Saturday, March 16, 2024

Glenstone and The Holdovers

Had a wonderful time today on my first visit to Glenstone, the art museum set in a sprawling grassy and woodsy large expansive setting out in Montgomery County, Maryland. There's a number of large outdoor pieces by Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, and quite a few others. The two buildings complement each other. The Pavilions are about a dozen large- and small-room galleries with a beautiful central pool that has grasses along the sides and a nice deck to sit out on. 

An Ellsworth Kelly retrospective was the featured exhibition covering his whole and varied career. Other rooms featured many different contemporary painters and sculptors. The Gallery was a more traditional design with an exhibit called Iconoclasts that had many well-known moderns--Calder, DeKooning, Pollock, Krasner, Yves Klein, Franz Kline, and many others. Two nice places for coffee and lunch--the Patio is outdoors and the Cafe indoors. Nice walks all around and between the installations and buildings.

Watched The Holdovers on streaming channel and thoroughly enjoyed it. Paul Giamatti is one of the most consistently superb actors who is on scene for the whole picture. His character is somehow likeable despite being deeply cynical and somewhat mean to his students at a classic New England prep school. He opens up when he's stuck staying at school over the Christmas holiday with a few students who also have no place to go home to. 

The settings are beautiful, of course--New England in the winter--and a trip to Boston allows some nice shots of familiar and other places there. Good performances by everyone but Giamatti holds the pic together in fine fashion. He was put up for the Best Actor Oscar but it was clear that that was the recognition he would get, not the Oscar; he's deserved one for many of his film performances.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

La Forza del Destino at the Met in HD

The matinee yesterday of La Forza del Destino was magnificent. I saw it in a movie house that carries The Met in HD series. I wanted to see it because this is an opera I love, for the music and singing. It is as good in those respects as any Verdi opera, beginning with the overture which is probably the best of any of Verdi's and is often played on its own by orchestras. The outstanding conductor was the Met's current Music Director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who also conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra and produced an immaculate musical rendition.

This performance was a chance to see the Met's new production, the first in 30 years and apparently the first series of performances in 20 years. It's hard to believe that it's been that long. The Met used to put this opera on frequently. Some of the Met worthies interviewed during the intervals claimed that it was the need for several great singers that caused the lengthy hiatus.

If so, Lise Davidsen, our Leonora, is the answer to the prayers of  lovers of La Forza. The Norwegian soprano has conquered many of the world's greatest opera stages in the past couple of years, and now she has added something, something wonderful, from the Italian repertory to her triumphs with Wagner and Richard Strauss. She has a lovely clear tone and can ascend to any note without any straining. In the opening scene, her formal dress was not as flattering as the trench coat and hermit's robe she wore in subsequent scenes. I'd have been satisfied whatever she wore, but she is a handsome woman who looked good in the coat and robe.

Her Pace, pace mia Dio near the end of the opera conjured up memories of hearing Leontyne Price, who loved this opera, sing the great concluding aria. She has already sung the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and next season will perform the title role in Tosca.

 I was not familiar with the rest of the cast, but that just is evidence of the few operas I've seen or hard in the past years of the pandemic. Tenor Brian Jagde as Don Alvaro started out a bit cold in the opening scene--he's only on stage then for 10 minutes--and would not appear for another hour after both the Inn and Convent scenes. He shone in his duets with Igor Golovatenko, the baritone who was a superb Don Carlo, one of the most revenge-fueled characters in all of opera. He reminded me of the wonderful Siberian baritone of only a few years ago, Dmitri Hvorostovsky. 

Patrick Carfizzi was an effective grouchy Melitone, if not particularly oriented toward the basso buffo comedic side of the role. With his gray brush cut, though, he was a perfect figure of a priest. Judit Kutasi was an entertaining Preziosilla (mezzo), although her Rataplan somehow didn't pack the punch this lighter interlude usually provides in the middle of the opera. It may have been the paucity of her camp followers in the scene when she sings that catchy number that limited the impact of the scene.

Soloman Howard, a young and very formidable bass, was cast both as Padre Guardiano and Leonora's father, the Marquis of Calatrava. I especially enjoyed his deep tones as the Padre and felt that having him return in the closing scene as the father was totally wrong-headed. The new production is set in today's world, which is not an easy thing to do with a plot and libretto that are extremely unbelievable even for opera. Mostly, it worked as most productions of truly great operas usually do. The crazy libretto, however, may have kept the Met from reviving La Forza for so many years. It was fun to see everyone in the cast included in the closing (and only) curtain call.

I think the relatively short run at the Met, which began in late February and now is either finished or nearly so, reflected a fear that so many opera people are unfamiliar with this fine middle-period Verdi stalwart. They shouldn't have worried, at least about attendance at the opera house, because Ms. Davidsen undoubtedly is already a huge draw. I was disappointed that the theater where I saw the opera, in Ballston in Arlington, Va., was not at all packed. Previously, meaning four or five years ago, this theater was full for the Met offerings. Probably the lingering fears, especially of older patrons, diminished the size of th audience. 

I had contemplated going to New York but will admit that ticket prices, along with travel costs, militated against the trip. The production by itself would win no plaudits, but just seeing and hearing the opera is worth any price of admission. This opera was often onstage during the golden Met years in the 20s and 30s with Rosa Ponselle and many other storied sopranos taking the leading role, along of course with th great Leontyne Price.



Sunday, January 7, 2024

Bad Days for the Establishment

The parlous situation in which Harvard found itself over the past weeks probably found many observers exhibiting a full dose of schadenfreude--pleasure at seeing the oldest and probably most prestigious American university roasted over the coals of truly bad publicity. After its governing body, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, known as the Harvard Corporation, had stood behind the university president, Claudine Gay, when she and the presidents of MIT and Penn had fallen into a trap before a Congressional committee intent on taking them down and using the schools' weak response to anti-Semitism on their campuses as a means of attack, it was getting harder for the governing board to keep supporting Gay.

They had named a special committee to investigate some charges of plagiarism by the president. As expected, this inquiry cleared her. But further allegations of plagiarism or miscitation or no citation kept dribbling out. This, more than the concentrated attacks from major donors and right-wing agitators, made the board increasingly unwilling to keep backing the president as it seemed she was digging herself deeper each day. 

It's likely that the Harvard Corporation had resisted the pressure initially because of the Harvard attitude that it didn't take direction from outsiders, and especially not from politicians, such as the Congresswoman who had shown up the three presidents and was herself a Harvard graduate. This is the university where, long ago, when a caller asked to see the then-president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, his secretary responded, "The President has gone to Washington to see Mr. Taft."

Harvard seems to have had little experience in crisis management. A large portion of the faculty had registered its support of President Gay. But it would appear that no one on the governing board or its staff had taken the time to explore with Gay whether there was more to the plagiarism charges. There was. Thus the Corporation was caught in the worst kind of posture: more charges and evidence dribbling out when they had thought they had doused the fire.

This turn of events also diminished the Corporation's reliance on Harvard's long-established hauteur. Unlike most institutions, Harvard's natural response to anyone criticizing the university was to ignore allegations as beneath its dignity even to respond. Since the charges didn't go away even after the Corporation had initially cleared Gay and reiterated its support, the rarely challenged Corporation had no place to go but to fold.

It now appears that Gay was told to get her resignation statement ready and the Corporation prepared its own announcement. Fortunately for the governing board, a qualified Provost was on hand to serve as interim President. When the leading critics--representing right-wingers and major donors--were savoring their victory, a counterattack was launched at MIT, whose leader, the third president at the hearing, had withstood pressure to resign. It turned out that an MIT academic who was the wife of one of the loudest major donors had been accused of plagiarism similar to what Gay had been accused of, and had apparently skated through the inquiry.

The donor responded by promising to launch a plagiarism investigation of the MIT President and just about everyone on the faculty at the school. This may have been an unwise feint in that it seems inevitable that any such inquiry would take time--presumably the donor could afford the significant cost--and would likely result in all kinds of difficult cases that inevitably arise in this area of academic misbehavior. The institutions could hold out while this fishing expedition searched through huge amounts of paper, all of which would need to be evaluated.

Lastly, the defense of free speech offered by the three presidents at the hearing was vitiated by the sorry history of the institutions' hypocrisy. They insisted that statements favoring genocide and that were thus anti-Semitic might not be held violations of the schools' conduct codes unless the speech became conduct. This is an admittedly complex area but the schools were defending free speech after coming down hard on those faculty members who resisted such requirements as using a student's preferred pronouns.


 

 


Sunday, December 24, 2023

Two Irish Plays Worth Seeing

 Last weekend we enjoyed Brian Friel's terrific play, Translations, at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York. For me, it was a special treat, in that I had just completed a four-play course led by Chris Griffin, who taught Irish lit at George Washington Univ., and presented by our independent bookstore, Politics & Prose, in which this Friel play was the final one we read and discussed. Somehow I'd never seen one of his plays and now I know what I've missed. The Irish Repertory Theatre will be doing two more, including his first big success on Broadway, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, this spring as part of their Friel Project.

The play is set in 1833 in Donegal, which is in some parts further north in Ireland than Northern Ireland. The Brits--their army--are documenting and Anglicizing place-names; most of the locals have nothing to do with another exercise of the colonial power but one man who's made a success in Dublin comes back to serve as their translator and interpreter. As he becomes friendlier with the young British officer who is the cartographer, he fails to see that this will not end well.

It's a well-crafted play that allows the audience (and readers) to consider the implications of what each of the characters is conveying. The performances are excellent and their accents impeccable. Friel grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland, and was present on Bloody Sunday there during "the Troubles".

Today we saw Conor McPherson's The Seafarer at Round House in Bethesda. This drama features five men--no women--all of whom are hanging on in a house where the only consistent activity is drinking. The first act was tedious and at least one friend had told us that she departed at the intermission. I'm glad we resisted doing that because the second act turned everything around and presented a clever dramatic conflict, with all five roles playing important parts.

It was amazing to see how the play came to life. You immediately begin to appreciate how each man fits into the drama. They all perform well and unlike the first act, you don't find yourself wondering when the act will end. McPherson also throws in some nice curveballs to heighten the impact. It was definitely worth coming back after the interval.



Monday, December 4, 2023

The Promised End at Source Theater

No, I'm not reporting the demise of the Source Theater on 14th Street. This was an IN Series production presented there which we took in last Saturday night. You might say that it was an interesting idea to combine Shakespeare's King Lear with Verdi's Requiem. As it turned out, the Requiem fared better, in my view, than Lear. 

The stage was a group of chairs and benches, with vertical rods running down the middle across the stage. There were eight singers--four men and four women--all with excellent voices covering the full range. There's also a narrator who also plays the parts of both Verdi and Lear at various times, mostly from a simple reading stand more than a lectern.

The singing is superb. The lower men's voices, bass and baritone in particular, added beauty to the performance of the Requiem that the eight singers carry on throughout the performance. The women singers were equally excellent. The narrator, played by Nanna Ingvarsson, projected a commanding figure but had the most difficult role because her task included telling something about the lives of both Verdi and Shakespeare, as well as tying the music to the words of the play, King Lear.

Ingvarsson was often overwhelmed by the sound of eight opera singers going all out. She was able to portray in some fashion the great dramatic points in Lear, which is often described as the peak of Shakespeare's output. Much of her presentation, however, was lost amid the huge sound of the Requiem singers and accompaniment. The performance early on emphasized Verdi's life and career, including singing from offstage of his famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Babylon, Va Pensiero, from Nabucco, which became the Italian national anthem.

To me, this was an example of "seemed like a good idea at the time" although I found the fine singing of the Requiem was enthralling. I've seen Lear performed as its own play and will attest to its greatness, but it is not in any way nor should it be a light three hours at the theater. This production ran for about 80 minutes and there was effusive applause at the end, for the singers, who were wonderful, and for the narrator, perhaps because of the superhuman task she was set and attempted bravely to accomplish.


Sunday, September 3, 2023

Ink: Rupert at the Round House

James Graham's play, Ink, traces the first year of Rupert Murdoch's campaign to conquer the British media world. It begins with his hiring Larry Lamb, an overlooked editor whose Yorkshire background apparently prevented him from scaling the climb to the highest media editorial aeries in London. The play shows the callow Australian seeking to transplant his method for building an editorial behemoth Down Under. 

Murdoch mouths lines about giving people what they want, making newspapers fun, and being a disrupter--in this case of the Establishment which dominated the British media. Lamb proceeds to hire the most able people he knows to grow The Sun from a minor broadsheet to the highest-circulation paper in the world, now as a tabloid. It's sex, scandal, and giveaways all round.

We get an inkling of how dangerous Murdoch will be (and now has been, at 90) to our society and democracy. He gradually insinuates his antilabor, pro-Tory beliefs into the paper. He urges Lamb to break out of all traditional journalistic guidelines and then disclaims responsibility when things blow up. But like him or not, we see how he proceeded to take over The Times [London], The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, while creating the Fox network and other TV channels worldwide.

The acting by all the players is excellent; it's hard to single any one or two out because the ensemble works beautifully. However, Craig Wallace as the reigning media monarch dethroned by Murdoch is superb; his versatility was demonstrated when I saw him as Louis Armstrong a few years ago at the Mosaic Theater Company at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

This show runs longer than the specified two-and-one-half hours (with intermission). It's a co-production of Round House and the Olney Theater Company. Before the performance on Sept. 2, a panel moderated by the Post's Peter Marks considered the implications of Murdoch on both the media and democracy. The outstanding contributions were made by Michael Steele, now a commentator on MSNBC but former Republican National Chair and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. 

My major difference with the panelists, particularly Jummy Olabangi of NBC4, was their acceptance of the idea that those who manage local TV news perform a largely objective service of presenting fact-based news. Their coverage, in my view, focuses principally on crime and creates an environment where one might conclude that crime is more rampant than ever, with consequent political demands for more stringent administration of justice. Murders have gone up in D.C., but as with other metro areas, crime as a whole has declined. 

The play moves nicely with good backdrops of headlines and sets focusing on adjoining multi-desk newsrooms and conversations  of two at fancy dinner tables. The first act focuses on the process by which The Sun builds up its circulation and the second act examines the results. All in all, it was a rewarding theatrical evening.





Thursday, July 13, 2023

An Enigmatic Brilliant Classmate

In the summer 2023 issue I received online today, the alumni bulletin of the law school from which I graduated, Harvard, reported the death last autumn (2022) of a classmate, Covert E. Parnell III, whom I cannot say I knew well but whose company I had now and then enjoyed while there.  Pete was an unusual guy, even if his resume was classic top-of-the-line HLS.

He was born and grew up in Alabama, attended Birmingham Southern College, and graduated magna from Harvard Law. Then he clerked for a respected judge on the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Francis Van Dusen, followed by service as one of the last clerks for Justice Hugo Black. When Black died while Pete was his clerk, the incoming justice, another Southerner, Lewis Powell, kept him on.

Pete always said that Black had hired him because he was a decent tennis player, always rumored to be a requirement to be a law clerk for the justice, who played frequently into his old age. Pete's being an Alabaman can't have hurt him either, as Black was partial to brilliant law grads from his home state. This was despite the prevalence of dislike, to put it mildly, for Black in Alabama because of his individual but generally progressive views (even though he'd been a Klan member in his youth): "Hugo Black used to run around in white robes scaring black people; now he wears black robes and scares white people" was the derogatory line about Black in the South.

He had been a Senator from Alabama during the New Deal and was FDR's first nominee to the Court, in 1937; Roosevelt had not had the opportunity to appoint a justice to the Court which had been striking down his legislation for his whole first term. Black was named after the collapse of Roosevelt's attempt to expand the Court so as to outvote the conservatives dominating the Court. It was felt that the safest political path was to nominate a sitting Senator.

It shouldn't be surprising that law came easily to Pete. Powell undoubtedly kept him on because everyone who knew Pete was impressed by both his brilliance and his charm. When I ran into him sometime later, I asked him about a clerk who served at the time he did and was well-known. In Pete's view, he was a "cottonhead". Pete became a partner in a major Los Angeles firm only five years out. This was quite uncommon, then and now, and I suspect he was the first member of our class to become a partner in a major law firm.

I lost track of him and so, apparently, did most of my classmates. I checked out the firm listing once when I was going to be in LA and he was gone. Several years later, I was at some legal gathering and found myself introduced to a young woman who was at Pete's old firm. Without getting very specific, something lawyers are very good at, she indicated to me that he had gone through some kind of crack-up and that as far as she knew, he was living in some nondescript part, of which there are many, of the LA metro area. She had no idea what he was doing. "He was the brightest, nicest lawyer I've ever known," she observed.

His obits all said he had been the lawyer for Home Savings and then on the executive team at H.F.Ahmanson & Co., which owned Home Savings. He then was a name partner in what was apparently a small firm and also served as executive director or chair of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. He retired and lived in Rancho Mirage, Calif., for the last 21 years of his life.

There's more of a story there. I say that because the obit referred to both his partner of many years, who is male, and also to a son. He appears to have been active in the Church of St. Paul in the Desert, which is in Palm Springs.  He became an inactive member of the California bar in 1997, only four years before he retired completely.

It's possible to suggest all sorts of suppositions about his life based on the scant evidence I've had access to. Yet, his story reminds me of the title character in Calvin Trillin's memoir, Remembering Denny. Trillin set out to learn what had become of a Yale classmate whom he admired for his easy disarming way and charm that appeared to guarantee a successful life. While Denny had achieved outward success as an academic and in government, following his time as a Rhodes Scholar, it turned out that he had demons of his own. He had a series of false starts in his career, and despite his accomplishments as a professor, had  committed suicide at 55.

In a review of Trillin's book, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluded: "At the end of Remembering Denny, the author recalls how one of Denny's more recent acquaintances 'seemed offended when I referred to Denny as an old friend.' He said, 'Roger would have said that you didn't know him at all.' Mr. Trillin replied, 'I couldn't agree with you more.'"