Staatskapelle Dresden and Daniel Harding in Beethoven at Lincoln Center - REVISED

Daniel Harding. Photo: Stina Gullander.


Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden
Daniel Harding, Conductor
Lincoln Center, Avery Fisher Hall
Monday, November 1, 2010

All-Beethoven Program

Piano Concerto No. 4, Rudolf Buchbinder, Piano

Ah Perfido,
 Deborah Voigt, Soprano
Symphony No. 7

The 2009-2010 Carnegie Hall season offered a magnificent survey of the world's great orchestras: Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Leipzig, Cleveland,Boston, Chicago. Only Dresden was lacking, and now they make their appearance, fortunately before that annus mirabilis

 has faded too far into the past. I try to avoid discussions about which orchestra is the greatest of them, because that leads nowhere, and few music-lovers are at their best when they are venting passions of that sort. Whatever one might say about the others, the Dresdener Staatskapelle has a special circle of enthusiasts, who follow them around the world, deeply gratified by what they hear. After basking in sixteen hours of their playing in the Semperoper Ring Cycle last spring — especially under the brilliant direction of Jonas Alber — I can count myself among them, however divided a music critic's loyalties may have to be, and however limited his travel budget.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Grooves in the Mist - A Vinyl Memoir ny Steven Kruger, Part II

The Vinyl Era. Image © 2010 Michael Miller.
Click here to read Part I.

Earlier in this backward glance, I tried to revive a feeling of what it might have been like to have a phonograph in one's life. Looking over it, a reader may sense that the 78rpm record was a fragile blessing at best, while perhaps understanding why even today a child would appreciate it. We left off in the early 1960s, where, one might suppose, the advent of the stereo LP solved everything! By then, I had decent quality electronics, and even the admiration of screech resistant female ears.

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

Michael Miller




Two at Davies Hall: San Francisco Symphony/Conlon; Staatskapelle Dresden/Harding, by Steven Kruger

The Critic at Davies Hall.
A tale of two orchestras, two conductors, two soloists, several accents, two continents... Indeed. Two recent musical evenings, performed back to back by our own San Francisco Symphony under James Conlon, and by the legendary Dresden Staatskapelle, on tour with Daniel Harding, were highly revealing of the differences which can still exist in the identity, tradition and manner of orchestras. By programming emotionally mainstream works, containing few neuroses or cataclysms, both conductors necessarily brought the focus of the audience's attention to beauty of execution, national perceptions of orchestral warmth and tone painting, and to their own manner of leadership.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Staatskapelle Dresden and Daniel Harding in Beethoven at Lincoln Center, by Michael Miller

Daniel Harding. Photo: Stina Gullander.


Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden
Daniel Harding, Conductor
Lincoln Center, Avery Fisher Hall
Monday, November 1, 2010

All-Beethoven Program

Piano Concerto No. 4, Rudolf Buchbinder, Piano

A Perfido,
 Deborah Voigt, Soprano
Symphony No. 7

There is a cohesion in the Staatskapelle's playing, both in terms of overall sound and in terms of their focus on the music they are playing, as if it were chamber music on a very large scale, that makes them unique. Other orchestras may shine with their virtuosity or luxuriate in brilliant soloists, but the Staatskapelle Dresden excels in its unique musicality. Mere effect is beneath them, in fact there is a strain of undestatement in their musicianship. It should also be mentioned that they have a strong will of their own, and they are capable of playing badly, if they don't respect a conductor. Hence the fine exhibition of their art they produced for Daniel Harding Monday evening was a success in itself, since no one can deny that they put themselves into it.

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

Michael Miller




Opera Australia’s Der Rosenkavalier by Andrew Miller

Cheryl-barker-and-catherine

Though one hundred years old and a comedy set in 1740's Vienna, Der Rosenkavalier is still fresh. This is partly because the opera is timeless because, as Robert Gibson and Andrew Riemer's interesting program notes point out, it is an anachronistic mixture of different bits of Viennese cultural. For instance one can nitpick the fact the romantic waltzes Richard Strauss incorporated into the opera's music and plot wouldn't exist until the 19th Century (they were barely dancing l'Allemande with linked hands in the mid 18th Century). Thus the opera is about as logical and historically accurate as a myth is --  it is a rich Dobos torte (whose recipe Dobos donated to the Budapest Pastry and Honey-bread Makers' Guild five years before the opera's première, for what it's worth) of many integrated layers, some chocolate, some nutty, some sugary, and some disturbing, ashy and mawkish. Present also is something of Sigmund Freud's contemporaneous Vienna, not just in the way we see how his patients' inherited neuroses manifested themselves some generations prior, but also as psychology as one of the last frontiers of the enlightenment. The famous final duet is to be sung "träumerisch": the young hero Octavian sings "Ist ein Traum..." just as the "secret of his dream is revealed" (see photo of tablet below). He wakes up from the intense love affair with the Marschallin and realises the true nature of his feelings. This happens only after he has convinced his rival the Baron Ochs of his insanity by simulating hallucinations in a kind of upside down abreaction in the form of a Viennese masked ball. Octavian awakens to the realisation that his love for the Marschallin is "mere" warm friendship and discovers true love for the young Sophie who is fresh from the convent. He had refused to face the dawn in Act I, but by Act III he comes to act on the dreams, or at least the strange events, of the intervening scenes in which he undergoes two transformations to the opposite sex, encounters a symbolic silver rose, tries to duel Ochs and sets up said masked ball, before fixing his and Sophie's lives. Octavian, knightly and hot headed though he is, has a manly grace. He forsakes brute force in the end to find a third alternative to his problems, which should be relevant today when the beastly Baron Ochs' style of greed of is often valued over character, civility and proper thinking. Or at least relevant to those who more reasonably mistake romantic love for friendship or believe one necessarily precludes the other for all time.

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

Alan Miller

A Grand Tour, Part 3: Some Cool Buildings by Alan Miller

Ronchamp-1

Urban planning is a sound and necessary activity, but you can’t eat a menu, right? Buildings, trees, curbstones; it is particularity which makes a city and in the end it takes physical objects to settle arguments about what is good, bad and weird in architecture. In that spirit, here are some buildings good enough to eat.

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

Alan Miller

Openings: The Boston Season begins, by Charles Warren

Paramount_marquee
Paramount Theater: Marquee


Boston Symphony Orchestra, October 7 and 15, James Levine Conductor
Mahler, Second and Fifth Symphonies; Harbison, Symphony No. 3

Emmanuel Music, September 24, Ryan Turner, Conductor
Handel, 

Alexander’s Feast

Opera Boston, October 22
Beethoven, 

Fidelio

Paramount Theater Film Series: Sternberg, Lang, Godard

The Boston musical season is now rolling along, with almost too many good things occurring to keep up with. The best news, and a great relief, has been the return of music director James Levine to the Boston Symphony Orchestra after many months off for back surgery and recuperation. Levine looks older, with more loose flesh around the face, and he walks onstage and off carefully with a cane (though at moments he just rests it on his shoulder and goes securely on). He seems to feel good, and once seated and starting to conduct shows great animation and involvement, indeed passionate involvement, in the work at hand. He has the orchestra playing spectacularly. He has really taken them beyond themselves, and they know it and seem to feel proud of it, as they should.

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

Michael Miller




More Caravaggio throughout Italy, by Daniel B. Gallagher

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Saint-Francis-in-Ecstacy, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.


The shows in Italy honoring the four-hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death have been so popular that authorities at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence have announced they are extending “Caravaggio e Caravaggeschi” at the Galleria Palatina until January 9th. Pilgrims can also take advantage of “Caravaggio e altri pittori del XVII secolo” at Castel Sismondo in Rimini until March 28th.

Among the fifteen paintings on loan by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford for the show in Rimini is Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy 

(1594 circa), one of Caravaggio’s first religious works. Not only does it showcase the artist’s earliest pictographic and metaphorical experiments with light, but also his unconventional presentation of standard religious themes. In this case, the seraph who imparted the stigmata to Francis on Mount Alverno is conspicuously absent. Caravaggio puts in its place a two-winged angel gently cradling the pierced friar in its arms. The seraph had been canonically present ever since Giotto’s first stunning renditions of the episode three centuries earlier. By omitting it, Caravaggio has poignantly evoked the interior dimension of the saint’s spiritual death and rebirth. With fingers lightly entwined in Francis’s cincture, the angel gently rotates the saint’s body towards us to give us a better view of the mysterious wound in his side, inviting us to follow him in uniting our sufferings to Christ’s. The Rimini show also includes rare paintings by Gentileschi, Strozzi, Zurbarán, and Caravaggio’s great admirer, Ribera.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Le Nozze di Figaro in Sydney by Andrew Miller

Figaroact4

I usually don't like to pick favourites, but of the Mozart operas it's hard to deny Le Nozze di Figaro. As such it has become familiar without become at all tired, and has probably sublimated a rather particular image of itself in my mind's eye and ear. The story of love giving way to jealousy, and then despair, and finally forgiveness, under the roof of an aristo ripe for Revolution, is bound to develop a thin farcical crust, but it never seemed a straight comedy, let alone a farce, to me. The characters are so genuine, even the myriad of supporting roles are so strong, that it's easy to sympathise with their harrowing trials. I see the opera more as the Orpheus and Eurydice story with a happy ending which makes sense. It also lovingly portrays the noble and logical humanist belief that (to paraphrase John F. Kennedy) it is not impossible for human beings to solve problems that they themselves created. No parts for any God or gods nor even Cupid here. This production, directed by Neil Armfield perhaps wasn't exactly my idea of Figaro or quite sat on my sense of humour, but it did try some new things. Armfield does try to play it for laughs by filling the opera with over-the-top physical comedy, but he often risks hamminess. It is hard to keep up that kind of farce for over three hours and he doesn't always succeed in creating dark comedy in putting a fluff of laughter on violent, frightening or dark situations. He never ruins the comedy intrinsic to the libretto or the music, in fact at his best moments he even compliments this by adding detail to the scene with subtler acting in the background.

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

Alan Miller

A Singer's Notes by Keith Kibler 25: He That Hath Ears to Hear, Let Him Hea

Christopher Innvar and Kim Stauffer in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Photo Kevin Sprague.


In The Crucible,

 the Proctors sit at their plain table with John's brief failing between them. He is a good man. He makes every situation better, more reasonable. He is a natural man. The land is his, and he is the land's. Everything is in the quietness. She is the quietness. Christopher Innvar with a voice which lurches sadly, breaks the silence. Kim Stauffer, with a face barren and wide, makes cautious answer, and holds the distance between them in her hands. These marvelous actors do not push the scene or frighten the quietness. They wait upon it. It becomes their whole union. Maybe the best art is the stillest. One thinks of the necessary silence in Rembrandt's great "Prodigal Son" where the hands, the fingers of the aged father are the only speaking agents, his old head only cocked in a certain way that seems to speak. Or the earned sense of settled quiet I heard in Peter Pears' singing at the end of his time on the stage, most of it at least a half-tone flat. What is this? As I saw at Barrington Stage, this is a listening. Listen first, sing later. After the miners rose encapsuled through dark tunnels in the earth, after the silence, there was singing.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller