Mark Morris Dance Group, Among the Shades

Whelm, Mark Morris Dance Company
When Mark Morris Dance Group passes through the area, every year or so, Ionarts is there. The group's latest appearance, on Friday night at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, was a typical mixture of joy and darkness. If there was not a stand-out work this time around, like the unforgettable Socrates in 2013, the program was varied and well-rounded.

The most memorable work was the terse and mysteriously somber Whelm, premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music last April. The action unfolds in Hell, or in some other murky, chthonic locale, with a woman in a black mourning veil interacting with three spirits, all in black and hoods (costumes by Elizabeth Kurtzman). The dancers moved in sync with the snowy steps of Debussy's Des pas sur la neige (Préludes, Book 1, no. 6) at the outset, while the veiled woman seemed to fight against the other three in the more frenetic middle section, set to the same composoer's Étude pour les notes répétées, played by the company's intrepid pianist, Colin Fowler. In the final section, set to Debussy's prelude La cathédrale engloutie, the dancers seemed more like tidal forces, rolling toward the front of the stage and then ebbing backward.

Cargo, premiered at Tanglewood in 2005, began in silence, with the dancers like a tribe of apish hominids gingerly approaching a pole placed on the ground at center stage. The pole becomes a cherished talisman for the dancers, serving as spear-like weapon, unifying groups of dancers who hold on to it, and carrying the limp bodies of dancers taken as prey -- seeming to fit with the South Pacific "cargo cults" mentioned as the inspiration in Morris's program note. The music is Darius Milhaud's La Création du Monde, heard here in the composer's later reduction of the score for piano and string quartet. Although you miss the saxophone and drums in this version, the jazzy overtones are still clear, used by Milhaud to accompany the ballet on an African creation legend. Here the story is more a comic counterpart to the tribal gestures of The Rite of Spring, with the dancers costumed in white underwear (costumes by Katharine McDowell).

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, The colorful restraint of the Mark Morris Dance Group (Washington Post, February 22)

The oldest work, Resurrection from 2002, provided some comic relief. To the polished swing of Richard Rodgers's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, played unfortunately from a recording, Morris tells a hard-boiled faux-noir story, with his energetic dancer Lauren Grant getting shot, then taking her revenge, only to end up in a broad Hollywood kiss with her murderous paramour on top of a human pyramid. Morris plays with all sorts of classic musical gestures, down to the kick line, almost a synchronized swimming routine, of the dancers in a circle. Morris's new choreography The, premiered at Tanglewood last summer and commissioned for Tanglewood's 75th anniversary, is somewhat reminiscent of L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato with its pastel costumes and happy upbeat style. Morris uses a transcription of Bach's first Brandenburg Concerto, by Max Reger for piano four-hands, so we lose all the fun of the raucous horns intruding on the courtly dance scene, and transposes the third-movement "Allegro" to the end of the piece, destroying Bach's odd form of a dance suite appended to the three-movement concerto. The perky staccato movements of the second trio movement, one of the score's delights, were a highlight.

Dip Your Ears, No. 193 (Les Choéphores: Repent and Amend)

D.Milhaud / A.Honegger / A.Roussel, Les Choéphores / Sy.5 / Bacchus et Ariane I.Markevitch / Orchestre Lamoureux DG Originals

Markevitch’s Milhaud Mono-Glory

Such is the stuff that golden oldies are made of: Igor Markevitch’s recording of Darius Milhaud’s Les Choéphores, one of Milhaud’s most exciting works. An intoxicating choral tableau (anywhere from Gounod to Dukas) and a distinctly modern early 20^th century idiom are interwoven by an inventively scoring hand. Just when you expect another dose of twisted perfume, Milhaud opts for percussion-only sections or lets the chorus growl, speak, huff, hiss, puff, whistle while a speaker rhythmically chants the text. All in 1915, seven years before Walton’s Façade. Good start, but Markevitch lets his hair down in Arthur Honegger’s Symphony No.5 and then puts a Bacchus et Ariane by Roussel that rocks harder than any on record, in glorious 1960s (mono) sound.

Upon re-hearing this disc, I must admit that I was dead-wrong when I dismissed the disc, taking a casual swipe at it in a 2010 Salzburg Festival review of Les Choéphores from 2010. 

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Briefly Noted: Milhaud's 'L'Orestie'

D. Milhaud, L'Orestie d'Eschyle, T. Mumford, L. Phillips, B. Rae, University of Michigan Choirs and Symphony Orchestra, K. Kiesler (released on September 9, 2014) Naxos 8.660349-51 | 141'24"

One might think that the Oresteia, Aeschylus's trilogy of blood-soaked tragedies, would have been adapted as opera more often. I know of two complete settings, by Sergei Taneyev in Russian and by Washington composer Andrew Simpson in English. Darius Milhaud's electric and pulsating score, over two hours of it made from 1913 to 1923, is not a setting of the complete text. The first two parts, a small section of Agamemnon and a slightly larger portion of The Libation Bearers, were created as incidental music for a staging of the plays by Jean Cocteau. Milhaud made the third play, The Eumenides, into a complete opera, and this new recording from the University of Michigan School of Music brings together all three of the pieces, which trace developments in Milhaud's style. We do not get the chance to review Milhaud's music all that often, especially live. While the recent performance of his one-act opera Le pauvre matelot was a little underwhelming, the brutalist force of these three pieces is not to be missed.

The influence of Stravinsky is heard, especially in the little choral scene of Agamemnon, with its motoric melodic cells repeating over and over again. Much of the music sounds cut from the same cloth as Satie's Socrate, composed around the same period, but more daring sounds come into play in the second and third parts. Milhaud calls for a form of rhythmic speaking, pulsed by percussion, in the creepy Omens section of Les choéphores, something that might seem boring or weird but is riveting when realized. To capture the immortal sound of Athena's voice in Les euménides, Milhaud writes the part for three women singing simultaneously, performed memorably here by soprano Brenda Rae, mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, and contralto Jennifer Lane. The performance is good, if not quite great, at its best in large textures.

Wolf Trap Closes Season with Surreal Double-Bill

Mireille Asselin (Thérèse) in Les mamelles de Tirésias, Wolf Trap Opera (photo by Teddy Wolff)
The gods of ancient Greece punished presumption. This was the theme, in a way, that united the double-bill of early 20th-century French opera that closed the season at Wolf Trap Opera, heard on Sunday afternoon. The eponymous sailor of Milhaud's Le pauvre matelot (1927), on a libretto by Jean Cocteau, is punished for returning home to his waiting wife but deceiving her -- not by the gods, but by his wife herself, unknowingly. Hera punished the prophet Tiresias by turning him into a woman, during which time he even gave birth to children before Hera turned him back. The story was reversed and updated by Guillaume Apollinaire in his play Les mamelles de Tirésias, set as an opera by Poulenc in 1947, in which a wife named Thérèse proclaims her feminist independence and is turned into a man.

Apollinaire used a neologism to describe the tone of his play, "surréaliste," which he explained by adding that "if it is not newer than everything found under the sun, it has at least served to formulate no credo, no artistic and literary affirmation." The two operas form an odd pairing, but the musical styles of the two composers have something in common and one is left scratching one's head by both of them. Each opera also featured a soprano who is one of the company's major discoveries of the last couple years. Dramatic soprano Tracy Cox had a compelling turn as the sailor's wife, demonstrating a serious side that complemented her turn as Alice Ford in last year's Falstaff, both with a powerful instrument that is deployed with compelling pliancy and force. Lyric soprano Mireille Asselin, who was a fairy-light Nannetta in the same production last season, was equally fine in the role of Thérèse, created for Poulenc's soprano muse Denise Duval, taming the role's high-flying excesses with a comic edge that lightened the more incomprehensible parts of the story.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Wolf Trap Opera presents engaging French duo: Sailors and breasts (Washington Post, August 11) ---, Wolf Trap Opera, Castleton Festival launch unevenly but laudably on same weekend (Washington Post, June 29) Charles T. Downey, 'Carmen' at Wolf Trap (Ionarts, July 29)

In the same category was the hilarious performance of baritone Tobias Greenhalgh as the husband in Les mamelles, who had both the extended high range for the role and the confidence and comic range to pull off singing much of the evening in drag. Tenor Robert Watson had the power side of the role of the sailor in Le pauvre matelot, if not quite the head voice needed at a few points. Norman Garrett and Ryan Speedo Green were effective as the sailor's father-in-law and friend, although further French pronunciation coaching is needed. Baritone Joo Won Kang was fun as both the theater director and the gendarme, and many of the company's studio artists filled out the rest of the cast.

Conductor Timothy Myers, whom we have reviewed at the Castleton Festival and at Wolf Trap before, had a good handle on both scores, although allowing the orchestra too much free rein in that some of the singers sometimes struggled to be heard. This was surprising in Les mamelles, since the performance did not use the complete orchestration, with only one of each woodwind, brass, and harp (a substantial and disappointing reduction, but necessary because of the constraints of the pit at the Barns -- hear the full effect in this performance from the Opéra de Lyon). The staging by Matthew Ozawa was minimal but caught something of the essence of each work, through simple means, like a white steel frame box that surrounded the sailor's wife in Le pauvre matelot, setting her off in her loneliness, and the two little pink balloons that floated out of Asselin's dress when Thérèse began her transformation in Les mamelles.

This performance will be repeated on August 16, in the Barns at Wolf Trap.

KC Chamber Players in Terrace Theater

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

On Sunday evening in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, the Kennedy Center Chamber Players, all principals of the National Symphony Orchestra, presented a polished program of music tied loosely together by the theme of contrast between sacred and profane.

The program began with Darius Milhaud’s four-movement Suite for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano, op. 157b (1936), for which pianist Lambert Orkis was joined by violinist Marissa Regni and clarinetist Loren Kitt. The piece’s prevailing lighthearted and danceable mood is tinged with tongue-in-cheek detachment and polytonal complexity, while a dreamy second movement reveals a heart of childlike simplicity. In a smooth and precise reading, Regni played with especially tender, almost vibrato-free purity in the second movement. Here as throughout the evening, Orkis was the most expressive performer of the group.

Next, Orkis joined cellist David Hardy for César Franck’s Sonata in A Major (1886), written for violin and piano and later arranged, with the composer’s blessing, for cello and piano. The piece gains expressive depth with the use of cello instead of violin, although in Sunday’s performance the cello was swallowed up by the piano in places where a violin would have soared above it. This was not helped by the placement of the cellist right next to the piano, making it hard to distinguish the two instruments. In this world-weary sonata, Franck’s nomadic chromaticism and cyclic rehashing of motifs create a sense of endless searching without finding. Orkis and Hardy brought an appropriately grand seriousness to the piece, while also injecting fire into its exhilarating fast passages. At times, though, this entailed a loss of some precision in the piano part. Hardy delivered the cello’s final gruff outburst with dramatic flair.

Orkis and Hardy returned for J. S. Bach’s Sonata in G minor, BWV 1030b. Bach reworked this piece in different keys and for different instruments; it is more commonly performed on flute or oboe than on cello. Bach’s unsettled chromaticism here recalled Franck’s, and Orkis and Hardy again grappled ably with this intricate music. However, they also succumbed to some of the dangers of playing Bach on modern instruments; it was generally too bright and insistent. Hardy’s higher register began to fray toward the end, sounding squeaky and not quite in tune. The players closed with Béla Bartók’s Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano (1938). This fiery piece was commissioned by jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, and in it, Eastern European dances mingle with jazz riffs appropriate to Goodman’s style. The players reveled in its eccentricities, from the opening mock-serious military recruiting dance to the jarringly mistuned (scordatura) violin scratchings of the final movement.