Juilliard String Quartet at Alice Tully Hall

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Infamously Difficult

If there were musical Olympics and it was 1980, the Juilliard String Quartet would be the East German athletic team. Last night they showed off by playing Hayden's infamously difficult Quartet in D Major, which is all sarcastic jokes and inversions, and Dvorak's No. 11 in C Major, which is equally complicated, and in between they exemplified perfection with Bartok's Number 5 which is so technically difficult that Bartok got fed up because he couldn't find anyone who could play it. I was transported by it and went into a sort of trance, spinning around with the atoms and the stars and the universe. It was like an out of body experience and literally amazing. The funny thing is, the rest of the audience didn't like it; they were pretty unresponsive and the people on either side of me actually said they hated it and wished it had been shorter.

Barak Obama

Reuters

The Final Year

This film, on preview at Cinema Village, focuses on Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor, and Samantha Power, the UN Ambassador, young idealists, recruited at the earliest stages of Obama's national career, who assert his audacious hope. Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor, looks on as though she knows a thing or two she doesn't especially want to discuss, John Kerry buzzes around, and Obama himself lets his aged yet open face receive the audience's projection of its own sense of tragedy. As Trump wins the election, Rhodes tries and fails to describe his feelings but he achieves a constructive outlook in positioning Putin, and by implication Trump, as looking out only for themselves, thereby leaving the bigger global picture open for future change. As Power wearily says as she packs up her office, they now know they are in for the long haul.

Watch the trailer:

Elevator Music at the Met

Metropolitan Opera

"Thais" at the Metropolitan Opera

Remember elevator music, those soothing strains of strings and muted xylophone to which we ascended through luxe hotels and department stores? Well, if you needed reminding, last night's performance of "Thais" might have been of help. The original production of Massenet's opera, about a prostitute who became an ascetic hermit and died in a holy grotto surrounded by angels, must have been quite racy because Anatole France, who was always being provocative, was thrilled by it and after the Vatican's representatives had seen the opera (over and over again) they put the novel on the Index of Forbidden Books, which thrilled Anatole France even more. But last night's version looked and sounded like a slow afternoon at Bergdorf's, which might have worked well had that had been the director's intention, and Iris Apfel could have have had a cameo.

Brigadoon at City Center

www.broadwayworld.com

Suspending Disbelief

Brigadoon is one of those plays that you couldn't make up. Oh hang on. Well anyway, seeing as it was made up, it is impossible to imagine the investors' meeting when the plot was pitched. If any musical requires suspension of disbelief, it has to be this one, and even then, suspension is impossible. Anyway, I quite like to believe. The reason "Brigadoon" has passed into loving legend has to be the score which is haunting, sombre, melancholy, wistful, yearning. As this production shows, Lerner and Loewe wrote songs which were such box office gold that anything they wrote made the plot irrelevant. Beneath even the merriest and most furious of the Highland strains is a sadness which resonates with audiences in a way that is understood only in hindsight, or therapy, whichever comes last.

La Finta Giardiniera at Juilliard Opera

Hiroyuki Ito

Country Matters 

Mozart must have been precocious in country matters as well as music because otherwise he could never have written La Finta Giadiniera in 1774, when he was 18. It's a romp of concupiscence, longing and betrayal, set in various vineyards, flower beds and canapes before the purifying flames of hell uplift the lust-lorn unto the Platonic ideal of love and harmony. The music is sublimely beautiful and foreshadows almost every opera Mozart ever wrote, which might explain why it is hardly ever performed. This production indulged in as much over-wrought opera buffa stage business and mugging as could be squeezed in which at times had the same effect as dressing the Venus de Milo in a frilly print frock but it was all very suitable for a beer hall, so Mozart would have loved it.

Thomas Ades

Thomas Ades at Alice Tully Hall

 

Photo:  Richard Termine 

Thomas Ades had no opera performance last night so instead he conducted a riotous concert at Alice Tully Hall which hypnotised the audience with his own mystical poem "All Shall Be Well", sliced through the Elgar cello concerto (Australian undergraduate cellist Rachel Siu) with the most precise conducting I've ever seen, and then played his "Three Studies of Couperin" which give voice to sounds which may be implied in the original scores and may or may not be inevitable. Some sounded like Couperin played on a mouth organ and some sounded like instrumental mistakes and all were fascinating. Then he expanded the orchestra into a scary monster, and belted out Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (written in a state of high anxiety in LA during the war). People screamed, then left in silence.

Sarah Cunningham and Richard Egarr at Paul Hall

Photos by Jubal Battisti & Matthew Murphy, http://www.nybaroque.org

Next week Sarah Cunningham and Richard Egarr are recording numerous Bach sonatas and suites, transcribed for viola da gamba and harpsichord, so tonight they practiced by giving a concert at Paul Hall. Sarah made the point that the pursuit of Lutheran contrapuntal strictness and the elusive "authentic"interpretation misses Bach's fundamental use of improvisation and transcription. So she followed his example and translated some of his most familiar work, music we have all heard played on the organ, in concertii, and as solos for various instruments, for performance by Viola da Gamba and harpsichord. The result entranced the audience for over two hours in a delicate, gentle yet exciting display of virtuosity, Sarah, stooped, with her tongue out, grimacing, and Richard raising his eyebrows and sometimes looking startled at the sounds which emerged. They concluded with the famous Sonata in G Minor BVW 1029, written for organ, in which the Viola da Gamba played the right hand and the harpsichord played the left hand (on the right hand) and the foot (on the left hand). People gasped but not as much as the performers who seemed to be relieved when it was over.

Mick Rock at NYPL

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Mick Rock and David Fricke at the New York Public Library

Last night Mick Rock (photographer) reminisced with David Fricke (Rolling Stone) about his life and Lou Reed's Transformer album. "Vose girls" [sic], David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and most of the early Glam Rockers, all shared the same clothes and make up and never wore the same thing twice. None of them had any idea they were making musical history except for Bowie, and none of them earned anything, except for Bowie. Lou Reed was much loved by all, except for Bowie, and Reed was fascinated by people in the housebreaking business. One day, when he found his own house had been broken into, nothing was missing but all the furniture had been re-arranged. Mick Rock summarized his career as a lot of fun at everyone else's expense, except for Bowie. "It wasn't effing lucky," he said, "but it was effing PROPITIOUS."

Watch Mick Rock discuss his career:

 

James Kim at Juilliard

Sonatenabend at the Juilliard School

You never know who's going to be playing at the weekly Juilliard sonata recitals but I always hope to see the astounding cellist James Jeonghwan Kim whose fan club I am. Last night, after Chelsea Starbuck Smith polished off the Alfred Schnittke Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano wearing crenellated witches britches and cowboy boots, Jim Kim (as he likes to be known) appeared like the fulfillment of a dying wish and committed all of us for life to his account of Shostakovich's four movement Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor. I last heard this played by Rostropovich 20 years ago during a blizzard in Chicago. Afterwards, because of the weather, almost no one stayed for the Q and A so a few of us got to chat with Rostropovich about rehearsing this piece in Moscow with Shotakovich himself. I'd say Jim Kim played it just as well, but then as Jorges, at the Flame Diner, said afterwards, "He is probably already past his prime. One day they come in with a cello, the next day with children and it is all over for them."

Watch James Jeonghwan Kim and Jin Hee Park play Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, D 821:

Daryl Roth Speaks

Daryl Roth at the League of Professional Theatre Women

As evidence that the one percent do give back, I surrendered to the trickle down effect today at a round-table at which Daryl Roth discussed the business of theatrical producing. Having spent some of her husband's spare change on her first few productions, she won seven Pulitzer Prizes and eleven Tony Awards partly by reviving Edward Albee ("he was not wanted in Manhattan") and mostly by following her instinct for plays that reflect people's lives and help to transform them. She proved her point earlier this year when she tore down the closing notice of "Indecent" ("I ripped it to shreds with my bare hands") and told the cast to spruik the audience for return visits with their friends. It worked and her investment paid off. But then, as she said, she has made enough from "Kinky Boots" alone to fly a few kites for a little while yet.

A Puppet at the Met

"Madama Butterfly": Liping Zhang as the title character in the 2011 production, created by Anthony Minghella, at the Metropolitan Opera. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

"Madama Butterfly" at the Metropolitan Opera

 

Last night The Metropolitan Opera used a puppet in the role of Mme Butterfly's son. At least Cio Cio San didn't actually throw her voice into it, as did the mother at the Metropolitan Playhouse last month, where a ventriloquist's dummy played the role of a hymn - singing infant. I prefer the usual mouth - breathing three year old who is much less likely to upstage the hari kiri. This production of Butterfly involved such minimalism at its most excessive. The vast Metropolitan Opera stage was largely unused, except for utterly ravishing perspectives, and the orchestra and singers were more muted than usual, probably to avoid melodrama, but what is more melodramatic than musically - accompanied belly cutting? Even at the finale, as the tsunami of blood poured across the stage, I found myself longing for something slightly more... gut - wrenching.