We went to the NYC premiere of Philip Glass's new opera "Galileo Galilei" at BAM last night. It was very disappointing. The music wasn't that interesting, the libretto wasn't so hot, and the directing was terrible. It seemed like a good idea: Galileo, Philip Glass, and director/co-librettist Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses).
As James said, it was more like a masque than an opera, but it just didn't work. The direction at times drove me crazy. At one point several people are moving in a gondola. It moves because a person at the front pulls it, but there is a gondolier there making the motions. That's fine, but once they get to the middle of the stage and the boat isn't actually moving, both the gondolier and the person with the rope at the front continue to move as if it is. I get the idea, but I was so distracted by the fake motion of the guy pulling the boat I couldn't listen to the music. At another point in the opera, Galileo refuses a drink from a servant when invited to share some wine with an important cardinal in the garden of his villa. I don't think so. Even if he didn't drink, there's no way he would have refused the glass.
Bad art is so depressing.
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Followup on Thurday: The NYT review. It's one of the most non-committal things I have ever read. One good quote though:
But without wishing to disparage either Mr. Glass or "Galileo" which is notably fresher than Mr. Glass's last few operas can it really be that, 20 years on, Mr. Glass is still the standard-bearer for what's "next" in music? Isn't the festival now an entrenched orthodoxy with a postmodernist accent?
