The Mirror and the Light

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

If you have not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, now is the time to start. And time is what you have now, right?

Wolf Hall, the first book in the series, features the profound effects of the plague in sixteenth-century London, along with a lot of other great stuff having to do with Cromwell’s deprived childhood, ambitious youth, and surprising coming-to-power. Plus the writing is amazing, as you will soon discover—fully up to the standard Mantel set in earlier books like A Place of Greater Safety and Beyond Black. She is surely one of the great stylists as well as being one of the greatest of historical novelists, and if you do not yet know her work at all, you are in for a treat.

Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume, is slightly less affecting. The Cromwell we loved has become more of a plain old fixer for Henry VIII and less of a character in his own right, while Anne Boleyn dominates the plot. But it is still well worth reading, and you will not be able to forego the next step in the plot, once you put down Wolf Hall.

And that leads us to this final volume, The Mirror and the Light, which is a masterpiece. Having finished it last night, I now feel a bit bereft; all I could do after closing the book was to sit there, stunned and moved. I am not giving away the plot if I tell you that it takes us up to Cromwell’s death—we all know Henry VIII executed him in the end. But for those of you who lack the detailed history, as I did, it’s best to let the plot unfold on its own rather than running to Wikipedia first: there’s a great deal of suspense in guessing which of those around him betrayed him and intrigued to bring about his fall. (If you must resort to Google, try getting the images Hans Holbein painted of Cromwell, Henry, Anne of Cleves, and others who feature in this plot—they will add to your pleasure in reading the novel, in which Holbein himself appears as a character.)

And, as always, there are intense satisfactions to be had in being inside Cromwell’s clever, supple mind throughout 750 pages of beautifully written prose. The writing  here is so good that it may even transcend that of Wolf Hall, which is an impossibly high standard to beat.  We are somehow suspended for the duration: between Cromwell’s interior life and the historical events taking place around him; between his time and ours; between humane sympathy and savage competitiveness (or perhaps competitive savagery). Thomas Cromwell cannot have been an altogether nice guy—he was probably a monster, of sorts—but Mantel makes us love him.

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The last time I was at the Met…

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

Since the Metropolitan Opera—not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and anything else with Metropolitan or New York or City in its title—is on indeterminate hiatus during the current crisis, I thought I would reflect on the last opera I saw there: Handel’s Agrippina.

By great good luck, I happened to catch this stellar production during my February trip to New York (which now seems much longer than a month ago, given everything that has happened since). I had already seen at least one unsuccessful production of this semi-comic, semi-historical, semi-ridiculous opera, so I knew in advance how hard it would be to get the tone right. To my surprise and delight, the Met performance succeeded on every level. I found it laugh-out-loud funny in places and oddly moving in others, and the rest of the audience seemed to agree with me. (You could tell by the laughter, and also by the fact that they uncharacteristically stayed in their seats until the end, which in this case was more than four hours after the beginning.)

When faced with Handel’s historical operas, one can either decide to update to a more recent moment or capitulate to a false sense of history. There are risks either way, but in this case the decision to modernize was the right one. Giving a twentieth-century look and feel to this Roman tale—which involves Empress Agrippina’s effort to get her son, Nero, installed as the heir to his stepfather, Emperor Claudio—never felt gratuitous or off, and even the obvious anachronisms (like Agrippina’s 1950s hairdo and little black dress) only served to enhance the humor.

As a whole, the production was greatly aided by the calibre of its stars.  Joyce DiDonato as Agrippina, Iestyn Davies as Ottone (the loyal but betrayed commander of the emperor’s army), and a brilliant newcomer, Kate Lindsay, in the pants role of Nero all did their utmost to make the lengthy evening an intense pleasure. The rest of the cast was vocally excellent as well, but these three could act as well as sing, and that was essential. DiDonato, in particular, invented a hilarious strut—part Marilyn Monroe, part cartoonish battle-axe Mom, and part Maggie Thatcher in high heels—that utterly defined her character. Even the way she held her hands, like little paws dangling from her wrists, expressed this woman’s character in a way that was both funny and frightening.

Harry Bicket, whose annual Handel concerts at Carnegie Hall I always religiously attend, did beautifully with the orchestra, as I expected him to. And when I looked to see who had directed this brilliant confection, lo and behold!—it was David McVicar, whose marvelous Death in Venice (starring the incomparable Mark Padmore as Aschenbach) I had just witnessed at Covent Garden last December. For a director to get one difficult opera right is unusual enough. For him to do two in a row is nothing short of miraculous.

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Beethoven and the Danes

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

All concert attendance is a betting game, but some bets are riskier than others. Earlier this month, I bet on something I thought would surely pay off: I traveled to New York from California just to hear the Danish String Quartet play all sixteen Beethoven quartets in an eleven-day cycle presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Yet even I, who am already on record praising these musicians to the skies, could not have predicted how marvelous the experience would be.

For one thing, they decided to play the quartets in essentially chronological order, which is not how the Beethoven cycle is usually played. Normally in such concerts (and in my favorite recordings as well) we get a mixture of early, middle, and late in each two-hour chunk. But the four members of the Danish String Quartet—Fredrick Øland and Rune Tongsgaard Sørensen on violin, Asbjorn Norgaard on viola, and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (the sole Norwegian) on cello—decided instead to display Beethoven’s development over time. So we got two initial concerts featuring the six lively quartets of Opus 18, which you might characterize as Beethoven’s Haydn period, though even at this early stage he was increasingly exhibiting moments of weirdness and idiosyncratic inventiveness. The third concert presented the three terrific Razumovsky quartets, which deserved a whole evening to themselves (especially given the Danes’ affinity for folk-derived classical music). The fourth bridged middle and late by covering Op. 74 (“Harp”), the rarely heard and rather grim Op. 95 (“Serioso”), and then my person favorite in the whole batch, Op. 127, which marks the start of Beethoven’s final, mature sensibility. And then there were two unbelievably great concerts that each treated just two of the late quartets: one combining Op. 132 and Op. 130 (the latter with the Grosse Fugue occupying its original position as the final movement), and the other starting with the deeply moving Op. 131 and ending with the oddly chipper Op. 135.

I have listened to all of these quartets many times in the privacy of my own house, and I have also heard them played live many times, including in a full cycle. But I have never before felt I was mainlining the music, getting it infused directly into me by performers who had fully thought about it, taken in its possibilities, and mastered it together. The variations from what I was familiar with were not extreme—a bit more dynamic range, perhaps; a few more sharply dramatic pauses; a greater sense both of group coherence and of soloist skill—but the overall effect was noticeably more thrilling than what I was used to.

And at each concert, the intensity grew and grew: not just in the music itself (though one could really feel the progression in this arrangement), but also in the audience’s reaction. I have been watching and listening to the Danish String Quartet for years, so I knew, in a way, what to expect. But for many of the audience members who were packing Alice Tully Hall on these occasions, the youthful, informally dressed, utterly fresh and musically intelligent Scandinavians came as a delightful surprise. Because one or the other of the musicians spoke from the stage before each of their encores (as they have a habit of doing in all of their concerts, sometimes even addressing us earlier on), we had the sense we were getting to know them personally—that is the atmosphere they always manage to create, on every stage, large and small, where I have ever seen them. The Alice Tully audience responded by becoming very quiet and very loud: very quiet during and before each piece of music, and raucous to the point of rock-band cheering when each quartet had finished. By the final two concerts, you could hear whoops of approval and witness massive standing ovations even at the intermissions. The audience, many of whom attended all six concerts, absolutely loved these guys, and the players responded in kind. At the end of the final concert—when, having wisely decided to forgo an encore and give the last word to Beethoven, they stood on the stage with their arms around each other’s shoulders and smiled back at us—the applause was so resounding, and so downright affectionate, that I wondered if the New Yorkers would ever allow the Danes to go home. Of course, we had to let them go in the end (one always does, alas, in live concerts), but the feeling of what they gave us will, I imagine, stick with us all forever.

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Photography Heaven

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

It seems unbelievable that ten years have already passed since Pier 24 opened its doors in San Francisco. Perhaps that’s because this great venue for looking at photography  remains so exciting, and so welcome, that it still feels like a recent addition to the local gallery scene.

Everything about the place is perfect. It’s free, but you have to reserve your visit in advance, so you are never looking at pictures among crowds. The rooms are purpose-built for photography—perfectly sized, perfectly lit—and the building itself is located on one of the old Embarcadero piers, a piece of San Francisco history converted to delightful modern use. There are no wall captions, so you are practically forced to have a direct encounter with the images themselves. (If you are curious, you can refer to a hand-out that gives the photographer name, title, and date for each piece.) And the annual shows last long enough so you can send all your friends to them, even friends visiting from out of town, before they have time to close.

I have liked some of the shows better than others, but every one of them had things worth looking at. And now the best-of-the-best from those ten years have been pulled together for this stellar anniversary show, Looking Back. Curated with great subtlety and intelligence by Allie Hauesslein, Pier 24’s associate director, it might just be the most exciting collection of photographs I have ever seen gathered in one place.

There are, of course, the classics: Paul Strand’s blind woman, Lewis Hine’s workers on the Empire State Building, Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother (in several different poses). And there are roomsful of Diane Arbus, including not just her best-known photos (like the boy with the toy hand grenade, or the bowed-down mentally disabled woman from the Untitled series) but also a huge range of her other work, including unexpected things such as an overhead view of Times Square. The additional Dorothea Langes, too, are worth attending the show for—not just the deservedly famous images like White Angel Breadline and the other Depression-era photos, but rarer ones like the 1952 Consumer Relationships, which shows a wide urban sidewalk with a haughty-looking mother trailed by a tiny and rather despondent-looking child. My favorite Hiroshi Sugimoto of all time—his wax-work Last Supper, movingly damaged by rain—has a room practically to itself.  The Lee Friedlander that graces the catalogue cover, of a woman in profile walking through a revolving door, is certainly one of his very best, too.

The colorful hotel rooms and apartment interiors by Alec Soth, the street scenes by Henry Wessel and Fred Herzog, the Mahdan Mahatta and Edward Burtynsky factory images are all amazing. But I think photographs I like best are the portraits. These range across the board, from the posed close-up to the distant capture, from the purposely strange to the excessively familiar. Weirdly, there are actually two different photos of Truman Capote in the show—one by Irving Penn, the other by Richard Avedon—but there are also much less typical Avedons, portraying the creased faces of working men. Lewis Hine’s touching group portraits of coal-workers convey one kind of intense emotion; a different kind of intensity is rendered in Dorothea Lange’s Funeral Cortege, which shows a woman looking out at us through her black car’s oval window. Famous photographers (Arbus, Friedlander) have been captured on film by other famous photographers (Winogrand, Avedon). And then there are the anonymous portraits, like those in the series of mug shots that fill one whole wall of a large room. Unknown people and unknown photographers are also important, this Pier 24 exhibit insists, and that is part of what makes it a great and true-to-photography show.

 

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The Dolphin Letters

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

Most people who were interested in poetry in the late twentieth century know at least the vague outlines of this story. In 1974, Robert Lowell published a book of poems called The Dolphin, a series which cannibalized the letters he had received from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, as he was leaving her in the early 1970s for his third wife, Caroline Blackwood (a Guinness heiress who was herself the ex-wife of the artist Lucian Freud and the composer Israel Citkowitz). The controversy that swirled around the book hinged on the moral violation of using Hardwick’s private letters—and, still worse, rewriting them—in a collection that was essentially a love letter to another woman. Years later, when the marriage to Caroline was breaking up, Lowell returned to Hardwick, and they spent the summer of 1977 together in Maine; in September, though, he died of a heart attack in the taxi that was bringing him home to her New York apartment.

Now Saskia Hamilton has performed the miraculous editorial task of putting together all of the actual letters: Elizabeth’s to Robert (whom she and others called “Cal”), his to her, plus assorted missives to and from other members of their circle during this fraught time, which dated from mid-1970 to Robert’s death and beyond. In The Dolphin Letters, Hamilton has scrupulously arranged and annotated this correspondence in a way that makes us feel immersed in the situation ourselves—if not as participants, then as close bystanders. Robert Lowell comes across as brilliant, erratic, and morally obtuse; both he and Caroline seem incompetent in the handling of daily life to an almost criminal degree (considering that they were in charge of four children); and meanwhile Elizabeth Hardwick appears as — I was going to say “a saint,” but she was too appealingly human for that; and then I was going to say “a tower of strength,” but was prevented by the memory of her own joke (repeated in one of the letters) about a fellow New Yorker who was “a tower of weakness.”

Hardwick’s letters are distinguished throughout by their honesty, their expressiveness, and their flashes of great wit. (Commenting on a positive review about Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry she finds “thin and disappointing,” she says to Lowell, the review’s author: “I will say as someone said about Christianity: ‘Important, if true.'”) It is during these years, too, that she really comes into her own as a writer, forced by finances as well as emotional stress to produce some of her best work; crucially, the divorce frees her from treating Lowell’s career as more important than her own. Throughout, she never ceases to sign her letters to Cal “with love” — and he in turn continues to address her as “Dearest Lizzie” and sign off “with all my love” even after he has married Caroline and had a son with her. But we also get moments of intense anguish, mainly on Elizabeth’s part but sometimes (when he is going into or emerging from one of his periods of madness) on his. It is a gripping story, and though I knew the outcome in advance, I was on the edge of my seat for the entire time I was reading it. The letters between the two of them of course form the core of the narrative, but there are equally important messages from those around them—in particular Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell’s best friend, who warned him in advance, in one of the most intelligent, loving, and powerful letters I’ve ever read, that he would be committing a moral atrocity if he used Lizzie’s correspondence in this way.

Perhaps I was more gripped than most would be because I knew or knew of the principals. I was friends with Elizabeth Hardwick during the 1980s and the 1990s, when I visited New York as a young person getting my toes wet in the New York literary world and stayed at her apartment. I had met Robert Lowell once in 1970, on the day I—an overly ambitious freshman—attended the first meeting of his poetry seminar at Harvard and then fled, suitably intimidated; and eight or nine years later I reviewed his last and posthumously published collection, Day by Day, for the Berkeley Poetry Review. But I think even if you had never read a word by either of these people, you would find this book of letters compelling. It is as intense and as beautifully composed as a well-constructed epistolary novel, but with the added force of being all quite real.

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A Bright White Light

Posted on November 22, 2019 by Wendy Lesser

Just about any concert performance of Pergolesi’s  amazing Stabat Mater, I have learned, is worth going to. When you combine that with Vivaldi’s movingly lovely Gloria—and when you further add in the stellar skills of the Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment, led by harpsichordist Jonathan Cohen—you are bound to have pretty much of a sure-fire evening of good music.

But what made Thursday night’s White Light program super-special, above and beyond the predictable pleasures, was the inclusion of countertenor Iestyn Davies. I have heard Davies in everything from modern music like Thomas Ades’s Tempest to an evening of John Dowland songs. I have seen him on stages as small as Poisson Rouge and as large as the Met. And I know that in addition to being a renowned singer, he is also a well-regarded stage actor. (His co-star from Farinelli, Mark Rylance, who was seated directly behind me during last night’s performance, shouted out an enthusiastic “Ies-tyn!” during the wild applause.) But I have never before heard Davies sing in pieces I love as much and know as well as the Stabat Mater and Gloria.

So it was a revelation to hear what his rich, mellow, expressive voice could bring to their live performance. He is one of those rare countertenors who never seems to have to push his voice or distort the melodic line; his diction is perfect, always audible but never intrusive; and he has a way of delaying the conclusion of a note to the last possible millisecond, without being a moment late, which adds to the thrill of his delivery. He also has a wonderful stage presence—as, for example, in the way he stood and watched the solo cellist who accompanied him in his Gloria part, as if he were receiving the instrumental music personally. For this and other reasons, I found it hard to take my eyes off him, even when he was not actually singing.

Every time I’ve heard Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater before, it featured two women, a soprano and a contralto. Having the contralto part sung by a countertenor, and in particular this countertenor, made something beautifully new of this beloved old work. As we sat in the subway on the way home, my companion commented, “If a countertenor is that good, you almost feel as if the voice is going directly up to God.” And when he (an agnostic) said this to me (an atheist), I knew exactly what he meant.

 

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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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