This is Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor extraordinaire, rehearsing one of the most
challenging pieces in opera today.
For six straight minutes, he and his fellow castmates have to sing the word “ah.”
That seems easy enough, right?
Until you watch it.
[Sings “ah”]
It’s an extraordinary feat that happens roughly one hour into Akhnaten, an opera by
Philip Glass about this influential Egyptian pharaoh.
Anthony plays the lead.
Pulling off this opera takes the coordination of hundreds of people.
There’s dozens of musicians.
Over 60 performers,
including twelve professional jugglers.
There’s stage designers, make-up artists
a costume with baby heads attached to them,
and a giant sun roughly the size of twelve Anthonys.
Oh, and the music is in four different languages.
This all happens inside this Iconic building, the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan.
Anthony has performed Akhnaten with the English National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera
But this one… it’s special.
I’m mean come on, look at this view.
It’s pretty awesome.
And what’s even cooler is we get a peek behind the curtain
to see how it all happens.
So I play Akhnaten, the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, who's a totally fascinating, weird, complex
guy.
He has this idea, which changes the course of history.
Which is that instead of hundreds of gods that have existed in Egypt forever, there
would be one God, and that would be the sun.
He was thus the first monotheist - the first person to worship one God.
This opera is like a fever dream of ancient Egypt, and it all starts with the music,
which wouldn’t exist without world class vocal chords.
[Singing]
These are Anthony’s.
Someone put a scope down my throat,
and then when you breath, they open up.
Should I walk you through some exercises?
[Singing]
How many of your neighbors know you’re an opera singer?
I was actually going to ask the same thing.
Do you get a lot of complaints?
I don’t get that many complaints.
I can't hear my own voice the way other ears can because it's buzzing in my head.
That’s where Joan comes in.
It’s so much to do with the way we use our breath.
She’s been his vocal coach since he was 17.
But then we have to do it without a lip trill and just starting on a vowel.
That’s the challenge.
[Singing: Oooo, ohhh, ahhhh, aaaaa, eeeee]
See the hardest thing in the world is the first tone.
That first tone is vitally important during every moment of Aknahten, but especially the
scenes where all they sing is “Ah.”
[Sings “ah”]
So that onset that he did, with no consonant, is real accomplishment.
Because if he did, hah ah, ha ah, he’d kill himself.
To understand how an opera could sound like this, you have to know Philip Glass - perhaps
the most famous living composer.
Philip Glass is a minimalist.
So he uses repetition with changing rhythms and syncopation to create a kind of meditative
state.
There’s a whole lot of arpeggios, meaning a broken chord.
So you'll hear da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da
And a lot of lyrical repetition.
In opera, there's a beat and the time is king.
And you can go 90 percent into your character, but if you go all the way, you might get totally
lost and you can’t afford that.
The first step in not getting lost is the sitzprobe.
So the Sitz probe is a German term, which sitz means sit and probe means try.
[Singing]
Let me have the drums and chorus please.
This is the first time the orchestra and singers hear what they sound like together after weeks
of rehearsing on their own.
So it's a kind of sacred moment where you hear the orchestra for the first time, you
sing with the orchestra for the first time.
And in this particular case, it's the Met orchestra.
They're the best.
There are two people in this room who keep everyone in check.
Karen and Caren.
In western music we have a tendency to steal time at the end of a phrase.
One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three
Here it’s more about thinking linearly and being really honest about the length of each
rhythmic pattern or individual note.
Okay, so, we did pretty well, orchestra.
After about three rounds we start to slow down.
So guys playing the offbeats, don’t listen to anyone because we tend to get slower.
I really feel like my job inside the rehearsals is to get inside the conductor’s mind to
know exactly what her tempo is.
[Singing]
It’s hard sometimes for the performers to remember in the moment exactly how many repeats
they’ve done, so there’s a lot of counting down measures.
A lot of this, which means don’t sing let me do the work for you.
I give a lot of positive feedback to them to ensure that they’re very comfortable
on stage.
Shall I start?
Yeah I think you should start.
Yeah so this is an opera with a lot of juggling in it.
This is Phelim McDermott and Sean Gandini.
He’s the director of the opera and he’s the Juggling Master.
One thing is the performers are moving really slowly.
It’s true, everyone moves in extreme slow motion the entire performance.
Like this scene here, before Aknahten is killed.
Zoom into the right side and you see Akhnaten with Nefrititi and their daughters.
It’s another one of those “Ah” scene.
Move to the left and you the rest of the cast moving again in slow motion.
The only thing moving fast are the balls.
Sean and Karen spent a long time looking at the score talking about the mathematics of
how the juggling relates to the music.
I spent a lot of time saying make sure there’s a development.
You sent me that script “balls, balls balls”
Yeah, exactly.
In the middle of the whole show there’s the hymn to the sun, and you basically get the
the sun god, which secretly me and Sean both know that actually that’s the god of the jugglers,
it’s the biggest juggling ball.
Big mama ball.
[Intercom: Standby, we’re about to start]
We’re about to start, I’ve got to go
Alright, well see you later.
This is the moment I realized, The Met stops for no one.
Hundreds of things are always happening at once, especially at dress rehearsals.
Where it’s all about getting every last detail right.
The goal is just to get out of people’s way because everything is a timed trial.
Over 60 cast members need their make-up done and there are just a few make-up artists who
have just 2 hours to do it.
And here’s something I haven’t mentioned.
Anthony enters the opera in slow motion and he’s completely naked.
Imagine taking three full minutes to descend twelve steps, looking straight at 4000 people
and you're totally naked.
So it’s not just his face that gets makeup, his whole body does.
There’s also some incredible costumes and wigs.
Each individual hair is knotted into a net to make the wig.
You don’t have to wear a wig?
I luckily don’t luckily have to wear a wig.
But he does have to wear this blue headdress.
Called a khepresh that many Egyptian pharaohs wore to symbolise their royalty.
There’s always a Cobra on the front.
It’s amazing and also crap.
It’s like a combo, you know.
This is literally styrofoam.
from the stage in the lights, it looks expensive.
The real show stealer is this.
The baby head dress.
If you look at ancient Egypt and the rituals of ancient Egypt, the Book of the Dead, for
example, is so fascinating.
The things they would do, preserve people's organs, mummify them, weigh someone's heart
against a feather in order for them to ascend into the next life.
We’re representing some of those rituals in our own way, and the shrunken baby doll
heads somehow evoke that.
Oh I love that there’s a pen.
Oh my God that’s where it is!
The images from the Book of the Dead also served as a visual reference for the multi-level
main set too.
The Met, the Metropolitan Opera is kind of the stage.
Did you try singing in the house?
Absolutely not.
You do it.
[Sings “Ahhhhhhhhh”]
It has a nice acoustic!
If I told you, you're going to come see a minimalist three and a half hour opera about
ancient Egypt where there's no real story and it's sung in ancient Egyptian, you'd think,
man, there's no way I'm going to that.
And yet I bet you're going to love it.