For Your Consideration: 'Jafar Panahi's Taxi'

Whatever else may or may not be changing in Iran, the situation for filmmakers there remains restrictive. Iranian director Jafar Panahi, placed under house arrest after a run-in with his government's censorship machine, managed to make two extremely low-budget films, This Is Not a Film and the less effective Closed Curtain that were smuggled out of the Islamic Republic. Panahi, who is now apparently enjoying some greater liberty, has made a new feature that takes up many of the same themes as This Is Not a Film, blurring the lines between documentary reality and cinematic artifice. Its conceit, so flimsy as to be absurd, is that Panahi is driving a taxi around Tehran with an anti-theft camera on the dashboard, speaking to a series of passengers who happen to get into his car. The result is ninety minutes of delightful whimsy and meta-satire.

Jafar Panahi's Taxi, directed by Jafar Panahi

In a regime where "sordid realism" is strictly forbidden by the censorship laws, Panahi has extended discussions with a petty criminal (on the subject of capital punishment, no less), a DVD bootlegger (who promises that he can get Panahi any film or television series he wants, even dailies of films still in progress), and a legal consultant (defending women arrested trying to watch sporting events in stadiums, from which women are banned in Iran, with open references to Panahi's masterpiece Offside, the film that appears to have landed the director in all this trouble). This legal consultant, with whom Panahi openly discusses his own harrowing experience with the government interrogators, lays a rose on the dashboard in front of the camera, blowing a kiss of tribute to us, the viewers of "the world of cinema," who will never waver in their support of justice in Iran. While still claiming to be true to the conditions of the judgment against him -- twenty years without making any movies -- Panahi effectively thumbs his nose at any attempt to impose censorship on free expression in the digital age.

Other Reviews: New York Times | Hollywood Reporter | Washington Post | Kristen Page-Kirby A.V. Club | The New Yorker | NPR | Los Angeles Times | Variety | Village Voice

In one of the stranger passages in the film, two old women get into the director's taxi, carrying a gold fish in a large glass bowl. The goldfish may refer to Panahi's earlier film The White Balloon, which is about a little girl who wants to buy a goldfish, but the women are taking this gold fish to the Spring of Ali. As they explain, somewhat exasperated, they have kept this fish from the spring alive for a year. Now they must return the fish to the spring or they will die. (The spring, in the southern part of the city, is a pre-Islamic site, but these sorts of popular devotions do not die easily, surely a point of contention in the Islamic Republic.) The passenger with the greatest impact is Panahi's precocious niece, whom he picks up at her school. Like the DVD seller, who is pressed into service to record a wounded pedestrian's last will and testament with Panahi's cell phone, the niece seems more directly a filmmaker than her famous uncle, using her digital camera to create a short film for a class project. Parroting her teacher, she dutifully recites the absurd government regulations on cinema to Panahi, all of which are broken in the course of the film, just to be able to show the most basic things. Without being a critique of the government, Jafar Panahi's Taxi reveals the absurdities of living in a society under such rules.

This film opens today, at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

#morninglistening: Franchomme, Discoveries

#morninglistening to #Franchomme discoveries by @WeeZeeDee on @DelosMusic #classicalmusic… http://t.co/4KirrFBTY5 pic.twitter.com/LpI7DSYZpj

— Jens F. Laurson (@ClassicalCritic) September 25, 2015

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NSO Organ Series Continues

Charles T. Downey, Kennedy Center’s organ series launches with fine performance
Washington Post, October 15

The acoustics of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall are not ideal. While it may be detrimental to the ensemble sound of the National Symphony Orchestra, the cavernous space is filled quite beautifully by the sound of the hall’s concert organ. The new season of the NSO’s organ series opened on Wednesday evening, with the NSO’s own organist, William Neil. Collaborative to the end, Neil invited along 10 colleagues from the NSO, offering a program of curiosities for brass, percussion, and organ.

In César Franck’s Chorale No. 1 in E Minor, Neil applied every combination of rich color in the organ to Franck’s tangled chromaticism... [Continue reading]

William Neal (organ) and Friends
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

NSO ORGAN SERIES:
Thierry Escaich (May 15, 2015)
Iveta Apkalna (May 21, 2014)
Paul Jacobs (February 7, 2014)
Cameron Carpenter (October 18, 2013)

Young Concert Artists: Seiya Ueno

Charles T. Downey, Flutist Seiya Ueno’s local debut performance sells itself (Washington Post, October 14)

Young classical musicians sometimes feel they have to turn to superficial or entrepreneurial ways to distinguish themselves. The local debut of flutist Seiya Ueno, presented by Young Concert Artists on Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, was a reminder that the best way for a musician to sell himself is by playing in a way people want to hear.

The success of this recital came down to one pairing, Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Pierre Boulez’s “Sonatine.” The Debussy arrangement showed off Ueno’s rich, polished bottom octave... [Continue reading]

Seiya Ueno (flute) and Wendy Chen (piano)
Young Concert Artists
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

#morninglistening: Paul Badura-Skoda & Mozart on the Beach

#morninglistening to #Mozart on the Beach. @GramolaKlassik w /Paul Badura-Skoda #classica… http://t.co/vxhoiAmFaO pic.twitter.com/wPrD3zPFyY

— Jens F. Laurson (@ClassicalCritic) September 26, 2015

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On Forbes: Kirill Petrenko remains at the Bavarian State Opera

Kirill Petrenko Remains At The Bavarian State Opera

arlier today it was announced that Kirill Petrenko, the coming chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, has renewed his current contract as music director of the Bavarian State Opera by three years until 2021.

The Bavarian State Minister for Culture, Dr. Ludwig Spaenle, signed the new contracts with him and the Bavarian State Opera’s Intendant Nikolaus Bachler who brought Petrenko to the house in 2010, after a tetchy relationship with the previous music director, Kent Nagano. Bachler had all but married himself to Petrenko’s remaining in Munich, after it was clear that Petrenko would become the designated head honcho of the Berlin Philharmonic. Keeping Petrenko was thought to be...

Full review on Forbes.com.

Jeremy Denk and the Rag

Ligeti, Piano Études, J. Denk (2012) Ives, Piano Sonatas, J. Denk (2010)

Jeremy Denk is a thinking person's pianist, at his best putting together quirky playlists or drawing out bizarre sides of pieces you thought you knew. He is a musician of equal parts wit and enthusiasm, and this is probably why reading his thoughts about music is just as good as hearing him play it, if not better. In his last few appearances in the area, solo recitals in 2012 and 2013 and with the National Symphony Orchestra, he has disappointed a bit in the hearing. I suspect that for listeners who focus, even unintentionally, on his manner at the keyboard -- his gyrations and especially his tendency to turn towards the audience so that his face communicates an expression mid-phrase -- the humor and analysis of the music come through visually. Having spent most of his latest recital, presented by Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Sunday afternoon, looking at the floor instead of at him, I received only the sounds he made, including the loud slams of his percussive left foot.

The results were least pleasing in the opening Bach, my favorite of the English Suites (G minor, BWV 808), where Denk emphasized speed over detail in the fast prelude, courante, and gigue, so that trills were often smudged and runs elided. Abundant use of the sustaining pedal obscured the allemande and sarabande, both quite unctuous, while the gavottes had a music-boxy fairy dust quality, sometimes so light in the keys that tone barely registered. Although Denk did not make the connection in his brief remarks mid-recital, all but the prelude in the suite are dance pieces, making what could have been a natural segue to the "iPod shuffle" set examining the influence of American ragtime that concluded the second half. (I had to miss Denk's jazz-classical "playoff" with Jason Moran on Friday night, because of a medical emergency: thanks to Robert Battey for pinch-hitting for me at the last minute for the Washington Post.)

Curiously, Denk took the same over-delicate approach to Scott Joplin's Sunflower Slow Drag, co-written with Scott Hayden, echoed in the later work that was the closest to it, William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost Rag, played even more sotto voce. This was not at all the sound of the rag imitated by Stravinsky in his Piano Rag Music, a jagged jangle of clashes and metric complexity, nor the "Ragtime" movement in Hindemith's 1922 Suite, which was on the vicious side. Both pieces date from before their composers immigrated to the United States, and both came to a more nuanced understanding of jazz after living here. William Byrd's ninth pavan (The Passinge Mesures), from My Ladye Nevelles Booke, and Conlon Nancarrow's first Canon for Ursula had only a tangential relationship to ragtime music, in that they had different kinds of rhythmic complexity. Denk likewise seemed to include Constant Donald Lambert's stride piano send-up of the Pilgrim's Chorus from Wagner's Tannhäuser mostly for laughs.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, Denk shows range in ‘iPod shuffle’ (Washington Post, October 13) Robert Battey, Two musicians in their prime, sharing music from their genres (Washington Post, October 10)

With Haydn's C Major Fantasia (Hob. XVII:4), Denk was back to his fast and furious Bach mode, with many of the details glossed over at an ultra-fast tempo. (It is marked Presto, to be fair.) This piece comes to a complete stop on a low octave a couple of times, with a fermata meant to be held for a long time followed by a move up a half-step, and Denk played with those moments quite gleefully. The frenetic and excessive side of Denk's musical personality was suited to the final work, Schumann's Carnaval, with its mood changes from madcap to distracted to delicate and back again. One had the sense of a somewhat unbalanced person flitting manically from one thought to another, which is at least part of what Schumann wanted to get across.

The only disappointment was that Denk did not play something for the "Sphinxes" movement. It is not really a movement, just the work's three letter-based themes (referring to Schumann and the birthplace of his one-time fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken) written in long notes, but I had hoped that Denk might do something unexpected with them. Instead, as with so many performances, the puzzles of the sphinx were left unposed, probably what Schumann intended, but not what one expects from someone like Denk.

Washington Performing Arts's Hayes Piano Series continues this Saturday, with a recital by pianist Herbert Schuch (October 17, 2 pm).

On Forbes: Vienna: Premiering Beethoven Symphonies All Over Again

Martin Haselböck’s RESOUND project takes on the Ninth Symphony

Decades of research have been poured into every musical and instrumental aspect of the “Historically Informed Performance” (HIP) of classical music: From the way the continuo bands of the time improvised to how cat-gut was cured before making strings out of it. How the stems on the hammers of fortepianos were themselves tuned; what tempo indications meant depending on who indicated and where he lived; how Bach hinted at the right tuning by means of coded squiggles etc. et al. You get the idea.

Comparatively little has been done by way of research into how audiences behaved or listened on, or for that matter: where. And whatever has been done, it hasn’t been made visible or audible to audiences in the same way. No matter how authentic “17th century” the band plays in front of us, audiences still sit on the other side of the fourth wall as if it were 1977. We treat music from Monteverdi to Stockhausen as if it were Parsifal. The lights are dimmed, we listen in awed quiet, are embarrassed if caught snoring, and duly hiss if someone has shown his or her appreciation at a point that doesn’t fit the current convention of when to show appreciation. (I call those hissers the “Vigilant Applause Police”, an odious faction that happens to overlap considerably with the only slightly less annoying “Eager Early Clappers”; see the scientific looking, albeit completely speculative Venn diagram below.)

Historic Venues

Doing just that – researching where music was played – is the raison d’être of the “Resound” project of the Orchester Wiener Akademie (the Vienna Academy Orchestra) under organist-cum-conductor-cum-impresario Martin Haselböck. In seven concerts over two concert seasons, the orchestra will have performed Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies more or less in the venues they were premiered in. Interestingly that is possible with just a little fudging, sinceies more or less in the venues they were premiered in. Interestingly that is possible with just a little fudging, since...

Full review on Forbes.com.