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Project Rameau
Sydney Theatre, Wash Bay: 29 October 2012
until 3 November
Sydney Dance Company
Rafael Bonachela – artistic director and choreographer
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Richard Tognetti – artistic director and first violin
Music – Jean-Philippe Rameau, Antonio Vivaldi, J. S. Bach, arranged by Graham Sadler, Vi King Lim, Jennifer Powell
Lighting and set designs – Benjamin Cisterne
Costumes design – Rafael Bonachela and Fiona Holley
Dance director – Amy Hollingsworth
If the fugue is the highest form of counterpoint it’s because it is truly an art. No one would deny that fugues do not write themselves, yet they are based on simple, sincere imitation, the first, most obvious ingredient one hears, yet the freedom of the voices is the fugue’s sina qua non. Different voices “speak” their individual melodies, and miraculously the result is not only coherent but harmonious too, and, at least under the masters, such harmonies! From one point of view the fugue is the highest composer’s art, even over-specified, yet it is a form-texture deriving from the performer’s highest art, improvisation, the fantasy. The fugue is in a way the quintessence of music, taking something which initially seems rigid and rule-bound, well, at least over-obedient, and sheds those rules completely to become free and creative, the fundamentally horizontal linear elements become nonlinear, sounding just as sensible vertically; sound, a dumb mathematical, physical process obeying laws of time and space, is refined into an art which can speak directly to something deep inside a warm human being. So the fugue, even as theoreticians have for centuries tried to define it and the rules of its creation (without much success), culminating in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Traité d’harmonie (1722), at the end of which he discusses fugues and how they are written, finally saying they cannot be reduced to general rules, except “le bon goût ou la fantasie.” J. S. Bach in turn put it most aptly of all… in his music.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!
Alexina and Jason have done it again.
The Hubbard Hall Opera Theater Resident Artists La Bohème played to a sizeable crowd in the Dorset Playhouse last night, and the audience departed well-pleased. Each opera that I have seen Jason Dolmetsch stage has had the benefit of his excellent ear. Just one example: in Act 3 of La Bohème, where Mimi usually listens off, or nearly off, to the dire pronouncements, Vedrana Kalas walked haltingly across the space way upstage, a few steps at a time, as if what she was overhearing made it difficult for her to continue. Her progress touched the heart. In this abbreviated production (75 minutes with no intermission), Act 3 was given most fully. This is important. Acute listeners have long known that the real action takes place here.
A few years ago I went to a lecture of which the most compelling theme was the link between 20th century architectural practice and toy design. I can’t remember the specific architects who were mentioned back then, but I can think of two practitioners from the Northeast who, I believe, at least partially fit into that thesis—Ann McCallum and Andrus Burr of Burr & McCallum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
With summer fading into the past, one compensation for earlier nightfalls and chillier water temperatures that limit swims to only intensely sunny midday outings is the pumped-up output happily spilling out of the vegetable garden. The squash vines have wound out into improbable places, and, if one pokes around under those umbrella-like leaves, there are plenty of butternut and spaghetti squashes playing hide and seek. Every day tomatoes are dropping off their stems. And suddenly there are lots of reasons for searching out some ripe, dense, maybe even rustic red wines to accompany all there is to eat.
Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House: 11 and 12 October 2012
Thursday, 11 October
Dvořak – Cello Concerto in B minor, B.191, opus 104
Jian Wang – cello
Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 10 in E minor, opus 93
The Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy – conductor
Friday, 12 October
Heitor Villa-Lobos – Bachianas brasileiras No. 1 for 8 cellos
J S Bach – Cello suite no. 1 in G, BWV 1007
Jian Wang – cello
Heitor Villa-Lobos – Bachianas brasileiras No. 5 for soprano and cellos
Jaqueline Porter – soprano
Qigang Chen – You and Me
J S Bach – “Air on the G String” from BWV 1068
Jian Wang, Catherine Hewgill, Leah Lynn, Kristy Conrau, Fenella Gill, Timothy Nankervis, Elizabeth Neville, Christopher Pidcock, David Wickham – cellos
Is Dvořak, to paraphrase Dr. Leonard McCoy, really that beautiful? Really so much more beautiful than other music you’ve heard? Or is it just that it acts beautiful? If it comes down to the performance to go more than skin deep, the musicians must play very convincingly indeed. Beauty in music has proven to be diverse. For a sound to be music rather than mere sounds, however pleasing, the it needs the broadest possible aesthetic idea of beauty. An ugly sound, it has been pointed out, can be “beautiful” if used so fittingly by a composer that nothing but that sound could be desired at that point in the music. For human beings, this has included the rasping shawms and the regals, and the augmented fourth of the middle ages and renaissance, the harsh use of the usual orchestral brass by Mahler, and all the freely used ugly sounds and outbursts in 20th century music and its terrible dissonances. I would draw the line at physically painful sounds, either through loudness or shrillness or both, as ugly in a destructive way, and so incapable of beauty, even betraying the faith of the listener who trustingly opens their ears to the music, though some do seem to find pleasure in the ginormous 19th century organs played at full volume with all the stops out. Free expression in a musician or a composer can be beautiful in itself, of course, though when that expression becomes gratuitous or self-indulgent, or sentimental (which can betray a certain narrow emotional rigidity) or arbitrary (which can betray a self-imposed or self-persuaded intellectual rigidity) it can become ugly. Music in a straight jacket can be ugly too. A masterful fugue in transcending any thought of a dichotomy between these two extremes can be most beautiful of all.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!
Around the time of Lance Armstrong’s first retirement in 2005, there were rumors that a movie was going to be made about his life. After the release of the US Anti-Doping Authority’sReasoned Decision, which beyond a reasonable doubt establishes that he “and his handlers engaged in a massive and long running scheme to use drugs, cover their tracks, intimidate witnesses, tarnish reputations, lie to hearing panels and the press and do whatever was necessary to conceal the truth,” the producers of this film should be doubly pleased, pleased that they avoided the embarrassment of making what would likely have been a hagiopic about a cheat and pleased that the Reasoned Decision has now turned their story into something as good as Citizen Kane. If you enjoyed It’s Not About the Bike, Every Second Counts and Melville’s The Confidence Man, you’ll love the Reasoned Decision.
Jermaine Smith as Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess with Bramwell Tovey conducting the BSO. Photo Stu Rosner.
Thursday, September 27, 8 p.m.
Friday, September 28, 8 p.m.
Saturday, September 29, 8 p.m.
Porgy and Bess
Opera in three acts by George Gershwin,
DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin Original 1935 production version
Restoration from the original production materials
by John Mauceri with assistance from Wayne Shirley, Charles Hamm, and Scott Dunn
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Bramwell Tovey, conductor
Cast:
Alfred Walker, bass-baritone (Porgy)
Laquita Mitchell, soprano (Bess)
Alison Buchanan, soprano (Lily, Strawberry Woman)
Angel Blue, soprano (Clara)
Marquita Lister, soprano (Serena)
Krysty Swann, mezzo-soprano (Annie)
Gwendolyn Brown, contralto (Maria)
Calvin Lee, tenor (Mingo, Nelson, Crab Man)
Jermaine Smith, tenor (Sportin’ Life)
Chauncey Packer, tenor (Peter)
Gregg Baker, baritone (Crown)
Patrick Blackwell, baritone (Jim, Undertaker)
John Fulton, baritone (Robbins)
Robert Honeysucker, baritone (Frazier)
Leon Williams, baritone (Jake)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
John Oliver, conductor
I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my keen anticipation of this reprise of the 2011 Tanglewood performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — not to here an excellent performance of a “good” version of the opera once again, but to hear it properly for the first time. As I said in my preview of this performance, the Tanglewood performance was totally vitiated — ruined — by the extensive use of amplification for the singers. None of Berkshire Review writers who attended wanted to review it. Although virtually the entire cast consisted of established opera singers, it was thought necessary to provide them with individual microphones. At the time, I thought this had to do mostly with the misguided notion of using elaborate “staging” for that concert performance, with singers entering from both sides of the vast stage. The result was that I heard the voice of a singer entering from the right coming from the left speaker, etc. Even worse was the fact that we rarely heard the singers’ voices directly, but only as recreated through the Music Shed’s wireless mics and enormous horn speakers. I couldn’t believe that the BSO management or the conductor, Bramwell Tovey, would try this again at Symphony Hall. For that reason I cheerfully procrastinated about writing about the problem until barely a month before the 2012 reprise. It seemed logical that one of the reasons for the Symphony Hall reprise was to set things right.
Tannery Pond Concerts
September 22, 2012, 6 pm
David Finckel, Cello
Wu Han, pianist
Beethoven – Sonata in G minor, Opus 5, No. 2, for cello and piano
Brahms – Sonata in E minor, Opus 38, for cello and piano
Debussy – Sonata I, in D minor, for cello and piano
Shostakovich – Sonata in D minor, Opus 40, for cello and piano
On looking over this program of familiar works for cello and piano, the last thing one would call it is challenging. Yet, this past Sunday evening, David Finckel and Wu Han made it into something extremely challenging and enlightening. The duo — a husband-wife team, as is well-known — put so much feeling and energy into each piece that each became a world unto itself, formed by such radically different personalities, that it seemed miraculous that the players could make the transition from one to the other within a single evening. As for listening to such performances, I found myself so deeply immersed in these varied planets, that the journey between them seemed vast. Finckel and Wu Han approached them as differing thought processes in different languages. Even though it is obvious enough that Brahms spoke Beethoven, it seemed here to be a highly evolved dialect, from a different city, with its own highly characteristic street slang, which gave its own intense coloration to the civilized poetic diction of the compositions.
If you ever need proof of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, stop by Rome’s Globe Theatre. Within a single evening you’ll be convinced that the Bard, disarmed of dactylic hexameters, can still speak to everyone and anyone.
All the more so to Italians when it comes to As You Like It (Come vi piace). Their temperament — irascible, passionate, effusive — stands opposite that of the English but squares precisely with what Shakespeare wanted to lampoon in this subtle masterpiece. Rosalind (Melania Giglio) is so sickly in love with Orlando (Daniele Pecci) that she can barely maintain her act as “Ganymede” in his presence. Duke Frederick (Nicola D’Eramo) hates his brother (also played by D’Eramo) so fiercely that anyone who reminds him of Duke Senior is mindlessly banished from the dukedom. Silvius (Patrizio Cigliano) dotes on Phebe (Barbara Di Bartolo) so cloyingly that the audience would gladly join her in strangling him if only he weren’t so hysterically funny. Each character is a caricature of Italian emotional excess, and no one can make fun of emotional excess better than the excessively emotional Italians.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!