jwilzewske: dramaturgy

Showing posts with label dramaturgy. Show all posts

Monday, June 13, 2011

Con Che Soavità Intuito: BEMF’s Production of Steffani’s ‘Niobe’

Philippe Jaroussky and Niobe cast; photo © BEMF and André Costantini

T he 2011 Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) opened yesterday with a production of the fully-staged North American premiere of the Baroque Italian opera, ‘Niobe, Regina di Tebe’ by Steffani. The work received its first performance in 1688 in Munich. Here it is restored with new choreography (dances by Melchior d’Ardespin from the original are no longer extant) and libretto by Luigi Orlandi now with a new English translation by Ellen Hargis.

T he opera is nominally Ovid’s story from classical Greece, but with Enlightenment characteristics.

E nlightenment-era people still were born into social positions with predestined obligations such as kinship and feudal duty, or even, as in the case of Niobe and Anfione in ancient times, royal privileges and duties to Theban subjects and kingdom. Human nature being what it is, even royalty could become frustrated with the lack of freedom, and with social positions and obligations that didn’t change throughout a person’s life.

O ut of chronic frustration come greed, pride, the wish for longevity or godlike immortality, and other motivations, which lead to bad, catastrophic decisions. In this case, at the end Niobe’s kids, the Niobids, have all been killed by lightning bolts hurled by the gods, who are hopping mad on account of all the vanity below; Niobe’s husband, the king Anfione, has committed suicide on account of the loss of his kids, his wife and his kingdom; and Niobe is turned to stone. It is about as bad a day as can be had by anybody in any Century.

D uring Niobe’s final aria at the end, the antiphonal utterances of two or three viole at a time—arrayed as the orchestra is across the entire width of the theater—add an especially dramatic, morbid effect.

G ià mi rende di Pietra.
Funeste Imagini
Già mi tormentano;
Stigie Voragini
Già mi spaventano:
Vinta al fin dall’empia sorte...

[Now I am turned to Stone.
Funereal images
Torment me now;
Stygian abysses
Frighten me now.
I am vanquished in the end by bitter Fate...]”
— Niobe, Act III, Scene XII [Agostino Steffani, tr., Ellen Hargis]

T he music establishes more of an orchestral underpinning than is usual... one cannot call it ‘accompaniment’. The vocal lines ride on the luxurious magic carpet of 20+ period instruments with natural inflections. [A four-piece off-stage viol consort adds a dramatic sense of acoustic distance and emotional depth at various times during the opera, complementing the sound from the larger chamber orchestra positioned between Row #1 and the stage.] The voices occupy their mid-ranges mostly, enabling each singer to project the text with crisp melismas and complexities that add to the emotion they are conveying. The naturalistic writing of the rhythms for the voices makes the dramaturgy that much more credible. The orchestral rhythms and phrasing are complementary to and sympathetic with the vocal parts: we are hearing one thing, a unity of voice and instruments, not accompanied voice. Really wonderful.

T he singers’ knowledge of the language and their sensitivity to phrasing and dynamics are truly remarkable. They and their coaches have clearly approached this work with extraordinary enthusiasm and depth of interest, to master all of the dramatic, musical, technical, and physical challenges that this opera presents.

T he BEMF cast members are superb in their parts—large voices that just won’t quit, countertenors too—all are compelling individually and wonderfully balanced, and the orchestra superb as well. The sets and costumes are sumptuous, and the production values: first-rate, as BEMF routinely achieves. Congratulations all around!

F our more performances of Niobe remain this week (Tue, June 14, 7pm; Wed, June 15, 7pm; Fri, June 17, 7pm; Sun, June 19, 3:30pm). Not to be missed!

Amanda Forsythe and Jesse Blumberg; photo © BEMF and André Costantini

Sunday, October 24, 2010

What can I do for Halloween that will be short but scary? I have a pretty good baritone/bass voice but not much time to prepare something.

Y ou might consider emulating “Fright Night” chamber performances, which have been part of Ottawa’s ChamberFest for the past several years, with bass Robert Pomakov performing Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’ [Песни и пляски смерти; Pesni i plyaski smerti] with pianist Valerie Dueck.

P omakov’s theatrical personality is perfect for this, and maybe yours is as well. He advises adopting a Rasputin-like alter-ego. In his own performances, he uses an extended range of dynamics, from softer pianissimos to louder-than-normal fortissimos, a dramatic technique that is effective for rendering scary realism in these lieder.

H ere are the songs:

Колыбельная (Last Lullaby in D-sharp minor; 4:26) - A mother cradles her sick baby with a tremendous fever, who through no one’s fault becomes septic, organ-failure sets in, and the baby then dies. The majestic cruelty of pointless annihilation.
Серенада (Serenade in D-sharp minor; 4:33) - Death lurks below the bedroom window of terminally ill woman, performing a pastiche of a serenade as though he were her lover. Unwelcome attentions, to say the least.
Трепак (Trepak in D minor; 4:03) - A drunk stumbles out of a tavern into the snowy night, takes off his coat and mittens, and freezes to death while hallucinating about fields filled with summer flowers. Mortal haplessness, decorated with depression and morbid chemical dependency.
Полководец (Field-Marshal in E-flat minor and D minor; 5:27) - Death is the commander of what’s left of grizzled dead and dying troops after an horrific battle, and he tells them how he will remember them all. Nice.

T his makes a fright-filled 20-minute program—or you can do just 2 or 3 of them if you like. The piano accompaniment is not terrifically hard.

Y ou might consider a black cape and possibly a black eye-patch. Scythes can be found at your local costume shop or, depending whether you live in a rural area or not, at your local garden store or feed/tack store.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Maya Beiser: Ideas that You Can Hold Onto, or that Recurse and Hold Onto You

B rightly voiced and musically attentive ... young Israeli cellist Maya Beiser has a firm and even hand, regardless of subject: bleak modernism, sultry ethnicity, or Romantic revival.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

T he performance by cellist Maya Beiser last night in Boston in the Celebrity Series (at the newly-restored Paramount Theatre at 560 Washington St in the Boston theater district) was deeply inspiring.

Arvo Pärt: Fratres (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Chinary Ung: Khse Buon (cello and electronics)
Osvaldo Golijov: Mariel (4 cello tracks, live cello)
Steve Reich: Cello Counterpoint (7 cello tracks, live cello, video)
Evan Ziporyn (arr.): Like Smoke (cello track, live cello, voice)
David Lang: World to Come (24 cello tracks, live cello, voice, video)

M aya Beiser’s repertoire enthusiastically propels the audience from ‘intention’ to ‘reception’ to ‘understanding’ and ‘liking’.

E lectroacoustic synthesis, digital reverb, and DAW sound-processing effects and antiphonal elements from her electrified cello (miked at its bridge) predominate in Pärt’s ‘Fratres’. Highly realistic cello emulations of classical qin glisses and sounds of other traditional Asian instruments captivate us and hold our interest in Chinary Ung’s ‘Khse Buon’. Maya’s cello technic is astounding—a spectacle in its own right well worth the ticket price just to see this. She and her production team put great effort into visual spectacle as well, on a par with what we would expect from, say, opera. (Classical music presenters, take note!)

M ost significantly, though, Maya’s repertoire does not involve separating art from life, and therefore it’s likely to be widely appreciated and subscribed to—compared to less accessible art music. People are more likely to integrate it into their listening and preferred experiences. Maya challenges us—including her use of Hebrew and medieval texts for her vocals; including rapidly altering meters and polyrhythms; including prolonged stretches of microtonal dissonances that refuse to resolve into hoped-for comfort. But she doesn’t ‘strip our [perceptual] gears’; doesn’t ‘trip our circuit-breakers’.

B y contrast, think of composers like Philippe de Vitry, who composed motets and other choral music where several languages were heard simultaneously. This is probably the nearest thing to what we heard Maya Beiser perform last night. Or maybe Glagolitic chant. Anyhow, Philippe de Vitry is, to me, emblematic of compulsive fuse-blowing and impedance mismatch regardless what century you live in. If you live for querulous reactions, or if your message is symbolic evocation of disparity and alienation and political discord, then, hey, go right ahead—do it like Philippe. Just don’t imagine that people will love it, buy it like hotcakes.

U nless. Unless, you use the complexity as a way to change the narrative or subvert the intention of the original—which is what Maya Beiser does so extensively in this program (and in her recordings).

E van Ziporyn’s ‘Like Smoke’ is based on Tsmindao Ghmerto, a 13th century Sanctus from the orthodox Georgian Liturgy that exhibits extreme polyphony of 15 or more distinct parts or voices, with untempered intervals and shocking harmonic convergences. In Evan Ziporyn’s arrangement, Maya’s voice and Maya’s cello weave a perception-bending pseudo-archaic ‘fabric’ out of tri-filar (two cello tracks; one vocal track) ‘threads’.

G od, the soul you gave me
Is smoke—
Memories of Love burning on eternal pyre.
Once born, we immediately begin to torch,
And so,
Until all the smoke vanishes,
[I am, we are—] Like smoke.”
— Yehuda Amichai.

T he poetic text [we humans are mortal ‘smoke’ that is not ‘real’ or ‘purposeful’ but only someone else’s (God’s) memories, residue of someone else’s love (God’s), destined to be consumed and vanish forever] subverts the religious postulate of eternal life; we are all inconsequential, beautiful-but-meaningless aerosols—mere air pollutants, not individuals with moral standing and worth.

T his beauteous prostrate imagery is mightily at odds with how we (all of us except monks, that is) conduct our lives. The quasi-archaism belies a post-modern, post-minimalist intention. The original sacred, liturgical purpose of Tsmindao Ghmerto is co-opted to the purpose of honoring romantic/carnal love—which is the substitution that is natural for us post-modern, western, sexy media-immersed souls to make.

U sing György Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ and ‘Requiem’ and Johann Strauss’s ‘An der schönen blauen Donau’ in the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is similar. Good examples of musical irony. Provocatively subverting our notions of the ‘specialness’ of us as human beings and individuals; provocatively subverting our assumptions/self-delusions about God, about linear time, about whether there is deep meaning in the Universe. Quasi-archaic music to challenge post-modern world-views.

T he dramaturgy and use of irony are engaging—Maya’s edgy acoustic textural and visual fields do not seriously test our perceptual boundaries, not really. Instead, the consistency and the psychological cohesiveness of Maya’s performance (and the cohesiveness of each of these compositions and videos) keep from blowing the listeners’ ‘fuses’, in much the same way that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ did not blow any fuses.

C ello Counterpoint’ for eight cellos...is irresistibly driven and less overtly contrapuntal than earlier installments in the series. Mr. Reich explores new harmonic ground, not least an almost Romantic lushness aided by Ms. Beiser’s rich tone and energetic playing.”
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times.

F or Steve Reich’s ‘Cello Counterpoint,’ Bill Morrison filmed Maya playing seven of the eight cello parts. She plays the eighth part ‘live’ alongside this film, forming an all-Beiser octet. The ‘septich’ film panels reveal the mutability of human personality over time. This is a rather long work, and Maya’s serially recording each of the seven tracks that appear in the film must’ve taken a day or longer. The seven panels comprising the ‘septich’ film show Maya and her cello, projected on the 7-meter-high floor-to-ceiling screen, with facial expressions and bowing gestures as widely varied as anyone might have during the course of a day—from fresh in the morning, to fatigued in the afternoon. The eight Mayas do have contrapuntal conversations with each other, as the title promises. But more than this, we emerge with a sense of the recursive quality of the meat-computer inside of Maya’s head, inside of our heads… its small-timescale 200-millisecond canons that return and re-trigger the same network of synapses and reinvoke the same thought that had not yet finished executing.

I rit Batsry made videos for David Lang’s ‘World to Come’ so Beiser appears to perform inside an empty warehouse or in front of rippling water. Lots of recursion, musically and visually, in this piece, too. In other words, Batsry’s black-and-white video is no mere ‘backdrop’ or throw-down scenery. It is genuine accompaniment and the result, a genuine multimedia performance. Fascinating!

O ver the past decade, Beiser has commissioned and performed many new works, collaborating with composers Tan Dun, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, and Mark O’Connor among others. Raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentinean father, Maya Beiser is a graduate of Yale University. Her major teachers were Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider, and Isaac Stern. Maya was the founding cellist of the new music ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Razumovsky Ensemble’s Account of Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat

Octet: Winfried Rademacher, Alexander Sitkovetsky, Laura Samuel, Anna-Liisa Bezrodny, Krzysztof Chorzelski, Barbara Doll, Oleg Kogan, Gemma Rosefield

O ur soul—how like the water! Our Fate—how like the wind!”
— Goethe.

It is difficult to find words that could possibly enhance enjoyment of the [Op. 20 Octet] Scherzo: [it is] at once a perfect and sufficient piece of abstract music and the most vivid tone-painting of wind-swept, cloud-wracked Nature: it is all gossamer, filigree, fugitive enchantment.”
— Hugh Wood.

The study of Mendelssohn has been ‘hot’ in recent years, and attention has focused on Mendelssohn’s identity. Jeffrey Sposato, professor at Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in particular discusses Mendelssohn’s response to his Jewish heritage. There are examples of cadences composed by Mendelssohn and their close correspondence to cadences in Jewish ritual chants. It is easy to be reminded of this while listening to this famous early composition by Mendelssohn, presented by the Razumovsky Ensemble tonight at Wigmore Hall in London.

The 1825 Octet] attempted to capture the spirit of the last stanza of the Walpurgis Night dream in Faust: ‘The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist / Are lighted from above. / A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds, / And all has vanished.’ One feels so near the world of spirits...”
— Jeffrey Sposato, The Price of Assimilation, p. 111.

It is reflexive, not deliberative; the narrative trajectory of this Octet is dramatic and impulsive. There is an energy of motion that is enhanced by the power of the eight instruments. The extrovertedness of the Octet is amazing—that of the then-16 year-old Mendelssohn—and is unlike the tempered, conciliatory, non-athletic dialogues of, say, Op. 44 and beyond. Larry Todd has a nice analysis of Op. 20 in his Mendelssohn biography, beginning at page 151.

Rather than a mere doubling of a quartet, Mendelssohn approached the writing as if it were an eight-piece orchestra. That much is conventional wisdom. But, to me, it seems that the biographers and historians have, to date, been writing hagiography; none has seriously considered what it must’ve been to write this piece as a teenager.

Mendelssohn composed his Octet for strings soon after his family had moved into a big house in the Leipzigerstrasse on the outskirts of Berlin. On the grounds was a garden house which had a room large enough to seat a sizeable audience for the family’s Sunday morning chamber music performances, which involved a number of Herr Mendelssohn’s musician friends. Mendelssohn presented the Octet to his string teacher, Julius Reitz, as a birthday gift. He wrote the soaring violin phrases at the beginning of the first movement in hopes of pleasing his teacher, but he was careful to provide meaty enough parts for the rest of the ensemble as well. This is the context that is seldom mentioned, in biographies or in program notes for this piece.

Octets for strings show signs of ‘clotting’ into an orchestral style. Spohr hit upon the device of dividing the eight into antiphonal quartets: and his four double quartets are much nearer to the true style of chamber music than his string quartets … But Mendelssohn, in the wonderful Octet, does not find Spohr’s simple antiphonal scheme worth the trouble of specially grouping the players when he can instead use 255 different combinations of the eight without enquiring how they are seated.”
— Donald Tovey.

How badly we need a detailed exploration of Mendelssohn’s notes with Fanny or other evidence—to see what frame of mind he was in during those months when this Octet was composed! This Octet is not a narrative of Jewish assimilation into Protestant Berlin; it is instead, I believe, a narrative of a precocious and eager-to-please teen’s assimilation into Leipzig adult culture. It is a story not of Jewish identity per se so much as it is a story of teen identity. Have a look at the books by Deborah Browning and Jane Kroger (links below) to explore this line of thought.

The Razumovsky Ensemble gave an enthusiastic reading of the Octet tonight that lends credence to the contextual importance of teenage identity and exuberance. The Razumovskys are an ad hoc assemblage of different world class soloists who are convened by Kogan for particular programs, based on their individual proclivities and repertoire affinities.

In 1989 Oleg Kogan won the All-Soviet Union Cello Competition. He has performed with orchestras including the Moscow Philharmonic, the Latvian State Symphony Orchestra, the Geneva Chamber Orchestra and London Soloist Chamber Orchestra and has given recitals in France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Switzerland and the U.K. In 1998 he became founded the Razumovsky Ensemble, a group of dynamic soloists and section leaders from world-class orchestras based in London. Tonight’s beautiful and illuminating performance was just one configuration of Oleg’s many friends and colleagues.

Mainstream kids do assimilate more smoothly and easily into social situations and their own neighborhoods, but often it is the children with out-of-the-box characteristics, who have the ability to make a significant and inspiring contribution to their community and the talent and vision to change the world in a positive way.”
— Stephanie Lerner, Kids Who Think Outside the Box, p. 3.