Silverlake Blvd.

Thaïs @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

L.A. Opera redeemed themselves: good singing, great sets and costumes, and decent direction of an eccentric and challenging oddity.

 

I didn’t know what to expect. From what I had heard of the music, it sounded appealing, but the story sounded proto-Cecil B. DeMille: Christianity and sex in the declining Empire, amped up for maximum sensationalism.

 

But it turned out to be serious, fun and compelling.

 

I was surprised how modern the situation was. Thaïs and Athanaël are my neighbors. They are both evolving over the course of the opera. But at no time along their two parallel paths can they really connect. There are all kinds of links between them—erotic, intellectual, spiritual—but there is no moment in the opera when they are speaking the same language. Their tragedy is so 21^st century that it makes Tristan and Isolde’s problems seem quaintly irrelevant.

 

A lot of credit goes to the decision to change the scene from Alexandria in Late Antiquity to Paris circa 1894, i.e. the time of the first performance. So instead of pretend Alexandrian revelers in fake togas, we had Parisian dandies and courtesans dressed up in Antique costumes: we get our dose of camp, plus verisimilitude and irony.

 

And this worked because the sets and costumes by Johan Engels were superb: the best things seen on the Dorothy Chandler stage in eons.

 

It’s normal for L.A. Opera sets to be so hideous that the most charitable response is to avert your gaze, but last Thursday night I saw a stage set I want to live in:

 

 

I hope Ikea will soon offer everything necessary to recreate the sitting-room of Thaïs from Act II. It wasn’t just that it was beautiful: it perfectly framed the confrontation between Thaïs and Athanaël. And then, during the most famous music of the whole opera, the orchestra Meditation interlude, the room slowly floated away from Thaïs, providing a beautiful visualization of her growing disenchantment with her old life.

 

The ingenuity was always practical. Engels devised solutions for tricky production problems, like the rotating landscape in Act III. It there was a bit of indulgence (why were the seats of the abandoned outdoor theater filled with dust-covered dandies?) but it cleverly accommodated the action’s abrupt location-changes.

 

Not that spectacle was skimped: there was a completely fantastic theater recreated on stage, the golden bird-feather dress of Thaïs, a Pierrot out of Aubrey Beardsley, and all extravagance you could desire, when it was called for:

 

 

Nino Machaidze obviously loved being Thaïs, played with the golden feathers of her dress like a kid (as Thaïs would), and made the most her part. However the secret of this opera is that Athanaël is the best role. Plácido Domingo of course knew this and ran with it. It was quite a performance. He was on stage almost every minute, and filled the hall with his voice, effortlessly and beautifully. I can’t wait to see what role he selects next.

Lionel Shriver's Big Brother

 

I can't remember being this impressed by a living author in a  long time. "Brilliant" doesn't suit her, because the intelligence of her work is not squandered in cleverness, verbal fireworks, or artiness. It's all in the characters and conflicts. They're so acute and vividly presented that you are constantly stalled in reading, in laughter and horrorified recognition. She  dares to write passages that are stupid and sentimental ... when it suits her, when it permits her to pull the rug out from under the reader and achieve the desired astonishment. And she takes on only the biggest themes: food, family, failure ... and the contemporary Middle-West. The novel lives.

[Image, Hippo (Juan, Count of Montizon, 1852)]

David Rakoff's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

 

I discovered David Rakoff through his brilliant and acidic contributions to This American Life. I particularly relish his story of encountering a prototype of the Internet in Japan in 1986, and deciding it was stupid.

 

This novel is posthumous, and--I suspect--incomplete. Eleven chapters, each presenting a portrait of a person and his or her world in chronological order, from the 1920s Chicago to 2000s NYC.

 

It’s written in rhyming couplets. It's doggerel at best, and both a discipline and a gimmick. While the discipline leads DR to a handful of lovely discoveries, I kept feeling  the gimmick hindering rather than aiding, his art.

 

The characters are related in one way or another, sometimes by blood, sometimes tangentially, in the style of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. It has the air of a multigenerational epic that unfortunately DR didn’t have time to perfect.

 

It ends with the character Josh, having been abandoned by his wife and kids after his mother dies, starts going though old boxes and discovers ...

 

“ ... envelopes—he counted at least thirty-two--
All scratched with the message, ‘Josh, these are for you.’
Inside each were handfuls of old foreign stamps.
Some of the packets addressed to the camps
He’d been sent to the summers of age seven-eight.
But what were they from? It was now far too late
For questions … "

By this point, we know more about these stamps than Josh. They were lovingly collected by Helen, his father's employee and mistress. We also have learned about Helen's brother Cliff, who died of AIDS earlier. We learned about their mother, and growing up in Burbank. We even learned about a young woman running away from her abusive father, who Helen and Cliff's father comforted on a westbound train in the 1920s. 

 

The book is a history in which, instead of stories of violence and power, what's disclosed are stories of frailty, cruelty, but above all tenderness and care. There’s  pathos, naturally. But there’s also something that is the opposite of pathos: a victorious sense that love’s never entirely wasted, never entirely lost, despite appearances.

 

The stamps, the care with which they were assembled, communicate despite all. The little boy in love with postcards and stamps in Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” grew up into the man James Merrill described in “The Friend of the Fourth Decade”:

 

“ … I now spend mornings
 
With a bowl of water and my postcard box.
Cards for all over. God! Those were the years
 
I never used to throw out anything.
Each card then soaks five minutes while its ink
 
Turns to exactly the slow formal swirls
Through which a phoenix flies on Chinese silk.
 
These leave the water darker but still clear,
The text unreadable. It’s true!
 
Cards from my mother, my great-uncle, you!
And the used waters deepen the sea’s blue.
 

I cannot tell you what this does to me.
Scene upon scene’s immersion and emergence
 
Rinsed of the word. …
 
Salt lick big as a fist, heart, hoard
Of self one grew up prizing above rubies—
 
To feel it even by a grain dissolved,
Absolved I mean, recipient with writer,
 
By water holy from the tap, by air that dries,
Of having cared and having ceased to care …”

 

Rakoff's fragments likewise resonate.

 

[Image: “A woman with 1940s hairstyle and dress picks peaches in Louisiana, Missouri, in 1946,” Posted on Piczload by Rajat Chauhan

Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road

 

Yates provides, in passing, some sharp architectural criticism:

 

“The architects of the Knox Building had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter. They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake. It stood in an appropriately humdrum section of lower midtown, and from the very day of its grand opening, early in the century, it must clearly have been destined to settle deep into that smoke-hung clutter of numberless rectilinear shapes out of which, in aerial photographs, the mightier towers of New York emerge and rise.”

 

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. Except for the whisk of his shoes on the asphalt and the rush of his own breath, it was so quiet that he could hear the sounds of television in the dozing rooms behind the leaves—a blurred comedian’s shout followed by dim, spastic waves of laughter and applause, and then the striking-up of a band.”

 

[Image from http://www.richardyates.org/]

The Apollonian Clockwork: on Stravinsky

 

Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger’s 1983 book is not just a good book about Stravinsky—of which there are several—it’s a work of art about other works of art. A rarer case. The only example I can think of is Nabokov’s book on Gogol.

 

Yes, there are classics of criticism, essential texts, but these tend to be about the author more than the subject. The poem/picture/composition functions as a pretext for whatever the author wants to say. But this book never crosses that line: the focus is Stravinsky, not Andriessen or Schönberger.

 

It takes the form of 45 chapters—some just a few paragraphs long—divided into 4 sections of 11 chapters each, plus an epilogue. Each is a self-contained discussion. The subject matter ranges widely, and there’s no sense of an argument being sustained. It’s aphoristic, not didactic. One passes from dense musical analysis, to discussions of Stravinsky’s life and times, to a journal of a comically futile expedition to visit all of Stravinsky’s residences in Switzerland, to discussions of other people significant in Stravinsky’s life.

 

Andriessen and Schönberger take up even the most lifeless old Stravinskian issues (neoclassicism, Adorno, emotion) and re-frame them in a way that makes them interesting. Then they proceed to add unexpected comments. At every point their comments are acute, unexpected and provocative. If one of the signs of good criticism is that it makes you eager to revisit the work in question, this book definitely rates very high. By the second paragraph I was searching for “Chanson russe” and “Marva,” and then later for Scriabin …. I have been listening to Stravinsky continuously for 40 years, and yet my taste has been refreshed.

 

Quotes:

 

“Stravinsky’s much-praised clarity is an extraordinary form of turbidity.”

 

“Stravinsky was not the only Stravinsky in history.” (i.e. C.P.E. Bach, Purcell, Pergolesi, Mozart: composers with many stylistic masks rather than a continuous theme, also craftsmanship, impersonality, greed …)

 

“Stravinsky’s classicism is always slightly irritating, the music is unfinished.”

 

There is a beautiful chapter devoted to Agon: “The violinist imitates a violinist playing Webern. … The mandolin in the Coda is Tchaikovsky’s harp, just back from the Viennese dry-cleaner. … Agon is a game, with the devil as challenger and the history of ballet as opponent. … The last bars … sound like the end of a Florentine ballet from 1380. Only with the last chord does it become apparent that no candles are being blown out, but that the switch is being turned off. With one flick of the wrist, out go the lights.”

 

The final chapter is the apex of the author’s art. It is at once another journal of pilgrimage (Stravinskian sites in St. Petersburg). It is also a meditation on bells: the bells of St. Petersburg, the bells of Russia, the bells of St. Paul’s in London, the bells and chimes in Stravinsky’s music from Firebird to Requiem Canticles: “… Bells unsettle the awareness of what they, as clockwork, regulate: time. A bell is also an audible calendar; nowadays merely proclaiming the hour, once also announcing events—birth, marriage, fire, war, peace.”

 

[Image: Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, 1911]

Streetcar Named Desire at Dorothy Chandler

 

I went into last Wednesday’s production of André Previn’s 1998 version thinking that Streetcar was a clever choice for an opera. The play is kind of a spoken-word opera to begin with, with over-the-top arias and elaborate ensemble pieces. However I quickly changed my mind.

 

Rather than amplifying dramatic conflicts, or creating distinct moods for each scene, or even distracting us with tunes, Previn’s music mechanically accompanied lines of the text with sound effects. It was as if the play were being transcribed live by an incredibly loud and annoying stenotype machine.

 

Even that would not be necessarily fatal, if Previn didn’t have a tin ear for the pulpy poetry of Tennessee Williams's language. By which it follows that he had no grasp of the drama.

 

As a result, this was a Streetcar in which Stella (Stacey Tappan) and Mitch (Anthony Dean Griffey) were the most interesting characters. She in the beginning and he near the end had exceptionally passionate, lyric moments. These moments were not repeated.

 

Blanche (Renée Fleming) didn’t have any music to sing, and so passed the evening slinking around the stage, pretending to smoke stage cigarettes, and sneaking nips of stage booze. Rather extravagant use of a world-class performer.

 

Likewise, the Stanley, Ryan McKinny, devoted the evening to displaying his torso, being given no other reasons for being on stage. Don’t get me wrong; I have the greatest respect for his abs. You would never know that McKinny can also act and sing. They appreciate him better across the street at Disney Hall, where he has been permitted to shine as Creon, Tiresias, and the Messenger in Stravinksy’s Oedipus Rex, and in Shostakovich’s Orango.

 

Speaking of abs, the stage was decorated with a septet of supernumerary hunks, who disported themselves as picturesque louts when they weren’t moving of furniture around (pointlessly). They were ridiculous, but they constituted the only visuals to generate some atmosphere.

 

Brad Dalton’s minimalist staging amplified the flaws and minimized the virtues of the work. Nothing was gained by having the orchestra share the stage with the singers: it just confined the space available for the action to an inconvenient isthmus. Steamy, run-down New Orleans may be a cliché, but the story is rooted, right or wrong, in it. If you don’t provide a cliché New Orleans, you better provide an adequate substitute. I suppose the music was supposed to fill that role, but it didn’t.

 

The whole evening was just baffling. Other than Einstein on the Beach, L.A. Opera has demonstrated bad judgment in selecting more recent operas. Now, why this of all things? And I’m also baffled by Previn. He has talent: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1978) is terrific, and he provided music for quite a few interesting movies (e.g. Inside Daisy Clover, 1965) so what happened?

 

And anyway, the first obstacle to any kind of production of Streetcar Named Desire is the 1951 movie. When anybody utters those famous lines, indelible images of Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Karl Malden pop up before us without fail, more vivid than any flesh-and-blood performers. I can imagine that this also happened long ago, when the opera versions of beloved stage hits like Marriage of Figaro and La dame aux Camélias appeared first appeared. They must have seemed very unnecessary and very strange, too. But they had Mozart and Verdi behind them, while this .... All I can hear is the voice of Tennessee whispering, "Baby, get me a strong one."

 

Today’s news, reported 62 years ago …

 

“A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

Were axioms to him, who’d never heard

Of any world where promises were kept

Or one could weep because another wept.”

 

--W.H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles,” 1952

 

[Image: Marcus Bleasdale]

Ragnar Kjartansson's The End

 

 

See also this report here.

From Patrick White's Voss

 

“... With great dignity and sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed. There were some who were disappointed to see but the pictures of fern roots. A warrior hit the paper with his spear. People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell.

 

These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful. These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon paper, and were sent away.

 

Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call.

 

The old man folded the papers. With the solemnity of one who has interpreted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces.

 

How they fluttered.

 

The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts.

 

Some the men were laughing.

 

Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos. ..."

 

[Image: Patrick White with Tom Jones (Axel Poignant, 1956)]

Philip Glass Ensemble @ Royce Hall

 

Philip Glass Ensemble last night at Royce did Music in Twelve Parts (1974). It was a pleasure, yesterday afternoon, just to sit in an air-conditioned room, though AD was absolutely right to suggest that it’s a perfect piece for the Hollywood Bowl. Imagine it blasting from that titanic sound system!

 

It was exhilarating: five hours was not too long. If anything, the ideal performance would go straight through, without any breaks. But the reality is that the breaks are absolutely necessary ... for the performers. Forget about the audience needing pit stops, the physical challenge of MITP is daunting. David Crowell, on saxophone, seemed to be the youngest person on stage and by Part 12 he was twitching and stretching painfully.

 

Likewise the vocalist Lisa Bielawa, articulating simple solfège syllable patterns with clarity and grace almost non-stop, provided the focus of the performance. It was mesmerizing to listen to her, shining through the often thunderous electric keyboard din, casting off heaven-knows-how-many repetitions of the same phrase with unflappable poise. From recordings I had always assumed that there was an ensemble of singers—it certainly sounds like it. Amazingly it’s just one—singing in all but two of the Parts! What does she have to do after a performance to recover?

 

The idiom is declarative, all on the surface (it is what it is). The “minimalism” comes not from any asceticism, but from regularity: repetition of little melodic patterns, steadiness of beat, uniformity of (high) volume, and uninflected performance. In most music, listening is a journey; here the listener is given the whole landscape all at once, and the interest lies in detecting the details within it as they start, repeat, stop, and change.

 

Each Part is composed of brief patterns juxtaposed and overlapped and repeated so that the patterns shift from being lines to masses. Overlapping produces a pulse, and also a drone. But it’s never static: the patterns change, they shift key, and instruments enter and exit. 

 

In general, there is an effect of constantly shifting from a state in which each of the patterns are given equal weight, to moments when one particular pattern is emphasized, followed by a shift back into equality. Drone to detail to drone; or, mass to melody to mass. This cellular construction is entirely different from most musical traditions, which are based on the contours of speech, or the rhythms of dance.

 

This is the difficulty, for people who find it difficult. All the nuances of conventional classical music are there, but within nondramatic frame. Of course one way to make this more palatable is to provide a dramatic frame (a scene, characters, Robert Wilson), which is exactly where Glass’s career went next. But what a pleasure to have a couple of hours to immerse oneself in this, without any Robert Wilson!

 

The idiom is idiosyncratic, but not eccentric. If anything, one of the things that really sets MITP apart from other classical music of its time (e.g. John Cage’s Etudes Australes, or Pierre Boulez’s Rituel) is how freely it echoes everything from the baroque (keyboards providing continuo) to Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Part 5 has a jubilant gospel/R&B groove that’s a welcome relief from the exquisite abstractions of Cage and Boulez. Paradoxically the effect of Glass’s systematic and rigorously plotted score feels like an intensely extended jam by The Allman Brothers or Funkadelic.

 

It’s part of the American modernist tradition of just-the-facts sounds (Copland, Cage, Feldman), but it’s hard not to sense a sketchy narrative. Part 1 provides a sweet and mild dawn, with the subsequent Parts increasing in tempo, volume and density. Part 5 is a joyous high point. Then the next Parts explore contrary motion (conflict?) The vocalist drops out of 9 and 10, marshaling her resources for the lyrical 11 and the tour de force of the last Part. Is this the depiction of a day in somebody’s life? A transition from quiet to activity, to transcendence?

 

 

[Images: LP covers by Sol LeWitt]