Why the New York trip?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wedding singer

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

Xmas in New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?