For the past few weeks I have practically been running from one performance to another. As follows:
On Friday, March 11, and Sunday, March 13, I once again saw L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (this time at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall). Since I have seen Mark Morris’s masterpiece at least 20 or 25 times—no exaggeration, since I always go at least twice if it’s in my vicinity—there is probably little new I can say about it except: Hooray! Bravo! Do it again! The company was in excellent shape for these performances, and it was especially moving to see a couple of the recently retired dancers, the superb Maile Okamura and amazing Amber Star Merkins, back onstage in their usual parts.
Soon after the L’Allegro run was over, I dashed off to New York in time to watch some previewed scenes of The Leopard, an opera that the composer Michael Dellaira is in the process of writing (with libretto by J. D. McClatchy, based on the book by Giuseppe di Lampedusa). On March 17, the Manhattan School of Music and its singers-in-training ably presented four scenes from this still-embryonic work, and though it is hard for an amateur like me to imagine the piano accompaniment transformed into a full orchestra, it is already clear that this will be Dellaira’s best opera yet: a worthy tribute to Lampedusa’s marvelous Sicilian novel.
The very next day, March 18, I was treated to a performance by Mikhail Baryshnikov in his limited-run one-man show, Brodsky/Baryshnikov, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. (There are a lot of Baryshnikovs in that sentence, but they are unavoidable.) More theater than dance, the piece borrows strategies from Tadeusz Kantor’s 1960s Polish “poor theater” as well as even older strategies from American vaudeville. It consists mainly of Baryshnikov sitting still and reading or reciting poems by Brodsky; occasionally he moves in strange and evocative ways as Brodsky’s taped voice recites the poems. Baryshnikov is a great speaker of poetry, and of course he moves beautifully; I just wish I knew Russian, because it was clear even from the sound that what I was getting in the English that flashed across the supertitle screen was in no way equivalent to the poetry itself.
On March 19 I went to a late-night performance of the Ethan Iverson Quartet at a tiny jazz club in the Village called Smalls. In fact, there is no “Ethan Iverson Quartet” — these were simply three other friendly jazz musicians (Ben Street on bass, Eric McPherson on drums, and the amazing Dayna Stephens on saxophone) gathered together by Iverson, a great jazz pianist usually associated with The Bad Plus, to improvise on some jazz standards. The fact that they were not accustomed to playing together did not hamper their affinity in any way; it might even have added to it, since the two sets (which started at 10:30 and ended at about 1:00 a.m.) constituted about the most exciting jazz I’ve heard recently. I was particularly thrilled to be sitting just behind Iverson’s right shoulder — close enough to turn pages, if he had used pages, but of course none of them did.
On Sunday, March 20, in the late afternoon, I went to something I had been looking forward to at Carnegie Hall — actually at Weill, the smallest of Carnegie’s three halls. It was James Levine conducting a group of chamber musicians drawn from the Met Orchestra in two different serenades, one by Schoenberg and the other by Mozart. The music was excellent, or would have been, if Levine had not been so severely hampered by his Parkinson’s disease, which has reached a level that makes conducting essentially impossible. It was a painful event: the musicians obviously know and love him, and were doing their best for him, but the performance kept pausing while he regained control of his arms and hands. More even than Brodsky/Baryshnikov, which was explicitly about death in a firm, purposeful, and aesthetically coherent way, this event struck me as a reminder of mortality’s ever-lurking presence, in ways its presenters had perhaps not fully anticipated.
After all these small-scale occasions in which the emotional level ran high, it was a bit of a relief to swan off to the Metropolitan Opera‘s huge auditorium on March 22 and simply bask in the rather staid but perfectly adequate performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Isabel Leonard was terrific as Cherubino; everyone else was just fine; the music was great, as expected. It did not move me at all. But then, not everything can.
And then, on March 23, a week into the strenuous New York schedule, I attended David Cromer’s production of The Effect—a new play by the English writer Lucy Prebble—at the Barrow Street Theatre. Once again I was in the front row, and once again I had the thrill of an intimate performance, this time set up by my favorite director, whose work I have been following since I first saw his Adding Machine and then his revelatory Our Town in the Village years ago. I think The Effect is the best new play Cromer has done (as opposed to those startling revivals, at which he excels), and I was gripped by every minute of the performance. The reviews I’ve read tend to underestimate its complexity: the play is not “about” pharmaceutical trials and cures, it is not “about” relationships, it is not “about” parallels between couples. Rather, it embodies and uses all of these to create an intense narrative experience that is at once theatrical and realistic. The performances by the two younger actors (Susannah Flood and Carter Hudson) were perfection—there was no seam between actor and character, and their chemistry (to use a loaded term in this context) was remarkable. The older woman doctor was beautifully conveyed by Susannah Flood, who brought real pathos to a difficult and sometimes unsympathetic role. My only problem, actor-wise, was with Steve Key, whose grasp of his mainly self-serving character seemed a bit weak. But that was a minor problem with the production, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys good theater — a rarity in itself these days.