MEMETERIA by Thomas May

October 6, 2015 • 9:01 am Comments Off on Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Risk Traditional Rep

Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Risk Traditional Rep

My latest review of Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony is now live on Musical America (behind a paywall).

Here I cover the first two programs of the season that recently began (Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and Mahler 1 in the first, Strauss’s Don Quixtore and Brahms’s Third Symphony in the second):

Now in his fifth season as the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Ludovic Morlot has hit a sweet spot. The momentum he initially brought to the SSO has not slackened…

continue reading on Musical America (behind paywall)

Filed under: conductors, Ludovic Morlot, review, Seattle Symphony

October 4, 2015 • 9:37 am Comments Off on A View from the Bridge at Seattle Rep

A View from the Bridge at Seattle Rep

Seeing the excellent production of A View from the Bridge currently running at Seattle Rep, I was reminded of Arthur Miller’s genius for distilling his themes and situations into pared-down forms that are unrelentingly direct.

But the straightforwardness is deceptively simple: Miller’s plays make their stunning impact with the resonance of myth and archetype. Seattle Rep’s production certainly delivers that one-two punch: directed by Braden Abraham, the pacing is as tightly wound as the boxing lesson Eddie Carbone gives Rodolpho. (It’s fascinating to contrast Miller’s emulation of Greek tragedy with that of Eugene O’Neill or of his contemporary Tennessee Williams.)

Mark Zeisler’s gruff but not uncharming Eddie sounded the right note of insecurity that is the character’s fatal flaw (a bit overdetermined, perhaps, in Miller’s hint of a homoerotic attraction to Rodolpho in addition to Eddie’s jealousy over his niece Catherine — but Zeisler downplays the former in any case).

In much of the first act (does anyone perform the original free-verse one-act version anymore?) it seemed some of the audience wanted to defang what was making them uncomfortable about Eddie by trying to view the play as a comedy — Eddie as an Archie Bunker type they could easily mock. But Miller is no sit-com, and fortunately the isolated outbursts of giggles and snickering soon died out.

Amy Danneker makes a compellingly conflicted Catherine, gradually finding her way toward self-determination, with prodding from her Aunt Bea (played with great sympathy by Kristen Potter). Frank Boyd brings an interesting mix of passion, goofiness, and naivete, to Rodolpho. As his brother Marco — and fellow “submarine” (hidden illegal immigrant), Brandon O’Neill hides his simmering desperation uncomfortably until it inevitably comes to a boil at the play’s climax.

Leonard Kelly-Young is all gruff 1950s noir as the lawyer Alfieri, Miller’s take on the ancient chorus. Yet his final speech, about “settling for half,” delivers possibly the play’s most searing moment: “And so I mourn him — I admit it — with a certain…alarm.”

But back to the mythic/archetypal aspect of Miller’s dramaturgy. At the same time, View is deeply rooted in its 1950s setting, politically, socially, culturally. This fusion of place and realism with the archetypal reminded me of Edward Hopper, as did the superb work of the design team: Scott Bradley’s sets, Rose Pederson’s costumes, Geoff Korf’s lighting.

And that combination of realism and archetypes of course brings to mind the verismo aesthetic. So it’s no surprise View has been made into an opera (in fact, more than once): most famously, into a work of American verismo by William Bolcom.

One of the several reasons André Previn’s opera A Streetcar Named Desire is so unsatisfying, in my opinion, is the superfluous prospect of translating Tennessee Williams’s theater, inextricable from his language, to this medium. But Miller offers a composer more genuinely operatic possibilities.

Reviewing Lyric Opera of Chicago’s world premiere production of the Bolcom opera in 1999, the critic Philip Kennicott makes some thought-provoking observations:

If you believe what seems to be a growing consensus in American opera–that pursuing stylistic and dramatic originality is a dead end–then this can be judged a truly great American opera. Bolcom mixes it up–barbershop quartets, jazz, Broadway flourishes and Puccini–creating an unapologetic and dizzying stylistic mix. Had this opera been written while Bernstein was at his peak, reviewers would have proclaimed a new genius to rival the master.

If you believe that new opera need offer only a good evening of musical entertainment, stylistic and musical originality be damned, then Bolcom’s opera will seem like a mongrelized family portrait of the last century of operatic history.

[…]

Bolcom … seems to argue that this opera isn’t just more mix-it-up postmodernism but a genuine American verismo work that just happens to have been written in 1999 (and is meant to sound like 1955).

I expect that many listeners will have exactly the same reaction to this paradox of late-20th-century opera–is it really indistinguishable from the music theater we love from an earlier era?–as I did. They will enjoy it yet question the artistic integrity behind it.

Nonetheless, Bolcom’s new work has a feeling of tragic grandeur to it, and the Lyric Opera production spares no effort to underscore it.

Filed under: Arthur Miller, opera, review, theater

October 2, 2015 • 3:31 pm Comments Off on Brian Friel RIP

Brian Friel RIP

Filed under: playwrights

October 1, 2015 • 7:42 am Comments Off on András Schiff on Bach

András Schiff on Bach

“Each day when I get up (and if there’s a piano) I have to play Bach for an hour. That’s how my day begins.”

Filed under: Bach, pianists

September 29, 2015 • 1:13 am Comments Off on Remembering Auden

Remembering Auden

W.H. Auden died on this day in 1973 in Vienna. And just in time to mark the great poet’s legacy: Edward Mendelson’s splendidly edited series of Auden’s complete prose writings has been completed with volumes V and VI.

“This is what scholarly publishing is meant to be,” writes the critic Michael Dirda. His review continues:

Over the years I’ve collected Auden’s books — both his own and the works he edited — and so I feel reasonably familiar with his writing. But there’s much here I’d never seen before. At the same time, these pages refresh our appreciation of, say, the poet’s introduction to Anne Fremantle’s “The Protestant Mystics” or to his own selection of Dryden’s verse by showing them as products of a busy professional life.

Moreover, Mendelson’s notes and appendices contribute illuminating, and sometimes amusing, extra-textual detail….

[E]verything [Auden] says about poetry is sharp and authoritative: “In judging a poem, one looks for two things: craftsmanship — it should be a well-made verbal object; and uniqueness of perspective — nobody but the author could have written it.”

Filed under: anniversary, Auden, poetry

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September 28, 2015 • 11:54 pm Comments Off on Crow Pose

Crow Pose

Filed under: photography

September 27, 2015 • 9:00 am 2

Shakespeare in “Translation”

Stop right there: “Most educated people are uncomfortable admitting that Shakespeare’s language often feels more medicinal than enlightening.”

This absurd claim (“medicinal”??) is just one of the hopelessly faulty assumptions in John H. McWhorter’s Wall Street Journal piece “A Facelift for Shakespeare”, which attempts to argue the case for “translating” all of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary English — an initiative commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival — “because Shakespeare’s English is so far removed from the English of 2015 that it often interferes [sic] with our own comprehension.”

This is the level of argument McWhorter puts forward: “It is true that translated Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare in the strictest [sic] sense.”

Let’s not forget to rewrite those passages that make us “uncomfortable,” right? After all, they gave King Lear a happy ending back in the Restoration.

And why hesitate when it comes to the other arts? I guess Walter Murphy was way ahead of his time in 1976 when he translated Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to “A Fifth of Beethoven,” making it safe and trigger-free for the disco era:

Filed under: Beethoven, Shakespeare, stupid ideas

September 24, 2015 • 6:10 pm Comments Off on Time Keeps on Shifting: Bloomsday at ACT

Time Keeps on Shifting: Bloomsday at ACT

Marianne Owen and Sydney Andrews; photo: Chris Bennion

“Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet.”

In Ulysses‘ “Hades” chapter, this terse formula spontaneously occurs to Leopold Bloom: part of the copious flow of thoughts rippling through his mind as he thinks about what it’s like to die.

They could also serve as the elevator pitch for Bloomsday. Steven Dietz’s new play at ACT Theatre is an ode to the ache of regret.

Watching the burial of Paddy Dignam, Bloom ponders what the poor man must have felt at the moment he knew it was all over. The sight of his coffin prompts Bloom to embark on an internal monologue filled with such alas poor Yoricking.

“Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet”: those seven words “sum up” the whole mystery of life, according to Robert in one of Bloomsday‘s most poignant moments.

A 55-year-old American and a professor who has taught James Joyce for decades, Robert has ultimately arrived at a jaded view of Ulysses: as far as he’s concerned, that phrase of graveyard musing is the only bit of worth to be gleaned from what he now considers “a piece of drivel,” best used as a doorstop.

But Robert is projecting his own bitterness and regret onto Ulysses. The fear-inducing modernist classic was the topic responsible for bringing Caithleen into his life 35 years ago.

Back then Caithleen, a 20-year-old Irish loner, had a gig leading a walking tour around the Dublin spots Joyce immortalized in Ulysses. These are the locations where the novel’s external events unfold within the span of just one day, June 16, 1904, now internationally celebrated as “Bloomsday” by fans of Joyce.

Also 20, Robbie (the name Robert went by in his youth) was a greenhorn American abroad with lots of time to think about what to do with his life. Young Robbie had no clue about Joyce and was blissfully ignorant of Ulysses, a book he hasn’t even heard of.

But his attraction to Caithleen when he happened to run into her — as instant as Dante’s for Beatrice — motivated Robbie to follow along on the tour to try his chance at romance. But, as the mature Robert announces with a shudder of self-disgust, “I am made of something cold.” He let the chance slip away.

Eric Ankrim and Peter Crook; photo: Chris Bennion

Bloomsday involves only these two characters, but it requires a cast of four: two actors each to play Robert and Caithleen during two phases in their lives, 35 years apart. Dietz dramatizes and puts onstage what is past tense to the middle-aged Robert and Cait (the name the older Caithleen prefers).

The play’s dramaturgical conceit is that Robert has come back to visit Cait after this long hiatus. In the process they watch and interact with their younger selves, who are reliving the day when they first met — a day that might have gone in a very different direction.

On the surface, it sounds like the makings of another formulaic rom-com, bittersweet variety, using a time-loop setup that might bring to mind Groundhog Day or even Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, with a dash of Our Town.

What Dietz actually does is to lure us into thinking we’re getting something familiar in the first act, only to push us out of that comfort zone into a deeply moving meditation on lost time, on the painful dissonance that comes with memory.

In one of the play’s most trenchant images, Robert contrasts the experience of time as a sequence of notes — the way we normally experience it, moment to moment — with time as a chord, where “all the notes are played at once.”

Bloomsday is a time-chord that pits recrimination against the yearning for resolution. The wonder of Dietz’s achievement here is to dramatize both sides so effectively, without resorting to easy sentimentality or mushy nostalgia. Robert’s existential esprit de l’escalier brushes up against Cait’s gentle acceptance of the past.

Peter Crook vividly embodies Robert’s mix of despair and cynical humor vis-a-vis his younger self and compassion for the mature Cait, whom he learns to know in a very different light.

As the latter, Marianne Owen uses gesture and understatement to imply the silent agonies and loneliness her character has lived through in the interim with haunting effect.

Dietz offers a less interesting, less developed characterization of the young Robbie — perhaps intentionally, to underscore how he is a “blank slate” at this point in his life — but Eric Antrim touches on an appealingly varied spectrum of notes, from naivete to Robbie’s dawning awareness of possibilities he hadn’t previously imagined.

Sydney Andrews gives a stunning, beautifully textured performance as Caithleen, the character Dietz develops most richly. Her Caithleen initially creates the impression of a strong-willed, confident young woman, yet we come to see her deep-rooted anxiety take hold.

Caithleen experiences time as a distressing “chord” of overlaid moments. While Dietz leaves the issue of her inherited mental condition vague — it’s meant to be both realistic and metaphorical at the same time — Andrews makes her unease and her contradictions touchingly palpable without resorting to melodrama.

Eric Ankrim and Sydney Andrews; photo: Chris Bennion

The design work is admirably integrated: Robert Dahlstrom’s simple, efficient set of cobbled street surfaces provides the backdrop for the play’s instant shifts of scene and mood, which are enhanced by Duane Schuler’s subtle lighting and Chris Walker’s sound design.

Catherine Hunt’s costumes visually rhyme with the subtle irony of Dietz’s time-loops and overlays: the older couple is nostalgically attired in the Edwardian period dress of the fictional turn-of-century Bloomsday, while young Robbie and Caithleen carry on in “normal” clothes.

Bloomsday is the last production Kurt Beattie is directing at ACT before ending his long and fruitful tenure as the company’s artistic director. His long-term partnership with Dietz is clearly evident in the graceful, emotionally resonant cadence and tempo of his staging. (This is the 11th play by Dietz to have been premiered/produced at ACT.)

As a variation on the memory play, Bloomsday is also a strikingly fitting farewell gesture for Beattie. Dietz’s theatrical poetry, enacted by this well-knit cast, captures the intensity of experiences that pass by fleetingly and that at the same time can leave an indelible mark: the essence of theater itself.

Steven Dietz’s Bloomsday runs through October 11 at ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle (206-292-7676 or here to buy tickets online).

Filed under: ACT Theatre, review, theater

September 23, 2015 • 8:14 am Comments Off on New General Director of San Francisco Opera

New General Director of San Francisco Opera

Matthew Shilvock

They sure know how to keep a secret. San Francisco Opera finally has finally announced who will succeed David Gockley, and it’s an insider: current Associate General Director Matthew Shilvock takes on the reins as the company’s seventh General Director starting August 1, 2016. His contract is for five years, through July 2021.

From SFO’s press release: “Mr. Shilvock, born and educated in England, joined San Francisco Opera in 2005 and has served as Associate General Director since 2010. As Associate General Director, Mr. Shilvock manages and leads five departments: Music Operations (orchestra, chorus, dancers, commissions); Electronic Media; Education; the San Francisco Opera Center (professional artist training programs); and Rehearsal. He currently also serves as Interim Director of Development.

Joshua Kosman observes: “In signing Shilvock, 38, to a five-year contract, the Opera has made a choice that emphasizes continuity in the company’s leadership over experience or a proven track record. Over the course of his decade in San Francisco, Shilvock has taken an active role in just about every aspect of the company’s activities, from artistic planning and labor negotiations to financial development and educational outreach. But this will be his first time at the helm of an opera company.”

Kosman offers the following roundup of Shilvock’s responses in regard to programming philosophy:

“We want to strengthen the brand of San Francisco Opera, so that people come to us not simply because they recognize a title, but because they have faith in what we’re doing. ‘Butterfly’ will always sell better than ‘Jenufa,’ but we want to give audiences the motivation to come to a piece like ‘Jenufa’ that may not be familiar to them.”

In response to a question about new and recent works that he had found particularly rewarding, Shilvock cited Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick,” Philip Glass’ “Satyagraha” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” as examples of the kinds of work the company should be doing.

Shilvock pointed in particular to the Diane B. Wilsey Center, the 299-seat theater scheduled to open next year in the newly renovated Veterans Building, as an engine for experimentation.

“The programming will have a shorter lead time, and we’ll be able to do works there with greater intimacy, or that find different resonances with the audience. There’s a wonderful sense of innovation that can happen there.”

“By choosing Shilvock, the San Francisco Opera has gotten to have it both ways: opting for the status quo by continuing Gockley’s tradition, while coming down on the side of youth and freshness,” remarks Anne Midgette in The Washington Post.

New York Times reporter Michael Cooper points out that the selection of Shivlock “signaled that the search committee — which had been grappling with whether to appoint someone with a background as an artist or an administrator —–saw his understanding of the practicalities of running the opera house as critical.”

Filed under: music news, San Francisco Opera

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