A New Blog Format

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

Those of you who have been following The Lesser Blog for the past few years may have noticed that my postings have been getting more and more infrequent. This is because I’ve been using a very unwieldy software linked to our website, which had to be completely uploaded every time I made a new entry. When I spent a month blogging on the NAJP site, where I was able to post daily even during the electricity-less Hurricane Sandy period, I realized there were better options out there.  So now we have updated.

This change means that I will be posting much more often, and it also means that you can make comments if you like.  Some of my posts will be shorter and some longer, but they will cover the same range of topics they always have, and perhaps more.  In the next few weeks, for instance, I’m planning to talk about my summer pleasure reading, the Music@Menlo festival, a visit to the Pier 24 photography gallery, a trip to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, a new play at the Mark Taper Forum, chamber music in the Napa Valley vineyards, and who knows what else. I haven’t left anything behind, either: all the old posts are still available in the Archives (over there to your right), and now they’re even searchable by key words and categorized by date of entry.

The blog may look a bit bare-bones at first, but we—the editorial we, which includes my computer consultant—will gradually modify it with a few attractive graphics.  And in the meantime it will be easy to use and easy to read, which is the main point, after all.  So do come join me whenever you like, and if you have an opinion, please let me know what you think.

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A Month of Daily Blogging

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Wendy Lesser

In addition to my intermittent entries on this blog, I have had a sideline over the past few years writing for a multi-authored site, the National Arts Journalism Program’s ARTicles blog. About twenty-five arts journalists, including me, were drafted into service to write for it occasionally, and we duly did so. Then, sometime around last summer, ARTicles (which had never been exactly a hotbed of activity) began to limp toward near-extinction. I felt slightly guilty, as well as anxious to keep this good thing going, so in October I volunteered to write a full month of daily blogs. Since I was in New York for the fall, I knew I would have plenty to write about. What I didn’t know was that Hurricane Sandy would become part of the story. So the arts blog I was writing became, perforce, an island survival blog—and even when it eventually morphed back into an arts blog, some remnants of the trials we Lower Manhattanites had all endured persisted in infusing themselves into my reports.

Shortly after my month of blogging came to an end, the National Arts Journalism Program disbanded and ARTicles was terminated. In other words, near-extinction became extinction. But the archive remains up for anyone to read, so I thought I would direct my Lesser Blog readers to the site, in case anyone is interested in this curious experiment. Like most blogs, the NAJP site places the latest entry at the top. I would recommend, though, that you go back to the start of my month, on October 22

http://www.najp.org/articles/2012/10/morris-and-ratmansky.html

or even to October 11, when I announced my blogging intentions

http://www.najp.org/articles/2012/10/blogging-for-real.html

if you want to get the full flavor of the narrative. In either case, you can simply click on the Next button to move forward chronologically.

The entire archive is available at http://www.najp.org/articles/archives.html

—January 6, 2013

 

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Operas and Productions

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Wendy Lesser

An opera and its production are so closely linked that it is sometimes impossible to judge them separately. You can try to assess the music alone by repeatedly listening to a recording in the comfort of your own home, but that will give you just a fraction of the whole opera. The rest is available only in a theater. Only there, watching the performance and seeing the stage picture at the same time as you hear the singers’ voices, can you get a sense of what the composer and librettist were really up to. And yet, ironically, this full experience will by definition also be an attenuated one, for in the theater the initial creators will be joined by the producer, the stage director, the costume, set, and lighting designers, the orchestra conductor, the actor-singers—in short, all the people who both make the opera and make it something other than the composer’s own original work. So you will probably have to see many different productions before you can arrive at a definitive judgment about which aspects, which particular flaws and virtues, belong to the opera itself as opposed to the individual performance.

You can, however, take a guess. I have seen only one production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd and one production of Leos Janacek’s The Makropoulos Case—both in the same week, as it happens, during their recent runs at the Metropolitan Opera House. Each production was very good, and I am not at all sorry I went to either, but the Janacek was certainly the more gripping experience. This, I think, was not only because the performances were slightly superior, but also because Janacek understood, in a way Britten did not, how to make sung theater come alive on a stage.

First, to get the equivalences out of the way: the stage designs for the two operas were both brilliant. If anything, William Dudley’s set for Billy Budd—a stage-sized ship which rose up to reveal the below-decks cabins, story upon story, and then collapsed as needed—was even more striking than Anthony Ward’s three beautiful Makropoulos interiors, each gorgeously lit by Howard Harrison. But neither set, for its purposes, could have been bettered.

As for the lead singers, Nathan Gunn was a terrific, endearing Billy Budd, his baritone voice movingly inflected, his diction clear, his acting and gestures all superlatively done. James Morrison, who played Claggart, was perhaps too old for the part. (He played it, after all, in the original performances of this John Dexter production, in 1978.) John Daszak, who sang Captain Vere—the tenor role Britten wrote for his companion, Peter Pears—was vocally adept, but not quite charismatic enough to support the whole opera. But here is where production problems begin to bleed into more basic structural problems. Couldany Starry Vere carry the whole show, as Britten’s score and E. M. Forster’s libretto force him to do? When Melville wrote “Billy Budd,” he understood that though the moral dilemma and the guilt-ridden aftermath resided with the captain, the pathos of the story lay with Billy. We need to fall in love with him—what’s more, we need to project ourselves inside him, feeling the frustration of his stammer as if it were in our own throats—for the unfairness of the tale to wreak its havoc on our emotions. By choosing to begin and end the opera with Captain Vere, Britten and Forster turned this from a passionate tale to a philosophical disquisition about good and evil. There are moments of pathos still, as when the old sailor Dansker goes below-decks to give food and water to the condemned Billy, and Billy winningly thanks him for his kindness; but such moments are too few to sustain the weight of a four-hour opera. Melville’s story did not need to choose between emotional impact and moral elucidation, for narrative prose—which intimately darts in and out of individual characters, allowing us to imagine ourselves as each in turn, or as none of them—is cleverly designed to do both. Opera needs to choose, however, and in this case I think the composer and the librettist chose to emphasize the wrong strand. But it’s possible, as I say, that a different performance might cause me to change my mind.

Janacek had the advantage over Britten here, in that he chose to base his opera on a stage play rather than a story—and a play, moreover, that featured an opera diva as its central character. But this choice was due to intelligence, not luck, and he deserves credit for it. More intelligent still was his understanding of the relationship between the sung and the spoken word. If I had to point to a single realm in which The Makropoulos Case triumphs over Billy Budd, it would be this: the sung line in Janacek’s opera always works dramatically as well as musically. In Britten’s case, word and music are occasionally allied but more often at odds, so that the straightforward vocal rhythms of the Forster/Melville prose fight against the more diffuse tones introduced by the composer—as they do, I have to say, in much other English-language opera, especially of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I do not know Czech, but even I can tell that Janacek’s singular genius lay in converting the spoken tongue into music. Apparently he arrived at this ability in a very practical way, for—according to the Met program notes—the composer “would roam the streets for hours, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and translating the rise and fall of casual speech into musical notation, taking special care to capture the word-rhythms in all their metrical complexity.” In this way Janacek was able to use Karel Capek’s theatrical dialogue nearly wholesale, making the long speeches succeed as opera through the skill with which he scored them.

In the Met production, this attentive scoring is amply served by the great Karita Mattila, who carries every scene as the outsized, heartless, glamorously attractive three-hundred-year-old Elina Makropoulos, currently making her living as the acclaimed opera singer Emilia Marty. (As she says at one point, “You can’t live three hundred years without changing your name a few times.”) The supporting cast members are all great too, from the weak, needy heir, Albert Gregor (Richard Leech), to the assertive attorney, Dr. Kolenaty (Tom Fox), to the cleaning woman (Jane Shaulis) who drolly picks up the flowers tossed to Emilia on the stage. Each embodies perfectly, in acting andsinging, the stage character he or she has been assigned, so that we feel immediately drawn in, as we are by a clever play, without the artificial distance opera usually imposes.

And in this opera, Janacek does not have to make a choice between feeling and philosophy, because the only true feeling is in the philosophy, in the contemplation of what would happen to human experience if we were allowed to live on forever. There is no question of individual pathos here, as there is in Billy Budd. Most of the characters are equally dislikable, equally beyond the reach of our intimate sympathy. The overall tone is sardonic, and even the most pathetic figures (like young Janek, who kills himself out of love for Emilia Marty) are too slight to earn our tears. If, by the end of this opera, we are brought to a condition approaching Aristotelian awe, it is through forces larger than mere sympathetic identification. The situation itself moves us: we are actually made to grasp, and to fear, the consequences of immortality. And Janacek’s music—with its perfect connection to everyday speech, its own practical understanding of what it means to be human—is what finally leads us to this realization.

—May 14, 2012

 

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All Hail the Pacificas!

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve been following the Pacifica Quartet for a few years now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, despite some very fierce competition, they are my favorite string quartet. This is largely, of course, because of the way they play. Whether it’s Beethoven or Shostakovich or something unreservedly modern, the music seems to retain its own character and at the same time become completely theirs. There is nothing strident or self-dramatizing about their interpretations: they never depart from the norm in a way that shocks or unnerves. And yet the differences between their performances and everyone else’s are distinct and important. It’s something to do with the dynamics, the way the Pacificas delicately alter the volume on otherwise repeated phrases. It’s something to do with the meshing of the four instruments, so that each one is heard separately, while at the same time their rhythmic collaboration seems almost uncannily coherent. And it’s something to do with how pure their tones are, whether they are producing high, fast notes or somber, slow ones.

I would no doubt enjoy all of these qualities of theirs even in a recording—and in fact I do enjoy them in their latest recording, a Cedille Records CD of four Shostakovich quartets (numbers five through eight) plus one quartet by Shostakovich’s colleague Myaskovsky. But something additional accrues when you see the Pacificas perform live. They are an attractive and various crew, to be sure: Simin Ganatra, the first violin, is a Pakistani-American who hails from Southern California; Sibbi Bernhardsson, the second violin, is from Iceland; Masumi Per Rostad, the violist, is a New Yorker whose parents are Norwegian and Japanese; and Brandon Vamos comes from one of those motley European Jewish backgrounds that involves cousins in numerous foreign countries, though he grew up in the Midwest. Ganatra, the only woman, is not only a great violinist, but she also has one of the most expressive faces in any chamber group performing today. And the others follow and reciprocate her expressiveness, partly in their glances toward her (she generally gives the cues) and partly in their own bodily and facial gestures. This is particularly true of Vamos, who sways from side-to-side with his cello on the most melodic passages, and whose interludes with Ganatra (when, as in many quartets, the first violin and the cello have collaborative moments) feel as intimate as two musicians can be.

This is as it should be, for Ganatra and Vamos are married to each other and form the core, as it were, of this familial company. The quartet was founded in 1994, but they all seem too young to have played that long together. Vamos met Ganatra when she was still in her teens, living in his parents’ house and studying violin with his mother, a noted teacher in the Midwest. Ganatra met Bernhardsson when they were at college together and he too was studying with Vamos’s parents. And Rostad, the relative latecomer, joined the group over a decade ago, when they lost their original violist and Bernhardsson suggested that they try out this talented acquaintance of his. Despite their name’s allusion to the Pacific Ocean—a nod to Ganatra’s L.A. origins, I think—the four of them currently teach and live in the heartland: having been at the University of Illinois at Champaign since 2003, they will be moving in the fall to Bloomington, where they will be Indiana University’s quartet-in-residence; they are also on the faculty at the University of Chicago, a few hours’ drive away. All of this means that they have already spent more time together than most siblings who have grown up in large families—and unlike most grown siblings, they continue to spend that amount of time together every week, whether they are touring, teaching, rehearsing, or just hanging out at home.

All this would be mere gossip if the Pacificas did not convey exactly this feeling of intimacy to their chamber-music audience. You can sense their long-term ties and their ongoing affection in the way they play together— particularly in a live performance, when you can watch their glances and smiles and concerted bowstrokes and quietly dancing feet. These are four people who share a great deal, and yet they all manage to make their separate presences heard in the music. I know from listening to them talk about their work that they hash things out in private—individual interpretations, preferences for what to include in the reportoire, and so forth—and that they then come up with a unified performance that is the result of all these opinions melded together. It is an astonishing thing to behold, and audiences always respond warmly to it.

I first became aware of the group in 2001, when they were playing the full cycle of Beethoven quartets at a series of lunchtime concerts at Columbia’s Philosophy Hall. After that I consciously began to follow their career—in Napa Valley, where they have played at Music in the Vineyards, and in New York, where they became the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum. Two seasons ago, when they were performing the complete Shostakovich quartets at the Met, I volunteered my services as an onstage interviewer before the performances, and they readily accepted; it is a role that made me feel, if only briefly, as if I were one of the far-flung cousins in their extended family. I loved the way they performed Shostakovich: their rendering of the Second Quartet made it new to me, and their version of the Third is the best I’ve ever heard, and as for their Eighth…well, you get the idea. I’ve also loved hearing them do the full Beethoven cycle this year, bringing to full circle my encounter with their playing.

As they played Opus 135 last Saturday night—Beethoven’s final work, and their final performance in the series of six concerts—Masumi Per Rostad announced from the stage that this would be their last appearance as the Met’s quartet-in-residence. An audible, unanimous groan of disappointment arose from the audience. I too felt saddened (not to mention concerned that the Met didn’t know when it had a good thing going). And then I reassured myself with the thought that the Pacificas, though they won’t be appearing regularly at the Met anymore, will get plenty of gigs in New York and elsewhere. Next week they will be at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, doing a program of very modern music, and by chance I will be there to hear them. In May they will be in Montreal, presenting a complete Shostakovich cycle at the Festival of Chamber Music, and again I will be there (this time not at all by chance). But you too can play this game. Just look up the Pacifica Quartet’s schedule on their website, at www.pacificaquartet.com, and find out when they will be coming to an auditorium near you. I guarantee you are in for a treat.

—March 13, 2012


 

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Art That Speaks to Us

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

On the first Thursday of October, I went to BAM to see the Berliner Ensemble production of The Threepenny Opera. Naturally my standards for this play are extremely high: the affinity I feel for it extends beyond its title to a number of its qualities and themes, and I always find it easy to criticize the shortcomings of a less-than-ideal production. Luckily, Robert Wilson, who directed this German-language, English-supertitled production, was at his most astute, and the performances by the Berliner Ensemble regulars could not have been bettered. Though it was hardly a traditional interpretation of the work (Macheath, for instance, was played in near-drag as a strange cross between Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin), it seemed to get at the very heart of Brecht’s intentions, and for me it worked beautifully, weirdness and all.

The conceit behind the show was that we were seeing a version of a Weimar-era film, not unlike Pabst’s 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera (whose scratchy soundtrack played behind the opening scenes of this production), but with elements of The Blue Angel, Modern Times, Lulu, and other classic movies mingled in. From the initial parade of heavily made-up, grotesquely exaggerated characters across the harshly lit stage, to the final all-group rendition of the dourly ironic song that closes the play, this was a production that borrowed the black-and-white, judderingly edited, vaudeville-influenced look of late-silent and early sound films. Buster Keaton was there in the marvelous (and in fact nearly overwhelming) performance of Tiger Brown by the spectacular Axel Werner; both Keaton’s and Chaplin’s heroines seemed to underly Stefanie Stappenbeck’s spirited rendition of Polly Peachum; and Stefan Kurt’s galvanizing Macheath went from the dolled-up appearance of a Weimar transvestite to the fetchingly graceful manner of the Little Tramp—a genre-bending look that was accompanied, every time he opened his mouth, by a singing voice that marked him as a man even as it recalled Marlene Dietrich’s glamorously seductive tones.

For those who are used to sympathizing heavily with Mackie Messer, this performance may have seemed a bit too filled with Brecht’s vaunted Alienation Effect to work as theater. But for me it brought the character into balance with the play, giving him an appeal that was more theatrical than sexual, more unnerving than heroic. The fact that all the actors in the play knew how to follow Brecht’s technique to the letter—fixing the audience with their glittering, accusatory eyes while singing their discordant lines with purposely less-than-perfect tuning—made for a remarkable evening of theater. As one has learned to expect from Wilson, the pace dragged at times; had I been allowed to edit, I would have cut ten or twenty silenced-filled seconds from just about every scene in the first half of the show, reducing the total running time to something closer to its usual two-hour length. But I’ll concede that even the odd pacing was ultimately salutary, in that it gave a sense of propulsive rush to the later scenes, which were performed without the languorous pauses.

It was here, in the final minutes of Mackie’s near-hanging episode, that Wilson’s production really earned its keep. For as Macheath stood on the gallows with a noose around his neck and delivered his lines defending the relative innocence of small-scale “artisan” crooks—”What is a picklock compared to a bank share? What is the burgling of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”—the BAM audience burst into spontaneous applause. It was one of those moments when history catches up with an old play and makes it sound entirely new. What might have seeemed mere preachiness or tired dogmatism forty years ago, when I first heard these lines, now sounded like a rousing speech from this morning’s Occupy Wall Street demonstration. The opera had become true again.

***

I had a similar sense of being spoken to directly when I went the very next night to see George Clooney’s latest film, The Ides of March. This is perhaps less surprising, in that the film has just been released. But it is based on a play (Farragut North, by Beau Willimon) that came out in 2008, and that was in turn based on political events of 2004 and perhaps even earlier. So the echoes of our own present dilemma, however pointed they may seem, have entered in by serendipity, or perhaps by prescience, but not by direct historical imitation.

The Ides of March has been wrongly reviewed as a political thriller or a typical Clooney caper movie—the kind of cheerful, light entertainment in which we can identify with handsome characters, thumb a nose at middle-class morality, and enjoy a pleasant evening out. It could not be further from this. In fact, it is in some ways even colder, harsher, and more alienated than Brecht. If the movie is tense and in its own way gripping, that is not because we are dying to know the answer to the thriller questions; it is because we can somehow sense the downward spiral on which we have been launched. The despair of the movie’s ending is built into the idealism of its opening—and for those of us who had the highest of hopes for this administration when it was elected in 2008, that despair is recognizably ours.

Clooney and his collaborators have created a movie that is not about who wins or loses an election. Instead, it focuses on the sure but devious ways in which our national political process, broken beyond repair, inevitably destroys everybody who participates in it. There is nobody in this movie you can wholeheartedly like. Ryan Gosling, who puts on all his boyish charm for the role of deputy campaign manager working for the presidential hopeful, ends up devoid of any true emotion, dead-eyed and icily ambitious. And George Clooney gives one of his best, most restrained, and least lovable performances as the candidate himself. When this character smiles, it is with his mouth only—the expression never reaches his eyes. If we liberal viewers long for him to win the presidential nomination, it is because we love what he is saying: his advocacy of the Constitution over Christianity, his attack on the death penalty, his defense of the poor. When, in the end, he turns out to be just another compromising, compromised politician, the emotional impact is like a stab in the heart. If this movie is too depressing for the average ticket-buyer (and its sales figures would suggest that it is), that should not be taken as its flaw; on the contrary, it is its tremendous virtue as a truthful work of art. That stab in the heart belongs to us. Its cause is politics as we know it, in our own time, right now, when even the most blinkered observers are being forced to realize that something has gone very, very wrong.

—October 16, 2011

 

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Tetzlaff Times Three

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

In mid-March, as I was leaving the Carnegie Hall concert that Christian Tetzlaff had just given with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I ran into a couple of friends. “Oh, we should have known we’d see you at this!” they said (because concerts are where we always run into each other). “We’re here for Tetzlaff. He’s our favorite violinist.” There are, of course, a great many wonderful violinists in the world today, ranging from astonishing twenty-year-old virtuosos to unforgettable seventy-year-old masters, and in such a context it might seem ridiculous to single out one above all the others. But I think that, if pushed, I would have to agree with my friends. Tetzlaff is my favorite violinist.

That March concert was one of a number of events he’s doing at Carnegie Hall this year, since he is the designated “Perspectives” artist for the 2010–2011 season. So far I’ve seen three of these performances, and each was thrilling in a different way.

The BSO event did not start out promisingly. James Levine had just canceled out due to ill health (and in fact he was soon to resign his post as BSO conductor altogether), so the young replacement conductor, though perfectly adequate, was not the charismatic leader the majority of ticket-holders had turned out to hear. And even those of us lured in by Tetzlaff’s presence were slightly underwhelmed by the first half of the program, which featured a charming but brief Mozart Rondo and then a rather senseless Harrison Birtwhistle premiere. The Birtwhistle violin concerto was at once difficult and superficial—a sort of movie-score music, complete with fake suspense and pointless drama, but without the visual accompaniment that usually makes such music bearable and even useful. At the intermission, I was wondering if it had really been worth coming out on a cold night even for a program that featured the indefatigable Christian Tetzlaff in all three works. But then, after the break, I discovered why I was there. Tetzlaff’s performance in Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto was so exciting, so forceful, so delicate, and so moving that it put everything that came before it (even the Mozart!) to shame.

Tetzlaff is a stand-out performer with an orchestra (I first heard him in Brahms’s violin concerto, also at Carnegie, and it was a revelation), and he is also a great solo player (his rendition of the complete unaccompanied Bach sonatas and partitas, performed a couple of seasons ago at the 92nd Street Y, remains one of my concert high points). But possibly his most appealing work is done at the chamber-music level, where he has a chance to be both intimate and grand at once. The other two concerts of his that I’ve seen this season were a performance by the Tetzlaff Quartet (he plays first violin, his sister plays cello) and a concert with the Ensemble ACJW, a group of young Juilliard-connected players who rope in various masters for each of their events. Both of these were held in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the attractively modern underground venue whose only flaw is a tendency to filter in the occasional noise of the subway. Even this I found forgivable, where Tetzlaff was concerned, because I was so entranced in his and his colleagues’ engrossment in the music that nothing else seemed to matter.

The Tetzlaff Quartet concert, which I attended just last weekend, was a study in subtly connected contrasts. The evening began with Haydn’s unconventional Op. 20, No. 3—not at all what you are expecting when you see a Haydn quartet listed on the program—and then moved on to Mendelssohn’s stirring, complicated Op. 13 (written, unbelievably, when the composer was only eighteen). By intermission my companion felt he already had a great concert under his belt, and he was tempted to leave before the second half, which featured Schoenberg’s First Quartet, since his prior experience of Schoenberg had not been positive. “Trust Tetzlaff,” I recommended, and at the end he agreed I had been right, for this performance of the Quartet No. 1 in D Minor was unlike anything either of us had ever heard from Schoenberg. Located somewhere between German Romanticism and the Second Viennese School, it had an expressiveness all its own—an emotionally rich if at times discordant expressiveness in which all four instruments had an equal share. Yet even in this gathering of equals, I felt I could hear Tetzlaff’s own individual voice every time it sounded, as if his violin were able to speak for him just as particularly and recognizably as a tenor’s or a baritone’s instrument does. And that eerie singularity, far from destroying the coherent feeling of the chamber group, only intensified it.

Possibly the best and certainly the most thrilling of the three concerts I heard Tetzlaff give this season was the December performance with the Ensemble ACJW. Gathered together on the relatively small Zankel stage were not only the young players and Tetzlaff himself, but also the incomparable Simon Rattle, who had been brought in to conduct, and the marvelous soprano Barbara Hannigan, who was helping the group perform an excerpt from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre. The whole evening—which also included Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, and a suite by Rameau—was at once serious and playful: especially serious in the rendering of the solemn Metamorphosen, and especially playful in the Grand Macabre outtake (where, for instance, the sexily attired soprano at one point shoved Simon Rattle away from his conducting spot and proceeded to lead a few bars of the performance herself, until he booted her in the rear end and took back his rightful role). The whole evening was a deep, sometimes dark, sometimes exhilarating pleasure. And a great part of my own joy lay in watching Christian Tetzlaff among his fellow performers, those young musicians who had been invited to stand alongside one of the very greatest violinists of our era and play, essentially, as his equals.

—April 12, 2011


 

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My Shostakovich Book

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Wendy Lesser

I don’t generally favor using blogs for self-promotional purposes, but I have been persuaded that it would be a good idea to let my regular readers know that a book I have been working on for four years is finally about to come out. It’s called Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, and it’s a rather strange, hybrid work in which I view the quartets in relation to the composer’s life and the life in relation to the quartets. Though it’s being published by Yale University Press, it is not at all an academic book. In fact, it’s aimed at general readers who may or may not know very much about Shostakovich—as the pianist Menahem Pressler (founder of the Beaux Arts Trio and profound admirer of Shostakovich’s music) suggested when he told my publishers, “Music for Silenced Voices is a book for those who love Shostakovich and for those who are going to love Shostakovich after they read it.” William Kentridge, the artist who did last year’s terrific production of The Nose at the Met, and Laurel Fay, America’s most erudite Shostakovich biographer, have also had nice things to say about the book.

But enough of this. Let me just give you the first few pages of the first chapter, so you can decide for yourself if you want to read more:

Chapter 1. Elegy

In him, there are great contradictions. In him, one quality obliterates the other. It is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.

—Mikhail Zoshchenko, in a private letter about Shostakovich, 1941

It is hard to say whether he was extraordinarily fortunate or profoundly unlucky. Even he would probably have been unable to decide, for in regard to his own situation and his own character, he was often dubious and always divided. He was a self-acknowledged coward who sometimes demonstrated great courage. A born survivor, he was obsessed with death. He had an excellent sense of humor and an equally strong streak of melancholy. Though reserved in outward demeanor and inclined to long silences, he was subject to bouts of intense passion. Mentally and physically he tended to be either lightning fast or practically immobilized. He was both a generous man and an embittered one. Immensely loyal to his friends, he was repeatedly guilty of disloyalty to his own principles. He cared a great deal for words, and he signed his name to documents he had never read. He was a modernist who officially despised modernism. He was a baptized unbeliever with a strong affection for the Jews. As for his country, he both hated and loved it—and the mixed emotion was returned, it seems, for he became at different times a prominent beneficiary and a prominent victim of his nation’s cultural regime. He was an essentially private person who lived out his existence on a public platform. He wrote music that pleased the many, and he wrote music for the very few: perhaps, finally, only for himself. We know a great deal about him, and he remains largely invisible to us.

In this last respect, Dmitri Shostakovich is like all subjects of artist biographies, only more so. You are drawn to the life because you love the art, and you imagine that knowing more about the life will bring you closer to the art, but for the most part the life is a smoke screen getting between you and the art. You pick up threads and clues, searching for a pattern that explains the whole, forgetting that a great deal of life (and art) depends on chance events. You can never definitively find the hidden springs of an artwork; you can only attempt to grasp the results as they gush forth, and with music, which is nearly as changeable and bodiless as water, that grasp will be especially tenuous.

Nevertheless, there is a desire to connect the human being who once lived to the still-living music, which seems to have a human voice behind it—doeshave a human voice behind it, if only one could hear it properly. For me, and I think for many other avid listeners, Shostakovich’s own voice is most clearly audible in his fifteen string quartets. He became famous in his lifetime for the symphonies and operas, and it is through these larger-scale works that most people know his name today, but those are precisely the works of his that were most subject to interference by the Soviet authorities. The interference was internal as well as external: that is, Shostakovich often censored himself, distorting and suppressing his own talent in order to write the kinds of pieces that were demanded of him as a public artist. But nobody at the top of the Soviet Union’s cultural hierarchy paid much attention to what he was doing in his smaller-scale, under-the-radar chamber music. So whereas the symphonies can be bombastic or overblown or afflicted with moments of bad faith, the quartets are amazingly pure and consistently appealing. Taken individually, each represents a major contribution to the string quartet literature; taken as a whole, they stand as one of the monuments of twentieth-century music. And as a key to Shostakovich’s own preoccupations—as a kind of “diary” that records “the story of his soul,” as his widow put it—they offer unparalleled access to the composer’s inner life.

Musicians who play Shostakovich’s string quartets can read that diary through the music: that is how they manage to perform the quartets, even if they know little or nothing about the composer’s life. You can get the whole story from the fifteen quartets themselves, if you are alert enough. But I am not alert enough, and I am not a musician, so I have had to go about it backwards, by way of the life first and then the music. Only after learning something of the biography have I been able to hear what was there all along in the quartets.

When we nonmusicians listen to music, we respond with an awareness of logic and pattern and history, but also with our emotions and imaginations, and to put these responses into words is not an easy matter. In speaking about Shostakovich’s quartets, I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism. I have tried to remain faithful to the specific demands of music, which by its very nature is less imitative of reality, less “naturalistic” or “figurative” than literature or painting. Still, my approach to Shostakovich’s music is essentially that of a writer, and this entails certain pitfalls. To hazard an interpretation, in the literary sense of the word, is to venture an opinion (some might even call it a guess) about what was intended or accomplished in a work of art. The line between correct interpretations and incorrect ones is bound to be fuzzy and inconstant; even the artist is not the ultimate authority in this regard, for he may well have given rise to something that is larger than his own intentions. (In fact, if he is a good artist, he has almost certainly done so.) But there arewrong interpretations, wrong assumptions, wrong pathways in approaching an artwork—or, for that matter, a life story. To say that opinions can vary is not to say that anything goes. And in dealing with Shostakovich it seems especially important to keep the known facts in mind at all times and to adhere to them, precisely because falsehood, dishonesty, and misrepresentation were such devastating issues in his life.

To uncover the truth about a dead artist is always difficult. Many things stand in the way: jealous colleagues who lie about their competitor to make him look worse; sycophantic followers who lie about their hero to make him look better; innocently inaccurate memories, which get the facts wrong and compound the myths; contemporary reviews, which are often silly and always subjective, then as now; and the artist’s own secretiveness, or evasiveness, or simple inability to articulate what he is doing in his art. But to these normal layers of obfuscation, Shostakovich’s case adds many more. Silence was at the heart of his enterprise. It is there in his music (which, especially toward the end, seemed to be pulling the notes out of a deep silence, or sending them back into it), and it is there in his personality (there are numerous stories about his sitting in silence, even in the company of friends), and it is there, most particularly, in the conditions of his twentieth-century Russian life. To speak, in those circumstances, was to betray, and to speak the truth was to betray oneself. Even private letters could be intercepted; even private words could be conveyed to the wrong ears. History got rewritten every few years, and no one was safe from the sudden switchbacks. So the wise kept their own counsel and didn’t put anything down on paper, except nonsense and distractions. People learned to speak in code, but the codes themselves were ambiguous and incomplete. Nothing that emerged from that world (or perhaps, indeed, any world) can be taken at face value.

This is why the uproar over Solomon Volkov’s Testimony—which purports to be the unmediated truth about Shostakovich’s experiences and opinions, as told to Volkov by Shostakovich himself—is finally moot. Perhaps the controversy had some meaning when the book first appeared in 1979, with Shostakovich only a few years dead and the Soviet Union still alive; perhaps it seemed significant then that Shostakovich could say nasty things about Stalin, the Party, and the whole Soviet machine. After all, his New York Timesobituary had described him as “a committed Communist,” and though people within Russia might have been aware, even at the time, of his uncomfortable relationship to authority, no one on the outside spoke of it. But now we have numerous other kinds of evidence—the oral testimony of the composer’s friends and relations, recently published letters to and from him, analogous instances in previously unprintable novels, stories, and poems, and our own increasingly informed sense of how life in that time was lived—to suggest that Shostakovich could never have been the placidly obedient Party apparatchik he was sometimes made to seem. So Volkov’s central and rather doubtfully obtained revelation is no revelation at all. And, perhaps more importantly, nothing is gained by this sleight-of-hand effort to transform the reluctant public figure into a secret dissident, for the Volkov portrayal of a resentful, self-righteous Shostakovich is far less appealing and finally less persuasive than the tortured and self-torturing man it replaces.

As for the rest of the book, well, anyone who has ever read a bad transcription of a poorly conducted interview will recognize in Testimony the feeble efforts of the speaker’s voice to make itself heard over the static generated by the interviewer’s biases and preconceptions. Some elements of his own opinions do probably make it through, which is why we Shostakovich-seekers are all tempted to mine Testimony for the fragments that are personally useful to us. But we need to recognize that in doing so we are essentially choosing at random, with no certainty about the veracity of our selections. We could be quoting Shostakovich, or we could simply be quoting Volkov—a character straight out of Gogol or Dostoyevsky, rubbing his hands with oily fake-servitude as he announces proudly in the preface that Shostakovich called him “the most intelligent man of the new generation.” Even this remark needs to be taken as coded (if indeed it was ever spoken at all), seen as a typically dark joke, similar to the one Shostakovich made annually when he offered as his New Year’s toast, “Let’s drink to this—that things don’t get any better!”

* * * * * * *

And so on. If you think you’ll want to read the rest of it, you can order it on Amazon or at your local independent bookstore. (It doesn’t officially come out until March 8, but I think some copies may be available a bit sooner.) And it’s even coming out as an e-book, I believe, so you could conceivably read it on your iPad and listen to a complete recording of the quartets at the same time. In any case, I hope you’ll enjoy it—and I hope if you do enjoy it, you’ll write to me and let me know.

—January 4, 2011


 

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Seeing The Hard Nut Once Again

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is a Christmas confection, but I first saw it in the summer. It was August of 1995, and my husband and I and our ten-year-old son traveled north from London to catch the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival. We were already fans of the Mark Morris Dance Group—I had fallen in love with L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato when it first premiered in America in 1990, and had subsequently helped organize a Berkeley conference around it—but we had no specific expectations for The Hard Nut and were basically just there for fun.

And it was fun. In that 1995 production, Morris himself had two roles—as a drunken party guest in the first-act Christmas party and, in the second half, as the leader of the Arabian women, a seductress with come-hither eyes and a swirling diaphanous caftan. Kraig Patterson played the black maid in toeshoes; a rather hefty opera singer, Peter Wing Healey, took the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum; the charming and diminutive June Omura played the rambunctious Fritz; and the incomparable Rob Besserer performed the central part of Herr Drosselmeier. The sets based on Charles Burns comics and the costumes of the party guests hilariously recalled the Sixties in a way that was both stylized and accurate. The party itself was a tremendous kick, and the various national dances performed in the second half were vigorous, playful, and (as always in Mark Morris) perfectly attuned to the music. I might have wished that some of the lovers’ duet between Marie and the Nutcracker Prince had been reduced a bit, or perhaps turned into dancing instead of kissing, and I might have found myself getting impatient with some of Tchaikovsky’s most romantic passages. (What was wrong with me?) I hope I noticed how beautiful the snowflake scene was, but more likely I was just thrilled by it, as first-time audiences always are.

After the performance, since we were acquainted with the dancers from their Berkeley visits, my family went around to the stage door to greet them in that foreign land. We were whisked inside and our son was instantly taken off to the dressing-rooms, where he was treated like the company mascot. Then he reappeared with a couple of company members, who informed us that the whole troupe had been invited to a party at the Lord Provost of Edinburgh’s official chambers: would we like to come along with them? Of course we would! So we climbed into their touring bus and spent the rest of the evening in one of the grandest public spaces I have ever partied in, complete with festive food, a bevy of excited dancers, a smattering of Edinburgh worthies, and the Lord Provost himself (who, if memory serves, gallantly shook my small son’s hand).

In the years since then, The Hard Nut was repeatedly performed in Berkeley around Christmas time, and we began to give a party for the dancers after the last performance. My husband and I felt like slightly less comic versions of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum; at one point we even considered buying a videotape of a log fire to play on our TV during the party, just as the Stahlbaums do. My son became adept at serving the dancers their drinks—mainly bottles of beer retrieved from the ice-filled bathtub, which was the only place in the house big enough to chill that quantity of beer. The dancers ate and drank and smoked and laughed and mingled with the poets, writers, and academics we had assembled to meet them. At one party they even sang Christmas carols, accompanied on our out-of-tune old upright by Ethan Iverson, who is now a noted jazz performer in The Bad Plus but was then the dance group’s music director.

We haven’t given that MMDG holiday party for quite a while now—our schedule and the dancers’ made it impossible—but we still try to catch The Hard Nut whenever we can, and I have probably seen it at least ten times over the course of fifteen years. This year, my husband and I and our twenty-five-year old son and his girlfriend (herself a former dancer), along with almost all the freshmen in my Hunter Honors College arts class, caught it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Things have changed, of course. Morris hasn’t danced the Arabian princess role in a while, and this year he even gave up the drunken party guest in order to take over the part of Mr. Stahlbaum. Peter Wing Healey has long since been replaced by John Heginbotham, who dances the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum with such delicate beauty and emotional authenticity that stagehands have been known to fall in love with “her” until they learn, to their disappointment, that she is really a he. Marie and her Nutcracker Prince are now embodied by Lauren Grant and David Leventhal, a real-life married couple (both marvelous dancers) who manage to make even the kisses seem like dance. Passages that seemed slow or merely routine to me at first, such as the scene changes (which get some of the best music), or the thrilling way all the different characters come back in mismatched sets at the end, now make complete emotional sense. I have come to love the music—all the music. And though I regret the absence of key dancers from the company’s past, I appreciate the uniformly high skills of the new people who have arisen to take the roles of snowflakes, flowers, rats, GI Joes, and others.

Marvelously, Kraig Patterson is still the maid and June Omura is still Fritz; sadly, Rob Besserer has retired, and I miss him terribly, no matter who is dancing Herr Drosselmeier. But this year an impressive young dancer named William Smith III took on that demanding role, and I have great hopes for him. Smith has the necessary acting ability as well as the grace and strength to dance the part, and though I still see Besserer’s shadow around him (especially in the incredibly moving sequence—perhaps my favorite thing in all of dance—when Drosselmeier has a duet with his younger Nutcracker self, and then the snowflakes fly, and then the aging magician walks diagonally upstage through them, causing the spinning flakes to fall still as he passes), I can almost imagine a time when I will be able to admire his performance for itself alone.

—December 18, 2010

 

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Edmund de Waal’s Hare

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

Every once in a while a book comes out that is so great, all you have to do is summarize the plot to hint at its greatness. It’s not that Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a heavily plotted work: it’s a family memoir, for one thing, or a work of cultural history, or a strange, Lilliputian-telescope view into massive world events, so it depends for its plot on what really happened. And it depends for its effectiveness on its masterful storytelling voice: de Waal, though he is actually a potter by profession, is the kind of cunningly sensitive writer one only runs across a few times per decade. Still, when I have simply told you what the book is about, I suspect that many of you will want to rush out and read it.

On several visits to Japan—where he was, among other things, learning his trade as a potter—de Waal, the English son of a half-Dutch Anglican clergyman, became close to his Great Uncle Iggie. Ignace Ephrussi, an elderly gay man who had lived in Japan for many years with his younger Japanese partner, was the brother of de Waal’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother; he also turned out to be the proud possessor of a unique and wonderful collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that had been handed down in the Ephrussi family since the late nineteenth century. Edmund, upon learning that he is to be the eventual heir to the collection, decides to investigate the history of these small, expertly designed, witty yet beautiful Japanese objects. In the course of examining who owned them over the course of a century and more, he gives us an astonishing look into several distinctly memorable corners of European, Asian, and even American culture and history.

The original collector was Charles Ephrussi, part of the Paris branch of this international Jewish banking clan (which seems to have been second only to the Rothschilds, with whom it freely intermarried). Having spread out from Odessa to Vienna and Paris, the Ephrussis quickly acquired enough polish to spawn art collectors as well as bankers—and Charles, who was apparently a fine amateur art critic as well as an early exponent of japonisme, was perhaps the most artistic of the lot. A dandy and boulevardier, he was friends with Manet, Pissarro, Degas, and Proust, and in fact he seems to have been the primary model for Charles Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. (Swann wrote about Vermeer, Ephrussi wrote about Dürer; each hobnobbed with aristocrats until falling out with them over the Dreyfus affair; each had a beautiful, willful mistress who wore Japanese kimonos; and so on, through many similar parallels.) In 1899, a few years before his own death, Charles gave his netsuke collection as a wedding present to his younger cousin Victor, a member of the Vienna branch of the family.

So now the tiny objects move, in their fancy display case, to the center of Freud’s, Schnitzler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Karl Kraus’s world. The vitrine occupies the dressing-room of Victor’s wife Emmy, where the children (including Iggie) are allowed to play with the valuable netsuke—the hare with amber eyes, the monk bent over his begging dish, the various kinds of fruits and vegetables, creatures and humans and objects—as if they were merely toys. And there they remain, through all the vicissitudes of the first third of the twentieth century, until the family finally flees Vienna in 1938.

But here I am going to stop telling you the story, because I don’t want to ruin the surprises that Edmund de Waal has very carefully set up. This book is as much about the discoveries he makes, and how he makes them, as it is about the objects and their surroundings; it alternates between a you-are-there sort of historical recreation (describing, for instance, how the children must have felt as they played hide-and-seek behind the tapestries in the grand Palais Ephrussi) and a more personal communication with the reader, here and now. It is a delight from start to finish—though a painful delight, in many places, given the history of the Jews over that century—and I could barely put it down to go about my normal life. Now that I have finished reading it, I wish I had it all to do over again. And so, like Iggie handing the netsuke on to the next generation, I am handing this incredibly valuable story on to you.

 

—August 26, 2010

 

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Two More Canadian Shows

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Wendy Lesser

A while back I recommended Slings and Arrows as an alternative for those who were suffering Wire withdrawal, and as time has continued to burnish my memory of watching that great Shakespearean series, I feel even more strongly about it. But television-watchers must have continual new fodder, and so I have had to seek out some of the other Canadian shows available on Netflix to fill the continuing gap. (The presence of Treme on “real” television has done nothing, it turns out, to feed my Wire hunger: beautifully shot as that new show is, it simply lacks the hateful characters, the devious misdeeds, in short the necessary violence that made the earlier David Simon series such a masterpiece.)

My two new discoveries are both set in Vancouver, and both are Chris Haddock productions. (I presume that Chris Haddock is, in some sense, the Canadian David Simon, since he creates, writes, and occasionally directs his own very personally inflected, somewhat grungy TV programs—but all I really know about him is that his name appears on these two shows.) The first one I found, which was made earlier, is Da Vinci’s Inquest, and it features a coroner named Dominic Da Vinci, a Vancouver citizen of Italian descent (though you could have fooled me: he looks and sounds Irish).

As with The Wire, the higher-ups among the “good guys” in Da Vinci’s Inquest are as bad as any of the perps, and a great deal of the pleasure of the series comes from hating them and their machinations. Da Vinci himself is an appealingly working-class guy (his father was a stonemason, as we learn in one episode), who is not a medical doctor himself but is in charge of a group of medical pathologists, including his own ex-wife. The ensemble acting in this show is terrific, and so are the bleak but also beautiful shots of Vancouver; but the main thing that makes the series stand out is that we get no real solutions to the murders. Oh, we may find out who committed the crime; we may even, occasionally, see that person brought to justice. But either the problem is too large to be solved by a single conviction, or the perpetrator is too connected with powerful interests to be punished sufficiently, or the crime itself is not, in legal terms, a crime, but simply the kind of accident that arises when society doesn’t care enough about its poorest, weakest members. Da Vinci’s Inquest is resolutely skeptical in its outlook—one might almost call it anarchic, if that didn’t imply a lack of concern, and Da Vinci himself is nothing if not concerned. He is the kind of subdued hero you can’t bear to part with, and the abrupt end of the series after a mere two or three seasons comes as a terrible blow.

Luckily, you can then turn to Intelligence, which I must say is the most addictive television program I have ever watched in my life. Even The Wire had its occasional longueurs, its moments when I was ready to nap if I had to sit through one more long speech about something; but I cannot open up a new disk of Intelligence without watching every single episode on it, even if this takes me to the small hours of the morning. The plots are so convoluted and the resolutions so infrequent that you begin to feel that you and the characters are juggling a million balls in the air, and yet the various people in this show are so persuasive, so viscerally present, that you never forget for a minute who they are and what they are doing in the plot.

At least one central character in Intelligence, the mob boss Jimmy Reardon, is played by an actor carried over from Da Vinci—that is, the excellent Ian Tracey. Other roles are filled by people I feel I have seen before in Canadian shows and movies (and sometimes American ones: James Garner’s old Rockford Files sidekick, Stuart Margolin, appears in a few episodes of Season One). There is a black crime-unit inspector, Mary Spaulding (played by Klea Scott), who eventually heads up her own spy shop, as well as variously backstabbing or helpful male colleagues who work with her; and there are many other mobsters with whom Jimmy routinely deals, including his partner Ronny, his bodyguard Bob, his sometime antagonist Dante, and his occasional ally, Fan. (Dante represents the Italian “biker” group, Fan the Vietnamese crew; all these people are engaged mainly in drug-dealing and money-laundering, though they do a sideline in murder and mayhem as well.)

The government figures sent out from Ottawa to oversee and intrude on Mary Spaulding’s difficult work do not impress one with their sincerity and intelligence, but the worst characters by far are the Americans from the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. These people are so persuasively despicable that you are likely to find yourself mentally turning Canadian in response. (Reading in this morning’s paper about how Canada has handled Toyota differently from the way the U.S. has, for instance, I found myself unwittingly thinking: yes, we do things more sensibly here in Canada…a direct result of last night’s immersion in Intelligence.) At this point I only have one disk left to go in the second — and last available — season of the show, and I am already trying to figure out how I’m going to cope with that painful withdrawal.
—May 6, 2010

 

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