jwilzewske: music tourism

Showing posts with label music tourism. Show all posts

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Biava String Quartet: Too Much Is Never Enough

T oo much is never enough.”
— Mick Jagger.

However big the repertoire for string quartets gets, it is not possible to have too many string quartets.

The Biava Quartet performed Saturday night at the annual black-tie gala/soiree benefiting the Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. Approximately 250 attendees enjoyed the concert-dinner-auction event in the Kirk Hall of the Kansas City Public (Central) Library, a 1906 historic building which was renovated/restored in 2004.

The Biava Quartet was founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Its members were trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Southern California, Yale University, and The Juilliard School. Currently the Biavas are the Lisa Arnhold Quartet-in-Residence at Juilliard. They were also the winners of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2003.

The Quartet is named after violinist and conductor Luis Biava, who has been a mentor to members of the group. Biava is Professor at Temple University Boyer College of Music and was previously Conductor-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A native of Colombia, Biava was a founding member of the Philarte String Quartet and continues to play first violin with the Philadelphia Chamber Ensemble.

The Biava Quartet’s repertoire features American composers John Harbison, Mason Bates, William Bolcom, and Ezra Laderman. Last year the Quartet premiered and recorded composer Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’.

[50-sec clip, Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’, Biava String Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

The Biavas last night gave the gala attendees a dazzling 30 minutes of ‘bon-bons’.

Schnittke—Polka, 1980 (arr. Sergei Dreznin): parts alternately take on serious and jesting poses; extreme rubato propels the circus theatrics; sheet music available from Sikorski; 2 minutes 30 seconds of ironical hilarity in B minor;
Puccini—Crisantemi (chrysanthemums), 1890: a G minor caricature written in a single night, in memory of duke Amadeo of Savoy; Puccini later reused this work in his opera Manon Lescaut; ‘pneumatic’ phrasing heightens the lyrical and dramatic effects, which alternately call into question the authenticity of theatre and of so-called ‘real’ life; Biavas’ incisiveness succeeds in animating these questions in just 5 minutes; sheet music available from MusicForStrings;
Turina—Oración del Torero (Bullfighter’s Prayer), 1925: opens quietly with stealthy pizzicato (What is this bullfighter praying for?); pace progresses impulsively and reveals out-of-control impetuosity and narcissism, then gets a grip in an expansive and calming melody; sheet music available from MusicRoom;
Beach—Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, Op. 80, 1916: sometimes paired with readings from poet Emily Dickinson or American Indian folk literature; coloristic American/Macdowellian whimsy at its finest; sheet music available from RecitalPublications.com;
Shostakovich—Age of Gold Polka (arr. Jason Calloway): incongruous dissonances that opine that ‘stuff happens’, humans are never really ‘in control’ of anything.

The Biava Quartet’s pacing is edgy and precise, neat, white-knuckled—exciting. Passages played expressively in other settings (conventional concerts; recordings) here come across as paradoxically stern (watch violinist Hyunsu Ko furrow her brow!), whereas rigid sections are in a festive mood read more lyrically and infused with humor and theatricality. The Biava Quartet devises a program that is perfect for a gala benefit!

The Biava Quartet’s members are:

Austin Hartman, violin;
Hyunsu Ko, violin;
Mary Persin, viola;
Jason Calloway, cello

This coming week the Biavas will be performing at the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar in New York. (Probably the repertoire there will be not quite so jocular as at the gala?)

It should go without saying that there is no ‘affluenza’ of string quartets, anymore than there is an affluenza of paintings or photographs or films: the threshhold of unmet market demand for excellent string quartets is still higher than the current supply. Instead of the growing classical musical wealth freeing us from ‘materialist’ preoccupations, it has the opposite effect—of making us more conscious of how much more there is to create and to have, and more conscious and less accepting of mediocrity. Not ‘acquisitiveness’ really; just a hedonistic joy in seeking out more of the experiences that the Biavas are providing!

Would there ever be ‘Enough’? If ‘enough’ means ‘satisfying desire’, ‘adequate to meet the need’, ‘sufficient’, I doubt it. What we have right now is, at best ‘in a tolerable but not super-abundant degree, denoting mere acceptableness or acquiescence, and implying a degree or quantity rather less than is desired’. As in, “This quartet was well enough, but I’m still hungry for more.”

There can never be too many string quartets—not compositions; not ensembles; not performances—especially when carried off with such panache. The Biava Quartet’s wonderful performance contributed significantly to reaching the Friends of Chamber Music’s fund-raising goals. A heart-felt thanks to the Quartet members for generously making a place for these sorts of promotional events in their busy schedule of teaching and concertizing! (It’s hard maybe for performing artists to place a value on promotion and audience development. But presenters know well how vital and valuable promotional events are. Without such events there would not be nearly so many commissions for composers, not nearly so many opportunities for up-and-coming performers and ensembles, and, ultimately, a less vibrant community in which publishers, recording companies, and presenters and other stakeholders also can thrive.)

Gala promotional events may not be ideal from acoustic or musical aesthetic perspectives, but they are a life-blood to the classical music community and privately funding chamber music in the U.S. These events are vital not only for retention and bonding with the usual, older philanthropist-patrons in the community; they are also vital for attracting new corporate sponsors, for whom the events have a certain desirable cachet.

F ind an ‘in’. Find a Board member or even a LinkedIn connection who can introduce you [to the business person you intend to solicit for sponsorship of your chamber music organization] so you’re not ‘cold calling’. I always respond to people who come recommended by someone I know, and businesspeople do, too. Start your sentences [addressing potential corporate sponsors] in the right way. Instead of ‘This is what we do,’ say ‘[Look at this.] This is what we can do for you.’ ”
— Katya Andresen, NetworkingForGood, 17-MAR-2008.

Besides this, gala events also attract a fair number of under-40s who see black-tie experiences as a sort of musical ‘adventure travel’. (‘Tourism’ would be the wrong word; too passive. To this group, gala cultural events are ‘expeditions’—opportunities to visit an esoteric place and society that few members of the group would encounter otherwise; a cross-genre dual art of ‘elegant conversation and dining’-plus-‘chamber music’, ‘hybrid art’ as the Australians would say; an ‘extreme contact sport’.) Participating in a civic cultural event, clustered in dinner tables of ten, these under-40s actively create memories. The uncertainties and risks and thrills involved are very much the same sort as arise in travel abroad, to places where you don’t speak the language.

A spirited and thoughtful volume. One of Bruner’s greatest contributions is his constructivist position, from which he views cultures as continually reinventing themselves. Tourist practices are seen as neither simulacra nor ersatz, but as active social performances in their own right. This position allows Bruner to free anthropologists from their previous impasse of thinking along the binary of authenticity-inauthenticity, a persistent focus of tourism scholarship ever since Dean MacCannell’s 1970s writing on ‘staged authenticity.’ Because culture is always emergent, alive, and in process, every cultural act is authentic.”
— Miriam Kahn, review of Bruner’s book, in American Anthropologist, 2004.

Not merely sight-seeing or posing as explorers, they immerse themselves; they talk with the Biavas and bid against socialites for choice live-auction items. Respectful amateur anthropologists, they conduct themselves politely and with earnestness and interest, as they would do when abroad in a foreign country. ‘Destination Culture’ enthusiasts, they take ‘tribal’ photos of the scene and of each other (discreetly on cell phone cameras, to be uploaded later and virally shared), recording the historical facts of their night’s expedition.

This sort of high-touch ‘face-to-face’ audience development (of Bruner-style active destination-cultural ‘explorers’) just doesn’t happen in conventional concert hall settings or tamer pre-/post-concert ‘socials’. There is no doubt that encounters like these are healthy for all concerned—the ‘natives’ and the ‘explorers’.

W hat we have is a circuit of embodiments and disembodiments, a passage of vivid sensations through bodies—first extracted from perceptions and affections, then rendered perceptible in the expressive matter of the artwork, then engaged by audiences swept up into the artwork.”
— Ronald Boque, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 170.

Basically, vigorous, civic-minded ensembles like the Biava Quartet are, through gestures like their superb, unusual performance in Kansas City last night, helping to insure the future of chamber music in this country—by revealing wider, more improvisatory, and less ‘serious’ dimensions of chamber music—to a wider audience, many of whom never imagined that these dimensions existed. Too much gratitude from us for their generosity is impossible—too much is never ‘Enough’.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Irish New Music: Back to the Future—‘Folk music’ Elements in ‘Art music’

M usic—the natural words in the natural order. Through that formula we go back to the people.
Music will keep out temporary ideas, for music is the nations’ clothing of what is ancient and deathless.”
— W.B. Yeats, Letter to Lady Gregory, 08-FEB-1937.

New music in Ireland is neither an attempt to move away from traditional music nor a deliberate construction upon previous works. The ‘Irishness’ of recent chamber music compositions is as idiosyncratic as the Irish counties and their distinct cultures and histories. I recently had an opportunity to explore the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin, in preparation for travel to Ireland later this year. The Contemporary Music Centre is funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and also receives funding from the Ireland Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO).

The diversity is phenomenal—throughout the musical genres really but especially so among chamber music idioms that the CMC-member composers represent. Some contemporary composers are clearly serial or atonal. Others among them are much more lyrical and tonal. Bodley especially inclines to settings of Irish poetry—which is especially appealing to a foreign visitor like me who craves the cultural ‘situatedness’ of compositions like Bodley’s. It is not inward-looking or insular; instead, this music just feels intensely, well, ‘Irish’.

S ee everything through music! Those chords yet to resound in you—they swim like fish in all the rivers of the world. You love their playful surge, their shadows flickering deep within you.”
— Susan Connolly.

The act of composing classical music is, I suppose, ultimately an assertion of creativity—a cairn placed by the composer as a marker of her/his—our—existence, against the fact of our mortality. Chamber music is inherently ‘serious’ as well as intimate, regardless of the humor or other emotions it may convey. But, over the years, informal Irish folk idioms—gatherings of friends, the clairseach—have been transformed into concert pieces. So one question as I listen to the output of these Irish composers of new music is, is there now a trend ‘back to the future’—reverting to more informal folk music themes and smaller orchestrations, chamber ensemble pieces?

With some difficulty, it could be so—and Bodley and other composers in the CMC stable do it regularly. Boydell, too, in his earlier years—String Quartet, Op. 31, for example. But there’s no business model for it (the ‘stick’). And, to be honest, the Gaelic tradition in literature and the arts does incline toward epic proportions anyhow (the ‘carrot’). So when we have Irish composers writing new music for small ensembles, it’s clearly done as a labor of love.

Boydell passed away in NOV-2000. Along with fellow composer, Frederick May, he founded the Music Association of Ireland in 1948. Much of Boydell’s writing bears the influence of Bartók. Not that his work is entirely derivative of European traditions; it is not. But his avoiding incorporating Irish folk tune themes into his compositions is conspicuous, compared to other composers of Irish new music. Here’s a clip from his String Quartet No. 2, performed by Vanbrugh Quartet [Gregory Ellis (vn), Elizabeth Charleson (vn), Simon Aspell (va), Christopher Marwood (vc)].

[40-sec clip, Boydell String Quartet No. 2, Vanbrugh Quartet, 0.5MB MP3]

I n the 1940s and early 1950s I was considered (in the Irish context) a very ‘modern’ composer. Now, about forty years later, my music could possibly be considered rather old-fashioned. This is largely due to a firm belief in artistic honesty: creating sounds that I like personally and refusing to follow fashions that might be more acceptable to the critics of the time.”
— Brian Boydell, 1996.

John Gibson was born in Dublin in 1951 and currently lives in Cork. His training/development included stints with Stockhausen and Lutoslawski. To date, he has five CDs released. Here’s a clip from his piece Sliabh Luachra, performed by Johnny McCarthy (trad fl) with the Crawford Piano Trio [Adrian Petcu (vn), Iosef Calef (vc), Jan Cáp (pf)].

[40-sec clip, Gibson Sliabh Luachra, Crawford Piano Trio with J. McCarthy, 0.6MB MP3]

F or he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.”
— Seamus Heaney.

Seóirse Bodley was born in Dublin in 1933. His writing has been prolific and varied, ranging from avant-garde to Irish traditional music. Among other things, he’s a founder of Aosdána, Ireland’s government-sponsored academy of creative artists. Here’s a clip from his String Quartet No. 2, performed by Degani String Quartet [Alan Smale (vn), Elizabeth Leonard (vn), Padraig O’Connor (va), David James (vc)].

[40-sec clip, Bodley String Quartet No. 2, Degani Quartet, 0.7MB MP3]

and a clip of his String Quartet No. 3, performed by the Vogler Quartet.

[40-sec clip, Bodley String Quartet No. 3, Vogler Quartet, 0.9MB MP3]

I s iomaí sort ceoil atá ann, mar adúirt an fear a raibh an trúmpa maide aige.”
[There are many different sorts of music, as the man with the wooden trumpet said.]
— Seóirse Bodley.

In summary, there are many novel and exciting new chamber music works being written and performed here. I look forward very much to my next visit to Ireland. Maybe you, too, will have a chance to visit sometime soon. Meanwhile, browse what’s on CMC’s website (they have a wonderful Calendar of Events and other features), order yourself some of the CDs and scores, and enjoy!

Friday, September 7, 2007

Llorca: Artist-Opera, Composer-Politics and the Internets

W e now need to look beyond restrictive theories; beyond galleries with their exclusive, radical agendas; beyond, even, artists themselves—and focus all our attention, and every critical fibre we can muster, on the works that are being produced today, wherever they come from and whoever makes them.”
— Julian Spalding, ‘The Eclipse of Art’, 2003

DSM: The performance by Agrupación Coral Benidorm (Benidorm Choral Ensemble) and members of the Julius-Stern-Institut für musikalische Nachwuchsförderung of the Universität der Künste Berlin last night was novel and exciting.

Director: Matias de Oliviera Pinto
Piano: Anastassiya Dranchuk
Soprano: Laila Salome Fischer
Speaker: Anna Thalbach

CMT: ‘Las Horas Vacías’, Ricardo Llorca’s chamber opera for soprano, chorus, piano and a chamber orchestra, premiered at the Sacred Music Festival of Benidorm, is a work about a woman, isolated in her executive role, trying to find meaningful interaction with other people—a lover?—via the internet.

DSM: More broadly, ‘The Empty Hours’ proposes to be a psycho-opera. It’s an extended meditation on the loneliness and feelings of ennui and meaninglessness that are prevalent in Western societies. It’s not a scholastic piece, it’s not an Adorno-style ‘negative dialectical’ set-piece—it’s accessible and and the music is moving. I would say, though, that it looks like Llorca’s very much in the tradition of Spanish tragedians like Cervantes.

The Empty Hours, premiere in Benidorm, Spain, with Dorota Grezskowiak (soprano), Maria Ruiz de Apodaca (speaker)

CMT: Llorca indulges in extended passages with bitonal harmony—purposefully—not with a superficial aim to unsettle the listener, but to advance the plot.

DSM: The score is organic, approachable. The timbral qualities of the soprano’s voice are extensively explored, in ways that are complemented by the orchestration. The writing for each instrument is lyrical—the only part of the score that’s self-conscious is the extensive bitonality—two keys simultaneously, clashing.

CMT: As new music goes, ‘The Empty Hours’ is something of a hybrid, both traditional and contemporary. It establishes its narrative with a harmonic and melodic foundation that’s not tonal but not atonal either—it might accurately be called non-atonal.

DSM: Llorca says that, due to the absence of a single unifying tendency or a specific defining style in new music today, he and other composers of new music are forced to choose between continuing along the path of experimentation or returning to a classical framework. The opera, to him, represents a middle ground—an escape from this dichotomy.

CMT: Llorca is 45—he was born in 1962 in Alicante on the southeastern coast of Spain, and he studied in Madrid at the Royal Conservatory under Román Alis, Luigi Nono, Carmelo Bernaola, and Luis de Pablo. For the past 20 years Llorca has lived in New York. He completed his studies at Juilliard, where he worked with composers David Diamond and John Corigliano, and then joined the Juilliard faculty. In 2001, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Award for his composing.

DSM: Llorca has had a number of important commissions, including the Virginia Luque Debut Recital at Carnegie Hall; the Julliard Performing Arts Program for Schools; the Composers and Choreographers Series at Lincoln Center; the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute; Sensedance; the Centro para la Difusión de la Musica Contemporanea; the Festival Internacional Andrés Segovia; the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha; the Grupo de Musica Barroca ‘La Folia’; the Festival de Musica Colombo-Catalana; the Setmana de Musica Sacra; and the French Institute-Alliance Française.

CMT: Llorca’s compositions currently include:

Tres piezas para piano y orquesta: ‘El tiempo malherido,’ ‘El fin de la inocencia,’ ‘La avalancha’;
Concierto Italiano para flauta de pico, guitarra, clave continuo y orquesta de cuerdas;
Tres piezas academicas para piano: ‘Sarao,’ ‘Coral,’ ‘Fuga’;
The Dark Side (monodrama for mezzosoprano and piano);
El Ángel Caído (The Fallen Angel);
The Swimming Pool; and
The Empty Hours (Las Horas Vacías, monodrama).

DSM: ‘The Empty Hours’ combines traditional compositional techniques with modern and post-modern musical elements. 17th Century recitatives are amended with contemporary motives and polyrhythms. The role of Llorca’s recitatives is not one of evoking nostalgia, though, or merely providing a foil for the contrasting aggressive passages. The recitatives have the effect of revealing the ‘disconnects’ in personhood, the multiple ‘selves’ that we are comprised of. Not just the multiplicity of the selves that we outwardly present to others, but the multiplicity of selves that we are inside. In other words, the combination of compositional techniques does shed light on Llorca’s politics—on the political arguments of his operatic essay.

CMT: Through the opera, the protagonist Frau experiences a series of self-doubts and reflections. She is totally absorbed by her job, a series of negotiations with investors and presentations to business clients. By the conclusion I had expected that she would reach a kind of meta-stable stance, a non-resolution to the human predicament but one that achieves a degree of dignity and meaning. That’s what I’d been led to anticipate from the pre-performance press...

W hen actions are merely diagnostic of outcomes rather than causal, the analysis of [personal autonomy and] choice becomes problematic... The cognitive dissonance can be reduced by re-evaluating the state of affairs. But cognitive dissonance theory does not claim that people must engage in actions that are ‘diagnostic’ of an inference in order to accept the inference. And dissonance theory is not inconsistent with the notion that people may choose actions that enable them to make favourable inferences.”
— George Quattrone and Amos Tversky, 'Self-Deception', in Jon Elster, ‘The Multiple Self’, 1987

DSM: The performance by Julius-Stern-Institute of Berlin was admirable—earnest and beautiful. At the Institut about 70 gifted students between 9 and 19 years receive a comprehensive musical education alongside a general curriculum. The Julius-Stern-Institut chamber orchestra was established in late 1999.

CMT: Matias de Oliveira Pinto’s conducting was passionate and sensitive to the requirements of the composition. The ensemble is comprised of young players—for whom bitonal writing could be confusing. Hell, dissonances so extensive as these can be confusing to players of any age, of any level of experience. But de Oliveira Pinto provides ample cues and support. With such a ‘safety net’ the performers can devote themselves to their parts, can invest themselves emotionally in their parts.

DSM: Anastassiya Dranchuk’s piano was suitably ‘metronomic’, in keeping with the score.

CMT: Bell-like, clock-like eighth notes—especially in the reverberous Berliner Dom. Yes, Dranchuk was relentless and precise in her performance. The piano and orchestra are, essentially, the ‘other’ subject in the opera—the antagonist to the ‘Frau’ protagonist. They represent the world, the relentless passage of time—the context within which human beings either find and create meaning or fail to do so.

DSM: Dranchuk’s piano is the core of Llorca’s ‘minimalism’ in this opera—the glue that holds the texture of the opera together.

CMT: As well as the harbinger introducing new motifs or announcing the reprise of previous ones.

DSM: The 29-voice Benidorm choir was a bit muddy. But that’s not their fault—Llorca has too many passages where there is a Tower of Babel of competing voices. Maybe in a studio or a smaller hall with more congenial acoustics this writing would be okay. But, really, I think the compositional techniques in the rest of the score have already ample abstractions symbolizing the fragmentation of society, the isolation, the loss of identity that accompanies technology, the dark side of technology that enables radical autonomy (or technology that inadvertently prevents people who need competent professional help from seeking and getting such help).

CMT: The string players’ performance was admirable. Llorca’s score allocates interesting passages to each of the parts, and the Julius-Stern-Institut members rose to the occasion.

DSM: Laila Salome Fischer’s singing was capable. Her part has a number of technically difficult staccato passages, for instance. Her intonation was spot-on, and she nicely accommodated her diction to the cavernous Dom sanctuary. Well done!

CMT: Anna Thalbach’s oration was too self-absorbed. She emitted giggles several times that sounded very much the way a teen-age girl sounds when she is on the phone with friends. If the score calls for those, then perhaps Thalbach’s effect is the one that Llorca did intend. But it seemed inconsistent with any plausible introspection regarding ‘emptiness’ of our post-modern hours. If this Geschäftsführerin’s hours are truly ‘empty’, then the existential weight of them should be felt by the character. I was expecting and hoping for this existential weight, but I never got it. Thalbach never experienced it, never delivered it; and Llorca never wrote it.

H ello? Hello?
I think you’re connected ’cause I see your name on the screen.
Yes? ...Hello? Hello? Are you there?
Hello?
Ah!... Shall I tell you?
Wednesday was a nightmare with the new employees;
Who did everything wrong:
Photocopies, bills of sale, contracts sent off with no signature.
So I had to fix up everything, staying late to correct their mistakes
And getting home with my eyes exhausted,
And too late for dinner.
And then I only got a few hours sleep
Since I had to be at a meeting on Thursday morning
Again !!! with the new investors,
Who never missed a chance to criticize,
To inspect, oversee, and appraise,
Coming and going as they saw fit,
Correcting, controlling,
And meddling in things they can’t understand,
And no concept of the work involved...”
— Frau, The Empty Hours libretto

DSM: I think the Berliner Dom’s crackly, distorted PA system is partly to blame for that.

CMT: Hmmm. Well, to the contrary, I in fact liked the creaky PA system through which Thalbach’s voice was amplified. I thought that its antique-ey, distorted sound lent a certain remoteness, a telephone-ey distance to the text. The physical or social isolation of Thalbach’s character was convincing because of the telephonic timbre that the PA system imparted. It was consistent with some of Llorca’s tendencies to use ‘found’ sounds and electro-acoustic effects in other of his compositions.

DSM: It might be interesting for a woman of 40 years or older—40 or 50 or 60, say—to perform the speaker role in The Empty Hours, don’t you think?

CMT: For a more world-weary, world-savvy, business-savvy demeanor you mean? For a perspective more realistic in portraying a female Managing Director? Yes, I think that would be more in keeping with the thematic aspirations of Llorca’s opera. Obviously, that’s not possible if the ensemble who’s performing is the young Julius-Stern-Institut group. But, yes, in other productions of this opera I think a speaker of a certain age would be a good idea. It’s hard to carry off the part of a business woman, a Managing Director no less, if you’re only 18 years old.

More than this, though, I think Llorca is way ‘over the top’ with the text of the libretto—the Geschäftsführerin’s ‘It’s all about me’ attitude. It’s hard to conceive of anyone so self-absorbed as this Frau; hard to conceive of any partner, online or otherwise, who would put up with such a person’s egotism and narcissism—conveyed by the words that the libretto puts in the Frau’s mouth/keyboard.

More than that, though, my impression from the libretto is that Llorca’s conception of online social networking and text-messaging—among business people—is flawed. The exchanges (for example, the excerpt above) are so implausible that it makes me wonder whether Llorca has ever used any Web 2.0 apps; makes me wonder whether he himself is online much at all, or whether he instead chose this online-culture conceit only for its topicality-cachet. The Internets! Okay—this opera proposes to be about online culture. But it clumsily depicts online culture—not even close to reality. The libretto could be convincing if the Frau’s lines weren’t so histrionic and confessional. If the text resembled actual online dialogues of real business people it would be effective and believable. No business woman in a position of any responsibility ever utters sentences like this ditzy, histrionic Frau’s. ‘I think you’re connected because I see your name on the screen.’ Please. If a thought or gesture like this actually arose in the course of online chat or solicitation of chat, what do you imagine would be the reaction? Loser! Flee at great speed!

What I mean is, I don’t think Llorca’s intent was to create an opera that takes a cynical, disparaging view of business women—but that’s in fact what he’s inadvertently done. A cynical, disparaging critique of hyper-capitalism, yes—that may be part of Llorca’s politics and part of what he intends. But I don’t believe he means to evoke this disparaging view of business women as self-absorbed, needy, hysterical Web 2.0 incompetents, unfulfilled and estranged from family and community. We can’t identify with this character if the portrayal is false or unrealistic. And we can’t identify with the character if the qualities she possesses are so off-putting and unlikable. Parasitic. Hours can have emptiness in contemporary social contexts even for full, whole every-woman/every-man characters; Llorca didn’t need to give us this empty, damaged woman character to enable the exploration of emptiness and social impoverishment.

I mean, I wouldn’t want to meet a business woman like this one in real life. And I have never met such a one in real life, in my own more than 30 years in business in the U.S. We wouldn’t tolerate such a portrayal of women today in theatre, television, film, literature. (Well, maybe we would if the woman character were a psychotic killer in a ‘B’ horror movie or a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ cheesy TV soap-opera.) So I can’t accept that such a characterization of us should here be thought ‘artistic’ or have critical punches pulled merely because it is in this medium. It should not get a free pass just because it is opera—wrapping it up as opera with a chamber ensemble and chamber choir can’t immunize the work from criticism that it deserves. The music is fine if you ‘go’ for minimalist abstraction, but the libretto seriously needs a re-do.

DSM: Wow. Because I don’t speak German, I didn’t grasp the feminist aspects you’re upset by. Even without understanding the words, however, I do recognize your point about the young speaker, Anna Thalbach. If the lines were delivered with a coolness and detachment calibrated by more decades of living, it might’ve mitigated some of the problems inherent in the text itself. And I do acknowledge your point about hyper-capitalism—or more specifically your implication that Llorca has no realistic notion of business at all. Consider his ignorance of the rights and duties that investment bankers and venture capitalists have in the operations of the companies they invest in, for example. That ignorance yields a libretto that makes the Frau say stupid, unrealistic things. Evidently Juilliard is very far away from Wall Street. In all, though, you’ll agree that this performance was an outstanding element of Musikfestival Berlin.

CMT: Yes—all opportunities to hear new music are welcome. Push our envelope anytime! But sometimes we may push back.

O nly by considering the views of Spaniards themselves can we test the validity of our own perceptions and perhaps rethink how we arrived at them in the first place. ‘Giving to art objects a cultural significance,’ as Clifford Geertz says, becomes then a matter for both insiders and outsiders.”
— Carol Hess, ‘Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain’, 2002, p. 2.