Poème Harmonique in Spain and Italy

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

Charles T. Downey, Le Poème Harmonique brings baroque to life at La Maison Francaise
Washington Post, February 21, 2011

Combattimenti! (Monteverdi, Marazzoli), C. Lefilliâtre, Le Poème Harmonique, V. Dumestre Plaisir d'amour, C. Lefilliâtre, Le Poème Harmonique, V. Dumestre

Has classical music become too literal because of performers' reliance on the written score? This was one of the questions posed by the improvisatory playing of the French baroque ensemble Le Poeme Harmonique on Friday night. In the auditorium of La Maison Francaise, Vincent Dumestre, playing the baroque-era lute called a theorbo, led his colleagues in a free-spirited rendition of Spanish and Italian music from the 17th century, rooted in historical research but animated by a more extemporaneous approach.

Through improvisation, pieces melted into one another, dissolving boundaries between works and even in between tunings and starts. Played without an intermission or other distractions, the selection of rather diverse works - dramatic recitatives, solo madrigals, canzonettes and instrumental dances and toccatas - created a sense of timelessness, extended by three lovely encores. Dumestre played the theorbo and baroque guitar with finesse, creating a sound at times so subtle that it almost disappeared, as in the rushing arpeggiation of a toccata by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger. He was ably seconded by Joel Grare, who enlivened dance pieces by Gaspar Sanz with spiky rhythms on castanets, drums and a bell bumped by his foot. [Continue reading]

Le Poème Harmonique
Vincent Dumestre (theorbo, baroque guitar)
Claire Lefilliâtre (soprano)
Esperar, Sentir, Morir: music by Luigi Rossi, Claudio Monteverdi, Etienne Moulinié, Tarquinio Merula, Gaspar Sanz, Juan Hidalgo
La Maison Française

There was no room for this in the paper, but the three encores that concluded this concert were Tout en montant la place d'arme, a French folk song, also known as La Louison; a Neapolitan version of a Spanish jacarà (recorded on this album); and La rose enflorece, a Sephardic song from the 15th century.

In Brief: Washington's Birthday Edition

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

• Mark-Anthony Turnage's new opera on the life of inexplicable celebrity Anna Nicole Smith opened in London. La Cieca has some photographic evidence of the costuming of the "titular role" (heh). [Parterre Box]


• Read the best review of Anna Nicole right here, by Andrew Clark. [Financial Times]


• Keith Scott Brown, who created a chamber music career for his five children by packaging them as The Five Browns, plead guilty to having sexually abused his three daughters. [People]


• The apartment in Metz where poet Paul Verlaine was born is up for sale. An Association des Amis de Paul Verlaine is trying to raise the money to buy the apartment and establish a Verlaine museum there. [Le Nouvel Observateur]


• Some arcane information on an odd Greek verb, Βδέω, which means to "fart silently." This is why learning is so much fun: the comment thread on this post is priceless. [Languagehat]


• Michel Gondry's exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, linked in last week's In Brief, offers visitors the chance to make their own short film, with backdrops created by Gondry. Here are some pictures of those backdrops. [Le Point]


• Amid all the depressing news of the death of classical music, the Opéra de Paris posted an impressive year in 2010. Overall, the company sold 94% of its available seats to 457 performances (both ballet and opera). By contrast Gerard Mortier's last year as the company's director, in 2009, saw a loss in audience revenue. What is sure to sell the most tickets? Not controversial productions or new or rare operas -- although those are selling just fine in Paris, thank you very much -- but strong casting, which Joel does very well. [Le Figaro]


• Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the death of writer André Gide. Pierre Masson, a Gide scholar from the Université de Nantes and editor of his works in the Pléiade edtion, answered some questions about Gide. What Gide book should someone new to the author read first? Answer: L'Immoraliste. [L'Express]


• Online video: Nicolas Le Riche's Caligula, a choreography for Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Opéra de Paris. [Medici.tv]


• Online audio: Oscar Strasnoy's Cachafaz, live from the Opéra Comique last December. Click on the headphones icon to listen. [France Musique]

For Your Consideration: 'Winter's Bone'

Winter's Bone (directed by Debra Granik) Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

In Winter's Bone director Debra Granik revisits the same basic set of issues, drug use and its impact on families, as her only other major feature, the sleeper Down to the Bone, from 2004, and her short film Snake Feed. The landscape of Winter's Bone is the desperate poverty of the Missouri Ozarks, the favored milieu of novelist Daniel Woodrell, whose book of the same name was adapted in the screenplay by Granik and Anne Rosellini. The scourge of methamphetamine, its dangerously explosive cooking labs and life-crushing addiction, pervades the extended family at the center of the story, but somehow the headstrong Ree, played with calm beauty and strong-jawed determination by relative newcomer Jennifer Lawrence, has managed to make it to the age of 17 without succumbing to it.

Ree has been dealt a bad hand: her father's free-roving meth adventures have left her mother depressed and non-functional and Ree in charge of two younger children, Sonny (tow-headed Isaiah Stone) and Ashlee (whimsical Ashlee Thompson). Food is scarce, the weather is cold, and ends in general are not meeting, even with the grudging help of neighbors and relations. Worse, the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt, just the right amount of douchey) informs her that her dad put up their house and land when he posted his last bail. If he does not turn up for his court date, they will lose everything, leading to a premise not unlike that in True Grit: this straight-shooting teenage girl goes on a manhunt, in this case for her own drug-dealing father.

Ree's isolation is captured in the sunless, bleak evocation of the Ozarks (cinematography by Michael McDonough) and the rough-faced cast of characters who enforce a clan code as harsh as that in Shakespeare's Macbeth. There are many laudable performances in minor roles, making this a company achievement, although the axis of tension is between Lawrence's Ree and John Hawkes as Ree's hapless and slightly creepy uncle, Teardrop. Both Lawrence and Hawkes received Oscar nominations that they will probably not win: Natalie Portman appears to have Best Actress sewn up for Black Swan (of the film's nominations, the one I would argue with the least), and Geoffrey Rush would get my vote as Best Supporting Actor for The King's Speech.

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

Best Picture is a long shot, but the film's best chance at an award may be for Best Adapted Screenplay, because Granik and Rosellini use story and sharpened dialogue to create the vivid backdrop of the Ozarks. The antiquated customs -- waiting to be invited over a home's threshold, invoking common blood between relations, not asking for "what oughta be offered" -- and the quirks of Ozark English are note-perfect: true, much comes from Woodrell's book rather than Granik, who grew up in Bethesda, outside Washington, but it was by no means certain that the book's narrative would make it to the screen so well. It does not need to bludgeon the viewer over the head with the plot's turns or make the characters into simple types: in fact, much remains unclear even at the end. In one of the best of many good scenes that fill in small details, Ree happens upon the birthday party being celebrated by some of her distant relatives. The down-home music performed by actual musician Marideth Sisco and her band Blackberry Winter (they also performed the cleaned-up version of Missouri's state song, the Missouri Waltz), part of a fine soundtrack with original music by Dickon Hinchliffe of the Tindersticks, is not window dressing but part of an organic whole, the simple sound that goes with the bleak landscape.

For Your Consideration: 'Biutiful'

It was difficult to write this review of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's new movie, Biutiful, not least because discussion of some of its finer points would involve an intolerable number of spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is a profoundly sad, lonely, yet ultimately uplifting film, one that made me lose my way in its complex characters and distressing situations as few movies are able to do. It is set in the gritty neighborhoods of Barcelona, where most of the shooting took place (grimy cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto and evocative original score by Gustavo Santaolalla): streets, squats, and sweat shops where African and Chinese immigrants scrabble for a living. Uxbal, played by the magnificent Javier Bardem, works as a go-between in the shady affairs of this foreign underclass, only a few steps ahead of the police and his own poverty. Bardem also has a lucrative gift, a spiritual sight by which he speaks to the recently dead, trying to help them accept their own deaths and move on to the next world. At the same time, he does the best he can to raise his two kids (Hanaa Bouchaib and Guillermo Estrella, both natural and adorable), keeping them clear of the emotional roller coaster of their manic-depressive mother, Marambra, played with disturbing frenzy by Maricel Álvarez. Worse, a diagnosis of prostate cancer, already spreading to other parts of his body, is about to stop him in his tracks.

Perhaps because González Iñárritu did not work this time with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, the story is not juggled annoyingly among an impossible number of subplots, as in their previous collaborations Babel and 21 Grams. Working from his own screenplay (credit shared with Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone), González Iñárritu still does not seem to settle on what kind of film he is trying to make: supernatural suspense thriller? political issue documentary? family drama? There are some distracting subplots -- a Chinese sweatshop owner's hidden homosexuality, the plight of an African immigrant couple -- but the story hangs principally on the weary face of Uxbal. Javier Bardem was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for his work here (he has already won the equivalent award at the Cannes Festival), and purely on merits he surpasses the front-runner, Colin Firth in The King's Speech, but Bardem has won that award once before (in 2007, for No Country for Old Men), which probably removes him from the running this year. This film is the antidote for anyone who still needs to exorcise the image of the implacable hit man Bardem played in No Country for Old Men: here he is more calm and resigned than vengeful, but in many ways just as single-minded, his dark stare just as fixed against whatever may come.

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

The film's other Oscar nomination was for Best Foreign Film, an award it will likely win, as much as compensation for Bardem not being picked for Best Actor as on its own merits. Some critics have found the film overly dark, and perhaps it is: no doubt about it, an air of desperation grows thicker and thicker as the plot progresses. Uxbal is no more a perfect father than any of the rest of us, for any number of reasons -- he feeds the children cereal for dinner, and the film's title represents his attempt to help his daughter with English spelling for her homework -- but he is his kids' best chance. What will happen to them after he is gone? Another spiritual medium, who appears only in one scene and who helped foster Uxbal's visionary gift, tells him the hard truth: he does not really take care of these kids, the universe takes care of them. The film's message seems to be that the universe is doing a pretty bad job by all of us. The medium also reminds him that they received their gift for free so they should not expect pay for what they see: that is easy for her to say, in her much more comfortable surroundings, but no one can begrudge Uxbal not turning down, usually with a somewhat guilty look, the folded bills that thankful family members force upon him. As his time grows short, he is amassing as much money as he can put aside for his children's future. It is a futile enterprise: the universe will have to take care of these children.

Ionarts-at-Large: Mahler Seventh with Bernard Haitink

Just Mahler’s Seventh Symphony on a program might be considered short measure for a night out at the (Bavarian Radio Symphony) Orchestra. But no diet is best measured by how long it takes to eat it, but rather by its calorie count. Or by the time it takes to digest the intake.

I, for one, have fed on Mahler’s Seventh a good number of times (if rarely in concert, since it’s one of the least performed Mahler Symphonies), and I’m still digesting the music… and hearing it with Bernard Haitink and the BRSO on this February Friday was going to be just another attempt at coming to grasps with the work. It’s fair to wonder, by now, if its reputation (“difficult”) isn’t better known than the music itself.

Is the finale sardonic or trivial? An inspired counterpoint to the hushed atmosphere of the Nightmusic incidents or a witty send-up of Wagner? Or, to liberally paraphrase Theodor Adorno, just a load of tosh? Is the whole thing too complex and deep for us to grasp, or just too damn daft? (as per E.P.Salonen, although not in those exact words.) You can find musicians and critics with more Mahler exposure than I shall ever have for any and each of these positions.

G.Mahler, Sy. No.7, Abbado / BPh DG G.Mahler, Sy. No.7, Barenboim / Berlin St.Kp. Warner G.Mahler, Sy. No.7, Jansons / BRSO BR Klassik

Perhaps the search for a thread, a storyline, an arch is simply not the right approach to the Seventh… perhaps it is best to just sit back and enjoy the different episodes as they appear? The crackling snappy first movement and its turn to lyrical, then tortured, pathos? The errant critters that creep, buzz, and crawl through the second movement (enough to fill two Ligeti string quartets and half a David Lynch feature) and the out-of-nowhere jubilations that sound like a rustic ballroom dance going on just inside someone’s head. The lonely voices and plain weirdness of the “Scherzo”, the stop-and-go chatter of voices, and its perfectly anti-scherzoesque spooky low grumbles? The mandolin induced sweetness of the second Nachtmusik, with violins and woodwinds and brass taking turns intoning a conversation as if the nightmare of the previous movement had never happened; as if the symphonic protagonist (if there is one) had just woken with no worries carried over. And yet, for all the loveliness, something seems askew. Twisted à la Mahler. Or are we already projecting? Are we so conditioned to find unmitigated happiness in Mahler—the man whom Haitink attested ‘a real talent for suffering’—suspicious?

After that fourth movement slowly drifts away—back to sleep, almost—a storm of timpani and brass fanfares comes at you all the sudden, like a most unwelcome alarm clock that reminds us that we completely forgot our appointment with the local Meistersingers welcoming Tristan and Isolde that morning, and we have only two minutes to slip into proper costume. It’s enervating, to say the least, but under Haitink’s hands it was neither pushed into the direction of Wagner-persiflage, nor did it come with its teeth clenched (as if the movement was channeled by the finale of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony). Where the Scherzo was beset by all kinds of ghosts of the past—in fact as creepy and nightly as I’ve ever heard, this finale was straight forward; an innocent if slightly senseless adulation played with oodles of gusto and great opportunities for the trumpets to make up for what had been missed earlier.

The problem that floundering before a work brings, is that judging a performance—beyond technical merit—becomes virtually impossible. One could point out that the Nachtmusik might be preferred in rather more hushed tones… but what if not doing it like that was an interpretive choice? And focusing on technical aspects with any BRSO concert is a little boring, because they’re usually so pristine. This Seventh, too, had all the expected precision and bite. The cowbells (thank you, SNL, for never letting me just associate them with Mahler or cows again) of the second movement weren’t embedded in particular atmosphere, but they were nicely spaced out and resembled the real thing, rather than an “arthritic bovine stumbling through an ironmongery” as they had in Amsterdam. Amid general excellence and nary a cock-up, the principal horn Eric Terwilliger needs singling out for the supremely felicitous evening he had.

After the last cacophonous rush, crash, and snap, and the extended, partly baffled, ovations for Haitink and the players, I suspect few in the audience would have complained about the lack of a second part to the program. Instead they got home at a reasonable hour, and with plenty time to digest.

Side Notes: The Conductor Trading Game (Vasily Petrenko Succeeds Jukka-Pekka Saraste in Oslo)

For the classically inclined, watching conductors rove on posts and succeed each other and get ousted here and courted there is at least as much fun as following baseball or football deadline trades and rumors. It's fun when your team trades up; depressing when it trades down. Either because it's an opportunity taken/missed, or because it says something about the desirability of your orchestra/team; its status in the world of conducting/sports. Can you snare someone considered out of your league with a bit of cleverness? Are you just getting a name, but no particularly needed skill? Are you discovering the next hot thing? Did you go all out and get stuck with Herschel Walker?

Well, here's the latest news: Vasily Petrenko succeeds Jukka-Pekka Saraste at the helm of the Oslo Philharmonic. (Jukka-Pekka Saraste meanwhile succeeds Semyon Bychkov in Cologne at the WDRSO while Bychkov's next stop is not yet known.) This looks like a trade that has goodness written all over it. At the very latest since Mariss Jansons took the Oslo Philharmonic and turned them into a thus-recognized world class orchestra during his 23 year tenure (1979-2002), the orchestra is one of the very respectable addresses in Europe... but without that sometimes crippling need to present a big name at all cost. André Previn following Mariss Jansons was certainly a prestigious move, but the subsequent tenure of Jukka-Pekka Saraste probably more productive. Now the administration has announced Vasily Petrenko (four years younger and not related to Kirill Petrenko, just announced to take over the Munich Opera from Kent Nagano) and in doing so they fall in line with a recent trend of appointing very young and extremely hopeful and talented conductors to major positions. (A trend that exists even if you don't count the Dudamel appointment in LA on account of being 40% gimmick or the Alan Gilbert appointment in New York on account of him being one of the oldest [sic] new music directors in the history of the New York Philharmonic.)


Petrenko, born in 1976, started out under the wings of Mariss Jansons (as did Andris Nelsons), and studied with Yuri Temirkanov and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Not a bad pedigree. He did his grunt-time at the St. Petersburg Opera and Ballet and the State Academy of St. Petersburg. But after winning a competition and getting to guest conduct the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, he was named Liverpool's principal conductor in 2005 and started in the 2006/07 season. (His title, upon contract renewal, was later changed to Chief Conductor.) Judging from afar, from audience numbers, and mostly from the smashing Shostakovich recordings he's made for Naxos, his success is very considerable.

Odd Gullberg, CEO of the Oslo Philharmonic, suggested the administration--in concert with the orchestra--had picked Petrenko off a long list as the clear choice for a long term run. A true successor to Jansons, one might say. Mr. Gullberg's suggestion that 'the combination of Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic had the makings of a strong international brand' is heavy on PR-BS, but actually true. Yay for Oslo. And an eye on Liverpool, to see who their next pick is. [Usually orchestras go "semi-safe" after bringing a relative nobody to stardom... a talented, neither-young-nor-old conductor with a solid record and experience. At least Liverpool has time to make their choice; Petrenko will remain through the 2014/15 season. Let's stay tuned to find out. ]

Ionarts-at-Large: Thielemann's Last Round of Munich Brahms

It’s the second half of the 2010/11 season and every concert with Christian Thielemann and the Munich Philharmonic comes with a touch of “Good-Bye”; a wistful note for most (especially among the audience and the musically sensitive players), a hint of relief for a few (in the administration). That’s especially notable when he is busy preparing some of his favorites. Like Brahms. He couldn’t have been happy taking over his orchestra immediately after playing Mahler when all four Brahms Symphonies—partly at home, partly on tour through Germany—were due. (To paraphrase him: “It takes me weeks to clean up their sound , after Mahler”.) But there he was, on the second-to-last weekend in January, conducting Brahms’ Second and Third Symphony.

The careful calibration of sound, Thielemann’s foremost trademark, stood out immediately when the darkly muted homogenous brass emerges in the Second Symphony while technical issues, meanwhile, had not yet all been tended to. In fact,

Read more »

DCist: Joyce DiDonato Lights up the Hall

See my review of Joyce DiDonato's recital, published at DCist today:

Joyce DiDonato Fetes Vocal Arts D.C. (DCist, February 16):

Diva, Divo, J. DiDonato, Orchestre de l'Opéra National de Lyon, K. Ono

For Washington listeners who love the human voice, the song recital series presented by Vocal Arts D.C. offers the most refined delights. Since its founding as the Vocal Arts Society of Washington twenty years ago, the organization's genial director, Gerald Perman, has presided over a series of triumphs: exquisite concerts of art songs and opera by the world's best singers, some of them already known and others given their Washington debuts. To celebrate, the group joined with Washington Performing Arts Society to host Joyce DiDonato for a praiseworthy concert in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall last night.

The outstanding American mezzo-soprano is known as a creature of the stage -- charming opera audiences with her disarming humor and pistol of a voice -- and for excellent recordings of Handel and other composers. She also has all the practicality and even stoicism of a Midwesterner, making it through a run of Barber of Seville in London two years ago in a wheelchair after breaking her leg on stage. Not only is she also a fine song recitalist (Vocal Arts has brought her to Washington twice before), but she keeps in touch with her fans through a blog and Twitter, even using the latter to invite President Obama to her recital. He did not take her up on it.

That was his loss. DiDonato gave a performance that was as noteworthy for its unexpected programming, with not a single chestnut until the final encore, as for the beauty and musicality of the singing. Opera scenes opened each half, plunging the listener into DiDonato's most expressive side, with the emotional pendulum swinging wildly back and forth in Haydn's Scena di Berenice, each successive state of the heroine rendered carefully in musical tone and gesture. Rossini's version of Desdemona's willow scene, from Otello, was steeped in melancholy gloom, in no small part thanks to the atmospheric accompaniment of pianist David Zobel. As the doomed heroine, DiDonato used her instrument to give the sense of terror at noises heard in the night, but could also reduce the scope of her voice to a softly glowing thread, as in the prayer that closes the scene. [Continue reading]

Joyce DiDonato (mezzo-soprano) and David Zobel (piano)
Vocal Arts D.C. / WPAS
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

Other articles:

• Anne Midgette, DiDonato keeps everything in the moment at recital (Washington Post, February 17)
• Marsha Dubrow, Mezzo Joyce DiDonato wowed DC audience with comments and concert (Washington Examiner, February 17)
• Timothy McDonald, Hometown diva Joyce DiDonato shows force and flair (Kansas City Star, February 14)