Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 35

San Francisco’s American Mavericks

I review the San Francisco Symphony’s remarkable “American Mavericks” festival in the current Times Literary Supplement (UK) as follows: #

There is a type of American creative genius whose originality and integrity correlate with refusing to finish their education in Europe. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman are writers of this type. In American music, Charles Ives is the paramount embodiment. The unfinished in Ives is crucial to his affect. Emerson, whom Ives revered, put it this way in his poem “Music”:”’Tis not in the high stars alone . . . /Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone . . . /But in the mud and scum of things/There alway, alway something sings.” The “Emerson” movement in Ives’s iconic Concord Piano Sonata (1910-15) is both literally and figuratively unfinished. He regarded it as a permanent work in progress. He also intended to make something orchestral out of it. #

Over a period of 36 years (1958 to 1994), Henry Brant – a composer variously admired for spatial effects and a sure symphonic hand – transcribed the Concord Sonata for large orchestra. Brant’s Concord Symphony not only orchestrates Ives; it finishes him: the mud and scum are mostly cleaned away. (Ives’s actual voice, which we can hear singing on a 1943 recording, was itself arrestingly frayed.) The result is improbable, provocative, and important: music that demands to be heard. At its first American hearing, at Carnegie Hall in 1996, the Concord Symphony was weakly conducted by the composer. It has rarely been given since. In recent seasons, Michael Tilson Thomas has emerged as its crucial advocate – with his San Francis Symphony (in concert and on CD), with his Florida-based New World Symphony, and most recently as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s indispensable “American Mavericks” Festival, with stops in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Carnegie Hall. #

Brant’s decision not to attempt an Ivesian orchestration makes sense – the Concord Symphony establishes its own sonic identity. His symphonic textures and sonorities do not resemble those of Ives; he paints with acrylics where Ives would use oils. Measure for measure, the score corresponds to its source. But there are countless surprise timbres and voicings. In the Concord Sonata, “Thoreau” evokes bells across the water; Brant here uses no bells. “Thoreau,” as composed by Ives, ends with a tolling bass line in octaves: an Ur-pulse. Brant here thins the bass. Ives’s simplest, most finished movement, “The Alcotts,” generates the most finished orchestration, climaxing with a peroration as stirring as any by Copland; this tremendous six-minute cameo should be sampled by every American orchestra. Ives’s most pianistic Concord movement – “Hawthorne” – is necessarily the movement Brant most makes his own: some pages are unrecognizable as transcription. In Ives, “Emerson” is wild and “Hawthorne” demonic. “The Alcotts” adduces a parlor plainness. “Thoreau” is a seer. None of this registers completely in the Concord Symphony. And yet the ear can still trace the arresting mutations of Ives’s faith tune – a derivative of Beethoven’s Fifth – en route to its final transcendental ascent. #

Neither a highly literal appropriation, like Ravel’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (after Mussorgsky), nor an interpretive paraphrase, like Liszt’s “Don Juan” Fantasy (after Mozart), the Concord Symphony is genuinely eccentric – but not in the ways that Ives is eccentric. At its belated 1939 premiere, the Concord Sonata was decisively reviewed by Lawrence Gilman in the New York Herald-Tribune as “exceptionally great music — . . . indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.” Decades later, Brant wrote of his orchestration: “It seemed to me that the complete sonata . . . might well become the ‘Great American Symphony’ that we had been seeking for years. Why not undertake the task myself? What better way to honor Ives and express my gratitude to him?” The Concord Symphony, whatever its possible disappointments, makes this bold impulse seem wholly understandable and commendable. #

The San Francisco Symphony’s festival (which I heard partly at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium and partly at Carnegie Hall – both acoustically resplendent spaces) was from start to finish musically, viscerally, and intellectually enthralling. At least two of the featured mavericks — Lou Harrison and John Adams – are highly polished craftsmen. If they qualify as mavericks, it’s because their renegade spirit remains intact. Harrison is chiefly known on the West Coast of the United States. He is an unclassifiable hybrid who consummately synthesized East and West long before it became musically fashionable. His 35-minute Piano Concerto (composed for Keith Jarrett in 1985) is a rangy American masterpiece whose lean, uncluttered textures connect with Copland and Roy Harris – and yet is more polyglot, more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. Tilson Thomas’s festival did not offer the Harrison Piano Concerto. Instead, we heard the kindred Harrison Concerto for Organ and Percussion, music of extraordinary sonic freshness capped by a cluster-laden perpetual motion finale anticipating the Piano Concerto’s rambunctious “Stampede.” #

Of Adams, the festival offered a terrific premiere: “Absolute Jest” for string quartet and orchestra. During the second half of the nineteenth century, landscape became the iconic genre for American painters, with Frederic Church in the lead, inspired by a New World vastness of topography. This trope has long found its way into American music. Among contemporary Americans, Adams brings to the act of composition an acute visual sense; he keenly translates widescreen imaginary vistas, often majestic or phantasmagoric. “Absolute Jest” keys on late Beethoven fragments — in particular, a passage from the Vivace of Op. 135 that doubtless appealed to Adams as one of the most raucous string quartet passages ever conceived. In “Absolute Jest” this Beethoven scrap goes viral. Absorbed into an expansive Adams soundscape, it generates a dialectic between New World and Old. The disparate elements combine or collide in a fast and furious 25-minute trajectory that peaks and improbably peaks again, but not without glimpses of serenity. I would like to hear the Berlin Philharmonic play this music. #

“American Mavericks” also formidably sampled two “unfinished” composers of great influence whose compositions are more acknowledged than heard: John Cage and Henry Cowell. The loudest “Mavericks” pieces included “Sun-Treader” by Carl Ruggles. The quietest was “Piano and Orchestra” by Morton Feldman. Having known both Ruggles and Feldman, Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall offered a little talk juxtaposing the two composers as antipodes. The real purpose of his too subtle speech, however, was to urge a large audience to remain silent. Feldman’s music attunes the ear to the softest sounds. At Carnegie, these included shuffled papers and chairs, coughs muffled and unmuffled, and a passing subway train. The score’s sonic prickles and washes were challenged by sounds less exquisite. #

Aaron Copland, not normally considered a “maverick,” was represented by the Orchestral Variations — a 1957 reworking of his 1930 Piano Variations: spare, hard skyscraper music preceding Copland’s populist/Popular Front phase. The festival’s youngest composer, Mason Brown (b. 1977), contributed its most conservative composition: “Mass Transmission,” an affecting choral work with organ, superficially spiced by electronics. The oldest piece was Edgard Varese’s “Ameriques” (1921; revised 1927), which in any company retains plenty of mustard. Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” is here an obvious influence. But to the degree that Stravinsky is Russian, Varese, transplanted to New York, became categorically and brazenly rootless. His title, as he once explained, does not refer to the Western hemisphere, but rather is “symbolic of discoveries — new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.” #

The orchestra brought with it a host of eminent soloists all of whom proved suited to the tasks at hand. The virtuosic organist in Harrison’s concerto was Paul Jacobs. The slashing string quartet for “Absolute Jest” was the St. Lawrence. The gripping singers for Cage’s “Song Books” were Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. The pianists for Cowell’s Piano Concerto and Feldman’s “Piano and Orchestra,” Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, relished unusual expressive possibilities. In Ann Arbor and New York, the festival also included chamber works (which I did not hear) by David Del Tredici, Lukas Foss, Meredith Monk, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Morton Subotnick. A cumulative festival statement, both impressive and startling, was that twentieth century American composers discovered a variety of avenues to originality other than modernist complexity born in Europe. #

Michael Tilson Thomas’s first season as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony — 1995-96 — featured an American composition on every subscription program and ended with an American festival. Four seasons later, he presented an “American Mavericks” festival that registered nationally as a signature event. This season’s “Mavericks” installment, marking the orchestra’s centennial, testifies to a resilience of mission and implementation: the San Francisco musicians tackled everything with unfailing concentration and polish. At a time when other ensembles are retrenching, the tour party totaled 129 musicians, 23 guest artists, and a stage/technical crew of 21. I cannot imagine that another American orchestra will offer as necessary a series of concerts anytime soon. #

Schubert Uncorked

For a variety of reasons, raw spontaneity is less common at symphonic performances nowadays than in the nineteenth century and before. In the days when they were also composers, performers were of course more prone to improvise. In the days before recordings and airplanes, there was no centripetal norm for interpretation. #

PostClassical Ensemble’s “Schubert Uncorked” in DC last weekend was the least predictable concert I have ever produced. At the close of the dress rehearsal the same afternoon, we had little real idea how the evening concert would fare. #

The main event was a world premiere: the Arpeggione Concerto for bass trombone and strings, this being a reimagining of Schubert’s Sonata for arpeggione (a sort of six-string cello) and piano by the inimitable bass trombonist David Taylor. You can hear Taylor’s Schubert – his versions of the song “Der Doppelganger” and of the finale of the Arpeggione with piano — on the Ensemble’s website. But these performances supply an imperfect impression of what happened when David Taylor played Schubert’s sonata with an ensemble of 22 intrepid strings. #

I first heard David Taylor play the Arpeggione Sonata in my living room, accompanying him at the piano. He had just come to the piece and was sticking to Schubert. In subsequent months, he took wayward possession of this music with a will. Tempos, dynamics, registers careened toward expressive extremes. The rehearsals with orchestra, courageously led by Angel Gil-Ordonez, were not reassuring. Following a wayward trombonist at the piano is a lot simpler than chasing him with an ensemble in tow. #

Meanwhile, Taylor inflicted his insidious sonic imagination on Schubert’s innocent keyboard textures. For the opening of the slow movement, he had the violins play in harmonics in imitation of a glass harmonica, the better to set off the low blasts of his instrument. #

The sheer virtuosity of Taylor’s command of Schubert acrobatic showpiece was never in doubt – he can play it, and beautifully. But Taylor’s virtuosity is divinely wed to an idiosyncratic musical personality wholly his own. A lot of head-shaking and head-scratching followed that dress rehearsal. #

The program began with a set of Schubert dances for strings. The Arpeggione Concerto came next, then – sans intermission – the sublime Adagio from Bruckner’s String Quintet (with string orchestra), followed by two Schubert songs with bass trombone and strings: “Die Stadt” and – Taylor’s specialty – “Der Doppelganger.” #

About a minute into the concerto, it was suddenly obvious that all would be OK. The performance was a bewildering success. The program as a whole moved clairvoyantly from light – the dances and concerto – to dark: the solemnity of Bruckner (magnificently rendered; Gil-Ordonez studied for years with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich); the anguish of the two late Schubert songs. #

None of us had anticipated the shock of “Doppelganger” in this context – it was Taylor’s first opportunity to open up and blast us full force. In the audience, bodies bobbed as if electrocuted. Watching the response of the musicians onstage was a rare pleasure: I have never seen members of an orchestra react as vividly, or visibly, to a soloist’s entrance as on this occasion. We invited the audience to stay for a post-concert discussion; the vast majority did, for fully half an hour. #

The days of the performance specialist are numbered. More and more, important instrumentalists will again – as in the days of Liszt and Paganini – be spontaneous creators of their own music. #

Orchestral Summitry

The recent “Orchestral Summit” at the University of Michigan was a labor of love on the part of Mark Clague of the university’s Musicology faculty. Mark is a tireless advocate of conciliation and consensual change in a field wracked by frustration and dissent. The conference had its ups and downs. I was especially impressed by the gravitas and honesty sustained by a panel of conservatory-level educators, alert to the need for fresh thought in preparing young musicians for a rapidly changing cultural landscape. #

Peter Witte, who heads the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri/Kansas City, hit a high note in calling for collaboration between orchestras and music educators at every level. “Education,” as pursued by orchestras, is too often limited to visiting elementary schools and bussing schoolchildren to Young People’s Concerts. #

A broader educational mission was also limned by Laura Jackson, Music Director of the Reno Philharmonic – whose composer-in-residence works in Reno’s schools to complement instrumental instruction. #

For me, the Summit afforded a further opportunity to rant about rethinking orchestras as purveyors of the humanities. As readers of this blog know, that’s the gist of a $300,000 NEH “Music Unwound” grant, supporting a consortium of orchestras pursuing cross-disciplinary programming in association with museums, universities, and public schools grades 4 to 12. The most recent installment, the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra’s “Dvorak and America” project, brought to four schools with ambitious instrumental and choral programs a different approach – contextualized instruction, linking music to history, literature, and the visual arts. A short film, created by the Pacific Symphony for the Summit, afforded a crisp snapshot of how and why it worked. #

I next lecture on “Rethinking What Orchestras Do – A Humanities Mandate” at the University of Texas at Austin on April 14, then (as a convocation address) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana on May 13. My previous “Music Unwound” blogs: Feb. 23, 2012; May 31, 2011. #

How Orchestras Can “Plug a Hole in the Curriculum”

“Music Unwound,” the $300,000 NEH initiative funding a consortium of adventurous orchestras, has two basic components. The first is contextualized thematic programming — it supports concerts that explore music from a variety of vantage points, including visual art and literature. The second is linkage — it supports connecting such programming with art museums, schools (grades 3 to 12), colleges, and universities. #

The latest “Music Unwound” project was “Dvorak and America,” presented by the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra — a gifted aggregate of 100 high school musicians supervised by Southern California’s exceptional Pacific Symphony (long a national leader in thematic programming and new concert formats). The lead-up to the orchestra’s Dvorak concert included classroom presentations in three high schools and an elementary school. The concert itself comprised a first half — including a visual track and the bass-baritone Terry Cook — exploring the Dvorak story and the programmatic resonances of the New World Symphony. Part two of the concert was a performance of the symphony itself. The concert was attended by hundreds of students from the participating schools. #

All four schools fall within the Irvine public school district, in which instrumental music is a longstanding high priority, thanks to support from Irvine Company. The high schools I visited all had multiple orchestras. The elementary school had both string and wind ensembles. What “Music Unwound” brought to these schools was a push toward integrating music education with music history — and also with American history and literature. #

At one of the high schools, I was delighted to discover that my Dvorak presentation was attended by an American History class — whose teacher confided that the topics I addressed comprised “a hole in the curriculum.” These topics included three that I have long believed belong in any overview of the Gilded Age: Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and the paintings of Frederic Church. It was through this music, this poem, and these paintings that Americans in the late nineteenth century saw and defined themselves. I cannot imagine how anyone could study nineteenth century American history without recourse to such iconic cultural markers. #

The participating music teachers felt empowered by the “Music Unwound” experience to amplify the impressive instrumental skills of their students with something more. There is a disconnect here that orchestras can help schools to address. In the Irvine, there are already prospective plans to link with the Pacific Symphony’s Rite of Spring festival next season. The next “Music Unwound” Dvorak festival will be presented by the Buffalo Philharmonic in April. #

Horowitz on Horowitz on Horowitz (continued)

Readers of this blog will be aware of an ongoing state of war with my son, Bernie, whose adoration of Vladimir Horowitz I do not share. But Bernie is relentless, and in order to get him off my back I occasionally concede that his icon is a more remarkable pianist than his recordings disclose. #

Bernie has now contributed a detailed interview on the topic of Horowitz’s concert performances and their superiority to manicured studio jobs and edited concert recordings. I confess that it is worth reading. For one thing, it reiterates a point that bears repeating — edited recordings often disserve both music and the performer. For another, it includes a tremendous live 1966 Horowitz recording of Liszt’s Vallee d’Obermann — which Bernie compares not to a studio recording, but to an edited live Horowitz recording from the same season. The unedited performance (as always with Horowitz’s Liszt) lacks something in gravitas and worldly ennui. But the demonic thrust of his playing here attains an unadulterated wildness that studio doctors and complicit performers oftentimes elect to suppress. #

North Carolina’s State-Wide Symphony

Having just spent a week taking part in a “Dvorak and America” festival presented by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, I think I’ve learned a thing or two about how an orchestra can serve an entire state. The NCSO travels the length and breadth of North Carolina – more than 12,000 miles annually, offering more than 150 concerts. And it’s done that for a long time. In all four cities that hosted festival concerts, audiences strikingly evinced pride in the orchestra and an intimate sense of ownership. No one in Chicago would speak of “our very own Chicago Symphony.” In North Carolina, the orchestra serves not as a city’s international ambassador; rather, it invaluably buttresses a range of cultural communities. #

The audience for “Dvorak and America” in Fayettville, on the campus of Fayettville State University, looked to be about fifty per cent African-American. I addressed a group of students earlier in the week, none of whom had previously heard the name “Dvorak.” A pre-concert recital featured members of the FSU music faculty in the Violin Sonatina and G-flat Humoresque. The first half of the concert was (in every venue) a multi-media exploration of Dvorak’s “American accent” in his New World Symphony. Dvorak’s espousal of “Negro melodies” was the central topic. The Fayettville audience hung on every word. The second half of the concert was the New World Symphony itself. Afterward, many stayed to offer intense expressions of gratitude. #

In New Bern (population 30,000), near the coast, the orchestra’s seasonal series is ever popular. I have rarely seen a more eager audience. I observed people listening to the New World Symphony with eyes closed, their faces aglow with appreciation. The venue was a large conference room with vivid acoustics; it sat about 800. #

In Raleigh, the concert took place Friday at noon. The hall was full to capacity, including two groups of high school students both of which had travelled for several hours. Their teachers had been participants in a 2010 “Dvorak and America” Teacher-Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony. Kevin Deas, the eminent African-American bass-baritone, frequently partners my “Dvorak and America” presentations. At Raleigh, Kevin and I offered a “Harry Burleigh Show” for the visiting students at 10:45 in the morning. #

In Chapel Hill, on the campus of the University of North Carolina, there was both an orchestral concert and an ancillary event featuring chamber music, and Burleigh songs and spirituals. #

The orchestra itself, a spirited and disciplined group, undertook this typical week of travel and performance without apparent fatigue. The music director, Grant Llewellyn, happens to be Welsh and yet is a fit. It matters that the pleasure he takes in the orchestra’s unusual mission is at all times palpable. He likes people. He gravitates to students. The message that he and the musicians convey is “We’re happy to be here.” The orchestra’s unusual mandate, which could prove a burden, instead functions as a beacon: it focuses and inspires the institution. #

The NSSO “Dvorak and America” events were part of a $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities project called “Music Unwound.” NEH funds paid for free student tickets, busses for school groups, and teaching materials – as well as the extra personnel (host David Hartmann, video artist Peter Bogadnoff, myself as producer/writer) and technical requirements (screens, stand-lights) the concerts demanded. The project next travels to the Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra (where it’s partnered by an elementary school and four high schools) and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (where the partners include an art museum). Few Americans have any idea what the NEH does. (Mitt Romney favors its termination.) Would that more orchestras undertook a humanities mandate, linking to literature, film, visual art, and history; and to high schools, universities, and museums. The NEH is there to help – for now. #

Porgy and Bess Writ Small

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) publishes my review of Broadway’s new Porgy and Bess — informed by a book I’m writing (for W. W. Norton) about Rouben Mamoulian and Porgy and Bess. This is what it says: #

By far the most controversial show on Broadway this season is a refurbished Porgy and Bess that originated last August at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even before the premiere, Stephen Sondheim denounced its creators – Diane Paulus, who directs, Suzan-Lori Parks, who adapted the book, and Diedre L. Murray, who adapted the score – for “willful ignorance” and “condescension toward the audience.” The Paulus /Parks/Murray Porgy soldiered on to New York, where it’s a hot ticket loudly lauded or deplored in the press. That the iconic American opera should remain an object of strident debate must say something about America itself: troubled relationships of race and national identity, of “high” and popular culture, of New World and Old bedevil American self-understanding. #

Porgy and Bess — with music by George Gershwin, a book by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin – split opinion when it opened on Broadway in 1935. No American could respond without prejudice to a black opera by a Brooklyn Jew with roots in Tin Pan Alley. Only immigrants and foreigners found it possible to acclaim Gershwin without patronizing him. A 1942 Broadway revival, recasting the opera as a musical, was more successful. In the 1950s and 1960s, Porgy and Bess was little mounted in the United States; its depiction of an impoverished African-American courtyard community was considered demeaning. Beginning in 1976, a widely seen Houston Grand Opera production revalidated Porgy and Bess and proved its operatic mettle. A 1985 production at the Metropolitan Opera was a ponderous failure. #

The new Porgy and Bess is nothing if not boldly conceived. In 1942 (five years after Gershwin’s death), Gershwin’s recitatives were replaced by dialogue, and cast and orchestra were greatly reduced in strength. Paulus and company have done that and more. We have new speeches, new harmonies, new accompaniments, even virtually new numbers. “Summertime” is a duet. “It take a long pull to get there” is a male vocal quartet distending Gershwin’s pithy fisherman’s tune. Both pit and stage are substantially amplified. #

There can be no such thing as a Gershwin purist. It is part of his genius that he cannot be categorized. The cultural fluidity of Porgy and Bess – of Gershwin, generally – is such that he is also interpretively fluid. Stravinsky insisted that his music not be interpreted. With Gershwin, interpretation is both necessary and irresistible. Rhapsody in Blue has no definitive text or length. The Concerto in F can be sentimental or sec, “Russian” or “French.” The first recordings of Porgy’s songs range in style from the operatic largesse of Lawrence Tibbett’s humbling “Oh Bess, oh where’s my Bess?” (1935) to Avon Long’s swinging “I got plenty o’ nuttin’” with the Leo Reisman Orchestra (1942). There will never be an “authentic” Porgy and Bess. #

The surest spine of the new production is its casting. Norman Lewis (Porgy), Audra McDonald (Bess), Phillip Boykin (Crown), and David Alan Grier (Sporting Life) are exceptional singing actors who transcend the generic. All four respond deftly and creatively to new tasks at hand. Leaning heavily on his cane, dragging his bad foot, Lewis is more effortfully crippled than any goatcart Porgy could be. When he smilingly confides that he has plenty of nothin’, we laugh complicitly at the knowledge that Bess is his bedmate; the whole number levitates. McDonald ruthlessly cancels her natural glamour: Bess’s allure plausibly emerges from a cage of confusion and anguish. In “Bess, you is my woman now” Porgy beckons and Bess succumbs, hesitantly deciding she’s good enough for a good man – a reading credible, fresh, memorable. At the same time, amplification works against the intimacy of this linchpin duet. And Lewis’s high, light baritone, however handsome, does require reinforcement. In fact, his notes are frequently transposed up an octave, or subject to exigent modulations. If Bess’s confrontational duet with Crown (“What you want with Bess?”) is ultimately more telling than her love duet with Porgy, it’s because McDonald and Boykin make it the evening’s most operatic number. They remind us that, on balance, Porgy and Bess is an opera after all. #

or that matter, the show’s biggest disappointment is Gershwin’s most consummated, most operatic sequence: Robbins’s funeral. Here Murray’s snipping and tucking distort the cumulative crescendo to Serena’s keening widow’s lament. Worse, Bryonha Marie Parham’s delivery is hyperbolic. Robbed of its pounding hieratic splendor, “My man’s gone now” shrinks to a passage of transitory individual pain. And this, writ large, is the central disappointment. Gershwin’s ceremony of mourning is at once a human and an epic tragedy. If the new Porgy feels small, it’s not because of abridgement or amplification or reduced forces. DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novella Porgy, the opera’s first cause, is a regional cameo documenting an exotic subculture: the Carolina Gullahs. Heyward’s story ends with Porgy, an abandoned beggar, adrift in obscurity. The opera Porgy and Bess, by comparison, feeds upon the spirituals that anchor Gershwin’s American style and subject matter: it is less a story than a communal rite, a universal saga of suffering and redemption. Its Porgy and Bess, accordingly, are archetypes. Bess is an addict, helpless submissive to Crown and to his “happy dust”; she fights her weakness strenuously, poignantly, but to no avail. Porgy is a cripple whose debility sensitizes him; held in special regard by the community, he becomes in return a moral beacon. His musical leitmotif, its primal fifth girding a bluesy minor third, compounds suffering and strength. #

That the makers of the new Porgy and Bess reject these archetypes as African-American “stereotypes” based in weakness is a reading of consequence. Bess becomes more robust, less pathetic. Porgy emerges wiser, more sophisticated, more specific. “When Gawd make cripple, He mean him to be lonely,” sings Gershwin’s archetypal Porgy. “He got to trabble dat lonesome road.” Paulus’s diminished Porgy sings, “When God made me, He made me to be lonely . . . I got to travel that lonesome road.” Gershwin’s Porgy is outsmarted by a lawyer selling Bess a “divorce” from Crown. Paulus’s Porgy is the whimsical author of Bess’s divorce; it’s his way of sealing her rehabilitation. Gershwin’s Porgy murders Crown in brutal anger. Paulus carefully justifies Porgy’s homicide by having Crown threaten to kill him first. No wonder the Paulus team struggles to find a suitable ending. McDonald’s Bess is too savvy to credibly flee to New York with Sporting Life. Lewis’s Porgy is too sensible – too civilized — to plausibly attempt limping one thousand miles in pursuit. He sings “Oh Lord, I’m on my way to a heavenly land” alone, on an emptied stage: a small, makeshift conclusion. #

Before Porgy and Bess there was the 1927 play Porgy, co-authored by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward. But a crucial animator of Porgy the play was its director, Rouben Mamoulian – he became a Broadway star overnight. Mamoulian’s Porgy in certain respects created a template for Porgy and Bess – also Mamoulian-directed. No feature of either production was as widely praised as the gigantic shadows cast by the mourners at Robbins’s wake – an effect extravagantly admired by Max Reinhardt, among others. Paulus, too, silhouettes the mourners on the back wall of Serena’s room. But what Mamoulian sought and achieved was an elemental effect: voodoo and Gauguin were points of reference adduced by stunned reviewers. Paulus, predictably, eschews any suggestion of the primitive. No one is stunned. #

Another Mamoulian touch, in Porgy and Bess, stands alone; to my knowledge, it has never been copied. Paulus and McDonald agonize fruitlessly over Bess’s capitulation to Sporting Life. A tortured pantomime has Bess reprising snatches of his “There a boat that’s leaving soon for New York” while pondering a cocaine vial, then inhaling its contents, then furiously washing her hands. Heyward’s original libretto instructs Bess to accept the cocaine just before Sporting Life croons his snake-in-the-grass song. But Mamoulian has Bess reject the powder. Sporting Life then deposits it on a step leading to Porgy’s room. She runs into the room and slams the door. Sporting Life exits. Heyward keeps the stage empty while the orchestra grandly reprises Sporting Life’s song (Maestoso, fortissimo). But Mamoulian has Bess return: “[She] comes out, looks around, and hesitates; suddenly, she grabs powder and goes in house, slamming door.” The resulting counterpoint of music and gesture – the grandiose peroration juxtaposed with Bess’s pathetic self-defeat – is vintage Mamoulian, a savage ironic flourish. The orchestra’s wicked laughter unexpectedly produces one of the opera’s saddest moments. Bess’s helplessness, sympathetically portrayed, is here more affecting than anything Paulus or McDonald have come up with in their efforts to make a character more “real.” #

Because it pokes at the fissures of the American experience, Porgy and Bess will always excite debate. Be that as it may, Porgy, through growing self-knowledge, earns the note of high elation with which the opera closes. As he sings “On my way,” Gershwin seals the epic moment by having his orchestra recall Porgy’s idealistic credo (“I got plenty of nuttin’”), his rapture of fulfillment (“Bess, you is my woman now”), and the pang of Bess’s betrayal (“What you want wid Bess?”). Porgy the cripple has endured; he has emerged strong and whole. If the Paulus Porgy and Bess (which omits this layered Wagnerian summa) is ultimately constrained – if Porgy’s culminating paean seems an uncertain non sequitur – it’s not George Gershwin’s fault. #

Restoring the drama to El Amor Brujo

The two best-known scores by Manuel de Falla – El Amor Brujo and The Three-Cornered Hat - began as stage works. Today, however, we know them as symphonic suites. In the case of Amor Brujo, the loss is formidable: an austere drama turned into a picturesque entertainment. #

The original 1915 El Amor Brujo, a gitaneria with dialogue, song, and dance, is unwieldy. The subsequent orchestral suite is fluent, but squanders the work’s gypsy soul. PostClassical Ensemble’s new staging of El Amor Brujo last weekend in DC was an attempt to restore the narrative and dance components without the words and stage detail encumbering the original version. Also, we used the original 1915 instrumentation – 15 players. It’s actually preferable – an amazing exercise in instrumentation/orchestration, eschewing the plushness of the 1925 ballet score. And for the songs we engaged not an operatic mezzo, but a famous flamenco cantaora from Seville: Esperanza Fernandez. #

The orchestra was onstage behind a scrim, used for projections and lighting design. There were eight black-clad dancers. The ingenious director/choreographer was Igal Perry, from New York’s Peridance Contemporary Dance Company. Esperanza was also choreographed. The Washington Post found the result “profoundly memorable.” #

In fact, we believe we have succeeded in creating a viable stage version Amor Brujo. As there are no sets, and the dancers only require fifteen feet of stage depth, we hope to tour it internationally.

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El Amor Brujo was presented in collaboration with Georgetown University on a double bill with Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, also fully staged. The two works were also coupled in 1925. They resonate in revealing ways. Falla, acknowledging the influence of Stravinsky on his own work, wrote of Stravinsky’s “primitivism” This is a term one could hardly apply to El Amor Brujo as it’s usually purveyed. But with a gypsy singing and gesticulating onstage, with the pared orchestration, with the austere flamenco influences on both music and plot brought into play, Falla’s appropriation of cante jondo proves gritty. This is a composer whose little home, fastidiously preserved in Granada near the Alhambra, is compact and severe. He lived ascetically with his sister. Stravinsky called him “painfully religious.”

The “Falla” we mainly know has wandered far from Falla. #

Siegfried at the Met

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of Fabio Luisi conducting SIegfried and Don Giovanni at the Met, as follows: #

Notwithstanding its importance as a showplace for rich boxholders — Mrs. Caroline Astor, who regularly came late and left early, was called a “walking chandelier” — the early Metropolitan Opera was a conductor’s house. During its “German seasons” (1884-1891), the dominant composer was Wagner and the dominant performer was Wagner’s protégé Anton Seidl, presiding in the pit. Not so long after, Mahler and Toscanini dominated the Met’s artistic identity. After World War I, the Italian wing was entrusted to Tullio Serafin and then Ettore Panizza, the German wing to Artur Bodanzky. Panizza and Bodanzky are largely forgotten today. How I wish the Met’s radio broadcasts would feature their broadcast recordings. Panizza’s Verdi, Bodanzky’s Wagner were incendiary, and the orchestra was a powderkeg — more explosive than any such ensemble to be heard today. (Just listen to Panizza’s 1938 “Otello” with Martinelli, Tibbett, and Rethberg, or Bodanzky’s 1937 “Siegfried” with Melchior, Schorr, and Flagstad — two of the supreme examples of operatic art ever documented in sound.) #

Much later, in the final phase of Rudolf Bing’s regime after the 1966 move to Lincoln Center, the Met was a house without great conductors. The orchestra was variable, the chorus worse. This was the setting for James Levin’s appointment as music director in 1975. Levine swiftly turned the orchestra into a reliably impressive instrument. The chorus improved beyond recognition. The repertoire was refreshed. In 2009, Levine concurrently took over the Boston Symphony. But a physical decline set in — his Met performances (never light-footed) turned massive and slack. Last September, the Met announced that Levine was bowing out of the fall’s new productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Siegfried” because of emergency surgery for a damaged vertebra. He would be replaced by Fabio Luisi — who was in the same instant named Principal Conductor. As of this writing, Levine is scheduled to return to duty in the spring — but no one knows if he really can. And so five seasons into Peter Gelb’s eventful tenure as General Manager, the company is negotiating a transition in musical authority. #

Though Luisi first appeared at the Met in 2005, he remains little known in the US. He was music director of the Dresden Staatskapelle from 2007 to 2010. He takes over the Zurich Opera in 2012-13. The Met is about glamour; Luisi is not glamorous. He defers to the orchestra when he takes his bows. He doesn’t smile at the audience. But he has won over the musicians. The best thing about the new “Don Giovanni and “Siegfried” productions is Luisi’s way of conducting the latter, and the orchestra’s way of playing it. He is the first conductor other than Levine to lead “Siegfried” at the Met since 1981. Before that, there was Erich Leinsdorf. To my ears, Luisi is a superior Wagnerian to either Levine or Leinsdorf. He achieves a striking refinement of style and sonority. His command is complete but never throttling. The balances between stage and pit are at all times impeccable. In the new “Siegfried,” the most memorable moments occur during the act one exchange between Mime and the Wanderer. Luisi seals the Wanderer’s music with a seamless majesty. Preparing Bryn Terfel’s descriptions of the gods and of the Volsungs, he achieves an unforgettable poetic hush. #

But the talk in the lobby is about Robert Lepage’s production. This is the third installment of the Lepage “Ring,” with its high tech projections and mobile metallic slabs. His virtual-reality special effects include running water, floating leaves, slimy worms, scampering rodents, and a Forest Bird that sits in Siegfried’s lap. The production works best where it is least intrusive: act one. In act two, the shallow playing space vitiates the expansiveness of Wagner’s forest; the dragon, if impressively large and animated, is neither frightening nor poignant. In act three, the magic fire frames Siegfried’s entire scene with Brȕnnhilde. Wagner asks that it disappear after Siegfried penetrates the flames for a reason: the mountaintop he attains trembles with a preternatural stillness, a preamble to apocalyptic events. This is but one example of Lepage’s failure to listen. Directing his singers in this final scene — the most psychologically complex duet in all opera — he is clueless. The steep rake of Brȕnnhilde’s “rock” doesn’t help. Only Gerhard Siegel, a terrific Mime, is consistently effective in keeping the opera’s trajectory moving. #

For “Don Giovanni” to succeed in a 4,000-seat house, it requires either an ensemble of larger-than-life vocal personalities, or an interpretation with a sharp edge. Mahler’s revelatory Met “Don Giovanni” of 1908, with a cast including Scotti, Chaliapin, Bonci, Eames, Gadski, and Sembrich, doubtless had both. The Met’s new “Don Giovanni,” directed by Michael Grandage, has neither. Remarkably, the strongest performance comes from the weakest character. Though Don Ottavio is a milquetoast, Ramon Vargas’s portrayal is so exquisite, vocally, that he steals the show. Both his great arias are delivered with exemplary diction, with pianissimo tones sustained on the breath, with elongated phrasings guided by Luisi in the pit. Grandage, a redoubtable director of plays, shows no signs of high operatic competence. Physically, the production is monotonous. The dancing at Zerlina’s wedding and Don Giovanni’s feast is over-choreographed. Inexplicably, the staging of the Don’s descent into hell is given away by the preceding statue scene: the only surprise is the duration of the conflagration. #

This season, Luisi also conducts “Manon” and “La traviata.” The Met is a company in need of strong artistic leadership. Luisi exerts authority quietly and inconspicuously. The possible parameters of his institutional vision are as yet unknowable. Will he be a fit? One hopes so. #