À mon chevet: 'Bel-Ami'

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

They said nothing while they ate their soup, and then Norbert de Varenne asked: "Have you read about that Gauthier trial? What a funny business!" And they discussed that case of adultery complicated by blackmail. They were not speaking at all as one speaks, among family, about events recounted in the public news, but as doctors speak of an illness or grocers speak of vegetables. They did not become indignant, they were not surprised by facts; they were searching for the deep, secret causes of them, with a professional curiosity and an absolute indifference to the crime itself. They were trying to explain neatly the origins of actions, to determine all the cerebral phenomena from which the crime was born, the scientific result of an individual state of mind. The women also were passionate in this pursuit, in this work. Other recent events were also examined, commented on, viewed from every side, weighed for their value, with that practical eye and that special way of seeing among news merchants, among sellers of the human comedy by the line, just how one examines, considers, weighs, in a business, the goods one is going to sell to the public.

* * * *

The young man's bedroom, on the fifth floor, looked out, as if over a deep abyss, over the immense trench of the Western Railway, just above the exit from the tunnel, near the Gare des Batignolles. Duroy opened his window and leaned his elbows on the support of the rusted iron rail. Below him, at the end of the dark hole, three red unmoving signals looked like large animal eyes; and farther away others were seen, and still more, farther away. Every few momenets, prolonged or short whistles passed by in the night, some near, others barely audible, coming from below, on the Asnières side. They had modulations like the calls of voices. One of them was getting closer, always making its plaintive cry that grew louder second by second, and soon a large yellow light appeared, running by with a loud noise; and Duroy watched the long rosary of train cars be swallowed up in the tunnel.

-- Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, pp. 36-37 / 67-68 (my translation)

Guy de Maupassant's short stories and novels are always sure to provide a good read. Maupassant got his start as a newspaperman, a journalist and eventually editor for several Parisian newspapers. The protagonist in his novel Bel-Ami gets a similar break, and in the second passage above struggles, in his apartment in the Rue Boursault overlooking the train tracks, to come up with the ideas to meet his first deadline. Maupassant's account of the power of newspapers and how the people who ran them shaped their times has been making me a little rueful about the impending death of the newspaper.

Classical:NEXT, Classical Music's new MIDEM

The Story of Naxos, Nicolas Soames Piatkus Books Chopin, PC No.1, Polish Airs, E.Nebolsin / A.Wit / Warsaw PO Naxos Dohnanyi, Nursery Variations, E.Nebolsin / J.Falletta / Buffalo PO Naxos Sarasate, Spanish Dances, T.Yang / M.Hadulla Naxos Beethoven, Variations, F.Uhlig hänssler Classic Schumann, "Young Virtuoso", F.Uhlig hänssler Classic Bach, Goldberg Variations, F.Haas la dolce volta Walter Arlen, Songs, R.Nelsen, C.Immler, D.Driver Gramola N.Rakov, Violin Sonatas, D.Frühwirth / M.Chernyavska Crystal Purcell et al., Love's Madness, D.Mields / Lautten Compagney Berlin carus Bruckner, Cello Suites, C.Abbado / Lucerne FO Accent DVD

The Event

What’s “Classical:NEXT”? In short: it’s the independent classical music label’s MIDEM. It’s the outgrowth of collective disgruntlement with the music industry’s dominant trade fair where classical music had become a tolerated afterthought. CLASS, the association for classical independent labels in Germany (read: Musikproduktion Dabringhaus & Grimm), banked on the dissatisfaction of Cannes in February, crowded expensive hotels, and increasingly high participation fees and opted instead for Munich in May (May 30 – June 2), a winning proposition right there.

With the experienced WOMEX team behind them, Munich’s accessibility, the Gasteig (Munich’s ugly and convenient behemoth cultural center) at their hands, and a little official city funding garnered by making sufficiently believable the whole thing was a partly public affair, Classical:NEXT was off to a promising start. The real stroke of genius was to have Naxos’ 25^th anniversary celebration take place as part of it. Naxos’s Global Logistics arm and Naxos Germany are headquartered in Kirchheim just north-east of Munich (Martin Anderson, critic and head of Toccata Classics suggests that “stepping into [NGL’s] warehouse is barely less breath-taking than entering Chartres Cathedral”), which made it sensible to have the main bash for Klaus Heymann’s 75^th and Naxos 25^th birthday held there. Conveniently Nicolas Soames’ impeccably researched label-hagiography was released just in time by Piatkus Books to be presented alongside the birthday cake.

Naxos’ invitation ensured that Classical:NEXT’s “start-up edition” (as the American expat Jennifer Dautermann – project manager and platitudinist-in-chief – did not tire to call it every opportunity given) had the critical mass of visitors its first year that instant success was a given. Seven hundred registered delegates, well over a third from abroad, made absence from Classical:NEXT look conspicuous. It led Richard Winter – proprietor of continental Europe’s oldest record shop, head of the clever Gramola label, and one of the very first distributors of Naxos – to suggest that after its first year Classical:NEXT had already passed the MIDEM in importance for classical labels.

Based on quantity alone, the future of the fair is ensured for at least a few years to come, which gives time and a little peace of mind to work out the organizational kinks that will take it from an unmissable networking event to something more pertinent yet… Something with better and more focused panel discussions (nods to Carnegie Hall and the Bavarian State Opera who stood out positively with their presentation on the use of new media and social networking), a greater variety of better integrated, briefer artists’ concerts (“showcases”), and actual utilizations of the public – the alleged, but ultimately ignored object of everyone’s desire in reaching.

Presuming the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich plays ball, the dates Classical:NEXT 2013 will be announced soon, which would be good news for me, too, because it would mean I could get another Classical:WEISSWURST gathering next year, the informal Bavarian breakfast-gathering of dear friends and acquaintances that I could otherwise never all find in one place at a time.

The Music

Dotted throughout the three days were recitals and “artists’ showcases” and Naxos 25^th Anniversary Concert. Attempting to emphasize the “Classical” but of the fair’s name, the opening concert featured Eldar Nebolsin, a Naxos artist (with a foray to Oehms and an ancient debut disc on Decca) with an Antonio Soler Sonata (I wrote down “#78”, but it was more likely the Scarlattiesque Sonata No.87 in g-minor) and sewing-machine Bach. Tianwa Yang, Naxos’ violinist for all things Sarasate, showed her chops in the Jacques Thibaud-dedicated Second Ysaÿe Sonata for Solo Violin. Unfortunately she butchered the opening pauses, as if they weren’t an essential part of the music, and the pizzicatos were awfully unimaginative. Toward the end did she forced the work off her instrument with aggressive approximation that hinted at something titillating to come.

If Barbara Kozelj were as good an instrumentalist as she is a mezzo soprano, everyone would have admired her skill and choice of repertoire in those six, seven Joseph Joachim Raff songs. But unfortunately Lied-singing is tough and often unrewarding and a very good, achingly sincere, stilted rendition just doesn’t cut the mustard. Florian Uhlig, the young pianist that hänssler Classic is currently unleashing on Schumann, finally made an instant impression of total professionalism. Schumann’s Abegg Variations were pretty good already, but the Jubilee-appropriate “Rule Britannia Variations” by Beethoven, played to the hilt, wowed everyone in the crowd of professional listeners.

For the Naxos Anniversary Concert, Nebolsin found himself more at home in deliberate, well articulated, very decent Rachmaninoff (D-major Prelude op.23/4) and Chopin. Thomas E. Bauer’s seven songs from Schumann’s Dichterliebe – accompanied by Uta Hielscher – were a different caliber than Miss Kozelj’s go at Lied repertoire, but the baritone didn’t knock one out of the park until the very well mastered, perilous “Ich grolle nicht”. Miss Yang was back and now she continued on the good note where she had left off the day before, getting a movement from Ysaÿe’s Third Sonata (the one dedicated to George Enescu) plenty right and dazzling with great tone, plenty character, rock-solid intonation, and virtuosity in her home-field, Sarasate.

The closing concert, in symmetry to the opening recital, meant to suggest the “NEXT” bit and programmed new music. First a selection of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes put together and performed by composer-pianist Moritz Eggert. What a treat, these endlessly fascinating witty spunky little creatures. If Scarlatti’s sonatas were “Happy Freaks” in Charles Burney’s time, Cages’ deserve the coy title today. Perfectly enjoyable, perfectly sensical they splendidly undermined the stereotype of Cage, so often dismissed in a quip about silence. You can hear that for Cage, as every honest composer, the impulse for composition is primarily a communicative and musical one. Eggert dipped the ears, who had just listened to James Jolly give a heartening and compassionately brief closing address, right into the midst of this joyous music.

Joyous is decidedly not the primary quality of Ernst Krenek’s Symphonic Music op.11, but as performed by the Munich’s Orchestra Jakobsplatz – a lively, craggy ensemble that excels in its director Daniel Grossmann’s clever programming – it conveyed musical joy via a sense of the uninhibited. It nearly cloaked the delicious irony that the “NEXT” of classical music apparently consists of composers who have been decomposing for an average of 20.5 years. Classical Music. Up next: Death!

Then again, in a environment where audiences still think of 140-year-old Schoenberg as modern, the charitable response is “We know what you mean!” So why not Cage and Krenek, who combine for a mere 202 years.*


Edit 6/11/12: Jennifer Dautermann feels compelled to point out that the final, third part of the closing concert with the Quartet New Generation (QNG) featured works by Moritz Eggert, Michiel Mensingh, Fulvio Caldini, and Wojciech Blecharz. Recent works and by composers she (rightly) "suspect[s] ... are still very much alive and kicking."

'Don Quichotte'

This article was first published at The Classical Review on June 6, 2012.

Massenet, Don Quichotte, F. Furlanetto, A. Kiknadze, Mariinsky Theater, V. Gergiev (released on March 13, 2012) Mariinsky MAR0523 | 111'34" Massenet, Don Quichotte, J. van Dam, T. Berganza, Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, M. Plasson (1992, re-released in 2010) Massenet, Don Quichotte (dir. Laurent Pelly), J. van Dam, Théâtre de la Monnaie, M. Minkowski (released on May 29, 2012)

Massenet must have identified with the knight of the sorrowful countenance from Cervantes’d great novel, featured in one of his final works for the stage, the melancholy and charming Don Quichotte. Just two years before his death, the composer was also in love with his Dulcinée, mezzo-soprano Lucy Arbell, even dedicating his terse but entertaining memoirs (My Recollections, in English) to her.

Massenet was susceptible to the charms of a woman’s voice, having conceived some of his earlier operas (Manon, Esclarmonde, Thaïs) for the American coloratura soprano Sibyl Sanderson, for example, and equally entranced by Lucy Arbell’s lower voice, he made the role of Dulcinée suit it in every way. Even so, Don Quichotte is perhaps better known for its extraordinary bass title role, created by the magnetic Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin at the premiere at the Opéra de Monte Carlo in February 1910. Even as part of an opera not widely recorded, the role has become associated with some of the great bass-baritones of the 20th century, including Gabriel Bacquier, Ruggero Raimondi, and especially José van Dam. This new recording from the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg features the Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto in the role, recorded for the first time.

The creation of Don Quichotte followed an exasperating period for Massenet, recently frustrated in his attempts to produce his opera Bacchus. In his memoirs, Massenet notes that it “came into my life as a soothing balm. I had great need of it.” The sense of ease with the subject matter -- the libretto by Henri Cain was based on a play adaptation of the Cervantes novel by Jacques Le Lorrain -- comes across in the handling of the title role, part buffoon and part Christ-like redeemer. Few scenes in opera are as moving as that at the end of the Third Act, when Don Quichotte blesses the crowd of bandits, a particularly radiant moment (‘Je suis le chevalier errant’).

Some of the musical qualities recall the combination of knightly redemption in Parsifal, for example. Massenet was blessed in the singers he had for the premiere, especially Chaliapin, not mentioned by Massenet in his memoirs, although he was reportedly excellent in the title role. Always focused on his leading lady, Massenet saluted the “curious audacity” of Arbell, who insisted on learning to play the guitar accompaniment of her serenade in the Fourth Act herself, a feat that few Dulcinées, I would wager, have been able to repeat.

Furlanetto, now in his 60s, is still in generally fine voice, with only a tendency to hit the underside of some pitches to criticize. In fact, his tonal quality is, if anything, too robust to make him believable as the skinny old knight. This is only one of the reasons to prefer the José van Dam recording, made at the Halle-aux-grains in Toulouse in fairly good studio sound (and recently re-released by EMI at a budget price, albeit with no printed libretto).

Anna Kiknadze has a more weighty bottom range than Teresa Berganza, who sang opposite van Dam in the EMI recording, but nowhere near the same gleaming high notes or overall power, making Kiknadze often fade into the sonic background. Andrei Serov gives the role of Sancho Pança all of the buffo bluster he can manage, although along with the rest of the cast -- aside from Furlanetto, made up of young singers from the Mariinsky’s training academy -- the French diction leaves something to be desired (another fault by comparison with the mostly French EMI recording), with the exception of Didier Jouanny, who does the honors on the speaking role of the bandit chief.

At the podium, as one expects, Valery Gergiev never met a fast tempo he did not like to push, making some of the crowd scenes a little over-agitated. Among these are the Fourth Act, with its folksy Spanish dances as alluring background to Dulcinée’s sad aria ‘Lorsque le temps d’amour a fui,’ followed by an ensemble scene with her other suitors and friends, with echoes of the big chatter ensembles of Falstaff.

In an interesting side note, Massenet got his musical start as a percussionist, even supporting himself by playing timpani for six years at the Théâtre Lyrique, a fact that makes the use of percussion in his scores interesting. These bright, perky numbers are contrasted with the more elegiac scenes for Don Quichotte, especially the Fifth Act, where an interlude with ardent solo cello leads to the knight’s touching death scene, visited at the end once more by the voice of Dulcinée. Even with some unnecessary stretching of slow sections, however, Gergiev’s timing is only four minutes shorter than that of Michel Plasson on the EMI set. The orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater turns on a dime with its demanding leader, also producing some lovely, ethereal sounds, in the dusk scene that introduces Act III, for example, and the chorus provides the most thrilling vocal moments in this performance.

Two years ago, approaching the age of 70, José van Dam officially retired from singing with a final performance of Don Quichotte, in a production directed by Laurent Pelly, under the baton of Marc Minkowski, at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. That performance has been released on DVD by Naïve, so the final word on the best version of this beautiful, often overlooked work -- part of an ongoing revival of Massenet’s operas, too long deemed sugary and facile -- will have to wait.

SEE ALSO:
Nicolas Blanmont, Mémorial Van Dam (La Libre Belgique, May 6, 2010)

Other reviews of the José van Dam farewell production, under the baton of Marc Minkowski, at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels

Jules Massenet, My Recollections (dedicated in the English version to Lucy Arbell)

Interviews with Teresa Berganza (Ionarts, March 9, 2005)

Verdi, Falstaff (Mariinsky Opera, 2007)

Baltimore Consort's 'The Ladyes Delight'

Charles T. Downey, High-profile act punctuates Early Music Festival
Washington Post, June 5, 2012

The Ladyes Delight (Entertainment Music of Elizabethan England), Baltimore Consort (1998)

The Washington Early Music Festival returned in force this weekend, and with 32 events scheduled over the space of 29 days, the largest in scope it has ever been. Festival director Constance Whiteside said that the organization even turned away some groups that wanted to perform, in the interest of keeping the event, staffed by volunteers, at a manageable size. While in past years it has focused on a single country’s music, the theme this year is “Vices and Virtues,” which opens up a wider field of possibilities.

On Sunday afternoon St. Matthew’s Cathedral hosted one of the festival’s most high-profile acts, the Baltimore Consort. The program, called “The Ladyes Delight,” featured only a few of the dance tunes from the group’s CD of that name, focusing instead on ballads and other dance pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries. The ensemble’s fragile sound, with the melody mainly in the treble viol and a breathy, low transverse flute, was often murky in the cathedral’s large space. Mindy Rosenfeld’s virtuosic turns on higher-pitched flutes and one magnificently odd French branle — played on three whining crumhorns — set one’s foot tapping the most. [Continue reading]

Baltimore Consort: The Ladyes Delight
Cathedral of St. Matthew
Washington Early Music Festival

Collite, virgo, rosas (poem attributed to Ausonius, sometimes to Virgil)

JACK Quartet @ NGA

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

I. Xenakis, Complete String Quartets, JACK Quartet (2009)

We will take every chance we can get to hear the JACK Quartet play, and we have had plenty of chances this season. The group, which specializes in new music, took part in the Ives festival hosted by the Post-Classical Ensemble last November, and performed at the Library of Congress the year before that. We even had to miss a lunchtime concert they gave at the National Gallery of Art just this past April, which we recommended but could not attend. Happily, the group was back at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening, in the auditorium of the museum's East Building, for another concert of contemporary music. It was sparsely attended, especially after some members of the audience heard the first one or two pieces, but a few masochistic stalwarts stuck it out to the end. A composer could not ask for more committed interpreters of his or her music: a performance by the JACK Quartet is likely to put any music these musicians believe in in the best light. Sadly, that is still not always enough.

Bookending the concert were two composers whom this eclectic foursome has championed most steadfastly. Georg Friedrich Haas's fifth string quartet, which opened the program, is not the one performed in complete darkness -- that is the disorienting no. 3, "In iij. Noct." -- but it plays with the same issues of space and time. The four players were positioned at the auditorium's four corners, surrounding the audience, making little snatches of sound swirl around our heads. These musical ideas -- glissandi, tremolos, dissonant clusters, consonant harmonies, microtones, overtones making the harmonic series buzz, sometimes moaning like human voices, sometimes whining like electronic feedback -- bounced antiphonally from player to player, in a little, semi-contrapuntal stretto of close imitation, beats of dissonance setting the air aflutter. The JACK Quartet has not yet recorded any of Haas's quartets, but I am not sure that the real effect of this music can be captured on sound equipment.

The Haas was paired quite nicely with much older music, three vocal pieces by 14th-century Guillaume de Machaut in a transcription by JACK violinist Ari Streisfeld, music that had its own fierce rhythmic complexity, in hocket-like interactions between the voices, and modal harmonies that can be hair-raising to tonally oriented ears. The JACK Quartet has recorded the quartets of Iannis Xenakis, heard at the end of the concert, and to magnificent effect. They gave everything they had to Tetras, a jolt of energy that brought me back to equilibrium after the middle part of this concert. It is a piece that exults in chaos -- or seems to, since most of the composer's music is rigorously controlled -- but it is enlivened by rhythmic vigor verve and shape. "Buckle up," was the pithy comment offered by cellist Kevin McFarland, and it was good advice.

In the middle were three pieces that can be enjoyed and appreciated fully just by hearing what they are about -- indeed it is probably better that way than actually hearing them. Roger Reynolds spoke about not forgotten, from 2010, as being inspired by the experience of hearing the Arditti Quartet play a new piece by Elliott Carter on two different occasions, first at the premiere and second a year later: the difference between the two performances made clear to him that "discovery was being replaced by mastery," that something about performers encountering the music new changed the nature of the performance. Reynolds based the inner four movements of his work on four excerpts from other composers -- when those little snippets surfaced, it was generally the most pleasing part -- leaving it to the performers to choose the order of the movements.

The other two pieces came from a composition seminar Reynolds led this spring, in which five students completed a work for string quartet that the JACK Quartet would perform and record. In Probabilities, Diarmid Flatley took 36 excerpts from earlier string quartets, one for roughly each decade of the genre's existence, and combined them using a mathematical probability structure. Jacob Sundstrom, for no comment from the Grey Room, used a similarly computer-oriented approach, taking a William S. Burroughs poem, breaking it into fragments, assigning musical ideas to each fragment, and recombining it. Some aspects of the words remained in the piece, in the form of consonants and vowels interjected by the musicians during the performance. If this sounds more like a process of assemblage than composition, you will not be surprised that it sounded that way, too. Even computers that have been taught to compose music have learned to introduce randomness, some digital approximation of inspiration, to be able to mimic human composers.

Next Sunday the free concert series at the National Gallery of Art returns to West Building's West Garden Court for a recital by soprano Rosa Lamoreaux and baritone William Sharp (June 10, 6:30 pm), in music by Barber, Musto, and other composers.

In Brief: Gradgitation Edition

Here is your regular (overflowing) Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Embedded here, a rare staging of Vivaldi's Farnace from the Opéra de Strasbourg, with a cast including Max Emanuel Cencic (Farnace) and Vivica Genaux (Gilade), with Concerto Köln in the pit and choreography by Lucinda Childs. [ARTE Live Web]


• A rare performance of Schumann's dramatic oratorio Der Rose Pilgerfahrt, by the Chœur de la Radio Flamande, the Chœur de Chambre Octopus, and the Brussels Philharmonic, under the baton of Michel Tabachnik. [France Musique]


• From the Salzburger Pfingstfestspiele 2012, watch Cecilia Bartoli, Andreas Scholl, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Philippe Jaroussky in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, with Il Giardino Armonico in the pit. [ARTE Live Web]


• Gustavo Dudamel leads the Berlin Philharmonic at the Salle Pleyel, in Beethoven's fifth symphony and Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. [France Musique]


• Starting this fall, Yannick Nézet-Séguin will be music director of three major orchestras -- Montréal, Philadelphia, and Rotterdam -- and he leads the latter ensemble today at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Christian Merlin caught up with the busy conductor for an interview. Since YNS described the relationship between a music director and orchestra like that of a "couple," how is he going to manage having a second and third family? "In Philadelphia, I found an orchestra that had always been among the best in the world but that had fallen into difficult times, with a change of performing venue, directors that did not stay long, an audience that was disappearing." He admits that it makes scheduling a nightmare and that he will have to take fewer guest conductor engagements, although he regrets the opportunity to learn from those. "When I direct the Vienna Philharmonic in Brahms, I learn a lot. The symphony orchestra is one of the last places in the Western world where there is still an oral tradition: you have to respect that and bring it to life." [Le Figaro]


• Recorded in Berlin in 1966, a performance of Gustav Albert Lortzing's Undine with a cast including Anneliese Rothenberger (Undine), Nicolai Gedda (Hugo), Hermann Prey (Kühleborn), Sieglinde Wagner (Marthe), and Peter Schreier (Veit), with the RIAS Kammercho and the Radio Symphonieorchester Berlin. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• You may be able to watch the anniversary performance of Britten's War Requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at Coventry Cathedral (video not working at time of writing). Andris Nelsons conducts, with soloists Erin Wall, Mark Padmore, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann. [ARTE Live Web]


• Frédéric Mitterrand led the establishment of the Festival de l'histoire de l'art last year in Fontainebleau, and organizers were expecting 17,000 people to attend the second edition this weekend. According to an article by Eric Bietry-Rivierre, the discipline of art history is poorly taught in French secondary schools, and the organizers have sponsored a plan to increase the teaching of the subject over three years of required study at the end of high school. It is one of the subjects that I teach, culminating in A.P. Art History, and my feeling is that the curriculum I teach is fairly rare in American high schools, too. Students in France should be able to write about David's Serment du Jeu de Paume, Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple, paintings with mythological or religious subjects, and Manet's Olympia, not to mention artwork from other continents. Yes -- yes, they should. [Le Figaro]


• You can hear violinist Isabelle Faust with Camerata Salzburg in an all-Mendelssohn program, from the George Enescu Festival in Bucarest last fall. [France Musique]


• Daniel Barenboim leads the Vienna Philharmonic and violinist Michael Barenboim at this year's Wiener Festwochen, in the Schoenberg violin concerto, plus some Debussy. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Ionarts favorite Alexandre Tharaud plays Falla's Noches en los Jardines de España with the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France, along with music by Debussy and Turina. [France Musique]


• Listen to organist Simone Vebber and trumpeter Markus Eder playing a concert of music by Martini, Bach, Torelli, and others at Vienna's Augustinerkirche. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Jean-Guihen Queyras and friends join the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, at the Cité de la Musique, for music by Schumann and Hans-Peter Kyburz, including the French premiere of Touché, from 2006. [France Musique]


• From the Wiener Staatsoper on May 26, a performance of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, with a cast headed by Edita Gruberova as Elisabetta. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Have a listen to Messiaen's Les Offrandes oubliées and Unsuk Chin's Šu, a concerto for Chinese sheng and orchestra, from 2009, with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under the baton of Myung-Whun Chung, at the Théâtre du Châtelet. [France Musique]


• Hear the Altenberg Trio and friends perform chamber music by Brahms and Schubert (the "Trout" Quintet), recorded in April. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Watch Pablo González conduct the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, with Donald Litaker and Christian Gerhaher. [Medici.tv]


• At the Théâtre du Châtelet, Jean-François Zygel leads one of his Les Clefs de l’orchestre concerts, on the Brahms symphonies, with commentary from the keyboard and orchestral excerpts by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. [France Musique]


• Watch Colin Davis lead a performance of Mozart's Requiem Mass, with the Choeur de Radio France, the Orchestre National de France, and soloists Elin Rombo, Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Werner Güra, and John Relyea. [ARTE Live Web]


• A tribute to early music pioneer and soprano Judith Nelson, who died this week. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• From the Proms last September, a rebroadcast of the concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with violinist Janine Jansen (the Tchaikovsky violin concerto) and led by Charles Dutoit. [France Musique]


• From the Salzburger Pfingstfestspiele 2012, John Eliot Gardiner leads the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in Schumann's overture to Julius Cäsar and Berlioz's La mort de Cléopâtre with mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Speaking of uncommon music you will want to hear, the same forces also perform the cantata Rinaldo, with tenor Piotr Beczala and male chorus. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• A recital by baritone Marc Mauillon and pianist Anne Le Bozec, recorded last month in the Auditorium du Musée d'Orsay, with songs by Debussy, Chausson, Schoenberg, Pfitzner, and Strauss. [France Musique]


• From the Internationale Barocktage Stift Melk 2012, Le Musiche Nove perform cantatas by Handel and Le Petite Concert Baroque perform music by Bach and Handel. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]

For Your Consideration: 'Turn Me On, Dammit!'

Adolescence is an awful time to be alive, which thankfully we only have to survive once. Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen), the first feature from Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a Norwegian documentary and short film director, follows the growing pains of a 15-year-old girl named Alma in the tiny town of Skoddeheimen, Norway, but it could be any rural town anywhere. Alma's pointed introduction to her town, in voice-over in the opening sequence, outlines the boring details of this place where there is nothing but sheep, a small circle of friends, the occasional teen party, and her own vivid sexual fantasies -- the breathtaking beauty of the place, along one of Norway's gorgeous fjords, does not register in a teenager's consciousness, but why would it? Wait, what was that about sexual fantasies? Yes, that is what powers the engine of this quirky little film, to Jacobsen's own screenplay, based on the novel by Olaug Nilssen (who has a cameo in the film as the voice of the wife of Sebjørn, who runs the local grocery store). Alma's intense fantasies -- about her neighbor Artur (Matias Myren), about her friend Ingrid, about the man she speaks to on a phone sex line -- are so real that sometimes she has trouble distinguishing them from reality. When she has an odd encounter with Artur at a party -- did it actually happen, or was it only in her imagination? -- she finds herself an outcast for even speaking about it.

It is 20-year-old Helene Bergsholm's debut as Alma, whom she plays with fresh-faced candor and humor, not easy considering the frankness with which the script confronts the innermost thoughts of her character. There are more than a few similarities with, rather than (probably) references to, Twin Peaks, another northern town with plenty of weirdness going on, not least in some of the original music by Ginge Anvik, in a style sometimes akin to that for David Lynch's television show. At least for me, among the many high-school teen angst movies it could be like, the one that came most to mind was Heathers. Here there are also three friends, led by Ingrid (Beate Støfring), who with her pink lip gloss runs the show and expects the others to tow her line (I wonder what the Norwegian is for "Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?"). Ingrid's sister, Sara (Malin Bjørhovde, a sort of Scandinavian Janeane Garofalo), is the smart one, with plans to get out of Skoddeheimen and go to Texas to fight for the abolition of the death penalty. She even writes letters to convicts on death row, like a sort of epistolary diary. Alma has to start a part-time job to pay for the phone sex costs, which her mother (Henriette Steenstrup) discovers, so she works as a clerk at the local grocery store, for Ingrid and Sara's father, Sebjørn (Jon Bleiklie Devik).

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Alma's problem is not that she has these fantasies -- that is quite normal -- but her daring to express them and claim them is what gets her into trouble. Skoddeheimen is not an actual place, but a composite of anonymous towns in western Norway, like Solheimsdalen in the county Sogn og Fjordane, where Olaug Nilssen grew up. “It’s supposed to be anywhere in Norway that is dominated by tall mountains, dark fjords and fog,” Jacobsen is quoted as saying on the film's Web site. "In the nynorsk dialect of the area, 'Skodde' is a word for fog, and 'Heimen' means homestead." Most of the locations were shot in the county of Rogaland. In a small town everyone knows everyone else's business, and Jacobsen uses black-and-white stills with voice-overs to tell the story of how knowledge of Alma's transgression is carried along the gossip chain. The busybody next door, Magda (Hilde-Gunn Ommedal), is always watching them, but on the other hand when Alma turns up missing, her mother knows that whatever she may have missed about her daughter's life, the neighbor will know.

This film is now playing in Washington, exclusively at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

NSO Is Packing Its Bags

This post was modified after publication, with a clarification provided by Patricia O'Kelly, the Managing Director of Media Relations for the NSO.

Christoph Eschenbach is coming to the end of his second season with the National Symphony Orchestra, and the news continues to get better. The ensemble's latest program, heard last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, featured some of the pieces being readied for their upcoming tour of Central and South America, the group's first international tour in quite some time and an ambitious undertaking in an era when this sort of large-scale tour is less and less common. The NSO and its audience gave a warm ovation to three stalwarts in its membership, who will all be retiring at the end of this season: principal flutist Toshiko Kohno, the cellist David Howard, and principal percussionist F. Anthony Ames, all of whom have given three or four decades of service to the group. Along with principal horn player Martin Hackleman, who will retire resign at the end of next this season, that leaves a substantial number of seats to fill, more canvas for Eschenbach to paint on.

The program was another in the series of concerts without a high-profile soloist, giving us a chance to focus on the sound and temperament of the orchestra, who played with commitment and verve, signs of the ongoing rejuvenation of an ensemble that had lapsed just a bit into blandness through desuetude. A world premiere, a little firecracker bonbon by Sean Shepherd, the composer-in-residence with the Cleveland Orchestra, popped and crackled appropriately as a concert opener. It was hard to detect any signs of the fires of hell in Blue Blazes, which is one of the things the composer, in a charming and self-deprecating introduction to the work, indicated as an inspirational thought for the work. Opening with a pizzicato walking motif, the work percolated with a lot of ideas, punctuated with pseudo-Latin percussion touches (egg shaker, among others). Touches of Schoenberg-like chromatic atonal harmony permeated the second section, with a dreamy slow section featuring Bernstein-like wind writing and poetic violin solos, all of it shaped admirably by Eschenbach, before it returned to the opening ideas in the final measures. It was very much cut from the same cloth as the composer's Wanderlust, heard from the NSO last November, pleasing and skillfully compiled but probably not bound to endure.

Shepherd has said that he conceived the piece knowing that it would be introducing the other two works on this program, Richard Strauss's ebullient and tender suite from Der Rosenkavalier and Beethoven's seventh symphony, part of Eschenbach's ongoing Beethoven symphony cycle. The Strauss received a fine performance, better in many ways than the ill-fated one given by the Vienna Philharmonic earlier this spring with Lorin Maazel. Eschenbach led with a pleasingly elastic beat, so that the sighing motifs had a languid vitality but without distorting the waltz section too much with mannerism. He gave the brass section free reign, making for ecstatic horn swoops and some great crashes of sound, including a near-manic, circus-like atmosphere for the waltz's return at the work's conclusion, but protecting the soft passages, especially the solo sections, in a contained envelope of sound.

Other Articles: Anne Midgette, Christoph Eschenbach and National Symphony Orchestra are having fun (Washington Post, June 1) Emily Cary, What in the 'Blue Blazes' (Washington Examiner, May 31)

The Beethoven was more mannered and therefore less successful, but with much to admire along the way. The first movement seemed lethargic, or perhaps intentionally deliberate and insistent for the tempo marking of Vivace. With such a large number of strings seated, it made some sections too heavy with this approach, like the leaden turbulence of the recapitulation, where there is all that activity on the dotted-note motif. By contrast, the second movement had a good sense of movement to it, with careful attention to dynamic contrasts, like the pianissimo repeats of many sections. The third movement was not too fast, which can happen in some performances, and the trio, slowed down considerably, had the feel of a nostalgic, pastoral horn call across an Alpine valley. The finale brimmed with brio, capping what many, myself included, consider to be Beethoven's best contribution to the classical symphony. The NSO also got to try out an encore piece for the tour, surprising the swaths of people who make an early exit to the parking garage: the "Bohemian Dance" from Bizet's Carmen, which could use a little more rehearsal to get it to a diamond-like polish.

This concert repeats tonight and tomorrow night (June 1 and 2), in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.