September 17, 2016 • 8:22 am Comments Off on John Adams in Berlin
John Adams has just started his season as artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic — with a program in which he also makes his debut conducting the Berliners.
BP’s Digital Concert Hall will live stream tonight’s performance (19:00 Berlin time). My essay for the Berlin Philharmonic program is available on the labeled tab here.
Filed under: Berlin Philharmonic, John Adams
September 16, 2016 • 9:46 pm Comments Off on RIP Edward Albee (1928-2016)
Another great artist of our time is gone. From the New York Times obituary:
“All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done, as opposed to things done,” he said in the 1991 Times interview. “I find most people spend too much time living as if they’re never going to die.”
Jeff Lunden for NPR:
“You know, if anybody wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about: They’re about the nature of identity,” he said. “Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how we permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity.”
From Playbill:
His home in Manhattan was in a loft in a former egg warehouse in TriBeCa, which he bought long before the neighborhood became trendy. Always interested in art, he filled it with large African and pre-Columbian sculpture and abstract paintings.
Several years ago, before undergoing extensive surgery, Mr. Albee penned the following note to be issued at the time of his death: “To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.”
Filed under: Edward Albee, theater
September 14, 2016 • 8:28 pm 1
Tomorrow’s sold-out concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre opens the season with a focus on Steve Reich.
The program includes two somewhat lesser-known works, both variations: Daniel Variations and You Are (Variations). Here is the program essay I wrote for the Miller Theatre:
“The function of music is to refresh the spirit and stimulate the mind.” Alluding to J.S. Bach’s title page to the third part of his Clavierübung, Steve Reich once contributed this response to a question about the function of contemporary music.
Filed under: essay, Steve Reich, Uncategorized
September 12, 2016 • 12:27 am Comments Off on Singing Archeology
That’s the term one of Philip Glass’s collaborators, Shalom Goldman, famously applied to the idea of transforming texts from ancient artifacts into the libretto for Akhnaten. Glass worked with Goldman and a handful of others to craft the libretto for this third in his trilogy of “portrait operas” including Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha.
I’m completely spellbound studying this work now ahead of the Los Angeles Opera production directed by Phelim McDermott and starring Anthony Roth Costanzo (which premiered to ecstatic reviews last spring at ENO).
Glass stated that he was drawn to these iconic figures as “people who changed the world through the power of ideas rather than through the force of arms.” Recalls Glass:
I came across a work by [Immanuel Velikovsky] that was new to m: “Oedipus and Akhnaten.” It is a concise and scholarly work in which Velikovsky attempts to trace the origin of the Oedipus legend to the period of Akhnaten, the 18th-Dynasty Egyptian pharaoh who, in modern times, is looked upon as the first monotheist. Like everything else about Akhnaten, though, this one-word description hides more than it reveals.
Filed under: Los Angeles Opera, Philip Glass
September 10, 2016 • 11:00 am Comments Off on New Season, New Intendant at Luzerner Theater
Luzerner Theater transformed into a space inspired by Shakespeare’s Globe: iamge by David Röthlisberger
Lucerne Festival isn’t the only arts organization to have introduced major leadership changes this year: down the Bahnhofstrasse from the KKL and the train station, the 39-year-old Peter von Benedikt has just begun his tenure as new Intendant of the Luzerner Theater (aka Stadttheater Luzern).
The original 19th-century institution opened in 1839 with (what else?) Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. The Luzerner Theater now ranks as the oldest still-operating repertory theaterin Switzerland (offering a varied season of opera, ballet, plays, etc.).
After being gutted by a fire in 1924, the theater reopened in 1929; it has been renovated since — including in a recent rethink for von Benedikt’s first season. Among his plans are experimentation with new spaces, new reconfigurations of the theater.
The native Kölner von Benedikt arrives with impressive credentials and has a notable passion for opera. He was part of the directing team for the world premiere of Péter Eötvös’ operatic treatment of Angels in America, and in 2011 he won the Deutscher Theaterpreis Der Faust as best director in the music theater category for his staging of Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960.
Nono was von Benedikt’s choice as well to open his first season with a new production of the Italian composer’s Prometeo: A Tragedy of Listening from 1984 — talk about challenging your audience!
The choice is also unusual in terms of the relatively small space (400-plus seats) for a work that’s encountered (when it is encountered live) mostly in concert halls. For this production von Benedikt had the theater reorganized to mimic the multi-level Globe theater of Shakespeare’s day — and to encourage an intimate, “egalitarian” experience of Nono’s remarkable, one-of-a-kind music theater.
More from the company’s description:
Die Komposition handelt zwar von Prometheus, der aber nicht als Figur, sondern als Prinzip vertreten ist. Nono setzt dem Vorwärtsstreben, der Fortschrittsgläubigkeit desjenigen, der in der Mythologie den Menschen das Feuer bringt, das Langsame, Leise, das Unspektakuläre entgegen.
Nono und sein Librettist Cacciari benutzen Texte von u.a. Aischylos, Rilke oder Benjamin, die jedoch nur fragmentiert und in verschiedenen Sprachen präsentiert werden. Man soll sie nicht verstehen, sondern ihr Inhalt bildet den Hintergrund für etwas, was wir erahnen, erspüren mögen.
Sie umkreisen auf höchst abstrakte, dichterische Weise Fragen wie: Wie autonom ist der Mensch? Oder aus der Sicht der Antike formuliert: Wie ist das Verhältnis von den Götter und den Menschen. Was ist Bestimmung, was Schicksal, haben wir aus der Geschichte gelernt, gibt es im 20. Jahrhundert noch Utopien oder leben wir in einer Zeit, in der die Hoffnung auf Veränderung erloschen ist.
Filed under: theater
September 7, 2016 • 5:51 pm 1
This coming weekend brings the close of the Summer Festival in Lucerne. Along with the usual Stendhal Syndrome-inducing concentration of great artists and great art, the 2016 edition introduced two major changes — if not exactly paradigm shifts — to Lucerne Festival’s organization and overall character: the inauguration of Riccardo Chailly as new Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, succeeding the late Claudio Abbado, and, in the wake of Pierre Boulez’s death, the first Lucerne Festival Academy under new leadership, with Wolgang Rihm as Artistic Director and Matthias Pintscher as Principal Conductor.
Michael Cooper reports in The New York Times on how the Lucerne Festival is “reinventing itself”:
But behind the scenes, the Lucerne Festival, an increasingly important part of the classical music ecosystem, was being forced to reinvent itself. Within the past couple of years, the festival has lost not one, but both of its guiding artistic lights: Mr. Abbado died in 2014 at 80, and Mr. Boulez this year at 90. Their losses pose a challenge at a moment when Europe’s leading summer festivals hotly compete for artists, audiences and prestige.
Cooper also wrote about the 2016 Lucerne Festival theme of women in music, interviewing four of the eleven female conductors who appeared on the podium there this summer: Barbara Hannigan, Marin Alsop, Susanne Mälkki, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.
And here’s a European perspective from one of the German-speaking world’s major music critics, Christian Wildhagen (who wrote his dissertation on Mahler 8, the work with which Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra opened the festival last month):
Niemand sei «in der Gewalt seelenvollster, rauschendster, visionärster Musik dem Himmel näher getragen worden» als Mahler, schwärmte Ernst Bloch in seinem Buch «Geist der Utopie». Eine Aufführung der 8.Sinfonie wäre indes nicht komplett, wenn auf diesem Weg nicht auch ein paar Unzulänglichkeiten Ereignis würden.
Filed under: conductors, Lucerne Festival, music news
September 6, 2016 • 7:17 pm Comments Off on Cells of Life
Charles Jencks’s incandescent mounds at Jupiter Artland.
Filed under: art, photography
September 5, 2016 • 4:48 am 1
I was very fortunate finally to have a chance to catch up with Thomas Ostermeier’s acclaimed production of Richard III the Schaubühne — not in Berlin, but at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Much has been made of Ostermeier’s highly original direction as a saturated, intensified portrait — a Machiavellian mirror — of the title anti-hero. That of course has been facilitated by the exciting, controversial translation/adaptation/condensation of the German text prepared by company dramaturg Marius von Mayenburg.
One of the most brilliantly effective choices — apparently a spontaneous decision arrived at during the course of rehearsal, according to Ostermeier — was to streamline the litany of climactic battles into a sequence of Richard fighting with himself, up to his inglorious demise.
This portrait approach was also made possible only through the weird, cultish charisma and electrifying stage presence of Lars Eidinger as a maniac-depressively embittered Richard. Not an “evil” character, according to Ostermeier, so much as one who makes the workings of power and its aggrandizement theatrically transparent, naked.
“The play is not about evil as such,” says Ostermeier, “but about participation in power, the exclusion of an outsider and the manipulation of others’ antipathies. In this respect it does have significant political implications.”
Eidinger’s matchless account requires intense physical acting, stamina, singing, and clownish, stand-up improv with the audience — the humor was particularly well-pointed, not a cop out (with a delightful exchange accusing a prematurely exiting patron of being rude when he claimed he was heading “to the toilet”).
But that’s not to shortchange the contributions of the rest of a stupendous ensemble cast. Percussionist Nils Ostendorf contributed an excellent, live-wire score, which interpolated some fascinating touches (like an intensely repeated loop that segued in and out of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”).
Filed under: directors, Schaubühne, Shakespeare
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
