That last sentence is a doozy, illustrating the perceived need for the comeuppance Milli Vanilli would soon receive. Curiously, it would take more than a year for the ramifications of that lip-synch incident to become clear. In February 1990, Milli Vanilli was awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist; only nine months later did Farian reveal to reporters that Rob and Fab had not actually sung on any of the records (the real singers were named Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howell). Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was withdrawn before the week was out (the only time such a thing has happened). Arista Records dropped Milli Vanilli from its roster and deleted their album and its masters from their catalog, making Girl You Know It’s True the largest-selling album to ever be taken out of print. A court ruling in the United States entitled anyone who had bought the album to a refund.

If nothing else, the backlash against Milli Vanilli reeked of excess. The public vitriol was intense; Milli Vanilli was instantly transformed into a laughing stock, an easy punchline. Rob Pilatus spent most of the next few years battling substance abuse, and on April 2, 1998, he died of an overdose of alcohol and prescription pills in Frankfurt.

Milli Vanilli were victims of shitty timing, to some extent. Obviously their success came at a time when the delicate technology of CD playback enabled the possibility of an embarrassing “skip,” although really any fakery always has the potential to be exposed in a humiliating fashion; for proof of that, just watch Singin’ in the Rain. But the timing of the public’s perception of artifice versus authenticity would end up punishing Milli Vanilli. When their story broke, nobody had any way of knowing that the most talked-about band in the country not even a year later would be Nirvana, whose very existence represented a punk-y rebuke to the likes of major touring acts like Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, etc. Whatever else they were, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were perceived as being very strongly anti-artifice, and they and several other Seattle-based bands would spearhead the grunge movement, which would take as its symbol par excellence the material of flannel, available not in haute couture design houses but in every Salvation Army in America. Furthermore, the new technology behind Soundscan was bringing new rigor to the process of tracking America’s #1 hits, and the payola-ish forces that enabled Milli Vanilli’s very existence would come to feel a thing of the past very quickly.
 

Christian Hawkey, Joe Diebes, and David Levine
 
The story of Milli Vanilli has it all: a fast rise and a faster fall, issues of powerful inclusion and exclusion, race (Milli Vanilli were a multi-racial outfit), temptation and exploitation. ... above all it has everything to do with the authenticity of the human voice, which is the kind of thing an opera can make hay with. As a child of grunge myself, I’m not alway so predisposed to let Milli Vanilli off the hook; their prefabbed sound represents the polar opposite of, say, Jesus Lizard. And yet the notion that Milli Vanilli was essentially crucified to make a lavish point about integrity in the music industry seems entirely inarguable.

Such a notion has inspired composer Joe Diebes, librettist Christian Hawkey, and director David Levine to pursue a remarkable operatic work about the Milli Vanilli scandal that has been several years in the making. It’s called “Wow,” and it was performed at BRIC House in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, earlier this year. In the piece, librettist Hawkey takes pains to bring in some notable examples of mass media fakery in the pop culture arena that failed to elicit comparable outrage, including Audrey Hepburn lip-syncing her songs in the movie version of My Fair Lady, the use of a dancer in Flashdance, as well as the Monkees, who were a TV band before they became a real band. Any opera that features the line, “but the ass of the woman in Pretty Woman was not real….” has got to be worth a listen.
 

 
In an interview with the New York Times, Diebes said, “Aside from their story being inherently operatic, in terms of the Faustian bargain the duo made with the German pop producer Frank Farian. ... I am interested in the machinery that surrounded and ultimately destroyed them, and what that can tell us about our contemporary digital situation. It’s significant to me that they emerged at the same time as digital culture went mainstream, and MIDI sequencers and drum machines became common.”

As Brooklyn Paper reported earlier this year,
 

Diebes’ score is a deconstruction of Wagner’s “Der Meistersinger von Nurenberg,” which will be fed to the singers and orchestra live on video monitors, making for a new show each night. Levine’s staging is inspired by the act’s music videos.

“They had an extraordinary amount of charisma and were able to create an act that was totally singular,” said Hawkey. “There was a level of choreography and even costume that was just utterly fantastic. I love shoulder pads, and they knew how to rock them.”

“I remember feeling at the time when the scandal broke that they had been wronged,” said librettist Hawkey, a poet who teaches at Pratt Institute. “That they were probably victims of a larger corporate system that gobbled them up and spit them out.”

 
Here’s a workshop of the “untitled” piece dating from 2011, in which you can hear some of the key arias:
 

 
More after the jump…..

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.22.2014
10:11 am
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‘Rob Ford: The Opera’ is a REAL opera
11.16.2013
03:35 pm
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Rob Ford: The Opera
 
On Friday bOING bOING featured a YouTube video of a section of Bizet’s Carmen reworked with lyrics pertaining to the trials and tribulations of Toronto’s singular mayor, Rob Ford. Ford has become a magnet of media interest lately, due to the surfacing of videotape proving that he smoked crack, his excuse for doing so (he was in a “drunken stupor”), and so forth. Basically Rob Ford is what would happen if you took your typical NCAA linebacker and made him mayor of one of the largest cities in North America.

The new Rob Ford version of Carmen is funny, but, to give you an idea of how long Torontans have been dealing with the insane Rob Ford phenomenon, there was an actual opera written and staged in Toronto nearly two years ago. Andrew Jaji (pictured above) played the title role.

Rob Ford
Rob Ford in costume for a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker last year

On January 22, 2012, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music put on a one-time-only performance of Rob Ford: The Opera. It was written by four student composers as part of a writing workshop with the considerable assistance of Michael Patrick Albano, resident stage director of the Faculty’s opera division. Albano spoke to The Torontoist while Rob Ford: The Opera was in production:
 

Well, [Ford] is quite bigger than life, which is very interesting. And I don’t mean physically bigger at all. That’s not what I mean. I mean, bigger than life the way operatic characters often are. He really seems to have a spotlight following him no matter where he goes. And what’s interesting about that kind of character—the same as whether you’re talking about Rob Ford, or King Lear, or Richard Nixon, or whoever you’re talking about—is the tremendous catalyst abilities that he has. He has very strong effects on other people around him.

 
According to the Musical Toronto website, “It looks like the opera includes a scene where Ford goes to Heaven, to discover that God looks an awful lot like Margaret Atwood. There is another scene where Ford is judged by a jury made up of Toronto librarians.”

God, I’d love to see this thing. Until then, shaky audience video will have to do.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Cramps ‘Human Fly’ opera version
War of the Worlds: The Rock Opera

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.16.2013
03:35 pm
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Listen to Fucked Up’s ‘David Comes to Life’ in full
06.06.2011
11:23 am
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Hardcore heroes Fucked Up’s new album is released today. David Comes To Life is being touted in some quarters as a modern classic, a rock opera romance for the ages set in 80s Thatcherite Britain. So is it that good? You can make your own mind up by listening to it in full at this link. Or, if you like what you have already heard, you can just go ahead and buy it here. There is more info on the album at Davidcomestolife.com.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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06.06.2011
11:23 am
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The Cramps ‘Human Fly’ opera version
01.12.2011
12:24 pm
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image
 
HOW IN THE HELL has this gotten so few views?!

Made by the uploader Papsfx, using 12 violins, one solo violin, four cellos, one piano and one soprano. It’s AMAZING:
 

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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01.12.2011
12:24 pm
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