vip in the city

Valentine’s Day snow

Snowy Calders, in New York City through March 18, 2007 :

City Hall Park at lunchtime:

Eugene Onegin

Tonight, the final opera of our Met season series, and the production with which I was least familiar: Eugene Onegin. In fact, we exchanged what had been tickets to La Bohème from last November, drawn to this particular show by the female lead casting of beloved soprano Renée Fleming as Tatyana.

Until then, having never read Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated four-volume English translation, I had only the most general plot outlines of the 1833 epic poem by Aleksandr Pushkin – whom many consider to be Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. I’d never even seen the film adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes as Onegin and Liv Tyler as his girlish admirer (though it seems I’m not really missing out there.)

Surely Fleming’s star draw was also one of the reasons the Met selected the Saturday February 24 matinee of this production for its live high-definition broadcast in some 150 screening theaters from Los Angeles to London.

Eugene Onegin presents an overview of traditional early 19th century Russian society, which Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s score adapts to the shifting scenes: from the countryside of rural gentry to the glittering ballrooms of St. Petersburg imperial aristocracy. Although Tchaikovsky’s most enduring and popular performance works are his ballets (Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake), Eugene Onegin is his best known operatic work and has secured a place in the standard repertory.

The sweeping dramatic arc of this opera — youthful longing, crushing rejection, deep regret — and Tchaikovsky’s swooning score seemed a natural match for the big screen. Less so Michael Levine’s exquisitely minimalist set. Barren, almost austere, floor and walls, swirling golden leaves, sparely but purposefully furnished period style rooms, wonderful, glowing lights… the overall effect was simply gorgeous when taken in from even our seats at the very rear of the opera house. I wondered, though, how the impact would translate to film and in close-up.

The performances, no doubt, would more than compensate for any production shortfall there. Ah, Renée!

The opera was sung in Russian (naturally) and I was very excited to have been able to pick out the phrase, “Ya lyublyu vas,” – “I love you” — from Lenski’s Act I aria. I’ll get back to my studies yet.

“Heaven grants us habit in place of happiness.”

I’d like to thank the Academy…

From February 12 through Oscar Saturday, February 24, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences displayed for public viewing 50 newly minted Oscar statuettes in New York at Times Square Studios, home of ABC’s Good Morning America.

Included in the “Meet the Oscars” exhibit were two statuettes previously owned by Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Clark Gable. Academy Award winners are required to sign a waiver, preventing them from ever selling their award. To dispose of an unwanted statuette, owners must sell it back to the Academy for $1. Oscars awarded before 1950 — including the two on display here — are exempt from the rule. In 2001, Steven Spielberg paid $578,000 for the Oscar Davis won for Jezebel  in 1938, with the express purpose of returning it to the Academy. Five years earlier, Spielberg bought Gable’s 1934 Oscar (for It Happened One Night) for $607,500, returning that statuette to the Academy as well. (Each of these was a relative bargain compared to the $1.54M Michael Jackson paid at auction for David O. Selznick’s producing Oscar for Best Film Gone With The Wind  (1939).

Oscar stands 13.5 inches tall and weighs a surprisingly hefty 8.5 pounds. The best part: the Academy made one golden statuette available for members of the public to pick up and hold (and perhaps fantasize a little bit.) How could I resist?

On Oscar Sunday, I was thrilled to see New York filmmaker Martin Scorsese win his long overdue Academy Award after three decades and seven previous nominations — five for directing (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York  and The Aviator) and two for screenplays (for co-writing Goodfellas  and The Age of Innocence.)

In his acceptance speech, Scorsese remarked of his drought:

I just want to say too that so many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers. You know, I went walking in the street, people say something to me. I go in a doctor’s office, I go in a whatever. Elevators, people saying, “You should win one, you should win one.” I go for an X-Ray, “you should win one.”

So typical of New Yorkers!