A Rainy Night

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Wendy Lesser

In this horrible-weather month that New Yorkers have been calling “spring” (but that we Californians would have no hesitation in labeling “winter”), Monday the 20th stood out as a particularly unpleasant night. After taunting us with a hint of summer warmth on the preceding Friday and Saturday, the climate had turned nasty again, with a cold, pelting rain that chilled the bones and made all ventures outdoors seem pointless. I wanted nothing more than to huddle inside by the radiator, but I had committed myself to attending the always-overbooked Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center—personally committed myself, by wangling two tickets from the Movado Hour’s endearing curator, Pedja Muzajevic, but also morally committed myself, in the sense that two deserving, music-loving souls could have sat in those free seats if my husband and I had chosen in advance to stay home. So we grudgingly covered ourselves in rain-repellent equipment and set out.

And it’s a lucky thing we did. I mean, it’s not as if we were taking a great risk: the Movado Hour is always pleasant, and not only because its structural outlines—free tickets, free drinks, a cabaret-style setting, and a single intermissionless hour of professionally performed music—conspire to make it so. With his wide connections in the music world, Muzajevic (who is himself an excellent pianist) has managed over the years to lure in an astonishing array of chamber-music performers, from the youthful Brooklyn Riders to the eminent Bella Davidovich. But even against that high standard, Monday night’s performance by the St. Lawrence String Quartet proved to be something special.

I have heard and liked this group in other venues, but there is no comparison between those more standard concerts and the way these four accomplished string players let loose, technically and emotionally, in the smaller, more intimate arena of the Movado Hour. I’ve now heard them twice in that setting—in the first Movado concert I ever attended, back in the fall of 2005, and in this latest one—and each time the experience was galvanizing.

This time, the program began with an intense, very specific, and quite moving rendition of Mendelssohn’s last composition, Opus 80, the string quartet he wrote just after his beloved sister’s death. I had heard this same quartet pretty recently, in last year’s “late-style” concert by the Brentanos at Weill Hall, but this time it was like a different piece of music, more alive and immediate than anything I normally associate with that composer. It was as if the St. Lawrence players had located the Beethoven side of Mendelssohn and proceeded to bring it out. So already, two minutes into the first Allegro movement, I had forgotten about the rain and the cold and my clammy feet, and had been transported into the here-and-now of a great performance.

And then came the pleasure of a complete surprise. For the second half of their program, the SLSQ gave us the Quartet No. 3 by R. Murray Schafer, a living Canadian composer of whom I (and, I’m willing to bet, at least half the audience) had never heard. The performance—from which the piece itself is inseparable, because it is the kind of piece that can only exist in live performance—was like nothing I had seen or heard before. Beginning with the cellist bowing alone onstage in complete darkness, the quartet gradually lightened, and expanded, to include the other three instruments, as their players strolled in from all directions in the course of the first movement. The entire foursome then engaged in a wild second movement that was like a cross between a Bartok quartet (seasoned with a bit of George Crumb) and an Inuit shouting match—their bows looked as frayed as their voices sounded, by the end of it. Finally, we got a trance-like last movement in which the long, slow notes held in unison bled indeterminately from one tone to another: not music, as I am used to thinking of it, so much as enveloping atmosphere. It created, at any rate, its own climate, not to mention its own world—so much so that I was startled, when I emerged onto the street, to discover that it was still raining in New York.

—April 21, 2009

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Wagnerian Time

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

Whether you find it easy or difficult to lend yourself to Wagner’s overwhelmingly powerful agenda—and I am still not sure where I stand on this question—you will be aware of having to alter something in yourself to accommodate his patently unreasonable demands. They are unreasonable by design: self-restraint was never part of his mode, and easy entertainment never part of his goal. He wants to make you capitulate to him. This wish —this need, I should call it—is perhaps what makes him so astute on the subject of compulsion, whether of one being by another, or of one being by forces beyond his own control (such as fate, or love). That compelled figure can be either mortal or immortal, king or commoner, male or female, young or old: nothing gets you out of having to submit, in Wagner’s world.

As an audience member, you are most likely to experience this sense of submission in respect to time. It’s not just that the operas are four or five hours long. It’s also that, minute by minute, you are being asked to suspend your desire for completion in a way that no previous opera asked you to. Handel may run the same lines three or four times over in a single aria, but the boredom factor can be dealt with by antic staging, and in any case it always comes to an end fairly quickly. You cannot stage a Wagner opera so that we don’t notice the passage of time. We are meant to notice it. Fairly near the beginning of the evening, we may ask ourselves: Are these two people ever going to stop singing at each other in this way? Are they ever going to get off this ship, or this mountaintop, or this blasted heath? And the answer is no, they are not; it is going to go on for so long that eventually, if the performance is good enough, you will forget about the very idea of an ending. And once you have reached that mental state, you will begin to enjoy, indeed wallow in, the sense of endlessness. The eternal present tense of the music—the way, melodically as well as narratively, it refuses to reach a conclusion—will come to seem like a form of immortality that is being temporarily granted to you.

The production of Tristan and Isolde that I saw last Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House, performed under the baton of Daniel Barenboim, was able to induce this dreamy yet alert state of suspension, and that in itself is high praise. In his conducting debut at the Met, Barenboim drew from the orchestra a galvanizing, moving, delicate performance that made the five hours pass in—well, if not a trice, then a very brief five hours. Even the difficult horn solo (performed by Pedro R. Díaz) was pure and perfect: a hard detail to get right, and one that seemed indicative of the whole production’s musical attentiveness. In this drama about the intense delights and torments of love, where the tragedy could only be deferred and not averted, there was something both sympathetic and generous about the way Barenboim allowed us to cling to each passage, each note.

This is not to say that the production had no shortcomings. The supporting performers—Michelle DeYoung as Brangäne, Gerd Grochowski as Kurwenal, and, spectacularly, René Pape as King Marke—were all terrific, but I had some problems with the two leads. Katarina Dalayman was an adequate if not spellbinding Isolde: her clear soprano voice was just sweet enough, and strong enough, to convey the role’s emotional power. Peter Seiffert, the tenor who sang Tristan, was somewhat worse. He got through the part with no major missteps (and I gather, given the role’s difficulty, that this is half the battle), but it always seemed as if he was working, not singing. I never once fell into that adoring swoon which the greatest Wagnerian tenors can produce; the music of his voice just didn’t feel like music. And because Seiffert was comparatively mundane while Pape was unbelievably thrilling, the whole plot got thrown weirdly off-balance. What Isolde in her right mind would have chosen this Tristan over this King Marke?

Still, plot is the least of our concerns with Wagner. Even words (though he paid close attention to them) are not much of a focus in this opera. Once you grasp the basic outlines of the story, you can forget about anxiously checking in with your supertitles every few seconds: they won’t tell you anything that the music isn’t already conveying much more powerfully. So you are freed up to watch that elegantly simply, surprisingly evocative geometric set (designed by Jürgen Rose), and to bask in the gloriously rich lighting (done by Max Keller), and to admire the stillness that is so often central to what these characters are doing. As Tristan and Isolde endlessly sing of their passion and their sorrows, Kurwenal and Brangäne, their attendants, may be holding a single pose for what seems like half an hour or more. Unmoving, statuesque, often silhouetted against the brightly lit set, they are our stand-ins onstage—ordinary bystanders who have been frozen into timelessness, and who have nothing better to do with themselves than to listen for as long as it takes, which might be forever.
—December 2, 2008

 

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Programming

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

I would have gone to hear Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Timeno matter what else was on the program. But by putting it together with other French twentieth-century pieces by Darius Milhaud, Pierre Boulez, and Maurice Ravel, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center made my experience of the Messiaen even stronger and more affecting — or, if that is not possible, they at any rate gave me a greater appreciation than ever of Messiaen’s particular genius.

The three short pieces that filled the first half of the October 3rd program at the New York Ethical Culture Society were, each in its own way, entertainments. One could see the composers playing with musical forms: Milhaud, in his 1923 piano quintet suite from The Creation of the World, was playing with jazz; Boulez, in his 1984 Derive I for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and vibraphone, was playing with cacophony; and Ravel, in his 1924 Tzigane, was playing with gypsy-violin virtuosity. All this (with the possible exception of the Boulez) was extremely pleasurable to hear and to watch, especially in the hands of the masterful Chamber Music Society musicians. But I never lost myself in the music: I was conscious, throughout, of my exact degree of appreciation for the skill involved on the part of composers and players, and I was also conscious of myself, sitting among audience members at a New York concert. It was, in other words, the standard “good concert” experience.

All of this melted away in the face of the program’s second half, which was entirely taken up by the Quartet for the End of Time. Part of this has to do with sheer length: at nearly fifty minutes, Messiaen’s beautifully austere piece requires a different kind of concentration from us, almost a different mode of listening. The austerity is not always severe — there is birdsong here, and unexpected melodiousness to counter the harshness, and surprising transitions between near-silence and ear-threatening loudness; plenty to keep the attention riveted. And part of it, of course, has to do with the story behind the music: written for fellow musicians in a Polish prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, rehearsed and performed under the supervision of a strangely tolerant camp commander, with a first audience that consisted entirely of other camp prisoners, the Quartet for the End of Time has a special, intimate connection with the horrors of the twentieth century. But this connection would mean nothing if the music did not bear it out — and in Friday night’s performance the music soared.

It was fascinating, in a way, to watch the very musicians who had done the fun, visibly virtuosic work of the first half turn themselves into mere (though that is hardly the right word) transmitters of Messiaen’s creation. Paul Watkins and David Shifrin, who had been skillful in the Boulez, became vehicles of pure feeling here; I don’t know which was more powerful, the painfully expressive music that Watkins pulled out of his cello in his solo moments, or the uncanny way Shifrin seemed to bring his clarinet sound from an almost inaudible distance into the very room where we sat. But perhaps the most transfixing moments of the piece occurred toward the end, where Daniel Hope performed the searing violin part against Gilbert Kalish’s self-effacing but perfect piano accompaniment. Hope, who used to be the violinist in the now-disbanded Beaux Arts Trio (and who has said, of his years with Menahem Pressler, that they turned him from a good violinist into a good musician), had performed with delightful, nearly acrobatic skill in the Ravel Tzigane, showing us all his fast-finger abilities at once. It was hard to believe that this man who had “showed off” so successfully in the Ravel was the same musician who now seemed to disappear into the Messiaen music. In the especially quiet passages, he almost seemed to close in on himself, as if he too were straining to hear the notes; throughout, he managed to convey the impression that the violin was playing itself, while he was merely its Bunraku-like human attendant. And yet the skill required to carry off this final, marvelous piece of music was more than anything he had demonstrated before. This, among other things, was what the program succeeded in showing us: that in the greatest music, pleasurable virtuosity drops away to reveal something even richer and more moving—something that looks like simplicity, but is not.
—October 5, 2008

 

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Slings and Arrows

Posted on May 4, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

Everyone who has seen at least two seasons of The Wire considers it the greatest television ever made. And it is. But a close runner-up, to my mind, is Slings and Arrows, a program about a group of Shakespearean actors that ran on Canadian television from 2003 to 2006. Different as it is from The Wire—it is billed, for one thing, as a comedy, though I would debate that categorization—Slings and Arrows shares some of the David Simon show’s crucial elements: beautifully written scripts, wonderful acting, a deeply informed sense of how particular institutions work on the inside, and, above all, enormous respect for the audience’s intelligence.

If you plan to rent this show on Netflix, as I just did, be forewarned that it is addictive. You will receive your DVD containing three episodes—half of each season—and you will plan on sedately watching one each night. But as soon as you have finished the first, you will be unable to resist moving on to the second, and then, no matter how late it is, the third; so if you want to get a reasonable night’s sleep, it’s safest just to allocate a full three hours on the night the disk arrives.

The plot centers on something called the New Burbage Festival (think Stratford, Ontario), which exists to present Shakespeare plays, but also promotes ghastly new Canadian playwrights, develops “hard-edged” musicals, and supplements its dwindling resources with forays into dreadful commercial ventures. At the beginning of the first season, the festival’s artistic director, Oliver Welles, is hit by a truck and dies; he reappears thereafter only as a ghost. I can become impatient with this ghost routine (I hated it in Six Feet Under, for instance—but then, I hated that whole series), but I can also be entranced by it, as I was in Topper, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Truly, Madly, Deeply. In Slings and Arrows, Oliver-as-ghost is essential if occasionally annoying: in fact, his annoying quality is part of what makes him essential.

The only person who can see and hear Oliver, in the first two seasons of the show, is Geoffrey, the certifiably crazy, very attractive, somewhat fumbling, deeply sensitive actor-turned-director who is drafted into Oliver’s job. Geoffrey and Oliver have an old history (Oliver directed Geoffrey in his most famous performance, as Hamlet, during which he went crazy and had to leave acting forever), so when Oliver appears in front of Geoffrey and starts ordering him around, their interaction has the quality of an old couple’s disagreements. To complicate this history, the production that Oliver left unfinished at his death, and that Geoffrey has to take over directing, is Hamlet.

But I have not begun to indicate the complicated strands of plot and character that make up each six-episode season. We get to know all the onstage actors—Ellen, the temperamental female lead, who is also Geoffrey’s former and future lover; Frank and Cyril, the two old English homosexuals who play all the spear-carrying parts; Jerry, the slightly pathetic guy who is always the understudy for the main role; plus the American movie star imported to play Hamlet, the self-important blow-hard who takes on Macbeth, the aging Canadian Shakespearean who becomes Lear, and the series of pretty ingenues who portray Ophelia, Juliet, and Cordelia. (The last of these roles is played by Sarah Polley, the brilliant young actress who directed the film Away From Her and whose real-life father, Michael Polley, plays one of the two gay old Englishmen.) Behind them are the administrators who run the New Burbage Festival— most notably Richard, the number-crunching executive director, and Anna, his put-upon assistant—along with some hilarious sidekicks, my favorite of whom is Darren, the violently pretentious, patently idiotic, theater-hating director who is Geoffrey’s nemesis. And behind them are all the schemers, moneymakers, board-members, ministers of culture, advertising executives, and other disreputable types who inhabit the nether regions of any corporate enterprise, but especially a non-profit corporate enterprise that runs to many millions of dollars every year. Art and money mingle cleverly in this series, and one of the more amusing plot strands involves the “re-branding” of New Burbage during Season Two, engineered by a glossy con-man who calls himself Sanjay. (He is not Indian, but has Zen pretensions.) It is this sort of wit that has caused the series to be labeled a comedy, I suppose, and there will indeed be many moments when you laugh out loud. But the humor is dark and frightening and accurate, and the sadness that underlies the humor is palpable and often foregrounded.

It’s hard to separate the acting and the writing in this show, because the people who wrote it seem so deeply inside the actor’s life that the lines are designed for perfect, convincing delivery. There is a reason for this: the people who wrote it are actors, and they all appear in the show. The three writers who are credited with every episode are Susan Coyne (who plays the long-suffering Anna), Mark McKinney (who plays the alternately foolish, evil, and endearing Richard), and Bob Martin (who appears briefly in Season One as Terry, an accountant taking a Change Your Corporate Life With Shakespeare workshop which Geoffrey undermines by turning it into a real acting class). I don’t know what kind of Shakespearean credentials these three have, but somebody in the crowd has thought long and carefully about how these plays work and what makes them wonderful. The series, as a whole, is an argument in favor of Shakespeare as a writer for the living stage, and against the kind of corporate dumbing-down that Shakespeare festivals often indulge in. This is not just a general argument: when Geoffrey, speaking to his actors, hazards a guess at how Ophelia’s mind works or contemplates what makes Lear’s fate moving, we learn something profound about the play itself. And even the people who can’t perform their parts properly (the egotistical Macbeth, the hateful initial Ophelia, the TV-star-turned Goneril, the mumbling Kent) show us something about how those roles function in their respective plays.

About ten percent of each season’s dialogue (at a guess) consists of lines from the specific Shakespeare tragedy that’s being performed by the company during that period. Just as the play’s language fuses with and enriches the script, its themes extend off the stage into the lives of the actors, managers, and behind-the-scenes players. The first couple of seasons feature Hamlet and Macbeth (with a side venture into Romeo and Juliet), and those two ghost-ridden plays naturally offer plenty of scope for Oliver’s supernatural appearances; in the third season the play is King Lear, which has no ghost, but in which the dying actor who plays the dying Lear begins to see and hear Oliver, just as Geoffrey always has. This kind of gentle but profound shift (nothing much is made of it in the script—it just starts happening, and we notice) is exactly what Slings and Arrows is best at. Subtlety is its finest mode, which is a rare thing indeed for something that is also so markedly satirical.

The show as a whole does that remarkable thing Shakespeare himself manages: to offer at once both comedy and tragedy, self-mockery and sincerity, manifestly artificial language and immediate psychological reality. Despite the fact that it is TV rather than staged performance, the emotions it provokes resemble those I have previously felt only in the live theater. As I watched the final episode of the third season last night, with tears in my eyes throughout the whole last twenty minutes—for Lear, for the actor playing Lear, for all the other players in the series, and for myself at the fact that it was coming to an end—I wondered how I was ever going to replace it.

—May 4, 2008

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In the Oddest Places

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

Over the past month, I’ve been finding the best music in places where I didn’t necessarily expect it, and less good music in places where I did. When this oddity occurred once, it didn’t seem worth remarking on, but now that it has happened over and over again, I’m forced to think about it.

The first such occasion for comparison involved the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House, viewed in relation to that much more famous orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, which lies catty-corner from it across Lincoln Center Plaza. In early March I was lucky enough enough to hear one of the performances of the Met’s Peter Grimes under the guest baton of Donald Runnicles, and man, was that music great. Since a great deal of the opera consists of purely musical interludes that Britten called “Seascapes,” and since John Doyle’s production very intelligently did absolutely nothing with the stage picture during those interludes, we could for once really hear the wonderful orchestration. The stark, looming, flat set, which some critics complained about, seemed to me a boon: it ricocheted the musicians’ excellent playing right back into our ears, so that we almost appeared to be surrounded by the auditory world of that harsh coastal village. I, who normally go straight for the narrative line in opera, was content to sit back and let the weird, poetic, slightly disjunctive libretto wash over me; I seemed to be taking in the tragedy of the central character more through the music than through the words, even though those words happened to be in English this time. And, as a Californian, I felt a strong if somewhat indefensible local pride in the fact that the Met audience was going absolutely wild over Our Donald’s conducting. (Okay, so he’s Scottish—but he has spent the past fifteen years as music director of the San Francisco Opera, and his imminent departure is the Bay Area’s great loss.)

In contrast, the New York Philharmonic was completely limp under Alan Gilbert, its prospective new leader. If his Haydn is anything to go by, we are in for a boring sequel to the current, largely insufferable reign of Lorin Maazel. Ironically, the best thing about the Philharmonic concert was its singing: in this case by Dawn Upshaw, who did her usual stellar job presenting some multi-lingual Berio songs. When a soloist like this sings out at full strength (or when, as happened later in the month, the Westminster Choir under Kurt Mazur does an enthralling performance of the St. Matthew Passion), you realize that Avery Fisher Hall is really only suitable for powerful vocal works, whereas it turns out that the Met can accommodate a purely instrumental sound quite nicely.

The St. Matthew Passion was the second religious work I heard in a secular location this month, and both nods to the Easter season were distinctly improved by their removal from a church setting. The previous instance was Handel’s Messiah, performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Time Warner Center’s Rose Theater. This is a very pleasant, well-lit hall, suitable for jazz or modern dance or chamber music, and it gave a warm, welcoming sound to the period instruments playing under Laurence Cummings’ skillful direction. The chorus was excellent in this concert, too (they were something called the English Voices), and the soloists were competent, if not compelling. What really made the piece work for me, though, was its translation from required Christmas fare to voluntary musical treat. Even the people who stood up for the Hallelujah Chorus didn’t bother me, as their behavior would have done in a church (implying, as it would have there, that I too should be standing up). It was kind of sweet to see them doing this in a concert hall—bravely, individually, or in scattered groups of two or three or five—as if to welcome the actual arrival of their invisible god, who apparently deigns to descend even during the off-season and in the oddest places.

By far the severest contrast between place and performance occurred just last week, at two different chamber music concerts. The first, on Tuesday the 18th, was the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s presentation of “The Pressler Connection,” a tribute to the grand old pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio that was also his tribute, in essence, to the rising generation. Joined by five youthful and talented string players, Menahem Pressler gave us deeply persuasive, musically involving renditions of Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major and Schubert’s Trout Quintet. (In between, three of the youngsters did a terrific job on a Dvorak trio.) What was so amazing about these performances was the collaborative musicianship, the way each player was clearly listening to and responding to all the others, so that the finished product they brought forth actually felt like a living piece of music, a newly born organism, even though it had been written down centuries earlier. The concert was so touchingly intimate and alive that I barely noticed the horribly uncomfortable pews of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, the inhospitable setting to which the CMSLC has been banished during the renovation of Alice Tully Hall.

No chamber music auditorium in New York could be nicer than Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, a perfect gem of a small space, complete with chandeliers and other fin-de-siècle flourishes, to which I went on Wednesday the 19th for a performance of the Brentano String Quartet. I was very much looking forward to the program, especially Shostakovich’s intensely moving Fifteenth Quartet, but also Mendelssohn’s final string quartet and Brahms’s late clarinet quintet. (This was a program devoted to the idea of late style.) To my disappointment, though, the playing didn’t live up to its glorious setting. It wasn’t that the Brentanos weren’t technically perfect; in fact, the problem may have been that each of the four musicians (five, if we count the visiting clarinetist) was too focused on his or her own perfection, to the exclusion of anything else. The Shostakovich, in particular, is a piece that needs to be inhabited— collaboratively, thoughtfully, dramatically lived in — in order to come alive; you can’t just play the notes. The Brentanos played the notes, and, sitting in my lovely, comfortable, enjoyable seat in that perfect auditorium, I felt absolutely nothing.

— March 28, 2008

 

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Vertigo, Etcetera

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Wendy Lesser

I made a special effort to catch what was being billed as the “New York premiere” of the Vertigo Quartet at the February 3rd Schneider Concert, part of a series held on Sunday afternoons at the New School. Actually, this very young ensemble, formed at the Curtis Institute in 2005, has been playing across the river at Bargemusic since last year, but apparently Manhattan does not consider Brooklyn a part of New York. I began following these four musicians avidly after hearing them do a masterful and moving rendition of Shostakovich’s Twelfth Quartet nearly a year ago; since then they have given equally amazing performances of Beethoven’s Opus 131, Corigliano’s massively complex 1995 string quartet, and Shostakovich’s Seventh. This time, at the New School, they played pieces by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and William Walton, and though the strikingly elderly audience had doubtless turned out to hear the nineteenth-century works, it was Walton’s String Quartet in A minor that turned out to be the surprising high point of a generally terrific concert. The Vertigos excel at difficult modern music, and that is not merely for technical reasons—that is, this is not just a matter of young fingers and young sensibilities keeping up with fast, jarring rhythms and harsh chords. What these four players have, above all, is a feeling for the drama and meaning of a musical piece. When you hear them play a quartet, from whatever century, you can sense that they have actually asked themselves what the composer thought he was doing at each moment in the music. Their subtle shifts in volume and pacing, the responsive echoes in their various melodic voices, and the significant silences they occasionally introduce are all part of that effort to convey meaning. It’s as if they are performers in a play as well as musicians on a stage, and their alertness to the composer’s intentions is as rewarding as an actor’s allegiance to a playwright’s words. The group’s name, by the way, comes from Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, rather than from the dizzying sensation itself. The violinists are Jose-Maria Blumenschein and Johannes Dickbauer, the violist is Lily Francis, and the cellist is Nicholas Canellakis. Watch for them; they are going places.

Mark Morris’s production of Purcell’s King Arthur is coming to New York City Opera for a brief run this spring. Do not miss it. I already had my full-length say about this piece when it opened in Berkeley a while back, but I plan to go again, as often as I can. Its pleasures are deep and lasting.

I wish to register my distress that the best American movie of 2007, In the Valley of Elah, went completely unrecognized by the Academy Awards. Of course we all know that the Oscars have very little to do with actual quality, that bad movies constantly win over good ones, blah blah blah. But this case seems to me more egregious than usual. In the Valley of Elahwas such a subtle, restrained, but searing look at our current foreign-policy disaster — focusing on Iraq by looking almost entirely at events that take place at home, forecasting with eerie accuracy the actual behavior of recent soldiers, and wrenching us with irresolvable emotions — that it seemed a particular shame not even to nominate it for an award. At least as disturbing was the failure of Tommy Lee Jones to win a Best Actor award for a performance that nobody else even came close to rivaling. Daniel Day Lewis gave a fine and skilled performance in There Will Be Blood, and Javier Bardem was delightfully, brilliantly scary in No Country for Old Men, but finally these were entertainments: actorly jobs well done in actorly roles. Tommy Lee Jones, in contrast, became the disillusioned veteran he played in In the Valley of Elah, to such an extent that I felt I was watching and getting to know a kind of person I have never actually met. Everything about the way Jones delivered this performance, from the tiniest movement of the corner of his eyes to the way his weary body looked from the back as he walked down a long hallway, gave depth and reality to the character, and to the character’s increasingly tragic situation. That this is, in effect, our situation — one of disillusionment and despair at the way our country’s faraway violence is bound to come home to roost — is possibly what made the movie too painful for most viewers to bear. The film’s disappearance without a trace is indicative of politics as usual: not just the petty Oscar politics about whose budget is bigger, whose dress prettier, but the larger politics of America, which prefers not to look its worst tragedies directly in the face until they have become so old as to be inert, and therefore safely convertible to “art.”

— February 26, 2008

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Short Takes

Posted on November 2, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

During a single week last month, I took my Hunter College freshmen to two dance events: a rehearsal of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, and one of the premiere performances of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company at City Center. This, to judge by the resulting discussion, gave them all they really needed to know in order to watch dance intelligently.

Unlike the professional critics (who may have been swayed by friendly feelings towards Wheeldon himself, as well as an understandable desire for something new to happen in the ballet world), my students were distinctly unimpressed by the Morphoses evening. “The dancers can certainly do amazing things with their bodies” and “I don’t know much about ballet” were the polite non-committals I got in response to my queries on the evening itself. But later, in class, they were much more forthcoming. They objected to the way the dances didn’t go with the music (or perhaps to the way the chosen music was unsuited to dance: they weren’t sure which). They liked certain of the poses the dancers took, but felt that in the end it was all posing, more gymnastics than dance. They also mildly deplored, though without a trace of politically correct stridency, the manner in which the men did all the heavy lifting and hauling — the lifted objects being mainly the women dancers, who were variously clutched, activated, and strummed as if they were mechanical dolls or musical instruments. One student backhandedly praised the final piece, Mesmerics, by remarking that at least it was more interesting to watch the eight onstage cellos playing Philip Glass’s music than it was to watch Wheeldon’s dancers.

Contrasting Mark Morris’s ensemble to the Wheeldon group, my class noted that the former had obviously worked together for a long time, and as a result the Morris dancers were “harmonious,” “precise,” and “loose.” (I am not making any of this up; those were their exact words.) My students were very impressed with the strength of the women — they commented, in particular, on the “iron thighs” of the tiniest dancer — and they were enchanted by the thrilling moment when one man ran diagonally up the stage and flung himself into the arms of another. They thought they could detect the shadows or suggestions of a story — a pointing finger asking a question, a delicately held container that collapsed into nothingness, a harried line of briefcase-bearing businessmen striding to work — but nothing, they agreed, as definite as a plot. Instead of plot, there was pattern: they were all able to describe, in minute detail, the passage in Mozart Dances in which an open circle of dancers looped around itself, with the curved line passing under an arch of hands and losing a single dancer on each loop. (They may have been helped, in this close scrutiny of form, by hearing Morris’s constant instructions called out to the dancers as they rehearsed.)

Towards the end of the discussion, one of my students said, “You know how Mark Morris told his dancers not to dance as if they had memorized the steps, but to surprise him, to make it feel new? Well, the Wheeldon dancers looked as if they had memorized the steps.” Someone else then observed that, whereas Morris had been able to say about several specific gestures “This is the first time we see that in this dance,” all the movement in the Wheeldon piece was at once so repetitious and so indistinct that you could never pinpoint a “first” time for anything.

Christopher Wheeldon, in his interviews, is always talking about how he wants to lure young audiences back to ballet, and he has added numerous bells-and-whistles (brief rehearsal films before each dance, projected titles, offstage meet-the-dancer sessions) to produce this effect. Perhaps he should try offering them some good choreography.

*

A critic I much admire, Daniel Mendelsohn, has written a largely negative review of the Met’s Lucia di Lammermoor in the pages of the New York Review of Books. I attended that opera (in fact, according to mutual friends, I attended the very same performance as Mendelsohn), and I found the production enormously satisfying. Is this just a matter of different tastes applied to the same perceptions? Or have I missed something that Mendelsohn saw — or vice versa? Even what we heard seems to be in dispute, for he describes Nathalie Dessay’s voice as merely “coolly agile,” whereas I thought it was astonishingly, transcendently beautiful. But his real objections are to the acting (anesthetized and inexpressive, he thinks) and to the directing (which he labels insufficiently forceful at best, meaningless at worst). I, on the other hand, thought that the director, Mary Zimmerman, whose primary experience has been with plays, did a remarkable job of turning a potentially ludicrous plot into something credible and moving. She was able to do so, in part, because Nathalie Dessay could carry off a realistic, almost naturalistic version of her role: what Mendelsohn takes as inexpressive, I take as numb with sorrow, fear, and madness.

Complaining that Zimmerman senselessly updates the piece to the Victorian period, Mendelsohn nonetheless singles out for special praise a moment when the wedding party is assembled for a photograph — not something that could have happened, technologically, before the Victorian period. He seems not to have noticed the way the carefully framed sets (sometimes we see only a small rectangle of forest or garden or castle, placed within a larger blacked-out rectangle) echo not only the conventions of the photograph, but also the conventions of the book. Donizetti’s opera is, famously, based on Walter Scott’s popular Bride of Lammermoor, and references to it have appeared in such novels asMadame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and (fleetingly) The Leopard. Zimmerman is reminding us of these literary associations even as she is pointing out to us the difference between a staged event and a book. Among other things, a staged event — and particularly an opera — must cope with the fact that styles of expressed emotion change over time, so that what seems truthful or authentic in one era will come off as exaggerated or fake or excessively manipulative in another. Whereas a novel seeps into our brains almost subliminally, an opera prances across our consciousness, demanding that we actively take things in: through eyes and ears, brains and hearts, spoken word and musical line, scenery and accompaniment. If we are more likely to object to being manhandled in this way, perhaps we are also more likely to submit completely — as I did — once we have been won over.

*

There has been a lot of Shakespeare around New York this fall, and most of it is less appealing than it should be. BAM’s much-ballyhooed King Lear, starring Ian McKellen, was adequate but no more — and given the amount of talent onstage, that is shocking. Even more shocking was the fact that the Public Theater thought it was a good idea to host the Wooster Group’s atrocious Hamlet: not Hamlet at all, as it turned out, but Elizabeth LeCompte’s narcissistic, dictatorial mangling of the film of Richard Burton’s classic stage performance, with Rocky Horror–style live actors onstage in front of the partially erased movie. Tearing out of the auditorium in a rage, I was almost ready to swear off all “experimental” Shakespeare productions, until I remembered that the best Shakespeare I had seen all fall (the best theater I have seen all fall) was a one-night-only, free-admission, three-person version of The Tempest, staged in a deconsecrated synagogue called the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. The piece, directed by Jim Calder in collaboration with the actors, was called Tempest Tossed, and it left out large portions of Shakespeare’s dialogue, coming in at a slender ninety minutes or less. Ariel was played by a strip of orange silk fluttering on a stick, to the accompaniment of an actor’s high, witchy voice. All three actors took on multiple roles (to the point where one of them had to clasp hands with herself in the final reconciliation scene), and this turned out to be highly instructive, for it it revealed the extent to which The Tempest itself is composed of discrete three-character scenes, cobbled together almost vaudeville-style into a larger romance plot. The double and triple casting (Caliban also being the surly Boatswain, for instance, as well as one of the King’s less-than-brilliant courtiers) also illuminated the extent to which Shakespeare’s own characters mirrored and doubled each other. In other words, Calder’s and his actors’ vigorous redoing of the play was somehow extremely true to The Tempest, not only at the structural level but also at the emotional one, so that when Prospero delivered his final lines to the audience, asking to be set free by our hands, I found I had tears running down my cheeks.

— November 2, 2007

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Music Audiences

Posted on June 17, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

After many visits to Avery Fisher Hall, I’ve decided that the real problem with the New York Philharmonic lies neither with the orchestra nor with the performance space, but with the audience. (There may be a secondary problem involving the conductor, but I won’t go into that here: suffice to say that you would do well to look out for occasions when a guest-conductor is visiting.) Under the excellent Riccardo Muti, who led the Philharmonic in a concert of Cherubini, Beethoven, and Hindemith on June 12th, the orchestra was at its brightest and clearest: precise without being rigid, delicate yet full-toned, and able to cover a range of musical styles competently and gratifyingly. The Cherubini was a mere aperitif, but it did its appetite-whetting job perfectly well. The Beethoven—the Emperor Piano Concerto, with Lang Lang as the soloist—was obviously intended as a crowd-pleaser, and please it did, to excess, with Lang Lang strutting his stuff up and down the keyboard. As a performer, he seems under the delusion that his strength lies in the fast, loud, showy passages, whereas his real ability comes through in the softer, slower, quieter moments, which he is able to fill with tension and feeling. No matter; the audience loved him equally well in the piano-pounding bits—in fact, I think they loved him better in those bits—and he earned at least four rounds of thunderous applause, complete with the standard (for Avery Fisher) standing ovation. Usually I interpret this move as advance preparation for the mass stampede to the subway, but in this case, since it was only the intermission, I guess they really meant it.

I wouldn’t have found this annoying if the audience hadn’t then responded to the program’s second half—a rare performance of Hindemith’s one-act opera, Sancta Susanna—with such churlish resistance. Granted, the Hindemith is a weird piece, with a heroine who, like a Freudian hysteric, tears off her clothing to offer herself to an apparition who may be either Christ or Satan, depending on whose observations you believe. At least, so I gathered from my intermittent glances at the supertitles; I was too gripped by the sight of Riccardo Muti going wild with the orchestra to follow the plot very closely. Hindemith’s score is both passionate and unsettling, with novel sound effects (a single piercing tone, for instance, that the characters hear and comment on) and frighteningly loud interludes that purposely overpower the singers. The New York Philharmonic entirely lived up to Muti’s ambitious aim in programming this unusual piece, and a Berlin or Brooklyn audience would have roared with excitement at the end.

The Avery Fisher audience acted, instead, as if it had been sold a spoiled piece of meat. As the opera stormed to its sudden close, there was a brief, surprised silence and then the kind of feeble applause that this crowd sometimes produces between movements. This time, though, it was not a mistake, but a willful rejection. About two-thirds of the house leapt to its feet without clapping at all, and the rush toward the exit was lemming-like. We outnumbered appreciators stood clapping our hearts out, but we couldn’t make a dent against the sound of mass disapproval. “You call this music?” is what their hastening footsteps conveyed.

The reason I blame this specifically on the Avery Fisher audience is that, at approximately the same time, I witnessed a vastly different response to equally difficult music in two other New York venues. At Carnegie Hallon June 14th, the Emerson Quartet played (among other things) Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet, which the composer had instructed his original musicians to play so slowly “that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” In fact, two or three people did leave their seats during the long first Adagio, but rather than irking me, as such behavior usually would, this seemed merely to confirm Shostakovich’s intentions. The rest of us remained rapt and silent (no program-rustling, no coughing, no chattering to seatmates) for the full thirty-six minutes of the all-Adagio piece. The Emersons are fond of saying about the Shostakovich quartets that they fully come to life only in front of an audience, and this seems to me to be true. Much as I love the Emersons’ own recording of this piece, it’s just not as great the two live performances I’ve heard them give—this year at Carnegie Hall, and last year at Alice Tully. In both cases, the hush that greeted the achingly sad ending—the way the final notes trailed off into a silence that the musicians and the audience held together—added something to the music that went beyond anything a CD could ever provide. And at Carnegie, in particular, the brilliant placing of the Shostakovich between Bach’s final fugue and Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue made all three pieces sound new again, as the audience (to judge by its hearty ovation) evidently appreciated.

The other good audience I encountered in recent weeks was the small crowd assembled to hear the last Movado Hour concert of the season. I’ve already raved about this series of free one-hour concerts, staged (with the accompaniment of drinks, snacks, and nightclub tables) in the fourth-floor studio of the Baryshnikov Art Center; but nothing I say can really do the experience justice. The June 5th concert, featuring the pianist Pedja Muzijevic, the soprano Lucy Shelton, and the Brentano String Quartet, started with George Crumb’s Apparition and moved on to Brahms’s Piano Quintet. The performers were as good in the haunting, fragmented, new-music mode as they were in the gorgeous classic, and the youngish, unstodgy audience—in stark contrast to their Avery Fisher counterparts —loved both pieces equally and showed it with smiling, vigorous, entirely un-self-congratulatory applause. The Movado Hour is, admittedly, one of a kind. Writers, dancers, and musicians, lawyers and businesspeople, the retired and the over-employed, all mingle in this setting to get one hour of pure pleasure that costs them nothing. Perhaps the free admission has something to do with the casual, knowledgeable enthusiasm with which this audience greets excellent music—not gracelessly, not unthinkingly, but as if they deserve to hear the best. And so they do.

— June 17, 2007

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A Month of Performances

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

It occurred to me that it would be useful to chronicle the live performances I saw in New York during just the past four weeks. March 2007 was not an unusual month, in that the number of events I attended was pretty typical of my stints in this city, and the quality of what I saw was neither vastly greater nor significantly lower than average. But I did discover several new things, and I managed to experience a few transcendent high points along with the predictable lows.

Going to see live performances is one of the most expensive indulgences there is — it is basically like betting, in that you have to lose often in order to win big occasionally — so my commentary will inevitably touch on the subject of money as well as on art. Some of these tickets I paid for myself, and some were given to me as press seats, but that too is part of my standard New York life, since no one who is not independently wealthy could afford to go to this many performances on a regular basis without the benefit of press seats. And that is a shame, because the performances are, after all, meant for the general public and not for us critics.

Sunday, March 4: Holy Trinity Church was advertising what appeared to be a free “vespers concert” of Bach and Buxtehude trios and passacaglias, so I headed up to 65th Street and Central Park West. Imagine my dismay when I realized that what I had wandered into was a full-scale Lutheran service, complete with a platitudinous sermon about how we can all transcend our greatest fears. When the collection tray came around, I resentfully plunked down two bucks. But my irritation was assuaged by the stupendous final Bach Passacaglia and Fugue, a piece of music which will certainly outlast the God it was written for.

Wednesday, March 7: The Paul Taylor Dance Company was doing its regular spring season at City Center, and cheap tickets were available on theTDF website, so I bought a good seat in the orchestra for about $25. I had seen recent Taylor but had never seen Esplanade, his famous 1976 work set to several Bach compositions, so I selected one of the few programs that featured it. The first two pieces on the program, Dante Variations andSunset, were nice but not thrilling, so I was completely unprepared for the revelation of Esplanade. It is quite simply one of the best modern dances of the late twentieth century, and you can see that the current Paul Taylor dancers are aware of this: they are at their best in this dance, managing to move with both precision and abandon, always timing their rapid steps and vigorous gestures exactly to the stirring Bach rhythms. It was a complete joy to see, and it permanently altered my feelings about Paul Taylor.

Thursday, March 8: I had read that Michael Imperioli — that’s Christopher, to you Sopranos fans — was starring in a new play calledChicken in a small Chelsea theater named Studio Dante, and general-admission tickets were available for only $35 (as opposed, say, to the $100 you have to pay for Broadway trash). Studio Dante is actually the brain-child of Imperioli and his wife, the stage designer Victoria Imperioli, and since there are only sixty-five seats in this tiny gem of a theater, it is obvious that they are making less than no money off this labor of love. The first thing you notice, coming in from rather grungy West 29th Street, is how beautifully designed the small lobby is, and this quality carries over into the theater itself. The sixty-five French Empire chairs (I don’t know what I’m talking about here, but they are some kind of fancy chair with a period pedigree) and all the faux-marble details make you feel as if you have wandered into some kind of theatrical paradise, where luxury and affordability are astonishingly combined in one intimate space. I sat in the very front row, where I could practically touch the actors, all of whom were at least as good as Imperioli (and that’s saying a lot). The play itself was neither good nor bad, but that too is saying a lot, in the barren world of New York theater; I can’t remember the last time I saw a new play that I didn’t hate. (Yes, I can: it was one of Adam Bock’s, and I saw it last fall, in an equally tiny theater.) Chicken, by Mike Batistick, is your basic kitchen-sink drama about appealing, annoying losers, except that it went way beyond the kitchen sink in its commitment to dirty realism — there was actually a live rooster onstage most of the time. (The plot centered around cock-fighting.) Sharon Angela, Raul Aranas, E J Carroll, and the other actors — all, except Imperioli, previously unknown to me — were terrific in their roles; in other words, the play was good enough to allow them to become believable characters. But the main pleasure of the evening came from the vitality and generosity of the offered experience: six actors appearing before sixty-five audience members, performing their hearts out for peanuts and the love of the art form, while we sat in French Empire splendor and breathed it all in.

Friday, March 9: The Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center has provided some of my favorite chamber-music experiences in New York, so I am always delighted when another of these concerts rolls around. Like Studio Dante, this is high-class stuff in an intimate setting — in this case, far west on 37th Street and then up four floors to what is usually a dance studio. Tickets are free, but you have to reserve exactly a week in advance, so it can be hard to get a place. Once you do, though, you are home free: drinks, snacks, and excellent music, all served up in a cabaret-like setting that is simultaneously elegant and informal. In this case, violinist Jennifer Frautschi led a group of talented string players in a program that culminated in Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht. The piece itself was wonderful, but I could have done without Frautschi’s long-winded exposition beforehand. “Just play it!” I wanted to tell her, and finally they did.

Sunday, March 18: I had seen Edward Hall’s Propeller company the last time they visited Brooklyn, with their astute production of The Winter’s Talein 2006, so I needed no extra encouragement to revisit this all-male Shakespearean troupe. This time they were bringing The Taming of the Shrew to BAM, and I was particularly curious to see how they dealt with that nearly unperformable play. It makes sense that having Kate played by a man would fix some of the script’s inherent problems, but that explanation doesn’t fully account for this production’s astonishing success. I would guess it was due, in part, to the decision to retain the play’s original frame — in which a drunken lout, Christopher Sly, watches a play called The Taming of the Shrew that is put on entirely for his benefit — as well as to the merging of Sly and Petruchio, both played with rude, despicable vigor by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart. And this kind of theatrical cleverness (cleverness in the deepest sense, so profound it becomes wisdom) ran through the whole production, so that you could sense at every moment that someone had sat down and said to himself, “What is going on here, and how are we supposed to feel about it?” That someone is, I suppose, Edward Hall — though even his directorial brilliance would be useless if he did not have such remarkable actors at his disposal. The members of this amazing ensemble manage to be at once male and female, Elizabethan and modern, speaker and singer, stage-hand and acrobat. Their very bodies are at the disposal of the text, so that when Simon Scardifield becomes Kate, even the delicate movements of his bare foot display his rebellious, feminine nature. I doubt that this play could ever be done better, by anyone.

Wednesday, March 21: I had already seen Bartlett Sher’s production ofThe Barber of Seville when it premiered at the Met last fall, and had enjoyed it immensely, but I wanted to go back once again, mainly to savor the performance of Peter Mattei as Figaro. So this time I bought a standing-room place at the back of the orchestra for $20, plus a $5.50 telephone fee. (If I had showed up at least three hours before the 7:30 curtain, I might have had a chance of getting one of the 200 orchestra-section rush seats available for the same $20 price, but this way I was sure of my place in advance, and with no additional expenditure of time. Since I was in the front row of standers and had a nice plush-covered bar to lean on, it was actually a reasonable bargain, and I heartily recommend it to all those who do not want to fork out either $175 or three hours of their valuable time.) Joyce DiDonato, who was playing Rosina, was even better than Diana Damrau, the soprano I saw last fall, and John Relyea was an acceptable substitute for Samuel Ramey in the bass role of Don Basilio. Mattei was as graceful and full-voiced and charming as ever, though I felt he was mugging a bit, as if the recent high praise for his performance had caused him to go over the top — but then, this Figaro is the sort with an eye toward his audience, as the built-out extension of the stage and Figaro’s frequent use of it make clear. The only catch is that this added platform seriously muffles the orchestra, which is encased within and below it: not a good thing, if you are there primarily to hear Rossini’s glorious music. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about Sher’s production. It is better and smarter than many otherBarbers I have seen (this delicate confection is easy to wreck with a heavy hand), but it has an over-ripeness at its core that may not wear well over time.

Thursday, March 22: In the three or four visits I have paid to Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, I have seen only one performance (by David Gordon and his company) that I really liked, so I was not expecting much. But the title of Cristina Moura’s solo piece, Like an idiot, seemed promising. The promise was not, however, fulfilled. This was one of those talky dance-theater pieces that never really got off the ground; there was nothing in it I would have called dance, and very little that was even interesting as movement. Luckily it cost only $15 and was over in forty-five minutes. Afterward, the Manhattanville College girls sitting on cushions in the front row (they had come in a clump, with their teacher) turned to each other in bewilderment. “I didn’t get it, did you?” said one, in a rather grumpy tone with which I completely sympathized. “I got parts of it,” said another, and then offered, “It was full of symbolic meanings.”

Saturday, March 24: Everything drew me to this concert of the New York Philharmonic: the guest conductor, Colin Davis; the program, which included Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert; and most of all the guest pianist, Mitsuko Uchida. I had most recently heard Uchida in November at Zankel Hall, where she and the Brentano Quartet gave a stellar rendition of Schumann’s marvelous Piano Quintet, and I would say that twice every six months is just the right interval for encountering Mitsuko Uchida’s playing: not so often that you take it for granted, but not so infrequently that you forget one iota of how great she is. This time she was the definite stand-out in the program, and indeed its only high point. The Haydn and Schubert symphonies (the 85th and the 4th) were played sensibly, respectfully, and a bit dully, with not much variation in tempo or volume. Only when Uchida came out for the Mozart piano concerto (No. 19 in F) did the concert truly come alive — but that interlude was so thrilling that it made the whole evening worthwhile. In this context, Davis’s calm reticence made sense, as if Uchida had purposely chosen a blank white wall against which to display her beautifully colored technique.

Sunday, March 25: Under the joint guidance of David Finckel and Wu Han (a married couple who are also, respectively, a cellist and a pianist), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has been getting more and more adventurous in its programming. This late-afternoon concert at Alice Tully Hall consisted of a wide range of pieces — from Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat Major to Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik of 1922, with works by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Elliott Carter in between — that all featured wind instruments. In choosing this oddball “March Winds” concert, I was reassured by the presence in the cast list of CMSLC stars like Anne-Marie McDermott (on the piano) and Fred Sherry (on the cello), but in fact the best piece was the Hindemith Opus 24, No. 2, which used neither of them. Listening to the witty, exciting voices of the flute (or sometimes piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn as they wove together the parts Hindemith had written for them, I felt the piece cried out for a Mark Morris dance to be choreographed to it — and then I remembered that Hindemith had in fact provided the music for one of my favorite Balanchine works, The Four Temperaments. Why can I never remember that I like this composer so much until I am forced, by CMSLC’s intelligent programming or its equivalent, to hear him again? The only flaw in the concert was its conclusion, a Grand Nonetto by a now-unknown (with good reason) nineteenth-century composer named Louis Spohr. The melodies were so irritatingly repetitive that I couldn’t get them out of my head for hours; it was like picking up a bad cold from a friend and not being able to shake it for weeks.

Tuesday, March 27: Edward Scissorhands, advertised as part of BAM’s spring dance program, was exactly what I expected it to be — a mildly amusing evening of cleverly devised narrative and brilliant moments of spectacle, but with virtually no good dance. I had seen Matthew Bourne’sSwan Lake and enjoyed it without deeply admiring it; even at that early stage, it was clear that Bourne had an extremely limited dance vocabulary which he was expertly deploying to produce various effects (detailed story-telling, political point-making, guffaw-inducement) that are normally outside the realm of dance. But Edward Scissorhands is even more limited — in part because the music is much worse (Danny Elfman as opposed to Tchaikovsky) and in part because the dancing is essentially restricted to two very basic styles, teen-dance-party vernacular and ballroom/romantic pseudo-ballet. The dancers are better at the vernacular mode, which means that the heroine, Kim Boggs, looks much livelier when she is bopping with her juvy creep of a boyfriend than she does during her romantic interludes with Edward: definitely not the effect you want, if the dancing is supposed to express the work’s central emotions. (The problem is exacerbated, of course, by the fact that Edward — in this case, Richard Winsor — is severely hampered in his dancing by those floppy, oversized scissorhands. But then, Bourne should have foreseen exactly that obstacle when he thought about adapting this particular plot.) Throughout the performance I was aware of seriously missing Johnny Depp, and I also kept wondering why Matthew Bourne has chosen to call himself a choreographer at all. Spectacle-maker, charade-producer, mime-artist, yes; but does he really think he is inventing the same sorts of new relations between music and movement that are the stock-in-trade of real choreographers?

Wednesday, March 28: Rossini is always a gamble at New York City Opera. Several years ago I saw a lovely, imaginative Viaggio a Reims there, followed a few weeks later by a completely boring Barber of Seville. This new production of La Donna del Lago is, unfortunately, one of the duds. A lot of the blame can be laid with the composer himself: Donna belongs firmly among his dull, “serious” operas, with a plot inadvisably borrowed from Walter Scott, a ridiculous group of cardboard Scottish characters, largely uninspiring music (except in a few good arias), and a heavy, inauthentic somberness substituting for Rossini’s native wit. But Chas Rader-Shieber’s production, which was static to the point of enervation, did not help. Nor did the variation in the quality of the singing: Robert McPherson and Laura Vlasak Nolen were excellent in their smaller roles of Rodgrigo and Malcolm, but the titular “Lady of the Lake,” Alexandra Pendatcharska, could hardly be heard over the orchestra. Such discouragements do not discourage me, however; all opera houses have their ups and downs, I’ve found, even the fabled Berlin Staatsoper, where I have thrilled to a brilliant Italiana in Algeri one week and walked out on a stupidFidelio the next. So I will be back at NYOC in a couple of weeks to see their production of Flavio, which — given their fine track record with Handel — offers reasonable grounds for hope.

I started by saying that this past month was a typical one, but there is one way in which it was not: I did not walk out of anything. I am a great walker-outer, which sometimes deprives me of good things (I would have missed the Bach Passacaglia if there had been an intermission before the sermon), and sometimes saves me from death-by-boredom, or worse. So the fact that there were no walk-outs this March does suggest that I was dealing with an unusually good selection of performing-arts events. Still, in most ways this was a lot like many other four-week periods in New York. The best things took place in small locations, or were European imports at BAM, or were revived from the distant or not-so-distant past. Talking on the part of people who should have been silent (musicians, dancers, pastors) was the bane of my existence. Dancers and dance companies, with a few notable exceptions, generally failed in their mission — that is, their use of movement was less interesting or engaging than what was to be found in ostensibly non-dance forms like the Propeller’s Shakespeare. And then there were the echoes and repetitions linking performances that were otherwise unconnected, including multiple appearances by Bach, by Rossini, by Mozart, and even by Dante (though in his case in name alone). That too is standard: in a capital city like New York, nothing ever stands alone, and much of the interest lies in the way the individual productions fit, strangely but satisfyingly, into the larger tapestry.

—March 29, 2007

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Teaching the Arts

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Wendy Lesser

This past fall I taught a course called “New York and the Arts” at Hunter. My students were freshmen in the CUNY Honors College, which meant that, on the basis of their academic promise, they had all been granted a free ride for four years—not only subsidized tuition, but also no-cost housing, a reimbursement for books, a free laptop, and even a monthly Metrocard. Of the twenty kids in my class, five spoke Russian, three others were from the Indian subcontinent, three were African-American, two were Italian-American, one was Asian-American, one was a Conservative Jew, and one, I think, was Persian. In other words, though they were mostly drawn from the greater New York City area, it was quite a varied bunch.

“New York and the Arts” is a required course for Honors College freshmen, but I wanted it to seem like a purely pleasurable elective. I had been given a free hand in designing the syllabus, so I decided to structure it around the idea of “good and bad art.” Not only would this help the students develop their own aesthetic convictions, I conjectured; it would also cover those inevitable occasions when my semi-blind selections from the universe of available art offerings turned out to be duds.

The only problem with this idea, in practice, was that we barely saw any bad art. Needless to say, I saw plenty of it on my own, over the course of the fall season—the appalling Sarah Michelson dance piece called Dogs, for instance, and the unspeakably awful Broadway musical Spring Awakening, to give but two examples from an array of performance disasters. But my students seemed to function as an amulet against terrible art: everything I took them to was golden.

We saw American Ballet Theatre perform The Green Table with David Hallberg in the starring role of Death; we saw Bartlett Sher’s production ofThe Barber of Seville, with the marvelous Peter Mattei playing Figaro; and we saw Gidon Kremer, along with two extremely talented young associates, perform chamber music in the magical setting of the Baryshnikov Art Center’s fourth-floor studio. In modern dance, we attended the opening night of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s and Akram Khan’s BAM performances for Steve Reich @ 70—not my favorite pieces of the year, but clearly an exciting event. In search of visual art, we went to the Frick Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and a selection of Chelsea photography galleries chosen by the students themselves. To sample the world of New York publishing, I took them on a fieldtrip to my own publisher, Pantheon Books, high atop the glassy Random House skyscraper, and then downtown to the homey, historic offices of New Directions. For an inside view of a life in the arts, I invited a retired Mark Morris dancer, Guillermo Resto, to come speak to the class about his work and experiences. And when, at the end of the semester, I gave them a choice about how to spend the last of the money in our ticket budget, they chose an evening at Bargemusic, the floating concert hall in Brooklyn.

The results, it seemed to me, were phenomenal. I started with a classroom of kids who had barely been to anything before (none of them had evenheard of the Frick, only one had seen an opera, and very few had ever attended any kind of dance or classical music performances), and I ended up with a group of people who were enthusiastic, vocal critics of the arts. Most of the time, when I teach, I have the feeling that I am merely supervising the natural evolutionary process: the good students do the good work they would have done anyway, the others do otherwise, and my function is nil to invisible. But this time I actually sensed that I was introducing students to a world they didn’t know about—and, more to the point, that they were taking it in wholesale. The class discussions were exciting almost to the point of chaos: far from having to elicit opinions from these kids, I had to keep them from overpowering each other. And the freshness of their perceptions was something that never ceased to amaze me.

“Why do the musicians walk off and then on again during the clapping?” they asked me after the first chamber-music concert we attended, and I was forced to reflect on the conventions of applause. “Why are the words in Italian when the setting is Spanish?” they sensibly wondered about The Barber of Seville, initiating a conversation that led from Beaumarchais and Da Ponte to the differing traditions of French, German, and Italian opera. “How can this place be non-profit when it’s obviously so rich?” they said about the Frick mansion, leading us into a whole discussion about the relationship between money and art. Everywhere we went, they caused me to see things with new eyes, because for them everything was part of the performance—the misplaced kick that caused an ABT dancer to ruffle her colleague’s skirt, the chandeliers that retreated up toward the ceiling at the Metropolitan Opera House, the fluid, jazzy physical gestures of the vibraphonist who accompanied Gidon Kremer. If I was introducing them to the arts, then they were doing the same for me.

Each of their final papers was on a different subject, because the students all used this opportunity to zero in on what had mattered most to them. One wrote about the way the modern architecture of places like Lincoln Center and the Baryshnikov Art Center played with and against the classical music performances that were set within them. Another reflected on the difference between watching a performance of The Barber of Seville and listening to a recording of it over and over. A third focused on the moment of silence that preceded important transitions in specific dance and musical works, and a fourth noticed how a sense of anxiety—the sense that “something could go wrong”—added to the heightened experience of watching a live performance in a small space. One adventurous student even explored the parallels between the minimalism of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Reich-inspired dance and the minimalism of Sean Scully’s Wall of Light paintings at the Met. These, perhaps, were the standouts. But even the students who didn’t write brilliant papers absorbed and gave back an enormous amount in the course of the semester. There was no one, I felt, who remained completely unchanged by the work we had done together (if you can call such pleasures “work”).

The minute the class was over, I rushed to the Hunter Honors College office and asked to teach the class again next fall. I have no illusions that subsequent semesters will exactly duplicate the delights of this one. For one thing, I will have done it before, whereas this time, as one of my students pointed out, “we were all freshmen together.” But even if the form of the course is familiar, the contents will be new each time. We might even see some bad art next year, and be able to work that into our conversation. And whatever we end up seeing, I now know that I can trust my students to make the experience as fresh for me as it is for them —a side-benefit so huge that it makes me want to urge every critic to teach “New York and the Arts,” or its local equivalent.

—January 12, 2007

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