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