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September 28, 2007
Ducks, Dumplings, Marriages and Emperors
Last night the wife and I traveled to Raleigh for dinner and an opera. Let me first dispense with the rant phase of today's broadcast: downtown Raleigh is a freakin' mess! If they want to bring people in there and build up more of an arts scene, they need to make it accessible. Closing most of the streets for a biker rally (which they had done yesterday) is about as dumb as it gets, given the downtown they claim they are trying to build.
Our first stop was dinner at The Duck & Dumpling, which was fabulous. We paired a chilled Riesling with a first course of crab cakes (simply perfect: crisp on the outside with moist and fabulous crabulousness on the inside) and a very refreshing tuna tartar with notes of wasabi. True, both appetizers are cliche, which is a mean way of saying classic, but both were done to classical perfection. For entrees she enjoyed a lovely duck breast while I had superb salt and pepper lamb chops. This place is the equal of Lantern in Chapel Hill. (And for you big city types who snicker at my provincialism, why don't you check out Food and Wine's top fifty restaurants of 2006: Lantern kind of kicked the butt of most of the local Asian haute cuisine offerings in the major metro markets.)
After finishing off with flan and a snifter of brandy, we headed to the opera. Tonight's offering was Le Nozze di Figaro. I really enjoyed this performance. It was light and fresh and genuinely and spontaneously funny. Stephen Powell delivered especially good acting as Count Almaviva, while Sari Gruber's Susanna hit just the right tone. I felt the highlight was the reconciliation scene between the Count and Countess, which was sung beautifully. Grant Llewellyn delivered a very steady and solid, if not necessarily innovative or moving, performance behind the baton, but it certainly was sufficient to support solidly the vocals. If there was a hole in the evening it was Wayne Tigges Figaro, but his was still a highly competent performance. It was a very enjoyable evening, despite the headaches of getting into Raleigh.
Finally, let me veer off course and dispense with Tan Dun's The First Emperor, which we saw recently on an HDTV broadcast from the Met. I had eagerly awaited this new opera which was such a bold venture for the Met and was at once supposed to revive the form and take it in new directions. Unfortunately, what was delivered was a tedious and incoherent mess. The trouble was evident from the opening notes of the overture, which was a rambling cacophony of Eastern and Western noise, with no real theme and not even memorable moments. From there it descended into a tedious and plodding story better suited to a documentary. From the overture onward it was musically flat (indeed, for all the talk of the innovative instrumentation, The First Emperor is basically several hours of the filler music opera composers have traditionally used to get through the filler libretto between the arias and choral elements that are the real reason people listen). The wife and I couldn't even finish it, and moved on instead to a DVD re-release of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train which, I can assure you, is a far better way to spend an evening. I am told that The First Emperor sold well at the Met, which I can only attribute to the "event" quality of its premier (you know: see and be seen).
Posted by dag at September 28, 2007 10:47 AM