Performances of two canonical mainstays, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Bizet’s Carmen, marked the closing weeks of the Metropolitan’s 2023-24 season. The Butterfly was a revival of the 2006-07  production that initiated Peter Gelb’s tenure as the company’s General Director. Anthony Minghella is given original “production by” billing, with sets designed by Michael Levine. Carolyn Choa is succeeded by Paula Williams as director and choreographer, and the conductor is Xian Zhang, in her debut assignment. Carmen is a new production directed by Carrie Cracknell, an English theatre director, again with Michael Levine as designer, and with Diego Matheuz  conducting (also a company debut).

Most of the advance interest (including mine) in the return of Butterfly was in the assumption of the title role by Asmik Grigorian. This Lithuanian soprano has established herself with major roles (Salome, Lady Macbeth, Turandot, in addition to Cio-Cio-San) in some of the major European houses (the Bolshoi, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, etc.). She carries the opera gene: her mother sang leading roles in Baltic houses, and her father, Gegam, is remembered from his performances and recordings for the Mariinsky. She is an interesting artist, who gave a poised, insightful  performance of distinct profile in this revival of a stylistically queasy production. She abjured most of the text-and-tradition invitations to Asian mimicry that used to be de rigueur in favor of playing the woman, and I found her physical acting consistently absorbing once we were past Act 1. I am sure it registered tellingly on the broadcast video.

The voice, though, is of modest size and restricted span. It is attractive and steady, albeit pale in timbre, in its upper octave, but has no grounding at the bottom and not much body in the midrange. There is plenty of precedent for voices of lyric, or even lyric-coloratura, format in this part—it isn’t necessary to have the engulfing lirico spinto of Tebaldi or the penetrating dramatic soprano of Destinn to succeed in it, and indeed many of its most affecting moments are “small” moments. But they need to be conveyed by a voice with solidity in the lower and middle ranges and/or the technique and imagination to use peculiarly Italian registral blends to make peculiarly Italian inflectional points. Grigorian has neither such solidity nor such technique, so whether or not she has the imagination is moot, and for all her compelling work as an actress for the eye, there is very little, interpretively speaking, for the ear, apart from her efforts with dynamic shadings. Even those, while sensitively guided, are limited in their effect because she has so little wiggle room to play with. And there are things I simply don’t understand. Here is an obviously gifted woman, musical and dramatically intelligent, from an operatic family; yet either her training included no development of the lower register in her voice, or for some perverse reason she’s decided to ignore it. (I will give long odds that it was the former.) Then, once launched, she’s tackled some of the biggest roles of the repertoire short of true Heldensopran, and has been hired by world-class companies to sing them. I’ve seen a few clips of her Lady Macbeth and Turandot. Those roles are preposterous for her, however lovingly the camera receives her.

First, a small correction. In describing some of the highlights of the 1956-57 Metropolitan Opera season (see Callas, Part One, 3/2/24) and relying on memory, I mistakenly named the bass Gottlob Frick among the prominent German artists imported for that season’s Ring cycles. But he did not arrive until the cycles of 1961-62. Kurt Böhme was the principal bass of the ’56-’57 Ring.

And a reminder for anyone who may have missed my announcement of 3/21/24: Marston’s long-delayed 10-CD set of studio and broadcast recordings of Lawrence Tibbett, to which I contributed the booklet essay, is at last available. See the Marston website for ordering details.

In 2018, I placed La Forza del destino, one of Giuseppe Verdi’s late-middle-period masterpieces, in my series of MIA (“Missing in Action”) operas. After a longish absence, it had been scheduled for a new Metropolitan production that year. But it’s a big show, and owing to a shortage of dollars, it was canceled. So I wrote about audio and video productions of the 1950s, when both cash and singers of the kind Forza requires were in better supply. (See the posts of 1/12/18 and 1/27/18.) Now, despite further depletion of the former and no significant change in the quality of the latter over the ensuing six years, Forza has returned, after a fashion, in a new production directed by Mariusz Trelinski and conducted by Yannick Nézet- Séguin.

I wish there were a way to write out the simultaneity of operatic experience; that is, to convey the reception of the sights and sounds coming from without, jumbled with the communiques from within, the flashes of prior experience that glimmer constantly in the background of the new sights and sounds, and which, like flares, fitfully illumine their contours and qualities. There isn’t, though. One is forced to lay out these elements of experience for display, and then try to explain how their interrelationships do or don’t satisfy one’s longing for a wholeness. And much depends on the state of that prior knowledge, and on an awareness of how it has led to whatever beliefs and standards one brings to the new encounter. One of my frequent, highly informed correspondents recently wrote to me about a live regional performance she’d attended, of another 19th-Century masterwork. Well aware of the physical and financial limitations on her home company, she was more than willing to cut some slack in the matter of production choices, and was grateful that this one wasn’t of an extreme conceptual type. Still, it was displaced to the here-and-now, so though she enjoyed many aspects of it, she ” . . . remained annoyed at the timewarp, which just plays as stupid if one knows the libretto!” Yes. Also if one knows the music, the atmosphere, the set of cultural values, etc., that are of the work’s essence, none of which fit the time and place of the production or the society shown in it. Yet, though the directors of nearly all contemporary opera productions countenance exactly this stupidity—embrace it, in fact—they are not themselves stupid. They are adversarial, dedicated opponents of the very material they are interpreting, and they count on some combination of three states of mind in enough of their audience to forestall violent rioting: ignorance—lazy, willful, or native; intimidation in the face of the stupidity, tolerance of which is presumed to arise from insights elevated above anything that smacks of the literal or commonsensical; or (in a small but influential minority) actual agreement with the cultural replacement project underway.

Dear devotees: I am pleased to be able to announce that Marston Records’ 10-CD set devoted to the recordings of the great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett is at last ready for release, and that an hour-long program, heard on 435 NPR stations (link below) has been aired in connection with it. Since I contributed to both the set and the broadcast, I cannot review them. But I can briefly describe and (of course) recommend them.

The Marston release. The set, long delayed owing to complications that originated with the pandemic shutdown, comprises every side that Tibbett recorded during his long, exclusive relationship with RCA Victor, including unreleased alternate takes, plus a large selection of his radio and film recordings, and even a live recital from the Worcester Festival. It is by far the most inclusive gathering of Tibbett material ever released, and is up to Marston’s customarily high standards of restoration and presentation. Coming up on 75 years since his last Metropolitan performance, there is still a plausible case to be made for Tibbett as the greatest male American classical singer. He set a standard for the singing and acting of the major Verdi baritone roles (Simon Boccanegra, Iago, Rigoletto, Germont) that has not been surpassed. He championed the cause of American opera with Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson, Louis Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones, and others, and with Helen Jepson was the first to record the important solos and duets from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, with the composer in attendance. With his hundreds of radio broadcasts, early sound film appearances, and extensive recital tours, he penetrated the American popular culture as no other operatic artist before or since. In my 35,000-word essay, I place critical discussion of his recordings in an ongoing biographical context, and attempt to bring some further clarity to the causes of the vocal crisis that, though it did not end his career, sharply curtailed his effectiveness over its final decade. The set’s booklet also contains an introduction by Will Crutchfield and a wonderful trove of photos, some never before published. The set may be ordered now, and will ship before the end of the month—see the Marston website for details.

The NPR program. This is an episode in the long-running series More than Music, conceived and hosted by Joseph Horowitz. The series is devoted primarily to American music and the American classical music scene, including its black and indigenous influences, so Tibbett’s uniquely American story is a natural fit. The program presents some choice Tibbett recordings reflecting his broad artistic sympathies, alternating with discussion guided by its host, with observations from an intriguing quartet of guests: baritone Thomas Hampson, tenor George Shirley, author and NYT columnist John McWhorter, and myself. It was first broadcast on the morning of March 19, with times dependent on local stations’ schedules. The full program, along with Horowitz’s excellent article in artsjournal on Tibbett and our rapidly changing sensibilities, can be accessed here.

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NEXT TIME: Under the time pressures of my recent articles on Maria Callas, I neglected this usual end-of-post feature. So: my principal subject will be the Metropolitan’s new production of Verdi’s long-absent La Forza del destino, whose MIA status I first wrote about a little over six years ago. Has that status actually changed? Target date: Friday, April 19.

My review of the most frequently cited extrinsic factors in the early and pronounced decline of Maria Callas’ voice (see last week’s post) has left us uncertain as to what might or might not with any confidence be declared causative. But what about an intrinsic one? That is, might there be something inherent in the way she sang that could have been a significant contributing element, if not the sole determinant? We should remind ourselves that singing, like any other discipline (especially one with a strong physical component), is best learned when young, and not easily re-learned later. Once set, the laying-down of tracks, the engagement of a complex of co-ordinations in a very particular pattern organized for a very particular purpose, responds with confusion when asked to re-direct. So it is especially regrettable that we have not so much as a single sampling of her singing from her years in Athens, the years of intense advanced study and early professional forays. It’s always difficult to know what value to place on reviews and testimonials, even from professional observers, singers, or teachers, unless one has become very familiar with their knowledge, predilections, and motives. We may, though, draw at least tentative conclusions from an accumulation of such reports and their alignment (or not) with what we are able to hear for ourselves, via recordings from a few years later. There is a goodly collection of such reports sprinkled through the opening chapter of Michael Scott’s book, and I think that with all due caution we can conclude that Callas had from the beginning “you know, the big voice,” and that at times she drove it overly hard in the exclusively spinto-to-dramatic roles she sang (no others were on offer). She was also evidently a very quick learner who had already acquired crack musicianship, and was in possession of enough florid capacity and range to embrace the challenging big-but-mobile Weber and Beethoven arias she essayed. The sopracuti were not really on display in her recital and concert programs, unless they poked through in the “Bel raggio lusinghier” or a Trovatore aria she sometimes programmed (which one is unspecified).

It is also difficult to know what has passed between teacher and pupil, not necessarily with respect to the teacher’s “method” or principles or declared goals, or with the pupil’s talent and dedication to them, but with respect to what has really been absorbed into the pupil’s network of reflexive activations at the functional level of technique I spoke of earlier. When Callas auditioned for lessons with the distinguished coloratura Elvira de Hidalgo in 1939, the latter heard “a violent cascade of sound . . . dramatic and moving;” it was as if she had been “waiting for that voice for a very long time.” In other words, there was already extraordinary material to hand, many tracks already laid down from this 15-year-old’s previous study, from her ambition and her imagination, her obsessive silent singing. Still, at that age the imprints are yet fresh, and more easily re-routed. It is clear that in Callas’ five years of work with de Hidalgo, at least two things were emphasized. One was the development of both ends of the range, but in particular the lower end by means of the chest register, which de Hidalgo herself, in company with all the Southern European high sopranos of her day, deployed. (We can hear it in especially enlivening form on her zarzuela recordings.) True, Callas was at the age where that function is emerging anyway, but de Hidalgo unquestionably summoned it and cultivated its uses; Callas herself referred to this. The second was mastery, in the form of an infinitely repeatable precision of pitch and rhythm, in music demanding extremes of velocity and flexibility, including elaborate embellishment—which meant, first and foremost, music of Italian Romantic styles. (Mozart and Handel call equally upon that mastery, but the former was only lightly engaged by Callas, and the latter not at all, save for a lonely outing of “Care selve.“)^(I) Obviously, Callas’ singing reflected both these emphases. But the critical question with the chest register (apart from its very existence, at issue in contemporary pedagogy) is what working relationship it forms with the two-thirds-to-three-quarters of the female range lying above it. And the critical question with the time-honored methods of mastering velocity and flexibility, assuming they have been well taught and well learned, is whether or not the teaching and learning of them has remained congruent with the essentials of strength and balance in the given voice. Those methods, enshrined in traditional progressions of exercises, belong to the executional level of technique. In and of themselves, they have but a fortuitous agreement with functional requirements, and even when they are to the keenest of perceptions successful, they are replete with opportunities for the kinds of unrecognized compensations, or overrides, I referred to earlier.

Dear devotees,

The post scheduled for today, March 9, will be published on Monday, March 11. With apologies for the delay,

CLO

We have recently (on Dec. 2) celebrated the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. For an artist so long departed (she died in 1977, and her last performances of a complete role were in 1965), there’s been a remarkable amount of attention paid. Warner (now the curator of both the EMI and Cetra catalogues) has released a 131-CD box that purportedly contains every known scrap of her recorded legacy. There’s a new documentary covering her Paris debut (1958) and the events surrounding it. Opera devoted the entire feature-article section of its December issue (seven articles) to her, and followed up with two more contributions in January. There was even a two-page spread in the heavily popcult-oriented Sunday New York Times and, more predictably, a festive smorgasbord of events and exhibitions in Athens, sponsored by Greek National Opera. On a more modest scale, there was also a full-day discussion, workshop, and concert event  here in New York under the sponsorship of Teatro Nuovo, in which I had the pleasure of participating as a member of the severely attrited cohort who saw and heard Callas in live performance with at least nominally adult eyes and ears.

There is just cause for celebration. Maria Callas was a great artist, and an enormously influential one. Michael Scott, in his artistic biography of her, ^(I)calls her “one of the three greatest opera singers of this [the 20th] century,” the other two being Caruso and Chaliapin. I’m not sure I’d rate her above all other contenders—where would that leave Lauritz Melchior, for one?—and so much depends on what each of us values most highly in singing—but she certainly belongs at that level of consideration. There cannot be much argument about her influence, except to note that it was confined to the operatic sphere. She did not, in addition to her operatic triumphs, elevate a folk-derived song genre, as did both Caruso and Chaliapin, or dominate an art song literature, as did Fischer-Dieskau, or penetrate down into music of the entertainment culture, in the manner of a Tauber or Tibbett, and by that means broaden appreciation of the classical voice. I think we are also entitled to assume that, in opera’s midcentury scramble to expand its repertory in the absence of viable new candidates, some restoration of the so-called “bel canto” part of it, and of the singing practices associated with that, was bound to take place. But of her status as primary catalyst, the single artist without whom such restoration would not have happened so quickly, embraced so much, or endured so well, there’s really no doubt. In my judgment, the restoration has not been without its underside, with respect both to operas deemed repertory-worthy and the direction some voices (beginning with Callas’ own) have been taken. But that, along with an evaluation of net gain or loss, is an argument for another time, and in any event is hardly Maria’s fault.

Callas’ unique artistic identity had three commonly attributed aspects: first, that she wedded the power and color of the best late-E-19 soprano voices with the agility and precision of embellishment of earlier styles (or, as I like to put it, the prismatic voice with the ornamental one), thus uniting two schools of technique and expression that had come to seem mutually exclusive; second, that she infused this vocality with a sense of dramatic purpose that rang true to a modern ear, and so relieved those older styles of the burden of seeming only aesthetic; and third, that this sense of dramatic purpose was also evident in her onstage physical presence and behavior (commonly referred to as “acting”), and fused with that element in her singing to create an unusually compelling unity of interpretive intent and effect. I believe those observations are accurate, though sometimes overly valorized. But what struck me upon first hearing her recorded voice, several years before seeing her, was a beckoning in its timbre that sounded ancient and modern at once, as if she were channeling something bygone, drawing us back toward it, yet also making it immediate to us. The something was embedded in the voice because it was embedded in her, and at her best she brought it forth directly, almost guilelessly, all the hard work involved notwithstanding. One of my fellow panelists at the birthday event, Peter Mark, observed that nearly all the masterpieces of 19th-Century opera are tragedies, and that Callas’ voice was uniquely suited to them because of a tragic quality in the tone itself. That’s getting close to the nature of her genius. With the advantage of hindsight, and staying for a moment with romantic notions about the sort of artist she represented on the highest plane: Maurice Maeterlinck—writing, if I recall aright, of the early passing of a brother—spoke of a certain look that marks those who are destined to die young, and Ernest Hemingway, writing of men in battle, of a particular smell that signals the same fate. If there is such a thing as a shade of the singing voice that sends that message to those attuned to it, it was there in the voice of Maria Callas. And that essence was there to the end, instantly recognizable even when the executional skills were severely compromised.

On Tuesday, Feb. 20, I’ll be delivering a talk, with a Q&A opportunity afterward, to the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA and UK. As always with this knowledgeable and devoted audience, the subject will be singing. Last year, I spoke about vocal poise—the balances of registration, breath, and resonance—as exemplified in the singing of Jussi Björling.

This time, the topic will be broader. I’ll be trying to trace what’s happened to the classical voice over the past century, influenced by fundamental shifts in how we communicate and listen and by parallel shifts in how opera is produced, and to define where the kind of singing we love stands in today’s virtualized culture. I’ll touch on some recent findings in our understanding of all this, and venture a few suggestions for how to address the problems it presents.

The registration deadline for this event is Feb. 19. For further details, see the Society’s website, here. 

And a reminder: Next post: Callas: An  Assessment, Fri., March 2.

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Herewith my thoughts on the subject of this season’s revival of Tannhäuser. Readers with an interest in the topic will be edified by the series of three (comparatively brief) articles Joseph Horowitz has posted on his own artsjournal blog. (It happens that he attended the same performance as I). As you’ll see, some of his observations are congruent with mine—in fact, he cites my article of last week on the matter of contemporary attempts to renew the repertory, which he kindly reposted. But he writes from a different angle, and extends his remarks to other Wagner stagings that in his view productively addressed the role of “Regie.” You can access all three here.

The least we can say of Richard Wagner is that he is Shakespeare’s only rival (or Shakespeare his) as greatest creator for the Western stage since antiquity. And a proof of his greatness is that an opera generally considered one of the weaker works of his maturity can register a measure of its soul-stirring power in a performance as emaciated as that of December 12, 2023 at the Metropolitan Opera. More remarkable yet is that the work did not need to overcome serious auteurial revisionism, or “concept,” to salvage what remains it could. For this was a revival of a thoroughly romantic-representational Schenck/Schneider-Siemssen production dating from 1977, which we may evaluate on the basis of how well it advocates for the work on its own terms, rather than on the merits of a corrective imposture. Thus, the event pitilessly illumines a state of performance that lends every apparent justification for the most hostile misrepresentations (or simple neglect) of the canon.

Tannhäuser completes our recent-season minitour of Wagner’s pre-Ring Romantic tales of the artist/sinner and his sufficiently-loyal-or-not co-protagonist. The other two, Der Fliegende Holländer and Lohengrin, were directed, along with Parsifal, by François Girard. Those productions have been discussed in previous posts, as has the thematically related case of Die Meistersinger. It’s a little ironic that of the pre-Ring trio,Tannhäuser should be brought before the public not at all à la mode, for it is the baldest of the three in its presumably outdated messaging. In it, the identity of the artist is not cloaked in parable, as in Lohengrin. Nor is the sinner’s blasphemous deed committed long before the start of the action, as in Holländer. Moreover, the specifically religious nature of the heroine’s sacrifice is openly declared. No parsing is required—it’s all right in front of us, in forceful, colorful, immediately apprehended music and action. The stage world’s level of reality is similar to Lohengrin‘s: a superimposition of legend onto date-stamped historical events populated by their actual participants, and of Christian piety onto the persistent presence of older, “pagan” practices. In Tannhäuser, the Christian/pagan agon focuses specifically on the sexual component of love: that’s the grotto of Venus herself, literally underground, that our hero has been dallying in at rise, and that’s a shrine to the Virgin, not a station of the cross, that Tannhäuser finds himself beneath after his cry of “Mein Heil ruht in Maria!”, and to which Elisabeth later prays. In this corner, the Cult of Venus, and in this, the Cult of the Virgin.

This year, the Metropolitan Opera is mounting six productions, among a total of eighteen, of new or recent works. Two are carried over from previous seasons; the other four are company premieres. None originates in Europe—five are by American composers (two of them black) and one by a Mexican composer. For a comparable example of attention to the contemporary in the company’s history, we would have to return to the first decades of the last century, when Puccini, Strauss, and assorted verists and post-Wagnerians were of the time, and it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that a new curiosity might turn out to be a repertory-worthy item. As for an equivalent American representation in a season’s offerings, there is no precedent. In those days of a century and more ago, the Met could lean on an audience in which large contingents of first- and second-generation Europeans, most prominently German and Italian, but all still marked by the great influence of 19th-Century Parisian grand opera, helped to fill in the old-money ranks. Opera had long been a high-class component of their home cultures, and while they naturally responded most readily to their native stories and sounds, they were also well accustomed to the interpenetration of repertories, and were assimilated into the broader European assumption of the virtues of opera and classical music. There was no perceived necessity to cater to one ethnicity or another, since opera went with the territory for all.

That assumption settled in for a good long run, and after 140 years^(I) is still the only plausible argument for the existence of a full-scale, full-season repertory opera company in an American city. It did not settle deeply enough, however, to turn opera and classical music into “public goods” in any but indirect ways; nor has it resulted in the creation of anything resembling a native American repertory that might lay the foundation for such a status. With the last influx of European emigrés now two to three generations behind us and the attentions of the rich increasingly drawn elsewhere, it has weakened, perhaps fatally. The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.   

Last week, I wrote about certain aspects of Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera—its close-to-the-unities compactness and the northerliness of its tinta as distinct from that of other proximate Verdi operas. And I discussed a Berlin radio performance of 1938 starring the Danish tenor Helge Roswaenge, along with some of the other singers and conductors who might have given us performances of the work bringing that aspect of its aesthetic to the fore. These thoughts were occasioned by Ballo’s return to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, but time ran out before I could address that event. My assessment herewith.

The Met’s production is a revival. As my regular readers know, I try to give revivals good attention, since—for all our interest in new operas and new productions—it is upon them that the survival of a repertory company ultimately depends. This one was one introduced eleven years ago, conducted then by Fabio Luisi and directed by David Alden with a design team of Paul Steinberg (set), Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes), Adam Silverman (lights), and Maxine Braham (choreography). Since no Assistant Director is credited with the re-staging, I assume that D. Alden was present this year to guide the re-installment of his interpretation. His brother Christopher was more prominent than David on the New York scene some years back (early on, there was also fraternal co-direction), so D. Alden’s work was not familiar to me when this production was new except secondhand, via European-based commentary. That commentary, though, had led me to watch the video of his Munich Festival production of Tannhäuser, and then to give that more-than-cursory attention in Opera as Opera. ^(I) There, in a chapter on revisionist Regietheater as of the time of writing, I gave Alden credit for a more complex and courageous approach to Wagner than Robert Wilson’s with Lohengrin. “He faces the work,” I acknowledged, “and from a certain P.O.V., digs into it.” I also quoted bits of his philosophy of production, which he describes as emanating from his own inner emotional life. “I can’t really direct something until I feel that what I have to say personally I can say through this piece.” I coined a term, “auteurial subjectivity,” to describe this sort of thinking about theatrical direction, and asked, as I have many times before and since, “. . . why is it we are supposed to accept the director’s inner emotional life in place of the field defined by the work’s creator(s), not to mention the huge philosophical assumption  . . . that the world itself is but a projection of that life . . . ?”

Much as I disagreed with Alden’s Fichtean notion of his role as director (and much as I was pleased to learn that Christian Thielemann had refused to conduct a revival of this Tannhäuser, an almost unique stand on artistic principle by a contemporary conductor), I did not dismiss him out of hand. The confession of inner emotional life on display in Tannhäuser was misplaced and often off-putting, but it was not that of an immature fanboy—a fanboy not of opera, at that, but of the silly side of the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s. That’s what this Ballo is. I had seen it in its first season, and while my memory is often all too sharp at retaining an unwelcome production’s look and vibe, a long-dormant forgetfulness faculty had mercifully snapped to and expunged it utterly, save for the pretty image of Icarus’ flight on the forecurtain. I recalled fragments of the individual performances, but nothing of the staging. I had taken notes, though, and while in what follows I will add a few observations from the event of 10/24/23 [in the brackets], the freshest overall response will come from those of 11/27/12. They don’t make elegant writing, but they do convey the unvarnished reaction. Lightly edited for clarity of syntax and punctuation: