In his lifetime, Handel wrote over 40 operas. Though primarily known these days for his choral works, Handel’s operatic oeuvre has been making a comeback in recent years, thanks to the efforts of New York City Opera, which has been trying to reinvigorate these sadly neglected works and offer them to a new audience in fresh, beautiful productions that are sexy, entertaining and skillfully executed. City’s new production of Orlando, which runs through April 7, marks the company’s tenth Handel revival. All in all, these Handel productions – very unlike anything you’re bound to see at the more conservative Met – is probably the best thing City has going for it. The reduced scope of Handel’s works (choruses and ensemble sets are rare) translates well in the comparatively intimate setting of the New York State Theatre. The unconventional style of the operas, which include extensive writing for counter-tenor and prominent continuo, means that the audience can approach this 300 year-old music with a sense of novelty and discovery. “Orlando” is the final opera in Handel’s “Ariosto trilogy,” which comprise Alcine and Ariodante (both of which City has staged to wide acclaim). The source material is Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso, which forms the basis for dozens of operas and even portions of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Ariosto’s work is mammoth and Handel’s librettist, Sigismondo Capece, provides a drastically condensed version.
Driven to distraction by his unrequited love for the princess Angela, the heroic knight Orlando wallows in his sorrows, until the sorcerer Zoroastro summons him to the glories of war. Orlando resists and confronts the untrue princess and her new suitor, Medoro in an enchanted forest. Amidst deceptions planted by Zoroastro, Orlando contends with the shepardess Dorinda, who is desperately in love with the increasingly unstable knight. He shuns her affection and pleas, blinded by jealously. He goes mad and believed he has killed the amorous couple, only to be brought back to his senses through Zoroastro’s magic. Restored to reality, Orlando blesses Angela and Medoro’s union and accepts his destiny as a great warrior.
City has assembled a fine cast for this co-production with Glimmerglass Opera. In the demanding title role (originally written for castrati), Bejun Mehta’s counter-tenor was clear and agile, matched by a marvelously physical performance (especially during his mad scene).  That said, he did experience occasional breathing difficulties during Handel’s characteristically long, trying vocal passages. As Orlando’s rival Medoro, Matthew White, making his debut, threatened to outshine Mehta. His lyrical counter-tenor was supremely refined and he possessed presence and vocal power that Mehta could not usually match. Jennifer Aylmer’s Dorinda was ravishing. Her voice was bright, youthful and strong, though her high notes weren’t always on target. As her rival Angelica, Amy Burton, also making her debut, sang with a more mature voice, which grew growing especially warm in Act Three. David Pittsinger, with his booming baritone made for a powerful Zoroastro, though he was flat in places.
Then, of course there is the music itself, led by the careful and precise Antony Walker, making his City debut. He gave a playful reading of the overture and guided the continuo, which forms an essential part of Baroque opera (both for aria and recitative), with care and precision. Though not performed with period instruments, one can safely conjecture that it approximated what Handel would have heard in his lifetime.
The dazzling costumes and sets by David Zinn make this Orlando as exciting visually as it is musically. The camouflage design of the forest situates the story in some timeless fairy-tale. The elaborate costumes combine simple elegance and slickness, effectively interacting with the minimalist set. There are dozens of unexpected and clever touches, such as a silent cupid with hot red hair and turquoise trench coat crouched onstage with his quiver and arrows for the bulk of the performance. Dorinda’s patients, arrow-ridden and bandaged, are aaid out on white hospital beds and sporadically show signs of life. Zoroaster’s genies are depicted as teenage vandals, gleefully defacing busts of Greek warrior heroes. Combined with the musical and vocal expertise and assured design, these delicious details are like the hot fudge on a sundae that is just too good to pass up.  

Salvador Dalí

Philadelphia Museum of Art

February 16 – May 15, 2005


A.J. Goldmann
 
In 1938, Salvador Dalí met with Sigmund Freud in his London office. In the course of their meeting, Dalí produced a sketch of his spiritual mentor. The aged doctor, for his part, observed, “In the paintings of the old masters, one immediately looks for the unconscious whereas, when one looks at a surrealist painting, one immediately looks for the conscious.” This is the challenge that awaits every visitor to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s expansive retrospective, Salvador Dalí. The show, which is being curated as part of the centenary of Dalí’s birth, offers an opportunity to view over 150 paintings spanning the artist’s entire career. For sheer breadth, the show deserves much praise. However, those who wish to take Freud’s wisdom to heart are sure to encounter serious difficulty. In displaying Dalí’s varied and controversial career, which spanned half –a-century, the exhibition shows a conspicuous lack of context, both historic and personal, to highlight and explain Dalí’s work. By focusing on painting to the near-exclusion of other media (there’s some nice stuff on film, very little sculpture, some sketches, no prints), it fails to give a fair show of the multi-faceted man. But for most this will seem a trifling objection, in light of the sheer volume of paintings on display. Drawn from collections In 14 countries, the show includes most of Dalí’s most familiar works – on view in thousands of college dormitories – rarely-seen works from his early period and still controversial work from his later years.
Upon entering the exhibit, one is greeting by “Impressions of Africa,” (1938). The focal point of the canvas is the artist himself gazing with a fish-like eye at the viewer from behind an easel. His outstretched arm and open fingers seem to be grasping at air for inspiration or maybe only an audience. Dalí offers us the promise of exotic possibility and aesthetic bliss and we follow his beck and call into the exhibit.
The earliest works exhibited are landscapes and portraits executed during prior to 1922. These surprisingly conventional paintings show the influence of pointillism and reveal a pastoral side that was to all but disappear in the later Dalí. A highlight from this period is the imposing “Portrait of My Father,” executed by the 18 year-old Dalí. The portly, daunting figure is seen sporting a pocket watch and holding a pipe. Dalí used heavy layers of black paint for the dinner jacket, symbolizing the psychological weight of the father figure. The colorful background is reminiscent of post-impressionism and much of these early works show an incredible debt to the movement. Of a different order are his sketches, which show a purity of form and realistic sheen that the artist, even in his most frighteningly surreal depictions never loses. A harking back to tradition can also be detected in the elegantly small “Basket of Bread,” which brings the Flemish school to mind.
We next encounter Dalí while a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where his increasingly bizarre vision and arrogance got him expelled. Among the works from this era are portraits of two artists he met in Madrid, both of whom encouraged him on the road to the avante-guard; writer Frederico Garcia Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Buñuel (with whom Dalí would later collaborate). Dalí’s cubist sketch of Lorca holding a guitar is a nod to Picasso while the 1924 portrait of Buñuel is painted in the expressionist tradition of the Neue Sachlichkeit. The portrait of Buñuel makes good comparison for 1925’s “Figure at a Window” which depicts Dalí’s sister leaning dreamily out a window. The most alluring images from this era, they show the artists exploring how best to evoke dream-like states.
The following year’s “Neo-Cubist Academy,” shows Dalí combining the technique of Picasso with classical form.  It is a synthesis of neo-classicism and cubism, and shows Dalí artist struggling to cast off Picasso’s influence. In this period, Dalí works primarily with jewel-sized canvases of wilderness scenes, from which seems to emerge almost organically his unmistakable and inimitable style. Nested among these smaller works, presented against a soft pastel background, are a couple of abstract works, which clearly show the influence of Arp and Miro and some example of automatic drawing à la Breton. Several bizarre collages, composed of seashells and sand reveal a curiosity and love of experimentation that he would never completely abandon.
The year 1929 marks a turning point in Dalí’s career, as he met the love of his life – Gala Eluard, then wife to the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard – and his enrollment in Breton’s International Surrealist Movement (from which he’d later be expelled). Arguably the most remarkable painting from this period is 1930s “Premature Ossification of a Station.” In a deserted wilderness, train-tracks are dug in the sands and extend to the horizon. In the foreground stands a sinewy figure, it’s visage obscured by a melting clock, and only hinted at in a sinister shadow. Sharp cliffs stand near the horizon, where we find two ladies’ shoes casting oblong shadows and two figures – a mother and child perhaps? – walking to the vanishing point. Among the most symbol-laden of all Dalí’s work (and that’s really saying something) is “William Tell” from 1930. This large canvas – especially given the surrounding work – depicts a surreal father-son competition. A triumphant white horse symbolizes Dalí’s rebellious freedom, while the festering carcass of a donkey symbolizes the bourgeois decay of the father. Another highlight is “The True Painting of the ‘Isle of the Dead,’” where Dalí uses deep perspective to communicate alienation and desire in a reinterpretation of Böcklin’s famous work.
Before dealing with Dalí’s wartime work, there is a slight pause to consider Dalí’s contribution to other media - sculpture, photographs and miscellanea - which is poorly placed and far from sufficient. We then transition to Dalí’s wartime work. Evenly spaced and set against a maroon wall, these works have a severity that is all but lacking in his earlier work. Though using a familiar visual vocabulary, he uses it to translate the earlier sense absurdity into horror. 1939’s “Enigma of Hitler,” is a brooding work that allegorically represents Hitler as a destroyer of European culture. The looming telephone symbolizes the Munich Accords, which were negotiated over the phone. Other works from this period (like “Imperial Violets” and “Palladio’s Thalia Corridor”) show their debt to El Greco and Goya. The next room brings Dalí’s famous Double Images, with their arresting baroque and morbid compositions and heavy symbolism. Among these are the famous “Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” and “Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach,” which presents a still life that can alternately be apprehended as a beach, a dog and a face.
Starting in the 1940s, Dalí began to react against the experimental nature of surrealism. “Constant experiment is sterility,” he wrote, ”Surrealist experiment no less than any kind.” His answer, “the New Classicism” is not so much a break with Surrealism as a reformulation of it. In pictures from this era – mostly of Gala – we find Dalí embracing once more the order and perfection of the Renaissance. This instance on formal beauty can be seen as a response to the barbarism of the Second World War, from which he ultimately fled Europe for America. The exhibition includes a small selection Dalí did during his exile. An oil painting produced for a dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” is on display, as are several set designs he produced for various ballet and opera.
The exhibit presents Dalí’s work from the fifties onward as they tie into the artist’s scientific and spiritual projects. Outside of the early work, this is the most rarely exhibited of Dalí’s work. One of the oddest pieces, “Still-Life , Fast Moving,” a dancing still-life of fruit, knife and bottle, illustrates Dalí’s fascination with Heisenberg’s theory of matter being discontinuous. Dalí described the newfound fascination as a shift from the iconography of the interior world surrealism represented to the iconography of the exterior world of physics. “Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” a reworking of his early masterpiece, illustrates this shift by suggesting the world’s disintegration into atomic particles. Nuclear Mysticism is the term Dalí gave to his newfound embrace of religion in older age. With painting like 1958’s “Piéta” and the life-affirming crucifixion “Corpus Hybercubicus,” Dalí uses the techniques and imagery of the renaissance to reinvigorate modern painting and his own personal faith.
In the penultimate room of the exhibition, we encounter the gallery’s largest canvas. “The Railway Station at Perpignan” (1965) is a perplexing image based on a real-life epiphany Dalí claims to have had while waiting inside a train station where it was revealed to him that the station was the center of the universe. The imposing canvas shows Dalí springing Christ-like into life, symbolizing the artist’s “cosmogonic ecstasy” amid scientific and religious symbolism. On the wall to the right hangs “Portrait of my Dead Brother,” (1963) wherein Dalí imagines the elder brother he never had (died 12 months before his birth) in the Benday dot pattern of Lichtenstein and Warhol. Dalí kept working up until 1983, but the exhibition offers precious little from these last 20 years of his artistic life. The only work on display from the 1970s is the infinitely strange “First Cylindric Chonohologram of Alice Cooper’s Brain.” From here, the gallery jumps to what is considered Dalí’s last painting, “The Swallow’s Tail” (1983). The abstract geometry and hint of musical notation brings Miró to mind. The only part of Dalí that lingers behind on canvas is his famous moustache.
The overwhelming sense one gets from the mammoth exhibit is a sort of aesthetic stupor.  Contrary to the curators’ expressed intentions; the impressive and varied collection doesn’t so much offer a new perspective on Dalí rather than gratify a public that has been over-exposed to his work. A more thoughtfully structured exhibit would have been less concerned about how many canvases to clump together and with how to contextualize the work in the artist’s own life and his times.  For a figure as controversial as Dalí, the exhibit is something of a naïve love letter. Those expecting a new angle on Dalí will find the early Dalí the most interesting. The free audio guide that walks the fine line between informative and pedantic are helpful in explaining obscure Dalí symbolism, but shies from offering any bold theories or ideas behind his oeuvre. This lack of guidance makes Freud’s challenge all the harder to meet. Dalí himself was far from helpful on this subject. “Just because I don’t know what my paintings mean while I’m painting them,” he contended, “doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless.”  

Carnegie Hall in Review

The Vienna Philharmonic

Conductor, Mariss Jansons

March 13, 2005 at 2pm

The San Francisco Orchestra

Musical Director, Michael Tilson Thomas

Piano, Lief Ove Andsnes

March 16, 2005 at 8pm

Over spring break, two orchestras with opposed philosophies of the role of the conductor graced Carnegie Hall in programs of riveting musicianship. The first, The Vienna Philharmonic, one of the most distinguished orchestras on earth, has a reputation that lies not on the work of a single conductor but rather the quality of their musicianship. For all their conservativeness (you can could the female members on your fingers) the orchestra is in one respect radical. It lacks a full time music director and democratically elects its conductors on a concert-by-concert basis. The other, the San Francisco Orchestra, owes much of its reputation as a world-class orchestra to their musical director of the past decade, Michael Tilson Thomas.

In the final of a three concert series, Mariss Jansons – who currently heads Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw - led the Vienna Philharmonic in an appropriately Austrian program of works by Schoenberg and Mahler. The first piece, Schoenberg’s moody tone poem, Verklaerte Nacht, is among the composer’s most frequently performed works. Though it dates from late in Schoenberg’s career, the piece, which is scored for string orchestra, has its roots in a sextet that the Schoenberg wrote at the age of 25, before his rejection of tonal music. Hence the re-orchestrated version (1943) enjoys rare accessibility in the composer’s oeuvre. Like Strauss’ Metamorphoses – which dates from around the same era – this languid, tumultuous and often ethereal peace floods the audience with rich, intertwining and repetitive music ideas. Jansons took an illuminating approach to a piece whose over-all character resembles the flickering light of an eternal flame. Janson presented the multilayered work with coherence, clarity and expression. Replete with arpeggios and chromatisms even in its quietest moments, Verklaerte Nacht – which means “Transfigured Night” – can be challenging for any orchestra. In Jansons’ hands, not only did the piece make sense, it assumed a religious character.

The program’s second half was a stunning performance of Mahler’s First Symphony. The ominous opening bars seemed dangerously understated for Mahler, until the quiet sense of dread was punctured by inflected horns. The slow uptake was matched by the equally ghost-like entry of the material from Mahler’s collection Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. In a piece that incorporates so many different themes and motifs, the musicians’ playing was remarkably fluid and connected. The second movement found aggressive strings and a shimmering use of timpani. The klezmer-like dance of th ethird movement started off a bit uncertainly but quickly gained momentum. Jansons led with pizzazz and quick-wit, which contrasted against the delicate incorporation of the composer’s song, “Die Zwei Blauen Augen.” In the fourth movement, played by the entire orchestra in a fever pitch, the various themes seemed in competition to be heard. Jansons’ pauses where effective at offsetting the sheer force of the entire movement, and the echoes of lieder wafted around the movement like half-forgotten memories. The cellos were exquisitely lachrymose. The entire ensemble built up splendidly to a regal and brilliantly ostentatious finale. For the encore, Jansons couldn’t resist giving the already heavily Austrian evening a fitting flourish, a delicious and timely Strauss waltz (“Voices of Spring”) that the orchestra seemed able to play in their sleep.   

Expectations ran high when Michael Tislon Thomas brought the SFO to Carnegie Hall to perform a program that included Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with soloist Lief Ove Andsnes. The concert - which also included works by Copland and Shostakovich - was daring and exciting. The first offering, Copland’s Orchestral Variations opens with cutting percussion, then becomes Hollywoody and jazz-like. It’s a fast breathless piece that introduces a score of variations in under fifteen minutes. Tilson Thomas led a playful and pulsating performance, full of aggressive pizzicatos and inventive timpani.

The highlight of the evening, the Rachmaninoff, was not so much a disappointment as a mystery. For a good part of the piece, there seemed to be a gulf between Andsnes and Tilson Thomas. This is all the more odd considering that the two spent the fall touring around Europe together performing that piece. In the first movement, while Tislon Thomas probed the uber-Romantic depths of the work, drawing out the tumultuous phrases, Mr. Andsnes seemed to be in his own world. There was a music-box quality to his playing that, while remarkably clean (especially for those familiar with Rubenstein) sounded unexpectedly gentle and lullaby-like. Slowly, reservedly, the piece opened in Tilson Thomas’ hands with fluid phrasing and languishing, mournful colors that seemed an odd pairing with Andsnes’ rigid rhythmical precision. Sudden crescendos and drawn out horn passages were awkwardly accompanied by Andsnes’ more deliberate built-ups and over-all reservedness.  In the second movement, as well, the orchestra was on the whole more expressive than the soloist. Tilson Thomas highlighted certain elements. The clarinet passages were lovely and the violins were especially expressive and mournful. Even at his most forceful, in the first two movements, Andnes showed a certain understatedness and care. Then came the Allegro, which Andsnes stormed with unexpected vigor. stung into the third movement with a vigor: plunging into the keyboard with an abandon that came as a breath of fresh air. Tilson Thomas mixed in some odd phrasing here and there. There was an overall progression in Andsnes’ playing, and the abandon with which he leapt into the third movement reflected an internal change undergone in the performer during the duration of the concert. It wasn’t that soloist and conductor weren’t listening to each other, but rather that they were swimming about, trying hard to connect up to each other. That they accomplished this organically was both performer’s greatest feat. Amid thunderous applause, Mr. Andsnes played a concentrated and lyrical encore of Janacek’s Andante 1 from In the Mists.

After intermission, a greatly expanded orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Symphony Fifteen, a work that is certainly challenging for musicians and audiences alike. Here, Tilson Thomas’ conducting was much more dramatic than in the previous offerings. The peculiar structure of the piece, only three movements, is matched by other symphonic oddities, such as very explicit references to other works (by Shostakovich, Rossini and Wagner) and long solo passages for the violin, cello and tuba. The piece opens sinisterly, like a kind of demented tone poem, where the violin’s solo is strongly reminiscent of Shostakovich’s own String Quartet #8. Other musical quotes include the incredibly famous overture to William Tell and the Annunciation of Death from Die Walkure (*add umlaut). In the second movement, the first cello plays a central role. Its mournful theme is taken over by the violin and tuba, until swept up by the entire orchestra into a terrifying scherzo. The allusions build in the third movement and seemed to receive both serious and playful treatment from Tilson Thomas. The highly disjointed finale had an uber-Romantic shimmer, which died with a clamour of timpani over an open A-chord.

Candide at City Opera

 For several seasons now, City has tried to dignify musical theatre by presenting it as opera. In doing so, however, it has not managed to do service to either art form. There whole endevour has an ersatz feel to it. Musical theatre and Opera are two radically different art forms. In calling attention to the musical expertise of certain Broadway tunesmiths – Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein notably – City has tended to ignore the practical disadvantages that presenting musical theatre in an opera setting pose. First off, there is the issue of venue and size, then this issue of amplification – common for musicals, but verboten in opera. In the cavernous New York State Theatre (whose seating capacity is easily double that of most Broadway theatres), musical productions seem dwarfed. This is the problem that both City’s productions of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd suffered from. There’s something odd, strangely wrong about seeing musicals in an opera setting. In the recent revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, the singers (some of whom have no opera experience) are miked and the crowded stage, with musty sets that would feel natural on Broadway - where one breathes more freely - seem burdensome and tiresome in the opera-house.

On a positive note, however, the cast that City assembled was impressive. The performers were as strong vocally as they were theatrically. The marvelous John Cullum (seen recently in the sadly demised “Urinetown”) gave a rousing performance as Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss (and half-a-dozen other characters to boot). His boisterous stage presence was complimented nicely by his Broadway-of-yesteryear baritone. One of the production’s most inspired choices, his voice and demeanor were perfectly suited to the playful plot and tuneful score. As the happy-go-lucky titular character, Keith Jameson was suitably naïve and oblivious. Thankful, his voice was for from immature, though his heroic singing radiated with his character’s initial optimism and subsequent disillusionment. There was no place for subtlety in his upfront, rhetorical style. As his love interest, Cunegone, Anna Christy sang exquisitely. One might have wished she had a bigger voice, although she more than came through for her Diva moment in “Glitter and be Gay.” Where she faltered most was in her ridiculously wooden acting and god-awful facial expressions. The vain Maximilian was inhabited flawlessly by the dashing Kyle Pfortmiller. The other member of the sizable cast deserving of laurels was Judy Kaye as the Old Lady. With her wise-guy attitude and her Yiddish accent, she was the closest the performance ever came to channeling the spirit of the original (which is lovingly preserved on a Sony compact disc) when she announced that they were off to “the new voyld!”.

For all the vocal strength and creative design on display, this Candide suffered from a stagnancy more often associated with high-school productions. So what made this joyful and flamboyantly designed outing less that the best of all possible worlds? Hal Prince’s vibrant and meta-theatrical production seems to have gathered some dust since last shown as part of the 1982 season. The multi-purpose set and incessant scene changes scarcely gave one room to breath. There is more than an element of the madcap in Bernstein’s music, but this production played it up to a T. For the most part entertaining, the production had its weak spots, in particular the awkwardly staged inquisition scene. Often there just seemed to be too much going on onstage. The well-utilized chorus remained onstage the whole time, making things unduly crowded and distracting from the main action. Needless to say, they sang wonderfully. The costumes were effectively storybook-like. One of the most comical touches was cladding the Westphalian soldiers in Viking helmets. 

Those familiar with Voltaire’s original will detect a major deviation in plot in the second act, with Candide’s arrival in the New World. The liberties that Bernstein, Lillian Hellman and subsequent revisers took with Voltaire’s text serve an important function, as they allow Bernstein to apply a free range of musical styles. With endless invention, he incorporates, confuses and blends a plethora of forms – including waltzes, polkas, tangos, chorales, and arias- into a harmonious whole that runs under three hours. Bernstein realized the daring and originality of what he was doing. Of the music he wrote, “The particular mixture of styles and elements that goes into this work makes it perhaps a new kind of show…There seems to be no real specific precedent for it in our theatre, so time will tell.” While the score remains a splendid entertainment and a genuine classic, battles on how to stage the work (on Broadway, on film and at the opera) are still raging, as the show’s long and complicated production history reveals. While City’s best efforts have not eliminated the problems posed by this “new kind of show,” at least it remained loyal to Bernstein’s musical vision. Braden Toan led the orchestra in a clear and spirited reading of the score that was never lacking in inventiveness and that rendered nearly every syllable audible.    

Concert Review: Carnegie Hall
Dec. 6, 2004 at 8 p.m.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra
  Hector Berlioz called his Roméo et Juliette a dramatic symphony. But this mammoth piece—scored for an enormous musical force, soloists, and a full chorus—bears little resemblance to any symphony before or since. Lying somewhere between oratorio and song-cycle, the bizarrely structured seven movement piece contains long passages of absolute music, switching off with theatrical scenes. In terms of scope and idiosyncrasy, it prefigures Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, which by comparison seems almost formally tame. During its New York engagement at Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave a highly uneven account of the entire piece, whose more lyrical movements are better known through concert selections.
The sold-out house gave a warm welcome to James Levine, no stranger to the New York musical scene. In addition to the BSO, which he took command of earlier this year, Maestro Levine retains his position as artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, which he has led for the past 33 seasons. Much praise has been lavished on Mr. Levine’s daring performance schedule in Boston, which includes many works by contemporary composers. All three of the Carnegie concerts— which also included a program pairing Stravinsky and Brahams with Harbison and Wuorinen and another of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony—were performed earlier in the season in Boston.
On the night of the Berlioz symphony, the musicians were packed like sardines in Isaac Stern Auditorium. It was a force that Mr. Levine was to conduct, like his orchestra, sitting down, due to his age and failing health. At the opera, where the orchestra is relegated to the pit, his baton can still make Wagner and Mozart shimmer. Conducting Roméo et Juliette on stage, however, the Maestro’s delicate condition translated into a handicap for the music. For all the musicians’ vigor and dedication, there was a gulf between them and Levine, separating them from a potentially glorious performance. Levine’s influence was clearly heard in the brass section, whose rich, Wagnerian playing provided some of the piece’s most arresting passages. But for the most part, the concert seemed a flurry of strings and undefined winds, rounded out by deafening tympani. The vocalists did much to improve the situation. There was a radical boost in the quality of the performance during the concert’s mostly choral second half. The small chorus, which recounts the warfare of the houses of Montague and Capulet in a prologue, sounded crisp and almost baroque, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus filled the auditorium with heavenly song during the finale. One of the soloists, the tenor Matthew Polenzani, who sang the part of Mercutio, was a disappointment. Mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang the contralto solo exquisitely. In the strophe praising love, her voice took on a quality of airy sweetness as she sang to a solo cello.
By far the best moments of the evening were those sung by Julien Robbins. His Friar Lawrence was astounding. His account of the lovers’ deaths and his plea for brotherly love encompassed a wide emotional and musical range. If only the same could be said about the concert as a whole.
—
Friday Dec. 10, 2004
8:00 p.m.
Les Contes D’Hoffmann  
Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les Contes D’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) brings Dr. Strangelove to mind. All of the main singers—save the lead—play two, three, and sometimes even four different roles. Like the tales in which they appear, the characters overlap and intertwine. Even so, the multiple casting conceit is a Peter Sellers-like wink at the audience. And quite a wink at that, when one considers the bleak message at the opera’s core.
Despite its immensely hum-able tunes—penned by the Mozart of the Champs-Elysées—and madcap supernatural situations, Hoffmann is a wistful, if not humorous, lament for lost love and the frivolity of human experience. The “tales” are narrated by E.T.A. Hoffmann—the real-life German writer and storyteller—to a rowdy crowd of soldiers and students at a beer hall. The stories themselves are drawn from the actual Hoffmann’s stories and related as biographical episodes.
In the first, inspired by one of the author’s most well-known stories, “The Sandman,” Hoffmann buys a pair of magical spectacles from the shady Coppélius and falls in love with his science professor’s daughter, not realizing that she’s no more than a robot. In the second, he plans to elope with a girl, whose father, for fear of Hoffman’s interest in his daughter, has sequestered her in the country. Hoffmann’s plans, however, are thwarted by Dr. Miracle, a demonic character whose arrival signals her imminent death. The third and final episode, based on “die Geschichte von verlornen Spiegelbilde” is a Faustian tale of obsession, in which Hoffmann unwittingly gives up his shadow to the sorcerer Dappertutto for love of a courtesan.
By the time Hoffmann is finished relating his tales, he is so drunk he can’t even recognize his current paramour, the opera diva Stella, when she walks through the door. She goes off with the wealthy Councilor Lindorf, and Hoffmann sings one final, frenzied paean to the joys of inebriation.
Given the work’s whimsical subject matter and dramatically challenging casting, Hoffmann can pose difficulties for opera houses that seek to stage it. The Metropolitan Opera has pulled out all the stops for their current revival, which had its first performance last Friday night. The dream cast includes Ramón Vargas in the title role, James Morris as the four villains (Linsdorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Dappartutto), and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt as the four servants. Vargas, a Mexican tenor, sang the entire evening with unbelievable energy and ease. He never faltered in his portrayal of the lovesick bohemian, coloring his amorous arias with vocal piety, and his drunken outbursts with contemptuous frivolity. The great Wagnerian bass, Morris, seemed to be enjoying himself immensely as the opera’s sinister quartet. After over 30 years of singing at the Met, he is still magnetizing—a vocal and dramatic miracle.
Chief among the female performers was the Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, making her Met debut as Olympia, the mechanical object of Hoffmann’s lust. The uproarious scene in which she entertains her father’s dinner guests by singing a song composed almost entirely of scales, during which the automaton repeatedly malfunctions, needing to be cranked up, was the peak of perfection. A murderously difficult piece of writing, it requires the performer to make her body robotic. Unlike her character, Kurzak pulled off the long, and at times rather torturous, aria without a hitch.
Ruxandra Donose sang the Muse of Poetry, disguised for much of the opera as the student Nicklausse, with the same stamina and accuracy that Vargas and Morris maintained. Playing the lovesick muse, Donose was by far the most affecting female performer of the evening. As Antonia and Stella, Hei-Kyung Hong was predictably deliberate and lyrical. Wendy White was eerily hypnotic as the talking portrait of Antonia’s mom. Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s sets, from a reworking of the original production by Otto Schenk, are spectacularly overblown. Crespel’s laboratory is a carnival-esque vision that seems straight out of a Tim Burton film. Gothic, grotesque inventions hang from the ceiling and line the walls. The Venetian palace, the setting for the final tale, has a faded splendor to it; the gondolas which glide by the arched windows seem ghostly. Effective lighting and realistic costumes enhance the enchanting spectacle. The orchestra sounded magnificent under the baton of Frédéric Chaslin. Indeed, in this version of the operatic spectacle Hoffmann, the Met has found a way to make the vocal and musical quality of the performers match the technical apparatus
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The Emerson String Quartet
Zankel Hall (Carnegie Hall)
Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005, at 7:30 p.m.
  In the first of three concerts dedicated to the chamber music of Felix Mendelssohn, the Emerson String Quartet played a long and varied program at Zankel Hall. Their series, “A Vision of Mendelssohn,” which includes additional concerts in March and April, coincides with the release of a CD box-set of the composer’s complete string quartets, on the Deutsche Grammophon label. On Tuesday night, the Emerson Quartet presented Mendelssohn in the context of two important influences, Bach and Beethoven. In addition to being arguably the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart, Mendelssohn was an accomplished violinist.
At the age of 12, he turned to the genre of the string quartet for inspiration. Of his pieces heard during the evening were the String Quartet in E-Flat Major and the Quartet in A Minor. The other pieces on the program included a Mozart arrangement of the D-Minor fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and the first Contrapunctus for the Art of the Fugue. Both selections can be heard on the Emerson Quartet’s recent release “The Art of the Fugue.” These short pieces seemed slightly out-of-place in Tuesday night’s program, like an after-thought sandwiched between Beethoven’s 10th Quartet, “The Harp,” and Mendelssohn’s A-Minor Quartet, subtitled “Ist es wahr?” (“Is it true?”). It was a long evening, and the Emerson Quartet occasionally sounded a trifle anxious, as if not entirely comfortable with the music.
As led by first-violin Eugene Drucker, Mendelssohn’s E-Flat Minor Quartet sounded more classical than romantic. Drucker’s technique was superb; in the fluid first movement, he was precise and clean and poured his heart into every note. At times, however, the ensemble’s understated approach, which highlighted the almost Baroque counterpoint to the expense of emotional impact, was a bit jarring. In the Canzonetta, and again in the final movement, violist Lawrence Dutton was far too forceful.
In Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet, the players seemed less concerned with playing up the Bachian sense of counterpoint. The wild cries of distress that begin the piece were almost comically refined and dangerously curt. Still, the Emerson Quartet managed to be expressive in the first movement, even if the pizzicato was too strong from time to time. David Finckel, the cellist, who is in many respects the ensemble’s backbone, seemed a bit hesitant, as he glanced around, gauging where his fellow musicians were. The second movement was languid and romantic. Drucker’s bow was as light as air, and he gave the movement a delicate finish. All four members played in perfect concert during the third movement. And in the Allegretto con Variazioni, a very animated Dutton drew clear, soft colors during his solo.
Before the second Mendelssohn quartet, the ensemble played three shorter pieces by Bach and Mendelssohn. While the offerings were lovely in-and-of themselves, they were hardly remarkable, nor were they worth the time they added to a program that ran two-and-a-half hours.
The A-Minor Quartet, the most Romantic offering, was a fitting end to the program. Of all the pieces, this featured the most balance between the players. Philip Setzer, taking over as first-violin, assumed a less central position than in the previous pieces. The tremulous second movement was marked by restraint and brought to mind the group’s Shostakovich recordings. Mendelssohn named the quartet after a lied, “Ist es wahr?” And indeed, sections of the piece sound very songlike. The muted moments bring to mind the echoes of an unheard sorrow. In the final movement, the ethereal harmony of the violins was reminiscent of an operatic love duet.
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Orchestre National de France
Thursday, Feb. 24, 2005, at 8 p.m.
Conductor, Kurt Masur
Soloist, Jean-Yves Thibaudet
  Days after President Bush officially rechristened the french fry, New Yorkers had a guilt-free chance to enjoy the musicianship of the Orchestre National de France. Patriotic sentiments ran high as the audience welcomed back an old friend, former music director of the New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur. Masur, who has led the Orchestre National since 2002, conducted a program that included works by Ravel, Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov.
For the concert’s first half, soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet joined the orchestra in two works that, despite their classification, have the force of a narrative. Thibaudet navigated the soft contours of Debussy’s Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra with inventiveness and sophistication. His general playfulness and exuberance suited the free-form Fantasy well, and his Andante was aquatic and glittering, full of romantic, draw-out phrases and blossoming crescendos. During the short, two-movement piece, he varied his style impressively, with a fluid and assured technique that suited a piece which sounds alternately jazzy, oriental and reminiscent of Rachmaninoff.
In the first movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, the notes flew out of the instrument like paint from a bucket, mingling into a rich soundscape ruled by vague des passions (waves of passion). Ravel’s concerto is among the best contributions to a genre generally neglected by French composers. In the luxurious Adagio, singing flutes and wailing clarinets answered Thibaudet, who played with energy and precision up until the carnival-esque finish, and especially strong brass and winds accompanied him throughout. Unfortunately, most of the evening’s excitement left at intermission with Thibaudet. The concert’s second half, Rimsky Kosakov’s majestic tone poem Scheherazade, was far too conservative to rival the Ravel. Korsakov’s masterpiece is a four-movement symphonic suite based on the Arabian Nights, and in terms of dazzling orchestration and sheer tunefulness, it is in a class all its own. Masur led a solid, if unremarkable, performance of this sumptuous and oft-performed piece. First violin, Sarah Nemtanu trilled distinctively, though her phrasing was puzzling at times and her playing possessed a squeaky-clean quality, which, combined with heavy vibrato, showed a frightening lack of subtlety. Some string passages were muddled and the massive orchestra could crescendo too suddenly. During the tumultuous final movement, Masur nicely accentuated the bass line and reigned in its impressive force, which was subdued by Nemtanu’s mournful bowing. She slipped in her final passages, but it was a decidedly French slip. As the French say, c’est la vie!