Last Saturday I went up to Hertz Hall on the UC-Berkeley campus to hear their new music group, the eco ensemble, led by David Milnes. According to a note in the program the ensemble's name comes from its connections to the cultural ecosystem in the Bay Area; nonetheless they pronounce the name like "echo" and not "eeko." I have been to several of their previous concerts and have to admit I hadn't given the name much thought. I figured it was related to the Italian Ecco, which is like the French voilà, but of course it's spelled differently, and that point my theories broke down and my mind wandered elsewhere.
The first piece was titled IT, composed by Franck Bedrossian in 2004 and revised in 2007. I won't quote anything the program says about it because I read the write-up and it did not sound particularly enticing. It turned out to be a stunner, and the write-up didn't do it justice (I can't say mine does, either, in all honesty). It begins quietly, then swells up into strange, growling, enticing bursts of sound and the saxophone slowly rises through and the sounds end by circling back to the quiet beginning. It was fascinating, given the instrumentation (listed below), to hear what sounds were produced; in a way you were made intensely aware of the nature of each instrument exactly because they were often called on to produce sounds that were not what you expected from them. At times the noise from the saxophone seemed mostly the player's fingers strumming the keys; the violin and cello produced eerie whispers. I was shocked when I realized afterwards that the piece was only about ten, possibly fifteen minutes long; I mean it as a sincere compliment when I say it seemed much longer: it was such a varied, intriguing, rich sound world that I was sure we must have covered as large a temporal area as we did aural.
The players were Stacey Pelinka on flute, piccolo, and alto flute; Bill Kalinkos on bass clarinet; David Wegehaupt on alto saxophone; Hrabba Atladottir on violin; Leighton Fong on cello; and Ann Yi on piano. All were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Wegehaupt on saxophone; he threw himself physically into his playing, so that at times his left leg it seemed involuntarily went across his right knee (at one point, and it may just have been the angle from my seat, it looked as if he were using his left heel as a mute on the saxophone).
While the stage was being set up for the second piece composer and Berkeley professor Edmund Campion came on stage, clearly excited by what he had just heard, and brought Bedrossian on stage. The latter has recently joined the music department at Berkeley. He was lanky and soft-spoken and looked pleased and took every opportunity to thank the musicians. He said he had composed the piece "about nine years ago" but that it was still representative of his work.
Campion introduced the next piece by saying that they were all very glad that Hertz Hall had a new sound system (it was then I noticed semi-discreet black speakers hung at intervals down the lengths of the side walls) so they could do spatial music pieces like Pierre Jodlowski's Limite Circulaire (composed in 2008). The house was darkened and Tod Brody came out and played flute, alto flute, and bass flute, while various flutish-related electronica, managed by Greg T. Kuhn and Jeff Lubow, came through the speakers in various places of the hall. It was enjoyable enough but with pieces like this I tend to feel after the first few minutes that I've pretty much gotten the point. It did suffer from comparison with the intense overload of the first piece, which I was hoping they would play again as an encore.
It also suffered by comparison with the third piece, Ligeti's Chamber Concerto from 1969 - 1970, though unfortunately there was an intervening intermission. I prefer not to have the mood- and behavior-break caused by intermissions if it's at all physically possible, and in this case it certainly was, since the players were mostly different for each piece and the whole concert, including late start, set-up time, and intermission, was only 90 minutes, so playing the whole thing straight through certainly wouldn't have taxed anyone unduly. The Ligeti is in four movements, each quite distinct in its sound world, though throughout each note seemed to wobble and dissolve immediately into another note, as if the whole piece were coming to us with the wavy indeterminacy of a mirage, a hallucination of an early symphony. The third movement, Movimento preciso e meccanico, was particularly striking; it brought to mind (as the program note also noted) the sound of Ligeti's piece for 100 metronomes (the Poème Symphonique). The players for this piece were Stacey Pelinka on flute and piccolo; Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, oboe d'amore, and cor anglais; Peter Josheff on clarinet; Bill Kalinkos on clarinet and bass clarinet; Alici Telford on horn; Brendan Lai-Tong on tenor trombone; Ann Yi on harpsichord and Hammond organ ("Oh, look, a harpsichord!" exclaimed an audience member as we walked back into the hall after intermission; it was perhaps not what he was expecting to see at a concert of contemporary music, though he sounded pleased); Karen Rosenak on piano and celesta; Jennifer Curtis and Dan Flanagan on violin; Ellen Ruth Rose on viola; Leighton Fong on cello, and Richard Worn on double bass.
Eco Ensemble's next concert is 12 April; they are presented by Cal Performances.
Showing posts with label Ligeti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ligeti. Show all posts
24 February 2014
17 July 2012
Beethoven waves us off
Running in place trying to keep up though always falling behind as usual, I might as well start with the final concert I heard in the San Francisco Symphony's centennial season and work backwards through some symphonic nights. . . .
My ticket for the big season finale was for the Thursday performance, so my original plan was to spend the time after work and before the concert at the Asian Art Museum taking a closer look at the Phantoms of Asia show. Unfortunately for me, that Thursday turned out to be one of the museum's silly and annoying monthly party nights, though I guess it was fortunate I found out beforehand so I could give the museum a very wide berth, since this particular party featured (1) "litquake," (2) Trannyshack, (3) some tattoo thing, and (4) a DJ. Any one of those four elements would have sent me screaming into the dark night, but the combination of all four promised to fill the museum with enough smug self-regard and general hipster-douchebag-asshattery to reach suffocatingly toxic levels. In fact the slightest event - a carelessly dropped name, the fizz when some inked hackjob popped open his ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon - could easily react with some dragonish drag queen's acid "Oh honey" or the shrill relentless thumping of trendoid world music to trigger an implosion in the building that would bring it crashing down (as Samson brought the temple crashing down on the heads of the Philistines), with nothing surviving in the wreck except perhaps some fragment of an unobserved impassive Buddha, his hand raised in ambiguous blessing, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.
So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.
Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.
I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.
There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.
During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.
I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.
I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.
The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.
And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.
So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.
Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.
I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.
There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.
During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.
I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.
I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.
The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.
And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.
07 November 2011
another November addendum
In case all of this and this weren't enough for this busy month, here's another enticing concert (especially if you're a cello fan):
Ligeti: Solo Cello Sonata – Brady Anderson, cello
Popper: Requiem for Three Cellos and Piano – Rio Vander Stahl, Mosa Tsay, Rachel Keynton, cellos, Karen Rosenak, piano
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 for orchestra of violoncello – Brady Anderson, Rio Vander Stahl, Mosa Tsay, Lukas Whaley-Mayda, Rachel Keynton, Cindy Hickox, Katie Concepcion, Felicia Tang, Katherine Soo-He Cho, Sam Leachman and Michael Tan, cellos
That's this Wednesday, November 9, 12:15-1:00 PM, at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus, and it's one of the free noontime concerts at Hertz Hall sponsored by the UC-Berkeley Music Department (check out their calendar of events here).
Often I don't even read the Music Department announcements not because they're not interesting but because they are, and I have to work and can't go, so why torment myself; but if I'd spotted this one sooner I might have given up a PTO day to hear the Ligeti solo cello sonata live. By the way, for those who followed the Ripken-era Baltimore Orioles, this Brady Anderson is not the now-retired outfielder.
Ligeti: Solo Cello Sonata – Brady Anderson, cello
Popper: Requiem for Three Cellos and Piano – Rio Vander Stahl, Mosa Tsay, Rachel Keynton, cellos, Karen Rosenak, piano
Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 for orchestra of violoncello – Brady Anderson, Rio Vander Stahl, Mosa Tsay, Lukas Whaley-Mayda, Rachel Keynton, Cindy Hickox, Katie Concepcion, Felicia Tang, Katherine Soo-He Cho, Sam Leachman and Michael Tan, cellos
That's this Wednesday, November 9, 12:15-1:00 PM, at Hertz Hall on the Berkeley campus, and it's one of the free noontime concerts at Hertz Hall sponsored by the UC-Berkeley Music Department (check out their calendar of events here).
Often I don't even read the Music Department announcements not because they're not interesting but because they are, and I have to work and can't go, so why torment myself; but if I'd spotted this one sooner I might have given up a PTO day to hear the Ligeti solo cello sonata live. By the way, for those who followed the Ripken-era Baltimore Orioles, this Brady Anderson is not the now-retired outfielder.
26 October 2010
Denk: Ligeti, Liszt, Bach (with some Adams at the end)
Last Sunday I trekked through the steady rain to Berkeley, to hear Jeremy Denk play Ligeti and Bach. I'm sitting in Hertz Hall, feeling both damp and overheated, and it gets to be almost fifteen minutes after the start time, and I'm starting to wonder what's going on, even though, honestly, I don't really have anyplace else to be, when Matias Tarnopolsky, the Director of Cal Performances, comes out, apologizes for the delay (which he says is weather-related), and then he says that there is a slight change to the program: instead of both books of the Ligeti Etudes, Denk will play only the first book, minus the third piece, followed by Liszt's Dante Sonata. No reason was given for the change. Sadness! It was Ligeti that led me to buy a ticket and brave the rain! And though we are indeed getting a first half filled with Hungarian virtuouso pieces, still. . . . The second half remains the Goldberg Variations, so no complaints from me there. And we are invited to stay afterwards to hear John Adams talk with Denk.
Denk comes out and sits at the piano for a moment, and then says they need a rack. The missing rack is found and put on the piano so he can put his music there. And then he starts playing. He snaps right into it, without any posing or fussing caused by the delays and the necessary adjustments. The first etude is strong and bright and rhythmically forceful in a way that makes me think it an embodiment of everything the Italian futurists ever dreamed of. The second etude, by contrast, is dreamy but muscular rather than languid. I don't keep notes during concerts, so I'll just say the rest of the etudes made me wish we were getting the whole set.
Though I certainly enjoyed the Liszt, still, as I reflected last season when I heard the SF Symphony performing the symphonic poem Tasso: lamento e trionfo, listening to Liszt is sort of like reading Shelley, in that it can be difficult for us moderns to distinguish what was once bold and original but has now become sort of an ur-text of generic Romanticism, and to distinguish those things from what was conventional even in its time.
After intermission came the strong and meditative flow of the Goldberg Variations. They were just wonderful, though I still mourned the dropped Ligeti etudes, which is admittedly greedy of me, especially since Denk, who had given us plenty, first repeated the Etude #5, Arc-en-Ciel, as an encore and then stayed for almost an hour talking with John Adams. Denk is a pianist who acts out – he throws his head back, he shuts his eyes, he pulls his mouth down into a grimace like the mask of tragedy, his eyes roll as if he's watching the notes physically fly past, he glances right at the audience but in an unseeing way, as if we're not there. It's not distracting (or it's easy enough to follow his example and close one's eyes if it is); it's fascinating and sort of enviable, to be so utterly absorbed in the physical act of playing and so drawn into that world of sound he's spinning around him. He seems to have a lot of nervous energy. He kept tapping his foot during the conversation.
The conversation with Adams was quite interesting and Denk is a thoughtful and graceful speaker. About half of the very full house stayed for the talk, though a number of them should have left, since checking their electronic toys was so very urgent and important. There was a rude amount of whispering during the conversation, too, though fortunately not during the music. I'm sure Messrs Adams and Denk were quite relieved that the old lady behind me kept letting us all know that she agreed with what they were saying. There was a lot of static and feedback from the microphones, so Denk and Adams had to keep remembering not to touch the bottom portion of the mikes.
Adams opened by talking about the effect of World War II on the composers who came of age during or right after the war – some, like Boulez, became very ideologically rigid, as if that was the only way to stave off chaos, whereas Ligeti, who had the same sense of the underlying seriousness and importance of art, rejected the deadening hand of ideological rigidity and had a kind of verve and wit throughout his musical career. They discussed the various influences on Ligeti, including jazz -- Adams described one etude (sorry, I don't remember which) as like Takemitsu remembering a Bill Evans tune. This was followed by an interesting and semi-technical discussion of how Denk learned these very challenging pieces, with their constantly shifting rhythms, and how the first etude was put together. At one point during the discussion of form Adams said he thought one of the difficulties of being a modern composer was that there were no standard forms (either to follow or rebel against, was what I took that to mean) – it’s sort of an anything goes time. There was quite a bit of discussion about this entry from Denk's blog.
Adams initiated an extensive discussion of Liszt by mentioning other composers who were deeply read in literature (Berlioz with Virgil and Shakespeare was one example) and asking Denk if he thought Liszt was a deep reader of Dante. It was clear Adams was not exactly simpatico with Liszt. Denk didn’t quite disagree, but pointed out the difference in sensibility from Liszt and his era to us and our era, and mentioned how the wide and partially absorbed influences on Liszt (musical and literary) all came out sounding like Liszt. Adams mentioned an episode from Cosima Wagner’s diaries: the Wagners were having a party, which Richard left early to go to bed. Liszt starting playing the slow movement from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, and when he finished they saw that Richard had returned, and was standing on the stairs with tears in his eyes. Adams, who was clearly restraining himself from just coming out and calling Liszt superficial, said it was difficult to imagine him playing the slow movement of the Hammerklavier so profoundly that it could make Richard Wagner cry. Denk pointed out that Liszt’s playing was a phenomenon of the days before recording and so forever lost to us and that it must have been something extraordinary. The Liszt discussion ended with a mention of some stylistic links between the last Ligeti etude he played, Automne a Varsovie, and the Liszt.
There were a few questions from the audience. Someone asked if Denk was planning to record the Ligeti etudes. He said he hoped to someday, after he had lived with the pieces for a while. His new Ives recording was mentioned; he’s a big fan of Ives (and he suggested that Adams was also an Ives fan, with perhaps some reservations). The last question was about the encore. Denk apologized for not naming it before playing it, and said that it was a repeat of the Ligeti Etude #5, Arc-en-Ciel. He said that the etudes go by so quickly when you’re listening to them that he thought it would be nice to give us another chance at that one; also, he had no idea what else to do as an encore after the Goldberg Variations. Very true on both counts!
Lovely afternoon, even if I can’t help regretting the lost Ligeti. . . .
Denk comes out and sits at the piano for a moment, and then says they need a rack. The missing rack is found and put on the piano so he can put his music there. And then he starts playing. He snaps right into it, without any posing or fussing caused by the delays and the necessary adjustments. The first etude is strong and bright and rhythmically forceful in a way that makes me think it an embodiment of everything the Italian futurists ever dreamed of. The second etude, by contrast, is dreamy but muscular rather than languid. I don't keep notes during concerts, so I'll just say the rest of the etudes made me wish we were getting the whole set.
Though I certainly enjoyed the Liszt, still, as I reflected last season when I heard the SF Symphony performing the symphonic poem Tasso: lamento e trionfo, listening to Liszt is sort of like reading Shelley, in that it can be difficult for us moderns to distinguish what was once bold and original but has now become sort of an ur-text of generic Romanticism, and to distinguish those things from what was conventional even in its time.
After intermission came the strong and meditative flow of the Goldberg Variations. They were just wonderful, though I still mourned the dropped Ligeti etudes, which is admittedly greedy of me, especially since Denk, who had given us plenty, first repeated the Etude #5, Arc-en-Ciel, as an encore and then stayed for almost an hour talking with John Adams. Denk is a pianist who acts out – he throws his head back, he shuts his eyes, he pulls his mouth down into a grimace like the mask of tragedy, his eyes roll as if he's watching the notes physically fly past, he glances right at the audience but in an unseeing way, as if we're not there. It's not distracting (or it's easy enough to follow his example and close one's eyes if it is); it's fascinating and sort of enviable, to be so utterly absorbed in the physical act of playing and so drawn into that world of sound he's spinning around him. He seems to have a lot of nervous energy. He kept tapping his foot during the conversation.
The conversation with Adams was quite interesting and Denk is a thoughtful and graceful speaker. About half of the very full house stayed for the talk, though a number of them should have left, since checking their electronic toys was so very urgent and important. There was a rude amount of whispering during the conversation, too, though fortunately not during the music. I'm sure Messrs Adams and Denk were quite relieved that the old lady behind me kept letting us all know that she agreed with what they were saying. There was a lot of static and feedback from the microphones, so Denk and Adams had to keep remembering not to touch the bottom portion of the mikes.
Adams opened by talking about the effect of World War II on the composers who came of age during or right after the war – some, like Boulez, became very ideologically rigid, as if that was the only way to stave off chaos, whereas Ligeti, who had the same sense of the underlying seriousness and importance of art, rejected the deadening hand of ideological rigidity and had a kind of verve and wit throughout his musical career. They discussed the various influences on Ligeti, including jazz -- Adams described one etude (sorry, I don't remember which) as like Takemitsu remembering a Bill Evans tune. This was followed by an interesting and semi-technical discussion of how Denk learned these very challenging pieces, with their constantly shifting rhythms, and how the first etude was put together. At one point during the discussion of form Adams said he thought one of the difficulties of being a modern composer was that there were no standard forms (either to follow or rebel against, was what I took that to mean) – it’s sort of an anything goes time. There was quite a bit of discussion about this entry from Denk's blog.
Adams initiated an extensive discussion of Liszt by mentioning other composers who were deeply read in literature (Berlioz with Virgil and Shakespeare was one example) and asking Denk if he thought Liszt was a deep reader of Dante. It was clear Adams was not exactly simpatico with Liszt. Denk didn’t quite disagree, but pointed out the difference in sensibility from Liszt and his era to us and our era, and mentioned how the wide and partially absorbed influences on Liszt (musical and literary) all came out sounding like Liszt. Adams mentioned an episode from Cosima Wagner’s diaries: the Wagners were having a party, which Richard left early to go to bed. Liszt starting playing the slow movement from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, and when he finished they saw that Richard had returned, and was standing on the stairs with tears in his eyes. Adams, who was clearly restraining himself from just coming out and calling Liszt superficial, said it was difficult to imagine him playing the slow movement of the Hammerklavier so profoundly that it could make Richard Wagner cry. Denk pointed out that Liszt’s playing was a phenomenon of the days before recording and so forever lost to us and that it must have been something extraordinary. The Liszt discussion ended with a mention of some stylistic links between the last Ligeti etude he played, Automne a Varsovie, and the Liszt.
There were a few questions from the audience. Someone asked if Denk was planning to record the Ligeti etudes. He said he hoped to someday, after he had lived with the pieces for a while. His new Ives recording was mentioned; he’s a big fan of Ives (and he suggested that Adams was also an Ives fan, with perhaps some reservations). The last question was about the encore. Denk apologized for not naming it before playing it, and said that it was a repeat of the Ligeti Etude #5, Arc-en-Ciel. He said that the etudes go by so quickly when you’re listening to them that he thought it would be nice to give us another chance at that one; also, he had no idea what else to do as an encore after the Goldberg Variations. Very true on both counts!
Lovely afternoon, even if I can’t help regretting the lost Ligeti. . . .
01 May 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: May
Here it is May Day already. Do you know why America celebrates Labor Day in September? The capitalists had to give the workers something, but they didn’t want May 1 to be a worldwide day of worker solidarity. So into September it went, where it now mostly signifies the end of summer, as if summer matters in a country with criminally small amounts of time off for most workers. Years ago someone gave me that bit of information about the move to September – such casual mentions are what we used to have instead of Wikipedia, which I’m not going to bother to check. On past May Days I would occasionally wear a red tie and red socks to work; just another of my little jokes which no one realized I was making, which is probably just as well (though someone in Boston did once think the socks were a baseball reference, so I went with that). Anyway here's what I'm seeing or wouldn't mind seeing in May, and some of these are coming right up! Internet failure and migraines delayed my posting. So rush out there to celebrate the Art workers among us by purchasing tickets – remember, culture costs.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
04 April 2009
De Profundis (out of the depths or out of their depth)
The first time I heard Anne-Sophie Mutter live was back in Boston days. She is of course famously beautiful and she used to say she preferred dresses that left her shoulders bare because she played better when she felt the violin against her bare skin. During intermission I was trapped behind two slow dowagers and one said to the other in slightly bewildered tones, “Isaac Stern doesn’t need his shoulders bare.”
Mutter and her playing are just as beautiful as ever, judging from her appearance with the San Francisco Symphony a few weeks ago for the North American premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens. Gubaidulina, who takes her own path somewhere between Shostakovich and Arvo Part, is the first Phyllis Wattis Composer in Residence at the Symphony; I had heard some of her music back in Boston, but this was my first chance in a long time to hear her work live.
This was an amazing half-hour. I’d describe the music, but instead I’ll just say you should buy it and come up with your own evocative metaphors – just trust me when I say it’s even better, much more so, heard live. I hope Mutter, with her well-known commitment to new music, will continue to travel around with the piece.
It was such a success that the second half of the concert, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse, left me itchy and restless. Normally I love Ravel (and I have to quote my favorite Ravel line: “People call me artificial – have they never considered that I am artificial by nature?”) but after the profoundly spiritual and nature-echoing Gubaidulina the waltzes grated on me and seemed silly and shallow, especially in a coarse performance that brought out the blare in the orchestra (though I should give Tilson Thomas credit for the beautiful handling of the first half, and for the delightfully spiky American Overture by Prokofiev that opened the concert). I spent my time coming up with things that I thought would have made a better coupling: maybe something by Beethoven, or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night.
I wish I had thought of leaving at intermission. I was tired anyway. The night before I had heard Barbara Bonney in recital, and it was a dispiriting evening: her voice sounded worn and strained, dry and forced, and I wondered if she had some sort of unannounced cold or allergy problem since she seemed to have trouble with breath support. There was obviously a lot of love and respect for her in the room, which made the concert that much more painful. It was one of those evenings when I think about the time lost and look at how much I spent on my ticket and I just feel sad about life. So out of two evenings, at least I had the half hour of Gubaidulina, and that honestly made it all worthwhile.
The symphony had a more consistently successful outing the next week, and another celebrated soloist in Martha Argerich. This concert was probably one of the most anticipated of the season, at least by me; I was so excited about the Ligeti Requiem that I actually kind of forgot that this would also be my first time hearing Argerich live.
One of the great things about going to the Thursday performances in Civic Center is that the Asian Art Museum is open late that night, so instead of just wandering around killing time before the theater (which, I have to admit, is basically all I ever really do anyway), I could wander the galleries, in particular the new Bhutan exhibit, which incorporates many fascinating videos of that country’s sacred dance and music (though I have to admit to being a bit amused by the museum’s reverent insistence on the religious origin and nature of the art we were seeing – it apparently never occurs to people that all those crucifixions and Madonnas by the Old (and not always so old) Masters that line galleries all over the world also have been torn out of their religious context).
I think some of that chanted aura, and also the sense of religious works surviving out of context, went into my hearing of the concert, which opened with the SF Symphony Chorus director Ragnar Bohlin conducting an excellent performance of Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis, with some of the chorus on stage and the rest lining the two side aisles to re-create the separated choirs of a Venetian church.
After that Tilson Thomas came out to conduct the Ligeti Requiem. He spoke beforehand, and for once I didn’t mind it; in fact, I felt some kinship, because I realized he trusted the Symphony audience as little as I did. A sizeable chunk of that crowd can only even pretend to listen to music that has been certified as a masterpiece, the more familiar the better, which makes them not the most receptive crowd for modern music. Tilson Thomas cited a Rilke poem, briefly and appropriately, to set the mood. (I had a link to a blog that gave the whole poem, but that entry seems to have disappeared, so maybe we should all just go read Rilke and think about Ligeti.) (I was also grateful Tilson Thomas didn’t mention the music’s use in Kubrick’s 2001; no offense to that film, which I enjoyed when I saw it years ago, but what’s important and intriguing about this music is not its use in a film which, I suspect, most people haven’t seen very recently – yet 2001 always comes up in articles about Ligeti. We certainly live in a movie culture. But I do have to admit that during the performance I kept thinking about Kozintsev's King Lear, which I recently saw again; I think a Ligeti soundtrack would have been even better than the one Shostakovich supplied for it.)
Tilson Thomas then conducted one will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of this season at the San Francisco Symphony. I realize there are people who find Ligeti “difficult”, but I only realize that because they say so; to me this music is so jaw-droppingly beautiful, and so nakedly and immediately available, that other responses seem a bit unreal to me. Not witty like Le Grand Macabre (though writing a Requiem Mass when commissioned to celebrate a new music festival is, as Thomas May’s characteristically excellent program note remarked, “characteristically provocative”), it has a similar mood-altering effect, in its somber way. Talking with Ms TS afterwards, I found that I was not the only one to feel it as cries and moans emerging from a swirling mist. There’s a part at the end when the cembalo startlingly shivers in, and I was reminded but in a good way of Beecham’s quip about harpsichords sounding like two skeletons making love. Hearing Ligeti live is always amazing and enriching. And while Hannah Holgerson, the soprano, and Annika Hudak, the mezzo, were outstanding, I think the Symphony chorus was the real hero of the performance. I hope the Symphony revives this piece soon.
During intermission I was yet again blocked behind two dowagers making their slow way up to the lobby. One was noting to the other with implied disapproval of what we had just heard that “Mozart’s Requiem is much more melodic.” I’m sure Mozart would be horrified to discover that his funeral mass is now preferred for its prettiness. I’m not sure why “melodic” is a great recommendation in a lament for the dead, anyway. Times and places and musical styles change, but dowagers do not.
After the intermission Martha Argerich came out to play the rather Gershwinesque Ravel Piano Concerto in G major, and this time Ravel did not seem like an irrelevant intrusion after a profound contemporary work. I mentioned to Lisa at the intermission that after the Ligeti, and after all I’d heard about Argerich, I was going to be disappointed if she didn’t make the piano burst into flames. Well, guess what? She did. She came out, looking rather shy and stumbling slightly. She sat down and ripped through an electric performance that was poetic and strong, fleet without being rushed, dazzling and deep. She had to repeat the third movement because the audience wouldn’t let her leave.
Where do you go after that? Home might have been best, but there was one more piece. Liszt’s tone poem Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo was in the unfortunate position of being a double anti-climax after Ligeti and Argerich. I enjoyed it, and it actually had some interesting submerged links with the rest of the program (Hungarian composers, political oppression, an individual against society), but it was really in an impossible position, and the music though often striking and beautiful also has its Romantic clichés, or what strike us as such; talking with Lisa afterwards, I wondered whether some of Liszt was like the Tarantino of Pulp Fiction – an innovator whose innovations were so rapidly absorbed that they don’t strike latecomers as innovations at all.
It’s nice when a concert you’ve been anticipating since it was announced actually lives up to your hopes.
Somewhere amid all these concerts I heard soprano Nicole Cabell (accompanied by Spencer Myer) in Berkeley (and I just checked my calendar because I could have sworn this concert was after the Ligeti/Argerich concert, but it was before, and I heard several other things in those weeks as well; how busy I am!). She and her voice are both fresh and lovely, though a few members of the audience, more querulous than I, felt that she sometimes sacrificed expressiveness for sheer beauty of sound. I saw their point, but I was happy to bask in the sheer beauty, though merely lovely sounds can become a bit monotonous.
To me any problems had more to do with her program. The second half had a cycle of five songs (I Hate Music) by Bernstein, which was five songs too many, and I have to say that nine Spanish songs in the first half were kind of a lot of Spanish songs; once again I couldn't help noticing a certain similarity in theme and style, and in the spirit of my generic Russian Song, I offer a generic Spanish Song, titled, of course, Mi Corazon:
Mi Corazon
My hair is dark and curly,
My eyes are black and sparkle,
But a dog has bitten my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi, yi yi yi
I play guitar and sing,
And the boys all come to listen,
But a dog has run off with my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi,
Ay yi yi yi yi yi yi . . . .
Mutter and her playing are just as beautiful as ever, judging from her appearance with the San Francisco Symphony a few weeks ago for the North American premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens. Gubaidulina, who takes her own path somewhere between Shostakovich and Arvo Part, is the first Phyllis Wattis Composer in Residence at the Symphony; I had heard some of her music back in Boston, but this was my first chance in a long time to hear her work live.
This was an amazing half-hour. I’d describe the music, but instead I’ll just say you should buy it and come up with your own evocative metaphors – just trust me when I say it’s even better, much more so, heard live. I hope Mutter, with her well-known commitment to new music, will continue to travel around with the piece.
It was such a success that the second half of the concert, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse, left me itchy and restless. Normally I love Ravel (and I have to quote my favorite Ravel line: “People call me artificial – have they never considered that I am artificial by nature?”) but after the profoundly spiritual and nature-echoing Gubaidulina the waltzes grated on me and seemed silly and shallow, especially in a coarse performance that brought out the blare in the orchestra (though I should give Tilson Thomas credit for the beautiful handling of the first half, and for the delightfully spiky American Overture by Prokofiev that opened the concert). I spent my time coming up with things that I thought would have made a better coupling: maybe something by Beethoven, or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night.
I wish I had thought of leaving at intermission. I was tired anyway. The night before I had heard Barbara Bonney in recital, and it was a dispiriting evening: her voice sounded worn and strained, dry and forced, and I wondered if she had some sort of unannounced cold or allergy problem since she seemed to have trouble with breath support. There was obviously a lot of love and respect for her in the room, which made the concert that much more painful. It was one of those evenings when I think about the time lost and look at how much I spent on my ticket and I just feel sad about life. So out of two evenings, at least I had the half hour of Gubaidulina, and that honestly made it all worthwhile.
The symphony had a more consistently successful outing the next week, and another celebrated soloist in Martha Argerich. This concert was probably one of the most anticipated of the season, at least by me; I was so excited about the Ligeti Requiem that I actually kind of forgot that this would also be my first time hearing Argerich live.
One of the great things about going to the Thursday performances in Civic Center is that the Asian Art Museum is open late that night, so instead of just wandering around killing time before the theater (which, I have to admit, is basically all I ever really do anyway), I could wander the galleries, in particular the new Bhutan exhibit, which incorporates many fascinating videos of that country’s sacred dance and music (though I have to admit to being a bit amused by the museum’s reverent insistence on the religious origin and nature of the art we were seeing – it apparently never occurs to people that all those crucifixions and Madonnas by the Old (and not always so old) Masters that line galleries all over the world also have been torn out of their religious context).
I think some of that chanted aura, and also the sense of religious works surviving out of context, went into my hearing of the concert, which opened with the SF Symphony Chorus director Ragnar Bohlin conducting an excellent performance of Gabrieli’s In ecclesiis, with some of the chorus on stage and the rest lining the two side aisles to re-create the separated choirs of a Venetian church.
After that Tilson Thomas came out to conduct the Ligeti Requiem. He spoke beforehand, and for once I didn’t mind it; in fact, I felt some kinship, because I realized he trusted the Symphony audience as little as I did. A sizeable chunk of that crowd can only even pretend to listen to music that has been certified as a masterpiece, the more familiar the better, which makes them not the most receptive crowd for modern music. Tilson Thomas cited a Rilke poem, briefly and appropriately, to set the mood. (I had a link to a blog that gave the whole poem, but that entry seems to have disappeared, so maybe we should all just go read Rilke and think about Ligeti.) (I was also grateful Tilson Thomas didn’t mention the music’s use in Kubrick’s 2001; no offense to that film, which I enjoyed when I saw it years ago, but what’s important and intriguing about this music is not its use in a film which, I suspect, most people haven’t seen very recently – yet 2001 always comes up in articles about Ligeti. We certainly live in a movie culture. But I do have to admit that during the performance I kept thinking about Kozintsev's King Lear, which I recently saw again; I think a Ligeti soundtrack would have been even better than the one Shostakovich supplied for it.)
Tilson Thomas then conducted one will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of this season at the San Francisco Symphony. I realize there are people who find Ligeti “difficult”, but I only realize that because they say so; to me this music is so jaw-droppingly beautiful, and so nakedly and immediately available, that other responses seem a bit unreal to me. Not witty like Le Grand Macabre (though writing a Requiem Mass when commissioned to celebrate a new music festival is, as Thomas May’s characteristically excellent program note remarked, “characteristically provocative”), it has a similar mood-altering effect, in its somber way. Talking with Ms TS afterwards, I found that I was not the only one to feel it as cries and moans emerging from a swirling mist. There’s a part at the end when the cembalo startlingly shivers in, and I was reminded but in a good way of Beecham’s quip about harpsichords sounding like two skeletons making love. Hearing Ligeti live is always amazing and enriching. And while Hannah Holgerson, the soprano, and Annika Hudak, the mezzo, were outstanding, I think the Symphony chorus was the real hero of the performance. I hope the Symphony revives this piece soon.
During intermission I was yet again blocked behind two dowagers making their slow way up to the lobby. One was noting to the other with implied disapproval of what we had just heard that “Mozart’s Requiem is much more melodic.” I’m sure Mozart would be horrified to discover that his funeral mass is now preferred for its prettiness. I’m not sure why “melodic” is a great recommendation in a lament for the dead, anyway. Times and places and musical styles change, but dowagers do not.
After the intermission Martha Argerich came out to play the rather Gershwinesque Ravel Piano Concerto in G major, and this time Ravel did not seem like an irrelevant intrusion after a profound contemporary work. I mentioned to Lisa at the intermission that after the Ligeti, and after all I’d heard about Argerich, I was going to be disappointed if she didn’t make the piano burst into flames. Well, guess what? She did. She came out, looking rather shy and stumbling slightly. She sat down and ripped through an electric performance that was poetic and strong, fleet without being rushed, dazzling and deep. She had to repeat the third movement because the audience wouldn’t let her leave.
Where do you go after that? Home might have been best, but there was one more piece. Liszt’s tone poem Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo was in the unfortunate position of being a double anti-climax after Ligeti and Argerich. I enjoyed it, and it actually had some interesting submerged links with the rest of the program (Hungarian composers, political oppression, an individual against society), but it was really in an impossible position, and the music though often striking and beautiful also has its Romantic clichés, or what strike us as such; talking with Lisa afterwards, I wondered whether some of Liszt was like the Tarantino of Pulp Fiction – an innovator whose innovations were so rapidly absorbed that they don’t strike latecomers as innovations at all.
It’s nice when a concert you’ve been anticipating since it was announced actually lives up to your hopes.
Somewhere amid all these concerts I heard soprano Nicole Cabell (accompanied by Spencer Myer) in Berkeley (and I just checked my calendar because I could have sworn this concert was after the Ligeti/Argerich concert, but it was before, and I heard several other things in those weeks as well; how busy I am!). She and her voice are both fresh and lovely, though a few members of the audience, more querulous than I, felt that she sometimes sacrificed expressiveness for sheer beauty of sound. I saw their point, but I was happy to bask in the sheer beauty, though merely lovely sounds can become a bit monotonous.
To me any problems had more to do with her program. The second half had a cycle of five songs (I Hate Music) by Bernstein, which was five songs too many, and I have to say that nine Spanish songs in the first half were kind of a lot of Spanish songs; once again I couldn't help noticing a certain similarity in theme and style, and in the spirit of my generic Russian Song, I offer a generic Spanish Song, titled, of course, Mi Corazon:
Mi Corazon
My hair is dark and curly,
My eyes are black and sparkle,
But a dog has bitten my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi, yi yi yi
I play guitar and sing,
And the boys all come to listen,
But a dog has run off with my heart
Ay yi yi yi yi yi,
Ay yi yi yi yi yi yi . . . .
22 September 2008
Fiesco to fiasco
What a whiplash beginning to the fall season. First a beautifully sung and profound Simon Boccanegra in an unexciting staging followed by a completely amplified and meretricious Bonesetter’s Daughter in a razzle-dazzle production (though unlike the magician’s sleight-of-hand, it doesn’t quite distract you from what’s really going on, which is really too bad); and at the Symphony, a wonderful evening of Ligeti, Poulenc, and Prokofiev followed by a completely mishmashed Bernstein tribute. No wonder I’m already dizzy and perhaps a bit cranky.
I take about as little pleasure in trashing the Bonesetter’s Daughter as I did in experiencing it; as someone who is constantly complaining about limited repertory and unimaginative productions, it’s the sort of thing I am really rooting for. But I have never felt any need to check my brain at the opera house door, and I can’t condescend to the art form by pretending that the libretto is “good enough for opera,” because opera plots do not have to be incoherent and simplistic or silly. (I’m still wondering why Chang the Coffinmaker, after being so eager to marry LuLing, suddenly decides not only to rape her instead, but to chase her down to Hong Kong in order to do so. Is he just trying to get away from his three or four other wives? More romance-novel self-indulgence, I fear: of course he is obsessed with me! Who wouldn’t be? And I keep reading that Precious Auntie is “disfigured” – again, since she is never disfigured on stage at any point, you would only know this by reading what’s supposed to be happening, not by watching what is actually happening. People, please note: incoherence is different from ambiguity.)
So much money, and so much effort by so many more or less talented people. . . . What’s really irritating me now, besides having dug myself even further into horrendous debt so I could see the sparkly new opera, is that I can already hear the PR machine clanking up to claim that Bonesetter’s Daughter is “controversial” or “thought-provoking,” qualities conspicuously lacking these days over there at The House of Easy Weeping (well, I'd cry too if I'd spent the rumored figure of 1.5 million and didn't even get a coherent storyline), or that it has “gotten people talking about opera” – for the record, What the fuck? is not the kind of conversation you want to be inspiring.
Every performance has a certain appeal to the senses, but once that immediate sensation fades into memory the intellectual underpinnings of a work become more obvious, and when they fail, you can end up feeling more frustrated and angry than you were at first.
After noting just a few entries ago that I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw performing in the same kind of hodgepodge concert as Gheorghiu, look at what Dawn goes and does in the Symphony's big Bernstein-o-rama! Ah, Dawn, keep the boys guessing! If I’d known she was going to be amplified in the second half, though, I definitely would have exchanged my ticket for something or maybe anything else. As previously noted, I am not of the cult of Lennie, except for Candide, which was completely omitted from what was sort of a survey of Bernstein’s theatrical works. My metaphorical mind was thinking that the concert was like having to sit through a birthday party for someone to whom I’m indifferent. Then I realized that was literally true: the concert was a tribute on the occasion of Bernstein’s 90th birthday. It’s being taken to Carnegie Hall as part of a festival of some sort. I hope it seems a little more coherent in that context. I hate to fall into that whole “it’s New York City!” thing, but I can’t imagine why the Symphony thought this was the right calling card for Carnegie. Message to New York: you missed some fine Ligeti!
The evening opened with a plush account of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and, not to get anyone in trouble, but the string section looked as tired of shouting “Mambo!” as I was of hearing it. They should have dumped this and had more songs. Tilson Thomas didn’t even bother to give a little intro to that piece, but he did for the two excerpts from A Quiet Place that followed. They were nicely sung by Quinn Kelsey and Dawn Upshaw, but I don’t think they work that well out of context, especially the first one, an aria about being angry. Is the anger justified? Or is there some situational irony that enriches the aria (like actually hearing Everything’s Coming Up Roses in context and realizing how desperately delusional the song is meant to be)?
After intermission Tilson Thomas informed us that it was a “gala” evening, which I guess explains why it didn’t make much musical sense. The program book implied that the intent was to show Bernstein’s range as a theatrical composer, but the actual effect was a weird hitting-the-tennis-ball-back-and-forth quality, with the overly familiar and comic slamming into the mournful obscurities. It reminded me of the passage in Oliver Twist when Dickens describes certain novelists who alternate between tragedy and comedy like the alternating streaks of meat and fat in bacon. Uh, but I really enjoy bacon, which shows you how metaphors can break down.
I’m sounding too harsh, I think. But it was a very strange concert. Stephanie Harwood came out and belted I Can Cook Too. The audience reacted with the enthusiasm of those who have never heard a Red-Hot Mama before, but immediately we had Peter Wyrick playing Meditation No 1 from Mass (the program made a case for Mass as well as Songfest as theatrical works). It’s an interesting piece – I kept thinking it would soar off into the sweetness of something like the Meditation from Thais, but it kept swerving in pricklier directions – but despite Wyrick’s skill I don’t think we were hearing it under optimum circumstances, what with the audience all revved up from the sashaying and whatnot.
(Here's my prior experience with Mass: I saw the PBS broadcast back in the 1970s when it was new. All I remember is that at what would be the consecration the Celebrant has some sort of hissy fit and I think smashes something. My mother looked up from her crocheting, said in a very drily sarcastic tone, "Was that the consecration? Oh my." And then she resumed her crocheting.)
Then an amplified Dawn Upshaw sang What a Movie from Trouble in Tahiti. Why is Dawn Upshaw being amplified? Beautiful performance, switching between rapture and cynicism, but she blasted my eardrums. I was sitting way too close. I usually like to sit close, partly I will admit so that I have less of a sense of being surrounded by people, but I should probably rethink my seating preference when it comes to the symphony.
Then Quinn Kelsey sang with tenderness and sensitivity the setting of Whitman’s To What You Said from Songfest (unamplified, fortunately). There were lots of individually fine performances, but the evening seemed random rather than cumulative. Then the Danzon from Fancy Free (enough with that one, too!). Then five guys from ACT’s student program (Nick Gabriel, Phil Mills, Kyle Schaefer, Christopher Tocco, and Weston Wilson) came out and did a high-energy Officer Krupke, and I’ve never seen a peppier, more charming and adorable street gang, which proves once again the superiority of art, or least musical theater, over life. I honestly don’t mean to sneer at those guys, who really were talented and fun, but it just sort of comes with performing that material. Can I make up for it by saying I’d love to see them in something else, preferably something without amplification?
The finale was a big sing-along to Ya Got Me from On the Town, in which Tilson Thomas had a solo (possibly unamplified – I can’t even remember at this point). People seemed to have fun, I should say. I was wishing I’d switched the ticket and gotten some rest, since the exhaustion of repeated late nights at the theater tends to accumulate in my system. I mean, I'm open to stuff: this could have been the evening that converted me to Lenny. But all I really wanted to hear at the end of the evening was Candide's final solo: Was it for this, nothing more than this? (Incidentally, some versions omit this number, which I think is a big mistake; it’s the psychological lynchpin of the ending.) Again, all those people working so hard. . . . I heard raves about the previous week’s Beethoven 9, which I missed. I was saving it up for you, Dawn. And then you went and got amplified like you didn't care about me at all. Boys, don't go givin' your hearts to no sopranos.
I take about as little pleasure in trashing the Bonesetter’s Daughter as I did in experiencing it; as someone who is constantly complaining about limited repertory and unimaginative productions, it’s the sort of thing I am really rooting for. But I have never felt any need to check my brain at the opera house door, and I can’t condescend to the art form by pretending that the libretto is “good enough for opera,” because opera plots do not have to be incoherent and simplistic or silly. (I’m still wondering why Chang the Coffinmaker, after being so eager to marry LuLing, suddenly decides not only to rape her instead, but to chase her down to Hong Kong in order to do so. Is he just trying to get away from his three or four other wives? More romance-novel self-indulgence, I fear: of course he is obsessed with me! Who wouldn’t be? And I keep reading that Precious Auntie is “disfigured” – again, since she is never disfigured on stage at any point, you would only know this by reading what’s supposed to be happening, not by watching what is actually happening. People, please note: incoherence is different from ambiguity.)
So much money, and so much effort by so many more or less talented people. . . . What’s really irritating me now, besides having dug myself even further into horrendous debt so I could see the sparkly new opera, is that I can already hear the PR machine clanking up to claim that Bonesetter’s Daughter is “controversial” or “thought-provoking,” qualities conspicuously lacking these days over there at The House of Easy Weeping (well, I'd cry too if I'd spent the rumored figure of 1.5 million and didn't even get a coherent storyline), or that it has “gotten people talking about opera” – for the record, What the fuck? is not the kind of conversation you want to be inspiring.
Every performance has a certain appeal to the senses, but once that immediate sensation fades into memory the intellectual underpinnings of a work become more obvious, and when they fail, you can end up feeling more frustrated and angry than you were at first.
After noting just a few entries ago that I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw performing in the same kind of hodgepodge concert as Gheorghiu, look at what Dawn goes and does in the Symphony's big Bernstein-o-rama! Ah, Dawn, keep the boys guessing! If I’d known she was going to be amplified in the second half, though, I definitely would have exchanged my ticket for something or maybe anything else. As previously noted, I am not of the cult of Lennie, except for Candide, which was completely omitted from what was sort of a survey of Bernstein’s theatrical works. My metaphorical mind was thinking that the concert was like having to sit through a birthday party for someone to whom I’m indifferent. Then I realized that was literally true: the concert was a tribute on the occasion of Bernstein’s 90th birthday. It’s being taken to Carnegie Hall as part of a festival of some sort. I hope it seems a little more coherent in that context. I hate to fall into that whole “it’s New York City!” thing, but I can’t imagine why the Symphony thought this was the right calling card for Carnegie. Message to New York: you missed some fine Ligeti!
The evening opened with a plush account of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and, not to get anyone in trouble, but the string section looked as tired of shouting “Mambo!” as I was of hearing it. They should have dumped this and had more songs. Tilson Thomas didn’t even bother to give a little intro to that piece, but he did for the two excerpts from A Quiet Place that followed. They were nicely sung by Quinn Kelsey and Dawn Upshaw, but I don’t think they work that well out of context, especially the first one, an aria about being angry. Is the anger justified? Or is there some situational irony that enriches the aria (like actually hearing Everything’s Coming Up Roses in context and realizing how desperately delusional the song is meant to be)?
After intermission Tilson Thomas informed us that it was a “gala” evening, which I guess explains why it didn’t make much musical sense. The program book implied that the intent was to show Bernstein’s range as a theatrical composer, but the actual effect was a weird hitting-the-tennis-ball-back-and-forth quality, with the overly familiar and comic slamming into the mournful obscurities. It reminded me of the passage in Oliver Twist when Dickens describes certain novelists who alternate between tragedy and comedy like the alternating streaks of meat and fat in bacon. Uh, but I really enjoy bacon, which shows you how metaphors can break down.
I’m sounding too harsh, I think. But it was a very strange concert. Stephanie Harwood came out and belted I Can Cook Too. The audience reacted with the enthusiasm of those who have never heard a Red-Hot Mama before, but immediately we had Peter Wyrick playing Meditation No 1 from Mass (the program made a case for Mass as well as Songfest as theatrical works). It’s an interesting piece – I kept thinking it would soar off into the sweetness of something like the Meditation from Thais, but it kept swerving in pricklier directions – but despite Wyrick’s skill I don’t think we were hearing it under optimum circumstances, what with the audience all revved up from the sashaying and whatnot.
(Here's my prior experience with Mass: I saw the PBS broadcast back in the 1970s when it was new. All I remember is that at what would be the consecration the Celebrant has some sort of hissy fit and I think smashes something. My mother looked up from her crocheting, said in a very drily sarcastic tone, "Was that the consecration? Oh my." And then she resumed her crocheting.)
Then an amplified Dawn Upshaw sang What a Movie from Trouble in Tahiti. Why is Dawn Upshaw being amplified? Beautiful performance, switching between rapture and cynicism, but she blasted my eardrums. I was sitting way too close. I usually like to sit close, partly I will admit so that I have less of a sense of being surrounded by people, but I should probably rethink my seating preference when it comes to the symphony.
Then Quinn Kelsey sang with tenderness and sensitivity the setting of Whitman’s To What You Said from Songfest (unamplified, fortunately). There were lots of individually fine performances, but the evening seemed random rather than cumulative. Then the Danzon from Fancy Free (enough with that one, too!). Then five guys from ACT’s student program (Nick Gabriel, Phil Mills, Kyle Schaefer, Christopher Tocco, and Weston Wilson) came out and did a high-energy Officer Krupke, and I’ve never seen a peppier, more charming and adorable street gang, which proves once again the superiority of art, or least musical theater, over life. I honestly don’t mean to sneer at those guys, who really were talented and fun, but it just sort of comes with performing that material. Can I make up for it by saying I’d love to see them in something else, preferably something without amplification?
The finale was a big sing-along to Ya Got Me from On the Town, in which Tilson Thomas had a solo (possibly unamplified – I can’t even remember at this point). People seemed to have fun, I should say. I was wishing I’d switched the ticket and gotten some rest, since the exhaustion of repeated late nights at the theater tends to accumulate in my system. I mean, I'm open to stuff: this could have been the evening that converted me to Lenny. But all I really wanted to hear at the end of the evening was Candide's final solo: Was it for this, nothing more than this? (Incidentally, some versions omit this number, which I think is a big mistake; it’s the psychological lynchpin of the ending.) Again, all those people working so hard. . . . I heard raves about the previous week’s Beethoven 9, which I missed. I was saving it up for you, Dawn. And then you went and got amplified like you didn't care about me at all. Boys, don't go givin' your hearts to no sopranos.
09 September 2008
the real deal
I’ve noticed for quite some time now that “passion” is a buzzword these days the way “ambition” was back in the late 1980s: both are deeply ambiguous qualities that are nonetheless presented as simple and unambiguously positive. “Passion,” in fact, has become such a cliché that I merely note its presence, since it has no real meaning anymore; I know most people mean “the thing that makes me interesting” but what they are actually describing is usually “the thing that makes me especially loud-mouthed and ignorant.” Last year I was living in fear that during job interviews someone would ask me the latest inane and fashionable question, “What are you passionate about?” Would I then be true to myself – to my passion – and blurt out the truth: “Avoiding conversations like this?”
“Authenticity” is now a rising buzzwords (or an emerging one, to use another buzzword); I’m hearing and reading it more and more these days. Again, since it is an ambiguous word used without ambiguity, I’m not sure what it means – what true purity and actual Reality are meant. Thoughts of authenticity and even of passion were floating cloud-like through my mind over the past few days, as I began the giddy autumn round of theater-going.
Nothing (except possibly a free ticket in premium orchestra, and even then only with a stun-gun) could induce me to go to Opening Night for either the Symphony or the Opera. I like to think I’m an open and democratic guy, but in my heart of hearts I have the snobbish conviction that the people who go to these things, like Catholics who only go to mass on Easter or Christmas, only believe in social obligation rather than in music. But I can catch the gala spirit, which is one of the reasons I very much enjoyed Angela Gheorghiu’s recital at Berkeley on Saturday. For someone who has only previously appeared in this area once before, she certainly received the ovation of a much-loved star, and she certainly knew how to milk it, which was charming in its way.
It’s a really lovely voice, though at times not quite powerful enough to rise above the orchestra (I was in the front row, but my balcony friend had the same opinion). The Puccini arias – Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta from Rondine, Un bel di, O mio babbino caro as an encore – came off best, I thought; her Pace, pace mio Dio, one of my all-time favorite arias from one of my all-time favorite operas, lacked the umber shades I wanted, but then I have heard Leontyne Price sing the aria live (in recital, several times).
The odd, somewhat incoherent program varied the celebrated opera arias with orchestral interludes from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, which sounded splendid and precisely flowing; what a pleasure to hear them sounding so good, and to hear the overtures to Figaro and Cenerentola and the intermezzos from Manon Lescaut and Cavalleria Rusticana without the chatter of those who are only waiting for the big arias (so good job by the Berkeley audience on this one!).
The orchestral interludes also allowed Gheorghiu time to change from her white gown to her black one and then to a red one – that’s three gowns for a total of eleven vocal pieces (counting the three encores); that’s 3.6 songs per gown, which seems like a high ratio, even for a diva, and despite my enjoyment I couldn’t help feeling we weren’t quite getting full value for our gala-priced tickets, with only slightly more than an hour of music (including the orchestral pieces). The ruched black gown was so tight that, in my humanitarian way, I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, and therefore sing, in it. She did succeed, and it turned out to be an interesting sight, like watching the buffer baritones sing shirtless: you got to see what muscular movements produced what sounds (and I didn’t realize those vibrated on the high notes – I love sitting in the first row!).
The “popular songs” – “popular” meaning “not operatic arias”; you’re not going to hear Curtis’s Non ti scorda r di me or Delibes’s Les Filles de Cadiz blaring from an iPod on public transit, unless you're next to a conservatory student, or hear them sampled by rappers keeping it real – were less interesting to me, though Gheorghiu sang them with as much conviction as the meatier arias. And I’m just not sure that a Romanian soprano is wise to risk I Could Have Danced All Night to an American audience. That’s one of the few songs I actually like from My Fair Lady (the other is On the Street Where You Live, thanks for asking). My dislike for that particular musical predates my becoming aware of what seems to be a critical consensus that it is “really” a Viennese operetta, proving once again that Viennese operetta is a genre to which I have an instinctive aversion. You’d think Romania being close to Vienna, at least physically, would help out, but I couldn’t help recalling Audra McDonald’s performance of that same song in that same hall last June; she had an easy mastery of the style and sold it (and even conducted a sing-along) in a way that Gheorghiu didn’t quite manage.
Somehow, despite the lovely evening, and my enjoyment, and the audience’s vociferous happiness, I can’t quite listen to Gheorghiu without a certain ironic distance. The grand diva mannerisms, like her somewhat studied on-stage flirtatiousness, seem slightly too calculated. That makes them oddly endearing in a way – she wants so much to have the audience adore her like an old-fashioned grand diva – but also makes her seem to be more in the service of La Gheorghiu than of la Musica, makes her seem not quite to have a deep musical intelligence – I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw doing this type of mixed-bag program. Have I heard too many stories about Gheorghiu’s backstage antics? That arm upraised in triumph at the concluding high note – both arms for a really big finish! – with each repetition it seemed less like the spontaneous exultation of the triumphant athlete that a successful singer is, and more like a gesture calculated to convey the Diva manner. I’d entertain the thought that the old-fashioned Diva cannot be regarded without irony these days, but I don’t think that’s true: Callas reigned in the 1960s, and that’s not a decade that, as it is popularly conceived, seems congenial to her form of the Divaesque. I’ve heard great divas, and I’ve heard great singers, and they move you to a place beyond ironic distance.
Friday night I was at Thick Description Theater’s second show this season, Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul. I didn’t find it as completely successful as their production earlier this year of Blade to the Heat (next up is The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, which I’m really eager to see), though it’s quite entertaining and sustained my interest for its (almost) 90 minute running time. Domingo overcame a slightly halting start, and his charm and energy and presence can carry you past the holes in the concept. But afterwards, waiting for the bus and then the BART train, my doubts loomed larger and I felt that the piece could have used some further work. (Though I should point out that a lot of the audience felt differently – the woman behind me, giggling constantly and chewing gum, was not the only one singing along – is this what it’s like to sit through Mamma Mia!? Anyway, she seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.)
It’s an autobiographical one-man piece about growing up black and, it turns out, gay in Philadelphia in the late 70s. The running theme that ties it all together is soul music. That felt a bit contrived to me. For one thing, that wasn’t the music Colman himself favored as a boy. He keeps asserting that the soul music of the late 70s is his music, the music that created him, but if there’s a moment when he really takes it to heart, we’re not told. The closest he comes is going with his sister to an Earth, Wind, and Fire concert, and realizing how much it unites the black audience.
As he flips through the family’s old vinyl LPs in a crate on an old record player (the show’s madeleine dipped in tea, and one of the few props on the mostly bare stage, along with some family photographs on the back wall), which he discovered abandoned in the basement after his parents moved out of their now crack-destroyed neighborhood, he comes across the Carpenters album that belonged to him – it gets a laugh, being the square white music among all the soulful black acts, and it’s also an early indication that he’s, you know, “different,” but I wonder why an old Carpenters album should be any sillier to us than an old Earth, Wind, and Fire album. And why should his practicing Beethoven on the violin – Beethoven, of all the soul-searching and soul-creating heaven-stormers – be used as evidence of his effeminate, nerdy nature? It’s the standard pop culture link between classical music and the effete, decadent, and esoteric (just as discussed by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise). Why should Beethoven be any more alien to his soul than to any contemporary American’s?
I was reminded of a novel I read quite a few years ago, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, about a well-off middle-class black widow who has to discover her “real identity” by abandoning her comfortable life and discovering her “cultural identity” in the happy and musical poverty of the Caribbean islands. But nothing in that life is what she has actually lived, and she actively resists it in the beginning – so in what sense is that way of life her “authentic being,” in a way that the comfortable middle-class existence she really lived is not? Why should she allow the sentimentally summoned “ancestors” to control her self-identity? (Try to imagine a novel about an Irish widow who discovers that she no longer needs the nice house she and her husband worked for, because what she really truly needs are the sod huts of her suffering ancestors, with their requisite rich poetry (at least according to the stereotypes) and empty stomachs.)
It’s a way of defining one’s allegiance to and identity with a group with which one might have little in common, but to which outsiders insist you belong: you embrace and celebrate the limitations. Domingo mentions that his mother encouraged his classical studies and love of art, and used to put Leontyne Price on the record player on Sunday evenings, until his stepfather said he wanted to hear music that “sounded black” (an interesting sidelight into the various types of racism Ms Price had to face during her great career, though that’s not the point that’s being made here). I had the feeling that what we were seeing here was simply the exhaustion of Otherness – that, worn down by the constant consciousness of his race in a racist society and his sexual orientation in a homophobic society, Domingo decided, based on the importance of soul music to his family, that declaring it important to him was his way of belonging not only to them but to the larger black community. I guess it’s a standard need to define oneself by a group or groups, whether or not the groups really want you, but why shouldn’t he include the Carpenters and Beethoven in the music that defines him? Why limit himself to his family’s or his society’s limitations? Why not include his mother's definition of "music that sounds black" as well as his stepfather's?
Domingo convincingly and swiftly embodies the different members of his family, though some portraits are less successful than others. His sister – a proudly loud-mouthed chainsmoker who makes a point of blasting her music to annoy people – is given a moment at the end, after we also hear that she battled drug addiction for years, when she says she feels like the B side – the flip side of the hit, the side that never gets played – and that maybe that’s why she’s so loud. Well, sure; there’s a certain poignancy there, but also a fairly obvious motive, and as someone who has ridden many buses and trains with people who make a point of being inconsiderate to prove that they exist and are important, it’s the adolescent obviousness of the motive that makes such behavior so incredibly annoying. It would be sentimental of me to pretend otherwise. I can’t muster too much sympathy with that sort of self-indulgence.
But the portrayal of the mother and stepfather are particularly interesting and moving, and the emotional high point of the show – the moment when the use of soul music didn’t seem like just an arbitrary gimmick to tie loose scenes together – is when both parents are slowly dying, each conscious that both are slowly dying, when the mother encourages her husband to sing Gladys Knight’s You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me the way he used to. It’s a deeply personal moment, painful and beautiful. There are other moments, however, when the personal moments are, to be somewhat harsh, less interesting. That’s a hazard in telling your own story. I’m sure it was profoundly significant and moving to Domingo when he came out to his family and they accepted him, but from a theatrical point of view it’s a story we’ve seen too many times before, and it feels a bit dated – though of course he’s talking about a couple of decades ago, and that’s already another era.
And there is a certain celebration of datedness here. At the end, we find out about a younger brother, who hasn’t been mentioned before, and he explains that when the parents moved they left the LPs in the basement, hoping some other family might enjoy them, because they had bought all the old music on CD at Virgin Records years before. This is meant to be sort of a comic moment, and the solution to the mystery of how his parents could abandon their past, but as soon as Domingo mentioned the abandoned LPs at the very beginning of the show I had already thought, well, they probably replaced the old albums with CDs. Times change and so does technology.
There’s a certain amount of dwelling on telling ephemera of the time (certain types of colored aluminum drinkware, certain ways of doing one’s hair or entertaining oneself) that can seem like easy nostalgia, a shared identity of age that really only seems shared. Except for a brief dismissal by the stepfather, there’s no mention of rap music, which has been around for decades now (and is also used by many as a signifier of black identity, and as such, like rock and soul, is quite popular with the corporations trying to sell us stuff). Despite his repeated assertions that the music made him, this piece isn’t really about that specific music – it’s about what was playing on the radio when he was young, when people he loved were still around to enjoy it.
Then the evening before that (we’re back to Thursday now) I went down to Davies for the San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra had recovered splendidly from the exhaustion of Opening the Season the night before. I did see a few women whose hilariously grotesque costumes made me think the Season Opener might be a two-day affair. It was a great beginning for the real start, the musical start, of the Symphony's exciting season, even though Tilson Thomas insisted on picking up the microphone before opening with Ligeti’s Lontano. He proceeded to talk mostly about Stockhausen. OK, he wasn’t quite as disjointed as I’m making him sound – his point was that Ligeti was trying to create with an orchestra the sounds and textures that Stockhausen created electronically – but did this gorgeous swelling beast really need to be defanged with the little lecture, putting it all in perspective? Let the gorgeous sounds speak for themselves. Ligeti and Berlioz, much as I love the recordings of their music, really strike me as two composers whose works have a different quality, more vivid and detailed and ravishingly alive, when heard in person. I'm glad San Francisco Symphony is including more Ligeti in its programming; the Requiem is coming up later in the season.
The gaminesque Labeque sisters, Katia and Marielle, then played the Poulenc Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra. I haven’t heard les Labeques all that often, but I’ve always liked them, mostly because I remember reading a review in the Boston Globe (probably by Richard Dyer) that mentioned they were one of the few soloists he had ever seen return to the hall after their part of the program just to listen to the rest of the music. The Poulenc is a delightful mélange, and it reminded me of the story that John Adams wrote his Chamber Symphony while studying a Schoenberg score and hearing a Looney Tunes cartoon that his son was watching in another room – not because of those specific influences, but just because of that free-ranging grasp of different styles, from knotty to nutty. Throw in the Prokofiev 5 after the intermission, and that’s a nice evening. I was glad that in the Prokofiev Tilson Thomas avoided his tendency of late to smash things out. I thought it was really nicely balanced.
At home on Saturday, killing time before the theater – which is basically all I ever do – I dug into the CD pile and pulled out a recent release of Porgy and Bess – a recent release, but an old performance (brought to me like Alcestis from the grave), featuring Leontyne Price and William Warfield in the leads. It was the touring version which gave Price her first big break, though after that I don’t think she sang Bess much, no doubt to avoid being racially typecast. The opera underwent some adaptations and adjustments during and after its first run, and there were several versions floating around until the Houston Grand Opera revival in 1976 sort of set the text. This version differs slightly from the now familiar one not only occasionally in text but also in feel – the drums have more of the African sound so familiar to us nowadays from our world-music CDs, and there’s a jazzier feel all around, and not just because Cab Calloway plays Sportin’ Life. Porgy and Bess was the first opera I ever saw, so I have a special fondness for it, and though many consider it the Great American Opera I know that others dismiss it, partly based on its mixed-culture origins. Whatever its impurity, to me it creates its own cultural field, and is deeply moving, and a beautiful thing.
“Authenticity” is now a rising buzzwords (or an emerging one, to use another buzzword); I’m hearing and reading it more and more these days. Again, since it is an ambiguous word used without ambiguity, I’m not sure what it means – what true purity and actual Reality are meant. Thoughts of authenticity and even of passion were floating cloud-like through my mind over the past few days, as I began the giddy autumn round of theater-going.
Nothing (except possibly a free ticket in premium orchestra, and even then only with a stun-gun) could induce me to go to Opening Night for either the Symphony or the Opera. I like to think I’m an open and democratic guy, but in my heart of hearts I have the snobbish conviction that the people who go to these things, like Catholics who only go to mass on Easter or Christmas, only believe in social obligation rather than in music. But I can catch the gala spirit, which is one of the reasons I very much enjoyed Angela Gheorghiu’s recital at Berkeley on Saturday. For someone who has only previously appeared in this area once before, she certainly received the ovation of a much-loved star, and she certainly knew how to milk it, which was charming in its way.
It’s a really lovely voice, though at times not quite powerful enough to rise above the orchestra (I was in the front row, but my balcony friend had the same opinion). The Puccini arias – Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta from Rondine, Un bel di, O mio babbino caro as an encore – came off best, I thought; her Pace, pace mio Dio, one of my all-time favorite arias from one of my all-time favorite operas, lacked the umber shades I wanted, but then I have heard Leontyne Price sing the aria live (in recital, several times).
The odd, somewhat incoherent program varied the celebrated opera arias with orchestral interludes from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, which sounded splendid and precisely flowing; what a pleasure to hear them sounding so good, and to hear the overtures to Figaro and Cenerentola and the intermezzos from Manon Lescaut and Cavalleria Rusticana without the chatter of those who are only waiting for the big arias (so good job by the Berkeley audience on this one!).
The orchestral interludes also allowed Gheorghiu time to change from her white gown to her black one and then to a red one – that’s three gowns for a total of eleven vocal pieces (counting the three encores); that’s 3.6 songs per gown, which seems like a high ratio, even for a diva, and despite my enjoyment I couldn’t help feeling we weren’t quite getting full value for our gala-priced tickets, with only slightly more than an hour of music (including the orchestral pieces). The ruched black gown was so tight that, in my humanitarian way, I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, and therefore sing, in it. She did succeed, and it turned out to be an interesting sight, like watching the buffer baritones sing shirtless: you got to see what muscular movements produced what sounds (and I didn’t realize those vibrated on the high notes – I love sitting in the first row!).
The “popular songs” – “popular” meaning “not operatic arias”; you’re not going to hear Curtis’s Non ti scorda r di me or Delibes’s Les Filles de Cadiz blaring from an iPod on public transit, unless you're next to a conservatory student, or hear them sampled by rappers keeping it real – were less interesting to me, though Gheorghiu sang them with as much conviction as the meatier arias. And I’m just not sure that a Romanian soprano is wise to risk I Could Have Danced All Night to an American audience. That’s one of the few songs I actually like from My Fair Lady (the other is On the Street Where You Live, thanks for asking). My dislike for that particular musical predates my becoming aware of what seems to be a critical consensus that it is “really” a Viennese operetta, proving once again that Viennese operetta is a genre to which I have an instinctive aversion. You’d think Romania being close to Vienna, at least physically, would help out, but I couldn’t help recalling Audra McDonald’s performance of that same song in that same hall last June; she had an easy mastery of the style and sold it (and even conducted a sing-along) in a way that Gheorghiu didn’t quite manage.
Somehow, despite the lovely evening, and my enjoyment, and the audience’s vociferous happiness, I can’t quite listen to Gheorghiu without a certain ironic distance. The grand diva mannerisms, like her somewhat studied on-stage flirtatiousness, seem slightly too calculated. That makes them oddly endearing in a way – she wants so much to have the audience adore her like an old-fashioned grand diva – but also makes her seem to be more in the service of La Gheorghiu than of la Musica, makes her seem not quite to have a deep musical intelligence – I couldn’t imagine Dawn Upshaw doing this type of mixed-bag program. Have I heard too many stories about Gheorghiu’s backstage antics? That arm upraised in triumph at the concluding high note – both arms for a really big finish! – with each repetition it seemed less like the spontaneous exultation of the triumphant athlete that a successful singer is, and more like a gesture calculated to convey the Diva manner. I’d entertain the thought that the old-fashioned Diva cannot be regarded without irony these days, but I don’t think that’s true: Callas reigned in the 1960s, and that’s not a decade that, as it is popularly conceived, seems congenial to her form of the Divaesque. I’ve heard great divas, and I’ve heard great singers, and they move you to a place beyond ironic distance.
Friday night I was at Thick Description Theater’s second show this season, Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul. I didn’t find it as completely successful as their production earlier this year of Blade to the Heat (next up is The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, which I’m really eager to see), though it’s quite entertaining and sustained my interest for its (almost) 90 minute running time. Domingo overcame a slightly halting start, and his charm and energy and presence can carry you past the holes in the concept. But afterwards, waiting for the bus and then the BART train, my doubts loomed larger and I felt that the piece could have used some further work. (Though I should point out that a lot of the audience felt differently – the woman behind me, giggling constantly and chewing gum, was not the only one singing along – is this what it’s like to sit through Mamma Mia!? Anyway, she seemed perfectly happy with the whole thing.)
It’s an autobiographical one-man piece about growing up black and, it turns out, gay in Philadelphia in the late 70s. The running theme that ties it all together is soul music. That felt a bit contrived to me. For one thing, that wasn’t the music Colman himself favored as a boy. He keeps asserting that the soul music of the late 70s is his music, the music that created him, but if there’s a moment when he really takes it to heart, we’re not told. The closest he comes is going with his sister to an Earth, Wind, and Fire concert, and realizing how much it unites the black audience.
As he flips through the family’s old vinyl LPs in a crate on an old record player (the show’s madeleine dipped in tea, and one of the few props on the mostly bare stage, along with some family photographs on the back wall), which he discovered abandoned in the basement after his parents moved out of their now crack-destroyed neighborhood, he comes across the Carpenters album that belonged to him – it gets a laugh, being the square white music among all the soulful black acts, and it’s also an early indication that he’s, you know, “different,” but I wonder why an old Carpenters album should be any sillier to us than an old Earth, Wind, and Fire album. And why should his practicing Beethoven on the violin – Beethoven, of all the soul-searching and soul-creating heaven-stormers – be used as evidence of his effeminate, nerdy nature? It’s the standard pop culture link between classical music and the effete, decadent, and esoteric (just as discussed by Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise). Why should Beethoven be any more alien to his soul than to any contemporary American’s?
I was reminded of a novel I read quite a few years ago, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, about a well-off middle-class black widow who has to discover her “real identity” by abandoning her comfortable life and discovering her “cultural identity” in the happy and musical poverty of the Caribbean islands. But nothing in that life is what she has actually lived, and she actively resists it in the beginning – so in what sense is that way of life her “authentic being,” in a way that the comfortable middle-class existence she really lived is not? Why should she allow the sentimentally summoned “ancestors” to control her self-identity? (Try to imagine a novel about an Irish widow who discovers that she no longer needs the nice house she and her husband worked for, because what she really truly needs are the sod huts of her suffering ancestors, with their requisite rich poetry (at least according to the stereotypes) and empty stomachs.)
It’s a way of defining one’s allegiance to and identity with a group with which one might have little in common, but to which outsiders insist you belong: you embrace and celebrate the limitations. Domingo mentions that his mother encouraged his classical studies and love of art, and used to put Leontyne Price on the record player on Sunday evenings, until his stepfather said he wanted to hear music that “sounded black” (an interesting sidelight into the various types of racism Ms Price had to face during her great career, though that’s not the point that’s being made here). I had the feeling that what we were seeing here was simply the exhaustion of Otherness – that, worn down by the constant consciousness of his race in a racist society and his sexual orientation in a homophobic society, Domingo decided, based on the importance of soul music to his family, that declaring it important to him was his way of belonging not only to them but to the larger black community. I guess it’s a standard need to define oneself by a group or groups, whether or not the groups really want you, but why shouldn’t he include the Carpenters and Beethoven in the music that defines him? Why limit himself to his family’s or his society’s limitations? Why not include his mother's definition of "music that sounds black" as well as his stepfather's?
Domingo convincingly and swiftly embodies the different members of his family, though some portraits are less successful than others. His sister – a proudly loud-mouthed chainsmoker who makes a point of blasting her music to annoy people – is given a moment at the end, after we also hear that she battled drug addiction for years, when she says she feels like the B side – the flip side of the hit, the side that never gets played – and that maybe that’s why she’s so loud. Well, sure; there’s a certain poignancy there, but also a fairly obvious motive, and as someone who has ridden many buses and trains with people who make a point of being inconsiderate to prove that they exist and are important, it’s the adolescent obviousness of the motive that makes such behavior so incredibly annoying. It would be sentimental of me to pretend otherwise. I can’t muster too much sympathy with that sort of self-indulgence.
But the portrayal of the mother and stepfather are particularly interesting and moving, and the emotional high point of the show – the moment when the use of soul music didn’t seem like just an arbitrary gimmick to tie loose scenes together – is when both parents are slowly dying, each conscious that both are slowly dying, when the mother encourages her husband to sing Gladys Knight’s You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me the way he used to. It’s a deeply personal moment, painful and beautiful. There are other moments, however, when the personal moments are, to be somewhat harsh, less interesting. That’s a hazard in telling your own story. I’m sure it was profoundly significant and moving to Domingo when he came out to his family and they accepted him, but from a theatrical point of view it’s a story we’ve seen too many times before, and it feels a bit dated – though of course he’s talking about a couple of decades ago, and that’s already another era.
And there is a certain celebration of datedness here. At the end, we find out about a younger brother, who hasn’t been mentioned before, and he explains that when the parents moved they left the LPs in the basement, hoping some other family might enjoy them, because they had bought all the old music on CD at Virgin Records years before. This is meant to be sort of a comic moment, and the solution to the mystery of how his parents could abandon their past, but as soon as Domingo mentioned the abandoned LPs at the very beginning of the show I had already thought, well, they probably replaced the old albums with CDs. Times change and so does technology.
There’s a certain amount of dwelling on telling ephemera of the time (certain types of colored aluminum drinkware, certain ways of doing one’s hair or entertaining oneself) that can seem like easy nostalgia, a shared identity of age that really only seems shared. Except for a brief dismissal by the stepfather, there’s no mention of rap music, which has been around for decades now (and is also used by many as a signifier of black identity, and as such, like rock and soul, is quite popular with the corporations trying to sell us stuff). Despite his repeated assertions that the music made him, this piece isn’t really about that specific music – it’s about what was playing on the radio when he was young, when people he loved were still around to enjoy it.
Then the evening before that (we’re back to Thursday now) I went down to Davies for the San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra had recovered splendidly from the exhaustion of Opening the Season the night before. I did see a few women whose hilariously grotesque costumes made me think the Season Opener might be a two-day affair. It was a great beginning for the real start, the musical start, of the Symphony's exciting season, even though Tilson Thomas insisted on picking up the microphone before opening with Ligeti’s Lontano. He proceeded to talk mostly about Stockhausen. OK, he wasn’t quite as disjointed as I’m making him sound – his point was that Ligeti was trying to create with an orchestra the sounds and textures that Stockhausen created electronically – but did this gorgeous swelling beast really need to be defanged with the little lecture, putting it all in perspective? Let the gorgeous sounds speak for themselves. Ligeti and Berlioz, much as I love the recordings of their music, really strike me as two composers whose works have a different quality, more vivid and detailed and ravishingly alive, when heard in person. I'm glad San Francisco Symphony is including more Ligeti in its programming; the Requiem is coming up later in the season.
The gaminesque Labeque sisters, Katia and Marielle, then played the Poulenc Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra. I haven’t heard les Labeques all that often, but I’ve always liked them, mostly because I remember reading a review in the Boston Globe (probably by Richard Dyer) that mentioned they were one of the few soloists he had ever seen return to the hall after their part of the program just to listen to the rest of the music. The Poulenc is a delightful mélange, and it reminded me of the story that John Adams wrote his Chamber Symphony while studying a Schoenberg score and hearing a Looney Tunes cartoon that his son was watching in another room – not because of those specific influences, but just because of that free-ranging grasp of different styles, from knotty to nutty. Throw in the Prokofiev 5 after the intermission, and that’s a nice evening. I was glad that in the Prokofiev Tilson Thomas avoided his tendency of late to smash things out. I thought it was really nicely balanced.
At home on Saturday, killing time before the theater – which is basically all I ever do – I dug into the CD pile and pulled out a recent release of Porgy and Bess – a recent release, but an old performance (brought to me like Alcestis from the grave), featuring Leontyne Price and William Warfield in the leads. It was the touring version which gave Price her first big break, though after that I don’t think she sang Bess much, no doubt to avoid being racially typecast. The opera underwent some adaptations and adjustments during and after its first run, and there were several versions floating around until the Houston Grand Opera revival in 1976 sort of set the text. This version differs slightly from the now familiar one not only occasionally in text but also in feel – the drums have more of the African sound so familiar to us nowadays from our world-music CDs, and there’s a jazzier feel all around, and not just because Cab Calloway plays Sportin’ Life. Porgy and Bess was the first opera I ever saw, so I have a special fondness for it, and though many consider it the Great American Opera I know that others dismiss it, partly based on its mixed-culture origins. Whatever its impurity, to me it creates its own cultural field, and is deeply moving, and a beautiful thing.
12 June 2006
Ligeti split
Gyorgy Sandor Ligeti, twentieth century man, May 28 1923 to June 12, 2006.
I'm listening to his vocal works now. I've only heard his music live a couple of times -- two performances of the American premiere of Le Grand Macabre and the complete piano etudes at Cal last fall -- and both times left me with an elation I rarely feel.
I can't even remember how or where I first heard of, or read about Ligeti, but I started collecting all the CDs in the series put out by Sony (then picked up by Teldec). The first one I bought had the Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, which was too zany an idea to be resisted. I expected it to sound sharp and angular but instead it was like a buzzing, humming cloud that gently died away. Can you ask more from a composer than sounds you didn't expect and had never heard before?
I hestitated about the title for this entry, fearing it would seem flip or disrespectful. But the program book for Le Grand Macabre (which I can't find at the moment) quoted him saying that after the Holocaust, it was only possible to write comically for the stage. This is as good an answer as any to the question about how one can write poetry after Auschwitz. One thing I really loved about Le Grand Macabre is that he avoids the separation into life = good; death = bad that a lesser artist would have chosen. The life we're shown is often filled with squabbles, vulgarity, and cruelty. Death is a strange visitor who may or may not be who we think he is. So I meant to salute his antic spirit.
I read that Ligeti had hoped to compose an opera based on the Alice books but poor health prevented him. What a loss. Somewhere in the spirit world there should be a ghostly opera house performing such great lost works as Ligeti's Alice or Gershwin's Dybbuk. Perhaps we'll all end up in the audience.
I'm listening to his vocal works now. I've only heard his music live a couple of times -- two performances of the American premiere of Le Grand Macabre and the complete piano etudes at Cal last fall -- and both times left me with an elation I rarely feel.
I can't even remember how or where I first heard of, or read about Ligeti, but I started collecting all the CDs in the series put out by Sony (then picked up by Teldec). The first one I bought had the Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, which was too zany an idea to be resisted. I expected it to sound sharp and angular but instead it was like a buzzing, humming cloud that gently died away. Can you ask more from a composer than sounds you didn't expect and had never heard before?
I hestitated about the title for this entry, fearing it would seem flip or disrespectful. But the program book for Le Grand Macabre (which I can't find at the moment) quoted him saying that after the Holocaust, it was only possible to write comically for the stage. This is as good an answer as any to the question about how one can write poetry after Auschwitz. One thing I really loved about Le Grand Macabre is that he avoids the separation into life = good; death = bad that a lesser artist would have chosen. The life we're shown is often filled with squabbles, vulgarity, and cruelty. Death is a strange visitor who may or may not be who we think he is. So I meant to salute his antic spirit.
I read that Ligeti had hoped to compose an opera based on the Alice books but poor health prevented him. What a loss. Somewhere in the spirit world there should be a ghostly opera house performing such great lost works as Ligeti's Alice or Gershwin's Dybbuk. Perhaps we'll all end up in the audience.
27 February 2006
Le Grand Macabre
Revisiting another production from the recent past: the American premiere of Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. This work was definitely one of the high points of Ms. Rosenberg's tenure as head of the San Francisco Opera. If that season hadn't also featured Nathan Gunn as Billy Budd then it would have been the clear winner that season.
I went to the panel discussion beforehand, which featured most of the singers and the directors. They were very eager to present this work as an adventure and an evening of entertaining theater. They kept stressing that although the music was difficult, it didn't sound that way (I guess what they meant is, this is not Moses und Aron). (Which I love, by the way.) The audience seemed fairly receptive, but then these are people who cared enough to go to a panel discussion. The question session was not as painful as those things sometimes are. My favorite question (and one of my all-time favorites): "Is there any actual music in this work, or is it all sound effects?" I was pondering the philosophical implications of the noise we define as sound effects and the noise we define as music, but the John Cage moment passed as the panel hastily explained that they were referring to a large and creative (one instrument is an inflated paper bag) percussion section, not to pre-recorded funny noises.
Here's the review:
Well, I loved Le Grand Macabre. I had already bought a ticket for a second performance (part of my one-man effort to prove there is a market for the offbeat) and I'm glad. I've heard the two official recordings, and a lot of Ligeti's other music, but this was the first piece I've heard live, and that always makes a difference to me. I was surprised at how gorgeous the music was. (In fact, at times I felt the music was almost too gorgeous.)
On the whole the audience seemed favorable, though clearly quite a few were either baffled or disgusted. When the first scene ended there was one very loud boo; of course, I heard someone boo the same way at the end of Rossini's Otello several years before, because he didn't like the big golden lion that was looming over every scene (he was next to me and explained, not that I asked). The opera company did a very good job of trying to educate/warn people about what they were going to see, so I really don't know why the guy was there -- why not spare yourself the time, money, and trouble if there's not even a chance you'll like it? Or at least wait to the end before deciding. Anyway -- some singers were better at enunciating the English text than others (Sir Willard White was particularly good, but then he's a native speaker, unlike some of the others).
The work has that whole eastern European politically-tinged sense of the absurd and the comically tragic. Many of the classic opera fixtures appeared in witty ways -- there's a bacchanalia a la Samson, a drinking song, two lovers with a mezzo as the man; it was noted often in the program that the aria for the Chief of the Secret Police (a woman) was reminiscent of the Queen of the Night's arias. The structure of the work actually reminded me of La Boheme, of all unlikely things -- there are four short scenes that are linked but not continuous, sort of giving a series of scenes from the life apocalyptic (as opposed to say the four short scenes of Rigoletto, which tell one tight story).
I said some of these things to an elderly usher I ran into on BART on the way home -- he appeared flabbergasted at my opinions, but his opinion was "to each his own" which is fine. This work is closer in style to a type of modernist theater and music that the core opera audience is probably not very familiar with. A lot of people go to the opera for overstuffed sofas, you know?
I think familiarity is the key here. The Magic Flute or Parsifal or Love for Three Oranges are just as strange, if
not stranger (OK, Parsifal is a lot stranger), than Le Grand Macabre; as the years roll by the general audience
will begin to hear the beauty, I think, the way they did for Nozze di Figaro or Rigoletto or Tristan or other works initially considered grotesque or too complex. The anime-style sets worked well -- they were in the spirit but didn't overwhelm the action. I wonder how a Brueghel-style setting (as specified by the composer) would work -- it might have the effect of making the work look quaint or distant.
They made a few changes to the lines of the Black and White Politicians to make them more politically pointed -- I didn't really think this was necessary, but it wasn't inappropriate. Definitely a memorable evening -- well worth seeing and very stage-worthy. I'm curious to see if any other American opera companies pick it up. At the end some of us jumped to our feet to applaud and others to run for the exits; this is how art advances. . . .
I went to the panel discussion beforehand, which featured most of the singers and the directors. They were very eager to present this work as an adventure and an evening of entertaining theater. They kept stressing that although the music was difficult, it didn't sound that way (I guess what they meant is, this is not Moses und Aron). (Which I love, by the way.) The audience seemed fairly receptive, but then these are people who cared enough to go to a panel discussion. The question session was not as painful as those things sometimes are. My favorite question (and one of my all-time favorites): "Is there any actual music in this work, or is it all sound effects?" I was pondering the philosophical implications of the noise we define as sound effects and the noise we define as music, but the John Cage moment passed as the panel hastily explained that they were referring to a large and creative (one instrument is an inflated paper bag) percussion section, not to pre-recorded funny noises.
Here's the review:
Well, I loved Le Grand Macabre. I had already bought a ticket for a second performance (part of my one-man effort to prove there is a market for the offbeat) and I'm glad. I've heard the two official recordings, and a lot of Ligeti's other music, but this was the first piece I've heard live, and that always makes a difference to me. I was surprised at how gorgeous the music was. (In fact, at times I felt the music was almost too gorgeous.)
On the whole the audience seemed favorable, though clearly quite a few were either baffled or disgusted. When the first scene ended there was one very loud boo; of course, I heard someone boo the same way at the end of Rossini's Otello several years before, because he didn't like the big golden lion that was looming over every scene (he was next to me and explained, not that I asked). The opera company did a very good job of trying to educate/warn people about what they were going to see, so I really don't know why the guy was there -- why not spare yourself the time, money, and trouble if there's not even a chance you'll like it? Or at least wait to the end before deciding. Anyway -- some singers were better at enunciating the English text than others (Sir Willard White was particularly good, but then he's a native speaker, unlike some of the others).
The work has that whole eastern European politically-tinged sense of the absurd and the comically tragic. Many of the classic opera fixtures appeared in witty ways -- there's a bacchanalia a la Samson, a drinking song, two lovers with a mezzo as the man; it was noted often in the program that the aria for the Chief of the Secret Police (a woman) was reminiscent of the Queen of the Night's arias. The structure of the work actually reminded me of La Boheme, of all unlikely things -- there are four short scenes that are linked but not continuous, sort of giving a series of scenes from the life apocalyptic (as opposed to say the four short scenes of Rigoletto, which tell one tight story).
I said some of these things to an elderly usher I ran into on BART on the way home -- he appeared flabbergasted at my opinions, but his opinion was "to each his own" which is fine. This work is closer in style to a type of modernist theater and music that the core opera audience is probably not very familiar with. A lot of people go to the opera for overstuffed sofas, you know?
I think familiarity is the key here. The Magic Flute or Parsifal or Love for Three Oranges are just as strange, if
not stranger (OK, Parsifal is a lot stranger), than Le Grand Macabre; as the years roll by the general audience
will begin to hear the beauty, I think, the way they did for Nozze di Figaro or Rigoletto or Tristan or other works initially considered grotesque or too complex. The anime-style sets worked well -- they were in the spirit but didn't overwhelm the action. I wonder how a Brueghel-style setting (as specified by the composer) would work -- it might have the effect of making the work look quaint or distant.
They made a few changes to the lines of the Black and White Politicians to make them more politically pointed -- I didn't really think this was necessary, but it wasn't inappropriate. Definitely a memorable evening -- well worth seeing and very stage-worthy. I'm curious to see if any other American opera companies pick it up. At the end some of us jumped to our feet to applaud and others to run for the exits; this is how art advances. . . .
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