Silverlake Blvd.

Bluebeard @ Disney

 

 

It was a relief that after four weeks I was able to sit through last night’s concert at Disney without making a nuisance of myself coughing.

 

But then Esa-Pekka’s homecoming was a disappointment. Magnus Lindberg’s Graffiti for big chorus and big orchestra had some nice moments (the oboe interlude) but was fatally under-powered. Using the texts of actual graffiti from Pompeii offered opportunities for humor, variety and pathos which Lindberg ignored. All the different voices were smothered in the same updated Respighi sauce.

 

L.A. Phil has done great semi-staged performances in the past (Tristan, Oedipus) so I was really looking forward to Bartók’s Bluebeard. Unfortunately they didn’t even try to dramatize the action (except for some tricky lighting) and we had to follow the symbolist fairytale plot in our heads.

 

The music was terrific but Anne Sofie von Otter and Willard White were often overwhelmed by the orchestra’s magnificent racket.

 

What a disturbing piece! And what actually happens to Judith in the end? Does Bluebeard kill her? Does she turn out to be a figment of his imagination? Whatever, it’s not a happy ending.

 

... Overheard at intermission:

 

A: Hey! What's this tune: Da-da-da DEE DEE da DEE? Is it Strauss, one of the Last Songs?

B: Yeah ...

A: It’ been driving me crazy; I’ve had it in my head all day. Da-da-da DEE DEE da DEE ....

 

 

 

Rabbit Redux

From upstairs Earl Angstrom’s thin voice calls anxiously, with a wheedler’s borrowed triumph, ‘They’re down! Eagle has landed! We’re on the moon, boys and girls. Uncle Sam is on the moon!’

’That’s just. The place for him,’ Mom says, and with a rough gesture sweeps her distorted hand back toward her ear, to smooth down a piece of hair that has wandered loose from the bun she still twists up.

Quartet in Autumn

 

Marcia’s short, stiff, lifeless hair was uncompromisingly dyed a harsh dark brown from a bottle in the bathroom cupboard, which she had used ever since she had noticed the first white hairs some thirty years earlier. If there were now softer and more becoming ways of colouring one’s hair, Marcia was unaware of them.

Memoirs of Hadrian

To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus behind the stones we find the secret of the springs.

 

Memoirs of a Beatnik

 

 

’Honey,’ he would say, ‘you wanna be in Earl Wilson’s column as the girl who went to visit Ezra Pound?’

‘No thanks, Ray,’ I would say, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

‘OK honey, it’s your life, but you really need some publicity. Everybody needs publicity.’

I learned a lot from Ray.”

 

Rabbit, Run

She discovers herself making lunch, like looking down into a food advertisement in a magazine, bacon strips sizzling in a pan at the end of a huge blue arm.