Out West Arts

Bad Behavior- A Contest

2012-01-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve been noticing lately a change in the standard pre-performance reminder from arts organizations for audiences to turn off their mobile phones. Even since a well-publicized incident where New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert halted a performance of Mahler’s 9th Symphony in the crucial quiet final moments to admonish the owner a ringing phone, everybody seems to want to mention this story as extra incentive to prevent those offending noise makers from going off. And while I’m over hearing about this topic, it’s given me an idea.

As it happens I have a pair of tickets (which are not comps) to this coming Friday, February 3rd’s performance of that same symphony, Mahler’s 9th, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under music director Gustavo Dudamel. And I’m giving them away to a reader in a little contest. All you have to do is submit your best story about out-of-control rude audience behavior at a performing arts event and I’ll pick a winner to be announced on Thursday morning from all the submissions. Now just to make this interesting, this story can be true, but it can also be imagined. Keep in mind that interrupting a performance is an art and depends not just on what the offending observer does, but also on exactly when and in what context it happens. I’m giving points for originality and whatever else I see fit to give them for and may republish some of them at a later date.

Either email me your responses (you can use the link above) or leave them in the comments section, but be sure to let me know some way to get back in touch with you. Completely anonymous responses won’t qualify to win, but I will protect your identity in any later re-telling at your request. Only one entry per respondent, and it goes without saying you’ve got to get yourself to the concert in downtown L.A. on time by 8pm on Friday February the 3rd to see the performance on your own dime. (I can’t do it all for you.) And if all goes well, the winner will get to hear this great symphony without the interruption. The floor in the meantime is yours.

Long Division

2012-01-30T00:34:00.000-08:00

Hallie Foote and Elizabeth Ashley Photo: Henry DiRocco 2012

It was a particularly good weekend to be in San Diego. Not just because of San Diego Opera’s very good production of Salome, but also because I got to see The Old Globe’s excellent production of Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which is running through February 12. The play comes largely intact with the ensemble cast that helped Mr. Foote get another Tony nomination for best new play in 2009. The cast features two of his own children, Hallie Foote as Mary Jo and Horton Foote, Jr. as Mary Jo’s ne’er-do-well older brother Lewis. Of course, Foote’s family most likely has nothing on the Gordons of Harrison, TX, circa 1987 as depicted in the play. The three adult Gordon children, Lewis, Mary Jo, and Lucille have all gathered at their family’s palatial if somewhat sputtering estate for a dinner at which perennial discussions of money and the fate of the family’s land in the not so distant future are again rehashed. The family matriarch, Stella Gordon, played by the simply incandescent Elizabeth Ashley, seems to change her mind nearly minute to minute about what she wants for the remainder of her life and afterwards. She’s also a soft touch enamored with her memories of the past, and easily persuaded into bad decisions by her children over the objections of the estate's caretakers Lucille and her own child, referred to as Son, who are striving to keep everything financially afloat.

But money stressors are all around as Mary Jo’s husband and children find themselves in increasingly deep water in Houston while Lewis finds himself ever in debt through some combination of gambling and alcohol. Foote takes a darkly comic view of these events and it isn’t long before the thin ice everyone is skating on opens up cavernous cracks as death starts to call for more than one member of the extended family. All of this is reminiscent of Tracey Letts’ landmark August: Osage County but with a far more restrained and subtle tack toward family dynamics. The Gordons may raise their voice, but things never descend into outright violence. Of course, Foote has thrown in more than a dash of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard here as well as the crumbling and inevitable economic realities loom large in the minds of the audience if not the Gordons themselves who are unable to wake long enough to save themselves from either their own greed or from wallowing in a bygone dream of themselves. The critique of the American dream is still front and center for Foote, if not always as brutally scathing as it is in August.

But the hint of nostalgic melancholy gives Dividing the Estate its unique sensibility. It is always a very funny play, but the expansive and beautiful homestead set can do little to disguise the socially claustrophobic family relationships playing out within its walls. Michael Wilson’s direction makes room for everyone in this large ensemble to shine but Ms. Foote and Ms. Ashley are given particularly juicy bits and understandably draw more attention. So while the show may not be a revolution in theater, it does promise for a very fun and hopefully hugely successful run in San Diego. See it before you lose the chance to.

Careful What You Wish For

2012-01-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

Lise Lindstrom as Salome Photo: Ken Howard/SDO 2012

Opera, like most other natural phenomena, travels south for the winter in California. Which means it’s time for the opening of the San Diego Opera 2012 season which kicked off Saturday night with a first-rate performance of Strauss’ Salome. Based on Wilde’s faithful play of the classical Biblical tale, Salome continues to be one of the more shocking and outright graphic of all operas. This is abetted, of course, by one of the most shocking scores in 20th-century music, one that serves as the starting point of Alex Ross’ great survey of the topic, The Rest is Noise. When done as well as it is currently in San Diego, it’s as unnerving now as it was a century ago.

So what makes a good, Salome? Well first an orchestra playing as well as the San Diego Symphony Orchestra did under Stuart Bedford. After a bit of a tenuous start, they dug in admirably with a difficult often-raging score that can lurk in some intensely beautiful lyrical passages before lunging unexpectedly for the throat. The production, originally commissioned by Opera Theater Saint Louis, comes from choreographer turned director Seán Curran. It’s a bland single room that looks like some abandoned sewer with a large covered circular opening at the back that serves as the cistern. The costumes are mostly modern dress with a few accents that might suggest the Middle Eastern setting of the piece, and the whole thing relies heavily on Chris Maravich’s lighting design for any visual punch. I wasn’t crazy about the production last time it surfaced in San Francisco and am still puzzled by some elements. (Still with those copper-colored shin guards for some reason.)

Lise Lindstrom, with Sean Panikkar and Greer Grimsley, as Salome Photo: Ken Howard/SDO 2012

But casting makes all the difference in some instances, and this plain production coursed to life with the enormously talented Lise Linsdtrom in the title role. That she looks gorgeous in this physically demanding role is one thing. But the fact that she can actually sing the part, and do so much better than most, is another matter all together. Her tone is even and well placed without ever turning shrill or her having to yell, a not uncommon occurrence in this particular role. She cuts through the orchestra readily when she needs to, and her final monologue on the mysteries of love and death came off as fresh and authentic. We’ll take some more of her please, and soon. And then there’s that dance. Lindstrom takes Curran’s twist on the dance of the seven veils by making it less of a striptease and a bit more contemporary with Salome using various bolts of cloth to engage, cajole, and tease Herod. Lindstrom makes the whole thing sexy in a way that is surprisingly understated and direct.

She has quite good colleagues around her on stage. Allan Glassman gives one of the more complex performances of Herod than I’ve seen in a while and avoided barking or mincing around the stage. Sean Panikkar was a sweet-voiced Narraboth and Irina Mishura avoided making Herodias overly campy, another common pitfall. Popular American bass-baritone Greer Grimsley sang one of his signature roles with Jochanaan and looked every bit as seductive as Salome imagines him to be. Oddly, his booming sound came clearest where I was sitting when Jochanaan was singing off-stage from within the cistern and somewhat muddier when he was onstage bare-chested and in chains. In any event, this is a show that works in the biggest moments and is blessed with talents both onstage and in the pit that make a great evening out of the most basic elements.

The Sixth Sense

2012-01-28T21:29:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Philharmonic reached the two-thirds point in the local run of its Mahler cycle, or “Project” for those so inclined, on Thursday. And after some time off for good behavior this week, it was back in the saddle for me. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s Symphony No.6 – the “Tragic” one. Mahler’s subtitle for this symphony of course turned somewhat prophetic for him personally in the year following its premiere, and given music director Gustavo Dudamel’s track record of conducting Mahler’s works, it certainly ran the risk of predicting this evening’s performance quality as well. As the symphony numbers in this series get higher, the works get progressively more challenging in terms of content. Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic have been doing fairly well so far in the cycle with solid performances of Symphonies 1, 4, and the Adagio from the 10th. But Dudamel appeared to be running out of steam on Thursday. Certainly not in any physical sense – he appeared hearty and hale as always. But the small cracks in the interpretive façade from earlier on are starting to expand as the cycle goes on.

Dudamel, as is his wont, conducted the score from memory. And things got off to a great start. The strings poured out rich beautiful wound in well coordinated attacks on the two contrasting themes in the early part of the first movement. I was sorry to hear it end and the interruption of late comers clattering in between the first two movements was a disappointing punctuation mark on the music. Dudamel went with the original ordering of the next two movements going on with the Andante moderato which was reserved and frequently lovely. But this is a big siymphony with a lot of angst-ridden themes in it, and Dudamel began to falter on entering the Scherzo. Things turned listless at this point. Not that there wasn’t passionate, committed playing from the orchestra members, but the various elements in the score became increasingly disorganized from one another. This lack of focus and overall direction spilled over into the forth movement which started off sounding uncertain as well. By the time the hammer let lose in the home stretch, things had pulled together rhythmically and again the orchestra’s sails seemed to catch the prevailing winds. But moments of muddiness continued to arise write into the final bars. The symphony ends with diminishing brass ad a large final crescendo that fades into darkness. It’s a profound and tortured moment and an opportunity for the kind of awed silence Dudamel has been cultivating in audiences here. But for some on Thursday he had not sealed the deal, and fervent applause immediately crushed the last bits of sound from the orchestra, a development the maestro looked none to happy about by his facial expression.

And I can certainly sympathize with him on that account. But this was not a performance or an audience that was entirely thrust into rapture by the end, and despite its many charms, continued to serve as a reminder of how much work there is left to do for Dudamel and this orchestra. There’s more Mahler ahead next week so stay tuned.

Taking the Fifth

2012-01-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

If it’s Thursday, it must be Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 which Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela did their one-off performance of on January 26. As mentioned earlier this week, I’m spreading the love around by passing along my seat to some guest voices to reflect on the Mahler mania downtown. For the 5th, I’ve asked bon vivant and man-about-town Ben Vanaman to share his thoughts on the performance, which follows.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Mahler Project” continued Thursday night with a performance of the composer’s Fifth symphony by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela. It was a messy business, but, then, the orchestra had to contend with the likes of the man sitting behind me who snored convulsively through the entire performance. In any event, this was my first time hearing this band perform. I’ve heretofore resisted, for while I appreciate that this is an ensemble made up largely of young people who are the future professionals of orchestras around the world, I would frankly rather listen to grown-ups play, men and women with a little more living under their belt who bring added maturity and wisdom to their collaborations with each other and the maestros leading them from the podium. In this regard, I wasn’t contradicted. This is a very large orchestra and they make a lot of noise, an often fractious, cacophonous, undifferentiated wall of sound against which there’s little defense. Think of an aural equivalent of the ninety-foot-tall tidal wave hurtling toward the S.S. Poseidon, and you get the idea of what it’s like being subjected to the mighty blast conjured up by these earnest but precociously unseasoned young players.

These kids hit their notes accurately but invariably. The horns blared, the woodwinds –not always in tune- bleeped, and the string players sawed away, swaying to and fro, with a fervor that would have made Mantovani blush. Everything was mezzo-forte. Inner voices were often indistinguishable. It was often like listening to a really good high school marching band. But is this Mahler? Part of the problem may have been at the podium. The massive architecture of the Mahler (and Bruckner) symphonies is paradoxically delicate, and it can be so easy for these cathedral-like structures to collapse lacking venerable leadership at the helm. Such sometimes seemed the case here, maestro Dudamel alternately pushing through the score with grim determination while occasionally stopping to luxuriate too long over this passage or that as is his youthful wont, the effect being equivalent to participating in an old fashioned taffy pull. It was gooey, but was it musical?

This brings us to the Adagietto. Immortalized for cineastes as the soundtrack to Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” this movement –some of the most beautiful music ever written- began prettily enough. Certainly my ambivalence over the conductor’s reading of the movements preceding it made me yearn to reach this emotional climax. But by the time Dudamel had slowed the recap of the opening theme toward the end of the movement to the point of dissipation, I couldn’t help but think that the snoring man behind me was Aschenbach raising complaint, his obsession with Tadzio having succumbed to narcosis rather than being driven inexorably if fatefully onward by the surge of Mahler’s passionate score.

This being L.A., the rousing final chords were met with an instant and uproarious standing ovation. Few left. Many were stamping their feet like they were at a hootenanny. In fact, that may not have been far off the mark, as the L.A. Philharmonic organization is arguably in the process of becoming the Ringling Brothers of classical music. Long before the end, I was wishing that I were somewhere else: seeing Norris’ Clybourne Park a second time across the street; sitting near my same seat in Disney Hall listening once again to the L.A. Philharmonic’s brilliant recent performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4 under conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen; lounging at home watching the latest episode of “Revenge.” When you’re in the concert hall and you keep thinking of the items you need to pick up at the market on the way home, there’s a problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Some Dance to Remember

2012-01-27T23:22:00.000-08:00

Rinde Eckertand Nora Cole Photo: Caleb Wertenbaker

Opera should be impossible. Obviously it isn’t, but the artistic forces involved from so many people at the same time make it perhaps the most challenging and least individual of art forms. The impossibility of such an artistic quest gives the concept of opera ideological parallels to a novel like Melville’s Moby-Dick. Music and theater artists have frequently picked up on this peculiar relationship to produce such varied work as Laurie Anderson’s Songs and Stories from Moby Dick from 1999 to Jake Heggie’s recent outright operatic treatment of the novel that premiered in Dallas in 2010 and will be seen next month in San Diego before arriving in San Francisco this fall. The commonalities also served as the inspiration for Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales a performance art piece that isn’t exactly opera, but takes up the topic of the creation of an opera based on Moby-Dick as its subject. The work originally premiered in 2000 to much acclaim and various performances over the following three years. More recently, Eckert, along with his collaborators, costar Nora Cole and director David Schweizer, developed a technologically retooled new version of the show that opened up the spring season at REDCAT on Wednesday for five performances before moving onto New York later this year.

Eckert directly taps into the concept of the struggle of artistic production and its parallels both with the struggle of every day life and the struggles for greater knowledge and the unknown in Moby-Dick. And God Created Great Whales tells the story of Nathan, played by Eckert, a composer working on an operatic version of Melville’s novel. Nathan has been diagnosed with a degenerative cognitive disorder and is losing his memory, making his task that much more difficult. He’s created an elaborate system using several tape recorders, including one that is strapped to his chest, to remind and orient himself to his project and work on a repeated daily basis. He’s also joined by Cole, who portrays an imagined version of a famous opera singer Nathan has previously befriended during his work as a piano tuner. She advises and motivates Nathan and after each repeated start with the tape recorder, she joins him in re-enactments of various scenes from his opera. Slowly but surely, things deteriorate for Nathan until he too must face the inevitable sway of forces greater than himself.

Nora Cole gives a wonderful performance as the imaginary friend with a lovely voices and a big stage presence. But at the heart of it, this is Eckert’s show. He has composed all of the accompanying music, much of it incorporating samples of whale sounds, and sings and moves through most of the evening. He plays and tunes a dilapidated piano strung up to the rafters above with thick rope. He’s both touching and funny at times in a script filled with wry, and sometimes bitter humor. Still the last decade alters one’s perspective on the show. The notion of saving memory on a tape recorder comes off as even more archaic in a post Momento, post i-whatever world which makes Nathan seem decrepit and weak even before the scope of his deterioration is elaborated upon. The operatic segments can also be rather genteel and softball in their lampooning of operatic conventions. The laughs here are warm, but rarely all that dark or biting. Nathan’s decline is more marked by apathy than psychic pain, which may be more naturalistic, but doesn’t always make for the best drama. Granted it’s smarter than drivel like Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations, but I often felt like I was missing something in the fleshing out of Eckert’s concept. The show continues through Sunday at REDCAT, downtown’s still best kept open secret.

Agitata da due venti

2012-01-26T23:42:00.001-08:00

Amid a huge expanse of overplayed Mahler this week from Dudamel and the visiting Bolivar Orchestra, there was a moment of beautiful music, simply played and wonderfully effective for it. The program was an evening almost entirely of works from Vivaldi played by Europa Galante under their music director Fabio Biondi and accompanied by the vocally and visually gorgeous Vivica Genaux. The crowd was small even for a Tuesday and paled in comparison to the packed and endlessly enthusiastic audiences Dudamel and his orchestra have played to. Which only goes to show there is no accounting for taste. Genaux and Europa Galante are the real deal, professionals who know without hesitation exactly what they are doing and, despite the smaller scale, they were met with the deserved ardor of the discerning crowd on hand.

Biondi’s players are one of the more polished period-practice ensemble around. Their playing is particularly crisp and never boring. In addition to two Vivaldi concertos they also presented works from Nardini and Locatelli. The Locatelli concerto, subtitled “Il pianto d’Ariana” (The Weeping of Ariadne) in particular benefited from the polished, more lyrical approach. Biondi’s players are quite good in bringing out the sort of thematic and emotional detail that modern audiences tend to gloss over in Baroque works now that their ears have become accustomed to much broader 19th-century dramatics. Of course, the evening rotated around mezzo-soprano Genaux who was as stunning here as she was during her appearances with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra last fall. She has a smaller sized voice that has kept her close to concert halls and smaller European houses for much of her career and she was challenged by the relatively large WDCH space. But unlike some vocalists with similar sized instruments, Genaux has actual Baroque technique to show off and readily manages the floral ornamentation of coloratura passages in such hallmarks as Vivaldi’s “Agitata da due venti.” She could also be heartbreakingly tender as with “E prigioniero e ré” from Semiramide. There are few vocalists that can imbue these Vivaldi arias with the color and pathos Genaux does, and even in this overly large space she was a thriller. Next time around here’s hoping she gets an audience that corresponds more accurately to the size of her talents.

A Serious Business

2012-01-26T12:14:00.000-08:00

Denis Matsuev

After deciding I couldn’t take another Mahler symphony with the Bolivar players under Dudamel this week, I headed over to UCLA instead for a solo piano recital from Denis Matsuev who is currently on a three-city tour of the U.S. that will end in New York on Friday the 27th. Matsuev shot to fame after winning the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition and he has continued to perform around the world since then. His name is everywhere lately with a new recording of Liszt's Piano Concerti on RCA and an upcoming performance of the two Shostakovich Piano Conerti with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. He’s also scheduled to make an appearance playing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto 1 under Krzysztof Urbański this coming summer at the Hollywood Bowl in what is easily the most exciting program all summer in terms of scheduled performers and repertoire. (Note to Bowl programmers, big classical music stars are most interesting when they are performing something interesting.)

But before all that was this solo recital that had a lot more in common artistically with the kind of approach Dudamel takes to music than you might expect. The show was primarily very familiar piano sonatas: Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor, and Grieg’s Sonata in E minor. The show concluded with Stravinsky's Three Movements from the Ballet Petrushka arranged for piano, a work he’ll also perform at the Bowl. Matsuev bounded onto the stage Tuesday and was clearly all business from the get go. He tore into the Schubert making it clear from bar 1 that timidity would not be the order of the day in this performance. The Schubert sounded incredibly broad and magisterial like some sort of music for a regal ceremony. Even in more quiet moments the sound could be on the severe side though never unpleasant. Matsuev was not trying to recast these works as something else, à la Marino Formenti’s take on the Diabelli Variations earlier this year, but was definitely pressing them into a service which called for high drama and big bold sound. The Beethoven gave off a flesh-bound burning passion in this version and the Grieg was no less intense or flashy.

The technique was a thing to behold, and Matsuev is surprisingly fleet given the level of energy and sound he puts out. But perhaps this approach worked best in the arrangement of Stravinsky's Petrushka. Matsuev amazingly made the piano sound like the entire orchestra in this work. It was an entire ballet from a single keyboard, but it worked brilliantly with propulsive motion throughout. Matsuev was swimming in floral bouquets from his many adoring fans in the predominantly Russian-speaking crowd. And while he didn’t make chit-chat or waste time lounging around, he did deliver a number of encores, most notable an unhinged version of Take the "A" Train. Matsuev is known as a jazz aficionado, and the encore was a chance to offer the audience something along the line of his other major performance area. It was an intriguing run through if no less intense than anything else on the evening's bill.

The Third Degree

2012-01-25T22:56:00.000-08:00

As much as I love the sound of my own voice, I find that even I can tolerate opinions other than my own once in a while. It’s a sign of good breeding. So following Sunday’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, I decided to take a pass on the next couple of collaborations of these particular artistic forces and invited someone else to chip in here at Out West Arts for a change. So, give a big hello to conductor and music critic Matthew Martinez who stepped into the breech for Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in the current cycle and contributes the following report.

Another opening, another show. So it goes in the jam-packed “Mahler Project.” Less than 48 hours removed from an emotionally exhausting Resurrection Symphony, the 150-plus players of the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela filled in every suitable inch of the Disney Hall platform to take on Gustav Mahler’s even longer subsequent work, the Third Symphony, for only one performance. Under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel, the players were joined by the Women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus and mezzo-soprano soloist Christianne Stotijn. While there were some stunning moments, the performance was often oddly detached, and even academic. Perhaps it was the grueling schedule. In any case, the capacity audience (many of whom felt compelled to clap after each of the first three movements), responded with a loud ovation. Some, however, seemed a bit dazed and were undoubtedly asking, “What was the point?” Unfortunately, this question wasn’t answered on Tuesday night, but some enjoyable moments and beautiful playing offered some glimpses into the majesty of the longest symphony in the repertoire.

After Mahler attempted to answer the questions of death and the after-life in his Second Symphony, he felt compelled to look closer at this life and all that shapes it: nature. In some ways, Mahler’s dramatic strengths are less obvious in this piece than in his other long works. The over-the-top thunderous cries of the Second and Eighth, are replaced by a nobler, more refined language. The constant intrusions by solo instruments can seem devoid of meaning if not given strong purpose. Unfortunately, this was common in the first three movements on Tuesday night. Rather than providing the propulsion for such expansive canvases, they seemed to interrupt rather than motivate. It made for a first movement that sagged and wandered, not due to slowness of tempo, but rather lack of direction and definition. Indeed, the most promising development was a moderation of tempo by the Maestro. There were certainly break-neck accelerandos, but overall, tempos were comfortable and buoyant. Dudamel conducted in a clear pattern and often took on the role of traffic cop, making sure that it was clear where the barlines and entrances were. In a way, this was remarkably refreshing.

Such clarity and moderation brought out the best in the players. The solo flugelhorn sweetly sang from the highest rear balcony in the hall and, while not perfectly in sync with the onstage forces, it was effective. Indeed, there were several fine solos throughout the evening. The first chair trumpet and oboist were exceptionally virtuosic and grand. Mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn’s solo in the fourth movement was effectively sung. Her tender tone filled the hall and, while not particularly rich, was satisfying in its authority. The Los Angeles Children’s Chorus sang skillfully, but with a slightly thin tone as their boy-sopranos were significantly outnumbered. The Women of the Los Angeles Master Chorale were exemplary as usual, singing with an appreciated dramatic playfulness of text that played well off of Stotijn’s lines. The finest moment of the night belonged to the Venezuelans, however, as Dudamel led a masterful beginning to the final movement, Langsam. The tempo was appropriately slow, but pulsed with a constant vitality. The playing was controlled, beautiful, and blossomed with a sustained energy that spoke naturally without artifice. It was one of the few extended passages where Mahler ascended with purpose. The music soared because it had to. While they were not quite able to sustain it for the final thirty minutes, it was still affirming. For Dudamel and the Venezuelans, it was an admirable step in the right direction.

— Matthew Martinez

I Hear Voices

2012-01-24T22:29:00.000-08:00

The cast of The Emperor of Atlantis with James Conlon and The Colburn School Orchestra Photo:mine

Remember the “Recovered Voices” project? It was the initiative spearheaded by Los Angeles Opera and music director James Conlon to present some of the music composed by artists adversely affected by Germany’s Third Reich and largely neglected in the history of 20th-century music. L.A. Opera kicked off the series with a concert in 2007 followed by full productions of Zemlinsy’s Der Zwerg, Braunfel’s Die Vögel, and Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten over the next few seasons. Unfortunately the state of the economy and the company’s budget have precluded any more fully stage productions along these lines since 2010. But neither the spirit nor the music itself has been forgotten, as evidenced by James Conlon’s appearance last weekend conducting members of The Colburn School Orchestra and L.A. Opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artists in a double bill of one act opera’s by two of those same composers featured in the “Recovered Voices” series.

The concert took place in Colburn’s Zipper Hall and while this may not have allowed for the largest space for these semi-staged productions, it was ideal considering the musical resources. The vocalists easily projected in the space over the chamber-sized orchestra without strain showing off their best attributes and allowing for some pointed and memorable performances. First on the bill was Ernst Krenek’s The Secret Kingdom. Krenek’s career covered a lot of 20th-century musical ground including the jazz-influenced 1926 opera Jonny spielt auf. The Secret Kingdom is more clearly situated in the dying days of late Romanticism with nods to the Second Viennese School. It also owes a lot at least thematically to Wagner. The story, which starts with narration from the court’s jester, tells of an unpopular king among his subjects and even his queen. The queen enlists her three ladies-in-waiting to cajole and seduce the king's jester into giving up the crown he is holding for the king in a clever reverse of the opening of Das Rheingold. She in turn attempts to use the crown to seduce a rebel leader with the promise of power and her affection but to no avail. The royals all escape the rebels and enter the forest where the queen turns into a tree. After the king contemplates suicide, the queen’s voice comforts him and the Jester returns the crown bringing the show to an end.

This sort of fairy tale material lends itself to any number of sociopolitical interpretations in its historical context. Director Gulu Monteiro and designer Swinda Reichelt, who contributed to both stagings, used the space and resources at hand to evoke German expressionism without overplaying either the political allusions or fantastic aspects of the story. Domingo-Thornton alumnus Daniel Armstrong sang the role of the jester and sunk his teeth into the playfulness of the part interacting with the audience. Baritone Museop Kim was the heartbroken king and he produced a warm even sound in his scenes with guest artist Stacey Tappan who was both commanding and lovely as a queen. Tappan has had a number of notable roles in California recently including singing roles in San Francisco’s recent Ring cycle such as Siegfried’s Woodbird. Her tree evoked Strauss’ Daphne for obvious reasons and her performance made me look forward to hearing her in bigger roles. The three Ladies in Waiting were Valentina Fleer, Renée Rapier and Tracy Cox who all performed with voices lovely enough to evoke the unavoidable allusions to Rheinmaidens.

The second half of the program was a reprisal of Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, a piece written in Theresienstadt and a favorite of Conlon’s. He performed it in Los Angeles at the Wilshire Temple in 2004 with members of the LA. Philharmonic, and this staging rivaled the quality of that previous one. This war time allegory about death taking a holiday and refusing to end anyone’s life despite the king’s request he do so as part of an ongoing war campaign is dark, sardonic material. The sweet and brightly voiced Ben Bliss played Harlequin, the character who represents life and debates Death’s decision to renounce his usual duties. Bass Erik Anstine made for an ironic and rather comical death figure. Renée Rapier returned as the drummer-girl in her Weil-inspired stage presence. But perhaps most engaging was the lovely lyric duet performed by Alexey Sayapin and Janai Brugger who performed as a soldier and Bubikopf, combatants who become lovers in the absence of death. Perhaps most satisfying, though, was the robust and sizable performance given by the Colburn players, which sounded much bigger than their number might suggest on the stage. This is music with lots of rapid stylistic changes and can move between tense and gently lyrical with little notice. It made for a lovely afternoon and a promising showcase for some of the company's youngest talents.

Second Coming (and Going)

2012-01-23T13:36:00.000-08:00

On Sunday the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela joined Gustavo Dudamel on the stage of the Walt Disney Concert Hall for their first appearance as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ongoing Mahler Cycle. It’s the orchestra’s first appearance here since 2007 when they performed Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 under Dudamel with pretty dicey results. Now they are back without the “Youth” in their name anymore, the orchestra is still composed of players aged 18-28, and a lot more Mahler under their belts in all sorts of international venues. They played Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 on Sunday, a work they played during last year’s BBC Proms to very mixed reviews. It’s been very popular for people who write music criticism to write about the SBSOV players as having special insight into this work. The idea being that a resurrection after death is somehow akin to the “El Sistema” backstory that has been a cornerstone of the publicity around the orchestra. Western art music saves the poor children of South America just as faith and religion promise life beyond earthly suffering. As to whether or not any of the orchestra’s players relate to such a proposition, I wouldn’t know. But clearly there are audiences around the world who find the idea alluring. Of course, you could also just see it as a bunch of 20-year-olds sharing their take on one of the great works about death and the afterlife.

In either event, the excesses that plague Dudamel’s conducting were back to the fore on Sunday with an orchestra apparently much less inclined to moderate them. How so much energy and emotional playing can result in music so empty of dramatic tension is a mystery to me. There are some admirable moments. Dudamel got a wonderful performance from the Los Angeles Master Chorale alongside soloists Christianne Stotijn and Miah Persson in the finale of the evening. But this moment like so many others felt disconnected from the whole. Dudamel continues to get bogged down with over-slow pacing, particularly in the second movement, and allows passages to too easily separate from one another. The motion grinds to a dead stop over and over, dissipating the overall effect and dramatic line again and again. Now it should be said that Mahler was not against excesses on the whole. He certainly called for as many strings as possible, and with the SBSOV that is what you get to the point that during the performance a bass player lost his instrument’s footing near the edge of the very cramped stage. But having a lot of players, and controlling their sound are two very different issues and many of the biggest moments from the orchestra sounded sloppy and unfocused more due to the sheer number of players than anything else.

But even in L.A. size matters and the big finish got the enthusiastic response it commanded with a big ovation stretching on and on for many minutes. As throughout their entire history both live and on stage, the quality of the actual performances of the SBSOV under Dudamel rarely correlate to the crowds response. The relationship seems to be based more on energy and enthusiasm. The more dramatic and overstated the performance, the more dramatic and overstated the response. But things work like this in the modern world more and more; why should classical music be any different?

The Winter's Tale

2012-01-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

Chinary Ung

The growth of Santa Monica’s ambitious Jacaranda Music series in just over four years of existence has been staggering. The series, under the direction of Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt, has become a major player in presenting 20th- and 21st-century art music in L.A., and if there was any question still remaining about that fact, all one had to do was look around the room at the faces in the nearly capacity crowd at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church this past Saturday night. (One wonders how much longer they'll be able to continue in this space given the ever increasing size of their audiences.) In addition to the concert, entitled “Ring Around the Moon,” the evening also marked the annual awarding of the group’s Forte Awards honoring individuals who have championed 20th-century music in L.A. Both of this year’s recipients, violinist Movses Pogossian and L.A. Philharmonic president Deborah Borda, were in attendance Saturday, a testament to Jacaranda’s reach and importance in the music community here.

Of course, all this seems obvious considering the quality and content of the show performed that evening, which lived up to the series’ high standards. The pieces all spoke to a nocturnal world and one often marked with a certain spirituality. It was music for the darkest days of the year with a cold and sometimes sparse beauty. Kaija Saariaho’s trio for piano, cello, and viola Je sens un deuxieme coeur started things off. These brief five movements grew out of Saariaho’s 2006 opera Adriana Mater and play with the idea of independent organic rhythms tied together such as the baby's heartbeat in a pregnant woman - a theme central to the opera. The trio was well played by Gloria Cheng and two members of the Calder Quartet, Jonathan Moerschel and Eric Byers, which set the tone for this sometimes quiet and introspective evening. This was quickly followed by a solo guitar work, All in Twilight by Toru Takemitsu played by Michael Kudirka. As with many of Takemitsu’s works, silence and space plays as big a role in the music here as the actual sound. Wrapping up the first half was Dutilleux’ Ainsi la Nuit performed by the Lyris Quartet. These twelve short movements gave off exactly the kind of glow that one might associate with the moon and I was just as impressed with the Lyris players here as I was when they played David Lang’s Difficulty of Crossing a Field for Long Beach Opera last year.

But all of this sparse nighttime music led to something a bit more unexpected: Chinary Ung’s 2006 work for small ensemble and two sopranos, Aura, conducted by Hilt. The nearly hour long piece is filled with Asian elements, some from Ung’s own birthplace of Cambodia. The six string players, three winds, two percussionists, and vocalists were all given double duty on both their own instruments as well as cymbals, water glasses, or at the very least vocalization of sounds more akin to chanting than singing. While some of the text used Khmer and Pali words, much of it did not, heightening the sense of ritual performance in the piece. Sopranos Elissa Johnston and Kathleen Roland were both provided lovely bright vocal sound on top of an often surprisingly large output from the small orchestra, expressing the sense of these various untranslated words. The sound spun outward in a consistent and somewhat meditative way that slowly swept you into it. It’s one of those pieces where by the end you feel you’ve gotten somewhere even if your not exactly sure how you got there. It’s what my friend Robert described as what Mahler imagined himself to be writing with Das Lied von der Erde. And there’s truth to that, if at least in the work's format, though there is something about Aura that while not unaware of death, seems less completely transfixed by it. It received the biggest and most enthusiastic response of the evening and it certainly felt much larger than the resources used in its production would imply. But this may be the story of Jacaranda as well, and the work suited the evening. Out of love for 20th- and 21st-century music and the ambition to martial available resources, a hugely successful concert series has thrived by the sea featuring music that often goes looking for a home.

First and Ten

2012-01-21T15:58:00.001-08:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director Gustavo Dudamel continued their Mahler cycle (or “Project” if you’re prone to marketing jargon) by covering familiar territory. The main course on the program was Mahler’s Symphony No.1, a favorite of Dudamel’s. Ironically, though, it’s not a work that he’s conducted particularly well in its previous outings here at least. Most notably was the symphony on the bill for the gala opening performance of his tenure as music director in Los Angeles, which was preserved on video. As you may recall, it was artistically disastrous, though the PR machine built up around him bowled over any objections from those who were really listening. Two years later the prospect of its return was not inspiring.

But two years is a long time, and Dudamel’s work with the orchestra has clearly started to pay off as evidenced by what was heard on Thursday. It’s by no means a deep or mature interpretation, but it was undoubtedly a reasonable and at turns quite reasonable one. Many of the same mannerisms are still present – the exaggerated tempi, the obsessive focus on maximizing every little detail at the expense of the whole, and so on. Again the first two movements bogged down occasionally over this preoccupation. But these issues were far less pronounced and the sense of motion through the piece was more intact. Of course, many of those small moments sounded wonderful and the third movement came off without any drag. Dudamel can always sell the big finish, and the finale was as heroic as you could wish for.

As the conductor himself noted, this is usually the point at which the concert would end. (And in fact did so during the inexplicably popular “Casual Friday” performance where you pay the same ticket price for less music with a side of chat, but go figure.) But as Dudamel told the audience before leaving the stage, there was more to come in the form of the Adagio from the unfinished Symphony No. 10, the final symphonic piece Mahler completed before his death. This was provided for contrast with Mahler’s earliest symphonic work, and while the idea may have been a little obvious, the execution was something else entirely. The increasingly lush strings of the L.A. Philharmonic poured themselves into this performance with Dudamel delivering what he had promised – a movement that connected Mahler to the musical revolutions of the 20th Century. Here the Wagnerian overtones were crystal clear and the second Viennese school was clearly in sight with a sound bordering on the dissonant and reorganized. The youthful excesses of both the music and the conducting of the first were gone and replaced with something far more cohesive and impressive. I’ll take more of this Dudamel, please. All this raises expectations for the later symphonies Dudamel will conduct with the L.A. Phil including the 6th next weekend and the 9th after that. You’ve got one more chance to hear this tidbit tonight before the Bolivar players take over the show with the 2nd on Sunday.

Death Becomes Her

2012-01-20T22:48:00.001-08:00

Helen Hunt in Our Town

David Cromer’s much lauded production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town made it to Los Angeles this week. It’s landed at The Broad Stage, a venue that is quickly developing an incredible track record for bringing the best in theater to Los Angeles. I’m happy to report that Our Town is another chapter in that growing, remarkable history. The production dates back to 2008 where it originated under the auspices of Chicago’s The Hypocrites and a successful long run in New York followed. (In fact it was the longest New York of run of the play ever since its premiere in 1938.) Director David Cromer and many of the original cast have followed the show West along with Helen Hunt who plays the role of the stage manager as she had during a later part of the New York run. And what’s arrived at The Broad is sensational and profoundly moving.

Wilder’s tale of everyday American lives in the early 20th Century was marked from its premiere with a stark, unusually barren staging – an artifice used to strip away what he saw as alienating pretenses of the stage including elaborate sets and costumes. Cromer follows Wilder’s stage directions to this extent with his actors pantomiming activities like cooking and cleaning. But Cromer uses other devices to brilliantly strip away the veneer of nostalgia associated with Our Town exposing the dark and blistering heart of the show. The stage of The Broad auditorium has been extended out over the entire seating area with the audience sitting on risers atop the expanded space in a U-shaped area. The narrow central corridor contains two tables with four chairs each and large walkways lie directly behind the first row of seating. All of this space is used by the cast completely integrating the audience into the day-to-day life of Grover’s Corners. The town’s children run down these aisles and Hunt is as likely to be sitting next to you as addressing you from the stage. Cromer goes further, though, dressing the cast in contemporary street clothes and playing down New England accents and overly expressive affect.

This all adds up to a certain darkness that sets in from the moment things begin, and suddenly the whole show is imbued by an awareness of human frailty and transience. This is not about longing for the past, but the exact opposite. The Our Town stands and screams with rage over our inability to live in the beauty of the moment which comes home to roost in a powerful third act. Cromer closes the show with a brilliant coup de théatre that I won’t describe here, but suffice it to say the audience was filled with sobbing patrons and I’m not ashamed to say I was among them. What’s more, not only has Cromer managed to expose the raw, painful crux of the play, but he’s done so in a way that feels contemporary. Despite its setting of events from over a century ago, this production of Our Town struck me as urgent a show as Next to Normal with modern day American families going about their lives. This is a not a gauzy John Ford version of the past but a dangerous, beautiful throbbing 'now' to be contended with. There is an excellent cast, not only including a superbly subtle Hunt, but James McMenamin as a heartbreaking George and Jennifer Grace as an Emily nearly bursting with youth. But all in the ensemble are quite good and there wasn’t a single moment in the calm, well-paced show that wasn’t worth savoring. I can’t say enough good things about the show. You should see it if you haven’t already before it’s gone on Feb 12.

Baby, You're a Firework

2012-01-19T23:38:00.000-08:00

Susan Graham Photo: Dario Acosta

Recently, a mini-debate fired up over at the esteemable Lisa Hirsch’s Iron Tongue of Midnight about the widely varying published opinions on Susan Graham’s recent recital appearance in Berkeley. Lisa, Joshua Kosman, John Marcher and others all had weighed in on relative strengths and weaknesses of the show, part of her current U.S. tour, which will soon reach Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. But lucky for the debaters (and you dear reader), Ms. Graham and her accompanist Malcolm Martineau graced the brand new (and as of yet neither donor nor major corporation monikered) Valley Performing Arts Center on the campus of CSUN, on Wednesday, allowing me to clarify things for them by providing the correct opinions about the evening. So let the healing begin…

To start with, Graham arrived in full-on mid-Century Hollywood glamour mode in a floor length plain white gown with plunging neckline and sparkly jewelry to match. I don’t know if Fred Leighton loans out to opera recitals, but they really ought to seize the kind of moment Ms. Graham could deliver. Overall, she was in splendid voice for the evening. She was certainly stronger and more assured than I recall in her last few fully-staged appearances (the Met’s last run of Iphigénie en Tauride and SFO’s revival of Xerxes). To be fair, in Northridge she wasn’t bothered with some overbearing and dull stage-direction to work around and she bloomed when left to her own devices dramatically. Someone should really be mounting more new productions for her.

The program started by playing to her strong suits with Purcell’s “The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation” and Berlioz’ La Mort d’Ophélie. Her voice still holds up amazingly well in Baroque material and she delivered moments of Biblical warmth and clarity in both pieces. Her French is always flawless and she is a natural for Berlioz as well. These were followed by a collection of six different songs from as may different composers setting poetic scenes from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Most interesting were three different settings of “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blüh'n” the first from Liszt that occurred half was through the set, a more comic twist from Duparc, and finally a strikingly more brutal and organic version from Hugo Wolf that demonstrated exactly what a difference a Wagner makes. Graham’s forceful cries of “Dahin!” in the final stanza were absolutely chilling.

Upon returning from the break, Graham switched gears by singing about “bad girls” in contrast to the romantic heroines of the first half as she announced from the stage. Now in black sequins and red lights, she sunk her teeth into some very different material. Sadly, some of this material let her down. First was Joseph Horovitz’s 1970 setting of Lady Macbeth’s dialog in a dramatic scene, Lady Macbeth. This came off as more recitative than actual music and was hugely disappointing in its lack of musical color. Also how these disembodied passages build on one another wasn’t clear. Graham made the most of it with her expressive acting, but there was so little musical meat on the bone everyone was soon starving. Poulenc’s witty Fiançailles pour rire came afterward and was delivered with a knowing smile and more lovely vocalism. Graham concluded the evening with a series of “bad girl” songs from Cole Porter and Sondheim including Ben Moore’s now familiar composition for her “Sexy Lady,” which lampoons her own image and place as a mezzo-soprano in the opera world. These songs do show off Graham’s incredible winning personality – one of the reasons that fans like me love her. But to be honest, even by conventional recital standards these days, it felt like rather a soft landing given how good the material in the first half of the evening sounded. There’s letting your hair down, and then there’s putting it up in curlers if you get my drift. Still I’d be thrilled to see her name on a season announcement for L.A. Opera or really anything out here in California, and this recital reminded me why that is.

Do the Reich Thing

2012-01-18T23:31:00.001-08:00

Somewhere along the line Steve Reich became a rockstar. It looked that way on Tuesday night when he appeared in Los Angeles alongside the Bang on a Can All-Stars and red fish blue fish at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in a program dedicated entirely to his music. The hall was packed with the biggest crowd I’ve yet seen for one of the L.A. Philharmonic-sponsored Green Umbrella programs dedicated to new(ish) music. And there was an almost party-like atmosphere in the audience filled with young faces and large clusters of people hugging as if they were old friends. Just about everybody who follows classical and/or new music in town was there, and even music director Gustavo Dudamel showed up casually dressed in a polo shirt for part of the evening along with Lionel Bringuier. The evening was a tribute to one of the lions of American music and everyone wanted to be a part of it.

Even Reich himself got into the evening by performing as one of the two hand-clapping parts in 1972’s Clapping Music. The other part was performed by percussionist David Cossin who followed this brief rhythmic introduction with a 2000 work Video Phase. Like Clapping Music, this second work was about variations in rhythmic patters at its most basic and unadorned. In Video Phase, a version of an earlier work for two pianos, Cossin filmed himself playing MIDI percussion pads programmed to reproduce piano sounds in a strict repeating rhythm. The film was played back in live performance with Cossin then playing the same pads in a second part where the original rhythm is repeated and periodically sped up enough to move it slightly out of phase from the original. This process is repeated several times until both tape and live performance are back in sequence. Undoubtedly both of these works, like so much of Reich’s music on the whole, are remarkable for the amount of physical endurance and dexterity they require from the musicians. There is a type of mathematical beauty to them that can’t be overlooked. But both also feel like tricks or high school science experiments at time as well.

The rest of the evening was filled with larger scale works. The evening was anchored with Reich’s masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians with its complex slowly shifting rhythmic patterns that are spread out between several percussionists, at least 4 pianists and just a few winds and strings. A very similar structure is used in Reich’s 2009 composition 2x5, which was receiving its West Coast premiere that evening. 2x5 is scored for two sets of a five member “band” consisting of a pianist, drummer, and three electric guitar players. The allusion here is to contemporary rock music, although the process of Reich’s shifting rhythmic patterns remains the same moving back and forth between the two ensembles set to mirror one another on stage. 2x5 struck me as a rather sly composition with its popular music references, but both of these later works still carried Reich’s hallmark ebullience. The meditative, Eastern overtones to his work fuse with a distinctly American sound. It was again exceedingly well played by these specialist ensembles, many of whose players know Reich’s music more than just about anybody.

It’s a good vibe, but admittedly for me, it can grow to be a somewhat hollow one. The constant often uncontested optimism in the pieces can create a certain “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” if you will. Which does have a Zen ring to it, doesn’t it. Reich's music always works best when one can let go and connect with the deeper meditative aspects of it. Perhaps what it cries out for is more of a direct attachment to the natural world. This performance made me harken back to the last time I heard Music for 18 Musicians at the Ojai festival in 2009. There was something about the contrast between the exacting playing of the music outdoors mixed with the sounds of wind through the trees and birds singing that set the whole thing alight in a way I missed indoors. But the surroundings made little difference for Tuesday's enthusiastic crowd who were there to celebrate music they loved and had connected with. And that makes for an exciting evening in and of itself.

Window Dressing

2012-01-17T23:23:00.000-08:00

The front wndow/performance area at Machine Project Photo: mine

I forgot my coat. It’s something you don’t think you’ll need often in L.A., even in January, but it was a particularly cold Monday. Of course in L.A. you also don’t expect you’ll be watching a string quartet in the expanded picture window of an Alvarado storefront just north of Sunset Blvd open to the street with midday traffic rushing by. But we’re Angelenos, and we roll with it. Where I had rolled earlier this week was the heart of Los Angeles’ latest, greatest blossoming modern, art music scene. In the last few years, an expanding network of artists and musicians with ties not only through CalArts but through the ethereal world of Twitter and other social media have been making increasingly important music, and doing it their own way, on their own terms. And on this particularly cold January day, they were making it that way in Echo Park.

The occasion was the launch of the first release from L.A.’s newest record label, populist records. (A superbly ironic name for a contemporary art music outfit.) The label is the brain child of internet-savvy violinist Andrew Tholl and violist Andrew McIntosh who explained that they had created the label as an outlet for Southern California composers to get their work recorded by a home-grown label while providing local artists a chance to perform music they wanted to play. The first recording Nicholas Deyoe – with throbbing eyes provides a survey of Deyoe's work for small ensembles including songs written for soprano Stephanie Aston and two string quartets played by the formalist quartet - Tholl and McIntosh’s quartet alongside violinist Mark Menzies and cellist Ashley Walters. In March, populist will release McIntosh’s recording of solo works from American minimalist composer Tom Johnson. (The sample below features the formalists playing Deyoe's Images from a sleepless night from the new release.)

And while self-publishing music isn’t new, populist records represent a further step in the development of a musical and artistic community in Los Angeles that is beginning to command attention for its breadth, excitement, and sheer energy of production and performance. The launch event was held at Machine Project, a Los Angeles arts collective in Echo Park that hosts and promotes a wide variety of events. Machine Project has worked closely for several years with sound artist/composer/trumpeter Chris Kallmyer who in turn, along with McIntosh, Tholl, and others, performs as part of L.A.’s new music chamber orchestra, wild Up. Kallmyer, whose own work has been seen at the Getty Museum and other major art institutions, helped arrange the event at Machine Project where cupcakes and beer were paired with performances from the formalists as well as Deyoe’s solo pieces for cello. Deyoe himself played electric guitar augmented with an empty aluminum can, a favorite implement in recent guitar-based compositions. The crowd gathered at the front of the space and on the street looking into the store like displaced shoppers in an arctic L.A. mall.

The sense of possibility was palpable as Tholl and McIntosh spoke of future plans for recordings from wild Up and other outfits in the area while the crowd filled with other familiar faces from the local art music scene, knit more closely together through an active online community. Composer Isaac Schankler, whose People Inside Electronics will produce their latest show on Feb 11 funded in part from an indiegogo campaign, was in attendance. Schankler is curating another evening at Machine Project on Jan 29, "Bandwagon! (a combine)", with all sorts of machines, musical and otherwise. All of this, of course, took place just two days after the last wild Up performance in Pasadena last weekend where artistic director Christopher Rountree helped put the final touches on wild Up's Kickstarter project to fund and press vinyl copies of their performance of the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony. The group has already surpassed its fundraising goal and is discussing plans to make a recording of last weekend’s concert available. To boot, Rountree will make an appearance on APM's Performance Today on the 19th to talk about the project. And the performance schedule of both wild Up and the formalist quartet is filled with appearances over the next several months, which, if their track record to date is any indication, will be superlative events.

Increasingly, and egged on by an active online community that has created connections in ways that may not have existed before, there is a new and expanding community of young musicians and composers across the city making exciting music they want to hear and play. The folks I've discussed here aren't the only ones, but they are creating a music scene in a way and with technology that hadn't existed before. They are intent on producing their own sounds in collaboration with one another without waiting for someone to come and discover them. And that is a great day for new music in L.A. Even if it happens in the most unusual spaces, on the most unusually cold days in our typically sunny, warm city.

War Story

2012-01-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

Eliza Kiss and the cast of Troilus and Cressida Photo: Rob Cunliffe 2012

Now in their sixth year, Los Angeles’ Porters of Hellsgate Theater Company has had a near religious devotion to the works of Shakespeare. This very young company, both in terms of the organization’s age as well as that of many of its resident artists, has touched on most of the major comedies and dramas and has kicked off this year with the famously thorny and relatively infrequently performed Troilus and Cressida. The thorniness comes from a text filled with often incongruent broad comedy and far weightier material about the transience of love, peace, and other aspects of the human condition. Not that Shakespeare didn’t balance these themes well in most of his plays, but here the combination can seem off. The lovers in the title, Trojans both, have relatively less stage time than the ongoing machinations and complications in the long standing war with the Greeks that’s going on around them. Hector’s battles with the likes of Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon and the debate over the merits of their conflict and the moral laws that define it take up far more territory. It’s interesting and surprisingly contemporary material, but Shakespeare has placed it in a rather cumbersome package.

The Porters’ Artistic Director, Charles Pasternak, who helmed this production, decides to go with the stronger cards the author has dealt him by emphasizing a particularly testosterone driven tale of war. The warring Trojans and Greeks posture and shout. And everything is wrapped up with an underlining gesture to make it clear this is first and foremost a play about the tragedy of war and moral ambivalence that it can spring from. Romance and heartbreak, though present, are given a back seat and the comedy is whittled down to something a little bleaker. The fool Thersites, played by Gus Krieger, spends most of the play in a leather half-mask strapped to his head which makes much of his dialog a bit more creepy than outright funny. The fight scenes between the young handsome actors playing the soldiers were some of the more convincing I’ve seen in this size of a production with Matt Calloway’s Achilles and Napoleon Tavale’s Hector bouncing off of the walls during their hand-to-hand combat. In this case, having a young and particularly attractive, athletic cast overall paid off in terms of physicality.

And despite some odd choices, like a mincing, effeminate Pandarus and a just two notches over the top Ajax, the show as a whole works well, maintaining focus and smooth pacing. And there were a number of very engaging performances as well, in particular from Thomas Bigley as Ulysses whose portrayal of the thinking and strategizing Greek warrior quickly became the centerpiece of the whole evening. He commanded attention through voice and manner in a show where action was more typically the order of the day. I was also taken with the space that many of the women in the cast managed to carve out in the show even when they frequently are put in the position of reflecting on the horrors of their men’s war. Taylor Fisher’s Cressida was sensible and believable, and Eliza Kiss’s Helen, who also served prominently in both the Prologue and Epilogue, was memorable. Does the Porters’ production milk everything it can out of Shakespeare’s play? Probably not, but then never being able to do so is part of the glory of Shakespeare. Pasternak and his fellow Porters deliver a solid, watchable, and compelling war story with Troilus and Cressida that deserves to be seen by a wide audience. It runs in the valley through February 19.

A City of Brotherly Love

2012-01-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

Larry Bates, left, and Curtis McClarin Photo: Henry DiRocco/SCR 2012

With all the negativity that’s been heaped on the current revival of Porgy and Bess on Broadway recently, one might forget how great a playwright that show’s collaborator Suzan-Lori Parks is. Well luckily for us in Southern California, there’s an excellent reminder of Parks’ talents that has just arrived at South Coast Repertory where a revival of her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning drama, Topdog/Underdog opened last week. The play is filled with multiple, complicated layers of meaning and is steeped in mythology, both American and more ancient. Two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, share a dilapidated apartment. Lincoln brings in what little money they have through his arcade job where he dresses as Abraham Lincoln in white-face for visitor to pay money and mock-assassinate him with blanks. Meanwhile, the unemployed Booth, periodically interrupts his fantasies of his own animal magnetism with efforts to cajole his now reformed brother to re-enter the hustle by teaching him the ins and out of dealing three-card monte. The lengthy dialog between these two characters unfolds to reveal much about their history, including their abandonment by both parents as children and the wounds, both imagined and real, that they continue to nurse from those days.

This is powerful material and, though it can be very comic, there is always a sense of menace, particularly considering Booth’s penchant to stay armed at all times. Like all good mythology-based stories, the ending seems inevitable and it’s the points that Parks wants to make about history and in particular African-American history in the U.S. that are the glue that keeps the show together. The chemistry between the leads in the show is crucial and both Curtis McClarin who plays Lincoln and Larry Bates, who plays Booth, managed a believable interaction. But in other ways this production is not what you might expect. Director Seret Scott has gone for an exceedingly naturalistic, almost sentimental take on the story. The staging plays down the more abstract and symbolic parts of the story toning down much of the menace that exists between the brother in an attempt to make a real or at least identifiably conventional relationship between the two. It’s a markedly different approach from the 2004 staging offered at the Mark Taper Forum and has its good and bad points. On the one hand when conflict does boil over between the brothers it is more surprising and unexpected. However, it can also make some of the comedy in the script feel very much like a sitcom. Still, the substrate here is an excellent one and SCR manages to remind us why Suzan-Lori Parks still matters even a decade after this major success with a worthwhile and still provocative statement about America. The show continues in Orange County through the 29th.

And one other note - SCR, a leader in new play development in the region, has just initiated another new and exciting program called "Studio SCR," which will bring in an array of local artists with more off-beat material in its Nicholas Studio space. There are short weekend runs, but there are two shows recently seen here in L.A. already on the schedule that deserve mention. Steven Connell and Sekou Andrews' hip-hop, spoken word meditation on language and race, The Word Begins, which was last seen as part of the RADAR LA festival in 2011 will appear Jan 19-21. Further into the spring, Robert Cucuzza's twist on Strindberg's Miss Julie, Cattywampus will return. The show was the highlight of last year's NOW Festival at REDCAT and I would highly recommend you catch it in June 22-24.

Kathleen Turner Can't Say That, Can She?

2012-01-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Kathleen Turner Photo: Mark Garvin/PTC 2010

When Molly Ivins died in 2007 at the age of 62, she left behind a pretty big hole in a lot of lives. The firebrand liberal journalist had many friends, and among them was actress Kathleen Turner who has been honoring that connection by playing Ivins in Turner’s one-woman show Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins that opened late last week at The Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. It’s a lovely heart-felt performance from Turner whose gravelly broken voice fits in well with the Texas twang she affects in recreating Ivins' speech. The show itself, at just over 70 minutes in one act, is lean and simple. Turner as Ivins recounts the major landmarks in her life with a dollop of psychological reflection. Ivins' own words are used by authors Margaret and Allison Engel more often than not, which helps capture not only her wit but the cadence of her writing. All of this takes place in a newsroom office where Ivins sits at a desk in front of other desks and chairs that have been packed up or removed and placed along the back wall. There’s a screen at the back that fills with faces and images from the writer’s past as she goes along until her story comes to its inevitable conclusion.

Ivins' writing is quite funny and the show does contain its share of laughs. But perhaps the most admirable thing about the show is that it captures Ivins’ undaunted moral and political spirit as well. The selected writings name some of the names Ivins made her career by calling out in the pages of newspapers, and the show is filled with the kind of rousing pleas the author made to her readers over the year about the importance of public political life and her advocacy for progressive causes. Her attacks on both Reagan and Bush are revisited here and the Los Angeles crowd responded in kind. Granted all of these elements - the social criticism, the autobiography, and homespun humor - can get in the way of one another. There is a real lack of dramatic development in the show outside of Ivins’ biographical timeline and some of the personal psychology revisited in the script can seem forced. Neither of the Engel sisters are playwrights but have spent their entire careers as journalists and Red Hot Patriot sounds like a magazine article and can be particularly clumsy with some of its framing devices. But while the show may not work on the level of a unified dramatic experience, it does serve as a rather painful reminder about how much this country has changed over the last 30 years. Gone is Ivins’ world of newspapers and journalists who viewed their primary role in the world as questioning the truth of what people in authority tell us. It sounds simple, but Ivins’ brand of insight is a rare and precious commodity when so much of the media work largely to pass on approved talking points. Red Hot Patriot reminds us of that world and and asks the audience not to just nostalgically memorialize its passing.

Four on the Floor

2012-01-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

Friday brought the opening performance in what the Los Angeles Philharmonic is calling “The Mahler Project.” What the “Project” part is exactly is unclear. What is clear is that over the next five weeks, music director Gustavo Dudamel will lead a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies first here in Los Angeles and then in Venezuela relying on both the L.A. Philharmonic and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela. Purportedly the event is “extraordinary.” But considering that Mahler symphony cycles are fairly common in modern orchestras (e.g. San Francisco) and that a complete set of the symphonies was performed as recently as 2009 by the Staatskapelle Berlin in 12 days at Carnegie Hall in New York under Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez, “The Mahler Project” doesn’t seem unique in terms of time, content or scope. (New Yorkers also got a performance of Das Lied von der Erde that time around which we in L.A. oddly will not, considering the work’s significance in Mahler’s symphonic output.) But perhaps all this will be new to some local audiences and/or players, which I guess is enough to warrant use of the term. "The Mahler Project" will be extraordinary - the question is simply to whom.

On Friday, the series opened with the Fourth Symphony paired with Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). And while it wasn’t necessarily a world-class performance, it was a undoubtedly a very good and quite enjoyable one. Mahler’s short and early song cycle came first, where Dudamel and the orchestra were joined by baritone Thomas Hampson. Dudamel wisely kept the orchestra mostly out of the way of Hampson’s performance with a light touch. Hampson is certainly a big star with a great voice, but to be honest I found him less than exciting in this overall. In the work’s most intense moments he came to life, showing a little of that fire that makes him so good in Verdi. But some of the higher stretches of Wayfarer's score sounded a bit out of reach for him. He was definitely more of a gleaming knife in the chest kind of guy than a romping over the green fields one.

All of this verdant Romance and heartbreak provided a nice segue to Mahler’s most familiar symphony that kicked off with its sleigh bells and bright melodies. Mahler is one of Dudamel’s favorite composers, but one he has struggled to present here in Los Angeles with any real coherence. This evening was certainly the best performance of any Mahler symphony that he has yet given in the city. The work bubbled with life and excitement around many corners and he seemed in touch with the almost pastoral quality of the piece. Dudamel can sell big moments, and he gave the players free reign to run with huge crescendos. The brass and winds sounded lovely and the strings continue to turn richer and more full-bodied under his leadership. The soprano soloist in the final movement was Miah Persson who delivered a very touching rendition of Mahler’s own text describing a child’s vision of Heaven. She soared above the orchestra with a bright and easy tone bringing the evening to a lovely conclusion.

However, this isn’t to say that the performance wasn’t without its share of problems that kept it decidedly earth-bound. Dudamel continues to have balance issues with the orchestra. The first two movements on Friday were full-bodied and brimming with so much activity and emphasis of competing details that the overall focus could get lost in the cacophony of sound. Things never turned harsh, but they were certainly overworked. Subtlety has still not entered Dudamel’s musical toolbox, but this opening Mahler symphony at least suggested he can keep things from unraveling in these large scale Romantic works. It’s a good, solid start that if he can manage to sustain over the next few weeks, just might make this cycle worth hearing from beginning to end whether it’s extraordinary or not.

Do As I Say

2012-01-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

AARGH! There is too much to do in January. No I can’t believe it either. But worst of all, the intensity of the local performing arts schedule has led me to have to make some very tough scheduling decisions. Try as I might, there are three shows this month that I am dying to see but am going to have to miss because of a variety of other commitments. Don’t make the same mistakes I have! My advice is to buy tickets to these shows now.

First is the latest concert from L.A.’s classical music young fresh fellows (and fellowesses) Wild Up, who’ll give a program they’re calling “Ornithology” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena on Saturday the 14th at 8pm. The evening includes their typical eclectic mix of surprises such as Messiaen, Haydn, Ferneyhough, Charlie Barker, songs from Andrew Bird and works from their own Chris Kallmyer. The subject is birds, of course, and you shouldn’t miss this one. And while you're at it, stop by their kickstarter page and help support their upcoming vinyl release of music from Shostakovich and Rzewski.

Then there is the upcoming program from Musica Angelica under their musical director Martin Haselböck which will take place on the evening of Jan 28 and again on the afternoon of the 29th in two different locations. Musica Angelica has invited vocalists Daniel Taylor and Emma Kirkby to join the in an evening of Bach's version of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This is some very beautiful music performed by L.A.’s own Baroque specialists, so I encourage you to do the right thing and go.

Rinde Eckert Photo: Caleb Wertenbaker

Finally, I’m somehow going to miss out on REDCAT’s first big show of the spring, Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales which will run from the 25th through the afternoon of the 29th downtown. Eckert’s much lauded piece about a tortured composer slowly losing his mind over the composition of an opera based on Moby-Dick comes in advance of Heggie’s real opera on the same book, which will open in San Diego next month though I suspect the two works are world’s apart. REDCAT’s missteps are very few and far between, so again don’t follow my lead, get down there.

Oh and one other quick note: Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy, one of 2011's best shows in L.A., will be broadcast on KOCE tomorrow night at 9pm PST so watch or record it.

Within You Without You

2012-01-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

Klaus Lang

Monday and the Los Angeles-based concert series that bares its name, Monday Evening Concerts, brought Austrian composer Klaus Lang to town this week for an evening of the most thoughtful music. Lang figured prominently not only as the composer of the major work on the bill, einfalt. stille., but also as organist for the three short works that preceded it. Lang has written extensively on music history and theory in addition to his work as a composer and he’s got a lot on his mind as suggested by the lengthy abstract program notes he provided. But these were not your average program notes in other ways. Some contemporary art music carries an unfair stigma of being overly intellectualized – more about the concept or theory behind its creation than the end product itself. Worse than this is the reactionary tendency of some living composers to strive for unvarnished and sentimental emotion in their music. But Lang, though certainly thoughtful, lies somewhere else with an approach I’d describe more as philosophical than simply theoretical. He argues for a Zen-inspired concept of pure music free from a tether of meaning. A music that “is not a form of language, it stands on its own as a thing without a purpose, justification and meaning outside of itself. Music neither depicts the structure of the cosmos, nor is it the language of feelings.” He sees his music neither as evidence of mastery of structural tricks or a way to connect with an audience. His hour-long work for voice, viola, flute and percussion, einfalt. stille., instead is firmly rooted in this ideology and is offered as a a text or object to focus concentration towards “a state of the highest inner clarity or inner silence.”

This sort of meditative take on music is not a new one as Lang himself acknowledges. It has roots in early music as much as in the 20th Century and may explain his choice to start the evening with a series of three short early 17th-century Italian organ toccatas. He played works by Girolamo Frescobaldi and Ercole Pasquini on a meantone temperament organ isolated on the Zipper Hall stage. The music theory behind meantone temperament is bit rich for my blood here, but lets just say its not the way instruments have been tuned since Bach’s time and it invites all of these works to have a certain dissonant and dark undertone. They evoked a kind of meditative state, as did Lang’s piece, which followed, and whose title translates as “simplicity. quiet.”

The ghosts of John Cage and Morton Feldman could be heard in Lang’s work, not only for its particular vein of philosophical grounding, but also in the deliberate but slow moving texture of it. The four players were stationed in the upper level of Zipper Hall around and mostly out of sight of the audience for the whole performance enhancing the bodyless sense of sound. The short constrained range of tones was repeated often at similar short intervals over and over often with only slight variations from one part to the next. There was a clarity and separation that gave each tone its own space with minimal overlap. The wordless vocal part consisted of a few frequently repeated sounds performed by soprano Natalia Pschenitschnikova. It was one of those abstract sensory experiences that as Lang suggests, doesn’t “transport” you anywhere other than perhaps inward. And while I didn’t find the conceptualization entirely original, that’s really part of the point. I admired Lang’s comprehensive and thought-out approach to the work that builds on a specific musical history showing how much, and how little things have changed in four hundred years. It was definitely the kind of music that doesn’t tell you how to feel and leaves things open to a more individual experience. That in itself is a major achievement and another reason to keep your Monday evenings open.

Some Things You Should Know

2012-01-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

Domingo as Simon Boccanegra Photo: Catherine Ashmore/ROH

Los Angeles Opera had a big day today with two announcements that may stir up some feelings good and bad in several different quarters. First off, the company paid off half the $14 million principal on a loan the company took out in 2009 from Bank of America that was guaranteed and supported by the County of Los Angeles. (This early partial repayment will lower the overall cost of the loan to the company in the long run.) This development, discussed at a County Board of Supervisors Meeting, also included a proclamation honoring the contributions of Placido Domingo to the company and city and a round of “Happy Birthday” sung by those in attendance. Good for him and good for Los Angeles Opera. As supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is quoted as saying, the loan "was the right thing to do." Well, he’s almost right. Actually the right thing to do would have been for the county (and perhaps less-attractively Bank of America) to just give Los Angeles Opera the money. The regressive concept of arts funding in the U.S. has somehow led people to believe that loaning a major cultural institution money with interest is somehow radical philanthropy. In a year when the City of Los Angeles was willing to back hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds to secure a new football stadium downtown, the notion that anyone would find a loan the size and kind of LAO’s is simply ludicrous.

And then there was this. The company also announced today that it’s recruiting social media savvy folks for what it’s calling “tweet seats” for the February 8 final dress rehearsal of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, which will star Mr. Domingo under the baton of James Conlon. The idea is that participants will tweet about the rehearsal as it happens and this notion will likely fire up all those parties that worry such an event spells the end of life and culture as we know it on earth. I continue to fail to see how such an initiative is so threatening to some people. Standards for acceptable audience behavior have changed widely over the last few hundred years and I imagine they will again at some point. In the meantime, I sincerely doubt there is a huge number of people dying to pay upwards of $100 to $200 a seat to witness an opera or other event for the first time now that they think they can tweet or text during it. Whether or not something like “tweet seats” at a dress rehearsal or anything else brings about increased interest or access to opera or other arts, I couldn’t say. If so, then great. But I feel certain that the expressed anxiety over social media as a sign of cultural degradation (or more dramatically the loss of humanity) is decidedly misplaced. Opera and classical music have survived indoor plumbing, the steam engine, television, and atomic energy. Opera and its audiences will make it through this as well.

Sardines Redux

2012-01-09T22:44:00.000-08:00

L to R: Deborah Strang, Lenne Klingaman, Geoff Elliott, Stephen Rockwell, Jill Hill Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2011

It’s never a bad idea to bring back a hit. And if you’re A Noise Within, Pasadena’s new repertory theater company you’ve had a number of those to choose from over the years. The company has revived successful productions of Waiting for Godot and Arthur Miller’s The Price in recent years, and for just two weeks, the company has brought back Michael Frayn’s evergreen Noises Off. It looks great, especially in their new Pasadena home. The backstage/onstage comedy calls for a comparatively large set involving two stories that can be seen from both front and behind with 7 doors, a stairwell and all those boxes, bags, and plates of sardines. To look at it, you might not realize that the set for the revival is the same one used in the troupe’s former Glendale home. It looks huge by comparison when not wedged at an angle into a much smaller space. Here with room to spread out, the show seems larger and more physical than before.

Of course, the play is supremely funny. I’d seen the show just recently in a London revival at the Old Vic directed by Lindsay Posner with a number of well-known British actors. To tell the truth, outside of the understandable issue of accents, A Noise Within’s current production was significantly better. Directors and founders Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott have wisely taken a bit broader approach that helps offset some of the more mechanical aspects of Frayn’s staging. There is an immense amount of stage direction here and all of it must look unplanned, which can distract from character development and other important qualities. But Geoff Elliott’s portrayal of director Lloyd Dallas bristles with an unspoken rage and stays completely out of sight for nearly all of the first Act making his eventual arrival from the dark all that more pronounced. Emily Kosloski meanwhile gives Brooke a more clueless edge that heightens the comedy of her character’s complete lack of improvisational skills. Of course, it’s an ensemble cast with many other strong turns and as is usually the case with ensemble comedies, it succeeds mostly because everyone onstage appears to be having as much fun as everyone in the audience ends up having. So, if you haven’t yet seen the show, or are ready to revisit an excellent comedy, you don’t need to get on an airplane, but you do need to act before January 15.

Source Material

2012-01-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

Marino Formenti

On Saturday, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County presented a recital by one of the most fascinating and challenging of all pianists, Italian-born Marino Formenti. His performances are nothing less than fascinating regardless of their overall success or failure. This is a man who has performed Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ naked on a stage covered with thousands of hamburger buns, among other daring musical feats. And while he didn’t quite go that far in Orange County, he nonetheless presented a show that was intellectually rigorous if not completely easy to swallow by all of those in attendance. The show was structured around Beethoven’s late Diabelli Variations, a collection of 33 variations composed in response to a project proposed by the music publisher of the same name who had solicited variations from a number of contemporaneous composers on a rather pedestrian waltz he had written himself. Beethoven scoffed at the request, but later surprisingly produced one of his greatest works by creating an overabundance of responses, one of the last major works of his life. The work has been lionized over the years and filled with projected rage against the dying of the light, serving as fodder for filmed documentaries and framing devices for deeply serious plays about death starring big Hollywood stars.

But Formenti was having none of this Jane Fonda glossy approach on Saturday. He views the work in much more every-day human terms, seeing the individual variations as being a collection of responses, sometimes mocking and farcical, that Beethoven might have actually had to such a request at the time of the work’s composition. Originally Saturday’s recital was to have included other variations on Diabelli’s waltz that Formenti was to have commissioned; however, they failed to materialize. Formenti kept in the spirit of the project, though, by playing works that were similar in structure and intent. First was George Benjamin’s set of 6 canons for solo piano, Shadow Lines. These short rhythmically complicated bursts segued into Evan Gardner’s Variations on a Theme by John Cage. The young Gardner had cleverly chosen the “theme” from Cage’s silent 4’33” for his work that relied heavily on electronics that was receiving its U.S. Premiere performance. Formenti, seated at the piano, didn’t actually play the instrument but instead followed a series of hand motions while wearing motion sensitive gloves that record the “silence” or ambient noise in the room. This sound is then looped, re-recorded and played through amplifiers resulting in distinct electronic thumps and beeps that arise out of the feedback from the absence of sound.

Gardner’s approach set the groundwork well for the performance of the Beethoven that followed in taking a rather shifting and unfixed notion of variations to inform his music. Like Formenti’s approach to the Diabelli Variations, Gardner takes a more complicated view of a composer's understanding of source material in creating music, which in the case of Beethoven has become ossified as a primary source material over time. It was interesting even when the sound became too unfocused and dissipated in the Segerstrom Concert Hall.

Needless to say, this starting material was not particularly well received by a Saturday night Orange County audience that was expecting comfortable and familiar Beethoven. Many people were restless and noisy even after opening remarks from Gardner and Artistic Director Dean Corey.At times Formenti appeared agitated during the first half of the evening and when he returned for the Beethoven, the crowd was about to find out that his Diabelli Variations would be like none they had heard before. He pounded into the opening waltz before the crowd had even stopped applauding with a churlish and mocking tone, one that would permeate much of the performance. Bounding bass lines crashed over melodic ones often at breakneck speed creating music that at times sounded as contemporary as anything in the first part of the evening. There were moments of calm in this, but any pretty moments were not in abundance confounding the expectations of many in the room. Formenti pointed out some of Beethoven’s mocking disregard for Diabelli’s original source material and suggested the composer was not necessarily looking for high-minded platitudes on the human condition in his work as much as nearly 200 years of history might lead you to believe. It was a bold interpretative choice and one that was fascinating to listen to if not always comforting or readily accessible. Perhaps Formenti was acting out some frustration with the audience by taking an exceptionally oppositional approach this particular evening, but regardless of the mood of the moment, this was not an interpretation meant to be comforting or reassuring in any way. And that in itself was exciting. Formenti lived up to his reputation, delivering something that was thought out and dynamic, even in the most unexpected of musical places.

You're the Colosseum - Best of Theater '11

2012-01-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

Mark Rylance from the London production of Jerusalem Photo: Simon Annand

I saw a crappy play last night and decided rather than depress myself by writing about it, I’d rather finish up something positive. And that would be the Out West Arts top ten theater productions of 2011. I published the OWA picks for the year's top music events a few weeks ago, but the theater year went right up until the last minute, and the show I saw on New Year’s Eve made it onto the list, so it was worth the wait. As in previous years the theater list includes both straight plays, musicals, dance and comedy events. And while I recognize the division between the music list and the theater list is arbitrary, the intent was not to separate the two as much as provide space for theater performances that would always come in second after an opera or classical music performance in my own heart. So to give them their due, here are the things that most impressed me on stage in 2011.

1. Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. Broadway, New York. By far the most ambitious, provocative and enjoyable play from last year was only that much more important given an unforgettable performance from the best stage actor working today, Mark Rylance. Funny and poignant this state of the nation play (that being England) managed to avoid any self-importance despite its dabbling in magical realism. A landmark play.

Anna Deavere Smith Photo: Joan Marcus

2. Let Me Down Easy written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith at The Broad Stage, Santa Monica, CA. The technique was quintessential Smith: a solo show where she recreates monologues from various real life interviews with persons famous and not. The subject was human frailty and the American healthcare system and its dysfunction. But the show was much more about the way we do and don't face death. Easily the most touching thing I saw all year.

3. One Man, Two Guvnors by Richard Bean. National Theater. London, UK. The oldest of Commedia dell’Arte gags and storylines are repackaged in England’s swinging sixties. Throw in the brilliant physical comedy of James Corden and a superb cast and you have hours of uninhibited laughter.

The Cast of IHO Photo: Joan Marcus 2011

4. The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures by Tony Kushner. Public Theater, New York. Yes these neurotic characters can ramble on and on for quite a long time. But there were few moments this year that were as engaging as anything in Kushner’s expansive drama about a family and a country on the brink.

Thomas Graves, Shawn Sides, and E. Jason Liebrecht of Rude Mechs Photo: Craig Schwartz/CTG 2011

5. The Method Gun by Rude Mechs. Kirk Douglas Theater, Culver City, CA. This surreal and beautiful comedy about an imagined theater troupe spending years rehearsing a drastically abbreviated version of A Streetcar Named Desire without their guru and founder was surprising as much for its off kilter approach as for its warm heart. It was also the highlight of the first installment of the RADAR L.A. theater festival which will hopefully become a permanent feature in the city.

6. Uncle Vanya by Anton Checkhov. Sydney Theater Company, Kennedy Center, Washington, DC. A big star, like Cate Blanchett in a high profile role is one things. A whole company of performances just as great is rarer and these Australians’ only U.S. appearance was radioactive.

7. Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker. South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA. Another theatrical comedy, Baker’s tale of the private pains and joys of students in a community center acting class unfolded with subtlety and a deft ease under the direction of Sam Gold.

Ioane Papalii in Lemi Ponifasio's The Tempest: Without a Body Photo: Lemi Ponifasio

8. The Tempest: Without a Body by Lemi Ponifasio. REDCAT. Los Angeles, CA. This avant-garde dance piece from Maori activist and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio grabbed audiences by the throat with its metallic noise soundtrack and ethereal visions that could turn menacing unexpectedly. REDCAT’s presentation of the work in L.A.’s historic downtown Million Dollar Theater was a brilliant and smart addition to these images that continue to lurk in the back of my mind.

9. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Either the Public Theater production in New York or the Theater for a New Audience on tour at The Broad Stage. Santa Monica, CA. This tricky Shakespeare play got two magnificent big scale productions and two great and very different Shylocks in Al Pacino and F. Murray Abraham. Daniel Sullivan’s fresh and clear-eyed staging in New York deservedly made Lily Rabe into a much bigger star and Darko Tresnjak‘s contemporary Wall Street setting galvanized TNA’s urgent production.

Stockard Channing and Rachel Griffiths with Stacy Keach in the background Photo: Joan Marcus

10. Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz. Broadway, New York. An incredible cast fronted by the likes of Rachel Griffiths and Stockard Channing made this family drama and comedy especially enjoyable. The reassessment of the recent American past and how that history played out in individual lives made this an especially welcome new play.

Honorable Mention: The Druid Theater’s production of McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Kirk Douglas Theater; Sondheim’s Follies on Broadway starring Bernadette Peters; Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia transferred from London to New York with Billy Crudup; Juan and John Robert Guenvuer Smith’s latest solo work on history and tolerance in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theater; Bill Rauch’s sharp, witty new Measure for Measure at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival; The SITI Company’s modern outdoor version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women at The Getty Villa; Kristoffer Diaz' The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity in its West Coast premiere at The Geffen Playhouse; Shakespeare’s Globe Theater’s revival of The Comedy of Errors at The Broad Stage; American Ballet Theater’s production of Shostakovich’s The Bright Stream on tour with Dance at the Music Center; and Faustin Leykula’s more more more ... future at REDCAT.

Twelfth Night

2012-01-05T23:55:00.000-08:00

It can be rough returning to work after a holiday break and I suppose that’s as true for musicians as it is anyone else. So perhaps it’s to be expected that the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first performance of the new year on Thursday was uncharacteristically rough and tumble. It also was a reminder that even though the Liszt bicentennial is over, the composer's music and influence continue even after the anniversary. The program, conducted by the L.A. Philharmonic’s former Assistant Conductor and the Fort Worth Symphony’s current music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, was packed full of late 19th-century Romantic warhorses. It’s all very pretty stuff with lots of dramatic flair, but it can be unforgiving as well if not reigned in a bit at the margins. The evening started off with the L.A. Phil’s first ever performance of Dvorak’s Hussite Overture, a piece of nationalistic music written for an official occasion in Dvorak’s own Prague. When these unfamiliar older pieces of music creep up on orchestral programs, things can break one of two ways: either one thinks “Gee, I wonder why this isn’t performed more often” or it can be more like “Oh, now I understand why we haven’t heard that before.” And while the Hussite Overture is unmistakably Dvorak’s, it fits more closely into the latter category, suffused with just enough pomp to classify it as what my friend Ben calls circus music.

This rather broad and sloppy intro was followed by Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which featured soloist and long-time L.A. Philharmonic friend Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Liszt’s fiery fingerwork was neatly dispatched by Thibaudet who availed himself admirably here. The sloppiness continued, though, with some serious tuning problems from the winds in the opening moments. Things eventually got straightened out but Liszt’s cacophony of notes did little to dispel the circus atmosphere. Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, which the composer dedicated to his friend Liszt who had died that same year, builds closely on Liszt’s own Romantic musical traditions. It’s almost always a crowd pleaser and its bombastic finish was warmly appreciated by many. Harth-Bedoya was able to bring out several moments of quiet lyrical playing from the orchestra that came as islands in a sea of blurry edges. So for the first concert back on the job, there were still some worthwhile moments, even if it wasn’t likely the best evening of the new year. The show repeats three times this weekend.

In the Wings - Jan '12

2012-01-04T22:41:00.001-08:00

The holidays are over and the local performing arts scene will be back in full swing this January with too much to choose from. The event I’m most excited about is the return of Marino Formenti to Southern California on Jan 7th as a guest of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County where he’ll play workers by Benjamin and Gardner as well as Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. His appearances are always surprising and this is the one show not to miss next month. A good second choice would be a local appearance by Steve Reich with red fish blue fish and the Bang on a Can All-Stars who will present an evening of his work including Music for 18 Musicians as guests of the L.A. Philharmonic’s “Green Umbrella” program on the 17th. And if you love Kaija Saariaho as much as I do, you’ll also want to consider this month’s performance from Jacaranda Music in Santa Monica on the 21st which will include Je sens un deuxieme coeur taken from her opera Adriana Mater.

Denis Matsuev

There are other musical performances to consider of course. Monday Evening Concerts continues its season on Jan 9th with the music of Klaus Lang. And the superb Vivica Genaux who dazzled with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in Berkeley last month will tour Los Angeles with Europa Galante singing Vivaldi arias on the 25th. Susan Graham will give a recital at the newly opened Valley Performing Arts Center with Malcom Martineau on the 18th. And the ever-popular Jean-Yves Thibaudet will return to perform with the L.A. Phil under Miguel Harth-Bedoya starting on Jan 6th. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will be joined by Nigel Armstrong in a Mozart program on the 21st and 22nd while Camerata Pacifica will play Beethoven and Chausson in a number of locales starting on the 12th. You may also want to check out 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition winner Denis Matsuev who’ll perform a concert at Royce Hall on Jan 24th including works of Schubert and Beethoven.

There are two opera offering to keep in mind this month. San Diego Opera will kick off its 2011 season with Strauss’ Salome starring Lise Lindstrom on the 28th. And closer to home, Long Beach Opera will likely surprise us with a production of Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires which will have the first of two performances on the 29th. And while not an opera, this would be a good time to check out Musica Angelica who will present two performances of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with Dame Emma Kirkby and Daniel Taylor on the 28th and 29th as well.

Helen Hunt in Our Town Photo: Carol Rosegg

More you say? New theater productions abound everywhere. Center Theater Group will present Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer prize-winning Clybourne Park at the Taper starting on the 11th while bringing back Phylicia Rashad’s production of the related A Raisin in the Sun by Lorriane Hansberry at the Kirk Douglas Theater on the 19th. The Geffen Playhouse will have stars in its eyes starting on the 3rd with Kathleen Turner playing Molly Ivins in Red-Hot Patriot while the valley’s Porters of Hellgate troupe will bring Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to that stage starting on the 13th. On the 6th, A Noise Within will be giving a two week run of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in their own successful production, while South Coast Repertory will revive Suzan-Lori Parks landmark Topdog/Underdog starting the 8th. Not to be outdone, City Garage will present he West Coast Premiere of Neil LaBute’s Filthy Talk for Troubled Times starting on Jan 6th. Odyssey Theater in West L.A. will also offer up Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw on Jan 14th. But the hottest ticket in town this month may turn out to be David Cromer's highly regarded production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town which will arrive at the Broad Stage on Jan 14th.

And among all of these going’s on, please do not forget about the good folks at CalArts’ REDCAT who will kick off an exciting spring season this month with Rinde Eckert's And God Created Great Whales on the 25th. This story about a composer struggling to complete an operatic adaptation of Moby-Dick may serve as an excellent precursor to San Diego Opera's presentation of Jake Heggie's completion of the very same thing next month.

Probably the most publicized event this month is the L.A. Philharmonic’s “Mahler Project” under the guidance of music director Gustavo Dudamel which starts Jan 13. What the "project" part is, I’m not sure other than no one wants to use a plain jane word like "cycle" anymore. Call it what you will, all of Mahler’s symphonies, and a few other works, will be presented over four weeks by either the L.A. Phil or the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela who’ll visit here before returning with Dudamel and the L.A. Phil to Venezuela to repeat the concerts. Both orchestras will perform alongside for Mahler’s 8th Symphony which will take place at the Shrine Auditorium on Feb 4th which the will later reprise from Venezuela as the next installment in the company’s live broadcast to movie theater series. And in case this "extraordinary" series doesn't have enough spoon-feeding built into it already, it will also bring the likes of stormin’ Norman Lebrecht to town (the real one not the fake one) who will participate by telling us why Mahler is important. So if this is a matter that has been puzzling to you, you may want to check out some of these shows along the way. Who knows? Maybe Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic will finally succeed in giving the largely unknown and misunderstood composer a foothold in the world of contemporary orchestra performance.

This Year's Model

2012-01-03T22:15:00.001-08:00

Ermanelo Jaho as Violetta from 2010 at ROH Photo: Johan Persson/ROH

The omnipresent La Traviata continued its drive through the 2011/2012 Royal Opera House season on Monday with its third cast since the fall. It’s not unusual for repertory opera companies to switch things up along the way in a long run of a warhorse like La Traviata especially in a production as old and familiar as ROH’s 1994 Richard Eyre staging! which has already been filmed twice: once with Angela Gheorghiu in her breakout performance early in her career and more recently with Renée Fleming. This season’s Violettas have included Ailyn Perez and Marina Poplavskaya thus far. Anna Netrebko was scheduled for two performances later in January until she dropped out recently due to a reported foot surgery. Her likely replacement will be Ermonela Jaho, the Albanian soprano who is already scheduled for all the rest of January’s performances alongside Stephen Costello as Alfredo and Paolo Gavanelli as Giorgio Germont. (Vittorio Grigolo watchers may note that he is still scheduled to sing two of the Alfredos at the very end of the run.)

But while multiple cast changes can keep an oft repeated show fresh, it can also create problems. One of the most common of these is not enough rehearsal time for a new cast in a show that is already up and running, which seemed to be the major problem on Monday. Many of the cast had difficulty staying in synch with conductor Maurizio Benini and eyes were glued to him throughout. His pacing could turn plodding at times. The blocking appeared unfamiliar to some of the cast and there was virtually no chemistry between any of the principles throughout the evening. The revival's direction this month is credited to Paul Higgins but if he had anything to contribute to this performance, it appears he didn't have enough time to do it in.

The good news is that some of these issues may get better as the last set of these performances comes along. Jaho has a compelling enough voice with adequate power and agility. Her acting was stiff in the first two acts and it wasn’t until the big finale that she seemed to show up dramatically. Act III Violetta’s aren’t uncommon (Fleming is one as well) but it goes without saying that one can’t spot them the first time around until that home stretch. She handles the dying well but never really gave us a sense of Violetta’s fragility before then, even when Alfredo confronts her in Act II. It sounded like she was coming at everything vocally at full-bore, and I often wished she could have delivered a little more in the way of dynamic range sound-wise. The most satisfying performance of the night went to Paolo Gavanelli. He’s a treasure (and will be performing alongside Placido Domingo in L.A. next month in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra), and, although no one in the cast was particularly interactive with him in this rather stoic performance, he was a pleasure to hear. Stephen Costello meanwhile is having a very high profile season following appearances opposite Netrebko’s Anna Bolena in New York. I like him a lot as a singer, but he lacked a certain darkness of tone here and instead emphasized Alfredo’s more youthful attributes. And while there’s a place for that in Traviata, I felt the lack of direction and chemistry between him and Jaho left me puzzled through much of the evening as if Alfredo was trying to convince himself he loved Violetta as much as he was trying to convince anyone else of it. Overall it is not a necessary La Traviata to see at this point, but if you’re a big Gavanelli fan, things may solidify to a better state later in the run, which continues through January 25.

Keep 'Em Laughing

2012-01-02T18:31:00.000-08:00

Karl Johnson, Celia Imrie, Jonathan Coy, Janie Dee, Robert Glenister and Amy Nuttall Photo: Alastair Muir 2011

London stages are packed to the rafters with comedies right now. And whether this is a sign of the bad economic times or political climate, audiences here have had a wide array of high quality reasons to laugh. In addition to Graham Linehan’s The Ladykillers and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvenors I caught two other quite funny ensemble casts here this weekend. The Old Vic currently has a revival of Michael Frayn’s industrial strength Noises Off playing to largely sold out audiences. Frayn’s behind—and in front of—the scenes stage comedy has been insanely successful at all times since its premiere almost 30 years ago. Director Lindsay Posner doesn’t mess with a formula that works well. Frayn’s play, much like the other one his characters are rehearsing, “Nothing On,” is all about boxes, doors and plates of sardines. There’s a huge amount of stage business, and much of the laughs and wonderment it inspires comes from the mechanics of getting all of these details right even when they appear to be random mistakes. Probably the biggest star in the cast is Celia Imrie who plays Dotty, the actress playing the housekeeper in “Nothing On.” But everyone has big moments here including Robert Glenister, Jamie Glover, Janie Dee, and Karl Johnson. It's very well done and everyone manages the physical elements well though I admit the show didn't necessarily feel urgent to me in any way which is probably more a product of the source material than the production itself.

Lenny Henry and cast in The Comedy of Errors Photo: Johan Persson/NT 2011

Over at the National Theater, Dominic Cooke has put together a new staging of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors that will be part of the company’s “NT Live” broadcast season later this year. It’s a maximal production with lots of elaborate moving scenery and a full cast. Each pair of twins in this show is cast with two different actors. The Antipholi are played by Chris Jarman and Lenny Henry with the corresponding Dromios played by Daniel Poyser and Lucian Msamati respectively. Identical costumes are used to connect the twins while slight Caribbean accents are used to differentiate the pair from Syracuse from their brothers in Ephesus. It’s all meant to evoke a contemporary urban landscape, which it does quite well. Cooke has left in a bit of the physical and scatological humor that’s associated with the piece, but less so than I’ve seen elsewhere. And while Cooke doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know about Shakespeare’s comedy of repeated and continuous mistaken identities, he does give us some grand-scale witty moments such as the huge chase scene in the final act that comes complete with psychiatric hospital orderlies and a working police van all darting around the circular rotating stage. Despite the promise of a gritty urban setting, there's not much sense of malevolence, but it's a pleasant successful comedy.

Wagner Idol

2012-01-01T20:11:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Koch as Hans Sachs Photo: Clive Barda/ROH 2011

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is an opera that takes readily to modern interpretation and reinvention. There’s that strange unfunny “comic” plot and the weird holy German art business at the end. Directors all over Europe have taken various cracks at this opera in recent years with varying results not the least of which is Katarina Wagner’s production for Bayreuth in 2007. So one might think the atmosphere would be ripe for something a bit more subtle like Graham Vick’s 1993 production of Mesitersinger for the Royal Opera House, which was revived in December with conductor Antonio Pappano under the direction of Elaine Kidd this time around. Unfortunately, as seen on New Year’s Day in London, Vick’s staging looks startlingly naïve. Critics here have focused on the excesses of the Brueghel-inspired costumes complete with cod pieces. But frankly I found those much less concerning than the cartoonish characterization of just about everyone in the production. Thank god Sixtus Beckmesser doesn’t have a moustache here or the audience would certainly have gotten a chance to watch him twirl the ends of it while laughing fiendishly. Not that the show isn’t colorful, but it’s bland with very few moments of visual invention over the course of a long nearly 6 hours. Those moments would include the topsy-turvey Act II riot with villagers popping out of the walls and ceiling in response to the noise Hans Sachs and Beckmesser are making.

The revival is not a total wash, though, thanks to the orchestra and the conducting of the newly-knighted Antonio Pappano, who entered the pit for the first time since receiving the honor late last week. Pappano gave an energetic, brisk take of the score that eschewed a feeling of grandeur and ceremony. (This may have compounded the production's weaknesses that cried out for something more processional than active.) Pappano did give the show a sense of motion when events on stage were essentially static and listless. Besides the excellent chorus though, he got little help from the stage in terms of vocal performances that ranged from uninteresting to mildly unpleasant. The two exceptions to this came in smaller roles with the always dependable Toby Spence as David and the legendary John Tomlinson as Veit Pogner. Simon O’Neill who was announced as sick before the show but performed anyway played Walther von Stolzing. As advertised he looked all but green by the end of the evening and often sounded strained and pinched. Emma Bell’s Eva could also sound harsh and was broadly acted. Peter Coleman-Wright was the aforementioned Beckmesser who wasn’t opposed to chewing what little scenery was made available, although vocally he was certainly competent. And then there was the matter of Wolfgang Koch’s Hans Sachs. Although not announced as sick, Koch also looked rather pasty and green at the end of the evening. He seemed rather absent in the first two acts, but then came on strong in Act III with increased projection, and clarity of tone. Yet his concluding music was overshadowed by the superb ROH chorus which had been there all along giving the highest-quality performance. But this production has long ago passed its sell-by date and is undercooked in a way more reminiscent or recent failures of new productions like Don Giovanni and Anna Bolena in New York. There are two more Mesitersinger performances in London through the end of next week.

You Better Work

2011-12-31T23:52:00.000-08:00

Jemima Rooper and James Corden in One Man, Two Guv'nors Photo: Johan Persson 2011

I dread seeing shows that I’ve read other people’s good reviews of or heard a lot of good word-of-mouth about. I dread it even more than seeing shows I’ve heard only negative things about. At least with the negative ones I know I won’t be disappointed, and if the show ends up better than I’ve heard, it’s a pleasant surprise. But with the hits, it’s easy for things to go sour in a million different ways. And it is this phenomenon that may explain why I was absolutely smitten with the National Theater’s production of One Man, Two Guvnors that ended up being my final theater experience of 2011. What a way to go.

The show is all that people have said about it and so much more. Only so often do comedies, and particularly physical comedies, turn sublime. But they do, and this is one of them. The story is a loose adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s Commedia dell’Arte classic The Servant of Two Masters. Guvnors’ writer, Richard Bean, and its director, Nicholas Hytner, have updated the action to a more contemporary setting, 1960s Britain, while trying to preserve the hallmarks of Commedia dell’Arte performance. To adapt Commedia for contemporary audience is not new, but I don’t recall ever seeing it done so well, and so honestly. Hytner and Bean have infused their source material with the unique perspective and elements of British humor. (Or at least those elements of uniquely British humor that fit well in the Commedia setting.) The Brighton of 1963 with its changing sexual mores, skinny ties, and broadening cultural influence is perfect right down to the four-man band, The Craze, that provides original period pop songs transitioning from skiffle to rock for scene changes. But this is no ersatz Austin Powers version of Britain’s swinging sixties. The show is far more loving and affectionate in its humor. And it is far more often precisely on the mark when it comes to big laugh-out-loud guffaws. It’s one thing to laugh in a show, it’s another when you are doing so much of it that you don’t even know it’s happening.

There isn’t a weak link in this superb cast. But it is also true that Hytner and Bean are fortunate in having James Corden in the Arlecchino role of Frances Henshall. Henshall is the clever servant despite his lack of book-smarts whose half-hearted commitment to two different masters is nothing compared to his boundless commitment to food and the promise of romance. Corden proves to be masterful in the kind of physical clowning around that makes legends. I’m not overstating the case when I saw names like Lewis and Tati come to mind in this show. There is a fair amount of audience participation in the show and Corden handles all of it with ease. On the matinee I saw, Corden also confronted a man filming part of the performance with his camera, mid-improvised monologue and managed to keep everyone in stitches while stopping the offending behavior without missing a beat. It’s a shame that he (or any performer for that matter) has to deal with this kind of thing, but his ability to deal with it in a way that didn’t disrupt the show or bring the audience down was in its own way a breathtaking example of his skills.

And yet, there is a real sense of community in this cast’s performance. Tom Edden has just as many great physical comedy moments in the story and Jemima Rooper’s cross-dressing gangster part is superbly done. Daniel Rigby’s lovelorn actor Alan Dangle is perfectly pitched as is Oliver Chris’ Stanley Stubbers. But some of the funniest moments in the show happen when things go slightly off the rails and one can tell that the cast is sometimes cracking each other up as much as the audience. There is danger in this to be sure with things disintegrating into chaos, but Hytner knows when to hold back and has kept everyone reined in so far. The show was almost instantly sold out when it moved out of the NT’s South Bank home into the West End for 16 weeks, and the show and Corden will come to New York this April. Given how quickly tickets disappear for this show, I'd recommend you move on them quickly when you can.

You Slay Me

2011-12-30T00:23:00.000-08:00

Clive Rowe, Marcia Warren, Peter Capaldi and Ben Miller Photo: Alastair Muir 2011

The Ladykillers is a comedy with a longevity almost as unexpected as the comic crime-gone-awry caper it details. One of the most successful of the Ealing Studio comedies of the post-war period (the other American audiences would be most familiar with would be The Lavender Hill Mob), the 1955 original was written by Bill Rose. Rose, who was born in America, wrote several screenplays for Ealing during his many years in Britain after the war, but he would have his biggest success in Hollywood in the 60s penning It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and wining an Oscar for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? in 1967. The Ladykillers is a rather genteel comedy about a band of criminals who move into the home of an elderly woman while posing as a string quartet in order to plan their latest robbery. The elderly woman, Mrs. Wilberforce, unexpectedly gets pulled into the plot. Things eventually go awry and comedy ensues.

The Ladykillers has now made it onto the stage in London in an update by another well regarded comedy writer, Graham Linehan, the man behind Black Books and Father Ted. Linehan is a smart writer and he knows enough not to fill Rose’s original story with snide contemporary in-jokes or cynical references. And although the play is not adverse to slapstick, it's not simply about bungling incompetent crooks. The show is still genteel, especially compared with the kind of brazen gags that populate something like The Book of Mormon or any number of other successful contemporary U.S. stage comedies. But The Ladykillers is an absolute joy to watch even with a low shock value.

A big part of the success is Sean Foley’s direction of his excellent cast. Foley recognizes that this tale can handle a bit of broad acting, and he gives the cast just enough leeway to ham things up without it overpowering the show overall. No one is spitting out scenery, but it's broad enough to make the audience feel that everyone involved is having as much of a good time as they are. This great cast includes James Fleet, Peter Capaldi, Ben Miller, Clive Rowe, Stephen Wight and Marcia Warren as Mrs. Wilberforce. They revel in moments that provide arch commentary on the changing world of post-WW II Britain. One of my favorite such moments comes when the criminals are enlisted to perform a concert as the purported string quartet for a gathering of Mrs. Wilberforce's friends. It's an obvious ploy to be sure, but The Ladykillers is done so well and is so well meaning, it's impossible not to appreciate it. The show continues its run at the Gielgud Theater in London's West End into the New Year.

Mark Your Calendars

2011-12-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

From Wunderbaum's Songs from the End of the World.

With only a handful of days left in 2011, it’s naturally a time to reflect and think about the coming year. And in 2012, there’s already a lot of very exciting things to consider and plan for on the preforming arts scene. So while I'm packing for London and before my January preview comes to light next week, I’ll leave you the following music, theater, and performance highlights for the year ahead. Let’s start with L.A.’s biggest classical music organization, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which will continue its current season with a wide variety of works from late 20th-century composers including Louis Andriessen, John Adams, Steve Reich and others. Probably the most important shows coming up for the L.A. Phil will be the world premiere of a new oratorio from Adams entitled The Gospel According to the Other Mary, which will be seen in late May/early June under Gustavo Dudamel, just weeks after Adams himself leads a program with the West Coast premiere of Glass’s latest Symphony No. 9 in April. And as for older music, the most enticing programs of the spring will be a string of recitals from Matthias Goerne accompanied by the L.A. Phil under Christoph Eschenbach and with the conductor alone on piano in works of Schubert the week of April 16. And don’t forget the long-awaited return of Simon Rattle in early May when he’ll lead Bruckner with our local orchestra as well.

And speaking of Adams, the other major living composer with that name, John Luther Adams will have his Inuksuit receive its West Coast premiere along with many other pieces at the 66th Ojai Music Festival starting June 7th. This year’s artistic director is Leif Ove Andsnes and he’s scheduled to appear alongside fellow pianist Marc-André Hamelin and clarinetist Martin Fröst over this first-rate weekend. Back in town, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will be celebrating music director Jeffrey Kahane’s 15th anniversary with the group by performing a new commission from Brooklyn-based composer Timothy Andres on March 24 and 25 as well as one from Gabriel Kahane on April 21. LACO, along with the L.A. Philharmonic and both the Colburn and Thornton music school will also host the first Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles beginning on March 9 for 9 days of concerts, master classes and recitals with over 20 of the world’s best known cellists including Alisa Weilerstein, Miklós Perényi, Steven Isserlis, and Mischa Maisky. These performances take place in multiple venues with a variety of different music so be sure to check the schedule. Oh and done forget L.A.'s rebelious Wild Up collective that will present "a compendium of hipster music" from both East and West coast young composers on March 23 and 24.

On the opera front, the biggest thing to talk about in Los Angeles prior to the announcement of the 2012/2013 season for Los Angeles Opera next month will likely be Placido Domingo’s performance in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra starting February 11. Long Beach Opera, of course, has assembled another season of rarities from the likes of Poulenc, Martinu, Piazzola, and Osvaldo Golijov. Out of town the two most exciting things on the schedule are Karita Mattila taking another swing at Janacek’s The Makropulous Case at The Metropolitan Opera starting April 27 and Mariusz Kwiecien’s scheduled appearances in the title role of Szymanowski’s King Roger at Santa Fe Opera starting in July. (I’m also crossing my fingers that I may make it to London in late June for the Royal Opera House’s new production of Berlioz’ Les Troyens with Jonas Kaufmann, Eva-Maria Westbroek, and Anna Caterina Antonacci. Stay tuned.) There will be Ring cycles everywhere, of course, on this anniversary year including new stagings at both the Metropolitan Opera and in Munich to name just a few.

The theater offerings are no less interesting. Center Theater Group has planned major West Coast runs of the critically well-received recent New York productions of Sondheim’s Follies in May and Jon Robin Baitz’ Other Desert Cities before the end of 2012. But before all this, L.A.’s largest theater producer will bring concurrently running productions of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park to the Kirk Douglas and Mark Taper Forum stages respectively. The Broad Stage will bring Helen Hunt in Thornton Wilder's Our Town starting January 14. And then there's the exciting line-up at REDCAT which has too many interesting things to detail here but I would not skip the return of the Netherlands' Wunderbaum on April 28 and 29 with Songs at the End of the World. This just scratches the surface so stay tuned for the monthly performance previews and have a great New Year.

Many Nations Under A Groove

2011-12-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

Sahr Ngaujah in the Broadway production of Fela! Photo: Monique Carboni/CTG 2011

Fela returned to Los Angeles earlier this month. Or more precisely, Fela! the musical that bears Fela Kuti’s name along with the requisite exclamation mark opened the Los Angeles leg of the show’s current national tour at the Ahmanson Theater. The show is a return of sort in that Fela Kuti, the person, spent some developmentally critical time in Los Angeles in 1969 where his exposure to activists in the Black Panther movement helped fuel his own political leanings and viewpoints. These events, including Kuti’s meeting with Sandra Iszadore, are depicted in the semi-autobiographical story line, which just as frequently veers off into exuberant dance, powerful live music, and a dash of magical realism thrown in for good measure. Which is good since the dance and musical numbers are frankly amazing and far more interesting in the end. There’s a musical education to be had in Fela! and the show is vitally compelling theater.

I first saw this show in January of 2010 in New York and thought very highly of it then and still. Choreographer Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis assembled the book with Kuti’s own music for a product that is far more idea-oriented than its average jukebox music brethren. The show has suffered its own share of slings and arrows as well, including Charles Isherwood’s charges of minstrelsy and the more general criticism that the overall image of Kuti constructed by the show glosses over some of the less-than-noble aspects of its subject's life and personality. But this is art, and most audiences have been sophisticated enough to appreciate that all art, and especially theater, is about making inherently unfair decisions to create something that is inextricably bound up in particular social and political perspectives. Jones and Lewis have created as valid an image of Fela Kuti as anyone might. It isn't the only possible one. If there is any crime in Fela!, it’s that American theater hasn’t provided for a dozen shows just like it on the same topic all from different perspectives. Maybe Fela! wouldn’t have to say so much to and for so many if other voices were given more opportunity and space to speak.

All that being said, this touring production of Fela! does suffer some unavoidable set-backs at the Ahmanson. The show critically relies on interaction between the audience and the ensemble members, often moving around the auditorium which in prior incarnations is highly decorated, blurring the line between stage and seats. The large, aisle-free Ahmanson refutes this, constraining the motion and activity to the stage and a series of call-and-response audience participation moments. This distance can take a big bite out of the finales of both acts where the intensity and actions of the ensemble seem far less encompassing and the political bite of Kuti's music is blunted.

One of the things I was most excited about in revisiting the show, though, was the strength of its cast, many of whom had appeared in the original production. Sahr Ngaujah, who appeared again in the title role in the show I saw, gives one of the most remarkable stage performances I’ve seen in the last few years and deserves far more recognition for this performance than he has sometimes received. He manages a character with very fine lines between humor and rage with real nuance. The show also preserves the thrill of having a red hot live band on stage. Fela! gets that a musical is about music, and having the flesh and blood players to make that sound on stage conquers the whole evening. It's a great show even in this somewhat lesser carbon-copy performance at the Ahmanson; and if you haven't seen it, you should before it ends on January 22.

OMG

2011-12-21T22:24:00.000-08:00

Josh Young as Judas Iscariot Photo: David Hou

In the lead up to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Gounod’s Faust, tongues wagged over the fact that the production’s director, Des McAnuff, has been jetting back and forth across the country during rehearsals. This was due to competing assignments in New York and La Jolla, California, where his production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar was simultaneously in rehearsals at the La Jolla Playhouse for its West Coast premiere. (The show, which originated at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is scheduled to arrive on Broadway in the Spring.) And while some commentators felt that the Met’s Faust may not have been getting all the attention it deserved, after seeing Superstar on a recent Sunday, I can tell you there’s little reason to believe this. On a basic level, the two productions are essentially the same in design. Apparently for today’s audience the distance between heaven and hell on stage is minimal.

McAnuff’s Jesus Christ Superstar incorporates a metal catwalk that runs along both sides and the back of the stage with stairs on either side. The rear of the stage is dominated by a large blind that is used for projections in what is otherwise a vacant space. Sound familiar? The only way you can tell the two shows from one another without a program on first glance would be the costumes. While McAnuff’s Faust is tastefully robed in the first half of the 20th century, Superstar has gone the way of a futuristic dystopia by way of Jerusalem. Actually, Weber’s music would probably give things away as well. It’s 70s rock licks sounded about as mannered as Gounod’s grand French operatic tradition. And whereas McAnuff’s Faust often suffers from too little stage business, Superstar periodically succumbs to too much. The energy level is high, no doubt, but the historical accuracy of the apostles tumbling moves when approaching the savior may be hotly contested by some of the faithful.

That’s not to say that the production isn’t effective at times. It builds on Webber and Rice’s initial idea of casting Christ as a modern-day rock star in retelling the events of the seven days leading up to his crucifixion. That sense is maintained especially in the all-out finale with its neon lit cross and Judas in dark blue skin-tight sequins. But there are just as many moments when the whole thing looks silly or even amateurish. For instance, most people have been to San Diego enough times to know there are plenty of hot guys there that could serve as leather clad go-go boys when Jesus comes to cleanse the temple. Jesus Christ Superstar takes itself very seriously and McAnuff isn’t afraid of building on Webber and Rice's broad strokes to differentiate between good and evil. McAnuff's vision steers perilously towards the farcical at times despite its good moments.

The pacing is very tight, however, and the evening races by at just around two hours even with an intermission. In the performance I attended, Jesus was played by Jeremy Kushnier with an appropriate serenity that bordered on ambivalence. Josh Young had the meatier Judas Iscariot part and at times seemed to be channeling Tim Curry’s Frank N. Furter. Chilina Kennedy’s Mary Magdalene was the evening’s most Broadway-ready performance and was vocally the most solid of anyone else on stage. Will the show fly when it arrives in New York? Maybe. But I think it probably needs to feel a bit less like Rhythm Nation: 1814 if it’s going to make it. Or they could just cast Janet Jackson.

Love, Christmas Style

2011-12-19T22:05:00.000-08:00

Jason Danieley, Andrew Mueller, Jenni Barber and Michelle Duffy Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

At Christmas time, stages are typically filled with either the most familiar entertainments or family-friendly fare. In San Diego, as one approaches the plaza outside of the two indoor stages of The Old Globe, there is a large tree decorated in various Dr. Seuss related items in conjunction with the company's production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is playing to big crowds. But there is another holiday treat going on right next door in the White Theater with a decidedly more adult attitude. It's a new musical called Some Lovers with book and lyrics from Spring Awakening's Steven Sater and music by Burt Bacharach. The single act has many things going for it, but primary among those is a reminder of what a potent songwriter Bacharach is. Of the songs that make up the score, there's not a dud in the bunch.

On the surface, the show is based on O. Henry's “The Gift of the Magi”. Some Lovers chronicles the ups and downs of a multi-decade love affair through a series of Christmas-time meetings between a couple that is preoccupied with Henry's classic tale. They often read or recite it to one another and, unsurprisingly, parallel some of the key events in the story. The couple is represented on stage by two pairs of performers: a younger version of Molly and Ben: Jenni Barber and Andrew Mueller; and an older and wiser pair played by Michelle Duffy and Jason Danieley. All four performers occupy the same physical space and at times interact with their past/future selves in imagined ways trying to undo the past or remake the future of this unfolding relationship.

But as much as the story owes to “Magi,” perhaps the more dominant archetype here is Sunday in the Park with George. Ben's career as a budding songwriter through its ups and downs is all-consuming, often leaving Molly feeling like a third wheel to Ben's relationship to his art. Of course, Ben's tendency to compose on the piano provides a perfect setting for Bacharach's songs of heartbreak and love gone wrong. The four performers are all given some big solo moments, but the show heats up most in the quartets where past and present intermingle freely. There were some intermittent pitch problems in these group moments and it sounded like Danieley had a worrisome widening vibrato at times. But overall the show's musical qualities are strong and the performances from Mueller and Duffy were first rate.

The show's a pleasure, even if it could probably use a little tightening. After the clouds begin to gather over the young couple's new love, there is a certain repetitiveness to Ben and Molly's conflicts. One argument begins to feel just like the next and a sense of the overall direction and movement of the show gets lost. But for an holiday show with this much lovely music that serves as a respite from family stressors and yet another Nutcracker and Messiah, Some Lovers has little competition. The show runs through December 31 in San Diego so take advantage of this break from the hectic holidays before its gone.

Remember When

2011-12-18T13:19:00.000-08:00

Bernard Labadie Photo: Luc Delisle

The last week leading up to the holidays brought the most familiar of music to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, nearly all of it from the 18th Century. The final regular subscription shows for the year with the Los Angeles Philharmonic were all Mozart affairs with Symphony No. 41, a snippet from Idomeneo, and Piano Concert No. 27. The conductor was Bernard Labadie, a Baroque specialist, whose previous appearances here with or without his own ensemble, Les Violons du Roy, have been well liked by many including me. The show on Saturday, though, overall was not up to the quality of those prior appearances or at least my memories of them. Of course, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is not a period practice ensemble and to compare them to the smaller Baroque specialist outfit is unfair. However, they've produced excellent performances of 18th Century fare in the past under him, and just this season, the produced some amazing playing of Handel under the direction of Emmauelle Haïm, so a lively earlier sound is certainly possible under the right circumstances. The sound on Saturday was very big and very polished for Mozart, and while pleasant enough, not particularly exciting either. None of this was improved upon by the choice of soloist, Italian pianist Benedetto Lupo. He, too, was both professional and technically accurate in his playing. But it was also uninteresting without clear lines and could be rather unemotional. I found the tempi in the Symphony to drag a little as well.

Mozart is not the easiest of music to get right, and by that I mean played in a manner that incites excitement in the listener. Handel’s Messiah is probably even more so. That’s not necessarily due to technical issues as much as the piece’s omnipresence at this time of year. Any performance invites comparisons to others and my current gold standard is the superb version filmed in Vienna with Ensemble Matheus under Spinosi including a full staging directed by Claus Guth. My dream version at this point would be staged as well, this time by Achim Freyer who worked wonders in Los Angeles with with Bach's Mass in C Minor all those years ago. In Los Angeles this year, you have several Messiah options. The Los Angeles Philharmonic hosted Nicholas McGegan and the Bay Area's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for two performances of Handel’s big oratorio last week. They availed themselves nicely with the assistance of their 24-member chorus and four soloists. The playing from the orchestra was up to its usual standards and McGegan led a well-paced performance with the expected cuts and plenty of character. The soloists were all fine, including countertenor Daniel Taylor, soprano Dominique Labelle, baritone Nathaniel Watson, and tenor Thomas Cooley. Cooley and Labelle stood out with ample power in the hall. Was it the best Messiah ever? No. But it was a good one by any standard and a welcome addition for a time of year that is often overrun with overly familiar music not always given the fairest shake.

The Silent Treatment

2011-12-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Olympia Dukakis and Marco Barricelli Photo: Craig Schwartz/CTG 2011

How many star vehicles for Olympia Dukakis can one theater-going year contain? Well this year I’ve seen two, and they were remarkably similar experiences. She is undeniably a fine actor and I understand the impulse to put her at the center of a show. Both times I’ve seen her on stage this year, I was impressed with her ability to communicate so immediately with her audience. Yet on both occasions, she was ultimately let down by odd or lackluster material that didn’t do her justice. In February, she starred in an Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a heavy-handed psychoanalytic tragedy about an artist-drifter who comes to act as a grim reaper for an elderly woman coming to the close of her days in a European villa. I didn’t write about this show at the time, but it was largely unsatisfying and provided a template for Dukakis recent stage appearances here in Los Angeles.

This weekend she wraps up a run in Morris Panych’s Vigil at the Mark Tape Forum downtown. It’s been one of the weakest season’s for the Taper in many years with five productions (one of which was actually on the Ahmanson stage) virtually all of which were either solo or small cast star-vehicles or half-baked revivals. (The exception was Theresa Rebeck’s world premiere Poor Behavior which gave the season its only real comic bite.) Panych’s odd-little dark comedy doesn’t change the season’s overall course. Vigil is a two-hander about a man, played by Marco Barricelli, who has come to see his dying aunt at her request. The aunt, played by Dukakis says almost nothing throughout the whole evening. Dukakis has a total of nearly 5 lines with the entire two hours taken up with a monologue delivered by the nephew. He’s a neurotic fellow whose relentless unanswered questions and stories end up telling us all about his own life and family. Dukakis, who has only one line in the entire first hour, meanwhile gives a wonderful, nuanced performance that is entirely about her body language. It’s a testament to her craft and it certainly the best part about the show.

Unfortunately, the play is fairly weak overall. Panych strings together short, staccato scenes punctuating them with morose punch lines often emphasizing the neurotic nephew’s desire for this whole episode to over and done with. There is an element of surreal absurdity to the play and the nephew’s unplanned visit soon stretches into months and months rather than days. His eagerness to see the aunt dead soon gives way to a sentimental story about loneliness and friendship in the face of death. Barricelli delivered Panych’s one liners with some zing, which one would hope for since Panych also severed as the director in this run. But I often felt the whole show was holding back, taking the easy way out of resolving what are some troubling scenarios and questions right down to those about suicide and our universal mortality. Panych is so wedded to the clever structural elements and turns of events that make up the story that the show feels forced and less funny than it might be otherwise. He fortunately has a very fine actor in Dukakis who can help carry the weaker parts of this material. But she deserves somehting a bit meatier than this outing.

You're the Colosseum - Best of Music '11

2011-12-15T22:33:00.000-08:00

Gerald Barry Photo: Betty Freeman

In 2011, I once again spent more hours sitting in the dark looking at other people on a stage than I care to admit. But as always, there are moments that take a nothing evening and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. So, as is the annual Out West Arts tradition, here’s the list of the 10 best things I saw on a stage this year that involved music. (The 2011 theater list won’t appear until January given that I have a number of new shows I’ll be seeing right up to the end of the month so stay tuned.)

1. Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Thomas Adès. 4/11. It’s a crime Barry isn’t a bigger name in music and opera and his setting of Earnest is exhibit A. A riotously funny musical version of Wilde’s play even in this concert version outshone everything else with its smashing plates and a bass singing Aunt Augusta. This opera should be on every opera company’s to do list and was easily the most fun I had at any show all year.

Nina Stemme, Andrea Silvestrelli, Ian Storey, and cast Photo: Cory Weaver/SFO 2011

2. Wagnerian diamonds in the rough - James Levine conducting Die Walküre at The Metropolitan Opera on May 14th, 2011 and Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde at San Francisco Opera 6/11. Even in not-so-great Wagner productions this year there were some causes for celebration. Despite Robert Lepage’s underwhelming production of the Ring at The Metropolitan Opera, this single performance of Die Walküre, which was projected as part of the company’s Live in HD series around the world, was just about as thrilling as opera gets. On the closing day of the Met’s season, music director James Levine led a ferocious performance raging against everything awful in the world. The odds were against him from a set that delayed the start of the show by nearly half an hour to his own health problems, which had led to many cancellations earlier, and then later on, in the year. In what increasingly looks like it may have been Levine’s last appearance in the Met pit, the beautifully conducted and sung performance was thrilling for all the high-wire, risk-taking, do-or-die human fragility that makes opera as exciting an art form as it is. Francesca Zambello’s Ring production in San Francisco only faired moderately better with less sensational musical qualities, with one very big exception: Nina Stemme. In California, she proved herself to be the world’s reigning Brünnhilde in her first complete cycles. Watch out Munich.

The chorus in The Death of Klinghoffer Photo: Ken Howard/OTSL 2011

3. John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer at Opera Theater Saint Louis. 6/11. The best overall single opera performance I saw this year was Adams’ still controversial work about terrorism and humanism, which returned to the U.S. after an unusually lengthy hiatus. OTSL put together a production that caught all of the opera’s beauty including a phenomenal choral performance. There are few things more exciting than hearing music this beautiful come to life. It was a stirring and heart wrenching evening.

4. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Shostakovich’s Prologue to Orango and Symphony No. 4. 12/11. The best single orchestral performance I heard this year was a return appearance of Salonen to the orchestra he made famous with music that was funny, painful, tortured and insanely difficult in a way that communicates with the audience and holds together on an aesthetic level. Salonen has few rivals with this kind of program and his mastery that weekend made me ache over what has been lost in L.A. in his absence.

Robin T Buck and chorus Photo: Keith Ian Polakoff/LBO 2011

5. David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field at Long Beach Opera. 6/11. This single act from Lang with musical accompaniment from a string quartet was both emotionally stirring and intellectually challenging. A meditation on memory and the weights of history, Crossing a Field got the kind of bold, fascinating treatment one has come to expect from Andreas Mitisek and his Long Beach company who create so much out of such limited resources that it should put most American opera houses to shame.

6. Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium performed by the CalArts Music ensemble and wild Up with soloist Mark Menzies at REDCAT. 5/11. Gubaidulina made a rare personal appearance in Southern California this May in conjunction with performances of several of her works including Glorious Percussion with the L.A. Philharmonic. The most impressive of those was her large scale violin concerto that got an unimaginably loving and enthusiastic performance from CalArts students and faculty. Joining them was conductor Christopher Rountree, the leading force behind L.A.’s biggest, boldest collaboration of young musicians, wild Up that had a banner year playing just about everything they or you, could think of. Watch their space for more.

David Lang and Grant Gershon with members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Photo: Ken Hively

7. David Lang’s the little match girl passion at Jacaranda Music. 1/11 and with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. 11/11. Lang had quite a year in Southern California and his multi-prize winning treatment of The Little Match Girl got a stunning four-voice chamber performance under the auspices of the Westside’s new(er) music leader, Jacaranda Music. Months later, one of the soloists from that performance, Grant Gershon, led his regular ensemble, the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a version for full chorus. The two performances were strikingly different and emotionally devastating in completely different ways, a testament to Lang's writing as well as the talents of the various performers.

Simone Alberghini, Maxim Mironov, Nino Machaidze, and Paolo Gavanelli in Il Turco in Italia Photo: Armin Bardel/LAO 2011

8. Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at Los Angeles Opera. 2/11. LA Opera had a banner spring season including this masterful comedy with a superb cast including Nino Machaidze, Paolo Gavanelli, and Thomas Allen among others in a modern whimsical production from Christof Loy in one of his show’s first outings in the U.S. Once again LAO proved that taste is one of its biggest strengths in bringing a show that takes what is arguably a light entertainment and turns it into undoubtedly something far greater. You’d be just as well off on this item if you chose to substitute it for LA Opera’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw from 3/11, which was equally as good in a Jonathan Kent production with Patricia Racette.

9. San Francisco Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 under Michael Tilson Thomas. 10/11. MTT and his orchestra proved that hard work and perseverance can pay off with a world-class performance of Mahler’s Third. Profound and perfectly proportioned, it was Mahler to be envied and aspired to by those of us in Southern California.

Philippe Jaroussky Photo: Ana Bloom

10. Beautiful Baroque singing everywhere you turned, from Philippe Jaroussky (10/11), Andreas Scholl (10/11), Lucy Crowe (5/11), Iestyn Davies (11/11), and Vivica Genaux (10/11). Everywhere I went this year, it was was consistently vocalists who specialize in Baroque music that impressed me most for some reason, often jaw-droppingly so. The U.S. debut of the year either has to go to Lucy Crowe who dominated Handel’s Hercules at Lyric Opera of Chicago, or it could just as easily be Iestyn Davies who gave a fantastic performance in Rodelinda at The Metropolitan Opera. The world’s leading countertenor, Andreas Scholl was in that same Rodelinda but his appearance with The English Concert in works of Purcell in Los Angeles was no less awe-inspiring. And within just days of this appearance, Philippe Jaroussky sang alongside Apollo’s Fire Orchestra with glorious tone at UCLA while Vivica Genaux was heard with the Philharmonia Baroque orchestra giving the best performance of “Agitata Da Due Venti” I’ll ever likely hear.

Honorable Mention: There were a number of other shows that could just have easily made the top ten this year including Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Boris Godunov, the return of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha to The Metropolitan Opera complete with protestors, Berg’s Wozzeck in either Santa Fe or New York, "Monodramas" at New York City Opera, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with Simon Rattle at The Metropolitan Opera, Mitsuko Uchida playing Schumann at Carnegie Hall, Gabriel Kahane’s Orinoco Sketches, which premiered on the L.A. Phil stage in the spring, wild Up playing punk rock and Barlow at Beyond Baroque, Thomas Adès conducting Stravinsky’s Les Noces with the L.A. Phil, Santa Fe Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s Griselda from the mind of Peter Sellars, and the glorious magnetic voice of Jonas Kaufmann be it in recital or as Siegmund.

To Know Him is to Love Him

2011-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

The cast of Godspell Photo: Jeremy Daniel 2011

Did I mention that I saw the current revival of Stephen Schwartz’ Godspell when I was in New York recently? It apparently had slipped my mind until someone asked me about it recently and truth be told, I did decide I was going to try and catch up with all the big late 20th-century Jesus musicals this month since I’ll be seeing Jesus Christ Superstar this weekend in La Jolla. Godspell, of course, is a different beast from Weber and Rice’s extravaganza. Schwartz took a much more obtuse, non-narrative approach to the same material with a show that even today functions more as a love-in than a conventional story-driven drama. And while there’s no real proselytizing in the show, the current revival comes at you with such an overabundance of good will and conviction that it has an air of desperation about it. The show is filled with New Testament parables from the Good Samaritan to Lazarus dutifully told by a rag-tag band of young theater performers who look like they wear only clothes they bought on Etsy. It’s all about making the material real to a contemporary audience, though, so the stories are peppered with jokes and allusions to just about everything you can think of to the recent Occupy protests to Republican presidential hopefuls. At times one wishes that the feeling wasn’t quite so up to the minute, but the jokes do tend to be reasonable ones even if the overall effect can be overwhelming. Just when you’re about to catch your breath, the cast members start passing around the hand-held confetti cannons.

That’s not to say there aren’t some really enjoyable performances here. The Jesus part goes to Hunter Parrish who manages to undercut his sharp good looks enough to seem inviting as a would be religious figure. Uzo Aduba stands out among the players as well vocally as does Wallace Smith. I was also taken with Telly Leung who gets to exhibit more range and skills here to those who may be familiar with him from the recent Star Trek movie. But even these talents can get mired in all the activity going on in this show. One wonders whether further distractions are needed here, but apparently the show’s promoters think that it might be warranted. In an odd case of life imitating…well…theater if not art, just as the ensemble enters the stage at the top of the show all with their heads buried in their individual smart phones, Godspell will reportedly get its own “Tweeting” section devoted to people who wish to use their mobile devices during the performance at some point in the future. Regardless of whether or not this bogeyman frightens you, the real question will be whether any of these would-be users will actually be able to get a signal in the depths of the Circle in the Square Theater. And if so, will they be communicating about the show, or will it be about something else?

Beyond God the Father

2011-12-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Monette Magrath (Abbie) and Jason Dechert (Eben) Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2011

I caught up with A Noise Within’s second production of the Fall, their second in their new Pasadena home, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms on Sunday. It’s a very good production of a 20th-century play that isn’t the kind of thing that most contemporary audiences quickly gravitate to. It’s filled with the kind of overt psychoanalytic thinking and references to Greek tragedy that can come off heavy-handed. Recent productions of Desire Under the Elms like the one Robert Falls recently took to New York, have dealt with this by running with the outlandish aspects of the story and doubling-down on them with surrealism. Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Dámaso Rodriguez in his staging for A Noise Within is his ability to keep the play relevant despite taking a far more naturalistic approach to the material.

Rodriguez also takes a traditional tack with the material, focusing heavily on the relationship between elderly Ephraim Cabot’s son, Eben, and Ephraim’s very young, brand-new wife, Abbie Putnam. Eben’s long standing desire to inherit the family farm is soon challenged by his new-stepmother’s plans until it is supplanted (and conflicted) by their desire for one another. Before you can say Oedipus, tragedy ensues. But this central relationship works with two young increasingly well known local faces, Monette Magrath as Abbie and Jason Dechert as Eben. Magrath strikes just the right tone of menace and desperation in Abbie while Dechert comes off as beautifully bruised in as believable a way as possible given the circumstances. William Dennis Hunt portrays an Ephraim more damaged than deadly here, but the combination of these three occupying the majority of the play’s action works quite well.

Better yet, the production itself suggested ANW’s continued adjustment to their new surroundings. John Lacovilli’s two story set, the Cabot family farm, expands to fill the available space more naturally than the concurrently running Twelfth Night. The overall feels was more relaxed and intimate, drawing the audience in from a greater distance into the thrust stage area. Sightlines at the Pasadena space are greatly improved and the cast is far more exposed from every angle demanding more from everyone. The cast and crew delivered all this on Sunday. Luckily, you’ve got two more chances to see Desire Under the Elms this weekend before it and Twelfth Night close for the holidays with the company returning in January with a short revival of their hugely successful production of Noises Off.

French Lessons

2011-12-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra celebrated the influence artists have on one another in their performances this weekend. Appropriately enough, the shows coincided with one of their own collaborations, the 20th anniversary of Kent Twitchell’s giant Harbor Freeway Overture mural that motorists heading north out of downtown on the 110 freeway have grown accustomed to. The eight-story tall painting commemorates LACO and its members including three players still in the orchestra to this day - Julie Gigante, Allan Vogel and Roland Kato. Like the mural itself, LACO has become an integral part of living in Los Angeles with great performances like the one which I saw Sunday at the groups’ Westside home, UCLA's Royce Hall.

Music Director Jeffrey Kahane led the orchestra through works inspired by the French Baroque and in particular the music of François Couperin. The evening started with Ravel’s impressionistic recollection of Couperin’s music with Le tombeau de Couperin. The players produced the kind of lush romantic sound that is usually associated with a much larger ensemble. The other composer on the bill most directly inspired by Couperin was Thomas Adès whose Three Studies from Couperin took a slightly different approach. Adès starts with Couperin’s music itself and uses several of his themes originally written for Harpsichord as starting points for his own contemporary music. Whereas Ravel uses Couperin more as an idea, Adès takes a re-constructivist approach with a music that is surprisingly modern and clean in its overall tone despite the clearly Baroque patterns that travel right along with it demanding to be attended to. It's just a snippet of what makes Adès such an urgent composer and it was the highlight of the night.

The evening also took up Respighi’s Gil uccelli, a piece with several brief movements, each related to a specific French Baroque (or earlier) composer and a bird. Again Kahane managed a light, fleet sound from the orchestra. If there was a weak point to the evening, it was Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, a single movement piece for orchestra and solo cello. The underdeveloped, almost concerto didn’t quite fit the program’s overall theme. It also didn’t seem to win over too many in the audience. Ralph Kirshbaum was the soloist and he seemed to struggle on Sunday with stretches of wrong notes and a sometimes abrasive tone. He played an encore from the Bach Cello Suites that was far more assured and typical for a performer with his reputation. His appearance served a s a prelude for one of the more exciting events of the Spring here in L.A., the inaugural Piatigorsky International Cello Festival that Kirshbaum will head up in March with appearances from many of the world's greatest cellists for a series of concerts, master classes and other events or 9 days that will involve collaboration from LACO, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Colburn School and the USC Thornton School of Music. Check out the full schedule.

Boston Common

2011-12-11T01:27:00.000-08:00

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of America’s most storied major orchestras, is capping off an unsettled decade. Following the departure of long-time music director Seiji Ozawa in 2002 after some controversial and tumultuous years, the symphony appointed James Levine as its new music director in 2004. Unfortunately, Levine’s own plans to reinvigorate the organization were met with yet more controversy and eventually his own declining health after many cancellations led to his own resignation earlier this year. But the Boston players have soldiered on through all of it, and they arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday as part of their current tour with Levine’s substitute for the out-of-town shows, newly-minted Seattle Symphony music director Ludovic Morlot. The program on Saturday night was a fairly typical one for a contemporary American orchestra with Brahms' Violin Concerto played by Gil Shaham followed by John Harbison’s Symphony No. 4 and Ravel’s second suite from Daphnis and Chloe.

The best news is that years of turmoil at the top has not hampered the overall quality of the Boston Symphony’s sound. The strings were absolutely lovely and polished throughout the whole show Saturday. The winds were equally spectacular with a horn section to die for. The playing was always assured and confident. But whether or not all of the music director changes of the last several years are to blame, the players' polished sound was one of the few things the lackluster and frequently dull evening had going for it. Much of the performance overall was lacking a needed energy. Maybe it was just an off night for Morlot and the players, but the end result was unmistakable. From the very beginning of the Brahms’ concerto things sounded awry with a lazy and slow Allegro non troppo. When the Adagio arrived with virtually no change in tempo things continued to go downhill. Even Shaham who can usually be counted on for a spirited performance seemed sloppy in his attacks, his sound turning screechy at times. The music moved along, but Morlot appeared to be unable to pull much out of the orchestra other than competent, accurate playing.

Things didn’t improve much later on. Harbison’s 2003 Symphony No. 4 is in five movements that contain a variety of references to different musical genres. It can stop and start with little rhyme or reason. There is certainly interesting music there, and the L.A. crowd is no stranger to this strain of contemporary music. But again there was a particular lack of enthusiasm that dragged things down. I never felt that Morlot really made a case for this particular piece in this particular program, though again the playing was clean and of a high professional quality. Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite seemed to connect more directly with the orchestra. At last a pulse was felt and Morlot seemed to dig in as well. But by this point, it was a bit too little too late, though the wind soloists availed themselves all quite well of this ornate score. It was tempting to wonder how different things might have been if Levine’s health had not turned out to be what it was. And for at least this one night on the road in Los Angeles, it was hard to believe that things wouldn't have turned out better.

Woman in Chains

2011-12-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

Renée Fleming, Andreas Scholl, and Stephanie Blythe Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2011

Before it gets away from me I did want to say a few words about the Metropolitan Opera’s current revival of Handel’s Rodelinda, which will conclude its run in New York on Saturday. I was in the audience last Saturday and have to say I had a great time, though admittedly sometimes for the wrong reasons. There is much about this opera that doesn’t work in this particular house. The Met has very little experience with Baroque operas, and the house, which is already too big for the works of Gluck and Mozart, is seriously ill-proportioned for Handel. The production was originally another star vehicle for Renée Fleming in 2004 and she returned to headline the revival as well. And love her though I do, vocally she is not the biggest attraction in this particular music, which cuts against her strengths of warmth and richness with a lot of fine detail that she never really does justice to.

Andreas Scholl and Iestyn Davies Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2011

But I felt really especially sympathetic towards her on Saturday for her pluck and perseverance in Stephen Wadsworth’s campy production. The novelty of the show is that Wadsworth has laid out the different scenes in a very wide linear set that moves left and right as the opera progresses bringing new portions into view for the audience. The setting is the 18th century which is good enough as any, but Wadsworth cannot resist histrionic gestures often undercutting the actual emotional content of scenes. Rage is most often expressed by throwing books or other objects to the floor. Fleming first appears on stage shackled by the wrist to a bed post by way of a long chain. As if this didn’t look silly enough, once removed on Saturday, the prop got wedged between the set and stage apron in the moving machinery, eventually dragging the bed along with the characters as they started to move into the next part of the moving set. The bed then got wedged up against the proscenium as stage hands tried to secrete the wayward furniture back into the wings. There was plenty of romping around and costume changes in the stable to enjoy after this. But, perhaps the most audacious moment, though, and the one that showed Fleming’s true mark of a diva, was her choice to overlook Wadsworth’s decision for the second countertenor (an excellent Iestyn Davies as Unulfo) to have abdominal surgery performed on him while laying on a table in the library as she sings her big concluding aria. As much as I like to rail against operatic conventions, can't we give the diva her moment at the end without whiskey-soaked wounds and cries of pain in the background? Just asking.

All of these unintentional chuckles were met with some spectacular singing, though, from the rest of the cast. There was the nearly miraculous Stephanie Blythe, of course, as Eduige. And then there was the splendid Andreas Scholl as Rodelinda’s husband, the deposed King Bertarido. Scholl is perhaps the most accomplished countertenor before the public and he sounded like it on Saturday with real agility and lightness to his sound. And yet he filled the house well under the thoughtful conducting of Harry Bicket. Earlier this year I had mentioned the soprano Lucy Crowe may have had the best U.S. Premiere of any singer this year, but now I feel she has might serious competition for that title from that same surgical patient, Iestyn Davies who appeared as Unulfo. He's commanding on stage with staggering vocal technique. It's the kind of voice where one begins to wonder, where has this guy been all this time. We need more of Mr. Davies vocalism around these parts, and soon. So whether the show's star gets the treatment she deserves, this Rodelinda is a good time and there are ticket's still available for tomorrow.

What is the Word

2011-12-06T22:53:00.001-08:00

Nicholas Isherwood with Movses Pogossian, Stephanie Griffin, Karen Ouzounian, and Jonathan Hepfer Photo: mine

The longstanding outpost for late 20th century and newer music in Los Angeles, Monday Evening Concerts, returned for its latest season on Monday at its most recent home, the Zipper Concert Hall, on Monday. It was a quietly intense evening filled with music inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett either in spirit or word. Beckett’s work, and particularly that of his later career, is undeniably musical in its sparse yet forceful language. This economy, and its related abstraction, make it ideal for composers who were interested in similar types of musical structures and language. Monday’s program went about this in two ways. The first half included pieces more related in terms of structure and style than actual content. Heinz Holiger, who will enjoy a major retrospective of his musical output at next year’s Salzburg Festival, has set a number of Beckett’s plays, but Monday’s concert began with his viola solo, Trema. The work rapidly shifts back and forth between two different sets of material mimicking a sort of restrained frenzy that certainly had parallels to the kind of psychology found throughout Beckett’s world. Holliger’s piece led immediately into a later work from John Cage, Seven. Here the viola is joined by six other players including piano and percussion. For most of them, only a handful of notes or chords are indicated over a period of twenty minutes with only general guidelines suggested for the precise entry or length of any of them. The resulting music can be highly variable, or even largely silent depending on the decisions the players make. On Monday, the excellent ensemble of MEC regulars performed a version that fit into the Beckett theme easily with its halting almost isolated islands of sound and subtle shifting percussion.

The second half of the show took on Beckett in a more direct way with Kurtág’s …pas á pas – nulle part…, a setting of the author’s poetry. Like much of Kurtág’s output, …pas á pas.. is a collection of miniatures – twenty-nine to be exact each clocking in at less than a minute or two. Beckett’s terse, dark, and sometimes morbidly humorous poetry almost precisely paralleled the notes of the three string players, percussionist, and baritone. Often the voice and instrumental parts traveled in tight unison. This is dramatic, and very literary material with Kurtág’s typical elaborate titling of each miniature in a manner almost more elaborate than the poetry itself, with different segments being dedicated to everyone from Holliger and Boulez, to Helmut Lachenmann and Erik Satie. One could spend a day just sorting out the elusive connections between Kurtág’s words and Beckett’s. But the dedication that may have most pointedly shaped the performance was that of baritone Nicholas Isherwood who announced from the stage that his mother had died earlier that very day and that his performance was given in tribute to her. Performing in the wake of such an immensely painful and nearly universal event was admirable and I would certainly offer my prayers and condolences to Isherwood and his family. But it also made for a ferocious and exacting performance, perhaps even the performance of a lifetime for an artist. Beckett’s mordant tone, and his ironic sense of living in the face of our certain mortality may never have sounded so poignant as it was then. Isherwood highlighted two of Beckett's short texts before the performance that caught the spirit of the moment best for him. And it certainly made a great and unique start for the MEC season.

sleep till death
healeth
come ease
this life disease

Great Apes

2011-12-05T20:00:00.001-08:00

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles this weekend there was another acute reminder of what was lost with the departure of Esa-Pekka Salonen from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a couple of years ago. Salonen, of course, has returned both last season and this year for two weeks of programming as conductor laureate and in his final appearance this year, he and the orchestra delivered the kind of outstanding large-scale multimedia project that was a hallmark of his tenure here. The program last weekend was straight forward enough. It included two pieces from Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 and the world premiere of an operatic fragment, Orango. But the demands of these particular works and the themes that link them were mighty stuff and the end result was one of the best L.A. Philharmonic performances I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

The show started with the much discussed Orango or more specifically the completed Prologue to Shostakovich’s opera of the same name. The work was commissioned in 1932 for the Bolshoi Theater on short notice to celebrate the 15^th anniversary of the October revolution. Shostakovich and his librettists chose a farcical story about a half-man, half-ape creature, Orango, who is created out of, and eventually falls victim to, the excesses of capitalism. The project was never completed and largely forgotten until a musicologist, Olga Dignoskaya came across a piano and vocal score for the opera’s prologue in Shostakovich’s papers archived in the Glinka Museum. With the support of Shostakovich’s wife, the piece was orchestrated and completed by composer Gerard McBurney prior to its world premiere here in Los Angeles.

The final product the orchestra played this weekend certainly sounded like Shostakovich from that period and had all the maniacal and comical musical hallmarks one associates with such a pointed farce. The Prologue concerns a giant celebration where an audience demands of the party’s host (sung by Ryan McKinny) to be entertained by the captive Orango (sung by Eugene Brancoveanu). At first the host is uncomfortable bringing Orango forward due to his propensity for aggression, but he eventually relents. However, Orango does in fact become agitated in response to several of the guests who have had prior undisclosed interactions with him—including the zoologist (Michael Fabiano) who helped create the creature by cross breeding an ape and a human—that will serve as the plot for the rest of the opera. The music is wild, rapidly changing genres at a whim.

And like so much of Shostakovich’s music, the Orango Prologue is notable in its potential for double meaning. It is clearly a farce about the evils of Western capitalism, but it is also taking not very subtle shots at the failures of the October revolution 15 years after the fact. And it was this double meaning, of the social unrest over economic inequalities and the failure to address them in the past or present that was at the heart of the stage direction collaborator Peter Sellars brought to the evening. Most of the singing party-goers were seated in the WDCH audience during the show implicating the concert’s viewers as participants in the overarching politics of the work. All the characters and chorus were dressed in contemporary street clothes. And just to make the connections clear, Sellars used a video consisting of repeated quick-cut still images displayed above the orchestra that included contemporary images of Occupy Wall Street protests, military drone aircraft, and the pensive faces of monkeys (some clearly in a laboratory setting) to accompany the music. This was not timed to the music, but was meant to allude to the cinematic work of Shostakovich’s contemporaries such as Sergei Eisenstein. Sellars had also pointed out the parallels in Shostakovich’s own musical structures with some of the cinematic ones used by Eisenstein. Even at this stage of the game, Sellars knows how to provoke and clearly some in the audience weren’t comfortable with this. But I felt, given the nature of the work at hand, it was appropriate for music that was meant to be comically confrontational. It was a wild and free-spirited performance by American orchestra standards, and even by L.A. Philharmonic standards.

The next surprise came with the highly-related Symphony No. 4 that followed. Shostakovich famously withdrew this work in 1936 following Stalin’s negative reaction to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the composers own relative black listing. It was a dangerous time for the composer as the government began to arrest or take action against his friends, family and associates leaving him constantly on guard that he, too, might be punished in some new, unexpected way. The monumental symphony reflects a justifiable paranoid state of mind with its rapid and unpredictable changes in tone and structure over its immense hour-plus length. It can be frighteningly dark and ephemeral or boisterous and militaristic. It is not a work for the fainthearted to perform and requires incredible amounts of control and organization to keep unified. Salonen was up to the task and gave the performance a masterful comprehensive sense of place and direction. The third movement was nothing short of riveting with music more chilling than anything in a movie thriller. This was the other side of Orango’s comic response to that sort of police state totalitarianism. One can cope through dark sardonic laughter, but underneath insidious fear still lurks. Salonen and Sellars have both been around enough to pull off this brilliant program - one that youthful vigor and excitement alone could never have spoken as eloquently too.

The Subject Was Roses

2011-12-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

Jonas Kaufmann and Marina Poplavskaya Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2011

With all the twittering about protests and such, you might forget there was an actual opera performance going on at The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. There was one and it was immensely frustrating. It was the second performance of a new production of Gounod’s Faust directed by Des McAnuff that was seen earlier this year at English National Opera. This time around it starred Jonas Kaufmann in the title role alongside Marina Poplavskaya as Maguerite and René Pape as Méphistophélès. The show, although admittedly not an entirely home-grown production, is a step in the right direction for the company after a number of recent awful premieres such as Michael Grandage’s Don Giovanni that appeared to have virtually no stage direction at all. But despite its aspirations, this Faust is unusually empty at most moments.

McAnuff has ideas, all right. The story goes that when Pamela Rosenberg originally commissioned what would become John Adams’ Doctor Atomic for San Francisco Opera she had asked the composer for a work to fit into a series of productions related to Goethe’s Faust that would cast J. Robert Oppenheimer as just such a figure. Well, she didn’t get exactly what she’d first asked for, but McAnuff has delivered more-or-less the same thing built atop Gounod’s setting of the story. Now Faust is an atomic scientist of the mid-20th Century working on the bomb and desiring his youth during an earlier war-torn era. It’s a single unit set consisting of a large steel girder framework with a spiral staircase and elevated catwalk on either side. Initially the elderly Faust (Kaufmann still showing his Movember pride) stands among the bombs and women in white coats scurrying about his lab before planning to end it all. Then Pape shows up in a white suit and Poplavskaya in the first in a series of hideous dresses that will haunt her all evening and we’re off to the races.

Or are we? The show seems to sputter and never recover from here on out. Very little changes from scene to scene and before long it all becomes rather dull to look at, like some sparsely appointed modern loft apartment, albeit one with a killer AV system. The characters in this apartment seemed superficially related to one another and scenes bleed from one to another with little differentiation. And even though I rather liked the small twist of an ending which reframed the opera in a manner more open to interpretation, it was like that same timidity had crept back in. This Faust despite its positives needs to go farther and needs to do more. This time a sharp looking contemporary design and overall concept was hollowed out with ambivalent and underdeveloped stage action. Even stage images meant to grab attention fell flat like the curtain of giant red roses that descends during the final parts of Act III. This problem was only compounded by a shockingly detached performance from Kaufmann. He wanders about with nary a clue to whether he is feeling love or anger or anything. As to how much of this was bad direction isn't clear, but it wasn't fun to watch. His vocal performance was not up to his recent standards either.He often turned to crooning and at the top of Act III, after the shouting incident, he cracked right in the climax of Salut, demeure chaste et pure taking a shine off of a performance that had a number of otherwise remarkably lovely moments. Poplavskaya was just a touch harsh vocally at moments, but she’s got the market cornered on onstage crazy and the maniacal look on her face in Act IV and V was a highlight. (Of course she is dirty and has a bad hair cut by this point indicating that she must be crazy given that these are the universal stage markers for madness.) The Act IV cathedral scene between her and Pape was the most engaging things got dramatically.

The unquestionable star of the night was Pape whose suave, somewhat bemused Mephistophélès was the charismatic center of the whole show. Let’s put it this way – if this had been a Saturday night at Akbar in Silverlake instead of the Met, as yummy as Kaufmann and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin are, on this night I’d still have chosen to go home on the back of Pape’s Harley in a hearbeat. But I digress. Nézet-Séguin led a lush, but light performance from the pit seemingly unflappable with all that was going on around him. He again left no question why everyone is rightfully excited about him on the East Coast as he turned another operatic warhorse into something musically enthralling. More of him, please. It was nice to hear some of the Act V cave scene preserved, although the ballet music was still cut. And while I'm at it, I would certainly be pleased to hear more of Russell Braun whose enraged Valentin seemed more like a suitor than the brother. Still I'd take this mixed bag over a number of recent things at the Met in that the show has some guts as compared to none. Who knows? With time and a different set of performances, this might turn out to be a memorable Faust after all.

A Shout Outor, Oper für alle

2011-12-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

The Occupy L.A. mural

So this happened. On Saturday I attended the second performance of The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Faust. I was sitting in the orchestra pondering this mess of a production (more on that later) as the first intermission was drawing to a close. As the lights dimmed and the crowd quieted, awaiting the arrival of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a man’s voice, which sounded as if it were coming from above the orchestra level, suddenly began to shout “occupy Wall Street” repeatedly. It was shouted about 10 times by my estimation, but by the second or third salvo the rest of the audience started to respond. There was supportive applause, laughter, and groans in equal amounts. Amidst the pervasive mumbling were some shouted retorts, some more colorful than others. Someone from the Metropolitan Opera’s house staff started to come out on stage. But before this man with a headset could make any announcement, the shouting stopped and he retreated back into the wings without comment. Nézet-Séguin came out seconds later and the show went on more or less like nothing had happened. I assume the shouting man was escorted out, but I don’t actually know this since I didn’t see him. The whole incident didn’t take more than a minute or two. It was the second such Occupy movement-related activity at Lincoln Center in three days. I had caught the tail end of the protest that followed Thursday’s performance of Glass’ Satyagraha at the Met.

And while I didn’t have much to say about it then, Saturday’s shout out reminded me of something from before. When I was finishing college, I once had an opportunity to have dinner with a small group of fellow students, our professor, the philosopher and author Linda Singer, and her friend and colleague, Judith Butler. Butler had just given a talk about photography and the right-wing politicians who were trying to score points over the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and public funding for the arts. She discussed the controversy over what she slyly described as pictures of “appendages resting on velvet” and people asked her questions about the typical American preoccupations over “rights” and “censorship”. But eventually, the conversation turned to some of the problematic elements of Mapplethorpe’s work concerning issues of race and aesthetics. Someone posed a question about the difference between tactics in critiquing Mapplethorpe’s work from these two very different ideological perspectives. Butler’s answer, as I remember it, was that the best way to address any concerns about art, or how it is made, funded or supported, should take a proliferative form. If you’ve got a problem with how art is made/produced/funded, then make/produce/fund your own in response in a manner that addresses your concerns and critiques. Fight art with art so to speak.

How all this relates to Thursday and Saturday at the Met Opera can be interpreted several ways. But I’ve always favored this idea that the best response to anything you don’t like is to be proliferative and productive in response. The opera house and the particular artistic forces it relies upon, have always been the locus of cultural contention, political or otherwise. Composers like Verdi and Wagner, or Glass and Adams for that matter, regularly infused their work with political concerns and shaped them in response to the issues of their days. Currently there are numerous musicians and artists who have been supportive and involved through such organizations as Occupy Musicians putting together both performances and recordings across the country. On the West coast meanwhile, members of Occupy L.A. have yet to protest in or at an opera performance there. Yet, some of the people camped out by L.A. City Hall produced a mural left behind when the city later evicted them from the site. The city is now trying to preserve that mural as a piece of public art. And while that won’t immediately resolve any of the social and economic justice issues at the heart of this movement, there is something powerful in it. We need more art, and more speech to bring about change - not less. Here’s to a world of such beautiful revolutions.

In the Wings - Dec '11

2011-12-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

Photo: Clive Barda

December brings its usual combination of holiday fare to Los Angeles stages this month. But even if you’re not in a holiday mood, there are plenty of things to choose from in town. Probably the one must see show is the latest appearance of Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend where he’ll lead a cast of exciting young singers such as Ryan McKinny, Eugene Brancoveanu, Timur Bekbosunov, and Michael Fabiano in the world premiere of the recently discovered fragments of Shostakovich’s abandoned opera Orango with a completed orchestral score by Gerard McBurney. This will be paired with Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony and will also mark the return of Salonen’s friend and theatrical collaborator Peter Sellars to the WDCH. There are a number of other good shows this month as well from the Los Angeles Philharmonic including a Mozart program led by Bernard Labadie the weekend of the 16th. And if you need your end of the year Messiah fix there are two excellent choices: the Los Angeles Master Chorale will perform it with your assistance on the 12th or without on the 18th, or you could hear the recently Grammy-nominated Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra give their version on either the 13th or 14th.

Ludovic Morlot Photo: Sussie Ahlburg

And there’s one more out-of-town guest you won’t want to forget, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will appear on the 10th with Gil Shaham and the recently appointed Seattle Symphony music director Ludovic Morlot in a show to include John Harbison’s Symphony No. 4. There’s other great music in town of course. The Jacaranda Music Series will continue on Dec 2 with a holiday show from Anonymous 4, which will also feature the premiere of a new commission from David Lang. While on the 10th and the 11th, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will feature an evening of French works inspired by Couperin from Ravel and Thomas Adès. And then there’s the return of the Monday Evening Concert Season on Dec 5 with pieces from Holliger, Cage, and Kurtág’s setting of Beckett.

Sahr Ngaujah in Fela! Photo: Monique Carboni 2009

Of the new theater offering’s this month, the one I’m most excited about is the local premiere of the Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis' musical Fela! on the 13th. The show on the life of artist Fela Kuti comes complete with a live band on stage and was fantastic both in New York and London and promises to be so here as well. There is also two new shows worth considering in San Diego. The Old Globe opens up Some Lovers, a new Burt Bacharach musical written by Spring Awakening’s Steven Sater on the 8th. Meanwhile the La Jolla Playhouse will offer a pre-Broadway run the the latest revival for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Back in Los Angeles there are plenty of other ongoing productions to catch as well and I’m going to take a look at A Noise Within’s Desire Under the Elms on the 11th and the Olympia Dukakis vehicle Vigil at The Mark Taper Forum on the 17th.

Lenny Henry and cast in The Comedy of Errors Photo: Johan Persson/NT 2011

And just in case you thought the holidays would be slow around here, I’m off to London over the New Year with full reports on the Royal Opera’s revival of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under Anthony Pappano and another outing of Verdi’s La Traviata with Ermonela Jaho, Stephen Costello, and Paolo Gavanelli. On the theater side there it’s mostly comedies with Graham Linehan’s adaptation of The Ladykillers, the National Theater’s One Man, Two Guvnors in the West End, and the new production of The Comedy Errors at the NT’s Olivier Theater. So have a great month and a Happy Holiday.

Unoccupied

2011-12-02T13:35:00.001-08:00

NY Phil and Daniel Harding: Photo mine

I spent my first 24 hours or so in New York the weekend mostly at Lincoln Center. I wasn’t alone. After seeing The Metropolitan Opera’s spectacular production of Glass’ Satyagraha when it opened, I returned for another viewing. It was a particularly emotional performance and even more intense than I remember. Richard Croft, who sang Gandhi, sounded a little under the weather, but he, like the rest of the cast, were totally invested. Upon leaving the house, I saw the 200 or so people behind a barricade standing along Columbus Avenue outside of the plaza as part of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. According to numerous other sources, Glass himself and other artists such as Laurie Anderson were there, but I didn’t see any of them as I left. Given that there were more exiting audience members on the plaza than protestors supposedly being kept out of the same area, the whole scene came off as arbitrary and unfocused with people pretty much going where they wanted as a handful of police officers looked on.

The revolution had apparently moved on by the next morning. I had returned to the plaza and Avery Fisher Hall for a performance from the New York Philharmonic led by conductor Daniel Harding. The program consisted of the Deryck Cooke version of Mahler’s 10th Symphony. It’s a piece still met with some raised eyebrows in that Mahler had not completed the work before his death and had requested the sketches and drafts be burnt in the event of his death. But you know Alma. Over the intervening years, a number of folks took a crack at completing the other movements of the symphony besides the well-known Adagio. Cooke’s version from the early 1970s has gotten a fair amount of traction. Its advocates have included Simon Rattle, so given that Rattle’s one-time protégée Harding is leading the work’s first NY Philharmonic performance in 25 years, it seems logical. Harding doesn’t exude the kind of personal charisma from the stage so in demand from conductors his age these days. And he’s not beyond a tepid, overly polished performance as evidenced by his appearances with the Dresden Staatskapelle last year on tour in the U.S.

But Friday’s performance was excellent with Harding tapping into a very Mahlerian sound whether or not the music being performed was unquestionably his. Harding’s biggest strength was giving the work a sense of unity. When he reached the Finale, admittedly a very different point than the opening Adagio, there was a sense of things coming full circle, fading into the distance much as the work creeps up from the distance to begin with. There was excellent and well-managed contrast with Harding eliciting delicate tender playing in the wake of thundering crescendos. The numerous tempo changes sounded like second-nature to Harding and he proved masterful at maintaining tension through pauses particularly in the lead up to the finale. I’ll leave the rest to your own discovery. The show repeats one more time on Saturday night if you’re in town.

Don't Speak

2011-12-01T14:26:00.001-08:00

Darcy Fowers as Edie Sedgwick Photo: Steven Gunther/REDCAT 2011

A lot of words come to mind when one thinks of 60s icon Edie Sedgwick: beautiful, inspirational, fashionable, pretentious, unpredictable, tragic. And much as Sedgwick served as an inspiration for Andy Warhol in the 60s, she’s continued to serve as muse for other artists. The most recent of these may be former Bauhaus and Love and Rockets frontman David J. He’s taken her life as inspiration for a short play with songs entitled Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick) which returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday at the REDCAT downtown. And there is a certain achievement in the play, which was entirely written and directed by David J, considering that the piece itself encapsulates all of those Sedgwick qualities, both good and bad into 90 minutes. Silver and Gold can be lovely to look at and stylish but it is equally bogged down with its own pretension and problems.

The evening begins with a white stage area containing two risers covered in white scrims that will be used for a variety of projected images. David J and his band, who took no bows at the end of the show, were stationed on the three levels of one of these. In the center of the stage was a silver couch and a small table with a toilet to the side surrounded by several heart-shaped mylar balloons. As the music begins, a strobe light goes off and we watch a figure in a wheel chair, with the body of a man and a horse’s head, wheel its way across the stage. That horse/man is Norihc (James Duval) who acts as a periodic one creature chorus for the largely biographical story that follows, drawing allusions to mythology throughout. Soon after, the show’s protagonist and only other speaking part, Edie herself, arrives all winsome and full of movement. Sedgwick is played by Darcy Fowers and she gives a physically involved performance filled with dance moves and posing that are highly evocative of Sedgwick’s particular time and place. Much of this movement is accompanied by the original pop songs written and performed by David J with his band during the show. The sound will be familiar to anyone who has followed his career, and the songs, which all directly refer to Sedgwick’s life and legacy, are the most enjoyable part of the show. As the songs play, Fowers dances about without singing or speaking and at these moments the character of Sedgwick most comes to life.

Where the show runs into significant trouble is in the theatrical department. Sedgwick’s monologues about the various episodes in her life are both pedestrian and poorly written. It’s packed to the rafters with clichés about beauty and art and at several moments produced small bursts of inappropriate laughter from the audience. When the heroin-addled Sedgwick in a long black wig rolls off the couch onto the floor and begins crawling towards the toilet, you know there’s going to be trouble, and there is. The dialogue is delivered with a rather forced tone that sounded inauthentic to my ear. Having never heard Sedgwick speak, I suppose that this may, in fact, be the way she sounded and the performance was trying to capture a sort of historical authenticity. But when each vignette leaves you wondering if it is the last one or not, something isn’t clicking. Finally however, the end for both Edie and the audience arrives. There is plenty of tragedy in Sedgwick’s story, and undoubtedly a great theatrical story in it. David J has managed to tap into that with his music, but Silver and Gold doesn’t manage to translate that successfully onto the stage. The show continues through this weekend at REDCAT downtown.

The Villagers it Takes

2011-11-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

Charlayne Woodard Photo: Craig Schwartz/CTG 2011

Charlayne Woodard is no relation to Alfre Woodard. But ironically the former Ms. Woodard’s solo show, The Night Watcher, which recently opened at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City, begins with an unexpected phone call from her more famous namesake. Charlayne Woodard, as she describes herself in this largely autobiographical work, is a “blue collar actor” living and working in Los Angeles. The phone call is a surprise solicitation from Alfre for Charlayne and her husband to adopt a baby that is about to be born in a nearby hospital to a young mother who will be unable to care for it. Charlayne contemplates the offer briefly, but then turns it down after reflecting on the real responsibilities of raising a child. In the following two hours with intermission, Ms. Woodard repeats related scenarios in a number of variations. While she and her husband remain willfully and happily childless themselves, she is repeatedly drawn into numerous relationships with other young people as a godparent, family friend, or “auntie”. She becomes a parent by proxy as one of the key villagers involved in raising these particular children.

The vignettes that make up The Night Watcher, which had a New York run in fall of 2009, revolve around the often traumatic and always emotional stories of these children and Ms. Woodard’s attempts to help guide them in moments of poor behavior or severe crisis. The material can be tough at times, but not graphic. And it is often touching, outright tear-jerking material. I'll defer from saying much more since the stories have the most power when they're fresh. But let it be said that abuse and social ills lurk around most bends in the road.

Ms. Woodard is excellent in this. She shows mastery of the essential skills needed to pull off a solo show. She is engaging and an expert storyteller. She manages multiple characters simultaneously with ease. But the material, as heartbreaking as it is, doesn't always make for great theater. The vignettes take similar courses and by the time the audience arrives at the last one. the resolution of it can be easily predicted. The stories of the children in Ms. Woodard's life often work much better than the larger narrative about her own life choices and psychological make up. Although the material that proceeds the final story of Ms. Woodard's confrontation with an African man on the New York subway attempts to answer questions of her motivation that have been strangely absent earlier in the work, the final explanation comes off as defensive and ironically unnecessary. But there is beautiful storytelling here and spending two hours in Charlayne Woodard's warm, glowing and captivating presence is far from unpleasant.

10 Questions for...Anonymous 4's Susan Hellauer

2011-11-29T06:44:00.000-08:00

The members of anonymous 4: Susan Hellauer, Ruth Cunningham, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, and Marsha Genensky Photo: Chris Carroll

There is something undeniably cool about Anonymous 4. The four women who comprise this vocal ensemble committed primarily to medieval polyphony and chant have been nothing less than musical trailblazers for the last quarter century. Their performances, which have been seen all over the world, are based on a unique combination of historical research and musical acumen, that make for a unique contemporary experience. Their visits are ones to treasure, and the four vocalists currently in the ensemble - Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, will soon return to Southern California. Theses two programs at UC Riverside (on Dec 2) and Santa Monica’s Jacaranda music series (on Dec 3) will feature favorites of their lengthy recording career and, perhaps surprisingly to some, a world premiere from composer David Lang, the wood and the vine. All of this also takes place following the release of their most recent Harmonia Mundi recording Secret Voices. The release marks the return of the group to the Codex Las Huelgas, a 13th-century manuscript with chant and polyphony used in a Cistercian convent. It's absolutely lovely. But before those highly recommended performances, one of the Anonymous 4’s great scholars and artists, Susan Hellauer, took a moment to sit down for the Out West Arts 10 Questions.

You’ve been a part of Anonymous 4 throughout the group’s rise as one of the world’s premiere early music ensembles. What’s it like being America’s rock stars of medieval polyphony?

We definitely have gotten recognition — hard work and sheer persistence can pay off! I think it's the same as it is for most people who receive recognition in their chosen fields. It's not so much "that's nice!" but more "what's next? how do I top that?" We're always looking for something that is new and different for us but that lets us remain true to who we are. There's so much behind-the-scenes work on repertoire, research and rehearsal that there's not much time left over to sit on one's laurels, so to speak. AND we try not to read too much of our press, for better or worse. We just keep marching forward.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Anonymous 4 is the medieval music research and scholarship that has gone into the group’s performances and recording. How much is being a musical detective part of being in the group?

It's a large part of it, and constitutes my dream job. I have degrees in musicology, but I knew early on and very well that normal musicology was not in the cards for me. So having the knowledge about the period and the repertoire that has survived has made it easier for me to put programs together. BUT, I do consult full-time musicologists about repertoires that are more obscure, controversial in some way, or survive in notation that is difficult or ambiguous to decipher. Musicologists now are much much more willing to share their work and their insights than their ancestors were, say 30 years ago and more. It's really a new world of cooperation and collaboration between musicologists and performers now.

What do you enjoy most about performing together on the road?

The audiences. It's our privilege and honor to bring our programs to them, especially when young singers are out there. To walk out to a full house in a great venue, with people of all ages and stages of life sitting out there . . . there's really nothing better. There's an episcopal hymn that has the words " . . . mystic sweet communion" in it -- that's how it feels.

What’s the biggest surprise for you about the public’s enthusiastic reception of Anonymous 4?

It has to be something I just alluded to above -- the great range of ages of our fans, from young to old. This never ceases to amaze me, especially as the audience for classical chamber music seems to be greying… BUT BUT BUT… there are fabulous young chamber music ensembles coming up and on the scene who are completely revamping ideals and aims of chamber music. The Kronos Quartet was out in front, but there's a whole wave of new groups who will surpass us all.

You’ll be making two appearances in Southern California in early December at UC Riverside and the Jacaranda music series in Santa Monica featuring a new work from David Lang, the wood and the vine. What’s the best part about working with a living composer?

It's that collaboration on creating a new work of art. We were thinking about him, then he started thinking about us, then he wrote a piece and we sang it for him. He tweaked it a little bit, he let us know the affect that he was after, modifying our sound and approach a little bit . . . all of us with the same goal. Very satisfying!

How does singing early music inform your performance of contemporary compositions?

Our ensemble sense, our "unity of intent" informs our early music singing — and it's just what we do for all music we sing. The sum is greater than the parts, and we do NOT alter the individual sounds of our voices, which are VERY different from each other. We determine the goal, direction and shape of each line, the weight of the words and the music, and then we agree on all those things expressively, and the voices come together. It's really no different in any repertoire.

Anonymous 4’s most recent Harmonia Mundi Release Secret Voices returns the group to music of the 13th and 14th centuries. What’s so special to the group about music from this period in particular?

The early years of polyphonic composition (as opposed to improvisation, which was going on for centuries in western music before it was written down) did not observe the now-common "SATB" range designations. The lines overlap, crisscross, in a polyphonic tapestry. We find this sort of writing very compatible with our almost-equal ranges, and it sounds (in our opinion) fabulous in higher voices, where the patterns of overlap and crisscross are a little more discernible to the ear than they would be in lower voices.

When should I clap?

Ha ha — very funny! But a good question. Most medieval pieces are quite short — a minute or three — and it's one of our biggest challenges to create a cohesive, flowing program out of these little miniatures. We once attended a concert at a European festival presented by a very famous medieval music vocal ensemble. They were singing 13th-century motets (VERY beautifully) but there was a full stop and applause after each tiny piece, which made it hard to get an overall impression of the "show." So we group pieces together and hope that our audience will clap where they see the breaks in the program. But, really, we're not all that fussy.

A tempestuous tenor destroys your iPod. What music on it will you miss most?

Actually, I don't really listen to an iPod. I think that the earbuds are very harmful to hearing, and I already have some hearing loss in my right ear. AND I think that constantly listening to music destroys its specialness. Silence is important — without it music is meaningless — go ahead and jog around the lake or the park just listening to the environment. Then go home and treat yourself to a Beethoven symphony, The Beatles, the Mozart or Brahms clarinet quintet, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schumann's Dichterliebe, anything by Josquin des Pres, Bruce Molsky, with his inimitable fiddle, guitar, banjo and voice. OR EVEN BETTER: pick up that uke, that banjo, that guitar, the concertina, the recorder, the harmonica, a couple of spoons, and MAKE SOME MUSIC YOU GUYS! It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be your own.

What’s the next big thing we should be looking for from Anonymous 4?

We'll be working on a full-length work by David Lang, called love fail — of which the wood and the vine is the first section. We'll be creating a new program called Marie & Marion — 13th century music again — just can't stay away — for 2013. We're thinking about one more Hildegard program, and one more American traditional program…we think and then we sing; that's pretty much what we do.

The Gift of Music

2011-11-28T09:44:00.000-08:00

Don’t kid yourself. Nobody really wants two front teeth or romance for Christmas. They want what they can’t have, and in lieu of that, they’ll take meaningless stuff that dulls the pain in the meantime. So to help you with this, I’ve put together my own little holiday gift guide. So if you’re one of those who feels compelled to participate in the orgiastic consumerism that is Christmas shopping in the U.S. (and trust me I’ve been there) here’s a collection of things I know I’d be pretty frigging thrilled to unwrap on the big day. I think they'd make great gifts for any classical music and/or opera lover you may know as well.

1. Let's start with the recent Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. Evelino Pidó conducts the Vienna State Opera in this performance filmed for Deutsche Grammophon starring Anna Netrebko and Elena Garanca in 2011. If you saw the Metropolitan Opera’s production of this bel canto sizzler, do yourself a favor and take a look at how its really done.

Photo: Clive Barda

2. Tickets to see Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic December 2 through 4th. It will seem like old times when Salonen returns to L.A. in a week with a program that includes the premiere of newly reconstructed fragments of a score to Shostakovich’s unfinished comic opera, Orango as well as his Symphony No.4 Yes it’s prior to the holiday, but it’s a chance to hear the orchestra lead by the conductor who helped make them one of the world's greatest on an evening with familiar collaborators like Peter Sellars. Or if you live in the Bay area, you could go see EPS conduct his own 2012 Grawemeyer Award wining Violin Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony on December 8-10.

3. One of the most exciting U.S. operatic debuts this year by my ear was Lucy Crowe’s appearance in Handel’s Hercules in Chicago last spring. She’s also kicked off a series of recordings on Harmonia Mundi with Il caro Sassone, “The Dear Saxon”, a collection of works composed by Handel during his time in Italy. One of my favorite vocal performance collections of the year with the help of Harry Bicket and The English Concert.

4. For something a bit more historical and instrumental, the Canadian Broadcasting Company has recently reissued the entire series of documentaries and specials that Glenn Gould made for them between 1954 and 1977 on DVD. The set includes a wide range of material in the original uncut format for over 19 hours of viewing.

Domingo as Simon Boccanegra Photo: Catherine Ashmore/ROH

5. Nothing beats live opera though, and surely one of the hottest tickets in L.A. next year will be tenor Placido Domingo singing the baritone title role in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra with Los Angeles Opera starting February 11th. The cast includes Ana Maria Martinez, Vitalij Kowaljow, Paolo Gavanelli (!!), and Stefano Secco under conductor James Conlon. Domingo’s performance in this role have been hailed around the world and it’s a great chance to see him onstage right here in town.

6. One of the best received opera productions of the past year was a return engagement of Lully’s Atys played by Les Arts Florissant under the baton of William Christie. For those of us not able to make it to New York for this Baroque gem, FraMusica has just released what may be the opera video release of the year on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Sahr Ngaujah in Fela! Photo: Monique Carboni 2009

7. If your looking for something a little lest oriented toward classical music, you can’t go wrong with a pair of tickets to see the touring production of Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones’ musical Fela! which will appear at the Ahmanson theater in Los Angeles starting December 14 for a six week run. The show was a high-energy barn burner with a red hot live band in New York and London and will surely make anyone on your list with an interest in world music thrilled.

8. Yes it’s elaborate re-packaging or previously released material, but no one does this quite like Harmonia Mundi these days and Lumières is the ideal gift for anyone wanting to hear more of the music that made the 18th Century. Included in the sets 30 CDs are three complete operas and many, many other works, some of them under the direction of label-favorite René Jacobs. Among the contents are Haydn symphonies, Vivaldi concertos and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. As an alternative, there’s Jacob’s recently released recording of Handel’s Agrippina to consider as well.

9. Or how about some good old-fashioned pop music? You can’t go wrong with one of the best pop recordings of the year, which in case you must ask would include PJ Harvey’s mercury Prize winning Let England Shake, Gabriel Kahane’s Where Are the Arms, and Bjork’s Biophilia Take your pick.

10. And just in case you want a gift that doesn’t involve sitting in the dark and watching someone else perform, how about Evelyn Rillé and Johannes Ifkovits' The Opera Cooks which is available in English through the Metropolitan Opera gift shop online. This cook book collects some of the favorite dishes from the world’s biggest vocal stars with some highly amusing photography. A certain pleaser for any opera fan.

The (New) House of Elliott,or, What You Will

2011-11-27T22:18:00.001-08:00

Max Lawrence (Fabian), Deborah Strang (Maria), and Apollo Dukakis (Sir Toby Belch) Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2011

On Saturday I headed over to Pasadena to see the new kid in town. Although already 20 years old, A Noise Within, is changing the theater landscape in L.A. again by transitioning from being Glendale’s premiere repertory theater company to being Pasadena’s with their move to the historic Stuart Pharmaceuticals building on Foothill Blvd. The powers that be in Glendale, unable to realize when they are about to lose a good thing, dropped the ball allowing A Noise Within to make a move from a dilapidated and cramped space on Brand Boulevard into a new, more permanent home that is the theatrical equivalent of winning the lottery. That’s not to say the company didn’t work incredibly hard to make this move happen, having raised million of dollars in the most inhospitable economic climate to make this dream a reality. They and their many supporters have worked long and hard for this move and the contrast between the new and former sites is immense.

Remember those cramped miniscule restrooms? Gone. Recall climbing those flights of stairs or waiting for the unpredictable elevator? No more. How about the uncomfortable, tiny seats? The new space has double the capacity with modern, comfortable and closer seating all around the thrust stage. The new location also boasts Edward Durell Stone’s mid-century modern façade complete with its fountain and beautiful clean lines while vastly increasing the space for virtually everything the company could want to do from storage and dressing rooms to ample space for audience services. If you’ve attended ANW performances in Glendale in the past, your jaw may well drop at the transformation, which makes the company seem less like a scrappy start-up and more like the seasoned troupe and educational powerhouse they are.

But A Noise Within is still a theater company and they kicked off their season at the end of last month with a new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It’s an exuberant and joyful comedy that comes as a celebration for the company and its future. Director Julia-Rodriguez Elliott has moved the action of the play from Illyria to an imagined mid-century Cuba at Carnival time. It’s bright, colorful and filled with dancing. But like any organization that has undergone a major transition, this Twelfth Night is a reminder that A Noise Within will also have to take some time to artistically adjust to the new space as well. The Glendale site may have been cramped, but it provided for, an albeit forced, intimacy. The Pasadena auditorium is by comparison cavernous and drawing an audience in may not involve or require all of the tricks it did previously.

Rodriguez-Elliott’s direction and her cast were on emotional overdrive on Saturday with everything pitched just a few levels higher than necessary at times. The energy sometimes overwhelmed the poetry and natural humor of the text. The anachronisms set up by the change of setting were mostly handled well. While it was somewhat odd watching sword fights replaced with machete battles, the voodoo ritual complete with (fake) dead chicken in Act IV when Sir Topas taunts the imprisoned Malvolio, played by the company’s co artistic-direct Geoff Elliott, was priceless. There were some lovely performances from Deborah Strang as Maria and Anthony Mark Barrow as Feste among others. So much bodes well for A Noise Within in their new space. The company has great talent resources and has proven over the years that it can come up with inventive and creative solutions under tight constraints. It's certain that they'll continue to excel now that they have much more room to maneuver.

Song to the Siren

2011-11-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

Anders Hillborg Photo: Rickard Eriksson

Esa-Pekka Salonen is back with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend and all is right with the world. In fact on Friday night, you might be able for an instant to forget the last three or so years had ever happened given the combination of artistic forces assembled for this week’s show. Salonen led two works by Beethoven, the Leonore Overture No. 2 and the Second Piano Concerto along with the world premiere of a major new work for orchestra and chorus by Swedish composer, Anders Hillborg. The soloists for the pieces were long-time Salonen collaborators – Emanuel Ax on piano and in the Hillborg work, vocalists Anne Sofie von Otter and Hila Plitmann. And while the show sounded a little rough and tumble at moments, the evening on a whole was a big success for the nearly capacity and very enthusiastic crowd.

The Beethoven sounded like quintessential Salonen: clean and not overworked. Ax is perhaps the ideal piano soloist for Salonen with this particular concerto. He gives a warm, polished performance that is nether drenched with Romantic embellishment nor unassuming reserve. His approach is clean and straightforward providing a compliment to Salonen’s orchestral approach. The Leonora Overture No. 2 that preceded this very familiar concerto was a bit more of an oddity. More dramatic and severe than the music that finally made it into Beethoven’s only opera, the Leonora Overture No. 2 has numerous stops and starts that play perfectly to Salonen's strengths. But the best was yet to come.

The Hillborg world premiere that followed, Sirens, was a surprisingly large one for orchestra, two female soloists, and a 32-member chorus. Of the four world and U.S. premieres presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic this season, this was by far the most ambitious and satisfyingly executed. As the title suggests, the 30-minute, single movement orchestral work is based on the famous story from Homer's Odyssey. The English language text, adapted and added to by the composer, concerns Ulysses' (Odysseus' Roman name as used in Sirens) encounter with the mythological creatures who lure sailors to their deaths on a rocky shoal by seducing them with their beautiful voices. In the Odyssey, Ulysses outwits the sirens by ordering his men to block their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of the ship, promising not to release him no matter how he threatens or pleads until they have arrived to safety. Hillborg's Sirens is not an oratorio or narrative of these events as much as a representation of what Ulysses might have heard floating in the sea.

The work calls for a large orchestra, which is often more restrained than thundering. The music for the most part involves several lengthy discordant tones held and passed back and forth between various sections of the orchestra like sea tides. The beauty and underlying horror of the sirens is reflected from the very beginning in these slowly shifting chords. About 10 minutes into the work, these chords are joined at times by sequences of rapid repeating single notes taking a page directly from the handbook of American minimalism. Atop this ocean of sound are soloists Anne Sofie von Otter, Hila Plitmann, and 32 male and female members of the Los Angles Master Chorale. They alternately plead and seduce with promises of joyous release and entry into another world. The choral music is quite beautiful and really the heart of the entire work. Plitmann and von Otter sounded great here. Plitmann managed recurrent sets of very high tones and von Otter came off much better than in her last L.A. Phil outings with a tessitura much better suited for her. The chorus, which used both men's and women's voices, provided a much richer sense of the sirens voices than simple seductive sea vixens.

Though Sirens is lovely and the L.A. Philharmonic had gone to lengths to give the work theatrical lighting, the work does suffer a bit from the lack of dramatic development. There is no sense of Ulysses or his crew's presence, nor is there a sense of real resolution to the piece as if the sailors have finally passed the sirens or that the creatures have any reaction to the fact that their deadly songs have been escaped for the first time. Initially Sirens does employ some whispering and finger-snapping from the chorus to suggest that the deadly creatures are just out of ear-shot before coming into view. But I never got the sense once they had arrived that there was anywhere else to go. There are also a couple of weak spots in the text as well, with the sirens promising at one point to "turn you on" and imploring Odysseus to "come fly" with them. But these moments are few and could be easily addressed if Hillborg was so inclined. And Sirens and Salonen couldn't have been more warmly received by the crowd on Friday. It was a lovely program and great evening from the L.A. Philharmonic's much missed maestro. The show repeats on Saturday and Sunday.

Louder Than Bombs

2011-11-25T23:02:00.000-08:00

Morrissey at The Music Box in LA Photo: mine

The singer Morrissey has managed to maintain a significant career in popular music longer than many of his contemporaries. Thirty years on, he manages to fill concert halls with ease and has been a regular fixture in Southern California where he maintains an enthusiastic following long after his days leading the landmark 80s band, The Smiths. On Wednesday, after an originally scheduled appearance on The Jimmy Kimmel Show fell through, Morrissey and his current band were scheduled for an extra performance in Hollywood at The Music Box prior to an appearance this coming Saturday at The Shrine Auditorium. And while a Morrissey concert in Los Angeles is not unusual, and the material in the show was mostly from his most recent recordings, there was an unusual serendipity to the evening.

First off, the show at The Music Box took place directly across the street from The Pantages Theater where another 80s alternative music icon, Robert Smith and The Cure were wrapping up the third night of concerts featuring the band’s first three recordings reproduced live in their entirety. Morrissey and The Cure have a longstanding, though largely manufactured, rivalry and the singer on Wednesday couldn’t avoid taking a shot at the band on Wednesday ironically welcoming the audience to “the sunny side of the street”. But as unusual a coincidence the logistics of these two shows were, there was another, more poignant shadow cast across the performance, that of Shelagh Delaney. Delaney, the famous British playwright and author of 1958’s A Taste of Honey, has been a prominent figure as a muse or point of reference for Morrissey’s work throughout his entire career. Her neo-realist drama and frank treatment of British working class life and homosexuality fit perfectly into the cosmology of symbols that have preoccupied the intentionally ambiguous lyrics of Morrissey; and his muse even got her image placed on the cover of The Smiths’ Louder Than Bombs in 1987.

Delaney died at the age of 72 just 3 days before the performance, and although Morrissey did not mention this fact from the stage, her image haunted the entire evening. Before the vocalist and the young men who make up his current band arrived on stage, a filmed interview with a young Delaney played. Her picture remained on a screen behind the performers throughout most of the remainder of the 100-minute show. Which provided another sort of contrast. The Morrissey who appeared on Wednesday is not the effete waif many remember from the 80s but the boxer/tough man who graces the covers of his most recent recordings including Years of Refusal. The set list was taken largely from these last few recordings, and while there were some upbeat moments early on, the last third of the show was populated with a more somber, downbeat mood. After a graphic and Thanksgiving-tinged “Meat is Murder”, he moved through “Satellite”, “Scandinavia”, and “Speedway” before the encore “Still Ill”. There were no tears shed on stage. Morrissey appeared to toy with the audience at times, leering at those whose hands he’d just shaken.

In the end it was a well-played rock show. And Morrissey played every-bit the rock star even into his 50s. He tore off his shirt at the end of the evening tossing it into the audience and exposing his chest. Which might have been slightly more exciting than the life-size naked cut out (with a 45 covering his genitals) on sale at the merchandise counter in the lobby. But all the swagger and sexuality couldn’t replace the feeling of time passing for all of us. Our heroes pass on. We grow older. We hate it when our friends become successful. These themes, not unusual in Morrissey’s work, seemed more present than normal on Wednesday for a show that ended up being less about nostalgia and more about what we lose along the way.

Rise and Fall

2011-11-22T22:35:00.001-08:00

Raymond Aceto, Ferruccio Furlanetto, and Stefan Margita. Photo: Dan Rest/LOC 2011

Please tell me that if you’ve been able to get to the Lyric Opera Chicago’s production of Boris Godunov you’ve done so. It’s a smashing one. While in Chicago over the weekend, I also got a chance to see Sir Andrew Davis lead this rich and well embellished performance with the best non-native Russian speaking cast I’ve yet heard in this opera. Of course, casting in Chicago is some of the most impeccable in the whole country and all of the principals prove as engaging as actors as they are vocalists. The title role goes to Ferruccio Furlanetto who does kings who are losing their grip like nobody else. If you’ve seen his Philip II you know what I mean. His is not a very Russian sound, of course, but the smoothness and power of his voice make up for it. He made Boris’ death one of the most engrossing I remember.

Then there’s Stefan Margita as Shuisky. I am more and more in thrall of this performer with each viewing. His performances of Loge in San Francisco were unforgettable and he should be the perfect addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s Das Rheingold cast next spring. Given how well he handled one of the most duplicitous characters in opera, it’s no surprise that his scheming, turn-coated Shuisky should radiate so much heat. Of course, this is a production, originally for San Francisco Opera under the direction of Stein Winge, that is mostly interested in the political machinations contained within the story. Thus Shuisky rises in his importance as a mastermind behind Boris’ eventual downfall. An added twist in the final stage image puts the point on this that might look somewhat overworked in lesser hands. But Margita’s ability to portray an icy manipulator with a Cheshire smile makes it work exceedingly well. (I don’t remember this gesture from the most recent revival of Winge’s production in San Francisco and the director of Chicago’s revival, Julia Pevzner, may have reinserted or re-emphasized it.)

There are many other fine performances here. The always enjoyable and big voiced Andrea Silvestrelli sang a Pimen that was as pious as Shuisky was evil. Raymond Aceto was notable as Varlaam and Erik Nelson Werner made much out of his two scenes as the pretender Grigori. Another familiar voice I was glad to hear was David Cangelosi’s as the comical Missail.

All this excellent casting does make a big difference. Winge’s production can be a bit dry at times. In an opera about pageantry with big chorus numbers, the sparse raked wooden stage that curves up into the flyspace upstage can be wanting visually. But it is also unobtrusive in the way it provides for good vocal projection and easy entrances and exits for the large chorus. There are several openings in the set's curved wall upstage and panels with Russian church iconography appear during key scenes. Still the performances here are so strong that the set and surrounding seem to vanish from focus. The interaction between these characters is the real joy of this performance. Lyric Opera has managed to put together a show that is much more than the sum of its parts with a sharp eye to casting and a strong hand in the pit. There are three more performances in the coming week.

California Love

2011-11-21T07:14:00.000-08:00

How much worse can classical music criticism get in the Los Angeles Times? In particular, I'm referring to the increasingly poor quality of what the organization's lead classical music critic, Mark Swed, has been producing. It has gotten to the point that one wonders if our region's largest news organization isn't asking itself if this is the best coverage it can provide of one of the key components of L.A.'s cultural life. This year Swed has managed to attack the use of most online social networking for classical music as “technological fascism” and to blithely use the Japanese tsunami in March as a framing device to describe the powers of Gustavo Dudamel (which he and his publisher later retracted, although the copy lives on in news aggregation sites and screen captures). He continues to offer Los Angeles readers little besides blind boosterism for their local orchestra. And now he’s rekindled one of his other favorite pastimes - picking fights with young East Coast composers.

This all started with Swed’s positive review of Los Angeles’ young and adventurous chamber orchestra wildUp on Saturday. (Or you can read my more detailed account of the show if you'd like.) Of course this presented an occasion for him to take an unnecessary swipe at young East Coast composers for some unexplained reason:

Uniting pop with new music is not new. Everyone does it. In happening arts centers such as Brooklyn, virtuous young musicians insist that Minimalism and anything that iTunes happens to be promoting that week must get along. Wired urbanites making nice is always nice. But soupy Radiohead arrangements are another matter.

(Note the obligatory Radiohead reference to establish street cred. But I digress.) I assume this intro, which has almost nothing to do with the rest of the review that follows, had its intended effect – pissing off New York-based critics and musicians alike. All kinds of drama broke loose on Twitter when The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross kicked things off with this:

Which soon led to a flurry of responses from many corners including composers Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly, and critics like Daniel Stephen Johnson and Alan Kozin to name a few. Some of the best of these 140 character tidbits are as follows:

Now I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with Mr. Swed expressing unpopular opinions or opinions that I or anyone else do or don’t agree with. But I am unclear how this particular statement, in this particular piece provides any added benefit to anyone. Is it telling us more about the wildUp performance or how it fits into the greater scheme of things? Does it provide real insight into the local or national music scene? It certainly does a disservice both to the New York based artists he alludes to as well as the West Coast-based artists he is writing about in the article. At best, this Tupac/Biggie Smalls approach to arts writing is lazy journalism. Swed’s writing is increasingly cranky and out-of-touch with what's going on in the music world and what is unfamiliar within his frame of reference is often met with off-hand derision. When it comes right down to it, Los Angeles, the Times, and the local music scene deserve much better writing and much better criticism than what Swed is providing at this point.

Post-script: Although this post is not about me, I think I should say one more thing. I’m not arguing here that I am free of any of the vices I’ve mentioned here with regards to Mr. Swed. Nor is Out West Arts meant as a substitute for music writing in the Los Angeles Times. I am certainly unfair at times and have plenty of weaknesses as a writer and sometimes amateur critic. However, I am also not paid to write music criticism and OWA is not a comparable platform to the region's largest news organization. We all should expect more of Mark Swed and certainly more of the Los Angeles Times.

Island Life

2011-11-20T11:05:00.000-08:00

Amber Wagner and Brandon Jovanovich with cast in Act II of Ariadne auf Naxos. Photo: Dan Rest/LOC 2011

I can’t shake the feeling there’s a changing of the guard underway on the stages of American opera houses. I suppose that is always true with various careers either taking flight or cooling off. And there is certainly always the next big thing waiting in the wings. But it is also true that a number of young American singers have been given notable high profile assignments lately commensurate with the heat surrounding their performances in smaller roles or on smaller stages. The Metropolitan Opera and New York critics are currently in the process of anointing Angela Meade as the next bel canto star without the requisite reality TV series such titles usually require these days. Meanwhile at the Lyric Opera of Chicago where superstar soprano Renée Fleming is taking her first steps in the role of administrator, the house has been integral in thrusting one of its own Ryan Opera Center alumna, Amber Wagner, into the spotlight. Wagner is making a splash in the Wagner/Strauss corner of the soprano repertory. She was slotted into a few performances as Elsa in last season’s Lohengrin that got her very good notices. And on Saturday she stepped into the headlining spot in a revival of Ariadne auf Naxos when the originally scheduled Deborah Voigt dropped out several months ago deciding instead to concentrate on her own Brünnhilde performances in New York.

It’s a good casting decision, and a deserved step up for a singer who made a far lower profile Met Opera debut this fall as Anna in Verdi's Nabucco. And from the sound of Saturday night’s opening Ariadne performance under music director Andrew Davis, there is no reason to believe that she couldn’t be the next Wagnerian superstar. She has a big, beautiful voice with ample warmth and that requisite ability to cut through a massive orchestra. Her acting appears to be developing by leaps and bounds as well. She was much more assured this time than previously. The top part of her range still didn’t strike me as completely opened up, but there was no shouting or strain and she held the stage well against a large ensemble cast. She may not have been a marquee name going into this run, but these performances will undoubtedly bring her one step closer to that point.

Alice Coote. Photo: Dan Rest/LOC 2011

To complement Wagner, the company cast an array of young Americans in most of the major roles. Brandon Jovanovich sang Bacchus. He seems to pop up in just about anything these days, and though he an interesting singer, as with his turn as Siegmund in San Francisco last summer, he sounded a little thin for this particular role. Anna Christy, a Chicago favorite, sang Zerbinetta with a lot of flair and solid coloratura technique. However, she sounded rushed in her extended Act II aria with Davis granting her little extra space for flourishes other singers milk with abandon. René Barbera and Matthew Worth were also included in the cast as Brighella and Harlekin respectively. There were outliers in this cast of young Americans including Eike Wilm Shulte as the Music Master who was quite good opposite the other big name in the cast, Alice Coote as the Composer. Coote also has a knack for a wide variety of roles in most corners of the mezzo repertory. Her composer had the requisite power and musicality but not quite the lyrical brightness I’ve seen her muster before in Baroque roles or as Massenet’s Charlotte in Werther. She too seemed hampered somewhat by Davis’ rather restrained conducting that lacked a greater dynamic range and lushness.

But really all of these minor issues could be less noticeable if it wasn’t for the staid and uninspired staging from John Cox who was greeted with cool applause during the curtain call. The opera is set in the 18th century and Cox uses the stage-within-a-stage conceit for the production. And while all of this is certainly within the letter of the libretto, the look is tired and predictable. Act I is inexplicably dominated by a large wheel used to raise the curtain and scenery on the back stage of the set while Act II has all the pretty costumes and stand and deliver singing you could ask for. Cox has a better take on the comic elements of the story, and when Zerbinetta and her boys show up to deface the set or merrily prank Ariadne, the show is at its best. Cox seems unsure about what to do with von Hofmannsthal’s more serious moments. He sometimes covers them up with concurrent visual gags either about the set or the characters, which is preferable to when he just elects to ignore them and let them pass. But for many in the cast including Wagner, there are surely many other notable productions of this and other operas that lie ahead. And now is the time to enjoy hearing the career of a major vocalist unfold here in Chicago where Ariadne auf Naxos runs through December 11.

Cover Band

2011-11-19T00:34:00.000-08:00

Clarence Barlow. Photo: UCSB

From Freud to Foucault to Prince, the song remains the same: there’s joy (and plenty of other things) in repetition. Such was the case on Friday when L.A.’s most exciting and relevant group of young musicians, wildUp, gathered at Beyond Baroque in Venice for the latest in their increasingly frequent concert series. The exuberance of artistic director Christopher Rountree and his chamber orchestra of all trades underwent a veritable sublimation; their pure energy threatening to change physical states without notice. Friday’s broad, adventurous program had a large agenda covering everything from the mechanistic production of music à la Conlon Nancarrow and George Antheil to the sly, spirited arrangements of pop and punk rock songs that were the centerpiece of the evening. All of it played with more heart than you’re likely to see elsewhere.

The first half of the show began with an exploration of the mechanistic production of sound. Richard Valitutto (who like the entire orchestra was so impressive playing the music of Sofia Gubaidulina at REDCAT this spring) played two contemporary “piano rags" – gleefully bastardized versions of the American originals - from William Albright and William Bolcom. Building on this, he was joined by violinist Andrew Tholl for Nancarrow’s Toccata for violin and player piano with Tholl playing alongside the prerecorded and decidedly superhuman pianola. Tholl, as he did at several points in the evening, amazed with his rapid-fire playing. A movement from George Antheil’s First Sonatas for Violin and piano was next. It was introduced, fairly I think, as a musical precursor of punk rock, a point punctuated by Valitutto's ferocious attack on the score that brought out the mechanistic qualities of the music. But this was all prelude to works from composer Clarence Barlow who joined the faculty of UCSB a few years ago and was present at theperofrmance. Both works performed here by an ensemble of strings, percussion, keyboard, trumpet and clarinet started from an atonal base that soon gave way to references to popular songs. The Beatles' "Michelle" mysteriously arose from Sachets des ciseaux Insatiables with a riff from Bizet’s Habanera to wrap things up. Which was almost as deliriously amusing as the rhythmic layering used to disguise Prince’s “Sexy MF” within Septima de facto. The freewheeling excitement of both of Barlow's pieces couldn't have been better suited for the polymorphously effervescent wildUp players.

But the goal here was more than cover band idolatry, and Rountree insisted, going into the second half of the evening that these performances were meant to reflect wildUp’s own spirit and approach to music. What followed were varied, sometimes witty, and often attractive arrangements by Tholl, Chris Kallmyer, and others of seminal punk rock songs from Fear, Black Flag, The Misfits, and X-Ray Spex among others. The players remained the same with additional drums and electric guitar from sound artist Kallmyer. The sound was fierce and sizable in its own way complete with amplified bassoon riffs (courtesy of Archie Carey) that would not have sounded out of place on the original versions of any the songs of the aforementioned artists. And while things didn't quite get as loud as the available ear plugs at the door might have suggested, it was a unique version of the original punk sound. Most of the vocal lines were left intact with various players taking turns including bass player Maggie Hasspacher who lead on X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" and made a unique addition to The Misfits' "Where Eagles Dare". Even Rountree himself turned to face the audience at one point during a rearrangement of Dirty Projectors' arrangement of Black Flag’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie” to sing-shout along. And while it may not have achieved the same decibels it was decidedly a punk rock moment all its own and true to Rountree's promise it was an arrangement and performance uniquely wildUp's own. The evening was heartfelt and organic with the kind of passionate music making and energy you don’t need a marketing campaign to convince you of. The show repeats again on Saturday, and you can check out the rest of their plans for the season on the website.

I Get Delirious

2011-11-18T23:15:00.000-08:00

Emmanuelle Haïm. Photo: Simon Fowler

Emmanuelle Haïm burst onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage Thursday night for the first of three concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend. She stood out in just about every way you could imagine. The only woman scheduled to conduct any of the regular subscription Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts this season, Haïm is a Baroque music specialist and this was an all-Händel program. She carries an impressive mane of reddish-brown hair and she placed herself in a sidesaddle position on the end of the bench she would occasionally use while conducting from the harpsichord in a Tori Amos-like fashion. Händel’s music is filled with 18th-century dance rhythms, and she would often follow along with her own jerky dance-like movements throughout the evening. But perhaps the most unexpected thing about her appearance this weekend is how she managed to extract such an exciting Baroque sound out of the players of a contemporary American orchestra. And while the Los Angeles Philharmonic is no stranger to Baroque music, this performance was something special with a leaner, crisper sound more akin to a period practice ensemble than a major American orchestra whose 19th and 20th Century repertoire is its bread and butter.

Haïm, like many other Baroque specialists, has made her name over the last decade by playing primarily with her own period-practice ensemble, Le Concert d’Astrée. She’s appeared with many other orchestras as well with varying success and periodic controversy as with her last minute departure from an assignment at the Paris Opera in 2010 reportedly over rehearsal time to perfect a period-practice sound. But if there were any such issues on Thursday, one wouldn’t have known it from the performance. The show began with Händel’s Concerto Grosso in G major paired with two of the Water Music Suites. The sound was kept to scale with the thirty musicians on stage including two harpsichords and an occasional recorder. But the playing was never overly polished. Haïm managed to preserve the feel of the dance rhythms indicated in the score while maintaining a beautiful singing quality to the sound as well. It was both bracing and frequently surprising.

After the break was a performance of Il delirio amoroso, Händel's pastoral cantata that was sung by soprano Sonya Yoncheva. Again the orchestra sounded superb with a particularly nice contributions from principal oboe Ariana Ghez. Yoncheva showed reasonable coloratura technique with her rather dark hued voice. She could overpower everyone on the upper end of her range, and I sometimes wished for a bit more shading and clearer diction from her. But she was a spirited actor with a dominating physical presence and was clearly committed to the performance. In fact her rather saucy approach to the text made the pastoral goings-on seem a little less staid and a bit more delirious. But the triumph in the end was Haïm's who proved that the schism over how Baroque music is played between historically-informed specialist ensembles, and larger more general orchestral ensembles, need not be so large. There are beautiful interpretations to be made by any set of forces and this weekend in Los Angeles, local audiences have a chance to hear the best of both worlds.

I See A Light

2011-11-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

David Lang and Grant Gershon with members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Photo: Ken Hively

I’m a sucker for symmetry. Give me a program arranged with an eye to mathematical balance or structural parallels and there is a part of me that can’t resist. Sunday’s Los Angeles Master Chorale program was just one of those shows where the interwoven structure of the program was something to admire in itself. The evening was built around two contemporary compositions, each a take on a traditional religious musical form, and paired it with a Bach motet. Both of the contemporary works, James Newton’s Mass and David Lang’s the little match girl passion were expansions of earlier versions composed for four soloists with musical accompaniment. And I would argue both pieces involved a rhythmic complexity that put Music Director Grant Gershon and his excellent singers to the test. It was the kind of program that sets the LA Master Chorale apart from their peers, and it was heartening to see such a large, interested and committed audience at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The first half of the evening started out with Bach’s Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied paired with Newton’s Mass. The Bach was full-bodied and musical overall, though perhaps in need of a bit more precision overall. Newton’s treatment of the Mass was receiving its U.S. Premiere. It had its own internal balance to admire with the outer sets of movements paired in their own musical structure and tone, the Kyrie with the Agnus Dei and the Gloria with the Sanctus. Newton is perhaps best known for his work with jazz musicians and ensembles, and the same rhythmic influences could be felt here, although it was subtle. The music had many clear connections with an American academic modernism that was rigorously produced if not always emotionally connected. The center piece of the Mass was the Credo, a quieter passage sung by the Master Chorale’s own barihunk-in-residence, Abdiel Gonzalez. He deftly maneuvered some tricky passages here adding another noteworthy solo turn with the LAMC.

After the break and Bach’s Fürchte dich nicht, came the showpiece of the evening, Lang’s setting of Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the Little Match Girl which won the composer a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. This is sad material. And I mean Dancer in the Dark sad. Lang’s direct and understated use of text heightens this effect creating in increasing emotional punch over fifteen movements where bursts of recitative are interspersed with some of the most powerful vocal passages he’s written. The work was originally written for a vocal quartet with percussion and it was this version that Grant Gershon himself performed in last January as part of the Jacaranda music series in Santa Monica. The difference between that version and this one with a full chorus is striking on a number of levels. The chorus softens some of the stark edges and halting musical passages that are filled with frequent starts and stops. But at the same time the chorus gives the “commentary” passages, those where the chorus is reflecting on the emotional content of the action as opposed to moving the story forward, an additional weight they were missing in the smaller version. The effect can be devastatingly sad and the crowd was enthralled through the very end when Lang appeared to a huge ovation. This was one of those great LA Master Chorale moments where the superb singers that make up the group got a chance to shine in difficult music they are well suited for. And it was a performance to remember.

Pleased to Meet Me

2011-11-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

Ronan Raftery (not in the current touring production) and Dana Gartland in The Comedy of Errors. Photo: Fiona Moorhead

I’ve seen a lot of Shakespeare this year. I guess that’s true every year, as well, but this year seems particularly brimming with everything, from King Lear in New York (on two different occasions) to Julius Caesar in Oregon. So, with all the competition, who would guess that the home of consistently the best Shakespeare I’ve seen all year is at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica? They hosted a smashing Merchant of Venice last winter from Theater for a New Audience and on Saturday, the venue welcomed back Shakespeare’s Globe Theater for their third visit in as many years, this time with their recent production of The Comedy of Errors. The troupe has been beloved here going as far back as Mark Rylance’s days with the company, but the Globe’s association with The Broad Stage has been very fruitful with satisfying touring productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Perhaps most striking about Shakepeare’s Globe is how physically little it takes to get it right. This point was driven home after seeing the elaborate reconstruction of the Globe Theater at The Park Avenue Armory this summer under the auspices of a residency from The Royal Shakespeare Company. A huge edifice, big casts, and elaborate sets rarely amounted to good theater there. But the Globe players, who are often traveling light, manage to impress with their focus on the best parts of Shakespeare – the language and desire to connect with the audience. The Comedy of Errors was directed by Rebecca Gatward and with its simplicity creates the deception that the show might be some summertime backyard lark. The set consists of little more than a large wooden pallet set upon the stage with a canvas-covered shack just behind it. Some chairs and a handful of props complete the physical stuff of the performance outside of the eight members of the ensemble and their costumes. It’s not Elizabethan dress per se, but evokes a 20th-century Turkish look with fezzes and sandals.

And yet the production feels large with its outsized comic performances. A single actor is cast for each pair of identically-named and unwittingly separated twin brothers. Antipholus is played here by the debonaire Bill Buckhurst and the servants Dromio are embodied by Fergal McElherron. This is not an unusual strategy given that there are only two scenes (one being the finale) that involve both twins in the same scene at the same time. Of course, having a single actor dash back in forth in those moments adds to the hilarity, and true to form, the Act III confrontation where one pair of Antipholus and Dromio are barred from entering their own home by the other pair, is particularly well done as the actors dash back and forth to either side of a free-standing door deftly donning and removing the few props—like a pair of glasses—used to communicate their different identities to the audience. But Gatward ups the ante in this production by having almost all of the rest of the cast take on multiple roles as well. Emma Pallant plays both the Abbess and the Courtesan in a particularly artful twist further muddling the social relationships Shakespeare is parodying. The Globe company and Gatward also strike just the right note with the numerous slapstick and low-brow elements of the play. The cast provides their own sound effects with slide whistles and drums for the pratfalls. But the whole thing is done with such a keen eye for the text and language that it never feels cynical. There is no effort to update or transform references using modern cultural ones. But there is an expansive sense of the stage and surroundings with the cast often entering, exiting, and delivering dialog from various points in the Broad Stage’s intimate space.

The show, which runs through the 27th, is perfect for older kids and just about everyone. It’s also another big success for Shakespeare’s Globe and The Broad Stage here in Los Angeles, which leaves one wanting more. So how about a two month residency sometime with the company here in Los Angeles at The Broad with five or six plays running in repertory. We could show New York how it’s done (again) and we wouldn’t even need to build a replica of the Globe Theater inside.

This Ain't No Party. This Ain't No Disco.

2011-11-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

Battaglia di San Romano (1456 ca.), Paolo Uccello

Los Angeles loves pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque. Or at least Los Angeles Philharmonic audiences do. They’re fixtures with the orchestra in both new repertory and old and have made three appearances with the orchestra already this year alone. In April they played Stravinsky under Thomas Adès and in September gave a lovely performance of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Piano’s under Juanjo Mena. Now it’s November and the sisters returned with a world premiere and new commission from Swiss composer Richard Dubugnon. The Labèques have had major successes with new compositions here before, including Louis Andriessen’s double piano concerto, The Hague Hacking, which they played in 2009 with then music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. This time around the L.A. Philharmonic's music director was nowhere to be found for the premiere, which was instead trusted to visiting conductor Semyon Bychkov. Dubugnon’s double piano concerto was inspired by the 15th-century Battle of San Romano as depicted by Paolo Uccelo (The second of the three paintings in this set is shown above). Of course one of the most omnipresent metaphors for concertos in general is the struggle between orchestra and soloist regardless of the instruments in question, so the inspiration of Medieval warfare wouldn’t seem too out of place. But Dubugnon has a number of layers and twists on the typical musical struggles. Rather than place soloists and orchestra on opposite sides of the struggle, he divides the players along other arbitrary lines. This “Battlefield” concerto pits the two pianos against one another each with their own contingent of orchestra players who are physically divided into two camps on stage as well.

The music moves through several uninterrupted movements representing stages of the conflict from a call to arms to a Funeral and Triumphant March. There are two off-stage trumpets that call players to the fray periodically on either side. Dubugnon notes that part of the musical inspiration for the piece was to avoid what he saw as the historic tendency to have both soloists in double concertos play more or less complementary parts often making it difficult to separate out the two instruments. Here the Labèques parried and thrusted back and fort throughout the length of the work. And while they did not play in unison, it is probably more accurate to say that their passages tended to mirror one another in terms of both musical tone and structure. These were solo parts that were not at all oblivious to one another, but engaged in an intimate if purportedly combative embrace. All this being said, I can’t say I was overwhelmed by the piece. There were some big dramatic moments, but the content overall seemed programmatic and didactic in the least interesting way. And despite the shifts in the battle, things tended not to vary much from section to section creating more of an exhausted sensation than a cathartic one at the end. Still, the work was more compelling than Enrico Chapela's recent concerto for electric cello, MAGNETAR, which premiered here several weeks ago. Dubugnon largely avoids the kind of endless references to popular music genres that are the hallmark of so much contemporary classical composition these days. There is an electric bass used intermittently in the "Battlefield" concerto and a few rhythmic touches here and there, but not the wholesale incorporation of jazz and blues riffs heard in recent works here by the likes of Chapela and John Adams.

Dubugnon’s concerto was paired with two quintessential Romantic pieces. First was Ravel’s Rhapsodie espagnole in the two piano version. The Labèques excel with this kind of material and the detailed wash of the sound was beautiful. After the intermission and the concerto was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. Bychkov led a warm and adequately muscular performance from the orchestra. The strings sounded great with the bigger, more robust sound they’ve developed over the last couple of seasons. This is not the most compelling music, however. The good news is that it is not Rachmaninoff’s piano music. But the Symphonic Dances especially when held up against the work of Ravel, can sound under-orchestrated and surprisingly banal. But Bychkov and the orchestra gave a top-drawer take on what there was to play. Which I suppose was a nice break after all the musical conflict that preceded it. The show repeats Saturday and Sunday.

In the Wings - Nov '11

2011-11-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

Yes, I’m a bit behind. But it’s never too late to catch up on what’s going on around town performance wise this November. There’s a lot of new(er) music leading off this months picks starting with the highly anticipated full scale performance of David Lang’s the little match girl passion that will headline the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s concert on the 13th. A four-voice chamber version of the work wowed the audience at Jacaranda last January and the show is one of the top picks this month. And speaking of Jacaranda, Santa Monica's first name in new music will host the great Calder Quartet on the 19th and 20th with a program dedicated to the music of Henryk Gorecki. Also high on the agenda are two performances from the L.A. new music collective wildUp on the 18th and 19th in Venice which will feature the music of Clarence Barlow among others. Another combination of experimental works from living composers will be highlighted when Vicki Ray gives her annual Piano Spheres recital at the Zipper Concert Hall on the 15th including a piece of her own. And lest we forget, Esa-Pekka Salonen will return to L.A. for two weeks of programming on the 25th. The first weekend will feature Beethoven and a world premiere from Anders Hillborg, Sirens. The following week will be the much anticipated premiere of the recently discovered Shostakovich operatic fragment Orango, which will arrived semi-staged on December 1. Katia and Marielle Labèque will also join the L.A. Philharmonic for a world premiere of a new double piano concerto from Richard Dubugnon starting on the 11th.

from David J's Silver for Gold. Photo: Xany Rudoff

There’s other music of course. The other big L.A. Philharmonic program this month will feature the music of Handel under the direction of Emmanuelle Haïm starting on the 17th. Perhaps as far from Handel as possible will be the Bob Mould tribute concert on the 21st at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and an appearance by Feist at the Wiltern on the 12th in support of her latest release. There’s opera as well, as Los Angeles Opera continues its run of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette starring Nino Machaidze and Vittorio Grigolo. And though not exactly operatic, former Love and Rockets frontman David J will come to REDCAT starting on the 30th with Silver for Gold a music-theater piece on Edie Sedgwick. I’ll be out of town briefly for some operatic reports as well from Chicago where Furlanetto and Stefan Margita will step into Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov on the 20th and the up and coming soprano Amber Wagner will take on the title role in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos starting on the 19th. The first of December will bring me back to New York where the Metropolitan Opera will be offering up Jonas Kaufmann in Gounod’s Faust and a return of Handel’s Rodelinda

Ronan Raftery and Miltos Yerolemou in The Comedy of Errors. Photo: Fiona Moorhead

On the theater side, Shakespeare’s Globe Theater will return to the Broad Stage starting on the 12th with a production of The Comedy of Errors while A Noise Within will continue the celebration around their new Pasadena home with a production of O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms on the 19th, which will run concurrently with their new production of Twelth Night. Center Theater Group will host the premiere of the new competitive cheerleading musical, Bring It On while the Taper continues their run of the dark comedy Vigil with Olympia Dukakis. In Culver City, the Kirk Douglas Theater will bring Charlayne Woodard‘s The Night Watcher starting on the 17th. All this and you’re still going to have to find time to start that Christmas shopping so get started and we’ll see you around town.

Back on the Chain Gang

2011-11-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

Bill Irwin, Sam Watterston, and Arian Moayed Photo: Joan Marcus/Public Theater

One last New York note: I and King Lear stopped by the Public Theater on Sunday. It was Lear’s third major appearance in New York this year following the Donmar Warehouse production with Derek Jacobi at BAM in May and the RSC offering in July as part of their residency at the Park Avenue Armory. In response, the Public Theater and director James Macdonald offered a well-cast, contemporary production that promised something unique in this Lear-heavy landscape. And given how dull the RSC showing at least had been, one would think it wouldn’t have been hard to muster something with a little more spark. But Macdonald and his excellent cast haven’t come much closer to cracking the notoriously prickly King Lear than most.

The production is set in a vacant, white-walled space with a dirt floor. There are few props and the set is mostly marked by a stage-width curtain made of chains. It's a Lear that could just a easily be a Godot with a few cast changes. That curtain slowly creeps downstage through the first two acts until the storm breaks and Lear is thrown out of his daughters’ houses into the wild. By that point, the space is so constricted by the curtain that the actors stand single file at the foot of the stage. With the lightning, the curtain recedes and soon the chains are dropped in a cascading sequence in the center of the stage imitating rain. But while this like the rest of the production is attractive, it doesn’t add much to the show in terms of meaning or insight. Sam Watterston plays Lear with an unexpected uniformity. Instead of portraying the kng as a man slowly sinking into madness, Watterston’s Lear comes out crazily shouting from the first entrance resolving the issue of the his unclear motivations for prematurely dividing his estate at the start of the play. This is a constraining maneuver as well, leaving the play with relatively few places to go.

There are some surprising choices in the casting. Michael McKean is a youngish Gloucester and Bill Irwin is Lear’s fool complete with his trademark ukulele. Irwin’s performance is particularly interesting with his own clowning dovetailing nicely into the fool’s sing-song approach to speech. Kelli O’Hara gives an intriguing and multifaceted performance as Reagan. She does well to build some sympathy for the character, before her inevitable downfall. Another nice surprise in the cast was Arian Moayed. After his success in Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo it was interesting to see him as the heroic Edgar. But despite these individually satisfying performances, I never felt that they added up to some larger whole. The typically painful scene where the blind Gloucester is reunited with his now mad king rang hollow and flat. And so it went for much of the evening with so many other unfulfilled promises and a King Lear failing to outshine its most recent competitors.

Do That To Me One More Time

2011-11-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

Vittorio Grigolo and Nino Machaidze Photo: Robert Millard/LAO 2011

When Ian Judge’s production of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette first appeared at Los Angeles Opera in the winter of 2005, I saw it five times. It was a very special occasion and one of the high-water marks in the company’s history to date. There were several reasons, but primary among those was the starring duo of Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon, who were just reaching a pinnacle in their period of recurrent collaborations on the operatic stage. Times are different now, of course, and LAO’s revival of this particular production might seem to tempt fate by asking for the miraculous to happen twice. And incredibly, the show comes closer than you might expect to that level of success by again relying on two stars in the title roles who appear to be on the verge of very big careers – soprano Nino Machaidze and tenor Vittorio Grigolo. I’m not going to compare either of them to their predecessors because I think it’s a pointless exercise. What I will say is that they deliver two very exciting performances that alongside Judge’s tight, visually interesting production ensure that no one in the audience will be going home disappointed.

Machaidze is well known in Los Angles having performed in bel canto roles here on two prior occasions. Juliette is a different, and much more lyrical assignment for her, although it is also her breakout role, having stepped into it at the Salzburg festival in 2008. (Ironically for a pregnant Netrebko opposite Villazon.) She manages fine detail with ease and has adequate power. There’s a darker hue to her voice overall, and despite a few sharp moments, she was very convincing and pleasing to listen to. Then there is her Romeo, Vittorio Grigolo. Grigolo is only making his third U.S. appearance in Los Angeles this month and he’s had a massive wave of excitement preceding him based on numerous European performances and his track record as a cross-over recording star. He’s got formidable chops, and his Romeo was strong, athletic, and full of character. His voice has that Italianate fragility common in some of the greatest tenors of the last half century, and it’s a sound that immediately sends your mind racing to all of the other roles you would be eager to hear him perform. He’s a young man and his acting can still tend toward too overstated, but he’s simply gorgeous. And I mean more than “opera hot.” He can and does spend nearly all of the Act IV love duet shirtless and has apparently been hitting the gym like some Twilight extra wannabe. (You can get a sample of what I'm talking about at 1:27 above)

Judge gives Grigolo quite a bit of physical stuff to do on his three-story erector-set inspired stage design. He climbs ladders, and barrels through gates. The costumes are mid-19th century, but Judge is able to insert just the right amount of glamor to make the whole thing pop. It may not necessarily be lush, but it is undoubtedly sexy and romantic looking. Best of all, the scene changes are all managed quickly with no down curtain time which keeps the pacing fleet. There are a number of excellent performers in the supporting cast. Ronnita Nicole Miller sings the part of Juliette's nurse, and Renée Rapier makes the most of Stephano's aria in Act III. LA Opera general director Placido Domingo is in the pit for these performances, and he gave his usual generous and measured approach in full support of the vocal artists. On the down side that means that things can get a bit muddy and featureless along the way. But it's not enough to overwhelm the many positives of the performance, and an opportunity to see these two stars working together on a local stage should not be passed by. The show runs through November 26.

Writers' Blocks

2011-11-08T22:56:00.001-08:00

Stockard Channing and Rachel Griffiths with Stacy Keach in the background Photo: Joan Marcus

Broadway is lousy with writers this fall. That might seem a perpetual condition, but I’m referring to writers in the sense of those serving as characters on stage. They populate two new plays that are running just two doors down from one another on 45th street. And while superb actors portray all of them, the plays themselves that these writers inhabit are not always so successful. Let’s start with Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Jon Robin Baitz’ Other Desert Cities, which was resurrected from its Off-Broadway run two years ago and is now again seeing the bright sun of a California Christmas Eve. It’s not a happy holiday, though, for Brooke Wyeth, played with a beautiful ferocity by Rachel Griffiths. After a multi-year slump following her first celebrated novel that was punctuated with some time on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital, she has returned to her parents’ Palm Springs home to share her latest book, a memoir, before it is published. She is anxious that her parents, a former ambassador Lyman (Stacy Keach) and his wife Polly (Stockard Channing), may react negatively to the book. In contrast to Brooke and her siblings, the senior Wyeths have a high profile reputation as right-wing Reagan Republicans and the memoir promises to drag family skeletons before the public. Brooke it turns out has good reasons to bring up some of these issues including the suicide of her older brother when she was still in school. And she is not alone in her conflicts as both her younger brother Trip (Thomas Sadoski) and her just-back-on-the-wagon maternal aunt Silda (Judith Light) are there to participate in the verbal sparing that careens back and forth between hysterical and scalding.

Baitz’ play goes for fairly big fish in a story that indirectly shadows real life figures including the Reagans and their one-time dissident author/daughter Patti Davis. The Wyeths are friends with the Reagans in the play and direct references to the parents’ right-wing connections are made repeatedly without being heavy-handed. But Polly and Lyman aren’t caricatures, and the story is as much about reconciling a family’s personal tragedy as it is how an increasingly politically fractured American population finds a common ground. The Wyeths have a deeply held commonality, but it is one steeped in a painful history and what they share won't be rekindled through simple platitudes. There are numerous searing, passionate speeches in this play, and Baitz couldn’t ask for a better ensemble. Audiences who know Light only from television may be shocked by the guts in this performance and Broadway royalty like Keach and Channing leave no doubt to how they achieved such status. Director Joe Mantello contributes a masterful feel for this particular California Desert community.

But strangely, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat disconnected from Other Desert Cities. The Wyeths are certainly filled with entertaining histories and ideas, but all of it can feel esoteric as well in a family of ambassadors, TV producers, screenwriters, and famous authors. These are American lives to be sure, but ones that are more familiar through constant exposure to television and other media than through most peoples' lived experiences. Baitz is not opposed to the melodramatic either, and some of his more glossy moments are rescued by actors who could make just about any dialog sound great.

Alan Rickman and the cast of Seminar Photo: Joan Marcus

Theresa Rebeck is not afraid of sentimentality either and her latest comedy, Seminar, is currently in previews before opening later this month. Rebeck recently gave a very funny and satisfying new play to CTG in Los Angeles, Poor Behavior, and the characters in Seminar are not much better behaved. This time there are four young authors who’ve paid a famous author and editor Leonard, played by Alan Rickman, to guide them in a ten session weekly creative writing seminar. The young authors played by Lily Rabe, Jerry O’ Connell, Hamish Linklater, and Hettienne Park (all but Rabe making their Broadway debuts) have had various levels of success so far in their careers including Douglas (O’Connell) who is about to appear in The New Yorker and has another famous writer for an uncle. Rickman is the bad boy character who dispenses terse, bitingly funny advice that is more likely to produce tears than calm reflection. Though he can be cruel, his roasts of the young writers’ own pretensions are easy to identify with. Soon the focus of the play hones in on Martin (Linklater), the wallflower and perhaps most talented member of the group. His own blossoming raises questions for everyone during this tight single act under director Sam Gold.

And like Other Desert Cities, Seminar has a melodramatic streak in it that comes to the fore in its largely comic surroundings. Rebeck is also interested in the life of the writer’s mind and the play uses the artistic process as a source of both comedy and pathos. Again excellent performances from the entire cast, especially Rabe, Rickman and Linklater, make more pedestrian moments believable. But again there’s a certain distancing going on that makes Seminar feel like it is, in fact, what it is, a play. Take for instance the many times characters read sections of text to themselves instantly and then claim they are either signs of genius or disaster. This will probably not be recognizable to many people from their own experiences reading and writing, though its likely unavoidable in a play about the writing process. Baitz gives his readers a comparatively generous scene change, and an afternoon, to get through Brooke's lengthy memoir. On the bright side, Seminar and Other Desert Cities would almost convince you that America is still a nation of serious readers, especially of fiction. Although as Leonard points out to his students, the tragedy of being a great writer is realizing that all the art you make is, in the end, made for a public that may not be up to appreciating it. Which may be the opposite problem that Rebeck and Baitz have with their own plays, which are imminently likable despite significant contrivances and a conventional theatricality.

10 Questions for...Nino Machaidze

2011-11-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

Nino Machaidze Photo: Uli Weber

The other hot young star who will be kicking of Los Angeles Opera’s revival of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette starting today is Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze. Unlike her current costar Vittorio Grigolo, Machaidze is well known to Los Angeles Opera audiences where she has had two incredibly popular appearances in the last two seasons including Adina in L’Elisir d'Amore and Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia. Machaidze, who is still under 30, is well known for bel canto roles such as these and will also star in The Metropolitan Opera’s revival of La Fille du Regiment in December. But in Los Angeles, she will return to the role that made her a star, Juliet. Machaidze made a very big splash in 2008 when she stepped in for a pregnant Anna Netrebko in the part in Salzburg opposite Rolando Villazon. The performance that was captured on DVD and since then she’s performed the role at La Scala among other world class venues. She’s recently released her first recording with Sony, Romantic Arias, earlier this year. So before you head out to hear her sing today, take a minute to check out what transpired with her turn at the Out West Arts 10 Questions.

What role would you most like to perform, but haven’t yet?

Manon

What role would you never perform, even if you could?

Carmen

You’re returning to Los Angeles Opera as Juliette, a role that you’ve sung to great acclaim in Salzburg, Milan, and elsewhere. What’s the biggest challenge in portraying Gounod’s (and Shakespeare’s) great heroine?

I love so much the role of Juliette and I love the story of Romeo and Juliet. It is so interesting to play and sing this girl who is so full of love, happiness and tragedy. It gives me great satisfaction.

Nino Machaidze and Vittorio Grigolo as Romeo and Juliet in Milan Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

You’re especially well known for bel canto roles here in Los Angeles including recent spectacular turns as Adina and Fiorilla in Il turco in Italia and in December you’ll return to The Metropolitan Opera as Marie in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. What’s the best thing about singing these touchstone bel canto roles?

I'm so happy that the bel canto is exactly my repertoire. I feel very comfortable in these parts and I hope to sing them for long, long time. It’s absolutely wonderful music, but you need to study a lot to have a very strong, good technique. You need a good voice, good and easy coloratura, high notes, low notes, piani, forti and musicality.

What do you like best about singing for audiences in the United States?

I really love American audiences. They are absolutely fantastic and give me a great, positive energy. It’s always a big pleasure for me to sing for them. I always try to give all my heart and all my best in every performance, and it makes me so happy to feel that they see this and give me back a big, big love.

Which opera or role inspired you to become a performer on the operatic stage?

I really don't remember one specific part. I just always knew that I wanted to be an opera singer.

You’re iPod is destroyed by a temperamental tenor. What music on it will you miss most?

“All Night Long” by Lionel Richie

You’ve worked with many of the greatest conductors and vocalists in the opera world. Is there someone you haven’t worked with yet you’d like to?

Yes, of course, but there are so many more than just one, and I hope to work with them all someday.

What's your current obsession?

I have one dream that I wish will come true.

With which of your operatic roles do you have the most in common?

Juliette!

Forging Ahead

2011-11-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2011

By the time one gets to Siegfried, it’s usually pretty clear which way things are going. That is, when a single director is engaged to put together an entire production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the imagery and visual syntax of the whole is typically well established by the time the third night in the music drama comes around. There are exceptions like Francesca Zambello’s recent production for San Francisco Opera where she more or less ignored or jettisoned what was laid out in the first two evenings to take off in any number of other directions after arriving in the bay area to complete the project started elsewhere. And given the lack of theatrical success with the new cycle at The Metropolitan Opera under Robert Lepage, one wishes he might more closely follow her example. I was in the house for the Siegfried performance on Saturday, where the audience was again met with the machine: Lepage’s unit set that has the major leap forward of making the Ring’s scenery as unpredictable in its functioning as the onstage talent can be.

But somehow, things were a bit better this time around for Lepage. There are still big problems: the most interesting visual moments are still the scene changes, action takes place too often in the recess behind the stage apron, and principals are left abandoned at the foot of the stage with little to do at times. The set still serves primarily as a screen for projected images, although the 3D image of the Forest Bird were pretty amazing in this installment. But this Siegfried, or at least the first two acts of it, did come off as more focused with better use of the set and more interaction between the vocalists than Lepage's two prior Ring outings. Perhaps the credit should be given to the cast, and in particular to the Siegfried of the afternoon, Jay Hunter Morris. Morris has rescued this show in a big way, just as he did in San Francisco earlier this year. He has stepped in for an indisposed Gary Lehman who had stepped in for an indisposed Ben Heppner along the way. And Morris' had done it with a rock solid, highly enjoyable performance. True, his voice overall is too small for the role and definitely too small for this particular theater. But he more than gets through this part. He is consistently singing without shouting or barking and has an excellent sense of the music. And he gives one of the best acted Siegfried’s I’ve seen, avoiding all the standard nature-boy mannerisms that are the stock and trade of singers two to three times his size. And bucking current trends elsewhere, Morris actually appears to be an athletic young hero on stage. I'll take some more of that please. He got a hero’s welcome at the curtain call where he was clearly moved to tears. It’s a big moment and he totally deserves all of the accolades he’s getting. He comes off as a humble, hard working guy, and if you don’t believe me, you should check out his website.

As for the rest of the cast, the rule of thumb was the smaller the role, the more impressive the singing. Eric Owens continues to be a commanding stage presence as Alberich. Gerhard Siegel’s Mime (I know, I know not really a small role here) is beautifully sung throughout. Patricia Bardon’s Erda was lovely as was Mojca Erdmann’s Forest Bird. I continue to be at a loss as to why I’m not getting more out of Bryn Terfel in this. There’s something so warm and enveloping about his sound that seems so out of place for the Wanderer. Of course, dressing him up as fat western Gandolph seems a poor choice too, though that is beyond his control. Deborah Voigt did not pull off quite the save here as she did in Die Walküre in the spring. She could be pinched and shrieky although I still enjoy seeing her on stage overall. The other big rescue worker in the show, of course, is Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi who led the orchestra in a rich and detailed performance. I still felt it could have used a few more rough edges here and there, but faulting the orchestra for being too polished feels rather nitpicky. I hope Lepage's Siegfried represents the course of things to come in this cycle. Of course, the other thing about Siegfried is that sometimes its hard to tell. It's like the Stockholm Syndrome of operas. After the prior seven or so hours in any production regardless of its weakness or merits one becomes more acclimated to the shortcomings at hand, and sheer survival, and the immense beauty of Wagner's music, can blur the lines.