Silverlake Blvd.

Monstruos y Prodigios @ RedCat

We went to RedCat last night and saw The Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes perform “De Monstruos y Prodigios: la Historia de los Castrati.” We went because the ads promised humor and baroque music, which there was, along with much more. It was prodigious and we walked out baffled but entertained.

 

One way to describe it would be to say it was a lecture on the rise and fall of the castrati fad. A troupe of seven men took turns narrating and falling into roles and acting out scenes. They took us through the medical procedure that made boys castrati, their musical training, their role in baroque music, their life as musical superstars, the contrasting musical cultures of France and Italy, and the detractors that eventually led to their disappearance.

 

This would be pretty tame if the characters presenting the story didn’t include besides a composer and a young castrato, an aboriginal slave, a centaur, a set of Siamese twins, and a mute man riding a live horse. The performers were all odd specimens, to add to the strangeness. They were also accomplished orators and comedians. The show zipped along at a brisk pace: it was performance art with all the boring bits left out. The end of the castrati was signaled by the man sitting next to me standing up and screaming insults at the performers, precipitating a food fight that pummeled the audience with biscuits. After that it was complete mayhem, ending with Napoleon blowing everybody up with a canon.

 

What did it mean? I don’t know. One thread seemed to be the tug of contrasting forces of nature and art. How these two things provide opposite points between which lies a a spectrum of possibilities in which people orient themselves. Some are more wild (the centaur, the slave), others more artificial (the castrato, the Siamese twin explicators).

 

Another thread seemed to be the element of weirdness in Baroque music that is entirely surpressed in performance today. Lorriane Hunt-Lieberson singing “Lascia ch'io pianga" on a CD is one thing, and a 18^th century transsexual in a hoop skirt and feathers (and full baroque theatrical scenery) is another. The whole modern sense of Vivaldi, Handel, & Purcell as wholesome, upbeat entertainment misses out on their decadent aspect, how their original performance context was more like Las Vegas plus a drag show than a modern-day concert performance, with good manners, and polite attentiveness to the music.

 

Sweet Sunshine, the pale grey horse white spots, was the handsomest performer on stage, danced and demonstrated the “canter pirouette, piaffe, passage and Spanish walk” impressively.

Shamefully, it was my first time seeing a performance at RedCat!

Magic Flute @ L.A. Opera

Perfection.

Marianne Moore wrote that The Magic Flute asked

What is love and
shall I ever have it?

and answered

The truth
is simple. Banish sloth, fetter-feigning uncouth
fraud.

So there's hope. But meanwhile, it’s possible to enjoy the antics of the unenlightened, especially when they are wearing Gerald Scarfe’s costumes. 

The blogosphere circa 1943

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. … They reported on, or rather ‘chatted about a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work.
 
… The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of ‘writer,’ but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.
 
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives, or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as ‘Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870,’ or “the Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes,’ or ‘The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans,’ and so on. …
 
… For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

(from Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game)

Venice Baroque Orchestra @ Disney

An all-Vivaldi program. First Giardino Armonico, then Cecilia Bartoli, and now these guys: obviously there’s an Italian nationalist conspiracy to sell us on Vivaldi as the Original Baroque Master. “Listen to this!” they say, “It’s as good as Bach, and it doesn’t have the boring parts!” 

And it’s hard to argue, when, like last night, they played things like the Concerto in D major for strings (RV 121) with a heart-stopping slow movement featuring a few delicate plucks of a lute. And the Sinfonia in B minor for strings (RV 168) with it’s folk-song swing. 

After that, Giuliano Carmignola, the violin soloist, came out and the rest of the program was slightly weightier concerti. But only slightly. Vivaldi rages and storms, but his tempests are stage effects. The Baroque theatrical machinery always peeks out, but it’s so adorable you wouldn’t want anything else.

Quite a Weil @ Disney

Last night’s La Passion de Simone was a disappointment. Saariaho’s music had some moments, but they were scattered between long stretches of aimless noodling. There were some attractively dark murmurs from the chorus. The best music, tellingly, was the purely instrumental moment when Dawn Upshaw stood holding a photo of Weil, and didn’t sing a note. In the “Light and gravity” episode the singing, the music, and the text suggested some kind of revelation. But that was one moment out of 75 minutes.

Amin Maalouf’s text was an insurmountable obstacle: a completely inert, undramatic collage of fragments that succeeded only in seeming sophomoric. It reeked of that unfortunate glamour-adoration that adolescents confer on rock stars and some Continentals confer on intellectuals. For a corrective, try to imagine what Simone Weil would have thought of it.

And then there was Peter Sellars’ staging. Michale Schumacher's dancing and miming suggested “Knock, knock! It’s Fate!” Or Death, or The Holy Spirit, or The Holocaust, or The Other, …. There were lots of early exits. Our friend remarked, “Why does Dawn always have to roll around on the floor? Why don’t we ever get a chance to hear her just sing?” I look forward to that. She was amazing, of course. I hope she had fun.

No. 6, 1928-2009

 

Good-bye to Patrick McGoohan.

Pärt’s 4th @ Disney

 

Arvo Pärt’s new symphony is seriously beautiful. I can’t wait to hear it again minus the coughing audience accompaniment. And after the shock of Pärt dedicating the piece to Mikhail Khodorkovsky wears off.

 

Yes, Khodorkovsky’s in prison for being a critic of Putin, but he’s still an oligarch. Pärt obviously lives in his own world, and we are all the beneficiaries. Is he working on something for Bernard Madoff?

 

Alan Rich was there that night and he was crazy to leave before Emanual Ax performed the first Brahms piano concerto. Brahms is the Paolo Veronese of music.

Betty Freeman, 1921-2009

Good-bye to our own modern-day Nikolas Esterházy of Beverly Hills, patron of music and musicians.

With all the stories about millionaire art collectors who treat art as a combination junk bond/status symbol/drug, it's nice to recall somebody who engaged in a different kind of arts patronage. Her assistance enabled John Cage to work, as well as Lou Harrison,La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle, Virgil Thomson, Helmut Lachenmann, Kaija Saariaho ....

Freeman seems to have rescued Harry Partch from the streets, given him a place to live and work, and ensuring he could continue his excentric path.

Compositions dedicated to her include John Cage’s Freeman Etudes, Lou Harrison’s Serenade for Betty Freeman and Franco Assetto, Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards and Vermont Counterpoint, and John Adams's Nixon in China.

Appreciations from Marc Swed and Alan Rich.