Chris Cantell Discusses - Art Live: Give Opera a Second Chance

And no, this is not going to be about that Internet browser, this is going to be about old respectable kind of art. The one which has been considered a "higher culture" or "culture for higher classes" since ever, meaning that it is rather antique and boring and if you are a huge opera fan it's most likely that you are either dust-bowl guy who knows nothing about real fun or you are trying to persuade others about your social status. I started thinking about opera as I was reading an article about "Satyagraha", an opera written by Philip Glass in 1980, which has been performed by The Improbable theater company at Metropolitan Opera nowadays. Satyagraha evolves the theme of Mahatma Ghandi's early life which he spent in South Africa and can be described as minimalist music, perfectly matching Glass' own term for his work - "music with repetitive structures". The reactions & as a matter of cause & are contrary, varying from calling performance exhausting and tiring, to being adored for its simplicity and novelty. By the way, that's what it means to be a genius & people cannot decide whether your work is either absolutely sophisticated or absolutely poor as there's nothing between.Anyway, I cannot judge because I didn't see this performance. But I can remember my very first opera performance I have ever been to, which, however, became at the same time the last one I have been to. I was fourteen years old (and had my own particular ideas of how I would like to spend my time), it was a school trip (so it was kind of compulsory) and it was one of the most boring things I have seen. Ever. It was Gioachino Rossini's masterpiece The Barber of Seville and it was just bad & old-fashionable, too long, too lame, too Italian, our seats were too cheap to see the subtitles running above the curtain so we had no idea what was going on there. Well, maybe I would appreciate it much more now, as an adult. Maybe I should give the opera second chance?

related story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/13/AR2008041302477.html?hpid=moreheadlines

by Kamila Moravcikova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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Edited by Iveta Nagyova