There Stands the Glass

Attending a Latin mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in January was a highlight of my churchgoing life. I’ve since been reduced to watching virtual worship services on Sunday mornings. Two recent releases remind me of what I’ve been missing.

Emmanuel, a 12-minute EP by Kanye West’s Sunday Service choir, catapulted me back to Jerusalem. The odd variant of the Latin hymns sung at Catholic, Anglican and Episcopalian churches toys with convention. The impossibly esoteric recording may have a target audience of one. Thanks to everyone involved- I treasure my bespoke Christmas gift!

While decidedly secular, Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott’s Songs of Comfort and Hope is typical of the inspirational music occasionally performed as offering plates are passed among affluent Protestant congregations. In addition to providing uplifting beauty, cello and piano duets in this vein are likely to inspire bouts of generosity.

Treacly readings of classic melodies such as “Over the Rainbow” will undoubtedly provide comfort and hope to thousands of anxious souls, but Ma and Stott’s unabashed sentimentality sometimes makes me want to throw bricks through stained glass windows. Even so, a third of the 79-minute public service project is positively divine.

Screenshot of Jeremy Ovenden in the Royal Theatre of Monnaie’s production of “Lucio Silla” by There Stands the Glass.

I often think about Kanye West’s 2013 concert at the Sprint Center. My review of the show for The Kansas City Star went viral because I was obliged to report the arena was only a quarter full, but it was the combination of avant-garde noise from West’s then-current Yeezus album and spectacular visuals including a mountain and ballet troupe that made the night unforgettable.

More than five months into my daily opera immersion (161 operas in the past 161 days!), a little piece of me dies every time I commit to a stale production set in a beige parlor featuring stocky vocalists in period costumes. Thanks in part to West’s spectacular imagination, I now expect the visual component to be as compelling as the music it accentuates at large-scale live performances and in every video production. Thrilling versions of two Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart operas I recently watched attest to the power of unfettered creativity in a form long associated with stasis.

“Lucio Silla,” an examination of a tyrant’s abuse of power, is considered one of Mozart’s least essential operas. Yet an arresting 2017 production mounted by the Royal Theatre of Monnaie forces me to revise my expectations of opera’s possibilities. Without compromising the music of the 250-year-old drama, the Belgian company places the work in a dystopian version of the present. The depictions of bloodlust and sexual violence are so graphic I repeatedly had to turn away. I suspect Mozart would approve of the unflinchingly kinky staging.

But why be constrained by a stage at all? Kenneth Branagh’s delightful cinematic version of “The Magic Flute” (“Die Zauberflöte”) successfully adopts the topsy-turvy tone I associate with the direction of Terry Gilliam. The fanciful 2006 reworking set amid trench warfare in World War I includes an excellent English libretto by Stephen Fry. Aside from scenes of battlefield horror, attempted rape and thwarted suicide, the film is suitable for children. My primary objection concerns Branagh’s suppression of the opera’s Illuminati subplot.

The scarcity of operatic innovations such as these might be part of a global conspiracy. I’m currently working my way through Glyndebourne’s four-hour and 44-minute stream of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” The stale 2011 production is set in a beige parlor and features stocky vocalists in period costumes. Music criticism is among the themes of Richard Wagner’s opera. In spite of the fusty visuals, I intend to give it a 8.7 rating.

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I observe the centennial of the birth of Charlie Parker by reviewing Champian Fulton’s Birdsong and Pasquale Grasso’s Solo Bird at Plastic Sax.

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