Silverlake Blvd.

Met Live presents The Tempest

 

This Tempest is the first piece by Thomas Adès that I don’t care for. I’m surprised and disappointed.

 

Six years ago he presented some selections at Disney Hall and they seemed tantalizing. Around the same time he conducted a production of his 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face at USC, and demonstrated that he could create entertaining theater, with plenty of clowning, pathos, and satire, all done with beautiful concision: four performers and eight pointed scenes. Over the years his various conducting gigs have let us see his refined side (Couperin, Stravinsky) as well as his noisy, fun Beaux-Arts claptrap side (Berlioz, Respighi). I love his pieces that mix all of this, pop and classical, old and new. His symphonies These Premises Are Alarmed (1996) and Asyla (1997), and the violin concerto (2005) are subtle and alert musical expressions of what the streets feel like these days. The Tempest had none of this.

 

The Tempest isn’t a complete disaster. There were good moments, like the opening storm, and the chorus at the end. The high point was Caliban’s “Friends don’t fear,” which was the opera’s version of Shakespeare’s “The isle is full of noises” speech. It was moving and eerie.

 

Unfortunately nothing else rose to that level. Simon Keenlyside did his best with a Prospero part in which he was given nothing to do but convey unwanted exposition set to music expressive of exasperation. I got tired of listening to it, and tired of looking at his tattoos and his pecs. Audrey Luna, the Ariel, was given an even more thankless task. She had one great moment, confronting the castaways as a monster, but otherwise her music never rose above irritating screeching. Somebody obviously told Luna that Ariel was “bird-like,” and boy, did we get some hammy ornithological attitudinizing. It was a reminder of how pedestrian and banal all the characterizations were.

 

Because I like Adès, I put all the blame on the librettist Meredith Oakes, who failed to provide clear dramatic situations and characters for the music to embody. In the absence of a dramatic container, Adès meandered. The music unspooled like so much fabric pouring out of a machine. Much of it was rich and intricate, but it didn’t make any dramatic sense. Moreover, the language was stunningly repulsive, outstandingly bad even for an opera libretto: neither Shakespeare, nor poetry, nor modern colloquial English. Oafish and tin-eared.

 

The only possible excuse for appropriating Shakespeare for anything is a unique, eccentric and passionate personal vision. Nothing like that is present in the Adès/Oakes version. Nothing in the characters, situations or the language of the Tempest has fired them up.

 

This absence of any compelling dramatic or musical vision created the opening through which Robert Lapage marched the Thanksgiving Day parade of his busy, bossy staging. The opera was so inert that I was glad for some of the spectacular moments: the storm, the weird exits through the prompter box, and the whole last act taking place in an opera house orchestra pit. (Don’t ask me why.)

 

What a mess! I hope Adès has learned not to listen to the people and institutions that prompted him to undertake this project. They’re merely appropriating Shakespeare’s prestige to prop up their own professional ambitions. God knows they’re not the first to do this, but I expected better of the composer of Powder Her Face.

 

[Image: Engraving after Prospero, Miranda and Caliban, by Henry Fuseli (1798)]

Thanksgiving, Autumn, Carl Sandburg

 

Growing up within 100-mile radius of Chicago automatically disqualifies anyone from appreciating Carl Sandburg. I had to wait till this October to discover for myself that he was a reporter of America in crisis. His poetry up to the 1920s was pointed, laconic, colloquial; his peers were Maykovsky and Brecht. And even afterwards, when he lost his way with banal improvisations on 4^th of July themes, he also produced the American Songbag collection, which ignited the mid-century folk music revival.

 

Thankgiving still reminds me of autumn, and Sandburg’s “Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn” (1918) ends 

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierced the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I.W.W. man in Vladivostok.)
 
I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.
 
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.
 

 

 

Wozzeck @ Disney Hall

 

 

Salonen returned to Disney Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra to do a concert version of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck last Tuesday. What luck that this was my first Wozzeck.

 

I had no idea it was this powerful. It’s terrifying, and impossible to resist or ignore. It’s as direct as an earthquake, raining bits of reality down on you. Horror, unrelieved by any humor or camp. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a clue about what Expressionism might have meant. There was nothing antique or dated about it.

 

It probably helped being in the 4^th row, being immersed in the amazing sounds coming out of the orchestra.

 

Johan Reuter and Angela Denoke not only realized every nuance of the score without strain, but fully embodied Franz and Marie. All the singers were excellent actors, and gave full characterizations, especially Peter Hoare as the Captain, and Kevin Burdette, who was a last-minute replacement playing the Doctor.

 

It was a concert performance, without sets, costumes or props, and only a narrow strip of the front of the stage available, but everyone delivered a complete characterization.

 

And what is this Wozzeck? A nightmare, a vision of Hell. But it’s a Hell of ordinary life. The taunts, humiliations and betrayals that Franz is subjected to are nothing special. They’re ostentatiously banal. It could all be the stuff of a comedy, except for the fact that Franz is extraordinarily sensitive—to nature, to the feelings of other people. He especially picks up the casual sadism of the creeps around him—the Captain with his horrific jocularity, the Drum-Major with his grotesque macho posturing. And above all, the Doctor, with his sadistic experiments.

 

Georg Büchner wrote his play in 1837, and Berg set it to music in 1922, but it’s impossible not to take this as a prophecy of the nightmare of Nazism to come. Fortunately this production was free of clichés of early 20^th century Expressionism, and so we in the audience were free to note the connections China, Russia, North Korea, and other places in the wonderfully enlightened era we live in.

 

Speaking of Büchner, I want to go on record as saying that while nobody could be more in awe of Büchner’s extraordinary visionary uniqueness—he’s the German for William Blake—you have to give Berg credit for turning Büchner’s notes into a real drama. Not making it conventional, but realizing the potential that was there, and creating, in the music, the fullest possible realization.

 

A nightmare, a nightmare. Did I "like" it? I was shattered.

La Vida Breve @ Disney Hall

 

 

Last night at Disney Hall, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, the venerable senior conductor with the magnificent Spanish Empire name tottered out on stage and conducted Manuel de Falla’s 1905 La Vida Breve. Burgos is considered the current master of this piece, and he brought his team of experts.

 

What a curiosity! It doesn’t seem very serious, but ends up being the concentrated essence of despair: a gypsy girl confronts her faithless lover at his wedding, and drops dead of a broken heart. Which is to say, it’s a theatrical representation of a flamenco song, plus elements of verismo opera and early modernist fairy tale. Despite the immediately engaging music throughout, it doesn’t get performed because, for a one-hour piece, it requires a huge orchestra and flamenco singers and dancers.

 

In the first scene the huge orchestra was a problem, overwhelming Vicente Ombuena (Paco), who couldn’t make himself heard. Gustavo Peña (The Voice from the Forge), in the other hand, could have made himself heard above Hurricane Sandy.

 

It wasn’t until the first extended orchestral interlude that I started to enjoy it. The music is charming, almost to excess. You wonder about De Falla’s credentials as a modernist.

 

In the second half, when poor Salud confronts faithless Paco, Nancy Fabiola Herrera rose to the occasion. But the vocal performance of the evening was by Pedro Sanz, the wedding singer, presenting a traditional wedding soleá. Sanz’s voice was not powerful, but his intricate melismatic filigree was hypnotic.

 

Núria Pomares provided two flamenco dances, intricate castanet accompaniment (is this noted in the score?), and sitting on stage she posed for a picture of Intensely Focused Attentive Listening. She got a round of applause for putting on her shawl, and deserved it.

 

Burgos began the evening with Beethoven’s 8^th symphony, framing Falla’s folkloric darkness with Beethoven’s folkloric cheerfulness.

Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

 

 

Elliott Carter died today at 103.

 

The critic Kyle Gann once joked that Carter was a fabrication of the East Coast music establishment, who needed a somebody to fit the role of American Genius Composer who wasn’t a crank (Cage, Ives, Varèse), or gay (Cage, Copland, Harrison, Partch), or Jewish (Berlin, Gershwin, Bernstein, Feldman) or Black (Ellington, et. al.) Indeed, Carter’s personal story is too flawlessly Preppie to excite anything other than a desire to not find him worthwhile.

 

But it’s not the whole story. He found an idiom that was maximally dense yet lucid. When I heard Ursula Oppens play Carter’s Night Fantasies in 2008, I wasn’t the only one tapping my foot, and lurching in my seat at the beat. In the Fantasies, Penthode, the Double Concerto, the string quartets, the sounds swell in volume and velocity, and then subside, then swell again, over and over. There are heart-stopping moments of loveliness; there are episodes of mayhem. But on the other hand, it never crosses over into terror; it always stays within the bounds of decorum. It’s like watching a storm through heavy glass.

 

In a radio interview in 2000, Carter spoke of creating in his music the effect of different things happening simultaneously, or in sequence, “Because that is how the human mind is, it’s how we think. ... It’s the only thing I’m interested in.”

 

Pacific Crest Trail to the Acorn Trail above Wrightwood last Saturday

Start:

 

 

Lunch:

 

 

End: