Night After Night

The devil and Miss Polk.

A bit more than 50 years ago, the young, relatively unproven composer Carlisle Floyd drew upon his youth as the son of a minister in the American South to translate the apochryphal Bible tale of Susanna and the Elders into a 1950s rural setting. The opera, Floyd's third, was tremendously well received; initially staged in Talahassee, Florida in 1955, Susannah came to New York City Opera in September 1956. The work garnered a number of prestigious prizes and quickly earned a place in the standard repertoire, establishing Floyd among the most important and successful American opera composers -- as well as a founder of the American verismo school that lives on in recent works by William Bolcom and Tobias Picker.

Dicapo Opera, a gutsy little company that performs in a handsome 204-seat theater under a church on Manhattan's Upper East Side, revived its popular 1995 production this month to mark the work's 50th anniversary, and it was there that I caught the opera on Saturday night. (One last performance will be presented on Sunday afternoon at 4pm.) As Jim Oestreich noted just a little over 11 years ago in his enthusiastic New York Times review, Susannah is a work that can be performed powerfully using modest means, and the Dicapo performance was rather more than that. John Farrell's stark, angular set design was striking in its elegant economy. Despite a dry, unresonant acoustic, Steven Osgood's orchestra made much of Floyd's colorful, melodious and often mysterious score, delivering a beautifully paced and balanced performance.

In the title role, the vibrant soprano Laura Pedersen began the evening as the only sunny, smiling countenance in the opening church-sponsored dance, surrounded by uptight neighbors suspicious of her beauty and seemingly carefree ways. She moved lithely and acted with distinction, and boldly bared her backside for the scene in which the Elders catch her bathing in the creek; her voice rang out strongly and sweetly throughout the evening, hardening only slightly in climactic passages. Pedersen convincingly portrayed her character's initial innocence, pained disillusionment and eventual decline; her performance of the second act's "The trees on the mountain are cold and bare" was a show-stopper.

As Olin Blitch, the traveling preacher who offers salvation to the community but preys upon Susannah in her moment of weakness, Matthew Lau was a towering presence. His thundering voice conjured God's wrath, from which he offered salvation with a greasy smile, yet he brought genuine humility to Blitch's pained plea for divine forgiveness after his own night of trespass. Coke Morgan, as Susannah's hot-tempered, often-drunk older brother Sam, tempered a hard-edged swagger with tenderness toward his sister. Now and then, Morgan's passion preyed upon clear ennunciation, which posed some difficulty since Dicapo did not employ its surtitles. Robert Hoyt's portrayal of Little Bat as a hulking simpleton was reminiscent of another Floyd role in this singer's repertoire, Lennie in Of Mice and Men.

Among the secondary cast, the four Elders and their wives were portrayed with sanctimonious menace, and the chorus provided powerful climaxes. As the Times review noted, Michael Capasso's direction serves the story admirably; like Oestreich, I was especially impressed with the subtlety of Capasso's conception when the outcast Susannah comes to church in the second act.

After the performance, it was a pleasure to see the gregarious impresario greeting regulars in the lobby, often by first name. Founded by Capasso and Diane Martindale in 1981, Dicapo has performed a genuine service to New York operagoers for a quarter century now, presenting fresh talent in smartly conceived, well executed productions like this one. Recent productions have included Sergei Rachmaninoff's Francesca da Rimini and Robert Ward's Claudia Legare; in its 2003-04 season, the company offered an especially impressive undertaking, mounting all three versions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly. (Anne Midgette's New York Times article about that event is here.)

No surprise, then, that the company's 2006-07 brochure, circulated tonight, included not only crowd pleasers such as Lehár's The Merry Widow and Puccini's Manon Lescaut (as well as a connoisseur item in the latter composer's Le Villi) but also, in February 2007, the New York premiere of Tobias Picker's Thérèse Raquin in the composer's own recently completed reduction for chamber-opera forces.

Playlist:

Osvaldo Golijov - Ainadamar - Dawn Upshaw, Jessica Rivera, Kelley O'Connor, Jesús Montoya, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus / Robert Spano (Deutsche Grammophon)

Taking Back Sunday - Louder Now (Warner Bros.)

Balun - Something Comes Our Way (Brilliante)

Mono - Walking cloud and deep red sky, Flag fluttered and the sun shined (Temporary Residence)

Richard Wagner - Siegfried - Deborah Polaski, John Treleaven, Graham Clark, Falk Struckmann, Günter von Kannen, Eric Halfvarson, Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Theatre del Liceu / Bertrand de Billy (Opus Arte DVD)

Deidre Rodman/Steve Swallow - Twin Falls (Sunnyside)

Richard Wagner - Götterdämmerung - Gwyneth Jones, Jeannine Altmeyer, Manfred Jung, Franz Mazura, Hermann Becht, Fritz Hübner, Bayreuther Festspiele / Pierre Boulez (Deutsche Grammophon DVD)

Student studies II.

Months ago, I'd made plans to spend this past Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera, to hear Deborah Voigt opposite Marcello Giordani in Tosca. But in late March I attended a performance by the Arditti String Quartet at New York University, which included new pieces by the school's graduate-student composers. (A report on that concert is here.) I contemplated postponing the Tosca then and there, because five of those NYU composers were to have pieces played by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Concert Hall that same night. More recently, Giordani cancelled his engagement due to illness, which pretty much sealed the deal: My enthusiasm for these new voices won out, which is why I found myself not at the Met but at Merkin on Tuesday.

With all due respect to Ms. Voigt, whose performance has been generally well received by press and blogosphere alike, I'm pretty sure I made the right decision. Once again, my encounter with this particular crop of young creators left me entertained, energized and enthusiastic with regard to the prognosis for new concert music in the 21st century. Given the amount of music I consume -- live and otherwise, as the banner overhead proclaims -- that's no small feat.

The program opened with "Stain," a song originally written for If I Told Napoleon, the rock band composer Sophocles Papavasilopoulos leads with his wife, singer Sheila Callaghan. (Another of these NYU composers, Matthew Quayle, plays keyboards in the group.) For this recital, Papavasilopoulos arranged the song for string quartet, double bass, flute, muted trumpet, harp, electric guitar, electric piano and drums. Sustained strings swelled cloudlike under Callaghan's evocative lyrics, which were delivered in a breathy whisper while flutist Claire Chase offered counterpoint. A slow, hypnotic pulse underpinned the verses in a melancholy reverie rattled now and again by swelling dissonance; the song ended with a patient percussionist's sudden bass drum thwack. The arrangement was attractive, even stately; still, having since checked out the band's demos on their MySpace page, I think its songs are better served in their original versions for electric keyboards, guitar, bass and drums.

Alexander Ness, whose music is influenced by time spent studying Indian classical percussion, was represented by Nine, Against Nature, a colorful nonet for violin, flute, alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, acoustic guitar, piano, harp and percussion. The brief, abstract work made intelligent use of an especially colorful timbral palette; instrumentalists mixed, mingled and parted like guests at a party, resulting in continually shifting colors and densities.

Three Spirits, the first of two Matthew Quayle compositions on the program, was an expertly crafted trio for piccolo, viola and harp -- lithe, breezy and even humorous. Confronted with virtuosic harp flurries mimicked by the piccolo, the viola offers tart, sullen asides. Eventually, the piccolo player takes an interest in the violist's lines, and parrots them instead. By the end, all three voices are dashing and swooping in tandem; the harpist strums what seems to be a final cadence, but the piccolo demands the final word. It's a lot of action to pack into a five-minute piece. (The program note indicated that an earlier version had clocked in at two minutes.) Another Quayle composition, Contradance, opened the concert's second half. A bristling, playful piece for cello and piano (the latter played by the composer), the work lived up to its billing as "somewhere between Bartok and bluegrass," yet Gershwin and Copland were surely present, as well. Cellist Jameson Platte played the piece confidently, although his lines were sometimes swallowed by the piano; his Baroque bow lent a sharp edge to his lines, answered by jazzy licks from the keyboard. Based on this evidence, Quayle reminds me of Paul Moravec, a contemporary composer who unapologetically finds value in consonance, straightforward melody and rhythmic vitality, and finds something new to say with those time-honored tools.

At the other end of the spectrum, Felipe Lara's Serenata, proved that complexity is far from played out. Based on the half-dozen or so pieces I've heard so far, Lara is a composer concerned with tonal clashes and rhythmic abrasion; even so, I've yet to hear a piece of his that didn't sound utterly natural, even inevitable. Like Jeffrey Mumford, Lara has a unique gift for creating difficult music that falls easy on the ear. His Serenata -- scored for flute, bass clarinet, French horn, acoustic guitar, harp, piano, double bass and percussion -- ebbed and flowed like a moody dream interrupted by fits and starts. Lara's masterful combinations of tone and timbre frequently suggested voices and instruments that simply weren't present on the stage.

The closing work, Jenny Olivia Johnson's The Endings, was billed as an "opera fragment." Based on children's books by Philip Pullman, the libretto -- which Johnson withheld from the printed program, in order to focus attention on the stage -- dealt with Lyra and Will, two childhood friends from alternate worlds who aged at different rates; when we encounter them, Lyra has grown old and is near death, while Will remains youthful. The two roles, scored respectively for soprano and countertenor, were performed by Elizabeth Barber and Adam Ward. (For those who keep tabs on developing singers, Ward should be on your radar; he's young and handsome, and while his technique is unfinished, it's already remarkably secure, and the sound he produces is exquisite. He'd make a devastating Akhnaten.)

Sans scenery, the work was semi-staged and accompanied by an evocative video. Johnson extended the range of her small orchestra by calling upon its players to tap and rub wine glasses, bow keening lines on vibraphone and summon an eerily rattling wail from a Tibetan prayer bowl stroked with a wooden dowel. Again and again, the composer conjured a sense of passing time through cannily scored clockworks; shimmering rhythms borrowed from Steve Reich, while the work's surging pace and sonic density were closer in sound to Michael Gordon. A hissing amplifier intruded upon the quieter moments, but Johnson's iridescent score was exceedingly well served. She is a composer with a genuine flair for musical drama -- which bodes well for Leaving Santa Monica, the work by which she will be represented during New York City Opera's VOX readings. (These will be held on May 6 and 7 at New York University's Skirball Center; Johnson's score will be performed at 2pm on Sunday. The details are here.)

Throughout the evening, conductor Matthew Cody and the International Contemporary Ensemble players performed wonders with a slate of scores that challenged musicians in a variety of ways. At the end of the concert's first half, four members of the ensemble were allowed to truly strut in the masterfully scored mayhem of Magnus Lindberg's Linea D'Ombra. This was the first piece Lindberg wrote as a "professional" composer, just out of the Sibelius Academy. Its violent tonal and rhythmic clashes, bashes and crashes, vocal shrieks and babbled glossolalia seem less angry than cathartic and bullishly gleeful; I wouldn't be surprised if each member of this NYU "Gang of Five" composes something equally bold, reckless and assured once their diplomas are delivered. They've certainly got the tools.

Playlist:

Nico Muhly - Speaks Volumes (Bedroom Community)

Osvaldo Golijov - Ainadamar - Dawn Upshaw, Jessica Rivera, Kelley O'Connor, Jesús Montoya, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus / Robert Spano (Deutsche Grammophon)

Anthony Burr, Oscar Noriega and Chris Speed - The Clarinets (Skirl)

Ted Reichman - My Ears Are Bent (Skirl)

Curtis Hasselbring - The New Mellow Edwards (Skirl)

Richard Wagner - Das Rheingold - Reinhild Runkel, Anne Gjevang, Chris Merritt, Graham Clark, Henk Smit, John Bröcheler, Residentie Orchestra / Hartmut Haenchen (Opus Arte DVD)

Isis - Panopticon (Ipecac)

Zombi - Surface to Air (Relapse)

Mono - You Are There (Temporary Residence)

Silent Civilian - Rebirth of the Temple (Mediaskare)

Eyes of Fire - Ashes to Embers (Century Media)

Beans featuring William Parker and Hamid Drake - Only (Thirsty Ear)

If I Told Napoleon - "Made of You," "Easy" and "Romance Bomb" (demos from the band's MySpace page)

Richard Wagner - Die Walküre - Jessye Norman, Hildegard Behrens, Christa Ludwig, Gary Lakes, Kurt Moll, James Morris, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra / James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon DVD)

Continent of spirit.

Deep downtown in Manhattan, near a still-gaping wound crowned by a sad excess of open sky, is a magnificent glass enclosure attached to a complex whose name speaks not of Apollo, but of Mammon. This is the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, and ironically, it actually echoes rather frequently with the sounds of art and beauty. It was here on Tuesday night that I caught pianist Randy Weston's African Rhythms Quintet and the Gnawa Master Musicians of Morocco, performing one of the Winter Garden's many attractive free-of-charge concerts.

The pianist opened with two solo numbers; I arrived in time for the second, which opened with a Monkish vamp that served to remind us that Weston was paying homage to Thelonious long before the Pulitzer Prize committee caught up. Riffs and chords were stacked into a massive spire of sound -- rendered steely and glassy by this massive steel-and-glass enclosure -- which resolved into a joyous explosion of stride rhythms.

Weston brought to the stage Abdullah el-Gourd, the Moroccan musician who'd first introduced him to Gnawa music more than three decades ago, during the pianist's sojourn in Tangier. Weston explained that when he'd first heard el-Gourd play his hag'houge, a rough-hewn baritone lute also known as the guinbre (or simply genbri), he'd been reminded of the great Ellington band bassist Jimmy Blanton. But when el-Gourd -- resplendent in a white gown with cowrie-shell decorations and a red cap fringed with dreadlocks -- began to play, the sheer physicality of his strumming fingers and thumping thumb was just as reminiscent of the slapping style employed by funk bass guitarists.

The remainder of the Gnawa contingent -- Abdenebi and Mostafa Oubella from Tangier on karkabou (Morocco's signature metal castanets) and vocals, as well as two players from Marrakech, Ahmed Saassaa on hag'houge and M'Barek Ben Othman adding vocals and percussion -- took the stage for "Chalabati," a traditional Moroccan song included on Weston's 1992 Verve album, The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians of Morocco. The musicians kicked off a loping, triple-time rhythm accented on the second beat of every other measure, its melody begun on an off-beat.

One by one, Weston's band came to the stage and joined in: bassist Alex Blake, whose florid strumming often seemed closer in spirit to flamenco guitar than to the more modest patterns of the two hag'houge players; percussionist Neil Clarke, who played percolating rhythms on conga drums while marking a steady pulse with a tamborine presumably controlled by a foot pedal; reed player T.K. Blue, whose offered dancing elaborations on the Gnawans' sung melodies with his soprano saxophone; and trombonist Benny Powell, whose own solo was issued in a rich, copper tone. One of Oubellas lept to his feet, dancing and whirling across the stage. In the aisle to my right, a tiny, beaming blond toddler in a pink sweater and stonewashed jeans responded in kind, restrained only by the protective grasp of her mother.

While the Moroccans took a breather, Weston kicked off "The Shrine" with rumbling notes in his left hand and cascading flurries in his right. The sinuous, floating melody led to a breezy flute solo from Blue and a yawning drawl from Powell, as well as an extended passage for Blake that was more reminiscent of the hag'houge style than anything else he played tonight. The quintet followed with "Blue Moses," one of Weston's best-known tunes; halfway through, the Gnawa musicians appropriated the theme and recast it in their own style. The Oubellas came forward and danced what amounted to a drum duet in clomping leather shoes. Blue led the entire troupe parading out into the audience, in a joyously ragged celebration of music as manifestation of spirit, as celebration and social function.

The following selection, "Lalla Mira," continued along the same lines, a hypnotic, cyclical melody in which Weston's pealing piano figures amounted to one more drum in the troupe. Once again, the band spilled off the stage into the audience, as Blue etched boppish alto saxophone lines across the boiling din. Audience members joined in the party, African-dance experts getting down alongside urbanites whose moves were clearly borrowed from Belinda Carlisle circa 1981. The band gleefully paraded around the audience -- a show of high spirits as well as a fascinating aural experience, from where I sat. The ebullient Ben Othman threatened to steal the show outright, so reluctant was he to let the music fade. Eventually, the Moroccans retired from the stage; having briefly transformed the Winter Garden into a steamy hothouse, Weston and his band cooled the room with their closing rendition of "Mystery of Love."

Playlist:

John Luther Adams - In the White Silence - Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble / Tim Weiss (New World)

Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura - Between (Erstwhile)

Kansas - Works in Progress (Intersound)

Frédéric Chopin - Nocturnes - Maurizio Pollini (Deutsche Grammophon)

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (Downtown/Atlantic)

Current 93 - Black Ships Ate the Sky (Durtro)

Robert Fripp - Love Cannot Bear (DGM)

Discomfort and silence.

Since there's nothing quite like diving right back into the deep end, I resumed my nocturnal activities tonight with the New York premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino's Lohengrin, which was performed by actor-soprano Marianne Pousseur and the Alliance Chamber Players at Florence Gould Hall on Monday night. The concert was the third of four in violinist Nurit Pacht's ambitious series, "Wagner, Our Contemporary," which has examined the works and influence of Wagner in a variety of contexts and from several perspectives: Wagner and Nietzsche in the first concert, Wagner and his French followers in the second. Wagner as harbinger of the breakdown of conventional tonality in the 20th century is the subject of the fourth concert, to be held here on May 1.

Tonight's program, it could be argued -- and was, vociferously, by a small handful of disgruntled patrons after the performance -- actually had rather little to do with Wagner. Despite sharing a name, the only things Sciarrino's monodrama has in common with that other Lohengrin are an inspiration in a particular medieval German fable and the fact that each is a product of a composer with a gift for limning emotional states through canny orchestration. Otherwise, Sciarrino's music is a logical continuation of Webern, a landscape of flinty utterances, alarming squeals and langorous sighs rendered all the more alien by Sciarrino's reliance upon unorthodox methods of sound production. Dramatically, the work continues the line of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, in both of which mental disorder is depicted through fragmented lines and extreme vocal techniques.

Based upon 19th-century French poet Jules Laforgue's version of the Lohengrin tale, Sciarrino's work is termed by its composer as an "invisible action," in which the skeletal plot is advanced entirely as the feverish dreams and delusions of a clearly unstable Elsa. The music alternatingly depicts her circumstances and her state of mind. Soprano Pousseur -- daughter of Belgian avant-garde composer Henri Pousseur, and a veteran of Philippe Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale and Chapelle Royale who has performed and recorded with both Pierre Boulez and Kurt Masur -- delivered the role in a series of whispers, repetitions, gurgles, coughs and sighs, all highly amplified and occasionally treated electronically to provide more resonance. It takes an utterly fearless performer to gurgle saliva into a microphone; Pousseur, a favored interpreter of Sciarrino's works, managed the composer's demands with poise and conviction, while also proving a commanding actor through countenance and gesture. Her feverish performance utterly conveyed a personality at the point of utter breakdown. Even the simple melody Pousseur sang near the end of the piece was rendered strange and shocking through its context.

The Alliance Chamber Players, a freelance band conducted by Alarm Will Sound director Alan Pierson, admirably handled Sciarrino's outre demands, playing smeared lines, imprecise unisons and glinting tintinnabulations that further extended the composer's depiction of a mind on the verge of collapse. Flutists occasionally blew across disconnected segments of their instruments; an oboist played without reeds, while a percussionist elicited a glowering rumble by tapping on an amplified thunder sheet with his fingertips. A chorus of three male vocalists, called upon only for two isolated lines during the piece's three-quarters of an hour duration, seemed to be singing in drastically slow motion.

No doubt about it, the slurps, squeaks and groans that Sciarrino calls for in Lohengrin include some singularly unpleasant sounds. Even so, the way in which these unruly noises are wed and ordered to vividly depict mental abandon made for a hypnotic experience. Roughly half the audience seemed to approve, afforded Pousseur and players a rousing ovation. The others, well, they were the ones complaining out loud on the way out the door. As far as I was concerned, there were more than enough transcendent passages -- the thunderous cacophony that led to a queasy dawn music in Scene Three, to name but one -- to convince me that Sciarrino's Lohengrin, if not necessarily a masterpiece, is far more genuine vision than mere provocation.

===

For anyone who might be wondering about my roller-coaster frenzy of the weekend past in Virginia, well, sadly, that didn't happen, thanks to the wet weather that consumed most of the eastern seaboard. Still, I'm certainly not complaining, because Saturday afternoon was filled instead by a visit to Richmond's Edgar Allan Poe Museum. This rich trove of Poe memorabilia is housed in Richmond's oldest surviving stone house, a building to which Poe apparently had no connection save for possibly having stood guard outside it one night during his Army cadet days. Even so, it's a well-organized collection of former family possessions and early printings of Poe's works, and includes a morbidly fascinating room devoted to supposed causes of the writer's demise. If you've got an active imagination and you find yourself in Richmond, this is a must.

That night, the good Dr. LP, myself and a mutual friend attended a concert by the Richmond Symphony Orchestra -- mainly because violinist Jennifer Koh happened to be the guest soloist. Regular readers already know of my high regard for Koh, whose career has been somewhat bifurcated between new-music gigs here in New York and standard-repertoire performances elsewhere -- at least with regard to orchestral appearances. Here in Manhattan, I'd heard her play concertos by Ligeti and Zorn, but I had to go to Virginia to hear her in an utterly ravishing version of Max Bruch's Concerto in G minor. Unsurprisingly, Koh had no problem at all with the work's highest extremities and relentless double stops, but she also readily mustered the passionate lyricism this work requires. (New Yorkers will get a taste of this when Koh plays the Tchaikovsky concerto with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park this summer; before then, her Walter Reade Theater recital on May 7 includes music by Mozart, Schubert, Saint-Saëns and Augusta Read Thomas.)

Led by conductor Mark Russell Smith, who impressed with both introductory patter and refined stick technique, Richmond's resident ensemble offers a short season filled with impressively wide-ranging fare. Saturday night's concert opened with Michael Daugherty's Snap!, a 1987 showpiece that uses contrapuntally positioned crash-cymbal players to evoke the verve of James Cagney's tap-dancing in the 1937 film, Something to Sing About. This was performed with precision, although I thought the players might have shared more of Smith's visible ebullience. Regarding the closing rendition of Sibelius's Symphony No. 2, the Doctor and I were of mixed opinion. She felt that Smith's tempi were too broad to sustain a narrative line, given the composer's sparse thematic material. I agreed to a point, but admired the Brucknerian heft Smith found in the work's climaxes -- especially the finale, in which the small Richmond band was certainly aided by the resonant acoustic of the city's First Baptist Church, which made the orchestra sound twice its size.

Throughout the concert, and especially in an encore of the scherzo from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which the Richmond Symphony presents in full this week, in conjunction with the Richmond Ballet and Virginia Opera), the orchestra's winds in particular proved an especially fine ensemble. The brasses were their equal in the Sibelius; all told, Richmond has a fine, flexible orchestra to be proud of.

Playlist:

Ihsahn - The Adversary (Candlelight)

Zyklon - Disintegrate (Candlelight)

Enslaved - Ruun (Candlelight)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La clemenza di Tito - Alexandrina Pendatchanska, Bernarda Fink, Mark Padmore, RIAS Kammerchor, Freiburger Barockorchester / René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La clemenza di Tito - Hillevi Martinpelto, Magdalena Kožená, Rainer Trost, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus / Charles Mackerras (Deutsche Grammophon)

Leonard Bernstein - Symphonic Dances from West Side Story; Gabriela Lena Frank - Three Latin American Dances; Sergei Rachmaninoff - Symphonic Dances - Utah Symphony / Keith Lockhart (Reference Recordings)

Felix Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture and Incidental Music - London Symphony Orchestra / Peter Maag (Decca)

Spring break.

Night After Night is taking a long weekend off and heading down to Richmond, Virginia this Friday, there to spend time with the good Dr. LP, ride some roller coasters at Busch Gardens, and on Sunday hit a major mile marker along life's highway. (The photograph at left bears a clue -- and no, it's not the contents of the vessel.)

Since the day job will be consuming all of my attention up to my departure, I'll be back in touch on Monday night, hopefully with reactions to Eine kleine Lohengrin.

Raging, melting, burning.

The activities that opened my week have strangely echoed those of the weekend past, completely without premeditation. Last Saturday, I caught Robert Wilson's Peer Gynt, followed on Sunday by a Handel work, Solomon, and a jazz set by the Billy Hart Quartet. Monday night was Wilson's Lohengrin; tonight, I caught Handel's Acis and Galatea at New York City Opera, then went down to the Bowery Poetry Club for Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. Strange.

Handel's Acis and Galatea, an English-language pastorale unveiled in 1719, is a short, charming gloss on themes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, with a libretto by John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Hughes. To call it slight in comparison to his best known operas is no insult but simply fact; still, it contains some lovely music for soloists and chorus, accompanied by lithe, picturesque music.

Mark Lamos's production sets the action, such as it is, as an airy countryside frolic; the chorus dances merrily and tosses large, inflated balls around the stage, while Galatea rocks back and forth on a swing suspended from the rafters. A massive Cupid figure reclines on a hillside behind them. Galatea sings of her love for the shepherd Acis; after being warned by Damon, a curiously fond bystander, not to rush off in pursuit of passion, Acis, in turn, sings of his devotion to Galatea. The chorus returns and everyone sings about how happy they all are. Curtain.

When we return to the action, the chorus warns that happiness is fleeting, because the giant monster Polyphemus also has plans for Galatea. The monster descends in what looks like a giant action-figure box, in which a reduced version of the stage set implies his titanic height, and a baleful red beam on his helmet stands in for his single eye. Polyphemus busts a few dance moves picked up from Michael Jackson and Culture Club videos, then makes a pass at Galatea, which is summarily rejected. Damon shows up to provide the monster with tips on how he might more successfully woo the maiden. Acis decides to do battle with Polyphemus; Damon tries to convince him not to be so hasty. Galatea stumbles upon a Damon-enwrapped Acis, and sets out to convince her lover's protector that she's worthy of Acis's trust and love. Polyphemus spies the happy couple and goes nuts, crushing Acis with a boulder. Galatea mourns Acis, then summons her magical powers to transform him into a bubbling stream. The chorus advises Galatea not to grieve too long, and everyone takes a dip in Acis -- several men stripping their shirts off to do so. Curtain.

No, really.

I can't be the only one who wondered whether Damon -- always lurking, and intensely physical in his demonstrations of care for Acis -- might not have had some hidden agenda. After all, if he can find a way to hook up Polyphemus and Galatea, well, that does free up Acis. Brokeback Hillock, perhaps?

Whatever you make of the piece and production, there was no mistaking the valor of tonight's performance. Sarah Jane McMahon was a bright, bubbly Galatea. Philippe Castagner, depite Paul Kellogg's pre-curtain announcement that the tenor was still under the weather (as Bernard Holland reported of the Sunday-afternoon opening), sang strongly and beautifully throughout the night as Acis. Nicholas Phan, as Damon, was clear and eager, and Jason Hardy, the Polyphemus, maintained a handsome sound despite challenges of music and choreography. Conductor Ransom Wilson led a perky reading, with especially fine contributions from his recorder players and continuo.

===

Later on, downtown, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society opened to the sound of drummer Jon Wikan's new, improved electric cajon, now even spacier. His phase-shifting beat propelled the wiggly guitar figures, rounded clarinets and muted brass that open Argue's "Phobos." Sam Sadigursky blew a passionate solo over a rhythm section that has become scarily good; the climax captured the cinematic sweep of Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays, all sunburst, breeze and melting joy.

Argue described "Transit" as a piece that uses the Fung Wah bus -- that cut-rate Chinatown line beloved of East Coast students and vagrants -- as "a metaphor for change." Static rhythms and long-lined melodies do indeed convey a sense of motionless motion...of sitting in one place for a long time, yet ending up somewhere other than where you began. Trumpeter Ingrid Jensen provided a solo exciting in its development: muted and slurred at its opening, racing and bold at its climax.

"Lizard Brain" conjured some large, unwieldy beast trying to sing a delicate aria, then raging in frustration at its failiure. (Polyphemus?) Baritone saxophonist Josh Sinton blew up a storm over a lurching 13/8 funk beat. "Chrysalis" opened with wind and brass sections playing gently falling lines, like leaves falling from trees; its theme, reminiscent of "Unchained Melody," provided a showcase for Erica vonKleist's breathy flute and supple soprano saxophone. "Ritual," a deconstruction of British cult soul singer Lewis Taylor's "Lucky," featured a fervent solo by trombonist Alan Ferber, backed by guitarist Sebastian Noelle's slicing chords; during his own spot, Noelle played a few desultory notes, then used a cassette recorder to play a soul vocalist's voice into his guitar pickup for further distortion, and closed with a flurry of weirdly harmonized chords.

A new chart unveiled tonight, "Induction Effect," played with the rhythmic clash of pitting five against four; long tones in the horn section hung suspended over busy ostinatos from the rhythm players. (Occasionally, I imagined a ghost vibraphonist, which made me think of Tortoise.) The band backed trumpeter André Canniere's solo with rolling, tumbling rhythms; a regal prog-rock climax led to a conclusion of busy little rhythmic conversations.

Two of the band's signature tunes followed -- somehow, it doesn't feel too early to make that claim. Alto saxophonist Rob Wilkerson sighed and wailed over the writhing pulse permutations of "Flux in a Box," to which pianist Mike Holober responded with an altogether cooler soliloquy. Donny McCaslin played the cruelly high figures that open "Desolation Sound" over throbbing, Steve Reich-like pulsations in 7/8; brass stabs in the central section of the piece might have been borrowed from Stravinsky or a metal band, take your pick.

Citing the notoriously fawning recent profile of classical pianist Condoleezza Rice in The New York Times, Argue suggested she might play "The Perils of Empire," tonight's closing number, "in a fall-out shelter after we nuke Iran." Opening with surly growls and sneering trumpets, the tune finally coalesced with a drunken waltz in the wind section; ironically, the songful melody might well have been borrowed from one of Disney's classic musicals. Wikan did his level best to derail it with his out-of-time stammers. I hadn't heard this piece performed live before, and didn't remember the versions I'd downloaded from Argue's blog being quite this unhinged and macabre -- a sign of the times, I suppose.

Every time his players finished a number, Argue wore what looked like a slightly incredulous smile, as if the bandleader couldn't quite believe what he'd gotten away with. This I could understand: Argue's charts are smart and tuneful, tough on players, and incredibly gracious to listeners. And some bright publisher should be pushing his compositions to college jazz bands -- hard. I know I'd have killed to play music like this.

Playlist:

George Frideric Handel - Arianna in Crete - Mata Katsouli, Mary-Ellen Nesi, Petros Magoulas, Orchestra of Patras / George Petrou (MDG)

Alexandre Tansman - Symphonies Nos. 4-6 - Melbourne Chorale, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra / Oleg Caetani (Chandos)

Stefano Battaglia - Raccolto (ECM)

John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano; Chess Pieces; Vittorio Rieti - Chess Serenade - Margaret Leng Tan (Mode)

Vision in blue.

Robert Wilson's controversial 1998 production of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin returned to the Metropolitan Opera stage on Monday night, in the process recapturing some sense of how utterly strange this groundbreaking opera must have seemed at its 1850 premiere. Unlike that undernourished debut, helmed by Liszt in Weimar while Wagner was in political exile, tonight's performance boasted the magnificent sound of an exceptional orchestra in full cry. Conductor Philippe Auguin, previously heard here in Doktor Faustus and Die Frau ohne Schatten, elicited a gorgeous reading from his players. True, there were a handful of brass clams, but on the whole, this was a sensibly paced, beautifully balanced reading. The Met chorus, too, gave a sumptuous, mostly secure performance.

This, in combination with Wilson's radically abstracted stage pictures and ritualistic action, cut to the work's heart in a way that a more traditionally staged performance might actually obscure. For all its feudalistic trappings, Lohengrin is at its heart a moral directive about faith and fidelity, and the potentially devastating cost when trust is tested and found wanting. Shorn of conventional stage narrative, the core concept rises to the fore all the more clearly. And in sharp contrast to the near-violence that greeted this production the first time around, tonight's response ranged from respectful to worshipful. Wilson, had he happened to attend, might well have felt vindicated, if such things matter to him at all.

Ben Heppner, in the title role, offered his customary heroism and beauty of tone, although not without some effort in a few key moments. (Mindful of reviews that noted his problems with this production in 1998, it should be noted that he navigated the stage tonight with ease.) Karita Mattila, as Elsa, was more commanding still, reminding everyone present why she's among the most impressive actors currently working the operatic boards. Mattila also did well with Wilson's Kabuki-style gestures. Richard Paul Fink, who I remember fondly both as Klingsor in Wilson's Houston Grand Opera Parsifal in 1992 and as Edward Teller in John Adams's Doctor Atomic last October, provided a suitably dastardly Telramund. (That he proved a convincing actor in Wilson's milieu was no surprise, given his HGO experience and the fact that he made his Met debut in the previous run of this production.)

Luana Devol proved his match as Ortrud. She, too, managed Wilson's directions admirably; her voice, beautiful at lower volume, turned slightly shrill when pushed to climaxes, but overall her performance was winning. Eike Wilm Schulte sang beautifully as the King's Herald, and bravest of all was King Henry himself: Andrew Greenan, who made his house debut as a substitute for an ailing Stephen West. (This is starting to feel strangely de rigueur during the current Met season.) While his performance may not have been technically unreproachable, Greenan managed the almost unthinkable difficulty of slipping at the last minute into a Wilson staging with substantial tone and, appropriately, regal bearing.

Official reviews will turn up shortly; in the mean time, here are a few fascinating blasts from the past:

Bernard Holland's New York Times review of this production's opening night in 1998.

Holland's subsequent, personable Times think piece on the premiere's tumultuous reception.

Edward Rothstein's Times review of Wilson's Parsifal at Houston Grand Opera (which as I recall was more abandoned than protested).

Playlist:

Joseph Holbrooke Trio - The Moat Recordings (Tzadik)

Richard Wagner - Lohengrin, Act Three - Elisabeth Grümmer, Christa Ludwig, Jess Thomas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gottlob Frick, Vienna State Opera Choir, Vienna Philharmonic / Rudolph Kempe (EMI Classics)

The whole story.

Regarding my claim to the near-completeness of the René Jacobs Solomon about which I posted last night, correspondent Bob Lee, a well-versed and zealous Handelian, has written to gently inform me that more was omitted than just the one aria I mentioned. Lee counted perhaps four other excised numbers (the words of which did not appear in the libretto distributed at the Jacobs concert), which suggests to me that I should perhaps be slightly less rash in the claims I make during the wee, small hours.

I'm grateful to Lee for the clarification, and he also brought up another good point: In massing his choral singers together as a single group, Jacobs may have inadvertently diminished the impact of some of Handel's juiciest antiphonal writing. From where I was sitting, rather close to the front, the intended effect could just be made out. But given that the counterpoint between first and second violins was so ideally achieved by dividing the sections left and right, one might well wonder why more physical separation wasn't effected between the two choral groups, as well. Perhaps there simply wasn't room on the stage?

Fierce joys.

Easter Sunday brought a sumptuous feast in the form of Handel's Solomon, performed at Alice Tully Hall this afternoon by conductor René Jacobs, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and an outstanding young British choir, English Voices. Composed in roughly five weeks during 1748, Solomon was Handel's 14th biblical oratorio. The name of the librettist is lost, and this is not one of the composer's more narrative works, anyway. Act one hails King Solomon's wisdom and details his conjugal bliss; act two describes his famous judgement in the case of the two women contesting an infant's motherhood, and act three is devoted to his kingdom's prosperity, as witnessed by the visiting Queen of Sheba.

In her program notes, Ruth Smith did an exceptional job of describing why 18th-century British listeners would have noted numerous specific parallels between the scenes described in the oratorio and their own contemporary milieu -- for better and for worse -- not to mention a slight frisson of discontent in the discrepancies between the two, as well as the less savory aspects of Solomon's later life omitted in the Handel work. This was a fine piece of writing; I'd love to provide a link to the notes online, but apparently Lincoln Center's website doesn't allow access to past events.

That Jacobs is a superb conductor of Handel is probably common knowledge by now, but again and again I was struck by the sheer energy of his leadership and the rightness of his choices with regard to tempo and balance. It might seem absurd to say so, but Jacobs actually elicited climaxes so strong and sturdy that I was reminded of Wagner, of all things. The OAE, close to celebrating its 20th anniversary, played with gutsy abandon, but didn't stint on refinement. And while the English Voices didn't sound altogether coordinated in the cruelly sibilant opening chorus, "Your harps and cymbals sound," the group's performance quickly tightened into a glorious mass of fine diction, snappy counterpoint and impressive weight at climaxes, particularly in the second and third acts.

Handel wrote the title role for a mezzo, but Jacobs opted for a countertenor: the young Australian singer David Hansen, who sang with a seemingly easy control similar to that of Andreas Scholl, even if Hansen doesn't quite command that remarkable singer's vocal heft and variety of timbre as yet. (Hansen will be singing the role of Trinculo in Thomas Ades's The Tempest at Santa Fe Opera this summer, so I'm certainly hoping to catch him again.) Singing the roles of Solomon's Queen and First Harlot was Swedish soprano Malin Christensson, a last-minute replacement for Lisa Milne. In the former role, she sang with beautiful tone but didn't really seem to lift the character off the page; she was far better as the mother willing to sacrifice her child to another woman, if only to save the infant's life. Her rival was another Swedish soprano, Marie Arnet, whose line, "False is all her melting tale" was delivered with evident venom; Arnet's rolled eyes and the trace of a cruel smile practically transformed the second act into a miniature opera. Arnet returned in the third act as a regal Queen of Sheba. (That Christensson and Arnet wore different dresses for each of their two roles was a subtle but appreciated bit of stage business.)

Tenor Jeremy Ovenden and baritone Henry Waddington, both of whom were featured in Jacobs's exciting recording of Handel's Saul issued last year on Harmonia Mundi, completed the cast of principals this afternoon. Of the two, Ovenden had the more thankless job: As the priest Zadok, he frequently had to produce rushing torrents of syllables at breakneck speed. While his tone was understandably somewhat constricted, he managed Handel's barrage altogether handsomely. Overden's proclamations as the Levite were suitably stentorian.

Unless I spaced out for a long moment, one of Solomon's first act arias, "Haste, haste to the cedar grove," was omitted despite its text appearing in the libretto provided. That aside, the oratorio was presented at [EDIT: near -- see the next post for clarification] full length, affording the singers ample opportunity for embellishment during the da capo repeats. All told, Solomon clocked in at just a tad under three hours. It could have gone on much longer as far as I was concerned, and the audience response suggested that I was far from alone in this.

Later in the evening, I caught the first set of the Billy Hart Quartet's closing night at the Village Vanguard. An undersung drummer of the generation that produced Tony Williams and Jack De Johnette, Hart has come into his own as a bandleader rather later than those peers. An impressively diverse CV includes important engagements with Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery and Shirley Horn, but Hart is probably best remembered as the drummer for the protean fusion group Herbie Hancock assembled upon his graduation from Miles Davis's band -- a band that finally claimed the renown it deserved well after its players had dispersed.

Hart is a drummer whose style can't be easily pigeonholed. To a large extent he carries on the ever-forward leaning urges of Williams, and did as much as any drummer to shape the nascent fusion vocabulary. But Hart is equally beholden to the legacies of Elvin Jones (in his volcanic temperament) and Ed Blackwell (in his thorough melodicism), not to mention the still-active Roy Haynes, whose multi-limbed coordination paved the way for Hart by bridging the gap between bop essentials and the emerging avant-garde of the late 1950s.

From his earliest efforts as bandleader, Hart has demonstrated a proclivity for wedding disparate players. His first album as leader, Enchance (A&M Horizon, 1977), included such mavericks as Dewey Redman, Oliver Lake and Don Pullen. Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland appeared alongside Bill Frisell and Steve Coleman on Hart recordings during the '80s; a '90s band featured Mark Feldman and Dave Fiuczynski. Accordingly, Hart's current quartet unites saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street.

"Mellow B," the Iverson composition that opened the set, found Hart's turbulent bashes, splashes and rumbles grounded by Street's slow, patient bass line. Iverson's solo climaxed in circular torrents, while Turner blew dry, disjunct lines that broke the melody apart into Mondrian-like blocks. John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" was slyly teased, then thoroughly dissected before its theme was stated outright; Turner seemed to sneak up on every note he played. Iverson's hushed opening soliloquy in "Charvez" sounded as if it was being played at some gaping distance. Turner's solo revealed his most gorgeous tone; behind him, Street tossed off five-beat handfuls of 16th notes against Hart's slightly outside-the-pocket sway.

Alternating figures at the top and bottom of his instrument, Street opened "Charvez" like two songbirds conversing from tree to tree. Turner once again unspooled a strand of consumate beauty; Iverson's whispered solo was punctuated by Hart's rude smacks on a low tom-tom. The pianist introduced a thoroughly fragmented "Body and Soul" that seemed to reference both Monk ballads and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- the latter quote I almost certainly invented. Over skeletal bass and a whisper of brushes, Iverson's left hand chased right at a canonical distance. A bright, upbeat rendition of Wayne Shorter's "This Is for Albert" ended in a splashy solo by the leader, punctuated by a persistent three-note tattoo that evolved into a take on Max Roach's signature piece, "The Drum Also Waltzes." Paradoxically, in this performance of another drummer's solo, Hart asserted his own personality; there could be no mistaking one for the other. The set ended with another Iverson composition, "Neon," in which the band seemed to frolic in duple and triple time simultaneously.

Since Hart is more a distinguished figure than a household name, tonight's capacity crowd came as a happy surprise. His performance fulfilled my high expectations, as did those of Iverson and Street. But I left the club wondering one thing: Has Mark Turner always been this good? I'd respected the records he issued between 1998 and 2001 on the Warner Bros. label -- all of them critically acclaimed -- but they hadn't moved me in the way his engrossing playing did tonight. On this evidence, it was hard to deny the notion that Turner neatly reconciles dry concerns of intellect with the more passionate demands of the heart, as well as parts further south. This left me thinking that I might have listened to his discs with the wrong ears; clearly, further research is compulsory. And in my book, that's always a good thing.

While I'm busy with that, let me commend you to the new website Iverson has set up for Hart. While there's little music available to download so far, Iverson's extensive interview with Hart -- of which two sections have been posted so far -- is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the evolution of modern jazz drumming.

(As for my prediction last Wedneday night that Made Out of Babies would form some part of this weekend's sonic intake, well, that didn't come to pass, sorry to say. Hopefully, my next chance to catch this scarily compelling Brooklyn-based grunt-metal band won't be too far off.)

Playlist:

Joseph Holbrooke Trio - The Moat Sessions (Tzadik)

Richard Wagner - Lohengrin - Elisabeth Grümmer, Christa Ludwig, Jess Thomas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gottlob Frick, Vienna State Opera Choir, Vienna Philharmonic / Rudolph Kempe (EMI Classics)

Miles Davis - The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965-1968 (Columbia/Legacy, disc one)

Herbie Hancock - Crossings (Warner Bros.)

Grateful Dead - Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1973 (Internet stream from Archive.org)

Be yourself.

In its broad strokes, Robert Wilson's production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt -- which was staged this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House, and which I caught on Saturday night -- was characteristic of everything I knew and had seen of Wilson's previous work. Originally created for the National Theatre of Bergen and the Norwegian Theatre of Oslo, the production was performed here in Norwegian with English surtitles. Wilson's stage pictures were beautiful in their abstracted approximations of representational figures, and frequently unsettling. His scenes, as always, were beautifully lit; Wilson seems able to create a subtle radiance that surpasses any other lighting effect I've ever seen. And as usual, movement and diction were stylized to unusual extremes. ("If everyone onstage looks like a vampire and acts like a sleepwalker," Charles Isherwood wrote with some evident snark in his New York Times review, "Mr. Wilson is probably in charge.")

What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer whimsy that constantly worked its way into Wilson's conception, certainly during the first half of the drama (which altogether ran just shy of four hours in length, with a single intermission). Ibsen's picaresque verse commands such treatment, but this was the first time I'd seen a Wilson piece so punctuated by trots and leaps, wagging tongues and outbursts of freaky laughter. The gamboling of the young Gynt (Henrik Rafaelsen) and Åse, his put-upon mother (Wenche Medbøe), during the opening scene set a playful tone that continued through the country wedding at which Gynt first meets the sweet young Solveig (Kjersti Sandal), and even into the macabre scene in the hall of the trolls.

Much of the second half was sober by comparison, although the scenes in Anitra's harem and the Cairo madhouse had their giddier moments. As a mature Gynt -- first an unscrupulous merchant and later a would-be prophet -- Endre Hellestveit lacked the boyish charisma that Rafaelsen had brought to the first half (and was also plagued by microphone problems on Saturday night). Depictions of Gynt's sea voyage and shipwreck, staged with minimal means, were both utterly masterful. The final stretch of the drama, in which the elderly Gynt (Sverre Bentsen) compared his life to the layers of an onion, then attempted to prove himself worthy of a fate more elevated than to be melted down among the other undistinguished souls claimed by the eerie Button-Moulder (Paul-Ottar Haga, as a character that suggested Riff Raff in a Rocky Horror Show helmed by Ingmar Bergman), delved into altogether deeper philosophical and spiritual waters; Wilson's staging accordingly grew ever more stark.

Not a note of Edvard Grieg's famous score was heard tonight, but music was omnipresent -- not only in the characteristic sense of singers and instrumentalists, though these played no small part, but also through the teeming environment of sonic incidents in which Wilson and composer Michael Galasso immersed the audience. Wilson's manipulation of speech (through elongated vowels, especially) and deployment of sound effects seemed considerations as musical as they were dramaturgical.

The song Galasso supplied for Solveig, finely spun by Sandal, had the effect of a shaft of pure white light that cut through Wilson's rosy dawns and opalescent twilights alike. His beautiful score, a shimmering tapestry of resonant string timbres (violin and cello, as well as tar, theorbo, rustic fiddle and kantele) and charming folk-dance rhythms, begged to be heard on its own. ECM, if you please?

Playlist:

King Crimson - Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, England, July 1, 1996 (DGMLive.com download)

George Frideric Handel - Athalia - Simone Kermes, Olga Pasichnyk, Trine Wilsberg Lund, Martín Oro, Thomas Cooley, Wolf Matthias Friedrich, Kölner Kammerchor, Collegium Cartusianum / Peter Neumann (MDG Gold)

Hans Peter Kuhn - The Night Before the Day - Score for "Robert Wilson's Vision" (Abrams)