an Anniversary, a Remembrance

As I slowly roused myself this morning I suddenly realized, out of nowhere or everywhere, that it had been exactly twenty years since the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (or, more accurately, twenty years since I heard of her death; her actual passing was three days before, on 3 July 2006). I remember sitting at my dining room table with strong afternoon sunlight slanting in, feeling weirdly unmoored. Things suddenly crystalized inside me & I went to my then relatively new blog, begun earlier that year in February, & posted this, which I have just now re-read after twenty years.

I've spent so much of my life sitting in the dark, watching & listening to performers. Like any of the strange breed that finds some sort of pleasure, solace, meaning in such activity, I have, as a counter-history to the life I'm supposedly living, an existence through the art of others (&, honestly, through irritations with others: not so much with artists who don't quite, in my opinion, succeed, because no matter what, they are out there trying, & trying to give, but with fellow audience members I have to share space with; it's always struck me that one of the powerful things about theater is that it gives us the best of humanity, in the art & generosity on stage, & shows us the worst, in the stupidity, selfishness, & lack of consideration that, too often, we find down below the stage).

There is a golden age in that counter-history, & for me that would be the start of my concert-going, when I was young & had moved to the other side of the country, to Boston. (A few years ago I listened to a recording of Handel's wonderfully named Occasional Oratorio, & listening by myself to an unfamiliar Handel oratorio was for me weirdly like dipping a madeleine into the lime-flower tisane, bringing up a flood of memories, of ornate concert halls & crowded theaters & the sun descending through stained-glass windows in dim stone churches with hard cold benches, & I'm listening, listening, anxious not to miss a sound.) I liked early & baroque music & also modernist & contemporary music (I gradually worked my way towards the creamy center of western music history) & so it was inevitable that eventually I would stumble across a performance by, as she was known at the time, Lorraine Hunt, a violist who had started singing soprano roles. (She switched to mezzo somewhere along the way, & added Peter Lieberson's name to hers after she married the composer.)

She soon became a favorite of mine. A few years ago I was looking through some old playbills (I have piles & piles of them, & keep reminding myself I should probably sort through them & toss some before my eventual executors have to) & realized I had heard her in roles I had forgotten about: I heard her in Idomeneo, & Handel's Belshazzar. What a strangely extravagant thing memory is, profligate & wasteful, that I should forget such things, while carrying for decades incidents of far less importance! It's a perverse sort of wealth that can toss such jewels aside.

When I moved back to California I heard her in person less often, though there were still some memorable moments, notably an incendiary Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea at San Francisco Opera. Her Addio, Roma was so intense that it burned the place down, & in my memory her face as she sings it is impossibly large, in cinematic close-up, though such a thing could not of course have been possible on stage. Her performance was so all-consuming & magnificent that it actually threw off the balance of the opera, & I felt sorry for the other performers: the exquisite duet Pur ti miro, which usually climaxes the evening, felt like an after-thought, something to get through so that we could wander out in the dark, reeling from the Empress's farewell to her native city & to life. My last attempt to hear Hunt Lieberson was at the SF Symphony, where she had been scheduled to sing in the Mahler 2, the Resurrection. By then there had been a worrisome pattern of cancellations on her part & I remember asking when I bought my ticket at the box office if she was still scheduled to be one of the performers. The man shrugged mildly & philosophically & said, "Yes, she's still on the schedule, but . . . you never know."

As it turned out, she was not one of the performers. You never really do know, but what you never really do know about certain things is not their if but their when. If I'd known her end would have come so much sooner than expected (she was only 52 when she died of cancer), I would have traveled more to hear her: or, at least, that's what I tell myself now; at the time, lack of the usual lack of money & time often prevented travel; it's the dailiness of life, the things we forget, that in the moment often redirect us from what we would end up truly valuing). So here we are, twenty years later. Later today I may put on one of her recordings, but it's not quite, as those of us who seek out live performances know, the same. The usual clichés still apply: value what you have when you have it, be grateful, keep going into the uncertain fog of the future, keep going, keep going, as long as you can, keep going, keep going. . . .

Michael Hersch, American Visionary at the NOVA Chamber Music Series

I don't remember when or why I started listening to Michael Hersch's music, but I've been doing so for years, and in all that time I had only heard one piece live – a song he wrote for Thomas Hampson, based on a passage from Thomas Hardy. So when I was randomly checking the composer's website and saw that in the last week of January 2018 the NOVA Chamber Music Series in Salt Lake City was performing three substantial works by him – The Vanishing Pavilions, Last Autumn, and On the Threshold of Winter – I decided it would be a good idea to take my first trip to the Beehive State.

I flew in on Sunday afternoon, which gave me enough time to figure out the location of the concert venue (the Libby Gardner Concert Hall in Presidents Circle at the University of Utah) in relation to my hotel (the University Park Marriott), before the first concert: The Vanishing Pavilions, played by pianist and NOVA Artistic Director Jason Hardink. I had checked for hotels near the University of Utah and found a nice one about a mile away, though since the music building is on the other side of the campus it was actually two miles away. That proved to be a good distance to walk after the concerts, and I was lucky the weather was not as wet and cold as it might have been, so I could ponder and decompress under the stars.

Each concert was preceded by a short conversation between Hersch and Hardink in a small lecture room down the hall from the auditorium. (I was very impressed that Hardink could conduct an interview right before playing a massive two-and-a-half-hour solo piano piece, but he's clearly a man of many talents). I took some brief notes on what Hersch said; one thing I wrote out right away was his response when he was asked what the impetus was for his composition: he responded that years ago he had started writing only pieces that compelled him because he is "not talented enough to write pieces that don't feel necessary." That really struck me, as our culture tends to favor the divine afflatus over the conscientious craftsman, but I think I saw what he meant: there's tremendous skill and also sensitivity in producing music by the yard, so to speak, the way a composer for film would, as opposed to being guided by your own inner necessity. It seemed typical of a certain tendency towards self-effacement on Hersch's part. He is soft-spoken, considerate with his words, and not at all anecdotal. He would answer each question and then fall silent.

I had sort of assumed that American Visionary was the name NOVA chose for the festival just because visionary always sounds good, but as I listened to Hersch talk about his approach to composition I began to understand that the word had been chosen more precisely than I had assumed. I had not previously considered Hersch a Wagner-like composer, but like Wagner he writes pieces of epic length, in a sound world of his own, uncertain if they will ever actually be performed. He has a distinct way of viewing the world, which I think often gets misunderstood. After Hampson sang that song, he courteously gestured to Hersch, who turned out to be in the audience, and made a deprecating little remark about how bleak his world view was. To me it came across as a bit dismissive, even condescending. I think Hersch sees the world clearly and tried to express his view – his vision – clearly. Obviously it's one I'm sympathetic with, and I've also been dismissed so often as overly gloomy or grim or pretentious that I bristle with a sense of personal identification when I heard remarks like the one Hampson made about Hersch. It was wonderful to be in an audience that was clearly open to what he was saying and how he was saying it.

Maybe this is a good point to mention that the people I spoke to at NOVA, particularly Executive Director Kristin Rector and Digital Content Producer Chris Martin, could not have been nicer or more welcoming to this visitor from California. And I might as well mention here as well that my series pass was so inexpensive ($50 for three concerts) that at first I assumed there was an error on the website. These concerts are clearly going to count as one of the great bargains as well as one of the most artistically exciting events of my year.

(the view from my hotel room)

Back to the talk: The Vanishing Pavilions, like Hersch's ensuing pieces, was written without regard to its practicality. In fact Hersch, a pianist himself, composed it away from the instrument so that he would not be guided or bound by his particular pianistic preferences or defaults. Someone in the audience asked if he would authorize excerpts to be played, and he said no, though on occasion it has happened. Hersch mentioned (he brought this up during one of the other talks as well) that one reason a piece like this isn't done very often is that you need someone who is not only interested in learning a lengthy piece of new music but has the technical skills and stamina required to bring it off.

Someone asked about how he memorized the piece and Hersch replied that there was a process of living with it for a year after the composition (which I think took more than a year; I didn't write that bit of information down in my notes). By then he did have a premiere date for the work and had to scramble a bit as his year of learning the piece was delayed by the birth of his child. (Hardink also played from memory, and I think said it took him about a year to learn it.) Hersch was then asked whether composition was an expression of self or of ideas, and he promptly said it was an expression of the self, which I thought was interesting in a composer so often seen as intellectual, though he immediately pointed out that ideas form part of the self, so there really isn't a clear division there.

The Vanishing Pavilions was completed in 2005 and its fifty segments are divided into two books (there was a brief intermission between the two halves). It is inspired by lines and images from the works of British poet Christopher Middleton. Hersch often works from poetry, or rather fragments and lines of poetry submerged under the music. The program notes by Andrew Farach-Colton for this piece were reprinted from the CD release. Last Autumn, which is sort of a companion piece to Pavilions, is similarly in two books and inspired by lines from W G Sebald. I was intrigued when Hersch mentioned that he had written a third piece, as yet unperformed, that is five hours long, inspired by a third poet whom he did not name.

When I found out the talks were down the hall I expressed some concern about getting the seats I like (front row) as it was general admission seating, and I was assured that it would not be a problem. Indeed it was not, as the rest of the audience apparently preferred sitting farther back. I was in the front, slightly to the left of the pianist, with no one around me for three rows. It was like a private performance. This is my idea of concert-going heaven. It seemed almost like a bonus that Hardink's performance was so superb, with just breath-taking colors. I think, from something I heard him say later, that the Steinway was his personal instrument, not the one belonging to the concert hall. The music is turbulent and searching, with lyricism slashed through, ending abruptly, the vibrations dying into silence. The audience was attentive and then extremely enthusiastic at the end. Hersch did not come up to take a bow, letting Hardink have the moment.

As I said, it was good to have a long walk under a cold night sky afterwards.

The next night it was back to the Libby Gardner Concert Hall for Last Autumn from 2008, performed by Utah Symphony Acting Principal Horn Edmund Rollett and cellist Noriko Kishi. In the talk before the performance, Hersch mentioned, if I understood him correctly, that this was only the third time the piece had ever been played. He wrote it for specific players; eventually he mentioned that one of them, the horn player, was his brother (Jamie Hersch). I assume the cellist on the recording, Daniel Gaisford, is the other begetter. Apparently the two performers had some sort of falling out that was linked in some way to the piece (as I said, Hersch is not anecdotal and did not go into the details). Hersch quipped that he hoped Edmund and Noriko would not find their friendship damaged by working on the piece. He was asked again about the length of his pieces: basically, does he know where he's going with them, or do they just extend as he works on them – his answer was that he knows where he's going to end up.

The program note for this piece was by Aaron Grad (it is also available on the recording). The texts by Sebald were printed in the program. I read them beforehand but decided not to follow along during the performance, as I can do that easily enough with the recording and it's such a privilege to hear this music live that I might as well bask in it. Though a piece for two players doesn't give the impression of having quite the virtuosic flash of a similarly sized piece for one player, that impression is misleading. NOVA audiences are lucky to have musicians of this level of accomplishment playing for them. Again, I had my private concert experience and was, once again, blown away.

The third and final concert was on Thursday night, this time at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Basically the theater was a large empty room, with the audience sitting in three rows of chairs against the long wall opposite the entrance. On the Threshold of Winter, a monodrama in two acts, had its premiere in 2014. Again, it was written without a commission and was inspired by poetry, in this case The Bridge by Romanian poet Marin Sorescu, written as he was dying of cancer. (The work was translated by Adam J Sorkin and Lidia Vinau and the text was adapted, I assume, by Hersch.) The composer was asked in the pre-concert talk about the circumstances surrounding the creation of this work, which I suspect he would not have brought up himself. He had a close friend who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. What he did not mention in the talk, though it is in the program book, is that while helping her through her illness he himself was also diagnosed with cancer. He survived, she did not.

One of the difficulties Hersch mentioned was finding the right singer for the demanding solo role; in fact he was told that he would never find what he was looking for. It turned out by chance someone had heard soprano Ah Young Hong singing church gigs in Baltimore and recommended her and, as Hersch noted, it was the case of a major artist who had just not yet gotten a break. (She now performs widely and I believe she is the only singer who has performed On the Threshold of Winter. She also directed this production.)

Hersch mentioned in the pre-concert talk that some critics had blamed the piece and him for not "offering hope" and he responded, with undertones of bewilderment and exasperation, that he wasn't trying to "offer hope" – he was trying to express an emotional state. (I was reminded of Hampson's  remark about the composer's bleak worldview). The opera is shattering, but you end up feeling not just shattered but also strengthened – you know, catharsis. That's what seeing someone create art despite pain can do.

The poems and fragments of poems that make up the text occasionally mention the hospital or illness-related matters but the general effect is not clinical; it's emotional, psychological, and spiritual. The singer,who is physically fairly small, was wearing a loose somewhat gauzy white gown, suggesting an angel or a ghost as well as a hospital robe. The text is in English but also projected, which is very helpful because the vocal lines are high and sometimes distorted for expressive effect (as with the operas of Thomas Adès, I wondered about the extent to which surtitles make this style possible by making the words intelligible). The text formed part of the scenic projections, which were mostly black and white with occasional slashes of red, and mostly of natural scenes. We were more likely to be shown the bare black branches of trees in winter than the white corridors of a hospital. The stage is right there in front of us, bare except for some large boxes that Young Hong sometimes sat or walked on or, at one point, knocked over.

I hope there is a recording fairly soon, as this is a score that needs to be listened to several times. (There is, however, a new recording of Ah Young Hong singing Hersch's a breath upwards, along with Babbitt's Philomel.) The music produces moments of astonishing beauty that collapse into confusion, only to rise again. And here I will praise conductor Tito Muñoz and his band – Caitlyn Valovick Moore (flute), Luca de la Florin (oboe), Jaren Hinckley (clarinet), Katie Porter (bass clarinet), Gavin Ryan (percussion), Michael Sheppard (piano), Hugh Palmer (violin), and Walter Haman (cello) – for their expert way with the music. Due to the set-up of the theater, I was not isolated in splendor as I was at the other venue, but the audience was very attentive and involved and quiet, except for one man in my vicinity who kept clearing his throat every few minutes. I think it was just a tic that he and his wife had become unaware of. Not ideal, but it was an interesting counterpoint to a piece that is to some extent about the breakdown of our physical bodies.

This was the only one of the three concerts at which Hersch took a bow, mostly because Young Hong insisted; she also kept directing the enthusiastic applause towards Muñoz and the band. The whole approach was very collegial, very much that of a community of people making art together. It was a beautiful feeling to end on, after a week of intense, emotionally involving music. The whole festival was a triumph.

Bay Area residents who want to hear Hersch's music live can go to the Ojai North concert at Cal Performances in Berkeley on 15 June, which features his latest work (a Cal Performances co-commission), I hope we get a chance to visit soon. (Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja is this year's music director for the festival, and for those able to get down south, the whole schedule looks enticing.) Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy will be the two sopranos in the new work and Hersch himself will be on piano as part of an ensemble led by Muñoz. As you have probably guessed, I already have my ticket.

Cathy and Heathcliff in Minnesota

I’ve been fascinated by Bernard Herrmann’s single opera, Wuthering Heights, ever since I heard of it somewhere years ago: the famous film composer’s only opera! Based on Emily Bronte’s only novel, that strange and demonic book! Add in my constantly thwarted attempts to find a recording, and the rarity of performances, and I figured it was time for a Twin Cities trip when Minnesota Opera put it on their schedule. (The performances will be recorded for DVD release, so future aficionados of Herrmann or Bronte won’t have the problems I had finding a good recording.) I was at the first performance, on April 16.

Herrmann’s music swells up to the great scenes, but is largely brooding and atmospheric, with many of the eerie touches for which his film scores are famous. Yet it doesn’t sound like “movie music” – that is, it stands alongside the action, rather than underlining it in the way of mid-century Hollywood films. The music frequently evokes the ghostly gray atmosphere of the wind-swept moors that play such an important part in the psychology of the story.

Projections were used extensively and instead of seeming, as they often do, like mostly a money-saving device, they stylishly brought both springtime and wintertime Yorkshire on stage. In the opening scene, the lodger Mr Lockwood seeks shelter from a raging snowstorm at Wuthering Heights. He sings about “the snow, the everlasting snow” and there was a big and unintended laugh from the audience – here it was the middle of April, and it had snowed in Minneapolis the day before, so it was a sympathizing laugh. “They’re going to have problems with that during the recording,” I heard one audience member say during intermission.

Minnesota Opera did Herrmann proud, with an excellent production and an outstanding cast of young singers. But . . . the libretto is a problem, at least for me (and probably anyone else who’s read the book). It’s not Wuthering Heights; it’s what people often think Wuthering Heights is: a brooding, fairly conventional romance. It’s not just that the opera cuts the story in half, ending with Catherine Earnshaw’s death (roughly the halfway point of the novel), or that in the transition from novel to stage you inevitably lose certain narrative nuances: the comedy of the urbane Mr Lockwood’s consistent misunderstanding of his landlord, who really is the brooding loner Lockwood considers himself to be; the sensible voice of housekeeper Nelly Dean as she tells the terrifying story; the whole atmosphere of inbred feverishness.

No, it’s that the opera fundamentally alters and softens the characters of Heathcliff and Cathy. In the novel the increasingly drunken and brutal Hindley, up on the staircase, throws his young son off the side and Heathcliff, who happens to be passing below, instinctively catches the falling child and then, equally instinctively, is horrified and regretful that he has saved his enemy Hindley from murdering his own child. In the opera (I’m going by the stage direction in the libretto I bought at the Minnesota Opera, as well as by what I saw on stage), Heathcliff confronts Hindley on the stairs and protectively takes the child out of his arms, to much more heroic effect.


Here are a few of the things Heathcliff does not do in the opera that he does in the novel: hit both women and children; hang Isabella Linton’s puppy as he elopes with her; throw a knife at her later in the marriage, cutting her in the face; terrify his own sickly effeminate son (whom he consistently and contemptuously refers to as "it") into marrying Cathy’s daughter (the second generation, except for a brief appearance by Hindley’s son, doesn’t appear at all). And his tight hold on money, so unsuitable for a romantic hero and frequently mentioned in the novel, makes no appearance in the libretto (except for a passing insinuation that he tried to become rich to be socially equal to the Lintons).

It’s a tribute to Bronte’s genius that she makes this unlikely figure one of the most memorable romantic figures in English literature. The libretto (written by Lucille Fletcher, who was married to Herrmann at the time) plays it safe, making him much more conventional. Lee Poulis as Heathcliff gave probably the most powerful performance in the very strong cast, so I mean no reflection on him when I wonder if a rougher-looking singer might have counteracted the libretto: Poulis’s tall slim build, unruly dark curls, and refined handsomeness made him the very picture of a brooding romantic loner, rather than the devil to which the novel’s Heathcliff is frequently compared.

As in the novel, Isabella writes to Nelly asking if Heathcliff is a man or a demon, but unlike in the novel, we opera-goers have no real reason to consider him evil. The unearthly (for good and ill) quality of their love is replaced by a more standard operatic emotion. There are grotesque touches, as in a quick scene in the beginning of Heathcliff embracing the skeleton of the dead Cathy, but the terrifyingly cruel and gothic obsessiveness of the novel's lovers is tamed.

Cathy (Sara Joubiak), the headstrong and sadistic, is also softened in the opera. She no longer humiliates her sister-in-law Isabella (Adriana Zabala) by forcing her to stay in the room as she tells the newly arrived Heathcliff all about Isabella’s love for him; now, they are all already in the room and Isabella brings the subject up herself. The cruel scene in which Cathy locks the door so that her husband can’t call the servants for help but instead must fight Heathcliff himself is also considerably softened (and so is Edgar Linton – in the novel, he punches Heathcliff with enough force to knock him down; in the opera, Edgar, played by Eric Margiore, simply collapses weakly on the sofa, wondering if his wife doesn’t love him any more, while Heathcliff stalks off contemptuously).

There are other clumsy elements in the libretto: Hindley’s descent into drunken debauchery and madness seems sort of arbitrary and even convenient, despite the efforts of singer Ben Wager, so it should be made clearer that it is due to misery at the death of his wife; Cathy’s violent temper should appear earlier, so that her actions don't seem quite so out of the blue when she cruelly pinches Nelly (Victoria Vargas) and then strikes Edgar when he objects. Until then we had mostly seen her singing about how much she loves the springtime flowers. There is, in my opinion, a little too much singing about the spring flowers anyway, when the time might be better spent on other aspects of the characters.

We also get not one but two “dream ballets” featuring Cathy and Heathcliff , which, though beautifully danced by Jeremy Bensussan and Megan McClellan, and not in itself a bad idea, unfortunately made me think of Curly and Laurie in Oklahoma.

It’s a puzzle to me why Herrmann, who I understand was very well read, considered this libretto an acceptable version of Wuthering Heights – why did he want this milk-and-water version of Bronte’s strange strong brew? It’s one thing to take a relatively obscure medieval legend like Tristan and Iseult (another story of obsessive, destructive love and death) and alter it so that your opera becomes in many ways the definitive version of the story. I don’t really understand why you’d take a story that is already iconic and then weaken it to this extent. Herrmann in many ways wrote a wonderful opera, but it doesn’t come near the strange and wild book. (By the way, I've also seen – once – the famous film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, and I absolutely hated it.)

Having said all that, I should point out that I was extremely glad I made the trip to see the opera in person, and will no doubt buy the DVD as soon as it becomes available. (Perhaps with repeated viewing I can accept the opera more on its own terms, rather than on Emily Bronte's.) The words of an opera are important to me, but the music and the singing can rescue them. The first night audience seemed to enjoy the work too, judging from the attentiveness, the applause, and remarks afterward (though I did hear one stout and sensible-looking middle-aged woman saying in slightly irritated and disgusted tones, “Well, he’s crazy, she’s crazy . . . they’re both crazy!”).

I salute Minnesota Opera for staging this enticing rarity and for recording it as well. The singers I haven’t mentioned by name yet are Rodolfo Nieto as Joseph, Jesse Blumberg as Lockwood, and Joshua Ross as Hindley’s son; Michael Christie conducted and Eric Simonson directed. Everyone in the cast had amazingly good English diction; there would have been no comprehension problems even without the surtitles, which is very rarely the case. In face everyone involved in general did an outstanding job, except, unfortunately, the librettist.

Titian and MacMillan in Minneapolis

Friday before last two long bus rides took me from the St Paul abode of my fabulous Twin Cities host, Jack Curtis Dubowsky, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, one of those capacious museums that varies the aesthetic overload by offering a different style or period every few galleries.

There were some enticing special exhibits, including the 38 alabaster mourners, each a bit over a foot high, except for one shorter altar boy, that normally form part of the tombs of the first Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and his son John the Fearless, but which were temporarily parading down the middle of a long medieval gallery accompanied by period-appropriate music. They are astonishingly varied and lifelike; so much so that you could almost take them for granted: yes, that is what they should look like, and so that is how they look.

I spent about an hour in the other special exhibit, Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting. As with the Burgundian mourners and most other special exhibits everywhere, photography was not allowed inside the exhibit, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that this exhibit was small but intense. The centerpiece was two great canvases by Titian, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, part of an instantly celebrated suite he painted for King Philip II of Spain, based on stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There were six large canvases altogether; one of the others, the Rape of Europa, was very familiar to me from Boston days, since it was always one of my favorite pictures in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Underlying the sumptuous beauty of these pictures is a tragic view of human life; each represents an innocent victim of the angry and lustful whims of the gods. The troubled and shadowed face of Callisto, as her fellows, at the virgin huntress Diana’s order, rip off her robes to reveal the pregnancy resulting from Zeus’s rape, is especially striking.

There were a couple of extremely loud docents but eventually I managed enough semi-quiet time in front of these rich pictures. It’s always a problem for me deciding when to stop looking at something like this: you could look at them forever, yet I may well never see them again, so how much is enough?

Towards closing time I went to the Information Desk and asked if I could walk from the MIA to Orchestra Hall. The kindly gray-haired woman there told me that I could, but she said it in doubtful and slightly surprised tones, and added, “But it’s nearly a mile!” I told her that was OK with me. “Well, you do have a jacket, don’t you? It’s windy out there!” she added in motherly tones. I assured her I had one (though I’d have brought a heavier coat if I’d known we’d get actual snow) and she told me which street to take in what direction and what landmarks to look for.

I managed to walk my mile and find Orchestra Hall without much trouble. It’s attractive enough outside, but inside the hall is honestly and to my surprise even less attractive than Davies Symphony Hall. There are giant whitish cubes of various sizes jutting out at different arbitrary angles all over the stage area. I did take some photos after the concert but I guess I shouldn’t post them since an usher rushed over to tell me photography was not permitted inside the auditorium. I apologized and said I thought that was just when the orchestra was on stage. “No,” she said, “the guy who designed this place owns the patent and the copyright and everything and he’s very strict about it and we can’t even change the horrible 1970s orange seatcovers without his permission.” (He apparently has withheld that permission, since there was a sea of 1970s burnt orange seating.) So I apologized again and added, “But it’s so ugly.” “I know,” she replied.

The sound was really good, though, rich and precise, no doubt in part due to the acoustical effects of the hideously jutting cubes. The orchestra seems to have embraced the protuberances, using a cube as its logo. The ticket they sent me in the mail was bordered with ornate and old-fashioned looking scrollwork, so I was expecting something older than the 1970s.

As noted, we were asked to leave our guns elsewhere. I was kind of startled by these signs. Jack explained to me that it’s legal to carry concealed weapons in Minnesota, but venues can forbid them – but if they’re concealed, how do you know if people are complying or not?

Music Director Osmo Vanska conducted the performance I went to. The opener was Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody in A Major, Opus 11, No. 1, a brief but kaleidoscopic whirl inflected by the folk music of Romania and its near eastern neighbors as brought through the area by the people who ended up being called gypsies. This was followed by the main draw of the concert for me, the world premiere of James MacMillan’s Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, The Mysteries of Light. Jean-Yves Thibaudet, wearing a jacket with oddly different shades of black angled together, was the virtuosic soloist.

MacMillan is, of all odd combinations, a Scottish Catholic, and as with Messiaen, his music is often inspired by his religion: in this case, the Five Luminous Mysteries of the rosary that Pope John Paul II added to the traditional Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Knowing this adds another dimension to the piece, and might provide an emotional guide to the various movements, but you could also just enjoy the piece as a dazzler without knowing any more about it than what you were hearing. The five movements are played without pause, though each is distinctive enough so that it’s easy to tell where you are. The concerto lasts almost half an hour, with music ranging from the rippling to the ritualistic. The pianist plays throughout, except for the fourth movement.

The audience seemed quite enthusiastic. MacMillan came up to take a bow. He was seated several rows behind me so during the intermission I got up the nerve to ask him to sign my program. He was very amiable and gracious. He speaks softly with a fairly heavy Scottish accent, so I had a bit of trouble hearing him in the noisy hall. I told him I had enjoyed the piece and was glad to hear his music live, since I’d heard quite a bit of it, but only on CD. I mentioned that I was in town to hear Wuthering Heights at the Opera. “That’s Bernard Herrmann, isn’t it?” he said. “I’d like to hear that.” Herrmann is kind of a cult composer, it seems.

After the intermission we had Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Opus 13. I was pretty tired by then and simply luxuriated in the sound, which was sort of like being adrift on a sea of caramel. I have the feeling I’ve heard this Symphony very recently at the San Francisco Symphony, but I’m feeling lazy about looking it up and since what sounded familiar was not so much the music itself as the story of the symphony’s unsuccessful St Petersburg premiere and eventual rediscovery I might have read about it in connection with a different piece. The applause seemed extremely enthusiastic, but afterwards as I waited for my taxi (having decided that a lengthy bus ride with transfers late at night while the snow was falling thickly in a city I didn’t know was something I didn’t need to do) I heard one woman say to another, “Well, I just don’t know about Rachmaninoff. He’s always so loud.”

Eventually my taxi driver showed up and he not only did not appear to know how to get to St Paul, he seemed unable to work his own GPS. If it hadn’t been snowing great wet flakes I probably would have gotten out and searched for another taxi, but I was already far enough from Orchestra Hall so that I decided to hope for the best. Soon enough he figured out what he was doing and I returned to St Paul.

critically disarming

Your rapier-like wit, however, is more than welcome!

A sign like this was prominently displayed on each door of Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. "Hey, M*****F*****! You call that 'andante'?" BANG!

April in Minnesota

Yes, that's snow on the ground. Seriously!

'twas the season 12

deflated Santa on 8th Avenue, New York, December 2009

'tis the season 11

miracle on (or near) 34th Street: Macy's side entrance, December 2009

'tis the season 10

holiday two-for-one, 5th Avenue, New York, December 2009

'tis the season 9

Columbus Circle, New York City, December 2009

'tis the season 7

Night-time Santa on one of the West 40 streets in Manhattan, I think outside a "gentlemen's club" (ho ho ho)

New York City, December 2009

'tis the season 6

Radio City Music Hall, December 2009

'tis the season 5

Rockefeller Center tree, December 2009

'tis the season 4

from Rockefeller Center, December 2009

'tis the season 3

Rockefeller Center, December 2009

'tis the season 2

poinsettias in Rockefeller Center, December 2009

'tis the season

Rockefeller Center, December 2009

St Sebastian and the torso of a Roman athlete

from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

the green man

the lid to a medieval ewer, The Cloisters, New York City: for MVD

medieval

the head of a dragon, from a tapestry in The Cloisters