Archive for July, 2008
Gramercy Bistro, North Adams
Gramercy Bistro 23 Marshall Street, North Adams, Massachusetts tel. Dress: casual. Prices, moderate: starters, $7 to $12; entrees, $18 to $26. Hours: 5 to 9 every day but Tuesday. Bar hours; 5 to 10. Reservations recommended. Gramercy Bistro in North Adams has been a favorite of ours for some time, and it’s not because [...]
The Haitink Weekend at Tanglewood, 2008: Beethoven and Mahler
It is worth remembering that Bernard Haitink became the chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the most prestigious positions in the musical world, in 1961 at the incredibly young age of thirty-two. Since even before then, up to the present day, he has continued to grow as a musician in his own discreet way, always maintaining a traceable thread back to the values of his early work—clarity, balance, and restraint—qualities, which in the end often proved much more affecting than the excesses of more histrionic conductors. He also showed a particular knack for long, complex symphonic works, working wonders in clarifying their texture and form. His performances of Bruckner’s symphonies on tour and on record made them accessible to a much broader audience outside Austria and Germany. Leonard Bernstein may have popularized Mahler with his intense but sometimes unbearably showy performances, but it was Haitink who made their best qualities more accessible by focussing on coherence in structure and in orchestral sound—a very handsome sound, which has often been described as the “burnished” Concertgebouw sound. It is really Haitink’s sound. None of his successors or predecessors have cultivated it to quite the same extent, and this burnished sound is what he brings to the BSO, especially in their present, improved condition. I still have a vivid recollection of his magnificent Eroica which closed the 2006-07 season in Symphony Hall. The BSO was able to produce that rich, homogeneous sound to perfection. With a full complement of strings there was both mass and fine detail: nothing was lost. The loudest tutti were as clear as the extraordinary pianissimi Haitink can extract from the orchestra.
On The Lord of the Rings, The Musical!
[Ed’s note. J. R. R. Tolkien detested movies, and he didn’t know what pop culture was, beyond perhaps Ivor Novello and the music hall. He would have been perfectly aghast to learn that he and his Lord of the Rings trilogy would become the most extreme sort of Hollywood epic and that he himself was [...]
Orchestral Mass at St. Paul’s: Haydn’s Nelson Mass and a Visit to the Wallace Collection
During the Reign of Terror, refined Parisian ladies attended balls wearing a thin red ribbon around their necks in place of jewels, to signify the guillotine in a graphic way. (I forget if they were pro or con.) Mass executions and blood in the street are too high a price to pay for getting rid [...]
Candide by Leonard Bernstein at the English National Opera
Innocents abroad. Few Americans fit the bill anymore. Since the advent of charter flights in the Sixties, London might as well be the sixth borough of New York City (it takes five hours to fly here; I once took three to go crosstown to the Lincoln Tunnel). It’s rare to hear an English accent in Leicester Square at the height of tourist season – every passerby I asked directions from ten years ago was American – but now that London has become de facto the capital of Europe, Babel prevails. Recently the most American place you could go to was the stage of the English National Opera, where Leonard Bernstein’s Candide resembles a tacky souvenir shop of Warhol images, including Jackie and Marilyn, but extending far, far beyond.
Of the Fourth of July, UNESCO’s Buddy Bears, and Atheists
Remember the U. N.? UNESCO, anyone? While lower Manhattan appears to have become the playground of incompetents, real estate manipulators, and egomaniacial poseurs, they have sponsored an amiable world tour of painted bears, one more variant of a popular shtick in public art, but one which seems, if you examine Joanna Gabler’s photographs, to [...]
Two of a Kind: Ronan Noone’s The Atheist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole
It is hardly surprising that Justin Waldman’s production of Ronan Noone’s The Atheist is already being hailed as the best play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival so early in the season. In form, it is a dramatic monologue. The audience listens to the stereotypically amoral and inconsiderate American journalist Augustine Early talk about his rise to disreputable fame, after tainting the lives of so many (though, ironically, he seems to have an unfortunate case of the Midas Touch, making his victims more famous than himself).
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