This weekend Franz Welser-Möst is conducting the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) with soprano Nicole Cabell and baritone Russell Braun as soloists. Robert Porco prepared the wonderful Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Rarely have I heard this work performed with such clarity and directness, yet with the requisite boldness and tenderness. Franz is an outstanding choral conductor–a trait not always found in orchestral conductors, even those with talent for opera. The chorus is not left “on their own” to figure out what to do. I have witnessed even such notable conductors as Pierre Boulez and Christoph von Dohnanyi leave the chorus behind in the dust.
With absolutely parochial interest, I note that the Norton Memorial Organ was used in this performance, played by Joela Jones, to give an added sonic “boost” to the bass, but also supporting the vocal lines. It was mostly not audible, but it was “there,” and I’m glad they used the organ.
Russell Braun has a lovely voice, but he seemed a bit underpowered for this particular performance. (Or perhaps Franz should have shut down the orchestra a bit more.) In the single movement that the soprano soloist appears, one has gotten used to hearing light voices (think Kathleen Battle, Dawn Upshaw, or even the German Christine Schäfer). Nicole Cabell, although obviously a lyric soprano, has a darker, richer, more luscious voice. It made a nice contrast with the “classic” texture of sound in the rest of the performance.
The concert opened with a Cleveland premiere of Chor (for orchestra), a 2003-04 work by German composer Jörg Widmann, who is beginning his two season tenure as the orchestra’s Young Composer Fellow. While it is impossible to judge a complex contemporary work on one hearing, what is not in question is the Cleveland Orchestra’s brilliant performance. The work is in a broad arc with a stupendous central climax marked with ear-splitting rolls on suspended cymbals, strings at extremely high pitch, and, I believe, multiple police whistles. (It was really too loud, and I felt forced to hold my ears.) The pace is slow, with many long notes overlapping one another. An offstage solo trumpet (the orchestra’s amazing principal trumpet Michael Sachs) started the work with a dialogue with a bowed vibraphone and notes on an accordion (played by the ever-versatile Joela Jones). The texture and amplitude gradually increase until the climax, then start to dissolve again, but with “speed bumps” along the way–huge interjections by the full orchestra interrupting the quiet flow of the music. At several points there are quite tonal “chorale”-type passages of an almost of a Brahmsian nature, but always deconstructed, as if the aural equivalent of looking in a funhouse mirror. The work makes extensive use of quarter-tone playing in all the parts, and the orchestra’s pitch and clarity were quite astonishing. (After hearing Chor, I am tantalized by what the orchestra would make of Thomas Ades’s monumental and beautiful Tevot, written for Berliner Philharmoniker. The orchestra is performing Ades’s Violin Concerto later this season, and Franz has conducted more of his music in the past. Come on Franz, let’s have Tevot!)
Virtual Farm Boy is constantly complaining about too many standing ovations at concerts in Cleveland, but this is a case where the ovation was richly deserved. The orchestra is off for a few weeks on European tour and a residency in Vienna. We’ll look forward to their return in mid-November.
[thanks to my sister-in-law, Cheryl Robson]
A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.
‘Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.’
Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s okay, he knows the bank manager.
Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.
The frog says, ‘Sure. I have this,’ and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.
Very confused , Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office.
She finds the manager and says, ‘There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.’
She holds up the tiny pink elephant. ‘I mean, what in the world is this?’
(prepare to groan at this point…..)
The bank manager looks back at her and says…
‘It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan, His old man’s a Rolling Stone.’
Today on NPR’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviewed the great scholar of world religions, Karen Armstrong. Armstrong has written numerous books, including a history of Islam, biographies of Buddha, Mohammed, among others. Her latest book, The Case for God, is about religion as practice, of learning about the transcendence of God—however God is defined by the individual—and how religion teaches people how to develop a sense of compassion towards others. She points out that The Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”) is found in all of the great religions of the world, and especially in the three faiths descended from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As usual when I hear Karen Armstrong interviewed, or when I read her works, I am left in awe of her intellect and scholarship. It seems that she knows everything about religion; almost nothing is too obscure for her. Interestingly enough, she is not herself an observer of organized religion. In the ’60s she spent seven years in a convent preparing to take holy orders, but she had a crisis of faith and left the convent. Her study of the world’s religions has become her religion. She is the Pope of her chosen field.
Today I–like many other people of a certain age around the world–have been remembering the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon on July 20, 1969. I was in between my junior and senior year of high school. It was a hot summer day in Iowa, and we were putting up hay on the family farm, but even my hardworking dad let us take a break to come into the house to watch the first steps the Neil Armstrong took on the moon. But then it was back to work. When the sun shines in the summer in Iowa, and there is hay to be baled and loaded into the barn, you do it.
Last night I received a really ugly private email message from someone about my most recent post, which commented on Maureen Dowd’s op-ed piece in the New York Times regarding the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. I would not normally make note of such things, but in this particular case, I think there needs to be a bit of explanation. In the headline to my post, I quoted Dowd’s use of the phrase “Sonia Legree” which she used as a satirical metaphor to characterize Judge Sotomayor’s ongoing efforts to distance herself from any kind of “empathy” (a vague and vastly overused term in this set of hearings). The judge has made it appear that she would put her own mother in jail if the law said it should happen. “The law is the law.” On NPR this morning Nina Totenberg characterized the judge as “sphinxlike” in her blandness. (Thank God for Senator Al Franken asking about Perry Mason yesterday.)
My correspondent last night clearly did not read the Dowd piece (or if she did, she totally mis-read it), and she addressed her diatribe to Ms. Dowd, not to Virtual Farm Boy. Unfortunately, I don’t have a direct line to Ms. Dowd, so I can’t pass it along.
I still think the whole confirmation hearing process is dysfunctional, and in this particular case there are strong and disturbing undertones of sexism and racism that have permeated this display of Grand Political Theatre.
Maureen Dowd, in today’s New York Times, gets it just right about the ongoing confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor has learned her coached lessons well: that is, don’t say anything; be as bland as possible; don’t let the old white guys get under your skin. Listening to the re-caps of yesterday’s hearing, it was astonishing to witness the patronizing and condescending behavior of the senators toward the judge. The most outrageous was when Senator Lindsey Graham asked about her judicial “temperament,” and said that it was reported that she was “nasty” and “a bully.” This is a classic case of gender bias: a male in a similar situation would be called “aggressive”; a female is “a bitch.” Today’s hearing appears to be more of same. These hearings take on the aspect of an old-fashioned college fraternity hazing: something horrifying to endure in order to become a member of the club. It is an unseemly spectacle.
My house looks even more surrealistically messy than usual. I’m having new bathroom floors installed, so I have one toilet sitting next to my pipe organ, another sitting next to my large screen TV. I’m hoping that things will be put back later today. (The ungrouted ceramic tile looks very nice.)
I was in St. Louis this past weekend to attend three performances at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, founded in 1976 with a mission of performing standard as well as new and unusual works in English, with casts of young American singers. The noted British stage director Colin Graham was the artistic director until just a few years ago, shortly before his death. As a protege of Benjamin Britten, Graham was responsible for presenting many of Britten’s works in St. Louis, including the four-act version of Billy Budd and Gloriana (with Christine Brewer, in 2005, which was my first encounter with the company).
This season was typical, with Mozart’s Il Pastor Fido, Puccini’s La Boheme, Richard Strauss’s Salome, and John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, in a newly revised version designed for smaller opera theaters than the Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned the work and first performed it in 1991. In the space of two days, I saw the Corigliano, Strauss and Puccini works.
La Boheme is Puccini’s weepy masterpiece. I don’t feel like I’ve had a satisfying performance unless my eyes get moist at the end. This was no exception, with a talented young cast that looked the part of the young Parisians. The production was imaginative, funny and touching.
I had real reservations about Salome: how would it work in a small theater the size of the Loretto-Hilton at Webster University, where Opera Theatre performs? The role Salome was being performed by Kelly Kaduce, a local favorite, having previously performed as Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly and as the title character in David Carlson’s Anna Karenina (recently released on CD). I am happy to report that she was not swallowed alive by the part itself or the orchestra. (Strauss famously commented the role of Salome requires the body of a 16-year-old and the voice of Brunnhilde, a virtually impossible physical and vocal combination.) Kelly Kaduce was convincing as the Judaean princess who falls in lust with John the Baptist and demands the Baptist’s head on a silver platter after Salome agrees to dance the “dance of the seven veils” for her pedophile step-father King Herod, while her mother, Herodias watches. Kelly Kaduce’s voice rode the waves of the the orchestra sound, but she was also surprisingly intimate when necessary. Just as La Boheme should make one weepy, Salome should make the audience feel like they should go out for a collective brisk walk at the end of Salome’s twenty-minute final scene in which she fondles and makes out with the severed head of John the Baptist. (I’ve never before witnessed a severed head used as a sex toy.) Ms. Kaduce’s antics with the head make no secret that this is a horny, spoiled teenage girl who gets what she wants. The whole opera had the necessary creepiness to be effective. A word about the staging: the libretto (based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, originally written in French, translated into German for the opera libretto, and here performed in English) calls for John the Baptist to be in a dark cistern below the stage floor. The St. Louis theater does not have that capability, so the director Séan Curran and stage designer Bruno Schwengl, came up with an imaginative solution, a huge round plate at the back of the stage that is removed to reveal an iris-like aperture that opens and closes to reveal John the Baptist (and later to admit the executioner into the Baptist’s dungeon.) Gregory Dahl was hunky and commanding vocally as John the Baptist (although, dressed in loin cloth, it was hard to disguise the fact that this desert prophet had not missed any meals.) Michael Hayes and Maria Zifchak were effective as Herod and Herodias. This was a very compelling and memorable afternoon of music theater. Kelly Kaduce would likely never sing the role in a house as large as the Met, but she made a brilliant impression here. When she was on the stage (which is most of the time) she was the center of attention.
My real reason for traveling to St. Louis was to see John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, which had received its first monumental production at the Met, directed by Colin Graham, in 1991, and for which no expense was spared, technically or musically. It was revived once at the Met, appeared at the Chicago Lyric Opera and perhaps once in Europe, then fell off the map: it was simply too expensive to produce. The Met performers included such stars as Teresa Stratas and Renee Fleming, as well as many more (there are 25 named parts in the opera, plus a huge orchestra, large chorus, dancers, and more. The Met production used every bit of the Met’s enormous technical capability.) The plot is far too complicated to tell here, but you can find it here.
The new revised performing edition, capably conducted by Brooklyn Philharmonic conductor Michael Christie, was a brilliant success. The score reflects the three levels of the opera: atmospherics for the ghosts, including Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI and the playwright Beaumarchais, that inhabit Versailles; pseudo-Mozartian/Rossinian music for the “opera within an opera” that is presented for the Queen; and “realistic” music for the scenes that take place during the blending of time of the opera and the French revolution. There are so many moments of extraordinary beauty: Marie Antoinette’s phrase first set to the text “There once was a golden bird” which returns time and again, seeming to represent how the queen was caught up in events not of her choosing; Beaumarchais’s phrase “I risk my soul for you, Antonia”, in which he declares his love for the Queen; the comic music of Figaro, Rosina, Cherubino and the other characters of Beaumarchais’s “opera.”
The soprano Maria Kanyova was perfect as Marie Antoinette. At first she almost seemed to be channeling Teresa Stratas, who originated the role. (I suspect, however, that this was more the fact of the vocal writing than any conscious attempt to sound like Stratas.) Ms. Kanyova’s acting was impeccable. At the end, when she is a tiny figure alone, center stage, reaching out her arms to be joined for eternity with her true love, the playwright Beaumarchais, it was a simple, but spine-tingling moment that I will carry with me for a long time. It was an astonishing coup de théatre.
The character Beaumarchais is second only to Marie Antoinette in importance in the opera. Baritone James Westman commanded his role in its many aspects, both musical and dramatic. There was not a weak link in the entire huge cast. The staging took advantage of the limitations of the small stage–all of the Met’s grandeur wasn’t necessary. This new look at the opera made us examine the relationships among the characters. I agree with critic Sarah Bryan Miller in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that this was a “must-see evening in the theater.”
My two experiences, separated by four years, confirm that opera is very alive and well in St. Louis. The three performances that I attended were all sold out, and the company seems to have a strong fundraising community upon which to draw. May they continue to thrive.
Every year at this time the British government publishes the long list of British subjects who have been given awards in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Several prominent musicians are on this year’s list:
Order of the British Empire: Dame Commander (DBE)
Mitsuko Uchida, CBE, Pianist. For services to classical music.
Order of the British Empire: Commander (CBE)
Stephen Cleobury, Director of Music, Kings College, University of Cambridge. For services to music.
Simon Preston, OBE, Organist. For services to classical music.
Jonathan Pryce, Actor. For services to drama.
Graham Vick, Artistic Director, Birmingham Opera. For services to opera.
