Neuenfels’ Lohengrin at Bayreuth – 2010 / 2011: a (P)review by Michael Miller


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Klaus Florian Vogt and Annette Dasch in Lohengrin, Bayreuth 2011.

Lohengrin
Bayreuther Festspiele 2010

Andris Nelsons - Conductor
Hans Neuenfels - Stage Director
Reinhard von der Thannen - Set Design
Reinhard von der Thannen - Costume Design
Franck Evin - Lighting
Björn Verloh - Video
Henry Arnold - Dramaturg
Susanne Øglænd - Conceptional Collaborator
Eberhard Friedrich - Chorus Director

20102011
Lohengrin - Jonas Kaufmann / Klaus Florian Vogt (22.8) / Simon O'Neill (27.8)Lohengrin - Klaus Florian Vogt
Heinrich der Vogler - Georg ZeppenfeldHeinrich der Vogler - Georg Zeppenfeld
Elsa von Brabant - Annette DaschElsa von Brabant - Annette Dasch
Friedrich von Telramund - Hans-Joachim KetelsenFriedrich von Telramund - Tómas Tómasson
Ortrud - Evelyn HerlitziusOrtrud - Petra Lang
Der Heerrufer des Königs - Samuel YounDer Heerrufer des Königs - Samuel Youn
1. Edler - Stefan Heibach1. Edler - Stefan Heibach
2. Edler - Willem Van der Heyden2. Edler - Willem Van der Heyden
3. Edler - Rainer Zaun3. Edler - Rainer Zaun
4. Edler - Christian Tschelebiew4. Edler - Christian Tschelebiew

I was no less fascinated than any writer by the troops of rats Hans Neuenfels mustered for his production ofLohengrin, which premiered last year (2010). It isn't fair or even intelligent to focus on the most obvious twist in his Neuenfels' vision of Wagner's first grail opera, but Neuenfels turned the rodents loose on us as bait, and in the world of theater, it is only right to jump on it with all the alacrity of one of the rats, when he or she sniffs some appetizingly ripe garbage—or bacon, as Herr Neuenfels has said. And I don't mention this to demean the rats, Neuenfels clearly did not intend them as red herrings, but as an intellectually nutritious and tasty Vorspeise.

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








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A New Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (UPDATED with prospective "short list") by Alan Miller

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After more than 750 architects and concerned citizens signed the petition, the Australia Council for the Arts has decided that the competition for the new Australian Venice Biennale Pavilion will be open to everyone...as long as you’re an Australian architect with international experience who has already designed a public gallery.

Read the full "short list" on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Le Tour de France 2011 (Version Française) par Alan Miller

Mqb_bike

Le Tour de France, comme une voyage à la lune ou une mission de la navette spatiale, est une espèce d’art performatif. Le parcours est dessinée, mais un scénario imprévisible se déroule toujours sur les routes de France. La plupart des Tours de France depuis j’ai commencé à faire attention en 1989 étaient dominés par les grands champions comme Miguel Indurain (cinq maillots jaunes) et Lance Armstrong (sept), avec les brefs interrègnes. Le Tour de 2011, possiblement le meilleur, est peut-être le Tour qui rompra cette modèle de “star-système.” C’est le premier Tour vraiment post-Armstrong, post-Armstrongiste.

Lisez le reste au Berkshire Review, un journal international des arts

Le Tour de France 2011 (English Version) by Alan Miller

Mqb_bike

The Tour de France, like a moon landing or shuttle mission, is a kind of performance art. The route is predetermined, but the scenario which plays out on the roads of France is always unpredictable. The majority of the Tours since I started paying attention in 1989 have been dominated by the likes of five time winner Miguel Indurain and seven time winner Lance Armstrong, interspersed with brief interregnums. If we are lucky, the 2011 edition, the greatest I have seen without a doubt, will be remembered as the Tour which broke this “star-system.” It is certainly the first truly post-Armstrong, and post-Armstrongian, race.

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

Prom 15: Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Kodály and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1 by Huntley Dent

Rembrandt_faust_360

Loved to dearth. Without remembering any legal documents I signed that had Satan written in the small print, just when I forget how tawdry and thin Liszt's Faust Symphony is, it comes around again and I give it another chance. Too late. I hear the old guy cackle and the doors of Albert Hall clanging shut. The only way to overcome the symphony's clattering banality is for the conductor to bash the score within an inch of its life. The thing won't die — no fear of that — and if there is truly inspired leadership, as from Leonard Bernstein and Jascha Horenstein in their classic recordings, the music will bring genuine pleasure, like the circus.

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

The San Francisco Ring, 2011 – Donald Runnicles, Conductor, Francsca Zambello, Stage Director, by David Dunn Bauer

Gordon Hawkins (Alberich) steals the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens. Photo Cory Weaver.

San Francisco Ring Cycle, 2011

When any object is taken apart and reformed, does its substance remain what it was in the beginning? Nothung, Siegmund and Siegfried's magical sword, proves stronger for having been shattered and forged anew. Does the Rhine gold itself acquire new properties through being the fatal, world-dominating ring, or when the Rhinemaidens receive it at the end of Götterdämmerung, has it the same intrinsic properties it did when Alberich stole it “twenty hours ago,” as Anna Russell clocked it?

Director Francesca Zambello, in her Americanized Ring Cycle, three-quarters of which were co-produced by Washington Opera, forged something new and wondrous from Wagner's tremendous and often toxic masterwork. Not every bit of Wagner's original symbolism reintegrates seamlessly into the newly fashioned work, and occasional cognitive dissonance results. Frankly, Wagner's own sprawling cosmology—one part German myth, one part creative genius, one part tortured personal psychology—leaves many questions unanswered and any number of unresolved contradictions and loose ends. In San Francisco, the director and her designer colleagues shaped a remarkable production that transcended its occasional awkward moments and that touched the heart in ways I've never known this uniquely ambitious epic work to do before. The striking and varied stage pictures are the work of Michael Yeargan, the always illuminating costumes are by Catherine Zuber, the colorful, refreshing, and often exquisite lighting is by Mark McCullough. The many projections, used as backdrops and show curtain, were created by Jan Hartley. I didn't find every element equally successful, but I left the theatre believing that this production had the mystical power to make the world a better place. The staging is that good.

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







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Malick qua Kubrick: 2011, A Life Odyssey – The Tree of Life, by Seth Lachterman


Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Gustav Klimt, The Tree of Life, 1909, Palais Stoclet, Brussels

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
 Tell Me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7

Film as Being

The Tree of Life opens with these questionings from the Book of Job, and in the course of nearly two and a half hours, questions and enigmas pass by, compelling the viewer to frame a response to this very metaphysical film. For those who expect linear and coherent drama, piecing the film’s parts together will ultimately be a dissatisfying exercise. Nothing resolves absolutely, leaving a viewer as witness to the mysteries of death and eternity, with a nagging ambivalence. Perhaps as a rejoinder to Job, Yeats’s gravestone inscription should precede the film’s end credits:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Read the full review in New York Arts

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A Woman Killed with Kindness at the National Theatre, Review by Huntley Dent

L-R Sebastian Armesto (Wendoll), Paul Ready (John Frankford), Gawn Granger (Nicholas), Liz White (Anne Frankford). Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

Too clever by halves. Although T.S. Eliot was describing Marlowe's once popular, now buried play, The Jew of Malta, when he dubbed it a savage farce, the phrase is a wide paintbrush for Jacobean tragedy, whose absurd motivations, wildly outsized emotions and sheer body count tempt us to burst out laughing. One of the breeziest writers of the day, Thomas Heywood, shuffled genres like a card sharp, and there's no reason to believe that he took his most famous tragedy, A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) too seriously. There's not much reason to revive it either, except as a study in stage contraptions antecedent to the great age of folderol bien fait in the Victorian theater, which gave us masterly contrivers like Scribe, Sardou, and the like.

To prove me wrong, director Katie Mitchell has tried to make more of A Woman Killed With Kindness than Heywood put into it...

Read more at the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts.

The English National Ballet’s Tribute to Roland Petit, by Huntley Dent


Roland Petit rehearses Carmen in 1949.

Roland Petit
English National Ballet
London Coliseum

Carmen
Carmen – Anaïs Chalendard
Don José – Daniel Kraus

L'Arlésienne
Vivette – Erina Takahashi
Frédéri – Esteban Berlanga

Le Jeune Homme et la Mort
The Young Man – Anton Lukovkin
Death – Jia Zhang

Stilettos, ready! To keep the audience entertained, the postwar French choreographer Roland Petit resorted to high jinks, low jinks, whatever jinks he could summon. He's a one-man, nonstop coup de theatre. Petit's women, long-legged and aloof, aren't asked to be graceful so much as dangerous and strange: they slither, prance and stamp, opening and closing their knees in insectoid twitches and mechanical jerks. It's as if they are perched on high-heeled toes. The men must earn advanced degrees in acrobatics (with post-graduate liniment for their abused muscles) to perform Petit's Cirque de Soleil cartwheels, tumbling, and feats of strength (such as forming a human bridge for the ballerina to stretch out on — at least she doesn't walk over it in stilettos). These antics were on display in a triple bill mounted by the ever-ebullient English National Ballet, the romping younger sibling of the Royal Ballet, which soberly covets its right of primogeniture.

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







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Prom 13: Verdi’s Requiem under Bychkov, by Huntley Dent


Giuseppe Verdi in 1872.

Prom 13:
Verdi: Requiem

Marina Poplavskaya - soprano
Mariana Pentcheva - mezzo-soprano
Joseph Calleja - tenor
Ferruccio Furlanetto - bass

BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC National Chorus of Wales
London Philharmonic Choir
BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov - conductor

Temporary immortality. The Verdi Requiem is an event, a masterpiece, an emotional catharsis, but also an old shoe. Well worn by dozens of recordings since two great ones, by Toscanini and De Sabata, started the grooves turning, it hasn't been saved from familiarity by being magnificent, any more than the Grand Canyon has. What do you do to breathe life back into music that has been worn down by so many feet? (I apologize to readers who feel that I'm asking the equivalent of "Caviar again? Didn't we have that yesterday?")

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







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