Tag Archive for ‘MA’
A Singer’s Notes 50: Listening to King Lear
Dr. Johnson famously refused to re-read the play for some years, remarking that it “did not keep faith with the chronicles” referring, I suppose, to an older play on the same subject. Shakespeare’s alterations were radical. Cordelia’s death is the issue. Nahum Tate saves her, and his version ruled the English stage for decades. These days it is either the bleak version where all hope is banished, or what critics quaintly call the Christianizing version. Like today’s pols, it’s one or the other; the middle lies empty. But there is a middle, very possibly a transcendent one. We have already seen the end of Shakespeare’s Lear twice, first in Pericles, and then The Winter’s Tale. Check the Quarto text of King Lear and you will read that music is called for in the awakening scene of Act 4 – just as Paulina does in the corresponding place in Winter’s Tale. Is there a chance the playwright is out to show that Lear’s so-called hallucinations in his final moments are true vision? This is not bringing a statue back to life – a statue that never died. This is seeing a dead person in a new life. Was this a deliberate challenge the playwright set himself – nothing less than all from nothing? Can we believe it? Was the dying King Lear the only one with the ears to hear? And finally the eyes to see? Is his own awakening scene a dress rehearsal for the promised end? Why are we so willing to deny Lear’s seeing? He himself tests it, puts the glass up to her nostrils. He despairs, but this is not the finality. The finality is open. ”It is required you do awake your faith,” as Paulina says in Winters Tale. Pace Dr. Johnson, maybe the old faith is kept, just not shown – forcing the imagination still further, the way that music brings us to the edge of the thing and we hear it in the silence after. Kelly Galvin’s Cordelia made us hear this every time she spoke, gave us an assurance of it. Her speaking was partner to her silence.
Vasily Petrenko and Joshua Bell in a Russo-English Program with the SF Symphony: Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Elgar
Hats off, ladies and Gentlemen! A conductor! And a great symphony!
Vasily Petrenko’s recent electrifying week with the San Francisco Symphony reminds the listener that Gustavo Dudamel is not the sole “conducting animal” to be found on the musical circuit these days. Esa-Pekka Salonen coined the term a while back, with the impassioned Venezuelan in mind. And indeed, Dudamel is the sort of refreshing performer who has the winds jumping to their feet like jazz musicians and bass players twirling their instruments. He is all about emotion as vitality. But physically, apart from the energy with which he beats time, his manner is unremarkable.
The fascination of Petrenko, by contrast, is his ability to reflect every quivering moment of the music somewhere on his face or body, as though he were a disembodied hologram. We joke about people who are “double-jointed.” But Vasily Petrenko might as well be quadruple-sprung and then some…this is a man who’d have no trouble tapping three heads, rubbing five tummies and signalling with numerous eyebrows at the same time!
The Rosés of Provence
If it were possible to bottle up the spirit of a place in a wine, my vote would go to the rosés of Provence. Warm, radiant, cheerful and decorously seductive, their appearance alone sparks the thought that a few sips will transport one to a world of sunshine and tranquility. Who wouldn’t want to have ...
Some True Things Arranged Deceptively – a Screenplay
A jumbo jet full of PASSENGERS waits to pass through customs, passports in hand. They are in between, not yet present in any country. At the end of the corridor an automated dispenser of hand sanitizer welcomes them to the United States and to Los Angeles, such as it is. A few passengers exchange anxious glances with the impassive and, for some, unfamiliar machine.
The line does not move.
Eventually a DIMINUTIVE WOMAN approaches the machine, hand extended. The dispenser BUZZES and a tennis ball-sized dollop of hand sanitizer appears in her hand. She returns to her place in line, staring at the impassive white bolus in her palm, more anxious than before.
The line begins to move.
SECRET CENTURY Greylock Arts and Pure Theory, Adams, Massachusetts through August 27th 2009
SECRET CENTURY Greylock Arts and Pure Theory, Adams, Massachusetts through August 27th 2009 (THE DNA-PHOTON PROJECT) RE-ADAPTED FOR SECRET CENTURY statement by Dan Rose: “WHAT CAN WE HUMANS BECOME? BOTH THE NOVEL AND THE MACHINE INSTALLATION ARE QUASI-NARRATIVES, A MULTI-GENRE NOVEL WHERE ONE OF THE GENRES IS ASSEMBLED FROM GLASS, METAL, AND PLASTIC.” DAN ROSE, ...
Sol LeWitt III: The ABCDs of Sol Lewitt
This exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art is supplemental to the immense retrospective installation at MassMoca in North Adams. In some surprising ways it reveals more of the evidentiary by-products of the thought process of the seminal conceptual artist than the spectacular realizations at MassMoca.
Goodnight Irene Directed by Paolo Marinou-Blanco
Director: Paolo Marinou-Blanco Cast: Robert Pugh, Nuno Lopes, Rita Loureiro An exotic place, an eccentric character and enticing story make Goodnight Irene an excellent motion picture – perhaps the best shown in the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Robert Pugh brilliantly plays an aging actor, expatriate and drunkard called Alexander Corless, who lives a life ...
In Praise of Herbert von Karajan, with a Selective Critical Discography
My immediate reaction to Michael Miller’s commentary on the Karajan centenary [Oh no! He’s not back again, is he? - May 2, 2008] was rather choleric, but I’ve settled down a bit since then and can write this from a relatively balanced perspective.