LA Opus

A car is never only a car

2009-12-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

Autos, enthusiasts park for a weekend
at Pebble Beach's Concours d'Elegance

by Tod Mesirow

(ALL OF MESIROW'S PHOTOS MAY BE FOUND HERE.)

With apologies to Groucho Marx or Sigmund Freud: a car is never just a car.

(You probably forgot that Groucho’s show “You Bet Your Life” was sponsored by the Chrysler DeSoto for years.)

Regardless of where you live, every few days you run into someone who says “my car is only a means of transportation, I only use it to get from here to there.”

But even the most ardent cars-are-utilitarian types waiver in their lack of ardor upon sighting something as exotic as a modern supercar, or a 1930 Bugatti with elephant belly seats. It’s all but impossible even to feign disinterest when presented to an immaculate Alfa Romeo or a rare racing Porsche.

Zagato, front grille.

There’s no way not to have a love/hate relationship with the car, the penultimate creation of modern technology, the apotheosis of the wheel, the holy grail of independence. A car is really magic – it’s a time machine, a trance machine, an embodiment of freedom, of personality, an extension of our limited physical abilities. There’s nothing on earth not man-made that can outrun a car. In the old days when the iron horse ruled the landscape there were famous races between men on horseback and the steam and coal powered behemoths that traversed our massive continent. Eventually the horses lost. When cars came into existence around the turn of the last century, the racing resumed. These days there’s no contest. Unless your electric car runs down its battery.

But the car is also profligate in its use of resources – oil, steel, concrete, rubber – and elephant belly, if you own a 1930 Bugatti. An inordinate amount of the world’s economic production is tied up in one way or another in the creation, use, and maintenance of the automobile-based transportation system. Some studies claim greenhouse gas output of cars and trucks is challenged in the United States by methane from cows used in the beef production system, but cars and trucks spew significant amounts of pollutants – to wit this one, claiming that “transportation is the largest single source of air pollution in the United States.”

Which leads some people to triumphantly predict the end of oil, the turning off of the pumps at the gas station, and a transportation future powered by quiet clean electric vehicles sourcing their energy from the sun, the wind, and the earth – if they can ever figure out how to generate geothermal energy without causing earthquakes.

The day may come when cars run on something other than petroleum. But that day is way more than the normal “in ten years” time-frame that is attached to any promising futuristic technology. It’s always ten years away, no matter how many years go by. It’s that future that seems to get further away the closer we get to it.

Next to no one who attends the annual automotive version of a religious ritual really gives a rat’s ass about all of this – other than the elephant belly interior. Thousands and thousands journey from across the globe to attend the premiere car event of the year, complete with a dizzying array of auctions, awards, and people dressed up in period costumes. The former weekend has expanded to nearly a week, with new events being added and old ones expanding. They’re referred to as Pebble Beach, and the crowning event in most people’s minds is the Concours d’Elegance, held at the Pebble Beach Golf Links every August since 1950, cars “are invited to appear on the famed eighteenth fairway.”

a 1941 Thunderbolt

But that’s Sunday. My third time there, only the second consecutive year, started on Thursday, when I drove up from Los Angeles in my relatively new, though purchased used, 530xi BMW wagon. It’s about a six hour drive from LA to Monterey, depending on the normal things like the chosen route, the traffic, and one’s willingness to exceed the posted speed limits. Often there’s difficulty along the 101 through Santa Barbara, and the speed limit is 65. Another option is the 5 freeway, which takes the driver over the Grapevine, a massive, steep, pass through the Tehachapi Mountains and down into the Central Valley.

It’s completely dramatic, both visually, and from the driver’s standpoint. There’s a slow truck lane to the right; there are huge, long, if-your-brakes-fail ramps towards the bottom, that seem as if there’s no way they would stop a runaway 18-wheeler. But I’m sure they would, otherwise why build them? Just for peace of mind? It would be fun to see one tested. Evil Knievel, where are you when we need you? Maybe we can get the Mythbusters to try it.

After the descent into the valley the speed limit bumps up from 65 to 70; using the tacit add-ten-mph understanding that seems to function on major highways I set the cruise control for 80. There’s a bit of weaving in and out of trucks and slower cars that a pack of us undertake as the 4-lane divided highway stretches off beyond the edge of the flat horizon. At the 46 things change again – the preferred route - most direct, least amount of curves and grade changes – several of us in the pack peel off and head west. Now the limit drops down to 55, and the road is two lanes – one in each direction. Oil pumps line acres on either side, eventually giving way to orange groves, then almond groves. The challenge here is to take advantage of the passing zones, and zip around the trucks and other slow-moving vehicles, without having to play chicken with on-coming traffic. And as always to avoid the officers of the law and their desire to catch people driving above the posted speed limit.

One of the pleasures of a road trip is the anonymous group driving that one can fall into – following someone with a radar detector, or just a willingness to ignore the possibility of an expensive ticket. It’s even more fun on a two-lane road like Route 46, where just because the BMW Z3 I’m following is able to get around the several slow-moving cars and trucks in front of us, I may not be able to tuck in behind him and keep up. Hence the challenge, and the enjoyment in taking it on. My friend Mark always talks about how golf is a perfect opportunity to learn a lot about someone’s personality in a very short period of time; so is driving, I think.

I make it up there safely, and without any short term painful relationships with the Highway Patrol. My friends Michael and Michael, who have known each other since they were in diapers, and have been attending the Concours nearly as long, have beat me by a day, and are set up comfortably at the bar at the Fishwife Restaurant, next to the Beachcomber Inn, where they always stay.

I join them in a martini, and we talk of cars, and their drive. Michael has a 1972 Ferrari Daytona 365 GT they drive up every year. Sweet sweet car. The best thing is to see it stomped on, which both Michael and Michael do on a regular basis. I’ve been in the passenger seat, but have not yet taken a turn behind the wheel.

There are all kinds of things to do the following day – several different events – but I’m going to try and get into the Quail. A mere $400, and called “a motorsports gathering.” It’s held at the Quail Lodge Resort & Golf Club – last year I managed a press pass, but at the time I was the executive producer of an NBC prime-time pilot that everyone expected to go to series. Top Gear, the most popular car show in the world, produced in London by the BBC, was, everyone thought, coming to NBC. The people who created the British show – Andy Wilman and host Jeremy Clarkson – had hired me to make the American translation. Our hosts were Adam Carolla, Tanner Faust, and Eric Stromer, and everyone connected with the BBC show – most importantly to me, Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson – thought we had succeeded. Everyone now knows what happened to NBC – they continued their drive to prime time insignificance – and decided against picking up the show to go to series. Several people have since been fired at NBC, and Leno is often lucky to beat the top cable shows in the ratings. Which is a long-winded way of saying this year I wasn’t perceived as someone with the same level of importance as last year.

I had dutifully e-mailed and called the appropriate PR people connected to the event. And had no assurance of being able to gain admission. Nor was I prepared to spend $400 for a ticket. But even if I had been willing to, the event was sold out. There was no desire to stuff as many people as possible into the rarefied air of the Quail. No – exclusive means not everyone gets in. At breakfast Michael and Michael asked me my plans. When I told them they said “good luck with that.” But my thinking was pretty basic – there was no charge to park, and if I didn’t get in, so be it.

The parking lot at the Quail is an event unto itself. There is no massive expanse of black top, with concrete car stoppers and white stripes to delineate spaces. When one drives to the Quail, one is directed to park one’s motor vehicle on the grass, the green green grass of the golf course. There are amazing cars everyone, cars not on display, per se, but driven their by their owners as their means of conveyance to this event. A more subtle form of display, perhaps, but only subtle in this environment, where a Ferrari is not rare, where an Aston Martin DBS warrants a glance perhaps, but nothing more. This is the domain of the serious serious car aficionado, which most often goes hand in hand with serious cash.

After attempting the frontal approach with the people at the media tent – “hello, I sent an e-mail and called; in the past I did (and so forth); currently I’m developing (and so forth) for Discovery Channel. No, it’s not on yet.” Failing, I manage to get one of my friends on the phone, despite the normal signal strength problems one encounters always at the wrong time, though the right time for signal problems are rare; and he manages to find a spare media ticket for me. I have one of those moments of transformation from being on the outs to being one of those inside, the privileged few. Among the chosen. It reeks of Jane Austen somehow. Though I try to adopt an air of Hunter S. Thompson, I feel like I manage to get a bit past Nick Carraway. The champagne and oysters make a big difference.

That’s the thing about the Quail – it’s really pretty hard to beat as an event if what you like is really good food and amazingly rare and beautiful cars, in an uncluttered gathering – that is an appropriate word, it turns out – a gathering of the faithful, with the cars grouped by year, by design, by manufacturer. As I attempt to find the end of the oyster line, there are other people doing the same thing. Without ropes and stanchions it’s up to the members of polite society to figure out the form of the line themselves. A woman with a hat – which describes half the women there, reminding me of one of my favorite works of children’s literature, which actually now that I think of it, does involve cars – Go, Dog, Go! – with the female dog asking her male friend “do you like my hat?” on various pages throughout the book – looks at my wrist, and says with a playfully accusatory tone “where’s your wristband?” the signifier that I have not actually snuck in, but did indeed buy or somehow procure a ticket to the event. You think I’ve managed to sneak in, don’t you? I return the challenge, pulling my actual ticket confidently from my jacket pocket and saying “I didn’t want to bother with the wrist band.” She laughs, and her companions – one is her husband, I’m guessing, and the other couple their pals – hand me a glass of champagne as we wait in the oyster line. We make polite conversation; I ask them if they’ve seen the Bugatti with the elephant leather seats. They say they haven’t yet. We talk of cars – of course – and at the mention of Lamborghini someone in line with us asks if we would like to see his Lamborghini. By now we’ve made our way to the head of the oyster line, where 6 people stand behind ice and oyster laden tables, a veritable Shangri-la of bivalves, and I’m more focused on enjoying the incredible taste and texture of amazing oysters, being shucked as I slowly make my way from one shucker to another, eating eating eating with an occasional sip of champagne the ocean coming to life on my tongue as the oyster’s life is ended; from the sea we came and to the sea I return with every precious experience, the chilled salt water the slippery deliciousness – did I use that word already – it’s hard to describe to a non-oyster lover the crystallization of the sensory experience of a perfect oyster, accompanied by a worthwhile champagne or super premium super chilled vodka. Ah but there it is, the end of the line, the last of the shuckers, and I pause an extra moment, down the last of the champagne, and avail myself of one last oyster. Slowly I ease away from the table by nothing less than sheer force of will, fighting with myself to find some semblance of decorum when confronted with such a rare and powerful opportunity. I emerge from my food fugue, and find my fellow oyster eaters nearby. Come look at my Lamborghini says one of them. I follow them all, the two couples, the Lambo owner, and his son.

Lambo

The Lamborghini is indeed beautiful, immaculate, and very cool. We’re all invited to sit in it, and I do. It provokes the era in which it was made – the mid 60’s – all Italian clean elegant modern design. A worthy object, this car, and probably fun to drive, though I imagine it drives like the past as well. Stiff and unforgiving and not how one imagines it would be. But fun to think about. I ask the owner’s son if he gets to drive it. Absolutely, he assures me, which is a great answer. They take it out most weekends, he says. Which is better than most rare objects – less than 200 were made – put to use, and not just turned into a full-sized expensive Matchbox or Hot Wheel.

We all wandered off separately. I went back to the elephant car. Even though I know things were different in 1930 – there were more elephants, the world seemed bigger, Histoire de Babar was to be published in 1931 for the first time – it still seemed somehow wrong to have the hide of an elephant adorn the inside of a car. Even though it took fewer elephants than cows to provide the leather, it was a bit unusual to see the interior and think about the elephant that was wearing the seat I saw in front of me.

ol' No. 18, a '32 Studebaker

More eating, more drinking, more strolling around and soaking in the sense of luxurious living. Old Ferraris are rare enough, but the dark blue Ferrari has its very own special lineage. I wonder who Prince Bernhard is, thinking maybe I’ll have to look him up on the internet some time. Turns out he was from Holland, and visited the Ferrari factory in Italy several times as the car was being made. He sold it in 1961. I wonder if he missed it.

A one-off MGA built in 1960 looked very Buck Rogers. Especially with the wooden seats.

I was in no hurry to leave, but I also didn’t want to be the last one there. So déclassé. Besides, they took down the oyster bar, and closed up the champagne. There was really no point in hanging around. Time to get out with the rest of the hoi polloi.

The next day was the Historics – the name by which most people call the Historic Races at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca – when old cars are taken out of the showroom, the garage, the museum and actually taken out on the track and run around the course. Not just oversized, overpriced Hot Wheels, but actual cars that run, going wheel to wheel, on the famous track where legends have been born, records set, and lives lost. It takes some balls to put a million dollar rarity on the track and subject it to the vagaries of actual use as opposed to reserving it for idolatry.

Each year the event honors and features a particular car manufacturer. This year it was Porsche, and America’s most famous Porsche collector, Jerry Seinfeld, was there with a car. Rumor had it he was going to get behind the wheel of one of his cars and take a turn or two on the track.

There were a few people looking at a Porsche with some significant history in mid-restoration. The signage that explained which Porsche it was – and sure enough there was Jerry, with a few squires in attendance. He wasn’t being mobbed, but it was fun to see people walk by, and every now and then stop in recognition, and think to themselves – do I really want to go over and bug him? Most walked on.

The Seinfeld Porsche was right next to an actual movie star Porsche, the one that Steve McQueen drove in the movie “Le Mans,” the number 20 Gulf Porsche, with the classic baby blue with orange color scheme. These cars were parked near the entrance to the track, where race cars were driven from their paddocks out into the pits, prior to taking their turns in class-by-class races. A small group of people hung around, waiting for certain favorite cars to make their way through the crowds. It was one of those scenarios ripe with small drama, from the track safety people, to the fans, to the casual car tag-alongs, there to please their spouse, loved one, or friend, and the actual drivers, mechanics, and owners themselves. Robert Duvall can extol the smell of napalm in the morning, but to these people nothing beats race fuel and exhaust any time of the day or night.

One of the fun things about attending the Historics is to stumble across the odd, the rare, the unusual and actually see these often unique one-of-a-kind vehicles opened up on a race track. This year I was fortunate enough to see the “Battlebird” in action for the first time out on the track. Built in 1957 by Ford, the special edition Thunderbird was one of two built for the Daytona Speed Week competition. Chris, the driver, gave me some details from the “Battlebird’s” past. Ford was after a new record in the “flying mile” on the hard-pack sand of Daytona Beach, a popular location for land speed record attempts in the old days, when those sorts of records were a regular staple of the popular media, and the cars and drivers enjoyed the limelight as legitimate sports celebrities.

The '57 Ford "Battlebird."

In 1957 the “Battlebird” made 1 pass and recorded at time over 200 miles an hour, pretty sweet for the day. But the time would only stand as official if a second pass above 200 miles an hour was recorded. Mechanical problems prevented a successful second run. The second of the two “Battlebirds” built for the effort is in the record books with two runs above 160 miles an hour. No one knows where the second “Battlebird” ended up.

There was a happy group sitting in the shade in their paddock area, behind a beautiful blue 1932 Studebaker, an Indy car, #18 Studebaker Special. While holding on to his tuna fish sandwich, the owner told me how the car was a true barn find, and how much fun it was to run the boat tailed, flat 8 around the track. He was fine with people sitting in the one seat and posing for pictures, and it was interesting to see how far race cars have come in 77 years.

I ended up wandering through the booth area with books, shirts, posters, and other race and automotive related items for sale on my way to an area next to the field where a new car was on display. Something that may be historic, and one day show up on the track, but for now is for show and tell - plug-in electrics being developed for market. An interesting combination of gasoline and electricity, the supercar styled hybrids can be recharged by normal 110 volt house plugs, but also feature a small on-board engine that runs on gasoline. The gasoline engine, unlike the Prius-type hybrid, does not work in conjunction with the electric engine. Rather, it’s designed only to recharge the on-board batteries that power the electric motors that make the car move. CEO and designer Fisker stood in front of his two door roadster and four door sedan, the first vehicle, named Karma, and posed in true captain of industry/superhero fashion. If his Fisker Automotive succeeds, he’ll be both.

Time for a few races, more wandering amidst the rows and rows of amazing cars, and off I went for the day. At a certain point it’s impossible to absorb any more.

And then it’s Sunday. The main event – the anchor of the nearly week-long immersion into the world of gears, wheels, deals, and big dollar cars – the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the 59^th Annual event, with cars from around the world, lined up on the 18^th fairway of the golf course by the water’s edge, separated by category, competing for various awards and trophies.

Hard to miss was the 1921 Paige – bright yellow, with a smiling woman in period costume holding an umbrella. I asked her if she donned her get up to go galavanting about in the car, which made me think of a crayon box; maybe it was the yellow and the green grass, the object from the past. No she told me. Once you drive it, you can’t show it. These cars adorning the pristine grass were specimens, museum pieces, rare examples of design, engineering, manufacturing; a display of passion and obsession for preservation and perfection. They’ve ceased to be cars in the actual specific sense, and have ascended to Mt. Olympus as car-like objects of reverence, representative of their time and place of origin, but no longer mere mortal cars to be used for something as mundane as driving them.

A Ferrari from 1957

My favorite of all the cars on the lawn was the 1937 Alfa Romeo 6C 2300B Pescara Berlinetta. The entire family was standing around enjoying themselves, and thrilled to be there from Europe with the car. The wife told me they were told it would take 3 years to restore, and it took 6. Just like construction – double the time estimate. From the fin on the back, to the rear wheel covers, the inset door handles, the circles on the engine covers – the integration of all the design details into a comprehensive and alluring whole strike one as so cohesive, so elegant and ideal. Looking at it made me smile, and this feeling of pleasure was enhanced by how happy the owner and his family were, standing around and soaking in the scene. They had somehow incorporated the car and their experience into their family dynamic – it had become a member of the family.

would you believe...an early Alfa?

Two Chryslers from 1941 made a matched set of style and innovation – the Thunderbolt, designed by Alex Tremulis and the Newport, designed by Ralph Roberts and Alex Tremulis. Some reports say five of each were built. The Newport was chosen as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500. Both cars made me think of the design palate of the film Roger Rabbit. The fanciful dual cowl, the voluptuous curves, the streamlined nature of them both leave one feeling drenched in nostalgia. They were built in 90 days, an almost impossible feat. And the Thunderbolt took two years to restore to its original condition. Which proves the maxim that it’s always more difficult and time consuming to fix something than to build it in the first place.

Nine years later and curves were still in – at least in Italy. The 1949 Fiat Topolino 750cc Zagato drew an appreciative onlooker. The Topolino name was reportedly based on affection for Mickey Mouse, “topolino” meaning little mouse in Italian.

1911 Oldsmobile Limited. Interesting to see how far things changed in 30 years, going back to the Thunderbolt and the Newport. From a hulking behometh more closely resembling farm equipment than the elegant lines of what was to come, its ability to endure the decades is impressive. The horn resembling a tuba, the wooden-spoked wheels borrowed from an actual horse-drawn wagon. Transportation in its purest, utilitarian form.

The oddest vehicles, in some ways, were the 3-wheeled Morgans. A white 1947, and a black 1937. Ten years on and the design relatively the same – the spare tire conveniently attached to the back end of the vehicle. 3 wheeled vehicles being less expensive to produce, and due to reduced weight and smaller engines, less expensive to operate. All in the pre-Hummer days of course. One would not want to meet up with a 4-wheeled behemoth in their sprightly little 3-wheeler.

And there are more. And still more. Great hats, bow ties, people dressed up and turned out for the occasion. Some remodeled and restored themselves, the running joke in the car world – customizers of cars have custom wives as well. At a certain point there’s a satiation factor that sets in, and I retreat from the field to the Mercedes Benz suites, thoughtfully placed in the prime location with access to the viewing and judging area, as each car will drive the short distance from its viewing location past the throngs and judges, to be considered for one of the awards and prizes. By then, I’m long gone. Another year marveling at motor cars, their fans, owners, and keepers.

A Borscht-Belt Bartolo

2009-12-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

Praticò, DiDonoto et al. light up LA Opera's Barber of Seville

Bruno Praticò and Joyce DiDonato

By Donna Perlmutter

Just imagine: Zero Mostel has come back to life and he’s impersonating Dr. Bartolo, that is, the semi-lecherous old stick of a guardian in Rossini’s confection of an opera buffa, Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

But wait. This Bartolo is also a patter meister extraordinaire. In his bass-baritone voice he can cleanly articulate/sing more syllables faster and more cleanly than the long-gone tobacco auctioneer of ancient, cigarette-ad days. And his timing? Better than Jack Benny’s. In the only English line spoken at the Music Center Pavilion, courtesy of Los Angeles Opera, Bruno Praticò rolls his rotund self downstage, faces the audience as he listens to an importuning knock on the door, and in a dead-pan, without moving a muscle, says loudly, “Who Ees Dare.”

I can’t do justice to the hilarity of that moment, or any of the other like moments that the master showcases, guided here by director Javier Ulacia. But even for those who don’t care for comic opera there’s much to revel in besides Pratico, who has performed this choice role at most of the elite international houses.

Others in the star-studded cast include the Rosina of Joyce DiDonato (left), the American mezzo (yes, a genuine coloratura mezzo, as Rossini ordered, not a canary soprano). She’s the trouper – remember? – who hobbled around on a crutch just after really breaking her leg mid-performance to “go on with the show” at Covent Garden; and, yes, she finished that run in a wheel chair!

Well, this Rosina not only lit up the house with her luscious voice and purling, nuanced roulades but she played just as nimbly as a girl who could outsmart her captor yet keep her innocence, too. What’s more, there was the Almaviva of Juan Diego Flórez – current king of the high C’s – and no slouch himself in the physical action department, although his voice sounds a tad small at the Pavilion and wiry at times. Most tenors sing sweetly, ardently and amiably but not with enough technique to seal the last act with Cessa di piu resistere, the killer aria they usually omit. Flórez does it. And with great vocal flourish.

DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez

As the title character, Nathan Gunn made a cheery cohort, if not a self-important enough Figaro and sang reasonably well. But the walrus-like Andrea Silvestrelli was a big, bluff, bellowing basso of a Basilio, comic without even trying.

The point here, as in most operas of the genre, is deception – Bartolo being the ridiculous old grump of a bad man everyone wants to deceive, in order for Rosina and Almaviva to betroth. The production, originated by Emilio Sagi, who, together with his team from Madrid’s Teatro Real that gave LA Opera its characterful 2005 Carmen, also put its stylish stamp here. Gone, thank god, are all those awful buffo clichés that have Figaro costumed as a red and white barber pole, for instance.

Instead, as the overture plays – deftly but almost facelessly under Michele Mariotti – we see, off in the distance, little men in black suits emerging from the floor boards to scurry about and push in place all the movable panels of Llorenc Corbella’s set. With a huge gray sky looming over the scene, its ingenious stagecraft looks like something from a Fellini movie and its musical phrasing is unerring.

So too were Renata Schussheim’s costumes, a sophisticated fashion display with smart hats, all in black-and-white prints, stripes, polka dots that identified the various Sevillian street types, even the occasional flamenco couple (of course, everything turned colorful for the happy ending). Nuria Castejon’s choreography, especially the scene with Rosina and Almaviva singing their duet while maneuvering on, around and under a table, even sitting up back to back on the table was a marvel of musicality. Of course it required talent of this proportion to even imagine such action.

Happily, there is no prompter’s box for these performances. It’s a dream show – all of it.

A Tamerlano for the Tenorissimo

2009-11-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

Tamerlano, Opera in three acts (1724-31)
Music by George Frideric Handel
Text by Nicola Francesco Haym (from earlier operas)

Saturday, November 21, 2009 – 7:30 pm, LA Opera
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center

Conductor, William Lacey
Director, Chas Rader-Shieber
Scenery and Costumes, David Zinn
Lighting, Christopher Akerlind
Stage Manager, Lyla Forlani

Tamerlano, Bejun Mehta, countertenor
Bajazet, Plácido Domingo, tenor
Asteria, Sarah Coburn, soprano
Andronico, Patricia Bardon, mezzo-soprano
Irene, Jennifer Holloway, mezzo-soprano
Leone, Ryan McKinny, bass-baritone

Review by Rodney Punt

The Tamerlano of history (aka “Timor the Lame”) was a 14th Century Mongol strongman to be reckoned with, his capital the legendary Samarkand. The last great nomadic leader, he was also an intellect and cultivator of the arts, bigger than life and ripe for stage treatment. Authors and composers duly complied, making much of his exploits for centuries after his whirlwind reign.

George Frideric Handel wrote his version of Tamerlano in a characteristic spurt of productivity in 24 days of July, 1724. One of a trio of his greatest operas, it comes just after Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724, produced by LA Opera in 2001), and before Rodelinda (1725). Of all Handel’s stage works, it is the most tragic, its mood of inner drama sustained through the extended use of dramatic recitative and short arioso. Musical numbers are prevailingly in the minor key. Dappled hues from its orchestra’s woodwinds and subdued writing for the strings, including two theorbos in the bass register, enforce a somber coloration in the score; there isn’t a brightening brass instrument to be found. It happens to be one of the masterpieces of Baroque opera seria, but the reason for LA Opera’s mounting of it may relate more to a fortunate historic convergence of opera politics and artistic second thoughts.

Handel had engaged the Italian Francesco Borosini for the role of Bajazet. The first superstar tenor in history (but certainly not the last), he brought with him another operatic setting of the same story that placed more importance on his character. Thus induced, Handel incorporated dramatic elements of that setting into his own version. In so doing he composed for Borosini opera’s first leading tenor role, as well as one of its most compelling death scenes.

The Bajazet role also happens to sit comfortably in the range of the indefatigable Plácido Domingo. As a result, Tamerlano has been revived, from 2008, as a star vehicle for the tenor-impresario, and shared between his two opera companies in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. The LA Opera incarnation was premiered last Saturday evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in a minimalist production only sporadically inspired in design and direction, but well performed by a cast of six singers and Baroque orchestra under the direction of William Lacey.

The opera’s plot is a tangle of alienated affections, frustrated intentions, and mistaken motives. Tamerlano (Bejun Mehta) a haughty, cruel monarch has conquered and imprisoned Bajazet (Plácido Domingo), and is bent on winning the affections of his daughter, Asteria (Sarah Coburn) who is herself in love with Andronico, (Patricia Bardon, in a trouser role). Andronico, allied with Tamerlano, is in love with Asteria, but unaware of this Tamerlano attempts to bribe him for his help in winning Asteria for himself. Irene (Jennifer Holloway) wants to convince Tamerlano to love her. Leone (Ryan McKinny), seemingly a friend to all, intervenes. Things spin seriously out of control in various duels of wits and wills, especially between Tamerlano, who holds all the cards, and Bajazet, defeated, depressed, and worried about the fate of his much sought-after daughter.

Within its operatic conventions of coercive power pursuing a love interest, the opera has remarkable psychological truth. Hell-bent on gaining the affection of Asteria, emperor Tamerlano is held in check by a desire that his ardent love be returned of Asteria’s own free will. The mounting tension is relieved only with the death of the intransigent Bajazet, and Tamerlano’s subsequent realization of Irene’s true love for him, which in turn leads to the forgiveness of his remaining rivals and enemies. This Enlightenment era denouement was to anticipate that of Mozart’s frothy Abduction from the Seraglio by over half a century.

The LA Opera production is not quite up to the opera’s dramatic potential, however. Its stark, unimaginative set resembles a 20th Century fascistic bunker, a hackneyed concept by now. The expressionistic lighting alternates bright glare with deep shadows, but only sporadically to valid psychological effect. The vision is bleak. Later on a metallic field riser, two plain chairs, and a red curtain backdrop serve as a bare-bones throne for conquering greatness. The look overall is crisp, but also cheaply expedient.

Some of the staging is problematic. A dozen bully-boy military police stand around in clichéd configurations, overhearing secrets they should not hear, having only passing reaction to them, and finally not being present at the critical moment in Act III when Tamerlano orders them to move against his enemies. They initially suggest Mussolini-like thugs, but end up looking like the impotent Russian soldiers I saw standing around and lost in Berlin after the Wall was torn down, with no remaining mission to perform, but no housing to return to in the Motherland.

The victorious Tartars and allied Greeks, in modern black suit and dress, blend into the bland setting. By contrast, the defeated Bajazet wears a flowing Turkish gown that glimmers of red and gold satin, with cape to match, his daughter Asteria similarly if less spectacularly attired. The dress code suggests gray and black militarism snuffing out a colorful and humanistic old order, but it may also have something to do with a star tenor’s desire for audience attention.

The implacable Bajazet is already out of step with the other characters on stage. His role should be sympathetic. But modern psychology might also find his character a neurotic depressive, projecting the negativity of a defeated man on all those around him, most notably on his daughter. The production does nothing to soften this perception. His constant state of anger has him stomping off to the same stage-left door in each act, bestowing unintentional tedium to an already intransigent character. Our initial sympathies flag by the end of the third act, and his much threatened death comes as something of a relief at his final gasps.

There are amusing elements. With a countertenor singing the alpha-male role of Tamerlano, his rival Andronico a trouser role, and stage action emphasizing a sexless disguise for Irene, there was as much gender-ambiguity on the Chandler’s stage as a Halloween on Hollywood Boulevard. A distinguished gentleman sitting to the left of me couldn’t make heads or tails of who was supposed to be in love with whom. Imagine his confusion had he attended an authentic Baroque performance with all three roles sung by the original castrati. Fellini, where art thou?

In his 126th operatic role, Plácido Domingo seems destined to be, if not the world’s most adored tenor, certainly its most accomplished. He has sung in only one other Baroque opera in a long career, but Bajazet is a role uniquely appropriate for him. Domingo’s recent outing as a dramatic baritone in the title role of Simon Boccanegra should by all rights have left his 68-year-old vocal chords hardened and unready for Baroque coloratura. Understandably lacking some of the vocal dexterity of his colleagues, Domingo was, however, able to summon a plangent, brightened version of his tenor voice with enough agility to negotiate the demands of a role that emphasizes dramatic elements over pyrotechnics. Even as his energies dipped toward the end of the victory lap that the role of Bajazet represents for him, Domingo was up to the challenge, investing his performance with a young man’s intensity and commitment.

Domingo and company have assembled a first class set of singing actors as his foils, capable youngsters still approaching their career highs, none of whom were even born when he launched his professional career over forty years ago.

I have admired Bejun Mehta from his LA Opera performance in Giulio Cesare several seasons ago, where his dramatic countertenor eclipsed even the more famous David Daniels in the same opera. Here, in the title role, he reigns supreme in flourishing coloratura passages. Lithe and limber in dark suit and bald pate, he has the look and manner of Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, moving menacingly on little cat feet. He cold-heartedly rips pages from Bajazet’s books and then carefully cleans his fingers with a 15th Century equivalent of a Handi Wipe. His sadomasochistic behavior toward Asteria lends potency to his later fearsome revenge aria, but also makes his final relenting toward her something of a large leap in dramatic credibility.

Sarah Coburn’s Asteria was winning, a pure lyric soprano of lighter weight than the others, but flexible and expressive. Her scenes with Domingo rang emotionally true and provided some of the evenings most tender moments. Likewise, Patricia Bardon’s Andronico was intensely focused, dramatically and vocally, with a near show-stopper aria at the end of Act II, though her role resembles that of the powerless Ottavio in Don Giovanni.

Jennifer Holloway’s Irene was also vocally accomplished, her character a statuesque career girl in business suit, but the use of glasses as her full disguise raised some audience eyebrows. Leone's Ryan McKinny made the most of his single aria, and his staging was the one brilliant touch in an otherwise merely efficient movement of the cast. While originally conceived by Handel and Haym as a loyal supporter of the court, in this production he secretly pines for Tamerlano's Irene, and as an ambitious royal wannabe writhes around the empty throne.

LA Opera has had a good track record with Baroque opera, the aforementioned Giulio Cesare a solid success and its production of Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea a few seasons ago an outstanding one. While this production does not live up to those standards either scenically or dramatically, it is every bit their equal vocally.

Might there be a Rodelinda, that third great Handel opera, in the offing for a future season?

Achilles and Agit-Prop

2009-11-21T11:05:00.000-08:00

DV8 Physical Theater at Royce Hall

by Donna Perlmutter

Holey Moley! Whatever could have happened to Londoner Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre -- the unique company that came to UCLA for the first time a dozen years ago with penetrating narratives devoid of a single spoken word? Yes, you read right. Its thoroughly amazing performances told whole, verbally-silent stories through settings, sit-drams and social characterizations.

Well, the DV8ers just returned to campus (Royce Hall, this time) and managed to break every rule it had so brilliantly established at its American debut. (More on that later.)

Back in 1997 Newson, a sober counterpart to his countryman satirist Matthew Bourne (of “Swan Lake” fame), along with a band of dancing actors, captured a machismo society’s ethos and, especially, the kind of relationships it breeds – those with fetishes and foibles, insecurities and bravado, false stances and fierce defenses, all in a context of raging neo-realism. A world of “guy-ism.”

Angry young men polished their bruises and competed as anti-heroes of one sort or another: stud, provocateur, pop singer, chug-a-lug champion, suavely swaggering pro. All of them were blokes with entry-level jobs bonding in aggressively physical encounters that often turned surprisingly affectionate. The caption to their acrobatic, body-linking antics, in the piece titled “Enter Achilles,” might be Pina Bausch meets Pilobolus.

But Newson struck all that down in his latest opus, “To Be Straight With You.” This time he veered into victim art: the degradation, cruelty and even death that gays suffer across the world (depicted in cleverly graphed statistical visuals). So not only does he ghetto-ize and narrow his frame of reference, he relies almost exclusively on the spoken word. Sad to say, he’s substituted agit-prop or a sociologist’s survey, for the genuine theatrical article.

What the collective audience-ear gets is soliloquy, seminar and sermon -- recited in barely intelligible Afro-Caribbean English by the actual dancing denizens of poor, immigrant neighborhoods. Some of them actually speak live while performing their gestural calisthenics and virtuosic moves – others resort to pre-recorded monologues. One, an Indian who cleverly combines a kind of Kathak with disco moves, is also a master at jumping rope, which he does over a vast dynamic range of speed, grace and nuance.

True, Newson’s emphasis rests with the fundamentalist Muslim world’s taboo against anything but prescribed heterosexuality – he even harpoons a hypocritical gay imam for enjoying a habitat with wife and children, while keeping his bathhouse harem on the side. And, not to leave out western religion, he documents how extreme Christians bear more in common with Muslim intolerance than do Jews, who, he says, boast a liberal posture.

But for American audiences, who now are on the verge of accepting gay marriage, there is an archaic feel to all this primitivism. How I wish that Newson, with all his creativity and powers of observation, could stay looking at the bigger picture society offers him.

Sig-Alert

2009-11-19T12:15:00.000-08:00

LA Opera announced yesterday that Laura Karpman's The 110 Project will be performed as works-in-progress at Saturday, Nov. 21, at Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum and the next day, Sunday, Nov. 22, at California African American Museum. Time is 1 p.m. for both performances, which is free with museum admission.

The work features stories drawn from communities adjacent to the 110 Freeway.

The Cancer Dance

2009-10-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

This alternatively hopeful and despairing and hopeful and agonizing and ultimately peaceful routine on So You Think You Can Dance, which has come to be known as "The Cancer Dance," rendered some otherwise talkative judges speechless last summer:

The poetry of the routine and the fact that it was on network television has caused some involved with dance have called this performance too emotionally manipulative. I disagree. The lift @ 0.49 is astonishing. The protestation @ 1:13 is all physicality. The quiet way the piece ends, with a slow, diminished but still elegant turn into a centering, peaceful lift, is a perfect hushed climax.

The ballerina is Melissa Sandvig, who was classically trained and who has danced locally for LA Opera and Long Beach Ballet. The man is Ade Obayomi, whose original idiom is contemporary dance. The choreographer was Tice Diorio. The sole prop is a scarf.

Hampson shines in Lieder and American songs

2009-10-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

by Rodney Punt

Like the lead character in the old TV spy show, baritone Thomas Hampson has led three lives, dividing his career between the contrasting emotional states of Germanic angst in Lieder, American optimism in song, and Italian drama in opera. The first two of those lives were on impressive display at his recital presented by the LA Opera last Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Resuming a US residency after two decades mostly in Europe, the American-born Hampson is a man on a mission. He is reacquainting local ears with the musical expressions of our peculiar, polyglot American vernacular. In a program of thirteen songs (including two encores), a youthful 54-year-old Hampson, with Romanian pianist Vlad Iftinca (left), made a compelling case for revival of the oft-neglected tradition of American song, reminding us also, in the program’s first half, of his credentials in Lieder.

The Chandler audience was peppered with singers, vocal teachers, and accompanists curious as to the state of the singer’s storied lyric baritone. He has been active of late in Verdi operas that can darken and coarsen a voice, his recent roles in La Traviata and Macbeth employing more than usual vocal power. Would Hampson be able to re-summon his famously creamy tone, seamless legato, and floating head voice in a recital of generally lighter-textured songs?

The answer was an emphatic yes.

Returning to the theater that, he told us, started his career (he was trained in Southern California), Hampson’s vocal apparatus proved remarkably fresh, taking just a couple of songs to open up its customarily burnished-copper timbre. Moreover, Hampson was blissfully free from the vocal mannerisms that mar many a middle-aged singer’s evening of exposed song.

Culling from “the largest shoebox on the planet”, as he described it, Hampson began his American set with Francis Hopkinson’s charming My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free, written in 1759 and presumed to be the first art song made in America. Appropriate for this occasion, it celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. Compare its upbeat words “…the little birds that fly with careless ease from tree to tree were but as blest as I” with almost any passage from a German Lied and you will at an instant grasp the essential difference in character between two peoples and their song traditions.

Hampson’s wide-ranging musical journey took us through many a regional stop. He reminded the audience in his introduction that our national motto, E Pluribus Unum, does not imply the homogenization of our people. From the romantic sentimental tradition of European-settled America came Stephen Foster’s antebellum seduction, Open they Lattice, Love, Edward MacDowell’s nautical-death lullaby, The Sea, Amy Beach’s impressionistically nostalgic Twilight, and Elinor Remick Warren’s soul-saving God Be in my Heart.

Other ethnic roots were celebrated more profoundly in Henry T. Burleigh’s Walt Whitman--penned and riveting Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, Arthur Farwell’s Omaha Indian warrior crying proudly in Song of the Deathless Voice, and the poignant lament of the William Grant Still-LeRoy Brant song, Grief.

Regional behaviors and their accents were a source of comic bumptiousness in four songs, brought off as only an American of Hampson’s pedigree and showmanship could, ably partnered by a bemused Iftinca. Two were Aaron Copland charmers, The Dodger with its nod to the great American con-man, and The Boatman’s Dance with its loveable lug of a river man. Two Charles Ives’ songs were similarly inspired, the hilariously droll cowboy yarn, Charlie Rutlage, played to the clump-footed hilt by Hampson (it could have inspired the Beatles’ similarly campy Rocky Raccoon), and as encore, the two-part Memories (Very Pleasant, Rather Sad), a hilarious yet sentimental send-up of an innocent at his first opera.

What these songs brought to the audience was something rare in a recital here: the power of personal memory. As Hampson stated, they tell us “what it’s like to be alive, now.” While we can love deeply the beautiful song traditions of other countries, in one form or another we have actually experienced life in our own songs; they stir us to the very depths of our American soul. Two in particular struck me dumb with wonder this evening, Hampson's renditions of the traditional Shenandoah and, as encore, Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer.

The German set on the first half of the program was an intelligently designed survey on the ubiquitous Austro-German poetic theme of lost or idealized love, ranging from settings by Franz Schubert to the post-romantic Erich Wolfgang Korngold. (The specific repertoire is mentioned in my earlier piece on Hampson.)

Settings by German poet Heinrich Heine were included in both the Schubert and Franz Liszt songs, and another poet, Ludwig Rellstab, set elsewhere by Schubert, was represented here in a setting by Liszt. We usually think of Schubert’s line of song succession as flowing through the Romantic traditionalists, Schumann and Brahms. But there is another, equally compelling line through the progressive styles of Franz Liszt and Hugo Wolf, the neglected songs of Liszt in particular worthy of more exploration and performance. These Lieder and those of Korngold and Richard Strauss that followed ably confirmed Hampson’s claim to interpretative preeminence in the Romantic Austro-German tradition. Here, as elsewhere, Hampson was ably partnered by the stylish and idiomatic pianism of Vlad Iftinca.

Sustained applause for their performance was justified. Looking impossibly tall and handsome, well-tailored, and exuding an eager charm, Hampson retired to the Founders Circle entry area after the recital and signed posters, pictures, and CD booklets for well over an hour. Employing all his resources, he works on overtime for a cause he embraces.

Addendum

Songs are topical; they bloom and pass away like ephemeral wildflowers. In his Johnny Appleseed quest on behalf of American song, Hampson is launching a vast inventory project on his website, Hampsong.com. He has also joined forces with the Library of Congress’ Music Division, representatives of which have accompanied him on tour with an exhibition of musical artifacts that appeared at the Founders Circle area before and after the recital. Among the items displayed was an original manuscript of George and Ira Gershwin’s Embraceable You, which I was able to hold briefly in my grateful hands. When you experience genius this close up, the customary boundary between popular and serious art is no thicker than the plastic micro-cover protecting the Gershwin masterpiece from the unintentional wear of mortal touch.

Gustavo con gusto

2009-10-14T04:13:00.000-07:00

LA and its Philharmonic enter affair with Dudamel

by Donna Perlmutter

He used to be the starriest young arrival in the international conductor sweepstakes. That was then. Four years ago – before clinching the win.

But after Gustavo Dudamel launched his first season as podium chief of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- with18,000 revelers at Hollywood Bowl and then at Disney Hall, which was sold to the walls and thronged with celebrities -- the Venezuelan Wunderkind is on world-watch, thanks to the information superhighway and media pitched to a 24/7 news cycle. And, oh, yes, let us not forget his extraordinary gifts and his charisma, duly captured by the electronic billboards and posters all over town.

Meanwhile, it would be good to remember that Dudamel, the product of an honest-to-god socialist democracy, knows music’s inherent value of community and collaboration. Why, he’s even sat in as an ad hoc string quartet’s second violin for an evening of chamber music with the orchestra players – how’s that for humility and egalitarianism?

All we had to do at Disney was observe his conduct at curtain-call time. No solo bows. Not even a tiny one. Instead he bounded off the podium and rushed to acknowledge his musicians, threading his way through the music stands, rousing soloist by soloist, section by section, to stand for their own deserved ovations. Only together with them, not as a separate being, would he beam back at the audience.

The music-making itself justified the uproarious response it got. First came a world premiere, John Adams’ City Noir, just what its title indicates: an extrapolation of scores written for Hollywood’s 40s and 50s film-noir genre – vaguely menacing, lonely sounding episodes of melancholy that swirl with smoldering languor. The work is a kind of Blues in the Night alternating with eerie, shimmering parts, intricate collisions of winds and strings, accented with Adams’ signature: warmly bouncy, minimalist flirtations.

Dudamel took the piece vigorously in hand and the players more than obliged.

But it was the Mahler First that our young maestro seized on, communicating every scintilla of its pastoral joy, lugubrious shtetl memory, piquant nostalgia and sky-touching exhilaration – which is not to say that he slighted delicacy or subtlety.

It’s all there. And it’s there because he’s in constant contact with the musicians. As though to say, “I’m on the ride of my life and I’m taking you with me. We’re on this ride together.”

What we heard in the Mahler, as well as in his previous outings here, was the Dudamel stop-and-consider moments. As if to underline a word by spelling it aloud he would elongate a passage, stretch it out as though teaching it – both to the players and the audience. And then, in its repeat, breathlessly speed it up as though to say, “Yes, now we know it intimately. Here is its ultimate impact.”

That’s one thing L.A. audiences already know about Dudamel and the Phil: they make fabulously full-blown, gorgeously high-colored music together.

It’s of a different order than what the orchestra yielded with Esa-Pekka Salonen, who, over his 17 years as music director, shaped and refined the band’s performance to a glistening shine. In fact, for all the Finnish conductor’s masterly ways with big, complex scores running multiple rhythms simultaneously, he often managed standard repertory – Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms – as would a sonic engineer, moving things carefully and with perfect balance but staying largely on the surface.

Dudamel takes the opposite tack – the highs are dizzying, the lows rumble – but his marvelous sense of abandon and vitality is undergirded by utter control. That’s what’s so amazing: the combination. And no better example could be heard last season than in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

It reflects his youth, 28, not just his huge talent. It’s all sunshine, full of character. Even the thunderstorm is a Technicolor close-up. And he dances, involuntarily, it seems: His whole body becomes the music, or at least the medium through which it passes. Nothing is designed here. It’s a case of spontaneity, of riding in the now.

Of course there’s no forgetting Carlo Maria Giulini’s very different way with the Pastoral. The late old-world Italian maestro who led the Phil for a few years in the 80s found, in the Sixth Symphony, a hushed, tensile lyricism – sustaining the slow movement as a single breath. But for all the brilliance of Salonen’s account of the Beethoven Fourth, so full of big architectural sites and needing only to be rocked to a rhythmic fury (which he did), his Pastoral was just a sleepy glide through the park, a place to beat time. Yes, that awful way station for too many conductors who turn into a human metronome.

And while we’re comparing Salonen and Dudamel – maybe the same way the late linguist Bill Safire compared the outgoing Reagan and the incoming Bush 1: the former liked jelly beans, the latter (supposedly) preferred pork rinds, an identifying process called the semiotics of dissimilarity – we might as well pay attention to their opposing physical and sartorial style.

Salonen had become, in these last years of his tenure, surely the hippest baton-wielder. He now wears slim, drapey, long black jackets over black silky collar-less shirts. He moves into action for big climactic moments like a slithery kinetic module. A marvel to watch, by itself, but also, importantly, an expression of the music’s underlying rhythmic convulsions.

Dudamel (who’s being affectionately called “The Dude”) has not lived in the world of fashionistas. His podium attire harks back to the old tradition -- white tie, white ruffled shirt with cumberbund and tails. But one thing he never is: a time beater. He leaps into the music, across the music stands, in an entirely unself-conscious way that still retains a certain body togetherness.

In fact, the orchestra members seem to be in love. They actually watch him, they lock eyes with him – and that’s something seldom seen; more often players follow in their scores and hardly look at the guy up there waving his arms. Really, it’s like the beginning stage of an affair, when every glance is meaningful, every caress observed. And we heard that last season in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, where they and their inamorata lingered too long, too lovingly over many phrases, breaking apart the continuity.

The love affair will deepen, no doubt, and move onto more familiar ground. This is just the beginning. But what a beginning.

Where music is life

2009-10-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dudamel era may be simpler than hype suggests

Yesterday's piece in the Wall Street Journal by LA Opus writer Donna Perlmutter discusses the Dudamel phenomenon.

The L.A. media is over the moon. One paper's headline tasks "The Dude" to "save classical music" (not that everyone agrees it needs saving). Several others make feverish references to the "Dudamania" or "Dudamelmania" that's been sparked.

But the man himself appears to hew to simpler values. He comes from an developing country which boasts a music education program called El Sistema, which annually provides a quarter of a million children with free musical instruments and instruction. The system, along with his middle-class musician-parents, nurtured the child prodigy, who began conducting at age 11 and has said: "I come from a place where music is life, where classical music has many faces, where young people know it's not just for sleeping or for grandfathers."

The gala, featuring Dudamel conducting Mahler's First and a new John Adams piece, is tonight.

Quixotic Reverence

2009-10-05T05:28:00.000-07:00

Ana Cervantes brings Rumor de Páramo to REDCAT

Ana Cervantes

by Joseph Mailander

Nearly drowned out from the raucous media noise attendant to the news of a new Ring production that doesn't clink and a warm-blooded conductor taking the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a woman from the spectacular colonial city of Guanajuato named Ana Cervantes quietly overwhelmed an entranced audience at REDCAT Wednesday night with a solo piano (and voice) performance of a suite of works quixotic and mesmerizing enough to be worthy of her own last name.

Ms. Cervantes performed twelve pieces inspired by novelist Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo with devotion and cunning, bridging the pieces by reading text in English (flawlessly) and Spanish (perfectamente) in between compositions. Her concentration on often syncopated, usually atonal works, commencing with Arturo Marquez's lyrical piece Solo Murmurs and culminating in Anne LeBaron's raucous work Los Murmullos--a work incorporating the flat-hand key-pounding of Cecil Taylor as well as Keith Jarrett's penchant for using piano strings like a harp--brought a sense of both the hallowed and the magical to the performance.

The entire suite as assembled by Ms. Cervantes is entitled Rumor de Páramo: Murmurs from the Wasteland. She has performed it elsewhere to critical acclaim. There have been seventeen pieces in the cycle but it felt complete at twelve. Mario Lavista's Páramos de Rulfo, a hypnotically halting fits-and-starts piece performed after the intermission, perhaps best reconciled the style of Rulfo's prose to music.

"Let's see where we end up," Ms. Cervantes said at the beginning of the concert regarding the concluding LeBaron piece, and forecasting the final return to playfulness in the program. We ended up showering her in applause and taking home something memorable.

Ms. Cervantes would be a fine choice for local series like Jacaranda and Ojai's festival, likely to bring new interest to each. She worked REDCAT's Yamaha grand with the airs of patience and reverence that local favorite Gloria Cheng often brings to a contemporary piece.

Enter the Dragon

2009-10-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Siegfried brings LAOpera's Ring closer to home
...

Linda Watson, Brunnhilde; John Treleaven, Siegfried

by Donna Perlmutter

If Siegfried is a scherzo, as some have suggested, then Achim Freyer’s gnomic depiction of it, as the third episode of Wagner’s Ring for Los Angeles Opera, is a race on a running track.

Just picture it: lanes outlined in neon white, then, blue and a sign pointing Ost (east) tell us that the characters, each in search of the be-all-end-all gold and/or love, will stay confined in their blindered paths, trudging toward a goal. And so they do.

Because director Freyer keeps his graphic novel of a concept in hand. He doesn’t stray, but brings back all the same wildly imaginative motifs – Wotan’s giant eye popping out of black spaces within the proscenium arch, his face-covering floppy felt hat and drapey coat (now carried on his spear), the dark background that absorbs bright cartoon-like costumes and fright wigs, the slow-moving, unlit figures somnolently making their way across stage amidst the other action, the raked stage on which the whole enterprise plays out.

Yes, to begin with, we’re in a strange fairyland. The titular hero is a young upstart who knows no fear, and despises and disdains the venal dwarf who raised him. Others wait to see how the race turns out: will Siegfried lead them to their respective desired end?

Freyer mixes it all up and nowhere better than at the end of Act I, when a kind of tumult arises, brilliantly in sync with the full orchestral fireworks, as the floor disc starts to spin with everyone assembled on it while prop embellishments suddenly get swept into the scene.

Traditionalists resolutely abhor Freyer’s cosmic circus, one whose characters operate on somewhat individual trajectories with very little human interaction -- they are not persons, you know, but universal entities. But while he mostly sticks to his conceptual horses, one can see small liberties being taken here compared to Rheingold and Walküre.

For instance, Siegfried’s guardian Mime takes off his head mask every time he wants to address an aside to the audience (and how clever that Freyer seizes on and marks these lines as asides, letting the character step out of the frame to make a wonderfully theatrical point). So, too, does Wotan (aka the Wanderer) carry his head mask rather than wear it, re-defining the all-seeing god as a tad more human.

Even some cast members bettered themselves this time around. Linda Watson as Brünnhilde was in terrific voice opening night, her darkish soprano sounding powerful, colossal really, and even from top to bottom. Of course, the toughest task of this five-hour marathon fell to John Treleaven, who, just for getting through it as well as he did, deserves kudos.

Sure, his tenor cracked slightly a few times at the end but all in all, he gave a heroic if not thrilling performance. With his commedia d’ell arte white-face, blond wig of plastic stand-up curls, his trompe l’oeil painted chest of ribs and muscles, he was the show’s standout cartoon. But that didn’t stop him from successfully deriding Mime, sung by the masterly Graham Clark, who brought out this foster father’s yippingly gleeful nefariousness. What’s more, he fairly salivated through his nasal tones describing the plots he was up to.

As before, Vitalij Kowaljow made a deeply sonorous Wanderer, while Oleg Bryjak, Jill Grove, Eric Halfvarson and Stacey Tappan sang affectingly. James Conlon coaxed from the orchestra both sweeping tenderness, ferocity and grandeur aplenty.

Divine Providence

2009-09-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Ah! Opera No-Opera at REDCAT

by Joseph Mailander

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe," says a singer/chanter/character--not important which one--halfway through the unusual linked fragments that together form Ah! Opera No-Opera at REDCAT tonight and tomorrow, "is that it is comprehensible." There are a deluge of such looking-glass observations flooding into the audience-in-the-rectangle space through the production, which draws from post-structuralist theory as well as the gamut of countercultural idioms from the seventies, idioms such as spoken word poetry, performance art, Deleuzean creativity, progressive chord loft jazz, Woody Allen's belle epoch movies, hyperkinetic New York dance, all of that wonderful incomprehensible time. Also subtitled A Counterpoint of Tolerance, the work--which is no opera, nor theater--is certainly multipronged and certainly tightly executed for such an apparently loose amble through thirteen stories, arranged like a clock in a likely deliberately helpful-unhelpful program diagram.

The audience is invited to take off their shoes and stay, the usual REDCAT seating stripped away as in a high school gym, and a cushy mat covering the entire area. Sitting along the perimeter, the audience files past the interior perimeter of musicians, most equipped with iMacs in the middle of their saxophones, percussion, etc., and initially focuses on scatting/recitativo singers and a slow moving woman in white. Emily Dickinson and tending foxgloves (cf. especially I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed, 214) are cited in the first segment; the audience wonders about the inclusion of the word "chiliocosm"--twice--and indeed we are heading straight for them...

The woman in white proceeds as though walking a labyrinth, following her own path with the emotions of Carol Lay's Story Minute heroine, now cartoonish glum, now cartoonish in consternation, now hopeful, now pathetic, now determined, quite slowly. She suddenly pops to life as out of a cake in one of the segments, losing her modest Wilma Flinstone bun in the back and now gyrating, even vibrating madly, for an exhausting strip of time: as with so many REDCAT dance performances, you are not only in awe but hopeful that paramedics are waiting in the wings as she takes her martyr's cooldown in the middle of the floor, breathing almost too heavily for comfort.

Notable along the way are the segments' flirtations with the word "providence"--one segment even unfolds at the University of Rhode Island to accommodate the word as place-name--this kind of Stoppard verbal tennis runs through the libretto no-libretto with surprising gracefulness.

This work would have been possible in the seventies, when so many of its elements were part of the loft scene, except for one element: those iMacs, which relay sound, noise, music, the kaleidescope of lighting, red lasers dancing in the figure in white's hair, and other information to the performers, especially the musicians, as the work progresses. The music itself is friendly and almost all in minors with occasionally jarring major sevenths (I believe) when it bothers with a tone; mysterious seventies jazz-soundtrack chord progressions such as thirds are also especially favored. The dancer gets taped by a cameraman, who becomes part of her choreography; there are hundreds of such nuanced delights as these. It is a brilliant piece, highly entertaining, with booming firings from all quarter: Director Travis Preston, writers David Rosenboom and Martine Bellen, and choreographer Mira Kingsley, and also Laura Mroczkowski's lighting design and Ajay Kapurs synching of interactive media.

Thomas Hampson and Vlad Iftinca to give recital of German and American Songs

2009-09-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

by Rodney Punt

Even in these budget-challenged times, the LA Opera devotes some of its resources to the art of song, and thanks be for that. American mega-baritone Thomas Hampson with piano collaborator Vlad Iftinca returns to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday, October 3 at 7:30 pm, for a survey of two contrasting song traditions, those of Germany and the USA. When an artist of Hampson's caliber comes to town with comparable talent as his pianist, a song recital can be an enlightening experience, as many remember from his last recital a few seasons ago at UCLA's Royce Hall.

Hampson has significant ties to Southern California, having studied in his formative years at Santa Barbara's Music Academy of the West. While much of his career has been spent in Europe, with a long domicile in Austria, in recent years he has returned to his roots in the States. Always supplementing his formidable opera presence with concert and recording work in Lieder (German art songs), he is now one of the most important proponents of American song as well.

The Romanian-born pianist Iftinca has worked with several New York-based singers in recent years. As a staff pianist at the Metropolitan Opera and a coach with the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, he is also active in developing young singing talent, as well as collaboration with other pianists, notably in recordings of works for four hands.

If opera is the macrocosmos of vocal music, song is its microcosmic counterpart. The current production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen depicts externalized action on an cinematic scale. By contrast, a recital of Lieder conveys human emotions through internalized musical snapshots. Most songs last no longer than three or four minutes; singer and pianist take their places on the stage before us unadorned with theatrical setting or movement. The chromatic musical palate of song is every bit as rich as opera, but where the latter comes in dazzling Technicolor, the palate of song with piano accompaniment registers with us more like the equally beautiful flickering colors of an opal.

The LA Opera has been kind enough to provide the program selections to LA Opus in advance of the recital

The German first half surveys the Lieder tradition from its near beginnings with the incomparable Franz Schubert, through the emotionally charged atmosphere of Franz Liszt’s progressive Romanticism, and on to two of its final exponents, Richard Strauss and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The program includes three gems of Schubert (An die Leier, Das Fischermädchen, Der Doppelgänger), three rarely heard songs of Liszt (Im Rhein im schönen Strome, Es rauschen die Winde, Die drei Zigeuner), a single song of Korngold (Pierrot’s Tanzlied from Die tote Stadt), and four late Romantic offerings from Strauss (Himmelsboten, Freundliche Vision, Traum durch die Dämmerung, Heimliche Aufforderung). What Schubert had begun in Vienna, Korngold summed up in Hollywood, as the most famous composer of the Golden Age of American film, though the song above was from his Vienna days before emigration to our shores.

The program shifts gears for its second half with mostly single song selections of no less than 11 American composers, “A Panorama of American Song” according to the program, including a rarely sung Stephen Foster piece (Open Thy Lattice, Love) two crowd-pleasers from Aaron Copland (The Dodger, The Boatmen’s Dance), a Charles Ives selection (Charlie Rutlage), and one by a former resident of our own L.A. West Adams district, the late and beloved William Grant Still (Grief).

Further program info can be found on Hampson’s website, and particularly the song projects page, which has several essays on American song. For tickets, contact the LA Opera's website.

Don't miss the opportunity of hearing Thomas Hampson at the peak of his artistic powers with a pianist in sympathetic partnership with him. Whatever your mood when you arrive, the variety of songs to be offered from these fine musical artists should guarantee some will chime with your state of mind - or shift it to a higher level !

Only Now for Misha

2009-09-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Baryshnikov at the Broad

by Donna Perlmutter

Finally! Fifteen years after the post-prime part of his career began Mikhail Baryshnikov has struck artistic gold. Yes, it took that long for the one-time Russian heartthrob to find his terra firma footing, so to speak -- no longer the paragon, at 61, who could toss off balletic pyrotechnics with laughing ease, defy gravity, devour space and dazzle us with the purity and power of his dancing.

But he always knew how to extract the human element in his characterizations of elegant, ironic humor or burning ardor.

And In a program at the Broad Stage, that little Westside jewel of a performance venue, Baryshnikov put on his best show of the decade.

At last we could forget about the primo virtuoso assoluto and find the vital dancing actor he was, and still is, even without the heady stuff. At last he did not come up empty, after rummaging through the once-revolutionary modern dance baskets, masquerading, to our disappointment, as a dark denizen of esoterica and recruiting the genre’s big-name choreographers to clothe him mostly in duds.

Here he gave us substance instead of shtick.

This time the custom-tailored pieces he danced with Anna Laguna abounded in the kind of sophistication and originality, he’s been searching for ever since hanging up his leotards and tights and heading for the less demanding portals of experimentalism.

Remember him in his prime in Twyla Tharp’s “Push Comes To Shove?” The street-wise, snazzy vaudevillian mugging his way through a Jimmy Cagney routine, ambling onstage – black derby cocked at an angle, the picture of smoldering mockery and calculated finesse – splicing fireworks from his balletic arsenal into a couth boogaloo?

Well, that same Misha, the master mime magician, materialized here in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Valse-Fantasie.” Set to Glinka’s old-chestnut, rinkydink music, the piece let our hero morph into an elegant suitor a lá Charlie Chaplin, telling graphic stories about a whole range of romantic approach/avoidance impulses and the myriad of gradations between them – often tagged with jokey modern dance accents.

But to appreciate its excellence – along with Swedish dance-maker Mats Ek’s works on the bill – you must credit these two creators for knowing how to squeeze every bit of juice from an unregenerate star who is no longer so springy or oiled as before.

Ek’s “Solo for Two” illuminates Laguna’s deep sorrow, a wrenching anger mixed with anguish as she bends herself in half, arms and torso swinging from the heavens to the ground – but not without a comic flourish here and there, flapping air up under her skirts, scratching her head.

The companion piece, “Place,” is the real marvel, its music by Fläskkvartetten (Flesh Quartet), a deliriously lyric and whimsical electro-acoustic lanscape that accelerates in volume and tempo as it mingles with the choreography -- original duet interactions the likes of which are hardly ever seen.

It has Laguna (Ek’s wife) and Baryshnikov dancing a love story, but not unburdened by stormy glitches and reconciliations, all calibrated to reflect real life. As they race in a circle, bound together as a single, ecstatic heartbeat, the image brands itself in the mind’s eye. A table, here, becomes both their prop and a gauge of emotional ebb and flow, depending on how they use it. Similarly Laguna deals with a chair in “Solo.”

Far less engaging was Benjamin Millepied’s “Years Later,” a cheeky foil, nonetheless, for Misha, here and now in streetwear, doing his contemporary cool-guy casual dancing in front of an old black-and-white film showing the young Kirov firebrand in practice clothes, leaping high the air, with perfectly pointed feet and turned out thighs. But wait, a third figure intervenes, as film layered on film: last year’s Baryshnikov as a black cameo, semi-obscuring the virtuoso action.

A very clever tease. In effect, “I don’t want you to be able to compare me then to now.” Nor did his audience need to.

First d'Amore

2009-09-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

LA Opera rolls out Elixir of Love for season premiere

by Donna Perlmutter

For reasons obvious to many of us music director James Conlon felt compelled to write a program-book essay in support of Donizetti’s ”L’Elisir d’Amore” (now advertised by Los Angeles Opera as – “The Elixir of Love” -- even though it’s sung in Italian, which is understandable to the local Spanish speakers who comprise maybe half of our city’s population).

Well, we’ll take him at his persuasively written word. There is a case to be made for the whole genre of bel canto opera buffa – you know, the style whose quaint comic clichés come feathered in 19^th-century conceits and spills over with lovely lyric tunes and rambunctious rhythmic cheer (that some of us find overbearingly simplistic some of the time).

But never mind all that. Just know that this gorgeous production, new in 1996, and trotted out only once since then, has everything else to recommend it.

As the curtain opens on Johan Engels’ stunning unit set --magically lit (by Joan Sullivan-Genthe) – such sober possibilities as a Chekhov farmhold, with servants as intimates, or Bertolucci’s film “1900,” come to mind. The last thing it conjures is a frothy comedy.

Director Stephen Lawless places the action inside a barn whose huge, slatted gate of dark wood looms over all; a pale sky, framing picturesque hay stacks upstage, makes for a strikingly luminous contrast. The décor becomes a springboard for interaction – workers, gathering wheat and shaving corn from cobs, mingle with the principals: no choruses are plunked down on stage left or right, as arbitrary units.

Lawless’s shrewd touches reject silliness and lend grateful dimension to the characters: Gianetta (Valerie Vinzant) tries to vamp Belcore on his way to woo Adina, then sulks resentfully on failing. Nemorino shows his transformation from woebegone to triumphant by flinging heavy sacks of grain onto a wagon like Clark Kent changed to Superman.

The assembled cast in this 2009 edition suffered two important cancellations – the immensely gifted Rolando Villazón and Ruggero Raimondi, whose Don Giovanni (in Joseph Losey’s 1979 film) lives in my mind.

Still, Giuseppe Filianoti filled the bill nicely as the besotted bumpkin Nemorino, certainly looking the part but also showing the capacity to mock his rival’s antics. He focused his bright tenor well, if without finding much sweetness anywhere or even while delivering the opera’s hit tune, “Una furtiva lagrima” -- though here he did boast an impressively applied dynamic range and head tones to spare.

As Dulcamara, the charlatan selling love-and-everything-else-potions, Giorgio Caoduro, could not match the uproarious antics of Thomas Allen, from the original cast. But his clear, forward-placed, burnished baritone stood him in good stead. So did Nathan Gunn, as the puffed-up, preening regimental authority Belcore, come across with panache, not to mention with his finely crafted coloratura intact.

The star, however, was Nino Machaidze (photo above), the Georgian soprano making her U.S. debut. As Adina, she was the image of a much sought-after, self-indulgent, rich and pretty girl who could also show, in small ways, that she was unnerved by Nemorino. Her lyric voice, a thing of beauty – soared effortlessly, especially in the long-lined passages filled with romantic fervor, and powered itself to the upper climactic reaches with excitement. But for the insistent patter it often turned chirpy.

Leading the whole enterprise Conlon coaxed from the orchestra loving accompaniments – supple, spirited, nuanced and tender in turn. The only disappointment came in Act 2, when a single, mystifying, red light bathed the stage.

63rd Ojai Music Festival: eighth blackbird and friends explore the new music cosmos

2009-06-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

-eighth blackbird chamber music ensemble- ------- ---photo: Luke Ratray

Ojai, California, June 11-14, 2009

Overview by Rodney Punt

It was once said of Toru Takemitsu, the late composer of environmental sounds, that he simply loved the whole world. The 63rd Ojai Festival, which concluded yesterday evening, might just as well be called the music festival that loved the whole world.

Artistic Director Thomas Morris invited eighth blackbird (they prefer lower case), a contemporary chamber music ensemble, to be Music Director this year. Only the second ensemble in six decades to be so named – the other was the Emerson Quartet in 2002 – they took full account of Ojai’s aging Libbey Bowl and its leafy, tree-filled park for endless musical experimentation.

Over a four-day stretch beginning last Thursday, the amphitheatre was the main venue for an eclectic mix of sounds that stretched ears and eyes, to say nothing of the mind. Outdoor music installations by Seattle-based artist Trimpin were festooned about Libbey Park, one of them actually participating in a final collective musical number.

Cloudy skies and unusually cool temperatures the first three days lent an appropriately reflective mood to a couple of the darker-themed musical selections. The surrounding hills of Ojai, carpeted in their oak-green majesty, inspired eighth blackbird and a large number of guest musicians to make the whole valley resonate as their chamber.

The Festival offered a world premiere of a new work of Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert, Slide, the world premiere of a semi-staged version of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, the west coast premiere of David Michael Gordon’s Quasi Sinfonia, major works of Steve Reich, the rarely heard Charles Ives Piano Sonata No. 1, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, George Crumb's Music for a Summer Night in an interesting program with works on the same wavelength, and numerous smaller works, some heard for the first time. One guest ensemble introduced us to the largest collection of recorders (old-style wooden flutes) I have ever seen.

Certain musical forces and artistic styles predominated: an extensive use of percussion; unusual instrumental combinations, timbres and textures; experimentations in form and style; showy virtuosity; cutting-edge musical theatricality; and bizarre intersections of visual, stage, and musical arts.

Big philosophic themes were examined: the origins of music and life, the power of Nature, humanity’s eternal quest for meaning and love, the nature and relationship of the divine in human experience.

The musical fare was almost too immense to digest in full, and concentrated in so short a time period, journalism can scarce do it justice. So we mention only highlights here and will select performances to cover in some detail in later postings.

Bottom line: the 63rd Ojai Festival was an enormous success, highly stimulating, occasionally puzzling, in at least one performance absolutely maddening, in many others lots of fun, and in a select few awesomely magisterial.

It was an essential dose of music for those curious to hear, feel and think in the differing worlds of organized sound.

Not bad for a music festival in a time of economic retrenchment.

-----------------------------------------Photo: Rodney Punt

NOTE: This is a first report on the 2009 Ojai Music Festival. Others will follow, but, as we post newer entries on top of older ones, look UP the blog for successive posts.

NOTE also: The Ojai Festival has an offer to hold ticket prices at current levels for early subscribers to next year's Festival, June 10-13, 2010. Visit OjaiFestival.org, e-mail info@ojaifestival.org, or call (805) 646-2094 for further information. And, while you are at it, book your favorite motel now too.

Ojai Festival 2009 - Opening Concert: MUSIC FOR A SUMMER EVENING

2009-06-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

----
-------Theirry de Mey’s Musique de Tables - Photo: Robert Millard

Thursday, June 11, 8:00 p.m., Libbey Bowl

THIERRY DE MEY: Musique de Tables
(3 pairs of hands, 3 plastic tables)

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Dark Waves (2 pianos)

TORU TAKEMITSU: Rain Tree
(2 marimbas, vibraphone, crotales)

GEORGE CRUMB: Music for a Summer Evening - Makrokosmos III (two amplified pianos and percussion)
I. Nocturnal Sounds (The Awakening)
II. Wanderer-Fantasy
III. The Advent
IV. Myth
V. Music of the Starry Night

Lisa Kaplan/Jeremy Denk, piano
Greg Beyer/Matthew Duvall/
Todd Meehan/Doug Perkins, percussion

Review by Rodney Punt

Viva percussion! The 63rd Ojai Festival began with a bang, in fact, lots of bangs.

According to eighth blackbird pianist Lisa Kaplan, the group determined early on that George Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening - Makrokosmos III should be featured at the end of the opening night concert. (This work is to a percussionist what the rainbow is to a prism; it contains everything but the kitchen sink in that family of instruments.) The puzzle then became what to program first. How they solved it was not explained, but here’s an educated guess.

Three works were carefully chosen and strung together for the first half of the concert, joining the Crumb to form a proto four-movement work that operates on two levels: as program narrative for a nocturnal creation story, and as a nifty subliminal music appreciation class. In the process the four become greater as a whole than the sum of their parts. It was a canny plan to familiarize us with uncanny sounds.

The resultant narrative on the idea of night music takes us on a musical journey from simple origins to vibrant complexity in one long arc. The narrative scheme can be put in fanciful terms as: 1) “the spark of creation”, 2) “watery masses emerge”, 3) “life-bestowing rain falls on the land”, and finally 4) “movements in the night; visions of heaven.”

In achieving this narrative, our ears accept unusual but relatively accessible sounds in the early works, becoming subtly accustomed to wilder, more far-out timbres when the denser Music for a Summer Evening arrives.

Theirry de Mey’s Musique de Tables (Table Music) starts where music itself begins, as pure rhythm. Three pairs of hands tap and scrape in percussive precision on three plastic tables (see illustration above). These rhythms are later elaborated, going in and out of phase or in contrast with one another. Spotlights on the hands working their rhythms give them a visual life independent of the black-clothed bodies of the three performers (and suggest the cinematic out-of-body shoes of Deco era dancers like Fred Astaire). We know immediately that visual effects and a theatrical flair will be integral to the music festival. We also know that music-making at Ojai this year will be at least as playful as it will be thought-provoking.

John Luther Adams’ Dark Waves moves us into the deep waters of a primordial sea. Fearsome depths in the opening bass rumbles of the two pianos slowly arise in vast watery movements to a state of emerging creation. Ominous power transitions to something lighter, with a gradual layering of arpeggios and spiky figures in ever higher registers that resemble emerging flecks of light. Oscillating loud and soft volumes lead to a concluding sustained chord, suggesting a first calm in the sea of life.

Toro Takemitsu once said that composition “gives a proper meaning to the ‘streams of sounds’ which penetrate the world that surrounds us.” With his Rain Tree we are on terra firma hearing the streaming sounds of marimbas, crotales and a vibraphone depicting dizzy, tingling raindrops on all kinds of surfaces. This rain will sustain life. The evening’s lighting engineers tease the audience with alternating spotlights in a playful game of dueling marimbas. Although a bit arch, in the context of the festival’s theatricality it celebrates whimsically the evening’s narrative of creation.

--George Crumb's Music for a Summer Night - Photo: Robert Millard

It is but a few paces from Takemitsu’s life-giving rain to Crumb’s nightscape of earthly sounds and heavenly visions that vibrate in the second half of the program. In Music for a Summer Evening we have entered the world of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and his Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Crumb’s own subtitle for his work, Makrokosmos III, further acknowledges his debt to the works of the Hungarian master, who was one of the first to use percussion instruments expressively.

As no other journalist will likely include the full, mind-blowing array of percussion instruments (in addition to the two amplified pianos - all illustrated above), here it is in all its glory: vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, crotales, bell tree, claves, maracas, sleigh bells, wood blocks, temple blocks, triangles, several varieties of drums & tam-tams & cymbals, two slide-whistles, metal thunder-sheet, African log drum, jawbone of an ass, sistrum, Tibetan prayer stones, musical jug, recorder, thumb piano and guiro. Whew!

The ears needed to be prepared for this fusillade. The real art, however, is in how Crumb uses these instruments in imaginative combinations to create his eerie sounds. As the composer himself explains: “Some of the more ethereal sounds… are produced by drawing a contrabass bow over tam-tams, crotales, and vibraphone plates. This kaleidoscopic range of percussion timbre is integrated with a great variety of special sounds produced by the pianists. In 'Music of the Starry Night', for example, the piano strings are covered with sheets of paper, thereby producing a rather surrealistic distortion of the piano tone when the keys are struck.”

To close our program narrative, from the spark of creation through the terror of ocean depths, rain engenders life. In Music for a Summer Evening , the “cosmic drama” is replete with struggle, yet we the living look ever upward at the starry night in transcendent awe of the heavens.

A minor miracle happened at Thursday evening's opening concert, an evocation of revealing, wonderful worlds of sound, without, by the way, a hummable melody to be found.

Every aspect of the performance of this and the earlier works was carefully gauged and skillfully executed. The performers were in fine form, the ensembles ready at every turn. Sound amplification worked unobtrusively but effectively. Lighting effects came off with flair and without a hitch. In short, a brilliant feat of programming, spectacularly realized.

The 63rd Ojai Festival was off to an exciting start.

Veni, Vidi, Vici: Vinikour essays Handel’s Harpsichord Suites on CD

2009-07-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

George Frideric Handel: Harpsichord Suites (1720), Chaconne in G Major (1732-3)

Jory Vinikour, Harpsichord

Instrument by John Phillips, 2001, copy of Johann Heinrich Gräbner of 1739, Dresden

Recorded: First Scots Presbyterian Church, Charleston, South Carolina

Recording: Delos DE 3394 (2009)

Review by Rodney Punt

Music lovers know the Handel of extravagant operas, their cousins the oratorios, and certainly the orchestral Water and Royal Fireworks music. We are less likely to have encountered his eight Harpsichord Suites of 1720, though by now there are many recordings on both harpsichord and piano. Far more famous in the genre are the nearly contemporaneous English Suites of J. S. Bach of 1725. Where the suites of Bach often seem like serene, internalized contemplations on dance forms, those of Handel brim over with exuberant impetuosity. If the Bach suites are best appreciated in the evening, those of Handel seem designed for our morning constitutional - as bracing as an ocean spray or the first rays of a dawning sun.

The suites derive some of their heady atmosphere from Handel’s free use of musical form and technique, with few strict fugues and many darting changes of pace and motif. It has often been noted that Handel composed for the ear, not the eye, and these suites are no exception. In many cases the individual pieces have an improvisational quality, and may well have originated as such. We also often hear in them music borrowed from or used later in other works; listening for examples is half the fun.

We have enjoyed harpsichordist Jory Vinikour’s virtuosity in the Los Angeles area before, most notably in his April 2007 outing with Musica Angelica, where he gave a brilliant performance of the Bach Concerto in d minor. Here he surpasses that performance with an instrument fully up to the sonorous demands of these suites. The Gräbner harpsichord is particularly rich, with a deep bass buzz adding a pleasing cushion for the soprano sparkle of the upper registers. In the many dialogue moments between soprano and bass lines, this equality of timbre pays off nicely. The instrumental placement in the recording is just right – not too close, nor too distant.

Vinikour’s performance is propulsive, his rhythms nicely gauged with just the right hesitations at cadences and phrases. His ornamentation is fully integrated into the musical fabric, which is to say it is natural and unselfconscious. In every sense, Vinikour, an extrovert performer by nature, has fully realized this music. It’s as if the composer himself were performing for us.

The two-CD set of Delos is a model of its kind. In addition to the eight “Great” Suites, there is a bonus inclusion of the Chaconne in G Major, HWV 435, a work which would take many guises over the years; Vinikour here performs the traditional version. Vinikour’s own intelligently written liner notes aid the listener with important details of the works offered.

Music, Absolutely

2008-11-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

Jacaranda features Bach and Webern

The Denali Quartet ~~~~~~~ Tereza Lucia Stanislav

Review by Rodney Punt

Jacaranda’s homage to Olivier Messiaen, The OM Century, resumed at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica last Saturday evening, after a season opener at the new and nearby Eli and Edythe Broad Stage. Jacaranda’s is the most comprehensive local survey yet of the seminal 20th Century French composer, and explores as many influences on his style as its organizers can conjure.

Sometimes the OM label stretches the imagination, as in this evening when not a note of Messiaen’s music was actually performed, his phantom presence in the hall only an idea. Three big solo works of J. S. Bach surrounded six tiny chamber or solo works of Anton Webern. Messiaen was well-acquainted with these two composers who appealed to that part of his creativity that relished sound for its own sake.

Before the word “absolute” took on its recent negative connotations (like from those who profess absolute certainties), it had more palatable employments. Take, for instance, the phrase “absolute music” which describes a musical purity that contrasts with mixed-media “program” music of a literary reference, descriptive text, or excessive emotional narrative.

Absolute music stands at an intersection where intellect meets sound. Exemplar works in this form are equal parts craftsmanship and abstract inspiration; listening to them is literally a mind-trip. The instrumental works of Bach fit this mold, as do those of Webern, one of the last composers in a long unbroken line of Austro-German musical purists, abruptly severed by the ravages of World War II.

Bach represented the apogee of 150 years of ever more complex Baroque musical art, and his well-tempered harmonic explorations set in motion possibilities for what was to follow in serious Western music. Webern began composing 150 years after Bach, a time just after the Romantic style had peaked, seeming to exhaust the possibilities of Bach's tonal system. In his slender works, Webern winnowed down the excesses of the concluding era into a kind of needle-point distillation of isolated sound essences. Pairing the two composers on the same program gave us contrasting polarities in the "absolute music" tradition.

I am happy to report the musical execution of the concept was very much up to its plan, another triumph for Jacaranda, matching the organizational prowess of its producers, Patrick Scott and Mark Hilt, with the impressive performing strengths of their musical team: the Denali string quartet - Sarah Thornblade and Joel Pargman, violin; Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola; and Timothy Loo, cello - who were augmented in various musical configurations by cellist John Walz, pianist Gloria Cheng, and violinist Tereza Lucia Stanislav.

The three Bach solo works featured on the program – the Suite for Unaccompanied Cello in C, the “Toccata” from Partita for Keyboard No. 6, and the “Chaconne” from Partita for Violin No. 2 - are each comprehensive essays that wring out all possibilities musical art at the time could explore on their respective instruments. In the context of the program, they stood like temple columns at the beginning, middle and end, casting their majestic shadows on what followed or had come before.

Webern’s six small works (only so in length) formed the middle action of the evening, with their clarity an antipode to Bach’s density. They included Two Pieces for Cello and Piano of 1899, the Piano Quintet of 1907, Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7, and Movement for String Trio of 1925, with one solo piece, Variations for Piano, Op 27.

Opening the program and setting a high standard for what was to follow, cellist John Walz infused the Bach suite’s six dance movements with a lilting propulsion and faultless intonation, taking a moment here and there to dwell on some of the more introspective musings in the work.

Gloria Cheng’s keyboard Toccata eschewed the snappy touch so often associated with virtuoso performances of such works. On her modern Steinway grand, she approached the work in the rhapsodic style of a Chopin ballade, exploring its expressive potential with nuanced phrasing and dynamics, and a suave touch of velvet. In Cheng’s masterful interpretation, Bach’s score took on the unruffled tranquility of a moonlit lake with a lot going on beneath the shimmering surface. Her later solo outing in the Webern was a fitting counterpart in its own way to the encyclopedic possibilities for keyboard of the Bach.

The Denali Quartet performed as an ensemble and as individual members with the evening’s soloists in five of the six Webern pieces on the program. As string-quartet longevity goes, the Denali is a young ensemble, individually and as a collective. But youth does not imply callowness. Far from it. They are the gazelles of the quartet world: musical sprinters who are flexible, agile, attentive to each other, with evenly bright instrumental tones, and light enough on their bows to keep up with any athletic demand. Their trademark is precision and fearlessness in tackling anything that comes their way. In short they are perfectly suited for contemporary music, even if much of the public still perceives that pieces written 100 years ago, such as this evening's Webern, are "contemporary."

The first two of the Webern works, still in the late Romantic mode (Loo on cello in both), plumbed the remaining sonorities in that tradition. The latter three gave the various ensemble groupings ample opportunities for their precise execution of the pointillist atonality that was to reenergize harmonic language for the next half century. The cumulative impression these Webern works leave is of flickers of light and darkness in tiny moments of sound and silence. In stark contrast to the exhaustive thoroughness of Bach, the Webern would seem to suggest rather than explain, hint rather than tell - like the wisps of a conversation one only half hears, or the darting images one only sees in peripheral vision.

After a full evening of such intense listening, the Bach Chaconne for solo violin might have seemed a bit much. It is, after all, one of the greatest technical challenges in the repertoire. But Tereza Stanislav's performance exhibited not the slightest evidence of labor. Rather, it invoked the delicacy and effortless precision of fine lacework, every stitch in perfect detail, and yet at one glance its profound master plan fully comprehensible. In an evening of miracles, it was the transfixing moment.

Continuing applause and a standing ovation of the surprisingly large audience acknowledged well deserved appreciation for Stanislav's triumph, and those of her colleagues earlier.

It was instructive on this evening to listen to Bach and Webern in light of our continuing exposure to those later Messiaen compositions. Next up: an ALL Messiaen program on December 6 at the same location. See you there.

Some further musings:

It is a bitter irony that Anton Webern, the bespectacled, musical egg-head and political naïf, was shot and killed by an American GI while smoking a cigarette on his front porch one night in 1945, just days after World War II ended. It was a freak accident; the soldier imagined the tiny flame a weapon.

Webern’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, having outlived his two most famous students, the other being Alban Berg, would live a few more years in our neighboring Southern California community of Brentwood. Richard Strauss, the last Romantic, had died in 1949, and, with Schoenberg’s death in 1951, the Austro-German tradition as it had been known in both its progressive and retrograde branches, had lost its last titans and finally died out.

In Webern's death, the vanquished impurity of National Socialism seemed to have reached up from the grave to vanquish a surviving remnant of pre-war artistic purity. Almost as cosmic compensation, however, Olivier Messiaen was to survive his own imprisonment during the war and thrive as a composer for another half century. His interest in new combinations of sonorities - a new kind of absolute music - would take the art of sound in new directions.

Two Modern Affinities for Nature

2009-08-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe at SF Moma

Massing: O'Keeffe and Adams in Taos

by Tod Mesirow

Painting and photography have been intertwined since Fox Talbot and Niepce first figured out how to capture an image. Some – most recently, Hockney comes to mind – have even noted that using photographic techniques to represent the real world in a frozen moment on canvas pre-date the chemical fixing of an image by centuries. But how do paintings and photographs compare when featured side by side?

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's current show Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities pairs the painter, student, lover, muse and wife of the doyen of modern American art, Alfred Stieglitz, against the photographer, he of the epic pristine landscape images. It may be a gratuitous exercise to do so, as nothing needs to be done for either; O'Keeffe's reputation seems as secure in the pantheon of American painters as Adams' among American photographers. But when situated as though for a competitive derby, the works didn’t do much to dissuade me from my notion that some of O'Keeffe's best work was done as a model for Stieglitz, and that when compared to Adams her work can appear less ground-breaking and more decorative.

The pair were indeed proximate. Mabel Dodge Luhan, one of the salon world luminaries from the first half of the 20th century, set up a writer’s colony in Taos in 1919. Adams and O’Keeffe first met at Luhan’s Los Gallos, according to the exhbition, in the summer of 1929. Adams returned the following summer and met photographer Paul Strand. According to the exhibit, Adams “claimed it was the first time he had encountered a truly modern photograph.”

The first room of the exhibit is filled with Steiglitz images, F64 images, and a 1925 O’Keeffe painting of black and purple petunias. From the F.64 group, there is an Edward Weston, the iconic Pepper No. 30, from 1930. It led me to wonder if Weston knew what Adams, a fellow F.64 founder, said about Strand, and whether he said it before or after he saw the pepper shot. It is difficult not to think of the pepper shots as modern in their simplicity, their purity, their sensuous play of natural curves and light.

There’s an unusual Adams, from 1935, Pine Branch in Snow. It is the opposite of what is normally thought of when one says Ansel Adams. Instead of the sweeping expanse of pure pristine wilderness, this image is close, intimate, quiet, and serene. The crisp focus, the gray scale on display contribute to the sense of natural peace to be found in a snowy forest. The hushed quality of the sound is powerfully evoked, and one can easily place themselves inside the remote winter woods, slipping easily into the image. Close-up, delicate, minimalist.

The second room finds more readily recognizable Adams photographs, including his best known image, the iconic Moonrise, Hernandez, 1941.

There is an Adams photo and an O’Keeffe painting of the same subject, a church in Taos. O’Keeffe’s painting is titled Ranchos Church No. 1; Adams is St. Francis Church. Both images were created in 1929 (though the Adams print in this exhibition was made in 1973). It’s interesting to see how each artist chose to frame and shape their subject. Both occupy the frame effectively, though here the painting, despite being more spare, is the warmer image.

In the third room, Adams has a later image, Ice on Ellery Lake, from 1954. It has modernist, surrealist, and elegant touches. There is also an earlier landscape, a classic epic Adams, Lake near Muir Pass, Kings Canyon, 1934. This is what we think of when we think of Adams; it is pristine, and crisp, the grandeur and silence of the environment at its most powerful.

Adams also has some cloud images, perhaps an homage to Stieglitz, which are interesting as exercises but not particularly significant as stand-alone images.

O’Keeffe’s paintings in this room are pretty, and decorative, but unremarkable. Should art rely on context for its power?

In the fourth room, the exhibition pairs O’Keeffe's Stump in the Red Hills, 1940, an orange and red composition, next to Adams’ Dead Tree, near Dog Lake, 1935

The photo has more impact than the painting. Again, side by side O’Keefe more often than not suffers by comparison.

The fifth room is about trees. There are four O’Keeffe paintings and six Adams images. While looking at one O’Keeffe, White Birch,1925, I overheard one viewer say to her friend “looks like it could be a scarf.”

One of the Adams images, Oak Tree, Snowstorm, Yosemite, 1948, is suffused with ethereal light. It’s not a close-up like Pine Branch in Snow, but it’s also not the massive sweeping scope and outsized scale of the familiar Adams style. It does what all successful works of art do: it stops the viewer, draws the viewer in, and carves out a place inside one’s consciousness where the image feeling linger in tandem, to be called upon as needed at any future date.

We're also treated to some snow sequences of Adams from the 1930's, printed in 1982. Now the shapes are melted around rock, dirt, evoking again the modern, minimal, natural, zen-like quiet; there is even almost the sound of the state of change after snowfall, as the sun warms the earth. Representational and abstract at the same time, the documented metamorphosis preserves an otherwise ephemeral shape and line in nature. These images are effective, evocative, powerful. It made me wonder what Adams thought, as he stood in his darkroom in 1982, printing these images from fifty years before.

I will note that is is a popular exhibition: on a Monday, and despite the extra fee for the exhibit, there was quite a crowd of museum goers. But ultimately the notion of combining these two artists didn’t yield the frisson I imagine the curators were after, but it does provide an excellent opportunity to see some amazing Ansel Adams images, and to see them mixed in with the closely related artistry of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Ojai Music Festival 2009: The Long Goodbye

2009-06-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

“Workers Union” performed as the finale at Ojai Festival 2009
Photo: Robert Millard

Sunday, June 14, 2009, 11:00 a.m., Libbey Bowl
STEVE REICH: Music for 18 Musicians

Sunday, June 14, 2009, 2:00 p.m., Libbey Park

TRIMPIN demonstration of interactive sound installations

Sunday, June 14, 2009, 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., Libbey Bowl
MARATHON FINALE IN THREE PARTS (Program in text below)

Review by Rodney Punt

Sunday lived up to its name. After three days damped with gray skies, a bright sun greeted concert-goers as they filed into their seats at Libbey Bowl for the 11 am performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Composed in 1976, it has long been acclaimed a high-water mark of Minimalism. Although I have heard this piece more in a groove in other venues, it got the audience off to a pulsing start for the last day of the festival.

Reich’s second featured work that day, Double Sextet, kicked off the nearly five hour marathon finale later on. Composed in 2008 for eighth blackbird, it won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year. Sextet is a much shorter work than 18 Musicians, with a lyrically languorous second movement, its outer movements in more familiar Reichian territory. Had critical perceptions been in sync with historic judgment, the Pulitzer might have been given at the time of Reich’s 18 Musicians, but, in the manner of film actors who are given the Oscar a year after their greatest performance, the recognition is still just and welcome.

MacArthur “genius” grant-recipient Trimpin had earlier installed musical artworks at Ojai’s Libbey Park for the weekend. They took to their new environment like scrub jays to sage. One could see in the main entry his ground-level dialing disc trigger whale-toned water pipes in a periphery, in another area a guitar-toy, and in the Libbey Bowl itself his clanging discs added to the din of the last concert. Between the morning concert and the marathon, he gave demonstrations of his installations at the park.

QNG (Quartet New Generation), four German-Austrian women with a pan-European outlook performed contemporary and classical compositions on a vast collection of recorders (wooden flute-like instruments originally from the renaissance and Baroque eras). Some of the recorders were tiny enough to be hidden in a sleeve, others taller than the tallest of the performers. Their all-contemporary music late evening concert on Saturday had already opened eyes. At the afternoon marathon, their three-works-in-succession were at turns playful and profoundly moving, especially the Kites Flying canon of Victor Ekimovskij and In Nomine by renaissance composer John Taverner, presented in quadraphonic projection from the four corners of Libbey Bowl's seating area.

Other highlights of the marathon, which kicked off at 4 pm and lasted until almost 9 pm: Stravinsky’s Pastorale (Russian songs) sung by a sensitive Lucy Shelton with Jeremy Denk her piano collaborator, combining heart-felt allure with peasant bite, a piquant reminder of the iconic 20th Century composer who contributed so much to the history of this festival. Lee Hyla’s We Speak Etruscan was a wild dialogue for bass clarinet and baritone saxophone that elicited as many chuckles as awes. Steven Hartke’s Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays and his Oh Them Rats is Mean in My Kitchen showed off this composer’s flair for brilliantly executed miniatures, full of wit and humor.

John Cage's Construction No. 3 gave me one of the biggest thrills of the entire weekend, and should be required listening for anyone who says Cage was more a conceptualist than a composer. A very pregnant Carla Kihlstedt’s violin-cum-vocal performance of Lisa Bielawa’s Kafka Songs was something of a tour de force, but the set outlasts its inspiration. David Rakowski’s Études reinforced the leitmotif of whimsy in the marathon finale, and Nathan Davis’s Sounder attempted to tie in Trimpin’s ill-timed clangs with other percussion.

Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union fittingly ended the whole shebang. This was no Haydn Farewell Symphony of limping one-at-a-time departure. It was more like a new music version of a Woodstock Love-In. Waves of accumulating clanging, banging, rhythmic charges grew like a twister in storm season, as every musician on the weekend’s roster joined in one-by-one, two-by-two, in a Noah’s Ark habitation on the stage. A thunderous pitch, and then suddenly it was over.

ΩΩΩΩΩ

Postscript: There are a lot of people to thank and some to remember in saying good-bye to Ojai 2009. In the thanking category, Executive Director Jeff Haydon and Artistic Director Thomas Morris can be justly proud of their fine preparations for this festival. Their respective back office and production staffs performed marvelously. In the realm of remembrance, two fitting tributes were given in the excellent program book penned by Christopher Hailey and edited by Gina Gutierrez. Let me add also a wistful good-bye to Lukas Foss and Betty Freeman, with both of whom I had enjoyed happy associations.

In 1973, as a green-horn in arts management, I worked a year at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and during that summer with Lukas Foss at the Hollywood Bowl. The orchestra’s then Executive Director, Ernest Fleischmann, had hired him to head up the innovative marathons the Bowl gave in those days. For the Beethoven marathon, Foss asked me to obtain the stage “soldiers” for the composer’s potboiler, Wellington’s Victory, a really funny task. He also gave me the far more rewarding job of obtaining electronic music selections to open the contemporary music marathon. He let me make the suggestions. Among the works I landed were those of Morton Subotnick, Edgar Varese, and Pauline Oliveros. We were all wary of how this music would sit with audiences, and programmed it as a kind of prelude to the main proceedings. In the event, electronic art music in the out-of-doors was a huge and unexpected success, due to the simple fact that audiences are more open to the “random” sounds of this music in the outdoors than the same sounds in a concert hall. Foss was ecstatic (often his state of being) and very appreciative of a nervous kid getting his start in the business. With his all-embracing smile, he burst out, “Wadney, tank you so much. Dat musik vas so vunderful.” During that anxious year, it was just the encouragement a green-horn needed.

Betty Freeman was another constant smile over many years. In the late Seventies, when I was at the L. A. City Cultural Affairs Department, one day a lady walked in and handed me her card, “Betty Freeman, Girl Photographer.” In the nearly thirty years of bumping into each other at concerts, occasional attendance at her home salons, or, in recent years greeting her at her customary last row seat at the Jacaranda music series in Santa Monica, or at her Ojai Festival seat, she was always welcoming and gracious. Yes, she had opinions; she did not care for Olivier Messiaen, which toward the end became a crimp on her attendance at Jacaranda’s two year OM Century tribute to the composer, but she did come whenever a work interested her. And she cared and she supported to the very end. We will all miss her terribly.

Juliet of the spirits

2009-07-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Dvorovenko floats in ABT's Romeo and Juliet

by Donna Perlmutter

It may not happen in the first scenes of "Romeo and Juliet," when the innocent teenage heroine is still playing with her teddy bear and her hair is still braided neatly around her head. Those are pretty much prescribed. But by the time love strikes her like a thunderbolt and she's flying around in an ignited state, we just might get to see who Kenneth MacMillan had in mind when he created his unendingly engaging 1965 ballet to Prokofiev's marvelous score.

And that's exactly what happened opening night of American Ballet Theatre's week-end run of the work at the Music Center -- because Irina Dvorovenko did not just dance the steps beautifully or negotiate the internally acrobatic pas de deux with Roberto Bolle expertly. She showed us the full dimension of Juliet's feeling states by taking the choreography's basic outline and adding her own imprint, her own grace notes -- nuances that enlarged on each stolen meeting with her Romeo and grew more weighted as the drama deepened.

It was outside the ballroom (scene of their momentous love-at-first-sighting), and in the courtyard, when the two flew into each other's arms -- for mere seconds at a time, before various Capulets came upon them -- that she leaned into his side, melting against him, each repeat yielding another level of intimacy and tenderness in these urgently fleet episodes.

Also, after the tragic consequences of their star-crossed love began to sink in, after she realized there was no escape from the parental order to marry another, she formed her body into a linear sheaf, and leaned backward on pointe to bourrée in helpless horror. Yes, MacMillan plotted the steps but she gave them an indelible image.

Dvorovenko, with her frail, child-like arms and chest, flies like a leaf, given up totally to the emotions impelling her. She resembles an antique print, a reduction to fragile lines but miraculously animated and wind-swept.

We remember others, of course. Most recently the just-retired Alessandra Ferri, whose balcony scene had the rapture of her voluptuously supple spine and neck and dove-shaped arches all stretched to the max in passionate explosion.

Bolle's Romeo certainly boasted a technique in the best classical tradition, if not the deeply dramatic profile Dvorovenko gave us. A perfect piece of equipment who's runway-ready down to his last hair, he is a glorious 6' 3 and could easily call himself the Robert Goulet of ballet. Everything works: his turnout, his line, his unity of movement, his alacrity -- even for so tall a dancer. But Bolle remains a "here I am, folks" kind of guy. Hardly one who loses himself in the character or in the moment.

One quibble regarding their partnership: in the balcony pas de deux they broke the ever-swirling momentum of lifts that should quickly devolve into body twists and turns; they held those lifts too long (circus acts?), thus contradicting Prokofiev's torrential music and even slacking off on the density of steps.

Other changes also took place. In the ballroom scene this Romeo, before spying Juliet, broadened and intensified his stage-side flirtation with Rosaline -- so distractingly that my eyes stayed on it and away from the central act, the young heroine dancing.

But all else was quite well done. The production, with its arresting Georgiadis decors and colorfully rowdy Renaissance townspeople, is a Ballet Theatre gem. It almost doesn't matter
that a small point -- no coaching for Clinton Luckett whose one task as the Prince of Verona was to walk on authoritatively, to Prokofiev's crashing intro, and stop the marketplace melée; instead he conjured up all the fearsomeness of a shrimpy schoolboy. And, of course, there seems never to be a way to get pit-orchestra horns to play without making us cringe at their bobbles. Otherwise, Ormsby Wilkins gathered his musical forces together for the score's sweeping ardor, delicate lyricism and mighty drama.

What moves people

2009-07-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

Pina Bausch, 1940-2009--an appreciation

Bausch in 1985

by Donna Perlmutter

Twenty-five years ago, here in Los Angeles, Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal first appeared on the American scene and so jolted the dance avant-garde that it has not been the same since.

Among choreographers of the experimental ilk there is arguably not one who has been able, or wanted, to resist her influence. Until then the leading lights had been Martha Graham, she of the grand Greek narratives and Merce Cunningham, he of the conceptual abstract; they and others practiced their art with a pristine modern accent.

But Bausch pushed the boundaries beyond movement, beyond abstraction, beyond simple narrative. Her scope included every aspect of theater -- the spoken word, visuals, entire stage environments -- and bounced between the surreal, the expressionistic and the palpable here.

She was not to be taken lightly. Indeed, her company's 1984 debut at Pasadena Civic Auditorium -- a centerpiece of the International Olympic Arts Festival -- was met in New York with howls of critical protest. She outraged the "dance-must-be-only-dance" contingent, specifically those critics of an elite sect (not including Anna Kisselgoff and Deborah Jowitt) who believed strictly in Balanchine and Fred and Ginger and Merce, of course. For here was an artist demanding that the total human experience be revealed, not just its lovely, comforting distillations, but its darkly layered side as well.

Like Bausch, who grew up in the horror of World War II and is imbued with a Günter Grass mentality, her dancers were people with stories to tell, a Euro-version of "Chorus Line" -- but not the instantly sympathetic soap-opera types Broadway dispatched to us. No, these folks dug deeper, with their mentor's coaxing; they harbored facets of existential truth -- not theatricalized but real -- double-sided by a flinty humor tinged with irony, sometimes even openly innocent in an amazing, original way. They were/are informed dancing actors of supreme intelligence and emotional awareness, who never belabor those points.

Getting back to the beginnings, Bausch had studied dance at Juilliard (with Graham and Antony Tudor, for instance, those fellow-seekers of artistic truth) and even performed briefly with some of New York's leading companies. When she returned to Germany and finally accepted an invitation from the northern industrial city of Wuppertal to form a troupe there, no one predicted that she would make that municipality's name famous to theater-goers worldwide.

Until the theater visionary's death at 68 on July 1, her Wuppertalers have appeared regularly in New York, Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Lisbon and Seville, never able to fill all the requests from other cities. Their last visit to Los Angeles in 2007 came only after UCLA/Live's director David Sefton traveled to Paris just to persuade Bausch (successfully) to bring her latest piece, the Japanese-based "Ten Chi," to Royce Hall.

And it was thrilling. By now, the older company members were not only familiar to us, but so steeped in life and having so ready a performance-conduit to it that they could enact their humorous little fetishes, their quiet frettings and fulminatings in the most seductively, confessional way. What we got to see amid their giddy, impulsive outbursts, their tantalizing encounters tinged with erotic innuendoes was Dominique Mercy, for instance, a weathered blond in shirt and trousers who came to the stage-edge, smiling, and pretended to invite his front-row patrons to snore -- yes, snore -- in the same way that he pointedly demonstrated, in long, sleek rumbles, his manner irresistibly intimate and helpfully coaxing (never mind the absurdity), and ever smiling.

So was Mechthild Grossmann touching-close as she strolled into the audience, speaking imperiously of her love-lorn anguish in deep Dame Edith Sitwell tones, only to appear onstage later in a short cocktail dress as a naively hopeful man-catcher beseeching the stars -- thus giving us two sides of a persona. And how could we forget Helena Pikon doing another version of her 1996 "Nur Du" solo -- where, in short shorts, fishnet hose and high heels she did cartwheels across the stage while excitedly yelling "he's coming to see me!" only to end up bemoaning "he's not coming to see me." The piece was also rife with funnybone parodies of japonaiserie -- competitive bowing and deliberated word pronunciation (kimono, bonsai, Mt. Fuji), none of it lost in translation.

But Bausch did not begin on her path so lightheartedly. At first encounter she was the central figure of Picasso-blue-period sorrow in "Café Müller," casting about blindly, crashing into chairs, while other strange figures whizzed past in manic fugue states. Per chance to dream? In a hazy grey nightmare scored by Purcell? Similarly her "Bluebeard -- On Listening to a Tape Recording of 'Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Bartok)" showed the women skittering from wing to wing mindlessly and finally plastering themselves high on the walls like gothic bats in long gowns. These are indelible images, paintings in motion that the mind's eye obsessively clutches.

In "Rite of Spring," the women formed a corps quaking so powerfully in fearful anticipation, that the episode triggered a kinesthetic response. At each juncture, in fact, Bausch re-emphasized the crippling torment of fear, while tons of peat moss, spread on the stage floor, gave off the smell of damp earth and flew in the air as dancers trounced on it.

All this came counterbalanced by studies in absurdity, on the benign indifference of the universe, on life as a lark, on harmless human foibles. Throughout her oeuvre Bausch took us to the simple heart of the matter. She was the keenest observer of people and their behavior -- in all its paradoxes and levels of defensiveness.

"Nur Du," a western-states commission, was her first piece created outside of Europe. Its title, which calls to mind "Wien, Wien, nur Du allein," leaves behind the eponymous city Vienna and latches onto American pop culture in its translation: "Only You." But, as usual, Bausch tapped into nostalgia with antennae that are universal, incorporating the doo-wop Platters' title song. One episode takes an amused look at Hollywood's obsession with bodies -- illustrated by having dancers take off their clothes in a provocative manner, finding pleasure or horror in what they see, as someone finally utters a mock profundity: "I'm naked under my clothes!"

As for music, Bausch had a remarkably sophisticated range -- "Nur Du" rounded up a sound track that had authentic fado and tango recordings, mixed in with jazz favorites like Jeri Southern singing "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" and Sidney Bechet playing "What Is Thing Called Love?" juxtaposed with '50s hit tunes by Jo Stafford and Les Paul.

The whole collection of her work showed her to be, variously, a fearless primitive, a keen yet loving satirist, a punster who bridged the arcane and the simple, a Mensch with a world view that did not shy away from sorrow, a purveyor of the unmitigated unconscious.

What can we say of the artist who, in the best tradition, was reclusive and humble? She herself once admitted: "I am just a human being. All this incredible praise frightens me. I'm sure that what comes out in my pieces is very sincere. But, remember, it was made just by little humans."

Few can argue that the extravaganzas she created with her Wuppertalers are an invaluable treasure -- although a fierce East Coast critics' crowd continues to march lock-step in protest of her, starting back in 1984 when the New Yorker's Arlene Croce coined the term "Eurotrash" to define Bausch and labeled her work "the pornography of pain." Well, I suppose they still need to keep the curtains drawn.

But never mind. She certainly didn't -- and went her own way.

"I am not so much interested in how people move as what moves them," Bausch once said, repeating the mantra of Antony Tudor to explain that steps and movement, for their own sake, are insufficient.

Inaccurate Conception

2009-06-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Yvonne Rainer at REDCAT explores what it is
to sit on a sofa and call it choreography

by Joseph Mailander

Conceptual art unfolds not in the plane of the subliminal, but in the supraliminal. It’s above consciousness, not underneath it. In fine art, this means resorting to text and slogans as artwork; in poetry, it means offering a typed geometric pattern rather than rhyme or meter; in dance means a woman who lies prone on stage rather than one who moves with agility and grace.

Yvonne Rainer, an unrepentantly conceptual choreographer, often brings her own intriguingly androgynous identity to her choreography, that’s for sure. But even more assertively, she is willing to bring conceptuality itself into the staging of expressive human movement. As choreographer, she works the margin of the margin: her main inquiry is into where dance ends and human movements that may or may not be worthwhile watching or even identifying as artistic begin, and what kind of background noise can ferry them along. It’s very difficult on all but the most tolerant audiences; unless, perchance, they might also be entertained by the extra layer of artistic expression she may bring to a piece.

Fortunately for Rainer as a conceptual choreographer, she’s very good at choosing that extra layer. Her provocative Stravinsky interanimation RoS Indexical at REDCAT last weekend is her telling of the telling, by a BBC film, of The Rite of Spring’s riotous debut night. This is a wonderful work to see interpreted in dance; it’s a brilliant concept. Everybody knows the story of the riot that broke out on the occasion of the first performance of The Rite of Spring; upstairs from RedCat in fact, the vaunted and tame Disney Hall itself hauled out the once avant-garde chestnut for one of its own galas in 2003. While the tale of the riot is well-known, few, even among those who know the piece well, have had a chance to visualize or consider what the evening must have actually been like. The film, and Rainer's "indexical" interpretation of the soundtrack, aspire to work us through the shock, bedlam, raspberries, whistles and staircase wit as though we were ringside to it all.

High concept: and anyone choreographing it may do something intriguing with it. Unfortunately, Rainier can’t—or simply refuses to—match movement to concept very much, and lets the piece drift toward the banal throughout.

Only one of her dancers, in fact, is worth mentioning as a dancer; all performers are very studied choreographers themselves, and maybe too little in the line of movement is conceded to them. They mostly perform as dancing mimes who make manic faces and turn the evening into something like a Civil War Reenactment. (One tried to go on point a few times but only got less than halfway there.)

Rainer more often asks her quartet of girls to perform pantomime and certainly not ballet, and they the mimicry often comes with a gimp; when hurling tomatoes, for instance, they have not bothered to learn what leg a right-handed rioter typically pushes off of. Sometimes they’ll even flail a phantom tennis racket, noisily, and the result comes across more as a victory for one time Roland Garros clay-court specialist Monica Seles rather than music hall specialist Stravinisky.

In short, three of four of her dancers rarely dance at all, they are mostly miming concepts that may or not be related to Stravinsky, a riot, music, Nijinsky, Paris, boxing…hodgepodge…dance. When they are at their most intriguing, they are simply piling onto a prop sofa and rearranging their limbs, the way we do in high school when there are too few seats at a party. But even this is desexualized and mimed, and the bodies are variously more bored or panicked than alive and searching for something in either the music or the mayhem. Always, whether on sofa or floor, they are dancing Rainer’s idiosyncratic idioms, often completely unrelated to the piece or to tradition, and they might as well be dancing your auto mechanic’s idioms for all we are invited to care about their individual talents and abilities. (In the performance I saw, Rainer herself was obliged to step in for one of the dancers, who was obliged to leave for the sake of an emergency family illness, and the choreographer pleaded to the audience that it might not find her own presence on stage distracting; alas, it was a hope against hope.)

In case you miss the conceptuality of it all, pennants bearing heavy nouns—nouns freighted with far too much meaning than is ever evident in the choreography—suddenly drop at a key point, and hang and twist slowly, but they still provided more kinetic amusement than the listless dancers provided at any given moment.

I most liked the second piece, Spiraling Down, especially the first third of it, because it flirted even more than RoS Indexical with the boundary of what dance can be: not only an accompaniment to music but an accompaniment to recited text. The four women assembled as joggers for the beginning of the piece and executed a fabulous front-back-front-back slow-mo conga line that almost brought some adrenalin to the evening. Alas, after a lap and a half of chugging locomotion they broke off into alternatively puzzling spheres of mime and narrative meant more to fetch ironic laughs than to celebrate running, another joyous but fatiguing stripe of human movement that one feels could have set up far more. The text itself—I don’t know whose it was—disintegrated towards its end into a narcissistic pile of rubbish, with the author duly noting that at 33, turning to fiction at last, not only was he past peak and ready for the morgue but also the same age of Christ at His Death. Rainer does manage to locate the killjoy in everything, not only dance.

Much caught up in her own identity, Rainer’s most special concept of all in conceiving work is to remorselessly desexualize and demystify that most sexual and celebratory art form of all, dance. She variously goes too far and not far enough. It is as though she wants to provoke a riot herself, but not with the shock of the new; instead, she wants to shock with the vulgarizing of the tried and true. Hoping to say something to everyone, it ends up saying nothing much to anyone, nothing other than, “Yes, this too might be art, if the right critic thinks it is.” Which is often the conceptual case, and makes for a very marginal exploration, whether you agree or dis.

Full-fledged swoons across town

2009-05-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

LA Opera's Traviata and Preljocaj Ballet's Les 4 Saisons close a feverish spring

By Donna Perlmutter

There she was, being denounced by her abandoned lover before all those horrified guests gathered at the elegantly risqué party. But did this Violetta end up on the floor, flung there by her hurt and angry young man? A repeat of that awful operatic cliché we see, coming and going, in “La Traviata?”

Not with Marina Poplavskaya, who sang the Parisian courtesan this time around in Marta Domingo’s 2006/07 production for Los Angeles Opera (originally staged for Renée Fleming), which is a quite ordinary mounting otherwise. No, what the Russian soprano gave us was a full-fledged romantic swoon onto the divan behind her. And how right she made that one epic moment -- as though Alfredo’s outrage, signaled by his sudden flinging of money at her was the gust that blew her over. (Nothing like Fleming’s merely contrived faint on the stairway.)

In fact, Poplavskaya’s handling of the role was right all around. Especially in the singing department – for, apart from some touch-and-go moments in the coloratura treachery of “Sempre libera,” she made Verdi’s expressive intentions clear and his music effortlessly natural, one phrase flowing organically to another, a stream of tonal beauty with a dark-hued mid-range (including those Slavic-styled covered vowels) and a blooming top that sounded almost like a different voice.

She far outshone her cohorts. Massimo Giordano was an Alfredo who inhabited off-the-rack histrionics to portray the spoiled but naïve young aristocrat. He rose to bursts of tenorial splendor but otherwise his voice lacked focus and nuance -- a disappointment compared with memories of Rolando Villazón, a truly impetuous lover. Nor did baritone Andrzej Dobber, a stiff, not just proper Victorian patriarch, manage more than a display of well-schooled singing. But L.A. Master Chorale director Grant Gershon, in his first foray with the company, was a model conductor: exceedingly sensitive to the cast without being indulgent, and grasping the overall arc of Verdi’s musico-dramatic effects.

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Indulgence was the watchword, though, at Royce Hall, when UCLALive! brought us another return of Preljocaj Ballet, this time “Les 4 Saisons,” using Vivaldi as the basis for what could be dubbed “A Day at the Beach!” – given all the seashore scenes. What the choreographer formerly focused on -- a contemporary “Romeo and Juliet” in dark, gritty, hard-edged reality, for instance – has been replaced by this whimsical romp, a series of vignettes that sample a little of this-a, a little of that-a, all designed to fill out an overly-long but audience-pleasing night out.

Not to sell Mr. Preljocaj short, there were some keenly arresting moments: a trio, for example, in which a masked man dances slowly from one stage side to the other while the two women take turns slipping into the mask attached in kissing-closeness to his -- all of it rife with metaphor.

Then there were bursts of bright physicality in bikinis, Paul Taylor-esque bent-knee brio dancing, a rope-jumping exhibition framing a tug o’ war contest, a bare-legged glam strutter in high heels yelling out non-sequiturs (this was a direct steal from Pina Bausch, but without the depth of personality) -- all sexual cartoons. There were even Achim Freyer-like mobiles hanging overhead that bounced onto the stage from time to time. Hand it to the choreographer, he knows how to send ‘em home happy.

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On another UCLA stage, the Freud Playhouse, things turned otherworldly when the Los Angeles Ballet, under the fine coaching hand of Thordal Christensen, mounted that 19th century hallmark of Romanticism, Bournonville’s “La Sylphide.” As a former Royal Danish Ballet Dane director he could not have excused himself from this labor of love. But one hardly needs to know that to wonder about those times so long ago, namely, at how men’s minds were so messed up by the idea of an elusive feminine spirit, the notion of naiads and dryads, faeries and sylphs, appearing and disappearing in the moonlit glade, ever out of physical reach.

This ballet, though perfectly poetic in its images, could serve as a handbook on the obsession with those spirits, circa 1830’s – in contrast, these days, to fantasy as the stuff of graphic sexuality.

Well, the three-year-old company had the whole period thing in hand – no easy task – with this lovely, scenic production borrowed from the Houston Ballet. What’s more, it had the key talent: Corina Gill, in the title role, danced with apt delicacy, her arms framing her head so as to make just the right rounded composition, her shoulders sloping, her elbows bent, her little butterfly wings, diaphanous glimmers. And Eddy Tovar, as the tormented Scotsman James, ever chasing his supernatural reverie, executed chiseled entrechats, his pointed toes, as he jumped in place, like daggers of passion, his whole body an integrated whole in elegant turns and leaps. Colleen Neary, co-director, took on Madge the Witch, gesticulating and grimacing her way expertly through the role.

All the others performed admirably. The only quarrel, and it could have been answered with a bigger budget, was the canned music. Oh, how needed was that live accompaniment!

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But there were no quarrels with Tim Miller’s new show at Highways, “Lay of the Land.” Once more the widely acclaimed performance artist found new paths, taking us from the little boy in Whittier with parents who – despite trying to put him in a gender re-education program – were kind and empathetic folks, to the mature man with that deeper, more modulated voice. Somehow he always taps into a meaningful metaphor for his life experience, while expecting Damocles’ sword to fall on his head.

It was, as always, a light into another’s soul – comedic, thoughtful, whimsical, and, yes, pained at the prospect of our often uncivil society.