Oslo

Managed to get to see the remarkable play, Oslo, at the Vivian Beaumont, Lincoln Center, when in New York last weekend. I had heard of two of the leads, Jefferson Mays and Jennifer Ehle, before but not much and not anything about the others in this excellent ensemble cast. The play is based on how two Norwegians with foreign policy backgrounds initiated and facilitated the talks between Israelis and Palestinians that led to the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.

Mays plays a policy think-tank head who has met leading Palestinians and Israelis through his contacts in the foreign policy world. One is the finance minister of the P.L.O. and the other is a right-hand man of Shimon Peres, the legendary Israeli politician who was described upon his death last year as the last of the Israeli founders.

He manages, with the help of his wife, an official in the Norwegian foreign ministry, to bring these Israelis and Palestinians to Norway to meet. (Later, when they warm to each other, they agree that it was a shame they had ended up meeting in Norway: "It's so cold!"). But his approach proves successful: he places the men in a room together and does not join them to facilitate, mediate, or try to drive a bargain. Instead, he wants them to speak directly to the other and he makes sure they are plied with superb local cooking
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It works. There are further meetings and eventually, Israel upgrades its representative and finally, a Washington lawyer is brought in to ice the deal in precise terms that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, will approve. Although it all seems likely to collapse at any moment, all persevere and the Oslo Accords are signed off by both sides, in Washington, despite the steady dismissal of the American efforts to broker a deal through traditional interventionist tactics.

The performances and the play are both top-notch. It is a thrilling experience to see this play which captures why this unusual event occurred. At the end, each character states what happened to him or her after the Accords were agreed to, and many had unfortunate ends. So did the Accords, rendered mostly ineffective when Israel's government turned to the right after the rightist assassination of Rabin.

Aside from its dramatic power, the play and its performers convince you of what might have been.

Explaining Schubert

I'm not sure Schubert is a composer you can explain but if you can, Rob Kapilow is the guy to do it. He presents a program for the Smithsonian here in D.C. entitled "What Makes It Great?" in which four times a year he takes apart a piece of music or a group of musical pieces. Last time (the first time) I heard him he was analyzing Cole Porter's songs. He showed how they are made up of amazing key transitions and all sorts of musical legerdemain. 

Sunday he devoted his program to Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in Two Movements, well-known as the "Unfinished Symphony" to the world. He had the Peabody Orchestra with him to play each phrase, or for parts of the orchestra to play the phrase, and then after his hour's lecture, he led them in playing the entire piece. As an added lagniappe, at the very end of the show, after a question-and-answer session, he led them in what is the only part of a projected third scherzo movement Schubert finished--the first 20 bars. The student players were magnificent.

In that these 20 bars added little, I tend to go along with Kapilow in concluding that even if he didn't intend to conclude the symphony after the first two movements, it turned out pretty well anyway. He actually didn't finish a lot of things he started, and the man died at 31. This was written about six years earlier. The two movements might just be the most melodic symphony ever composed.

I don't think any other composer came up with the incredible range of melodies that Schubert did. My other favorite is the Quintet in C for string quarter and an added cello. It is not unfinished. In fact, it is long and yet you don't feel it ever lags or is padded. And I'd love to hear Kapilow expound on what Schubert intended with the strange couple of notes at the end. There were so many questions about the Unfinished that asking one about the Quintet would have meant changing the subject.

His usual inspirations were the mixture of love and pain, according to Kapilow. These also of course are the ideas behind the lieder for which Schubert is also renowned. The lieder, like Winterreise, make the sorrows of young Werther seem mild by comparison. And he was enthralled by Beethoven, too. Yet he composed in his own inimitable style, which does pay some tribute tio Beethoven but is in no way repetitive or even derivative. Just glorious in his own particular way.

The Real Deal on the Piano

This week I went to a mid-week concert at Kennedy Center to see and hear the latest piano sensation, Daniil Trifonov. He's a Russian pianist in his mid-20s who has taken the world by storm. I first read about him only a month or two ago when he performed with the New York Philharmonic. We are lucky that major classical performers and orchestras often set up their tours to stop here, if only for a night, in between major stops like New York and Chicago.

My companion rightly observed that he abjured the usual Chopin and Beethoven in favor of a first half entirely of Schumann, followed by Shostakovich etudes and fugues and then three selections from Stravinsky's Petrouchka. The Schumann was a good starting point because it showed his capabilities in playing slow, romantic passages and then in a toccata, furious and fast emphatic traversal of the keys.

The Shostakovich was varied -- seven parts of Opus 87 -- and challenging, to the listener as well as the pianist. Again, he seemed to be in total command. His stage presence was perfect, clad in tails in which he actually look comfortable. He would come out, sit down, immediately begin to play, and then stand for the inevitable strong applause, and walk off. He would come back and resume promptly.

I enjoyed the Stravinsky the most, perhaps because I love the Petrouchka music, ever since I first saw Fokine's magnificent dance performed years ago by the Joffrey in New York. It is both warm and exciting. Reviews a day later accepted that he was outstanding and made small criticisms of some tempi and other minor points. Trifonov has already played with what seems to be an exhaustive list of the world's top orchestras and conductors. He is only likely to get better but he is already at an extremely high level.