Operatically Inclined

At Dia:Beacon modern art museum; a note on hotels

I might be playing catch-up with other art lovers, but on my last day in the Hudson Valley, my hotel's owner encouraged me to visit Dia:Beacon, the modern art museum in Beacon, south of Poughkeepsie. It was a radical change from estate tours, and I want to enter a quick note here about one of the exhibits. The basement space currently is occupied by an installation by Tacita Dean: "Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007..." I can't describe it and still be brief, but it was a mind-altering experience. It was also the first time I've "heard" Cage's famous work, and it was made more special by the "choreography." According to the installation's pamphlet, it will be in place until September 1 of this year.

There might be more information at this site: diaart.org

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Speaking of hotels, in the Hudson Valley I stayed at the Madalin Hotel in the village of Tivoli, just up Route 9G from Bard College. The hotel and its restaurant, Madalin's Table, seem to be well-regarded and celebrated among New Yorkers and regular visitors to the valley, but I mention them here for the benefit of friends.

I stayed at a corporate chain hotel in Ithaca. I would stay there again, but while in town I saw several more interesting lodgings for future visits.

I plan to post more photos, lovingly and desperately cropped and enhanced by me for your viewing pleasure. All of my posted photos are thumbnails, so they might look a little better if you click on them to get the larger pop-up format.

Seduced by "Harnasie" and "King Roger" at Bard SummerScape (Links to other posts and articles added.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, I went twice to the performance of Karol Szymanowski's ballet, "Harnasie" ("The Highland Robbers"), and opera, "Krol Roger" ("King Roger"), in the Fisher Center at Bard College last week. Even as the performance was in progress on Thursday night, I mused about how rarely these works are performed and when would be my next chance to see them on stage -- and with an entire cast of native Polish singers in the case of the opera. The American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein was also a wonder to hear.

I'm still in awe after seeing these powerful works on stage and reeling from Szymanowski's music (described elsewhere as having elements of Richard Strauss and Scriabin). General reactions I was hearing from other audience members considered the music and singing in the opera to be wonderful but the production design to be flawed or leaving something to be desired. Some elements of the production which perplexed me on Thursday night seemed to make more sense or were less annoying on Saturday night; for example, the swinging incense burner in the opera's first act which continued to swing back and forth like a pendulum over the heads of the performers for the entire act. There was also director Lech Majewski's device for indicating which of King Roger's courtiers had been taken over by the mysterious Shepherd's hedonist message: In the first act, most of the players moved about the stage with hands held in front of them and directed downwards in a rigid, doll-like manner. As the second act proceeded, Roger's wife, Roxana, and most of the courtiers, moved around with their arms waving or undulating sensuously, just like the Shepherd's arms. It was a bit like a sci-fi movie where you can tell who the pod people or the disguised invaders are by certain tell-tale signs. If this was a little too much for some viewers, it seemed to go well with the ecstatic (orgiastic?) music.

The available lists of artists involved in the production prior to the performance dates included the Wroclaw Opera Chorus, joined by the SummerScape Festival Children's Chorus. I couldn't find any lists of the principal singers until I had a program in my hands on Thursday night, so following is the cast for "King Roger" at Bard:

Roger II, King of Sicily (in the 12th century) -- Adam Kruszewski, baritone
Roxana, Roger's wife -- Iwona Hossa, soprano
Shepherd (Dionysus in disguise) -- Tadeusz Szlenkier, tenor, also tenor soloist for "Harnasie"
Edrisi, an Arab scholar and advisor to Roger -- Wojciech Maciejowski, tenor
Deaconess -- Ewa Marciniec, contralto
Archbishop -- Wojciech Bukalski, bass

I also noticed in the program that one of the dancers for "Harnasie," Lucy York, is from Baltimore and studied dance at Peabody Prep and theater at Baltimore School for the Arts. York now directs the small company, York Dance Works, in New York.

And now, please excuse me if I keep this post relatively short. There was much more to enjoy in both "Harnasie" and "King Roger," and I was so glad to enjoy all of it twice. While I'm under Szymanowski or the Shepherd's spell, there is much more to learn about the gay Polish composer's work. For a start, the larger program book for Bard SummerScape 2008 includes an essay, "Bacchantes and Bandits," by Ruth Ochs, who is writing a dissertation on 20th-century Polish music at Princeton University.

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Links to reviews and and other posts:

Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times. Tommasini saw an earlier performance, and maybe the orchestra shaped up by the time I saw the production. Botstein was conducting a rather large ensemble in the pit. About that swinging incense burner: The deaconess came forward in silence at the beginning to give the burner a push and start its motion across the stage to those very faint percussion beats (a gong?). This was a powerful opening to the action, but the continued swinging of the burner through the entire act was a distraction... Tommasini's article includes a picture from the production.

From Leonard Link, a blog by a New York Law School professor. Note the posted comment about the children's chorus.

Geraldine Freedman of the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, NY, interviewed the director before the production run.

Finally, a Polish blog "o muzyce klasycznej" anticipates the Bard production.

Back from the Hudson Valley; Seeing "King Roger" at Bard

This morning, I was standing here, the site of the Catskill Mountain House overlooking the valley of the Hudson River. It's a view that is glorious in any weather, and I had my choice of weather as the scene rapidly changed before me. Francesca Zambello could have had her gods or Valkyries congregating on this spot.

This was a fitting end to my vacation in the Finger Lakes region and the Hudson Valley of New York State. I must put in a quick word about the dance piece and opera at Bard College, and I'll write a more complete post soon. Let me mention now that I went to see the performance of Szymanowski's "Harnasie" and "King Roger" twice! In spite of some mixed reviews from fellow audience members with which I partly agreed, this was an event that warranted a second experience, as far as I was concerned. More later!

packing

I should be on my way to the Finger Lakes and Hudson Valley tomorrow morning. Fasolt and Fafner will be let out of the basement to patrol the grounds in my absence. Ollie the Wonder Cat will be safe somewhere else on his own vacation. He does have as good a time as I do when I go on vacation, thanks to some wonderful people who care a lot about cats.

Besides the opera and ballet at Bard, I'm anticipating....Taughannock Falls, Watkins Glen and other sights around the Finger Lakes....the Corning Glass Museum....Cornell University, which I learned was one of Vladimir Nabokov's haunts....the art museum on the Cornell campus designed by I. M. Pei....as well as Gehry's theater building on the Bard campus....painter Frederick Church's Olana house....the Catskill Mountains....maybe a glimpse of the Headless Horseman....

I found the art museum designed by Pei at Indiana University, Bloomington, a couple of years ago. It looked like a study for his East Building for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and I'm wondering what to expect for the Cornell work.

and I thought the meniscus was my friend

Careful: This is far off topic, and it could hurt just to read.

meniscus -- the layer of cartilage between the surfaces of the knee joint and other joints. It's supposed to stop things from rubbing up against each other too much and hurting.

As maladies go, I could be much worse off, but on bad days the knee hurts like there's no tomorrow. The mechanics of the problem might be of interest, so I hope you don't mind me sharing, and maybe another reader has had a similar experience. I saw an orthopedic surgeon this afternoon. Because no particular motion seems to trigger the pain, and because I have really bad days with it and then some days of no pain at all, the doctor didn't think it was tendonitis. He suggested that the meniscus in that knee has frayed with aging and that a tiny flap of it is moving around like a piece of torn rag. If it happens to slip into the joint, it triggers that severe pain, which feels like something is ripping the muscle from the bone, as I described it earlier.

So if you know me and you see me in public apparently fine one second then suddenly doubling over, grabbing my leg and yelling, "Make it go away!", that's what it's all about. (Actually, I yell much worse things when it happens.) The Advil in double doses has made a big difference, and this means that I can go to work, go on vacation or sit in relative comfort for an entire opera. Later, there will be an MRI to help determine the real cause, and possibly there will be some minor surgery, and I won't encumber the blog with lots of details about it.

readings: a John Simon article; director's theater; 20th century fact and fiction; links and critics

I must take a break as my vacation approaches. If I don't have access to a computer while I'm in New York State, I hope to have some pictures and notes to post later. (After staying in the Finger Lakes region, I'm heading for Szymanowski's "Krol Roger" at Bard College.)

Meanwhile, I'm getting some decent reading done on and off line. I've barely dipped into the August Opera News, but be aware that there's an article by John Simon: "The Right Words." He was asked to list his ten favorite librettos, and he treats us to a dozen. Simon limits himself to 20th century opera, and it's also interesting to see his list of modern composers he wanted to avoid. He also makes a case for some almost unknown operas by Nino Rota and Xavier Montsalvatge. These I want to investigate in addition to some that I've read about but not heard yet (Prokofiev's "The Fiery Angel" among them).

There is also an article by Matt Wolf on the twin brothers and directors, David and Christopher Alden. Provocative reading here, whether you agree with their approach or not. David Alden's design for "Jenufa" at ENO is the same one which we saw in Washington in the 2006-07 season. That one I admired very much, but I don't think I would have liked the same director's notorious chainsaw "Mazeppa." (According to the Penguin Guide, that production ruined the reputation of Tchaikovsky's "Mazeppa" for a while, but we were lucky enough to see a traditional staging by the Kirov at the Kennedy a few years ago.)

I'm getting to the end of "The Rest is Noise." There have been some distractions (sorry), but when I get into it the history is absorbing, even if Ross sometimes gets too musically technical for my comprehension. I'm in the middle of the chapter about Britten. That and the one about Sibelius have been my favorite parts of the book, but there is much more of the 20th century that I must hear. On the fiction side, I just started reading Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five." It's about time I did. It's another book which I've heard about all my life, and it's fiction with a disturbing basis in fact.

There are a couple of new blogs in my blog roll. Notice a young conductor named Young, who has been working with Marin Alsop. Also, after detecting some rumblings in the blogosphere, I included a special link to Tim Smith's music column. Smith is the music critic for the Baltimore Sun, and even though his column is linked on the Critical Mass blog also in my blog roll, I thought I might check his column more often if it had its own link in the list.

Smith's latest column entry is about the operatic performances at Artscape and a recital at An die Musik. If I follow the column correctly, Smith saw Opera Vivente's 5:00pm show on Sunday, then he headed down Charles Street to catch the viola and piano recital by Baltimore Symphony members at An die Musik at 7!

(Sorry that I didn't make it to Opera Vivente's Sunday performance, and thanks to Director John Bowen for posting a comment and listing performers' names on my Artscape post.)

@ Artscape

The Ferris wheel in front of the Meyerhoff Concert Hall (home to the Baltimore SO) captures the spirit of Baltimore's giant Artscape festival. I walked around a little yesterday, but my main destination was the Brown Center to see Baltimore Opera's "L'Heure espagnole" by Ravel. They sang it in English with the BO's James Harp accompanying on piano. The young cast was very funny to watch, especially baritone Paul Corujo as Don Ramiro. I began to wonder how far the stages of his undressing each time he returned from the unseen bedroom would go. (Corujo sang the part of the husband in the Peabody's "The Yellow Wallpaper" earlier this year.) Patrick Toomey sang Torquemada; Jessica Renfro was his wife, Concepcion; David Kirkwood was Gonzalve, Concepcion's lover; and Jason Widney was Don Inigo Gomez.

I had hoped to get up to Artscape again today to hear Opera Vivente's baroque show, but I might not make it there. I'll mention this, though: There is a baritone in Vivente's cast who I've read and heard much about, and I've been wanting to hear him. I'm missing the chance today, but maybe some time this coming season I can hear him finally.

Some of us who go to opera regularly in Baltimore, and not just at the Baltimore Opera, will recognize a certain senior gentleman among the audience members. I've chatted with him before, and I finally got his name yesterday before L'Heure. I look forward to seeing him around and hearing his views in future.

Definitely dress for the summer weather, not the opera, for Artscape. I have to insert a tone of bitterness, too: The pay parking lots along Charles Street doubled their fees for Artscape weekend, and this is one of the reasons I'm not in a hurry to return today. There are other parking and access options listed on Artscape's site....

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On another personal note: I almost didn't make it to Artscape this weekend, and I hope I don't have to cancel the vacation to upstate NY which I've been harping about recently. What apparently is tendonitis to the side and just above my right knee has been giving me a lot of trouble, but I'm making a second visit to the doctor soon. Meanwhile, a double dose of Advil seems to be staving off the worst pain. Trust me, when it happens, it feels like something is ripping the muscle off the bone!

Any more cancelled opera trips, and I'll have to change the blog title to "Operatically Disinclined."

Late Notices of Early Music at Artscape

I just received the following note on the e-mail list run by Peabody Institute's Mark Cudek. This might be on the Artscape site in my links, but it could be easy to miss.

Sorry for the late notice but I wanted to let you all know that the 
Peabody Consort is performing on the Exotic/Hypnotic series at 
Artscape this Saturday at 5:00 at the U of Baltimore Student Center 
Theatre at the intersection of Maryland and Mt. Royal.  Soprano 
Elizabeth Hungerford and instrumentalists Andrew Arceci (bass viol), 
John Armato (lute), Jeffrey Grabelle (treble viol), and myself 
(cittern & Renaissance guitar) will perform a program of 16thc. 
English & Italian music.  If you're at Artscape come and join us and 
get out of the heat (or the rain) and enjoy an hour of great music.

warm regards,
Mark

Wait, there's more. Director John Bowen has revealed that the period ensemble for Opera Vivente's baroque double feature on Sunday will be the one and only Harmonious Blacksmith. The "operas" are Handel's "Apollo and Dafne" and Monteclair's "Pyramus and Thisbe."

On Saturday, Baltimore Opera gives us Ravel's "L'heure espagnole."

Here's the just-opera schedule from the Artscape site. Clicking on the categories at the top of the site's page takes you to other performances.

Critic Tim Smith has more details about the operas at Artscape.

Attaining Citizenship; Doodlebugs and Flying Machines

My mother turned 70 this year. She grew up in a small village in Bedfordshire, England, and met my father, a fireman in the US Air Force, at the local air base in the late 1950's. Dad passed away some years ago, but Mom has remained in her husband's Carolina home town to be close to children and grandchildren. A subject of the crown all this time, Mom decided to pursue US citizenship a couple of years ago and hopes to finally gain it later this year.

I have seen the house where my mother and her two sisters grew up, and I remember visiting it while my grandparents still lived in it during the 1960's. It stands out from the village on a country lane, and the property is actually a small farmstead. I've walked by it as an adult during a visit to England, and we've found it on Google Earth. They had to allow soldiers to quarter in the barn at the bottom of the property during World War II. There was also an air raid shelter somewhere back there, but this I never knew until more recently when Mom told me about it. The village lay under the path of Nazi bombers and flying bombs on their way to London. The flying bombs were unmanned aircraft loaded with explosives and in some manner aimed and flown from Europe to a general target area in England. Doodlebugs were something very similar or the same thing. Not quite as accurate as a missile, a flying bomb would ultimately descend and drop onto whatever lay in its path. People lucky enough to be passed over could hear these things up in the sky. After hearing a few of them, as my mother explained it, you could tell the difference between a manned bomber and an unmanned flying bomb.

Although they were a couple of hours out of London, sometimes my grandparents and their three girls did have to go down into the shelter. Everybody had to put on gas masks -- except the baby. For a baby still small enough to be held in a grown-up's arms there was a contraption like a bag made of the same stuff as a gas mask. Parents would have to zip up a baby inside this thing. It must have seemed more like a body bag for infants, and it likely was made of the same smelly rubber as the masks worn by the older folk. Mom tells me that Grandma could not bear to seal up her youngest inside the bag. While everyone else in the shelter sat with gas masks in place, the baby was safe in her mother's lap or arms with no contraption covering her.

Years later in happier times, in the same area the villagers could watch the vintage airplanes flying overhead during the filming of "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines."

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Later: I must acknowledge my mother for scanning and e-mailing the picture of her childhood home. (Yes, she is on the cutting edge with the Internet now, more so than I am, it seems.) The house was built for the family shortly before the War broke out and passed into other hands some time in the late 1960's. Mom was very young during the war and isn't sure how many times they had to use the shelter, but she knows they went into it at least once. Some of the other details were related to her by her mother when she was older.

cinematically inclined

I've been raiding the bargain DVD bins at Borders again. Also not to be overlooked are the DVD bins at Daedalus Books here in Columbia. Some movies I've seen recently, another eclectic selection:

~ The 2003 Norwegian-Swedish film directed by Bent Hamer, "Kitchen Stories." This might have been the rage in the arthouses a few years ago, but I missed it then. It's a quiet comedy with a lot going on under the surface. Very briefly: A Swedish researcher observes his Norwegian farmer subject's dietary habits as part of a larger research program. The fabric of the cosmos gets gradually ripped asunder as researcher and subject befriend each other and foil the scientific method. A bouncy Scandinavian pop song, heard mostly on the radio, provides much of the musical background.

~ "49th Parallel" (1941). As a wartime propaganda film (and exciting story, well-filmed), maybe this could be considered part of a trio with Olivier's "Henry V" and Errol Flynn's "The Sea Hawk." Olivier is also in 49th, and this movie also had a great composer to provide the score: Ralph Vaughan Williams. (This DVD is on the pricey art film Criterion label, and I don't think that ever gets put in the bargain bins.)

~ "The Brother From Another Planet" (1984). I know that I saw this one when it was first released. I'd forgotten much of it, but it was all the better to rediscover. There are a few familiar black actors from the 1970s and 80s here, but I was straining to remember the name of one of the actors playing the two white aliens. End credits revealed him to be the young David Strathairn. The film's director, John Sayles, plays the other alien joining him to recapture the escaped black alien, played sympathetically by a silent Joe Morton. Sayles and Strathairn are wonderfully weird as Morton's pursuers in Harlem. The interesting score includes Caribbean steel drums played a little differently from the way I've heard them before.

~ "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (instead of "Hellboy II"!). This Walt Disney wonder from 1959 must have had another theatrical release, for I remember seeing it at the cinema in the late 1960s. The Disney movie wizards achieved some atmospheric images and scary moments that have stuck with me since then. Albert Sharpe's Darby seemed fresh in my memory, but I never realized before that this was one of the first screen appearances by Sean Connery. You even get to hear him sing, but not too much. He apparently was bashful about doing that scene, but he doesn't sound bad. The Technicolor film looks painterly and does justice to a land of leprechauns and banshees.

P.S. While on the subject of movies with Irish settings: I gave "Into the West" another viewing a while ago. That's another foray into Irish lore, albeit with a more serious edge than the Disney movie. The two young brothers are played perfectly naturally by the child actors, and that magic horse is a superb actor, too. Quite a different movie set in the same country is "Breakfast on Pluto." I saw it in an arthouse cinema in DC on its release, and it's waiting near my DVD player now.