First of all, I apologize for the length of time between my last post and this one. I’ve been in Scandinavia, a most delightful and enlightening place, which I previously knew only from decades of Nordic noir reading and television-watching. A full report will emerge eventually in book form; for the moment I just want to thank the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, the Swedish Embassy in Washington, and the Swedish Academy in Stockholm for the generous travel grants that made my trip possible.
It was with predictable culture shock that I returned to the hot, dirty streets of New York in the midst of our current administration’s worst depredations. Everything in this country is, of course, a mess at this point, and 98-degree days and bad subway service only exacerbate the general feeling of despair. I knew I would be escaping on July 4 to California (which, although it is not another country, often feels like it), so I decided to celebrate my last summer night in New York by going to Le Poisson Rouge on July 3.
The program consisted of Michael Riesman playing live piano to Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula. But this was not just any old film improvisation: it was a score by Philip Glass, first released in a version by the Kronos Quartet in 1999 and now reconfigured for solo keyboard. After hearing it performed live by this stalwart and professional pianist, I can’t now imagine it done any other way.
The music managed to augment the film without in any way overpowering it. Browning’s stylishly designed black-and-white movie came into being shortly after talkies emerged, and it includes its own (rather primitive) spoken dialogue. Those speeches and other sound effects were for the most part still audible through the music, but they had been supplemented with subtitles, which meant that we could enjoy the music even when it was at risk of drowning out the talk. Glass has always been good at soundtracks (his Thin Blue Line music is, to my mind, essential to the creepy feel of Errol Morris’s great movie), and in this case his trademark frenzies of repeated, cascading notes went perfectly with the supernatural plot and the highly mannered performances. Bela Lugosi was quite perfect as the augustly threatening, piercing-eyed Count, but for me the plum role turned out to be Renfield, a part that allowed Dwight Frye first to appear as a proper English gentleman and then as a raving lunatic serving his vampiric “Master.” I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, musically and cinematically—it was both a hoot and a serious wonder—and I would have been satisfied if the evening had ended with our avid applause for the performer.
But then, on top of that, we got a special treat. For as Reisman gestured gratefully toward the audience, who should appear up on stage with him but Philip Glass himself, beaming and embracing the performer? Only in New York, I thought, would one of the major American composers of the past eighty years show up at a little club with fewer than a hundred audience members to watch and hear his movie score being played once again. Now that’s what I call a good kind of culture shock.