Music 
A Singer’s Notes 23: Three from the Bard(0)
The Winter’s Tale is the finest play by Shakespeare which nobody knows. Form and content meet and marry in this play. Everything is focused in a concentrated and clear line. The poet had two dry runs before writing the tale. Pericles, one of the most popular plays of the 17th century, is a rough-hewn rollicking tale which finds its heroine converting lechers and being lusted after by her own father. Next up, in the trial of romances, is Cymbeline, a complex rambling play with too many resurrections. The rightness of the The Winter’s Tale takes us by surprise. The themes of the last plays: separation, fathers and daughters, emotional destruction and rebirthing, here seem to have found a shape which sears itself into the mind. The most played and latest of the romances, The Tempest, can seem almost valedictory after Winter’s Tale.
Full Story»
Blurring the Lines, Part 2 The Bard Retrospectives: “Berg and His World,” Second Weekend
In the second weekend of the Bard Music Festival “Berg and his World” there emerged more clearly a reevaluation of Berg’s historical position. It could be paraphrased this way: Berg’s true spiritual and musical father was Mahler rather than Schoenberg; he was also strongly influenced by Schreker and Zemlinsky, both of whom were more connected to Romanticism than Modernism. While Schoenberg’s role as mentor and colleague was crucial, Berg’s aesthetic sympathies were with tonal opulence, melodic expressiveness, musical eroticism, and formal expansiveness, even though he sought to downplay this throughout his life in order to placate Schoenberg. The larger historical consequence of this view is a revision of the narrative about Modernism: its advocates, including followers of Schoenberg and Webern (i.e. atonalists and dodecaphonists) saw it as the main line of artistic evolution, a music of the future that would last a century and ensure the greatness of German music. This view dominated the historical narrative until the 1970’s, but was never borne out by audience acceptance and/or popularity. On the other hand, the new, emerging narrative has it that Berg was a conservative sustainer of Mahler’s vision, and achieved success that worked alongside the post-1960 Mahler revival and the emergence of Neo-romanticism. In Friday’s day-long panel, Klara Moricz went so far as to classify Berg’s use of tone rows as an occult, mystical and therefore musically arbitrary elements unrelated to expressiveness and musical effectiveness or value. The implication was that while this mystical side of Berg’s personality resonated with that of Schoenberg and many other Viennese contemporaries, it played no role in the aesthetics of the music as experienced by the audience.
Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Old Copland, New Carter, and Others
Varieties of modern orchestral experience, British and American, were on display at the concluding event of this summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, with three out of four offerings featuring the full (or over-full) resources of large ensembles. The Carter song-cycle used the pared-down configuration of a good-sized chamber-orchestra to support the solo soprano. Each work inhabited a distinctive sound-world and had its own conductor; it was almost as if we were hearing four different orchestras. It would be neat if I could diagram the four pieces as the points on a musical compass, but the chronological distance between the Copland (1946) and the rest (1982-2010) was such that the picture would look more like a buried root system connected to the leafy ends of three branches, and not all even belonging to the same tree. (Freud said that you are bound to run into problems if you try to construct a physical model of the mind; I’m having the same problem with this set of pieces.) But one implicit subtext may have inadvertently bound three of the four works together, that of war and peace.
A Singer’s Notes 22: To Sing in Endless Morn of Light
The very short apotheosis at the end of Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” at Hubbard Hall made me think of confluences — the building, the performers, the audience. All of these were here in a gentle and honest synch. It was the most evenly cast opera I have heard in this venue. The staging was honest. The two singers in the title roles were convincing in the simplest way. They looked right, and they sounded right. In the dream sequence, which no staging can match, director Dianna Heldman brought to me a naturalness which was moving in its humility and acceptance of the place in which it was performed. The old hall itself seemed an ideal house for this reality. Nothing which Alexina Jones and Kara Cornell did as Gretel and Hansel was prolix. There was no fake childishness. Humperdinck could be said to have produced an adult’s version of what childhood is- simple tunes, good things to eat, etc. I suppose when compared to “The Magic Flute”, an opera which really is childlike, this is true. But this dead-honest production and its raptly attentive audience in the golden light of the hall made it seem a miracle. There were no weak links on stage, and there were no false steps in the staging. It was great.
More in this category
- Hell on Earth and Hell Beyond: the Kronos Quartet in Usher Hall
- Derek Katz, Janáček: Beyond the Borders
- David Robertson, BBC Proms 2010
- Mozart’s Idomeneo with Sir Roger Norrington and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival
- A Lamb, a Book, and the Apocalypse at Bard Summerscape, August 22, 2010
- The View from Usher Hall, Edinburgh
