À mon chevet: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

"Am I right?" Haroun asked his father. "Is this the place the story was about?" It made sense: Rashid was sad, so the Mist of Misery enveloped the swan-boat; and Snooty Buttoo was so full of hot air that it wasn't surprising he'd conjured up this boiling wind!

"The Moody Land was only a story, Haroun," Rashid replied. "Here we're somewhere real." When Haroun heard his father say only a story, he understood that the Shah of Blah was very depressed indeed, because only deep despair could have made him say such a terrible thing. [...]

Haroun decided there was nothing for it but to put his Moody Land theory into practice. "Okay," he shouted into the mist. "Everybody listen. This is very important: everybody, just stop talking. Not a word. Zip the Lips. Dead silence is very important, on the count of three, one, two, three." A new note of authority had come into his voice, which surprised him as much as anyone, and as a result the oarsmen and Buttoo, too, obeyed him without a murmur. At once the boiling breeze fell away, the thunder and lightning stopped. Then Haroun made a conscious effort to control his irritation at Snooty Buttoo, and the waves calmed down the instant he cooled off. The smelly mist, however, remained.

"Just do one thing for me," Haroun called to his father. "Just this one thing. Think of the happiest times you can remember. Think of the view of the Valley of K we saw when we came through the Tunnel of I. Think about your wedding day. Please." A few moments later that malodorous mist tore apart like the shreds of an old shirt and drifted away on a cool night breeze. The moon shone down once more upon the waters of the Lake. "You see," Haroun told his father, "it wasn't only a story, after all."

Rashid actually laughed out loud in delight. "You're a blinking good man in a tight spot, Haroun Khalifa," he said with an emphatic nod. "Hats off to you."

-- Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, pp. 48-50

This was the book that Salman Rushdie dedicated to his oldest son, following suit with a recently published book for his younger son, Luka and the Fire of Life. A son, Haroun, sees his storyteller father -- Rushdie's stand-in -- lose the narrative gift when his wife runs off with a neighbor. To save him, Haroun goes on an improbable voyage to the legendary source of all stories, places that he thought existed only in his father's tales. The sense of a child's adventure story is encoded within a literary framework, where words matter and brilliant wordplay and puns are part of the territory.

Reviving Grétry: Opera Lafayette's Latest

The mission of Opera Lafayette, to perform largely forgotten French operas of the 17th and 18th centuries, is so important and so near and dear to my musicologist's heart that it might seem ungrateful not to praise every one of their performances to the skies. Thanks to the leadership of conductor Ryan Brown and the veteran hands of his talented instrumental ensemble, the group's musical performances are always stylish and a delight for the ears, with greater or lesser pleasure depending on the vocal casting, which is generally quite good. The question that must be asked, including of their latest performance on Saturday night -- the modern world premiere of Le Magnifique by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813), at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater -- is whether or not the work revived holds interest beyond a first hearing. Opera Lafayette's performances are always worth the listener's time, even when one of these forgotten works turns out to be justly forgotten, and their recordings of hitherto unrecorded works merit a place on every library's shelf, but is there any interest for reasons beyond the obvious musicological ones?

D. Charlton, Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-comique

Grétry was a Belgian composer, born in Liège, who spent most of his life working in Paris. He received his musical education at the collégiale of St. Denis de Liège, where his musician father played the violin. When the boy was a teenager, an Italian comic opera troupe took up residence in Liège, and he was able to spend time listening to and studying the form from the orchestra pit. A period of independent studies in Rome left him fluent in Italian and worldly: his Mémoires, ou essai sur la musique is a delightful read. His works were the toast of Paris for a time beginning in the 1770s, although almost none of his fifty-odd operas, comic or otherwise, are remembered today in spite of having been performed not infrequently in the early United States. Only a few of them have been recorded, and sometimes not particularly well: exceptions include the Andromaque by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, La Caravane du Caire by Mark Minkowski, and Richard Cœur de Lion and a few others, championed for nationalistic reasons by Edgard Doneux and the Orchestre de Chambre de la Radio Télévision Belge, re-released on EMI.

Le Magnifique was first performed at the Comédie-Italienne on March 4, 1773. It was Grétry's first experience working with a libretto by Michel-Jean Sedaine, who was formerly the collaborator of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (on Le Déserteur, among others). Grétry was lucky to work with some excellent librettists, Voltaire not least among them: Sedaine took the story from La Fontaine, who in turn had adapted it from Boccaccio's Decameron (Day Three, Novella Five), in which a man arranges a tryst with another man's wife during a meeting where the wife is not allowed to speak. The ruse in Boccaccio is that he "speaks" for both of them, with the woman's implicit approval, giving instructions that she later follows to the letter. Sedaine changes the pursuit from an adultery to the courtship of a sheltered girl, Clémentine, by a Florentine grandee named Octave. Known as Le Magnifique, Octave has generously paid his own money to rescue Clémentine's father, Horace, and his servant, Laurence, from slavery, into which they were sold following a shipwreck nine years earlier.

Tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro

Le Magnifique tricks Aldobrandin, the girl's deceitful tutor and guardian, out of his chance to force the girl to marry him. (Beaumarchais was working on a similar character, Bartolo, in his Le Barbier de Séville, which had been rejected by the Comédie-Italienne as a comic opera libretto the year before.) Although Clémentine is not allowed to speak to Le Magnifique during their 15-minute conversation, he tells her to drop the rose from her hand if she is pleased by his proposal of love. In his Mémoires, Grétry says that a friend of Rousseau's introduced him to the libretto: it was the rose scene that seduced him, he writes, although he sensed the difficulty of setting it to music, the longest such scene attempted up to that time, in his estimation. Grétry was a great melodist, and he was particularly talented at what contemporaries called déclamation, that is, creating musical lines that mimicked the meaning of the words being sung. An example of this in Le Magnifique is Alix's short, excited exclamations of "C'est lui!" as she thinks about the unexpected return of her husband from slavery in Turkey, which the fine soprano Marguerite Krull rendered with girlish nervousness in this performance.

Grétry's characters can often be identified by melodic motifs that pepper their arias, like Aldobrandin's octave-leap motif that sounds like a donkey braying, which French specialist tenor Jeffrey Thompson incorporated into his antic characterization of the role. The best singing came in the American debut of Swiss tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro (pictured above), who was imposing and polished as Le Magnifique, a voice of impressive power and even distribution over the role's considerable range. As Clémentine, soprano Elizabeth Calleo sounded much as she did in Opera Lafayette's revival of Philidor's Sancho Pança dans son isle last spring: some lovely high notes but an overall vocal production that was tight in the jaw and that wilted flat and sounded a little shallow at the top and rather pale at the bottom. Karim Sulayman, who was announced as ill, drew attention to himself mostly for a grotesquely hammy performance as Aldobrandin's silly servant Fabio. Douglas Williams had a promising, solid sound as Laurence, and Randall Scarlata was authoritative as the narrator of Nick Olcott's time-saving compression of the French spoken dialogue, who then steps into the action as Horace. The relatively effective semi-staging, with no dancing, was the work of Catherine Turocy.

Other Articles: Joe Banno, Opera Lafayette's 'Le Magnifique' (Washington Post, February 7) Emily Cary, Opera Lafayette performs the modern premiere of 'Le Magnifique' (Washington Examiner, January 29)

In essence, the operas of Grétry are a stepping stone, a way for later giants to stand on his shorter shoulders, to reverse an old metaphor. Mozart, who admired Grétry's scores, took what Grétry did with his ensembles -- like the lively Act I chatter trio and Act II finale in Le Magnifique -- much farther, and the earlier scores of Rameau and the later ones of Berlioz are of much greater interest in terms of orchestrational variety. Grétry gives most of the rhythmic interest to the violins, with the winds mostly doubling, except for a brief moment for the horns and woodwinds alone at the opening of Act III. The opera does contain interesting moments that have been singled out as important for the transformation of the opéra-comique into a weightier genre, not least the "extended mime sequence" of the overture, calling for a procession of extras (there being no chorus at the Comédie-Italienne and rather limited space). Grétry wrote in his memoirs that he observed actual processions of this kind when composing the overture: he quotes the Air d'Henri IV for the entrance of the priests and creates a cacophony of different melodies and sounds that are heard simultaneously. Horns and drums are used (perhaps overused) for martial effect, and the trumpets in the score are the first in the history of opéra-comique, according to scholar David Charlton. The closing music of Act III is supposed to accompany a final divertissement, a pantomime where Clémentine and Le Magnifique release the other captives from their chains, but in this performance, it served simply as the "bow music."

This opera will be repeated on Wednesday (February 9, 7:30 pm), in the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. The final performance of Opera Lafayette's season will be Handel's Acis and Galatea (April 5, 7:30 pm), in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

In Brief: Super Bowl Edition

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

• In the world of online music video this week -- the Centre de Musique Baroque's concert of music from the reign of Henri IV in the Chapelle Royale at Versailles; Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques performing Lully's Bellérophon in the Opéra Royal de Versailles; and much more. [Arte]


• Lisa Hirsch has hit on a fun idea, asking opera lovers to compile a fantasy opera season. The response has been good so far, with the predictable result that critics and people with specialized interests are compiling seasons that would send any company into bankruptcy. It may be relevant to recall what I labeled the programming formula at Santa Fe Opera: in a summer season of five operas, they generally program two chestnuts, one 20th-century masterpiece, one world premiere, plus a wild card slot for Baroque opera or a less-performed work by a popular composer (in 2008, for example, Marriage of Figaro, Falstaff, Britten's Billy Budd, the U.S. premiere of Saariaho's Adriana Mater, and Handel's Radamisto). Chestnuts are an inevitable part of making an opera company budget work, but if you keep the chestnuts in an appropriate rotation, you can attract a much broader audience. [Iron Tongue of Midnight]


• Providing an example of how not to do things, Washington National Opera announced its new season. Five operas and not much to get excited about. Alex Baker hit the nail on the head by calling it a "retrenchment season": "I think its safe to say DC isn't going to be a destination city for opera travelers next year." Indeed. [Wellsung]


• Is Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's marriage cursed? After a fall from the podium, Muti will have surgery for jaw fractures. [Chicago Tribune]


• Remembering Jussi Björling on what would have been his 100th birthday. [Clef Notes]


• We even tweet in regional dialects. [Languagehat]


• The National Endowment for the Arts was gutted during the presidency of Ronald Reagan: in spite of those "savings," "public debt roughly tripled during Reagan's eight years in office" and "Federal spending rose 25%." [Culture Monster]


• In widely noted news, Citibank seized control of EMI this week. [Reuters]


• Thoughts on the death and life of Milton Babbitt from Tim Rutherford-Johnson. [The Rambler]


• Hooray! Matthew Guerrieri got the Twitter virus. [Soho the Dog]


• This week, the Musée du Luxembourg will open the first retrospective in France of the works of Lucas Cranach. [Le Point]

For Your Consideration: 'Inception'

Inception is essentially a riff on The Matrix, using a non-linear narrative that gradually reveals more of the story's basic premises as previous realities turn out to be false. The virtual worlds within the mind created by director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan are not the elaborate video game of The Matrix but personal dreamscapes, invaded by a team of information thieves, who use elaborately detailed false dreams to steal valuable information from the vulnerable minds of sleeping targets. Nolan's interest in memory and the mind's inner realities goes back at least as far as his much less profitable (and low budget) film Memento, in which he cast Carrie-Anne Moss, shortly after her memorable role in The Matrix, as the murdered wife sought by a man who has lost the ability to form new memories. Nolan then spent several years turning out, among other things, high-budget blockbusters for the Batman franchise, neither of which was particularly good. Inception at least holds one's attention while you are watching, if its Byzantine complexity does not always stand up to harsher scrutiny, although the film is meant to be intentionally obscure. The Internet conversations about the meaning of fine details in the movie are potentially endless.

Leonardo DiCaprio is brooding and secretive as Cobb, the team leader, who hatches a plan to do the impossible in this world of dream adventurers, an "inception," that is, planting a false memory in a target to influence his future behavior. The client who hires them, a Japanese businessman named Saito (the suitably laconic Ken Watanabe), wants the son of his major competitor (Cillian Murphy, all pampered filial insecurity) to break up the company after the death of his ailing father (the late Pete Postlethwaite). After a botched audition operation, Cobb seeks out a new dream architect on the advice of his father-in-law (Michael Caine, largely wasted by the screenplay) in Paris. (This is one of the script's unexplained dead ends, as Caine's character is apparently both teaching in Paris and taking care of Cobb's children in the United States.) The young woman with the somewhat heavy-handed name of Ariadne, the smart and fresh-faced Ellen Page (most famously of Juno), has a talent for labyrinths and provides the metaphorical thread to find the way out of them.

Other Reviews: Roger Ebert | David Denby | A. O. Scott | Washington Post | Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times | TIME | Village Voice | Movie Review Intelligence

Lurking in the maze of Cobb's dreams, however, is a monster of his own, the memory of his wife, who also bears an unfortunately significant name, Mal, played with sultry menace by the ravishing French actress Marion Cotillard (reminiscent somewhat of her turn as a seductive but vengeful prostitute in Un long dimanche de fiançailles). The conceit of the layering of dreams within dreams is that actions in reality affect lower levels of consciousness, which are proportionally stretched out as time seems to slow. In reality as the dreamers plunge in a van off the side of a bridge, their dream personae float about weightless, allowing Nolan to create a memorable sequence as characters spin and crawl around all sides of a hotel corridor, for example. To time their recovery of consciousness, the team plays a song, Edith Piaf's iconic Non, je ne regrette rien, that synchronizes the "kick" or jostling movement that rouses them from sleep -- the song is a nice allusion to Cotillard's gorgeous turn as Piaf in La Vie en Rose. The composer of the score, Hans Zimmer, peppers the song throughout the movie, slowed down to initially unrecognizable speeds corresponding to the time shift in the dreams. (This is hardly a new idea, something that artist Leif Inge did a few years ago, stretching out Beethoven's ninth symphony over a 24-hour period, in that case without pitch distortion. Last year, someone did it to a Justin Bieber song, inspired by Zimmer's score.) Trying to determine what is real and what is dream at the end of Inception misses the point: Piaf's song is all about forgetting the past -- "Je me fous du passé" as she puts it quite firmly.

Most of the film's budget, reportedly about $160 million (in other words, roughly equal to the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts!), probably went to CGI imagery. There are amazing effects, to be sure, as Paris folds back upon itself to create a prism of three-dimensional boulevards, or endless towers and apartment blocks grow up and crumble into the roaring ocean. Trains barrel down the middle of city streets, cafes explode around the protagonists, and an endless supply of projections carry and shoot lots of weapons. (While the film's chances at Best Picture or Best Screenplay seem pretty low, it will possibly get recognition in cinematography, art direction, score, or sound.) Still, it all feels less like an actual person's dream than a Hollywood executive's wet dream, with visions of summer gross revenue dancing in his head. Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep, with a budget of $6 million, all told, was much closer to the oddness of actual dreams.

For Your Consideration: 'True Grit'

It is generally a terrible idea to remake any movie, and the better the original was, the more likely the remake will be a dog. That being said, one can hardly be surprised that the Coen brothers have done the impossible, remaking the classic 1969 Western, which featured an iconic performance by John Wayne, and ending up with a True Grit that is tauter and has more rounded characters than the original. To Jeff Bridges fell the thankless task of playing the John Wayne role of Rooster Cogburn, an aging, one-eyed (the patch is over the right eye, nota bene, rather than the left in Wayne's portrayal), alcoholic U.S. Marshall who shoots first and asks questions later. Bridges dances entertainingly along the line between gravity and parody, grinding and mashing his lines to the point of near-incomprehensibility, portraying a stumbling, bluff shipwreck of a man who still possesses the shreds of a conscience. Few have mastered so perfectly the art of the bemused and blank stare: some combination of these qualities adds up to the "true grit" of the title. Bridges would not get my vote for Best Actor, but neither would such recognition be undeserved (we have so admired him for major roles in movies like Fearless, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and of course The Big Lebowski, and his win last year for Crazy Heart makes an award this year pretty unlikely).

In their screenplay and direction, Joel and Ethan Coen create the same mix of playful satire -- a meta-approach to movie making that is hyper-conscious of so much film history -- and serious drama that has made some viewers uncomfortable with their previous films. (The film's broad popular appeal, which not many of their films have enjoyed, could nudge them ahead in the competition for the Best Director award.) The mythical American West is adoringly captured in almost grisaille cinematography by Roger Deakins, a barren and windswept canvas, both visually and morally. The standout performance comes from newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, a Los Angeles native who was the same age as her character, Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old spitfire who comes from her farm home to avenge the shooting of her father. With remarkable gumption, Mattie settles her father's affairs -- in one of the best sequences of the film, she negotiates fearlessly with a local trader over the money owed her for her father's horses -- and hires Cogburn to hunt down the man who shot her father, Tom Chaney (a menacing but also comically hapless Josh Brolin).

The Coens keep the story closer to its source, Charles Portis's 1968 novel, than the Wayne film did, reportedly lifting much of the dialogue directly and keeping the action focused on Mattie's bold, even reckless teenage view of the world. She is the smartest person in the story, making Biblical allusions (to Ezekiel and the valley of dry bones, for example), explaining Latin legal terms (malum in se), and correcting grown men on the spelling of "futile." It is a mistake for Mattie to be considered a supporting role, given how the story really revolves around her in the Coens' casting of the story: at the same time, it is a mistake that may give Steinfeld a fighting chance, well deserved, at winning an Oscar in her first major feature.

Other Reviews: Roger Ebert | David Denby | Manohla Dargis | Washington Post | Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times | Rolling Stone | Village Voice | Movie Review Intelligence

Matt Damon is hilarious as the vainglorious LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger who is hot on the trail of Chaney for the unrelated murder of a state senator. His attempts to impress Mattie and Cogburn are met only with scorn, but his pride, symbolized in a stubborn cowlick that makes one tuft of hair stand ridiculously on end like a cockscomb, does not allow him to work gracefully with them or give up his quest. It is a performance of many charms that does not quite rise to award level (Damon was not nominated), although that may have as much to do with an essentially comic film not seeming as weighty. As far as its merits as a film, although its Best Picture nomination is justified, it falls short of the highest honors, because for all of its Coen-brand whimsy, it does not hit upon any new territory in the genre, unlike the crushingly bleak Unforgiven did, for example. It has appeal because it stays vinegary when it could go sugary, and a subtle score by the Coens' regular musical collaborator, Carter Burwell, is appropriately spare. The tune that runs through the film, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms by Elisha A. Hoffman and Anthony J. Showalter, is only from the late 19th century but seems timeless. One hardly needs to wait for the sung version of this hymn at the final credits to hear the words in one's mind, and of all people Mattie certainly seems to feel that she has nothing to dread, nothing to fear, even though she certainly does.

Tomb of Prophet Zechariah Possibly Found

Agence France-Presse reports that a team of Israeli archeologists have uncovered a Byzantine-era church in Hirbat Midras last week. The site was in a Jewish community dating back to Roman times, and the church was built over the tomb believed to be that of the prophet Zechariah. After looters were arrested with a lintel pillaged from the site, the Israel Antiquities Authority moved in, discovering a beautifully preserved mosaic floor on a lower level. Caves under the floor of the church are believed to be the location of the prophet's tomb: the church collapsed in an earthquake 1,300 years ago and has remained buried since then. More information, an official press release, and a few pictures can be seen here.

For Your Consideration: 'The Social Network'

David Fincher's The Social Network has received nearly universal praise from film critics, even winning Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes. This is beyond my understanding, given how meager the film is: the story of how college high jinks make Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking Web site Facebook, into the youngest billionaire on the planet, it is a sort of Bildungsroman for the Noughties, success porn for the generation coming out of college into a disastrous recession. (The real Zuckerberg has taken issue with parts of the film's version of his life.) The backdrop, in the grand tradition of college-prank films, is that mythical collection of ivy-covered halls where the dorkiest misfits in the world somehow become big men on campus. Zuckerberg's hacking antics bring him into conflict with university administrators: as even Lawrence Summers, then still President of Harvard, where Zuckerberg and Co. were students, is drawn into the furor over just who created Facebook, there were many references to classics of the genre like National Lampoon's Animal House (so memorably parodied in the television show Futurama -- "Robot House!!") and Real Genius (recalled in a pathetic Caribbean Night party at a Jewish fraternity). When Zuckerberg and his friend Eduardo Saverin (the somewhat nondescript Andrew Garfield) work out an algorithm to compare the hotness of all of Harvard's female undergraduates in a side-by-side online competition -- one of the kernels of the Facebook idea and the digital age equivalent of the panty raid, I guess -- Saverin writes the formula on their dorm room window, an allusion to a similar scene in A Beautiful Mind, continuing the theme of the Ivy League outsider.

For its spot-on evocation of the narcissistic, high-achieving undergraduates it portrays, Social Network may be a convincing documentation of the mainstream culture of the last decade, but it is as dull and mindlessly time-consuming as the Web site its lead character created. Having tried and mostly abandoned Facebook as a pastime, I am bemused by the site's continued popularity, which seems mostly to serve to reconnect people whom time was meant to disconnect, and likely for good reason. Aaron Sorkin, adapting a book by Ben Mezrich, writes dialogue that is whip-smart but also intolerably superior at times. Sorkin's best work has been in the smaller bites of television episodes, especially for the outstanding series The West Wing, but none of his film screenplays (The American President, A Few Good Men, or this one) has the same concentrated bite in terms of characters or wordplay. Particularly disappointing is the one-sided maleness of the screenplay: besides the girlfriend whose breakup with Zuckerberg supposedly drives his need to succeed (Rooney Mara, in a minor role) there is little more than a raft-load of bimbos who circle like vultures around the promise of success. Where are the brilliant, funny, self-possessed women of Sorkin's television work?

Other Reviews: Roger Ebert | David Denby | Manohla Dargis | Washington Post | Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times | Rolling Stone | Village Voice | Movie Review Intelligence

Jesse Eisenberg is something of a cipher as Zuckerberg, a study in pursed lips, blank stares, and clipped, cutting retorts. He is a dead ringer for Zuckerberg, but it is hardly a performance worthy of the nominations for lead actor awards he has been receiving. The nominations for best ensemble cast are no less mystifying. A large proportion of the movie's action consists of people staring at computer screens and answering questions at legal depositions, as Zuckerberg is sued by other students who claim to have had a stake in the founding of Facebook, including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin brothers who were working on a social networking site at the same time (both played, by a digital sleight of hand, by Armie Hammer -- the great-grandson of Armand Hammer, who has found his way into an acting career). Justin Timberlake has a very meta-L.A. turn as ultra-cool, suave Sean Parker, the founder of Napster who gets mixed up in the mad build-up of Facebook into the megalith it has since become.

Does the directing of David Fincher somehow make all of this into an award-worthy picture? Maybe. There is a certain Los Angeles charm to the product, a fast-moving, quick-shifting slickness that may explain the film's appeal. A hip indie score by Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, and Atticus Ross certainly does not hurt either: I loved the synthesizer and bass-heavy arrangement of Grieg's music In the Hall of the Mountain King from the incidental music for Peer Gynt, heard in the beautiful, balletic regatta sequence at Henley-on-Thames and would not be upset to see the score win an Academy Award. The amped-up maleness of the story is reminiscent of the only other Fincher film I really liked, Fight Club. The hard-hitting but superficial qualities are too much like the Fincher films I have really hated, Zodiac, The Panic Room, Se7en, Alien³, and the worst of all, his last film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

In the Washington area, Social Network is still being screened at the West End Cinema.

Juho Pohjonen Goes for Baroque

Saturday afternoon in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen performed on Washington Performing Arts Society's Hayes Piano Series, replacing Till Fellner, who had to withdraw due to muscular issues. The program promised cohesion and thoughtfulness, pairing a Couperin set of harpsichord works with Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, and a Handel keyboard suite with Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. Starting with François Couperin’s Vingt-septième ordre (Book 4), it became clear that Pohjonen’s technique was perfectly suited to evocations of the harpsichord: every turn, trill, and embellishment was so impeccably executed that one almost forgot he was playing a modern piano. The sound was transparent, with the dynamics and pedal used ever so delicately to enhance the period sound. Pojhonen even used tempo and ornamentation as devices to indicate phrasing, just as a harpsichordist would, without ever letting the pervasive ornamentation take away from the melodic lines. It was beautifully done.

Immediately following the Couperin, the Ravel took new meaning from its usual pedal-heavy wash. Pohjonen began the first movement (Prélude) with such clarity of sound that the voices and ornaments almost sounded as if from Couperin’s oeuvre. It was wonderful to hear these influences directly, but Pohjonen never quite seemed able to get beyond this airiness of touch. The Ravel never leapt beyond this inspiration into its own personality. Instead, it sounded like the work of a pianist who was trying ever so hard to make these connections known. At a certain point, though, it became clear that this slightness of sound was not just an interpretative decision, but simply indicative of his capabilities. Puhjonen’s slight body does him no favors when it comes to his sound: his soft passages are gorgeously rendered, but anything meaty or loud comes across weakly. The Rigaudon was far too delicate, and even the Toccata sounded forced and underdone.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, Juho Pohjonen (Washington Post, January 31) Anthony Tommasini, Exploring Complex Works, Before You’ve Even Had Your Coffee (New York Times, January 17)

The Handel keyboard suite (B-flat major, HWV 434), again, was easily suited to Pohjonen’s style, but the Brahms fell flat. Pohjonen has remarkable fingers and effortless technique, certainly due to the muscular looseness of his gangling body, but the Brahms, based on a stately Handel theme, needed more. In contrast to the Couperin and Ravel, which, if nothing else, were meticulously thought out, the Brahms variations often felt like nothing but a series of notes. One wondered if Pohjonen was even enjoying the music. Phrases were clipped, often rushed, and the overall sound was anemic, with the larger variations lacking that Brahmsian substance.

WPAS has rescheduled Joshua Bell's recital, a victim of last week's snowstorm, for this Wednesday (February 2, 8 pm), in the Music Center at Strathmore.