Classical Music, Opera, Theatre, Photography, Art

A Singer’s Notes, 13: Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young – of Così Fan Tutte, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Romeo and Juliet (0)

Cosi Fan Futte is an opera I have sung often so I looked forward to going to The Dangerous Liaisons that Shakespeare and Co. has had up for some time now. The brittleness of the spoken play and the precipitous action constantly crowding scene into scene requires exquisite skill from the actors in this play. Mozart’s opera seems expansive and almost sweet next to it. Making the epistolary prose of Laclos into a working drama of reasonable length is not an easy task. The action has an awful purity which is only softened at the very end and given an almost romantic turn as the true lovers die in close succession.

Marianne von Werefkin: L’Amazzone dell’Avanguardia, Museo di Roma in Trastevere, closed February 14th (0)

Marianne von Werefkin (1869 – 1938) is one of those rare artists whose words and sketches almost tell us more about her paintings than the paintings themselves. The words are found in her Lettres à un inconnu written while travelling through Brittany, Paris, and the Provence with artist/companion Alexej von Jawlensky. The sketches, initially outlined in ink and later colored in with pastel or tempera, were her way of satiating an irrepressible “thirst for the abstract” which she subsequently expressed in her full-scale works.

Buy books, CDs, and DVDs at the Berkshire Bookshop. (0)

Do your Christmas shopping at the Berkshire Bookshop: books, cds, dvds, electronics, and more. It’s fast, easy, and cheap…and you help support the Berkshire Review for the Arts. Powered by Amazon.com.

Radio City—A Great Escape? (0)

Why do we go to the theater? To learn? To be inspired? To infuse our eyes and our minds with culture and history? Yes. Yes. And yes. Nevertheless, deep down, beyond the pretension, the academia, and the commentary, what is at the essence of why we attend a performance? To escape. To have, for an hour or two, the divine pleasure of slipping into another world, another life—one where your problems, your hopes, your daily duties are null and void, and for one small moment, it is acceptable, and expected, to abdicate your own life for the sake of immersing yourself in someone else’s. When have we needed an escape—a fantasy—more than now?

Wild, but Not Crazy Enough: Scorsese’s Shutter Island (0)

It’s good news that somebody, let alone a director of Martin Scorsese’s calibre, has finally recognized the highly cinematic creepiness of the Boston Harbour Islands. The opening scenes of Shutter Island reminded me of school excursions to those islands, which have the feel of a mid-ocean archipelago, rather than land sheltered by a harbour. Thankfully, no school excursion ever went as badly as the one on the film. I always got off the island.

The Saint and Notes on a Trend, Edinburgh (0)

The people behind the Bramble Bar & Lounge have recently opened a restaurant called The Saint on Saint Stephen Street in Stockbridge.

Like Bramble and The Bailie (a fine pub on the western corner of the same street, great for an after-dinner dram), The Saint is located in the underground level of a Georgian building, typical of Edinburgh’s New Town which is renowned for such spaces.

Boston Baroque under Martin Pearlman play Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 (0)

As a 400th anniversary tribute to Monteverdi’s Vespers, Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque have returned to one of their signature pieces. Their history with the work goes back to their early years, and their 1997 recording remains one of the most highly respected. These performances, two at Jordan Hall and one at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York were an opportunity to hear Pearlman’s thoroughly researched and solid reading with a new crop of singers, most of whom are young performers from New England. Kristen Watson in particular I remember as one of many excellences in Aston Magna’s Purcell program two summers ago. Her rounded tone as well as her clean articulation, as well as her intelligence and wit, were truly memorable.

Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More: Photographs and Traveller, a film by Alen MacWeeney (UPDATED, including audio: Traveller Liam Weldon sings “The Blue Tar Road”) (0)

In his important collection of anthropological photography, Robert Gardner made clear the connection between the ethnographer’s record of life in western Papua or Ethiopia and the photojournalist’s observation of downtown Barcelona or Dallas. Alen MacWeeney’s Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More is one further document in this fluid branch of study. The travellers were and still are a constant presence in Ireland, where MacWeeney was born and raised, although, at least in the 1960’s when these photographs were made, a largely unseen one—this is, on purpose. A professional need, it seems, sucked Alen MacWeeney into their society, and he remained, to observe and experience it in depth. Now, after some forty years, this experience has been made public.

The Short, Fast Life of Jonathan Van Allen (5)

Jonathan Van Allen’s family and staff had no time to grieve. The day after he was killed in an early morning, one-car accident they had to put on an elegant wedding reception at a restaurant that would soon be Jonathan’s third in South Berkshire County.

Gil Rose talks to Michael Miller about contemporary music, BMOP, and the Opera Boston premiere of Madame White Snake (0)

Gil Rose is best known for his leadership of two high-profile Boston organizations, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), one of the major supporters of contemporary music in America, and Opera Boston, which specializes in musically outstanding performances of operatic masterpieces which have been neglected by the mainstream houses. I know I’ll be eternally grateful to him and Opera Boston for my first opportunity to see Weber’s Die Freischütz, universally regarded as a seminal work in the history of opera and a great one, but rarely performed today. Just last year there were Shostakovich’s The Nose, and Rossini’s Tancredi, and now Opera Boston’s first commission of a new opera, Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake.

Claudio Monteverdi, L’Incoronazione di Poppea at the Boston Early Music Festival, 2009 (0)

One of the happy results of the economic crisis—and there have been some—was this important and delightful production of one of the greatest of operas, Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. BEMF’s original plan, in keeping with their policy of devoting their operatic performances to spectacular stagings of rarely performed, ambitious works, was to present Antiochus und Stratonica (1708) by Christoph Graupner (1683-1760). At the very least Poppea would need only some forty odd people on stage, as opposed to over a hundred in the Graupner, and no machinery, large choruses, or dancers. Poppea was also BEMF’s first repetition of an opera: They staged it at the very first festival in 1981. BEMF has performed numerous important operas, but, if any opera deserves revisitation, it is Poppea. In fact, as brilliant and as successful as this production was, Poppea presents so many problems to specialists, as well as to audiences, that no single production can solve them all, and I can only hope that the people behind this production, above all Gilbert Blin and Ellen Hargis, as well as the musical principles, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, will have an opportunity to return to it at least once again in their careers, to develop and refine their insights, which were both intellectually trenchant as well as blessed with common sense of the best kind. The Seattle Ring, Caramoor’s Semiramide, and this Poppea show how much there is a lot to be gained by respecting the composer’s intentions and the conventions of his time. In my enthusiasm I saw the production twice. I’d venture to say that they got it right.

Ragtime, Neil Simon Theatre, Broadway, NYC (0)

This dispassionate revival feels less fraught with meaning about the American melting pot than it evokes a dusty museum diorama where mechanical figures in period costume move their arms around; not stimulating, but off-putting and cold. This scaled-down production features a gorgeous score of rousing anthems and duets with a full 28-piece orchestra. Though the score is padded with some forgettable music, there are a handful of fantastic songs that make the characters’ longing and tenacity come alive. But this staging, with its bleak design and lack of stellar performances, seems reductive and watered down. The material demands an exuberantly beating heart, but here receives a treatment that is mostly anemic and remote.