Travel, by Michael Miller

The Tracks at Chemnitz. Photo Michael Miller.

The only real way to travel is to travel aimlessly, without a destination, purpose, or agenda. One should have only the vaguest, dreamiest intuition that the country travelled may be of interest. Once, when I was still working as a curator, my then wife and I went on holiday to a Central American country, largely because it lacked a museum, or at least a museum that would prove irresistible to either of us. We were mostly likely wrong in that assumption, but I can't say, because we never visited the museum. Neither did we visit the capital city's renowned German restaurant, nor did we indulge a weakness for souvenirs, although we did seriously discuss the adoption of a small mutt who decided to follow us on a late night stroll through a port city. Awakening one morning, we beheld the threatening underside of an iguana perched on a ceiling support over our bed. If we cannot travel without purpose or plan, we should at last cultivate the illusion of it, if only as a literary device, like Norman Douglas in Old Calabria. 

Travel is fertile soil for  illusions, and we should make the most of it.
Read the full article on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Paul Griffiths' latest novel, let me tell you, Reality Street Editions, Hastings, 2008

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851–1852). The Tate, London.

 

Paul Griffiths, let me tell you. Reality Street Editions, Hastings, 2008

Paul Griffiths' most recent novel, let me tell you, is a spare work of engulfing mystery and power, although its technique is highly conceptual: he has set himself the task of telling Ophelia's story from her own point of view, using no more than the 483-word vocabulary Shakespeare allotted her in Hamlet. This is hardly the first time a modern writer has attempted to scatter new seeds in this corner of Shakespeare's garden, but few have approached it with Griffith's fluid imagination and verbal sophistication, a talent he has developed as much from his career as a music critic and historian as in the role of a literary man. Even a naive reader will be captivated by Griffiths' touching portrait of Ophelia, as she grows up in an ensnaring web spun by the habits, desires, and social obligations of her father, her brother, the queen, the old and new kings, and, of course, the Prince. But in this case, she is no victim. With her own native ingenuity and a healthy desire to survive, she finds a way out.

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

Michael Miller

Chailly, Lortie, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra play Beethoven at Symphony Hall, by Michael Miller

Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven


Symphony Hall, February 25, 2010
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Riccardo Chailly, conductor
Louis Lortie, piano

All-Beethoven Program
Emperor Concerto
Seventh Symphony

___

Thursday, February 18, 2010
James Levine, conductor

All-Beethoven Program
Symphony No. 6, Pastoral
Symphony No. 7

A couple of years ago the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and conductor Riccardo Chailly visited Boston and gave a wonderful Symphony Hall concert of Richard Strauss tone poems. The orchestra, with a lot of young members, played splendidly, with great group spirit. And Chailly gave extraordinary purpose and meaning to the music. He and the orchestra under his leadership showed care and commitment with every bar, every note, and fashioned each piece into a compelling organic whole. Wow! one felt. Friends of mine in New York heard the same program a week later there and had much the same reaction.

Michael Miller
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Mozart and Da Ponte's Le Nozze di Figaro at the Bayerische Staatsoper, by Michael Miller

Le Nozze di Figaro: Jürgen Rose's set. From the premiere on June 30, 1997. Photo Wilfried Hösl.


Bayerische Staatsoper, Nationaltheater
Sunday, March 7, 2010

Mozart/Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro

Conductor - Juraj Valcuha
Stage Director - Dieter Dorn
Set and Costumes - Jürgen Rose
Light - Max Keller
Dramaturg - Hans-Joachim Rückhäberle
Chorus Director - Andrés Máspero

Il Conte di Almaviva - Michael Volle
La Contessa di Almaviva - Barbara Frittoli
Cherubino - Kate Lindsey
Figaro - Erwin Schrott
Susanna - Laura Tatulescu
Bartolo - Christoph Stephinger
Marcellina - Heike Grötzinger
Basilio - Ulrich Reß
Don Curzio - Kevin Conners
Antonio - Alfred Kuhn
Barbarina - Elena Tsallagova

Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Chor der Bayerischen Staatsoper

Many of my most memorable early operatic experiences came from the Bayerische Staatsoper, either from when I was a student or a somewhat underoccupied summer intern in public relations. It's been all too long since my last visit, not to mention my last look at the Aigina pediments or the great Dürers in the Alte Pinakothek. In operatic terms the work of the Staatsoper is very much on this level. Hence, I'll not soon forget this three-day orgy, which began with a fine Nozze di Figaro, continued with Donizetti's Roberto Devereux with none other than Edita Gruberova as Elisabetta, and concluded with an important premiere, Peter Eötvös' and Albert Ostermaier's Die Tragödie des Teufels, an impeccable performance in a spectacular staging.

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

Michael Miller


Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra in San Francisco play Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto with Denis Matsuev and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15

Gergiev_fingers
Valery Gergiev, photo Anna Eriksson
Mariinsky Orchestra

Davies Hall, San Francisco
Monday, March 22, 2010

Valery Gergiev, principal conductor
Denis Matsuev, pianist

Berlioz, Royal Hunt and Storm from 

Les Troyens

Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No.3 in D minor, Opus 30
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 15 in A major, Opus 141

This week, the touring Mariinsky Orchestra, led by the ubiquitous Valery Gergiev, performed two evenings at Davies Hall in San Francisco. The first program, which I did not hear, was devoted to Prokofiev ballets and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The second, more intriguing to me, presented Shostakovich's enigmatic final symphony, as well as an opportunity to assess the Rachmaninoff artistry of Denis Matsuev, who is being hailed these days as a pianist in the Horowitz tradition.

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

Michael Miller


Shostakovich's The Nose, Metropolitan Opera, by Ilya Khodosh

Paulo Szot in 
The Nose
 (photo by Sara Krulwich)

The Nose

by Dmitri Shostakovich

Directed by William Kentridge
Conducted by Valery Gergiev

Metropolitan Opera, New York City

With Paulo Szot (Kovalyov), Andrei Popov (Police Inspector), Gordon Gietz (The Nose)

Dmitri Shostakovich was 22 years old when he composedThe Nose

, and it shows – the comic three-act opera, based on an absurdist story by nineteenth-century satirist Nikolai Gogol, should be a whimsical flight of fancy that brandishes a sardonic edge and skewers social hierarchy and bureaucracy in St. Petersburg, a ridiculous metropolis awash with sanctimony and paranoia. But the work, laboring beneath Shostakovich’s jagged, dissonant style, is regrettably bloated and unfocused. It turns an inspired sketch into a pastiche of incoherent elements that showcase the young, brilliant composer’s free-reigning imagination, but also his gleeful neglect of structure and mindful storytelling. The opera is a resplendent mess – daring and surreal, but too haphazard to be engaging or make much narrative sense.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Henry Purcell's Fairy Queen from Glyndebourne: Semi-Opera Made Whole, at Last, by Larry Wallach

Fqueen_claire-debono_andrew-da
Claire Debono and Andrew Davies in Henry Purcell's, The Fairy Queen. Photo Pierre Grosbois.

The Fairy Queen

a semi-opera by Henry Purcell
BAM March 25, 2010

based on Shakespeare’s 

Midsummer Night’s Dream,
as revised probably by Thomas Betterton and performed at the King’s Theater, Dorset, in 1692-93

Produced by Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opéra Comique, Théâtre de Caen, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Musical direction by William Christie with Les Arts Florissants
Chorus master François Bazola
Stage direction by Jonathan Kent
Set and costumes by Paul Brown
Choreography by Kim Brandstrup

The life and career of Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the colossal figure who dominates the history of English music, occurred at the chronological mid-point of the Baroque, a period whose leading and most distinguishing genre is opera. And yet, opera never took root as a native product in English cultural soil. For that it had to wait until Purcell’s distant successor, Benjamin Britten, appeared on the scene two hundred and fifty years later. Twenty years after Purcell’s death, Handel arrived with his succession of exotic opera singers: Italian divas and castrati who swooped in like birds of paradise warbling their outlandish roulades and then vanished. The taste for such entertainment lasted at the most 25 years. Meanwhile, Purcell wrote only one true opera, a tiny gem that was held to be the only crown jewel for centuries, the miniature Dido and Aeneas

 of 1689. (John Blow’s fine companion piece, Venus and Adonis of 1701, still has not established itself in the canon.) And it was written for a girls’ school run by a dancing master, or at least its first documented performance occurred in this context.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller


Thinking Mann, by Alan MIller

Anthony_mann
Anthony Mann


William Darby, 

Anthony Mann: The Film Career
, 304 pages, McFarland & Company (www.mcfarlandpub.com)

I learned how to make movies from Anthony Mann: why the shots, how the shots, traveling shots, location shots, strategies and techniques in editing -- he was my sense of movement.

-Wim Wenders

Mystery is at the heart of all that is appealing about movies; and Anthony Mann, born Anton or Emil Bundsmann in 1906 or 1907, is one of cinema's mystery men, as well as one of its few thinking men. He remains unfairly neglected, in part because he came to prominence sometime after the shiniest years of the golden age. In looking at the important directors of Hollywood's creative pinnacle, say, from the mid-1930s to the late-1950s, it is clear that there was an advantage to making one's debut as early as possible. The big three -- John Ford (born 1895), Howard Hawks (born 1896) and Alfred Hitchcock (born 1899) -- were each born in the nineteenth century. They had the advantage of establishing themselves in the silent era (though obviously Hitchcock worked in England until 1940) and were well established directors throughout the salad days of the factory system, when studios were vertically integrated under one roof, or at least all within one great big enclosing fence. These three beloved giants then moved smoothly into the era of independent production in the 1950s and managed to outlive the old Hollywood which had made them, working well into the 1960s and beyond.

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

Michael Miller


Frederic Rzewski at EMPAC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, Saturday, March 20 at 8 pm

Frederic Rzewski

The pianist-composer performs a program of works for solo piano, including the early work “Dreams” (1961) and a selection from his recent and on-going series of short works “Nanosonatas.”

Frederic Rzewski has been a formidable presence on the new music scene in the U. S. and Europe since the late 1950’s. Now 72, he continues to explore and expand his musical universe, which is unlike that of anyone else active today or in the past. In one way, he is a throwback to the nineteenth century in that he is a pianist with an awe-inspiring technique and a composer whose music reflects his own performing abilities and tastes; it is easy to hear his music as a kind of aural photograph of his improvisations and explorations at the keyboard. This would place him in the tradition of the great 20th century composer-piano virtuosos Bartók and Prokofiev, but the composer who comes even more vividly to mind is Franz Liszt. (A younger pianist-composer highly favored by the public and the press [cf. NYT, March 21, 2010] these days is the Englishman Thomas Adès.) Rzewski’s best-known work is a 50 minute piano “monster-piece” which has been frequently compared with Bach’s Goldberg and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations: it is his “Thirty-six Variations on ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated,’” a tune which served as the Chilean national anthem during the left-wing regime of Salvatore Allende, composed in the mid-70’s.

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

Michael Miller


A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler, 15: Masks

I've just been working on Benjamin Britten's Abraham and Isaac with my students. Here are the puppets artist Douglas Paisley made for us.

The great thing about these puppets was that they were handled by the singers of the roles with the singers fully visible. One saw the mask and one saw the face of the singer at the same time. I saw at the beginning of the performance eyes switching back and forth from one to the other. By the end the audience seemed to be looking at one thing. The puppets have faces which are impassive. The only manipulation possible was some movement of the head and one human arm which came out through the fabric of the costume. When this is all there is though, it's a lot. Great puppets are tragic objects. They cannot respond; they must go quietly. I can think of no story better suited to this kind of performance than Abraham and Isaac. Britten's music always seems to me to be caught in some kind of dead-honest structure, even rigidity, which makes the characters blank out their faces.

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

Michael Miller



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