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Gotterdammerung: Washing the Bearskin

2012-02-03T00:18:00.001-05:00

First the pleasant section about what was a solid if not extraordinary reading of Gotterdamerung last Friday's premiere offered, falling slightly above par for the cycle on the whole.

This is certainly Deborah Voigt's most successful Brunnhilde of the three, with a sound delightfully rich and comfortable after those effortful Walkure and Siegfried B-hilds. The end of the Dawn Duet included a rockin' final C, Act II was an impressive feat of stamina and the Immolation, if stopping short of ecstatic territory, was powerfully sung and a great improvement vocally over most of the other Brunnhildes in the Met rolodex.

This was my first time seeing JHM live after his dreamy turn in that Siegfried HD-cast in the fall. The volume issues, even with Luisi's singer friendly playing, are certainly a challenge live, and the depth of his charm on the screen is a bit lost at 500 yards. Still, his commitment to finding the beauty in Siegfried's music is always in evidence, and notorious tenor killing passages came off with great sensitivity. As hoped, his death scene was finely sung and quite moving.

But the overall strength of this Gotterdammerung owes at least as much to its supporting cast as its principles. The Hagen of Hans Peter Konig was the biggest sound happening on stage by some margin and a constant source of musical excitement. Other highlights included Iain Paterson's harrowing portrait of a Gunther consumed by his fears and guilt, a robust Norn crew led by Elisabeth Bishop, and of course the twin juggernauts of Waltraud Meier's Waltraute and Eric Owens' Alberich.

Luisi's way with Wagner, such a revelation in Siegfried, was less distinctive here, but very rewarding nonetheless. The boundless energy and lithe movement of the score in Luisi's hands is ever intriguing if a bit inert in those moments where ultimate grandeur is called for.

* * *

And now the less pleasant section.

Oh, LePage Ring cycle. I don't know if I have the energy anymore. The Gotterdammerung production had more to recommend it than the Rheingold or Walkure (I'd call it a toss-up with the Siegfried, though my thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt since I only saw it in broadcast), but the fatal flaws of the enterprise are still very much in evidence. The LePage Ring remains a prototype physical concept in search of a story, and the audience's experience of the Ring, despite substantial musical achievement, is the poorer for it.

So what worked? The two large group scenes (the vassals in Act II and hunting party in Act III) were staged traditionally but very effectively--for long stretches we got minimal funny-business from the Machine, allowing those scenes to unfold without distraction. Several touches, like Siegfried's pitiful attempt to take another shot at Hagen after he's been stabbed in the back, were particularly inspired. Gotterdammerung lacked any image as striking as those snowy trees from Walkure or the forest wall from Siegfried, but points for the Act III forest scene with its huge waterfall (nice to see what the Rhinemaidens are swimming in for once) and the Gibichung throne room.

This last image, a huge golden disc pattern, seemed, along with a few of the transition projections, to indicate a more abstract, perhaps even psychedelic, direction for this installment, which would have been a welcome liberation from the literal-minded drudgery of the previous shows. But alas, the golden disc thing turned out to be a lame tree ring (cuz like, wood burns and that's why the Gibichung palace goes up in flames, got it?) and the trippy transition sequences were used sparingly and never developed.

So, on that note, here is the now standard selection of offenses against stagecraft for this final Ring installment, by category:

1. Make-work for the machine award: For the Norn weaving of fate sequence, we basically have the Machine serving as a giant cat's cradle. This is one of those situations where one could make thoughtful suggestions about how maybe it looks like a giant loom, or, isn't it clever that the spinning planks cut off the different ropes--but they all miss the point, which is that this "idea" only serves to draw attention to the ugly, bizarre, dramatically inert object dominating the stage and distract from the actual drama.

2. Putting cast members in harm's way: In Act III scene I, the Rhinemaidens continuously clamber up that waterfall projection mentioned above and then slide down under the lip of the planks in the front of the stage. Here again we have the production mistaking actors doing something nervewrackingly dangerous onstage for an actual stage illusion. Every time one of them slid down the thing (and no, a waterfall projection does not a complete illusion make when accompanied by the sound of butts skidding on fiberglass) the audience collectively gasped about whether she would smack her head on the front planks.

3. Upstaging the opera with unnecessary set pieces: And of course, the LePage Ring has often indulged in using the set to stage trivial moments that confuse the balance of the drama. Here LePage zeroed in on the several pages around Siegfried's arrival at the Gibichung castle. Yes, the dialogue there seems to exist solely to fudge the fact that its really hard to stage people in the interior of a house and someone arriving on a riverbank simultaneously, but its also a trivial part of the script. LePage uses the opportunitity to show the machine clumsily "doing" a river, and Hagen ends up stupidly narrating his arrival to the rest of the Gibichungs who can see it with their own eyes.

But surely the least forgiveable offense is the deeply unimaginative and clunky staging of the opera's climax. I won't go into too much detail, as it has been excoriated in other outlets already, but for this production to so baldly phone in a moment both heavily anticipated for years now, not to mention its greatest chance for redemption, is all the proof one needs that no one is really invested in this failure any longer.

NSO plays Matthews, Mackey, Sibelius

2012-01-14T21:29:00.000-05:00

Saw the NSO with violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu last night, in the DC-premiere of a captivating violin concerto by the composer Steve Mackey composed, Sibelius' 5th, and orchestrations of selected Debussy Preludes by Colin Matthews.

The Mackey piece, "Beautiful Passing," was composed with Josefowicz in mind in 2008. Josefowicz played some of the key themes before the performance and explained their provenance in Mackey's experience of his mother's death. I can appreciate this as a way to get an audience to identify with a new work--its hard to expect even the most open-minded concert-goers to develop much rapport with a complex piece the first time out. Premieres end up being "that new thing" between the overture and symphony. Some framing and a story, live from the musicians or composer, helps ensure listeners walk away with a lasting association, even if they can't hum the tune.

Yet, as Robert Reilly notes here, a work like this should really stand on its own as a piece of abstract music and learning about the "program" in this way can be a bit distracting. For instance, the work opens with a violent contest between wild percussive gnashing in the orchestra and the exuberant, almost desperate violin solo--it ends softly, the violin exhausted, the orchestra at a quiet drone. We are told this is Mackey's mother resigning herself to die, but such information seems so terribly reductive when applied to this rich, evocative music. Words and stories fail, as they should, to describe the experience. While inspired by a specific experience for the composer, the music becomes more universal, in the hearing, transcending its subject matter. Which is all to say, my hope for this worthwhile piece is that it is still played in 10 years but that the majority of audience members without the initiative to check out its history are none the wiser about its context.

Josefowicz was quite stunning in the solo part, embracing the raucous dance figures that reappear throughout with diabolical gusto and imbuing the closing section with a devastating sense of collapse.

After the half was a bravura performance of Sibelius' 5th symphony. Lintu goaded along the rollicking rhythms of the first movement with swift, intense precision, culminating in an ecstatic climax that was hard not to applaud. The winning final movement (I swear to God that theme is ripped off in a tearful Don Bluth-animated animal reunion somewhere) was urgent but suitably majestic. Lintu clearly has that great intangible conducting skill of maintaining momentum while allowing the audience to appreciate the "vertical" harmony and texture in a work. The NSO sounded agile and rich throughout, though some shrillness in the winds and scattered coordination problems in the strings were popped up.

The concert opened with a series of five Debussy preludes, as orchestrated by the composer Colin Matthews, apparently best known for his role in Deryk Cooke's performance version of Mahler's 10th. This may be a personal bias, but I have difficulty seeing the point of these sorts of projects. The Preludes are quintessential creatures of the piano, and, not having particularly memorable tunes, much of their appeal is bound up in the way Debussy's colors play on that instrument. Why one would want to hear an orchestra try its hand is unclear. Moreover, it is exceedingly grating to hear Debussy's music orchestrated in a way that is far removed from how Debussy's orchestral music actually sounds. Not that I would find it particularly worthwhile to hear someone fake Debussy's style, but there is some deep cognitive dissonance in listening to the composer's music via a sensibility far more obvious and schmaltzy than anything we would expect from Debussy himself. Not saying all orchestrations are bad ideas, but it doesn't work for all material.

(And dere's Downey's original take at Ionarts.)

Zuill Bailey plays Bach

2012-01-08T16:05:00.000-05:00

Zuill Bailey did the cellist's Iron Man yesterday at Strathmore--a back-to-back performance of all six of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. His disc of the suites is here.

It's no mystery why people don't run this gauntlet in public more often. After a decade of preparation, a recording under his belt, and a lifetime of performing the suites like any cellist, a live performance is still riddled with dicey moments well outside the realm of "respectable" CD-smooth sound audiences are at least thought to demand. In short, it's a beast, and a very different experience from all those laboratory-created performances swimming around one's head.

Yet thank goodness we have brave souls willing to do it, as it is a very special thing indeed to hear them live. A cherished performance memory for me will always be sitting in the front row at a Bargemusic concert during a frigid winter in what must have been 2001 or 2002 for a performance of the fifth suite by Fred Sherry. Watching Sherry bear-wrestle his cello to the ground to extract this remarkable music was a visceral experience, not soon forgotten.

A traversal of all six in a large venue like the main Strathmore hall is bound to be less captivating, of course. There are some basic endurance issues that give a concert like Bailey's more of a congenial exhibition flavor than a full-throated reading. (Bailey wisely embraced the not-quite-a-normal-recital circumstances by adding a generous helping of charming anecdotes and his own thoughts about the suites throughout.) And of course, this is music of a surpassingly intimate character that is ill-suited to a full-sized concert hall. The atmosphere for yesterday's show was also not helped by a Strathmore sponsor who decided 120 minutes of solo baroque cello music was a clear winner for families and offered free tickets to kids, leading to constant disruptions throughout by bored-out-of-their-minds children.

But all that aside, there were many things to love about the afternoon. Bailey uses his instrument, a 1693 Gofriller cello originally designed to serve more of a bass role in baroque orchestras, to stunning effect, opening up the range of these pieces with a rich, booming lower register (find an excerpt from the CD and check it out). The uptempo dances are earthy, rhythmic, and at times downright raw, reflecting Bailey's interest in emphasizing the forms that inspire the different movements over a more abstract approach. Beauty of tone is surely sacrificed in some places, but this approach frequently pays dividends in exciting, kinetic interpretations. He contrasts these with leisurely, almost indulgent, readings of the slower movements, for instance a stately, intimate Sarabande from the 4th suite and a spectral, haunting Sarabande in the 5th. Special commendation, too, for Bailey's lovely and simple take on the first suite, a carefree reading that brought new interest to these well-trod pieces. He offered the prelude to No. 1 again as his only encore, inviting the audience to reflect on the remarkable journey these pieces represent.

Stuff from last year: Lucia at WNO

2012-01-06T17:45:00.001-05:00

More from before the break...After the competent but pedestrian Tosca that opened the season, WNO's Lucia de Lammermoor, in a production by David Alden, was a most welcome second outing. I saw the B cast led by Lyubov Petrova on November 16.

Alden's placement of the opera in a sort of nightmare-Victorian-asylum-type space stands in stark contrast to a lazy Victorian "updating" like the LA Romeo discussed below. Where that production seemed mostly motivated by a desire to spare the audience the spectacle of drippy Renaissance costumes, Alden is deadly serious about stripping away the Lucia's kitsch to get at the social and sexual themes that drove the work's contemporary appeal. The biggest choice is a foregrounding of the Enrico-Lucia relationship--indeed, one might read Enrico and Lucia as the only "real" characters in this production, orphans abandoned long ago in an institution. Both are emotionally stunted, Enrico by his failures and Lucia by Enrico, who abuses and lusts after his sister, then suffers remorse for it. The other characters in the opera are almost figments of their psychoses, Edgardo becomes Lucia's storybook fantasy of a highland protector and a virile reminder to Enrico that he cannot have his sister; Arturo, presented as a literally golden dandy, is Enrico's perverse vision of the self-realized adulthood that eludes him.

All in all this is a rich and provocative production and a model of the kind of regie-lite (genuinely provocative, but not greedy for headlines) interpretation that a company like WNO would benefit from trying out at least once a season. One quibble I saw mentioned elsewhere was the final gesture of the production, Enrico snapping Edgardo's neck after his suicide. Between this and the gratuitous neck snapping doled out to Ulrica in last season's Ballo production, the WNO stage is starting to resemble the less credible kills in a Lethal Weapon movie. Enough already.

But this would hardly have been such a success without a strong, game cast. Charles Downey saw both casts and I suspect his assessment of Petrova as the dramatically richer, if slightly less musically consistent Lucia is correct. Her "Regnava nel silenzio" was not the most promising start, lacking a certain finesse in the phrasing. That was quickly forgotten however, by her committed work throughout the middle acts and a decidedly stunning Mad Scene. Brian Mulligan, as Enrico, was solid vocally but really shone in his willingness to inhabit all the neuroses and desperation demanded by the production. Someone whose name I can't find right now made for a robust and satisfying Edgardo, with good work up and down the rest of the roster. And Auguin back in the pit!

Stuff from last year: Dark Sisters

2012-01-04T21:07:00.000-05:00

So anyways: way on back in early November I saw Dark Sisters (i.e. the other Nico Muhly opera, about polygamists in a splinter Mormon sect, with libretto by Stephen Karam). Reviews of this first run (it returns in Philadelphia in June) were, shall we say, very cautiously supportive and littered with a non-insignificant amount of commentary that had more to do with a canned meta-narrative (good for you classical music! sort of!) than the work at hand, but for my part I was pretty taken with it.

Here is a work that is really invested in using the possibilities of opera to support modern theatre, a marriage that seems so ideal but is rarely consummated. Works like "An American Tragedy" (though clearly I would go if they put it up again) seem disturbingly dominant in the major league new opera landscape, when the target demographic is making events out of pieces like "Nixon in China" and "Satyagraha" that look a lot more like the kind of straight theatre being made by interesting folks everywhere except the opera house. But I believe I was just bashing meta-narratives, wasn't I, so...specifics:

The score is an intimate and ever rewarding player in the piece--not just an extension of the characters' transient emotions but a manifestation of the illusion that surrounds and isolates them, the presence of the moral and religious code (patriarchy, yo) that structures the way they see the world. The heretical thoughts of Eliza, the rebellious wife at the center of the story, are tied to dissonant motifs that challenge the sweet, narcotic atmosphere established for the sister wives.

I dunno, maybe that sounds obvious, but the effect is deeply immersive, and realizes the central emotional tenet of what the piece is trying to convey about these women: to understand why they stay in lives that appear so dreadful means understanding not just how they are trapped, but how they feel comforted and tied to this world that is deeply ingrained in them. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the piece is Armela's plaintive aria halfway through the first Act, in which she encourages Eliza to abandon her wayward thoughts to ensure they will be together in heaven. And yet, while doing a tremendous job of creating sympathetic characters in these women (as opposed to just victims) it also shows their cruelty and capacity to close ranks against their "sisters" under threat of offending their husband.

My chief quibble is with the pacing of the main narrative story about Eliza's decision to defect from the family. When, in the final scene, Eliza's daughter rejects her in favor of the sect Eliza has abandoned to save her, there should be more of an emotional punch, but it comes too quickly. I would almost prefer an ending with less resolution--perhaps a split scene where we see the daughter attending the funeral juxtaposed with Eliza coping with her strange new life on the outside.

Rebecca Taichman's production is mostly very strong, with a simple, arresting set evoking the red dirt of the desert, and the powerful recurring motif of the sisterwives' dresses stained with its dust providing memorable images. If anything, Taichman's staging abandons its abstract strengths too readily--I can imagine straightforward set pieces like the television interview with the sisters (in which a screen in the "studio" displays footage of the sisters being filmed real time while they sit on the opposite side of the stage) easily accommodate and in fact profit from less literal staging choices.

Though if I could make one big request of the staging--lose the video, k? Clearly, the scene is a television interview, and the temptation to use onstage video strong it is. But I can imagine a raft of different configurations that would increase the impact of this segment, and none involve the deadening, alienating effect of onstage video. Someday I would like to see a video gimmick done in such a way that the real-time feed looks something like the kind of real-world studio quality feed that is being portrayed, but until then it just evokes awkward home movies and it sucks.

I'm shortchanging the cast, but only because all the reviews two months ago were uniform in their praise. This was a first-rate group of singing actresses (and actor) and it was great to see what they were able to do with the very ample opportunities the score provides for distinctive statements by the key wife characters.

Romeo at LA Opera

2011-11-21T21:36:00.009-05:00

OK...going to start digging out of my blog-hole in reverse chronological order.

Saw LA Opera's Romeo yesterday, sans main draw Vittorio Grigolo. The company served up a fun surprise sub though, in Charlie Castronovo, in town for a gala the previous night--he was unfamiliar to me but apparently a big hit in their Il Postino the other year. The reviews made Grigolo sound like a supreme exponent of the lusty Italian Romeo, so I imagine Castronovo's fine French styling and longing puppy-dog looks actually shifted the overall impression from Sonny to Tony quite a bit. Castronovo's lyric tenor has that plaintive edge ideal for Romeo, and never degenerates into anything close to shoutiness, even when the demands of the score get less polite. I thought at times he had trouble cutting through the orchestra, but this seemed to disappear when he stood on the upper levels of the set, so I'm going to tentatively blame the quality of the Chandler pavilion acoustics in the middle of the orchestra. And since you ask, rest assured that the hottniss level was preserved in Grigolo's absence, as Castronovo is also really, really, really, ridiculously good looking and had no trouble popping off that shirt for the bed business (prediction: in 10 years no one even mildly fugly is going to be let anywhere near big time productions of this show).

His costar, Nino Machaidze, has many things going for her--a big formidable sound that is brilliant on top and agile throughout, a generosity with the fireworks throughout money numbers like the poison aria (though choppy phrasing prevented this from being a real home run), and of course, the hotniss. But these are relatively generic pleasures and she never really offered a believable Juliet. R&J is pretty indestructible as warhorses go, but for the final tomb scene to deliver its emotional payload and not just some priddy sangin', we need to really pity Juliet as a vulnerable child meeting a gruesome end. Some judiciously deployed restraint is really all that is required to get there but Machaidze's attempts at coquetry had all the credibility of a courtesan who doesn't think she's fooling anyone (the Penthouse Executive Club midtown tunnel billboard makeup scheme she had going on--see above--did not help things either). There's certainly no disputing she's a charismatic stage presence, but I would like to see her in something that takes more appropriate advantage of her special qualities.

The production transplants the action to the 19th century (in France maybe?), an attempt, as we learned in the preconcert lecture, to better align the work's gothic, romantic themes with the period in which they are at home. But its one of those situations where you suspect the move was really made because 19th century costumes are easier to procure than Renaissance, as none of the rewards of the updating are exploited with too fine a point. The physical production is organized around multi-story skeletal structures that are moved to create different spaces. Useful enough, but the ultimate effect, as it usually is with this trick, is to dissolve any atmosphere that might have been generated. Probably budget-friendly, though. The direction was effective enough, with an appropriately boisterous fight centerpiece. Judgment is reserved on the spotty chemistry of the leads during their scenes together, for obvious reasons.

I'm glad to say Placido's work in the pit was far less distracting than last month's Tosca debacle. No doubt, there's more life to be had in this music under other batons and some showpieces really suffered from the lack of momentum (sorry Stephano the page cover!), but a few coordination hiccups aside, he supported the singers sensitively and without incident.

Washington Bach Consort plays Pergolesi, Bach, and Graupner

2011-11-06T23:30:00.010-05:00

A very engaging take on the Pergolesi Stabat Mater from Washington Bach Consort this afternoon (the composer's second most famous work, I believe). J. Reilly Lewis' ensemble captured the driving energy that characterizes many of the work's movements with great verve and precision as well as the often overwhelming beauty that belies the modest forces required. Its easy to see why this is Pergolesi's masterpiece--there is a rich variety to the movements and the emotional communication is immediate and powerful. Also, for those who like their Italian baroque full of decadent, unbearable tension (and who doesn't), it's like suspension city up in this b***h.

Soprano Agnes Zsigovics, performing in both the Stabat Mater and a setting of Vergungte Ruh by Christoph Graupner (a contemporary of Bach) combined a warm, ringing sound with an unwillingness to hold back the kind of firepower sometimes missed in this music. Countertenor Daniel Taylor delivered some beautiful sounds in the upper part of his register and acquitted himself well in the Stabat Mater, but a setting of the same Vergungte Ruh by J.S. Bach was less successful. With the caveat that the countertenor voice is a mysterious thing about which I would not feign understanding, Taylor frequently sounded poorly supported here, resulting in some choppy phrasing and a weak, often inaudible lower register. Indeed, the Bach in general was a bit of a snoozefest.

Scott Detra, organist for the Washington National Cathedral, rounded out the program with a thrilling reading of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor (BWV 542).

New Siegfried

2011-11-05T22:28:00.014-04:00

Some quick thoughts on yesterday's Siegfried HD cast. The movie theatre is very kind to the LePage productions, I think. Among other things, the swooping cameras can get into the trench area between the apron thing and the machine, meaning the awkwardness of the setup is not a constant bother. So take this faint praise for the production with a grain of salt: I think this is the most successful outing of this Ring so far. The audience is asked to endure almost no time with the hideous naked Machine, which I'd wager might almost allow for some suspension of disbelief from the Family Circle. The projections are set for much longer periods, mitigating the "whatsit gonna do next" dynamic that so cheapened Walkure and Rheingold. And elements like final conflagration for the love duet and the deep forest background for Act II were quite lovely (funny how this was the instance in which the videoz most faithfully mimicked the plastic shrubbery of the Schenk, no?)

Which is not to say it is "good". There are still unforced errors aplenty, including, but hardly limited to: the need to over-choreograph Wagner's transition music with stage business ranging from the merely distracting (Siegfried's one-man fire dueling over the Act III scene transition) to the downright boneheaded (the extremely misguided stealing of baby Siegfried in the opening material); the inability to leave well-enough alone when it comes to video gimmickry (I'm not a hater I swear, a little bit of 3D woodbird would have been fine with me, but when things cross into Zippideedoodah territory you've gone too far); the weird fussy staging choices (Wotan's speer is really a poster tube with the runes rolled up inside? And he has to take them out when he talks to Erda? And then Siegfried doesn't bust the speer but the left over metal rod? Wha?); and the refusal to use all these alleged magical powers to solve some of the most obvious staging challenges of the piece ($45M and we get a hilarious talking snake head for a dragon, gotcha). But the biggest trouble is that we still have zero evidence that this Ring has any sort of an aesthetic, much less an interpretive, program in place. We are not witnessing a vision for the Ring; we are witnessing an ambitious but pointless formal experiment in stagecraft.

But these shenanigans were mostly forgiven on account of a winning afternoon music-wise, for which we can chiefly thank last-minute Siegfried Jay Hunter Morris and slightly last-minute maestro Fabio Luisi.

Morris' Siegfried is a joy in a part where "less-awkward than others" is considered a triumph. He brings out the beauty in Siegfried's music in a way rarely heard, lingering lovingly over phrases that often get a bark. He sounded a bit less fresh than on the prima broadcast (because who wouldn't) but still maintained a remarkable level of security throughout, never delving into that danger, danger fake throaty business that is the Siegfried's most common weapon. As if that weren't enough, he credibly portrays Siegfried's naivete and wonder in a way that goes beyond the standard "middle-aged dude bouncing around" delivery. Truly, he had the HD audience eating out of the palm of his hand (his ability to look the part doesn't hurt either) by the end of the show, a feat I'll admit I didn't quite think possible. Here is a Siegfried that is not overshadowed by his colleagues with lesser assignments but is truly the star of his own show. Complaints that his voice is a shade too light for the role, or might be underpowered in house could be valid but also I don't care. JHM is operating at the forefront of research in the field of Siegfried portrayals and should be celebrated for it.

Luisi likewise deserves great credit for his energetic, propulsive reading of the score, the kind of reading that makes one question how this opera could ever get a reputation for dragginess. I suppose he might be guilty of TOO much momentum at times--there are some magisterial moments lost in the fray here.

The supporting men in this dudeliest of operas were uniformly strong. Perhaps Luisi's gentler accompaniment was what Terfel needed, or the Wanderer just lies in a better place for him, but I detected little of the shoutiness that marred his Rheingold and Walkure outings. And where the stentorian authority needed to make those Wotans resonate seemed to escape him, the Wanderer's shadings of regret, humanity, and desperation were beautifully drawn out. Gerhard Siegel has been appropriately praised for his musical singing of Mime, though he perhaps suffered most from the production's lack of a clear concept. Eric Owens and Hans-Peter Konig supplied vocal luxury to spare in Alberich and Fafner.

This was a success for Voigt, though I don't think anyone is unclear about the fundamental discord between where her voice is right now and the demands of Brunnhilde. Still, she seemed to be working very hard to keep things in the right place and it paid off handsomely (moreso during the HD cast than on opening night, where she appeared to be wisely and aggressively cutting her losses). She also seems much more alive to the dramatic demands of the Siegfried scene than the Walkure Brunnhilde, which felt like it never came together beyond a very general level. Vocally, I don't know if the good work here says one way or another how she'll fare with the big Gotterdammerung sing. But acting-wise I'm certainly looking forward to what she does with the part.

P.S. Not that I don't appreciate Renaay's time, but could we maybe transition into having these HD cast intermission interviews done by professionals? There's a whole group of people who get paid specifically to ensure public/recorded interactions are not painful to watch. Hire some of them.

Louis Lortie plays Liszt at the Library of Congress

2011-10-20T21:00:00.021-04:00

I suppose I don't attend the right conferences, but I'd be interested in a panel session titled "Did it Make a Difference? Taking Stock of the Liszt Bicentenary," in which key, um, Liszt stakeholders take a candid look at how well the jubilee year of programming has succeeded in its oft-repeated objectives of broadening the repertoire in circulation and mitigating the impression of Liszt's music as mostly impressive but vacuous showpieces.

I imagine a number of those panelists would take a pessimistic view. Sure, some high profile champions (see Hough especially) have been making the case as part of the festivities, but the general narrative in the media must still feel disturbingly noncommittal for the Liszt partisan, along the lines of "Liszt: Shallow Showman or Something More? Eh." The birthday weekend coverage alone sounds pretty discouraging. A. Ross calls the main Times story by Kenneth Hamilton, a "fine, if unsentimental appreciation" but by classical music standards, this kind of merciless even-handedness comes off like a hit piece. Over at NPR, the b-day headline registers as that cruelest of backhanded compliments--nice guy, but the music doesn't have much going for it (as called out by Ionarts).

If the concern is the taste of the general classical audience, these measured, musicologically-minded assessments just aren't going to cut it. What is needed are some new narratives about Liszt that modern audiences can grasp and appreciate. Understanding Liszt as "proto-modernist" is certainly a fascinating current that has surfaced throughout the year (see Pierre Laurent-Aimard's excellent DC recital last spring), though the appeal here may be limited. But Louis Lortie's engrossing show at the Library of Congress this past Wednesday demonstrated he is onto something very different...

Lortie presented Years 2&3 of the Années de Pèlerinage (he has just released a recording of the complete cycle). He gets that this music turns upon a deep, intimate connection between performer and audience--that, to a degree far greater than the other great Romantics, much of Liszt is not fully formed until it is communicated by the artist. This quality might make Liszt's genius harder to grasp in a midi file, but in the right hands, it can make for a magical performance.

In the opening works of the Deuxieme Années (Italie), Lortie seemed to discover each color in the Sposalizio, meandering through its varied facets almost as if playing jazz. The gently martial dance of the "Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa" and the wistful "Sonetto 47 del Petrarca" appeared like childhood songs suddenly and imperfectly recalled.

The second half brought the entirety of the Troisieme Année. This is Liszt descending into the abyss, with brief moments of shimmering respite ("Les Jeux D'eau"). Despite the frequently transgressive harmonic language, that element of deeply personal connection remained. Doing justice to works as black as the "Marche Funebre" and the two "Threnodies" requires an unflagging emotional investment, but Lortie pursued them faithfully.

Recording this music is difficult. I've been listening to Lortie's disc for the last few days and while enjoyable, the discrepancy between concert and artifact is significant. Indeed, this may be one of Liszt's challenges in 2011--the inventor of the modern virtuoso recital naturally created works that live most intensely when they are experienced live in the hands of someone with rare dominion over the piano.

* * *

See Charles Downey's review of the Lortie recital. Also note the satisfying takedown of that Times article from Lisa Hirsch--audiences and critics can obviously have differences of taste about great composers of the past (i.e. Rossini blows) but trying to adjudicate whether or not someone whose music has been consistently played all over the world for the past century plus has a worthwhile musical legacy is an absurd bit of overzealous even-handedness. You don't need to be make it a puff piece, but you do need to report that the vast majority of great concert pianists of the past and present have demonstrated they think this question of whether there's "any good" in Liszt's output is moot.

Tosca at WNO

2011-09-13T11:45:00.012-04:00

WNO pulled out some big guns for its season opener Saturday (from the looks of it, perhaps the most significant gunshow on offer this season) for a satisfying if not memorable Tosca.

Pat Racette brings considerable assets to her Tosca, though I don't know if she really breaks away from the pack. The voice is certainly a fine fit, and everything seems comfortable, but Vissi D'Arte, for instance, never grabs you the way it did last season with Radvanovsky. Now, its tough competing with a special quality like SondRad, but hey--the game is just more intense when you're trying for something beyond a reliable workaday Tosca. But still--great performance, great voice, and hopefully she will continue to make this attention to WNO a habit.

Ditto for Alan Held's Scarpia. It needs no repeating that Held is a great actor endowed with a voice that is always a pleasure to hear. I don't think I ever hit publish on the review, but let me just add for the record his Met Wozzecks last Spring were a "delight". There are some intriguing aspects to his Scarpia--here's the police chief as robust and handsome, an true perverted aesthete rather than just a lech. His psychological torture of Tosca becomes more acute because we can better believe her resistance to seeing him as a monster, often a foregone conclusion with obviously suspicious characters. This also allows the big "reveal" about what he wants from her to be a more powerful break with the rest of the scene. That said, Held and the production would have to go farther to make this interpretation really pop--instead we we mostly got standard issue Scarpia business but without the full complement of nastiness.

Catapulting a voice with the heft of Frank Poretta's up into Cavaradossi's heights is not an easy thing, but he managed it with a pleasing dexterity that surprised again and again throughout the evening. Just when one was getting comfortable, "E Lucevan le Stella" included a kind of disturbing crack, but he recovered well. Also, some might accuse him of being bit of a ham acting wise, but I'm a sucker for when people do gestures that underline the notes they want you to pay attention to, so we're cool.

As for Placido Domingo's conducting...just...damn. I mean, at least its a useful reminder for folks who only attend professional opera that conducting this stuff is really hard. If the worst of it had just been relentlessly draggy, four-square tempi it would have been *only* dull. But he seems not to have mastered the fundamental skill of anticipating the singers in close-quarters aria work, which, if distracting to the audience, must have been brutal for the singers. What is this conducting racket he has going? Is it like a consolation prize to companies when he can't afford to use a limited vocal appearance on them? Please, dude. I just want to have positive, uncomplicated feelings about you. Stop these shenanigans.

If the old Zefferelli production is the Cadillac of traditional Toscas, this Dallas Opera production is more like a Ford Focus. Yes, everything has four walls and there is a lot of fake stone of various sorts, but its not actually an attractive set. Also, let me throw out a pet peeve with "traditional sets" like this: if you are going to depict a "real" interior, you can't just disregard the basic architectural elements of that interior and think the set dressing will allow it to pass. Case in point--the Act I church has most of the action taking place at ground level, and a balcony overhead which, through some scrim cleverness, is revealed as the altar area for the Te Deum sequence. Yeah, I see how that's a convenient way to do this scene, but is there a church in all of Italy that has the altar suspended on a balcony thing above the main sanctuary area? Little quibbles maybe, but this sort of thing just invalidates the whole appeal of a traditional set, which should allow the audience to lose themselves in a credible facsimile of a real space.

Attila at WCO

2011-09-11T21:21:00.015-04:00

Raphael's Vatican fresco of Attila meeting Pope Leo, part of the series on 1st Millennium Christianity WIN.

For its fall show this past Friday, Washington Concert Opera presented Verdi's Attila headlined by John Relyea and Brenda Harris and an excellent supporting cast.

I missed out on the Muti-led Attilas at the Met last season so this was really my first experience with it. Musically, its neglect is certainly unfortunate--lots of colorful orchestral writing, a string of excellent if not quite top-40 arias, and some thrilling ensemble/chorus numbers. Libretto wise, however, its curiosity status makes a bit more sense. Editing isn't the problem--Attila is all business in banging through its plot points--but rather that the dramatic possibilities of the characters aren't quite realized to the point where they take off.

Attila is really the most interesting and, in a way, sympathetic character onstage. Being a Hun and all, he starts the opera indifferent to anything that doesn't involve pillaging, but is moved by Pope Leo to renounce his plan to sack Rome and ends up making a short-lived truce with the Italians. But, Michael Corleone style, he is pursued by his past wrongs and ultimately gives into and is undone by his thirst for blood and power. That arc also comes with a love story--part of his attempt to be a better barbarian is his love for Odabella, daughter of the general of the town he has just destroyed when the opera starts--but she of course has sworn her revenge and ultimately stabs him. Certainly a lot to work with in the tragic anti-hero department, right? But Attila's best music passes without much in the way of psychological engagement and he is virtually a bystander for Acts II and III until he is unceremoniously dispatched. Perhaps Verdi hasn't quite invented the signature introspective baritone aria that serves his later works so well, or perhaps the sublimated political agenda that runs through the work precludes any stronger sympathy for Attila. Either way, the piece feels like it revolves around a missed opportunity.

The same limitations afflict Odabella's character as well. The setup is clutch: she is introduced with that powerhouse aria about the badassery of Italian women which perversely attracts her father's killer to keep her in his camp. The potential for some internal conflict between her need for revenge and some mutual attraction with her captor is high, especially after we meet her wet blanket of a boyfriend (Foresto). But again, Odabella is largely sidelined after her aria opening the first act (a strong showpiece but emotionally static). These possibilities keep the drama interesting for a time, but ultimately do not move the plot.

* * *

Washington Concert Opera's production, if not quite a homerun on par with their Werther last spring, had lots to recommend it. Antony Walker excelled in demonstrating how much more there is to this score than oom-pah, and shepherded some riveting climaxes with the massed chorus and principals.

As discussed above, an Attila is somewhat disadvantaged by the material he has to work with, but John Relyea still seemed underwhelming. Its a fine voice certainly, and he turned in engaging readings of the main arias, but he lacked the authority required to give Attila much a commanding profile. His voice is probably not ideal for this work, which would benefit from some blacker flavor than his very pleasing instrument delivers. But still, it was a bit casual.

Brenda Harris made the strongest impression of the principals--here is one of those remarkable voices that is just naturally at home at its loudest. On the evidence of that killer first aria, I was a bit concerned that she actually didn't have a viable piano. But those fears were dispelled in her first Act aria, a smorgasbord of chilling effects, which, if not always the priddiest, were deftly executed and made for the evening's second biggest showstopper.

As whiny boyfriend Foresto, Arthur Espiritu brought a sweet beguiling tenor and fine sense of Italian diction and style (as I understand these things at least) that made his multiple arias a musical highlight, even if the drama could benefit from a lot less Foresto. That said, I see where Anne Midgette is coming from here--a sound like Espiritu's is more suited to an Ernesto than, say, a proto-Manrico, and there's certainly an argument to be made that the role should lean heavier.

James Stearns' Ezio (this Italian buddy of Attila's that ends up conspiring against him who also gets a questionable amount of stage time) was a strong player as well, bringing a rich baritone to the role and good command of the role.

Kudos as well to the assembled chorus, who offered the kind of precision that allows one to really take notice of the choral writing.

Next up, Saturday night's WNO opener...

Yuja Wang

2011-08-17T00:40:00.003-04:00

Great recital here from last year's Verbier festival courtesy of medici.tv. She plays Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs, the Symphonic etudes, a variety of Scriabin preludes, some Prokofiev, etc. I love what a grand time she seems to have while playing--then as soon as she gets up to bow she can't get out of there fast enough.

Also note that her dresses here would probably also be scandalous if they weren't floor length. That means this whole kerfuffle is about acceptable hemlines. C'mon grandmas. Get over it.

Gross

2011-08-16T23:00:00.005-04:00

Zachary Woolfe has done a great service in digging into the backstory on the Met's shutdown of Brad Wilber's Met Futures page, for fifteen years(!) an invaluable source of information about future Met schedules (also h/t to parterre, of course). Reuters' Felix Salmon, primarily known for patiently explaining stuff about bonds to me, also weighs in.

The Met's pretense was that possible errors on the site somehow gave them the legal whatnot to request he take the site down. As Woolfe's piece makes clear, this is basically a gentle way to say "you are contrary to our corporate directives to control all information and you wouldn't last a second contesting this":

“I don’t know the facts of the situation involving the Met,” the noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said in an email, “but as a general matter the Met has no legal right to control what is said about it unless the material published is libelous or written in a way to suggest falsely that the Met itself is the author. Material in the public domain may freely be described so long as the copyright laws are adhered to and non-defamatory material from sources may be published whether or not it was confirmed.”

I mean, obviously. In what America could a site like that be "libel" while the RNC's press releases circulate freely?

Not that it's a hill to die on or anything--its opera, and there are more important things in the world, etc. But that's what's so gross about it. Here's a site for the hobbyists, for the hard core that don't do the institution any economic favors but nonetheless carry the flame for opera as a great tradition for the listeners, not just the musicians--as an art form too beloved to be contained in the glossy morsels served up by one PR department. Its proof that the enterprise has a "constituency" and not just a subscriber base. And it's part of what makes New York far and away the greatest opera city in North America. (You don't see anyone committing to a Lyric Futures do you?)

But the Met's behavior isn't surprising or unique here--its just another symptom of the increasing dominance of marketing and PR prerogatives among classical music institutions. To the extent that "buzz" is a factor in reeling in an audience, it's nothing the machine can't generate on its own--and the machine can ensure that buzz is delivered in slick luxury packaging consistent with overall branding principles. One would like to be able to make some sort of statement about how an institution treating its most devoted fans like crap can only make for bad business but it doesn't quite wash. Opera's "fanboys" just don't deliver the goods.

But to channel a little Sandow: it's also hard to see how the increasingly hermetically sealed worldview of big-time classical PR, with its inexorable drive to erase all vestiges of a critical faculty in its audience, its flagrant abuse of superlatives, its need to turn the dark, messy, somewhere on the autism spectrum world of classical music into a Louis Vuitton handbag ad--its hard to see how that kind of PR will ever be terribly successful in facilitating new audiences' love for the art. Those who love it will still come, of course--but they'll love it in spite of its packaging.

P.S. Apparently Opera Tattler seems to be keeping up with San Francisco's futures seasons, albeit less comprehensively. Beware!

Re: Porgy

2011-08-14T14:36:00.006-04:00

Stephen Sondheim's epic burn on the "Porgy and Bess" production being helmed by Diane Paulus with new material by Suzan Lori-Parks raises some natural pushback about whether Sondheim is getting behind excessive traditionalism here. So it seems appropriate to reiterate what is cool and what is not cool when producing new versions of old plays:

1. Productions supplying an existing text/score with stage business that radically departs from the traditional production: COOL. Here's the space for your Regietheater, your modern dress productions, your severe minimalism--you don't have to like it, but this is a valid way to present an existing play in a new light, draw new inferences, keep things fresh. As long as you allow some leeway with stage directions, there's really no theoretical daylight between a "traditional" version produced 100 years after the fact and a "nontraditional" version.

2. Productions that add/subtract elements of the body of existing text in an attempt to get closer to what they believe is an authoritative/performance friendly version: COOL. Yes, this gets tricky, and people can have heated arguments in good faith about what belongs in an authoritative/performance friendly version of a work. But its just in the nature of work written for the theater that "authoritative" is open to debate. Especially in opera, of course, we also have a long tradition of performance cuts. The current trend towards performing more rather than less of a score is a good one, but where cuts are kept, they are kept out of expedience or tradition, not some larger agenda, and constitute a relatively minor sin.

3. Productions that use substantial elements of an existing text but are unmistakably a new work: COOL. Here's the category for theatrical "mash-ups" of all sorts (provided ludicrous copyright laws aren't an issue).

4. Productions that substantially change the source material but could easily be mistaken for the original: NOT COOL. And that's what this new Porgy production sounds like. Go ahead and create a new play that is "about" Porgy and Bess. Call it "Porgy 2000". Proviso #3 says that's fine. But the whole enterprise of revival has to do with grappling with a text and trying to offer what is worthwhile about a work to a present-day audience. Without the bright line of the Text, the temptation to serve the lowest common denominator of current tastes to leverage an existing brand is too great, and surely that is a recipe for the most dishonest kind of art.

Others have suggested that what's really going on here is Paulus/Parks' attempting to be diplomatic about while softening "Porgy's" undeniably racist trappings for a modern audience. But why not just have that conversation outright instead of criticizing the quality of the work? If "Porgy" has more merit than other racist works of the period that have been justifiably consigned to the dustbin, that should be apparent in a good production. If it doesn't have merit beyond the catchy songs, then do a production that questions and interrogates that content (or do a highlights CD). What's not OK is sending the original material, with all its complexities, down the memory hole, and assuming that you can pass off something more palatable as the original.

Dept. of ridiculous child prodigies

2011-08-10T21:27:00.002-04:00

Wait for the bow...

Unions

2011-06-15T23:32:00.015-04:00

Nice to see Michael Kaiser coming out against those who would blame arts organizations' travails on unions and be done with it:

It is absolutely true that when income falls precipitously, as it has for many arts organizations, costs must be realigned. And it is also true that unions, in protecting their workers, fight tooth and nail to maintain their members' standard of living and work environment. That is why there are unions in the first place.

But the key issue is: why has revenue fallen so far for so many arts organizations?

It is not the fault of union members that we are selling fewer tickets or raising less funds. We can blame a terrible economy, lack of arts education in our schools, substantially lower government grants at every level and new forms of entertainment that compete for the time and resources of our audiences for much of the reduction in resources available for arts organizations. A recent study, for example, found that contributions for the arts fell much farther during the recession than had previously been expected.

There sure has been a disturbing amount of union-bashing in the last year or so. Not that one isn't allowed to disagree with specific unions' actions or policies, mind you--these are fallible institutions seeking their constituents' interests like any other, and any specific case will have multiple perspectives. What's distressing are the kneejerk suggestions that have nothing to do with a specific case but just generally assume collective bargaining practices are incompatible with economic reality.

The implication here is that union workers have been able to extract, and refuse to give up, salaries so unreasonable that they are a major impediment to institutions' financial health. Hence all the unseemly public dissection of middle and upper-middle class incomes and pundit handwringing over whether some other citizen "deserves" their morsel, a frequent note in the debate around public employees in Wisconsin as well as the orchestra performers in Detroit.

But this is just acquiescing to what anti-labor conservatives would have us believe: that workers are are entitled to no more than how the "market" prices their labor. This may sound good in econ 101, but in the real world negotiations do a much better job of ensuring workers get their fair share. Amidst capricious labor markets, stagnant wages, and persistent unemployment, its a bit alarming that so many are ready to believe unions have outlived their usefulness.

Update: Lisa Hirsch drops some truth bombs about some of the classical institution crises du jour in this post right here. Also see today's podcast from Andrew Patner.

More Liberals and the Arts

2011-06-09T15:40:00.007-04:00

CAP's Alyssa Rosenberg delves into the issue of whether the arts should do more to align themselves with progressive politics (and by extension the Democratic party) to shore up a more durable position from which to protect its funding. She sees the appeal of this idea, but also wisely points out the costs:

But powerful outside groups have had to use hot pincers to obtain much of the support labor and women’s organizations have obtained from the Democratic lawmakers, and still experienced dramatic contractions of labor rights, union memberships, and abortion access. Throwing in with a political party may get the arts community access to machinery and infrastructure—but it would require arts organizations to build formidable new organizations and fundraising capacity to earn a seat at the party table, much less a favorable slot in the list of Democratic priorities.

The cultural sector in America possesses nothing akin to the organizations these other causes use to translate supporter dollars into lobbying might. And while there are an endless number of enlightened notions precious to progressive Washington, only the ones that line up along some angle of money and constituency actually precipitate action and taxpayer dollars.

That aside, how likely of a fit are the arts for progressive politics? Rosenberg calls it a "tough sell" because progressives, despite their best intentions, still have a hard time sticking up for controversial art, a big roadblock given conservatives' undimmed enthusiasm for culture war stunts.

But I think this underplays the real challenge: that liberals have serious misgivings about whether even the non-degenerate arts warrant government funding. Certainly there is a large swathe of liberals (who probably intersect with public television and radio contributors) that consider arts funding a virtuous use of taxpayer dollars. We observes this milieu, compares it to the narrow-minded, anti-intellectual strain of conservative zealotry now (still) ascendant, and assumes that liberals must be on the side of culture and by extension whatever government can do for it. But that fight is really about free speech and cultural tastes (i.e. letting people express themselves vs. being a reactionary asshole); it tells us very little about how different political persuasions feel about government's role in subsidizing the arts.

So in the interest of figuring out where liberal-minded people really come down on that question, I submit four concerns/suspicions that a lot, if not the majority, of liberals probably have about government funded sponsorship of the arts:

Arts subsidies have some fundamentally anti-populist features. This is the protest one hears against government support when aligned with bastions of "high" culture--that the government shouldn't be in the business of supporting culture that is experienced by relatively few people or culture that, despite subsidies, still charges for entry.
Unsubsidized culture is satisfying enough. If you don't mind largely excluding a few sectors (i.e. classical music), it is the case today that a liberal-minded person in a big city can live a highly fulfilling cultural life without ever consuming (or more importantly perceive that they are consuming) a piece of art that has received any direct government subsidy.
Arts subsidies' effect on societal welfare is weak to nonexistent. After 40 years of fighting a rearguard action against conservatives who would drown government in the proverbial bathtub, liberals are highly protective of the narrow but unimpeachable space in which justified government action exists. As an economic welfare enhancing activity, the arts may well have some value, but it falls somewhere below the already dubious value of state-sponsored sports stadiums and well short of preferred investments in infrastructure, health care, etc.
Arts subsidies go to works without redeeming social/political content. This is sort of the liberal counterpart of conservatives' anger over taxpayer dollars spent on "degenerate art"--a sense that, if the people are going to fund art, then it should at least advance the peoples' aims. More fundamentally, it is a rebuke to the (not unfounded) concern that governments sponsor art in order to perpetuate the dominant culture.

Save perhaps for #3 and probably #4, you'll recognize these as points that Greg Sandow makes frequently. What arts (and especially classical music) inclined folks need to confront is that he's not playing a classical music provocateur when he channels these ideas, but as a liberal trying to reconcile his enthusiasm for the arts with his gut reactions.

Follies at the Kennedy Center

2011-06-05T12:19:00.004-04:00

Big caveat: I am a Follies virgin as far as a staged production goes--listened for years, read my share, etc., but suffice it to say this is going to include a lot of half baked speculation of what Follies "should" be. Fair warning and all.

Its not a huge mystery why this show is problematic. The central story of Ben and Phyllis and Buddy and Sally--the now-tortured couples who met thirty years ago while the women were chorines in the last days of the fictional "Weisman Follies"--requires the highest caliber acting if it is to be believed amidst the book's flimsy framework. And then there is the massive score that demands its army of supporting players deliver the pastiche songs with such a range of particular shadings that the probability one production will get them all right approaches zero. And, perhaps most troublesome, the production numbers can't just coast along on empty dazzle, how they are presented and their effectiveness are integral to the success of the show.

The current Kennedy Center production, directed by Signature Theatre's Eric Schaeffer, does well on point 1, not so good on point 2, and quite strongly on point 3. And when it is firing on all of these cylinders--as it might more frequently in a less fallible world--it is truly a thing of terrible beauty.

Even by Sondheim standards, the four principals in Follies each has a daunting acting challenge. Among these, Sally, the 49-year-old living out a 19-year-old's fantasy world, is surely the heaviest lift, and Bernadette Peters follows her down the emotional rabbit-hole fearlessly. This is the Sally the book really asks for--damaged goods from the start and often an unlikable wreck, even as she breaks your heart. On the whole, this is a very successful interpretation, set back only by the fact that BP looks more spectacular than any downtrodden housewife has a right to. Also, the Act I numbers, particularly "Too Many Mornings", are clearly a bitch to sing, but they may lie in an especially unfriendly portion of BP's voice and she has not quite figured out how to navigate them successfully.

The slightly weak link among the principals is Ron Raines' Benjamin Stone. Raines brings a fine, strong voice to the part that makes Ben's numbers a lot more attractive than when done by an older voice (i.e. John McMartin on the OBC). But its also difficult to take his travails seriously--rather than a man thoroughly broken by the evening's end, this Ben doesn't seem to fully believe the claims to agony coming out of his own mouth.

Jan Maxwell's Phyllis and Danny Burstein's Buddy are recommended without reservation. Her "Could I Leave You" and his "God-Why-Don't-I-Love-You-Blues" (hon. mention to "The Right Girl") are probably the finest instances of the Sondheimian art on view in this production, each delivered with a blistering, spot-on intelligence.

On the second point: Can I make a somewhat glib blanket statement about the problems with the supporting cast? Older actresses may not be old enough to make Follies work properly anymore. The haunting magic of the show is rooted in a central conceit that is just a little bit grotesque: elderly people inhabited by the ghosts of their former selves to the point where they, and the audience, can't quite tell where the person ends and the ghost begins. The idea is that as we age we must learn to cope with our accumulated spectral pasts--the protagonists of Follies are pointedly middle-aged to explore the problems of succumbing too early to those ghosts against the backdrop of the older performers who may be in closer communion with them. But the dramatic effect of this contrast doesn't really take off when everyone onstage resides in that robust, perpetual middle-age which we now take for granted.

For instance, Linda Lavin sings"Broadway Baby" here as though she has no plans of quitting show business any time soon. Lavin sounds and looks great (in a classy purple cocktail outfit), and gives a stirring performance of the song, but that's just the trouble. "Broadway Baby" isn't a feel good showstopper to demonstrate the actress has "still got it"--set properly in the context of the show it should have clear pangs of discomfort, where the key lyric "Maybe someday/All my dreams will be repaid" is poignant and dark (though the degree to which the character delivering it is in on the irony may be ambiguous).

Unfortunately, this is largely the MO for all of the Act I character numbers, not least of all a very unconvincing "I'm Still Here" sung by Elaine Page. Schaeffer stages them as cute crowd-pleasers and the audience is duly pleased, but the thread of loss, wistfulness, delusion, and gritty determination that should run through these sequences and define the mood of the show is rarely found.

That leaves the final leg of the Follies three-legged stool: the production numbers. And on this count the Kennedy Center production does very well. "Mirror, Mirror" is an early success. A largely faithful recreation of Michael Bennet's original choreography (so I gather), the interplay between the ghost dancers and the aging stars is complex and fluid, producing the unnerving effect of the boundaries between past and present being crossed.

The main event--the Loveland sequence in which the leads' intractable emotional mess is transfigured into a half hour musical theatre extravaganza--is an acid delight from beginning to end, a winning spectacle that rivets your attention with its blend of bravado and emotional nakedness. The one weak link may be Peters' "Losing My Mind". She offers a devastating, emotionally fraught performance in line with the characterization she has marked out, but it feels out of step with the fantasy of "Loveland", where the characters are supposed to be burrowed into characters within themselves until Ben's epiphany breaks the spell. "Losing My Mind" should be Sally as wounded chanteuse, not Sally as wounded housewife.

Update: Just in case it's not clear, that IS a recommendation to go see the show. If it isn't quite the elusive unicorn Follies one dreams of, it is nonetheless a very serious, rewarding attempt to grapple with the show and one that invests the level of resources necessary to present a legitimate full-fledged production. Not to be missed if you love Sondheim and can manage (it closes June 19th)...

Get comfortable

2011-05-30T21:58:00.014-04:00

Oh lord. Well, clearly the brave new world of balance sheet repair in our classical music institutions is going to involve more B'way and pops, if the recent reports from Philadelphia and the WNO are any indication.

I think most people would agree that schmaltzy arrangements and, as Downey puts it, "half-ass Broadway" are two pernicious trends which our civilization could do with less of (not that whole-ass Broadway indicates a professional show with all the trimmings mind you, just that ulterior motives like hoodwinking people into the opera house tends to make for bad theatre). Without too much tiresome wringing of hands, though, I'm interested in what these strategies really accomplish.

In WNO's case, they haven't done anything yet of course, and even then it's not the end of the world--more prestigious companies have gone down that road and a forgettable musical production here and there will be easy to ignore or muddle through (FZ, I will go if you do Sondheim but I'm not sitting through a poorly staged Showboat). But nonetheless there's something to quibble with in bringing up musicals and "accessibility" in a conversation about new directions for a financially challenged opera company. As far as I can tell, lots of people are accessing the WNO despite its persistent stinginess with tickets under $50--the problem isn't poor attendance, but rather the murkier problems of an inadequate donor base, poor financial planning and excessive operating costs. Yet readers will see "WNO considering musicals to dig itself out of its financial hole" and come away with the tired old narrative that classical music needs to increase its appeal by...not offering classical music. So go and do it if you like, but let's be clear that 1) it isn't a response to some massive unsatisfied demand, and 2) it doesn't really belong on a list of exciting "new directions" for an opera company.

Whatever the merits of its bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra sales situation is clearly more dire, and so my question here is non-snarky--I can see where pops shows do well on dedicated occasions and as special alternative programs, but what has the experience been with expanding these seasons? Is there a large untapped audience for listening to Star Wars in the concert hall that will keep showing up if you keep feeding them new shows? How often does a new pops concertgoer show up at a regular symphony program? Again, honest questions, though I will say that making the Philadelphia Orch do medleys or whatever seems a lot crueler than using the KC opera house to put on a show (perhaps owing to some unexamined opinions about the relative scrappiness of singers vs. elite instrumentalists).

Werther at WCO

2011-05-23T18:49:00.011-04:00

Washington Concert Opera offered a very fine presentation of Massenet's Werther Sunday--a work which I'm sorry to say I was relatively unfamiliar with beyond some assorted Youtube clips, a review here and there, and the occasional fits of snark it seems to inspire. And indeed, the first two Acts really don't do too much more than hang a lot of balls-out tenor writing on the fairly static and unmoving story about how Werther is a total bummer. But the revelation in Acts 3 & 4 that his love for Charlotte is not unrequited makes things far more interesting. Sorry, Werther fans, if this should be obvious--it's very possible Massenet is dropping this plot all through Act II and I just failed to pick it up. But regardless, the drama that comes into focus in the second half is unexpectedly taut, and by the end, quite moving.

In fact, I found Werther much more emotionally direct and engaging than Manon, where one's sympathy for the central character suffers a lot by the end on account of the relentless slut-shaming. Clearly Werther has a better time in Europe these days, but I was surprised to find it loses out to Manon by a hefty Margin judging by the Met Opera Database scorecard--a whopping 257 to 73.

Mind you, that discrepancy may have something to do with the relative paucity of leading men who can make Werther an event in America's diva-oriented opera culture. And so it was the WCO audience's good fortune to have Giuseppe Filianoti, in superb voice, bring his Werther to GW' Lisner's Hall this past Sunday.

I last saw Filianoti live in 2005, during his spectacular run of Lucia's at the Met, and since then, the heartbreaking story of his battle with thyroid cancer has read like the script to one of those tearjerkers about a young gifted opera singer facing adversity, finding out who his real friends are, and ultimately returning in triumph (why can't we have this? why?). I've heard some broadcasts in that period that definitely revealed his challenges, and indeed, the Rigoletto's that just wrapped up at the Met may have demonstrated that he is not entirely out of the woods if caught on the wrong night.

But forget that noise. Filianoti's Werther was a thing of triumph through and through. After the slightest hint of a warm-up period, he locked into form, offering page after page of ardent, thrilling vocalism--indeed, until costar Jennifer Larmore got some real stage time in Act III it was more or less a matter of impatiently waiting for Filianoti to shuffle on morosely from stage left and open that golden throat. More than just the unique beauty of his sound, though, Filianoti possesses some of that old time magick I mention from time to time. His sheer commitment raises the stakes of everything that happens onstage.

Oh, there were a few quibbles--the ~~high A that closes~~ high B towards the end of the second Act (h/t Downey...that'll teach me to be fancy) didn't work out so hot and, unless I was misinterpreting some death noises, his stamina flagged a tad at the very end. Also, and I may be wrong about this, but I suspect his open Italian vowels may not have played well with the French at a few points, producing some off-message sounds here and there. But again: quibbles.

Filianoti had a great partner in Jennifer Larmore, who I don't think I've ever seen before. Her moody, back-to-back arias at the beginning of Act III demonstrated her capability to create a stunning range of colors with her by turns airy and dark-hued mezzo. Throughout the second half she matched Filianoti in passion, realizing Charlotte's tortured frustration and pity for Werther with biting intensity.

The rest of the cast was strong as well, particularly Joelle Harvey's skillful, big-voiced presentations of Sophie's difficult coloratura material and Timothy Mix's thoughtful Albert. Antony Walker led a fine performance in the "pit" from the WCO band, bringing a lot of gravity and transparency to the effects Massenet uses to build the emotion behind his story, and making the pretty parts plenty pretty, too.

Update: Here's Joe Banno in the Post, and Downey's take is here.

NSO in NIELSEN! and also perhaps Beethoven and Sibelius I guess

2011-05-20T18:53:00.011-04:00

Had a chance to hear Nielsen's 4th symphony live last night--the first performance, the program tells us, done by the NSO since 1985, which is decidedly f'd up. Because upon hearing it one is left with little doubt that Nielsen's symphony is a completely remarkable piece of music, and that its tremendous impact really must be experienced live.

Nielsen is a master of many things--of suspense, of ecstatic climax, of dazzling harmonic invention--but to think the 4th symphony is only fireworks (and dueling timpani!) is wrong. It is also a work of Brahmsian melancholy and deep introspection. It's a work that reminds us why we go to the symphony.

How it is still relatively unpopular in this country should be a great mystery (nice rundown from A. Ross here). Nielsen's appeal to the Kennedy Center audience was palpable, the electric energy of the "Inextinguishable" far more than they had bargained for with the sedate first half pairing of one of those national-flavored tone poems by Sibelius and the Beethoven 4th piano concerto (played with much fleetness but frequent unpleasantness of tone by Nikolai Lugansky).

As led by Thomas Dausgaard, the NSO played the Nielsen with fearless abandon, clearly reveling in its novelty and its challenge. Our (my) experience with the Nielsen 4th is limited, of course, but its hard to imagine anyone walking away from this NSO performance with less than a desperate hunger to hear more Nielsen on American programs.

The last time I looked at the seating chart, coverage looked fairly grim, though the house was respectable on Thursday night. For those of you considering attending tonight (Saturday) what with the discount tix and all, you should obviously do it--you won't see another NSO concert this exhilarating for a while...

Update: Anne Midgette spends a lot of time on the flaws of the Beethoven, but does have this to say about the Nielsen:

It’s a piece that grabs you by the throat and leaves you flattened, culminating with a pitched battle between two full sets of timpani, positioned at opposite sides of the orchestra, that evokes nothing so much as trench warfare (the piece was written during World War I) [...] Dausgaard couldn’t get the orchestra to play with all the finesse one might have wished for, but he got a lot of blunt force out of them, and muscled the concert back into the realm of the viscerally exciting where it had begun.

Paul Appleby at the Kennedy Center

2011-05-16T23:04:00.007-04:00

Vocal Arts DC presented up n' coming tenor Paul Appleby with pianist Steven Blier last night, hot off his run in the Luisi-DiDonato-Urmana Ariadnes at the Met, where he is in the Lindemann Young Artist Development program (you want buzz? at least one parterre chat room lurker called out his Brighella during the b-cast last week).

Appleby boasts a warm, very fresh sounding tenor of moderate weight that is always appealing and frequently striking. In this rewarding program of off-the-beaten-path songs, he also demonstrated a wide ranging musical intelligence. Steven Blier, his voice coach and collaborator (nice profile by Justin Davidson here), served as a robust and fascinating partner at the piano, if the balance was perhaps a shade more competitive than I find ideal.

The opening set presented three unfamiliar Italian songs from Verdi, Mascagni, and Pedrotti. These were hard to dislike, given their natural fit for Appleby's voice and his engaging sense of Italian style. Yet, perhaps a casualty of their lead billing, his sound was also frequently unfocused and and a bit careless. The following two sets, songs by Zemlinsky and Roussel, were the meatiest of the program, and Appleby made a persuasive case--particularly in the anxious eroticism of the Roussel numbers.

Perhaps the strongest selections opened the second half, however--Latin American songs by Carols Guastavino, Carlos Lopez-Buachardo, Pixiguinha, Piazzolla, and Villa Lopez. Here Appleby offered an exquisitely controlled and seductive sound, as well as thrilling climaxes, as in the penultimate showstopper, Villa-Lobos' "Samba Classico". I find, when listening to vocal recitals, that the degree to which I ignore the translations can be a sort of perverse indicator of how well things are going: I can assure you I have basically have no idea what's going on in these Latin pieces.

Unfortunately, the American songs which closed the program were decidedly less successful. The one art song in the set, "Evening Song" by Griffes, was overstuffed and forgettable (not entirely Appleby's fault, to be sure). In the remainder, jazz/standard selections by Gershwin, Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and Thelonious Monk ("'Round Midnight" with appended lyrics) Appleby fell short of the crucial test for opera singers doing pop/rock/what have you: whether a reasonable person can forget they would rather be hearing a native pop/show interpreter doing the song. Appleby's voice didn't stop sounding great, of course, but his interpretations are as yet contrived--jazz/pop affectations artfully arranged rather than attempts at real communication.

Things did not improve in the two somewhat indulgent encores--a rather twee rendition of Bruce Springteen's "Fire" and a take on Paul Simon's "American Tune" that substituted generic pop dramatics for that song's haunting humility.

Update: Here's Downey in the Post with a mixed review (though not so bad as the title implies).

Iphigenie at WNO

2011-05-07T01:32:00.014-04:00

WNO pulled out the big guns Friday for an Iphigenie en Tauride that was no doubt the most significant musical presentation of the season (not to downplay the many fine qualities in other recent shows, mind you). I've managed to see it twice before, in that celebrated Met Wadsworth version with Domingo, Graham, and Paul Groves, and the '06 Lyric run with Graham and Groves (which I remember as total dullsville production-wise though apparently I had some kinder words for it at the time)--but I'd venture that this outing made me appreciate anew what an incredible work it is. Some superficial flaws aside, this WNO revival makes an excellent case for the taut drama, involving psychology, and disarming music of Gluck's work. As Charles Downey's preview notes, this is a work that thrives the closer it gets to the sensibility of the Greek drama at its source. Where those afore-mentioned productions sometimes traded in heavy melodrama at the expense of clarity, the WNO production does a fine job of letting the plot unfold on the strength of the characters' own motivations and intelligence, and allowing the audience to really engage with the play.

Racette, in a role debut, sounds glorious in this music, if some of the trickier transitions are as yet a bit clumsy and the top thins a bit. This is a more thoughtful, reserved Iphigenie than Susan Graham's desperate refugee--the stern, almost desensitized authority Iphigienie must project in her public capacity clearly contrasted with her private anguish. The second act was gripping throughout, though I think she has room to dig deeper into the possibilities afforded by Iphigenie's arias in the first act, which were beautiful to listen to but somewhat perfunctory.

Shawn Mathey's Pylade turned in a fine first act, including a soaring "Unis dès la plus tendre enfance" (trans. "Oreste, I am totally gay for you"). He remained pretty committed through the second act (I imagine it is tough for most people not to seem just a bit aloof next to his stage bro), though vocally seemed to hit an increasing number of rough patches and was working awfully hard for it by the end. At his best he delivers a warm passionate sound, and his middleweight (vocal) size is a solid fit for the part, even if I find myself wanting something heavier at times.

And of course, Placido Domingo is onstage. I mean, there's just no getting around the fact that hearing him live continues, against all odds, to be one of the greatest gifts you can give to your ears (love this old Sieglinde post from the 2005 Met Walkure's intimating that the dark arts are at work). But even more than that, one pines for the immediacy of what he does with that big wonderful voice. On a stage of sensitive method actors, Domingo is old-school Hollywood--there's little chance of him disappearing behind Oreste, or Lohengrin, or what have you, but that doesn't mean what he's communicating isn't true. His tortured bravado, and the sad tender moments between him and Racette were the dramatic highlights of the evening.

As noted above, the dramatic action between the principals was well choreographed and communicated, and included some striking visuals like the red fabric representing the altar in the finale and the "blood" pursuing Oreste during his great monologue, though there were also a number of needlessly artsy/fussy moments. As choices go, the first act ballet was one of the more intriguing bits, a creepy interlude performed by four dancers in bathing suits and disco mirror caps plus a guy on hoof-like shorty stilts.

Before the half, the physical production flirted dangerously with the sort of unappealing hodgepodge concept we've been seeing a lot of here. But the second half brought enough successful moments to temper, if not entirely reverse, that assessment. The set is your basic "abstract antiquity" theme which, if somewhat static, gets the job done, and things vastly improved after the shiny black terrazzo wall that dominated the first half was retired. Costuming was a kind of lazy nondescript modern dress, trenchcoats for principals, sequined smocks for the chorus--you fill in the blanks. This sort of aesthetic muddiness doesn't really detract from the overall impact, but doesn't do it any favors either.

Oh and PS, if you are seeing the production, do note the whole aria Pylade does by the light of Marcellus Wallace's briefcase...

Update: Here's Anne Midgette's Post review...and Downey weighs in at DCist...and here's Tim Smith.

Aimard plays Liszt, Scriabin, Berg, Wagner

2011-05-05T23:41:00.005-04:00

Had the chance to hear Pierre Laurent-Aimard live for the first time Thursday evening at the 6th and I synagogue. I know calling someone's approach "clinical" can imply you are accusing them of being a robot pianist, but it's really a compliment here, I swear. Aimard's masterful refinement of tone and color allow him to create insightful, intense readings full of precise detail.

Hearing Wagner's non-operatic music is always kind of disappointing in an interesting way (the Siegfried Idyll and to a lesser extent the Wesendock lieder excepted, of course). Aimard's placement of his Sonata in A Flat Major between two Liszt pieces (La lugubre gondola I and Nuages gris) brought those impressions into high relief. The takeaway: while in no way bad to listen to, Wagner's small bore pieces come off more or less like a Wagner-highlight CD, lots of unbearable priddiness and heaving, but very little of the magic that makes people really like Wagner. But played with Aimard's severe commitment, Liszt's pieces start to sound a lot like what Wagner's should, and what makes his operas so great--the sense of suspended time, the visceral power of the smallest detail, the reliance on overwhelming atmosphere rather than statement. The other two highlights of the first half was Berg's Piano Sonata No. 1, from which Aimard extracted many beautiful moments, and Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 9, the "Messe Noire". Aimard plays Scriabin with little of the ephemeral, shadowy flavor to be found elsewhere, but what is lost in mysticism is gained in clarity.

The second half was devoted to the Lizst B Minor Sonata--my second hearing this Spring after Kissin's March recital. Where Kissin brought forward the Sonata's emotional sweep, Aimard seems wary of layering too much sentiment on top of this beast, and seemed most at home in its blackest most terrifying moments. Also, the finale was ridiculously impressive. No encores after that, though the audience certainly tried...

Update: Here's Charles Downey and Joe Banno in the Post...

The cost disease and classical music

2011-05-04T22:15:00.006-04:00

Here's Greg Sandow on the "cost disease" afflicting symphony orchestras:

The principle -- generally accepted by economists -- is simple enough. Suppose you're a company that manufactures things (or, these days, contracts to have them manufactured). As time goes on, the manufacturing process gets more efficient. Productivity rises. So you spend less money to make more widgets.

This happens more or less through the entire economy. So we all (very generally speaking) get richer. (Obviously, I'm leaving out such factors as glaring income inequality, which normally I care a lot about.) Because we're richer, we can have things we didn't have before. Computers. iPhones. More sophisticated cars. More varied clothes and food. We take these things for granted. They're part of our lives. We expect to be paid enough so we can buy them. Which, if we work for a company that shows increased productivity, isn't hard for our employers to do.

But some big players in our economy get left out of this. These are institutions (very typically nonprofits) that don't show productivity gains. Orchestras, for instance. It takes just as many musicians to play a symphony now as it did 50 years ago. Or hospitals. Or universities.

Orchestras, in fact, are less productive than they were, because (see above) they need larger staffs, for marketing and development. And so orchestras fall behind the rest of the economy. Their costs keep rising, just everybody else's do. Just like General Electric, or Ralph Lauren, they have to pay higher salaries than they used to, so their musicians -- and the people on their staff -- can buy computers, and nicely varied food.

A nice summary of the notion, as articulated by its main proponent William Baumol in a 1966 book and subsequent papers, can be found here.

There's something seductive about this idea: a nice graph pops into one's head in which the cost line mercilessly rises past the income line, something like those graphs of Medicare spending if we don't get our shit together fast.

But some things also seem fishy. Like, just how long does this cost-death take, anyhow? Private symphonies and opera companies in some semblance of their modern administrative forms have been around for at least 150 years. Compared to other horror stories of obsolescence by productivity (banister carvers and carriage whip makers anyone?), that seems like a pretty balmy fate. Also, the crux of the cost disease argument seems to come back to the idea that industries which cannot improve the unit productivity past some point are doomed--once you can't reduce staff or increase product volume any further, rising wage costs mean you're dead in the water. Yet we seem to be surrounded by business models that would also fail this test, like any independent urban restaurant that is predicated upon the labor that goes into food production and service, rather than the simple distribution of increasingly cheaper foodstuffs to a larger audience.

Tyler Cowen touches on many of these issues in a 1996 critique of the "cost disease" notion here, focusing on a couple of key points:

1) In economist speak, the "cost disease" hypothesis posits that substitution effects swamp income effects, i.e., the desire to switch away from the low-productivity symphony sector to a higher productivity substitute dominates decisions. But a scenario where increased incomes cause individuals to consume more of the symphony sector, even if it is more expensive, is no less plausible.

2) Why should we assume that the symphony orchestra and other performing arts organizations are fundamentally incapable of increasing their productivity? Baumol's example which Sandow repeats--it still takes the same 50 dudes to play symphony x it did in 1780--seems far too narrow a way to conceive of the musical services a modern arts organization is capable of rendering with the technology available to distribute their product. Recordings, and recent developments in live broadcast, are the obvious innovations, of course. But consider as well the ways that modern travel and communications allow the most modest string quartet to tour the globe. Even the ubiquity of large modern concert halls represent advances in distribution.

3) Finally, Cohen argues that the "cost disease" hypothesis ignores improvements in product diversity and quality and illuminates nothing more than rising nominal costs. Today's orchestra has a few hundred years of extra repertoire to offer relative to that 1780 orchestra, and large improvements in the quality of performance that create real additional value for orchestra consumers--value that can't be easily compared to the 'value' gleaned from cutting the timpani section.

Obviously, performing arts organizations are having a hard time of it right now, and I'm not saying that any of these things are a silver bullet or "prove" that everything is alright. But the cost disease idea and its predictions of inescapable economic annihilation for the performing arts seem just a bit too convenient for those who indulge in classical music pessimism. Blaming the current troubles on theories about the economic exceptionalism of arts organizations rather than understanding them in the context of the larger economy seems counterproductive.

Update: Matthew Guerrieri has a great post on the "cost disease" here (and kindly links to the above)...

The New Walkure

2011-04-26T22:52:00.016-04:00

So…about that Walkure premiere last Friday. Not a home run, music wise, but a lot going for it:

Voigt confidently meets the role’s basic demands (this premiere should really silence the shrillest doubters) and, for sheer vocal appeal, is clearly in a superior class than your Gasteens and your Watsons. But if her top notes can still capture that steely purity, further down the staff things grows hollow and pinched. More problematic was the fact that her reading Friday was fairly pedestrian; passages meant to bloom with careful dynamics came off as secure but blunt. Hopefully this is attributable to needing some time to grow in the part (and the run) and not a sign that the level of security she achieves comes at the price of the finesse that really makes the part exciting. Her Brunnhilde wasn’t quite as superficial as fall’s dramatically flat Salome’s in DC, but the overall impression just isn’t terribly authoritative as of yet.

As expected, Terfel is much better served by the Walkure Wotan than the Rheingold one. While that coveted “deity timbre” is clearly not on the table, and the spectre of barkiness can never quite be dispelled, his interpretation offers some undeniable pleasures, like a bitter, haunted Act II monologue and a melting “Der Augen Leuchtendes Paar” that reminded everyone why his casting seemed like a good idea in the first place.

Kaufmann and Blythe are the principles that really deliver without reservation. My small quibble with Kaufmann is that his Siegmund has lots of potential for a great portrayal but would benefit from a bit more freedom and lacked something in the seduction department (Jimmy wasn’t doing him any favors in the pit, mind you). That said, if you see him don’t say anything because with that remarkable voice he should clearly be owning Met Siegmunds for the next decade or so. Blythe is a total pro in this music and offers the complete Wagnerian package—her booming Fricka combined spine-tingling sound with jumbo-sized doses of spite and indignation (I was up against the wall in Fam Circ and could hear her rattling the paneling). Westbroek’s Sieglinde sounded excellent in the first Act but was apparently ill—her fancy cover was Margaret Jane Wray who drove things home with little missed.

Hearing the Met Orchestra play this music with all their exceptional precision and warmth is always a privilege, though Levine turned in a somewhat subpar performance on the heels of his riveting Wozzecks. The problems, as others have noted, were most pronounced in the first Act, which never really managed to catch fire as it should. One can take slower tempos in Act I, of course, provided the payoff is a richer experience of the score, but Levine’s heel-dragging was carried out in rigid four-four time, largely smothering any opportunities for the sensuality and abandon called for. Acts II and III picked up substantially, but I still could have used a little more feeling and sweep in the big Act III moments.

* * *

As far as the production goes: sorry, but I’m out. I wanted to be a good sport about this new Ring, and last night’s Walkure made a much bigger effort than the fall’s Rheingold, but it also proved just what a mess the thing is.

To go back to basics: an opera production follows a certain aesthetic or conceptual frame in order to highlight and enhance intellectual and emotional aspects of the piece in question. In some productions, your Chereau Bayreuth Ring for instance, the visual language helps to articulate a fairly specific interpretation (the industrial revolution setting driving the audience to consider the political and historical currents in the Ring). In something like the New Bayreuth productions of the 50s, severe aesthetic parameters encourage a dialogue with the Ring's past productions and challenge the audience to appreciate it anew without all the baggage.

Even the hyper naturalistic Schenk Ring is far from “neutral” in its production values—it delivers emotional impact by heightening the romantic use of nature that permeates the piece (e.g. Wotan is like an awesome mountain, Siegfried’s puberty is like a sunrise, etc). Its claims to authenticity are as much a konzept as anything, engaging the audience in questions about whether an “authentic” representation brings us closer to or narrows our experience of the piece. And, of course, whether “authentic” is even a worthwhile or possible goal.

The aesthetic of this LePage ring is: “making the big set machine look like whatever we can manage, hopefully pretty”. It is an anti-production, a production without an idea in its head, and unified only by the constant desperation to pull off pleasing looking things within the meaningless parameters of its physical materials. Its most ambitious claim is simply that it can be done—that it will live up to vague promises to astonish. The experience of watching it, waiting Gollum-like for the meager thrill of a spinning plank or fleeting sparkly graphic, is intellectually deadening—an astonishing conclusion to reach while watching a piece so rich with dramatic and intellectual possibility.

Yes, on the surface it seems to be going for some of the same territory as the Schenk production, and there are some nice looking bits to be sure, particularly the trees/snow setup for Siegmund’s opening run through the forest. But any gestures in this direction are just a convenient way to provide some cover for its empty soul. No one really aiming to present beauty and nature onstage—implying an experience that is seamless, elegant, and inspiring to look at—could justify mounting a production which routinely asks the audience to watch the unadorned planks in all their horrible nakedness.

With the needs of the machine reigning supreme, it is perhaps not surprising the extent to which the normal considerations of stagecraft are sacrificed or neglected in this production. The machine generally constricts the singers’ playing space to 10-15 feet between the raised apron and the whirling planks of death, and within this narrow band they are choreographed with a shoddiness embarrassing for such a major stage. Key blocking moments (i.e. the final Brunnhilde/Wotan moment) are played clumsily and have little emotional impact; elegant solutions of routine staging challenges (i.e. how to make Brunnhilde’s getaway at the end of Act II mildly plausible) are simply not attempted (she stares at Wotan’s back for 90 seconds from two feet away before slowly gathering her things and walking off).

Also, the lighting is bad—for long stretches the singers look like they are being illuminated by the Met’s work lights. Even when things are a tad more deliberate, the lighting design does little to evoke the dramatic locale or moment. Consider the Valkyrie horse gimmick: so, yes, the Valkyries each “ride” a plank that bobs up and down kinda like a big horse head. But that’s it. They are bobbing up and down on a uniform brightly lit set that does nothing to evoke a night sky or horses or whatever. The point of this “coup-de-theatre” is not to bring to life this improbable moment onstage—it is to “inspire” the audience to clinically examine the bobbing motion, determine it is like horses, and applaud. Theatrical illusions are supposed to awe by persuading the audience that extraordinary things (helicopters landing, cats flying tires, etc) are happening onstage—LePage’s Ring defines illusion down.

Another complaint: even more so than Rheingold, this Walkure features a number of moments in which one fears for the safety of singers or extras. That’s not to say they are sacrificing singers’ safety for the production—I’m sure everything is on the up and up—but it points to how the design team’s concerns lie with creating apparent thrills rather than real visceral excitement. Audience members may be impressed that you hung someone upside down 30 feet in the air, but if done poorly they don’t actually enjoy it. Take the final scene on the rock: stunt double Brunnhilde is shuffled to the top of the machine, gingerly laid down (attached to some kind of invisible harness) and then very slowly lifted to be upside down and vertical, to get the effect of the audience looking down on top of the mountain, with the whirring planks doing a poor imitation of fire on all sides. By the end of the whole clumsy set up, shown in excruciating detail with little sense of surprise, the audience is simply glad that not-Voigt hasn’t fallen to her death.

But I’ll stop there. I have no problem with a “traditional” Ring, and certainly not a “traditional” Ring that tries to get where it is going with novel means instead of papier-mâché boulders. But there needs to be a destination—some vision for the 17 plus hours of the Ring that gives it a life or meaning that could never be achieved on a concert stage. The disturbing thing about LePage’s Ring is that it isn’t derived from any vision for the Ring, but a narrow vision for a spectacle which isn’t even very spectacular.

Urban Arias III: Glory Denied

2011-04-19T20:54:00.005-04:00

Before saying a word about the final Wozzeck performance at the Met last Saturday, I just want to give a shout out to Tom Cipullo's "Glory Denied", the last installment in Urban Arias inaugural season, which I neglected to review after the fact.

Suffice it to say, this was a great way to send off the first round of what promises to be a very enjoyable institution for DC. The piece, for a quartet of singers and chamber orchestra, deals with the story of Jim Thompson, the longest held Vietnam POW, and his wife, Alyce, who left him for another man during his captivity, and is a fine example of the dramatic and musical possibilities of the form. The cast led by Michael Chioldi in a commanding performance, made a strong impression as equal to both the dramatic as well as musical demands of the piece, while the orchestra under the direction of Robert Wood achieved fine balance with the singers without sacrificing the many interesting details in Cipullo's score.

If I could register two quibbles, they would be Jim's bitter aria on his return to a changed country--I'm sure one day the rhyming list of postwar cultural touchstones will be acceptable again but for now its hard to take these things seriously when it just puts "We Didn't Start the Fire" in your head. Here the gimmick seems too glib and out of place with the otherwise earnest, plainspoken libretto. Also, Urban Aria's otherwise efficiently and elegantly staged production suffered from a stream of intrusive, poor quality overhead projections. I get that this is tempting when dealing with quasi-documentary material, but it just never works, people.

Anyhow, looking forward to seeing what next year's season will be...

P.S. For a more detailed discussion of the opera, see this Parterre review of a Chelsea Opera production from the fall.

Urban Arias II: Green Sneakers

2011-04-07T22:11:00.009-04:00

So, second evening at Urban Arias, for another piece by Ricky Ian Gordon entitled "Green Sneakers", was decidedly less successful than the first installment, though certainly a well put together production.

The show's problems largely have to do with Gordon's piece itself, a very personal meditation on his partner's death, and honest and serious work that is nonetheless limited by a fundamental mismatch between the content he draws on and how he executes it. The trouble isn't the music--Gordon's musical language here, call it "sentimental Britten" (I mean that in a nice way), is perfectly engaging on its own terms. But unfortunately it is a limited way to convey the dramatic material he is working with, a series of scenes from the period leading up to and following his partner's passing.

I'm afraid there's no way to do this without a lot of bad generalizations, but here goes. The musical language of opera and its derivatives communicates a lot of things well--desperation, ecstasy, what's on deities' minds--a result of opera's closer alignment to abstract music. Opera's strength, first and foremost, is direct communication via music (for this reason, opera librettos can suck pretty hard and not impair the overall effectiveness of a work). Does that mean dramatic content isn't important in opera and we'd do just as well to listen to Traviata with everyone singing solfege? Of course not. But the content exists more to signify a dramatic corollary to the music than engage us directly in its language and details, in the manner of a play.

Which is all well and good, but not very ideal when it comes to communicating highly specific, contextual emotions, like say, the mixture of resentment and pity that derives from being in a stupid mall shopping for athletic wear for your terribly sick partner when you really need to get back to rehearsals for the show you have opening, to take one of the poignant episodes Gordon describes. The image of this scene, not the music, is what is what is primarily memorable, and turning operatic firepower on that image just results in a lot of bluster where there should be simple, effective clarity. Fortunately, we have a whole art form that is attuned to just these situations: the modern musical theater song.

Now obviously there is a wide gray area between these "opera" and "musical" archetypes where the actual art gets made, so I'm not saying that the painful details of Gordon's work would be better expressed through showtunes or crappy imitation rock songs. But on the grand spectrum of drama + music, Gordon has chosen a position that is too abstract for the familiar, intimate details he has gathered, details that a style with greater focus on text and the accessible, specific emotional gestures of modern musical theater writing would excel at bringing forward.

I know there is a lot of baggage wrapped up in these claims and I really ought to go back to office work, but I'll mention one revealing moment near the end of the piece that cemented my thinking: Gordon's character sits at the piano and plays a scrap of piano melody that hews closer to a musical theatre sound than anything we have heard so far, and the emotional impact of the piece seems to click into place immediately, and makes us realize just how emotionally inert the rest of the piece had been up to this point.

Baritone Ian Greenlaw, who sang the role of Gordon's character, offered a likeable stage presence and warm baritone well-suited to the conversational style (although he strained noticeably at the upper end of his range). But in a story like this we need some sort of coherent personality to engage with emotionally, and in large part due to the issues described above, he simply never registered as a credible character. The dramatic effect of this is offputting, as the confessional details of the monologue become information conveyed by a third party, rather than the testimony of a specific person the audience can identify. The Adelphi String Quartet provided a reading of strong Gordon's score that demonstrated a lot of musical interest.

Excited to check out the final Urban Arias installment, "Glory Denied", on Sunday!

Urban Arias I: Orpheus

2011-04-05T22:02:00.004-04:00

Imma be late to the party on this one. Saw the last perf of the inaugural show of a very exciting new development: a company called Urban Arias devoted to presenting chamber opera (mind you, this should not prevent anyone from naming their urban demographic-targeted romance novel the same).

So, it probably gets old when reviews of chamber opera always start with some fawning about the joy of hearing big time voices in lil' spaces, but for people who live in places where the motherlode of their operatic experiences occur in auditoriums that could credibly host professional basketball tournaments, the necessity of small-scale stagings like this "Orpheus and Euridice" by Ricky Ian Gordon needs to be acknowledged.

Gordon's piece, for soprano (Euridice), clarinet (Orpheus), and piano is distinguished most by the exquisite writing for its constituent parts--Elizabeth Futral's aching soprano and the remarkable emotional range of Todd Palmer's clarinet weave about each other and combine to thrilling effect. Gordon inhabits the unassuming musical language he lays out with great skill--but is this derivative or lightweight (Midgette makes note of such sentiments here)? One grows tired of interrogating every tonal piece of new music for whether it is sufficiently "hardcore", or *gasp* "Broadway". Suffice it to say that I think Gordon has very little interest in cheap musical appeal in this piece and every commitment to creating something that is both enriching and honest.

Experiencing Futral up close was a delight. This was a very fine vocal performance, but I was particularly struck by the quality of her overall characterization. I know there's been talk about opera singers' acting skills recently. But to some degree, the kind of acting available in a theatre or movie just isn't possible for opera singers, who must work through their voices and through gesture rather than characterization. But Futral demonstrated her ability to give both a compelling vocal performance and the kind of physical acting critical for a production like this.

Moreover, the stage direction (by Kevin Newbury) achieved precisely the level one hopes for in a work like this--understated in accordance with the modest forces but confident and inventive in its stage craft.

Butterfly at VA Opera

2011-04-04T20:00:00.008-04:00

So, DMV opera companies (or at least 2) seem to be all about redeeming themselves with solid Butterflies this spring. And with the cherry blossom madness upon us (as indicated by the crappy traffic by the river and the chicken "cherryaki" on the Old Ebbits menu) what can one do? VA Opera served up a satisfying version yesterday, as driven by an excellent cast.

Sandra Lopez does not hail from the school of Cio-Cio San's concerned with producing a sound that always comes from a beautiful place, such as the Cio-Cio San Catherine Naglestad presented at WNO earlier this year (sorry, going to be that kind of review, its in my head). That means that her first act included a bit of a rocky warm-up and a Love Duet that was solid but not especially notable. But about three minutes into Act II, one realized how fully she was to own the emotional center of this show (as your Cio-Cio San should, of course, but there's a big difference between "should" and really doing it). With her chief weapon a throbbing, commanding upper register that fully embodies the tortured emotional swells of Puccini's score, Lopez created the kind of high stakes vocal (and emotional) intensity that Butterfly thrives on. I quibbled that WNO's Act III dragged a tad, but there was little danger of any dragging when Lopez was onstage--she is a vocal actress to watch.

Brian Jagde, heard at SFO in Vec Makropoulos in the fall, brought the most luxe voice to the cast, distinguished by a velvet middle and secure, passionate top, even if the journey up there is still a bit eager. His sound is a pleasing middleground between your slightly less than credible barnstorming Pinkertons and your super sweet lightweight Pinkertons--a combination of vigor and plushness that makes me eager to hear his Alfredo or Edgardo. I only wish his characterization had incorporated a bit more of the self confidence justly earned by that killer voice.

The rest of the principals were also noteworthy. Levi Hernandez offered a fine, lyrical Sharpless, and Magdalena Wor's rich mezzo imbued her Suzuki with the necessary gravity. The high musical standard was matched by the pit, where Joseph Walsh led the orchestra (members of the Richmond Symphony) in a reading that credibly plumbed both the sensitivity and savagery of the score.

If the WNO's Butterfly (sorry again) production exemplified the Butterfly-by-the-numbers aesthetic at its most elegant, the VA Opera was generally that same approach at its most serviceable, and risking garishness at times with great washes of pink and turquoise on the all white surface of the set. The periodic introduction of a large cherry blossom branch added some much needed texture.

Dramatic direction was solid, particularly in the choices of the blisteringly staged climax: Suzuki mans up and ends up handing Butterfly the knife, who doesn't kill herself until after Pinkerton's cries. He then runs in, rips down a screen, and finds her slumped over. But some of the more substantial indulgences didn't hang together. Points are due for allowing an actual curtain between Act II and Act III, and for the thoughtful choice of staging the instrumental opening of Act III as Butterfly's dream during the night. But the dream sequence didn't have much to offer in terms of interesting stagecraft--instead we get Trouble, and a dude in a suit billed as 'Future Trouble', chasing butterfly props (groan). The piece gives us just about enough of opera's most famous child prop to tug at our heartstrings without becoming total tripe--I'm afraid any more time spent pondering his fate just serves to dilute the main drama.

Pinnock Plays Landowska Tribute Show at LOC

2011-03-29T23:34:00.008-04:00

I am trying to start this review without some dull generic observations about "the harpsichord" but that is proving difficult, so... It strikes me that it is very hard to lie on a harpsichord, which is a good thing. Yet the harpsichord as solo instrument suffers much the same fate as the organ in its accessibility to modern ears, i.e. neither gets a fair shake on record. To get into the harpsichord at length, you really need to hear it live, whereas a modern piano recording, if not the same as a live performance, is pretty persuasive on its own.

As for the program...Trevor Pinnock is just a delight, and peppered the concert with background on Landowska and fascinating introductions to the works. His playing is infectious and charming in a DIY sort of way. He finds the singing or dancing line in a piece and lets the rest coalesce around it. Also, he is not about to let a little gold leaf deter him from doling out the punishment that bad keyboard deserves.

Highlights of the program included a Handel Chaconne and Variations opener, picturesque pieces by William Byrd and contemporaries (Bells, Birds, that sort of thing), and a mid-17th c "Lamento" of Jonah Froberger that evaporated into an exuberant reading of the Bach French Suite No. 5. The second half featured some elegant French numbers and three Scarlatti sonatas, austere and grave on the harpsichord in a manner quite different from their usual impression on the modern keyboard.

Also onstage was one of Landowska's own pleyel harpsichords, a beast of an instrument with *4* sets of strings (the extra is basically a 17th c subwoofer) and somewhere between 6 to 14 pedals below. Like a harpsichord but with teeth. Pinnock demonstrated the instrument at the close of each half, and had a good chuckle with the audience over a number of false starts from difficulty maneuvering his feet (good sketch fodder for the nerdiest variety show ever, mind you). The effect when he eventually got it right was quite special though, adding additional dimensions of depth to the sound, to which he attributed some of the "grandeur" Landowska communicates in her recordings.

Update: Migette's review here, also check this very instructive matchup she posted of Landowska and Pinnock playing Bach. Downey has great resources here.

Brewer!

2011-03-24T22:51:00.006-04:00

Christine Brewer, last noted for her much lamented disappearance from the last Schenk Ring cycles in 2009, and last heard doing some paint removal at Lyric Opera in their 2007 Frau Ohne Schattens, presented an extraordinary recital with Craig Rutenberg at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater Wednesday.

This was really a highlight of the year, I think, so apologies in advance for any unpalatable fawning. The sheer splendor and depth of her voice, which, impressive from the back of the opera house, is exhilarating at close range, makes this a rather different experience than your regular thoughtful, tasteful recital. Brewer's pleasures are maybe just a bit passe: she delivers great art to be sure, but a key vehicle for that is the sheer visceral thrill of her generous instrument.

The program was an interesting mix of American songs. I loved the first selection, Gian Carlo Menotti's Canti Della Lontananza, though the interpretations did not always seem as polished as selections later in the program and there was some finding of footing during the first pieces. Rutenberg's playing was especially distinguished in the lovely piano part here, and by the final two songs Brewer had arrived in force. The other cycle in the first half was a knockout. The work, by a contemporary composer, Alan Smith, uses texts from the love letters of a soldier killed in World War II, and Brewer delivered a chilling and deeply moving performance. One moment that will not soon be forgotten: the text of the final song is a transcription of the telegram that announced the soldier's death to his wife--the sound that Brewer unleashed on "Secretary of War" is something very few singers are capable of, I think.

The second half had some trouble competing with the wrenching drama of the first, with more of a grab bag program. Rutenberg offered a nice selection of the piano music of Virgil Thompson as a segue to the final aria from Thompson's "Mother of us All", of which Brewer offered a towering, account. Then some Ives songs, by turns sublime (Shall we Gather at the River) and nutty (the Operahouse song).

The program closed with selections from a new Brewer CD, a tribute to encore numbers favored by divas past, i.e. Flagstad, Traubel, Farrell, etc. Some of these were a bit slight, but all fairly hard not to like. The bluesy Harold Arlen number, "Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe" was perhaps the highlight, demonstrating Brewer's substantial abilities in theater/non-classical/etc songs. This kind of thing is so hard to do in a way that would ever convince a reasonable person they wouldn't rather be hearing a theater voice do it. Given all the firepower at her disposal, Brewer would be about the last singer I'd imagine successful in this material, but she pulls it off through some skillfull modulation of her sound and deep instincts about how to properly communicate these songs. This was confirmed in her second encore, a charming and remarkably unaffected rendition of "Mira" from the musical Carnival. The other encore was Ives' arrangement of "In the Mornin'."

Update: Midgette nicely captures what a pleasant and relaxed affair the whole thing was here.

More update: BTW, not sure where Midgette was going with her last graf quibble about this being a "not altogether stirring" evening in the review above. An inconsistent presentation, I'll grant you, but if this doesn't qualify as stirring for a vocal recital I'm not sure what does.

Downey has no reservations about what's up, and includes a ton of great links and context for the interesting selections on the program...

Boston in DC, sans Levine

2011-03-20T01:18:00.009-04:00

Very nice program from the Boston Symphony Saturday despite Jimmy's unfortunate absence--Roberto Abbado did guest conducting duties instead, and Peter Serkin joined as a soloist for a program of Haydn, Bartok and Beethoven (a wholesale revision of the Levine program, I believe, but I'm not going to go digging out my old WPAS mailers). Hearing awesome orchestras that one has never heard before is always a treat, and Boston did not disappoint. Everything that separates the men from the boys was on display here: a distinguished sound with great depth, unerring balances, consistently fine winds and brass across the board, and skillz to spare when it comes to executing precision moves.

I find my reasons for liking or disliking lead-off Haydn (No. 93 in this instance) somewhat mysterious, but this I liked. Perhaps it was largely just my first chance to really hang with their sound for a while, but the whole thing had a gravity and deliberateness that was hard not to admire, though Abbado maybe let things get a bit four square at times compared to the more organic Haydn to be had elsewhere.

The Bartok piano concerto No. 3 was certainly the most eagerly anticipated thing on the program, but I'm not sure if it entirely succeeded. The first movement unfolded with a romantic heaviness that seemed at odds with the work--one need more of that mercurial Bartok flavor to really capture the flickering textures of the music. The second movement was closer to the mark--Abbado's glacial pacing and Serkin's solemn reading nicely capturing the elemental qualities of nature or folk people and stuff tapped into here. The finale was exhilarating to be sure, with some truly astounding playing by Serkin, though again, the propulsion seemed derived from sheer force of will, not Bartok's babbling rhythms.

After the half was Beethoven 5, and, well, you really can't go wrong with a great orchestra playing that, now can you? I will take this opportunity to reprint a bit of that famous E.M. Forster passage in case you haven't seen it in a while (extended passage at Sandow here):

"No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back," breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right. Her brother raised his finger; it was the transitional passage on the drum.
For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then--he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. Any fate was titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered would alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.
And the goblins--they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or ex-President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

The first three movements were played beautifully, if without too many distinctive touches, besides perhaps a grittier sense of the drama in places. But Abbado's breakneck finale (with the BSO hardly breaking a sweat) was simply fantastic, irrepressible music-making, reminding all how much visceral power there is in this music, no small accomplishment given its familiarity. Walking out of the auditorium, I realized that the version on my ipod for a while now is some burnished Karajan snoozer and well, after hearing Beethoven like this, that just won't do.

Update: Downey a shade less enthusiastic about both the band and Abbado here. Given the comparison he draws with the NSO and BalSO ("the playing remained at a very high level...although not so far above our two local orchestras as one might have expected"), I would add that "boys" above is general and not meant to impugn any local teams. Downey also suggests that the problem might not have been less Bartok flavor, but rather inferior Bartok product.

Midgette is a more admiring of the Bartok and likewise measures Abbado's professional readings against Eschenbach's more emotionally involved approach here...

Goerne, Eschenbach, NSO in Zemlinsky

2011-03-18T11:46:00.011-04:00

A quick note on last night's Lyric Symphony with Matthias Goerne, Twyla Robinson, and the NSO. And I shall only speak about the second half because I mistook the early start time for a 7:30 rather than a 7, and missed Eschenbach playing and conducting Mozart piano concerto something or other. I find the penalty box only barely acceptable for opera, and it is beneath consideration for something like a concerto, so I enjoyed a cocktail and the nice weather on the KC terrace.

The audience was on board, judging by some kind of encore that turned a half hour Mozart appetizer into a 50 minute first half, but I'm thinking Eschenbach is going to be around for a while, so there should be other chances to hear him play. And not that anyone is listening, but the unfortunate practice of programming Mozart as the least interesting thing on the program continues unabated. I get it, of course, and the reportedly abysmal attendance at last week's un-partnered Messaien just goes to show that unfamiliar works all by their lonesome continue to be box-office death. But I feel no good can come of making audience members attracted by more ambitious programming come to disdain Mozart because his works are the price of admission just to get to what they really came for.

Anyhow. Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony is being presented as part of the Maximum India Festival which wraps up this week, as the texts for baritone and soprano are taken from a German translation of the Bengali poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. As you probably know, the musical language is right in that sweet spot of lush German early 20th century tonality, high on drama and sweep, with that big everyone-gets-to-play approach to orchestral texture akin to Mahler and Strauss. Eschenbach and the NSO certainly got the precision and depth of texture, but there was something lacking in the drama. I was sitting pretty close, I'll admit, but there was something a bit static in the dynamics and a tendency to drive the volume and pace rather than letting things play out naturally that detracted from the impact.

The biggest hook for the evening was Matthias Goerne, recently forced to bail on the upcoming Met Wozzecks for knee surgery, much to everyone's chagrin. Goerne needs no introduction of course, he brings a unique combination of vocal beauty and artistic intelligence to his work, and this is a great piece for him, showcasing his interpretive skills in a great range of settings, from the despondent opening song to frenzied heights and back again. Yet he remained credible and involving throughout while offering a number of beautiful moments. And of course, where many other fine baritones would descend into shoutiness in material like this, that Goerne magic keeps things buttery and on point all the way through.

Soprano Twyla Robinson was a strong partner, with an inviting sweetness to her voice and power where required. Her bio highlights work in Strauss and it was easy to hear how this would be a natural fit. She was less than convincing in places, particularly her first number about the "junge Prinz" but standing next to one of the preeminent recitalists of our time and dealing with kind of weird subject matter is not a recipe for success. I appreciated that she tried to incorporate some idiosyncratic effects to heighten the characterization, though some might not...

Update: Takes from Downey (including an appraisal of Eschenbach so far) and Midgette...

Kissin at the Kennedy Center

2011-03-06T23:15:00.010-05:00

Evgeny Kissin brought some of the old-time magic to the Kennedy Center yesterday, in the all-Liszt program he is touring with (here's John von Rhein's take on the Chicago stop). One goes to a Kissin show expecting technical brilliance, of course, but comes away with so much more. In their finest moments, his concerts let you experience the overwhelming possibilities of the instrument in a way that no one, at least that I've heard live, can.

Kissin excels most in the work of the composers who are the true keyboard animals--hence his association with Chopin, and here, Liszt. This was a program to upend the preconceived notions of the Liszt averse, skeptical and indifferent alike. Kissin demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of this music and is able to exploit its reaches like few can, from surging rage to heart melting poignance.

He kicked things off with an aching Ricordanza from the Transcendental Etudes, followed by the main event--the B Minor Sonata--a consuming voyage that brought shivers and some less than dry eyes in the house, as well as some terrifying climaxes that no doubt ensured some overtime for the Kennedy Center piano tuner. The second half-opener Funerailles perhaps lacked some of the blackest recesses to be found elsewhere, but I was sold by the end. A deeply felt Valse d'Obermann followed, and was probably a personal favorite of the afternoon. Regulation play ended with three selections from Liszt's Venezia cycle, perhaps the least ambitious Liszt on the program, profundity-wise. Kissin demonstrates however, that if you're not utterly charmed and seduced by these pieces, someone is doing it wrong.

I was going to crib the identities of the encores from someone else but the reviews are slow in coming so I'll just have to admit that I can only call the last and most obvious one off the top of my head: a tender, valedictory Liebestraum.

Update: The coverage is starting to come in...here's Thomas Huizenga (NPR)...Tim Smith...Downey (who notes the other two encores as Liszt's arrangement of Schumann's "Widmung" and a movement from his "Soirees de Vienne")

Opera at the movies: Aida from La Scala

2011-02-28T23:21:00.012-05:00

Caught that 2008 Zefferelli Aida w/ Bobby, Violeta Urmana, and like 10,000 other people at the West End Cinema here last night. It's on DVD here.

This is a sumptuously sung production. Urmana's virtues are well known, but the beauty of her voice here manages to awe nonetheless, demonstrating a creaminess that just don't quit. Unfortunately, her Aida is a tad whiny. Not that I don't want pathos, but when she starts to be a BUMMER I'm out. As for Bobby, I think we should all just agree that for whatever reasons "Celeste Aida" brings out the worst in his voice and that it doesn't matter because that is not really a great song anyway and everything that comes after is pretty spectacular. The shadow of that uncontrolled pingless hooty sound may lurk, but in stretches of riveting, unflagging passion like his 3rd and 4th Act scenes here it is all but forgotten. Ildiko Komlosi, who I don't know at all, offered a womanly, regal Amneris, and a great Act IV monologue and scene with Radames did some preemptive thunder stealing from the death scene.

The production is the Zefferelli joint that opened the 2008 season and it is some good red meat spectacular for the most part. But you know, there IS a line between opulent and busy, and this time out you find yourself somewhat desperately looking for the casino exit about 10 minutes before the end of Act II. I don't object to the shininess of the sets, though things do get a tad claustrophobic at times. The really berserker part is that Zeff decides to hang these metallic horizontal bars to frame the whole set, because, apparently, the absence of sparkly shit in the 40 feet above people's heads could not be allowed to stand.

The big dance numbers are...labor-intensive, but kind of a drag on video. This being Italy, they go all in for the black face, which is neither here nor there for the most part, but starts getting a bit absurd in the big Act II showpiece featuring legions of "Africans" in complicated masks and bodysuits. It looks a little something like this:

But then! Amidst all the mildly racist dullness, Roberto Bolle appears--no bodysuits need apply--and the next 10 minutes become the Roberto Bolle's rockin' bod show, ultimately scoring him bigger applause than any of the lumpy ol' singers:

The overall video production is superb quality, though as many have mentioned, there are a lot of "artistic" moments cut in of flowing drapery and soft focus closeups of all the fake-ass golden Phthah tchotchkes. I don't object to these shots when used judiciously, but it often gets ridiculous, as during the final scene, when the camera can't keep its attention focused on the oh so boring shadowy tomb set for more than 10 seconds at a time without switching to some supernumerary's gold lame arm netting. That annoying tic aside, however, the camera work offers a nice balance of closeups and full-stage views so you can soak in/OD on the magic.

Butterfly at WNO

2011-02-27T00:21:00.008-05:00

Props to WNO for giving great Butterfly this evening, in what is definitely its most consistent production so far this season, due in great measures to a very exciting A-cast. Mind you, with two full casts of the main principals, plus another cast for the Young Artist program, this effort is veering close to La Boheme on Broadway territory, and future iterations may not fare as well--but whatever: tonight's lineup was the real deal.

Catherine Naglestad gets both thoughtful AND ravishing points for her Butterfly. This is a great voice for the part: she maintains a sweet edge and easy, very pure sound even when pushing the volume. But she also knows how to deploy great fx where appropriate, and had the audience in pin drop mode with her pianissimos on several occasions. If there are some money transitions missing here and there, she gives every reason to think they'll be added in time. Particularly appreciated the lovely, restrained reading of "Un bel di" and some very credible coquettishness.

Her fine partnership with Alexey Dolgov set the standard for the evening. Dolgov offers an awfully attractive light n' easy sound that makes for an extra insidious Pinkerton. I mean, it's one thing when Pinkerton is basically Cavaradossi in nice fitting trousers and belts you into submission--but an irrepressible, urgent, youthful sound like Dolgov's is the more devastating. At the curtain calls, the audience couldn't help but respond with some tongue-in-cheek boos. Michael Chioldi's Sharpless and Margaret Thompson's Suzuki were both first-class as well, rounding out a principal cast with nary a weak link.

Philipe Augin led the WNO Orchestra in a lush, sensitive reading, with energy only flagging a tad in the beginning of the Act III before recovering for a wrenching finale.

The elegant, tasteful production, from San Francisco, is really about all one needs in a Butterfly before one gets into the puppet children/floating lantern/Butterfly as space hooker territory. There are thoughtfully choreographed screens, a priddy raining petals moment, a big scrim in the back that does a dawn effect after the humming chorus and then goes red when she kills herself--it may sound like Butterfly by the numbers, but it is done with nuance and skill and the overall effect is fully satisfying.

One particularly nice touch is the slightly more explicit eroticism of the Love Duet. The screens part to reveal a starry sky and a modest twin bed--Pinkerton's classy contribution to the marriage chamber--and the blocking revolves around Pinkerton, in an increasing state of undress, sweetly cajoling her to get in the bed. It's a gentle choice but it makes the scene richer and more honest. With a chaste Love Duet, the sequence can seem false, given what the libretto clearly tells us about Pinkerton's motives, and you know, him being a douche and all. But the erotic moment has its own truth, and Puccini's rapturous music fills in the space between the naked facts of the story and the fleeting emotional world of the characters to create something real and poignant, even if we can already see the tragedy in motion. Also--when the Americans get back they are hanging out in the room with the bed which must have been REAL awkward for Kate.

Anyhow, very strong showing from the company tonight!

Nixon at the Met

2011-02-26T13:54:00.000-05:00

Clearly a bit tardy on this, but wanted to say something for Internet posterity about Nixon in China, because it really is a marvelous thing. My familiarity with "new" operas is far from encyclopedic, but it's the first time I've seen an opera successfully use the language of the modern American theater--and the effectiveness of that marriage was something of a revelation.

Here is all the casual avant-gardism, fluid treatment of time, space, and relationship to the audience, artful synthesis of found and created text, and voracious historical appetite that defines so much new theatre in all but most retrograde Broadway enclaves. Language dominates this approach--it drives the imagery and atmosphere of the work and asks the audience to wrestle with not just a script but a text. Yet the song-based musical theatre, which prizes concision and surgical deployment of ideas, is not ideally suited to this medium. An operatic score, on the other hand, is a perfect complement to a dense, meandering text and can develop the complex, long form structures that serve such a fractured narrative.

Judging from some of the commentary, its interesting how frequently the piece's deliberate artifice is misunderstood--a symptom, I think, of a hesitance to accept opera's ability to perform at this level of sophistication. Opera's place in the modern musical theatre is strange in this respect: the most notoriously "artificial" of art forms is assumed captive to the dullest sort of naturalism (but, you know, with singing).

But Nixon takes seriously the possibilities of opera to go beyond simple narrative and allow its characters to describe a rich inner landscape and Goodman, Adams and Sellars use these possibilities to interrogate a very particular emotional space. The work tracks its characters as they turn inward in the face of a fundamentally artificial and impossible cultural confrontation. The fluidity of the operatic form allows for the constant disintegration and dissolution of the political and performative spaces they occupy. See the remarkable first Act scene between Mao and Nixon, in which Nixon's pragmatic American sympathies are dwarfed by Mao's all-consuming politics, scored by Adams with increasing grandeur and dread. Or the inspired gesture that closes Act II, in which the boundaries of the noxious propaganda ballet directed by Mme. Mao break down and the Nixons enter the performance, rendered bewildered and helpless by the alien politics and history they have stepped into. But the surprising third Act upends this dynamic--taking us into a fully interior space where the characters drift away from the political towards their personal histories.

The effect of the evening works on several levels--a provocative window into public and personal history, a meditation on our attempts to understand the world through politics, and a deeply affecting emotional observation of the central characters' humanity (not all good, obviously). In short, it demonstrates unequivocally how intellectually and dramatically rich a modern opera can be, and for that deserves what will hopefully become a permanent place in the Met's repertoire.

To digress for a second: so why did Dr. Atomic, a work with similar aspirations, suck so hard? First and foremost, there is the vast gulf between Goodman's carefully wrought Nixon libretto and Sellar's lazy hodge-podge of found sources for Dr. Atomic. Again, the text is dominant in a work like this, and the moment it sounds phoned in, or strikes a false note, as was the case with all that tangentially relevant Renaissance poetry Oppenheimer and Kitty kept singing to each other, the whole thing falls apart. Dr. Atomic also failed to have the courage to sustain the kind of non-naturalistic architecture of a work like this. Instead, Dr. Atomic kept returning to fairly standard "scenes" with arias that tried to advance the timeline of the story, wedged into a bunch of unconnected choruses and half-monologue type things. But this kind of hedging results in the worst of both worlds: a drama with little urgency, and a lot of elements that are confusing outside of an integrated whole. Finally, there is a certain postmodern-y sensibility that is key to this kind of work: a willingness to allow the audience to "discover" individual voices and histories as they emerge, and make their own connections. That's not synonymous with political even-handedness, as some have charged Nixon, but with the integrity of what is being presented. But Dr. Atomic violated that sensibility repeatedly with its morass of didactic messages (the nadir being that scolding Native American nanny, of course). A heavy moral hand is good for say, Tosca, but its death to a work that is trying to deal honestly with historical themes.

Musically, the Met performance left a bit to be desired but was generally very fine. Adams led a grand, persuasive reading of his score, though one left feeling some of its full power was not exploited. I'm still not clear on what the amplification situation was, but the balance between singers and orchestra was way off for much of the first Act. Maddalena started out with the vocal issues everyone has talked about, but they were a small price to pay for the kind of authority and depth he brings to this part. Kathleen Kim nailed the difficult Mme. Mao part but with some cautiousness which, from the old recording sounds, like it is part for the course in this role. I don't know if it is feasible, but I'm adding a Mme. Mao who can sing the part like the best Brunnhildes as an addition to my fantasy list. The rest of the cast was uniformly strong...

Joyce DiDonato at the Kennedy Center

2011-02-15T23:25:00.013-05:00

Joyce DiDonato's KC recital last night reiterated (for anyone who has been living in a cave for the last couple years) that she is the real deal--a compelling interpreter and stage presence armed with an exceptionally pure voice and assassin-like technique.

She and collaborator David Zobel designed an interesting and well paced program that reminds one of the unique and refreshing programming freedom that vocal recitals enjoy. This was not to be a program based in the operatic repertoire with which she has taken so very many names (I like this flabbergasted Maury account of her 2009 Carnegie Hall show) but a song recital with operatic shout-outs that highlighted a broader set of skillz.

She kicked it off with some gauntlet throwing--the "Scena di Beatrice" by Haydn--that showcased the full range of her operatic abilities, sans opera. I suppose these sorts of pieces never fully satisfy in recital, but it was nonetheless a marker to be reckoned with. Next up was the first salvo in a series of selections showing off lesser known but very fine works of Rossini, which seemed aimed directly at any haters in the audience (guilty). Here was a lovely, thoughtfully observed quartet of Rossini songs, which DiDonato brought out with some knowing characterizations and beautiful phrasing. Here's Freni in the first selection, "L'invito":

She also dazzled in the next set, selections by a turn of the century French composer, Cecile Chaminade, especially the beautiful "Viens, mon bien aime!" and this virtuosic one about summer and birds (you can imagine).

The second half opened with some more unexpected and amazing Rossini: the treatment of the Willow Song for his Otello. This is a completely gorgeous sequence--what even is the rest of this opera like??? This selection probably included the most seductive music making of the evening--the tightly (but not excessively) controlled, successively quieter final passages had the whole house in rapt silence. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm making a lame reference to her Midwestern roots...but...arg here it comes...the thing about DiDonato is that her vocal power comes from a very pragmatic place. That means that things like soft high notes don't have the kind of head-swimming glamour they might elsewhere; instead there is a forthright precision that shocks in the coloratura stuff she is known for, while that earnest immediacy wins you over in things like the Composer (see below).

Everyone was excited for the following Reynaldo Hahn sequence about Venice, but these might have been the least persuasive. Not sure what the right approach is here, but she was taking a casual, veering close to pedestrian, tack that didn't offer much to draw one's attention. The final trio of Serenades (Pecci, Leoncavallo, and Di Chiara) demonstrated DiDonato's considerable charms--recital funny business is no easy task (combining as it does the terrifying nakedness of the art song recital AND standup comedy) and if not as carefree as her comedy on the big stage, she definitely pulled it off.

Zobel had what I think is the ideal touch for a collaborator in any recital setting. Ever aware of the need to complement the other instrument on stage, he never let the piano drift into the harsh tones and excessive dynamics which always turn jarring and distracting when competing with the solo voice. Not that the piano was static by any means, he drew a wealth of elegant colors to complement DiDonato.

She didn't get into the familiar operatic territory until the first encore, the last aria from Donna del Lago. Having already disarmed the Rossini skeptics in the audience with those interesting late songs, she reminded everyone why she is so (uniquely?) celebrated in this work--the ridiculous technique of course, but also the seriousness and dignity that she imparts to Rossini's music. The final encore was "Over the Rainbow", a gesture to the anniversary of Vocal Arts DC, which was about 75 percent deeply touching and 25 percent maudlin, which are pretty good odds for that kind of thing.

She also peppered the evening with a steady stream of earnest, endearingly twee banter, such that I'm thinking DiDonato may have a second career as an opera-show version of Delilah, which now that I think of it, seems to be all I've ever really wanted from the radio. Maybe the Sirius channel should start diversifying...

Update: Downey and Midgette also enthusiastic (she doesn't really inspire a wide range of opinions)...

NSO with Radu Lupu: Smetana, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky

2011-02-11T11:10:00.006-05:00

Heard the recent NSO program Thursday night. The bookends for this series, Smetana's Overture to The Kiss and Tchaikovsky's Manfred suite (yes, THAT Manfred) were robust if somewhat static demonstration opportunities for the orchestra, but more about them later. The Beethoven Piano Concerto #3, with Radu Lupu, was the real highlight of the evening.

What is that Lupu magic? One couldn't help but be taken aback by his first entrance--that distinctive sound, in which each exquisitely balanced chord says so much, immediately changes the terms of the performance from something satisfying yet familiar to something elusive and mysteriously beautiful. I struggle at times to really hear Beethoven's piano music afresh, and Lupu is a precious if very specific antidote to that problem. If others seek a mountain-traversing clarity in their Beethoven (or at least one that always has mountains on the brain), Lupu's strolls through the woods, ambivalent about weightier landscape issues.

But if that made for a fascinating central performance, it did not necessarily make for an integrated whole, with the NSO doing its part solidly but not really complementing the deep thoughts going on downstage. Lupu's engagement in return was sporadic, at times conducting a tad, at others suddenly picking out a woodwind with which to share a passing moment.

The opening Smetana piece was not terribly interesting, and I'll agree with Downey that the driving approach was not doing it any favors. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaged I was on the Tchaikovsky, though. It's a concert piece organized around some 19th century claptrap that's seriously risking irrelevance. The program notes seemed to be having a good time with this, helpfully offering some choice quotes from the original scenario, i.e., how the second movement illustrates when "the alpine fairy appears to Manfred in the rainbow of the waterfall" and then how the third brims with the sounds of "the life of Alpine hunters, full of simplicity, good nature and a patriarchal character" (I'm thinking they vote Republican). But 21st century snark was no match for Tchaikovsky's skill in writing irresistible theater music. And Noseda, who clearly brought some of the abilities that have distinguished his work in the opera house to bear, led an earnest, relentless reading that was hard to dismiss in all but the most indulgent passages.

Flatness

2011-02-01T22:43:00.004-05:00

I was lazy about mentioning at this time, and moreover, I wasn't at a live show so what do I know--but it looks like Sieglinde protested here and here against all this ragging on SRad for being flat and I feel compelled to provide some solidarity.

Look, people: ragging on singers for being flat who otherwise give great performances is just lame. Are you Sondra Radvanovsky's rehearsal pianist? Do you have to sit next to her at choir? No. Then I guarantee whatever minor, subjective flatness you're hearing is not that big a deal to you. Obviously, I'm not saying that noone has pitch problems, but there's a difference between pitch problems that are obvious and pitch problems that only you and a handful of other people with magic bat ears like yours can distinguish. Pointing out the former is fair game, but one should think long and hard about how maybe so-and-so's voice just sounds like that before going to press with the latter.

WNO Announces

2011-02-01T11:44:00.004-05:00

Hrm. I guess we'll just agree to call this a retrenchment season:

Tosca (Dallas): Racette/Ushakova, Porretta/Hughes Jones, Held/Hendricks; Conductor Domingo/Gursky
Lucia (ENO): Coburn/Petrova, Pirgu/Dolgov, Chioldi/Mulligan, Palazzi/Pecchioli; Conductor Auguin
Così ("Seattle"): Futral, Pokupic, Prieto, Tahu Rhodes, Shimell, Kemoklidze; Conductor Auguin
Nabucco (New): Vassallo, Boross, Panikkar, Chauvet; Conductor Auguin
Werther (TBD?): Meli, Ganassi, Foster-Williams, Robbins; Conductor Villaume

On the rep and personnel front: it looks like the one A-lister of the season will be Pat Racette in the opener (at least out of the pit--I guess for consolation we get more time with Plastico on the baton). Slightly less boldface names include a welcome Alan Held as Scarpia and Futral and Teddy Tahu Rhodes in Cosi--I find Futral solid and look forward to hearing TTR in person so that's cool. I also note that Sean Pannikar who did a great Narraboth in the fall is back in a bigger role for Nabucco. Have really been enjoying Auguin so far so it will be nice to hear him conducting so much. Rep choices obviously leave some variety to be desired: all Italian with just the mildest respite in Werther (and Cosi).

On the production front: I'm personally looking forward to seeing Nabucco and Werther on stage for the first time. Speaking of Werther, that TBD production is ominous--this company WILL get a production to the stage by any means necessary but "Werther: IN CONCERT!!!" just doesn't sound as fun. The Nabucco production is by the team who did Hamlet the other year, which is not hugely promising. There were some intriguing moments in that show but the more I think about that production the more I feel like it was exercising its freedom to look cheap and ugly without any real ideas to redeem it (and no, updating to a nondescript fascist period is not an idea anymore). The Cosi is that modern-dress Jonathan Miller production that has been making the rounds for years (much to the chagrin of some people). If the company can overcome any alleged suckiness in the production and bring the same sense of humor and light it brought to Nozze last year, that could be a season highlight.

So, no obvious stinkers to leave out of a subscription (better than this year for me--I am still on the fence about Pasquale). That said, I think its safe to say DC isn't going to be a destination city for opera travelers next year. People seem willing to get on board with some curtailed ambition for the time being (i.e. Midgette is more forgiving than I would have expected) but WNO PR Department, please use this season as an opportunity to get everyone juiced up about future seasons, m'kay?

BSO at Strathmore (Haydn/Sierra/Brahms)

2011-01-30T23:15:00.005-05:00

Saw the Baltimore Symphony Orch (for the first time actually) at Strathmore last night--no Marin Alsop tho, the conductor was Spaniard Juanjo Mena.

The first offering, Haydn's "La Reine" symphony was what it was. Nicely put together, priddy, and ample opportunity to think about what I was going to eat after the show. The kind of Haydn that makes me think impolitic thoughts about how maybe our HIP commissars are right and this kind of thing should really only be performed by their approved bands.

A new work, "Sinfonia. No. 4" by Roberto Sierra was quite promising. Sierra trades in rewarding, densely clotted textures driven by a disjointed momentum which uses Latin-identified rhythms for its raw material. The third movement, with its haunting combination of piano and woodwinds was especially memorable. The boisterous finale, in which the percussion came to the fore, was plenty satisfying, but I fear at times Mena wanted it to "groove" more than was really warranted. Much of the power of Sierra's work lay in the tension between these rhythmic fragments, while by the end Mena seemed all to eager to lay down a backbeat and be done with it. Oh, and the brass sounded a little anemic for what one would want in that go-for-broke finale.

The Brahms violin concerto was less convincing, I'm afraid. Mena and the BSO seemed to fall victim to that surest death for all Brahms concertos: treating the orchestra like mere accompaniment. Because when you go to a Brahms concerto, and the man is throwing all the weight of the previous century of concerto making into one big 1000 ton statement, you want to see a fight, right? Well this was more of a polite accord. The big foolproof moments couldn't help but inspire some awe, but otherwise the orchestra always seemed a hair too slow or marred by four-square conducting that leeched much of the life out of the piece. Soloist Augustin Haedlich proved on several occasions that he was capable of the right sensibility (including a badass Paganini encore) but these were isolated incidents. Not sure if the tempo was holding him back or what, but in this piece you need to DIG IN and he never quite DUG.

The paranoid style in cultural commentary

2011-01-20T12:03:00.006-05:00

Probably the most offensive thing about this column by Neal Gabler is simply that such an amazingly lazy column could make it into a paper. The argument, about how grassroots democrats are throwing off the shackles of elite taste dictums by not keeping the new Jonathan Franzen book on top of the bestseller list, and how this is also a victory against the tyranny of booooorrrinnggg classical music, or something, is ably and justly busted by both A. Ross and A.O. Scott.

So no need to pile on anymore there. But it is a nice reminder of the strange bedfellows inspired by this kind of thinking. Gabler, judging by writings like this, is no conservative, and I expect he would see little common cause with the dominant conservative rhetoric about "elites", with its suspicion of science, other cultures, vegetables, and of course, pervert art. The disdain Gabler is tapping into (albeit rather clumsily) is left-identified, rooted in an anti-authoritarian impulse to upend the fusty dominant culture that seeks to assert its superiority as a means to suppress authentic experience.

But that doesn't make it any less problematic. People on the left are supposed to have a real analysis about culture and power, but it doesn't work when you just substitute a bunch of posturing and neutered carping about culture you don't enjoy, while blaming a bunch of people that have little actual control. Indeed, Gabler is trafficking in the same rhetoric that allows conservatives to redefine class as a simple matter of aesthetics and cover for the social, political and economic interests who have a real incentive to define culture. Not helpful.

Dept. of nice use of opera similies

2011-01-20T11:39:00.002-05:00

Josh Marshall, on liberals' tendency to view politics as an inconvenient sideshow to "real" policy debates:

Democrats often console themselves that even when they don't win elections, usually their individual policies are more popular than those of Republicans. Too bad you can't elect a policy. It's true for instance that Health Care Reform -- which still has more opponents than supporters -- is pretty popular when you ask people about its individual components. But why is that? It's not random, because that pattern crops up again and again. It's another one of the examples where liberals -- or a certain strain of liberalism -- focuses way too much on the libretto of our political life and far too little on the score. It's like you're at a Wagner opera reading the libretto with your ear plugs in and think you've got the whole thing covered.

Mattila on Marty

2010-12-05T18:44:00.003-05:00

If you've ever spent time trolling the Internet for Mattila content, you've probably come across this 2003 interview. Love this little digression on what she finds interesting in Slavic characters, esp. in light of her triumph as Emilia Marty:

CV: You have sung to universal praises a lot of strong and interesting female roles from Slavic operas.

KM: Pardon me for interrupting, but Slavic female characters are weak as well as strong. They are simultaneously weak and strong. What I admire in them is that their strengths and weaknesses can be so openly performed and conveyed and needn’t be hidden or covered by a veil of simplicity, innocence and purity. They do not act as others expect them to. Everybody is able to create decent characters which are extremely boring from a performer’s point of view. It is difficult to create true characters and what I admire in Slavic female roles is the truthfulness of their strengths and weaknesses. There are also various open endings which the audience must sort out when they return home from the opera house, such as in Jenufa. I enjoy this unfinished quality in movies and theatre plays too.

Mattila in San Francisco

2010-12-02T11:16:00.009-05:00

Finally getting around to saying a word about the last performance of SFO's splendid Vec Makropulos, as my extended "telework" Thanksgiving has resulted in a lot of karmic retribution in the form of office work (which is surely the cruelest karmic retribution of all).

Mattila as, um, Floria Tosca (hope audiences weren't confused when EM didn't stab anyone).

But first a very special thanks to the SF blogger contingent I got to meet before the show (in attendance were the respective authors of Reverberate Hills, the Standing Room, and Civic Center), all on account of Lisa Hirsch's hosting skillz. Meeting, in person, those regular civilians who have wowed and touched you over the years with their prose is a particularly enjoyable and special phenomenon of the Blogging Period of the Internet Era, I think.

And speaking of special phenomena...

So, until I heard it was happening, the idea of Mattila doing Emilia Marty hadn't really crossed my mind for some reason. My only reference was the Anja Silja DVD, and that kind of thing doesn't really inspire daydreaming about who else would be good in something.

My b.

I think I've read this in every review, but it is such a visceral impression for those who like their Mattila that it bears repeating: this part is an obscenely good fit for her talents. The unifying motives of innocence and penance found in the damaged ingenues of Jenufa and Ka'ta are absent here. Half the time, Marty doesn't know why the fuck she does what she does. After 300 years, she is a clutter of emotions and impulses, a junkyard of wants and reactions. Mattila owns this madness, bringing all the gross schizo stuff celebrated in her Salome to bear on the Second Act sequences. Yeah, and the whole thing is done in this ridiculous harlequin outfit and skullcap. Please future productions, never let her do this in a cocktail dress.

But Mattila's great advantage lies in the number of ways she has of unifying characterization and voice, the number of ways she has of being on the stage. After watching Marty flail against the world, her remarkable turn in the third act, to reject further life, is simple, modest, and radiant. It doesn't hurt either that we get one of the most glorious unbroken stretch of Janacekian lyricism to be found in any of his works, which just happens to lie in the sweet spot of her voice.

It's exciting to think how much more she might grow into the role between now and the New York shows. The chatty first act material is not yet quite natural, I think, and polishing things like this will round out what is already a bona fide triumph.

Great accolades should go to SFO (and the Finnish National Opera) for mounting such a strong production around her. The singing and acting throughout the rest of the cast was very solid, though there was a lot of variation in ability to cut through the full-throated level maintained by the orchestra through many of the chaotic group scenes. Miro Dvorsky made a passionate case for the great Janacek tenor role of Gregor, though I would like to hear someone in the mode of a warmer-voiced Steva type in the part. Gerd Grochowski also stood out as a commanding Prus.

The production is a handsome black and white number with good functional solutions for the three settings, especially the first act law office. As mentioned above, Mattila's costuming is genius--when not in the harlequin getup, she looks normal amazing, particularly the evening gown in the last act.

Finally, we must note the great playing in the pit under Jiri Belohlavek, the same man who made Mattila's last Jenufa run so memorable. Precision of texture, lusty momentum, and great emotional pathos were all delivered as hoped.

BOAC All-Stars at Strathmore

2010-11-16T13:05:00.003-05:00

Had the novel experience of falling close to, if not slightly above, the median age of a Strathmore audience last Thursday, on the occasion of an all-Steve Reich program performed by the venerable Bang on a Can All Stars.

I was in the penalty box for the first selection, Music for Pieces of Wood, which was lame (not the piece, but my missing of it -- and even moreso because it turned out I had my pick of seats in the basically empty sides of the promenade level). The first half was rounded out by the wonderful "New York Counterpoint" for solo clarinet and prerecorded tracks by the soloist. Then the premeire - 2x5 - an appealing piece for rock quintet plus prerecorded tracks. Sounding like a sort of jam session with obsessive compulsive disorder, Reich offers many unexpected and fascinating textures here, from the slow movements hypnotic, bell like electric guitar plucks, to the good times California flavors that emerge and recede through the finale. The amplification had some issues though--the mic'd piano sounded nasty.

The introduction to the electric guitar's less familiar but perhaps more appealing possibilities continued after the half in Reich's "Electric Counterpoint", also for solo instrument and prerecorded tracks--the neat sonic bursts of the guitar bouncing lithely across a crackling landscape. The closer was the well-knownish Double Sextet, which presented the richest, most intricate writing of the evening. I wish I could hear this piece with the full live band, however--while the prerecorded elements of the other works added information and depth, here it seemed to muddy and detract from the more delicate textures of the standard ensemble.

Emanuel Ax at Strathmore

2010-11-10T09:41:00.010-05:00

Pardon the radio silence, one gets discouraged from writing things about nice orchestra concerts when brooding over stupid no-good politics. And yet I suppose I really should thank the Dresden Staatskapelle and NSO from saving me from spending last Wednesday and Thursday evenings reading endless conservative takeover horror porn (articles). So good job orchestras, particularly the great, fluid Brahms 2nd from the Staatskapelle and that knockout creepshow Bartok piece from the NSO and guest conductor Xian Zhang (who is a dynamo to watch, PS).

But no use dwelling on the future, the concert season goes on! Last night was Emanuel Ax at Strathmore--who, I missed, I believe, in his last WPAS outing--in a program of Schubert and Chopin. It was a lovely show, and I wouldn't think of complaining, but I'm curious about what drives the staid programming for big time piano recital series. We know that so many of these artists are big champions of the piano literature of contemporary composers and overlooked 20th century composers, and yet year after year its the greatest hits without even the little bit of spinach major orchestras are able to work into the pre-intermission slot in their subscription series. What gives? Do presenters demand the vanilla repertoire for their flagship series? Is the elusive recital subscriber that much more fickle than your symphony subscriber? Do the artists just not feel this is the venue for all this work they are otherwise working diligently to champion through...I dunno...their late nite TV gigs? It's weird.

Oh, but I suppose we'll take Schubert and Chopin if we must. The Schubert half kicked off with the four impromptus of Op. 142. These pieces are such a perfect showcase for the rounded, ringing tones Ax elicits from his piano--to say there are no "rough edges" makes it sound as though the effect is boring or too pretty, but his exacting attention to the beauty of each sound makes the music more real, more present--the spell is never broken. I particularly enjoyed the faster tempo in the opening and closing sections of No.2 (perhaps my favorite of the bunch), which lent a playful, familiar air to what often comes off somber, though the exquisite middle section may not have had a chance to blossom as much at that speed. The real treat of the first half was the Sonata in A Major (Op. 120)--the endless melody of the first movement seemed to sing from somewhere several feet above the keyboard.

For the Chopin half, Ax offered a winning Baccarolle (op. 60), followed by three Mazurkas (Nos. 1, 2, and 3 of op. 59). The Mazurkas are primordial piano music for me, so its sort of hard to be objective, but Ax's readings have a welcome plainspoken earthiness--always excited to get to the dance break and never degenerating into the kind of self-conscious prettiness better meant for other Chopin. Of the two Nocturnes he played, the D-flat Major (C-sharp minor was the other) achieved a particularly stunning suspended-in-time feeling. The last piece was the Scherzo No.2 Op. 31--I'm afraid I find this piece a bit tedious, and not especially exciting as a showpiece (tho it is obviously HARD). Ax brought out a lot of color, but it still felt a bit disjointed. Not sure how you solve that problem. Encores were the "Valse brilliante" and something else ~~Chopin~~Schumann...

Bullet points on Boris Godunov HD cast

2010-10-24T02:08:00.004-04:00

In no particular order:

The HD cast people really need to chill with the closeups--I get that they want to avoid the impression that any of this is taking place on a stage, but its quite maddening in a production with so much going on to not be able to orient yourself with periodic wide shots.
Rene Pape is a great man. That said, this didn't bowl me over the first time. Also, the HD cast is not really his friend. Some part of Pape's reputation is about a silky smoov voice, but its a far cry from a one-size-fits-all-spaces voice. Understanding his volume choices is key to appreciating his portrayal, and the HD cast drastically compresses those things.
With her mane of red curls as Marina, Ekaterina Semenchuk bears an uncanny resemblance to Glory, the villain from Buffy season five.
Props to all who deserve it for bringing together such a ginormous and strong cast for this. Alexandrs Antonenko (Grigory) is the real deal, rite?

Talich Quartet at LOC

2010-10-22T00:05:00.006-04:00

Went back to the Library of Congress for the Talich quartet in a program of Beethoven, Janacek, and Dvorak last night.

The Talich's Beethoven (No. 6) had a light, appealing bounciness to it, but I'm afraid I need something more to get me going about this piece. Why not serve up an all-Janacek first half and let DC hear both quartets 1 & 2? Do we really need to bait a FREE concert that only music lovers are schlepping to with such well-trod material? Did they feel an all-Czech program would pigeonhole them? Grumble. Anyhow, it was perfectly nice.

The Janacek quartet was a treat indeed. For anyone who knows the operas well, it is wonderful to hear those distinctive Janacek-ian harmonies emerge in these pieces. But the string quartets are a step beyond the operas in their inventiveness and interest in new sounds. Folky elements enter not as melodic material, but as disjointed fragments alongside passages of jarring noise. The Talich's take played up this inventiveness I think--rather than the propulsive energy I've heard elsewhere, the leisurely pacing, warm tone, and attention to detail allowed one to soak up the shifting, surprising environments Janacek creates. There are visceral and emotional thrills to be had in this piece that were not played to the hilt here, but the alternative was a more fluid and cerebral reading that fully inflamed one's sense of injustice at how rarely it gets programmed.

The Talich reserved their most profound investment for the Dvorak G Major Quartet (Op. 106) after the half. Making a solid case for the level of commitment necessary to ensure these works don't degenerate into static priddiness, they highlighted the many distinct textures in Dvorak's writing while maintaining a steady core of rich, generous, warmth--like strings with a molten chocolate inside. If Dvorak isn't always played like great Brahms, as I think it was here, well it should be.

The encore was more Dvorak featuring the viola of Vladimir Bukacs, whose clear, consistent tone was a standout throughout the evening. Special props are also warranted for the the exciting agility of Petr Prause's cello.

Other takes: Joe Banno in WaPo...

Two Mahlers

2010-10-20T12:20:00.013-04:00

The Gergiev show that has been tramping up and down the East Coast this month landed at the KC last night for a Mahler 8 with his Mariinsky Orchestra, the Choral Arts Society, the Children's Chorus of Washington, and others.

I love me some good Gergiev, and was totally game for wherever he was going with this. While the first part had some thrilling climaxes (and really, how can you get 300 professional musicians to play in coordination as loud as possible and not have some thrills) it didn't come together for me. Too often the textures were muddy and the momentum unfocused, with aimless stretches that felt like they were trying to balance predictability and survival with the music making. Having been in choruses during a few such massive operations, the together but middling sensation is familiar, but of course doesn't really create the conditions for an inspired reading. Gergiev likes to play it close to the edge, but the prospect of losing control of this most freight-trainish of movements may have inhibited even him.

The virtues of Gergiev and orchestra were much more evident in Part II--unabashed old-movie-score-pathos in the strings; an exciting ruddy brass sound that doesn't just dig deep, it excavates; and an unflagging attention to the drama and heart of the piece--like Bernstein after an all-night Stoli-fueled bender.

The vocal ensemble was pretty strong, with tenor August Amonov the standout in his passionately sung Part II solo work. The women brought some nice Slavic flavor (loved deep-voiced mezzo Zlata Bulycheva) but individually were a bit underpowered in relation to the orchestra, with the possible exception of ~~Lyudmila Dudinova~~ (UPDATE: Ok, I'm pretty sure I can't figure out the name of the soloist I'm trying to indicate here and I don't know the 8th well enough to figure it out, so...dark-haired one third from stage right, with a lot of material about 2/3rds of the way through Part II: you sounded good).

The choirs sounded tremendous. Any ensemble deserves a lot of points just for showing up and wrestling successfully with this thing, but there were moments where the vocal forces distinguished themselves, to be sure. The opening of the Chorus Mysticus was a model of controlled, finely blended piano singing, not an easy effect to achieve in such a large group, and the result was quite magical.

More reviews: Tim Smith...Anne Midgette...Downey (who is having none of that)...

***
Haven't had a chance to write about it, but I had my first opportunity to see Eschenbach as NSO director last Friday, in the second installment of the the Mozart 34/Mahler 5 program that concluded his Fall run. While I haven't been terribly diligent about attending NSO shows the last few years, I think that's about to change...

The consolation Mozart was very nice (it was supposed to be an all-Mahler program)--I was especially struck by the orchestra's sensitivity to the precise articulation Eschenbach called for--though its a bit hard to keep one's mind on Mozart when you know you have Mahler in store. (Sorry.) There was the usual defensiveness in the program and the nice post-show talk Eschenbach participated in about doing the piece with the regular ol' orchestra with only modest reductions. Eschenbach had a funny story about a letter from Mozart to his father in the 1780s where he is all jazzed about seeing some freaky big orchestra, so take that HIP facscists. I mean, I don't REALLY know how bad the situation is--maybe Eschenbach went home to find some threatening note on his doorstep festooned with catgut--but all the HIP backlash backlash seems like a bit of a straw man these days. And PS, can you think of anything more tragic than the major symphonies of the world starting to up the quotient of Mozart and Haydn in their programs again?

But anyhow, the MAHLER. In my aforementioned limited experience, this really is the best thing I've heard the NSO do. The orchestra delivered a wonderfully vivid, transparent sound, complemented by very high caliber solo work. Eschenbach's Mahler is thoughtful and intimate. He devotes loving attention to the lyrical moments, drawing them out of the din with great clarity and poignancy. He also has a penchant for creating an effect whereby passages sound almost suspended in time, allowing one to discover and linger in Mahler's eclectic sound worlds.

One could get used to this...

English Concert at the Library of Congress

2010-10-14T23:49:00.011-04:00

You know what? People who badmouth the federal government can suck it. Because: A) Social Security, B) volcano monitoring, and C) last night the Library of Congress hooked up a killer free show with the English Concert, led by Harry Bicket and ft. Rachel Podger and Alice Coote.

The chamber selections--Vivaldi's Trio Sonata in D minor ("La Follia"), Violin Concerto in D Major ("Il Gross Mogul"), and Cello Concerto in C minor--were stunning, totally in love with the dancing rhythms of these pieces and the glory of the sound of the solo string instrument.

Can we talk about Rachel Podger for a sec? Save for the Ionarts notice that got me interested, I didn't know her before but am now mildly obsessed. The woman is a completely sensational performer--the audience was clearly ill-prepared for the disarming immediacy and personality she brings to this music and applauded with abandon. Part of it is surely how she works that baroque violin--those modern instruments make Vivaldi all FM smoothness, but this sound is unprocessed, not afraid of hitting a few speedbumps, and very, very direct and exciting.

Jonathan Marson, soloist for the cello piece was also splendid. Podger, Marson and the band clearly relish Vivaldi's mastery in building unbearable tension; and, when this group finally breaks that tension, like in the lush treatments of the "free-jam" sections in the trio, the release is overpowering.

Coote, who I've never heard live before but enjoyed in the Met Hansel n' Gretel bcast, was probably least effective in Monteverdi's "Lamento d'Arianna". The content was interesting--the only surviving fragment of Monteverdi's opera on the Ariadne story--but there was maybe a little too much OPERA going on for the material at hand. A selection of songs by John Dowland, accompanied by William Carter on lute, were beautifully read, perfectly pitched to illuminate the emotional resonance of the poems. The Handel selection, an oratorio on the Lucrezia story, is a small masterpiece, culminating in a spectacular sequence on Lucrezia's suicide. The full splendor of Coote's rich mezzo was most on display here and made for a powerful climax. Put on a copy of this and listen for the incredible passage where Lucrezia talks about the knife in her breast and her melodic line undergoes this disintegration at once painful and sensual--Coote was on fire. The EC band throughout was a dream of sensitive, urgent Handel playing--must have the Messiah they did under Pinnock in the late 90s.

Check Downey's review here.

Voigt in D.C.

2010-10-07T23:46:00.017-04:00

Surely the perfect antidote to a spate of neither-here-nor-there Ballo's is a ballsy, cathartic Salome. If the new revival at WNO isn't quite in the league of Salome's that make you forget your name and moral compass, it's nonetheless a rich and effective reading from an excellent cast and new music director Phillipe Auguin.

We saw Debbie V's Salome's in Chicago a few years back, and I think its safe to say her Salome is more secure and exciting today than it was then, which was a pretty high standard already. The key money music was positively thrilling, with Voigt bringing the big rich pealing sounds we all know and love. Naturally, there is a bit more "negotiation" today as compared to her former peaks of effortlessness, and there were a handful of rocky moments in the high soft business (her middle seemed to carry poorly too, though this may be partially Auguin's fault). Her portrayal also remains on the efficient side: her motivations are clear in the moment but she never quite grasps the longer game necessary for a truly devastating Salome. But "settling" for this level of commitment and sheer vocal splendor ain't much of a chore.

Rest of the cast was pretty strong. Daniel Sumegi's ruddy-voiced Jokanananaaan captured the terror of the character and was also deliciously LOUD. Doris Soffel's vampy Herodias delivered a truly musical reading of that oft-shrieked role. Sean Panikkar gets the requisite "oh what a nice sounding Narraboth" mention.

If anything though, it was the pit that set the musical standard for the evening. Auguin led a sweeping account, long on majesty and grace, and the band played with great authority.

The production isn't much to look at. From the press photos I couldn't figure out if this was the same Zambello Salome Voigt did in Chicago, or if it was an entirely new production, which seemed unlikely. Turns out it's the Chicago production--Jokannanan with dreads, check; garish O'Hare tunnel to Terminal C lightshow, check; massively unimaginative dance of the seven veils, check--but WNO couldn't afford the sets. So the nondescript desert-flavored business in Chicago has been replaced here by a manhole cover on an empty stage surrounded by shimmery shower curtains plus maybe some arches in the back that you can't really see. That's it. I could probably move the whole thing in my car if you let me do a couple of trips. It is being billed as a "new production" replete with Zambello actually in house for a curtain call, but "reheated" would be more accurate. Ragging on WNO for lame productions when they are in dire financial straits feels mean, but it would be nice to see them embrace the situation and get creative, rather putting up distractingly half-hearted stuff like this. (BREAKING: Anne Midgette's generally enthusiastic review is here--seems WNO disputes the earlier report that it was a cost issue, and that the Lyric sets just didn't fit in the KC. Either way, the result was bleh--I mean, its Salome, the physical production just needs to get out the way, but throw us a bone.)

All the more a pity because the staging does have some striking moments. The Jokanaaanan preaching to Salome section was particularly tender and moving, especially given Sumegi's uncompromising characterization. I also loved Salome addressing the "I will now kiss your mouth Jokaaanan" speech directly to the horrified Herod/Herodias, a choice which emphasized what is surely one of the best instances of sticking it to your parents ever.

A lot more performances left--tonight a BUNCH of the upper tier was empty, which seems like a scandal of some kind. Go git a ticket.

UPDATE: See Downey's review at DCist here, including an amazing DV-as-character-on-True-Blood shot from the curtain call...

New Music Director Madness

2010-10-06T10:02:00.003-04:00

Great news for WNO: Philipe Auguin, celebrated leader of last year's Gotterdammerung anti-spectacular spectacular, is taking over as WNO music director. My praise for that show is here, and here's a positive mention in the '06 incarnation of the Wilson Lohengrin; Charles Downey's coverage here.

As Anne Midgette has noted, the company seems to be on the fence about whether it is to continue to aspire to the tier of American houses with a claim to international interest, or whether it is going to be a solid regional enterprise. Sure, some of that has to do with the amount of A-list talent they can muster, but it's a lot more about the degree to which the company seems to have a distinct mission and artistic personality. And that has a lot to do with leadership--leadership which, for the WNO, has seemed in absentia for the last few years.

I don't have the history to really judge Domingo's tenure--but as an audience member, the broad impression was more "PR goldmine + guaranteed chance to hear him" than compelling vision. Sounds like Fricke deserves a lot of credit for getting the orchestra to where they are today (which is a very good place to be) but the low-profile twilight of his tenure has also surely contributed to the general sense of drift.

So, in sum, the introduction of Auguin and the promise of a discirminating and steady hand for the company's musical fortunes is a very exciting turn indeed, and another reason to get stoked about tomorrow's Salome!

Random Cosi Watching

2010-10-05T11:38:00.008-04:00

A: man, roschmann is so cute
J: what was she in?
A: i bought this random cosi dvd
A: that is like cosi via boeing boeing
A: and she is all tiny in these 60s getups
A: like this:

J: cute!
J: I think she's excellent
A: huh
A: Ferrando just wrote an "F" on Dorabella's boob
J: heh
A: i'm thinking that's going to come back
A: Gugliemo is going to be all "lemme see those tits...the F!"
J: haha
A: the young-ish evil preppy sexy Don Alfonso is fun in this
A: the dorabella kind of looks like Patsy

Double Bill from the In Series

2010-10-02T00:29:00.009-04:00

Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and Bolcom's Casino Paradise, the two one-acts offered by the In Series Friday (perfs are done now), both operate in that fertile "American operetta" terrain. To lovers of musical theatre in all its forms, there's something so appealing about this combination--the musical is freed from the stultifying limitations of the song n' book format while the opera gets to revel in a degree of literacy and playfulness with language that it rarely achieves. It's hard to compare these works with the often leaden libretto of something like AmTrag* (New York has changed you? Otay...) or the dreadfully opaque Dr. Atomic** and wonder if the latter pieces weren't translated into English from some other language.

Tahiti's heart is a drama of marital dissolution that succeeds on an insightful libretto and Bernstein's wonderful score. There's a lot of anti-suburban snark around that emotional core that one hopes sounded fresher and less mean-spirited back in the day, but this is done cleverly and with such a nice grasp of the styles it riffs that you can't hate it. The sung dialogue scenes and the big centerpiece number are both particularly memorable. One can imagine more vocal beauty being brought to bear on the score, but the sensitive readings turned in by leads Grace Gori and Will Heim were more than sufficient to make the piece successful. Here's that big number from a BBC production:

The scrappy delights of Casino, which cribs styles and stock characters from wherever they can be found in the service of a nutty satire about a tycoon and seaside town that falls for his ill-fated Casino, were well served here in a tight, inventive staging. Special shout-outs to Scott Sedar's charismatic tycoon and the finest vocalism of the night from Jase Parker (they tycoon's son) and Brendan Sliger (as a townsperson).

*Which I generally liked a lot and wish they would bring back, despite that knock.

**Which I do not forgive.

New Rheingold

2010-09-28T03:29:00.023-04:00

To start with a caveat, it's not very fair to judge a Ring production on its Rheingold. Perhaps in a high-konzept outing you can glean some good information about whether the gimmick has some basic validity or not, but in a traditional interpretation, you don't get to audit any of the climactic moments which tell whether a staging is capable of complementing and enhancing the emotions at the Ring's heart. Because it is Rheingold. And Rheingold is kind of boring. Wagner is probably rolling in his grave at the thought that opera companies' routinely produce his "teaser nite" on its own and then make audiences wait months or years to get to any of the red meat.

Jumbotron LePage, as yet unbooed. Turn back Robert!

That in mind, I think the jury is still out on the new Ring staging on the evidence of last night's Rheingold. It's not bad or offensive by any means (the booing, at least according to my booing philosophy was totally unwarranted), but the dearth of coherent ideas should raise concerns that the staging is gambling on isolated visual ideas that don't add up to much. A selected list of my quibbles:

1. The "character" of the set machine is unclear. The set works best when it successfully mimics a setting, particularly in the Nibelheim scene, in which it is heavily disguised by a projection, and the much advertised "stairway to Nibelheim" setting. During the long sequences in front of Valhalla, however, the machine is constantly adjusting to accommodate different entrances and such, including a needlessly busy Freia-burying sequence. Is the moutain side moving around on its own or what? There needs to be SOME discipline imposed on the set elements for visual coherence, here it just seems like they felt the twisty business wasn't getting enough of a workout.

2. The set machine is ugly. While there are sequences where the "moveable blank set + amazing projections" really comes together, like the afore-mentioned Nibelheim scene, without these disguises it looks like a bunch of big pointy grey shapes. It reminds one of nothing so much as the kind of "mountains" a high school would build that didn't have the wherewithal to make papier mache mountains happen. If a major selling point of this Ring is technical wizardry and beauty, it needs to be said that long stretches are pretty dismal to look at.

3. The production makes odd choices about the stagecraft problems it wants to solve. The floating staircase descent to Nibelheim scene, for instance, while cool, is not something you're really dying to see acted out. Wagner pretty much tells you what he wants the focus to be in the incidental music by including all those cool anvil sounds. Why go to town on a boffo piece of stagecraft that can only end up competing with what's there? And then, in the following Nibelheim scene, instead of coming up with some great solution for the always-problematic Alberich transformations, they just default to having Alberich duck under the stage and trotting out a big snake tail prop, a bit of jokeiness totally out of character with the rest of the production.

So I'm going with a provisional conclusion that, while the production team has created some innovative stage elements that are both impressive and tasteful, they haven't been able to bring them together in the service of a seamless vision. Nor have they been able to sufficiently refine those elements to the point where they complement the opera rather than draw attention to themselves.

The Ring deserves boffo stagecraft, to be sure, but it also deserves a degree of consistency that allows the viewer to focus on the presentation as a whole. This Ring is erratic in doling out the inspiration, leaving some stretches over-nourished and others starved.

We'll see how Walkure goes.

Some of these people are famous.

Anyhow, onto the actual sangin'.

Bryn Terfel had some strong moments as Wotan, but I'm questioning how good of a fit this is for his voice. I certainly thought it was a good idea on paper. Everyone likes Bryn Terfel singing those nice English art songs, who wouldn't want that swell voice singing "Der augen leuchtendes paar"? But daydreaming about Wotan's five minutes of ballad makes one forget about the other 8 hours of heftier fare. Maybe the other shows will treat him better but I suspect Terfel's instrument is at the limit of how light of a baritone can legally carry the Wotan label. And it showed--Terfel frequently sounded like he was pushing the sound out. It didn't sound UNpretty, but you were constantly aware of his agitating to be heard.

This bolstered the general impression his Wotan made, which is way far out on the smarmy jerk end of the spectrum. With those long greasy locks covering his face and a sort of hunched, ambling gait that underplays his height, he cuts a decidedly swarthy figure for a deity. It will be interesting to see where he goes with it in Walkure, but the base note definitely seems to be Wotan as frustrated, desperate, none-too-bright, thug.

Stephanie Blythe was awesome, as usual, and the house went crazy for her at the curtain calls. Silver lining of sitting in Fam Circ row ZZ: the beautiful acoustics up there transport Blythe's voice with thrilling immediacy. I feel like maybe we're friends now.

If anyone dominated the proceedings, though, it was Eric Owens' masterful Alberich. This was the most memorable characterization of the evening. If the default Alberich interpretation flows from the slapstick business in the opening scene, Owens' performance flowed from the curse scene. Which is as it should be, I think. Watching a performance like Owens' leaves no doubt Alberich is the most interesting character in Rheingold--while Wotan and the rest are still dominated by simplistic motives of greed and fear, Alberich makes choices, displays real self-awareness, and serves as our window into the rich mutli-faceted characters that emerge in the later operas.

Levine performed to a rapturous reception. When was the last time an opera conductor anywhere in the world has achieved a relationship of such boundless love and loyalty from his audience? Anne Midgette wrote something a little while back wondering if we should lament the shortened tenures of today's maestros. I was skeptical, thinking that classical music organizations are simply reflecting the general trends in executive leaderhip, and how can we really gauge the extra value that tenure adds anyhow? But you can't deny what a remarkable thing Levine and the Met Orchestra are, nor that they make the most exciting big-time music in New York, hands down. The pit did not disappoint this evening, at times putting to shame the mixed-bag stage business above, at times gently cajoling "hey there friends, we're playing THE MF'ING RING CYCLE DOWN HERE just so's you don't forget." Levine and this orchestra manufacture awe like its their freakin' job.

Sigh. Back to work.

Priddy.

Verge Ensemble at the Corcoran

2010-09-19T19:16:00.005-04:00

Saw the first concert of the Verge Ensemble's season at the Corcoran this afternoon. Great playing by the ensemble members, though I found the program a mixed bag.

There was a lot to like in the first half. David Smooke creates a rich and involving sound world in his Hazmat Sextet (listen about halfway down the page here)--a kind of impromptu Rite of Spring carried out by the birds of an unidentified planet. The second offering was a video set to a sound design created by Ken Ueno (animation by Harvey Goldman), a mesmerizing sort of essay on the violent properties of bubbles (watch it here)--the unsettling sounds Ueno creates evoke violent, fundamental processes replicated across natural, mechanical, and human experiences. The last piece on the first half was Another Face, by David Felder, a dazzling turn for solo violin describing the psychological anguish of duality (excerpt here), which was played with great skill and depth by Lina Banh.

I'm afraid I need to put on my Philistine hat for a discussion of the second half pieces by Wesley Fuller and Eric Slegowski--both of which I found fairly tedious. Fuller's (phases/cycles for viola and computer) pitted the violist against an electronic track in a series of back and forth interactions, all painstakingly documented in the program notes and motivated by various weighty allusions. The description gave the piece a sort of playful cast, but there was little playfulness or wit in evidence--indeed, there seemed to be little interest in directly engaging the audience to understand the properties of the dialog as constructed. An interesting "experiment" if you will, but without a lot of interest for non-scientists.

The Slegowski piece (Resonance), a trio for wind, cello, and piano, suffered as well from higher aspirations. I have no doubt the plan announced in the notes--"an overarching form of expansion and contraction...movements connect with one another on both a micro- and macro-structural level...an organic evolution that characterizes the work in its entirety"--was executed as promised, but for practical purposes the work felt like an endless procession of anonymous little phrases, here fast, here slow, now soft, now loud, at once overwrought and meaningless.

To be taken with a grain of salt, as I have difficulties with works like this, but they always strike me as conceptual art works that bear only a passing resemblance to chamber music. I would actually be quite curious to hear these two in some kind of installation setting, but the traditional concert format seems like a terrible vehicle for works which don't offer many rewards for intensive, purposive listening.

Ballo at WNO

2010-09-12T21:57:00.013-04:00

A second-hand Ballo production with a star no one is dying to hear does not exactly a splashy season opener make. But on the plus side it: 1) wasn't Barber (which last year kept me out of the opera house til November) and 2) was really a very solid effort, if not quite exhilarating.

The production, which comes from Colorado or something, is, um, efficient. Everything's been moved back to Sweden as originally intended before censors made Verdi set it in Puritan New England. The scenes at court, which are dominated by this back wall of big whitewashed tiles and a deteriorating ceiling, kind of look like they take place in a subway station. Those basic wall and ceiling elements shift about and have a go at suggesting the other settings (witch hut, brooding moors, Renato's house) but it is never much to look at. The excellent lighting, however, has a very distinctive Nordic shadowiness, and and goes a long way towards salvaging the meager raw materials.

When Licitra's voice is firing on all cylinders, his Riccardo has the most juice of anyone onstage. Hearing barn-sized voices ringing out in the KC opera house just doesn't get old and he's got that natural pro's charisma to boot. Unfortunately, the overall package is marred by bouts of unfocused sound, some inelegant planning (Riccardo's arias are hard, yo), and pitchiness here and there.

After that, Tamara Wilson as Amelia was probably the standout of the evening. The sound is taut and attractive and very exciting throughout, with only a bit of strain on top to contrast with the ease everywhere else. She doesn't quite have the knack for milking the big numbers in a way that makes them showstoppers yet, but that can't be too far off.

Milking issues were a problem in Renato's material as well. Here's a very strongly sung portrayal by Luca Salsi, authoritative, rich, etc., but when we got to the big Act III number where you want that great Verdian moment of heartbreak amidst the thunder, they kind of plowed through it.

Elena Manistina's scene-stealing Ulrica also deserves a shout out, though putting the action back in Sweden forces one to spend that entire scene thinking about how this random native witch lady ended up in Sweden in the first place. And how she deals when it gets really cold.

Daniele Callegari handled things nicely in the pit for the most part, I think (judging orchestral prowess in middle period Verdi is not a strong suit, I'm afraid), though a number of the ensembles were dicey where they should have been thrilling and climactic. Also, just as a public service announcement, sitting in the orchestra on the extreme right under the balcony makes the orchestra sound really canned in that space.

Opening night at WNO is naturally a more sedate affair than the paparazzi-mad decadence of Met, but we were bummed at the total absence of famous-for-DC sightings, which may indicate either a disturbing lack of opera enthusiasm from the current administration or weird DC hangups about going to a gala on the dread 9/11. Come on people, if it's an elitism issue, just remind reporters that they had to perform Gotterdammerung IN FRONT OF THE CURTAIN...

Update: Kagan was there and we missed her?!?!? Arg!

Throwdown

2010-08-24T20:39:00.005-04:00

After reading Greg Sandow's complaints about that Heather Mac Donald article about classical music's golden age with the usual tongue-biting, I decided it wasn't worth the energy. But I feel compelled to link to Mac Donald's thorough rebuttal. (h/t Adaptistration who has links to all the posts)

(Just to be clear, Mac Donald is really an awful conservative hack on her usual beats of policy and cultural politics. Go to her archive at the Manhattan Institute, choose an article at random and just wait for your blood to boil. And yes, her article is clearly motivated in part by some wearisome bone-picking with postmodernism or 'identity politics' or whatever they think is destroying the country from the inside out.)

I will resist the urge to reargue her case, but will point to one illustrative passage:

As evidence of decline, Sandow weirdly offers the fact that a Spohr concerto for two violins sold 7,000 CDs in five months. Is he crazy? How many of us have ever heard of the Spohr double violin concerto, much less heard it performed? I unashamedly confess ignorance. If Spohr were apprised of these sales figures, would he say: Gee, how disappointing, only 7,000 CDs sold? Or would he say: What an unpredicted bonanza for my work, put in the hands of magnitudes more listeners than ever heard it during my lifetime, and who can now play it not just once, but over and over?

Which is to say: defining "success" for the classical music enterprise right now is pretty hard. Nonprofit organizations, donor funded organizations, the music recording industry, live performance, people with job security, and specially trained professionals have all been taking their lumps in recent years, and that puts classical music at the crossroads of a lot of negative forces. Its unclear what classical music will look like in ten years, and key elements of the landscape of the last 50 years will continue to disappear.

One the one hand, and especially from Sandow's business consultant's perspective, we might look at this enterprise in flux and blame its participants, ask why they insist on hurting themselves and tell them to get ready to swallow some bitter pills for the good of their bottom line. I get that. From this perspective, Mac Donald's article is like telling the horse and buggy makers that they should be really proud of themselves for perfecting the craft of buggy making and never mind that auto-mobile over there.

But Mac Donald is looking at this from the perspective of music lover rather than widget analyst. As someone who knows that classical music is a living institution subject to the whims, triumphs, and maladies of the society in which it exists. But who can also marvel at the fact that, after this century's endless cultural and technological upheaval more people than ever before (yes, that's in absolute numbers) are in love with performing and listening to and immersing themselves in the music of the past.

In public policy one must learn that, while projections are important, they should be taken with a grain of salt. History is rarely so mechanical as an Excel spreadsheet: small unanticipated shifts in one trend have huge effects elsewhere; the past does not perfectly predict the future; values and cultural norms have a way of reasserting themselves over unflinching budget numbers. Disturbing audience demographic shifts are clearly something to be cognizant of, and will potentially have a big role in what that "success" looks like in the future for classical music. But that doesn't imply we should summarily dismiss the evidence in front of our own eyes for classical music's enduring appeal, or rashly change the thing real people like now into something we think this projected future audience will like down the road.

That's not why we got in the game, baby.

September Dreamin'

2010-08-16T19:56:00.003-04:00

J: yo
J: how is it?
J: with the sausage
A: S'ok
A: All dumb corporate orientation today
A: It is hard to swallow after a while
J: serz
J: like sexual harassment policy and stuff
A: "Firm values"
J: sick
J: "I'll show you my firm value"
A: Haha
A: Lots of stuff about excellence in servicing your clients
A: I ended up getting an opening nite rheingold ticket
A: The rest of fall was sold out by the time I got there
J: oh!
J: nice
A: And I don't really want to wait til may or whatever
J: where are you?
A: On a shuttle to the metro
J: no I mean, where are you sitting
J: hah
A: Oh heh
J: I'm in Washington DC jackass
A: Like 3 rows from the back of FC on the extreme right
A: Pretty brutal
J: yeah we're totally in fam circ row H
A: Ah well
A: Hopefully the giant slinky or whatever will still register
J: it'll be a taste of slinky
A: Maybe its more like a big horizontal jenga
J: oh that sounds right
A: LePage: "for this ring I was inspired by party games of the early mid nineties..."
J: "but will remain always faithful to Wagner's timeless score"
J: "Uno!"
A: Ha
A: "Beaten and disgraced by his own progeny, truly the god must...draw four."
J: hah

Stuff I did week before last: Lulu/Pollini

2010-05-22T01:06:00.000-04:00

Sigh...never got around to posting on the fine week of music last week, but for posterity's sake...

I made an executive decision to miss this awesomeness in DC for Lulu at the Met (the first matinee...oh, and I guess my family was there and stuff). And while I am still jonesin' bad for a hit of that sweet sweet Brewer earmagik, I was very happy to "do the deed" and get rid of this nagging Lulu virginity I've been harboring.

It's really just such a fantastic piece of music. While I felt Wozzeck (in the last Met outing) was wonderful musically, the drama feels subsumed by the symphony at times. Lulu on the other hand is all flesh and blood, with Berg's spectacular orchestration supporting moment after moment of pure OPERA.

The cast, as noted, was universally fine. Marlis Petersen sounded great and pulled off the trick I think must be central to an effective Lulu--maintaining that air of amoral cruelty right up until the excruciating pathos demanded by that horrific final scene. JMo towered over his scenes as Schoen and JtR, and Gary Lehman's massive tenor made for a consistently exciting Alwa. Luisi's conducting frequently "made clear" the beauty of Berg's score.

Good sign o' the times moment: in the fourth act, when the "humans are godforsaken animals" theme is extended to a bunch of 19th century financiers at a party screwing each other over on some stock market BS, there were HEARTY laughs from the audience. Choice laff line was something like: "We're bankers, we know what we're doing."

***
Maurizio Pollini was on at the Kennedy Center the following Wednesday, and those who know about that dutifully gathered to participate in the communal brain pleasuring. The program was all Chopin: played, not as wistful memories, but as something approaching modern art in immediacy and formal power. Pollini teases these pieces apart like a surgeon, separating muscle from bone so that one can see how they lie together.

Sometimes his manner can seem a bit cruel with slighter tissue. The simple mechanism of a mazurka in the first half could feel harangued by his probing treatment. But Pollini's interpretations reward those willing to play a deeper listening game--the effect at its best is cumulative rather than acute, an architectural beauty only fully appreciated when the last girder is snapped into place.

Oh, but give the man a substantial subject for dissection--the Sonata No. 3 which dominated the second half of the program was nothing short of transporting. His project--finding truth through the structure, emotional power through clarity, is clearly as vital as ever.

As Downey points out this was a somewhat disjointed program, a mixed bag of Chopin replacing the apparently planned complete Preludes + all Etudes in the second half. But just in case there's any confusion, we will take what we can get.

Just for kicks, here's Pollini on opera:

He closely examines the sources of pieces he plays. Chopin, he pointed out, changed the voicing of the final chords of the Second Ballade four times.

"He was seeking perfection in every detail," Mr. Pollini said, fingering the different chords on the hotel coffee table. Was he the same way, Mr. Pollini was asked. "I'm not exactly like this, certainly," he answered. But he gave a clue about his attitude later, saying he did not go much to opera. "There are too many elements," he explained. "You are rarely satisfied. But if it succeeds, it is something absolutely phenomenal."

Sounds about right.

Figaro at WNO

2010-05-05T10:12:00.014-04:00

As others have already noted, WNO has turned out an immensely pleasing Figaro revival (I saw it Tuesday with the A-cast). This is a production focused on emphasizing the opera's vast appeal and, watching such a natural, well-conceived staging (kudos to director Harry Silverstein), it is hard to believe this magical piece of musical theatre ever produces anything else. But getting 200 year old humor right is not easy (witness every godforsaken Barber production) and finding a production that avoids wallowing in the endless hit parade while meeting the piece's musical demands is something to value indeed.

The mood was evident from Patrick Fournillier's downbeat on a madcap, rollicking reading of the overture, and he proceeded to keep things moving at a healthy clip, which was clearly catnip to the enthusiastic cast.

Now, it must be said, despite the considerable fun of Teddy Tahu Rhodes' SexyCount ^TM, it sacrifices something in the plausibility department. There's something to playing the Count as a sort of hapless Don Juan, but the discrepancy between his station and dissolute behavior is an important tension. If he just comes off like a rich 28 year-old d-bag, it is hard to be very perturbed by this. Moreover, it makes sympathy for the Countess less easy to come by--you married this jerkstore who's at least a decade younger than you, what did you expect? That said, Rhodes clearly has a great stage presence and to my ears was the most exciting vocal thing happening onstage. One of the musical thrills of the evening was hearing his warm, resonant baritone cutting through the ensembles.

His Countess, Virginia Tola, turned in a fairly sedate performance relative to her colleagues that at times verged on the nondescript. The voice has an appealing strength and urgency through the middle despite a sometimes unpleasant edge, but peters out at the top, with pitch issues on some of the big moments. But all of that equivocation was promptly forgotten for the duration of her "Dove Sono" which seemed to suck all the air from the room, as it is wont to do in the right hands.

Veronica Cangemi's Susanna was a great deal of fun--she works the Despina angles hard where others might try to keep things straighter and more sympathetic, but it really is a better character this way. Vocally there were some quibbles, including a failure to hold her own in the ensembles where Susanna's soaring lines are so key. But, as with Tola, she went out on a high point, offering a sensitive and beguiling "Deh Vieni".

If less consistent than Rhodes, Michèle Losier's Cherubino was certainly the other vocal standout of the evening, bringing all the ardent passion one wants from this role, if not the exalted levels of mezzo creaminess one finds in the finest readings. The rest of the cast was uniformly strong, particularly: Ildar Abradzakov's polished Figaro and Victoria Livengood's bawdy, hilarious Marcellina, which could be too broad depending on your taste, but never crossed the line to vulgar or distracting.

The crime is not doing Figaro too much, but doing it in a way that anyone could leave bored and unfulfilled. Figaro is like comfort food and haute cuisine all at once--a delicate balance, to be sure, but one that, successfully achieved, leaves one's heart full and one's head swimming. So let's not phone it in, OK? More of what this production has going is a good start.

Jenny

2010-05-04T17:27:00.003-04:00

A: there is this jenufa in english from the 70s on sirius right now
A: it took me like 15 minutes of listening to realize this
J: oh?
J: I still wish they called the English version "Jennifer"
A: ha~!
A: inflected je-NI-fer
A: ?
J: no, just plain old Jennifer
A: je-NIIIIIII-fer
A: the women are totally unintelligible
A: this is with Astrid Varnay as Kostelnicka
A: creepy...one forgets that Laca is totally just talking about her cheeks the entire end of the first act before he cuts her
J: “Larry"
A: ha
A: and Steve
J: "Steve"
A: Aunt Connie?
J: hah
J: that one doesn't really translate as it's basically like "Deacon"
A: right
J: "Evil Stepmom" is the same number of syllables
A: ha
A: just sung really fast
A: evilstepmom
A: Jon Vickers is a bit much as Steve
A: tho maybe we're just too used to pretty douchey Steves
A: as opposed to scary douchey Steves
A: i want to see a live Makropoulos case
A: how is that going to happen
J: come to SF with me in November
A: oh?
A: oh mattila in san francisco!
A: done
A: i am so there for that

Jack Quartet at Library of Congress

2010-05-01T00:00:00.025-04:00

The monastery of Sainte_Marie_de_La_Tourette.

A strong show by the Jack Quartet, a group of Eastman grads specializing in contemporary and new music, at the Library of Congress last night. The program was works by Jeff Myers, Matthias Pintscher, a premiere by Caleb Burhans, and a REDONCULOUS Xenakis quartet.

The opener, Jeff Myer's "Dopamine", operates in a unique space tonally, creating (through tuning I think) these not-quite-dissonant-not-quite-vanilla harmonies that dance uneasily around various solo figures. Toward the end, they converge in great masses of alternative chords and the effect is quite brilliant. You can listen to it on his myspace page here.

Pintscher's "Study IV for 'Treatise on the Veil'" is one of those pieces I find out of place in a regular concert setting. To the unprepared ear (perhaps all ears) it is almost completely without structure. An endless soundscape of demonstrations of the different noises the violin can make, both on its own and with certain augmentations added by the musicians. It could very well be an interesting sound world, but I can't help but feel it might be better explored in the freedom of a gallery space or something similar. In concert, on first hearing, one tries to interrogate it with the concentration one accords other things one hears in that space, and this approach offers pretty meager rewards with such a piece.

After the half, we heard the premiere of a gorgeous piece called "Contritus" by Caleb Burhans. So, sometimes watching new music, I wonder about whether the space exists for something like the generous feeling one finds in, say, Brahms--that kind of unabashed wisdom, feeling for the human condition, what have you. One the one hand, its an essentialized sentiment, and hard to square with a lot of the advances in the "research program", for the best in large measure, but on the other hand--its a question of how well music fulfills some basic human needs.

Burhans' new piece meditates on guilt via three sections organized around prayers of contrition. Not suffocating and terrifying guilt, but, I think, as a sort of beautiful humility before God. The piece is constructed from small figures, multiplying deliberately in pure, vital harmonies. At its climax, the swoon of the strings cuts deep and disarms, resolving in a slow fade out and reverent silence. It is a piece that wants to convey deep emotions, and does, through a deeply persuasive musical logic. I hope to hear it again.

And then there was the Xenakis, specifically the quartet "Tetras". I thought I had heard Xenakis live before, but now I'm doubting that, because I think I'd remember. Here's a little excerpt of him talking about his music out of A. Ross' Rest is Noise:

"The listener must be gripped...and--whether he likes it or not--drawn into the flight path of the sounds, without a special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss."

Done and done, buddy. It is indeed primal--but not in the animal sense: in the chemical, rock formation, lava vs. atmosphere sense. It is the performance through humans of deeply unhuman processes. Today, when we think about how to portray such elemental forces, our minds go to a recorded artifact. Imagine the possibilities of technology to create strange, unsettling sound worlds that shock and surprise us. Yet Xenakis has humans doing it, choosing how to create it, in real time, WITH VIOLINS. And bizarrely, I suspect that this is the vehicle which produces the deeper effect of alienation, of disjuncture, of "sensual shock". The act of watching other humans force these noises into the world--and I'm sorry, but the Jack Quartet players just fucking outdid themselves here--resonates more deeply and personally than a disembodied recording.

I dunno if that made any good sense but that's where I am trying to get a handle on what I heard earlier.

Anyhow. Excellent program and performance.

The Eternal "Concert Halls are Too Offputting" Debate

2010-04-28T19:34:00.011-04:00

Crossposting a long comment I wrote on Greg Sandow's blog, since, well, content is content...

Sandow's original post is here, which was followed by comments that people, especially the young, are loath to replete shrinking classical music audiences because the concert hall is too restrictive and doesn't allow for enough audience expression.

* * *
I guess I just find it hard to believe that anyone who is likely to actually be interested in classical music is being kept out of the concert hall because of these petty prohibitions. At some point you have to want to sit through 40 minutes of Beethoven, not just try to endure 40 minutes of Beethoven by distracting yourself with your phone and intermittent clapping. And if you don't want to sit through it then why should you have to? Look, if the goal here is to trick people to get some extra butts in the seats and massage hurting orchestras' revenues, that's a business decision and you gotta do what you gotta do. But that's a conversation for business development departments or something, not for people interested in broader questions about how to best serve music they love.

On who has the etiquette rules, I made careful to specify "not in a bar". I like going to bars, and I like to hear music in bars, and I think that these efforts to do chamber music in bars and bar-like venues is great. I'm hoping to finally get to a show at Le Poisson Rouge the weekend after next and am very excited about it. But it's a different etiquette because its a space with multiple purposes. And while it's great for some things, it's kind of hard to fit the CSO in most bars, not to mention major dance and theater, which have similar if not identical etiquette. I was at that CONTACT show that had Nico's pieces in it, and I agree that the Harris theater is a big hulking space far better suited to opera or dance than the kind of intimate, personal chamber music they were doing, and the atmosphere was stilted. Presenters can always do a better job of choosing an appropriate venue. But the point is there are different levels of appropriate interaction in each that would feel out of place in another.

It goes to the heart of why Sandow's comments sometimes feel problematic to me, i.e. this example Sandow uses above with a New Orleans jazz band inspiring dancing through the street. Putting aside his misleading example of the Bernstein performance, which obviously is a special case of history and moment, why should an everyday Beethoven 9th performance and an everyday New Orleans jazz band performance be experienced the same way? Why must we force those people dancing in the street to do it to Beethoven or vice versa? Can't we just let them have the real thing?

I think we have all this anecdotal evidence of younger audiences being disproportionately attracted to groups like Bang on a Can because THAT IS WHAT THEY LIKE. It doesn't make them particularly interested in hearing Schubert art songs. So let people listen to Bang on a Can at their desired volume. And if that means in 20 years, there are fewer Schubert recitals given, then that’s how its going to be. I feel pretty confident that there is enough of a critical mass of people who will still love to perform and listen to Schubert that we're not facing some kind of Schubert extinction. But when it is performed, let people listen to it the way people who love it want to listen to it. Let them enjoy the quietness and delicacy of Schubert's melodies in some kind of recital space, unamplified, and don't force them or the performers to interrupt their concentration for people getting up to go to the bathroom or a round of applause every 3 minutes.

Let's have more trust in the judgment of people who seek out the performance of music because they love to know how they want to experience it. I suspect anything else is an exercise in futility.

P.S. This agony over the clapping thing has got to stop. It’s a useful convention because the audience doesn’t know how a conductor/ensemble/etc. wants to handle a transition between movements and it’s just the nature of the beast that we let it be their prerogative to shape a performance. We give them the freedom to let a quiet movement settle or drive right into the next. Also, it ends up adding a lot of time to a concert with a bunch of movements. The only people who are “concerned” about it are those who act like this one piece of practical performance etiquette is a grave personal affront. We live in a society predicated upon venue specific etiquette, why can’t people accept that this is the etiquette for this particular interaction? I don’t get it.

* * *
A final point: I hope the part about Bang on a Can and loudness doesn't come off dismissive. Disproportionate interest among contemporary audiences for contemporary music is obviously the world we want to live in and they are creating really exciting and interesting music. Yeah, it probably means some restructuring in the Schubert industry, but Schubert will be OK. My point was just that we shouldn't force the appropriate performance practice of one onto the performance practice of the other.

Later: Dur...small correction: that commenter on Sandow's blog was referencing a comment Nico Muhly made about the NY Phil's new music series. I mixed that up with the MusicNOW series the CSO does that I saw Nico in the other year (I think I imagined it with a similarly aggressive exclamation point). Anyhow. The Harris Theater is still kind of a sucky venue for chamber music.

Christopher Maltman at the Austrian Embassy

2010-04-27T23:42:00.010-04:00

A lovely recital by Christopher Maltman last night, with Graham Johnson at the keys. Maltman's voice is extremely beautiful, to be sure, but his first priority is really conveying the dramatic meaning of these pieces, and in that he succeeds quite brilliantly. Yes, he does that baritone lieder singer thing where his loud dynamics sometimes push into this coarse hollow place that gets overused and is grating. But I think maybe that's just my issue with the medium, since everyone (except Goerne, natch) does it.

The program was a really unexpected and surprising mix of, uh, settings of Goethe by 19th century Austro-German composers. But you know, parameters like that and you've got to pick some interesting stuff. So among the numerous Schubert selections we got a fascinating setting of an excerpt from Faust in which the singer shifts between Gretchen, the evil voice tempting her, and a chorus (how awesome would a Schubert composed one-man Faust opera be??? #fantasylieder); two mythological pieces, the beautiful "Ganymede" and the epic "Prometheus"; and the delightful "Der Fischer". In the sheer Schubertian beauty department, Maltman offered up both the "Wanderers Nachtlied(er?)", an incredibly restrained, haunting "Meeres Stille", "Wilkommen und Abschied" and more.

We also got the setting of "Erlkonig" by Carl Loewe (though they couldn't resist doing the Schubert as an encore), and Loewe's delightful setting of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", taken at an appropriately dazzling speed. The regular program closed with two completely beautiful knockouts: Brahms' "Dämmerung senkte sich von oben" and Loewe's "Lynceus der Türmer, auf Fausts Sternwarte singend".

Not that Goethe needs the shout-out, but it is remarkable to think about how a single artist provided 19th century romantics with inspiration for basically every aspect of their emotional/aesthetic imagination. Bleakest despair, check. High (but genuine) Romantic Schmaltz, check. Medieval fantasies, check. Magic and faeries, check. It's all in there.

But Maltman clearly thrives on this variation, and reminded the audience that done properly, interpreting these songs requires truly rarefied storytelling skills. I'm not great at extracting the details of accompanists' contributions to recitals but I will also note that Johnson's fine playing shone particularly in the wonderful piano writing in the Wolf selections.

Update: Link to Charles Downey's take in the Post...

Mitsuko Uchida at Strathmore

2010-04-22T00:45:00.012-04:00

Had my first chance to hear Mitsuko Uchida live last night at Strathmore in a deeply affecting performance of Mozart and Schumann.

To grasp for a word, there is something so internal about this playing. One feels as though there is no gesture, no effect designed solely to appeal to the listener in the concert hall. Not that speaking to the audience is a bad thing, of course, but I think wrapping your head around her approach means understanding how everything she does is to serve an internal emotional logic in the music.

Accordingly, the opening of the Mozart A Minor Sonata was neurotic, frantic, desperate. The forward momentum, save for those blessed, haunting echoes in the main theme, nearly tripped over itself, devolving into masses of clotted chords in the denser sections. But of course this frenzy resolved into the Andante, and some of the most enlightening Mozart I have heard in a long, long time. Uchida shies away from Mozart as a deliciously balanced, finely humming machine--instead she seeks a clarity of statement almost embarrassing in its immediacy.

In her Davidbundlertanze, it was easy to muse on how this reading must get very close to how Schumann sought to truly portray the inner life of the heart and mind, each miniature singing with completely authentic ecstasy, melancholy, what have you. Though at times one grew restless for perhaps more structure to guide things overall.

And then after the break, the Fantasy in C Major. I love this piece so dearly, and to hear it played with an honesty and conviction that never left one feeling something had been compromised or left to expedience was just...really, really awesome. The third movement was especially fine--the opening sequence, earthbound, circling around itself, unable to to find any light, then suddenly and completely disarmed by a theme of raw naked longing, utterly incapable of being anything but itself. I think there may have been some note slips in the nastier sections (which were still exhilarating), but these mattered not at all to the overall impression.

Surely spent from such an evening, the sole encore was simple, purifying Bach.

P.S. Charles Downey's WaPo review here...

P.P.S. What was up with the riff-raff in the grand tier the other night? The parody level extent of inappropriate coughing/candy unwrapping/KLEENEX UNWRAPPING/whispering would have been hilarious if it hadn't been so frigging annoying. It was like date night at the Met but with adults who should know better. Let's get it together, people.

Rachmaninoff, Chaikovskii, Auerbach at Kennedy Center

2010-02-21T00:47:00.007-05:00

Denis Matsuev has some serious ideas about Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. He sees it not as the Second Symphony with piano accompaniment, but rather as a Prelude of massive size with orchestral connective tissue. He sees it as a work of sometimes unbearable momentum, and at other times of heart rending stillness. And he has the technique to back up these ideas--a hugely satisfying use-your-paw-to-press-the-note-down-as-far-as-it-goes sound that cuts through the orchestra like there's a whole "piano" section, exceeded only by a beguiling sensitivity that unabashedly steals your heart.

In short, after taking a lot of heat for schmaltzing up the Concertgebouw's program on Monday, I think its safe to say that Rachmaninoff has redeemed himself in DC's eyes.

The NSO, under the direction of James Gaffigan (any relation to this guy?) played with delicacy and distinction in many moments. But at other times, they seemed to turn Matsuev's crisp, driving sets into gluey, halting picks (volleyball metaphor FTW!). Not that its easy to maintain momentum over those expansive themes, but one wonders at what could be achieved with an orchestra matching the brilliant agility Matsuev was serving up.

Matsuev responded to ecstatic applause with this showpiece, providing me with cheesy encore #2 for the week. I mean, it's his right and all, but after being so blown away by his Rachmaninoff I was really jonesing for some more information about what he could do with, you know, teh serious music.

The opener was a fascinating piece called "Requiem for Icarus" by Lera Auerbach. There were passages that came off a bit clumsily in the NSO's hands, but the overall impression was searing and direct, particularly the chilling final section.

After the half was Chaikovskii (love that bad-ass spelling) #4. Quibbles in the first half be damned, this was an exquisitely executed performance from the NSO. The allegro was played with glorious, tense precision, giving way to a second movement of disarming simplicity of expression. I don't know what to say about that plucked business in the scherzo, but the finale was an all cylinder tour de force. Gaffigan has a keen sense of phrasing that feels at once driving and deeply intuitive.

Concertgebouw!

2010-02-15T23:08:00.012-05:00

Well, much to my chagrin, I didn't get to see the Concertgebouw on my trip to Amsterdam a few months ago, but was able to save some face tonight seeing them at the KC Concert Hall, courtesy of WPAS.

The first half was the Sibelius violin concerto with violinist Janine Jansen, and I liked it fine. That said, it was a bit domesticated. I'm listening to the Heifetz/CSO record I have of it now, and there's something sort of desperate and sad that was missing in Maestro Jansson's very beautiful and thoughtful reading. For her part, Jansen brought an exciting hard-edged tone and brilliant skill to the solo. But mostly I think I just wanted more Concertgebouw than the concerto could serve up.

The Rachmaninov Second Symphony after the break did not disappoint. So, maybe Rach Symphony II is not the most cerebral piece. Maybe, like 'Party in the USA', one could accuse it of basically being "all chorus." But as a tour calling card that makes me want to abandon my job and apartment and just go live in the sound the string section makes? Yeah, its pretty freaking good for that purpose. I mean, I'm not a huge Second Symphony connoisseur, but I just can't imagine how one plays the piece better than this. The lyric money lines, which, as mentioned, come like ever 20 bars, were time and again just pure plush brainfreeze gorgeousness.

But not cheap, you know? The Concertgebouw is able to achieve that thing it seems great orchestra string sections are able to with remarkable consistency: that sense that the lines are really 'speaking' as when played by great soloists. Mind you, I've never played in an orchestra, so the whole thing is kind of voodoo magic to me, but I know when an orchestra gets beyond the earthbound "here is the melody we are playing it nice" level and it is a magical, exhilarating sensation. Is it an absolute fidelity to phrasing across players thing? In any event, the Rachmaninov really spoke this evening, in all of its big wet earnest glory.

The encore was cheesy (if impressive). Enough of cheesy orchestra encores. Why can't they roll like pianists and come up with something in the familiar but classy/unexpected favorites vein?

And now, the Naxos bobsled team...

2010-02-13T14:30:00.004-05:00

A: UM
J: yes....?
A: have you ever heard of how in seoul in 2004 when they lit the torch they lit all these doves on fire??
J: no!
A: uh
A: start this video at like 4:30
A: er
A: 4:20
A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgAXCAWQUic
J: ok waiting for it to load
J: whoa
J: I mean, they had to know that was going to happen
A: koreans are hardcore
A: "yes, pigeons will die...what of it!!!!"
J: do you feel like watching an intense Waltraud Liebestod in extreme close-up?
A: sure i do
J: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvRlZndM70Q
A: lots of people dead in that tristan
A: ah
A: its the guy who did that salome i saw in amsterdam
J: oh...
J: well the rest is just Waltraud in extreme close up
A: ha
A: oh man
A: she kicks so much ass
A: that is the best
J: she really gets into it
A: i want to see her in a production of "Sunset Boulevard"
J: totally!
J: that lead up to and the actual moment of that last huge loud note....amazing
A: and then that funny kind of grimace on the very last note
J: yeah....oh, that note.
A: kind of a dick move on wagner's part
J: Stemme gets it in the one I found online
A: rarg
A: i think i bought tix for somethign else the night of the 20th
A: i may need to bail on it to see her tho
A: are you excited for olympics
J: oh man
J: yes
J: though my figure skating crush did not make the team
A: who is that?
J: http://ryan-bradley.com/photos_podiums.html
A: oh cute
A: dommage
J: dude listen to how perfect this is
J: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo_9PAnuFmA
J: just from this past fall
A: i want to get into ski + shoot this time
J: oh good one
A: wow
A: that is great
A: she is the real deal yo
J: I mean
J: 2011 we're flying to SF for a full cycle
J: you know she's doing all the Brunnhildes
A: got to be
A: i will totally sit through more Crackerjack Ring for that goodness
J: oh totally
J: I will say though....I wouldn't stress yourself about coming up for the Ariadne
J: she's SO wonderful
J: but
J: the Bacchus BLOWS
J: I went back last night
A: ew
J: and so it ends with a real thud
A: that sux
J: and I think Kathleen Kim is not all that
J: she's fine
J: but def not wonderful
A: that dark flavor in stemme's voice is so killer
A: like, yes, I'll take a little coffee with my cream, thanks
J: I want to hear her whole Isolde so bad

Clothes War-Horses

2010-02-07T12:06:00.005-05:00

Rupert Christiansen comments on a column Opera Chic has written about conductors' wardrobes:

Offstage, it doesn’t matter what a performer wears; onstage, however, it regrettably does. We are meant to go to a concert to listen rather than look, and ideally how musicians are clothed should have no bearing on the sound they make. But the brute fact is that understated elegance inspires confidence in the performer, while ugly, ill-fitting and garish outfits (still the norm in our concert halls) make one sub-consciously doubt the wearer’s competence. And it matters too in terms of popular preconception and prejudice: a shiny, baggy suit or a Primark evening dress promotes the notion among the trend-conscious young that ‘classical music’ is terribly cheesy and uncool.

Really? I mean, it's all well and good to gossip about classical performers' wardrobes--the clothing of rich and classy people is interesting as always. But people not attending classical music because of the sometimes-dumpy dresses? First, anyone who is lukewarm on the whole concept of classical music is probably not paying for seats anywhere near close enough to get a good look at the outfits. Renaay just looks like a big sequin from the cheap seats at Carnegie Hall no matter what she has on. Second, if the performer and the music isn't doing anything for you in the first place, its hard to imagine you'd want to come back for the great outfits. I'm afraid this is another one of those variables that people can have fun thinking and talking about but has no effect whatsoever on the attendance side of the equation.

That said, while the impact of outfits is questionable, there's clearly a lot going on with appearance where performers' body types are concerned. Whether this is all in programmers'/artistic directors' heads, or whether people are now attending the Met in droves because of all the thin people plastered on bus steps (or is it just increased visibility overall?) is an open question, and has clearly real effects on who we end up seeing on stage.

BTW

2010-02-05T00:32:00.005-05:00

So, I did see Radu Lupu at Strathmore last week, but it was one of those concerts that is kind of hard to write about because I didn't feel I was really in the proper space to appreciate it. But you know, posterity and all that, so I shall say a few words.

Obviously, Radu Lupu kicks ass. There is that beloved Brahms CD of course, and then I saw his Debussy which was ridiculous. This program was Janacek's In the Mists plus the Appassionata, plus Schubert (the Sonata in A Major) after the half. It was great to hear the Janacek (yay!) live--I seriously don't get why his piano works and those of Poulenc are not programmed more often. But it was nice here.

I found the Appassionata problematic. I would never characterize Lupu's approach as "precious"--"genius of coloring" is more appropriate--but he seems to have sacrificed some of the work's momentum for the sake of pursuing those gorgeous colors. The resulting experience, while fascinating in places, was less than satisfying. But maybe it was just me.

The Schubert suffered a bit from the same syndrome but was much more successful, particularly his spectral reading of the slow movement. And then there was the encore--one of those famous Intermezzi--and all the magic came flooding back. Brahms' chords in Lupu's hands are not assemblages of notes, but single, bottomless sounds. As Alex Ross says in that review--it's as though Lupu's piano is a different instrument entirely...

Capuçon-Angelich Trio at the French Embassy

2010-02-03T00:05:00.004-05:00

You know how sometimes you go to chamber music and you wonder if you've forgotten how to enjoy it? Well, the snowy Capuçon-Angelich Trio show at the French Embassy tonight was not one of those occasions.

The program was Haydn (the "Hungarian" trio) and Shostakovich (the trio No. 2 in E Minor) before the half and Brahms (the trio in C Major of 1882) to close. I was searching for a word to describe this delightful, disarming Haydn, and the best I could come up with was "plainspoken"--which sounds kind of lame, yes, but there was something so forthright, so honest about the declamation of the piece, if you will, and particularly the violin of Renaud Capuçon. Haydn is so often reduced to the sensitive, but precious--this felt like Haydn had something to say.

The Shostakovich was the highlight of the evening, I think. What to say about this chilling, jaw-dropping, ecstatic performance? This trio understands what it is to imbue a piece with character. That is, they can traverse a fairly wide range of idiosyncratic perspectives without appearing gimmicky. And it is done with so much confidence, so much joy at finding out what makes the music tick and playing to that idea with fearless yet precise abandon, that it does not feel inconsistent. The blistering, desperate Allegro non troppo evoked a sort of dueling banjos suicide pact played by drunken peasants. The Largo was conceptual art--strange and terrifying harmonies floating in space. The finale--Death delighting in a perverse, funky little tune he has invented and getting entirely carried away with it.

As for the Brahms, well, maybe I am too picky about Brahms. The performance here had many very beautiful things and moments of real introspection, and it was miles better than the last Brahms chamber music I heard, the quintet which closed the otherwise stellar Marlboro concert last fall. But for my ear they still fell back too easily on those scourges of Brahms performance: over-emoting and the pervasive mezzo forte. I think to play really successful, interesting Brahms, one must have to go into it playing with restraint, and then double it. There is so much passion, so much heave and sigh in the music already, that anything more strikes a false note. Still very enjoyable and played with commitment, but not as much to savor as in the readings of the Haydn and Shostakovich.

Hope to see more of them in the future...

Update: A positive assessment from Charles Downey is up here...

#sotu watch party w/ @lillaspastia

2010-01-27T23:15:00.008-05:00

A: dude
A: what is wrong with John Edwards
J: what happened??
J: I missed it
A: just the sex tape thing from the other day
J: did the sex tape come out?
A: no
J: well we knew he was spreading his change juice all over the place
J: I missed the SOTU for Carmen
J: I think it's a good thing. It would have given me a heart attack
A: get a close up when i change on your tits, rielle
J: haha
A: i missed it for a piano recital
A: sounds like it went ok
A: but also sort of glad i didn't watch
A: how wuz carmen?
J: In a new book, a former aide claims that Edwards asked him to fake a paternity test and steal one of the baby's diapers to perform a DNA test on its poop.
J: I mean
J: WHAT is going on with him
J: Carmen was really fun
A: like, he is CRAZY
J: it was Jovanovich' debut
A: that is a CRAZY person that was running for pres
J: I know! and I voted for him once!
A: how is it that he was banging this chick and stealing poo and no one ever leaked it?
A: that is disturbing
A: i read something one time by some journalist about how they were creeped out by edwards
A: that like, every candidate they ever interviewed had an "off" switch where they would stop being in their candidate character and just be a normal person with you
A: but like, they had never seen Edwards in off mode
J: weird
J: so this Carmen is so much less awful than the old one
A: oh swell
J: and Borodina was out and it was this got chick
J: hot
A: that old one was death
A: garanca?
J: and Jovan Muskovich is way hot and was emoting all over the place. and she was acting like a TOTAL SLUT
J: it was awesome
A: haha excellent
J: no, Garanca's run is over and tonight was supposed to be the first night of Borodina
J: but she was out and it was some gal named Viktoria Vizin
J: http://www.viktoriavizin.com/High_Resolution_Photos.html#8
J: and her singing was good. Her voice was a little small but she basically brought it and just REALLY ACTED LIKE A WHORE
J: and he was all on top of her and feeling up her dress all the way up to her ass and verging into crotch
J: and all the Russians who came to see Borodina were like "ach!" and turning their heads
A: haha
A: damn
J: and they put that nice gay Kwiecien in this tight matador outfit but it was clear he maybe had more of a crush on Jovanovich than on Carmen
J: and it was also the met debut of this really young french composer
J: and he took all the dances really fast and had floppy hair and was bouncing up and down
A: that's a good subtext for carmen
J: totally
A: escamillo really steals her just to make don jose jealous
J: but he loved his pretty glittery matador outfit
J: yeah there's total opportunity during the knife fight music for erotic tension
J: that would be such a great deconstructionist Carmen!!!
A: oh man
A: c'mon europe
J: and then Don Jose kills her to be with Escamillo
A: yeah
A: and then then he runs in and they kind of make out before the bullfighting police or whatever take him away
A: and scene
J: so good
A: with like, extreme red spotlight center stage
J: and all the outfits could be leathery
and Michaela should DEF be like a fat fag hag
A: ha totally
J: and he sort of goes with Carmen cause she's so fierce
A: "hey don jose...does this dress make me look fat? Don jose I really need yoru opinion here"
J: haha
A: "Mais oui, tu est une vache"
J: Michaela is all trying to dance with a rose in her mouth but she's like Camryn Manheim fat
J: haha
A: "Vache totale"
A: where is that opera suggestion box when you need it
A: i think i heard an interview with that conductor
A: it was cute
J: he was tres adorable

WNO Announces

2010-01-12T23:33:00.005-05:00

A: um, did you see that SF Opera is importing the Washignton ring wholesale?
J: it was always a co-production
J: they partially financed it
A: oh
A: i missed that
A: i thought maybe they saw it first and then decided to get in on it
A: i guess they are going to do the gotterdammerung now
A: maybe they can send it back to DC after
J: yeah what is the fucking deal
J: is DC just not going to do the cycle?
A: i mean
A: none of it is on the sched for next year
A: i guess maybe they missed their window
A: nice that that dumb production will dominate ring performances in two cities for god knows how long
A: i mean, i was more ok with the walkure and siegfried, but I don't want to like see them again or anything
A: people should start referring to it as "The Discount Ring"
J: it really is
J: Zales' Ring
J: Der Ring des Claire's Accessories
J: wait is DCs season up already for next year?
A: yeah
J: !
A: it is little
A: do you see the randoms in that Voigt Salome?
J: oh that's not a bad seasons though
A: yeah
A: i would see all of that except the DQ
A: er
A: DP
J: Pat racette Iphigenie is interesting
A: yeah totally
A: i like that
A: and doesn't look like the met/seattle or the lyric/danish productions
A: what are the chances one sees 3 different iphegenie productions in 3 years
A: Uh, did you also see "Dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt, the definitive Salome of her generation..."
J: heh
J: um
J: some bitches may beg to differ

Seasonal Interlude

2009-12-12T01:49:00.001-05:00

The Shepherd's Farewell, Berlioz, from "L'Enfance du Christ"

Smyooth Myusic

2009-12-12T01:35:00.003-05:00

A: how was elektra, yo???
J: oh it was good
J: Bullock was good but not hottt
J: Voigt kinda summoned fat voigt!
J: which is a good thing
A: oh word??
J: she sounded way way better
A: nice
J: I thought G--- was going to die
A: "I call on thee, spirit of fat voigt, rise now..."
J: hah
A: die how?
J: just with general elektra excitement
A: kewl
A: his review is great
J: it's really fun
A: hmmm
A: how wuz felicity palmer
J: she's really great
A: i think i have to do the 22nd or the 29th
J: if you do the 29th I'll go with you
J: I fly to chicago in the morn for Kitty Kabs
A: indeed!
A: that is exciting
A: its really an amazing role for her
A: more complex than jenufa is in a way
J: yeah I'm way excited
A: where are you sitting
J: in the $136 orch seats. row HH.
J: basically the Carmelites seats
A: right
A: worth it

As You Don't Like It

2009-12-12T01:02:00.003-05:00

So, I saw some things in the past week, starting with From the House of the Dead and, um, Hair, in New York last Saturday, and concluding with As You Like It at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here on Wednesday. While the latter two are somewhat off topic, I shall start with them first for reasons of relevance (lord knows when FTHOTD is coming back) and ease of review writing.

In the case of "As You Like It", this is owing to the incredible and vast suckage of this production. Now, I want to be clear that this really doesn't reflect on anyone in the truly excellent cast, which was filled with a great assortment of committed and skilled actors. No, this is exclusively a case of directorial misconduct in pursuit of the cheap laff.

The opening scene of this "As You Like It" involves a sort of faux old movie gimmick, which was somewhat inexplicable, but quickly forgotten. The first 40-50 minutes of the production is cast in a Puritan milieu, which is a perfectly good, neutral historical period for Shakespeare. The production is spare, but handsome, and we are clearly dealing with a set of actors committed to the task of inhabiting these mercurial characters and delivering Shakespeare's words with insight and passion.

And then, the characters flee to the forest to escape their various fates, and the whole thing becomes an opportunity for the Shakespeare Theatre Company to demonstrate how much worthless bang they can give you for your buck. Under the rubric of "escape to the forest" being synonymous with an "escape to the uncharted land of historic America", this production casts each successive set of scenes in a different period of American history. So for 15 minutes they are in the Civil War era South and they are all doing Gone with the Wind accents. Then they are all cowboys. Then they are on a steamboat. Then they are all silent movie actors. Any of the actual "drama" constructed during the first forty minutes is flushed right down the toilet in the service of this absurd gimmick that allows them to put the characters in different silly costumes and make them speak in different silly voices that elicits kneejerk laughter from the audience. This isn't a play. This is dress-up.

In the past year or so that I've been going to Shakespeare Theatre Company's productions, I have often been highly impressed. Their Twelfth Night, Dog in a Manger, and Ion last season were inventive, playful, and honest interpretations of classics that earned whatever gimmicks they indulged in. But this production, and the wretched production of "The Alchemist" I suffered through earlier this fall were both pure chicanery. Shakespeare Theatre Company, please stop this madness and start acting like you trust your audience to appreciate the classics on their own terms and not as vehicles for cheap and vulgar sitcom caricatures. Productions like this are an embarrassment.

Phew. OK. Hair and FTHOTD thoughts coming soon.

Seasonal Interlude

2009-12-08T00:31:00.001-05:00

The Lamb, John Tavener, based on a poem by William Blake

Strauss in Amsterdam

2009-12-04T01:14:00.012-05:00

So, about that Dutch Salome...Parterre has a clip, natch.

First things first: Opera of the Netherlands is housed in the Het Muziektheatre, a modern hall at the southern end of the city's old town. I got a very nice seat on the fringe of the orchestra for less than the price of the Met balcony, tho I think it might have been partial view for the supertitles (surprisingly only in Dutch, since it seems pretty clear that language has about 50 years tops before everyone gives up the ghost and starts speaking English.) Audience (for a Sunday matinee) was probably a notch more hip than your usual Met or Lyric audience, like the usual oldsters plus the monied end of the BAM crowd.

Anyhow. The Salome on view is a fascinating production by Peter Konwitschny, a high practitioner of the sorts of things we apparently will NEVER be able to handle here. Here's a bit of an interview with him.

In Konwitschny's concept, Jochanaan is never down a cistern, but rather a guest at Herod's dinner party of debauched gangsters--something like the last supper of the Patriarchy. While he is clearly conflicted, he is really no more than another face of the male power structure which keeps the other women in the play--Salome, Herodias, and the Page--in a constant state of fear/degradation. Konwitschny makes explicit a dynamic which Strauss and his libretto strongly suggest--it is after all, at base, a tragedy about Salome's innocence, regardless of how much depravity one finds in her, and we can't help but sympathize with her against Jochanaan. Here, we are led to understand his cruelty as part of the same sick universe in which female sexuality is both a commodity to be abused as well as a dangerous threat to the status quo.

As Konwitschny begins to engage in deeper subversions of the superficial action-- Herod executes Narraboth, and Jochanaan uses his death as a chance to appeal, in vain, to the better nature of the other guests--he introduces a distinction between the play as it is being performed, and a sort of transgressive space outside the play which he uses to posit an 'alternate' conclusion.

After a frenzied dance of the Seven Veils which includes the entire cast trying desperately to escape the play and then (I think) slaughtering each other, Salome receives Jochanaan's head as usual--but then hands it over to him so he can think about what he's done. The dining room set begins to recede from the proscenium and he is left alone with Salome on an empty stage, confused and lost. Through this violent reversal, Salome has saved him, wresting him from a his sick institutions, and facing him as an equal. Removed from the brutal machinery of the play, they acknowledge their love for each other, and run off together. And in a way, isn't that how it really ends? With ecstasy and rebirth and the overwhelming joy of finally understanding?

Now, mind you, the subtext was flying pretty fast, and I was working from memory of the libretto, so this really just scratches the surface of the richness of Konwisthny's conception.

At the same time, one must point out the inherent failings in such an enterprise. While I really was quite intrigued and sort of touched by the ending, there was nary a shred of that overwhelming emotional experience that non-bizarro universe Salome is designed to produce. There was also a lot of gratuitous regie bullshit--Narraboth's corpse getting sodomized by everyone onstage, Salome helping Herod do heroin, an extra gory Jochanaan head with bonus shoulder still attached (actually, I kind of liked that), etc.--which came off as the usual finger to the audience that tends to sour one on an otherwise very interesting and nuanced project. (To their credit, a few courageous Dutch patrons did send that gang-rape a little boo.)

Annalena Persson was a so-so Salome. Vocally capable enough but not much going on in the sumptuousness department. I kind of think she may be a pretty great actress, though it is hard to tell, when you're ready to judge a SALOME and instead you get a KONZEPT. She, uh, was really convincing when she reversed that male gaze, I guess? That said, girl was game for ANYTHING, so credit is due there.

Primary vocal honors went to Albert Dohmen's rich, magnificent Jochanaan. None of that shouty business that plagues so many of them, but instead a warm commanding tone that brought out many of beauties of the part that you know are in there but don't necessarily get a chance to appreciate in performance. Dohmen also really got the characterization Konwitschny seemed to be going for here, bringing many human touches to Jochanaan's initial weary resignation, tortured questioning, and final revelation--i.e., that him and Salome should totally get married and have babies.

Additional shout-outs to another great Narraboth by Marcel Reijans (of all the challenges of the opera world in 2009, not enough good Narraboths sure isn't one of them, is it), and a Herodias (Doris Soffel) who made more effort than most to sing through the shrieking, to nice effect.

Janáček in Chicago

2009-11-30T22:40:00.003-05:00

Hey y'all. Back from Chicago, where I stopped home for Thanksgiving after five days in Amsterdam for a friend's birthday. More on the regietastic Salome I saw at the Nederlandse Opera later--for now, some thoughts on Lyric's current production of Káťa Kabanová, which I saw Saturday...

Káťa Kabanová has a lot in common with the more popular Jenůfa--nice but flawed girl vs. provincial assholes in two-bit town--though it is decidedly the less 'feel-good' of the two. That said, the heroines are really quite different. Where Jenůfa is simple and naive, a creature of the village who, through hardship, reveals great moral depths within herself, Káťa is doomed to never reconcile herself to the hypocrisy and deceit of the village. She is cursed with an artistic soul in a universe devoid of true and pure sentiment, and it destroys her.

The fit of Karita Mattila's voice to the music of these two characters is surely one of the more exquisite things one can experience in an opera house right now. In Káťa's long monologue in the first act, telling of the cherished internal life being crushed under the heel of her married life, Mattila creates moments of such jaw dropping beauty and intensity you almost can't believe your ears. Mattila's Káťa is a woman driven to frenzy by a problem she can't figure out--how she can live, and be expected to live, in the world without any real feeling. Mattila draws you deep into Káťa's terrible dilemma, her voice pealing out of the nervous mass of Janáček's score to reflect the sunlight for a moment before it is consumed again. Chicago people: four shows left. No excuses.

Mattila was well paired with the very exciting Brandon Jovanovich as Boris. I've never seen him before, but looked up him up after Will mentioned him in comments the other week, and was pleased to hear him fulfill all the promises of those youtube videos. Warm and passionate voice and way loud. Can't wait for more of him.

Supporting cast is uniformly strong--can't get quite as excited about the Kabanicha as the Kostelnicka, but Judith Forst was shrill and suffocating and all that good stuff. Special props to the rich-voiced Tichon of Jason Collins.

Great work in the pit from the Lyric orchestra and conductor Markus Stenz--if Jenůfa is more lyrical, the KK score evokes a more varied landscape for its play, at times sensuous, weary, and cruel, and packed with fascinating detail. The production, an early 90s show from the Met, is basically on target. The sorta faux hinted perspective thing with little buildings at the back of a severely raked stage looks like crap from the balcony, but it provides the kind of simple, neutral platform on which Janáček seems to work best, so fine.

Hey! (hey) You! (you) Get into my schiff...

2009-11-15T21:37:00.000-05:00

Well, I was really hoping to get back to the WNO Ariadne for the last perf on Friday, but hateful office things intervened, and I didna make it. But in the interest of completeness, my thoughts on the one I did attend, a few weeks back:

So, as reported elsewhere, this production had its flaws, but I was really in love with both cast and production by the end of the evening. Maybe I'm starving for Strauss, or maybe I just wanted WNO to have a hit (after the allegedly lame Falstaff and lame-fest Barbiere), but blemishes and all I had a much better time than the last time I saw Ariadne.

For Ariadne to work as a play, it seems, it really needs to be legitimately funny. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy a production that gives short shrift to the humor--its short enough and the music is real purdy after all. But the true dramatic effect doesn't click unless, like the Mozart comedies, the deep abiding humanity of the piece flows directly from the atmosphere created by the farce--it has to feel like a truth revealing itself amidst the simpler pleasures of life. This WNO production (originally from Seattle) does a tremendous job of not taking itself too seriously, and letting those simpler pleasures do their part.

This was partially the work of the production which, while not terribly handsome (e.g. Kristine Jepson is rewarded for her wonderful Komponist with a hideous ill-fitting suit and Stuart Smalley wig) has great direction in the comedy elements and some effective conceits (e.g. the audience on stage during the Opera).

Irene Theorin (seen as Brunnhilde in Walkure at the Met and Siegfried at WNO last year, and in the "Gotterdammerung without the Rhine" here the past two weeks) was a compelling Ariadne--the woman has a ginormous voice, especially in the relatively puny Kennedy Center Opera House. Yes, the volume was fairly subdued well into Act II as some reviews have pointed out, only finally breaking out on the soaring patches of "Es Gibt ein Reich", but it seemed like a clear choice to me, and an effective one at that. Maybe she's not an ideal Ariadne who can bring the cream at all times, but she was committed and funny and all the beauties of the role were in place.

As noted above, Kristine Jepson was a marvelous Komponist, and certainly the best cast in the show, as this is one of her specialties. Her sound is rich and passionate and the reading very intelligent, really everything you could want in the role. Susan Graham: you're great, and I'mma let you finish your career, but you're going to need to relinquish this at the Met at some point. And when you do, Jepson is going to be all over that shiz.

Lyubov Petrova turned in a way enjoyable Zerbinetta. So the voice doesn't really approach the Battle/Dessay standard for prettiness in the part. It DOES sound effortless and exciting, and, as I mentioned after the lackluster Covent Garden Zerbinetta of Gillian Keith, if "Grossmachtige..." doesn't sound effortless then what's the freaking point? Petrova worked it to within an inch of its life, in a good way.

As appears to be the misfortune of the run, unemployed Siegfried #1, Par Lindskog, bailed on the show. Revealing once again WNO's dicey understudy program (everyone remember pantomime Siegfried?) the replacement Bacchus, Corey Evan Rotz, was bumped up from Scaramuccio. This was clearly a bit of a stretch, but Rotz kept the show going, made some nice sounds if within a limited range, and, thankfully, chose his battles carefully in the last 10 minutes. And really, 10 minutes of dicey Bacchus was not nearly enough to torpedo such a winning production.

WNO? More like this, please.

Musicians from Marlboro at the Freer Gallery

2009-11-14T02:03:00.002-05:00

Musicians from the Marlboro festival (to which we make plans to go every summer after longingly looking at their website in a cold winter month and then never make good on it...check out their website, it is some serious summer classical music festival porn, no?) offered a program Thursday at the Freer Gallery. The first half was a Mozart flute quartet plus three 20th century works. The second half was Brahms' piano quartet in C minor.

The Mozart that opened the program was a bit of a revelation for one who A) is used to being underwhelmed by Mozart chamber music in concert and B) hates the flute. This was not your standard pretty-melodies-layered-over-the-metronome-beat Mozart playing. There was a great sense of tempo, far more malleable and alive than one expects in this music. Moreover, there was something in the sound that felt entirely "classical"--while unmistakably more evolved than say, Telemann, there wasn't a hint of overweening romantic excess for the sake of excess. All in all, a really unique and committed reading.

The following trio of 20th century works was the heart of the evening. The first, "Mirrors" by Kaija Saariaho, was the furthest afield, featuring the decidedly creepy effect of flautist Joshua Smith whispering phrases in French over the half wuffled half played flute line. But there's no denying the foggy, tortured combination of flute and cello textures was compelling. The second piece, by Toru Takemitsu, most evoked the Debussy reference Smith made in his introduction to the three pieces, pairing a sensuous, damaged viola solo over neat jazzy chords in the piano.

And then to close the circle, violinist Soovin Kim played the Louange de l'Immortalite de Jesus from Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, which was, to use a word, transcendent. I don't really know how violins work, but Soovin was able to coax this remarkable, immaculately pure sound from his instrument, extremely fine and with virtually no vibrato. That sound, modified only ever so slightly to be more expressive as the violin's line develops further, was the perfect vehicle for the pure white light of Messaien's work. The audience was ecstatic.

I was less enamored of the Brahms which made up the second half. Brahms seems to me most alive when played as great prose--this was more like abstract art, or perhaps an action movie. They seemed desperate to find something viscerally thrilling in the quartet rather than letting it speak for itself. The dynamics were too extreme, and the momentum of the piece nearly ground to a halt between sections, forfeiting the great structural forces which make Brahms so rewarding. Mind you, the violent dynamics weren't savage--everything sounded very wonderful, it just failed to add up to much of a coherent whole. The exception was the gentle Andante, which would tolerate none of the agenda imposed on the other movements and was quite exquisite.

Totenhaus!

2009-11-13T02:08:00.002-05:00

A: was house of the dead tonight?
J: yes!
J: it was great
A: neat
A: i don't know it at all
J: it's really neat
A: kewl
A: um...what is the deal with this opera "The Excursions of Mr. Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century"
A: "Some critics have also pointed out that the moon excursion has a basic flaw in the plot: there is no real “hero” to balance out Brouček, who is the “villain” on the moon."
J: HAH!
A: one can see how that might be problematic
J: Yeah I feel like
J: Janacek wrote Jenufa and Kata Kabanova
J: which are awesome
J: and From the House of the Dead, which is harder to love musically but very very cool and exciting
J: and then like really fucking random shit
J: like OSUD
J: and SARKA
J: and the Manipulative Little Bitch
A: of course, the Loco Tiny Ho
J: hah
A: you've listened to Sarka right?
J: yeah it's nice
J: but too short to perform maybe
A: maybe they could double bill it with Cavallierra Rusticana sometimes
A: call it Cav-Sark
A: for short
J: such a good idea
A: but maybe announce it as a last minute change
J: or a double bill of OSUD and Bluebeard's Castle
J: oh I forgot about Vec Makropulous
A: right
J: that can be done on its own
J: and Bonkers Wee Slut is long enough to do on its own, but all the characters are fucking animals
A: is that opera for children or what?
J: not specifically
A: nice comments about it on parterre

A: tho i suppose it will still be poorly attended
A: if mattilla in jenufa couldn't fill seats...
A: i like how they used to do salome as a double bill
J: that would make for a long night
A: maybe it was like salome and then gianni schicchi
J: hah totally
J: Sal-Pag
J: the production nicely homoeroticizes some shit
A: indeed
J: the older dude gets freed
J: and the younger dude has been knifed and keep singing "you're my father"
J: but I think they should translate it to be "you're my daddy"
A: hehe
A: you know what's his name in the bcast booth is going to be making that joke by the end of the run
J: hah Will Berger
J: totally
J: people really cheered for that production
J: which was a nice change
J: even though there's like weird mimed rapes and such
J: with like....guys in drag "putting on a play"
A: bondy's all "what's a guy gotta do?"
A: you boo scarpia w/ hookers and you cheer this?
J: hah
A: tho i imagine there is nyet a lot of intersection between those crowds
J: yeah, that's probably true
A: PS, this is a neat if nutty looking lohengrin

A: by the same guy who did that parsifal i sent a while back
A: with KFV done up to look exactly like old-skool lohengrins
J: Röschmann as Elsa!!!!
A: yeah dude
A: that sounds clutch
J: totally fetch
J: I want that so bad
A: "At the beginning of the third scene of Act 3 the people's consciousness is awaking. The military fanfares sounds from all sides causing anxiety and verzweiflung."
J: there's a good pill for acute bouts of Verzweiflung.

Fine Arts Quartet at NAS

2009-11-09T17:25:00.014-05:00

In general, I don't have a ton of interesting things to say about string quartet performances, but feel I should at least give a shout out to the very nice program of Haydn, Bruckner, and Schumann given by the Fine Arts Quartet at the National Academy of Sciences yesterday afternoon.

First things first--have you even been to this auditorium (left)?? I don't have the best ear for acoustics--I notice when they are bad, but above a certain level in a modern concert space I can't really distinguish the good from the great. That said, the acoustics in this auditorium in the main NAS building off the mall are freaking phenomenal. There's a detailed explanation of the technique used here. We were about 100 feet back from the stage, and the sound of the string instruments was absurdly present and warm, as though you were sitting next to the instrument, and yet it was coming from all around you. Really, the acoustics were entertainment enough--it's honestly the best room I've ever been in for chamber music. Unfortunately, looks like they only do three public shows a year.

Anyhow, I won't dwell on the program too much. The interesting Brucker quartet on the program, only discovered in 1949 from the program notes, had some really lovely moments despite my general (though largely unjustified) indifference to Bruckner. The Schumann Op. 41 No. 1 which made up the second half of the program was very beautiful, particularly the adagio with its aching viola line played movingly by the Quartet's newest member. The encore was an invigorating rendition of the last movement of Shostakovich's 1st string quartet, which kind of left one hungry for what the group can do with 20th century fare.

UPDATE: ~~Charles Downey~~ Sophia Vastek (who felt the afternoon left quite a bit to be desired) points out at Ionarts that the concert page for NAS linked above has the remaining performances in their season taking place at the National Gallery instead of that magical auditorium. WTF NAS?

PS, here's that priddy Adagio from the Schumann:

Götterdämmerung: Two nights only...

2009-11-08T18:30:00.011-05:00

Well, as we all know, the cost of this infernal recession now stands at 10.2% unemployment and exactly one complete Ring Cycle. Watching the first installment of WNO's very enjoyable "Götterdämmerung - IN CONCERT" last night, though, I preferred to think of more romantic reasons for the spare presentation--perhaps they had a full production in the bag, but on the eve of the big show, the mean ol' Republicans in Congress heard about the new and improved and topless Pocahontas-Rhinemaidens in FZ's production and decided to padlock the warehouse, but then Irene Theorin and Alan Held and the rest of the WNO gang got together and decided they didn't need any fussy old sets to tell the timeless story of Götterdämmerung, and decided to just go ahead and do the show in their street clothes on a bare stage and it was a big success and they all learned the true meaning of Christmas. Or something.

In any event, musically this installment held its own, and surpassed in some areas, the previous WNO Ring installments. I continue to go back and forth about Irene Theorin, but its mostly forth at this point. She's a convincing actress, of course, and when she hits her mark, the soaring lines are definitely more rich than strident and a cut above other work-a-day Brunnhildes who have the stamina and accuracy but not a crumb of the vocal splendor one so desperately wants. Some local observers were complaining about her too-quiet middle and lower register in the recent Ariadne here (which I really loved, despite some faults) and I think one must conclude that a) she really doesn't have much juice down there, but b) the woman appreciates, and knows how to work, a good piano. The low-key portions of the immolation scene, for instance, were quiet and lovely and quite surprising. But then again, I imagine the Theorin nay-sayers on Ariadne probably don't care too much about her lower register here.

So, not sure when this happened, but seems the tenor troubles made plain during the Ariadne run with the previously engaged Siegfried(s) may have been too much, and they called in Jon Frederic West. Now, I can see how at the Met, with the full Wall of Sound in effect, West's voice may come off a tad small, but in the Kennedy Center its just the right size and sounds great. He's extremely lyrical and precise, and except for an occasional back-of-the-throat thing he does to keep big notes in check it is a sweet, winning tone with none of the strained hootiness one is used to suffering at Siegfried's hands. He is also a total goofball. While using the score a lot more than the rest of the cast due to shorter preparation time (I imagine), he also chose to mime the shit out of everything, "Our Town" style--he even tried to hold onto the Speer for Theorin to grab in the oath section, only to be left hanging--cold, Irene, just cold. Oh, and when Brunnhilde finally turned to notice him in Act II, he did this amazing big dumb "how ya doin'" grin that elicited a huge laugh from the audience. I suppose in a full production, one might label this "bad acting", but in the context of the scrappy quasi-concert setup, it was awfully enjoyable.

Gidon Saks made quite an impression as Hagen, with a large, booming sound in the middle-lying passages and an irrepressible portrayal which came off despite the obvious limitations. This Hagen was inviting and masterful, sinister but not repellent, manipulating the other characters through the force of his personality and intelligence rather than simply taking advantage of their stupidity and blindness. It must be said, though, that the lower register was a reach for him, and one missed the basso splendor of the Hagen who can go deep and sound like he could hang out there all day.

The rich Waltraute of Elizabeth Bishop also deserves a mention. It's a hit or miss scene, I think, and she made it quite compelling, both in her sad portrait of Wotan and in the fiery scolding of Brunnhilde, where Bishop expertly captured the haughty superiority coloring Waltraute's desperation. Another great half-staging moment: when Brunnhilde finally tells her to get off her rock, Theorin pointed off stage, Waltraute picked up her score and stalked offstage in her concert gown and heels with ATTITUDE.

As for the Gibich kids, I think we can all imagine what a great Gunther Alan Held makes, so I will leave it at that. As for Gutrune, let me just say that this Bernadette Flaitz totally nails everything that is funny and ludicrous about Gutrune, i.e., everytime she comes onstage its the operatic equivalent of a Stacy alert. People, can we start agreeing that Gutrune should actually be played as a character part, like Mime? It's all there in her music, you just need to have the courage to not make her a lame romantic side character but rather the ur-hose beast.

Philipe Augin turned in a thoughtful and exacting performance from the pit, in the Wagner-as-chamber music vein (in keeping with the WNO's modest forces). Augin rarely let a motif get by with rushed or perfunctory phrasing--the opening and dawn transitions in the first and second acts were masterfully built from their constituent parts with many beautiful details revealed. His Funeral March needs to be highlighted for special praise, instead of going for the savagery (not that that's a bad thing) he put together a mesmerizing essay on the microdynamics of the passage. Were I to quibble, I'd say at times he failed to capture the appropriate momentum--for instance, the meat of the Act II confrontation scene plodded and the Act II chorus lacked some of the rollicking bravura drive it can achieve.

The WNO orchestra played with great distinction and responsiveness, save for some occasional messiness in the exposed brass lines, and really, what are you gonna do? One does note that the wall-shaking one wants in parts of Götterdämmerung just isn't possible here, but that doesn't make it any less credible a performance.

As for the "production", WNO did a good job with a tricky situation. Keeping the orchestra in the pit and only the relevant singers on stage (against some of the cloud backdrops from previous installments and minimal lighting) did a lot to focus one's attention on the story, despite the lack of, you know, sets. And while there were some silly (but delicious) moments, as described above, there were also a couple of inspired choices. For instance, instead of having Siegfried do his death section with the vassals et al. standing around, the front scrim came down and Jon Frederic West sang it alone, sitting in a chair illuminated by a single spotlight. The effect of having this exquisite moment--usually accompanied with the tenor sprawled in some godforsaken position, covered in sweat, making excessive death gurgles, and about an inch from expiring himself--done perfectly straight brought it an intimacy that was quite haunting and emotionally affecting. Likewise with two of Brunnhilde's moments: the section before the trio at the end of Act II and the entire immolation--both done with Irene Theorin standing alone at the center of the stage. I have to imagine this setup would be a bit of a chore for someone coming to Götterdämmerung fresh, but for someone reasonably familiar with the proceedings, there were lots of interesting opportunities to meditate on the piece without the constant grinding of scenery and rustling of bearskins. One wonders what else might benefit from the recession treatment...

UPDATE: Hmmm...Charles Downey of Ionarts differs with my assessment of the comedic gifts of last night's Gutrune:

The supporting cast was equally strong, with the exception of the flimsy Gutrune of Bernadette Flaitz, who seemed ill.

In hindsight, I suppose one should tread carefully with one's conclusions about a singer who appears to be mining their company debut in Götterdämmerung for maximum laffs, but something about it was working for me...

UPDATE II: Some other positive and thoughtful reviews in from WaPo, WaTi, and Wagneroperas.net. There seems to be general consensus that Jon Frederic West was straining by the end, but I honestly didn't hear it. His death scene was subdued but hardly inaudible, and as described above, this was an arresting choice. Maybe I'm just used to "straining" in this part meaning "blowing vocal cords and making ungodly screech noises" and I can't tell the gradations anymore.

At any rate, with this kind of coverage, next week's encore is going to be a hot ticket. Pretty nice coup for a plan B...

Vogt

2009-11-08T10:53:00.005-05:00

Great assessment of the K. Flo-Vo conundrum from jfl at Ionarts:

Vogt is a stranger bird, altogether. With his odd, or perhaps lacking, technique, one wonders how many trained but struggling tenors listen to him thinking: “I’m stuck in the boonies and he’s got a world class career with that!?” Well, the difference is that whenever his voice ‘fits’, he has something no one else does. Since the listener/viewer only cares about the result, not what went into it, that’s more than sufficient. Klaus Florian Vogt’s special quality—“strange” doesn’t begin to describe its chorister-metallic-behind-the-forehead-bell-like character—certainly takes getting used to, but when he’s playing outsiders or introverted characters (Lohnengrin, Walter von Stolzing), that’s easy, because its distinctive character makes immediate dramatic sense. For it to make sense as Florestan, it will take longer than two arias in one evening. With him in that role, there is at least no doubt who’s wearing the pants in the two characters’ relationship—not just during, but also before and after his incarceration.

That pretty well expresses my feelings after the Met Lohengrin a few years back and the Bayreuth Meistersingers I've listened to on the radio. You can use "ethereal- space-alien-like" as a prefix for any portrayal he does like you can "lusty" for Domingo's roles. But once you hear that sound you need it again and again...

PS, here's a clip, though of course it doesn't get at how freaky loud that sweet voice sounds in the opera house:

Gotterdammerung for under $100 a day!

2009-11-06T21:29:00.002-05:00

A: WNO just sent a nice preparatory note for gotterdammerung reminding ticketholders of its length and telling them about how they can get food
J: hah
A: and somewhat erroneously calling it a "once-in-a-lifetime event"
A:considering it is a somewhat pedestrian cast and there are two performances
J: yeah and that it's downgraded from a full production
A: "Rarely, if ever, is Gotterdammerung mounted with so little to recommend it...you won't want to miss it!"
A: "Where most companies would just walk away, WNO delivers! Be there!"
J: it's so true
J: like, learn to fold gracefully
A: "I mean, at least its still Gotterdammerung, right? A singular event!"
A: huh
A: Sondra Radvanovsky is Gutrune in this 2000 Gdams on sirius
A: random
J: huh
A: that part makes luxury casting really boring

'08 - '09 Season Reviews

2009-06-01T09:35:00.001-04:00

Götterdämmerung (Met)
Die Walkure (Met)
Peter Grimes (WNO)
Sonnambula (Met)
Lucia (Met)
Tristan (Met)
Salome (Met)
Ariadne (ROH)

Siegfried Follies

2009-05-06T11:01:00.007-04:00

A: hey
A: you are def not traveling for siegfried, right?
J: nah
J: I think I will skip
A: k
J: maybe for Ragtime tho
A: just wanted to check before
A: i pull a trigger
A: right
A: newt gingrich was sending twitter updates from the premeire
J: hah!!
J: what did he say?
A: he made a joke (i think) about siegfried waterboarding mime
A: tho that might actually happen
A: i couldn't tell from the review
J: hah!
A: apparently the siegfried was sick, but the cover didn't know the blocking or something
J: oh man
A: so he sang it from offstage while the main guy acted it out
J: weird
J: the whole thing??
A: that's what it sounded like
A: does a place like WNO not rehearse a cover for siegfried?
J: they are just in way over their heads with this Ring
A: yeah
A: jeez
A: wapo: "While MacAllister's Siegfried gave it his all, Lindskog's Siegfried, confronted with a whole lot of woman, finally let hormones trump his puzzlement and ended up rolling around with her on the stage so energetically that his body kept the final curtain from coming fully down until Theorin prompted him to roll out of the way."
J: oy
A: may just go thsi evening and get it over with
J: I am trying to figure out is Macallister is that awful tristan I saw
A: this video of obama at a burger place today is fun
A: hm
A: i don't know if this is quite pc
J: heh
J: I'll tell you this much
J: that exhibit sounds dull as dishwater
A: SERIOUSLY
A: in celebration of the WNO's production of turandot, we preesnt a panel discussion around the themes of Puccini's work entitled Turandot: Brutality of the Chinaman
J: National Geographic Presents "Brutally Decapitate Your Suitor: An Examination of China's Rich Cultural Past"
A: i would really like it if they unearthed a bunch of puccini's turn of the century asian porno
J: esp if they all looked like Jane Eaglen and Ghena Dimitrova, but Chinese
A: haha

Klavier Trio Amsterdam and "Riskiness"

2009-05-06T10:09:00.002-04:00

So, per the Douglas McLennan post I discussed below, I kept thinking about his suggestion that the performances we encounter today may not be "risky" enough. The idea of "riskiness" in classical performances sort of stuck in my craw, because it seems like a pretty poor descriptor for many of the performances I find most memorable.

Clearly, "riskiness" in its most common meaning is a good criterion for certain works...no use seeing an Elektra that refuses to take any risks, right? But as a blanket expectation, it makes me think more of the best in Madonna than the best in, say, Andras Schiff. I want to leave a performance of Bach saying that it was exquisite, or shattering, or transcendental, but not necessarily "risky" which implies, to some degree, aesthetic choices deliberately designed to jar an audience, as much for the disorientation itself as for any deeper aesthetic value. Again, it certainly has its place, but I'm skeptical about it as an all-purpose artistic goal, especially when we're talking about the performance of centuries old masterpieces. Calling Vivaldi "risky", even when you have everyone onstage naked, just always sounds like desperate marketing to me.

Then I went to a concert given by the Klavier Amsterdam Trio the other night (this time at the French embassy, as opposed to the Corcoran concert reviewed here). Folks, if you're looking for a definition of risky concertizing, then I have the trio for you.

The whole affair started innocently enough, with Klara Wurtz playing a brilliant but sweet rendition of the Bach Partita No. 1. I have sort of a hard time objectively reviewing Bach beyond saying that it worked and I was in total rapture or it didn't work and I was bothered. This worked. Then Joan Berkheimer (on keys) and Nadia David (on cello) came out and did Dvorak's Sonatine Op. 100, followed by Ravel's Tzigane, with Berkheimer on violin and Wurtz back on keys. This was not the sort of performance one finds on a studio recording. Both pieces were very raw, very passionate, and totally heedless of proasic niceties like ensuring a consistently priddy sound. And both efforts were totally captivating. Berkheimer's violin in (the?) Tzigane crackled with cutting sounds of great emotion and seductiveness, juxtaposed with almost terrifying ones. Nadia David in the Sonatine sawed away at her cello with abandon, chasing, almost desperately, this really deep, rich, exciting sound she is able to produce. After the break was the main event, Dvorak's Dumky trio. Again, this was not a performance aimed at having the harmonies lock in perfect equilibrated balance, this was a performance about wringing some blood out of the thing. And blood they wrang.

Anyhow, definitely some risks being taken there, and with quite thrilling results. Still, I wonder if we benefit more from understand a performance like this as a distinctive interpretation, instead of an exercise in boundary pushing...