I knew it had been a while since I attended a Piano Spheres recital. Afterwards I checked and discovered it had been six years! What's wrong with me? One of the best music events L.A. offers, and I don't even go. Even if I don’t care for the music, it's good simply to take in the atmosphere: always the perfect combination of earnestness and unpretentiousness.
This recital was an especially instructive one for me to attend. Nic Gerpe is a prodigious and attractive pianist, but the theme of his program--boundlessness, the infinite, the sublime--was challenging. The musical evocations of this theme in the first part were so well chosen that I had trouble telling them apart.
No matter. I had come for the second half: George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I suite for amplified piano. I had heard about it, but never heard it performed. Gerpe's performance was heroic. Two of the twelve sections were unforgettable.
Number six, Night Spell, required Gerpe to whistle over into the amplified soundboard. This was just the apex of many delicious, eerie moments produced by the amplification system. It also meant that all the non-traditional playing techniques--the plucked strings, struck frame, and shouting into the soundboard, etc. …--actually generated audible effects (and the loud points were delirious).
The other section--Number 11, Dream Images--features, a “gentle caress of a faintly remembered music”—as its subtitle explicitly announces. The delicate irony pierced the surrounding grandiloquence and bombast, clearing a space for a welcomingly human moment.
[Image: Manuscript for section 8 of Makrokosmos I (George Crumb, 1972)]
I didn't think we would get in. We didn't have tickets and I expected the place to be mobbed by people trying to see to the last show before the Clark shuts down for a year of renovations. But we did and the New Orford String Quartet was mesmerizing.
Their Haydn op. 76, #1 was genial and lyrical, with rowdy outbursts. Which is to say, perfect. This music is not commanding like some others, but it has an integrity of its own and cannot bear being trifled with. It is a straightforward divertissement, but not simply that.
I could go on and on about Haydn; I’m not objective about him at all. It was a performance of another one of Haydn’s quartets, heard when I was eighteen, that marks the beginning of classical music as part of my life. Ever since, his music has gotten to me, especially when people take the trouble to play him with conscientiousness and love.
The novelty of the program was a 2013 quartet written by Tim Brady for the New Orford. In his introductory remarks, the composer invited the audience to consider the physical activities required by his piece. It was a good clue. The piece began with scrapings on the violin so quiet that the Clark Music Room is the only venue on earth they would be heard. The musicians engaged the piece like an obstacle course, which it rather was. It discovered novel sonorities without being gimmicky.
The concert concluded with Beethoven’s op. 132 in A Minor. The New Orford took to it was an intensity that did not flag from the first note to the last. As they unreeled the adagio, very slow but absolutely steady, Haydn, Brady, and the Clark itself receded far into the background. It’s one of those monuments that speak so intimately, one-on-one, that they cease to be monuments.
It was a whole new experience at Dorothy Chandler last Thursday night. We were permitted to bring our drinks to our seats. We were upgraded from the Loge to the Founders’ Circle. Nine soloists stood in a line singing under the screen while Christopher Allen led the orchestra. Mario Bava’s 1961 Hercules in the Center of the Earthprovided all the paper-mâché boulders, flexed pecs under red spotlights, ancient Greek ladies with blond beehive hairdos, etc., that the most avid peplum fan could desire.
The unprecedented liberties were appreciated, but really weren’t needed. The fact is, Hercules vs. Vampires is the best new opera L.A. Opera has ever done. After many dreary experiments, they have produced an opera that’s popular, hip and fun.
I confess that Patrick Morganelli’s music seemed, at first, a bit disappointing. He seemed to be doing nothing more ambitious than providing the movie with a better score.
But as scene after scene of absurdity unfolded, I realized that his strategy was brilliant. The last thing the rocks and pecs and hairdos needed was musical emphasis. On the contrary, a steadily flowing musical accompaniment rendered the ridiculousness charming. The stupid dialog become poetry, like an amiably absurdist play by Kenneth Koch.
Morganelli was doing what Monteverdi and Lully and Rameau and Handel did when they affixed noble musical scores on pre-existing plays. Plays that were every bit as formulaic, campy and ludicrous as Hercules in the Center of the Earth.
Plus, the fact that Bava’s movie deploys characters from classical antiquity in a completely non-classical way links Morganelli’s accomplishment with Handel and the rest conclusively.
It was charming.
I was charmed despite being skeptical of this genre of providing new, live music for existing movies. Dean and Britta’s songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests and Philip Glass’s Cocteau Trilogy are impertinent expropriations. When the movies are strong, they have their own moods and tempi, that are invariably more interesting than later aural incrustations.
But I suspect Morganelli’s work is more like Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, and it could be produced successfully without screening the movie at all.
Last night Emmanuelle Haïm led from the harpsichord a triumphant demonstration of how well the French can do baroque. The evening began with violinist Stéphanie-Marie Degand in Vivaldi’s “Spring” and “Summer” concertos. The sound—with a select ensemble of L.A. Phil regulars—was delicate, dry and refined. The performance was intensely alive. Degand interacted with the other musicians, especially the other violinists during the bird song section of “Spring”.
The rest of the evening was devoted to highlights from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724), with soprano Natalie Dessay and countertenor Christophe Dumaux. Dessay personified elegance and drama even when she was just sitting down listening to her colleagues. When she sang, she was completely in character—Cleopatra scheming, wailing, crowing. When the music was dark she crafted delicately pathetic shadings, sometimes delivering the melody in a heart-stopping whisper. When the music was upbeat, she bopped along like “Da tempeste il legno infranto” was “Uptown Funk.” She was fantastic in the MetLive Giulio Cesare, but now I realize that I really, really need to see her perform live on stage.
Dumaux, looking extremely dapper, accomplished even more impossible vocal feats with grace and a roguish wit. His music was more purely spectacular, but there were also moments when his high, perfectly clear tones resonated plaintively.
As during the Vivaldi, the soloists interacted with instrumentalists—flute, clarinet, violin—with a winning intimacy.
A week earlier there was another masterclass on musical theater—MetLive's presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del lago(1819). A new production—the Met’s first ever (!)—directed by Paul Curran, conducted by Micheli Mariotti.
It’s almost a parody of opera—of all the absurdities that everybody criticizes opera for. At the slightest pretext—or no pretext at all—characters suddenly explode in titantic outbursts of passion. In the middle of violent action—running for your life, fighting a duel—characters have sufficient leisure to sing extended arias of impossibly intricate music. The story was adapted from Sir Walter Scott in a way that minimizes the plausibilities and maximizes the absurdities. It ends with the lovers united and everybody happy. And so on …. I used to consider these qualities faults, but now I can appreciate them as values.
The decisive element was Joyce DeDonato (Elena), whose mastery of the music and whose engagement with the drama are absolute and irresistible. And for once her colleagues are up to her mark: Juan Diego Flórez (King James V), John Osburn (Rodrigo) and especially mezzo-soprano Daniela Barcellona, who triumphs despite having to play Elena’s true love Malcolm while dressed in a kilt. The two women sing passionate love duets, at one moment achieving topicality as they vow, despite all, to marry.
There are similarities between the dramaturgy of Handel and Rossini. Rossini’s Elena doesn’t express her feelings in musical ejaculations, but in intricate, involved studies, just like Handel’s Cleopatra.
But there’s a difference in sensibility: Handel’s aria’s present moods, or rather modes that are passionate but not especially individualized. You could say they're impersonal. Whereas Rossini’s aria’s seem closer to portraits of individuals at specific psychological states. Rossini wrote Donna at the time when novelists were beginning to explicate the psychological states of their characters more minutely than ever before. One of these pioneers, Stendhal, wrote one of the first books on Rossini. I used to wonder why.
Barbara Willis Sweete’s videography for this MetLive production was admirable. There were no embarrassing close-ups of saliva spray or HD excursions up the singers’s noses. The camera kept a respectful distance, and permitted appreciation of Kevin Knight’s attractive stage pictures.