Now that I am back from Siena, Ionarts will slowly be returning to some of its usual habits. Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.
I love it when non-musical artists I love turn out to think musically. Oh, like the incomparable and tragically departed Ingmar Bergman, as described in an article pointed out by Bob Shingleton. [On an Overgrown Path]
Matthew Guerrieri explains the next phenomenon in musico-cryptology: encoding words and names in a musical theme, via the Braille alphabet. [Soho the Dog]
Jeremy Eichler points out yet another centenary anniversary being ignored this year, Joseph Joachim. A. C. Douglas was kind enough to bring this article to our attention. [Sounds and Fury]
We love opera. We love LOLcats... (Thanks, M. C- -- I mean, Sidney.) [LOL Opera]
Corine Lesnes, a correspondent for Le Monde now based here in Washington, writes a fun to read blog. Her take on French President Nicolas Sarkozy's vacation in New Hampshire (and visit to the Bush compound at Kennebunkport) was interesting. It turns out that Mitt Romney, the American presidential candidate, owns a vacation house on Lake Winnipesaukee. Corine notes that Romney, who spent his Mormon missionary years in France and speaks French very well, tried to score points with conservative Republicans by French bashing early in his campaign. Among other things, Romney said that voting for Hillary would mean having France in the United States. Now the President of France is temporarily Romney's neighbor. [The Big Picture]
The Santa Fe Opera has adapted the Opéra National de Paris’s smashingly silly production (you can watch clips from Paris on YouTube) of Rameau’s lyric comedy Platée. The success of the production by Laurent Pelly (director and costume designer), Chantal Thomas (scenic designer), and Laura Scozzi (choreographer) highlights the grounds for their growing popularity. (Pelly's staging of Cendrillon was one of the high points of last summer in Santa Fe.) Platée was premiered in 1745 for the celebration of Louis XV’s son’s marriage to Maria Theresa. The opera’s green water-nymph main character, with a speech impediment, shares with Maria Theresa the attribute of being rough on the eyes -- an apparently well-known connection at the time. The work centers on the gods' reenactment of a method used by Jupiter to quiet his wife Juno’s jealousy and teach a lesson to both gods and mortals.
The opera being a play within a play, the substantial overture showed ushers with little flashlights rushing people around to their seats, then moving them and crawling between rows of the steep set with the occasional flash of uplifted skirt ending in hearty laughter and applause from the audience once the chorus was finally seated. The Prologue featured Thespis (Norman Reinhardt) sprawled across a few rows of the front seats with a near-empty bottle at his side ignoring the chorus trying to awaken him. Once sobered up, the scheme was set and Cupid (Leena Chopra), eventually wearing only red lingerie, interrupted to complain about not being involved, saying “just see that I get proper credit… and that young lovers know who I am.” The chorus sang “well put on a splendid show; long live Bacchus and wine,” and a long table with 100+ glasses of wine was pushed to center stage. A frog leapt from behind it to feed Thespis more wine. A quick, punctuated dance movement with five male dancers and the six female ushers, who get their rears grabbed, precede Thespis’s slumbering back to sleep stretched across a few front-row seats. Let the show begin.
Platée, the leader of the swamp, makes her entrance in Act I. She’s a tenor (Jean-Paul Fouchécourt -- whom Ionarts last reviewed in excerpts of this opera with Opera Lafayette), and very ugly – sort of like a daintily singing bag lady with very long, slimy fingers. Randomly, a half-dozen frog-like things pop up from the floor making “qua qua” sounds in rhythm to the music. Mercury, who had descended from the ceiling to charming descending string figures, tells Platée that Jupiter (Wilbur Pauley) will soon descend to declare his love for her. After that, an excellent dancing troupe of thirteen frogs began a groovy step, playing leap-frog, while one began break-dancing, ending in a virtuosic head-spin. A second dance movement in different rhythm accompanied the frogs lying on their backs, legs in the air with feet shaking in rhythm. Highlights of the rest of the production include the musical and actual fireworks at Jupiter's descent into the swamp, Folly’s (Heidi Stober) dress composed of sheets of music (some of which she sings from and later hands to an orchestra member), and Juno’s scream -- western rifle in hand -- as she lifts Platée’s veil at the mock-wedding. That scream immediately turns to laughter once she has realized the farce, exclaiming to Jupiter: “You have restored peace to my heart... let us ascend to the clouds.” This occurs as Platée runs offstage, soon followed by a sympathetic frog.
The easy-going, pleasing style of the French Baroque allowed the comic momentum to be sustained throughout the entire opera. Likely the first time performing music of this period, Santa Fe’s tenured professional orchestra did an admirable job tackling their most difficult work in one member’s thirty-year recollection. British conductor Harry Bicket (future artistic director of the English Concert), after a disastrous first rehearsal (by one report), achieved good contrasts and overall results by giving very clear guidance; yet one wished for the extra overtones of gut strings and the lighter releases that Baroque bows help capture.
Bicket amusingly gave up his baton to a frog after Act II, when during the long set change a bored-acting frog beside the audience began gesturing for the conductor to begin the introduction to Act III. Bicket finally complied, and the frog strutted through the audience, perched behind the conductor, and began messing with his hair. Bicket lunged after the frog, though the frog escaped, only to return (after grabbing a bass player’s music and handing it to an audience member) to steal Bicket’s baton, cut off the orchestral introduction at its actual end, and take a massive frog bow to applause from the real audience.
Besides the ridiculous act, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt best idealized the French Baroque style by targeting dissonance and exploiting it. Heidi Stober (Folly) conveyed impressive dramatic energy and presence, while Norman Reinhardt (Thespis and Mercury) sang beautifully with voice always floridly in motion -- perhaps he had an off night the previous evening. The impressive chorus matched the dance troupe in virtuosity, though were at times a bit screamy.
As an angry Platée was dragged around by the dancers and teased by Folly and the gang, one sympathized her because of the cruelty shown her: a true victim who lost power over her swamp creatures. After having her threats mocked, Platée, who was just realizing her fate, bemoaned: “They’re not scared of me at all.”
Put this one on your To Do list. When visiting Vézelay, which you will do anyway to see the incredible Romanesque abbey of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine (where Bernard of Clairvaux made his famous sermon whipping up enthusiasm for the disastrous Second Crusade), there is a new modern art museum in town. The Musée Zervos is located in a house, famously owned by the writer Romain Rolland, in the Rue Saint-Étienne, a narrow pedestrian street that leads up to the abbey church, now a basilica. After twenty-some years of government negotiations, it is now the home of a collection of art -- Picasso, Ernst, Giacometti, Léger, Calder, and others -- left to the city of Vézelay by the editor and art collector Christian Zervos. Nathaniel Herzberg has the story (Vézelay hérite d'un musée, July 29) for Le Monde (my translation):
Off the boat from Greece at age 17, passionate about art and publishing, Christian Zervos left his mark on several artistic fields. Lovers of theater are saluting, again this year, his essential role in launching the Avignon Festival in 1947. Lovers of books know his publishing house that, from 1926 to 1970, produced many works and contributed to the marketing of contemporary art to the publishing world. Lovers of the plastic arts, finally and especially, celebrate the man who, for forty years, devoted his magazine, Cahiers d'art, and the gallery that he opened with his wife, Yvonne, to the diverse emerging trends of the 20th century.
Of the hundred paintings and sculptures on show in Vézelay, not all passed through the couple's hands. "Christian Zervos owned these pieces, or could have owned them," says Brigitte Milleron, the museum's administrative director. Most of them come from the collection that he left to the city, works bought, or more often given by the artists whom he championed, often long before they were generally recognized. Alexander Calder, who forgot a magnificent mobile after an exhibit, then gave it to Yvonne. There was Max Ernst, who dedicated to Yvonne the painting La Sauterelle in 1934. Sold by Christian in 1936, the canvas has been purchased in 2002 by the museum, then still just a dream, with help from the city, the state, the federal and regional governments.
The collection was accepted by the city in 1970, but the museum took over 30 years to become a reality. The house of Romain Rolland was available, with the sole demand that the author's bedroom and writing space be preserved as it was when he lived there. This request has been honored, and the room is in almost the state (with the addition of the author's piano) it was in when Rolland, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 (and also held a doctorate in music history and taught the subject at the Sorbonne), wrote his later books Le Voyage intérieur in 1942 and Péguy in 1944. Although local residents make up most of the staff, the director had to be imported from Paris, although he does not condescend to live in Vézelay: Christian Derouet, a curator from the Centre Pompidou, visits the museum four times a year and essentially runs it from Paris.
The Salzburg Festival did something extraordinary last summer, staging full productions of all of Mozart's operas, in honor of the 250th birthday of Salzburg's native son. The box set of all 22 operas on DVD came out earlier this year, and the two productions that most interested me (because of the reviews by Renaud Machart for Le Monde last summer) have recently come across my desk.
Die Zauberflöte As one of the centerpieces of a festival of all of Mozart's operas, Magic Flute was crucial. The Salzburg Festival's last new production of the opera, a revisionist monstrosity by Graham Vick, was out of the question, so Pierre Audi did some renovations on a production of Magic Flute made for De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam in the 1990s. With bright, multichromatic sets by Karel Appel and costumes by Jorge Jara, this Flute seems to be transpiring in a 60s acid trip or (not unrelated?) a Dr. Seuss story. Papageno's laid-back attitude is explained by his being costumed as a bright yellow Rastafarian, minus the doobie. Sarastro, in pale face paint, is accompanied by what look like Loraxes rather than lions. In Act I, the Queen of the Night is a bright green version of Thing 1 and Thing 2, while the Alpine climber outfits for the Three Ladies are vintage Bartholomew Cubbins.
Master Ionarts, who has proclaimed Flute his favorite opera, was able to follow the action and seemed to like the wild, colorful setting. I am not so sure that it added anything to the opera, although the staging of the trials was among the best I have seen, with the chorus wearing helmets with actual flames coming out of them and a fountain bursting into the middle of the stage. Audi also feels that Sarastro has to save or forgive the Queen of the Night, which was also done in the Santa Fe staging last season, although in a slightly different way. The libretto says only that the Queen and her ladies lose all their power and then sink down into the stage defeated.
The cast was excellent, beginning with René Pape looking perhaps a trifle bored with his umpteenth excellent turn as Sarastro. Diana Damrau is one of the leading Queens of the Night on the stage today, and she was thrilling to watch. Vocally, I tend to prefer a singer with a lighter, more razor-precise technique in this role, but Damrau lives the Queen, speaking and singing, in a way that was all spit venom and blistering malice (see her rendition of "Der Hölle Rache" in the video below). The best surprise of the cast was Genia Kühmeier's Pamina, more substantial than Natalie Dessay (in many ways, the Pamina of my dreams) but packing a punch within a sharp sense of line (her splendid "Ach,ich fühl's" is on YouTube, of course). Christian Gerhaher, in spite of the ridiculous costume, was a wry Papageno, with the exquisite pronunciation and diction one would expect from such an accomplished, German-born Lieder singer. The only disappointment was Paul Groves, who seemed a little old and beefy as Tamino. Can all of you opera directors agree, after this and The First Emperor, that Paul Groves and hair extensions are not a good match? The Vienna Philharmonic and Staatsopernchor are both in excellent form under the authoritative baton of Riccardo Muti.
Last year, I reviewed a couple of CDs of music by Giacinto Scelsi. The interest in Scelsi continues to grow, and this year the Salzburg Festival offers a series of concerts dedicated to his music. Renaud Machart published a tribute to Scelsi (L'énigme Scelsi fêtée à Salzbourg, August 9) in Le Monde, which contains an anecdote from his visit in Scelsi's home shortly before the composer's death (my translation and links added):
His apartment, at no. 8 (it goes without saying) via San Teodoro, had an amazing view of the Palatine Hill, and Scelsi used to say, in all seriousness -- tempered, however, by a glimmer of malice in his eye -- that he was located at the exact meeting point of East and West. When we visited him in Rome, in 1985, we had sat down on the side of the sofa that he reserved for himself, under the diptych Couple with Clouds in Their Heads by Salvador Dalí (Scelsi was a friend of painters and poets). The little man suddenly got agitated: "Not there, I pray you, because from there I can see my palm tree, and it sees me." The local government had threatened to cut down the palm tree, and Scelsi had threatened the government in return. No one laid a hand on the special tree.
Xerxes had his platano amato, and Scelsi had his palm tree. (One of the apartment's windows overlooks the Foro Romano.) Machart, lucky fellow, is reporting on the Salzburg Festival at the moment. You can also read his rave review (Un concert exemplaire, à la limite du surnaturel, August 9) of the first of those Scelsi concerts, featuring Les Jeunes solistes, the Kammerchor Salzburg, and the Basel Sinfonietta. The program of Scelsi's music was introduced by Perotin's Beata viscera, a felicitous combination sure to yield interesting results. Yesterday's concert in the series of eight -- Scelsi's mystical number (he fell into a mortal coma on August 8, 1988, and died on August 9, 19 years ago today) -- included a complete performance of Espaces acoustiques, a cycle of six pieces by Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) that crescendo from a movement for solo viola to a conclusion for full orchestra and four horn soloists.
The North American premiere of Chinese-born Tan Dun’s opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul at Santa Fe Opera proved a remarkable success. With the roots of the opera more Asian than Western -- slowly building to an extreme intensity as one long phrase and containing attributes to what one may find at Tokyo’s Kabuki-za Theatre or the Vietnamese Hat Boi Opera, recently in D.C. as part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival -- Tan Dun has convincingly furthered his stated aim to introduce Eastern opera to the West in his own personalized way. He made the point recently in the New York Times, in reference to his most recent opera, The First Emperor: “Opera will no longer be a Western form, as it is no longer an Italian form” (June 26, 2005).
Tea is an exotic commodity that among other things motivated the British to instigate the Opium Wars in the 19th century, but it fails to trigger the American imagination beyond the famous “Tea Party” of 1773, or something processed in a bag. In Asia, tea’s traditions, both ceremonial (considered an art one must study for years in order to serve) and religious (having been brought to Japan from China by Buddhist monks), have exalted tea to metaphoric heights. In an interview with the Executive Producer of Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on the occasion of the opera’s 2002 world premiere in concert form, Tan Dun said:
In my research for Tea I traveled around Japan and China, and learned that Japanese Tea is a ‘mirror of the soul.’ When I was in the southern regions of China, which is of course the home of tea, I had the opportunity to interview an eminent nun. She always presents to her first-time guests an empty tea bowl, and on such occasions she herself also puts an empty tea bowl to her lips, as if to drain it of its contents. In this very action her spiritual world-view becomes vividly apparent. For me, there was something greatly enlightening about the spirit of Chinese tea as made manifest in her, and about the spirit of Japanese tea.
The overture begins with long, unison bass tones, followed by hazy water-sounding string tones by three players gracefully spinning their way through the audience with unique instruments. Act I, titled “Water, Fire,” is set in an incense-filled tea garden of a tranquil Kyoto monastery where time seems to stand still. Three girls at first appear to be washing their hands in large, elevated glass bowls on opposite sides of the stage, which turn out to be amplified for percussive effect. The Chorus of Monks enters singing long notes, similar to the bass sounds that have continued in the orchestra. The three on-stage percussionists (Haruka Fujii, Chihiro Shibayama, and Yuri Yamashita) begin striking the water rhythmically – the work’s first rhythm.
Seikyo (Haijing Fu, metaphor of discovery/philosophy), a monk and the main character, sings, “though the bowl is empty, scent glows; though shadow is gone, dream grows,” and slowly drinks from an empty bowl. Startlingly to the ears, the pitch of the bass drone changes as the upper-strings begin sliding around in unison, which is a typical orchestration found in Asian, Arab, Irish, and Old-Time North American music. From this point, the three on-stage percussionists place brass disks into the water bowls creating vibrations by rubbing them with something red; shake long, water-filled glass tubes filled with glass beads rhythmically; and later let water drop from modest height through pasta strainers into the bowls. This takes place during Seikyo’s slow sliding between notes in rich baritone voice, with the monastic stillness never disturbed.
Scene two is set ten years earlier in the Chinese Emperor’s palace, where in elaborate costume Princess Lan (Kelly Kaduce, metaphor of love) and the Prince (Roger Honeywell, metaphor of anger) are performing The Monkey King, a shadow-puppet opera for their father, the Emperor (Christian van Horn, metaphor of tradition/culture). The shadows are seen through the rice paper windows of a striking red box now centered on stage. As wind instruments join the texture, Seikyo interrupts the puppet show and soon asks the Emperor to choose a theme to display his skill at poetry in order to win the Princess’s hand. He chooses tea, and Seikyo replies about the sensuousness and beauty of tea, with a long melisma on the final word “tea”. With growing string textures, the Lady of Ritual (Nancy Maultsby, metaphor tea/messenger for spirit) enters in Native American mini-headdress to prepare the tea, which they enjoy to repeated gong and percussion rhythms. From this point, the plot thickens with Italianate fervor, though Asian delivery (i.e., jealousy), in a romantic scene during which dancers create ying-yang motions, dueling, accidental death, etc., and concludes back at the monastic tea garden.
Act II, titled “Paper,” utilizes multiple large hanging rice paper sheets that when shaken, sharply create the sound of wind. Act III, titled “Ceramic, Stones,” utilizes the Chorus of Monks tapping stones together rhythmically to build intensity preceding the Princess’s murder by her brother. These techniques were also reinforced by the three capable on-stage percussionists.
Overall, at just over two hours in length, the opera was very well sung, and each character embodied their assigned metaphors. Librettists Tan Dun and Xu Ying’s sparing use of language increased the audience’s reliance on sound to understand context, something that conductor Lawrence Renes did an excellent job conveying. If you did not care for the Met’s world premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor last season, see this production.
Since March I have been working on a lithograph with master printer Brian Garner. Each time, we approach a project in an open-ended way. What may begin as a one- or two-color print can, as it did in this case, with a print I call The Trollers, turn into a seven-color event.
A print image can begin from scratch, a fresh idea, or spring from an ongoing process. There have been many water/boating images as themes for my paintings over the years, and the Troller image is a continuation of The Drifters, On the Reach, and this painting, in particular, as well as ceramic relief works like this and this.
The beauty of collaborating on a print, especially with a great printer, is that you end up pushing limits and trying endless combinations of colors or the many possible versions of a particular color itself. We experimented with three to five possibilities for each. The transparency of each color can also be adjusted: this is very important when colors interact, as when blue and yellow overlap to form green.
Printer Brian Garner and his Steinmesse & Stollberg Dufa V, circa 1955, 30" x 40" bed press
The print started with a key image, which in this case is a strong line drawing, produced with grease pencil, brush, and ink on acetate paper, then transferred to a light-sensitive aluminum plate. The key image, in black, was the last plate to print and, if all went well, would tie the whole piece together, making a cohesive image. The qualifying word here is if. Although it’s a great thrill to witness the result, as the ink-laden roller lays down each color on the paper (and we coo, eeewww and ahhhh!), it’s never complete until the final plate brings the image home.
We ended up with an edition of 20 signed, numbered, and embossed prints. Go to my Flickr site to see photos documenting the project.
It happened originally on July 23, 2003. A friend -- Tom Hoffman, who writes Tuttle SVC and is very indulgent of my oversights -- explained what a blog was, and a guide at a technology seminar showed me how to use Blogger. Tom recommended reading blogs first, to see who was already writing about what one wanted to cover. Ionarts was born.
Four years later, we are bringing you reviews from around the United States and Europe. Next year, the world! Thanks to all of our readers, and to all the friends who have put so much into this enterprise, making Ionarts into what it is. All of that work is given with no compensation other than our eternal gratitude.
Now that I am back from Siena, Ionarts will slowly be returning to some of its usual habits. Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.
