Yet that smoldering movie hero couldn’t be farther from Clayton’s portrayal though the tenor is roughly the same age the English actor was when he directed and starred in his Oscar-winning film. Even when his full-on “To be or not be” finally arrives, it soon develops into a duet with the frightened Ophelia who has been eavesdropping.Īn enormous banner picturing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull greets Met audiences as they approach the opera house. As Shakespeare’s play is particularly noted for its soliloquies, this Hamlet gets few.
Unfortunately, the usually surefire Murder of Gonzago that follows is also mostly carried out in accompanied speech resulting in one of the opera’s least effective sequences.īefore the premiere of his 1968 Hamlet opera, English composer Humphrey Searle asserted that the aria is dead, and indeed there are few in Dean’s work following Hamlet’s opening monologue. As Hamlet quizzes the four players, they declaim rather than sing them winning knowing chuckles from the audience. Perhaps aware that Dean’s boisterous yet fascinatingly intricate orchestration would make much of the text indecipherable, Jocelyn randomly places many of Shakespeare’s most famous lines into the mouths of the traveling actors who arrive at Elsinore. However, after a brief orchestral and choral introduction, Clayton’s murmured first words “…or not to be” immediately evoke Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy which doesn’t appear until the play’s third act. Despite some inevitable abridgement, the nearly three-hour opera follows the play’s chronology. Throughout their adaptation, Dean and Jocelyn play with their audience’s expectations of Hamlet: in fact, it’s nearly impossible to imagine what anyone unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play could make of their hermetic work.
The Met imported Neil Armfield’s unsparing production from England’s Glyndebourne Festival where the Australian composer’s second opera premiered in 2017. While it’s unlikely to take its place next to Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff or Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, it did offer the marvelous English tenor Allan Clayton the opportunity to make a remarkable local debut as the tortured and ineffectual Prince of Denmark. The striking if unengaging work proved to be less a straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare than a spikey, self-conscious meditation on Hamlet. One of the latest attempts, Hamlet with music by Brett Dean to a libretto by Matthew Jocelyn, arrived Friday night as the Metropolitan Opera’s final new production of the season. William Shakespeare’s works have proven irresistible to many classical composers through the centuries, yet there are few operatic adaptations that have remained popular. The Met Opera’s ‘Hamlet’ Karen Almond/Met Opera
0 kommentar(er)
