Ankenaten

This has been a strange week; I've felt disjointed time-wise:  Wednesday felt like Friday, Tuesday felt like Monday, Thursday felt like Wednesday.  I'm blaming The Child's school schedule; the first day of their second trimester was Tuesday.  I suppose I'm also blaming the long Thanksgiving weekend.

I, thankfully, managed to catch a viewing of the Metropolitain's Ankenaten, Philip Glass's, opera.  I liked the first act the most; the opera is more a series of vignettes loosely following the rise and fall of Ankenaten, and by the end there's a sense of time leaving behind nothing but ashes and inscrutable anonymity.  Which isn't bad, but does leave one feeling exhausted. 

 Despite its minimalism, I enjoy Glass's music.  The cyclical nature of it is meditative, but at times I found myself tensing up in my seat.  The orchestra's relentless throb feels like the massive machinery of the cosmos, which makes my body want to move in sympathy to it.  Or possibly leap out of the way.

The singers were good; they managed to sing twenty minutes of repetitive "aahs!" and ancient language fragments in time with the orchestra while moving glacially across the stage in forty pound costumes.   

I did wish that the singer playing Amenhotep III had made different choices.  I'm used to a British voice solemnly intoning the narrative, and this version's singer went more for a breathy and impassioned delivery.  My favorite part of Ankenaten is the love poem, spoken first as a prayer to a god, and repeated as adoration to a lover... and, didn't get either sense this time around.  I suppose I'm one of those Ankenaten fans who want to get up and recite the poem and I had to restrain myself a little during the show.  

The costuming was deliberately anachronistic:  a mixture of ancient Egyptian, Renaissance England, and modern fashions.  I liked the High Priest of Amon's and Queen Tyre's costumes the most--probably because they were the most Egyptian looking (also, The High Priest was hot; had a Egyptian rod of dominon; giant, clunky rings; and a fabulous cloak).  I thought Ankenaten's first costume--with fused doll's heads for shoulder pads--was ugly, odd, and distracting.

The set worked well.  It wasn't overbearingly cool, like the set to The Magic Flute.  Like the music, it was minimal scaffolding--but it invoked a hieroglyphic frieze.  

The Metropolitan played up the ten jugglers in the cast who juggled small balls, pins, and beach balls throughout the opera.  They were dressed like mummies in desert camouflage, which allowed them to manipulate the set like the darkly garbed puppeteers in The Magic Flute.  The juggling was supposed to echo the cyclic nature of the music, and for the most part, it did.  Occasionally, I found myself thinking it was gimmicky.  It worked best during the first battle scene, the founding of Armana, the Hymn to the Sun scene, and during the priest-led revolt at the end.   

Several hours after the opera, I still had echos of Phillip Glass music in my head.  I thought I would dream about Egypt, or Egyptian gods, or have some overly ornate theatre dream--but I didn't.