Mingus, Monteverdi, and Others

We heard the Mingus Big Band at the Jazz Standard with our friends Krin and Paula and with Michel and Nadine from Switzerland.    It was just what I needed in the time of gloom.   Once again the band put on a incredible performance; and saw fit to include several of Mingus's more political pieces.  A highlight was Mingus's "Meditations on Integration (or For a Pair of Wire Cutters)".  The performance was very much to the point of the current political situation.  It was a performance rollicking with energy and astonishing solos and wonderfully clashing rhythms and moments of chaos.   I was a bit alarmed when I saw that several of my favorite members of the ensemble, including the core of the rhythm section, Helen Sung and Boris Kozlov, were not performing, but shouldn't have worried; their replacements were fantastic, and brought new perspectives to the music.  And I can't praise the drumming of Tommy Campbell enough.   After hearing several overbearing drummers in other bands lately, it was wonderful to hear a drummer as subtle and interesting as Campbell.   What a band!    What a composer!
It was also nice to see both Sue Mingus and Sy Johnson in attendance.   I couldn't help myself, and had to tell Johnson how much I loved his arrangements on Mingus's 1972 album "Let My Children Hear Music".   I remember when that album came out, and it's astonishing to think that some 44 years later, I was able to thank one of the arrangers.  And nothing but praise for Sue Mingus who has kept this vital enterprise going for so many years.

The next night, we went to the Gerald Lynch Theater to hear a performance of Monteverdi's opera "Il Ritorno de Ulisse" as realized by William Kentridge and the Handsprings Puppet Theater.   (Well, it's not as much of a stretch as you might think; I remember the Art Ensemble of Chicago's recording of "Theme de Monteverdi" many many years ago.)  The production was originally mounted in 1998, and features a condensed version of the opera, lasting one hour and forty minutes with no intermission.
It was superb.   The two main singers for Ulysses and Penelope were as expressive as any I have ever heard in Baroque opera, with extraordinary pianissimos and beautiful tone colors.  The ensemble played mostly without being conducted, with lots of expressive fluctuations of sound and rhythm.
The production featured the Handsprings Puppet Theater from South Africa.   Each of the singers was with a large scale puppet which represented their character, along with the puppeteer.   The singers and puppets were in front of elevated wooden semicircle, where the musicians played.    And there were video projections in the Kentridge style behind all this, showing all kinds of things from hand drawn animations to biological footage and close ups of surgery and angiograms, etc.   This was typical Kentridge production; there were many things to look at, all going on at once:  the singers, their puppets and puppeteers, the video projections, and, of course, the surtitles with the text of the opera.   You can switch your point of view of view as you please, I suppose, and of course the music is happening, too.   This was what I disliked in Kentridge's production of Lulu last year, but, it this case, I found myself more forgiving of the excess of concurrent streams.   There was an interesting discussion with the directors of the Handspring Puppet Theater afterwards which helped to illuminate some of the thought behind the production.  They spoke of the Brechtian effect of the puppets, and characterized the semicircle as an invocation of the public dissection demonstrations that were popular at the time Monteverdi wrote his opera.   The production existed in three different historical periods simultaneously: Ancient Greece, 17th century Italy, and present day South Africa.  In addition, there was a puppet who represented the dying Ulysses on the beach, and the whole opera was meant to be his dream as he lay dying on the beach.    While I certainly praise the production because it rendered the music sensitively  and did not violate what we heard, this was perhaps more complicated than I could comprehend in a single performance.

A few days later, we went to hear the Romanian Jewish German cabaret singer Sanda Weigl at the Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie.   She has a wonderful voice, and a superb chameleonic ability to perform many kinds of music.   My favorites were some wonderful songs by Hans Eisler (some with texts by Brecht) and a Leonard Cohen song in which she somehow seemed to evoke the sound of Leonard Cohen's voice.   The Cafe Sabarsky attempts to impersonate some kind of Viennese cafe aura in the midst of NewYork's Upper East Side.  They kind of succeed in that perhaps dubious proposition, to the extent that it is at all possible.   But it was a pleasure.

And to make the week completely mixed up, we went to hear a performance of Bach's B Minor Mass, performed by the Juillard Historical performance  students and students from the Hague conservatory, conducted by the venerable Ton Koopman.   We had just heard a performance in Vancouver last summer as part of the inaugural Vancouver Bach festival, but that performance was marred by the atrocious acoustics of Vancouver's Chan Centre, and only made me want to hear a performance in a respectable venue.   It was an excellent performance, though I think that Bach's masterpiece is one of those works that eludes a definitive performance, whatever that is.   It was a large ensemble, with six violins in the first violin section, and a choir of about 6 voices per part.  All of this worked beautifully in Alice Tully Hall; Bach's complex counterpoint mostly came through.   I thought the choir was very good; Bach's complex sixteenth note lines came through very clearly.   The soloists were all students; not outstanding vocally, but fitting very well into the overall sound of the music.  There was one extraordinary countertenor from Bulgaria; even the Romanian next to me agreed he was very good.
The B Minor Mass is not a work that expresses itself in a very direct way to the public.   (There are those who argue that Bach never intended for it to be performed in its entirety.) It is full of counterpoint; dense and intricate fugues are everywhere.  It could almost be called a treatise, like the Art of the Fugue and the Well-Tempered Clavier.   But it really is extraordinary music, and quite expressive in its own way, and I would happily go hear it again any time.