A Bachian video by Alexander Chen, of Google Creative Labs.
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Not to mention Robert Ashley
Robert Ashley will receive much welcome attention in New York next month. Amanda MacBlane, in Time Out New York, has a profile of the avant maestro, who turned eighty last year. There doesn't seem to be a specific reason for the current "groundswell," as MacBlane calls it, and there needn't be: Ashley is a major figure not only in the American experimental tradition but also in the recent history of conceptual theater. From Nov. 1 to Nov. 5, the Incubator Arts Project, based at St. Mark's in the Bowery, focuses on Ashley's chamber and instrumental music; there's info here. On Nov. 6, as part of Performa 11, there will be a daylong performance of Ashley's 1983 television opera Perfect Lives, moving through various locations in the East Village. And, on Nov. 19-21, the Kitchen, again in league with Performa 11, presents Ashley's pathbreaking 1967 opera That Morning Thing, which no one has attempted in forty years. One more event follows in December — a Spanish-language version of Perfect Lives, called Vidas Perfectas. Anyone who wishes to read about Ashley in depth should await Kyle Gann's Ashley book, which the University of Illinois Press will publish next year; there's a teaser page of musical examples on Kyle's site. No one has expressed interest in reviving the Ecstatic Radio Fantasia on Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor," which is just as well.
Illustration: Richard Merkin, from The New Yorker.
Happy birthday, Bridge
I meant to add to one of my recent miscellanies a few words of congratulation to the top-flight independent label Bridge Records, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. Allan Kozinn recently had a profile of the Starobin family — David, Becky, Robert, and Allegra, all involved with the label — in the Times. Christian Carey reviews an anniversary concert in Musical America. Bridge's most recent releases seem as strong as ever: Susanna Phillips's recital of Debussy, Messiaen, and Fauré is gorgeous at every turn.
Miscellany: Teletubbies lunaires, etc.
In a recent column on Mieczysław Weinberg, I mentioned the composer's score for Vinni-Pukh, the Soviet cartoon version of Winnie-the-Pooh. This same music, in an arrangement by Lev Zhurbin, will appear on a Nov. 3 program by the Brooklyn Phil, focusing on Russian cartoon scores. Shostakovich's The Silly Little Mouse is also featured.... The great experimental composer Alvin Lucier recently retired from Wesleyan University after teaching there for forty years. The college will host a major celebration of his work on Nov. 4-6.... The fierce-fingered pianist Lisa Moore will play at Roulette on Nov. 16, marking the release of two records on Cantaloupe: Caprichos Enfáticos, by her husband, Martin Bresnick; and Annie Gosfield's Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, which is paired with the same composer's Brooklyn Dodgers tribute, Brooklyn, October 5, 1941 (for piano with baseballs and catcher's mitt).... The Oregon Symphony Spring for Music program that I and others raved about last spring is now on CD.... The new season of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, in Philadelphia, begins on Nov. 5, with a program of Sibelius, Piazzolla, and Beethoven.... A Halloween special: Pierrot Lunaire Meets Teletubbies. Three people sent me a link to this; it must have my name written on it, which is unsettling.
The Schoenberg shelf (2)
These musical examples come from my essay "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century," which appears in Charles Youmans's anthology The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss. The first is a famous horn passage from Strauss's Salome (right before Herod's "Wer hat meinen Ring genommen?"); the second is the bass clarinet and bassoon line at the beginning of Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand.
Strauss's enormous influence on the Second Viennese School has been much noted over the years, but I believe it's still underrated, not least because the eternal politics of twentieth-century historiography — radical vs. conservative, etc. — keep getting in the way. The fact is that Schoenberg adulated Strauss when he was young, and was intimidated by him in a way he never was with Mahler. Emphasizing the link does favors for both composers: Strauss seems less vulgar, Schoenberg less forbidding. I write this in lieu of a promised post on Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner's Cambridge Companion to Schoneberg — I'm a bit too frantic with other work to give this volume the attention it deserves. But let me note that Craig De Wilde offers an excellent summary of the Strauss-Schoenberg relationship from the other side. "It is rare when two great minds can parallel," De Wilde writes, "but it is even more remarkable when they intersect, if only for a moment."
Here's another set of examples — swirling flute passages by Strauss, Schoenberg, and Boulez (Salome, Pierrot lunaire, Le Marteau sans maître):
Great Plains photojournal
Back in 2007, I headed out on the road to hear some orchestras that aren't regularly covered by classical critics with a national reach — all four or five of us. Since then, I've been plotting to produce an operatic counterpart. Because I've spent very little time in the Great Plains, I was particularly eager to travel in that part of the country. (I've now been to forty-seven of the fifty states; the missing ones are North Dakota, Hawaii, and, somewhat scandalously, Louisiana. Yes, I know, I know.) The result of my efforts is in this week's New Yorker — a report on recent productions at the Tulsa Opera and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. (I'm sorry to have missed the Omaha Opera, which I would have visited if I had gone through with this expedition last year.) As is my wont, I'm posting a largely irrelevant smattering of amateur snapshots.
Don't listen to that
The American paperback of my book Listen to This arrives in stores this week. The new edition includes my recent essay about John Cage; the audio guide has been updated accordingly. Here again is the video we made for the initial release for the book last year, featuring Ethan Iverson, Tyondai Braxton, and Rebecca Ringle. The UK paperback is already out. On Thursday of this week, I will give a lunchtime talk at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca — a visually enhanced version of my "Chacona" lecture. On Nov. 3, I'll speak at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin; on Nov. 8 I'll read at Powerhouse in Brooklyn; and on Nov. 16 I'll appear at Boston College. A little later in the fall, I might bother you with news of a couple of events dramatizing the release of Best Music Writing 2011, which I co-edited with Daphne Carr. There may be Denk.
Opera on the Plains
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2011.
Whenever a new town sprang up on the American frontier, one of the first orders of business was to open an opera house. In 1883, the newspaper of Red Cloud, Nebraska, proclaimed, “We need it, and need it bad, and by all means Red Cloud should have an Opera House.” Few of these venues had the resources to mount their own full-scale productions; instead, performances by travelling opera troupes and solo singers intermingled with band concerts, Shakespeare nights, variety shows, Wild West revues, lectures, and other entertainments. (Oscar Wilde, on his American tour of 1882, took in a number of smalltown opera houses.) Nevertheless, the choice of name signifies the respect that opera commanded in the popular imagination, as the most extravagantly fulfilling spectacle of the age. John Dizikes, in his history “Opera in America,” observes that “the price of tickets at the opera house was usually within the reach of most residents, and its prevailing atmosphere was informal, democratic.”
I recently passed through Red Cloud, which was the childhood home of Willa Cather. She moved there with her family in 1883, at the age of nine. The opera house, a small theatre on the second floor of an old hardware store, has been handsomely refurbished, with the Willa Cather Foundation occupying offices downstairs. The schedule, ranging from chamber groups to Elvis impersonators, is as eclectic as it must have been in Cather’s time, when the author got her first taste of music theatre, in the form of light operas like “The Bohemian Girl” and “The Mikado.” Cather heard grand opera only after she left Red Cloud, encountering Wagner in Pittsburgh, in 1897. In her subsequent writing, most vividly in the diva-from-the-plains novel “The Song of the Lark” and the piercing short story “A Wagner Matinée,” Cather weaves together operatic epiphanies and memories of life on the prairie. Implicit in much of her work is the idea that the Red Cloud Opera House is no contradiction in terms.
These days, it’s much easier to find decent opera in cities and towns across the country. The advocacy organization Opera America has more than a hundred companies on its rolls; fifty years ago, there were only twenty-seven houses of comparable size. Amid the financial crises of the past few years, smaller-budget houses have struggled, and several have closed. There has been additional competition from an unexpected source: the Metropolitan Opera, whose hugely popular movie-theatre broadcasts may be siphoning off some of the audience for local opera. Nonetheless, the fat ladies have gone on singing, as have the barihunks. During a weekend trip to the eastern edge of the Great Plains, I dropped by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Tulsa Opera, making a detour into Cather country along the way. Both of the productions that I saw had more spark than the Met’s first new shows this season, and, unlike the Lincoln Center simulcasts, they provided the irreproducible thrill of live action—what Walt Whitman once called the “liquid world” of operatic art.
Oil brought money to Tulsa, and, with it, opera. The city’s Grand Opera House opened in 1906, and thrived for a while. (According to a 1919 Texaco newsletter, when touring singers visited a West Tulsa refinery, the tenor Orville Harrold remarked, “If there was any form of oil to be used in Grand Opera work, toward lubricating the voice, it would be Texaco brand.”) The present company, which was founded in 1948 and has an annual budget of two and a half million dollars, is known as one of the sturdier and more adventurous organizations in its class. Last year, when the Tulsa Opera was forced to make cuts, it staged Massenet’s “Don Quichotte” instead of more obvious fare. Rising singers have often stopped in Tulsa early in their careers: Stephanie Blythe, now a Met star, sang Carmen there back in 1999, and gratefully returned for a gala earlier this year.
Tulsa’s current season opened with “The Barber of Seville.” Taking the lead female role of Rosina was the soprano Sarah Coburn, who, at the age of thirtyfour, is nearing her peak; she has already won international notice for her appearances in bel-canto repertory, and made a successful Vienna State Opera début earlier this year. She grew up in Oklahoma— her father is Senator Tom Coburn, who, oddly, is a fanatical opponent of federal arts funding—and she lives in Tulsa when she is not on tour. Her loyalty is a boon for the company; she sings with fundamental beauty of tone and pinpoint coloratura agility, adding tasteful embellishments and effortlessly reaching to high C and above. (She withheld a high F in “Una voce poco fa” on this occasion, but it is within her power.) What I missed in her performance was the emotional urgency that even a comic role like Rosina requires; Coburn never seemed altogether lost in her character’s plight, absurd as it is.
Jokey detachment was the main flaw of this generally lively and well-rehearsed production, directed by Tara Faircloth. Cutesy dance moves for Rossini’s vamping rhythms and a few anachronistic additions to the libretto (“Fruita di Looma” appeared on Rosina’s laundry list) had the effect of distancing both performers and audience from the action. In any case, the jokes by Rossini and Beaumarchais are funnier. David Portillo was a nimble if sometimes dry-voiced Almaviva, Corey McKern a resonant though not always dexterous Figaro. Peter Strummer and Michael Ventura vigorously filled out the buffo roles of Bartolo and Basilio. Most impressive was the fluid, idiomatic playing of the orchestra, under the direction of Kostis Protopapas, who has served as Tulsa’s artistic director since 2008. In any city, it’s rare to find a conductor who sets the right tempo so consistently, in scene after scene, that you stop noticing he is there.
The man who imported opera to Kansas City was Kersey Coates, a Quaker who moved west in 1854, helped build the first bridge across the Missouri River, fought slavery, and did very well in real estate. The Coates Opera House had many splendid seasons before burning down, in 1901. After lean years in the mid-twentieth century, local opera resumed with the founding of the Lyric Opera, in 1958. Like the Tulsa Opera, the Lyric has a history of supporting rising talent, none more significant than the mezzo Joyce DiDonato, who grew up in the Kansas City suburbs, on the Kansas side. DiDonato has become perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation, the heir apparent to the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. She still has a home in the area and keeps an eye on local affairs. When Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas, abruptly eliminated the state’s arts funding, earlier this year, DiDonato took to her ordinarily cheery blog to denounce the move as “ignorant, shortsighted, fearful, and unspeakably damaging.” Perhaps out of deference to a colleague, she has had nothing to say about Senator Coburn.
Last month, the Lyric Opera moved to the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, a four-hundred-milliondollar complex designed by Moshe Safdie and financed principally by the Kauffman pharmaceutical fortune. It’s not a particularly original piece of architecture, its nested forms recalling, variously, the Sydney Opera House, Disney Hall, and the New York Guggen- heim, but its vast glass-canopied lobby is stunning, and its concert hall is a golden-wooded wonder. The interior of the opera house veers toward chintziness, and its acoustics are imperfect: voices project well and the brass ring out, but the upper strings tend to wither away. All the same, the Lyric had no trouble selling out a run of “Turandot.” Tickets are becoming scarce for the remainder of the season, which includes John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” in March.
The “Turandot,” directed by Garnett Bruce and designed by R. Keith Brumley, is a markedly more thoughtful show than the Zeffirelli warehouse sale that still clutters the stage of the Met. Faded reds and greens mimic the gritty grandeur of the Forbidden City, with various scenic details borrowed from Mingdynasty treasures in the collection of the nearby Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Zeffirelli could also learn a few things from this team about making the action clear. Less focussed was the playing of the orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony. At the matinée I attended, Ward Holmquist, the Lyric Opera’s artistic director, had evident feeling for the Puccini style, but he tended to conduct along with the score rather than in front of it; various cues were imprecise, leading to helter-skelter moments.
The cast offered no talent on the level of DiDonato—the home-town diva will make her Kauffman Center début in March, in the concert hall— but the singing rose above the humdrum. Lise Lindstrom was a forceful Turandot, slightly shrill but precise; Arnold Rawls, the Calaf, got by mainly on clarion high notes; Samuel Ramey lent quavery soul to Timur. Most notable was the Cuban-American soprano Elizabeth Caballero, who sang Liù in sensuously glowing tones, her charged legato shaping the music into cogent paragraphs. Liù’s death scene tore at the heart. For a long stretch in Act III, the performance achieved the kind of unselfconscious emotional directness that has lately been in short supply at the Met, where almost every new production seems designed for people who think they don’t like opera, or, worse, for the movie cameras.
Caballero also appears this season with the Nashville Opera, the Florida Grand Opera, the Austin Lyric Opera, and the Central City Opera, which occupies a great old opera house in Central City, Colorado. She has sung only one small role on the Met stage—Frasquita, in “Carmen”—but deserves to ascend farther. Anyone who has given up on a local company in favor of the Met broadcasts might ponder how singers like Caballero will be able to hone their craft if America’s national opera network flickers out. In opera, as in the rest of the economy, outsourcing kills careers.
See also: Great Plains photojournal.
Christus, Parsifal
Listening live to Christus on Liszt's birthday yesterday, I was struck again by the complexity of the Liszt-Wagner relationship. There are numerous echoes of Liszt in Wagner, of course, but the resonances are probably most acute in Parsifal, which draws on various religious works of Liszt, Christus included. Here is the opening of "Tristis est anima mea," the Mount of Olives scene (from the Helmuth Rilling recording):
And here is the passage in Parsifal which tells of how Titurel found Kundry asleep in the place where he was building Montsalvat (from the Thielemann recording, with Franz-Josef Selig as Gurnemanz):
The passages are scored in a similar way, with muted violins against clarinets, bassoons, horn, and lower strings in Liszt and muted violas against clarinets, bassoons, and tremolo cellos in Wagner. As so often with Wagner, the gesture is at once a theft and an homage, perhaps also a clue. After all, the "Tristis" text contains the line "Pater, si possibile est, transeat a me calix iste" ("O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me").
Early Sellars
Sellars in Bolinas, California, 2007.
Robert Kiely, the longtime master of Adams House, a complex of undergraduate dorms at Harvard College, recalls how he gave a helping hand to a future genius of opera production:
A jolly personage came smiling up to me, shook my hand vigorously, introduced himself as Peter Sellars ‘80, and asked for twenty-five dollars from the Master’s Fund to clean up and paint an old basement storage room so that it could be used as a theater. At first I thought he was kidding, but it quickly became clear to me that despite deferential giggles and guffaws he was in earnest. So I figured, twenty-five bucks, what can I lose? But little did I imagine what Adams House and the college were about to gain! Within days, the dungeon-like space was cleaned, painted, and lighted. Not very well lighted, but there were a light bulb and two small dirty windows looking out at people’s feet passing up and down Plympton Street. Soon those feet were headed to Explosives B, the new Adams House theater, seating capacity a comfortable twenty or an uncomfortable forty sitting on mattresses left over from storage. The first production, if I remember correctly, was a Polish satire that involved an enormous hand made of plywood that kept entering menacingly from the only door. The performances, the concept (short plays, no admission charge, limited space, late starting times), and the unbounded creativity and imagination of the director and actors made the place a sensation. Everyone wanted to come! People lined up in Randolph Court hoping to squeeze in.
Theatrical talent and ideas rained down on Adams House. A new play seemed to appear every few weeks. Some were new and experimental, others old favorites. Nothing seemed too ambitious. I went to them all, but some still seem to have been impossibly terrific. Peter decided to do something Russian. Was it Boris Godunov? Anyway, it was a mammoth Russian opera cut down to forty minutes. Peter liked moving his audiences around, so it began in Explosives B, then, with the director leading us on like Puck, we moved to the billiard room where Boris or someone died on the green felt table, and then we all were taken (in a lightly falling snow) to the Lowell House courtyard where I swear he had arranged to have the Russian bells ring. Am I dreaming this? Some of the details may be wrong, but the picture is right. Other classics followed in various unlikely places: a thirty-five-minute Macbeth with three actors in the tunnels; Genet’s The Balcony utilizing the staircase of the Gold Room; and, most memorable of all, Antony and Cleopatra in the Adams House pool (audience sitting around the sides, Cleopatra enthroned on a raft in the middle of the water). They were some of the very best, most original theater I have ever seen at Harvard. Peter would sit in the dining hall, eyeing the crowd and then walk up to someone who had never been on stage, saying, “You would be a terrific Lady Macbeth.”
This is from an Adams House alumni newsletter called Gold Coaster. I should disclose that Kiely was my thesis adviser, and a extraordinarily generous counselor. He has a new book entitled Blessed and Beautiful: Picturing the Saints.
