Ionarts at Large: Peter Grimes at the Met

Peter Grimes, directed by John Doyle with sets by Scott Pask, Metropolitan Opera, photo by Ken Howard, 2008

The Metropolitan Opera's new production of Peter Grimes had a rocky critical reception. All critics lavished praise on the musical aspects but, with the exception of Martin Bernheimer, cast aspersions on the dark, spartan staging of the opera by John Doyle. At the final performance on Monday night, it was clear why the Met, for its first Grimes since 1967 (when Jon Vickers sang the title role), had misfired. The main feature of the set, designed by Scott Pask, was a looming wall of dark wood that rolled forward and backward, split into two, and was pierced by door and window openings. Doyle, a Broadway director in his first outing at the Met, chose to draw a parallel between this claustrophobic feature and the dark impassivity of the drably clothed cast and chorus (costumes by Ann Hould-Ward), the gossiping, judgmental villagers of the Borough ("Where the walls themselves gossip of inquest!," as the libretto reads). This makes perfect sense, since the Borough is so skewed that even its sea shanties ("Old Joe has gone fishing") are in uneven meter.

Other Reviews: Anthony Tommasini, The Outsider in Their Midst: Britten’s Tale of the Haunted Misfit (New York Times, March 1) Anne Midgette, A Grim Outcome for 'Grimes' at The Met (Washington Post, March 1) Jeremy Gerard, Magnificent 'Grimes' a Fiasco in New Met Staging (Bloomberg News, March 1) Joshua Kosman, Runnicles energizes Met's 'Grimes' (San Francisco Chronicle, March 7) Heidi Waleson, A Staging Better Heard Than Seen (Wall Street Journal, March 6) Martin Bernheimer, Peter Grimes, Metropolitan Opera, New York (Financial Times, March 3) Matt Blank, Photo Journal: John Doyle Directs Peter Grimes at the Met (Playbill Arts, February 29) James Jorden, Surmounting Disaster (Gay City News, March 20) Attend the tale of Peter Grimes (Out West Arts, March 25)

The wall is removed completely only at the very end of the opera, when Grimes has set off for his suicide at sea. The villagers all watch from the shore, powerless (really, unwilling) to help, and finally the light of the sea is visible. On Monday night, the wall was removed to reveal only a brightly lit backdrop, but the opening night performance reportedly featured something in that empty space, a wall-like set of ramps with supernumeraries on them in trendy modern dress. Martin Bernheimer was the only major critic to mention having seen it ("The walls disappear during the final resolution, exposing a skeletal steel structure that in fact suggests a cruise ship. Distant travellers on symmetrical ramps observe Grimes’ Borough from another time, another place"). James Jorden, and his blog alter-ego La Cieca, identified that vista, disposed of by the second performance, as the "Wall of LGBT Role Models." Was the production conceived as a way to connect the possible homophobic side of the story to modern homosexuals?

The bleak story of Grimes was drawn from George Crabbe's poem The Borough (a set of 24 letters about a Suffolk seaside village, with Letter 22 about Peter Grimes). Montagu Slater wrote the libretto, in close association with Britten (who was born in Suffolk, the seascape where "half-naked seaboys crowd," according to the libretto) and his companion, tenor Peter Pears, who created the title role. The work began in the early 1940s, when Britten and Pears were refugees in the United States during World War II, and the outsider title character could be identified with Britten's predilection for teenage boys or his pacifist views, both of which set him uncomfortably apart. While the ominous wall captured the oppressive sense of the "Borough hate [that] poisons your mind," as Peter sings at one point, it was a visual bludgeon where more subtle means would have been more apt. Furthermore, the Borough's hatred is only one part of this masterful score, and the only visual element corresponding to the siren call of the sea interludes was a blue light (design by Peter Mumford) cast on the wall from time to time.

The best example of a more subtle and truly excellent production was the Santa Fe Opera Grimes in 2005. The Grimes from that production, Anthony Dean Griffey, was just as fine at the Met. The cavernous space here was a less welcoming acoustic for his sweet upper register, which almost evokes an abused choirboy grown old and bitter. That is one possible explanation of the perverse tendencies of Grimes, as we know that abusers of children were often abused as children, perhaps hinted at in the particularly rough direction of the scenes between Grimes and his ill-fated (ap)prentice, John, played with innocent, mute vulnerability by Logan William Erickson. In Griffey's mad scenes ("Now the Great Bear and Pleiades," notably) there was a tender, poetic quality that goes along with those oddly lyric words from a roughneck fisherman. All in all, Griffey was a much better choice for the role than Neil Shicoff, whom he reportedly replaced in the role, for whatever reason.

Felicity Palmer (Mrs. Sedley) and Teddy Tahu Rhodes (Ned Keene) in Peter Grimes, Metropolitan Opera, photo by Ken Howard, 2008

Patricia Racette, an Ionarts favorite certainly since her memorable Jenůfa in Washington last season, was a warm, tragically misguided Ellen Orford. The only regret vocally was that the grain in her high range removed some of the clarion clarity necessary to propel her over the orchestra and chorus (in the second act, especially -- where Christine Brewer so excelled in Santa Fe). However, the quieter moments like the Embroidery aria, were luscious and radiant. Other noteworthy performances came from Felicity Palmer as the laudanum-hooked busybody Mrs. Sedley, Jill Grove as a brusque, voluptuous Auntie, Anthony Michaels-Moore's officious but stentorian Captain Balstrode, John Del Carlo's suave Swallow, and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as a dashing, quirky, and resonant Ned Keene, the apothecary.

The main dramatic effect of the production's ominous wall was to reduce the large and musically potent chorus (directed admirably by Donald Palumbo) to something like a concert performance of Peter Grimes. Removing some of the characters to the niches in the wall (which La Cieca so archly compared to the sets of Laugh-In) further sapped the opera's dramatic vitality, as in the final scene. Some choreographic attempts to create a sense of movement, like the hauling motions in the first act, came off as lame-hearted and ridiculous. Fortunately, none of this mattered much to one's enjoyment of what could be considered the greatest opera of the 20th century, not least because of the excellent playing from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the masterful, left-handed baton of Donald Runnicles. The orchestral fabric, even without visual help, painted the sea as sometimes gentle, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately the only bed where Grimes could take his rest.

To our great joy, Britten's Peter Grimes is also on the schedule for the 2008-2009 season at Washington National Opera (also with Patricia Racette as Ellen Orford).

Ionarts at the Guggenheim: I Want to Believe

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008, photo by David Heald/Guggenheim Foundation More images

The exhibit that everyone, even those friends who are not art-heads, told me to see during this trip to New York is Cai Guo-Qiang's I Want to Believe. It is both a retrospective of the Chinese-born artist's work and a site-specific installation that has taken over almost all of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At its center is the new piece conceived for the exhibit, Inopportune: Stage One (pictured), which is an ingenious use of the iconic helix-shaped atrium space of Frank Lloyd Wright's problematic building. Nine identical white Chevy Cavaliers, on a pedestal and hung from the ceiling at various elevations, trace a scenario all too familiar in the era of the terrorist: a car parks in the atrium of the Guggenheim, is exploded from within by a blast represented by arcing fiber-optic rays, flips upward and over backwards, and lands on the top level of the rotunda.

The piece is given some context by a video also shown at the ground level of the rotunda, Illusion. On a normal night in Times Square, people are driving and walking, seemingly oblivious to a car that rolls through the scene, lit by a fireball of pyrotechnics exploding inside it. That explosions could be so normal to our lives today as to go unnoticed is at the heart of the almost comic-book levity of the violence in Cai Guo-Qiang's work. It is a medium and approach that is perfectly suited to art in the post-9/11 world, all the more so because he began working with gunpowder and explosions in the late 1980s. His work was not begun as a reaction to 9/11, but in a sense he was ideally prepared to react to those events and to the particular challenges of today's omnipresent conflicts. The artist himself sets out his thoughts about the work shown in this exhibit, in an editorial piece for NY Arts Magazine.

Cai began using gunpowder in the 1980s, for example in Self-Portrait: A Subjective Soul. A video in the exhibit shows the artistic process: assisted by a team of collaborators, Cai attaches little packets of gunpowder in lines and shapes, or spreads it out with a broom over the canvas, paper, or other surface. After the gunpowder is ignited, shadowy images and burn marks remain, which are augmented by the artist with written annotations. All of these qualities connect these works with the most important tradition in Chinese art, the Confucian calligraphic landscape (Cai's preferred formats are, not coincidentally, multifold screens and scrolls). Later, the paper works became plans for actual explosion events, video records of which are also included in the exhibit. To document such ephemeral creations, many of which existed in time only for a few seconds, he sometimes displays scientific records (seismic measurements, graphs of his own heart rate) collected during the event. With the exploding light and resulting smoke of firework-distributed gunpowder, Cai can "paint" the sky with abstract patterns in striking ways, with a kinetic element provided by the wind that recalls the work of Alexander Calder.

Other Reviews: Roberta Smith, Cars and Gunpowder and Plenty of Noise (New York Times, February 22) Edwin Heathcote, The blast picture show (Financial Times, March 1) Ariella Budick, China's Cai Guo-Qiang captures horror at Guggenheim (Newsday, March 2) Richard Lacayo, The Big Bang (TIME, March 6) Ed Pikington, New York minutes: Sparks fly at the Guggenheim (Guardian Blog, March 6) Alexis Wang, Cai Guo-Qiang makes an explosion at the Guggenheim (Washington Square News, March 7) Carol Strickland, Cai Guo-Qiang has a blast with explosive art (Christian Science Monitor, March 14) Todd Jatras, Floating Cars Take Over Guggenheim (Wired, March 17)

The other side of the coin here is preservation, the natural obverse to destruction, which is the focus of many of the large-scale installation works in the show. In Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki (Smithsonian, 2004), Cai excavated the wreckage of a wooden ship and filled it with shattered porcelain dishes and Buddhist idols. In the piece that made him a finalist for the 1996 Hugo Boss prize, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, Cai combines the past (sheepskin bags associated with Genghis Khan) with Western fears of rising Asian industry (three noisy Toyota engines). In An Arbitrary History: River (Lyon, 2001), visitors are invited to ride in a yak-skin raft down a bamboo watercourse, viewing art pieces with live animals in them. (Most of the takers on this offer are children, and in general this exhibit is great for kids.)

The most profound pieces in the show deal with the issues of both preservation and destruction, in a sense, as part of the confrontation with, and simultaneously embrace of, totalitarianism. Head On, originally conceived for the Berlin Guggenheim, shows a pack of replica wolves running toward an invisible wall (set at the same height as the Berlin Wall), beginning on the ground and then lifted through the air, only to crash into the plexiglass barrier and tumble back to the ground. In Inopportune: Stage Two (2004), replicas of nine tigers (the number and the title recall the exploding car piece) are pierced with arrows like pincushions, at first eliciting sympathy and then raising questions about the cartoonish depiction of violence (also evoking the taxidermy sources of Henri Rousseau's animals).

Both Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard (1999 Venice Biennale) and Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows (2000) deal with episodes in Chinese history, the first contemporary and the latter farther in the past. In the former, adapted specifically for New York, soft clay replicas of a famous Chinese communist propaganda piece are recreated, showing the suffering of heroic Chinese peasants under tyrannical warlords. A work in progress, to the point that tools and materials are left strewn about the exhibition space, the figures gradually dry, crack, and crumble to pieces, a reference perhaps to "finishing" element of time in some works of Marcel Duchamp. Even with Stephen Spielberg and artist Ai Weiwei pulling out of the artistic efforts to stage the Beijing Olympics this summer, the participation of Cai Guo-Qiang (along with film director Zhang Yimou and composer Chen Qigang -- reportedly not Tan Dun) will make the games of significant cultural interest, although the fear of the Chinese regime's interest in the event as propaganda must also be noted.

Cai Guo-Qiang's I Want to Believe will be at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in Manhattan, through May 28. At the same time, the smaller From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim (through May 4) is also well worth seeing, a collection of paintings and other works at the nexus between post-figural work and real abstraction.

Bill Schmidt @ Paperwork

An artist I've admired since moving to Baltimore, quite a while ago, is Bill Schmidt. Bill, a multi-talented musician (playing the banjo, guitar, ukulele and fiddle) and a long-time teacher at the Maryland Institute and sculptor, has returned to painting, after a residency in Roche-en-Terre, France. The paintings in the exhibit at the Paperwork Gallery, Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time, are all gouache and colored pencil on paper along with several sculptural works.

A bit of an homage to Paul Klee's organic shapes and color, Schmidt's small (7"x5" and under) works are infused with organic forms, but also radiating electronic-like signals and, for me, what feels like an internal world of the human body, with its complex vascular system, molecular structures, and pulsating organs, held in their virtual world by a base of colorful grids. This patient is doing quite well.

The sculptures, for which Bill is most known, are either gently altered found objects, arranged on a shelf (pictured), or larger forms such as Pendule, made of stained wood and found objects, gracefully hanging from its perch. The shadow it casts creates a depth as seen in and around the shapes in the paintings.

Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time is at Paperworks Gallery through May 2nd, and there are more images on my Flickr site.

Beggar’s Opera at Châteauville Foundation

Lorin Maazel, conductor

Saturday evening, Lorin Maazel led an “in-house” production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera, adapted from the original airs of John Gay’s ballad opera from 1728, as a culmination of the 2008 Castleton Residency for Young Artists. Sponsored by the Châteauville Foundation and staged in the Maazels’ Castleton Farms Theater House at the foot of the Shenandoah mountains, the Castleton Residency has built upon the gripping success of their 2007 production of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia and Turn of the Screw in 2006. The 2008 Residency has provided an opportunity for up to 50 young artists “to live and work together intensively.” The outcome of this intensity is apparent in the fully staged production’s quality and level of detail.

Rarely performed in the United States, Britten’s 1948 adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera does not idealize John Gay’s adaptations of popular songs in a vividly colorful, Poulenc-like way. Britten’s earthy neo-classical approach sets the songs with rather thick orchestrations that remove much of the rhythmic character of the period, thus creating his own flavor. Britten’s thematic, sometimes melodic use of the timpani is clever.

Indeed, whenever the audience was likely saturated with the expert acting by the singers, a wonderful series of songs would unfold. The quick wit of the thieves Mr. and Mrs. Peachum (Michael Capra Rice and Melissa Parks) and their loyal gang of corrupt parties – the police, jailer, prostitutes, and street criminals – could only be accommodated in fleeting, brawny, accented dialogue. Information about the secret marriage of the Peachums’ daughter, Polly, to the charming philanderer Captain MacHeath (Dominic Armstrong) was met with Polly being addressed as “hussy,” “wench,” or “slut” by her parents throughout the entire work. “I love the sex,” said MacHeath, speaking of women. The expressive tenor then sang a sappy song at the side of a female audience member of “roses and lilies her cheeks disclose,” which kept on going to the point that Maazel began to roll his eyes. MacHeath then remarked, “I must have women.” Maazel quipped from the podium, “I know the feeling.”

The most expressive singing came from the wives of Captain MacHeath – Polly Peachum (Julia Elise Hardin) and Lucy Lockit (Sarah Moule). Both sopranos had voices that complemented the other, as the impassioned and bitterly jealous women sang for MacHeath’s favor. With voices always in motion, their fast, narrow vibratos allowed for a piercing clarity fitting for this music with equally clear text. Peachum and Lockit (Darren Perry), with their booming bass and baritone voices, demand a hanging.

Stage Director William Kerley utilized the entire theater by having entrances from ladders leading from the back balconies, passageways from below the stage, and multiple side entrances. Additionally, a platform was built around the pit so that singers could pass behind the podium. The set (basic furniture and a mural of St. Paul’s Cathedral) and period costumes (Nicholas Vaughan) were fitting. The Keio University 150 Student Orchestra of young, non-music major Japanese musicians made a fine effort.

Polly and Jenny (Laura Quest) were at times behind Maazel’s beat, leading him to frantically gesture for their attention. The dynamic mezzo Melissa Parks astounded with the bitterly expressive range of her voice, which might one day be appropriate to the role of Herodias in Salome. As Charles has mentioned, we hope that the Châteauville Foundation's Castleton Residency for Young Artists will one day be expanded to include performances in Washington, D.C.

The next concert hosted by the Maazels at Castleton Farms will feature the Attacca Quartet (April 6, 4 pm). All performances are by invitation only, so put yourself on the Châteauville Foundation's mailing list.

Heroic Helsingborg

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica"), Helsingborg SO, A. Manze (released March 11, 2008) Harmonia Mundi HMU 807470 Online score

Classical music fans everywhere are getting edgy as, more and more, historically informed performance (HIP) specialists eye masterpieces of the 18th and even 19th centuries for the early music treatment. Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr's last recording featured Schubert violin sonatas, and the effect of the fortepiano and reconditioned 18th-century violin in live performance was unforgettable. Manze is in the midst of a career shift, as he sets aside some of his work as a violinist, with the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music and as a soloist, to take up the post of Chief Conductor of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra. His first recording with the group, a mid-sized orchestra with a chamber-sized history, is a re-examination of the third symphony of Beethoven, a project labeled the "Eroica Effect."

Anyone who has studied the score of the Eroica symphony can recognize any number of distortions frequently taken by conductors. These are accretions that have been deposited like silt on top of the music, because it has been performed and recorded so frequently. Manze does not approach the score mechanically or slavishly, but he does try to hew to it much more closely than most conductors. His tempo choices are not strikingly different from other recordings, but the pacing is kept mostly consistent, leading to a lean, but not mean, total timing of 50:24.

While the Helsingborg Symphony is not playing on historical instruments, Manze does control the texture in ways that allow unfamiliar colors to shimmer in the orchestral fabric, again through a careful observation of the dynamic and articulation markings of the score. The timpani have a brilliant bite in places, and those low second bassoon notes I never noticed before (in the opening section of the fourth movement) sound much more prominent. The undermining of assumptions about the Eroica continues in the works selected to accompany the symphony. Most classical music fans would already know that Beethoven had used the theme of the symphony's last movement earlier in the last movement of his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, op. 43. In fact, the melody had already appeared in an even less heroic guise, as the seventh in a set of twelve Contredances, WoO 14. Both works round out this satisfying CD (but not the more obviously related "Eroica" Variations, op. 35, for fortepiano).

Next weekend, Andrew Manze will lead the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in a concert (March 30, 7 pm), at the George Mason University Center for the Arts. Tickets, from $25 to $50, remain available. The program, combining the Eroica Symphony with three overtures from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, should be worth a trip out to Fairfax.


Andrew Manze, The Eroica Effect, Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra

Don't Fence Me Out

I've haven't had the time to get out of the studio for some art viewing lately, but I have been keeping track of events. Here in Baltimore we're having a debate turned shouting and spitting match over an art collaboration between the Walters Art Museum and students from Professor George Ciscle's exhibition development seminar at the Maryland Institute. What started as a simple collaborative public art project, if there is such a thing, has turned into a heated debate over the public's right to the park, outrage over an unsightly-looking fence, whose paying for this, and even a public safety issue. The safety issue may be from the dog pooh left in plastic bags on the fence -- yuk.

Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square is an exhibit which is intended to bring attention to Mt. Vernon park, in collaboration with the Walter's current exhibit Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. The park, a designated National Landmark, is part of the neighborhood that surrounds the Museum. The controversy is over a tall, gold spray-painted chain link fence that surrounds each of the four public park squares radiating out from its centerpiece, the city's symbol and the country's first monument to George Washington. The monument itself had a controversial beginning, with complaints over its cost and fears that it would collapse, crushing the neighborhood. The fence is student artist Lee Freeman's contribution and will be removed on March 29th, allowing the public to access the park and view the work of nine other artists, whose interactive works will be set up throughout the four park squares.

The following concern was expressed to me by e-mail from George Ciscle:

We hope at some point everyone realizes this is only one artwork, not one exhibit of only one artist. Our fear is that once the other nine artists' works are installed in time for the March 29 opening/community celebration that the context of what has transpired will be lost in sacrifice to the exhibit as a whole.

I don't think it will. If anything the attention will draw more curious visitors to the site; it's turned into a perfect hands-on learning experience. Nothing grabs attention more than a public art project, especially when spring flowers are beginning to sprout and dog walkers want access to the park. I'll follow the progress of the collaboration and look forward to seeing the rest of the artwork. Sun article here.

Easter Wishes 2008

Ionarts at Large will be writing from New York City for the next couple days, with some reviews from the Metropolitan Opera. Enjoy the holiday!

This is a brief excerpt of the Troparia for the Lumen Christi, which we sing at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in a plainchant setting by Leo Nestor, every year at the Easter Vigil as the paschal candle is brought into the darkened church. The texts are translations of 2nd-century writings by Melito of Sardis and Clement of Alexandria:

Born as a son, led like a lamb,
Sacrificed like a sheep, buried as a man,
He rises from the dead as God,
Being by nature both God and man.

He is the judge of all things:
When he judges, he is law; when he teaches, word;
When he saves, grace; when he begets, father;
When he is begotten, son; when he suffers, lamb;
When he is buried, man; when he rises, God.

Come, then, all you races of humankind, whom sin has saturated,
And receive the forgiveness of sin.
For it is I who am your forgiveness; I, the saving pasch;
I, the lamb, sacrificed for you; I, your purification; I, your life;
I, your resurrection; I, your light; I, your salvation; I, your king!
It is I who bring you to the heights of heaven:
It is I who shall raise you up here on earth.
I will show you the eternal father, I will raise you with my right hand.

These remarkable texts lead into the proclamation of the Easter Exultet, the ancient chant that was intoned in the Middle Ages from ornately decorated scrolls. When I hear this music, only then do I know it's Easter.

Best wishes for joy in the Easter season!

Image:
The Resurrection (1596-1600) by El Greco, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid

DVD: Mademoiselle

Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger, film by Bruno Monsaingeon (released November 20, 2007) Idéale Audience International DVD5DM41

The name of Nadia Boulanger comes up all the time in the discussion of music, not least because of the long list of composers who studied with her, including Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Pierre Henry, Astor Piazzola, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Roy Harris, Thea Musgrave, Daniel Pinkham, Walter Piston, and many others. Michel Legrand once described her thus:

A monster, and one of the wonders of the world. She is the undeniable master who has made all the composers of the entire world work. I was in her class for seven years. I learned rigor there, discipline, and when she was done with me, when I was 20, I was ready for anything. I acquired such technique from her that, when I am at the podium, when I play, when I write, I know exactly what I want. I play very badly, but I play all the instruments, which means that almost no one can bullshit me.

This recent release is a DVD repackaging of a 1977 film that English-language audiences may never have seen, although students of Nadia Boulanger are likely familiar with the transcripts of these encounters, published as Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. In 1977, Canadian filmmaker Bruno Monsaigneon was allowed to film some of the famous mercredi, the Wednesday classes that Boulanger held in her apartment, even at this point, when she was 90. It is not really a documentary, since Boulanger zealously guarded her private life from outside eyes, but it is perhaps the best way to gain an understanding of what her teaching process was like (not to mention to learn how well Leonard Bernstein spoke French).

The camera gives the perspective of one of the students sitting in her classroom, with closeups of Boulanger's hands and face as she speaks and listens. For all that she was demanding and tough, she shared the mark of all great teachers in that she was willing to submerge her own personal taste in music to help her students find their voice. Stories are told here about her including the work of Schoenberg and Hindemith in her classes, for example, to help her students understand their work (even though her own tastes were not necessarily in those directions). The DVD has a bonus track, the ORTF Philharmonic Orchestra playing Mozart's Prague Symphony, conducted by Nadia Boulanger's student Igor Markevitch, who is featured in the film. It is not in itself a reason to buy this DVD, but a pleasant enough addition.