Today's Times focused on outdoor theater in the arts section. One article recalled going to see productions of well-known musicals in the summer at theaters that were either outdoors or in less auspicious settings. The writer, one of the paper's theater critics, remembered when he was young, seeing shows like Gypsy with Angela Lansbury at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Devon, Pa.
That's a venue I recall well because I went there with my parents years and years ago in the 50's. It was where I first saw a production of South Pacific with good, second-level leads. My father was in that area checking out a film production located in Chester Springs, Pa., which is not much farther out near the Main Line. A director named Frank Perry was filming there--he had been well know for a time after he made David and Lisa. A rundown "resort" called the Allenberry was there and now I see ads for it, after it has apparently been renovated and is somewhat posh.
There were circuits of these summer musical theaters in those days. The Valley Forge one was one of the classier ones, run by some Philadelphia people and later expanded to theaters further up the East Coast. I think they originally started the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. All are gone now, although Westbury still hosts trendy pop bands.
An operator named St. John Terrell ran theaters in Lambertville, N.J., and Rye, N.Y. His shows were not quite as well cast as the Philly outfit's. Once when we were watching a production of Carousel at his Rye venue, they cut the Soliloquy from the end of the first act. Why? They needed more time at intermission for a fashion show.
Going to these and other summer theaters--the Times used to call them "the straw-hat circuit"-- was a great way to see a lot of classic musicals. Perhaps the last time I went to one was north of Boston near Route 128 where a theater-in-the-round, outdoors, presented Marlene Dietrich in what had to have been one of her last appearances, in the 1970s. She looked a little shaky but her voice and style were still pretty distinctive and worth hearing. She always kept her eyes totally focused on her conductor -- I'm sure he probably travelled with her, as was the case with Luciano Pavarotti when he made appearances on tour. I figured that she was afraid of losing track of everything if she lost that eye contact with her maestro.
When I was travelling through Vermont around 1974 and later in the 1970's, there was a chain of summer theaters where we caught plays. I remember that one playhouse was in Dorset, Vt. Usually they didn't have musicals, although those were popular, because it cost more to stage them. I recall seeing old chestnuts like George Kelly's The Show-off and George M. Cohan's Seven Keys to Baldpate. The latter was at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth.
The piece brought back lots of memories and made me feel we've lost something even before what we're enduring now. As the writer said, you could see a lot of shows for tickets that were priced under $9.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Streaming Opera--La Forza del Destino
The Met has been streaming a different opera every day--you can start listening at 7:30 P.M. but you have to watch it before 6:30 P.M. the next day (I think) when it disappears from the free category. I managed to listen to a classic 1984 performance a week or so ago of one of my favorite operas, Verdi's La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny.
It was conducted beautifully by James Levine, then in his prime as Music Director of the Met, and starred Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Giacomini, Leo Nucci, and Bonaldo Giaotti. The traditional sets were by Eugene Berman, who was best known for his production at the Met of Don Giovanni, which was on the boards there for decades. Everything clicked, right of course from the glorious start--one of the most famous overtures in all of opera--to the magnificent finish--Price as Leonora singing the great soprano aria Pace, pace, mi Dio.
Giacomini and Nucci as Dons Alvaro and Carlo, tenor and baritone, sang beautifully, especially the Act II and III duets. The plot, as with much of Verdi and opera generally, is nothing to merit much praise. But the whole cast did the libretto proud, as did Levine and the Met orchestra the music. Old Met hands like Bonaldo Giaotti as Padre Guardiano, Isola Jones as Preziosilla, and Anthony Lacira as Trabucco added verisimilitude to the story, which will always be a stretch at best, I didn't recall Enrico Fissore, who was Fra Melitone, but he too was excellent.
One of the factors that makes this a great opera is the way Verdi weaves his theme of destiny through the opera, He anticipated Wagner's use of the leitmotifs in The Ring some years later: La Forza premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. The melodrama begins right after that fabulous overture in an opening scene that sets the plot quickly and definitively but then e are in the Inn scene, which is a rollicking excursion into the full world of eighteenth-century Spain. Preziosilla and Trabucco, who cater to the wants of the strong drinking crowd, make their first appearance, and when we get to the second act, with everyone transported from Spain to Italy, where Alvaro and Carlo, unknown to each other, are battling on the same side--whichever it is--while Preziosilla and Travucco, hoined now by Fra Melitone, sell to what seems like a remarkably similar crowd that populated the inn in Spain.
We also have the rousing music of Rataplan launched by Preziosilla and picked up by the mob/chorus. Fra Melitone is the bad-tempered monk whose misanthropy (and probably misogyny) are held in check by Padre Guardiano who reacts as a good priest that he is to Leonora's plea for refuge and consignment to a distant mountain refuge as a hermit. Melitone returns to start the third act by berating the beggars to whom he is ungenerously ladling soup; the Padre arrives to chastise him gently and then to direct Alvaro to where his love Leonora has gone.
Carlo is one of the most obsessed crazies in opera as he pursues Alvaro--for all of Act Two until the very end he does not know that his firm fighting friend is really the man whom he has been seeking to murder as revenge for Alvaro's accidental shooting of Carlo and Leonora's father, the Marquis, in the first scene as Alvaro and Leonora were preparing (and taking too long) to make their getaway.
Alvaro and Carlo--Giacomini and Nucci--take out their swords in the opening of the last act and then Alvaro takes off to find Leonora. Carlo of course pursues him and after Price sings that fabulous aria, the opera ends in a classic bloodbath where two of the three perish.
There's wonderful contrasts in the opera--the somber tones of the Convent scene--sandwiched between the rollicking Inn and Camp Followers' settings. When I first saw La Forza at the Met, the delightful Inn scene had been cut. Levine restored it, I believe, which was an act of brilliance. The opera house had occasionally performed the Convent scene along with the Verdi Requiem as an alternative on Good Friday afternoon to the traditional Parsifal.
La Forza has never been as popular as some of the Verdi canon in the spectacular middle period that gave us Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, among others. But right from its mighty overture it is magnificent. I also watched much of Verdi's much less popular Luisa Miller, based on a Schiller play. It's a fine opera, but probably has languished as a lesser light in the Verdi firmament because it has few if any memorable arias. The Met did well by it, though, and I enjoyed seeing it all the way through.
It was conducted beautifully by James Levine, then in his prime as Music Director of the Met, and starred Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Giacomini, Leo Nucci, and Bonaldo Giaotti. The traditional sets were by Eugene Berman, who was best known for his production at the Met of Don Giovanni, which was on the boards there for decades. Everything clicked, right of course from the glorious start--one of the most famous overtures in all of opera--to the magnificent finish--Price as Leonora singing the great soprano aria Pace, pace, mi Dio.
Giacomini and Nucci as Dons Alvaro and Carlo, tenor and baritone, sang beautifully, especially the Act II and III duets. The plot, as with much of Verdi and opera generally, is nothing to merit much praise. But the whole cast did the libretto proud, as did Levine and the Met orchestra the music. Old Met hands like Bonaldo Giaotti as Padre Guardiano, Isola Jones as Preziosilla, and Anthony Lacira as Trabucco added verisimilitude to the story, which will always be a stretch at best, I didn't recall Enrico Fissore, who was Fra Melitone, but he too was excellent.
One of the factors that makes this a great opera is the way Verdi weaves his theme of destiny through the opera, He anticipated Wagner's use of the leitmotifs in The Ring some years later: La Forza premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. The melodrama begins right after that fabulous overture in an opening scene that sets the plot quickly and definitively but then e are in the Inn scene, which is a rollicking excursion into the full world of eighteenth-century Spain. Preziosilla and Trabucco, who cater to the wants of the strong drinking crowd, make their first appearance, and when we get to the second act, with everyone transported from Spain to Italy, where Alvaro and Carlo, unknown to each other, are battling on the same side--whichever it is--while Preziosilla and Travucco, hoined now by Fra Melitone, sell to what seems like a remarkably similar crowd that populated the inn in Spain.
We also have the rousing music of Rataplan launched by Preziosilla and picked up by the mob/chorus. Fra Melitone is the bad-tempered monk whose misanthropy (and probably misogyny) are held in check by Padre Guardiano who reacts as a good priest that he is to Leonora's plea for refuge and consignment to a distant mountain refuge as a hermit. Melitone returns to start the third act by berating the beggars to whom he is ungenerously ladling soup; the Padre arrives to chastise him gently and then to direct Alvaro to where his love Leonora has gone.
Carlo is one of the most obsessed crazies in opera as he pursues Alvaro--for all of Act Two until the very end he does not know that his firm fighting friend is really the man whom he has been seeking to murder as revenge for Alvaro's accidental shooting of Carlo and Leonora's father, the Marquis, in the first scene as Alvaro and Leonora were preparing (and taking too long) to make their getaway.
Alvaro and Carlo--Giacomini and Nucci--take out their swords in the opening of the last act and then Alvaro takes off to find Leonora. Carlo of course pursues him and after Price sings that fabulous aria, the opera ends in a classic bloodbath where two of the three perish.
There's wonderful contrasts in the opera--the somber tones of the Convent scene--sandwiched between the rollicking Inn and Camp Followers' settings. When I first saw La Forza at the Met, the delightful Inn scene had been cut. Levine restored it, I believe, which was an act of brilliance. The opera house had occasionally performed the Convent scene along with the Verdi Requiem as an alternative on Good Friday afternoon to the traditional Parsifal.
La Forza has never been as popular as some of the Verdi canon in the spectacular middle period that gave us Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, among others. But right from its mighty overture it is magnificent. I also watched much of Verdi's much less popular Luisa Miller, based on a Schiller play. It's a fine opera, but probably has languished as a lesser light in the Verdi firmament because it has few if any memorable arias. The Met did well by it, though, and I enjoyed seeing it all the way through.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Bloomsday at Home
Two years ago I was lucky enough to be in Dublin on June 16, Bloomsday--celebrated by Joyceans the world over as the day Ulysses was published, and it appeared on that day in 1922 because June 16 was when James Joyce first took Nora Barnacle out for a walk. So there was a Bloomsday Breakfast at the James Joyce Society, featuring a prok kidney of course and black and white pudding and even a few other things that Eileen would consider consuming. There were talks on Joyce and a tour of Joycean sights--7 Eccles St., Bloom's home--and Belvedere College, where Stephen Dedalus studied--were two. There was also a one-man, two-hour rendition of Ulysses in a pub basement. And we stayed at the Gresham, not quite as snazzy, I suspect, as when Gabriel and Gretta stayed there in The Dead.
This year, the annual reading of Ulysses I attended on June 16 occurred online. This reading covers a 111-page abridgement of the novel, and it started late. It took more than four hours--the whole book takes most of a day or more. I had attended this last year when it was at American University, but this year I had volunteered to read. I get a chance to read Joyce aloud on the first Thursday of every month at the meeting of the Capital James Joyce Group, now meeting online but otherwise at Politics & Prose, our locally-owned and operated bookstore.
Joyce is an author who benefits from being read aloud. He had a fine musical mind and ear, so the cadences of his prose gain in effect when heard. Although those of us assigned various sections attended a practice session a week previous, there were the usual technical problems that tend to occur at the start of every program requiring technology, both before and after the present situation.
Finally, we began. It hasn't taken too long for me to become very exhausted with meetings and lectures on Zoom, and this would have been no exception except that even the really dense parts of Ulysses are worth hearing and your comprehension is aided by each hearing. The high point of these annual readings is provided by Robert Aubrey Davis, who has been a classical music host on various DC radio stations. He always reads Chapter 3, Proteus, in which Stephen walks along Sandymount strand.
To describe the chapter so, however, is to miss the many, many other subjects, allusions, and references which fill this chapter. Most readers find it especially challenging because of its complexity but Mr. Davis brings a fine accented voice to the task of presenting this material in the best way. It is a delight and it was only unfortunate that he only read half the chapter because of the ongoing technical problems.
The other readers were a mixed bag: too many people make careless mistakes and others don't know how to pronounce words in languages other than English--Joyce spoke eight languages and uses many of them, only glancingly, but it all adds up. Place names are important, too--Howth, the north side of Dublin Bay, where Bloom proposed to Molly, is pronounced HOE-th, for example.
They finally got to me, for I was assigned two sections of Chapter 11, Sirens, which takes place in the hotel bar of the Ormond Hotel, which I remember walking past in central Dublin near Trinity College, but much of the south side of the Liffey is near Trinity College. Among Joyce's themes in this chapter is music, and traditional Irish songs are sung by the men in the barroom. The scene opens with the two barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, conducting their mostly oral sparring with the men--in 1904, they were the only women in the barroom. Bloom appears but remains apart from the group, partly because he sees Blazes Boylan present, whom he knows will be shortly having an assignation with Molly that afternoon.
This was a comparatively challenging chapter to read, and I felt I acquitted myself well. I enjoyed it, tried to get into the spirit of the text, and made good efforts to pronounce the occasional almost unpronounceable words Joyce includes to capture some sounds. I'm not sure everyone was familiar with the close of the chapter, where, timing it to the noise of a passing trolley car, Bloom on the street passes gas, I'm told my rendition was credible.
This year, the annual reading of Ulysses I attended on June 16 occurred online. This reading covers a 111-page abridgement of the novel, and it started late. It took more than four hours--the whole book takes most of a day or more. I had attended this last year when it was at American University, but this year I had volunteered to read. I get a chance to read Joyce aloud on the first Thursday of every month at the meeting of the Capital James Joyce Group, now meeting online but otherwise at Politics & Prose, our locally-owned and operated bookstore.
Joyce is an author who benefits from being read aloud. He had a fine musical mind and ear, so the cadences of his prose gain in effect when heard. Although those of us assigned various sections attended a practice session a week previous, there were the usual technical problems that tend to occur at the start of every program requiring technology, both before and after the present situation.
Finally, we began. It hasn't taken too long for me to become very exhausted with meetings and lectures on Zoom, and this would have been no exception except that even the really dense parts of Ulysses are worth hearing and your comprehension is aided by each hearing. The high point of these annual readings is provided by Robert Aubrey Davis, who has been a classical music host on various DC radio stations. He always reads Chapter 3, Proteus, in which Stephen walks along Sandymount strand.
To describe the chapter so, however, is to miss the many, many other subjects, allusions, and references which fill this chapter. Most readers find it especially challenging because of its complexity but Mr. Davis brings a fine accented voice to the task of presenting this material in the best way. It is a delight and it was only unfortunate that he only read half the chapter because of the ongoing technical problems.
The other readers were a mixed bag: too many people make careless mistakes and others don't know how to pronounce words in languages other than English--Joyce spoke eight languages and uses many of them, only glancingly, but it all adds up. Place names are important, too--Howth, the north side of Dublin Bay, where Bloom proposed to Molly, is pronounced HOE-th, for example.
They finally got to me, for I was assigned two sections of Chapter 11, Sirens, which takes place in the hotel bar of the Ormond Hotel, which I remember walking past in central Dublin near Trinity College, but much of the south side of the Liffey is near Trinity College. Among Joyce's themes in this chapter is music, and traditional Irish songs are sung by the men in the barroom. The scene opens with the two barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, conducting their mostly oral sparring with the men--in 1904, they were the only women in the barroom. Bloom appears but remains apart from the group, partly because he sees Blazes Boylan present, whom he knows will be shortly having an assignation with Molly that afternoon.
This was a comparatively challenging chapter to read, and I felt I acquitted myself well. I enjoyed it, tried to get into the spirit of the text, and made good efforts to pronounce the occasional almost unpronounceable words Joyce includes to capture some sounds. I'm not sure everyone was familiar with the close of the chapter, where, timing it to the noise of a passing trolley car, Bloom on the street passes gas, I'm told my rendition was credible.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
A Chance to Contemplate
There have been quite a few essays and columns written about the current pandemic but most cite the two greatest classic pieces about previous such occurrences: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus's La Peste (The Plague). The selections all appear appropriate to our situation even if I will confess I haven't read the originals, which always makes me reluctant to comment too much about them. (I have Camus's novel in French somewhere upstairs and I intend to find it today!)
This is the first time that I'm feeling that we may be experiencing a moment of the kind this country knew in World War II, when life as people knew it changed forever. What didn't change, though, was the return of narrow-minded behavior right after the war. I was born in the month when the war ended so I never really got to experience how people for the most part worked in concert for a change. But people were still driving their old prewar cars when I was very young and there were some signs like that of how people felt then that they were all in this together.
Living in Washington, of course, prevents me from getting rhapsodic about how people behave. The same craven lobbyists who operate here constantly peppered the stimulus package with gifts for the special interests. The Democrats did indeed make a terrible bill less terrible, but they didn't excise everything awful: the miserable Republicans were able to treat DC as a territory and thus cut its allowance of funds under the bill to half that of any state, many of which have fewer people than the District. The airlines got their bailout without having to eliminate their sheer greed displayed in the endless extra charges they have levied on travellers confined to ridiculously tiny seats--a condition that was superbly exposed last week by Columbia law Prof. Tim Wu in a N.Y.Times op-ed piece.
And the first thing the Kennedy Center did with its own earmark in the bill was decide not to use any of it to pay the National Symphony Orchestra players. On the plus side, Opera, the British magazine, sent out a list of operas being streamed by companies all over Europe and the Met is also making its recorded productions available for streaming. I do look forward to seeing a lot of worthy series on streaming television that I haven't bothered to watch until now.
Staying inside is indeed stultifying even if life-saving. We've gone for walks but I've decided to keep shopping trips to a minimum now. It seems too easy to make a wrong move and pay for it big time. I don't focus much here on politics but we are truly paying the price for our totally antidemocratic electoral system and our tolerance of malevolent and ignorant people in major leadership positions. Those who are skeptical of religion are certainly on point in fighting those who would elevate religion and wishful thinking above science in dealing with our crises.
This is the first time that I'm feeling that we may be experiencing a moment of the kind this country knew in World War II, when life as people knew it changed forever. What didn't change, though, was the return of narrow-minded behavior right after the war. I was born in the month when the war ended so I never really got to experience how people for the most part worked in concert for a change. But people were still driving their old prewar cars when I was very young and there were some signs like that of how people felt then that they were all in this together.
Living in Washington, of course, prevents me from getting rhapsodic about how people behave. The same craven lobbyists who operate here constantly peppered the stimulus package with gifts for the special interests. The Democrats did indeed make a terrible bill less terrible, but they didn't excise everything awful: the miserable Republicans were able to treat DC as a territory and thus cut its allowance of funds under the bill to half that of any state, many of which have fewer people than the District. The airlines got their bailout without having to eliminate their sheer greed displayed in the endless extra charges they have levied on travellers confined to ridiculously tiny seats--a condition that was superbly exposed last week by Columbia law Prof. Tim Wu in a N.Y.Times op-ed piece.
And the first thing the Kennedy Center did with its own earmark in the bill was decide not to use any of it to pay the National Symphony Orchestra players. On the plus side, Opera, the British magazine, sent out a list of operas being streamed by companies all over Europe and the Met is also making its recorded productions available for streaming. I do look forward to seeing a lot of worthy series on streaming television that I haven't bothered to watch until now.
Staying inside is indeed stultifying even if life-saving. We've gone for walks but I've decided to keep shopping trips to a minimum now. It seems too easy to make a wrong move and pay for it big time. I don't focus much here on politics but we are truly paying the price for our totally antidemocratic electoral system and our tolerance of malevolent and ignorant people in major leadership positions. Those who are skeptical of religion are certainly on point in fighting those who would elevate religion and wishful thinking above science in dealing with our crises.
Saturday, March 14, 2020
'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' and 'Emma'
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a well-conceived French pic that is well worth the effort to see. It won't be on the wide distribution circuit, nor will Emma, which is also worth seeing.
One has an all-French cast and the other an all-British one. Both are excellent. The French one is set in the 1770s at a massive castle house in Brittany, right on the sea. The two leads are a young woman about to be sent off to marry a rich husband in Italy and a slightly older woman who has been hired to paint the first lady without her catching on. It's sort of a wedding present for the bridegroom but also is being done to ensure that she shows up, because her sister opted out--of life--to skip her wedding.
Eventually she figures out what's going on but surprisingly, the two get on famously, in fact, more than that. Things definitely get intense between the two of them and they also befriend a servant girl who needs an abortion, so we also get to see the social crusaders of the day. Adèle Haenel is a lovely-looking actress who plays the bride, while Noémie Merlant is more "interesting looking."
I found the story worth following and the acting and directing were top-notch. The sex scene--there's only one brief one--is nicely done and hardly leering or offensive.
Emma is just the latest movie or miniseries based on a Jane Austen novel. Most of the critics recalled, as did I, that the best adaptation so far was the film Clueless, where Alicia Silverstone plays a California rich kid trying to remake her friend who's new to the high school so she can join the in crowd and find romance. Amy Heckerling, who directed the classic Fast Times at Ridgemount High, helmed that one.
Here we have a cast of good Brit performers who were all new to me since I haven't resided in the U.K. for too many years. Anya Taylor-Joy is the title character and she is delightful as the heart of the story and the picture. Johnny Flynn is Mr. Right and Callum Turner is Mr. Wrong. Taylor-Joy makes the lead believable as a 21-year-old who enjoys her privileged life but tries to help a less well-born friend find an upper-class husband.
The veteran Bill Nighy is, as always, an absolute delight as her hypochondriac father, and everyone else fits in nicely. Needless to say, the settings in English country houses are magnificent and a lot of Jane Austen's social satire comes through loud and clear.
I liked the music--a combo of lots of Mozart, one major Beethoven sonata, some Haydn, and lots of English folk tunes. The hapless vicar who gets into the plot as a would-be suitor when he isn't marrying others, played by Josh O'Connor, is a cross between the stiff Mr. Bliffel in Tom Jones and Rowan Atkinson's classic purveyor of malapropisms in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
One has an all-French cast and the other an all-British one. Both are excellent. The French one is set in the 1770s at a massive castle house in Brittany, right on the sea. The two leads are a young woman about to be sent off to marry a rich husband in Italy and a slightly older woman who has been hired to paint the first lady without her catching on. It's sort of a wedding present for the bridegroom but also is being done to ensure that she shows up, because her sister opted out--of life--to skip her wedding.
Eventually she figures out what's going on but surprisingly, the two get on famously, in fact, more than that. Things definitely get intense between the two of them and they also befriend a servant girl who needs an abortion, so we also get to see the social crusaders of the day. Adèle Haenel is a lovely-looking actress who plays the bride, while Noémie Merlant is more "interesting looking."
I found the story worth following and the acting and directing were top-notch. The sex scene--there's only one brief one--is nicely done and hardly leering or offensive.
Emma is just the latest movie or miniseries based on a Jane Austen novel. Most of the critics recalled, as did I, that the best adaptation so far was the film Clueless, where Alicia Silverstone plays a California rich kid trying to remake her friend who's new to the high school so she can join the in crowd and find romance. Amy Heckerling, who directed the classic Fast Times at Ridgemount High, helmed that one.
Here we have a cast of good Brit performers who were all new to me since I haven't resided in the U.K. for too many years. Anya Taylor-Joy is the title character and she is delightful as the heart of the story and the picture. Johnny Flynn is Mr. Right and Callum Turner is Mr. Wrong. Taylor-Joy makes the lead believable as a 21-year-old who enjoys her privileged life but tries to help a less well-born friend find an upper-class husband.
The veteran Bill Nighy is, as always, an absolute delight as her hypochondriac father, and everyone else fits in nicely. Needless to say, the settings in English country houses are magnificent and a lot of Jane Austen's social satire comes through loud and clear.
I liked the music--a combo of lots of Mozart, one major Beethoven sonata, some Haydn, and lots of English folk tunes. The hapless vicar who gets into the plot as a would-be suitor when he isn't marrying others, played by Josh O'Connor, is a cross between the stiff Mr. Bliffel in Tom Jones and Rowan Atkinson's classic purveyor of malapropisms in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Dorothea Lange photography and Repositioned MOMA Collection
Managed to take in a preview of a new show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring the photography of Dorothea Lange. She was a photographer who shot scenes all over the country but especially in down-and-out places during the Depression in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl and other similar locales. Her work reminded me of Walker Evans and some of her photos are just as famous--one in particular called Migrant Mother was featured in the New York Times.
The show has been put together very deftly. Different walls are devoted to different phases of her career. As usual, problems in seeing the photos are significant--even at a members' preview, the crowd was making getting close to many items difficult. And it's always hard to read the descriptive panels. But enough griping. It is a terrific exhibit and if you get to MOMA, you should definitely take the time to see it. I suspect it's one of those exhibits that if you go starting in its second week, it may be far easier to get close to everything.
The reinstalled permanent collection at the museum is magnificent, as one would expect. The first room has versions of Munch's The Scream, Van Gogh's Starry Night, several Cezannes, and work by Gauguin, Mondrian, Henri Rousseau, and Vuillard. Many pictures are placed with others that may come from a different style and time, but the contrasts are fascinating. I happen to get a charge out of seeing the Italian Futurists, of whose work MOMA has a good sampling. I even spotted a Severini out in the hall as you come off the escalator and a familiar (from previous visits) golden Boccioni sculpture beckoned from across a gallery.
The show has been put together very deftly. Different walls are devoted to different phases of her career. As usual, problems in seeing the photos are significant--even at a members' preview, the crowd was making getting close to many items difficult. And it's always hard to read the descriptive panels. But enough griping. It is a terrific exhibit and if you get to MOMA, you should definitely take the time to see it. I suspect it's one of those exhibits that if you go starting in its second week, it may be far easier to get close to everything.
The reinstalled permanent collection at the museum is magnificent, as one would expect. The first room has versions of Munch's The Scream, Van Gogh's Starry Night, several Cezannes, and work by Gauguin, Mondrian, Henri Rousseau, and Vuillard. Many pictures are placed with others that may come from a different style and time, but the contrasts are fascinating. I happen to get a charge out of seeing the Italian Futurists, of whose work MOMA has a good sampling. I even spotted a Severini out in the hall as you come off the escalator and a familiar (from previous visits) golden Boccioni sculpture beckoned from across a gallery.
Monday, February 10, 2020
'The Mother of Us All'
There aren't too many opportunities to get to see a production of the three operas by composer Virgil Thomson, who was also a highly-regarded critic in an age when such conflicts of interest were not regarded as problems. So this past Saturday, an unusual combination of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, and the Julliard School of Music presented a semi-staged version of Thomson's 1947 opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, in the Engelhard court which is located in front of the old Subtreasury building facade that once stood at Wall and Broad, but now fronts the American Wing of the Met.
The space was set up with a raised stage that stood amid three banks of folding wooden chairs for viewers. Surtitles were flashed on a well-suited space in the colonade around the court and pictures were flashed with major points on the front of the Subtreasury facade. Felicia Moore was the excellent soloist who portrayed Susan B. Anthony, and the many other parts, ranging from John Adams to Ulysses S. Grant were filled by Julliard students. A half-dozen Philharmonic musicians, dominated by the trumpeter, provided the orchestral component.
Thomson's music was most enjoyable. He used techniques that Charles Ives was employing--drawing on American patriotic songs, folk music, and marches among many other influences. The plot, if it can be called that, was hard to follow because it was disjointed and mixed real and fictional characters. (Images of many of the characters were flashed up on the facade and identified as appropriate "Real" or "Fictional".) But what would you have expected from the famed avant-gardist who wrote it, Gertrude Stein?
She also had provided the libretto for Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which had been written twenty years earlier in 1927-28. The Mother of Us All did win praise from many--an example comes from Opera News in 2013, regarding a Manhattan School of Music production:
"The opera remains riveting, too, in the lightness and wit of its approach to serious themes such as the struggle for women's suffrage. Preaching would soon pall, but Stein's playfulness, surprises and absurdities, like the Mozartean clockwork of so much of Virgil Thomson's all-American music, have a tonic effect, especially in their ability to keep the listener off guard."
The opera was originally produced at Columbia University, but later was presented (in this century) by the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera.
It did not drag and I found myself wanting to know more about the long life and career of Susan B. Anthony, who lived to be 86 and died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the vote went into effect.
The space was set up with a raised stage that stood amid three banks of folding wooden chairs for viewers. Surtitles were flashed on a well-suited space in the colonade around the court and pictures were flashed with major points on the front of the Subtreasury facade. Felicia Moore was the excellent soloist who portrayed Susan B. Anthony, and the many other parts, ranging from John Adams to Ulysses S. Grant were filled by Julliard students. A half-dozen Philharmonic musicians, dominated by the trumpeter, provided the orchestral component.
Thomson's music was most enjoyable. He used techniques that Charles Ives was employing--drawing on American patriotic songs, folk music, and marches among many other influences. The plot, if it can be called that, was hard to follow because it was disjointed and mixed real and fictional characters. (Images of many of the characters were flashed up on the facade and identified as appropriate "Real" or "Fictional".) But what would you have expected from the famed avant-gardist who wrote it, Gertrude Stein?
She also had provided the libretto for Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which had been written twenty years earlier in 1927-28. The Mother of Us All did win praise from many--an example comes from Opera News in 2013, regarding a Manhattan School of Music production:
"The opera remains riveting, too, in the lightness and wit of its approach to serious themes such as the struggle for women's suffrage. Preaching would soon pall, but Stein's playfulness, surprises and absurdities, like the Mozartean clockwork of so much of Virgil Thomson's all-American music, have a tonic effect, especially in their ability to keep the listener off guard."
The opera was originally produced at Columbia University, but later was presented (in this century) by the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera.
It did not drag and I found myself wanting to know more about the long life and career of Susan B. Anthony, who lived to be 86 and died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the vote went into effect.
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