Another Berlin Diary

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

I spent a wonderful nine days in Berlin earlier this month, but I didn’t have my computer with me, so I am only now catching up on the Lesser Blog account.  (Apologies for the delay, but I have yet to figure out how to write criticism on an iPad.)  As usual, I’ll report my musical experiences by date, in order of their occurrence.

Saturday, October 5: On my first night there, I went with my Berlin friends Martin and Barbara, who accompanied me on all these adventures, to a performance at the Berlin Philharmonic, which is the closest thing to a sure thing I have yet discovered in this world. This time Adam Fischer (the older brother of conductor Ivan Fischer—what a household that must have been!) conducted the Berliner Philharmoniker in four pieces of music: Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 at the start, Haydn’s No. 104 at the end, and songs by these two (Haydn’s “Berenice, che fai” and Mozart’s KV 505) as palate cleansers in between.  The soprano in the two interval-hugging songs, Julia Lezhneva, was excellent, but the songs themselves felt oddly detached in this context. The Mozart symphony (more popularly known as the “Linzer”) was, dare I say it, a bit boring; I understood upon hearing it why it’s not played nearly as often as the Hafner or the Jupiter. But the Haydn was terrific, in a rather restrained and dignified way, and that made the whole evening worthwhile.

Sunday, October 6: If the large hall of the Philharmonie is a sure bet, the small hall is something even better, when it’s good at all. You are practically within touching distance of the players, and what you are hearing truly feels like intimate chamber music. For this Sunday night concert at the Kammermusiksaal, we were treated to the noted pianist András Schiff conducting, and in two instances playing with, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, an incredibly talented group of musicians from a variety of nations. The program couldn’t have been more pleasing. The first half was all Haydn—a brief overture to his Desert Island opera, the piano concerto in D major, and Symphony No. 88—and the second half was Mendelssohn: first the Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, and then the “Italian” symphony, his Fourth. I hope it conveys the quality of the evening if I say that the Haydn half was even better than the Philharmonic’s rendering of No. 104 the night before, and the Mendelssohn half was still better than that—the kind of musical experience that leaves you so immersed, so dreamy, that you forget where you are. (Afterwards, for instance,I spoke to the coat-check man in English, and only realized when Martin addressed him in German that I was in Berlin, and not in my own little world, where the music had left me.)

Tuesday, October 8: While Martin was in Hamburg for a few days, Barbara and I went to a short afternoon concert, called an “Espresso-Konzert,” at the venerable Konzerthaus in the Gendarmenmarkt. Part of what is great about going to hear music in this building is being in that physical space—not just the Schinkel-designed concert hall itself, but the wonderful public space of the Gendarmenmarkt, which is anchored by a cathedral at one end and the Konzerthaus toward the other. I know of very few other spaces (the central piazza in Bologna might be one) that offer such a sense of well-being even to the most casual stroller. Anyway, after Barbara’s and my brief but idyllic stroll, we were treated to a not quite lovely but still interesting one-hour concert by a French group called the Franz Trio. The three players—a female violinist, a male violist, and a female cellist—performed two pieces by French composers Barbara and I had never heard of (and Barbara, who among other things translates Simenon from French to German, knows a lot about France). One was Jean Cras, who lived from 1879 to 1932 and apparently made his living as an admiral in the French navy—an occupation you could actually detect in his String Trio. The other was Jean Français, a twentieth-century composer who is apparently somewhat better known in France. I will not mind if I never hear either piece again, but I enjoyed the experience, and it was especially fun to hear Barbara comment on the East-Berlin-ish aspect of the Konzerthaus space and audience. (These distinctions have not died out among long-time Berliners, even though the Wall has now been down for thirty years.) She has a particularly acute sense of smell—on another night, she could smell the mushrooms growing in the dark by the side of the path we were walking on—so for her, East Berlin’s most evocative quality was its aroma, which she can still sense when she enters the old former-East locations.

Thursday, October 10: With Martin back in town, the three of us ventured out to the Staatsoper to hear a revived production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova. All of Janacek’s operas are great, partly because he took such care in matching the Czech language exactly to the music he wrote—something he was only able to do after weeks and months of eavesdropping and note-taking in public places, where he wrote down the rhythms and melodies of spoken Czech. We had excellent seats to this Staatsoper performance—my favorite seats in any opera house in the world, right in the center of the First Ring—and the orchestral playing and the singing were both excellent, so you’d think I would have been happy.  But the direction, by one Andrea Breth, was so atrocious, so resolutely and willfully wrongheaded, that I couldn’t even enjoy what was good about the show. From start to finish, everyone’s emotions were played at a heightened, exaggerated pitch, so that Katya’s own hysteria (and she is indeed a religious maniac, of an intense and self-destructive kind) barely showed up against the general background. And what were all those extraneous sex acts doing there?  Poor Karita Mattila, who played Katya’s horrible mother-in-law, had to mime sex while singing to her visiting gentleman-friend, and Katya similarly had to have her illicit assignation onstage, which is not at all what the lyrics indicate. The whole thing worked against Janacek’s patent attempt at some sort of realism, some melding of regular life and opera life in his carefully devised “speech tunes.” I was glad, for once, that the composer was long dead, so he didn’t have to suffer through this travesty.

Sunday, October 13: Luckily, the Staatsoper’s act of directorial malfeasance was countered and practically wiped out by the new production of Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids, which we attended at the Komische Oper on the final night of my stay. I had been drawn to this event by two of its participants: the director Barrie Kosky, whose West Side Story thrilled me in the spring, and the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who may well be my current favorite conductor in the world. (Both have received ample praise in these posts already.) Added to these was the genius of choreographer Otto Pichler, whose contributions had also been essential to that great West Side Story, and who in this case directed not just the movement of the highly skilled dancers, but also that of all the chorus members and the principal singers. When added to the wonders of staging and costuming wrought by Katrin Lea Tag—whose sole set for the entire opera consisted of an elegant, intimidatingly Speer-style flight of steps—these incredible talents produced what Martin characterized as “the best musical theater I have ever seen”; and even I, jaundiced as I am, figured it was the finest thing I was likely to see all decade. It’s hard to explain in this brief space what was so great about the production, so I will try to do it at length in the printed pages of Threepenny later on. But for now let me simply comment on the way Dionysus (sung by a fabulously agile and eloquent Sean Panikkar) and Pentheus (played by the excellent Günter Papendell) were made to mirror and even partner each other in this Auden/Kallman version of Euripides’ The Bacchae; the way the danced and acted Intermezzo (usually dropped from this rarely performed piece) weirdly and thrillingly intensified the frightening themes of the whole opera; the way Jurowski himself, raised up on a podium but very pointedly restrained in all his motions, was a kind of duplicate Dionysus leading the orchestra through its various frenzies; and the way the very things that make opera itself so powerful—its Dionysian qualities of overwhelming emotion and anti-quotidian atmosphere—were here deployed with pointed self-consciousness but also with enormous effect. I have rarely been so moved as in the scene when Pentheus’s mother (sung and acted by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) sorted through the bloody intestinal remnants she was carrying with her and realized that she herself had torn her son apart in this way. The rest of the audience seemed equally stunned; and at the end of the intermissionless two-and-a-half hours, when the final notes of the score were sounded and the conductor lowered his arms, there was one of those divine moments that only occur rarely in the theater—a complete silence lasting a good five or ten seconds, before the onset of the thunderous, shouting applause.

 

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Britten’s Billy Budd

Posted on September 8, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

I am not used to thinking of the twentieth century as a period that produced great operas, but two of my favorites—Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd—were first performed in 1925 and 1951, respectively. I have never seen a bad production of either, and whether this is attributable to my good luck, the excellent taste of those who choose to put them on, or simply the unbeatable merits of the works themselves is something I cannot answer.

The San Francisco Opera‘s current Billy Budd—a production imported from Glyndebourne, and originally directed by the English theater and opera director Michael Grandage—is no exception. I saw it last night, at its opening night at the War Memorial Opera House, and found myself as moved as I ever am by the tremendous music and the powerful story. Melville deserves a certain amount of credit here, of course, for his canny ability to translate the Christ story into semi-modern terms, creating a sympathetic Pilate in the process. But it is Britten’s genius that overwhelms one repeatedly in the course of listening to this great score. At every moment of the intense plot, the music echoes not only the internal feelings of the characters and their intimate interactions, but also the vast surrounding environment of the sea. Conductor Lawrence Renes and the orchestra of the San Francisco Opera took full advantage of every nuance; if there had been no show to watch, the musical performance alone would have been worth attending.

There was a show, however, and it was excellently acted and beautifully sung, for the most part. Particular standouts included Christian Van Horn in the role of Claggart (he almost succeeded in temporarily effacing from my memory Robert Ryan’s terrific performance in the Ustinov movie) and William Burden’s in the star turn as Captain Vere. Written for Britten’s lover and companion, the tenor Peter Pears, Captain Vere is certainly one of the most interesting and complicated figures ever introduced into an opera. He is both the hero and the villain of the piece, in that he is responsible for Billy’s death but also guilt-ridden about his responsibility, simultaneously aware that he has to enforce the War Powers Act against a sailor who murders a superior and cognizant of the fact that Billy is at root innocent. Claggart is, if anything, even more fascinating, a combination of Iago and Hamlet, as it were—someone who reflects aloud, intelligently and perceptively, on the depths of his own evil. Together, these two major characters loom over the production, forcing Billy himself into a comparatively smaller role.

Which, in this case, proved to be a good thing. John Chest, the baritone selected to play the Handsome Sailor, had the necessary good looks, but that’s about all he had. He was fit but not very big (Billy is always described as towering over Claggart, but this one certainly didn’t), so his body alone can’t have won him the part. His voice was not strong enough to project completely—a deficit that showed up especially in the group folk-sing, where a number of sailors take turns at performing a slightly off-color song—and his deep tones often lacked any kind of musicality or delicate inflection. Worst of all, he delivered his vocal lines in a plummy upper-class manner that seemed at odds with the character of Billy, a poor “foundling” who speaks simply and sometimes ungrammatically. Chest’s inadequacies by no means ruined the show, but he certainly did not add much to it.

Everything else was terrific, though, up to and including the stage design. Reminiscent of a giant ribcage opened out to our view, with its lower, upper, and sidelong curves, the single set conveyed both a realistic ship’s interior and a vulnerably eviscerated body. Christopher Oram deserves the credit for that, along with lighting designers Paule Constable and David Manion. High marks, too, should go to Ian Rutherford, who revived Grandage’s 2010 production and also directed the excellent chorus. It was, if not a perfect evening at the opera, a deeply satisfying and intensely moving one, and I think that’s quite good enough.

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Cop Shows

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

When I’m in New York or Berlin, I’m out just about every night, soaking up the music, dance, theater, and miscellaneous events that are available in those cities. I hardly ever watch TV during those seasons. But the whole time I’m there, I’m also keeping a list of the television programs people recommend to me—mainly cop shows from various countries around the world—that I can watch to my heart’s content when I return to Berkeley.

So far this summer I’ve managed to see all five seasons of Line of Duty, an excellent British show that is wildly popular on its own turf. Each season features a new crime—generally several intertwined crimes—to be resolved by the stalwart investigators in AC-12 (that is, anti-corruption unit twelve, which is assigned to root out crimes committed by other cops). But in addition to each season’s gripping plots, there is an over-arching plot involving an unnamed but very high-up corrupt police administrator whose name may or may not begin with H. As a procedural, this one feels real enough to be persuasive; and as a demonstration of good, low-key British acting, it can’t be beat. One of the most interesting aspects of the show is the fact that it takes place in an unnamed city (it was filmed mainly but not entirely in Belfast), and all the characters have different regional accents—as if to suggest that Scotland, the Midlands, Northern Ireland, and southeast London have all come together in a single place. You have to stay on your toes to keep up with the action, but it all pays off in the end.

The other series I’ve watched in full, so far, is the first and perhaps the only season of something called Delhi Crime. This remarkable concoction is so realistic-feeling that it seems almost like a documentary, though its attitude toward character—not to mention its plenitude of characters—reminds me of some of the best works of Indian fiction, like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. It is also, in its own way, a Delhi version of The Wire—and like The Wire, it appears to have sprung from the imagination of a single person. The David Simon figure is in this case named Richie Mehta, and you can find his name all over the credits, from the “created by” and “written and directed by” at the front to the tiny end-notes about assistant directors and subtitle writers.

So many things are gripping about this series that I hesitate to limit its appeal by naming them. The cops are all characters: some good, some bad, some middling, and all struggling against circumstances that would make anyone else give up on the job. The one-and-only crime at the heart of the show is based on a real one—the horrific gang-rape of a young woman on a bus—and we watch as, day after day, the cops make Herculean efforts to catch the six offenders. The female DSO who heads up the investigation is staunchness personified (she basically doesn’t go home between the rape and the final arrest, five days later), but some of her helpers are no less admirable in their stolid pursuit of reasonable justice. And to watch the “procedures” in this police procedural is fascinating for a Westerner raised on Anglo-American cop shows. When the Delhi cops arrest someone, for instance, they don’t put him in handcuffs; instead, one of the police officers holds the perp firmly by the hand. To evade protestors at the front door of the police station, they might all —including superior officers and criminals alike—have to clamber over fences and through discarded trash to go in the back way. And when the police address civilians, their tone can range from deeply respectful tenderness (toward the victim’s parents, in particular, who are addressed as “Auntie” and “Uncle” by the cops watching over the injured girl) to a strange form of antagonistic intimacy, as when they tell a fleeing perp that if he doesn’t come back, they will reveal his crimes to his family. There is something both wonderful and self-consciously appalling about the India this program portrays, and to me it feels very true to the stupendous, hair-raising, entrancing country that gave rise to it.

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Ballet in New York

Posted on May 24, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

In a kind of battle of the bands spanning Lincoln Center Plaza, the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre both had their spring seasons running at nearly the same time during the past few weeks. I attended four of these performances—two at NYCB, two at ABT—and while ballet still seems to be a functioning art form in this city, none of the four programs was classifiable as a complete success.

I think the most pertinent thing I can say about the first NYCB program is that I’ve already forgotten three out of the four ballets. Hallelujah Junction, choreographed by Peter Martins to music by John Adams, was predictably tedious; I figured the live piano music (played by Cameron Grant and Alan Moverman) would be the best part of it, and I was right. Gianna Reisen’s Judah, also to Adams, was marginally better, as was Matthew Neenan’s The Exchange (to music by Dvorak), but I will be just as happy if I never see either again.

My real reason for attending that May 1 show was to see Alexei Ratmansky’s Concerto DSCH again, and it indeed justified the whole expedition. This piece, to Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, is one of the first things Ratmansky ever choreographed for an American company (it premiered in 2008), and it remains one of his best. The mood of the piece—with its gestural references to Soviet athletics, its charming solo, duo and particularly group compositions, its brief allusions to Russian folk dance and other forms outside ballet, and most of all its unusual combination of irony, wit, and risk—is so finely balanced between pure pleasure and something more complicated that I would have to watch it a hundred times to pin it down. And the collaboration between living choreographer and dead composer is so intense, so visceral, that one feels, upon coming out of it, not only that Ratmansky understood Shostakovich completely, but that Shostakovich, in a fit of uncanny prescience, also understood Ratmansky completely.

That, for me, was the high point of the four programs, and indeed I was mainly interested, in the other three, in seeing what else Ratmansky could do. This meant that the second NYCB program, though far better otherwise than the first, had no high points, since it had no Ratmansky. It did include an interesting if minor Jerome Robbins work, A Suite of Dances, which I found gripping mainly for how this solo has changed since it first premiered in 1994. It was designed as a rather fraught and highly interior piece—Robbins’s own psyche, set to Bach’s cello suites and transferred onto the body of Mikhail Baryshnikov—and that was how it was rehearsed and originally danced; I know this because I have obsessively watched the rehearsal tapes over and over, along with the tape of that first White Oak performance. But in the hands (and legs, and body) of the current dancer, Daniel Ulbricht, that anxiously contained quality, which may be the dance’s strongest element, utterly disappeared; it came across instead as a mere frippery, something light and frothy and easily tossed off.

Elsewhere on that May 12 program were two Balanchine numbers (including the grotesquely kitschy Western Symphony, which NYCB would do better to keep in permanent cold storage), a Justin Peck premiere called Bright, and a Pam Tanowitz premiere, set to Bartok’s Fifth String Quartet, called Bartok Ballet. The Peck was charming but slight; the Tanowitz (which was my real reason for choosing that program) was just the opposite. Bartok Ballet made no effort whatsoever to charm the ballet crowd, which is a relatively new audience for this serious, up-and-coming modern dance choreographer. Instead, Tanowitz almost literally dissected the music, rendering its buzzing complexities and folk-music allusions in frequent insect-like gestures of the arms, occasional Balkan-dance movements, and a nearly unending series of quick, rhythmically complicated steps. The piece never reached the level of what I would call dance—that lift-off feeling you get when the moves you are watching seem to enter your own body and carry you away on the music—but it was fascinating to watch and to think about.

I chose both ABT programs for their Ratmansky performances, and in fact each consisted entirely of his work, so I was perhaps too hopeful going in. I got my punishment squarely on the nose with the first concert, an evening-length performance of Petipa’s Harlequinade, as restaged last year by Ratmansky. If I tell you that this May 14 concert was even worse than Ratmansky’s 2017 confection Whipped Cream—and in most of the same ways—it may perhaps give you some idea of what was wrong with it. Both dances hark back in too many ways to the awful things the Kirov Ballet used to bring over here in the late twentieth century: that is, pieces of trashy choreography encased in horribly complicated costumes and sets but intermittently marked by moments of exquisite dancing. Whipped Cream at least had some truly comic moments and a few brief sequences of great dance; I couldn’t find any of that in Harlequinade, which began as pure pantomime and descended in the second act into endless waves of boringly repetitive court-style dancing. It was a positive relief when the evening ended.

The second Ratmansky program, on May 23, was better mainly because it contained three different selections (two of which I had seen before). The concert began with Songs of Bukovina, which would be a pleasant enough piece if someone else had choreographed it, but does not really employ Ratmansky’s incisive talents to the full. But it then moved on to On the Dnieper, a 2009 piece, set to Prokofiev’s score of that name, which I failed to appreciate fully when I first saw it. Now I can see that it is one of Alexei Ratmansky’s really excellent works, filled with true feeling and beautifully original movement, with not a false emotional moment from beginning to end. It is storytelling without pantomime, evocative gesture elevated in every case to dance, and the ABT dancers (who included, among others, Thomas Forster, Devon Teuscher, Catherine Hurlin, and Alexandre Hammoudi) did it full justice.

Unfortunately it was followed by The Seasons, a new Ratmansky piece, set to Glazunov, which had had its premiere at the season gala only a day or two earlier. Once again we were back in the territory of Whipped Cream and Harlequinade, with one eye always on the gala or family audience—down to the inclusion of young dancers from the ABT school (a device he also used in Harlequinade, with equally horrific effect). Perhaps I am the only person who feels this way, but what is really going on when grown men lift thinly clad little girls up in the air while the children spread their knees apart? If this kind of thing appeared in Mark Morris, it would be a purposeful commentary on child molestation, but here it seems marked by a willful obliviousness, which only makes it more disturbing. Ballet is bad enough already in terms of its highly fixed and (to me) frequently annoying gender roles; do we really need to watch this rigid behavior instilled in the impressionable young?

But enough of my ranting—you want to know about the dance. Reader, it was tedious beyond belief. Rarely have forty minutes seemed so long. I would never have guessed that Alexei Ratmansky could have reminded me of Peter Martins, but here we were, back in the world of endlessly repeated gesture and routine balletic combinations with which I had begun in Hallelujah Junction.  Well, no, that’s unfair: Ratmansky could never descend to the level of Martins, even on his worst day, and there were bits and pieces of pleasure to be found even in The Seasons. But there was not a moment of true feeling in the whole thing—a flaw that became particularly apparent when it was scheduled right after the heartfelt and beautifully executed On the Dnieper. Ratmansky, I am pleading with you: Give up on that gala audience, with its bottomless desire for confections and whimsy and superficiality, and get back to the Shostakovich-like virtues—sharpness, hardness, originality, ironic wit, and a strong dash of melancholy—with which you wowed us in the past. Ballet needs you, but not in this present form.

 

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Two in a Row

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

This past weekend was rather incredible. On Friday night I attended a chamber music concert at Carnegie Hall‘s Zankel auditorium that featured my favorite violinist in the world, Christian Tetzlaff. And on Saturday night—again at Carnegie, but this time in the main hall—I heard my favorite pianist, Mitsuko Uchida, play Schubert. Each concert alone would have been great; in combination, they were almost stupefying.

Tetzlaff was playing with the Tetzlaff Trio, which consists of himself, his sister Tanya Tetzlaff on cello, and the excellent Lars Vogt on piano. To my mind, almost nothing could be nicer than a piano trio (I cannot think of a single piece in this form that I don’t like); and to hear musicians of this caliber play first the Schumann Piano Trio in D Minor and then the Dvorak Piano Trio in F minor was a real treat. I have heard the three of them before, in San Francisco, but not with this precise combination of pieces. Once again, though, I was struck with how delicately and effectively they varied the dynamics, from assertive loudness to passages so quiet you practically had to lean forward in your seat to hear them. (In San Francisco, when I commented on this unusual range to Tanya Tetzlaff, she answered, “Well, we’re just following the instructions in the score”—as if to suggest that no one else does.) And once again I was delighted by the fact that even when Christian Tetzlaff is sitting down, he can dance his way through a piece of music.  Simply in the way he tips his head or moves his shoulders, not to mention how he taps his toes, we are alerted to the rhythmic intricacies of whatever he is playing.  In this case, that came in particularly handy in the Dvorak movement that featured fast triplets on the two string instruments played against a different, slower beat on the piano: had I not had the violinist’s gestures before my eyes, it would have taken me far longer to pick up on the relationship between the two sets of rhythms. (And this is to say nothing of the way Tetzlaff can make his violin sing—almost as if it were a human voice, capable of moving from softly plaintive to thrillingly warm, all in the space of a few measures.) The whole evening was a pure delight, enhanced by the lovely bit from the “Dumky” Trio that the group played as a generous encore.

The pleasures of hearing Mitsuko Uchida play Schubert, and especially late Schubert, are less straightforward but perhaps even more intense. She too is great at dynamics, and also at tempo: the way she pauses, at times, until the last possible millisecond before delivering the next note can take your breath away. For her concert on Saturday, she gave us three Schubert sonatas: the A minor from 1817, the C Major (also called “Reliquie”) from 1825, and the B-flat Major from 1828. (The dates are important because Schubert’s career was so tragically short: he was only twenty when he wrote the first of these, and he died at age thirty-one, of syphilis, two months after completing the last.) The Reliquie was apparently left unfinished—it contains only two movements—but it still stands as one of Schubert’s most powerful, least accommodating works. Throughout its half-hour length, it rages relentlessly and repeats itself obsessively, leaving little doubt  (at least in my own mind) that at the time of its composition, Schubert was grappling with the news of his fatal illness. The final sonata, in contrast, seems to have come to terms with death: the four movements, lasting forty-one minutes in all, cover the entire range of emotion but focus often, and finally, on a kind of tender appreciation of human existence. It was not an easy-listening program (a fair number of demonstrably insane audience members left at the intermission), but it was a great one, and it left me with an even stronger affection for both the miraculously gifted pianist and the tragic, brilliant composer she represents so well.

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A Surprise at the Komische

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

The Komische Oper is the liveliest and least formal of Berlin’s three opera companies, and I have seen many great productions there over the years—most recently, in December, Andreas Homoki’s brilliantly directed Love of Three Oranges. So when I saw that Homoki had a My Fair Lady on this week, I jumped at the chance to get a ticket: social class is always one of his fascinations, and this well-known Lerner & Loewe work seemed tailor-made for that angle. A much-touted West Side Story, directed by Barrie Kosky, was also playing at the Komische later the same week; I decided to go to that too and round out my German experience of American musicals.

What’s unusual about the Komische, which was the “people’s opera” of the old East Berlin, is that all the productions are translated into German. I thought it would be difficult to render songs like “Just You Wait, Henry Higgins” and “The Rain in Spain” in German, and I was curious to see how they went about it. The answer was: skillfully, but not quite persuasively. Because my family owned the My Fair Lady album and I learned all the songs by heart as a child, I couldn’t help hearing the superior English lyrics in the background as the German ones were sung, and though that didn’t ruin the experience for me, it did make it odd. More problematic was the fact that the central tenet of My Fair Lady—the idea that a Cockney flower-girl can be converted into a high-born-seeming lady by altering her vowels and aspirated consonants—is utterly foreign to the Berlin notion of class, which is something at once more deeply rooted and less clearly audible. The German friend who accompanied me said that Katharine Mehrling, the actress playing Eliza Doolittle, did a good job of imitating the old Berlin working-class dialect, but that made no sense whatsoever of the songs in which Max Hopp, as Professor Henry Higgins, tried to get her to pronounce her Hs and As properly. And when Homoki tried to infuse his usual working-class enthusiasms into the plot—making Alfred Doolittle’s wedding scene, for instance, a symbol of honest vitality, set against the patent deadness of the aristocratic Ascot—that only made things worse. Watching these vain efforts, I realized (possibly not for the first time) that My Fair Lady is in fact about the superficiality of class, whereas the Brechtian productions I’ve loved at the Komische, Homolki’s among them, have at their core a belief in the essential nature of class. There is no such thing as essential nature in My Fair Lady—that is its point—and Homoki would have done better to use this musical as an occasion to mock, say, the typically British looniness of Brexit.

It was with fear and trepidation that I set out for last night’s West Side Story. I have always wholeheartedly loved the 1961 movie of this musical, with Robbins’s full-scale-genius dance numbers and Bernstein’s marvelous score; there isn’t a dud song in the bunch, and I often find myself humming the tunes in the course of my daily life. It is something I carry with me all the time—I just watched the movie again within the last year—and I dreaded seeing it eviscerated by a production that was touted as having all-new “testosterone-driven” choreography by someone named Otto Pichler. (This anxiety was not alleviated by the fact that I have hated almost all the dance I’ve ever seen on Berlin stages.) And then there was my profound disbelief in the idea that any Komische translation could ever replace the brilliant lyrics Stephen Sondheim came up with on this, his first venture into musical theater.

About the lyrics, I needn’t have worried: someone at the Komische (probably Barrie Kosky, the director) was smart enough to realize that the lyrics had to remain in their original English even though the dialogue was translated into German. So for the first time ever, I heard songs in this old East Berlin theater sung in a “foreign” language. I don’t know who decided that Sondheim was more important, more necessary, than Lorenzo da Ponte or W.H. Auden or the other verse-meisters they’ve translated in the past, but whoever it was was right: the cleverly rhyming, cunningly rhythmic words are essential to the music of this musical, and without them it probably would have gone down in flames.

The choreography, too, was about a hundred times—no, a thousand times—better than anything else I’ve ever seen in a German production. I don’t know about “testosterone-driven” (that would not have been my chosen descriptor, especially for the marvelous “I Like to Be in America,” which is danced entirely by women), but Pichler managed to update the gestures and make them his own without abandoning Robbins’s feel for the connection between street movement—that is, real-life movement—and dance. Time and again, I was thrilled by how beautifully the choreography matched both the music and the action. This was especially true of the charmingly silly dance set to “Officer Krupsky,” which actually made me laugh out loud, but it was true in a different way of the opening basketball sequence introducing the Jets and the Sharks, or the dance at the gym, rendered here as a kind of Berlin late-night club, complete with face masks, disco balls, and heavily booted women. That we couldn’t always tell Jets from Sharks felt strange at first—their skin colors and clothing and hair styles were pretty much the same, so you just had to keep track individually of who seemed to be antagonizing whom—but even that came to seem part of the point: the gang differences were being presented as socially constructed oppositions, not essential qualities.  (Among other things, this twist gave a whole new ironic meaning to Anita’s song “Stick to Your Own Kind,” delivered in a very touching scene in which Anita and Maria end up sitting side by side on a bed, their backs to us.)

Throughout, in fact, the gesture of enacted emotion was as powerfully choreographed as the dances themselves. Anita’s lively temperament (embodied in a terrific Sigalit Feig), Riff’s charismatic leadership (danced and played by the very talented Christoph Jonas), Maria’s girlish delight in her new love (portrayed by a luminous Alma Sadé), and Tony’s and Maria’s avid kisses were persuasive in a way they aren’t always in the film. Johannes Dunz, as Tony, was a million times better than the ghastly stick-figure in the movie, though his excellence only showcased the fact that it is necessarily the character of Maria who always dominates the plot and makes it her own.

In the final sequence, after Tony is killed and Maria accuses both gangs of being responsible for his murder, Kosky made the intelligent decision not to have the two gangs come forward to carry the body off jointly, in the traditional healing gesture; instead he left them helplessly frozen in a surrounding semi-circle of observers—mirroring us, the still, silent audience—as we all watched Maria mourn her dead lover alone. In Berlin they have the guts to carry the tragedy all the way through like this, and it is worth it: the tears I shed at the end of this production felt, if anything, more clear-sighted and less sentimental than the ones that always flood my eyes when the beloved movie reaches its close.

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Another Mahler’s First

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Well, that’s Berlin for you. No sooner have I pronounced a favorite performance than another leaps in to take its place. I am now in a divided state, and wouldn’t know how to choose between listening forever to Daniel Harding’s terrific version of Mahler’s First Symphony and being permanently wedded to Vladimir Jurowski’s equally wonderful one. I’d ask, I suppose, to alternate between them, as I did in real life.

Two days after the Berlin Philharmonic performed the piece I praised so highly in my last blog entry, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, appearing at the lovely old Konzerthaus under the baton of the unbeatable Jurowski, played the same Mahler symphony to a sold-out crowd. Because I’d heard this conductor with these excellent musicians before, I knew to expect something special. In this case, the pleasure of the program’s second half was intensified by the mild disappointment of the first, in which Nicholas Angelich—billed as a Brahms expert—managed to tamp down and hold back the orchestra with his pedestrian rendering of the solo part in Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. Oh, well, I thought, the best is still to come.

A wild understatement. Jurowski’s Mahler One was recognizably the same piece as Harding’s (even to the offstage trumpeters in the early part, and the French horns who stood up to play their final blast near the end), so a certain amount of credit must obviously go to the composer. But something special and uniquely appealing emerged from the combination of this conductor, this orchestra, and this composer. Jurowski brings out a level of enthusiasm and individuality in these musicians that is thrilling to watch and hear; he also finds things in the music that no other conductor can find. In this performance, I was particularly aware of how intensely klezmerish the klezmer parts of the symphony sounded, thanks in large part to the brilliant solo oboist, but also to all the other supporting musicians. Jurowski has spoken before about his half-Jewish heritage, and that no doubt played a role here, but I couldn’t help feeling that his expertise in conducting Shostakovich also came into play. This was a Mahler who crossed geographical and temporal boundaries, who reveled in the strength of his youthful vision, who happily stole from everything and everywhere and yet gave it all back in the end.

I was so engrossed in the music that I didn’t even notice the goings-on in the parterre section of the symphony hall, which included a man collapsing from an apparent heart-attack and being carried out during the performance. Because of my seat (I was up in the first ring), my height (I am short), and my focused attention (I was hypnotized by the symphony’s repeated surges), I had no idea any of this was going on. But Jurowski evidently did. He kept glancing around to his right side with a worried expression on his face. I thought he was concerned about the second violins and I couldn’t figure out why, because they were playing beautifully; but a friend who had a better view said he was clearly worried about the sick patron. His facial expression, according to my friend, seemed to ask, “What should I do? Should I stop playing? A terrible thing is happening, and we are powerless to help. Do we just carry on?” The answering expressions on the faces of the musicians must have said yes, because carry on he did, with all the full force of his emphatic talent. It was the only gift he could give at that point to the rest of us, and our evident approval of his decision was signaled by the wild intensity of our collective ovation at the end.

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Discovering a New Conductor

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Of course, I am very late to the show on this one, since Daniel Harding is already a known quantity in the classical music world. But I had never before heard him conduct live (never, to my knowledge, even heard a recording of his conducting) before last Friday night.

I chose that Berlin Philharmonic program, as best as I can recall, for three reasons. One was that it was the last program the orchestra was giving before they left town on their spring tour, and I wanted to drain that particular cup to its last drop. Another was that I had heard good things about Harding, and this would be a great chance to hear this youngish British conductor (he is now in his early forties) in the best possible setting. And the third was that the program—some Ives, some Berg, and Mahler’s First—looked really interesting.

Programming well is part of the conductor’s job, and I have long since learned to trust my favorite conductors in their choices and arrangements. The Berlin audience, which in this case seemed slightly younger and hipper than the usual Philharmonie crowd, seemed a little dubious about the Charles Ives piece— titled “Three Places in New England”—which opened the program, but after listening to the entire set, I was completely won over.  “Ives is America’s Shostakovich,” I whispered to my seatmate when it ended; “you can never tell when he’s kidding.” And, I should have added, even the kidding is always deadly serious: that too is like Shostakovich. In this case, the aura of celebratory patriotism and nostalgia that marked these three pastiche-filled bits of Americana was infused throughout with a darker, scarier tone that manifested itself mainly in the purposeful wrong notes (again, a Shostakovich strategy, though one that Ives clearly invented for himself, since Shostakovich was only a small child when this orchestral set was written).

When we got to the second work on the program—three excerpts from Berg’s opera Wozzeck, two of them featuring the soprano Dorothea Röschmann in the role of Marie—I realized that military music, ironically treated, was central to Harding’s unifying idea for the evening. Wozzeck himself is of course a badly treated soldier, the lowest of the low, and Marie, his lover, betrays him with a more glamorous drum major—an act for which he, now driven mad by his own mistreatment, murders her. I love this opera and have never seen a bad production, but since it always causes me to sympathize with the victimized Wozzeck to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, it was useful to be asked to contemplate Marie separately: first in her relatively joyful mode, against the background of a military march, and then in the scene when she is being murdered. It was the third section, though—a purely orchestral sequence, in which Harding brought out the immense complexities and subtleties of Berg’s music—that clearly won over this previously dubious audience. I imagine that they, like me, could now begin to see what Harding was getting at in putting these two near-contemporary composers—one American, one Austrian—together in a commentary on the allures and dangers of military music.

We all had a wonderful treat still in store for us, though. In the second half of the program, Harding and the Berlin Philharmonic brought out every echo, every source, every borrowed element in Mahler’s First Symphony (including, of course, the patriotic/military ones) while nonetheless making it feel entirely original. The conductor managed to forge a direct connection between the Berg and the Mahler by, in both of them, sending some of the brass players offstage to play behind the scenes—and he also managed to suggest a link between the dark ironies of the program’s first half and the various pastiches one could hear in the Mahler. Most of all, he made me understand, as I have never understood before, why the young Shostakovich adored Mahler’s music so much. (The affection must have included, for instance, an awareness of their shared passion for Jewish klezmer music, which was particularly noticeable among the other influences in this rendering of the Mahler.)

At this point, if I could only listen to a single Mahler symphony over and over, it would be Daniel Harding conducting Mahler’s First at the Berlin Philharmonic. The daring choices Harding made as a conductor (which he was able to carry out fully, thanks to having a precision instrument of an orchestra at his disposal) caused every sequence of the ambitious work—each delicate solo, each lengthy pause, each booming crescendo—to seem meaningful in a new way. When the long-anticipated conclusion finally arrived, with its clash of symbols sounding amidst the frenzied outpouring of strings, brass, winds, and drums, the normally sedate Philharmonie audience went wild. Their enthusiasm wasn’t just audible in the loud cries of “Bravo!” that accompanied the deafening applause, but also in the non-verbal whoops and yells, the likes of which I have never heard in this hall before. People were clearly thrilled to have witnessed this stupendous performance—and, to judge by the wide smiles on their faces, Harding and the musicians were thrilled to have given it.

 

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Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out, has accrued to me over the years through my attendance at Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken over the orchestra. He was already something like a rock star, in terms of local popularity, and I and my friends attended every concert we could. Over the years I have kept up with these musicians whenever they visited New York or whenever I visited Berlin, and the results were never less than thrilling.

Now that Rattle has officially left the Berlin Phil for the London Symphony Orchestra, that era has come to an end. Whenever he is brought back as a guest conductor, as he certainly will be over the years, the feeling is likely to be slightly different—more formal, perhaps, and with less taken for granted. (That may not be altogether a bad thing.) This March, which included performances of the St. John Passion and a symphonic program the week after, marked the first of such returns. And so here I am in Berlin as well, since I am not about to miss the chance to hear this great conductor at the head of the great orchestra he both shaped and was shaped by.

The St. John Passion—a revival of the original 2014 production—is actually the second major Bach collaboration between Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars, the first being the St. Matthew Passion from the year before. I adore the music of St. Matthew and I have loved almost every production I’ve seen of it, from Mark Padmore’s scaled-down version at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw to Jonathan Miller’s English-language version at BAM. The Sellars-Rattle production, which I saw in both New York and Berlin, was no exception; it may even have been a high point of the genre. For me, St. Matthew is a religious work that transcends religion, a passion-play that evokes all the contemporary human passions, and a magnificent choral work that depends equally on its orchestral music, so that each aspect finally becomes indifferentiable from the other.

The St. John Passion, on the other hand, is something much weirder and harder to grasp. As an atheist Jew, I have always felt somewhat more excluded from the emotions it generates, which depend heavily on sympathizing with the tortures Christ endured. Orchestrally, too, it is less fascinating and integrated than the St. Matthew, which excels at solo instruments matched with solo voices, and which generally is performed with two separate orchestras, each backing half of the chorus. St. John, though equally complex, relies much more on its singers, and particularly on the tenor who sings the Evangelist role.

Luckily, this Berlin production in March featured—as it has always featured—Mark Padmore. I will cross oceans, and have done, to hear Padmore sing just about anything, from German lieder to Handel operas to Czech and English songs. He excels not just at making you understand the words (even if they are in a language you don’t know), and not just at putting across the music through his straightforwardly appealing voice, but also at conveying emotion through his bodily stance, which is never histrionic yet always expressive. Nothing he has ever done is better than his Evangelist in this St. John. He almost literally knits the piece together—with his recitatives, which join up the others’ passages, and also with his physical expressions of caring and concern. Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance, Padmore’s St. John crouches by Christ’s side, or carefully shadows Pilate, or tenderly lends his support to Peter, or simply listens attentively to the chorus, all the while maintaining the look of a man immersed in what is happening around him. It is through him that even the least Christian among us can begin to apprehend the point of the suffering we are witnessing.

And he is helped, in this production, by a stellar cast of singers, including the outstanding members of the Rundfunkchor Berlin, who allowed themselves to be deployed to wonderful effect in Sellars’ typically wild crowd movements. I was disappointed, at first, to learn that Christian Gerhaher (also a singer for whom I will cross oceans) was being replaced by Georg Nigl, an Austrian baritone previously unknown to me. But I needn’t have worried. Nigl’s lovely voice is almost as delicately nuanced as Gerhaher’s, and his acting in this case was perfect— his Peter movingly distraught, his Pilate even better, with a combination of arrogance and self-doubt that ultimately made sense of the strange role. Camilla Trilling made a great Mary, and Magdalena Kozena an equally persuasive Magdalene (though I could have done without the excessively sexual gestures that Sellars always encourages her to perpetrate in this role). And no one could have made a more sympathetic Christ than the terrific baritone Roderick Williams. Even the bit parts, all played by Andrew Staples, were beautifully performed. It was like watching a play underlaid by the world’s greatest music—gripping from beginning to end, and satisfying in just about every way. All of us who were in the audience that night (and I speak for the strangers around me as well as my four friends) felt we had witnessed something special.

To go from a sublime work like Bach’s to the more routine excellence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century masters is necessarily a bit of a comedown, but in the hands of Simon Rattle, even a Schumann symphony can scale the heights. I was particularly happy to hear him conduct Schumann’s Second—which he did a week after the St. John—because I had just listened, on the preceding Monday, to a performance of that same work by the Philharmonie’s youth orchestra, playing under the baton of Jörg Widmann. I always love to hear and watch the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a collection of incredibly talented, enthusiastic youngsters who end their concerts by hugging each other. But no youth group could live up to the professionalism of the Philharmonie itself, and Widmann (who is primarily known as a composer and clarinetist) is by no means the conductor Rattle is. Under Widmann, the Second was a single prolonged, excitable blast of sound, with softer, slower passages intervening only in the third movement; whereas under Rattle, practically each measure seemed to have its own dynamic, its own tempo. Because the orchestra knows him so well (and because they have played this piece together numerous times, in numerous places), Rattle barely had to move a muscle to evoke the perfect performance: it had all been done beforehand in rehearsals, and what we were seeing was merely the outward reminder, with a gesture here and there to bring out or tone down the sound.

Silences at the Berlin Philharmonic can be as telling as overt music. This had been especially noticeable in the St. John Passion, where the silences between the passages of recitative seemed almost as memorable as the lines themselves. For his final performance (for now) in this august concert hall, Rattle knew how to introduce such silences even into the oceanic Schumann symphony. It may not have been my favorite Rattle performance ever—I would be hard put to choose that one—but es war genug.

 

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Five Nights in Berlin

Posted on December 31, 2018 by Wendy Lesser

For various reasons, Berlin is my favorite city in the world, and one of the reasons is certainly the quality and variety of music it always makes available to me. I spotted a window of opportunity to get there for a week in December and, as it happened, my week included five performances in a row—three of them spectacular, one strange but good, and one astonishingly bad. Since even the bad one provided food for thought, I will recount them here, in order.

I had arrived on a Monday, in time to have dinner with Martin and Barbara, my dearest friends in Berlin (they are also one of the reasons it is my favorite city), but since it turned out they were both occupied on that Tuesday, I bought myself a single ticket, at pretty much the last minute, to the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performance at the grand old Konzerthaus in Gendarmenmarkt. The initial draw for this concert, as I had vaguely noticed from afar, was the inclusion of Murray Perahia as piano soloist, but by the time the date arrived he had been replaced by a young, unknown (to me) performer named Jan Lisiecki.  Boy, did I luck out!  As all the surprised reviews in the Berlin newspapers noted in the subsequent days, this twenty-something Polish-Canadian pianist was a phenomenon of the first order: not show-offy in any way, neither extreme nor insipid in his interpretations, just very, very good. Lisiecki was playing two Beethoven piano concertos that night—both the Second and the Fourth—and since the latter is my favorite of the five, I was thrilled to get to hear it in these circumstances. I had a great seat, hanging over the stage on the left-hand side, so I could watch not only the pianist’s hands, but also his sweetly attentive facial expressions as he turned to watch the conductorless orchestra in between his own passages. Meanwhile, the audience had begun to realize what it was being treated to: about 10 bars into Lisiecki’s first entrance, I turned to my nearest neighbor (a middle-aged German stranger) and discovered that we both had the same raised-eyebrows expression on our faces; by the first intermission, my neighbor was pounding the railing in enthusiasm, while I and the rest of the gallery clapped our hardest; and by the end of the concert, the whole auditorium was roaring its approval in a very un-German, unrestrained way.  They were right, too. It was the kind of evening I remember from my first days in Berlin, back in 2003, when hearing great music played this well made me feel…not exactly that everything was going to be all right (because no art can assert that without lying), but that I could somehow bear whatever was going to happen, as long as music like this existed to keep me company.

Wednesday night was the closest thing to a sure thing in my schedule: an intimate performance by the amazing baritone Christian Gerhaher and his longtime pianist friend, Gerold Huber, in the small hall, the Kammermusiksaal, of the Berlin Philharmonic. I had originally planned to take along both Martin and Barbara, but she wasn’t well enough to come out that night; she urged us both to go, however, and said she would happily stay home watching crap Regency romances on TV, something she can’t get away with when Martin is present. Martin himself is not usually a lieder fan (neither is my husband—I often have to attend such things alone), but in this case the performance was so pure, so beautiful, and so instinctively collaborative that he was won over completely. The program alternated between the relatively old (Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Alban Berg) and the absolutely contemporary (two works by a living composer named Wolfgang Rihm, both written precisely for this duo), and though I didn’t love all the pieces equally, I loved the simple, straightforward presentation and the depth of feeling that was conveyed. Gerhaher was the antithesis of histrionic—he simply stood by the piano, occasionally lifting a finger or two from the hand that rested on it—and Huber matched him perfectly at every turn; the newspaper critics called their relationship “osmotic.” (The German reviews also focused—a bit too heavily, I thought—on the fact that two other major figures in Berlin music, Thomas Quasthoff and Max Raabe, were there in the small audience for this performance.) The Kammermusiksaal is small enough and cunningly designed enough so that you actually feel as if you are at a house concert, even though hundreds of people are in the room, and that too was a great part of the pleasure—as if these two old friends, wonderful musicians both, had simply invited us along to hear what they were working on these days.

I had been looking forward to the Thursday opera performance for months, and so was the rest of Berlin, apparently—it had been completely sold out for weeks. This was a new production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the recently remodeled Staatsoper, with musical direction by Simon Rattle, sets, lighting, and costumes by the renowned Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and choreography and direction by someone called Aletta Collins. In the event, there was no direction, and the choreography was the usual atrocious Berlin garbage (agonistic Wayne-McGregor-like poses and gestures that were utterly unsuited to the lightly tripping Rameau rhythms), but the real villain of this piece was Eliasson. I guess he had never seen an opera before: there’s no other explanation for how his darkened, spotlight-pierced, self-aggrandizing set and utterly inhuman costumes could have struck him as a good idea, given that they literally prevented the characters—including the two lovers—from visibly connecting with each other. The music was predictably lovely (Rattle did a fine job conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester), and some of the voices were excellent, but if you kept your eyes open—as one does at trainwrecks and other similar events—you couldn’t really enjoy the show. Martin alluded to it, accurately, as “Rameau in Las Vegas,” and as we were leaving the Staatsoper building (which is, by the way, even more wonderful than ever in its remodeled state), he taught me a useful term invented by the nineteenth-century Schlegel brothers:  Unkritisierbarkeit des Schlechten, or “Too bad even to be criticized.”

Friday’s performance (which Barbara was finally well enough to attend) again took us back to my beloved Philharmonie, this time to the large hall, where we were hearing Valery Gergiev conducted the always-terrific Berliner Philharmoniker itself. That—the autocrat meeting this notoriously self-assertive orchestra—promised to be interesting enough, but the interest was enhanced, or at any rate complicated, by the strangeness of the program. Gergiev had picked four pieces in a row—Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, large excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel and Prokofiev’s Cinderella, and finally Stravinsky’s Firebird—that were all scores to dances. It made for a fascinating combination, and it also stretched the Philharmoniker players beyond their usual comfort zone, which tends more toward the German classics and the wild post-moderns. Here they were forced to become intensely and enthusiastically Russian at times, and that was quite something to see and hear—as if they were inside and outside at once, going through the proper motions and then being won over, themselves, by the music. It was far from the best performance I’ve ever heard at the Philharmonie (those were all conducted by Rattle, and there were many of them); but it was thrilling in its own way.

On Saturday night I went alone to an opera that Barbara and Martin declined to come to with me, but only on the grounds that they had already seen it twice. They predicted I would love it, and they were right. It was Prokofiev’s Love of Three Oranges, performed in German at the Komische Oper, which is the old East-Berlin venue that has always translated works into the local tongue. I had actually seen half of this opera performed in its original Russian at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Opera House (and I only left at intermission because I had to interview a Shostakovich source: otherwise I would happily have stayed for the whole thing), but the German version at the Komische was, if anything, even better. From the minute the squabbling chorus members appeared onstage at the beginning—clad entirely in white, with whitened faces and white gloves, like marble statues or solid ghosts—I knew I was in for an intelligent, hilarious treat. It’s a great, self-mocking opera to begin with (the Prologue argues about whether it should be a comedy, a drama, a romance, or a farce; the scariest of the several villains is a cook; and the love-interest actually does emerge from an orange), but in this case the direction had made it into something more: a commentary on how ridiculous opera is, combined with a childlike delight in ridiculousness and make-believe. The singers were all excellent actors who could also move beautifully (there was more choreography in this opera’s little finger than in the whole of Thursday night’s Rameau), and the sets—which were carried on and off by the performers—were, like the costumes, so brightly, beautifully colored that one felt one was looking at a child’s picture-book. It had that quality I have rarely seen outside a Mark Morris opera: a combination of “let’s put on a show” enthusiasm with a totally professional level of skill. My hat comes off to everyone involved, including the director, Andreas Homoki, the conductor, Ainars Rubikis, the fine Komische musicians, and most of all the terrific singer-actors, not one of whom I’ve ever heard of before, and all of whom I hope to see onstage again soon.

 

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