a fool in the forest

Who'll Stop the Thane? [Ernest Bloch: Macbeth, Long Beach Opera]

2013-06-17T09:17:02-07:00

The Scottish play.There is always occasion for another production of the Scottish play, and on this occasion the occasion is Long Beach Opera's season-ending staging of the U.S. professional premiere of Ernest Bloch's 1906 operatization of—let's just say it and have done—Macbeth.

Bloch's Macbeth is yet another case of Long Beach Opera championing a piece whose obscurity seems, upon actually hearing the thing, inexplicable. The composer was all of 24 when he wrote it. It is his only opera. Its premiere engagement was in Paris at the Opera Comique in 1910, and it epitomizes much of what was best in then-contemporary music two brief years before this year's Centennial Birthday Boy, Stravinsky's Sacre de Printemps, kicked in the doors of the 20th Century. Bloch's influences are Wagner and, most particularly, Debussy. Much in Macbeth is clearly Bloch's own, but he draws enthusiastically on the burly brawling Debussy of La Mer and the Nocturnes. It turns out that that Debussy, given the chance and the proper material, might have been an even better operatist than the Debussy of Pelleas. Patron of the standard repertoire who are willing to embrace the secondhand Debussismo of, say, Madama Butterfly should be equally comfortable with the more interesting sounds of Bloch and his Macbeth.

LBO has made a habit of performing in spaces that are in, on, or closely bounded by the Pacific Ocean. The company has staged operas in a swimming pool (adjacent to the ocean), in the Aquarium of the Pacific, and deep in the hull of the Queen Mary. In September, LBO will be staging Peter Lieberson's King Gesar not only in Long Beach, but on Long Beach, 'round the campfire under the stars. For Macbeth, the maritime site in question is an empty passenger terminal at Berth 92 of the Port of Los Angeles. The playing area is a long thin slot of a space, the audience on risers on either side. A heavy wooden table dominates the center, additional abandoned furniture lies at either end, draped in blood-spattered fabric. The orchestra—a full-Romantic complement of roughly 40 players, with a large, unseen and unexpected Chorus—is secreted behind a scrim at one end of the room.

Most of the action plays out around, or atop, that central table, and it is there that we meet immediately with the three Witches (Ariel Pisturino, Danielle Marcelle Bond and Nandani Sinha - stay weird, sisters!). They are a sunken-eyed, hungry, spasmodically hissing crew, and they reappear throughout the evening, unseen by the other characters, to press along the inexorable working of their prophecy/curse.

Any Macbeth must first decide how capable and decent Macbeth himself is at the start: is he a good man who goes wrong or is he simply a dupe, a catspaw to the witches, his ambitious Lady, or both? Long Beach opts for the former: As portrayed with strength and lustre by Nmon Ford, Macbeth is a leader of men, initially content with his service to and regard from his King. Suzan Hanson is Lady Macbeth who here is not some overweening shrew but, at the outset, a beloved companion and equal to her husband, lively, intelligent, sexy, cherished, respected. The Macbeths have a relationship of trust and mutual admiration, until the Thane becomes King and a celebratory canoodle turns selfishly brutal, the first symptom perhaps of his ultimately fatal overreach.

Macbeth's error grows out of his strengths: The witches have promised that he will be king, but warned that he will not father future kings. Macbeth is able first to implement the witches' prophecy by the murder of Duncan. Power achieved, he foolishly attempts to thwart the remainder of the prophecy by the slaughter of perceived rivals such as Banquo (Doug Jones, also appearing as divers servants, etc.) and the Macduff family. Naturally, it does not end well: all Scotland rises against him, his wife runs fatally mad, and the witches return in the end to savor Macbeth's own death at the hands of Macduff (Robin Buck), all as they have foretold.

LBO artistic and general director Andreas Mitisek conceived and directed this production. The orchestra and chorus were subtly and propulsively led by Benjamin Makino, overcoming a difficult placement at the far end of an acoustically challenging room. The opera's three acts were run together without intermission, and events never flagged over the near two-hour running time.

The unanswered mystery of this Macbeth is why it is so little known. Bloch ultimately revised his original French libretto into English (the version heard here) and incorporated nearly all of the best known lines and speeches from the play, yielding an admirable adaptation that lands all of the requisite Shakespearean beats. A good Macbeth is a good evening in the theater, and this is assuredly a good Macbeth.

Two performances are still to come on June 22 and 23. The bad news is that those performances are reported as being sold out. Perhaps some helpful witches could get you in. What could possibly go wrong?

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

[As ever with Long Beach Opera, the blogger attended this performance as a subscriber, at his own expense.]

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All Mozart on the Western Front: Kenneth Branagh's Magic Flute Receives a US Release

2013-06-13T10:28:26-07:00

Seven years after first becoming available in the rest of the world, Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Mozart and Schikaneder's The Magic Flute has at last received a US release, with a selection of theatrical showings over the weekend (the theatrical trailer is below) and a DVD release earlier this week. The film was originally released in Europe in 2006, to coincide with the sestercentennial [250th anniversary] of the composer's birth, but it did not receive US distribution at the time. Los Angeles Times classical music critic Mark Swed stumbled upon it in 2008 and bemoaned the absence of a legitimate Stateside version.

As well he might, because Branagh's Flute, with an English adaptation of the libretto by Stephen Fry, is a lively smile-inducing charmer, broadly and immediately appealing. Greatest opera film ever? Hardly: that would likely be Ingmar Bergman's Flute (once you disqualify Bugs Bunny and the Marx Brothers). Does the world need another Flute? One can never have enough Flutes, really, and Branagh's offers plentiful justification for the work's enduring popularity.

Abandoning the quasi-Egypt of the original, Branagh has reset the tale in and around the trenches in the latter part of the First World War. This seems less for purposes of commentary on that war, or on War generally - beyond the message that Peace is much to be preferred - than for the purpose of having a distinctive and attractive production design. As in Branagh's Shakespeare films, everyone and everything looks great. Even when they are flooded and muddied during Tamino's and Pamina's testing by water, these are some of the prettiest trenches you have ever seen. (This must have been by choice: Branagh is no stranger to depicting the grit and misery of warfare, as in his Henry V.)

Here, the prince Tamino (Joseph Kaiser) is an army officer—seemingly British, but any one-to-one mapping of historical allies and enemies breaks down almost as quickly as the weather, which bounces from high summer to snowy Yuletide and back, seemingly in a single night. During the bravura overture—built around a marvelous long tracking shot through the trenches, up, over and out to the massed forces—Tamino leads his men across No Man's Land in a frontal assault on the opposing line. His fellows largely felled, he finds himself facing not a fearsome serpent, but a cloud of poison gas. The three Ladies of the Queen of the Night ( arrive as frontline nurses, all in white. The Queen herself (Lyubov Petrova) enters fearsomely atop a tank, backlit and wind-machined. Papageno the bird man (Benjamin Jay Davis) is a weary infantryman, his birds kept to detect gas attacks; he himself is encased in a gas mask when the Ladies seal his overeager mouth. The noble priest Sarastro (René Pape) now presides over a ruined chateau turned field hospital turned temple, gently bringing about the inevitable bonding of Tamino with the Queen and Sarastro's daughter Pamina (Amy Carson) and the more earthy union of Papageno with Papagena (Silvia Moi) while incidentally shedding a bit of Masonic enlightenment on all and sundry.

The orchestra is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the direction of James Conlon, whose principal day job is as musical director of Los Angeles Opera. LA Opera-goers know from experience that Conlon is a dab hand at Mozart, and the playing here is uniformly fine.

Flute has been and remains perhaps the most immediately lovable piece in the standard opera repertoire, and the qualities that make it so lovable—a fairy tale love story, plucky comic relief, and the fact that Mozart's score bears pleasure on all its surfaces while revealing ever more pleasures the deeper the listener digs down into it—are all on display. Where Bergman (as one would expect of Bergman) was interested in the Flute's more sublime and philosophical corners, Branagh is out to show us a good time in the company of a masterwork. Mission accomplished.

[This post was written on the basis of a review copy of the DVD provided by the distributor, Revolver Entertainment. As my curiosity about this film had nearly driven me to piracy in the past, I was well pleased to have a legitimate copy tumble my way.]

In the Ripening-Shed [The Industry: (First Take)]

2013-06-03T15:23:56-07:00

The Industry is the new kid in town pressing the cause of innovative/new opera and music drama in Los Angeles. To date, the company has one production to its credit—Anne LeBaron's Crescent City, for the missing of which due quantities of self-kicking have been administered—with highly intriguing plans to premiere Christopher Cerrone's Invisible Cities in October in situ at Los Angeles' Union Station. And at the Hammer Museum this past Saturday, with wild Up as its house band, The Industry presented (First Take), concert versions of extended excerpts from six new operas in various (but comparatively advanced) stages of development.

The roots of (First Take) lie in New York City Opera's VOX programs, for which Industry founder/Artistic Director Yuval Sharon served as Project Director. As with VOX, (First Take) aims to spot and spotlight projects that warrant the opportunity to receive quality, professional performance to help them to move that much closer to completion and full production.

In part because I fancy myself an aspiring "freelance librettist" these days, I will confess to a personal bias in favor of music drama in which the composer has been enabled to draw on a well-turned text. By that subjective standard, the pieces I most favored were the three presented in the later parts of the day, each very different from the other but each engaged in the joinder of words and music with particular effectiveness.

Ellen Reid's Winter's Child, with a text by Amanda Jane Shank, is a ghost story, southern gothic style: a girl about to turn 15, living alone with her mother, is beset by visitations from the ghosts of her three dead sisters, each of whom died just prior to her 15th birthday. The chittering ambiguously ominous spirits of the three sisters are embodied in a six-member chorus, their warnings (threats?) emerging as from a shredding mist. Britten's Turn of the Screw is something of a gold standard for operatic ghost music; Reid's angular, shifty score never imitates it, but achieves comparably unsettling effects. The excerpts on offer comprehended much of the opera's narrative arc, leaving this listener hankering to hear the story whole. The librettist is (In September, Ellen Reid ventures to a different supernatural realm, supplying music to accompany the Getty Villa's production of a new translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.)

Judging by applause and audience reaction, Pierrot Lunaire from composer Mohammed Fairouz was the popular favorite of the day, and it is a piece with prodigious reserves of unwholesome appeal. On the cusp between song-cycle and opera, this Pierrot has only a tenuous relation to Arnold Schoenberg's famed setting of twenty-one poems by Albert Girauds. Here, the text is a sequence of ten poems (the latter six segments were performed on Saturday) by Wayne Koestenbaum, which allude to Girauds's poems principally by imitating their rondeau form. Otherwise, the poetic material goes very much its own way, swimming and spattering about, contemporizing the creepy JungundFreudische dream visions of High Surrealism. Koestenbaum is a gleeful name checker, inserting the likes of Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag in to discomforting circumstances, like Lenin on a grand piano. Fairouz's score fully exploits the simultaneous zaniness and dread of the text, larking sharply through a kaleidoscopic range of styles and backhanded references. Tenor Timur Bekbosunov, in the role of Pierrot, was called upon to croon, burn, wheedle and shriek, or all at once, and did so commandingly. Pierrot is a literate, nightmarish treat.

(Pierrot Lunaire in full receives its premiere production in New York later this week. In that connection, the composer posted an essay about the work last week at the Huffington Post. In his fast growing catalogue of work, Pierrot contrasts neatly with Mohammed Fairouz's earlier opera, Sumeida's Song, a well tuned little clockwork tragedy of a piece of a more traditional operatic kind: a sort of verismo on the upper Nile, it is excellently crafted, dramatically and musically compelling, and well worth seeking out. An earlier collaboration with Koestenbaum, the three-song sequence "POSH," is featured on the fine new survey of Fairouz's work recently released by the Naxos label, Native Informant.)

Showing The Youth How It Is Done, the afternoon concluded with the latest work from the perpetually questing Pauline Oliveros, just turned 81. If The Nubian Word for Flowers had an epigraph, it would perhaps be T.S Eliot's "Old men ought to be explorers." With a text by the poet Ione, the opera imagines the British general Lord Kitchener, a skilled botanist in addition to being a maker of wars, plucked out of the world to a mysterious island where he meets an equally mysterious Nubian boatman/astronomer, catalyzing a communion of the past and the infinite.Three strands of music underlie the piece: prerecorded electronics incorporating found sounds and birdsong, fully notated parts for the singers, and "guided improvisation" by the orchestra with substantial infusions of traditional Nubian motifs. Saturday's performance shared just enough of the full work to make plain that it is a dream one would fain enter more fully.

Aaron Siegel's brother brother, with which Saturday's program opened, meditates on the condition of brother-hood through pairs of real and imagined brothers: Orville and Wilbur Wright and twins named Red and Blue. Combining sparely poetic arias with spoken questions and narratives that verged on non sequitur, the selections from the three-act work that were performed on Saturday did not coalesce in to a clear idea of the larger whole, but were never less than intriguing from moment to moment.

Alexander Vassos' The House is Open ruminates on family and on the relations between waking and sleeping life, hanging its narrative on Charley, a nine-year old boy who has spent six of those years asleep. Consciously modeled on the "horror of the ordinary" aesthetic of David Lynch, House is also interested in different ways of presenting sound to the audience: at one point, Charley is fitted with a "crown" of microphones and turns slowly about as family members sing in to them, their voices traveling around the hall depending on which mic each is faced with at the moment. Plenty of ideas are moving about the piece, but again the overall dramatic shape was hard to glean on Saturday.

Davið Brynjar Franzson's Longitude was the most "unoperalike" piece, and the least suited to being taken in in a concert format. It is inspired by the figure of Jørgen Jørgensen, who in 1809 "liberated" Iceland from Denmark and ruled the briefly independent nation as a Protector/dictator for forty days before the Danes returned, ousted him and turned him over to British authorities. The composer and collaborators describe it as a "site specific monodrama," and on this occasion it was wordless: an actor stands, largely motionless except when his arm is manipulated bunraku-puppet style, his profile silhouetted by projections as live musicians and realtime electronics scrape and creak and crackle. It is more interesting than that may make it sound, but it would make more sense as an immersive sight and sound installation upstairs on the Hammer's video gallery than it did on stage.

Each of the six works on this initial (First Take) program is deserving of the encouragement it received by its inclusion on the program. The largely-full house in the Hammer's Billy Wilder Theater responded with enthusiasm to them all. The greatest enthusiasm, however, was reserved for The Industry and for the (First Take) project itself. This fool, for one, hopes that the first (First Take) is far from the last, and that it will become an annual fixture in the Los Angeles new music landscape.

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What Kind of Thing Makes a Noise Like That? [Big Farm: Big Farm]

2013-05-23T09:51:24-07:00

Put on your sturdy boots and let us walk the rows, turn the soil and delve deep into the fertile loam that is the highly diggable Big Farm

Big Farm is both album title and band name, the band consisting of Steven Mackey (guitar), Rinde Eckert (vocals and accordion—stay with me now), Jason Treuting (drums and percussion), and Mark Haanstra (bass). In other words, a quintessential rock ensemble. More to the point, an ensemble that closely parallels the two great quartet versions of King Crimson. The sound worlds of Larks Tongues/Red-era Crimson (Robert Fripp, Bill Bruford, John Wetton, Ian Wallace) and to a somewhat lesser degree of the Discipline period (Fripp, Bruford, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin) provide a good if imprecise reference point in thinking about Big Farm which, yes, unapologetically embraces many of the attributes of the oft-maligned (and oft-unfairly maligned) genre of "Progressive Rock." (Other sidelong touchstones might be Frank Zappa, albeit stripped of the juvenile potty humor he embraced, or perhaps Gentle Giant, a band deserving of reassessment and of a better defense than that offered by Rick Moody a few years back.)

In contrast to the original generation of Prog Rock musicians, who were fundamentally rockers looking to import elements of classical, jazz, and avant-garde musics into a rock idiom, the members of Big Farm all bring maximal New Music/cultural credibility to their band project. Steven Mackey played guitar in bands in Northern California in an earlier life, but embraced more formalized composition training and now, as his day job, heads the Music department at Princeton. He has collaborated regularly with Rinde Eckert, who sings, acts, composes, writes, and has earned (among other honors) an Obie award and a Pulitzer nomination in his own right. Two Mackey-Eckert projects—Dreamhouse and Slide (aka, on record, Lonely Motel)—have been nominated for or won Grammy awards in recent years. Jason Treuting is a founder and core member of modern percussion ensemble Sō Percussion. Mark Haanstra is a much admired, jazz-based electric bass player headquartered in the Netherlands. All of Big Farm's songs are credited to the members jointly, though investigative work can trace at least a few of them to individual composers.

Big Farm begins, in "Like an Animal," as life itself does: lost in the dark, on the edge of panic, wondering at every stray sound, searching for the way out to someplace else. Things lost and damaged—love, dreams, identities, lunch—are present or missing in profusion in Big Farm songs. Time passes. Time "has mustard on her hands" in "Break Time." Time comes between us and those irrecoverable "Salad Days." Time creates the illusion that it is not passing while we are "Lost in the Splendor" of belief in love. And in "She Steps," the charming woman with the purse and the dog and the thoughts of Provence is, all unbeknownst, mere moments from death at the hands of speeding drunk.

The elves and spaceships of old school Prog are nowhere in evidence. Oh, there are ghosts—even an entire song called "Ghosts," drawn from Mackey and Eckert's Slide—but they are made less of ectoplasm than of angst. The protagonist of Jason Treuting's "Margaret Ballinger" is something of a ghost in her own life, a contemporary Eleanor Rigby, sinking into her bath at the end of a day with "nothing left to lose," possibly not planning to rise from it again. "My Ship"—not the Weill-Gershwin tune, more like "Dazed and Confused" with lyrics by Burroughs or Bukowski—introduces a correspondent from "the land of spoons and needles" who hits us up for food or a ride and shares a lame joke or two and wanders off in a haze. Big Farm ends not in death but in a stasis of maturity as Eckert enters into countertenor range, sweet and bruised as a Britten choirboy, to share what "John Knows": that you can't quite trust the face you see in the mirror.

And, other than some quiet times with Margaret or John or a fixedly contemplated piece of rice paper, Big Farm rocks. Steven Mackey's guitar is everywhere, flinging power chords, crying the blues, deploying prickly harmonics, prowling and striking. Jason Treuting never met a polyrhythm he didn't like, apparently, and is ably joined on the bottom by Mark Haanstra's fluid bass. Rinde Eckert, meanwhile, floats and dives and lurks through the hubbub, as much actor as singer, shifting on a dime from sneer to croon to falsetto to patter/rap to bellow and back again. It is riveting stuff, embracing the full range of modern unease.

For me, the big story on Big Farm is how much pure pleasure I have been deriving from it. I have had the benefit of a review copy since early spring, and it has rarely strayed far from whatever device I am listening with at any given time. The performances, the writing, the recording, the sequencing, the pacing, the eccentrically meshing gears of rock and art song: it is all seemingly effortless and seamlessly satisfying. The first half of 2013 has seen a string of very fine new music releases, more of which I hope to get round to writing about here, but even in that strong company Big Farm stands out. At midyear, it is an almost prohibitive favorite to top this fool's "favorite albums" list come December.

Highly recommended to anyone with ears and a soul below 'em and a brain betwixt 'em.

Big Farm releases on May 28, via New Amsterdam Records. Until the release date, the entire album is available to stream exclusively at I Care If You Listen.

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Happy to Meat, Sorry to Part

2013-04-01T12:54:13-07:00

The "Fool" atop this blog is a cropped and flipped version of Touchstone, from As You LIke It. The illustration is by John Pettie, engraved by Charles Cousen, and appears in the two-volume Imperial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, published in London between 1873 and 1876.

Here it is in its entirety:

In observance of April Fools' Day, I was searching for additional illustrations of my blog's motley namesake, when I stumbled upon a remarkable repurposing of Pettie's picture.

Here, via the Boston Public Library, a worldy wise and mercenary Touchstone, smitten with the shepherdess Audrey, sells out to the canned meat firm of Libby, McNeill & Libby:

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Bottom Feeding

2013-03-26T21:55:01-07:00

At the eminent What About Clients? blawg, Dan Hull and Holden Oliver have gone and done it, reposting Henry Fuseli's vision of Nick Bottom and Titania reine des fées shown below or, as they say in the trade, infra.

"I consider it a challenge before, etc., etc., and I don't intend to lose," he said, Mercurially.

Hence, this revisitation of my own cobwebbed poetic tribute to Queen T and Nicky B:

~~~

When Bottom bore the donkey’s head and brayed,
Titania wreathed his upstart ears with flowers
‘Til — disenchanted, open-eyed, dismayed —
She cast him from the comforts of her bowers.

Botanical elixirs were the tools
With which the weaver and his fellow rude
Mechanicals, with other mortal fools,
Were fuddled, led astray and misconstrued.

Old Athens’ misty woods and fogbound lovers,
Her naiads, pixies, fairies, sprites and elves
Are gone; but surely Puck still grins and hovers
As modern men make asses of themselves.

No spell but self delusion clouds their sight,
And leaves them pathless in the summer night.

~~~

Print the Legend Camelia la Tejana: Only the Truth Long Beach Opera

2013-03-26T09:27:11-07:00

The general notion of Opera does not associate it with current events and social ferments, but topical engagement has a long history in the opera house. The class struggle embedded in Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro was still a sore spot for many aristocrats when Da Ponte and Mozart operatized it. Verdi was politically active in the unification of Italy, and the assassination depicted in Un ballo in maschera was as recent to his audience as the events of John Adams' Dr. Atomic are to us. Adams' Nixon in China, dismissed by some at the time of its premiere as mere "CNN opera," opened the door to an ongoing string of new opera examining political and cultural events and figures.

Camelia la Tejana: Only the Truth is one of these, and is receiving its first U.S. professional production now via Long Beach Opera. Composed by Gabriela Ortiz, Camelia's libretto is described as being "compiled" by Rubén Ortiz Torres [the composer's brother and a noted visual artist in his own right] "from various sources", emulating the method favored in recent collaborations between John Adams and Peter Sellars. The piece explores not so much current events as the landscape in which they are played out and processed, the intersection of art, media, belief, truth and untruth.

For those who—not unlike this blogger—are unfamiliar with norteño music: the woman known as Camelia la Tejana ["Camelia the Texan"] features in the song "Contrabando y Traición" ("Contraband and Betrayal"), which in 1974 made superstars of Los Tigres del Norte. The song tells the story of Camelia and her lover, Emilio Varela, smuggling marijuana from Tijuana to Los Angeles concealed in their vehicle's tires. When the deal is completed, Emilio announces that he is leaving to join another woman in San Francisco; this news is not received with equanimity. "Seven shots rang out" and Camelia and the drug money were not heard from again. That is, they were not heard from again until the song, with its tale of a woman standing against male domination, proved so immensely popular that it spawned two additional songs, several films, and a fervent belief the Camelia must be, or must at least be based upon, a real woman.

The operatic Camelia springs from an actual incident some years after the figure of Camelia had taken root. In Ciudad Juarez, one Eleazar Pacheco Moreno killed himself in a fit of drunken pique by laying his neck across a railway line. His locodecapitation was reported by the lurid tabloid ¡Alarma! in a story suggesting that the mysterious Camelia la Tejana was real, was still alive, and was somehow connected to the tragedy. (¡Alarma!'s slogan, "Únicamente la verdad", provides the opera's subtitle.) The opera is a collage of investigation, speculation, and fabrication, as a somewhat more legitimate journalist investigates Camelia's possible reality.

The Camelia of the song hovers over the proceedings, manifesting at intervals above it all. Two different women each claim to be her: one tells of childhood rape, a life on the run, and eventual redemption as an evangelist, the other demands "absolute discretion" but tells little, denying that she killed anyone (and by the way the man she didn't kill wasn't named Emilio) and asserting that her only run-ins with the law have been "administrative discrepancies," minor fines involving, ahem, "imported goods." Both women deny that there is a word of truth in the song, while implying that they are the truth behind it. A U.S. scholar comments in English. The songwriter of "Contrabando y Traición" tells how he made the whole thing up. Jorge Hernandez, lead signer of Los Tigres, is pointedly ambiguous in his beliefs concerning a figure who has loomed so large in his group's success. A blogger weighs in conspiratorially—with the sort of profanity that is rigorously disdained by this blog. Nothing is ultimately resolved: you believe what you want to believe ... and the legend will outlive us all.

The Long Beach production, directed by Mario Espinosa, spins the fractured facets of Camelia''s mirror ball on a high platform surrounding the orchestra, traversed by a structure recalling the international bridges connecting the U.S. and Mexico across the Rio Grande. A stream of evocative video imagery—train tracks, border wire, the zeroes and ones of the digital world—plays out on the surrounding walls.

Musically, Camelia is a mash of contemporary composition technique—some minimalism here, a lot of postminimalism there, tonality eschewed, tonality embraced—spiced with norteño tuba and accordion and enveloped in electronic soundscaping, eventually subsiding to the legendary Camelia singing a melancholy a capella arrangement of her song. It is all well done, but (other than the corrido itself) hardly hummable, if that's the sort of thing you insist upon.

The hard working chorus does much of the narrative heavy lifting, while members of the Nannette Brodie dance company play out yet another, high body count version of Camelia's story throughout. Teresa Rios is dancing/pantomime Camelia, last seen running and running and running toward apotheosis. Singing Camelia, in all of her manifestations—legendary Camelia, evangelical Camelia/Agustina Ramirez, and Woman of Mystery Camelia—is Enivia Mendoza. Nova Safo charms in his brief appearance as Jorge Hernandez, "El Tigre," the very model of a self-effacing superstar who knows he is one. John Atkins brings appropriate self-importance to the role of the U.C. professor. Adam Meza fills several roles, including the disreputable blogger, with vigor, while John Matthew Myers is earnest as can be as the inquiring reporter for la Jornada. The flying severed head of Eleazar Pacheco Moreno is uncredited.

Camelia la Tejana is an opera more to be admired than loved. It is undeniably smart and well made, if occasionally as murky as the clashing "truths" that are its subject. An imperfect but ultimately intriguing piece of contemporary music drama, worth a trip by the adventurous to the Terrace Theater where its final performance will run on Saturday, March 30.

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

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All That Fall [Philip Glass, The Fall of the House of Usher Long Beach Opera]

2013-01-29T14:53:31-08:00

Long Beach Opera set off about the business of its 2013 season this past Sunday, returning to the cavernous Deco expanse of San Pedro's Warner Grand Theater with a claustrophobically erotic West Coast premiere production of Philip Glass's 1987 operatization of Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher.

Poe was a funny guy. No, really. Underneath even his most famously grotesque tales there is almost always a joke, even if it consists in no more than Poe's mordant sending up of the Gothic conventions of which he proved himself the master. While "The Fall of the House of Usher" is an elaborately wrought exposition of Poe's recurring theme—the workings of a disturbed mind—it is all carried forward for the purpose of transmuting the title of the tale in to an elaborate pun: the decline, fall and ending of the titular family line, the House of Usher, in the concluding paragraphs coincides with the literal fall and collapse in a roaring of waters of the storm-wracked great and awful edifice that was the family's perpetual home, the house of the Ushers.

Most of Poe's disturbed-mind tales are told in the voice of the possessor of the mind in question, a narrator never to be trusted. "Usher" differs in having a surviving, ostensibly sane and seemingly reliable teller. As a result, unlike those other Poe stories and unlike the psychological puzzle box of James's "The Turn of the Screw," we are asked to accept that the grim events in the Usher manse actually occur as described.

When Britten adapted James for the opera stage, he and his librettist chose to have the ghosts be really, truly ghosts. Philip Glass and his librettist Arthur Yorinks chose the opposite course: everything and everyone in Usher may or may not exist at all outside of someone's fevered imagination. In particular Roderick Usher's twin sister Madeleine, whose existence Poe's narrator affirms and whose escape from premature entombment brings on the story's final crisis, becomes a phantasm, a symbolist figment—of Roderick's? of his visiting friend? who can say?—wordlessly singing onstage, seeking attention but never seen or engaged by others.

For Long Beach Opera, director Ken Cazan ventures the theory that the prevailing morbid aura chez Usher—personified and manifested in part in the figure of Madeleine—stems from a virulently repressed homosexuality, a self-destructive refusal by Roderick or his friend or both to acknowledge their truest nature. The staging dangles the further possibility that neither Roderick nor Madeleine—who are partial to sharing one another's lip gloss and filmy loungewear—is anything more than a dream projection, the product of their visitor's conflicted identity. No pat or "correct" answers to the mysteries of the House are on offer. Like the story from which it was drawn, this Usher stands in the end as a self-contained recursive object to be held up to and reexamined in the shifty light of memory.

Cazan sets the action in the present day—in the opening moments the friend, William, receives Roderick's plea to pay a visit via his iPad—but ageless Gothic atmosphere envelopes the House and its occupant(s). The House has a sentient life of its own as well, embodied in eight leatherclad bemohawked Goth supernumeraries moving its walls, corridors and doorways about as in some David Lynch version of Hogwarts. (All that leather, and the stark play of light and shadow on the architectural elements, is reminiscent of the underworld and the biker boy servants of Death in Jean Cocteau's Orphee, another work later adapted to opera by Philip Glass.) Coffin-like transparent boxes, overlit from within like a Jeff Koons vitrine, serve as dining tables, William's uneasy bed and, naturally, Madeleine's sarcophagus. A small metal music box—an innovation not mentioned in the story—repels Roderick with its tinkling but holds an unhealthy fascination for his twin, its shape echoed in the larger fixtures. A cyclorama sky provides the requisite dark and stormy night.

The arpeggios and percussive bursts of the score are immediately recognizable as originating with Philip Glass, the compact string and woodwind orchestra supplemented by an unexpectedly lyrical acoustic guitar. The chords weigh as heavily as the stones of the rotting estate, and suffuse the already hazy atmosphere with ample gloom.

As Roderick, Ryan MacPherson suffers mightily, one moment cringingly immobile, the next violently assertive in his demands, yearning and uncompromising by turns as he spirals toward his ultimate dissolution. Lee Gregory's William is an earnest innocent increasingly enmeshed in a place, and an emotional maelstrom, he can barely understand or fears to confront. Both perform with power, conviction and commitment.

Suzan Hanson's Madeleine—a role she originated in the opera's original production for American Repertory Theater—is a sort of wistful succubus. She has no words to sing and is granted only a single vowel with which to make herself known, which she does unerringly in a richly physical performance. Crawling, clambering, sinuously enveloping the male characters in her seeming invisibility, eventually kicking her way out of the family crypt with her bright red shoes, Hanson is a force, whatever that force might represent. Nick Shelton and Jonathan Mack round out the principal cast, as stoic servant and an ambiguously unhelpful doctor respectively.

Dive on in, the guignol is grand.

~~~

Two performances of The Fall of the House of Usher remain: Saturday Feb. 2 at 8 p.m. and Sunday Feb. 3 at 2 p.m.

Photos by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera, except top: a fragment of the Usher score, photo by the blogger.

~~~

Listening Listfully 2012[This Blogger's 48 Favorite Albums of 2012]

2013-01-01T19:51:50-08:00

Pliny the Elder, among others, reports in all earnest that bear cubs arrive in the world as unformed lumps and become bears only after their mothers have literally licked them in to shape. Blog posts are also like that. My hard drive is littered with unformed lumps of prose that were meant to become posts to one blog or another but that never achieved bearhood, pieces that failed to find their true form before losing their sense of urgency and subsiding back in to the primordial broth. Some of those were reviews of newly released music, to which I would certainly have liked to refer you in conjunction with the List that follows, but to which such a reference would be futile because they never became bears.

Here, then, is 2012 iteration of my Year-End Music List. As always it is, to paraphrase a 2011 Twitter remark by Steve Smith, really just a list of "Albums I Played a Lot This Year, and Will Likely Continue to Play Next Year." The methodology behind it, and the associated disclaimers, are essentially as I described them last year:

Yada-yada: purely personal, totally subjective, necessarily omitting all sorts of worthy choices that I simply haven't heard or that I was not inclined to seek out or that did not penetrate my thick aesthetic skull for whatever reason. The List itself displays all of the biases that went into its making. No doubt some of my judgments are flatly wrong. I am at peace with that.

As I went to work on this [2012] compilation, I was pleasantly surprised to discover just how long my initial "Long List" was—it seems [2012 ]was a pretty good year, musically-speakingwise—and how reluctant I was to snub any of the music that I found there. I also found that even as I grew increasingly comfortable with my rough rankings, I was troubled that some of the music down the list was much better than its numerical rank might suggest. I am satisfied that the upper end of the list fairly reflects my personal top choices, but the quality differential between topmost and bottommost listees is not all that great. All have won; all by rights should have prizes.

Surveying the nominees, I was again confronted by a certain bicameral quality in my tastes. Roughly half of my choices come from the realm of Popular Music, though hardly from popular music. The other half are drawn from so-called Classical and the Genre With No Name that is typically referred to as (insert prefix of choice)-Classical: new music for orchestra or for smaller ensembles of mostly orchestra-type instruments, largely but not exclusively composed and played by artists a generation or two younger than this blogger, often but not always associated with one or more of the five Boroughs, generally not understood or appreciated by certain West Coast music Authorities who shall remain nameless, etc. Some items "do go both ways," and could fit with near equal ease or unease in either of the main collections.

At first, I tried to rank the entire List item by item, but that proved frustrating and ultimately unsatisfactory, especially given that a list of 40 or so selections inevitably exacerbated my worry over short-shrifting "lower ranking" music: did I really want to tar some Very Deserving Record with a lowly "35" ranking, giving the impression that it is perhaps not so Deserving? So I compromised with myself: I divided my picks sheep-and-goatwise in to two lists of [23] based on the bicameral system heretofore outlined, ranked each sublist from 1 through [23], then recombined them so as to produce a list with two picks in each of twenty spots. In the resulting list, the choices from the Classicalorwhatever group are listed first in each position, but that is merely a gratuitous result of the cutting and pasting process by which my absurd edifice of song was finally constructed. I am not looking to privilege either artificial subset over the other: I like all of it, thank you very much.

The List comes with links to each artist's website, and with links to each album's page at [generally] Amazon.com—from whence this fool would receive a small gratuity if you were to make a purchase of some kind after clicking on through. There are also two "special cases" appended at the end, each of which would have placed well into the upper half of the list had I included them in it. They are sui generis for reasons I will note, so they get a separate spot of their own.

And now, behold! The List:

The List—
a fool in the forest's Hybridized Catalog
of 46 Favorite Albums of 2012
[with 2-Album Addendum]

1.
Tin Hat – the rain is a handsome animal
Cardinal – Hymns

Tin Hat's setting of fourteen e. e. cummings poems, interspersed with three cummings-inspired instrumental pieces, was perhaps the most unexpected and satisfying recording of this year. It is something of a refutation of genre: in some sense these are art songs, but with arrangements as well suited to a smoky boîte as to a salle de musique. The cummings classics are here—"buffalo bill" as town-square funeral march, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" ticked out with a stunning widescreen dobro part—but the emphasis is on lesser known poems, especially those that expose cummings as at heart a bruised romantic. Eccentric, bracing, and necessary music. (Listen here.)

Cardinal—the pairing of Richard Davies and Eric Matthews—had its moment in the cult-favorite sun in 1994, followed by an 18-year hiatus. Both members pursued solo careers; Davies became an attorney in New Jersey. ("Carbolic Smoke Bomb" on Hymns refers to an 1893 decision encountered in every first-year Contracts course.) Somehow, the pair overcame their differences—or most of them: Matthews still doesn't perform live—and recombined to produce a chamber-pop gem full of guitars, horns, strings, fabgear vocal arrangements, and more hooks that a deep sea dragline.

2.
Missy Mazzoli (Abigail Fischer, NOW Ensemble) – Song from the Uproar: Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt
Gabriel Kahane – February House [Original Cast Recording]

Two very different flavors of musical theater here.

Missy Mazzoli's opera is a plangent collage of incidents surrounding the mysterious title figure, Isabelle Eberhardt, a young woman who traveled from Switzerland to north Africa, lived for a time disguised as a man, and drowned in the desert. Among other things. The whole is enveloped in the pulsing bursts and cantilevering melodic lines that make Mazzoli one of the most distinctive and immediately recognizable stylists among the "rising New York composers". (Listen here.)

In February House, Gabriel Kahane has written an old-fashioned musical (with a book by Seth Bockley) about refusing to be old fashioned: a tour through the house in Brooklyn briefly shared in 1940-41 by the likes of Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten with Peter Pears, Gypsy Rose Lee, and a rotating gallery of "bright colored brilliant" creators and thinkers. Witty, heartfelt, it will certainly make you laugh and possibly make you cry. And you will never think of bedbugs in the same way again. (Listen here.)

3.
Roomful of Teeth – Roomful of Teeth
David Byrne & St. Vincent – Love This Giant

Nothing else on this list—or elsewhere, really—sounds like Roomful of Teeth. An eight member a capella ensemble under the direction of Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth starts with finely honed traditional choral chops, then lavishly applies every worldwide and extended vocal technique they can find: yodeling, throat singing, breathing-as-percussion, monkey chant, nasal filterhumming … whatever the human head and lungs allow. Astonishing stuff to render eyes and ears as round as saucers. An old Steely Dan lyric insists that "[e]ven Cathy Berberian knows there's one roulade she can't sing." Roomful of Teeth acknowledges no such limitations. (Listen here. Really, do.)

Love This Giant, meanwhile, is a collaboration between David Byrne, Annie Clark, and brass, Brass, BRASS. Grand, typically eccentric popcraft. Also, one of the most fully enjoyable live shows of the year.

Max Richter – Recomposed by Max Richter - Vivaldi:The Four Seasons
Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Crown & Treaty

Max Richter embraces Ezra Pound's dictum to "make it new," deconstructing the hyperfamiliar much-beloved wheels and cogs of Vivaldi's concerti and reconstituting them as a series of layered quasi-minimal set pieces. The result is recognizably still Vivaldi, but imbued with the foggy melancholy of Richter's own compositions.

This fool is a long-time endorser of Tim Elsenburg and his mates in Sweet Billy Pilgrim: I first wrote about them in 2005 and their prior album, Twice Born Men, was my #1 pick for 2009. They returned this year with their third full album, still aggravatingly hard to come by in the US, but deserving of the effort to do so. Difficult to categorize, but still a thoroughly engaged and engaging ramble 'cross the wounding but worthwhile business of being a living human among other living humans.

5.
Michael Mizrahi - The Bright Motion
Bob Dylan – Tempest

Michael Mizrahi, pianist with NOW Ensemble, leads a scintillant survey of new solo piano repertoire, written in the past five years. It is all of it worth hearing, but the highlight is definitely the title piece, by NOW Ensemble guitarist Marc Dancigers. (Listen here. Video excerpt here.)

There was a new Dylan album this year. This is probably all ye need to know.

6.
Brooklyn Rider – Seven Steps
Steve Adey – The Tower Of Silence

In Seven Steps, string quartet Brooklyn Rider combines two contemporary originals—the semi-improvised title number and Christopher Tignor's quartet+electronics piece, "Together Into This Unknowable Night"—with an account of Beethoven's [late] Quartet No. 14. It may not be remotely idiomatic, but it is consistently urgent and compelling music making.

Steve Adey's prior album, 2007's All Things Real, landed at #7 on my list that year. A line from Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man captures the feel of this music, each note seemingly excavated with effort from a dark place at the base of the spine:

'Never to me,' was the reply; the voice deep and lonesome enough to have come from the bottom of an abandoned coal-shaft.

Gloomily commendable and worth seeking out.

William Brittelle and ACME – Loving the Chambered Nautilus
Tame Impala – Lonerism

William Brittelle makes me happy. His orchestral pop opus, Television Landscape, with its visionary apotheosis of Sheena Easton, tied for #2 on my 2010 list. This collection focuses on his compositions for sting quartet, and subcomponents thereof, supplemented by a battery of electronic frills and gewgaws. The title piece, with Caleb Burhans' fallen angel falsetto vocal, is pure melodic ecstasy so joyously inexcusable as to require no excuse. (Listen here.)

Fine old fashioned psychedelia is made new again by Australia's Tame Impala, who were likely required to file an environmental impact report as a condition of deploying this much reverb. The tricksy twisty bass lines alone are worth the price of admission.

8.
ETHEL – Heavy
Matthew E. White – Big Inner

String quartet ETHEL runs the table with style, skill and near-non-stop action. From Don Byron's back alley "Four Thoughts on Marvin Gaye" and the Delta wheeze of John King's "No Nickel Blues" to the widescreen action sequence of Raz Mesinai's "La Citadelle" and foot-stomping pleasures of Kenji Bunch's "String Circle No. 1," excitement is the watchword. The notable exception to the hurly-burly is a stilled and perfect transcription of David Lang's "Wed," which I could wish went on several times longer than it does. The packaging of the CD, by the way, is a marvel of attractive simplicity.

The pleasures of an easeful southern summer run through Matthew E. White's debut, whispering its way under your skin. The porch swing and a little something with branch water in it are calling.

9.
Gavin Bryars et al – Mercy & Grand: The Music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan
Mark Eitzel – Don't Be a Stranger

Composer Gavin Bryars plays in the ensemble (upright bass) and provides many of the arrangements in this Opera North-originated project that strips away the sonic oddities and gravelly yawp of Waits' own recordings and situates a selection of his songs in company with Brecht/Weill and a handful of folk tunes. Mezzo Jess Walker is the singer, deftly and movingly navigating Waits' and Brennan's labyrinth of cynicism, yearning and heartbreak.

And speaking of cynicism, yearning and heartbreak: American Music Club's Mark Eitzel returns with his strongest collection in several years. Smoke and whiskey not included.

10.
Nico Muhly – Drones
The Mynabirds – GENERALS

Combining three EPs and a lengthy bonus selection, Drones collects several years of pieces written for electronics-accompanied solo instruments: piano (Bruce Brubaker), viola (Nadia Sirota) and violin (Pekka Kuusisto). Knotty and rewarding.

Laura Burhenns and the Mynabirds only make rock 'n' roll, but I like it very much. A swift sinus clearing kick to the energy centers, like Dusty Springfield adjusted to 11.

11.
Eighth Blackbird – meanwhile
Meshell Ndegeocello – pour une âme souveraine - a dedication to Nina Simone

Chicago's Eighth Blackbird ensemble plays in the dark corners of your head. The centerpiece of this collection is the title piece, Stephen Hartke's six-part suite of music for "imaginary puppet plays," assuredly not plays for children. Also here: a teriffic Missy Mazzoli piece ("Still Life with Avalanche") and Philip Glass' seminal "Music in Similar Motion."

It is hard to think of a working artist more appropriate than Meshell Ndegeocelo to showcase and honor the legacy of Nina Simone, performing fourteen songs associated with Simone without succumbing to rote imitation. Simone's power, idealism, dignity and talent are all honorably emulated. Features possibly the least languid "Suzanne" anywhere, and concludes with a simmering, unflinching version of "Four Women" that is not to be ignored.

12.
Esa-Pekka Salonen – Salonen: "Out of Nowhere" - Violin Concerto - Nyx
Ramona Falls – Prophet

Salonen's Violin Concerto, with its high speed marathon solo part owned by Leila Josefowicz, is the ostensible attraction here. And it is terrific. But. For me, the reason to listen to this album is Nyx, an invocation of the night drawing on the Debussy-to-Stravinsky toolbox, to ravishing effect.

Ramona Falls is the project of former Menomena member Brent Knopf. Intricate explorations of life, the universe and everything.

13.
Mohammed Fairouz – Sumeida's Song (An Opera in 3 Scenes)
Giant Giant Sand – Tucson: A Country Rock Opera

Ibsenesque tragedy plays out in a preindustrial early 20th century Egyptian village, where the burden of blood revenge rebounds upon both the innocent and the vengeful in Sumeida's Song. A powerful, highly promising work from a young composer to watch.

Tucson is best thought of not as an opera per se as a series of excellent, thematically linked Howe Gelb songs. Two parts Arizona, one part Denmark, a twist of Monkish piano jazz, and all of it sprinkled with what-nots from south of every border.

14.
wild up, Christopher Rountree – Salt of the Earth
Damien Jurado – Maraqopa

wild up has received more column inches on this blog than anyone this year. The ensemble's official premiere recording features a sortie through Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony that produces enough energy to power a small duchy and provides at least a glimpse of what makes this group so compelling in live performance. (Listen here.)

Produced by Richard Swift, Maraqopa is a textbook "singer-songwriter on spiritual journey" album, which is a perfectly fine thing to be.

15.
Mariel Roberts – Nonextraneous Sounds
A. C. Newman – Shut Down the Streets

Nonextraneous Sounds collects five new pieces for cello and electronics. It is all interesting, and Mariel Roberts is an aggressive stretcher of her instrument. The high points lie in the percussive interplay of Andy Akiho's "Three Shades, Foreshadows," and the 1-bit tidal surge of Tristan Perich's "Formations."

I have never really warmed to the New Pornographers, but the solo albums of core member A. C./Carl Newman, of which this is the third, are among my favorite things. Brainy, moving pop songs of a high order.

16.
ALIAS Chamber Ensemble – Boiling Point: Music of Kenji Bunch
Smoke Fairies – Blood Speaks

Nashville-based ALIAS surveys the smart, personable music of Kenji Bunch. The set includes the complete "String Circle" series (see ETHEL, supra), an evocation of the experience of running the New York Marathon ("26.2") and the delicious "Boiling Point," a chugging churning new music equivalent to the cartoon-assembly-line sound of Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," the length of which is determined by the time it takes a tea kettle to boil. Hot steamy pleasure.

Smoke Fairies, centered on the Jack White-endorsed pairing of Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies, is another UK act too little known in the U.S. Lovely folk harmonies and a fondness for sidewise blues and slide guitar make for a darkly winning combination.

17.
Hahn & Hauschka – Silfra
Jherek Bishoff – Composed

Pure coincidence that these two should land in the same spot, but they share one key attribute: I actually managed a full blog post on each of them. Read about Silfra, here, and Composed, here.

18.
Contemporaneous – Stream of Stars - Music of Dylan Mattingly
Theo Bleckmann – Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush

Contemporaneous is a new music ensemble out of Bard College and Berkeley native Dylan Mattingly is its co-director. He is also a composer of furious promise, suffering if anything from a surfeit of intriguing ideas jostling within his pieces. A composer, and a collection of fine players, to watch and to conjure with.

Theo Bleckmann frequently gets categorized as a jazz singer, but he is not so easily pigeonholed. Here, he makes a selection of Kate Bush songs—some well known, some deep album obscurities—his own, while highlighting just how well made her music is.

19.
David Lang, Andrew Zolinsky - this was written by hand
Field Music – Plumb

Andrew Zolinsky's recording of the solo piano music of David Lang is a thornier thing than The Bright Motion (#5 above), more focused on rhythmic and textural probing than on melodic expression. In addition to the title composition, the album collects Lang's "Memory Pieces," written over recent years in honor or contemplation of friends now gone. Among those pieces, in its original version for piano, is "Wed" (for Kate Ericson, a young artist married in her hospital bed just prior to her death), five minutes of inarticulable sad true beauty.

Thank heaven there will always be an England, as that immediately improves the odds that there continue to be new Field Music records. So clever, so charming, such pleasant company. More from Peter and David Brewis in the Special Case section below.

20.
Kronos Quartet – The Music of Vladimir Martynov
Neil Young - Psychedelic Pill

Some artistic schools or genres get to name themselves—the Pre-Raphaelites, the Italian Futurists, dubstep—while others have names or genre-hood thrust upon them either by way of insult—those filthy Impressionists, those nasty Fauves—or critical laziness. "Minimalism" is of the latter, lazier sort. Virtually none of the musical or visual artists to whom the term has been applied has approved or embraced it. The same is true of so-called "Holy Minimalism," typically used to portmanteaulize music by the likes of Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki. Lazy sod that I am, it is convenient for my purposes to now add Vladimir Martynov to that list. Instead of repeating a phrase and expanding it with minor variation, Martynov tends to worry a phrase slowly, until its deepest secrets are shaken out of it. Meditation, with teeth.

Neil Young's "Psychedelic Pill" album is well named: after lo these many years Neil is still psychedelic and he's still a bit of a pill.
— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) December 29, 2012

21.

Valgeir Sigurðsson – Architecture of Loss
Calexico – Algiers

With his work as producer via Bedroom Community and on projects such as Hahn & Hauschka's Silfra, supra, Valgeir Sigurðsson's influence feels like the contemporary equivalent to late '70's Brian Eno. Here, a collaboration with such usual suspects as Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota, and Shahzad Ismaily, yields an abstracted but rigorous series of pensive miniatures.

Calexico relocated from Tucson to New Orleans to record Algiers. You can take the band out of the great Southwest, but you can't take the great Southwest out of the band. Which is all to the good.

22.
Icebreaker with BJ Cole – Apollo
Menomena – Moms

Icebreaker's Apollo shares lineage (and record label) with Bang on a Can's transcription of Brian Eno's Music for Airports. The synthesizer-based originals melded the electronic and organic largely through the presence of Daniel Lanois' steel guitar. Here, with B J Cole as guitarist, Apollo's atmospherics become both warmer and more transparent.

Moms is a Menomena record, which arguably tells you already whether you will like it or not. Reduced from three members to two, the Menomena blend of twitchy precision and visceral squish survives intact.

23.
Robert Fripp, Andrew Keeling, David Singleton – The Wine of Silence
Various – Lost in the Humming Air (Music Inspired by Harold Budd)

An atmospheric pairing tied to former collaborators of Brian Eno. The Wine of Silence consists of orchestral arrangements of Robert Fripp "Soundscapes," the digitally looped and layered guitar pieces that are the contemporary heirs to the analog "Frippertronics" recordings. Immersive envelopes of sound ensue. Lost in the Humming Air, meanwhile, is what it holds itself out to be: an array of obscure (to me) electronic/ambient performers emulating the spacious reverberant drift and feel of original-ambienteur Harold Budd. Immersive envelopes of sound ensue.

Two Special Cases:

Minnesota Orchestra has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: an ongoing labor dispute that has left the musicians locked out by management. In late March, however, the Orchestra premiered Judd Greenstein's Acadia, about which I raved at length here. A recording of the March 31 performance is still available for free download from the Orchestra's website. With beauty and brains for days, Acadia is a rich, proliferating, idea filled feast of a piece that deserves to be embraced by orchestras everywhere. (Who will give it its west coast premiere, I wonder, and when?) Not a true "album," really, and so not included on The List, but Acadia remains a work I am supremely happy to have heard and reheard in 2012. My single favorite composition of the year, hands down.

Field Music's Field Music Play… was released as a strictly limited CD purchasable from the band. I took the plunge and imported a copy when it was briefly available, and smile warmly just at the thought of it. Play... is a covers album: eight songs the Brewis brothers claim as influences, or simply as songs they wanted to play, from a range of predecessors including John Cale, Leonard Cohen (like Meshell Ndegeocelo, they put their spin on "Suzanne"), even Ringo. It is a delight, if a slightly trifling one, and would have landed mid-List if only it were actually available in general circulation. Three tracks—Roxy Music's "If There is Something," Pet Shop Boys' "Heart," and Syd Barrett's "Terrapin"—can be streamed via Soundcloud.

And in 2013, perhaps I will be more successful over the course of the year in setting free some bears?

~~~
Photo: Sled Dog and Gramophone, Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913), via

~~~

Song: "I am the Wombat of D. G. Rossetti"

2012-10-25T15:22:19-07:00

~~~

I AM THE WOMBAT OF D. G. ROSSETTI

~~~

In the Southern Hemisphere
They say that the creatures are terribly queer:
Some of them poisonous,
Some of them vicious.
Furred, but with duck’s bills!
Or scaly, like fishes!
But I, sir —
You see me, sir —
Harmless and dreamy, sir —
Make my acquaintance: I’m pleased to be here.

Oh —

I am the wombat of D.G. Rossetti,
Imported to London from over the seas.
When Maestro Rossetti was wanting a pet he
Sent off a request to the antipodes.

There a bold sun-burnished strapping Australian
Beat through the bush to see what he could see.
Searching through forests eccentric and alien,
He found a burrow and there he found me.

Many months later I came to the jetty,
Was met by my master, Christina, and Jane.
Now I am the wombat of D.G. Rossetti:
I live in Cheyne Walk and I walk on a chain.

Kangaroos relish their fisticuff combat
Whilst I on the other hand flee from a fight.
In London I am the preeminent wombat,
The only one owned by a Pre-Raphaelite.

I have been called both a joy and a madness,
Delightful to all who my company keep.
When some day I die of homesickness and sadness,
My master will fall to his knees and he’ll weep.

Fighting his tears he’ll erect a memorial,
Hon’ring the wombat what wuvved him so well,
While my marsupial soul incorporeal
Sighs from on high like some blest Damozel.

He taught me Italian and fed me spaghetti:
All chubby in Chelsea, I couldn’t stay long.
I was the wombat of D.G. Rossetti:
Though mortal in life I’m immortal in song.

Yes I was the wombat of D.G. Rossetti —
Though mortal in life I’m immortal in song!

~~~

This waddling lyric is the result of a bit of free association on Twitter last week between soprano Jennifer Behnke, composer Garrett Shatzer, and myself. I am afraid 'twas I who inserted wombats in to an otherwise perfectly serious train of thought about poetry. At length, I decided to take a run at lyrics for a wombat song, and here we are.

I hear a tune for this in my head, a Victorian music hall waltz of sorts, but your own imagination may lead you in other directions.

~~~

Illustrations: "Rossetti's Wombat Seated in his Master's Lap," pencil drawing by William Bell Scott, on Rossetti's letterhead, from the holdings of the Tate. A sketch of the wombat by William Michael Rossetti, provenance unknown.

Additional visual inspirations:

"Mrs. Morris and the Wombat," pen drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, original in the holdings of the British Museum, image via The Rossetti Archive.

"Rossetti lamenting the death of his wombat", pen drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from the holdings of the British Museum.

~~~

Jackin' the Bachs [wild Up, Bach-BQ, Hammer Museum]

2012-09-04T13:18:49-07:00

Ah, Labor Day weekend! That bittersweet time of year when we shuffle off our white shoes and suchlike summery equipage, and when a young ensemble's fancy turns to thoughts of … Johann Sebastian Bach. Yes, "Papa" Bach, and in particular the much-beloved Bachicism of the six Brandenburg Concertos. [Sic; it's always "concertos" with Bach, isn't it, rather than "concerti"?]

Midway through its six month residency at the Hammer Museum, wild Up wound up the summer on Saturday with a Bach-BQ, venturing a full Brandenburg cycle of sorts. There are three things that wild Up has shown itself to do well: (1) bracing, gumption-packed performances of existing, mostly modern or arcane, repertoire, (2) premiere performances of new work, much of it by members of the band, and (3) smashing old and new together all CERN-like to see what new forms of energy may result. The Bach-BQ partook of all three strains, but was ruled by the spirit of Number Three. Call it if you will a "reBrandedburg cycle".

Is there another musical phrase so universally recognized as "Baroque!" as the opening "Ba-da-bum ba-da-BIM, ba-da-bum ba-da-BIM, ba-da-bum-diddlediddlediddle-bada-bada-bada-biddle...." of Brandenburg No. 3? There is not. The version on offer to begin the afternoon was arranged by wild Up director-conductor Christopher Rountree and entitled "Transcriptions." I took it as a puckish homage to that genre of transcriptions and arrangements of Bach in which the gleaming precision mechanics of the original is hyped and puffed and supercharged for a more Great Romantic Composer feel as in, for instance, Stokowski's steroidal version of the Toccata & Fugue that opens Disney's Fantasia. Here, while the pleasures of the piece that Bach actually wrote were amply in evidence, they were Supplemented! and Improved! by lingering brass drones, recurring crescendos, and extended super-dramatic climaxes unimagined (or tastefully omitted) by their maker. Good music and a good joke made for a good time.

While Bach was easy to spot through the thickets of Rountree's piece, composer Mark Menzies buried him deep within his "Bachs 5," extracted from the Fifth Brandenburg. Menzies drew his premise from the notion that some of Bach's most high-flying, seemingly joyous music is actually an expression of having passed through deep seated spiritual agonies. He distilled that suffering in a piece both hard to play and challenging to hear. Atomized bits of Bach trickled out, or were extracted, through constant difficulty. Clacking sticks were used as percussion one moment, to bow strings or to strike a flute the next. Near the conclusion, non-players entered and physically prevented their fellows from performing. The closest thing to a constant came not so much from the keyboard (the dominant player in a traditional Brandenburg 5) as from the electric guitar, on which Chris Kallmyer meditated away in the spirit of Fred Frith or Derek Bailey.

Andrew McIntosh next had his way with Brandenburg No. 6 in "J.S. BA C H," in which he swapped out the violas of the original in favor of bass saxophones and bassoon before running the piece through a cycling-Minimalist filter. The portions into which Bach was sliced were larger and more recognizable than in Menzies' piece: here old JSB could be spotted repeatedly, as if between the trees in some Chekhovian birch wood populated by large hooting birds.

Following intermission—and the opportunity to grab a Bach-BQ-appropriate hot dog or, in my case, a bracing Rhone rosé—wild Up pianist Richard Valitutto took up the compositional reins with "Razing Castles," a three part ramble on Brandenburg No. 4. Each movement was given its own stylistic makeover: the first in the free-jazz/harmolodic idioms of Ornette Coleman's double quartets, the slow second cross-pollinated with Ravel's Valse (and perhaps a soupcon of Satie), and the third revisiting New York Minimalism. Each worked well in terms of both Bach and the styles with which he was blended. The second movement, already sublime in its original form, emerged from its meeting with Ravel as the most straight-up lovely music of the day.

Mark Menzies contributed his second arrangement of the afternoon with "E-Flat May Yams & Web," formerly known as Brandenburg No. 2. The second Brandenburg is famous for providing a showcase for the trumpet, which Menzies took to its illogical extreme. The trumpeter becomes the uncompromising center of attention, his largely improvised cadenza shifting direction and meter throughout as conductor and orchestra work to keep up. Attendants come and go, offering the trumpet player a selection of mutes, some of which he accepts, most of which he disdains. In a virtuoso if slightly sociopathic turn, Conrad Jones conjoined Bach's manner with the questing, spartan self-absorption of Miles Davis (though he neglected to turn his back on the audience, Miles-fashion). One could not look away.

Ending the performance at the beginning of the series, Andrew Tholl retooled Brandenburg No. 1 as "Eine Art Brandenburg (Aber Nicht Wirklich)" [Kind of a Brandenburg (But Not Really)]. With most of the ensemble returned to the stage, Tholl left his usual station among the violins to settle in to a full drum set, with which he recurrently interrupted/ drove on the band with a rush and a thump more in the spirit of Sebastian Bach than of Johann Sebastian Bach. That sort of whiz-bang irreverence made for a satisfyingly raucous conclusion to wild Up's engagement with the sainted Kapellmeister of Anhalt-Cothen.

As Procol Harum has it in that song with a tune itself lifted from Bach: "The crowd cried out for more."

Incidental Intelligence

Procol Harum was included alongside Jethro Tull, the Swingle Singers, Apollo 100 (Joy!) and many more in a fine pre-show/intermission playlist of pop tunes derived from Bach.

Mezzo Abby Fischer stayed in town for an extre week to fill the second cello position beside the tireless Derek Stein. Double-reed man Archie Carey, meanwhile, inspired me to this:

One of the benefits of a @wildup show is the comfort of knowing you *will* get your recommended daily allowance of amplified bassoon.
— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) September 1, 2012

Photos by the blogger.

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Number Her Daze: Abigail Fischer's AbSynth, Hammer Museum

2012-08-27T10:49:13-07:00

Under the benevolent auspices of its 6 month residency at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, the unstoppable wild Up sponsored a Saturday afternoon appearance by Abigail Fischer with AbSynth, her evolving performance piece for mezzo soprano (herself) and accompanying electronics (an Apple laptop, natch). In addition to pursuing a career within the core opera repertoire, Ms. Fischer has staked a place for herself as a go-to singer in New York New Music ["none dare call it 'indie Classical'"] circles, and AbSynth is as much a showpiece for its collection of contemporary composers as it is for the singer who commissioned them.

When AbSynth first surfaced, around 2007, it seems to have been postured as the story of a robot who becomes a woman and wished to return to robotitude. As it has evolved for the Hammer performance (under the co-direction of Ms. Fischer and wild Up conductor/artistic director Christopher Rountree), plot is no longer a particular point of emphasis. The singer appeared human throughout, albeit not necessarily a human you would feel comfortable being left alone with. While the performance played out as a series of intriguing incidents, there was little attempt to tell a fully cohesive tale.

AbSynth begins and ends with Nico Muhly's "Mothertongue," commissioned for Ms. Fischer and later recorded with her for Muhly's 2008 album of the same name. The premise of the piece is a release of the accumulation of addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, passwords, and other identifying rubrics that each of us builds up over time. As Muhly pieces go, it has never been among my personal favorites, but it proved to work far better as a piece for performance than it does as a recording.

In a loose fitting robe, Ms. Fischer sang to an accompaniment of layered versions of her own voice, spinning out numbers, addresses, etc., while arranging alphanumeric blocks on a table and hanging index cards with place names on paired clotheslines. Soon enough, she doffed her robe to "shower" in leopard-print underthings while standing in an inflatable wading pool, singing all the while. Refreshed, she transitioned by way of Caleb Burhans ["No"] to pick up a [working] blow dryer, to the accompaniment of which she sang a Florent Ghys do-fa-sol song ["Patatra"] in which her live voice looped and relooped with itself and the voice of the composer. Slipping at last in to a salmon pink dress, Ms. Fischer concluded the initial arc of the performance with a pensive, yearning segment from Missy Mazzoli's chamber opera, Song From the Uproar (the full recording of which, with Abigail Fischer and NOW Ensemble, is forthcoming later this year from New Amsterdam Records).

With wild Up pianist Richard Valitutto at the keyboard, Fischer next slid smoothly from art song to show tune, combining sparkling wit with an edge of psychosis in Lerner and Weill's "Mr. Right" (Love Life, 1948), cataloging the myriad perfections that a man would be expected to bring to their relationship. Mr. Right himself was waiting in the wings: briefly leaving the stage, the singer returned dragging him on in the form of a large pinata, a bright yellow robot, seemingly part Klaatu, part Big Bird, singing now with a lo-fi beatboxed accompaniment composed by Kevin McFarland. The path of true love did not run smooth for Mr. Right, however: after releasing him from his bonds, Fischer soon enough murdered and eviscerated her cybernetic fella with a pair of scissors. (Robot viscera, for the curious, resemble turquoise tissue paper. The candy to be found within the sacrificial victim was distributed to innocent children at the end of the show.) The singer now seemingly freed by her wanton act of pinaticide, the program worked its way back to where it began, as the accumulated props were joyously gathered and cast aside while Ms. Fischer sang through to the conclusion of Muhly's "Mothertongue."

Abigail Fischer is a strong and flexible singer, and AbSynth is custom built to show off her range of expressive talents. She is as comfortable and commanding with the non-linear gibber and vocalise of the opening pieces as she is with the more traditionally operatic lines of the Mazzoli or the puckish sparkle of the Weill. She is also a most engaging and personable person in person, happy to chat with audience members after the performance.

While AbSynth may not hold up under the scrutiny of mere logic in retrospect, there is hardly an uninteresting moment in it as it is being performed. Abigail Fischer is an exciting performer and has developed a close working relationship with some equally exciting composers. wild Up and Christopher Rountree deserve a vote of thanks for letting southern California sample her wares. I would hope we will hear her here again soon.

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Incidentals:

In the absence of actual program notes, AbSynth is at times a challenging game of "Spot the Composer." To the extent selections have been misidentified, omitted, or dropped in out of sequence, the faulty memory of the blogger is to blame.

Earlier performances of several of the core pieces of AbSynth exist on (gracious!) Myspace, in live recordings that tell as much about certain audience members' allergies as they do about the artists. Additionally, several of the pieces, or at least their electronic components, have been collected on Soundcloud.

Next for wild Up itself: another free-w/-museum-admission performance in the Hammer courtyard next Saturday, September 1; a "Bach BQ" in which the ensemble takes on/has its way with JSB's Brandenburg Concertos.

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Photo: Shamelessly lifted from Ms. Fischer's site; I hope she doesn't mind.

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Here at the Western World [wild Up - "WEST" - Hammer Museum]

2012-07-23T19:47:22-07:00

Los Angeles contemporary chamber orchestra wild Up has fans. Not "regular attendees" or people who simply "enjoy" their performances. Fans. Full-on enthusiasts, craving the mixture of homegrown original commissions, creative arrangements con reimaginings, and fire-breathing straight-up performance of challenging pieces from the repertoire that are the wild Up stock in trade.

Through December, wild Up is attached to the Hammer Museum in Westwood as the institution's first "orchestra in residence." On Saturday, the ensemble took to the museum's courtyard for "WEST", the first full-scale concert of its residency. The fans, this blogger among them, were in evidence.

The mythical, Italianate west of Ennio Morricone's film music bracketed the afternoon, beginning with an arrangement by Isaac Schankler of Morricone's theme for Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario (sometimes known in English as A Professional Gun). A bravura opener, the arrangement featured a throbbing trumpet solo, a battery of percussion including clanging brake drums, and conductor Christopher Rountree (seen in letterboxed widescreen action above) displaying his formidable skills as a whistler.

In his 3 Meditations on California Girls, Andrew Tholl had his way with three songs of that name by Katy Perry, the Beach Boys, and the Magnetic Fields, each movement manipulating a discrete, recognizable slice of the original. The most succesful section was probably the first, which plucked out a sliver of Perry's song—the four-note descending "Cal-i-forr-nyuh" melody that connects the chorus to the next verse—and derived from it a slow canon less eminiscent of melting popsicles than of the "Air on the G String" or a Beethoven slow movement, imbuing it with an unexpected gravitas. Inserted between the movements of 3 Medi-Cal Girls were two other pieces: a trio arrangement of Eric Dolphy's "Something Sweet, Something Tender," its honks and bleats at home in the stew of sirens and low-flying aircraft that filtered down in to the courtyard, and the slippery rollick of Silvestre Revueltas' Ocho por Radio (8 Times Radio), a reminder that The West does not stop at the Mexican border.

The second segment of the program began with a ritual humming chant, climaxing in a highbrow variant on the Harlem Globetrotters "bucket of confetti" joke, all in tribute to La Monte Young. That done, wild Up settled in to a trio of vastly different works, each performed with riveting conviction.

Above Chiangmai is one of the more haunting vignettes on Harold Budd and Brian Eno's Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror—still in this blogger's view one of the most purely beautiful recordings ever made. wild Up performed it in an arrangement by Chris Kallmyer, who achieved the extraordinary feat of capturing free-drifting essence of a piece built on piano and the processed sounds of a piano, without a piano. In its place, Kallmyer turned to such topsy-turned arrangements as electric guitar played, ever so gently, with a tympani mallet, and the wispy keening of chimes played with a bow. Aircraft, sirens and buses for a moment subsided into resonant stillness.

And then: Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 (1906), the beast—maestro Rountree's term—from which all contemporary chamber orchestras are sprung, in which the composer tosses late Romanticism in to the stock pot, reduces and concentrates it, and serves up it with a side of its own bleached bones. Apart from the generally known fact that Schoenberg spent the latter part of his life complsing and teaching in Los Angeles, this piece has a specific L.A. connection: thirty years after he wrote it, Schoenberg returned to it, arranged it for full orchestra, and personally conducted its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Chamber Symphony is twenty-odd minutes of ferocious and constantly shifting musical challenge, and the wildUpistes took it on without fear, earning themselves another of several ovations.

While listed last on the program, the Schoenberg left room for one more: a second Isaac Schankler Morricone arrangement, this the most famous of them all: a fully elaborated version of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It was most assuredly the first of those three things.

wild Up continues in residence at the Hammer until December. All concerts are free with museum admission.

Incidental Intelligence:

After working closely with Morricone's music in making his arrangements, Isaac Schankler wrote about it, and about its unsuspected ties to the early 20th-century avant-garde, for New Music Box here.

Morricone's Il Mercenario theme can be heard in its original context in that film's climactic duel, featuring Jack Palance, Franco Nero and Tony Musante here.

wild Up's next full-scale performance at the Hammer will be September 1. For its summer-ending BACH-BQ, the merry band promise to have its way with J. S. Bach's Brandenberg concertos.

Photographs and rudimentary processing by the blogger.

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"Bottle of Claret for you if I had realised…"

2012-07-02T14:42:58-07:00

Apparently my self-absorption knows some bounds: it did not occur to me until just now that today, July 2, marks the Ninth Anniversary of the inception of this blog. Having sprung this realization upon myself all unexpected, I have not shown the foresight nececesary to craft a traditional poste nostalgique. Perhaps if I am still here for Anniversary Number Ten next year, I will overcompensate.

Here, then, an appropriate musical interlude: Matt Marks' arrangement of the Beatles' "Revolution 9" as performed by Alarm Will Sound.

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Things Not Seen [The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Long Beach Opera]

2012-06-18T12:11:38-07:00

In 1985, neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks published The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat And Other Clinical Tales, essays describing and meditating upon some of the more unusual cases he had encountered over years of inquiring into the enigmas of the mind. The book was a surprising and long-lived success. Composer Michael Nyman immediately obtained rights to the title piece, intending to adapt it as an opera. The resulting work, with a libretto adapted by Nyman and Christopher Rawlence, premiered in 1986.

As performed by Long Beach Opera as the final production of its 2012 season, The Man Who Mistook... is an intricate miniature puzzle box secreting at its heart—further puzzles. It is a piece that appeals, albeit quietly, to the old Aristotelian standbys, pity and fear, and leaves the viewer to wonder at the degree to which The World may exist only in our perceptions of it and in our unspoken agreements on what those perceptions signify.

The libretto sticks closely to Dr. Sacks's original essay, in which he describes his investigation and diagnosis of the case of "Dr. P," an internationally successful singer and respected musical instructor whose behavior has grown progressively more eccentric. It emerges that Dr. P's perception of the exterior world has come unmoored from the visual: he can perceive shapes, forms, even intricate patterns, but no longer processes clearly the broader context of what his eyes see. At the same time, his overall mental faculties remain acute, and he is particularly attuned to information he receives through sound or rhythm: he will not recognize a familiar person who stands still, but the sound of a voice or even the perception of the particular way that person moves will trigger completely "normal" responses. In the end, Dr. Sacks ["Dr. S" in the opera] learns that Dr. and Mrs. P have adapted to his condition by constructing a way of life structured around predictability, order, and the association of recurring events with music ("eating songs, dressing songs"). The only advice Dr. S offers is that Dr. P should make "more music" of his entire life, for without music he fundamentally ceases to be.*

The Man Who Mistook... is compact and distilled in most every way: it runs little more than an hour, involves only three characters (Dr. S, Dr. P and Mrs. P), and is scored for a string quintet, harp and piano. The score is rooted in [so-called] minimalism, relying principally on swirling recursive chord figures in the strings, but also evokes and paraphrases art songs of Robert Schumann, pieces often performed by Dr. P. (At one point, Drs. P and S join together in singing an excerpt from one of the most particularly sorrowful songs from Schumann's Dichterliebe.) The combination of minimalist rigor and Romantic colorations proves powerful, a simulacrum of sorts of the patient's interior lives.

Long Beach Opera has always emphasized engagement with the drama as much as the music in the operas it chooses to stage, and on that score the three LBO-veteran principals here are more or less perfectly cast. Suzan Hanson's Mrs. P ranges through worry, protectiveness, denial, and the quiet assertiveness of a woman willing to change the external world itself if need be, the better to match it to her husband's. As Dr. S, tenor John Duykers combines low-key demeanor with a focused curiosity and fundamental sympathy as he seeks the nature of Dr. P's condition.

At the center of the production's success is baritone Robin Buck as Dr. P, the object of all our inquiries. Buck's Dr. P is a well of uncertainty, from which are drawn unexpected moments of beauty and confidence, as in the Dichterliebe excerpt or when P describes the bucolic riverside scene that he perceives in what is actually a photo of a parched desert. The fine vocal turn is supported by an equally nuanced, fully realized physical performance, centering particularly around the eyes.

Benjamin Makino, who deftly navigated the shoals of 2011's The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, conducts the seven member ensemble with a steady, not pushy, propulsion that eases smoothly in and out of the more overtly expressive sequences. The staging, by director David Schweizer, is straightforward and semi-naturalistic, as Dr. S meets the Ps first in his office and then in their home before pronouncing his diagnostic opinion. The piece offers little in the way of external action, and Schweizer successfully avoids letting it fall in to inertia.

The Man Who Mistook... is an intimate, precision instrument with which we are reminded that oftentimes our knowledge of ourselves and others is simply the sum of its gaps.

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is being staged in the EXPO Building, the former furniture store previously used for LBO's 2011 production of Medea. Two performances remain, next Sunday, June 24, at 2:00 and 7:00. [Tickets.]

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

The blogger attended this performance as a subscriber, at his own expense.

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* In his original essay, Dr. Sacks did not identify a specific medical cause for Dr. P's "visual agnosia." Pathologic examination following Dr. P's death apparently determined the root of his condition to have been an unusual variant of Alzheimer's Disease that affected only the visual centers of the brain, leaving the other faculties unmolested.

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