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

(

? had its Gala UK Premier at the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival. So far it has screened exclusively at festivals and popular distribution is uncertain. It is scheduled to be released on DVD in the USA on 14 September 2010.)


Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon and Chlöe Sévigny eat Jell-O.


The Searchers 

begins with Westerner Stan Jones’ heavy, harmonizing ballad, which, to the music of Max Steiner, asks: “What makes a man to wander?” Lee Marvin, with a similar profundity of voice in The Killers (1964), wonders: “What makes a man take a bullet without trying to escape it?” (The 1946 version answers, “a double-crossin’ dame!”) Werner Herzog’s latest film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, asks its plot-spinning question in the title and its audience, together with Willem Defoe’s detective and the baffled people he questions, have it lodged in their minds throughout.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


A Singer's Notes 17: Great Things All Over, by Keith Kibler

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

. Ben read some of the juicier sections of this strange book with his usual cheekiness and resonance. Telemann's music was played alongside it expertly on modern instruments, but with fluency and quickness, with the exception of one section illustrating the enormous keyboard that Gulliver must play. For this, Mr. Cooper encouraged his players to use one finger only to approximate the difficulty Gulliver might have had. It was hilarious. I would like very much to hear more of Telemann's music on this subject, and more baroque works which use the spoken voice.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Bernstein's Mass at the Royal Festival Hall, by Huntley Dent

The 1971 premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass

Mass
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Libretto by Stephen Schwartz and Leonard Bernstein

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

, which opened Kennedy Center in 1972, was a drastic one.  Reviews weren’t merely dismissive; they expressed embarrassment for the composer, who leapt from his pedestal as an icon of classical music into the arms of hippies, flower children, and the Age of Aquarius. The work owed a distressing amount to Hair, the musical, and less obviously to Benjamin Britten and Bernstein’s own earlier works. As a spectacle, it combined the liturgy of the Latin Mass with episodes of the mob (updated with tie-dye, peasant blouses, and afros)  jeering at the Church and belief in God generally. Bernstein wasn’t, shall we say, the most obvious candidate for a work of Christian devotion, and with eyes averted from the schlocky libretto -- crafted by Broadway baby Stephen Schwartz, who was young but no wunderkind-- the composer’s admirers chose to bury Massas an ecumenical mess. The prevailing wisdom was that this, too, shall pass.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Emerson String Quartet with guest clarinetist David Shifrin Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Tuesday July 6 at 8:00 pm

Emerson
The Emerson String Quartet. Photo Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.


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.

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

Michael Miller


La Forma del Rinascimento. Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Rome, until September 5th, by Daniel Gallagher

Eolo
Aeolus, or Sea Breeze, attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti

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.

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

Michael Miller


Glimmerglass Opera 2010 Festival Opens with Puccini’s Tosca and Copland’s The Tender Land. by Seth Lachterman

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-pressthumb-kcadel-002
Adam Diegel as Cavaradossi and Lise Lindstrom in the title role of Glimmerglass Opera's 2010 production of Tosca. Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Opera.

 

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.

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

Michael Miller

Vacation! Summertime in America, in CinemaScope! by Eliot Vivante

 debuted at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It is twenty-something producer/writer/director/editor Zach Clark’s third feature film, hot on the heels of 2009’s Modern Love is Automatic, which also premiered internationally at Edinburgh. There, I met with Clark and two of his lead actresses, Lydia Hyslop and Maggie Ross. Press here for its EIFF page and trailer.)


Lydia Hyslop reclines, posing as Manet's "Olympia," with Trieste Kelly Dunn in the background.

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

Michael Miller


Lulu, by Frank Wedekind, adapted by Anna Ledwich at the Gate Theatre, London, by Huntley Dent

Lulu at the Gate Theatre


Lulu
by Frank Wedekind

Gate Theatre
adapted and directed by Anna Ledwich

Cast:
Sean Campion, Michael Colgan, Paul Copley, Helena Easton, Jack Gordon, Sinéad Matthews with Greer Dale-Foulkes and Tessa Sowery

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.

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

Michael Miller


Women Beware Women, by Thomas Middleton at the National Theatre of Great Britain

Screen-shot-2010-07-05-at-6
Harriet Walter (Livia) and Samuel Barnett (Leantio), photo by Simon Annand


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

 (1621), in a stirring revival at the National Theatre, affords an equally mindless vacation from morality. But it wants to be more adult. With an aristocratic audience to please and no Hollywood ratings agency, Middleton could add salaciousness and bawdry to the max. The popcorn has been sprinkled with wormwood and gall.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Bizet's The Pearl Fishers at the English National Opera, by Huntley Dent

Bizet's The Pearl Fishers at the English National Opera


The Pearl Fishers
An Opera in three acts, by Georges Bizet
English National Opera

Cast:

Leila - Hanan Alattar
Nadir - Alfie Boe
Zurga - Roland Wood
Nourabad - Freddie Tong

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.

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

Michael Miller