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When Riccardo Muti is in town, the New York Philharmonic somehow sounds like a completely different orchestra. Of two recent concerts, one with Scriabin is still playing ping pong in my head. If the second didn't quite reach that level, a rarely heard Bruckner symphony on the menu counts for something.
[Photo: "Fire and Ice" (2004) by Nigel Winters, Finchampstead, UK, via BBC's Hitchhiker Photography Competition]
Never having seen Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, I was not prepared for the quietly disturbing production from the National Theatre of Great Britain, directed by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw. (It is playing through February 2 at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and if my schedule weren’t so congested this coming week with the Focus! Festival, the MET Chamber Ensemble and the New York Philharmonic, I’d go again.)
Visible while the audience enters, the entire stage is a jumble of torn-up stone blocks, wall fragments and piles of sand and gravel—a chaotic ruin, an aftermath. Shaw’s character, Winnie, first appears waist-deep in the bombed out detritus, yet looking and sounding rather chipper, trying to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of a situation neither she or we can imagine. A large handbag nearby holds a handful of props: lipstick, a hat, an umbrella, a bottle of some kind of medication (cough syrup?) and a pistol, which she embraces with a kiss, as if greeting an old friend. Her compatriot is Willie (Tim Potter, in a small but memorable role), barely glimpsed through most of the first act. He is fully mobile but seems to be merely marking time, accompanied only by grunts; right off the bat, he spends a few minutes masturbating. Winnie laughs nervously, looks around, fiddles with her purse, tries to engage Willie in conversation, but always with an unsetting subtext: something has happened, and neither she or we know precisely what it is.
As the curtain fell to reveal Act II, I gasped out loud: the sand now covers Winnie up to her neck. Her forehead appears slightly bruised, her eyes puffy and red, and a few of her teeth seem to have fallen out. Her smiling demeanor has faded, replaced with desperation she is increasingly unable to conceal. At the end, as Willie tries to approach her but begins to slide into oblivion, she tries one final time to hold onto what little sanity she has left by singing a little song, before being snuffed out.
In a pre-opening article, Warner and Shaw mentioned their share of “boring” productions of this play, which I can well imagine. The constricting stage premise virtually ensures that only the best actors will be able to succeed, but here Shaw rivets attention. In the first half, she can at least use her arms, shoulders and torso, but in Act II, she must command the stage solely with her head. In what could be merely a stunt, Shaw not only triumphs but also makes Beckett’s prose teem with energy and pathos. I can imagine lesser actors plummeting. Some invest this playwright with too much manually applied “meaning,” but Shaw’s delivery indicates she has no idea what has happened, or is happening, or will happen. Or perhaps she’s in shock. I certainly was, after it all ended.
[Photo: Fiona Shaw in the London production of Happy Days, January 2007, by Tristam Kenton for The Guardian]
Tomorrow night's Focus! festival at Juilliard begins with Pierre Boulez and ends with James Levine, in a week of (mostly) music by Elliott Carter, coordinated by the ever-enterprising Joel Sachs. Yes, the free tickets for tomorrow and Feb. 2 were gone a few weeks ago, but that shouldn't stop anyone from showing up. A few minutes before 8:00 p.m., prospective listeners without tickets will be admitted to fill the remaining seats, and in past years I've had no problems getting in.
The complete schedule is here.
Some viewers in 1961 must have been seriously freaked out by Last Year at Marienbad, which I saw last night in a nifty new 35mm print at the Film Forum. While I don't pretend to have "figured it out," its concentrated screenplay and elegant black-and-white funhouse of visuals are hard to resist. Director Alain Resnais and photographer Sacha Vierny created an enduring artifact that remains unlike anything else I have ever seen.
It is probably "the" quintessential art film, which some viewers still find insufferably pretentious. (About halfway through last night, a young guy with a backpack left in a huff, making a point to cross in front of the screen on his way out.) The elliptical story by Alain Robbe-Grillet may indeed take place "last year," or maybe next year, or perhaps now, or all of the above. Often motionless, the film's stylish cast roams the halls of a vast old hotel, chock-full of mirrors reflecting their every move. I'm still ambivalent about the musical score (by star Delphine Seyrig's brother, Francis), which is mostly for solo organ and almost aggressively austere. (Think "gloomy haunted house.")
In The New York Times, Mark Harris has an incisive article on the film's context and history, and how seeing it now might compare with the experience almost 50 years ago.
[Photo: Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad, cited by artist Josephine Meckseper on Artforum]
In addition to my choices for the best concerts of 2007 for MusicWeb, several formidable contenders arrived late in December, after that deadline: a coruscating Shostakovich Fourth Symphony with Andrey Boreyko and the New York Philharmonic, and the holiday concert from The Crossing, the remarkable choir in Philadelphia directed by Donald Nally.
Monotonous Forest turns two today, and I can't think of a better way to mark the occasion than to offer a quip from last night's concert with Pierre Boulez: "I like virtuosity--not for the sake of virtuosity, but because it is dangerous."
With Boulez conducting, mezzo-soprano Hilary Summers and members of the Lucerne Festival Academy handled Le marteau sans maître with complete aplomb and naturalness--not easy in a work that after more than fifty years remains sparkling yet inscrutable. In further comments that spoke volumes about the abilities of today's performers, Boulez recalled the world premiere in Europe, which took fifty hours of rehearsal, and the United States premiere in Los Angeles which required sixty. He said last night's Lucerne musicians had "eight or ten hours."
After intermission came a highly charged version of sur Incises, for three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists. One acquaintance, who knows the piece well, said he doesn't quite like it completely but that he had never heard it sound so persuasive. I only know it from a single recording (on Deutsche Grammophon), but as usual, the live performance had even more electricity.
[Photo: Comet "Wild 2," photographed on January 2, 2004 by Team Stardust, NASA]
Tonight at Zankel Hall, Pierre Boulez conducts Le marteau sans maître and sur Incises, the former with the great contralto Hilary Summers (so memorable last year in George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill). But slightly further north, virtuoso Ursula Oppens is at Symphony Space, in an evening of Elliott Carter's solo piano music, including the short Catenaires, which Pierre-Laurent Aimard presented as a surprise world premiere at his recital in 2006.
I hate these dilemmas.
What was most noticeable to me during Alex Ross's excellent appearance on The Charlie Rose Show was how one of Ross's theses was subtly confirmed by Rose himself, who seemed a good bit more reserved than usual. Ross notes that many intelligent people who keep up with the latest developments in other arts (e.g., theater, visual arts, film, etc.) have a blind spot when it comes to the latest in "classical" music.
I kept waiting for Rose to mention that he had heard say, some John Adams (or even some Stravinsky), or dropped by The Stone or The Kitchen, or to describe what recordings he had purchased lately, but...nothing. (It actually made me a little sad. Charlie, write me, and I’ll take you to a concert.) I also commend Ross for citing Serge Koussevitsky as one of the 20th century's greatest conductors, not particularly for his technique of the moment, but for the his legacy of commissions that include Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, and Britten's Peter Grimes.
Conductor Marin Alsop was also enjoyable, reminiscing about Leonard Bernstein and discussing the importance of programming works by living composers. Her initial rocky reception in Baltimore seems to have abated, thankfully. And it's hard to imagine in 2008, but just a hunch: this may have been the first time many viewers have seen a female conductor interviewed on television.
My blogging service, TypePad, has selected Monotonous Forest as one of its "Featured Blogs," here. If it means more readers, and especially those who might be encouraged to listen to more contemporary music, that can't be a bad thing. I'm delighted.
[Image created at www.churchsigngenerator.com]
As a destination, Merkin Concert Hall has long been slightly frustrating. Its intimate space seating 450 people has a pleasingly clear acoustic with excellent sight lines, but the lobby and exterior were as cheerless and institutional as a high school cafeteria. No more.
In a dramatic transformation, Robert A. M. Stern Architects have completely reconfigured the Kaufman Center (where the hall is housed), opening up the space to the outside, with enormous windows facing the street. Upstairs, the balcony used to face a tiny hallway, adjacent to a dreary, virtually windowless space where receptions were held after concerts. Some evenings the idea of following great music in this cheerless little room caused me to flee home, much as I wanted to talk with artists and audience members about what we had just heard. In a radical change, the upstairs has been opened up into a single large windowed space, vastly more inviting.
Tuesday's opening night concert represented the Center's aspirations well, with a prominent role for some of the students of the Lucy Moses School (also part of Kaufman), and guest artists including soprano Esther Heideman, who gave a gleaming performance of Aaron Jay Kernis's Simple Songs for soprano and chamber orchestra. Mr. Kernis also conducted some of the city's best musicians invited for the occasion (as the Friends of Kaufman Center Orchestra) in Aaron Copland's Music for the Theatre from 1925.
The celebration continues with a free, six-hour piano marathon on January 21, including new music stars like Ursula Oppens and Lisa Moore, and performances of György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, conducted by Merkin Hall Director, Gregory D. Evans. But with all the promise of exciting musical evenings to come, as a frequent visitor to Merkin I am most heartened by this sparkling renovation, one of the year's first architectural exclamation points.
[Rendering by Augustus Wendell for Robert A.M. Stern Architects]
