Nearly a century after it premiered, Leoš Janáček’s “Katya Kabanova” has made it to the Seattle Opera stage for the first time. The Czech composer’s portrayal of a sensitive young woman desperately in need of an escape route from her repressive surroundings contains all the ingredients for a searing music drama.
In a Janáček mood after hearing last night’s mesmerizing performance of Zápisník zmizelého (“The Diary of One Who Disappeared”) at the Summer Chamber Festival. This song cycle/minidrama of a hapless farm boy’s seduction by a mysterious Gypsy woman was performed with minimal but haunting staging. Great work by tenor Nicholas Phan, mezzo Sasha Cooke, and pianist Jeremy Denk, along with singers Rena Harms, Nerys Jones, and Rachelle Moss.
(Copy of the score here, with its killer tessitura for the tenor.)
Unfortunately I missed the prelude concert featuring Benjamin Beilman and Denk in Janáček’s Violin Sonata. (Beilman and cellist Efe Baltacıgil gave a marvelous rendition last week, along with pianist Anna Polonsky, of the rarely heard Shostakovich First Piano Trio.)
Here’s Ian Bostridge — who even made a documentary about Diary — on the real significance of Janáček’s legacy:
It’s telling, I think, that the voice came first. Janácek’s musical creativity needed an immersion in humanity, in emotion, in flesh and blood, to sustain it. In that sense, he was a world away from the mainstream of German modernism (Schoenberg, Webern et al) or the success story of international eclecticism, Stravinsky, for whom music was about music, not really an expressive art form at all. Stravinsky wrote few songs, and his one opera, ‘The Rake’s Progress’, brilliant and moving as it is, remains cumulatively cold and detached.
If Janácek’s music lives with an extraordinary power and urgency, it is because he bucked the trend of musical abstraction. He did so because he couldn’t avoid it, because it was in his temperament to confuse the personal and the aesthetic. This is something of an intellectual puzzle – how, after all, do we turn feelings into music? – and, at the same time, an artistic miracle.
NPR's Ailsa Chang chats with Brandon Kyle Goodman about their new book You Gotta Be You: How to Embrace This Messy Life and Step Into Who You Really Are.
The massive sound of The Aristocrat of Bands, a highly respected HBCU marching band, and the overflowing history of gospel combine on a single album (with a great title) — 'The Urban Hymnal.'
Taneum Bambrick's second collection of poems portrays how moments of intimacy can represent moments of violence – and how difficult it can be to untangle the two from each other.
In her new book, By Hands Now Known, Margaret Burnham reports on little-known cases of racial violence in the Jim Crow era, including crimes that went unreported and murderers who were never punished.
The new four-hour Paramount+ documentary is told mostly through cellphone videos and police body cams. It is surprisingly not gruesome — the visuals are selected and edited very judiciously.
The scandal has been the talk of the chess world this month. Interest exploded last week after Carlsen resigned from a match against Niemann after making only one move.
Skeens won first, second and third place in the categories for cookies, candy and savory bread. After a widespread Internet effort to find her took place on TikTok, she has joined the platform.
Halay Turning Heart speaks only Yuchi to her three children. She's one of only a few fluent speakers of the Native American language. But she faces pushback from both outsiders and her own family.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 