beggared by sunset
my poor words too exhausted
to say what I saw
30 November 2010
29 November 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: December
It’s sugarplum month, but we don’t need to let that stop us. There will be Christmas-tinged items on this list, but that’s hardly avoidable, even if I wanted to. I will proceed along my usual arbitrary and personal lines (no Nutcrackers, but the Hard Nut would be listed if it was being staged this year in these parts, which it isn’t being). There will be Messiahs! I know it’s one of the ultimate holiday chestnuts, but this is the season for chestnuts, and even though I should be tired of it I’m not. In fact I’m listening to it right now. Because I probably won’t make any of the live performances, due to conflicts beyond my control.
Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!
John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.
Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.
Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.
Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.
Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.
I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.
And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.
Thursday, December 2, the Pacific Film Archive, Paramount Theatre, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival unite to present Carl Theodor Dreyer’s astounding 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, an oratorio inspired by the film. Information here. Go and marvel!
John Adams and El Nino return to the San Francisco Symphony December 2-4. Later in the month there’s a little more Adams and a lot more Messiah.
Philharmonia Baroque presents Messiah on December 3, 4, 5, and 7, in various locales as is their wont. And American Bach Soloists presents Messiah on December 16, 17, and 18. If the calendar or location don’t decide for you, you can compare casts and other relevant information: here for Philharmonia Baroque, here for American Bach Soloists, and here for the San Francisco Symphony.
Magnificat mixes it up by presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit, which uses old French carols as its basis, along with other seasonal music. December 17-19 in various locales; details here.
Berkeley Rep revives Mary Zimmerman’s fun production of The Arabian Nights, December 11-30.
Cutting Ball Theater extends its production of The Tempest to December 19 (my thoughts here, but in case you don't want to click through, it's a recommendation). And if you want more of the Elizabethans, Cutting Ball’s Hidden Classics Reading Series (which is free), has Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, on December 5. (Opera fans may know the play as the source for Richard Strauss’s Die Schweigsame Frau, though the opera is possibly done even less often than the play. I have actually seen the play staged, but never the opera.) By the way, can anyone explain to me why there is no good (that means affordable and scholarly yet meant for the public) complete edition of Jonson’s plays and masques? He must be fuming over how his rival Shakespeare has outstripped him.
I would be at Epicoene on the 5th if I didn’t already have a ticket for Elza van den Heever’s solo recital, presented by San Francisco Performances, part of their always worthwhile Young Masters series.
And Cal Performances has a full slate, including Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on December 4, and Nicholas Hodges on the 12th, with the Hammerklavier and Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X.
28 November 2010
thus would I chant a song for you, O sane and sacred death
After a season of garish Aidas and bedraggled Butterflies, San Francisco Opera finally justified its existence by presenting Karita Mattila in her role debut as Emilia Marty, in Janacek’s great opera The Makropulos Case. “Emilia Marty” is only the latest pseudonym of Elina Makropulos, born in 1575 and still alive well over 300 years later, thanks to an experimental formula concocted by her alchemist father at the behest of Emperor Rudolf II, who ordered him to use his daughter as a guinea pig. She escapes and her father is imprisoned as a quack (as she notes, the Emperor couldn’t know that she would live over 300 years). She spends the next few centuries in various guises, always with the initials E.M., gathering lovers and acclaim as a singer.
The opera opens in the Prague law office of Dr Kolenaty, who is representing one side in a century-old lawsuit over an inheritance; the celebrated opera singer Marty shows up, rather surprisingly, and further surprises everyone with a supernatural-seeming knowledge of the location and contents of papers sealed and hidden decades ago. It develops that the original owner of the disputed property was one of EM’s lovers, and she has returned seeking the alchemical formula, which her long-ago lover took and never returned to her: her 300 years of youth are coming to an end, and she needs the formula to renew them.
Mattila is superlative, bringing a somewhat icy glamour and an incandescent voice to a role she seems born to play. (I’ve seen the DVD with Anja Silja and two other live productions of this opera, but it’s now difficult for me to imagine anyone else in the part.) Years of watching death take friends and lovers has left EM both cold-hearted and anguished. It’s in little asides (“they all die. . . “) that Mattila deftly and momentarily plumbs the grief of the character, before reverting to a Lulu-like aura which attracts a fresh generation of willing and would-be victims. There are moments even in the beginning when she suddenly moves in the jittery and uncertain way of an old and fragile person, preparing us for the revelation of her final monologue, in which she astonishes the skeptical lawyer and the other participants in the lawsuit with the story of her life.
The costuming also sets EM apart, from her first appearance in an elegant silken white outfit (this production is apparently set in the 1950s, but aside from this Marilyn Monroeish outfit the time change doesn’t really register; everyone else’s outfits look like the 1920s as originally specified, an impression reinforced by the Pierrot costume EM has on in Act 2's back-stage scenes; Pierrot was an artistic fashion in the 1920s, not the 1950s). The sets are elegantly done in blacks, whites, and grays (often cross-hatched in the manner of an old engraving), with touches of red (some roses, EM’s lips. . . .). It all has the air of the chic and the fantastic.
Each scene is dominated by an enormous clock, keeping real time. I have a bad habit (I think it is a bad one) of being obsessed with time passing during a performance; sometimes I think about just covering the time counter on my DVD player. Here the clocks are a constant urgent reminder of mortality, and the value of the fleeting; that’s live performance for you, vanishing even as you watch. This effect was even more powerful for me because there were only six performances scheduled and due to various conflicts I wasn’t able to get to a second one, even though this is the kind of powerful, rewarding evening you go to the opera hoping for (needless to say one is usually disappointed in that hope, however entertained in other ways; this production really is special).
I do have some complaints. One is that I wish the momentum of the piece had not been broken with a lengthy intermission between Acts 2 and 3 (though that did give the awful couple in front of me the chance to leave). Performed without an intermission, the opera would be about the length of Salome, which we all know Mattila sings; would it really be too taxing to perform this opera straight through? (I’m genuinely asking. When I’m doing something physical like exercise I tend to start slow and build strength as I go, so an intermission would throw me off; perhaps singers feel differently.)
I was thinking about Mattila’s Salome (which I saw on a Met livecast, the only one I’ve been to) because she brings a similar movement to both characters, towards a deeper understanding and acceptance of life that includes and ends in death (at least, Salome does this in Mattila’s interpretation). I thought her Salome was fascinating and individual because her final monologue became a movement towards spiritual insight, and not just towards the final grotesque expression of lurid sexuality. EM moves in the same spiritual and psychological direction, towards an understanding and acceptance of the power and beauty of life as enforced and illuminated by death. At the end, Janacek does that thing he does at the end of many of his operas, where the music, though still very much in character with what we’ve been hearing all night, lightens and spreads out and upward in a way that exalts the meaning of the final action, as well as the listeners.
Mentioning the ending leads to my second complaint, and this one is major. There's one other prominent female character in the opera: Kristina, the youthful daughter of the clerk Vitek. Kristina, just embarking on adult life, longs to be a great singer like Emilia Marty, whom she idolizes (at least until her boyfriend kills himself for unrequited love of Marty). The end as written has EM offering the formula to Kristina, partly as compensation for the death of her boyfriend; she then, having witnessed both EM’s final suffering and EM’s exhausted indifference to suffering, chooses to burn the formula. It’s an incredibly powerful moment: a youthful version of EM essentially looks at what that life has been and chooses a different path. In this production, inexplicably, one of the men (a descendant of EM’s, in his 30s) snatches the paper from Kristina’s hands and burns it. I have no idea why the change was made, or what we’re supposed to make of it. Given our time and place, this action is simply going to be read, and condemned, as a man imposing his judgment on a younger woman, without consulting her. I thought this was the one major misstep in the production, and I hope this inexplicable change is switched back to the superior original.
The orchestra, under the direction of Jiri Belohlavek, was superb. The entire cast was strong the night I went (in addition to Mattila, the performers are: Thomas Glenn as Vitek, Miro Dvorsky as Albert Gregor, Susannah Biller as Kristina, Dale Travis as Dr Kolenaty, Gerd Grochowski as Baron Jaroslav Prus, Maya Lahyani as a chambermaid and then as a cleaning woman, Austin Kness as a stagehand, Brian Jagde as Janek, and Matthew O’Neill as Count Hauk-Sendorf, a doddering old lover of EM’s who remembers her as the gypsy dancer Eugenia Montez who ruined and delighted his life. The performances are dedicated to the late Sir Charles Mackerras, who did so much to introduce Janacek to the world outside of the Czech Republic. San Francisco Opera had started a program of broadcasting some of their productions; if they’re still doing that, The Makropulos Case should be at the top of the list (once they correct the misguided change at the end, of course).
The opera opens in the Prague law office of Dr Kolenaty, who is representing one side in a century-old lawsuit over an inheritance; the celebrated opera singer Marty shows up, rather surprisingly, and further surprises everyone with a supernatural-seeming knowledge of the location and contents of papers sealed and hidden decades ago. It develops that the original owner of the disputed property was one of EM’s lovers, and she has returned seeking the alchemical formula, which her long-ago lover took and never returned to her: her 300 years of youth are coming to an end, and she needs the formula to renew them.
Mattila is superlative, bringing a somewhat icy glamour and an incandescent voice to a role she seems born to play. (I’ve seen the DVD with Anja Silja and two other live productions of this opera, but it’s now difficult for me to imagine anyone else in the part.) Years of watching death take friends and lovers has left EM both cold-hearted and anguished. It’s in little asides (“they all die. . . “) that Mattila deftly and momentarily plumbs the grief of the character, before reverting to a Lulu-like aura which attracts a fresh generation of willing and would-be victims. There are moments even in the beginning when she suddenly moves in the jittery and uncertain way of an old and fragile person, preparing us for the revelation of her final monologue, in which she astonishes the skeptical lawyer and the other participants in the lawsuit with the story of her life.
The costuming also sets EM apart, from her first appearance in an elegant silken white outfit (this production is apparently set in the 1950s, but aside from this Marilyn Monroeish outfit the time change doesn’t really register; everyone else’s outfits look like the 1920s as originally specified, an impression reinforced by the Pierrot costume EM has on in Act 2's back-stage scenes; Pierrot was an artistic fashion in the 1920s, not the 1950s). The sets are elegantly done in blacks, whites, and grays (often cross-hatched in the manner of an old engraving), with touches of red (some roses, EM’s lips. . . .). It all has the air of the chic and the fantastic.
Each scene is dominated by an enormous clock, keeping real time. I have a bad habit (I think it is a bad one) of being obsessed with time passing during a performance; sometimes I think about just covering the time counter on my DVD player. Here the clocks are a constant urgent reminder of mortality, and the value of the fleeting; that’s live performance for you, vanishing even as you watch. This effect was even more powerful for me because there were only six performances scheduled and due to various conflicts I wasn’t able to get to a second one, even though this is the kind of powerful, rewarding evening you go to the opera hoping for (needless to say one is usually disappointed in that hope, however entertained in other ways; this production really is special).
I do have some complaints. One is that I wish the momentum of the piece had not been broken with a lengthy intermission between Acts 2 and 3 (though that did give the awful couple in front of me the chance to leave). Performed without an intermission, the opera would be about the length of Salome, which we all know Mattila sings; would it really be too taxing to perform this opera straight through? (I’m genuinely asking. When I’m doing something physical like exercise I tend to start slow and build strength as I go, so an intermission would throw me off; perhaps singers feel differently.)
I was thinking about Mattila’s Salome (which I saw on a Met livecast, the only one I’ve been to) because she brings a similar movement to both characters, towards a deeper understanding and acceptance of life that includes and ends in death (at least, Salome does this in Mattila’s interpretation). I thought her Salome was fascinating and individual because her final monologue became a movement towards spiritual insight, and not just towards the final grotesque expression of lurid sexuality. EM moves in the same spiritual and psychological direction, towards an understanding and acceptance of the power and beauty of life as enforced and illuminated by death. At the end, Janacek does that thing he does at the end of many of his operas, where the music, though still very much in character with what we’ve been hearing all night, lightens and spreads out and upward in a way that exalts the meaning of the final action, as well as the listeners.
Mentioning the ending leads to my second complaint, and this one is major. There's one other prominent female character in the opera: Kristina, the youthful daughter of the clerk Vitek. Kristina, just embarking on adult life, longs to be a great singer like Emilia Marty, whom she idolizes (at least until her boyfriend kills himself for unrequited love of Marty). The end as written has EM offering the formula to Kristina, partly as compensation for the death of her boyfriend; she then, having witnessed both EM’s final suffering and EM’s exhausted indifference to suffering, chooses to burn the formula. It’s an incredibly powerful moment: a youthful version of EM essentially looks at what that life has been and chooses a different path. In this production, inexplicably, one of the men (a descendant of EM’s, in his 30s) snatches the paper from Kristina’s hands and burns it. I have no idea why the change was made, or what we’re supposed to make of it. Given our time and place, this action is simply going to be read, and condemned, as a man imposing his judgment on a younger woman, without consulting her. I thought this was the one major misstep in the production, and I hope this inexplicable change is switched back to the superior original.
The orchestra, under the direction of Jiri Belohlavek, was superb. The entire cast was strong the night I went (in addition to Mattila, the performers are: Thomas Glenn as Vitek, Miro Dvorsky as Albert Gregor, Susannah Biller as Kristina, Dale Travis as Dr Kolenaty, Gerd Grochowski as Baron Jaroslav Prus, Maya Lahyani as a chambermaid and then as a cleaning woman, Austin Kness as a stagehand, Brian Jagde as Janek, and Matthew O’Neill as Count Hauk-Sendorf, a doddering old lover of EM’s who remembers her as the gypsy dancer Eugenia Montez who ruined and delighted his life. The performances are dedicated to the late Sir Charles Mackerras, who did so much to introduce Janacek to the world outside of the Czech Republic. San Francisco Opera had started a program of broadcasting some of their productions; if they’re still doing that, The Makropulos Case should be at the top of the list (once they correct the misguided change at the end, of course).
27 November 2010
Zenshinza Theatre Company
Last weekend I had a double dose of the Zenshinza Theatre Company, who came to Berkeley on their American debut tour. Zenshinza describes itself as “Japan’s oldest and largest repertory theater company”; they were founded in 1931 by two famous kabuki actors, Kawarasaki Chojuro and Nakamura Kan’emon, after a 1928 kabuki tour of the Soviet Union. Ironically, this first kabuki tour outside of Japan, while hugely influential on western theater, left the Japanese actors wishing for a more realistic performance style.
Saturday evening featured two works in classic kabuki style. The first, a comic curtain-raiser called Chatsubo (The Tea Chest), tells of a drunken servant carrying a chest of fine tea home to his master, a tea connoisseur. He falls asleep in the middle of the road with his arm through one strap of the chest; a clever and desperate thief comes by, sizes up the possibilities, and puts his arm through the other strap, claiming the chest is his. A magistrate comes by and quizzes the two, who mirror each others words and movements. It’s a fun little piece, expertly performed by Fujikawa Yanosuke as the servant, Nakajima Hiroyuki as the thief, and Masuki Hiroshi as the magistrate, though it’s not really the kind of thing that makes me laugh out loud. Instead I enjoyed it the way I enjoy silent movie comedies – not so much because they’re funny as because I admire their elegance and wit of movement and invention. This story of a disputed prize seemed like something Mack Sennett might have produced. The piece was first performed in Tokyo in 1921, and though it’s an adaptation (by Okamura Shiko) of a presumably older kyogen piece, I did idly wonder if there was some cross-influence to the short comedies Hollywood was producing then. They feed the same theatrical appetite, in their different styles.
After the intermission came the evening’s main event, Narukami (The Thunder God). It is the tale of a powerful priest, Narukami (Arashi Keishi), who is angered by the Emperor’s refusal to dedicate a temple to him. He traps the rain dragons by his magic and the land suffers drought until, at the Emperor’s secret behest, Princess Taema (Kawarasaki Kunitaro), pretending to be a young widow intent on becoming a nun, seduces Narukami into drinking excessive amounts of sake, which priests are forbidden to drink at all. When he passes out, she cuts the magic rope trapping the rain dragons. Both dragons and Princess flee, and when Narukami awakes and realizes he’s been tricked, he in his fury changes with spectacular visual effects into a thunder god and vows to pursue the Princess, seeking revenge.
The bold and colorful sets and costumes of both plays were a pleasure to watch. It’s also a pleasure to watch a theatrical style that has been, as far as I know, basically unchanged for centuries (although of course the bedrock of English-speaking theater is much older – Shakespeare died about a century and a half before even the oldest kabuki plays were written – the English performance style has changed constantly).
I was in the second row for this night, which was fine with me despite the neck-craning necessary to read the surtitles, but I saw some other front-row habitués move farther back at the intermission. That might actually have been a good idea for this second play, which uses the whole stage, often to significant purpose (for example, the way the Princess, who enters from stage right, and the priest over on stage left slowly move towards each other and the center of the stage as they move closer emotionally during the seduction scene). Since this is kabuki of course the Princess is played by a man; initially his stylized falsetto caused a few giggles but anyone who wasn’t expecting that sound or thought it was meant to be comic caught on quickly. Quite a spectacular show.
We had a spectacular of a different sort the next afternoon. Though I knew that Honen and Shinran was a new play (written by Tajima Sakae to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Honen Shonin and the 750th anniversary of Shinran Shonin, two monks who developed what became the largest Buddhist sect in Japan today), I thought it would be a new play in the kabuki style.
But the incidental music sounded like bits from a 1950s Biblical epic (pre-recorded for this play, though we had live music in the traditional style for the Saturday night performances). And there were actresses playing the female parts. So, no kabuki style! Instead it was a fairly old-fashioned religious pageant. Although I wasn’t familiar with the titular monks beforehand, the general arc of the story is familiar from any number of western saints and sages – from Jesus himself to Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther to the Ba’al Shem Tov: a holy man seeks enlightenment, and finally finds it not in the rules of established religion but in simple things of the spirit. He preaches and gives hope to the poor and dispossessed, offering them a direct route to the spiritual, bypassing the established priests and their complex and lucrative rules; eventually he is persecuted by the priests who are threatened by his message of spiritual equality and by the governors who are threatened by the spiritual message’s implicit message of political equality.
Though I probably would not have bought a ticket if I’d known exactly what the play was (or, more precisely, that it wasn't in traditional Japanese style), I don’t regret seeing it, though at three hours it struck me as too long. (Saturday night’s two plays were altogether about two-and-a-half hours, including intermission.) Perhaps I was just particularly impatient, having been stressed and fairly sick the whole week. On the other hand, the spiritual message of resilience and strength in the face of humiliation and rejection did resonate strongly under those circumstances, as did the realization that we’ve cycled through this particular story many times, not that we’ve ever learned much from it.
Certainly the audience was with them all the way. At one point a curtain jammed and there was a delay while they tried to get it to rise (the whole thing was quite fluidly and cinematically staged). This is normally the type of thing that reduces audiences to excited whispers and chuckles that last long after the problem has been fixed, but instead there was a respectful and reasonable silence. During a blizzard that opened the second part, the theatrical snow (little squares of white tissue paper) fell so abundantly that those of us in the front were well dusted with it. I noticed the woman next to me carefully pick the snow-scraps off her outfit and place the little pile in her purse as a souvenir. Afterwards she said to me, “Well, we got snowed on! That was something special.”
Saturday evening featured two works in classic kabuki style. The first, a comic curtain-raiser called Chatsubo (The Tea Chest), tells of a drunken servant carrying a chest of fine tea home to his master, a tea connoisseur. He falls asleep in the middle of the road with his arm through one strap of the chest; a clever and desperate thief comes by, sizes up the possibilities, and puts his arm through the other strap, claiming the chest is his. A magistrate comes by and quizzes the two, who mirror each others words and movements. It’s a fun little piece, expertly performed by Fujikawa Yanosuke as the servant, Nakajima Hiroyuki as the thief, and Masuki Hiroshi as the magistrate, though it’s not really the kind of thing that makes me laugh out loud. Instead I enjoyed it the way I enjoy silent movie comedies – not so much because they’re funny as because I admire their elegance and wit of movement and invention. This story of a disputed prize seemed like something Mack Sennett might have produced. The piece was first performed in Tokyo in 1921, and though it’s an adaptation (by Okamura Shiko) of a presumably older kyogen piece, I did idly wonder if there was some cross-influence to the short comedies Hollywood was producing then. They feed the same theatrical appetite, in their different styles.
After the intermission came the evening’s main event, Narukami (The Thunder God). It is the tale of a powerful priest, Narukami (Arashi Keishi), who is angered by the Emperor’s refusal to dedicate a temple to him. He traps the rain dragons by his magic and the land suffers drought until, at the Emperor’s secret behest, Princess Taema (Kawarasaki Kunitaro), pretending to be a young widow intent on becoming a nun, seduces Narukami into drinking excessive amounts of sake, which priests are forbidden to drink at all. When he passes out, she cuts the magic rope trapping the rain dragons. Both dragons and Princess flee, and when Narukami awakes and realizes he’s been tricked, he in his fury changes with spectacular visual effects into a thunder god and vows to pursue the Princess, seeking revenge.The bold and colorful sets and costumes of both plays were a pleasure to watch. It’s also a pleasure to watch a theatrical style that has been, as far as I know, basically unchanged for centuries (although of course the bedrock of English-speaking theater is much older – Shakespeare died about a century and a half before even the oldest kabuki plays were written – the English performance style has changed constantly).
I was in the second row for this night, which was fine with me despite the neck-craning necessary to read the surtitles, but I saw some other front-row habitués move farther back at the intermission. That might actually have been a good idea for this second play, which uses the whole stage, often to significant purpose (for example, the way the Princess, who enters from stage right, and the priest over on stage left slowly move towards each other and the center of the stage as they move closer emotionally during the seduction scene). Since this is kabuki of course the Princess is played by a man; initially his stylized falsetto caused a few giggles but anyone who wasn’t expecting that sound or thought it was meant to be comic caught on quickly. Quite a spectacular show.We had a spectacular of a different sort the next afternoon. Though I knew that Honen and Shinran was a new play (written by Tajima Sakae to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Honen Shonin and the 750th anniversary of Shinran Shonin, two monks who developed what became the largest Buddhist sect in Japan today), I thought it would be a new play in the kabuki style.
But the incidental music sounded like bits from a 1950s Biblical epic (pre-recorded for this play, though we had live music in the traditional style for the Saturday night performances). And there were actresses playing the female parts. So, no kabuki style! Instead it was a fairly old-fashioned religious pageant. Although I wasn’t familiar with the titular monks beforehand, the general arc of the story is familiar from any number of western saints and sages – from Jesus himself to Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther to the Ba’al Shem Tov: a holy man seeks enlightenment, and finally finds it not in the rules of established religion but in simple things of the spirit. He preaches and gives hope to the poor and dispossessed, offering them a direct route to the spiritual, bypassing the established priests and their complex and lucrative rules; eventually he is persecuted by the priests who are threatened by his message of spiritual equality and by the governors who are threatened by the spiritual message’s implicit message of political equality.
Though I probably would not have bought a ticket if I’d known exactly what the play was (or, more precisely, that it wasn't in traditional Japanese style), I don’t regret seeing it, though at three hours it struck me as too long. (Saturday night’s two plays were altogether about two-and-a-half hours, including intermission.) Perhaps I was just particularly impatient, having been stressed and fairly sick the whole week. On the other hand, the spiritual message of resilience and strength in the face of humiliation and rejection did resonate strongly under those circumstances, as did the realization that we’ve cycled through this particular story many times, not that we’ve ever learned much from it.Certainly the audience was with them all the way. At one point a curtain jammed and there was a delay while they tried to get it to rise (the whole thing was quite fluidly and cinematically staged). This is normally the type of thing that reduces audiences to excited whispers and chuckles that last long after the problem has been fixed, but instead there was a respectful and reasonable silence. During a blizzard that opened the second part, the theatrical snow (little squares of white tissue paper) fell so abundantly that those of us in the front were well dusted with it. I noticed the woman next to me carefully pick the snow-scraps off her outfit and place the little pile in her purse as a souvenir. Afterwards she said to me, “Well, we got snowed on! That was something special.”
not hearing Rufus
Last season at the Symphony one of the programs I was most looking forward to was the premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Five Shakespeare Sonnets, since I like Wainwright and love Shakespeare. The rest of the program (the ballet music from Faust, Vivier’s Zipangu, and Poulenc’s suite from Les Biches) was also well-chosen: French or French-inflected, sly and stylish. Of course Wainwright postponed his appearance, and Duncan Shiek appeared in his stead, with a song suite from Whisper House.
Wainwright reappeared on this season’s schedule, but once bitten twice shy, so I didn’t hurry to get a ticket ahead of time. By the time it was clear he would indeed show up with the Shakespeare piece, I had come to one of my periodic realizations that I spend way, way too much on performances, so I decided I should try for a rush ticket, only none were available. I did drop several shamelessly broad hints to my better-connected friends, but they had other guests in mind. This is where I would have posted about Wainwright’s piece if I’d gone to hear it this time around, so I figured I might as well post about last spring’s concert, since I never got around to writing about it at the time.
This was my first time hearing anything by Duncan Shiek. I had skipped Spring Awakening because (what a lesson to people like me who regularly praise theater pieces hoping other people will go see them) the raves really put me off. All that talk of how Broadway would never be the same since the voice of a new generation had arrived blah blah blah – isn’t that exactly what they said about Hair? and West Side Story? and, I don’t know, Babes in Arms? Also: amplified voices with a rock-inflected score: ah, the two things that have ruined American musical theater, together once again.
So Shiek came out after the ballet music from Faust to play his amplified, rock-inflected songs from Whisper House, a musical about an orphan boy during the Second World War who is sent to live in a New England lighthouse which is haunted by the ghosts of those who have died in the surrounding waters. The songs are probably very effective in context, but hearing six of them played straight through rendered them completely ineffective: the material (both words and music) was too thin and the songs all ran together. I could hear the Symphony’s strings under the amplified guitar and vocals, but they didn’t add a whole lot besides ambient buzz, so I really don’t know why they were there.
Shiek seems like a nice guy and was extremely earnest about the whole thing, which is possibly why I was cringing in embarrassment the entire half hour. He was there “to bring in the young people” as he put it in an interview somewhere (I forget exactly where; it was last spring, I can’t remember everything!). The young people failed to oblige. I’ve never seen Davies Hall so empty. When I was, technically, a young person, I was more interested in Messiaen and Mahler than in rock – that’s why I started going to the symphony. I really can’t emphasize that enough: the key to an orchestra’s survival in any meaningful form is that it presents an alternative to the music we get everywhere else.
My point here is not that the sacred temple of Art was profaned by the unholy sounds of Duncan Shiek and his rocking and rolling – it’s that you have this magnificent thing, the symphony orchestra, and it was being reduced to back-up buzz for a novelty act. You don’t survive as an institution by offering a watered-down, more costly version of what is easily available elsewhere. Orchestras claim that pieces like Whisper House bring in people who don’t usually go to the symphony, but so would pole-dancing. Are those people going to come back and listen to Bruckner?
I’m certainly not saying that symphonies should be closed off from the music of their time or content with their current audience; I think there is a real hunger out there for substantial art, though most of those hungering don’t look to the big musical institutions for nourishment. Ironically, this program had a perfect example of where orchestras should be going: in the direction of music like Claude Vivier’s Zipangu, which used the traditional resources of the orchestra to create striking new sounds. Vivier had a strange and almost too picturesque life story (his childhood as an orphan is fairly mysterious and after suffering premonitions of death he was killed in his mid-30s by a young man he had picked up – though, not to be callous, but given his promiscuity at the height of the AIDS epidemic, it’s likely he would have died young anyway; in either case, it was a tragic loss for contemporary music). There's a terrific DVD of his work, Reves d'un Marco Polo, that contains a fascinating documentary as well as a wonderful performance of several of his pieces, including Zipangu; I recommend the disc highly.
In addition to excellent work with the Vivier, conductor Edwin Outwater made the Poulenc crisp, elegant, and witty, and shaped a really lovely performance of the ballet music from Faust – I was so grateful not to have to sit through the dances at the Opera House a few months later, because Gounod’s opera is really long enough as it is without an extra twenty minutes of dancers hopping around in a prettified and therefore inadequate Walpurgishnacht, but the music is delightful on its own. In fact, aside from the intense embarrassment of Shiek’s piece, the whole evening was quite enjoyable. Less Shiek, more Vivier!
Wainwright reappeared on this season’s schedule, but once bitten twice shy, so I didn’t hurry to get a ticket ahead of time. By the time it was clear he would indeed show up with the Shakespeare piece, I had come to one of my periodic realizations that I spend way, way too much on performances, so I decided I should try for a rush ticket, only none were available. I did drop several shamelessly broad hints to my better-connected friends, but they had other guests in mind. This is where I would have posted about Wainwright’s piece if I’d gone to hear it this time around, so I figured I might as well post about last spring’s concert, since I never got around to writing about it at the time.
This was my first time hearing anything by Duncan Shiek. I had skipped Spring Awakening because (what a lesson to people like me who regularly praise theater pieces hoping other people will go see them) the raves really put me off. All that talk of how Broadway would never be the same since the voice of a new generation had arrived blah blah blah – isn’t that exactly what they said about Hair? and West Side Story? and, I don’t know, Babes in Arms? Also: amplified voices with a rock-inflected score: ah, the two things that have ruined American musical theater, together once again.
So Shiek came out after the ballet music from Faust to play his amplified, rock-inflected songs from Whisper House, a musical about an orphan boy during the Second World War who is sent to live in a New England lighthouse which is haunted by the ghosts of those who have died in the surrounding waters. The songs are probably very effective in context, but hearing six of them played straight through rendered them completely ineffective: the material (both words and music) was too thin and the songs all ran together. I could hear the Symphony’s strings under the amplified guitar and vocals, but they didn’t add a whole lot besides ambient buzz, so I really don’t know why they were there.
Shiek seems like a nice guy and was extremely earnest about the whole thing, which is possibly why I was cringing in embarrassment the entire half hour. He was there “to bring in the young people” as he put it in an interview somewhere (I forget exactly where; it was last spring, I can’t remember everything!). The young people failed to oblige. I’ve never seen Davies Hall so empty. When I was, technically, a young person, I was more interested in Messiaen and Mahler than in rock – that’s why I started going to the symphony. I really can’t emphasize that enough: the key to an orchestra’s survival in any meaningful form is that it presents an alternative to the music we get everywhere else.
My point here is not that the sacred temple of Art was profaned by the unholy sounds of Duncan Shiek and his rocking and rolling – it’s that you have this magnificent thing, the symphony orchestra, and it was being reduced to back-up buzz for a novelty act. You don’t survive as an institution by offering a watered-down, more costly version of what is easily available elsewhere. Orchestras claim that pieces like Whisper House bring in people who don’t usually go to the symphony, but so would pole-dancing. Are those people going to come back and listen to Bruckner?
I’m certainly not saying that symphonies should be closed off from the music of their time or content with their current audience; I think there is a real hunger out there for substantial art, though most of those hungering don’t look to the big musical institutions for nourishment. Ironically, this program had a perfect example of where orchestras should be going: in the direction of music like Claude Vivier’s Zipangu, which used the traditional resources of the orchestra to create striking new sounds. Vivier had a strange and almost too picturesque life story (his childhood as an orphan is fairly mysterious and after suffering premonitions of death he was killed in his mid-30s by a young man he had picked up – though, not to be callous, but given his promiscuity at the height of the AIDS epidemic, it’s likely he would have died young anyway; in either case, it was a tragic loss for contemporary music). There's a terrific DVD of his work, Reves d'un Marco Polo, that contains a fascinating documentary as well as a wonderful performance of several of his pieces, including Zipangu; I recommend the disc highly.
In addition to excellent work with the Vivier, conductor Edwin Outwater made the Poulenc crisp, elegant, and witty, and shaped a really lovely performance of the ballet music from Faust – I was so grateful not to have to sit through the dances at the Opera House a few months later, because Gounod’s opera is really long enough as it is without an extra twenty minutes of dancers hopping around in a prettified and therefore inadequate Walpurgishnacht, but the music is delightful on its own. In fact, aside from the intense embarrassment of Shiek’s piece, the whole evening was quite enjoyable. Less Shiek, more Vivier!
26 November 2010
Measha Brueggergosman
I had heard Measha Brueggergosman only once before, at a strangely disappointing recital in Berkeley, but she has been so highly and regularly praised that I was eager to hear her again last Wednesday, presented this time by San Francisco Performances. I was a little concerned because I had been up late at Cyrano the night before, and worried that the announced theme, Night and Dreams, might prove all too effective, and the artists would be treated to the sight of me snoring and drooling away in the front row. As with at least some of my anxieties, I needn’t have worried; I was alert throughout and missed nothing of the enchanting recital. I was so charmed I even stayed after to buy a CD and have her and Justus Zeyen, her accompanist, sign it. The CD is also called Night and Dreams, and though there isn’t that much overlap between the recital and the record, I haven’t listened to it yet, because I want to keep for a while longer my memory of her voice without distorting the memory with the recordings.
Her voice is indeed gorgeous; none of the breath control problems I noted in Berkeley were evident. At times it reminded me of Kathleen Battle’s voice, only in bronze instead of silver, if that makes sense. Her burnished tones were perfect for the theme. I enjoyed Zeyen’s solo turns in Schumann’s Nachtstuck in F Major, Opus 23, No 2, and Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat Major, Opus 27, No 2. Nice to see them mix up the standard recital format in this way. I also liked the creative intercutting in the final set between three lied by Richard Strauss (Wiegenlied, Die Nacht, and Standchen) and four of Berg’s Seven Early Songs (Nacht, Traumgekront, Liebesode, and Schilflied). Her Wiegenlied stayed with me for days.
Brueggergosman is both glam and a down-to-earth total charmer; she looks like Eartha Kitt, only without the kittenish affectations. She wore two gowns (a deep red velvety number streaked with darker tones for the first half and then a silver gown, perhaps in homage to the moon) and she changed into a third for the CD signing. I complimented her on the performance and mentioned that she had changed again, and she said, “Well, I know how [the Bay Area is] about fashion.” I was wearing plain black wool pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, which proves my theory that the secret of elegance is long sleeves.
Oddly enough, at intermission a woman came up to me and asked if I was perhaps a singer (clearly she’d never heard me sing; as a friend thoughtfully pointed out recently, my voice still cracks) or a dancer (clearly she’d never seen me move). She was with a group from Oakland Lyric Opera and they had sent her over to find out if I was anybody. I assured her I was not. I thought it was odd only because I was asked the same question at the last Brueggergosman concert, and that is how I met Mr G/S Y (boa viagem, meu amigo!). Apparently I look extra-theatrical when I hear Ms Brueggergosman.
Her voice is indeed gorgeous; none of the breath control problems I noted in Berkeley were evident. At times it reminded me of Kathleen Battle’s voice, only in bronze instead of silver, if that makes sense. Her burnished tones were perfect for the theme. I enjoyed Zeyen’s solo turns in Schumann’s Nachtstuck in F Major, Opus 23, No 2, and Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat Major, Opus 27, No 2. Nice to see them mix up the standard recital format in this way. I also liked the creative intercutting in the final set between three lied by Richard Strauss (Wiegenlied, Die Nacht, and Standchen) and four of Berg’s Seven Early Songs (Nacht, Traumgekront, Liebesode, and Schilflied). Her Wiegenlied stayed with me for days.
Brueggergosman is both glam and a down-to-earth total charmer; she looks like Eartha Kitt, only without the kittenish affectations. She wore two gowns (a deep red velvety number streaked with darker tones for the first half and then a silver gown, perhaps in homage to the moon) and she changed into a third for the CD signing. I complimented her on the performance and mentioned that she had changed again, and she said, “Well, I know how [the Bay Area is] about fashion.” I was wearing plain black wool pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, which proves my theory that the secret of elegance is long sleeves.
Oddly enough, at intermission a woman came up to me and asked if I was perhaps a singer (clearly she’d never heard me sing; as a friend thoughtfully pointed out recently, my voice still cracks) or a dancer (clearly she’d never seen me move). She was with a group from Oakland Lyric Opera and they had sent her over to find out if I was anybody. I assured her I was not. I thought it was odd only because I was asked the same question at the last Brueggergosman concert, and that is how I met Mr G/S Y (boa viagem, meu amigo!). Apparently I look extra-theatrical when I hear Ms Brueggergosman.
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