We went with David to hear a concert of the music of Kaija Saariaho performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Essa-Pekka Salaonen. The concert took place at the Park Avenue Armory. (No sheep were involved, alas.) The Park Avenue Armory is not a concert hall, but rather an extremely vast interior space which is more suitable for presenting "events". And it was an event; the program notes for the production included people for the following roles (besides the usual ones): "Mise-en-espace", lighting designer, sound designer, video and projection designer, seating and staging designer, and assistant director. The orchestra was seated in the middle of the armory floor, and there was a stadium size video screen behind it. Speakers were mounted everywhere, soloists and orchestral members would occasionally move down lighted paths. Orchestral, soloist, and prerecorded sounds were all manipulated and projected into different parts of the vast space. All of which is to say is that there was plenty going on.
I like Saariaho's music; she has a wonderful ear for sound color, for half-heard, suggestive ideas and elusive, fragmentary gestures. Hearing her orchestral colors amplified in this vast space, though, was at times problematic. Was that sound I heard in Saariaho's original conception, or was it a result of the sound designer's actions, or the improbable acoustics of the vast space? Though, ultimately, it doesn't really matter, I suppose. I did find, however, that a whole program of Saariaho's music (90 minutes, with no breaks or intermission) became too much of the same thing. While there are moments of contrast, mostly the music is meditative in mood.
There were video projections for all of the pieces, done by Jean-Baptiste Barriere. I thought the imagery was interesting, and the visual quality was superb. On the other hand, the videos moved at the same slowly transforming pace as the music, and I often longed for something that was more contrapuntal.
Is this a concert hall?
I have to say that the people running the Armory are doing a great job of getting the audiences out. The show was sold out; this for an orchestral concert of an avant-garde Finnish composer. On the Upper East Side, no less.
I wonder what the late pioneer of spatial music, Henry Brant, would have done in the armory space. Maybe they should try some time to do one of his pieces.
Two nights later, it was back to Brooklyn to hear and see Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporum". It was an hour long dance piece, choreographed with a live performance of Gerard Grisey's score "Vortex Temporum". It was an extraordinary event, the best thing I have seen this fall. Keersmaeker is my type of choreographer; like Balanchine, she is extraordinarily attentive to the music, and has excellent taste in contemporary music. Grisey's score, written 1996, is an amazingly inventive piece, moving out from the French spectralist tradition. Grisey famously said that music is composed with sounds, not notes; I would add, in this case it is sound in time which matters.
The piece was quite similar to the one of Keersmaeker's that we saw last fall, in that the piece began with a live performance of the first part of the music on stage, with no dancers present. The musicians were performing from memory, and the performance was extraordinarily good. Rarely have I heard such a good performance of a difficult contemporary piece. (The ensemble, "Ictus" is a frequent collaborator with Keersmaeker.) The musicians left, and then the dancers arrived and danced in silence. Though not really in silence, though, because we were hearing in our heads the music we had just heard performed. It was as if we were seeing a kind of visualization of what we had just heard. Keersmaeker uses the same number of dancers as musicians, and she has said that, in some cases, each dancer is paired with the music of a specific instrument. My favorite part of the piece is when the musicians return to the stage to join the dancers, and she choreographs these large circular moments of both dancers and musicians across the stage. Did I mention the ensemble included cello and piano? The piano moves, too, pushed in circles by a dancer (or was it the conductor?). The pianist has to play his part standing up, as the piano keeps moving. And the cellist had some kind of special harness to hold the cello to his chest. But the overall sonic and visual effect of the dancers and musicians moving in carefully choreographed circles was amazing. For the last section of the piece, the musicians moved to a more conventional space towards the back of the stage, and the dancers were in front.
Keersmaeker has said that the choreography was meticulously tied to the music; I would love to see it again and see and hear more.
Then, two nights later, we went to the Metropolitan Opera to hear "Tristan and Isolde", conducted by Simon Rattle. The musical performance, especially by the orchestra, was phenomenal. Rattle is very meticulous is balancing all the instruments of the orchestra to make Wagner's musical ideas as clear as possible. What is amazing is that Rattle can do this while at the same time giving the score all the intensity and momentum that the drama needs. I came away with a renewed sense of Wagner's musical genius; Tristan is his most radical work. The "delirium" scene of Act 3 had me thinking of Schoenberg's "Ewartung" (I am sure I am not the first to think that.). And the singers were superb, as well.
Oh, and the production. I hated it. The director, Mariusz Trelinski, was the same director who added sound effects to Bartok's "Bluebeard". I can't possibly enumerate all the ways in which he violates the music in Tristan, all in the name his dramatic interpretation. One example. Isolde is singing passionately, and suddenly the stage is plunged into darkness, while she continues singing. Why? Who knows? The opening prelude, one of the most extraordinary pieces in all of classical music, becomes a soundtrack to a music video which starts hinting at Trelinksi's invented backstories, etc. There were numerous other moments when Trelinski's stage conceptions violated the music.
Enough. Luckily, our seats were partial view, right above the orchestra. Partial view gradually became voluntary no view as the evening went on. As Wagner apparently said, all the story is in the music, and that's all I needed. It was an extraordinary evening.
