Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh at Wyndham’s, by Huntley Dent

Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh. Photo Catherine Ashmore.

Abigail’s Party
by Mike Leigh

Directed by Lindsay Posner

Jill Halfpenny – Beverly
Joe Absolom – Tony
Natalie Casey – Angela
Susannah Harker – Sue
Andy Nyman – Laurence
Wyndham’s Theatre

Gin and it.

There are cocktail parties, and then there are cocktail parties. Dramatists like to use them as a trope for the viral malaise that has infected middle-class life. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the unraveling of a marriage is x-rayed with malicious glee, while in the sedate confines of The Cocktail Party T.S. Eliot takes up his familiar, morose theme of “shoring up fragments against our ruin,” giving us hints of the Alcestis of Euripides so that the failed marriage at the heart of the play has mythic resonance. (Albee seemed to stretch for all-American resonance by naming his duelling couple George and Martha, although the relevance to George and Martha Washington never hit home for me — history is the last thing one thinks about as the air blisters and boils in the play.)

Using Woolf as his template, the young Mike Leigh took the cocktail party to absurd, vicious extremes in his 1977 play, Abigail’s Party, which was taped for television by the BBC.


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








Watch out for Porgy and Bess! Or, better, keep an ear to the ground…by Michael Miller

Laquita Mitchell as Bess and Alfred Walker as Porgy in the Tanglewood performance of Porgy and Bess. Photo Hilary Scott.

Boston audiences may possibly have something truly wonderful to look forward to in September following the gala season opener. Bramwell Tovey will repeat his splendid 2011 Tanglewood performance of Porgy and Bess. At Tanglewood it was an extraordinary musical experience — a performance of the operatic version of George Gershwin’s “folk opera” — which is not all that common an event and is likely to become even less common, since the Gershwin estate has approved a “lite” Broadway version running about 90 minutes with a severely simplified score. Add this to the current infatuation of cash-strapped American opera houses with musicals, and the prospect is depressing.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler, 54: Mozart/Schikaneder, Die Zauberflöte at Hubbard Hall Opera Theatre

 

The cast and orchestra of Hubbard Hall Opera Theatre’s production of Die Zauberflöte. Photo Pete Carrolan.

Mozart/Schikaneder, Die Zauberflöte at Hubbard Hall Opera Theatre
Directed by Paul Houghtaling
Conducted by Kelly Crandell

The most accurate way I can sum up Hubbard Hall Opera Theatre’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is that it is direct. This is in fact, a compliment of the highest order. There is no pretension here, no fussiness. Paul Houghtaling’s direction is self-effacing. The clean, pure lines of the opera are brought to life in the practicality of the set and the actions of the singers.  A circular walkway encloses the orchestra, making Mozart’s music the central player. The performance itself seemed to me a splendid and solemn ritual, enacted around the players, ably led by conductor Kelly Crandell and concertmistress Irene Fitzgerald-Cherry. The comic elements were, for once, in balance with the more serious tone to which the music returns incessantly. Brian Kuhl’s steadfast Tamino and Mary Thorne’s clear-voiced Pamina were priest-like in their steadiness and pristine vocalism. Charles Martin as Sarastro sang instead of orated, and in his second aria showed tenderness as well as strength. Of course, Andrew Pardini stole the show as Papageno — Schickaneder knew what he was doing.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








Emanuel Ax explores Beethoven sonatas; Pamela Frank returns…with Brahms at Tannery Pond, by Michael Miller

Pamela-and-manny-finished-3434

Pamela Frank and Emanuel Ax take their bows. Photo Leslie Teicholz.

Tannery Pond Concerts
Sunday, August 12, 2012 at 4 pm

Beethoven – Sonata in A major, Op. 2 No. 2
Sonata in C minor, Op. 13, “Pathétique”
Brahms – Sonata in G major for violin & piano, Op. 78, No. 1

Pamela Frank, violin
Emanuel Ax, piano

There was a certain amount of mystery surrounding this concert since the Tannery Pond season was first announced earlier this year. Venues usually have Emanuel Ax’s programs in plenty of time to include them in their advance season previews. Even if a musician’s repertory is generally familiar, audiences begin to feel insecure, if they don’t know what they’re going to hear in advance, but Emanuel Ax is one of the few musicians who can sell out a house without a program, and that is what happened. The delay made it possible offer a very special surprise, the return of the great violinist, Pamela Frank, to the concert stage after an absence of over a decade. In 2001, she received acupuncture treatment for a hand injury, and this in turn damaged nerves in her arm. She has been teaching at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Peabody Conservatory, as well as a variety of summer music schools and festivals, but it has been uncertain whether she would be able to play again. She played Brahms’ First Violin Sonata in G Major.

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








A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 53: Lully’s Armide at Glimmerglass

Jack Rennie as Love with Peggy Kriha Dye as Armide and Curtis Sullivan as Hatred in The Glimmerglass Festival/Opera Atelier production of Armide. Photo Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Marshall Pynkoski’s direction of Lully’s Armide at Glimmerglass was a beautiful and unpretentious thing. It was also limited by the demands of a repertory opera house. The production trod a middle ground stylistically, using by necessity young conservatory-trained singers, the best that we have. This made for heavy going in the choral sections. The orchestral playing as well began with some detail and point, but changed slowly into a kind of general approximation of what standard Baroque practice is thought to be. Orchestral texture in this style is of the greatest importance, especially the continuo group. I would be looking for much more variety and also more stillness where the silences carry the words forward.


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








The Damnation of Faust and the Ascension of Berlioz by Larry Wallach

Berlioz

The paradox of Berlioz is that he is both quintessentially of the nineteenth-century and in many ways far ahead of his time. Grandiose, self-absorbed, at home in both Heaven and Hell (well, perhaps a bit more in Hell), operating on the largest temporal and spatial canvases, bringing together mammoth forces to speak in one voice; but also episodic and arbitrary in construction, harmonically idiosyncratic and technically suspect, bombastic, addicted to overwhelming sound spectaculars, in short, in questionable taste; in these ways he epitomizes Romanticism. All of these characteristics of his music have been noticed and pondered in attempts to come up with an evaluation of this unavoidable maverick, a figure whose closest counterpart in his own time might be Mussorgsky, or in ours, Charles Ives. Today, with post-modernism, mash-ups, the valuing of discontinuity and fragmentary statements, Berlioz rides high. He is seen as a predecessor to the liberation of tone color as an independent element of construction, as in the music of Debussy. In the past, when polished craftsmanship and solid structure were primary virtues, critics often looked askance at Berlioz’s bulky, generically ambiguous compositions. Today, we recognize the uniqueness of his vision [1].

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

Wiederkehr ans Leben wiederholt: Gerhard Oppitz plays the complete piano music of Brahms, Part II, by Larry Wallach

Johannes Brahms sitting at the piano in the music room of his friends, Richard and Maria Fellinger

Gerhard Oppitz plays the complete piano music of Brahms
(Concerts 3 and 4)

Wednesday, July 25:
Piano Pieces, Op. 118
Paganini Variations
Two Rhapsodies, Op. 79
Piano Pieces, Op. 116

Thursday, July 26:
Piano Pieces, Op. 76
Piano Pieces, Op. 117
Piano Sonata no. 2 in F-sharp minor
Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24

To read Part I, click here.

As it turns out, the impression that Brahms himself was performing his own piano music at Tanglewood this summer proved to be illusory, compounded of the modest and Brahmsian demeanor of the actual performer, German pianist Gerhard Oppitz, his serious and total identification with the voice of the composer, and a certain hypnotic spell cast by his unhesitating progress from work to work, as if to say “and then I wrote…”. Oppitz’s performances showed characteristics that would be easy to ascribe to Brahms himself: a completely unfussy treatment of details to keep attention on the large structural sweep of each composition, of which he maintained a clear and magisterial vision at all times; a coloristic differentiation between secondary harmonic figuration and foregrounded contrapuntal activity; and a refusal to be brilliant simply for the sake of being brilliant. What might have appeared casual or even at times careless was the by-product of this focus on structure. This is not to imply that there was any slighting of expression: Oppitz/Brahms understood that in music this constructed with such profound care and logic, it is the larger shapes rather than the individual moments, however striking, that provide the most powerful and lasting forms of expression.

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








Father and Son Mozart: Kurt and Ken-David Masur conduct the Boston Symphony, with Gerhard Oppitz Playing Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, by Michael Miller

Gerhard Oppitz Plays Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, Ken-David Masur Conducting the BSO. Photo Hilary Scott.

Sunday, July 22, 2.30 pm
Shed

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Kurt Masur and Ken-David Masur, conductors
Gerhard Oppitz, piano

All-Mozart – Program
Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Ken-David)
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491 (Ken-David)
Symphony No. 36 in C, Linz (Kurt)

I have read that Kurt Masur has shared concerts with his estimable son, Ken-David, several times over the past year or so, before his fall from the podium in April caused an interruption in his concert schedule. This concert at Tanglewood is, I believe, the only appearance he will make until his broken shoulder blade heals entirely. Mr. Masur is looking forward to a full recovery, and we can only wish him a rapid and complete one. Meanwhile, Ken-David is in his second summer as a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. Last summer, he made a strong impression on me with Beethoven’s Leonore No. 3 Overture with the TMC Orchestra in Ozawa Hall. Unfortunately I missed his other concerts then, but this year I have heard more, with some very challenging pieces among them, including Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto and Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques. Everything augurs an important career ahead for Ken-David Masur and a cherishable contribution to our musical lives. Few conductors even of the older generation have had a thorough grounding in the German classics and in the German classical style of orchestral playing. His father Kurt, from whom he learned the art, was considered a rara avis when he first became known in the West, since at the very least he knows the scores inside and out, and his conducting was highly valued at a time when a younger generation of conductors was taking over, who knew Mahler and Ravel better than Beethoven. Kurt Masur’s art has many other virtues as well, above all his deep insight into works like the Missa Solemnis and the Symphonies of Bruckner and Brahms, not to mention Gershwin and Shostakovich. He is one of our great conductors, a worthy successor of Weingartner and Klemperer.

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








Late Raphael at the Prado, Madrid (until September 16th, 2012), by Bruce Boucher

Fig. 1. Raphael, Santa Cecilia. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 236 x 149 cm (ca. 1515 – 1516) Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

Late Raphael continues at the Museo del Prado until September 16th, 2012. A slightly different version will be shown at the Musée du Louvre,Paris, from October 8th, 2012 to January 14th, 2013. The catalogue was edited by Tom Henry and Paul Joannides.

If we think of Raphael today—and that is a big “if”—our mental picture is probably of a painter of Madonnas or, perhaps, of the Raphael of his first Roman frescoes, which long epitomized academic art at its best. But these are works associated with the early to middle periods of the painter’s brief life (1483-1520) and do not tell the whole story of his evolution, one of the most remarkable in the history of western art. The splendid exhibition now on show at the Prado gives us a glimpse of the greatness Raphael achieved in his last decade even though it does not fully answer the question of who Raphael really was.


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








Classical Music at SPAC: The Philadelphia Orchestra and André-Michel Schub’s Chamber Music Festival, by Michael Miller

A SPAC concert in the early days

The Saratoga Performing Arts Center presents the Philadelphia Orchestra’s three-week residency in tandem with an outstanding chamber music program directed by André-Michel Schub.

I regret that I could not attend a pre=season concert in June, the Buffalo Philharmonic under their Music Director JoAnn Falletta, who has garnered a great deal of respect in the musical world for her work with the orchestra, or last Thursday’s Philadelphia program, endowed with the catchy title, “The Lure of Paris,” in which Jean-Yves Thibaudet joined Stéphane Denève in a program of Bernstein, Gershwin, and Ravel. Many of the programs carry this popular appeal even further. There are date nights and family nights with ancillary activities suitable to the occasion. You can pick these out on the list published below. When M. Denève’s stint comes to an end, we will get to hear Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Québequois Music Director Designate, who will begin his full official duties in September, conduct a variety of programs. He has already appeared with the orchestra quite a bit, so he is not a mystery in Philadelphia, but if you haven’t heard him conduct his new orchestra, the Brahms-Liszt program coming up on Wednesday, August 8th will serve you well:


Read the full preview on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!