This is a chaotic post but I don't want to triple post so bear with me. What is VTA? I'm assuming it isn't the Silicon
Valley
Transit
Authority.
So apparently the HE-1 uses eight ESS SABRE ES9018 chips. How do these chips stack up against multibit chips? Does using eight somehow help?
Just got back from girls of teh golden west. It takes Louise Clappe's letters from circa the gold rush and attempts to make them into an opera about the gold rush from a female perspective. Peter Sellars wrote teh libretto. John Adams wrote the music. The music is fine. The libretto is an unmitigated catastrophe from beginning to end.
First: It does not tell a story. It has no plot. It moves from episode to episode without integrating them into an organic whole. The whole is less than the sum of the parts. There are some nice moments, but they do not fit into a story. There is no "ordinary life" no rising action, no conflict, no climax, no denouement.
Second: It is not a drama. It's travelogue set to music. People reciting dame shirley's letters is not the same as people living out the events contained therein.
Third: When it wasn't travelogue, it was didacticism explaining, as if to a child, that yes racism and sexism made people who weren't white men live distinctly less privileged lives in the mid nineteenth century. What a hot take! However, I am dismayed that representing less-privileged groups was done so ineffectively. One does not interrupt Othello for an Angela Davis speech. Likewise, one should not set a WEB Du Bois essay to music (here I do a disservice to Mr DuBois, who undoubtedly could have written a far superior libretto) and stick it in a drama in which it serves no dramatic purpose. The liberal white guilt was so clearly apparent and so ineptly conveyed, I groaned throughout. It was three hours and a quarter, plus the intermission. It could have been five hours or forty five minutes. It wouldn't have changed the experience.
The Chronicle nailed it in its review.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/With-Girls-S-F-Opera-pans-for-gold-and-12378363.php?utm_campaign=twitter-premium&utm_source=CMS Sharing Button&utm_medium=social
Interestingly, the Exterminating Angel music was much less engaging than Adams's (also a very talky libretto) but the story was at least coherent and involving. Neither would I see again though. It's dispiriting because I'm in principle excited about contemporary opera. The problem is that so much of it is just so bad. Maybe I should establish myself as the Metastasio of the c21.
Did you hear that? It was
James Levine's career.
