What do Weinberg's The Passenger, Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, Stenhammar's Tirfing, Lully's Atys (conducted by Christie), John Estacio's Lillian Alling, Verdi's Macbeth (conducted by Muti), Smetana's The Kiss, Mozart's Mitridate, Dvořák's Vanda and The Jacobin, Porpora's Semiramide riconosciuta, Martinů's The Greek Passion, The Makropulos Case, La traviata, Les Pêcheurs de perles, The Rake's Progress, The Golden Cockerel, Francesca da Rimini, Lohengrin (recorded in Bayreuth this summer), Meistersinger, Rheingold, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung have in common? They can all be heard on Internet radio today. Details at Operacast.
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Peter Hill in New York
In the next couple of weeks there will be a crazed logjam of concerts in New York: the fourteen events of the SONiC Festival (starting tonight), the London Symphony's Missa Solemnis and War Requiem (kicking off White Light), Fabio Luisi's Met Orchestra concert, a Yuja Wang recital (you might have first read about her in the New Yorker), a free concert by Jordi Savall with Juilliard415, Paul Lewis's Schubert, the annual Vänskä visitation, an Ekmeles exploration of microtonal Gesualdo, a Parthenia program of modern pieces for viols, and so forth. On Sunday, there's a painful conflict between the JACK Quartet's SONiC marathon and a rare appearance by the severely undersung British pianist Peter Hill at Poisson Rouge. Hill's major achievement to date is his epic survey of the complete piano music of Messiaen, for the late, great Unicorn-Kanchana label (the discs were later reissued by Regis); no pianist in my experience has gone deeper into Messiaen's world. Hill is also the co-author, with Nigel Simeone, of the definitive Messiaen biography. At Poisson Rouge he'll offer a program of Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Bach. Tickets are $20.
Update: Leo Carey points to a video of Hill playing Messiaen's "La Colombe." He follows it with one of the composer's sight-reading exercises — the only one that survives.
CD of the week: Hahn's Ives
Ives, "In the Barn" from Violin Sonata No. 2; Hilary Hahn, violin, and Valentina Lisitsa, piano (DG B0016082).
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Beijing chill
I made a visit to Beijing in 2008, curious to see if the then widespread cliché about China being the "future of classical music" had any basis of reality. In my piece "Symphony of Millions," which is reprinted in Listen to This, I came to the conclusion that the Chinese classical scene, while energetic and full of promise, was hardly the juggernaut that some Western observers perceived, and that a current of political fear ran beneath it. "If you are not free yourself, how can you interpret music freely?" a former music critic told me. Since the Beijing Olympics, that fear has moved more obviously to the surface. The latest episode involves the cancellation of Huang Ruo's opera Dr. Sun Yat-sen, which was to have had its premiere at the National Centre for the Performing Arts last month. The young American journalist and scholar Nick Frisch, who accompanied me around Beijing when I visited in 2008, has a must-read piece in the New York Times about the Huang Ruo affair. Particularly troubling is the fact that Carl F. Bucherer, a Swiss company with Beijing interests, abruptly withdrew support for upcoming Hong Kong performances of Huang's work. Nick also raises the question of whether the Philadelphia Orchestra has acted wisely in entering into a partnership with a Chinese arts bureaucracy that is inclined to place limits on creative freedom. All told, it's a hugely dismaying story.
The full Morty
The next release in Mode Records' Feldman Edition — a compilation of works for orchestra, with Brad Lubman conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin — will bring us tantalizingly close to having Feldman's entire published ouput available on recording. Chris Villars's most recent list of unrecorded pieces contained thirteen items. The new disc knocks off four of them: Structures (for orchestra), On Time and the Instrumental Factor, Voice and Instruments, and Orchestra. These are exceptional performances by Lubman and company, lacking the tentative, tiptoeing quality that sometimes mars large-ensemble attempts at Feldman. The program is filled out with a large-orchestra rendition of the graphic score Intersections I. Surely it's time now to record Feldman's arrangement of the "Alabama Song"!
Previously: American Sublime.
High noon in Kansas City
The astonishing lobby of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the new home of the Kansas City Symphony and Lyric Opera of Kansas City. I saw a production of Turandot and a performance by Laurie Anderson — details to follow in The New Yorker in a couple of weeks.
Paperbacks
Maulina can scarcely contain her excitement at the sight of the paperback editions of Listen to This, my second book, which, I'm happy to say, will receive an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award next month. The UK version, on the right, is out now; the American version will be published on Oct. 25.
Pop notes
Portishead at Hammerstein.
Twenty years ago (sigh), my favorite band was the Bay Area post-punk outfit Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. I went to see them four or five times when I was living in Berkeley in 1990-91, always getting excited when they pulled out the trombone. A few years later, I reviewed them for the New York Times, and also covered the allied weirdness of Caroliner. After a dormant decade, the Thinking Fellers are back in circulation; they played at All Tomorrow's Parties over the weekend, and you can hear the result at NPR. "Hurricane" remains sublime.... I saw Portishead at Hammerstein Ballroom last night — always a great place to hear music, with the ghost of Mary Garden's Salome haunting the corridors — and was hypnotized along with the rest of the sell-out crowd. "Machine Gun," whose pulsing ostinato somehow reminds me of the second movement of Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony, was the ferocious highlight. There was some classical relevance to the expedition, since Adrian Utley, one of the band's master texturalists, has collaborated with Will Gregory on a score for Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which will play at the White Light Festival later this month.... Here's a Nate Chinen piece on Anthony Braxton, who is the subject of a four-day festival at Roulette starting tonight.... Have you heard anything created by people under forty, Mr. Ross? Well, a friend pointed me into the intriguing world of Nicolas Jaar, a Brown University undergraduate who describes himself as "haunted by Mulatu Astatke and Erik Satie." I also like Jace Clayton's work on the collaborative project El Resplandor, a sonic imagining of a remake of The Shining in Dubai.... Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is one of many artists moving unaffectedly between indie-pop and classical worlds. She has a winning piece called Proven Badlands on yMusic's Beautiful Mechanical CD, and she's been collaborating with David Byrne and the Asphalt Orchestra on a series of songs that should see the light of day at some point; they have an incredibly infectious number called "I Am an Ape."... Heck, I've even been listening to a bit of black metal, which Sasha Frere-Jones surveys in this week's New Yorker. It's important to keep in mind that Bernard Gann, guitarist of Liturgy, is the son of Kyle Gann. Under the tutelage of Brandon Stosuy, I've fallen cautiously in love with the overawing noise of WOLD, from southern Saskatchewan. Their only public show to date, in Long Island City, is documented in Brandon and Matthew Barney's book Tubal Cain. This is the sum of my current non-classical knowledge.
CD of the Week: Nicholas Phan's Britten
Sonnet XXX from Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo; Nicholas Phan, tenor, and Myra Huang, piano (Avie 2238).
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Atys at BAM, Anna Bolena at the Met
“Resurfacing”
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Oct. 10, 2011
The late-nineteenth-century Encyclopædic Dictionary defined a “repertoire” as “the list of operas, dramas, &c., which can be readily performed by an operatic or dramatic company, from their familiarity with them.” In other words, a repertory is that which doesn’t require a great deal of extra work. Given how much effort is needed to learn an operatic role, the resistance to undertaking new pieces, or reviving neglected ones, is understandable. But no one should mistake the consensus repertory for a roll call of the most significant operas ever written. An accumulation of comfort and habit on the part of performers and audiences alike, it gives a fragmentary picture of the past. Fortunately, you can always find a few high-minded guerrillas doing battle with the received wisdom.
The conductor and harpsichordist William Christie has done as much creative damage to the repertory as anyone. In 1986, in Prato, Italy, he and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, performed Jean-Baptiste Lully’s opera “Atys,” which had played to the immense satisfaction of Louis XIV in 1676, was often revived in the following decades, and then, with the rest of Baroque opera, had dropped from sight. As Andrew Porter wrote in this magazine, the Christie production “was the first endeavor in over two hundred years to present a Lully opera with resources approaching those the composer commanded.” It arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989, elating large crowds, and returned in 1992. Recently, the agrochemical magnate Ronald Stanton, who had been smitten with Christie’s “Atys,” funded a revival. So the show had one more turn at BAM, in September, confirming its reputation as a semi-miraculous feat of resurrection.
Lully, a natural autocrat with a weakness for page boys, came to Paris from Florence, finding his fortune after he was hired as a tutor for a cousin of the young Louis XIV. He danced alongside the monarch in ballets and began to contribute music to royal entertainments. Following a series of collaborations with Molière, Lully achieved near-absolute power in 1672, when the king granted him a monopoly on large-scale opera productions. Lully established a genre known as tragédie en musique the operatic equivalent of the French classical drama of Racine and Corneille. He imposed Italianate fluidity on French declamation, though he took care to immerse himself in the rhythms of his adopted language, committing each libretto to memory and then reciting it until the music came to him. At the same time, he maximized opportunities for spectacle, filling the stage with gods, heroes, monsters, and disasters.
“Atys” is a tale of true hearts stymied. Sangaride, daughter of the river god, is in love with the beautiful youth Atys, but she has been promised to King Célénus, while Atys is desired by the earth goddess Cybèle. In a harsh dénouement, Cybèle clouds Atys’s mind so that he takes Sangaride to be a monster and slays her. When he realizes what he has done, he slays himself. (Self-castration is not specified, as it is in the Greek story of Attis, which later became one of the chief cults of the Roman Empire.) The libretto, by Philippe Quinault, traces the conflicting attachments of the principals with mathematical elegance. The theme of the night is articulated when Atys sings, “How cruel a torment / To avow that a Rival is worthy of being happy!” The torment is ultimately Cybèle’s, as she gazes upon the carnage that her passion for Atys has caused.
In contrast to so much later operatic writing, Lully’s vocal lines seldom call attention to themselves. They have a conversational ease, and at moments of high emotion they intensify into a pure, spare lyricism, often with reference to older Italian models. When, in Act I, Sangaride expresses her abiding sorrow—she believes at first that Atys is indifferent to her, “sovereign of his heart”—she sings over a four-note descending bass line recalling Monteverdi’s “Lamento della Ninfa.” The most astonishing music appears in Act III, when Atys is visited by the gods of sleep and dreams, who advance Cybèle’s agenda in his subconscious. Lully sets up a steady, slow quarter-note pattern in the recorders and strings and sustains it at hypnotic length. Although the opera opens with a panegyric to royal authority, it hints at an underworld of secret loves and dangerous passions, to which even the mightiest are subject.
The 1986 production of “Atys,” with direction by Jean-Marie Villégier and sets by Carlo Tommasi, seems to have shed none of its complex allure. The jokey staging of the prologue threatens a prolonged campfest, with bewigged singers tottering about, aristocratic dancers fuming at the antics of harlequins, and an actor mimicking the imperious Lully. (When he beats his conducting stick on the floor, you are reminded that Lully famously died of gangrene after accidentally impaling his own foot.) Then a mysterious, dark-clad figure makes a sudden gesture and the backdrop vanishes, revealing a sombre marbled hall. The production keeps alternating between flamboyant and intimate scenes, zany pratfalls and solemn rituals; there is a strange kind of realism in its jarring contrasts, which suggest the irrational rhythms of life itself.
Christie, a Buffalo native who has long held sway over early music in France, maintains an uncanny closeness to the composer of “Atys.” (Richard Taruskin has observed, “Just like Lully himself, another favored immigrant, Christie has been officially charged with teaching the French to be French.”) As much a dancing master as a conductor, Christie drew out the essential bouncing pulse in each section while never letting go of the flowing line. The tenor Ed Lyon, as Atys, sounded less secure than he did in last year’s Arts Florissants residency at BAM, although he acted vigorously. Anna Reinhold, as Cybèle, and Emmanuelle de Negri, as Sangaride, sang with affecting force. And Paul Agnew and Cyril Auvity, in the high-tenor roles of the God of Sleep and Morpheus, impeccably enacted the central mission of Lully’s art—in the words of one contemporary, “to keep the mind, eyes, and ears in a constant state of enchantment.”
The beginning of the Sleep Scene from the Harmonia Mundi recording of Lully's Atys, with Gilles Ragon as Sommeil and William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants.
Gaetano Donizetti is another victim of the repertory of convenience. Although he has hardly lacked for performances at the Met, only one of his serious operas, “Lucia di Lammermoor,” has played regularly at the house. Last week, the Met gave a belated company première to Donizetti’s 1830 historical drama “Anna Bolena,” arguably his masterpiece. Like “Atys,” it tells of a hopeless clash between love and power: Henry VIII casts aside Anne Boleyn in favor of Jane Seymour. Donizetti lavished care on the score, giving orchestral variety to the recitatives and adding Beethoven-like harmonic jolts to the ensembles and choruses. As in Verdi’s mature dramas, there is a sense of tragic fate embodied in a political behemoth, and the climax is tremendous: Anne goes to her doom as the pageantry of Henry’s next wedding begins.
Alas, the new Met production is a misfire—the third consecutive below-par opening night for the Peter Gelb regime. The Scottish director David McVicar, who created a stylish, mildly provocative “Trovatore” for the Met three seasons ago, here retreats to bland pictorialism, with Dutch Master lighting directed at hulking sets. Resembling a half-finished Hollywood project, the staging prevents intimacy and hampers the singers’ projection.
Anna Netrebko took the title role. She is unquestionably a star, the kind that keeps companies afloat. Her voice has grown darker and plusher without losing its lustre. In the ensembles, the gleam of her top notes caused chills. But she lacks coloratura dexterity, and her solo turns were self-consciously poised, bordering on smug. In the final scene, I marvelled at the beauty of her voice without believing for a moment that she was a queen going mad.
On opening night, the only singer who showed real ferocity was the Russian mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova, finding a potent mixture of outer brilliance and inward fire. (When the fast-rising soprano Angela Meade takes over as Anne, on October 21st, Gubanova may have competition.) The young tenor Stephen Costello, as Anne’s former lover Percy, sang with honest grit but struggled in the upper register, his voice thinning to a near-squeak at the very top. Ildar Abdrazakov didn’t quite have the vocal weight for Henry VIII, yet his acting was superb, his eyes shooting daggers in all directions. Marco Armiliato, in the pit, had an uneven night, at times imposing crisp momentum and at others engaging in a tempo tug-of-war with his singers. In all, the evening had an untethered quality: no one seemed fully in charge.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the first opening in many years without James Levine. Beset by medical problems, the maestro had already scaled back his schedule, and a few weeks ago he cancelled his fall appearances. Fabio Luisi has been named principal conductor, although Levine remains music director. The need to address the vacuum in artistic leadership is urgent. It is time for Levine to step aside, receiving due veneration for his legacy, and for Gelb and the Met board to decide on a long-term musical leader—and not one inclined to rubber-stamp dubious ideas. Otherwise, the Met will devolve into business as usual: familiar repertory in perpetual rotation.
Morlot's debut
Reports of Ludovic Morlot's first concerts with the Seattle Symphony suggest not only that he's off to a strong start musically but that he has begun to reshape the orchestra's image with the wider Seattle public. Belying his sober reputation, Morlot surprised and charmed the crowd at his gala debut with a bit of theatrics during Ravel's Boléro, leaving the podium for a few iterations of the theme and joining the violin section. More important, he's been making an insistent case for his modern-leaning programming, in line with the crisp new house slogan, "Listen boldly." (In a piece for the Guardian last year, I commented that no major orchestra seemed prepared to advertise itself as the Museum of Modern Art does, as "radical," "provocative," or "bold"; I'm happy to see that the Seattle Symphony has become an exception.) Bernard Jacobson wrote up the gala for the Seattle Times and then praised a sizzling-sounding program of Stravinsky's Rite, Gershwin's American in Paris, and Varèse's Amériques. Gavin Borchert of the Seattle Weekly, while distinctly unenthusiastic about the choice of Friedrich Gulda's Cello Concerto for the gala, said that the orchestra sounds "as good as I've ever heard them." David Mermelstein covered Morlot's debut for the Wall Street Journal, and Thomas May has a long report in Crosscut. Of particular note is the reaction of Jen Graves of The Stranger, the hugely influential alternative weekly. "The whole symphony is being revitalized," she says. This is all good to hear.
Previously: Morlot to Seattle, Change in Seattle.
Miscellany: John Schaefer's Radiohead solo, etc.
The LA Phil will unfurl a very attractive-looking Green Umbrella on Tuesday, Oct. 4: Zosha Di Castri's La forma dello spazio, Feldman's Viola in My Life 1 and 2, Takemitsu's Rain Coming, and Georg Friedrich Haas's chants oubliés. Writes Haas: "The title refers to late works by Franz Liszt (Valses oubliés, Romance oubliée) – Liszt’s technique of presenting one-part melodies in a different sound environment (often that of the piano) is applied here to the possibilities of the chamber orchestra." ... John Adams, who is overseeing Green Umbrella as LA Phil's Creative Chair (a great season overall), also has a lovely piece on Mahler in the New York Times Book Review.... The new building of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest is named after György Ligeti.... The Red Light New Ensemble opens its season on Monday night with a "Music as a Map" program.... For some years now, Gotham Early Music Scene has been fighting to change the widespread impression that New York's early-music community lacks lustre in comparison with Boston's or the Bay Area's, not to mention scenes in a dozen European cities. They're making headway, as sampler concerts this weekend should testify.... Scandal! Anne Midgette has got into a public dispute with Plácido Domingo.... My American Musicological Society post below inspired Will Robin to start a "fake AMS" game on Twitter, the results of which are summarized on NewMusicBox. All this is good-natured fun — I have deep respect for so many brilliant scholars out there, and Will is himself a musicology grad student.... I saw Radiohead on Thursday night at Roseland. Three random notes: 1) I'd never noticed that one of Jonny Greenwood's ondes Martenot lines in "The National Anthem" seems to quote the Andante sostenuto theme from the second movement of Sibelius's Second (see 4:08); 2) yes, that's the voice of WNYC's beloved new-music advocate John Schaefer on Jonny's radio in the first minute — talk about Soundcheck!; 3) the version of "Bloom" that opened the show was one the most awesome things I've heard them do, a swirling juggernaut.
