La Traviata at La Fenice with Sadovnikova, Secco and Meoni, under Myung Whun Chung, by Michael Miller

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La Traviata at La Fenice, Act II. Photo Michele Crosera.


Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata

Melodramma in tre atti
Libretto di Francesco Maria Piave
dal dramma La dame aux camélias di Alexandre Dumas figlio
prima rappresentazione assoluta: Venezia, Teatro La Fenice, 6 marzo 1853
versione 1854
Teatro La Fenice
September 19, 2010

Cast:
Violetta - Ekaterina Sadovnikova
Alfredo Germont - Stefano Secco
Giorgio Germont - Giovanni Meoni
Flora Bervoix - Rebeka Lokar
Annina - Sabrina Vianello
Gastone, visconte di Letori - Iorio Zennaro
Il barone Douphol - Elia Fabbian
Il dottor Grenvil - Luca Dall'Amico
Il marchese d'Obigny - Armando Gabba
Giuseppe - Cosimo D’Adamo
Un domestico di Flora - Nicola Nalesso
Un commissionario - Claudio Zancopè

Conductor - Myung-Whun Chung
Orchestra e Coro del Teatro La Fenice
Chorus director - Claudio Marino Moretti

Director - Robert Carsen
Scene and costume design - Patrick Kinmonth
Choreography - Philippe Giraudeau
Assistant director - Christophe Gayral
Light designer Robert Carsen e Peter Van Praet

Piave’s and Verdi’s adaptation of Dumas fils’ La dame aux camélias is ubiquitous these days, both in regional companies and the major houses, but for some time it hasn’t caught up with me...until now. It is without a doubt regrettable that the audience draw of a handful of operas pushes outstanding less familiar works from the repertoire, and La Traviata is one of the most egregious culprits, but a cast, staging, and musical direction of the calibre I witnessed at La Fenice this Sunday afternoon make all these considerations irrelevant and make it impossible to resist La Traviata as an extraordinary masterpiece that touches basic issues in us all: the life of women in society, the faith of young men in passion, the blindness of good intentions. The results are genuinely tragic, and a performance like this goes far beyond the usual ritual and can genuinely move us.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Three from the Bard: The Winter's Tale, Richard III and Macbeth in the Berkshires, by Keith Kibler

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Jonathan Epstein as Leontes and Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Hermione in The Winter's Tale. Photo Kevin Sprague.


The Winter's Tale

 is the finest play by Shakespeare which nobody knows. Form and content meet and marry in this play. Everything is focused in a concentrated and clear line. The poet had two dry runs before writing the tale. Pericles, one of the most popular plays of the 17th century, is a rough-hewn rollicking tale which finds its heroine converting lechers and being lusted after by her own father. Next up, in the trial of romances, is Cymbeline, a complex rambling play with too many resurrections. The rightness of the The Winter's Taletakes us by surprise. The themes of the last plays: separation, fathers and daughters, emotional destruction and rebirthing, here seem to have found a shape which sears itself into the mind. The most played and latest of the romances, The Tempest, can seem almost valedictory after Winter's Tale.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Blurring the Lines, Part 2 The Bard Retrospectives: “Berg and His World,” Second Weekend by Larry Wallach

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In the second weekend of the Bard Music Festival “Berg and his World” there emerged more clearly a reevaluation of Berg’s historical position. It could be paraphrased this way: Berg’s true spiritual and musical father was Mahler rather than Schoenberg; he was also strongly influenced by Schreker and Zemlinsky, both of whom were more connected to Romanticism than Modernism. While Schoenberg’s role as mentor and colleague was crucial, Berg’s aesthetic sympathies were with tonal opulence, melodic expressiveness, musical eroticism, and formal expansiveness, even though he sought to downplay this throughout his life in order to placate Schoenberg. The larger historical consequence of this view is a revision of the narrative about Modernism: its advocates, including followers of Schoenberg and Webern (i.e. atonalists and dodecaphonists) saw it as the main line of artistic evolution, a music of the future that would last a century and ensure the greatness of German music. This view dominated the historical narrative until the 1970’s, but was never borne out by audience acceptance and/or popularity. On the other hand, the new, emerging narrative has it that Berg was a conservative sustainer of Mahler’s vision, and achieved success that worked alongside the post-1960 Mahler revival and the emergence of Neo-romanticism. In Friday’s day-long panel, Klara Moricz went so far as to classify Berg’s use of tone rows as an occult, mystical and therefore musically arbitrary elements unrelated to expressiveness and musical effectiveness or value. The implication was that while this mystical side of Berg’s personality resonated with that of Schoenberg and many other Viennese contemporaries, it played no role in the aesthetics of the music as experienced by the audience.

 on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!
Alan Miller

Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Old Copland, New Carter, and Others

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Monday August 16, 2010 at Ozawa Hall
“Aureoles” (1979) by Jacob Druckman
Conductor – Keitaro Harada
“Turning Point” (2006, American premiere) by Colin Matthews
Conductor – Cristian Macelaru
“What Are Years” by Elliott Carter (2010, American premiere)
Songs for soprano and chamber orchestra on poems of Marianne Moore
Soprano – Sarah Joanne Davis
Conductor – Oliver Knussen
“Third Symphony” (1946) by Aaron Copland
Conductor – Robert Spano

Varieties of modern orchestral experience, British and American, were on display at the concluding event of this summer's Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, with three out of four offerings featuring the full (or over-full) resources of large ensembles. The Carter song-cycle used the pared-down configuration of a good-sized chamber-orchestra to support the solo soprano. Each work inhabited a distinctive sound-world and had its own conductor; it was almost as if we were hearing four different orchestras. It would be neat if I could diagram the four pieces as the points on a musical compass, but the chronological distance between the Copland (1946) and the rest (1982-2010) was such that the picture would look more like a buried root system connected to the leafy ends of three branches, and not all even belonging to the same tree. (Freud said that you are bound to run into problems if you try to construct a physical model of the mind; I'm having the same problem with this set of pieces.) But one implicit subtext may have inadvertently bound three of the four works together, that of war and peace.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Save the Warburg Library! by Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Hamburger (from the New York Review of Books Blog

 

Panels from Aby Warburg's «Mnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of Preconditioned Antiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life in the Art of the European Renaissance», 1926
Panels from Aby Warburg's «Mnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of Preconditioned Antiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life in the Art of the European Renaissance», 1926

 

Particularly painful is the University of London’s attempt to disperse the unparalleled collections of the Warburg Institute. Named for a supremely imaginative historian of art and culture, Aby Warburg, the institute began as his library in Hamburg, which was devoted to the study of the impact of classical antiquity on European civilization. The library was rescued from Hamburg in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power, thanks in part to the help of British benefactors. In the midst of World War II, Rab Butler, president of the British Board of Education, decided that the institute must be kept in Britain, and that the only way to do this was to make it part of the University of London, which was in those days a great force for openness and innovation in British higher education.

In the age of austerity that followed the Blitz, the University of London saw Warburg’s library as a jewel to be cherished. An ugly but efficient home for the institute was built in Bloomsbury, and for decades the university took pride in supporting its work. In the new age of austerity, by contrast, the university, which now controls the funds once earmarked for the institute, is doing its best to destroy what it once helped to save. In 2007, like a Dickensian villain, the university began self-parodically demanding enormous “economic” space charges for the Warburg’s building—charges so large that the institute cannot possibly pay them. The only way for the institute to avoid these charges would be to move into much smaller premises and close its stacks, a decision that would destroy its essential character.

...

Read the full entry in the New York Review of Books blog.

 

Michael Miller
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Hell on Earth and Hell Beyond: the Kronos Quartet in Usher Hall, by Michael Miller

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Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of the Last Judgment (detail), 1504, Berlin.

Kronos Quartet
Usher Hall, Sat 21 Aug: 8:00pm

David Harrington, Violin
John Sherba, Violin

Hank Dutt, Viola
Jeffrey Zeigler, Cello

Aleksandra Vrebalov -  ...hold me, neighbor, in this storm...
Steve Reich - Different Trains
George Crumb - Black Angels

The greatest surprise in the Kronos Quartet's concert at Usher Hall was that this was their very first appearance at the Edinburgh Festival. I'd have thought that they'd be regulars going back many years, given their well-known mixture of daring repertory and popular appeal. For almost forty years now, they have achieved almost cult status by playing a certain kind of contemporary music: challenging works which demand concentration but which are sufficiently colorful and aggressive that they commandeer the audience's attention from start to finish. The works in this concert were all endowed with a vast range of color, thanks to the introduction of quite a menagerie of alien instruments and the almost constant use of electronic enhancements. Along with this, the compositions exceeded the limits of music, since they were performances in themselves through the use of elaborate props and lighting — and all of them made their effect by conjuring up images in our imaginations, and through this imagery, telling stories, or relating experiences, feelings, and ideas in a poetic way that more or less consistently suggests a narrative. This internal Gesamtkunstwerk is entirely in harmony with the Edinburgh Festival, and I shouldn't be surprised to see them here again.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Derek Katz, Janáček: Beyond the Borders, by MIchael Pisani

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Leoš Janáček


Derek Katz, 

Janáček: Beyond the Borders, 
University of Rochester Press, 2009

Whether you first became aware of the composer Leoš Janáček while seeing or hearing one of his unusual operas, operas with animal characters, moon people, or 400-year-old women, or, like me, you encountered his well-known Sinfonietta

 in a traditional orchestra concert, you probably instantly realized that this is a composer with his own distinctive sound and musical sensibility, neither Germanic, like Richard Strauss, Finnish, like Sibelius, or Russian, like Scriabin, to compare him with three of his immediate contemporaries. Though there are occasional echoes of Smetana and Dvořák, the nineteenth century’s two great Czech nationalists, Janáček’s music most often sounds sharply different from theirs nor does he remotely resemble his contemporaries in nearby lands. This relatively short book — about 136 page of easily readable prose — is an exploration of that sound.
Read the full reviewon the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



David Robertson, BBC Proms 2010 by Huntley Dent

Prom50_david_robertson

The buddy system. Last night’s Prom was as close to an all-smiles evening as one could hope for with rain pouring down all day. David Robertson, although known as a champion of contemporary music,  programmed two easy pieces, the Barber Violin Concerto, which is about as challenging as a box of caramels (very delicious caramels) and the Sibelius Second Symphony, a sure-fire hit in Nordic-friendly Britain. There are so many stories of promising American conductors who falter in middle age (Robertson turned 52 last month) that I was eager to hear him a second time. The first  was with the Boston Symphony some years ago. Before I register my impressions, however, there’s a spic-and-span back story to his career — apparently this man has left behind him a trail of good will wherever he goes. He looks fit and friendly, with flat gray hair and the long face of a Yankee banker sitting for a Copley portrait. Born and raised in Malibu — not an arduous beginning, one assumes — Robertson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music. This tie to London glided into becoming the chief guest conductor of the BBC Symphony, which he presided over last night with happy faces all around. Robertson even entered the thorny patch that is the Ensemble Intercomtemporain in Paris and was cheered on despite having no ties to its founder, the formidable Pierre Boulez. Robertson preferred to conduct John Adams instead, and he got away with it.

 on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!
Alan Miller

A Lamb, a Book, and the Apocalypse at Bard Summerscape, August 22, 2010, by Seth Lachterman

Franz Schmidt’s Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln 

(1935-1937), The Book with Seven Seals

Christiane Libor, soprano
Fredrika Brillembourg, mezzo-soprano
Thomas Cooley, tenor
James Taylor, tenor
Robert Pomakov, bass-baritone
Kent Tritle, organ

The Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, Choral Director
The American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, Music Director

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Gustave Doré's The Final Judgement

Tonight’s much-anticipated and touted performance of little-known Austrian composer Franz Schmidt’s magnum opus, Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book with Seven Seals), was nothing short of startling, and more than a bit revelatory. Being fashioned as a dramatic oratorio, the mystifying and unsettling text of The Revelations of St. John the Divine becomes, in Schmidt’s hands, a terrifying and sensational virtuosic musical juggernaut. It was clear from Leon Botstein’s program notes that this evocatively dramatic work is one his favorites; in his program notes, he wastes no time in dubbing it one of the twentieth-century’s greatest choral works.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller