Wow.
Yesterday, I spent five and a half hours at Avery Fisher Hall experiencing the Tristan Project, Bill Viola's rendering of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, with a live unstaged performance. The first act was incredible; not just in terms of how the video interacted with the music, but the spatialization of sound created by placing singers and soloists throughout the balconies. The sailor's chorus was shouting Land Ho about two feet from my right ear, and the trombones weren't far off either!
The second act was a bit weaker, and I had some real issues with the video; I suppose that Viola (who has been a huge inspiration for me) is a victim of his own success, because the video that isn't spectacular in the way we are led to expect immediately looks terrible. I'm not sure if five hours of full-on Viola hi-def video would be like too much dessert, but in my opinion juxtaposing the lower-res video didn't work at all.
But none of that matters. Because the third and final act, and the Liebestod in particular, put me into a rapture that I have not often experienced in live performances. The L.A. Philharmonic and singers (Christine Brewer as Isolde, Christian Franz (I think) as Tristan) were terrific, and the second half of the final act was transformative: as Tristan is dying and memories of his childhood and Isolde rush around him, we see Isolde walk through fire, then collapse head first into a hallucinatory pool; finally, we see Tristan's body gradually pulled up off his pallet gracefully in an upwards-flowing torrent as the "love-death motif" sung by Isolde and the orchestra floats ever-upwards.
Obviously, images of water and fire are nothing new for Bill Viola. His work has always seemed to represent the mystical questions of death (aside from all of the sadness, there's always that feeling that the whole thing is so weird, that someone can just disappear, where do they go to? etc). And Wagner's grandiosity of emotion has always been a bit much for me. In the Tristan Project, these two extremes are married; the abstraction in the video is a perfect match for the intense emotionalism of the opera.
It is the most expensive ticket I have ever purchased, but it was a cheap price to pay for a transcendent experience.
Comments