Silverlake Blvd.

The Marriage of Figaro @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

Ian Judge’s production was good in 2006 and 2010 and it still holds up. I’ve never been sold on Tim Goodchild’s sets that seem to place the fun in an swanky 1980s Italian horror movie, but the emphasis remains on humor.

 

And this time around the cast was blessed with singers who were expert clowns, especially Doctor Bartolo (Kristinn Sigmundsson) and Marcellina (Lucy Schaufer). The last time we saw Ryan McKinny he was Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire; he was a clever choice for the Count, playing him as a clueless peacock.

 

His wife, the Countess, has her moments of flirtation—what else does she have to do?—and moments of silliness, but Guanqun Yu emphasized her pathos and solitude. She really is one of the greatest female characters: suffering because of her fidelity, and in the end, suffusing the household with forgiveness.

Toronto City Hall

After listening to loyal Torontonians tout their heritage of modern architecture for three days, I remain unconvinced, but not unmoved. Who could resist Viljo Revell’s City Hall? The Members Lounge is a tasty slice of kitsch modernist sublime. At one point, curving interior walls intersect with a curving upwards floor to create a dark hiding-crevice for the collective municipal unconsciousness. 

 

The Aga Khan Museum

 

A fantastic collection, Fumihiko Maki, plus no fear of writing checks gets you a really nice museum. Once my eyes and brain had adjusted to the scale and fineness of the work, I wandered in a deep art-trance. All this exquisitely refined art from places we only hear about now in conjunction with bad news. The 3^rd or 4^th century gold-on-lapis blue Koran from North Africa (above) was just an appetizer. 

 

There was a special exhibit of Howard Hodgkin’s collection of Indian paintings, prefaced by a room of his own pictures, like Autumn in Bombay (2014):

 

 

His Indian collection was even better, made even more enjoyable by a witty installation (a wall of all the elephants, etc). Best of all was a sketch for a picture by Nainsukh (?) circa 1750-60, featuring a highly formal encounter between Raja Balwant Singh and a Goose:

 

Art Gallery of Ontario & OCAD

 

Basquiat @ the Art Gallery of Ontario

 

I'm sorry, but Now’s the Time struck me as a step backwards. The Basquiat retrospective that circulated ten years ago was problematic, but at least it didn't attempt to frame him as a visionary social critic. The organizers of this show completely missed what remains audacious, which has more to do with JMB being an irreverent club kid than preaching. 

 

Most of all the exhibit did Basquiat a disservice by consisting of a mostly second-rate work. Way too many bad easel paintings. Fortunately there were some drawings--not enough!--such as the lovely item from 1981 displayed above. 

St. Patrick's Day, Toronto

 

The holiday began well, though soberly, with a funny/helpful/disturbing talk on Toronto by Shawn Micallef, the author of The Trouble With Brunch.

 

 

A visit to the Bata Shoe Museum, which featured the disturbing/amusing/fascinating exhibit Fashion Victims ...

 

Followed by a visit to the Toronto Reference Library ...

 

... where they're keen on dist./fasc. cylinders ...

 

And they had a pop-up shop organized by the Toronto Comic Arts Festival that was the best library giftshop of all time ...

 

When I returned to the hotel, I discovered that somebody on my floor celebrated by Ironing Under the Influence:

Boston Trio @ the Clark

The program notes for the Boston Trio recital at the Clark Library a few weeks ago asserted that the music of Fauré“ was an “acquired taste, like retsina or fried grasshoppers.” It’s hard to imagine a more off-the-mark assertion. The Trio in D from 1922 was, like all of Fauré, animated and amiable.  Perhaps the programmist was talking about another composer with the same name.

 

John Musto’s recent (1998) Piano Trio covered more ground in terms of moods and tones, but gave the Boston Trio performers an opportunity to demonstrate their vigor and precision.

 

The afternoon ended with the first piano trio of Brahms. The Bostonians conveyed the majesty without pomposity, and the passion without schmaltz.

 

A perfect program; a perfect afternoon. 

Turner @ the Getty

 

After walking through the paintings and watercolors of J.M.W. Turner: painting set free, the word for Turner is “astonishing.” He was doing Rothkos 100 years before Rothko. But of course Turner was not doing abstract pictures at all. Even the preliminary works, never intended to be exhibited, like the exquisitely named “Sunrise with Sea Monsters” are observations of nature. On inspection the smudges resolve into cliffs and shore, and the vague washes above them delineate familiar daylight effects.

 

Moreover Turner’s sensibility was firmly fixed in the grand romantic tradition, illustrating scenes from Childe Harold and portraying Napoleon pondering a puddle with all the gusto of the trashiest Victorian illustrator. For all his seeming modernity, Turner was really contemporaries  with Delacroix more than Monet. Or, rather, the contemporaries that are relevant to Turner are the extreme early Romantic originals: Blake, Hölderlin, Nerval, Gogol, and Büchner.

 

Too dense to grasp in a single visit …

 

[Image: Turner, Bedroom in the Palazzo Giustinian (the Hotel Europa), Venice, about 1840]

Alice in Wonderland @ Disney Hall

 

I tend to pride myself on sticking through performances to the end, no matter how annoying, but made an exception last night for Alice in Wonderland. At the intermission I bailed.

 

I remember begin thunderstruck when I encountered Unsuk Chin’s Double Concerto on KUSC a few years ago. She writes rich, powerful, and exciting instrumental music. Vocal music, unfortunately, is not her thing. Nor theater.

 

This Alice was doomed from the start by the execrable libretto by David Henry Hwang. Neither Hwang nor Chin demonstrated any awareness of the musical or poetic value of Lewis Carroll’s words. Hwang’s interpolated additional doggerel (e.g. for the Caterpillar) was stupefyingly crude.

 

Ralph Steadman’s video and décor provided the happiest moment—the children’s chorus wearing pink mouse heads popping up from the stage floor—but it wasn’t enough.

 

[Image: Portrait of Madame Cézanne (Roy Lichtenstein, 1962)] 

Ghosts of Versailles @ Dorothy Chandler

 

 

The Ghosts of Versailles will live forever because of the finale to Act 1. I can’t imagine there will ever be a time when some veteran singer will not want to ride a pink plaster elephant on stage and stop the show with an extraordinarily incorrect parody of a North African ballad, while acrobats and slave girls animate the stage with colorful gyrations. It was the funniest thing I’d seen in a long time, and Patti LuPone milked it for all it was worth. However, it would be incorrect to say that she “stopped the show”; her scene was the one moment Ghosts actually came alive.

 

Without ever being positively bad, Ghosts never achieves any kind of significance. The opera-within-the-opera plays on the venerable tradition of classical French plays-within-plays from Corneille’s Illusion comique to Godard. It can be a beautiful thing, but here it blunts the immediacy. For the supernatural and multiple realities aspect to amount to something more than a synthetic substitute for art requires wit that William M. Hoffman’s libretto doesn’t demonstrate. And if the preposterousness of the text is deliberate, John Corigliano’s music isn’t powerful enough to make it compelling. Though the music is never less than agreeable.

 

Ghosts requires a big cast and a big production, which L.A. Opera supplied without cutting any corners. They did an admirable job. It was nice to see that the production was so popular. Usually non-standard fare means lots of empty seats, but Ghosts was packed.