Month: March 2009

Monteverdi with puppets: “The Return of Ulysses”

ulyssessWilliam Kentridge: artist, sculptor, animated film maker, stage director, visionary artist marrying one form to another, eschewing boundaries. Stephen Stubbs: lutenist, teacher, performer, concert and opera director particularly of the Baroque, founder and director of Pacific Operaworks. Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa: sculptors of puppets, inventors, stagers and performers of shows for children and adults. And Monteverdi: towering 17th century Italian composer, creator of opera as we know it.

Put the first three together with all their multiple creative skills and you have next week’s revival of Monteverdi’s 1641 opera “The Return of Ulysses” in Kentridge’s original staging from 1998, presented by Pacific Operaworks.

In it, Kentridge has taken the opera’s prologue, an argument over Ulysses’ future between Human Frailty, Time, Fortune and Love, to highlight the underlying theme of the opera: the human vulnerability and heroism which pervade Ulysses’ vacillating hopes about whether he’ll ever get home to his wife, Penelope, and what he will find when he gets there after 20 years away.

Close your eyes, and you will hear a straightforward, period-perfect, well-sung performance of Monteverdi’s opera. Open them, and all sorts of nuance and ideas flit before your eyes, literally, as Kentridge’s animated charcoal drawings, Xrays conjuring up the internal human, photos from space, and more come up on a video screen behind the stage.

At front of stage is a hospital gurney with a huddled figure on it. While the figure, breathes and occasionally moves, it doesn’t speak, it’s just there throughout the opera,. The figure is Ulysses in extreme old age, dying in modern Johannesburg, and the opera is the memories of his long journey home.

The figure is a puppet.

Sculptor Adrian Kohler of Handspring carved these lifesize puppets from wood, hollowed out to be very thin so that the puppeteers can hold the weight up for the length of the opera (which has been slightly shortened to enable this). Asked how he chooses what sort of face, Kohler says he always has his eye out for photos of interesting faces which he can use. In “Ulysses,” he says, the head of the shepherd is modeled on the composer Stravinsky, sticking-out ears and all. The models for Penelope and Ulysses come, appropriately, from ancient Greece and the dying Ulysses is an aged version.

However, Penelope’s three suitors are 17th century gallants, as Kentridge has set the opera in three eras and places: today’s Johannesburg, Monteverdi’s 17th century Italy, and Homer’s Greece.

Puppeteer Brian Jones, together with Kohler a founder in 1981 of Handspring Puppet Company, describes how tiny details make puppets come alive.

“With puppets, you have macro movement, ‘he says,” that’s the stage direction. Micro movement is, for instance, the way we pick up a glass, or bend forward to get up off a chair.” The puppets mimic those movements exactly.”It’s based on breath, and the result becomes a transcendant experience rather than everyday. The puppets strive for life, in small movements.” Five puppeteers of the company have come for this production.

Watching a “Ulysses” rehearsal, where each puppet is manipulated by two people, the puppeteer and the singer, the three merge into one as we watch it. The singer has to remember not to upstage the puppet while singing and manipulates one of the puppet’s arms; the puppeteer holds the puppet up taller than he or she is, and manipulates the other arm, the head and anything else.

For this production, the eight singers are people with whom Stubbs has worked. Many will remember tenor Ross Hauck who sings Ulysses and Human Frailty, and took over the role of Nero in the Early Music Guild’s terrific production of “The Coronation of Poppea” a couple of years ago. Baritone Jason McStoots as Giove and a suitor, and mezzo-soprano Sarah Mattox as Melanto and Fortuna also performed in”Poppea.” Soprano Cyndia Sieden graces both early and modern opera these days, and here sings Amore and Minerva. Laura Pudwell’s rich mezzo-soprano makes a strong Penelope in the short exerpt heard in this rehearsal.

Stubbs himself on chitarrone (great bass lute) heads the group of eight instrumentalists, again many known to Seattle’s early music devotees, such as Ingrid Matthews and Tekla Cunningham, violins, Margriet Tindemans, viola da gamba, and Maxine Eilander, harp.

The five performances take place at the Moore Theater at 7.30 p.m., beginning March 11. Tickets are $40-85 at 206-292-ARTS or www.ticketmaster.com

Dawn Upshaw mesmerizes audience with intimate, pure artistry

dawn-upshaw1

A great artist can give a concert for a thousand people yet make it seem as if she is performing just for you. Such is the artistry of Dawn Upshaw, who appeared on Tuesday (March 3) evening at the Newmark Theatre in a concert sponsored by the Friends of Chamber Music. Upshaw showed an incredible ability to connect with the audience in spite of singing music that was relatively unknown. In a program that included works by Charles Ives, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, Osvaldo Golijov, and George Crumb, it would have been easy for Upshaw to just park and bark – make some beautiful tones and take some bows. But she expressed the music not just with her voice but with every gesture, facial expression, and the way she stood. And the total effect was amazing because Upshaw did all of this in a hall that is very dry (no reverberation whatsoever) and in which it is difficult to create a warm tone (the Newmark has lots of carpeting and was made for plays rather than for music).

Upshaw, and her accompanist Gilbert Kalish, drew the audience into an impressionist soundscape that began with a selection of songs by Ives. This selection transitioned from songs that had a more traditional, harmonic sound (like “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and “Two little flowers”) to some that were somewhat dissonant yet intimate (like “Rather Sad” and “Tom Sails Away”). Kalish supported each piece perfectly with a subtle touch that always added to the words and the atmosphere.

With the aide of a microphone, Kalish mentioned that Ives wrote 140 songs and had a fierce independent streak. His remarks served as an introduction to “The Alcotts” movement from Ives’s “Concord Sonata.” Kalish used a light touch to evoke the parlor room and everyday atmosphere of the Alcott home in his playing of this gem.

Next, Upshaw sang a several songs by French composers, and since the house lights were turned almost all the way down, it was impossible to follow the translation. Yet, that didn’t matter at all, because Upshaw has a way of drawing you into the world of the music that she sings. I think that in both of the Messiaen’s pieces, “Le collier” (“The necklace”) and “Prière exaucée” (“Fulfilled prayer”), she pulled some high notes out of no where and then expanded on them in an exquisite way that was absolutely thrilling.

After intermission, Kalish performed a movement from Abel Decaux’s “Clairs de lune.” Kalish’s light touch on the keyboard nicely matched the slow-moving sounds of this piece, making it easy to imagine a moon hanging over a cloudless night or another nighttime tableau.

As a preface to the next piece, Golijov’s “Lúa Descorlorida” (“Moon, Colorless”), Upshaw explained that Golijov wrote it for Kalish and her and that it is the piece that she has performed the most often at her concerts. Although the text of the music is sad, telling about a woman who wants to be removed from the earth, the music has an improvised feel and is not a downer. Upshaw really captured the full range of emotion in this song, and, for me, it was the highlight of the evening.

The program closed with the six songs from Crumb’s “Apparition.” For this music, the piano top was removed so that Kalish could strum and pluck the piano strings and rap the inside of the piano with his knuckles. Some of the text required Upshaw to use a Sprechstimme (speaking voice) and at other times she sang non-sense syllables. There was real text to be sung also, but it seemed secondary. The songs dealt with silence and death and serious matters, and the music was sort of other-worldly.

The audience soaked up this unusual piece and responded with long-lasting applause. Kalish and Upshaw returned to sing two encores. Both were William Bolcom cabaret songs: “Watin” and “Black Max,” and the latter really lightened up the evening and put everyone in a good mood for the journey home.

Perlman has the goods but doesn’t know where to go with them in concert with the Oregon Symphony

perlman1World-famous violinists typically draw big crowds and buckets of adulation, and that was case when Itzhak Perlman stepped on stage to perform with the Oregon Symphony on Saturday (February 28). A standing ovation greeted Perlman, who had appeared in the national broadcast at President Obama’s inauguration just a month ago, but his performance as violinist and conductor with the Oregon Symphony, though it had some fine moments, didn’t have enough shape and verve to make the evening memorable.

The program featured Bach’s Concerto No 1 for violin and string orchestra, Schubert’s Symphony No 3, and Brahms Symphony No. 2. A first-rate conductor would bring out all sorts of nuances in each work and place a personal stamp on it, but Perlman seemed not to have a clue about what he wanted the music to say. The volume for each piece was medium loud, most movements, once underway, cruised along at the same speed that they started with, and, outside of a soaring horn solo by John Cox in the Brahms – which almost startled the audience out of the doldrums – the entire affair was boring.

As a result, the standing ovations that Perlman and the orchestra received were perfunctory. It was sort of like, hey, we’ve got this great artist in our midst and we’re really happy that he stopped by our little town, so let’s shower him with affection. If anyone should receive extra helpings of applause, it should be concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, who used his entire body to help keep the violins together. There were times, especially in the Brahms, when the violins laid down a silky smooth and golden sound that is just pure pleasure, but these pieces needed more than just some beautiful phrases. Even the Bach Violin Concerto, with Perlman sitting on a raised platform where the concertmaster usually sits, didn’t go anywhere in particular despite the gorgeous tones from his Strad. When the ensemble reached the last note, the piece just ended, but nobody was elevated.

One little interesting point in the performance of the Bach was hearing Janet Guggenheim play the harpsichord. Guggenheim was Perlman’s accompanist for many years, but even her presence didn’t alter the final score, so to speak.

Several years ago, Oregon Symphony violinist and Third Angle director Ron Blessinger (who wasn’t playing in the Perlman concert series) told me (and I’m paraphrasing here) that it’s always best when a conductor comes to the orchestra with good ideas for the music, but a conductor with bad ideas is better than a conductor with no ideas, because a conductor with no ideas makes the concert dull as hell.

Opus 7: Mendelssohn, Purcell and Handel

Opus 7’s enticing program of Mendelssohn, Purcell and Handel, while planned months ago, was the perfect antidote to today’s unremittingly bad news, what you might call comfort food for the mind.

Not that it was all familiar. The group’s artistic director, Loren Ponten, chose less commonly performed works by all these composers, including one of eleven anthems written for the future Duke of Chandos by Handel (some phrases of which he clearly borrowed later for “Messiah”). Singing this glorious work, “As pants the hart for cooling streams,” Opus 7 made a truly uplifting and joyful noise with which to end its concert at St James Cathedral Saturday night.

However, not all of the works sung came off so successfully, particularly at the start of the program. Mendelssohn’s early “Kyrie in C Minor” is a gentle piece and the chorus would have sounded less draggy, less tentative if the performance had had more bite. The tempo seemed a tad slow, but had the performance taken off floating, I think this unhurried beat would have worked fine. It didn’t feel a really good choice to begin the program with, despite good work from the soloists, soprano Lisa Cardwell Ponten, mezzo-sorano Kathryn Weld, tenor Howard Fankhauser and bass Charles Robert Stephens. Something more decisive was called for.

Consonants are always hard to hear at St. James, and this night was no exception. The first Purcell work with its evocative chromaticisms, “Remember not, O Lord, our offences,” had similar problems to the “Kyrie,” plus occasional slightly off-note intonation by the sopranos.

The cathedral’s acoustics have a long reverberation time which tends to blur sound. It was hard sometimes to tell whether the singers were not exactly together or it was the way sound reached my aisle seat in the fifth row on the northwest side. I wondered if performers on the right of the chorus and orchestra could always hear performers on the left.

Performances became more satisfactory after this beginning, with the serene “Cor dulce, cor amabile” of Villa-Lobos and Mendelssohn’s dramatic motet “Mitten wir im Leben sind,” plus his gorgeous cantata “Jesu, meine Freude,” clearly influenced by Bach.

From the early Kyrie, written at age 14, to the much more mature “Christe, du Lamm Gottes” written only four years later, (and the above-mentioned cantata which comes from the year after that), it’s fascinating to trace Mendelssohn’s development; the ideas, the influences and the genius which propelled him into his own secure musical place even at such a young age. The “Christe” is a rich tapestry of sound, gorgeous to hear, and Opus 7 gave it a thrilling performance. From my seat the bass orchestral line gave prominence to the important musical grounding of the work, strongly but not obtrusively so, showing its role as anchor for the whole piece.

I would have liked to hear this program somewhere with just a little less reverberation. Having a great admiration for Opus 7 and its quality, I felt this time that the acoustics sabotaged the performance a bit.

Pinchas Zukerman at 60

The following is a paragraph from Zukerman’s official biography

for this year, outlining his ambitious plans in celebration of his 60th birthday:

“Pinchas Zukerman turned 60 on July 16, 2008 and celebrates with a schedule which comprises more than 112 concert engagements and travel to 17 countries including France, India, Israel, China, Turkey, Peru, New Zealand, Austria, Russia and the United Arab Emirates. He performs orchestra, solo recital and chamber music repertoire in more than 34 cities. He spends 10 weeks teaching in his role as Director of the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music, and as Artistic Director of the National Arts Centre Summer Music Institute in Ottawa, which includes the Young Artist Programme, Conductor’s Programme and Composer’s Programme. Currently in his 10th season as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Mr. Zukerman conducts London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Moscow, Italy and Spain as well as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on tour in the United States. He performs with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra and joins the Israel Philharmonic in New York’s Carnegie Hall, Bombay and Israel, the Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France and the Gulbenkian Orchestra. Mr. Zukerman and pianist Marc Neikrug give recitals in Vienna, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.”

It is an astounding world tour to say the least, and I was in attendance at the last concert mentioned – a recital with pianist/composer Marc Neikrug in Chicago’s Harris Theater. He performed a healthy variety of pieces, mostly for violin. With that slight instrument, Pinchas performed Mozart’s sonata, K.454, Franck’s Sonata in A, and Takemitsu’s From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog. With his viola Zukerman brought forth the brooding and pensive viola sonata of Dmitri Shostakovich. As a gentleman in front of me uttered to his wife, Zukerman made it all “look effortless.” The problem was that I wished there were a little more effort put into connecting with the audience.

For this recital, the violinist/violist wore what looked like pajamas – a flowing black shirt, like from a Chinese restaurant, some black pants and the most comfortable shoes he could find. They looked like structured socks. His accompanist, bald with a long ponytail, was a little more dressed up. The Mozart was first, and as the notes stated, the piece is to start with a grand and forceful statement in unison, as befits a piece of music written for the emperor. What I heard was a lot less forceful, almost anemic. Zukerman barely moved as he played, eyes locked onto his music stand. There was barely any communication between Zukerman and Neikrug either. Don’t get me wrong, Zukerman’s playing is flawless. As a musician who has to muscle a sweet tone out of the grouchy viola, his violin tone is rich and full, effortless. He commands a treasure-trove of skills on the violin, brought out in full measure when necessary. The only reservation is that he seems to make no connection to the music or the audience when he plays. After the Mozart was over, he immediately took off his glasses, bowed once and walked off, Neikrug right behind him, and the page turner behind him.

He bolts right out with his viola and sends us into a world we are not prepared for: Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, the composer’s last musical utterances. The piece opens with pizzicato of yet another melancholy melody. Zukerman plays with a little more passion and commitment. This music fits his performance style perfectly: constrained and inhibited. During the work’s middle movement, with all of its folksy tunes and flourishes, Pinchas lets go. It is a very convincing reading. The last movement is fascinating, and if you don’t know this piece of Shostakovich, go out and listen to it. It is an homage to Beethoven, even taking the basic outline of the composer’s “Moonlight” sonata as this sonata’s foundation. It is an eery piece and ends quietly, effectively played by Zukerman and Neikrug. The stunning contrast between the sweet violin sonata of Mozart and the brooding viola of Shostakovich left me cold. They were strange bedfellows to say the least, and really didn’t complement each other well. Again, the performers flew off the stage.

The audience was duly impressed by whatever Zukerman was giving as they proceeded to talk and chat. I was sitting behind a large contingent of Russians who waved to others and spoke softly during the performance. They were having lots of fun, although listening intently to the music wasn’t part of that fun. Twenty minutes for intermission having passed, Zukerman et al. burst forth back on stage. The house lights gave no indication that it was time to return, so everyone was still standing around as the violinist was ready to go. Takemitsu’s piece was short, as they all are, and spare. It evidenced Zukerman’s commitment to bringing a panoply of music to the audience. Unfortunately, the audience seemed disconcerted by the intermission, and so it passed without much notice.

The program concluded with Franck’s Romantic sonata for violin. In four movements, it was described in the notes as being “large.” The playing was beautiful, the violin in his hands seemed small, almost like a toy fiddle, but the sound was smooth and effortless. The playing was also uniform. The performers moved from the first to the second without notice, the break almost non-existent. The same for the third and fourth movements. Of course, this may be a matter of interpretation, creating two related movements instead of four, but it just made the piece seem rushed. The ending flourish was played hastily  and off they went again. There may have been an encore, but I didn’t stay.

Pinchas Zukerman is a world-reknown musician with due fame for his various musical gifts. I just don’t think that one of those gifts is being a live performer. I have also seen him with the CSO, and he just seems bothered by having to perform in front of others. It makes the whole affair seem condescending. His recordings play up his exceptional performing ability, whereas live performance detracts from it, as you look at this man who appears put-upon. This concert gave me that impression, and although it had a lot of variety and beautiful music making, a performance without connection is a pretty dull performance. Listen to him on CD or MP3 instead.