Silverlake Blvd.

Rite of Spring @ Disney Hall

 

Last night Dudamel led the best Rite of Spring I’ve ever heard. Our seats certainly had something to do with it. We were right behind the timpani, dead center in the first row behind the orchestra. It was annoying not to see the musicians’ faces, but the benefit in being really immersed in the sound was worth it. The sound was thick and brilliant, and completely clear. Part of the clarity was being so close to the action that the spatial aspect of the different musicians was so obvious: the chimes sounding from three o’clock, the tubas wailing from six o’clock, the contrabassons at 10 o’clock, and so on. It made the interplay between instruments physical.

 

And the interplay of sections is everything. The Rite is a mosaic of clashing rhythmic patterns. Modules that start and stop without conventional gestures of beginning or ending. They’re organized dramatically—a succession of contrasting moods—rather than as continuously unfolding musical themes. It’s curt and abrupt. It doesn’t wallow.

 

The elements are further particularized by novel harmonies and piquant instrumental colors: the strangely thin sound of the two trumpets, the weird drone of the contrabassoons. In that sense it is like Petrushka, a succession of brilliant swatches. Petrushka is a hard-edged work, but it has lots of surface glitter. The difference here is that the Rite drops all that genial folklorish bustle.

 

What is the Rite, in the end? A sequence of episodes of contrasting mood: slow and somber then fast and wild. Listless routine alternating with moments of ecstasy. The difference is that this isn’t Faust’s or Isolde’s Romantic ecstasy of individual realization, but something shattering, impersonal and inhuman. Instead of presenting the expansion of a soul, the Rite presents a vast factory full of noisy machines working away.

 

Next May will be the centennial of the Rite’s premiere. The scandal/riot has become a beloved vignette in the official mythology of modernism. But there were a lot of disorderly musical premieres around a century ago. The difference with the Rite, is that it’s the one scandalous work that has become genuinely popular. Alban Berg’s Altenberg Songs—which prompted an even more violent riot at the Musizverein in Vienna two months earlier—is lovely, but it’s never become part of the repertoire. Likewise for the Erik Satie’s delicious Parade—which would be the Russian Ballet’s big scandal a year after the Rite. They would probably still succeed in upsetting audiences today, whereas the Rite’s inescapable energy makes it about as pop as a modernist composition can be. I don’t know quite what the moral of this story is. Perhaps it’s just the coincidence that Stravinsky’s focus on rhythm mirrored the same focus in 20^th century pop music. Or maybe the Rite is just that much more alive.

 

[Image: Natalia Goncharova, curtain design for the Coq d’Or, 1913]

 

Madmen of Mandoras, a.k.a. They Saved Hitler's Brain

 

Madmen of Mandoras is a 1963 science fiction/horror movie directed by David Bradley. I learned about Bradley in one of my movie archiving classes. When he wasn’t directing schlock B-movies, Bradley was that rare Hollywood character, somebody who loved and collected films. The collection he amassed is now at Indiana University.

 

 

 

Five years after Mandoras was released, the distributor got somebody to shoot 27 minutes of crappy footage, adding a framing story about two journalists. This was titled, The Saved Hitler’s Brain. Yes, I love the title, but the remix was a travesty of something rare and wonderful.

 

 

 

Madmen of Mandoras is a work made despite the odds. It is one of those B-movies that feels genuinely naïve. A preposterous story and laughable dialogue. Actors who barely succeed in embodying clichés. Sets, costumes, locations, props that betray desperation. And yet it has a compelling visual style. It imposes a mood. It documents something very concrete. Unlike escapist “good” cinema, you can never quite get away from awareness of the film receiving with complete indifference the optical traces of the strange antics transpiring in front of the camera.

 

 

 

“Naïve” is problematic, but less blatantly stupid than “primitive,” “folk,” or “raw.” Jack Smith wrote about movies that failed so spectacularly to realize illusion that they the failure of illusion became their theme. The beauty of a machine that fails to accomplish its purpose: something like that informs Mandoras. In mocking our horrible compulsions, it liberates.

 

 

 

I due Foscari @ Dorothy Chandler

 

For an opera that’s notoriously lacking action, there wasn’t a single dull moment last Thursday. The playing, singing, acting, staging, and visual elements were exhilarating and moving from beginning to end.

 

There’s no denying it’s a strange work. It’s rarely performed. The source, The Two Foscari is, like most of Byron’s work, a polemic against tyranny and sadism that masquerade as order and justice. Byron’s Venice is a hell in which nobody does anything except suffer. The question of whether or not Jacopo is guilty or innocent of treason against Venice is not examined. No one tries to prove or disprove the charge. Jacopo has been condemned, he suffers and dies, and that is all there is to it. His father, the Doge, as the leader of the community, does nothing to mitigate Jacopo’s sufferings out of an exaggerated sense of duty. Jacopo’s wife spends her time confronting all the principals and accusing them, in thrillingly intemperate language, of heartlessness and hypocrisy. Neither she nor anyone else attempts to help Jacopo escape.

 

I due Foscari transformed this unlikely material into, like most of Verdi’s work, a vivid theatrical presentation of the individual conflicting with the official face of society. He trimmed its adolescent Goth elements (Byron’s Jacopo spends most of the time being tortured), and diminished Byron’s satanically wicked Loredano into something resembling a human being.

 

However Verdi did not tamper with the fundamental static quality of Byron’s poem. He didn’t turn it into an opera so much as a staged oratorio, a musical illustration of the results of tyranny. The three acts consist of the characters complaining about the injustice of their situations.

 

This would be unbearable without music as exciting as Verdi’s. He makes all the different responses vividly clear, even if we don't have much context. There are spectacular moments like the council chamber scene, but the real power of the score is in its restraint. The voices often rise up unaccompanied, as if to embody their lack of support. There a deft bits of scene-setting, like the doleful klezmer-ish clarinet music that precedes Jacopo’s entrance in Act 1. 

 

All of these nuances were clear because Verdi’s music was presented Thursday night by a precise and fired-up orchestra, and by animated, larger than life singers. Plácido Domingo (the Doge) was almost too hale and hearty to be a convincing old man. But of course he was magnificent. Francesco Meli (Jacopo) and especially Marina Poplavskaya (Lucrezia) knew they had great parts, and rose to the challenge. I suspect that productions with so-so singers are responsible for the myth that this is one of Verdi’s duds. However that was not the case the other night, lucky for us.

 

Journey to the abyss: the diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918

 

 

I waited for months in the LAPL queue to borrow this, but it wasn’t nearly as fun as I expected. There was a vivid glimpse of his very exotic life every 200 pages, but no more. All the rest consists of guest lists and itineraries.

 

There are gems of course. On March 1, 1902, Harry summed up most of the books that would be produced in England in the next hundred and ten years.

 

“Read Ernest Dowson’s Decorations. A very talented decadent; more classical, more cultivated than ours. You sense that he has lived in Oxford or Cambridge and probably has clean underwear.”

 

On May 23, 1911, in a similar vein, he sums up Gabriele D’Annunzio:

 

“… light gray summer pants such as one sees in bazaars in Florence, or Sundays on Italian traveling salesmen. Add to that rundown patent leather shoes, a somewhat frayed coat with a black-braided casual suit, and a no longer new, light lilac necktie, the whole outfit in the style of a fading coffeehouse Don Juan from an Italian small town, Bologna or Pisa.”

 

Kessler preserves forever this scent from June 2, 1912:

 

“With Nijinsky at Rodin’s. I was there first, already before eleven. The curling tongs had been brought out and Rodin appeared with freshly waved hair, Olympian, but still smelling a bit like pomade.”

 

[Image: Le cycliste, Maillol, 1907-8. A portrait of Kessler's boyfriend Gaston Colin.]

Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoline

 

 

I was surprised and pleased by its gentleness. It isn’t about the sane working class versus the crazy rich. It doesn’t mock the architecture, or the patron, but gives full justice to the house--its marvels and also its leaks.

 

It is a very sane, humane and clear-sighted account of subjects such as masters and servants, elite versus mass culture, lived reality versus image … which are almost always handled in slogans.

 

 

 

Comedy of Errors @ Griffith Park

 

Comedy of Errors has no memorable lines, and the few extended speeches tend to be lame exercises in wit, morality or narrative clarification. While lacking Shakespearean verbal fun, it demonstrates Shakespeare’s less flashy skill in giving actors opportunities to run wild.

 

Last Saturday night David Melville’s ukulele band and the WWII-era costumes defined an appropriately screwball frame. André Martin as Antipholus of Ephesus reached a dizzy peak of absurd ferocity. Richard Azurdia and Bobby Plasencia grabbed their parts as the Dromio twins and were sublimely idiotic and put-upon. It was silly, and by the end I hurt from laughing. 

 

Helen @ the Getty Villa

 

What are ancient Greek plays good for? For scholars they are playgrounds in which they can demonstrate their mastery of intricate language, arcane lore, and even more arcane topical allusions. But what use are they to theater-goers? None, unless somebody with some insight discerns the drama, and finds a new way to present it. The assumption is that these strange old texts contain characters and conflicts that, despite millennia, remain compelling. However all the things that delight the scholar—the language, the lore, and the allusions—are positive impediments to the theatrical professional. All that has to be cut. In their place, the adaptor has to find modern equivalents. The adaptor has to be especially ruthless when dealing with a comedy. Quaintness and incomprehensibility can add grandeur to a tragic effect, but comedy has to communicate more directly, or else it won’t get any laughs.

 

Jon Lawrence Rivera’s production of Nick Salamone’s adaptation of Euripides’s Helen was so productive of equivalents you could relax and enjoy it as a comedy without caring about the fact that it was faithful to the spirit of the old play.

 

The first equivalent Rivera and Salmone found was for the format: they employed the conventions of musical comedy to emulate the dialog/music/dance mix of ancient Greek dramaturgy. Streamlined to three female back-up singers, the Chorus, for once, wasn’t an embarrassment to be hushed up. The music was not always first-rate, and the lyrics didn’t get within a mile of the vivid poetry of Euripides, but the framework accommodated the tricky changes in tone of the original. While Euripides made the characters and situations outrageously ridiculous, he gave Helen some very serious moments: her exasperation at her bad reputation, her longing to get back home, her longing to get her old life back, her grief and disgust over the pointlessness of the Trojan War. Helen’s solicitude for Troy is an extraordinary violation of conventional patriotism. All of that came through vividly. Salmone even invented (out of somebody else’s speech) a tender reunion between Helen (Rachel Sorsa) and an old servant.

 

There was also a gladiator movie element in the performance of Maxwell Caulfield as Helen’s estranged husband Menelaos, who spent most of the evening in a loincloth showing off his abs. Making the King of Sparta a preening dimwit himbo was, again, entirely in the spirit of the original. Euripides was particularly enraged by the stupidity of official history, and took pains to make sure we despised the Greeks’s stupidity, while also feeling sorry for them as victims of patriotic propaganda.

 

In terms of the story, Rivera & Salamone's crucial invention was equating the ancient Olympian folklore with modern legends of celebrity culture. Their Helen is a movie star, as the most famous beauty in the word would be nowadays. This provided a familiar context for Helen’s complaints about the disconnect between her public image and who she really is. We’ve heard that before, but it sounded very fresh coming from Helen of Troy.

 

The lost Greek soldier Teucer was translated into a damaged vet. Christopher Rivas appeared only in the one scene, but he made an impact. Teucer doesn’t realize who he’s talking to; he just appreciates a lady who’s kind. His parting words leave Helen—and the audience—shattered:

 

“You are like Helen only in appearance; in heart you are utterly different. I pray she may never reach home, but come to a bad end. But you—good luck be with you always!”

 

Another equivalent was the translation of Helen’s captor and persecutor from some vague Egyptian into a Kim Jong Il-type tyrant (Chil Kong). Rivera and Salamone obviously loved this character and, contrary to Euripides, inserted him in scenes throughout the play. His solemn sister (played by Natsuko Ohama) was deprived of one of the enduringly funny moments in the original play—when, like a B.C. Lady Bracknell, she portentously informs Helen what she already knows (i.e. that the man standing next to her is her husband.) However they gave her the last big laugh of the evening, when from the balcony she channels the spirits of Helen’s brothers, and then comments, “Whew! I never had a man inside of me before!”

 

The full moon emerged from clouds with tremendous dramatic effect above the east corner of the museum balcony. I didn’t notice any special blueness, but its light was certainly brilliant. 

 

[Illustration: Bacchus & Ariadne, 1620, Guido Reni]