The Transformation of Ritual Space: Berlioz’s “La Grande Messe des Morts” at Tanglewood, by Larry Wallach

The Transformation of Ritual Space: Berlioz’s “La Grande Messe des Morts” at Tanglewood
Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Russell Thomas, tenor
Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit, July 9, 2011

Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno: The Judecca-Lucifer, wood engraving,1857

For medieval and modern readers, Dante’s Inferno imparts to the after-life a spatial grandeur, a vision of echoing vaults, vast beyond the reaches of terrestrial architecture, filled with souls in various stages of damnation or beatitude.  Our imaginations seem capable of constituting visual and three-dimensional experiences from such partial cues as words on the page or moving images on a screen. Natural locales such as the top of Pike’s Peak or the rim of the Grand Canyon inspire awe, if not vertigo, but provide a different order of experience. Closer to Hell-Purgatory-Heaven, or to the view from the space-ship Enterprise, perhaps, are the interior architectures designed by humans to enclose us in ideological spaces. Chief among these, in the Western historical experience, is the Gothic and post-Gothic cathedral, in which spatial experience is given a precise theological definition.

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







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Three Last Quartets: the Emerson at Tanglewood: Haydn, Bartók, and Schubert, by Larry Wallach

The Emerson String Quartet. Photo Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.

Three Last Quartets: the Emerson at Tanglewood
Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, July 12, 2011
Emerson String Quartet

Haydn, Andante and Minuetto in D minor, op. 103
Bartók, Quartet no. 6
Schubert, Quartet no. 15 in G major, op. 161 (D. 887)

The Emerson Quartet has become our honored eminence grise of chamber ensembles—they have recorded much of the literature (excluding critical 20th-century repertory by Schoenberg and Carter but including the complete Shostakovich) in performances that are regarded as definitive. Their concerts have taken on the aura that I recall experiencing a generation or two ago with the Budapest and then the Guarneri Quartets. The high-mindedness of the string quartet genre performed by the ensemble known to be the best there is induces in audiences a state of meditative reverence that is sustained by beautifully polished, superbly controlled performances. There is even a moral component involved: rather than relegate one performer to a subordinate role (that of second violinists Alexander Schneider or John Dalley) the Emersons are egalitarian: Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker share first and second violin duties. Their textural preferences are for rich, even-voiced sound that easily allows the viola and cello to speak through, and the balances are almost perfectly calibrated to display the endless resourcefulness of the composers.

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







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Michael Francis conducts the San Francisco Symphony: Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Rachmininoff and Beethoven with Lisitsa and Buechner, by Steven Kruger


Michael Francis. Photo Chris Christodoulou.

Summer & The Symphony
The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, San Francisco
Friday, July 8, 2011

Michael Francis, Conductor
Valentina Lisitsa, Piano
Mussorgsky-Rimsky-Korsakoff:   A Night on Bald Mountain
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade, Opus 35

Saturday, July 9, 2011
Michael Francis, Conductor
Sara Davis Buechner, Piano
Beethoven: Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Opus 43
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat  major, Opus 73, Emperor
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67

If the ebullience surrounding every squeak made by the San Francisco Symphony last Friday and Saturday is any measure, the orchestra's summer season is in fine hands.  On the podium for much of the month has been Michael Francis, and waiting in the wings pianists Valentina Lisitsa and Sara Davis Buechner, all to dazzle and command in their own ways. About which more in a moment.

Summer concerts are a special art and a fine test for the temperament and ability of musicians. While accuracy and sight-reading abilities reflect the latter, there is a special dimension of celebration and showmanship involved, and the treacherous challenge to popularize without diminishing. So it is a delight to report that the programs I attended in Davies Hall sported no colored lights, no floral wreaths, trotted out no talkative or, worse, awkward masters of ceremony, and contained no "special occasion" works of dubious provenance. Just classic music, and very well played it was. Remarkably so, with what must have been little rehearsal.

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


 

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Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Angry Young Men/Giovani e arrabbiati: la nascita della modernità, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze. by Daniel B. Gallagher

Salvador Dalí, Venus and a Sailor: Homage to Salvat-Papasseit, oil on canvas, 1925, Ikeda Museum of 20th-century Art, Shizuoka, Japan

Picasso, Miró, Dalí. Giovani e arrabbiati: la nascita della modernità, Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze

The latest exhibition at the Strozzi Palace is a walk back through time to the roots of modern painting. It retells the sad tale of three “angry men” culminating in an alleged meeting between Dalí and Picasso in 1926. Barely twenty-two years old, Dalí had come to Paris with his mother and sister. Upon entering Picasso’s studio, he exclaimed: “Master, I just arrived in Paris and have come to see you before heading for the Louvre.” The episode completed a series of encounters between Miró, Dalí, and Picasso while each was striving to invent a new visual language by contemplating the work of the other two.

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







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Rubens in London, by Huntley Dent

Titian, Rembrandt, and who? Several years ago I read an assessment of Peter Paul Rubens in the New Yorker which called him "history’s chief painter’s painter," while snatching back the compliment in the next breath, dubbing him "the leading pictorial decorator, propagandist, and entertainer for a Catholic Europe."  Since depreciation is more fun than appreciation, the magazine's art critic says, of Rubens' female nudes, "all that smothering flesh, vibrantly alive but with the erotic appeal of a mud slide." As zingers go, here's another goodie: "Nor do Rubens’s characters appear significantly more intelligent than his farm animals."

The final impression one got was that a simple drawing of an ox – the most highly praised work in the article – surpasses Rubens' vast output of oil paintings, which is like dissing Alain Ducasse except for his appetizers. Unassailable reputations are waiting to be assailed, I suppose. Like a master chef, Rubens was guaranteed to serve up a feast for the eye, and he worked rapidly, as if the customer was impatiently tapping his wine glass. He died in 1640 at the age of sixty-two, and it's startling to consider that when he was around thirty, Rubens could have come to London to see the first performances of Hamletand King Lear.  His style seems at least a century ahead. So prolific was he that London abounds in Rubens, major and minor.  The works were well worth pausing over this summer, when the big museums seemed empty of important, intriguing shows.

It takes a conscious effort to recover Rubens as you walk past acres of his Biblical and historical scenes. He has the disdvantage shared with Tiepolo and Watteau, for example,  that a single style, sweeping through multiple canvases, sums him up too quickly. A typical Rubens is crammed with figures in billowy, fleshy abundance, as witness The Conversion of Saint Paul at the Courtauld Institute on the Strand. Here we have the risen Christ illuminating the apex of a tumultuous scene, while  the blinded Saul, lying flat on his back in the foreground, is almost lost in the welter of confused and amazed figures.  A crowd is sharing his epiphany, or at least its repercussions. The event isn't seen with mystic awe; rather, it affords a reason for Rubens' familiar way of tangling a host of characters into a Baroque pile-up of passion and posturing.

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

Rockwell Kent and the Cape Cinema Mural, by Lucy Vivante

Cape_cinema

(First published on 5 July 2008 by Lucy Vivante)

Part of the Cape Cinema’s appeal comes from the high contrast between outside and in. The church-like exterior is patterned after the nearby town of Centerville's Congregational Church. The murals you might expect inside–of a Puritan religious gathering or colonists working–are instead of exuberant figures dancing across the ceiling. Within the space of a few feet, just by crossing the lobby, we travel from stern New England to lush Art Deco.

Dennis's Cape Cinema is open year round, in the summer months for art-house movies and some live concerts and in the winter for Metropolitan Opera Live in HD performances. The movies are selected by Eric Hart, the cinema's manager, and George Mansour. Mansour has been booking art-house films for more than forty years and is a consultant for the Angelika Cinemas.

The cinema forms part of a larger cultural campus with the Cape Playhouse (formerly a Unitarian Meeting House) and the Cape Cod Museum of Art. The Playhouse was founded in 1927 and it bills itself as the oldest professional summer theater in America.  The cinema is well located since it is at the Cape's midpoint. It is well located in another way–far away from multiplex viewing– shoebox proportioned rooms, jolting sound, and the assault of snack advertisements.

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

Production Notes: Woody Allen’s Bop Decameron in Rome, by Eliot Vivante


Woody Allen on the set of the Bop Decameron, Photo: Eliot Vivante

Woody Allen is in Rome shooting his latest production, The Bop Decameron. Italian newspapers have been brimming with “Where’s Woody?” stories, and tourists and citizens have been tweeting their sightings. Woody is very popular in Italy and while this is his first Rome-set picture, he has been a frequent visitor in the past with his New Orleans jazz band.

The Bop Decameron will be structured into four vignettes, two of which will be in Italian. Yesterday, Woody shot at Piazza Mattei with a predominantly Italian cast and crew. Jim Jarmusch used the same location in the Rome segment of Night on Earth, starring Roberto Benigni, who is also signed on for The Bop.

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







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Production Notes: Woody Allen's Bop Decameron in Rome, Photos

Woody Allen is in Rome shooting his latest production, The Bop Decameron. Italian newspapers have been brimming with “Where’s Woody?” stories, and tourists and citizens have been tweeting their sightings. Woody is very popular in Italy and while this is his first Rome-set picture, he has been a frequent visitor in the past with his New Orleans jazz band.

The Bop Decameron will be structured into four vignettes, two of which will be in Italian. Yesterday, Woody shot at Piazza Mattei with a predominantly Italian cast and crew. Jim Jarmusch used the same location in the Rome segment of Night on Earth, starring Roberto Benigni, who is also signed on forThe Bop.

The grips all wore Cinecittà-issued T-shirts, now faded, from Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film, Gangs of New York, which was shot at the Roman studio.There were two camera and dolly set-ups, one of them a mock-up for a 1930s-set, film-within-the-film, starring Antonio Albanese, Alessandra Mastronardi and Ornella Muti.

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

Bel Canto at Caramoor: Guillaume Tell by Gioachino Rossini, by Michael Miller


Wilhelm Tell

William Tell by Gioachino Rossini
Bel Canto at Caramoor

Saturday, July 9 at 7:30pm ~ Venetian Theater
Friday, July 15 at 7:30pm (repeat performance) ~ Venetian Theater

Orchestra of St. Luke's, Will Crutchfield, conductor

Cast: 

William Tell - Daniel Mobbs, bass-baritone
Matilde - Julianna Di Giacomo, soprano
Arnold - Michael Spyres, tenor
Jemmy - Talise Trevigne, soprano
Hedwige - Vanessa Cariddi, mezzo-soprano
Walter - Nicolas Masters, bass
Rodolphe - Rolando Sanz, tenor
Fisherman - Brian Downen, tenor
Melchthal - Jeffrey Beruan, bass
Gesler - Scott Bearden, baritone
Leuthold - Michael Nyby, baritone

In Steffani's Niobe, premiered in 1688 in the Munich Residenz, a confluence of Italian and French traditions in a Bavarian court, BEMF gave us an opportunity to see an opera which is not quite like any other. It combines so many different genres and situations, that it is comprehensible only when one witnesses the spectacle as it unfolds on stage. Another rarity, although a much more famous one, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, is also unique in its own way, and certainly a stranger to modern opera-goers. Rossini's grandest work disappeared from the repertoire of both the Paris Opera and the Met in the early 1930s, and even before then, it was heavily cut—most likely as alien to Rossini's intentions as the version of Il Barbiere di Siviglia that was current before the early 1970s. Even the famous overture doesn't appear as often on symphonic programs, although it did show up at Tanglewood last weekend...on an Italian opera pot pourri, where, as a "French" overture, it was the odd man out. It is truly astonishing, when one reads Philip Gossett's program notes for Caramoor, to learn the time and effort Rossini put into learning about French operatic conventions and the traditions of the Paris Opera in order to produce a work that was as genuinely French as possible, without abandoning his personal style—which involved retaining some Italian conventions—a far more profound effort than Wagner's in Tannhaüser or Verdi's in Don Carlo. Rossini, by then in his late thirties, remade his compositional technique in a foreign mode and from that created a unique hybrid of great genius. Guillaume Tell was to be Rossini's first French opera, but in fact it was his last operatic work altogether, for a complex variety of reasons. He never gave himself a chance to develop further his own peculiar mixture of beautiful vocal writing, vigorous, even daring harmonies, folk-tunes, ballets, spectacle, conflict, and the celebration of national autonomy and freedom.

Read the full review in New York Arts

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Opening Night at Tanglewood, BSO, Dutoit in an Italian Opera Potpourri, by Charles Warren


Giulia Grisi as Norma in Bellini's Opera

Opening Night at Tanglewood
Friday, July 8, 8:30 p.m. Shed
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, conductor
Angela Meade, soprano
Kristine Jepson, mezzo-soprano
Roberto DeBiasio, tenor
James Morris, bass-baritone
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, conductor

Bellini - Excerpts from Act 1 of Norma
Rossini - Overture to William Tell
Verdi - Trio from Act 3 of I lombardi
Respighi - Pines of Rome

The Boston Symphony Orchestra opened this year's Tanglewood season July 8th with an Italian program planned by James Levine—now resigned from Boston—and taken over pretty much intact by guest conductor Charles Dutoit. The program book declared the evening "La Prima di Tanglewood." I would call the concert only half a success, but the best part was the second half, and the huge audience seemed very well pleased at the end.

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







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