Monodramas

To the New York City opera for Monodramas, which is a performance of three otherwise unrelated works for soprano and orchestra:


La Machine de l’Être by contemporary New York composer John Zorn;

Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung; and

Neither, a setting of a Samuel Beckett text by Morton Feldman.

The show was directed and designed by Michael Counts, who works on “large-scale immersive installations and theatrical productions, often in unconventional spaces”.

The performance began about a quarter of an hour before the advertised starting time with the appearance of a man and a woman, both formally dressed, who stood in front of the curtain surveying the audience. They didn’t interact with one another: distancing themselves from experiencing a crystallized totality both in the social world and in the self. I’m not quite sure, but the man might have been doing the party trick of rolling back his eyes in a scary way so only the whites were visible. They were there until about twenty minutes after the advertised starting time as “patrons were being seated”; or so it was said. I suspect the audience was in fact experiencing an immersion in Erwartung by design.

John Zorn’s description of La Machine de l’Être is – “ there is no text, no plot, and no stage directions whatsoever”. The title is taken from the name a drawing by Antonin Artaud and Mr. Zorn hopes it’s stage presentation will be inspired by his works, which this one was.

As the work is only ten minutes long and as the production provided much distraction, I couldn’t form any opinion about Mr. Zorn’s music. The soprano part, as the description suggests, is wordless vocalising, and was sung by Anu Komosi from Finland. The singing was a highlight of all three performances. I imagine that each part, in it’s own way, involved some extraordinary feats of technique and memory and each of the singers was amazingly good.

When the curtain eventually rose for the first piece, the alienated couple entered the stage to find a crowd of people dressed in burkhas or the like. The couple disrobed one, to reveal Anu Komosi, and another to reveal a man in bright red suit with wires attached. Surely it would not be too long before this man was lifted into the air: and so he was.

It is a known fact that people who levitate do not have wires attached. Magritte knew this and never drew in the wires. My complaint is that stage magic is not magic if you can see the working parts. I also have a problem with the distraction caused by actors and dancers holding poses for lengthy periods of time. I can’t help wondering if the pose is painful to hold, and the diversion was compounded during Neither when the same man in a another suit was left, hanging in mid air, in a stylised pose, for what seemed like about half an hour.

The composer’s request for reference to the work of Antonin Artaud was honoured. Cut out speech bubbles appeared from the floor and as they hovered over the performers Artaud’s images were projected onto them.

Next was an Entr’acte in which to the sound of amplified forest murmurs, mainly crickets chirping, some ninja or buraku puppeteers joined the hooded ones, one of whom was disrobed to reveal Kara Shay Thomson the protagonist of Erwartung. There was a speech bubble over her head and some very attractive images of trees and leaves by video artist Jennifer Steinkamp were projected.

Erwartung was the best known work on the program, but I don’t recall having heard it before. The score is rich and interesting and the mood similar to that of Verklärte Nacht. It concerns the varying emotions of a woman who searches for her lover and then stumbles across his dead body. It may be carping to say that it is now over 100 years old. It draws on Freud’s outmoded emotional world of hysteria and alienation, which led to a dead end. The less sophisticated passions of nineteenth century opera have survived better. Since I would have preferred to hear and concentrate on the music, I may not be the best judge of the production, which was a distraction to me. It was only partly descriptive. Some symbolism, which I did not unravel, may have been involved. For example, the lover, alive and dead was duplicated. One lover must have been a contortionist from the remarkable way in which he rose from the dead.

For me the highlight of the night was the final piece on the program Morton Feldman’s Neither. I only discovered Morton Feldman’s work a couple of years ago when I heard a performance of his Rothko Chapel in Melbourne. That is a remarkable piece but Neither even more so, if only because it is longer. The music is very difficult to describe; if I said it was translucent it would convey very little, but it the best word that comes to mind. In harmony with the text by Samuel Beckett, it seems to be going nowhere, hovering somewhere in space, until close to the end when it develops a sense of menace leading to the final words “unspeakable home”.

The collaboration between Feldman and Beckett must be the most unusual in opera: assuming Neither is, in fact, an opera. Beckett simply supplied the text. At the time he wrote it, it is said that he had heard none of Feldman’s music. Although Feldman began composing before he had received the text, the work is accordingly more like the setting of a poem than a collaboration between composer and librettist. Some of the text is sung in syllables very high in the soprano’s range, so that it is not intelligable as a text at all. At times the soprano has passages of pure vocalisation as well as the sung text. I have not found any comment by Beckett on the fate of his text. As he could be very particular with stage directions in his plays, it would be interesting to know if he approved of such a free treatment of his text in the completed work.

The soprano part was beautifully sung by Cyndia Sieden.

The setting was a bright space of changing colours with ( as well as the suspended man mentioned above ) many mirrored cubes which rose and fell. This was an effective visual expression of the whole piece, which might be called an inconclusive introspection.

Monodramas: New York City Opera, Friday 8 April 2011.

JACK QUARTET

If there is anything better than an exciting performance by a great string quartet it’s hearing them play from about five feet away. I had this wonderful opportunity at the concert given by the JACK Quartet - Ari Streisfeld and Christopher Otto, violins, John Pickford Richards, viola, and Kevin McFarland, cello, in the Greene Space at WQXR Thursday night.


Without the internet, which shows its value in all kinds of ways, it is unlikely that I would have heard of either the JACK Quartet or the Greene Space.

I only found out why the quartet is named JACK at the concert; but it is obvious enough and spelled out on the group’s website. JACK is an acronym made up from the players’ names: John, Ari, Chris and Kevin. The history of the name is more complicated. The players met and first played together as students at Eastman School of Music. Before they constituted themselves as JACK, they played a string quartet by Helmut Lachenmann: Grido, (scream in Italian), which is also an acronym for the then members of the Arditti Quartet, (including Australian violinist Graeme Jennings) for whom it was written. So they took the JACK acronym as their name.

The concert was presented by Bill McGlaughlin of WQXR who managed to be both unobtrusive and very knowledgeable in his explanations. Various radio announcers and lecturers I can think of would benefit from listening carefully to his work.

The first piece was Death Valley Junction by Missy Mazzoli, who was present and introduced the work, which is descriptive of a location of that name which Ms. Mazzoli happened upon during a car journey. The settlement comprised a restaurant, hotel and unexpectedly a theatre, Amargosa Opera House, where Marta Becket (b.1924), a dancer, performed ballet and mime. Death Valley Junction is an imaginative piece in the tradition of descriptive works like Small Town and Knoxville: Summer of 1915. It includes a passage inspired by the dancing of Marta Becket and ends with a memorable solo passage for the cello.

Mr. McGlaughlin asked the quartet to play the last 90 seconds of the work a second time. He mentioned that the conductor Lukas Foss often played new music twice when introducing it at a concert. I wish more performers would do this. Musicians who learn and play new music have a huge advantage over their audience. I often get no idea what a new work is about on one hearing and then it is gone forever. Sometimes, but not always, it’s possible to find a recording of the music but often there is none. The music must make some kind of impression to motivate the search – and, as with the piece by Xenakis which concluded this concert recordings can sometimes convey only a little of what is heard in performance.

Next, the quartet played violinist Ari Streisfeld's arrangements of three motets by Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613).   Mr. McGlaughlin read the words for which the pieces were originally a setting before each was played, and at the conclusion asked the players to demonstrate some features of the arrangements which he said might be better described as orchestrations. There seems to be a new interest adaptations and arrangements of early music by contemporary composers, which brings welcome new light to the pre classical period. But Mr. McGlaughlin mentioned with approval a remark by Neville Marriner, assigning original instrument movement to a “brown sandals and granola” set. How any body who has heard the tone and colour of a good performances on original instruments could say this is beyond me.

The great highlight of the concert was the last work performed Tetras by Iannis Xenaxis (1922-2001). Thanks to the innovative programming of Roger Benedict, director of the Sydney Symphony’s fellowship program, I was not completely ignorant of Xenaxis’ music. Composers have now escaped the clutches of the serialist police and we can  listen to a great variety of interesting and involving new music. However, having learned that Xenakis used mathematical models including stochastic processes and other incomprehensible techniques in his work, I can’t help approaching him with fear and trepidation.

But this was swept away by hearing Tetras played with overwhelming energy and precision. Emerson like, Christopher Otto had replace Ari Streisfeld as first violin. The players almost shredded their bows, which were dripping with strands of hair at the end. No recording or hi fi system could reproduce the effect or of hearing this music seated five feet away from these outstanding musicians.

At the time of writing, this concert was available on streaming video at the WQXR website.

JACK quartet at The Greene Space WQXR, 7 April 2011.

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GYPSY RONDO

It was pouring with rain when I emerged from the subway at Houston Street; fortunately only a block from WQXR where I was headed for a free mid – day concert by members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. I had seen the Greene Space at WQXR on streaming video which, apart from giving an idea that the space is quite small, gave no real indication of what the venue was like. It is surrounded by windows onto the street so that passersby can look in.


There is no fixed seating: portable chairs surrounded the small stage, which was overlooked by a radio control room. It holds 200 – 250 people. The notices advising of maximum occupation over which things become illegal and unsafe mentioned two possible configurations. The space was full

Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor was played by Wu Han, piano; Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Lily Francis, viola and Nicholas Canellakis, cello. It was a lively and passionate performance. To my mind chamber music takes on extra excitement in a small space like this where I was very close to the musicians. Some of the texture that can be heard from strings is lost even in a small hall.

CMS of Lincoln Center at The Greene Space New York 6 April 2011

Nixon in China

According to Google Earth, my house is 15,968.78 kilometres from the Metropolitan Opera New York, so it isn't practical to go there as often as I would like.   I would have liked to have seen the recent production of Nixon in China, a marvellous work and a turning point in the development of modern opera.  At least these days we have internet streaming and the live HD broadcast's to cinemas, although here they are not live, probably because few of us, no matter how good our intentions, would be there at 5 am of a Sunday morning.   So we saw a recording two weeks after the Saturday matinee which was telecast.  Good as these transmissions are, it is quite a different experience from being there.

Nixon in China has music by John Adams to a libretto by Alice Goodman. It was originally devised and produced by Peter Sellars, who directed the Met production. John Adams conducted in his Met debut.


The music is remarkable and memorable. There may be exceptions, but I think there should be music in opera which engages us as we listen; and which we can remember later on. I was pleased to see this thought echoed in Michael Tanner's article in The Spectator about the recent premier of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole. He said that ...one of the cardinal musical weaknesses of the piece (is) that it sends one out of the theatre with nothing musical going on in one’s head. When I first saw John Adams' Doctor Atomic in 2005, I had the impression it was a work that would last for this very reason. The powerful aria Batter my Heart, and Am I in Your Light, were not only engaging at the time but, remarkably for a piece newly heard, remained with me long after.


In Nixon we have the thrilling soprano aria I am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung, a little of the music more developed in Adams' orchestra piece The Chairman Dances and the pastiche which satirises the revolutionary vogue for group composition accompanying the revolutionary ballet.


We also have the RN's long aria News ... has a kind of mystery, which is an example of the sympathetic way in which the libretto and the music treat him. The other example is his monologue in the third act about his experiences in the second world war. Nixon's character is carefully developed to avoid the stereotype Watergate villain. Speaking at an event webcast on WQXR/Q2, John Adams said that at the time the opera was written all most people saw of Nixon was a succession of comic mimics on late night television.


On the same webcast, Peter Sellars saw the writing of an opera about recent historical events in a various ways. He said that the usual television commentary made a snap judgement and then moved on; it presented historical events inconsequentially so that we don't have the same feeling about the significance of historical events as we have about the history of past centuries. Music and poetry can lift you past the facts into a visionary space which offers us something much more profound.


He also saw Nixon as an instance of what opera can do: we go to a place that was never announced at the beginning . He saw this as a place for secret thoughts, a place you don't have words for, which creates feelings which none of us know how to process.


I think this gives us a good idea where we are headed in Nixon. The opera begins in a documentary way, depicting the arrival of the Nixons in Beijing and the his meeting with Mao. It then veers off into a surreal landscape inspired by a performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women, in which Henry Kissinger somehow becomes a sadistic landlord and Pat Nixon intervenes in the action to save his victim. The last act consists of monologues by Nixon, Chou En Lai and Mao in which they provide a historical context which, up to that point, was missing, and an imagining of what was going on inside their heads.




Of course we have no idea what was going on inside their heads. History books which invent dialog are often and rightly condemned. Opera is not a history book; and one of the things it can do is create a world which simulates the kind of thoughts we have when thinking about past events. I don't think when we read history we always convert the story into a catalogue of established facts; we do the opposite. We imagine what it would have been like to be a Nixon or a revolutionary in China, and the opera give a voice to such thoughts and feelings, just as opera gives a voice to the thoughts and feelings of a Tosca or a Violetta.


Max Frankel, a journalist who covered Nixon’s trip to China, does not accept this. In an article in the New York Times, he argues that operas shouldn't be based on contemporary events. He is not very convincing. The article suggests that Verdi and Shakespeare wrote of long past events for aesthetic reasons, overlooking the political censorship which constrained both of them. He concludes:


It is easy to mock the story lines of most operas, but that is not my main purpose here. I mean to suggest, in all sympathy, that when living reality is so blatantly harnessed to bait the audience with familiarity and to create a heightened sense of excitement, it risks being constrained by that same reality from reaching true depths of drama and character. At the sudden and surprisingly ambiguous end of “Nixon in China” we hear Chou’s plaintive aria asking, “How much of what we did was good?/Everything seems to move beyond/Our remedy.”


I left wondering whether the opera’s creators might not share his anxiety.


I would like to ask him: why shouldn't familiarity be an element in a work of art? and doesn't any heightened sense of excitement achieve exactly what Peter Sellars set out to do - remove the events from the babble of the daily news and suggest their real significance. And what are the "true depths" of drama and character? The drama and character in Nixon are absorbing and creative. Surely nobody would mistake an opera for an attempt at an all encompassing and definitive historical narrative, even if it was possible to produce one.


Nixon is sung by James Maddalana who created the role in 1987. He also sings on the recording made at that time with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Edo de Waart on which his youthful voice sounds a little out of character. He is now more of an age with the Nixon he portrays. When I heard the internet stream of the opening night, and a stream of the performance seen in the movie theatre, I wondered why he was allowed to continue. His voice was breaking up and he sometimes coughed. The reviews were surprisingly favourable,and seeing his performance in the cinema showed why this was. It's certainly not great singing, but he inhabits the part so well that this doesn't seem to matter. He doesn't look much like Nixon, but very soon he becomes Nixon.


The other highlight of a uniformly excellent performance was Kathleen Kim's portrayal of Chiang Ch'ing. The aria I am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung was thrilling, and a complete answer to those who would not see recent history on the operatic stage. It might be a stereotype but in both the aria and her performance of it were a memorable depiction of a fanatical revolutionary woman.


Henry Kissinger was sung by Richard Paul Fink. He was excellent in a difficult role. My one reservation about Nixon in China is the way in which it portrays Kissinger as a pantomime villain, in contrast to its empathy with all the other characters. Doctor Atomic did something similar by making General Groves, the military head of the Trinity project, very unfairly, a kind of buffoon. Perhaps there is thought to be a need to offset the serious plot with some comic relief. An itinerant scholar suggested to me that this was a tradition of American musical theatre: cf. and cp. Officer Krupke in West Side Story. If so, I am not convinced it's a tradition that should have been followed here.

Ships made in Japan

On 15 February we had a visit from MS Asuka II ( 飛鳥II ), operated by the Japanese line Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (日本郵船株式会社). She was on a Pacific cruise from Yokohama and Kobe and return.





The ship has an interesting history: she was built at the Mitsubishi yard in Nagasaki in 1989.



She commenced service in 1990 as MS Crystal Harmony for Crystal Cruises. Crystal Cruises is owned by Nippon Yusen.



In 2006, the ship was renamed Asuka II under current ownership. Asuka II has a gross tonnage of 50,142; and is 241 metres long.



The name Auska II suggests a first Askuka, and she is still afloat under the name Amadea. The first Asuka ( of current times: there were earlier ships of this name) was also built at Mitsubishi in Nagasaki, and commenced service in 1991. In 2006 she was sold to Amadea Shipping Company and is operated under charter by the Germany-based Phoenix Reisen. She also visited Sydney this year and was at the Overseas Passenger Terminal on 26 February.



Amadea has a gross tonnage of 28,856, and is 193 metres in length.


Her itinerary would suit those who like to spend some time at sea: she departed Nice on 22 December 2010 and travelling around the world from west to east will arrive in Hamburg on 7 May 2011. The itinerary gives an indication of the many and varied ports accessible to smaller cruise ships.



( Facts in this post come from wikipedia and are hence as accurate as the wiki. )

Shipping News for 5 February 2011

This weekend Seabourn Soujourn made her first visit to Sydney. Her maiden voyage was in June 2010, and she is one of five ships of this line.

The ship has length of 198 meters; beam 25.60 meters and a deadweight tonnage of 32,000 metric tonnes.

I think this makes her similar in size to the old P&O liners Arcadia (219.9 m; 27.6m) and Iberia, though I am completely confused by the changes in measurement to the mass of ships. ( I know the displacement of ships I saw 50 years ago but the changes in measurement make comparison difficult. )



The Seabourn Sojourn, however, carries only 450passengers, less than half the number on the Arcadia.



She was berthed at Wharf 5 Bangaroo: a new name for the former Darling Harbour terminal.




Rhapsody of the Seas was also in Sydney on 5 February; berthed at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay. She has been coming and going from Sydney all this summer.



Rhapsody of the Seas has operated since 1997. She is one of 42 ships operated by Royal Carribean International. The ship as a length of 279 metres; beam 32.2 metres and a Gross Tonnage of 78,491 tons. This makes her a little smaller than Cunard's Queens Victoria and Elizabeth. So maybe a little more crowded with 2435 passengers.

Geoffrey Rush: The King's Speech and The Diary of a Madman

It was fascinating to see Geoffrey Rush in a film and on stage in the same week.


I don't see many films and can't easily compare The King's Speech with other recent releases but it is reported to be in line for major awards this year. Apart from thinking it was perhaps twenty minutes over long I enjoyed it, though not as much as Deborah Ross who wrote in The Spectator "... I love it so much that, if I could, I would take it home and put it down for a good school and wrap it up warm in the cold and, should it catch a chill, I would nurse it and offer hot lemon and maybe even oxtail soup...". In fact, I am surprised that such an old fashioned and low key movie is so well received; but, as I said, I haven't seen the others.

The King's Speech is about the relationship between the Duke of York, later King George VI, (Colin Firth) and, Lionel Logue, an unorthodox Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush). The Duke had a very bad stammer and was unable to speak effectively in public. He engaged Logue to assist him at a time when events leading to the abdication of Edward VIII and his own accession to the throne made his ability to cope with the impediment all the more critical.

Colin Firth mastered the stutter, and the accompanying frustrations and outbursts of temper very well. Geoffrey Rush's portrayal of Logue was very restrained, you could say underplayed, depicting an otherwise very ordinary man with a particular gift going about his work almost unaffected by the status of his royal patient. As a former and failed actor, Logue was a slightly unconventional father to his growing sons. There was a silent but brilliant flash in his portrayal when, on the outbreak of war, Logue looks at his elder son and realises, I think, that the boy may become a victim of the conflict.

His acting was in great contrast to his Aksenth Poprishchin in The Diary of a Madman at the Belvoir Street theatre and the comparison shows the great range of his talent.

If Geoffrey Rush's acting was restrained, you could say the same of the whole film which avoided the clichés of royal costume drama, particularly in the music. The film has an original score by Alexandre Desplat. But, interestingly, towards the climax, the King's first radio speech of the second world war, Beethoven was heard. A slow measured passage which I found came from his 7th. symphony. Royalty and Empire usually demand Elgar, who was absent, and the King's coronation, seen as a black and white newsreel being watched by the participants, could have had Walton's coronation march Crown Imperial which was written for the ceremony, but may have been thought too grandiose for the established mood.

And then to Belvoir Street for The Diary of a Madman. This play was written and first performed by Geoffrey Rush at Belvoir Street in 1989. It's revival marks the retirement of its director Neil Armfield as Artistic Director of the theatre. The play is based on a short story by Nicolai Gogol (1809 - 1852), adapted by English playwright David Holman with Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush.

We have all heard of Gogol but is he known than read? The story is in the form of a diary by a member of the lower orders of the Russian civil service. We first learn that, like many in structured organisations, such as schools and some parts of the legal profession today, he is both trapped in and fascinated by the intricate hierarchy of which he is an insignificant member.

 "I'm only forty-two, that's an age nowadays when one's career is only just begining. Just wait my friend, until I'm a colonel or even something higher, God willing. I'll acquire more status than you."

Then, in the most innovative part of the story, he hears a conversation between two dogs, which doesn't surprise him over much as he had read of cows asking for a pound of tea in a shop. He then claims to have tracked down some letters between the dogs and relates their content in some detail. Finally, on reading that the throne of Spain is said to be vacant, he realises that he is the King of Spain; and mistakes the men who come to take him away for the royal entourage. If there is a fault in the narrative, it is that the final delusion appears from nowhere. It doesn't seem to develop smoothly from the character's illusions about the dogs, or his hopeless infatuation with a woman well out of the reach of a junior clerk. You might say that it was an appropriate delusion for a man obsessed with position and rank, but it happens suddenly nevertheless.

The story was written as a satire on aspects of Russian life at the time: such things as a quotation from an obscure poet Poprishchin wrongly attributed to Pushkin, a contemporary newspaper nicknamed the Little Bee, and the sharpening of quills in goverment offices - in which Poprishchin takes such delight -and which a note to the Penguin edition of the story tells us was, unsurprisingly, the responsibility of the most minor clerks. However, all this is similar enough to aspects of modern life not to matter much.

The story as written is ready made for adaptation for the stage. Although in the form of a diary, the writing quickly jumps into what must be intended to be read as the stream of Poprishchin's thought rather than a transcript of his diary; so it translates very well into a monologue for the theatre. The adaptation  includes large sections of the story unaltered.

The Blevoir street theatre is unusually configured with banks of steeply raked seats looking towards the stage which is in one corner of the space. It's similar to, but not quite a thrust stage. The amazing thing about it which we noticed as soon as we came in was the way in which this unpromising space is transformed by each set built in it. The set for The Diary of a Madman depicts  Poprishchin's decrepit but brightly painted attic bedroom. It's so different from the very modern hotel room on a revolving stage used for Measure for Measure that you immediately feel you are in a different place.

The play cleverly adds a context for the narrative of the diary by placing Poprishchin in the attic attended by Touvi a faithful Finnish servant, charmingly portrayed by Yael Stone, who also takes two other minor roles. However, it soon moves into the diary itself.

Geoffrey Rush depicts an engagingly eccentric man, whose first steps into another world - his contacts with the talking a writing dogs - are almost believable. There is a little improvisation, including some interaction with the musicians, which is never allowed to detract from the narrative. The performance is very physical; seemingly out of control at times. Gradually the character collapses, so that by the time he reaches an asylum he is a grotesque and frightening figure. A truly remarkable performance.

Postscript added 12 March 2011

Since this was written Geoffrey Rush has missed out on the oscar for best suporting actor for The King's Speech and Diary of a Madman has opened in New York: here are reviews from the New York Times and The New York Review of Books.