I don't know how merry the month of May is for those who suffer from allergies (so if I've left out something major here, I already know where I will point the finger of blame) but there's certainly plenty of great stuff to occupy you indoors:
Theater of Yugen presents the final week of Erik Ehn's Cordelia, a Noh-style re-imagining of King Lear from his youngest daughter's point of view. Wednesday and Thursday performances are at 7:00 (thank you!) and Friday and Saturday are at 8:00.
I don’t usually pay much attention to the Magic Theater, as it a pain in the ass for a non-driver from the East Bay to get there, but their current extravaganza, Taylor Mac's The Lily’s Revenge, sounds promising. Unfortunately, given my afore-mentioned status as a non-driver from the east bay, I could only make the Sunday afternoon performances, and I’m booked Sundays through the run, but don’t let that stop you.
San Francisco Ballet closes out its season with a revival of last season’s Little Mermaid, choreographed by John Neumeier based on Hans Christian Andersen, with an original score by Lera Auerbach, April 30 to May 7.
American Bach Soloists presents the Bach Magnificat in D Major and the west coast premiere of the recently discovered Mass for Three Choirs by Antonio Lotti, 6-8 May in various locations.
City Arts & Lectures presents Kay Ryan, local resident, national Poet Laureate, and recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems) in conversation with Steven Winn on May 9 at Herbst Theater.
Friday, May 13, the Oakland East Bay Symphony presents Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
Volti closes out its 32nd season with works by Eliott Gyger, Matthew Barnson, Yu-Hui Chang, Ruby Fulton, and Frank Ferko, May 13-15 in various locations.
Cutting Ball Theater presents Risk Is This. . . , its mostly annual festival of new and experimental plays in staged readings, this year featuring plays by Eugenie Chan, Andrew Saito, Rob Melrose and Dave L, and Annie Elias.
The San Francisco Symphony presents lots of Mahler: the Mahler 9 (May 5-6), the Mahler 2, Resurrection (May 7-8), and the Mahler 6 (May 12-14). The fabulous Symphony Chorus has its annual concert on May 22, with works by Nystedt, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Barber, Mahler, and the Durufle Requiem.
New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with works by Elgar, Bridge, Schnittke, and Elevations, a world premiere by Mark O’Connor, 19-22 May in various locations.
SFMOMA presents one of the most eagerly awaited (by me) exhibits of the year, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Member previews are on May 19-20 and it opens to the public after that – there's plenty of time before then for everyone to re-read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
San Francisco Performances closes out its season with solo recitals by Anthony Dean Griffey on May 4 (postponed from January) and Kate Royal on May 24. In between is Doug Varone and Dancers on May 21 and 22.
And of course there was an exciting late addition to their calendar, composer Magnus Lindberg in person on piano, along with Jennifer Koh on violin and Anssi Karttunen on cello, playing works by Lindberg himself, Schulhoff, and Villa-Lobos, as well as "Mystery Variations on Giuseppe Colombi's Chiacona for solo cello." That is on Sunday May 15.
On Saturday May 28 Chora Nova presents works by Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Galuppi at First Congregational Church in Berkeley.
Cal Performances offers eclectic fare,with Ian Bostridge and Les Violons du Roy on May 1 and 3, the Druid Theater in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan May 4-14 in Zellerbach Playhouse, and the Royal Danish Ballet in two programs: traditional (La Sylphide and The Lesson on May 31-June 1) and modern (Nordic Modern Choreography on June 3 and 4).
And just like that we’ve slipped into June.
30 April 2011
29 April 2011
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.
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.
28 April 2011
27 April 2011
26 April 2011
25 April 2011
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.
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.
24 April 2011
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