James Ehnes @ Clarice Smith

Charles T. Downey, Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Orion Weiss display vital chemistry at Clarice Smith (Washington Post, March 8, 2014)

Prokofiev, Complete Works for Violin, J. Ehnes (Chandos, 2013)

Among the leading violinists performing today, James Ehnes seems to fly under the radar. Because of his recordings and past performances in the Washington area, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra, the Canadian violinist is one not to miss. Yet his accomplished recital Thursday night, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland, did not fill the small Gildenhorn Recital Hall, an indication perhaps that Ehnes’s musicianship outstrips his attention-grabbing notoriety, entirely to his credit.

Aaron Copland’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano” was cool and airy, playing perhaps too much into the immaculate quality of tone Ehnes produced on his 1715 “Marsick” Stradivarius. The piece is a little snoozy, and Ehnes gave it no sizzle. [Continue reading]

James Ehnes (violin) and Orion Weiss (piano)
Copland, Sonata for Violin and Piano
Grieg, Violin Sonata No. 2
Schubert, Fantasy in C major
Clarice Smith Center

PREVIOUSLY:
Bartók | Paganini | Strads

BSO: 2011 | 2009 | 2007
Philadelphia Orchestra: 2012

Gauguin @ MOMA

One of the things that has impressed me most about Paul Gauguin as an artist was his exploration of a variety of media. In addition to his paintings he used woodcuts, lithography, carving, and ceramics, making each medium his own personal invention. In a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Gauguin: Metamorphoses, visitors get to see Gauguin as just as revolutionary in printmaking and wood carving as he was in his paintings.

Traditional lithography in Gauguin's time was produced on limestone slabs; however, he chose zinc plates, zincographs, which allowed him to play with unconventional shapes for his compositions. The suite of eleven from the Volpini series are also printed on bright yellow paper commonly used for commercial printing.

Anyone familiar with Gauguin's work knows of the many wood carvings he created during his two Tahitian adventures. From those carvings evolved, for me, some of his best work, his woodcut prints. The Noa Noa suite, his cycle of everyday life, love, fear, religion, and death completely changed how the woodcut would be from then on considered. From a precise engraver's medium, Gauguin exploded the block print into an artistic vehicle full of possibilities.

This wonderful gem of an exhibit runs through June 8th.

The Last Uptown Biennial

The 77th Whitney Biennial, the last to take place in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building, is set to open. In the future, the show will be moved to its new Chelsea waterfront location.

Considered a “snapshot” of the current American art scene, the 2014 edition, curated by Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer, and Michelle Grabner, includes 103 artists, diverse in age, location, and, medium. Men still outnumber women, some artists were actually born before 1960 -- surprise! -- and painting, some of it good, is well represented.

Starting on the fourth floor, the most alive with color -- Amy Sillman’s thick swashes of paint make for a familiar starting point and Sterling Ruby’s trio of over-sized ceramic -- are they bumper cars? -- are unavoidable. Sheila Hick’s floor-to-ceiling, multicolored woven textiles say, "Hug me," and Joel Otterson's Rags to Riches, a crazy-wonderful beaded curtain complete with a hem of rusted old tools, and Zoe Leonard's room-sized camera oscura are probably the best works in the show.



It’s easy to quibble with this exhibit -- we always will, it's part of the fun. Why were some artists chosen and not others? WTF is this or what is that particular work doing here? Or just plain meh.

There will undoubtedly be something for everyone's sensibilities in this show. My issue, and I've got a few for sure, is that this like most biennials is a big mess of stuff, and as you make your way from the fourth floor back down to the lobby, it gets more tedious with each. There is so much great art being made out there in America that this show should be rockin' - but it ain't.

More images from the Biennial can be seen on my flickr.

Murray Perahia Back at Strathmore

Charles T. Downey, Murray Perahia’s piano recital at Strathmore delivers on expectations and exceeds them (Washington Post, March 6, 2014)

Schumann, Papillons (inter alia), M. Perahia (CBS Masterworks, 1990)

One expects certain things from a recital by Murray Perahia: some carefully chiseled Bach, some Chopin or Schumann miniatures performed with a rubato so spontaneous that they sound as if they have just been improvised. The celebrated American pianist, now in the fifth decade of his career, delivered all of those things during his concert Tuesday night, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at Strathmore.

The fourth French Suite was classic Perahia Bach, with no need to make grandiose statements, just to let the music unfold: a blithe allemande, a tripping courante, a delicate sarabande, sprightly small dances with curlicue decorations, a brash gigue. Schumann’s “Papillons” was enlivened by tiny voicing details, like the brushstrokes and fine shading of a master painter, a series of whimsical thoughts rambled out like a Romantic stream of consciousness. [Continue reading]

Murray Perahia, piano
WPAS
Music Center at Strathmore

PREVIOUSLY:
2012 | 2009 | 2007 | Bach Partitas

On Forbes: In Memoriam Claudio Abbado: A Discography

Claudio Abbado at Wien Modern in 1992. Photo courtesy Wiener Konzerthaus, © Christof Krumpel

The 13 Best (??) Recordings of Claudio Abbado on Forbes.com:

When a fine artist dies, we hear that it is a major loss to art. This is usually gross exaggeration: when Mozart died short of 36 years age, just as his career was really taking off, that was a great loss to art. Ditto for Schubert’s demise at 31 or when Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga died days short of his 20th birthday, with so much promise of future greatness.

But when an accomplished and celebrated artist dies in the autumn of their years, with great accomplishments behind them, not that much ahead of them, and often after they have retired or passed their artistic peak, it isn’t in any meaningful way a loss to the greater community. (Though it certainly is one to friends and family). Instead, one should react with gratitude and joy for having been given so much by the artist, and amazement at how much these women and men were allowed to touch our lives—living on in the memories and legacies, recollections of ours and influences on us.

Claudio Abbado, who died on January 20th, aged 80, falls right between the tragic loss and life-fulfilled templates...

Continue reading here, at Forbes.com

A Second Sighting: Moby-Dick at the Washington National Opera

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for this review from the Kennedy Center.

This month, composer Jake Heggie’s opera, Moby-Dick, received its East Coast premiere with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I caught the second performance on the evening of February 25, 2014. I had seen the opera in San Francisco in October, 2012, and I was anxious to see if my initial impressions (review here) would survive a second exposure. I will not repeat my initial review and leave it to the interested reader to go to the link to see my full take on the work.

I found that the opera held up very well, indeed. It is every bit as dramatically compelling as I had remembered. The theatrical effects could not engage my attention as fully as they had the first time around, but this allowed me to focus more on Heggie’s score. It is a thematically coherent piece of work, with well-marked out themes and characterizations. Its impressionistic evocations of the myriad moods of the sea are very fine. Heggie also sets Melville’s Shakespearean language with great dexterity. His vocal and choral writing is very effective. I’m still not sure how memorable this music is, but I did enjoy it more on this outing. My only reservation, which remains from my first impression, is that one of Heggie’s main themes skirts the vernacular of the American musical a little too closely for my comfort.

J.Heggie / G.Scheer, Moby Dick, P.Summers / San Francisco Opera J.H.Morris, S.Costello, M.Smith et al. L.Foglia (Director) EuroArts DVD

I was struck again by the metaphysical ferocity of Melville’s work, which Heggie and his librettist Gene Scheer deserve so much credit for capturing. In the opera, Ahab’s first words are “Infinity, infinity, we shall harvest infinity.” We are, then, on a metaphysical voyage. The drama revolves around the question of free will and fate, and whether the universe is based upon providential reason or sheer, brute will, indifferent to man. As if he were in a medieval debate at the University of Paris, Ahab asks, “Is it God, or I, or who, who lifts this arm?” The subject of metaphysics often produces somnolence in the college classroom; so it is some measure of this work’s success that it makes metaphysics literally a life or death proposition. “Where’s God?” desperately sings Starbuck. He knows his life—or even more importantly, his soul—depends on the answer.

On my second encounter, I am even more persuaded that this opera convincingly captures the titanic figure of Ahab in all his metaphysical madness. He is pure Nietzschean will to power: “What I dared, I’ve willed, and what I’ve willed, I’ll do,” he proclaims. He has the Miltonian stature of Lucifer. Ahab not only declares, “non serviam,” but launches a counterattack against God to strike at his seeming indifference. “I am darkness leaping out of light,” sings Ahab. It doesn’t get much darker than that.

To keep Ahab from becoming a caricature, he must also be given a human dimension. This is most poignantly conveyed by the second act scene in which Ahab and Starbuck reminisce about Nantucket and their respective families. This is the moment in which Ahab considers leaving his mad endeavor. Because of the purpose it serves, this is one of the most important scenes in the opera. It adds an indispensable psychological complexity and invests the cold metaphysics with warm humanity. Even more so than the first time I saw it, I think this scene is one of the opera’s finest achievements.

How does the WNO cast compare with the San Francisco Opera production? In the case of Ishmael and Pip, very well indeed, for the simple reason that tenor Stephen Costello and soprano Talise Trevegne reprised their respective roles. I was, however, even more impressed by Costello in this performance and took far more note of him than I had in San Francisco. Trevegne could not have been better in either performance.

Of course, a great deal hinges on Ahab. In San Francisco, Jay Hunter Morris gave a superb portrayal. In Washington, Carl Tanner was equally fine. In fact, I prefer Tanner in the role because the quality of his tenor voice seemed to me to have more weight—a quality that left me less confused as to why Heggie should have made Ahab a tenor in the first place. An announcement was made before the performance that Tanner was suffering from a bad cold, but had decided to go on despite it. He sang so well that I could only wonder how well he would sing without a cold. His voice never flagged. Baritone Matthew Worth made a fine Starbuck. Eric Greene looked as if he had been sent by Central Casting to play Queequeg, and his singing was a perfect match in his duets with Costello’s Ishmael.

As in San Francisco, the production was theatrically arresting and graphically thrilling. Conductor Evan Rogister, making his WNO debut, and the Washington National Opera Orchestra captured all the intricacies of Haggie’s score in a highly transparent manner that might have benefited from a touch more subtlety.

If you did not make it to the Kennedy Center, you can get a very good impression of this work from the excellent DVD of the San Francisco Opera production produced by EuroArts. If you play it on a large screen, you may even be able to experience some of the theatrical impact. I would like to add that Moby-Dick has a broad age-range appeal. My 16-year-old daughter, who accompanied me, liked it very much. When I played the DVD at home, two of my other children—ages nine and 14—gathered on their own to view it, were immediately engaged, and did not move for extended periods of time.

Bernard Herrmann chose to write a cantata on Moby-Dick rather than an opera because, he thought, “the medium of opera seems too limited.” Heggie’s work and this imaginative production prove otherwise.

The production still runs twice more, on March 5^th and 8^th. 

Thoughts on the English Suites

Charles T. Downey, Bach’s ‘English Suites’ tackled at Phillips Collection and National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, March 4, 2014

Bach, English Suites (inter alia), C. Rousset (Ambroisie, box set, 2010)

Bach’s “English Suites” are among his most diverting music for the keyboard, where a delight in patterns and brilliant finger-work crowds out a severe contrapuntal approach. Bach’s encyclopedic tendencies meant that he had a plan when he grouped works into a set like this, so one gets more out of a complete performance than hearing these pieces singly. So the complete performance offered on Sunday afternoon and evening, in numerical order and split between a harpsichordist at the Phillips Collection and a pianist at the National Gallery of Art, was most welcome. [Continue reading]

Bach, English Suites
Anthony Newman, harpsichord
Phillips Collection
Peter Vinograde, piano
National Gallery of Art

Academy Awards True to Form

Once again, the informal Ionarts Best Movie of the Year poll correctly predicted the Academy Award for Best Film, which went to 12 Years a Slave, to no one's surprise -- with Best Adapted Screenplay for John Ridley to boot. For my money, Bruce Dern was better for Best Actor, in Nebraska, but Matthew McConaughey had a very good year (not just for Dallas Buyer's Club, with a nod for his Make-Up and Hairstyling crew, but for Mud and as the best part of the generally awful Wolf of Wall Street), although he should have hired a speechwriter. Neither Philomena nor August: Osage County felt like an exceptional film, which perhaps diminished the achievements of two fine performances, by Judi Dench and Meryl Streep, respectively. This meant that Best Actress went to the most deserving Cate Blanchett, whose role in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine -- a sort of updated Blanche Dubois -- was right in her wheelhouse. Michael Fassbender was robbed in the Best Supporting Actor category, but Lupita Nyong'o lit up the evening with her beautiful speech after winning as Best Supporting Actress.

As I predicted, Gravity pretty much swept the technical categories (Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects), cementing its position as "Runner-Up Best Picture" with wins in Cinematography and Directing for Emmanuel Lubezki and Alfonso Cuarón -- even Best Original Score for Steven Price (which seemed like a possibility to me). The Great Gatsby, a dog of a movie, got some consolation prizes in Costume Design and Production Design, probably more than it deserved. The truly odd Her eked out Best Original Screenplay for Spike Jonze, although its quirky best song -- as performed by Karen O, the best actual live performance of the Oscars show (where Auto-Tune cannot help you, Adela Nazeem) -- was beaten out, most predictably by the song from Frozen, which also -- and again most predictably -- took Best Animated Feature.

The remaining categories were won by Helium (Short Film, Live Action), M. Hublot (Short Film, Animated), The Great Beauty (Foreign Language Film), 20 Feet from Stardom (Documentary Feature), and The Lady in No. 6 (Documentary Short Subject), about the extraordinary Alice Herz-Sommer. As usual, the absence of an award for Best Comedy means that some great movies are left with nothing.