The Arts in the Nation's Capital

Why the New York trip?

2010-04-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm in New York City right now for a whirlwind trip, having come up yesterday afternoon and returning to the District tomorrow morning. It's always nice to see and visit my good friend Ian at his lovely apartment overlooking the historic Gramercy Park, but this trip also has another special purpose.

You see, tonight is the gala opening night performance of a brand new production at the Metropolitan Opera of Rossini's rarely performed opera, Armida. International opera star Renee Fleming stars in the title role, and the production was mounted at her request. This opera has a special meaning for me, since back in 1992, the North American premiere of the opera was the very first professional opera in which I sang. To my knowledge, that production in Tulsa, along with its later co-production at Minnesota Opera, are the only two recent American productions of the opera before tonight's opening. The last time we saw Armida in the United States before that was back in the 1950s, when Maria Callas requested and starred in the role.

Im excited. A couple of months ago I was surprised and delighted to be able to acquire a couple of tickets to tonight's gala, and the tickets happen to be in the box immediately adjacent to the box of the Met's general director.

Armida is rarely performed because it is extremely difficult for the starring soprano, who has very demanding coloratura passages throughout the four-hour long opera. It is also an expensive production, since, in addition to what always ends up having to be a world-class soprano, the show requires not one, but six leading tenors.

The storyline for Armida is based on a 16th century epic poem called Jerusalem Delivered, a tale about the Christian knights in the First Crusades who encounter a Muslim princess and sorceress, with magic, love, and later tragedy resulting. The poem apparently sparked a lot of fancy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and then even into the 20th century, with well over a dozen major composers doing operas based on the story, including Lully, Saliere, Gluck (Armide), Handel (Rinaldo), Haydn, and even a 1904 composition by Dvorak.

From what I've seen of the pre-production publicity, the Met's version of the opera is going to be very different from the one I sang in Tulsa. Tulsa's version was conceived and staged by Nicholas Muni, who was sort of the American bad boy of opera known for some of his radical updatings and controversial stagings of classic operas. (Muni is the one who did the infamous AIDS La Traviata at City Opera.) We performed on a steeply raked stage and a huge projection screen upstage provided the means for projections of scenery, and, somewhat controversially, a recording of the opera's ballet, plus there were close-ups of Armida's face and views of her handling a large albino boa constrictor during some of the magic sequences.

In preparation for tonight's show, I had the chance back in February to view a concert version of the Gluck opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington. I finally wrote my review of that show on the bus yesterday, and I'll post it here as soon as I get a chance to key it in.

More later! It's time to start getting ready.

Over the rainbow

2010-03-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

ROFL....one of my friends decided to order DVDs of The Wizard of Oz for his kids....the package came yesterday....he just opened the box tonight....he's speechless....he ordered Oz by mistake.

Guess the Easter bunny won't be delivering that gift!

Verdi

2010-03-11T14:19:00.000-08:00

We're going to the Kennedy Center tonight to hear Christoph Eschenbach conduct the Verdi Requiem. Anyone else going and want to get together afterwards for dinner in Georgetown?

Oscar

2010-03-07T23:46:00.000-08:00

Who's going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture? The only movies I saw last year that got any nominations at all were Star Trek and Julie and Julia. Didn't see a single one of the Best Picture nominees. Were any of them any good?

Opera benefit

2010-02-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

Yay! Scored a ticket to tonight's sold-out anniversary performance of Opera Lafayette. Fabulous seat, too! I'm in the first parterre box nearest the stage on the right. If anyone else is going, message me and let's meet for cocktails at intermission.

Ballet report

2010-02-01T02:52:00.000-08:00

This past week I've been down at the Kennedy Center being a supernumerary for American Ballet Theater's production of Romeo and Juliet. A couple of years ago, I did a Romeo and Juliet for the Kirov Ballet (Mariinsky Theater) from Russia, and, even though they both use the same music (Prokofiev score), the choreography of the two productions is vastly different. I was kind of excited to be cast this time with ABT, because it's the first time I've ever been cast by an American ballet company. The Russian companies are used to having tall dancers (I've met several taller than me!), but American dancers typically are rather short, so they never have costumes to fit me.

Here are a few pictures from the production.

More cast members.

Ballet

2010-01-24T15:03:00.000-08:00

Dance audition tonight. Someone should talk some sense into me and make me stay home.....I'm too old and too fat to be doing this anymore! Probably won't get cast, though, cause this is an American company and I'm probably too tall for the costumes.

Haiti benefit

2010-01-22T12:44:00.001-08:00

We're going to the National Symphony's Haiti Earthquake Relief Benefit Concert tonight, featuring Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

Wedding singer

2010-01-19T12:13:00.000-08:00

This is the dog that "accompanied" me from under the piano at the wedding I played Saturday.

Xmas in New York

2009-12-24T20:33:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to New York for a Christmas shopping and musical weekend with Ian as well as to escape the "blizzard" that was forecast for Washington that Saturday (as it turned out, D.C. got about 20-24" of snow and, predictably, the whole city shut down, including all buses and above-ground Metro trains, and even on Monday, the federal government closed all offices because of snow). It was a fun weekend, even considering the 8-10" of snow that made its way to New York City on Saturday night (the original forecast had the snow curving out to sea and missing New York).

Snow or not, New York is always fun in December. Here are a few shots around town during the snow storm.

This is Macy's on Herald Square, with the Empire State Building in the background. We shopped in Macy's for a while, and it was a good thing, since the next day, they had an escalator fire and had to close down the building for a while (and I bet a lot of the clothes and things smelled smoky after that, too!).

It was snowing to hard to get a good picture of the tree, but this is Rockefeller Center. We didn't stay out too long. The horizontal snow was starting to hurt our faces due to the already-fast winds being accellerated in the wind tunnels of downtown skyscrapers.

Here are some chestnuts roasting on an open fire at one of the street vendor carts.

Memorial Day weekend

2009-05-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon and evening, we went up to the Delaware pow-wow. They had a good dance with a lot of dancers and a lot of drums. I counted five drums in the center, and another three Northern drums were on the side of the arena in front of our chairs, and two more drums were on the side on the other side of the speaker's stand. We stayed til midnight.

To boldly go

2009-05-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I saw Star Trek today. It was a late afternoon matinee and I think there were only about half a dozen people in the theater. Good movie. Lots of action, and lots of camera shaking to make it seem like there was even more action going on. I particularly liked the performances of the new Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban). And, what's the deal with Mr. Chekov being seventeen-years-old? I won't talk about the rest of the movie cause I don't want to spoil things for those of you who've not yet seen it.

Musical Modernism

2009-05-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's Contemporary Music Week at the Kennedy Center right now, so we're getting ten days of modern music from ensembles of all sizes. Last night, Kevin and I went to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play four mostly 21st century works under the direction of contemporary composer/conductor Oliver Knussen.

The evening opened with Julian Anderson's Imagin'd Corners, a twelve-minute tone poem inspired by visions of the Last Judgment and Resurrection of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. The composer makes use of a wide variety of novelty percussion instruments while exploring the abilities of the brass section. A quartet of horns played from the lobby at the back of the hall giving us an antiphonal effect of brass against orchestra (we just heard the brass from our seats on row E down front; I don't know how the effect worked for people in the various balconies of the concert hall). Anderson's writing demanded a lot of "playing between the cracks" for the brass players, so much so that the conductor explained between the first and second works that the horns weren't playing "wrong notes," but they were supposed to sound that way.

During the interlude, Maestro Knussen also explained some of his rationale in selecting the music for the evening's performance, calling the program "incestuous"—it included pieces by him, his teacher, his student, and his friend. Knussen is a large, heavy man with unkempt brown hair who chose to wear one of those black Maoist-style formal jackets that are so popular with European conductors.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz joined the orchestra for the second work, Knussen's Violin Concerto, Op. 30. Written as three interconnected movements, the beginning and ending passages were the same, representing, Knussen said, two pillars, allowing the violin to be suspended on a high wire between them. I found the concerto to be very accessible and almost melodic in the neo-Romantic style.

Miss Josefowicz was a fascinating soloist with an extremely expressive and emotive face throughout the concerto. A pretty young woman, she wore her long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and fastened with a jeweled barrette. Her dress was a striking blue ensemble with a pale sky blue top over a deep turquoise, form-fitted skirt. Sky blue fabric draped from the back of each shoulder to below the knees waived in the air like long wings with every movement of her athletic performance.

After intermission, composer Augusta Read Thomas came out to talk about her work and to offer her thanks to her teacher Knussen for programming her Helios Choros I, which she said was part of a larger ballet. She wore a gold cocktail dress with a beaded bottom that was above-the-knee in the middle and mid-calf on the sides. Much the same as Anderson's work, this piece made extensive use of percussion instruments. It ended rather abruptly and without resolution, but that may be resolved with performance of the entire ballet.

The final work of the evening was the older piece of the day, a 1993 composition and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner by Gunther Schuller called Of Reminiscences and Reflections. The music was very beautiful and grand, yet still distinctly modern.

It is always difficult to write about modern music, since most readers have never heard—or heard of—the works and thus have no frame of reference for comparison. I will have to say that this was a very enjoyable musical evening (sometimes contemporary music can be quite painful), and Knussen did a fine job of selecting four pieces that were challenging yet eminently listenable.

I also have to assume that the National Symphony played well; with all the atonality of contemporary music, I sometime have to wonder why they bother to tune.

Creation

2009-05-03T23:39:00.000-07:00

Friday night we went to the Kennedy Center to hear the National Symphony Orchestra do Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation). They were accompanied by the University of Maryland Concert Choir.

Conductor Helmuth Rilling took the podium without a score and led the assembled forces through the nearly two hour performance completely from memory.

Soloists for the evening were Klara Ek, soprano; James Taylor, tenor; and Nathan Berg, bass-baritone. Miss Ek wore a tight black sheath dress with a short, sheer, black capelet ornamented with stripes and a wide borden of silver sequins. The men were in white tie and tails (unlike the singers, the maestro wore a tail coat, but in lieu of white tie wore a white turtleneck shirt).

Overall, the orchestra and chorus put forth a solid effort, though the performance was not particularly memorable. The soprano sang some nice coloratura passages, and the tenor had a pleasant voice with plenty of squillo. I was less favorably impressed with the bass-baritone, finding a lack of consistency in his vocal production as he went up and down his register.

Cocktails at the Kennedy Center have gone up a dollar. :-(

April poetry

2009-04-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye.

Dancing

2009-03-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

Dancing has been in the news a lot lately. Whether it's dancing with the stars or dancing on the basketball court, not a newscast goes by when that action verb isn't overused. Thursday, we got to witness dancing of another kind as we watched the National Symphony Orchestra dance its way through the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat, K 595, with soloist Jonathan Biss at the keyboard and conductor Herbert Blomstedt on the podium. The orchestral playing was light and delightful.

After intermission, the orchestra made a complete change as it doubled its onstage forces to present the three movements of Anton Bruckner's unfinished Symphony No. 9 in D minor. The symphony can be described as no less than massive, and, if anything, it most certainly was loud. The octagenarian Blomstedt impressively maintained the intensity and energy of the long performance throughout the symphony.

Quotation

2009-03-22T02:59:00.000-07:00

I strongly advise you to smoke a pipe; it is a remedy for the blues, which I happen to have had now and then lately.
—Vincent Van Gogh

Dolly and friends

2009-03-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Part of the fun of living in Washington and being able to hear the National Symphony Orchestra on a regular basis is the chance to hear some of the world's leading musical talents. Those talented artists aren't always just big-name soloists on the concert tour, but sometimes they include major talents known primarily to the craft. Thus it was this past weekend when we went to hear an NSO Pops Concert called "Jerry Herman's Broadway."

Now, anybody can throw together a bunch of Jerry Herman songs and have a Herman concert, but the NSO gave us the singular opportunity to hear Herman conducted by a Herman expert, Donald Pippin.

Donald Pippin? Who? Pippin is the former longtime musical director of Radio City Music Hall and the person who conducted a careerful of major Broadway musicals during their long runs, including Jerry Herman's musicals and other major shows like Cabaret, A Chorus Line, Applause, and Oliver. He's won Tonys, Emmys, gold records, and other drama awards, but since he's in the orchestra pit, most theater goers don't know his name or recognize his face. In putting together this concert, he was able to call up Jerry Herman and discuss what to play, and he already was very, very familiar with the music.

Pippin led the show, sometimes from the podium, sometimes from the piano, and interspersed a comfortable, chatty commentary in between numbers.

The show opened with an arrangement called "Symphonic Overture," and the second half opened with an arrangement of marches from Herman musicals. Near the end of the show, they played a special arrangement of the title song from Hello, Dolly—what Herman calls his most internationally-known song—called "International Dolly," with very cute national flavors from around the world. The rest of the show was a series of solos and duets from Herman's musicals Hello, Dolly, Mame, Mack & Mabel, La Cage aux Folles, Dear World, Mrs. Santa Claus, Milk and Honey and even Herman's brand new musical, Miss Spectacular.

The songs were sung by soprano Melissa Errico, mezzo-soprano Debbie Gravitte, tenor Hugh Panaro, and baritone Ron Raines. All four have considerable Broadway credits, though Raines is probably best known for his long-time character Alan Spaulding on the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light. I particularly liked Gravitte. Her personality was just bubbly and she really commanded the stage when she was on.

The NSO played sturdily for Pippin, though a few times I found them a bit wooden, rather like a Broadway pit orchestra that had played the same show for too many hundreds of times. As they are wont to do at Pops concerts, the gentlemen wore white dinner jackets and the women were in white tops, the fact that we aren't anywhere near Memorial Day notwithstanding. I think they feel it necessary to have a less serious costume for their less serious pops concerts, but I'd much rather they went with blazers and regular ties than dress sartorially incorrectly for the winter.

Also, as usually happens at Pops concerts, special lighting in reds and blues illuminated the side walls of the proscenium arch and the organ pipes in the back of the stage.

After the show, we somehow managed to walk to Adams-Morgan and ate a late supper at Lauriol Plaza, where Kevin had a taco platter, Robert had a fajita platter, and I had shrimp and crab enchiladas, with calimari for the table to share.

Inferno

2009-03-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a front row seat to Hell.

The Synetic Theater of Arlington presented "Dante," their adaptation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri at the Rosslyn Spectrum Theater, and I was there, right on the front row by the lip of the stage. The Synetic Theater is one of the more interesting small performing arts companies in the metropolitan Washington area. They emphasize motion and dance in their productions, and even have done some things such as their recent Carmen production totally without words. In "Dante," the limited spoken dialogue served mainly to provide continuity between scenes and to introduce what we were about to witness in movement and dance.

The production stars Ben Cunis as Dante and Greg Marzullo as Virgil, plus a large ensemble cast that fills the subsidiary roles and acts as lost souls in Purgatory and Hell, including my friend Scott.

A steeply raked stage provided the main element of the set, with stone-like concentric circles acting as arches and wings plus representing the Circles of Hell. Trap doors were scattered all over the stage floor for dancers to use for entrances and exits throughout the show. Theatrical smoke billowed over the stage (and often into the audience) during much of the evening.

Music design is by Konstantine Lortkipanidze, their resident composer, but I'm not sure if this was original composition, adaptations of existing works, or a combination of the two. From where I was sitting, though, it was all very, very loud.

The show used a series of twelve scenes to depict Dante's dream-vision of Hell, with the ancient Roman poet Virgil serving as his guide. At each level of Hell, the cast, using different costuming and occasional props, danced, moved, and writhed in frenetic ways to illustrate the torments of the damned at that particular level of Hell, and Dante interacted with them, sometimes at his peril.

This is a very interesting production, and one that is hard to describe. Go see it if you can. It runs through March 21.

An unexpected moment of patriotism

2009-01-25T18:25:00.000-08:00

Was yesterday some kind of national holiday? We were surprised at the National Symphony Orchestra concert when the conductor came out, took his initial bow, then immediately launched the orchestra into a rendition of the National Anthem. I've been to dozens of NSO concerts, and this is not their normal procedure.

Everyone, having just settled in and having arranged their bags and heavy winter overcoats around them and on their laps, had to stand up and figure out what to do with all their stuff.

Once our patriotic duty was done, though, the orchestra settled down to play an all-French musical concert, beginning with a work by a living composer, then doing a 1930 work, then an 1830 work.

The opening work was certainly the most interesting of the evening. "Apex" is a work of the profilic French composer Pascal Dusapin. It's very modern and abstract, a collection of tone clusters and swells of sound one might called organized noise.

Chinese pianist Lundi Li provided the entertainment for the featured work of the evening as he played the very difficult Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major. Generally I only like the first movement, which reminds me of the jazz influences of the major classical works of George Gershwin. The middle, slow movement was interesting, though, and Li's work can best be described as placid. Then he moved into the bombastic final movement and we finally got to see some emotion from the piano.

After the intermission, they played Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14.

The symphony played well under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine.

Oh, did I mention the audience kept applauding between movements?

Mechanical music

2009-01-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

The rubber and metal of the escalators at the Silver Spring Metro were all rubbing together tonight in such a way as to sound exactly like a gaggle of saxophones playing jazz.

Concert time

2009-01-13T20:37:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday Kevin and I went to go hear the National Symphony Orchestra play one of its regular subscription concerts. It featured Philippe Jordan making his directorial debut with the orchestra.

Jordan is young, tall, and slender, looking very elegant in his white tie and tails, and he worked with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. The strings took a moment to warm up at the beginning, but ultimately the orchestra played well for him throughout the performance.

Featured soloist for the evening was Lynn Harrell, the well-known American cellist, who played the Schumann Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129. Harrell is a master of technique and his nearly fifty years of professional experience was readily apparent as he finessed his way through the Schumann. Thursday was a tough crowd, though, giving him only one extra curtain call before the nearly full house ran out for intermission cocktails.

NSO opened the evening with Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, "Classical," featuring several tunes that are very recognizable to those who listen to classical music radio stations. After intermission, they closed with the familiar Beethoven Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60. The Beethoven was clean in the classical manner, though I thought Jordan embued it with a bit of a Romantic flavor, not unexpected, given his high level of opera conducting experience.

We had a good time, and I think Kevin particularly enjoyed the people watching. Our seats were right in the middle of the center section about 60% of the way back, so we had great views of the stage and many of the patrons. Some of the people do carry on so! We had a group behind us that went from chattering about their New York Broadway trips to their hints on ski resorts and skiing all of whom had to be in their sixties.

No Russians this year

2009-01-12T23:48:00.000-08:00

Well, I don't get to dance with the Russians this year.

I was called again to come to audition for a supernumerary role with the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet's Don Quixote production, so I dragged myself down to the Kennedy Center for the auditions tonight. You may recall that I've danced with them the past three years. But, not this year. They only cast eight men, all of them about 5'8" or 5'9" and with a similar build.

So much for all my practicing on my grands jetés and plies. LOL. Seriously, though, professional ballet is often cast based on who fits the existing costumes, not who is the best dancer, and it sounds to me like they've got eight costumes for eight average-sized guys. The production opens tomorrow night, so there wouldn't be time to build all new costumes for a bunch of different sized supers.

I'm not all that disappointed. Since I don't live in Foggy Bottom anymore, it's a major effort to commute all the way down to the Kennedy Center daily, and, on top of that, the television weathermen are predicting really cold temperatures ("fifteen year lows") the end of the week. So, I'll just stay home and keep warm.

Milk

2008-12-13T02:51:00.000-08:00

Laurent and I went to see the late showing of Milk tonight at the E Street Theater. It's a poignant film and well worth seeing, especially to see Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey Milk.

After the show, Laurent said he liked the movie, but he thought it must have resonated a lot more with me. Meh. He makes me feel geriatric. I was in college when Milk was elected and assassinated; Laurent wasn't even born yet.

Being in the heartland of the country, we heard (barely) bits and pieces of Milk's activism, though his name was not familiar to me at the time. There really wasn't much gay activism in Oklahoma and Kansas in the mid-1970s, and what he was doing was just branded more of that "California" kind of hippie/radical extremism. We certainly knew about his nemesis Anita Bryant—she's a former Miss Oklahoma and runner-up Miss America—and her viewpoints that were considered very normal in middle America. When Milk was assassinated in 1978, I heard about his death because that was my Georgetown semester, and it was news in D.C.

Recently the phrase "men who have sex with men" has been created by the HIV/public health community; it's a phrase we really needed in the 1970s, because there were a lot of us MWHSWMs who did not embrace the queer, gay, homosexual, or even bisexual labels. We didn't think of ourselves as being closeted, either, because we didn't think of ourselves as being gay, secretly or otherwise. Back then, I was busy being a typical fraternity man and overachiever who'd go on the occasional date (with a girl) arranged by fraternity brothers and with a little private "hobby" on the side. If there was a gay movement in Oklahoma or Kansas, I missed it.

So, the movie has made me a bit melancholy.

I'm also a little saddened because thirty years later, we're still fighting the same conservative Christian voters with the same ignorance and tired arguments who are choosing to vote on gay civil rights. Back then, it was employment security; today, it's marriage rights. There are times when democracy is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory form of government. I can't wait for science to conclusively prove the biological etiology of homosexuality and the futility of attempts to "cure" it. Then, perhaps, people will be more open minded to seeing gayness the same as race or gender.

Obviously, we still have our issues and our need to progress, but at least Milk gives us a brief, sanitized, and scrubbed look at gay life of the 1970s and tells us the story of one of the great heroes of the gay rights movement.

Dilemma

2008-11-19T00:37:00.000-08:00

:::sigh:::

Booked a ticket to go away for Thanksgiving, and now today I get an email asking if I'm available to be a super and dance with the San Francisco Ballet when they're in town over at the Kennedy Center to do Giselle. Alas. I would have loved to have done that gig.

Somebody go to the show and report back and let me know what I missed.

20th century music

2008-11-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

The National Symphony Orchestra played a concert of all 20th century music last night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, featuring Jennifer Koh as violinist and Michael Christie on the podium. It's not often we get to hear a classical concert where all of the music is less than a century old.

The program included two Stravinsky works and one Bernstein.

The three of us sat on the far side on the first row behind the cross-over, which is about a third of the way back into the house. The sound is fine there, and as we were on the left, we had an excellent view of both the soloist and the conductor, plus being on that first row gave us all a little bit more leg room—always a plus.

The concert opened with a work for just woodwinds and light brass (no strings) by Stravinsky called "Symphonies of Wind Instruments." It was interesting, and sounded very stereotypically Stravinsky, with tonality arriving only at the very end of the ten minute piece.

Strings returned to the stage for Bernstein's "Serenade after Plato's Symposium" to accompany Miss Koh, who opened the work with a solo melody. As the first movement developed, I kept hearing snippets of Bernstein's famous musicals from the early 1950s Each of the five movements were quite different, the penultimate being the most interesting due to the very high piano pianissimo of the soloist as the movement wound to its conclusion. The final movement included much of the jazzy feel for which Bernstein was famous.

Koh engaged her audience, though the usual standing ovation was rather half-hearted, I think, and mostly from those seeking to race to the lobby for a cocktail to beat the crowds. She played enthusiastically, occasionally so vigorously she broke horsehair on her bow and would have to break it off between passages. She wore a fire engine red Grecian-style dress gathered at the bust line, then allowed to drape down in front. Silver shoes completed her ensemble.

After the intermission, the full orchestra returned to play Stravinsky's ballet, Pétrouchka.

Christie is a young, short leader who conducts as with a broad brush. The orchestra sounded well under his baton, and played the difficult modern music clearly and crisply.

Additional performances of this concert are tonight and tomorrow night.

Can you spare 30 seconds for opera?

2008-11-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

Bows flying through the air

2008-10-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

It's always nice when a cello soloist finishes his phrases with a flourish, but last Friday night while we were at the Kennedy Center watching the National Symphony, the cellist had such a flourish we practically saw bows flying through the air.

British cellist Steven Isserlis played the Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major for a highly appreciative crowd. His appearance and performance technique were striking, however. He has a lot of salt-and-pepper, long, curly hair that he tossed around. His hair and bow flinging were in great contrast to the fleet-fingered, light, and delicate way he played—made love to—his cello. While some cellists sit hunkered over their instruments, he sat upright with his head elevated, and instead of scrubbing the strings, he lightly caressed them with his bow.

The Haydn was preceded by a work I'd never before heard, the 1906 work Serenade, Op. 3, by Hungarian Leó Weiner. I found the work rather frothy and trivial, but under the steady hand of Maestro Iván Fischer, the NSO played with a lovely, tight, ensemble sound.

After the interval, the full orchestra returned to play Rachmaninoff's famous Symphony No. 2 in E minor. It was a very solid performance, and Fischer really punctuated the fourth and final movement with a lot of conducting acrobatics.

I was pleased to see the concertmistress looking better this week. She wore a long, three-quarter length sleeved blouse with rhinestone studded cuffs over a full floor length skirt.

Marlowe? Bacon? DeVere? What's-his-name's play.

2008-10-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

In the 16th century, the English language finally was settling into what we now know as "modern English." Elizabeth I was on the throne, and the people were finally starting to calm down about who was more Christian, Catholics or Protestants. England was a conservative place. Morals were enforced by designated churchmen, much the same as Saudi Arabia has religious police today. And, one of those morals was a prohibition on women appearing as actors on stage.

It was into this environment that William Shakespeare penned one of his most popular and well-known plays, Romeo and Juliet, knowing that the role of Juliet would be played, not by a beautiful, young, teenaged girl (Juliet is only thirteen years old), but by a boy with an unchanged voice. Such was the world of drama in Elizabethan England.

Here in modern Washington, we are blessed with a stable, well-funded, experienced group of actors at the nationally-known Shakespeare Theatre Company. During October, they have been running Romeo and Juliet, and we were fortunate to have seen the show this past weekend.

Director David Muse wanted to do something to "freshen up" the production—clearly one of the old war horses of the Shakespearean category—so they opted to follow the practices of Elizabethan England with an all-male cast of characters. With all the gravitas they could muster, men played each of the female roles in the play. And, this was a very serious play, not some gay-inspired farce, that sought to replicate old performance practice.

It worked.....almost. Certainly, I was not bothered by the men playing the roles, and those men playing the older women were all very effective. Even the man playing Juliet was very good, but therein lied the fault; a man played the role, not a boy. That may not have been a problem in and of itself, but it was, to me, a failure in the pairing of the Juliet they cast, James Davis, with the Romeo, Finn Wittrock. Now, in their own scenes, Davis and Wittrock both were very good. Wittrock was very believable as a 15 or 16 year old teenager with his energy and his angst. Davis made a comely and effective young woman. That was problem number one. Juliet seemed to be a young woman, whilst Romeo seemed to be a teenager. Then there was the physical pairing. Romeo was quite noticeably shorter than Juliet, the nurse, and Lady Capulet. And finally, when they were together, I didn't feel the love and infatuation between them.

That lack of emotion seemed underscored in two key scenes. First, in the famous bedroom scene, there was no bedroom scene. They simply walked out on the balcony, Juliet in her dress, and Romeo with his shirt off (but quickly put back on), then Romeo climbed down the wall, and all the lines were delivered from there. No love. No romance. No "ahhs." Finally, in the end, the suicides were too quick and mechanical, especially Juliet's, and there was no room for the audience to cry, to mourn, to experience catharsis.

Otherwise, this is a dazzling production. Making use of the thrust stage in their new Harmon Center for the Arts (they continue to retain their proscenium stage at their Lansburgh Theatre in another building downtown), the stage was painted in wood tones with a large sunburst pattern in the center. In the background, we could see a series of three flat arches for depth and various entrances upstage. The furthest downstage arch housed a balcony and a series of bars were attached to the side support wall for Romeo to climb up and down.

Costumes were fascinating and varied—that's one of the advantages of being in a house with a large budget and a large wardrobe department. There was a little of the red and blue Capulet and Montague theme going on, but it wasn't overwhelming.

The thing that impressed me most, though, were the props. With essentially a bare stage and no curtain, all of the atmosphere had to be created with props. Many of the props were ingeniously designed, serving many different purposes with just quick adjustments. Some props, too, were stunning, such as the tall, beautiful, floral topiaries brought in for the Capulet ball.

The show saw some very strong performances from Aubrey Deeker as a great, energetic, fun Mercutio, and from STC regular Ted Van Griethuysen as Friar Lawrence, plus a noteworthy but slightly over the top go at the nurse by Drew Eshelman. I wasn't quite so impressed by Cody Nickell as Tybalt, but that may have been an issue of direction (more on this later). We also saw solid work from Hubert Point-Du Jour as Benvolio, Dan Kremer as Lord Capulet, and Tom Beckett as Lady Capulet.

It's been a while since I last read the play, so I'm not totally sure exactly who was to say what. I seem to recall, though, that some of the lines seem to have been rearranged or maybe even supplemented with new text. I don't know what was the practice in the 16th century, but there were parts of the prologue and epilogue that weren't delivered by a single actor, but by multiple members of the large cast.

They played up the bawdy nature of some of the lines—again, a common period thing—and there was quite a bit of sexual humor, including one spot after the party when Mercutio relieves himself on stage.

Now, I don't think I'm spoiling anything, given how well-known is the play, but they made a major change in the mechanism of death for Tybalt. As you know, Tybalt stabs Mercutio, then Romeo gets mad and kills Tybalt.....Shakespeare had Romeo kill Tybalt with a sword, but in this production, Romeo does the deed by drowning Tybalt in a barrel of water on stage! It was a very effective and violent death, but we were just kind of looking at one another thinking, "huh?" and then thinking that again when Lady Montague's lines referred to stabbing.

Finally, there was one sour note running through the production. Original, 21st century music was written for this production by a group called The Broken Chord Collective, and it just didn't fit. What's more, the actors singing the music weren't really what I would call "musical," but the production—same as the bad habit we often see on Broadway—didn't want them to be musical. It annoyed me, and I don't think it added to the show.

Last weekend was the last weekend of the run (actually, it had been extended), so, you won't get a chance to go see the show. Sorry I didn't get my review written up more quickly. Nonetheless, STC has a full season planned, and I'm looking forward to Twelfth Night in December.

Mahler Third

2008-10-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night, Scott and I went to the Kennedy Center to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3 in D minor, featuring Birgit Remmert, contralto; the Children's Chorus of Washington, and the women of the University of Maryland Concert Choir, all under the baton of this year's principal conductor, Iván Fischer.

We got there a bit early, since the Metro's been a bit undependable of late, so we wandered around the Kennedy Center and went out on the terrace to watch all the crews rowing up and down the river.

Some Swedish boys' school choir was singing in the far end of the Grand Foyer for the Millennium Stage. We listened about two minutes, then quickly moved on. Sometimes I have to be in the right mood to get engaged with choral performances.

Finally about a quarter to the hour, we wandered into the concert hall to find our seats. We were down on the right, first row, by the second violins and the percussionists. It's an okay place to sit, mostly because I like having all the extra leg room! We're also in the position to be able to watch the conductor work from the side, which I always find fascinating.

The concertmistress came out wearing black hostess pajama bottoms (why would she wear pants when all the men are in white tie and tails?) with a black sequined belt worn low on the hips gypsy style. Not one of her better outfits. Maestro Fischer came out in white tie. He's always fun to watch—and hear—since he's a very animated conductor with audible heavy breathes and vocalizations.

The Mahler Third is rather an unusual work, thought to have been inspired, in part, at least, by Friedrich Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zoroaster). It's about a 90 minute piece, and half of it is devoted to the first of six movements. As I find typical of Mahler symphonies, I think the first and last movements are great, and the internal movements are okay, but they get rather sleepy. And, Mahler is one of those composers who can't quite put down the pen—you think the movement is over, but it goes on and on and five minutes later, he's still ending.

There's something about Mahler finales, though, that I love, especially the Second ("Resurrection"), but also in this work, that makes me feel the yearnings inside me being pulled and stretched by the music. It can be very emotional, and the NSO did a good job with the intensity and the feeling here in the Finale of the Third.

The beginning was impressive, too. Early in the opening phrases, we felt the distinct physical rumble of the low brass and then low woodwinds. In the middle, the trombone section provided terrifying music of the heavens, and ensemble member Craig Mulcahy did the solo work. The movement ended with the conductor punching the air like a boxer.

They took a short break after the first movement to get the choirs into the performance space. The university women were all attired in long black dresses. The children's choir wore wine colored sweater vests and white shirts, the boys in olive khaki trousers and the girls in olive-toned tartan plaid skirts. As the maestro reentered, we also saw for the first time the contralto soloist. Miss Remmert is an attractive young lady. She wore a simple long black dress held up by a wide strap over one shoulder. A sheer black thigh-length overlay with black sequined edges and clasped on the opposite shoulder from the dress strap finished the ensemble.

The second and third movements were pretty and pastoral, and the orchestra played well for Fischer. Movement four introduced Miss Remmert's voice to sing "Zarathustra's Midnight Song." The song, though, was short and did not afford Remmert much opportunity to show off her voice. Movement five used the two choirs, the children singing as bells and the women providing textual support. I had the impression that this movement didn't really belong in the symphony, as it had a light bounce to it that was out of context with the mood of the preceding and following movements.

Finally we got to the sixth and final movement, Adagio, beginning with a long exposition of the string section with such tight playing by the ensemble I was able to float on the music. The music was neither fast nor slow, it simply proceeded towards its goal. Fischer kept the energy and tension there to get that Mahlerian "pull," milking out every last emotion from the players and the audience. I do believe that Mahler's finale is so good that were I only to hear the one movement instead of the entire symphony, I would feel rewarded.

Saturday fun

2008-10-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

The local Scottish Rite valley held its annual Americanism program last night to give out awards to D.C. public schools junior ROTC students. They also had as a speaker Ivan Ware, one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, who gave quite an interesting talk. One of the other bits of entertainment included the Williamsburg Field Musick, the trio pictured above that gives lectures around the area telling about the use of music in the early American armies. I had to go, too, since I was singing and playing the national anthem, and I played the prelude.

They had a great standup dinner beforehand with heavy hors d'oeuvres and a raw bar featuring some of the best, plumpest oysters I've had in years. I chatted with the caterer afterwards, and he told me they came from the Chesapeake Bay and had been harvested just yesterday morning. Yum.

Schedule overload

2008-10-17T18:45:00.000-07:00

Went to the National Symphony last night. Tonight is the Shakespeare Theater. Tomorrow I have to play the organ at a big Americanism program. Busy weekend. I'll try to post something substantive soon.

W.

2008-10-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

Did you know the President ran for office because he had a calling from God Himself?

Tonight we attended the Washington premiere of W., Oliver Stone's new movie (opening nationwide this coming weekend) about George Walker Bush. It was a full theater, including half a dozen rows of press. The audience was surprisingly supportive of the President, and when the movie tried to portray the President's malapropisms in a negative light, the only titters of laughter I heard came from the press section.

The movie weaves scenes of the Bush presidency with the history of his life since his Yale undergraduate days, with a repeated dream motif of Bush in the outfield of an empty baseball park. While some are calling the film a biography, I'm going to have to call it semi-biographical.

Certainly there are a lot of statements and materials about the President's past, plus public accounts and news footage of him over the past twenty years, so there is history available. The problem was, many things were used completely out of context, and the conversations and positions of high level governmental officials in private White House meetings are purely conjecture and highly speculative.

Josh Brolin, as the President, put in a surprisingly strong performance. He had down a lot of the President's mannerisms and way of talking, though he did, I think, from time to time, cross the line a bit into caricaturism. On the other hand, Richard Dreyfuss's performance as Vice President Cheney was chilling. Certainly, Dreyfuss will be up for a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for this movie.

Scott Glenn did a fine job as a particularly smarmy and obnoxious Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Toby Jones was effective as Karl Rove. Elizabeth Banks sympathetically did a great job as Laura Bush, and James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn portrayed the elder Bush couple.

I did have problems with the casting for then-National Security Adviser now Secretary of State Condolezza Rice. Thandie Newton did the job, but she didn't capture anything of Rice at all except the hairdo, and I felt almost offended at some of her portrayal. While not as bad, Jeffrey Wright was okay, but I don't think he had the strength or the command presence of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The movie offers two basic themes for George Bush's life.

First, they overemphasized the presumed tension between father and son and GWB's constant quest for paternal approval from GHWB. They went so far that GHWB, long known to be a gentleman and statesman, came across as a bully and a jerk. Of course, this led to one of my favorite lines in the movie (one you've probably seen in the trailers), where GHWB is dressing down his son and his party boy behavior and says, "Who do you think you are...a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one."

The second theme is the President's evangelical Christianity and how it seeps into every aspect of his life. They protray him closing every staff meeting with prayer, something I'd not previously heard reported by departed staffers in their memoirs. They also have a scene where he announces to his long-time pastor that he has heard a call from God to run for president, because something is going to happen and the country is going to need him.

Naturally, the movie spent a lot of time dealing with the Iraq war, and they got pretty judgmental about it being prosecuted solely for the preservation of the oil reserves in the Middle East. Again, the writers were speculating. There's no doubt in my mind now, though, that Oliver Stone must be against the Iraq war.

And thus was the movie. It's rather longer than I expected, coming in at about two hours and ten minutes. Would I go see it again? Not if I had to buy a ticket. Should you see it? Maybe. If you're in Washington, you're a political science or government student, or you're involved in party politics (of either flavor), you should see it, simply because it's going to be discussed in the next few weeks, as well as the implications it casts about the war. For others, you should see it eventually, but you can probably wait for the DVD to come out.

Speaking of coming out, on my way out of the theater, I was stopped by reporters from Swiss Television wanting to interview me about my impressions. I declined, though, so you don't have to stay up late tonight watching Swiss TV to see me.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

2008-09-26T01:38:00.000-07:00

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Walk, walk, walk!

St. Patrick's Cathedral

2008-09-23T23:53:00.000-07:00

Sunday whilst Ian worshipped with St. Mattress, I made it up to midtown to the famous St. Patrick's Cathedral, reputed to be the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in North America. It's a stunningly beautiful place! The architecture is neogothic with great height and intricate tracery, designed by James Renwick.

I'd gotten to church early enough I was able to get a seat near the center aisle in the first archway just west of the crossing, usually a good place to hear the musical balance. At St. Patrick's, the choir sings from the loft in the balcony and the entire organ appears to be back there as well. In actuality, there is a chancel organ in the north side of the chancel, but the gallery and chancel organs are essentially unified into one huge instrument with five manuals, 177 ranks, and over 35,000 pipes, all by George Kilgen and Son, I believe.

Review: A Tale of Two Cities

2008-09-20T11:56:00.000-07:00

The French have their Les Misèrables musical, now the English-speaking world has its A Tale of Two Cities. There's a big difference between Victor Hugo's enormously long novel of the French Revolution and Charles Dickens' long novel of the French Revolution, but the thing they both have in common is that they are both thick books with involved, convoluted plots; I don't see how either of them can be condensed into a Broadway musical.

I'm not sufficiently an expert on Broadway to predict what will and will not last. Personally, I've never seen the attraction either to Les Misèrables or to Cats, yet both of those dreadful musicals have had enormous financial success and longevity. What will happen to Tale? I don't know. Thus far, the New York reviews have been lukewarm to negative; yet what I saw last night in the house was an audience that seemed to particularly enjoy and appreciate the performance. And, strangely, I enjoyed it, too, it's rather uninspired and formulaic music notwithstanding, but I've always liked Dickens and I've still never been able to force myself to read a Hugo novel cover to cover.

A Tale of Two Cities formally held its opening night Thursday. Not having a tuxedo with me, I deferred my attendance to last night, thinking things would still be fresh and the cast would be in better voice, not having opening night jitters with which to contend. Playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, the musical is directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle and music is directed and conducted by Kevin Stites, using the new book, music, and lyrics by Jill Santoriello.

Many aspects of the production were very impressive. I loved the costume design (by David Zinn). So many times, I've sung operas where the characters were common peasants all dressed in dark, drab colors, but Zinn was able to find opportunity for color in their lives. "Prison clothes" even looked like they had at one time been colorful finery that now was faded, tattered, and filthy. And the happy wardrobes of the protagonists were particularly fine and beautiful. Tony Walton's scenic design fascinated me, as he used a series of three three-story iron structures, all on wheels, that were wheeled around the stage by cast members to change scenic locations, with props and the occasional flown signage helping to fill out the visual pictures. Richard Pilbrow's lighting design is particularly impressive. In addition to lighting the mass cast scenes, he also had to do pin lighting to show various tiny vignettes to draw attention from other areas of the stage during scene changes and he and the director concocted very creative ways of depicting guillotine scenes in a way that executes the aristocrat whilst leaving the actor alive for another show.

I would be remiss if I did not recognize the work of the casting agents, Barry Moss and Bob Kale. What really, really made this show was the second tier of performers, all strong character actors, and Moss and Kale did such an excellent job in casting it was as though they had plucked the very people off the streets of Dickensian London.

Now, it's unusual for a play review to mention these technical people first, before discussing the merits of the musical and the actors playing the roles, but in the case of A Tale of Two Cities, it's these technical aspects that make the show, and, hence, my rationale for their preliminary discussion.

I intentionally chose not to read any reviews until after I had seen the show. Then as I made my way home for the night, I started thinking about what to say. This morning, I read the reviews by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, plus a couple of others, and it's going to be very difficult to say much about the music and the singers without plagiarizing (and even saying that is close to plagiarizing!). They all make their comparisons to Les Misèrables. I also was reminded of recent semi-successful musicals Jeckyll and Hyde and Titanic, and those were mentioned, too. The WSJ reviewer even mentioned an opera I'd sung before called (in English) Dialogues of the Carmelites, a story of Carmelite nuns in the French revolution by Francis Poulenc, and much like him, I thought of the Poulenc during the final guillotine scene. I suppose this all goes to support my long-time assertions that there is very little that is original on Broadway these days, with practically everything falling in to the molds of the formulaic musicals of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Les Misèrables, Chicago, Rent, or the Disney productions.

Jill Santoriello is either a genius or a hack. I'm not sure yet which. She packed in a huge amount of plot into the musical, so much so that it was almost but not quite overwhelming. She did a great job fleshing out the secondary characters, and she really developed the leading man, Carton, but the other leads Lucie, Charles, and Dr. Monette were poorly developed. But, she got through the book, she developed the elaborate plot, she told the story, and she told Dickens's story, not a story of her own reimagining.

James Barbour, playing the English barrister Sydney Carton and the main character of the story, completely wowwed me. As I told him at the stage door after the performance, it's not often that I (as a baritone performer myself) like the work of other basses and baritones, but he really impressed me. I predict at least a Tony nomination for him for this role. He was witty and sarcastic, and one could see his character's development over the course of the musical. While in some of the scenes, he sang in the Broadway-stereotypical falsetto for soft, high passages, when the music demanded it, he had a full, powerful bass voice with a good top that I could hear (remembering that I was on the front row just to the left of the conductor) over the amplification system.

The other strong voice in the ensemble is Brandi Burkhardt as Lucie Manette. She has a nice, pure, spinto soprano and she was able to sing operatically and properly most of the show. She is also a very beautiful woman! I blew her a kiss during the curtain call and she not only smiled back at me, she remembered me afterwards at the stage door.

The other soprano did very well, although in a very small part, with Mackenzie Mauzy singing the Seamstress. She reminded me of Kristin Chenoweth, both physically and vocally. The mezzo is Natalie Toro, who sings the angry role of Madame Defarge. She did well but really only had one song with which to show off her talents; in other spots, though, I did not find the score kind to her.

The other two leading men were both tenors, with Aaron Lazar as the fated lover Charles Darnay, and Gregg Edelman as Dr. Alexandre Manette. Edelman did what he could with the role, trying to show that after seventeen years of unjust imprisonment in the Bastille, he'd suffered psychological damage, but I was just left feeling that Manette's role was tentative. Lazar, on the other hand, enjoyed the camp of his role and sang well, though he's sung Broadway too long—he is both too dependent upon the microphones and he's allowed his top to be a bit strangled and tight. He and Burkhardt, though, made an excellent couple and had a great chemistry between them.

And thus was my observation of the new A Tale of Two Cities. What will happen to it, I don't know. If the show lasts until the Tony Awards, it could well be around for a long time. I certainly found it entertaining, though with tickets at $110, I'm not sure how many times I would be willing to see it again (or any Broadway show, since this is pretty much the going rate these days). I actually would like to see the show at least one more time, because I want to see if any of the tunes are going to become popular tunes—a couple of Carton's ditties I'd like to sing myself. Santoriello didn't write any of the songs with repeating themes or with reprises, so the hit songs are going to take a little longer to emerge.

Tonight's show

2008-09-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight's show, based on the Dickens novel of the same name. Opening night was last night.....I didn't go then cause I didn't bring a tuxedo to town. I'm looking forward to seeing it.....my seat is front row center, about four seats to the left of the conductor.

Opera photos

2008-09-15T00:17:00.000-07:00

More pictures? See them in my Flickr Album.

Opening Night at the Opera

2008-09-14T01:50:00.000-07:00

The opera season started tonight with Washington National Opera's new production of the Verdi opera, La Traviata, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was a glittering, black tie evening at the Kennedy Center, but the more exciting crowd wasn't the 2,400 at the Opera House, it was the estimated 15,000 at Nationals Park, the new baseball stadium in southeast Washington, where operaphiles watched the show as a simulcast on the enormous flat panel HD TV in the scoreboard as they sat in the stands or out on the grass. The ball park was where Matt, Robert, and I went.

This is the fourth year that WNO has done an outdoor simulcast, though the previous three were out on the national Mall.

Now, there are pros and cons to the two locations. What I miss about the Mall is that we were able to take our gourmet picnic baskets and eat our own foods. The nice thing about the ball park was real seating and real restrooms. Of course, we would have been better off financially had we gone to the Kennedy Center, since concessions at the ball park are exorbitantly expensive (and "exorbitant" is not a strong enough word to convey their pricing plans), even more expensive than going to a big city movie theater. Robert spent nearly $7 a piece for his chili half smokes, something one can buy from a street vendor in town for $1.75. Right before the performance, I bought a little cup of faux champagne (which I had to ask the seller to top off twice, and she still didn't completely fill the cup) and a small bottle of water, and it cost me $17.50! I also saw them using tiny little cups for still wine drinkers, and they were using those little individual serving bottles of wine, but only giving people about half of one of those little bottles!

The interesting thing about Traviata as a popular opera is the matter of familiar tunes. There's really only one tune—the famous "Libiamo" duet and chorus—with wide recognition, and then amongst hard core operaphiles there are maybe one or two well-known arias, but those arias aren't really recognized by the general public. I was prepared, though, for the "Libiamo" chorus with my glass of champagne so I could drink along with the cast!

Speaking of drinking champagne, the ball park is trying to be "green" now, so they were using some of the same biodegradable cups made from corn that Nancy Pelosi forced upon the House of Representatives and its cafeterias. Unfortunately, those cups have a rather disconcerting tongue "feel" that distracts from the enjoyment of the wine. I'm also of the opinion that these supplies have a taste, or at least the flatware does, since I've experimented with chewing a spoon before and it definitely was not taste-neutral to me. If the ball park is going to charge triple the cost of a bottle for a little cup of wine, they need to provide a decent glass or cup from which to drink.

We went, though, to see the opera, not eat the ball park food. La Traviata is one of the "old war horse," very popular, and commonly done operas, and those of you who recall the Richard Gere/Julia Roberts movie Pretty Woman will remember their trip to the opera to see Traviata. Some people have also compared elements of the opera to the Nicole Kidman/Ewan MacGregor movie Moulin Rouge.

After opening with the national anthem (which surprised me), they moved straight into the overture for the opera. The Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra was under the baton of Dan Ettinger, a new conductor I'd never seen who Robert said reminded him of Perez Hilton. I don't know about that, but I was absolutely appalled by the get-up he was wearing; it looked like an old, black, '70s leisure suit with a long, long tail, rounded in back, and some kind of black shirt underneath we never could really clearly see.

The fabulous Elizabeth Futral stars as Violetta. She was in magnificent voice. I thought she looked tired during much of the show, though, and I couldn't tell if that was "real life" tired or an attempt to portray the terminal illness of the character. Co-starring with her as Alfredo is Arturo Chacón-Cruz, a young Mexican tenor who was wonderfully youthful, earnest and energetic, and I really liked his voice. He's definitely a singer to watch. While the two of them sounded good together, I didn't sense a lot of chemistry between them, and with the telecast close-ups, their hugs and love scenes were not convincing from just the visual perspective.

Lado Ataneli as Germont père and Margaret Thompson as Flora both offered strong supporting roles.

During the scene change in the middle of act two, they projected on the ball park screens that it was the "seventh aria stretch."

Marta Domingo, wife of the artistic director and general manager Plácido Domingo, was the stage director and put together some impressive crowd scenes and kept the action going. In fact, she chose to chop off the last two pages of the score, ending the opera as soon as Violetta dies.

Costumes and sets are beautiful and lavish. I was particularly impressed with the lighting design by Joan Sullivan-Genthe, who kept the action areas of the stage illuminated without harsh spotlighting and who allowed Violetta's bed at the end of the opera seemingly to glow, rather than being directly lit.

There are another six or seven performances of La Traviata between now and October 5. This would be a great show for people looking for their "first opera" or who just like Verdian grand opera.

From what I was hearing from WNO staff, they are planning on doing this again next year at the ball park. I suppose that's okay (I miss the picnics on the Mall!); certainly the television screen in the scoreboard is far superior to the temporary screens they've put up in the past. I'm not sure what I feel about the amplification of sound, though, since the sound came from behind us, not from in front in the area of the screen. And, they've got two major problems to address. First is the concessions cost. It's totally out of hand, especially given the very long lines. Second, they've got to deal with noise from the concessions area. Throughout the opera, we could hear noise from the vendors drifting down into the stands, and it was most especially noticeable and distracting during the final act as Violetta was dying. The vendors were yelling at one another, playing their own music, and moving loud, noisy carts up and down the walk ways.

Opera does attract a different element from the usual baseball crowd. Generally at baseball performances, people leave their concessions trash and refuse laying on the floor by their seats, but tonight I saw countless people carrying out their trash to put in trash cans that quickly and unexpectedly filled.

Robert brought his camera tonight and he and I took about five dozen photos. Once he sends them to me, I'll edit a few and put them up. Robert was cranky after the show because there was no place in the area to go for a post-performance cocktail or even a nice place to grab a bite to eat. We ended up at a McDonald's a few blocks away from the ball park. If anybody wants to try a new business venture, setting up a bar with food really near the stadium with the capability of handling big crowds before and after ball performances and other events could be an extremely profitable venture.

Took him long enough

2008-09-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

You know, if Fred Thompson had spoken as well as he is tonight back when he was actually supposed to be running for president, he might actually have been a serious candidate and possible nominee. I guess having a script makes a big difference for an actor!

Outdoor concert

2008-09-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

Every year for Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day, the National Symphony Orchestra, in conjunction with the National Park Service, performs an outdoor concert on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol. It's a fun evening of socializing and picnicking on the lawn while listening to orchestral pops music.

Neighbor Joel and I decided sort of at the last minute to go last night (the Memorial and Labor Day concerts are always on Sunday night of the weekend), so we quickly dressed and headed down to the Capitol. Once there, we waded through the throngs of picnickers spread out on the lawn and found us a little patch of grass down towards the bottom of the seating area, giving us prime seats as close to the orchestra as we might have been in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center. Since we hadn't planned this trip, we were without food, so we were tortured by all of the sights and smells of the foods around us. There was a full array of food choices, too, from people who had simply picked up a few bags of chips to those who brought complex and elaborate gourmet suppers.

It was a beautiful evening, with lovely weather and clear blue skies. As the sun went down, we could see first orange and then deep red skies on the horizon through the back of the stage backdrop. And, actually, by the time the concert was over about 10 p.m., it was actually cold! I should have brought a summer sweater.

After the national anthem, the orchestra, under the baton of principal pops conductor Emil de Cou, opened with a suite of pieces in honor of the 100th birthday of composer Leroy Anderson, including his most famous work, the Christmas song, "Sleigh Ride." De Cou explained to the audience that it was included since Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, is the official start of the Christmas shopping season!

Next they played a series of works used as the sound track for lots of the old Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons, including "Merrie Melodies" and "Powerhouse" ("Powerhouse" is the jazzy work excerpts of which were often used for chase scenes and for mass production/manufacturing scenes), then doing Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," which was used in Fantasia, and the concluding the first half of the concert with "Kill the Wabbit" from What's Opera, Doc?, a/k/a "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's Die Walküre.

After intermission, they opened with an arrangement of "Seventy-Six Trombones" from The Music Man that was interspersed with themes from Sousa marches. In honor of the start of the fall school semester, they next played Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance Military March No. 1 in D" (the "graduation" march) and then Robert Planquette’s "Le régiment de Sambre et Meuse," also known as the "Script Ohio March" that is traditionally played before Ohio State football games. That was followed by Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave, which includes the hymn tune Russia, a melody that always reminds me of Boy Scout summer camp and the Order of the Arrow official song, "Firm bound in brotherhood."

Next we went to Hollywood and the sea and heard Korngold's "Overture to The Seahawk," an old pirate movie (I've never seen the movie, but this piece gets played a lot at various pops concerts), and then, in honor of all the Washingtonians who are at Rehoboth Beach this weekend, they played John Williams's "Main Theme from Jaws." The Hollywood section continued with more John Williams music, a suite from Harry Potter and the "March from Raiders of the Lost Ark."

They concluded the concert with "America the Beautiful," asking everyone to stand and sing along in solidarity with the Gulf Coast residents preparing for the hurricane. It amused me; the arrangement they played had essentially two "verses" of the song, so when the melody first came up, people started to sing, yet when we heard the melody the second time, the conductor turned around to lead the audience in singing. Some people didn't know what to do and stood silent. Some sang the first verse again, but I went ahead and (though I can't guarantee the accuracy of the words) sang the second verse.

As the audience left the lawn (or stood and listened, as was the case with many of us), they played Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Something I noticed at the concert bothered me a bit. There was a decided lack of diversity. Now, this was a free concert, completely open to the public as it has been for years. One of the park rangers we talked to as we were leaving said there were probably between six and eight thousand people there at the concert. Since some 600,000 people live in the District, that meant over 1% of the population came to the concert. Yet, if you don't count the police and security people, I didn't see a single black person sitting in the audience. There were lots of white people, of course; we were sitting near Spanish-speaking Hispanics, east Indians, and Asians; Joel and I represented the American Indian element; yet, there weren't any black people. The audience was young and old, with elderly, middle aged, young, and little children, and it looked to have the full socio-economic spectrum. The concert was all pops, with familiar tunes from cartoons, musicals and major movies that all Americans should recognize.

So, why didn't the black people come?

Gutter TV meets opera

2008-08-31T17:25:00.000-07:00

"Well, dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!"

Last night, Richard, his friend John, Robert, and I were at Studio Theater to see their production of Jerry Springer The Opera. I can't remember when I last laughed so hard or so enjoyed a musical.

Jerry Springer The Opera is a send up of the notorious Springer television show. Years ago, Springer was a serious talk show host with credible and respectable guests discussing serious topics, but they had terrible ratings. His producers found that as they got more and more sensationalistic and outlandish, their ratings went way, way up. Now, the show is little more than pablum for trailer trash, a demographic amongst whom the show is still wildly popular. The formula show includes adulterers, fornicators, transvestites, bigots, drug addicts, freaks, and people with limited vocabularies (the F-word seems to be their only adjective or adverb) inclined to fisticuffs.

Composer Richard Thomas, who co-wrote the book and lyrics with Stewart Lee, has translated that television show to the stage in a highly controversial opera that opened in London in 2003. I remember a few years ago seeing a few minutes of the Springer television show, and the censor's beeps took up more that half of the audio track; the opera isn't censored, so the dialogue includes a constant stream of profanities from the "guests." In fact, one British journalist reported that there were over 3,000 uses of the F-word.

In the opera, act one is a taping of a typical Springer show. At the end of the act, one of the signature fights breaks out, and in the melee, Springer is actually shot by a guest. In act two (acts two and three are combined into one in this production), Springer first is seen in the hospital and then he is taken to Hell, compelled to be the host of a satanic show, "Jerry Springer In Hell." In Hell, Satan has a confrontation with a diapered Baby Jesus, and God himself makes an appearance. Needless to say, hard core Christian groups have objected to the show and most productions have had their share of picketers. While we didn't see any picketers at Studio Theater last night, I understand there were some on opening night.

What particularly amazed me about the "opera" is that the music was actually good. While Jerry speaks all of his lines, the rest of the show is fully sung by the cast. The opera opens with an audience chorus that was remarkably similar to Bach and Mozart Masses I've sung. At various other parts, there were very elaborate and complex musical numbers including a Dies Irae and a "Jerry Eleison" (Kyrie). When Satan and Jesus have their confrontation on the show in Hell, Satan and Jesus sing a long and extended duet in full Handelian style with a massive melissma on "fuh-" as the two sing "F- You." In other parts, cast members—especially female—have complex modern melodies to sing in full operatically trained voice style, and many of those bits of music reminded me of modern operas I've heard and sung.

And there was choreography. Lots of fight choreography was required, of course, but what really brought the house down was a stage full of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen. The finale of the show was a full cast tap dance reminiscent of the finale of A Chorus Line. I found myself watching the end of the show with a big, silly grin on my face.

The real star of the show is well-known local actor Bobby Smith, who plays the dual role of Springer's warm-up man Jonathan in the first act and Satan in the second act. His portrayals were perfect and fit the roles with sleazy confidence. Dan Via as Jerry Springer, though, disappointed me a bit. He was okay, but he seemed a little too young for the role and lacked the sense of gravitas that the real life Springer has. Other standouts included Patricia Portillo as the Valkryie and Florrie Bagel as Baby Jane, both with some difficult operatic music to sing, and character actor Ron Currameng as a short, fat, diaper-clad Montel in act one and Baby Jesus in act two.

The local production is directed by Keith Alan Baker with choreography by Matthew Gardiner and music direction by Christopher Youstra. The work of both Justin Thomas as lighting designer and Kristopher Castle as costume designer was impressive.

I really would like to go see the show one more time before it closes next weekend, because there is so much to see and absorb. I'd also like to see a different audience. The paying audience actually becomes a part of the show, with much of the dialogue delivered from the house, and with the eighteen-member show "audience" actually seated out in the house amongst the paying customers. That audience sings and dances the whole evening, sometimes even interacting with the regular audience.

My one main criticism of the show is that the orchestra ensemble is too loud. It looked as though the singers were performing without microphones either on their bodies or on the stage floor, and many times the band covered their dialogue.

So, Jerry Springer The Opera turns out to be a surprisingly good and entertaining show. If you have a chance, go see it before it closes next Sunday night. Be aware, though, that there is a lot of raw language in the show and that very adult topics are discussed, much like the real life television show—but without the censoring bleeps!

Enormous bats and shadows

2008-08-31T14:02:00.000-07:00

Finally I got around to going to see The Dark Knight more than a month after it opened to all the acclaim and hype about Heath Ledger's performance. Eh. There was no rush. I wanted to wait for the IMAX version to come to D.C.

The IMAX theater at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is a great venue for blockbuster films, if only because the crowds are much better behaved than the ones at standard movie theaters. We get to sit in comfortable, high-backed chairs in steeply banked stadium seating facing an enormous 66' x 90' curved screen. In anticipation of an IMAX release, the director of Dark Knight actually shot some of the footage with special IMAX cameras. All I can say is that if you are the least bit acrophobic, put on your seat belt!

This movie was absolutely full of major stars. Christian Bale is Batman and Heath Ledger is the Joker, but the list doesn't end there. Morgan Freeman is the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, Michael Caine is butler Alfred, Gary Oldman is Commissioner Gordon, Aaron Eckhart is DA Harvey Dent, Maggie Gyllenhaal is Rachel Dawes, Eric Robert is gangster Sal Maroni, Anthony Michael Hall is a TV anchorman, Nestor Carbonell is the mayor, soap opera actor William Fichtner is the bank manager, and even other celebrities make cameo appearances such as WWF wrestler Tommy "Tiny" Lister and U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy.

Ledger acquitted himself well, and, given the sentimentality of the Academy, will probably get the best actor Oscar. It was odd, though; I had no sense that it was him up there on that screen. What with all the makeup and the weird voice he was using, plus the rather psychopathic role he played, I never really saw a glimpse of Ledger the person, not even in the way he moved.

The movie itself is entertaining and gripping. It's long—two and a half hours—but the time flew by and I never found myself checking my watch to see if it was over yet. The editing and cinematography are excellent. All of the technological tools and gadgets and toys Batman has are intriguing, though their use and some of the plot elements do stretch the limits of credibility. While special effects and makeup were great, my one big criticism was their decision to make Harvey Dent's Two Face makeup too comical and comic book, though I understand the director thought realism was too frightening. I'd have preferred the fright, since that would have helped to fill out Dent's character and explain his descent into criminal madness.

I'm not sure if it was the script or the acting, but I didn't feel much empathy for Christian Bale's Batman. I did not see Batman Returns, the immediately previous movie in the Batman franchise, so I can't compare his performances. His "Batman whisper" was almost comical to me. I also found Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance to be rather wooden. The script left me a bit dissatisfied, too, because we had no clue who the Joker was, where he came from, or how he got the skills and technological expertise he had to be able to pull off all his heists.

On a higher level, though, I found the overall movie disturbing for its underlying message. I haven't seen any of the Batman movies since Michael Keaton's first portrayal in 1989 (I can't remember if I saw Batman Returns in 1992 or not), so I'm not sure where things have been going. I remember watching Batman on television as a child, though, and the one thing I remember about Adam West's Batman is that he was always admonishing Robin about respect for the law.

Now we have a Batman who feels the ends justify the means, no matter the cost, no matter the laws broken, no matter the rights violated, no matter the property damage, no matter the lives lost. If Gotham City has a problem, Batman just throws more money and technology at the problem until the problem is solved, and heaven help the innocent citizen or police officer who happens to get in the way. Batman is a wealthy bully who gets what he wants by might and money, not by right. This is not the sort of message that we should be teaching our children. This is the very attitude that is causing us Americans so many problems on the world stage right now, too.

Perhaps we should not expect movies to inculcate morals and values in our children anymore like they used to do. People today claim to want gritty reality, not happy idealism. We must, though, be aware of what we show on screen and what those movies teach so that we can have a dialogue as a family, if not as a society, as to the ethos of fantasy. Doing any less will lead us into a generation of amorality.

Are this summer's movies anti-Catholic?

2008-08-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

This month I actually got twice to the movie theaters to see new releases, in fact, the first and only movies I've seen in 2008. The lucky productions getting my theater going dollars were The X Files: I Want to Believe and Brideshead Revisited. It just so happens that I am intimately acquainted with the stories behind both of these movie plots, so I can see more in the scripts than many people.

In retrospect, what particularly struck me was the viciously nasty anti-Catholic tone of both movies.

It seems an eternity since The X Files was on television every Sunday night. I watched it religiously, even in its very first season. As the characters developed over the years, we knew that Agent Mulder was an agnostic Protestant and Agent Scully was a devout Catholic. Then we get to this movie, where we find neither as agents anymore, with Mulder in hiding and Scully working as a physician in a Catholic charity hospital. The movie, much like the shows, had two simultaneous plots, both dealing with the Catholic Church.

The major plotline for the movie involves the kidnapping of an FBI agent and what turns out to be a series of murders. A defrocked pedophile Catholic priest claims to have visions regarding the investigation, and appears quite unsympathetically throughout the movie. Dialogue from multiple characters snipes not only at the former priest but also at the Church (are we tired of pedophile priest jokes yet?), and Scully is particularly disrespectful. The secondary plot line involves a child patient of Scully's with some rare, most likely fatal disease, with no known cure. The hospital's administration, led by a particularly sour priest, wants to shuffle the boy off to a hospice-type facility for palliative care, but Scully somehow chooses to defy them and treat the boy with some highly experimental stem cell therapy (stem cell therapy, since it deals with cells from unborn fetuses, is vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church). There are a lot of unlikely scenarios in the plot and it just doesn't quite work when viewed as a free-standing work apart from the culture and tradition of the series.

Then we get to Brideshead Revisited, based on the 1944 novel by former popular British writer Evelyn Waugh. This happens to be one of the very very few novels I've ever read twice, I have seen multiple times the faithful 1981 BBC/Granada six-episode, twelve-hour mini-series, and I worked with many of my students to analyze the work in their papers on early 20th century British novelists. So, being so familiar with the twelve-hour treatment of the novel, I found myself spinning trying to keep up with the instant two-hour long movie. The screenplay writers took so many liberties with the story line, I took the novel with me to brunch today to reread it so I could refresh my memory.

In the "new" version, the entire story has been rewritten to focus on the Catholic faith of the family, giving it sinister and evil overtones, and having it ruin the lives and happiness of its adherents. Meanwhile, Teresa Marchmain (played by Emma Thompson) has become a vindictive and overbearing matriarch in the name of Catholicity, which is totally different from her character in the novel, and the narrator of the story, Charles Ryder, has become a staunch atheist who actively works against the family's Catholic superstitions and practices, again contrary to his novel character (in the novel, there's even a line where someone refers to him as an atheist, and he corrects them, saying he's agnostic, plus, he would have been way too polite to have acted in such ways).

So, what's the deal with all the negative treatment of the Church?

Anyway, let me give a brief analysis of the movies.

The X Files was both satisfying and disappointing. It was little more than a two-part TV episode, and an episode with a weak plot line, at that. Because of the length of time since the television show was in original release, the writers seemed compelled to use a whole lot of expository dialogue to explain the backstory, some of which was rather annoying (like when Skinner made his first appearance on screen, Scully says, "It's Assistant Director of the FBI Walter Skinner!" as if Mulder didn't know who he was). The writing was poor and plot elements weren't connected. The overall series story arc really isn't going in a good direction. The editing felt choppy (and as if much of the important plot development was left on the cutting room floor). The cinematography at times lacked focus while at other times it moved in a way that gave me a headache. The musical score was pretty hideous. But, at the same time, it was The X Files and Mulder and Scully were back together again. With a better storyline and writing staff, I'd be willing to go see another movie. Recommendation? If you're an X Files fan, go see it, you'll enjoy it well enough. If you're not already an established fan, it's okay, and it's certainly better than a lot of the trash movies out this summer.

Meanwhile, Brideshead is a beautiful movie, reminiscent of the Merchant-Ivory type movies. I've heard Emma Thompson has gotten some supporting actress Oscar buzz.

In the past, my alma mater Oxford University (where much of the novel is set) did not allow film crews at the university, so "Oxbridge"-type movies set at Oxford (Chariots of Fire, Oxford Blues, the Brideshead mini-series, et al.) were actually filmed at rival newcomer Cambridge University. I was very pleased to see this movie was actually filmed on location in Oxford, as it brought back many memories. I also thought it highly interesting that they chose to go to Castle Howard as the location site for the scenes of the fictional "Brideshead Castle," the same location where they shot the mini-series. Consequently, all the sets (as well as costumes) were beautiful.

Naturally, adapting a full-length novel to a modern two-hour movie time frame requires a lot of cutting and rearrangement. I realize this. This version, though, I found to take a few too many liberties not only with the plot but with the characters. I've mentioned Lady Marchmain; Rex Mottram's character was so changed, his now-minor character was a particularly nasty cad and opportunist; Anthony Blanche has become a cameo role with biting lines not in the novel.

Casting was also a bit of a problem. The novel spans twenty years, from the time Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) meet as 19-year-old undergraduates at Oxford, to a point about ten or twelve years after that for Charles and Julia's affair, to Charles' time as a 39-year-old Army officer in World War II. The movie appears to have shortened the intervals so the actors ultimately end up playing their real-life ages. Because of how so much of the story was truncated and compressed, more than half of the movie is devoted to the time when Charles and Sebastian are 19, yet the actors were much too old to convincingly play teenagers, with Goode at 30 and Whishaw at 28. I think I would have found younger actors, especially since—Goode's intensely clear and bright blue eyes notwithstanding—neither of these actors gave particularly memorable performances.

I've been looking for an intelligent, literary person who's never read this novel or seen the mini-series so I can have him or her watch this movie and then tell me how it works for them. If this description fits any of you, go see it and then write a comment. Meanwhile, for Waugh or Brideshead fans, you'll want to go see this movie just because it's Waugh and Oxford and Castle Howard and your unrepentant anglophilia.

Summer music al fresco

2008-08-16T04:13:00.000-07:00

Several restaurants have patios around the big quadrangle at the Department of Commerce downtown. During the summer, they often have live musicians playing on the outdoor stage, and on this past Friday lunchtime, they had a jazz trio with a "lounge singer." One never knows where one will find free culture in the Nation's Capital.

Lodge hall

2008-08-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

View of the East from the entrance to the lodge room.

Several people asked about the meeting room where we had the DeMolay investitures this past Sunday, seeing the hieroglyphics and stuff in the background of the pictures. We met at Naval Masonic Lodge on Capitol Hill. They have an old building that dates back to 1893. The lodge room is up on the fourth floor, and I think it's one of the prettiest lodge rooms in town. Probably a hundred years ago (it would be cost-prohibitive to do it today), someone painted Egyptian symbols, motifs, and hieroglyphics on the walls and affixed gold leaf stars on the ceiling. To my knowledge, there is no special Masonic "meaning" or secret to the designs; they are purely decorative. Now, up in the East (where the master or president sits during meetings), there are some Masonic symbols like trowels, books, squares and compasses, etc. painted around the opening, but that's it, and those aren't Egyptian.

Views of the West and the South in the lodge room.

Up in a balcony organ loft, they have a very interesting old pipe organ. It needs a little bit of maintenance (the pedal division is dead), but it could be a fun little instrument. It's only ten ranks, but that was probably a "normal" size for the space at the time it was installed. The swell and great each have only four ranks, and there're just two ranks in the pedal division, but they've got couplers to supplement things. It all sounds rather like a reed organ, and it has stiff tracker action. Couldn't find a manufacturer's label or mark anywhere, so I don't know who made it.

M.P. Möller was at the height of operation in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, about the time the lodge room was built and furnished, so I'm curious whether or not this might be a small Möller. That would require opening up some things and digging around, though—dusty, dirty work.

One of the unique things about the building itself is the tiny, manually-operated elevator. Most people are going to prefer to use the stairs to walk up. The elevator is crowded with three people in it. This is the only manually-operated elevator I've been in in decades.

Anyway, that's the story about the room we used.

Another new play

2008-07-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sunday evening, my friends Jim and Meredith and I went to the Kennedy Center to see a new play sponsored by the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. It was a busy night at the K.C., as we were competing with sold-out performances of The Lion King and the 210th anniversary concert of the U.S. Marine Band, and lost-looking people were everywhere! Fortunately, though, we were upstairs in the Terrace Theater, away from the bulk of the crowds.

The Terrace Theater is a nice, 500-seat, steeply-banked theater designed for more intimate performances of plays, chamber music, and other things not suited to the 2,000-plus seats of the three large houses downstairs. It was a bicentennial gift from Japan, and the design shows a calm Asian simplicity, with plain pink panels on the walls separated by gold-tone sound deflectors, and a full proscenium stage.

This particular play is called Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Written by Julie Marie Myatt, it premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before coming to Washington for its first real theatrical production, having opened here on Saturday night.

Welcome Home is the story of a young woman (played by Gwendolyn Mulamba) returning home from service as a United States Marine in Iraq after having suffered devastating injuries there. She is having difficulty making the transition from soldier to veteran, and she doesn't quite know how to return to California to her mother and her two small children, fearing their rejection of her. At a bus station along the way, she meets Lou (Kate Mulligan), an eccentric, funny woman who takes Jenny to stay with her for a few days at Lou's home in a squatters' camp in the middle of the California desert called "Slab City." There, Jenny is able to interact with the other residents and make decisions about her future and her life.

It's a challenging topic. Certainly, it is a challenge to try to portray the emotions of returning soldiers after their traumatic experiences in the Middle East, and playwright Myatt wanted her work to focus on the viewpoint of a woman, not just be another masculine "war story."

The problem with Welcome Home is that it's a story about Lou, not Jenny. Lou is the only character with lots and lots of lines and scenes and with a fully developed character; we hardly got to know Jenny, let alone learn her feeling and emotions, or develop any real sense of sympathy for the character. About all Jenny does is sit or lie there while Lou chatters away. The war trauma aspect was demonstrated with the clichéd balloon pop that made Jenny tackle and "shelter" Lou from "danger," and the worry that no one would love her now that she's injured—both thoughts that have been used in any number of war stories from Iraq to Vietnam to Korea to World War II and probably every other war in history. I think Mulamba's understated performance did what it could with the part of Jenny, but the weakness was with the script. The world went on around Jenny who did little else but quietly sulk and watch things go by, yet we never looked into Jenny's soul or began to hear her thoughts, understand her motivations, or feel her pain.

Director Jessica Thebus also took a rather languid approach to the show, thinking, perchance that due to the short script (the play only ran 95 minutes in one act), she could afford lots of dead time and silence. While that may have worked at the beginning of the play when we spent a long time in silence watching Jenny change clothes on stage from her military fatigues to civilian clothing, by the time we're well into the play listening to the denizens of Slab City, those silences merely become awkward and I kept waiting for the prompter to step in.

One bright spot in the production is the lighting design, by Tony-nominated designer Allen Lee Hughes.

That's not to say there isn't merit in the play. It's going to have to have a serious script review and overhaul, though, keeping Lou's part where it is, and substantially fleshing out Jenny's character. What is it that makes this story unique to Iraq? What makes the experience and viewpoint uniquely feminine? There were also two potentially very interesting characters we met but hardly got to know, Hugo the bus station attendant, and Donald the cynical observer who seemed to have an interesting history of his own. Yes, it will require increasing the play to a two act production, but I think it's going to be a necessity to have any hope of conveying the play's message.

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter runs through July 27.

Wedding dresses in a Georgetown storefront

2008-06-29T02:11:00.000-07:00

Got weekend plans?

2008-06-27T17:32:00.000-07:00

If you're still looking for something fun to do this weekend, let me suggest that you go to the Studio Theater here in Washington and watch their new production, This Beautiful City. The show premiered a couple of weeks ago, and will go to Los Angeles this fall and then move to Broadway after the first of the year.

Last Sunday, my neighbor Joel and I went to see the show, and it was a very enjoyable evening.

This Beautiful City is a rather unusual work that tells the story of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the "Vatican" of the Evangelical Christian movement in the United States, a Denver suburb sitting in the shadow of Pike's Peak. About two years ago, the ensemble and writers went to Colorado Springs to do on-site research and interviews in the run-up to the 2006 elections, thinking they were merely studying conservative Christianity. Fortuitously for them, during their residency, the scandal broke over the alleged drug use and homosexuality of Ted Haggard, national evangelical leader and the pastor/founder of the mega-megachurch, New Life, and that became the focus of their script. The show explores the growth of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, the evangelical scandals at the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Colorado anti-gay ballot measures, and, of course, the impact of Haggard's disgrace on his church and other religious institutions in town.

The cast is a three-man, three-woman ensemble called The Civilians, each actor doing multiple roles. The Civilians has done several other productions with a similar technique of research and interviewing to develop the scripts for those shows.

I'm not sure whether to call this show a "musical" or a "play with music." They seem to favor "play," yet there is a lot of music by composer/lyricist Michael Friedman—eleven big songs—so I tend to think of it as a "musical." They had a small instrumental ensemble on stage in the wings off stage right, and cast member Stephen Plunkett also played lead guitar during a lot of the songs as a part of his roles. The music, though, isn't a series of polished, production numbers, and there are not a lot of memorable tunes. Friedman was at his best crafting "praise songs" for the cast to sing when they were portraying members of New Life Church, and I could see those song being developed into actual church music. Some of the cast singing was a little shaky, but I couldn't tell if that was a performance weakness or if that was how the music was written. I really would need to see the show a second time.

The cast members were all very good in their portrayals of their various characters. Marsha Stephanie Blake stood out particularly as an accomplished and effective actress. As the lone African-American cast member, her multiple roles included both a troubled member of a large black Baptist church and the male pastor of that church. Her portrayals were full of depth, nuance, and stage presence, and I think you'll be hearing from her as a major television or motion picture actress in the future.

When I first got tickets to this show, I wasn't sure how they were going to handle the evangelical church members. Was this going to be a send-up of the evangelicals, full of caricatures and stereotypes? So many evangelicals act like caricatures in real life, what with their arm raising in prayer, their esoteric vocabulary, and their constant references to having to pray about every little mundane act in their lives. The cast and writers went to great lengths to try to be fair and balanced in what they were doing, so much so that I thought their portrayals were rather reserved compared to real-life evangelicals I know. The show definitely is not a satire or exposé about evangelicals.

It will be interesting to see how this show evolves during "try-outs" here in Washington and then later Los Angeles. It definitely needs to be trimmed and tightened (running time was about two hours, twenty minutes). There also is no sense of a plot line to the show; it's more of a newsy series of vignettes, with a few short story lines that are followed during the evening. Of course, the plotless musical is nothing new—after all, look at the success of Cats. And, while friction between evangelicals and non-evangelicals in Colorado Springs is noted, there is no "conflict" between any of the characters, except maybe the ongoing, real-life conflict between Ted Haggard and reality. So, with no real plot and no real conflict, once the show ends, the playgoer just leaves, with no sense of joy or sadness or catharsis.

Sets and costuming were simple. During much of the show, cast members merely traded hats or jackets to help establish their current character. The main backdrop of the set is a huge aerial photograph of the city with Pike's Peak in the background. On the sides of the stage are large projection screens much like those used in big evangelical churches to project song words or the preacher during the sermon. The show used the screens for other photographs and diagrams to illustrate what was being discussed, including some actual press photos of Ted Haggard as his scandal was unfolding. Lighting design, also, tended towards the simple, creating both standard stage lighting during the expository dialogue and mimicking church stage lighting during the worship service scenes.

This Beautiful City is a fun show and will provide you with an entertaining evening (or afternoon). I wouldn't mind seeing it again. So, if you don't have anything else planned this weekend, go to Studio Theater.

Yevgény Onyégin

2008-06-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges of having once been an on-stage opera singer and actor is that it becomes difficult to engage in opera performances as a spectator; the task is even more difficult when the performance is a "concert version" (without costumes, sets, or acting) of the opera. Thus was my challenge Monday evening when we went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to see the National Symphony Orchestra to see their concert presentation of Tchaikovsky's major opera, Eugene Onegin.

Onegin is not one of the "old warhorses" perpetually done by American opera companies. There are not any whistleable tunes or familiar melodies from some movie, although Tatiana's "Letter Aria" is often done by operatic sopranos in recitals. Most American audiences are not that familiar with the opera; I, however, am. The very last opera I prepared in my limited "career," just before moving to Washington, D.C., was, in fact, Eugene Onegin.

So, off to the concert hall we went. My lawyer friend Jim, who was in his long-distant youth a violinist, accompanied me (much to the disappointment and jealousy of his lady, who was left home alone). We sat on the right side of the house on row S, which is about halfway back, a place where there's usually a good sound blend.

Musical forces were provided by the National Symphony under the baton of soon-to-be retired music director Leonard Slatkin with choral music by The Washington Chorus under the direction of Julian Wachner. The soloists were almost all young Russians.

From the first phrase of the overture, I knew we were in trouble. The NSO has some amazing musicians; there have been times I've heard them and felt it was a transcendent experience; this was not one of those nights. As I have oft bemoaned over the past few years, the orchestra frequently doesn't play well at all for Slatkin. They were languid, even sloppy in their playing. It lacked care, cohesion, and crispness.

Once we finally got to hear the chorus, I was disappointed with them, too. It was a very static, sterile, "park and bark" effort with no sense of drama. And, what's worse, the diction was woefully lacking. Now, Russian is a very difficult language to sing. Russian words have a tendency to start with like a dozen consonants, all of which have to be voiced, and I know from having sung Onegin before that many of those consonant strings are on sixteenth notes at quarter note=144. So, it's not easy. But, all I was hearing from the chorus was a wash of vowel sound, with very, very little consonant expression at all.

The young women soloists were quite fine. Irina Mataeva, clad in a simple, white satin, A-line dress, sang the leading role as Tatiana. She's at the age where she can still play the ingenue credibly, and where she has the maturity and power to sing dramatically when needed. Ekaterina Semenchuk sang the role of her younger sister Olga with a tomboyish playfulness, emphasized all the more by the role's mezzo-soprano tessitura.

I was somewhat more critical of the men. The poet Lensky was sung by the young Daniil Shtoda from the Mariinsky Academy in St. Petersburg. While he had nice vocal sensitivity and a sense of drama, I thought his voice sounded rather constricted and lacked volume and power. He's only about thirty years old—considered "young" for a tenor—so perhaps his power will improve as he matures.

On the other hand, Sergei Leiferkus as the title character had just the opposite problem. Leiferkus has been a major performer for probably thirty years, and his baritone is now more suited to mature roles like Germont pere in La Traviata than to younger, vibrant characters like Onegin. When Leiferkus and Shtoda made their stage entrance together, I was confused at first; Onegin and Lensky are supposed to be good friends; while a little age difference between Russian male friends isn't unusual, when these two men entered, it looked like father and son, if not grandfather and grandson. Later when Leiferkus sang his meeting scene with Mataeva, he had to sing some of the higher notes in falsetto. Even Jim commented at the interval that with Leiferkus's interpretation, Onegin must be a "jerk" and was not a sympathetic, troubled figure at all—that makes it very difficult for the opera to meet its mark at the end of the opera, when the abandoned Onegin must be a tragic figure that garners the audience's pathos.

Local character tenor Robert Baker came out in a white dinner jacket and made quite a favorable impression in his turn as the French poet Triquet. His serio-comic performance gave the concert a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Other soloists included Irina Tchistjakova as Tatiana's mother's Larina, Mzia Nioradze as the nanny Filipyevna, Gustav Andreassen as Prince Gremin, Nathan Herfindahl as the captain, and Grigory Soloviov as Zaretsky.

And, thus went Eugene Onegin. I should have known better than to go to a three hour-long concert opera, especially in a language I don't speak, and especially without any big name stars to make the evening interesting.

Osage County

2008-06-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

The play August: Osage County cleaned up at the Tony Awards last night. I really must get to New York some time to see it.

Back in the years before I moved to Washington, I used to live for about five years in a remote little house on sixty acres in the woods out "on the Osage" (so called by the locals because Osage County and the Osage Indian Reservation are conterminous), and I grew up in a town that straddles the Osage and Cherokee Nations. So, I know those people!

Extra ticket

2008-06-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have one extra ticket to hear a concert version (meaning, no costumes, sets, or acting) of the Tchaikovsky opera, Eugene Onegin, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra on Monday night at 8 p.m. at the Kennedy Center here in Washington. It'll be sung in Russian with English surtitles.

Who wants to go with me?

Delawares

2008-05-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

Every Memorial Day weekend, the Delaware Indians have their annual pow-wow at a tribal site up near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. My family has gone there for years to visit and socialize with friends and extended family, and, more importantly, to dance. When I was a child, we had a family campsite there and camped out every year. In recent years, we've driven the 15 or so miles back and forth every day from my parents' house instead of camping, losing the fun campfire smoke smell, but giving us the advantage of daily showers.

Pow-wows are social gatherings and dances that began to evolve in the early 20th century as an outgrowth of the old wild west shows. They are "pan-Indian," meaning they are a collection of people from a number of tribes, rather than being a special ceremonial or traditional dance of a single, particular tribe. In Oklahoma, there are usually two or three (or more) pow-wows every weekend, somewhere in the state.

There really aren't any pow-wows around the Washington area, so this is the first time I've gotten to dress and dance in about four years. I miss it. The drum is very centering. It was also nice to go around to the various camps and see distant family members and longtime family friends, again, most of whom I've not seen since moving to D.C. Some of my childhood friends and contemporaries were there with their now-large families, many of whom are now well into being grandmothers. Seeing camps with four generations of a family is a common thing.

Everyone likes to pass down the Indian traditions to the younger generation. Even small children are dressed in traditional tribal regalia and brought by their parents into the dance arena.

For more pictures of the dance, click here to get to my Flickr album.

Lighting the cathedral

2008-05-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

This past weekend as a part of its celebration of the centennial of the groundbreaking, the Washington National Cathedral brought in internationally-noted Swiss lighting designers for "Lighting to Unite," an unusual event where the cathedral building was used as a canvas for interesting outdoor lighting effects. We went to go look, and it was certainly an interesting thing.

I'm not really sure what "Lighting to Unite" had to do with anything. There wasn't any theme or propaganda presentation associated with the lighting. The lights also weren't really what I was expecting. The press releases talked about he artists "lighting" the cathedral, so I was thinking they would position various lights around the place and turn them on at various times, but in reality what they did was use the building as a projection screen for colored slides. It was still pretty.

Here are a few more views. If you'd like to see a lot more of the pictures, go to my Flickr album to view them. Sorry about the blurry pictures, but I don't have a high end camera or a tripod, and it's difficult doing photos at night without the proper equipment. You can get the idea, though.

Speechifying

2008-04-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the regional DeMolay speech tournament over in Fairfax, Va., and I got drafted into serving as a judge to listen to state winners from the mid-Atlantic area. Winner got $500 and a trip to Anaheim, Calif., this summer for the national competition (where the prize jumps up to $1500!). The worst thing about youth speech contests is always the topic—this time it was "America: What's Right with It." Gag. LOL

Walked in the door and the first thing that happened was that some people from Pennsylvania remembered me from twenty-five years ago! It always amazes me when that happens....I have such a bad memory for names and faces.

The grand master (national president) was there from Kentucky. First I'd met him.....seemed very nice. Here are some pictures of the winners with the grand master, and also a shot of us judges with him.

Newseum opening

2008-04-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

Washington is a city well-known for spin and displays of self-importance, but I don't believe I've ever seen such an enormous show of self-indulgent self-aggrandizement and self-congratulations than at the newly opened Newseum, a monument and self-funded commercial for the press.

Once a modest museum about the history of the press located in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, sponsors of the Newseum secured a lot of private contributions from the Freedom Forum (a free press, free speech group funded by wealthy publishing magnates) and several additional foundations started by wealthy publishers, allowing them to buy up a prime bit of real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and next door to the Canadian Embassy. There they built a glitzy, modern, glass-walled, seven-story museum with an attached, ultra-luxury, apartment building and a high-end Wolfgang Puck restaurant. Their sixth floor terrace overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue has spectacular views of the Capitol, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, The Mall, and many of the office complexes along Pennsylvania.

Inside, the Newseum has an impressive collection of press memorabilia and historical artifacts, including hundreds of years' worth of newspapers, plus a growing collection of radio- and video clips. In fact, they could have opted to use their collections in a venue more suited to serious study of journalism, but they've gone the reality TV, ratings-driven, least-common denominator route to higher ratings and turned everything into a brief sound bite of sensationalism. They've also taken some historical artifacts from important world events that had little if anything to do with the press (other than later news coverage) and created big, fancy galleries around them, such as a series of panels from the Berlin Wall and a piece of wreckage from a television tower that once stood atop the World Trade Center. There's a lot of wasted space in the place, what with the enormous central atrium that runs the full height and width of the building, plus three museum shops vending souvenirs. A very large cafeteria space is in the basement level of the main building with Wolfgang Puck's influence (not to be confused with his restaurant, The Source, in the apartment tower section of the building) on the menu options and the high prices ($14 for a main course cafeteria entree is high in my opinion, and on the "cheap" end, I saw a dessicated hot dog for $4 that one could buy from a street vendor for $1.25). That's not to say that there aren't some good and some entertaining exhibits and things in the building. You just have to cut through the glitz and the propaganda to get there. I especially liked the exhibit with all of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs. And, it's possible to sit at some of the interactive booths looking at news clips and getting lost in exploration, forgetting about the time.

We did go to their "4-D Movie Experience." They use their big auditorium with the big screen, moving chairs, and 3-D imagery. It was fun, but, once again, it's a lot of flash with limited substance. There were some snippets of educational information offered by really bad actors, but it didn't go anywhere and it wasn't all tied together, but they furthered their theme of the gloriousness of the press and the fabulousness of journalists, and the special effects made it all very entertaining. Ask Robert about his experience with the rat.

My favorite thing was in the men's room. They had embedded a bunch of custom tiles into the walls that featured actual published newspaper "bloopers."

With all the opening crowds, we almost didn't get to go. Friday's opening day was free admission for everyone. The museum advertised all over the place, talking about their 9 to 6 hours, with last entry at 5. Lines, I hear, stretched all the way down to the Capitol. About 2 p.m., they decided they were at their capacity, and stopped the line to great complaint from people in line and more people arriving. I'd taken off early Friday afternoon to head over to see the place, arriving about 2:30 or 2:45, and I saw some of the disappointed and angry tourists. It didn't look like the museum staff was handling things well or compassionately at all. They were basically taking the attitude that they were a private museum and they didn't care if people had been in line for hours to see a museum advertised as open until 5. Then, somebody printed up a small stack of tickets for free admission on Saturday and staffers all around were telling people to go get a free ticket from the line formed for that purpose, but they quickly ran out, and once again, people were distressed. For a press museum, they sure mishandled their public relations on opening day. I wandered off to do other things in the neighborhood and just happened to make a return pass, only to find yet another line all the way down in front of the Canadian Embassy, and they had printed up a bunch of Saturday free tickets and were giving them away. So, I got back in line and managed to get Robert and I a couple of tickets (other people on Saturday were paying full ticket price of $20 per person). By the time I got my tickets, I noticed the line was still growing, extending behind me past the Canadian Embassy. Even though I had to make a second trip downtown, I think we were better off....Friday, the museum was jam packed, and on Saturday, we had room to move around and actually see and read exhibits.

Now, while I enjoyed my visit to the museum, I'm not so sure I'd have enjoyed it as much had I paid $20. I'm not sure what the deal is about the price......$12 would have been okay, maybe even as much as $18 (what they charge at the Spy Museum), but $20 just seemed way too much. They could hold their costs down if they'd trim their staff. We saw dozens and dozens of workers and security guards milling around all over the museum, and they didn't all look busy. I asked some if they were volunteers or employees, and they said employees. Hmm.

So, I took some pictures. So as not to bore people and use up all their bandwidth, I've put them in a Flickr photo album. Click here if you'd like to see my pictures.

Butterflies are free.....on Tuesdays

2008-04-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Did you know that butterflies have taste buds in their feet and legs? They do!

The National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution recently installed a new permanent exhibit in the insect-plant co-evolution section that is a working butterfly house. It's a fun little exhibit, though "little" is the operative word here.....for a segment of the museum that charges $6 per person to view, I really expected it to be several times larger than it is. Fortunately, though, the butterflies are free on Tuesdays, subject to timed ticket availability.

The butterfly house is a high temperature and high humidity-controlled room with a lot of tropical and flowering plants. An assortment of butterflies—varying, due to hatching and breeding cycles—fly free around the room, sometimes even alighting on tourists, or, more dangerously, alighting on the walking path where the occasional child steps on and kills a butterfly. There are a number of different kinds of very ripe fruit that have been set out in various places as butterfly food. The room also includes a big hiberation case with cocoons in various stages of development. On either end of the room are airlocks to keep the butterflies in as tourists come and go.

If you like butterflies, go see the exhibit (go early in the morning while there are still tickets). Or, you can go to my Flickr album for a little slide show: Butterfly slide show.

Gorging on Shostakovich

2008-03-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

It's a good sign for a performance when a professional music reviewer stays for the second half. Friday night, I went with my friend Peter who used to review for the Washington papers, plus his partner, Paul, and Robert to hear the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Stereotypically, Peter leaves at the intermission when we go to things, but he actually stayed for the whole show this time.

I don't know why, but it often seems to me that many music reviewers leave at intermission. Publishing deadlines? I don't know....maybe in New York, but in other cities, the reviews typically don't appear in the papers the next morning, but not until the following day. There have been many performances, though, where I've been on stage or in the audience, and when I read the review, it seemed as though the "review" was largely written from the advance press materials provided by the company and then the reviewer would make some general glowing comments about things, then always there would be one little negative observation--always from something in the first act--to "prove" that the reviewer was actually there.

Well, we actually went to the entire concert and stayed to the very end, when, as it turned out, the most interesting thing of the evening happened; more about that later.

It seems as though the NSO is going through a series of guest conductors, austensibly "auditioning" for the soon-to-be-vacant post of music director, what with the impending retirement of Leonard Slatkin at the end of this season. This weekend's guest conductor is Mark Elder, CBE,a Brit who's currently music director of The Hallé, the orchestra in Manchester, England. Elder was, I thought, a very understated conductor, and the musicians played well for him with a tight, focused, and together sound.

The programming choices for the evening were a little odd, and I was hard pressed to find a theme running though them, though the official idea was that the works all showed the juxtaposition of sadness and joy.

They opened with Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes, a work, actually, for chamber orchestra. The small ensemble was gathered around the podium and came up with a surprisingly intimate sound. I thought it interesting to note how, what with all these years of being subjected to modern music, I found the Stravinsky to sound rather old-fashioned. Phil had warned us that during Thursday's performance, he found the Stravinsky to be incredibly boring and he couldn't wait for it to get over; we didn't come away with as negative an impression of it Friday.

After a brief pause to allow the stage crew to reset the chairs for the full orchestra and to bring on the piano, we met the piano soloist for the evening, Canadian Louis Lortie. I was very pleased to see Lortie wearing the proper white tie and tails for his performance (Mo. Elder was wearing one of those hideous European black Nehru jacket things that hung on him like an untailored sack coat).

Lortie played the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major, Op. 10. He brought a special piano in for the performance, but I thought it had rather too bright a sound. Lortie seemed to have fun playing, rather insouciantly wagging his head from side to side as he played. I don't know, perhaps some of the cadenzas sounded a little ragged and rushed with a little too much crash and bang. Peter opined, though, that Lortie sounded to him like a "drunken lounge pianist."

He returned to the stage in the second half of the concert to play the major piano part in Francis Poulenc's little private ballet commission, Aubade, concerto chorégraphique for piano and 18 instruments. I thought Lortie's playing was much more sensitive in this piece. Once again, the stage was arranged for this small ensemble that, interestingly, included strings but no violins. I was unfamiliar with the work; it didn't really recall other Poulenc harmonies and compositional structures. Peter had heard a recording of this before, and thought the instant performance not as "sweet" as the recording.

The final work of the evening (after yet another pause to rearrange the stage) was the Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54. I've never really understood the concept of Russian politics in music, but this is supposedly a piece that is gloriously "Soviet." I've always found the very long first movement Largo to be rather boring and unexciting (is that an analogy for life in Soviet Russia?); things don't pick up until the second and third movements. Those movements can be very demanding for an orchestra, and I thought the NSO acquitted themselves well.

The Shostakovich gave us an opportunity for an amusing moment for the evening. Now, for those of you who have never been in the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center, the hall's stage is designed as a platform with a sort of sound shell behind it, with no curtains, wings, or other theatrical stage trappings. In the back are also the organ pipes and seating for about 70 in what are called "choristers," the place where the choir sits during choral-orchestral performances. If no choir is on the agenda, those seats are sold to the general public at the cheapest price in the house. Well, this is spring break season, so some school group bought up about four dozen of those tickets and the kids got to listen from there. Except, about halfway through the long Largo, there was an incident.

One of the boys sitting on the end of the front row got sick and apparently lost his dinner. Now, I didn't exactly see the event in question, but I did notice the reaction from the twelve or so teenaged girls in the row next to him as they all melodramatically, in the way only teenaged girls can do, covered their noses with their hands, jackets, and blankets, and several of them scooted away, filling in empty seats on the row and even sharing seats. Meanwhile, a teacher/chaperone guided the boy out of his seat and took him outside. Eventually, a house staff member came to the end of the row to inspect the "damage" and left, apparently deciding it could wait the fifteen minutes or so til the end of the concert. The girls, though, maintained their act for the rest of the evening, though I can't imagine that things were all that bad, since the people on the row directly behind the boy's seat seemed to have little to no reaction. Needless to say, Maestro was not pleased, and during the break between movements, he seemed to be staring the girls down and glowering at them.

The poor boy. The ultimate indignity, though, was that when we left the auditorium and were out in the inner lobby, the boy and teacher/chaperone were sitting on a sofa where everyone could walk by and stare at him. I suppose he'll have memories of Washington to talk about when he gets back home!

Scrubbing the strings

2008-03-14T22:24:00.000-07:00

Last night Ian, Laurent, and I went to the Kennedy Center to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play an all-Russian concert. Before the concert, we met up with Phil, but, even though I had an extra ticket, we couldn't talk him into moving downstairs and joining us.

The NSO played three pieces, two by Rachmaninoff and one in the middle by Prokofiev. The Rachmaninoff works were both nicely melodic, at times sounding a bit like a motion picture score. The Prokofiev, though, was half an hour of the cellist scrubbing his bow back and forth across the strings.

The evening opened with Three Études-tableaux. These were three of the five études-tableaux that had been orchestrated by Ottorino Respighi from Rachmaninoff's original piano pieces. They chose "March," "The Sea and the Seagulls," and "The Fair."

Alban Gerhardt was the featured cellist for the Prokofiev, Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 125. It seemed like quite a difficult work for the cellist, but the composition itself was not "musical" and not pretty at all. He had to do a lot of sawing on the strings and there was a lot of rather rough chordal pizzicato that I often though might break the strings. It was certainly an athletic work, though, and Gerhardt's shock of straight dark blond hair provided punctuation to his movements. While I was not all that impressed with the work, the audience loved it, giving Gerhardt an immediate standing ovation and three curtain calls.

Gerhardt then played an encore, choosing a composition by Mstislav Rostropovich called "Moderato." That got two curtain calls.

After intermission, we heard Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44. It was fine, though the ending is rather subdued, so the audience wasn't as enthusiastic at the end as it had been for Gerhardt. There were a couple of very nice solo moments for the concertmistress, especially in the second movement.

One of my little thanksgivings for the evening was that the audience did not applaud between movements.

On the podium last night was Austrian Hans Graf, current music director of the Houston Symphony. He was a decidedly straightforward and non-flamboyant conductor, but he kept the oft-times unruly NSO together and unusually well disciplined.

Graf and Gerhardt both wore these hideous Euro-style black Nehru jackets (although it looked from a distance as though they were collarless) with a black satin placket running down the front. They looked baggy and were not flattering on either man. The concertmistress, who has quite a variety of dresses—some elegant, some unfortunate—chose to wear not a dress, but tight black pants (leather??) with a shiny black blouse that was rather short and gathered at the waist; she looked almost like she was dressed to go horseback riding.

The Mahler Second is coming up soon. I'm looking forward to going to hear it, especially since Iván Fischer will be conducting. Hope it works out....the one concert I wanted to hear in the fall (Elgar Cello Concerto and Saint-Saens Organ Symphony) I didn't get to hear.

Benefit concert

2008-02-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

Last night the National Symphony Orchestra played a benefit concert for their Young Soloists' Competition, a national program that supports 18–25 year old musicians, ultimately giving the winner $10,000 and a chance to play with the NSO in May.

Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris music director Christoph Eschenbach, long a champion of young musicians, conducted the NSO in a vibrant performance of familiar old war horses. Eschenbach did the entire concert from memory and got quite the physical workout from his vigorous conducting.

Eschenbach protégé violinist Erik Schumann, age 25, from Germany played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35). The audience seemed quite impressed with the young man, giving him sustained applause after the first movement and then awarding him a brief standing ovation at the conclusion of the concerto. I thought he was quite good, though certainly not the child prodigy of, say, a younger Joshua Bell. His playing is still a bit bright and doesn't quite have the soul-pulling depth and maturity of sound and vibrato he'll no doubt develop as he continues to play; that is made all the more apparent because of the instrument he plays, the 1722 "Jupiter" Stradivarius.

The Tchaikovsky, while one of the standard works in the virtuosic violinist repertoire, is fiendishly difficult to play. In fact, Tchaikovsky had a hard time finding a violinist to premiere the work, with many famous violinists of the time declaring it "unplayable." It's in those "unplayable" cadenzas that a violinist is tested, and while Schumann played the notes, he still hasn't quite mastered the art of keeping those occasional stratospherically high notes from popping up out of context from the rest of the musical line. A couple of other times, he lost sound as he attempted diminuendos at the end of some very high pianissimo passages.

At the same time, though, there were times Schumann played with great passion and fire. And, as I mentioned, the Tchaikovsky certainly is not an easy work to play, so he definitely has technical skills. I expect that as he grows and matures in his musicality, we will see a lot of Erik Schumann on the international concert stage. I hope also as he gains more and more experience, he'll gain more self-confidence, as he definitely looked rather shy on stage and almost embarrassed to receive the audience's applause and adulation.

One of the disadvantages of being an Eschenbach protégé is exposure to Eschenbach's sartorial choices. Rather than a standard tail coat with white tie, or even a tuxedo jacket with black tie, Eschenbach chose to wear what looked like a loose, Nehru-style, black jacket, buttoned all the way up to the throat. Schumann wore a similar black jacket, but opted to wear his open all the way, revealing an untucked, black and taupe print, square-tailed, banded collar shirt underneath.

We heard Johannes Brahms' dramatic Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 in the second half of the concert. The themes of the first and last movements are well-known to those who listen to very much classical music or radio stations. Those movements were fine; what caught my attention, though, was the penultimate movement, when the orchestra played with hoppy excitement under Eschenbach's frenetic conducting.

The audience liked the Brahms, with many people in the audience (remember that this was a fund raiser for young artist programs and there were, no doubt, a lot of adoring parents in the audience unused to concert going) applauding between movements, and then standing for two lengthy curtain calls.

Oscar

2008-02-25T09:12:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched the 80th Academy Awards broadcast, and the one and only best picture nominee that I saw won Best Picture. See what a great steward of my movie-going dollars I am?

My favorite dress? Keri Russell in Nina Ricci. Runner up? Heidi Klum in Dior. Worst dressed? Well, it wasn't the dress, it was the stalactite necklace on Nicole Kidman—the dress by itself was pretty, but that necklace just had to go! And youngster Ellen Page looked like she was stuck in a bad bridesmaid dress. And then there was that writer in the leopard print with the huge tattoo on her arm......

Guys? George Clooney looked very sharp and extremely well tailored in Armani and looked better than his date. Daniel Day-Lewis was wearing ***brown*** shoes to match his brown-piped shawl collared tuxedo—yuck! That's the real reason Helen Mirren is the closest he'll get to a knighthood! LOL And we won't even talk about Viggo Mortensen's 19th century frock coat.

I thought the writers' strike was over. Didn't they have anybody help Jon Stewart with his lame, went-nowhere, attempt at comedy filler? I kept hearing crickets.

No Country for Old Men

2008-02-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

After eating at a Texas-themed restaurant in Silver Spring, we went to the lovely AFI Silver Theater to view Academy Award Best Picture nominee No Country for Old Men yesterday. With less than a fortnight left before the Oscars, I'm in my usual last-minute crush to try to see the nominated films, and thus far, the only thing I'd seen was Sweeney Todd.

No Country for Old Men is set in West Texas, near the Mexican border. It's a gritty tale of the Mexican drug trade and its impact on American society starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. I'm not quite sure how Javier Bardem qualified for his best supporting actor nomination; he seemed a very, very major presence in the movie, so I'd have considered him for best actor, instead.

There is a lot I'd like to say about this movie, but I can't really discuss it without revealing too many plot points. So, I'll simply say the movie reminds me a lot of the genre of French films that don't really have a beginning or an end, but that merely represent a slice of life for the protagonists.

How will it do at the Oscars? I don't know. Sweeney Todd isn't nominated for Best Picture, so I can't compare and contrast yet. It certainly leaves a dramatic impact, though. Some of the violent scenes are filmed in a way so as to avoid gratuitous violence and gore, which is a technique that I always think strengthens a film. I found the little performances of many of the small roles for small town Texas resident characters to be a highlight.

This movie is not suitable for young children, and even for older children, I would want to be sure that they were sufficiently intellectually developed to be able to absorb and consider the moral message of the film.

All Mahler, all the time

2008-02-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

He's a little heavier and a little greyer, but there's still that commanding stage presence that comes from his great height, still that same voice with the wide-open top that I remember from twelve or fifteen years ago. I used to accuse him of being a lazy tenor, but he persists in being a lyric baritone, not opting to push his voice up the way tenor Plácido Domingo has done. It's been a long time since I last saw him, since he last helped me to open my throat as I sang and avoid that swallowed, woofy sound young singers sometimes get when they are trying to sound "operatic."

I speak of Thomas Hampson, international opera star, featured soloist at the National Symphony Orchestra's "Music of Gustav Mahler" concert this past weekend at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The evening opened with Hampson singing Kindertotenlieder, a poignant song cycle based on five poems by Friedrich Rüchert called "Songs on the Death of Children." This is not a flashy or dynamic work, but a quiet, introspective work, and a virtuosic opportunity for Hampson to display the sensitivity of his singing and the lyrical beauty of his vocal line. He did well, though he's finally "covering" a bit more than he used to when he's above his passagio, and I noticed he pushed into falsetto for one of the very high, soft phrases. One thing about Tommy, he's always the consummate artist.

After the intermission, supplemented by quite a number of players that had the orchestra completely filling the stage, the NSO played the lengthy Symphony No. 6 in A minor. Musicologists seem to think the 6th is Mahler's most important work, though I think probably only the 2nd ("Resurrection") is well known to those who frequent the concert hall, and the 6th, while interesting, has never been a great favorite of mine.

What I noticed most in watching this live performance of the 6th was the instrumentation. There were, for example, not one, but four harpists. There was an entire rack of cow bells of various sizes. And, most melodramatically, the score calls for the use of a "hammer." Well, hammer doesn't quite convey the right idea: think maul. The stage arrangement made the hammer's use unintentionally comical, too. A large, desk-looking box sat off to the far downstage left corner of the stage. When it was time for the hammer, a percussionist walked from the back row of the instruments where the drums and more conventional percussion instruments sat to the big box, and with all the dignity that only an orchestra percussionist in white tie and tails can muster, delicately picked up the maul, then with a big back swing, thunked that box like a carnival worker setting big top tent pegs.

Otherwise, the Mahler is a massive work, and one that keeps all sections of the orchestra unusually busy. He particularly makes extensive use of the low brass. The four harps were needed, indeed, since in some harp passages, the rest of the orchestra was playing fortissimo, and the quadruplication was needed so we could hear the harp.

Leonard Slatkin was back on the podium. Alas, he was back to his old ways, and not conducting with the magic he'd elicited in the fall. There were throughout the evening synchronization problems, particularly between the strings and the brass/woodwinds. I also noticed a rather disconcerting feel of the brass and winds sounding like someone had put the treble on the equalizer on maximum. The orchestra got somewhat better as the evening dragged on, but it was rather too little too late.

After the concert, Hampson was to be sitting out in the Grand Foyer outside the Concert Hall autographing his CDs. We slipped out a side door of the hall to leave and it completely slipped my mind to go out the back doors of the hall so we could slip by and say hello. Oh, well, it would have been awkward trying to talk with all the other fans bunching around.

Saving throats

2008-02-04T13:19:00.000-08:00

What with my need to be at the Verizon Center for the Wizards-Lakers basketball performance by 11:30 Sunday morning, I opted to go to the 5:30 service at St. Stephen's. Attendance was light (about 2/3rds usual) due to the upcoming Super Bowling performance on television. I always wonder if the absentees for football actually made the effort to go to Mass in the morning, or if football needs to be added to the ever-growing list of Catholic mortal sins.

The highlight of Mass was actually after Mass, when they did the annual Blessing of Throats in honor of the patron saint of throats, Saint Blaise. After the service, those who wished could come up to the altar rail where the priest stood with crossed candles to touch the throats of the faithful and pronounce the throat blessing. Too bad all those football fanatics weren't there.....with all the yelling and screaming they were about to do, they, above all people, were in need of protected throats!

Per intercessionem Sancti Blasii liberet te Deus a malo gutteris et a quovis alio malo. Amen.

This afternoon's hunt

2008-01-26T16:58:00.000-08:00

Gary's pics

2008-01-26T08:22:00.000-08:00

Here are some backstage pictures taken by Gary, another supernumerary.

Four down, three to go

2008-01-26T01:01:00.000-08:00

We're past the halfway point in performances now. That's good, though tomorrow will be a particularly grueling day, as we dance both matinee and evening performances.

Tonight's Prince Solor was very popular with the audience and got not only applause and cheers, but what I'll call teenaged girl shrieks. I think someone told me he's only 22, but he's already got quite a flare for the dramatic.

There was a little gathering of supernumaries after tonight's performance at 600 Restaurant, which is across the street from the Kennedy Center. Not that many people went, but it was fun nonetheless.

I drank some Domaine Chandon champagne, but most of the other people were having cranberry drinks of various kinds and sorts. I thought cranberry was passé these days.

More pics

2008-01-24T23:43:00.000-08:00

What do you think? Should I shave my head?

Here are a few pictures from the dressing room at tonight's performance.

Another review

2008-01-24T22:15:00.000-08:00

The Washington Times ran a review of La Bayadère in this evening's paper. They called the production "stunning" and it's much better written than the one in the Post. You can read it here.

The photo above (by an uncredited Times photographer) is from the famous scene in act 3 when three dozen ballerinas come down the mountain in an endless stream of arabesques and amazing technique.

Review's up

2008-01-24T05:36:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post's review of the ballet is up. You can read it here. The Post requires registration, but it's free. There are a couple of nice photos there (above and below, here, plus, I think there was another one).

Above is Grigory Popov as the Golden Idol in act 2. This picture was taken during the dress rehearsal, so you can't see the gold body paint he wears during the performances. Below are Uliana Lopatkina as Nikiya (the bayadère) and Ivan Kozlov as Prince Solor in act 3 (in acts 1 and 2, she's in a gauzy, burgundy temple dancer costume). They danced the dress rehearsal and then they danced last night's performance (the three principal dancers change every performance).

Speaking of which, last night went well. Another full house. I'm feeling very weary this morning, though. Five more performances to go.

Opening night

2008-01-23T01:10:00.000-08:00

A full house at the Kennedy Center continuously interrupted tonight's opening of the Kirov Ballet's production of La Bayadère with not just applause, but outright cheers. Headlining tonight's cast was international star Diana Vishneva as the temple dancer in the title role, with Kirov principals Andrian Fadeyev as Prince Solor and Viktoria Tereshkina as Princess Gamzatti.

Meanwhile, I've had a long, long, hot shower; I've taken half a bottle of Motrin, my feet are iced and elevated, and as soon as I wind down enough, I'll be off to bed.

I'll be anxious to see if there's a review in tomorrow's Washington Post. The Post had photographers at this afternoon's dress rehearsal, so maybe there'll be something.

There is no better seat in the house for a ballet than to be on stage with the dancers. Even with front row orchestra seats and a pair of opera glasses, there's no way to see and appreciate the subtle details that go into performance. I could see the intense concentration on the face of a ballerina behind the smile and the glistening glow of her bliss and determination to be dancing. I saw the subtle quivering of the fabric of the trousers of a danseur as he struggled to stand perfectly still in a ballet pose, all the while holding a woman up in the air over his head. I noted the little droplets of sweat that collected at the ends of little tufts of a dancer's neck hair. I observed the critical eye with which the dancers watched and mentally critiqued their colleagues' performances and the occasional slight raising of an eyebrow.

Here are a couple of pictures of my costumes this year. The first picture is with my dresser while I wear my first act Brahmin outfit; the second is with a fellow super in our second act costumes—we look a little tired, cause we'd just come off the stage after a long and grueling period of standing still. While I don't know about him, I know that my feet had gone numb in my too-tight ballet slippers!

In the interim

2008-01-22T16:23:00.000-08:00

I'm home briefly between the dress rehearsal and the opening night performance (7:30 curtain tonight!) for the Kirov Ballet's production of La Bayadère—The Temple Dancer—at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The Kirov Ballet, from the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, is one of the world's very top and most outstanding ballet companies. They are a national treasure of Russia and certainly an icon in the international cultural world. They make an annual tour to Washington, D.C., to perform at the Kennedy Center, and it's always a wonderful experience for the audiences. This year is going to be another splendid time for everyone.

For the third year in a row, I'm serving as a supernumerary—an extra, if you will—to supplement the cast. This year I have lots of choreography to remember. In act one, I'm one of the Brahmin priests. There are four of us locals helping six of the professional Russian dancers (three of whom are taller than me!) in an elaborate temple dance routine, and it's a bit nerve racking, since we open tonight and we have had only two rehearsals! In act two, I do more traditional "super" duties, carrying the ornate and very heavy litter chair for the majarajah, then I become an on-stage spectator, standing on the sidelines for most of the act. Of course, standing perfectly still, feet in first position, all that time is not nearly as easy as it sounds, and the muscles in the arches of my feet were cramping before we could move!

I have to say that being on stage during this show is like living through a real life Russian twink porn video!

In act one, about 20 young guys in the corps de ballet are running around, wearing nothing more than what appear to be shredded boxer shorts! The sweat glistens on their lithe, young bodies, and they are so full of excitement and youthful enthusiasm, they remind me of an adult Lord of the Flies. In act two, half of those same guys are in nothing but tight red pants to do a wild, frenzied, athletic dance filled with masculine braggadoccio. The way the stage lights catch their muscles and their glistening hair is nothing short of pure beauty. Then we get to meet the guy who dances the role of the Golden Idol, and he, too, is nearly naked, wearing basically gold body paint, some jewels, and a hat, all the better to show off his splendid musculature and his excellent and dynamic dancing.

I'm not in the third act, so I got a pass and went out into the house to watch it. Act three is the famous "Kingdom of the Shades" scene, where the prince, despondent that his bayadère love has died at the end of act two, smokes opium to escape his pain, and he has this beautiful dream about his beloved temple girl. After all of the action of the first two acts, the dream sequence is slow, stately, and romantic. While the action looks simple when all 32 female members of the corps de ballet individually make their entrance to come down the mountain, the women are placed through incredible physical demands to get the unified precision required and, most especially for those entering first, to continue that repeated perfect performance over and over and over again. Then, of course, the prince and the bayadère have their solo and duet moments of virtuosity. And they lived happily ever after, at least so long as the opium lasts.

The four weekend performances are all already sold-out. There are still tickets available for tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday's performances.

For a bit of background about the ballet, there's a nice story in the Washington Post.

Automated post

2008-01-21T11:22:00.000-08:00

"I'm cast. More later."

Anticipating aching feet

2008-01-18T15:58:00.000-08:00

Remember back in early November when I said I desperately had to lose a large amount of weight if I expected to be able to dance with the Kirov Ballet when they come to town later this month? Well, I haven't lost any. In fact, I've gained two-tenths of a pound. :-(

Today I got an email: "You are invited to attend the audition for the Kirov Ballet’s performance of La Bayadère on Monday 21st January in the Kennedy Center."

Well, I guess I'll show up as requested at 9 a.m. and see what happens. If I get it, I'm going to need a list of volunteers to provide foot and leg massages Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.

Anyone wanna sign up?

Post-Golden Globe musings

2008-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's time for the writers to get back to work.

Tonight the Writers Guild of America strike took its toll on the annual Golden Globes awards presentation. All kinds of hard working hourly staff and small mom-and-pop businesses like florists and caterers lost millions of dollars because with the strike, there were no stars, and with no stars, there were no parties or even a real award show this year. All this after other colleagues in collateral areas of Hollywood such as actors, makeup artists, carpenters, electricians, and other crew, have suffered through the holidays with no or extremely limited income.

It's hard to be sympathetic to wealthy strikers in safe—if not luxurious—workplaces like the writers. Yeah, they claim they've got a low average income, but the writers' guild, much like the actors' guild, is a combination of what I'll call full-time workers (the minority) and a bunch of people who were required to join the union but who may write only on a very, very part-time basis if at all (the majority), so if you take out the part-timers, you'll see a bunch of rich writers who are striking for a bigger cut of those elusive internet profits. It's all about greed.

So, writers, you've had your fun, but you're hurting too many of your colleagues and your industry's support service businesses, so stop this nonsense and get back to work.

Meanwhile, the strike has revealed some interesting things.

1) I actually liked the abbreviated "news conference" format of the Golden Globes award announcements tonight much better than the long, drawn-out, self-aggrandizing, normal show. It wasn't as boring.

2) What, exactly, do David Letterman's writers do? Now, I usually watch Letterman in preference to Leno, but this month, when I look at the two shows, Leno is doing just as good if not better than Letterman. Maybe Letterman needs to trim that big writers staff if they can't churn out any better work than what they're doing now. Leno's fine without writers. Conan sucks, but he does that with or without writers. Ellen (which Ryan tapes every day when he's at work) never went off the air during the strike, and I think her show has been great, if not actually stronger, without writers.

3) Several people I know in the D.C. area who belong to WGA and SAG have told me they don't agree with their unions and wouldn't belong if their dues weren't automatically taken out of their checks. They all say they wish California and New York had Right to Work laws so they didn't have to belong to the union.

Geriatric rockers

2008-01-11T08:47:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else cringe when they see geriatric rock and rollers singing and performing with their bands?

I'm sorry, but I just can't deal with the concept. Right now, Ringo Starr is playing "live" from Liverpool, England, on the CBS Morning Show, and it's just creepy. To make matter's worse, there's a live English audience, which means everyone is politely sitting in chairs in the auditorium.

Starr is 67-years-old and looks it. His surviving Beatle compatriot, Sir Paul, is 65.

Eek! Right now, the audience, still seated, has taken to waiving their arms in the air. Reminds me of exercise day at the nursing home.

Movie tonight?

2007-12-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter based on the eponymous Stephen Sondheim musical, opens tonight in Washington at 11:59 p.m. for an after-midnight showing at the movie theater in Chinatown/Gallery Place.

Who wants to go with me?

Three seven ace

2007-12-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

Today is the 115th anniversary of the premiere of Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker. While I've no Nutcracker plans for this year, last Friday night, while thousands of Washingtonians were attending one of the area's dozens of Nutcracker performances this holiday season, I was attending another Tchaikovsky performance. This performance, while no less magical, was much darker and much longer: we went to see Queen of Spades.

Tchaikovsky wrote several operas, but only Queen of Spades (a/k/a Pique Dame) and Eugene Onegin have any real name recognition. Name recognition is about all either of them have, though, since they are not on the regular rotation, at least in this country, and people don't know the melodies. I was preparing an Eugene Onegin right before I moved to D.C. several years ago and had to withdraw from the production before staging, but until Friday, I had never actually seen a Tchaikovsky opera live.

This particular opera seemed almost Wagnerian to me in terms of its story line and development, not to mention the four hour length! Tchaikovsky's younger brother Modest served as librettist for this work, and he based his words on a short story by famed Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin. It's the story of a common young man in love with a beautiful young woman who is engaged to be married to a prince. The woman is the granddaughter of an elderly countess called "the queen of spades," who, in her youth, had the secret formula to success in gambling with cards; the young man decides that he also wants the secret to the cards, and gambling becomes his new, overriding obsession. And, in the great tradition of opera, by the end of the show, everybody dies.

The show was performed by the traveling company of the Mariinsky Theater from St. Petersburg, Russia, known in the United States as the Kirov Opera. As Tchaikovsky premiered this work at the Mariinsky in December 1890, it seemed particularly appropriate to watch this opera sung by these Russians.

Having just seen this company sing Otello two nights previous, I saw a lot of the same people in the casts. The principals were all different, but the supporting roles shared many of the same singers. The principals were all very solid singers. The Kirov, however, still operates in the older operatic system where they cast specific voices for parts, not specific singer/actors for parts, as is being done in modern opera in America.

It was this casting technique that caused the problems for me in watching this opera and kept me from fully engaging in the drama. I simply didn't buy the idea of the actors singing Herman and Lisa as young people in love, and thus the show lost credibility. Herman (Vladimir Galouzine) was clearly well into middle age and (while I would never presume to guess the age of a lady!) Lisa (Mlada Khudoley) seemed more matronly to me than innocent, impetuous young maiden. Now, both sang well, but I was sitting on the front row center of the house, so I had to have not only a splendid aural experience, but a splendid visual one, as well.

The sets were very spare, and there was an annoying use of "dancing curtains." It started with two parallel curtains, one black, one white, down on the main curtain line. Once both had parted, though, we saw several other curtains in various locations on stage, including a series that bisected the stage diagonally. Throughout the show, they used these curtains to create different "rooms" and spaces during the action, and some of the curtains were even rigged to move in circular patterns. It was a unique and interesting idea, but they overused the concept and it became quite tiresome by the end of the opera.

Much as in Otello, I had difficulty determining the era of the adjusted story. Pushkin's play was set in the early mid-19th century, but the librettist placed the story in the era of Catherine the Great (late 18th). I don't know where this show was. The costumes seemed to me a mixture of 19th century clothing, but with the men particularly in late 19th. Then we had props—as in Otello—from the present day to confuse matters more. For example, the old countess (Irina Bogacheva), who was so severely done up in black and white age makeup as to look like the caricature of a ghost, wore early 19th century dresses, yet was being wheeled around the stage in a brand new, contemporary wheelchair. Then, during the masquerade ball, when the group was visited by Catherine the Great, we saw a projected silhouette of the empress on the backdrop, but the image looked just like the century-later British empress Victoria.

So, it was in the little things that we found distraction in the production.

Some of the singing was quite fine. I particularly enjoyed the love aria of Yeletsky (Alexander Gergalov). Herman (Vladimir Galouzine) was a very powerful and dramatic singer, and I can see him in any number of other major roles because of his excellent portrayal of a man descending into insanity. It kind of pointed out a Russian staging matter with which I disagree, though, in that their main male characters are very "one note." Wednesday, Otello was "angry" and Friday, Herman was "insane." The characters lack dimension, and that makes it very hard for the audiences to relate to and "like" those characters.

The stage director also missed a couple of good opportunities to advance the drama. He never really highlighted Lisa during her moments on stage, and it was well into the opera before I figured out who the main female character was. In her group scenes, she faded into the crowd; she was never the "star." Then, at the end of the opera, when she realizes that her Herman is more interested in cards and money than her, she's supposed to jump into the river in her despair, but here, she just calmly walked down the embankment. Had I not read the synopsis in the program, I'd not have known that she was committing suicide then. Perhaps she needed a trampoline backstage like Tosca has.

So, Kirov's Queen of Spades definitely gave us an interesting evening. The simple Pushkin story has become a complex opera, and it's an opera that will require a few more viewings to fully understand and appreciate. This production probably is not the best vehicle for learning and appreciating the opera, though. There are limitations that a touring company has, and the way the company addressed those limitations creates dramatic challenges of its own. I did enjoy the evening, though, and it was nice hearing this opera for the first time.

Russian Verdi

2007-12-13T23:04:00.000-08:00

Every now and then in my opera singing and spectating careers, I find one transcendent performance, one hauntingly memorable singer. Last night was one of those times.

Joined by my friend Peter (himself a former music critic for a major urban daily newspaper) and his partner, I heard the Kirov Opera from St. Petersburg, Russia, present Verdi's Otello at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts here in Washington. It was a rather odd production, with the staging and sets centered around a large lighthouse and a performance that opened with the lighthouse beacon shining painfully brightly into the audience's eyes.

The true beacon of the evening, though, was Irina Mataeva and her sensitive and beautiful portrayal of Desdemona, the unfortunate wife of Otello. Miss Mataeva is a very beautiful, slender, young woman, perfectly cast for the role. Her voice is powerful and dramatic, yet her acting skills and vocal nuance allowed her to be the vulnerable victim of circumstances. Her emotional pain could be felt, even when the production got in the way, such as in her fourth act "Ave Maria," when the production put her in an intenable location. In the immediately previous scene, though, her "Song to the Willow" was touching and compelling.

Avgust Amonov sang Otello and Edem Umerov sang Iago. Otello normally is a four act opera; the Kirov chose to combine acts 1 and 2 into one long act. It wasn't until the end of that long first act that I felt Amonov and Umerov's voices blended into a powerful dramatic force, but, alas, that was really the only time. Umerov spent his time skulking around and Amonov spent his time knocking things over. I enjoyed more the performance of Sergey Semishkur in the smaller role of Cassio, the young lieutenant Iago tries to set up as Desdemona's alleged paramour.

Valery Gergiev conducted the Kirov Orchestra. They were particularly fine, although Gergiev often had them playing at surprisingly loud volumes when singers were singing. It was an exciting orchestral performance, though, especially at the end of act 2 (the opera's act 3). While they did have a few problems in the opening choruses staying precisely together with the orchestra, the Kirov Opera Chorus was solid.

The concept for this production is unusual, and I still haven't quite figured it out. Male costuming seemed to be mid-19th century, whilst female lead costuming was early 20th century. Clearly, they were "updating" from Verdi's intended 15th century time frame. Verdi's direction also put the set by or in a castle. Here, a huge lighthouse dominated the upstage center, with long, white, stuccoed walls on the diagonal leading the eye along their V to the lighthouse. During the opera's opening storm sequence, the lighthouse beacon beamed very bright light into the eyes of the audience. When the action goes "in" the castle, a cherry wood desk and credenza with hutch that look much like office furniture from the "traditional" collection at Office Depot are added to the stage right half of the stage with a rather contemporary large "ceiling" light fixture suspended on a wire over the desk.

The final act of the opera is supposed to take place in Desdemona's bedchamber. The first portion ("Song to the Willow") takes place far stage right in front of a black backdrop in front of the curtainline. When Desdemona begins her transition to prayer ("Ave Maria"), she leaves that set, the stage left half of the black backdrop raises to reveal a close-up of the top of the lighthouse, and she emerges on what is a raised level above the stage on the lighthouse; Otello soon enters the lighthouse yet one more level above. Why? Exactly what the production designers wanted to accomplish escaped me.

I enjoyed the evening. The audience's reaction, though, I felt was oddly restrained and polite. During the curtain calls, Mataeva was the only singer greeted with cheers. A number of audience members chose to stand when Gergiev came on, possibly in tribute to the orchestra, but it did not seem a majority. As the principal cast all came on stage in front of the black backdrop and remained there for multiple bows, it was a little awkward, and I think I felt some impatience from the audience for them to exit more quickly than they did. Nevertheless, this is an interesting production, and there still remains a Sunday afternoon matineee for those who wish to see it.

Entitlements

2007-12-13T21:54:00.000-08:00

What is it about people today that makes so many so extremely egocentric and demanding? Why do so many people today feel they are entitled to things without working for them?

Last night I witnessed a disturbing incident of such presumed entitlement. I was standing in line at the "will call" window at the box office to pick up my tickets for the evening's performance. An expensively dressed young woman was standing at one of the windows throwing a major fit because she didn't like the location of the tickets she was getting and she thought the box office should upgrade them to a better location. What was particularly interesting is that they were $98 (each) tickets and she wanted to be moved to the $175 (each) section; further, she had not bought and paid for these tickets; they were "comps"—free tickets that had been given to her from amongst unsold ticket inventory. After this young woman thoroughly berated the window clerk for not upgrading her, she got a box office manager to come over. The manager, with far greater patience and politeness than I would have shown, calmly explained again to her that these were free tickets, that the marketing office had chosen them not the box office, and that he would be happy to upgrade her two tickets to the section she wanted for $350. She snatched away the free tickets, saying in no uncertain terms that she was not about to give them any money, and stormed off to the performance. When I saw her again in the auditorium, her free tickets were better than mine! I certainly hope that they blacklist her and never, ever give her another comp ticket.

I was always raised to be grateful for gifts and favors, especially when they inconvenience the giver. Yet, people today feel free to make further demands on givers and do not seem to feel the need to extend what I consider to be common courtesy.

Am I just hopelessly old fashioned and out of touch?

It's a contest!

2007-12-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

Want to win a free ticket?

I have been fortunate to be able to purchase two excellent tickets—front row aisle, center orchestra—to the Friday, December 14 performance of The Queen of Spades, an opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tschaikovsky based on the novella of the same name by Aleksandr Pushkin, to be sung at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, by the famed Kirov Opera of the Mariinsky Theater from St. Petersburg, Russia.

I am so excited!

So, in order to have a perfect evening, I've decided to have a contest for my evening's companion. This contest is open to anyone, male or female, young or old, who might be interested in accompanying me to this event and hearing what promises to be a fantastic and memorable performance. Since it's a Friday evening, some of you who are out of town might want to consider coming in to Washington for the night/weekend.

How to enter? Write me here by midnight Eastern standard time Monday, December 10, and tell me: why you want to go? why should I choose you? I'll pick the winner early next week.

This contest is not limited to blog people, so if you know someone who'd like to go, get their information and make the entry for them. I love meeting new people!

For planning purposes, curtain is at 7:30. I like to get to the Kennedy Center a little early so we can cocktail a bit before going into the Opera House. Depending upon schedules, we might have a light supper beforehand. I'll be wearing a normal suit and tie—this isn't a formal occasion—so you can dress accordingly. The opera is sung in the original Russian, but they project the English translations as surtitles above the stage, so you'll have no trouble understanding what is going on. Afterwards, we'll probably walk over to Georgetown for a little late night snack or dessert.

Don't delay! Do your entry today!

Exploring the Belmont Mansion

2007-12-04T10:34:00.000-08:00

In anticipation of playing/singing for a lodge installation of officers next week, I wanted to see the meeting venue and play the instrument(s) in question before showing up. This particular ceremony is going to take place in the Belmont Mansion, now the international headquarters building of the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic-affiliated group for women.

The ceremony will be in the ballroom, and I'll be playing a gold-covered 1911 Steinway B. I'd also considered playing the organ, but it's actually a huge thing for the space, and not at all subtle—the pipe chambers open into the grand staircase, and the instrument blasts the entire house.

The international secretary and her husband actually live in the house as resident caretakers. I'd made an appointment with them to look around and play last night. After I'd played a little and sang a bit to note the acoustic, they revealed that the Most Worthy Grand Matron (think "international president") was downstairs, and, since she coincidentally is also from Oklahoma, they wanted me to meet her. So, I acquiesced. But, then, the husband got on a loudspeaker and told everyone in the house to come up to the ballroom immediately! It turns out they were having some kind of international officers meeting, and there were quite a few people downstairs.

Well, the Most Worthy Grand Matron and I had actually met once before, years ago. When I was International DeMolay of the Year, I made an official visitation to the Grand Chapter meeting of the Oklahoma Eastern Stars, and she was just then starting the progressive grand line (state offices) in Oklahoma.

She happens to be Indian, and one of her little things she likes to do at Star meetings is the Lord's Prayer in Indian sign language. I had to play and sing for her while she did that for the group. Then, they wanted me to sing something else, so I had to find a little Mozart aria in what little music I had with me. Keep in mind, I'd only gone up there to test the piano, not play/sing a concert!

After all that was over, Ryan (who no doubt was probably bored to death by this point) and I had to chat with people, and then they gave us a brief tour of the public rooms of the building. It's quite a nice place, and hard to believe that people actually built and used it for a private residence a century ago.

Here are a few pictures of the building. Above, I'm at the piano in the end of the ballroom. We forgot to get a pic of the ballroom and its big dome and skylight. The other rooms are pretty, too, though.

The entry and grand staircase:

The music room and the butler's pantry:

The state dining room:

The gold room:

Kennedy Center Honors

2007-12-03T01:20:00.000-08:00

Ryan's social forwardness at the allegedly high security Kennedy Center Honors worked out quite well for him tonight. The President left before he could say hi, but he managed to meet a bunch of other celebs, elbowing his way past their bodyguards and handlers. He's just home with a load of photos to add to his collection of celebrity pictures. Do you recognize any of these people?

Incidentally, the top picture was taken by Sen. Chuck Schumer....who was talking with the Speaker when Ryan interrupted them for a photo request. And Ed Schlossberg (Mr. Caroline Kennedy) isn't very excited when people ask him to take a picture of them with his wife. LOL

By the way, Madame Speaker is surprisingly frugal! Odd for a Democrat, eh? She wore the exact same dress tonight that she wore to the state dinner last May in honor of Queen Elizabeth. Looks like the same nasty old pearls and earrings, too. Don't we pay that poor millionnairess enough money in her job? At least she wasn't wearing a pant suit.

I hear furs are in in a big way! And Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin (plus Aretha's husband) were all wearing white full-length furs at the gala. Lots of other "normal" black and brown minks of all shapes and sizes there, too. I've always wanted a full-length mink coat (almost as much as an opera cape), but the only guys I've ever seen in them have been Luciano Pavarotti and Wayne Gretzky, and both of them live(d) in colder climates than Oklahoma or D.C.

Here're some shots of the tables in the Grand Foyer and the menu for the post-gala supper.

Radio City Christmas 75

2007-11-30T12:24:00.000-08:00

As we approach the Christmas season, what can be more festive than an afternoon with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes and their Christmas Spectacular show?

All I can say is "wow."

What's more exciting, this is the 75th anniversary of the very first annual Christmas show, so I think they made it a little extra-special spectacular this year. It must be exhausting to be a Rockette, since they do a minimum of three shows a day to as many as five, from mid-November through New Years. I'm sure they must be double cast, but still, dancing more than one 90-minute show per day, every day, would be a challenge!

The show is in the beautiful and spectacular Radio City Music Hall, a gem of American Modernist architecture from the 1930s. The stage is huge at over 100 feet wide, there are three balconies, and the auditorium is said to be the largest indoor theater in the world, seating a little over 6,000. And, Ian and my seats were perfect Wednesday afternoon, just a little to the left of center in the middle of the orchestra seating, giving us wonderful views of the full stage.

Before and after the show, organists at huge organ consoles along the side walls flanking the stage played duet holiday music on the enormous "Mighty Wurlitzer" theater organ. I was kind of amused to see the organists' shoes spiked with bands of rhinestones to catch the spotlights as they played and moved their feet.

There's a beautiful, three-story-tall, crystal Christmas tree in the soaring lobby of the music hall, and there are all kinds of souvenirs for the show and for the Rockettes. They sold cocktails with glowstick stirrers, and I was surprised that they allowed drinks and food in the auditorium (especially those $10 little bags of cotton candy being sold to the kids—who'll clean up the mess?).

But, on to the show! I wish I could have taken some pictures for you, but photography was prohibited, of course. Plus, there was no way to adequately capture everything that was happening to give you any kind of idea of the great pageantry and the scale or scope of this event.

They opened with the Rockettes dressed as reindeer at the North Pole, ultimately doing their signature kickline. Throughout the show, the precision and perfectly, perfectly straight dance lines of the Rockettes just astounded me. Even the military marching in formation doesn't get lines like these.

After we meet Santa Claus, he decides to go to New York City and instructs the audience to put on their 3-D glasses to come along for the voyage. A special screen drops down over the front of the stage, and we all go on a special effects animated tour across the tundra, through the skies, and up and down the narrow streets of New York with all the amazement and wonder that 3-D can bring!

The show is a series of a dozen "scenes" starring the Rockettes and with a cast of singer-actors to help maintain continuity while the dancers change costumes and prepare for the next scene. Some of the scenes were absolutely magical. We got a holiday tour of downtown Manhattan with the Rockettes on a real double-decker bus that drove around the stage and with an actual ice skating rink and skaters that came up from the stage traps. There was an abridged version of The Nutcracker with a young girl ballerina as Clara, and her magical nutcrackers and characters were all danced en pointe by bears, including some pandas for the Chinese dance and a particularly large and divaesque bear as the Sugar Plum Fairy. The parade of the wooden soldiers marched forth (this was only the 74th year for them!). There's a nativity scene with a couple of live camels and a donkey and a flown angel with big, flapping wings.

One of the most amazing technical accomplishments of this show happened to be the backdrops for each of the scenes. There was one for the whole show: an enormous high definition flat panel television screen! The colors just popped from that HD TV and it allowed for all kinds of animation and film special effects. They did a lot of lighting and projection, too, making use of the entire auditorium and the walls and ceilings of the auditorium. Also, at one point, when Santa is demonstrating his magic to convince a skeptical fourteen-year-old that he really exists, he makes it snow on stage.....well, I've done enough shows to know how the stagehands do stage snow.....but this Santa was especially magic, because not only did he make it snow on stage, he made it snow out in the house! Several snowflakes hit me, and they were real snow!

The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Christmas Spectacular is an American treasure. I wish everyone could make the pilgrimage to New York at least once in their lifetime to see this show—it's well worth the trip!

Strike's over

2007-11-29T02:07:00.000-08:00

Just in from New York City and I'm glad to see my trip was successful!

As we were walking around Times Square and the theater district around Broadway this evening, I told three or four lines of stagehands picketers to get back to work. Apparently, they listened to me, since when I got home, I found the news of a union compromise and settlement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/theater/29broadway.html?_r=1&ex=1354078800&en=4e599847fe223a8a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

Now, you all can go to Broadway and see a show. You needn't thank me. The smiles of happy little children is all the thanks I need.

Mélange des danses

2007-11-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

It's always interesting how Washington, D.C., has a way of helping people see just how small the world is.

I was born in a town back in Oklahoma that straddles the border between the Osage Indian Nation and the Cherokee Indian Nation. For several years, I lived out in the country on the Osage, and I love going to the annual Osage religious ceremonial dances in the summer. Well, the Osages have three beloved women—all in their 80s now—who were internationally famous ballerinas. One of those Osage ballerinas is Maria Tallchief, the first prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet, the country's preeminent ballet company. During her reign there, she fell in love with and married George Balanchine, one of the most famous ballet choreographers of the 20th century who was also the founder and director of NYCB.

Balanchine, as much as his name is spoken of in awe in ballet circles, had this bad habit of falling in love with his latest beautiful and talented ballerina and then creating his best work for them. His marriage to Maria only lasted about five or six years, and she ended up leaving NYCB because of another beautiful and talented ballerina who joined NYCB in 1961, Suzanne Farrell. Well, he fell in love with her, but Miss Farrell ended up marrying another dancer because Balanchine was married to yet another ballerina at the time; I think it's probably the fact that she was never an ex-wife that allowed Farrell to maintain her close friendship and association with Balanchine. She had a long, distinguished, international career through NYCB, and dozens of major works were created and choreographed specifically for her. At his death, he willed her the rights to the choreography of several of his great works, and she has since worked with the George Balanchine Trust.

Then, in 2000, Farrell formally created the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, the resident ballet company of the Kennedy Center in Washington. We went to one of their dance concerts last night at the Kennedy Center, a dance concert that was based entirely on the works of George Balanchine. And hence we come full circle to see the small world.

It was an interesting concert, to say the least. They presented five ballets in three acts.

The evening opened with Bugaku, a stylized representation of a Japanese marriage. Some very unusual music by Toshiro Mayuzumi made up the accompaniment, played by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra with Ron Matson conducting. Mayuzumi was a fan of blending the avant garde of modern 20th century music with Japanese sensibilities.

The set was a striking three-sided rectangular, red barre with Japanese architectural lines that was suspended by thick ropes. Costumes were gauzy white overlays that trailed behind both male and female dancers as they moved. In the short first scene, the women wore classical tutus such as the one in the photograph that graces the cover of this month's Kennedy Center Playbill.

The dance was rather slow, with movements and postures designed to evoke Japanese theater and geisha traditions. At times, that stylized movement seemed almost robotic to me.

In act 2, they opened with Ballade, set to the music of Gabriel Fauré with a very romantic piano and orchestra score. This ballet featured their up and coming star ballerina Bonnie Pickard, partnered with principal Runqiao Du (who we would later see in the fourth ballet pas de deux). The company danced on a bare stage with only a cyclorama backdrop illuminated in midnight blue.

The third ballet was my favorite of the evening. Pithoprakta is a starkly modern study in binary black and white, complete with black and white costumes and a large backdrop with mathematical numbers and a graph. Music was by 20th century Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, from his work Pithoprakta. Xenakis originally trained and worked as an architect before turning to musical composition, and that mathematical nature can be heard in his music; this work has a lot of random plucked notes and is freeform, even for modernism. The dancers were very angular in their movements and much of the company rolled around a lot on the floor. We particularly noticed featured dancer, soloist Matthew Prescott, who's a tall, tossled-headed blond man who was required to dance a very physical performance.

Tchaikovsky's Meditation, Op. 42, from his Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher provided the backdrop for the fourth ballet and opening of the third act, Meditation, a simple pas de deux for principals Du and Natalia Magnicaballi. This was one of those ballets that Balenchine created especially for Farrell. While I think the focus was to be on the male dancer, the real work and choreography was all with the female dancer. They also danced to a bare stage, and Du was costumed in street clothes and Magnicaballi was in a simple, unadorned, romantic tutu.

The final work of the evening used Arnold Schoenberg's orchestration of Johannes Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, as the background for a ballet called, simply, Fourth Movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. This was their big company finale number, starring Miss Pickard and Bulgarian principal dancer Momchil Mladenov. It seems to have been inspired by Eastern European folk dance, and the costumes had a Hungarian look to them. Mladenov was the first male dancer of the evening to have any particularly challenging choreography, and Pickard was very well received with her dancing en pointe.

We sat in an interesting location on the third row of the opera house in the center of the left side orchestra section. We were surrounded by a bunch of balletomanes who knew dance and had definite opinions. There was a very elderly couple to my right who shared many of my thoughts and opinions, while a man in front of me was incredulous that I liked the third ballet better than the first. I also ran into someone on the first row who was recruiting me to work again with the Kirov Ballet when they come back to Washington in January, and then he looked at me and queried, "Have you gained weight?" Not wanting to admit it, I blamed it on my sweater.....you know how sweaters can make you look bigger....it's true! Really! However, if I'm going to try to dance again, I'm going to have to go on a massive weight loss campaign between now and then, since even the last time I danced, I was too heavy, and my feet and knees were killing me!

Anyway, it's nice to see someone working on preserving the Balanchine choreography. The women were all fine technical dancers, though none of them had me enraptured (that's hard to do, though, with these short ballets—you need a full-length production to develop the character). I was, though, a bit disappointed with the men, though disappointed is probably too strong a word and it really wasn't their fault.

Farrell certainly does not expect much from her men. Most of the time, she just has her men moving in rhythm, promenading, and partnering (lifting the girls). In the second ballet, the guy had one little sauté (small leap), and in the fifth, the danseur did some entrechats (jump with feet beating the air), and some single tours en l'air (spin in the air) and pirouettes, but not a single grand jeté (splits in mid-air) and not even any real tours chaînés déboulés. There were no "star" moments for the men.

I was trying to explain this to Ryan (who'd never before seen live ballet) using ice skating analogies. You know how when you watch those Olympic competitions and the really really top skaters do a "triple lutz" or a "triple toe loop," and if something goes wrong and the skater only does a double—or, heaven forbid, a single!—the commentators just jump all over it? That's how I felt with the men's dance performances, except they weren't scripted to do anything but singles, and very few of those to begin with.

The ballerinas, though, had plenty to do, and I'd imagine that Farrell—having been an international star herself—is very demanding with them. They, at least, got the opportunity to shine and display their grace, strength, and balance.

While I tend to prefer full-length productions, it will be interesting to watch the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and I'm sure I'll be going to many of their concerts in the future.

Starting the Christmas onslaught

2007-11-21T23:20:00.000-08:00

Every year in Washington, there are dozens of productions of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, The Messiah, and all kinds of Christmas shows and concerts. We had our first exposure to the annual onslaught last night when Ryan and I ventured down to the Anacostia waterfront to attend a new reimagination of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the Arena Stage called Christmas Carol 1941. This new play, commissioned by Arena Stage, is by James Magruder with new original songs by Henry Krieger and Susan Birkenhead, and had its world premiere just last Friday.

Christmas Carol 1941 is set on Christmas Eve 1941 in Washington, D.C. Ebenezer Scrooge is now known as businessman Elijah Strube and Bob Cratchit is Henry Schroen, his typist. There's no Tiny Tim, just Schroen's son Butch, a seventeen-year-old anxious to enlist and go off to war. Partner Marley is burdened with chains made of Washington paperwork. And, instead of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, the visions are led by famous D.C. statues come to life: Winged Victory from the First Division Army monument near the White House, Freedom from the top of the Capitol dome, and Grief from the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery.

The reimagination is an interesting idea, but the playwright sorely needs an editor! I know that Dickens was known for being long-winded, but his play flowed and his wordiness always contributed to the plot; Magruder's play is often pedantic with obscure American history lessons. There are many long speeches that could use focus and major pruning, and the banter between Strube and the statues just didn't do it for me. I also felt we were being mauled with pro-war patriotism and 1940s morality lessons, things that were probably common in the '40s, but they could have been less heavy-handed.

On the bright side, the ensemble cast was good and the technical achievements with sets, lights, tech, and so forth were phenomenal! The music—by the same guy who wrote Dreamgirls—isn't really that memorable, but the USO scene is sweet and the song is toe-tapping fun in the big band style.

The Arena Stage's Fichhandler Theater is a square theater-in-the-round and a surprisingly fine facility. I don't know if this is normal or if it's a set built just for this show, but the stage was a two level construction. The upper platform had two trap doors that were frequently and skillfully used for set changes. The lower level had compartments that went under the upper level for both set changes and character entrances. Characters also entered from the house aisles at each of the four corners of the square. A raisable platform on two pillars was used for Strube and the statues to "fly" over D.C. to see and watch the scenes from above.

The lighting design for this show is excellent and demanding. Occasionally, characters would be listening to a radio address from Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt's or Churchill's face would be projected on the stage floor. During some of the nightmares and moments of turmoil, ledger numbers flashed on stage. Mood lighting—always a challenge in the round—and character spotting were both great.

Christmas Carol 1941 runs through New Year's Eve, so there are plenty of chances to go see it. The reimagination is different, but the show was entertaining, and Ryan loved it. And, I think that there's a good chance it could become an excellent play as the playwright tightens and trims the dialogue, tweaking it as most new works are, and it might even get some productions in the future outside of the D.C. area. It will be interesting to watch its evolution.

Russian cello

2007-11-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night's Kennedy Center expedition was to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play one of its tribute concerts for its late conductor laureate, Mstislav Rostropovich, who led the orchestra from 1977 to 1994 and who died earlier this year. The first time I ever heard the NSO when I was first at Georgetown in 1978, Rostropovich was on the podium.

The main feature of the concert was Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107, a work that was actually composed in 1959 specifically for Rostropovich to play. Heinrich Schiff played the work. Schiff is an older man with an unruly shock of long white hair who has an interesting way of draping himself over his cello when he plays.

The concerto is a difficult, virtuosic work. I happened to like it, as well as the performance, though I don't think the other three guys in my group appreciated it.

We had good seats down front that gave us a fine view of Schiff and his cello, so we could actually see his fingering. We also got to watch guest conductor Roberto Minczuk, who seemed fairly standard in his conducting. He was wearing a black bow tie and cummerbund with his tail coat instead of the standard white piqué bow tie and waistcoat, so he kept reminding me of a waiter.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Rimsky-Korsakov's famous tone poem Scheherazade, Op. 35. It's often loud and brassy, so the other guys liked it a lot. I was less than excited about sitting through it, since this is one of those "old war horse" piece I've heard at children's concerts all my life, and it regularly gets in the rotation on classical radio stations. But, I actually heard some new colors in the work, since we were sitting right by the orchestra, so the brass was right there without being blended into the background by some sound engineer. One thing about Rimsky-Korsakov, he certainly was a master of orchestration.

The first work of the evening was a rather odd Homenaje a Federico García Lorca by early 20th century Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. It's a short piece—about ten minutes—in three movements for a tiny orchestra, but it all had this odd, bright, unfinished sound to it, and it wasn't my favorite.

Time warping from the '50s

2007-11-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

Illegal immigration. Homosexuality. Incest. Jealousy.

What is this, a discussion of 2008 presidential candidate speeches?

No, these were the issues last night when Washington National Opera plunged a full house at the Kennedy Center Opera House into the dark, gritty 1950s for its penultimate performance of A View from the Bridge.

Opera mirrors the hot topics of the day. A View from the Bridge, though, isn't a 2007 composition. William Bolcom composed the music in the mid-1990s, but, even then, this wasn't new stuff. The source of these "current," angstful issues is actually half a century old, as Bolcom based his work on the 1955 play by Arthur Miller.

WNO mounted a gripping production. Starring University of Oklahoma voice professor Kim Josephson as longshoreman Eddie Carbone and legendary soprano Catherine Malfitano as Eddie's wife, Beatrice, an excellent cast gave the audience a glimpse of 1950s culture in the working class Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Josephson and Malfitano created their roles in the opera's 1999 Chicago premiere, previously reprising them at the Metropolitan Opera in New York a couple of years ago, along with their original cast member Gregory Turay, who sings Rodolfo, Beatrice's cousin from Sicily. Rounding out the lead cast are Christine Brandes as Catherine, Beatrice's niece; John Del Carlo as narrator and lawyer Alfieri, and Richard Bernstein as cousin Marco.

Since I just got my ticket rather unexpectedly yesterday morning, I hadn't done my homework and learned who was in the cast, so finding Josephson, Malfitano, and Bernstein on the roster was a pleasant surprise. Josephson has a little ranch near Vinita, Oklahoma, about an hour from my parents' home (and about an hour from 's ancestral home, too), and I haven't heard him sing since an Il Trovatore with Tulsa Opera a few years ago. This was my first time to hear Richard Bernstein in person, and I'd been very interested in his sound, since he was the subject of so many feature articles about his athleticism and muscular body during the "opera beefcake" era of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And Catherine Malfitano.... wow.... what can one say about being in The Presence?

You know, Miss Malfitano will probably laugh, but my one criticism of her performance in this opera is that she looked and sounded too young for the part. Well, the character Beatrice is probably 40-something, and Miss Malfitano celebrated earlier this year her 60th birthday!

The primary tension in this opera is the relationship between Eddie and his niece, Catherine, whom he has raised since she was orphaned as a baby. He is overprotective and he loves her, though that love begins to take on a more sinister note as the young woman begins dating Rodolfo. It was difficult to judge Miss Brandes' performance as Catherine, since the musical line she had to sing was not terribly sympathetic. Whether the music or the casting decision, though, I never had an impression of innocence or youth, and Miss Brandes always sounded like a mature woman rather than the seventeen-year-old that Catherine is supposed to be.

The operatic love triangle came with Mr. Turay and his Rodolfo, an incredibly challenging role with a high tenor tessitura. In fact, in one line of the opera as Eddie criticizes Rodolfo, he says, "Sometimes he hits a note so high, you stop looking for him, and start looking for her." Turay has a tightly wound spinto voice with a highly pressured sound. He had a difficult character to portray, being not only a lover of singing, but having to dance on stage, and Rodolfo was also known to be good at cooking and at sewing dresses. The script rather heavy-handedly hinted at his potential homosexuality (though he certainly seemed appropriately romantic with Catherine), and Eddie opined that Rodolfo's only love interest in Catherine was so he could get married and become a legal American citizen. Two of Turay's solos (I hesitate to use the traditional term, "aria") garnered applause from the audience.

The "bridge" in the opera's title is the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City that links Manhattan to the southern portion of Brooklyn, overlooking where the opera is set. I presume the "viewing from the bridge" was being done by the lawyer Alfieri, who narrates the tale as an historical report. The stage design is starkly simple with industrial elements evoking the steelwork of a bridge. Projection screens along the back and sides show various old black and white photographs of New York. An area stage right includes the small Carbone home and stage left is an all-purpose area for the docks, the streets, and the lawyer's office. Raked ramps on the sides and back are often filled with members of the chorus, all dressed in dark, working class, period costumes. A scrim downstage serves as the main curtain for the stage; a small piece of scrim material hung obliquely over the "home" area and is used to receive a "shadow" of the lawyer's office door wording during those scenes where he is singing.

Dramatically, the opera is intense, emotional, and highly successful. Musically, though, I found it tedious.

Over the years, I've had the privilege to sing several opera premieres and to visit with the composers about their work. Many times, they write some beautiful, lyrical arias for the principal characters, and fill the rest of the score with typical modern opera atonality, dissonance, and cacophony. When I ask them if they really like that, if that is the music that sings in their hearts, every single composer has told me, "No." They all have said that they have to do that to be "taken seriously" and not considered "old-fashioned" by the musical academics who inform the critics what they should think of new compositions. Therein lies the problem for View. Composer Bolcom is a college professor—one of those "academics" who enforce the rules against melody and pretty music. He has no fear herein that his colleagues will accuse him of being old-fashioned!

The musical score for View is a stereotype of late 20th century opera modernism. The singers are forced to sing harsh, awkward intervals that bounce all around, back and forth, high to low, with no beauty to the musical line. Only Rodolfo and Marco had solos allowing the audience to applaud, and neither Beatrice nor Catherine had solo moments with any lyricality to show off their vocal talents. And how can Catherine sing beautifully of young love when her score has her braying like a mule? Meanwhile, the orchestral accompaniment chugs along with all kinds of atonal noise that bears little if any resemblance to the tunes being sung on stage, or even to the emotions being portrayed. Bolcom seems to favor a lot of minor second clusters. A lot. This, unfortunately, is "academic modern opera" at its height, and I can only say that I did not leave the theater humming a little tune.

Nevertheless, View is a powerful opera. I'm glad I went. Josephson, Malfitano, and Turay all offer noteworthy performances. There's one remaining performance in Washington, so grab a ticket if you can find one.

Opera tonight?

2007-11-14T10:44:00.000-08:00

I'm going to the opera (A View from the Bridge) at the Kennedy Center tonight all by myself. Is anybody else going? I'd love to get together for a cocktail or something at the intermission. My ticket is H 12, orchestra right. Lemme know!

I'm really excited to be going to Washington National Opera tonight. Their tickets are so dreadfully expensive (orchestra seats can be as much as $220 for a non-gala performance!), that I seldom go unless I know people in the cast, or the opera is unusual or a new work, as is the case tonight.

This particular new opera is based on the play by Arthur Miller. Miller, who was formerly married to Marilyn Monroe, also wrote the play, The Crucible, and I've previously sung the opera (music by Robert Ward) based on it. The music tonight is by a guy called William Bolcom, who is a pianist and composer on faculty at the University of Michigan. He received the commission for this work from Lyric Opera of Chicago, where it premiered in 1999 to great critical and popular acclaim. While he's written a lot of stuff, I don't recall ever having heard any of it before, and Bridge is his most famous oeuvre. So, it should be a very, very interesting evening.

All Beethoven, all the time

2007-11-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

The National Symphony Orchestra is playing an all-Beethoven concert this weekend in their classics series, featuring the young violinist Nikolaj Znaider as soloist. Our little gang went last night. I never get tickets in the same spot in the house, so this time we all sat on the very first row right in front of the first violins. This ended up being quite the interesting place to sit and watch, especially to observe principal guest conductor (who becomes the principal conductor next fall) Iván Fischer on the podium, and we were perfectly positioned to see the violinist's fingering and hear his fingers thumping on his instrument.

The highlight of the evening was the famous Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, the one with the "da da da dahhhhhhh" opening motif. Maestro Fischer took the first movement at a frightening brisk tempo, then in the final movement he was again so fast I remember thinking to myself how I was glad I wasn't having to try to play a piano reduction! In the first movement, the horns were right on the mark and in the whole symphony, the cellos got quite the workout. The audience rewarded the symphony (and the end of the concert) with a standing ovation and three curtain calls.

The first half featured Znaider in the Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 61, and he was well received by the audience. He played passionately, sometimes almost violently on his 1704 Stradivarius. I was in just the right position in the house that, when Znaider was turning to watch the concertmistress at key times, he started looking right at me! For those of you who've never performed on a large stage, the lights blazing on the stage generally make all but the first two rows or so of the house a big, black hole. Some performers need the feedback and support of their audience, so they play/sing to some of the people they can actually see, and I guess I got picked for that task last night.

Znaider is a handsome thirty-year-old who is tall with an athletic build and a shock of curly, brown hair. He chose to wear, however, some sort of hideous European-styled black frock coat with four buttoned buttons, no lapels (they were so obviously missing they almost looked cut away), and a turned up collar that looked way too small for him (but that is the current "modern" European fashion), paired with a white, wide-banded collar shirt worn open at the neck. The coat had a bright red lining and he sported a matching red pocket square; his cuffs were fastened with gold square cufflinks bordered with black onyx.

Each half of the concert opened with an overture, first the one to Egmont, Op. 84, and second the one to Coriolan, Op. 62.

Earlier I mentioned watching Mo. FIscher conduct. It was actually both surprising and entertaining. He's a very active and dynamic conductor, but what most caught my attention was the degree of noise he makes. He made all kinds of breathing and whooshing sounds, even growling a couple of times, to help him punctuate his direction. And, he managed to get a pretty good sound out of the orchestra, though there were at least three times when I heard unexpected wrong notes pop up from somewhere in the orchestra.

I was pleased to note that Mo. Fischer was properly attired in white tie and tails, unlike Mo. Leonard Slatkin, who never seems to dress correctly. Being on the first row also gave me a chance to look in detail at the orchestra members, and I noted an interesting thing: the men who wore wing-collar shirts (the proper shirt for white tie) also wore black patent leather shoes (the proper shoes for a tail coat), while men in regular pointed collars wore more casual black leather shoes.

Twas a lovely evening with a packed house and music that was 200 years old, yet refreshing and inspirational to us all.

Piano soundings

2007-10-20T23:49:00.000-07:00

It's like we've gotten a new conductor in Washington.

Two weeks in a row now, I've been to a National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center with NSO's music director Leonard Slatkin on the podium, and the orchestra has been brilliant, the conducting inspired, and the entire ensemble of players and conductor have been together and have been right on the money with one another. This is the famous Slatkin who put the Saint Louis Symphony "on the map" in the 1980s and '90s, and who came to Washington with such excitement and high expectations a dozen years ago. I've missed "that" Slatkin the past few years in D.C., but, wow! he's back now in his final season at NSO before he goes off to Detroit as music director and Pittsburgh as principal guest conductor.

If you want to hear him with the NSO, you have to wait until after Christmas now, as he's not scheduled again to conduct until January, but do make a point to come hear him if you can.

Last night, Jon, Ryan, and I went to hear the NSO and famed piano soloist Emanuel Ax. Twas a lovely performance.

NSO saved Ax for the second half of the concert. He lumbered out on stage as if playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major with a major international orchestra were the simplest, most lackadaisical thing in the world to be doing. Then, rather than showboating to the audience, he played to the orchestra, nodding at players, watching them play, and occasionally keeping time with a shake of his jowls. When it was time for him to play, he loomed over the keyboard, his arms spread wide and his elbows always out more than I would find comfortable. The keys were his, though, and he hoarded them, making them sing the way of his choosing.

The Brahms has been a well-known part of the piano repertoire for over a century, and Ax did a fine interpretation. The first two movements are both fast allegros, rather massive, and quite typical of a major piano concerto.

One of the gems of this concerto, though, is the third movement "Andante," where the cello joins in as a major player, almost as if this piece were a double concerto. The cello duties fell to NSO principal cellist David Hardy, who played his 1694 Carlo Testore instrument exquisitely. Hardy is actually a Baltimore native who studied at the Peabody Conservatory there, and right out of college he was appointed associate principal cellist by NSO's late music director Mstislav Rostropovich, himself an internationally reknowned cellist. That should certainly say something about Hardy and his abilities! Today, Hardy has been principal since 1994, having spent practically his entire career at NSO; he's a tall, slender man with immaculately groomed silver hair, rimless glasses, and a very upright, formal air about him. He seemed almost embarrassed during the curtain calls as Ax repeated brought him forward for a bow.

The final movement of the concerto is an allegretto, a suitably playful bit that matched well Ax's whimsy in playing. The audience awarded Ax some four curtain calls after the performance.

The first half of the concert was as though the music were from two totally different worlds. Starting with American William Schuman's "Prayer in Time of War," then ending with Englishman Ralph Vaughn-Williams' Symphony No. 6 in E minor, both of these post-World War II works were loud and brassy at times, yet both conveying sorrow and introspection. This is also a pair of pieces that helps to clearly demonstrate the major difference between sitting at home listening to a CD or MP3 of orchestral works and hearing them live and in person in a concert hall. One very simply cannot use electronic recordings and the compression necessary to transmit them and appreciate the full dynamic range and emotion of these works, from very very loud portions to the very very soft.

Schuman is one of those "modern" composers who can at times be rather trying. I liked this work, though, and I thought it was quite approachable. I was previously unfamiliar with it, but it's a good bit, and I hope someone records it so it can be heard by more people.

Before last night, I never appreciated the Vaughn-Williams Sixth. This is largely because of having to hear it in recorded form, and there's just absolutely no way to appreciate this music—especially the last movement "Epilogue"—without sitting in a concert hall. This was a particularly good reading, too, with Slatkin and NSO in synch together, Slatkin even at times jumping around and almost dancing on the podium.

Many people are familiar with Vaughn-Williams because of his church hymns—"standards" like Sine Nomine (For all the saints), Salve festa dies (Hail thee, festival day), King's Weston (At the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow), Down Ampney (Come down, O Love divine)—but his orchestral music is very, very different. This particular symphony is shockingly modern for those used to Vaughn-Williams' melodic hymns, as it's rather bombastic at times, almost jazzy at others, and even makes rather odd use of a saxophone. It's also played as one continuous bit with no break between movements.

What enthralled me about the Sixth, though, was what I'd never been able to appreciate on a recording: the Epilogue. The entire movement is played with the loudest dynamic a pianissimo, and much of the orchestra work was even softer than that at times. This made the audience have to sit forward in their seats, nearly straining to listen, nearly holding their breaths to hear. There was no big ending, no bombastic explosion of virtuosity, just the sad, soft, undulating tunes, like a lost child wandering aimlessly in the night.

Yet, even with the quiet and uncertain ending of the work, the symphony moved the audience to award two curtain calls.

Definitely, this was a memorable musical experience.

I moved our seats up a bit for this concert, since I wanted to be able to see the piano and the keyboard. The Kennedy Center Concert Hall has a rather unique seating arrangement on the orchestra level. If one were to draw a long tic-tac-toe grid, that's pretty much how the floor plan looks (not counting the four levels of horseshoe boxes and balconies). For orchestral music, I usually sit towards the back of the hall in the upper center section of the "grid" for the best sound blend; last night, we were in the center square, a section the orchestra management considers to be the "orchestra prime" section. I really don't know why. A few rows back or even forward to the top or bottom center grid sections, or across the aisles to the side sections, and there's at least a $20 ticket price drop. All that pricing stuff makes no sense to me. When I go to the opera or the ballet, I like to be up front in the first couple of rows so I can see the singers and dancers work, and those are actually the cheapest seats in the orchestra level.

Afterwards, we walked into Georgetown for dinner. More on that in another post.

Midori on the strings

2007-10-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

The National Symphony Orchestra is back this season in a big way, and they are sounding wonderful in this the last year of Music Director Leonard Slatkin's tenure with the group. We heard them for the first time this fall Friday night, and I found myself unexpectedly pleased with their performance, sound, and excitement.

My UMCP English professor friend Kevin joined nephew Ryan, Laurent, Laurent's new beau Carter (coincidentally, a UMCP English student!), and me for a delightful evening at the Kennedy Center. We were, alas, too late in our arrival at the K.C. to have a chance to cocktail before curtain, since Laurent is worse than Brian about getting dressed on time (or, I should say, not so much getting dressed as getting started getting dressed). That put me in a bit of a bad mood, since I'd been anxious to see if the bars in the lobby were featuring special drinks making use of Midori, the green melon-flavored liqueur from Japan. Why Midori? Because the featured soloist for the evening was the wonderful Japanese violinist Midori.

The primary reason I went to the concert Friday night was to hear Midori play Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2, and, wow! what a stellar performance it turned out to be!

The Bartok is a long and notoriously difficult work for violinists, and the "modernness" and occasional 12-tonality of the work doesn't make things any easier for the soloist. Midori was an incredibly active and physically emotive player, too, getting such exercise that I'm sure she must have been exhausted just from her fortysome-minute-long workout.

Midori is a diminutive, beautiful, young woman (I would guess thirty-something) who wears her raven hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Her first appearance on stage was breathtaking as she sailed in wearing a stunning sleeveless sheath gown made of shimmering reddish-brown and metallic gold fabric. Her metallic gold ballet slippers peeked out on occasion from beneath her hem. She was the perfect accessory to the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesu instrument she plays.

I thought the performance was excellent and deserving of more than the two curtain calls she got. They also were not properly recognizing of the NSO harpist, who has such an unusually major role in this concerto, she should almost be considered a subsidiary soloist. That's one of the quirks of the Washington/NSO audiences, though, where often world-class soloists play brilliantly in the first half to lukewarm applause and then mediocre second half orchestra-only works get standing ovations—as was the case Friday night.

Preceding the Bartok, the NSO played "Toccata Concertante," a short fanfare-like work by 20th century composer Irving Fine. I was not previously familiar with his works. This was a pleasant piece with multiple internal divisions giving the ten minute work complexity. It also reminded me a bit of some of the movie film scores from the 1940s and '50s.

After the interval, we heard a very competent reading of Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 9 in C major ("Great"), D. 944.

In the previous three seasons, I've often remarked at the sloppiness of the orchestra and how they just never seem to play up to their potential with Maestro Slatkin at the podium—an indictment often confirmed when I heard them play wonderfully under the batons of various guest conductors. That wasn't the case Friday night. The playing was clear and crisp and they stayed with Slatkin, even in some of those difficult and frenetic passages in the Bartok.

My only complaint? After all these years, Slatkin still hasn't learned how to dress for work. With all the men of the orchestra in white tie and tails, Slatkin appeared in a black suit with what looked to be a solid black banded collar shirt and no tie!

Opera on the Mall

2007-09-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

La Bohème this weekend

2007-09-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Who wants to go to the opera with me? It's free!

Washington National Opera is doing their annual outdoor live simulcast on the National Mall (plus adding theaters at universities all over the country) this Sunday afternoon. This year's offering is Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, one of the beloved "war horses" of the opera repertoire and the inspiration for the popular musical and movie Rent.

The outdoor opera broadcasts (on a huge, billboard-sized Jumbotron screen) started two years ago with the highly successful Porgy and Bess, followed last year by an unfortunately rainy Madama Butterfly. This year, though, the weather forecast for Sunday afternoon is a beautiful, sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s.

So, Ryan and I are going, and we'd like to get a few people together and organize a little picnic lunch we all can eat on the ground at the Mall during the show. It'll be lots of fun! Will there be gourmet home-cooked foods? Or will be be dining on fried chicken from the Safeway deli? Who's interested? Let me know so we can get this all planned out.

"Curtain" time for the opera is 2 p.m., so we should plan to be at the Mall by at least 1 p.m. While the opera is sung in Italian, there will be English translations on the screen as subtitles.

This should be a particularly interesting production. The opera originally is set in the 19th century with the bohemian artists of Paris, but Washington National Opera has elected to "update" the production to the modern day. I understand there's a La Cage a Folle-type production number (no doubt at the Cafe Momus) and there are video montages of Mimi and Musetta. It will either be wonderful or a total abomination! Let's go see!

For those of you not in the D.C. metro area, there are a number of colleges showing the simulcast as well. More details are on WNO's Web site, but I think the schools are: Brown, Bryn Mawr, Cumberland School of Law, Duke, New York University, North Carolina School of the Arts, Ohio University, Princeton, Rice, Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, Temple, Tulane, Union College, U. S. Military Academy, Virginia Tech, Wellesley, and the Universities of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts–Amherst, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Richmond, Virginia and Washington.

Here's a pic of me the last time I sang in a Bohème production (no, I'm not singing in this one, and, unfortunately, I don't know any of the cast of this show). My makeup designer asked me to grow a moustache for the production, so I did that for nearly three months, and he still had to color it in with an eyebrow pencil!

New theater

2007-09-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday we went to the open house for the new Harmon Center for the Arts downtown across from the Verizon Center. The Harmon Center is the new second venue for the Shakespeare Theater Company. The company will continue to operate its original theater a block or two away, so they'll have two places for shows. The old theater holds about 450 and the new theater seats about 750.

The new facility is an office building that's been gutted and completely redone to include the new theater, performance space, concessions, patrons' lounge, box office, office space, and gift shop. The upper floors of the building are traditional office space for outside entities. The architectural design opened the building facade to the street and added a series of cantilevered floors that create more space overhanging the sidewalk, then enclosed it with a glass wall so the entire three floors of the theater lobby will be visible to the street.

I took a few photos inside the new theater, but as they were having a constant series of free performances during the day, flash was prohibited, so you'll have to deal with a little bit of blurriness from me trying to hold the camera still in a dark auditorium.

Above is a photo of the stage. It's rather open with no proscenium or curtain—part of the unfortunate modern trend in theater design to eliminate the "distance" between the action and the audience in an attempt to make live theater more "relevant" (whatever that means). In the second photo, you can see the fly space, which really isn't a fly space, as the lights and things are just hanging there out in the open.

Next is a view of the house. The lower level actually has two levels, but I was standing on the side about midway, so you can see the lower seats, which are on a flatter floor. The balcony up above is quite steeply banked; you can see that in the second photo, taken from the back row of the balcony. The view of the stage from the balcony is actually quite good.

Brian was very excited about the new theater facility, since he is considering applying for a year long internship with the company for after he finishes his technical theater degree at Dartmouth next June.

Stuck

2007-09-10T02:36:00.000-07:00

I was playing through my Tannhäuser score this afternoon, and now I can't get the Pilgrim's Chorus out of my head!

Il maestro dorme

2007-09-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago, a fairly forgetable movie called Yes, Giorgio! played in Oklahoma City, telling the story of a opera star who loses his voice before an important concert, then falls in love with the doctor who treats him. The operaphiles—of which I was not yet one—were all excited because the main character was played by this fat Italian guy who was, apparently, one of their big opera stars.

We were just college students then, and, while we liked classical music and sang in school and church choirs, we weren't particularly well-versed in opera. Sure, there were a lot of opera melodies that were familiar tunes (thanks to Bugs Bunny and others), but we weren't exactly experts in the genre. But, off we went, and it was that night that I was first exposed to Luciano Pavarotti.

Also for the first time, I heard in that movie a little aria from a Puccini opera Turandot called "Nessun dorma"—None Shall Sleep. It was one of the songs from one of Pavarotti's standard roles as Prince Calàf, but it hadn't yet developed the "signature song" status it would get after the 1990 World Cup performance. And I liked it.

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! Tu pure, o Principessa, nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle che tremano d'amore e di speranza. Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il nome mio nessun saprà! No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò, quando la luce splenderà! Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia. Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!

None shall sleep! None shall sleep! Even you, o Princess, in your cold room, watch the stars, that tremble with love and with hope. But my secret is hidden within me, my name no one shall know. No, no, on your mouth I will tell it when the light shines. And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine! Vanish, o night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!

The performance was pretty phenomenal, and I was particularly intrigued with the ending: Pavarotti didn't sing "veen-chay-ro," but "vee-nah-chay-ro," adding a little shadow vowel syllable to his native Italian language, giving himself essentially a springboard to catapult him to that long, glorious high B that is the penultimate note of the aria. That's the way everyone sings it now.

Now that Pavarotti was on my radar screen, I started listening to his music, and marveling at his amazingly easy, pure tenor voice. There was never any struggle, never any pressure, never any pinched sound, never any heroic effort. He just floated those high notes on the air.

After that 1990 soccer game, it seems like everyone was a Pavarotti fan. In fact, it got to be next to impossible to get tickets to an opera or a concert when he was on the bill. Ticket prices skyrocketed—one Met gala had tickets as high as $1,875 each. Yet, it was worth it. As magnificent as his voice sounds on television or on a CD, there was nothing quite like hearing it live and in person.

The last time I heard Pavarotti in person was probably back in 1994 or 95 singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in a Verdi opera called I Lombardi. I almost didn't get to go, because the performance was long sold-out, and I wasn't able to pull any strings at the box office to get one, even at inflated prices. Fortuitously, on my flight to New York, I ran into Samuel Ramey—also en route to the Met for Lombardi, but to sing it—and bewailed my plight that I wouldn't be able to hear Sam sing because all the Pavarotti fans had bought up all the tickets. Sam said he'd take care of it, and he did: he got me a company pass that put me in the first balcony in a fabulous seat. After the long performance, I went backstage to Sam's dressing room to thank him for the ticket and get him to autograph my program. As I left, I saw this huge line going to Pavarotti's dressing room, so, even though we were only supposed to be backstage when we were on the "approved" guest lists, I decided to seize the moment, get in line, and meet il Maestro.

Once I was in the Presence, I was surprised to see how short he really is. When he is on stage, his voice and his personality made him larger than life, but that was merely an illusion. It was also so obvious that he was dying his eyebrows and beard dark, dark black, as though he wanted to avoid having to get another headshot taken, so he just changed himself to match the old photograph. He was quite patient and quite gracious as the endless fans all came to pay their respects and seek his signature. His staff had to encourage people to move along in the line and not monopolize his time. When it came time for me to greet him, he looked me up and down warily, then in his accented English said, "You sing?" I don't know how he would know to ask me that, but after my confession, he said, "Ah. Remember always to be to the music sincere."

Just a few hours ago, Pavarotti lost his battle with cancer. Today, no doubt, all the news agencies will offer retrospectives of his life and career, probably endlessly playing clips from "Nessun dorma" or "Che gelida manina." Certainly, he was the most important opera singer since Enrico Caruso, he was the modern opera superstar, he was the first cross-over musical artist, he was a leader in bringing opera to the American masses, he made "Nessun dorma" almost a household melody, he was the quintessential divo.

Calàf sings "none shall sleep," and ultimately declares that in his struggle with Princess Turandot, he will win—vincerò. Well, the cancer prevailed in this round with Pavarotti, but it didn't win. It didn't win at all, because that voice will live forever in the recordings and videos and the hearts and minds of all who heard and loved Luciano Pavarotti.

Resto nella pace, Luciano.

Gay history makes it to the Smithsonian

2007-08-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

In 1957, an astronomer working for the U.S. Army Map Service was fired for being homosexual. He pursed appeals and litigation to regain his job, but lost in an era when homosexuality was deemed to be "degeneracy" and something that made a person a security risk. That astronomer is Franklin Kameny, a Harvard Ph.D. and World War II Army veteran, who then launched a campaign to convince the U.S. Civil Service Commission to lift its ban on homosexuals in government service, a ban that was not lifted until 1975. In the meantime, Kameny became one of the most important gay civil rights leaders in the country, founding the Mattachine Society, an early gay activism group, and helping found the Gay Rights National Lobby, now known as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). He was one of the leaders in lobbying the American Psychological Association to remove homosexuality as a "mental illness" and the American Bar Association in establishing legal rights for homosexuals.

Last year, Dr. Kameny, who is now in his 90s, contributed his half century's worth of files and memorabilia on the struggle for gay civil rights to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and to the Library of Congress.

This morning, my RSS feed picked up a story from The Advocate announcing a new exhibition from the Frank Kameny Collection on display at the Smithsonian through the end of October. So, this afternoon, I decided to wander over to the Smithsonian to see the exhibit. And, I was disappointed.

The "exhibit" consisted of just two protest posters and three buttons. But, I suppose I should be happy that there is this much on display at the Smithsonian where thousands of tourists could see the words and maybe, just maybe, give some thought to the matter.

In another part of the museum, I ran across what was marked as a panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Unfortunately, the display did little to convey the enormous emotional impact—or purpose—of the Quilt. I don't know how many of you have ever seen portions of the quilt, but usually when I see it, panels are laid out in a way that entirely covers the floor of a gymnasium or convention center. Each panel was made by the family and friends of a victim of HIV, and offers a memorial to that person and his (or her) life and interests.

While at the museum, I had to visit the men's room. Interestingly, I was very self-conscious as to how wide my feet were apart in the stall, and then when someone came in and sat in the next stall, I became very concerned about not moving my toes—I'd changed into a pair of Birkenstocks before going to the museum, so they were very visible. Odd how current events have an impact on us, even in a museum with an exhibit on gay rights.

While I was in the neighborhood, I thought it would be comforting to visit a certain exhibit of those fundamental documents that provide our civil rights in this country, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, on display in very carefully constructed and controlled cases at the National Archives. They are getting very faded these days, especially the Declaration, but we all still know what they say and we have plenty of reproductions around. Nevertheless, it's always good to see the real thing.

Oh, thank God, it's the Mormons!

2007-08-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

Nearly fifty years ago, many in the country were asking whether or not John Kennedy could be trusted to be president of the United States because he was a Roman Catholic, and he might be subject to taking orders from the pope. This morning as I was sitting in St. Stephen's—a place where the Kennedy family often worshipped—I started thinking about that and the parallels of the current dilemma we have in the Republican Party with the upcoming 2008 presidential election.

What triggered this line of thinking is the fact that Friday night, we went to see the new movie September Dawn, the true story of how the Mormons in Utah slaughtered a group of 120 Arkansas pioneers on their way to California in 1857, and the "conspiracy theory" that orders for the massacre came from the highest levels of the Mormon Church, even from then-president Brigham Young himself.

Now, September Dawn purely as a movie wasn't really the best-made movie I've ever seen. Aside from some fine performances from Jon Voight as Bishop Samuelson and Terence Stamp as Brigham Young, the rest of the cast (mostly because of the script and direction) bounced between stilted and high school drama club. The movie was based on the few available details of the factual massacre, and the script writers took a great deal of artistic license to create a very predictable love story that dominated most of the movie, I guess to balance out the hard facts of church history, conspiring with the Indians, and killing men, women, and children. The editing is choppy, camera angles monotonous, and it was several minutes into the film and its jumping around from date to date that I finally figured out what was going on.

The one thing the movie did drive home, though, was the strong, controlling, dominating influence of religious fundamentalist fanasticism and what such zealots can do "in the name of God." Now, the Mormons certainly have no monopoly on fanaticism and murdering in the name of God. After all, the Catholics have been doing that for millennia (remember the Crusades? the Inquisition?), and the Protestants have continued it themselves for centuries (reformation wars, witch hunts, etc.). We're also seeing a lot of it these days with modern Muslims.

Fifty years ago, though, I would venture to say that most Catholics would be quick to question an order from the pope or some archbishop to go murder innocent people, and today in 2007, Catholics not only would question but would "tell them where to go." The papal control thing was never really a serious concern in 1960 with John Kennedy.

The Mormons, though, are completely another matter. Now, as a non-Mormon, I may not have all the details just right, but I think I understand the gist of things. I might also say that I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are Mormons, and I respect the family-centered commitment and uprightness of their church and membership, so I have no ax to grind against them. The Mormons have a president they believe is God's prophet on earth, and a high council of a dozen or so "apostles" they believe are also in direct communication with God. The Mormon Church is extremely hierarchical, with small, local groups being ruled by lay bishops who have pretty much absolute authority over the members of their wards. I know Mormons who have quit their jobs and moved to different towns to fulfill the orders of their bishop or higher church authorities, and others who have taken on volunteer positions or tasks even when they didn't really have time for them. Discipline and obedience are very highly prized standards in the Mormon Church. Certainly, they aren't the zealots they were in the mid-19th century and they don't go around killing their errant members anymore, but the rules and pressure for obedience are still there. And, thus, we have the source for the Republican's current dilemma: Mitt Romney.

If Governor Romney were to become President of the United States, if the highest councils of the Mormon Church were to tell him to do a particular thing, what would he do? Now, of course, Mr. Romney is going to say that he will fulfill his oath of office to the Constitution and to the People, and that will override anything the Mormon Church might want. Yet, what will really happen? I believe that even today, Mormons are acculturated to do what the church leadership tells them to do. If push comes to shove, my gut feeling is that Mr. Romney is going to do what his church tells him to do.

What is particularly interesting about the September Dawn movie is Governor Romney's ancestor's role in the massacre. His Mormon polygamist great-great-grandfather "stole" an Arkansas woman to make her one of his wives, but the woman's husband didn't take kindly to that, and killed the Romney progenitor. It is believed that revenge and "blood atonement" for his death was one of the primary motivators for the Utah massacre of the Arkansans. I hear that Governor Romney does not plan to see September Dawn.

There are many who are claiming that this movie was made solely for the purpose of embarrassing the Mormons and hindering Governor Romney's presidential campaign. I give that argument short shrift. The massacre is historical fact. Look at the date of the massacre, too: September 11, 1857. This is the sesquicentennial (a/k/a 150th anniversary) of the massacre. I hardly think that the Governor's detractors began planning this 150 years ago.

September Dawn isn't going to win any Academy Awards. It is a useful vehicle, though, to educate us about a sad chapter of American history and to remind us of the rules and traditions of a major religious organization in America. I don't believe the movie's purpose is to foment anti-Mormon sentiment or embarrass Romney any more than a movie about the 1507 historical incident when 30 "witches" were burned by the Spanish Inquisition would be anything more than a 500th anniversary observance of the event, and certainly not a movie attempting to drum up anti-Catholicism or embarrass the presidential campaign of Rudy Guiliani.

So, I take the movie on its face value. Release is pretty limited (it's only at one theater in all of Washington, D.C.!), so if its showing near you, consider seeing it, especially if you are unfamiliar with the Mormon Church. And, if you can't catch it this month, at least try to rent the DVD.

(By the way, the title of the post is a quote from the movie, when the Arkansans have been under siege and the Mormons show up to "help" them shortly before murdering all of them.)