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American Symphony Orchestra Examines Obscure Works of Major Composers

Posted on: March 27th, 2015 by Art Leonard No Comments

Last night at Carnegie Hall, the American Symphony Orchestra presented “Opus Posthumous,” a concert devoted to works that were not first performed until after the deaths of their composers. These included an opera overture by Franz Schubert to an opera never published or performed in his lifetime, Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 00 (a study symphony he composed but did not consider suitable for performance), and Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 1, which was composed for entry into a composition contest. Dvorak sent his only copy of the handwritten manuscript, which was never returned to him, and the work was long thought lost, only to show up years later in a bookstore where it was purchased by somebody who shared the composer’s surname but was not a relative. The piece was first performed long after the composer’s death, and then in an abridged version.

This was a very pleasant concert of 19th century romantic music, but none of the works is an imperishable masterpiece. Indeed, my opinion after the concert was that Dvorak was lucky the piece was not played when it was written, because it could have impeded his career. The orchestration is amateurish in places, creating a heavy and clotted effect, and the development of the themes is unduly repetitious. Some good ideas are just buried under clumsy orchestration, unfortunately.

Dvorak and Bruckner were late bloomers as mature symphonists. Dvorak wrote nine symphonies, but published only the last five, and until mid-20th century, most music lovers would say their favorite was Dvorak’s Symphony No. 5, the “New World Symphony.” By the time I was learning about classical music in the 1960s, it was usually identified as Symphony No. 9 (old “No. 5”), as by then the earlier unpublished symphonies had been edited and published in a complete edition of Dvorak’s music. But the first four symphonies are rarely performed, as he really didn’t hit his stride until “old No. 1,” which is now known as Symphony No. 6. Old No. 2 became Symphony No. 7, Old No. 3 became Symphony No. 5, and Old No. 4 became Symphony No. 8. This is all ancient history for the generation of classical music lovers following me. With Bruckner, there is last night’s Symphony No. 00, then his first published Symphony, No. 1, then Symphony No. 0 which comes before Symphony No. 2. Bruckner was very self-critical and withheld pieces from publication if they didn’t meet his high standards. Bruckner’s situation is complicated by his tendency to revise, abetted by some of his younger supporters who thought his music would be more readily accepted if he would just shorten things! So there are multiple versions of most of the published symphonies, including so many versions of Symphony No. 3 and Symphony No. 4 (two completely different versions of one of the movements are floating about) that one can easily lose count.

Last night’s Bruckner was a pleasant student work that shows few signs of the mature composer. Indeed, it sounded much like the Schubert overture that came before it on the program.

There’s nothing seriously wrong with any of these pieces, but none of them stand to become part of the standard orchestral repertory, as they are put in the shade by other works of the composers. The ASO played them all very well under Leon Botstein’s direction, as members of the audience had a rare opportunity to hear works by major composers that they are not likely to get to hear in live performance ever again! This is central to the ASO’s mission under Botstein’s leadership. To cast light in dark corners….

American Symphony Revives Von Schillings’ “Mona Lisa”

Posted on: February 20th, 2015 by Art Leonard No Comments

I haven’t been blogging concerts and theater this season… too overwhelmed with legal developments and work. But having just attended the American Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Max Von Schillings’ opera “Mona Lisa” at Carnegie Hall, I couldn’t resist offering a few observations.

First, to thank Leon Botstein, the ASO, the singers and chorus for the enormous effort that goes into putting on these revivals of forgotten music. They usually have to go to significant lengths to track down scores and parts, and everybody involved has to spend time learning music that nobody has performed and that they are unlikely to be called upon to perform again. This is especially true of the singers. While they don’t memorize their parts, as they would have to do for a staged production, it still is a tremendous effort to get beyond sight reading, putting in significant time to learn a part that it is unlikely one will ever sing again.

I emphasize the unlikeliness of living off this capital investment because accomplished as this opera is, it isn’t likely to hold the stage. There are too many problems with it. The plot is a silly soap opera, and the piece is structurally unbalanced to a pronounced degree. The first act is about twice as long as the second, and this disproportion is even more pronounced when you look at the libretto: 42 pages of text, of which all but the last 9 pages come before the intermission. (And a word to the ASO and Carnegie Hall – when so much has been invested in producing a libretto booklet and distributing it to everybody, why do you dim the lights during the performance, making it eye-straining to follow along? What is the sense in this??? It is particularly useful to be able to follow text for a virtually unknown work. I found the effort and eyestrain exhausting and gave up mid-way through the first act. Better luck with the second, which may be why I enjoyed it a bit more.) The music, while containing moments of great beauty and inventive orchestration, lacks truly memorable thematic material. The first act just goes on for too long, and the fine singers are taxed with technically difficult extended solos that have little real dramatic pay-off.

All that said, it is fantastic that the ASO makes the effort to produce these concerts. They are a window into the past that is so valuable for music lovers, because it gives us a context within which to understand the masterworks contemporary with it and to appreciate them all the more. This piece was composed in 1913-15 and premiered in 1915. Thus it is contemporary with Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, and postdates by just a few years Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and 9th Symphony. It falls somewhere between the works of these composers – not nearly as dissonant and rhythmically inventive as the Stravinsky, but perhaps a further step in the line of Mahler, albeit without Mahler’s flare for inventing and developing memorable themes. Listening to Schillings, one understands the background against which Mahler and Stravinsky was composing, and why their works survive to be part of our standard repertory.

The performance seemed more than adequate to communicate what is interesting about the work. The lead singers – Petra Maria Schnitzer, Michael Anthony McGee, and Paul McNamara – each provided very fine, alert, involved singing, the orchestra — while it could have used a bigger string section to balance the big wind complement (I counted 7 horns on stage) — seemed well-rehearsed and confident, Botstein’s direction was very effective, and the supporting roles and choral interventions, including some soloists from the Bard Festival Chorale, was fine (if the chorus was underused by the composer). Hat tip to James Bagwell for preparation of the chorus, which was sterling when called upon.

Although the work itself is not particularly memorable, certainly the evening was…

ASO Triumphs with Obscure Schnittke Cantata – Nagasaki

Posted on: December 11th, 2014 by Art Leonard 1 Comment

I’ve had such a busy semester with legal developments that I haven’t been posting about the concerts, opera and theater that I’ve been attending for the Fall 2014 season. A big stack of programs has accumulated, and sometime during the next few weeks I hope to catch up with some retrospective postings, since I’ve attended plenty of events that are worthy of comment.

But I decided to make an exception and post today about the extraordinary concert I attended last night at Carnegie Hall. The American Symphony Orchestra directed by Leon Botstein presented a program titled “Requiem for the 20th Century.” The 20th century is one that many people will say can never really rest in peace because of all the horrific things that happened during it, the millions slaughtered in wars, felled in epidemics and natural disasters, and so forth. That aside, Botstein decided to put together three works responsive to that difficult century, and it made for a highly unusual and absorbing program.

The only purely instrumental piece on the program was the 6th Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), a British composer whose active career spanned the first half of the century and then some, since he was composing until the last year of his life. The 6th Symphony was his first major work to be premiered after World War II, having been written during 1944-47. It received its first performance by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in April 1948. The American Symphony Orchestra’s founder, Leopold Stokowski, recorded the piece with the New York Philharmonic in 1949, and that gripping performance has never been out of the catalogue very long since then. (The most recent CD coupling I know pairs it with a recording by Dmitri Mitropoulos and the NYP of the 4th Symphony.) V-W eschewed the idea that this was a “war symphony” or directly related to the war. Although he wrote his share of program music, he considered this symphony to be purely abstract music, but listeners and commentators were not willing to accept this, because its unusual structure suggested all kinds of extra-musical images. The opening movement is noisy, turbulent, churning, although interspersed is a noble march-like recurring theme that sounds like a slightly more modern version of an Elgar Pomp and Circumstances march. The scherzo, which comes third, features a jaunty saxophone solo. The second movement is an ominous slow march that gathers tension several times and can’t help but invoke military images in the listener. The finale, titled Epilogue (a favorite designation by V-W), is marked Moderato but feels slower, perhaps because of its evanescent tonal quality as it just sort of fades away at the end, not with the tragedy of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique or the dying gasps of Mahler’s 9th, but more like a gentle ascent to heaven, perhaps the best comparison being a much quieter version of the ending of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony. V-W gave some hint of what he was trying for by quoting some Shakespeare: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded [by] sleep.”

I thought last night’s performance was exemplary in every respect. Botstein set perfect tempi and the orchestra achieved miracles of virtuosity. I can’t recall the ASO ever playing better than it played in the V-W 6th. My concert-going companion remarked on this at intermission, and I totally agreed. In fact, the last time I thought they had played this well was several years ago when they performed Vaughan Williams’s 4th Symphony in a program dedicated to British music between the world wars, back in the days when they were performing at Avery Fisher Hall. Botstein and this orchestra have a real flare for middle-period V-W. I hope we can expect Symphonies 3 and 5 from them sometime in the future. I consider the 5th Symphony among V-W’s greatest achievements, but it is rarely played in the U.S.

Second up on the program was Gyorgy Ligeti’s Requiem. Ligeti (1923-2006) was one of a handful of composers who became dominant figures in the second half of the 20th century, bursting through to the general public’s consciousness when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used excerpts from his Requiem in the soundtrack of the film “2001 – A Space Odyssey.” It was interesting to hear the entire piece, which doesn’t get played very much, probably due to its great challenges to both listeners and performers. Ligeti went through phases where his music became more or less listener-friendly as he became intrigued with particular modernistic devices. This piece emerged in 1965 during his extreme modernistic phase, featuring tone clusters and deep buzzing sounds from the chorus, and tortured lines with great interval leaps for the mezzo and soprano soloists. The text he selected was a portion of the Latin mass for the dead: Introitus-Requiem aeternum; Kyrie; De Die Judicci Sequentia (Dies Irae etc.), Lacrimosa. However, because of the nature of his musical setting, the text was only intermittently understandable. The point of this piece is that the voices are treated like instruments, the text provides inspiration for the composer, but the listener could just as well ignore the actual words and follow the dramatic-emotional path of the music. The performance sounded like it might have used a bit more rehearsing, as there were a few tentative spots, but overall it was highly effective. The vocal soloists, soprano Jennifer Zetlan and mezzo Sara Murphy, coped skillfully with the extremes called for by the music, and the Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by James Bagwell, seemed entirely caught up in the challenge of Ligeti’s demanding vocal parts.

Finally, the great discovery of the program: Alfred Schnittke’s cantata, Nagasaki. I was unaware of this piece before first hearing about this program, and had no idea what to expect. I’ve got a fair number of Schnittke compositions in my music collection, but I have rarely heard anything by him performed live in concert. The NYP has performed a handful of things in the time I’ve been a subscriber. I’ve always found him to be a difficult composer to pin down, because over time his style of music went through many changes. My biggest complaint in the past has been that I’ve found many of his works to be essentially incoherent as musical statements – elusive, without any strong apparent structure, and lacking in any kind of memorable melodic invention. Nagasaki came as a complete surprise. Schnittke (1934-1998) wrote it as a “graduation exercise” set by his teacher Evgeniy Golubev during his final year at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. Golubev assigned Schnittke to write a piece using a poem by Valdimir Sofranov about the bombing of Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Schnittke cut up the original poem a bit and interpolated verses by two other authors to create a five-movement work for chorus and large orchestra with a solo mezzo-soprano part in the fourth movement. As a student work it is quite derivative, and it predates all of the stylistic experimentation that characterizes his mature work. In some ways it seems reminiscent of various early and mid-20th century composers. Shostakovich, of course, as well as Prokofiev (especially Prokofiev of the Alexander Nevsky film score). The final movement had, to me, a strong flavor of Miklos Rozsa, the Hungarian-born composer who made his greatest contributions as the write of epic Hollywood film scores. I’ve read some comments on-line suggesting Orff’s Carmina Burana as an influence, but I don’t hear that at all.

In any event, I thought this was a tremendous accomplishment for a conservatory student and was in some ways the most interesting and absorbing piece on the program. This is not to say that it is “better” in any respect than the V-W symphony or the Ligeti Requiem, each a masterwork in its own way. The cantata is so different in style and execution as to make any such comparison unnecessary. But it was a work that stood on its own. I was impressed with the range of its moods, the skillful use of the orchestra and voices (especially percussion effects), and the strong melodic gifts that I don’t recall from his later pieces. In some ways it sounds like Soviet Realism poster music, such as the Shostakovich 11th Symphon;, in some ways it reminded me of the Weinberg symphonies that have been revived lately (mainly on recordings). Some post-concert checking showed that there is one commercial recording, by BIS as part of their on-going Schnittke series, and it is currently out of stock at most distributors. My first attempt to order a copy from a third-party distributor on Amazon brought me an email stating my order had been cancelled because the vendor who listed it had failed to notify Amazon that it was out-of-stock. I just ordered from another third-party vendor on Amazon and have my fingers crossed, because I would like to get a chance to become better acquainted with the piece.

Botstein, mezzo Sara Murphy, the Bard Festival Chorale (James Bagwell, director) and the ASO played their hearts out in this piece. It was like they really believed in it, were delighted with their discovery, and were eager to share it with an audience for whom it would be a genuine discovery. This was a “wow” performance, and I wish there were some way that they could release the concert-recording (the ASO records their Carnegie Hall concerts for internal use and some on-line distribution) on a commercial CD. Or perhaps interest a record company in doing a studio recording. The work deserves exposure.

Leon Botstein generally wins acclaim for his imaginative programming and brickbats for his conducting, but I thought last night that he had achieved truly fine performances of three difficult pieces and I could not find any fault with his conducting on this occasion. Indeed, he had the entire large ensemble, with chorus and soloists, playing at the highest international level, and he seems to have inspired everybody involved to perform above and beyond expectations.

Bravo!

Cultural Diary – January 27 2014 through February 9 2014: From Marc Andre Hamelin to Bill Finn

Posted on: February 13th, 2014 by Art Leonard No Comments

Didn’t expect to see those two names in the same headline? Well, I’m multicultural…. I’ve been so consumed with writing about legal developments that I now have a backlog of cultural events upon which to comment, so here goes:

On January 27, I attended a recital by the Canadian-American pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, the recital auditorium under the main stage. Hamelin likes to play unusual repertory, so the biggest single piece on the program was Nicolas Medtner’s Piano Sonata in E Minor, Op. 25, No. 2 “Night Wind”. He is also a composer, so we got to hear the New York premiere of his “Barcarolle.” Finally, for the second half, reverting to the core repertory of every serious pianist, he played Franz Schubert’s Impromptus, D. 935. On the one hand, this was an exceptionally fine recital in that the pianist brought his usual magical technique to the diverse array of works, playing with intense concentration mixed with the requisite humor and wistfulness when called for. On the other hand, the Medtner was a bit of a “black hole” in the middle of the recital. There is a reason almost nobody plays Medtner in public. Despite the high regard in which he was held by such as Rachmaninoff, it is difficult to give sustained attention to his music. The themes are not memorable enough to sustain such attention through a long and convoluted development. Perhaps the first movement of his sonata is in sonata form (I don’t know) but it is difficult to follow this as a listener without a score in my lap, because it all seems so diffuse and wandering. There were many distinctive parts to arouse interest, but the whole just seems to sprawl. I don’t think one could blame Hamelin for this — he always provides about the most persuasive case one could imagine for anything he plays — and he has recorded all of Medtner’s sonatas and much of his other music, so I would treat him as authoritative in this repertory. It’s just repertory that I find less absorbing. Hamelin’s own piece, the Barcarolle, seemed to owe heavy debts to Debussy, and I thought it slow going at times. I would certainly want to get better acquainted with it. The Schubert was absolutely magnificent. Robert Schumann had observed that these four impromptus could together make up a monumental piano sonata, and Hamelin treated them that way. Each is a masterpiece, and each received the treatment it required. This was totally effective playing, sensitive to nuance and variety of sonic color. I can’t imagine these pieces being better played. The audience’s ovation earned three encores: a Debussy piece, a weirdly fantastic take on Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and a virtuosic etude by de Schloser that is a genuine rarity — probably because few pianists can manage to play it. But Hamelin can play just about anything. (Proof of this statement: Try his complete recording of Godowsky’s take-offs on the Chopin etudes – a total wow and you won’t believe that one pianist is responsible for what you are hearing.)

January 29, I attended Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” a play based on a short story by Alan Sillitoe adapted for the stage by Roy Williams and directed by Leah C. Gardiner. This story achieved a fair amount of fame as a result of a movie based on the story that made a splash decades ago. This production puts a different slant on the story by having an extraordinary young black actor, Sheldon Best, played the lead role which Tom Courtenay, a white actor, played in the film. The essence of the story is that a young, somewhat aimless tough guy gets caught in a robbery and sent to a reformatory, where his talent for running is discovered and leads to his extended training for a long-distance race against students from a private school. He is encouraged in this by the authorities of the reformatory, including one particular counselor, but conflict emerges from his fear that he is being “used” and, ultimately, this leads him to make a difficult and controversial decisions as the end of the race draws near. I thought this staging was superb, and the performance by Sheldon Best was pure magic. According to the bio in the program Best is a graduate of Brandeis University and has already performed in a wide variety of stage productions both in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., ranging from classical theater (Romeo & Juliet, playing Romeo, at the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival) to the most contemporary stuff, like a production of The History Boys. He’s also been on CBS TV’s “Person of Interest.” Be on the lookout for him. Very impressive! The rest of the cast was fine, too, but Best really stood out.

The American Symphony Orchestra presented “This England” at Carnegie Hall on January 31. The program was intended to show a range of British music from mid-20th century by composers whose music is infrequently encountered on American concert programs. None of the music could be deemed totally neglected — I have recordings of everything on the program — but I had never heard any of it performed live prior to this concert directed by Leon Botstein. They began with a suite from Sir Arthur Bliss’s music for the British film “Things to Come”, which was based on work of George Orwell. This was the most “listener-friendly” piece on the program, as one would expect from a 1934-35 film score, falling close to the category of “easy listening” and being at times so simple-minded that I found my own attention wandering. Frank Bridge’s Phantasm (Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, 1932) followed, with the excellent Piers Lane as soloist. Lane has been a mainstay of Hyperion Records’ Romantic Piano Concerto series, and has a serious interest in unusual repertory for his instrument. The Bridge piece has moments of interest, but using the word “rhapsody” to describe a piece can frequently be a sign of formlessness and sprawl, and such was the case here. Lots of interesting moments, but they didn’t add up to a really coherent musical statement. After intermission, we heard Robert Simpson’s “Volcano,” a brief tone poem for brass and percussion which is avowedly pictorial and which did not hold much interest for me. I first became aware of Simpson as a leading biographer of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen as well as being an important Bruckner scholar, and over the years I’ve acquired recordings of most of him symphonies and other major pieces. I wish the ASO had played a symphony instead, because I found those to be works of great substance, but the length of this program limited them to a shorter piece. Finally, the one real masterpiece on the program, William Walton’s Symphony No. 2, which I have long enjoyed on records and despaired of ever hearing in live performance (unless I happen to travel to England and really luck out with the concert schedule). I love this piece, but I was really let down by the ASO performance, which I found underpowered and lacking the requisite virtuosity from the orchestra. Whether this is a function of limited rehearsal time, the leadership from the podium, or the limitations of the players (who don’t have the kind of full-time working relationship of an orchestra that plays together week in and week out) is hard to say, but, especially compared to my favorite recording by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, this one seemed to lack impact. Szell takes everything faster, which keeps the occasionally loose structure from falling apart and gives sharper point to the complex rhythms. There is a big fugal passage in the last movement that is a highpoint of the piece, but the ASO strings seemed to be struggling to stay together during that episode, which the Cleveland strings take in their stride in the recording. I would urge anybody who was at the concert and hearing the Walton symphony for the first time to withhold judgment until you’ve heard a recording by a major orchestra. I don’t know if the Szell is still in print – it was a 1960s Columbia stereo that achieved brief CD reissue, coupled with the composer’s Hindemith Variations (another fine work almost never played) and the Partita for Orchestra. We really should hear more Walton in U.S. concert halls. I would love to hear what Alan Gilbert and the NYP would do with this piece. I would also highly recommend Walton’s Symphony No. 1, especially in the old RCA recording by Andre Previn and the London Symphony, which has been intermittently available on CD.

On February 2, I was back at Carnegie Hall for a performance of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Theodora” by conductor Harry Bicket, the Choir of Trinity Church, and The English Concert, an early music ensemble, with soloists Dorothea Roschmann as Theodora, Sarah Connolly as Irene, David Daniels as Didymus, Kurt Streit as Septimius, and Neal Davies as Valens. This is a tale of Roman times, when the governor of Antioch is trying to stamp out the heresy of Christianity. Theodora is a proud Christian who will not be swayed to honor the gods of Rome, and Didymus is a Roman soldier secretly in love with Theodora (and secretly a Christian). Tragedy ensues, at great length. (This three-act oratorio, when performed uncut, is as long as a Wagner opera, and some impatience in the audience express itself in early departures, especially during the second intermission.) Theodora was not a success at its first performance. The program note by Janet Bedell suggest that the subject matter had something to do with this, mid-18th century Brits having little interest in works celebrating early Catholic martyrs, but I suspect it is also the heaviness of the last act and the absence of the more rousing elements – especially choral – that made such works as Judas Maccabeus and Messiah such monster hits in the composer’s lifetime. In any event, this was all-star casting with expert direction from the podium, spot-on choral singing, and an instrumental group that provided a rich, colorful framework for the vocal acrobatics. I found it totally absorbing through the entire, lengthy proceeding. But I rather suspect this is a piece that would work best on recordings, where one could take it one act at a sitting and not be overwhelmed by its length.

Looking for an extremely unusual and effective theatrical experience? Imagine Tolstoy’s great novel “War and Peace,” stripped of the war scenes, leaving only the soap opera of the home front, transformed into a rock musical, played in large space decked out in the style of a Russian night club, with musicians and singers distributed throughout the space, the singers in constant motion, threading their way through the space and around platforms surrounding the audience. This is “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” currently playing at Kazino, a large tent-like structure raised on a vacant lot on West 45th Street near 8th Avenue. The adaptation and music is by David Malloy, as directed by Rachel Chavkin and commissioned and developed by an outfit called Ars Nova. It is super-fine, and super-charged, and loads of fun. The program book and production are designed to help the audience quickly sort out the numerous characters and their relations to each other, and then the fun begins. Some of the members of the cast play musical instruments from time to time, and there is singing and much athletic running about. The title characters are played by David Abeles (Pierre) and Phillipa Soo (Natasha), but the character who emerges as the most memorable and central to the plot is Anatole, a Polish aristocrat played by Lucas Steele who is the brother-in-law of Pierre and who makes it his goal to seduce his friend Andrey Bolkonsky’s fiancé, Natasha, while Bolkonsky is off with the Russian army fighting the forces of Napoleon. Lucas Steele as Anatole is HOT, HOT, HOT. And I don’t mean just because he is handsome and talented; I mean because he radiates an intensity that is positively electrical. He’s helped in this by the plotting and dialogue, of course, but Mr. Steele is ideally cast in this part. Also quite effective: Blake Delong in the dual role of Andrey Bolkonsky and his father; Nick Choksi as the saturnine Dolokhov, Grace McLean as Natasha’s aunt Marya, Amber Gray is Helene, wife of Pierre and sister of Anatole, and Brittain Ashford as Sonya, Natasha’s cousin and confidant. But everybody is truly excellent in this, and conductor Or Matias keeps it all together and constantly driving forward. It’s a long show, even without the war scenes (yes, a War and Peace without General Kutuzov or Napoleon Bonaparte), but it never seems long because the staging is so lively and absorbing. A total hit that should run forever… I was there on February 5.

Interesting coincidence. Sid Caesar, the great TV comedian of the 1950s, passed away the other day, just as City Center Encores! was reviving a show that was written specifically for his talents, “Little Me” – book by Neil Simon (who wrote for Caesar’s TV shows), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, and music by Cy Coleman. The show is based on a novel by Patrick Dennis (famous for “Mame”) which purports to be the autobiography of the great fictional entertainer Belle Poitrine, reminiscing about her life and loves (all seven of her loves, some of whom she even married). In the original production, Caesar portrayed all seven, requiring quick costume changes and changes or characterization (appearance, gestures, costumes), of which he was a master. Although the show was a success, it was not a big hit and faded from view after its initial run. This revival cast Christian Borle, star of the ill-fated “Smash” TV series and Tony winner for Peter and the Star-Catchers on Broadway, playing all the Sid Caesar roles with great success. Veteran Judy Kaye was superb as the elderly Belle, reflecting on her past, and Rachel York was stunning as the young Belle. The cast was packed with excellent people, as is the norm for Encores!, with the extraordinary dancers being a special highlight. Somehow, choreographer Joshua Bergasse managed to recruit an outstanding crew. (Bob Fosse was the original choreographer for the Broadway production.) Rob Berman led the excellent Encores! orchestra, and John Rando created a production that managed to feel complete even without any elaborate sets or many props. I’m glad to have had a chance to hear a live performance of this piece. It’s not a great work – Cy Coleman went on to do many extraordinary shows – but many of the songs are quite attractive, and I’m inspired to go back to the original cast album.

I attended the matinee performance of “Little Me” on February 8, and topped off the evening with an excellent program at Peoples’ Symphony Concerts, which presented the conductor-less East Coast Chamber Orchestra at Washington Irving High School. ECCO was started by a bunch of Curtis Institute students who enjoyed playing together and wanted to keep doing so after going their various professional ways. Now several years out of school, they are members of major symphony orchestras, established chamber ensembles, but make a commitment to come together a few times a year to rehearse a program and present it in various venues, including PSC now for several years. Their performances are always a highlight of the series. They are a true democracy, rotating seats so that everybody gets a change to play first-desk and to deal with solo passages at some point. They are also innovative in programming, mixing new music with established repertory. For this program, they gave a stylish rendition of Mozart’s Divertimento in B, K. 137, followed by the NYC premiere of David Ludwig’s “Virtuosity: Five Microconcertos for String Orchestra,” Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, Judd Greenstein’s Four on the Floor, a string arrangement of a motet by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (an Italian Renaissance master), and concluding with a string orchestra rendition of Ravel’s String Quartet. The entire program was wonderful because of the total commitment and high technical skill of the players, as well as their collective interpretive insights. The Ludwig piece gave the first desk in each section a chance to shine in solo passages, and they truly shone. I found both Ludwig and Greenstein were worth hearing, challenging in some respects but not straying too far from the mainstream of tonal contemporary composition. The arrangement of the Satie, originally a piano piece, for string orchestra by a former member of ECCO, Michi Wiancko, superbly captured the piece’s mystery. I’ve heard Debussy’s orchestration of this piece, which also uses some wind instruments, but this all-string arrangement was fine, with the inspired idea of having the theme assigned to different sections rather than keeping it in the heights as the piano version might suggest. Hearing a rich string orchestra sound transformed the Ravel Quartet into a much “bigger” statement without losing any of the delicacy and gossamer of the quieter passages. I would account this concert a total success.

Finally, and a bit off the beaten path, on February 9, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, NYC’s LGBT synagogue, presented its annual “Shabbat Shirah” concert at Merkin Hall. This year the program was a tribute to CBST member William Finn, a prominent member of the Broadway community whose musicals have brought LGBT issues into the mainstream, especially through his three early shows that were combined to make up Falsettos. For this occasion, Finn helped to assembly a group of performers who have taken part in various productions of his shows, with a fine young pianist, Joshua Zecher-Ross, as musical director, and Shakina Nayfack as overall director. The result was a marvelous program that ranged over Finn’s achievements, including selections from the Falsetto shows, Stars of David, Elegies, A New Brain, LIttle Miss Sunshine, Royal Family (a work in progress), and Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was a one-of-a-kind event that could not be topped, especially when one includes Mr. Finn’s performance of a song conceived for the occasion!

So, my past few weeks were packed with cultural events. This week has provide a bit of a break, but my cultural calendar resumes Saturday night at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series with a concert by Jonathan Groff, whose work on “Spring Awakening” caught my attention and whose current venture – the HBO series “Looking” – is bringing him to an entirely new audience beyond his Broadway theater achievements. I look forward to this with much anticipation. Also on the schedule in weeks ahead: A Man’s a Man, Werther (Metropolitan Opera), Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall, Prince Igor (Met Opera), Alexandre Tharaud at Peoples’ Symphony (quick, get tickets, this is going to be so exciting on March 1), Goerne and Eschenbach performing Schubert’s Schoene Mullerin at Carnegie Hall, Enchanted Island (Met Opera), Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and that takes me up through Spring Break.

Weekend Music in NYC: New York Polyphony & R. Strauss’s “Feuersnot”

Posted on: December 15th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

Quite a combination, this…. On Saturday evening, I battled through the snow to Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel to hear New York Polyphony present a splendid Christmas season program under the auspices of the Miller Theatre Early Music Series. On Sunday afternoon, it was much less of a battle to get to Carnegie Hall and hear Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra present Richard Strauss’s early, and forgotten, opera, “Feuersnot.”

From the sublime to the ridiculous?

New York Polyphony is one of my favorite early music groups, and their recent BIS release has been nominated for a Grammy Award, a source of much excitement since they were nominated in the chamber music and small ensembles category, where they will be competing with some of the world’s leading musical groups. Their speciality is Tudor-period English polyphonic music, but they venture round about that central core repertory, and also perform modern pieces written or arranged for them. This Christmas-season program was wide-ranging, from early chant to some world premieres of music by Andrew Smith and John Scott. From their core repertory came a motet by Thomas Tallis and a seasonal song by Richard Pygott, both of whom worked at various times at the Tudor Court in London. There were also roughly contemporary works by Philippe Verdelot, Tomas Luis da Victoria, and Jacob Clemens ‘non Papa’. For more contemporary tastes there were arrangements of early music by Geoffrey Williams and Alexander Craig. Andrew Smith, a young British-born composer with whom the ensembles has cultivated an on-going relationship, had a Miller Theatre commission, Nowel: Arise and Wake, and earlier settings of Veni Emmanuel and Ave maris stella.

As always with this group, everything was presented with extraordinary polish and care, but also with rhythmic excitement and great expressive force. NYP is a real phenomenon, worth going out of your way to hear. In this small church space, their voices combined with the reverberant acoustic to create a very special sound. The members of NYP — Geoffrey Williams, countertenor, Steven Caldicott Wilson, tenor, Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone, and Craig Phillips, bass — were all in excellent voice last night.

The American Symphony under Botstein’s leadership is devoted to exploration, seeking out infrequently performed works by great composers and the hidden gems by composers whose works are rarely encountered on our concert stages. Strauss is hardly overlooked in the opera house, having written central repertory pieces like Salome, Elektra, and Rosenkavalier, and a string of other works that hover around the edges of the repertory. Virtually forgotten is Feuersnot, a work of the composer’s early maturity, coming after some of his famous early symphonic poems but before he really hit his strike in the opera house with Salome. The opera’s plot is arrant nonsense and even a bit offensive from a modern perspective. Set in medieval Germany, it proposes a young sorcery student, smitten with the mayor’s daughter, who through a spell casts the village into darkness until the prim young woman gives in to his advances and abandons her virginity. The high point, dramatically, comes when the entire town is singing, at the top of their lungs, “Give it up, Diemut, give it up, give us our light back.” And when she does, there is an outburst from chorus and orchestra like you wouldn’t believe. (You had to be there….)

They put together a splendid cast, with Alfred Walker and Jacquelyn Wagner doing the honors as the leading characters of Kunrad, the obsessed young sorcery student, and Diemut, the mayor’s daughter. The standouts in the supporting cast were Branch Fields, a sonorous bass singing the small but key role of an innkeeper, and Jeffrey Tucker, also a bass, as the mayor. The Manhattan Girls Chorus gave an enthusiastic rendition of the children’s chorus part from memory, and the Collegiate Chorale Singers voiced the townsfolk with equal enthusiasm. I’ve rarely heard the ASO play so beautifully, and Leon Bostein led a spirited performance.

But the piece, itself, is barely worth a listen. Of course it is gorgeously orchestrated and harmonized, and the bits and pieces of quotes from Wagner are amusing, but overall there seemed to be little substance, and, deadly for an opera, little in the way of memorable tunes for the main characters to sing. A long soliloquy for the sorcery student towards the end seemed to go on forever without saying anything memorable, despite Mr. Walker’s best efforts to animate it. I think this would not really be stageable today, and if anybody were to put it on, who would go to see it? But that’s why the ASO is valuable. Reviving something like this for a listen gives us a chance to connect the dots between the young Strauss who is remembered for orchestra pieces like Don Juan and Tyl Eulenspiegel, and the mature Strauss revered for Rosenkavalier. The legacy of the former and the foreshadowing of the later are clearly heard in this piece. Somebody should put together a short orchestral suite….

From Machaut to Sondheim – A NYC Weekend Cultural Diary

Posted on: November 18th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

This was a very busy weekend on my concert schedule — actually, an extended weekend since it began on Thursday night — so I have much to report. On Thursday night I was at the New York Philharmonic from a program that included the NYC premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Oboe Concerto, played by the NY Philharmonic’s excellent principal oboe player, Liang Wang. On Friday night I attended “Armida: A Baroque Opera Celebration” presented by New Opera NYC, one of the numerous small opera companies that have sprouted up in recent seasons, performed at a venue previously unknown to me, a dance studio on West 60th Street way west towards the Hudson River. On Saturday afternoon, I headed over to City Center for an Encores! presentation of titles “A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair,” made up of music from Stephen Sondheim’s shows. That evening, at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, I head a program of Renaissance music titled “A Love Affair,” performed by England’s Orlando Consort. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in Carnegie Hall for “Elliott Carter: An American Original,” presented by Leon Bostein and the American Symphony Orchestra. So, literally from the 14th century of Machaut to the 21st century of Sondheim I covered a lot of bases this weekend.

The New York Philharmonic is playing at such a sustained level of excellence these days that it is hard to find any fault with anything they are doing. Thursday night’s concert, conducted by Alan Gilbert, just returned from several weeks of guest-conducting in Europe, maintained that high standard. Gilbert has championed the music of Christopher Rouse, programming, playing and recording it in Stockholm during his previous music directorship, and bringing it to New York, where the Rouse is now composer-in-residence at the Philharmonic. (The premiere of his “Prospero’s Rooms” was one of the highlights of last season.) Although the Oboe Concerto is almost a decade old, this was its first Philharmonic performance, as a previously scheduled debut was postponed for various reasons. This concerto is unusual among Rouse’s compositions in being relatively “laid back.” The composer has in many of his compositions imported influences from American pop and rock music, but this piece struck me as more indebted to the American classicists of the mid-20th century than to the pop artists of more recent years. Perhaps this has something to do with the nature of the oboe itself, as most effectively a lyrical instrument that beautifully sustains long unfolding musical lines that can cut through a full orchestra, at least in the hands of a master virtuoso such as Wang. I’m hoping that the partnership of Gilbert and Rouse results in some recordings, including this concerto. They have produced a recording of music by the prior composer-in-residence, Magnus Lindberg, so we have a precedent, and the Philharmonic does have a recording contract with the Danish DaCapo label, so I’m hopeful! * * * The remainder of the program was made up of two tone poems by Richard Strauss, Don Juan to open the program, and Also Sprach Zarathustra to close it. This virtuoso orchestra tossed off both pieces with aplomb, and brass especially covering themselves with glory. One might complain that at times the music was unrelievedly loud — partly an artifact of the very lively acoustic in Avery Fisher Hall — and that the Philharmonic’s lack of an installed pipe organ, and thus necessary resort to an electric organ, slightly undercuts the effect of Zarathustra. Not much one can do about those things, although perhaps Gilbert can work on getting a wider dynamic range at the lower end. I was hearing the first performance of this program, and Gilbert had only been back rehearsing the orchestra as of Tuesday, so it is possible that things got progressively more nuanced over the course of performances, and tomorrow night’s final run will probably be even more spectacular, if that is possible, with the entire program really “played in.”

New Opera NYC is the brainchild of producer Igor Konyukhov and music director Raphael Fusco. Apparently lacking the resources to put on a full-scale Handel opera with sets and cast appropriate to such an endeavor, they made up their own Handel opera, for which Konyukhov wrote an original libretto (in Italian), extracting an overture from Faramondo, arias from Rinaldo, Agrippina, Giulio Cesare, Delirio Amoroso, Orlando, Tamerlano, Imeneo, and Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (plus some inserts areas from works by Vivaldi and Broschi). Maestro Fusco also composed some recitatives to tie the piece together. Konuyukhov’s story, set in an unspecified time and place, was set in a landfill/dump where members of the upper-crust go to harass the beggars and rag-pick from the junk. At least, that was Act I. Much of Act II took place as a Dream set in the residence of one of the upper-crust, who is pursuing one of the women from the landfill! Figure it out. I really couldn’t make much of it, and the person operating the projected titles seem stymied at times, finally apparently giving up during the 2nd act, leaving the same titles up without regard to what was being sung. A kink to be worked out. That said, the music was nicely performed, with a small orchestra of period string quintet, Oboe, guitar and harpsichord (played by Maestro Fusco). Minimalist sets (counting heavily on rear projects that did not always make sense) but suitable costumes and some crazy wigs!! The singers were all at least adequate, perhaps Amelia Watkins (Armida) and Dmitry Gishpling-Chernov (Almiro) more so. One of the things they lacked as a good counter-tenor, thus necessarily omitting some of Handel’s finest works from inclusion. I think that would have helped the show. Certainly this company deserves encouragement. Check out their website: www.NONYC.org.

The Sondheim show at City Center was conceived, according to the program book, as a result of Sondheim editor Peter Gethers coming to see Wynton Marsalis’s Cotton Club Parade and asking Encores! Artistic Director Jack Viertel whether Marsalis had ever played any of Sondheim’s music. It turned out that Marsalis, as a youngster, had been in the pit orchestra for the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, and was receptive to trying something new. They put together a song and dance show in the now well-established tradition of Sondheim anthology productions, taking songs from wherever they could be found – musicals, film scores — and enlisting Marsalis and the various arrangers who work with him to recast them in a form suitable for Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which has the standard configuration of trumpets, trombones, double reads, double bass, piano and percussion. Sondheim essentially without strings. Forget all those delicate Jonathan Tunick orchestrations that are as much a part of Sondheim’s sound as his melodic lines and harmonies. And it does make a difference, because Sondheim is not just a composer, he’s a lyricist as well — indeed, that was his starting point as a creative artist — and the words are as important, if not more so, to a Sondheim song as the music. There were plenty of problems with this show, but the biggest, in my view, was to sabotage the lyrics all too often with the loud jazz band and the underamplified singers, who got buried at times. Three of the singers were proven Broadway stars: Jeremy Jordan, Norm Lewis, and Bernadette Peters, but unaccountably the producers enlisted somebody without Broadway credentials, Cyrille Aimee, to be their second female lead. Aimee is a jazz singer, and proved less of a presence than the others. Bernadette Peters is always doing a star turn, and had quite a few here, although she was more restrained than one remembers from Broadway. Lewis and Jordan were also more restrained than one remembers from their theater gigs. Only once or twice did Jordan really cut loose. Perhaps this was partly a problem of inadequate time to put the thing together, as they sounded tentative at times. Four fine dancers — Meg Gillentine, Tyler Hanes, Grasan Kingsberry and Elizabeth Parkinson — were assigned roles as “shadows” in dance for the singers. Any Sondheim anthology will have its pleasures, because his songs are wonderful, although not always suitable to excerpt or dragoon into service, since they tend to be very tied to the situations they illustrate in the original shows for which they were composed. I can’t say that this was a failure; it seemed to engage the audience, but in the end I agree with my concert-going companion that this wasn’t a “wow.”

The Miller Theatre Early Music services presentation of the Orlando Consort came closer to being a “wow” in my estimation. This group recently recorded songs from Guillaume de Machaut’s masterwork, “Le Voir Dit,” a compilation of poetry, letters and music intended to illuminate a lengthy “affair” (not known whether it was physically consummated) between the elderly Machaut and a young woman, and the first half of this concert was made up of eight songs that appear on the recording. For the second half, the Orlando Consort gave us a “tasting menu” from the leading compositional lights of the 15th and 16th centuries: Dunstaple, Dufay, Ockeghem, Compere, Brumel, desPrez, Clemens non Papa and Gombert. The first half was all in the royal, flowery French of the 14th century royal courts; the second in the church Latin of the great cathedrals and royal chapels from mid-15th to early-16h century Europe. The contrast worked well, although I retain my reservations about the performance of secular Renaissance music in a space like St. Mary the Virgin, a resonant church space that clouds harmonies and makes most of the sung text unintelligible. (They hand out translations, then dim the lights to make them hard to read…. Go figure!) Most of the sacred music works better in this space, although even here the music that was primarily intended for chapel use can be a bit encumbered by the reverberation in a large church space. The Orlando is a fine group, with a membership that has evolved over time. The young alto (countertenor), Matthew Venner, made a strong impression as he seemed to casually float his high notes above the polyphony of the group. The other three members of the Orlando Consort – tenors Mark Dobell and Angus Smith, and baritone Donald Greig, who wrote the excellent notes – are all performers of the highest order. (Greig’s name is familiar from several groups, including the Tallis Scholars.) This was an excellent program in terms of variety, but the second half lacked any really big, weighty piece as an anchor.

Finally, the American Symphony’s Carter program on Sunday. I must admit right up front that I find much of Carter’s music quite difficult to cope with as a listener, especially – but not exclusively – when I am hearing something for the first time. Surprisingly, however, two of my first-time experiences proved the easiest to digest, loving early compositions for high voice and orchestra. Mary MacKenzie sang “Warble for Lilac-Time” and Teresa Buchholz “Voyage”, the former on Whitman verses, the later on Hart Crane. Both were composed during 1943 and I suspect have not been performed much since. They are in the composer’s early, tonal style, which owes more to Copland than to the thornier models of Schoenberg, Sessions, etc., that characterize the composer’s middle period. I thought MacKenzie a bit more successful than Buchholz in projecting Carter’s lyrical lines through the sometimes thick orchestrations. The Pocahontas suite, drawn from a ballet that received a theatrical presentation on Broadway during the 1930s, was also easy listening (and I have a recording of it, so was not venturing completely unprepared.) But Sound Fields, a string orchestra piece that seemed to last much longer than its actual duration because nothing much was happening to engage the listener’s mind, struck me as forgettable. The Clarinet Concerto brought forth Metropolitan Opera Orchestra principal clarinet Anthony McGill, and it is always a pleasure seeing and hearing him perform, even with thorny material like this that is not written to be particularly ingratiating. The score requires the soloist to walk about the orchestra, playing each of the many movements from a different location. I could not discern any particular spacial effect that was enhanced by this movement, which just seemed a bit silly to me. The piece had some fine moments, but was not particularly easy to follow as a musical argument. The grand finale was the Concerto for Orchestra that Carter wrote for Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic. They gave it an uncomprehending premiere performance — Carter was not really Bernstein’s cup of tea. I’ve heard several performances over the years, but this is a nut I’ve yet to crack. My mind loses focus a few minutes in and I sort of zone out because I find it hard to find music, rather than organized noise, in this piece. Perhaps, some day, I’ll experience a breakthrough. The orchestra seemed well-prepared for this concert, and Leon Botstein (the conductor), certainly showed a flair in the earlier music as well as the Clarinet Concerto. Will Carter’s music enter the repertory and be played regularly by orchestra’s a generation from now? Prediction is difficult, but I am dubious. Unless there is a wide-scale revival of his earlier, more listener-friendly music, this does not strike me as the kind of stuff that conductors will voluntarily perform (pace James Levine, who’s a glutton for punishment where Carter is concerned) or that listeners will go out of their way to hear. Attendance was pretty dreadful at Carnegie Hall yesterday, but Carter’s reputation for being difficult precedes him.

The New Season Begins – Opera, Symphony, Film, Theater

Posted on: October 5th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

My new culture season is duly launched. As of last night, I’ve taken in: “Anna Nicole,” apparently the last production of New York City Opera, presented in collaboration with the Brooklyn Academy of Music on September 21; the new film “Don Jon” by Joseph Gordon-Levitt at the AMC Theater on Broadway at 84th Street on September 29; a memorial celebration for my friend, the late Ari Joshua Sherman, at the DiMenna Center for the Arts that same evening, September 29; my first New York Philharmonic subscription concert at Lincoln Center on September 28; the new Broadway revival of “The Glass Menagerie” at the Booth Theatre on October 1; and the American Symphony Orchestra’s “New York Avant-Garde” concert at Carnegie Hall last night, October 3.

Herewith a brief summary of these experiences as the season really gets under way.

New York City Opera has been an important part of my cultural life ever since I arrived in the city in the fall of 1977. I have particularly appreciated their staging of new works and works that are not central to the repertory, since the mainstream stuff is available in generally superior performances from the Metropolitan Opera. It isn’t so much that City Opera was less expensive to attend, but that it was usually more interesting to attend, even when they were putting on standard works such as “La Boheme” or “Carmen,” since they usually found an interesting “twist” that made them seem like new works as well.

But a series of management mistakes, and the heavy fundraising competition of the Met, together with the impact of the Great Recession on charitable donations, has put the City Opera into a financially untenable position. If there had to be a last production, I’m glad it was a new opera, a premiere for New York, and something that lived up to most of the advance hype. Although I found Mark-Anthony Turnage’s score to be serviceable rather than memorable, the libretto by Richard Thomas would have made an excellent play with incidental music on its own, and the production directed by Richard Jones with the music conducted by Steven Sloane was consistently entertaining and attention-grabbing. From one perspective, this might seem a trivial piece of musical theater fluff about a gold-digger who was famous for marrying an elderly billionaire and then battling his family in court for her intestate inheritance as a surviving spouse, but it had an awful lot to say as wry satire about our celebrity-obsessed society and the dangers that these “no-talent” celebrities run into as they encounter the hangers-on, exploiters, and – in this case—hostile “in laws.” Too bad there is unlikely to be a film from this production, but I think there may be one from the original English production at Covent Garden.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” is reportedly his first attempt at scripting and directing a major motion picture – starring himself – and I think Gordon-Levitt pulls off the Woody Allen act with aplomb. He impersonates a “dumb jock” Jersey boy obsessed with his body, his car, his pad, his boys (friends) and his girls (sex objects). He haunts the suburban nightclubs looking for chicks to score, and because he’s a self-confident, sexy hunk, he can have almost anybody he wants. But the sex is not satisfying – there’s really no emotional connection – and he’s convinced that masturbating to pornography is more satisfying. As a result, even though he’s having sex several nights a week with real women, he’s getting off to porn several times a day. Something has to give. And there’s the story, when he happens upon somebody to whom he’s attracted who doesn’t want to jump into bed without some personal acquaintance. Of course, this isn’t a perfect film. No film is. But it is dramatically credible, well written, acted, and directed, and I found it compelling – at least to the extent that my mind never wandered, as it tends to do if a film bogs down in slow, talky, lassitude. This one never does.

The New York Philharmonic initiated its subscription season with a program that could easily be criticized as semi-pops concert fare: Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Light, not challenging, virtuosic, catchy tunes and rhythms, etc. But, as expected from this orchestra conducted by Music Director Alan Gilbert, everything was so well-played, and the program was actually so canny in terms of constructing a concert program that “works,” that it was a pleasure to attend. I might have wanted the Ravel to be slightly faster in pacing, but the moderate tempo made it easier to appreciate the subtlety of orchestration, and then to remark to myself about how whoever was responsible for the orchestration of the Bernstein piece really knew their Ravel!! This is a bit of a question, actually: Bernstein followed Broadway tradition of having the usual experts translate his piano score into an orchestration for a standard B’way pit orchestra, and various other hands were involved in extracting the dances, knitting them together into a continuous piece, and expanding the orchestration for a symphony orchestra. Of course, the musical ideas are Bernstein’s, but it’s unclear to what extent the orchestration is. He didn’t even conduct the world premiere, although he subsequently recorded the piece with the NYP, and surely he approved the final orchestration and probably tweaked it. . . As for the Tchaikovsky, Yefim Bronfman, who is the orchestra’s “artist in residence” this year, was reportedly playing it for the first time in public! Hard to believe, not just because it was such a well-conceived and executed performance, but because he was born and educated in Russia and is famous for his Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich concerto performances. Every young pianistic firebrand is expected to have this concerto in his or her active repertory. But for whatever reason, he hadn’t gotten around to Tchaikovsky until the NYP asked him to do it to start off this season. Magnificent! He and Gilbert should get right into the recording booth together.

Ari Joshua Sherman, know to his friends as Josh, passed away last spring in Vermont. He had not let many know that he was seriously ill, and the NY friends were used to long periods between sightings after he and Jorge had shifted their principal residence from W. 108 Street to Addison, VT. Jorge arranged two events for friends to remember Josh, one in Vermont and the other at the DiMenna Center (housed in the basement level of the Baryshnikov Center on W. 37 St.). The event was a worthy tribute and remembrance, including performances of music that had been important to Josh, who was an enthusiastic chamber musician (violin) and music lover, interspersed with readings from the memoirs he had worked on over many years. So sad that a long-time friend is gone, but consoling that he had such an interesting and productive life.

Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” put him on the Broadway theater map, but I find it a lesser work than some of his subsequent plays. This performance is really mainly about Cherry Jones, one of our greatest living actors, whose portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in this production is a completely convincing one. Talk immediately began about Tony nominations as soon as previews began, and this is now expected, regardless what happens the rest of the season. Zachary Quinto as her son Tom is not so totally successful. I thought it took him some time to warm up at the performance I attended, not really coming alive fully until well into the first act, but burning on all cylinders in the second. Celia Keenan-Bolger was extraordinary as Laura, the shy daughter, and I thought her performance was right up there with Cherry Jones in terms of accomplishment and vivid characterization. I enjoyed Brian J. Smith as “Jim, the gentleman caller,” who appears only in the second act, but then for an extended scene with Laura that provides great comic relief and emotion combined. Smith was just right in this part. In short, this was a performance that worked very well, performed on a set that worked very well, with fine incidental music by Nico Muhly, in a wonderful conception of the script directed by John Tiffany. The show, whatever its flaws, was certainly worth reviving in a production of this quality as a showcase for these fine actors.

Finally, the American Symphony. At first it appeared this concert might be lost to the Carnegie Hall stagehands’ labor dispute, which had cause cancellation of the opening night gala the prior evening. But the union had made its point and was content to hold back for a while and allow the season to begin with the ASO while continuing to negotiate, and I just heard that a bargain was struck on Friday.

Leon Botstein’s program, “New York Avant-Garde”, took as its point of departure the famed “Armory Show of 1913” that formally introduced New York to the new “modernism” in visual art. Botstein suggests that this program had echoes in music that first began to be expressed in New York concert halls after World War I, in a burst of musical modernism that extended to the end of the 1920s. This showcase for the avant-garde presented music by George Antheil (A Jazz Symphony 1925), Charles Griffes (Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918), Aaron Copland (Organ Symphony 1924), Carl Ruggles (Men and Mountains 1924), and Edgard Varese (Ameriques 1918-21). The particular Carnegie connection was that the first and last of these pieces were first performed at Carnegie Hall during the 1920s, the Varese in a performance conducted by Leopold Stokowski, who would later in his career found and conduct the ASO.

I thought the concert was very successful, especially given the uncertainties of the day that had resulted in some juggling of last-minute rehearsal time. The ASO secured the services of three excellent soloists. Pianist Blair McMillen was a joy to hear and to watch as he threw himself body and soul into the Antheil Jazz Symphony, which is not quite a piano concerto but at times seems to think it is one, with extended piano cadenzas that McMillen tossed off insouciantly. Randolph Bowman, principal flutist for the Cincinnati Symphony and the ASO’s summer seasons at Bard College, was excellent in the sumptuous Griffes piece. Stephen Tharp pulled out all the stops (couldn’t resist that) in the Copland, whose organ part was originally conceived for Nadia Boulanger’s American tour and appearances with the Boston Symphony and New York Symphony. This first half of the concert was just one thrill after another.

I was a bit less thrilled by the second half. I’ve never quite “gotten” Ruggles. Although at times I find his orchestration to be interesting, I don’t get a feeling of organic flow to his compositions, which to me are an essential part of music. It feels too static, too granitic, although on this occasion I had a more favorable reaction to the middle movement – Lilacs – which actually seemed to flow in the hands of the ASO string players, who made a warm sound amidst the pounding brass of the outer movements.

The first time I heard Ameriques at Carnegie Hall, Christoph von Dohnanyi was conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. On that occasion, it struck me forcibly how strongly influenced Varese was influenced by Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, which was first performed shortly before World War I broke out. I was less struck by the resemblance at the ASO concert, perhaps because Botstein’s interpretation was less overtly aggressive than Dohnanyi’s.

Overall, however, I thought this was a useful concert for bringing to light music that doesn’t get played very much, and the orchestra did a marvelous job of pulling it together and making it work.

Cultural Diary – March 23 through May 1, 2013 – A Busy Season in NYC

Posted on: May 2nd, 2013 by Art Leonard 1 Comment

Between work, concerts and theater, I’ve been so busy that I’ve generally avoided blogging about the things I’ve been attending over the past five weeks or so. This is a catch-up posting, briefly mentioning that things I haven’t had time to write about in longer posts. This post details the musical events (including opera). In another, I’ll address the theatrical ones.

Beginning at the beginning, with Richard Goode, and – surprise – ending with him as well, because the first concert I’ll note included his performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on March 23, and the last is his solo recital last night in the same location, devoted to late piano music by Ludwig van Beethoven.

The Schumann Concerto was excellent, in the best “Goode” manner – solid, mainstream tempi, beautiful piano sound, careful but energetic navigation of the rhythmically difficult finale. Indeed, it is hard to understand how a pianist and orchestra can get through that finale without a conductor at a reasonably fast tempo (it is marked “Allegro vivace”), because of the syncopation in the score that must make coordination difficult unless everybody figures out how to ignore the bar lines and just go with the flow… They obviously figured that out here, and the effusive ovation of the audience earned a more bountiful encore than usual: the “Adagio” second movement from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, K. 453! For the first half of the program, Orpheus gave us a fleet, songful run through Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A, Op. 90, the “Italian” symphony.

The next afternoon, I was in for another pianistic treat as Yevgeny Sudbin presented a brilliant recital at Town Hall under the auspices of Peoples’ Symphony Concerts. Sudbin has been a favorite since I acquired his first solo recording on the BIS label of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. His BIS albums are cherishable as much for his revelatory program notes as for his playing. This is a man who thinks deeply about everything he plays, and always has cogent reasons for his departures from tradition — such as his decision to record the original version of Rachmaninoff’s 4th Piano Concerto rather than the composer’s revision. He presented a mixed recital on March 24, beginning with four Scarlatti sonatas, continuing with Frederic Chopin’s Ballade No. 3, Op. 47, and completing the first half with Claude Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse. After intermission, we had Franz Liszt — Funerailles from the Harmonies poetiques et religieuses, and Harmonies du soir from the Transcendental Etudes. The final programmed piece was Alexander Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5, Op. 53. Encores included more Scarlatti, some Rachmaninoff, and Sudbin’s paraphrase on Chopin’s Minute Waltz. Some people find Sudbin too cerebral or too dry, but I find him wonderfully clear-eyed and totally engaged in whatever he is playing. I enjoyed every moment of this concert, and could have listened to him play even more encores! He is in the midst of recording a Beethoven Concerto cycle with Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra, and every one will be worth hearing, but his newest recording, just out, of Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto with Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony is superb in every way, and Shui’s urgent traversal of the rarely performed Symphony No. 1 must be heard to be believed. He makes more sense out of this piece than anyone I’ve heard.

On April 17, I experienced a feeling of deja vu when I opened the program book in Carnegie Hall for the concert by Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden: An all-Johannes Brahms program: Academic Festival Overture, Violin Concerto (with Lisa Batiashvili), and Symphony No. 4. Deja vu because this is exactly the program I heard in the fall of 1974 when Klaus Tennstedt made his conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra! Exactly the same!! And what a difference. Tennstedt made the BSO sound like a rich, luxuriant central European big-city orchestra. By contrast, Thielemann made his group — a central European big-city orchestra — sound nothing like that at all. The sound was much more tightly defined, the strings less luxuriant, and phrasing more clipped, less songful… At every turn, this Dresdners sounded less central European than that long-ago evening with the BSO. Of course, memory can play tricks, and perhaps my memory has enlarged the differences. In any event, Thielemann and his band were definitely worth hearing, especially in the Symphony, which got an excellent performance, particularly in the intense and dramatic finale. The Academic Festival was big-boned and joyous, the Violin Concerto sweetly songful with Batiashvili a stronger soloist than was Miriam Fried in my recollection of that long-ago Boston affair. Thielemann has a sense of humor as well: For an encore they played the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin by Richard Wagner. Only a conductor with a real sense of humor would cap an all-Brahms program with a Wagner encore.

On April 19 I enjoyed the rare treat of a New York Philharmonic program devoted entirely to American music – almost unheard of in these parts. Alan Gilbert led the world premiere of Christopher Rouse’s “Prospero’s Rooms” and was joined by Joshua Bell for Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) for Violin, String Orchestra, Harp and Percussion. After intermission, we had Charles Ives’s Symphony NO. 4, with Eric Huebner the prominent piano soloist, members of the New York Choral Consortium intoning the opening hymn and the worldless choral lines in the finale, and Case Scaglione occasionally standing up to co-conduct during the most rhythmically complex passages of the second and fourth movements. This was a wonderful concert!! I always experience some nostalgia for my college days when I hear works by composers who were among the musical composition graduate students at Cornell when I was there as an undergraduate. Earlier this season, it was Steve Stuckey, and at this concert, Christopher Rouse. His piece was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” and paints a vivid, moody picture with his usual extreme dynamic contrasts. It was much fun to hear the first time through, and I hope a recording eventuates, since I’d like to get to know this one better. The Berstein is always a pleasure to hear, and Bell knows how to dramatize the music effectively. I’ve yet to hear a totally convincing concert performance of the Ives — I’ll always have the Stokowski/ASO world premiere version in my head from listening to that old LP so many times and trying to figure out what was going on in the even-numbered movements. Gilbert has the measure of the piece, and actually made an even richer thing out of the third-movement fugue than Stokowski. But nobody exceeds the old wizard in finding the transcendental pitch of the last movement. This performance left me engaged, but not quite exalted.

Then to NYC Opera at City Center for Gioachino Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” in a rather minimalist production relying on projections rather than sets. I thought the cast was better than the show in many respects, and David Salsbery Fry, who stood in on short notice for the indisposed David Cushing as Moses was excellent. This is not an opera that we are going to hear at the Metropolitan any time soon, so City Opera does a distinct service in giving it a short revival for our delectation. But it is clear why it is not in the standard repertory. Rossini in a serious mood does not entertain as well as Rossini in a more frivolous mood – think Barber of Seville – and there are only a handful of really memorable moments in the score.

As the season neared its end, I managed to squeeze in a last visit on March 31 to the ongoing Schubert & Co. lieder project. I wish I could have attended more of these, because the young artist performing at these concerts — all volunteers — have been superb, and the opportunity to hear so much rarely, if ever, performed music is unlikely to recur soon. Schubert wrote more than 500 songs, and the goal of Lachlan Glen and Jonathan Ware, pianists and co-Artistic Directors of this series, was to present all of them over the course of the season. By March 31, they had really and truly gotten the hang of the challenging acoustics at Central Presbyterian Church, producing a fine balance of voice and piano, and they assembled a terrific cast to explore settings of verses by Ruckert, Holty, Schreiber and Pyrker — not all deathless poets, but usually deathless music. Singers for the evening were Simone Easthope (soprano), Michael Kelly (baritone), Alexander Lewis (tenor), and Jazimina MacNeil (mezzo-soprano), and Glen and Ware shared collaborative honors with pianist Ken Noda, who partnered with Lewis for his extended set of eight songs in the middle of the concert. Lewis was a new discovery for me, very exciting, brilliant dramatization of the texts, large handsome voice, and a very attractive manner. But all the performers were great, and I so regret I’ll be out of town this weekend and so will miss the big finale of concerts on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening – Schwanengesang, of course, to wind things up, with baritone Edward Parks and pianist Lachlan Glen, whose growth as a collaborate keyboard artist over the course of this season has been extraordinary! Congratulations to this enterprising crew!

It was back to the New York Philharmonic for me on April 3, for a collaboration with pianist Andras Schiff in Bach keyboard concerti (Nos. 3 and 5) and orchestral music by Mendelssohn and Schumann. I find Schiff’s approach to the keyboard concerti a bit heavy-handed compared to Murray Perahia, whose recording of this repertory I love. Also, he’s a bit more straight-laced than David Fray, whose recording and DVD of this repertory are most entertaining. But Schiff’s approach has it’s place, too, bringing lots of beefy good cheer to the fast movements — played at a more moderate pace than the competition, it must be said — and much poetry to the slow ones. The early Mendelssohn string sinfonia (the composer was 14 when he wrote it, and not yet the mature musical thinker he would become in just a few short years) was a bit of a throw-away on this program, but the best came last. Schiff’s conducting of the Schumann 4th Symphony was superb in every respect. I would love to hear him conduct the entire cycle.

For an interesting break, I went up to Miller Theatre at Columbia University on April 6 to hear baroque ensemble “Les Delices” play a program they called “The Age of Indulgence,” a collection of instrumental music by French baroque composers: Philidor, Rameau, Mondonville, Duphly, and Dauvergne. One might think that an entire evening of French baroque chamber pieces would blend into an indistinguishable blur, but not so in the hands of these excellent musicians – Debra Nagy, Julie Andrijeski, Scott Metcalfe, Emily Walhout and Michael Sponseller. Everything was richly characterized, contrasts were pointed up, and teh evening ended on a sprightly note with Dauvergne, a composer rarely encountered. One could easily hear why Rameau is the one of these still best remembered today, as his Concert No. 3 from the Pieces de clavecin en concert was the most inspired piece of the evening, but everything heard on this program was worth hearing and in the context provided an interesting display of the variety possible within a very narrow range of stylistic permissibility.

On April 7, back to Town Hall for PSC’s presentation of the Johannes String Quartet, playing Brahms (naturally!) No. 1, Op. 51, No. 1, Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit”, and then Brahms No. 3, Op. 67. The Johannes are well-named. They do know how to play the music of their namesake composer with grace, poise and insight. That said, I like the rather more assertive performances on the Emerson Quartet’s recording, but the Johannes’ way was no less valid. The Dutielleux is a startlingly modern effusion of the mid-1970s, treasurable more for sound effects than for melody or motivic development.

PSC provided a very different string quartet experience with the Quatour Ebene, performing at the High School of Fashion Industries (as the renovation of Washington Irving High School’s auditorium drags on and on). I am a big fan of Quatour Ebene, four young Frenchmen who play with incredible subtlety. Perhaps they could have been a bit more forceful in Mozart’s Quartet K. 465, the “dissonant” quartet, but after that was out of the way, the evening was sheer bliss. Their performance of Schubert’s Quartet D. 804, called the “Rosamunde” because its variations movement uses a theme from the composer’s incidental music for the play of that name, was incredible. That’s the only word for it. They found a degree of mystery, pathos and tension throughout the piece that was unrivalled in my experience. At the end of each movement, there was a collective feeling of “wow!” from the audience. Everybody was buzzing during intermission. And then the Mendelssohn, ending with an “allegro molto” supercharged to the finish line!! (I promptly ordered a copy of their new recording, which includes the Mendelssohn Op.80 – just arrived and not heard yet, so I hope it adequately recreates the experience! For encores they played some selections from their “Fiction” album, short pieces based on popular songs, including “Some Day My Prince Will Come” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You haven’t really heard it until you hear what these guys can do with it. They even sing some of it. (I already knew they could sing… Their brief vocal performance with Philippe Jaroussky on his new DVD recital release is worth the price of admission.) Can’t get enough of the Ebene. This was probably the most memorable concert I’ll mention in this diary.

On April 21 I was up at Symphony Space for the last of this season’s Classics Declassified programs by the American Symphony Orchestra. Leon Botstein selected music from Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde, marking the Wagner bicentennial year. But I thought this program was a rare misfire from Botstein and the orchestra. His talk verged on incoherence, disorganized, rambling, and full of too-long orchestral examples with no real follow-up to tie up his pre-playing propositions. The performances themselves sounded underrehearsed and uninspired, with the possible exception of the Lohengrin Prelude to Act III, although I still had the triumphal sound of Thieleman and the Dresdners in my ears, so it wasn’t a fair comparison.

On April 25 it was back to City Center for Jacques Offenbach’s La Perichole – or what was purported to be La Perichole – presented by New York City Opera. This was one of Christopher Alden’s re-imaginings of a classic musical theater piece, and I thought he managed to trash the piece pretty well. The singing and acting was fine, but the staging was bizarre, reducing the French light opera tradition to slapstick and pratfalls. I was not amused, just aghast. I give the cast credit for gamely going along with the shenanigans and doing their best, but still….

For a complete contrast April 28 I journeyed to the East Village for the Greenwich Village Orchestra’s Wagner program, conducted by Pierre Vallet. This is an amateur neighborhood orchestra with high goals, and they set themselves quite a challenge with this program. Indeed, some of this music would put the most exalted professionals to the test, and it was to the credit of orchestra and conductor that they got through the program with honor. (Indeed, their playing of the Prelude and Leibestod bested the ASO from a week early, IMHO, although they had the advantage of Christine Goerke singing the Liebestod while the ASO went it alone.) Madame Goerke, a fine Wagnerian soprano, also gave us two arias from Tannhauser and Senta’s Ballade from Dutchman. Jesse Blumberg, in splendid voice, sang Wolfram’s Hymn to the Evening Star from Tannhauser as well. This was an afternoon well spent.

On April 30 I attended the last NYFOSNext program of the season. This is a series mounted by the New York Festival of Song to showcase music by living composers in the intimate surroundings of the DiMenna Center on West 37th Street. Each program is “curated” by a composer, who assembles a program from the music of his or her friends and acquaintances calling upon a variety of talented young performers. For this program Mohammed Fairouz brought together fellow composers Daniel Bernard Roumain, Paola Prestini and Huang Ruo to provide a very diverse evening of song. I have been a Fairouz fan since hearing his contribution to the 5 Boroughs Songbook, and it was a delight to hear three offerings from him: Tahwidah and For Victims (both on the new Naxos CD of his chamber works) and The Poet Declares His Renown. I would say that the strongest of these is For Victims, a Holocaust remembrance piece that was strikingly sung by baritone Adrian Rosas with the Catalyst String Quartet. (The equally striking performance on the recording is by David Kravitz and the Borromeo Quartet.) Other excellent singers for the evening included Kristina Bachrach and Fang Tao Jiang (sopranos) and Samuel Levine (tenor). I enjoyed hearing so much new music, so well and energetically performed. Thanks to NYFOS for putting on this series!!

Finally, coming full circle, last nights recital at Carnegie Hall by Richard Goode. Goode chose to play the last three Beethoven piano sonatas, Opp. 109, 110 and 111, with six bagatelles from Op. 119 to introduce the second half of the program. I had the strange feeling of duality in this program. The first half struck me as a bit sleepy, even boring. Maybe it was me. I don’t know. But I found Goode’s approach to Op. 109 and Op. 110 to be so restrained, flowing, understated, as to pass by uneventfully, which one doesn’t expect with Beethoven. But something really seemed to charge him up during the intermission, because the second half was Beethoven on steroids. The Bagatelles were charming and sparkling, the firsrt movement of Op. 111 ferociously dramatic, and the final movement, the extended variations, a symphony of contrasts culminating in that heavenly, quiet ending. He refused to play an encore, despite the rapturous audience response, and I fully agreed – one can’t play anything after Op. 111. It’s a natural concert closer, puts a period to things, and shouldn’t be followed by some trifle.

Thus ends a prolonged period of season-ending musical activities. (But not entirely, of course, since the season has weeks to run, and because the Philharmonic will be away on tour for part of that time, the season is really extended to the end of June, so more to come…)

Unfamiliar Operas in NYC Debuts

Posted on: March 18th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

Andre Previn’s opera based on Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire” was composed for the San Francisco Opera about fifteen years ago, had a successful premiere, but had never received a staging in New York. Renee Fleming, the soprano for whom the leading role of Blanche Dubois was written, is an artist-in-residence at Carnegie Hall this season, and was able to enlist the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to include a semi-staged version of the opera as part of their subscription series, performed last Thursday, March 14, so I attended this as a St. Luke’s subscriber.

Putting on this kind of semi-staged opera performance is a tricky business. The orchestra is scrunched across the back of the stage, as Carnegie Hall has no orchestra pit, and the performance was staged with props (no sets) in the front half of the stage. The conductor had a television monitor showing the stage action, and small screens lined the front of the stage facing the cast, who were thus able to follow the direction of the conductor, who was standing behind them. There was no amplification of singers as far as I could tell. I was sitting up in the first row of the balcony. Coordination between podium, singers and orchestra went very smoothly, but at times some of the singers could not be heard very well above the orchestra – a problem I suspect would evaporate were the orchestra in a pit below the stage. (This was well demonstrated a week earlier when the New York Philharmonic presented the Broadway musical, “Carousel,” at Avery Fisher Hall with the orchestra on stage and the action in front of the orchestra with some amplification of the voices, resulting in excellent intelligibility. Although purists may complain about amplification, it is a practical solution to voice and orchestra performances where there is no recessed orchestra pit.)

That said, this was an enjoyable and effective staging by Director Brad Dalton, Lighting Designer Alan Adelman, and costume designer Johann Stegmeir. Patrick Summers conducted the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Fleming made a wonderfully expressive Blanche, even when she couldn’t clearly be heard. (Projected titles above the stage certainly helped.) Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Stanley Kowalski was never difficult to hear; his big, booming voice projected splendidly over the orchestra, but Carnegie’s acoustics are sufficiently reverberant that the projected titles also helped to make his part more understandable. Susanna Phillips also gave an excellent performance as Stella Kowalski, and Anthony Dean Griffey was quite moving as Harold Mitchell, the simpleton friend of Stanley who romances Blanche. Perhaps the most striking performers, at least visually, were the “Men of New Orleans,” supernumeraries without lines to speak or sing! Other supporting roles were all up to snuff.

Previn’s music is serviceable without being extraordinary. He is a master of orchestration and effectively creates the requisite moods and emotional states, evoking New Orleans, the French Quarter, and the sleezy ambiance of the rundown neighborhood where the Kowalskis live. The score is richly lyrical, but I did not hear lots of memorable tunes. I hesitate to paint with too broad a brush as to this, but much of modern American opera is dramatically effective without being thematically memorable, and Previn’s work here seemed to me to fall into that category. However, if the piece were taken up into the repertory and performed with some frequency, the tunes might register more.

Tthis is not just a problem of American opera. On Sunday I attended the American Symphony Orchestra’s presentation of Heinrich Marschner’s gothic opera, “The Vampire,” first performed in Leipzig in 1828. My description above of Previn’s work on “Streetcar” might well be applied to Marschner’s opera. It is dramatically effective, the writing for orchestra is well-judged, the choral music is splendid, the score is “richly lyrical,” but again memorable tunes were not present in abundance. Leon Bostein conducted with great energy, the orchestra played their hearts out (but sounded a bit ragged in some particularly challenging spots), and the large cast sang splendidly. Nicholas Pallesen made a great vampire (“Lord Ruthven”), especially in his seduction scenes with Tamara Wilson and Jennifer Tiller. I think the audience favorite was Vale Rideout, a tenor who sang the part of Edgar Aubry, the man who breaks his oath to save the woman he loves (romantic cliche, but heartwarming all the same). Other role singers, all very accomplished, included Alison Buchanan, Justin Hopkins, Carsten Wittmoser, and Glenn Seven Allen.

Marschner’s opera alternates dialogue with musical numbers. The cast performed the dialogue in English to varying degrees of effectiveness — they are, after all, singers, not actors — but the English language dialogue helped in the absence of surtitles to make the action comprehensible, as the sung numbers were performed in German and Carnegie Hall, as is its annoying custom, dimmed the lights even though the ASO distributed libretti with English translations; not much use if it’s too dark to follow along without eyestrain. (Why don’t they adopt the sensible practice of leaving the lights at normal strength for vocal music that is being performed without projected titles?)

The Collegiate Chorale were truly the heros of the afternoon, performing the many choral numbers with enormous spirit and panache, a credit to their director, James Bagwell.

Perhaps the somewhat nonsensical story line works against this opera belonging in the repertory, although putting aside the supernatural element of the vampire the plot is no more nonsensical than many others that hold the stage, but in an age that is reviving minor early Rossini and the earlier Wagner efforts, this is a piece that should get a look-in from a major opera company in New York. (Hint, hint, Metropolitan Opera, this could actually be a big hit!). The seeds of Wagner are very evident! The piece certainly could use a good modern digital recording with major talent.

Busy Musical Calendar – NYCO at BAM, ASO at SS, NYP (Carousel), CBST at SWFS

Posted on: March 5th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

I’ve been so busy attending interesting musical events over the past few weeks that I’ve fallen behind in noting them here. So, here goes:

The New York City Opera, having foresworn Lincoln Center, is in its second year of wandering, with four operas on the schedule. The first two, which I’ve now attended, were presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I went to successive Saturday performances of “Powder Her Face” by Thomas Ades (music) and Philip Hensher (libretto) on February 23 and “The Turn of the Screw” by Benjamin Britten (music) and Myfanwy Piper (libretto) on March 2. This was the 20th century British half of the season. Next up will be two operas presented at New York City Center, Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” and Offenbach’s “La Perichole,” the 19th century Romantic half of the season.

While I thought that both of the BAM productions were worthy efforts in the sense of providing a showcase to relatively contemporary works, in the end I was not persuaded that either work is all that wonderful. “Powder Her Face” presents imagined scenes from the life of the Duchess of Argyle, famously divorced by the Duke for her brazen philandering. This piece struck me as intended to make a sensation rather than a serious musical statement. In fact, with some exceptions I found the music rather thin on the ground, more like a soundtrack for a movie (in the traditional sense of background commentary to heighten emotions or stimulate mood) than an opera where the music takes a central place. The production was undoubtedly true to the composer’s intent in packing the stage with nude bodies. The best bits from the score might be heard on an EMI recording of an orchestral suite comprised of the overture, a waltz, and music from the finale. “The Turn of the Screw” is derived from a short ghost story by Henry James, with prominent roles for two child characters, here sung by performers who struck me as slightly too old for the roles. The music has more substance than that of “Powder,” but I don’t find it anywhere near as strong a score as “Billy Budd” or “Peter Grimes.”

Production values for both were very high, with workable sets, innovative lighting, and excellent costumes — especially for the nude men! Conductors Jonathan Stockhammer (“Powder”) and Jayce Ogren (“Screw”) did what could be done for these scores, with excellent work from the instrumental ensembles (not full opera orchestras) in the pit, and fine contributions from the singers. The cast list in the “Powder” program was not particularly helpful, since several singers took on multiple roles, but were unhelpfully identified in the program only with one role each. Allison Cook as the Duchess seemed comfortable with her challenging role, and the “corps of lovers” seem to have been recruited at a serious gym. Sara Jakubiak was very convincing in the lead role of the Governess in “Screw,” but I was less convinced by Dominic Armstrong’s performance as “Peter Quint” — although much of the time he sounded like Peter Pears, for whom the part was written, he seemed a bit strained by the wide range of the music – perhaps this goes with the territory. Jennifer Goode Cooper was suitably creepy as the other ghost, Miss Jessel. I recall Benjamin Wenzelberg’s performance as Miles from Symphony Space last year, when he was perhaps just within the proper age range for this role. Now he seems a bit old for the part, although he sang it very well.

On Sunday, February 24, I attended the American Symphony Orchestra’s Classics Declassified program on Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 at Symphony Space. Leon Botstein, a bit of a contrarian where Bruckner editions are concerned, decided to present the original version of the score, which Bruckner subjected to substantial revisions after Herman Levi rejected the opportunity to conduct the premiere on the ground that he couldn’t understand the score. (It’s hard in retrospect to sympathize with Levi, having now heard that original score.) Ultimately a revision was conducted in 1892 by Hans Richter, to great success. Leon Botstein’s talk provided an illustrated comparison of Bruckner’s first thoughts with his revised version, and proved most illuminating, although I suspect it was most comprehensible to those of us who are reasonably familiar with the standard version usually performed today.

I was very impressed by the full performance of the piece. Botstein prefers faster-than-usual tempi in Bruckner, and I think he is correct in this, since the music coheres much better when not unduly stretched out. Even at these brisk tempi, the piece took more than 70 minutes. The brass playing was extraordinary, and the comfortably small concert hall at Symphony Space helped the string section – numbering somewhere between a chamber orchestra size and a full symphony orchestra size – to full and rich sound. After hearing this original version in concert, I think most of the changes Bruckner made were improvements, but that may be as much a function of familiarity as of actual quality. This deserved to be heard. The more of late Bruckner I hear, the more I am persuaded that his musical genius approached that of his contemporary and antagonist, Brahms.

On Thursday night, February 27, I attended the second of the New York Philharmonic’s five performances of “Carousel,” the musical show by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (1945). “Carousel” induces nostalgia in me because I played double bass in the instrumental ensemble for a production at Oneonta High School when I was just a lad. The handful of performances followed many weeks of rehearsals, by which time I had pretty much memorized the dialogue and lyrics. Although it’s been many years since I listened to the cast recording, it all came flooding back on Thursday night. Every song is skillfully constructed to advance the action, most of the tunes are difficult to get out of your head, and Rodgers’ harmony is pretty sophisticated for 1940s Broadway stuff. I don’t think Hammerstein’s lyrics have aged quite as well, and the handling of Billy Bigelow’s abusive treatment of Julie Jordan would not meet today’s standard of political correctness, as the lyrics incorporate sexual stereotypes in ways that today sound naive or offensive -sort of letting Bigelow “off the hook” because the pressures of his life help to explain his physical abusiveness.

The production was excellent, with special commendation for NYC Ballet dancers Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild (choreography by Warren Carlyle), who made something splendid out of the ballet-pantomime in the final scenes. Nathan Gunn and Stephanie Blythe, the two opera singers in the cast, seemed over-microphoned to me. They really didn’t need amplification in this hall, but their fellow cast-members from the Broadway theater did, and I guess it wouldn’t work to have some amplified and some not. Kelli O’Hara, Shuler Hensley, Jason Daniely, Jessie Mueller, Kate Burton and John Cullum rounded out the cast, and Rob Fisher, the original music director from City Center Encores!, led the orchestra. It is quite a luxury to hear this score played by the NY Philharmonic string section, just slightly reduced from the size that would be used for Beethoven symphonies. The overture in this rendition was very well upholstered. John Rando’s direction had the cast moving about well in the restricted space they had using a stage extension in front of the orchestra (with some platforms for added movement). The production was beautifully designed and staged, coming very close to what one might consider a fully-staged production were the orchestra to be moved down into a pit. These performances deserved the encomia they’ve received in the local press.

Finally, last night I attended the 18th Annual Shabbat Shirah Concert presented by Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, my synagogue. This year the event, held at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side, was devoted to celebrating and honoring Jonathan Sheffer, composer-conductor-pianist, who is a member of our board of trustees and a very active congregant in supporting the musical program. Sheffer displayed all his musical talents yesterday, including even singing for an encore number. He announced that he plans to set the entire Friday night Shabbat service, and has begun with a very moving setting of Oseh Shalom that was performed with great enthusiasm by the CBST Community Chorus directed by Joyce Rosenzweig. David Marks (violin), Adrian Daurov (cello), and Spencer Myer (piano) collaborated on Sheffer’s Piano Trio No. 2, Mary Feminear (mezzo), Jonathan Estabrooks (baritone), David Mintz (tenor), Naomi Katz Cohen (soprano) and Joyce Rosenzweig (piano) performed the 10-minute chamber opera, Camera Obscura, and ballet dancer Tom Gold superbly executed very athletic choreography to three Sheffer piano pieces. The highlight for me included two songs Sheffer had written for musical shows, especially a show-stopper from 1982 sung by Christine Ebersole and deserving of wider exposure. It was a very interesting concert, well performed, and an unusual opportunity to hear lots of music by Jonathan, who received an award for his services to the congregation.

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