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A lavish presentation of this American opera, first performed in London. It is a take on the Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV & V plays, to a libretto by the composer,. "one of the Bay Area’s and the world’s great music and education philanthropists" [San Francisco Classical Voice]. Decently recorded in Munich. There is a 73-page booklet, oddly pasted into the back cover making it impossible to open properly... I could not work up interest in its idiom "neither tonal nor atonal, neither avant-garde nor neo-romantic, neither radical nor retro". Buy instead the marvellous DVD of the Henry IV plays at London's Shakespeare Globe in 2010 ! Peter Grahame Woolf http://www.sfcv.org/reviews/gettys-plump-jack-at-last I wish I could say that all this fine singing and stage work were in the service of some good cause, but I found the opera itself to be a dull and at times aggravating affair. - - Bottom line: the music simply failed to hold my interest, and I therefore found myself increasingly unable to care about the story or the characters. |
