Stravinsky!

Our cultural season has started in earnest, so much so that I have fallen behind in my blog.  Two ballets, a concert, and an "opera" in a week.
We heard the NY Philharmonic perform Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" last week in an astonishingly clear and powerful performance conducted by Alan Gilbert.  I heard things I had never heard before, and the dynamic power of Stravinsky's brass writing has to be heard in person.  But the audacity and energy of Stravinsky's conception is what stood out.  The relentless movement, the crashing dissonances, and delicate sonorities are still startling, one hundred years after the piece was premiered.  A truly memorable experience.  Also on the program was Beethoven's 3rd Piano concerto, with an enigmatic slow movement, and a kind of mini-concerto by Kurtag, with the piano on the stage, and the rest of the instruments spread around the hall.  A pleasure to hear, and the audience actually behaved itself.

The New York City Ballet has been having a 2 week Stravinsky/Balanchine festival, and we have heard/seen two programs.   The music, to begin with, is wonderful; we have heard performances of Symphony in Three Movements, Violin Concerto, Orpheus, Agon, Apollo, Movements For Piano and Orchestra, and Duo Concertante, among others.   And the choreography is consistently inspiring, interacting with the music and changing how we perceive it.   Agon is the summit of the Stravinsky/Balanchine collaboration, and I feel very lucky to be living on a planet where I can experience this piece live.   I am only beginning to get a grasp of how Balanchine's choreography interacts with the music; they are deeply intertwined, in ways that are both straightforward and subtle.  It is true counterpoint of music and movement, and a delight to experience.

Less delightful was our experience with the Robert Wilson/Philip Glass opus, "Einstein on the Beach".  This notorious mishmash of downtown New York culture from the 1970's has its moments, but often bogs down in the endless repetition of the Philip Glass music.  I enjoy Robert Wilson's visual settings, and the slowed down time doesn't really bother me that much.  (The space ship finale is stunning, though it is either ripped off from or an homage to the scene in Lang's "Metropolis" where all the workers are rapidly adjusting the clock hand type levers of the Moloch machine.)

In the beginning of the opera, the Philip Glass music has some interest, with some slowly changing processes.   But eventually, he runs out of invention, and simply plays the same riff over and over again, with virtually no changes, for 20 minutes at a time.   The worst part, though, is when Glass abandons his austere minimalism for some sentimental glop at the end, including an ersatz Bach style organ interlude, and a very sentimental little tonal interlude which sounds like the work of a very young composition student who has fallen under the spell of something like Schubert's "Ave Maria".  I had always thought that Glass's sentimental music was a later career move, but it was there from the start.

The whole piece, which includes text and dance as well, lacks a true visionary coherence; it is more something that a bunch of people kind of put together without really knowing what they were after.  But it is famous...