The San Francisco Symphony battles the Boyg

Last Thursday I was at Davies Hall for the first time this season, for San Francisco Symphony's Peer Gynt program, which combined actors and singers and video projections in a traversal of Ibsen's great play, along with some of the orchestral music written for it (including sections of Grieg's famous score, written at Ibsen's request, and more recent pieces by the late Alfred Schnittke and by Robin Holloway, who was there in person). This program had jumped out at me when the season was announced about a year ago. Ibsen's play, the last he wrote in verse before turning to the prose plays that helped create modern theater, isn't staged very often, mostly because (like its obvious model, Goethe's Faust) it's very long and very weird, combining realistic social drama, the supernatural, political satire, dream and fantasy sequences, myth-making and intimate psychological analysis, working as both biography and allegory.

Key Ibsen themes run through it: an intense examination of the roles men and women play in relation to each other (and how natural urges battle against social structures), the influence of one generation on another, the role of the dreamer or idealist in a workaday world, the danger and the necessity of one's illusions and delusions. Peer is a fascinating character: sort of an Everyman (which doesn't mean he's likable, exactly, though I don't find him unsympathetic) as well as an outsider; a dreamer who achieves (and loses) great worldly success; he's a habitual liar who spins out great fantastic adventures that enthrall his listeners, even those who realize he's repeating stories they told him, but he also can tell blunt and cruel truths that others don't want to hear (as when he runs off with Ingrid on her wedding day; shortly thereafter he tires of her and she berates him, but he points out that she was completely willing to run off with him and he doesn't owe her anything - if she expected him to turn into a solid bourgeois husband, well, who's the delusional dreamer in that pair?). He's a selfish man who is constantly, desperately, seeking to hold on to his self.

I have seen the play performed live: ACT did it some time in the early to mid-1970s. I believe it was either complete or nearly complete (I think it was around four hours, which was a bit much for the other high school students with whom I saw it). At this point I don't remember much about the production except for the scene in which Peer's mother Ase dies. And now available on DVD there's a version starring a seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston in his first film. Directed by David Bradley, it's mostly silent with Grieg as the soundtrack. It's an amateur film, shot in Michigan and featuring mostly local college students. It's surprisingly effective, and Heston is very good: lots of times I'd look at the other actors and think, you're really an American college student from the 1940s in fancy dress, but I always thought of him as Peer. There's also a ballet version, which is where the Schnittke music comes from. In short, it's a story that, for various reasons, mostly practical, is often shortened or adapted.

I re-read it before the Symphony show. I'm never sure if that's an advantage or not in these situations: it brings fresh knowledge and context to what I'm seeing, but also makes me maybe too aware of what's been cut or changed. Quite a lot was cut to fit the story within a normal symphonic evening of slightly over two hours. In the spirit of the original play, the Symphony's performance was wide-ranging and episodic, even a bit disconnected; disappointing decisions jostled next to brilliant successes; sometimes it seemed like a play with eruptions of music, and other times like an orchestral piece interrupted by dialogue. I gathered from those around me on Thursday that there was a wide range of reactions, from enthralled to appalled. I've dropped out of most discussions and held off on reading most  reviews until I posted this, but I gather that they cover as wide a range. On the whole I enjoyed the evening quite a lot, despite some reservations. But if the evening wasn't a total success, it was at least the right sort of failure (well, I didn't think it was a failure at all, but you see what I mean): ambitious, thoughtful, new, and creative. Peer Gynt was a particularly bold choice for the Symphony, since I suspect it appeals more to serious theater-goers than to symphony-goers, and there is less overlap among those audiences than one might expect or hope for.

The things I didn't like: the actors were brutally amplified. I've complained about amplification frequently; it flattens the sound and tends to make people sit back rather than lean forward. I do understand that Davies is acoustically tricky and there might be problems with unmiked spoken dialogue in that cavernous space, but two people talking in a normal tone should not be louder than a symphony orchestra. The smashing sound of a large orchestra is one that, sadly, we can't appreciate as much as nineteenth-century audiences did, since all you have to do now is turn the dial up. But at times the volume of the actors shoved the orchestra too far into the background.

Having embraced the evil technology of amplification, the Symphony really should embrace the good technology of surtitles. I've never understood why they don't use them regularly. When the chorus joined in as awesome trolls in Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, it was unclear if they were singing words that meant something or just troll-like sounds.The dialogue was in English, but when Solveig sang, as when the trolls sang, it's back to the original Norwegian, and - well, how many fluent Norwegian speakers are in the usual Bay Area audience? At least Joelle Harvey's lovely singing was not amplified. (Solveig is basically Peer Gynt's Marguerite, to continue the Faust analogy, with the added acerbic twist that at the end, during his ambiguous redemption (or, possibly, his indefinitely deferred damnation), it is strongly implied that the reason he has no Self is because he wasn't more like her - selflessly loving and giving; as several religious traditions hold, in order to gain yourself, you must lose yourself.)

I wish the play-pruning hadn't been so severe in some sections; in particular, Peer's dead father, a genial drunkard who pissed away the family fortune, is important to understanding him, and most of the references to him were gone. There was enough with his mother to give you a sense of their relationship, so Ase's death had the power it should have. But most of the play after her death up until the appearance of the mysterious Button-Molder was gone. It was replaced by what was basically a tone-poem by Holloway, which I enjoyed, but if the action is cut then the music makes its own journey, which may or may not be the journey on which Ibsen sent his protagonist. Having the play fresh in my mind, and assisted by the beautiful projections, I could tell when Peer was in the desert or on his ocean voyage, but Ibsen's words shape and suggest the meanings of those travels in a way you wouldn't necessarily get from the music unless you knew the play well. I enjoyed Holloway's piece, which slips easily among sounds and moods, but it was a bit out-sized: it replaced roughly a third of the play, and at around 25 minutes it was easily the longest single piece of music in the performance. There was a repeated melody that sounded to me like a bit straight out of Peter and the Wolf. When the Symphony performed excerpts from Holloway's opera Clarissa, the fire was represented by a very extensive quotation of Walkure's Magic Fire music, so that sort of quotation is a thing Holloway does, but I'm not sure what was going on there.

When the Woman in Green (the Troll-King's daughter, played by Peabody Southwell) re-appears with Peer's son, she is supposed to be an ugly old woman - that's why Peer doesn't recognize her at first. But on Thursday she was just as uber-hot as in her first appearance, so it didn't make sense that Peer claimed not to recognize her. I wouldn't have had the Boyg chuckle with horror-movie menace: that gives it a certain malevolent definition, and I think the enigmatic blankness of the formless, unseen Boyg is what makes it so terrifying and haunting. (Is it something inside Peer, or outside? Is it trying to destroy him with its advice, or help him?) The program note claims that the Boyg also appears as the Button-Molder, the lean priest, and the ghastly passenger on Peer's voyage home: it's unclear from the phrasing if this is specifically Schnittke's interpretation or is being put forward as inherent in Ibsen. I think it's a possible but not a necessary interpretation, and personally I feel the Boyg is separate in function and meaning from those other characters (the ghastly ghostly passenger, by the way, fell victim to the extensive cutting).

On to the things I did like. The actors, despite having to work against the amplification, were all strong. Ben Huber showed Peer's uncertainty and longing as well as his headstrong fantastical ways, and moved convincingly from wild boy to cynical man. Rose Portillo as his mother captured Ase's love for and frustration with and complaining about and defense of her wayward boy. In addition to the ones I've already named, there was also good work by Jesse Merlin as Solveig's Father and the Troll King, Brian Ruppenkamp as the Brat and the Lean One, Mark Deakins as the Boyg and the Button-Molder, Janice Lancaster Larsen as Ingrid, and Keith Perry, Alexandra Sessler, and Dianne M. Terp as wedding guests. James Darrah was director and production designer, and Adam Larsen was video designer.

I loved the chance to hear so much of the possible Peer music; I knew the Grieg but not the others. It was always immediately clear which of the three composers was being performed, and that eclecticism is very much in the spirit of the play. I loved Schnittke's eerie vaporous Boyg music. Grieg's Morning Mood sounded as fresh and lovely as sunrise on a spring meadow, the way it was meant to sound before it became a cartoon signifier of spring dawn. It was great to hear the Hall of the Mountain King with chorus. I loved the vast irregular white shape on which the projections were shown; it looked like both mountains and mist. The projections themselves were striking and well done, moving from black-and-white to color and from church interior to lush forest to vast ocean and many points in between. The long narrow stage space was used well, with the occasional addition of action up the aisles.

Mostly, I just really love that they did this at all.

John Gabriel Borkman

I went to the Aurora Theater’s recent production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (in a new version by David Eldridge), because how many chances am I going to get to see that – though having said that, I suspect that this play will be making the regional rounds, since it can be sold as an up-to-the-minute expose of financial misdeeds. Borkman is a bank manager who arrogantly and illegally speculates with client funds, and you can draw the comparison to whichever recent Wall Street gangster you like (Bernie Madoff is referenced in the program).

The problem with describing the play this way, though, is that it really isn’t about the financial chicanery. When we see Borkman (the reliably excellent James Carpenter), he has been out of prison for a while, and though his reputation has suffered, his family didn't lose enough money to cause them difficulty, nor is there much exploration of the masses who did lose money, or much guilt expressed about them. Instead money just represents part of the shame and the will to power among the family (some other type of scandal might have had the same effect, only not as fully and, let me say, economically).

The center of tension is the tight triangle among Borkman, his bitter wife Gunhild Borkman (Karen Grassle), and her unmarried sister Ella Rentheim (Karen Lewis), who lost Borkman to Gunhild years before. John Gabriel had not speculated with Ella’s money, so she is still quite wealthy and owns the house the Borkmans live in. The Borkmans have a grown son, Erhart (Aaron Wilton), on whom all three project their plans: Borkman wants Erhart’s youth and vigor to join him in working again towards Borkman’s great plans of economic development and power; Gunhild wants him to restore the family’s name and reputation to respectability (in effect, to achieve what his father set out to do, only honestly); Ella, the dying Ella, wants him to be the son she never had.

Borkman is one of those Ibsenite master spirits (like Halvard Solness the Master Builder, or like Hedda Gabler, or Nora in A Doll’s House) who struggle to force reality to conform to their idealistic sense of their own superiority. The financial crimes are just a way of getting at the real subject, which is the struggle among Borkman and the two women for dominance (even if it comes in the guise of love), and their struggle to achieve their goals as their time runs out. This is another of Ibsen’s plays which look as if (and are described as if) they are realistic works about pressing social issues when they are actually weird expressionist psychodramas on poetic, epic themes. (Same with August Wilson, which is why he strikes me as the American Ibsen.)

Erhart beautifully evades every choking, conflicting demand of the older generation with the simple answer, “I want to live.” Usually what people mean by this is they want to have lots of sex in a warm climate. And that’s exactly what Erhart means, as he’s heading off to Italy in what is pretty clearly a ménage-a-trois with a shady divorcee, Fanny Wilton (Pamela Gaye Walker) and the young Frida Foldal (Lizzie Calogero, who also plays the maid Malene), a musician who is the daughter of a somewhat silly, naïve and idealistic, poet, Vilhelm Foldal (Jack Powell), who has stuck by Borkman in his troubles. Erhart's ability to pick up and flee is what convinced me that the financial shenanigans are not really what the play is about – whatever its effects on unseen others, the money loss isn't crimping the freedom of any of the Borkmans. The restrictions on their freedom are mostly internal – mostly, because with all their grand schemes, they simply run out of time – they run into the fact of Death, which cuts short their hopes and ambitions.

I give full credit to Aaron Wilton for being able to carry off a potentially dangerous line like “I want to live” with simplicity, conviction, and truth. (There is no camp echo of Susan Hayward here.) His escape, which might have seemed cowardly or evasive, instead seems right and even sensible. One of my many, many problems with August: Osage County was the way it denied this truth: sometimes running away is the only way.

And the last time I saw James Carpenter, he was Frankenstein’s Monster in The Creature, Trevor Allen’s adaptation of Frankenstein. Carpenter was astonishing, hunching his body in ways both ape-like and noble, threatening and supplicating. Here he was a completely different type of monster – a visionary, upright and strict, who considers himself unbound by the rules that bind the multitude. This was a cast where the men were definitely stronger performers than the women, which I guess makes up for all those evenings (this often happens at the opera) when the women outshone the men. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the women; I just felt they (particularly the two sisters, Gunhild and Ella) could have gone deeper, been more nuanced and intense. Possibly on other nights they were. But moments like the climax of the first half, when Gunhild for the first time enters Borkman’s part of the house, bursting in on him and Ella, just fell kind of flat.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: April

April 8, 10, 11, and 13, Nicholas McGegan leads Philharmonia Baroque in Handel’s great opera, Orlando (one of the first operas I ever saw!).

Berkeley Opera offers Copland’s The Tender Land on April 10, 16, and 18.

As always San Francisco Performances has a lot of exciting stuff going on: On April 2, Alice Coote, recently announced as the replacement Charlotte in San Francisco Opera’s upcoming Werther, gives a recital. I was looking forward to hearing Garanca, whom I’ve never heard, but frankly I think Coote, whom I have heard, is going to give the audience a more interesting evening. On April 6, cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Lera Auerbach perform Shostokovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano (arranged for cello and piano by Auerbach) and Auerbach’s own 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. The brilliant young pianist Yuja Wang gives a recital on April 22 featuring Schumann, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson read and perform from The Rest Is Noise on Saturday morning, April 24, and Yevgeny Sudbin performs Chopin, Stevenson, Liszt, and Ravel on April 25.

The Aurora Theater offers a rare chance to see Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. I’m already thrilled with this one – not only did my Tuesday night ticket cost me less than $40, but the play starts at the more rational weekday hour of 7:00, and not the standard 8:00. It can be a little tricky to call the box office, which has limited hours, but it’s worth it because the Aurora’s on-line system uses that horrible “best seat” system. I’ve decided I’ll only buy tickets on-line if the system shows me exactly which seats are available. I’ll decide which is the best seat available, thank you.

April 23-25 Magnificat performs Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (in a different location each day).

At the San Francisco Symphony, Edwin Outwater leads an interesting program April 7-11, featuring music from Whisper House, a new composition by Duncan Shiek (of Spring Awakening, which I haven’t seen or heard). Shiek’s piece replaces the previously announced Five Shakespeare Sonnets by Rufus Wainwright, which will allegedly happen next season. The program also offers Zipangu by Claude Vivier (I’ve heard a lot about the late composer and am very eager to hear this) as well as Gounod’s ballet music from Faust and Poulenc’s Suite from Les Biches. The wonderful Symphony Chorus gives its annual concert on Sunday April 11. On April 15-16 the symphony accompanies Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush. Me, I’d happily stay at home and watch the DVD, but if you don’t have the DVD and a big screen TV and can stand to watch movies in a crowd, then go and have a wonderful time. This is probably my favorite Chaplin film, though my favorite Chaplin moment remains the last scene in City Lights, which I can’t even describe because I break down and sob helplessly. Since the symphony is accompanying the film, I assume this is the original 1925 silent version, and not the inferior version Chaplin released in 1942 with some cuts and his overly fey narration replacing the intertitles. April 29-May 1, Christoph Eschenbach conducts Schumann’s Fourth and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony, with wonderful soloists in Christine Schafer and Matthias Goerne, and that brings us into May.

Why ask for the sun, when I've given you the stars?

To prove my point about Ibsen, here's my review of the Berkeley Rep's Ghosts from a year or so ago (the years, how they jumble together. . . .): I found the evening a mixed bag. There are some powerful performances and moments, but a lot of weak ones as well. I think they needed to think a little more deeply about how to present Ibsen to a Berkeley audience. Pastor Manders (James Carpenter -- OK -- I just realized he's the guy who was so outstanding in The Master Builder -- so as I surmised it was the direction of him in Ghosts that was at fault), the voice of social convention, was pretty much a foolish, dried-up prig, and that's a traditional interpretation that was well performed, but it just doesn't work for a contemporary audience. When a clergyman starts talking about duty (especially wifely duty) and what others will think, a Berkeley audience is just going to laugh at him. If there's no sense of power or reason behind what he says, where's the drama? We're just patting ourselves on the back for laughing at him and wondering why Mrs. Alving listens to him. He should at least be goodlooking enough and unconsciously seductive enough (which is how successful preachers are) for us to understand why Mrs. Alving ever found him so attractive. If they had thought of him as an aging hippy, I think that would have conveyed the right blend of idealism, foolishness, and sanctimony. They could have adjusted the translation so that instead of talking about duty (a cue for laughter) he talked about "social responsibility" -- it's another way of saying the same thing that would have given Manders's point of view a little more credibility with a contemporary audience. The man playing Jakob Engstrand (Brian Keith Russell) was pretty much a complete failure at conveying the man's greedy calculations and his whining manipulation and his menacing presence. He just seemed like a fairly nice guy who was trying to watch out for number one. You don't really get that this is someone who's trying to prostitute his daughter (well, stepdaughter, but still) and who burns down the orphanage to blackmail the Pastor (and again, a contemporary audience is only going to be pleased to see the Pastor hoodwinked). I also am not sure the audience really got the nature of the sailor's home he's trying to set up (even though they kept referring to it as a "seamen's home"; I guess they hoped the pun would make it all clear). The daughter Regina (Emily Ackermann) was fine but they (especially the son) keep describing her as a robust and vital and shapely young woman, and though she has an offbeat kind of goodlooks she just isn't that type. The last time I saw Ghosts Cherry Jones was in that role and she's more the type -- a big strapping healthy girl. Mrs. Alving (Ellen McLaughlin) was powerful and gave a ferocious and compelling performance, but I wasn't entirely convinced by some of her choices -- especially at the end, where she's throwing herself around and hurling the morphine -- she just comes off as too strong for us to understand why she would go back to her husband, why she would cover up her husband's real life, and why she would be torn about her son's demand for euthanasia. I've always pictured her at the end as physically constricted and almost bound, not throwing herself on the floor writhing. The son (Davis Duffield) was fine, though for some reason he played the entire second half shirtless (though he keeps talking about the cold -- is this meant to convey a high fever?) and I kept wondering what weird vanity or lack of vanity (he's not buff, which he shouldn't be for the part) was at play here and why he didn't shave the hairy patches on his back. The staging of his scenes with Regina was too physical and almost absurdly overdone, and there wasn't enough irony in his confrontation with the pastor about the immoral lives of the artists -- he already knows he has syphilis, he should be a lot more tentative with Regina and should be trying to convince himself as well as the pastor of the purity of the artists' lives. Again this argument is a stacked deck for us, so you need to play the scene for something other than the social views presented. The initial set, some large bare walls and a few basic pieces of furniture, was pretty ineffective; there's no sense of suffocation or tradition because it's too large and too bare. Put a looming picture of the Captain on the wall or something! After the orphanage burns they lift the walls and the rest is played against the large back wall with a flame-like and semi-abstract painting of bodies in reds, pinks, and oranges -- it tied in Oswald's painting and the fire and the syphilis very well. The music was mostly absurdly melodramatic (with lighting to match) though at the end they played a conventionally effective but weirdly anachronistic sort of alt rock song. It kind of worked but was more distracting than persuasive. Look, if someone gives you a ticket, go -- it's a fairly solid though conventional production of Ibsen, so if you're thirsting for Ibsen it's worth it.

My Master Builder!

I saw Ibsen's The Master Builder on March 1, at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. This was only the second time I'd been there; I was there last year for an excellent production of Aeschylus's The Persians, a play that unfortunately is newly relevant (arrogant empire comes to sorrow in the middle east. . . .). It's a small theater, with an open stage in the middle surrounded by four rows of seats. So your view is sometimes blocked by the actors, but to make up for it you can see everything close up. It sounds dismissive to say this was a really solid production, but I mean that as high praise. It was one of the most consistently cast and performed works I've seen recently. James Carpenter as the Master Builder was the right combination of attractive and reptilian; Lauren Grace as the odd, troll-like young woman who enters his life was strange enough to be unsettling but not so strange as to be off-putting. So much was conveyed with glances, suppressed smiles, little movements. . . .
It was actually pretty amazing. I think Ibsen, much as I love him, is very difficult to stage these days. His symbolism can seem too obvious. And the social issues that once got him banned are too close to us to be merely historical but different enough so that he's not really talking about the same thing -- this is particularly true of the "women's issues." Despite the oppression fantasies of most of the Bay Area population, the life of a middle-class woman in the Bay Area is a very, very different thing from that of a comparable woman in 19th century Norway.