San Francisco Symphony with Alondra de la Parra conductor and Joyce Yang, piano in Glinka, Rachmaninoff, and Mussorgsky, by Steven Kruger

Alondradelaparra1
Alondra de la Parra. Photo Courtney Perry.

The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, July 23, 2010

Alondra de la Parra, Conductor

Joyce Yang, piano

Glinka, Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla

Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Opus 30
Mussorgsky-Ravel, Pictures at an Exhibition

Summer concerts in the city are frequently revealing in their own several ways. A quick look around Davies Hall last Friday would have reminded locals that there is no need to escape San Francisco in July. Many of the regular faces were present, and so, too, were throngs of young couples in from the suburbs. In the shirt-sleevy dusk, Van Ness Avenue and its many venues seemed the focal point of date night. The line for will-call tickets snaked around the block.

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

Michael Miller


A Singer's Notes 19: Remembering; Pieter Wispelwey and Benjamin Bagby

The Art of Memory: Benjamin Bagby sings Beowulf. 

Everywhere around me leaving two great concerts at Tanglewood this week, the talk was of those phenoms of memory, Benjamin Bagby and Pieter Wispelwey. Mr. Bagby spoke, sang, and roared Beowulf, and Mr. Wispelwey played all six of Bach's Cello suites. What is it about memory that engages people? Do they think they can't do it themselves? They're probably wrong about that. We are told that toddlers have a nearly photographic memory. The skill can be greatly enhanced with steady practice. Just ask a soap opera actor. Do we have so many machines that memory is becoming a slow information feed for us? Musicians and actors know in their minds and their bodies how second nature memory becomes when a great work is concentrated on. There is something else to it. I remember a great teacher saying when asked what artists do replying, "Artists remember in public." The whole act of performing is one of memory or if I may make a word work for me, rememory. Rememory is not the same as memorization. The latter is a technique; the former a state of mind. Easy memorization skills can be limiting. Nothing about a performer's work should be facile. Rememory is a state that leads the great work out of the performer's imagination with some kind of a dependable flow which can be trusted.

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

Michael Miller


An Opera House, Judged: Ken Woolley’s Reviewing the Performance, by Alan Miller

Ken Woolley, 

Reviewing the Performance, 
Watermark Press, 2010

Stage I. A Detour

Sydney Opera House as apparition for bored commuters

“What’s that thing?”

-A boy points out the Sydney Opera House to his grandmother, overheard on a train crossing the Harbour Bridge, 21 July 2010.

During a recent screening of Rear Window

 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I became preoccupied by the audience’s reaction. For me, Rear Window was a “gateway” film, an open door into the beautifully fraudulent world of cinema. I had not seen it for a long time, and watching a good 35mm print with an intelligent audience was a good chance to assess its true impact. In the cinematic canon, if such a thing exists, Rear Window seems to have come to rest partway along the spectrum between familiar, comforting films, say, It’s a Wonderful Life or Gone With the Wind, and perpetually unnerving experiences like, to name two of the blackest noirs I’ve ever seen, Scarlet Street or Detour. Films in the former category tend to generate formulaic responses which paper over any disturbing themes, and allow the work to be arranged as part of the cultural furniture. Films from the bad part of town, by contrast, refuse enclosure in a tidy package. Beyond whatever unsavory aspects of human nature they might reveal, these disturbing films demand to be viewed at 1:1 scale, as though for the first time, every time (this is not a simple distinction between blanc et noir, whenSwing Time screened at the Gallery the week after Rear Window, any stirrings of featherbed nostalgia among the audience were quickly overcome in the presence of 103 minutes of sublime cinematic bliss). Rear Window retains characteristics of each extreme. Jimmy Stewart’s voyeurism now seems relatively innocent, at least compared to what people are into these days. The audience reacted to his obsessive nosiness with the same sighing, nostalgic little titters emitted by a gaggle of thirty five year olds watching The Breakfast Club. At the same time, certain moments of Rear Window remained shocking, particularly Stewart’s almost brutal coldness to Grace Kelly. Perhaps every classic film might be found somewhere along this imaginary line between Scarlett’s Tara and Ann Savage’s consumptive cough in Detour.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller



Begin forwarded message:

From: kitdiva@aol.com

Date: July 31, 2010 11:37:35 PM EDT

To: editor@berkshirereview.net

Subject: Re: question


By the way, although I enjoyed the performance a lot. I thought the brothel scene was surprisingly tame in comparison with Les Huguenots, with its topless crucified nuns, etc. Was Strassberger told to be discreet, or were you aware of any "censorship?"
Nothing of the kind, Michael - as far as I know!  I was in that as well, btw.  Enjoyed being a raped Protestant noblewoman.  Yeehaw! 
In fact, several of us whores were actually virtually topless in this production, covered merely by VERY sheer silk tops (or in my case a dress).  The lighting I think keeps our breasts from being a large (or small) topic of discussion....  Last years boobs were courtesy of dancers; no singers bared significantly, in contrast to this year.

I'm glad you enjoyed the performance.  Thad certainly knows how to put on a stunning multi-sensory display, keeping every pore stimulated. I just wish we could see the damned shows!  (Which is why your pix were so important to us...!)
~k.
PS: What year were you at Hahvahd? And which house?

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Miller <editor@berkshirereview.net>
To: kitdiva@aol.com
Sent: Sat, Jul 31, 2010 1:05 pm
Subject: Re: question

By the way, although I enjoyed the performance a lot. I thought the brothel scene was surprisingly tame in comparison with Les Huguenots, with its topless crucified nuns, etc. Was Strassberger told to be discreet, or were you aware of any "censorship?"

Best,

M

Michael Miller
Editor/Publisher
The Berkshire Review for the Arts
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On Jul 31, 2010, at 11:35 AM, kitdiva@aol.com wrote:

Hi ~
I'm a singer in this summer's "Der Ferne Klang" at Bard and my face is wonderfully visible in the top picture you use (of colorfully wigged whores flanking the central heroine) in your review of the work.  Is there ANY way I could get an online jpeg copy of that pic at a larger size for my archives.  I just want it for ME.  I don't have to post it if you prohibit that (if I can post it, I'm happy to put the credits where necessary, too).

Thanks for considering my request and getting back to me.
Appreciatively,
~Katharine (Kit) Emory
"The whore with the orange hair"....  :-)


=

Wake in Fright’s Aggressive Hospitality

Wake-in-fright-7
Waiting for a train he'd rather not have taken: Gary Bond in Wake in Fright


“It could be worse; the supply of beer could run out.”

-Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) assesses his home town of Bundanyabba

Wake in Fright 

is not a film about the 2010 Australian federal election (that one might be called Lie Awake in Despair), but it is a film which says uncomfortable things about Australia, and therefore is not entirely unrelated to this winter of political discontent. It lays waste to the cherished Australian ideal of mateship and beyond that specific cultural provocation, it can be seen as a film about friendliness in general. Many places are described as friendly, without the further interrogation which might reveal the differences between, say, the way people are friendly in northeast Ohio, and they way they are friendly in Istanbul. The study of friendliness is rich territory for art and the fact that nearly everyone in Wake in Fright could be described as friendly is disturbing indeed.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Beowulf, sung and recited by Benjamin Bagby at Tanglewood, by Michael Miller

Benjamin-bagby-performs-his-ve
Benjamin Bagby performs Beowulf. Photo Hilary Scott.


Seiji Ozawa Hall, Thursday, July 22, 2010

Benjamin Bagby has been performing Beowulf

 now for twenty years, usually to sold-out houses, especially in New York City. (I’ve tried and failed to get tickets more than once.) Audiences and critics rave about Bagby’s ability to create a spellbinding effect in his recitation/singing over the hour and forty minutes of its duration — all in what is practically a foreign language, even if most people call it Old English. With brilliant success, Bagby has transformed what was once the bane of American English majors — all too long ago: that last of those required to address the older stages of our language are hoary of head and halting in gait — into a thrilling entertainment full of color and expression. It is as if the early music movement had finally spawned their Stokowski. The effect is so essentially baroque. What Lear or Hamlet has speech, declamation, and singing in his dramatic quiver? In this way Bagby has bridged the language gap and made it possible for modern audiences to share something like the enjoyment a medieval scop’s audience would have experienced in a bardic performance. Of course today we sit decorously in Seiji Ozawa Hall or some place like it, and there is no mead or beer at hand. On the rare occasion that a line comes out as comprehensible modern English, we laugh. Our eyes flit back and forth to and from the supertitles...
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner, directed by Michael Grandage, at the National Theatre, London

Danton_2
Eleanor Matsuura as Marion and Toby Stephens as Georges Danton in Danton's Death, The National Theatre 2010. Photo Johan Persson.


Danton’s Death
by Georg Büchner
Adapted by Howard Brenton

National Theatre
Directed by Michael Grandage
Designer - Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer - Paule Constable
Music and Sound - Adam Cork

Cast:
David Beames - Gen. Billon
Max Bennett - Hérault-Seychelles
Stefano Braschi - Citizen
Kirsty Bushell - Julie
Jason Cheater - Citizen
Judith Coke - Duplay
Emmanuella Cole - Citizen
Ilan Goodman - Lyonnais
Taylor James - Citizen
Michael Jenn - Herman
Phillip Joseph - Barrere
Barnaby Kay (as Camille Desmoulins) - Camille
Gwilym Lee - Lacroix
Elliot Levey - as Robespierre
Eleanor Matsuura - Marion
Elizabeth Nestor - Elizabeth
Alec Newman - as Saint-Just
Chu Omambala - Collot d;Herbois
Rebecca O’Mara - Lucile
Rebecca Scroggs - Eleonore
David Smith - David Smith
Toby Stephens -  Danton
Jonathan Warde - Citizen
Ashley Zhangazha - Legendre

Bloody philosophes

. The French Revolution was not the most monstrous of its kind. In World War II Hitler beheaded more people with portable guillotines in Vienna than the tumbrels delivered in Paris. But it survives as a lasting emblem of the fall of reason. That the society of Voltaire and Diderot could descend into the mindless savagery of the Reign of Terror prefigured Freud’s gloomy conclusion that civilization is a thin veneer painted over atavistic brutality. In the shattering drama, Danton’s Death, the point is made more trenchantly when the hero declares that sanity itself is a fragile construction, a bubble that bursts when the true nightmare of life reveals itself. This was essentially the world view of Georg Büchner — we see it reinforced in his better-known Woyzeck (largely thanks to Alban Berg's operatic adaptation as Wozzeck), in which the schizophrenia of a common soldier is played upon by the equally mad but socially acceptable devices of his superiors.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Beyond the Horizon, by Eugene O'Neill at the National Theatre


By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Laurie Sansom
National Theatre

47600599_beyond_the_horizon_00
Liz White and Michael Malarkey in Spring Storm

Hard scrabble. America’s two greatest playwrights, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, both met horrible ends that mirrored their world views. O’Neill, the tragic fatalist, was imprisoned by Parkinson’s disease, struggling to finish his last masterpiece in a crabbed, undecipherable hand. Williams, the perfumed fantasist of flesh, waned in a haze of drugs and alcohol (he died, with pathetic ignominy, by choking on the cap to a medicine bottle). They shared the same dread of life‘s inexorable cruelty. Williams was perhaps the more coyly sadistic artist. He lets his characters lull themselves in a warm bath of delusion until it’s time to destroy them. O’Neill is more cold-eyed and frank. In the current revival of his early success, Beyond the Horizon

, magnificently brought to life on the Cottesloe stage of the National Theatre, the three main characters descend into bitter disillusionment while watching every inch of their slide. They grow to have some pity for each other but none for themselves.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Mahler: Symphony No.8 in E flat major, 'Symphony of a Thousand'

Mardi Byers – soprano
Twyla Robinson – soprano
Malin Christensson – soprano
Stephanie Blythe – mezzo-soprano
Kelley O'Connor – mezzo-soprano
Nikolai Schukoff – tenor
Hanno Müller-Brachmann – baritone
Tomasz Konieczny – bass
Choristers of St Paul's Cathedral
Choristers of Westminster Abbey
Choristers of Westminster Cathedral
BBC Symphony Chorus
Crouch End Festival Chorus
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

BBC Symphony Orchestra,
Jiří Bělohlávek conductor


Conductor Jiří Bělohlávek


Sacred monster. This year’s Proms season began with the Mahler Eighth, which is like having the Queen Mary

 tootle up the Thames for the first day of Henley. (To let us down gently, we get Die Meistersinger
 tomorrow night and Simon Boccanegra
 the night after that – no musician in London will go without a paycheck this week.) In the bad old days all of Mahler’s symphonies were accused of being freakishly outsized, but only this one, to my mind, qualifies. One longs for it to be smaller, even when the chorus is only six hundred strong, as it was last night, well short of the eight hundred or so it would take to qualify as the “Symphony of a Thousand” – to be fair, the nickname was added by an imaginative impressario. The symphony has trouble getting ashore, but worse than that, Mahler’s conception is self-defeating.

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

Michael Miller


Ödön von Horváth's Judgment Day, at Bard College's Summerscape, by Michael Miller

Hayley Treider as Anna and Kevin O'Dennell as Herr Hudetz in Judgment Day at Bard Summerscape. Photo Cory Weaver.


Ödön von Horváth, 

Judgment Day

Directed by Caitriona McLaughlin

Cast:

Herr Hudetz – Kevin O'Donnell
Frau Hudetz, Stephanie Roth Haberle
Alfons – Dashiell Eaves
Anna – Hayley Treider
Ferdinand – Shawtane Bowen
Landlord – Craig Bockhorn
Leni – Beth Cole
Frau Leimgruber – Kelly McAndrew
Pokorny/Prosecutor – Rod Brogan
Kohut/Costumer – Sidney Williams
Woodsman/Deputy – Joseph Adams
Traveling Salesman/Detective/Kreitmeyer – Brandon Dirden
Policeman – Eric Miller
Child – Isabel LaBarbera / Cassandra LaBarbera

In the opening scene of Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day,

 Frau Leimgruber, bitingly played by Kelly McAndrew, gives us (and the travelling salesman who walks in) an earful about the nice, hard-working stationmaster, Herr Hudetz. In this remote small town, Herr Hudetz has to do everything that needs to be done at the station. He sells tickets, collects packages, changes the signals, etc., etc. — all for low pay. However, he does get a house by the station, which affords his jealous wife a view of everything that goes on there. Frau Hudetz, fourteen years older than her husband, managed to entrap him into marriage. Now, as her age catches up with her, she is embittered and makes his life miserable any way she can — above all through her jealous rages and her unwillingness to allow him any independence at all. She has stopped even his innocent hours in the local tavern, “The Wild Man.” She and her brother Alfons, the local apothecary, are without a doubt the most unpopular people in town.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


A Day-Long Celebration of the Life and Work of Pianist, Leonard Shure at Mannes, The New College of Music, at: 150 West 85 Street, New York

Shure
Leonard Shure, Pianist


Leonard Shure was surely one of the great thinkers of the keyboard, and I can only applaud this initiative to honor his memory and hope that it will result in a generous offering of his recordings.

Honoring the Memory and Artistry of Leonard Shure

http://www.leonardshure.com/

The International Keyboard Institute and Festival, Jerome Rose, Artistic Director, is hosting a day-long celebration of the life and work of pianist, Leonard Shure, on the occasion of the Centenary of his birth.

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

Michael Miller