In Brief: Pentecost Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. (After clicking to an audio or video stream, press the "Play" button to start the broadcast.) Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• From the Opéra Comique in Paris last month, a rare performance of Ali-Baba, the 1887 opera by Charles Lecocq, an adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights. [France Musique]


• Semyon Bychkov conducts Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Royal Opera in London, with Johan Botha (Der Kaiser), Emily Magee (Die Kaiserin), and others. [ORF]


• Handel's oratorio Solomon performed by Bernard Labadie and Les Violons du Roy, with soloists including Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Solomon) and Karina Gauvin (Queen of Sheba), plus La Chapelle de Québec. [RTBF]


• Listen to music of J.S. Bach, W.F. Bach, J. Christian Bach, and others performed by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and oboist Xenia Löffler, recorded last month at the Schwetzinger Festspiele. [ORF]


• The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment plays a concert at the Spitalfields Festival, with works by Schutz, Rosenmuller, and Praetorius. [BBC3]


• Mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes joins the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège and conductor Patrick Davin for music by Ravel, Henri Duparc, and Carl Nielsen. [France Musique]


• Bernard Haitink conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in music of Schumann, Berg, and Beethoven. [BBC3]


• Vassily Sinaisky conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in Elgar's second symphony and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, with Daniil Trifonov as soloist, recorded at the Berlin Philharmonie. [ORF]


• Music of Czech composers from the Pavel Haas Quartet, recorded at the Conservatory in Brussels. [RTBF]


• Pianist David Fray plays a recital at the Salzburger Pfingstfestspiele, with music by Rossini, Liszt, Schubert, and Bach. [ORF]


• From Les Musicales de Colmar, music by Schubert, Saint-Saëns, Respighi and Mozart performed by the Leipzig String Quartet and guest soloists. [France Musique]


• Also from Colmar, more from the Leipzig String Quartet: music by Lucien Durosoir, Claude Debussy, and André Caplet. [France Musique]


• Cornelius Meister leads the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien in music of Hans Rott, the violin concerto of Jörg Widmann (with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist), and Martinu's third symphony. [ORF]


• From the Wiener Festwochen, Paavo Järvi leads the Orchestre de Paris and cellist Tatjana Vassilieva, with music by Ravel, Stravinsky, Musorgsky and Shostakovich. [ORF]


• A recital by pianist Giovanni Bellucci with music by William Byrd, Beethoven, Ferruccio Busoni, Prokofiev, Chopin, and Franz Liszt. [France Musique]

TCR: 'A Coffin in Egypt' in Philadelphia

R. I. Gordon, A Coffin in Egypt, F. von Stade, Houston Grand Opera, T. Myers (New Albany Records, May 1, 2014)

Charles T. Downey, Even with von Stade, Gordon’s inert “Coffin” is a deadly night in Philadelphia (The Classical Review, June 7)

Opera singers sometimes have had second careers in music theater or other lighter genres, from Ezio Pinza to Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman. We might add to that list the beloved American mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who has returned to the stage this spring in a new music theater piece composed for her...

Ricky Ian Gordon, A Coffin in Egypt
With Frederica von Stade
Opera Philadelphia

SEE ALSO:

• David Patrick Stearns, For 'A Coffin in Egypt,' von Stade goes deep into the heart of Texas (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 4, 2014)
  
• Bryan Butler, Interview: Frederica Von Stade Comes to Opera Philadelphia (Philadelphia Magazine, May 29)
  
• Mark Swed, Frederica von Stade is regal in 'A Coffin in Egypt' (Los Angeles Times, April 25)
  
• Timothy Mangan, Frederica von Stade not enough to lift 'A Coffin in Egypt' (Orange County Register, April 25)
  
• George Loomis, A Coffin in Egypt, Houston Grand Opera (Financial Times, March 19)
  
• Mike Greenberg, Cryptic Actors Drive Final Nail Into Coffin Opera (Classical Voice North America, March 18)
  
• Charles T. Downey, Ricky Ian Gordon's Green Sneakers (Washington Post, April 4, 2011)
  
• ---, Dead Man Walking (Ionarts, March 6, 2006)

À mon chevet: 'My Struggle'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

On one such day Dad decided to teach me how to swim. He told me to follow him down to the water's edge. Perhaps half a meter below the surface, a small, slippery ridge overgrown with seaweed jutted into the sea, and that was where I was to stand. Dad swam out to a reef four or five meters from the shore. And turned to face me.

"Now you swim over here to me," he said.

"But it's deep!" I said. Because it was, the seabed between the two reefs was barely visible, it was probably three meters down.

"I'm here, Karl Ove. Don't you think I could rescue you if you sank? Come on, swim. It's not in the slightest bit dangerous! I know you can do it. Launch yourself and do the strokes. If you do that you can swim, you know! Then you can swim!"

I crouched down in the water. The seabed was a greenish glimmer a long way down. Would I be able to float over that? My heart only beat this hard when I was frightened.

"I can't," I shouted.

"Course you can!" Dad shouted back. "It's so easy! Just push off, do a couple of strokes, and you'll be here."

"I can't!" I said. He studied me. Then he sighed and swam over.

"OK," he said. "I'll swim beside you. I can hold a hand under your tummy. Then you can't sink!"

But I couldn't do it. Why didn't he understand? I started to cry.

"I can't," I said. The depth of the water was in my head and in my chest. The depth was in my arms and legs, in my fingers and toes. The depth filled all of me. Was I supposed to be able to think that away?

There weren't any more smiles to be seen now. With a stern expression he clambered onto the land, walked over to our things, and returned with my life jacket.

"Put this on then," he said, throwing it at me. "Now you can't sink even if you tried."

I put it on, even though I knew it didn't change anything. He swam out again. Turned to face me.

"Try now!" he said. "Over here to me!" [...] But I couldn't. I would never ever be able to swim across that deep water. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.

"Come on, boy!" Dad shouted. "We haven't got all day!"

"I CAN'T!" I shouted back. "CAN'T YOU HEAR?"

He stiffened and glared at me, his eyes furious.

-- Karl Ove Knausgård, Min Kamp, Vol. 3 (translation by Don Bartlett)

I have been racing through each volume of this Norwegian novel as the translation comes out (see my posts on Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). The author was born just about a month before I was born, and one part of the book's appeal is noticing the parallels between our rather different lives as children of the 1970s and 80s. This is likely why many of the things that happened to the author, as I read about them, feel so personal. In particular, the way that imagination and reality are woven together in a child's mind is pitch perfect in this volume, as is the way that young Karl Ove sees human faces and other attributes in everything around him -- the doorknob of his bedroom, a cement mixer standing in his friend's back yard, pencils standing in a jar.

After dealing mostly with episodes of his young adult life in the first two volumes, Knausgård now turns back to the beginning, poring over his earliest memories and what life was like growing up on Tromøya Island in southern Norway. The tense, conflicted feelings the author has for his father, the towering and yet often petty figure whose disastrous decline dominated the first volume, are coming more clearly into focus. Earlier this week, I tweeted that a piece on Knausgård by Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker had suggested the idea of searching the Internet for images of Knausgård's family and friend who are characters in the book. That possibility had never occurred to me, and I was a little afraid that I would regret replacing the imagined characters in my brain with the real people. When I searched for pictures of Yngve, Knausgård's older brother, that was exactly what happened, leading me to tweet again: "Well, looked at pictures of Yngve, Knausgård's brother. Going to stay with the Yngve in my mind, and all the others, too." Yngve Knausgård himself favorited that Tweet and now is following my Twitter account, the first time that a character in a novel I am reading has communicated with me outside of the book.

Another Ninth Symphony

T. F. Kelly, First Nights: Five Musical Premiers (including Beethoven's ninth symphony) (Yale UP, 2001)

Both of the pieces on this week's program from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, heard on Thursday night at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, are repetitions from recent seasons: John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, from 2006, and Beethoven's ninth symphony, more recently (and already planned again for next season). The combination of the two was also curious in that the events of the day commemorated by the Adams piece, September 11, 2001, seem to smash any and all hope one might have in the words of Schiller hammered on by Beethoven, "Alle Menschen werden Brüder." (The pairing was the same at the New York Philharmonic premiere of the Adams.) Worse than that, the length of the Adams made necessary some extremely fast tempi in the Beethoven, as if music director Marin Alsop was hellbent on hitting the target of a two-hour concert, as announced in the program. She almost made it by 10 pm, but at a cost.

My feelings about the Adams piece were not altered much by this performance, namely that it had its greatest power in the aftermath of the attacks, winning Adams a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, but as the years recede, its emotional power ebbs and weaknesses are revealed. I would love to hear the score without the recorded track, a recitation of victims' names and words spoken by their families, quoted in the New York Times. Most of the music is simple and repetitive in nature, soft chords that rise up and vanish through sections of the orchestra, and without those recorded voices it would be revealed as a vanilla accompaniment. Both the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and Peabody Children's Chorus made pleasing and well-articulated contributions to the atmospheric nature of the piece. It has one major emotional climax, as the chorus takes up the words of the wife of L. Russell Keene III, one of the victims -- "I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is" -- in a sort of gut-wrenching howl, with big sweeps of Sibelius-like sound in the orchestra. Little else leaves a lasting impression.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform 9/11 tribute paired with Beethoven (Washington Post, June 8) Tim Smith, Affecting pairing of Adams, Beethoven from the Baltimore Symphony (Baltimore Sun, June 7)

Beethoven's ninth symphony is performed so often that conductors look for something to make their interpretation stand out, and movement by movement Alsop's was marked by an almost anxious, frenetic quality. The first movement was rushed in a way that left little room for the "poco maestoso" part that Beethoven wanted to happen. In this attempt to wrench all the drama from the piece she could, most of the mystery of the movement, especially in the coda, was rushed over, with some sloppiness in the faster runs of the violins and winds. The scherzo was, appropriately, very fast and crisply articulated, but it felt more studious than playful, more furrowed brow than arched brow. Even beyond the sudden rests, the shift of time in the trio, and the surprise entrances of the timpani, it should have a playful side. The straightening out of the extreme rubato often applied to the third movement was much appreciated, but when you do not have to subdivide an Adagio molto, you are probably going too fast. The reason to make the trip to Baltimore was to hear a rather fine vocal quartet -- Angela Meade, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Dimitri Pittas, and Eric Owens (stepping in at the last minute to replace James Morris) -- but there was little to savor at the tempi imposed by Alsop. All of the musicians gave their best, but too much of this performance, from the first unsteady statement of the main theme by Owens, felt unsettled and rushed, even the final quartet moment, where Alsop could have luxuriated in Meade's voice soaring over our heads but did not.

This concert repeats tonight at Strathmore and tomorrow afternoon in Baltimore.

Picturesque: Cameron Carpenter's mobile-ish Marshall & Ogletree & our 100 year old Rieger

The Wiener Konzerthaus saw the European premiere of Cameron Carpenter's made-to-order Marshall & Ogletree digital organ, his mobile touring organ… if you can call something that needs two 18-wheelers to be moved truly “mobile”.

In any case, the instrument allows him to pull of his organistic pyrotechnic-tricks without wasting hours or days before each concert trying to figure out the stops, getting the registration just right (and he registers—every phrase—meticulously!), and adapting to the touch, feel, and play of the organ at whatever hall or church he has just arrived. That may take one element away, from what makes organs special (the adaption to it... the individual character of each instrument—warts and all), but it also adds something to it: namely that Carpenter-element of Barnum & Bailey—meets Franz Liszt which is something rather different and ought not be compared to the traditional organ recital. It’s certainly good to have both: the sometimes admittedly stodgy, professorial organist diligently playing Reger and Bach and Vierne… and then the young man who reminds me of nothing so much as a love-child between Offenbach and Pee-wee Herman who ran through a glue factory and then stood nearby an exploding Swarovski outlet.

At the Konzerthaus Magazin there are several pictures of Carpenter’s brand new baby—as it sits on stage together with the 100-year old Rieger organ of the Konzerthaus (the largest of its kind).

Also: Here’s a little video made for the launch at Lincoln Center in March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNC6vqJ7baI; here he is discussing the idea of having three such beasts… one stationed in Europe, one in North America, and one in Asia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QioNj4lXzgw

Mobile speaker system of the Marshall&Ogletree opus 8

More here.

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Boston Ballet @ KC

(L to R) Lasha Khozashvili and Lia Cirio in D.M.J. 1953-1977, Boston Ballet (photo © Rosalie O’Connor)
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Boston Ballet, a milestone the group is celebrating with a brief run of performances at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Seen last night, the selection made by artistic director Mikko Nissinen highlights his organization's strengths in the contemporary, while the central panel of the triptych -- the Rubies portion of George Balanchine's Jewels sandwiched between two recent works by Czech choreographers -- had a musty quality.

This Rubies was a mild-mannered, sort of happy-go-lucky version by comparison to the recent performance by New York City Ballet, which is the source, so to speak. It was fun and jazzy, of course, but Whitney Jensen in the dynamo solo role was less buoyant, and her scene with the four men, who position her like a marionette had little menace or sizzle to it. This put the focus more on the couple of Jeffrey Cirio and Misa Kuranaga, whose pas de deux in the central movement was lovely. The Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra sounded like they were much more familiar with the music, Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, although the piano soloist from the Boston Ballet, Freda Locker, was less sure.

Other Articles: Sarah Kaufman, Boston Ballet performs ‘Bella Figura’ at the Kennedy Center (Washington Post, June 4) ---, The Czech National Theatre Ballet at the Harman Center (Washington Post, April 27, 2009) Rebecca Ritzel, Kennedy Center performances cap 50th season for Boston, Pennsylvania ballets (Washington Post, May 31) Jeffrey Gantz, Boston Ballet glitters in ‘Jewels’ (Boston Globe, May 23) ---, Boston Ballet puts its versatility on display in new production (Boston Globe, May 10)

D.M.J. 1953–1977, by Czech choreographer Petr Zuska, was more alluring, a work whose title refers to the names of the three Czech composers whose music is heard in it, just premiered by the Boston Ballet last month, but seen in Washington in 2009 from the Czech National Theater Ballet. (The years 1953-1977 in the title were glimpsed by Zuska on a woman's tombstone in Montreal.) It tells the story of a man's regret over the death of a beloved woman, as he seems to sleep fitfully, tormented by bad memories, between scenes. The Largo from Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, with its haunting English horn solo, was the backdrop for scenes of mournful reminiscence, as six couples acted out the joys and sorrows of conjugal life, after the man deposits a rose on what looks like a grave. Martinů’s third symphony, also the Largo movement but more jagged and driving, was paired with scenes of greater violence and tension, with the outstanding male lead, Lasha Khozashvili, shirtless and menacing. For the final scene, to the last movement ("The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!") of the first book of Janáček’s piano collection On the Overgrown Path, the corps gathered around the tomb, and hearing the hoot of the barn owl in the score, gradually departed. The lamented woman, danced with muscular agitation by Lia Cirio, writhed about in anguish on a tomb-like bed.

The triptych concluded with the most disturbing of the three pieces, Bella Figura, by another Czech choreographer, Jiří Kylián. It uses a mishmash of unrelated music -- Lukas Foss, Pergolesi (movements of the Stabat Mater, the Adagio from Alessandro Marcello's D minor oboe concerto, a Vivaldi mandolin concerto -- and the corresponding vignettes, some compelling and others merely odd, were just as much of a mishmash. Kylián, like Zuska, uses a lot of mime, a sense of having crossed a line reinforced by the choreographer's embrace of silence for long stretches at the beginning and end. To make matters worse, the music was played from recordings, with a canned, obtrusive sound and leaving the orchestra pit darkened, only adding to the sense of something unfolding in the machine-cut way that it must. The movements of identically costumed men and women, bare-chested and with red, flower-like skirts, added a Polynesian flair and there were some interesting visual effects, as when one of the women was enveloped by a black curtain, but not enough to sustain interest.

This performance repeats tonight and tomorrow night (June 4 and 5), in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

«Stained Glass», Concertino for Joshua Redman, Aaron Goldberg, and the WKO

 

 Gerd Hermann Ortler, «Stained Glass»

Concertino for Joshua Redman, Aaron Goldberg, and the Wiener KammerOrchester (2014)

(World Premiere Performance, commissioned by the Wiener Konzerthaus)

Performed on Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 at the Grosser Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus ¶

Second Opinion: WNO Magic Flute goes High School Musical

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

Photo (detail) courtesy Washington National Opera, © Scott Suchman

On May 7, 2014, I caught the third performance of The Magic Flute at the Kennedy Center Opera House in a production that is scheduled to run till May 18. It was vocally satisfying, but visually irritating.

The production design intruded already on the substantial overture: we were treated to projections of blue striations and what looked like microscopic fabric fibers that kept changing color tones and assuming geometric shapes. What had this to do with Mozart or The Magic Flute?

W.A.Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, R.Jacobs / AKAMUS D.Behle, M.Peterson, D.Schmutzhard et al. Harmonia Mundi W.A.Mozart, The Magic Flute, C.Mackerras / LPO S.Keenlyside, J.Tomlinson et al. Chandos

It turns out almost nothing. Projections of his crossing lines, bleeding colors, and geometric blocks came from paintings by Japanese-American production designer Jun Kaneko, made in response to Mozart’s music during more than three years of listening. In an interview with the Washington Post, Kaneko said, “I still consider myself a real amateur. I have no idea about opera, close to zero. …”

As reflected in this production, I’m afraid this is not false modesty. I’m not saying there was no relationship between the sets and the projections and the stage action—when Tamino and Pamina undergo their trial by fire, for instance, there was a projection of flickering flame, and when the praises of the sun were sung, there appeared a large yellow disc to simulate it—but these were the exceptions. Overall, there was no detectable correlation.

Charles' reviews [!] of this production of the Magic Flute can be read here: first performance, second performance, and final thoughts.

This reminded me of the John Cage ballet scores that were completely unconnected to and independent of Merce Cunningham’s choreography for them. The orchestra and dancers rehearsed separately and appeared together for the first time at the premiere performance. Consequently, the dancers’ movements had nothing to do with the music. The audience was left to make of these random juxtapositions what it could. There was no shared experience—except of disconnectedness. If this was the experience Kaneko was aiming at—which I doubt—then he achieved it. Perhaps I’m being too rough on the production, but the disconnectedness of the design constantly called attention to itself, and away from the action on stage or the music, which it purportedly should have

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