My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? By Werner Herzog (with David Lynch’s name attached)post
(
The Searchers

(
The Searchers
Down in the splendid old Meeting House at New Marlborough, Kenneth Cooper, Ben Luxon, and the Berkshire Bach Society presented an ingenious program which intrigued me. In the center of it was music which Telemann composed in connection with Swift's Gulliver's Travels
The Mass Orchestra
Marin Alsop conductor
Jesse Blumberg baritone, celebrant
SBC Voicelab
A cast of young performers from Lambeth & soloists
“My time will come.” This, the most famous quote from Gustav Mahler, wouldn’t seem apt for the music of Leonard Bernstein. His time was now, over and over, whatever decade from the Forties to the Eighties one is talking about. But there were dips in his meteoric trajectory, and Mass
Emerson String Quartet with guest clarinetist David Shifrin
Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Tuesday July 6 at 8 pm
All Mozart Program:
Five fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” book II by Bach transcribed for string quartet (BWV 874, 876, 871, 878, and 877)
String Quartet no. 19 in C major, K. 465, “The Dissonant”
Quintet in A for clarinet and string quartet, K. 581
Encore: fragment of a Quintet in B-flat for clarinet and string quartet
For many reasons, Mozart is one of the most difficult composers for today’s performers to encounter. Historically, he occupies an intermediate zone between Early Music and mainstream performance practices, and today’s musicians have a wide range of performing styles from which to choose, from those passed on by traditional conservatory teachers and established mainstream performers, to the spectrum of historically informed practices exemplified by Dutch, German, English, and even American ‘schools,’ and extending to hybrids of the two. This counts enormously in Mozart, whose sensitive, vocal-based melodies and elegantly complex textures reveal every strength and weakness of a chosen performing style with spectacular clarity. This is not to say that anyone can claim a ‘correct’ choice; writers have long ago established that the notion of ‘authenticity’ is a chimera. The real issue is how effectively and convincingly a performing style can convey the heart and soul of the music to a modern audience.
There is more to the exhibit currently underway at the Palazzo di Venezia than meets the eye. What it lacks in size it makes up for in importance. Composed mainly of statuary and reliefs by Donatello, Andrea Bregno, Michelangelo and their pupils, it focuses on the underappreciated stylistic transition that took place from 1460 to 1520 in Roman workshops as they moved, roughly speaking, from the purity of classicism, to the sublimity of humanism, to the energy of Renaissance rationalism.
ooperstown, N.Y.
Glimmerglass Opera’s 2010 Festival opened the weekend of July 9, 2010 with Puccini’s Tosca on Friday and Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land on Saturday.
Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro opens July 17 and Handel’s Tolomeo opens July 18. All four new productions will run in rotation in the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown from July 9 through August 24, 2010.
Tosca is directed by Ned Canty and conducted by David Angus, Glimmerglass Opera’s Music Director. Lise Lindstrom sings Tosca in her role and company debut and Adam Diegel sings the role of Cavaradossi in his company debut. Also in a company debut, Lester Lynch sings the role of Scarpia. Members of the 2010 Glimmerglass Opera Young American Artists Program, the company’s apprentice program for young singers, make up the remainder of the cast. Angelotti is sung by Aaron Sorensen, Sacristan is sung by Robert Kerr and Dominick Rodriquez sings Spoletta. Zachary Nelson sings Sciarrone, Xi Wang sings the role of the Young Shepherd, and Jonathan Lasch sings the role of the Jailor. Donald Eastman designed the sets for the productions, Matthew Pachtman designed costumes and Jeff Harris designed lighting.
Lulu
by Frank Wedekind
Gate Theatre
adapted and directed by Anna Ledwich
Eternal feminine. One cannot leave the tiny Gate Theatre, hardly big enough to park two Smart Cars, without feeling almost violated by what went on inside. Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, a shocker since its premiere in 1894, searingly validates Freud’s comment that his entire work was anticipated by the poets. Everything you would be afraid to admit to a therapist is spelled out here in letters of fire. Lulu is a chaotic carnival of psychopathology, as charged as the unconscious and just as annihilating to reason. The loosely stitched plot is circular, like Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, in which one scene connects to the next by passing along a linking character. Here that character is Lulu herself, an erotic lightning rod in baby-doll panties who tempts three husbands, a father, two lovers, one of them a blackmailer, and a lesbian countess to their ruin.
By Thomas Middleton
Olivier Theatre, National Theatre of Great Britain
(Finished on 4 July)
Directed by Marianne Elliott
Cast & Creative
Motiveless malignity. It’s hard to transport one’s mind back far enough to empathize with Jacobean drama, when immorality masqueraded as the It Thing, as if a casual rape was merely the aperitif before fine dining. Today we have summer movies, admittedly, where mass carnage goes down well with popcorn and no harm done. We aren’t frightened or disgusted by how many people the Terminator terminates. Two minutes after leaving the theatre we return to our moral selves. Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women
Cast:
Director - Penny Woolcock
Conductor - Rory Macdonald
Not enough pearls. It has become fashionable for opera houses to invite movie directors in for some cinematic sprucing up, hence Rigoletto turned into a Don Corleone clone, Die Zauberflote with puppetry courtesy of The Lion King, and so on. But when English National Opera invited independent filmmaker Penny Woolcock to stage George Bizet’s rarely seen Pearl Fishers, she didn’t look to Hollywood for inspiration but rather to something like a public service message from UNICEF. When the curtain rose we had been helicoptered to Ceylon, the right setting but updated and now seriously impoverished. On a wharf lapped by the sea were jammed native washer women wringing out their bright saris, sadhus bathing from a bucket, Hindu devotees performing temple rites, and anonymous stragglers emptied out of a kebab shop on Brick Lane. When two Western tourists show up handing out alms, they get eager takers. I stared doubtfully. Exotic doesn’t mean Third World. But Woolcock had no political agenda. The extras mingled in Franco Zefferelli fashion, pretending to occupy themselves with everyday life despite the presence of opera singers quayside.