Opera Parallèle & Cal Performances: La Belle et la Bête

Several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, Opera Parallèle presented Philip Glass's operatic take on Cocteau's magical fairy-tale film from 1946, La Belle et la Bête; I missed that production but fortunately a revised version was given a two-day run in Zellerbach Hall (I saw it last night) under the auspices of Cal Performances. Opera Parallèle has now performed all three of Glass's Cocteau operas (the other two are Orphée & Les Enfants Terribles); La Belle et la Bête is a bit different from the other two in that rather than a stand-alone stage recreation of the film, it is meant to run alongside the original as an alternative soundtrack (& in fact it is available as such on the Criterion blu-ray release of the film).

The Zellerbach stage was set with six different screens, three on top & three below. Their sizes & the line-up were balanced but not symmetrical; the middle screen on the top, the largest of the six, showed Cocteau's film. The smaller screen below usually showed the film as re-shot with OP's personnel (chiefly baritone Hadleigh Adams as the Beast/Prince & Avenant & soprano Chea Kang as Belle). The two screens flanking the top screen showed fragments & close-ups of the Cocteau film & the two flanking screens on the bottom showed other OP performers (chiefly mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis as the stepsisters & baritone Aurelien Mangwa as Belle's father, her brother Ludovic, & the moneylender) or appropriate scenes related to the mood or setting of the scene (such as re-creations of the stone faces with blinking eyes from Beast's castle). The screens each had an ornate frame, as if around an artwork, while the top center screen, the movie screen, had none, making it look like a regular movie screen, while the others with their fancy frames reminded us of the artistic eye & placement guiding everything we were seeing, a note of the artificial & aesthetic which reinforced Cocteau's plea, at the beginning of his film, that we have the conscious sophistication to watch it with the unsophisticated but therefore farther-seeing eyes of a child open to magic.

In addition to the action being shown on the screens, the performers also enacted some of the scenes on stage, often alongside their filmed selves or Cocteau's originals. One of the beauties of the staging was how it reflected the film's intentions; in the scene in which Belle first enters the Beast's castle, in which she floats weightlessly down dim & eerie halls, Kang somehow managed to recreate the effect without camera tricks, moving with incredible dancer-like lightness down the stage along with Josette Day's original on the screen above. The interplay between the original film, the OP re-creations, & the physical performers was so seamlessly done that it seemed inevitable; it's only later, when the inevitable noise & distractions of the after-theater world start to rub away at the enchantment, that you realize how incredibly difficult it must have been to pull all of this off, how much work & organization it takes to get so many different components both mechanical & human (the different sets of films, the lighting, the singers, the orchestra) to click into place with dream-like inevitability.

It has been years since I last heard a recording of this opera or last saw the movie (that happens when you're overloaded with movies & music). I had forgotten how marvelous the score is. As is well known by both those who love & those who dislike this composer (I'm in the former camp, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to this performance, particularly with its ridiculous 8:00 PM start time), his music has a very distinctive & even unmistakable sound; but though the whole opera "sounds like" Philip Glass, each scene reflects an appropriate, often strikingly distinct, mood: uncanny, yearning, threatening, frightening, touching, elevating. The segments of the score move along with cinematic speed, like camera cuts. Certain melodies that are on the border of big Romantic tunes regularly appear & float off before they develop too far, reminding me of the unresolved musical longing in Tristan without ever echoing or parodying that distinctive score. (One of these tunes in particular, one that lent a touch of the "exotic" to the score, reminded me of one of the Borodin tunes used in the musical Kismet). Glass has written a number of fairy-tale chamber operas (The Juniper Tree, The Fall of the House of Usher – the latter is of course based on Poe's "horror" story, but is a sibling of the fairy-tale world) & he is adept at creating memorably unworldly worlds. There is a wide range of moods produced from a relatively small orchestra, one that is mostly keyboards, percussion, & wind instruments (no strings! as a friend in the mezzanine reported to those of us below). The final moments, with the transformation of Beast into Prince, are accompanied by what sounded to me like an organ, offering that instrument's sacred & otherworldly aura for his apotheosis with Belle.

As usual with Opera Parallèle, Nicole Paiement conducted, & as usual, she led a clear & beautifully judged rendition; Brian Staufenbiel was, again as usual for OP, the director & the guiding hand behind the production concept, &, again as usual, thought & care had gone into a visually arresting & creative presentation (aided by the production design & film work by David Murakami). Delphis & Mangwa brought distinctive edge & depth to each of their characters. Kang & Adams were both superb. Her clear & lovely voice echoed & reinforced the distinctively innocent & loving Belle. Adams was a virile & anguished Beast, his voice skillfully softening as Beast is tamed by love or raging up as he is threatened. You realize how insightful & controlled his performance is at the end, when he resumes human form as the Prince, & though the handsome Adams looks appropriately princely there is a very slight, very subtly & astutely judged, sense of self-pleased placidity, a touch of royal entitlement, that reminded me of the story that when Garbo first saw Cocteau's film, she is said to have slumped down in her chair & murmured, "Give me back my Beast."

I also have to note the astonishing work by Sharon Peng & Natalie Barshow in recreating respectively Beast's make-up & his & Belle's sumptuous costumes for the stage & OP film scenes.

The audience . . . they were generally attentive, though I could hear some whispering & someone down the row from me kept pulling out his or her phone & flashing some light (checking the time?). Those were relatively minor things; the opera, done without intermission, was about an hour & forty-five minutes, which is not a long time in a movie theater but which for some reason seems like a long time for people at a live performance (it doesn't help that Zellerbach is an uncomfortable hall). But though the audience seemed appreciative, giving the performers well-deserved & hearty applause at the end, they also seemed, as a whole, & I realize I'm sliding out onto some thinnish ice here, not quite to get the mood & therefore the meaning of the piece. There was quite a bit of laughter at various points that struck me as appreciative but uncomprehending, starting with the scene in which Belle's Father, who has wandered into Beast's castle, sits down to dinner & is unnerved by the disembodied hands that hold the candelabras down the hall & that serve him at the table. Cinematically these are fairly simple tricks, but effective nonetheless, if you enter into the unreal enchantments of the tale. (I will say that I find such tricks, not just from Cocteau but even more so in the films of Méliès, far more beautiful, moving, & effective than the shiny plastic fakery of computer-generated effects in current films.)

Maybe the audience laughed because they were expecting Mrs Potts, Lumiere, & Co to launch into Be Our Guest? I don't say this to be dismissive of the wonderful Disney version of the story, but though the animators clearly studied their Cocteau, their film has a different mode & mood. There was also quite a bit of laughter, not quite mocking but also not quite comprehending, of various love-story lines at the end, & I was at a loss to figure out what was supposed to be funny. This is a fairy tale, not a sitcom or a Hallmark "romance". During the scene in which the guileless Belle is led into giving her siblings some of the Beast's magic secrets, a woman in the row in front of me whispered (very loudly whispered) that Belle was . . . she said either stupid, or a fool, or a word to that effect. Reading innocence & trustfulness & guilelessness as stupidity is exactly the attitude Cocteau asks us to consciously though perhaps only temporarily renounce while watching his enchantments. He is very clear in his statement at the beginning of his film that he wants the audience to approach this story with an openness that draws on a purity & innocence usually crushed out by or at least hidden away from the social & adult world. We are certainly meant to appreciate the sophistication of all the artists involved, the silvery cinematography, the lovely surrealist touches, the artificiality of our suspension, which is perhaps only temporary, of our usual civilized skepticism. But it is only by doing so that we can truly grasp the anguish of Beast's dark & deliquescent heart, & the beauty of Beauty coming to love him.

William Kentridge: SYBIL

As part of William Kentridge's residency at UC-Berkeley, Cal Performances presented the American premiere of his stage work SIBYL over a three-day run in Zellerbach Hall. The attendant Gala on the first night meant that, unusually for Cal Performances, the show did not have a ridiculously late start time, so that was the performance I went to (I did not, of course, attend the Gala).

SIBYL is based on a legend of the Sibyl of ancient Cumae (near present-day Naples): she would write your future on an oak leaf & lay it on a pile with other such futures. As you went up to retrieve yours, a wind would rise & shuffle the leaves, so that you could never be sure if the future you were holding was your own or someone else's. This is certainly a resonant parable, suggesting both the inevitability & the uncertainty of our destiny.

The first half is anchored on a short film, The Moment Has Gone, which explores in Kentridge's familiar style of feathery charcoal drawings, constantly erased & redrawn. the story of a Kentridge-like figure going to an art museum & simultaneously the life of a marginal mining operation. Scenes flow naturally with oneiric logic into one another. There is also a live score by Kyle Shepherd & an all-male chorus of African men headed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu. After an overly long intermission, which I would have preferred not to have (intermissions break the flow, especially for an audience a large number of whom are clearly just waiting for the after-party, & I didn't see that any set-up was needed for the second half), we have a short chamber opera, Waiting for the Sibyl, a collection of scenes that do not each end so much as continue in some other universal space after the curtain drops on them. There is no resolution other than reinforced ambiguity.

There are gnomic, possibly gnostic, brief sentences or saying that are broadcast on the back walls (partially obstructed from my right front orchestra seat by the placement on stage of the chorus, & of a large megaphone-like device, but they are also spoken aloud & repeated, so I was given most of them). In one of the scenes a man tries to sit down, only to have the chair pulled away from him mid-descent; after several attempts, he manages to sit down, only to have the chair collapse. It is a scene redolent of both the silent comedians & Beckett (who, of course, admired those comics; Keaton & Chaplin are really some of the underacknowledged springs of the twentieth-century avant-garde). In another scene, an African woman sitting on a chair (chairs keep recurring) is slowly revolved around; on her shoulders she carries a long stick, one side of which has a sign saying Dreams & the other a sign saying True, & both the signs also rotate slowly. Is True a noun, opposing itself to Dreams, or an adjective, modifying Dreams? What are True Dreams? Prophetic ones? Later, one of the repeated sententiae is None of Our Dreams Came True – is that what was suggested here? Or possibly all possibilities are, you know, always possible.

A reference to the circles of Hell recalls a thought that some of the portraits in the film looked like Dante, or someone Dante-esque. The singing, choral & solo, is constant, & an enchantment, but the words are not in English & not translated; one section involves clicking so I am assuming there is an African language involved there. Sound & meaning do not always coincide, at least for some of us. The megaphone gets used to repeat some of the slogans we've seen projected, ending with the pronouncement, over & over, Starve the Algorithm repeats into the darkened auditorium. A woman in the back shouts Yes!, which seems a bit . . . sure, it's what people who attend performances in Berkeley are currently thinking, but these are also the people who whip out the inevitable mobile phone as soon as they can, & put them away as late as possible, so what does it mean for us to think this?

I would love to have seen this show over & over; I think each viewing would reveal new connections & deeper richness, but of course that would be missing the point of a stage work, which gives us moment-by-moment & then passes away into memory before the curtain falls: uncertainty & ambiguity rule us, & part of what makes beauty beautiful is that we know it is fleeting. SIBYL is another astonishing work from Kentridge.

Harry Bicket & the English Concert: Handel's Solomon

The first CDs I ever bought were Philip Glass's The Photographer & the John Eliot Gardiner recording of Handel's Solomon, & the Internet tells me that was 38 years ago, but neither before nor after that momentous purchase had I heard the oratorio live, so when Harry Bicket & the English Concert stopped at Cal Performances & Zellerbach Hall last Sunday on their Solomon tour, I made sure to be there.

I should start off by making it clear I enjoyed it immensely, but there may be reasons beyond the large forces called for that make this oratorio a relative rarity. It lacks the sweep & tragic intensity of such works as Jephthah (my favorite), Saul, or Belshazzar; I wouldn't call it static, but it's not exactly action-packed. I knew this going in, thanks to John Eliot Gardiner (though this performance included a couple of arias that were not in his edition), but I think some of those around me did not; I heard some observations, clearly meant as complaints, that "it was long", & at three & a half hours indeed it was, but if you surrendered to the grandeur it was also quite radiant.

Some of Handel's oratorios are virtually operas & can be staged as such, but Solomon is more like a pageant or masque. It opens with praise of God & King Solomon, with many dazzling choruses (superbly sung by The Clarion Choir, led by Steven Fox), ending with Solomon's unnamed (&, contrary to the Bible, singular) Queen praising their nuptial bed. This was one of several passages in the anonymous libretto that led to much chuckling from some of the people behind me – "bosom" was another word that set them off. You'd think they were middle-schoolers, & not particularly mature ones at that, rather than a couple of wrecks clearly teetering on the brink of the grave. I was glad when they left after the second intermission.

The second part contains a dramatic interlude, the famous dispute over a baby by two women (called "harlots"; the program tells us Handel objected to the term but it doesn't tell us why or what form the objection took; the King James translation does describe the women initially as harlots but thereafter refers to them just as women), with "divide the baby" as the judgment designed to reveal the true mother. Handel's deftness as a dramatist certainly comes to the fore here, with the Second Harlot's sharp interruptions of the First Harlot's laments making a particularly striking deviation from the usual circumspect forms of baroque oratorio. The part concludes, after the judgment & Solomon's assurance, in case you were worried, that he never meant to actually kill the infant, with a bit of gently melancholy pastoral ("Beneath the vine, or fig-tree's shade / Every shepherd sings the maid / Who his simple heart betrayed") & further praise of Solomon.

The third & final part begins with what is, or used to be, one of the best-known orchestral interludes in Handel, the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, who has come to see the glorious sights & generally bask in the wisdom & benevolence of the celebrated Solomon. He treats her to a series of tableaux illustrating the variety of music's emotional powers, to rouse us to martial feelings, to inspire & console us for melancholy love, & so forth (similar in spirit to the Handel / Dryden Alexander's Feast). When she departs, Sheba thanks Solomon for the unforgettable wisdom he has imparted, but it's actually not quite clear what actually constitutes this "wisdom"; for all the praise of the King, & of God, you can't help feeling that in this section Handel is slyly pointing out the superior power of the Composer, among whose powerful creations are not only martial spirit & gentle love, but Majesty & Deity.

As is frequently the case with Handel's oratorios (as opposed to his operas), the chorus plays a major part, & as noted above they were superb & tireless & expressive in all ways, from the ethereal benevolence of the "Nightingale" chorus to the rousing, timpani-studded swells of praise for God, King, & Music. Bicket led the sumptuous band at a pace that never felt either delayed or rushed, & the soloists did not let down either chorus, orchestra, or audience, starting with mezzo Ann Hallenberg as a dignified & intelligent Solomon. Mezzo Niamh O'Sullivan made a fierce Second Harlot, as the Queen of Sheba soprano Elena Villalón's voice was as rich & golden as her floor-length one-shouldered sheath, &, in smaller roles, bass-baritone Brandon Cedel as a Levite & tenor James Way as Zadok the Priest were both smooth & forceful. But it was soprano Miah Persson, as Solomon's Queen & as First Harlot, who, in her pastoral interlude (the one mentioned above, where every shepherd sings the maid who his simple heart betrayed), managed, among the pageantry, to reduce me to tears.

Mark Morris Dance Group: The Look of Love

For reasons unfathomable to me, Cal Performances persists in 8:00 start times most evenings, which means that, no matter how enticing their offerings, I'm mostly not going to bother with them unless it's something I think I would really regret missing, which is why I found myself in Zellerbach Hall at 8:00 last Saturday for the second performance of the Bay Area premiere of The Look of Love, Mark Morris's tribute to the late Burt Bacharach.

As usual with the Mark Morris Dance Group, the musical accompaniment was live; Ethan Iverson, who performed the same function for Morris's Beatles piece, Pepperland, had arranged the songs (as well as an excerpt from the soundtrack to The Blob) & performed piano as part of a small jazz ensemble, accompanying the sweet, stylish, & haunting voice of Marcy Harriell (who also designed her own elegant black gown).The songs were mostly familiar, or half-familiar, to me, & they do have an uncanny way of sticking in your mind for many days after you hear them.

Another frequent Morris collaborator, Isaac Mizrahi, designed the costumes, which were evocative of that peak Bacharach period, the 1960s, with their bright shades of pink & orange offset by muted moss green, though, in typical Morris style, boundaries, of gender among other things, are blurred (women & some men are in tunics or short dresses, some are in pants & tanktops), so this work in no way looks like a simple exercise in candy-coated nostalgia. When I tried to figure out exactly how many colors there were in the costumes, I realized that there were many more than I had first assumed; there was orange, for example, but when I tried to see how many other orange pieces there were, none of the other shades quite matched the first, & what looked like a unity turned out to be a series of subtle variants.

The dance achieves the same effect: what at first might seem straightforward, a swooping celebration of love, breaks down into something more complicated & ambiguous. There are ten dancers, & some chairs, & a single deep color glowing on the back wall, a color that harmonizes with the costumes & that changes from time to time (lighting by Nicole Pearce). There are duets, but often with tension as well as longing between the two lovers; or a third dancer/lover appears to distract the couple in different ways. As often with Morris, there is some straightforward illustration of the words: dancers mime sneezing to "You get enough germs to catch pneumonia" from I'll Never Fall in Love Again; during an extended riff on the opening of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, as the instruments plink like the first drops plashing down, the strolling dancers pause, lift out their hands to check (was that a random drop, or the start of a downpour?), tilt their heads back to catch a few drops.

Sometimes the gestures slide from literal to metaphoric: during Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, as the "stars who never were" are pumping gas, there is a rapid, tight, up-&-down movement of a clenched fist that suggests pumping gas but also deep reserves of barely suppressed anger & frustration. There is graceful swirling, but the most passionate & dramatic moments are for love expressed through jealousy & anger. In one of the later movements the dancers, at different times, sit in one of the chairs & move their arms up & down in a way that suggests a bird's wings, but a bird whose flapping isn't quite wide & powerful enough to lift it up into the air (the effect is of frustration & longing).

This is not a dark & gloomy dance, though. Even something as potentially sinister as the creeping sounds of The Blob have a comic element to them. There are moments of dazzling, intricate beauty, as in the complicated patterning of the lines of dancers in Walk on By (I wanted to see that movement from the balcony instead of my front-row orchestra seat). The last number is I Say a Little Prayer, & we leave the complications of love with a benediction towards the loved one – but are the various lovers still together? Will they stay together? Maybe, maybe not; what matters is the generous gesture outwards.

Before the curtain rose Morris came out & gave a brief, witty speech in which he mentioned last year's visit by the troupe to Cal Performances, which was cancelled after the first performance when COVID hit the company & they had to shelter in place, on the other side of the country from their usual home (that was why, for the first time in years, I missed a visit from the MMDG). He was happier to see the full houses on this visit. He then dedicated the performances to the memory of Bacharach. It was a fitting & touching tribute.

Cal Performances Winter Sale

Cal Performances has a winter sale going on through 26 January. Basically it's a steeply discounted mini-subscription: you have to buy a minimum of four tickets (that can be four singles, two pairs, or one set of four) and when you do each ticket is only $25. The sale doesn't apply to every performance, but to enough to make it very worthwhile – I bought tickets in last year's sale and was very happy with the seats and concerts I was able to get. Check here for more information and seriously do follow their advice to read the instructions first (last year I didn't and tripped myself up a bit).

The Czech Philharmonic at Cal Performances

Last Sunday afternoon was one of those recent days of disquieting beauty – November is supposed to be cold and rainy, and something feels awry when all is blue, balmy, and beautiful. There was comforting beauty in store at Zellerbach Hall, where I headed that afternoon to hear the Cal Performances's presentation of Jirí Belohlávek leading the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Philharmonic Choir (Lukáš Vasilek Choir Master) and four soloists in Dvorák's Stabat Mater, his epic setting of the old Latin prayer meditating on the Virgin Mary at the foot of her son's cross.

I'm surprised the piece isn't as well known as the Brahms and Verdi Requiems; it requires vast forces – the stage was packed – but it's a wonderful piece, and people want to hear it – the auditorium was also packed, and on such a lovely day. I've sometimes thought of compiling a list of words and phrases I've come to loathe, and accessible (as applied to the arts) would head the list – it always makes me feel like a scrawny baby bird mewling for mommy bird to chew up my worms for me – so I'll say that the piece is immediately emotionally available, and filled with melodies that flow and ebb like a melancholy sea; it creates a meditative and moving atmosphere and keeps you there for its ninety-minute duration.

The orchestra and chorus were both splendid, but I did go back-and-forth a bit about the soloists. I guess my favorite was the imposing bass Jan Martiník. I really liked tenor Jaroslav Brezina (oddly listed in the program as a baritone) but I always had the feeling he was singing Italian opera – that's not a bad thing, necessarily. It was just how his voice struck me, with its exclamatory heroic sound. Alto Dagmar Pecková seems a bit underpowered to me, though I heard from others who sat elsewhere (I was about halfway down the left-hand side of the orchestra) that her voice had more presence elsewhere. Soprano Lucie Silkenová had a lovely clear voice but sometimes it seemed a shade unsteady to me. But these are all quibbles. I've heard recordings of this piece but they never really came alive for me the way this performance did. The audience was spellbound and deeply attentive. The young woman down the row from me kept coughing loudly, but she did leave several times – but then she'd come back. I can't really blame her for wanting to hear the rest of the performance, though.

At the end there was an ardent ovation, one of the most striking I've heard recently. As his final gesture, the lights behind him giving him an aureole of white hair, Belohlávek held up his copy of the score. I love it when performers do that, giving the composer the final salute. When the audience started filing out I ran into a friend who raved about how pretty it all was. I think I'd have gone for a different word, but she clearly loved it though she then said she had to ignore the words since she has trouble with all religious stories. I was kind of amused by this since I had been wishing they had used surtitles for the Latin text. I suggested that perhaps she could just think of it as a mother mourning a son tortured to death by the authorities. "No, I just want to hear it as sound, all sound." The sounds were indeed beautiful, and conveyed their own meaning.

Eco Ensemble: Bedrossian, Jodlowski, Ligeti

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.

anguished German nights, dreamy French afternoons

A few Sundays ago I headed out to Hertz Hall to hear Eric Owens (bass-baritone) and Warren Jones (piano) in recital, presented by Cal Performances. Owens had been scheduled to make his first recital appearance here last season, but had to cancel, which is why at the end of the afternoon he thanked Cal Performances for presenting him "again for the first time." New York City was being buried under snow but it was a balmy beautiful day in Berkeley; we were lucky they made it out, since most flights were being cancelled, and they said smilingly that they were grateful for the weather.

The charming remarks and the smiles came later. For the first, all-German, half, the two artists simply walked out and started. And that half was one of the most remarkable recitals I have experienced. Owens seems like a genial guy but seconds after he walked out he went to a very different place, and stayed there for the next forty-five minutes or so. It may have been a sunny afternoon outside, but it was a dark night of the soul in Hertz Hall. I have never heard a singer who could summon up sonorous nobility so quickly, so fully, and so much as part of himself - and not just nobility, but an inner anguish that comes from generous wisdom. It felt extremely unguarded and intimate, but almost as if I were seeing emotions I wasn't meant to see, that were usually and perhaps best kept hidden. It was like eavesdropping on Wotan when he thinks he's alone. I've heard a lot about (but have not myself seen) Owens's performances as Alberich, and now I can see what the raves were about; his would be an Alberich who truly is Wotan's double.

If you take a look at the repertoire (listed below) you can get a feel for the mood, even if your German is rudimentary: Michelangelo, Prometheus (two heaven-stormers!), Hades, Tartarus, melancholy, heart, soul. The songs bled into each other and created one mood, the mood of a man sleepless during an anguished night, looking deeply inward. I found it emotionally naked, and riveting.

After the intermission the second, all-French, half was enjoyable, but not I thought at the level of intensity of the first half. Look at the French songs below, and you can see the difference, even with rudimentary French: beauty, flowers, romance: soft honeyed hours! I've heard and loved these songs other times, but to me after the first half they felt almost like a cool-down after an exhausting, sweat-soaked, but exhilarating marathon. Ironically, since the first half sounded so much like out-takes from the Ring Cycle, the only actual Wagner piece on the program was a little curiosity he wrote for money during his early, desperate years in Paris. He took a poem by Heine translated into French and hoped its patriotic theme - two grenadiers, returning in defeat from Russia back to France, wish only for the return of their beloved, godlike Emperor - would make him some money. The Heine text also threw me, since I kept expecting an ironic twist or subtle insight and instead got  pretty much potboiler patriotism. It was kind of an enjoyable oddity, I guess. If you've ever idly wondered what Wagner would have done on piano with La Marseillaise, you could find out in this song.

There were two encores: Purcell's Music for a while was first. Usually I hear this sung by sopranos or countertenors, so hearing it sung softly in a bass-baritone's upper register created an eerie sort of unearthly mood. The snakes dropped from Alecto's head with soothing, regular plops, like overripe fruit falling. The second encore was the hymn Shall We Gather by the River, which seemed emotionally like the real completion of the first half: a calm-after-the-storm benediction to send us back out into the world.

The German songs:
Hugo Wolf: Drei Lieder nach Gedichten von Michelangelo: Wohl denk ich oft; Alles endet, was entstehet; Fuhlt meine Seele das ersehnte Licht
Robert Schumann: Mein Herz ist schwer; Muttertraum; Der Schatzgraber; Melancholie
Franz Schubert: Prometheus; Fahrt zum Hades; Gruppe aus dem Tartarus

The French songs:
Claude Debussy: Beau Soir; Fleur des Bles; Romance
Maurice Ravel: Don Quichotte a Dulcinee: Chanson romanesque; Chanson epique; Chanson a boire
Richard Wagner (yes, that one): Les Deux Grenadiers

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.

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.

Home and the World with Esa-Pekka Salonen

For the past three or so years - ever since Matias Tarnopolsky took over - Cal Performances has had an annual residency from a visiting orchestra. This year we had renowned composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. I heard the last of their three concerts, the Mahler 9, but before that I heard the "composer portrait" concert dedicated to Salonen's music. He was of course there in person and Tarnopolsky interviewed him on stage during pauses in the intermissionless performance. The first part of their talk reflected some of the information also in the program book, but later on Salonen became more expansive and even offbeat.

There were four different pieces: knock, breathe, shine for solo cello (Kacy Clopton), Homunculus for string quartet (here the Calder Quartet), Dichotomie for solo piano (Gloria Cheng), and Mania for cello (Clopton again) and a small orchestra (here the University's Eco Ensemble). There was a nice variety of sound and style among the pieces, even when the underlying sensibility was clearly the same; there were several moments that sounded - I can only say "exotic," like moonlight on shifting desert sands. Salonen likes to play with the considerable virtuosity of his performers. In his remarks Salonen talked a bit about some of the initial conceptions or technical notions that expanded into the various pieces. Homunculus, for example, came from the early theory of human conception which held that each sperm contained a very miniature but fully formed man (with the implication that inside the tiny man's tiny sperm was an even tinier man with even tinier sperm containing an even tinier tinier man, and so on ad infinitum): so this quarter-hour for string quartet was meant to contain in compact form all the changes of sound and texture that you might find in a bigger piece. This was my favorite of the four pieces, though I enjoyed them all thoroughly. Also it was a pleasure to be in the midst of an attentive audience, after a series of recent evenings in which idiots kept pulling out their phones during the performance. You'd think that new music concerts would tend to draw only people who wanted to be there, but there was my first experience with the Eco Ensemble, that Boulez concert, where the audience was strangely awful.

During his remarks Salonen paid touching tribute to Elliott Carter, who had recently died just when we were all thinking he would outlive us all - Salonen mentioned giving an interview in which he talked about different schools and generations of composers, "and then there's always Elliott Carter" - just when there no longer was Elliott Carter. He also spoke of the need he had as a young composer to fight against the established models; in his case, he fought against Sibelius. Then one day in Milan after rehearsals he happened to come across a pocket score of one of the Sibelius symphonies, and he realized its greatness. He saw this as part of the normal process of maturation for a composer, in which you progress from rebel against the establishment to part of the establishment yourself; and that was part of his commitment to working with young composers and performers. He also mentioned his theory that (I think I have this right) originally language and music were the same thing, the basic and in-born means of communication (on the grounds that all human society creates music) and then gradually evolved in separate directions as language needed to create territorial and personal distinctions - so I guess the implication is that both are basic human urges; music is communal, language less so.

Sunday afternoon was the Mahler 9. Zellerbach is not the greatest concert hall for orchestras, but then neither is Davies and, at least on Sunday, the audience was amazingly quiet and attentive - there was some loud coughing towards the end, and as I heard someone in the audience say afterward, "They could at least try to stifle it a bit," and yes indeed, but a bit of coughing isn't too bad during ninety solid minutes of intense music. And when a woman in my row very briefly flipped through her program I realized that the program-flipping omnipresent at Davies was not taking place: people were actually sitting there listening to music. The magnificence of the performance deserved such attention. It seemed irrelevant to talk of the quality and skill of the orchestra, they moved so far beyond such virtues, bringing out the whole vast universal expanse of Mahler's final symphony. Worlds were created and passing away moment by moment, right in front of our ears.

At the end as he took his bows Salonen was visibly exhausted; nonetheless he came back after a short break and led the UC Berkeley student orchestra through a run-through of La Mer. (Such work with the students is an integral part of the orchestra residencies.) I thought about staying, but for various reasons decided against it. It might have been the perfect way to ease re-entry into our little world after the Mahler, but instead I plunged into the immediate shock of public transit.

sounds and sweet airs

A couple of weeks ago, when I was starting to come down with the flu, I did manage to fool myself into thinking I was well enough to get out to Berkeley for the Cal Performances presentation of Delfeayo Marsalis Octet performing Sweet Thunder, which turned out to be a fortunate self-deception since I would have hated to miss this outstanding concert (though I could have done without the three rude stupid girls also in Row J who kept their cell phones on the entire performance; apparently they felt the pre-concert announcement that all electronic devices should be turned off did not apply to very special people like them; sadly I could not, for a number of reasons, either say anything to them or move; I could only contemplate the fathomless blithe stupidity of people).

Anyway. Sweet Thunder is an adaptation for octet of the orchestral suite Such Sweet Thunder, composed by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and inspired by Shakespeare. Given the artists involved it's not surprising that this is a wonderful, freewheeling, and inventive piece, moving selectively among the vast possibilities of Shakespeare, touching some unexpected points (I wouldn't have thought that Henry V was particularly inspirational to anyone, but there's a lively and somewhat obstreperous Sonnet to Hank Cinq (a name which is typical of Ellington's offhand wit and elegance)). Ellington and Strayhorn seemed particularly drawn to unhappy love (pieces  on Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and the confused quartet of Midsummer Night), madness (Hamlet and Ophelia, Lady Macbeth), or both (Othello).

Marsalis gave brief, useful insights into each piece, with offhand charm; he sounded completely spontaneous, though he must have planned what to say. Before playing Lady Mac he mentioned that people could bring craziness and even madness on themselves; "That's true!" proclaimed the loud woman behind me. Marsalis gave some useful tips on the clever structure of the pieces, noting that the three "sonnets" (besides the Sonnet to Hank Cinq we heard the Sonnet in Search of a Moor and the Sonnet to Caesar) were constructed, in tribute to the traditions of the sonnet form, in fourteen ten-beat lines. He also noted the difference between Strayhorn and Ellington, with the former more structured and "written" and the latter more improvisational and eclectic.

Marsalis can make his trombone speak like a character, from wails and shrieks to low laments to martial swagger to a lover's bravado. Such speaking instruments can really do justice to the richness of Shakespeare's characters. The rest of the band was equally dazzling: Mark "Preacherman" Gross on tenor and soprano saxophone, Jeff Clayton on alto saxophone, Jamelle Williams on trumpet, Oliver Bonie on baritone saxophone, Glen Pearson on piano, David Pulphus on bass, and Winard Harper on drums. I went in expecting Shakespeare, Ellington, and Strayhorn to be great, but I left convinced that Delfeayo Marsalis had done them proud.

the elephant in the room

Last night I was in Berkeley for the first night of the three-night run, hosted by Cal Performances, of the Theatre de la Ville-Paris's production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. Cal Performances Director Matias Tarnopolsky started the evening with a short talk from the stage in which he pointed out that this was the second time the Theatre de la Ville has appeared in Berkeley; the first time was in 1906, when the group in an earlier incarnation presented Sarah Bernhardt in her legendary performance of Phedre, an event from which Cal Performances dates its existence, as well it might.

Rhinoceros, Ionesco's landmark 1959 work of the Theater of the Absurd, is another legendary moment in twentieth-century theater, one of those post-war works whose combination of menace and philosophizing absurdity got to the heart of the mid-century political situation more piercingly than any earnest "realistic" drama ever could. It is well-known that Ionesco wrote the work in response to the rise of fascism in his native Romania, and the play is often seen as an allegory of resistance to conformist totalitarian systems, which makes it sound high-minded and uplifting. It may be the historical moment to drop that particular framing (that is, limiting) of the play; the thought-provoking and lively production I saw last night made me realize that the play is stranger and richer than its reputation.

There's no need to see the play in political terms at all; as a study of individualism and conformity, it resonates in many ways not tied to specific political systems or philosophies. Anyone who's ever worked in a corporation has witnessed many rhino-metamorphoses, and indeed anyone puzzled by the strange cult fervor motivating the crowds who waited patiently for days and nights to update their iPhones to the latest release has observed the urge to be part of the pack ("it's the wave of the future!" announce the people turning into rhinos). But there's more to the play than feeling superior to the herd, and more to it even than noting the many ways people convince themselves that the herd is the only place to be. (If it were really that simple and straightforward, the play probably wouldn't be worth reviving.) The really subtle, brilliant, challenging thing that Ionesco did is that he doesn't tip the scales: once you set aside what you've been told about what the play is supposed to mean politically, you have to notice that the humans come across as a fairly shabby lot, and the rhinos don't look all that bad.

Demarcy-Mota has the play open with a passage from Ionesco's novel The Solitary. An average-looking, undistinguished middle-aged man comes out alone and talks about walking as a child through crowded streets and seeing the people as phantoms; he finds it comforting, yet he is not quite one of them - it's the classic note of urban alienation. The stage is mostly very dark (as it will be throughout), with piercing, focused white side lights on the speaker. Our average-looking undistinguished middle-aged man turns out to be Berenger (Serge Maggiani), who is indeed undistinguished, but not quite average - in fact, he's pretty much a loser. He has a drinking problem and squanders money on booze; he is unkempt and unpunctual; he longs for his coworker Daisy (Celine Carrere) but assumes he doesn't have a chance against another, more accomplished, coworker, Dudard (Philippe Demarle); he puts up little resistance to the hectoring constant lectures of his boisterous friend Jean (Hugues Quester). He can't bring himself to defend himself, but he will quarrel with Jean over whether the first rhino that charged down the street had one horn or two.

He's not a very inspiring representative of the human spirit. He's pretty much a marginal man, but it's his very inadequacies (he can't even make it to work on time) that allow him to remain human; to be blunt, he doesn't have it in him to turn into a rhinoceros. In the three acts of the play we see him first in a social setting (at a crowded cafe, where he meets the bullying Jean for a drink), then a work setting (at the publishing house that employs him, where his coworkers flirt, fight, and laugh at each other, debating the very existence of the rhino, before one appears and smashes the stairs of the office building), and finally in a romantic setting, as he and Daisy join together as apparently the last remaining humans, before she too defects. Berenger grows to hate his pale weak body, so insignificant next to the strength and purpose and joyful unity of the rhino herd, but he persists - partly out of self-loathing - in being human. At the very end, indecisive and confused, he is isolated on a height, and the stairs down have just given way with a bang, and he pauses, one foot raised out over the abyss that has just opened in front of him, feeling that he will remain human, out of perversity if nothing else.

From the beginning the humans have been close to animals (some even have animal names: Papillon, Boeuf). They bicker and talk at cross-purposes and prove by logical means the most illogical propositions; they can't even agree on what they've just seen when the first rhino runs down the street, and are quick to use the disruption of the African or possibly Asian rhino to criticize foreigners. They are spiteful to friends as well as strangers. The death by trampling of a woman's cat brings some of them together in a moment of sympathy, but I have the feeling they'd be less sympathetic if it had been the woman who had been trampled. They're all indeed individuals, but it's not really working for them; they're mostly destructive, self-serving, and short-sighted. It's a bleak world. The stage is mostly black, and the sets are strange, dark, heavy, and mechanical-looking, with boxy rooms and large walls and pillars that come crashing down. The clothes are mostly black and white. There's the occasional splash of a bright red tie or an orange phone. The eerie offstage music sounds like a distant memory, even when you first hear it. This is a very physical production, with bicycling in circles and running and shouting and the office workers slipping downward as the floors beneath them buckle under the blows of the unseen rhino in the lobby below.

The rhinos, by contrast, appear relatively stable and unified, and were looking better and better as the evening went on. At the end we see rows of their ghostly gray-green heads in the darkness, bobbing up and down. They are called destructive, but once you observe the behavior of the humans in the office you can hardly blame their former co-worker turned rhinoceros for trying to smash the place. If you unlink the rhinos from associations with specific political systems, it opens up interesting interpretive ambiguities in the play: you could even see them as a sublime force of nature. I was definitely feeling the appeal of turning into a rhino. That may not be what anyone intended, but unintended and unforeseen readings are one of the things that make a play endure.

The play is almost two hours and given without an intermission; many people blench when they hear that, but I think that's purely a psychological reaction, since many movies are longer and also don't have intermissions. But people feel freer to get up during movies (several did last night, as well, and one idiot a few rows in front of me even pulled out his iPhone at the end to record the appearance of the rhino heads - like calling to like, perhaps - though on the whole the audience, quite large for a week night production that didn't start until 8:00, was enthusiastic and attentive). An intermission would have really cut the mood and tension of the performance. It's presented in French with English surtitles; the dialogue is sometimes so quick that you miss a few things as your eyes dart up and down, but the language is simple enough so that if you have some even rudimentary French you can make out at least part of what the actors are saying.

There is one more performance, tomorrow (Saturday 29 September) at 2:00. More information is here.

fireworks & ashes

Going to concerts doesn’t leave much time for writing about them. It's been a busy time and I have quite a little backlog built up.

About a week ago I heard Philippe Jaroussky with the Cleveland-based Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra, headed by Jeannette Sorrell, in a program of arias and instrumental works by Handel and Vivaldi. Each program held a little card advertising a free Jaroussky download; these little cards are aptly named dropcards because drop is what they did, littering the floors and corridors in Hertz Hall after the concert like the autumn leaves that had not started to fall even though it was late October because the summer heat had not gone away, and it was downright too hot that Sunday afternoon. It would have been a nice day to lie in the shade or maybe work in a garden, but not so much to be in a packed overheated concert hall, no matter how attractive the program. Also, my allergies were really bad, I guess because of the heat and subsequent confusion among the plants as to when they should release their pollens, and I had taken some meds, so there was that.


Sorrell, who conducted from the harpsichord, is petite and lively with an explosive mass of curly red hair. She addressed the audience frequently; a little too frequently for my taste, even if I hadn’t been leaning towards the slightly drugged and churlish, since most of what she said was I would think pretty much stuff most of us already knew, since many in the full house were clearly baroque aficionados (and were heading over to hear Viveca Genaux with Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational right after this concert; in fact a friend generously offered me his ticket since after a week of constant concerts he was concerted out – and if a retired man feels that way, what hope does a working stiff like me have, so I declined with thanks). Sorrell noted that this concert was the group’s “San Francisco debut,” even though we weren’t in San Francisco, and her tone kind of indicated that she knew that but she said it anyway, which I thought was a little odd. So, for the record, it was their Bay Area debut. I’m not a big fan of little talks from the stage, though I do make occasional exceptions, no doubt to the delight of all, and since I was way off to the left side of the hall the spoken remarks sounded a bit muffled (though the music came through fine), which made them a little tiresome to me.

The group had the occasional tuning problem, which is an occupational hazard of playing early-music-style instruments, but on the whole they were fleet and glittering and did Apollo proud, and they clearly enjoyed playing for us as much as we enjoyed listening to them. There were a number of instrumental pieces interspersed with the arias, including several portrayals of tempests at sea or in the soul. Olivier Brault was the violin soloist for a Vivaldi violin concerto (in E-flat, Op. 8, No. 5, "Tempesta di Mare"), and he bobbed up and down with concentrated delight as he played, his long hair tied back in a very eighteenth-century style with a wide yellow ribbon. The concert was officially billed as “Handel and Vivaldi Fireworks,” and though there was plenty of sparkling furor, I thought that Jaroussky’s pure clear countertenor was best suited to the arias of plaintive regret. He is fairly tall and thin and has a Caravaggian face, and his body shakes slightly to his roulades in an oddly birdlike way.


The audience was quite enthusiastic and frankly started getting on my nerves more and more, since their enthusiasm led to more and more exclaiming over the music during the music. I’m thrilled that Jaroussky was singing some random woman’s favorite aria, but maybe she could hold that joy secretly in her heart instead of talking over the music? Same thing for the other random woman when he then sang her favorite aria. And I could have done without the watch-alarm obbligato in the second half.

And I was still under the influence of Simon Keenlyside’s recital a few days earlier, the magnetic fascination of which I completely failed to convey here. At least one friend who was also at both concerts was in the same mood as I was, but then he is a baritone himself and was put off by the cult of the countertenors. So, sorry, but you see how sadly it was with me, and unfortunately I felt a bit disconnected from what was really a quite enjoyable concert.


This was my first time hearing Jaroussky live. I became a big fan of his a few years back after watching the DVD of Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio, in which Jaroussky gives a memorable performance as the titular saint (also known as Saint Alexis), a fifth-century Roman patrician who announced to his wife-to-be on the day of their arranged marriage that he was putting himself in God’s hands and leaving. His family did not see him or hear of him for seventeen years, during which time he wandered as a holy beggar. The abandoned young wife of the unconsummated marriage continued to live with his parents as a daughter, and all mourned his mysterious absence from their lives. After the seventeen years he returned incognito to his father’s house, where no one recognized him, and he lived in a crawlspace under the stairs for another seventeen years as a lowly servant/dependent of the house. His identity was discovered on his deathbed, and a mysterious voice from Heaven proclaimed him a man of God.

This strange, Hawthorne-like fable (in fact Hawthorne wrote a very similar story, about a man who leaves his wife and children and lives secretly for decades apart from them) is brought to mesmerizing life by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, with strong assistance from director Benjamin Lazar. It’s a really stunningly beautiful production; each shot looks like a baroque painting, which is probably why Jaroussky’s face always reminds me of a Caravaggio.

Kronos plays Reich at Cal

Last night I went over to Berkeley for the Cal Performances presentation of a Kronos Quartet Steve Reich program. I have heard less of Reich's music than that of other minimalists (a label I'm sure they all reject) like Glass or Adams. I'm not sure why, since I always am interested in it when I hear it. Maybe it was just that Glass made regular trips to Boston when I lived there and was starting to listen to music, and Reich maybe did not. Hertz Hall was packed and the audience was attentive and enthusiastic. (A cell phone did go off, loudly, during one of the pieces, but there was so much recorded ambient noise that at first I wasn't sure if it was intentional or a delightfully Cagean accident.)

Kronos played the Triple Quartet, selections from The Cave, WTC 9/11 (the Bay Area premiere), and then, after the intermission, Different Trains, followed as an encore by an arrangement for string quartet of Perotin’s Viderunt Omnes. All of the Reich pieces except for The Cave were Kronos commissions. All of the pieces except for the Perotin made heavy use of pre-recorded material.

I go to the trouble and expense of live performances because the music sounds different from a recording, more vivid and immediate and subject to chance and fate and the happenstance of how one feels and where one sits; they’re, you know, live. Here’s my basic reaction to sitting in a concert hall and listening to a piece that depends on pre-recorded material, even if I enjoy the piece: I always wonder, “Why did I have to trek out to a concert hall, wait around for the performance to start (usually at an inconvenient time), and pay (usually two to five times the cost of a CD) just to listen to a recording (only one I can’t listen to repeatedly)?”

The Triple Quartet provided an exciting opening. It can be played by three quartets, or by one quartet to a recording of the other two parts, which is how it was done here. I loved the piece and so have little to say about it, except that I would love to hear it again.

The second piece, The Cave, refers (according to the program notes) to The Cave of the Patriarch, the traditional burial place of Abraham, Sarah, and their offspring, as well as of Adam and Eve. It is also a place sacred to Muslims, who venerate Abraham. I liked the piece (yes, we’ve gone from love to like), but the whole Jewish/Islam aspect is only clear if you’ve read what I’ll call the liner notes. The musical material is generated from the taped remarks, which is a very interesting way to generate music, but the remarks themselves don’t reveal much, except that the setting is somewhere in the Middle East.

There’s what I think is a muezzin’s call to prayer, though it could just as easily be a chanted psalm; it sounds vaguely religious and definitely middle eastern – the point is, without annotation you don’t really know where you are. I can see how working on this material would be fascinating for the musicians involved, but for an audience member (this one, anyway) it worked more as absolute music, which made me wonder why there was so clearly a program imposed on it. It was fine on a purely aesthetic level – sounds are sounds, which are interesting – but if you deliberately write a piece about “the only place in the world where both Jews and Muslims worship,” then I’m thinking you have more on your mind than purely formal issues, though it was a little difficult to say what that might be. Perhaps the string quartet is as unsuited as lyric poetry to dealing effectively with political issues.

But the Cave did provide an excellent political and cultural context for the last piece on the first half of the program, WTC 9/11, which of course commemorates the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. I had listened to the new recording of the brief (about 15 minute) piece on Saturday. My immediate reaction was disappointment. I thought hearing it live might change my mind. It didn’t. It seemed to me that this piece more than any of the others last night relied on recorded voices, so much so that I felt the music was reduced to underscoring. It all sounded the way you would expect it to sound.

The taped voices themselves are manipulated much less than in the other pieces on the program, which, on the one hand, is fine because it would be grotesque to make artsy arrangements of this material, but on the other hand is – setting aside the political and emotional content, and I realize this is itself a slightly grotesque complaint – kind of dull and dutiful. We’ve all heard all this before. In fact we’ve heard this material treated in the same way before (with heavy use of taped recollections from survivors), in John Adams’s 2002 piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, a work I found more oblique and to my ears therefore more evocative and wide-ranging than this one.

According to the program notes, “the Kronos Quartet asked [Reich] for a piece using pre-recorded voices.” He eventually realized that the voices should be from 9/11. He was in Vermont during the attack but his son, grand-daughter, and daughter-in-law were all in his apartment four blocks from the World Trade Center (fortunately it seems they were not injured). So centering the piece on 9/11 was Reich’s idea (and the timing with the tenth anniversary of the attacks is just a coincidence). He’s a composer, so of course his way of processing our time is through composing. But as an audience member, I didn’t feel he was saying anything I hadn’t already heard too often. I think it was a piece he needed to write, but it wasn’t a piece I needed to hear.

It’s hard to believe it was only two years ago when I was mocking the SF Symphony for scheduling their season-opening free public concert, a cheery program of waltzes, on September 11. And I still feel it was weird of them not to acknowledge the date. But I’m also feeling that it’s become rote, disingenuous, and intentionally naïve (let me be clear that I’m talking about the effect on me and not the motives of anyone involved last night) to recite the martyrology for our dead 3,000 while completely ignoring the over 100,000 (that’s only Iraqi civilians, and only an estimate) that we have since killed using our 3,000 as an excuse. WTC 9/11 is not a dishonest or shameful piece, and it’s not fatuous propaganda like Heart of a Soldier, but it’s also not very illuminating or interesting. It felt like a hard little lump that Reich had to get out of his system.

So for me the evening was on a downward trend, despite the beauty and intensity of the Quartet’s playing (which I think was amplified, to compete against the pre-recorded tapes; I was sitting far back in the hall, which is not where I usually sit so I'm not that familiar with the sound quality there, but the instruments sounded amplified until the encore, when there was to my ears a definite change away from a mechanical sound).

Different Trains is from 1988, which makes it the earliest Reich piece played Sunday night. He notes in the program that it began a new musical direction for him. It is based on his memory of cross-country train trips he took as a child, accompanied by his governess, shuttling between his divorced parents in New York City and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942, and his later realization that if he had been a European rather than American Jew during those years he most likely would have been taking a train ride to a death camp. So there is a political and cultural context here, as in The Cave and WTC 9/11 (though I felt Different Trains conveyed the context more urgently and successfully than the other two).

The contexts and connotations of the three pieces played off each other in interesting ways (with the jagged and swirling Triple Quartet acting as prelude). I thought WTC 9/11 gained from the context (which it does not have in the recording, on which it appears first and is followed by the pleasingly gamelan-like Mallet Quartet), but it lost by being another taped-voices-and-string-accompaniment piece on a program made up of them – it made the method seem less like a necessity or a way of respecting the dead than like a mode.

I wondered during some of the pieces if they would work as well with a live vocalist. It would be interesting to hear some of them that way. But it wouldn’t work for all of them – one of the important recorded voices in Different Trains is Lawrence Davis, a retired Pullman porter who used to work the Los Angeles-New York line that Reich rode. Pullman porter was one of the very limited number of jobs open to black men in America at that time. Davis’s inclusion is a subtle and necessary link between American politics and American racism and the political situation and looming racial genocide in Europe at the same time. His voice complicates and deepens the piece. And obviously you can’t have a vocalist imitating the sound of an elderly black man without sounding offensively like a minstrel show. But using a vocalist instead of tape could work in some other places. There’s a sense of somewhat fetishistic “authenticity” about the insistence on a particular recorded voice that limits the possibility of what can happen in a live performance.

Sadly for me, I am the sort of person who often has little to say about something he loves except that he loved it (usually expressed as “that was nice; I enjoyed it”), but who has plenty to say about his nagging thoughts during something he loves less. So I should point out that I really did enjoy the music (not so much WTC 9/11, but I was glad to hear it) and the performers. But my ticket cost me I think $45 (that’s with a subscriber discount), and given that most of the evening involved listening to recordings, I have to wonder if this was the best use of my time and money. I didn’t feel disappointed or ripped off, but I could have stayed home and had basically the same experience for a fraction of the trouble and cost.

This frustration of a live performance that wasn’t quite live was really brought home by the encore. I had not previously heard of the medieval composer Perotin (though there’s always the possibility I had heard his music on some recording while not registering the name; coincidentally this morning Amazon recommended a Perotin disc to me, which needless to say I bought). He is apparently a favorite composer of Reich’s, who brought him to the attention of first violin David Harrington. It was a mystical and witty piece, played with stately tenderness. And it was the first time all evening I felt I was experiencing something I could only have experienced live.

Dido dances

The Cal Performances season opened this week with the annual visit of the Mark Morris Dance Group, in a revival of Morris’s 1989 classic, Dido and Aeneas. Philharmonia Baroque played Purcell’s music. I was at last night's performance.

I have seen Dido several times, but only when Morris was still dancing Dido/the Sorceress; sometimes it is part of a double-bill and sometimes it’s on its own. Both methods work; it certainly is a rich enough hour on its own, but it worked strangely well coupled with the company’s shortened version of 4 Saints in 3 Acts (though I think they did 4 Saints first; I would have reversed the order, so that you had earthly suffering followed by heavenly joy). The first time I saw Dido it was a stand-alone and it must have been shortly after the Belgian premiere.

I think the most recent time was also a season opener for Cal Performances. I saw it twice in that run, and it was fascinating to see how Morris adjusted his performance for the second night – the first night there had been a pre-performance party for donors and maybe people had too much wine, since there was some laughter at what were seen as Morris’s more flamboyant gestures (I liked having a man dancing Dido and the Sorceress because of the link to ancient Greek tragic theater, but I am relentlessly aesthetic and high-minded and there’s always the danger some people are going to assume it’s meant purely as camp, if you can describe camp as "pure"). The next night, all the gestures that evoked laughter were made sharper and more angular and there was no laughter.

Morris has transitioned to conductor of the piece, shaping an alert and well-paced performance from Philharmonia Baroque (though for some reason the pauses between scenes struck me as held just a bit too long; as always, though, I can’t rule out that I was just being weird). The piece survives and triumphes with its second generation of dancers. Domingo Estrada Jr was a virile and sensitive Aeneas, expressing both a lover’s suffering at abandoning Dido and a leader’s recognition that he must move on with his troops (it’s quite an achievement, particularly in this short and Dido-centered opera, to make Aeneas this sympathetic; we are empire-dwellers but like to pretend that love is the obvious choice over duty).

Amber Star Merkens was a perfect choice to take over Morris’s role; in fact she somewhat resembles the younger Morris (particularly in her flowing tangle of dark curls, which she ties back for Dido and loosens for the Sorceress, just as Morris did), though I think she’s taller, leaner, and more sinewy. (Maile Okamura was nicely contrasted as a daintier, sympathetic Belinda.) Merkens makes little gestures count for a lot, as in her final confrontation with Aeneas, as the tender slight movement of her hand (to “by all that’s good”) gives way to the injured dignity of “it’s enough that once you thought of leaving me.” Her Dido is regal and moving. Her Sorceress is cynical and nihilistic and amused. She’s dazzling in both roles.

Stephanie Blythe certainly provided the vocal equivalent, with a beautiful, hall-filling voice, so expressively used, particularly in the suicide aria at the end, when Blythe and Merkens together indelibly expressed Dido’s sorrow and dignity and beauty. Philip Cutlip was distinguished as Aeneas, but had a few slight vocal bobbles. The other soloists (Yulia Van Doren as Belinda, and the First Witch Celine Ricci as the Second Woman and the Second Witch, and Brian Thorsett as the Sailor) were all strong. The chorus was very good and actually enunciated more clearly than some of the soloists (of course, I was sitting right in front of them, my view of the stage slightly blocked by the rising curl of the cello; such are the hazards of preferring the front row).

When Dido and Aeneas touch, it is briefly, and often at a distance from each other (arms extended, space between). The Sorceress is isolated, even from her attendants (Noah Vinson and Dallas McMurray), except for one moment, when she reaches the climax of her evil plan to destroy Dido, and they jump up on her, one on either side, and balance for a moment of glee. Usually she disdains even them, and is clearly and amusingly bored by their baroque repetitions and repulsed when they or any of her attendants come too close to her. We see Dido and Aeneas make love, but we see the Sorceress masturbate alone while her attendants scamper behind her; afterwards she wipes her finger with a bored “well, that’s over” expression. It's profoundly moving to see royal Dido's suicide brought about by this solitary hater of human joy, and a rich connection to have one dancer play both parts.

The setting is stripped down, with a vague blue and gray map of the Mediterranean glowing palely as backdrop to the Carthage scenes, reminding us that Aeneas has to go off and found Rome, and with black banners streaming down for the Sorceress. The dancers' movements are frieze-like and angular and often resemble classical Greek vase paintings. Even many of the movements in a line proceed at an angle. But then there are odd jittery moments thrown in, or little crude jokes, reminding us that more is going on here than an attempt to recreate the vanished (and partly unknowable) style of the Greek tragedies.

The gender ambiguity continues, with the corps, both men and women, portraying female attendants, male sailors, and in-between witches. (The Sailor’s solo is jauntily danced by Lauren Grant.) They do this by switching their black skirts to black pantaloons (I don't know if they just hitch them up or whip them off; their tank tops are always black). Some of the men have slightly crimsoned lips and gold hoop earrings. Dido has glittery silver nails and Aeneas’s nails are black.

At the end the stage slowly darkens as the attendants slip off in pairs through the curtain center stage, behind the dead queen prone on the bench facing us, her head bowed down towards us and arms extended out on either side. Belinda remains and takes a seat on the right side of the bench near her dead sister, and bows her head as the stage reaches almost total darkness.