Silverlake Blvd.

Brahms, Mendelssohn & all of us @ Zipper Hall

 

The Colburn Community Chorale was impressive last night—powerful when the music called for dramatic power (Mendelssohn), and lucid when it called for lyricism (Brahms). Accompanied by an orchestra of Colburn students, the performance was a lesson in subtly contrasting moods and modes of high German classical romanticism.

 

Sarah Reynolds sang the solo part of the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms with electrifying intensity. It was the only piece on the program that I knew. It’s an extraordinarily moving experience, even for Brahms, who was a specialist in the gently, quietly overwhelming. I thought of William Stryon’s memoir, where he’s jolted out of a suicidal depression by hearing it.

 

Their performance of the Brahms Nänie was probably my favorite because the sound was so lush and beautiful. But I appreciated the smart programming decision to end the concert with “When Israel out of Egypt came,” so that the Chorale could shout and storm Mendelssohn’s flashy, extroverted showpiece.

 

Besides their musical accomplishments, their Chorale is also a heartening political and social accomplishment. Performers representing the range of L.A. diversity, volunteering their time to master demandingly intricate music. It’s a little realization of utopian dream of music being part of everybody's lives.

 

[Image: Monet, 1872, Argenteuil basin]

(Almost) a month in Osage County

 

In the movie of August: Osage County, the bravura exhibition of monstrousness and hurt by the all-star cast—Streep and Roberts in particular—is getting all the attention. And rightly so. I laughed in terror. But I was also struck by the classical frame: that big, isolated house, long past its prime.

 

150 years after A Month in the Country, the country-house play thrives, and accommodates people and goings-on that Turgenev would not have believed. 

 

The formula is straightforward: characters show up and hang around—and consequently make nice, fight, flirt, and air dirty laundry. Though they may be related, they shouldn’t be cohabitating. After many demonstrations of mutual incompatibility, most of the characters flee.

 

That’s about all there is in terms of action. As a genre, it’s the complimentary opposite of the detective story, which originated around the same time. The same gradual exposure of the real relations between an oddly sorted little community. But, as in Turgenev, there’s no solution, no end. Things go on.

Samuel French Bookshop

 

Why don't I stop by more often? What an amazing place. Where else in L.A. are you going to find The Complete Plays of Flann O'Brien? Along with everything else for the theater, from Aeschylus to Matilda-the Musical. Also calling out to me from the discount pile were film books: biographies of Pasolini and Rossellini. And then there's all the resources for actors! I had never noticed before the shelf devoted to books and CDs to assist you with accents, including Chicago ...

 

Classic Photographs Los Angeles

Paul Kopeikin at his booth, in front of Alejandro Cartagena’s brilliant Car Poolers series (2011-2) of guys sleeping/hiding/huddling in the back of pickup-trucks photographed from directly above.

The scene, mid-afternoon Sunday.

 

 

Highly covetable: a photograph of geological strata annotated with text and diagrams, from a 19th century Carte géologique de France

 

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing

 

 

An hour into it I had to take an Ethical Dilemma Break. What were the characters doing? What was the filmmaker doing? What was I doing by watching?

 

I’ve seen it. The impression is indelible. But what was it? While watching, I kept changing my mind. At no point did I feel comfortably settled. I was convinced at times …

• It was fiction, with actors performing scripted lines and actions. This was the most comfortable idea. It made it into very brilliant, but otherwise unexceptional avant-garde theater.

• It was a documentary about gangsters making a historical drama about their massacring circa 1965.

• It was a documentary about the gangsters, that the subjects mistook for an opportunity to create a historical drama. And the filmmakers were clever enough to realize a bit of their fantasies.

• It was a documentary about what happens when fascism triumphs. The movie plunges us into a world of gangsters, protection money, no rule of law, shakedowns, running for elected office in order to get bribes, …. One of the characters comments that life is like a soap opera, with everyone acting a part without believing anything. And these gruesome scenes of elderly men, reminiscing, joking and giggling about the men they tortured, the girls they raped, the people they garroted. I got the nauseating feeling that if the Nazi’s had won, scenes like this would become a cliché of post-WWII family gatherings, and probably a subject of jokes. And then the Pancasilia Youth on parade, like it’s 1922 and the March on Rome.

• It was a documentary about a culture that has utterly alien values, customs, modes of expression, and have responses to things that are incomprehensible. I have no idea how to interpret the man’s narrative of his Chinese stepfather’s murder. He rattled it off excitedly, and repeatedly burst into laughter. But later he seemed upset. I realize I don’t know how to read his emotional state

• It was a documentary about the impact of Hollywood. How that impact can have nothing at all to do with the "content" of movies. It’s all about sensational images, and music by Elvis that makes you dance. “Gangsters,” “sadism,” “violence,” “murder” … all appear as unproblematic positive values. Even more insidious, the culture of movie-making was so naturalized, that the gangsters were capable of filming a credible re-creation of their own massacre of a village, while remaining completely dead to any misgivings or regrets about having perpetrated it. Attributing it all to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. And Congo called himself a “movie theater gangster,” a specific type.

• It was a documentary about the inevitability of remorse. Congo’s extended episode of retching at the end. Or was that acting, too?

 

... And what is going on with all the scenes of Koto in drag? Expressing himself? Comic relief? Indonesian theatrical tradition?

Bait & switch @ Disney Hall, again

 

I can’t believe it happened AGAIN! At the last minute L.A. Phil canceled this evening’s performance of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto! This is the second time this has happened. A repeat of their cop out in 2001, when at least they replaced the concerto with Schoenberg’s 5 Pieces for Orchestra.

 

Last night they substituted Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. If there was ever a name that could calm my anger, it’s Beethoven. But the painful truth is that Beethoven’s violin concerto is a trifle, the closest he ever got to trash. And Augustin Hadelich milked it as a showcase for his dexterity—which was phenomenal, but had didn’t take me anywhere. And then, to add insult to injury, he played an encore of a Paganini Capriccio. No disrespect to Paganini, but I bought a ticket to hear one of the central masterpieces of 20^th century classical music—one of the handful actually composed in Los Angeles. And instead I get Paganini. It’s like I buy a ticket to King Lear, and get, instead, an episode of Falcon Crest. It has a certain appeal, but it’s not the same.

 

I suppose I should count my blessings and be happy about all the “difficult” music that I HAVE gotten to hear.

 

I have heard Schoenberg done well: I caught Barbara Sukowa’s shattering performance of Pierrot Lunaire, and the SW Chamber Music ensemble doing Schoenberg’s 4^th Quartet, and the Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello, and the L.A. Phil has done the 5 Pieces for Orchestra a couple of times, always brilliantly.

 

And I shouldn’t rag on the L.A. Phil: I’ve heard powerful performances of John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a mad king, Kurtag’s Stele, Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, Messiaen’s Canyons, Varèse’s Ameriques, and a double bill of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles and Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, in addition to all their other excellent Stravinsky performances.

 

And in general I've been lucky ... I’ve heard John Cage conduct his Winter Music, and I’ve heard Atlas Eclipticalis. I’ve heard Jean-Pierre Arnaud, Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble intercontemporain and other ensembles a dozen or so times, Dawn Upshaw singing Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments, Marino Formenti doing Messaien, Philip Glass and his ensemble, James Miller doing Berio’s Sequenza V for trombone, Charlotte Moorman doing Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Ursula Oppens doing whatever she felt like, Mark Robson and Joanne Pearce Martin doing Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen, Joel Sachs playing Cage’s Sonata’s & Interludes, Sanford Sylvan doing Stravinsky’s Abraham & Isaac, Christian Wolff conducting the music for the Merce Cunningham Company a half dozen times, George Benjamin conducting his Pied Piper opera at Ojai, Laurie Anderson (twice), and I heard somebody whose name I can’t remember play the hell out of Luigi Nono’s Lontananza nostalgica.

 

But am I satisfied? No.

 

All I can think of is all the music I know—imperfectly—from recordings but have never actually heard live. None of the major pieces for orchestra of Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Peter Maxwell Davies, Sofia Gubaidulina, Morton Feldman, Charles Ives, Mauricio Kagel, Bruno Maderno, Luigi Nono, Alfred Schnittke, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or either of the Virgil Thompson/Gertrude Stein operas. Just to consider Arnold Schoenberg, I would like to hear sometime his Serenade, Variations for Orchestra, the Chamber Symphony #2, the Variations for organ, the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, the Survivor from Warsaw, and the operas Von Heute auf Morgen, and Moses und Aron. ... And his Violin Concerto!

 

I confess that I haven’t always been vigilant, and might have missed some opportunities. But is keeping up with the music of the last century supposed to be a test? Maybe chances will improve later, but I doubt it.

Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin

 

I have a weakness for the “city high and low” genre, and, consequently am willing to put up with a lot of unlikely coincidences bringing the rich and poor, powerful and powerless together. Spin presented a sequence of stories about people in Manhattan on August 7, 1974—the day Philppe Petit walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

 

It began brilliantly, with a strange and sad and altogether compelling story of a Irishman’s hunger for sainthood leading him to operate a comfort station for hookers in the Bronx. 

 

Unfortunately the beginning was the high-point, and the rest of the book was a swift, steady decline into silliness. When Zadie Smith engaged the H & L form in NW she at least was clever enough to not try to be too clever: she didn’t strain to make all her disparate characters meet up, or strain to tie their different stories together neatly. McCann couldn’t resist the temptation. But it's redeemed by some breathtaking sentences …

 

“Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.”

 

"The skinniest dog I ever seen is the one on the side of the Greyhound buses.”

 

Jane Ridley’s The Heir Apparent

 

A new “life of Edward VII, the playboy prince” ...

 

What to make of Bertie (as he was known)? He wasted most of his life waiting to take his mother’s job. Then, his brief reign has been remembered mostly as the gathering of the ingredients that produced World War I. Even worse: despite starting well after the Edwardian Era, The Great War has always been represented as the sum of its factors. Just one day after Britain declared war on Germany, Henry James wrote that the immanent “abyss of blood and darkness” gave away the secret of what the previous decade had been “really making for and meaning.” 

 

Ridley’s approach is a perfect combination of skepticism, amusement, sympathy and Show-Me-The-Evidence realism. She takes Bertie as a historic fact that deserves accounting for. She treats him as neither the defining force nor an irrelevant sideshow to his era, but one of its products.

 

Indeed you can see Bertie's Philistinism and utter detachment from anything significant happening in culture, politics, science, industry, business ... as completely characteristic of his time and place and class. See the representations of George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy, Ford Maddox Ford, H.G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, … through Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey. 

 

From Ridley's account, however, the most disturbing part of Bertie's world was the complete indifference with which he damaged the lives of other people. Probably none of it was intentional--he wasn't cruel--but the class barrier between him and any of his fast girlfriends usually resulted in a bad later life for the ladies. It's hard not to be haunted by the image of Sir Charles Mourdaunt, who, after discovering his wife's afternoon dates with HRH, forced Lady M. to watch as he shot her pet ponies (she died in a madhouse). One of the less tragic mistresses had the marvelously appropriate name of Susan Vane-Tempest.

 

One explanation for this was certainly the fact that Queen Victoria was professional, heavyweight, world-class bully. Whenever a bit of late-Victorian tedium creeps into the narrative, Ridley enlivens things by quoting one of the acidic epistles Victoria fired daily at children, nieces, and nephews across Europe.

 

Yikes! No one is ever right but her. No one has any right to do anything without her say-so. No one understands the pain of her widowhood. No one understands the simplest thing. Good news is always actually bad news. Bertie gets an unexpectedly warm reception in New York? She informs him it was really because “of the (to me incredible) liking they have for my unworthy self.” Bertie and Alix do their duty and produce a male heir and lots of princes and princesses? The Queen remarks that they are “such miserable, puny children, each weaker than the preceding one.” The only wonder is that World War I didn’t start earlier.

[Image: 1902 Coronation souvenir]

Classic Photographs Los Angeles, January 18 & 19

The ads for Classic Photographs L.A. are brilliant ...

 

"Who is your favorite 19th century photographer?"

 

 

 

 

"What is your favorite type of photograph to collect?"

 

 

 

 

"Who is your favorite 20th century photographer?"

 

 

 

Calder @ LACMA

 

Take a deep breath. Exhale. Better? Naturally. That almost undetectable movement of respiration is where most of the Calders currently on display at LACMA reside. They don’t charge ahead purposefully, and they don’t flail around violently. Their movements are often borderline imperceptible.

 

Every artist is subject to it, but abstract artists seem especially prone to having all their work reduced to a gimmick: Mondrian’s grids, Rothko’s clouds, Calder’s mobiles. But fortunately we’re approaching a point where we can see beyond the gimmick to the work. With Calder, what novelty there was faded long ago. Mobiles are long-established fixtures of every nursery.

 

And so now we can relax and appreciate the respiration. Or—to shift metaphor—admire how the breeze jostles the branches.

 

It’s probably significant that Calder came to these works via jokes—the wire caricatures of celebrities, and The Circus. Jokes impose discipline: economy, grace, surprise.

 

And so …

 

Hair-thin lines and flat shadows of pebbles/leaves/petals performing a drawing against the wall (Eucalyptus, 1940)

 

 

 

Thick, crude black bronze lumps. The opposite of lightness, even a bit sinister … until you notice they wobble (The Vine, 1944)

 

 

 

A tripod sitting very solidly on the ground supporting (1) a aerial spray of branches and leaves, which is counter-weighted by (2) an irregular flat ring around the base (Laocoön, 1947). The exhibit offered a half-dozen variations on the same elements, large and small, colorful and dark, in a variety of moods. A magnificent chorus line.

 

 

Then, most touching of all, were the pieces that perched on the edge of pedestals or tables, dangling their legs below, and waving their arms above, balancing on a single counter-weighted loop (Pomegranate, 1949). A flapper waving from the edge of the pool.

 

 

Atomized bits of stuff tossed into the air: colors, words, sounds. A modernist cliché? Perhaps elsewhere.