December 10, 2012
This week's links to NAJP members' work:
Martin Bernheimer on the Met's "Rigoletto" and previous (per)versions (Promenade)
Martin Bernheimer reviews "The Sorcerer" (Financial Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on Cuban music at Carnegie Hall (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews "The Gershwins and Me" (The New York Times)
Michael Feingold reviews Theresa Rebeck's "Dead Accounts" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews David Mamet's "The Anarchist" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on "Inner Voices" and the solo musical (The Village Voice)
Jan Herman on a first-class fake (Straight Up)
John Horn on female film directors at Sundance (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on the 10 best films of 2012 (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Waiting Room" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday interviews Bill Murray (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Playing for Keeps" (The Washington Post)
Allan M. Jalon interviews D.A. Pennebaker (The Huffington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on rebuilding after a disaster (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein reviews "The Fun Stuff" (The Boston Globe)
Peter Plagens reviews Carroll Dunham et al (The Wall Street Journal)
David Streitfeld on cultivating positive Amazon book reviews (The New York Times)
Kenneth Turan reviews "The Central Park Five" (Los Angeles Times)
Kenneth Turan reviews "Room 237" (Los Angeles Times)
This week's links to NAJP members' work:
Martin Bernheimer on the Philharmonia Orchestra's "Wozzeck" (Financial Times)
Laura Bleiberg on "The Nutcracker" and guest artists (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Bleiberg on Trey McIntyre Project's "Ways of Seeing" (Los Angeles Times)
Robert Campbell on a Paul Rudolph library, reworked (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Sarah Ruhl and her Bishop-Lowell play (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes reviews Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews the musical "Giant" at the Public (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "The Piano Lesson" at Signature (The Village Voice)
Jan Herman on Sinclair Beiles and "The Idiot's Voice" (Straight Up)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Life of Pi" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Hitchcock" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein reviews "We Killed" (The Jewish Daily Forward)
Julia M. Klein on the exhibition "American Spirits" (The Wall Street Journal)
Dennis Lim on "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (Los Angeles Times)
Renee Montagne interviews poet Kevin Young about "The Hungry Ear" (NPR)
Renee Montagne interviews cartoonist Ellen Forney about "Marbles" (NPR)
David Streitfeld on Amazon's book pricing (The New York Times)
David Streitfeld on Tim Ferriss and publishing's future (The New York Times)
Kenneth Turan reviews "'Hitchcock" (Los Angeles Times)
On Monday night at Avery Fisher Hall I saw a wonderful Wozzeck. Alban Berg's brilliant opera was conducted concert-style by Esa-Pekka Salonen; it featured Simon Keenlyside as Wozzeck and Angela Denoke as Marie, and had the whole Philharmonia Orchestra and Westminster Choir onstage behind the nine soloists. I have a great deal to say about this semi-acted-out performance--especially about the way the music and even the setting allowed Keenlyside to triumph in his wrenching role in a way that the Met's Tempest, a much more fully staged production, did not--but what I have to say can't fit into this space. So I will save all those ideas for a Threepenny Review article. There are some things, apparently, that print can still do better than blogs.
But there are definite virtues to this form too--virtues of immediacy, of concision, of instant correctability, of necessity mothering invention--that I have discovered to the full over this past month of daily posts. It's not clear what I will do from now on with all the thoughts that bubble up each morning untransmitted; nothing, I suppose. I am grateful, at any rate, for having had this outlet for a time, and I hope it's been interesting to you out there too.
I guess that's all, folks. Have a good Thanksgiving!
The Man in the White Suit is playing this week at Film Forum, and what a joy it is. First and foremost, we get the young Alec Guinness--graceful and spritelike, handsome enough but not too handsome, with a deadpan manner that could rival the Peter Sellers of Being There and an occasional tentative smile that could melt ice. From the minute he appears onscreen, he stands out from all the other gray postwar British (most of them industrialists and factory employees), even though he is not yet wearing his glow-in-the-dark white suit.
Then there is Joan Greenwood as the love-interest, the daughter of the textile industrialist at whose lab Guinness, an eccentric, impractical genius, secretly develops the undamageable white material. Greenwood is one of those British actresses who have no equivalent on the American scene. Her sulky pale beauty is only a part of her charm; most of it comes from her inimitable voice, with its deep-throated huskiness and its tiny speech impediment--more a purr than a lisp, I would say, but something that in any case makes every line her own.
The supporting cast is terrific, too, and the plot and script are hilarious, pitting labor against capital and both against the scientific genius who threatens to upend the entire textile industry. I even loved the sound effects: the musical notes that emerge from Guinness's bubbling beakers, the explosions that wrack his unsuccessful experiments, and the silences that accompany his successful ones are all part of an engaging soundtrack that glowingly fits this glorious black-and-white print. The movie was made by Ealing Studios in 1951, proving once again (as if proof were needed) that there is no such thing as progress in the arts.
This past Sunday's expedition was to Roosevelt Island, which can be reached from Manhattan's East Side by an airborne tram, which flies over the East River from a station at Second Avenue and 60th Street to a central location on the small island. (The tram trip is an excitement in itself: I don't think there can be another urban view, anywhere in the world, as novel as the low-flying return to Manhattan, which descends in over city streets.) Our initial aim was to walk along the west coast of the island and get a great view of Manhattan, but when some friends told us about the recently opened Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, designed by Louis Kahn but left unbuilt for many years, we made that our destination.
The park occupies the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, and it immediately adjoins an old ruin of a nineteenth-century smallpox hospital, suitably preserved in all its historic spookiness. Just past this noble wreck, you can slip through the gates into the Louis Kahn park itself, which rises in front of you as the land narrows to a point. Imagine something like the Vietnam Memorial, only in white, with a low wall that starts just above human height and gradually approaches ground level as you walk along it. Imagine an Aztec pyramid flattened and narrowed, with triangular steps rising briefly at the front end, and with a long ramp at the far end that eventually meets the water. Imagine a thick-walled fort, with very thin chinks between each massive stone, through which you can peer at a thread-sized section of either Manhattan or Brooklyn. All of these are elements in the Kahn design--as are two double-rows of stately trees leading up the central avenue, a plaque quoting FDR on the "four freedoms" (which included not only the usual American "freedom of speech," but the much more socialist "freedom from want"), and marvelous views in every direction.
It was lovely to see the site for the first time in the light of a late fall afternoon, but now I am anxious to go back in the early summer, when the trees will have leafed out and the monument will have given way, in part, to the park. Considering the size of Louis Kahn's reputation among architects, there are not all that many examples of his built work in America (the Yale Center for British Art, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and the Salk Institute in southern California are among them), so it is particularly pleasing to have one of them right here in New York. If you want to find out more about this great artist's work, I highly recommend the movie My Architect, a very personal documentary made by his son, Nathaniel Kahn. This movie is so good that I went to it twice in 2003, the year it came out; and now that I have seen the FDR park, I think it's probably time to watch it again.
This week's links to NAJP members' work:
Larry Blumenfeld on International Contemporary Ensemble (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold on "Ivanov" and Durang's "Vanya and Sonia" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (The Village Voice)
James Hale on Blue Note Records (CBC)
John Horn on Douglas Hodge and "Cyrano de Bergerac" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Paul Thomas Anderson and "The Master" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Anna Karenina" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Silver Linings Playbook" (The Washington Post)
Allan M. Jalon on Chinese art in Santa Barbara (Los Angeles Times)
Michael Kimmelman on building differently after Sandy (The New York Times)
Renee Montagne interviews Joe Wright about "Anna Karenina" (NPR)
Renee Montagne interviews Anne Lamott about "Help, Thanks, Wow" (NPR)
Kenneth Turan reviews "Silver Linings Playbook" (Los Angeles Times)
Kenneth Turan reviews Jacky Comforty's "The Optimists" (Los Angeles Times)
Okay, fellow NAJPers. We are nearly down to the wire here. I've been doing this daily blogging for about four weeks now, and I have only three days left in my promised month. Who would like to step up next?
You wouldn't have to commit to a whole month, and you wouldn't have to blog every day (though there is something to be learned, in a kind of pseudo-Zen-practice way, by the daily obligation to pour out one's opinions or experiences online). Even if you only committed to a week of this--a mere work-week, with weekends off, say--you would be doing our community a tremendous favor. There are thirty-one of us listed over there on the right-hand side, and if you subtract Laura Collins-Hughes (who does yeoman's work for ARTicles already), Doug McLennan (who handles the technical side of the blog), and me (of whose voice we are all heartily sick by now), that still leaves twenty-eight potential volunteers. If each of you did just one week, that would take us through more than half a year. Easy, no?
The designated blogger wouldn't by any means have to be the only voice involved. I would have liked it if someone else had been writing intermittently during my month on duty. I would have liked it if someone else had been writing during the three or four months preceding my month on duty, but the absence of any such voices, including my own, is what compelled me to take on this task in the first place. Surely we all have occasional interesting things to comment on (and I myself hope to report in again once in a while over the next few months, after I've got my wind back). But ARTicles, in order to survive, seems to need at least one committed writer who is willing to be responsible for keeping it going in the short run. That could be any or all of you.
Why does it matter if this blog lives or dies? Well, I don't think I have to tell any of you about the parlous state of the arts in America these days. The bad economy and the ever-more-consuming digital world have combined to make things very difficult for the live arts--that is, the arts in person, the arts that allow for a direct encounter between the viewer and the artwork itself, whether it be a concert or an opera or a painting or a book. We arts critics or reporters, by paying serious and in some cases knowledgeable attention to those desperate and necessary art forms, are helping to keep them alive. I hope there are also readers out there whose curiosity we feed and whose interest we stimulate, and that too helps the arts.
I didn't mean to turn this into a commercial. I just hoped to get my fellow bloggers thinking about who might come next in this rota, doing this little job that earns no pay but is actually rather fun, if you enjoy fun that has an element of self-imposed work in it. My one-month term ends on Wednesday, November 21. We can all take Thanksgiving off--hell, we can take the whole holiday weekend off. But isn't there someone out there in NAJP-land who is willing to take up the torch by Monday, December 3? If so, I would certainly love to read what you have to say.
There are a few tremendous pieces of music that I could happily hear live several times a year, every year of my life. Beethoven's Ninth is certainly one of them, and as it happens, I have already heard it twice in the last six months: once last night at Carnegie Hall, and once in June in San Francisco. Both performances were thrilling in almost equal measure, I would say, but they were very different in approach. At Carnegie, John Eliot Gardiner conducted his period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and his Monteverdi Choir (I say "his" because he founded both groups) in a performance that was at once quicker, lighter, and quirkier than the more traditional San Francisco Symphony version. But the Ninth was all there nonetheless, and its peak moments--in particular, that final joyous movement in which the voices enter in, at first singly and then in full force--remained the kind of experience that one wants to go on having over and over again. I was deeply glad to be there, and so was the rest of the roaring, standing, vociferously applauding audience.
Since I actually played a small role in last night's Symphony Space performance, this will not be an objective critical review (as if any of my accounts, in this space or elsewhere, are objective!), but rather an inside report on an arts event.
The event was a modified recreation of John Cage's piece How to Get Started, a 1989 performance in which Cage randomly turned over 10 index cards (pre-inscribed with ideas for topics he had given himself) and spoke for up to three minutes, extemporaneously, on each topic. As he responded to each successive card, loops of his earlier responses played in the background, so that by the end of the piece, the repeatedly looped recording was thick with all the interactions between the ten Cage monologues.
At Symphony Space on Thursday night, Allen Shawn and Wallace Shawn--with the significant collaboration of a borrowed sound engineer, Peter Price, who had mastered this technique through his work with the John Cage Trust and the Slought Foundation--each went through a version of this process in front of a friendly, fascinated audience of about 200 people. I had lured the two Shawn brothers into this event, and I was responsible for interviewing them onstage afterward about the results, but to be honest, I had no idea beforehand what those results would be, since I knew about the Cage piece only through hearsay. I never expected the evening would turn out so beautifully, with two separate but clearly related artworks materializing before our very eyes.
Allen is a composer and pianist, and his looped performance (complete with snippets of music by Schoenberg, Carter, and other favorites that he played on the piano when he wasn't speaking) was essentially a musical artwork, with thoughtful lyricism as its dominant mode. Wallace is a playwright and actor, and his performance had the verbal density and emotional intensity of a play. What astonished me--and rather amazed the two participants as well--was that it was possible to achieve something through this method that at once reflected their individual characters as artists and also presented something of the family life in which these two characters had developed. We cheated a bit on the prescribed Cage method by allowing some of the card-cues to come from the outside: two each were suggested by the brothers to each other, and one for each came from me. This made the exercise even more random and spontaneous, but it also brought it closer to home. When Allen responded to the cues "a woman's laugh" (put forth by Wally) or "automobile" (my idea), we learned something about his relationship to his parents, as a child and as an adult. And when Wally did a wonderful final riff on "puppets" (proposed by Allen), we in the audience found out about the puppet theater on which the two boys had first practiced their separate arts jointly.
Afterwards, I asked each of the Brothers Shawn what had most surprised him about his brother's performance piece. "That it was so serious," Allen said. "That it was so intimate," said Wally.
It is an odd feeling to be completely out of step with the rest of an audience. Last night, at the performance of Thomas Adès's The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera, I sometimes felt I was the only person in the entire auditorium who wasn't wildly enthusiastic.
It's not that I hated the opera, or even disliked it. The music was always stirring, sometimes strikingly lovely, occasionally touching. The performances couldn't be beat: Audrey Luna, as Ariel, did astonishing things with her voice and body; Alan Oke, as Caliban, managed to be both creepy and pitiable; Simon Keenlyside was a powerful, melancholy, beautifully rich-voiced Prospero; and Toby Spence was wonderfully evil as Antonio, portraying him as a kind of sleazy corporate backstabber. Even the last-minute guest-singer, Bruce Sledge, who replaced William Burden as the King of Naples, had a notably terrific tenor voice.
Except for the opening scene, which was a delightfully inventive version of a storm-tossed sea (with great music to match it), I could have done without Robert Lepage's overly busy staging. The theater gimmick he employed for the sets--rows of red-plush opera seats, huge backstage machinery, stage-lights and other obvious props--made no sense in the context of the opera's island setting, and if it was meant to evoke Shakespeare's departure from the stage in Prospero's final renunciation speech, well, Shakespeare knew how to do such things a lot more delicately; Lepage's decision to crush the theatrical metaphor into our faces essentially ruined it as a metaphor. Even more incomprehensible were the hordes of extra people onstage. The second act opened with something like a ballroom scene, complete with numerous women in long gowns, as if the ship Ferdinand and his father took from Naples to Prospero's island in the sixteenth century (when women were unheard of on ships, not to mention onstage) was essentially the downed Titanic. Who were these women, in the Tempest plot? And who were all those sprites dancing around the stage, when we know from Shakespeare that Ariel, the only spirit on the island, had to produce all the special effects for Prospero by herself?
But that was the real problem: what we knew from Shakespeare had no relevance here. I would have been happier if Adès had chosen to call his opera The Storm, say, and let me pick up the stolen elements of the Shakespeare story on my own--but who chooses to take over Shakespeare just for the plot? Verdi and Rossini and a million others, you will say; but they didn't have the choice of doing it in English, and besides, Verdi's Macbeth has a far greater relationship to its source story than this does to the scripted Tempest. A big part of the reason is Meredith Oakes's stark redoing of the language (no doubt approved and perhaps even ordered by Adès himself). She has reduced all the beautiful lines of poetry to a kind of doggerel in rhyming couplets: in a libretto where Caliban says to Prospero, "You beat and strike me / You do not like me," we seem a lot closer to the realm of Doctor Seuss than to the world of Shakespeare.
When I complained about such things at the intermission, the response of all my friends (and there were surprisingly many of them at last night's performance) was essentially oh, Wendy, get over it. "Don't compare," one advised. So I sat through the last act trying not to compare, attempting to imagine that I was enjoying a completely original spectacle, and to a certain extent this worked. But my effort pretty much broke down when we got to Prospero's renunciation speech--one of my favorite theatrical speeches of all time--and the single abbreviated line "Now our revels are ended" was the only thing that made it through the wreckage. I understand that you can't write music to iambic pentameter, but wouldn't it have been possible to preserve more of Shakespeare's language in an English-language opera?
Still, I have to say--as I said in relation to the Poisson Rouge appetizer I attended a couple of weeks ago--that the Adès score holds its own against more well-established operas. And by this standard even the specific production was not terrible: I would rather go back to The Tempest three times than be forced to sit through another minute of the recent Met versions of Salomé or Tales of Hoffmann or Damnation of Faust. This is worth something, perhaps even a great deal--the ability of a modern composer to stand up against Strauss and Offenbach and Berlioz--and Thomas Adès deserves to take a bow for it.
There is a wonderful show up at the Guggenheim Museum right now, called Picasso in Black and White. It takes up the whole of the spiral ramp, from top to bottom, which is how I always prefer to see their shows, even if it involves going in reverse chronological order, as it does this time. It's easier by far to take the elevator to the top floor and glide down from Picasso's maturity to his youth, rather than trudging uphill to watch him develop--and since he didn't actually "develop," but just changed his skin every few years, he is one of those rare artists who can easily be viewed from either direction.
The amazing thing is that, even if you confine yourself to these primarily grayscale works (the curators cheat a little, allowing a tint of blue or yellow or lavender to intrude here and there), you can pretty much represent the whole of Picasso's career. At the top level, in the 1960s, are some fascinating works that somewhat resemble the designs he was doing on plates in those years, though in this case they are black-and-white paintings, often of schematically portrayed men and women. At the bottom is the lovely, intensely moving Woman Ironing, which the Guggenheim itself owns, and which the artist completed in 1904, when he was still doing largely figurative work. And in between lie early cubist figures leading toward Demoiselles d'Avignon; monochrome versions of the Blue and Rose periods; the flat, angular, disembodied females he was doing in the late Twenties and early Thirties; horse heads and other sketches for Guernica; a black-white-and-gray group portrait from the same period as MOMA's Four Musicians with Dog, this one set in a milliner's shop; paintings, sculptures, and drawings of Marie-Therese, Jacqueline, and the other important women in his life; and numerous other delights that I've never seen before. What is most remarkable is that this master of color, whom I associate so strongly with the vivid hues of, say, Woman with a Book (at the Norton Simon) or Woman in the Mirror (at MOMA), should turn out to be so completely a master of form that he triumphs just as powerfully when color is removed.
This enormous and exhausting exhibit would take many hours on many days to absorb thoroughly, and so far I've only been once. But it is up until January 23, so I can go again, and so can you, even if you are coming from out of town. This is a show not to be missed.
They're new to me, at any rate, and probably to you, though they were first published a long time ago. Both are part of the NYRB neglected classics series, which consistently unearths treasures that our inconsiderate publishing industry has allowed to go out of print.
Yesterday, on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, my husband and I decided to interrupt our usual Lower Manhattan walk with a visit to the New Museum. Located at on the Bowery at a point that becomes visible as we approach from Prince Street, the museum is an attractive if not always useful addition to the neighborhood--by which I mean that of the five or six shows I've seen there since it opened a few years ago, only one or two have seemed worth the admission price to me. But, ever undaunted, I decided to try again.
The current big show is of the German artist Rosemarie Trockel, and it takes up floors 2 through 4. A lot of this stuff looks like warmed-over Quay material: freakish and meant to shock, but not so much as to make anyone feel really uncomfortable. (The Quay Brothers, it seems to me, have stronger obsessions--perhaps more powerfully believed in by the artists themselves--and that makes their freakishness considerably more effective.) The best things in the show, by far, are Trockel's woven artifacts on Floor 3: I hesitate to call these pieces sculptures, since they are mainly two-dimensional rectangles, but since they are made of yarn, they have a more noticeable texture than paintings, and some of them are very beautiful indeed.
Enough of this, though. The real reason to go to the New Museum, this time and every time, is the seventh-floor terrace. The room it abuts is sometimes used for parties, but otherwise you come out of the elevator onto a large, empty space glassed in on two sides. Beyond the glass is a terrace that wraps continuously around two whole sides of the building and provides stunning views of New York. In one direction lie the Chrysler Building and its environs; in the other, you can see the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and even a bit of the Brooklyn Bridge. In yesterday's golden afternoon light, the downtown looked beautiful and serene; from the seventh floor, we were far enough above the Soho crowds that their noise didn't reach us, so the experience of the city was largely visual, not aural. One could hardly imagine that a mere ten days earlier, if one could have visited this spot, the whole southern prospect would have been dark and empty.
This week's links to NAJP members' work:
Martin Bernheimer reviews "Ballo in maschera" at the Met (Financial Times)
Jeanne Carstensen on riding out Sandy (Religion Dispatches)
Steve Dollar on Dree Hemingway and her role in "Starlet" (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on Tim Heidecker and "The Comedy" (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews Samuel D. Hunter's "The Whale" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews Douglas McGrath's "Checkers" (The Village Voice)
Gayle Feldman on the Random House-Penguin merger (The Daily Beast)
Patti Hartigan reviews "Thornton Wilder: A Life" (The Boston Globe)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Lincoln" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Skyfall" (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on the Barclays Center and its context (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein reviews Richard Russo's "Elsewhere" (The Chicago Tribune)
Julia M. Klein reviews David Nasaw's "The Patriarch" (The Boston Globe)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Skyfall," the new Bond film (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell on Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to movies (CinemaDope.com)
Renee Montagne interviews Sam Mendes about "Skyfall" (NPR)
Ann Powers on Wanda Jackson's "Am I Even a Memory" (NPR)
Craig Seligman reviews Jami Attenberg's "The Middlesteins" (Bloomberg News)
Laura Sydell on downloads and the music industry (NPR)
And in print:
Mark Rozzo on his Hong Kong eating adventure with chef Chris Cosentino in the November Town & Country
The difference between going to a concert given by a great string quartet, like the Pacifica Quartet, and even a very good one, like the Belceas, is that in the presence of great musicians, you forget about everything but the music itself. I'm not saying you don't notice the players' lovely individual characters, or the way they beautifully interact with each other, or even the fact that they are all terrific musicians; these are factors, inevitably, in the way you take in the music at a live concert. But when the musicians are as dedicated, as talented, and as cohesive as the Pacificas are, what finally comes through is the pure expression of the composer's gift. All intermediary considerations drop away: you do not ask yourself how well this interpretation works, or which of the four musicians plays with the most originality, or even whether this performance accords with your preconceived idea of the piece. For the duration of the concert, the performance is the piece, pure and unadulterated by any considerations of individual ego or pyrotechnic display.
Or so I felt on Saturday night at the Peoples' Symphony Concert in Chelsea, when the Pacificas performed three of my favorite pieces of quartet music: Haydn's Op. 76, No. 4, Shostakovich's Second Quartet, and Beethoven's Op. 132. All critical sensibility dropped away, and I simply relaxed into the pleasure of hearing these gems played perfectly, one after the other. The Haydn is something I listen to all the time on my iPod; it is part of the background music of my life. The Shostakovich is dear to my heart: though it was only the composer's second venture into the form, I think it's in some ways the most stirring of his fifteen quartets (and the Pacificas, in my opinion, play it better than anyone else, living or dead). The Beethoven, though undeniably one of his late great quartets, somehow gets shamefully neglected in my internal list of music I care about; it always takes hearing it again, especially in a beautiful performance, to remind me that it is indeed one of the best.
I was thinking approximately these thoughts as we were approaching the end of the powerfully wrenching Heiliger Dankgesang movement in the Beethoven, when suddenly the stage lights went out. They didn't go out with the abrupt shock of a power failure: they faded, as if on a predetermined schedule, and at first the audience evidently thought the Pacificas had decided to use lighting effects to echo the music's somber, contemplative mood. But I know the Pacifica Quartet too well to think they would ever stoop to such flashy tricks, and soon everyone realized that this "trick" had gone on too long. The Pacificas bravely continued playing in the dark to the end of the movement. Then they paused, and a member of the Peoples' Symphony Concerts staff--the only member of the staff, if I can judge by the fact that he collected tickets, arranged the stage backdrop, and informed us where the bathrooms were--came to the stage and announced that since he couldn't figure out how to turn the stage lights back on, the concert was over.
I consider myself a socialist at heart, and I like the idea of a concert series that charges $13 per ticket and holds its events in high-school auditoriums. But incidents like this repeatedly prove to me that if something is called the Peoples' This or That, disorganization and incompetence are likely to ensue. I hate to say that we must have administrative dictatorship and wealthy patronage to make arts presentation possible. Surely there is some other alternative--some way the People can sponsor the best in musical performances without allowing the lights to go out.
Last Wednesday, as I noted a couple of posts ago, the Belcea Quartet performed excellently if eccentrically in Beethoven's Op. 127 and 130. But now, in the final concert of their scheduled Beethoven series, those eccentricities moved to the forefront and began to consume their host. Modernism does not need to be exposed or discovered in the Grosse Fuge: the piece has enough discord, enough wildness, enough rhythmic disunity of its own, and when the Belceas' tendencies in that direction were super-added to it, the result was almost a caricature, a fiendish exaggeration. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Grosse Fuge I heard at Zankel Hall on Friday night was not, to my ear, Beethoven's.
But then they won me back with Opus 131. It was a fine, sensitive performance, with a few mild oddities of timing here and there, and an extra-harsh bowstroke or two (or three), but manifesting none of the destructive willfulness the Belceas had displayed before the intermission. The four string players were attuned to every subtle passage of this remarkable piece, and they gave full and complicated attention to the numerous transitions from intensity to softness to near-silence, from melancholy to resurgence and back again. Their playing throughout was filled with delicacy and emotion, and one felt at the end (as one should always feel with Op. 131, if it is done right) that one had been through something important.
And then they capped the evening with a lovely encore, the Ländler movement from Op. 135. As the violist said in his brief introduction, they were performing this as the encore for two reasons: "One, because we didn't get to do it the other night, when the concert was canceled. And two, because Beethoven at one point thought of ending his Opus 131 with this movement, so it seemed a fitting way to end the evening." The cellist then leaned over and whispered in his ear, and the violist added: "And also because we love this movement." It showed, in their moving and rigorously restrained performance.
For years I used to teach a course called "New York and the Arts" at Hunter College, and one of the high points of the semester was always the moment when I got to take my class of freshmen to a rehearsal at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn. This year I'm not teaching the class, but that didn't seem sufficient reason why I should miss out on my much-loved fieldtrip, so I asked Mark Morris and his executive director, Nancy Umanoff, if I could come to a rehearsal by myself, and they kindly said yes.
At yesterday afternoon's rehearsal, Morris was working on a new dance set to Carl Maria von Weber's Grand Duo Concertant, to be premiered in April. For the ninety minutes that I watched him work, he was repeatedly reconfiguring the eleven dancers--eight men and three women--in a section of the dance that will probably take up about thirty or forty seconds of elapsed time in performance. Eleven is a hard number to work with. Not only it is a prime, and therefore not susceptible to easy division (in contrast, say, to its next-door neighbors, ten and especially twelve), but it is a large prime, too big to be grasped easily as a coherent unit, the way smaller primes like two or three can be. "Why did I choose eleven? No one forced me to choose eleven," the choreographer was muttering to himself as he deployed and redeployed the dancers in various formations.
I love watching MMDG rehearsals--especially rehearsals of new dances that are coming into being on the spot--because it is one of the few chances I ever have to see actual thought taking place. There are at least two different kinds of thought going on in such a case: Morris's own inventiveness, which involves moving dancers around as if they were giant chess-pieces (except that there are no firm rules to this game) and deciding which patterns work and which don't; and the dancers' related but different kind of thought, which joins the physical to the mental in a near-simultaneous spark of ideas. Time and again, I saw Morris give a brief instruction to his dancers--a suggestive phrase, a specific hint about how to move, a question about other possibilities, a small gesture of his own--and then I saw them translate it into movement: coherent movement, in which they all gestured together or in a related way, and beautiful movement, in which the patterns traced by their legs, arms, torsos, and heads all made sense, separately and together. The whole process went very slowly, until the rehearsal pianist (Colin Fowler, who is also Morris's performance pianist) struck up a few bars of the music, and then it all went by at warp speed. The final dance, when it is finished, will be thrilling, I think; but nothing will ever be quite as fascinating to me as getting to watch it take shape in this way.
After Morris left the room, his rehearsal director, Matthew Rose, worked on an older dance, The Office, with the six or so dancers who were learning it for the first time. Set to a Dvorak Bagatelle, The Office is and always has been one of my favorite Morris works: lyrically beautiful, melancholy to the point of being frightening, and yet also very joyful in places. It has an overall air of carefree simplicity, mingled with an underlying complexity of rhythm and design that is deeply challenging to the dancers--yet these six were picking it up as if they had been born to dance it. It was especially thrilling for me to watch Rose take apart the separate strands of the "trio" section, instructing one dancer to begin a three-beat move on the first beat, the second to enter on the second, the third to enter on the last, and all three to add a little hiccup of syncopation at different points in the sequence--and this doesn't even begin to address the very complicated semaphores they were making with their arms, not to mention their whole spatial relationship to each other. As I said to one of the dancers when the rehearsal was over, it was like watching Ricky Jay perform a magic trick slowly (not that he ever would, for an outsider like me!). Beneath the surface magic that I have always loved in this dance was an entirely other, more calculated, yet no less beautiful magic.
Mother Nature appears to love President Obama. She sent him a tropical storm to ruin the Republican convention. When that didn't prove sufficient, she provided a hurricane to win him the support of Governor Christie and Michael Bloomberg (not to mention all the needy citizens who were helped with surprising rapidity after the storm). Finally, she delayed the cold, wet, snowy weather by a single day to allow east-coast Democratic voters, who are notoriously less weather-resistant than Republicans, to make it to the polls on Election Day.
She has not manifested the same fondness for the Belcea Quartet. The first of their three Beethoven concerts at Carnegie's Zankel Hall was canceled last Saturday in the aftermath of Sandy. Their second concert, which took place last night, required audience members to trek through a horrific Nor'easter (I know, it sounds quaint, but it is really just a massive dose of snow, wind, and rain, all mixed foully together) to get to the concert hall, with the result that Zankel was only half full.
This is a shame, since the Belceas are one of the most interesting young quartets to come out of Britain (or, for that matter, Europe as a whole) in recent decades. They are vigorous and at the same delicate in their approach. They have a strong feeling about the music they are playing, and they translate that feeling into practice. In last night's program--consisting of two remarkable late Beethoven quartets, Op. 127 and Op. 130--they manifested skill at every level. The quiet parts of Op. 127, in particular, were so entrancing that the audience seemed to be holding its collective breath; you could have heard a pin drop in the silences.
If Mother Nature has an excuse in her unfair prejudice against them, it would be because there is something, well--I hate to use this word, for fear it will be misunderstood, but-- "unnatural" in their approach. I don't mean this as a criticism, exactly, for the strangeness, the eeriness, is partly what gives their playing its strength. They are eccentric almost to the point of willfulness in their interpretations. The results are never outlandish--both 127 and 130 were recognizably themselves on Wednesday night, with all their usual delights--but the Belceas do something with timing and particularly with dynamics that makes the quartets sound like nothing you've ever heard in anyone else's recordings. In places these four players are the very opposite of cohesive: your ear finds itself picking up the underlying cello or second violin line almost as a separate theme you've never noticed. This is Beethoven's wild inventiveness pushed to its furthest extreme, the quartet as break-out music. Yet the result is not always violent: the Belceas' dynamic range is such that their quiet portions are surely the softest passages I've ever heard in these string quartets. At times you feel yourself leaning forward to catch the slightest puff of sound, and it almost disappears before you've heard it. The method is intriguing, even captivating, and it is certainly Beethoven; it's just not at all what anyone was expecting. That may be all to the good, but I will have to wait for Friday's performance of the tremendous Op. 131 to be sure.
(I realize, by the way, that in the course of these daily blogs I have become as much weather reporter as arts critic. I apologize, but it seemed unavoidable: the environment was just too overwhelming. Here's hoping that, in the final dozen or so days of my postings, the arts will fight back at full strength.)
I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about partisan politics on a non-affiliated arts blog, so let me just remark that as my friends and I were gathered around the television set last night, we burst into spontaneous applause at 11:12 p.m. It was a very satisfying program, all in all. Now if only California had managed to abolish the death penalty...
Yesterday I spoke before a class of bright, articulate non-fiction students in the Hunter College MFA program. My nominal subject was the history and practices of The Threepenny Review, though we ranged (partially in response to their intelligent questions) into many other areas related to the composition, editing, and publication of good writing. As always when an older person visits a class of younger people, there were names I mentioned--names of the dead, in particular--that they didn't recognize. What surprised me was which names.
Almost all of them seemed to have heard of Roberto Bolaño and Gore Vidal, and most of them knew who Leonard Michaels was. To my surprise, some of them even knew of Paul Bowles. But not one recognized the name Mario Savio, and this shocked me.
Okay, granted, Mario Savio was not primarily a writer: his day job, for most of his life, was as a college-level teacher of remedial math, and his fame stemmed from the impromptu speeches he made during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964. Though his grasp of the English language was both immense and sensitive, he only published a few articles in his lifetime--one of them, I am proud to say, in The Threepenny Review. But if you said his name today in the Bay Area, I am pretty sure even young people would still recognize it. This is partly because the legacy is still alive there: the main snackbar on the UC Berkeley campus is called The Free Speech Café, and something called the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture is given by an eminently grey left-winger every year. But it is also because the effect he had on the world in which Berkeley found and still finds its place was so powerful then, and so memorable now.
I told the Hunter students they should look him up and try to see some of the speeches he gave--long, eloquent speeches containing whole sentences and paragraphs, with nary a jargon phrase among them, delivered with passion but also politeness by a curly-haired, angelic-faced young man who often wore a tie, and who took off his shoes before climbing up on a cop car in order to avoid damaging the car. You can find his most famous speech here, for instance; but though it brings back his words, it does not really evoke the man himself, with all his unusual presence. As he got older, he became softer and more saintly, but he never let go of the ideals of his youth. I hope, for their sakes, that there is someone like him among the young people coming of age now, so that they too will have a name to remember.
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