a fool in the forest

Living la Muerte de Lorca [Ainadamar, Long Beach Opera]

2012-05-22T09:20:04-07:00

I am not generally one for sports metaphors, but if an opera company could be compared to a major league slugger, Long Beach Opera has been on a successful hitting streak since at least the start of its 2009 season. Not a home run every time, but a surprisingly high number of them, and always at least a double or a triple. To put it another way: One of these nights, LBO is finally going to disappoint me again, but Sunday night was not that night as the company sent Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar lofting toward the wall.

The subject at hand in Ainadamar is the death of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, "Ainadamar" being the centuries old Arabic name ["fountain of tears"] for the Fuente Grande ("large fountain") in the town of Alcafar some miles outside of the city of Granada. It is generally accepted that García Lorca died there, executed by Nationalist militia elements loyal to Francisco Franco at the outset of the Spanish Civil War in August, 1936. The poet's remains have never been found, although the search has continued as recently as the past decade.

Golijov and librettist David Henry Hwang frame one death with another: the opera is a memory piece, unfolding in the final hours of the actress Margarita Xirgu in Montevideo in 1969. Xirgu had been a favorite of García Lorca's, playing principal roles in the original productions of most of his plays during his lifetime. She had urged him to seek safety by joining her in [pre-Revolutionary] Havana, but he remained in Spain. (Only two weeks ago, the Guardian purported to reveal the identity of the lover for whom the poet fatally lingered.) Following his murder, and during a time when his works were banned in his homeland, Xirgu became the keeper of the García Lorca flame in the Americas. In Ainadamar, she speaks of the poet a last time to one of her students, Nuria, while the events she describes play out around them. Ainadamar is postured more or less explicitly as a secular Passion, with García Lorca as sacrifice and redeemer of Spanish art and the Spanish soul.

The three central roles in Ainadamar, including that of García Lorca, are written for women, and Long Beach Opera is fortunate to have an ongoing relationship with three exceptional singing actors to fill those roles. Suzan Hanson, who sings Margarita Xirgu, has associations with LBO since 1995. Ani Maldjian (Nuria) joined the company in 2008, while Peabody Southwell (García Lorca) first appeared in 2009—as the Fox to Ms. Maldjian's Cunning Little Vixen in the production that for me marks the start of that string of hits to which we earlier alluded. All three singers appeared in last season's Medea, but their roles there were largely separate. Here, they combine to ravishing effect, as Golijov has provided not one but two extended trio passages of great richness. Between the three of them, Ainadamar is something of a survey course in What Sopranos Do. The student Nuria is the least developed character, but her high ornamental music is perfectly suited to Ani Maldjian. Suzan Hanson brings gravitas, passion and a refined exaltation to the dying Margarita. Peabody Southwell as the poet is riveting, a combination of Cocteau's Orpheus with the young and unstoppable Chaplin, ambiguous, desired, unattainable and, in death, a transfigured intermediary with the sacred. This is, incidentally, the second time this season that Ms. Southwell has been brutally killed by Spanish-speaking Fascists: she suffered a similar fate in Piazzola's Maria de Buenos Aires.

Long Beach Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek has long been trying to mount a production of Ainadamar. It was announced for the 2007-2008 season, but canceled due to fiscal constraints. This season, the opera was to have been staged in the now empty Long Beach Tribune building, but that plan was scuppered by a construction project even as rehearsals were beginning. Forced to relocate and completely reconfigure the production, the performances were transferred to the Terrace Theater at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center.

As revised, the large proscenium stage of the Terrace is draped in white fabric through most of the performance, the better to display the partially improvised "real time" video projections of Frieder Weiss. At the center, a small playing area contains a chair where Margarita Xirgu speaks of the poet one last time. The 8-woman chorus rises and falls, Rhinemaidenlike, from the pit. (The large orchestra, conducted by Stephen Osgood, is secreted at the rear of the stage, unseen until time for curtain calls.) García Lorca's final days play out around the remaining stage space.

Weiss's projections dominated (for better or worse) last season's LBO staging of Akhnaten. In Ainadamar, they are deployed with a more ambient organic subtlety, lending atmosphere and supporting the drama without constantly gesturing for our attention. Fine as the projections are, the most striking image comes when they subside: in the closing minutes, as Xirgu leaves the material world behind, the dead poet pulls down the the fabric at the rear of the playing area to reveal a Paradisal vista of gently glowing chandeliers.

So, then: another high yield, stimulating at-bat for Long Beach Opera. One inning performance remains - this coming Saturday, May 26 at 8:00 p.m. The Terrace is a big house, so tickets are likely still available.

~~~

Photos (except top) by Keith Ian Polakoff; all photos used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

~~~

Something in the Air Besides the Atmosphere[Hilary Hahn and Hauschka : Silfra]

2012-05-18T09:41:59-07:00

Silfra could have gone wrong down any number of regrettable paths, most of them leading to the dreary nether zone populated by the chittering shades of purposeless "Classical Crossover" recordings. But it did not. Rather, by dint of superior skill or rigorous commitment or perhaps just good fortune, Silfra emerges as a unique and rewarding creation, a lapidary melding of sound and idea that deserves extended and repeated attention.

The story has it that in 2008 violinist Hilary Hahn was introduced to the Düsseldorf-based composer/prepared-pianist Volker Bertelmann, who records and performs as Hauschka, by folk musician Tom Brosseau. Brosseau had collaborated with Hahn, and he was a label mate of Hauschka's on Fat Cat Records. A few weeks later, Hahn joined in a 5-minute improvised performance with Hauschka at the end of a Brosseau show in San Francisco. By the end of those five minutes a slow growing creative seed had been planted.

Hahn contributed a violin part to "Girls," a track on Hauschka's 2011 Salon Des Amateurs, but there was no public indication that the two were at work on anything larger until March of this year, when Hahn's label, Deutsche Grammophon, announced the forthcoming release of Silfra. In fact, at about the time that Salon des Amateurs was being released, Hahn and Hauschka were in Reykjavik's Greenhouse Studios, where they recorded Silfra over ten days in May 2011, after two years of planning and long-distance rehearsal.

While Hilary Hahn will be the best known participant in this project for most listeners, I am far more familiar with Hauschka's previous work—and for that matter more familiar with the work of co-producer Valgeir Sigurðsson—than I am with Ms. Hahn, who is known to me only by reputation. The music of Silfra was for the most part created on the spot through the two musicians improvising an initial track together, then jointly or individually improvising further in response to it. The use of a variously prepared piano for Hauschka's parts added a further layer of the unexpected to each performance.

Much of Hauschka's work here is of a piece with the range of styles and tactics he has displayed in his own releases. That said, this is arguably the best version yet of those styles and tactics. "Bounce Bounce"—the 'single' of sorts, since it comes with a lovely hand-animated submaritime video—is in many ways a quintessential Hauschka number, violin and piano each setting their own insistent percussive counterrhythms as they slew across one another. Similarly, the stately dance rhythms and frayed and faded overcoat moodiness of "Kraków" would slip easily in to, say, Ferndorf. Stepping away from his prior work, however, Hauschka also explores a more abstracted, atmospheric approach on several Silfra tracks, laying a ground over which the violin can rummage for a path.

Hilary Hahn meanwhile, freed from the set expectations and more regimented milieu of the symphony hall and the Classical repertoire, has taken the opportunity to press and stress her instrument to see just how much she can command from it—and given her acknowledged technical prowess, she is able to command a great deal. Her explorations and discoveries in these pieces have less to do with unexpected notes or chords than with exploring of the range of tone and color and feel that her violin can produce. Silfra is in part an extended meditation on how the violin can sound, without venturing too far over the line toward distortion, and how it can be recorded. This is particularly the case in the album's long central piece, "Godot," a 12+ minute single take during much of which the piano takes on the role of contemporary percussion ensemble while the violin enters and recedes with snatches, drones, twitches and wails, until the two parts subside at the last to a resigned trudge of quiet chords beneath a fragmentary, plaintive melody.

Will Robin earlier this week posted an insightful piece on Silfra on his blog, Seated Ovation, in which he speculates persuasively on the extent to which Valgeir Sigurðsson, as engineer and co-producer, is almost a third performer in bringing Silfra to its final form. Sigurðsson today strikes me as the heir to Brian Eno's seminal work as a producer/musician in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a clear willingness to embrace happenstance as opportunity, and to treat the recording studio as an additional instrument of sorts. In the case of Silfra, the fortuitous combination of Sigurðsson, Hahn and Hauschka yields music that is well-wrought at its center while shading intriguingly at its edges toward an unresolved horizon.

~~~

Some video.

First, DG may call it an Electronic Press Kit, but I call it a Coming Attractions trailer. Pretty good whate'er its name, with glimpses of the Hahn/Hauschka/Sigurðsson triumvirate at work:

Second, Hilary Hahn vids and chats up Volker Bertelmann as he Prepares his Piano:

And . . . Silfra.

Silfra is scheduled for release May 22. This post is based on a requested review copy of the CD.

Photo: Silfra Fissure near Lake Þingvallavatn, Þingvellir National Park, Iceland, via Wikimedia Commons. The album title refers to this rift or fissure outside of Reykjavik, filled with glacial melt water of near perfect clarity and marking the point where the North American and European tectonic plates meet.

~~~

Epithalamium Redux Redux

2012-05-15T06:58:00-07:00

The poem below first appeared on this blog on February 26, 2004, during the period when then San Francisco Mayor (now Lieutenant Governor) Gavin Newsom unilaterally directed the City of San Francisco to license same-sex marriages. That original post had a tentative "do I dare" quality to it that irks me a bit now, though that tone was more or less consistent with the tenor of the time in which it was written andmight serve as a marker for how the times have changed. The poem itself is something of an oddity, bringing a light verse form to bear on a subject of some little seriousness, but I still like it eight years on.

Back in 2004 the California Supreme Court ruled within a month that the City of San Francisco had no legal authority to license marriages not specifically authorized by state law, but it also invited the City to challenge the limitations of those statutes in court. The City did, and that case eventually worked its way through the system and back to the court that suggested it. Four years ago today, May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court declared in In re Marriage Cases that the restriction of marriage to couples of differing genders was impermissible under the California Constitution. On that same day four years ago it seemed appropriate to republish, and I did, with less circumspection than on the first time round.

In the ensuing four years, the voters of California have amended the state's Constitution via Proposition 8, for the express purpose of reversing the state Supreme Court's decision. That Court has confirmed that the constitutional amendment was lawfully adopted and is binding upon it, so that there is no longer a state-constitutional basis for an expansive definition of marriage. Quite the opposite in fact: the state constitution is now explicit in defining marriage as strictly a man-woman arrangement. A challenge to Proposition 8 under the U.S. Constitution has since produced decisions in the U.S. District Court and from a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals finding the Proposition constitutionally impermissible. The outcome of the challenges to Proposition 8 remains inconclusive, however, pending further en banc review by the Ninth Circuit and an expected/inevitable petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given that I have republished it on a rough four year cycle, and given that the President of the United States made his views on this subject explicit suring this past week, the time seems right to roll these verses out again, so roll them out I shall:

~~~

Epithalamium

I

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Gay men and lesbians
Flock to the City Hall,
Follow their bliss,

Purchase their licenses,
Swear to their permanence,
Pose for the camera crews
Sharing a kiss.

II

Damned, sir? They’re damned, you say?
Possibly, possibly:
Love has led millions to
Suffer a Fall.

That’s for the next world, sir;
Here with the living -- well,
What was it Chaucer said?
“Love conquers all.”

III

Poets, sir. Love poets.
Some of the best have been
Gay, sir. Consider this
List I’ve compiled:

Wystan Hugh Auden and
C.P. Cavafy and
Sappho. James Merrill, Thom
Gunn, Oscar Wilde.

IV

Legally, legally,
Should an impediment
Rise to the marriage of
Minds that are true?

Sure as there’s only one
Race, sir -- the human race --
How would you feel if it
Happened to you?

V

Citizens, citizens,
Leave to your churches these
Questions of sanctity,
Tough and profound.

Secular governments
Ought to facilitate
Binding of lovers who
Yearn to be bound.

VI

Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Cleave to the one who’s your
Heart’s true companion, the
Thou to your I.

Now, when the times are so
Fearsome we all must, as
Auden says, “love one a-
nother or die.”

~~~

Of Course You Realize This Means War [wildUp, The Armory, Pasadena]

2012-05-14T10:46:34-07:00

wildUp, the musical collective/contemporary chamber orchestra under artistic director/conductor/composer Christopher Rountree, returned to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena Saturday night with The Armory: Music About Art, War and Peace.

Typically for wildUp, the program featured a mix of new pieces, new pieces based upon older pieces, and older pieces spun in new ways. Also typically, some pieces proved more successful than others, but the cumulative impact of the evening was thought provoking and invigorating.

The evening hit the beach explosively with Andrew Tholl's still not a place to build monuments or cathedrals. Tholl is a regular composer for wildUp and typically plays violin in the ensemble, but here he picked up the electric guitar. Scored for ensemble, guitar and electric bass, still not a place... is above all loud, an escalating series of raucous, confrontational crescendos. It is a difficult piece to judge on first hearing, because the thick layer of surface noise is so impenetrable.

Loudness and aggression were the hallmark of all three pieces on the first half of the program, but each offered its own variant. Andrew McIntosh's Inch and Mile, worked off of the conceit that myriad small things can lead, when combined, to much larger things: inches to miles, small subgroups of instruments to full ensemble, seemingly rational choices to conflict and war. Written largely in just intonation, McIntosh's piece was as loud as Tholl's, but also featured passages of real beauty with sonorities reminiscent of the more tranquil bits of LIgeti's Atmospheres (cf. 2001).

And then all hell broke loose, with Nicholas Deyoe's aptly titles A New Anxiety. Deyoe derived his inspiration from the churning rhythmic and tonal pile-ons of the most unapologetically committed Death Metal bands. The result is uncompromising in its aggression but ultimately fascinating in its combination of seemingly impossible shifts of speed and direction, in its array of textural effects, and in its unrelenting insistence that it will not be ignored. At the center of the maelstrom, bassoonist Archie Carey roared away, his amplified instrument run back upon itself through looping and effects pedals in a reasonable approximation of the orc hordes of the Apocalypse. Carey was also called upon, whilst wailing bassonically, to assault a pan full of broken crockery repeatedly with a power drill. These descriptions may make the piece sound unlistenable, but my own reaction was the opposite: the rigorously disciplined, cleansing abandon of the piece broke through all resistance, leaving me wide eyed, nodding and grinning in stark amaze.

Post-intermission, peace and contemplation returned, at least on the surface. The bright lights of the first segment were dimmed for Christopher Rountree's For Allen Ginsburg, in which wildUp's eight string players first established a rich harmonic drone reminiscent of the pump harmonium with which the poet often accompanied himself. Rountree and others emerged from the darkness, placing small bouquets on the empty conductor's podium, before joining in a blossoming Sanskrit chant derived from the Heart Sutra (om gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā).

The peaceful surfaces of Chris Kallmyer's Here We All Are, Moving Forward masked a guilty war-torn secret. Again the strings were the center of the piece, now joined by a quintet of percussionists tapping quietly on wooden boxes. As the strings perfomed an arrangement of a William Byrd Sanctus, the hushed patterns played by the percussionists mirrored the number of deaths, month by month, sustained by coalition forces in the Iraq war. In performance, this potentially gimmicky arrangement was surprisingly affecting, the wooden taptaptap beneath Byrd's hymn of praise reminding that in the midst of life we are in the midst of death, and that our own lives are bought sometimes with the unacknowledged death of others.

To conclude the program, wildUp turned to Stravinsky's popular L'Histoire du Soldat ['The Soldier's Tale'], but with a typically wildUp-ian variation: rather than utilize the traditional text written by C.F. Ramuz, this performance turned to the alternative "American Soldier's Tale" written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1993. As Vonnegut told it, he was invited to narrate a performance of L'Histoire, but became incensed when he read the text: a whimsical tale of the devil, a violin, and a "soldier" who had nothing to do with the actuality of soldiering. Later, at the suggestion of George Plimpton, Vonnegut wrote his own version, drawing on the awful reality he knew well from his own World War II experiences. Vonnegut's version is acrid and foul mouthed, its rhymes a sarcastic counterpoint to the casual dreadfulness of the story he chooses to tell: the execution by firing squad in 1945 of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, the first and only US soldier to be executed for cowardice and desertion since the Civil War.

For this performance, Vonnegut's four characters—Soldier, General, MP Sergeant and "Red Cross Girl"—were perched on the upper level of the Armory space, the small mixed ensemble of musicians below. In Vonnegut's telling, Slovik is just the unluckiest mug in the world, tossed aside and crushed by way of "example," with strict precision and adherence to the Manual. The seeming jollity of Stravinsky's score, always deceptive, contrasted pungently with the sordid business of bureaucratized death.

So ended what Christopher Rountree declared the second full season for wildUp. Having now attended three wildUp events, I would not select this one as my favorite—January's "Ornithology" and April's "Brooklyn/LA" programs are running a dead heat for that title—but it displayed what are now the expected hallmarks of a wildUp show: intriguing new music and unexpected angles on older music, all of it played with skill, vigor, and a commitment to the ideal that even ostensibly "difficult" music can give pleasure and that The New is where you find it.

~~~

Top Photo, by the blogger: the Pasadena Civil War Memorial, Memorial Park, Pasadena, CA, across the street from the Armory. Middle Photo, by the blogger: Earplugs, thoughtfully supplied by wildUp. Lower Photo, by the blogger: Timeline of Iraq war casualties, with woodblock.

Darthness Visible

2012-05-01T21:31:52-07:00

We take it as a given that the Death Star, in the Star Wars films, is evil in itself.

It may be wielded by men who are themselves innately evil—the Emperor—or by men who have fallen under evil's sway—Vader—but it makes no difference: the Death Star is not an object open to redemption.

It is an evil device, and it is not made more or less evil by the degree of evil present in the individual humans behind it.

There is no suggestion, really, that a "kinder, gentler" Death Star is a possibility.

The very existence of a Death Star is an evil, and it would remain so even under the presumptively enlightened rule of a successful Rebel Alliance. What choice would the triumphant Alliance have but to dismantle the thing as quickly as possible?

Are we in agreement thus far?

Where, then, does the evil in the Death Star lie?

Is it in the sheer vastness of its destructive power? The ability to reduce a planet such as Alderaan to powder?

Does the Death Star become less evil if it empowders only half a planet, or only very small planets?

Does the Death Star become less evil if it can level no more than a mid-sized continent?

An agricultural district?

The Thieves' Quarter of a city?

A single city block?

Apartment 22C, where that irritating (and possibly even evil) Mr. ExemBexumBinksenmurtttt lives?

Mr. ExemBexumBinksenmurtttt?

Just him, only him?

And perhaps, unintentionally but unavoidably, the shoe shine guy to whom Mr. ExemBexumBinksenmurtttt's custom happens to be given at just the moment that the Death Star's uncannily precise albeit uncannily destructive power is unleashed—

by its presumptively benevolent masters,
from the comfort of their state of the art terminals,
on orders produced by a rigorous vetting process
engaging multiple layers of unidentified but plainly trustworthy functionaries
who are doing what is best,
as you would understand if only you knew what they cannot tell you,
at the end of a long day just in time to head home
to the kids and a stiff martini
and maybe Game 3 of the championship series

—to rain death without warning, remorse, or appeal, from the sky?

Is it less evil then?

A Saucerful of Secrets [New Lens Concert Series premieres in Pasadena]

2012-04-20T20:11:04-07:00

The promise of the unknown, the mysterious, the surprising—of the NEW!—can generate anticipation and instill excitement, or it can sow uncertainty and envelop us in dread. The New Lens Concert Series proposes that the unknown and the unanticipated are our friends, and that the element of surprise can and should enliven a listener's encounter with music, whether that music is familiar or, better yet, new. The inaugural New Lens program as I heard it on Wednesday evening in a performance by Seattle's Finisterra Piano Trio at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music makes its case persuasively.

Two young composers—Garrett Schatzer and Juhi Bansal—and Finisterra Trio cellist Kevin Krentz are the artistic directors and moving forces behind the New Lens series, which aims not only to provide exposure for their own music, but to expose perhaps unforeseen strands of connection between the music of today and music of earlier periods that has succeeded in lasting until today. New Lens posits that an audience's assumptions about the music it will hear stand as impediments to actually hearing it, and proposes to toss that impediment aside by simply keeping the music as a secret until it is played. What was revealed beforehand was only that the members of the Finisterra Trio would be playing, that there would be eight compositions presented, and that the years of composition would range from the 19th century to the 21st. The printed program provided little more in the way of clues.

When all was revealed—in performance, each piece was identified after it had been played—the program turned out to be:

Part 1

Alexander Scriabin, Trois Morceaux [Three Pieces], Op. 45 (1905);
Pierre Jalbert, Dual Velocity (1998) [excerpt listenable here];
Garrett Shatzer, Piano Trio No. 1 (2009) [listen via the player here]; and
Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Trio Op. 70 (1808) [the so-called "Ghost" trio].

Part 2

Matthew Whiteside, The World in an Oyster, An Oyster in the World (2011) [listen here];
Matthew Peterson, Näcken (2011) [listen here];
Juhi Bansal, Wings (2010), parts I and III [listen to all three sections, as Piano Trio, via Soundcloud here]; and
Antonín Dvořák, Piano Trio No. 4 (1891), sections I, II, and VI.

The juxtaposition and sequencing of the evening's selections was a strength. Finisterra pianist Tanya Stambuk wove deftly through the late Romantic hothouse mysticism of Scriabin's tiny theosophical morsels—the longest of them lasting little over a minute. Jalbert's piano-cello coupling was similarly unmoored but with a more angular and abstracted aesthetic. Garrett Shatzer's trio productively collided sturm und drang and the nervous twitchy soulfulness of Prokofiev or Shostakovich, with the urgency and intelligence of Beethoven concluding the first half as a sort of reanchoring in the trio tradition.

Matthew Whiteside's Oyster is not, I think, actually about oysters, but its methodical poking and scraping could be taken as a reference to the persistent irritation by which a pearl is made. Watery things also underlay Näcken, which takes its name from a fiddle-toting Swedish stream-spirit, a sort of siren/kelpy whose music is perilous to mere humans; it provided a highly-arpeggiated solo showcase for Finisterra violinist Brittany Boulding. Juhi Bansal's Wings, as its title suggests, draws on the form of birds in flight, and would have been entirely at home on wild Up's "Ornithology" program back in January. Wings is a strong, appealing piece and, alongside the Shatzer Trio, was the item on the program I would most hope to hear again. After travels by water and air, the Dvořák Trio's roots in village dances provided a satisfyingly grounded and earthy conclusion.

The New Lens mission, as described in the program notes, is to "Juxtapose eras.... Evolve the program [and].... Transcend assumptions." In this, I would have to say the lensistas have succeeded. The program in Pasadena worked, in the manner of a fine multicourse meal, by dint of variety and its combination of the familiar and the unexpected, bound together by a commitment to quality of performance. The organizers' ambition is to present New Lens concerts at least annually, and more frequently if possible. Given how well this initial venture seems to have come out, one can only hope those ambitions will be fulfilled.

Congratulations to @NewLensConcerts and the Finisterra Trio on a fine, various, thoroughly satisfying program. San Franciscans take heed.
— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) April 19, 2012

~~~

This initial New Lens Series began in Seattle before arriving in the Los Angeles area, and concluded with two performances in San Francisco, April 19 and 20. I chose to hold this post until the series had concluded, because Nobody Likes a Spoiler.

Illustrations: Isamu Noguchi, "California Scenario" [detail], Costa Mesa, California. Photo and rudimentary processing by the blogger.

The Maine Event [Minnesota Orchestra: Judd Greenstein's Acadia]

2012-04-09T16:01:01-07:00

One of the advantages of living in a time of fast, easy, high quality recording, reproduction and distribution is this:

You can and leave this blog right now, go to the site of the Minnesota Orchestra, and download, at no charge, a recording of the Orchestra's March 31 performance of Acadia, composed by Judd Greenstein and conducted by Sarah Hicks.

Do that now. I'll wait.

Even if you don't come back, I know I will have done you a service. When you do come back, it will be my pleasure to tell you why...

.@juddgreenstein's "Acadia" premiered by @mn_orchestra is substantial, moving, built to last. Download it, frees:bit.ly/H77S8h
— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) April 4, 2012

Welcome back.

Acadia is the product of a "microcommission" process in which hundreds of donations of all sizes were pooled to fund the composition and premiere as part of Minnesota Orchestra's "Inside the Classics" series. The premiere took place on March 30 (the recording is of the second performance) on a program in which it was the only piece played: the first part of the evening was given over to a discussion of the work and its workings, followed by performance of the work itself.

The title, Acadia, refers in part to Acadia National Park in Maine, and to that region where New England ends and shades into maritime Canada. Judd Greenstein has written that the roots of the work lie in a long weekend camping and hiking trip that he made to the Park with a friend, which proved in some important way to be "a pivotal time — literally, in the sense of a pivot — in my life. If I were to break my life into two sections, the first part would end in that Acadian weekend...."

Not a symphony per se, but symphonic in scope, Acadia lasts roughly 35 minutes and is organized in four movements, played without interruption. One way to hear it, as suggested by the composer's description of the change of direction that inspired it, is in very loosely dialectical terms of thesis, antithesis, and seeming resolution through synthesis—followed by a coda of sorts, expanding back out into the larger world. A parallel, in a very different style, might be John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

The first and shortest section, "Moving," begins with an avian burble and thrum in the strings and winds from which the low brass emerge to state for the first time a rising four-note motif that grounds the entire piece, a marker in the landscape from which the metaphorical traveler can strike out and to which the traveler can at need return. In the second segment, labeled "Adagio," additional motifs appear—a new horn figure descends before circling back in on itself, a dance-like line advances crabwise—and tension builds in with bursts of horns and urgent percussion. The central arguments of the piece are joined in the third and longest segment, "Fast," in which, over a distant bed of metallic percussion that ticks and clangs like a Nibelung pocket watch, musical ideas draw in from every direction, combining or glancing off of one another, yielding unanticipated connection and the sense of new purpose. That purpose is built upon in the concluding section, "First Tempo," in which earlier strains return renewed and emboldened, the opening motif achieving a connection with its more circular cousin in what proves to be a false ending; a brief passage of meditation leads to the true conclusion in slow chords and a swell of bell and tympani.

Judd Greenstein has a compositional voice that is his own, and those familiar with his compositions for smaller groups such NOW Ensemble will hear it plainly in Acadia. It scales up exceedingly well from chamber size to full orchestra. The composer has often acknowledged Ravel as a major interest and influence, and that strand can be spotted running through Acadia. I also hear echoes of Leonard Bernstein—the rhythmic and modal approach to the dance-motif I mention, for example, would not be out of place in Mass—and the unexpected presence of Carl Nielsen, particularly when the hurly-burly suddenly falls away at a critical central moment of the third movement.

Acadia is always serious but never ponderous. Its forward momentum is constant but never frenetic. Its rhythmic and tonal palette is shifty and mercurial but never flippant or confused. It asks for, and never fails to reward, the listener's attention.

Beyond the excellent recording that Minnesota Orchestra is generously sharing with the world, Acadia deserves to be taken up and widely played by other orchestras, and to become a permanent addition to whatever equivalent we have to a contemporary canon. It is, in the true and original sense, sublime.

~~~

Photo: Bubble Pond, Acadia National Park, via Wikimedia Commons.

~~~

Blawg Review #315 - April Fools' Prequel

2012-04-01T00:01:00-07:00

APRIL FOOL!

~~~

Surprise! Blawg Review, the blog carnival for everyone interested in law, is ready for its comeback and its close up.

Launched originally in April 2005, and overseen by the still-anonymous Editor, Blawg Review ranged about across the legal blogging landscape, appearing each Monday in a new and different exotic locale for the next six years before seemingly going silent following its 314th edition this past August.

It has been my pleasure to host Blawg Review on my legal blog, Declarations and Exclusions, on five occasions, beginning with Blawg Review #51. Since April 1, 2006, I have also hosted, here, five April Fools' extra editions, in the same week as the Decs&Excs editions. That's ten hosting turns for me, an ample store of evidence from which our Editor was able to infer that, yes, I'm just a blogger who can't say "no" if you were, hypothetically, to float the notion of refiring the boilers under Blawg Review and ending its sabbatical on an April Fool-ish note. Thus it comes to pass that Blawg Review #315 will be up at Decs&Excs on Monday and that the sixth annual April Fools' Edition is now before your disbelieving eyes.

While the original installments of Blawg Review were simple collections of links to the prior week's best or most interesting or most curious legal blogging, it early on became common, albeit never mandatory, for each host to adopt a Theme for his or her presentation. On this day last year, Blawg Review #305 took the form of a tribute to and adaptation of "I've Got a Little List," from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. Today, I hope I may be pardoned if I return to the same well and build this 2012 April Fools' edition around another popular G&S number, the introductory song of Major-General Stanley from The Pirates of Penzance, best known by its opening line:

"I am the very model of a modern Major-General."

We need not go into the absurd plot of Pirates today. Suffice it to say that it involves pirates, an unfortunate young fellow apprenticed to their service until his eighteenth birthday, the difficulty posed by his having been born on the 29th of February and thereby having had only four birthdays in eighteen years, a collection of young lovelies who are wards in chancery to the aforementioned Major-General, a collection of unhappy policemen, and a joyous, nuptial ending.

Major-General Stanley himself is a figure of a kind W.S. Gilbert delighted in mocking: a man who has risen to a position of stature for which he has no practical qualifications whatever. What the Major-General does possess is a vast store of arcane and useless knowledge bearing on most every topic except those that might make him an effetive military man. He would likely have made a fine blogger, had the Victorian era offered that outlet.

Upon his arrival in Act I, Major-General Stanley demonstrates his breadth of study with this famous patter song. Here it is, as performed by John Reed, principal comedian with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1950's and 1960's:

Here, George Rose performs it in the wildly successful 1980 New York Shakespeare Festival staging in Central Park, with Linda Ronstadt as Mabel and Kevin Kline in his star-making turn as the Pirate King:

Sir Arthur Sullivan's catchy tune has achieved a further measure of immortality thanks to its having been adapted by Tom Lehrer to provide the melody for his cataloging of the chemical elements, "The Elements." (Clever title, that.)

Lehrer's song drew renewed attention recently when the performing of it was revealed to be a favorite party trick of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe. Allow him to demonstrate:

And so, with that tune now well-implanted in your ears, we may turn to the matter at hand. Friends, the 2012 April Fools' Prequel to Blawg Review #315:

~~~

THE BLAWGER-GENERAL'S SONG

Blawger-General:
This is the snappy patter-singing April Foolin' Blawg Review.
We're bringing back this legal blogging carnival to all of you
Who've missed it or forgotten it while it's been in absentia:
(A weekly dose of blawging is believed to slow dementia.)
There's many kinds of blawging, folks: it may be theoretical,
From time to time rhetorical, and sometimes alphabetical.
We hope you'll find this parody enlightening and risible....
Inspired by Major-General Stanley's rapid polysyllables.

    Chorus:
    Inspired by Major-General Stanley's rapid pollysyllables,
    Inspired by Major-General Stanley's rapid polysyllables,
    Inspired by General Stanley and his rapid Polly Polly syllables!

Blawger-General:
The Law's much more than drafting-stuff-while-sitting-at-your-
desk-ery
And offers opportunities for wackiness, grotesquery,
For odd quixotic ventures, and for trumpery and trickery,
And litigants possessèd by the spirit of Terpsichore.
A matter rather serious we feel we need to mention: you
Should click the links below and take the time to pay attention to
The awful depredations of a so-called blogger/journalist
The Lord High Executioner might add to his infernal list.

    Chorus:
    The Lord High Executioner might add to his infernal list,
    Oh yes he would indeed do well to add to his infernal list
    That most eternally infernal wicked so-called blogger/journalist.

Blawger-General:
With cigarettes and chocolates, we try to be responsible.
These clever cartoons educate the criminal and constable.
If you work at McDonald's, all your problems may be supersized.
(These blawgs are all original, there's nothing here
that's plagiarized.)
From blawgs you'll learn a thing or three about judicial etiquette
And dangerous misguided legislators in Connecticut.
Perhaps with an analogy we'll find that a solution'll
Present itself to when a health care mandate's Constitutional.

    Chorus:
    We do not understand it, all this complicated push 'n' pull!
    To find it inter-esting you would have to be delusional!
    We like a nice long walk, yes that's a proper daily
        "constitutional."

Blawger-General:
You, too, could be an expert, so be sure to trim your cuticles
And brighten your appearance through the use of cosmeceuticals.
Now take the time to listen to a podcast full of Georgery
Or head out to a gallery where ev'ry work's a forgery.
Our time here it is fleeting and I fear I hear it flittering
Or fluttering or flattering or maybe even Twittering
This Prequel's the embodiment of ev'rything that's ex- cell- ent....

All:
And now that Blawg Review is back,
You'll wonder why it ever went!

THE LINKS

Here are gathered stand-alone links to all of the blawgs embedded in the lyric above. Where multiple entries originate from the same source, I have kept them together, so the order of links below does not necessarily follow the order of links above.

Above the Law -
"Nanny State Ban on Words Is Lazy Educating By New York State"

The Criminal Lawyer [Nathaniel Burney] -
"Better Criminal Lawyering through Smart Risk-Taking"
Also by Mr. Burney, the ongoing and highly commendable
Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law.

An Associate's Mind [Keith Lee] -
"Churchill's 5 Elements for Persuasive Speaking"

Koehler Law Blog [Jamison Koehler] -
"Cross Examinations. Directs, too."

slaw.ca -
"Guide to Rhetorical Fallacies" [Michael Lines];
"The Friday Fillip: The Military of Silly Walks" [Simon Fodden]

noncuratlex.com [Kyle Graham] -
"The Affordable Care Act Oral Argument, If Hollywood Had Scripted It";
"The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Indexed to Franklin, Rabin & Green’s Tort Law and Alternatives" (via Overlawyered);
Just the Facts, Ma’am: Daily Training Bulletins of the Los Angeles Police Department, in Cartoons (1954)

New York Personal Injury Law Blog [Eric Turkewitz] -
"A New Personal Injury Waiver (Updated)"

D.A. Confidential -
"A word in your ear"

Technology & Marketing Law Blog [Eric Goldman] -
"What Do Soymilk and Nutella Have to Do With an Online Harassment Case?--Taylor v. Texas"

California Appellate Report-
"Brantley v. NBC Universal (9th Cir. - March 30, 2012)"
["It basically depends on if you know you're Don Quixote or if, instead, you're actually Don Quixote."]

SCOTUSBlog -
"The RNC shoots itself in the mouth"

WSJ Law Blog -
"Witches’ Brew! NY Suit Over Court Victory Dance Continues"

The Legal Satyricon [Marc Randazza] -
"Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN’T a journalist";
"How Crystal Cox is helping to prove the strength of the First Amendment"

Simple Justice [Scott Greenfield] -
"A Blogger Not Like Us"

Popehat [Ken-at-Popehat] -
"'Investigative Journalist' Crystal Cox's Latest Target: An Enemy's Three-Year-Old Daughter";
"For Plagiarists, The Internet Is A Double-Edged Sword";
"In Which I Dare Connecticut To Come Get Me. COME AT ME, BRO."

Philly Law Blog [Jordan Rushie] -
"Crystal Cox – Investigative Blogger? No, More Like A Scammer and Extortionist"

Defending People [Mark Bennett] -
"Crystal Cox"

Abnormal Use [Nick Farr] -
"Philip Morris Not Liable for Fire Started by Cigarette"

Jonathan Turley -
"Pinch Me: First Truck Spills Millions of Coins All Over Highway, Second Truck Covers The Money In Candy . . . Men Wait Anxiously For Moosehead Beer Truck"

Overlawyered [Walter Olson] -
"Woman Blames McDonald's for Prostitution"

The Trial Warrior Blog [Antonin Pribetic] -
"Supreme Court of Canada: Canadian lawyers must turn the other cheek when bench slapped"

Concurring Opinions [Nathan Cortez] -
"Why Can’t We Analogize the Mandate?"

Criminal Defense [Brian Tannebaum] -
"Wanna Get Famous Off Trayvon Martin?"

A Georgia Lawyer -
"A New One: 'Cosmeceuticals'"

Infamy or Praise [Colin Samuels] -
"George Rises (and Falls)"

The Art Law Blog [Donn Zaretsky] -
"Remember when I asked how long it would be before a gallery signed him up?"

Charon QC -
"Twitter"

Tomorrow [April 2, 2012] BLAWG REVIEW #315 will be hosted at my law and insurance blog, Declarations and Exclusions. Please drop in and sample the wares on offer.

[Update 4/2/12: Blawg Review #315 is up and readable here.]

Blawg Review has information about next week's host, future hosts, how you too can become a host, and instructions on how to get your own blawg posts considered in upcoming editions.

~~~

Something Boroughed, Something New [wild Up, "Craft" in Venice]

2012-03-24T15:49:19-07:00

The wickedly engaged and engaging new music collective wild Up returned to Beyond Baroque in Venice on Friday evening (repeated on Saturday afternoon) for a continent-spanning exercise in comparison, contrast, and What's Happening Now. "Craft" was the announced title for the program, which set new music from Brooklyn* alongside new and newer music from Los Angeles. Although it was framed in confrontational terms of "Brooklyn vs. Los Angeles," there was no real rivalry or conflict in evidence. Rather, the evening reemphasized that both coasts are in the midst of an expansive and fertile period of new music making.

A piece by piece rundown:

Round 1—Brooklyn

The night began with a jolt of energy and action in the form of Andrew Norman's 2004 violin octet, "Gran Turismo." [Caution: the player at that link launches automatically.] Inspired by the eponymous video game, combined with the speed-and-motion paintings of Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla and Baroque precision string practice, it is (to borrow from John Adams) a short ride in a fast, meticulously crafted machine. The piece moves nonstop, shifting and recombining its parts constantly over its whipfast eight minutes, themes and playing techniques sparking kaleidoscopically from player to player to player, leaving the audience wide awake and fully attentive.

Ordinarily, wild Up is not a conductorless ensemble. The absence of conductor/artistic director Christopher Rountree was explained in an introductory video, revealing that long after this program had been set, Rountree found himself required to spend time this week and weekend as assistant conductor to (ha ha!) the Brooklyn Philharmonic, so that instead of conducting "Brooklyn music" in California, he was obliged to talk to Californians from Brooklyn, about Brooklyn's music and their own.

Composer, pianist and elegant dresser Timo Andres has been in Los Angeles for several days, both to attend wild Up and to perform with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in three concerts featuring his compositions. He contributed three out of five of the Brooklynese pieces for wild Up, beginning with the solo piano revision of his "How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas?", performed by Richard Valitutto. (The original dual piano version appears on Andres' excellent 2010 debut recording, Shy And Mighty.) Where "Gran Turismo" burns, "How Can I Live..." smolders while tossing out unexpected sparks.

Missy Mazzoli's "Dissolve O My Heart" for solo violin was commissioned and premiered through the LA Philharmonic last year. It alludes to Bach, but quotes him only once before twisting off in its own knotty, pensive direction. It is perhaps the most magisterially off-putting piece of Mazzoli's that I have heard; a piece to be admired rather than loved. Andrew Tholl navigated its sinuous course with focus and grit.

In recent years, an entire performance genre has developed around solo string players—such as violinist Todd Reynolds, cellists Zoe Keating and Jody Redhage, and contrabassiste Florent Ghys—playing off against recorded versions of themselves, often generated with laptop and looping pedals on the fly. "Are your fingers long enough?" (2010), commissioned for and played here by bassist-vocalist Maggie Hasspacher, is a Timo Andres contribution to the genre. Equipment troubles forced a restart, but they were forgotten within moments of launching in to the second attempt. The material that ultimately loops upon itself incorporates more open space and less obvious rhythms than some other pieces of its kind. Midway, the surprise is sprung as Ms. Hasspacher begins to sing a text drawn from Hart Crane, the apparent sweetness of her song—it sounds at first like a child's counting rhyme—poignant against the relative darkness of the bass and the melancholy secreted in the verse.

Andres' "Some Connecticut Gospel" (2008) which closed out the first portion of the program winningly. Written for a mixed ensemble of strings, winds, piano, it is a backhanded homage to the spacious generosity and love of place sometimes displayed by Charles Ives, evoking a sort of Platonic Form of Connecticut and generating a mood of cautious, hoped-for optimism.

Round 2—Los Angeles

After intermssion, the California segment of the program began with the oldest piece of the night: the late Art Jarvinen's "Egyptian Two-Step" of 1986. The piece is an eccentric hoot, its twisty marimba part recalling Frank Zappa (with whom Jarvinen was a collaborator), reeds, piano and electric bass shoogalooing about, and twinned cans of compressed air providing rhythmic punctuation. It could not be heard without grinning.

In the absence of Christopher Rountree, it fell to Richard Valitutto to offer some thoughts on "Los Angeles music," which noted the do-whatcha-want quality with which the region is often tagged and the less often noted introspective element of much Los Angeles art. Odeya Nini's "Shelter in Swarm," which followed, was as introspective as Jarvinen's two-step was ebullient, its structure built on microtonal drones revealing glimpses of unlooked for order within a seemingly entropic field.

wild Up violist Andrew McIntosh contributed the premier of "Silver and White" for a quartet of viola, cello, trumpet and trombone. As I craft this post a day later, I find that I have not retained a sufficient memory of the details of the piece to provide you, reader, with a good description of it. That gap in recollection is galling, because it was one of the very best things on offer last night and I am unable to tell you why. I can only say with certainty that the conjunction of strings and muted brass was riveting and that this was a piece that I hope to hear again, and soon.

Christopher Rountree, in absentia and in his role as composer, contributed "Brooklyn," in which his recorded reading of Walt Whitman's paean to the place was set within an energetic musical framework expanding outward, as Whitman himself so often did, from the quotidian toward the galactic, an eloquent roar of approval for being alive and in a time and a place full of other lives.

To conclude by circling back toward the energy with which the evening began, the closing piece was wild Up violinist Andrew Tholl's "Corpus Callosum", a thrilling contraption mirroring the dual nature of the brain structure for which it is named, the elements of the elaborately mixed ensemble pairing off to lob a succession of pulsing, scintillant musical ideas at one another. Where Rountree's piece grabs hold to the living Brooklyn of another era (Whitman's), Tholl bursts out with the sharp-edged glint of the living Los Angeles of today.

So, what have we learned? If nothing else, wild Up's program demonstrated handily that geography is not really destiny at all when it comes to making gripping contemporary music. The awkwardness of the Los Angeles-New York relationship, particularly the West's presumed sense of inferiority, is a cliché in which wild Up will not indulge. Quality is the great equalizer in music, and quality is being generated at an impressive rate on both coasts, and likely in between. To overstate the case a bit, we can part on this note, from notable New Yorker Herman Melville in his effusive essay on Hawthorne:

"Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round."

These are good musical times, and wild Up are their prophets.

~~~

* "Brooklyn" has it seems become the geographical signifier of choice when referring to new music by youngish composers from the eastern U.S., particularly those whose music is also labeled "alt-classical" or "indie classical" or suchlike. This imagined Brooklyn encompasses, at a minimum, all five boroughs of New York and the States of New Jersey and Connecticut. As with many another imagined realm, its exact bounds are obscure, and may be crossed without knowing it.

Photos by the blogger.

~~~

No Picnic

2012-03-15T13:27:35-07:00

George M. Wallace

Surrealism or Bust [Tears of a Knife and Breasts of Tiresias,Long Beach Opera]

2012-03-12T21:04:05-07:00

In programming an opera season there are ideas that, if they are not pursued by Long Beach Opera, are just not going to be pursued in southern California, or perhaps at all.

A double bill of Surrealist one-act operas would be one such idea.

In practice, it is not a perfect idea but, beginning in fear and unease and ending in a hearty belly laugh, it proves—like certain waistcoated white rabbits—to be more worth pursuing than not.

Sunday afternoon, LBO offered up the first of two performances of its pairing of Poulenc's The Breasts of Tiresias [Les mamelles de Tirésias] with Martinů's Tears of a Knife [Les larmes du couteau or Slzy noze]. Tiresias is the main event, with Knife as a curtain raiser, and one would not want to see this program the other way round.

Knife is the more purely (unrepentantly?) Surrealist of these two pieces. Written in 1928, its libretto is the work of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, an authentic Dadaist. (A 1920 exhibition of Ribemont-Dessaignes's visual work came with a catalog essay by M. Dada himself, Tristan Tzara.) A distant ancestor of mid-century theatrical eviscerations of domestic life, Tears of a Knife introduces us to young Eleonore who has fallen in love with and wishes to wed the corpse of a recently hanged man. Her highly conventional mother is appalled, preferring a match with their neighbor, "Mr. Saturn." Eleonora goes ahead with her marriage to the hanged man, but he is unresponsive to her. She attempts to inflame him with jealousy, only to find that the faux rival she sets up is actually Mr. Saturn. Ultimately, she kills herself and discovers that not only was her dead beloved really Mr. Saturn all along, "Mr. Saturn" is only a pseudonym for ... Satan!

Tears of a Knife is brief, under 30 minutes, but few would wish it longer. Martinů's music is well-crafted and frequently interesting in the angular, jazz-inflected mode of the early 20th century, but the Ribemonte-Dessaignes text often reduces itself to willfully obscure post-Symbolist poetic fragments, likely no more dramatically potent in French than they are in English translation.

After that bitter medicine, however, we are treated to the spoonful of sugar that is The Breasts of Tiresias. Poulenc's 1944 opera is a setting of the 1917 play by Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term "surrealist" to describe it. Alongside Jarry's Ubu Roi, Apollinaire's play is commonly identified as the fons et origo of the skewed and rude approach to drama that flowered after World War II as the "Theater of the Absurd" of Genet, Beckett and, particularly, Ionesco. It embraces not only the illogical logic of dreams, but a vigorous wackiness that makes its lampooning of convention far more palatable than the acrid cocktail that precedes it on the Long Beach program. Poulenc filled it with music that is both high-spirited and elegant, ornamenting and elevating the relentless silliness of the plot. It is an explosive bit of operatic patisserie, a lovably ludicrous bombe surprise.

The catalyst for Apollinaire's plot lies in the feminist yearnings of the housewife Thérèse who, having grown tired of the domestic life with her nameless Husband, liberates herself by transforming in to a man: Tiresias. In the play's most famous image, her breasts fly away as helium balloons. She embarks on a life of manly adventure, ultimately becoming a military ruler who decrees there shall be no more births in her domain. The abandoned Husband, meanwhile, dons women's clothing and embarks on a career of spontaneous generation, production tens of thousands of infants in a single night by force of will. In the end, Thérèse returns to her Husband and her original form, and the assembled cast urges the members of the audience to go home and immediately make as many babies as they can.

Both operas are mounted in Long Beach under the direction of Ken Roht, who previously oversaw the company's 2010 production of Good Soldier Schweik. As with that production, Rota manages the trick in Tiresias of producing something surprisingly affecting within a raucous, circus-like atmosphere. If he is somewhat less successful with Knife—and he is—the fault lies in the material and not in Roht's conception or in the performers. Roht is aided significantly by the video projections of John J. Flynn: a long, Viola-slow sequence of decaying roses that runs under Knife and a series of risible (and risque) images poking puckishly at Tiresias.

Soprano Ani Maldjian has established herself as a superb singer and skilled actress as LBO's cunning Vixen and a ruthless Madame Mao, among others, and she again brings those qualities to bear on the instability of Eleonore and the aspirations and triumphs of Thérèse/Tiresias. Poulenc gifted his heroine with some exquisitely complex and gorgeous music, which Maldjian negotiates with heartening ease. As Saturn/Satan and the put-upon (and fertile!) Husband, Robin Buck is similarly impressive, especially in the extended sequence in which he must raise his new found brood whilst fending off the inquiries of the press and the amorous intentions of the local gendarme.

The aforesaid gendarme, in a truly terrible wig, is Roberto Perlas Gomez—for once, not playing a king in Long Beach—who also introduces the gender-bending proceedings as the Theater Director and serves silently as a version of Eleonore's deathly beloved. Suzan Hanson (Medea, etc., etc.) fills an abundance of supportive roles—Eleonora's mother, a terpsichorean Announcer of News—with focus and aplomb. Benito Galindo and Doug Jones are Messrs. Presto and Lacouf, a sort of macabre Abbott & Costello (or Tweedles, Dee et Dum) who lose everything to one another at the casino, then slaughter one another in a duel. The chorus and two dancers serve as symbols, shadows, babies, citizens, supernumeraries and what have you, moving everything along as needed.

On balance, when all is said, this may not be the most probing examination of the Surrealist impulse, but it is a varied and ultimately entertaining exploration of a much obscured bit of musical territory, from the only company in the region with the, shall we say, helium balloons to attempt it.

~~~

Photos: by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

The surrealist double-bill repeats on Saturday, March 17, at 8:00 p.m., in the Long Beach Center Theater, and at least a few tickets remain available at this writing.

~~~

We're So Sorry, Uncool Albert [Albert Herring, Los Angeles Opera]

2012-03-04T21:03:18-08:00

Puritanism, prudery and their ilk are always with us. The aging scold, wielding morality as a cudgel to control the lives of others, glowers down at us across the centuries. This past week in American politics, oddly enough, has been marked by wave upon cresting wave of self-aggrandizing thuggery in the name of All That is Pure and Good. And so it was that Saturday night during the intermission of Los Angeles Opera's performance of Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring, I was moved to launch this remark to Twitter:

The joy of smart, subversive, crafted and crafty things. Remarkable how *timely* "Albert Herring" feels tonight @LAOpera. Praise be, Ben B.
— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) March 4, 2012

Leaving the snoots and the horse's patoots to their own devices for a time, let's say what should be said: Albert Herring is above all a terrific comedy, seemingly all sunshine and innocence at first but, like the glass of spiked lemonade that is its fulcrum, carrying a hidden kick. It would be hard to better musically or dramatically the production now running at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which has to stand as the sleeper highlight of the 2011-2012 LA Opera season.

The plot of Albert Herring is simplicity itself. The English village of Loxford lives, in relative content, under the eye and thumb of the censorious Lady Billows. With the aid of her trusty housekeeper Florence Pike, Lady Billows attempts to know all that goes on in the town, and has a particular devotion to the sniffing out and eradication of anything that may even imply the sin of unchastity. Each year, the most chaste and worthy of the Loxford village girls is selected and honored as May Queen. Alas, this year—the year is 1900, but this production is shifted forward to ca. 1947—the selection committee comprised of the mayor, the vicar, the schoolmistress, and the superintendent of police, find that none of their suggested nominees will satisfy Lady Billows' standard. At a loss, Superintendent Budd proposes they select instead a May King, specifically Albert Herring, working with his widowed mother to run the family greengrocery, universally known as quiet, inoffensive and perhaps not all that bright. Lady Billows is persuaded, and volunteers an honorarium of 25 pounds, seemingly on the theory that money can't buy love but may persuade the recipient not to go looking for it.

Albert's reluctance is overcome, with the aid of some threats from his mum, and May Day arrives. Sid, the butcher's assistant—Albert's contemporary, not at all a bad chap, really, but has a way with the ladies and is ready for a lark when he can find one—spikes the May King's lemonade with a hefty ration of rum. A ration of hilarity ensues. Albert determines to find more to life than has been his lot, and disappears into the night. Finding he has gone missing, all assume the worst. But, no: as his mother and others in authority bewail his untimely death, Albert returns with three pounds spent and quite a tale to tell. Lady Billows and company are scandalized, the balance of power between Albert and his mother is equalized somewhat, and everyone lives uncertainly ever after.

So then: this production comes to Los Angeles by way of Santa Fe, under the direction of Paul Curran. It is, physically, smaller than what typically fills the expanses of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The effect, thanks to particulary clever use of perspective, is not so much that of a small production in a big space as it is of a really fine bit of letterboxing in high definition. A great deal could be said in praise of the scenic design of Kevin Knight and, particularly, the flat out brilliant lighting scheme from Rick Fisher.

Albert Herring is a true ensemble piece, each character being of near equal importance to the whole. The performers here are laudable across the board. As Albert, Alek Schrader is immediately likable, and only grows more so as he reveals what runs deep beneath the still waters of the underestimated greengrocer. Janis Kelly's Lady Billows is formidably unpleasant, while navigating the high flying ornament Britten assigned to his "elderly autocrat." The opera is full of allusions to other composers and other operas, and both Lady Billows and the headmistress Miss Wordsworth (Stacy Tappan) are called upon to emulate Mozart's Queen of the Night, and do so with seeming ease. Ronnita Nicole Miller, as the redoubtable housekeeper Florence Pike, is a particular pleasure, entirely supportive of her Ladyship while always watchful for the chance to relax with a cigarette and movie magazine. Liam Bonner as Sid and Daniela Mack as his best girl Nancy, from the bakery, are the very model of healthy youthful sensuality, for which Lady Billows would surely pillory them if she could.

Britten's score, for a chamber orchestra of thirteen musicians, operates almost as a handheld documentary camera, moving in around and through the action, focusing attention on first this detail, then that, and providing a running commentary. The necessary musical forces are small enough that conductor James Conlon was able to bring the entire orchestra on stage at evening's end, to receive the warm adulation it deserved.

Ultimately, Albert Herring speaks to anyone who is, or who ever was, young and alive and ready to light out for the territory of their own self and to return more fully human. That is a valuable thing, and that this production is continually and genuinely funny is a bonus not to be sniffed at.

Four performances remain through March 17. Christine Brewer, who sang the role in Santa Fe (and who was this blogger's first Isolde, *sigh*) will be Lady Billows in the final two. You really should go, if you can.

~~~

Photos by Robert Millard, used by kind permission of Los Angeles Opera.

~~~

Greater and Lesser Lights

2012-02-28T13:04:42-08:00

"Urban Light" by Chris Burden, at LACMA.
"Moon" by ....
Photo by the blogger.

~~~

The Genoan Article [Simon Boccanegra, Los Angeles Opera]

2012-02-20T20:14:13-08:00

The famous natural philosopher and super genius, Wile E. Coyote, demonstrated convincingly that one can accomplish absurd and impossible things, such as running at speed on the thin air above absymal chasms, so long as (and only so long as) one does not Become Conscious of the absurdity and impossibility of one's position.

Italian opera works in much the same way. A performance with the necessary conviction and skill can persuade an audience that the events portrayed upon the stage make sense even when those events, upon reflection, are revealed as errant nonsense. Los Angeles Opera's current production of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra has more than sufficient stores of conviction and skill on stage and in the pit to carry the day. While it lasts, it is possible to disregard, and even to be moved by, an implausible and profoundly overelaborate plot that runs something like this:

In 14th century Genoa, the People and the Powerful are not getting on well. Boccanegra, a populist sort, loves Maria, the daughter of Fiesco, a man of Power. Maria has already borne Boccanegra a daughter who, having been left in the safekeeping of the usual now-deceased old woman in Pisa, has disappeared. Boccanegra, returned from a Genoan seafaring venture, arrives at the house of Fiesco seeking to wed Maria at last, only to learn that she has died that very night. At just that inopportune moment, the ambitious Paolo Albiani arranges it that Boccanegra should be unwillingly elected Doge of Genoa.

And that's just the Prologue.

The main action picks up 25 years later, with Boccanegra still in power as Doge and with the dueling factions still at one another's throats. By the end of Act I, Boccanegra has discovered his missing daughter, who was found in infancy by nuns and proactively substituted by them for Amelia, the young heiress of the Grimaldi family. As Amelia, she now lives under the care of Fiesco, who was banished but who has returned to Genoa under an alias. Fiesco has no idea that "Amelia" is his long lost granddaughter Maria because she has not shared with him the portrait of her mother (Fiesco's daughter, also Maria) that she carries with her. She does share it with Boccanegra, who propitiously carries with him an identical portrait. He thus finds his daughter at last, while never noticing that her guardian, who has altered his name but not his appearance, is his sworn enemy Fiesco.

And so on.

The Genoa of Simon Boccanegra is the sort of place where abduction and poison are the preferred methods of statecraft. Citizens shift from howling for the death of the Doge to declaring their eternal devotion to him from one minute to, literally, the next. Slow-acting poisons here are so slow-acting that a single draught at the start of Act II is completely effective in the long term, but takes until the end of Act III to do its foul work, leaving ample time for the rise and defeat of (yet another) armed insurrection, the arrest and execution of various villains (particularly supporter-turned-nemesis Paolo Albiani), and a lengthy and exposition-filled final soliloquy in which Boccanegra explains all and brings about at least temporary reconciliation among the fractious surviving citizenry before singing his last.

It is all so persuasive, so long as you don't pause for even a moment to question it.

This particular production of Boccanegra exists principally for the sake of showcasing Placido Domingo's ongoing migration from the tenor to the baritone repertoire, but it is not a traditional "star vehicle." As Verdi wrote it, the opera can only hope to work if the other four principal parts are as strongly portrayed as the title role. The cast here in Los Angeles rises to the needs of the piece across the board.

Placido Domingo's skills as an actor are at this stage largely on a par with his long-settled gifts as a vocalist, and his shift into his lower register in this role pays off primarily by permitting him the opportunity to explore and lay open the conflicted but honorable character of Boccanegra. His baritone voice is not so dark or burly as some, allowing him to make effective use of subtleties of vocal coloration where others might rely on raw power. As Amelia Grimaldi/Maria Boccanegra, Ana Maria Martinez is appropriately warm and noble, with a scintillant clarity at the high end that compels one to forgive Verdi for the gratuitous bits of crowd-pleasing ornament he slipped in to the part. Amelia/Maria's beloved, Gabriele Adorno, is performed by tenor Steffano Secco in vibrant heroic young tenor style, forthright and true.

Vitalij Kowaljow, who was Wotan throughout the LA Ring cycle and returned earlier this season as Friar Lawrence, brings abundant nobility and gravitas to the part of Fiesco, a worthy lifelong enemy who declines the low road to vengeance. Paolo Gavanelli (the put-upon Don Geronio in last year's Turk in Italy) exudes appropriate amorality as the manipulative and casually villainous Paolo Albiani, Boccanegra's maker and murderer.

Each of these principals has been provided an aria or two in which to shine individually, but the particular virtue of this cast lies in the duos, trios and other character combinations in which the intermingling of voices is nearly flawless, to distractingly rapturous effect.

The strength of the LA Opera orchestra when conducted by James Conlon is such an expected quality now that a blogger might almost forget to mention it. That would be wrong. Fine as the singers are, they would be nowhere without the thrills of Verdi's score, and Maestro Conlon and company deliver it with fervor, point and potent intelligence.

Simon Boccanegra continues at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with four performances remaining through March 4.

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Incidental Note: Boccanegra was last seen in southern California 20 years ago, in a Long Beach Opera production under the direction of the late Reza Abdoh (1963-1995). Then-Los Angeles Times critical eminence Martin Bernheimer disdained what he called a "pretentious, high-tech-zombie production". The two things I recall about it are (1) I spotted Peter Sellars in the audience, and (2) it is the only truly boring production I ever recall seeing from Long Beach Opera. Los Angeles Opera more than amply overcomes the risk of boredom.

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Photos: Robert Millard, courtesy Los Angeles Opera.

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Digging in the Dirt [Maria de Buenos Aires, Long Beach Opera]

2012-01-30T16:22:44-08:00

Tyrannies do not come in ones or twos; tyrannies come in battalions.... It does not matter what the party motto is, what flag flies, what history pretends to teach, what rewards will be yours, what hurt feelings will follow; we need to be free to choose our own errors, our own myths, to furnish our souls as we see fit.

— William H. Gass

Long Beach Opera began its 2012 season on Sunday afternoon in the dark deco spaces of the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro exploring the dark indecorous spaces of authoritarian cruelty with a revised edition of Astor Piazzola and Horacio Ferrer's 1968 "Tango Operita," Maria de Buenos Aires. Jettisoning the plot and supernatural trappings of the original, and shifting the action in time, Andreas Mitisek's production lays open Argentina's "Dirty War" of 1976-1983 in which the military junta of the time "disappeared" tens of thousands of its own citizens. It is a potent and harrowing look into the abyss, a sort of anti-Evita in which Argentina cries not for celebrity but for justice and human dignity.

In Piazzola and Ferrer's original conception, the figure of Maria represents the "spirit of the Tango." She rises from the slums and enters a life of prostitution, only to be killed by a conspiracy of thieves and brothel keepers; her shade lives on, however, wandering Buenos Aires, ultimately achieving a sort of rebirth and immortality. Maria sings, as does her male counterpart El Duende, who in turn is also portrayed by a non-singing narrator. Dance, naturally, is involved, and there are longer stretches without singing than with. None of the characters is fleshed out at all realistically: Ferrer's text is a long, highly poetic meditation on Maria, her mysterious nature, and El Duende's devotion to the ultimately unattainable essence she embodies.

If Maria is the spirit of the Tango, and the Tango is the spirit of Argentina, then artistic logic dictates that Maria can be transplanted to the late 1970's and can serve as a surrogate for the suffering of the Argentine people. In Mitisek's revision, Maria is a creature of flesh and blood and El Duende, now the younger (singing) and older (speaking) Payador, is as well, the latter narrating from the present day, wracked by his loss and perhaps by survivor's guilt. In his recollection, he and Maria meet and marry; he is taken in by the junta without explanation; Maria seeks him out on the sordid fringes of the military's goon squads, only to fall herself in to their clutches. She is raped, imprisoned, briefly reconnects with her lover in song, and then is killed in her cell. We last see Maria as her body is removed in a tableau reminiscent of Caravaggio.

As LBO's General and Artistic Director, Andreas Mitisek is in full auteur mode with this production, responsible not only for the revisions of text and score, but also for the production concept and much of its design. He deserves at this point to be acknowledged as one of the most consistently interesting theatrical minds currently at work in southern California. That he is a skilled and fluid conductor is almost secondary, though his leadership of the small pit ensemble contributed a valuable momentum and scope to Piazzola's twisty, expansive music.

The action unfolds behind a scrim, which serves as a screen for impressionistic film montages—conceived by Mitisek, executed by Adam Flemming—evoking Buenos Aires, picturing some fraction of the actual Disappeared, and advancing and commenting on the action. The older Payador speaks and remembers, the projections lending a dream quality to transitions as the scene moves from barroom to bedroom to interrogation chamber to cell. (The soundlessness with which the large erector-set prison was somehow brought on stage is a credit to the tech crew.)

Mitisek's Maria is Peabody Southwell, in a performance that is fearsomely committed and painfully exposed in every sense. Followers of this blog will know that I am a confessed fan boy when it comes to Ms. Southwell's work in Long Beach, dating to her debut in 2009. This, I think, is easily her strongest performance yet with the company, abetted by her willingness to hold nothing back as an actor while sacrificing none of her considerable gifts as a singer. Her richly burnished mezzo runs a thread of fatalism and sorrow through Maria's tale as she is crushed inexorably beneath the heel of the state.

As the younger, singing Payador, tenor Gregorio Gonzalez is mostly called upon to look dashing and to sing handsomely, which he does. His older self is portrayed by Gregorio Luke, expert and lecturer on Latin American arts and culture and former director of the Museum of Latin American Art. whose sonorous speaking voice seems well suited to Ferrer's verse, albeit tending to veer toward the unnecessarily shouty at the most dramatic moments.

LBO's utility non-singer Mark Bringelson, memorable as the disappearing landowner and the investigating magistrate in last season's Difficulty of Crossing a Field, takes the silent, freshly invented role of Marco. First seen as a slightly goofy barfly being snubbed by the ladies, Maria among them, Marco falls in with the military, the ordinary citizen willing to turn on his fellows. In that capacity, he directs the abduction of Maria's lover, and is personally responsible for Maria's torture and death. Bringelson is appropriately cold and economical as the human face of an inhuman regime.

As reimagined here, Maria de Buenos Aires is fierce and gripping music drama of undeniable power. It does not explain. It will not excuse. It offers no comfort. It does what it can, bearing witness to a great wrong and demanding that we not look away from either the evil that has been done or the thousands of unique, invaluable lives that evil destroyed.

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Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, used with kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

One performance of Maria de Buenos Aires remains, at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 4. Tickets are available here.

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