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Want not

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

By: James Jorden

Our old friend Heather Mac Donald is back, ostensibly to mourn the loss of “Petrarchan intimacy with the past“ in the study of the humanities, but, reliably enough, she can’t help taking a swipe at Regietheater while she’s at it.

Now, my contact with academia has been scarce and spotty since I last took a graduate course in… well, I don’t remember the year precisely, but I do know that everyone was talking about this controversial new pop singer called Madonna, so the math is easy enough to do. So, like the unreconstructed opera queen that I am I’ll skip over the dull bits of Mac Donald’s rant to get the juicy stuff. Let’s see, “…nudity and kinky sex on stage, as well as cell phones, Big Macs, and snide put-downs of American capitalism…. the detritus of consumer culture… sluts, psychopaths, and slobs…” Ah, here we are:

As the director of the Frankfurt opera declared, no one should care what Handel wanted in his operas; what matters is “what interests us… what we want.” Actually, the only thing that matters is what Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky wanted.

Well, Christ only knows what “the director of the Frankfurt opera” was actually talking about, and I’m hardly going to get into whole thing of trying to parse the meaning of an badly attributed, unsourced translated quotation taken out of context. No, I’d prefer to examine Ms. Mac Donald’s reaction.

She says, “Actually, the only thing that matters is what Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky wanted.” But how does she know what Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky wanted? For that matter, how can anyone know what Handel, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky wanted?

Without the application of the art of necromancy, what these gentlemen “wanted” is purely a matter of conjecture. I have always thought that one of the most poisonous and destructive rationalizations in common use is “He would have wanted it that way.” This sentence almost invariably means, “Never mind  what he wanted, I want it that way, and I’m willing to drag a corpse into the argument to prevent you from answering me.”

We have at best an imperfect and partial idea of what this or that composer “wanted,” particularly in regard to the dramatic presentation of their opera. We may have some documentation on what the composer allowed in his own time, assuming he had control over his work. So far as we know, Mozart or Handel took no direct control over the staging and design of their operas. So do we decide from that negative information that they had no interest in how their operas were produced as theater, or do we assume that under different conditions they might have taken an active interest?

If there is documentary evidence of how Tchaikovsky wanted his operas staged, I’m not familiar with it. I don’t read Russian, and I’m unfamiliar with any of his letters or other writings available in translation in which he addresses issues of stagecraft relative to his operas. So for the purposes of this argument, I’m going to turn to two composers whose voluminous writings are widely available, and who clearly did take an active interest in how their operas were staged.

The letters of Giuseppe Verdi include many suggestions as to how his operas should be presented theatrically, though his ideas generally seem to be more derivative than original. For example, he saw or heard of a stage effect used in British productions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a way of presenting Banquo’s reappearance as the ghost at the banquet, and he insisted that this effect be duplicated in the first production of his opera.

But what does that practical detail reveal to us of Verdi’s broader philosophy of how his operas should be staged? He chooses a technique that is tried and true and insists it should be applied, from which we may infer that his approach to opera staging is fairly conservative. On the other hand, he does not borrow his idea from a practice standard in the Italian opera houses of his time, or even from Italian spoken theater. No, his taste was eclectic and practical: if it had been effective in London for 200 years, it should be effective in Florence. This kind of open-minded approach suggests that Verdi might have been to say, “do whatever is effective, never mind about tradition.” That’s the opposite of “conservative.”

So was Verdi conservative or not? What did Verdi want? About the only answer we can reliably come up with is, “he wanted a good show.”

Given Richard Wagner’s enormous output of theoretical writings, we ought be able to come up with an answer to the question, “what did Richard Wagner “want?”  If only it were that easy!  Wagner’s thinking was bewilderingly polymathic, and so reading even his “practical” pieces, his instructions on how he wanted his operas to be produced, leads to a kind of sensory overload. He talks about cuts, about tempo, about scene-painting, about choreography, about declamation. In the space of a single sentence he jumps from step-by-step instructions on how to beat time in a tricky passage to a high-flown psychological and philosophical analysis of the character of Tannhäuser.

But, stepping back at a distance of more than a century, there are some generalizations we can make. One in particular is striking. Even as early as 1852, Wagner’s notion of the task of the operatic stage director is radically modern, decades ahead of what even the most avant-garde theaters in Europe were then putting into practice.

Theater history ordinarily credits Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen as the prototype of the modern theater director. Wagner knew Saxe-Meiningen’s work but it’s problematic to say that he was influenced by it; rather, the composer and the nobleman indepently arrived at convergent conclusions. Their vision of theater was director-based, under the control of a sort of production czar whose vision informed every aspect of the production: costumes, scenery, blocking, lighting, sound effects, even the widely-derided notion of completely darkening the auditorium during the performance.

At the time these two artists were active, their form of director-driven theater was the most avant-garde concept imaginable, a style of production that frankly most audiences found bewildering, at least at first. So what, then, can we say Wagner “wanted?” Was he striving for a hodgepodge of minutely detailed psychological naturalism with tatty pantomime visual effects (as the first production of the Ring turned out to be)? Or was Wagner’s goal rather to create a truly modern theatrical experience, a production so vivid and powerful that the audience would apprehend it as a sort of waking dream?

Well, the thing is, we don’t know. But in the meantime, here are these masterpieces that don’t exist until they are performed. I prefer to think that Wagner and Verdi and Mozart and even Tchaikovsky would prefer to have their operas performed as opposed to unperformed. And when those works are performed, I would hope that the creators would want each new production to be done thoughtfully and creatively, not simply following a rote formula determined by tradition.

Every opera production needs to make a case for itself: does it communicate with the specific audience is is targeted to? That production may look like something Mozart or Verdi or Wagner would recognize or it may not, but the deciding factor should not be the imagined whims of someone who died long before any of us were born.

Or, worse, the expressed whims of a Heather Mac Donald.

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Requiem aeternam

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid
The Festtage of the Staatsoper Berlin, founded by Daniel Barenboim in 1996, is not officially an Easter Festival. But while the Berlin Philharmonic left the Philharmonie for some mountain air (taking up residence for the first time this year in Baden-Baden), the maestro— between conducting the first full cycle of the Cassiers/Bagnoli Ring production, which has unfolded between the German capital and Milan since 2010—presided over ensembles of both the Staatsoper and La Scala in two different Requiem masses.

The pianist and conductor, currently music director of both opera houses, opened Mozart’s Requiem on April 1 with W.A.’s last piano concerto, KV 595. The Staatskapelle’s rich warm, strings lent the music great strength—particularly in forte passages—while gentler nuances could have been more florid and secretive. Still, the balance with the piano was ideal in the opening Allegro. Barenboim brings a wonderful spontaneity to his performances—even if there were a couple of smudges on the keyboard—and he masters the Staatskapelle’s full-bodied sound with a firm but giving hand. The final Allegro movement, which opens deceptively with a variation of the chirping song Komm, lieber Mai, attained a mysterious quality that provided a captivating bridge to the Requiem, where Mozart could no longer take refuge in the childlike playfulness that masks a complex spectrum of emotions in other late works.

The mass, which lay unfinished on the composer’s deathbed, conveys a God-fearing sense of his own mortality. It is not until the bright E-flat major triad of the Sanctus movement, completed largely by Mozart’s contemporary Frank Xaver Süßmayer, that the light of day shines. There is nothing operatic about the work—one of several masses Mozart wrote between 1768 and 1791. As penetrating as the voices of the Staatsoper chorus were, one almost wished for a more penitent approach. Of the soloists, it was René Pape and Bernarda Fink—respectively the lower male and female voices—who captured the music’s demands for internal spirituality.

Rollando Villazòn seemed to vie for attention with his hystrionic facial expressions, so it was all the more excruciating when he switched suddenly from head to chest voice mid-entrance in Tuba Mirum. He managed to push above the ensemble later but it seems unlikely his timbre will ever recover the luster it bore pre-vocal crisis. Soprano Maria Bengtsson lent every line a pretty, creamy sound, but her inflections were often mannered. The Staatskapelle performed with increasing intensity, investing Domine Jesu Christe with an incision that drove to the heart of the music. Barenboim brought the final Lux Aeterna to a spaciously paced close.

Verdi’s Requiem, performed March 30 with the orchestra and chorus of La Scala, is unarguably the more theatrical of the two masses, emerging in the 1870s when the composer wrote no new operas. Verdi, moved to complete the work upon the death of his literary hero Alessandro Manzoni in 1873, nevertheless commented modestly that with so many Requiem Masses “there’s no point to writing one more.” He was wrong. His Dies Irae is one of the most petrifying moments in musical history, the chorus descending into a fiery pit of swirling strings and brass so demonic that even Wagner looks tame. The effect was nearly ear-numbing from my seat on the balcony above the stage, but I couldn’t miss the chorus’ homogeneity of tone and commitment to every syllable.

Daniela Barcellona gave a lesson in rich shading, carrying effortlessly across the hall in her solo of the second Dies movement. Soprano Maria Segreta, stepping in last minute for Anja Harteros, has a sweet timbre that sometimes struggled to hold its own alongside the voluminous mezzo, although it’s impossible for me to judge properly given the acoustics from my seat. They struck a placid balance in Agnus Dei. Pape was his usual serene self, and tenorissimo Fabio Sartori rounded out the ensemble with a penetrating but unpretentious tone. The musicians of La Scala made clear how deeply this music flows in their veins, phrasing with an unforced fluidity worthy of the highest Kunstreligion.

rebeccaschmid.info

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A Dance Labyrinth by Kyle Abraham

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

By Rachel Straus

The world premiere of Kyle Abraham’s Pavement, seen at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse on November 3, evokes a vision of urban youth careening through a dark world. Abraham begins Pavement by marking a spot with his downcast arm.  Then he lassoes his body, drawing a circle with his outstretched limbs. He moves loose, full force and in searching manner, as if looking for a clear compass. When a white dancer enters, he stops Abraham, lies him face down on the floor, and brings his hands to the base of his spine. Abraham’s arrest is done without emotion. This lack of drama makes the event feel doubly devastating.

Pavement’s racially provocative introduction occurs to the accompaniment of Fred McDowell’s rasp-voiced blues song “What’s the Matter Now.” Its lyrics suggest impending violence, but the brutality in Pavement never occurs on stage. It transpires through sound bites from John Singleton’s 1991 crime drama Boyz n the Hood in which young men lose their lives to gang violence.

The recent violence of Hurricane Sandy robbed Pavement of its intended set design. Yet the square stage’s red outline and the presence of a basketball hoop, whose backboard occasionally projected visions of a housing project, gave the 70-minute work a clear sense of place. Abraham’s casting—four black male dancers (Abraham included), two white male dancers, and one black female performer (the powerful mover Rena Butler)—augured a dance about race. Yet Pavement is far from being a modern-day West Side Story. A tale of black against white never comes to the fore. Like T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Wasteland, Abraham creates scenes that don’t necessarily fit together or have clear beginnings and endings. They are snippets of everyday life (Abraham asking for a dollar) and dream evocations, in which his remarkable dancers’ limbs weave in and out of each other to the accompaniment of a red strobe light.

Pavement’s stream of conscious structure is also created through a collage of 12 pieces of music. The recorded selections include a J.C. Bach and Mozart aria (performed by the French tenor Philippe Jaroussky), two ballads by Sam Cooke, and an excerpt from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (about homosexual oppression). Almost all of the musical selections, listed in the playbill by the composers’ names only, carry metaphorical weight. Unfortunately, it requires research to understand the connections Abraham is making between the music and his messages regarding the slipperiness of love, gender and race.

In the program notes, Abraham excerpts a quote from W.E.B Du Bois’ 1903 Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois developed the theory of a black person’s double consciousness. He called it the veil. When Abraham’s dancers do the high five, the gangsta walk, and behave too cool for school, they appear to be acting out today’s veil. When they launch into pure dancing sections, they move beyond coded acts of identity. They become unveiled.

Pavement ends with a pile up of bodies. The dancers, however, don’t look dead; they appear to be sleeping, lulled by the sound of Donny Hathaway singing “Some Day We’ll All Be Free.” Here again Abraham transforms a violent image into one that is doubled or fractured in meaning. This shirking of didacticism makes Pavement more porous than concrete. Here is a dance work that becomes a labyrinth, one that is as puzzling as it is fascinating.

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New York Rites

Friday, September 21st, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

In Berlin, where contemporary music thrives from the Philharmonie to off spaces, it is a widespread perception that New York’s mainstream institutions are afraid to program anything past Stravinsky. A look at Alan Gilbert’s recent undertakings with the New York Philharmonic, notably in a hugely successful “360” concert of Mozart, Stockhausen, Boulez and Ives in June that exploited the full space of Park Avenue Armory and was streamed live on medici.tv, reveals the idea to be a fallacy. Yet it is ironic that the orchestra’s new season has kicked off with a tribute to Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). The concert is only the first of many events that will commemorate the centenary of Stravinsky’s ballet, which falls on May 29 of next year.

As with many works that have shaped the canon, the work was a scandal upon its Paris premiere. Choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky reportedly set off physical fights in the audience, perhaps a response to the primitive energy that Stravinsky’s music launched onstage—a far cry from the cultivated elegance high society expected to encounter on the Champs-Elysées. Le Sacre has since become one of the most widely recorded and well-known 20th-century works. Even if it doesn’t feel monumental, in the right hands, it is still hard to resist the score’s raw power.

Alan Gilbert and the Philharmonic, seen at Avery Fisher Hall on September 19, made a strong account for venerating Stravinsky, investing ripping strings and grinding rhythms with the animalistic vigor that turns this music into a pagan feast. The painterly dissonances of “The Sacrifice” emerged with ethereal mystery, while the players invested the metallic, stabbing attacks of the final “Sacrificial Dance” with unrepressed drive. The delicate, overlapping wind solos of the opening “Adoration of the Earth” emerged with unpretentious clarity before ceding to the mechanical churning of the “Augurs of the Spring” that effectively wipes the unconscious of its need for soothing classical idioms.

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, performed with Leif Ove Andsnes, received a less unified, persuasive interpretation. Andsnes could not quite match the heat of the Philharmonic in the opening Allegro, although his clean, incisive pianissimi nearly redeemed the performance. He and Gilbert communicated effortlessly, and yet the emotional arc from inner torment to Mozartean bitter-sweetness at times lacked conviction. The inner Largo movement felt a bit studied despite the orchestra’s sensitive phrasing, while the players’ tempered use of bombast was well suited to the final Rondo in its stormy pursuit of light-heartedness. Andsnes brought a natural, although not terribly spontaneous, playfulness to his final solo passages.

Opening the program was Kurtag’s …quasi una fantasia…for Piano and Groups of Instruments, an approximately 10-minute work that calls for the distribution of instrument clusters around the performance space while the pianist (Andnes) remains onstage in pseudo-concerto style. The rustling percussion and sparse descending piano melodies that open the piece would have been even stronger with the lights dimmed, but even more importantly than visual aesthetics, Avery Fisher Hall did not provide ideal acoustics. The snare drums behind me at one point overwhelmed the timpani onstage. Gilbert nevertheless coordinated the work with care, allowing sensuous sighing melodies to linger as strongly as the battery of percussion.

Although the piece is not tailor made for Avery Fisher Hall, Gilbert is making a concerted effort to seduce his audience base into what many listeners would consider unusual repertoire, and one hopes that he will succeed. It takes vision, charisma and daring but sound artistic choices to guide an orchestra through the current age of economic uncertainty and cultural levelling. And if Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring can teach us anything, it is that challenging the status quo is sometimes the only way to make artistic progress. As I descended into the subway after the concert, the flute melody from the opening “Adoration of the Earth” hovered mystically. It was of course just a busking musician. Even if New York does not meet the expectations of more academically-minded new music connoisseurs, one can´t deny its magic.

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Infektion! ‘Europeras 3&4’ and Rihm’s ‘Dionysus’ at the Staatsoper

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Infektion!, the name of the Staatsoper’s annual Festival for New Music Theater could easily extend to describe the presence of John Cage in Germany this year. No other country outside the U.S. has planned as many events for his centenary of his birth, and Berlin is in some people’s minds already ‘Caged out.’ The Akademie der Künste has been holding a multi-disciplinary, year-long retrospective since last fall; the annual new music festival MärzMusik dedicated itself to Cage and Consequences, flying in Joan La Barbara and the entire Sonic Arts Lounge. Cage’s works will take center stage next week in Darmstadt, where his 1958 visit “swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster,” in the words of German musicologist Carl Darlhaus. His Europeras 1&2, which premiered in Frankfurt in 1987 and received their last U.S. performance at the MOMA in 1992 (the year of Cage’s death), will be revived next month at the Ruhrtriennale. Meanwhile, at the Berliner Staatsoper, Die Musik ist los—100 Jahre John Cage (July 1-15) features six-hour evenings of Cage in ad hoc programming that includes his Europeras 3&4. The German premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus, a Salzburg Festival commission from 2010; a revival of the Staatsoper production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; and a recital with Ian Bostridge are also officially part of the festival, just founded last year.

Cage’s Europeras, of which he wrote five altogether, are intended as a negation of opera, particularly in its synthesis of the arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk. “For 200 years the Europeans have sent us their operas,” the composer reportedly commented. “Now I am returning them all to them.” The first two include ten and nine singers, respectively, in extracts from over 60 operas, with sets and costumes that are meant coexist independently like objets trouvés. The third and fourth, which premiered in London in 1990, are more modest in scale: Europera 3 features six singers in a capella arias of his or her own choice, two pianists in excerpts from Liszt’s Opera Phantasien and 12 record-players, while Europera 4 dwindles to two singers, a wind-up gramophone, and a pianist. A ticking digital clock substitutes for a conductor to synchronize the Happenings, which overlap comically and sometimes irritatingly into a non-linear plot of sorts that is left to the viewer’s imagination.

Seen July 11 in the Werkstatt of the Schiller Theater, a small wing which the Staatsoper uses to stage new music theater, the singers walked onto strategically numbered platforms that also served as seats for the audience (most moved around at will). Unfinished excerpts of Liszt’s at times schmaltzy transcriptions yielded to the entrance of well-known arias, which were sometimes sung over more than one album of opera music. The cacophony built into a messy  tapestry of sound that must be a challenge for even the best-trained singer; all were equipped with pitch forks, while the most prominent figure onstage, the soprano Esther Lee, in a tutu and giant plaster mask, had her iPhone (replete with a bunny-eared case) in hand for assistance. Singing one cameo aria after another, from “Dove Sono” to “Sempre Libera,” Lee eventually dropped dead, while a Papageno in leather pants (Roman Trekel) stepped over her in insouciance. This being anti-opera, the female heroine eventually rose for more drama (stage direction by Sophia Simitzis), although her booming timbre became increasingly metallic. Alfredo Daza assumed a kind of Don Giovanni figure as he cavorted around in a robe. He also broke out into the aria antica “O mio dolce ardor” so well-known to voice students, blocking his ear from the waves of Liszt emanating from the piano. Blaring record players intermittently asserted their dominance. Just toward the end of the 110 minutes, the theme from Die Walkyrie charged in unopposed, a satisfying close to an otherwise frustrating musical experience.

Esther Lee drops dead from singing too many arias (c) Staatsoper Berlin

Europera 4 proved more redeeming in its simplicity (and brevity, clocking in at 30:00). The presence of René Pape was overwhelmingly powerful as he sang Sarastro’s arias from Die Zauberflöte, opening the production with “O Isis und Osiris” offstage. As he stood just inches away from the audience in a black cape at the center of the room, the immediacy of his rich, visceral tone, crisp diction, and emotional calm left this listener nearly speechless. The effect turned comic as he put on sunglasses and addressed Trekel with “In diesen heiligen Hallen” (stage direction by Isabel Ostermann). Trekel, emerging in an acid washed suit, had the audience in stiches as he sang through “Ra la la la, ra la la la, heisse Mutter, ich bin da.” The wind-up gramophone had its own comic appeal as old recordings interrupted wiltingly through the cylinder, while Pape continued to amuse as he sat at a baby grand to play air piano (a friend noted that everyone stopped paying attention to the actual pianist, Günther Albers, across the room). “Bella Figlia dell’Amore” was the last artifact to emerge from the gramophone before the lights fell.

René Pape in 'Europeras 4' (c) Staatsoper Berlin

The program continued unexpectedly with a Qi Gong session on the small lawn in front of the Schiller Theater, just in time for those emerging from the intermission of Dionysus to watch us in bewilderment. The non-hierarchical nature of the Happening, which transforms audience members into their own kind of spectacle, also fulfills the increasing demands on arts institutions for interactive audience participation. Despite some shades of absurdity, the fluid movement, stretching, and deep breathing (even if many weren’t wearing the right clothing) was in fact an ideal precursor to a performance of Nicholas Isherwood’s attempt at Japanese throat singing with a meditation bowl, echoed by another singer at the back of the Werkstatt theater space. One can only imagine how happy Cage would be to know that eastern forms of recreation are slowly finding common ground with European tradition, even if westerners continue to pose with their pretensions to worldly virtue, and that Berlin’s leading opera house indulges in such radical programming. The evening opened on a more clichéd note with a performance of 4’33’’ on a tiny toy piano outside the theater. Robert Farkas sat cross-legged playing silently as cars rumbled past, the original idea of mocking concert hall convention evolving into a more abstract, Cagean concept.

Dionysus

Wolfgang Rihm has become a familiar presence in the concert hall this season, starting with the Musikfest last fall and continuing with MärzMusik, which took his 60th birthday as an opportunity to posit his neo-Romantic idiom as an opposite ‘pole’ to Cage’s anarchic experimentalism—a perplexing bit of programming that nevertheless emphasizes both composers’ reactionary position with regard to the Darmstadt School. In contrast to Cage, who turned increasingly to chance operations and non-musical material in his last years, Rihm only seems to become more Romantic with age. His most recent stage work, the ‘fantasy opera’ Dionysus, takes Nietzsche’s Dionysus Dithrambs as well as the poem Klage der Ariadne as the basis for a self-devised libretto that explores the quest of N. (a character embodying both Nietzsche and Dionysus) for truth and in and out of his conflicted and, in this case, thoroughly nebulous relationship with Ariadne, whom according to Greek myth the god of wine and fertility seduced and deified. The opera, seen at the German premiere on July 8, opens to a sea where N. is taunted by nymphs, travels through Hades and ends on “A plaza. The horse. The skin.”—referencing Nietzsche’s exposure to the flogging of a horse that is said to have precipitated his mental breakdown. Apollo “a guest” accompanies N. only to taunt him: “I am also your labyrinth,” he tells Ariadne in the opening scene, while ensembles of sirens continue to reappear with teasing allure.

References to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte appear in both the libretto and score, with a flute emerging prominently throughout the opera. The Wagnerian undertones also assert themselves from the opening scene (Rhine maidens) as well as in primordial, brooding harmonies, while Ariadne directly quotes Richard Strauss in the opening tableau. The opera’s quasi-philosophical precepts range from gripping to confounding. It is a journey through the mind of Nietzsche, his struggle to reconcile the destructive powers of an infinite quest for knowledge—“Selbsthenker (my own executioner)” N. repeats in the second tableau, while the ‘The Guest’ counters with “Selbstkenner (your own connoisseur)— yet Rihm also attempts to embed the highly erotic story of Dionysus and Ariadne into this dialectic, making the plot more labyrinthine than many viewers could handle. The music follows this pattern naturally, morphing freely from lush tonality into unsettling dissonance, such as in the female chorus “Tag meines Lebens” which suddenly transforms into a group of anti-sirens. The music in Hades teeters on the edge of insanity, yielding to a raw percussion interlude. As the conductor Ingo Metzmacher states in the program notes, no one knows his craft better than Rihm. The laughing staccato of nymphs in the opening tableau and sinister eroticism that emerges through his orchestration may place Dionysus firmly in the German Romantic tradition, and yet the score lacks the clear deliberation and cohesiveness of earlier stage works such as Proserpina , and even this score had a tendency to wind too freely through the rivers of Hades.

Sets by Jonathan Meese evoke a dark, expressionist fantasy world, drawing carefully upon the symbolism in Rihm’s text while bringing a provocative touch one would only expect from the German ‘enfant terrible.’ While the sloppy black and white drawings assigned to the Dionysian chorus and the “Total Horsebee” at the end are irritatingly tongue-in-cheek, the opening cliff on which N. rows to no avail and the giant bottle and beach balls in the brothel of the third tableau are deliciously imaginative despite the kitsch factor. Meese’s aesthetic was well-matched by Pierre Audi’s direction, who counters Rihm’s intellectual weight with subtly subversive humor. While the contrast was at times jarring and threatened to oversimplify the opera’s internal quest, Audi brought a fresh contemporary approach to a stage work that would have dragged its feet insufferably with a more cerebral approach. Costumes by Jorge Jara were at their height in the bulging female costumes of Hades; lighting by Jean Kalman created artful shadows and further propelled the opera into the realms of the unconscious.

'Magic Flute' references in 'Dionysus' (c) Ruth Walz

Mojca Erdmann, in the role of Ariadne, proved why Rihm has found inspiration in her stratospheric if somewhat soubrette-like soprano, razor-sharp musicality and dramatic flexibility. A sprite seductress throughout, she inhabited the opera’s mercurial terrain with poise. Replacing Georg Nigl as N., James Cleverton, who also sang at the Salzburg premiere, convincingly conveyed the character’s emotional frustration vocally and dramatically. The tenor Matthias Klink was an effectively jeering Apollo despite some strain in the upper range. And yet the female voices ultimately sang the men offshore, with Canadian soprano Elin Rombo bringing smooth, full-bodied tones to the stage, complimented gloriously by mezzo Virpi Raisanen and alto Julia Faylenbogen in ensemble numbers. The Staatskapelle performed incisively yet with calm expressivity under Metzmacher, Germany’s leading conductor for new music, also testifying to the quality that Daniel Barenboim has cultivated as music director of this orchestra. The musicians brought velvety phrasing to Straussian turns while following Metzmacher’s precise conducting through the unpredictable contours of Rihm’s score, which expired into dust after failing to help N. find his way.

Sets by performance artist Jonathan Meese (c) Ruth Walz

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Claus Guth’s Forest-bound ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s new Pleasure Garden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Few operas in history have gripped the human psyche to the same extent as Don Giovanni. Pushkin, Kierkegaard, and Bernard Shaw count among the literary figures to have written their own account of the daemonic seductor since Mozart and Da Ponte staged their ‘drama giocoso,’ a tragi-comedy, in Prague. Since the 19th century, some champions of the work have further added to the opera’s moral ambiguity by excluding the final sextet, “Questo é il fin di chi fa mal/e de’ perfidi la morte/alla vita è sempre ugual” (this is the end for evildoers/death and life are the same for the villainous) after Don Giovanni is sent to hell. Meanwhile, his female conquests have been increasingly interpreted as consenting perpetrators of his sexual games rather than just victims and continue to provide stage directors with ample fodder. Robert Carsen, in his new production for La Scala last December, sets the Commendatore’s murder by Don Giovanni in the chambers of Donna Anna (Anna Netrebko), leaving her white slip covered in blood as she holds her father’s dead body on the same bed where she frolicked with the murderer. In the final scene, the accursed aristocrat reemerges from hell puffing on a cigarette while his avengers descend into infernal smoke.

Carsen’s vision was supposed to travel to Berlin this month as a guest production of the Staatsoper until it emerged that it would be impossible to adapt sets to the company’s current home in the Schiller Theater (the company’s 18th-century headquarters on the Boulevard Unter den Linden are currently undergoing renovation, recently delayed—again—until 2015). In another strange twist, La Netrebko, the highlight of a live screening that will be broadcast to an outdoor plaza, announced in May that she would withdraw in order to make time for her son. The Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson was whisked in and Claus Guth’s 2008 production, mounted during Staatsoper Intendant Jürgen Flimm’s tenure at the Salzburg Festival, quietly slated as a replacement. The star appeal was not entirely lost as Netrebko’s husband Erwin Schrott remained on the roster as Don Giovanni’s sidekick, Leporello, while the original Zerlina (Anna Prohaska), her Masetto (Stefan Kocan) and Don Ottavio (Giuseppe Filianoti) provided continuity for an event that has been touted as a highlight of the season.

The Guth staging, seen at its German premiere on June 24, takes a dark, pseudo-cinematic approach to the opera, confining the action to the middle of a dark forest with a rusty bus stop serving as the only manmade shelter. The curtain opens to a beer-chugging, ex-convict like Leporello while Donna Anna rips off the Don’s shirt in the background. In the showdown with the Commendatore, Don Giovanni is shot in the stomach with a plastic gun and walks around through the remainder of the opera with an open wound. During Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he has already become a specter. Meanwhile, a business-like Donna Elvira chases after her one-time husband in heels, gets stoned out of her mind with Leporello, and lies on the forest floor with the dying anti-hero during her aria “Mi tradi.” In the first act, Zerlina and her bridesmaids emerge like wood nymphs in the thick of what appear to be real pines (sets and costumes by Christian Schmidt) before the stage turns to reveal a tree swing that will serve as Don Giovanni’s seduction grounds. The rotating stage spins at its fastest when Donna Anna and Don Ottavio pull up in a sedan, although they are ultimately as damned to roaming the forest as much as any other character.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

While it is hard to deny the poetic weight of setting Don Giovanni in the woods—the opening to Dante’s Inferno, “Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” ‘I found myself in a dark forest’ is the first thing that comes to mind—the production is mired in Regie gimmicks that undermine its psychological depth. Staring at tree trunks for two full acts also proved monotonous. Guth omits the final sextet, leaving Don Giovanni to fall into the earth after the Commendatore returns to a wintry forest (further emphasizing the notion of a terrestrial hell in which the characters cannot find the way toward redemption), yet scenes such as Don Giovanni and Leporello roasting marshmallows and the senseless presence of immaculate, bourgeois dressed characters in the brambles linger irritatingly within the director’s otherwise morbid vision. To be sure, his concept is fully in keeping with the opera’s legendary blend of comic and tragic elements, and his surrealist take on Don Giovanni’s existence, trapped somewhere between life and death, could not be more dead-on in literary terms, yet the production demands a level of intellectual engagement that supersedes its theatrical appeal. 

Nevertheless, Guth was blessed with a cast that largely rose above the quixotic circumstances vocally and theatrically. The audience hardly seemed to miss Netrebko as Bengtsson, a statuesque blonde with natural allure, portrayed the distraught Donna Anna with creamy tones and fine attention to dramatic nuance. Her voice was tearful in opening stanzas of “Non mi dir,” kept painfully slow by Music Director Daniel Barenboim, while she revealed unblemished strength in her swift declaration that heaven may someday forgive her. As Don Giovanni, Christopher Maltman evoked more of a modern playboy than an irresistibly virile predator, yet his high-lying baritone warmed up to give a fine rendition of his aria “Deh vieni alla finestra,” and his fear was vividly credible in the final scene. Schrott nearly stole the show as the riotous buffoon and manipulator Leporello, his booming bass and excellent Italian diction carrying magnetically in the dry acoustics of the Schiller Theater.

It is almost unfair to cast Elvira, often considered a mezzo role, with a soprano as eloquent as Dorothea Röschmann, and yet her acting skills do not always rise to the same level. While her rich tone and technical polish were the vocal stand-out of the evening, her presence more easily called to mind the countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, which she sang earlier this season, than Don Giovanni’s brash consort. As Zerlina, Prohaska (Musical America’s current “New Artist of the Month”) lived up to her usual standards of musical and thespian excellence, effortlessly singing through “La ci darem la mano” as she pumped herself on a swing. Kocan was a convincingly exasperated Masetto, although his voice retains a thick Slavic quality that interferes with the demands of singing in Italian. By contrast, Filianoti, in the role of Ottavio, cultivates a flexible technique that was ideal for the coloratura runs of the aria “Il mio tesoro,” yet his nasal timbre lacks body. He also failed to remain in time with Barenboim on more than one occasion. Ukranian Bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk was an imposing, expressively full-voiced Commendatore.

Barenboim led the Staatskapelle in a performance that never lacked dynamic shape and dramatic purpose, sensitively accompanying the singers at all times with great emotional depth, yet his tempo relations in Mozart were occasionally perplexing. The second half of “La ci darem la mano,” “Andiam mio bene” was twice as fast as the opening. The orchestra, despite its rich, Germanic sound, is also not terribly flattered by the acoustics of its current home, and its attacks could be rounder. Despite the odds stacked against this production, Barenboim proved that his ensemble is the best in town for Mozart operas, even if the composer is rolling is in his grave as Don Giovanni continues to wander the forest.

The production runs through July 6.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

Out at Friedrich the Great’s old stomping grounds…

The city of Potsdam is currently inundated with tributes to the tercentenary of Friedrich the Great, from Das Musical Friedrich to an exhibit of personal items entitled Friederisiko that stretches from the rococo palace Sanssouci to the Neue Palais, built at the end of the Seven Years’ War. While the 18th-century Prussian king may be best remembered for an aggressive military campaign that annexed parts of modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic in an escalating power struggle with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ‘enlightened despot’ was also a great patron of the arts. A flutist and amateur composer who penned 100 sonatas and four symphonies, Friedrich included C.P.E. Bach and Quantz among his court musicians; enjoyed a legendary if tumultuous friendship with Voltaire; and, fittingly for his time, favored the French language above German. Homages to “Old Fritz,” as he has been nicknamed, have extended to a new album released by Berlin Philharmonic Principal Flutist and soloist Emmanuel Pahud, Flöten König. The Swiss musician even dressed up earlier this season on the grounds of Sanssouci.

Potsdam’s annual Musikfestspiele (June 9-24) similarly seized upon the opportunity to transform city grounds into a courtly celebration, including a “Sanssouci Prom Concert” in the garden of the Neue Palais and ensembles as such as the Freiburger Baroque Orchester and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment in baroque and classical repertoire. The festival also included a “picnic concert” for the first time this year. The setting on Potsdam’s Freundschaftsinsel, a picturesque botanical garden nestled quietly away from the post-war architecture surrounding the main station just minutes away, proved a fitting escape for the occasion, replete with a couple in 18th-century garb pushing a tram that carried a baby anachronistically sucking a pacifier. Locals festively spread out their blankets and picnic fare, some including white tablecloths and prosecco on ice with an eye to winning the competition that was underway for “most inventive arrangement” (Potsdam, while only an hour away from Berlin and Friedrich’s summer getaway of choice, maintains its own brand of provincial flair).

The opening concert, however, represented a decidedly non-continental take on celebrations for the Flute King, featuring the band Fine Arts Brass in an all-British program. As both a visiting journalist from a U.K. publication and one of the group’s members individually commented, it felt “surreal.” The concert fell just on the heels of the Jubilee Weekend in England, and the brass band naturally included an arrangement of Handel’s Water Music. The group’s leading trumpeter Simon Lenton, moderating between numbers with a refreshing blend of humor and informative material, joked that the German native was “England’s finest composer.” Yet the program ranged from arrangements of Dowland and Purcell to a suite by Anthony Holborne that is usually performed for Christmas and Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies, living proof in his position as “Master of the Queen’s Music” that the art of patronage has not died.

In conversation with the festival’s Artistic Director Andrea Palent, it emerged that the event was partly modeled after “Last Night of the Proms,” which moves from the concert hall out into Hyde Park and other outdoor venues. She also mentioned the 18th-century tradition of “pleasure gardens,” which according to Palent spread its influence throughout Europe in Friedrich’s time (although the fact remains that he was Francophile). Palent also grounded the concept in a more general principle of the Enlightenment as championed by figures such as Rousseau—“back to nature”—saying that she hoped the outdoor setting would affect listeners on a sensual as well as intellectual level.

As the Meccore Quartet, a young group of Polish musicians, performed from string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn during the second part of the program, the music indeed served to heighten the sensory experience of sitting on the lawn and breathing the summer air rather than become an isolated spectacle. While one of the violinists mentioned afterwards that they had been concerned about acoustics, the music felt as if it were meant to be played in this setting, which in fact camouflaged technical and dynamic details that would have been more apparent to a critic’s ear in the concert hall. In an age of technological oversaturation, the event proved a fleeting reminder of the values that bred 18th-century art, even if a retiree couldn’t refrain from chasing after the musicians to take pictures with her digital camera.

 A gabled sculpture from the garden of the Neue Palais © Holger Kirsch for the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci

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Dresdener Musikfestspiele pay Tribute to Eastern Europe

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The theme of this year’s Dresdener Musikfestspiele, “Herz Europas” (the Heart of Europe), inventively returns the East German city to its roots as a thriving cultural hub. While today’s united Germany is roiled by the end of the ‘Merkozy’ era and Eurobond controversy, the emphasis of the festival (May 15-June 3) on central European repertoire and the cultural proximity of Dresden to the former Hapsburg Empire in effect harks back to a time when the arts served as a better common currency than any fiscal pact. As the Intendant and cellist Jan Vogler pointed out in a discussion, no other part of the world has produced a more influential body of composers than Eastern Europe. Vogler, who took over the festival in 2009, has turned a once provincial institution into an international attraction boasting a roster of coveted artists and ensembles. At the same time, he strives in his programming to strike a balance between the local love of native tradition and a more outward-looking approach. While last year’s theme, “Stars of Asia,” must have seemed positively exotic for the conservative ‘baroque’ city, Vogler—who spends most of the year in New York—hopes to provide a kind of ‘double-window’ from Dresden into international trends and vice versa.

The city of former East Germany has received a face lift in recent times, from the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in 2005 (sixty years after the Protestant church was bombed to the ground) to Daniel Liebeskind’s provocative redesign to the Museum of Military History—a wedge of concrete and steel that slices through the traditional architecture—last year. Boxy post-war buildings line the outskirts of the shell-shocked city while fancy new hotels abut the cobblestone streets of the city’s small but opulent center, where the rebuilt Semperoper stands as a monument to the heyday of late German Romanticism (the original 19th-century building premiered works by Strauss and Wagner). The resident orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, has already cemented its relationship with the incoming Music Director Christian Thielemann—who, according to Vogler, may have filled Karajan’s shoes as a leading conductor for many in Germany, unfortunate political allusions aside.

Thielemann with the Staatskapelle Dresden (c)Matthias Creutziger.

The program notes to a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, presented as a co-production of the Staatskapelle and the festival, go as far as to compare the collaboration to a fated marriage, with the symphony acting as testimony. While a couple of my colleagues from the Music Critics Association of North America found the performance lacking a sense of arch at the expense of attention to dynamic detail, it is hard to deny the authenticity Thielemann brings to this music, with its triumphant Wagnerian brass and inner torment. Performing a 1939 edition that melds Bruckner’s original score with a modified version he penned between 1887 and 1890, the young Karajan kept the orchestra flowing like a well-oiled machine, with the Staatskapelle’s strings providing a full-bodied sound reminiscent of the Vienna Philharmonic. As a tuba solo hovered over a rising string motive in the final movement Feierlich, nicht schnell (a passage not included in the original score), history seemed to stand still.

To be sure, Dresden cannot as easily rest on its laurels as the long established Salzburg or Bayreuth festivals, yet the former imperial city of Saxony boasts its own lineage of noble interest in the arts. Princess Amalie, daughter of Prince Maximillian and the Princess of Parma, wrote a total of twelve operas based on her own libretti between 1816 and 1835, the last of which—La Casa Disabitata—was retrieved from an archive in Moscow with rights to a single unstaged performance at a 17th-century Lusthaus in Dresden’s Großer Garten this year. The grounds remain largely untended and the salon unrestored, yet the faded glory provided a fitting context for this mock opera buffa involving an orphan, Annetta, who is given shelter in a vacant house owned by the nobleman Don Raimondo where the poor poet Eutichio has secretly taken refuge. In the end, Raimondo and Annetta are finally able to acknowledge a mutual crush, while Eutichio and his wife Sinforosa also overcome their differences.

The plot is somewhat half-baked, and the music can be succinctly described as a rehashed Mozartean farce with shades of Cimarosa and Rossini. Amalie’s attempt to extend the formulaic final coda may reveal a poor grasp of dramatic tension, but at least she had the good taste to resist the lure of courtly indolence by immersing herself in the Mozart-Da Ponte masterpieces. Eutichio even breaks out into a meta-dialogue between Don Giovanni and the Commendatore before Annetta bursts in with her new keys while the poet waves a plastic pistol in his defense. As Eutichio, Matthias Henneberg was a bit of the sore thumb in a cast of otherwise budding young singers as he struggled to tailor his mature bass to the small resonant space. The lyric soprano Anja Zügner gave a stand-out performance as Annetta; Tehila Nini Goldstein (Sinforosa), Allen Boxer (Callisto, the house caretaker) and Ilhun Jung (Raimondo) also displayed fine musicianship to accompaniment by the Dresdner Kapellsolisten under Helmut Branny.

Just around the bend from the grassy promenades of the Großer Garten sits the monumental ‘Gläsener Manufaktur,’ a largely transparent glass and steel complex erected in 2002 that serves not only as a Volkswagon production plant but an event space. On a small stage beneath suspended half-built sedans with their engine parts exposed (call it factory chic), violiniste du jour Patricia Kopatchinskaja joined with both her parents and two other friends for an evening of gypsy-inspired music from Bartok to Ravel. The contrast of her father’s 120-year-old cimbalom with the industrial surroundings and the faint sound of a machine whirring (apparently an air-conditioner to counteract the heat produced in manufacture) was somewhat jarring for this listener, and Kopatchinskaja’s correction to the program notes that this music should not be considered ‘coffee house’ fare despite the fact that she hopes we can all drink coffee through the economic crisis only drove home the irony, but her ensemble’s spirited, authentic musicianship eventually created a world of its own, culminating in an encore of the full quintet performing to the Balkan dance melody “Hora Stacato.”

Back in the center of town a few days earlier, Steven Devine conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and English tenor Ian Bostridge in an all-Bach program at the Frauenkirche. The acoustics of the church were a bit too fractious for the clear textures of the period ensemble—a colleague noted an approximately four-second reverb—yet the musicians increasingly settled into the space with their signature elegance. Bostridge, opening with a dedication to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, gave a tender account of the cantata “Ich habe genug,” although the transcription for tenor did not always flatter his instrument. His timbre found a better match in an aria from the cantata “Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl” in which he also revealed impeccable breath control. As no festival would be complete without educational activities, Kristian Järvi was busy rehearsing his Baltic Youth Orchestra together with the MDR Symphony, where he will take over as music director next season. The young musicians, joined by a few professional members, displayed great potential in a performance of Mahler’s Bach Suite at the city’s event space “Messe Dresden,” followed by the MDR in a clean but sorely rushed interpretation of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Vogler, upholding his commitment to diverse programming, joined Valery Gergiev and the Marinsky Orchestra for his first performance of Honegger’s Cello Concerto, an approximately 16-minute gem that weaves together expressive neo-Romantic lyricism, shades of Gerschwin, and early twentieth-century angst. Vogler shaped the cantilenas expertly and nailed the fast runs of the final movement. Despite the sharply accented style of the Marinsky, Gergiev provided deferential accompaniment, and the music’s precise architecture emerged gracefully. As an encore, Vogler offered a movement from Bach’s Cello Suite in C-major, the lower range of his instrument singing with particular clarity of expression. The concerto was flanked by a somewhat clunky reading of Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” (many noted that Gergiev’s nose never left the score) and Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben,” which vacillated between the brash and the serene. The orchestra silenced all criticism in an encore of Lyadov’s “The Enchanted Lake,” creating a pianissimo as rich and placid as is earthly possible.

The Dresdener Musikfestspiele has tapped a wealth of potential with a new festival orchestra joining players from top period ensembles such as the Academy of Ancient Music, Concentus Musicus Wien and Il Giardino Armonico, which premiered under Ivor Bolton just after I’d made my way back to Berlin. Vogler also let on that Britten’s centenary will receive some deserved attention next year (the Semperoper has no plans to the effect), including the “War Requiem” with Andris Nelsons and the Birmingham Symphony. Dresden can of course also boast its share of extra-musical attractions, which will surely continue to work to the festival’s advantage. The Alte Gemälde Galerie boasts striking paintings of an intact city by the Venetian artist Canaletto, a sizeable collection of Dutch masters and just launched an exhibit with Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” at its centerpiece. The local wine industry, despite its northern location, produces a Gold Riesling on par with Alsatian vineyards. As it happens, the Herald Tribune ran a travel story last week about Dresden’s move away from its communist past (always a newsworthy bit) and toward a vibrant cultural life: perhaps the Elbe is indeed bringing in fresh wind again.

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Hillary Hahn and Hauschka join Forces on ‘Silfra’; Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig

Friday, May 18th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Hillary Hahn’s taste for the unconventional has in recent years taken her career onto a trajectory unlike that of most violin prodigies. Last October, she appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series improvising to traditional American melodies that inspired the works of Charles Ives, donning a fedora for the occasion. She maintains an active web presence, blogging and twittering about her life on the road, perplexing critics last year when she posted a Skype interview with a fish on YouTube.

Her latest project is a collaboration with the German master of the prepared piano, Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka). After playing together at the behest of folk singer Tom Brosseau two years ago in San Francisco, the duo began meeting regularly to improvise and ultimately decided to consolidate their endeavors on a recording with Deutsche Grammophon. The recently-released Silfra, named after an island outside Reykjavik that lies just between the European and American continents, is a collection of non-notated works documented at a studio in Iceland.

“We had a hunch,” Hahn said to the audience during a DG “Yellow Lounge “ concert at Berlin’s Club Asphalt on May 10. “We played, then we recorded just improvising together, and now we’re on tour to capture that spirit.” Their next stops include Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and Boston.

Hahn greets the audience at the DG Yellow Lounge © Stefan Höderath

The violinist, wearing a polka-dot dress and matching headpiece, seemed to revel in the freedom of entering the percussive and melodic layers of Haushka’s sound world. From my seat on a short wall at the far corner of the stage (the small basement venue was packed to the point that oxygen felt scarce), I spied wooden sticks, duct tape and tin foil inside the grand piano. Hahn responded with an intuitive, relaxed air to the whirring textures emanating from the instrument, from brief melodic gestures to full-thrust harmonics, yet her immaculate technique was always present. As she admits in an interview with local magazine concerti, she remains a perfectionist.

While several tracks on Silfra feature an atmospheric, minimalist blend that may not captivate those after ground-breaking developments in contemporary classical music, the album reveals a range of subtle ventures. One of the most effective works, at least for this listener, is fearlessly lyrical and neo-Romantic. “Ashes,” inspired by the eruption of Grimsvotn just a few days into recording, opens with a violin melody innocently inquiring into the underlying forces of nature against simple harmonic accompaniment. “No one walked outside. The birds went silent,” the musicians write in the liner notes. “The only sounds we heard were the one we made.”

The pieces all last under ten minutes with the exception of “Godot,” a slow exploration of Hauschka’s raw industrial sounds complimented by whinnying and other timbral exploration on the violin. The musicians write that the track is hypnotic in surround sound, which I haven’t been able to test yet. “Halo of Honey,” dedicated to Brosseau, traps the violin in a ghostly netherworld against crinkling and muted, distorted piano. The final track “Rift,” referring to the “deepness and isolation” of the island of Silfra, creates a sense of suspended time and nostalgia before launching into a mesmerizing minimalist tapestry. Hahn and Hauschka open the album with the last track they recorded, “Stillness,” which hovers in the upper registers of the violin and piano only to fleet by like an afterthought. Such free collaborations are rare in the classical music establishment, and while it may take an artist of Hahn’s stature to find the backing of a label such as Deutsche Grammophon, it could set a precedent for other soloists itching to explore another side of their creativity.

Mahler and Ravel with the Gewandhaus Orchester

A spring tour brought Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig to the Konzerthaus this week, a rare occasion to hear this fine orchestra in the German capital. For a moment I lost my orientation, as I’ve never heard a guest orchestra on the stage of the East Berlin hall, and the Leipzigers’ incisive string playing made me do a double-take. The program, seen May 15, opened with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G-major featuring Hélène Grimaud, elegant as ever in velvet pants and a fitted silver jacket. The French pianist gave a poignant, introspective account of the nocturne-like passage that opens the middle Adagio movement while Chailly stood with his eyes closed on the podium. He subsequently summoned graceful entrances from the winds, particularly in the flute and English horn solos, while the piano continued as if trapped in its own world. Ravel’s brief use of bi-tonality in this movement is one of its most captivating moments, and Grimaud did not wander from a tender but focused pianissimo.

The opening Allegro, peppered with the quote of a falling melody from Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and jazz rhythms, received a vigorous if not muscular reading from the orchestra. Grimaud indulged in impressionist textures that, while evocative of the spirit in which Ravel synthesized the influences of his time into a personal blend, threatened to submerge the piano’s inner melodies in a bleeding wash of colors, such as through the passage of Spanish-inflected triolas in the section Meno vivo. While Grimaud’s ability to subsume emotion contributes strongly to her appeal, a bit more Sitzfleisch would have made the performance stronger. By contrast, she revealed a razor-sharp technique through the rapid chordal spans and arpeggiations of the final Presto, whose tempo Chailly kept particularly fleet. As a colleague noted, the brass could barely keep up speed.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, also in G-major, created a more serene atmosphere for the second half of the concert. Following the Mahlerthon that occupied programming during the composer’s centennial last season, this work feels as commonplace as a Mozart Symphony, yet it is hard to resist Mahler’s delicious harmonies and searing Lebensschmerz, particularly in the inner Adagio. The Gewandhausorchester plays with a directness that nevertheless conveyed a sense of inner torment beneath the vital sheen of sleigh bells and nods to Viennese Classicism in the opening movement. The strings produced an even, warm pianissimo.

Chailly created unbearable tension through his use of ritardando in the Ruhevoll (Poco adagio) movement, steering through tearful laughter before the gates opened for Das Himmlische Leben, a song from the Knaben Wunderhorn cycle. Soprano Christina Landshamer’s youthful, clear timbre captured the childish delight Mahler explicitly instructed, yet there was no sense of the subtle irony that emerges in a more dramatically nuanced performance. While she and Chailly gave clear emphasis to the final stanza’s critical line “Eleven thousand virgins/allow themselves to dance,” the delivery was almost too reverential, failing to provide a window into Mahler’s ambivalent spirituality. An elderly couple to my left was following the text with a nearly pious air, not sure whether to give in to the movement’s mordant satire.

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Omus in Person

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

by Sedgwick Clark

I first met Omus Hirshbein in Carnegie Hall’s executive offices, where he worked for a brief time in 1973 between tenures at the Hunter College Concert Bureau and the 92nd Street Y. He was walking out of a planning meeting, saying in frustration to anyone nearby, “They won’t listen to me—they should be emphasizing the sound of Carnegie Hall.” Guess what Carnegie’s subscription campaign was the next season, after Omus left for the Y? There he would create a concert series that for two decades would dominate the chamber-music field in New York (and annoy the hell out of me because it was such a nuisance to get to from my apartment near Lincoln Center).

We became friends over the years, especially after buying one of his pianos several years ago when his upper West Side apartment could no longer house two Steinways. Every time my wife and her four-hands partner, the composer and conductor Victoria Bond, get together to play, we think of Omus and his wife, Jessica.

Omus died on December 31st after a long decline due to Alzheimer’s. It seems especially tragic that one whose mind was so fertile would leave us in such a manner. I’m sorry I took so long to take note of him in this forum. Perhaps I was stymied because Brian Kellow, who worked for Omus at the Y in the 1980s, captured his personality and accomplishments so warmly and vividly in an Opera News piece, as did Allan Kozinn in his New York Times obituary (January 7, 2012). So I decided I would do something different and reprint Omus’s own typically impassioned words from a panel discussion on the programming of classical music, which appeared in the 1995 Musical America Directory. Participants with Omus in the discussion were industry V.I.P.s Deborah Borda, Eugene Carr, Mary Lou Falcone, Christopher Hunt, and Jane Moss. I highly recommend your reading it; check out the Services section on top of the Musicalamerica.com desktop. You may find, as I did when I read it again, that it could have been recorded yesterday.

Omus Hirshbein: “I think there are two reasons why people like to go to concerts these days. One is being addressed by the kind of programming that the American Symphony is doing. Back in 1986 I agreed to put together a series of eight concerts for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition called “Vienna 1900.” It had to do with the years of the Vienna Secession, which are roughly 1898-1918, and the composers were Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, Schmidt. And I said to them, “But no one will come.” To my surprise, tickets were being scalped on 53rd Street. I saw virtually none of the usual New York music people at those eight concerts. Audience members were reading, they were seeing the paintings, they were seeing the workshop of Hoffman, and they were hearing a group of composers described by curator Kirk Varnedoe as part and parcel of the Secession, and they went. Okay, that’s one reason.

“The other, of course, is that music is supposed to touch the heart. And it’s supposed to touch the soul. Now, there was a period of 40 or 50 years when what was new was ugly. Sorry, it was mostly ugly. And the legatees of those Viennese geniuses—and I speak of Schoenberg as a genius—made it worse. They became academic, producing a system of writing in this country that was not for the public. Now, there are some young people writing music today who are mobbed by audiences. I’m talking about Aaron Kernis, and Bright Sheng, and there are others. And maybe it signals a reversal of that horrible trend where what was new was impossible to listen to. That’s all I can hope for, because the teaching of music has become of little importance in most of the major cities today as they cope with their social and educational problems.

“Let me just add that money is really an issue. And I’m not talking about balancing budgets. On the wall in my new office is a blowup of an advertisement from 1971, announcing a repeat concert of Victoria de los Angeles and Alicia de Larrocha doing a program of Spanish tonadillas and whatnot. I ask people to look at it because it has tremendous meaning—and finally down at the bottom, they come across what is really disturbing about it. And this is 1971, folks. The top price at the Hunter College Concert Bureau, where this took place, in a 2,200-seat house, was a dollar below Carnegie Hall and a dollar below Lincoln Center: six and a half dollars. A movie was three bucks, or three and a half. A musical event of that magnitude was twice the price of a movie. And that was prevailing.

“Now, I throw down a gauntlet to the commercial interests that have ruined our business. I assure you that Mostly Mozart once was a three- and four-dollar ticket. Commercial interests, and the interests of unions, have hurt us a great deal. This not a high-tech business, this is not the movies, this is not mass media, and we are paying the kind of monies out that would say it’s mass media, and it ain’t anything like that.

“. . . I had a staff of music lovers in my previous job. Music lovers. A couple of them were married, they were in their thirties, and you know what they do? They get together with their friends in a restaurant, and they spend an evening, and that’s all they can afford to do; they are making $23,000 and $24,000 a year, and they cannot afford to go to these concerts.

“. . . There’s another side of the coin. Once the performer becomes recognizable, there is the most extraordinary avarice to get the fees up as fast as possible. And that, for me, is what has wrecked the business. An artist could go on the road and make a decent living at fees somewhere in the $5,000 or $6,000 range and that’s about all that anybody out there in the hinterlands can afford. Now, I think maybe that’s all I have to say.”

Of course, it wasn’t all he had to say. His last professional endeavor was to found, with his former Y colleague Jacqueline Taylor, a series of free public concerts with major artists that they called “Free for All at Town Hall.” They wrote about its genesis in the 2004 edition of Musical America Directory, and we can still look forward to these concerts each spring. Martin Riskin, who is now president and artistic director of the series, tells me that the upcoming concerts will be dedicated to Omus.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

2/1 Paul Hall. FOCUS! Festival. Cage: Five Songs (1938); Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard (1950); Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939); Etudes Boreales, Nos. 1 & 3 (1978); Sonnekus² (1985); Satie Cabaret Songs; Child of Tree (1975); The Perilous Night (1944).

2/7 Rodgers Theatre. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess. Audra McDonald (Bess), Norm Lewis (Porgy), David Alan Grier (Sportin’ Life).

1/8 Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Gluck: Armide. Juilliard Orchestra/Jane Glover. Emalie Savoy (Armide), Alexander Hajek (Hidraot), David Portillo (Renaud), Alexander Lewis (Artémidore), Luthando Qave (Ubalde), Noah Baetge (Le Chevalier Danois), Wallis Giunta (Phénice), Devon Guthrie (Sidonie), Evan Hughes (Aronte), Renée Tatum (La Haine), Soo Yeon Kim (La Naïade), Pureum Jo (2nd Coryphée), Deanna Breiwick (Une Bergère), Lilla Heinrich-Szász (Lucinde), and Raquel González (Mélisse).

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Afterthoughts

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

By Alan Gilbert

I have been thinking generally about how orchestras define themselves and, specifically, about what the New York Philharmonic means to the public we serve.

Last week’s Philharmonic production of The Cunning Little Vixen was a joy to work on, and I am hugely proud of what we achieved as an institution. For the last month or so, our various departments banded together and effectively functioned as a top-notch opera company. Hallways became costume and prop storage areas, people could be heard discussing the story and meaning of Janáček’s masterpiece, and the buzz of activity with its unifying force was truly gratifying.

The experience we had last year with Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was helpful — we certainly learned a lot that came in handy this second time around. But, at the same time, the bar had been set so high by the enormous triumph of the Ligeti that I think we all felt real pressure to have a great success. Many of the previews in the press openly wondered, ”Can they do it again?” and ”Will lightning strike twice?” On a personal level, I was hoping to provoke a response that would justify the unusual commitment that presenting a staged opera demands of the Philharmonic.

It worked. Reactions were overwhelmingly positive, and many opera buffs even said that they felt that we achieved a greater-than-usual emotional power with Doug Fitch’s enchanting production of Vixen. I am sure that the unexpected and non-traditional setting was largely responsible for this — as soon as one entered Avery Fisher Hall one felt a fresh sense of possibility that naturally comes along with the unexpected. Who had ever seen a huge grove of sunflowers sprouting among the musicians of the New York Philharmonic?

What was most gratifying, however, was the response to the Orchestra’s playing. Each night the ovations were the loudest when the musicians stood. Of course, my choice of this particular opera was largely influenced by the prominent role that the orchestra plays, but the combination of hearing the New York Philharmonic play this ravishing score, with its range of opulence and shimmering tenderness, and of actually seeing the musicians on stage had to have been extremely powerful in inspiring this reaction. It felt like a new paradigm not only for opera, but also for orchestras. Why shouldn’t we do away with the artificial boundaries that separate art forms?

Of course the New York Philharmonic’s primary mission remains that of performing great orchestral repertoire at the highest possible level. I will never forget this season’s many highlights, which include memorable performances of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, Bruckner’s 2nd, Mahler’s 5th, and Beethoven’s Eroica. I will equally remember Lindberg’s Kraft, and Vixen, both because they were artistically important and gratifying, but perhaps even more because they were accepted and received with an enthusiasm that is doing away with the lines that would have at one time caused them to be defined as ”out-of-the-box.”

Last week more than one audience member came backstage after a performance of Vixen to tell me that the applause for the Orchestra and for me was not only for that night’s performance: it was also for our vision, and for what this Orchestra is coming to mean for New York City. All of us on stage sense this as well. We feel the support and connection with the audience that is based on this identity — an identity that is, after all, at the very core of our aspiration to be, in the deepest, most meaningful way, New York’s own Orchestra.

(For more information on Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, visit nyphil.org.)

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