For Your Consideration: 'Of Gods and Men'

We took note of Xavier Beauvois's film Des hommes et des dieux when it was released in France last fall. The film, a retelling of the story of the assassination of a group of monks in Algeria in 1996, won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Catholic diocese around France sponsored screenings of the film, followed by discussions of the film to promote Catholic-Muslim dialogue. The monastery featured in the film, Notre-Dame de l'Atlas, was established by the Trappists near the village of Lodi, itself founded by French colonists in the agricultural region of Tibhirine. It was only a priory in the late 20th century, and its prior, Frère Christian de Chergé, led a faith exchange between Christians and Muslims. Played with solemn intellect by Lambert Wilson, he guides the monks in his care as the civil war between Islamic fundamentalists and the government worsens, making the threat to the safety of the monastery more and more imminent.

For events that took place in the 1990s, the look of the film is more timeless, seeming set farther back in the past than it actually is. Part of that impression is due to the effect of monastic time, which comes across in the stillness and silence of this movie, perhaps less effectively than the real thing in another recent film about monks, Die große Stille. The monks in this film have their weaknesses and fears and squabbles, but the love of the community is felt in a very real way. They do not all agree at first that they should remain in the face of danger from the civil war, after a harrowing late-night encounter with the militants. In accordance with monastic tradition, at chapter meeting the monks follow the advice of the senior brother, Frère Amédée (the spritely Jacques Herlin), to think and pray over it longer. They reach agreement after they all come to an understanding that they were called to this greater love in this place and to help these people. They put themselves on this particular road back to God, so why deviate from it now?

Other Reviews: Roger Ebert | Anthony Lane | A. O. Scott | Washington Post | Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times | Salon | Village Voice | Movie Review Intelligence

The performances are all stately but honest, missing some of the earthly humor of monks that balances out their spiritual elevation. Veteran actor Michael Lonsdale returns to the monastic habit, after his memorable turn as the Benedictine abbot in The Name of the Rose, as Frère Luc, a doctor who runs a clinic for the local villagers. (Although not portrayed that way in the movie, Frère Luc was actually older than Frère Amédée.) At dinner in the refectory after the community has come to a decision to stay, Frère Luc puts on a recording of the climactic scene of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (the meaning of self-sacrifice for a beloved other is clear) and offers the monks some well-deserved wine. The only false note in the film was the music, which is mostly Taizé-style French chant and simple polyphony: this music is pleasing in its own and quite appropriate for a 20th-century French monastic community, but it lacks the solidity and tradition of Gregorian chant, featured so beautifully in Die große Stille. This facet of the movie, combined with a perhaps overly angelic view of the martyrdom (the monks who were taken hostage were decapitated), weakens the film slightly, but it is still well worth watching.

Serrano and His Bodily Fluids

As was widely reported, Andres Serrano's controversial (and somewhat pedestrian) photograph Piss Christ was attacked and destroyed with a hammer during an exhibit in the southern French city of Avignon. The date of the incident -- Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week -- was not coincidental. According to an article by Anthony Hernandez (Qui sont ces catholiques intégristes mobilisés contre le "Piss Christ" ?, April 19) in Le Monde, the attack is related to protests against the exhibit that were mobilized over the weekend by a Catholic institute called Civitas. Many suspect that the attackers of the photograph came from among this group and its associated organizations.

On its Web site, Civitas says that its goal is a "political and social reconquest seeking to re-Christianize France." The group's general secretary, Alain Escada, told Le Monde that they want to "restore a Catholic France, to orient political decisions and laws in keeping with a Catholic vision." Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus believes that Civitas and groups like it are furthermore connected to far-right Catholic followers of Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist bishop whose Society of St. Pius X has long opposed the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council. After a long period under excommunication for the unauthorized ordination of bishops, the group was returned to communion with penalty was lifted by the Holy See in 2009.

In an interview with Le Monde, the director of the Collection Lambert in Avignon, Eric Mézil (Piss Christ : "Nous recevons des menaces de mort", April 19), said that the gallery has been inundated with complaint messages, by phone and e-mail, some containing death threats. Much of the rancor takes on anti-Muslim and antisemitic overtones. In spite of the possible danger, the gallery reopened to the public yesterday, intending to show Piss Christ in its now damaged form. When Piss Christ was exhibited in Avignon in 2007, there was no public protest. It is possible that the rehabilitation of the Society of St. Pius X has emboldened this sort of action; Mézil also points to politicians on the right encouraging Christian extremism -- Claude Guéant recently invoked the example of the crusades, and Nicolas Sarkozy, while on a visit to Le Puy-en-Velay, made a call to "take up the Christian heritage of France."

Two Jons at Dumbarton Oaks

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Brahms Clarinet Sonatas [REVIEW] Novacek / D'Rivera / Gershwin

Charles T. Downey, Clarinetist Jon Manasse and pianist Jon Nakamatsu at Dumbarton Oaks
Washington Post, April 19, 2011

The clarinet is a chameleon among instruments, finding a habitat in classical music, jazz, the marching band and klezmer. The intersection between the first two of those was the subject of a recital by clarinetist Jon Manasse and pianist Jon Nakamatsu on Sunday night at Dumbarton Oaks. The program included one of the Brahms clarinet sonatas from the duo’s debut recording and selections of jazz-influenced American pieces from their latest disc.

Manasse, former principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, has an impeccably smooth tone on the instrument, highlighted to mellow effect in the warm, restrained opening of the Second Brahms Sonata. Nakamatsu, who won the gold medal at the Van Cliburn Competition in 1997, matched and supported Manasse in polished tone, helping to create a sense of surging but contained passion in this autumnal work. Throughout the evening, neither player forced his instrument, aware of the intimate scale of the museum’s Music Room and focusing only on beauty of sound. [Continue reading]

Jon Manasse (clarinet) and Jon Nakamatsu (piano)
Friends of Music series
Dumbarton Oaks

Peter Brook near the End

(L to R) Yoshi Oïda, Hayley Carmichael, and Bruce Myers in Fragments, directed by Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne, 2011

Two homeless men torment one another; an elderly woman moves from her window to a rocking chair, waiting for death; three old women gossip about one another; lonely people confront the pain of existence. Somehow English theater director Peter Brook made these five brief vignettes by Samuel Beckett into an evening that was not profoundly depressing, in his production of Fragments, which played at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater over the weekend. Not likely to want to miss Brook's first performances at the Kennedy Center since 1973, I was in the house on Saturday evening.

When Brook turned 85 last year, he stepped down from the leadership of his ground-breaking troupe in Paris, based at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Within a short time of Brook's retirement, the French government made substantial cuts to the theater's government subventions, slashing public subsidy by almost half. Brook embarked on this American tour last month, with performances in a few cities of The Grand Inquisitor (a staged reading of the chapter of that title in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov) and Fragments, a collection of short pieces by Samuel Beckett. Brook presented only the second half of the double-bill here in Washington -- the work had its 2007 premiere in England and its American premiere in Chicago in 2008. One might regret The Grand Inquisitor, but there were reports of trouble with it in Boston; I would have actually rather seen Brook's farewell production, an adaptation of The Magic Flute that he recently took to London.

Other Articles: Sophie Gilbert, “Fragments” at the Kennedy Center (Washingtonian, April 15) Barbara Mackay, Kennedy Center offers gems by Beckett (Washington Examiner, April 14) Charles McNulty, An Evening of Peter Brook at the Broad Stage (Los Angeles Times, April 8) Lavanya Ramanathan, Peter Brook's Fragments (interview) (Washington Post, April 7) Laura Collins-Hughes, Actor’s memory lapses blamed on exhaustion, jet lag (Boston Globe, March 31) ---, Peter Brook on the right to be bored (Boston Globe, March 24) Susan Saccoccia, Beckett's humor, darkness shines through in 'Fragments' (Bay State Banner, March 30) Don Aucoin, Moving moments of Beckett at Paramount (Boston Globe, March 25)

Brook has worked on Beckett's plays many times over the course of his career, and in his Director's Note about the production, Brook insists that the labels so often associated with Beckett's work -- "despairing, negative, pessimistic" -- are false. Beckett "peers into the filthy abyss of existence," he adds, but "his humor saves him and us from falling in." Brook's choice of these fragments certainly goes along with this thesis, monologues and small ensemble scenes that range from whimsical to bleak, and the characters react to their predicaments with humor and sometimes brave resolution. The two men in the cast, Yoshi Oïda (whose English was a little difficult to understand) and Bruce Myers (who did seem to stumble with his lines here and there), open the evening as a blind homeless man and a one-legged man in a wheelchair in Rough for Theater I. Despite their misery they reach out to one another and needle one another's weaknesses: at one point one asks the other if when he is sad he thinks about ending it all. "Not sad enough," is the defiant response.

In the other duo scene, Act without Words II, the same pair mime a Chaplinesque silent scene about the pointlessness of life. Two sad sacks go to sleep (in tent-like sacks), are awakened by a pointed stick that falls from above, get dressed, and start the cycle all over again. One does so complaining about everything but careful to pray to a force above, while the other is uncomplaining and blissfully unaware. Both suffer the same misfortunes, and the message seems to be that faith is inconsequential until the end, when the man who has prayed has a moment of blissful communion with something beyond himself.

Hayley Carmichael was a little cool and uninvolved, perhaps intentionally clinical, in the two monologues: Rockaby, about the old woman readying herself for death, and the very brief poem Neither, where the question of something beyond this life is again uncomfortably confronted. Both here and in Act without Words II, the glowing light designed by Philippe Vialatte. The closing Come and Go, featuring all three actors as a trio of old women sitting on a bench, is a lighthearted look at petty venality, and the trio all seemed most at ease here, the men playing in drag with just enough camp. A success made all the more unusual in that the production did not sell out, nor did it get reviewed in the Washington Post.

Chaplin's Gold Rush

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, BSO scores with Chaplin’s ‘Gold Rush’
Washington Post, April 18, 2011

Charlie Chaplin’s films are classics, not least for their entertaining musical scores, some of which Chaplin composed with professional help. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra celebrated the filmmaker’s birthday, which fell on Saturday, by presenting a Chaplin film accompanied by a live performance of the score. After a grand success with “City Lights” in 2008, conductor Marin Alsop returned to the format with “The Gold Rush,” heard Friday night at Strathmore.

Chaplin showed an affectionate knowledge of classical music by weaving in memorable melodies. “O du mein holder Abendstern,” from Wagner’s “Tannhauser,” becomes the leitmotif of hunger and suffering as played by wah-wah trombone; Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” illustrates swirling snow; the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” accompanies the dance of Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Georgia, a saloon girl, as he ties his pants with a dog’s leash while it is still attached to the dog. [Continue reading]

Chaplin, The Gold Rush
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Music Center at Strathmore

OTHER ARTICLES:

• Timothy Brock's restored version of the score
  
• Joe Banno, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Washington Post, March 3, 2008)
  
• Michael Lodico, Alsop Conducts Charlie Chaplin (Ionarts, March 3, 2008)

In Brief: Palm Sunday Edition

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

• 
  Here we go again -- as rumored for a couple days, the Board of the Philadelphia Orchestra has voted to take that organization into bankruptcy. As Peter Dobrin has reported, the musicians did their best to convince their audience and the board itself that it was a bad idea. [Philadelphia Inquirer]


• If this is making you think of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which nearly labor-disputed itself into non-existence, you are not the only one. Speaking of which, Alex Ross called for Mark Stryker to get consideration for a Pulitzer because of his coverage of the strike for the Detroit Free Press. Seconded!
  [@alexrossmusic]


• Speaking of which, when the DSO finally made it back into the Orchestra Hall, that "acoustic miracle on Woodward," a full audience gave them an ovation to remember. “ 'Now we know how it feels to be at a Lady Gaga concert', Slatkin told the adoring crowd once order was restored." Now, DSO patrons, keep buying tickets regularly, even if Slatkin programs the Turangalîla-Symphonie. [Detroit Free Press]


• Google celebrated Charlie Chaplin's birthday -- on April 16 -- with a tribute video. Review coming tomorrow about the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's screening of The Gold Rush with a restored version of the film's score. [Tubefilter]


• So I am reading Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan with a group of students, and we recently discussed how, in the section of the book on language, Hobbes referenced the story of the Tower of Babel, where after the flood God confused the one early language of humans into a multitude of them. There is evidence now that all languages may have descended from one ancestral mother language that came from Africa with the earliest humans. Like all theories, this one will be tested and already has some detractors, like those who feel it is dangerous to speculate on the development of language in the complete absence of any actual record. [Wall Street Journal]


• With hat tip to Cronaca, just who invented the idea that somewhere back in prehistory, human societies were matriarchal and worshiped "the Goddess"? Cynthia Eller, a women's studies professor at Montclair State University, has the goods on the legend and how it came to be. She blames the credulity of academics, including many in her own discipline, and further posits that no one is served by a distortion of the truth. [Chronicle of Higher Education]


• As tweeted earlier this week -- Eric Whitacre speaks truth: "I priced myself into a place where [my music] was perceived as more valuable than it was." [Capital New York]

Gergiev, Mahler, Quintets: France Musique

What could be better on a rainy Saturday than listening to some music on the radio? Now that the Met broadcast of Berg's Wozzeck is over, here is something else for your listening pleasure. Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra performed two all-Mahler concerts late last month (symphonies 7, 9, 10), in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. You can listen to the concert online, thanks to the folks at France Musique: once you are at their site, click on the headphone icon to start the streaming audio. Act quickly, because it will only be available for a couple more days.

For further listening, Yuja Wang and musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic play quintets by Schubert and Brahms and Dvořák and Mozart, too, also at the Salle Pleyel.

St. Petersburg Philharmonic

Shostakovich, Cello Concerto No. 1 / Symphony No. 1, M. Rostropovich, Philadelphia Orchestra, E. Ormandy

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein completed her undergraduate degree at Columbia in Russian History, and her Russian specialization has continued this month. She is playing Shostakovich's first cello concerto on tour right now with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the orchestra that premiered the work in 1959, when its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, played it in Leningrad. The group came to Strathmore on Tuesday night, with conductor Yuri Temirkanov, whose tenure with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra we enjoyed for many years, leading his longtime "other band" in Rimsky-Korsakov's dynamic Russian Easter Overture and a heavy-handed Brahms fourth symphony.

Other Articles: Joe Banno, Temirkanov’s appearance at Strathmore reminds Washington of what it’s missing (Washington Post, April 14) Tim Smith, Temirkanov leads St. Petersburg Philharmonic in high-powered concert at Strathmore (Baltimore Sun, April 13) ---, Temirkanov: Sounding upbeat (Baltimore Sun, April 9) Matthew Guerrieri, St. Petersburg Philharmonic brings precision to Symphony Hall (Boston Globe, April 11) Keith Powers, Alisa in wonderland (Boston Herald, April 9) Andy Thomason, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra stuns with epic evening (Daily Tar Heel, April 6) Susan Isaacs Nisbett, St. Petersburg Philharmonic shines at Hill Auditorium with Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov (AnnArbor.com, April 3) Lawrence A. Johnson, St. Petersburg Philharmonic shows brawny strength and refinement (The Classical Review, April 1) Alan G. Artner, St. Petersburg Orchestra easily scales the peaks (Chicago Tribune, April 1) Sue Gilmore, Cellist Alisa Weilerstein teams with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in S.F. (Contra Costa Times, March 24) Mark Swed, St. Petersburg Philharmonic begins U.S. tour with Alisa Weilerstein (Los Angeles Times, March 23) Tom Jacobs, Alisa Weilerstein with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (Santa Barbara Independent, March 21) Donna Perlmutter, Cello virtuoso Alisa Weilerstein is always at the head of her class (Los Angeles Times, March 20)

The best playing was on the Rimsky-Korsakov, something in the overture slot of the classic orchestral program (overture, concerto, symphony) that was not actually a waste of ten minutes. Temirkanov, with his trademarked hands-off conducting style, allowed the Easter liturgical themes to unfold and breathe naturally. The violin section was not always together with itself (splendid violin solos by concertmaster Lev Klychkov, though), but overall the orchestra played with remarkable ensemble unity, especially in the many shifts of meter and syncopation. While the overture popped and sparkled under this rather amped-up kind of playing, in the Brahms one missed some greater exploration of the soft side of the dynamic spectrum, beyond some melting, sweet horn playing in the second movement. The third and fourth movements of the Brahms, especially, had tinges of the "Russian triumphal" sound that not only seemed a little out of place but kept the ensemble from quite locking into place. The piece is itself on the weighty side, both formally and texturally. One thinks of Edouard Hanslick's private review, sent to Brahms after hearing this symphony performed in a two-piano version: "All through I felt I was being beaten by two terribly clever men." Thank goodness that Tchaikovsky was not programmed, or our hearing would have been damaged.

Weilerstein is a remarkably charismatic player, approaching the music with smoldering energy and intellectual commitment: that is at least what is communicated by her enigmatic staring into space and often-flopped hair, but it comes across even when one keeps one's eyes closed and focuses only on the sound. Her tone has a resonant buzz but does not really have a large, searing intensity in the style of someone like, say, Rostropovich, for whom Shostakovich composed his first cello concerto. At times one missed a certain vicious quality in Weilerstein's sound, although sometimes her attempts to reach a gutsy sound compromised the accuracy, but this performance had considerable appeal. In particular, Shostakovich's mastery of orchestration by this point in his career is evident in many odd colors, like the strange opening in the low winds, a sort of hurdy-gurdy wheezing, and at the end of the second movement the graveyard-pale mixture of cello harmonics (impressively clean playing from Weilerstein) and celesta and hushed strings. The horn solos, prominently featured throughout the concerto, were burnished and clear. Weilerstein played the extended Cadenza movement in a tense and somber way, pushing the fast passages to the edge of wild chaos. The orchestra showed more of its delicate side in an encore of the Nimrod movement of Elgar's Enigma Variations.

The next visiting orchestra to be presented by WPAS will be the Philadelphia Orchestra (May 20, 8 pm) in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, featuring Gil Shaham in Walton's violin concerto, with Charles Dutoit at the helm also in pieces by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky. Given the very disturbing news that the Philadelphia Orchestra may soon file for bankruptcy, a plan that has been loudly protested by the players, you will want to support the musicians when they come to Washington.