LA Opus

Baritone Thomas Quasthoff to quit singing

2012-01-11T12:26:00.000-08:00

by Rodney Punt

Word has come that the great German baritone, Thomas Quasthoff, has ceased his singing career.

Quasthoff's performances were riveting. Southern California audiences will miss his visits to both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, among other venues.

My first encounter with Quasthoff came unexpectedly, on a visit to Germany.

I was in Munich in the early 1990′s and noticed a playbill for a lieder recital at the Herkulessaal, featuring a baritone new to me. A man named Thomas Quasthoff was to sing, among others, the Heinrich Heine songs from Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang. I bought a ticket and took my place in the middle of the hall. An elderly couple entered my row and sat next to me. When Quasthoff walked on stage, I was shocked at his short stature and obvious disabilities. He had to climb on a platform next to the piano just to get his head above its height.

And then he sang – supremely, with deep resonance and a huge range, a voice even throughout the register and full of genuine expressive power. When he got to the Schubert songs, their significance became apparent: ‘Der Atlas’ tells of a man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders; The ‘Doppelgänger’s malevalent shadow follows the man everywhere. I began to sob silently, or so I thought. The elderly German next to me asked in English, “Are you an American?” Struggling to control myself, I responded that I was. He said, “That man on stage, he is my son.”

Many consider Quasthoff the greatest lieder singer of our time. His absence as an active singer will be incalculable. Fortunately he has left us an outstanding library of recordings that range from art songs to jazz standards. LA Opus wishes Mr. Quasthoff many productive years ahead as a teacher and lecturer on the art of singing.

The Brandenburgs are their Brand

2011-11-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

LACO does the six concertos of J.S. Bach

Review by Rodney Punt

Johann Sebastian Bach compiled what are today called the Brandenburg Concertos as showpieces and probable calling cards for employment with the Margrave of Brandenburg. The provincial Saxon Kapellmeister put everything he knew of musical brilliance into their design, borrowing from and enhancing his earlier compositions to impress the Prussian royalty at its Berlin capital. Never performed, alas, the concertos languished for over a 100 years until a 19th-century revival finally and firmly established Bach’s preeminence in Western music’s firmament. Once rediscovered, the Brandenburgs' evergreen popularity has never waned.

The six concertos contain nineteen movements for various soloists and ensembles, each with its own sound-world, colors, and rhythms. Fast movements are upbeat and energetic, almost frenetically so, and bubble with an irresistible thrust. Slow movements and minuets contrast, often with exotically sensuous atmospheres.

Having performed the Brandenburgs some fifty-two times in its history -- the latest last Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall -- the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has a special affinity to these works. As has been their procedure in recent years, the customary ordering of the six concertos, not likely conceived by Bach to be performed all at once, was altered to good effect. In the original ordering, the first two works are in the key of F, the next two in G, and the last two in D and B-flat respectively. By switching the second one, with its piccolo trumpet solo, to the final position, the set wraps up with its most brilliant piece and has the bonus of beginning and ending in the key of F, lending a facsimile of cyclical logic to the tonal scheme. Also, an earlier work of Bach's was interpolated after the third concerto's enigmatic two-chord second movement.

Time was when LACO represented the sine qua non in the performance practice of the Brandenburgs. In the years since LACO’s founding in 1968, however, music scholarship has led to more historically informed early music practice, whittling away at repertoire once LACO’s exclusive province. Locally, the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra now claims bragging rights as Southern California’s purist of pure early music ensembles, with their catgut strings, host of odd-looking antique instruments, and sonic textures so lean they are sometimes more seen than heard.

LACO’s approach to last Sunday’s performance embraced the spirit of early-music practice while retaining the more practical aspects of modern performance, and the orchestra can at the very least claim mastery in execution if not the ultimate in style. Musical forces were pared down; period instruments were mixed with modern -- steel in lieu of cat-gut strings, cellos for violas da gamba, modern woodwinds with the antique harpsichord. At times balances suffered, as with the huge-in-size but lite-in-sound theorbo that could clearly be heard only when paired with just one other instrument.

Impeccable virtuosity, however, is the great virtue audiences have come to expect from these musicians whose day jobs are in Hollywood’s film studios. And they got it. Violinist and concertmaster Margaret Batjer led most of the concertos, enforcing brisk tempi and crack ensemble work; other soloists led the rest. Most musicians stood as they performed, aiding sound projection in acoustic-friendly Royce Hall.

The first concerto’s Adagio found Batjer’s violin weaving delicious arabesques in the air like Moorish smoke-rings. The seasoned concertmaster embraced the first and the fourth concertos’ virtuosic movements at such a breakneck pace she traded some tone for the fireworks. No matter; the feat was impressive. Batjer then ceded other violin solos to two of her colleagues: Josefina Vergara employed in the fifth concerto the minimal vibrato and the generally drier tone associated with Baroque authenticity, while Jacqueline Brand produced a lovely, honeyed tone in the limpid second concerto.

Impressive as the violin solos and ensembles were in most of these works, special mention is due the contributions of the lower strings -- cellos, bass, and especially the violas led by soloists Victoria Miskolczy and Robert Brophy -- who gave a near perfect execution of the richly lush sixth concerto, which features no violins. Among its many felicities were the last movement’s sparkling syncopations.

The featured woodwinds -- two veterans and one newcomer -- were impressive in their own star turns. David Shostac on flute in three concertos scored points for both luminescence and endurance, while oboist Allan Vogel in the second concerto proved he has lost none of his storied and beguiling agility. In her company debut in the fourth concerto's duo with Shostac, flutist Brook Ellen Schoenwald was far more than just a worthy echo.

The horns were in an agreeable posture and accurate throughout the evening. Patricia Mabee provided informed harpsichord continuo with an opportunity to shine bright in the fifth concerto's extensive solo cadenza. She took full advantage of her encyclopedically swirling passages. David Washburn nearly stole the show with the last-played second concerto’s blazing piccolo trumpet work in the two outer movements, sending the audience out in the cold night with a warm glow.

In the passion they conveyed in these favorite works, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra ceded not an inch to its rival upstarts in or out of town.

-----ooooo-----

Incidental: The powers that be at Royce Hall’s concession counter have apparently concluded that tea bags and hot water are just too difficult any longer to stock. On a particularly cold night, in a particularly cold hall, the warm beverage of choice was either coffee or nuttin’. Also not available were freshly baked cookies of fond memory, only the cheap-package types with mysterious embalming preservatives.

Ah, Progress.

Rodney Punt can be reached at Rodney@ArtsPacifica.net.

Photo source: Wikipedia Commons

Lovers and other icons

2011-11-11T14:51:00.001-08:00

Machaidze, Grigolo make Roméo et Juliette smoulder

by Joseph Mailander

Here came a production that everyone in town who enjoys opera knows has everything going for it: our present LA Opera run of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. It has splendid red-hot soprano Nino Machaidze (above) as Juliette, off of her fabulous in-town spring romp in the flighty buffa of Il Turco in Italia. It has smouldering hot tenor Vittorio Grigolo preening, dancing, and dry-humping as buff Romeo, singing for his life. It has one of Ian Judge's now-patented whirling dervish stagings, with action, action, and action, twisting emotions, and more fun things to look at than most Grammy broadcasts. And it has global superstar Placido Domingo vigorously bobbing his grey mane in the pit, pumping the adroit orchestra with now musical, now historical sensibility. What could go wrong?

Nothing. Nothing goes wrong. It all comes off as you expect it would: shocking, whirlwind, fantastic, and playing this way to big big appreciative crowds at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

A few sopranos have much enchanted LA audiences over the past decade, but Nino Machaidze is my own personal favorite. She hits every note and hits it with energy, makes most baritones sound like whisperers next to her, and far from a caged bird, stirs with every emotion every time she's called to do so. She's beautiful and poetic and her fill-the-house phrasings give her full license to the title of nuova regina della lirica and a few titles in English I haven't thought of. She's a special thing that happens to a place at a special time, and she's happened to LA twice now in the past six months, and it's been all wonderful, all the kind of performance that makes you want to see someone more than once a run.

Someone has to dare to stand next to her, and why not Tuscan-bred Vittorio Grigolo, as much a specimen as a singer, a Roméo who is quite the Romeo. He takes a ballerina's spin on hearing that Juliet will love him; he turns this production's skeletal but sumptuous steampunk set into his personal jungle gym, climbing ladders, hopping fences, approaching Juliette's balcony as though shooting through a floor exercise. When love is a waltz in the first act, he can barely contain himself. It continues through the curtain calls; he's singing, but he's also exhibiting athleticism at every point, sometimes shirtless in a very good way, sometimes convincing enough in Juliette's bed to fetch an X.

No, there's not much not to like here. The production is staged intriguingly, and for about an hour you might even think the stars of the show are the pulleys in the rafters as they lift and lower countless tealights, chandeliers, velvet curtains, mirrors...a panoply of mood hidden in the fourth story, waiting for showtime. Something I didn't favor that the pulleys leave hanging through the balcony scene are two gigantic rhizomes, a little too inviting of Round-Up for me to appreciate. I get it--two family trees with deep roots--but they didn't add anything. Everything else, though, far more subtle, does add, and, like the production itself, is perpetually fun to watch.

Give a thunderous nod to Maestro Placido, who may now have seen this opera more than any man or woman presently on earth has, and who spends more time watching the singers himself than any conductor I've observed. He can--he knows these scores backwards and forwards--he probably knows this one better than Charles Gounod ever did by now. He has a special look as a conductor--he doesn't ask for more, because when he simply looks at you, you are prompted to give more. He's obviously very pleased by now with where the orchestra is, and he pulls in the singers he wants.

Down the program, Museop Kim is a more-than-serviceable Mercurtio; he brings some comic relief to this taut and often engagingly stupid romance-cum-brawl. I also saw a stand-in, Renee Rapier, as the taunting boy Stephano; this is a role that doesn't do much for me, but she certainly went puckish enough to make it work better than it does for me ordinarily.

Try to get a ticket--but if you saw Machaidze in Turco, you probably already have anyway.

This Roméo et Juliette is an original LA Opera production. Remaining performances are on Saturday, November 12, 2011, at 7:30pm; Thursday, November 17, 2011, at 7:30pm; Sunday, November 20, 2011, at 2pm; Saturday, November 26, 2011, at 2pm. Ticket info here.

Improving on Love

2011-09-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

LA Opera's Cosi Fan Tutte brings psych to the frolic

Photo by Robert Millard for LA Opera

by Joseph Mailander

Cosi Fan Tutte always brings to mind some other opera--and it should not, as it's grand enough on its own.

But it happens to be the third prong of the greater-than-grand Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations; it especially if modestly draws from Figaro; and it strongly anticipates not only The Barber of Seville but also Il Turco in Italia. It has its puppeteer and it has its frothy love complexities. Like Figaro and the two Rossini operas, it dispenses plot points like a bubble-blowing machine; dozens and dozens of poofy little spheres of action float by, to pop a little after their born. But the plot never entirely floats away as it does in other opera buffa, and Cosi never runs to farce. In fact, underneath the easy frolic is a complex psych study of the way men and women behave when daring to try to improve on love requited.

And that's the way the silly geese presently flapping their wings onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in a new LA Opera production of Cosi all work: they bring their full emotional chops to the many moods of paranoid love. Mostly, they do the work very well with their antics and acting; and its in their psychological expressions as singers and actors that the ensemble most shines. When there is little to emote, however, the singers merely pass muster, tapering off from the highs of the production's top moments.

I liked the girls as singers and also as actors. The girls experience the most heart-tugging and their emotional swings are bundled up tautly in their vocals. Roxana Constantinescu's Despina is perky and mischievous enough for her world-wise maid role and all her attendant soubrette double duty. Cecillia Bartoli sets the standard for this role and sets it high, but Constantinescu brings a good contender, and it's not a wonder as she's also sung in the two other Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations. Ruxandra Donose's Dorabella works out her eagerness for the boys with giddy aplomb, while Alexandra Kurzak's Fiordiligi, the sturdier sister, walks her path with the requisite alternating blends of sanctimony and surrender and finds a likeable coloratura when called on.

And I liked the boys as actors and also as singers. The men are physical, challenging, capricious as actors; they are indeed certifiable peacocks, mugging and strutting and straddling their way through the two hundred minutes. As singers, they are similarly spot-on, though again, they sometimes fall off when the demands lighten. Guglielmo is sung by Ildebrando D'Archangelo, a smoldering presence either as shorn Italian or mustachioed Albanian, and a very excellent bass-baritone. The great irony of the production is tenor Saimir Pirgu, an actual Albanian (!) who plays Ferrando; he plays an Italian playing an Albanian with appreciable nuance, and his part of the duet Fra gli amplessi is particularly appealing. I found Lorenzo Regazzo's Don Alfonso a little too cutesy as an old philosopher; his hair is not gray and his gait is young and spry, but cast against type, his antics still manage to set the table convincingly.

The musicianship under the baton of James Conlon is exceptional, as it almost always is. One particular set with a resolutely bel di blue sky backdrop is very commodious and worth the ticket alone. But I had some trouble with the lighting of this production; footlights were used sparingly and scenes set downstage were shadow-riddled while faces down right and down left remained less than bright.

Cosi Fan Tutte, a new LA Opera production, is at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through October 8. Maestro James Conlon conducts. It plays Saturday, 09/24/2011 7:30 PM; Sunday, 10/02/2011 2:00 PM; Wednesday, 10/05/2011 7:30 PM; Saturday, 10/08/2011 2:00 PM. Tickets here or at the box office.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-09-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

THE CLEVELAND QUARTET SHINES WITH EMANUEL AX

by Anne French

Formed in 1969, The Cleveland String Quartet has been lauded as one of the premier quartets of our time. For a time they were the quartet in residence at the State University of NY at Buffalo, my old alma mater, and I was fortunate enough to become well acquainted with their work. I was quite excited to find some clips of their recordings with Emanuel Ax posted on YouTube, and I simply had to share. This breathtakingly beautiful movement from Schumann's Piano Quartet is a wonderful example of their exquisite performances, and Emanuel Ax is the perfect pianist for this undertaking. If you haven't heard the ensemble before, prepare yourself for a rare treat.

Third Annual California International Theatre Festival

2011-08-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

by Anne French

An ambitious third season of events will be presented by the California International Theatre Festival from September 8-18, at venues in downtown Los Angeles, Ventura and Calabasas. Festival director Joe Peracchio and executive producer Tammy Taylor, have put together a spectacular array of productions from Armenia (Komitas' 10 Commandments & Colors), Canada (The Cure for Everything), France (Roadway Closed to Pedestrians), Germany (Scenario: for a Non-existent, but Possible Instrumental Actor), Guatemala, Ukraine (Marjana Sadowska in concert) and the U.S. On September 11th a panel of international and American artists, scholars, politicians and celebrities will discuss The Global Stage: The Theatre Movement in a Post 9/11 World. The festival also includes 3 free staged readings and a festival wrap party.

CITF's founding artistic director is award-winning actress, Linda Purl.

A complete schedule of performances, times and places can be found at www.citfestival.org, where individual tickets ($17 - $30) and ticket packages are also available. Call 888-712-CITF (2483) for further information.

Griselda in Peter Sellars Production at Santa Fe Opera

2011-08-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

Review by Rodney Punt

Director Peter Sellars has forged a strong reputation for envisioning contemporary operas and rethinking classic ones. Of present day fare, John Adams' Nixon in China, in both its original and revived versions, may be the most iconic. Notable among the classics are the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations and several of Handel’s operas including the Chicago Lyric’s recent Hercules.

Sellars can be uneven. His over-produced stage version of Adams' oratorio, El Niño, of a decade ago comes to mind as well as his under-produced George Crumb song cycle of just this past June at the Ojai Festival. There are times when the trademark extravagant explanations that are a standard part of the Sellars production package lead only to visual confusion and stingy stage-crafting.

Such was the case with Antonio Vivaldi’s long-forgotten Griselda, now in production at the Santa Fe Opera. I will review it from three perspectives: as a work, a production, and a performance.

[The rating scheme: **** Outstanding *** Solid ** Some Issues * Forget It.]

Griselda's overall rating (**½)

Work (**½) Venice was Opera Central in the eighteenth century and the sybaritic Venetians attended operas like today's crowds flock to rock concerts. Antonio Vivaldi got into the action frequently; about fifty of his reported 95 operas survive. Superstar Cecilia Bartoli’s advocacy in concerts and recordings some years ago has stimulated a European revival of the composer’s operas. The phenomenon now crosses the Atlantic in the new U.S. production of Griselda at Santa Fe.

The story of the long-suffering Griselda, Queen of Thessaly, comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron (also retold in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). In Vivaldi’s version -- with a libretto by an up-and-coming 25-year-old Carlo Goldoni -- longstanding public objections to King Gualtiero’s marriage to a commoner prompt him to publicly test Griselda’s loyalty. He had already removed their daughter Costanza from her mother at birth fifteen years before and he would to do the same with their son some years later. Now he dismisses his wife from their marriage and her royal place as his queen and casts her out to live in a cave. Griselda grieves but never questions her husband’s judgment.

Perplexing twists and turns in the plot, some hard to decipher, give rise to 'simile' arias of metaphorical comparisons with nature that explore extreme states of alienation and emotion. Vivaldi throws down a gauntlet to his six principals with agitated bravura passages in regions stratospheric to cavernous. Ears may weary of the long recitatives and harmonically static arias, some recycled from earlier operas. As a dramatist Vivaldi was no Handel, but if the Venetian's formulas seem a prescription for tedium, his gifts for melodic variation, string sonorities, and dramatizing emotions through vivid arias more than compensate.

Why this story? It may come across as borderline sadistic, but Boccaccio’s yarn is an updating of the Greek myth of Medea, another female victim who lost her marriage and her position, but who murdered her own children in revenge. Rather than follow the latter’s example into violence, Griselda’s turning the other cheek replaces “primitive” behavior with the medieval Christian ethos of faith and self-control. Boccaccio modernized the story from its savage roots, even if Vivaldi would later exploit it for his audience of jaded Venetian thrill-seekers.

Production (*½) The mostly Los Angeles-based production team included Sellars and Chicano artist Gronk. (LA Opera's Associate Conductor/Chorus Master Grant Gershon also conducted.) As ring-mastered by Sellars, the production is set in a traditional New Mexican 'Fiesta de Quinceañera' (a girl’s fifteenth birthday graduation to young adulthood), as suggested by Dunya Ramicova’s pastel-colored costumes for the men and the character Costanza’s traditional white ruffled, red trimmed dress.

Confusing that scenario, however, was urban-based Gronk’s backdrop mural of dark colored, aggressive abstractions. A literal depiction of the anxiety inhabiting the characters’ psyches, it overwhelmed the stage in massive statement, rendering the relatively tiny human action almost irrelevant. James Ingalls’ expressionistic lighting in garish Las Vegas tints added another layer of competing spectrums.

Design clashes aside, the actual dramaturgy looked as if produced on a shoestring. With the stage empty save for a couple of chairs, the actors had little off which to play. Stock movements -- including stylized gestures seen in other Sellars productions -- produced clumsy character interactions. Gualtiero was given cruel and arbitrary gestures that mimicked Latin American macho stereotypes. But would he really have called for swat-teamed henchmen with M-16 rifles to threaten his courtiers? His sham test is, after all, only a temporary ruse to prove a point, and many in his kingdom are already in on the game.

In SFO’s Crescendo magazine, Sellars states of the East L.A. based Gronk: “When you ask an artist to paint, he sees things in his own way; I have not told him anything. When different art forms meet, they inspire one another. The singers are alive inside the spectacular universe of the painting.” The question that follows: were the elements of this mise en scène -- set, costumes, and lighting – conceived independently, meeting only when they collided on stage? In this jumbled production the answer would seem to be yes.

Performance (***½) The singing of five young principals and a mid-career one almost redeemed Griselda’s production problems. Supported by a only a string orchestra, they were fearless in the face of Vivaldi’s merciless, but also beautiful, vocal challenges.

Contralto Meredith Arwady’s title character is the medieval version of a battered wife. At one point Griselda is recalled to the palace to become a maid for Costanza, who Gualtiero represents as his new bride. Griselda is unaware she is actually their daughter. The portrayal of calm acceptance to these indignities required a thespian's full craft.

Arwady's star role here was not particularly a gratifying one, with Vivaldi giving her few good arias and only contrite recitatives. One of her special moments, however, comes at the end of Act One when her 'Ho il cor già lacero' (my heart is torn to pieces) is broken up with rests, an effective musical analogy. Sellars also provided Arwady with some interpolated vocal relief by inserting the first part of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater for the less worthy of her later arias. Arwady made the most of what she was given. To hear her deep and true contralto plunge the vocal depths was to follow Jules Verne on a journey to the center of the earth.

Stalwart tenor Paul Groves, a regular at the SFO and survivor of last year’s unfortunate Tales of Hoffmann, was a commanding dramatic presence as Gualtiero, his voice strong if not completely comfortable in the rapid vocal figurations of the Baroque style. Had he been given more stage business to telegraph his transition from jack-booted martinet to empathetic husband, his characterization might have come across as even more interesting.

Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard soared as a vocally dazzling and attractive Costanza, who is devastated to learn she must marry the king (not knowing he is her father) in lieu of her beloved Roberto. A highlight was her Act Two "Agitata da due venti' (comparing love and duty to two contrary winds). Whether standing, kneeling, or writhing on the floor, she sang in consummate Baroque style, stunning in both legato and coloratura passages, and rich-voiced up and down the register. A major operatic star has arrived on the scene, and the Santa Fe Opera captured her talents in a breathtaking, breakthrough role.

Surrounding Costanza dramatically were two countertenors. David Daniels was the honey-voiced Roberto, her lover and protector, torn in his loyalty to the king by the prospect of losing her to him in marriage. (Daniels remains the gold standard of our time for a pure-toned countertenor.) Yuri Minenko, as his brother, Corrado, knowing the sham marriage was just part of the test, added silvery-smooth vocal assurances for some kind of a happy resolution to the lovers. His Act One 'Alle minacce di fiera belva' (with orchestral horns) casts his mission as that of a hunter who will pursue his prey relentlessly -- in this case, Ottone.

Soprano Amanda Majeski was riveting in her fedora-sporting trouser role as Ottone, in love with Griselda and nominally the villain for opposing the king's harsh treatment of her. Ottone's 'Scocca dardi l'altero tuo ciglio' (the heart is a butterfly drawn to lamplight) projected all the ardor and agony of this character’s conflicted feelings toward king and outcast queen. Also notable: 'Vede orgogliosa l'onda' (a lover's persistence like a helmsman trying to reach land in a raging sea).

Making his company debut conducting without baton a slimmed-down Baroque string orchestra, Grant Gershon was placed high on his seat to maintain eye contact with the occasionally horizontal singers on stage. The cast's confident vocal performances confirmed the security they must have felt under his leadership. Gershon's control of the orchestra was also firm and fluid. Momentary appearances of horns in two arias added color; trumpets in the finale bestowed a festive send-off to the work’s not entirely convincing happy ending.

In the most inspired production touch of the evening, the totally confused but recently restored Queen Griselda, alone on the stage after all have departed, continues to sweep up after her subjects and her husband.

It was the singing, however, that saved the day for this Griselda.

-----ooooo-----

Griselda:

Music by Antonio Vivaldi
Libretto by Apostolo Zeno
Performance reviewed: Friday, July 29
Performances run through Friday, August 19

All above photos by Ken Howard, used by permission of the Santa Fe Opera.

Rodney Punt may be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Devils & Crazy Guys

2011-08-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Santa Fe Opera’s 2011 Season

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Commentary and reviews by Rodney Punt

Lightening and thunder struck a few days ago at the very moment when Rodolfo touches Mimi’s hand in the dark of his garret apartment. No suspended disbelief was necessary for this early August performance of La Bohème. Real-life theatrics are par for the course at the Santa Fe Opera, perched high on a desert mesa with its theater sides open to storms on the nearby Sangre de Christo Mountains.

Now in its 55th year, the improbable vision of the late conductor-impresario John Crosby was dismissed early on as a wealthy man’s plaything, but it has become a summer cultural and economic anchor for New Mexico’s lively capital. (Founded in 1610, Santa Fe is the oldest capital in the USA and was a thriving outpost of the Spanish Empire when the Pilgrims landed precariously at Plymouth Rock in 1620.)

The SFO is the contrarian player in American opera. While big city companies – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – have their seasons from fall through spring, Santa Fe runs its five productions during July and August. Many in their audience are not local commuters, but must travel great distances at considerable expense to this small mile-high city in the vast American Southwest.

Luring folks to the Opera is its reputation for quality, its spectacular natural setting, Santa Fe's charms and historic importance, a thriving visual art scene, and the world-class rankings of New Mexican cuisine. All contribute to a mystique of specialness that attracts tourists to visit (and well-to-do retirees to stay).

As with Haydn’s residency at Esterhazy, the semi-isolated SFO has thrived through innovation. Its apprentice program for young singers was begun in 1957, the year the Opera itself was founded. At first a means to provide inexpensive choristers for productions, it is now one of the most important incubators of new singing talent in the nation. The SFO’s education program visits local schools and provides top-flight lectures before each opera. A dinner-cum-talk series with the charming Desirée Mays has become a sought-after (and sold-out) attraction for fifteen years.

What was a few decades ago a relatively isolated operatic activity is today fully integrated with programs in the major international capitals. During the current Wozzeck, for instance, one encountered on stage a partnering of two world-class Ring Cycle Alberichs, one from the LA Opera and the other from the Met Opera.

This report and two to follow will take a critical look at all five of the SFO’s current productions: Gounod's Faust, Puccini's La Bohème, Vivaldi’s Griselda, Menotti’s The Last Savage, and Berg’s Wozzeck. They are reviewed in the order each was introduced during the season, in three categories: the work itself, its production, and its performance.

The rating scheme: [ **** Outstanding *** Solid ** Some Issues * Forget It ]

NOTE: The first two operas are reviewed here. Two coming postings will review the remaining three. Stay tuned.

Faust

Overall rating (***)
Music: Charles Gounod
Libretto: Jules Barbier & Michel Carré
Performance reviewed: Monday, August 1
Performances run through Saturday, August 27

Work (**½) It was the world’s most popular opera at the turn of the twentieth century, yet Gounod’s Faust was never before produced at the SFO. Its love-and-betrayal story is adapted from Goethe. Catchy tunes abound in the oft-excerpted dances. Long Gallic lines float off the lips of Faust, Marguerite, and, most deliciously, the comically cynical Méphistophélès. Sinewy woodwind configurations add orchestral interest, yet the work’s characterizations can be superficial and its musical structures conventional. It dates badly next to older confrere Berlioz’s less theatrical ‘dramatic legend’, La Damnation de Faust, with its vivid harmonies and orchestral sonorities, now often produced in lieu of the Gounod in opera houses.

Production (***½) SFO pulled out all the stops for director Stephen Lawless’s tongue-in-cheek La Belle Époque decadence, with well-staged cast encounters along Benoit Dugardyn’s Parisian boulevards, night-lit by Pat Collins. Anchoring the scene was a central coffin from which Méphistophélès emerges and into which Faust obligingly retires, knowing Marguerite has been redeemed. Sue Wilmington’s silk-and-satin Lautrec-era costumes sparkled in bright colors against jet-black window displays. Amusing scenes included the early fair with a functioning Ferris Wheel and a carefree Marguerite on roller skates; choreographer Nicola Bowie’s courtesans and queens prancing (if not quite dancing) to Gounod’s tamed down Walpurgisnacht music, with femmes fatales Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Manon, Carmen, Salome, and Delilah vying clench-clawed for doomed Faust’s attentions; and at the end Marguerite’s campy entrance into heaven, embracing Christ’s pipe-bedecked celestial organ after her unfortunate encounter with Faust’s impregnating one.

Performance (***½) A solid outing for all principals. Bass-baritone Mark S. Doss’s barking trickster Méphistophélès was strained at the extremities of his voice but was to the manner born as the cynical collector of fallen souls. Bryan Hymel’s plangent tenor lent suave urgency to Faust’s yearning ruminations. Pretty Ailyn Pérez was in splendid voice as the victimized Marguerite. Matthew Worth’s high, bright baritone (and graceful swordsmanship) lent nobility to doomed Valentin. Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Holloway’s ardent-voiced trouser role as protective Siébel was all boyish charm and good intentions. Jamie Barton’s amusingly available, ample-figured widow Marthe gave Méphistophélès a run for his conniving money. As the SFO's new chief conductor (and French music specialist), Frédéric Chaslin’s well-paced conducting with Susanne Sheston’s small chorus provided stylish, idiomatic accounts of the not so gracefully aging score.

La Bohème

Overall rating (***½)
Music by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto: Giuseppe Giacosa & Luigi Illica
Performance reviewed: Tuesday, August 2
Performances run through Friday, August 26

Work (****) Puccini’s break-through opera, one of the most popular in the canon, is ever fresh. The slice-of-life story of four bohemians in a Parisian Latin Quarter garret has an artist, a musician, and their inamoratas on the ins and outs with each other. Richly etched characterizations and poignant moments are wrapped in the composer’s uniquely soft-grained Verismo style. Passionate melodies and evocative, pithy motifs abound and are skillfully recalled at later developments. Post-Wagnerian orchestrations and glinting harmonics capture each emotional incident with its own special expression. Puccini makes it all sound natural; any effort he may have extended is entirely concealed within his art.

Production (***) Paul Curran’s nicely gauged direction was balanced between the story’s poignant and droll moments. Kevin Knight’s garret, its walls festooned with paintings and plays, felt like a cock-eyed, communal utopia of the arts with its slanted walls placed in the claustrophobic middle of the surrounding stage. It would later open like a hinged walnut-shell for Act II’s Café Momus street scene. Knight’s plain-clothed bohemians kept the story unfreighted with self-consciously precious elements as in Zeffirelli, though he spiced the ensemble nicely for the Café Momus scene of uniformed soldiers, baristas, patriotic flag-wavers, and Musetta’s usual flamboyance, this time in a lipstick-red dress. Rick Fisher’s lighting shifted smoothly between carefree bright and care-burdened darker moments in the story.

Performance (***½) The standout was young Mexican tenor David Lomelí’s Rodolfo, whose ardent, golden tenor awakened long-slumbering memories of Jussi Björling. The audience rewarded him with sustained applause after his “Che gelida manina.” Ana María Martínez, a robustly vocal Mimi, held her own in the match-up. Corey McKern’s jealous painter Marcello stewed while Heidi Stober’s Musetta took a subtle approach to her “Quando me’n vo” waltz, beginning it as an intimate song within a small group competing with the melee, and growing it organically into crowd notice until she was spirited away by Christian Van Horn’s stentorian Colline and Markus Beam’s Schaunard. Double cast as befuddled landlord Benoit and stood-up politician Alcindoro, comic bass Thomas Hammons was humiliated twice. The final scene's tragic conclusion forged no new dramatic territory but was effective. Conductor Leonardo Vordoni maintained Italian lyric virtues in the pit.

-----ooooo-----

Photo credits: ‘The Santa Fe Opera on a Performance Night’ by Robert Godwin, stage scenes from ‘Faust’ and ‘La Bohème’ by Ken Howard. Used by permission of the Santa Fe Opera.

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-08-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

THIS WAS OUR PAST. IS IT NOW OUR FUTURE?

by Anne French

Happy August Vacation to the American Congress. Something about Nero fiddling while Rome burned?

Ojai Music Festival 2011

2011-07-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

Summertime, and the Listenin’ was Easy

Review and Commentary by Rodney Punt

A month ago at Ojai, morning fog came on little cat feet, birds chirped, the sun shone at noon, oaks drooped at four, swamis lead evening meditations, and the hills were alive for four days with the sounds of unusual music. It was June and the faithful, with many new faces, had congregated in the town’s enchanted valley for the annual Ojai Music Festival, this the 65th in the long-enduring series.

The folks who run the Festival had a busy year leading up to the event. There was the matter of a brand new bowl stage and seating configuration at Libbey Park, with a task to finesse, finance, and fabricate it in the twelve-month interval between annual festivals. Add to the need to coax a few more patrons into the expanded seating, the usual challenges of shaping programs and symposia, and the logistics of fetching hither far-flung celebrity artists.

A New Bowl and its Entrance Portal

The Festival's audiences had for years endured the splintered stiffness of the old Libbey Bowl's wooden benches. All that changed this year with the completion of the new amphitheater complex, designed by politically savvy and environmentally sensitive local architect-cum-community leader, David Bury. His new stage is a slightly larger version of the old one, with up-to-date support facilities. Its orientation is rotated on axis to more logically align with the seating and lawn-lounging areas. Comfortable stadium seats replace the old benches. Even if the new Bowl's replicative design is a compromise from earlier, more innovative conceptions, it had passed muster with local authorities, was completed on time and ready for the season.

Sadly, on the opening day of the Festival, Bury succumbed to a long illness, putting a wistful pall on the capstone of the architect's career and the celebratory culmination of this long-anticipated facility .

Seattle-based environmental sculptor Trimpin returned after a year hiatus, his previous temporary installations having given way to a permanent one called "Sound Arch" that serves as an entry portal to the amphitheater from the rest of Libbey Park. Its design mimics the iconic arch of the Libbey Bowl stage cover, playing off it like an architectural Mini-Me. Sound Arch is dedicated to the memory of the late Ernest Fleischmann, Managing Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who had also served several stints as the Festival's artistic director.

Trimpin inclines toward whimsy. As you enter Sound Arch, hammers on its sculpted steel tubes intone musical jingles. Their sharp pings sound uncomfortably like the slamming of metal cables on a flagpole. (Sound Arch is an unintentional and less pretentious cousin of downtown Los Angeles' tinkling Triforium.)

The Festival Program

And what of the festival’s program? “It’s all about me”, declared soprano Dawn Upshaw, a frequent artist at Ojai since 2006 and this year’s Music Director. This was not a declaration of ego -- the singer is self-effacing to a fault when not portraying a role -- but a reference to the musical friends from the “different pockets of my life” she had assembled to share the long weekend with her.

Among those friends: pianist Gilbert Kalish, violinist Richard Tognetti and his Australian Chamber Orchestra, jazz composer-conductor Maria Schneider and her orchestra, percussion group ‘red fish blue fish’, and vocalists from Upshaw’s master classes. Collaborating on a new theatrical production was a friend of two decades, director Peter Sellars.

Upshaw’s eclectic programming moved gingerly in a style-continuum from classical to modern, with doses of more exotic New Age jazz fusions and World Music. Works by composers considered thorny or obscure were often represented in their more accessible styles. The fare was generally mellow, and, if occasionally soul-searching, also mostly soul pleasing.

Thursday evening opened the festivities with a high-spirited recital by Upshaw’s vocal students from Bard College -- where the 50-year-old singer spends much of her time these days -- in a varied program of standard to obscure vocal pieces.

A major statement came the next night in a song cycle by George Crumb for soprano (Upshaw), piano (Kalish) and percussion (red fish blue fish), staged by Sellars as a monodrama. It was presented a week later at UC Berkeley by Cal Performances, launching the new Ojai North! initiative. I attended both.

Composed in 2004, The Winds of Destiny (American Songbook IV) was Crumb’s originally intended finale to a cycle of American folksong settings based on four diurnal periods. Depicting a Civil War battlefield at night, it concludes that series with its darkest emotional coloring. Scoring points for relevance, Sellars adapted the work’s scenario to America’s current Middle East and South Asian wars.

Two years ago, Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) was featured as the opening concert at Ojai. In that work, as in many such, Crumb seizes and expands on Béla Bartók’s use of percussion for expressive flights of abstraction. In Winds of Destiny, however, folksongs with archetypal associations supplant percussion as the star musical element. Employed as cannons, rifle fusillades, and other specifics, Crumb’s sound worlds play a supporting role more akin to sound effects. His allusive abstractions are concretized with narratives.

In this staged version, a camouflage uniformed Upshaw is a returning American soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She is confined to a bed and is often under its sheets as if shrouded in death. The arc of eight songs takes her on a spiritual journey from the conflicted righteousness of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”, through a series of shocks and ruminations, to a final trance-like glide on a river of no return in the plaintive “Shenandoah.”

Crumb sets his folksongs evocatively: the death-rattles of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, the pentatonic harmonizations and echo effects of “Go Tell it on the Mountain!” and the percussive sounds of the clay-pot Udo that invoke ancestral memories in the spiritual, “All My Trials.” A huge battery of percussion, precisely gauged by 'red fish blue fish', achieved these eerie effects. Yet the very strength of these iconic songs resists their cohering into a unified statement.

Sellars' staging was conceptually intriguing but somewhat superfluous. It's visually distracting effect on Crumb’s aesthetic powers was akin to the trimming of Sampson’s locks. As a theatrical experience, and without any prior acquaintance with its main character, Winds of Destiny plays as if one were attending the funeral of a stranger. There is no specific personality on which to hang our empathy.

Upshaw put her all into her character but in so doing pushed her voice hard at the Ojai premiere. She was more vocally pliant a week later at Berkeley, and, in fact, the performance there seemed more secure overall. While percussion had greater sonic spaciousness at Ojai’s open-air setting than at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, the latter compensated with expressionistic lighting projections on the back wall that had not been possible within Ojai’s smaller stage shell.

Following the Crumb on Friday evening, the Sakhi Ensemble with, among others, vocalist Ustad Farida Mawash and instrumentalist Homayoun Sakhi, performed traditional music from Afghanistan well into the night, sensitizing the audience to musical traditions and personalities that political conditions in that country, especially from the puritanical Taliban, had largely suppressed.

If at Ojai Crumb’s cosmos was rendered a bit comatose in Winds, the strings of the Australian Chamber Orchestra gave a more persuasive account of the composer’s powers in his Black Angels, its four movements interwoven within those of Anton Webern’s Five Pieces for Strings, Op. 5. Improbable on paper, the Sunday evening program proved gratifying in execution because key relationships were compatible and moods sharply contrasted in the dazzling virtuosity of Tognetti’s string players. The intense precisions of the Webern pieces were shaken to their roots by the violent follow-on energy of Crumb’s outbursts, reflecting the composer’s reaction in 1970 to the Vietnam War, yet another American conflict. As if to wash away the tension, the program ended with a silk-sheened performance of Edvard Grieg’s String Quartet in G minor, arranged by Tognetti for his strings.

Sunday’s concert also gave Upshaw a couple of works that proved more vocally gratifying than her outing with Crumb. Bartók’s Five Hungarian Folk Songs are the kind of sad but stoic reflections on love that populate folk expressions the world over. Upshaw gave their spiky inflections particular point and dignity.

Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks is a setting for soprano and ensemble of nine short poems by Ted Kooser, written as he recovered from a serious illness with early-morning walks through a Midwestern countryside. Representative are two of his lines: “My wife and I walk the cold road in silence, asking for thirty more years.”, and “This morning the sun stood right at the end of the road and waited for me.” The lines are pared-down, but their very directness, stripped of pretense and artifice, is key to their healing psychology.

Commissioned for Upshaw by the Ojai Music Festival, Cal Performances, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the work was given its world premiere by the singer, the Australians, and three of Schneider’s performers on clarinets, piano and bass. Its soft jazz sonics worked well in Libbey Bowl's al fresco, the improvisations for musicians and singer blending with the random sounds of nature. The Midwestern-reared Upshaw having also recently endured her own bout of illness, clearly related to Kooser's lyrics, conveying in her serene delivery the poet's poise that overrode his existential duress. It was Upshaw's most heartwarming performance of the weekend.

Had you not first encountered Winter Morning Walks at Ojai, you could be forgiven for presuming it originated as a direct-to-disc New Age CD. Although it rises far above the pablum that can characterize the genre, you have to listen attentively to grasp its specialness. Several of the entrepreneurial Schneider’s other hyper-smooth recorded works were available in the bins of Ojai 65’s tent store.

Continuing a theme of musical accessibility, Tognetti and Kalish collaborated stylishly on a Saturday morning program of violin-piano sonatas, one by Janáček, another a craggy proto-sonata, Irkanda I, by Peter Sculthorpe, Prokofiev’s two-violin sonata (with Satu Vänskä), and Beethoven’s evergreen Kreutzer.

On their own Saturday evening, the Australian strings gave suave accounts of Giacinto Scelsi’s otherworldly Buddhist-inflected Anâgâmin, transitioning seamlessly on a shared Bb note into Alfred Schnittke’s world-weary Trio Sonata, arranged for string ensemble by Yuri Bashmet. Also on the program was a Bach violin concerto and a feather-light, translucent rendition of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Tognetti’s own arrangement, Deviance (on Paganini’s Caprice No. 24), gave him a show-offy vehicle for his violin skills that also hinted, through the peculiar balanced-crouch stance he assumed when performing, at his surprising passion for surfing. This hobby was documented the next morning in a film, Musica Surfica, that illustrated Tognetti’s spiritual yin-yang: giving his zest for music and receiving his Zen from surfing.

If Richard Tognetti, musician and athlete, is the Alpha male of his Australian Chamber Orchestra, Schneider is the Omega female (she who has the last word) of her mostly male Maria Schneider Orchestra. Jazz ensembles are collaborationist by nature, and even in Schneider’s own compositions, solo riffs are under the purview of the virtuosos within the orchestra’s ranks. In a selection of their standard repertory on Sunday morning, Schneider’s players ably demonstrated their command of the standard jazz tropes.

Of Schneider’s works on the program, two stood out. Thompson Field, based on an organic farm in Southwestern Minnesota, depicted sounds that emanate from environmental utopias. Cerulean Skies, a commission by the ubiquitous Peter Sellars for his New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna, mixed jazz and New Age soundscapes. Opening in a forest of Brazil, the work is populated with enchanting birdcalls and their erotic behaviors in a score layered with delicious dissonances and luxuriant jazz textures.

A Festival Seminar

The Festival’s seminars are not often given coverage in reviews, but they are an important element in the Festival's line-up, providing background on the artists, conceptual perspectives on works to be presented, and dimensions of performance style.

In a pre-concert seminar preparing the audience for the Crumb song cycle, led by Ara Guzelimian, journalist Mark Danner and Sellars discussed America’s recent wars, from the reckless adventures of the Bush administration in Iraq to President Obama’s perspective that NATO actions in Libya constitute a “universal moral mission.” Sellars posited the arts as our main vehicle for interpreting the cultural significance of wars, hardly a revelatory observation but nonetheless frequently true. The subsequent staging of Winds of Destiny did not, however, clarify the panel’s mixed signals on the necessity of wars. While the Crumb piece might have argued against wars, the performance of the Afghan musicians after the Crumb could just as easily have prompted armed resistance to political forces that forbid artists from performing and activists from speaking in their own countries.

Drawing from his experiences as an implanted journalist, Danner related the terrible toil recent wars have taken on individual soldiers, highlighted by the story of an American Army lieutenant he had interviewed on the unwarranted deaths of civilians and roadside bombings of American troops. With Danner’s eye for detail, the unfolding story captivated the audience and later wrapped it in sorrow when the flawed but vibrantly struggling lieutenant was killed himself by a roadside bomb. Danner’s real-life soldier had dug deeper into our hearts than would the theatrical unknown soldier, and his story shed every bit as much light on war’s cultural significance as would the stage performance later that evening.

Composer George Crumb’s appearance at that seminar -- in a rare outing for him these days -- prompted the most enthusiastic applause of the weekend. It was as if a rock star had been thrust in our midst. The enthusiasm that met Crumb, coming before any of his compositions had been performed, was for a body of work that had on so many occasions at Ojai provided (to coin a phrase) shock and awe, not to mention wonder and enchantment.

Concluding Thoughts

It wasn’t so long ago that the impenetrable titans and intimidating tyrants of modern music held sway at the Ojai Festival. The likes of Igor Stravinsky, Ingolf Dahl, Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, Lawrence Morton, Ernest Fleischmann, and more recently, Esa-Pekka Salonen, often favored abstract music based on audience-baffling utopian models. The Festival’s loyal core of patrons hung in with them during the modernist musical era of “Progress is our most important product.”

That was then but this is now. The future ain’t what it used to be and hardcore musical futurists are not so fecund on the audience vine. In this rough patch in the pace of civilization – with disturbing conditions in so many areas of human endeavor -- audiences bring a higher quotient of emotional dislocations to their concert experiences. Under such conditions they may be less tolerant of harsh, intimidating music, because life itself is already so harsh and intimidating.

Perhaps in response to this cultural climate, which coincides with the loss of consistent music education in the schools, Artistic Director Tom Morris has over the last eight years ushered in a slate of kinder, gentler music directors. With them, he has cultivated new audiences even as he has catered to the cognoscenti from Los Angeles and other music capitals. It has been a delicate balancing act.

A softening trend in Upshaw’s spirituality seemed evident from her personal and artistic intersections at this Festival, and her programming chimed with the need for connection and empathy in her audience. People do count. With attendance a third larger than last year, the Festival may be on the right track, at least for the near future.

The weekend had indeed been all about Dawn Upshaw. But it was just as much all about us as well. In a time of war and worry, one could do worse than taking a few days to mellow out and renew at Ojai.

---oooo---

65th Ojai Music Festival, June 9-12, 2011 -- Ojai, California

Thomas W. Morris, Artistic Director -- Jeffrey P. Haydon, Executive Director

Dawn Upshaw, Music Director -- Ara Guzelimian, Symposium Director

Chris Haley, Program Annotator and Lecturer -- Trimpin, Sound Sculptor

Guest artists: director Peter Sellars, pianist Gilbert Kalish, violinist Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, percussion ensemble 'red fish blue fish', vocalist Ustad Farida Mahwash and the Sakhi Ensemble, composer-conductor Maria Schneider and her Orchestra, film documentary director Mick Sowry

Photo: "Moonrise in Ojai" by David LaBelle, provided by the Ojai Music Festival

Rodney Punt may be contacted at: Rodney@artspacifica.net

Saturday Night in Pasadena:

2011-06-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Make it a June Night, the Moonlight, and You
at "Classical Underground" Free Concert Under the Stars

by Anne French

Stars shining above Levitt Pavilion at Memorial Park in Pasadena will have an added sparkle Saturday night, June 25th, as the "Classical Underground" ensemble presents a wide-ranging array of instrumental and vocal music in an 8:00 p.m. concert. The program, which is free to the public, includes works of Vivaldi, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Bellini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Paganini, Lutoslawski and Bernstein. Self-described as an "illustrious camaraderie of artist, musicians and friends....," Saturday's ensemble players (combinations change according to program requirements) include trumpeters Ilya Sergienko and Courtney Jones, cellist Laszlo Mezo, percussionist John Astaire, soprano Oxana Senina, and pianists Mikael Oganes, Diane Ketchie and Steven Vanhauwaert.

Just bring your chairs or blankets for front-row lawn seats in the pavilion's family friendly atmosphere. Located on Raymond Avenue between Holly and Walnut in Old Pasadena with ample parking available.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-06-24T00:04:00.000-07:00

Peter Nero Plays Michel Legrand ... "Summer of '42"

by Anne French

Looking for songs to usher in the summer of 2011, I came across this unforgettable Michel Legrand theme written for the film, "Summer of '42." I had forgotten the Peter Nero million selling recording that I had always loved, and when I listened to him playing in concert on this video, I was taken back to that haunting and nostalgic theme that defines both the music and the film. Hope you enjoy it as the first weekend of summer of '11 begins today.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-06-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

Musical Discoveries from "Down Under" ...
the Works of Phillip Wilcher

by Anne French

Australian composer Phillip Wilcher (b. 1958) has recently brought my ears to attention through several clips found on YouTube. The hauntingly beautiful "1791" For Oboe and String Orchestra is an example of Wilcher's wonderfully lyrical style that seems to permeate everything he writes. Says one critic, "I believe this is a composer who is a unique creation - as if he belongs to another time, another world. No musician who plays his music comes away the same or feels unchanged by the experience."(Wendy Reid, "Cultured Views," France) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of Wilcher.

Photo used by permission

Happy Birthday to the Immortal Robert Schumann

2011-06-08T23:42:00.000-07:00

Hélène Grimaud and Albrecht Mayer Play Two Romances

by Anne French

A loving and lovely interpretation of two Romances written in 1849 by the great, immortal Robert Schumann (1810-1856). There are a plethora of recordings of this, his Opus no. 94, transcribed for many different solo instruments. But I thought the Grimaud/Mayer symbiosis was really quite remarkable. We hope you agree.

Japanese Commercial Captures Joy of Man's Desiring

2011-05-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

Hats off to our friend, Tim Mangan, music critic of the Orange County Register, for finding this charming video on YouTube and sharing it around. Here's proof that J. S. Bach's depiction of the state of bliss has universal appeal. Enjoy!

The Friday Phonograph

2011-05-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

The Music and Meaning of Memorial Day

by Anne French

We enter Memorial Day weekend, that time of remembrance and thanks for all who have given their lives in battle in order to preserve our democracy and our country. These are the kinds of phrases we will hear repeated over and over for the next three days, even as we continue fighting two wars of questionable purpose and at great expense to the nation. Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings was used as the theme for the movie, Platoon, seen by millions of viewers, and exposing the terrible truth of war. I believe the gut-wrenching emotions produced by the Adagio continue to capture the essence of all war. We commemorate, but we do not celebrate.

"...And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind." .... from the poem, Remember Them, written January 1, 1970 by Major Michael Davis O'Donnell, Dak To, South Vietnam

Lisztomania Reconsidered at Jacaranda Music

2011-05-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Review and Commentary by Rodney Punt

At his death in 1886, Franz Liszt left to posterity a curious artifact that sums up the great musician’s lifelong obsessions: a walking stick on which were carved the heads of St Francis of Assisi, Mephistopheles, and Gretchen. All three iconic but contradictory characters were at least implied in works of Liszt presented by Jacaranda Music on April 23 at Santa Monica's First Presbyterian Church. It was one of the first local tributes to the 200th birth anniversary of the ubiquitous Hungarian pianist, composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, and music director who was born in 1811.

Liszt’s influence on the development of musical aesthetics in the nineteenth century was far-reaching, as Jacaranda’s insightful sampling of two middle period tone poems, four lieder, and one late sacred work demonstrated. But while the survey shed light on Liszt’s creative process, it also confirmed that the pan-European musical phenomenon remains a brilliant but at times frustratingly uneven composer.

Liszt’s lifelong quest for creative and spiritual growth straddled three musical epochs. As a child prodigy at the end of the Viennese Classical era, he performed before Beethoven and Hummel, studied with Salieri, and in 1822 contributed to one of the last projects of the era, a set of variations on a theme by publisher Anton Diabelli. Subsequently Liszt became the ringmaster of the Romantic Movement’s progressive wing, originating the term “New German Music” and mediating between the prickly personalities of Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. (Unlike either, he spoke both their languages fluently.) Outliving his two colleagues, he continued mentoring the next generation of musicians, among them Edvard Grieg, Alexander Borodin, and Camille Saint-Saëns, and laid the groundwork for the dawning of Impressionism with his use of whole tone scales in works like his 1883 masterpiece, Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este.

Once the lion-king of musical Europe, Liszt ironically enters his bicentenary as something of a lamb to contemporary audiences. He is most often associated with pops favorites like the first Mephisto Waltz and the sentimental Liebestraum, even as connoisseurs like Jacaranda’s impresarios admire his more esoteric works.

Unlike either Berlioz or Wagner, success came early and easily to Liszt. A personality with almost too many ideas, he barely tossed off one work before moving on to the next, composing over 700 in the process. And like many an influential composer before him (viz. Gluck and Cherubini) his posthumous reputation would suffer by the consolidating work of others who more definitively grasped the potential of his novelties. Liszt’s Ballade No. 2 in b minor, composed in 1853 for piano, is often cited as the source for Wagner’s Tristan chord. If so it is but one example of Wagner’s synthesizing Liszt’s scattered pearls into his own operas.

Liszt invented the orchestral tone poem, a fantasia-like composition built around a literary theme. The two that Jacaranda presented were in Liszt’s own duo-piano transcriptions, versions popular before sound recordings enabled orchestral works to become widely known. Les préludes of 1848 and the lesser-known Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns) of 1857 provided vehicles for Liszt to introduce new compositional techniques. These new paths would be further exploited by successors like Richard Strauss.

Two years ago the duo-pianist team of Steven Vanhauwaert and Danny Holt created a sensation at Jacaranda in their four-hand version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. They returned here with a grand piano each in a yin-yang configuration for the two tone poems, joined by Mark Alan Hilt on the organ for the latter of the two. All three performed impressively.

Where Stravinsky’s piece took on a whole new life in its four-hand version, Liszt’s otherwise fine transcriptions of these tone poems surrendered something of their original effectiveness. Orchestral colors that sparkle in the rhetoric of Les Préludes were submerged in the thick middle-register regions of Liszt’s doubled pianos, rendering the main theme merely repetitive rather than cumulative at its many returns. Yet it was instructive to hear how Liszt juices majesty into that famous tune with his secondary melodic material, a technique Wagner was to borrow for his Ring Cycle operas.

The orchestral version of Hunnenschlacht is a tricky piece to bring off. The slow-paced musical battle relies on the subtle colorings of muted strings that depict the engagement of the ghost armies of good and evil in the skies. (The piece is based on a painting of the same name by Liszt’s contemporary and friend, Wilhelm von Kaulbach.) The epic struggle between civilization and paganism in AD 451 has a “gypsy scale” for Attila the Hun’s forces contrasting with a church organ for the Christianized Romans.

Jacaranda tried to capture some of that drama by reinstating the organ part, but its sonorities with those of the pianos proved only a tepid facsimile of the orchestral version’s catharsis. The piece’s main battle motif did provoke smiles of recognition, as it strongly resembles another propulsive “warriors in the sky” theme, Wagner’s "The Ride of the Valkyries." As Liszt’s piece came after the Ring's most famous excerpt, one supposes he was able to borrow something back from his habitually purloining colleague.

Tucked in between the two much-touted tone poems was a mini-recital of four lieder, settings of Goethe poems, and they became the surprise highlight of the evening.

Mignons Lied has one of the genre’s iconic texts, opening with “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn” (Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom…?). Liszt infuses his version with the lush scents of Italy’s natural wonders. Der Kőnig in Thule is Gretchen’s vision of the faithful love she craves but will never find. Goethe’s two Wanderers Nachtlied poems are profound studies in man’s existential relationship with nature and his own mortality.

Undoubtedly inspired by Germany’s greatest poet, Liszt had employed the latest harmonic devices and rose to new expressive heights in these settings, imbuing them with some of the most sensitive and tasteful writing of his middle years. Standing proudly with settings on the same texts by the likes of Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz, they confirm Liszt’s place as an essential link to the late romantic songs of Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss.

Mezzo-soprano Buffy Baggott, substituting for an ailing Paula Rasmussen, and pianist-collaborator Armen Guzelimian proved a magical combination in these songs, with youthful bloom (Baggott) supported by experienced mastery (Guzelimian). A California native who has made a name for herself in Chicago and Santa Fe, and was one of the Valkyries in LA Opera’s Ring, Baggott possesses a fresh, creamy mezzo with interpretive resources to spare. Guzelimian provided by far the most sensitive pianism of the evening, as the two made the intense, subjective world of these songs come alive.

(Liszt's kinship with German lieder had not come haphazardly. He had studied Schubert’s songs early on and made solo piano transcriptions of them that were once and are now again popular in recitals and recordings. Liszt and Berlioz were also among the first to make orchestral versions of the Schubert songs, which were to confirm, even more than Schubert's completed operas, that had the Viennese composer lived longer he would certainly have conquered the dramatic stage. These orchestrations also prepared the way for the declamatory vocalism of Wagner’s mature operas, not to mention setting the pattern for the later orchestral lieder of Strauss and Mahler. Musical party-quiz factoid: It was Heinrich Heine, poet of the last Schubert songs and many of those by Liszt, who coined the term "Lisztomania.")

Liszt’s sacred compositions are for most an acquired taste. I have never been able to abide his tediously protracted oratorio, Christus. To close this program, Jacaranda chose the virtually unknown late choral work Via Crucis (The Way of the Cross) of 1879. Its harmonic language is startlingly advanced and prophetic of what was to come in the decades after Liszt’s death, but its means are spare and hollow. An a cappella setting of the last day of Christ’s earthly journey – consisting of an introduction and fourteen stations of the cross -- it is in many ways a painful work to listen to, with disorienting, disintegrating harmonies that mimic imminent death, relieved only with a few traditional chorales suggesting a distant Godhead. As a music drama its effect lies somewhere between understated and unstated.

Via Crucis came toward the end of Liszt’s long career and he undoubtedly ascribed to it personal associations with his own suffering and regrets of unachieved aspirations, with the depression of losing friends and even the toll of excessive alcohol and absinthe favored in Liszt’s long-suffering old age. But even as he was disintegrating as a personality, Liszt reached for new musical horizons with this work’s whole-tone melodies, non sequitur harmonies, and intimations of atonality. Via Crucis was not published during Liszt’s lifetime and he may not have intended it to be, keeping it in his desk as a kind of personal Augenmusik more for the inner eye than the outer ear.

Its performance at the close of the program was so unadorned with ingratiating moments as to have left many in the audience numb and puzzled. Jacaranda Music’s Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt are unabashed champions of this work, but the evening’s ten professional vocalists -- selected from the ranks of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and billed as the "Jacaranda Chamber Singers" -- struggled nobly to give the bloodless music character. There was one stand-out amongst them: Bass Abdiel Gonzalez sang the role of Jesus with a plangent voice and a dramatic thrust as bracing as the thought of facing down one’s own death.

Thinking again of that curious walking stick, the evening had opened with a Mephistophelean battle between good and evil and it closed with the solemn pieties of a St Francis of Assisi contemplating his savior’s sacrifice. In between a plaintive song of a love-stricken Gretchen and three others of like sentiments had fleshed out Jacaranda’s survey of the essential characteristics and aesthetics of the force of nature that was Franz Liszt.

----ooooo----

What: Passion & Stillness: Celebrating the Bicentenary of Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

When: April 23, 2011

Where: First Presbyterian Church, Santa Monica, California

Who: Jacaranda Music, featuring duo-pianists Steven Vanhauwaert & Danny Holt; organist Mark Alan Hilt; mezzo-soprano Buffy Baggott & pianist Armen Guzelimian; Jacaranda Chamber Singers: sopranos Tamara Bevard & Karen Hogle Brown, altos Monika Bruckner, Amy Fogerson & Nancy Sulahian; tenors Andrew Brown & Jody Golightly, basses Michael Blanchard, Dylan Gentile (as Pilate) & Abdiel Gonzales (as Jesus).

Picture: Franz Liszt, portrait by Pierre Petit from 1870. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Note: Blog updated on May 31, 2011: Liszt never met Schubert but studied with Salieri.

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Upcoming Events

2011-05-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Something Old, Something New
at LACO Annual Silent Film Gala

by Anne French

Two Charlie Chaplin comedy classics from 1918, A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, will be showcased at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's 22nd annual Silent Film Gala this Sunday, May 22nd at 6:30 p.m. in Royce Hall. A special third treat is also in store with the presentation of Walt Disney's short, Trolley Troubles (1927), which features original photoplay music composed by Alexander Rannie specifically for the short. Sunday's Gala marks the world premiere performance of this score, which calls for violin (Margaret Batjer), clarinet (Joshua Ranz), percussion (Wade Culbreath), with the composer himself leading from piano.

Alexander Rannie

No stranger to LACO, Rannie first worked with the ensemble in 2004 when Timothy Brock conducted his reconstruction of Carl Stalling's score for the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, screened before Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. Rannie has also consulted on hosts of projects for The Walt Disney Company, including the restoration of Fantasia's original Stokowski-Philadelphia Orchestra Fantasound soundtrack. Last May he produced the opening clip-reel, wrote program notes and curated an exhibit of rare musical artifacts for What's Opera, Doc?-Animation and Classical Music for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in conjunction with Ring Festival LA.

As a pianist, organist and harpist, Rannie has performed throughout California, has appeared on numerous albums and film soundtracks, and has appeared live alongside such inimitable talents as Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing, Shirley Jones, Lorna Luft, Clay Aiken and Glee pianist, Brad Ellis.

Rannie's original score for Tol'able David (1921) will receive its world premiere this June as part of the Motion Picture Academy's "Summer of Silents." His many other compositions include several chamber and vocal works.

For ticket info, visit http://www.laco.org

Photo by JayPG Photography used by permission.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-05-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

A Mother's Day Tribute in Film and Song

by Anne French

The combination of Dvorak's familiar Songs my Mother Taught Me and the 2005 film, Mother of Mine, produces a moment of poignancy to celebrate this weekend. Enjoy!

The Friday Phonograph

2011-04-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

Royal Wedding Features Music by Paul WHO?

by Anne French

For 35 year old Welsh composer Paul Mealor, the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton was much more than a worldwide media phenomenon (some say circus). Mealor's hushed and reverent setting of Ubi Caritas, which premiered last autumn at St. Andrews University, was heard round the world as the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey fortified by singers of the Chapel Royal sang it at the close of the Royal Wedding ceremony. It is a wonderful piece that will put this young composer on the liturgical music map forever. More on the composer can be found at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8479863/Paul-Mealor-The-royal-wedding-composer.html. Meanwhile you can enjoy it here on wedding day. A wonderful beginning to the weekend in which we welcome the merry, merry month of May!

Some Nudity Required

2011-04-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

Pat Graney Company's Faith comes to REDCAT

PHOTO: Tim Summers

Joseph Mailander

Two generations ago, the city was in robust economic health and people went to Dodger games. Now it's forty years later, the city is at the brink, the Dodgers are in virtual receivership, and we're going to revivals of provocative contemporary postfeminist dance.

Excepting a stay-in-your lanes crisscrossing of the stage with red exercise balls, Pat Graney's Faith, now at REDCAT through Sunday, is slow and often static, so static that it sometimes flirts with ceasing to be dance at all. The first segment, in fact, is drawn from the chiaroscuro and posing of fabled Caravaggio paintings. It's a good idea if a little on the Pageant of the Masters side of re-enactment; what lends drama most of all, as in the paintings, is the lighting, the mix of light and shadow on the chiseled bodies and limbs of the dancers. (I didn't know to look for paintings before taking the work in--I think I saw Calling of Matthew and The Entombment, and I'm sure there were many others--but hell, I thought I saw Raft of the Medusa too, even without the cue to look for paintings--I even wrote this down, in fact).

There is also much historical feminist, post-feminist &c. narrative running through Faith, and the all-women ensemble, some of whom were in the original production in 1991, have the panache to pull it off. Women are far too complex to have had but one liberation, they have had at least four waves of it even by 1991; some have involved shoes, some nudity, and some on drawing a distinct line between essentialist and separatist lesbianism. All of this is present in Faith; we see one woman limping around in too-high heels, we see a tedious segment involving said red shoes for all, we see nude bodies celebrating themselves and each other in isolation and in aggregate, we hear the dancers moving to the New Age thumping of a concluding dona nobis pacem.

As the troupes' bodies are on display for much of the final third of the piece, they invite comment, and comment I promise. You wouldn't call the dancers lithe; their dancer body type is powerful, sturdy, callipygous, refreshing, Greek. But I was equally enchanted by the crushed red and purple velvet minis of the earlier segments.

These are indeed hard times, and there was no media kit. Instead, only the tip sheet was available describing the dancers: "..., short with short dark brown hair." This is truly an audacious postfeminist moment in dance, when we always baffled scribes are obliged to identify the dancers by the physical attributes on the tip sheet, and have no other scoop other than the audience's program notes on either dancers or performance. But for what it's worth, Deb Rhodes-King, who steals many scenes, even from occasionally featured soloists, does so with her variously taught and supple limbs as well as her arresting, occasionally pained, even tormented facial expressions, and is certainly worthy of more in the take-home material.

It is probably trite to call Faith "entertaining"--the production is too high-minded to be that. But the word does come to mind; you leave the tedium of the static in the theater and take away the sculpted moments, the post-feminist theorizing, and wondering if our interactions, or our city or even our lives, can be a little better after all.

Pat Graney Company's Faith at REDCAT tonight and Saturday at 8:30, and Sunday at 3:00; tickets from $26-$16, better deals for CalArts folks.

Prima Donna

2011-04-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

Donna Perlmutter has joined LA Observed. Her two year run here at LA Opus, a time during which she also contributed to Huffington Post and blogdowntown, was a very memorable one, and it came at a time when music and dance in LA endured near-tectonic shifts. She brought many readers here, and she'll be missed here. Thank you, Donna, for contributing so much to LA Opus.

Passionate

2011-04-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

Joseph Mailander

I Corinthians is about sex and love; The Sun Also Rises about sex and impotence; St. Matthew Passion about sex and Christ.

After listening to the work on Good Friday for many years, I finally saw it performed at our own Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Good Friday 2001. I still consult my notes from that performance from that time...and still listen on Good Fridays. I know the work as well as one knows a work by listening to it once a year--which I have to say is really a good way both to come to know a work and to keep it mystical. But while music is best when it remains mystical, the concert hall experience can make things obvious that no recording can.

For me, most notably, the work in the concert hall became highly sexualized. Never on the recordings did this ever become clear. However, with sopranos and tenors and baritones before you (in this happy case, but four rows before me--two late cancellations from the season subscribers, front row dead center), alternating recitatives and arias--a style of presenting music that shares more with Roman rhetoric than with previous liturgical music--you get the feeling even after the first twenty minutes that Christ is someone who must be not just the center of your Lutheran life but the primary object of the direction of Geluste within it.

There is, owing to the nature of the story, which is one of supreme brutality, much S&M in a Passion (I suppose Mel Gibson would discover this soon enough), and in Bach's piece not a lash is spared--it is all there--the whips on the back of Christ recorded in the grinding of cellos, the drops of blood flicking away as staccato scattered notes, the forlorn gasping of the Marys for the departed Christ. You don't especially note these things when listening to recordings, but you note them when you see the musicians frantically sawing away. Bach is ethereal to most, and heady and intellectual, but there is so much in all the Passions that is physical, nude, painful, sexual, real, and it come alive on stage, as it does in another quirkily sublime religious work, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.

There's a soft uniquely early-Lutheran moment in St. Matthew Passion. Jesu sprach: This is my blood you drink, this is my body you eat. In concert you realize how simple yet teasing this statement is--as teasing as it must have been when someone spoke it. In Bach, there is of course not quite a baroque (in the Catholic sense of the word) presentation about the thunder of this historic moment, but neither are there Protestant trivializings--no, the solution again is sex, another seduction. This moment, the heart of the disputa, presents the offering as Bacchus's cup presented to someone about to be seduced--as is so much of the music, the music of the most sublime dancing, the music of a seducer.

And that is the way I find so much of this piece, though I didn't recognize it until I saw it performed: not liturgical music at all, but the music accompanying a smoldering dance at court, the sexual tensions masked but popping out at last in every aria.

It may turn out scholarship finds that every moment between Bach and Christ is a lusting one. Excepting the few astonishing, nearly sacramental choral moments in this work, especially its whirling, deeply disturbed beginning, St. Matthew Passion is mostly seductive music set to beauteous, longing rhetoric. We are listening to the Evangelist patiently, tenderly, waiting for a climax that never really comes--if it comes at all, in fact, it comes in the first six minutes, precisely where it should, lest we be exhausted by listening.

Though the singers I saw a decade ago were nearly all from Germany and all among the world's top leider performers, including Matthias Goerne, the guy who stole the show was a fellow named Christopher Cock (left), a last minute substitution, a young and very Lutheran fellow with side about him that was akin to Joel Gray in Cabaret, an impish master-of-ceremonies evangelist who is orchestrating the show, not just reporting it, and never mind the perfect assertive voice which held up for three hours from start to finish. Cock is now at Valparaiso, a choral master as well as a tenor, and is a Bach specialist...one saw it all begin to unfold that night a decade ago.

That night resonates still. Not in the immediate way that baroque perfection drops from the very surface of Caravaggio or from maddening Bernini marble, but perfect in the shocking way that a religion suddenly announces to the world that it is not a heresy after all: by encoding all the tension into a secret subtext, celebrating our sense of deity by keeping our private human mischief percolating just beneath the surface for nearly exhausting but ultimately captivating Tantric hours.

Bach fathered many children--I don't remember how many, just that there were very many, and the second set of them numbered thirteen, with a woman seventeen years his junior. He was 42 at the time he wrote St. Matthew Passion--his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcke, was 26. Certainly this is evidence enough that his Geluste evidently ran elsewhere, far beyond Christ alone. Yet we also tend to think of him today as a Luftmensch, not only godly in his art but also near to God. Even the most secular among us are willing to see his immense life work a piece of Opus Dei, responsible, impenetrable, saintly.

But sublime is the word that comes to mind also with Bach, and when I saw this work performed for the first time, what struck me was how overtly salacious this best-known Passion was. It made me think that Bach was closer to worldly experiences than the those who have deified him suggest. And far against the present day dour stereotype, I think he expected the most prim and proper Lutheran to be right there with him, lusting their way through life, tacitly acknowledging at least internally that it turns out none of us are very prim and proper at all.

The recording of St. Matthew Passion that has serviced me best throughout the years is the Harmonia Mundi recording featured above, which includes Howard Crook (tenor), Ulrik Cold (basse), Barbara Schlick (soprano), Rene Jacobs (alto), Hans-Peter Blochwitz (tenor), and Peter Kooy (basse solo).

Music: As Real As Life Itself When It Comes To The Brain

2011-04-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

"Scientists.....are trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

"The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.

"Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians."

This interesting article by Pam Belluck in the April 18 edition of the New York Times's Science section explores a fascinating topic. It's worth a read for all music lovers who have a yen to fathom the mysterious relationship between life and music. -- LA Opus Publisher

Photo by Rodney Punt, used with permission.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-04-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Great Music on Good Friday

by Anne French

Our world is truly blessed to have such an abundance of great music to express both the depths and heights of the religious experience. From medieval chants to the most modern choral and orchestral works, music from every culture and tradition is available to enhance the human spirit as it reaches towards the transcendent. Good Friday is an especially emotional and contemplative holy day for Christians around the world. I have chosen Anton Bruckner's Christus Factus Est, sung by the Bristol Cathedral Choir, as an example of how music can itself be a prayer on a special Friday such as today. May Christians and non-Christians alike be touched by its profound beauty.

Barak Marshall's Monger Sells Ideas with High Energy

2011-04-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

by Donna Perlmutter

There’s the world, says choreographer Barak Marshall, with all its social inequities, hard-scrabble struggles and heartless contradictions. And then there’s a person's heritage -- a dual one in the case of this native Angeleno whose mother is the former Yemeni star of Inbal Dance Theater and whose father hails from the Bronx. In Monger, the piece danced by Marshall’s Israeli troupe at UCLA’s Royce Hall in its L.A. Premiere on April 9, we find them both -- societal vagaries and his own cultural heritage -- framed in the dark downstairs quarters of humbled, obedient servants answering their mistress’s bell.

We hear her clicking footsteps through the floor boards and a leak dripping from the interior plumbing -- all of it fearsome and ominous. We hear those solemn, ting-a-ling attention calls, followed by the employer’s amplified voice delivering orders. We see the listeners below gather like frightened prisoners as one of them replies to those orders and apologizes for any infraction previously committed.

But all hell breaks loose after the duties are fulfilled. No longer supplicants, these workers show their raging side; through hyperkinetic, in-your-face movement, they spill agression in forcefully rhythmic low squats and pungently pithy gestures plotted as a convulsive step-per-beat -- all set to a raucous sound score pieced together from Middle Eastern rock and Klezmer bacchanales. At intervals it stops to embrace American pop ballads and ‘50s swing, and, yes, even Handel and Verdi.

Because, after all, there is a lyrical component to life, even in the worst of circumstances. For that, Marshall turns to an aptly balletic Traviata excerpt, in this case, the terminally tubercular Violetta sadly reciting Alfredo’s love letter to her. (Remember, she is of the underclass as well, a courtesan who would bring dishonor to a “good” family, so the episode is thematically akin).

And then there’s the curious sleight-of-hand image he constructs of three women clutching their babies, born in the backstairs, away from public view. Also, there’s the outright comic cross-dressing vignette that brilliantly makes two seated men into three figures, one of them a woman. Interspersed are choice tidbits like commercials for Manischewitz as delivered on NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project and spoken with laughably perfect English diction.

No doubt, the choreographer boasts endless sources of material that inspire him, though, possibly, he might want to limit his palette somewhat.

And while the work may not boast the nuanced stratification seen in Bob Altman’s Gosford Park or the grim sado-masochism of Jean Genet’s The Maids (both cited in the program notes as its basis) there’s a huge inventory here of vulnerability, helplessness, and finally revolt.

Still, it’s subterranean anger that has a field day in Monger, which in the spirit of fish-sellers and war-makers, is no subtle business. Brutish, it curiously resembles an aspect of Israeli culture: argumentative, unafraid of loud debate. The national reputation is built on this stuff, as with the Israeli Philharmonic, for example, that marvelously irascible band of players.

Monger shows a tender nostalgia, though, as it ends. The ballad “Close Your Eyes,” led us out the door, with a golden-oldie male voice poised in the air, gently floating above all that had preceded it.

Photos by Gadi Dragon, used by permission.

Lil Buck and Yo Yo Ma do The Swan Thing

2011-04-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Here's something off the beaten track - way off, matter of fact. Cellist Yo Yo Ma teams up with street dancer Lil Buck to give us a graceful a rendition of the Saint-Saens "The Swan" from his Carnival of the Animals. (Thanks to Wendy Velasco for certain musicological assistance!)

Enjoy!

The Friday Phonograph

2011-04-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Elgar's Enigma: "A Mighty Hunter Before the Lord"

by Anne French

Edward Elgar's well-known orchestral work, written in 1898-1899 and known as The Enigma Variations, was dedicated by the composer to "my friends pictured within." Each of the 14 variations is a musical portrait depicting 14 different intimate friends whom Elgar identified by initials or nickname. Variation IX, the oft heard and intensely moving adagio titled "Nimrod," was dedicated to Augustus Jaeger, a friend who persuaded Elgar to continue working when the composer was in a state of despair. Since Jaeger is the German word for "hunter," this variation was named for the Old Testament patriarch, Nimrod, described as "a mighty hunter before the Lord." However the real enigma is not in the names, but is rather some hidden theme, musical or otherwise, that in Elgar's words is "not played." This Friday's Phonograph plays the Nimrod Variation performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult conducting. It has been synchronized with truly awe-inspiring images from space. And who knows? Perhaps these mysteries of space are themselves the enigmatic unplayed theme.

Daniel Catán

2011-04-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

LA Opus is saddened to learn of the death of Daniel Catán, composer of the highly successful opera "Il Postino", which had its premiere last September as the opening production of the LA Opera's current season. Catán died unexpectedly in his sleep on Sunday in Austin, Texas, at the age of 62. With his wife, Catán was a resident of South Pasadena. For many years he had been part of the higher education community in greater Los Angeles. At his death, he was on a semester's residency at the University of Texas' Austin campus, where he was working on a new opera based on the Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe."

LA Opus publisher Rodney Punt said of the premiere of "Il Postino":

Catán's Postino is a well-crafted, old-fashioned romantic opera, a crowd-pleaser with a conservative but genuinely expressive musical vocabulary. The score suits its subject (with) characters well-etched by a savvy Catán.

Some will criticize Catán's score as not spiky enough for today's audiences. But this composer knows his mind and owns a technique fully capable of expressing his dramatic intentions. Just as Puccini had made more polished and sensuous the crude Verismo tradition he inherited, so Daniel Catán has made subtler the Puccinian tradition to fit this less overtly intense drama.

This is a civilized and gentle tragedy brought to life by a gifted artist and craftsman. Compared to other premieres the LA Opera has offered in recent years - Grendel, Nicholas and Alexandra, or The Fly, for instance - this work's musical expressivity soars high. It should stay with us for years to come.

(The) opera had sung in the apt but still unusual operatic language of Spanish. That made it feel more akin to an Hispanic than an Italian spirit, even with its Italian title and setting. Sonorous words like azul, luminosa, mariposa, and desnuda were projected on the stage's backdrop as its poet protagonist taught his novice pupil the art of metaphor and poetic perception. They announced also the operatic potential of a new world, more properly The New World. Audience members from the longstanding Hispanics for LA Opera support group were not the only misty-eyed ones seeing the enchanted words of their native language floating on a heavenly blue background.

Requiescat in pace, Daniel Catán.

Above photo by Robert Millard courtesy of LA Opera

The Friday Phonograph

2011-04-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy Lightly Turns to ....

by Anne French

....thoughts of love! And what could be more appropriate for Tennyson's vision of spring than John Dowland's Come Again! Sweet Love Doth Now Invite. Dowland (1563-1626) was an English Renaissance composer, singer and lutenist who wrote most of his music for solo lute or voice with lute accompaniment. (One poet wrote that his "heavenly touch upon the lute doth ravish human sense.") Today's Phonograph choice is the musical setting of a lovesick young man's longing, beautifully sung a cappella by the Collegium Vocale Köln. Follow the three stanzas of verse along with the score, and enjoy the beginnings of another great spring weekend!

Bridges to Somewhere: Master Chorale Embraces Worlds in Los Angeles

2011-04-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

Reviews and Commentary by Rodney Punt

Disney Concert Hall will be the scene this Sunday of Franz Josef Haydn’s glorious musical depiction of the biblical origins of life, as the Los Angeles Master Chorale presents his greatest work, The Creation. Next month, music director Grant Gershon rounds out his tenth season at the helm of the city’s premiere choral organization with a program billed as "Ellington: Best of the Sacred Concerts." If the contrast between classic Austrian refinement and cool American jazz seems startling, consider it intentional.

A decade ago European choral traditions had lost a bit of steam in a city grown modern and multicultural. Gershon’s challenge had to go beyond improving just the Chorale’s virtuosity and versatility, both of which he eventually did in excelsis. His biggest test was to help the ensemble regain its relevance in a vastly changing city.

Even as the multi-talented director, who recently turned fifty, has kept the venerable organization’s musical roots alive, he has also sought to build bridges to other traditions in the city’s many component cultures. In that quest he has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. A canny artistic and marketing strategy is filling Disney Hall with not just music but also audiences. As it was in the less culturally diverse days of its founding director Roger Wagner, the Master Chorale is once again the musical voice of Los Angeles.

Central to the Chorale’s plan is the initiative “L.A. is the World”, described by Gershon as “a multi-year commission project dedicated to creating dynamic new works for chorus and non-Western musicians to premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall.” It was launched in 2007 with an aim to “bind Western and non-Western musical traditions.” The ultimate goal is to “broaden the definition of what ‘choral music’ means in this era of global interconnections.” It is connected to local concerns “by the many world-class musical artists who have immigrated to Los Angeles and who represent an array of traditions with deep roots in their communities and cultures.”

A related programmatic approach has had the Chorale presenting a travelogue of concerts this season. Last fall included musical stops at French and Russian ports. (Relevant to Los Angeles: Russian is a language heard from Hollywood to Encino, and the Westside’s Le Lycée Français is at the educational crossroads of L.A.’s surprisingly large francophone community.) Even the Chorale's annual Messiah had a special twist this year with a performance of Mozart's later Viennese version.

Both of the Chorale’s two most recent outings have employed the term “bridge” to celebrate resonances within Los Angeles communities to the contrasting cultures of England and Korea.

London Bridges

“London Bridges” on January 30 surveyed choral music of England, the staple of legacy music programs in the Southland’s churches and schools whose graduates constitute the Chorale’s core membership. It was no surprise that the execution of the program was masterly. Soloists from the Chorale’s ranks ably complemented the works at hand.

Two masses, four hymns, and eight chestnut madrigals constituted the whirlwind survey of the Emerald Isle’s vast musical legacy. William Byrd’s ethereal Four-Part Mass, continuing a Catholic tradition in the Protestant England of Queen Elizabeth I, teamed with inner spirituality. By contrast, Benjamin Britten’s Missa Brevis in D, sung by the women, suggested the quirky-sassy spikiness of the composer’s French contemporary, Francis Poulenc. Judith Weir’s Two Human Hymns, with flourishes and syncopated rhythms in the accompanying organ’s Baroque registers, gave the Chorale irreverently cheeky outings. (‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat:’ So I did sit and eat.) John Tavener’s haunting Song For Athene, oft employed at funerals, ended the first half in an elegiac frame of mind. The madrigals in the second half compensated with light-heartedness, teeming with the frivolous fa-la-la's of love and leisure.

It was, however, Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia (conducted by the Chorale’s Lesley Leighton), with a brilliantly erotic text by W. H. Auden and the choral magic of England’s greatest composer since Purcell that stole a show already brimming over with wit and humor.

Stories from Korea

The distance from sophisticated London to a Korea of ritual and religion five weeks later required a bridge if not too far then at least as far as one could cross. A lively tradition of choral music on the Korean peninsula has been the legacy of missionary work begun there 130 years ago. Though its continuity was cut short in North Korea during the last half century, the tradition persists in South Korea in works that fuse Eastern and Western styles.

The Chorale’s local bridge to Korea was much shorter but until recently rarely crossed: that from the Music Center to nearby Koreatown, a community that boasts the largest colony of Koreans outside the country itself. And Disney Hall was well represented by those residents for its “Stories from Korea” concert of March 6. Results were mixed but the initiative opened the ears of the Chorale's base audience with fresh sounds and made some new friends for the Chorale from an important constituency in Los Angeles.

The program opened with a half dozen musical snapshots of colorful locales by contemporary Korean composers. Me-Na-Ri by Hyowon Woo felt like the gathering of tribes on a mountaintop, appropriate for a land that has been at the crossroads of struggle throughout its history. Chorale members were arrayed along the side aisles of Disney Hall’s central area and sang antiphonally, supplemented with pounding percussion and gongs. An invocation of a new artistic presence, it was the evening's most effective piece.

Hyunchul Lee’s Dona Nobis Pacem shimmered in trills with motifs in minor thirds, its harmonies a blend of East and West. Ben Jisoo Kim’s a cappella Hangangsu Taryeong was a dissonant tone painting of the swelling, pulsing Han River. Heejo Kim’s Gyeongbokgung Taryeong greeted the morning with a rhythmic lilt and pulsing joy in the opening of a gated royal palace. Jungsun Park’s Dal-A Dal-A Bal-Geun Dal-A found moon-struck lovers planning their futures in close harmony and intervals of minor thirds and fourths. Hojun Lee’s Arirang Fantasie had a hiker traversing Korea’s most famous mountain peak in music perhaps a little too sweetly Westernized with consonant harmonies and twinkling piano arpeggios in a manner equivalent to Thomas Kinkade's idyllic paintings.

Featured on the program’s second half was the world premiere of American composer Mark Grey’s Mugunghwa-Rose Of Sharon, an ambitious work built around the poetry of Namsoo Kim, a Korean who’s father was caught up in the uncivil struggles of the Korean peninsula sixty years ago. It employs a solo violin, chorus and chamber ensemble and incorporates elements of a violin concerto, tone poem and dramatic oratorio. Grey's music does not try to duplicate Korean folk elements but rather suggest the setting.

According to Grey, the solo violin and the ensemble together "channel the voice of Namsoo's father" with the violin also playing a shamanistic role. Kim's impressionistic poetry provides emotional signposts as the chorus conveys the story of Kim's search, after his escape to the south, for his father in North Korea. Alas, it was not to be; the North Koreans had denied Kim's entry until long after his father's death. Whether referencing the struggle between north and south or evoking the traditional poetic images of nature, Kim's poetry inspired musical settings from Grey that conveyed generalized feelings more than drama. The mood migrated from uneasy to agitated and eventually to elegiac. Jennifer Koh's solo violin busywork was often lost within the thickets of the combined ensemble and Chorale, as finely performed individually as all these elements were.

Following the script at the work's premiere was a challenge for the audience, not especially aided by the relative lack of differentiated characterization in each of the five scenes with additional Prologue and Epilogue. With a work of such ambition and sincerity, however, further tweaking may more effectively realize the obviously heartfelt intentions.

Looking Ahead

The Los Angeles Master Chorale is taking the right chances and making well-founded commitments to emerging musical directions in a Los Angeles ever complex and evolving. It's an organization that is smart and visionary at each critical level: singers and musicians, musical direction, and organizational management.

Next season will bring new musical adventures. One I anticipate in particular will be the performance of The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang, a preview performance of which was presented with a complement of just four singer-percussionists at Santa Monica’s Jacaranda Music Series earlier this year. (See review) It was led by a free-lancing Gershon, who was one of the singer-percussionists himself.

But before next season there are those two performances of Haydn’s Creation this Sunday and the Ellington Sacred Concerts on May 22.

Neither should be missed. See you there.

Top photo by Lee Salem, bottom two photos by Steve Cohn, used by permission of L.A. Master Chorale.

Rodney Punt can be reached at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Gernot Wolfgang's Thinging Theremin

2011-04-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

by Rodney Punt

I dashed home Saturday evening from the gemütlich birthday party of a friend - a TV star of German origin. It was one of those magical outdoor affairs with banks of pin-lights beaming warmth through the misty dampness, plenty of drinks and food, a classy if incongruous mariachi band, and lots of glitzy guests. (Partiers were split between television industry types and L.A.'s German community, and conversations between the two groups migrated from the superficial to serious and back, but not from the obvious candidates in either camp.)

Memorable moment: a chat with engaging comedian Bill Maher. I am with him all the way on religion and politics, but not quite ready to buy into his take on the demerits of vaccinations, though he made good points on not messing with Mother Nature's immune system. (Plug: HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher delivers the best combo of political insight and gut-busting fun available on TV.)

So why did I come home early?

To turn on KUSC-FM for a delayed broadcast of the latest work of Austrian-born, L.A.-based film composer Gernot Wolfgang. I had missed its live world premiere at the brilliant Piano Spheres recital of Joanne Pearce Martin on March 16. Wolfgang's Theremin's Journey is scored for that odd hands-in-the-air electronic gadget that emits otherworldly sounds, along with piano and electronica (a Mac computer). Not having a video handy as I listened, I'll have to take KUSC's word that the multi-talented Martin performed all the music I heard during the course of the piece. (OK, some of the electronic elements may have been prerecorded.)

Journey is an atmospheric mood piece with a retro pop-jazz feel to it. Here's my fanciful take: the Theremin (beloved of old sci-fi films) takes us initially to a forbidden planet where Robbie the Robot might at any moment burst out from behind a rock. A couple of motifs of romantic longing from the Theremin, with the piano echoing them, then beam us back to a film-noirish earth. We arrive in an Edward Hopper painting in the wee small hours of a sleepy Gotham. A morose Frank Sinatra, his girl having ditched him, sits at the other end of the bar with his only-the-lonely drink. Journey's middle section gets more animated and inventive but the mood lingers just as hauntingly. There's a great piano riff that suggests a startled cockroach scampering across the floor. Despite the eerie elements, the work overall keeps to a mood of wistful reverie. The scale is at once intimate and infinite.

Gernot Wolfgang knows what he's doing. (Even if I may be off base in my response.) Theremin's Journey is mixture of old electronics, new media and traditional piano with more than enough incident to transcend its vernacular idiom into something very cool, clever, and seductive.

And you don't even need a vaccination against modern music pretensions before listening to it.

----ooooo----

Note from publisher: Gernot Wolfgang kindly supplied the program notes from his concert which were posted below as an addendum to the review above on Wednesday, April 6, 2011.

THEREMIN’S JOURNEY (for piano, Theremin and electronica) by Gernot Wolfgang

Program notes from the concert:

Theremin’s Journey was commissioned by Joanne Pearce Martin and generously underwritten by Rich and Luci Janssen of Santa Barbara, CA.

The Theremin and the piano are performed live, while the electronica parts are prerecorded. The inspiration for the title came from 2 sources. Theremin’s Journey is the name of the sample patch (from a virtual instrument called Atmosphere) which I used while composing the piece. But the layout of the piece itself also suggests a journey the theremin undertakes.

One of the great things about traveling is that - ideally - we undergo a transformation of sorts. By seeing new places, and by meeting people from cultures and backgrounds other than our own, our perspective changes. When we come home we see the world somehow differently, and the big picture seems to be a little bit more apparent.

This is what the Theremin is experiencing in this piece. It starts out with the main theme, accompanied by an ambient electronica track inspired by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew period from the early 1970s. The Theremin returns to this musical environment two more times, but in between these sections life happens in form of the piano part.

The piano covers a wide range of emotions and mindsets here - from contemplative to frantic, from tentative to rock solid and uncompromising, from agreeable to contrarian. Its two extensive sections each start out with unaccompanied solo passages, which then slowly evolve into groove-oriented climaxes. From here on the piano slowly eases its way back to sonic environments familiar to the Theremin. Now the Theremin gets to reflect on what it has seen and heard. While the main theme is still recognizeable, it is now varied. The surrounding ambient tracks have also changed ever so slightly. A new perspective has been found.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Happy 279th Birthday, "Papa" Haydn!

by Anne French

Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn was born March 31, 1732, and we celebrate his birthday a day late (no April Fooling) on today's Friday Phonograph. Affectionately known as "Papa," Haydn lived until 1809, writing volumes of string quartets, piano trios, piano sonatas, symphonic works, folksong arrangements, and more. He was dubbed "the father of the symphony," was a teacher to Beethoven and friend to Mozart. I have chosen one of the most recognizable of his melodies, the second movement of his String Quartet in C major - "The Emperor" - so called because it was written for the birthday of Austrian Emperor Francis II. The stirring melody was later set to a variety of texts and remains a familiar hymn tune in many churches. In 1922 it was adopted as the German National Anthem, using the original text from 1841. Tragically the Nazis later exploited both the words and music, twisting the sound of music into the sound of evil for many. Post-war Germany stopped using it altogether as a national anthem, but it was reinstated in 1952 using only its inoffensive third stanza text. There is a wealth of information online concerning both the music and the text, but I think "Papa" would not want his music to be silenced by the forces of darkness. I hope you enjoy his wonderful piece, played here by the Kodaly Quartet, as we usher in a new weekend and a new April.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-03-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Wunderlich Sings of Spring to the Tune of Humoresque

by Anne French

Fritz Wunderlich is without doubt one of the greatest tenors of this century, and we can only imagine what he might have achieved had his life not been cut short by a freak accident. Nevertheless, we are blessed with a multitude of recordings to remember him by, and his Eine Kleine Frühlingsweise set to the tune of Dvorák's Humoresque is a special springtime treat (the German title translates to A Little Spring-Time Song). It is delightfully playful, but still shows off the greatness of this magnificent voice. He sings with ease and charm, bringing a smile to the face and fresh spring to the heart. This video comes with the added bonus of lyrics in both English and German. Happy Weekend, everyone!

Austria Hangs On To Hitler’s Vermeer

2011-03-22T23:30:00.001-07:00

[Note from LA Opus Publisher: This is a second article by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg on a painting by Jan Vermeer tainted with Nazi associations. Today's posting comments on the decision last Friday by an Austrian governmental review agency ruling against a claim by the heirs of a family pressured to sell it to Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.]

By E. Randol Schoenberg. Esq.

Last week, Austria once again refused to return the famous painting by Jan Vermeer, The Artist in His Studio, that Hitler managed to wrangle from its prior owner Jaromir Czernin-Morzin. The history of the dispute was described in the March 16, 2011 posting Will Austria Part With Hitler’s Vermeer. On March 18, 2011, a committee of political appointees issued a unanimous 33-page recommendation to the Minister of Culture and Education Claudia Schmied, asking her not to return the painting under Austria’s 1998 art restitution law. The decision, issued with a press release just minutes after the seven-member committee met in closed session to discuss the case -- supposedly for the very first time -- leaves no doubt that there is little will left in Austria for confronting its Nazi past.

Austria’s 1998 art restitution law allows the government to return artworks from federal museums that should have been returned under Austria’s prior restitution laws. But no claims can be filed, and victims or their heirs are not permitted to take part in the process or appear before the advisory committee. The entire operation is conducted behind closed doors and in secret, until a decision is announced with no opportunity for comment or recourse. Although hundreds of Nazi-looted artworks have been returned under the 1998 law, occasionally this opaque process has led to egregious errors. In the case of the famous and valuable Klimt paintings taken from the Bloch-Bauer family, a mistaken recommendation by the advisory committee was overturned only after eight years of litigation and a US Supreme Court decision that resulted in an independent arbitration award ordering Austria to return the paintings. The advisory committee seems to save its biggest blunders for the most valuable artworks.

The case of Hitler’s Vermeer, valued at over $200 million, is complex, but the errors of the advisory committee are easy to see. The decision hinges on a determination that Jaromir’s wife Alix-May was never persecuted by the Nazis. Under Austria’s restitution laws, a sale entered into by a spouse of a persecuted individual is voidable, unless the purchaser can prove that the transaction would have occurred independent of the Nazi takeover -- a tough chore in a case where Hitler himself put a hold on the painting and later purchased it at a reduced price. Despite devoting 25 pages to the history of the painting, most of the facts related to the key issue of Alix-May’s persecution were glossed over or omitted.

Alix-May was one quarter Jewish, but her grandfather Eduard Oppenheim was a famous Jewish-born banker in Cologne and his family was an early target of the Nazis. In 1933 Alix-May was married to the aristocrat Roland Faber-Castell. For this she was viciously attacked in Der Stürmer, the infamous Nazi periodical published by Germany’s number one Jew-baiter Julius Streicher. (Streicher’s incessant anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in Der Stürmer led to his conviction and execution at the Nuremberg Trials for inciting crimes against humanity.)

About Alix-May, Streicher wrote:

"The matron of the house in the town of Stein has a Jew for a mother. Jewish blood can never be concealed. It finds somewhere its expression. . . . She did not appear at the hearing. Probably her Jewish blood forbids her to appear in court before “Goyim” [Yiddish: non-Jews]. Her blood is closer to the Jews. When recently she had to stay in Switzerland with her sick child, she called for her Jewish doctor, Dr. Neuland from Nuremberg, who treats her children. . . .The fact that the matron of the house in Stein belongs to the Jewish race makes many things understandable that until now were a riddle."

Faber-Castell was subsequently removed from the board of directors of his own business because of his wife's Jewish background. The Nazis even tried to have him committed. His fortunes improved only after he divorced Alix-May in 1935. A post-war court found in 1946 that he had been politically persecuted because of his relationship to her.

Thanks to Streicher, Alix-May’s Jewish background was well-known to the entire community. At one point in the 1930s, Alix-May’s home was graffitied with the slogan “Oppenheim, the Jewish swine, must get out of Stein." The epithet was repeated, when, in 1940, after Alix-May had married Jaromir, the Gestapo [Nazi secret police] intervened in Alix-May's custody battle with Faber-Castell.

“From state police principles,” the Gestapo reported to the court, “she appears to be unfit to raise children. In any case, because of her overall orientation, which may also be a result of her Jewish background and upbringing, she is on National Socialist principles politically unacceptable.”

As a result, Alix-May lost custody of her children. Finally, in September 1940, just weeks before Hitler’s emissaries came to her home to negotiate with her husband Jaromir to purchase the painting (for 65% the price that he wanted before the Nazis took over), the Gestapo and the Racial-Political Office determined that Alix-May should be treated as a “Jew and an enemy of the State” and her passport was ordered to be taken away.

The advisory committee made no mention of the article in Der Stürmer, and obliquely referred to the graffiti as “anti-Semitic words.” The problems faced by Alix-May’s prior husband Faber-Castel went unmentioned, as was the official finding that he had been “politically persecuted” as a result of his wife’s Jewish background. Her problems with the Gestapo are treated as minor incidents of no real consequence. Rather, the committee blithely concluded: “Alix Czernin was indeed subject to anti-Semitic hostilities by the Nazis, but not political persecution.”

As grounds for this improbable conclusion, the committee relied on the fact that ordinarily, people with only one Jewish grandparent were not persecuted by the Nazis. Alix-May was permitted to marry Jaromir in 1938, which would not have been possible if she had really been treated as a Jew. When she briefly was divorced from Jaromir in 1943, her Jewish background was not an issue and she was allowed to keep custody of their child. She was permitted to remarry Jaromir in 1944. Because she managed to avoid persecution in these proceedings, the committee declared that Alix-May was not a member of the class of systematic or individually persecuted persons.

The author Hilde Spiel used to say that Austrians live in a world “between dream and reality.” When it comes to Austria’s Nazi past, many still have a blind spot. Underlying the committee’s verdict is the continuing Nazi practice of euphemistic public lies covering up private truths. For example, in Nazi parlance Jews were not deported and murdered; they were “resettled” for “special treatment.” Similarly, Alix-May was not persecuted when she was attacked in Der Stürmer, the Gestapo interfered in her custody hearing or declared her an enemy of the State; she merely suffered the indignity of some “hostilities” – as if all she endured were some rude remarks at a dinner party. The reality of her situation, the actual torment and persecution she suffered over a course of years, the completely natural fear she testified to when in 1940 the Nazis arrived at her home to make a deal with her husband to purchase his painting for Hitler, all those facts were not recognized by the advisory board seeking to justify its decision to hold on to the Vermeer painting.

The restitution laws that Austria enacted under pressure from the Allies are quite clear. Property taken from persecuted individuals or their spouses must be returned. Once it was established that a person was a member of a persecuted class, or had been persecuted, all transactions were considered void. As one restitution tribunal explained shortly after the war:

“It must suffice that proof of political persecution is set forth, for in the uncertain legal conditions that prevailed under the German regime, a onetime subject of political persecution ran the danger that the persecution would start up again without any special reason. Whoever once was politically persecuted, lived always under pressure in the Third Reich; he could also not operate so freely in economic matters, as those persons who were never persecuted.”

The advisory committee could only justify holding on to Hitler’s Vermeer by finding that Jaromir’s wife was never politically persecuted. But the truth has a way of seeping out, and public lies work only for so long. At some point, reality must prevail over fantasy.

E. Randol Schoenberg is an attorney in Los Angeles, California. He represents Helga Conrad, the step-daughter of Jaromir Czernin-Morzin. During the past decade, he has litigated several prominent Nazi-looted art cases, including Republic of Austria v. Altmann, which resulted in the return of five paintings by Gustav Klimt valued at over $300 million.

Happy Birthday J.S. Bach!

2011-03-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

Paying Tribute to the Master

Anne French

What can one say about J.S. Bach that has not already been said? He is the Master of the Masters of Western Music, the composer idolized by Albert Schweitzer, Glenn Gould, too many to even consider listing. And how can one choose a single piece? A choral work? Instrumental solo? Sacred music? Invention? Prelude and Fugue? A glorious work for Organ? I settled on Andreas Scholl singing the Agnus Dei from the B-minor Mass because I like it so much, but I could have easily chosen from hundreds of others. Let this be my small tribute to the birthday of a true musical giant.

Turn of the Screw Gets a Stunning New Turn at LA Opera

2011-03-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

Review by Rodney Punt

In an age of shock-value opera stagings, it has become common to stuff the veiled implications of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw into one-dimensional little-shop-of-horrors productions. Both the Los Angeles and Santa Fe Operas followed that course in years past. While conceiving this work so narrowly may be titillating, it forecloses alternative perceptions and downplays thought -- fatal mistakes with Britten, that most mental of operatic composers.

The work's current LA Opera production, borrowed from Glyndebourne and premiered at the Chandler Pavilion on March 12, is a game-changer. It works exceedingly well at revealing latent complexities of character motivation while leaving the ultimate responsibility for their evaluation to the viewer. Its musical realization is also first rate, allowing the work to shine as a towering masterpiece.

Henry James’ 1898 novella, on which the opera is based, concerns an overwrought governess who protects her young charges from the carnal influence of two malingering ghosts. It was a well-made story with a puzzle of red herrings in the manner of Arthur Conon Doyle, but also a thriller with the subliminal sexuality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which had been published just the year before. Britten’s version, the last of his three great chamber operas, and composed a half century later, maintains the original novella’s ironically detached style and unsettling tone.

The Turn of the Screw’s central theme is the loss of innocence. Productions of it must come to grips with two dynamics. The first is how to treat the passage of time and experience in the opera’s narrative. The second is how to incorporate the changing mores from a prim Victorian England to an empire amid decline and reappraisal after the Second World War and beyond.

A full appreciation of the work’s insight into alternate aspects of human nature also depends on one’s willingness to change viewpoints during the course of the opera. (One precedent can be cited as a clue: the shifting allegiances in Magic Flute after Tamino is sent by the Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter Pamina from the “evil” clutches of Sarastro.)

In the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Glyndebourne production director Jonathan Kent and LA Opera stage director Francesca Gilpin set the initial action in the bland daily routine of an English country estate. The effect of the false normalcy is to twist the building tensions of subsequent abnormalities all the more tautly.

Paul Brown’s costumes place the action at mid-twentieth century, about the time of the opera’s premiere in 1954. His clean and crisp scenery is gestural, anchored with a central pane of a dozen glass windows mounted on a large pivot that migrates from drawing room windows (above) to the surface of the nearby lake (below), and eventually to a kind of two way mirror that both separates and reflects alternate realities (second from bottom). A massive dead tree branch hung horizontally above it is a key visual leitmotif for sinister forces outside.

Two circular turntables on the stage floor allow for rapid scene changes (sixteen in all) moving the action in and out of doors. Household scenes -- a child’s train set, a brother and sister horseback riding, or piano practice -- vie in split-second timing with the appearance of uninvited guests, or a nearby lake with a floating body. Mark Henderson’s lighting captures the changing moods, from bright innocence to inky terror.

Britten’s musical structure is as immaculately outfitted and precisely lethal as the collection of blades in a Swiss Army knife. A labyrinth-like principal theme incorporates all twelve tones of the scale, a nod to the composer Arnold Schoenberg’s angst-ridden atonality. This theme will be varied and applied to each character’s actions through the 16 scenes. Intervals of the fourth note on the scale rise while intervals of the fifth fall, as fragments of a melismatic figuration sinew throughout. After an introduction for tenor and piano, the measured pacing of each of the first act’s eight scenes notch up in key signature like twists in a corkscrew. The second act’s eight scenes mirror the first in character interactions, and take the same spider walk down the keys that they had earlier climbed up.

Britten’s orchestrations conjure a mesmerizing psychology in sound, with a large toolbox of instrumental combinations performed by just thirteen virtuoso musicians. Spine-tingling effects pour out of the orchestra pit: steamy strings, creepy celesta, slippery harp, fluttery piccolo, tender soprano and alto flutes, seductive bass and treble clarinets, and a battery of heart-palpitating percussion instruments. (For a single snapshot of these black magic orchestrations, listen to the opening measures of Act II.)

Conductor James Conlon and his thirteen charges brought off the opening night performance in stunning form, all the more impressive as each musician soloed on his or her respective instrument or family of instruments in various registers. Britten would have been as proud of this band as of the virtuosos he had hand picked for the opera’s premiere. It was apparent that Conlon understands this score from broad architecture to intimate detail.

Vocal contributions and dramatic action on stage were no less impressive. Soprano Patricia Racette, taking on this role for the first time, was the emphatically sung Governess who morphs from tentative new member of the household to anxiety driven maternal proxy. Her uneasy embodiment of traditional family values mixes with a psychological insecurity that could undermine the Governess’s fitness for duty.

Tenor William Burden’s restrained and mellifluous performance as a very life-like Peter Quint (also as narrator in the Prologue) was, if not quite sympathetic, then not entirely sinister as the “older man” who entices the boy Miles, in a manner not dissimilar to Schubert’s initially seductive but later insistent Erlkönig. Burden’s final gasps at his denunciation were haunting and pathetic. Tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s lifetime partner and the original Quint, would seem to be Burden’s vocal role-model but this spectral burden proved no barrier to his smooth-voiced successor.

The role of Miles, performed by boy treble Michael Kepler Meo (left), is key to the opera, and the young singer was very much up to its demands. The inner life of Miles is a focus from the beginning when we learn he has been expelled from school. Meo’s handling of Miles’ later maturation and increasing self-assertion was stylish and well modulated. His lament of “Malo” was affecting and his final shout of “Peter Quint, you devil!” arresting as tortured outcry.

Irish Mezzo Ann Murray conveyed the loyal but timid Mrs. Grose with warmth and grace and the idiomatic authority of this beloved veteran of the British stage. Murray has us wondering why Mrs. Grose is so timid, and if she knows more than she's telling. Soprano Ashley Emerson’s Flora, short of stature and in bouncing naughty pigtails, convinced all she was a girl and not a young adult singer of experienced accomplishment. Rich-voiced soprano Tamara Wilson induced sympathy and revulsion as the deathly, anguished ghost of Miss Jessel. The problematic Flora-Jessel relationship is resolved by Flora’s prompt departure with Mrs. Grose as the tensions mount.

As a defender of conventional mores, the Governess resists what she sees as inappropriate human desires, even in her own repressed feelings for the guardian. It is not clear who, if any, have seen the ghosts other than the Governess, and doubts arise as to her mental composure. In the ensuing struggle with Quint, we also wonder whether the Governess is protecting Miles’ innocence or preventing his natural development, even if proves to be out of the norm.

Has her job of protection migrated into a clinging possessiveness? Britten telegraphs some dramatic hints when in the last scene he has her sing the same unsettling melismatic line that Quint has used all along, and after the boy’s death intoning his “Malo” lament.

The tragic operatic journey ends with further speculation. The simultaneous disappearance of Quint and the collapse of Miles when the boy “outs” his pursuer by naming him suggests the Quint character was as much the doppelganger of Miles’ personality (below) as he was the ghost of the Governess (right). Quint may all along have been the latent adult that Miles is anticipating within himself. (“I am all things strange and bold.”)

Had the confrontation with his Governess come a few years later, one wonders if Miles might have defied her and embraced his inner Quint.

----ooooo----

Additional Considerations

Speculation focuses on the sensitive subject of how much autobiography was in Benjamin Britten’s depiction of Miles and Quint. The composer was molested as a youth, and like Miles was a child prodigy on the piano. He was also reportedly obsessed with David Hemmings, the boy who premiered the role of Miles.

How one perceives The Turn of the Screw as social commentary depends on one's point of view and tolerance for deviation from social norms. Pedophilia is universally scorned. However, perspectives on adult same sex relationships have changed over time and locale. The novella’s first readers inhabited a pre-Freudian England. Britten’s opera premiered a half-century later in a post-Freudian one. Today we take in both works with sensibilities shaped not only by Freud, but also by gay liberation, the repeal of DADT, and in some states, the emergence of equal marriage rights for same sex couples.

As civilizations advance, people of intelligence and empathy accommodate to changes in social mores. In Bram Stoker’s London of 1897, a vampire would have been treated with a stake through his heart and a cross on yours. In the Los Angeles of the not too distant future, perhaps even vampires may be accepted as True Blood lovers. Or are they already?

----ooooo----

Remaining performances March 25 (7:30 pm), March 27 (2 pm), March 30 (7:30 pm). See LA Opera.

All photos courtesy of LA Opera, and, except as indicated, by Robert Millard. From top: 1) Michael Kepler Meo as Miles, William Burden (at back) as Peter Quint, 2) Ashley Emerson as Flora, Ann Murray as Mrs. Grose, Meo, 3) Emerson, Patricia Racette as the Governess, photo by Mike Hoban, 4) Meo, Racette, 5) Burden, Racette, 6) Burden, Meo, Racette.

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

The Friday Phonograph

2011-03-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

Music to Sustain Us When Words Can Say No More

by Anne French

Unspeakable horror from multiple disasters suffered in Japan have dominated our thoughts and lives for the past six days. Today marks the first-week anniversary of a tragedy inexpressible by either words or images, and we feel powerless, frustrated and fearful. Thus I have chosen Morten Lauridsen's transcendent Lux Aeterna, sung by the Los Angeles Master Chorale under the direction of Paul Salamunovich, to bring some comfort to those whose hearts are aching now. May light perpetual, lux aeterna, illumine our world in the days to come.

Will Austria Part With Hitler's Vermeer?

2011-03-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

[Note from LA Opus Publisher: We are pleased to share the following chronicle by prominent Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, concerning perhaps the most important work of art still under ownership contention in the aftermath of the Second World War.]

By E. Randol Schoenberg. Esq.

If only Adolf Hitler had been accepted to art school, the old joke goes, he never would have felt the need to conquer the world. Unable to fulfill his dream of becoming an artist, Hitler rampaged through Europe looting and pillaging its great treasures. One of his trophies, Jan Vermeer’s “Artist in his Studio”, is again at the center of controversy, as Austria’s art restitution advisory board considers on March 18 whether it should be returned to the heirs of its prior owner.

Austria came into possession of the Vermeer by nationalizing the painting at the end of World War II. It currently hangs in Vienna’s famed Kunsthistorisches Museum. Hitler had obtained it in 1940 and planned to have it as the centerpiece of his museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria. The museum was never built.

Prior to World War II, the Vermeer was owned for many years by the aristocratic Czernin family. Count Jaromir Czernin-Morzin inherited the painting. He considered selling it. The American industrialist Andrew Mellon offered to pay $1 million, which would have made it the most expensive painting in the world. But the Austrian authorities wouldn’t allow the painting to leave the country, and so Czernin held onto it.

When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, Czernin was put in a difficult position. His new wife, Alix-May, was the granddaughter of a famous Jewish banker named Oppenheim. As a result, she and her former husband, Roland Faber-Castell, had been subjected to vicious anti-Semitic attacks in the popular Nazi tabloid, Der Stürmer. Czernin’s sister was also married to Hitler’s chief opponent in Austria, former chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, who was kept imprisoned from 1938-1945. Czernin had to be careful not to run afoul of the new Nazi bosses.

In 1939, a cigarette manufacturer from Hamburg, Philipp Reemtsma, who was also a close friend of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, offered to purchase the Vermeer for RM 1.8 million (about $720,000). Although Göring gave his support to the deal, Austrian officials managed to block it by begging Hitler to intervene. Hitler’s secretary sent a telegram declaring that the painting could not be moved without Hitler’s approval.

Jaromir’s wife was still suffering anti-Semitic attacks. In February 1940, the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) intervened in her child custody dispute with her former husband, stating that she was unfit to be a mother. Later that year, she was officially declared “Jewish and an enemy of the State” and her passport was ordered to be taken away.

Hitler had his heart set on obtaining the Vermeer. In September, he set his henchmen in motion. Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, asked around if any outstanding taxes could be used to take the painting away. Hans Posse, Hitler’s special envoy in charge of obtaining artworks for the planned museum in Linz, was dispatched to Czernin’s home to negotiate the purchase of the painting at Hitler’s price. Posse told Czernin he might as well sell, because Hitler would get the painting “one way or another.” Hitler set the price at RM 1.65 million, or about $660,000 and Czernin had no choice but to agree.

Even after selling the painting to Hitler, Czernin and his wife did not escape persecution. Alix-May was driven from their home in Bohemia in 1942 and Czernin was forced out a year later. In 1944, Czernin was arrested by the Gestapo. He was held in prison and forced to do manual labor, but was never charged with any crime.

After the war, Czernin sought to recover his painting. But the Austrians, having nationalized the painting, balked at returning it. They claimed that Czernin and his wife could not have been persecuted because Alix-May had only been one quarter Jewish. The restitution tribunal determined that Czernin had “freely chosen” to sell to Hitler. Czernin’s appeals fell on deaf ears, and, betrayed by his own country, he died a broken man.

This Friday, the case of Hitler’s Vermeer will once again be reviewed by an advisory committee appointed by the Austrian government. Over the past 12 years, this committee has returned hundreds of works from Austrian museums to persecuted families, but not without controversy. The committee famously refused to return the Klimt paintings taken from the Bloch-Bauer family, valued at over $300 million, and those were recovered only after eight years of litigation ended with an arbitration ruling overturning the committee’s decision. Will the committee once again struggle to hold on to a valuable painting, notwithstanding its Nazi taint? Or will Austria finally come to terms with its Nazi past and clear its museums of their ill-gotten treasures?

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Pictured above: Jan Vermeer's 'Artist in his Studio' -- Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Jonas Kaufmann Triumphs in Lieder Recital for LA Opera

2011-03-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

Review by Rodney Punt

Sometimes you get the impression that Jonas Kaufmann is a tenor working his way into a Heldenbaritone. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but the singer’s dusky voice plays tricks on you before you realize his brighter tenorial overtones barely trump their subterranean brethren for ultimate categorization. Duff Murphy, KUSC-FM’s effervescent opera buff, labels him a “lyric” tenor, but “spinto” is probably closer to the mark.

Though Kaufmann has sung Mozart, and more recently lyric French roles, his larger voice hasn’t the effortless flexibility of a lyric tenor, and an emerging proto-dramatic direction has been his wont this season, as Florestan in Fidelio and Don José at La Scala’s Carmen (under LAPO Music Director Gustavo Dudamel). Next month he undertakes the role of Siegmund (a baritonal tenor role sung here last year by Plácido Domingo) in Robert Lepage’s new Metropolitan Opera production of Die Walkűre.

Tall and handsome with curly locks and sparkling eyes, he has the kind of movie star glamour that could corrupt a lesser performer into self-indulgence, but Kaufmann is too serious and ambitious an artist to let that happen -- at least not yet.

Last Friday at the Chandler Pavilion, the German tenor took a break from his dramatic roles on stage for his United States debut as a lieder recitalist. Under the auspices of LA Opera, Kaufmann's program featured songs of Robert Schumann and Richard Strauss. Opening with four selections from Schumann’s Aus den Kerner-Liedern (songs of Kerner), Kaufmann initially took a few songs to refocus his voice to that of a recitalist in this more delicate material; with minor control issues and a crack or two, the downsizing adjustment soon settled him into a groove.

Poet Justinus Kerner's themes are often associated with melancholic mankind in an uneasy relationship with enchanting Nature, a pervading subject in nineteenth century German poetry, but the four poems here were tilted to the happier prospects of “going out into the world” on a journey of discovery. As such, and with the exception of the next work, they set the evening’s tone of love’s raptures over its ruptures.

More serious matters were explored in Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love), to poems of Heinrich Heine. In subtle allusion and metaphor -- invoking the natural world’s usual flowers, birds, and rivers (the Rhine), but mixed here with specific locations and artifacts like the Cologne Cathedral, the bridge at Mainz, and even a huge wine cask in Heidelberg -- Heine tells of a poet’s love of a woman who initially reciprocates, but, deciding to marry another, induces the rejected poet to find a way to bury his sorrows. Schumann’s finely etched musical miniatures infuse the equally fragile poetic images with acute emotion.

Kaufmann’s voice was at both its most limber and controlled here, his delivery achieving subtle colorations in the work’s atmospheric hothouses, as with his nearly vibrato-less “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (I wept in my dream), his plangent “Aus alten Märchen winkt es” (From old fairy tales beckons…), and the oaken darkness of his “Die alten, bösen Lieder” (the old, angry songs), summing up the poet’s journey.

His achievement in Dichterliebe notwithstanding, Kaufmann came even more alive in two sets of Strauss songs that followed the interval: Schlichte Weisen: Fünf Gedichte von Felix Dahn (Simple Melodies: with five of the poems by Felix Dahn) Opus 21, and Vier Lieder, Opus 27, numbering 13 songs in all. Both are early works of this most optimistic and extrovert of composers. Strauss’s poets in this instance anticipate love’s bliss more than regret its loss. At the pinnacle of this singer's early maturity (Kaufmann is a very young-looking forty one years of age) the sentiments seemed natural to his public persona.

Something of the rhapsodic style of the first set of these Strauss songs, not to mention their symphonic piano accompaniments, released a superabundance of energy within Kaufmann, and we discovered new dimensions in his artistry: a long-winded breath control, his openhearted romantic fervor, a darkish head tone, and a kind of pure ecstasy in his delivery.

Piano collaborator Helmut Deutsch followed Kaufmann every step of the way, from melancholy to bliss in sympathetic partnership, fully earning his pay in the florid accompaniments of the Strauss songs, his well-articulated arpeggios flying up and down the span of the keyboard like so many effortless birds in flight.

A now energized audience swelled the large hall into a frenzy of enthusiasm in the final set, which included two of Strauss's greatest songs, "Morgen" (Tomorrow) and "Cäcilie" (Cecilia), with the latter's high B firm, but constituting most likely the tenor's upper range limit.

(Apropos, had Strauss never composed a tone poem or an opera, he would still be remembered as the last great proponent of the German Lied, with its origins in Mozart and Haydn, its extension in Beethoven, its high point in Schubert, and its noble continuity in Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, among others, right up to Strauss's last work in the genre, the Vier letzte Lieder of 1948, a tradition of almost two centuries.)

The energy field that enveloped both singer and his audience did not abate, even after five encores, three of them by Strauss ("Breit über mein Haupt", "Nichts", and "Zueignung"), the Franz Lehár evergreen, "Dein ist mein ganzes Herz", and finally Schumann’s seraphic "Mondnacht" (Moonlit Night), announcing by gentle implication that it was finally time to go home.

But there was no going home for vast hoards of Kaufmann’s admirers, the majority female, who waited in line over half an hour for his appearance in the Chandler’s lobby to sign CDs. After this debut in the now somewhat esoteric genre of lieder, you could call Jonas Kaufmann the thinking woman’s tenor. Also the unthinking woman’s tenor. Or, to paraphrase Ira Gershwin, the tenor’s magnetic appeal might apply to all the sexes from Maine to Texas.

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More on Jonas Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s amber tenor is not as large as another dark-hued one we are well acquainted with in Los Angeles who has sung many of the roles Kaufmann now essays. Nor does Kaufmann have Plácido Domingo’s metallic ring, but he uses his voice intelligently and his focused projection makes his respectably-sized voice seem huge in powerful moments. As heard in the more subtle repertoire featured this evening, he can also give colors to the chameleon.

According to those in the know, Kaufman took a long time to discover and use his true voice. It is interesting that the teacher who ultimately enabled his successful voyage of vocal discovery was American baritone Michael Rhodes. It was also his triumph at the Metropolitan Opera, another American association, that after years of yeoman’s work in provincial German opera houses earned Kaufmann new respect at home and enhanced star status around the world.

With this triumph in his U.S. debut in song literature in Los Angeles, Jonas Kaufmann now adds to his string of successes on the operatic stage a considerably enhanced reputation in the art of song.

All photos courtesy of LA Opera. Top photo of Kaufmann by Uli Weber; middle photo of Kaufmann and Deutsch by Robert Millard; bottom photo by Robert Millard, from left: soprano Nino Machaidze (star of LA Opera's Turk in Italy), LA Opera's Richard Seaver Music Director James Conlon, mezzo soprano Marilyn Horne, Kaufmann and Deutsch.

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Dress-up

2011-03-12T15:34:00.000-08:00

Color and coloratura made "Il Turco in Italia"
a watershed moment for LA Opera--and maybe LA too

More like the way we like it. / Photo: ROBERT MILLARD for LA OPERA

Joseph Mailander

One reason to see an opera when you're young is that you may see it transform into something entirely different when you are not so young. Beverly Sills was here in Rossini's Il Turco in Italia at the Dorothy Chandler in 1978. Back then, LA's opera experience was not much more than autumn stagings of chestnuts--often in English--when New York City Opera came to town.

Last Thursday night, hurling dramatically across the years, we went to the same opera, LA Opera's 2011 production of Il Turco, which ends Sunday. Dynamite seats for a great, engagingly louche production of Rossini's that is in his top-tier but not performed nearly often enough.

Though memories of anything outside of the classic coloratura of Ms. Sills (right, in Turco) are dim--I even had to consult another source to confirm the language it was sung in--one thing I do remember from 1978 is wondering if big opera stars in general had to act at all, or if they simply always stood on their blocks smiling vividly as might Limoges figurines (left), perpetually acknowledging our admiration. I ultimately accepted the fact Beverly Sills would ever stand like a glamorous caged cockatoo, facing the audience and singing magnificently, the curtain rising and lowering with every scene, handily enveloping most of her movements on and off stage, and admired along with the rest. That kind of opera has mercifully evolved...and so has my own understanding of what opera singers do.

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Along the way, there has been much else. Staging Il Turco in English, which Long Beach did in 1995, is hopefully unthinkable today. Art direction is not only more important than it was then, the arguments that unfold about it may make or break a run. The setting of these things can be anytime at all. And productions in general between then and now have been more sexualized--and about time, as especially the buffa librettos have been sexualized and oversexualized since the moments they were conceived.

Early on, LA Opera showed it was up to speed with all happy trends. Its early, gloriously grotesque production of Wozzeck, in which Elise Ross found room under her skirt for her Vietnam Vet captain's obliging head and tongue, was an international-level staging; a decade later, the late Hildegard Behrens, at 61, shoehorned into a nude body-stocking to do the dance of the seven veils in Salome; and throughout various Wagner productions have been various titillations, some even larger than our dragon in Siegfried.

And along the way, keeping the people in the seats informed, also have come dozens of eloquent commentaries about what these fusses might really be all about, including perhaps most notably Wayne Kostembaum's audacious late-nineties classic The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and Mystery of Desire, which laid bare as can be laid the certain feeling certain men get for the voices of certain women, and why they might get such feelings.

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At intermission, March 2011, Lynn dashed off to the ladies room while I went to sit under the enormous mounted Chinese screen in the bar. At the bar I spotted what I was certain were not one but two sets of young lesbian couples, not together, both dressed so responsively to the opera's art direction that I made some BlackBerry notes: pinches of gypsy, berber earrings, a tiny splash of this spring's trending coral, specks of tangerine and mint, large swaths of knitted elegance. The girls were obviously responding to the art direction in this production with its own toucan-via-Hamburg trending colors in it: the frieze of Neapolitan bathers and cross-dressers in key scenes that have been described as straight outta La Dolce Vita by some and tropical fruit stands by others. It was just a night of dress-up for the girls, but it was dead-on dress-up, to complement the opera and the chorus's colors schemes and even its zeitgeist.

[And beyond costume, even beyond art direction, dress itself plays a big part of the staging of this Turco. Racks of clothing and costumes drop from the rafters, and the chorus rifles through them while the buffa absurdites unfold. Fiorella flings shoes from her closet when despondent. The sustained masquerade referencing Cosi Fan Tutte is distilled into an energetic and ridiculous scene in which the cuckolded Italian dresses like the cocksure Turk. Tone-perfect boxing trunks echoing a long lost Ali prizefight are bared as the two antagonists square off.]

From there, I have to take Lynn's word for it, but what happened was, as soon as the first couple were inside the ladies room, they started photographing each other in the restroom's lounge, and then again in the mirrors. The second couple joined them, and they all ended up art directing their own intermission, maybe for Facebook uploads, maybe to send virtual postcards, or maybe as a prelude to their own Second Act elsewhere.

Lynn was a little amused, also initially a little annoyed because she wanted to wash up but has to elbow her way into the mise-en-scène to do so. But after working her way to a sink, she ended up in a few shots herself, and obligingly smiled. All in good fun, right?

Then we got back to our seats and noticed the program cover: Fiorella preening in a pocket mirror. Another fine fit for the goings-on we had observed.

º º º º

I mention all this because it is precisely the kind of scene that interests me in the way opera lives today when it fetches a promising young audience, as this Turco has. Maestro Conlon, this inordinately gifted soprano Nino Machaidze &c. are certainly thrilling to see work their magic, but they don't nearly interest me so much these days as young people responding to something new at the opera. At the opera, you often have a chance to see the way the opera public themselves are, but magnified; opera is larger than life, and it always calls out its public to be. And the people who come for the love of coming are, when they are deeply involved, for me the very best part of the show--and this is a show in which every performance is outstanding, even memorable. Venerable Thomas Allen as the accident-prone poet Prodoscimo, locates both the hidden agility of a circus clown and the suave machinations of an ever-hopeful lyricist. Kate Lindsey as the wispy, forlorn Zaida, Paolo Gavanelli as Don Geronio, the beleaguered cuckold--and Matthew O'Neill, Simone Alberghini, and Maxim Mironov, all spot on, all eager and willing to make this production not merely special but stupendous.

My mind went racing in many literary directions, wanting to get this Proustian moment down and wanting to get it right. So--say you're a performative-gender buying, culturally transgressive social mediatrix interested in looking at the world and interested in making your own life as vivid as a toucan's beak. This can be one of your games, then: dress-up at the opera, where art direction now, formerly stilted and historic, can be as rich as a grand finale. The subtle and not-so-subtle art directions we routinely see (and routinely argue over, as though they are make-or-break decisions) in LA Opera productions, like productions in many other opera-enlightened cities, often pushes its appreciative public towards such variously fashion-forward, sexuality-forward, alternately Vogue spread or la cage aux folles moments, even capable of transforming urban chic itself.

For most of the brittle ones in Founders Circle, for whom opera attire is evening attire, suits and modest gowns, this dress-up subculture, this time inspired by the art direction and the costuming of Herbert Murauer (left), is often simply indulged as goofiness; but for a spirited, younger few, dress-up is a large part of it. It's not precisely the same as dressing up for Rocky Horror midnight screenings but it's a snooty cousin of it.

And this kind of vivid art direction, which for so many now is opera's top story, often falls very flat in sanctimoniously Nestorian corners of the city these days, where such phenomena, when they are noted at all, are noted as something gone wrong. But when I am out in this city, or even in one like San Francisco or New York, it is reflective of and a stimulant to the kind of life that I see everywhere.

This is all incautious ground but I find many elements of American urban life extremely interesting as people strive to find ways to distinguish themselves from the overriding relentless homogenization of their political and economic lives. I also lived through NYC in the mid-1970s and I have to say that as Fear City was spectacularly falling apart--the way LA is presently--people simply threw themselves into cultural craziness with abandon--which is also happening in LA presently. Back then it produced a kind of cultural renaissance (from Pavarotti to Richard Serra and of course the more-than-banal but true-to-the-times Brat Pack) because the day-to-day lives of the young frothy things were too miserable to endure without these then-new phenomena cheeking them up a bit.

LA is having this kind of a renaissance too, but news of it doesn't break out much in mainstream media. MSM so often doesn't want to document so much as to confirm suspicions about what the young frothy things are doing--they want it it to be outrageous and silly rather than performative and sublime. The media types typically whiff on the youth reality most of the time. The street artist JR got two covers in town these past two weeks--and Nino Malchaieze none. Cartoon-artist Banksy's half-baked scams on LA have generally been the artistry-of-record for March; the 3,000 or so people turning out for dress-up buffa at the Dorothy Chandler these past three weeks have largely been ignored.

What the deplorable politics and equally deplorable media of urbi-et-orbi have brought us in the mainstream is largely a social network of hectoring sanctimoniousness. We can and should and do let this go at the opera--which is not mainstream despite video's attempt to make it so--and more should notice that we do, and more of the brittle octogens should not sneer but should watch it happen and even whip up some enthusiasm for it. Also, many in media who are chasing the latest bas-culture trends are missing this kind of refreshingly apolitical American watershed moment, in which things of interest, artistic, cultural, sexual, are sure enough happening all around us, even in high culture--if only we're willing to bear witness to them. This production--in which an airstream trailer, Neapolitan bathers and a magnificent actress-vamp-soprano--so far removed from a caged cockatoo in a period gown--gave me as many goosebumps as Bubbles ever did.

The Diabelli is in the Details: Variations on Beethoven

2011-03-12T09:19:00.001-08:00

(Watch for an upcoming feature, to be posted here, on a recent performance of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations in Santa Barbara at the same time a play, Thirty Three Variations, based on the work, was having a run at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.)

The Friday Phonograph

2011-03-10T23:50:00.000-08:00

Alexis Weissenberg Plays a Personal Scarlatti Favorite

by Anne French

I fell in love with this Scarlatti Sonata (K 87) many, many years ago when it appeared on a vinyl LP recording of the wonderful guitar duo, Ida Presti and Alexandre Lagoya. I played that recording every night as I rocked my infant son to sleep, and of course the baby slept very peacefully as a result. Since then I have listened to several other interpretations of K 87, but I never heard pianist Alexis Weissenberg's performance before today. (Actually I haven't heard Alexis Weissenberg at all in quite a long time.) So for me this Friday's Phonograph choice is a double delight... my favorite Scarlatti exquisitely played by yet another great artist. Here's wishing you a lovely beginning to great weekend.

Baroque suites, Mozart's Zaide, and Poulenc's Carmélites

2011-03-09T23:39:00.000-08:00

Reviews by Rodney Punt

Harpsichordist Jory Vinikour Leads LACO Baroque Ensemble

There are conductors who flail their hands, scowl or swell at every musical phrase. Then there is Jory Vinikour, who cues musicians and telegraphs rhythms with the slightest of gestures while busy at the harpsichord. Let’s call it leading by example.

A Baroque specialist to the manner born, Vinikour’s confident bonhomie and effortless virtuosity were on fine display February 17 at the downtown Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, latest in a series from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Equally at ease facing an audience as his musicians or harpsichord, Vinikour’s introductory remarks and closing Q & A were also engaging and informative.

Works included Georg Muffat’s Propitia Sydera (Lucky Stars) concerto grosso, Handel’s Chaconne from Terpsichore, a W.F. Bach harpsichord concerto, Rameau’s suite of dances from Hippolyte et Aricie, and a solo harpsichord suite by Pancrace Royer. If all Baroque music stems from dances, these extravagantly propulsive works confirm the assertion and suggest the era’s contemporaneous discovery of electricity was no fluke.

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Mozart’s Zaide Exhumed by Musica Angelica at The Broad Stage

Before Magic Flute there was Abduction from the Seraglio, and before that an incomplete torso now known as Zaide. Mozart was drawn to the singspiel format as prototype for a German national opera, but put aside this first effort when commissioned for Idomeneo. Eventually the later, greater Abduction’s similar plot of rescue from a Turkish harem co-opted it. Recent champions have “completed” the charming chunk with additional text, the earlier Symphony in G major, KV 318, as overture, and the somewhat Italianate quartet, KV 479, as finale.

Zaide was performed at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage on February 20 under the stylistically informed direction of Musica Angelica’s Martin Haselböck with period orchestra and four singers: up-and-coming quicksilver soprano Valerie Vinzant, promising lyric tenor Andrew Bidlack, tenor Christoph Genz, and baritone Christian Hilz. Brian Michaels translated the stilted period dialogue and directed a sketchy staging with gratuitous puppetry too archly cute for its own good. In this case, better to have let the music speak for Mozart.

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Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at UCLA

Francis Poulenc’s haunting opera, Dialogue des Carmélites, has the French Revolution’s progressive social program going badly astray against religious orthodoxy when a Carmelite nunnery refuses to vacate, setting up a fatal test of wills amongst varied personalities. Its drama wears the habit of monastic fealty in emphatically tonal music of astringent solemnity, minor third motifs, and no showy pyrotechnics but plenty of vocal challenges. Requiring audience concentration, Carmélites’ performance history remains spotty but it retains passionate adherents amongst opera cognoscenti in major music capitols.

In Opera UCLA’s production at Schoenberg Hall, seen February 24, designer Cameron Mock’s stark scenes and lighting had three oversized abstract crosses leaning on their sides, suggesting the martyrdom to come. Peter Kazaras’s austere staging, Neal Stulberg’s well-coached orchestra, and Caitlin Talmage’s mixed-periods costumes inspired solid performances from the student cast. Most affecting scene: the guillotining, one by one, of the martyred nuns, each falling into the shadows with the swishing sound of the blade.

Photos: top, Jory Vinikour and harpsichord at Zipper Hall, photo by Rodney Punt; middle, Musica Angelica in Zaide at Broad Stage, photo by Laura Spino; bottom, UCLA student cast of Dialogue des Carmélites, photo by Henry Lim

Rodney Punt may be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Winter Valentines - Chamber Music Palisades Warms Frosty Hearts

2011-03-07T16:54:00.000-08:00

Review by Rodney Punt

Los Angeles is just emerging from the coldest, wettest, and, improbably, the snowiest winter in living memory. Chock it up to that mysterious periodic cooling of the Pacific Ocean known enigmatically as "La Niña."

This February, Angelinos could peer out their windows and see the low-lying Verdugo Hills above Burbank and Glendale dusted with white powder. Switzerland seemed magically at our doorstep.

We may not have thrown frisbees at the beach, but what a great month it was to enjoy indoor music making.

The belated West Coast Premiere of Czech film composer Jan Novak’s Sonata Tribus by Chamber Music Palisades, now in its fourteenth season, was occasion on the first of February for another uncovering of a flute rarity at St. Matthew’s Parish in Pacific Palisades.

Written in 1982 and left in manuscript at the composer’s death in 1984, Novak’s flutist daughter premiered it and made it available to series co-director and flutist Susan Greenberg. She was joined in its performance by co-director and pianist Delores Stevens and violinist Sarah Thornblade. The work’s accessible blend of Impressionism and jazz is shaped into a Baroque trio sonata form. The initial Allegro movement has the piano establishing jagged propulsion over which the flute’s commentary is prominent in the two A and violin in the B sections. The Lento movement’s piano chorale is infused with intense nostalgia from the high voiced and long-phrased lines of the violin and flute. An energetic Allegro vivo movement rounds it out. It’s a skillful and attractive work from a composer who possessed both solid craftsmanship and a tender sensibility.

The program had three other works, including the youthful Mozart’s lively Quartet in D Major, K. 285, for Flute and Strings (Thornblade, violin; Rob Brophy, viola; and Arman Ksajikian, cello). Like flowers lining a pathway, pizzicato strings accented a lovely, lingering piano as it day-dreamed in the prominent Adagio middle movement. Two carefree outer movements surrounding that Adagio added further garnishment.

Schubert’s equally youthful Adagio & Rondo Concertante for Piano Quartet, in F Major, D. 487, had the strings engaged by Stevens’ melodic piano motifs and arpeggios floating above them, in presciently lyrical fashion to the later Trout Quintet.

César Franck’s Sonata in A Major, a standard for violin and piano, but originally composed for cello and piano, received a performance of equal solo opportunity for flute in the first movement, violin in the second, cello in the third, with all joining in the finale. Each of the featured sonorities worked in their own way; Greenberg’s flute solo in the first tilted the movement toward a Gallic sensibility, Thornblade’s violin in the second set off sparks, and Ksajikian’s cello solo in the third movement Recitativo-Fantasia was particularly warm and embracing in the hall’s acoustics. Everyone’s participation in the last movement felt a little crowded, but fun anyway.

The hall of Pacific Palisades’ St. Matthew’s Parish -- as impressive in its windows-to-nature way as the similar but more famous Wayfarer’s Chapel is in Palos Verdes Estates -- produced a tubby acoustic that emphasized the percussive middle tones of the piano, and sometimes threw it off balance with the more delicate sonorities of the flute and strings. It was, however, a relatively small price to pay for gratifying performances and insightful programming, enhanced by the usual high standards of Alan Chapman's commentary.

Four winter valentines had warmed the hearts of unaccustomedly frigid concertgoers on a frosty first of February. No one tarried, however, as they made their way through the cold of night to their chilly cars.

Photo above courtesy of Chamber Music Palisades. From left, Susan Greenberg and Delores Stevens

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

The Friday Phonograph

2011-03-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

It's "Play the Recorder Month" (No Kidding!)

by Anne French

To my great surprise, I have discovered that recorder players across North America are celebrating this month as "Play-the-Recorder" month. March 19th has even been designated "Recorder Day!" Well, it's only fair that I give the instrument its due on today's Phonograph, but my knowledge of recorder music is scant and I could only think of Franz Brüggen and Michala Petri to search. After listening extensively to these fine players, as well as many others I found on YouTube, I could not resist playing today's selection: Michala Petri and Victor Borge playing Czardas by Monty at Borge's 80th birthday party in Tivoli. Although the performance is Borge's typical side-splitting humor, it still showcases the awesome talents of Ms. Petri and the recorder. Happy weekend to you all!

Blended Pleasures

2011-03-03T11:20:00.000-08:00

Today and tomorrow, go out and you can't go wrong.

At the Disney Hall, Dudamel conducts Bruckner and a modern work, the haunting Takemitsu Requiem, tonight at 8 p.m.

On the westside tonight, Berlin's Scharoun Ensemble is at Royce Hall for a concert featuring a Mozart quintet and the Schubert Octet.

And tomorrow, Maestro Conlon again cranks up LA Opera's marvelous Hamburg production of Il Turco in Italia--the zaniest of the zany Rossini buffa canon, last seen in Los Angeles in 1978--at 7:30 p.m. at the venerable Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Another forty-eight hours, another embarrassment of classical riches here in the City of Angels.

Happy Birthday to Frédéric Chopin!

2011-03-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

A Celebration of Genius Ushers in Month of March

by Anne French

Frédéric (or Fryderyk) Chopin was born March 1, 1810 in Warsaw, Poland, settled in Paris following suppression of the 1830 Polish Uprising, and died in 1849 in Paris at the age of 39. In that short span he became a composer of such renown that it would be impossible to summarize his contribution to western music in this brief description. We can note that all his works involve the piano, and he invented the instrumental form known as the instrumental ballade. From his myriad sonatas, preludes, mazurkas, nocturnes, études and more, I have chosen his Nocturne op. 9, no. 1, performed by Maurizio Pollini. It was not an easy task to highlight just one short piece, and this selection was almost arbitrary... though a favorite of mine. Happy Birthday to this giant of the music world.

Dudamel and the Teatro alla Scala

2011-02-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

Note from the editor: With this review of La Scala's production of Carmen, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, we welcome Evan Baker to LA Opus. You may know Mr. Baker from his excellent program notes for the San Francisco Opera. With Maestro Dudamel back in Los Angeles after an interval concertizing abroad, it seemed a good time to share Mr. Baker's perspective on one of those music-making events of the popular new conductor of the LA Phil and most famous graduate of El Sistema, Venezuela's famed music education program.

Gustavo Dudamel and Carmen at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan
November 8, 2010

Review by Evan Baker

Gustavo! Sur tes pas nous nous pressons tous!
Gustavo! sois gentille, au mois réponds-nous!
Et dis-nous quel jour tu nous aimeras!
Gustavo ! dis-nous quel jour tu nous aimeras!

Gustavo! Here we all are close around you!
Gustavo! Be nice, just answer us!
And tell us what day you’ll love us!
Gustavo! Tell us what day you’ll love us!

With this slightly altered text from Georges Bizet’s Carmen before the opera’s namesake first entrance in Act One, one might apply this text to Gustavo Dudamel’s seemingly few appearances at Disney Hall as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

So might be the thinking of those grumblers at Dudamel’s extended absences from the Los Angeles concert scene. Gifted musicians including Dudamel are booked with orchestral and opera engagements many years in advance. An immediate cancellation of a large number of existing contracts simply to extend Dudamel’s presence in Los Angeles is, for artistic and business reasons as well as good form, not possible. Artistic development requires guest engagements, which includes conducting opera, and in Dudamel’s case, at one of the foremost opera houses of the world, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.

Dudamel has in his short career to date conducted only three fully staged operas (not counting last year’s concert performance of Carmen at the Hollywood Bowl). All of them were at the Teatro alla Scala: Don Giovanni (2006), La Bohème (2008), and now Carmen. None were new productions, each being revivals. Carmen opened the 2009-2010 Scala season (conducted by Daniel Barenboim), also culminated the season itself in November. One must take into consideration that because each of the works was a revival, the opportunity to leave one’s own artistic imprimatur was limited. In general (based on my own experience of working in European opera houses), rehearsals for revivals receive small amounts of time; the opportunity of working with soloists on their interpretations may only be happenstance at best. Several musical ensemble rehearsals might occur. The schedule may permit some stage rehearsals, but these are primarily for singers to familiarize themselves with one another as well as the scenery. Dudamel may have received several rehearsals with the orchestra, including the Sitzprobe (a purely musical rehearsal for the singers alone with the orchestra) and a run through with the full production.

The production of the opera was a two-sided affair. Musically, it was a solid performance by the singers and the orchestra. Dudamel, when conducting the Overture, entr’actes, and the music that required no coordination with the stage, was lively, theatrical, and the orchestra sparkled. I had the sense, however, that when he concentrated on keeping the musical forces in cohesion with the stage action and his enormous energy and vitality was somewhat dampened.

La Scala’s production did not do complete justice to the house’s proud theatrical traditions. The set’s massive grey, movable brick walls with steps at the right gave no indication of the opera’s setting in Seville or the high mountain pass. Some semblance could be discerned, albeit only slight, of the entrance to bull-fighting arena in Act Four. Based on the revival, it is difficult to judge if respected Sicilian theater director

Emma Dante, here making her first foray into opera, had any clear concept in mind. Presumably, a commentary on misogyny and the heavy presence of the Catholic Church was the prevalent theme. Reports emanating from the rehearsals for the premiere back in December, 2009, indicated that many of Dante’s ideas either were toned down or rejected outright.

With the exception of Anita Rachvelishvili (who recently made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the same role), the entire cast was new to the production. The staging seemed to suffer from the lack of rehearsal. Certainly, without the direct supervision of the original director, much of the original details were lost and the singers reduced to observing pre-determined traffic patterns.

One of the few directorial conceits seemed to have passed muster was the overweening and distracting presence of religious figures. One was the constant presence of a priest accompanied by acolytes bearing a large wooden cross whenever Micaëla (Alexia Voulgaridou) appeared. In turn, white, hooded, and crowned religious figures followed Escamillo (Gabor Bretz) who made his first appearance lowered on an “elevator” into Lillas Pastia’s tavern. During Bretz’s pièce de résistance with the Toreador aria, the hooded figures extended their robes in fan-like shapes as if to act as invisible “shields” for the toreador. Fortunately, in Act Three these characters remained far in the background as silent observers during Escamillo’s encounter with the smugglers and his well-executed knife fight with Josè.

Another of Dante’s ideas survived the cut, that of Josè’s attempt at the final moments of the opera to rape Carmen before he murders her. Such brutality, while a potentially truthful reflection of reality, is out of place with the music. If the singers are reasonably talented, then the music combined with Josè’s desperate words should be more than sufficient to create not only great drama, but also exhibit the heightened sexual tensions between the protagonists.

No simpering Micaëla for Voulgaridou; instead of the usual light lyric soubrette of the past, this was a person with a healthy voice and a strong, dramatic character that contrasted Josè’s infatuation with Carmen. The third act narrative of Josè’s mother on her sickbed with Micaëla inverting her costume from black to white; the religious acolytes lurking in the background came forward to extend her skirt down the stage representing an enormous bed sheet with Voulgaridou at its head, effectively mimicking the mother’s pleading in her despair for Josè.

The up and coming American tenor, Bryan Hymel had the unenviable task of following Jonas Kaufmann’s Don Josè from the premiere in December 2009. Hymel, however, acquitted himself well as both an actor and as a singer worth watching in the future.

Anita Rachvelishvili made her professional stage debut with the Scala production. Working with the director Dante, she eschewed s the portrayal of Carmen as the erotic vamp. Instead, her Carmen is a tough, down to earth woman, filled with joie de vivre. Yet at times, she revealed vulnerability, particularly in the scenes with the tarot cards and recognition of death during the smuggler’s scene in Act Three, as well as her final and fatal encounter with Josè. Rachvelishvili possesses a dark timbred mezzo-soprano and used s it well on this occasion.

As an opera conductor, Dudamel is not yet quite on the same level as in his symphonic repertoire. When presented with the opportunity of conducting a new production, Dudamel will undoubtedly exploit his substantial musical gifts and deliver memorable, invigorating, and exciting performances of opera. What say the Messieurs Domingo and Conlon to providing Dudamel precisely that opportunity?

The Friday Phonograph

2011-02-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Last Friday in February - Can Spring be Far Behind?

by Anne French

I just looked at the calendar and realized that today is the last Friday in February. Soon the month of March will come blowing in like a lion and exit like a lamb, having ushered in the first day of Spring along the way. Today's Friday Phonograph heralds this much anticipated period with Henry Purcell's My Beloved Spake, a portion of a larger work titled Come, Ye Sons of Art. A few lines of lyrics, "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come...," are filled with promise and hope. They came to mind today, and I share them here in a wonderfully joyful anthem sung by The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, directed by Timothy Brown. May your weekend be filled with the promise of Spring.

A Turk in Italy Comes to Town in an Airstream Trailer

2011-02-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

Review by Rodney Punt

If you have not yet seen The Turk in Italy at LA Opera, here’s what you need to do: Drop everything and buy a ticket before they are sold out. Then call your cousin in Milwaukee and tell her to book the next flight out to L.A. so she can join you.

Honestly, it’s that good.

Gioacchino Rossini’s opera arrived in Los Angeles last Saturday for only the second time since its La Scala premiere 197 years ago. (A NYCO production also at the Chandler Pavilion in 1978 featured Beverly Sills, and the nearby Long Beach Opera produced it in that city in 1995.) It comes via the Bavarian State Opera from a 2005 production that originated in Hamburg. LA Opera may be curating more than producing these days, but it has a knack for choosing winners.

Turk (Il Turco in Italia) is homage to Mozart, a comic cocktail that mixes two parts Così fan tutte with a twist of Abduction from the Seraglio. Under masterful direction and with a dream-cast of veterans and newcomers, it is a once in a lifetime production of dazzling invention and dizzying non-stop action. It is also one of Rossini’s more subtle scores, emphasizing ensembles and interaction over arias, though its few moments of quiet musical contemplation are much to be savored.

Felice Romani’s libretto for the 1814 opera (borrowed from an earlier work) followed the wildly popular L’Italiana in Algeri by one year. In this farce about the love-games people play, Italian glam-girl Fiorilla, wife of doting middle-aged Don Geronio, has a wandering eye for exotically handsome Selim, a Turkish prince on the outs with his lover, the slave Zaida, who, with fellow fugitive Albazar, has encamped in Italy with a wandering band of gypsies. Narciso, meanwhile, pines for his former lover Fiorilla. A series of attempted liaisons, attendant histrionics, and a masked ball with mistaken similar identities (third photo below) leads to some genuinely poignant soul-searching about the true nature of marital happiness.

Spicing up the drollery (this is where the opera pivots into comic genius), the poet Prosdocimo, observing all, uses this tawdry reality show to shake his writer’s block and shape an opera libretto, becoming unwittingly entangled in everyone else's troubles.

Making their debuts at LA Opera, Christof Loy, the original production and stage director at Hamburg, and Axel Weidauer, directing L.A.'s revival (with Herbert Murauer’s sets and costumes and Reinhard Traub’s lighting) have updated the Neapolitan setting to a mid-twentieth century La Dolce Vita Italy, where frivolity reigns and anything goes in social mores.

Prosdocimo's search for an opera plot is used as a conceptual premise to spoof all opera conventions, particularly those of contemporary directors. If Peter Sellars can stage Così fan tutte in a contemporary diner, this Turk will update the action to an Airstream camp-trailer, out of which a score of gypsies file as if from a Mack Sennett two-realer. In equal opportunity roasting, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach is mocked with scenes punctuated by glacially moving cast members in bathing suits. Further emphasizing the self-conscious mockery, chorus members playact as stage technicians, sporting black teeshirts emblazoned with "LA Opera" logos.

Did I say the production had a dream cast?

Simone Alberghini’s dark baritone and his exotic swarthy suaveness lend commanding authority to the title character of Prince Selim (top left), whose somewhat shadowy background makes him all the more attractive to the ladies. His allure isn't hurt any by his arriving on an airborne Turkish carpet behind a scrim painted as the Naples harbor.

Nino Machaidze’s Donna Fiorilla (top right), with superficial appetites that include an Imelda Marcos-sized shoe collection, is spurred on by her illicit attraction but regrets it later in a final aria recanting her capriciousness. Delivering a stunning display of bel canto lyricism in that aria, Machaidze garnered the largest applause of the evening on opening night.

Paolo Gavanelli, as the much put upon Geronio (above center), proves again that, in addition to being a Verdi specialist, he is also one of the world’s great buffo baritones, delivering a spectacular display of parlando (Italian patter). With twice as many resonant words streaming out of his mouth as anyone else on stage, he is the work’s desperate center of gravity, in all senses of the word, and a man who must reclaim his wife and his honor in the face of humiliating cuckoldry.

Young mezzo Kate Lindsey’s lovely, lithe Zaida (right) more than holds her own vocally and dramatically as the lover whose passion and constancy win out in the end. Possessing a dancer’s grace, she needs no stunt double for her many lifts and thrusts. (She is also suited for lyric trouser roles, and her Nicklausse last summer at Santa Fe was the single redeeming element in their muddled Tales of Hoffmann.)

Tenor Matthew O’Neill’s Albazar is sympathetic as Zaida’s helper. Tenor Maxim Mironov’s Don Narciso (below right) is as effective in florid vocal outpourings as his Don Ottavio-like character is ineffective as the spurned lover pursuing an unresponsive Fiorilla.

Veteran baritone Thomas Allen brilliantly gauges the hapless Prosdocimo. Plagued with encounters too close for comfort -- props, characters, even walls seeming to jump into his path -- he ends up in a surgeon’s nightmare of bandages and crutches worthy of Naked Gun's Officer Nordberg.

He may have gotten his opera story, but the cost to Prosdocimo in this production has been steep. (above right, below left)

In the end, capricious Fiorilla, faced with the loss of her husband, comes to her senses, just as proud Selim realizes that all along his true love had been his faithful Zaida. While the others have reconciled themselves to their individual fates, our final view of the two couples, as Loy and Weidauer have it, is in side-by-side households, dealing with the the usual domestic stresses and strains but as assuredly married as any two couples in modern suburbia. (photo below)

Under James Conlon's sensitive and idiomatic leadership, and after some rough moments in the overture on opening night, the orchestra sparkled as it kept the action moving, sprinkling Rossinian pixy dust over the assembled and deftly changing gears from the frivolity later on for a few tender moments.

Original audiences thought Turk a lukewarm knock-off of the Italiana of the year before, rejecting it without realizing the new musical and dramatic paths the composer was exploring. While Italiana hewed to convention by producing a laugh-fest of comedic plot entanglements, catchy melodies, and high-flying solos, Turk goes a step further by integrating music into the action with its sophisticated ensembles and short cavatinas. Its serious moments are all the more effective by arriving so unexpectedly. Think of Turk's following Italiana as you would Mark Twain's following his fine Tom Sawyer with the even greater Huckleberry Finn.

Profoundly simple insights, it would seem, are sometimes found in the most superficial of packages -- and scintillating of scores.

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The Turk in Italy opened February 19 and continues on February 27 and March 2, 5, 10, 13 at various times. See Los Angeles Opera.

Photos by Robert Millard and courtesy of LA Opera. Above from left: 1) Simone Alberghini and Nino Machaidze, 2) Paolo Gavanelli and cast, 3) Kate Lindsey and Thomas Allen, 4) Alberghini, Lindsey, Machaidze, Maxim Mironov, 5) various

Rodney Punt may be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

The Friday Phonograph

2011-02-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

Image of an Egyptian Maiden from Jean-Philippe Rameau

by Anne French

Egypt has thoroughly dominated worldwide news in recent weeks. So when I spotted a video of Jean-Philippe Rameau's L'Egyptienne (The Egyptian Maiden), it seemed like a timely selection for this week's "Phonograph." Composed as a section of Rameau's Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin in 1726, the title is a reminder of Egypt's enormous influence on the human psyche over centuries of culture. The music itself is delightfully playful and coquettish, executed magically here by pianist Grigory Sokolov, who maintains its embellishments with delicacy and grace. Here's to a light-hearted start to a wonderful weekend.

Secular Spirituality: Scenes from a Gallery, Set to Music

2011-02-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

-----------------------------------"Calculated Risk" by Michael Westmoreland. Photo courtesy of the artist

Short Take Review by Rodney Punt

Churches today showcase secular spirituality in the arts. Chamber Music at All Saints’ in Beverly Hills is part of this movement, its organist-choir director Craig Phillips a composer-in-residence. Two West Coast premieres, Scenes from a Gallery (2008, organ, violin and flute) and Sojourn for Organ & Winds (2009, with oboe, Bb clarinet, F horn, bassoon) featured his traditional, lyrically gifted style.

Scenes, inspired by Mussorgsky, comments on six contemporary artworks: the swirls of “First Chakra Light”, thrusting wings of “Calculated Risk”, isolation of “Lone Tree”, birdcalls of a winged “Muse”, geometric chord progressions of “Mathematical Equation for Grace”, and abstractions of “Breaking Loose.” Sojourn’s single movement in four episodes has cinematic Handelian motifs, bucolic horn calls, swelling mountain vistas, and a village dance for organ – all atmospherics of Alet-Les-Bains, France.

Inserted mid-way, Francis Poulenc’s Sextet (for winds) brought the sassy joie-de-vivre racket of naughty French Pigalle to a stone-sober English church.

Concert: Scenes from a Gallery
Performers: Craig Phillips, organ; Pip Clarke, violin; Heather Clark, flute; Cathy Del Russo, oboe; Donald T. Foster, clarinet; James Thatcher, horn; Mark Robson, piano; William Wood, bassoon
Date: January 23, 2011
Venue: All Saints’ Episcopal, Beverly Hills

Rodney Punt may be reached at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Jacaranda Music presents The Little Match Girl Passion

2011-02-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

------------Cedric Berry,  Grant Gershon, Adriana Manfredi, Elissa Johnston -- Photo: jacarandamusic

Short Take Review by Rodney Punt

Composer/Librettist David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) is a winter’s tale without a happy ending. Based on the H.C. Andersen tearjerker, a beggar girl is forced to sell matches in the snow, lighting them one by one in a losing battle to keep warm. The setting elevates the story to a universal secular passion, with music of pointillistic brightness and mesmerizing grace. The music has traces of minimalism and chant; its utmost economy of motifs treads an inexorable path from the dread of a flickering heartbeat to a death in frozen stillness.

Its cast of four singing narrators did double duty as eerie trance-inducers and light-as-a-feather percussionists: Elissa Johnston, soprano; Adriana Manfredi, mezzo-soprano;  Grant Gershon, tenor ; Cedric Berry, bass baritone.

The concert also had other genre-bending works: Elliott Carter’s spidery Sonata for flute, oboe, cello & harpsichord, Sofia Gubaidulina’s oddly-registered pulsing sonics for organ in Light & Darkness, Joan Tower’s big-boned Night Fields for string quartet, and Alfred Schnittke’s goofy-glorious Sound & Resound for organ and trombone.

Performers in other works above: Pamela Vliek-Martchev, flute; Leslie Reed, oboe; Timothy Loo, cello; Gloria Cheng, harpsichord; Mark Alan Hilt, organ; Lyris Quartet (strings), Steve Suminski, trombone

Concert Title: Perilous Balance
Date: January 22, 2011
Venue: First Presbyterian, Santa Monica
Future concerts: Jacaranda Music

Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

Recital Excitement

2011-02-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

Broad hosts Salerno-Sonnenberg, Bell, DiDonato

Joyce DiDonato: photo by author

by Donna Perlmutter

Santa Monica’s Broad Stage is crackling with musical fireworks these days – in swift succession there were celebrity violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Joshua Bell. Then came the starry mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. For three consecutive nights revelers packed the house and got what they came for.

Among those treats, a rarity. Now when have you seen or heard from that first fiddler mentioned above? Not recently. But when Salerno-Sonnenberg arrived at the Eli-Edythe Broad jewel of a hall, leading and playing with the San Francisco-based New Century Chamber Orchestra, the 50-year-old virtuosa lit up the stage with her pizzazz, passion and personality.

In fact, those qualities also proved infectious to the mostly female string ensemble. Could we -- jokingly, of course -- call it a version of Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra (plus four men)? Seriously, though, the playing was robust, full-bodied, spirited, and nowhere more so than in Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade,” a work seared indelibly in many minds by Balanchine’s same-titled ballet, the waltz a thing of smiling loveliness under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s ministrations.

So, too, was the rest of her program made up of easy-access music, leaning to various ethnic rhythms. Bartók’s “Romanian Folk Dances, ” with their deep syncopations in gutsy minor key, had a special allure. And Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov, was just as characterful. Vivaldi quotes kept creeping in here and there. But this account was less intriguing than the Gidon Kremer edition we heard downtown several years ago when the Latvian violinist and his Kremerata Baltica played their “Seasons,” which slyly alternated full sections of the Vivaldi score with Piazzolla tangos.

This violinist, though, who used to upset the staid world of classical music with her self-styled outfits and antic playing, managed a gritty, grunting sound, perfectly in touch with tango style -- and also with the Billie Holiday-ish edgy tone we heard in her encore, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”

But Joshua Bell, the next night’s arrival, was no less engaged or engaging -- though focusing on perfect, tonal polish and breath-taking virtuosity. With pianist Sam Haywood – who took equal partnership in Schubert’s dense and rousing "Fantasy in C" – he fashioned high drama. The grand flourish in this music suited him to a T. And all the facets of his extravagant technique that did not get displayed here – the complex filigree, the glassy refinement, contrasting with the great thrusting strokes -- spilled over in the encores, pieces by Wieniawski and Chopin.

One thing, though, that Bell did not (does not) manage from the stage is any sense of inclusiveness with the audience. That belongs largely to women, methinks. And was borne out by mezzo Joyce DiDonato, last on these three nights and accompanied sensitively by pianist David Zobel. She and Salerno-Sonnenberg welcomed their fans sitting out front. They chatted about themselves unself-consciously, praised the Southern California climes that granted a haven from raging snowstorms elsewhere and proved that warmth and charm are critical parts of the performer’s wares.

Still, DiDonato has the goods. She knows how to stand alone onstage and create drama equal to a Hamlet speech – which she did in Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice,” soaring to the top at forte and never producing any wild notes, only purity of delivery. She ran the gamut of emotions – everything from wrenching despair to tenderness in a chillingly delicate trill. Mind you, this number came first in a program of French and Italian songs and arias – no easy warm-up for her. And she went again for the drama in the “Salce” from Rossini’s “Otello.” A stunner.

Her other Rossini offerings hewed to the composer’s lesser-known songs, leaving DiDonato’s big ornamental display to Chaminade’s “L’éte,” which she sang with the kind of glittering coloratura that charms the birds off the trees.

My only quibble is with her mushy diction. And, like most trained singers -- DiDonato included -- they unfurl their magnificent voices without scaling down for wistful little popular songs like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Although she tried, this girl from Kansas was no Dorothy.

Donna Perlmutter is an award-winning critic, journalist and author. Formerly chief music/dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, she contributes to the Los Angeles Times and other publications.

Medea Cries for Justice, Acts on Revenge, in an Abandoned Warehouse

2011-02-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

Review by Rodney Punt

There is at least as much to praise in the careful preparation of Luigi Cherubini’s rarely performed Medea as in its ultimate performance by the Long Beach Opera. That amounts to a lot on both counts in the US stage premiere of the opera’s original version, which opened the 2011 season on January 29. In keeping with the LBO’s iconoclastic ways, it was staged in the site-specific space of the former EXPO Furniture Warehouse in north Long Beach.

Cherubini was one of those innovative composers to whom the even greater ones that followed were indebted for his bridges to new stylistic worlds. What made him so compelling in the aftermath of the French Revolution was his choice of emotionally charged scenarios, his muscular treatment of the orchestra, and his dramatic vocal declamations. For all that, we listen to Cherubini today with ears influenced by what others like Beethoven and Weber would make more of later.

An editor’s scalpel and some creative license shaped this production, so the term “original” in describing it must be taken with a grain of salt. LBO General Director Andreas Mitisek’s Medea has enhanced dramatic flow at the expense of its reflective choruses and other passages cut from the score. Some of that music was strategically rearranged for single voices when deemed important for the narrative. An element of the ancient Euripides play was interpolated as prologue to the opera. Original spoken dialogue was also restored. (A nineteenth century version, in Italian and with recitatives by Franz Lachner, is more familiar in recordings, and it was once a vehicle for soprano Maria Callas.)

The net result of the LBO’s rewriting is an opera considerably shorter (an hour and a half vs. three hours) and leaner musically than the original, but with newly gained dramatic thrust. That drama is further advanced in the expressive English translation of Suzan Hanson, who also performed the title role. Mitisek’s creative energies are present everywhere else as stage director, set designer and conductor.

The production is built around two contemporary metaphors: 1) marital conflict as a boxing match - this one on a raised square platform centrally placed in the vast interior of the warehouse like Madison Square Garden - and 2) the excesses of self-indulgent beautiful people in the mold of Lindsay Lohan and Robert Downey Jr., whose fame and fortunes too often lead them into dissipation. Neither of these metaphors is new, but both are employed effectively.

The action is omnidirectional on the central stage, with actors in anachronistic dress - some modern, some classic - facing several directions at once. Lighting is projected up from within the central stage unit itself, carving sharp contrasts on the actors’ faces.

Medea’s agony is central to the story. She is an ally betrayed, a lover forsaken, a wife scorned, and a mother soon to be bereft of her children. Her prologue tells us that she had secured her husband’s career by helping him obtain the Golden Fleece. Yet the heedless man-on-the-make now throws her aside for a nubile cypher, his marriage to whom will secure him another rung on the ladder to political power. Medea is abandoned without remedy or recourse. We see under her large skirt the writhing bodies of her children by Jason, foretelling the outcome of a struggle between protective maternal instinct and a compulsion for revenge. That compulsion will turn into a trail of blood, consuming the whole kingdom.

Vocal and dramatic performances of the seven principals were on a very high level. Hanson’s steely but plaint soprano imbued Medea (left) with an intensity that invoked sympathy more than revulsion. Tenor Ryan MacPherson was stentorian as Jason (below), a perfect fusion of heroic bearing and hunky male callousness. Ani Maldjian as Dirce (above) was the spoiled, erotically charged, pill-popping daughter of Roberto Gomez’s blustery king, Creon. Peabody Southwell as Medea’s attendant Neris nearly stole the show with her melting pledge of loyalty to her mistress, in a duet with a sinewy, entangling bassoon. Ariel Pisturino and Diana Tash, along with Southwell, contributed solid performances as chorus stand-ins. The voices of all filled with ease the amorphous warehouse cavern.

The orchestra’s big-boned effects were well performed if not ideally transmitted in the tubby acoustics of the space and its corner location within it. In particular, the sheen of the upper strings was missing. One can hear Cherubini struggling in his orchestral textures to free himself of the operatic conventions he inherited, straddling as he does the high classic tradition with emerging romantic tendencies.

Coordination between singers and the somewhat remote orchestra was better than might be expected, facilitated from monitors at each of the four sides of the center square-cut and due, no doubt, to solid drilling from Mitisek, who led the proceedings with a steady hand throughout.

Site-specific productions have certain risks, including unanticipated glitches to be worked out after initial shakedowns. For this viewer on opening night it was the supertitles projected on each of the far walls. With the audience at floor level viewing the action several feet above, the actors mostly obscured their own scrolled utterances.

It was bold of Euripides in 431 BC to alter an old myth by assigning the murder of Medea’s children directly to her and not the occupying Corinthians. It was equally bold of Luigi Cherubini to write an opera in 1797 that went even further by shaping perceptions of a woman at least as much a victim of her crime as its perpetrator. It is not surprising that both productions were met with less than full acclamations from the predominantly male audiences of their respective eras.

Medea’s tragic story is one that remains modern by speaking to the issue of human rights in general and women’s rights in particular. Cherubini may have set the way forward for male composers to come, but he also contributed to the advancement of women when he exposed the injustice of male dominance over them. This advocacy, as much as Cherubini’s trend-setting music, keeps historically important Medea relevant as well for today’s audiences.

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The Friday Phonograph

2011-02-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

You've Got a Valentine From Georges Delerue

by Anne French

I've decided it's easier to choose a card, a box of chocolates, a dozen roses, or the myriad of traditional things one does on February 14^th than it is to choose one piece of music for the occasion. Cupid apparently does not shoot arrows aimed at musical scores. But I knew I could rely on the genius of Georges Delerue to capture the spirit of the day. And I knew there must be a French film providing a perfect vehicle for Delerue's genius. So I kept looking, and voilà! I found this poignant and haunting theme written by Delerue forPhilippe de Broca's 1972 film, Chère Louise, starring Jeanne Moreau. I confess I never saw the film, but if this theme isn't romantic, I don't know what is. So listen now, and I'm sure the sentimental value will be strong as ever on Monday. Happy Valentine's Day!

Junky and Monkish

2011-02-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

George Herms takes a bric-a-brac opera to REDCAT
Monkish junkman Herms, with slide of protégé.

by Joseph Mailander

Towards the end of George Herms' musical-assemblage bricolage, The Artist's Life; a Free Jazz Opera, the lanky septuagenarian is hoisted into the air, far above two other suspended pieces of urban junk, a metal spiral staircase and a 600-pound buoy, that have also been lifted, spun, and "played" in performance. The stress load on REDCAT's rafters endures, and so does the point: there is lots of junk in the world, and the human spirit is both kin and transcendent to it. Like plants, as critic Robert Hughes has said, we need the shit of others on which to feed, and nobody in contemporary multimedia takes this to heart more than Herms.

Herms is equal mixes ad hoc artist and structured entertainer. While engaging, his constructions of detritus and his over-serious North Beach-circa-1960 stage presence play as much to giggle fits as to solemnity. He is possessed of as much gravitas as a boulevardier falling into a manhole, Chaplinesque in his solemnity.

His current work is scored as a "Free Jazz Opera" and two formidable jazz ensembles run away with the music to it. There are moments that make you laugh, and moments that make you wince. The first musical piece is pure brazz loft jazz and you wonder if you are in for ninety minutes of Eric Dolphy times seven. Through the piece, Herms stamps papers with various stamps on paper plates, makes unrecognizable impressions, and then holds them up to the two music ensembles, as though they are sheet music. They are not, of course; they are spontaneous conceptual art, and don't mesh with music at all.

But as much of the rest of the media are the recognizably found-objects we see in assemblage sculpture, much of the rest of the music is recognizable west coast jazz, some of it as friendly and refreshingly familiar as Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers ensembles of old. The music is pumped out by Bobby Bradford Mo’tet and the Theo Saunders Group, and these two units are split on stage, delivering sturdy, brassy, spot-on bop and modal jazz through the evening.

If there is disappointment, it is that Herms does much not explore the musicality and tonality of the found objects he fetishizes. A spinning staircase and later a spinning buoy--rolled out on dollies and hung from the rafters--end up exceptionally large gongs emitting exceptionally small dongs. Herms taps them, somewhat rhythmically, somewhat curiously, and appears to have no special talent for percussion, In fact, the production's highly talented and multi-faceted soprano, Diana Briscoe (she not only sings and dances, she helps Herms slip into his hoist), invited to play the buoy by rapping it with a short segment of a 2x4, brings far more musicality to the exploration than Herms, who seemed satisfied to pound one of the buoy's indentations that consistently resounded a perfect B perhaps because he recognized the note.

Highlights for me included a very solemn construction and erection of a makeshift cross during the piece that celebrated death and the final dance in which Herms shoulders a helter-skelter stepladder riddled with detritus and dances with his sporting soprano.

It does not require genius or even much irony to announce a makeshift--everything is makeshift--encore entitled "Concerto for Saw and Cellphone" in which the audience is invited to take out their cells and take photos. But it does take an affable amount of panache to pull such a thing off, even such an evening off, and ultimately Herms leaves you laughing over his bric-a-brac, and appreciative of art for entertainment's sake. I took a photo too (below), and left very pleased to have taken it, and very pleased to have come.

The Friday Phonograph

2011-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

A Brief Respite from the Stormy Winter

by Anne French

What could be better than an aria from Bach's Easter Oratorio to remind us that winter cannot last forever? And when countertenor Andreas Scholl sings a joyous duet with a baroque oboe d'amore, the results are truly spectacular. Belgian oboist Marcel Ponseele, one of the greatest oboists of our time, provides a brilliantly played obligato for the incomparable Scholl, performed here with the Collegium Vocale of Gent, Germany. I have learned that in addition to being a master of the baroque oboe, Ponseele also builds oboes based on 18th Century models. My Friday favorite for this week is Saget, Saget, Mir Geschwinde, from the Easter Oratorio of J.S. Bach, conducted by Philippe Herrweghe. May it bring a bit of warmth to your weekend.

Happy Birthday to Franz Schubert!

2011-01-31T21:39:00.000-08:00

by Anne French

Franz Schubert was born on January 31, 1797, and lived to be only 31 years old. Not many birthdays to celebrate. Yet in those few years he wrote some 600 lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), great liturgical music, operas, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. We celebrate his birthday today by sharing one of his many gifts to us: the serenely beautiful Impromptu in G Flat Major, performed by Vladimir Horowitz.

The Eclipse Quartet and Its Contemporary Cosmos

2011-01-30T07:36:00.000-08:00

Review by Rodney Punt

Less flamboyant than the Kronos and more feline than the Arditti, the Eclipse Quartet is L.A.’s answer to both in twentieth-century and present-day music. Its four members -- violinists Sara Parkins and Sarah Thornblade, violist Alma Lisa Fernandez, and cellist Maggie Parkins -- have teamed in this ensemble for eight years, but still have combusting fires in their bellies, at least by the evidence of recent performances.

I reviewed their impressive concert of Annie Gosfield’s industrial-inspired music at the West Adams Café-Club Fais Do-Do last fall. The Eclipse and their audiences, by the way, favor such gritty, out-of-the-way venues. Two more housed their recent outings.

The Royal T, a retail site and restaurant on Culver City’s artistically alive Washington Boulevard, was the acoustically cozy setting in mid-January for a single long work by Morton Feldman, with the Eclipse joined by pianist Vicky Ray. Morton, a musical Abstract Expressionist, was a product of the heady New York arts scene of the 1950’s. One of his last works, the Piano and String Quartet of 1985, is a grand summation of what he had first revered in Anton Webern’s highly distilled miniatures, grown over the years into his own vast landscapes. As Feldman wrote: “Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale.”

The listener tries to “figure out” the work in its first hour. Ever-varying but singularly lonely piano arpeggios thrust upward from a pillow of harmonically morphing strings. Slowly, subtly, an hour into the work, a rocking cosmic-cradle rhythm is introduced in the strings. At this point the listener begins to let go of his will and give up on analysis. Lovely motivic moments enter and depart from the cello and her string siblings. The listener’s subconscious has been kidnapped beyond cognitive resistance, and almost physical endurance. The work’s lapidary complexly is Bachian and yet also minimalist in its glacial pacing, suggesting the still, quiet desolation of a Rothko painting.

The Eclipse Quartet and pianist Vicky Ray, on a psychedelically painted and visually jarring piano, were in full control of this carefully paced, well articulated performance, even as their audience eventually surrendered any conscious control on how to navigate their receptivity along the way.

Moving north for a concert a dozen days later, the Eclipse inhabited a bright acoustic at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts in a program of four challenging works. Premiered was a piece by Stephen Cohn, along with a modern classic by John Cage (Morton Feldman’s lifelong friend and musical soul-mate) and some recent works by Meredith Monk and Lois Vierk.

Cohn’s Winter Soul (2010) is a precision-cut jewel of twelve minutes duration, based on a four-note opening motif and two related themes. It unfolds in crisp modern sonorities by means of playful but rigorous devices, in the manner of baroque treatment. Variations, transformations and stacked chains of melodies, modulated and inverted in their entrances, elaborate the musical argument. Cross rhythms and tone clusters tickle the senses while a four-note atonal canon adds a wistful element. Despite the formal treatment, the work’s emotional climate struck me as not so much about a winter’s melancholy as a frisky solstice jog that stimulates the mind and warms the heart. It deserves a concert life; hopefully the Eclipse will keep it in their standard repertoire (assuming that anything could become standard for these relentless musical explorers.)

Monk’s Stringsongs (2005) explores technical devices in its four engaging movements: double-stopping for rotational “Cliff Lights”, non-sequitur solos in “Tendrils”, a close-harmony session for “Obsidian Chorale”, and wispy-scratches for “Phantom Strings.” Written for the Kronos Quartet, it found a congenial home-away-from-home in the Eclipse’s focused performance.

A forerunner of the “still” music later favored by the minimalists is Cage’s austere String Quartet in Four Sections (1950). Its four seasonal movements express not so much directionality as state of mind. “Quietly Flowing Along – Summer” rests in its languid stupor, points of light piercing as through occasional heavenly-sky portals in a leafy tree. “Slowly Rocking – Autumn” is a plaintive folk lament tinged by sharp-edged cuts. “Nearly Stationary – Winter” is a lonely visage of bleakness in high-registered, continuously dissonant, softly spoken chords. “Quodlibet – Spring” takes us full circle in the annual cycle to a short and sweet announcement of renewing life.

Finally, Vierk’s River Beneath the River (1993) paints its deep aqua flows with tremolos and glissandos, eventually working its way into a kind of harvest square dance with cello drones and gaily flaying fiddles.

With this affirmation, the program’s curious nocturnal trip concluded. The eclipse had passed, but we look forward to the Eclipse returning again, and soon.

*****

Who: Eclipse Quartet -- Sara Parkins, violin; Sarah Thornblade, violin; Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola; Maggie Parkins, cello (with Vicki Ray, piano, January 13 only)

What: Piano and String Quartet by Morton Feldman (1985)
When: January 13, 2011
Where: Royal T, 8910 Washington Blvd, Culver City

What: Eclipse Quartet
When: January 25, 2011
Where: Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena

Above photo courtesy of Eclipse Quartet
Rodney Punt can be contacted at Rodney@artspacifica.net

The Friday Phonograph

2011-01-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

A Real Dutch Treat!

Unico Willem van Wassenaer's "Armonici" Concerto

by Anne French

The Concerti Armonici, written somewhere between 1725 and 1740, went through quite a process of parental misidentification before their proper composer was found. They were first published by an Italian violinist, to whom they were also attributed. (Wrong.) Some years later a Polish composer asserted that they were written by famed composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. (Also wrong.) But since they were stylistically of the Roman Baroque fashion, similar to Italian composer Locatelli, it must be that he wrote them, right? Wrong. Finally in 1979-1980 the original manuscripts were found, and the concerti were rightly declared to be the work of Unico Willem van Wassenaer, a Dutch nobleman who hadn't wanted them published in his own name for some reason. So it took over two hundred years to prove their authorship and settle the score forever... so to speak. I've chosen the fifth of these concerti, performed here by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra directed by Ton Koopman. Enjoy, and happy weekend to all!

Schubert's Winterreise from Le Salon de Musiques

2011-01-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

Review by Rodney Punt

When a young singer sets out to make his reputation in Lieder (German for art songs), he must carefully consider how he will introduce himself. He may choose appealing, often familiar works that sound more difficult than they are to avoid pushing the limits of his still forming technique and interpretive abilities. Alternately, he may choose repertoire that is new or out of the ordinary to focus the audience’s attention on the novelty of the songs themselves.

Baritone Christopher Herbert chose a third option. He threw down and picked up his own gauntlet, taking on the summit of the art of Lieder, Franz Schubert’s monumental Winterreise, for his local debut. Here is a work widely known for its vocally exposed, 85-minute endurance-run in twenty-four songs. Scrutinized by attentive audiences, it presents daunting technical and interpretive challenges even for veteran singers. Maybe especially for veteran singers.

You have to admire, then, the ambition of Herbert’s first ever outing with Winterreise, performed with pianist François Chouchan at last Sunday’s Le Salon de Musiques at the Chandler's fifth floor room. While their version is far from fully formulated, it could be a first important step for them on that long winter’s journey to a full realization of the work’s potential.

The sheer discipline of memorizing the words and music of Winterreise over the relatively short period of time Herbert apparently had to prepare it is commendable, not to mention his courage in facing down first performance anxieties. (He mentioned after the work's completion fearing the looming high F# in “Die Krähe.” Happily, he hit the note just fine.)

Courage itself does not, however, negate the questionable wisdom of taking on a public performance of the equivalent of an actor’s King Lear role so early in his acquaintance with the work.

Make no mistake. Herbert’s career will likely be a memorable one. He has matinee-idol good looks and an attractive lyric voice of emerging shadings that, with careful cultivation, could put him on track for solid success in the song repertoire.

Herbert is about thirty years old. At that age a baseball player is already pacing himself to avoid strain and injury. A composer may have already achieved the peak of his powers, as had Franz Schubert who composed this work at the age of thirty. But a singer at thirty, particularly a male and a baritone, has barely taken off his training wheels.

Ian Bostridge was singing Winterreise at about this age, but his London performances had come after years of study, and his high tenor voice had developed early. Fischer-Dieskau also performed it young, but again after years of study.

While this first time run-through for Herbert and Chouchan was respectable, it was also equally far from deeply satisfying. Perhaps it is their trial run for a performance with ballet scheduled for the 29th of this month in Santa Monica. There are some steps between now and then which they could consider in their approach to the work.

Overall tempos were a bit too rapid, even for the general trend in today’s Winterreise performances to move along more than their ancestors. The aforementioned “Die Krähe”, for example, should depict a crow floating above the protagonist’s head, but here it was more like a sprinter running alongside him.

On a technical level, Herbert would do well to sustain more legato phrasing on his lines. His phrasing sometimes yielded to choppiness. It was not clear also if the various colorations of his voice were used for expressive purposes or simply were the only ones available for the register he was singing in; low notes were invariably dark, high notes intended as soft were too often breathy.

As for Chouchan, a more distinct articulation in his pianism, particularly in the rapid passages, would come closer to a true Schubertian style. More sensitivity to phrasing to compliment textual moments will improve the subtlety of his performance. The art of piano collaboration is not the same as instrumental collaboration; the pianist must execute downbeats, for instance, infinitesimally behind his singer to allow the singer’s consonants to be heard. Executed at the same time, as in this outing, the percussive piano smothers a singer’s delicate consonants and compromises the audience’s ability to hear the words.

With these technical aspects mastered, the singer and his pianist are ready for the even more challenging task of interpretation. This cannot happen in two weeks; it is a long, laborious process. Performers who essay Winterreise will be acutely aware of the legacy left from their predecessors in recordings, or performances still in collective public memory.

Of the two-dozen or more performances I have heard live, what is memorable in the best of them is not so much dazzling vocalism as an interpretive point of view. These performances are informed by individual personality and emotional investment, sometimes even a conceptual framework. They will be guided by a principle important to all great artists, trusting one's instincts to be true to both the work performed and oneself.

To give an idea of the potential, here are a few twitter-ready characterizations of performances I have attended that stand out: the iconic, subtly nuanced 1969 one of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Brussels, the affectingly ponderous 1984 version from Jon Vickers with Peter Schaff at the Chandler, the poignant 1995 one in the original high-keys by tenor Peter Schreier and Alexei Lubimov at the Chandler, the super suave 1997 one from Thomas Hampson and Wolfram Rieger at the Chandler, the intensely internalized 2004 one of Matthias Goerne with Alfred Brendel at Disney Hall, the destruction-derby 2005 staged version of Erik Nelson-Werner and Michelle Schumann at the Long Beach Opera, the tough-guy 2008 version from Sam McElroy and Armen Guzelimian at an Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, and, most recently, in March 2010, the psychotically unhinged one of Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

One may have their preferences from the above. One may not even like some of these performances. But one must acknowledge that each bore the stamp of individual investment and integrity. Each had its own distinct personality, its own raison d’être, and each was the result of the artists' long association with the work. Absent a point of view and substantial investment by performers in Winterreise, there is little justification for taking on the rigors of preparing such a monster work.

One aspect of the program did meet high standards of professionalism. An articulate, informed UC Riverside Professor Byron Adams introduced it. He noted that Wilhelm Müller’s poems depicted an “existential crisis” for the story’s protagonist. He reminded the audience that in the early nineteenth century, the urban noises of today simply did not exist. Silence was truly silence. In such atmosphere, one could hear one’s own heartbeat, the sound of feet tramping on snow, and the bark of dogs in a lonely city. A horse's gallop and the post-horn announcements of arriving mail, anachronistic today, would have been commonplace sounds in this period. Adams also led a discussion with the audience after the concert that touched upon symbolism in the poems, as in the “three suns” of the penultimate “Die Nebensonnen.”

Le Salon de Musiques has offered two programs in a row in which its performers are essaying, singly or collectively, first time public performances of well-known classics. Yet it is important for the credibility of any chamber music series to project an image not of recent acquaintance but mastery. If that is to be the ambition of this series, it is one that should be pursued vigorously.

Above Photo: Carole Sternicha
Rodney Punt can be reached at Rodney@artspacifica.net