August 2011 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer on the Mostly Mozart finale at Avery Fisher Hall (Financial Times)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Julie Salamon's Wendy Wasserstein bio (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on Álex de la Iglesia's "The Last Circus" (GreenCine Daily)
Michael Feingold on Charles Busch's "Olive and the Bitter Herbs" (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on "The History of Forgetting" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Our Idiot Brother" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the Sept. 11 documentary "Rebirth" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein interviews Richard C. Francis about "Epigenetics" (AARP.org)
Anne Midgette on the role of commemorative classical music (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette asks how many commemorations are enough (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on why "Pumped Up Kicks" is this year's ideal summer song (NPR)
Carlin Romano reviews Bruce Duffy's Rimbaud novel (The New York Times)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Robert Christgau on a '50s miscellany (Barnes & Noble Review)
Robert Christgau on a Fountains of Wayne show (MSN Music)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews director Jesse Peretz (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on Magnolia Pictures at BAMcinématek (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews Anna Kerrigan's "The Talls" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Rent" at New World Stages (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on a football stadium in downtown L.A. (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on dramatizing MLK's life for the screen (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette gives a primer on contemporary classical (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on artist Nira Pereg's "67 Bows" video (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews "Cocktail Hour" memoirist Alexandra Fuller (NPR)
Ann Powers on American apathy toward Kate Bush (NPR)
David Streitfeld on Amazon's aggressive move into publishing (The New York Times)
David Streitfeld on the market for rave reviews online (The New York Times)

And in print:

Mark Rozzo profiles director, memoirist Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Town & Country)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer on "Orlando" at the Mostly Mozart Festival (Financial Times)
Laura Bleiberg on high turnover at Los Angeles Ballet (LA Weekly)
Robert Christgau on Fountains of Wayne (MSN Music)
Robert Christgau on Mamani Keita, the 5 Royales, et al (Expert Witness)
Michael Feingold reviews Noël Coward's "Bitter Sweet" (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Watch the Throne" (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch on translations between languages, media (Beyond Criticism)
Christopher Hawthorne on the National Sept. 11 Memorial (Los Angeles Times)
Jan Herman on Philip Levine's factory stiffs, society's throw-aways (Straight Up)
John Horn on the prospects for "30 Minutes or Less" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Help" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Guard" (The Washington Post)
Allan M. Jalon on architect Giorgio Cavaglieri and his shaping of New York (Tablet)
Michael Kimmelman on our trouble with traditional sculpture (The New York Times)
Anne Midgette on criticizing female musicians' stage clothes (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews "Devil's Double" star Dominic Cooper (NPR)
Ann Powers on country music's new guard (NPR)
Craig Seligman reviews Amy Waldman's "The Submission" (Bloomberg News)
Marcia B. Siegel on Jonah Bokaer at Jacob's Pillow (The Boston Phoenix)
Laura Sydell on the future of Netflix streaming (NPR)

In small-town Iowa, where I grew up, a summer's Saturday meant packing up the blanket and a picnic basket for some free Sousa at the local bandshell, and an extra nickel for flavored ice. 

Since then I've witnessed amazing Shakespeare in New York's Central Park, holiday concerts at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and wonderful fringe festival fare the world over. But I was nevertheless amazed by what I heard, for free, at Chicago's Millennium Park this past weekend. 

The program -- Franz Schmidt's "The Book with Seven Seals" (Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln) -- was a connoisseur's dream, an evening-long 1937 rarity based on the biblical Book of Revelation for full chorus and orchestra, with virtuoso solo roles for an organist and five singers, one of them a Wagnerian heldentenor who must also be capable of nimble, Bach-like narrative. 

It was a titanic performance that seemed to fit the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, with its Frank Gehry stage framed by billowing stainless steel sails and an airy trellis of loudspeakers extending out over the lawn. To sit in this outdoor space with the clouds rolling above is to feel you're embarking on a space and time voyage, which the concert surely was. 

Schmidt (1874-1939) played cello in the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra under Gustav Mahler. He was well versed in the church music of Bach, the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the operas of Strauss and Wagner. His 1937 choral-orchestral masterpiece could easily be mistaken, in certain passages, for a work written a hundred years earlier.

For its conservative style alone, Schmidt's "The Book with Seven Seals" would have probably missed the cut when it came to the works that would live for future generations. But Schmidt's music was also championed by the Nazis after the Austrian Anschluss and thereby heavily stigmatized. Few conductors outside of Austria came forward to champion Schmidt's music after the war, and as the years passed the growing reputations of Debussy, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky eclipsed Schmidt's accomplishment. 

Except, that is, in Austria, where two-thirds of the population is Catholic, choral societies abound and the great oratorios of Bach, Händel, Haydn, Schütz and Mozart are still prominent features of the musical calendar. Schmidt's gargantuan piece has fixed itself firmly in the rotation there. Grant Park Festival's Uruguayan-born artistic director Carlos Kalmar, who studied in Vienna, says he flipped out when he discovered it. 

Schmidt's portrayals of the four apocalyptic horsemen are grand exclamation points of cataclysmic outburst and spine-chilling creepiness. The quintet of Austrian soloists offered searing emotional clarity. Yet the sounds that are in my head as I write this are the gentle devotional counterpoints of the opening prologue and the great choruses of horror, woe and thankfulness that play out over the two-hour saga.

Most pre-concert, post-concert, and connected-to-concert talks are, quite frankly, a waste of time--and I say this as someone who has given a few of them myself.  You might pick up a bit of history or a brief passage to look out for, but more likely you are made impatient by the unhelpful summaries, critical gobbledegook, and stiltedly informative manner of the speaker. 

Last night, however, I went to a talk at the Music@Menlo series that was, if anything, as good as the concerts it accompanied.  Granted, the speaker was Ara Guzelimian, the acknowledged master of live music talks, whose interviews with Mark Morris, John Adams, and Paul Jacobs have delighted me in the past.  But in this case Guzelimian transcended even himself.  He had put together a two-hour evening about late Brahms that was intended to enhance Music@Menlo's three weeks of marvelous Brahms-related concerts.  I know they were marvelous because, prior to the talk, I had already attended two of the concerts--but I didn't fully realize how marvelous Brahms himself was until Guzelimian led me through the steps to that realization.

His argument--which he amply proved in the course of the evening--was that Brahms was both the last classicist and the first modernist.  (Even fans of the composer tend to take one side or another in this argument; Guzelimian is rare in advocating both.)  He talked about the earlier composers who had influenced Brahms and the later ones he had in turn influenced; he elaborated on the pianist (Clara Schumann), violinist (Joseph Joachim), and clarinetist (Richard Mühlfeld) who had inspired some of his greatest works.  But best of all, he brought the excellent musicians from the Music@Menlo community to the stage to help him illustrate his points.  To hear Wu Han play side-by-side piano pieces of Milton Babbitt and Brahms (Babbitt was, apparently, a lifelong fan of the German master), and then to hear her elaborate on what she loved about each passage, and how the two pieces reflected each other, was a rare pleasure--and it was Guzelimian who evoked these revelations from her, in a completely warm and informal way.  It was like being present at a rehearsal, or a heavenly music lesson, in which we were treated to the most insider-ish observations voiced in plain speech.

And then, as a finale, Guzelimian brought on the five players who tonight and tomorrow will perform the Clarinet Quintet in the closing concert of the festival:  David Shifrin on the clarinet, Philip Setzer and Ani Kavafian on the violins, Yura Lee on the viola, and Paul Watkins on the cello.  I had heard Shifrin do the Brahms clarinet trio and a couple of the clarinet sonatas the preceding Monday, so I already knew how great his playing was going to be--but what I didn't suspect was how, in the small setting of the Martin Family Hall, even this grand quintet could be made to seem intimate and personal.  Before and during their snippets from the Adagio and their full performance of the first movement, the musicians exchanged comments with Guzelimian about exactly how the passages worked, and why they worked.  Again, it was almost like being at a rehearsal, but even better, because they were directing their observations at intellectual clarity for us, not just practical clarity for themselves. 

I haven't heard such great music talk since the day I went to hear Alex Ross's touring version of The Rest Is Noise, with Ethan Iverson performing the piano illustrations.  At the time, I figured I'd never hear anything like it again, but last night's experience certainly rivaled it.  I hope it signals a new trend in music talks.  We should be so lucky.

This week's (and last week's) links to NAJP members' work:

MJ Andersen on summer reading (The Providence Journal)
Martin Bernheimer on "Don Giovanni" at Mostly Mozart Festival (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on "Selma Ježková" at Lincoln Center Festival (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on the Mostly Mozart Festival opening (Financial Times)
Robert Christgau on Serengeti's "Family & Friends" (NPR)
Robert Christgau on the Staple Singers, Lobi Traore, et al (Expert Witness)
Robert Christgau reviews Tom Zé at Alice Tully Hall (MSN Music)
Robert Christgau on the Teddybears' "Devil's Music" (NPR)
Laura Collins-Hughes on the remaking of "Porgy and Bess" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes reviews "Paradise Lust" (The Boston Globe)
Christopher Hawthorne on Field Operations' Santa Monica parks (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on fears for Neutra's Kronish House (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on D.J. Waldie's "Holy Land" (Los Angeles Times)
Alan Hess on architect John Lautner's relationship with L.A. (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Sundance Institute's online distribution initiative (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Change-Up" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Cowboys & Aliens" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Crazy, Stupid, Love" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on "Sugar in My Bowl" (AARP.org)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Cowboys & Aliens" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on classic musicals staged opera-style (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews "Tales of Hoffmann" at Wolf Trap (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on Francesca Zambello at Glimmerglass (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the task of Wolf Trap at 40 (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on Mariachi El Bronx's "II" (NPR)
Ann Powers on the 51st annual Newport Folk Festival (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the phone-only service Muve Music (NPR)