An old picture from a different show:
After a Thanksgiving break, we heard Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano in a new show at Birdland. Comstock and Fasano get better every time we hear them. Fasano has become more and more capable of using beautiful shadings and colors in her voice, and the blend of the two of their voices is superb. I also think Comstock and Fasano are really an extraordinary arrangers (I have no idea who does the arranging among them). No song is ever done routinely; they are always thinking of creative and interesting ways of making a song work. And Comstock's piano playing is equally creative; he is always using all the registers of the piano with a witty and inventive musicality. And sometimes he just stops and lets the amazing Sean Smith on bass keep the tune moving. Their last number "Broadway", was a real knockout.
A few days later, it was time for more Mahler at Carnegie Hall, this time the Fifth Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov conducting. The Concertgebouw Orchestra has a reputation of being one of the world's greatest orchestras, and they certainly sounded like it. The concert began with a 25 minute piece by the German composer Detlev Glanert "Theatrum Bestarium". It was about humans as "beasts". In other words, it was program music. It was strikingly orchestrated, with some fascinating sonorities, but it was genre of music that doesn't really excite me that much. At a certain point, I started hearing it as cartoon music in the manner of Carl Stallings, music for a cartoon of said beasts. It was also notable for the extensive use of Carnegie Hall's organ.
The Mahler, though, was truly extraordinary. Semyon Bychkov is an exemplary Mahler conductor; he seems to concentrate very hard on ensuring we hear everything in the music that Mahler wrote, and with an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw, the results are amazing. Incredible details of orchestral balance emerge, especially in the acoustic of Carnegie Hall. Every time I hear a Mahler symphony I get different ideas about what Mahler is doing; this time, it felt like he was an alien who had come to Earth around 1900 in Vienna, heard a lot of music, and then put it all in a symphony without really understanding how it all worked. (OK, this is a little exaggerated.) But I constantly hear these very familiar little chunks of music that you expect to do certain things, and then they don't. That little landler tune comes in a beat too late, and then the harmony goes in the wrong direction. Or that triumphal march suddenly gets interrupted by something completely contrasting. In other words, it's modern. But it all depends on using very predictable bits of music. (In contrast to the Glanert piece, where very little is predictable, thus there are no really unexpected happenings.)
It is an extraordinary privilege to hear an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw; the extended ovations and bravos for many the the individual players in the orchestra at the end were truly deserved. New York concert goers are lucky to have all these orchestras come to visit.
We went to a house party/concert at a brownstone in Brooklyn to hear the singers Sanda Weigl and Libby Shapiro, accompanied by Shoko Nagai. We have been to a number of house concerts lately, and it's a pleasure. (The Microcosmos Quartet in Vancouver is doing this, too.) In this case, Weigl and Shapiro did a wonderful set of songs, primarily from Germany around the years 1927-1931, by composers such as Theo Mackeben, Werner Heymann, Friedrich Hollander, and others. Part of the fun, too, is to see the homes of the hosts of the concert. This one was in an old brownstone in the Fort Greene section of Brookyn, and the owners had a wonderful collections of both of art and odd sorts of things, all of which reminded me of my old family home. The highlight was their collection of coat hangers, beautifully displayed on a stairwell wall. I am not being sarcastic; it was a truly memorable sight. Like the Becher's photography of the typologies of German industrial sites, this collection showed an astonishing variety of shapes designed to perform the basic function of hanging clothes.
At the Met, we heard Kaija Saariaho's opera "L'Amour de Loin" in a production by Robert Lepage. The opera, which was first done in 2001, was done at the Met for the first time. It has a cast of thee solo voices and a choir. The plot is quite simple; in medieval times, a troubadour falls in love with a princess who he has never seen. The first three acts, were, to my ears, too static. Saaraiho's music, while sensuous and subtle, can sometimes lack the necessary drive to sustain my interest over longer spans of time. The fourth and fifth acts, though, were considerably more involving and dramatic. The Lepage production was visually spectacular; the stage was covered with some thirty or so parallel strands of LED lights which could change colors and go on and off. The strands could also move up and down. All of this computer controlled, of course. The sea is an important character in the opera, and the lights were usually meant to convey the sea. The opening of the fourth act was a stunning invocation of the sea, with Saariaho's powerful music invoking a stormy sea, and the lights moving in great waves. The choir was nestled between the strands of lights, and would appear and disappear. (They functioned both a a chorus in the plot and as a pure sound color in Saariaho's sonic palette.) There was one major miscalculation to my ears; Eric Owens, the bass-baritone, was the troubadour. His voice, though, is more of a stentorian Wagner type, with a heavy vibrato and little in the way of tone color or dynamics. Saariaho often invokes medieval music for her medieval tale, and it would have been better to have a male voice who could sound like a troubadour, and not like an Alberich. The female voices also were singing more in a nineteenth century operatic mode, but I gradually warmed up to them. Needless to say, the Met Orchestra under the baton of Susan Malkki was superb.
And to end the fall season, I went back to where I started with a premiere of a new dance work by the great Pam Tanowitz. In this case, it was a work created with the Juilliard dance students, as part of their end of semester performance of four newly choreographed works for the students. I went specifically to hear/see Tanowitz's work, and it was excellent. She really is the best choreographer who is carrying on the Cunningham tradition; the work is about the movement and the music, and she is consistently inventive, unpredictable, and original. Patterns interact in asymmetrical ways, and her vocabulary is always a bit quirky. The music in this case was Andrew Norman's "Companion Guide to Rome", played by a live string trio of Juilliard students. (It is helpful when a dance program is part of a school of music; you get live music!) I wasn't familiar with the music. On first hearing, it made a wonderful dance score and went very well with Tanowitz's choreography.
One of the great things about having a student company is that a choreographer can afford to work with a lot of dancers. Each piece on the program used twenty or more dancers. And I thought the student dancers were excellent. The rest of the program was not as good. A piece by the choreographer John Hegenbotham was set to the first movement of Schubert's profound C Major string quintet. It's not something I would recommend doing for any choreographer. Hegenbotham has danced with Mark Morris, and I couldn't help but see some similarities with Morris's approach to music, with a sometimes excessive correlation of the choreography with the music. It can become goofy sometimes. In Morris's case, he somehow makes it all work. It didn't work so well in this case. Schubert doesn't take well to choreographic imitation. The other two works were forgettable; the last, choreographed to soporific recordings of Rufus Wainwright, reminded me of many things I don't like in dance. And beware of dances where the costumes include madras shorts and suspenders!
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