the troubadour plays his guitar

Last week I went over to Berkeley to hear the young guitarist Milos, presented by Cal Performances. He grew up during the latest round of Balkan strife (I think he's 29 or 30 now) and describes himself as from Montenegro, and even more as from the Mediterranean (his first album was called Mediterraneo). He goes by his first name professionally; I suspect that's because he doesn't want to keep correcting the pronunciation of his last name (Karadaglic). As someone who constantly has to correct people who mispronounce my last name (it rhymes with "jazz"), I sympathize.

I was curious to hear Milos for several reasons. Primarily, I thought I would enjoy hearing him play, but of course that's my primary reason for hearing anyone. I have heard some classical guitar but not a whole lot so I wanted to hear some live and expand my live-music experiences. And the marketing push behind him has taken some interesting forms: last summer I was idly channel surfing one day and came across what seemed to be basically an infomercial: a thirty-minute show in which he was interviewed about his second album and its Latin American theme, intercut with scenes of him playing and shooting a music video. And I saw the album for sale from some unlikely source (could it have been QVC?). By the way, I guess I should make it clear I am not looking askance at these methods; I'm all in favor of creative marketing, and I get exasperated when people announce that certain types of music (for example, almost anything composed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) "just won't sell" and I think, well, you're not trying.

But there's always a certain amount of backlash to perceived hype, particularly when the performer is also notably good-looking. So I wasn't quite sure what to expect last week at First Congregational Church. As the place filled up we saw an empty chair in front of the altar, and a white guitar case on the floor to the left of it. The concert started late (seriously, if you're not going to start a weeknight concert until 8:00, then at least start it on time). As the lights dimmed Milos came out, sat down, put his left foot up on the guitar case, and without looking up or speaking started playing Bach's Lute Suite in C minor, BWV 997.

I've realized over the years that I dislike electric guitar, and then I realized why: it seems a violation of the instrument's inherent intimacy: no wonder love serenades all feature acoustic guitar. I had assumed that there would be a microphone in front of the guitar, but there wasn't. The playing felt very pure and direct. When Milos finished the Bach piece, he then looked up and smiled and spoke. He speaks very much to the point, pausing occasionally and smiling. He said he liked to open with Bach, which was good for "clearing the ears." He mentioned how happy he was to be in this beautiful church and he praised the acoustics there several times. First Congregational has always had a very New England look to me; I wonder what associations he brought to it. He gave some historical background on the Bach piece, which was written before there were guitars. Then he talked about playing Latin American music, and how in Europe and also probably in the US there are fairly clear lines between  what is "classical" and "popular" music but the lines are blurred in Latin America.

So he played four pieces by Villa-Lobos: Prelude No. 1 in E minor, Etude No 11 in E minor, Valsa-Choro from the Suite Popular Brasileira, and Etude No 12 in A minor. He described the last piece as "a showcase of crazy." Milos is not a large man but his hands look large and his fingers are very long and tapered, moving swiftly over the strings. But what I found most impressive about his performance throughout was not the flash and dazzle, but the inwardness. His interpretations (all evening, not just of these pieces in particular) were very poetic, gossamer and fleeting but with underlying tensile strength, like a spiderweb. If you were wandering in a moonlit garden with a fountain splashing quietly, this is the music that would go with the scene. He's clearly a serious artist and one with integrity, which might be a way of saying he clearly thinks more about his playing than his marketing.

After the intermission he thanked us for coming back: "It's always nice when people come back," which he followed with another quick smile. He played some more pieces, but I think the order was different from that listed in the program. He announced that since he liked the acoustics there so much he would play four pieces. So there was Danza Brasilera by Jorge Morel, Milonga by Jorge Cardoso, Batucada by Isaias Savio, and Un Sueno en la Floresta by Augustin Barrios Mangore (these are among the pieces on his second album). He said that one of them (it might have been Milonga, but I'm not sure) was his mother's favorite, and he liked to play it and think of her since he hadn't seen her in a very long time. He seems to like pieces that transport himself and us to another place. His last piece, Domeniconi's Koyunbaba, was inspired by part of the Turkish coast, and when Milos saw the area, he was immediately reminded of his native Montenegro. So he described it as an inexpensive flight home, and he hoped it would conjure up a similar place for us. The audience was mostly very silent and attentive, but of course it was during the quietest portion of Koyunbaba that some guy behind me started sneezing with a weird high-pitched pew sort of pinging sound. Well, I of all people know that you can't control a sneeze. What was really irritating was that he followed this with the very very slow unwrapping of crinkly plastic around a lozenge. Just rip it off if you must! Better yet, buy the lozenges wrapped in paper! Sometimes people really are hopeless. That aside - that little flaw that throws the beauty of the rest into relief - it was a very impressive and enjoyable evening.

Milos went to the lobby afterwards and signed CDs and programs. (That's where the photos are from.) He was very genial and gracious and very tactfully kept the line moving.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: March 2013

Other Minds presents its annual festival 28 February - 2 March at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco.

Awesome local chorus Volti sings new music by Dan Visconti, Harold Meltzer, Mark Winges, Kirsten Broberg, and Huang Ruo, 1 -3 March (with a San Francisco performance sandwiched in between two Berkeley outings).

American Bach Soloists present music by Handel (Dixit Dominus), Bach (Concerto for Oboe d'amore), and Vivaldi (Beatus vir and Concerto for Viola d'amore), 1 - 4 March, in their usual various locations.

Violinist Rachel Podger joins Philharmonia Baroque for a program of, not surprisingly, baroque violin music, featuring Corelli, Vivaldi, Mossi, Pergolesi, and Locatelli; 15 - 17 and 20 March, in the usual various locations.

At the Conservatory of Music, new-music ensemble BluePrint, conducted by Nicole Paiement, performs the world premiere of Ian Dicke's Grand Central, along with Lou Harrison's Tandy's Tango, Leo Brouwer's String Quartet No 4, and Armando Luna's Graffiti, on 2 March. For some reason the Conservatory website is not set up with links to individual events, but if you click here you will get the performance calendar for the current month and it's easy enough to slide over to March and then down to BluePrint - check out their other offerings along the way!

Cutting Ball Theater presents Ionesco's The Chairs, in a new translation by Cutting Ball Artistic Director Rob Melrose, directed by Annie Elias, 1 - 31 March.

Shotgun Players continues through Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy with Part 2, Shipwreck, 22 March - 21 April (they are also presenting Part 1, Voyage, 6 April - 4 May, in case you missed it last year).

Earplay performs music by Yao Chen, Tiffany Sevilla, Mikel Kuehn, Arnold Schoenberg, and Peter Josheff, on 18 March (7:30 at ODC Theater).

The Oakland East Bay Symphony performs Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks (Michael Morgan conducting), Britten's Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes (Bryan Nies conducting), and Faure's Requiem (Lynne Morrow conducting, with soloists Carrie Hennessey and Zachary Gordin), on 15 March at the Paramount.

San Francisco Ballet presents three programs: The first features the world premiere of Yuri Possokhov's version of The Rite of Spring, as well as Beaux (choreographed by Mark Morris* to music by Martinu), and Guide to Strange Places (choreographed by Ashley Page to music by John Adams); that's Program 3, 26 February to 10 March. The second features the world premiere of From Foreign Lands (Alexei Ratmansky choreographer; no composer is listed), as well as Within the Golden Hour (Christopher Wheeldon to music by Ezio Bosso), and Scotch Symphony (George Balanchine to Mendelssohn); that's Program 4, 1 - 9 March. The third features the return of Onegin, by John Cranko to music by Tchaikovsky (but not from his Onegin opera); that's Program 5, 21 - 28 March.

* Mark Morris's own new version of The Rite of Spring will be coming to Cal Performances in June as part of Ojai North.

Speaking of Cal Performances, they have another busy month in March. Here are some highlights: The Secret Garden, a new opera (co-presented with the San Francisco Opera) by Nolan Gasser (music) and Carey Harrison (libretto) based on the beloved childhood classic, 1 - 10 March; the Brentano String Quartet, playing Haydn, Purcell, Bartok, and Beethoven, 3 March; baritone Nathan Gunn, accompanied by Julie Gunn, will sing Schubert, Schumann (Dichterliebe), Barber, Ives, and Bolcom, 9 March; pianist Jeffrey Kahane playing Chopin, Liszt transcriptions of Bach and Schumann and Schubert, Pavel Haas, and Gabriel Kahane (his son), 10 March; Trisha Brown Dance Company, 15 March; the Afiara String Quartet playing Haydn, Beethoven, and a new work by Brett Abigaña, 17 March. Check here for a full listing, though be advised that Wynton Marsalis and the Tallis Scholars (those are separate concerts, which is really too bad) are sold out.

[UPDATE: The Jeffrey Kahane concert has been cancelled due to injury.]

San Francisco Performances presents violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis playing Mozart, Schubert, Lutoslawski, and Saint-Saens, 4 March; mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and pianist Vlad Iftinca, singing and playing many different things, 17 March; pianist Jonathan Biss completing his four-concert series on Schumann and his influences with a solo concert on 17 March featuring Janacek and Berg as well as Schumann and then a concert with the Elias String Quartet on 29 March featuring Schumann, Purcell, and a new work by Timothy Andres (Andres is a pianist as well as composer and will present a "musical self-portrait" on 27 March at one of SFP's Wednesday 6:30 Salon at the Rex concerts); and violinist Midori playing all of Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin in two concerts, 23 and 24 March.

Over at the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts selections from Mozart's Zaide with soprano Nadine Sierra along with Bruckner's gorgeous 7th Symphony, 28 February - 2 March; he is joined by dazzling pianist Yuja Wang for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4, along with the Brahms 1 and Samuel Carl Adams's Drift and Providence, 6 - 9 March (be advised that the Thursday 7 March concert is up in Sonoma); and then he conducts the Mahler 9 on 14-17 March.

The Exit Theater presents Behind the Curtain, a mini-festival of "dramatic readings" of three backstage dramas by three local playwrights: In the Wings by Meghan O'Connor (28 March), The Rose of Youth by Marissa Skudlarek (29 March), and Pastorella by Stuart Bousel (30 March).

Normally I don't list Los Angeles performances here, since I don't live down there, but I received a press release that included the magic words "inspired by American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, The Artist of the Beautiful" so here it is: The Ghost Road Company presents The Bargain and the Butterfly, 26 March - 7 April, at Artworks Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. Ghost Road has also been influenced by Jerzy Grotowski, so they're just full of magic words for me. More information here.

Poem of the Week 2013/9

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee;
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company;
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought;

For oft, when on my couch I lie
in vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

It's late February in California, which means spring is well on its way, manifested not only in the watery (or dry) itchy eyes and running noses and sneezes and bad headaches of allergy attacks, but also in happier signs of the changing season; years ago I planted some daffodils in my backyard, and though I've done nothing with them since but look at them when they bloom around this time of year, and though there are fewer than there once were, they still spring up faithfully and dance in the breeze, just as Wordsworth said they did. I always think of this poem when I see them, though I have neither a crowd nor a host of daffodils.

I can hear the boys next door playing basketball, and the children on the other side will no doubt soon be out screaming again, and the people behind me are chain-sawing down a tree. Solitude is very important to this poem; the speaker discovers the flowers while out wandering alone - actually, while lonely. He typifies himself as a cloud, not a man, and we don't know exactly where he is when he sees "a crowd, a host" - there's a sense of being in Nature, but that's only because he's brought a cloud floating high into our minds; that might have been an emotional metaphor, and there's nothing to prevent this from being in a city, and the crowd being one of people, or the host being armies on a plain. It's a dazzling surprise when we suddenly come across the wild spread of the daffodils (I can sense some of the same broad golden effect when I look at the oxalis that has taken over various portions of my yard).

The man is a cloud and the daffodils are personified as a crowd, but at least it's a dancing crowd. The dancing effect is mentioned twice in the first two stanzas, and the nearby waves are also said to dance, though not to such striking effect as the flowers; but the mention of the waves and the bay and the earlier mention of the stars brings a lot of the natural world into conjunction with this glimpse of spring flowers. But it's in memory that the sight has the most power, and in memory that the wanderer also comes into conjunction with the world around him; later, his loneliness turned to solitude, he discovers bliss when the vanished moment returns inwardly to him, and his spirit joins with the remembered daffodils in dance: the lonely man finds company united with the splendors of undisturbed nature.

Wordsworth of course wrote during the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution that would remake the world's landscape and climate. I wonder if his bayside stretch of daffodils is still around, possibly saved only as a marketing possibility for Lake Country tours, or if development has taken over such a desirable spot. (Now my neighbors behind me are playing their crappy music too loudly.) If I ever moved to another house I would plant some daffodils there too, and wait for spring despite its attendant allergies.

I took this poem from the Penguin edition of the poems, Volume 1, which appears to be out of print, but it's one of his greatest hits and would be in most Wordsworth collections, including this one from Penguin.

Poem of the Week 2013/8

I've received some hints that it's been a bit gloomy here at Poem of the Week, so I thought I'd lighten things up with a song about syphilis:

Oh my darling Paquette,
She is haunting me yet
With a dear souvenir
I shall never forget.
'Twas a gift that she got
From a seafaring Scot
He received he believed in Shalott!

In Shalott from his dame
Who was certain it came
With a kiss from a Swiss
(She'd forgotten his name),
But he told her that he
Had been given it free
By a sweet little cheat in Paree.

Then a man from Japan,
Then a Moor from Iran,
Though the Moor isn't sure
How the whole thing began,
But the gift we can see
Had a long pedigree
When at last it was passed on to me!

Well, the Moor in the end
Spent a night with a friend
And the dear souvenir
Just continued the trend
To a young English lord
Who was stung, they record,
By a wasp in a hospital ward!

Well, the wasp on the wing
Had occasion to sting
A Milano soprano
Who brought home the thing
To her young paramour,
Who was rendered impure,
And forsook her to look for the cure.

Thus he happened to pass
Through Westphalia, alas,
Where he met with Paquette,
And she drank from his glass.
I was pleased as could be
When it came back to me;
Makes us all just a small family!

John La Touche / Richard Wilbur, from Candide

This might be the wittiest song ever written about venereal disease, with the possible exception of the other song in Candide that's also about syphilis. Two songs on STDs might seem excessive, but Bernstein's musical has such a convoluted textual and staging history that directors can probably use either, neither, or both numbers. And given how many musicals have multiple songs about love, why not more than one about the possible consequences? When the San Francisco Symphony performed the work several years ago, V and I took her daughter, who turned to me at intermission and said, "Am I to understand that syphilis is a major plot point in this work?" I assured her that she was indeed to understand that. This sort of subterranean transmission of disease underlies much of the sexual anxiety in works that predate the discovery of a cure (just part of the biological imperatives behind our morality). Perhaps a song with this light tone could only be written once a cure had been discovered; on the other hand, dancing on in the face of disease and death is a common and even praiseworthy reaction. The short, two-beat lines and the clever rhymes move us through rapidly; rapidity, as well as elaborate rhyming, are hallmarks of light verse in English, a language which is famously less rich in rhymes than some other European languages, but perhaps the very difficulties in rhyming are what make them seem so smart and witty when they're done right. I love the line "And she drank from his glass," which reminds me of a comic I once heard (I can't remember her name) who said that if she ever came down with an STD she was going to tell her mother by saying, "Oh, Mom, you were so right about toilet seats!"

For reasons I'm still pondering, I don't really respond to Bernstein's persona or most of his music, but I love Candide and it's been one of my favorite musicals since I first heard it. These lyrics are taken from Bernstein's 1989 recording. It's complete, and authorized, and all that, and that's usually enough for me, but I'm not crazy about some of the singers, and the recorded sound itself is odd (and that's usually not something I'm really picky about): mostly very recessive except for the loud parts, which are way too loud (this might have changed, of course, on a re-release; I bought it when it first came out). The original cast album is a classic - Barbara Cook is still the gold standard for "Glitter and Be Gay" - but it's nowhere near complete. I think I read somewhere that Wilbur wrote these particular lyrics alone, but the booklet attributes them to John La Touche as well, perhaps because they are embedded in the auto-da-fe scene ("What a day, what a day / For an auto-da-fe!"), and that might be what La Touche wrote. (If anyone knows for sure, please let me know). Pangloss is about to be publicly hanged by the Portuguese inquisitors but insists that they can't hang him since he's too sick to die. The crowd, reluctant to be cheated of the expected entertainment, demands an explanation, and he launches into the song. (I have omitted the choruses.)

7

Seven years of reverberating, so happy blogaversary to me. Many thanks to all who visit. Please continue to do so!

These are the BART tracks that take me off to events in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland. I spend a lot of time staring at them.

Poem of the Week 2013/7

Lament 10

Ursula, my sweet girl, where did you go?
Is it a place or country that we know?
Or were you borne above the highest sphere
To dwell and sing among the cherub choir?
Have you flown into Paradise? Or soared
To the Islands of the Blest? Are you aboard
With Charon, scooping water while he steers,
And does that drink inure you to my tears?
Clad in gray feathers of a nightingale,
No longer human, do you fill some vale
With plaintive song? Or must you still remain
In Purgatory, as if the slightest stain
Of sin could have defiled your soul? Did it return
To where you were (my woe) before being born?
Wherever you may be - if you exist -
Take pity on my grief. O presence missed,
Comfort me, haunt me; you whom I have lost,
Come back again, be shadow, dream, or ghost.

Jan Kochanowski, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney

Jan Kochanowski (1530 - 1584) was the major pre-Romantic Polish poet, one of those whose adopted forms and use of the vernacular (as opposed to the humanists' universal language, Latin) paved the way for those who followed him. His beloved youngest daughter Ursula died before she was three years old; he responded with a series of nineteen elegies. Here is number ten, in which the poet emphasizes our uncertainty about what happens after death by rapidly shifting among the many post-life possible alternatives: is she in Heaven? Limbo? the classical realm of the Underworld? reincarnated? in Catholic Purgatory? Just . . . gone? His ache for his lost darling is so strong that he doesn't really care what the truth is, as long as she abides with him in some form.

This is from the 1995 translation of Laments by Baranczak and Heaney.

Poem of the Week 2013/6

The rainy Pleiads wester,
  Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
  And I lie down alone.

The rainy Pleiads wester,
  And seek beyond the sea
The head that I shall dream of,
  And 'twill not dream of me.

AE Housman

The constellation Pleiades - the Seven Sisters - sets in the west shortly before dawn in the late fall months, signalling the oncoming winter weather for civilizations that were guided by the stars. The constellation Orion follows after the sisters in heaven as the hunter Orion did on earth. This poem seems like echt Housman, with its sea and stars, its deep emotion held in by a strict structure, its spare lyricism, its stoic sense of loneliness and unrequited love. It seems like a deeply personal poem. And as children of the Romantics, we tend to think that this is what poetry is - what it must be: deeply personal, sprung directly from the writer's soul and closely linked to his or her daily life. But there's another tradition, dating in Western tradition back to the Greeks and Romans, one of which Housman, a classics scholar by profession, was well aware: that of building off existing tropes, revising, revisiting, and extending the work of past masters. And this very Housman-like poem is actually based closely on a centuries-old fragment from Sappho. Here it is in the Loeb Classical Library rendition:

The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time goes by, and I lie alone.

Sappho, Fragment 168B, translated by David A. Campbell

Since the purpose of the Loeb volumes is to provide a crib on the right-hand page for those working through the original Greek or Latin on the left, we can assume that this is a straightforward, fairly denotative version. Here's another rendition in English that takes a slightly more flexible approach. Several months ago I was suddenly gripped by a need to read Sappho in different translations; of all the ones I read, this is the version of this particular fragment that I found most haunting, most memorable as a stand-alone English poem:

Tonight I've watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho, translated by Mary Barnard

Adding "Tonight I've watched" really sets the frame for this piece; it adds a note of self-awareness, as the speaker literally watches time, in the form of the regular movements of celestial bodies, pass her by. "The night is now half-gone" is equivalent to "it is midnight" and "youth goes" is surely the implication of "time goes by" but half-gone and youth goes emphasizes, in their repetition, the going, and though the moon and the Pleiades will continue their rounds, the watcher's youth will never come back. The line breaks slip downward and the stanza breaks emphasize the thoughts rising up in her sleepless night.

These lines make a very complete emotional statement, but of course, as with almost all of Sappho's surviving poetry, this is a fragment, and though the temptation is to read these lines as Sappho pouring her heart out, we have no idea what the actual context is (in fact, according to a note in the Loeb edition, some scholars reject the attribution to Sappho altogether). This might be a personal poem, it might be for some public ceremony, it might be about the speaker, or about someone else, it might be part of retelling a myth, it might be about any number of things. But does this really matter to us? This is what we have left, centuries later, and if the way the words are put together and the emotions they conjure are real and meaningful, do the personal and public pressures that went into these lines ultimately matter? (Leave it to a dramatist, and therefore a master of inventing intense emotions, to see the situation clearly: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?" Hamlet raises, but does not answer, the question; instead, he takes the emotions raised by the First Player's poetic speech and relates them back to his personal dilemmas and struggles.)

Back to what Housman did with this fragment. He brings out the atmospheric touch of the rain implicit in the mention of the Pleiades, and he changes the moon to Orion - another hunter, like the moon goddess Artemis/Diana, but one that never catches his prey - indeed, one who was punished for the pursuit. In Barnard's version of Sappho, it seems the speaker is already in bed, alone, lying awake (unable to sleep), pondering time - her life - passing her by. In Housman, just the conjunction "and" ("and I lie down alone") makes the speaker's lying down seem dependent on the stroke of midnight ceasing, as if he were waiting for something or someone and finally admitting to himself that nothing will happen and no one is coming.

Then Housman takes the Sapphic fragment and narrows the possibilities down to one: he makes it a poem about unrequited love. I'm fascinated by the use of "head" for the distant lover: there are several Housman-like possibilities that would have fit there: girl, lass, youth, lad, even one if he wanted to avoid specifying gender. Why is the loved one's existence reduced to a head? Specifying head reduces the physical aspects of  the speaker's love, as if he is looking for an intellectual or emotional connection even more than a physical one (though he won't get any of them). It emphasizes the interior, unspoken and thoughtful, nature of the speaker's love, as if it exists only in his head, and may or may not ever be expressed outwardly. Given the loved object's distance and indifference, such expression seems unlikely. Whatever personal pressures and feelings went into Housman's, or Sappho's, urge to write their lines is mostly irrelevant for readers, for whom Housman's poem, like Sappho's fragment, now exists independently of the dead writers, as an arrangement of words waiting to strike a respondent chord in our possibly very different lives.

I took the Housman poem from this edition of his works, which appears to be out of print though available; there is also a Penguin edition. The Loeb Sappho is in Greek Lyric I: Sappho & Alcaeus. Mary Barnard's translation is available here.

Shotgun's Woyzeck

Last Thursday I finally made it to the Shotgun Players production of Woyzeck, with music and lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, directed by Mark Jackson, based on a concept by Robert Wilson. Originally I was supposed to go the first week of January, but I got sick, which was not how I wanted to start the new year. Luckily for me the run had been extended and the box office was able to  switch my reservation to another day. The Shotgun Box Office folks are always extremely helpful.

I had really been looking forward to this show. First of all: Woyzeck! Also, I had really enjoyed the previous Tom Waits/Robert Wilson work I had seen, The Black Rider, which ACT presented a few years ago (like Woyzeck, that was also based on a work better known as a German opera; in that case, Weber's Der Freischutz). I thought it was a cool bold choice for a relatively small theater. Its appearance on the schedule was one of the reasons I became a subscriber.

So sadly I have to say I just didn't connect with the show. I can't say I disliked it; in fact there were many things to like. But, as with their production of Sondheim's Assassins, the show was brutally, inexplicably amplified. Why? Why, in a theater as small as the Ashby Stage, would you need to do that? The advantages of a space like that are intimacy and immediacy and a sense of involvement: why would you sacrifice all that for a pointless wall of aggressive sound that pushes you back from the performance rather than draws you in? At times the amplification blurred the words. All the performers had those ugly little wires taped to their faces with what I guess is the power source bulging out of their back waistbands, which doesn't exactly help the illusion that these people I'm watching are anything but contemporary performers. I guess that's fine if you're going for that Brechtian distancing effect, but it really pushed me back from any emotional involvement with the characters.

It doesn't help that the ending is changed: in this version the child of Marie and Woyzeck is still a babe in arms, and so there is no heart-breaking ending when the little boy goes out to play with the other children and it turns out what they're doing is looking at his mother's dead body. She still dies - in fact, I realized that this is the third Mark Jackson show I've seen in the past few years in which the female lead has her throat slit, though in the other two (Miss Julie and Faust, Part One) she does it herself. The night I saw the play the Marie, Madeline H.D. Brown, was sick. Her understudy was fine, but I've really liked Brown in the other things I've seen her in recently, so I was disappointed not to see her. (I'm afraid I don't know the understudy's name; the substitution must have been a last-minute thing, since Jackson announced they would need to delay the start of the show by a few minutes so she could get ready, and there was no paper slip in the program or any announcement that gave her name.)

Tom Waits is a great songwriter, and a very distinctive one, conjuring up a very specific world and worldview in his songs, but it did cross my mind that maybe that world is just a shade too wistful and picturesque, just a shade too scruffy low-life colorful, for the harsh cruelty and caustic absurdity of Buchner's play. I thought Kevin Clarke as the Doctor and Anthony Nemirovsky as  the Captain were the best at capturing the cruelty and the comedy. The rest of the cast was also strong (Andy Alabran as Karl, an Idiot; Alex Crowther as Woyzeck; Joe Estlack as the Drum Major; Josh Pollock as the Carnival Announcer;  Kenny Toll as Andres; Beth Wilmurt as Margaret). But I just couldn't get past the awful fake sound.

Birtwistle weekend in Berkeley

Cal Performances had a lot going on this last Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and though I was tempted by the Joffrey Ballet down in Zellerbach Hall I ended up at two mostly-modern music concerts up at Hertz. Both of them featured works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose music I had previously only heard on CD.

The Eco Ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, played Saturday night. I felt some trepidation as I saw many students filling up the seats, having vivid and unpleasant memories of the weird rude audience at the first Eco Ensemble concert, but this time, at least from where I sat (I slipped into the front row right before the concert started), the audience was attentive and appreciative. The Ecos ambled out and there seemed to be some mix-up or mishap with the set-up, since there was some low-key discussion back and forth and one of the players turned to us and suggested we talk among ourselves. They got it straightened out shortly whatever it was and launched into Birtwistle's Secret Theatre. It's a rich, dense, fun thirty or so minutes. About five wind instruments stood off to the right and jetted and fluted about above the thick, slower flow of the strings. At times I was reminded of some great slow river-beast crawling forward while the bright birds swooped above and around. Layering seems to be a major technique for Birtwistle, in ways that are easier to appreciate during a live performance as opposed to a recording.

After the intermission came a showing of Jean Epstein's 1928 French silent film La Chute de la Maison Usher, with a new score by Ivan Fedele (who came up afterwards to take a bow). The film is pretty artsy and weird and wonderful, as befits both experimental silent films and anything based on Poe, who has always been admired by the French (sometimes more than he was in his own country). Oddly and amusingly, though the very brief English synopsis at the beginning of the movie referred, as in Poe's original story, to Roderick Usher and his sister, the film changed her into his wife; according to the program, this was to avoid the overtones of incest, which I thought were kind of the point. (In fact I wonder if one reason Debussy was drawn to this story for his unfinished opera was because of such hidden links to Wagner's Ring: incest, complications of love, betrayal, and degeneration, followed by a cataclysmic finale.) The intertitles were in the original French. It would have been helpful to have a print with English subtitles as well; I got the gist of each title, but sometimes there were too many words and too little time. But that's a small matter.

I'm pretty sure Epstein took a very good look at Murnau's Nosferatu before making this film; there was a similar eerie carriage ride to a haunted destination, with the local villagers reluctant to go anywhere near; waving bare tree branches scraping like fingers across the gray skies; a soft ghostly grayness playing between the light and shade. There are abrupt transitions and unsettling cuts in the editing and sudden close-ups of hands or faces and pale candles dripping down low. Fedele's music is moody and circular and fits the film very well. Oddly there was less overt drama in this score for what is after all an intensely dramatic plot than in the Birtwistle piece, the theatricality of whose secret theater was very evident.

I was back up at Hertz on Sunday afternoon for pianist Nicolas Hodges. It was a recital of high virtuosity, but it's a virtuosity of a deeper dazzle than the flash and fireworks usually associated with the term. Though he is now bearded and therefore looking a little more Bohemian than the last time I saw him, he is still completely no-nonsense in his presentation: he strides out quickly, sits down and starts playing immediately, without swaying or rocking or humming or any kind of drama outside of the music he's making. He started off with Debussy's Etudes, Book 1, starting from the simple exercises with the amusing dissonant note insisting on inserting itself and then shimmering and dazzling through to the end. That was followed by Elliot Carter's tuneful Two Thoughts About the Piano, like a clear river.There was extremely enthusiastic applause from the audience when he finished and when Hodges came out for the third bow he extended his arms to each side to still the clapping and told us that that was the first time he had played Carter's music since his death late last year, making it the first time he couldn't call the composer up to the stage, so he asked us to give a round of applause "for Elliott." We obliged. I love it when artists do generous things like that. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Rolando Villazon because after he sang Dichterliebe at Cal several years ago he picked up the score and gestured to it, directing the applause towards Schumann.

After the intermission Hodges played Busoni's Giga, Bolero e Variazione, Study after Mozart, from An Die Jugend, Book III. It's based on a little dance tune from Nozze di Figaro. This twentieth-century spin on an older form led suitably up to the west coast premiere of Birtwistle's Gigue Machine (which was co-commissioned by Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall). As with the Secret Theatre, a bright, sharp set of high notes dart above a deeper, smoother, steadier base. The piece starts slowly with sort of a stuttering note and rapidly grows in complexity only to die back down and then start up again before dying back down for the final time. A lot of simultaneous motion is packed into a relatively short time (between ten and fifteen minutes). It actually sounded more organic than machine-like to me. I hope I'll get to hear more live Birtwistle soon. Debussy book-ended the recital, with Etudes, Book II following the Birtwistle. It was an excellent Sunday afternoon.

Poem of the Week 2013/5

The Erl-King

O who rides by night thro' the woodland so wild?
It is the fond father embracing his child;
And close the boy nestles within his loved arm,
To hold himself fast, and to keep himself warm.

"O father, see yonder! see yonder!" he says;
"My boy, upon what dost thou fearfully gaze?"
"O, 'tis the Erl-King with his crown and his shroud."
"No, my son, it is but a dark wreath of the cloud."

{The Erl-King Speaks}
"O come and go with me, thou loveliest child;
By many a gay sport shall thy time be beguiled;
My mother keeps for thee many a fair toy,
And many a fine flower shall she pluck for my boy."

"O father, my father, and did you not hear
The Erl-King whisper so low in my ear?"
"Be still, my heart's darling - my child, be at ease;
It was but the wild blast as it sung thro' the trees."

{Erl-King}
"O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest boy?
My daughter shall tend thee with care and with joy;
She shall bear thee so lightly thro' wet and thro' wild,
And press thee, and kiss thee, and sing to my child."

"O father, my father, and saw you not plain
The Erl-King's pale daughter glide past thro' the rain?"
"Oh yes, my loved treasure, I knew it full soon;
It was the grey willow that danced to the moon."

{Erl-King}
"O come and go with me, no longer delay,
Or else, silly child, I will drag thee away."
"O father! O father! now, now, keep your hold,
The Erl-King has seized me - his grasp is so cold!"

Sore trembled the father; he spurr'd thro' the wild,
Clasping close to his bosom his shuddering child;
He reaches his dwelling in doubt and in dread,
But, clasp'd to his bosom, the infant was dead.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Sir Walter Scott

This famous ballad is given here in a contemporary translation (Goethe was older than Scott, having been born in 1749 as against Scott's 1771, but he was also longer-lived, since both died in 1832). It's not surprising that this atmospheric German tale of the uncanny should appeal to the man who made the wild moors and men of Scotland a staple of Romanticism. Every time I'm at a bookstore or supermarket and I pass the romance novels and I see covers featuring a brawny tartaned outlaw clasping a fearless lass, I'm impressed once again by the enduring influence of Scott. His English version maintains the original's steady on-driving force (reminiscent of the father's galloping horse) and the sudden stop short at the final word: dead. In the eerie storm-filled night it's unclear whether the sick child is hallucinating the spectral Erl-King and his misty daughter or whether the menacing spirits are real. In either case the father's love and fear are definitely real.

For me the most haunting line in the poem is ". . . and saw you not plain / The Erl-King's pale daughter glide past thro' the rain?" Given the multiplicity of characters (father, son, Erl-King, Erl-King's daughter, galloping horse), the evocative atmosphere, and the primal fear at the poem's heart (death is stealing my loved child), it's not surprising that this poem has appealed to so many composers (Schubert's setting is the most famous).

Everyman's Library has an excellent series of books called Pocket Poetry, some of which are selections of individual poets and some of which are anthologies. I found this version in one of the latter, Poems Bewitched and Haunted, selected and edited by the poet John Hollander.

UPDATE: Let me draw your attention to the comments, where Lisa has posted a link to her blog entry in which she has collected several videos of different musical performances as well as the original German text.