High Culture

On Tuesday night, we went to another NYC Ballet concert, this time only 50% Balanchine and 50% Stravinsky.  The first piece was "Rubies", set by Balanchine to Stravinsky's Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra.  The music was a pleasure to hear (why do these pieces by Stravinsky never get performed?).  The choreography was Balanchine in a more populist mode, sometimes seeming to channel his inner Rockette.  The other highlight was "Symphony in C", set to a symphony written by Georges Bizert when he was 17.  The music is some sort of Mozart "lite", as if Mozart had taken out all the complicated stuff his father disapproved of.   But it serves the choreography well, as it is clear and well structured.  The finale is truly astonishing, as Balanchine carefully brings in more and more dancers, until the end when there are more than 50 on stage, in a dazzling display of intricate patterns.   The rest of the program reminded me that I don't really like more traditional ballet very much, and that one can get tired of tutus and tendus.


On Wednesday night, we went to hear Turandot at the Met, as we were invited by my stepmother.  It was an over the top Zefferelli production, where no possible square inch of the stage remains undecorated.   It suits Turandot well, though, and I like eye candy as much as anyone else.   The opera itself was a mix of bombast and little comedy bits.  As it is set in some sort of ancient China, there are lots of Chinese style melodies, which to me grate against the conventional Puccini Italian opera style.   There are some striking moments in the choral and orchestral writing, and it was exceeding well played and sung.

On Friday night, I returned to Lincoln Center for the third time in four days (Vera had had enough) to hear Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, something that one rarely gets to hear performed in North America.  It was one of the best things I have heard in years!   I have never heard it live, and the Philharmonic performance was fantastic, with scrupulous attention to detail combined with an expressive intensity.  This piece, a true 12-tone work, has always seemed interesting in recordings, but somehow pedantic.  In this performance, I felt like I was hearing one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century.  Schoenberg's musical thought, as always, moves at lightning speed.   Interestingly, the performance was followed by a lithe and expressive rendering of Mozart's Linz symphony, a juxtaposition I dismissed beforehand, but which I found very illuminating.  Mozart's musical thought also moves rapidly, and some of his quirky rhythmic shifts reminded me of Schoenberg's rhythmic patterns  (which can sometimes be even more disconcerting to the listener than his pitches).

So that's it for Lincoln Center high culture for a while....