Political Icons on Stage: Nixon in China at the Met, by Rebecca Y. Kim

Nixon (James Maddalena), Mao (Robert Brubaker), Chou En-lai (Russell Braun) and Pat Nixon (Janis Kelly) share a toast.

The Metropolitan Opera
Saturday, February 5, 2011.

John Adams - conductor
Peter Sellars - director

James Maddalena - Richard Nixon
Janis Kelly - Pat Nixon
Robert Brubaker - Mao Tse-tung
Russell Braun - Chou En-lai
Richard Paul Fink - Henry Kissinger
Kathleen Kim - Chiang Ch’ing (Madame Mao)

Richard Nixon is an unlikely operatic protagonist. Surly and inscrutable, he stands outside a world of lyricism and emotional disclosure. His first stage entrance in Nixon in China is appropriately ironic, as the Spirit of ‘76 descends in life-sized proportions with impossible physics from straight above like a spacecraft. President Nixon had indeed stepped into another world when he visited Communist China in 1972, but in the 1987 opera collaboration by composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris, his dramatic journey ventures well beyond historic cultural diplomacy. Nixon’s first steps into China are also his first steps onto the operatic stage, and the parallel journey that unfolds alongside the cultural disorientation of an American in Maoist China circumnavigates the territory of opera itself, through storytelling that is as self-conscious and historically conscientious as its uneasy protagonist.

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

Michael Miller




Another Angle on Wagner's Lohengrin in Chicago, by Amy Stebbins

Amber-wagner-better
Amber Wagner.

Lohengrin
Music and libretto by Richard Wagner
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Civic Opera House
8 March 2011

Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Stage Director: Elijah Moshinsky
Set and Costume Designer: John Napier
Lighting Designer: Christine Binder
Chorus Master: Donald Nally

Lohengrin - Johan Botha
Elsa - Amber Wagner
Ortrud - Michaela Schuster
Telramund - Greer Grimsley
King Heinrich - Georg Zeppenfeld
The Herald - Lester Lynch

The Chicago Lyric Opera’s Lohengrin is a testament to the major problem of many American opera productions today. On the one hand, conductor Sir Andrew Davis’ formidable interpretation rivalled the greatest in Wagnerian history, but on the other hand, director Elijah Moshinsky’s lackluster staging rivalled your average high-school production. The irony of hearing some of the world’s greatest Wagnerian voices while seeing some of its most awkward blocking is nothing new to regular attendees of the American Wagner scene. That said, the Lyric might have done well to present the evening in concert form.

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

Michael Miller




Lohengrin Revived at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, by David Kubiak

Totem poles in Lohengrin. Photo: Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Lohengrin
music and libretto by Richard Wagner
Lyric Opera of Chicago
Civic Opera House
8 March 2011

Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis
Stage Director: Elijah Moshinsky
Set and Costume Designer: John Napier
Lighting Designer: Christine Binder
Chorus Master: Donald Nally

Lohengrin - Johan Botha
Elsa - Amber Wagner
Ortrud - Michaela Schuster
Telramund - Greer Grimsley
King Heinrich - Georg Zeppenfeld
The Herald - Lester Lynch

This year’s production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin was only the second mounted by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in its history. The Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal have been seen multiple times on Wacker Drive since the 1950’s, but what is usually thought to be Wagner’s most accessible opera was not performed until 1980, a pedestrian premiere memorable only for Eva Marton in her prime as Elsa. The psychological complexities of the later works have generally commanded more attention in the post-war musical world, and the fairy-tale Lohengrin inevitably began to seem old-fashioned, a victim of jokes about Slezak and Melchior hauled upstream by swan boats. But Wagner achieved in Lohengrin a purity of lyric expression, both tender and ardent, not found in any of his other compositions, and always a pleasure to encounter again. Perhaps rightly, it was the Italianate Lohengrin of Plácido Domingo in 1984 that drew the serious attention of New York audiences back to the piece, and then Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt in the controversial 1998 production conceived by Robert Wilson. That staging cut through accumulated theatrical tradition by adopting a highly stylized Kabuki-like form, both in the sets and the singers’ movements. (Ben Heppner has claimed that his vocal problems began with this production and the unnatural singing positions he was forced into.) What Lyric Opera audiences saw in February and March was, as is usual in Chicago, hardly so challenging.

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

Michael Miller




Another Angle on Wagner’s Lohengrin in Chicago by Amy Stebbins

Amber-wagner-better

The Chicago Lyric Opera’s Lohengrin is a testament to the major problem of many American opera productions today. On the one hand, conductor Sir Andrew Davis’ formidable interpretation rivalled the greatest in Wagnerian history, but on the other hand, director Elijah Moshinsky’s lackluster staging rivalled your average high-school production. The irony of hearing some of the world’s greatest Wagnerian voices while seeing some of its most awkward blocking is nothing new to regular attendees of the American Wagner scene. That said, the Lyric might have done well to present the evening in concert form.

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

Alan Miller

Lohengrin Revived at the Lyric Opera of Chicago by David Kubiak

01

This year’s production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin was only the second mounted by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in its history. The Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal have been seen multiple times on Wacker Drive since the 1950’s, but what is usually thought to be Wagner’s most accessible opera was not performed until 1980, a pedestrian premiere memorable only for Eva Marton in her prime as Elsa. The psychological complexities of the later works have generally commanded more attention in the post-war musical world, and the fairy-tale Lohengrin inevitably began to seem old-fashioned, a victim of jokes about Slezak and Melchior hauled upstream by swan boats. But Wagner achieved in Lohengrin a purity of lyric expression, both tender and ardent, not found in any of his other compositions, and always a pleasure to encounter again. Perhaps rightly, it was the Italianate Lohengrin of Plácido Domingo in 1984 that drew the serious attention of New York audiences back to the piece, and then Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt in the controversial 1998 production conceived by Robert Wilson. That staging cut through accumulated theatrical tradition by adopting a highly stylized Kabuki-like form, both in the sets and the singers’ movements. (Ben Heppner has claimed that his vocal problems began with this production and the unnatural singing positions he was forced into.) What Lyric Opera audiences saw in February and March was, as is usual in Chicago, hardly so challenging.

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

Alan Miller

Political Icons on Stage: Nixon in China at the Met by Rebecca Y. Kim

Met-opera-nixon-in-china-toast
Richard Nixon is an unlikely operatic protagonist. Surly and inscrutable, he stands outside a world of lyricism and emotional disclosure. His first stage entrance in Nixon in China is appropriately ironic, as the Spirit of ‘76 descends in life-sized proportions with impossible physics from straight above like a spacecraft. President Nixon had indeed stepped into another world when he visited Communist China in 1972, but in the 1987 opera collaboration by composer John Adams, director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and choreographer Mark Morris, his dramatic journey ventures well beyond historic cultural diplomacy. Nixon’s first steps into China are also his first steps onto the operatic stage, and the parallel journey that unfolds alongside the cultural disorientation of an American in Maoist China circumnavigates the territory of opera itself, through storytelling that is as self-conscious and historically conscientious as its uneasy protagonist.

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

Alan Miller

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Myth of Italy in Victorian England, at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma, until June 12

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia (1864-8), Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, e il mito dell’Italia nell’Inghilterra Vittoriana. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome) until June 12th.

The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna follows up a Burne-Jones retrospective it hosted twenty-five years ago with a hundred pre-Raphaelite works illustrating the influence of Italian art on Victorian England.

Formed in London in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, like the Impressionists, felt challenged by photography and the emerging science of color. Whereas the Impressionists took to the fields, the Pre-Raphaelites closed themselves in a private, inner world of nostalgia. They staunchly opposed the academy as they strove to recapture pre-Renaissance ethical sensibilities, assimilating and re-expressing them in the language of modernity. They rejected Raphael because he forsook the truth for ideal beauty. They concluded that the only way forward was to go backward and construct a new grammar with elements of Gothicism, Romanticism, and Classicism, recapturing a Gefühl for nature to counter the devastating effects of “progress” on rural and artisanal life.

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

Michael Miller




Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Myth of Italy in Victorian England by Daniel B. Gallagher

Venus_verticordia_rossetti_456

Formed in London in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, like the Impressionists, felt challenged by photography and the emerging science of color. Whereas the Impressionists took to the fields, the Pre-Raphaelites closed themselves in a private, inner world of nostalgia. They staunchly opposed the academy as they strove to recapture pre-Renaissance ethical sensibilities, assimilating and re-expressing them in the language of modernity. They rejected Raphael because he forsook the truth for ideal beauty. They concluded that the only way forward was to go backward and construct a new grammar with elements of Gothicism, Romanticism, and Classicism, recapturing a Gefühl for nature to counter the devastating effects of “progress” on rural and artisanal life.

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

Alan Miller

Trash Talk: Griffin’s Willoughby Incinerator Revived , by Alan Miller


Ornament is no crime at the Willoughby Incinerator (1934). Photo © 2011 Alan Miller.

Between 1930 and 1938, Walter Burley Griffin and Eric Nicholls designed thirteen municipal incinerators in various Australian cities. Built in the heart of the Great Depression, these odd little buildings must have been a creative and financial godsend for Griffin, an architect whose splendid dreams were too often thwarted by unsplendid clients. The incinerators, which often sat in suburban streets, were ‘green’ infrastructure avant la lettre, fascinating both as urban history and as a possible model for the urban transformations required by the 21st century.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller