Magic Flute and Sayat Nova
They being the opera we came to Chicago to see, and the New Restaurant for This Visit.
We saw The Magic Flute five years ago, and while I always appreciate Mozart's music, the production there was, well, unfortunate, to put it kindly. This was a vast improvement, not least because the actress performing the Queen of the Night nailed the second-act Revenge Aria. I mean she pegged it. This is the one which requires the performer to hit some phenomenally near-impossible high note1 SEVEN count them SEVEN times in not just rapid succession but, well, Mozartian succession....and a bar later hit a merely impressively high note the same number of times at the same tempo. Very few sopranos can manage that convincingly. As for the rest, I'm rather left feeling that Papageno and Papagena steal the show, as is often the case with Mozart's sidekicks/servants. And that the Lyric's transators for the supratitles played fast and loose on a couple of occasions--one of Tamino's lines was translated as "The Cubs are happy!" after he plays his flute and attracts/calms the wild beasts.
Short description of the production/staging: the producer wanted to rework The Magic Flute from the perspective of a kid not quite fourteen years old, the age he first encountered the opera, and I think he got it to work. This one's a backyard/neighborhood production of said opera, in a suburb of some city which most of us would unequivocally recognize as 'American'. Wd see the first scenes from the perspective of an audience on folding chairs in someone's back yard, and the last from the perspective of 'huzzah, the performance is over, lets set up for the cast party!' Secondarily, this allows the company to duck how to produce a believable 'dragon': it's a cluster of actors in what looks like a Halloween costume done up to look like a dragon. In other words, it isn't believable and we're not expected to think it's in any way believable, not least because once the dragon makes its pass, the actors trotting along under the cardboard boxes tumble the boxes off to watch 'Tamino' perform his next scene.
Overall, this production was a vast improvement over that previous production because they moved away from the traditional 'African' setting to a more modernistic one, reasonable given the gist of the opera's setting is 'land of legend' rather than anything audiences of Mozart's own time would recognize as Africa...never mind an audience of modern sensibilities in a community which (clears throat circumspectly) would do well to recognize what, precisely, 'African' means. I mean, Aida and Girl of the Golden West have an unequivocal setting. This doesn't. Monostatos and his cronies seem to have come from some other unrelated production. But Sarastros's 'lions' were in this production played by a couple of Golden Retrievers in lion suits; said goldens were suitably delighted to be so acclaimed by the audience. Pump handle tails for the win.
The New Restaurant for This Trip was Sayat Nova, an Armenian restaurant I'd heard about some years ago on the Chicago PBS's show Check Please, and the short version here is: we'll be back. Indeed we're kicking ourselves for not having come here much MUCH sooner. Appetizer of the cheese boereg-phyllo dough around a soft filling of melted cheese and ?not sure. stephe had the sarma and I had the kufta2 as entrees-consensus here being that I won the dinner choice. We're both appreciative of meats wrapped in grape leaves, but mine was meaty without being overwhelming, minty without overpowering the lamb.
Not all of Check Please's restaurants are up my-and-Stephe's alley-inconvenient by public transit from River North, not a cuisine we're interested in, out of our price range, not an ambiance we're comfortable with, whatever. This one caught my fancy, and I've been lobbying for it since I saw the show, but things (health, unemployment, whatever) kept getting in our way. Well, I regret that. We'll be back at least once and I suspect multiple times. I suspect it'll always be a dark(ish) hole-in-the-wall-it's a long narrow restaurant with a small picture window. But the food's worth coming back for. Tasty, not drowning in greasy sauce.
Armenian food serves as a reminder for me that cuisine crosses international borders; not surprisingly, I was reminded of Greek and Turkish and Moroccan foods (phyllo, lamb, mint, grape leaves, that sort of thing).
1I'm sure and his father will chime in here
2don't laugh, this was a shell of ground meat, crisped up, around a filling of softer ground meat plus something I'm not sure about, in a bright sauce of yogurt, mint and dill. 'Meatball' isn't at all an accurate description here.
We saw The Magic Flute five years ago, and while I always appreciate Mozart's music, the production there was, well, unfortunate, to put it kindly. This was a vast improvement, not least because the actress performing the Queen of the Night nailed the second-act Revenge Aria. I mean she pegged it. This is the one which requires the performer to hit some phenomenally near-impossible high note1 SEVEN count them SEVEN times in not just rapid succession but, well, Mozartian succession....and a bar later hit a merely impressively high note the same number of times at the same tempo. Very few sopranos can manage that convincingly. As for the rest, I'm rather left feeling that Papageno and Papagena steal the show, as is often the case with Mozart's sidekicks/servants. And that the Lyric's transators for the supratitles played fast and loose on a couple of occasions--one of Tamino's lines was translated as "The Cubs are happy!" after he plays his flute and attracts/calms the wild beasts.
Short description of the production/staging: the producer wanted to rework The Magic Flute from the perspective of a kid not quite fourteen years old, the age he first encountered the opera, and I think he got it to work. This one's a backyard/neighborhood production of said opera, in a suburb of some city which most of us would unequivocally recognize as 'American'. Wd see the first scenes from the perspective of an audience on folding chairs in someone's back yard, and the last from the perspective of 'huzzah, the performance is over, lets set up for the cast party!' Secondarily, this allows the company to duck how to produce a believable 'dragon': it's a cluster of actors in what looks like a Halloween costume done up to look like a dragon. In other words, it isn't believable and we're not expected to think it's in any way believable, not least because once the dragon makes its pass, the actors trotting along under the cardboard boxes tumble the boxes off to watch 'Tamino' perform his next scene.
Overall, this production was a vast improvement over that previous production because they moved away from the traditional 'African' setting to a more modernistic one, reasonable given the gist of the opera's setting is 'land of legend' rather than anything audiences of Mozart's own time would recognize as Africa...never mind an audience of modern sensibilities in a community which (clears throat circumspectly) would do well to recognize what, precisely, 'African' means. I mean, Aida and Girl of the Golden West have an unequivocal setting. This doesn't. Monostatos and his cronies seem to have come from some other unrelated production. But Sarastros's 'lions' were in this production played by a couple of Golden Retrievers in lion suits; said goldens were suitably delighted to be so acclaimed by the audience. Pump handle tails for the win.
The New Restaurant for This Trip was Sayat Nova, an Armenian restaurant I'd heard about some years ago on the Chicago PBS's show Check Please, and the short version here is: we'll be back. Indeed we're kicking ourselves for not having come here much MUCH sooner. Appetizer of the cheese boereg-phyllo dough around a soft filling of melted cheese and ?not sure. stephe had the sarma and I had the kufta2 as entrees-consensus here being that I won the dinner choice. We're both appreciative of meats wrapped in grape leaves, but mine was meaty without being overwhelming, minty without overpowering the lamb.
Not all of Check Please's restaurants are up my-and-Stephe's alley-inconvenient by public transit from River North, not a cuisine we're interested in, out of our price range, not an ambiance we're comfortable with, whatever. This one caught my fancy, and I've been lobbying for it since I saw the show, but things (health, unemployment, whatever) kept getting in our way. Well, I regret that. We'll be back at least once and I suspect multiple times. I suspect it'll always be a dark(ish) hole-in-the-wall-it's a long narrow restaurant with a small picture window. But the food's worth coming back for. Tasty, not drowning in greasy sauce.
Armenian food serves as a reminder for me that cuisine crosses international borders; not surprisingly, I was reminded of Greek and Turkish and Moroccan foods (phyllo, lamb, mint, grape leaves, that sort of thing).
1I'm sure and his father will chime in here
2don't laugh, this was a shell of ground meat, crisped up, around a filling of softer ground meat plus something I'm not sure about, in a bright sauce of yogurt, mint and dill. 'Meatball' isn't at all an accurate description here.