review | MEMETERIA by Thomas May

March 22, 2014 • 1:52 pm Comments Off on Richard Goode Vibrations

Richard Goode Vibrations

Richard Goode

Can there be any better therapy than to spend an evening with Richard Goode in recital? I mean therapy here not as some kind of temporary balm but as a restorative of a sense of musical health. Mr. Goode’s playing, for me, is able to reaffirm the essential values that make music such an indispensable part of life.

It’s admittedly hard not to wander into Ye Realme of Hyperbole when attempting to convey just what it is that makes Mr. Goode’s pianism so damn appealing. But after two blissful hours of listening to Mr. Goode at Meany Hall — his program this week was part of the University of Washington’s World Series and followed — I emerged invigorated and more alert to the unique qualities as well as the originality of the three composers Mr. Goode juxtaposed in his recital.

His program framed the early Romanticism of Robert Schumann’s Op. 6 Davidsbündlertänze (1837) with two examples from the early 20th century: selections from Leoš Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path (published in 1911) and the first book of Claude Debussy’s Préludes (1910). All three call for innovative approaches to keyboard sonority and form alike.

Mr. Goode’s musicianship proves so enthralling in large part thanks to the sense of conviction undergirding his interpretations. Now 70, Mr. Goode plays with all the intensity of someone eager to share the miracles of a new composer he’s freshly discovered, whose code he’s just cracked. There was never even a hint of “getting through” this or that thorny passage using tricks worked out decades ago. Of lazy habits or complacent readings I could detect not a trace.

And that means being unafraid to push in surprising directions (particularly in the Schumann) so as to risk a certain emphasis or refine a structural insight. The curious thing is that Mr. Goode’s fearlessness isn’t reckless or arrogant — on the contrary, it’s simultaneously reassuring. I repeatedly enjoyed the illusion of being treated to a private performance in a salon, with the pianist showing off something exciting he couldn’t keep from sharing.

So in the Schumann, for example — he played the entire 18-piece cycle from memory — Mr. Goode emphasized the fantastical contrasts of Schumann’s bipolar alter egos. His remarkable feel for dynamics allowed for maximal, shocking antitheses: heaven-storming attacks followed a second later by eerie, muffled scamperings. Here was composition as the art of non-transition: rather than smooth over the rapid shifts of thought, Mr. Goode sought out the emotional logic within Schumann’s mercurial, wildly roaming imagination.

But Mr. Goode avoiding invoking the cliché of the “unstable” Schumann, as if this music foreshadows his mental breakdown. This he accomplished largely by digging in to the pockets of humor which abound in Schumann’s score.

The more serenely lyrical dances, meanwhile, carried over echoes of the calm, knowing simplicity that radiates from the Janácek with which the program opened. Mr. Goode chose four pieces from the first book of On an Overgrown Path. I felt fortunate to be hearing these, performed by this particular pianist, so soon after experiencing Peter Brook’s The Suit at Seattle Rep.

Janácek’s pared-down lines and poignant, clutter-free harmonies suddenly seemed to share a kinship with Brook’s enigmatic clarity. Through the briefest of gestures — the mere wisp of an interval as ostinato, for example — Mr. Goode’s sensitive reading conveyed all the compressed density of meaning of a Webern score.

When Mr. Goode returned for the program’s second half, I admit wondering how he could possibly elicit a connection between the Debussy and what we’d previously heard. His Schumann was clearly forward looking, far ahead of his time, while his Janácek breathed nostalgia free of sentimentality with its elegiac, backward glances.

Soon it became clear that the connection was in Debussy’s own startling contrasts — spread out though they are over far larger scales — and in those evanescent, painterly gestures of a measure or two that suddenly illuminate an entire prelude. The spangle of notes at the keyboard’s uppermost extremity which ends Les collines d’Anacapri, for instance, glittered with an almost psychedelic vividness. And with La fille aux cheveux de lin, Janácek’s unfeigned simplicity was again recalled.

I found much of Mr. Goode’s Debussy refreshingly unconventional. In lieu of the intensely sensual, “sonorous poetry” you often hear in accounts of the Préludes, Mr. Goode showed off the solid construction of Debussy’s thinking with rhythmic acuity and clearly articulated voicings (his pedal technique is superb). Humor, again, was given its due, along with the proto-jazz elements that Debussy annexes to his vocabulary.

Filed under: piano, review

March 20, 2014 • 6:47 pm 1

Ménage à froid: Peter Brook’s The Suit

l to r: Nonhlanhla Kheswa, Rikki Henry, Raphaël Chambouvet, and Ivanno Jeremiah, in Peter Brook’s The Suit. Photo: Pascal Victor, ArtcomArt.

“Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time.” — from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space

Brook’s insights into theatrical reality have meanwhile kept the director himself perennially relevant, despite the inevitable backlash and challenge from younger artists who take his innovations for granted. Consider the theatrical reality he creates in The Suit, which just opened at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

With extraordinary economy — and in dramatic contrast to popular culture’s fixation on psychological realism and “virtual reality” — The Suit centers on one of the most paradigmatic of all stories and yet fills it with surprise, sorrow, and revelation. It is the immemorial story of love given and love taken away — the story of jealousy, revenge, and the patterns of cruelty that link our social, political, and private selves.

In other hands, it might be easy to be misled by the brevity and light touch of this play — it lasts a mere 75 minutes or so — into regarding The Suit merely as a sad and wistful tale, or perhaps a rather slight essay in pathos benefiting from the vibrancy of its South African “local color.” A trio of actors and a trio of musicians together recount the story of a young married couple, Matilda (“Tilly”) and Philemon. Soon after Philemon introduces us to his happy life with Tilly, he’s informed by a friend that she’s been cheating on him. He rushes home, discovering the suit left behind by Tilly’s fleeing (and disrobed) lover. As punishment, Philemon insists that she pretend the suit is her lover, in the flesh, and react as she would to a third person who has now settled in with them.

But it would take the theatrical equivalent of tone deafness to remain impervious to the deeper realities sounded in Brook’s remarkably potent blend of narrative, acting, stage movement, and live music. Simplicity, that hallmark of so much great art, becomes all the more effective when allied with this degree of nuance and ambiguity.

Peter Brook. Photo: Colm Hogan

The source of this unforgettable theatrical experience is a story by the tragically short-lived South African journalist and fiction writer Daniel Canodoce “Can” Themba (1924-1968). His short story was posthumously adapted for the famous Market Theatre in early-1990s Johannesburg by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon.

Over the years, Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, his longtime partner, further honed and directed this material in keeping with the aesthetic of Brook’s Paris-based company, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. The show currently on tour across the U.S. represents a more-recent adaptation (in English) of an earlier Brook staging and is receiving its West Coast premiere in Seattle Rep’s presentation.

Themba wrote the The Suit in the 1960s in the wake of the brutal destruction by South Africa’s apartheid government of the black community of Sophiatown. From this thriving though impoverished suburb of Johannesburg, many residents were “resettled” into the sprawling shantytowns of Soweto.

Not that life was easy in 1950s Sophiatown, where one of Themba’s characters recounts a Sunday being denied the right to celebrate with other worshipers by racist church gatekeepers. But it represents a comparative Eden, and this takes on a domestic guise at the beginning of the play in the private idyll as depicted by Philemon (Ivanno Jeremiah). He greets each morning as “a daily matutinal miracle” that reinforces his love for his young wife, Matilda (Nonhlanhla Kheswa).

l to r: Nonhlanhla Kheswa and Ivanno Jeremiah in Peter Brook’s The Suit. Photo: Pascal Victor, ArtcomArt.

Here Brook’s method is already apparent. The most minimal of details — framed by a minimalist set of bright wooden chairs, a table, and rolling clothes racks and Philippe Vialatte’s versatile, effective lighting — evoke a world that is simultaneously specific and timeless. Brook refuses to allow us to settle into the complacent (and apolitical) attitude of abstracted “universality”; at the same time, he has no intention to preach a didactic lesson about oppression whose moral we already know (another form of complacency).

And so one dimension of the scene that Philemon so charmingly lays out for us feels like something between folk and fairy tale. But as The Suit progresses, Brook clarifies the dangers and humiliations of his social milieu. Philemon commutes on a bus to his job as a lawyer’s secretary, meets with one of his friends (Jordan Barbour, in a variety of roles) in a speakeasy, where the government’s increasingly harsh racist policies are discussed. A trio of musicians (guitarist Arthur Astier, keyboardist Mark Christine, and trumpet player Mark Kavuma) provides an ongoing level of commentary with powerful music interludes designed by Franck Krawczyk. On occasion they also play minor roles. The pared-down aesthetic here similarly draws a great deal from the elegantly simple cues of Oria Puppo’s costumes.

By the devastating final tableau, you realize how complex and multilayered are the threads Brook has woven underneath the simple facade of the narrative. There’s a recognition of the recurrent elements of human nature — and yet this story could happen only in the most extreme circumstances of oppression and cruelty.

Jeremiah’s demeanor in his first scenes as Philemon is so disarming we spend the rest of the play trying to square it with the humiliation and psychological pain he’s willing to inflict on his beloved Tilly. Barbour’s depictions of a large cast of characters, from Philemon’s “realistic” friend to a flirtatious townswoman at the play’s climactic party, contain an enthralling study in the art of transition and theatrical timing. But alongside even such excellence, Kheswa’s transformation from a bored, doted-on wife to a woman cornered into hopeless desperation is a rare theatrical achievement in its power to shock and move. The visual of the opening returns full circle, but the light-as-a-feather story with which we began is now freighted with the most intricate emotional counterpoint.

As to the actual score, Krawczyk’s choices and arrangements are uncannily effective. Among the pieces the musicians perform are some Schubert references (his song “Serenade,” intoned by an accordion, and the ominous tread of “Death and the Maiden”), a lovely and lilting Tanzanian song (sung by Kheswa), and a chillingly detached version of “Strange Fruit” (featuring Barbour). At the end Christine softly plays the music of one of the most moving arias from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (given just a few weeks ago by the Seattle Symphony).

What we’re left with are gnawing questions of who is to blame, who could have changed, how could the tragedy which had begun like a comedy have been averted — for in theater, as Brook tells us, the slate is wiped clean all the time.

Just before the performance, Jerry Manning and Benjamin Moore of Seattle Rep and Josh LaBelle of Seattle Theatre Group spoke about their partnership to bring this tour of The Suit to Seattle. I very much share the sense of gratitude they expressed that Seattle was able to host Brook’s The Tragedy of Hamlet back in 2001 — among the most indelible memories of my theater-going life — and that this city is again giving a platform to his work. You really should try to see this one — more than once, if possible.

The Suit runs through Sunday, April 6, at Seattle Rep’s Bagley Wright Theatre. Tickets here.

Filed under: review, theater

March 15, 2014 • 7:40 am Comments Off on A Homecoming and a Debut in Seattle

A Homecoming and a Debut in Seattle

James Ehnes

My latest Seattle Symphony review is now live on Bachtrack:

Not until the morning of the day before their concerts this week with the Seattle Symphony did conductor and soloist meet for the first time, yet the shared sympathy and depth of understanding they together brought to their interpretation of Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto no. 2 made this the richly satisfying highlight of the Seattle Symphony’s program.

continue reading

Filed under: Bartók, James Ehnes, review, Seattle Symphony

March 3, 2014 • 11:11 am 1

The Bach Passions Project in Seattle

Over the weekend, Stephen Stubbs and his Pacific MusicWorks company concluded their ambitious Passions Project with performances of the St. John Passion. The project included partnering with the Seattle Symphony for the St. Matthew Passion the previous weekend. Here’s my review for Bachtrack:

Adducing Simon Schama’s comparison of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross with the same subject as painted by Rembrandt, the conductor and Bach authority John Eliot Gardiner has observed that the differences drawn by the art historian – chiefly, between an emphasis on “action and reaction” in the former and “contemplation and witness” in the latter – might broadly be applied to Bach’s two great Passions as well: St John and St Matthew, respectively. Audiences in Seattle have been provided an opportunity to compare and contrast these unfathomably rich works on the basis of live performances of both, presented over consecutive weekends.

continue reading at Bachtrack

Filed under: Bach, Pacific MusicWorks, review, Seattle Symphony

February 17, 2014 • 12:55 am Comments Off on Taste the Whip: Seattle Rep’s Venus in Fur

Taste the Whip: Seattle Rep’s Venus in Fur

Michael Tisdale and Gillian Williams in Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Venus in Fur; photo by Chris Bennion.

It’s not just the topic of sexual power dynamics combined with S&M role play that makes it seem as if David Ives has taken on something risqué in his Tony-nominated Venus in Fur, which premiered in 2010. He dares a lot formally by writing an evening-length, two-character play set in a drab rehearsal room.

In terms of ambition, he dares even more in his obvious desire to probe the personal politics and psychological complexity of our “theatrical” selves: the rotating, evolving, ever-variable selves we present in our daily encounters.

Seattle Repertory Theatre’s staging — a co-production with Arizona Theatre Company — offers a smart, riveting, often unsettling take on Ives’s much-hyped play. It makes for a largely persuasive theater experience, though without managing to overcome all the dramaturgical stumbling blocks in the script — most of all, the unconvincing swerve that marks the drama’s culmination.

Ives is, to start with, a masterful writer of dialogue, attuned to the ways actors manipulate their subtexts as they monitor and mirror the variabilities of their stage partners. In the ongoing, intermissionless duologue that is the basic structure of Venus in Fur, his two characters assume and cast off multiple identities that continually keep the audience guessing about what the real stakes are.

Venus in Fur starts in quasi-sitcom mode: a frustrated playwright/director, Thomas Novachek, rails against the limitations of the women he’s seen audition for the lead in his new stage adaptation of Venus in Furs, the once-scandalous novella published in 1870 by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (part of the first volume of a large-scale fictional cycle he had planned under the overall title Legacy of Cain).

In blusters Vanda Jordan in a scenery-chewing entrance. She’s an actress who presents herself as desperate for the part — so desperate, she ends up convincing the reluctant Thomas to stay on and see her audition, even though she’s hours late and all the others have already left.

But Ives cleverly uses the familiar patterns of lightweight humor to disarm his audience, to set up expectations that repeatedly trip us up — exactly mirroring the dance of role-playing and sudden change of tack Vanda stage manages vis-a-vis Thomas.

Sibyl Wickersheimer has designed an imposingly affectless rehearsal loft — we’re told it’s been converted from a former sweatshop (its identity around the time Sacher-Masoch’s novella was written) — and tilts it to an angle, adding yet another layer of obliquity. Geoff Korf’s lighting starts with unfriendly late afternoon light and descends into terrifying darkness

Thomas wants to be appreciated for having written what he believes to be an important play — his Fur is a gloss on the “furs” of Sacher-Masoch and the mirror of Titian. He loathes being misunderstood for tackling the trendy “issues” of the day. Vanda pretends to be clueless about his artistic aspirations, describing the novella that’s the basis for his play as “S&M porn” and hastily showing off the up-to-date dominatrix outfit (Harmony Arnold’s witty costume design) that she picked out for her audition.

Titian, Venujs with Mirror, c. 1555 (National Gallery of Art)

Titian, Venus with Mirror, c. 1555 (National Gallery of Art)

Director Shana Cooper sustains the slow burn of tension that underlies the rapidly shifting scenario as Thomas starts to realize Vanda has been dissembling and is intimately familiar with the nuances of Sacher-Masoch. Like a staged Droste effect, ironies begin to proliferate within the play-within-a-play setup. Vanda the over-emoting, stressed-out New Yawk actress suddenly seems to be more authentic when she casts her “real” self aside to play the fictional role of the nineteenth-century, velvet-gown-clad Wanda von Dunajew.

Ives’s play is completely dependent on the effectiveness of his lead actress. Gillian Williams gives an untrammeled and multifaceted performance, toggling back and forth between “acting” and — to the evident unease yet fascination of Thomas — taking over his role as the playwright and director. It’s also an intensely physically aware performance, her shifts in tone mirrored by a virtuosic range of gestures and physical expression.

As Thomas, Michael Tisdale (like Gilliam Williams, making his Seattle Rep debut) doesn’t project the sheer arrogance needed at the beginning to give substance to Vanda’s fury — he’s too fussy — but grows more convincing in the transformation into Sacher-Masoch’s alter ego Severin von Kusiemski, which he willingly undergoes.

Gillian Williams and Michael Tisdale; photo by Chris Bennion.

The real interest of the dramatic arc lies in its unpredictability: shocks of recognition intensify and begin to align Thomas’s script with the power play developing between him and Vanda, but Ives counterpoints this with a movement away from the realism at the start of the play toward an ambivalent surrealism.

And there the chief difficulty lies. As Vanda’s rage gathers righteous feminist force and we’re led to expect a straightforward revenge plot, Ives changes the fundamental tone again — and makes her an archetype, an avatar of the pagan classical world.

But it ends up evoking a bit of old-fashioned stagecraft: a dea ex machina come to deliver a moral lesson for our times. The rattling thunder of a storm raging outside (Robertson Witmer’s atmospheric sound design) isn’t enough to pull off the transformation.

Venus in Fur runs through Sunday, March 9, at Seattle Rep at Seattle Center.

Filed under: review, theater

February 14, 2014 • 2:40 pm Comments Off on Morlot, Seattle Symphony, and Berlioz: An Explosive Match

Morlot, Seattle Symphony, and Berlioz: An Explosive Match

High school students discovering the world of Berlioz at a Seattle Symphony rehearsal

Ludovic Morlot is now back from his winter duties as chief conductor at La Monnaie in Brussels (where he just led performances of Janáček’s Jenůfa). And in its most incandescent moments, last night’s program — his first with the Seattle Symphony following the hiatus — blazed with the impatient passion of lovers meeting after an enforced absence.

The players were champing at the bit to whip up the energy of the brief concert opener, Emmanuel Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque. Despite the nice thematic tie-in of the title, Chabrier’s piano piece felt like a mere diversion from the heart of the matter. The orchestration by the famous fin-de-siècle Wagnerian Felix Mottl layered lavish, high-calorie toppings over Chabrier’s zesty piano piece – frankly, at times, threatening to smother it.

Morlot has a genuine affinity for the music of the Romantics, so there’s a fascinating opportunity in this program to compare his approaches to the subjectivity of Robert Schumann versus Hector Berlioz. The issue of Schumann’s mental illness is by now such a cliche that it was refreshing to encounter a performance so alert to the astonishing mindfulness of his poetic reveries. In other words, what came across in the Cello Concerto wasn’t so much a sequence of “moody,” unsettled and changeable emotions as one lengthily sustained poetic fantasy.

The three chords in the orchestra that launch and unify the piece were shaped with an appropriately evanescent dreaminess, setting the tone for the Concerto’s primarily meditative as opposed to show-offy quality. The soloist, the French cellist Xavier Phillips, was especially memorable in the slow middle section of the three interlocking movements, when his orchestral “doppelgänger” (SSO principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil) engages him in a duet.

Phillips played with an inviting warmth and intimacy well-suited to Schumann’s elaborate lyricism, but the moment when the cello “rouses” the orchestra from the fantasy at the very end of the Concerto sounded underwhelming. Acoustic imbalances with the orchestra — a particular peril of cello concertos, and one reason composers avoided them for so long — were a persistent distraction. Still, there was breathtaking beauty to be enjoyed in Phillips’ sensitive and musically intelligent phrasing.

A good concert then became great in the program’s second half: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, that blockbuster of Romanticism that flips the bird to the conventional polarities of French/German, Classical/Romantic, fact/fiction.

Too often we hear the Symphonie as a manifesto of its moment in time, a “textbook” of Romanticism with the usual checklist — and the result is a performance that sounds like the epitome of a museum piece (in the bad old sense of museums, before the smart ones started updating themselves).

Young Berlioz in 1832, around the time of the Symphonie fantastique ; painting by Émile Signol

Last night it suddenly occurred to me that Morlot’s understanding of Berlioz is of the same category as Leonard Bernstein’s identification with Mahler: apart from all the technical knowledge and even sensibility he brings to Berlioz, it’s as if Morlot internally identifies with this music and so is able to give his interpretations a uniquely compelling stamp.

That’s the only way I could make sense of the 3-D vividness of last night’s performance: colors and textures I’ve never noticed before, for sure, but most of all a sense of what’s at stake with the emotions and obsessions of Berlioz’s score. I found myself grinning with near disbelief at how shocking and still over-the-top parts of it can still sound.

Morlot got the SSO musicians to tap into that sense of conviction. There were memorable achievements from every single section of the orchestra. None of this would have worked without the artistry of Michael Crusoe (timpani), Valerie Muzzolini Gordon (harp), Stefan Farkas (English horn), Christie Reside (flute), Ben Haussman (oboe), Seth Krimsky (bassoon), for example, not to mention the thrilling playing by the strings and brass, particularly in the witches’ “orgy” of the last movement.

This wasn’t the usual colorful story of young Hector going all wild after seeing the actress Harriet Smithson and getting tangled in an insanely obsessive/possessive love attachment – the whole business is really a MacGuffin, anyway — just as it wasn’t the corny 1960s-flavored rethink of an orchestra on an LSD/mushroom/opium-fueled trip.

Morlot understands that Berlioz’s “protagonist” in the Symphonie fantastique is an artist above all else — that the Eros, the drive, the alienation, the hallucinations, all of it, are all components of a universe he imagines into being, not mere triggers of emotions that require expression. And that the entire epic he lays out for us in this score is an “instrumental drama” (the composer’s own phrase) that expertly transforms his musical material to give voice to a radical subjectivity.

I especially like how Morlot refuses to settle for one overall approach — stressing Berlioz’s Classical underpinnings, say, or staying focused on his novel orchestration. He understands the multidimensional character of this score and allows its widely varying facets to come out when they make sense in the dramatic context.

There was a particularly persuasive hint of Beethoven of the Pastoral in the beautifully played woodwind writing of the third movement. (Beethoven cast an enormous shadow over Berlioz at this point in his career.) Some of the “spatial” effects of offstage timpani and shepherd’s pipe anticipate Mahler.

The March to the Scaffold, sardonic as hell, actually helped set the scene for what usually seems an abrupt shift of tone in the Witches’ Sabbath/nightmare finale. And in that fantastic musical phantasmagoria, despite all the humiliations and horrors the protagonist endures, it’s the image of the cocky young artist Berlioz who emerges, dominating and enthralling his audience.

So what is it with Berlioz and obnoxiously intrusive noise in Benaroya? Two years ago, smack in the middle of one of my favorite Morlot performances to date — Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust — a patron’s alarm actually forced the music to a halt for several minutes. Last night someone spoiled the carefully built-up atmosphere by ringing heedlessly away, audible at a good distance. Now that should be a damnable offence.

There’s one more chance to hear this program: Saturday night at 8:00 pm at Benaroya Hall.

Filed under: Berlioz, review, Seattle Symphony

January 31, 2014 • 3:46 pm 1

Shostakovich Meets John Adams at Seattle Symphony

Estonian conductor Olari Elts

I realize it’s hard to believe, but this weekend in Seattle actually includes some worthwhile activities not related to (or even conflicting with) monitoring the Super Bowl. To wit: the latest music-making by the Seattle Symphony, either in the condensed “untuxed” version this evening or on Saturday 1 February in the complete program designed by guest conductor Olari Elts.

And a damn fine program this is, featuring a combo that might at first seem a bit unusual but that actually makes a lot of sense: Dmitri Shostakovich and John Adams. I’ve grown tired of the hyperbole that compares the pressure to conform to serialism in the West during the postwar decades to the Soviet Union’s cultural watchdogs — it’s insulting, to say the least, to equate whatever American composers who chose not to adhere to the predominant fashion had to face with the year-to-year dread about their very survival that was the experience of Shostakovich and his peers.

Still, there are some valid parallels: composers on other side of the Iron Curtain had to deal with implicit or explicit guidelines as to what was considered the “proper” music to be writing — guidelines that were diametrically directed, as it happened, toward populism in the East and “elitism” in the West. Both Shostakovich and John Adams in his early breakthrough years discovered ways to navigate the fault lines between these putatively incompatible realms, exploring new imaginative possibilities that could balance complexity with accessibility, experimental vigor with a recognizable and rooted vernacular.

Olari Elts, a native of Tallinn, Estonia, as well as this week’s guest soloist, the Moscow-educated Alexander Melnikov, were both teenagers during the waning years of the Soviet Union. So, while still relatively young, they bring a perspective that hasn’t yet forgotten how a composer like Shostakovich could manipulate expectations to write music whose meanings are more ambivalent than what seems on the surface to be the case.

Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov

And bravo to both for selecting the lesser-known Second Piano Concerto, a later work Shostakovich wrote for his son Maxim to premiere at his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory. Melnikov, in what I believe marks his Seattle debut, revealed why he’s regarded as a leading Shostakovich specialist — his recording of the complete Preludes and Fugues has been heaped with awards — and used his impressive technical precision to make eminent musical sense.

The Second Piano Concerto is a most unusual Shostakovich score — almost neoclassical in sensibility, but without the sense of parody that often goes along with that (especially in Prokofiev), and certainly lacking the ironic air you’d expect from Shostakovich himself. At the same time, it’s not entirely innocent or naive. That hard-to-define zone in between is what emerged from Melnikov’s performance.

He managed to articulate the straitjacketed, percussive metrics of the first movement’s big solo as a joyful romp, discovering a sense of freedom amid its strictly regimented confines. Especially memorable was his dialogue with the SSO strings in the Andante, paced here like a Chopin nocturne. Wistful without giving in to sentimentality, this builds into some of the tenderest moments to be found in Shostakovich — as if he were conjuring in music a hoped-for but knowingly unrealistic future for his son.

Returning after his SSO debut two years ago, Elts maintains a serious podium demeanor but conjures a sensuous and scintillating palette from the players, as his take on Adams’s The Chairman Dances at the top of the program revealed. (Was Daniel Licht listening closely to the woozy middle section when he wrote the theme music for Dexter?) A bit foursquare in his overall approach to the score’s intricate cross-rhythms, Elts was more spontaneous with the beguiling sound picture of this Nixon in China-vintage music.

He similarly showcased Adams’s masterful orchestral thinking in The Black Gondola a late-period, experimental piano score by Franz Liszt which Adams orchestrated in 1989: so many shades of dark, drawing the listener into a black hole of melancholy.

With The Black Gondola as its prelude, Elts apparently also wanted to signal that there’s a good deal more to the Symphony No. 9 by Shostakovich than its allegedly “cheerful” character. He then led a riveting account eager to plunge into the enigmas posed by this compact score, not smooth them over — or explain them away as defensive irony.

A kind of “revocation” of Beethoven’s affirmative Ninth (if not in the spirit of Thomas Mann’s protagonist composer in Doktor Faustus), Shostakovich’s No. 9 caps his epic “wartime symphonies” with a tightly condensed, often lightly textured work that makes for a fascinating contrast with the completely different “lightness” of the Second Piano Concerto.

The performance features some first-rate solo playing by bassoonist Seth Krimsky and flutist Christie Reside as well as Ko-ichiro Yamamoto on trombone and David Gordon on trumpet. Elts brings out the inner logic that connects Shostakovich’s elliptical thinking, above all in the almost cinematic dissolves of the last three movements. It’s rare to find yourself so pleased by being teased and puzzled.

Filed under: concert programming, review, Seattle Symphony

January 16, 2014 • 3:02 pm Comments Off on Garrick Ohlsson’s Seattle Recital

Garrick Ohlsson’s Seattle Recital

My ears and nerves are still buzzing from the excitement of last night’s recital by the always-dependable Garrick Ohlsson (at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall). What generous programs he offers: Beethoven’s Op. 109 Sonata, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (D760), a triptych of selections by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata in B minor. And as if that weren’t enough, two superbly characterized Chopin waltzes for encores: the Op. 18 Grand Valse Brillante and the Waltz in C-sharp minor (Op. 64, no. 2).

I tend to think of Ohlsson as one of today’s least pretentious and fussy pianists, an artist to be counted on to give performances that are filling and satisfying. Of course that’s possible only because of his utterly confident technique — that left hand! — and his deep knowledge and love of the repertoire. What seems at times to be a “straightforward” approach turns out to reveal subtle insights. In the miracle of late Beethoven, for instance, he was able to explore different facets of the last movement’s variations (the new angle on the ultra-minimal two-note motif over which Beethoven obsesses in the first movement) without seeming to short-shrift the larger architecture beauty.

The Schubert Fantasy emerged as it should: a virtuoso showpiece on the surface, sure, but far more exhilarating for its sheer scope of invention and the pleasure Schubert takes in the powers of transformation of a basic idea. Ohlsson left no doubt as to why the next generation of Romantics fell so deeply in love with this spectacular but anomalous example of Schubertian ambition.

The Chopin Sonata may have been the most satisfying interpretation among these three well-known works. What struck me as especially successful was Ohlsson’s understanding of Chopin’s rhythmic articulation, both in his swooningly beautiful skeins of melody and in the robust, hell-bent momentum of the finale. But this didn’t come across as an affected exaggeration, or at the expense of those other aspects essential to this magnificent score. The whole picture is always in view – it’s just that it resembles getting a higher resolution, more dpi for clarity and detail.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920)

And then there were the pieces by the early-twentieth-century American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Two of the Roman Sketches, Op. 7, from 1916 (“The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” and “The White Peacock”) and the Scherzo from his Op. 6 Fantasy Pieces (1913). I found these to be an utterly delightful discovery. Hints of Griffes’s infatuation with then-new French music abound, but there’s something fresh about it all. The killer-energy Scherzo made for a nice cross-link with the Schubert.

Ohlsson recently released a recording devoted to this fascinating artist who died very young, a victim of the influenza pandemic. A gay man from Elmira, New York, Griffes was still of the generation when studying abroad was the done thing to gain any cred as a “classical music” composer.

Here’s what Aaron Copland had to say about this predecessor (in 1952, 32 years after Griffes’s death):

Charles Griffes is a name that deserves to be remembered … What he gave those of us who came after
him was a sense of the adventurous in composition, of being thoroughly alive to the newest trends in
world music and to the stimulus that might have derived from that contact.

Filed under: Beethoven, piano, review, Schubert

January 13, 2014 • 2:31 pm 4

The Cursed Clown Returns: Seattle Opera’s Rigoletto

Rigoletto (Marco Vratogna) at work in the court; photo by Elise Bakketun

It’s no surprise that general director Speight Jenkins opted to reprise Seattle Opera’s production of Rigoletto, staged by the American director Linda Brovsky, for his farewell season (which also coincides with the company’s 50th anniversary). Introduced a decade ago, this Rigoletto is of fine vintage and remains hands-down the most satisfying Verdi production I’ve seen at Seattle Opera (a close tie being the Falstaff directed by Peter Kazaras).

Seattle can hardly be called a Mecca for Regie opera in the usual sense in which that term is bandied about. But that doesn’t mean it’s a haven for boringly conservative “traditional” stagings. The company actually is director-centric in that it places a high premium on theatrical values: it prizes directors who can contribute a sensitively close reading so that musical and dramatic meanings enhance each other. (Jenkins is, after all, a Wagnerian, and a good deal of the success of Seattle’s Ring has hinged on director Stephen Wadsworth’s ability to do just that.)

Rigoletto is certainly an opera amenable to directorial transposition, and the concept applied by Brovsky and the design team is to set the swiftly moving plot in the lurid “court” of a Benito Mussolini-like duce in the 1930s, at the height of Italian fascism. Rigoletto serves as a kind of spy who can feed him information and of course also as his procurer. The decadence of the duce/Duke of Mantua and his cronies turns out to be an expression of their unchecked power — the way they “loosen up” when not arrogantly terrorizing the citizens into submission.

Marco Vratogna as Rigoletto, Nadine Sierra as Gilda, Sarah Larsen as Maddalena and Francesco Demuro as the Duke of Mantua; photo by Elise Bakketun

l to r: Marco Vratogna (Rigoletto), Nadine Sierra (Gilda), Sarah Larsen (Maddalena), Francesco Demuro (Duke of Mantua); photo by Elise Bakketun

Robert Dahlstrom’s sets and Thomas C. Hase’s lighting dramatically contrast the two poles of Rigoletto‘s world. The palace, thrumming with lust, is sleekly decked out with the spoils of art (a version of Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina sculpture serves as a prop littered with dirty champagne glasses), while the dimly lit, claustrophobic backstreets where the jester lives with his daughter Gilda are creeping with menace, an underworld that mirrors the cynical brutality of the rulers — only without their stylish veneer and classical trappings. The scenery of the last act, with its storm-swept cityscape across a river, is especially evocative. Marie Anne Chiment’s elegant gowns and chic suits make exceptionally eye-catching costumes.

All this provides more than a mere backdrop against which the familiar melodrama plays out. By anchoring what otherwise might seem a far-fetched series of unfortunate coincidences in a repulsive political and moral order, the fascist setting pushes buttons. When the nobleman Monterone reproaches the Duke for “seducing” his daughter — it’s clear that she’s been traumatized — Brovsky shows the old man wearing a yarmulke and dragged off to prison on the Duke’s orders: a voice of protest silenced by anti-Semitic thuggery. (Could this explain the family secrets Rigoletto keeps hidden from Gilda, including the mystery of her mother?)

Rigoletto will find himself in the same position as Monterone when he mourns the ruin of Gilda. The opera’s denouement is fueled by the jester’s plan for vengeance, his realistic version of the curse pronounced by Monterone. Marco Vratogna portrays an uncommonly sympathetic Rigoletto, making for a harrowing final scene. The problem is that he’s essentially too “nice” for the production’s milieu — particularly in the opera’s opening scene, where Verdi shows his cynical persona at work. The less-than-imposing curse delivered by Donovan Singletary’s Monterone should be the climactic focus of the scene, but the jester’s reaction barely registers.

Vratogna’s baritone admirably balances sturdiness and lyricism — it can be thrilling in a cabaletta wrap-up — but on opening night didn’t display the variety of colors essential to making this character vivid. You need to experience Rigoletto’s jabbing viciousness for his final sorrow to earn its full impact. Vratogna’s pivotal second-act solo lacked the differentiated phrasing Verdi calls for when Rigoletto, accustomed to his role as a performer, at last gives vent to his rage but then quickly changes tack to plead for his daughter.

Francesco Demuro as the playboy Duke; photo by Elise Bakketun

A similar drawback applies to Francesco Demuro’s depiction of the Duke. A lyric tenor with a gorgeous command of legato, Demuro brings out the careless playboy side of the role quite convincingly. It’s just that he’s too suave, too effortlessly mellifluous to generate the effect of a feared, ruthless leader. In fact, the emotional depth Demuro gave to his richly sung “Ella fu mi rapita!” scene (the Duke’s most interesting solo and the one eclipsed by the popularity of his other two famous numbers) ends up jarring against the rest of his characterization. The Duke’s moment of interiority of course goes nowhere — and that’s one dramaturgical lapse Brovsky’s smart production doesn’t solve.

On the other hand, the really, really dark side of this Rigoletto is supplied in spades by Andrea Silvestrelli as the assassin-for-hire Sparafucile. His bass sounds as fathomless as an unlit, echoing cave, and Silvestrelli telegraphs noirish menace with just a flick and boot crush of his cigarette. As his sister and partner-in-crime Maddalena, Sarah Larsen channels a touch of Carmen, working out an entire character transformation in the course of her one scene.

Andrea Silvestrelli (Sparafucile); photo by Elise Bakketun

But no one else matched the art of transition displayed by American soprano Nadine Sierra, making her Seattle Opera debut as Gilda. It’s not hard to discern what wowed the judges when they chose her as the youngest-ever winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Councils a few years ago. Sierra — and you’ll most definitely want to pay attention to her name — has an alluring, immediately identifiable voice that encompasses dark-hued deep notes as well as spectacularly spun, floating light notes at the very top of her range.

And that’s only a starting point for Sierra: her remarkable control allows her to venture an exciting variety in her phrasing. Her characterization complements this vocal richness: Sierra shows Gilda not as the innocent “tabula rasa” we usually see at first but as a loving daughter who already has desires of her own. The pain of her humiliation in the second act is so palpable it’s hard to watch. And her Gilda’s persistent attachment to the Duke isn’t a sentimental weakness but a desperate attempt to salvage some kind of meaning within the opera’s heartless environment. An especially effective touch is the shudder of terror she reveals even after she’s resolved to sacrifice herself.

Nadine Sierra; photo by Elise Bakketun

Another indispensable contribution is made by conductor Riccardo Frizza, doing the best work I’ve heard from him. The orchestra itself wasn’t on quite the same level on opening night, and some sloppy intonation crept into the mix, but the musicians are clearly responsive to the conductor’s reading of the score. Frizza understands that these immortal melodies get their punch precisely from the contexts Verdi creates. As a milestone experiment on the way toward the mature Verdi, Rigoletto is all about restyling the conventions of Italian opera within a context of breathless, dramatically compelling momentum.

Frizza was able to stretch a phrase here and there, effortlessly accommodating the singers, but all the while maintaining the needed tension. He also has a terrific ear for the telling, sometimes ironic details Verdi uses to punctuate the lyrical flow. The first scene especially benefited from a snarling energy that supplied in sound what the staging meant to evoke. The chorus (prepared by John Keene) also used details to excellent effect in the two palace scenes, hinting at a whole spectrum of implicit back stories for the audience’s imagination to supply.

One especially memorable detail from Brovsky: her treatment of “La donna è mobile,” the opera’s most-famous (and ironic) number, as a kind of prop. Here it’s a pop hit that obviously gets a lot of play on the state radio. We hear it (i.e., the orchestra’s preliminaries) as the Duke tunes in the radio while he’s out slumming for sex, prompting him to sing it himself. It’s when Rigoletto hears the Duke’s version again, after his presumed stabbing, that the corpse’s identity becomes a chilling question.

Brovsky’s conceit is right in keeping with Verdi’s own “high concept” interpolation of the tune, which refuses the expected cadence but has the melody fade away. Verdi begins the tune with a false start, and it never really ends — the Duke is left unscathed, ready for his next conquest, leaving us with a catchy tune. Fascism, as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, is the “aestheticization of politics.”

Seattle Opera’s production of Rigoletto runs through January 25. Tickets available here.

Filed under: review, Seattle Opera, Verdi

December 30, 2013 • 4:46 pm Comments Off on CD Review: Hochman/Homage to Schubert

CD Review: Hochman/Homage to Schubert

Benjamin Hochman; photo by Jürgen Frank

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of encountering Benjamin Hochman in live performance, but I come away from his new release, Homage to Schubert, with a remarkably vivid sense of what he brings to the competitive scene of today’s young pianists. This is his second solo album and debut recording for the AVIE label, and it amply reveals Hochman’s qualities as an interpreter as well as the creative and original programming style that appears to be a signature.

A native of Jerusalem now based in New York, Hochman counts Claude Frank and Richard Goode among his mentors. He made his New York debut in 2006 with a Met Museum recital juxtaposing Bach, Berg, Schubert, and a newly commissioned piece. A similar imaginative leap ties together his program here: two lesser-known Schubert sonatas and a pair of contemporary pieces “commenting” on the Austrian’s legacy — by György Kurtág (Hommage à Schubert) and Jörg Widmann (Idyll und Abgrund), respectively. Hochman performs on a Steinway and benefits from the tasteful production and engineering (Eric Wen and Dennis Patterson).

Of course there’s lots of powerful competition even when it comes to these less-familiar Schubert sonatas. Paul Lewis, the spiritual scion of Alfred Brendel, has recently staked an irresistible claim to this territory, and Mitsuko Uchida is another eloquent advocate. (She also began linking Schubert’s piano music with Schoenberg back in the ’90s.) A fundamental attraction of Hochman is that he allies a natural sympathy for Schubert’s brand of musical thinking with superbly balanced technique, all the while effacing any temptation to showboat or force a newfangled reading onto these scores.

In other words, Hochman’s overall stance toward Schubert himself is pretty traditional, while smartly allowing the “moderns” sharing his program to provide a contemporary angle. It’s a daring and subtle strategy, and one that rewards the listener. Which is by no means to imply that there’s anything even remotely stodgy or routine here: Hochman initiates the proceedings with the gorgeously spun lyrical flow of the Sonata in A major D664 (from 1819), his control of the pulse so mesmerizing that it seems as if this music has always been going on — a stream we’ve been graced to chance upon.

Hochman is fully alert to the potential of Schubert’s wild contrasts. That’s the premise, after all, of pairing the gentle, smaller-scale A major with the hugely ambitious and even aggressive Sonata in D major D850 (the so-called “Gasteiner,” after the spa town where it was written in 1825, the year Schubert sketched most of the “Great” C major Symphony). Yet Hochman doesn’t overload these contrasts with melodrama, but lets the few outbursts in D664 take us by surprise within the larger context.

At several points I could almost imagine D664 versus the “Gasteiner” as a precursor for Schumann’s Eusebius (especially in the melancholy appoggiaturas of D664’s Andante) and Florestan dichotomy. But what excites me the most about Hochman’s deeply satisfying approach to D850 is his implicit understanding of the Schubert-Beethoven connection. By this point, Schubert’s acquired admiration of the German composer had begun inspiring a new level of ambition (he was a Beethovenian convert).

Hochman seems to hint at the uncanny echoes of late Beethoven, as in the “Gasteiner”‘s widely wandering second movement, where one passage of reiterated chords suddenly approaches the radiance of the Arietta in Beethoven’s Op. 111. But he avoids any impression of Schubert as an imitator or epigone: these moments occur as genuine Schubertian epiphanies within a remarkably different musical landscape.

Between Schubert and Beethoven, there is an almost diametrically opposed sense of drama, as Hochman points out in his excellent booklet essay, alluding to Brendel’s famous image of Schubert “the sleepwalker” in contrast to Beethoven “the architect.” That groping around unforeseen corners to alight on a new vista that is so characteristic of Schubert is especially apparent in the weirdly mercurial variants of the finale’s rondo theme as Hochman performs it.

As for the contemporary homages, Hochman has chosen two utterly distinct ways of thinking about Schubert. Kurtág’s lapidary piece (lasting about a minute) distills the contradictory ingredients that make up Schubert into an intense poetic reverie — a musical life that flashes before our ears.

The German composer Widmann — who is just 7 years older than Hochman — has meanwhile written a miniature suite of “six Schubert reminiscences” in Idyll and Abyss (originally conceived as a companion work to the great final B-flat Sonata D960). Teasing direct references to cadences and phrases slip a reflective scrim over the distance between Schubert and us. Alternately playful and disturbing, Widmann’s suite rudely juxtaposes the many sides of Schubert’s personality, purposely emphasizing the paradoxical nature of a genius that encompassed sweet melody, leisured reflection, and savagely violent outbursts. Widmann and Hochman leave it up to the listener to put the pieces together.

Filed under: CD review, new music, review, Schubert

« Previous Next »

MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Richard Goode Vibrations

Ménage à froid: Peter Brook’s The Suit

A Homecoming and a Debut in Seattle

The Bach Passions Project in Seattle

Taste the Whip: Seattle Rep’s Venus in Fur

Morlot, Seattle Symphony, and Berlioz: An Explosive Match

Shostakovich Meets John Adams at Seattle Symphony

Garrick Ohlsson’s Seattle Recital

The Cursed Clown Returns: Seattle Opera’s Rigoletto

CD Review: Hochman/Homage to Schubert

Pages

Archive

Follow Blog via Email

Arts & Culture Stories from NPR

Blogroll