This about That

I’m still intent on visiting as many of the seven Maine museums this summer as I possibly can, but I’ve been severely slowed by excesses of lobster, fried things, and various pies, but it’s not over until the last bite or the fat man sings.

This past week I got to tour the secret private garden of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller on the grounds of Eyrie, the former Rockefeller estate in Seal Harbor, Maine, now Arcadia National Park. The Garden was created between 1926 and 1930 by Abby and garden designer Beatrix Farrand (who designed the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks for our D.C. readers); the flower beds have been overseen by Mrs. Rockefeller’s heirs since 1961. The Asian-inspired garden, with its fortress-like walls and thick wooden doors, won’t be at peak bloom until the first weeks of August, but it’s well worth the effort.

A limited number of passes to the garden are free, and reservations are made by phone beginning each season on June 14th. This year the garden is open to invited guests and those with reservations on Thursdays from July 16th through September 10th from 9 am to 11 am and 11 am to 1 pm -- just like my garden in Baltimore, except for the beer keg floating in the fish pond.


This past Friday night, my squeeze of some 28 years and I attended the Haystack Mountain School of Craft's summer auction, to see if we could score an addition to our extensive art holdings. The craft arts have been a bit tired lately, without much innovation. The pickings were slim for this year's auction items, and as with most events this year the bidding prices were very low. We successfully bid on a very cool Boris Bally recycled traffic sign tray.

Haystack's pristine rustic oceanfront environment is an amazing place to spend a summer making things, and it should play a major role in the next evolution in the craft arts. More images of the Rockefeller garden and the Haystack auction are on my Flickr site.

Tokyo Sonata

See my other film review published at DCist yesterday:

Out of Frame: Tokyo Sonata, July 17

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa sets the mood of Tokyo Sonata almost immediately, with a moody, quasi-Minimalist score (original music by Kazumasa Hashimoto) in the background of the dreary routine of the Sasaki household. The family's putative head, Ryûhei Sasaki, played as a distant, weary Japanese Everyman by Teruyuki Kagawa, loses his position as "Director of Administration," a job that is never explained but does not really need to be. His boss learns that the entire section can be outsourced to China much more cheaply, and within minutes Sasaki is on the street. His shame only worsens the disconnection from his children, a shaggy-haired older son, Takashi (Yû Koyanagi), who appears early in the morning and sleeps all day, and a smart, underachieving younger son, Kenji (Inowaki Kai), whom he forbids to study the piano. [Continue reading]

Out of Frame: 'Séraphine'

Yolande Moreau (Séraphine Louis) and Ulrich Tukur (Wilhelm Uhde) in Séraphine

Séraphine Louis (1864–1942, dite Séraphine de Senlis), the subject of Martin Provost’s recent film Séraphine, is not exactly an unknown painter. Although her work is found in only a few museums now, in her native Senlis and a few other small cities in France, the Museum of Modern Art in New York ended up with a couple of her paintings, Les Pommes and Tree of Paradise. (Also, the Musee Maillol just had an exhibit of her work, which closed on May 18, and images of some of her paintings can be found on Flickr.) She was a naive painter, an ultimately unsatisfactory but unavoidable term indicating that although she was never trained in painting, she painted as a way to act out a sort of compulsion, what now is sometimes called visionary art.

The paintings of Séraphine de Senlis were first championed by Wilhelm Uhde, a collector prominent enough to have been painted by Picasso in a 1910 portrait (Uhde was also an early Picasso collector). Uhde organized two famous exhibits of the primitif painters he favored, Les Peintres du Coeur sacré (1929) and Les Primitifs modernes (1932), including Henri Rousseau and Séraphine de Senlis. Director and screenwriter Martin Provost drew most of the material for his film from the work of Françoise Cloarec, who has also just published a version of her thesis on the painter with Editions Phébus. Provost, a one-time actor, has come out of practically nowhere as a director, his last film Le ventre de Juliette having won a prize at the 2003 Avignon Festival, to come close to a clean sweep of this year's César Awards, the French Oscars, with this beautifully crafted movie.

Françoise Cloarec, Séraphine: La vie rêvée de Séraphine de Senlis

Wilhelm Uhde, played with patrician reserve by Ulrich Tukur, comes from Paris to Senlis under somewhat murky circumstances in 1914. Much to his surprise, the art critic finds his next discovery scrubbing the floors of his rented rooms. We see much of Séraphine’s life, in a moving, witty performance by Yolande Moreau, before we know anything about her painting, which reveals the art as just another part of her unusual life. She scrimps together a living serving as a maid, scrubbing linen in the river, occasionally cooking for the Sœurs de la Providence in Clermont, where she spent part of her early life after being orphaned. All the while she is collecting odd things -- cow’s blood, used candle wax, ochre-colored mud, wildflowers -- that we later learn serve as special pigments, creating the inimitable colors of her paintings. Unfortunately, Uhde has to flee France suddenly as the battles of World War I approach Senlis, fearing he will be shot as a deserter. When Uhde has returned to France a decade later, he reconnects with Séraphine and helps sell her art, providing income that allows her to focus on painting and, unfortunately, helps lead to the breakdown that ultimately leaves her confined to an asylum for the last decade of her life.

Yolande Moreau (Séraphine Louis) in Séraphine

Wisely, Provost has avoided the typical pitfall of the biopic (he shares the writing credit with Marc Abdelnour), by not including a series of cameos by famous personages: there are no actors trying to incarnate Henri Rousseau, Marie Laurencin, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Daniel Kahnweiler, or Gertrude Stein, although all could conceivably be related to the story. This is a film about the life of Séraphine de Senlis, not the history of early modern art. That being said, the movie is remarkably detailed, incorporating research and historical documents into the flow of the story. At one point, Uhde's sister Anne-Marie (a laconic, enigmatic Anne Bennent) takes Séraphine's photograph by a canvas, in which the painter insists that she must look not at the camera but up toward heaven (such a photograph was actually taken by Anne-Marie Uhde). We also learn that Uhde fled Paris because his marriage had fallen apart after only a couple months (his ex-wife, Sarah Stern, then married Robert Delaunay and became Sonia Delaunay). The reason is that Uhde's preference was for men, and he returns to France with his young lover, the painter Helmut Kolle (an appropriately frail-looking Nico Rogner). At one point, Kolle is shown painting a portrait of Anne-Marie Uhde, precisely the portrait that is now in the Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie in Senlis.

Other Reviews: Los Angeles Times | Village Voice | New York Times | Movie Review Intelligence

What is most surprising about this movie is how the question of Séraphine's artistic inspiration, which she claims is divine, is handled. The only real art to which she was exposed was in church, especially in her work with the nuns at Clermont, and her fervent Catholic faith percolates through the film, without any sign of secular humanist derision in the way it is treated, even when she descends into madness. It is the sort of simple piety that can scandalize the official church, by putting it to shame: in the course of the film, the unschooled Séraphine quotes Teresa of Avila about the sanctity of work (a Benedictine virtue) and sings Gregorian chant from memory as she paints (most memorably, the Pentecost hymn Veni creator, to invoke the Holy Spirit). The film's visual beauty, its attention to historical detail, and above all one of the best performances of Yolande Moreau's career will hopefully put this film into the field for an Academy Award in the foreign film category.

Séraphine opens today at Landmark's Bethesda Row Cinema.

Merce Cunningham at Wolf Trap: Alea jacta est

Merce Cunningham became a nonagenarian in April, but rather than preparing a successor to lead the modern dance company that bears his name, he has announced that it will die with him. In a column about the decision (Why Dances Disappear, July 7) in the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout asserted that Cunningham's plan, to establish a trust to preserve his choreographies rather than having the company carry them on, will fail because it relies on the imprecise medium of choreographic notation. However, for many years, Cunningham has created his complex choreography with the aid of a computer program: combined with video recordings, one could certainly recreate what Cunningham told his dancers to do. The question is, will anyone other than scholars of dance really want to?

Split Sides, Merce Cunningham Dance Company (released on June 30, 2009) Microcinema MC-980

Given that the company's visit to Wolf Trap on Tuesday night, with the state of Cunningham's health and mental acuity, may have been its last in the area, the Filene Center was certainly nowhere near its capacity, with many empty seats in the auditorium and lots of open lawn space. The evening opened with Split Sides, from 2003, Cunningham's first collaboration with rock musicians, although of the alternative variety. Radiohead and Sigur Rós contributed pieces, now performed with a recording, of equal length. The catch is that the arrangement of performance elements is left to chance, rolls of the dice performed on stage just before curtain by members of the audience. In effect, two choices in five areas (choreography, music, set decoration, costumes, lighting) were performed in the order determined by dice throws. This recalls Cunningham's work with experimental composer John Cage, who used such aleatory techniques in his work, based on his fascination with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese system of philosophy and divination, based on the understanding of apparently random events.

The music was of the ambient variety, Radiohead moving between pulseless repetition and booming bass and Sigur Rós combining synthesized sounds and recorded noises, some of them reportedly produced by "a kind of xylophone made of pointe shoes, connected to contact microphones." The choreography explored the issue of evenness and oddness, with thirteen dancers often grouping into odd numbers, especially seven -- who often seemed like the figures in a Giacometti sculpture, near one another but not really interacting -- then forming into partnered even numbers. The exercise, which can result in thirty-two different combinations, in fact says something about the question of Cunningham's decision about the future of his choreographies. Here, the choreography can work with either musical score, either set, either group of costumes, either lighting scheme. It undermines all sorts of assumptions about the nature of dance. Can something that undid so many classical traditions itself become a classic?


The ballet on the second half was the classic Sounddance, created in 1975 with Cunningham in the main role (the man who appears first and leaves stage last). It is an exciting bit of choreography, an almost constant series of frenetic actions, as the dancers are swept in, writhe about, and are swept back out through the opening at the back of the stage. Cunningham described it once as "a space observed under a microscope." Unfortunately, music technician Stephan Moore, who sat in the pit controlling the playback of the score, David Tudor's Untitled 1975/1994, had the sound system at a dangerous level for the entire performance. Tudor, the pianist who premiered John Cage's notorious 4'33" and many other works, created a noise composition of electronic shrieks and squawks. The impression was of being imprisoned under the rails of a constantly trafficked subway track, with carnivorous pterodactyls swooping down angrily from time to time. This would have worked beautifully with the agitated movements of the dancers, except that one had to keep one's fingers over one's ears the entire time to prevent eardrum damage. Given that we have finally recognized as a country that sonic torture at American terrorist detention centers (the so-called black sites) is immoral and illegal, either the sound level should have been kept at a humane level or protective earplugs should have been issued to all audience members.

An Operatic Miss D.C.

Jennifer Corey, Miss District of Columbia 2009 Gown from The Crowning Touch (photo by Sonya Gavankar, Miss D.C. 1997)

Beauty pageants are not part of our normal beat, but the summer slowdown of cultural news put this story on our radar. This year's Miss District of Columbia, who was crowned on Sunday afternoon, sang an opera aria (or something) in the talent competition -- as it turns, she was only one of four contestants this year who listed their talent as "Opera Vocal." Jennifer Corey, a 22-year-old graduate of the music program at American University, took top honors in that competition, as well as in the ones for bathing suit and evening gown (watch this YouTube video for a taste of the competition).

Corey's other local operatic connection is that she has been spending her time working as the Education Intern at Washington National Opera, helping with outreach and school programs. WNO's Manager of Media Relations, Michelle Pendoley, told Ionarts by e-mail that the company "offers its sincerest congratulations to our city’s new Miss D.C.," adding that "we’re very fortunate to have such a wonderful role model working directly on our outreach and education programs." Pendoley also said that the midnight blue gown worn by Corey when she sang in the talent competition was loaned by WNO’s Costume Studio. "It’s the least we can do for an intern who is dedicated to public service, the arts and education!" Pendoley remarked. "WNO wishes Jen all the best as she begins preparations for the Miss America Pageant, and we stand ready to provide all the advice, support and operatic expertise that we’re able!”

Corey, whose platform issue was recycling awareness ("Let's Talk Trash"), wins a $5,000 scholarship and the opportunity to represent the District of Columbia in the Miss America pageant. On a side note, it is a little strange for those of us who actually make our permanent home in the District of Columbia -- that is, if we think about the Miss D.C. pageant at all -- that many of the contestants are not young women with any long-term roots in the city: they are often students at local universities and, this year particularly, Capitol Hill staffers. One supposes that this could happen in any of the 50 states, but it is surely more of an issue because of the unusual nature of this city.

Ionarts-at-Large: Munich's Lohengrin with Kaufmann & Harteros

A wonderful bad production. Richard Jones’ Lohengrin at the Munich Opera Festival forcefully makes the point that it’s possible to warm up even to a bad idea. The bad idea? Overusing the building of a house as a—far too simplistic—metaphor for the opera’s admittedly odd story. Worse: Jones mocks his own direction through strained ironic distance, lest anyone accuse him of taking Lohengrin seriously. Lohengrin’s duel with Telramund is a cartoonish cutlass-ballet that makes Errol Flynn’s such seaborne adventures look of positively Olympian restraint. And while Ortrud using Telramund’s gun to kill herself is an inspired touch, having the entire Brabantian chorus off themselves in identical fashion makes an extraneous point—perhaps about losing freedom and fearing the new, old, totalitarian order under Führer Gottfried—that contradicts, not enhances, what the text and music tells us. Scenes to which closing your eyes won’t do; eliciting, if perhaps not demanding, the audience’s juicy boos after the first and third act.

For the many who gained nothing from Jones’ overarching idea, there were the singers to enjoy, their acting, and the direction’s superb craftsmanship. When has there last been a cast so good, young, and homogenous for a production of Lohengrin? From Christof Fischesser’s virile king to Evgeny Nikitin’s sung (not belted!) Herald, to Michaela Schuster’s curiously seductive, finely frayed Ortrud, and Wolfgang Koch who makes for a believable, euphonious Telramund, it is the even excellence of the singers that makes this Munich Lohengrin a feast for the ears.

Anja Harteros outshone even Jonas Kaufmann. Apart from singing with unlimited reserves of steeled luster, she pulls off being hopelessly adorable in ordinarily unflattering overalls, handling a bricklayer’s trowel. Her Elsa defiantly ignores the accusations hurled at her, insisting on building her nest… err, house, instead. Fortunately she gets a handy-man helper in the form of Kaufmann, whose gritty and earthly Lohengrin makes an ideal partner-in-masonry. After tough going for the orchestra in the first act, Nagano accompanied coolly underplaying the nationalist-romantic side of Lohengrin for the most part and mustering some real warmth during the emotional high points.

The setting is an odd mix of a 1960’s collegiate society with the red-headed men in their Brabant-High letter jackets and wavy hairdos and a vaguely fascist Telramundian regime. (Costumes and set by “Ultz”, lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin.) Building the new house (…that is post-dictatorship Germany?), the society changes into loosely Swabian costume when they consecrate Mr. & Mrs. L.’s new abode, replete with a cradle that Lohengrin later incinerates when the relationship fails. While the metaphor of the house is by now stressed well beyond the breaking point, it works rather well as a set, populated with two such consummate actors who turn Lohengrin into an intimate story of love-gained-and-lost. Actually, the interplay of all the couples, Ortrud and Telramund, Lohengrin and Elsa, is defined by great sensitivity and moving tenderness. Alas, what Richard Jones giveth, Richard Jones taketh away when he insists on instilling extraneous ideas that don’t organically develop from the story.

All images © Wilfried Hösl, courtesy Bayerische Staatsoper.

Recommended recordings:

Lohengrin, Bychkov / WDRSO / Botha, Pieczonka, Lang, Youn, Struckman et al. Profil Hänssler SACD 9004	Lohengrin, Kubelik / BRSO / King, Janowitz, Jones, Stewart et al. DG 449 591	Lohengrin, Jochum / Bayreuth 1954 / Windgassen, Nielsson, Varnay, Uhde, Adam, et al. - Archipel 281	Lohengrin, Nagano / Baden-Baden 1953 / Vogt, Kringelborn, Meier, Fox, König et al., Production by N. Lehnhoff - Opus Arte DVD 964

Ionarts-at-Large: Munich Orchestras in May

Schumann, Sy.3, Overt., Scherzo & Finale, C.T., Philharmonia DG 459 680 UK | DE | FR Grieg, PC et al., Andsnes, Kitayenko, Bergen PO Virgin 61745 UK | DE | FR

Grieg’s Piano Concerto sandwiched by Schumann: with Rudolf Buchbinder as soloist and Christian Thielemann conducting his Munich Philharmonic, that has great promise. Promise, was made good on. The 1842 Overture, Scherzo, and Finale op.52 audibly contained spring; there is something lovely and gay about that early orchestral work of Schumann’s. Schumann’s planned title of “Symphoniette” would have perfectly conveyed the spirit of this cohesive work. It’s a long way from the brooding late Schumann that Heinz Holliger dubbed “crypt-music”. It is Thielemann’s recurring feat that he makes anything by Schumann—of whom he conducts seemingly everything from memory—sound like perfectly written music.

Rudolf Buchbinder veered seamlessly between the showmanship that the creamy romanticism of Grieg’s Piano Concerto provides and the enchanting grace that Tchaikovsky attested it. Most delightfully was the classical cool—almost Mozartean lightness—that Buchbinder casually and fleetly retrieved from what can otherwise end up a treacly affair.

Schumann’s Third Symphony opened so much on its toes, with every note threatening to trip over its predecessor, that one was sucked into the work without being able to think much about what was going on. Smooth, flexible, and with great determination, the orchestra followed Thielemann’s vague gestures to a T. His Schumann is not lean, not paired down, and in no way conforms to any current interpretive trend. As flexible as his tempos are, so his Schumann solidly stands like a romantic oak in the European orchestral tradition. The results are, lest musico-ideological peculiarities get in the way, usually exciting and sometimes even breathtaking.

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Brahms, Haydn Variations et al., Belohlávek, BBC SO, HMC 901977 UK | DE | FR Barber, VC et al., Shaham, Previn, LSO, DG UK | DE | FR Rachmaninoff, Sym. Dances etc., Jansons, St.P.PO EMI 62810 UK | DE | FR

Johannes Brahms wrote his Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn in the picturesque lake-town of Tutzing, what’s now just a 30 minute suburban train ride outside of Munich. In the Haydn year 2009 that was Marin Alsop’s curtain opener for her Academy Concert of the Bavarian State Orchestra—Munich’s ‘opera band’ in May of this year.

Alsop at the podium often strikes me as mechanical with much of the energy that she so obviously puts into her conducting dissipating before it takes a hold of the musicians. More heat than light, one might say, characterizes her performances of the core romantic repertoire. Instances of dynamic extremes are dutifully observed where Alsop demands them, but that did not cache the lack of liveliness. The threat of familiarity lurked everywhere.

Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto with James Ehnes—music that lends itself to noodling right through—saw the orchestra more alert, but was carried by the soloist. The result was genuine excitement and involvement, bringing a bit of rarely heard (but perfectly accessible) American music to the German audience. Marin Alsop may dislike being thought of as a conductor of American repertoire. In fact, she thinks herself primarily known for her standard romantic repertoire in Europe. (If so, it must be because programmers won’t let her conduct the good, but sadly audience-repelling, American stuff.) Whatever the reason, there is rarely a performance of Alsop where I don’t get the ever-same perception: Just above average in the standards, but reliably superb in American classics.

That said, the Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, themselves dancing on the thin line between inspired and circus-music, were very much above average, with the saxophone and assorted other woodwinds in colorful interplay and Alsop’s diligence translating into something altogether entertaining: A credit to Rachmaninoff, Alsop, and the orchestra.

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Schubert, Mass in E-b, Mackerras, Dresden StaKap. Carus UK | DE | FR Schubert, Mass in E-flat, Kubelik, BRSO Audite UK | DE | FR Schumann, Nachtlied et al., Gardiner, ORR, Archiv 457660 UK | DE | FR

Nikolaus Harnoncourt was supposed to conduct the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Schubert’s E-flat Mass earlier this May. Health reasons sadly prevented him from appearing, but the replacement Daniel Harding, even if his popularity with orchestra and audience is waning, was an impressive patch. After seeing Harding struggle to get the LSO in line during Bruckner rehearsal and performance, it is not difficult to imagine why he enjoys working with an orchestra that is—usually—more responsive and not only quick to master a score (at which London orchestras excel) but also to follow an interpretation.

If not much of an interpretation revealed itself in Brahms’ Haydn Variations, the plainly played result was still considerably more enjoyable listening than the Bavarian State Orchestra’s go at it. For one, it introduced the idea of the Variations appropriately serving as a concert overture, not a sedative.

Schumann’s Nachtmusik–three stanzas by Friedrich Hebbel, worked out to a lengthy piece evocative of the warm dusk of a Heidelberg night—brought out the Bavarian Radio Chorus and they performed up to their predictably terrific, painstakingly precise standards. After hearing his poem ‘reborn’ in musical guise, Hebbel wrote to Schumann that not until hearing the latter’s setting did he fully grasp his own poem. Why is it such a rarity in concert and on record?

The E-flat Mass of Schubert is truly one of the great masses. Neither ostentatiously religious nor of sacred bombast, it’s such a subtle statement of personal faith that the listener’s inclination towards religious aspects—not any composer’s intent—determines whether we respond to it as a sacred or purely musical work. Good recordings are plentiful, but I like two particularly well: Charles Mackerras’ contribution is the most recent addition and was recorded with the Dresden Staatskapelle in the gorgeous acoustic of the Frauenkirche in Dresden (Carus 83249. The other, forty years older and also a live recording, has Rafael Kubelik conducting the BRSO and BR Chorus at the Herkulessaal and a particularly delightful Gundula Janowitz among the soloists (Audite 92541).

Harding’s performance was also recorded (for live broadcast), and the pleasant result perhaps worthy of being released on disc, one day. Extolling the BR Chorus’ virtues again and again reads like lazy hyperbole, except they really are that good. At least the orchestra’s horns added an element of fallibility amid nuanced dynamics and marvelous cohesion. Werner Güra’s natural, smallish, and very efficiently driven tenor voice has an understated way of standing out: Strain, effort, or artifice are completely absent—and if he sometimes tend towards the bland, the former qualities are so rare in tenors that it makes him a tonic for the ears. Almost like a lighter (and completely untroubled) version of baritone Christian Gerhaher. With soprano Christiane Oelze and tenor Markus Schäfer, the high voices were the vocal focal point; Andreas Hörl and Elisabeth von Magnus unobtrusively complemented the chorus.

PICUTRE OF MARISS JANSONS © ASTRID ACKERMANN

By and For Henry VIII

Henry's Music, QuintEssential, A. Lawrence-King, Alamire, D. Skinner (released on May 1, 2009) Obsidian CD705

The packaging and program concept of this new disc from the British early music ensemble Alamire is very similar to an earlier release by the same group. However, with the exception of one track, all of the music recorded here is new, motets and songs composed for the court and various chapels of King Henry VIII, as well as some pieces attributed to the king himself. The occasion is the 400th 500th anniversary of that monarch's coronation, June 24, 1509, an event that Alamire commemorated with a concert at the British Library last month. Many of these pieces have been recorded before, but there is considerable historical interest here because of the six motets transcribed from a manuscript in the British Library (MS Royal 11.e.xi), known to have been a gift to the king and queen at some point around 1518 and never before recorded. Just in time for the anniversary, the Folio Society has published a luxury facsimile edition, for a cool $795.

The vocal sound -- clean, beautifully tuned and blended -- is weighted toward male voices, with an earthy, somber tone in the low-oriented pieces. The motets from the manuscript are all worth hearing, devotions to Mary and prayers on behalf of the king. The singers use a largely English pronunciation of Latin, with Jesu as "Jesu" instead of "Yesu" and "spetsialem" for specialem, for example. The historical instrument ensemble QuintEssential provide some contrasts with short dance and consort pieces, the inimitable sound of the cornets and sackbutts, well played, but typically braying. Gothic harpist Andrew Lawerence-King adds another interesting color to the palette, an at times clumsy, metallic (even twangy, almost sitar-like) sound that has interest but not necessarily beauty. The primary attraction is in the vocal selections, from the excellent sacred music (especially the harmonically surprising Salve radix and the thickly textured and cross-relation-laden Quam pulchra es, by the mysterious composer known as Sampson, and the rather sublime Marian antiphon Sub tuum praesidium by one Benedictus de Opitiis, all from the manuscript) to the lighter secular songs, mostly by Henry VIII.

76'28"