Perfect Beckett

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

It’s been over two weeks since I saw the British production of All That Fall at 59E59, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Rarely have I seen a Beckett play performed so movingly or so delicately.

What Trevor Nunn’s production has going for it is that it both honors and transcends the script’s origins as a radio play. First performed in 1957, All That Fall is in many ways more naturalistic than the more familiar Beckett stage works. It features smalltown Irish voices essentially going about their daily business.  Mrs. Rooney, an elderly, perhaps overweight, certainly rheumatism-ridden woman, makes her way to the local railway station, where she meets the incoming train of her blind husband, Mr. Rooney, and brings him home. Nothing much, and nothing terribly shocking or surreal. But the bite of the sorrow, when it enters in, is severe, and the pain of existence ever-present.

The Beckett estate has held closely to this work, refusing to allow it to be performed as an actual stage play. I first read it in the early 1990s, when I was following around the director Stephen Daldry, who wanted to put it onstage (he never managed to). Last year I attended a version at BAM’s Fisher Theater which seated the audience in rocking chairs and left them in the near-dark to listen to recorded Irish voices. It made the play seem so tedious that I would have hesitated to give it another try, had it not been for the presence of Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon in the 59E59 performances.

And their presence is really what made the play. Trevor Nunn staged it as a radio play being recorded live, which meant the actors all carried scripts and spoke into dangling microphones. There was a trace of scenery—a tubular object which could serve as a car (Mrs. Rooney hitches a brief ride into town) as well as a generalized piece of the derelict landscape. And we could see the actors, live, as they waited quietly on the sidelines and then moved centerstage to speak their lines. It was especially important to be able to watch Eileen Atkins, who was onstage the whole time, and who brought to this central role all the capacities of her expressive face, voice, and body. As she interacted with various townspeople on her way to the train station (there are about five smaller parts in addition to the two main ones), many small, engaging, humorous moments mingled with the prevailing sense of despair; at such times, the play was almost fun, the audience rejoicing audibly in its collective appreciation.

And then, as Michael Gambon stepped into his role from his chair on the side of the stage, the emotion darkened and the audience fell completely silent. This great actor has recently reported problems with his memory: he has had to cease performing regular dramatic roles, resorting only to non-speaking characters or to the rare part like this, which allowed him to read from a script. Yet this very handicap intensified his performance, causing us to wait breathless on the edge of our seats, hanging on his every word. It was as if the blindness of the fictional Mr. Rooney had been transmuted into the stage-fright and memory-loss of the actual Michael Gambon, so that the guiding hand of Eileen Atkins (who, in true trouper fashion, here took on a literally supporting role) was necessary to get him through the part. The section of the play in which Mr. and Mrs. Rooney alone held the stage—that is, roughly the last third of this seventy-five minute script—was among the finest twenty-five minutes I have ever seen in live performance, anywhere. You could sense the palpable suffering shared between these two people; you could feel his lostness and fear, her cranky but affectionate sorrow. And you could hear the words Beckett wrote, almost as if they were taking shape in the air like a thick atmosphere surrounding, and in effect giving rise to, these inimitable, pathetic, valiant characters. It was magnificent.

 

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

News Flash

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

It turns out—to no one’s great surprise—that Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, now a quarter-century old, is as amazing as it ever was. In fact, like many of the best works of art, it seems to have accumulated extra layers of meaning in the course of its long life.  Or so it seemed to me as I watched it on Saturday at Lincoln Center, exactly twenty-five years to the day after its first performance. If anything, this grand evening-length performance—a celebration of Milton’s seventeenth-century poetry and Handel’s eighteenth-century music as well as Morris’s abundant choreographic imagination—was richer and more galvanizing than ever.

Part of what I found so moving, this time, was its splendidly persuasive utopianism. How can a work that begins in melancholy and ends in mirth—that starts in autumn, essentially, and concludes in spring—strike us as so beautifully true? I can’t answer this question.  I can only say that if this great work comes to your vicinity, you should see it, preferably as often as possible. I attended two of its three recent performances at the White Light Festival, and my only regret is that I didn’t see the third.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Pacificas (Again)

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve already had my say, at length, about how great the Pacifica Quartet is, so when I set off for their Zankel concert last night, my only intention was to listen for the pleasure of it. The performance was so spectacular, though, that I feel obliged to make a few remarks.

The concert consisted of two long pieces: the Piano Quintet of 1927 by Leo Ornstein before the intermission, and Beethoven’s Opus 130 with its original long ending, the Grosse Fuge, after. I had never heard the Ornstein before, barely even heard of it, and though I’m not yet sure how I would rank it against  either the Schumann Piano Quintet or the Shostakovich Piano Quintet (two of my favorites in this genre), I was thrilled to hear it for the first time. The pianist was the marvelous Marc-André Hamelin, who found the piece and brought it to the Pacifica Quartet; Hamelin has recently been rediscovering and playing a lot of work by Ornstein, a twentieth-century composer whose life spanned the whole century—he died in 2002 at the remarkable age of 108—but who essentially disappeared after the 1920s. As you listen to the mingled excitement, romanticism, and discord of the Piano Quartet (performed with miraculous exactitude and exemplary vigor by all five players), you can sense to the full the year 1927, with all its anticipations and thrills. You stand as if on the edge of a brave new world of art, music, literature, theater, dance, and film, in which everything seemed about to change forever. No wonder Ornstein felt he couldn’t adapt to the drab, depressed world that followed.

Beethoven’s Opus 130 is something else again. It is of its time, I suppose, but it is for all time as well, and in the right hands it can seem a newly minted piece every time it is played. The eight hands of the Pacifica Quartet are exactly the right hands.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more satisfying performance of this complicated, much-loved, occasionally resistant work. In their version, the Grosse Fuge was not just an appropriate but a necessary ending to what had come before. Having thoroughly explored every mood from quiet tentativeness to melodic romanticism and harsh distress, we were rewarded at the end with a feeling of emphatic exhilaration. I felt it coming, as I always do with this rousing ending, and yet I was surprised at the same time: that’s how good the Pacificas are.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Arcangelo

Posted on November 19, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

Going to hear a musical group you’ve never heard before always entails a risk, but the risk tends to be less with Baroque music, which—if it is played at all—is usually played at a fairly high standard. The risks in this case are all small ones: that the period-instrument performance will be rigorously academic in mode, or that you will be lulled into tepid enjoyment by the familiar strains of familiar music, or something innocuous like that.

Arcangelo, I am happy to say, transcends even these small risks by taking bigger ones. This young British company, conducted by the harpsichordist Jonathan Cohen, played at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall last night, and I suspect I am not the only newcomer to their audience who felt that the evening went from good to great. What made the difference was Arcangelo’s willingness to venture out of the world of pure music and into the realm of staged song.

The Bach violin concerto which opened the concert was fine, if slightly willful in its sedulous avoidance of any tinge of romantic inflection (but can unadorned Bach ever be a bad thing)? Next up, though, we had a cantata from a different Bach:  Johann Christoph, a cousin of Johann Sebastian’s father, who had chosen to arrange a passage from the Song of Songs in a movingly simple plain-chant sort of setting. The soprano for this performance, Katherine Watson, was so terrific that I actively missed her when we moved on to the purely instrumental Handel concerto that closed the first half, even though Handel may well be my favorite composer of all.

Imagine my delight, then, when the piece after the intermission turned out to be a full performance of Handel’s Apollo e Dafne cantata, featuring not only the wonderful Watson as the nymph Daphne, but also an equally fantastic Russian baritone, Nikolay Borchev, as the proudly aggressive god who was chasing her. Somebody (my suspicions lie with Jonathan Cohen) had gone to a great deal of trouble to stage this unstaged mini-opera in a way that brought out both its meaning and its emotional depth.  The acting skills of Watson and Borchev helped, too.  When she staunchly defended her virginity, she was shrill and pinched; when he boasted about his masculine prowess, he was sickeningly self-confident and vain. You didn’t have to understand a word of Italian to follow the plot.  And when, after tracking her around the circumference of the stage (where she had been cowering behind the bass player), Apollo suddenly grabbed Daphne by the shoulders, he was left holding a sprig of greenery as she fleetly disappeared—a lovely piece of stage magic that utterly complemented the intense beauty of the voices. I understood, as if for the first time, why Handel’s vocal music needs to have so many repeats:  because the line of sung melody is so gorgeously expressive that we want to hear it again and again.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Highlights from October

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

I was so busy attending things in October that I didn’t get a chance to write about any of them at the time. Now that we’re well into November, I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the best of what I saw and heard. So here is my summary of what sticks in the mind.

October 3:  A revisit to William Kentridge’s wonderful production of The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera.  I’ve already written at length about this three-way collaboration between Kentridge, Shostakovich, and Gogol (please click on this link if you want the full story); for now, suffice it to say that the ninety-minute intermissionless opera, written when Shostakovich was twenty-two, was as rich and intense an experience as ever. If anything, it seemed to have more going on in it than I was able to notice at the premiere three years ago, in terms of background graphics and sideline acting. But I think that’s just because this time my attention was freed to focus on the peripheral details as well as the sweep of the whole.  The minute it was over, I wished I could see it again. Later in the month, I was able to spend an evening at Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was also a brilliant Met revival—the sets by Antony McDonald were stunningly original, the performances by Matthew Rose as Bottom and Iestyn Davies as Prospero were particularly outstanding, and Britten’s music went sublimely with Shakespeare’s text—but because the opera lasted more than four hours, I began to feel weary. It is not the Met’s fault or even Britten’s if I lack the stamina for the long haul, but it did make me grateful, retrospectively, for the fulfilling brevity of Kentridge’s Nose.  (Perhaps the Met could consider having only one intermission instead of two in a long production like Tim Alberry’s Midsummer Night’s Dream; it would help.)

October 9:  A concert at the Berlin Philharmonic, led by guest conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens. Whenever I go to Berlin (which I try to do at least once every calendar year), I time my visits in part to what’s on at the Berlin Philharmonic. This fall I was able to capture two great concerts—a lovely mixed program at the beginning of my stay, and Simon Rattle conducting the St. Matthew Passion at the end. I will be writing about the latter for the print edition of Threepenny, so here I will confine myself to the former, which featured Beethoven’s Leonore overture, two pieces by Schubert (the Rosamunde overture and the Third Symphony), and two by the mid-twentieth-century composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann—about whom, embarrassingly, I was completely ignorant. His Symphony in One Movement was an excitingly modernist piece; his Canto di Speranza (an astonishing work that included virtuosic playing, at times in near silence, by the masterful cellist Ludwig Quandt) was alone worth the price of admission.  And after it we had the marvelous Schubert Third, which the Berlin Phil executed superbly.  Whenever I am back in this acoustically perfect, warmly intimate hall, listening to these incredibly talented, mutually attuned musicians, I feel I have arrived at home again—the kind of home one can never spring from in real life, but can only invent as one ages.

October 20 and 21:  Bernard Haitink conducting the London Symphony Orchestra as part of the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center. I got back to New York from Berlin just in time for this treat:  two concerts featuring Mozart concertos paired with Shostakovich symphonies. The Mozarts were more than fine (Emanuel Ax was the soloist), but for me it was the two Shostakovich performances that stood out.  On the Sunday afternoon, the orchestra played the Fourth Symphony—the first Shostakovich I ever heard, and still my favorite after all these years. About this symphony (which was yanked from its planned 1936 premiere and not performed until 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death) Shostakovich reportedly said to a friend:  “You ask if I would have been different without ‘Party guidance’? Yes, almost certainly. No doubt the line I was pursuing when I wrote the Fourth Symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas more openly instead of resorting to camouflage.”  I’m not sure sarcasm is what I hear in the blaring trumpets and cymbal-crashes of this nearly hour-long symphony, but I do hear a youthful energy, a willingness to invent new things at every moment, an evident pleasure mixed with equally evident pain, that is pretty much absent from the later work. Hearing it again always invigorates me and saddens me at the same time.  And though on Monday night the London Symphony did a wonderful job on Shostakovich’s final symphony, the Fifteenth, I couldn’t help hearing it as a last gasp, a faintly struggling echo, of what the young Russian genius had been capable of in his youth. For Shostakovich, Rossini represented a composer who had “lived too long,” outlasting his talent and writing nothing for the last thirty years of his life; perhaps that’s why he inserted so many echoes of the William Tell Overture in his own Symphony No. 15.

October 23:  A visit to the library designed by Louis Kahn at Phillips Exeter Academy.  I will be writing about Kahn at length later, too (in fact, I am working on a book about him right now), but I can’t let this occasion go without mentioning how awestruck I was by his library at Exeter. It is possibly his most exciting building I’ve seen to date, and it has all the usual Kahn qualities: a relatively subdued modernism when seen from the outside (though with strange archaic features at the roofline, where empty windows in the brickwork make you feel you might be looking at a Roman ruin); a thrillingly suspenseful entrance, where you start in a low-ceilinged room on the ground level, go up a gorgeously enticing flight of curved travertine stairs, and end up in a huge but nonetheless coherently graspable atrium that rises the full four stories of the building; an engaging geometry of circles, squares, and triangles, created out of concrete, wood, and empty air; a miraculous use of natural light; and, above all, a feeling that you—the individual visitor, the human actor at the center of this—have been elevated rather than diminished by all this grandeur around you.

October 30: Andras Schiff performing Bach at Carnegie Hall.  Can there be anything better than this? Schiff is the kind of performer who becomes a favorite, I think, only after you have heard him live. His recordings are great, but you only (or at least I only) perceive how great they are after you’ve seen the quiet modesty of the man, the way he makes it through a musical endurance test—in this case, all six Partitas—without visible effort, without pedals, without a score, without anything except his own fingers directly transmitting the Bach to us, as if the music were emerging from him on the spot, alive and new and beautifully eternal.  He rearranged the order of the Partitas to give a particular shape to the evening: Five, Three, One, and Two before the intermission, then the longer and more complicated Four and finally Six after. Each piece felt marvelous in a different way, and rather than getting tired, we in the audience became increasingly animated as the evening progressed: it was as if we were being fed a delightfully rich meal that had no fat in it, so we could just keep gobbling it down for as long as the dishes continued to appear.  At the end, after four rounds of voluminous applause (not to mention a few hearty shouts of approval), he gave us dessert: a tiny, delicate encore consistenting of one of the Two-Part Inventions.  It felt like generosity personified.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Good Dance, Better Music

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

One of the fun things to go to in New York every autumn is the annual Fall for Dance series at City Center. There are generally four or five separate programs, each of which presents four different sets of performers in an evening, so no one thing goes on for too long. The pricing is great—only $15 for any seat in the house—and as a result all the seats are taken by an audience filled with young, enthusiastic dancer-types as well as a varied collection of dance fans.

This year I opted for Program Three, mainly because all the other programs were nearly sold out by the time I logged onto the ticket site a mere three hours after it opened.  (You have to get up early to snag those bargain seats, especially if you’re buying from California.) I was satisfied with my purchase, though, because this program would allow me to see not only José Limón’s masterpiece, The Moor’s Pavane, danced by American Ballet Theatre, but also an interesting-sounding Irish soloist, Colin Dunne, and two other groups, Ballet Hispanico and Introdans, that I’d never seen before.

The Moor’s Pavane was fine, though its Othello could have been stronger, and the taped music did some injury to the lovely Purcell score. But this dance was stellar compared to the other two group dances on the program:  a smarmily snazzy, extremely lightweight confection called Sombrerísimo danced by six extraordinarily skillful men from Ballet Hispanico; and a leaden, pseudo-ethnic performance called Sinfonía India (supposedly inspired by “the ritual dances of the Mexican Indians”) from Introdans, a Dutch company.  The latter, choreographed by Nacho Duato to music by Carlos Chávez, was like warmed-over Agnes DeMille mixed with overly stylized Martha Graham. Both its repetitive gestures and its hokey music were so anodyne, indeed so retrograde in modern dance terms, that I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for us to be told it had all been a joke.

The highlight of the evening turned out to be Colin Dunne, not only because he was the only dancer performing with live music (a string quartet), but also because his percussive feet turned out to be music of a different kind. His choreography in his solo dance, The Turn, borrowed from Irish dancing and American tap, but also from Spanish flamenco, reminding me of something I had forgotten—that the “black Irish” are reportedly descended from survivors of the Spanish Armada, which wrecked on the coast of Ireland in 1588. Dunne, while possessing the same ramrod-backed, relaxed-arms style of the more typical Irish dancer, has managed to incorporate something of flamenco’s fiery darkness into his dancing as well, and seeing him made the whole evening worthwhile.

I used to write more about dance than about music, mainly because I knew more about it. But these days it seems the chances of having a really good time at a concert are better if you opt for music rather than dance. At Bargemusic, one of my favorite places to hear music in the whole world, the chances are even better than average, and last Saturday’s concert fully lived up to expectations. Steven Beck, on piano, and Joel Noyes, on cello, played an evening of works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and Britten. The Britten (which was the only solo piano piece—all the rest involved both instruments) was a fascinating thing called Holiday Diary, Op. 5 that I’d never even heard of before, much less heard; and Beck, who is a consummate artist, executed it beautifully.  Beethoven’s rousing Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major made a lovely opening for the concert, and Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata No. 2 in D Major an even more intriguing (because less familiar) close, while the Debussy Cello Sonata filled out the evening with its nicely jazzy rhythms. The concert as a whole couldn’t have been better, and the two players—each a wonderful performer in his own right—melded their tones in a way that exhibited long hours of practice together.

The Barge, which rests at the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn and looks out through a glass backdrop onto the lower Manhattan skyline, was filled that night with appreciative listeners, each of whom clearly felt he or she had lucked out. And they were right.  Unlike the enthusiastic audience at Monday night’s Fall for Dance performance, which cheered equally loudly for the gripping Turn and the atrocious Sinfonía India, the Bargemusic crowd knew the difference between good and bad.  So when all 140 of us (maximum capacity for the old converted coffee-barge) burst into strenuous applause for Beck and Noyes, it may not have sounded as loud as the crowd at City Center, but it meant more.

 

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Urban Frenzy

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve been in New York for less than a week, and already the entire pace of my life has changed. When we’re in Berkeley, my husband and I spend at least five nights a week at home, watching movies or TV shows on Netflix. In New York, we’re often out five nights a week. What I see on these outings is not uniformly great, but searching out the great stuff is always a fun process, and the results are rewarding enough to keep me at it.

I arrived last Saturday night and spent Sunday seeing friends and relations. So the cultural schedule didn’t really kick in until Monday, when I attended my first event of the season:  Johnny Gandelsman playing solo violin at Le Poisson Rouge, one of my favorite intimate places to hear music. Gandelsman plays with Brooklyn Rider and The Knights, so I had heard him before, but it was a special pleasure to see and hear him alone onstage, performing pieces that ranged from Biber and Bach to Stravinsky and Philip Glass.  Another part of the pleasure was to be out so late:  the concert started at 10:30 p.m. and didn’t end until about midnight.

Tuesday was the opening of William Kentridge’s new show at the Marian Goodman Gallery.  (Kentridge had also come to town to oversee the revival of his marvelous version of Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met; I’ll be going to that in another couple of weeks, and it will be my third time seeing this production.) The new exhibit is called Second Hand Reading, and it takes off from—though in a rather indirect and not clearly traceable way—the terrific series of Norton Lectures Kentridge gave at Harvard last spring. The primary focus of the show is images painted or drawn on the pages of a book, or images of trees with words coming out of them (as words do come out of trees, when they are made into paper). The stress is on the book as a physical object, the page as something you can hold in your hand, though there is also a video that reproduces the qualities of a flipbook, flashing through images to the rhythm of accompanying music. Included as well are some wonderful non-book-related sculptures, the kind of moving gadgets that Kentridge excels at. These mechanical devices have various functions, but my favorite ones are composed of Singer sewing machines that play madrigal-like African songs when you turn the crank.  (Singer: get it?  It took me hours.)

Wednesday was a day off, in the sense that no live art event was on the schedule. I took my friend Arthur for drinks to celebrate his birthday at a West Village bar where he and I always have Negronis; then I met my husband at our good local vegetarian restaurant, Gobo. As I was consuming my lettuce-wrap pine-nut medley, who should be seated at the  adjoining table but Sarah Deming, one of my Threepenny writers!  (And she doesn’t even live in my neighborhood:  she had come all the way over from Brooklyn to meet a photographer friend who is working with her on some articles about women’s boxing, a subject Sarah knows intimately because she was once a Golden Gloves champion.) Sarah immediately mentioned that she knew I was in town because a mutual friend had seen me at the Johnny Gandelsman concert. At moments like this, New York can feel like a small village.

Thursday was a double-header: the final dress rehearsal of Eugene Onegin at the Met in the afternoon, and then the New York City Ballet gala at night. I’m not supposed to write a review of the opera because it was just a dress rehearsal, so I will only say: with Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien in the starring roles, Gergiev conducting the orchestra, a libretto partly written by Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky at his musical best, how bad can it be?  There was much to delight in, especially since my free seat happened to be located in one of the central boxes, the perfect angle from which to view any opera.  In the grand tier above me were lots of student groups, including a whole unit (or whatever they call themselves) of military cadets, suitably attired in uniforms and short haircuts.  When I asked one of them at the first intermission how they came to be there, he said, “We’re in the Russian language program at West Point, so our teachers thought it would be good for us to see this, ma’am.”  I hope and trust it was.

The New York City Ballet gala was ridiculous, but then galas almost always are. In this case it was not the dancing that was ridiculous (the dancers were all very good, and the choreography in the three premieres, while never outstanding, was never terrible either). What appalled me was that the whole evening had been designed as a fashion display: its main purpose, it appeared, was to show off the attending ladies’ designer finery, and even the program itself emphasized costumes over dance. Before each of the three premieres, we were treated to a short video about how the costume designer arrived at the clothing worn by the dancers, and the three choreographers—Justin Peck, Benjamin Millepied, and Angelin Preljocaj—were interviewed essentially as adjuncts to these designers. This approach proved so distracting (to me, at least) that I could barely watch anything but the costumes when the live dances started.  And in case you think I am exaggerating, let me point out to you that the gala was actually called “Fashion Returns to New York City Ballet.” What role can satire play when reality so exceeds it?

Friday I had lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities and listened to Peter Maas tell us all about how the government is tracking us everywhere through our cellphones. (No doubt this is true, but if they are tracking all of us, how are they ever going to find any of us in that morass of information?) And then Friday night I saw the new Nicole Holofcener movie, Enough Said, about which enough said.

Whew!  Tonight my husband and I are going to stay home and watch Rectify (an excellent and vastly underrated TV show) on Netflix.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

American Night at the San Francisco Symphony

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

It looked, on paper, like an adventurous program:  all American composers, all twentieth-century work, and (with the exception of George Gershwin) not names that are often viewed as audience-friendly. Indeed, Michael Tilson Thomas brought his microphone out and spoke to the audience before the first piece—generally a sign that something difficult to absorb is about to take place. Yet the Charles Ives work that he introduced, the “Alcotts” section of A Concord Symphony, turned out to be an uncharacteristically smooth and indeed almost anodyne pieces of Ivesiana (a fitting tribute, skeptics might think, to the family that produced the horribly saintly Marmee and Beth). Its six minutes of hymnlike melody went down like a cool draft of water.

And in a way this was the problem with the whole evening. It was pleasant to hear Gershwin’s An American in Paris (though I must admit I found myself missing Gene Kelly), and it was enormously amusing to listen to George Antheil’s twelve-minute Jazz Symphony. The latter was both witty and exciting enough to raise some startled laughs, and the virtuosically jazzy trumpet solo by the brilliant Mark Inouye was a definite thrill.  But even Antheil’s antics were not difficult or even challenging, just fun.

The only part of the program that soared above this easy-listening level was the Barber Violin Concerto, which had James Ehnes in the solo role.  I would go to just about any concert that featured James Ehnes.  He is an amazingly skillful player, capable of hitting every note truly and accurately even in impossibly fast passages. But skill is perhaps the least of his virtues.  He plays with intense, suppressed feeling—unpretentiously, undemonstratively, undistractingly—as if the pulse of the music were flowing through his veins and down to his fingers and thence directly into our ears.  He is, in this respect, a pure vehicle of the composer’s intentions, not a star on the stage; and yet in his own modest way he makes audiences love him.

Because of the felicities of his style, I could see how the first movement of the Barber was sweepingly melodic, the second filled with slow, deep feeling, and the third rich with an infinitely complicated grace.  The third movement is notoriously difficult to play (the violin part seems to include about a thousand notes per minute, all in different rhythms) and it lends itself to being done as a discrete, show-offy party trick, but Ehnes made it seem of a piece with the rest:  built up to, grounded in its predecessors, and not just a confection on the top. Unlike the other works performed on this program, the Barber asked us some questions; it didn’t just let us enjoy.  That one could nonetheless enjoy it without bothering to answer the questions (questions like “How do these three movements fit together?” “What is the relation between virtuosity and feeling?”  “To what extent is the violin an extension of the composer as well as of the player?” and so on) was proven by the vast and resounding enthusiasm with which the entire audience greeted Ehnes’s performance.

It was a slightly odd audience for the San Francisco Symphony, in a good way—there were many more young people than usual, and many more people who obviously were not regular attenders of classical concerts.  Lower-than-normal ticket prices may have explained some of this, but clearly there was some kind of effortful outreach going on as well.  Does that commendable desire to include new audiences necessarily have to go hand-in-hand with an evening of easy listening?  I hope not.  I suspect not.  And if I were asked to prove my suspicion, I would point to the Barber as Exhibit A.

 

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Hidden Gem

Posted on August 20, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

Last night, via streaming on Netflix, I watched a movie I had never heard of.  It was called Detachment, and it was directed by a British director named Tony Kaye—of whom I had also never heard, I am ashamed to say, since he is obviously a master. The movie probably ended up on my list because it starred the wonderful Adrien Brody, though it also had other celebrated names (Blythe Danner, Bryan Cranston, Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan) as well as talented newcomers (Sami Gayle, Betty Kaye, and a huge number of other student-age actors whose names went by too quickly for me to catch them).

Set in a disastrous New York City high school that is filled with disillusioned teachers and angry students, the movie has a semi-documentary feel to it, complete with intermittent “interviews” with the Adrien Brody character, Henry Barthes. Its plot is a downward spiral of loss and depression; besides the high school, the settings include the geriatric ward of a poor hospital, Barthes’s barely furnished studio apartment, and some nearly deserted city streets and buses, mainly at night.

Barthes himself is a “long-term” substitute teacher, meaning he comes into the high school for a month to hold down the classroom until a permanent teacher has been hired.  He is a capable teacher, if an unusually sorrowful one, but what he teaches the students is only occasionally literature and grammar and writing, the ostensible subject of the class.  Most of the time, he is just trying to hold together their lives by helping them to act more decently toward each other and toward themselves.

This is not an inspirational story. Barthes mainly fails with his classroom, just as he mainly fails to save his grandfather, his mother, and all the other people who have veered close to him.  His nearest thing to a success is a brief period in which he cares for a young street prostitute who practically forces her way into his life.  Part of the success (and it is a very sad one, nearly the saddest thing in this wrenching movie) is that he eventually forces her out of it.

You will be asking yourself:  Why should I watch this downer?  No doubt many other people asked themselves the same thing, which is why this terrific movie, made in 2011, has remained completely obscure, whereas a false film about false people experiencing false tragedies, like Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, can fill the moviehouses.  But why do you read Dostoyevsky or Kafka?  Why do you go to late-period Michael Haneke or mid-period Ingmar Bergman films?   Why do you stand in front of Goya’s dark paintings or read Thom Gunn’s AIDS poems?  Because truth matters.  And truth is finally what we go to art to receive, even if it is painful.

Detachment has this, and it also has the other saving grace of good art, which is a mastery of form and craft (which in this case means not just the visual mastery of film, not just the artistic intelligence of brilliant performances, but also the literary craft of an excellent script, here credited to Carl Lund).  I don’t know how Kaye, an Englishman, can know so much about an inner-city American high school.  I don’t know how anyone who has not been a teacher can know this much about the terrors and heartbreaks of the classroom.  But I do not need to know how he managed to do it. I only need to know that he has created a true work of art.

 

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Pier 24

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

There is a wonderful new place to see photography in San Francisco. Well, it’s not exactly new — I think it may have been around for two years or more — but it’s such a well-kept secret that it’s new even to many of us who live in the Bay Area.  It’s Pier 24, a private, beautiful, free gallery that I never noticed on my frequent Embarcadero walks until I actually had an appointment to go inside.

That’s the catch: you have to make an appointment.  And since only 20 people are allowed in during any given two-hour period, the appointments can be hard to get, especially since the gallery is only open Monday through Thursday and bookings are limited to a 30-day period. But if you keep checking the Pier 24 website as relentlessly as you check your favorite restaurant, eventually you will be rewarded with a reservation. And your visit will be worth every minute of the time and energy you spent getting it.

The collection of photographs hanging on the walls of this soothingly quiet, masterfully converted space varies several times each year, and at the moment the show is called “A Sense of Place.” This is landscape photography in the widest sense of the term. It includes everything from a whole roomful of Lee Friedlander’s photos taken from his car, to Carleton Watkins’s and Ansel Adams’s Yosemite photos, to a rather moving video by Doug Aitken called “House.” Also sprinkled throughout these twenty small rooms are a number of classic Robert Adams photos in black and white, a range of huge, colorful Andreas Gurskys, a healthy selection of not-quite-identical Paul Graham pairings, a series of barely-distinguishable-from-real Thomas Demand constructs, and much else besides. The hang is extremely intelligent:  for instance, a Jeff Wall illuminated glass box showing a line of people waiting for a nightclub adjoins a captivating Veronika Kellndorfer photo of a Neutra beach house, printed on a big glass sheet that projects forward from the wall. Yet technical novelty is not the only thing being celebrated here. My favorite part of the whole show is a series of three rooms borrowed from the Paul Sack Collection, featuring straightforwardly marvelous work from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including great Atgets, Kerteszes, Moholy Nagys, and other urban masterpieces.

I am able to identify all these pictures not through my superior knowledge of photography and not because of any captions or wall identifications—Pier 24 scrupulously avoids these—but because I questioned the helpful curators who are strewn around the exhibition space.  This is one of the great things about this particular gallery.  It asks you to look at the photos as images in themselves, detached from their maker or their title, and it makes you work to get the IDs if you feel you really must have them. There is a little bit of helpful material that is printed up for you to hold in your hand as you stroll around, but for the most part you are required to use your eyes and your brain—almost as if you were encountering these photographs as found objects, as living landscapes in themselves, rather than as designated, valuable works of art. It is a triumph of curatorship over commercial consumption — a personally owned, expensively acquired photography collection transformed, in each exhibition, into something that creates a direct connection between the photograph and the individual viewer.  Pier 24 is a gallery that blurs the line between public and private, giving us the best of both.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment