Don Giovanni (Opera) (2025)

Mozart has grown on me in my old age. I used to find his music kind of boring. But in its simplicity is actually musical perfection as God divined. Even when writing about womanizers and their conquests his music is gorgeous. The Cattalog aria sung by Leporello is my favorite in the 3.5 hours. The music itself is interesting in that it's sometimes just singing over a sparse harpsichord line. It's kind of odd harpsichord against the brutalist backdrop of the Ivo Van Hove set. There are three pieces that rotate very slowly, so slowly and subtly that you don't even notice it until it reaches its final position. In the climactic scene when the Commendatore's ghost (or Mozart's father according to Amadeus) drags Don Giovanni down to hell there are these intense projections that look as though they're on a screen, but all of a sudden the projections turn off and I'm told they're projected straight on the set. It's a trick of the eye. From the heights of the family circle, I had a hard time telling the female characters apart. They were all dressed kind of similarly and I'd forgotten my binoculars. Could not tell that Federica Lombardi (Donna Anna) dressed in basically a nightgown was so pregnant she is just a couple weeks away from maternity leave. The singers are all universally excellent. 
 

Salome (Opera) (2025)

Two straight hours of music, without applause breaks, the new Met Opera production of Salome boasts a large 100-person orchestra. Yannick Nezet-Seguin is at the helm, his music stand glowing in gold. The music, like everything about the opera frankly, is wild. Richard Strauss got some bizarre sound effects out of the orchestra. The music is undoubtedly interesting. There are bits of melody, but no such arias really. It has the drama of Wagner without the beauty. Not intro level opera. The singing role of Salome is extremely demanding and Elza van den Heever sings it powerfully.

The production design has two levels, the palace upstairs and the cistern downstairs. When the scenes transition like an elevator, it's quite a sight to behold. The cistern is stark, but has a steep staircase and ominous shadows. There are small children playing younger/inner Salome; they just sit on stage observing. It's traumatizing. The little girls will never forget the severed head. It's all super creepy like a nightmare. The projections shimmer tricking the mind as though the floor moves--which of course it does. Some of the characters wear rams heads rather inexplicably. For much of the first act, they remain in the background coming on and off stage bandying around a woman in a bikini. There is a ram-man statue that they actually smash to pieces! They have budget to irreparably break props performance after performance.