San Francisco Symphony: Arabella Steinbacher plays the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto; Charles Dutoit conducts Stravinsky and Bartók, by Steven Kruger

Arabella Steinbacher

The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, San Francisco
Saturday, March 3, 2012

Charles Dutoit, conductor
Arabella Steinbacher, violin

Stravinsky – Le Chant du rossignol (1917)
Tchaikovsky – Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35 (1878)
Bartók – Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

Every time I hear Stravinsky’s 1917 tone poem, Song of the Nightingale I’m reminded that being a successful revolutionary is difficult. What exactly is a composer to do next, when he has overturned the apple cart so thoroughly with works like The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring? By the standards of those pieces, Song of the Nightingale can seem a pale also-ran, going over “old new ground” from Petrushka. Its Geneva premiere elicited something of a riot, it is true, but before a Swiss audience still unfamiliar with the groundbreaking ballets.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Doisneau: Paris Les Halles at the Hôtel de Ville (English Version)

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To judge from the enormous queue in front of the Hôtel de Ville to get into this magnificent exhibition of Doisneau’s photographs, there remains a Les Halles shaped void in the Parisian heart. There is perhaps no real place in Paris which exerts such fascination as the memory of Les Halles, “le ventre de Paris.” Of all the wounds inflicted on the city during the same period, from the rive gauche expressway (1967) to the Tour Montparnasse (1973), perhaps none was so psychically damaging as the closing of Les Halles in 1969. There was something intimate about this particular blow; it was literally a punch to the stomach, a bureaucratic meddling with the primal, particularly in France, human need for nourishment.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Doisneau: Paris Les Halles à l’Hôtel de Ville (version française) par Alan Miller

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Devant l’Hôtel de Ville l’énorme file d’attente pour cette magnifique exposition des photos de Doisneau atteste qu’il reste toujours un trou des Halles béant dans le coeur parisien. Probablement aucune autre lieu parisien soustrait autant de fascination que la mémoire des Halles, “le ventre de Paris.” Peut-être la différence entre la fermeture des Halles en 1969 et les autres blessures urbaines de cet époque, parmi eux la voie express rive gauche (1967) et la tour Montparnasse (1973), est sa qualité autant psychique que physique. Cette perte avait quelque chose d’intime, une véritable tape au ventre par les fonctionnaires anonymes contre le besoin humain de la nourriture.

Lisez le reste au Berkshire Review!

Rok Miłosza (The Miłosz Year) Comes to Williams College: Inspired by Miłosz, a Tribute by Omar Sangare and his Students, by Michel Miller

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Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz (proonouced Cheswav Meewosh), who died in 2004, was perhaps the best known of Polish literary men in the  U.S., thanks to his 20-year tenure as a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Calfornia at Berkeley, where he carried on his work as an essayist, poet, fiction writer, and translator. While he could communicate and occasionally write in English, his poetry became familiar to American readers through translations published in magazines like The New Yorker. He became widely recognized as an ambassador from the land of exile, continually bearing the cross of his numerous emigrations. A Lithuanian Pole, he left for Warsaw under the German occupation. He received his education in Wilno (Vilnius), a city which was long a part of Poland, with many Polish associations, above all literary, since the two great nineteenth century poets, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, like Miłosz, spent their formative years there. A diplomat of Communist Poland in the U.S. and France, he sought political asylum in 1951 and lived as an expatriate intellectual in Paris until 1960, when he emigrated to the United States and claimed citizenship in the great everywhere and nowhere of academia. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. After 1989 he divided his time between Berkeley and Kraków. For a brief, but fuller biography, see the Miłosz Year site, where you will find further texts and bibliography.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


Matthias Pintscher, Guest Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Play Stravinsky, Ravel and Pintscher by Andrew Miller

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Aleksandr Yakovlevich Golovin. Kashchei's stuffy kingdom. Sketch of scenery for the ballet by I. F. Stravinsky "Firebird" 1910 Paper, gouache, water-colour, bronze paint 82,5 х 102. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall: 7 March 2012

Maurice RavelMother Goose (Ma Mère l’Oye) Suite
Igor Stravinsky – Violin Concerto
Matthias Pintscher - towards Osiris – Study for Orchestra
Igor StravinskyFirebird Suite (1945)

Matthias Pintscher – conductor
Sydney Symphony Orchestra

Isabelle Faust – violin

Before Diaghilev decided to bring Russian art to the west, starting with his exhibition of Russian art in Paris in 1906, in 1908 bringing Chaliapin to Paris to sing Boris Godinov, and then his formation of the Ballets Russes, first performing in Paris in 1909, unadulterated, purely Russian art was little known or appreciated outside asia. Vast Russia, except for its toe in Europe was perhaps considered something of a cultural backwater in Europe. Diaghilev didn’t hold back in bringing this unadulterated Russian art, also discovering and hiring young or little known artists — like Stravinsky — and this was part of his art’s huge appeal in west to this day. So when Stravinsky visited the far, far East — Australia — in 1961, it was perhaps not so far from his roots nor so incongruous. Traditional indigenous Russian or central asian art was often an influence in the set designs and style of Bakst, Benois, Golovin, Roerich and the others, costumes sometimes used original traditional textiles (like the ikat fabrics bought from nomadic traders at St Petersburg markets for the costumes for the Polostvian dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor), the choreography was sometimes classical in the best Petipan Franco-russian tradition preserved in the imperial Maryinksy school, but was often entirely new in style, especially Vaslav Nijinsky’s for the Rite of Spring, though often borrowing from traditional, indigenous Russian dance, as in Firebird and Petroushka. Western audiences seemed unconsciously to understand this bizarre new art and went crazy for it, famously starting riots and booing, also becoming most fashionable tickets to have.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Darra Goldstein and Hannah Fries Talk about An Evening of Art, Literature, and Food, Presented by Gastronomica and Orion Magazines at the Second Annual Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, by Michael Miller

Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936

Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead, 1936

As part of the second annual Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, Orion and Gastronomica will co-host a reading featuring renowned food writer Ruth Reichl, poets Ellen Doré Watson and Patty Crane, and fiction writers Francine Prose (finalist for the National Book Award) and Elizabeth Graver.

The event will take place at the Williams College Museum of Art on March 16, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

Listen to the podcast on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 46: Rhymed Verse on the Stage, a Balancing Act; and More Fun at the Clark

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Kelly Galvin in Molière's The Learned Ladies at Shakespeare and Company. Photo Kevin Sprague.

Balancing Act

Try this for starters. Read a scene in rhymed couplets to someone you know, and ask them if it sounded natural. Not easy, is it? Great rhyme masters, from Alexander Pope to Richard Wilbur, require their readers to use these couplets on stage or page, and this is no small task. It asks from the performer something like singing. The regularity of the rhyme scheme, its dominance, can be treacherous.  Peter Hall maintained that a script of Shakespeare’s can be read like music, but iambic pentameter is too strong and unbalanced to accept this kind of strictness all the time. Rhymed (sometimes called heroic) couplets need, indeed require, a balancing act. The listener knows instinctively when the rhymes are over-sung. I am saying there has to be a large and flexible middle to the actor’s method. This middle might be defined as the place that is returned to.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


A Small Oboe Festival: François Leleux and the Sydney Symphony Play Bach, Ravel and Mozart by Andrew Miller

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Ravel with friends Maurice and Nelly Delage and Suzanne Roland-Manuel. Photo by Roland-Manuel?

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House: 2 March 2012

J. S. Bach – Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C Major, BWV 1066
Maurice Ravel - Le Tombeau de Couperin
Mozart – Oboe Concerto in C Major, K 314

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra
François Leleux – oboe-director

Whoever says that the Sydney Opera House doesn’t function should visit on a day like last Friday morning. On this fairly typical day, there were six separate shows, concerts and plays scheduled — it is not an opera house at all but a true complex of theaters and concert halls. Neither the large group of Japanese schoolgirls touring the building, nor the long queue of people after tickets to the Olivia Newton-John concert that evening, nor the individual tourists looking around and photographing, nor the people for the Sydney Symphony concert (the Olivia Newton-John fans didn’t know what they missed) who arrived early for the morning tea set out for us under the vaulted lunes of the concert hall foyer, got in one another’s way. It was crowded for sure, and they could use a few more lady’s rooms, but miraculously there was room to move. The building works!

Leleux had put together a program of classics, well known but in playing he brought them a freshness and bright enthusiasm as if encountering them for the first time. He played, in both senses of the word, in an unlabored way even in the more difficult sections, even while his technique proved his mastery of the instrument and all the work and practice that entailed. His honest and lively playing was infectious. The musicians seemed not like performers set up on stage and weighted by everyone’s eyes and ears and expectations set on them, but they gave the impression of artists playing music for its own sake in private, the listeners seemed not exactly an audience but more invitees to share in the experience, the exploration of the music anew.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Strauss’ Zarathustra, Brahms’ Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili, Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony

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Richard Strauss in Dresden. From richardstrauss.at

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall: 25 February 2012

Beethoven - Coriolan Overture, opus 62
Brahms - Violin Concerto, opus 77
Richard Strauss - Also sprach Zarathustra: Tondichtung (frei nach Friedrich Nietzsche) für grosses Orchester, opus 30

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy - conductor

Lisa Batiashvili - violin

The concert pulled us away from a particularly beautiful sunset over Sydney with Cray-Pas pink-crimson streaks and squiggles and a new moon following closely behind the sun, sparing us the feeling of mono no aware of a finished sunset. Zarathustra gave us maybe a more conventional sunset's "riot of color", or rather sunrise, to complete Vladimir Ashkenazy's three concert series of Germanic music which opened the Sydney Symphony's 2012 season. This small selection of major Strauss symphonies if not totally satisfying and complete in itself, gives one an urge to seek out more Strauss in order to seek out more in Strauss. Then again symphonic music can be enjoyed as a riot of marvelous sounds. Ashkenazy's pairings in the three concerts of a tightly formed Beethoven piece — The Ninth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Coriolan Overture, respectively — with a more spread-out Strauss piece (with the exception of Metamorphosen), perhaps more fun to conduct than to listen to at times, and the music with Vladimir Ashkenazy's enthusiasm for it, speaks for itself and justifies itself. Anyway, it is hard to speak generally about Strauss since he is quite varied even within one piece.