Buika has become a jazz singer. The songs have become pretexts for extended, free improvisations. When I saw her before, she operated within the lines, showcasing her phenomenal vocal skills with just a piano to accompany her. But now she has a serious band. And the mood has gone from mellow to intense and erratic. There were moments she didn’t seem to know what she was doing. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but it was an honor to see someone who is so skilled risking it all, rather than repeating past accomplishments.
La Santa Cecilia's riotous performance and the rapturous ovation of the sold-out crowd may have sealed the deal on their becoming the official band of Los Angeles. Who could not love ranchera buskers from Olivera Street that listen to Pink Martini? I surrender, even though with my perfect ignorance of Mexican pop music causing half of their allusions to fly way over my head. I didn't even know who Pepe Aguilar was when he came on stage and redoubled the hysteria.
La Marisoul, like Buika, is a diva, and among other pleasures the evening provided a lesson in different modes of divadom. Where Buika’s expressive gestures come from high-strung inwardness, La Marisoul’s gestures and dances come from a street-performer’s outgoing exuberance. She was wearing an oilcloth skirt, for heaven's sake. The knowingness is part of the fun.
The first scene of the third act of Julius Caesar is extraordinary, endless, dark. It begins with Caesar strolling into the Capitol on the top of the world ("The ides of March are come") and ends with his corpse being dragged out.
Every word uttered becomes ironic. Caesar goes on about being the unmovable North Star a minute before he’s assassinated. Cinna cries, "Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!" as if he knows already that they are precisely what has just been murdered. Mark Antony’s expressions of compliance are so transparently fake that it becomes a demonstration of the fatuousness of Brutus and the other conspirators.
What could republican Rome matter to audiences and writers in Elizabeth’s monarchy? Base self-seeking disguised with noble rhetoric. All familiar stuff.
There’s the music at the end of Act 2, in Romeo's ..
… then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbor air, and let rich music’s tongue
Unfold the imagined happiness that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter.
But then Act 3 ends with the Capulet’s servant, Peter, brawling with the wedding musicians because they won’t play. What a scene! The whole Capulet household has been shrieking their horror at discovering Juliet apparently dead. The musicians are too polite to ask to be paid and just try to quietly exit. But no, somebody decides the disaster entitles them to a distraction.
I’ve been thinking about Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields all week. I arrived at the Master Chorale concert last Sunday expecting to be moved. I was even half-expecting to be shaken up. But I left with mixed feelings.
The second (The Breaker Boys) and fourth (Flowers) sections were phenomenally compelling. Breaker Boys grabbed your attention and made you listen. It was rude, angry and a musical and dramatic triumph. I suspect that when Wolfe discovered the songs and poems by and about the children who worked in the coal mines, she was so outraged that pathos wasn’t possible—she responded with an outburst of the bitterest irony, and raucous punk exasperation. The Master Chorale--especially the women--rose to the challenge and were astonishing.
Flowers was a lyric interlude—and more than a welcome rest. It implied more than it said/sang. It was also the one moment when Jeff Sugg’s video accompaniment actually added to the music—as the the dim black and white botanical illustrations suddenly burst into color. I suspect that hearing stories of happier memories—memories of the beautiful gardens the mining families cultivated—pushed Wolfe and Sugg into genuine invention.
For most of the piece, Wolfe and Sugg presented moods and images without clarification and context, presumably triggering reactions along the lines of “Child labor = Bad” and “Dirty dangerous manual labor = Bad but Noble” and “Hard lives = Dignity” …. It is trading in slogans, which is the opposite of art. Except for the two exceptional movements, the chorus was not especially well used (except for some eerie whistling) and the instrumental music functioned as sound effects.
This was also a problem with Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns (2010)—another movie-plus-live music eulogy for a vanished coal mining culture. (Two big music and movie eulogies for lost worlds of mining in the last five years? What's up with that? Nostalgia? Activism?)
Morrison’s archival footage of the work and life of the mining towns in north England in the first three-quarters of the 20th century avoided context-setting more rigorously than Wolfe’s songs. And linked with the somber music of Jóhann Jóhannsson, it became less an investigation of the miners’s lives, than a meditation on the inexorable passage of time. Wolfe and Sugg were more focused on individuals. At least that seemed to be the ambition. Unfortunately the overall effect was of a view from the outside rather than the inside.
Two weeks ago I caught Esa-Pekka Salonen’s semi-staged production of Pelléas and Mélisande at Disney Hall, and this Wednesday I saw L.A. Opera’s “silent movie” Magic Flute.
1.
Pelléas should be unbearable—and sometimes it is. A Chopin Nocturne … extended for three hours?!
Our seats were just above stage left, so we looked at the backs of the singers for most of the performance. This was terrible because they were all good actors, and performed their singing cleverly despite the physical limitations of the stage. But we were immersed in the orchestra. That made up for it. Three hours inhaling intoxicating aromas. In recordings you’re struck by the big, swelling tutti passages—the moments when the opera sounds like La Mer. I had always felt the best thing about the piece were the instrumental interludes between acts. But sitting with the musicians made clear that Debussy’s real achievement is creating moments when an a voice described a line in concert with a scrap of melody from a single viola, a shimmering fade of a chime, a reverberating pluck of a harp string.
Ravishment, refinement, aromas, intoxication … yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s also a severe austerity at work. Debussy knows that too much of a good thing would cloy. He holds back. Most of the time the music avoids rapture, and instead evokes feelings of hesitation and uncertainty. There’s only a handful of “operatic” moments, when the singers let it rip.
The story also deliberately frustrates the expectation of action. “It’s about shadows,” one of our party said afterwards, and that’s exactly it. Shadows of leaves and trees evoked by the orchestra, and characters frightened by shadows. They are frightened, but they also cling to them with affection, “Ah! How beautiful it is in the shadows! …” as Pelléas exclaims rapturously. It’s a decent summary of the whole opera.
Semi-staged is better than nothing at all, but I was left with the feeling that I didn’t get the full experience. After all, a lot of its power is due to Maeterlinck’s play, and you can’t pretend that scenes like Pelléas caressing Mélisande’s hair, or Golaud hoisting Yniold up to spy into her bedroom are just pretexts for the music. They sound like they can be breathtakingly disturbing. Hopefully, someday, I will get the chance to see what these scenes really can do.
The lovers provide the pretext for the most ravishing music, but in the end the opera is dominated by Golaud. He’s a Pre-Raphaelite/Symbolist Alexei Karenin. In the last act, on Mélisande’s deathbed, he almost grows up. But at the final moment he relapses into being a stupid, spoiled bully—clamoring to know the “facts” of Mélisande’s relationship with Pelléas. As if that will help him. Maeterlinck is merciless. Laurent Naouri went straight for the horribleness of it, but not before stopping the show with Golaud’s final Hispanic-Sephardic-Arabic cantillation, “Mélisande, as-tu pitié de moi comme j'ai pitié de toi?”
All the singers managed to act out their parts, even within the limited space available.
As usual with an Esa-Pekka concert, all the soloists were superb musicians: Camilla Tilling (Mélisande), Stéphane Degout (Pelléas), and Willard White (Arkel). Felicity Palmer managed to make the unpromising scene when Genevieve reads a letter out loud into a dramatic and lyric high point. Dashing Hadleigh Adams, stuck with the worst role in all of opera—The Shepherd, who utters eleven syllables in Act 4—managed to make an impression with his bow, letting his long hair fall forward, à la Mélisande.
2.
It would have been hard to go wrong, I suppose. It’s Mozart, after all. And the music of The Magic Flute defines a space in which it is possible to encounter joy and hope, even now. The musical aspect of last Wednesday’s performance was perfect, with singers at ease with both the decorative and dramatic work, amplified by Jimmy Conlon’s orchestra, which was delicate, precise or commanding as needed.
I suppose it’s possible to screw up The Magic Flute. But that didn’t happen here because the designers of this production— Barrie Kosky, Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt—obviously sat down and read the libretto with the intention of inventing ways of presenting the drama as vividly as possible. This is not a popular or common approach. The result was a hilarious romp, with one breathtaking tableau after another. Even the mis-steps were executed with such skill they were impressive.
And it was all done with a big screen with six doors: no sets or props. Other than costumes, the visual part of the show was entirely video projections and lighting. Not everything was beautiful; and there was no straining after uniformity of visual style. The designers pillaged Edward Gorey, Eduardo Paolozzi, Keith Haring, Takashi Murakami, et al, but especially modeled their work after silent movie graphics from a century ago. The silent movie allusion was extended by the introduction of a hint of dust, dirt and flicker in the spotlights—which were all interesting, subtly discriminated colors.
This appeared most spectacularly in the title cards that replaced the episodes of music-less, spoken dialogue. These bits are a nuisance. They’re boring and ridiculous in the wrong way. Title cards eliminated the problem entirely, and conveyed the necessary plot information more elegantly. This seems a trick that would work for all such episodes in opera. (I hope they are planning to do something like it in L.A. Opera’s upcoming Abduction from the Seraglio.)
There were so many scenes that are already fixed in my mind as definitive presentations: The three ladies sending their cartoon hearts down to sleeping Tamino at the beginning, and near the end, Tamino descending an elevator down into the depths of the earth for the trial by fire.
I think Pamina got the best tableaux: her being threated by Monostatos’s dogs, escaping across the rooftops with Papageno, bemoaning her lost love in a garden, soaring up in a sky of butterflies with the three boys. …
You can get some sense of it from the videos, but this truly was one of those things that you had to see in person, live, and in full scale.
There was one thing I didn’t like at all: Why did the Queen of the Night first appear as a terrifying tarantula, zapping Tamino with lightning bolts? Didn’t that give the game away, dramatically? Isn’t she supposed to be sympathetic at first, only gradually revealed as a villain? Why deprive the audience of the pleasure of discovering this on their own?
[Top image: Mary Garden, the first Mélisande, 1902]
I had just finished To Kill a Mackingbird when Harper Lee died.I had never read it before. It is artfully written. I’m afraid Lee unflashy style has been mistaken for straight-talk, hence literature for people who don’t really like literature, but pieties dramatized.
And so then reading Go Set a Watchman was a pleasure. But it wasn't the pleasure of a good novel. The editor rejected the manuscript—rightly so—but suggested Lee do something with the childhood reminiscence sections. (From whence came Mockingbird).
Watchman is more ambitious than Mockingbird. Overly so: Lee was trying to write a gently satirical British village life novel, that dealt, at the same time, with the civil rights movement. It was too much. The two couldn't fuse. The closest analogy would be Trollope’s Barchester novels, but his comedy of High vs. Low church politics was trivia compared to desegregation. Sir Walter Scott might have been a better model, but Lee didn't want to go there.
Being a smart and conscientious writer, Lee realized her experiment was a failure and discarded it. Unfortunately the assistant of her sister/attorney/guardian knew about it, and, eight months after Alice Lee’s funeral, we have a New Novel by a Beloved Author.