Today was the opportunity to go to your local movie Cineplex (the Hacienda or the Emery 10 in Emeryville) and watch the live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera matinee. We kinda blew it, as it’s a bit late for today, the screening starts at 10:30am on the west coast. But you’ll have three more opportunites to catch the show live from New-York: Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" on Feb. 24th, Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" , on March 24th, and Puccini's "Il Trittico" on April 28th.

Today’s performance was the First Emperor, a world premiere by Tan Dun, the composer of the music for movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or operas like the peony pavilion. We got to see the performance from the Lincoln center a couple shows ago, and came away with mixed feelings.

Picture of Elizabeth Futral as a white ghost by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

We wanted to see the show as it follows the same inspiration which prompted the San Francisco Opera to commission its own East-meets-West epic, with the Bonesetter’s Daughter. The Bonesetter’s Daughter is composed by Stewart Wallace on a libretto by Amy Tan, and will open during the 2008-2009 season of the SF Opera. It supposedly merges traditional Chinese music with western style too, so we had to see how Tan Dun worked that out.

Since we did not go to the premiere, we had the opportunity to read the early reviews, and man, those guys in NY are harsh. The NY Times said Alas, once Plácido Domingo, as Emperor Qin, appeared, the Chinese musical elements were overwhelmed by long stretches of tedious neo-Puccini, pentatonic lyricism.

The New Yorker goes The musical language turns prosaic, clichéd, pseudo-Romantic. A few faintly catchy melodic formulas are worked to death. Long stretches of conversation are set to nondescript, tootling music of the kind that plays in movies when naughty pets or children are on the loose. …The setting of the English language—only the very opening and a few subsequent passages are in Chinese—borders on inept.

The WSJ (no link available) adds: It’s probably a great operatic story, but Mr. Tan’s version is flat and static where it should be bristling with drama and forward movement. As for the intersection of the East and the West, the WSJ states that the opera cannot avoid the pitfalls of pastiche and sounds too much like Puccini in Turandot, an Italian composer trying to write “Chinese.” With such as set of low expectations, we knew we could only be happily surprised!

Well, yes and no. The opera tells the story of Qin Shi (260-210 B.C.), the emperor who unified China and built the Great Wall. He is a ferocious dictator, but with a soft side: his love for his daughter, Yueyang (sung by Elizabeth Futral), who is disabled and can’t walk. He commissions a composer for an anthem to go with his newly unified country; the daughter and the musician are so in love, that she recovers from her sickness (or as a to-the-point blogger states, as the composer Gao Jianli, Paul Groves, reliably sympathetic and sweet of voice, almost manages to puncture the dreadful gloom of the scene in which his character f*cks Elizabeth Futral so hard she can walk again.) But the emperor wants to marry her to a general for political reasons, setting the stage for the tragedy.

We were totally impressed by the sheer grandiosity of the proceedings. From the opening scene, we were swept away: a Peking opera singer, Wu Hsing-Kuo, as the court’s master of ceremony, introduces the setting of the opera accompanied by a chorus of percussion banging with rocks on drums. No western influences here, it was a pure rush of unadulterated Chinese tradition, and the opera was off to a great start.

Then Domingo arrives, and it is true that the music might be a little, let’s say, soporific. Then again, when we invited someone to join us for a same-day performance of Tristan and Isolde, the person declined on account that he had not enough notice to change his sleep pattern accordingly. And there are enough treats in the First Emperor.

Domingo himself, despite all the talks about his nearing retirement, sang with a rich, regal tone. We feel that some of the criticism that the First Emperor received was ill-deserved, and none more than the reproach that Domingo sang the English lyrics with a Spanish accent (in the New-Yorker and the Wall Street Journal). This has to be the silliest put-down of a singer. Come on! The guys speak better English than say, Anna Netrebko speaks Italian (there is an off-chance that statement is not true, but you get the point). Yet would they say that his accent is an issue in her current run in I Puritani at the Met?

Another treat was the emperor’s daughter, Elisabeth Futral, especially when re-incarnated as a perky ghost. The traditional Chinese instruments provided us with plenty of intruiguing and wondrous sounds. And the most succesfull musical parts involved the extraordinary choir, especially singing the anthems of the slaves with resignation and melancholy. The set had this spectacular rock blocks from which the Great Wall is being built, hanging from strings, a quite compelling visual effect, except we had just recently seen a Christmas show where gift packages were hanging from fishing rods while a kid was trying to grab one, and the collision of the two images just ruined it for us. And Tan Dun, who was conducting as well, did a magnificient job at the baton.

The opera is ambitious, and somewhat hit-and-miss, but a much more worthy endeavour than the last creation at the Met, Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy. As far as drawing some lessons for the Bonesetter’s Daughter, we are pretty sure that Wallace, who grew up in Texas, won’t be accused of pastiching western music. And if he does include elements from both traditions, the libretto does bridge both continents anyway. We’ll see, it’s opening in only a year and a half. The First Emperor is a co-production with the LA Opera, where Placido Domingo, despite his trouble speaking English, is music director, so you might be able to see the live version not too far from SF relatively soon.