Ahh, Hot Time Summer in the City
Unfortunately, the mantra for me this day was “closed for installation,” as was Pierogi, which looks like it will have a nice exhibit entitled Reconfigure, with 28 artists included. The figure is king for most of the summer shows around town. Also in Brooklyn, Sarah Bowen Gallery, a very nice converted garage, is showing Phong Bui’s installation called Hybrid Carnival for St. Exupéry #2. Phong is also curating Paint It with Black at Betty Cunningham Gallery in Chelsea. This guy doesn’t sleep much: he also publishes The Brooklyn Rail, and he’s also a nice man.
Melody Weir Gallery has Peter Tunney’s Paradise Garage, literally in an open-space garage, complete with Wild West theme. It’s a great idea. Paul Kasmin is showing what seems like Audobon on crack, with the beautifully rendered but bizarre work of Walton Ford. Will the woodland owl devour the cute squirrels?
Atomica: Making the Invisible Visible is a large group show in memory of the sixteenth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at Esso Gallery and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts. Thirty-five artists including the late great Leon Golub, Robert Longo, Nancy Spero, and Joy Garnett (AKA the mistress of Newsgrist).
Off to the great state of Maine to open the Ionarts Summer Camp. My watercolors and paper are packed, and visions of lobster dance in my head.
Well, I was driving right by it on the way to see Gloriana (see my 
The largest of the structures at Cahokia, now known as Monks Mound, dominated the city, an earthen pyramid fashioned by people carrying dirt in baskets to cover a mound that is 14 acres at its base and rises far into the air, shaped into what looked like a stepped pyramid or ziggurat, just not made of stone. What I did not know about the site was that this main mound is only one of over 100 such mounds. You can also see a henge, with wooden trunks staked in a perfect circle around a central trunk for use as an astronomical calendar. (This site was established and then rebuilt numerous times over the centuries.) As my visit nearly coincided with the summer solstice, the henge was lined up with the sun’s smoldering descent as I peered at it from the top of Monks Mound. The later towers to the American gods, the Gateway Arch and the skyscrapers of modern St. Louis, were visible in a view made slightly less spectacular by the haze of heat and pollution. The area around old Cahokia is less than savory, as I discovered. Right next to the Cahokia park, just behind where I took these photographs, is the most unseemly of sites, a garbage dump. That such things would one day be visible all around—the interstates cutting through the countryside, a bustling metropolis in the polluted distance, the silvery rainbow of the arch—could surely not have been conceived by the people who put their sweat to raise this mound toward the sky.
The Cahokia flea started itching in my ear when I 
Troubles resulting from some sort of improvement/update (I think both terms can apply here only ironically) at Blogger have led to the formatting disaster you see on Ionarts, for now uncorrectable. The good people at Blogger assure me that a fix is in the works. For the present, you will simply have to scroll past the large blank space to get to the content. Thank you for your patience.
You might not think of St. Louis, Missouri, as a place to go to see opera in the summer. However, having recently caught one of the last performances of the 
Gloriana was composed in honor of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. It was generally considered a failure, for a number of reasons, and has been little performed since. However, this opera, as we might expect from a work by Britten at the height of his compositional powers, is a very satisfying work. Covent Garden missed an opportunity by not reviving Gloriana in 2003, to mark the queen’s 50th anniversary. The generally unflattering portrait of the present queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I, in her latter years, it was probably feared, might have provoked royal disapproval as too close for comfort. In fact, I am amazed that Britten had the temerity to create a work so critical of monarchy when he knew that its modern incarnation would be present at the premiere. In general, I would call the role of Elizabeth unflattering, if not entirely unsympathetic, especially in terms of her age (“the queen needs more artifice to deck her fading bloom,” as Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting tell each other). William Plomer’s libretto was adapted from Lytton Strachey’s 
Are Britten’s operas comedies or tragedies? There is not always a clear-cut answer to this question, and Gloriana is no different. The dark side of Britten’s personality, so evident in Billy Budd, Death in Venice, and most disturbingly of all in Turn of the Screw, comes out here only in the conclusion of Act II, when Elizabeth sends Essex off to fight in Ireland (in this production, the two singers spun around as the lighting turned dark and grotesque), and somewhat in the less than satisfying conclusion. Here, the comic wins out, especially when Elizabeth humiliates Essex’s wife, Frances, by parading around in her too-fine gown (to the accompaniment of Shostakovich-like trombone glissandi). Britten also took the idea of royal entertainment quite seriously, including a masque scene (danced beautifully by a good corps de ballet, and principal dancers Anthony Paul Krutzkamp and Janessa Touchet) and various imitations of Elizabethan court dance music. The royal ear was surely diverted, in the best continuation of that tradition, in 1953. (Ms. Brewer’s expanding girth, an embarrassingly common topic on the lips of people seated around me, was an issue only in these dance scenes, which were awkward for her.)
Yes, it is good to make the occasional foray into flyover country, and not only if you are a Midwestern expatriate like I am. We made our way to the big city on the Mississippi to see a famous St. Louis native, Christine Brewer, sing Britten's Gloriana with 
The 
Standing in front of a case holding her nursing caps and letters was a soft-spoken woman named 
The vocal and dramatic performance of the American singer Deborah Polaski, as an imposing homeless princess [see her costume in the image shown here], merited her a very long ovation when the last note had faded. It was a recognition of the bravery and substantial energy deployed during the two hours and some in this crushing role, never absent from the stage, more than the beauty of singing, which was sometimes hard and unstable in the high register, but particularly touching at the moment of her reunion with Orest.
One of those operas by Richard Strauss I would like to get to know better is 
It must be summer if Baltimore's 
So much good opera this summer. The next one on my list (
