L'Elisir d'Amore

Last night we went to hear Donizetti's opera "L'Elisir d'Amore", having been invited by my stepmother.   I have to admit that, although I have heard Berg's "Wozzeck" countless times, I have never heard an opera by Donizetti.  Now I have.   What is striking to me is how remarkably efficient Donizetti is at his craft.  The music is extremely effective, and the point is the voices.   There are several wonderful ensemble moments that follow in Mozart's footsteps, and the whole thing is exceedingly entertaining, especially when sung and played by the Met Orchestra and brand-name singers.  Vera has heard and taught many of these operas, and gets annoyed by the boiler-plate music that gets used in every opera; for someone as ignorant as I am, it is all charming.   The production itself was extremely well done, and acted with great energy and evident pleasure by the cast.

January in New York

It has been very cold in New York this week, which has its advantages and disadvantages.   Because I am now walking Maggie all the time, that means going out to Riverside Park at midnight, when the temperature is 15 degrees F., and the wind is blowing at 30 mph off the Hudson River, and I am trying to pick up poop while juggling the leash, my gloves, etc.   You could say the the wind at that temperature is certainly invigorating, but even Maggie hustles home at high speed to retreat to our warm apartment.
Speaking of poop, I bought some doggie poop bags at a local pet store, and when I looked at them more carefully when I got home discovered that they were "scented".  For someone who is allergic to perfume, this is doubly appalling.   (For those in need of confirmation of the Decline of Western Civilization, a visit to your local pet store is all that is needed.   I think I saw dog nail polish the other day.)

I experienced the advantages of January in New York today when I went to the Metropolitan Museum.   It was relatively empty (18 degrees temperature and snow in the forecast!), and I got involved in all the 19th century French galleries, the back rooms of which I had never explored before.
Here is the main Cezanne room, which I had all to myself for a long time (except for Madame Cezanne).  I have never seen it this empty.

Degas is also a highlight, including this rather strange pastel, which up close has an extraordinary variety of textures and colors.

I also saw an exhibit of the American painter George Bellows, who is known mostly for his paintings of boxing, especially this one, which is always reproduced when someone is talking about American painting of that period.

It was an interesting show, since I knew nothing about him.  Most exciting were the paintings of New York at that period, including one of Riverside Park at night  (see above!).  Bellows was talented, and his career followed a number of promising trajectories, but I didn't come away thinking I had seen the works of a great painter.  Interesting, though,  in that he was around at a time of great ferment (he was involved in the famous Armory show of 1913), and that a lot of his work reflected the tendencies in art at the time.

Home?

We arrived back in New York this week after a 3 week vacation in Vancouver, seeing friends and spending time with Ada and Andrew.   Which means everything is reversed.  Normally, we might go to New York for a vacation, and then return to work in Vancouver.  Now it's the opposite.  So now that time in January when you settle back into normal working life is happening in New York.   So where is home, exactly?

When we arrived in Vancouver after being away so long, everything felt strange.  All the automatic things you do in a home as a matter of reflex had been forgotten.   I couldn't remember where things were.  (Where are the sharp knives?)  In some cases, though, Ada had moved them as she readjusted the family home to suit her routines.  But very quickly everything becomes normal again.

The biggest change in New York now for us is that we have brought our dog, Maggie.  She couldn't fly with us because of Air Canada's byzantine sets of regulations, so she flew on her own on Cathay Pacific.   I went to JFK airport at 6 AM this morning to pick her up.  I needed to rent a car, because the process involved going back and forth between several destinations in JFK's enormous cargo area, which looks like the kind of place where bodies can be disposed of.   I encountered very slow and laconic paper pushers in the cargo office, but the highlight was an extended conversation with a US Customs official who had received extensive training in the the Kafka and Monty Python divisions of bureaucratic studies.   I wish I could reproduce the exactly sequence of bizarre and insinuating questions and comments that ensued (between long pauses while computer screens were contemplated and documents stamped).  When I told him that we were bringing Maggie here for 2 and a half months, and then she would go back to Vancouver, he said "Do you really expect me to believe that?"  It may have been a joke, or maybe not. He also said that my dog would never be the same again and that he didn't know that they let mixed breeds into the country (I think that was a joke).   Even the process of getting to see someone was bizarre.  I was told by a friendly bystander to stand at a specific spot in the middle of a large room, and wait until some arrived to help me.

But at last, I got Maggie, and we drove off to the Upper West Side.   Maggie seems very excited to be here, and did her first big poop on Broadway.  So now we are dog owners in New York, and have reason to go to some of the infinite number of pet stores on the Upper West Side.

Culture awaits!

Olga Neuwirth

We heard a concert of the music of the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth at Columbia's Miller Theater, as part of their composer portrait series.  Neuwirth is an interesting composer, known for her opera "Lost Highway", based on the David Lynch film, and her recent "American Lulu" in which she re-orchestrated the first two acts Berg's opera for jazz ensemble, and wrote a new third act.   Which is to say that she does not lack for audacity.    The concert itself featured two contrasting works.  The first, a sort of piano concerto, was very rhythmic, but with a sonic palette that resembles a beefed up Lachenmann, including an electric piano tuned a quarter tone apart from the regular piano.  In seven relatively short and fast moving movements, it was intriguing.  The second piece was more problematic; an hour long piece for recorded spoken voice (with texts and voice of Paul Auster), live electronics, live ensemble, and several recorded Weill-like vocal  numbers.  The spoken text is not dramatic, and as a result, it it simply existed as another element in the fabric.  Neuwirth warned us that it was not an easy piece to listen to.  It simply drifts from one thing to another, as we shift our listening gears to follow.  There was the requisite intellectual underpinnings to go along with it (required of every European composer), but the end experience was not that interesting.

Inventing Abstraction

I saw a big new show at MOMA entitled "Inventing Abstraction", which covers the eponymous activities of artists in the period 1910-1925.   Being a big fan of abstract art, I was pleased to see this.   The exhibition covers a lot of ground and is organized by country.  Thus we get the Constructivists, the Futurists, the Vorticists, the French (Delaunays, etc), Mondrian and the Dutch, the Americans, etc. (and even Polish in one corner..)  On the one hand, this is interesting, to see the extent to which the movement towards abstraction quickly spread internationally, and to see how each different school evolved.  On the other hand, this makes for a very diffuse exhibit, with a room or two for each country, and lacks interesting and more focused detail on any one of these countries, each which could be an exhibit in itself.   There are also token nods towards parallel movements in music and dance; the exhibit opens with some early Kandinsky, and some Schoenberg manuscripts.  Though I am not sure I buy the parallel between the move towards atonality and the move towards abstraction in painting, despite Kandinsky's excitement.  There is also a listening room with very poor sound at the end of the exhibit, playing a loop of predictable choices of music from the period.


Guess who did this drawing..

Nijinsky, the dancer....

An abstraction from Popova:

A very large work by Morgan Russell:

My Grandparents

When I was growing up, my family eventually moved out of New York and into the suburbs.   I used to visit my maternal grandparents in New York; I would stay for the weekend, and my grandmother would take me to the NY Philharmonic.  They lived in an apartment at 9 East 10th Street, just north of Washington Square.   They were party types.  There are rarely any pictures of them without a drink in their hands; I think they lived a life of partying and going to the theater, and they had a whole circle of eccentric friends.  My grandfather was a Yale educated lawyer and worked for the family law firm in Brooklyn, and my grandmother was a great beauty who had lived in Paris before WWI, and who most likely had numerous affairs.

Here they are:

(No, I have no idea what the hookah is about, I think they were just goofing around..)

A number of years ago, I started to read the great novels of the American writer Dawn Powell, who wrote in the 1930's and 40's.  One of the things I enjoyed about the novels was that most of them take place in the Greenwich Village milieu, featuring characters that could (I imagine) have been found in my grandparent's living room.   What later astonished me was that I later found out that Dawn Powell had actually lived in my grandparent's building, which was not a large one.  I don't know if they actually overlapped in time, but it is an amazing coincidence.

The building itself is still there, and has a remarkable facade, with decorations in carved  teak.  The neighboring building, built by a teak dealer, has an even more elaborate facade.


Pictures:

The neighboring window:

Seeing unexpected architectural flourishes like the above window is one of the things I love about walking around New York; you never know what you might see.

Les Troyens

This week we went to hear Berlioz's opera, "Les Troyens" at the Met.   This is a truly extraordinary opera, in a grand style, lasting five and a half hours, with intermissions.  The Met production was superb, both visually stunning, and with many scenes of large choral groups on stage, and even 24 dancers.  The choreography, by Doug Varone, involves not only the specified ballet numbers, but some of the major crowd scenes as well.  Berlioz's music is magnificently strange; it really seems to originate from Planet Berlioz, and nowhere else.   The music moves harmonically in totally unpredictable directions, and there are sonorities both beautiful and strange.   There are far fewer solo vocal parts than normal; the chorus has a huge role, and there are important dramatic moments where there is no singing at all, and the orchestra conveys the entire narrative.

It was a great privilege to hear this performed live by Met Orchestra in such an elaborate production.

A few pictures:

The above background appears as a reference to Italy, i.e. the Pantheon...

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

Chelsea Redux, Sort Of

I went for a gallery trawl in Chelsea last week, my first visit since the area was flooded during Hurricane Sandy.  While most galleries are back in business, there are still a number closed for restoration, those that were on the ground floor.  The others show signs of restoration, with new dry wall, etc.   They must be happy that concrete floors are trendy...
I saw a very exciting exhibit of paintings by Mark Bradford, an American working out of L.A.  These are large scale abstract works, painted but also with layers of different types of material peeking out underneath the painting.  Some of the paintings resemble large scale maps that might have been painted over.  Some illustrations give a general idea, but don't convey the three dimensional quality of the collaged material.

Adès in Your Neighborhood

We went to a concert in our neighborhood tonight, a performance by the Calder String Quartet.  It was a free concert, in a church a few blocks away.  The chief attraction was Thomas Adès's string quartet, "The Four Quarters", written last year.  It was absolutely engaging;  Adès has genuine musical ideas that build on tradition and yet sound new and fresh.  The music strikes me as more succinct and clear than his earlier works.  I can't think of any other contemporary composer whose work I look more forward to hearing.  The quartet performance was excellent, (they have worked closely with Adès)   The Adès was preceded by Stravinky's "Three Pieces for String Quartet", which sounded Webernian in their brevity, and followed by a sensuous performance of Ravel's String Quartet.   A beautifully balanced program.   (The Calder Quartet played in last September in Vancouver.)

Manhattan Bridge

As Manhattan begins to be overwhelmed by shoppers, it was time to retreat for another walk on a bridge, this time the Manhattan Bridge, which is very close to the Brooklyn Bridge.   It is more or less ugly;  the bridge is undistinguished, and you are mostly surrounded by fences and so forth.  In addition, the pedestrian path runs right next to the subway tracks, which makes for considerable noise and shaking.  That said, it was still a wonderful and interesting walk, starting from the mostly high rise modern section of downtown Brooklyn, and ending up in the heart of Chinatown.

I took lots of pictures...

Some detail on the bridge:

A view of a beach and weddings in the new Brooklyn Bridge park:

Walking next to the subways:

 A very peculiar building, with Manhattan towers in the background:

More rooftop grafitti and towers

I never knew that rooftops were a good place for grafitti:

Grafitti on the bridge:

Subway tracks:

Geri Allen

Last night we heard the jazz pianist Geri Allen in a quartet at a club called the Jazz Standard.  The quartet was the pianist Allen, a bassist, a drummer, and a tap dancer, Maurice Chestnut.   The tap dancer was there as an instrumentalist, and functioned as a musician in the quartet.  While this sounded very odd at first, with the sound of the taps jarring with the very traditional sound of a piano trio, I gradually became used to it, and by the end, with a vigorous duet between the drummer and the tap dance, I was enjoying the combination.  Allen is a wonderful pianist, mostly in the mainstream, but with a delightful quirkiness and sometimes a very delicate touch.   At a certain point, I was listening to one of the numbers, and realized it had evolved into  "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" .   You haven't lived until you have heard "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" performed by a jazz piano trio and tap dancer.  Perhaps my only Christmas concert of the year...

The Romanian Film Festival

The other night, we went to the opening night of the Romanian Film Festival, mostly to see the film, and partially to see what the crowd was like.   The film, "Of Men and Snails", was a kind of Romanian version of "The Full Monty";  set in 1992, it chronicles the attempt of some workers to save their factory from being shut down.  They propose to raise money to buy the factory by donating sperm to a sperm bank (Romanian humor!).  The French buyers pretend to propose to turn the factory into a snail canning facility.   It was entertaining, but didn't really have the pitch black humor that we enjoy in contemporary Romanian films.  But not coming to a theater near you.   And we got to see Romanian film stars and directors.

Wanderings in the Metropolitan Museum

I went to the Metropolitan Museum the other day to see a  small exhibit of Klee paintings.   (The Met has quite a large collection of them.)   They are wonderful to see in person, because the texture and character never really come across in reproductions.  It is surprising to me how delightfully messy Klee's work is.  In one painting, the canvas is nailed to the frame, and the nails are not painted over.  There are sometimes little punctures, leftover globs of paint, and the painting board itself may be warped.  And the lines, of course, are never straight.

I took a quick look at the new Matisse show, which received rave reviews in the NY Times, but there were so many people there that one could barely see the paintings.

Then I wandered, and saw a small exhibit about the interaction of American artists and African art in the early 20th century; different from the European story that we know, because African art also became an inspiration for African-American artists.

Then I saw this Mayan 8th century painted limestone, which made me think of Klee in its color palette and texture.

Then, an icon painting, which turns out to be from 17th century Ethiopia.  I never would have guessed.

I can never get tired of wandering in the Met.

The Barnes Collection

Over Thanksgiving, we were in Philadelphia, which gave us an opportunity to visit the Barnes Collection in its new home in Philadelphia.  This collection, established by the eccentric American art collector Albert Barnes, was for a long time in its specially built home in suburban Philadelphia, existing under the terms of Barnes's will, which specified that basically nothing could ever be changed, or lent, etc.  After much legal wrangling, the collection was moved to a newly built museum, where the architects were charged with the task of recreating the original installation, a recipe for failure if there ever was one.  Astonishingly, it is a great success; the highly eccentric arrangements of art and objects have been recreated in a beautifully lit reconstructions of the original rooms. The art includes about 70 Cezannes, a seemingly infinite number of Renoirs, and major works by Matisse, Seurat, and others.

What is still problematic is Barnes's penchant for symmetrical arrangements of paintings.  While I like the juxtaposition of art from different periods, the idea of arranging paintings in symmetrical pairings seems to detract from the from the works themsleves and call attention to Barnes's ideas instead.

Some examples:

(Pictures not by me; forbidden)
Also note the various items of hardware interspersed between the paintings.
In some cases, like Seurat's "Models", the work is hung above another painting, so that is is barely visible.   I don't think that  because a person acquired great works of art in his lifetime he is able to dictate for posterity the way in which we are able to view them.  Hopefully, at some point, the Barnes Collection will countenance a gradual rearrangement.

Wozzeck

Last night we heard Berg's opera "Wozzeck" in a concert performance with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting.  It was yet another astonishing rendition from this ensemble, and a truly memorable performance.  Berg's opera emerged as truly expressionist in this performance; a virtual nightmare from beginning to end that left us exhausted.  Though it was a concert performance, all the singers sang from memory and acted their roles convincingly, even dressed in their concert attire.   Because this is  a "symphonic opera", the increased presence of an on stage orchestra made it even more symphonic.  The famous crescendo on the note "B" was about the loudest thing I have ever heard from an orchestra.  I did miss some of the effects of a staged version; for instance, the "snoring" chorus strikes you unexpectedly when you are not in the visual realm of a darkened barracks.  And Berg's onstage orchestra effects were meaningless in this context.

Some pictures:

(From Lincoln Center, I didn't take them)

Another thing that struck me in this performance is the extent to which Berg uses so many traditional elements in this opera;  ranging from folk songs and marches to fugues. All these are transformed through his expressionist vision, but remain a musically grounding focus during what is an hour and a half of extremely dense and nightmarish music.    I remain in awe of how Berg was ever able to create and realize this vision.

After 5 concerts in 7 days, I am ready for a break!

An amusing encounter

Last spring, when we went to hear the Ring Cycle at the Met, there was a rather eccentric woman who shared our partial view box with us, and with whom we had the occasional scuffle regarding box space and the subtitle displays.  She would always arrive about 1 minute before the curtain, carrying an number of bags, and was frequently on her feet to get a better look at the stage. We found out she had seen all three performances of the Ring.
       When we got our tickets for the Tempest this fall, we ended up in exactly the same box.  We joked as we arrived, at least our lady friend won't be here.  At 1 minute before the curtain, she arrived.  Maybe she goes every night?
        Then, last night, as we stood up from our seats in Fisher Hall after the Mahler, there she was again, sitting in the seats right behind us!   It turns out she goes to orchestral concerts too!  (Edit:  She was there for Wozzeck, too.)

Mahler 9

Tonight we heard a performance of Mahler's 9th, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.  It was amazing.   Vera, who is rumored to know something about Mahler, thought it was the best Mahler performance she has ever heard. The orchestra played with fearsome intensity and precision, and Salonen's conducting brought out all the intricate details in Mahler's scores that others smooth out.  Dissonant inner voices, jarring juxtapostions, and Mahler's unique orchestrations were all very audible.  There is really nothing like hearing a work like this performed live by an orchestra of this caliber.  I am becoming an orchestral junkie!

And tomorrow night, the same forces will be performing "Wozzeck".

Williamsburg

 Last week I went to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which I haven't been to in years.  Williamsburg is now known as the hippest area of NY, where all the younger types go to live and hang out, and where the latest restaurants are.  How hip is Williamsburg?  When I stopped to get a coffee at a coffee joint, the barista, after serving me, when over to the cafe's turntable, and put on an LP of the Rolling Stones "Beggars Banquet".  How many coffee shops do you know that play vinyl?   (Though it is debatable whether geezer rock can really be hip...)

Williamsburg is mostly very low rise architecture, with very little of the predominant historic details that characterize area like Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope.  But a interesting mix of styles, nonetheless.   Some Long Island style renovations...(vinyl siding?)

The most fun, though, was walking back to Manhattan on the Williamsburg Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world for 20 years, and lives in the shadow of its more famous neighbor.   It has a great pedestrian walkway, for some reason painted in pink.  You walk above the cars, and slightly parallel and above the subway lines.  It lands you in Manhattan in the middle of the Lower East Side.

Some pictures  (click to enlarge):

Graffitti, chain link fences and pink railings at the beginning:

The Empire State Building framed:

Strange metal things:

The walkway in pink, with decorations;

The end, as you descend to Manhattan:

The official nameplate for the bridge, as reconfigured by New Yorkers:

Some buildings in Manhattan, as you get off the bridge;

A building in Chinatown, with all windows filled with boxes:

Brahms, part 2

I heard the NY Philharmonic play Brahms 3rd and 4th symphonies in a concerto-free program on Friday night, conducted by the very frail Kurt Masur.   Both symphonies were an absolute pleasure to hear; Masur's tempi were very, very slow, which is fine with me, as it gives more time to savour the details of Brahms's orchestral writing.  It is music which I used to know very well, but haven't listened to in years.   It still strikes me as a wonderful battle between romantic impulses and Brahms's painstakingly worked out details and construction in the symphonic tradition.  

Another Storm

Not really a storm;  we saw the Thomas Adès opera, "The Tempest".  We saw it first in the movie theater broadcast presentation, and then in live performance at the Met.  This was my first experience of the Met HD broadcasts, and the difference with the live performance is striking.  The sound is certainly lacking in the HD broadcast;  what you hear is primarily the singing voices, with the orchestra more in the background.  With closeup focus on the singers, what you get is primarily an experience of acting and singing. (It becomes more like a movie going experience.) In live performance, though the orchestra is much more present, and the singers and the acting are part of the overall experience.  This is especially significant in "The Tempest", which Adès has described as a "symphonic opera".  By that he means that the orchestra is the musical focus of the drama, working in parallel with the singers.

I was very much impressed by the opera, in both performances.  It feels to me as legitimate descendent of the tradition of the great 20th century operas like "Lulu" and Wozzeck", a stunning musical vision.  Adès music is both complex and expressive.  As intense a musical experience as I have ever had in an opera house.

Prospero, with Ariel, who sings in Queen of the Night register exclusively...

I was inspired to get a copy of a recent book of conversations with Adès, published in 2012.  He turns out to be very entertaining in conversation, and endlessly provocative in his opinions (and he knows it..)  Both Vera and I were laughing out loud when reading it.   He describes Wagner's music as  "a fungus", and has harsh words for Mahler, Britten, and Brahms.  But he is also very intelligent regarding his own music, and it is well worth reading.