First impressions

I know we haven’t gotten to “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” yet, but I went to see a concert of excerpts from it this weekend and I just had to share my first impressions of the work.

I must say that the first time I looked at the Youtube clip of the questions game in operatic form, I had just watched the film and was a little bit put-off by the Broadway-esque translation of the text into vocal music. I felt that it didn’t honor the wit and darkness of the script. However, hearing it for the second time, with six other scenes to frame it, I felt that it was very effective and, at the very least, entertaining.

In general, the music for “Rosencrantz” is extremely accessible, tonal, and neo-romantic sounding, with lush harmonies and supple melodies. Herschel Garfein, both composer and librettist, does a fairly nice job of maintaining a certain speech-like pacing that doesn’t undermine the original dialogue.

At the after concert discussion, the composer said that it was Mark Morris, who directed the staged reading in New York, that suggested to him that both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should be baritones. This cleverly plays into one of the running jokes in the play, which is that everyone, including themselves, cannot figure out which one is Rosencrantz and which one is Guildenstern.

In general, the favorite scenes (according to one of the singers, and a critic) were the arias which Garfein wrote for the character of Alfred, a pants role, sung exquisitely by mezzo Krista River. Garfein took the opportunity to use the character of Alfred to liberate some of Guildenstern’s more philosophical monologues, and the effect is really touching. His/her arias “The Unicorn Song” and “The Butterfly Song” were the highlights of the work for me as well.

Overall, I found the excerpts to be really charming and promising. I look forward to seeing the entire work staged some time in the near future.