Monotonous Forest

Summer Snapshot IV: Heroic Hamelin

Inside the lobby of Mannes College the New School for Music, dozens of people lined the stairs leading to the school’s intimate concert space, the line stretching all the way back to a far hallway. The occasion (July 26) was another recital by Marc-André Hamelin, whose appearances in recent years have closed the International Keyboard Institute and Festival on high plateaus, drawing a serious, eager crowd for whatever he chooses to play. Inside the hall, one noticed the wisps of charged conversation, pairs of piano students comparing notes, discriminating fans sliding their chairs an inch or two left or right to refine the viewing angle—Hamelin’s recitals are events.

Given his bent for the unusual, the menu this time took few chances. Yet the pianist found good reasons to renew acquaintance with old friends, starting with C.P.E. Bach’s Sonata in E minor, Wq. 59, No. 1, H.28, which loped along like an easygoing hound. After the second movement (little more than a bridge between the outer ones) the Andantino was slower than one might expect, with a delightfully abrupt ending that caused a shimmer of laughter before the applause. For some the highlight was the Janáček, seven of the thirteen pieces from On an Overgrown Path. Chosen from the first book, Hamelin’s set began with the homey “Our evenings” and the gusts of “A windblown leaf,” ending with the peacefulness of “Good night.” One friend thought these were the best of the night, and was struck by the pianist’s honesty in transmitting the composer’s unique cadences.

It could be argued, however, that the greatest transcendence came at the close of the first half, with the first book of Debussy’s Images. The heartbreaking surge-and-retreat of “Reflets dans l’eau” was precise beyond all expectations, and Hamelin’s ability to control and sustain dynamic shadings was at its peak in “Hommage à Rameau.” During the final “Mouvement” I wrote in my notes, “One sits in meditative bliss, entranced, as all that is unimportant fades into the background, the horizon growing ever fainter.”

Even the Brahms Third Sonata that followed seemed to carry the crowd into a different realm. Using a huge sound, Hamelin sculpted a narrative—a craggy landscape—and after the peaks and valleys of the first movement, the second (“Andante espressivo”) came like a flashback, as if telling the story of a swashbuckler’s early life. The third movement had both swagger and twinkle—including a galumphing barroom waltz—perhaps the protagonist’s stormy teens. In the “Intermezzo,” some of the opening returned, before the finale, with its dazzling thickets bringing the journey to its close. Only then, did the quiet, rapt audience begin applauding.

Looking a bit weary, Hamelin nevertheless obliged with two encores, starting with a mellow Rachmaninoff G-Sharp Minor Prelude. But the prize went to Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” with Hamelin’s own uproarious “wrong-note” refinement. When the familiar main theme returned, after the interlude, it did so with (apparently) each note of the right-hand melody welded to one of its half-step neighbors—whether up or down, I couldn’t quite tell. Hilarity aside, I can’t imagine the difficulties involved in learning the piece with all these new skin grafts, but Hamelin is an unusual—not to mention entertaining—surgeon.

[Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke]

Talea Ensemble in Three Provocative Premieres

From Darmstadt, With Love. Seen and Heard International, October 24, 2012

Opposites Attract

Boulez and Cage, Talking to Each Other. Seen and Heard International, October 20, 2012

Summer Snapshot III: Waterfront Cage

Concerts at Bargemusic are unlike any others in town, and in these two evenings (July 11 and 18) that fact meshed neatly with works of John Cage by the FLUX Quartet (Tom Chiu and Conrad Harris, violins; Max Mandel, viola; and Felix Fan, cello). In Cage’s world, “there are always sounds to be heard,” and that was abundantly, cheerfully clear, from the faint blast of water-taxi horns, to the distant glissandi of ambulance sirens—even the barge’s toilet flushing at the back of the room. And there was a the occasional flock of tourists outside, some pausing to peer at the performers through the wall of glass behind the stage. 

The String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) is an early work, tautly constructed (22 rhythmic units of 22 measures each, with an intricate internal pattern), yet all that is forgotten when absorbing its Satie-like delicacy. Parts reminded me of medieval chant—albeit interrupted by other events—and the piece grows more transparent until its fast, dance-like conclusion.

The more contemplative Solos from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) unfolds more spaciously, with lone plucked notes, scrubby scratches, a hollow tap of a bow on a music stand, the soft squeak of a tuning peg adjusting (and that toilet). At one point one of Chiu’s violin strings snapped, waving like a small tail—all part of the Cagean experience.

For the Thirty Pieces for String Quartet (1983) the instructions ask the players to arrange themselves in “unplanned fashion”—in this case, not facing each other. Using the contemporary equivalent of stopwatches (i.e., smartphones) to synchronize, the result was less silence and more polyphony, with high contrasts—and flashbulbs going off outside, as tourists wandered by to photograph the waterfront and New York skyline.

On the second night, just as Conrad Harris was about to begin the brief Nocturne for Violin and Piano (1947), some unexpectedly vigorous rocking from the barge forced him to spend a few moments steadying himself with mock-alarm, before his simple, sober reading, with pianist Joseph Kubera as his slightly bemused partner. And using a special mute to produce a tinny, constricted tone, Harris gave a bit of playfulness to Cheap Imitation, Part 2 (1977) in its version for solo violin.

Violist Mandel got a star turn in the sole non-Cage offering: Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life 1 (1970). With five colleagues (Alex Sopp on flute, Matt Gold on percussion, plus Kubera, Chiu and Fan) Mandel gave each hushed phrase the care of an archivist in the slowly evolving score.

Two of the most striking works—at least, as realized here—were Seven (1988) and Music for Nine (1984-1987), both augmented by percussion. With the usual instrumental array as a base, Mr. Gold rushed back and forth to shake marbles in a bowl (at least one rolled down the aisle), rub ridged sticks on the barge’s wooden walls, pour water, blow a whistle, rub an inflated balloon and whirl a length of plastic tubing. In the latter piece, clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt and singer Thomas Buckner completed the evening’s game, alert cast—all as courageous and uninhibitedly Cagean as one could want.

Summer Snapshot II: Speed and Sulfur

For two weeks each year, the International Keyboard Institute and Festival (IKIF) creates a dream fortnight for piano lovers, drawn to wall-to-wall performances in the intimate recital hall at Mannes College The New School for Music. On July 23, the young Dmitri Levkovich sailed through a difficult program that might have flummoxed lesser talents. Originally from the Ukraine and the son of two concert pianists who later emigrated to Israel and Canada, Levkovich studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute before arriving at the Cleveland Institute of Music to work with the renowned Sergei Babayan. 

As evidenced by his opening, Chopin’s Barcarole, Op. 60 and Sonata No. 2, Mr. Levkovich has no shortage of technique. The final two movements of the sonata were especially effective; the “Marche funèbre” had appropriate gravitas, and the treacherous unisons of the finale were executed with mind and fingers seemingly unfazed by the score’s difficulty.

But perhaps best on the first half was Scriabin’s Ninth Sonata, the “Black Mass,” which began delicately, even tentatively—giving no warning of the grotesque torrents that would come flooding in later. Despite the Ninth’s dense midsection, the pianist gave the inner lines their due. Overall the tempo seemed slightly quicker than usual, yet the pianist was still able to maintain a sulfurous mood. Barely pausing for breath, he tore into Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 (“Appassionata”), ultimately giving it a monumental cast. The final Allegro ma no troppo - Presto was adroitly phrased, with carefully considered details.

To close the evening, the pianist plunged into Stravinsky’s Trois mouvements de Petrouchka, with the “Danse russe” at a stingingly fast tempo. “Chez Pétrouchka” and “La semaine grasse” were mercifully a tad slower, yet vivacious and packed with color. As a gentler encore, Levkovich offered a thoughtful, beautifully spun-out Rachmaninoff Prelude in G Major, Op. 32, No. 5.

[Photo: Emily Burns]

Summer Snapshot I: Thoughts on Pina Bausch

I miss Pina Bausch, who died in 2009. No choreographer has altered my view of dance so profoundly. This past summer I found myself recalling many of her pieces, thanks to a Wim Wenders film, followed by a magnificent Lincoln Center Festival appearance by the Paris Opera Ballet in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice.

My introduction to Bausch was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984, with her discomfiting take on Bartók’s only opera (Full title: Blaubart. Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartóks Oper “Herzog Blaubarts Burg,” or “Bluebeard – While Listening To A Taped Recording Of Bela Bartók´s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle”). Afterward I couldn’t sleep, and the piece both fascinated and disturbed me for weeks. Yet as time passed, Bausch’s annual appearances at BAM became a string of wondrous experiences, most using jaw-dropping stagecraft. The odd co-star of Arien (1979) was a lifelike hippopotamus, sloshing on a stage covered with six inches of water. In 1980 (1980), working sprinklers kept green chunks of sod (and a few bugs) alive as the cast frolicked on a summer lawn. And as the audience assembled for Palermo, Palermo (1989), the stage was dominated by a mammoth floor-to-ceiling wall of concrete blocks—that toppled as the work began, leaving the dancers to navigate amid the rubble. (The latter was revived last July at Sadler's Wells, along with nine other late Bausch works over five weeks—Sarah Crompton comments here.)

But Bausch’s extravagant, “let’s-give-the-tech-crew-another-headache” sets were just part of her esthetic, which invites the audience into a universe of movement coupled with unsettling emotional content. Her dancers—most of whom could be your neighbors, rather than looking classically trained—were physically and emotionally adventurous. A Bausch performance never left me unmoved or unshaken, after seeing men and women ignore each other, play with each other, be cruel to each other, fight with each other. Her patterns have a hypnotic pull, but radically different from the formations of say, George Balanchine or Paul Taylor; hers are behaviors from which the participants cannot escape.

Wenders’s touching documentary Pina (2011) captures the strange Bausch allure, using footage  from The Rite of Spring (1975), Café Muller and Kontakthof (both 1978), and Vollmond (2006). Additional sequences were shot in the slightly gritty streets of Wuppertal (home of Bausch's Tanztheater), all interwoven with reminiscences from the individual dancers, facing the camera in tight close-ups. The film also deploys 3-D photography as effectively as I’ve ever seen.

Which brings us to this year's Lincoln Center Festival, and the Paris Opera Ballet in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice—the only time I have seen a Bausch piece done by a company other than her own. In its North American premiere (originally created in 1975), Orpheus made a powerful impression, starting with the minimal sets by Rolf Borzik (who also did the costumes and lighting). On the mostly bare stage in Scene I (“Mourning”) are a glass cube, a mound of charcoal earth, a horizontal tree branch extending from a side wall. “Violence” (Scene II) has a grove of tall wooden chairs, and later, three men in black leather executioners’ aprons, while the orchestra plays a tingling Allegro vivace. Beds of flowers and a back wall of reflective glass give Scene III (“Peace”) a zen-like calm, leading to the final empty black stage (Scene IV, “Death”) when Orpheus returns to the Underworld.

The three singers—Maria Riccarda Wesseling as Orpheus, Yun Jung Choi as Eurydice and Zoe Nicolaidou as Love—were uniformly excellent, along with (in one of Bausch’s brilliant strokes) their dance doubles: Stéphane Bullion, Marie-Agnès Gillot and Muriel Zusperreguy, respectively. Thomas Hengelbrock conducted the superb Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble und Chor (based in Freiburg). In the Paris corps, Bausch’s movements became sleekly refined, even ethereal—a wave of bodies gently washing the stage. An early sequence, in which the black-clad group advanced diagonally, brought to mind the sobriety of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.

As an example of Bausch’s early work, Orpheus shows the great choreographer already beginning subtly to depart from the dance world’s traditions. The unnerving theatricality, ambiguity, gender confrontations—and humor—would appear in her later works, which get under your skin with alarming ease.

[Above: Marlis Alt in the original 1977 production of Blaubart. Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartóks Oper “Herzog Blaubarts Burg." Photo by Maarten Vanden Abeele]

 

 

Kurtág, Andsnes and "The Rite"

Gilbert Opens New Season with a Rarity. Seen and Heard International, October 3, 2012

Leif Ove Andsnes, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic (Photo: Chris Lee)