Australia says No, Thanks: the Election of 2010 by Alan Miller

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Three weeks after deposing Kevin Rudd, as though ticking off another item on her to-do list, Julia Gillard called a federal election (one of only three winter federal elections in Australian history). I can’t summon the heart to give much of an account of the five week campaign which followed, especially since the twist in the story only came once the votes began to be counted. You really had to be here. The campaign was truly godawful, a complete extinguishing of the hope which had seen Kevin07 elected three years before. Both major parties pandered to the same focus groups in the same few marginal electorates. They peddled small bore middle class welfare and indulged trumped-up fear; they blandly appealed to the most disgracefully narrow-minded tendencies in the darkest marginal corners of the Australian electorate, the people who fear their leaf blowers will not be powerful enough to defend their McMansions against Taliban invasion. It was easy to to believe that the entire country had become, as one correspondent to the Sydney Morning Herald wrote, a Boganocracy.

 on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Alan Miller

The View from Usher Hall, Edinburgh, by Michael Miller

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Our first Edinburgh Festival and our first visit to Usher Hall opened with a delightful surprise. We didn’t have to get very far into Mozart’s Idomeneo

 for me to realize that the acoustics of the hall are surpassingly beautiful. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, playing period instruments, and the singers floated in a warm acoustic atmosphere, but the sound was also direct and present, so that the attacks of strings and brass and the fleeting nuances of the human voice were as clear as you could want them to be. Our seats were also several rows in the Grand Circle and well covered by the level above. In most halls the sound becomes rather muffled in that kind of situation, but, when I noticed that I was surrounded by fellow critics, I assumed that the Festival media representatives knew what they were doing. More importantly I loved what I heard.
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Michael Miller



A Singer's Notes by Keith Kibler 21: So many good things...

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Mezzo-soprano Lucille Beer

So many good things...

Ah, the tone of a production. Was Schumann right when he quoted Schlegel at the top of his score to the Fantasie this way: "Through all the world's dream there sounds one tone for him who can hear it?" I'm thinking now of many different pieces — Our Town

 of Thornton Wilder, first. This concentrated text has the bareness, the emptiness of Greek tragedy on the page. The actions, however, are humble. Is there a single tone there?
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Bach, Ligeti and Carter at Tanglewood: thought-provoking, ear-opening, by Larry Wallach

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Pierre-Laurent Aimard

Tuesday, August 10, 8 p.m. Ozawa Hall
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
Members of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe

Pierre-Laurent Aimard and guest soloists from the European Chamber Orchestra performed excerpts from Bach’s Musical Offering, four late chamber works by Elliott Carter, and the Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano — Hommage à Brahms by György Ligeti

Today many musicians feel it necessary to organize their programs around a theme. Themes can be programmatic (music of spring/summer…, war/peace, food, etc); they can focus on nationality and/or time-period (modern Polish music); a particular characteristic (Maurizio Pollini and the Juilliard Quartet once presented a program of nothing but very short pieces, including Webern’s Bagatelles and Chopin’s Preludes); a survey of a certain repertory (e.g. the complete Bartók string quartets); or actual musical themes (music based on “L’homme armé”). In fact almost anything can be made into a ‘theme.’ When all else fails, you can call a program “Music of Sorrow and Joy” (or “Lament and Celebration”—you get the idea). The theory is that a thematic title gives an audience additional food for thought, and perhaps offers cues of what to listen for; it may create a more active role for the normally passive listeners, or it may simply provide a catchy headline.

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

Michael Miller



Blurring the Line Between Romanticism and Modernism: a review of the first weekend of “Berg and His World” at Bard College, August 13—15: Berg and Vienna, by Larry Wallach

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The theme of Bard’s retrospective “Berg and His World” was clearly stated and restated: Berg needs to be liberated from the so-called “Second Viennese School” and seen in a wider context of Vienna and beyond. Too long has he been seen primarily as a student of Schoenberg along with Webern; this perspective masks his individuality as well as his stature, which, if anything, is as great or greater than that of his beloved “master.” The gauntlet was laid down right away by Leon Botstein, who gave the first pre-concert talk: Berg gives us the best of both worlds, the expressive, content-oriented approach to composition as communication, and the formally strict, self-contained structural world of the music for its own sake. Implication no. 1: Schoenberg and Webern over-emphasize the latter at the expense of the former. Implication no. 2: other composers and artists than Schoenberg had powerful influences on Berg’s urge to compose expressively (read “romantically”). Implication no. 3: Berg was as much a romantic as a modernist. Result: Berg became by far the most popular (hence, successful) composer of the three.

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

Michael Miller




Arthur Miller's All My Sons at the Apollo Theatre by Huntley Dent

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Missing in action. A play is greatly fortunate when it receives a performance better than it is. The current revival of Arthur Miller’s family drama from 1947, All My Sons, needs that kind of help. You hear hollow echoes throughout of socialist catch phrases and pat Depression-era notions about the working Joe as mythic hero.  Money stinks. Bosses are glint-eyed bastards. In the Soviet system such virtuous cant was backed up by totalitarian terror: if you didn’t write a paean to the crews who built a new dam in Omsk, the secret police were ready to stimulate your inspiration with a midnight visit. Miller wanted to be a good leftist and a great writer at the same time. We can be thankful that his artistic ambitiousness won out. Otherwise, All My Sons would be like a Christmas pudding studded with thumbtacks — as it is, the action stops for  mini sermons on one-worldism, war profiteers, the corrupting decay of capitalism, and so on. Finger wagging isn’t helpful when you aim to be the working-class Sophocles. Who cares if Oedipus paid his charioteer a decent wage at the crossroad to Thebes?

 on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!
Alan Miller

Spur of the Moment at the Royal Court Theatre by Huntley Dent

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Her dark materials. I’m sure that the parents of Anya Reiss are bursting with pride that their daughter has written an acclaimed debut play, Spur of the Moment, at the unheard-of age of seventeen. But aren’t they horrified, too? As staged by the adventurous Royal Court Theatre, whose young writers program nurtured Reiss, the play is Ozzie and Harriet Burn in  Hell. Their precocious offspring wasn’t just listening at doors to what the adults were squabbling about. She was prying into their psyches with sharpened tweezers, as coldly objective as Nabokov with his butterflies skewered and pinned on a board.  Mums and dads across the land must be applying double insulation to their bedrooms.

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

A Note from Bayreuth, by Michael Miller

From Hans Neuenfels' Lohengrin at Bayreuth.

I had originally planned this commentary simply to let you, our readers, know about the changes in our usual coverage for the remainder of the summer: Larry Wallach, Seth Lachterman, and Keith Kibler will bravely continue their coverage of summer festivals in the Berkshires and Hudson Valley, while I visit Bayreuth, to review the entire 2010 season: Tankred Dorst's production of the Ring

, along with the controversial productions of Parsifal (Stefan Herheim, 2008), Die Meistersinger (Katharina Wagner, 2007), andLohengrin (Hans Neuenfels, 2010). I left my rat-catching gear at home, not wishing to incur overweight charges and thinking it might be cheaper simply to purchase the necessaries here, but all the ratting supply stores in Bayreuth are sold out of equipment, and I realize that I simply have to remain unrattled, while the rodents run free.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Henry Moore at the Tate Britain (24 February – 8 August 2010), by Huntley Dent

(24 February – 8 August 2010)


Henry Moore | Reclining Figure (autumn 1945 - October 1946) | Private Collection © Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation


Ship of state. In his long lifetime, which spanned the buggy whip and the atom bomb, Henry Moore’s sculptures were never derided for being “lumpy, swollen, etiolated, hunched, extruded, squashed, and dismembered” by anyone who championed modern art. Such disdain has been saved for our time. The quote is from a London daily's art critic on the opening of Tate Britain’s large Moore exhibit, and she has no patience for the artist’s repetitiveness, lack of originality, overproduction (the museum culled over a hundred sculptures and drawings from a possible 11,000), endless borrowing from his betters (particularly Picasso), ubiquity as a favorite of corporations and colleges that need to art up the place (my college boasts a large, expensive Moore outside my old dorm), and so on. Such are the whines of twerpdom, which every iconic artist endures as the generations change. The only exception I can think of is the Teflon-coated reputation of Cezanne.

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

Michael Miller



American Gothic – Aaron Copland The Tender Land, Glimmerglass 2010, by Seth Lachterman

American Gothic – Aaron Copland’s 

The Tender Land
, Glimmerglass 2010

The Tender Land

Music by Aaron Copland
Libretto by Horace Everett (Erik Johns)

Conductor

, Stewart Robertson
Director, Tazewell Thompson
Sets, Donald Eastman
Costumes, Andrea Hood
Lighting, Robert Wierzel
Assistant Conductor, Zachary Schwartzman
Assistant Director, E. Reed Fisher
Chorus Master, Bonnie Koestner
Principal Coach/Accompanist, Jocelyn Dueck
Assistant Coach/Accompanist, Clinton Smith
Stage Manager, E. Reed Fisher
Projected Titles, Kelley Rourke
Hair and Makeup Design, Anne Ford-Coates

Cast

Laurie Moss, Lindsay Russell
Martin, Andrew Stenson
Top, Mark Diamond
Ma Moss, Stephanie Foley Davis
Mr. Splinters, Chris Lysack
Grandpa Moss, Joseph Barron
Mrs. Jenks, Jamilyn Manning-White
Beth Moss, Rebecca Jo Loeb
Mrs. Splinters, Claire Shackleton
Mr. Jenks, Will Liverman

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Andrew Stenson as Martin and Lindsay Russell as Laurie Moss in Glimmerglass Opera's 2010 production of The Tender Land. Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Opera

In a year that has seen several stellar productions of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town (for example, Walking the Dog Theater at PS21and the Williamstown Theater), perhaps it is a necessary corrective to experience Copland’s subtle and discomfiting The Tender Land. Copland’s collaboration in the 1940 film version of the Wilder classic has helped to promulgate the myth of a gingham-and-apple-pie-innocence as the psycho-social basis of the Rural American Gothic. As beautifully Transcendentalist as Our Town is in depicting the ethos of a 1900s New England town, the darker, narrow-minded qualities of insularity should not be overlooked. Copland’s score for the film has abetted the play in providing a heart-string-pulling idealization of what family life could be, but what always remains an elusive fiction. The Tender Land, Copland’s only full-length opera, and a work whose final shape would trouble him for years, is something like Of Mice and Men Meets Grover’s Corners. Copland, of course, wrote the music for the film version of Steinbeck’s tragic tale, and probably appreciated how “different from us folk” really works in the cemented close-mindedness of much of this country. It’s easy to imagine personal motives for Copland’s stirrings away from Wilder’s benignity. Copland was comfortable and public about his homosexuality, and Wilder was apparently repressive and closeted. Both artists having reached the status of Deans of American Arts, with hugely popular appeal, one could imagine the daring Copland having some interest in the heartbreak borne of those on the peripheries of the socially phobic grass-fed American family. Perhaps something like this was on his mind when the composer saw the photographs of depression-era sharecroppers in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

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

Michael Miller