The Bayreuth Festival season is approaching, so I dug up an old review (published on Artsatl.com) of Christian Thielemann’s Bayreuth Ring from 2008, which originally came out on Opus Arte:
It’s no coincidence that the technologically forward-looking Opus Arte — an early adopter of the high-definition DVD and Blu-ray formats — here documents the current Bayreuth “Ring” via good old-fashioned CDs. In fact, this set marks the company’s first foray into the CD market. The stage direction by octogenarian German playwright (and opera novice) Tankred Dorst, which revolves around the idea of the modern and mythological worlds coexisting in parallel universes, has gained few fans since the production was unveiled in 2006. Instead, the real buzz around this “Ring” has focused on what Thielemann and the orchestra accomplish.
Along with its mix of well-known and unusual repertoire, the Seattle Chamber Music Society annually commissions a brand-new work for its Summer Festival. Monday evening’s programme unveiled the selection for 2015: Cantus by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky, who has gained prominence primarily as an instrumental and choral composer. (His first opera – a brilliantly witty yet at the same time touching one-act buffa to Jeremy Denk’s libretto improbably “dramatising” Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style – will receive its full stage première next week at the Aspen Festival.)
The second week of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s month-long Summer Festival concluded with a programme that – as the two earlier concerts that week had similarly done – expanded perceptions of the notion of chamber music itself by including works that cross over the instrumental divide and call for voice.
As a foretaste of the upcoming Seattle Art Fair, Seattle Art Museum is currently hosting a series of talks by contemporary artists about their practice. The first one took place this week.
In it Joshua Sofaer, who focuses on projects involving collaboration and participation, talked about his recent effort at the Science Museum in London: The Rubbish Collection.
During the first phase, visitors to the Science Museum last summer were invited to participate by “sorting and documenting of one month’s worth of rubbish generated by the Science Museum’s visitors, staff, contractors, and exhibition projects to create a growing visual archive of the things we throw away from day to day… With a focus on sustainability and reuse, The Rubbish Collection confronts the materiality of rubbish and highlights that the things we throw away do not disappear but are transformed.”
Says the versatile British artist Sofaer: “Museums generally display items that have some special status, that are rare, or valuable. But in this project, I want to give the ‘museum treatment’ to the stuff it would normally throw away.”
I was intrigued to learn that Sofaer had also recently directed a staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Folkoperan in Stockholm:
In this production the recitative which carries the biblical text has been replaced by filmed interviews that are projected on a screen which covers the wall behind the stage. In the interviews, singers and musicians share personal stories which concern the big themes of the passion: forgiveness, guilt, pain, fear, loneliness, and love.
The staging is kept simple, with the ensemble, including the orchestra, on stage all the time. As one body of people, they act as collective witnesses, with soloists emerging from the amongst them in a series of tableaux.
At the start of his talk, Sofaer quoted this famous statement by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou as his own “rallying cry”: “‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”
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.
Here’s my piece for The Strad about violinist James Ehnes and his string quartet, who recently opened Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2015 Summer Festival:
James Ehnes has long been a familiar presence on the international circuit, but he remains known to many music lovers primarily as a solo violinist — a virtuoso who, armed with a stunning technique, also has something compelling to say. When he does appear in chamber programmes, it’s often been with a piano partner or in varying chamber formations.
In honor of Jon Vickers, who died on Friday. He stopped singing live before I was able to have that experience, but even on recordings you can get a sense of how he cast a spell on his audiences.
He once touched on the impetus of his artistry in a graduation address in 1969 at the Royal Academy of Music in Toronto. “I sang because I had to,” he said. Singing, he explained, was “an absolute necessity, fulfilling some kind of emotional and even perhaps physical need in me.”
Richard Osborne at Gramophone offers an assessment:
Vickers was sometimes accused of pushing too far, of breaking the mould of the roles he played: Laca in Jenůfa, Alvaro in La forza del destino, the uninhibitedly promiscuous Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. And Tristan. Though he was a practised Wagnerian, proud to have been Knappertsbusch’s last Parsifal, Vickers mistrusted Wagner in general and Tristan in particular – ‘a glorification of Wagner’s own immorality’ as he put it. Robin Holloway summed up the terribilità of Vickers’s Tristan when he wrote of the Third Act of the Karajan recording: ‘There is no doubt whatsoever about the stature of this unique tour de force, but it remains an extreme – something unique as if the story were, just this once, literally true [my emphasis].’
Greta Wilson, Sara Mountjoy-Pepka, Sydney Andrews, and Darragh Kennan in The Trial; photo credit: Chris Bennion/New Century Theatre Company
Coming up early next month is a workshop of a new chamber opera by Sarah Mattox, Heart Mountain, presented by Vespertine Opera Theater. This will take place in the site-specific space of the repurposed INS building in Seattle. Here’s a piece I wrote a couple years ago about another theater work that made use of that space for an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial:
Arbitrary, inscrutable bureaucratic authorities with the power to determine individual fates. The tension of not knowing. The cruelly frustrating uncertainty of the whole process. In spite of the trappings of reality, life’s daily rituals twisted into a surreal waiting game.
That’s an impressionistic précis of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in the brand-new theatrical adaptation currently being presented by New Century Theatre Company. But it could also describe what generations of immigrants who hoped to become U.S. citizens experienced while being detained in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Building located south of the ID and east of Century Link Field.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 