Classical Week in Washington (8/21)

Classical Week in Washington is a weekly feature that appears on Sundays. If there are concerts that you would like to see included on our schedule, send your suggestions by e-mail (note the spiffy new address: ionarts at gmail dot com). Plan your concert schedule for the entire month of August with our Classical Month in Washington (August), or your summer opera listening with Opera in the Summer 2005. The selection is meager enough that we gave some thought to not even bothering this week, but here is what we have found.

Monday, August 22, 6 pm
Voest-Alpine Concert Band (from Linz, Austria)
Kennedy Center Millennium Stage

Tuesday, August 23, 12:10 pm
Rachel Barham, soprano, with Andrew Simpson, piano [FREE]
Church of the Epiphany (1317 G Street NW)

Thursday, August 25, 6 pm
City of Belfast Youth Orchestra [FREE]
Kennedy Center Millennium Stage

Friday, August 26, 8 pm
U.S. Army Concert Band concert
U.S. Capitol, west side

Saturday, August 27, 8 pm
AIDS Marathon Opera Gala
Washington, D.C., Scottish Rite Center
See the review by Joe Banno (Washington Post, August 29)

Sunday, August 28, 5 pm
Organ Recital: Gerald Gifford (Thornham, U.K.)
Washington National Cathedral

Sunday, August 28, 6 pm
Ronald Stolk (St. Patrick's in the City, Washington), organ [FREE]
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Great Upper Church

——» Go to last week's schedule, for the week of August 14.

Charles Mackerras at 80

Also on Ionarts: More on Janáček Operas in France (May 27, 2005) Makropoulos Affair in Lyon (May 20, 2005) Cunning Little Vixen in Berlin: Follow-Up (February 3, 2005) Cunning Little Vixen in Berlin (January 28, 2005) Kát'a Kabanová in Paris (November 9, 2004) Opera Is Back in Toulouse (October 16, 2004) Leoš Janáček (August 2, 2004)

Thanks to On an Overgrown Path, I read an excellent profile (The modest maestro, August 20) of one of my favorite conductors, Charles Mackerras, by Stephen Moss in The Guardian:

At 80, Mackerras shows little sign of slowing up. He is conducting Mozart's unfinished opera Zaide at the Edinburgh Festival on Tuesday, goes to the Czech Republic to conduct the Prague Symphony Orchestra next month, will conduct Fidelio in Edinburgh and London's Barbican in early October and three concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic later that month, and then heads for Covent Garden, where his birthday performance of Un Ballo in Maschera is sure to be a heady occasion. The house that never quite gave him the top job is now his natural home.

"My wife always jokingly says - well, I don't know how jokingly - that I only seem to be happy when I'm standing in front of an orchestra," says Mackerras. "There's an element of truth in that. I would be very sad if I had to retire. In fact, I'd quite like to die on the podium." Then he laughs. "Well, something like that anyway."

A far better plan, in my opinion, would be to go on conducting forever. I adore the operas of Leoš Janáček, and it is unlikely that I ever would have gotten to know them without Mackerras's pioneering work. I advise you to go and read this long and fascinating article about him.

Summer Opera: Britten's Curlew River

I thought I had written the final summer opera post on Britten, but it is still officially summer in Scotland. Actor/director Olivier Py directed a rare production of Britten's Curlew River at the Edinburgh International Festival (August 15 to 19). The libretto is based on the Noh play Sumidagawa (The Madwoman at the Sumida River), which was also staged in Edinburgh this year. David Murray reviewed the production (Curlew River, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, August 18) for the London Financial Times:

[Librettist William] Plomer conceived [his adaptation] as a play-within-a-play put on by a troupe of Christian monks, led by their abbot. In East Anglia a bereaved mother crazed by grief, the Madwoman, searches on a ferryman's boat for her lost son, and is at last consoled by the appearance of his spirit at his tomb. Britten adapted his style radically for this very un-English but irresistibly moving story, with a mere seven-strong band of monodic instruments each following its own path, like the five solo singers and small chorus (all male). He never wrote another opera like it, though the other two little operas he composed later as companion-pieces share some of its features. With Garry Walker’s perceptive conducting, the tenor Toby Spence adapts his usual exuberance for the desperate Madwoman. Tim Mirfin incarnates the wise and kindly Abbot; William Dazeley sings the staunch Ferryman, and Neal Davies the sympathetic Traveller. They are all good to hear, and the stage-realisation is faultless.

Tim Ashley's review (Curlew River, August 17) for The Guardian puts the work in a more religious context:

Catholic director Olivier Py's new production is a devastating experience, theologically exacting, yet never for a second swamping naked emotion beneath religious imagery or ritual. Py's basic idea is that suffering represents for each of us a private Calvary. While dressing for the performance of their "mystery", the monks playing the Madwoman, the Ferryman and the Traveller are daubed with Christ's stigmata. The revelation that the child buried by the river is the Madwoman's son is staged as the deposition from the cross, while the appearance of the boy's spirit hints at images of Christ triumphant. Py also implies that the Madwoman is not alone in her agony: the Traveller clutches a picture of an unidentified woman throughout - perhaps his wife, but certainly someone both lost and hopelessly sought.

In his review (Edinburgh reports: tragedy gets lost in the comedy, August 17) for The Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen is not as enthused:

"Please note, there is some nudity in this production" reads a sign in the foyer. Here we go, I thought, skinny-dipping in Britten's Curlew River, whatever next. In the event, there was only the momentary stripping of poor Toby Spence as he is ritually transformed from a lyric tenor into a lady in a long black dress, but yes, it was pretty gratuitous - one of several desperate tactics by the director Olivier Py, who clearly does not trust this austere moral drama to make its effect without some extra theatrical frissons.

On the other hand, Lynne Walker's review (There's no business like 'Noh' business, August 18) for The Independent gives some interesting details:

Py is adamant that, despite being performed by men, the piece shouldn't come across as a camp work. The young British tenor Toby Spence plays the madwoman. He has learnt from Py, he says, how to get inside the skin of a woman. When not directing, Py has another life as a chanteuse, a comic-tragic creation called Miss Knife, yet to make her Edinburgh debut. Spence was mesmerised when he caught Py's one-man/woman show in Paris.

You have to see the pictures of Le Cabaret de Miss Knife to believe it. (There is also some video footage from Miss Knife's appearance in New York.) Lynne Walker also reviewed the Noh play, Sumidagawa, which was the focus of the review by Alastair Macauley (Sumidagawa, The Hub, Edinburgh, August 18) for the London Financial Times, in addition to some remarks on the opera:

To see Curlew River back to back with Sumidagawa is an opportunity that most of us will never have again. They share very much the same dramatic schema. A ferryman tells of the anniversary of the burial of a 12-year-old boy; it becomes clear that the Madwoman who is among his passengers is the mother of this dead child; the ferryman leads her to the tomb; she invokes the ghost; the ghost appears and vanishes; she is left disconsolate but healed. The power of this drama, delivered with extreme economy by an all-male cast, emerges through the blend of movement, music and, above all, stylised dramatic vocalism. One would like to analyse at length the extraordinary use of chanting, of chest and head tones, and of heavy tremolo used by the dramatic soloists. The effect is cumulative: so that, at Edinburgh, the performance by the shite (leading actor) Tetsunojo Kanze achieved heightened emotion of a most haunting kind. The fixed gaze of his mask was riveting; his slow arm gestures towards the eyes and away from it were piercing; his changing place, direction, and rhythm within the overall stage geometry created many intensities. Certain phrases, never loud but delivered with a particular vocal pressure, rising and falling as do so many lines in Noh, acquired an astounding level of pain, bewilderment, and loss, throbbing in the mind’s ear long after the performance.

OK, if we add Edinburgh, next year's Ionarts junket of summer festivals is going to be a long trip. By the way, this production will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, September 18, at 6:30 pm.

Googleberg

Other Articles: Eric Leser, Les défenseurs de la liberté sur Internet s'en prennent à Google (Le Monde, August 19) Frédérique Roussel, Google bute sur les droits d'auteur (Libération, August 17) R. G., Bibliothèque universelle : Google recule (Le Figaro, August 15) Adam M. Smith, Making books easier to find (Google Blog, August 11)

As you probably know, Google Library has drastically altered its procedures and plans for scanning all of the books in five major libraries of the United States and Great Britain (mentioned in my post yesterday). When Google announced their initial plans, there were complaints in Europe, entirely justified in my opinion, that the Library would be too heavily focused on anglophone literature. The government of France, much to my delight, quickly put together its own digitalization project, so I was not surprised to see that the leaders of that project had something to say about Google's step back from the brink this week. An article by Thomas Sotinel (Le président de la Bibliothèque nationale de France "salue la sagesse de Google", August 16) in Le Monde relays the crucial details (my translation):

Reacting to the announcement by Google that it was suspending the digital scanning of copyrighted books, the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, hailed "the wisdom of Google, which took into account a certain number of criticisms, notably those coming from Europe." [...] In the face of mounting opposition from American publishers, the company in Mountain View (California) announced, on Friday, August 12, on its site that it was suspending, until November, the scanning of copyrighted books. It is asking publishers to compile a list of works that they do not want to see scanned. The Association of American Publishers, through its president, the former Democratic Congresswoman from Colorado, Pat Schroeder, has already rejected the offer.

This delay does not solve the problems caused by the Google project. "There are also problems in how works are chosen, in making up bodies of literature," M. Jeanneney remarked by telephone. "When you look up Victor Hugo in the Beta version of Google Print (the premilinary version already online), you find only one title in French." The president of the BNF sees in the pause announced by Google a sign of the "collective efficacy" of the Europeans, who are working on an alternative project to make a universal virtual library, which has received the support of heads of state and the European Commission in Brussels, after the Journées européennes de la culture, in May. For M. Jeanneney, "now is the time to accelerate our pace and avoid bureaucratic snags, especially in Brussels, to make it clear that this is a European undertaking and not just France getting its underwear in a bunch [qui se dresse sur ses ergots]."

Although I have seen the unflattering words projet pharaonique (an adjective that combines the quixotic qualities of Google's project with a sense of self-aggrandizement that I myself do not see in it) attached to Google's plan in more than one French daily, there is also widespread admiration for the idea of Google Library, if not the anglocentric realization. (Frédérique Roussel, writing in Libération, had the most beautiful phrase when he called Google Library "this beautiful idea of a digital Babel, with a Borgesian flavor." Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote The Library of Babel, would probably have loved this idea.) If Google wants my two cents (and, hey, they should also buy out Ionarts and hire us as cultural correspondents while they are at it), they should make an official alliance with the European project right now, which would give them plenty of books to scan that are all without legal problems attached. The publishing houses can decide one by one if they want their books to be part of the digital revolution. Those that decide to abstain will probably regret it.

Three person'd God; for you / As yet but knocke

This is a follow-up to my recent tour of Blogville. For those of you who haven't been checking The Rest Is Noise almost daily to see if Alex Ross has resumed blogging yet (or who don't use Bloglines yet), the entire Music neighborhood of Blogville is breathing a sigh of relief. Thank goodness, once you have the blogging bug, it's pretty hard to give it up. His recent post (it's so good to be able to say that about The Rest Is Noise, isn't it?) on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson withdrawing from the upcoming premiere of Doctor Atomic has a nifty image. I was struck more, however, by the title of the post, Batter My Heart, which comes from the first line of one of my favorite Holy Sonnets by John Donne. He also has posted lovely pictures from his trip to Austria.

Summer Opera: Blitzstein's Regina at Bard

Other Reviews: David Noh, Regina Rocks Hudson Valley (Gay City News, August 11) David Patrick Stearns, Bard festival skillfully revives Blitzstein's 'Regina' (Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2) Kyle Gann, Regina, Briefly Out of the Closet (PostClassic, August 1) Ben Mattison, Photo Journal: Regina at Bard SummerScape (Playbill Arts, July 31)

The first and only time I have heard an excerpt from Marc Blitzstein's opera Regina was at the American opera scenes recital at the Renwick Gallery last year (American Opera at the Renwick Gallery, October 11, 2004). So, I noted with great interest (Opera in the Summer 2005, June 2) the full production planned for this summer at Bard SummerScape (July 29 to August 6), and judging by the number of reviews I have read, most people in the press were interested, too. Michael Feingold went out to Bard to review it (Southern Discomfort, August 9) for The Village Voice:

The quintessence of the indeterminate form that, for want of a better word, we call "Broadway opera," Regina is as hard to produce as it is to place artistically. You need an opera house orchestra at ease with jazz rhythms and sensitive enough to play sympathetically under dialogue sequences. The cast has to answer operatic demands musically, project difficult words with immaculate diction, and act convincingly enough to get through at least the equivalent of an adequate summer stock performance of The Little Foxes. And the director has to be able to shape these forces — always assuming the conductor's cooperation — into a performance that will not only hold the crazy-quilt work together, but will give some sense of its social and moral, as well as its musical and theatrical, resonance. For The Little Foxes is not simply a wicked-woman melodrama; it is about the rise of industrial capitalism in the agrarian South, about indeterminacies of race and class after the Civil War, about a robber baron era in American politics with painful similarities to our own. The play's alliance of "Hubbard Sons and Marshall" (Regina's crooked brothers and the Northern cotton buyer they team with) is the ancestry of today's Republican party. Decidedly, Regina is not a task for the fainthearted.

He calls the production "a brave one, starting with the choice of work," Leon Botstein's conducting "powerful, though sometimes aggressively rowdy or hurried, and installation artist Judy Pfaff's contribution a "dreadful abstract set, which ingeniously managed to obstruct movement without conveying any atmosphere." Another reviewer, Anne Midgette (That Frightening Regina, Her Breeding and Rage, August 1) writing for the New York Times, disagrees about Pfaff's set, which actually sounded quite interesting:

The staircase was a silver helix spiraling up from the earth to balance the first story and continuing on to evoke a phantom upper floor. It was a structure at once complex and crystal clear, refined and vernacular, and thus mirrored the piece it was made to serve. Created by the installation artist Judy Pfaff, it was the focus of her set for the production of Marc Blitzstein's opera "Regina" that opened Friday night at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College as part of the Summerscape festival. In fact the staircase said it all: this "Regina" was spare, elegant and classy. Which is no small feat, because "Regina" is hardly a streamlined opera: there's lots of plot and lots of text (here delivered largely comprehensibly, without supertitles, to the credit of the generally respectable cast). It's based on Lillian Hellman's play "The Little Foxes" (known to many through the film with Bette Davis), and Blitzstein sought to fuse various strains of the American vernacular in a conglomerate score that's studded with set pieces, now lush, now bristling, now tinged with jazz and complete with singing and dancing African-Americans. These minstrel-show elements date the work, which had its first performance in 1949; what the composer intended as a gesture of emancipation now reads as rather the opposite. Still, the production showed why they should be included, uncomfortable though they be, in part because of the exuberant music and in part because of the composer's sense of dramatic pacing (which this complete version showed to have been quite sound).

Most of the reviews I read have praised Lauren Flanigan's work in the title role, and some gave kudos to tenor Jason Collins, a singer from South Carolina who clearly understood the southern nature of his character, Leo. Will someone please release a CD of this work? The old Decca/Polygram recording with Samuel Ramey et al. is out of print and hard to find. Fortunately for me, there is a copy at my local library. The "Rain Quartet," which I heard at that recital last year, is really a catchy piece of music.

Out There in Blogville

You know, I used to do a post of links to other people's blogs quite regularly, and then I stopped. This is not because of a lack of good reading in Blogville, certainly, and must have something to do with our craze for content lately.

Thanks to the Blowhards (are there really only 2 of them now?) for their kind mention of little old us in a (typically) thorough and wide-ranging post on the culture of the arts:

The culture-chat ground has been leveled. If you find that what the Sunday Times peddles is displeasing, it takes almost no effort to surf over and check in with the classy cast at IonArts.

As I was finishing up my last traversal of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Waggish started in on Waggish Reads Proust. It was a real attempt to blog the reading of Proust, and I enjoyed reading it, but it appears to have stalled out in the middle of Volume 4. However, Waggish's eclectic and profound, if infrequent, posts have continued on his regular blog, much to my enjoyment. Some of the good ones lately include an appraisal of a difficult but rewarding book, Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau and a series of reflections on the genre of blogging.

The Standing Room recounts a hilarious tragic story that befell a parking control officer in San Francisco. (Three-wheeled scooter, hill, brake failure, crash with carpet cleaning truck.) We returned from our trip to Santa Fe to discover a ticket on our car, which was parked in a completely legal spot. Fortunately, the hearing examiner agreed with me, on the basis of photographs I took with me to dispute the ticket. Do I stop there? No, I am trying to get the Department of Motor Vehicles to put an official complaint of frivolous citation in the officer's file. Sadly, we don't have many dangerous hills in Washington.

How long should recorded sounds be legally copyrighted? At The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson discusses the British plan to double it (or so) from the current length of 50 years. We have to be able to get around the copyright issue somehow, to move the information revolution ahead. What will happen to our grip on information if Google Library really is only allowed to scan books printed before 1923? Will our view of literary history be permanently skewed?

Not really bloggish but still funny are some of the great articles in this week's issue of The Onion:

• Rumsfeld Makes Surprise Visit to Wife's Vagina
  
• U.S. Intelligence: Nukehavistan May Have Nuclear Weapons
  
• Evangelical Scientists Refute Grave with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

I was planning to write something in reaction to this article (The New, Exciting and Soon Forgotten, August 15) by Allan Kozinn for the New York Times, about orchestral programming of new compositions. However, I can be lazy and direct you instead to two professional players' responses to it, from Patricia Mitchell at oboeinsight and Brian Sacawa at Sounds Like Now.

Summer Opera: Rameau's Zoroastre in Drottningholm

A few days ago, I wrote a post (Saving Drottningholm Court Theater, August 10) about the famous Baroque court theater at Drottningholm Palace, outside of Stockholm. Shortly thereafter, I came across an article (A Drottningholm, le baroque en son écrin, August 14) by Renaud Machart in Le Monde on the same subject (my translation):

It has to be said: the façade of the legendary theater in Drottningholm ("the Queen's island"), located on the grounds of the Swedish royal family's palace, which it still occupies, is disappointing for those who are expecting to find a Rococo building. In fact, if you put the SNCF sign on the front, the building would almost look like a small town's railway station. [...]

At the court of Gustave III (1746-1792), everyone spoke, read, and wrote French. The monarch, who had visited the Kingdom of France in 1771, also had a troupe of French actors in permanent residence, who performed Grand Siècle classics, as well as Beaumarchais. Many 18th-century operas were performed also, but never Rameau or Mozart. The king ended all relations with France at the Revolution (calling the new government "orangutans") but was himself assassinated in the theater, in 1792, by a plot of the nobles, furious at having seen their privileges eroded by his. This event inspired operas: Auber's Gustave III, ou Le Bal masqué (1833) and Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera (1859) on the same libretto by Eugène Scribe. After the sovereign's death, the theater was left practically unused through the beginning of the 20th century, which explains the miraculous state in which it was found in 1921.

Machart was in Sweden to see the production of Rameau's Zoroastre conducted by Christophe Rousset from France (the last of this summer's three operas). In the article, he describes the tour of the backstage machinery that Rousset led him on. In the same day's issue of Le Monde, there was also Machart's review of Zoroastre (Luxure musicale et sobriété dramatique pour le "Zoroastre" de Rameau, August 14):

There are two unforgettable acoustic experiences for any music-loving festival-goer: that of the Bayreuth theater, constructed precisely for the operas of Richard Wagner, and that of the little Drottningholm royal theater, ideal for the operas of the 18th century. [...] The great Swedish singer Elisabeth Söderström, who was the theater's artistic director for several years, had it right when she said that this theater's sound has "the same magic as that of a Stradivarius."

When, on Friday, August 12, the conductor Christophe Rousset launched his musicians into the almost raging overture of Zoroastre, an extraordinary opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, not staged much, one felt oneself trapped in a beam of harmonious vibrations. The sound has presence, energy, grain. It was dry, but a muscled and not woody dryness, a fullness in this wooden background. The sonic force was decoupled when the singers came to the edge of the stage, where the sound is the most ideal. One's ears were filled: Rameau played like this is an orgy of sound.

The same team of artists and musicians, led by Christophe Rousset, will reconvene next summer for a production of Rameau's wonderful mythological opera Castor et Pollux. Perhaps the Ionarts junket of European opera festivals next summer should include Drottningholm along with Savonlinna?