Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 33

“Bring My Boat!” — Who Wrote the Ending of Porgy and Bess?

“Bring my goat!” Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess has left for New York City and he’s determined to find her. When his request is met with astonishment — New York is a great distance from Catfish Row — Porgy remains undaunted. He mounts his goat-cart and leads the community in an ecstatic finale, “Oh Lawd, I’m on my way.” #

Stephen Sondheim has called “Bring my goat!” “one of the most moving moments in musical theater history.” For years it was assumed that DuBose Heyward — the author of the seminal 1925 novella Porgy and subsequent 1927 play of the same name, and later the librettist for the opera Porgy and Bess — penned this historic line. In fact, both it and “Oh Lawd, I’m on my way” were added to the play eight years earlier by that production’s unheralded architect: Rouben Mamoulian. Porgy and Bess as we know it would not exist without the contributions of this master director. #

Hence my new book: “On My Way” – The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess. Culling new information from the recently opened Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress, I show that, more than anyone else, Mamoulian took Heyward’s vignette of a regional African-American subculture and transformed it into an epic theater work, a universal parable of suffering and redemption. #

The book comes with festooned with blurbs attesting that it “restores Mamoulian to the pantheon of essential figures in the development of American theater and cinema” (Larry Starr), “reveals Mamoulian as a brilliant co-auteur of Gershwin’s masterpiece” (Mark. N. Grant), and “completes our understanding of Porgy and Bess” (John Mauceri). #

A forgotten hero of American musical theater, Mamoulian subsequently directed Oklahoma! and Carousel – Broadway landmarks fired by Mamoulian’s early exposure to Russian experimental theater. The play Porgy made Mamoulian famous overnight. Three decades later, Samuel Goldwyn fired Mamoulian from the film version of Porgy and Bess, effectively ending his career. Once Broadway’s boy-wonder director, later the Hollywood director of Maurice Chevalier and Greta Garbo, he died in sordid obscurity. #

The Mamoulian Archives, which supplied the smoking gun that ignited my findings, remain largely unexplored. A proper understanding of Mamoulian’s no doubt crucial role as meddlesome director of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Lost in the Stars awaits future researchers. #

The Great American Symphony

Tom Huizenga, who presides over Classical Music for National Public Radio, recently initiated a discussion thread on “The Great American Symphony” – and invited me to contribute something about early lineage. Keying on a superb new Naxos recording of John Knowles Paine’s Symphony No. 1, on my idiosyncratic enthusiasm for Dvorak and Chadwick as quintessential “American” composers, on my passion for George Templeton Strong’s Sintram Symphony (with the most beautiful slow movement of any American symphony), and on my conviction that Charles Ives composed the (only) two Great American Symphonies, I contributed a little essay. #

After 1920, Serge Koussevitzky predicted that “the next Beethoven vill from Colorado come” – and embarked on a fruitless interwar quest for the Great American Symphony. No one realized the magnitude of Ives’s symphonic achievements. Finally, in 1951, Leonard Bernstein premiered Ives’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. Leopold Stokowski premiered Ives’s Fourth 14 years later. In retrospect, the Americans championed by Koussevitzky were more in thrall to Europe than they realized. If Ives remains the great American symphonist, it’s partly because – like Melville, like Whitman, like Mark Twain, like Gershwin – he disdained attending “finishing school” in Germany or France. #

Humanizing Stravinsky

To my ears, the most sublime music Igor Stravinsky ever composed is “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” — the Epilogue to The Fairy’s Kiss. #

The 1928 ballet itself, possibly Stravinsky’s most emotionally naked music, is a confessional love letter to the homeland he excoriated in his Norton lectures and elsewhere as “anarchic” and inimical to artistic fulfillment. That he protested too much is self-evident; as I argue in my book Artists in Exile, Stravinsky’s ostensible estrangement from Mother Russia manifested a “psychology of exile.” #

The Fairy’s Kiss is a loving homage to Tchaikovsky, whose songs and piano pieces furnish the exquisite musical materials. The two Tchaikovsky works most tellingly cited say it all: “Lullaby in a Storm” and “None but the Lonely Heart.” The Fairy’s Kiss is Stravinsky revisiting his own childhood, confiding his emotional roots. And the six-minute Epilogue – in which the first of these plaintive songs is distilled to a timeless echo, frozen in time — is a remembrance of Stravinsky’s own childhood innocence. #

The Pacific Symphony, an orchestra that does things differently, celebrated the centenary of The Rite of Spring last week by exploring two Russias: the rural Russia of primal ceremony, where Stravinsky and Nicolas Roerich observed the ritual sacrifice of a straw effigy; and the St. Petersburg of the elegant Mariinsky Theatre, where Stravinsky’s father sang in the operas of Tchaikovsky. #

The concert included two film clips: an excerpt from Tony Palmer’s classic 1982 Stravinsky documentary, in which Stravinsky recalled introducing The Rite of Spring to Diaghilev, and a film I created with Jeff Sells, of the Pacific Symphony staff, that combined “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” with a biographical sequence (clips culled from Palmer’s film) reviewing in retrograde the events of Stravinsky’s long life – so that music and film ended in tandem with the bliss of infancy. It looked like this. #

As the concert had begun with danced excerpts from The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the Fairy’s Kiss Epilogue (prefaced by “Lullaby in a Storm”) was the linchpin of the evening, setting the stage for a terrific Rite of Spring performance conducted by Carl St. Clair. The program as a whole aspired to humanize Stravinsky in surprising and extraordinary ways. #

A Status Report on City Opera

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of the City Opera season just past, as follows: #

Now is a tough time for American orchestras and opera companies. Many are cutting back. Some – including opera companies in Baltimore, Hartford, Orlando, and Orange County, California – have shut down. Others – including the Minnesota Orchestra, which is among the nation’s best – are in abeyance. In New York, New York City Opera is navigating a drastic and controversial downsizing. The company began in 1944 at the City Center, a converted Shriners’ Auditorium on West 55th Street that in 1948 also became home to George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. City Opera’s signatures were young American singers, adventurous repertoire, and low prices. In 1966, seduced by the glamour of Lincoln Center, it moved to the City Ballet’s New York State Theatre on the Lincoln Center campus – a move for which no one subsequently cared to take credit. The State Theatre proved inordinately expensive. Its architectural aspirations toward sleekness and refinement were a fit for Balanchine’s company, which (unlike City Opera) urgently needed a bigger stage than the City Center afforded. The acoustics of the new house were amazingly bungled – neither the singers nor the orchestra registered with impact or warmth. (Christopher Keene, during his tenure as City Opera’s general manager, privately likened the sound of opera at the State Theatre to that of a “car radio.”) The company could sustain neither its finances nor its identity. In 2011, the current general manager and artistic director, George Steel, decided to decamp. The City Opera is now itinerant. The present season, just ended, comprised 16 performances of four operas. The annual budget is now only $13.6 million. The City Opera season once totaled as many as 145 performances of 21 productions. #

Two ironies compound this saga. The first is that Steel, just before departing Lincoln Center, played a key role in rescuing the acoustics of the State Theatre. The second is that the company’s eight Spring performances – of Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” and Offenbach’s “La Perichole” – took place at the home the company abandoned nearly half a century ago: the City Center. A final twist: two years ago the City Center underwent a $56.6 million renovation. Its faux Moorish décor has been lovingly restored. The seats (there are 2,250) are new. So are the sprung stage floor, the dressing rooms, and the lighting. The result is beautiful and distinctive but not glamorous or elegant: a fit for a spunky opera company dedicated to novelty. #

“Moses in Egypt” was a terrific show. This was the original 1818 “Mosè in Egitto,” sung in the original Italian – not the revised and augmented “Moȉse et Pharaon” Rossini fashioned in 1827. Rather like that of “Aida” six decades later, the plot of intertwines a tragic love story – the Pharoah’s son loves an Israeli maiden – with epic pageantry. Michael Counts, the production designer, eschewed sets in favor of projections created by the video designer Ada Whitney: a bewitching “cinematic environment” that simulated camera pans and kindred special effects. At one point, the singers entered a care and the “cameras” swiveled 180 degrees so we were looking out, not in. When in act one Moses lifted a plague of darkness, Whitney’s projection was not realistic but galactic. Other projected images were wholly abstract. Some poetically showed shifting sands and animated camels. The parting of the Red Sea for the Israelis, and the drowning of the pursuing Egyptians, were beautifully and dramatically rendered. The production as a whole achieved a stylized visual and gestural aesthetic that aligned with hieratic Egypt, and with the score’s “opera seria” formalities. Unlike Robert Lepage’s projections for the Metropolitan Opera’s now notorious “Ring” cycle ten blocks uptown, the imagery never seemed gratuitous. Rossini was at no point upstaged; a Gesamtkunstwerk was memorably achieved. If he did not find the long line of the ensembles, the conductor – Jayce Ogren, the company’s newly appointed music director – led the performance smartly. If not paragons of bel canto, the singers were uniformly young, credible, and robust. There was no coughing whatsoever in the sold-out house. “Moses in Egypt” had apparently never been staged in New York in its original version. This was an important occasion. #

Offenbach’s operetta, with its fabulous score, directly followed. Expectations ran high: Christopher Alden, Steel’s de facto house director, was in charge. Alden’s work is invariably witty and ingenious; his 2010 staging of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” for Santa Fe Opera, was an intellectual tour de force. In “La Perichole,” Alden’s version of Offenbach’s synthetic “Peru” was properly tacky: all vinyl and linoleum, with pinatas suspended from on high. He began by turning the piece on its head: the ebullient opening chorus was indolent; the fetching streets singers Perichole (Marie Lenormand) and Piquillo (Philippe Talbot) were nervous and inept. The Viceroy (Kevin Burdette) – the operetta’s third principal, who steals Perichole – was a sex-crazed escapee from a Monty Python skit. (With his long rubbery body, manic exertions, and droll features, Burdette uncannily resembled John Cleese). #

The production, conducted by Emmanuel Plasson, was saturated with cunning detail and in-your-face excess. If it failed to levitate, the main problem was the cast’s two French imports. Talbot, a winning artist, revealed a light tenor too small for the house. Lenormand could not sing Perichole’s beautiful music beautifully. The resulting show was over the top but under-sung. It failed to make a winning case for doing “Perichole” – with its acres of dialogue – in French for an American audience. Beginning in the 1950s, the Met gave “La Perichole” in a clever translation by Maurice Valency. Cyril Richard (who also directed) and Theodore Uppman were unforgettable as the Viceroy and Piquillo. Offenbach’s opera comique was made silly, charming, and touching. The City Opera “La Perichole,” while entertaining, was neither charming nor touching. #

The prior Fall component of the company’s 2012-2013 season comprised two chamber operas – Thomas Ades’s “Powder Her Face” and Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” – at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2,000-seat Opera House. The Ades work should not have been attempted in so large a space. (I could not attend the Britten.) “Powder Her Face,” “Moses in Egypt” and “La Perichole” all disclosed economies imposed on a cash-strapped operation. That there were practically no sets was not problematic. But Steel fielded too small an orchestra and chorus for Offenbach at the City Center. The program books (if they can be called that) were unworthy of the company’s intellectual ambitions. The oversized house for “Powder Her Face” seemed self-evidently calculated to maximize revenues. #

Next season City Opera returns to City Center only once – for a new Christopher Alden version of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” At BAM it presents the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole.” Michael Counts directs the first American performances of Johann Christian Bach’s “Endimione” at the Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. In collaboration with English National Opera, City Opera gives Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, which also co-produces. There are 23 performances in all. #

What’s the status of New York City Opera? Plainly, it is not a company wandering in the wilderness, like Moses’s Israelis. Nor, however, has it found the Promised Land – a home conferring identity, such as City Center could potentially re-provide. Its ongoing reinvention retains interest and fascination both with regard to the fluctuating fate of opera in New York City, and in the nation at large. #

Ives the Sophisticate

Leonard Bernstein did Charles Ives an incomparable service when in the 1950s he premiered and recorded Ives’s Second Symphony. But Bernstein did Ives a disservice when in a program note for that work – a compromised encomium not unlike the back-handed compliments Bernstein would dole out to George Gershwin – he called Ives an inspired “primitive” and compared him to the painter Grandma Moses. #

A recent Ives festival at the University of Washington – a week packed with concerts, lectures, panels, classes, a lecture/recital, a master class, all under the aegis of Larry Starr of the School of Music — feasted upon Ives’s largesse of scope and spirit. The absurdity of Bernstein’s words haunted me throughout. #

An orchestral program, kicking off the UW festival, offered three Ives works. But the main offering was a European masterwork: Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The Sibelius (strongly conducted by a graduate student), whatever else one makes of it, is a symphony saturated with cliché, clinched by a tub-thumping finale. It occurred to me, experiencing this movement’s banal trumpet fanfares, that Ives is a composer who never succumbs to the banal. His endings, in particular, are immune to the predictable or formulaic. A case in point: “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” (sung UW by the baritone William Sharp, a peerless Ives interpreter), with an ending so surprising, original, and right that it never fails to stun the awaiting listener. #

In fact, a signature Ives trait is his way of recontextualizing cliché with irony; his music of course abounds in clichés, but every one of them is enclosed by quotation marks. How he acquired this habit – so precisely in parallel with Gustav Mahler an ocean away – I cannot say. The cranky example of his father, tweaking the Connecticut bourgeoisie, must have something to do with it. Or perhaps this is an instance of Ives’s fear of sentimentality and the genteel, a strategy for dealing with his own susceptibility to high but conventional feeling. #

Bernstein’s characterization of Ives as a primitive also masks Ives’s compositional sophistication. Proof of that, if proof were needed, is a German song Ives set at Yale: “Feldeinsamkeit,” composed alongside Brahms’s famous setting of the same Hermann Allmers poem. Sharp, at UW, sang (sublimely) the two Feldeinsamkeits in tandem. And he reminded us that George Chadwick told Horatio Parker, Ives’s Yale teacher, “That’s as good a song as you could write.” It’s more than that: as several audience members felt impelled to remark at UW, it’s as good a song as the Brahms. #

Sibelius of course went on to far greater things than his Second Symphony. He composed it in 1902 when he was 37. #

Ives composed “Feldeinsamkeit” in 1897 at the age of 23. #

The Greatest Film Score You’ve Never Heard

Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes is one of the greatest of all film scores. That it remains virtually unknown is a function of Revueltas’s own neglect and the neglect of the 1935 film itself, an iconic product of the Mexican Revolution. Unlike such renowned film scores of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and Virgil Thomson’s The Plow that Broke the Plains, the music of Redes is so organic to the film that it does not register as a concert suite. You have to see the movie. #

And the movie is a mixed bag. Its cinematography, by Paul Strand, is unforgettable: visually, Redes is a poem of stark light and shadow, of clouds and sea, palm fronds and thatched huts, with Strand’s camera often tipped toward the abstract sky. Metaphor abounds: a rope is likened to a fisherman’s muscled arm. Pregnant, polyvalent, the imagery invites interpretation equally poetic: music. For a child’s funeral, Revueltas furnishes more than a dirge: his throbbing elegy combines with Strand’s poised, hypersensitive camera to fashion a transcendent tableau. The recurrent visual motif of nets (“redes”) that catch fish subliminally suggests the confinement of rural fishermen: a metaphor underlined by the musical motif of massive tolling brass. At every turn, Strand and Revueltas elevate the film’s simple tale to an epic human drama. But the script is weak and so are the actors – with few exceptions, actual fishermen filmed onsite in Alvarado (near Veracruz). #

While the ultimate significance of Redes may be considered political (both Revueltas and Strand were activists on the far left) or photographic, for me it is first of all an essay in marrying sound to the moving image. The film completes the music. #

That is: Revueltas’s astonishing score partly comprises a series of set pieces applied to silent footage: the weary processional of the child’s funeral; the surging exhilaration of the season’s first catch; the epic thrust of a final act of proletarian rebellion. The last of these, in particular, is as powerful a swath of musical cinema as was ever conceived. Revueltas’s score is here shaped by the pulsing oar-strokes of the fishermen, storming the hacienda where they’re underpaid and undervalued. #

Because music rarely overlaps dialogue, it becomes possible to screen Redes with live orchestral accompaniment – a revelatory opportunity. It’s been done by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, by the Santa Barbara Symphony, by my own PostClassical Ensemble – and most recently (last week) by the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Jorge Mester, as part of the NEH’s “Music Unwound” consortium. #

In Louisville, Redes ignited a standing ovation. Next season, the Austin Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and PostClassical Ensemble (again) present Redes with live symphonic accompaniment. PostClassical Ensemble will also record Redes for a Naxos DVD that will once and for all make the film widely available with a proper soundtrack (the 1935 Mexican sound recording is execrable). #

Sooner or later, Revueltas will be widely revealed as a major twentieth century composer. He far eclipses his compatriot Carlos Chavez. He bears comparison with his precise contemporary Aaron Copland (who drew inspiration from Mexico, and from Redes). Meanwhile, we will have to suffer the increasingly popular Noche de los Mayas, passed off as a four-movement Revueltas symphony by Gustavo Dudamel and other enthusiasts. This vulgar film score, for a vulgar film, was in fact never turned into a symphonic composition by the composer; what we hear in the concert hall is a concoction by another hand, created long after Revueltas’s death in 1940. It does Revueltas a disservice – and so (alas) does the Redes Suite created by Erich Kleiber, and increasingly performed in the concert hall. #

Would that for every half dozen presentations of Alexander Nevsky or Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights with live music we could see and hear at least one Redes performance. Assuredly, Revueltas is a composer whose time will come. #

Dvorak and Hiawatha

Two wicked questions to ask conductors of Dvorak’s New World Symphony are: “Why does the coda begin with a dirge?” and “Why is there a diminuendo on the final chord?” The musical content of the finale in no way dictates these developments. Obviously, a story of some kind – a “program” – is in play. The dirge is a pentatonic “Indian” theme with timpani taps. It is restated as an apotheosis. Then there is a robust arpeggiated tonic cadence and that final E major chord fading to silence. Any conductor who performs this music without a story in mind has failed the composer. #

But what story? Any story that fits will do. But there is an obvious story already at hand: “Hiawatha’s Leavetaking” from Longfellow’s famous poem. Hiawatha sails his birch canoe into the purple mists of evening, “to the regions of the home-wind, to the land of the hereafter!” That, to my ears, is what the coda to the New World Symphony describes. #

That Dvorak and Longfellow have something to do with one another is indisputable. The composer told New York reporters that the middle movements of his symphony were inspired by The Song of Hiawatha. We know that the opening of the Scherzo was envisioned as the whirling, spinning Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis at Hiawatha’s wedding feast. And, thanks to the music historian Michael Beckerman, we are pretty sure that Minnehaha’s death in winter inspired the heart-stopping middle segment – with pizzicato double basses – of the great Largo. #

The alignment of Longfellow’s poem with Dvorak’s symphony is not only suggestive but supremely poetic. Dvorak was already stirred by The Song of Hiawatha when in Prague he read it in Czech. In New York, he re-read it in English (a language he knew). His crowning aspiration, in America, was to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata. But it was not to be. #

My own obsession with Dvorak’s Longfellow fixation long ago compelled me to create (with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff) a visual presentation for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak’s symphony, culling text from Longfellow’s poem and imagery from iconic nineteenth century American painters (Bierstadt, Church, Remington, Catlin, etc.); it’s been used by the New York Philharmonic and many other orchestras. I’ve also, with Mike Beckerman, created a nine-minute “Hiawatha Melodrama” for narrator and orchestra, also widely performed. (You can see and hear it by scrolling to 35 minutes at http://vimeo.com/27663049.) This combination of textual and musical fragments has now begotten a full-fledged, self-sufficient concert work: a 32-minute Hiawatha Melodrama in five parts: “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” “The Death of Minnehaha,” “The Slaying of Pau-Puk Keewis,” and — an Epilogue — “Hiawatha’s Leavetaking.” The music is drawn from Dvorak’s New World Symphony and American Suite. In addition, I’ve composed sections myself, using themes from Dvorak’s symphony and suite, and also from the Larghetto (“Indian Lament”) of his Violin Sonatina, which happens to be a picture of Minnehaha. #

The new Hiawatha Melodrama was premiered to a standing ovation last weekend by PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (who also orchestrated the sections I’ve composed), with Kevin Deas as narrator. We’ve also just recorded it for Naxos, for a themed CD (“Dvorak and America”) that will also include music by Arthur Farwell (who as the leader of the “Indianists” movement in music called himself the “first composer to take up Dvorak’s challenge”). #

In other words: I have just made my debut as a composer. As it happens, I’ve also just finished, in draft, my first novel: The Disciple: A Tale of New York in the Gilded Age. The novel is historical fiction – the story of Anton Seidl, who spearheaded the Wagnerism movement in America. At the moment, I don’t see myself writing any more “non-fiction” books. I’m a novelist now — and a composer, with more projects to come. Though I cannot explain these sudden personal and professional developments, they can’t be unrelated. #

The Met’s New Parsifal

The current Times Literary Supplement UK), not available online, includes my review of the Met’s exceptional new Parsifal, as follows: #

In the program book for the new Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera, the French Canadian director Francois Girard comments that his goal “is to engage a modern audience and to let this piece say things that matter, without kidnapping it and throwing it into a new context, which I think is being done to Wagner too often.” This prescription, which could be anodyne, proves triumphant. But the triumph begins not on stage, but in the pit with the conductor: Daniele Gatti. For more than three decades, James Levine has owned Parsifal at the Met. Levine’s Parsifal is satisfyingly weighty, but also ponderous and stiff. Gatti, who previously had only led Aida and Madama Butterfly in New York, offers a Parsifal vision of exceptional altitude and breadth. Though the range of tempo is great, for the most part the Gatti Parsifal is uncommonly slow. He also obtains a remarkable range of timbre and dynamics from the Met’s superb orchestra, including myriad soft gradations and a wondrous depth of tone for the big moments. The many cadential retards (not to be found in Levine’s reading) include climaxes – in particular, the act one transformation scene and the Good Friday music — that shake the stage. #

Gatti’s deliberation registers a detailed investment in text and incident that constitutes both an invitation and challenge to his singers. They are up to it. The revelation is the tragic stature of Peter Mattei’s Amfortas. This character, so obviously the opera’s “Tristan” with his deliriums of pain and longing for death, typically lacks anything like Tristan’s nobility: we only encounter him at the destitute tail end of his life’s journey. Mattei enters not in the usual litter, but leaning heavily on a pair of knights, dragging his feet, contorting his face and body, a picture of unendurable physical pain. His act one monologue, reshaped by Gatti, becomes intimately narrative rather than exclamatory. When he elevates the Grail cup it quakes with the palsy and shudder of his infirmity. Then, unassisted, he raises himself and staggers off, momentarily uplifted by the residual idealism of his youth, when in seeking to defeat the renegade Klingsor he instead relinquished the Grail knights’ Holy Spear. On his heaving, spastic shoulders, Mattei’s exiting Amfortas bears his entire story and fate. #

Jonas Kaufmann’s Parsifal is a model of histrionic art; he registers Parsifal’s evolution by exquisite degrees. His initial persona — confronted by the swan he has thoughtlessly shot – is amazingly plausible, all insolence and confusion, hands in pockets, shoulders twitching and shrugging. In act two, comprehending his mother’s death and Amfortas’s pain, he achingly embodies the profundity of empathy that is here Wagner’s message. In act three, entering in possession of the recaptured Spear, this Parsifal is yet not fully mature — so that his transformation into an agent of redemption is something we get to witness. Kaufmann’s beautiful tenor admittedly lacks something in heft for a house of great size, but he gloriously sustains the long lines that Gatti extracts. Rene Pape remains an incomparable Gurnemanz. If Katarina Dalayman’s Kundry is an interpretation less textured with verbal and gestural nuance than the others, she is a strong vocal and dramatic presence. #

Girard, whose production was previously seen in Lyon a year ago, directed the films The Red Violin, Silk, and Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould. He has staged Siegfried for the Canadian Opera, and written and directed for Cirque du Soleil. The Girard Parsifal is notably unencumbered by a Hall of the Grail Knights, by flowers or flowered maidens, or by Parsifal’s suit of armor. In fact, there are few sets to speak of. The contributions of the video designer Peter Flaherty are vital and poetic. The towering backdrop for act two is a bloody cleft. The blood courses downward in a variegated stream (1,600 gallons per performance, according to a production note). Sulfurous hues intensity Kundry’s seduction scene; when Parsifal seizes the purloined Spear, at the act’s close, the red stream turns milky white. In acts one and three, the transformation sequences are video only, an animated abstraction of globes and light-shafts – and it is enough. The most anomalous feature of this Parsifal is the constant presence of groups of women. What they are doing in act one I do not know. But the direction taken by this motif is knowable: at the close, it is the redeemed Kundry, not Parsifal, who raises the Grail Cup – and then expires, cradled by Gurnemanz, released at last from her life of Schopenhauerean restlessness and pain. This ending does not register as strange. Rather, it indelibly excites compassion – and compassion is what Parsifal is about. #

Any Parsifal production sleights aspects of so multifarious a stage work. At the Met, with a Parsifal history going back to 1903, Parsifal has never been about decadence, racism, or anti-Semitism. In recent decades, the innocence of the Met Parsifal has sometimes seemed a loss or incongruity. Not this time. Peter Gelb, as General Manager, has steadily campaigned for a more populist, less elite image for opera at the Met. Entrusting the Ring of the Nibelung to the stage magician Robert Lepage, Gelb created a monster, false and moribund. This Parsifal is a true and living incarnation. Close up, the Mattei and Kaufmann performances, in particular, should transfer superbly to movie theatres on March 2, when the Saturday matinee is transmitted live throughout the US and most of Western Europe, including the UK. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Wagner’s genius. #

Schubert Uncorked

Readers of this blog in the New York vicinity will (I hope) be interested to know that I’m producing a take-no-prisoners concert event – “Schubert Uncorked” – this Friday night at The Stone, John Zorn’s club on the Lower East Side. There’s a single, one-hour set at 8 pm. Tickets are $10 at the door. The performers are David Taylor and Bill Wolfram. #

Taylor is a subversive bass trombonist – Gunther Schuller once called him “one of the world’s three greatest instrumentalists” (he didn’t say who the other two were). #

Wolfram is one of our most outstanding American pianists – whom I featured in my book The Ivory Trade as the quintessential competition loser who deserved to win. #

To sample Taylor’s one-of-a kind Schubert (and to learn more about Friday’s event): click here. #

To hear Taylor play Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata on the trombone, click here. #

To read my previous blog on David Taylor, click here. #

To hear Taylor and Wolfram play the Arpeggione, two late Schubert songs, two late Schubert Klavierstucke, and the Allegretto in C minor, come to Friday’s concert. #

Interpreting Shostakovich

PostClassical Ensemble’s month-long “Interpreting Shostakovich” festival, in DC, began with a screening of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 film version of King Lear, with music by Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak’s Shakespeare translation. If ever there was a film that cannot be viewed at home in TV, this is it. On the wide screen of the National Gallery of Art’s film auditorium, and a superb sound system, Kozinstev’s Lear was the most powerful Shakespeare experience I can recall, on stage or screen. #

In the course of a long and interesting post-film discussion, an audience member praised Kozintsev for his fidelity to Shakespeare. But I do not find the film Shakespearean. Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is an obvious point of inspiration. Like Boris, the Kozintsev Lear is in equal measure personal and epic. Lear himself – his repentance, sorrow, and death — is Boris. Mussorgsky’s truth-telling Holy Fool is Lear’s Fool. But Shakespeare’s play contains nothing like the film’s vast wastelands – rock and dirt and sullen skies – or its huddled or processional human hordes, a complex mass protagonist at once powerful, dangerous, and pathetic. No less than Mussorgsky, Shostakovich underlines the magnitude of the terrain and its strewn inhabitants. Serendipitously, late Shakespeare here mates with late Shostakovich: a musical idiom as spare and dissonant as the imagery and action at hand. #

“Shostakovich and film” was one focus of our festival. Its featured participants included the Shostakovich scholar Solomon Volkov, who in his book Shostakovich and Stalin explores the Soviet dictator’s hands-on management of Soviet film, and speculates that Shostakovich’s usefulness as a film composer insured his survival. The festival booklet included a seminal essay, by Peter Rollberg and Roy Guenther (both of George Washington University), arguing the importance of Shostakovich’s film scores as a fresh and vital topic, notwithstanding the composer’s own denigration of this component of his creative output. #

The National Gallery of Art showed three other Shostakovich-scored films, including – at the opposite extreme from Lear – Joris Ivens’ 1954 documentary Song of the Rivers, in which workers of the world unite for more than 90 minutes. Shostakovich’s potboiler music includes a proletarian song (words by Bertolt Brecht) in the style of Eisler, performed by Paul Robeson. #

We also showed Tony Palmer’s 1988 film adaptation of Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, starring Ben Kingsley as the harrowed composer. Both Palmer and Volkov were on hand to comment. The film concludes with a fantasy: Stalin posthumously visits the dying Shostakovich and claims, “you needed me.” Shostakovich, in the book Testimony, admits no such thing; he treats Stalin with hatred and contempt as a bloodthirsty philistine. But Volkov agrees with Palmer’s Stalin. Stalin, in Volkov’s view, was a master propagandist who stage-managed the sensational success of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the West. #

The festival’s music was supplied by violinist Dmitri Berlinski, the cellist Andrei Tchekmazov, the pianist George Vatchnadze, and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. Rudolf Barshai’s string orchestra transcription of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet was unforgettably reshaped by Gil-Ordonez as a Brucknerian essay in sorrowful breadth and repose – a reading in which the Washington Post’s Stephen Brookes plausibly found “unearthly luminosity.” #

An ongoing debate, permeating the festival, questioned whether such iconic Shostakovich creations as the Eighth Quartet are necessarily to be understood and experienced in the context of the Stalinist conditions that imposed their morbidity. I am old enough to remember a time when Shostakovich was widely perceived in the West as a composer whose precocious genius was distorted and diluted by Soviet aesthetic dictates. (The New York Times obituary called him a loyal Communist.) After that, conventional wisdom – influenced by Testimony – shifted toward an appreciation of Shostakovich as a subversive chronicler of Soviet suffering, an ironist whose double meanings were endlessly exhumed. In Volkov’s view, such readings as Gil-Ordonez’s in DC (which he called “better than Barshai”) suggest a new chapter in Shostakovich reception history, canonizing the composer with scant lingering regard for the political circumstances shadowing his odyssey. #

In any event, three decades after Shostakovich’s death, his music continues to resonate disturbingly. Pertinent, it seems to me, is Shostakovich’s discomfort (in Testimony) with a Stravinsky “personality flaw” – that he “always spoke only for himself.” Shostakovich also says, in Testimony: “Meaning in music – that must sound very strange for most people. . . . What was the composer trying to say? . . . The questions are naïve, of course, but despite their naivete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance: Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed?” #

The twentieth-century view that saw Stravinsky and Schoenberg towering over the contemporary musical landscape has never seemed more remote. #