Silverlake Blvd.

Fidelio @ Disney Hall, with Deaf West Theatre

 

 

Still digesting the “Fidelio” I saw on Good Friday. The first opera - and first Beethoven - I ever cared for.

 

It’s seems more relevant now than ever. Will there come a time when audiences will not thrill to the scene of a tyrant collapsing because honorable people have the courage to stand up and say, “Enough”?

 

The singers and orchestra were superb. The music was bold, bright and clear. The first act quartet, Leonora’s solo, the chorus of prisoners, Florestan’s solo were magnificent, piercing.

 

The production in effect gave each of the principal parts to two performers – a singer and an actor signing in American Sign Language. They generally – but not always – kept close to each other. The singers tended to wear mostly white, abstract multi-part robes, in contrast to the signing actors, who wore interpretations of 18^th century costumes in colorful textiles. The actors signed and mimed as their counterparts sang. The spoken dialogue interludes were done entirely in sign, in silence. The signing chorus sat in the seats on both sides of the stage, with the white-robed Coro de Manos Blancas signing their words on stage.

 

The first few minutes were confusing. There was a lot going on: the orchestra, the singers, the signing, the supertitles projected above the stage, German, English, ASL. But all you had to do - all you wanted to do - was focus on the actors. You didn’t need to look at the singers – you could hear them loud and clear – and the signing and miming were articulate, even for illiterates like me. A glance every not and then at the supertitles sufficed.

 

The Leonore soprano Christiane Libor was tremendous. She filled the hall without harshness.

 

Russell Harvard, the signing Rocco, was so amusing he almost derailed the show. Likewise Gregor Lopez (Jaquino). I had forgotten that the work begins in a comic mode. But the comedy quickly turns sour, as soon as you realize that Fidelio (Leonora) is deceiving and manipulating all these amusing comic characters.

 

I wish I knew more about signing. It seemed to unfold in a broad, expressive and highly choreographed manner. Is this the signing equivalent of an aria? The actors did seem to be doing the repetitions of phrases that are a feature of the music. Also the ensemble pieces, when each of the principal is singing different words and projecting a different mood – they seemed to be presenting the conflict with vivid clarity.

 

The signing provided a solution to the problem of the spoken dialogue. Should it be done in German or English? Both are jarring. Here, it was done in beautiful gestures.

 

The doubling of the characters grew in significance as the piece unfolded. It’s a story of disguise and deception. Characters are divided. Characters also grow and change. It was electrifying to see this embodied on stage.

 

But what was the effect for the deaf audience? There were signing people all over the theater – probably a lot of first time visitors to Disney Hall. Without the music, I would suspect the story would seem absurdly repetitious and slow-moving. But there was a wild acclamation at the end, with the deaf audience members waving their wide-open palms in the air – the deaf “applause” sign.

Sparks at Disney Hall

 

February 8. First rock concert in four years and it was a blast. Never seen dancing in the aisles like that at Disney Hall. The classical music venue was an appropriate frame for 73-year-old Russell Mael’s voice, negotiating the tricky falsetto, voices and hairpin turns as if he was 23. Two hours without a break and no strain or roughness.

It was a 50^th anniversary concert. Fifty years since their first album. It was also a hometown celebration. Many in the audience seemed fans from 1972. There were also many whose parents hadn't been born then, and discovered the band in last year's terrific documentary. At the end, Russell and Ron paused a long time on the stage, savoring the roar of adulation and love.

Launching the centennial

 

9/30/18. CicLAvia in the morning. Starting from Koreatown – after extensive tire-inflating and cobweb dusting – we headed up Western to Melrose, and up Vine. Then back down Melrose to Wilshire & Western, as far as H.M.S. Bounty. Glorious bright, sunny, warm with a breeze. The novelty of actually seeing buildings and businesses that have been driven past for three decades.

 

 

The Bowl in the evening. Grabbed chips and To Go food and just made it to our seats with the 18,000 other lottery winners. There were also a million people on stage: all the YOLA kids were there sitting with their mentors.

 

After which it unfolded as an extremely miscellaneous concert. Kali Uchis provided an interesting retro-30s bombshell style. Herbie Hancock provided a gigantic jam on “Rockit,” perhaps the best music of the evening.

 

Katy Perry provided a tribute to CicLAvia: Queen’s “Bicycle”! Then she sang “Firework” as an amazing firework illuminated the sky. Who is she?

 

A surprise at the end: John Williams, conducting the intro to “Star Wars”.

 

The “visual experience” by Xitelabs animated the arch of the shell, the speakers, the sides of the stage, etc. with lines, patterns and colors. It was colorful and fun, appropriate for the festive occasion. It probably helped people tolerate the Paul Desenne premiere, which was a bit too acidic for a celebration.

 

The “Firebird” visuals provided prismatic chiaroscuro constructivism that was genial, but with Stravinsky’s music, who needs it? As visual accompaniment it wasn’t quite up to choreography by Balanchine.

 

And that Appix app …. First of all, it seems a funny moment to ask people to download an app that will take control of their phone. Second, the flashing light effect it created was only visible if you turned your back to the stage: is that what the performers want?

 

 

10/2/2018. Refik Anadol’s “WDCH Dreams”. There were absolutely breathtaking moments. At times Disney Hall disappeared, which is really something. It wasn’t an installation, but a movie, projected on the building, with each piece of the façade acting as a separate screen. I thought you would experience it by walking around the building. No: if you got too close you just cast a shadow, spoiling the effect.

 

10/4/2018. LA Phil’s 100^th season kick-off concert was broadcast live on KUSC. The big event was a premiere of Andrew Norman’s “Sustain”, in which arpeggios unfurled with deep-sea-like slowness and grace.

 

Tuesday, 10/9/18. “L.A.’s Newest Music” started in the garden, with Ellen Reid’s “Oscillations: One Hundred Years and Forever” in the Keck Amphitheatre: a choir and soloists cooing, ah-ing, and sighing in shimmering, shifting harmonies.

 

Carolyn Chen’s “The Sleeper and the Drinker” seems to have been the official Big Event, with Dudamel himself conducting. But the the work that has stuck with me was Natacha Diels’ “Laughing to Forget”, featuring tightly choreographed nervous ticks (Face right! Face left! Sway!), odd exhortations (“We’re here!” “Consolations of beauty”), and, joking aside, the richest, liveliest instrumental music of the evening.

Schubert 2 Mahler 1 @ Disney Hall

 

 

It seemed a bit peculiar for Disney Hall to program Songs of the Death of Children on Mother’s Day weekend. But even more consequential was presenting Mahler’s piece between Schubert’s 3^rd and 4^th symphonies.

 

Schubert’s sanity and emotional equilibrium made Mahler seem morbidly attention-seeking.

 

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

 

It wasn’t the performance itself—Dudamel extracted the maximum loveliness out of Kindertotenlieder, and Matthias Goerne sang as if he were alone in his room, and we were spying on his private grieving. The first song, "Now the sun wants to rise as brightly," was heart-stoppingly beautiful, but as the piece progressed, the pathos became unbearable. Not painful but indecent.

 

I discovered Mahler as a teenager—the right time to catch the bug—and have been a committed fan ever since. Mahler has always seemed so familiar and Schubert a bit alien.

 

Not this night. Schubert’s 3^rd was a fizzy cocktail of Haydn and Rossini, and in the smashing finale of the 4^th, Dudamel drove the Phil headlong. The violinists all shook their weary arms after it was over and the audience cheered.

Fifths of Beethoven & Shostakovich @ Disney Hall

 

When the concert ended I said, “We are so lucky to have such an amazing orchestra in town!” Jaap van Zweden, the soon-to-be music director of the New York Philharmonic conducted, and he and the LA Phil really sang.

 

Beethoven’s Fifth unspools from the clearly defined cell. It’s almost minimalism. But it’s the opposite of pattern-making: there’s an urgency to it. The stately second movement is like a diagram of grandeur—there’s the pomp, but it is ordered to symmetries beyond any specific occasion.

 

Then came the contrast of the Shostakovich Fifth, in which nothing is clear. Is it earnest? Is it ironic? There are moments of jubilant ruckus, and moments when the ruckus seems presented as a nightmare. He follows his moods where they take him—an assertion of individuality that seems heroic as Beethoven’s.

 

It was a funny evening, with the hall packed with visiting high-school band members from across the nation. And then four days later came the bombshell that JvZ was taking Deborah Borda back with him to NYC!

Mozart, Schoenberg, Steve Reich @ Disney Hall

 

L.A. Phil demonstrated a range of unflashy, ardent virtuosities over the last two weeks of January.

First the All-Reich celebration on the 17^th. I needed this. Even better, the Mallet Quartet (2009) might be Reich’s most cheerful work. There is just enough dryness, relentlessness and repetition to retain credibility. But it’s also more in touch with pop traditions, from do-wop on. The ending is ecstatic.

The newest item on the program, Pulse (2015) doesn’t care about credibility at all. It’s not only pop, but light pop, a Reichian version of Michel Legrand’s Umbrellas of Cherborg.

In Tehillim (1981), the Synergy Vocals female quartet of singers was beyond praise. Precise, warm, animated, incisive. I can’t imagine a better performance. And what music! The best vocalists-plus-ensemble music since Mahler.

Then on the 28^th there was a matinee with Emanuel Ax. Ax’s amiable stage presence dispels every hint of drama. His art hides his art. He makes so little show of his performance, he tricks you into thinking its no big deal. But it’s an enormous deal.

For instance, I can’t imagine a better presentation of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (1942). His command of the music is absolute. He was on top of all of the various moods: angst, festivity, ferocity, bemusement, introspection, exclamation. The cadenzas were especially beautiful—the one after the big brass explosion, and the other at the end of the 3^rd movement, before the quick-step 4^th begins. 

For all its serialism, it’s no more challenging than a Richard Strauss tone poem. And a good deal better humored than that. The audience roared its approval.

I can’t help think that AS heard be-bop or at least some progressive jazz. It’s pop as pop as he ever got (after the cabaret songs). It’s also a film score, but instead of an expressionist cinematic nightmare, this time to an atmospheric American noir thriller.

It’s a work of reconciliation. It’s morning. Yawning and looking out at the new day. City not countryside. Irritations, demands, but not torment. Rather sweet. Almost Elmer or Leonard Bernstein. Mid-century blues. You can absolutely imagine Oscar Levant (to whom we owe its conception) playing it.

The concert began with Accompaniment to a Film Scene (1930). Dudamel and the L.A. Phil delineated each gesture, every contrast and transition with nuance and grace. It is breathlessly fast-paced, the moods shifting abruptly from tenderness to terror, pathos to exhilaration. And each passage—or scene—is densely packed with dissonance, polyrhythm, polyphony. There’s a whole epic here. The implied movie is a tumultuous Fritz Lang thriller.

Then Ax did Mozart’s Piano Concerto #14. His Mozart is not a proto-expressionist, but always in keeping. There’s a focus on the whole, rather than the most theatrically effective bits.

The concert ended with Dudamel leading a reduced L.A. Phil in Mozart’s Paris symphony (#31). This was a surprise. I didn’t think Dudamel or the Phil had any special affinity for Mozart. But Ax’s example obviously informed their performance. It avoided obvious show-off stuff, in favor giving the whole work unity. The rhythmic liveliness was especially marked—it danced along—but not too much. It was earnest and warm, but not headlong. Lucid, but not pedantic. More, please!

Haydn creates the world @ Disney Hall

 

The Creation is tricky. I can imagine some people walked out of the performance last Friday thinking Haydn wasn’t up to it. It felt domestic, rather than cosmological. As an 18^th century oratorio, it was neither a transcendental drama (Bach) nor a rousing big noise (Handel). And yet the beginning, The Representation of Chaos, is intensely serious—Beethoven without the posturing. And the barely-audible entrance of the chorus is a theatrical stroke out of Verdi. The whole piece is dramatic: “Let there be light” is a fortissimo blast. The fishes appeared with meandering melodic lines. The elephants appeared with a trombone fart. And so on. The soloists were celebratory, not introspective. It’s humane joy.

 

The only problem last Friday was Alberto Arvelo’s video accompaniment. Yet another video light show. It’s just insulting that LA Phil continues pushing them on us. If anybody really wants to look at Googled images of fish crawl over the interior of Disney Hall instead of listening to Haydn, the Phil should be working to educate them. And if you have to do a video (though I can't imagine why) this is Hollywood, for crying out loud: there are several generations of video artists, not to mention the folks in the entertainment industry who know how to do these things. Enough!

Pacifica Quartet @ Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

 

I think it might have actually helped to not be in the Clark Library’s fantastical neo-baroque music room, but rather a dumpy heavily-used classroom in Schoenberg Hall last Sunday. The leaks from the rain (rain?!) chased us out of the scheduled recital hall.

 

The Pacifica wasn’t fussed. If anything, their Bartók—with a Haydn chaser in-between—was laser-intense.

 

In Bartók's #2, the second movement has a headlong wildness that teeters on the verge of chaos. Then comes a long movement of introspection so absolute it’s neither insouciant nor grave. The Haydn third movement had the same violent slashing tutti chords, but the mood was entirely different: Pulcinello acting up.

 

Both Bartóks ended with heart-stopping quietness—a single note, a phrase cut off. Both went very far out, but found a way home.

 

It good to watch the players watch each other, and sit with an audience listening as intently as the playing.

Musica Elettronica Viva @ RedCat

 

Last Wednesday, three of the original memembers of MEV—Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and Alvin Curran—reunited.

 

Curran began the concert by stepping behind the backdrop to perform a plantive harmonica solo. He also played piano, shofar and inserted jarring electronic sound effects. Teitelbaum manned a laptop and electric keyboard. Rzewski played piano (I didn't know he was a virtuoso), and made occasional comments, and the honk with a duck call. He provided the ground: “Johnny comes marching home” and bits of other haunting folk songs kept unfolding majestically.

 

The tempo was slow and easy, but the textures and moods waxed and waned. Mostly it took the cue from Rzewski’s piano: plantive and elegaic.

 

About fifteen minutes into the performance, a white-haired old lady in the front row stood up and started dancing. Really dancing—doing slow, steady, repetitive gestures. Almost ordinary movements, nothing balletic or theatrically “expressive”. After a while, Rzewski introduced her as their oft-times collaborator of 50 years ago, Simone Forti.

 

My God, one of the heroines of post-modern dance. She danced 20 minutes, took a break, and then did some more. She was at times the embodiment of the music. Other times she was a critical listener. Sometimes she clowned with the performers, getting into their face. She crawled over the floor. She rolled around on the floor, over the cables and power strips. At one point she sang an Italian song—faintly, quaiveringly—but with ardor. It was astonishing, but it was also disturbing. An 81-year-old dancer, no matter how fit, is so outside the norm that it’s a struggle to see her as a dancer at all. I’m sure that was the point.

 

The concert was a salute to something created 50 years ago, but it also was its own creation, vividly alive, here and now. Even as the sirens at the Not My President demonstration happening around downtown filtered through MEV's music. A lesson in focus, dignity, perseverance: exactly what I needed.

Chopin & Bruckner in San Francisco

 

Davies Symphony Hall is a terrific venue. Why have I never been before? The crowd seemed more posh and less diverse than the usual Disney Hall crew, but they kept quiet.

 

Chopin seems simple—what could be clearer?—but he never is. The Concerto #2 is a house party novel. The first movement is the arrival of the dramatis personae. It’s grand but a bit stiff; only the piano sounds human. The next movement is the morning after—a clandestine meeting before all the others are awake. The last movement is a busy Saturday—kids, visits, duties, uproar in which something important is happening. But what? Who knows. Yuja Wang was superb. She pretends to be a thoughtless chica in a sexy dress in order to surprise with her eddies of introspection.

 

Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFO made Bruckner’s 7^th lush and opulent. The Adagio is sumptuous, melting, rapture and MTT kept nudging it towards ecstasy. At times it seemed to reach it. But Bruckner’s fatal garrulousness—or, call it his insistence on giving the audience their money’s worth—undermines the experience a bit.