On ClassicsToday: A Vikingur Retrospective, Musicianship over Hype

 Triad: Víkingur Ólafsson’s Greatest Hits

Review by: Jens F. Laurson

Artistic Quality: ?

Sound Quality: ?

Triad, the latest release by Icelandic pianist Vikingur (Heiðar) Ólafsson, isn’t a new album. It’s simply a fancy repackaging of his last three main releases for Deutsche Grammophon. This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy if all three of those releases weren’t absolute corkers. There’s a disc of Bach–transcriptions both original, third-party, and by Bach himself–that was an easy 10/10 choice when we reviewed it here (see reviews archive). Both of the other two albums are similarly lofty achievements... (read the entire review at ClassicsToday) 

In the News: New SFS Music Director, Philip Glass, and Jeremy Denk

In the News:

Esa-Pekka Salonen - the Complete Sony Recordings Sony US | UK | DE

Top News surely the announcement that Esa-Pekka Salonen (as had been rumored) will succeed Michael Tilson-Thomas in San Francisco to be the San Francisco Symphony’s 10^th Music Director. It’s a logical appointment. A stellar conductor with a great reputation, interesting repertoire, and a real feel for the American – indeed Californian – way of being an MD… which is to suggest: naturally good at fundraising. For the very little it’s worth: I should have liked to see the slightly less splashy appointment of David Robertson… not so much because I think that would have been better for the SFS but simply because I want Robertson, whom I consider to be one of the most underrated conductors around, to be more in the limelight and with an orchestra of an international reputation to play with. After all, he’s at an age where one might consider that the once steeply ascendant conductor’s career has petered out, lest he pull a Günter Wand-like golden autumn. (Which would be fine, but I want him now.) Anyway, Salonen is certainly the safer choice and every bit as good (and certainly more glam-inducing) for the orchestra. Here’s the official announcement.

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P.Glass, Symphony No.11 D.R.Davies / Bruckner Orch. Linz Orange Mountain Music US | UK | DE

Next up: You must get intimations of mortality when a university names a program after you. Case in point Philip Glass and The New School’s College of Performing Arts, which announced today to engage in a landmark partnership with the Philip Glass Ensemble (PGE) and long-time PGE member, Lisa Bielawa (named inaugural Composer-in-Residence and Chief Curator), around the work of Philip Glas, to form a new learning and creative center. Because Glass’ works have been so neglected, the Philip Glass Institute will offer students, faculty, and the public the opportunity to immerse themselves in the work of Philip Glass, other important artists within his circle, and the work of the iconic Philip Glass Ensemble. Facetiousness aside, this is good news for the PGE, which is Glass’ legacy, and the future of which is thereby secured, independently of its namesake… erm, aliveness. Added the composer himself: “At the new PGI we can prioritize a curriculum which doesn’t require critical approval of any period or style...Young composers need to be true to their voices. ‘Coming up’ can be very independent, and this is what will be guiding our work at The New School.” The whole thing will launch on January 6^th at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium.

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Beethoven / Ligeti, op.111 / Etudes Jeremy Denk Warner US | UK | DE

Combining the topics of San Francisco and schools: Pianist (and once our blogging-colleague) Jeremy Denk has been announced to join the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As such, he will lead a piano studio beginning in the 2019-20 academic year, joining piano department instructors at SFCM such as Jon Nakamatsu and Garrick Ohlsson. How gratifying (if envy-inducing) to see Denk’s career – not only as a musician but also as a man of letters – blossom like the dickens: MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Avery Fisher Prize, and most recently his being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences… and now a great job. Here’s to you, Jeremy, and hats off. Here’s the official announcement.

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Forbes Classical CD Of The Week: Víkingur Heiðar Ólafsson; Through The Piano Glass

...It’s easier to quip about Philip Glass’ music than to write intelligently about it. But Víkingur (Heiðar) Ólafsson, the young and trendy Icelandic pianist, shows how it’s done in the liner notes to his first release on Deutsche Grammophon. I first heard the Juilliard-taught student of Ann Schein and Seymour Lipkin when he was a stiff tween at the Icelandic Ambassador’s residence. His image has changed, since...

-> Classical CD Of The Week: Víkingur Heiðar Ólafsson; Through The Piano Glass

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New York City Ballet celebrates Robbins and Bernstein

New York City Ballet in Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces (photo by Paul Kolnik)
Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein were both born in 1918, the former on October 11 and the latter on August 25. After a program honoring three of its major choreographers earlier in the week, the New York City Ballet offered a tribute to Robbins, its other co-founder, and the composer with whom he often collaborated, seen on Friday night in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Robbins is most remembered for his hybridization of classical ballet with popular dance, a trend he began in his very first choreography, Fancy Free. Premiered in 1944 by the company that would become American Ballet Theater, it is set to a jazz-heavy score by Bernstein, in a foretaste of what they would create a decade later in West Side Story. The scene is wartime Manhattan, evoked immediately by the "overture," a minute or so of a recording of Big Stuff, a Bernstein original that sounds like a classic blues. NYCB's new music director, Andrew Litton, has changed the recording used at this moment to one made by Billie Holiday, the voice envisioned by both Bernstein and Robbins, although she had obviously not recorded the song at the time of the ballet's creation.

Roman Mejia, Harrison Coll, and Sebastian Villarini-Velez, the Saturday matinee's trio of sailors in a last-minute substitution, burst onto the stage one by one with cartwheels. The opening music, bubbling with enthusiasm, contains the kernel of the melody of "New York, New York, it's a helluva town" (the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, the people ride in a hole in the ground), from the musical adaptation of this ballet, On the Town. This trio was enthusiastic and physical, if not always as unified as they might have been. The style of choreography must have been bracing to see in 1944, still some years before Gene Kelly would popularize the style in countless big-production film musicals. It now feels rather dated, however, especially the interactions of the sailors with the three Passers-by, women who are minding their own business and end up basically getting harassed.

Other Reviews: Alastair Macaulay, Then, With a Touch of Now, and a Fully Charged Prodigal Son (New York Times, January 21, 2008) Brian Seibert, A Jerome Robbins Tribute by New York City Ballet Brims With Brio (New York Times, February 9, 2015)

The Robbins legacy came off the strongest in the first work, Glass Pieces, from 1983. Lucinda Childs had already choreographed Glass's music at that point, in Einstein on the Beach and Dance, but Robbins captured something essential about Glass's style in these excerpts from Glassworks and Akhnaten. In the opening scene (see photo above) the corps walks about busily, like the bustling city streets slowed down in the film Koyaanisqatsi, which came out just before this ballet.

Pairings and small groups of dancers in solid colors enter the scene accompanied by new musical motifs, disrupting the workaday mood with lyricism. Eventually the corps is drawn into what they are doing, a sort of metaphor for artistic inspiration. The choreography is most ravishing, however, in the slow movement, set to the "Facades" movement of Glassworks, with a gorgeous pas de deux, spotlit in front of a sort of conga-line corps silhouetted in blue light. The exceptionally strong new principal dancer Russell Janzen elegantly lifted the long-limbed Maria Kowrowski around the stage to the held, hovering notes of the soprano sax solo. The final scene, with its percussion-heavy syncopated elements, did not reveal the men of the corps in the strongest light. Conductor Andrews Sill had some trouble at times keeping musicians on opposite sides of the pit perfectly aligned in this complex, repetitive music.

The eccentric side of Robbins came across in the last piece, The Four Seasons from 1979. It is principally a choreography for the ballet of that name in the third act of Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes, augmented by some music from the same composer's I Lombardi and Il Trovatore. The staging and costumes, with caped dancers in front of a huge, soaring crest bearing Verdi's name, seemed extremely kitschy by comparison to the week's worth of bare stages. Robbins made many jokes that matched music to movement, like the shivering ballerinas in the Winter scene. Outstanding solo work came from the poised Sarah Mearns, with an elegant, upright vertical line in the Spring section, paired beautifully with Jared Angle. Ashley Laracey was again extraordinary in the lead role of Summer, even in this least striking of the four scenes, and Ashley Bouder and Joaquin de Luz excelled in the wine-dipped concluding dances of Fall, watched over by the athletic caprioles of Daniel Ulbricht.

This program will be repeated today at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. and tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. in the Kennedy Center Opera House with various casts.

American Ballet Theater: New Choreography at Kennedy Center

Blain Hoven and Daniil Simkin, Serenade after Plato's Symposium, American Ballet Theater (photo by Rosalie Connor)
American Ballet Theater has taken over the Kennedy Center Opera House this week, offering a smorgasbord of new ballets. The first program, seen on Wednesday night, was a combination of three choreographies from the last decade, plus a Jerome Robbins classic from 1976. The second night cast included some of the company's best dancers -- meaning that the usual vocal group of Misty Copeland followers was in the audience -- and some new discoveries.

The best part of the Leonard Bernstein anniversary celebrations, otherwise a seemingly endless sequence of celebrated mediocrities, arrived unexpectedly with Serenade after Plato's Symposium, perhaps Alexei Ratmansky's most important work to date, premiered by ABT in 2016. The music is Bernstein's, a rather gorgeous five-movement violin concerto premiered in Venice in 1954, setting to music the seven speakers of Plato's Symposium, invited to extol the virtues of love. Seven men, mostly from the group of rising soloists, brought this evening of conversation and intense philosophical argument to life, with Hee Seo taking the startling single female role, entering in a starkly lit rectangular opening in the rear curtain. Violin soloist Kobi Malkin struggled with intonation on the numerous double-stops of the solo part, but the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra supported him ably.

The Robbins piece, Other Dances, was originally a vehicle for Mikhail Baryshnikov, but it was the woman of the pairing, Sarah Lane, who most stood out for the grace and buoyancy of her movements. Emily Wong played the selection of Chopin pieces, four mazurkas and a concluding, spirited waltz, at a piano on stage.

Other Reviews: Alastair Macaulay, Review: In Gala, American Ballet Theater Is Open to Debate (New York Times, May 17, 2016) ---, A Big House, Big Names, New Twists (New York Times, May 25, 2011) Gia Kourlas, Review: At American Ballet Theater, Mostly Millepied (New York Times, October 26, 2017)

The most recent piece, premiered just last fall, was the spirited I Feel the Earth Move, with choreography by Benjamin Millepied set to music by Philip Glass. Stage hands cleared away all of the curtains and scrims from the stage, revealing the catwalks and bare walls, as well as the lighting instruments above. Danced to a rather loud recording, this ballet was hyperactive, seemingly in constant motion, perhaps an expression of individual freedom against repression, represented by the female corps, which appeared marching in step, bandannas over some of their faces.

Christopher Wheeldon's story ballets have not been my cup of tea for the most part, but this more abstract short choreography had greater appeal. Barbara Bilach took the solo part of Benjamin Britten's Diversions for Piano (left hand) and Orchestra, again conducted with abundant energy by Ormsby Wilkins. It was another beautiful score to discover, brought to life by dance, made better by it as the Bernstein had been earlier. The variations form worked elegantly for dance, as Wheeldon has crafted pairs, solos, and group numbers for each brief movement. Misty Copeland finally appeared on stage, for a time-stopping solo in the fourth variation ("Rubato"). Her pairing in the exquisite pas de deux for the tenth variation ("Adagio"), with Cory Stearns stepping in for Gray Davis, was the highlight of the evening, muscularity merged with poetry.

American Ballet Theater performs Whipped Cream, with a forgotten ballet score by Richard Strauss, tonight through February 4.

Glass's New 'Appomattox' a Long Battle

Charles T. Downey, Glass’s revised “Appomattox” proves even more unwieldy at Washington National Opera (The Classical Review, November 15)

In some ways, the United States is still fighting the Civil War. Political divides, even now, often fall along similar fault lines, and the wounds caused by the conflict, Tristan-like, refuse to heal.

This was the premise of Philip Glass’s opera Appomattox, premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2007, which connects the Civil War to the Civil Rights era. Although critics hailed it as unwieldy...

[Continue reading]

Philip Glass, Appomattox
Washington National Opera
Kennedy Center Opera House

SEE ALSO:
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, Review: ‘Appomattox’ at the Kennedy Center (New York Times, November 15)

Anne Midgette, ‘Appomattox’: A superb night at the opera (The Washington Post, November 15)

---, The war that would not end: Race relations take the opera stage (Washington Post, November 14)

Alex Baker, Glass Warfare (Parterre Box, November 16)

Seth Colter Walls, Appomattox review – Philip Glass's revised opera considers race in America (The Guardian, November 15)

Tim Smith, Philip Glass opera 'Appomattox' addresses Civil War, civil rights (Baltimore Sun, November 12)

Michael Cooper, Seeing Voting Rights Under Siege, Philip Glass Rewrites an Opera (New York Times, November 10)

Charles T. Downey, Virginia Opera Does It Again (Glass, Orphée) (Ionarts, February 11, 2012)

---, Philip Glass at the Phillips Collection (The Washingtonian, October 4, 2011)

---, Nothing but Dance (Ionarts, April 25, 2011)

---, Ionarts at Large: Satyagraha at the Met (Ionarts, April 21, 2008)

Joshua Kosman, Philip Glass opera 'Appomattox' both impressive and inconsistent (San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 2007)

Ballet Across America 2: 'Les Patineurs'

The second part of the Kennedy Center's Ballet Across America festival (see Part 1) had the choreography that really caught my eye, Frederick Ashton's classic Les Patineurs. Overall it was likely the high point of the week because of the combination of Ashton's skating ballet, made for Sadler's Wells in 1937, with a Philip Glass choreography, Wunderland, and more Balanchine, The Four Temperaments. The impetus for Les Patineurs was some of the music from Giacomo Meyerbeer's Le Prophète, an 1849 grand opera which had featured an ice-skating interlude leading into Act III. Sadly, Ashton did not follow that ballet's example of having the corps dance on roller skates, which had become a fad in Paris that year, but Les Patineurs, in this revival presented by Sarasota Ballet, is an unabashedly sentimental, even corny choreography that cannot but bring a smile to your face.

The idea is ingeniously simple: a frozen lake surrounded by snow-touched trees, some white gates and colorful lamps, and a corps and soloists in pairs or alone all mimicking skating on the blue floor (sets and costumes were loaned by the Birmingham Royal Ballet). At one point snow falls, at others sudden stops in the music are accompanied by pratfalls of the skaters. The dancing was all quite fine, led by the Blue Boy of Logan Learned, an energetic role that included some athletic acrobatics, and the elegant White Couple of Danielle Brown and Ricardo Graziano. Two pairs of women, one costumed in blue and the other in red, provide occasional comic relief, all to Meyerbeer's music, much of which borders on pedestrian but with the dancing is magnified in interest, played well by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra under the baton of Ormsby Wilkins.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America: ‘Les Patineurs’ and ‘Wunderland’ (Washington Post, June 8) Carrie Seidman, Sarasota Ballet does a 'capital' job in D.C. (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, June 8)

Septime Webre and the Washington Ballet brought Edwaard Liang's choreography Wunderland, premiered in 2009. Here the music -- excerpts from Philip Glass's second, third, and fifth string quartets -- was played by a selection of the Opera House Orchestra players, plus talented pianist Lisa Emenheiser, a performance that unfortunately had to be amplified (noisy page turns and all). Liang's work was much busier than Les Patineurs, and the repeated gestures of Glass's music were matched with geometric movements, often striking but just as often seeming to fill time. The orchestra returned for the Pennsylvania Ballet's revival of George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, with an evocative score by Paul Hindemith, conducted by Beatrice Jona Affron. A rather serious work, with dances that illustrate the medieval concept of the bodily humors, it would have benefited from being placed first on the program, while Les Patineurs would be enchanting at any point in the evening.

This program is repeated twice on Saturday (June 8, 1:30 and 7:30 pm) in the Kennedy Center Opera House. The Ballet Across America festival continues through June 9.

The Most Regrettable Death of the Conductor

Intelligent programming trumps musical horse-power: A self-serving Celibidache-memorial performance of Zubin Mehta in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in across town may have promised polished glory by an orchestra that knows its Bruckner, but the rag-tag band of Munich’s JCC, the Jakobsplatz Orchestra and its director outmaneuvered them, appealing to my penchant for the eclectic with an adventurous program of Wagner, Scriabin, Wyschnegradsky, Kagel and—perfectly in time for the Fourth of July—Cage and Glass. Cleverly presented as part of the Munich Opera Festival, the Jakobsplatz Orchestra attracted a full house in the unorthodox but surprisingly functional location in the west wing of the history-laden Haus der Kunst.

Shaky at first, the Siegfried Idyll soon flowed with gorgeousness, aided by steady horns and crisp, unsentimental tempi. Played at the far end of the sparsely lit hall, away from the young audience, the lanky silhouette of the Jakobsplatz Orchestra conductor and artistic director Daniel Grossmann reminded vaguely of an excerpt from Fantasia. Instinctive silence led, via short spoken excerpts on Scriabin and his Mysterium, to the open, light mysticism of Scriabin’s 7^th sonata, “Messe Noire” well played by Sophie Raynand, if lacking the necessary commanding presence and conviction.

For Philip Glass’ Third Symphony for strings, the orchestra migrated to the center of the shoebox-like wing. It’s a simple, popular, charming work, none to challenging but effective with several rows of audience-heads, from 17 to 70, bopping along to the fourth movement. (If you’ve seen The Fog of War, you’ve heard the Symphony.)

John Cage’s 4’33” is something you can never hear enough of. Performed after intermission, the piece—more clever than it is usually being given credit for—has an image problem: It’s just a crafty joke to some; the epitome of Cagean absurdity for others, and it does in fact distract from so the non-absurd, surprisingly orthodox music Cage has written, be it for prepared piano or string quartet.

With all hands on deck, 4’33” for large orchestra turned out to be a success, without giggles and only occasional whispers on how long it would last. The planners got unforeseen help from a thunderstorm that had broken loose: the rain that poured on the large glass roof with blinders made the point of 4’33” more obvious, which is not about silence—much less about ‘meditation amidst stressful modern life’—but about the impossibility of silence. Not heeding the call for quiet afterwards, the actress-speaker prattled on quoting Thoreau and more Scriabin before the Ivan A. Wyschnegradsky Étude—quarter-tones and glissandi for small orchestra and two (differently tuned) pianos over faint hints of Varèse—took over and ended… this time to confused, not instinctive silence from the audience.

Mauricio Kagel’s Finale mit Kammerensemble is morbidly humorous performance art, but the acted-out death of the conductor, mid-performance, can easily distract from how much delicate and lovely music there is, enchanting and lyrical, then increasingly dark, and intermittently segueing into a robustly pounding circus romp. The unfortunate death of the young conductor at the hands of the composer’s instructions (which ask for realism) was meant, here, to be stylized, so as to avoid a cringe-worthy moment of awkwardness… but unfortunately it only ended up looking cringe-worthily awkward as Daniel Grossman gently, carefully placed himself on the floor, ad libitum, as if he had acute Avian Bone Syndrome. 

Virginia Opera Does It Again

La Princesse leads Cégeste to the underworld -- Jonathan Blalock (Cégeste) and Heather Buck (La Princesse) in Orphée, Virginia Opera, 2012 (photo by David A. Beloff)

Virginia Opera has moved into the lead position as the local opera company most willing to take risks and challenge its audience. After winning new productions of Aida and Hansel and Gretel in the fall, it threw all caution to the wind by staging an opera by Philip Glass, and not a well-known one at that, Orphée, premiered in 1993. It was a sparse audience indeed that showed up for last night's performance at George Mason University's Center for the Arts in Fairfax, and it thinned out even more amid some grumbling at intermission. Based on the 1949 film of the same name by Jean Cocteau (French libretto adapted by Glass and Robert Brustein), Orphée did not impress me (or others) that much on a recent recording on Glass's Orange Mountain Music label. It again became apparent to me how much Glass's repetitive music relies on a visual element -- true of both his operas and his film scores -- to bring it to life. In this staging, created for Glimmerglass Opera and taken to Portland Opera for the production from which the OMM live recording was made, the work became many times more hypnotic and alluring.

Glass, Orphée, P. Cutlip, L. Saffer, Portland Opera, A. Manson (released on July 20, 2010) OMM 0068 | 101'49"

Cocteau updated the Orpheus legend to the modern era, with a celebrity poet and his wife becoming entangled with a mysterious princess, later revealed to be death herself, and the spirits of those she has taken, wandering in an unexplained other world. It begins when a young poet, Cégeste, is struck by a motorcyclist at their home. Orphée becomes obsessed with his patron, La Princesse, and listens to mysterious messages received from the world beyond through a transistor radio -- quite appropriately for Glass's music these cryptic communications, in a sort of Symbolist nonsense style, are repeated over and over. The princess's chauffeur, Heurtebise, takes a shine to Orphée's wife, Eurydice, helping to guide her husband to find her in the underworld after she, too, is struck by a motorcyclist. A panel of judges sends Orphée and Eurydice back home, but the banal reality of living with someone you are not allowed to look at becomes intolerable and Orphée seeks out death to spend eternity with the Princess. She instead sacrifices herself to make Orpheus immortal.

Much of this cast's magic is due to the regal presence, vocally and dramatically, of soprano Heather Buck as La Princesse. We last reviewed her as a venomous Queen of the Night in an odd Magic Flute at Santa Fe Opera, and the same icy strengths were assets here as the bewitching figure of death, both loving and terrifying. After the opening scene, in which Glass subordinated his trademark style to an evocation of bubbly jazz, the composer's stripped-down, static music returned to the score, making an elegant characterization of the tense dread of much of the story and especially of the alluring role of La Princesse. Buck was matched vocally by the robust baritone of Matthew Worth and strong, radiant soprano of Sara Jakubiak as Eurydice, and less so by the somewhat pale tenor of Jeffrey Lentz as the silver-haired chauffeur Heurtebise. The supporting cast was distinguished by able performances from the lead judge of Christopher Temporelli, the Poet of Matthew Burns, and the commissioner of Oliver Medina.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, Virginia Opera presents Philip Glass’s ‘Orphee’ at George Mason University (Washington Post, February 13) ---, For Virginia opera lovers, it’s a whole new scene (Washington Post, February 4) Alex Baker, Orphee at Virginia Opera (Wellsung, February 11) Emily Cary, Matthew Worth sings Philip Glass' 'Orphee' (Washington Examiner, February 7) Paul Sayegh, Va. Opera's 'Orphée' powerful, haunting (The Virginian-Pilot, January 31)

The single set (designed by Andrew Lieberman) place the action in a bare, modern apartment, dominated by a large reproduction of a head shot of Worth, underscoring the narcissistic self-regard of the title character. Mirrors provide the method of travel between the world of the living and that of the dead, an idea echoed in the first transmission from the transistor radio ("Mirrors would do well to reflect more, I repeat, mirrors would do well to reflect more"). Rather than actual mirrors, which appear only in the hands of the mysterious glazer in this production, director Sam Helfrich instead uses a small army of supernumeraries to create mirror images of most of the characters, who move about the stage in disorienting ways. Conductor Steven Jarvi had his hands full keeping the generally good but sometimes not quite aligned pit, filled by members of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, on the same page. His beat was admirably clear and he was generous in cuing the singers on the stage, but it did not always line up as well as it could. Although not perfect, this production is still recommended as a compelling evening of contemporary theater.

This production will be repeated tomorrow afternoon (February 12, 2 pm) at GMU, followed by two performances next weekend in Richmond (February 17 and 19). Virginia Opera has also announced its lineup for next season: Bizet's Pearl Fishers, Strauss's Die Fledermaus, Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

Konstantin Soukhovetski @ Phillips

Charles T. Downey, Konstantin Soukhovetski at Phillips Collection
Washington Post, February 7, 2012

R. Strauss, Capriccio, R. Fleming, G. Finley, Opéra National de Paris, U. Schirmer

What would happen if you took the music of three rather different composers and played it all like Rachmaninoff? This was apparently the goal of a recital by Konstantin Soukhovetski, heard Sunday afternoon at the Phillips Collection. The Russian pianist, in his 30s and fresh out of Juilliard, played with flair and plenty of rubato, but his performance lacked interpretative seasoning.

Soukhovetski also studied acting and has performed in a couple of short films. The sense of the melodramatic was palpable, as Soukhovetski introduced the piano version of Philip Glass’s score for “The Hours” by quoting from the suicide note left by Virginia Woolf in the film. He gave this music, characterized by its sometimes monotonous repetition, considerable expressive shape, accelerating the tempo to enhance the effect of the fast passages and hammering the fortissimo chords mercilessly. [Continue reading]

Konstantin Soukhovetski (b. 1981), piano
Phillips Collection

Philip Glass, piano transcription film score for The Hours
Schubert Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960
Transcription of the Mondschein scene of Strauss's Capriccio (watch Renée Fleming singing it in Paris)

Ives and the JACK Quartet

Charles T. Downey, JACK Quartet adds its signature to Ives Project
Washington Post, November 7, 2011

Xenakis, Works with Piano, JACK Quartet et al.

It says something about the JACK Quartet that Charles Ives’s second string quartet is one of the oldest pieces in their repertoire. On Saturday night, the New York-based foursome brought the three-day Ives Project, hosted by the Post-Classical Ensemble, to its conclusion with an Ives-centered program in the Mansion at Strathmore.

Balancing the chaotic jumble of Ives was Philip Glass’s lyrical, opulently beautiful fifth string quartet, from 1991. It is a throwback to the cult of beauty in the history of the string quartet, recalling Glass’s avowed affinity for the music of Franz Schubert, with whom he shares a birthday. The JACK Quartet may have gained notoriety for its eclectic programming, but they will endure because they can play with a glowing, warm sound and poetic phrasing, even with simple, repetitive motifs. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Cecelia Porter, PostClassical Ensemble makes beautiful sense of Charles Ives’s music (Washington Post, November 4)

Andrew Lindemann Malone, Ives from All Sides (DMV Classical, November 6)

Tom Huizenga, JACK Quartet offers new music and dynamic variety (Washington Post, May 3, 2010)

On YouTube: the first recording of the Ives second quartet, by the Walden Quartet; and the Kronos Quartet's recording of Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 5

Philip Glass at the Phillips

See my review of the first concert of the season at the Phillips Collection:

Philip Glass at the Phillips Collection (The Washingtonian, October 4):

P. Glass, Metamorphosis / Mad Rush, P. Glass

Let’s just say this up front: Philip Glass is not a virtuoso pianist. Technical ability was not the reason he drew a full audience to the Music Room at the Phillips Collection on Sunday afternoon, to kick off a new season of concerts. Glass was there to play his own compositions, in the simplified, repetitive style—call it minimalism, although Glass does not like the term—that has made him famous. This style can be found in his film scores (Koyaanisqatsi and Notes on a Scandal, among others) and his ground-breaking operas (Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, for example). Glass also spoke about the pieces he played during the course of the recital and in a post-concert talkback session with the audience. The Q&A was led by Caroline Mousset, the director of the museum’s music program. Somewhere between what he said and what he played, in spite of the uneven technique and sometimes halting rhythm, the performance became quite compelling. Glass will turn 75 this January, and one had the sense of being in the presence of someone who had made an immense mark on the course of music history.

All of Glass’s music is essentially the same: He begins with the pulse of a repeated pattern, then layers on other patterns that add rhythmic complexity, creating a harmonic pattern that is the basis for variation, not unlike the chacona and passacaglia ostinati used in earlier music. It has struck me many times before that Glass did his best work in the 1970s and ’80s, the heyday of his creative energy, and that was also the case here. The best piece on the program, Mad Rush, dates from 1979. The piece was first performed on organ the organ for the Dalai Lama’s visit to New York in 1981. As adapted for piano, it features a simple Alberti bass sort of pattern in the left hand, contrasted with sextuplets in the right, with the thumb of the right hand jabbing out a jazzy, syncopated rhythm. The tumult of faster notes in the B section, which returns a couple times, gives the piece its name. The opposition of energy and stasis in the two musical ideas was compelling. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Philip J. Kennicott, Philip Glass opens Phillips Collection concert series (Washington Post, October 4)

Stephen Brookes, Hands of stone: Composer Glass jars in playing his work (Washington Times, October 4)

Nothing but 'Dance'

By turning to the abstract, artists were liberated from having to depict something, at least according to the traditional narrative means used by painters and sculptors of the past. Abstract dance choreography would follow the same course: freed from its historic role -- to tell a story in gesture -- choreography could produce nothing more than a visual delight in movement and shape, paired with music concerned not with character or narrative but only rhythmic patterns. This was the goal of Dance, the ground-breaking collaboration of dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs and composer Philip Glass in 1979, experienced on Friday night at the Clarice Smith Center in College Park, part of the company's national tour. The original project followed Childs's partnership with Philip Glass and Robert Wilson on that grand experimental failure Einstein on the Beach, the sort of work that will be mentioned as a watershed event in every history of opera but that has no performing life of its own. A few years later, Childs and Glass produced a work for her dance company, five numbers with music by Glass that they called Dance 1-5.

P. Glass, Dance Nos. 1-5

Abstract geometric artist Sol LeWitt made film versions of the first production, which included only three of the five sections. To mark the work's 30th anniversary, at the Bard Festival in 2009, Childs created a new version of Dance, with live dancers performing in sync with those recorded in LeWitt's film, projected on a transparent scrim in front of the stage. At some times one sees only the projected dancers, at others only the live ones, with manipulations of the film frame making possible various juxtapositions of the two -- side by side or one behind or above the other. The choreography is geometrical, avoiding any touching between dancers the way Mondrian avoided non-primary colors and curving lines. The dancers moved across an abstract, Mondrian-like grid, coming close to another but without overlapping. In the first part, pairs of dancers cross left and right, women in front and men in back, in tandem or in contrapuntal imitation, like dux and comes.

Other Articles: Sarah Kaufman, Just ‘Dance’: Work by Lucinda Childs captures the essence of the art form (Washington Post, April 23) ---, Lucinda Childs’s ‘Dance,’ back in motion at the University of Maryland (Washington Post, April 15) Andrew Freedman, Dancing with themselves (University of Maryland Diamondback, April 19) Euan Kerr, Controversial dance returns 30 years after first run (Minnesota Public Radio, April 7) Caroline Palmer, 'Dance' from 1979: This ain't no disco (Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 8) ---, 'Dance' moves toward acceptance (Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 1) Roslyn Sulcas, Simple Movements, Complex Patterns (New York Times, October 7, 2009)

As the music's bubbling arpeggiated patterns are recombined, this basic idea of crossing pairs becomes more complex and repetitions are layered over one another. Larger groups cross together, but the closest we come to some kind of personal union is toward the end, as the male dancer crosses toward the front to move next to his partner. The mathematical abstraction is reinforced by the vocal lines in Glass's score, set with the only text being the corresponding solfege syllables, another connection to Einstein on the Beach.


The triple meter of the outer sections is squared by a shift to 4/4 in the second. With a basic vocabulary of twirling, strides, and arm swings, a single dancer moves around the stage in a diamond pattern and along a central axis from back to front. The tall, lithe Caitlin Scranton mirrors the image of Lucinda Childs herself, featured in the film in the second part of Dance. The more austere music, played in the recording by Glass and Michael Riesman with a more rock-style bass, and the rather spartan choreography are wearying after a while, reinforcing the idea that the streamlining of Dance from five to three movements gave it a much-needed concision and tighter structure. The third section returns to the flying, almost weightless choreography of the first, with the music giving buoyant metric shifts by playing with the cross-relationships of 3/4 and 6/8.

This new version of Dance continues on its tour to San Francisco (April 28 to 30), Los Angeles (May 6 and 7), and Santa Barbara (May 10).

More Glass: BSO's 'Icarus'

Mobtown Modern's performance of Philip Glass's classic Glassworks on Wednesday night served as an introduction to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's local premiere of a new Glass work, Icarus at the Edge of Time. After a rather disappointing first half of the season -- the last concert by the BSO under review was the season opening gala back in September -- Marin Alsop finally seemed back on track with this concert, taking microphone in hand to introduce the new work, a collaboration between Glass and physicist Brian Greene to create a film of his recent children's book Icarus at the Edge of Time, complete with a new score. It was a partnership that Alsop helped engineer (see some video notes about this), and the BSO was one of the co-commissioners of the piece that resulted, although it has already been premiered, as part of science festivals in New York and London last summer.

B. Greene, Icarus at the Edge of Time

Greene himself gave a brilliant, funny explanation of the scientific understanding of black holes before the second half began, making a case for his book's updating of the Greek legend of Icarus. In this modern version of that classic tale of adolescent hubris, Daedalus is the pilot of a spaceship on an expedition of 25 trillion miles to make the first rendez-vous with alien life. His son Icarus, a mathematical prodigy, has designed a special small craft, the Runabout, which he soon takes out on an unauthorized voyage to investigate an uncharted black hole. Ignoring his father's pleas to return to the ship, Icarus manages to steer his winged craft along the edge of the black hole without falling into its inescapable gravitational pull. What Icarus has failed to take into account is Einstein's theory of relativity, the distortion of time and space near the black hole, so that when he returns from his daring voyage, ten thousand years have passed. The divine punishment for hubris becomes the cost of scientific discovery, as Icarus loses his father but learns about the future that their pioneering trek has made possible.

A large screen above the orchestra displayed the film version of the story, created by Al + Al (Al Holmes and Al Taylor), pioneers in the combination of computer-generated imagery and live action performance. Librettist David Henry Hwang assisted Greene with the adaptation of the book, rendering it as scenes in the silent film and narration (read beautifully by NPR personality Scott Simon). Glass's score struck my ears as one of his more prosaic, with few moments of particularly striking instrumental or harmonic combinations, although the composer's trademarked repetitions made an excellent metaphor for the whirling revolution of cosmic orbit. Somewhat unusually, Glass turned often to the snare drum (perhaps a tribute to the military sounds of Holst's Mars) and evoked a sort of maracas-tinged Latin dance as Icarus enters the library of the future, and there was an interesting augmentation of the values of the bass notes as Icarus was slowed down by the warping of time. Alsop led a smooth and polished performance from the BSO, who played admirably all evening long, a few infelicities in the horns aside, in spite of the sheer number of repetitions.

Other Articles: Tim Smith, Baltimore Symphony explores the inner child and outer space in fun program (Baltimore Sun, January 15) ---, BSO explores 'Icarus at the Edge of Time' (Baltimore Sun, January 9, 2011) Andrew Clements, Icarus at the Edge of Time (The Guardian, July 6, 2010) Icarus at the Edge of Time - Glass, Greene and Al and Al (Gramophone, June 18, 2010) James R. Oestreich, Salute of the Stars, Cosmic and Otherwise (New York Times, June 3, 2010)

Alsop's programming gave the whole concert a science fiction and astronomy theme, opening with Ceres, a brief sort of overture about the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt of our solar system by Mark-Anthony Turnage. (The composer subtitled the work "Asteroid for Orchestra," dedicating it to Simon Rattle and recently joining it with two other astronomically themed pieces.) Collisions of wind lines (bitonal combinations were reminiscent of Petrushka at times) and the distant rumble of bass drum led to dense brass paired with metallic percussion, the latter like an intergalactic phone ringing (the piece imagines Ceres knocked out of its orbit and into a collision path with Earth -- pick up the phone, Earth!). The most alluring moment was a sort of cosmic growl near the end, produced by low strings bowing behind the bridge.

As much as I would like to think that two scores from 2004 and 2010 were a draw for audiences, the hall seemed to be near full because Alsop also conducted John Williams's Star Wars Suite. Stormtroopers stood in the lobby for photographs with kids big and small at intermission, and two concert-goers seated near me arrived dressed as Jedi knights, complete with glowing light sabers. The music from the first two movies served as the outer movements, a series of motifs that, due to having been a member of the Star Wars generation -- how clearly do I recall seeing the first movie as a kid! -- never fails to give me an emotional frisson. (It was a good thing that Alsop did not pair this score with The Planets, as that would draw attention to just how much Williams stole from Holst.) The inner movements are drawn from the later three movies of the Star Wars series, in which the poor quality of the films is matched by a corresponding lack of inspiration in William's music. For the mind-numbing repetition of a drab, minor-mode ostinato in the "Duel of the Fates" section alone, the musicians should file for workman's compensation.

This concert will be repeated twice more, this evening (January 15, 8 pm) in the Music Center at Strathmore and tomorrow afternoon (January 16, 3 pm) back at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

Mobtown Modern Smooth as Glass

P. Glass, Glassworks, Philip Glass Ensemble, M. Riesman

Mobtown Modern, Baltimore's black sheep contemporary music concert series, returned on Wednesday night for a performance of music by Baltimore favorite son Philip Glass. For this concert, Mobtown Modern partnered with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which is also presenting a major new Glass piece this week, Icarus: At the Edge of Time, which it co-commissioned (January 14 to 16 -- a full report on that tomorrow). This collaboration involved the participation of a few musicians from the BSO, who joined the ensemble of about a dozen for a performance of Glassworks, a 1981 work created for Glass's first recording on the CBS label (now available in a remastered re-release). It is a sort of suite, six movements that condensed a few of Glass's musical ideas into an album-length work, meant as a response to the invention of the Walkman, a vehicle to bring minimalism to a much greater number of moving ears.

The first movement ("Opening"), an arpeggiated chord pattern for solo piano, seemed promising, with more chords in the loop than is sometimes true of Glass. The rhythmic disjointedness of simultaneous duple and triple meters (2 vs. 3) is established in the first movement and pervades the work. Mellow paired horns marked the start of "Floe," the second movement, later joined by Glass's trademarked fluttering woodwind arpeggios, and the third ("Islands") was driven by arpeggios in a forlorn 6/8 from the strings (viola and cello). The fourth movement ("Rubric") featured the crazy wash of notes (sixteenths alternating with even smaller values) often associated with Glass's music, with the synthesizer and flutists especially getting quite a workout. This aspect of Glass's style calls for a different kind of virtuosity and consummate concentration, something that the Philip Glass Ensemble, for example, was expert in, after years of endless arpeggios. Mobtown Modern's ersatz ensemble did not do so quite as comfortably and seamlessly, the running notes not always quite aligned rhythmically or uniformly in tune, even with Julien Benichou's conducting.

Other Reviews: Tim Smith, Mobtown Modern demonstrates enduring appeal of Philip Glass (Baltimore Sun, January 13)

The fifth movement ("Façades") was pretty spell-binding: gloomy, oscillating triplets whose tanglings created more interesting dissonances, with a floating soprano sax solo from Mobtown's curator Brian Sacawa (I assume -- it was difficult to see). The final movement had an undulating control of dynamic swells, part of an overall rather calm and subdued approach to the score that emphasized the tidal appeal of Glass's music. The only problem with this performance was its location, part of Mobtown Modern's attempt to extend its reach beyond its home at Baltimore's Contemporary Museum. The gritty little venue, The Windup Space on North Avenue, was stuffed to the gills, with people standing and sitting in every available space (with the faces of Marin Alsop and Baltimore Sun critic Tim Smith, for example, dotted among a rather eclectic mix of people). I understand the idea behind performing in this kind of venue, but I would prefer a comfortable seat in the Kennedy Center any day. Guy Werner's accompanying video projection, shown over the seated musicians at the back of the room, was out of my line of sight, so it receives no comment.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs Glass's new piece Icarus: At the Edge of Time this evening (January 14, 8 pm) in Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The next concert from Mobtown Modern (February 23, 8 pm) will be back at The Windup Space, featuring Will Redman's Book.

Venice Baroque Orchestra with Robert McDuffie

P. Glass, Violin Concerto No. 2 ("American Four Seasons"), R. McDuffie, London Philharmonic Orchestra, M. Alsop Vivaldi, Four Seasons, G. Carmignola, Venice Baroque Orchestra, A. Marcon

American violinist Robert McDuffie’s “The Seasons Project” with the Venice Baroque Orchestra arrived Sunday evening at Strathmore for their twenty-fourth North American performance in the past month. “The Seasons Project” pairs Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Phillip Glass’s Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (“American Four Seasons”), following intermission. Since he commissioned the work from Glass, McDuffie conveyed a sincere ownership of it in performance that helped convince the audience of its merit. McDuffie considers Glass "America's Vivaldi" (a comparison Charles made in these pages a few years ago) and has made the The American Four Seasons the focus of his touring since its world premiere in December 2009.

Each movement opens with a solo violin prelude, the first of which had the orchestra enter the texture by magically merging with McDuffie’s trill. The audience is tasked with guessing the label of each movement: the first movement was reminiscent of fallen leaves, the second an icy landscape, the third a sprouting thaw, and the fourth movement rather long. Glass’s redundant use of repetition, imitation, and arpeggiation reminded one of over-the-top Vivaldi, excessive when in the third movement the basso continuo began mercilessly sawing up and down on the same octave with assistance from the electronic keyboard. Moments of brilliant color and texture emerged through the work’s four movements, enhanced by the Venice Baroque Orchestra’s incredible dynamic spectrum.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Philip Glass reflects Vivaldi in 'American Four Seasons' at Strathmore (Washington Post, November 16) Mike Paarlberg, Philip Glass’ The American Four Seasons at Strathmore, Reviewed (Washington City Paper, November 15) Allan Kozinn, Through the Seasons With Glass and Vivaldi (New York Times, November 14) Chris Starrs, Georgia-born violinist brings concerto to Athens (Athens Banner-Herald, November 14)

Comprising only seventeen members, the facile Venice Baroque Orchestra always had technique to burn and a chamber-like demeanor (with all musicians standing except cellists, lutenist, and harpsichordist). In Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one could imagine frolicking love birds, summer thunderstorms, and a swirling winter wind. The lutenist (with a lower octave attached to the top of his instrument) sat front and center and was seemingly the group co-pilot, making lots of eye contact with his colleagues and at times humorously imitating the soloist. In brisk movements, McDuffie established balanced tempos that could bounce without being bouncy and also allowed room for personalization, while he indulged in eloquent ornamentation in slower movements. Hearing all four concertos in sequence allowed one to notice upward scale motifs in the warmer movements and descending ones in “Winter.” Strathmore’s acoustic was especially wet due to a weak – yet enthusiastic – audience filling only about a quarter of the hall’s two-thousand seat capacity. Perhaps the low turnout was due to Strathmore’s lack of a dedicated subscriber base for their eclectic series, which earlier in the week included an all-Reich concert by the Bang on a Can All-Stars (reviewed by the Washington Post).

This Friday (November 19, 8 pm), the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra makes its way to Strathmore, for a concert that includes music by Mozart, Schnittke, and Shostakovich.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Glass, Waiting for the Barbarians, R. Salter, E. Perry, Philharmonisches Orchester Erfurt, D. R. Davies (released June 3, 2008) Orange Mountain Music 0039 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Philip Glass premiered this opera, his twenty-first, at Germany's Theatre Erfurt in 2005. Christopher Hampton adapted the libretto for Waiting for the Barbarians from J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel of the same name. The story is set in an unspecified town at the edge of an empire, embroiled in a conflict with an unspecified adversary. The characters' xenophobic, racist paranoia justifies, in their minds, their inflammatory tactics, including taking prisoners, interrogating them under torture, and summarily executing them without trial. Coetzee, a Cape Town-born author who won the Nobel Prize in 2003, had the South African apartheid era in mind, but when Glass approached the work as an opera, it was against the background of the American invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

A government official, a magistrate in a small imperial outpost, begins to disapprove of his government's conflict against a faceless enemy group, the "barbarians." He watches as a colonel and other army officers take over the prosecution of the war in his town. By becoming involved with a barbarian prisoner and trying to stop the torture, the Magistrate becomes a suspect and is himself tortured, which turns the tables on the government but ultimately makes the punishment fall on a man who tried to stop these illegal practices. Some superficial similarities invite comparison to Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater, premiered one year later in 2006: the scenes are connected by "dreamscape" orchestral interludes, the action is commented on by a faceless chorus placed in the pit, the horrors of a society at war are communicated through a small group of individuals.

The live recording on this 2-CD set was made not during the opera's premiere run, in Erfurt in September 2005, but at a 2006 Amsterdam performance by the same forces (although that information is not found in the liner materials). There are more than enough glitches and noises to convince the listener of the value of studio recording (there are also several tracking errors on my second disc, especially in the final tracks). Musically, it is not always the most polished performance. Singers more than once fall out of time with the orchestra, and the solo voices are captured in a close sound that exposes some odd qualities. Glass's music, no surprise, is in the style that one associates with him, but not as austere a version of minimalism as heard in the much earlier Satyagraha, for example. The orchestration is tinged with interesting colors, more varied than some other Glass works, with percussion added, for example, to the wavelike repetitions of short motifs. As I have felt before with Glass, the music would work better with its visual component (Glass's forte, I remain convinced, is the film score). Waiting for the Barbarians is a significant and timely work, but not a home run.

133'46"

Les Journaux: Philip Glass in Paris

My recent trip to Italy passed only briefly through Paris, where the Richard Serra exhibit Monumenta 2008, at the Grand Palais, ends on Sunday. One of the musical events associated with the show was a solo piano recital by Serra's friend Philip Glass. Renaud Machart wrote a review (Philip Glass chez Richard Serra, June 10) for Le Monde (my translation):

The crowd, decidedly young and "bobo" [BOurgeois BOhème], seated even on the floor around the piano, came because Glass is a sort of star. Many have forgotten or have never heard his more austere first compositions from the 1960s, based on a fistful of notes (for example, 600 Lines, from 1968), and know Glass only through his film scores (for Stephen Daldry's The Hours, for example), repetitive and languid like the tide, which brought him commercial success.

The music written by Glass in the last thirty years, especially that he played at the piano at the Grand Palais, is a harmonic canvas barely more complicated than that of the songs of Richard Clayderman [ouch!]. Glass's fans will answer that the "poverty" is the essence of this art and that, on that account, the works of Richard Serra on exhibit are hardly more refined than gigantic steel plates, slightly rusty, in an abandoned navy yard. But the true difference is that Philip Glass's music is sentimental, the opposite of Serra's work.

Pascal Dusapin also gave a concert around the opening of the exhibit.

Ionarts at Large: Satyagraha at the Met

Philip Glass, portrait by Chuck Close (left) and recent photograph (right) -- see the exhibit of Chuck Close portraits of Philip Glass in the Met lobby

Arguably, the most significant difference to arrive with the Peter Gelb era at the Metropolitan Opera is a greater openness to contemporary opera (also the unforeseen success of the HD broadcasts, although that has had both positive and negative effects). Rather than a real step toward the future, however, the shift in favor of new operas, however slight, is actually a return to the great house's historical tradition, during the period that ended approximately with the premiere of Howard Hanson's Merry Mount. The repertorial concretization at the Met of recent years was actually a dangerous flirtation with provincialism, meaning that the wealthiest American company was regularly being upstaged by smaller, more adventurous outfits like Santa Fe Opera, in terms of world premieres and American premieres.

As a result, the recently opened production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha was a cause for celebration, and critics descended from far and wide for opening night last week (including Washington's own Tim Page, who spoke eloquently on the Sirius broadcast) to witness the Met turning this important page (next season will have Adams's Doctor Atomic, reportedly with The Ghosts of Versailles and Golijov's new Daedalus to follow). Ionarts was able to get there for the third performance of the run, Saturday's matinee.

The Met's first and, until now, only experiment with Philip Glass, the 1976 performance (not really production) of Einstein on the Beach, was a watershed event in opera history. That work, more experimental theater than real opera, is often described as a one-time test case, but Satyagraha, premiered only four years after Einstein, has much more in common with its predecessor than not. Its libretto (in Sanskrit -- it may as well be numbers and solfege syllables, in terms of audience comprehension), adapted by the composer and Constance DeJong from texts in the Bhagavad-Gita, does not actually tell the story of its purported subject, the years that Gandhi spent in South Africa. The audience is required to familiarize itself with that story beforehand, and the tableaux of stage action refer to it and connect it with other stories, both ancient and modern, religious and secular.

Satyagraha, Metropolitan Opera, 2008, photo by Ken Howard

The work's title indicates that the opera is not really about its central character, Gandhi, at least not exclusively. Satyagraha, a Sanskirt word usually translated as "truth force," is how Gandhi described his tactic of nonviolent protest, and three historical figures who influenced it or were influenced by it (Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) look down on the three acts like guardian angels. The paradox of the work is that it sprawls so widely, passing without borders from mythology to the modern and back again, and yet does so immersed in an enveloping stasis. There may be more of an actual story than Einstein, at least in the background, but the process of relating it -- or not relating it, perhaps -- is remarkably similar.

Other Reviews: Ronald Blum, Glass' 'Satyagraha' Reaches Met (Associated Press, April 13) Anne Midgette, 'Satyagraha': Simplicity & Splendor in the Glass (Washington Post, April 14) Anthony Tommasini, Fanciful Visions on the Mahatma’s Road to Truth and Simplicity (New York Times, April 14) Daniel J. Wakin, Puppets enliven Metropolitan production of opera 'Satyagraha' (International Herald Tribune, April 14) Jeremy Eichler, Gandhi at the Met, Glass in transition (Boston Globe, April 14) Mark Swed, Live: 'Satyagraha' (Los Angeles Times, April 14) Patrick Cole, Selling Gandhi, Glass: `Satyagraha' Uses Posters, Yoga Teachers (Bloomberg News, April 16) Tim Smith, Glass' hypnotic opera at Met (Baltimore Sun, April 17) Vibhuti Patel, Gandhi’s Wonder Years (Newsweek, April 17) Heidi Waleson, History and Hypnotic Magic (Wall Street Journal, April 19) Karren L. Alenier, Satyagraha (Culture Vulture, April 20) Other Articles: Matt Blank and Stephen Kent, Satyagraha: Can Opera Help Fight Climate Change? (Playbill Arts, April 3) Elena Park, Metropolitan Opera: The Force of Truth (Playbill Arts, April 11) ---, Philip Glass: The Message in the Music (Playbill Arts, April 21) David Cote, Puppet Regime (Opera News, April 2008)

This performance is anchored by the astounding interpretation of tenor Richard Croft as Gandhi. Whenever Glass's score was metered unevenly, the other singers seemed to be changing notes more on the cues of the conductor than on a sure internal pulse. Croft was not only rock solid from his first note (unaccompanied, he opens the opera, just after he has been famously thrown from a train), no matter how complex the rhythms, but his line always sounded like a melody, lyrical and flowing. Conductor Dante Anzolini had his work cut out for him, keeping the complicated and regularly changing meter with one hand, cuing all of those singers' entrances and cutoffs with the other, and even mouthing words to the chorus. That Anzolini was able to keep the largest parts of the score together at all was remarkable. When the chorus, after a solid start in the indelibly memorable Ha-Ha scene of Act II, began to rush, however, he was not able to retain control.

All members of the supporting cast are to be congratulated for surviving the score's grueling demands, especially soprano Rachelle Durkin (Miss Schlesen) who sang so many high notes again and again (not always right where they needed to be, but still), it was hard to keep track. Of the quartet that often sings together, baritone Earle Patriarco (Mr. Kallenbach) was the most consistently impressive. As Parsi Rustomiji, bass-baritone Alfred Walker was too easily covered by other sounds when he was anywhere but near the apron. Mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips had a grand presence as Mrs. Alexander, the wife of the regional governor, who protects Gandhi with her umbrella. Phelim McDermott's direction emphasized statis, sapping all of the personality from the characters, as they mostly stood in place or walked in slow motion with no impetus or direction.

The production, which comes to New York from English National Opera, is beautiful, monumental, and puzzling. Julian Crouch's set is a raked stage surrounded by a ring wall of nondescript color, and the largely monochromatic costumes designed by Kevin Pollard follow the course of Glass's score, towards a more and more austere set of colors. Thankfully, an element of whimsy and menace was added by the puppeteers and supernumeraries of the Improbable Theatre Company, the only thing that saved Glass's ponderous, philosophical opera from its own sententious seriousness. Most of the evening's visual souvenirs involved the puppeteers, creating a halo for Richard Bernstein's Lord Krishna, crumpling newspapers to form heads and limbs, flying on wires, manipulating the over-sized capitalist goons behind the Ha-Ha chorus in Act II and the giant bird puppet, and unrolling undulating bands of packing tape across the stage.


Satyagraha, Metropolitan Opera, 2008, photo by Ken Howard
Eventually, one gives up caring about the words being sung, as the text just flows over the listener (in spite of the beautifully realized projections). Someone should make a video like the Carmina Burana with alternate lyrics, with the Sanskrit of Satyagraha replaced with nonsense (beginning with "Raja, naba do wa, gola wookie, nipple pinchie?," the gibberish spoken by Jaba the Peter in Family Guy). This Buddhistic relinquishing of conscious comprehension is likely part of Glass's strategy in the third act, where he prolongs the plainest music (all those endless unison string arpeggios!) to separate the listener from harmonic expectations. That austerity sets up the memorable conclusion, with Gandhi repeatedly intoning that ascending phrygian scale (heard earlier, in the flute, in the first act) over more complex orchestral textures that blossom in the final bars.

The production of Satyagraha, which is an event not to be missed, continues for four more performances (April 22, 25, 28, and May 1), at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.