old times there are not forgotten

Some of the world premieres I’ve gone to have been tarted up with klieg lights and glam women in gowns they should have known better than to wear; not so last Friday night at Appomattox,the new Philip Glass opera, and the subdued, even somber atmosphere was better suited to this somber and meditative piece. The opera opens and closes with clusters (not really a chorus) of women: Julia Grant worries about her husband, who has assured her the bloody war will end soon; the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Lee counsels her daughter on facing adversity with fortitude; Mrs. Lincoln and her black seamstress discuss their anxieties and interpret dreams. Christopher Hampton's libretto deftly individualizes the women through the course of the evening and avoids the sentimental mistake of separating them into a Trojan Women chorus lamenting a disaster they are related to only through suffering. In the final scene, the same women repeat the opinion of Abraham Lincoln, with all the moral weight his words carry for an American audience, that war and the suffering of war are inevitable. Not only has this war not ended with the triumph of justice, but it is part of the endless cycle of violence and suffering; if the mournful conclusion of this opera isn’t inspiriting like the final aria in Satyagraha, it’s because that aria expressed an endless cycle of suffering followed by regeneration, and Appomattox ends with an expression of an endless cycle of suffering.

Small and large events illustrate the inevitability of greed and bitterness: after the generous peace is signed, souvenir hunters loot Wilmer McLean’s house and beat him up when he resists; when a Union officer checks with Mrs. Lee to see that she has been treated with respect, that bitter woman, who had claimed that she and the General would have freed their slaves happily (and who also claims that some day the slaves will regret being freed) objects to having a black soldier guarding her house, and the Union officer switches the guard to a white soldier with apologies to her but not to him. The work’s title is carefully chosen: this opera is not about “the Civil War” as an historic event (there’s no mention of state’s rights, John Brown, the Fugitive Slave Law, territorial rivalries, the contradiction between the founder’s revolutionary ideology and their slave-holding, or any number of other causes and crises, and the atmosphere of the work justifies spending more time on Mary Todd Lincoln and a former slave discussing dreams than on Lincoln and Grant discussing strategy). It’s about one very specific incident, the battle at Richmond and the resulting surrender at Appomattox, and how that was supposed to be the end of the war, and how it was not. There’s a scene in the second half in which some of the black soldiers we’ve seen are now civil rights workers from a few decades ago, angrily pointing out that a hundred years after Appomattox the former slaves are still waiting for justice. This scene is the only one in rhyme, possibly because the most contemporary moment needs to be stylized for contemplative distance, or to capture the sense of chanting; it was also the only scene interrupted by spontaneous applause on opening night, in which I would have joined except the music was already playing for the next scene. The thought-provoking, smoothly managed juxtapositions of past and recent events and the shifts between depiction and meditation deserve lots of praise, since, to judge from the botched libretto of Dr. Atomic, it’s very difficult to bring off this sort of thing effectively.

The women who open and close the opera appear throughout, and my initial reaction was that I would have preferred a little less of them if it meant more time for the voices of ordinary soldiers (again, this absence was a major fault in Dr. Atomic, which found plenty of time to repeat the Kokopelli kitsch of the chanting “Native American child-care giver” but couldn’t bother scrounging up the thoughts of a single soldier on the ground, or indeed find any military man who wasn’t a posturing buffoon). Daguerreotypes of individual soldiers are carried in by the women in the opening and left on the front of the stage, and more appear on the backdrop later, but only two choruses come close to giving us their opinions and voices: one a sardonic, mournful soldier’s ballad sung by the Confederate men and the other a song of muted defiance sung by the black troops invading Richmond. These two choruses have a very distinct, catchy sound, and I’m assuming they’re based on actual Civil War songs (which the rest of the score is not; one advantage of Glass’s method – or of “the Philip Glass sound” – is that the Civil War is wrenched away from familiar associations with Dixie, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, slave spirituals, or even Max Steiner’s Tara and since what we hear is new it forces us to see things in a new way). These choruses also, in their immediate appeal and sense of comradeship, help show a little of the excitement and glamorous appeal that war undoubtedly possesses, and without this sense (brilliantly evoked by Whitman in the beginning of the Drum-taps section of Leaves of Grass) it’s too easy for us to shake our heads and wonder what they were thinking. You especially need this evocation to understand General Lee and his insistence on his honorable behavior.

I confess I have never admired General Lee. Perhaps I should make clear that, despite my frequent mentions of Boston, I am not some determined Yankee. I’m a native Californian, and though I wasn’t raised with any special sense of the southern myth, I did have a maternal great-grandmother from Virginia who watched her brother being shot dead by marauding Union forces when he ran to save the family horses (so the dead horses suspended on the stage, and rising again in the end, had a certain resonance for me); decades later, dying in Detroit, she felt she was dying in a foreign land. And I have also been the victim of racial harassment and even violence, so I don’t think I have an overly sentimental view of what oppression does to people. Others might hear the opera and have a more sympathetic view of Lee’s dilemma. He decides to surrender rather than switch to guerrilla warfare because his men will inevitably end up lawless, but in fact that’s pretty much what happened, in one of the great tragedies of American life, as the ideology of white supremacy defeated any advances in social justice the end of the war might have brought; the whole moonshine and magnolia farce of “the Lost Cause” is a thin decorative veneer over a corrupt society that used terrorism and twisted laws to promote its racist exploitation of the impoverished former slaves. If we were presented with a German military man steeped in the traditions of Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, who, however reluctantly, and motivated by love of the Rhineland’s beauty and a sense that he owed it to his birthplace, agreed to command the Nazi army (not “didn’t emigrate” or “reluctantly continued to function” but commanded the entire Nazi army), would we really be expected to sympathize with him? So how is Lee different?

There’s a scene early on (I assume this really happened) in which General Cobb protests Lee’s proposal that slaves be used to fight alongside white soldiers (unlike the segregated units of the Northern army). There are hints that Lee is considered wishy-washy on the subject of slavery. Lee’s response is that he is practical and his business is to win the war, but supporting the corrupt ideology of the weaker side does not seem like a practical act. (Also, though this point isn’t mentioned: if your slaves are fighting by your side, you can keep an eye, and a gun, on them; if they’re in a separate unit, there’s a good chance they would shoot their commanding officers and go join the Union forces, so I'm a little doubtful that Lee's stand is just about equal rights.) General Cobb is, in a sense, correct: if you are fighting an ideological war, and you ignore or subvert your ideology because it doesn’t work, then why are you fighting for that ideology in the first place? If Lee felt this way, and had the same conflict about slave ownership as many in the Revolutionary generation, then shame on him for not taking the offered leadership of the Union Army. Perhaps I just lack the egotism to think that a place is important because I happened to be born there, but some things are even more important than your blue remembered hills, and justice or even simple human decency might be two of those things.

During the intermission I overheard a few people saying they were disappointed (though the audience as a whole gave an enthusiastic ovation at the end). As a general principle I think you need to see where a piece ends up before you decide it took the wrong road getting there, but I wonder if for some people the word “opera” conveys a more limited meaning than it should. Appomattox does not build up to big, tension-releasing arias or to moments when the emotions, either tragic or triumphant, soar upwards through the action, and if that’s what you’re looking for in an opera, you’re better off approaching Appomattox as something like the St. Matthew Passion, or indeed not approaching it at all. During a lot of the first half I had the feeling that the music was building, and then building again, and not breaking through. It wasn’t until the end, with the mournful acknowledgement of the inevitable cycle of war and suffering, that I saw that the music’s stifled, circular feeling was the intended point. (Anyone who doubts Glass’s ability to say exactly what he wants to should listen to the bright sparkling piano music illustrating Grant’s migraine before his meeting with Lee, though I have to say that my migraines, described musically, would probably take the form of very bright repeated arpeggios – in other words, what people think of as “Philip Glass music.”) Dennis Russell Davies kept the music from sounding overly repetitive (though occasionally he did allow the orchestra to cover the singers.)

The only scene I found a bit disappointing musically was the siege of Richmond, with a chorus saying, “Ah!” repeatedly, though the staging, with refugees clutching treasured possessions coming down the ramp mid-stage and more refugees entering from the back, some dropping from exhaustion, was effective, as was the entire production generally. The costumes were historical but the sets were mostly abstract. The stage curtain was a beautiful abstract in grays and white, with some splashes of black, which opened directly onto the action (there is no overture). The silvery first set gives way to a stage-sized orange box which holds abstracted fences, maps, and mirrors as the act progresses. The second half set, with its pale grey and white, its pale squiggles, its scrawled phrases (Sic Semper Tyrannis, notably), and soldier’s portraits barely emerging from the background, made me think “Cy Twombly’s Civil War”, which gives you an idea both of its beauty and of the disorienting effect it could have on someone who came in expecting a history rather than a meditation.

Dwayne Croft as Lee and Andrew Shore as Grant were excellent, but the many Adler Fellows in the cast really shone: Rhoslyn Jones as a warm and sympathetic Mrs. Grant, Jeremy Galyon as Lincoln (it can’t be easy to put on the stovepipe hat and avoid caricature), Heidi Melton as Mrs. Lincoln and Kendall Gladen as her seamstress, and Elza van den Heever as the increasingly bitter and racist Mrs. Lee – it’s a tribute to her portrayal that when she walked on stage for her curtain call, smiling and young-looking, it took me a moment to realize who she was. Noah Stewart was powerful as T. Morris Chester, a black journalist who first reports on the fall of Richmond and then returns to describe how later years have failed the promised justice of the Union victory. And long-time SF Opera singer Philip Skinner made my skin crawl with the casual sanctimony and viciousness of Edgar Ray Killen, a preacher and Klan member who murdered four Civil Rights workers.

If I haven’t mentioned any parallels with our sad times and our endless wars fought from ignorance and greed, it’s because there’s no need to; a meditation on the endless cycle of war and suffering and injustice is too obviously of our times, and of all times.

hey there -- you with the stars in your eyes

I walked past a movie theater today and its marquee was advertising both the regular feature and the Friday night midnight movie, so it read:

The Jane Austen Book Club
Night of the Creeps

That is exactly how the previews for that movie make me feel!

In further blog-related hilarity (I’ve had another visit with the plumber, and this time he brought his camera guy, and when you hear “Sorry, but we may need to adjust the estimate” with a friendly clap on the shoulder, you start desperately searching for hilarity of any kind), I’ve finally had my first (to my knowledge) “Nathan Gunn naked” hit on Google, which seems like sort of an opera blogger's bar mitzvah. I also had “David Adam Moore shirtless”; Moore was Gunn’s replacement as Billy Budd in the Pittsburgh production I saw last May. I guess I’ll know he’s had his big breakthrough moment when the search graduates to “David Adam Moore naked”.

Next up on the opera front is the opening night (I know there are people who call these things “the prima” but I just can’t bring myself to do it; insidery jargon fascinates me, but the implication in using it is that you’re an insider) of Appomattox. On the bus last night I ended up talking to two ushers who had been at a dress rehearsal. I asked what they thought; the verdict was that one would like it if one liked Philip Glass. That’s about as insidery as I’m going to get. So let me talk about Dancing with the Stars, which I stumbled onto last spring several weeks before the finale, and to which I rapidly became addicted. This time around I was ready with my popcorn before the big opening night (the prima, as it were). Unlike a certain popular singing competition (yes, American Idol, I’m staring at you – don’t you ignore me!), it is pleasantly free of nasty undercurrents, and the judges actually say helpful things, as opposed to “I dunno, dawg – it was a little pitchy,” which is probably as helpful to the singer as it is clear to the audience. On Dancing with the Stars, the judges actually give useful, specific technical advice that helps the viewers understand what to look for, things like “you need to keep your shoulders back.” And they will praise whatever they can, even if it’s clearly a desperate reach (the only thing that really bugs me about the show is the audience booing at the slightest hint of criticism – maybe this really is the generation that received trophies just for showing up). Of course, there’s a difference between dealing with desperate unknowns hungry to break into pop music and established celebrities who are larking in a highly specialized art form. Still, in the words of the immortal Swan of Avon, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. I wish Bruno would tone down some of the Roberto Benigni-style effusions, but the judges usually make astute and even subtle points (again, what a contrast to the paradigmatic trio), as when they told Cameron Mathison that his classically handsome looks created expectations of perfection that worked against his beginner’s level of skill, or when Len told the Cheetah Girl (who initially bugged me but is now winning me over by quantum leaps) not to rely overmuch on her obvious skill at fast and flash. My preference for the constructive, technically clear approach as opposed to snark-and-stab may only be due to the intense tenderheartedness of my nature, however. I just don’t know if I have the emotional strength to deal with reality shows. I hated to see sweet Josie the swimsuit model leave after the first week, and not just because my favorite moment that week was when she said, “I think dancing is like this” and flung her arms out and her partner, who had already wittily described her as “deceptively unfit”, had to suppress the look of panic and horror on his face. (Possible runner-up moment: Jonathan “I’m the perfect gentleman of ballroom” muttering “cameracameracamera” to Marie Osmond, his chatty and easily distracted partner, during the opening pan of the cast – by the way, did anyone have to explain to her what Carrie Ann meant by calling her a “cougar”?) And then this week, continuing the ruthless purge of models, Albert Reed was booted. Like everyone else except Abercrombie cultists, I had to look him up when the cast list was announced. I like to think I don’t make assumptions about people, but I guess the surfer/male model combo did not lead me to expect his good-humored, low-key charm; that plus his dancing skills had me big-time man-crushing on Albert even before his elderly grandmother told him how proud his grandpa would be. Who could resist that? I was also amused by the two women from the audience who were so excited that he danced with an open shirt the first week: Ladies, being a surfer/Abercrombie model pretty much means that taking your shirt off is a major professional skill. Some day you will find out about The Google, and then you can learn all about it. (I was also amused to see that Cameron Mathison was working the open-shirt look the second week. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.) So once again I have to sit the nation down for a stern talking-to: America, just what the hell are you thinking? Do we have to have this conversation after every single election? You boot Albert and leave me with Wayne Newton? Not to be unkind since it’s the way of all flesh, but many of us watch these things on big-screen or even HD TV, and there are just certain people, iconic entertainers though they may be, beloved and worthy human beings though they undoubtedly are, who, um, are not at their scenic best on either big screens or high definition television. Yes, I’m a shallow man. A shallow, shallow man. No, I don’t really have a problem with that. Wayne Newton is also just a really clunky dancer. I realize there’s the Jerry Springer Memorial Spunky Older Guy Who Isn’t Very Good But Goes Farther Than Expected spot, but come on. Though I have to admit, I basically like Wayne, and am only reacting this way because of the Albert thing. And doesn’t Scary Spice need to go practice whatever it was the Spice Girls did for their big, long-awaited, much-anticipated, 38-second-sell-out reunion? But even her “look at me, I’m naughty” brand of faux-outrageousness is winning me over, or at least not causing me active revulsion as it did at first. And I wanted to hate billionaire basketball-team owner Mark Cuban, but I really can’t. That nice billionaire is just trying so darn hard! I think maybe I should always come in on these things towards the end, since the early departures are so painful for me to watch. I will probably get over the Albert thing (but can I ever really trust America’s voting again?) and learn once more to love, laugh, and tune in next week, only to find myself unexpectedly liking someone else who had put me off, and then I have to go through the whole "stages of grieving for reality-show stars who are better off than I'll ever be” thing all over again. All this sympathy for people I was cheerfully looking forward to hating and ridiculing reminds me of the great line from The Rules of the Game: “Everyone has his reasons; that’s the terrible thing about life,” which might be my favorite movie line of all time.

everybody is always being what they are

Sometimes it was just by chance that I started listening to certain composers. I can’t remember when or why exactly I started listening to Philip Glass, but it was a long time ago. In fact the first CDs I ever bought were Handel’s Solomon (John Eliot Gardiner, in what was then a brand-new performance) and The Photographer, which I had recently seen staged by Joanne Akalaitis. Maybe it was Koyaanisqatsi that started me. I was surprised to realize last year during all the Steve Reich birthday celebrations that I knew very little about his music; I would have said it was because he didn’t happen to come to Boston when I lived there, but recently when sorting out over twenty years worth of playbills I came across some flyers advertising him, so I guess it’s just that I didn’t happen to go to any of his concerts, who knows why. It’s strange to say that a major composer slipped through the cracks, but so it was with Reich and me. So I bought the Nonesuch set to catch up on what I’d been missing. I can see why he and Glass (and Adams) were grouped together, but they don’t really sound alike, and I can also see why they all rejected the “minimalist” label (it’s odd how many art movements bear names that started out as dismissive insults: Gothic, Fauve, Impressionist, Ash-Can School. . . ). But Glass I heard fairly often: chamber operas (The Juniper Tree and The Fall of the House of Usher) at ART; 10,000 Airplanes (a collaboration with David Henry Hwang with such an awful libretto – hey, maybe the crazy people are really the sane ones! – that I ended up never seeing M. Butterfly; knee plays and tissues for Robert Wilson works like The Civil Wars; and performances by the Philip Glass ensemble. One of these is particularly vivid in my memory, since it took place in the long, narrow auditorium belonging to the Berklee College of Music and the woman right in front of me was bobbing her head in time to the music. Think about that for a minute – she was nodding her head up and down in time to Philip Glass’s music. A glance around verified that not one other person in the entire place was similarly bobbing. Nope, just the person directly in front of me. My habit of listening to instrumental music with my eyes shut may have started that night. I had to do something to avoid vertigo. Too much of a steady beat is actually what made me listen to less Glass over the years; increasingly I was disturbed by the overwhelming monotonous thump of most pop music, and I look for sounds with a little more variety. But every time I think I probably wouldn’t like Glass any more, I listen to him and find him mesmerizing. Satyagraha is one of those works I just need to hear on a fairly regular basis. You respond to this sort of thing or you don’t. People like to say that all Glass sounds the same, but you could say the same about Gregorian chant, if you didn’t respond to it. But if you do, there’s infinite variety within a very specific-sounding world. Hearing Philip Glass is like reading Gertrude Stein at her most cubist; both have a stripped-down feeling that sounds permanently modern, and both are going to send some people screaming into the night, while others will be hypnotized by how significantly a single modal change can affect what’s happening, and find a lot of wit and profound understanding in the experience. Last Friday’s “Evening of Chamber Music” with Philip Glass, presented by San Francisco Performances, was more intimate than the other Glass concerts I’ve heard. It’s always interesting to me to hear chamber works from a composer when I’ve mostly been hearing big operas or symphonies; a year or so ago Cal Performances presented a John Adams Composer Portrait featuring small-scale instrumental works (performed by Alarm Will Sound, I think – my apologies to the artists, but I always get them confused with Bang on a Can), and there was a whole side of Adams I hadn’t heard much of lately. Glass has a pleasingly low-key, slightly confused-sounding manner that obviously hides a very determined personality. He announced the program from the stage; he started off by himself playing Metamorphosis on the piano. I’m not really familiar with this piece; I wonder if another pianist would have used the pedal as much, but I also don’t care a whole lot – there’s something really thrilling to me in hearing an artist perform his own work, even if he’s not a dazzling pianist. This is, I suppose, basically irrational, since the thing is to hear the music and not see the person through whom it arrived in the world, but music itself is an irrational pleasure, so I enjoyed his performance possibly more than I would a more accomplished one. Then Wendy Sutter took over with a fluent Songs and Poems for Cello (which, by the way, is a piece that doesn’t “sound like Philip Glass,” the way Metamorphosen to me doesn’t sound like Richard Strauss, which may say more about the assumptions we make about composers than about their actual range). Then the final performer, Mick Rossi on percussion, appeared, and we heard Tissues from Naqoyqatsi and some music for Genet’s The Orchard (Glass rather endearingly admitted he had seen the play so long ago that he couldn’t remember what part was prompting the music). The concert closed with the Opening and Closing sections of Glassworks, which, Glass wittily noted, “sound the same.” But even within the distinctive Philip Glass sound, there are differences; his music seesaws between frenzy and elegy, which I think captures the mood of our time persuasively.

unhappy lieder are unhappy in their own way

I have just returned from hearing Olga Borodina at Zellerbach Hall. Cal Performances Director Robert Cole came out beforehand, but since I was in the front row and he was using a microphone I couldn’t make out most of what he said, except for “bronchitis” and “begs your indulgence.” Why is it that Borodina sounds better with bronchitis than most people do when in perfect health? There was an occasional sense of strain on soft or high notes, and she omitted one of the songs in the second half, but otherwise there was so much to admire and enjoy in her Venetian sunset of a voice. She sang Tchaikovsky songs in the first half and Rachmaninoff in the second; although she clearly would have preferred going home and getting under the covers, she came out to the ovations, blew her nose, coughed, gave a slight smile and shrug, and seduced us into submissive Samsonhood with Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix.

There were many Russian speakers there (though unfortunately not enough to fill cavernous Zellerbach), but even so there was much following of texts (printed not in Cyrillic but transliterated and then translated) with the accompanying rustle and rattle of programs. At least I assume that’s what was going on. Maybe people were just folding origami cranes – I hear that if you fold a thousand of them, peace descends on the concert hall. I had read the texts beforehand and decided just to listen, a decision I was happy with, since Russian songs have, let me say, certain similarities in theme. Afterwards, wandering through the misty poplars near the mournful river, my large, dark, incredibly near-sighted eyes saw an answer; and so here, with trembling heart and affectionate respect, I present the all-purpose generic one-size-fits-all Russian song to the cold indifferent world:

Russian Song

Though it is morning, the sun has set;
The fragrant meadow regards me with insolence.
Ah, little bird, why do you sing so sadly?
Hey, bird, I’m talking to you!
Away you have flown on the mournful breeze!
So you, my love, have flown away like a dream,
Taking with you my anguished heart,
And several nice shirts
Of which I am now bereft.

hypocrite lecteur - mon semblable - mon frere!

Recently I stumbled across a French translation of this blog, which mystified, fascinated, and delighted me. I have no idea who prompted this or why, and in any case I’ve messed up the records by obsessively returning to it myself, but as I’ve also found out there are a surprising number of Patrick Vazes out there (surprising since it’s a fairly odd combination of an Irish given name and a Portuguese family name, but clearly not as odd as I had thought), one of whom is a professional soccer player in France (unfortunately for me, I am not a professional soccer player), perhaps this was someone looking up a favorite footballer and being surprised by his many opinions on theatrical performances in California. In case anyone is wondering, I do not play soccer in France, I do not sell real estate in Florida, and I am not the assistant manager of a garage in Goa. Right now, in fact, I’m not doing much here in my native San Francisco Bay Area besides gazing into the funhouse mirror which is the automatic translator’s version of me. I wouldn’t call myself the best judge of le mot juste en francais, but it seems pretty accurate, though I have no idea if idioms like “got my Irish up” make any sense at all in French; on the other hand, from now on when Lunch Lady Doris appears on the Simpsons I know I’m going to think of her as “Mme Doris de dejeuner,” which sounds delightful, which is why it definitely gives you an amusing wrong impression. I checked the recent entry on my plumbing problems to see how the translation device handled my little pun on “crappy.” I don’t think “une semaine miserable” carries the joke as well, though on further reflection perhaps the reference is to the chase through the sewers in Hugo’s novel, in which case I credit the Google Automatic Translator for an effective if higher-toned substitute joke.

I found the translation through my statcounter.com statistics, which I find fascinating now that I’ve bothered to learn how to check them. Most of the keyword searches are fairly standard and unsurprising (though unlike M. C- at the Standing Room, I’ve never to my knowledge had searches for “Nathan Gunn naked” but I have had “Greer Grimsley naked”; since Grimsley was Claggart in the Pittsburgh Billy Budd I saw, I’m wondering if someone shouldn’t just stage an all-nude Billy Budd and get it over with). But to the guy (I’m safe on the gender here) who keeps searching for “menstrual pad porn” and ending up with my weird trip to LA in which I found the pad in my suitcase and was charged for porn I didn’t watch, I know I’m not supplying what you’re looking for, and please go away, you’re creeping me out. (I was actually most creeped out when he spelled it “menstrul pad porn” – something about misspelling makes it so much worse to me.) To all those searching for “guys gone wild” who end up with my entry on last June’s Don Giovanni, I wish to say that, in retrospect, I probably should have chosen a different title, and I wish you luck on your well-nigh impossible quest through the vast reaches of The Interwebs to find pictures of hot shirtless guys (damn, I just let myself in for all those searches – this thing is like Tar Baby – and now I’m going to get the Toni Morrison/Joel Chandler Harris searches – damn!). To all the people out there with narwhal searches, my apologies on my lack of any but the most frivolous and marginal information, which in fact pretty much just amounts to the blog’s subtitle – though maybe it’s just one person with a narwhal thing, in which case I sincerely hope you find the answer to your poignant search term “What makes a narwhal happy?” and may you and your narwhal(s) find said happiness for many years to come.

And speaking of happiness, I got a needed jolt of it myself when I discovered that the Boston Celebrity Series (Bay Area residents, think of Cal Performances or San Francisco Performances) not only has a blog but they say nice things about me and have me on their blogroll. What a refreshing change from my emotionally abusive relationships with the local arts groups: in case anyone is wondering, no, the San Francisco Symphony did not invite me to their Blogger’s Night at the Symphony last July (I've hidden the pain until now); though in fairness to them I should note that (1) they almost certainly have never heard of me; (2) even if they have heard of me, they probably don’t read me; and (3) if anyone over there does read me, they probably just figured, “Yeah, he’ll blog about the evening – six months after it happens, and in the middle will be some weird-ass digression about how professional football is like Kabuki theater, and he’ll just end up bitching about how ugly Davies Hall is and how much he hates it when conductors make little jokes before the performance, so we’ll save our cookie trays for the worthy, thank you very much.” Fine. I’ll still show up with fistfuls of cash begging for you, O local Symphony, once I figure out how I’m paying for my home repairs. To return to less dysfunctional relationships (aren’t long-distance relationships really the best kind?), I’ve added “Aisle Be Seeing You” (the Boston Celebrity Series blog) to the blogroll; once I managed to tear my eyes away from the entry about me, I found the self-described “goofy promotional tool and informative arts link generator” full of lots of interesting and entertaining stuff. I have to say I got an extra thrill out of the entry and link because so many of the memorable performances I saw when I lived in Boston were brought to me by my annual subscription to the Celebrity Series. If you have me on your blogroll or want to be on mine, or just want to give me an extra thrill of your own, French or not, drop me a line. . . .

out of the strong came forth sweetness

Actual overheard dialogue during the first intermission of Samson et Delilah at San Francisco Opera last Tuesday:

Man with ratty shoulder-length iron gray hair: “You’re not wearing any panties?!?”

Woman who sounded (and looked) like Lunch Lady Doris from the Simpsons: “Tell the whole world, why dontcha!”

It’s nice to see people getting into the spirit of the opera. You know who else got into the spirit? The San Francisco Opera Chorus. They switched from anguished pleading with Jehovah to the sybaritic laughter of Dagon’s devotees with the assurance, conviction, and steady tone with which a Republican politician switches from denouncing gay rights to cruising public toilets for rough trade. Their contribution may have been such a highlight because the Samson of Clifton Forbis was so disappointing. I thought he sounded strangled and wavering in tone. He got better in the later scenes, but there’s not much left of this fairly short opera by then. (Here’s a little digression on opera length, and it’s not my usual plea that anything that lasts over three hours start no later than 7:30: I was recently reprimanded by another commenter over at The Iron Tongue of Midnight for saying that Messiaen’s St. Francois lasted five hours. I thought he had a valid point about how much music there actually is, but since I’m not discussing the works as a musicologist (because I’m not one) but as an audience member, I do include the intermissions in the running time because I find they affect the total experience. So in order to avoid getting overly pedantic about saying “the performance” instead of “the opera”, I should make it clear that any references I make to running time refer to the time you’d spend in a theater and not what you’d spend listening to a CD.) The various High Priests and Old Hebrews were fine but no one really knocked me out. That leaves Olga Borodina’s Delilah, emerging like Kundry from ululating flower maidens, who was our best hope, if not Samson's, all along. Before the overture the disembodied voice from above had informed us that Ms. Borodina had been suffering from a cold – a great groan went up – but she had agreed to sing tonight – sighs of relief – and she asked for our understanding. We understood. I thought she sang richly and acted with conviction. The announcement could have been an insurance policy. She might have held back at a point or two, but the scenery and costumes were always there to supply any necessary extra oomph. I’ve heard that these were officially inspired by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, but the usual reference I hear is to Cecil B. DeMille, who might actually be ranked higher these days by tastemakers who care about such things. The dusty garments of the oppressed Hebrews were in tasteful muted shades that matched the palm trees and temples, but the Philistines glittered and glowed with many colors and sparkling jewels. To the Righteous may be salvation in the form of a kick-ass final curtain, but the ungodly (or the differently-godded) always get the best tunes and all the big dance numbers. I kept thinking of the wonderful intertitle from DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings: “Harness my zebras – gift of the Nubian King! This Carpenter [that would be Jesus] shall learn that He cannot hold a man [that would be her boyfriend, Judas] from Mary Magdalene!” (For those unfamiliar with the story, it is in fact she who learns so very much from the Carpenter.) The only major costuming mistake was for the male dancers in the orgy (I can’t really call it a Bacchanal, since it’s for Dagon – you see, I’m overly precise by nature, so I try to avoid extra pedantry), who wear baggy golden briefs that look like diapers designed by Liberace. It is naturally difficult for one of my retiring and melancholy disposition to judge an orgy, but what I saw on stage seemed fully as overwrought in intention yet listless in action as such things undoubtedly are in real life. I don’t mean to condescend to the opera by referring to DeMille; it’s just that type of thing, and excellent of its kind. I find the music quite beautiful (since Saint-Saens actually wrote Vinteuil’s “little phrase,” who am I to be more aesthetically refined than Charles Swann?), and the story is dramatic and effective (though without the Miltonic depth of Handel’s version), but I don’t know if the feelings it inspires can actually be called religious. It’s not the Saint Matthew Passion, but what else is? If you were looking for a film about religion, one that makes you think or feel about it, you’re better off watching Ordet or Dead Man Walking than King of Kings. Musically, you might even be better off with purely instrumental, non-descriptive music and leaving yourself open for the vertiginous and occasional descent of grace that can smack you out of your seat and spin you through the celestial spheres. Hoping for this sensation is of course what also keeps opera goers returning to the theater, so I leave it to the lucky individuals experiencing it to decide if their ecstasy is religious or other, and if the distinction really matters.

See the Music

I spent two evenings last week at Mozart Dances, because I knew anything by Mark Morris would be worth seeing at least twice. Last year’s wonderful King Arthur, a parade of theatrical views of Britishness, was more of a staged opera; instead of having singers in the pit and dancers on stage (as in Dido and Aeneas, his other Purcell evening) both were visible and involved in the action, but the movements for the singers were inevitably simpler than they would have been for dancers. This time there was no opera or other vocal work as a basis; I can’t think of another of his evening-length works that is so free of story-lines, no matter how submerged or fragmentary (as in L’Allegro ed il Penseroso or Four Saints) they might be. The backdrops (different for each of the three dances and black-and-gray except for the third, which includes red; other colors are supplied by the lighting) are large curvy abstractions that look like details of Japanese brush paintings, greatly magnified. Mozart Dances, as the name implies, is more dance than narrative; the title is basic and descriptive and the three dances are named Eleven, Double, and Twenty-Seven after their music (Piano Concerto No. 11, Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and Piano Concerto No. 27, and even those with eyes obstinately shut all evening would still have enjoyed Garrick Ohlsson and Yoko Nozaki at piano, and Jane Glover conducting the Berkeley Symphony). Morris’s ability to capture music in movement is always noted, but even after years of seeing his works it amazes me that the movements seem so inevitable yet so fresh. Mozart swirls and the dancers swirl; there’s a looping figure and the dancers make a looping figure, but it never seems like a reduction or a simple equation; in other words, it looks obvious but no one else could or has come up with it, which might be a good definition of genius. He has even succeeded in dancing about architecture (I’m thinking of the “Populous Cities” section of L’Allegro), which can only give heart to those who try to write about music.

You could always find narratives in Mozart Dances, if you were so inclined, of course. Anytime you have a dancer break away from a group, run into a group, move with a partner, or end up on stage alone, there’s an implied and fluid story. There are sudden jabbing gestures and moments when a group will stop and look upwards expectantly, or point at each other or gesture imploringly, and then the moment sinks away, but the cumulative moments help move the dance beyond the purely graceful and fluid, just as Mozart does with the music if we have ears to hear it. The first dance opens with alternate male and female dancers in a line; the men step forward, dance, and then exit the stage, leaving the entire rest of the dance to the women; this is the sort of subtle disjunction (I kept expecting a symmetrical return at the end or suchlike) that helps give a deeper ambiguity to the loveliness. Like Mozart, Morris is very witty, but I have to say I don’t find his work what you might call “ha-ha funny” the way some seem to; I’m sure everyone at any abstract dance has had to put up with the sort of audience member who giggles ostentatiously at the witty parts, lest the surrounding rows think she didn’t get it, but I think Mark Morris the Fabulous Personality can color views of what Mark Morris the choreographer is actually doing. I’ve seen him interviewed and he’s outrageous and hilarious and over-the-top in a kind of old-fashioned gay way (he also objected strenuously to having his work described as camp, which I thought was revealing), and audiences can bring that to their viewing: when he did Sylvia for the SF Ballet, some writer at the local paper made the astonishingly stupid remark that “everyone” was surprised that he treated the work seriously. I don’t know who “everyone” is, but anyone who’s paid attention to his work could have told them that Sylvia is exactly the sort of thing he would be serious about. Several years ago he did Dido and Aeneas here; the first evening was the season opener, and (I’m totally speculating here, I should point out) the party atmosphere and champagne (for the big donors and schmoozers, not for me) might have gotten to people, including Morris, because there were some giggles at his Dido. It was fascinating to return the next evening and see how he responded by making certain gestures more severe, by toning down the hair tossing, and otherwise connecting his Dido with the world of Greek tragic drama rather than drag revues; there was no giggling the second night. Even The Hard Nut, the most overtly comic work of his I’ve seen, is not a parody or deconstruction of the Nutcracker but its own thing, complete with moments of sob-inducing beauty (the pas de deux between the Nutcracker and Drosselmeier, for instance, which I have actually heard audiences giggle at, presumably because two men dancing together is by nature a campy joke). Making a separate, non-satirical thing of the Nutcracker is pretty difficult to do, based on the evidence of Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, which is fairly enjoyable but completely lacking in the psychological integrity or emotional depth of the Hard Nut. What brought all this up is the moment in Mozart Dances when one of the men runs down a double row of dancers and leaps into the arms of a lone man at the back of the stage. I guess there was a Looney-Tunes quality to it since it involved sudden running and jumping, but I also found it incredibly poignant, which is something your standard pratfall is not going to be. But then sometimes audience laughter makes me feel like a particularly ponderous German professor of metaphysics, straining his whole life to define the origin and purpose of wit in the weltschmerzy Weltanschauung.

Making it a mostly Mozart weekend, on Sunday evening I went to Il Re Pastore, performed by Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational Church in Berkeley, an elegant brick rebuke to my former home, the Unit III dorms across the street. It’s like a New England Congregational Church, but higher and broader, which may be what gave the voices a strange reverberate halo in the first Act; I noticed the top-notch cast (Lisa Saffer, Heidi Grant Murphy, Michael Slattery, Iain Paton, and Margaret Lattimore) adjusted their voices to the space for Act Two. Philharmonia eschews surtitles, I assume because of expense and difficulty (since they perform in so many spaces, not all of them intended as concert halls), so you get the paper-turning, -crinkling, and -folding obbligato. I read the libretto beforehand and decided I only had enough energy to listen without reading along as well. The plot is fairly simple and involves an Emperor first causing and then solving romantic complications among two couple. Beautifully as everything was sung, I wish they had avoided the temptation to play the resolution for laughs; this type of story might be alien to us, but it’s not inherently ridiculous, and in these days when what used to be our country is lumbering imperially through the world, a bad enemy and a worse friend, it might not be such a strange idea to seek instruction on the clemency and justice appropriate to Emperors. But perhaps I’m just being the ponderous metaphysician again.

sufficient unto the day. . . .

This has been, and I mean this quite literally, a crappy week, and delighted though I am to have a chance to use words like "mephitic" it is never a good thing when plumbers refer you to the hydro-jet guys who refer you back to the plumbers who start using phrases like "give you an estimate" and "city permits" and "you'll also need someone to take care of the concrete." There goes winging away many months of some entirely imaginary putative future pay, which is another reason to subscribe for a season in advance (because everything is theater after all, and vice versa): even I have been brought smack up against the cold hard brick wall of economic reality, but I have already bought (OK, charged) tickets that will carry me through dozens of evenings from September through June. Past extravagance can carry future rewards! Performing arts organizations may want to push this particular marketing angle, given the teetering state of the American economy.

let me entertain you

Just like Tax Day or Christmas, which always show up punctually at the same time each year yet catch some of us unprepared, the beginning of the autumn theater season is barreling right on down and I keep having to remind myself that it’s coming. Well, maybe it’s more like Easter, which is a moveable feast and therefore provides an excuse for lack of preparation. There really isn’t any preparation necessary, of course, other than keeping an eye on the calendar and the tickets. I’m not going to blame San Francisco Performances, either, or even mention that they sent my tickets a month after they said they would (you’ve heard the expression “being inefficient doesn’t make you artistic”? It should be blazoned on the walls of every arts organization). Anyway, David Gockley was nice enough to send a double-disc CD set reminding me of what I paid for last February. This is the second year the Opera has sent out CDs, in place of the lavish booklets they used to send. Initially the CDs took me aback, but then I decided that since I listened to the CDs and rarely ever looked at the booklets (though I've kept them all and they keep popping up during the clean-up/organization thing I’m doing and I can’t decide what to do with them), the CDs were fine. This year’s CDs are better than last year’s, which were heavy on plot summaries and such insights as “Did you hear about Deborah Voigt and the little black dress?” (yes, way too many times, and I’m sure Ms. Voigt would agree) and “That Nathan Gunn sure is a looker!” (noted). I don’t really understand the persistence of operatic plot summaries in program books – sure, they were vital before surtitles, but now that anyone coming in cold can follow the action as if it were spoken theater, must we persist in draining any possible surprise out of the evening? There’s a little more cultural context in this year’s set; for example, the Samson discussion has a whole lot about fin-de-siecle femme fatale fantasies as a projection of male anxieties, which I suppose is true as far as it goes, which isn’t quite far enough – the funny thing about such discussions is that they’re meant to illustrate the speaker’s insight into and distance from a purely male perspective, but they rarely step outside of the male-centered perspective and make the obvious corollary point that such fantasies may have been enjoyed and promoted as empowering by women themselves. If you were a woman living under the restrictions of upper- and middle-class life in late-nineteenth century Europe, wouldn’t you enjoy seeing yourself as Salome or Dalilah? (Just as you can easily see why some poor Jewish boys in Depression America could come up with Superman.) It’s worth listening to both discs to find out why the Opera switched from the Sendak production of the Magic Flute (water damage – I really love water but have been more cognizant of its destructive side ever since the year in which first the rains caused my kitchen ceiling to collapse and then the water heater failed and flooded the basement) or – and this is quite exciting, I think – Nixon in China will finally be staged here in some unspecified future season. This latter tidbit comes up in a discussion of Madama Butterfly, of all things – even Gockley sounded bored at its return and went off on various tangents, such as the source of La Scala’s name. I’m not criticizing that – I’m easily distracted myself. (Though just when I figured I could skip Butterfly despite the undoubted appeal of Racette in the role, he reveals that instead of the inadequate Franco Farina we saw last time Pinkerton will be played by up-and-comer Brandon Jovanovich, whom I’ve heard good things about and would love to hear in person – like another Italian-founded organization, they just keep pulling you back in.) But it’s a little hard to know quite what to make of these CDs, ultimately, both because I’m not sure who exactly the audience is and because I’m not sure how much is Gockley trying to position himself with an allegedly disgruntled public. When leaving Titus Andronicus with Ms. S last spring, I expressed my surprise that people who cared enough about theater to have subscribed for years didn’t know the basic plots of what I would consider fairly standard works. I had to explain to her that I wasn’t criticizing those people – if anything, I was praising them (and why do people always think I’m being critical? I, who have a heart that is filled with love!); it was more that I didn’t understand how they could keep from knowing these things, at least osmotically. (Which is as good a place as any to point out that Gockley, in his discussion of Verdi’s Macbeth, seems to think that Verdi and Piave changed Shakespeare’s characterization of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; actually, the whole criss-cross pattern in which the ambivalent Macbeth becomes more cold-blooded and cruel and his fierce wife descends into confusion and madness is faithful to the play.) The moment that really irritated me was in the discussion of Tannhauser, when we are treated to a smug conversation between Gockley and the director in which both agree that “no fedoras” will appear in the production. Throughout, Gockley has said all the correct things about Runnicles and Rosenberg, but I think he’s showing his claws here, since “fedoras” seem to have taken on a Magritte-bowler-hat level of significance in what passes for the minds of the Opera audience. It’s a coded way of assuring us that whatever we see will not ruffle us up too much, which shouldn’t really be the aim of a theater. I just can’t cite any really inappropriate Rosenberg-era productions (with the possible exception of the atrocious and entirely traditional Nozze di Figaro she inherited from Mansouri), which is not to say they were all incredibly successful, but I’m still puzzled at the depth of the hostility. Contemporary American culture generally is very reactionary and anti-intellectual (both symptoms of a fearful culture) and I hate to see an opera company join in, especially with such smugness. I hear the same tone when people talk about how “at last” the terrible reign of the twelve-toners has been overthrown and composers need no longer tremble with fear if they write “beautiful melodies that the audience wants to hear.” Setting aside possible music-world (or academic-music-world) politics, which don’t really concern me as an audience member, I have to say that in my decades of concert-going I haven’t exactly been drowning in the dodecaphonic, and I’m someone who seeks it out. It’s like those articles in which we’re assured that (again, at last) people can ignore the food police and finally resume eating butter, as if all those puffing Americans waddling to their cars had actually ever given anything up instead of just thinking they should. It’s a projection based on guilt. But why not avoid guilty feelings by being open to and trying a variety of things? Isn’t it clear by now that anyone announcing the one true music of the future is only trying to encourage him- or herself to find a path? Why should the audience buy into the thought that one particular style must win? Given that most of us, even inveterate concert-goers, experience music most often through recordings, why limit yourself? Why not try something new and then just sell it to Amoeba if you genuinely hate it (or simply don’t respond to it)? Speaking of recordings, what really springs out at me from both sets of CDs is that the opera has good-quality recordings of their past performances – I realize there are artist permissions and royalties and such things to hammer out, but if they’re not looking into this as a possible revenue stream then they’re crazy. I’d hit that. Well, as I said, I’m easily distracted – back to the new Opera season. It all looks pretty promising to me, at least at this point. I’m partial to The Rake’s Progress, of course, and I’m always happy to hear Wagner (with the possible exception of Meistersinger), and a world premiere is always good, but the one work that keeps recurring to me when I think of this season is Ariodante, with a kick-ass cast (Graham, Swenson, and Podles). But that’s not for many evenings yet.

perche un di nella reggia, m'hai sorriso

With the recent death of Pavarotti following a year in which so many other great singers have died it is starting to seem as if an entire generation is passing into history, the generation that had just retired or was edging off stage around the time I started my concert-going. As a result some of these people I knew only by recordings or a rare live performance. Pavarotti I heard live only once. He gave a recital in Boston in the late 1980s and it was already considered something of an event for him to do so. The Globe always had thorough and high-quality arts coverage, so in addition to the usual review there were some articles before and after, most of them commenting on the bond he had with the audience. There was an older black woman who survived cancer and felt that his recordings helped her to do so; she met with him after the recital and from the Globe report it sounded like a warm and, if the expression makes sense, very human meeting. The recital itself was not the singer at his best; even by then there was some bloom off the voice, and he had his music in front of him, which I have never seen at any other vocal recital. But I was still glad for a chance to hear his remarkable voice live and feel his charismatic presence. It’s too bad that in later years he became more clownish; I wonder if the magnitude of his natural gift was more than he could really bear. I remember Ms. S and I back in Boston joking that there was something morbid about our annual ticket purchases; some of them were definitely “see them while you can” shows. I heard Anna Russell once, in what was apparently her farewell tour, though of course if Anna Russell had announced a farewell tour everyone would have assumed it was a diva joke. She went through just about every one of her classic routines and gave us three hours. I was with someone who said, “Wow! She’s like the Bruce Springsteen of whatever it is she does!” And when Horowitz came to town I knew there was just not going to be another chance, so I didn't care how pricey the tickets were. He was a tiny, frail-looking man; I can still hear the thundering octaves at the end of the first half and then a very long intermission so he could lie down backstage. At some point the last person to hear Horowitz live will also pass into history. I doubt I will be that person, but I’m glad I had at least a glimpse of these remarkable performers; it’s like seeing a sketch or fragment and knowing that it gains significance from its connection with an artist’s whole body of work.