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"Hall-marked moments," Time Out Chicago, December 27, 2007. Instead of writing up the usual "Best Concerts of 2007" list, I compiled the concerts I felt made the best use of their venues. Props to Opera Cabal, the New Millennium Orchestra, and pianist Maurizio Pollini, whose solo recital provided the solid, traditional context for the experimenters.
Previously: The review of Opera Cabal, and my advance interview with Pollini prior to that recital last May.
"I dream not of a world where religion no longer has any place but of one where the need for spirituality will no longer be associated with the need to belong. A world in which a man, while remaining attached to his beliefs, to a faith, or to moral values that may or may not be inspired by scripture, will no longer feel the need to enrol himself among his co-religionists. A world in which religion will no longer serve to bind together warring ethnic groups. It is not enough now to separate Church and State: what has to do with religion must be kept apart from what has to do with identity. And if we want that amalgam to stop feeding fanaticism, terror and ethnic wars, we must find other ways of satisfying the need for identity."-Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity, 2000. Translated by Barbara Bray.
Ludovic Morlot made his official, subscription series debut with the Chicago Symphony last night, having filled in at the last minute for Riccardo Muti previously. His lack of pretension and focus on the details, along with an ability rare in a musician not yet 40 to corral the differing ideas of a large group of musicians caught my eye when I first heard him, and so it went last night. (I'm not the only one to take notice.) Strauss's over-the-top Suite from Der Rosenkavalier was appropriately over-the-top, but not ugly. And I've heard it done ugly.
The Strauss was the big main course of the program, and Morlot led a swashbuckling account of it, with big, lusty, brassy waltzes. The tender parts of the score weren't lost on him, either, and for those who don't like their Strauss all bloated and goopy and leaking all over the place, this was pretty much ideal. Others found it too bombastic; based on other accounts I've been unfortunate enough to attend (Yan Pascal Tortelier in Pittsburgh, looking in your direction), it wasn't.
Principal oboist Eugene Izotov made his solo debut in Mozart's C major Oboe Concerto, with a reduced complement of strings. His lithe and focused tone cut the work's phrases to the quick, and his ability to spin out a legato line effortlessly is rather enviable. Izotov also wrote his own cadenzas, I think, and improvised little connective passages in the finale; all nice, all welcome, all congenial.
Four of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances opened the program, and Bizet's L'Arlesienne Suite came first on the second half. Instead of playing them up as mini-showpieces, Morlot and the orchestra found the music inside, and the saxophone of Burl Lane and Mathieu Dufour's flute made special contributions in the Bizet.
I could go on, but suffice to say, this was a warm and friendly way to for the orchestra to end 2007. This is also, I hope, a warm and friendly way to end the blogging of 2007, so I look forward to getting back to the swing of things in 2008. I love you all...but not like that.
Doctor Atomic review, Financial Times, December 19, 2007. The post's subject is the final line of the opera, and it's sung by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Following that, the countdown grinds inexorably forward.
Those keeping score at home will notice that this is the first article or review I've published this year not to appear in Time Out Chicago. It's been that kind of a year, on balance, but I have some interesting plans for doing more of this sort of thing in 2008. Onward.
"That they will go on engaging such concentration, time and again, is one of the conditions of classic works. They remain classics not just by 19th-century dictate (though indeed the notion of classical music began then) but also because generations have found them of personal and social value. Not the least of their values, in a culture of speed and the eye, is in their encouragement of sustained attention and their education of the ear. They also, in a world where the individual is primary, offer the comforts and challenges of community: the community of musicians taking part in a performance, of traditions in any score or realization, of notes in whatever the piece may project as harmony, of listeners. Our journeys through a work—or through our lives of listening and, if we will, performing—form strands in a counterpoint of millions."—Paul Griffiths, from the preface to The Penguin Companion to Classical Music, 2005
I'll have a formal review of Doctor Atomic early next week, but will put a few thoughts here. Adams has always gotten a lot of mileage out of the choruses in his operas, but that goes to an entirely new level in Doctor Atomic. The singers in the chorus serve as the work's soul a great deal of the time, from singing in stunned tones as they name the cities being considered for destruction, as Oppenheimer and Edward Teller debate this in fact, to a fierce and terrifying scene near the end as they describe Vishnu in the evening sky.
I was floored by the choreography of Lucinda Childs, whose dancers serve as the unspoken feelings of the singers, and Sellars's direction, so off-putting to many people, touched me deeply. His direction was the first topic of conversation brought up by any critic who saw the premiere, and who returned to Chicago for this revision.
You have to think a little to figure out why the singers and dancers are doing what they're doing, and why Gerald Finley's Oppenheimer is staggering in stylized agony as he sings the big aria, "Batter My Heart/Three Person'd God," but I'm not opposed to that. How you respond to the proposition of thinking about the onstage action, and how it relates to the music, says a lot about what you think opera can aspire to be.
Photo: Robert Kusel. You can can see dancers in the background with slide rules, hammers and wrenches; choristers with pine branches; physicists and soldiers huddle around a bank of lights; and the Oppenheimers with their maid's family in the foreground. (It's a little too big to fit clearly into DecSimp's template, so it was cropped. Click on it for the full picture.) Four distinct visual images, propulsive music for the choir with Kitty Oppenheimer going all Cassandra above them. This was an awe-inspiring stage picture of music and imagery.
Jumping in a little late to this trend (see Alex Ross, My Favorite Intermissions, and the Wellsungs), but here is a triptych of Lucy. The gritty, verite style of the photos can be ascribed to the gritty, verite style of the BlackBerry with which they were taken.
Those troubled and irritated by the difficulty of watching YouTube videos of cats, but not contemporary music, or contemporary music, but not cats can be exercised no more: Here, at long last, is a video of a kitten chasing its tail to the soundtrack of Ligeti's Piano Concerto.
DecSimp will silent for a few days as I take a brief, pre-holiday vacation. I had the days left over, and figured I ought to use them. Judging by the depth and erudition on display in this post, however, it might reasonably be decided that I've already punched the clock.
John Adams is guest-hosting WFMT-FM, 98.7, this morning until 1:00, live web streaming is here. Lisa Flynn is interviewing Adams now, and I'm waiting to see what crazy stuff he calls up from his iTunes library.
Update: He played the fugue from Mitsuko Uchida's recording of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, Op. 106, Hoodoo Zephyr, and parts of Doctor Atomic and A Flowering Tree. Adams threw down at one point about The Death of Klinghoffer, claiming that American opera companies are too "scared" to produce it. (I was multitasking, so if he didn't actually say "American," and meant opera companies the world over, I'll fix if someone objects.)
Also, Adams took part in a three-hour symposium on Doctor Atomic yesterday that will be available as a podcast by the end of the week from the Lyric Opera. I'll link to that when it's posted, You can listen here, but and my TOC editor Craig Keller wrote about it here, with an enormous picture of Oppenheimer and Einstein looming over the discussion. His fellow panelists were Peter Sellars, Gerald Finley, Oppenheimer biographer Martin Sherwin, and the physicists Henry Frisch, of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Norman Ramsey, a 92-year old Nobel Prize-winner who worked on the Manhattan Project. Frisch's parents worked on the Project, as well, and he himself was born at Los Alamos in 1944.
I've been slowly updating the Critics, Journalists, Writers blogroll, and now David R. Adler's Lerterland (with a trenchant take on Cornelius Cardew's deeply twisted takedown Stockhausen Serves Imperialism), Maury D'Annato's My Favorite Intermissions, Jonathan and Alex's Wellsung (with Chicago posts-to wit: "Getting reasonable seats at Lyric is kind of a bitch."), Monotonous Forest, Brian's Out West Arts, La Cieca's Parterre Box, Peter Matthews's New York-based Feast of Music, Sieglinde's Diaries, A.C. Douglas's Sounds and Fury (who clearly adores Stockhausen in toto), and Brit Tim Rutherford-Johnson's The Rambler are all over there. Those you've probably heard of, but I bet you haven't read Chicago flutist Jennifer Swanson's Chronicles, cuz it's only one post old. If this post doesn't give you sufficient procrastination material, nothing will.
