TLES Announces New Roar Schack Program

Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson encountering the “Osirisan post-human” in the performance of Machines & Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit (from the Eventbrite Web page for this production)

Late yesterday afternoon I received the most recent announcement of a new program to be presented by The Living Earth Show (TLES). The title of the program will be Machines & Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit. As usual, the performers will include the TLES duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and drummer Andy Meyerson. However, the length of the title of the program will also reflect the versatility of the third performer. M Lamar will contribute through his multiple capacities as countertenor, keyboardist, visual artist, and composer. The narrative for this production will involve “an Osirisan post-human being whose Transatlantic spacecraft journeys them [gender-appropriate pronoun] to an outer space that becomes an inner space.”

As will be the case later this month, this show will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 11, with doors opening at 6:45 p.m. Admission will be on a “Pay What You Can” basis within the “window” between $1 and $100. Eventbrite has created a Web page through which these payments can take place. For those that do not recall, the venue is located in the heart of the Mid-Market district at 34 Seventh Street.

The Excitement Factor (previously August, 2008)

In reviewing Larry McMurtry's Books: A Memoir for The New York Review, Michael Dirda chose to dwell on the fact that McMurtry's first reading experiences were with "a box of cheap adventure fiction from the 1930s." Dirda reacted as follows:

In truth, what could have better suited a dreamy boy than just such wonderful trash? After all, real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life.

This line of reasoning is similar to that I had heard in a lecture by Harlan Ellison to the effect that reading comic books (regardless of whether or not they were "good" ones by whatever criteria one might have for "good") is better for kids than reading nothing at all. Excitement can be delivered in a variety of packages. The source of the excitement is less important than the skill we acquire in focusing our attention on that source.

Dirda's comment also reminded me of David Denby's book, Great Books. Given the benefit of a sabbatical from his work at The New York Times, Denby decided to exercise it by taking freshman courses at Columbia, basically reading the same "core" of "great books" that he had read in his own freshman year. He then wrote his book about how much more interesting the reading had been the second time. This is key to Dirda's point: Denby's life experiences had changed the nature of his excitement. To choose a personal example (which also happens to be part of the Great Books of the Western World collection), there was little about Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that excited me during my freshman year, while these ancient insights into the tight coupling of politics and warfare now seem all too relevant in the context of our current Administration's military adventurism (which may be one reason why contemporary generals have been writing about Thucydides with such insight lately).

An important point that arises from such reasoning is that reading for excitement does not imply reading only "trash" (whatever that may mean and however wonderful it may be). Perhaps reading is a matter of choosing what one reads on the basis of that need for excitement, then supplemented by a faculty for finding excitement in what one happens to be reading. Thus, I found myself reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss because a variety of other reading sources (which happened to include both philosophy and anthropology) had cited this novel; and my curiosity over why such a diverse collection of writers should see so much value in this book tipped the balance of my "excitement scale." Once I made the commitment to start reading, new sources of excitement started leaping out of the pages of the book, until I found myself pushing ahead at a pace as maddening as the one that carried me through the final pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (one of the authors who appears to have been a source of excitement for Dirda himself).

As a concluding thought I would like to observe that what Dirda says about "real" readers can also be said about "real" listeners where musical performance is concerned. Indeed, my music composition teacher, Ezra Sims, believed that both text and music had to pass a "first sentence test." At its most extreme, this test implies that, if the first sentence of a text does not excite you enough continue reading, then you may as well stop before you waste any further time. Similarly, your excitement is already heightened during the silence before the music makes its "first statement;" if that statement does not leave you excited about what happens next, then it is pretty likely that the mind will "tune out" long before the end of the composition. Peter Shaffer caught this in Scene 7 of Amadeus, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reproduces from memory the "March of Welcome" Antonio Salieri had written for his arrival in Vienna. Mozart reconstructs the beginning of the piece and then turns to Salieri to ask, "The rest is just the same, isn't it?" Centuries later Mozart continues to excite in ways that Salieri never could, but only at the hands of performers who can both perceive and convey that excitement. Listening for that excitement is no different from Dirda's concept of reading for excitement; and perhaps skill in one can facilitate the other, regardless of the direction in which the transfer may take place.

“Soldier’s Tale” Contends with Media Overkill

The latest addition to the SFSymphony+ Web site is a “digital music theater” performance of “L’Histoire du soldat” (the soldier’s tale). It was created at a time when Europe had to contend with both World War I and an influenza epidemic. Since these were not the best times to go out for a night at the theatre, composer Igor Stravinsky and Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz created a production that would fit inside a truck and be brought to the audience, bringing the theater to the people, so to speak.

As the title suggests, the narrative is about a soldier returning from battle, who sells his soul to the devil, marries a princess after saving her from a fatal disease (the cure coming from the devil), and ultimately loses his soul. The story unfolds through a narrator (assisted by two actors in the original version) with music provided by a septet. The princess is depicted by a dancer.

This back-of-a-truck project was converted into “digital music theatre” created by British director, designer, and video artist Netia Jones. An English translation of Ramuz’ text (probably the version created by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black) was delivered by Bruce Davison, adjusting his tone of voice to serve as narrator, the soldier, and the devil. The princess was danced by Adji Cissoko, a member of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet. The musicians were San Francisco Symphony (SFS) members: Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, Principal Bass Scott Pingel, Principal Clarinet Carey Bell, Principal Bassoon Stephen Paulson, Associate Principal Trumpet Aaron Schuman, Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins, and Principal Percussion Jacob Nissly. While this was a small ensemble, a conductor was necessary to negotiate the complex rhythms; and that conductor was SFS Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Bruce Davison narrating with the assistance of his bottle of wine (screenshot from the video being discussed)

Salonen clearly knew how to engage with the small ensemble to make sure that every mark that Stravinsky had placed on paper was given the attention it deserved. Davison’s narration had all the necessary clarity, as well as the appropriate shifts in character. The staging also had him pouring himself several glasses of wine, as if the personification of drunkenness might complement the dark turns in the plot. Cissoko appeared only in video projection, probably because the layout of the septet and the positions of the screens for projected video left little room for her physical presence.

Sadly, however, all of the projections tended to interfere with the bare-bones delivery of the narrator in the context of music that was both transparent and devilishly (pun intended) difficult. Except for Cissoko’s performance, most of the projected images did little to complement the narration. Thus, where the listener/viewer was concerned, the overall video would have been better served had it been directed at Salonen and his musicians more often.

Sean Jones Reflects on Half a Century Ago

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the final program in its Great Artists and Ensembles Series entitled Dizzy Spellz. Jazz trumpeter Sean Jones led a quartet whose other members were Alex Brown on piano, Kris Funn on bass, and Mark Whitfield, Jr. on drums. They were joined by turntablist Wendel Patrick and Jones’ wife Brinae Ali, who served as narrator, vocalist, and tap dancer. The narration was basically a reflection on the black experience during the third quarter of the twentieth century, a time of significant progress for equal rights set in a wider turbulent context of social unrest.

The title of the program was basically a nod to another jazz trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was one of the most inventive of the jazz musicians. He deserves credit as a “founding father” of bebop; but he subsequently directed his inventiveness to other genres, including both Latin and African influences. He was represented in last night’s program by two major Gillespie creations. “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” was first recorded with saxophonist James Moody. In its original version it presented Gillespie at his most African, but that context was elided in last night’s performance. The other “Gillespie classic” was “Salt Peanuts,” possibly best known from Gillespie’s performance with Jimmy Carter when Gillespie’s combo was invited to the White House. Other presidents have displayed more polished musical skills; but Carter “got the spirit” with a bit of Gillespie’s coaxing.

Last night was also about “getting the spirit;” but, for most of the program, the “messenger” was Ali. Towards the end of her narrative, she framed the entire experience with a reference to “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.” The intensity of both her text and its narration was punctuated with her style of tap dancing, which frequently erupted as over-the-top frenetic. Her narration reflected on, among others, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, while her delivery of “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” (very much her own, rather than a reflection on Gillespie and Moody) contrasted sharply with her following delivery of the hymn “I’ll Fly Away.”

Nevertheless, it seemed as if any evocation of Gillespie and his music served a that-was-then-this-is-now context. The intense urgency of Ali’s verbal delivery made it clear that much has changed over half a century. Nevertheless, all that change has been haunted by an uncertainty of how many of those steps went forward and how many went back. The program concluded with what amounted to a nostalgic reflection on Pangea, before our planet separated into continents. The “message,” as such, was a plea to come together at a time when all seems to be coming apart.

Sadly, while the message could not have been better delivered, most likely last night’s recipients already knew it, while those needing to hear it were far away from Herbst Theatre.

Jazz Reflections on Frankenstein

What Survives is a two-volume collection of 26 original jazz recordings that grew out of Tobin Mueller’s project to bring the narrative of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the stage. It began as a one-act musical entitled “Frankenspell Superstar,” originally  conceived as a progressive rock opera. Most likely, the initial motivation was one of “getting even” with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which enjoyed mass popularity in spite of it trivial shallowness. By 1995 “Frankenspell Superstar” had matured into Creature a full-length Broadway show performed at the John Houseman Theatre, followed by an eighteen-month off-Broadway run at The Thirteenth Street Theatre.

The ordering of the 26 tracks of What Survives does not follow how they were presented over the course of Creature. The objective of the album seems to have less to do with providing an account of the narrative and more to do with taking the full scope of the show’s “incidental” music and endowing it with more of a “foreground” treatment. To this end, Mueller, who plays a prodigious number of different keyboard instruments, assembled a moderately large ensemble with a front line of three saxophones (Woody Mankowski on soprano, Doug Schneider and Tom Washatka on tenor) and two brass (Ken Schaphorst on flugelhorn and Bob Levy on trumpet). Rhythm was provided by percussionist Dane Richeson, Jeff Cox on bass, and Chris Mueller (nephew of the composer) on piano. Mankowski is also one of the vocalists on the album, joined by Emily Rohm and Jessica Flood as well as the multi-voice combo called The CenterStage Players. There are also guest instrumentalists, including bassist Ron Carter.

Cover of the Radio Edits version of Tobin Mueller’s What Survives (from the Amazon.com Web page)

For those interested in a full-extent account of the relationship between the music he composed and the narrative served by his compositions, Mueller has prepared a lengthy Web page, which provides a track-by-track account of all of the pieces on the album. Since the album itself has only been released for digital download from a Web page that provides only the 26 tracks, Mueller’s Web site is essential for those whose interest in music goes beyond “background stimulation.” The reader of that Web page will note that fifteen of the tracks also have a shorter “Radio Edit” version. All of those tracks have been collected on a Radio Edits album, which has been released as a CD with an Amazon.com Web page. That physical release also includes two bonus tracks from the full release.

Personally, I prefer the 26-track release. While I am not consistently impressed by the vocal selections, the instrumental work covers a wide diversity of styles. The members of the group play in different combinations over the course of the entire album. However, the musicianship is always consistently right on the money, endowing each track with its own capacity to appeal to the attentive listener. Given the relatively dire straits of jazz radio, I am not sure how much impact the Radio Edits release will have; but the “whole enchilada” will definitely appeal to those that take their jazz listening seriously.

Bartlett Sher: from Rossini to Donizetti

Bartlett Sher at an event organized by the International Peace Institute (photograph provided by the International Peace Institute, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

To the best of my knowledge, my “first contact” with stage director Bartlett Sher was the Public Television broadcast of his 2006 staging of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Metropolitan (Met) Opera. To be fair, by now I have lost count of the number of stagings of this opera I have experienced, almost all of them the in a performance setting rather than from a broadcast; and I am somewhat surprised to admit that I have yet to encounter one that left me totally disappointed. This provides a somewhat challenging context for my having just viewed a recording of the PBS broadcast of Sher’s most recent project at the Met, Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (the elixir of love), recorded during a performance this past February 10.

There is an old joke in the theater profession that “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” This tends to be just as true of opera as it is of drama, and I realize how much satisfaction can be drawn from my having experienced successful interpretations of comic scenarios in operas from the eighteenth century to the present. However, when we consider settings of Italian librettos, it is hard to avoid the sense that, as with other genres of music, the comic operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart set a very high bar for subsequent efforts to confront.

Where Rossini is concerned, it is hard to ignore that bar when both composers undertook to make operas based on the plays of the same French author, Pierre Beaumarchais. Mozart’s K. 492 The Marriage of Figaro, with its Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, continues to establish a height to which even contemporary opera efforts aspire. The text is an intricate web of amorous intrigues within barely conceived political overtones, whose intricacy is matched, if not surpassed, by Mozart’s stunningly imaginative command of polyphony, meaning that the “web of the plot” is consistently reinforced by the “web of the music.”

The first performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville took place about 30 years after the premiere of K. 492. However, while K. 492 enjoyed considerable and sustained attention in Vienna, even during the composer’s lifetime, Rossini’s opening night was a disaster. Fortunately, the opera overcame the misfortunes of opening night and quickly rose in popularity. Nevertheless, there was a change in approach that could not go unnoticed.

Rossini’s librettist Cesare Sterbini was less interested in “webs of intrigues” and more interested in developing a cast of vivid personalities, each of which unfolded with the development of the overall plot. As a result the music tended to focus more on accompanied melody, rather than polyphony; and development was more a matter of gradually building up the level of dynamics, instead of superimposing the voices of conflicting characters, each with its own thematic signatures. Fortunately, Rossini was more than simply capable of realizing Sterbini’s texts through music, which is one reason why so many of the tunes from Barber are so memorable and immediately recognizable.

From a point of view of craft, on the other hand, it was clear that, while Rossini may have admired and respected Mozart, Barber never managed to capture the elegant (but still accessible) complexity of K. 492. On the other hand the characters of Barber are so vividly defined that stage directors have been consistently inventive in coming up with new ways to present them to their respective contemporary audiences. However, when it comes to L’elisir, both music and text (by Felice Romani) have been reduced to the simplest of terms. Romani’s text presents stock characters in stock situations; and Donizetti provides “musical backup” for each of those situations. There is a familiarity about everything; and it is a familiarity that only barely endures through the entire duration of the opera, even in the hands of a truly inventive stage director.

This brings us to how Sher fits into the picture. His staging of Barber pulls a prodigious number of rabbits out of any number of hats, even coming up with a particularly clever way to break through the fourth wall. The rabbits just aren’t there in the new L’elisir. This may be because neither the music nor the text provides very much by way of a “breeding ground;” or it may be because Sher chose not to go against the stock infrastructure.

One factor may have been the attention directed toward South African soprano Pretty Yende, who was making her role debut as Adina. This would hardly have been the first time that a performer took priority over both the music and the underlying narrative. However, to be fair, when all the characters are based on familiar stock, attention turns to how the performers breathe life into those characters. In the better situations, that life emerges through the successful collaboration of performer and stage director; but sometimes the performer prevails with ideas of her/his own.

Another possibility is that, while there is enough to mine from Barber that will sustain watching a video document more than once, an opera like L’elisir thrives best in the “immediate present.” (To lay my own cards on the table, this is the first time I have seen this opera on video, rather than in performance.) Nevertheless, having enjoyed Sher’s approach to Rossini so much with video as my only opportunity for experience, I have to confess that my hopes for L’elisir were high; and, perhaps, I have just succumbed to an unrealistic expectation.

David McVicar at the Metropolitan Opera

An early twentieth-century (historically sensitive?) Metropolitan Opera performance of Tosca (photograph by Boyer, from Wikipedia, public domain)

For several months I have set up my xfinity box to record all new PBS broadcasts of performances by the Metropolitan Opera. Since the San Francisco Chronicle tends not to be the best source for either the time or the channel of these broadcasts, I decided that I would be better off with Comcast technology. Nevertheless, I have to confess that these recordings have been building up at a rate faster than I can work them into my viewing schedule.

Nevertheless, those who know about my current condition can appreciate that I am not in shape to attend concerts these days; so catching up on accumulated recordings seems like a good way to keep my head (and writing skills) in the game. As a result, over the course of the last few weeks, I have watched two of these recordings; and, curiously, both of them are productions created by Stage Director David McVicar, Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, which opened the Met’s 2017–18 season, and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, which was given its first performance this past New Year’s Eve. McVicar is no stranger to the San Francisco Opera (SFO); and his productions here tend to resonate with impressions of strong opinions strongly held.

The strength of those opinions were displayed unabashedly at the first SFO Insight Panel of the 2016–17, when McVicar was invited to discuss his approach to Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. One of the first questions he fielded was whether his approach to this opera about the French Revolution would depart from fidelity to the period, as had been the case when he staged Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens with pyrotechnics that seemed to owe more to the Marvel Cinematic Universe than to the Homeric bards. This provoked a series of rants over the course of the evening, beginning with the disdainful observation that any opera based on history must be true to the historical setting and that Les Troyens was not such an opera, because it was based on myth.

Whether or not McVicar’s precept is a valid one (and I, for one, do not accept it), it is interesting to consider the extent to which both Norma and Tosca can count as “historical.” They are certainly not mythical, since neither involves supernatural intervention and the only role taken by any deity involves providing grounds for a sacred rite. On the other hand each opera raises its own questions about how a musical drama can take a valid stand with respect to a historical context.

In the case of Norma that context is the Roman invasion of Britain; and the obvious question is “Whose history?” We know at least some of the names of historians that chronicled the age of the Roman Empire, but we also know enough to assume that none of them were writing with any disciplined sense of historiography in mind. Under the Roman Empire a historian had two major priorities: fiscal reward and staying alive. Having their texts is useful; but unraveling those texts to establish “the story behind the story” is a task that has occupied only the most recent generations of historians.

Nevertheless, “history,” whatever it may be, really does not signify in Norma. There is a community of Druids and a battalion of Romans tasked with subduing them. For narrative purposes they could just as easily be Montagues and Capulets, particularly when we learn that the title character, the high-priestess of the Druids, has had twin sons by the Roman proconsul Pollione. Furthermore, to shift the context from Romeo and Juliet to Medea, while Norma has been caring for the children in secret, Pollione has shifted his attention to falling in love with another priestess, Adalgisa. In other words whether or not the opera is “historical” signifies less than its reliance of earlier (and familiar) dramatic narratives.

Ultimately, the weak underbelly of Norma has nothing to do with history and everything to do with the weaknesses of the text provided by Bellini’s librettist Felice Romani. To be blunt, over the course of this two-act opera, Romani’s narrative is beginning to run out of steam by the time of the second scene of the second act; and McVicar appeared to be at a loss when it came to compensating for Romani’s shortcomings. If anything, he seemed inclined to prolong every episode leading up to the climax, when Pollione joins Norma in being burned alive on a pyre. This is when McVicar succumbs to the urge to revive his pyrotechnical tricks from Les Troyens, lighting up the entire stage with images of fire as if Norma and Pollione had ascended to Brünnhilde’s Rock to be consumed by the flames that Wotan ordered Loge to light.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Norma is a bel canto opera. As I wrote on my Examiner.com site when Norma was was given its most recent SFO performances, presentation is all about “beautiful vocal sonorities (bel canto), usually to the exclusion of attaching very much significance to matters of logic, structure, and rhetoric that arise in either the music or the narrative of the libretto.” Thus, what matters most is that McVicar did not get in the way of the display of those “beautiful vocal sonorities.”

Indeed, one of the sources of that beauty was the same one I had enjoyed at SFO, the title role sung by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, perfectly matched with mezzo Joyce DiDonato as Adalgisa. Both vocalists impressed not only through a thorough command of the text but also a stunning capacity to work a wide dynamic range. This was bel canto in which stillness on the threshold of silence carried just as much impact as a bold fortissimo, if not more so. Furthermore, if their talents as soloists were stunning, then their approach to the rich amount of duo work that Bellini had written was downright transcendent.

To be fair, however, this was a performance that was not entirely about the beautiful vocal work. There was more to the overall show, even if it was not due to McVicar. The other hero of this production was Carlo Rizzi, who was as sensitive to every instrument in the orchestra pit as he was to how the libretto was being sung on stage. Rizzi was able to call attention to subtle mixtures of instrumental coloration in the overture that tend to pass unnoticed while everyone is waiting for the curtain to rise; and those rich sonorities served the singers on the stage as well as they served the instrumentalists in the pit. Rizzi almost (but not quite) made the case that Norma might do better in a concert setting!

Where McVicar may have been closer to his own mark was in his approach to Tosca. The libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa is firmly routed in Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and the impact of that invasion on governance in Rome. McVicar seems to have grasped the role of this context in establishing the character of Baron Scarpia, and the execution of that role by baritone Željko Lučić was definitely the high point of the production. Unfortunately, the remaining characterizations ran the gamut from woefully overwrought (both soprano Sonya Yoncheva as Tosca and tenor Vittorio Grigolo as Cavaradossi) to annoyingly fussy (baritone Patrick Carfizzi as the sacristan). Even when “history matters,” a compelling opera production demands attention paid to more fundamental qualities of stagecraft.

The SFCM Opera and Musical Theatre Program Presents Britten at his Best

Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the Opera and Musical Theatre Program presented the first of two performances of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 54 The Turn of the Screw. Structured as a prologue and two acts, the opera is an “interpretative account” of Henry James’ novella of the same name. The scare quotes are intended to suggest that the source text is no simple tale; and, indeed, the way in which it is framed within the discovery of an old manuscript previously kept hidden in a locked desk indicates that the very authority of authorship (a pun that appealed to Michel Foucault) could come into question. Britten chose to respect that framing by having a solo tenor (sung last night by Taylor Rawley), identified only as “The Prologue,” explain the manuscript source before the two acts of the opera unfold its context. (On the other hand, Britten chose not to explain the title, which is a phrase used by the man who introduces the manuscript in James’ introduction.)

The production was staged by Heather Mathews, Associate Director and Production Manager of the Opera and Musical Theatre Program. Britten scored the opera for a chamber orchestra, which was conducted by Musical and Managing Director of Opera Curt Pajer. I should observe, by way of personal context, that this was my second encounter with Mathews staging of this opera, having seen a production at Fort Mason by one of the regional opera companies, probably about ten years ago. Mathews clearly appreciated the rich ambiguities of James original text; and, as a result, last night’s interpretation differed significantly from the last one I had seen. Most of those ambiguities found their way from the source text into the libretto that Myfanwy Piper prepared for Britten. (There is even a new ambiguity of authorship that takes place at the beginning of the second act, when Piper slyly shifts her source from James to W. B. Yeats.) They, in turn, were reinforced by a set design that suggested that the very loci of the actions might not have been situated in the physical world but only in the imagination of the author of that mysterious manuscript (who may or may not have been one of the characters in the story).

If the transformation of narrative from James’ source to Piper’s libretto to Mathews’ staging was not enough to fill the mind with twists of uncertainty, Britten’s approach to the score was as cerebrally engaging as it was rhetorically intense. The score is structured as a theme (the opening scene following the prologue) followed by fifteen variations for each of the fifteen remaining scenes. In addition there is a “screw “ motif in which the pitches wind around each other and define a twelve-tone row. (This screw-like contour was illustrated in the program notes provided by Stev Täal, class of ’18.) Throughout the entire performance, Pajer led both instrumentalists and vocalists in a clear account of all of the rich content that Britten had packed into his score, enabling the attentive listener to appreciate just how much the composer could weave from a relatively spare set of basic materials.

When so much is packed into a single composition, there is the risk that even the most sympathetic listener will be overwhelmed. However, Mathews’ approach to staging the narrative was as clear in its presentation as was Pajer’s interpretation of the score. This was achieved not only through meticulous attention to establishing each of the six characters but also in her manipulation of the set, whose transformations of context reflected the psychological transformations that unfold as the story is revealed.

Note that I have tried to avoid being specific as to just what that narrative is. Those who know their James know it already, just as those already familiar with the opera. However, the production will be given a second performance tomorrow; and because Mathews was so successful in staging this work as a journey of discovery, it would be a bit of a shame to reveal any spoilers to those who have not yet experienced those discoveries.

This second performance will take place, with an entirely different second cast of vocalists, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 11. SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. There will be no charge for admission. While all reservations have been taken, the Box Office will have a window set up for a Wait List; so some admission will be possible if seats are available due to those who failed to show up to use their respective reservations.

Rudolf Buchbinder Brings Stunning Mozart to the San Francisco Symphony

Last night pianist Rudolf Buchbinder visited Davies Symphony Hall for the first of four performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 466 concerto in D minor with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). Buchbinder has not played with SFS since 1985, although he was last in Davies in 2010, when he played Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 54 (fourth) concerto in G major with the Dresden Staatskapelle conducted by Daniel Harding. Either way, such a long absence of a pianist with such a solid command of both the technical and the expressive sides of “the Classical style” (to borrow the phrase from Charles Rosen) is regrettable.

The boldness of K. 466 makes it one of the most memorable of the many piano concertos that Mozart wrote. This is not a concerto for the “show-off kid” delightfully strutting his stuff before a wide-eyed audience. Drawing upon the key of D minor, regarded as one of the darkest keys by those who believed that every key carried its own emotional implications, K. 466 is, on just about every imaginable account, music that stuns, rather than dazzles. Yet, while Buchbinder certainly displayed an indubitable capacity to stun, he could to so through the undercurrents of an almost affable patina of elegance. Well aware of how familiar this concerto is, Buchbinder wanted to make sure that he had an attentive audience, rather than one that had come to sit through just another Mozart piano concerto.

With that agenda in mind, MTT served Buchbinder well as conductor. While, he reduced the size of the string section, he also bore in mind the presence of one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani. In the face of such resources, he made sure that there were enough strings to pack a wallop when Mozart wanted one. At the same time, he and Buchbinder clearly shared an effective sense of balance, recognizing that impact can only come from a few moments of climax. Thus, the first movement of this concerto succeeded through its capacity to establish omens to keep the listener in suspense, rather than to drown him/her in decibels.

Ultimately, an intelligent understanding of contrast determined the success of last night’s program. The outer movements established themselves not only through the darkness of D minor but also through any number of unexpected mood swings, a rhetorical device that was extended into Buchbinder’s decision to perform the cadenzas written out by Ludwig van Beethoven. By contrast, the B-flat major middle movement, which Mozart labeled “Romance,” is almost cloyingly naïve in its rhetoric, as if Mozart wanted to calm down his listeners before subjecting them to the roller coaster ride of the concluding Rondo. This was a performance that appealed to not only the serious listener but also the less-experienced wondering why so much fuss keeps being made about Mozart; and one cannot fault any of the technique through which the “good news” about Mozart was delivered.

The evening began with an oddity based on a familiar anecdote from the life of the young Mozart. This was Gregorio Allegri’s setting of Psalm 51 in Latin (number 50 in the Vulgate), “Miserere mei, Deus” (have mercy on me, Lord). Mozart heard this music sung at the Vatican when he was fourteen years old and then transcribed it all from memory. MTT introduced the piece with this oft-told tale; but a reality check is in order. Like much of Roman Rite music, this setting is based on the technique of a reciting tone, usually called a “psalm tone” when the text is one of the Psalms. This is a technique that goes back at least as far as Gregorian chant practices; but, between the education provided his father and the experiences of going to church, Mozart must have had a solid command of it by the time he was fourteen. Thus, while the music lasts for about twelve minutes, there are only a few minutes of basic material that recurs as the score proceeds through the Psalm text.

In other words this was a relatively routine part of a service at the Vatican. The only thing that made it special was that the music was not supposed to be performed anywhere else; and then a child with a keen wit “broke the code.” However, if the music itself is routine, it was given an impressive performance by the men of the SFS Chorus joined by the high-register voices of the Pacific Boychoir. The main chorus was lined up along the side aisles beside the Side Boxes, physically opposed to four solo singers (two sopranos, one alto, and one baritone) up in the Terrace. The result was a far more spatial account of Allegri’s music than may have ever been experienced at the Vatican, all conducted by Pacific Boychoir Director Kevin Fox. If the music itself was not particularly profound, the “staging” made for a thoroughly memorable listening experience.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for MTT’s approach to Johannes Brahms’s Opus 73 (second) symphony in D major following the intermission. This is Brahms at his best, a shining example of his ability to balance an intricate logic of structure with rhetorical techniques that span a diverse palette of expressive colors. Unfortunately, last night’s performance showed far too little attention to the details behind either of these components; and the overall sound was just plain ragged too much of the time. Furthermore, MTT’s tendency to bathe in the lush sonorities of his performances of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky now seems to have invaded his approaches to Brahms. Tchaikovsky is rarely well served by such techniques, and Brahms suffers even more. All listeners, not just those with a particular love for Brahms’ passionate rhetoric, deserve better.

Paul Hersh Presents a Piano Recital for One, Three, and Four Hands

This afternoon in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Paul Hersh presented the first Faculty Artist Series recital of the 2016–17 season. This was originally announced as a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of (“Goldberg”) variations on an Aria theme; but Hersh changed the programming to a selection of piano compositions for one, three, and four hands. Each of these selections was preceded by some highly informative commentary, a feature that continues to make Hersh’s performances some of the most fascinating SFCM offerings. Additional hands were provided by Hersh’s former student Hye Yeong Min (’09).

The commentary was structured around three major topics, narratives, the “sense of an ending” (a phrase Hersh may have explicitly borrowed from either literary theorist Frank Kermode or the novelist Julian Barnes, who probably lifted it from Kermode), and cooperation. The program began with the last of five piano studies that Johannes Brahms composed, a transcription of the final Chaconne movement from Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor to be played by the left hand alone. After explaining that, while myriad transcriptions of this movement had been composed for different combinations of instruments (including the one by Ferruccio Busoni for “two-hand” piano), Brahms’ version came closest to the original Bach version (since about the only thing that Brahms added were dynamic markings), Hersh wasted no time getting into narrative.

He began by explaining the overall plan of the variations on the four-measure theme. 32 variations in D minor are followed by 20 in D major, after which the music returns to D minor for another 10 variations. Hersh suggested that this was a narrative of human life, beginning with the vigorous energy of youth, maturing into a more refined middle age, and then accepting the quietude of finality. (Note that this was how that “sense of an ending” would first rear its head.)

As the Italians like to say, this may not be true; but it is a good story. That remark is not meant to be either frivolous or pejorative. As this site has already observed, the very act of listening to music must, of necessity, take the flow of time into account; and among the various categories of texts (which narrative theorists tend to call “text types”), narrative is the one category that is explicitly time-sensitive (hence the need to talk about that “sense of an ending”). Thus, while Bach’s priority may have been primarily pedagogical, even to the point of balancing the number of variations, identifying a narrative framework can be a very useful way through which the attentive listener can not only experience but also appreciate the flow of time as having an underlying logic.

This afternoon the result of suggesting a narrative framework resulted in one of the most coherent accounts of Bach’s chaconne provided by any performer or ensemble, regardless of instrumentation. Hersh had clearly established his own logic for both the flow of time and the termination of that flow. By sharing that logic through his introductory remarks, the listener was better equipped to negotiate that flow and thus was confronted with just how much considered and attentive performance can bring to music that is far more than marks on paper with staff lines.

At this point Hersh departed from the printed program sheet to include a short addition, “Evening Song,” the last work in Robert Schumann’s Opus 85 set of twelve four-hand piano compositions “for young and old children.” Because the upper part has only a single melodic line, this was the “three-hand” portion of the program. Hersh may have chosen this piece as another example of intense dramatism that reaches far beyond the notational representation of brief and simple gestures. Curiously enough, the sensitivity that both Hersh and Min (providing the “third hand”) brought to this almost microscopic composition conveyed one of the most difficult of dramatic effects, making time stand still. (This “temporal illusion” can be encountered frequently in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Schumann has several of these moments, but not as many.) Thus, “Evening Song” is almost an “anti-narrative,” suspending the listener’s sense of time passing, even if only briefly.

This short piece provided a transition to the far more extensive four-hand fantasia in F minor (D. 940), which Franz Schubert composed during the first four months of 1828, the last year of his life. This was where the theme of the program shifted from narrative to cooperation. This is music in which the two pianists must be aware of each other, with respect to not only the music they are playing but also the physical challenge of sharing the keyboard and the pedals. It is also music whose overall structure involves the recurrence of the material that is presented at the very beginning, but not in a manner that can easily be classified as rondo form. As Hersh put it, D. 940 has a “form unto itself,” which has more to do with evolving transformations (my phrase, not Hersh’s) than with sections that can be neatly labeled with capital letters.

Most interesting was how Hersh’s introductory remarks involved calling out structural properties on both small and large scales. This need to keep track of those properties on multiple scales requires that both pianists need to be of “multiple minds” about what they are doing; but they also have to establish what amounts to a shared consciousness. Hersh also observed that, even though it was not a four-hand transcription of music composed for orchestra or string quartet, D. 940 was probably intended as music for a personal living room, rather than a concert hall. Nevertheless, the piece is definitely a serious challenge; and it is only through the performance of skilled musicians that one can appreciate just how much Schubert managed to pack into a composition whose intentions may have been “domestic.” Hersh and Min were definitely such musicians, providing an enlightening and stirring account of how productive Schubert was in his final year.

Virgin Ignorance

Apparently, The New York Times has decided to run a series of retrospective reviews under the rubric Virgin Eyes. The idea seems to be for the reviewer to recall a particularly intense "first contact" experience. Today's piece is by Ben Brantley, and it is about David Lynch's Blue Velvet. To be fair, I have enjoyed quite a few of Lynch's projects, one of which was actually a totally riveting stage piece with music by Angelo Badalamenti. However, Blue Velvet left me cold, probably because, by the time I saw it, I had enjoyed an abundance of plays by Sam Shepard; and Blue Velvet felt like familiar material warmed over inadequately. I can appreciate that, out in Kips Bay, Brantley did not approach the film with the same background, which just goes to show how mercilessly subjective aesthetic judgement can only be.

Fear of the Adventurous

Bearing in mind that, for the most part, the public entertainment business has an almost pathological fear of venturing into unknown territory, I have to say that the Golden Globe nominees for Best Television Series may have pushed the predictably dull to a new level:

• Breaking Bad
• Downton Abbey
• The Good Wife
• House of Cards
• Masters of Sex

Yes, I include House of Cards in that "predictably dull" category, since, while it was well-executed, it was still a remake of a British series that had already broken the ground. I would say that the series that may have been most successful at being different while still being compelling to watch was Orphan Black. At least Tatiana Maslany got a Best Performance nomination for taking on the title role. Given the demands of that role, one would have had to have stuck one's head in the sand (or elsewhere) to be oblivious to the quality of her work.

Considering a Scene as a Character

Once again I find myself involved with a major listening project. This time it is the Decca collection of the complete works of Benjamin Britten. This is structured according to categories, rather than ordered chronologically. This works for me, because it will allow me to deal with each category as a separate Examiner.com article.

The first category in the set is opera; and I have to take satisfaction in having acquired enough experience that each of the operas is familiar to me through at least one staged production, through video when not through experience in an opera house. Every now and then, however, there are certain dramatic elements that are better recognized through the music without visual distraction. This is the way I feel about A Midsummer Night's Dream, which lends itself to imaginative visual design while having to bear the burden of familiarity with William Shakespeare at the same time.

What fascinates me about Britten's opera is how the composer chose to make it his own narrative without ever compromising Shakespeare in any serious way. This is apparent from the very beginning, since the very first music you hear establishes the scene (to use Kenneth Burke's technical term) of the forest in which all acts (from the same Burke terminology) of significance will take place. Indeed, to prepare the audience for Puck's epilogue, it is clear that Britten has chosen to establish the forest as a "dream world" of sorts, rather than merely an untamed piece of land on the outskirts of Athens. One might almost say that, from a musical point of view, the forest matters more to Britten than all those agents (Burke's term again), both supernatural and "natural" that will be bumping into each other (often in comic ways) as the narrative unfolds.

Clearly, the forest does not itself act; but perhaps Britten is trying to prepare the audience for how the scene will create a variety of dispositions through which the acts themselves will be motivated. This strikes me as significant, particularly since the opera never leaves the forest until the final scene of the final act. (The text for that scene actually begins with the very first words of Shakespeare's play.) In other words one only returns to "reality" for the multiple wedding celebration (in which Oberon and Titania are somewhat like "participating bystanders"). Furthermore (notwithstanding the influence of Felix Mendelssohn), that scene has less to do with the wedding and spends most of its time on the "Pyramus and Thisbe" performance, which, since it is the (highly distorted) enactment of a familiar myth, involves yet another move into yet another "dream world."

Samuel (Shmuel?) Beckett's Yiddishkeit

Fecilia R. Lee just put up a post on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times announcing that a group called the New Yiddish Rep is preparing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in a Yiddish translation by Shane Baker. As far as I am concerned, this makes a lot of sense. Readers of this site know that I have long enjoyed Alexander Pushkin's decision to call his play about Boris Godunov a "comedy of distress." Waiting for Godot is far from the only such comedy of distress to be written in the twentieth century (and hardly the only one to be written by Beckett); but it continues to serve as an almost iconic definition of the concept. However, long before Beckett had set pen to paper, Jews understood the concept perfectly; and Yiddish was far more capable of bring the concept to reification than Hebrew was.

The staging will be by David Mandelbaum, founder and Artistic Director of New Yiddish Rep. The translation will be faithful to the text, which means that it should also be faithful to Beckett's intentions. However, to provide a suitable context for their speaking Yiddish, both Vladimir and Estragon will be dressed as Holocaust survivors. Supertitles will be provided in both English and Russian. This project strikes me as fascinating as it is bold, and it will be interesting to see what sort of audience it draws in the New York area.

On the Entertainment Value of Politics

Yesterday I wrote a piece in favor of The Newsroom having received a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Drama category. Given the intensity of its political subtext, I found myself musing that, over in the "Best Miniseries or Television Movie" category, there were three offerings whose political impact was no less than that of The Newsroom:

1. Game Change
2. The Hour
3. Political Animals

This makes for an interesting "size matters" lesson (which should have the useful side-effect of suggesting that the proper metaphor for the entertainment industry is Godzilla). Apparently, The Newsroom counts as "drama" because its overall duration exceeded some threshold, while the other three programs were treated as "lesser" candidates. On the other hand all three of these projects deserve credit for recognizing that it would take time to work out their subject matter in an appropriate narrative setting; and, from the point of one who "reads text" (which means I am not a typical television viewer), I found this sort of segregation to be more than a little unfair.

On the other hand I found it interesting that politics should play such a prominent role in the overall scheme of these awards. The bad news may be that television viewers prefer to get their politics as entertainment, rather than as "non-fiction;" which seems to be the principle behind the success of programming on Comedy Central. This raises the corollary that real politicians only matter to us on the basis of their capacity for entertainment, which strikes me as yet another move within our culture to escape, if not deny altogether, the reality that exists beyond the frames of our television sets.

One Cheer for THE NEWSROOM

I suspect that The Newsroom will have a hard time holding its own against Homeland in the Best Drama Golden Globes category, but it was good to see that it at least got as far as nomination. There was nothing particularly new about its premise: The idea of using a show about producing the news as a platform for expositions of various insights from investigative journalism goes back at least as far as Lou Grant, if not further. Nevertheless, The Newsroom managed to do an excellent job of rendering through "dramatic fiction" a keen analysis of just how far "big money" has gone in undermining current political practices in this country. Then, just to make it clear that they were not just picking on the United States, they offered a particularly barbed treatment of how the Japanese media handled the Fukushima reactor story. Stuff like this rarely gets further than penetrating analyses in the progressive press, so HBO deserves credit in letting The Newsroom boldly go where no television drama has gone before.

The Ingredients in the “Tonic of Tragedy”

Reading Stanley Wells’ review of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies in the latest New York Review set me to thinking about Simon Schama again, specifically, his observation that history “delivers the tonic of tragedy, not the bromide of romance.” I realized that he was playing fast and loose with that noun “tragedy’ (such as whether he was using it in the Aristotelian, Marxian, or some other sense). After reading Schama, I chose to rebut him as follows:

I prefer Hayden White’s position that history is best approached as literature, assessed for its quality of writing as well as its consistency with documented evidence.

However, “literature” may also be too general a noun to address how we approach history.

In introducing Mantel’s book, which is a novel, Wells makes an important claim:

History has no plot. It happens randomly, goes beyond human control. People plot, but things go amiss. The desire to capture the past in unquenchable but fruitless. A historian, whether of recent or long-past events, tries to tell it how it was, but the attempt is vain. History books have to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Whether consciously or not, their authors tell stories from particular perspectives; they choose who and what to write about; they select from the multifariousness of human experience, imposing order on randomness, seeing what they choose to see or what their subconscious minds put before them, setting their stories within a frame of their devising, revealing subjectivity even as they seek to convey an impression of objectivity.

Any account of the past requires artistry in the telling, but those storytellers who proclaim their artifice, melding the stuff of history with the forms and conventions of art, are more honest about the illusory nature of their endeavors than those who seek to convey an impression of impartiality.

That “artistry in the telling” is, of course, narrative technique. In other words it is the framework of narrative that facilitates sensemaking: the perception of order in that randomness that is “beyond human control.” From this point of view, White is less interested in the generality of the concept of literature than he is in the specificity of the concept of narrative. To invoke the terminology of Friedrich Hayek, narrative provides the device that facilitates “sensory order” on what is little more than a random array of events. However, it is only through that order that those events can register as memorable, thus establishing history as the literary vehicle of memory.

Richard Strauss among the Vampires

Normally I do not pay too much attention to the music on True Blood. It always seems to be appropriate to the setting, and nothing more strikes me as particularly relevant. Last night, however, we got to know the character Salome Agrippa; and, sure enough, she was the Salome. Her version of the story made for a fascinating departure from Oscar Wilde, not to mention the rather more mundane account that emerges in Robert Graves’ Claudius the God. Nevertheless, this was the first time I found myself consciously aware of what Nathan Barr had composed for the soundtrack. This was because Salome’s lines were backed with the same kind of sinuous chromaticism that Richard Strauss conceived for the “Dance of the Seven Veils” scene in his opera based on Wilde’s play. Barr reworked Strauss just enough to define his own originality, but there was also just enough suggestion to recognize Strauss as the influential source. It was a clever bit of composing, making for the first time in which the soundtrack really contributed a useful perspective to the narrative!

Neil Simon goes British

If I am to believe Sarah Hemming of the Financial Times, then things are looking good for the run of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys at the Savoy Theatre in London. The photograph of Richard Griffiths and Danny DeVito that accompanies her review definitely helps to make her point. Still, I have to wonder: Just when was it that the future of Yiddishkeit get passed over to the responsibility of goyim?

The Google Initiative to Make the World a Better Place

Faithful to the conviction that technology can solve all problems, Google has launched an online initiative to take on what has begun to seem like a pandemic of violence as a preferred alternative to discussion and deliberation.  At least this seems to be what Dana Kerr reported last night in a post to her Internet & Media blog for CNET News.  The basic idea seems to be that, if you bring together people like “a former violent jihadist from Indonesia, an ex-neo-Nazi from Sweden and a Canadian who was held hostage for 15 months in Somalia,” alternatives to violence will emerge, will be implemented, and will be embraced around the world.  The above quote comes from a blog post by Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, which is supporting this initiative.

For my part I tend to subscribe to the Zen precept that he who tries to change the world can only make matters worse.  Thus, while I have no quibble with Winston Churchill’s declaration that “jaw jaw is better than war war,” I believe that serious problems require serious deliberation.  Thus, before I take this Google initiative seriously, I would like to see it run a gauntlet of some healthy skepticism.

I was a student during the Sixties, so I have had my own previous exposures to those who expressed strong beliefs through violence.  I thus was drawn to a production by a local theater company called Riot, which left a strong mark on my own thinking.  On the surface the piece was staged as a panel discussion.  The premise was that, while reasonable minds may differ, those differences can be resolved by honest efforts at dialog.  Beneath the surface, however, the result was anything but reasonable.  Dialog led to greater divisiveness as each participant became more entrenched in his/her personal convictions;  and, at the risk of trivializing the production, the result was that riot triumphed over reason.

This is actually a very familiar narrative.  The story keeps popping up in different settings based on different events, but the punch line never changes.  One of the more popular voices to repeat the story has been Yasmina Reza with her play God of Carnage, now given a much larger audience through Roman Polanski’s film, titled simply Carnage.  However popular the narrative itself may be, it probably keeps recurring because so few people get the message:  Before bringing together people of radically opposing opinions, it is more important to think in terms of how communication breaks down than it is to ask how technology can broaden the forum in which communication takes place.

Such breakdowns are almost always difficult to analyze.  Often they arise from data points that are too easily dismissed as either irrelevant or insignificant.  However, communication is a complex social system;  and we should think about that complexity they way we think that the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can trigger a tornado in Kansas.

Let me, therefore, consider one possible butterfly.  As Jürgen Habermas has observed, the success of a communicative action can sometimes depend critically on the specific words that are exchanged.  In this context we should consider the very name of the Google Ideas initiative:  Against Violent Extremism.  This is admirable, but we live in a world in which names get reduced to acronyms.  In this case the acronym is AVE.  This happens to be a Latin word that was used for greeting when the language was still a living one.  More specifically, it was a standard greeting among the military, often used specifically in reference to Caesar.  To be thoroughly blunt about it, it was used in the same context that the Nazis used “Heil, Hitler!”

Now, the fact that our own culture has become one that is ignorant history should not lead us to assume that all other cultures enjoy that ignorance.  There is thus a good chance that many who might otherwise be interested in participating in dialog will be put off by what amounts to “linguistic provocation” before the conversation even begins.  That will be when the butterfly flap triggers the tornado vortex;  and, as was the case in the Riot play, destruction will ensue.