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Thursday, 21 January 2010
NOTE: In the New York area, The Audition will
repeat on WNET Channel 13 at 2.30am on Friday 22 January and at 12noon on
Sunday 7 February, and on WLIW Channel 21 at 3.00pm on Sunday 7
February. Set your DVRs accordingly.
The Audition, a two-hour film by Susan
Froemke, follows the day-to-day lives of several opera singers
in their twenties as they prepare for the Metropolitan Opera's National
Council Auditions. Those who win have the opportunity to launch their
careers, and even those who do not have the opportunity to sing from the
Metropolitan Opera stage, accompanied by the Met Opera orchestra (perhaps
the greatest in the world today), to a paying public.
The young singers demonstrate that opera singing, as an art form,
remains in brilliant health, even as a more philistine, barbaric cultural
life may relegate opera to the wayside as an elite unnecessary luxury. Of
course, it is not — the human voice, as a musical instrument capable
of extraordinary and sublime expression of the extremes of passion,
comedy, suffering and desire, is irreplacable, as indeed are the works
that offer that expression a disciplined outlet. And discipline, as well
as devotion to the art and the repertoire, is at the center of the
audition process. Perhaps the most memorable sections of the documentary
are those which take place during coaching sessions. Those who have seen
Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's fictionalized account of the
premiere of The Mikado, will recognize the extraordinary
attention to detail and tentative hope (as well as profound
self-criticism) that engages those within the rehearsal room. These
men and women at work (and certainly singing for these auditioners is a
profession, not a career) make the populist dreams of American
Idol look like a high-school talent show. While all of the
singers are influenced by the tradition of opera singing (they
are unmiked and take from the history of the form bits and pieces of
performance tradition), nonetheless their art is highly personal, as
several of the coaches take pains to point out. The best of them
indeed reveal themselves through their singing, an intimate revelation
that demonstrates the ability of discipline and craft to release what
can finally be called an aesthetic expression of some genius; this
comes out most clearly in those moments when the singers perform
unaccompanied, with the bare voice. Viewers are also privy to the
judging process: an uncompromising, unsparing discussion of the
virtues and vices of the individual competitors.
Except for the to-camera interviews, The Audition utilizes
hand-held cameras and the fly-on-the-wall techniques
of a Frederick
Wiseman documentary, but these are shined and edited to a very high
gloss indeed (and, as a documentary made with the support of the Met Opera
itself, serves perhaps inevitably as a two-hour commercial for the
Met). The film, however, is immediately engaging; it doesn't take long
before favorites emerge, and you do root for your own. More than anything
else, this is testimony that opera continues to be a living art form,
the human voice raised to a high pitch of discipline and craft as well
as spirit an irreplacable instrument. And it does have its poignant
conclusion, communicated in a brief title card at the very end of the
film.
The Audition premiered nationwide on the PBS Great
Performances series last night, and as usual with PBS programs,
it will be rerun at various times on PBS stations over the next few weeks.
A trailer for the film is below.
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Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
home page
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minima home page
Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum
II (2008-2009)
Critique of
Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes
Howard Barker
1
Howard
Barker 2
Samuel
Beckett 1
Samuel
Beckett 2
Bertolt
Brecht
Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
Foreman 2
Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
Music
Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
Contact
geh@panix.com
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George
Hunka
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