Falla and Orff

New York Philharmonic

Avery Fisher Hall, June 01, 2012

Liked it.

So, I have decided this about massive, major orchestras: I really only want to see them when they are playing something LOUD.  Otherwise, what is the point of eight double bases and four (four!) bassoons?  Orff’s Carmina Burana fits the bill - it is many things, but mostly it is loud.

The Philharmonic started the program with Falla’s Atlantis, an incomplete non-opera about Colombus discovering Atlantis via a handful of Greek myths.  It starts out desperately uninterestingly with a wall of sound from slightly dissonant, droning, surging violins and a jacked up to 11 chorus.  In continued in this way, with little texture or interest to the noise for maybe two thirds, until the soprano’s bit.  She started off much the same way, actually - with a big, uninteresting sound - and struggled a little with the volume and, perhaps, boringness.  But then something changed.  One passage, and then another and another were surprisingly lovely, and well the soprano’s her vocal grasp. By the ending, it was almost a different piece - the orchestra took a break and the soprano complete her lengthy section unaccompanied in soft, hushed, warm tones before the chorus picked it up to finish.  It was a seriously great ending and so much more interesting and effecting than the big, loud, boring beginning.

Then the headliner.  The Carmina Burana is a blockbuster.  Not a Michael Bay blockbuster, but a good one.  Maybe Die Hard?  Something awesome and classic, but still massively over the top. There are definitely explosions in this music - big loud sections like the opening O Fortuna* - but there’s also sly little comedy moments, a rollicking story, tightly choreographed action sequences and a sex scene.  There are even zinger lines.

It’s a work full of seemingly contradictory pieces - sections are in a bunch of different languages and have very different tones; the chorus sings pretty much the entire first half and then the soloists take over for the second; the narrative is all over the place (one minute we’re in a tavern full of drunkards, the next we’re hanging out in a forest with some lovers).  It feels less like a cohesive song cycle and more like an album of pop songs.  It shouldn’t work - it is too patchy - but like any good blockbuster, it forces you to suspend disbelief.

The first half was wonderful because the chorus were great - snapping out that famous staccato, really soaring when the score allowed for it, and harmonising so naturally.  The soprano looked supremely bored for the first two thirds, but when she got up to sing in the third, she was really lovely.  Her crystalline voice was firm and yielding both at once - full and warm but also sharp and precise.  She was a knock out.  The baritone was also quite good - I barely noticed him in the Atlantis piece, but here he relished his characters with a lively compassion and marvellously rich tone.  The tenor was not very good, trading musicality for jokiness, but he only had one short bit, so that wasn’t too disastrous.

Orff’s music is great and the structure of the songs in this cycle really interesting - they’re almost like pop songs.  They all go verse, chorus, verse, and so on, and sometimes go to the bridge.  It’s unexpected for classical music and would be boring, but these are really, really good pop songs.

*The palpable force of O Fortuna (both the volume and the emotional intensity) makes me think of images like this one.  But, the again, it also makes me think of beer. 

Ligeti and Beethoven and Denk

Jeremy Denk

Le Poisson Rouge, May 22, 2012

Liked it a whole lot.

Have I told you before how much I love Jeremy Denk?  He’s a wonderful pianist who plays interesting stuff, but he’s also a writer and deep, deep thinker about music.  I loved him even before I’d heard him play.  And now that I have heard him, I love him more.

Le Poisson Rouge is a jazz club in the West Village.  Not a usual venue for a classical music recital, but certainly a usual place for a CD launch. To launch, as for example, Denk’s recording of Ligeti and Beethoven.

I’ve said before that I don’t love piano music.  Despite that, I do keep trying it out.  Maybe I want to be convinced.  Maybe Denk is the person to do that.  He played Book 1 of Ligeti’s Etudes and Beethoven’s 110 piano sonata.  Both magnificently.

After the first Etude - a two-and-a-half minute cacophonous, dissonant, wall of energy - someone behind me muttered “Sweet Jesus”.  I agreed with him - the music is forceful and the playing so expressive and so smart that it was physically winding.  It is the most confronting piece in the Etudes, though, and the rest (although still in their own ways variously cacophonous, dissonant or energetic) are a little more interested in making pretty sounds along with the intellectual engagement, musical inventiveness and massive technical skill required to play them.

Denk then, after a short break, played Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op. 111.  He called it the holy of holies for piano sonatas and I see why - it’s beautiful.  There’s the jolly and jaunty first movement and the serious and patient second movement, strung out to its very fibres of hope, melancholy, and quiet joy. 

I’m starting to see what all the fuss about piano music might be about.

Wagner: Gotterdammerung (Ring Cycle part four)

Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera House, April 24, 2012

Liked it.

I’ve complained at length about the staging of the Ring Cycle so far – about the clunky set and the distracting projections.  But they all get turned up a notch here in the finale and the projections look like nothing so much as a karaoke backdrop – the swirling, purple psychedelic scene-changers are jarringly inappropriate for the story.

Not the only jarring thing about this production, unfortunately.  The two stars JAY HUNTER MORRIS and DEBORAH VOIGT were inexplicably replaced by two not-quite-as-good singers KATARINA DALAYMAN and STEPHEN GOULD.  When Gould came on stage as Siegfried, with a very different body shape and acting style I had a moment of “waaaait a minute…” and then a crashing realization. Kind of like that scene in Space Balls where the bad guys realise they are chasing the good guy's stunt doubles, including a fat bearded man in a womans' wig and dress.  Gould and Dalayman’s voices were okay - sometimes really very good - but were not strong enough to carry over the very loud orchestra (and it’s the finale of an eighteen hour epic, so the orchestra is VERY loud). 

In Gotterdammerung, the gods are waiting in Valhalla to die and the action is squarely on human drama and deeds.  Brunnhilde – now mortal – lives with Siegfried on the fire-ringed mountain and Siegfried gives her the ring of the Nibelungen as a pledge of love.  Then he takes off for adventure.  After Sieglinde and Siegmund’s love story in Walkure, Siegfried and Brunnhilde’s is a little luke-warm and watery.

Siegfried continues to be as dumb as two short planks and about as interesting.  However, he is tricked by some local royalty into forgetting Brunnhilde and wooing her for the prince.  She is distraught, he is an oaf, and he steals the ring from her.  The irony of this gesture is not lost.

The first half of the opera continues Wagner’s run on exposition.  I can hardly reconcile the tight writing of Walkure and Rheingold with the sloppiness of Siegfried (aka “Exposition”) and Gotterdammerung (aka “Exposition II: The Repetitioning”).

HANS-PETER KONIG returns for his third character in four operas to play Alberich’s son Hagen, and his scene with ERIC OWENS was really great as they tried to out-bass each other.  The eighty voice male choir was a bit of a treat - unexpected given Wagner’s apparent disdain for operatic conventions, but welcome.  In many other ways, Gotterdammerung felt so much more conventional than the rest of the Ring Cycle.  It also felt somehow removed from everything that had come before it, like a separate story in the same universe, but not really connected to the rest of the Ring Cycle.  And it seemed less powerful because of that.

When Siegfried betrays Brunnhilde, she gets really angry.  That was nice to see – she was far less interesting when she was happy.  As she loses it, the music loses it with her, getting all fractured and wild and desperate.  It’s powerful stuff, but increadibly difficult to sing.  I can’t help but think that Voigt would have handled it easier.  And it was nice to see Siegfried get – no, what am I saying, he started dumb and stayed there.

Siegfried continues to be the least interesting character - he starts dumb and stays there - but his funeral march is spectacular and the highlight of the opera.   The lowlight is the collapse of Valhalla - should have been spectacular and terrifying to catch the mood of the music.  But it was just kind of lame and snortworthy.  If Siegfried’s funeral march was a fitting end to the music, the collapse of Valhalla was a fitting end for the staging.

Wagner: Siegfried (Ring Cycle part three)

Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera House, April 21, 2012

Liked it.

In lots of ways, Siegfried (the third opera in Wagner’s ring cycle) is quite similar to Walkure (the second) - the structure is similar, the events are similar, the all around feel is similar.  And yet Siegfried is clearly the inferior opera. 

There are moments to like though - the bellows song as Siegfried (JAY HUNTER MORRIS, pictured) forges his sword anew, and pretty much anything with Wotan (BRYN TERFL) in it.  Mime (GERHARD SIEGEL) is very good too, and Fafner (HANS-PETER KONIG) is a serious bass as a dragon.  It’s great that ERIC OWENS, as Alberich, was over the cold that hampered him in Das Rheingold - he has such a rich and warm tone to his voice.  DEBORAH VOIGT continues to be great as Brunnhilde, but her character has disappointingly lost her agency.

Playing Siegfried is a tough call - he is either awful or stupid.  In previous operas, Wagner has clearly demonstrated that he’s capable if complex characterisation, motivation and the slow revelations of either (or both) to make the audience care very deeply.  Not so much here, though - Siegfried is a dick in the first act, in the second he’s a buffoon. There’s little to work with, but Morris has such a lovely voice and plays him with such sympathy that I can see that Siegfried does have a good heart, just not an overabundance of brains.

Wagner’s writing gets sloppy in other ways too.  The pivotal plot point - that Siegfried has no fear - should have been so much more of a cataclysmic thing.  Instead of being a cause for tension and torment and revelation between characters, it is just a thing to sing about.  

And there was plenty of that kind of singing here - the “singing rather than showing”.  It should be called Siegfried: The Exposition.  There was so much recapping (“last week on The Ring of the Nibelungs”) and so much repetition (“here’s what everyone just heard me sing about in the last scene”).  It’s true that in Walkure Wotan does a 25 minute recap of the story to date, but there the music is tremendous. Here it felt like nothing so much as filler.

The set continues to get into the way - both visually and sonically - but I am doing my best to ignore it and, for the most part, that’s working.  It’s made easier by this cast - who sing beautifully and with stamina and conviction.  Bring on the grand finale!

Prokofiev and Mahler

New York Philharmonic

Avery Fisher Hall, April 17, 2012

Liked it okay I guess.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in major, Op.26 is clearly a challenging piece to play.  From where I was sitting I could clearly see soloist Yuja Wang’s fingers (which is to say that I couldn’t see her fingers at all as they flew and flitted about the keyboard as fast as all get out).  The piece gets all virtuostic up in everybody’s business and doesn’t really let go.  Clearly Wang is massively talented, but I didn’t particularly like the music.

Her encore though - which I recognised at the time, but have since forgotten what it was - was just lovely: sad and sweet and played just perfectly.  Apparently, you don’t need to get in people’s faces to impress them.

After intermission we got Mahler’s first symphony with its massive orchestra and massive sound.  I am particularly fond of this piece despite its flaws.  I like the slower sections best, which are jarred and slammed into by bigger, brighter, louder sections.  The creepy, creeping Frere Jacque melody from the third movement is very effective and the orchestra nailed it.  Other sections were less convincing as the louder sections were all ratcheted up to eleven - the trumpets too shrill, the cymbals to crashy - and they began to be repetitive, and not in a good way. The rest of the piece relies of repetition and an almost leitmotif style of characterisation - the heralding horns, the twittering flutes and the squawking oboes paint elegant little pictures of characters, but the narrative is still abstract (so I don’t mind it so much).  The final movement, however, overstays its welcome and finishes about four times.  But I still enjoyed myself - especially at the true ending with its peeling, triumphant horns, surging strings and joyfully rumbling timpani. 

Debussy and Stravinsky

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Alice Tully Hall, April 15, 2012

Liked it a Lot.

Honestly, I picked this program for something different.  I haven’t heard much Debussy or Stravinsky and when I do they’re a footnote in a program headlining something else.  Based on the little I did know about Debussy and Stravinsky, I expected to be challenged by this show, rather than to like it.

But I DID like it.  The eight pieces turned out to be a strong, complete program - a bento box of bits and pieces that all worked together: a three minute flute solo for the seaweed salad; a Debussy piano solo the pickles; the super famous “Afternoon of the Fawn” was the rice and Stravinsky’s Divertimento for Violin and Piano was the fire cracker.

The Stravinsky crapped all over the Debussy - the Orion String Quartet (pictured) played “Three Pieces for String Quartet” which was three little ideas (called “Dance”, “Eccentric” and “Canticle”) that, like all intellectual exercises, posed a musical question, played around with it some and then stopped before wearing out its welcome.  The pieces are near perfect.

But the highlight of the program was the piano/violin duet.  Played by two women who looked like they might have been my mum’s bridge friends.  They played with passion and precision as the piece required - sometimes flipping from one to the other in a semi-quaver.

The most famous bit - Debussy’s “Afternoon of the Faun” - was the least interesting on the bill.  After all the complexity and passion and wit of the Stravinsky pieces, it felt kind of wafty and conventional.  But in a bento box, something has to be the rice, doesn’t it?

Wagner: Die Walkure (Ring Cycle Part Two)

Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera House, April 13, 2012

Liked it a Lot.

During intermission after act one - about one third the way through this five-hour-plus-change opera - after we’d just spent an hour watching Seiglinde and Seigmund fall in love, I was irked by Wagner’s massive self indulgence.  We’d just sat through Das Rheingold, an opera-length prelude, to have another hour of prelude? As I say, self-indulgent.

But something happened in Act Two - when the gods Fricka and Wotan fight about whether Seglinde and Siegmund have to die for their love, I really cared.  About everyone.  I cared that Fricka was justified, but cold, in her demand that Seigmund and Seiglinde be punished for their incestuous adultery - a double slight on her post as the goddess of marriage - and I cared about Wotan’s warm defence of their genuine love.  And I care about what happened to the twins too - despite the unsavoury incest, I cared that they were happy with each other and got a shot at something shiny in lives that had just been the worst.

While Rheingold had been about dwarves and giants and gods who schemed and built castles in the sky with water views and rainbow bridges, the human level drama of Walkure - which happens both to humans and to gods - was inescapably poignant.

Also, The Ride of the Valkyries - despite its unfortunate associations with American troops and the Nazi Party, and its mockery in popular culture - is a knock-out piece of music.  It is BIG, it is original and it is exhilarating.  It is not, however, the most impressive piece of music in the opera.  There are two more emotionally potent, musically perfect pieces.  One is the interlude following Wotan and Fricka’s fight - a wordless song that potently summarises all the grief that has just been played out and foreshadows all the downfall and suffering to come.  It’s not a heavy piece, by any stretch, but it is sad and knowing.  It is what plays as Ficka leaves the stage - and the opera - for the final time and it’s a fitting end to STEPHANIE BLYTHE’s effecting and righteous portrayal of a character more often done as a nagging shrew.

The other is a moment as Wotan, for all his pursuit of power and making dodgy deals with shady characters, is broken in spirit.  He cries- first in anger, then in pained surrender- that all he really wants is the end. It takes about forty seconds, and it is spectacular when sung by BRYN TERFL.

I have not a single thing bad to say about this cast.  Terfl is phenomenal - he has one single 25 minute monologue basically giving the history of everything we’ve seen so far (this in between two mammoth acts where he fights with Fricka and gives up his beloved daughter Brunnhilde).  Terfl’s energy, expression and beautiful voice meant that I didn’t mind about the sloppy storytelling - Terfl could sing me a shopping list and I’d be happy.  DEBORAH VOIGT is as good a feisty, cheeky Brunhilde as she is a defiant one as she is in her downfall.  And EVA-MARIA WESTBROEK (Seiglinde) and STUART SKELTON (Seigmund, both pictured) - despite some unfortunate staging during their scenes - were clear and strong voiced.  HANS-PETER KONIG plays his second character in the cycle and is excellently rich voiced as Hunding, Seiglinde’s cuckolded husband.

(I wish I could also say nice things about the staging but the truth is that “The Machine” continues to bug me.  I am finding it easier to look away from it when it moves, in order to concentrate better on the orchestra and Wagner’s music. I did get a little kick out of one moment in Act Three.  Wotan and Brunhilde about to be separated forever and are singing on a mountain top.  The “mountain-top” projection stopped, rebooted with a Windows symbol and that infinite blue processing circle for a minute or so and then the rock face magically appeared.)

By the end of the opera I was in it - I completely understood why Wagner was taking his time and why the three hours of prelude were important.  So that now, when the stakes are high and the tension really exists, I actually do care.  And boy do I ever.