Lulu at Home in Lyon

Berg, Lulu, directed by Peter Stein, Opéra de Lyon, 2009

The Opéra de Lyon has mounted a new production of Berg's Lulu, the first ever (!) of the entire opera and in its original language in the company's history. The debut was entrusted to German director Peter Stein, who adds Berg's masterpiece to his growing CV at the Opéra de Lyon since 2004, including three Tchaikovsky operas (Mazeppa, Eugene Onegin, and Pique Dame). Marie-Aude Roux wrote a review (A Lyon, une "Lulu" puissante et sensuelle dans une mise en scène digne des Années folles, April 23) for Le Monde (my translation):

At 71, Peter Stein is still a formidable director of stage action: precise, pertinent, often inspired -- there was not a note of the score that did not have its repercussion on the stage. Stein wanted his Lulu to be like that of the silent film of George Wilhelm Pabst (Loulou, 1929), the angelic face and boyish haircut of the actress Louise Brooks. The seductive costumes of the Roaring 20s (by Moidele Bickel) are equally hymns to the ravaging beauty of Lulu. The same is true of the pompous Art Deco sets by Ferdinand Wögerbauer and the veiled, quasi-mystical lighting by Duane Schuler, which complete this luxurious vision, sometimes at the edge of kitsch. American soprano Laura Aikin possesses the entire arsenal of seduction of the heroine, a femme fatale in the curvaceous body of a teenager. With a mutinous pout and splayed body, long legs and stratospheric top range, she unleashes desire and death with an impudence as palpable as Berg's sensual score, explosive up to the point of Jack the Ripper's knife, who will take credit for the seductress's defeat in a shabby London brothel.

We have been following Laura Aikin's successes in Europe, especially in contemporary opera, for several years, and this is only her most recent triumph as Lulu. (Speaking of which, Washington National Opera has yet to mount a production of Lulu, but I suppose that will have to wait for financially more secure times.) This production continues in Lyon through May 2 and will later travel to La Scala in Milan in April 2010 and to the Wiener Festwochen that summer.

Quatuor Mosaïques Worth the Wait

Quatuor Mosaïques: Haydn op. 20 Haydn op. 77 Beethoven op. 18/1,4 Mozart Quartets

Ionarts has been recommending the recordings of the Haydn quartets by the Quatuor Mosaïques for years, but we had the first chance to review them live on Saturday night in an exceptional concert at the Library of Congress. The group was formed in the 1980s by cellist Christophe Coin and other members of Nikolaus Harnoncourt's historically informed performance (HIP) ensemble Concentus Musicus. Over two decades, their recordings of Classical string quartets, performed on historical instruments with gut strings, have changed the way we hear Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Two Haydn quartets on the first half had all the superlative qualities expected from the group's recordings: rhythmic clarity, impeccable balance among parts, and clean intonation partially due to a sparing use of vibrato. The G minor quartet (op. 20, no. 3) had a crisp first movement, a wistful yearning treatment of the second movement (with a more dance-like trio), Venetian glass-like layering of sound in the third movement, and an active, energetic finale (albeit with a few squeaks here and there in the first violin).

Even more pleasing was the last published of Haydn's complete string quartets, the F major (op. 77, no. 2), in which the clever handling of the formal outlines of each movement was noteworthy, like the transition from development to recapitulation in the first movement. The jokingly clumsy return from the trio to the minuetto, like a sputtering engine trying to get started (in a coda that haltingly gets us back from D-flat major to the home key), played right into the hemiola games of duple versus triple that unsettle the second movement. In general, second violinist Andrea Bischof seemed a little too retiring and could have brought out her occasional solos with more flair, while the perceptive and sonorous playing of cellist Christophe Coin marked him as the group's leader.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Quatuor Mosaïques at the Library of Congress (Washington Post, April 20) Vivien Schweitzer, Thankful and Soulful on the Road to Recovery (New York Times, April 20) Alan G. Artner, Satisfying debut for the Mosaïques (Chicago Tribune, April 20) David Patrick Stearns, Early-music quartet at the Kimmel (Philadelphia Inquirer, April 18)

Beethoven's C minor quartet (op. 18, no. 4) was of the same approximate vintage as the later Haydn example, Beethoven's op. 18 set having been commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz at the same time as Haydn's (unfinished) op. 77 set. The comparison of the two quartets side by side highlighted the basic qualities of the young Beethoven's compositional style: the restless character of the first movement's main theme, the hammered tonic and dominant chords (as in the rewrite of the bridge of the first movement), the fugal writing of the second movement, and all of those sforzandi on third beats in the menuetto. Gut-stringed 18th-century instruments cannot produce the same violence of sound as later ones, but there is such a thing as way too much sound in a Beethoven string quartet, and what is gained in the soft end of the spectrum makes the overall range of dynamics still very broad, just more subtle. The nature of the instruments also makes it much less easy for the first violin to dominate the texture, making the triplet accompaniment figure of the third-movement trio more transparent, for example. The Quatuor Mosaïques played with remarkable physical energy in the final movement, cranking up the wattage with each return of the rondo theme and then exploding in the Prestissimo coda.

The feast of HIP ensembles continues at the Library of Congress, with a concert by the Geringas Baryton Trio this Friday (April 24, 8 pm).

900th Anniversary, Feast of St. Anselm

Manuscript Vita of St. Anselm, detail

April 21 is the feast of Anselm of Canterbury, who died 900 years ago today. Anselm is a favorite saint, not least because he is the patron of the Benedictine abbey and school in Northeast, where I teach music and art history. He was an Italian, born in Aosta in 1033, and received a calling to the monastic life when he was still a young man. His father prevented him from joining a monastery, after which Anselm fell into a life of dissolution and wandering, abandoning the vocation of monastic learning for a time. Fleeing his father's severity, Anselm set out on foot across the Alps, wandering north all the way to Normandy. He was taken in as a student and later a monk at the Abbey of Bec, where he finally found a mentor in the scholar Lanfranc, who was the prior. Anselm was to succeed Lanfranc in many positions, first as prior (and eventually abbot) at Bec and later as Archbishop of Canterbury in England.

Anselm is often cited as the founder of the Scholastic movement of philosophy and was in later years given the rank of Doctor of the Church for his theological and philosophical writings. His most famous philosophical idea is the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God, quoted below. Anselm staunchly opposed the interference of the state in church affairs but just as staunchly opposed the crusades as wars sponsored wrongly by the church. He died in peace on April 21, 1109. He is buried at Canterbury Cathedral, the loss of which to a heretical sect (in fact, a result of the most egregious interference of the English government in church affairs) he would certainly condemn.

Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Anselm's Proslogium (translated from the Latin by Sidney Norton Deane, with some updating):

And so, Lord, who gives understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe. And indeed, we believe that you are a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the fool has said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms xiv. 1). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak -- a being than which nothing greater can be conceived -- understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist.

For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he will paint later, he has it in his understanding, but he does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, he both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it exists, because he has made it.

Hence, even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

See also these Other Works by St. Anselm of Canterbury. For a lighter version, a philosophy professor set a version of Anselm's ontological proof to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. A few years ago I had my student choir sing it, and it works quite well.

Don Quixote Rides Again with the Folger Consort

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Available at Amazon: Don Quixote, new translation by Edith Grossman (2003)

Like many beloved works of literature, Cervantes's novel Don Quixote (published in 1605, coincidentally the same year as Victoria's setting of the Requiem Mass, performed by the Folger Consort last season) had an extensive afterlife in music. It is by its very nature a musical book, a sonic soul that Jordi Savall documented in a remarkable recording of all of the pieces (or as many of them as possible) performed, heard, or even mentioned in the book. The last program in the Folger Consort's season was devoted to two pieces that came after the novel, musical works intended for the stage that preserve the comic spirit of the novel while also adapting it to their own times and locales, Germany and England in the early 18th century. Excerpts from both works, Telemann's Burlesque de Quixotte and incidental music composed by Thomas D'Urfey for three English plays on the Don Quixote story, were interwoven with dramatic readings. This arrangement recounted the general arc of the story with a few of the most famous episodes.

The instrumental ensemble consisted of a well-balanced string quintet, with most of the emphasis on the demanding first violin parts, played with dexterity if not universally clear and beautiful tone by Risa Browder. Pleasing accents were added by the continuo group of Webb Wiggins on harpsichord, William Simms on theorbo and Baroque guitar, and Christopher Kendall on lute and therbo, as well as some occasional solos by Robert Eisenstein on recorder, contributing some much needed variety in the treble range. Particularly worthy were Telemann's music for Quixote's attack on the windmills, the book's most famous passage, a very fast, agitated performance of music focused especially on a rapid-fire repeated-note motif, and for the sighs of love for Princess Aline, with a chromatic sighing motif for the first violin. A country dance medley was added to the conclusion of the program, to give a sampling of Thomas D'Urfey's poaching of pre-existing dance tunes. This had little to do with the program, coming after the death of Quixote, but the different colors applied -- lute and guitar with only double bass on one, recorder featured on another -- relieved the uniformity of the instrumentation up to that point.

William Sharp, bass-baritone

Actors Floyd King and Robert McDonald narrated the story with humor and bonhomie, speaking lines by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively. Baritone William Sharp was at his best in these broadly comic songs, grimacing and blustery on the hearty guffaws of Sancho in Hat mich der große Menschenfresser, for example. Sharp adapted his elegant and subtle voice to a range of humorous songs, from the mock-epic tribute of Sancho to his donkey (Telemann's Mein Esel ist das beste Tier) to the inebriated stagger of D'Urfey's The Doctor is feed for a Dangerous Draught, sung in praise of a wine bottle. Sharp was paired with soprano Rosa Lamoreaux, who sang first from the upper balcony as a vision of mythical Dulcinea. At times her voice sounded slightly strained, but her performance was especially compelling in the extended and highly varied made scene, From Rosie Bow'rs -- as it turns out, the last piece that Purcell completed, when he was quite ill.

The Folger Consort's 2009-2010 season will be devoted to music from around the year 1610, centered on a performance of Claudio Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers at Washington National Cathedral (January 8 to 9, 2010). Other programs include a comparison of 17th-century music in Italy and China (October 2 to 4), a German Baroque Christmas program with Cantate Chamber Singers (December 11 to 20), a French Baroque program (March 19 to 21, 2010), and Robert Dowland's Musical Banquet, from 1610 (April 9 to 11, 2010).

Felicity Lott

Read my review on the Washington Post Web site today:

Charles T. Downey, Felicity Lott at the Vocal Arts Society
Washington Post, April 20, 2009

Felicity Lott (soprano) and Eugene Asti (piano): "Une Attente Mostly Cordiale"
Vocal Arts Society
Embassy of Austria

See also my review of Lott's recital with Graham Johnson last year: Felicity Lott Channels Yvonne Printemps (Ionarts, May 9, 2008)

In Brief: Quasimodo Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

Leontyne Price appears on What's My Line? (with hat tip to La Cieca)

• On Easter Sunday we had the most delightful news of another long-desired resurrection, that of Marion Lignana Rosenberg, the author of one of our favorite erstwhile Internet destinations, vilaine fille, and much more. We wish her all possible success with her new project and travel plans. [Re-visioning Callas]


• Check out the new blog to cover developments on making the photography collection of the Smithsonian more accessible to the public. [The Bigger Picture]


• Bruce Weber's obit for adult movie star Marilyn Chambers was not intended to be funny, of course, but the way that he summarized the "plot" of the notorious film that lost Chambers her sponsorship deal with Ivory Soap cracked me up: "Ms. Chambers was an aspiring actress and model in 1972 when she starred in Behind the Green Door, a pornographic film about a woman who is abducted to a theater and ravished in front of an audience, ultimately to her great satisfaction, by both men and women." You stay classy, Gray Lady. [New York Times]


• In this hilarious fake poll ("What Are We Twittering?") one of the responses made me wonder: 22% "Waiting for cue -- flute solos suck." The thought of an orchestral musician tweeting in the middle of a concert seemed so absurd. But is it? Perhaps on stage in a symphony concert would be too brazen, but why not in a ballet or opera pit? Any readers ever seen this happen? No names please! [The Onion]


• How could Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg audition for the YouTube symphony thing (the gimmick everyone was talking about and about which I could not care less -- Anne Midgette's article in the Post sums up the performance perfectly) and not get chosen? By videoing herself playing the piano, of course. [Oboeinsight]


• Yeah, whatever did happen to Sofia Coppola the film director? Like Keith Demko, I too described her last film -- three years ago -- as "her first failure," a gorgeous, stylish looker of a film with a dud of a story behind the exterior, like one of the famous Parisian confections featured in it, beautiful colors and sheen on the surface and nothing but air inside. With a better script, it could have been a devastating tragedy, a lesson that Coppola has hopefully learned during the intervening years. Thankfully, the director of Lost in Translation and Virgin Suicides, both extraordinary movies, is getting behind the camera again, with Somewhere, about "a bad-boy actor (Stephen Dorff) stumbling through a life of excess," at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont, who receives a surprise visit from his daughter (Elle Fanning). Coppola has written her own screenplay again (that worked for the two films set in her own times, if not for Marie Antoinette), and she starts shooting this summer. [Reel Fanatic]

What Has Happened to France?

Gone are the days of the French passengers on flights to Paris lighting up in Charles de Gaulle at the luggage carousel, much to the irritation of capnophobic Americans. In 2009 some ads on public buses in Paris, for an exhibit at La Cinémathèque Française on the films of Jacques Tati, were censored. The problem? The posters showed an image of Tati's iconic character, Monsieur Hulot, smoking a pipe, that dangerous instrument of tobacco consumption. Worse, he was using it to endanger the life of the child on the back seat of his bicycle! The controversy was reported by Flore Galaud (Evin trouve «ridicule» la suppression de la pipe de Tati, April 17) for Le Figaro (my translation):

"Tati without his pipe is like Chaplin without his hat!" was the exclamation from La Cinémathèque française, [which] decided to furnish the commission with posters where a ridiculous yellow pinwheel takes the place of the famous pipe. "A ridiculous addition for a ridiculous act of censorship," explains La Cinémathèque, an opinion shared by former minister Claude Evin, who introduced the law in question.

Pass your cursor over the picture in the Le Figaro article to see the censored and original versions of the poster. The decision is all the more absurd because Tati never even lit his pipe in any of his films, according to Costa Gavras, who is president of La Cinémathèque. Tati, however, is not the first victim of the law: in 1996, the French post office edited a cigarette out of the mouth of André Malraux on one of its stamps, and in 2005 Jean-Paul Sartre had a cigarette butt edited out of his hand for posters advertising an exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Even the cartoon cowboy Lucky Luke had to give up his famous cigarette for a stalk of grass. Anti-smoking prudery is not so American anymore.

UPDATE:
According to Le Monde, the RATP has also refused to display promotional posters for Anne Fontaine's new film about Coco Chanel, in which Audrey Tautou is shown with a cigarette in her hand. Yes, because Coco Chanel NEVER smoked.

Kavakos Roars through Mendelssohn

Leonidas Kavakos, violinist

Anyone who heard the last appearance by Leonidas Kavakos with the National Symphony Orchestra, an unforgettable Sibelius concerto, was not going to miss his return to Washington this weekend. Last night, he played one of the other Big Five Romantic violin concertos, the Mendelssohn (E minor, op. 64), to be repeated on Saturday, with a single performance of an even bigger concerto, the Tchaikovsky, scheduled for tonight. The Mendelssohn concerto, as hard as it is to dislike, can be played badly, but that was certainly not the case here. Kavakos, who has technique to burn, tore through the fast outer movements at a breath-taking pace, almost without a single note out of place. As noted of his Sibelius concerto, Kavakos handles adjustments of tempo with extraordinary freedom, a mercurial unpredictability that makes his performances exciting for the listener. At the same time, it poses some problems for the orchestra attempting to play with him, if it lacks the flexibility to follow so many gradations of tempo.

From the opening of the first movement, Kavakos, conductor Iván Fischer, and the NSO had difficulty forming a cohesive unit. At an AfterWords talk following the concert, Kavakos spoke about his way of phrasing, which explained something of the surging nature of his performance, saying that if left to itself a phrase would unfold gently but that if impelled it will have its own spark of energy. This propulsion forward left the NSO players in the dust many times, although there were many calming moments, like the transition to the second theme in the opening movement, where the flow came almost to a stop as Kavakos savored the tender, plangent tone applied to the new theme. Kavakos's approach to music may be benefiting from his recent forays into conducting, since his appointment in 2007 as artistic director of Camerata Salzburg. After the concert, he said conducting has been a long-held dream, motivated primarily by a fascination with the Bruckner symphonies. He noted that the repertory for solo violin has its limits and that he may have reached them (players of even less represented instruments like the bassoon likely do not feel much sympathy for the violinist's plight) and that learning so many new scores for his conducting work, although it takes up much of his time, has given him a more symphonic view in his work as soloist.

The first-movement cadenza displayed the admirable match between Kavakos and his new instrument, a 1782 Guadagnini that he picked up last summer, with pure intonation and present, but not overpowering tone across all strings. Here and in the demanding third movement, the agility and accuracy of Kavakos's left hand were practically faultless, striking a balance between fairy-dust lightness and combustible power.

Daniel Kellogg, composer

Kavakos also spoke about his new violin after the concert, saying that its tone, if not forced, could fill a large hall like the Kennedy Center's without being overbearing. This was exactly the experience of hearing the simple, radiant sound of the instrument in the slow movement, where even in the B section the melody was voiced with exceptional clarity and with consummate line.

The concert opened with the world premiere of a new orchestral work by Colorado composer Daniel Kellogg, Western Skies, an NSO commission made possible by a gift from the Hechinger Fund. The composer remarked at the AfterWords event that he had cast out most of his first drafts for the commission when he learned that the NSO was planning to take this program on its upcoming tour of China and South Korea. He settled instead upon the idea of depicting in music the mythic expanses of the American West, as seen from his home in Boulder, Colo. He did so with seventeen minutes of music of striking homogeneity, a bubbling unfolding of sound recalling the Klangfarbenmelodie of the Second Viennese School -- from a static repetition that builds and recedes, individual colors condense and evaporate, including clarinet arpeggios, glockenspiel pings, bowed vibraphone irradiations, tuba bleats. Overtones of Coplandesque Americana were everywhere, as well as hints of the Britten Sea Interludes in the second movement (Moonbeams in the Snow), where monolithic brass chords unsettled more stable harmonies. The stasis was finally disturbed slightly with greater rhythmic activity in the third movement (White Mountains on the Horizon), but as easy on the ear as it was there was little to ponder afterward. The composer's program notes read like a Colorado travelogue, to the point that one hopes he received a stipend from the Colorado Tourism Office. The piece may have a future as the soundtrack to future "Ski Colorado" ads.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, For the NSO, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Time Is a Charmer (Washington Post, April 17)

All evening Iván Fischer was a suave and assured guide, with his best contribution coming in the final work, Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony (E minor, op. 64 -- a strange coincidence with the Mendelssohn violin concerto). Regular readers know of my aversion to Tchaikovsky's orchestral music, especially when its excesses, both of the syrupy and sonic boom variety, are overindulged. Fischer did a fine job of moving through the score, as in the agitated first theme of the first movement, perhaps giving in too much to the swooning second theme. This allows some of the more unusual parts of the score to stand out, like the wild growling of the low strings at the conclusion of the first movement, the passionate themes given to the NSO's elegant cello section in the second, and the squawking sounds of the stopped horns in the third. There is nothing you can do with the truly awful coda to the fourth movement, a theatrical flourish of the symphony's fate theme one wishes Tchaikovsky had excised.

This concert repeats tonight (April 17, 8 pm -- with Kavakos playing the Tchaikovsky concerto) and tomorrow night (April 18, 8 pm -- back to the Mendelssohn concerto) in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Conductor David Zinman is the star of next week's concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra (April 23 to 25), leading performances of Webern's Langsamer Satz (arr. Gerard Schwarz), Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, op. 4, and the Brahms fourth symphony.