Midsummer Night's Dream

I went to hear Britten's opera "Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Met.   I have very little aquaintance with the music of Britten, having been in graduate school in music during the period when Britten was not to be mentioned.  I have also composed several scores based on the play, so I had additional incentive to hear it.   The most successful musical versions, though, have been those with mostly incidental music (Purcell and Mendelssohn), and not full settings with the play as libretto.   Unlike Ades' version of the Tempest, Britten uses the original text, with judicious cuts.

I enjoyed the opera, though, for me, Britten still does not speak to me personally.  Like the play, the opera combines contrasting moments of magic, love, and burlesque.  There are some very intriguing moments, especially in the magical parts; but then we get into moments of music-hall farce.  I never get tired, though, of hearing the Met orchestra.  Britten's orchestration is often very delicate, and hearing every detail is a delight.
The production is brightly colorful without being particularly striking in any way.

It's not every day that you see a countertenor (Oberon) in a flashy chartreuse suit:

Textiles and Ligeti

I went to the Metropolitan Museum, both to hear a concert by the ensemble "Alarm Will Sound" and to see art.
The show "Interwoven Globe", an exhibit of textiles from around the world between 1500 and 1800, was both fascinating and a great visual treat.   The fascination for me was in the cross-global pollination of ideas and techniques.   For example, one hanging, "The Abduction of Helen"  (of Troy) was a depiction of an ancient Greek story, created by Chinese artisans for the Portuguese market.   The embroiderers  worked from European visual models, but also incorporated elements from Chinese weaving.  In addition there were painted sections, done by Chinese artists who had been trained in Japan by Jesuits!    Talk about globalism and multiculturalism....
Here it is: click to enlarge (It is about 15 feet wide in the original):

Other examples were equally complex in global connections, adding Iran, Turkey, and Latin America into the mix.

Here is another one, as described on the Met's website:

This tapestry was produced by highly skilled Andean weavers. Its diverse iconography reflects the range of sources and ideas that informed the intellectual framework of colonial Andean society. Along with scenes from the Old Testament, classical Greek mythology, and local daily life, the amorphous central blue shape seems to reinterpret a Chinese symbol. At top left, three horsemen (possibly representing the Magi) wear European-style garments; above their heads is the enigmatic phraseMoussom Nessept. Although the precise meaning is unknown, moussom may relate to the Arabic mawsim, referring to trade winds that are favorable for sailing.

(I have to say the the Met's website is exemplary, with easy access to high resolution images and information.)

After viewing this exhibition and a quick look at the Balthus (which is too creepy for my taste..), I wandered through the Met and had a light dinner in the cafeteria before going to a 7 PM concert.   This was my first time at an evening at the Met, and the atmosphere was very nice; less crowded and noisy than during the day.  And there is something to be said for being able to peruse ancient Egyptian art while waiting for a concert to start.

The concert, performed by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, was excellent.  They played a early Thomas Ades piece, "Living Toys", which is almost hyperactive in its rapid juxtaposition of contrasting materials.  It is orchestrated to the hilt.   I also heard a kind of Ivesian quality to the piece, with its jarring quotations and juxtapositions.  Which made even more sense when the next piece on the program was Ives, one of his crazy ragtime pieces for ensemble.   The highlight, though, was the Ligeti "Chamber Concerto" from 1969 or so.   To hear all of Ligeti's inventive sonic textures live was treat.  The concert ended with another Ives ragtime piece, even crazier than the previous one.

Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern

Which orchestra in New York has played pieces like Webern's "Symphony" and his "Concerto", Stravinsky's "Symphony in Three Movements" and his Huxley "Variations" in the last year, multiple times?
The answer is the New York City Ballet Orchestra, playing live with the choreography of George Balanchine.   In fact, one could say that Balanchine remains the major advocate for twentieth century orchestral music in New York.  
I heard and saw an amazing program at the New York City Ballet as part of their "Black and White" series; which means just music and movement; no sets and simple leotard costumes.  The highlight for me was the piece "Episodes", choreographed, in order, to Webern's "Symphony", "Five Pieces" op. 10, "Concerto" op. 24, and his arrangement of the Bach "Ricercar".   I was incredibly moved to see what Balanchine had done with this music which I love so much;  the choreography was subtle, inventive, and always consistent with the spirit of Webern's music.  It's impossible to describe.  I feel very lucky to be on a planet where I can go with 2,000 other people on a Sunday afternoon and hear these pieces.

The other 3 pieces on the program were exciting as well.  A piece which was new to me was "The Four Temperaments", choreographed to a Hindemith score of the same name for piano and strings.   I had not heard the music before.  (Hindemith wrote many interesting pieces, especially early in his career, but his reputation suffers badly from some of the more pedantic and academic pieces he wrote.  Not to mention those of us who suffered through his "Elementary Training For Musicians")   The music works in an incredibly intricate way with the choreography, the dialogues between the piano and the strings being contrasted with various formations of soloists and groups.

I also love the "Duo Concertante", where Balanchine consistently subverts or expectations by having the dancers stop dancing and go stand around the piano and listen to the music.  And the "Symphony in Three Movements" is always exhilarating.  

Balanchine is an extraordinary artist; he really deserves to be on the same 20th century pedestal with people like Stravinsky and Picasso.

For further information, the New York Times was as excited as I was..


New York Times Review

Voluptuous Microtones

I went to hear a concert of the music of the Austrian composer Georg Haas at Miller Theatre.  It was extraordinary.   I was unfamiliar with his music before this concert, and now I am eager to hear more.   The most distinguishing feature of his music is the use of all kinds of microtones; just intonation, overtone series, quarter tones, you name it.   But all of this is in service of obtaining some absolutely beautiful sonorities;  you really feel like you have landed on some other, different planet where they never were limited to the tempered scale.   His sonic imagination is truly amazing.  But Haas' sensibility is a very traditional one, though; these sonorities are used to build up great masses of sound and climaxes which are almost Wagnerian in expression.   In texture, the music most closely resembles that of Scelsi; sonorites are sustained and juxtaposed, and the language is basically harmonic and timbral.

The major work on the program, "Atthis", a cantata for mezzo and eight instruments, is a moving work in the European art music tradition.  Using texts from Sappho, it is extremely expressive in a very traditional sense.  Usually, microtones sound like out of tune playing to me; but, in this music, it all seems very natural and convincing.  Needless to say, the piece is extremely difficult to perform, especially for the singer.  I thought the performances were fantastic.  Brad Lubman conducted the Ensemble Signal, and the singer was Rachel Calloway.

The first work on the program "tria ex uno",  for small ensemble, starts as a straightforward arrangement of a short fragment from Josquin.  The second short section turns that fragment into something like Webern's arrangement of Bach.  The third, and longest part takes the Josquin into Hass' microtonal world in an entirely convincing and expressive manner.

Health Care and Guns

As I flew across the US from Vancouver to New York during the time of the US government shutdown and the hostage taking by Republicans in Congress, I was thinking about the strangeness of the US, with the obsession with guns and now the obsession with avoiding health care.  (I had lots of time to think, with my plane delayed three hours, missed connections, lost luggage, etc.)  And it suddenly occurred to me,  health care must be Un-American.   Real Americans don't go to doctors, they tough it out.  Doctors are for wimps and losers and those who can't take care of themselves.   When John Wayne was riding his horse to go out and kill Indians, did he stop to check to see if he had health insurance before he went?  No!   He had a gun, so anything that could harm him, he could deal with with a gun.   So if you have a gun, you don't need health care!

(Many years ago, I once saw a bumper sticker that said "The West wasn't won with registered guns".)

Magritte at MOMA

I saw the Magritte show at MOMA.  Magritte is one of those painters whose images are instantly familiar and recognizable as Magritte.  In fact, to me they seem so familiar that I have trouble getting beyond the fact that what I see is a Magritte.   I was hoping that a large show would give me a better insight, but it didn't really happen.   The most interesting parts were the early collages, where you see him experimenting with the same images he ended up using in a lot of his painted pictures.   Ultimately, I found that his paintings recycle the same motives over and over again; thus there are numerous variations on the "Ceci N'Est Pas une Pipe" motive.   Seeing the paintings in person didn't do much for me, they don't really look the different than the reproductions, to my eyes.
I did notice one phenomenon in the very crowded exhibit.  As I was trying to look at a large painting, I counted four people standing in front of the painting.  None of them were looking at the painting; all of them were squinting at their little gadgets, trying to start up the commentary or whatever.   Not good.

(Perhaps some future enterprising artist will come up with a show that is nothing but blank spaces on the walls, except for little numbers that tell you which which file on your gadget to access for words and images.  Putting things on walls is so outdated.)

Trying to find images at MOMA's website makes my internet browser crash...

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                             SCREENSHOT OF MAGRITTE PAINTING


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Godard in 3D

Last night we went to a showing of the film "3X 3D" at the Vancouver Film Festival.   The film was a collection of three short films, commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimares, directed by Godard, Greenaway, and Pera (a Portuguese director).

The Godard episode was something extraordinary, in his very late style; a dense collage of spoken aphorisms, musical excerpts, sounds, excerpts from films, still images, etc. which resists any kind of interpretation that I know of.   Incomprehensible, in the best sense; I think he is pushing the limits of what we can perceive in the cinema, and forcing us to rethink how we perceive.  

A few days later, I was at the Neue Galerie in New York to see their show of early Kandinsky.   As I sat in a room surrounded by the wildly colorful canvases that Kandinsky made in his very beginning abstract period, I wondered what people made of them back then.   For a world where representational painting was the only kind of painting, they must have been both shocking and incomprehensible; people did not know how to look at the canvases.  I feel that way about the Godard; I need to look and listen to film in a different way to understand it.  So, for the moment,  I am content to let it wash over me.

(Screenshots should be in 3D, but, luckily, the internet is not in 3D yet.)

Godard's dog!

The Greenaway episode was completely different, taking full advantage of 3D technology.  It was one continuous shot moving through space and time around an old church.  People, written texts, and objects were flying around everywhere in a dense visual collage.   And, for once, the sonic collage was equally inventive; snippets of classical music from different eras moved in and out, along with a jumble of voices and other sounds.   Candy for the eye and ear!

I have no idea what these colored spheres are about, but it was fun to watch them move about it 3D space.

The other episode shall not be spoken of.

High Alpine

While we really don't have that much going on culture-wise in Vancouver, we do have high mountains.    So on what the weather service was calling "the last day of summer", we made the 2 hour drive up to the "resort municipality" of Whistler.   Whistler is indeed that; it is a town entirely created with the idea of entertaining its visitors, primarily through outdoor recreational activities.   And, of course, extracting as many dollars as possible from those visitors.   Just like Las Vegas, only with skiing, mountain biking, hiking, etc. replacing gambling as the major pretexts for visiting.   But for those of us of a certain age when we can no longer manage 10 hour hikes into the wilderness, the Whistler gondola represents an easier way to get up into the high alpine landscape.   (Many years ago, while staying in Switzerland, I used to take the Swiss postal buses up to the small villages in the high Alps, and hike higher from there.)   So we took the gondola and chairlift up to the peak of Whistler Mountain on what was a hot and completely cloudless day.  The landscape is magnificent; glacier-topped peaks in every direction, and rocky landscapes with bits of alpine vegetation here and there.   We did a few hours of hiking and ambling about.   And, at the end of the day, we drove back home to Vancouver.

Pictures  (Click to enlarge):

Black Tusk mountain:

This lake is not on any marked trail;  it looks like paradise to me.

There was still lots of snow leftover, even in September.

The view from the Peak to Peak Gondola.   You don't want to be looking down.

Cloud Atlas

I finally caught up with the movie, "Cloud Atlas".  I have always been a great fan of David Mitchell's novels, starting with "Ghostwritten", which I heard about when A.S.Byatt declared it her favorite book of the year in the TLS. So I was intrigued when I read about the Wachowski-Twyker film adaptation.  Normally, one of my cardinal rules of film going is to never see a film made from a good book.  (A film made from a bad book is a different story.)  A filmed version can never compete with what our imagination creates from an author's words, and the result is usually some sort of paint-by-numbers version of the book.  But the film-maker's strategy in this case was too audacious to ignore.  Taking Mitchell's six stories, which are told in a kind of palindromic, Russian doll sequence in the novel, and telling them all concurrently is a brilliant idea.  Simply put, viewing the film requires you to have six simultaneous narratives in your head, each set in an entirely different era. Once it gets going, the film shifts abruptly from one story to the other in brilliant feats of editing, so that in the middle of a sci-fi action scene, you are suddenly in an scene on a 19th century ship, with no transitional devices whatsoever.  Six part polyphony!  This is fun, and really subverts the standard Hollywood notions of editing and storytelling.  It also brings to mind D.W. Griffiths equally audacious classic of parallel storytelling, "Intolerance", whose ending features the narrative climax of four different narratives in four different epochs.   So all of this narrative excitement makes up for the frequent stretches of risible dialogue, bad acting, and silly prosthetics that litter the film. (Another cardinal rule of mine is to never see a film which has a classical composer as a character.)   The film makers, like D.W. Griffith before them, are trying to do something very ambitious: whether they succeed or not is almost besides the point.

The East Village

I had run out of ancestral homes to visit, so I decided to go see Charlie Parker's residence, at 151 Avenue B in the East Village, right on Tompkins Square Park.   Here it is:

The East Village, another gentrified neighborhood in New York, has gone through a number of transitions in the last 100 years.   It is fascinating to walk through, mostly because it has a lot of architecture of contrasting styles.   Right around the corner from Charlie Parker's house, I found this French Country Chateau:

It's actually a public school.

Now we are in Germany:

A bit of Art Deco ornamentation:

And the remnants of graffiti:

I had a snack at the New York outpost of Vancouver's famous Japadog hot dog joint.

More Music

We went to hear the Charles Mingus Big Band at the Jazz Standard.   The Jazz Standard is one of my ideal places to hear live music; intimate, with an excellent quality sound system, a "quiet policy" that requests that the audience refrain from talking during the music, and delicious food.   The Mingus band was in top form that night; the soloists inspired; and the whole thing with a kind of rollicking, group improvisatory feel which epitomizes the Mingus big band sound.  And the Mingus repertoire is always interesting.

We also went to the Cornelia Street Cafe to hear the Romanian born cabaret singer Sanda Weigl do a show of the music of Piaf and Dietrich.   Weigl's voice is the real thing, and a pleasure to hear, with spirited accompaniment by accordion or piano.  My only complaint was that I wished her choices of music had been more adventurous; apparently she does wonderful Romanian repertoire as well.   Maybe the next time...

European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum

I went to see the newly redone and expanded European paintings galleries at the Metropolitan Museum.   I was amused to see that they now have a similar organization to the Gemaldgalerie in Berlin. Upon entering you can turn one way to go through painting as it developed in the Northern European tradition, or the other way to go through through the similar history in the Italian tradition.   Broadly speaking, of course.
The galleries are wonderful, and for the most part, even in the crowded summer tourist season, relatively calm and peaceful.   After seeing Jem Cohen's intriguing film "Museum Hours", I was pleased to catch this view of a museum guard contemplating a wall of Rembrandts, with no one else around:

Aside from seeing all five of the Met's Vermeers temporarily in one room, the highlight for me was seeing the early Italian paintings.   What struck me was the vividness of the colors and designs; it seemed to me that the paintings were less about their ostensible religious subjects and more about the sheer beauty of color and line.   All those brightly colored robes!   There is one painting with a particularly striking blue robe, by Fillipino Lippi about which you learn that the wealthy commissioner of the painting paid extra money to have the finest quality blue.   All of which reminds you of the sheer inventiveness it took back in those days to create these colors.

There are some paintings that seem Klimt-like in their sheerly decorative surfaces, as in this part of a painting of Saint Ursula:

And there are things like the painting from the school of Valencia, which seem to exist in a different world than many of the traditional Italian paintings.

After spending a lot of time with these paintings in two separate visits, my eyes weren't good for much else.
I did see, though, a small exhibition from the Met's Klee holdings that exhibited Klee's development towards abstraction, which came early on in his career.  The blurbs noted that unlike painters like Kandinsky or Mondrian, whose move towards abstraction generally reflected some kind of spiritual or philosophical quest, Klee's turn towards abstraction was in order "to keep drab reality at bay".   While the point is certainly debatable, I like the notion, which sounds Nabokovian to me.

Aunt Hazel of Brooklyn Heights

Continuing in my habit of tracking down my ancestral residences in New York, I looked up my "Aunt Hazel", a gruff and humorous woman who was my maternal grandfather's sister.  I knew she lived in Brooklyn Heights with her companion Aunt Marguerite.  And there they were, listed in the 1940 census as living at 160 Columbia Heights.  The census lists Marguerite as the head of household, and Hazel as her "partner".  Their occupations are listed as secretaries.  Hazel and Marguerite always came to our house for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, along with all the other relatives in New York.   I wish I knew more about them!

160 Columbia Heights was a very new building in 1940, in an Art Deco style, with amazing views of Manhattan.

After walking around Brooklyn Heights and its wonderful historic architecture, I walked down the hill towards what is now called Dumbo, and saw the famous dual bridge view that everyone photographs:

Dumbo is really more a real estate marketers idea than anything else, with some nice old historic warehouses converted into condos, and some old buildings. It is fun to look at the bridges from underneath.  Who knew that the Manhattan Bridge was held up by a brick chimney?

But what they don't talk about is the absolutely deafening roar produced by the subways as they cross the Manhattan Bridge.  It's kind of like living next to a runway at an airport; I don't know how anyone can stand it.  There was a good reason for this being a warehouse district.

Naturally the next step was to join the crowds and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.
I have to confess that I find the notion of Gothic arches on a modern bridge to be somewhat  peculiar; I prefer my bridges to be all metal, like the Manhattan and Williamsburg.   But there is no denying the appeal of the patterns of the cables.

The renovations also add a bit of variety, with this tarp covering part of the bridge.

Once in Manhattan, I walked down towards the Battery, and saw the beginnings of Santiago Calatrava's  transportation hub emerging above ground.   It looks a bit sinister at the moment, but will hopefully be a great relief from the bland glass boxes that surround it.

Perry Street

Recently, the New York Public Library posted a searchable version of the 1940 New York phone book on line, with links to the census of 1940, which is also on line.  So I looked up my mother's family, and there they were, listed as living at 33 Perry Street in Greenwich village in 1940.   I knew anecdotally that they had moved around New York a lot.   And the census showed the four of them (including my mother's sister) living there. (And it turns out that the young Thomas Merton, the theologian, lived next door.)
So I went to see the house, and here it is:

All of this was a pretext for a long walk around Greenwich Village; the first thing I saw, was, a bit further down the street (66 Perry Street), a few people taking pictures.  I wondered what famous resident of the Village had lived in that house.   A quick check on Google revealed that it was the exterior location of the townhouse of the fictional character Carrie Bradshaw in the series "Sex and the City".  And I thought it would be some real person's house...

The West Village, is at this point, an incredibly chic and affluent neighborhood of historic low rise townhouses and small apartment buildings.  And many restaurants and bars, usually with signs out front reminding patrons to be quiet so as to not disturb the neighbors.   Doesn't sound good.

I saw this interesting old cobblestone alley near Charles Street and the river:

A few days later, I was at MOMA, and there was a picture of the same alley, taken by Bernice Abbott:

Walker Evans and Soundings at MOMA

I went to MOMA to see their take on "sound art", and a 75th anniversary commemorative show of Walker Evan's "American Photographs".    The sound art show was mostly inconsequential and annoyingly simplistic.   For example, one artist had taken a copy of a Xenakis score, and drawn lines from each note to the center point of the paper.   That's it....   If you want to extrapolate artistic meaning from that exercise, feel free to...   Others continued along the same lines, mixing contemporary art cliches with abandon...   I did like one work, consisting of 1,500 small sized speakers arranged on a wall, with varying frequencies of pink noise that changed as you moved around.

On the other hand, the Walker Evans show was wonderful.  I know many of the photographs form the original catalog, "American Photographs".  What I was not prepared for was the richness of the silver gelatin prints.   The show (one large room) had a copy of the catalog at hand; comparing the prints directly with the reproductions in the catalog showed that the reproduced images were  feeble, pale imitations of the originals.   I tend to think of Walker Evans as a "documentary" style photographer, inheriting the tradition of Atget in taking photographs of the ordinary.   These prints showed Evans as a sensual and subtle visual artist as well, working in the medium of black and white photography.

A pale imitation:

I like the show so much, I went back to see it again a few days later.

Stravinsky at Bard

After a few months in Vancouver, it was time for a visit to New York to recharge our cultural batteries.   Not that there is nothing happening in Vancouver (more on that in another post).   

Our first major event was the opening night of the Stravinsky and His World festival at Bard College.   We drove up with our friend Tina to the campus (about 2 hours north of New York).  The concert took place at Bard's Gehry-designed concert hall.   

For the most part, I have become tired of Gehry's signature wavy surfaces.  I hate his new high-rise condo building in downtown NY.   But this building, situated in a lush green environment, is beautiful to see.   And, more importantly, beautiful to hear.  The concert hall seats about 900 people in a nicely shaped wooden space, with a stage that can hold a full orchestra and chorus with ease.  The program was a truly inspired cross-section of Stravinsky's career;  Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Symphony of Psalms, the late and rarely performed "Abraham and Isaac" for baritone and orchestra, Concerto for Two Pianos, Les Noces, and a mini song retrospective.   Whew!   It made for compelling listening, as I heard musical ideas ricochet between Stravinky's stylistically contrasted works.  Symphony of Psalms was vivid and clear in the smallish space, and the very energetic performance of Les Noces brought the house down, with two very idiomatic performances from Russian singers brought in for the occasion.   

       The Bard Festival is a truly first class enterprise, with programs designed to create maximal musical interest, with scholars giving pre-concert talks, and even a book which is published on the opening day of the festival.  Not to mention an after concert party tent, with a bar, live band, and dance floor!   I wish we could have stayed for the whole thing!

Back in Vancouver

We are back in Vancouver now.  It was hard to leave; the calendar showed upcoming performances of Ives 4th symphony by the NY Philharmonic, a Charpentier opera by Les Arts Florissants, and a performance of Weill's opera "Mahagonny" by the Manhattan School of Music, among other things.   But, on the other hand, we have seen and heard many things, and I do feel the urge to sit at my desk and produce things.  Vancouver is very green and quiet, two qualities in short supply in New York, and it is great to reconnect with all our friends here.

Perhaps the lawn needs to be mowed...

I did see several more exhibitions in New York in our last week.  The Bill Brandt photography show at MOMA was impressive.  I was particularly struck by the techniques he used in altering his prints as he developed them, using various black washes to darken his prints and isolate things that interested him.  And, in general, things are dark.    I also finally caught up with the Surrealism show at the Morgan Library.  The show, like the abstraction show at MOMA, strains to include everyone they can, including Pollock and Rothko.  While I don't really have much interest any more in the surrealist aesthetic, which seems very dated to me, I did find the range of techniques that the surrealists and their fellow travelers used to be of interest.      The Morgan also had an exhibit of Proust manuscripts and corrected galleys that was fascinating.  Impossibly small handwriting, and infinite numbers of crossings out, scribbled annotations, and arrows and lines leading here and there.  It is a wonder that any Proust scholars could figure this out; it is like looking at Ives's manuscripts.

A sample corrected galley:

Bedford-Stuyvesant

On Saturday I took a long walk through the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn.  I was curious to see the architecture, but I also wanted to find the home of my great-grandparents, who lived at 101 Hancock Street.   This was the house that my maternal grandfather grew up in.  His parents were Henry Nelson Meeker and Clara Jones Meeker.  The house was originally owned by my great great grandfather, one John Wesley Jones, who was known as a photographer in the mid 19th century.
And there it was; nothing particularly distinctive, looking just like the neighboring houses, and without even an identifying number. But interesting for me to think that my grandfather, whom I knew when I was a child, grew up there. He was born in 1889.
Here is the house:

After that, I went wandering through the neighborhood, which has all kinds of beautiful homes, including a historical district.  Bedford-Stuyvesant is a predominantly African-American community; it was known in the 60's and 70's as an area of great poverty and frequent racial conflicts.  It is now slowly gentrifying, with a more affluent population, both black and white,  moving in, and many of the older homes being restored.   Here is a selection of photographs of buildings in the area.  (Click to enlarge)

Two churches:

A former movie theater:

More houses:

and things in need of restoration: