Silverlake Blvd.

A Tribute to Ernest Fleischmann @ Disney Hall

 

Boulez--looking pretty darn good for somebody pushing 90--conducted a performance of his Sur Incises that was intermittently engrossing but overall exasperating. Immediately afterwards I was told by two intensely musical people

 

“I just don’t get modern music.”

&

“That was the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!”

 

I agreed with both. I have a longstanding hate/love thing with Boulez.

 

I hate his academicism: “intellectual” in the most deadly sense of the word. Its “objectified, mechanized savagery.” (Andrew Ross) Polemical posturing rather than communicating or exploring anything. Rebarbative not for its content, but for its insufferable Wagnerian pretentiousness. A museum modernism in the worst sense of Viennese modernist taste—naughtiness/pathology presented as trinkets for snobs. Its “hyperactive chic” (Morton Feldman)

 

I love his abstract and intricate delirium. There was a passage where the ensemble swelled, then subsided, again and again. It was hypnotic. For the moments of quietness to fascinate, there had to be the wilderness of the setting. It created openness and attentiveness. And something like this happens whenever I hear Boulez well played. Pierre-Laurent Aimard played his first piano sonata as a meteorological event. The Ensemble Intercontemporain playing Dérives I with each sliver of sound given a form and a trajectory. 

 

The delight of the evening was Renard. I realize now that my official Stravinsky-supervised recording is a travesty. The real thing is loud and boisterous and yet—without being a drag about it—disciplined as clockwork. It also is full of echoes and anticipations of a half dozen other Stravinsky pieces, none handled with reverence.

Turn of the Screw @ Dorothy Chandler

 

Britten’s Turn of the Screw (1954) is so eerie and ingenious you wonder why the piece isn’t produced everywhere all the time, and L.A. Opera’s production—imported from Glyndebourne—takes you from scene to scene so smoothly and makes its points so well you wonder how it could have been produced any other way.

 

Could its rarity have something to do with the fact that it’s an opera with only six characters, and they consist of two women, two small children and two ghosts? And then the whole effect is much more like a really engrossing stage play than a noisy grand opera spectacle.

 

Part of the challenge of the piece is that it zips along—the music hurries us from scene to scene without pause. In the first three scenes we pass in a matter of minutes from the Prologue with the narrator explaining that we’re about to hear a story from long ago, to The Governess on the train heading to the house, then to her reception at the house by the housekeeper and Miles and Flora, then to her delight at at her situation, and then the start of the trouble when the message arrives that Miles has been expelled from school.

 

This production dealt with that by keeping the sets and props to a minimum, and then animating them. There was a glass wall of windows and doors that spun around, rose and set, and provided interior walls, interior walls, church windows, a greenhouse and even the surface of a lake. A few chairs, beds and other props rotated onstage on interlinked tracks in the stage floor. We were able to pass through the sixteen scenes without fuss.

 

Act I ends with a long, disturbing scene in which the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Quint seduce little Flora and Miles. Quint’s call to Miles, an eerie wail. It is breathtakingly creepy. The extraordinary whiff of evil that Henry James manages to hint at in the original story is vividly realized.

 

Then comes the instrumental prologue to Act II, which is a memorable piece of music in itself. Instead of an orchestra, the piece has an ensemble of thirteen players. It is so light, and Britten’s music so deftly fixes each nuance that he really succeeds in creating a musical analogue to Henry James’ precisely calibrated elliptical prose. The thirteen players seem to be infinitely more varied and alert than conventional opera orchestras.

 

There are moments when the instrumental music is really electric. And often these directly reflect passages in the original text of the story.

 

Where Henry James notes “the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bells almost gay,” Britten provides a jangle of chimes that shade in and out of the sinister.

 

Where James remarks how Miles would play for The Governess, and  “The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies,” Britten provides a animated but slightly unhinged piano riff.

 

In short, it was a triumph of Benjamin Britten, while being exactly as James wrote:

 

“We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance.”

 

Elizabeth Taylor

 

 

"If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture,I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down." 

 

And what's this about the author of her obituary in the New York Times having died 5 years ago?

Akhnaten @ Terrace Theater, Long Beach

 

“What do they do when nothing happens,” asked Gertrude Stein, perhaps anticipating Long Beach Opera’s challenge when they decided to present Philip Glass’ 1984 opera Akhnaten.

 

LBO did a terrific job presenting a difficult piece. The music is sublime, but as theater Akhnaten is about as far from melodramatic grand opera as you can get. It is a series of tableaux in which characters declaim orations (in Akkadian and other familiar Southland languages) and not much else happens.

 

Akhnaten and five other characters have names, but they have only a notional individuality. There’s only a hint of personal interaction between them. The chorus does more to convey the narrative, and they were the musical heroes of the evening.

 

The other heroes were Dan Weingarten, Frieder Weiss and the lighting crew who provided digital projections and lighting effects that were, in turn, eerie, animated and soothing. I especially liked how the mob overthrowing Akhnaten was attired in shimmering pixils. 

 

Outside the Chinese garden at the Huntington

 

Another peach tree in blossom.

St. Patrick's Day 2011

 

... consisted of a long lunch at the Getty villa, where this peach tree was in bloom.

The Turk in Italy @ Dorothy Chandler

 

I understand now why Stendhal was in love with Rossini. The lack of sentimentality—or is it freedom from sentimentality? Treating marriage, honor and above all love as jokes.

 

Fifty years after it premiered Wagner wrote Tristan and Isolde to uphold the romantic ideal, and the romantic ideal has remained part of pop culture ever since. Tristan is overwhelming, but it doesn’t quite annihilate the Turk.

 

This was one of L.A. Opera’s good productions.

 

Setting it in Fifties Italy permitted some stylish sets and costumes. It also naturalized some strange aspects of the piece. As if Turk wasn’t ironic enough, Rossini has a character The Poet, who comments on the action—“Now she’s going to faint! Now there’s going to be a grand finale!” The updated scene turned him into the Director character from Fellini’s 8 ½ creating the story that we see.

 

Everyone exerted themselves to really act, and to really go for the laughs. It was funny, but funny-disconcerting as well as funny ha-ha. Which is I suppose the point.

 

Testes procedant / Let the witness proceed

 

Ethereus totum radius lustraverat orbem. / An ethereal ray once encompassed the whole earth.

--The last line of the Speculator consiliorum enigmaticus microcosmi protheati torrens

 

Check out the new website

Word Screen Park

 

Sid & cyberspace

 

“… our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and are ready to do; this, in turn, gives us a sense both of our power and of our vulnerability to the risky reality of the physical world. Furthermore, the body’s ability to zero in on what is significant, and then preserve that understanding in our background awareness, enables us to perceive more and more refined situations and respond more and more skillfully; its sensitivity to mood opens up our shared social situation and makes people and things matter to us; and its tendency to respond positively to direct engagement with other bodies; underlies our sense of trust and so sustains our interpersonal world. All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.”

--Herbert L. Dreyfuss