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(More customer reviews)Given Richard Foreman's "profound influence" on Zorn, to quote from the accompanying notes, their collaboration on this opera makes it an important release for anyone interested in Zorn's music. As would be expected from the brief but beautiful notes accompanying the CD release of Astronome, this is a non-narrative opera, and neither Zorn nor Foreman has any interest in telling a story. The imagery is not what I would have expected from the "libretto" packaged with the CD, but represents Foreman's unique artistic vision. I probably would have imagined something much darker, but Foreman certainly does provide the sense of ritual and mystery suggested by the libretto, without following it very literally. It has little in common with traditional Western operas (there is no plot, the actors don't sing, and rarely speak), but reminded me more of Chinese opera or traditional Japanese theater.
As usual, the Tzadik packaging is first-rate, but as usual, makes no attempt to explain anything that is presented. While I have never seen Foreman's work before, an accompanying 20-minute bonus film by Henry Hill provides a brief introduction to his philosophy via an interview cut with excerpts from another of his plays, filmed in a kind of You-Tube dancing-cat style. The video quality of the hour-long opera is better than I might have expected, considering that it was filmed with two small consumer video cameras. It was carefully edited from 5 live performances, with some black-level enhancement to compensate for the low-light conditions. (Expanding to a dual layer format may have allowed it to be presented with less compression, but could have caused continuity problems on some players.)
The quality of the stereo soundtrack is excellent, and in spite of the typical AC3 compression, is comparable to the CD release. (A linear PCM track would appear to have fit on the DVD, and would have been a welcome upgrade, however.) Because of another review questioning the audio quality, I took the trouble to view the entire decoded waveform with editing software. There are absolutely no instances of glitches or clipping, apart from a clipped "thump", about 0.2 seconds in duration, that first appears 46 seconds into the opening titles, and is repeated several times later, each time with a precisely identical waveform indicating that it is a probably a recorded sample. There is no audible effect from this clipping, and it could be intentional. See the user-provided images for wave profiles of the entire opera, a one-to-one zoom of the first "musical" passage showing a wide dynamic range and glitch-free recording quality, and a picture of the "thump" to show what clipping would look like. It would be a shame if a questionable review prevented this fine work from reaching its audience.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Astronome: A Night at the Opera - A Disturbing Initiation (Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Vol. 2) (2010)
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