Category: Reviews – Music Theatre

High Mountain Flowing Water – theatre, poetry and music

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Dong Fei - dancer | Gao Ping - piano | Wu Na - Qin | Evan Li - photographer

The Confucius Institute, Victoria University, Wellington, presents:
High Mountain Flowing Water (Gao Shan Liu Shui)

An ancient Chinese tale with guqin, piano and Kunqu opera
Music-drama settings of poetry ancient and modern

Gao Ping – piano
Dong Fei – actor/singer/dancer
Wu Na – guqin (qin)

Director: Sara Brodie
Visual design: Jon He
Text arrangement: Luo Hui
Production curated by Jack Body

Massey Concert Hall, Wellington

Wednesday, 22nd October, 2014

Encounters with exotic art-forms and performance-styles which are unfamiliar can have profound consequences – one thinks, for instance of the effect upon the composer Claude Debussy of the Paris International Exhibition of 1889 with its displays of art and music from places like Java, in particular the sounds made by the gamelan orchestra. Earlier the prints of Japanese artists such as Hokusai had reached Europe and inspired a whole generation of French and English painters to emulate the characteristics of Japanese art, an influence that extended to the art-nouveau movement of the early twentieth century. It was the sheer novelty and force of an encounter with a new tradition which both delighted creative people and caused simultaneous havoc with Euro-centrist sensibilities – and the process dealt a long-overdue body-blow to the hegemony of those over-familiar western traditions, a revitalization whose effects are still felt in artists’ work everywhere today.

Of course, even in the here-and-now one doesn’t have to be a creative artist to be shaken up by encounters with other cultures and their art-forms. In fact, such occasions can return the humblest of beholders to the tremulous realms of formative experience, no matter how seasoned or experienced a “normal” event-goer she or he might be. So it was with me at the Massey University Concert Hall on this particular evening, sitting amid the steeply-raked rows in darkness as if suspended mid-air, watching and listening to the work of the three on-stage performers, presenting an ancient Chinese tale “High Mountain Flowing Water”. The chiaroscuro of darkness and light powerfully focused my attentions upon the performers, and transformed my sensibilities at certain moments into those of a child’s, enabling the full force of delight and wonderment to flood through my opened doors and windows and set me awash with that precious excitement of reimagined reality, cut adrift from all expectation save for the unexpected.

For this was something quite out of the ordinary – a retelling of an ancient legend concerning a musician and a woodcutter, and what passes between them via the musician’s playing of the guqin (or, simply “qin”), an ancient Chinese 7-string zither-like instrument. It’s really an exploration of transference of understanding and empathy, using acts of music-making and -listening as metaphors for the process. Taking part in this theatrical retelling of a musical friendship, which the accompanying program note called “the shared spirit of understanding” was pianist Gao Ping, whose music is well-known to New Zealand audiences, having for a while been resident in this country, alongside Wu Na, an acknowledged “young master” of the qin, on which she was performing for the first time in New Zealand with this production.

With these two musicians was an actor/dancer/singer Dong Fei, an exponent of Chinese Kunqu opera, and who specializes in the traditional “Nan Dan” kind of operatic roles – those in which a male actor performs female characters. A sometimes collaborator with Wu Na in productions in China, he too was making his New Zealand debut with this presentation. His fully theatrical and exquisitely-appointed role, that of characterizing through speech, song and movement the full force of rapport between the cultured musician and the simple, intuitive woodcutter, made a profound impact of contrast with the austere, relatively neutral figures of both musicians, who spoke almost entirely through the sounds of their instruments.

The production was directed by Sara Brodie, whose stage-work I had encountered a matter of days previously in an entirely different theatrical context, that of “Don Giovanni” at Wellington’s St.James Theatre. “High Mountain Flowing Water” was certainly a different world, more in scale with works I had seen her direct in similarly confined places (Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Victoria University Memorial Theatre, and “Kreutzer Sonata” at Bats’ Theatre, for example), but still removed in a sense of style, gesture, language, music and overall ambience. Of course, the very human emotions displayed by the characters in the Chinese story had something of that universality with which one could readily connect, even if certain of the nuances remained, to an extent, behind a mask. As with learning a new language, literal meaning goes only so far – deeper currents of expression take longer to explore and even longer to understand.

What mattered most was that I was, along with others I spoke to afterwards, entranced by what I saw and heard. I’ve already mentioned the hypnotic effect of the lighting, which used simplicity and suggestiveness to direct our attention towards the significant places at which the drama unfolded, note by note, gesture by gesture, movement by movement, and silence by silence. From the very beginning a sense of ritual was all-pervading – a performer (Gao Ping) entering and making the motions of washing hands, after which came the sounding of a soft bell as a kind of summons or invocation, as much a sense of an unseen presence as anything else. Gao Ping the sat at the piano and played Ravel-like figurations which led beautifully into the first section of the work, Landscape, featuring three poems whose words described the scene and introduced its main players.

The English words of the poems were projected onto a screen as Gao Ping played – delicate and evocative at first, the music occasionally stepped outside its ritualistic mode, plunging for a short time into agitation and anxiety before recovering its poise and introducing a costumed figure turning around in the darkness as if free-falling in space, then transfixing us with his “Xiao Dan” (young female) falsetto voice, singing the poem’s words, which firstly describe the ambient world of the music-making and -listening rituals performed by the two friends – “Beyond the bamboo, the plane trees are dry….” the vocalizing haunting, with sharp timbres and a wide vibrato. This was Dong Fei, whose appearance was the stuff of dreams, a kind of exotic angel come down to earth, his arms fluttering like wings with the movements augmented by wondrously long sleeves, to almost hallucinatory effect.

Dong Fei spoke in his normal voice the words of the second poem (I confess, for me not as interestingly as with his “Xiao Dan” tones!), which characterized the stillness of the outside world and the tremulousness of the rapport between the seven strings of the gaqin, and the readiness of the ears and the heart of the player to explore the timeless quality of music-making – “The heart quiets the sound – in it, no difference between now and then….”. With the entry of the qin-player Wu Na, the dramatis personae lineup was completed – the words of the poem filled out the symbolism – “The qin player sits, resembling the qin: the listener the strings….” We sensed a moment of readiness, and it came with the first notes of the qin, making us even more aware of the concentrated focus of the player and the stillness of both singer/dancer and pianist/listener, as the instrument played its spacious, meditative music.

And so the stage was set for the extraordinary unfolding, via music from both qin and piano, and music with poetry from the singer/dancer, conveying the story – firstly the communion of playing and listening – “Not until today do I hear music….”, followed by the realization of the musician that his quintessential artistic partner has died – “My heart gone, without a trace / Tears pour down like rain….”, and most affectingly, the wordless (but still graphic) breaking of the qin and its strings, a gesture of existentialist despair, which an epilogue attempts to interpret in a more cosmic context of continuation.

My notes, scribbled in the dark, the phrases criss-crossed and overscored, tell me only of fragments of impressions along the way of this journey, frustrating to now try and decipher. What I remember are things like the gentle dance-like music from the qin in the “Not until today do I hear music” sequence, an ancient melody Liu Shui (Flowing Water) supposedly composed by the actual musician of the legend, Bo Ya himself. As a counterpoint to this the singer either turned dancer or vice versa, alternating the haunting “Xiao Dan” singing tones with sinuous movements sillhouetted against a screen. Gao Ping at the piano then joined with Wu Na’s conjuring of exquisite delicacies from her instrument, the intermingling sounds expressing that “famous first encounter” between musician and woodcutter.

I remember, too, the pianist doing different kinds of timbal adjustment to his instrument’s sounds, such as “dampening” his bass notes in conjunction with those of the qin, the tones resonating as much as initially sounding at first, but then changing character, as each instrument’s player allowed excitability to creep into the dialogue, exuberance growing from the communication in the most organic way. A more consciously symbolic act was that of dancer Dong Fei slowly, almost ceremonially “unwrapping” his body from a kind of winding sheet, beginning his circling peregrinations on one side of the stage and crossing to the other side, leaving behind a tremulously-quivering vertical wall of unwound fabric, a poised, beautifully-controlled sequence!

The instrumental combination really showed its range and mettle over the sequence “The One Who Knows My Name”, which described and delineated the growing joy and exuberance of both player and listener at their musical communion. With Dong Fei using his haunting “Xiao Dan” voice to recite the “Nothing, not this body, nor even the clouds” verses, the instrumentalists embarked on an extraordinarily varied exchange, beginning with soft, sitar-like slides from the qin and answering resonances from the piano, playing a measure behind (like a living echo – very effective!), then developing from these sounds a “walking” motif, underscored by more “doctored” bass notes from the piano. Slowly, the rhythms grew in strength and confidence, Wu Na’s playing becoming fiercely exultant, and Giao Ping’s response mirroring the fierce joy of the mood.

How dramatic and impulse-arresting a moment it was when everything stopped! – the piano sounded a few resonant notes, and the qin spoke in a disembodied kind of voice, with the use of a metallic stick applied to the strings, itself a kind of symbolic act of severing the human touch from the music-making. Dong Fei’s ordinary voice actually needed a bit more projection, here, more “quiet” emphasis, perhaps more gestural support for the hushed tones – but the projected on-screen words helped tell the story and convey the tragedy of the musician’s shock and despair – “My heart gone, without a trace – Tears pour down like rain…” – as did the desperate, grating sounds made by the metal on the strings of the instrument.

Portentous and agitated piano sounds summoned the dancer, moving like a disembodied spirit through the air, feet seemingly transformed into wings! The movements suggested to me a kind of injured bird coming to earth, accompanied by disoriented, aimless musical sounds, moving those long sleeves firstly as great feathered extensions, then as quivering, protective shields, displaying pitiful tremolandi of grief, all of which was caught and bound up in a frenzied whirling, as the music shouted and screamed aggressively, the instruments struck and beaten rather than played. This was the breaking of the qin, the silencing of the voice, the end of the perfect union, leaving only darkness.

Had we in the audience been left with nothing more at that point, our spirits would have taken some time to recover – however, from out of the gloom came the qin’s soft notes, echoing fragments of memory, reviving the fallen dancer/singer, who listened to the gently resounding qin notes and then, in a kind of Sprechgesang consisting almost entirely of glissandi, uttered the words of the final poem: – “Dressed in green silk, plucking in vain, I let my sorrow flow….” – the qin player continued to quietly “sound” the instrument strings as the singer’s “Xiao Dan” voice continued to the end – “….Never think that, after High Mountain Flowing Water, all bosom friends must part…” The darkness slowly enfolded the qin player, and, eventually, the music – here was closure, enough to cover and soothe the rawness of the life-wounds, both real and imagined.

It seemed to me that the spaces, the lighting, the screening of text translations, the placement of figures and of instruments, and the various movements were all used to work to the presentation’s best advantage. The overall pacing and ambience of the story drew us unerringly into a world wrought of both delicate sensibility and powerful emotion. I for one felt “captured” by what I saw and heard, right through to the story’s concluding silences.

I hope these poor, uninformed words can convey something to the reader of the unique character of my experience of “High Mountain Flowing Water”, as well as express my appreciation of the efforts of director Sara Brodie and the incredible “trio” of performers, Wu Na, Gao Ping and Dong Fei, who worked with her to produce something so distinctive and special.

 

Ancient Mariner Rime watered-down, though stunning to look at

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:
RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

The Tiger Lillies
Martyn Jacques: Vocals, accordion, piano, guitar
Adrian Stout: Contra bass, musical saw, theremin, vocals
Mike Pickering: Percussion
Mark Holthusen: Animation and photography

St.James Theatre, Wellington
Saturday 8th/Sunday 9th March 2014

Review by Frances Robinson and Peter Mechen

This was an evening which, on the face of things, promised much, with a presentation that, right from the outset, looked terrific, but then didn’t go on to adequately develop the musical and contextual possibilities afforded by these arresting visual images. I’d not seen but had heard about the group’s previous appearance at the New Zealand Festival in 2000 with the anarchic musical Shockheaded Peter, and so was looking forward to what I hoped would be some comparably stunning realisations of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visionary saga of a soul in torment.

Alas, past Mark Holthusen’s brilliant visual realisations, projected onto gauze screens arranged to give maximum spatial perspective, I thought the show was disappointingly bland as regards both music and literary response. Perhaps the advertising blurb unwittingly put its finger on the essence of the presentation, with its emphasis upon Holthusen’s “extraordinary animations” and its cliched description of the show as “the perfect fuel for those late-night club conversations” – I must have missed that part of it, for some reason.

Joking aside, there were sequences indeed well worthy of discussion, and indeed, argument, in the wake of it all – but they were invariably centred on the visual settings and those extraordinary projections of ships, sailors, oceanic swells, exotic places, and, of course, the ever-present albatross, the fulcrum around which the story of Coleridge’s poem revolves, both up to and subsequent to the bird’s untimely end, shot dead by the “Ancient Mariner”. In fact the  show might as well have been a silent-movie realisation of some of the poem’s events, the three-man ensemble’s textual and musical realisations a grossly watered-down version of the poet’s richly-conceived detailings.

So, throughout the evening the narrative action of the Ancient Mariner was broadly depicted by these amazing film projections that unfolded within the stage space. These spanned from the backdrop, right out to the front edge of the stage, with multiple layers often operating simultaneously, hanging in the void like a series of ethereal, translucent curtains. They were never for a moment static, as within them moved the characters of the tale like the Mariner himself, the albatross, the mermaid, the hapless cabin boy (I thought some of the suggested sexual abuse of the boy a bit gratuitous) and the ship’s crew. Across these ethereal vistas moved the jagged icebergs and drifting snowflakes of Antarctica, the listless clouds of the doldrums, the heaving stormy seas of the roaring forties, and the doomed vessel itself. Most dramatic of all were the wondrously fearful sea monsters, spiky, scaly, sinuous of tail, and hideous in tooth and claw.

The role of the three piece band was built around the vocals of Martyn Jacques, which sometimes narrated brief portions of the story narrative, sometimes commentary on the events.  They fell into two broad styles – heavy bass gig-style numbers thumped out from front of stage, with Jacques doing accordion and lyrics; or more soulful crooning cabaret-style numbers with Jacques doing piano and lyrics. In only a few instances was the diction clear, and only a few brief snatches of the Rime were clearly enunciated. The Coleridge poem provided no more than the skeletal framework for the vocals, while the sequence of the narrative was played out almost entirely by the projected stage effects.

I found this inbalance rather disappointing. I would have liked to hear much more of the wonderful tale, simply provided by Coleridge’s matchless word painting. Instead there were the booming lyrics from front of stage, with words barely distinguishable, or the keyboard numbers in a classic nightclub croon, complete with mangled American vowels which sat, to my ear, very oddly with the musings of a classic British tar.

In places I was reminded of another production I’d seen recently on DVD, that of Thomas Ades’s opera “The Tempest”, with Shakespeare’s texts disappointingly “flattened out” and the poetry’s extraordinary inbuilt resonances of ambience and rhythm destroyed. Here, the effect of the words was similarly diminished – only the predictable phrases from Coleridge were touched upon, and were rarely developed, apart from, in some instances, being subjected to endless repetition.

This may have been a deliberate intention, used to highlight the endless wanderings of the vessel and the hopelessness of the Mariner, or simply the group’s normal style of gig music. Having said that, some numbers married brilliantly with the visual effects, and particularly the finale. This comprised little more than the repeated phrase “Living Hell” thumped out numerous times, but the stage and band were progressively engulfed by leaping flames from every direction in a spectacular finish to the show. It brought the house down, which suggested that the audience came largely for a hugely entertaining production, which this most certainly was.

It was clearly not a “setting” of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the traditional sense, and this was probably never the intention of its creators. Given that, the Tiger Lillies and their inventive visual artist Mark Holthusen produced a highly creative spectacle where the visual effects were undoubtedly the standout feature.

 

Festival opera Ainadamar semi-staged but powerful, strongly cast and magnificently performed

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Ainadamar, opera by Osvaldo Golijov

Production, semi-staged, by the New Zealand Festival with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and directed by Sara Brodie

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Publication here of this review of the performance on 2 March was delayed till 18 March because it is in some part based on my review in the New Zealand Listener; it is unethical to publish elsewhere until the issue of the Listener has gone ‘off sale’, at the end of last weekend.

I made use of the delay to add some material from reviews of earlier productions of Ainadamar. In the light of conflicting attitudes towards the work, I find it illuminating to read a range of opinions from other parts of the world.

Sunday 2 March 2014

In spite of the many attempts by composers of the present day to use contemporary issues and events as subjects for opera, few have survived more than an opening season of performances.  For by determining to display a command of the concepts and fashions that musical academia has developed and made de rigueur for a composer who wants to be taken seriously by his peers,  most have failed to engage more than small dutiful audiences dedicated to serious academic music.

Ainadamar, however, premiered in 2003 at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts (where it won “a shouting, stomping ovation”), and has been rapturously received, at least by audiences, in a dozen places. Certain critics have been less open-hearted.

The work deals with poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca’s assassination by fascists in 1936, though much of the narrative is through a powerful portrayal by actress Margarita Xirgu, who was devoted to Lorca and was the famous creator of the role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name.  Pineda was an early 19th century liberal who was garrotted by the monarchy (a particularly kindly execution technique practised by the Spanish); she is presented as presaging Lorca’s own fate.

The text is by David Henry Hwang, translated into Spanish by the composer (with good English surtitles).  Using some projected images from overseas productions, this most successful semi-production is a great credit to Sara Brodie; there were several experienced international singers and we were lucky to have Ainadamar veteran Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting. The former musical director of the Auckland Philharmonia has conducted several incarnations of the work in North America (including the debut of the opera’s revised form in Santa Fe in 2005), produced an authentic, sometimes hair-raising performance. Percussion and guitars made prominent and splendidly vivid contributions.

A reduced NZSO was on stage, and the singers, including a strong, authentically Spanish-sounding chorus (director, Michael Vinten) occupied the space in front of the orchestra and an elevated platform behind it.

Ainadamar might be one of a rare number of contemporary operas to have touched a wider public. However, several critics have attacked it for an alleged lack of coherent story and a literary context for García Lorca, that it’s ‘not really an opera’. And some reviews have been pleased to refer to such phenomena as ‘multi-ethnic hodgepodges’, ‘Arabic music’, ‘Ladino (Sephardic-Jewish)’, ‘flamenco’, ‘indigenous folk’, with a ‘trivial’ libretto, all to suggest an incoherent, tasteless mess.

Most such views seem driven by pre-conceived, negative attitudes, unschooled aesthetic sensibilities, and artistic and intellectual pretension.

One must look at what the creators made, not what critics might fancy.
A sane review of the 2012 Long Beach production in the United States magazine Opera News acknowledges the almost universal praise from most critics, and certainly audiences: “The bestselling, Grammy-winning 2006 recording (DG) with Dawn Upshaw helped spread the reputation of the opera considerably; today Golijov’s taut, lush work is widely viewed as one of his bellwether achievements and one of this generation’s more significant contributions to the art form.”

I go with that.

The four main roles were taken by singers acclaimed in overseas productions.  The most impressive performances were by Kelley O’Connor as Lorca and Jessica Rivera as Margarita; Leanne Kenneally looked a little misplaced as Margarita’s student Nuria though her voice totally redeemed her. The Falangist thug, Ruís Alonso, was excellently sung by Jesus Montoya.  A minor negative in the entire context was the amplified voices, sometimes disconcertingly: with amplification, one loses a sense of the source of the sound, of who is actually singing. These were well experienced opera singers who appeared to have voices that would have projected well.

The story (yes there is one) emerges in three dreamlike ‘imagen’, or tableaux, the first and last in 1969 in Montevideo where Margarita is dying; the second Imagen is Lorca’s murder in Granada in 1936, graphic but not actually seen.

Its power lies in the vividly portrayed emotion arising from a major 20th century conflict between brutal autocracy and liberal democracy, and genuine grief for Lorca’s barbarous death.

No opera can give all the facts in a historically-based drama; we do not need them, and the engaged and curious will go and find them.

But it seemed a shame to have mounted such a fine production for just one performance, given the huge enthusiasm from the full house.

 

Other views of Ainadamar

The first production was at the Tanglewood Festival, Massachusetts, in 2003.

There were reviews of that production in Opera (London) and the New York Opera News.

George Loomis in Opera began by noting Golijov’s rocketing to fame with a St Mark Passion marking the 300th anniversary of Bach’s death, for Stuttgart.  But he judged that there was disappointment with Ainadamar.

He referred to eclecticism, to the dominating flamenco rhythms, incessant repetition of vocal lines that “retraced the same  stepwise successions of intervals”.  He claimed that it “tested the audience’s knowledge of Lorca with cumbersome parallels between his life and the heroine of his play Mariana Pineda (also a revolutionary martyr), while the playwright himself was barely fleshed out as a character”. He thought Lorca himself was “oddly cast as a mezzo-soprano, Kelley O’Connor [whom we also saw in Wellington]”.

However, the critic for Opera News (Willard Spiegelman) seemed to be reporting on a different performance.

He heard the audience exploding after “Golijov’s more [than for the first work in the evening’s double bill] accessible, tuneful, lush and dramatically nuanced Ainadamar”.

He wrote that it possessed “both symmetry and depth”; and he sees Margarita Xirgu as the key figure, saying that “she has triumphantly given voice to both Lorca and Mariana Pineda. In a secular rather than a religious way, Ainadamar traces a path to transcendence.”

After describing the instrumentation, Spiegelman  concludes: “Golijov’s expressive score was, throughout, rich and expansive, but perhaps too often predictably beautiful”. Furthermore, he admired the work of conductor Robert Spano, who brought out “its flamenco and folk tonalities and coaxed his superb, youthful musicians into building the music to heights and depths of romantic passion.”

Dawn Upshaw sang the older Margarita at Tanglewood, as she did for the revised version premiered at Santa Fe and in the 2006 DG recording. “She made her character reflective and passionate, wistful, uncertain and then  confident, by turns.”  He found Kelley O’Connor wonderful as Lorca.

Santa Fe: the Peter Sellars revision

It was also Loomis who reviewed the revised version at Santa Fe in 2005 for Opera. His severity had somewhat abated.  The opera had been worked over by Golijov and director Peter Sellars and one clear improvement was to have Margarita, who, in 2003, had been shared between Amanda Forsythe and Dawn Upshaw, now sung entirely by Upshaw, while some of the role of the young Margarita was assumed by her student, Nuria [sung by Jessica Rivera who, in Wellington, truly moved from being Margarita’s student to being the mentor herself].

Loomis still implies disapproval of the pervading flamenco idiom, but he liked the trouser role given to Lorca, “which allows for mellifluous trios in the tradition of Der Rosenkavalier”.

And he admired the women’s chorus as well as the conducting of Miguel Harth-Bedoya (the conductor in Wellington as well as for several other productions).

But Simon Williams was distinctly more generous in his Opera News review.

“The highlight of the festival was the revised version of Ainadamar…”, he wrote, saying that Peter Sellars’ production did more than merely to recall Margarita’s “profound artistic affinity with the Spanish poet…”; “…it became a ritual that mourned not the death of an individual man but the appalling waste of youth, beauty and life that blighted the last century and now threatens our own.”

I think parts of the review are worth repeating in full.

“Golijov’s mesmerising score articulates the destruction of spontaneity and beauty with disquieting accuracy. The vital rhythms of flamenco are dismembered by the sounds of war – mean fanfares on brass, the oppressive rhythms of the march, the dismal breakdown of tonal beauty, and the incursion of spoken voices, commanding, screaming babbling in fear – which are replaced, in turn, by the piercing, elegant music of lamentation. It is music whose idiom is instantly accessible, arising from the sounds of life, centred constantly on the misery we visit on ourselves through an ineradicable urge towards violence.”

“Dawn Upshaw brought a concentrated inwardness to Margarita Xirgu, her unwaveringly clear, pure vocal line blending effortlessly with the chorus, allowing her to develop the character into a figure of heroic suffering. Golijov sees violence as inherently masculine, suffering and sympathy as feminine; hence the poet Lorca was sung by a woman, Kelley O’Connor , who aptly invested the gentle figure of the poet with a bewitching androgyny.”

Other elements:
“Jessica Rivera embodied horror at the past and a faint touch of hope for the future … the shooting of Lorca – along with a schoolteacher and a movingly inarticulate bull-fighter – by a hysterical soldier … a treacherously pious guard … terrible deeds to which our prejudices and mindless obeisance to authority can drive us.”

Productions since Santa Fe

There have been productions at the Ravinia Festival near Chicago in 2006; by Opera Boston and by Indiana University in 2007; by the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 2008; and Cincinnati Opera in 2009.

A CD recording that won a Grammy award was made by DG with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2006: it featured Dawn Upshaw, Kelley O’Connor, Jessica Rivera and Jesus Montoya (Falangist officer).

Later productions have been at the Granada Festival in 2011 and that production went on to Santander and Oviedo.

Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles staged it in May 2012.

In 2012 Peter Sellars directed a production for the Teatro Real in Madrid. And in October the same year there was a production at Pittsburgh.

The Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco staged it in February 2013

And Opera Philadelphia produced it in February 2014.

Long Beach

A review of the production by Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles, gave a very just view:

“… today Golijov’s taut, lush work is widely viewed as one of his bellwether achievements and one of this generation’s more significant contributions to the art form.

“The Long Beach Opera production … was an aesthetic and musical success, offering a strong artistic vision and sound execution throughout.  …

“David Henry Hwang’s libretto for Ainadamar is a nightmarish meditation on the death of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca at the hands of Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, as seen through the eyes of his frequent artistic collaborator, Margarita Xirgu.

“The work’s uncanny rhythmic vitality and melodic elegance put Golijov’s strengths on full display. Drawing from Latin, Arab, Jewish and European influences, the score blends traditional structural elements with contemporary invention. The comforting familiarity of arias–chorus–dance episode is counteracted by, say, prerecorded gunshots that take the role of percussion instruments. Graceful vocal lines and brutal percussive chaos — it works.”

Philadelphia

But even as late in the day as February 2014, when Opera Philadelphia staged Aindamar, a so-called critic could write a piece that displays perversity, ill-will and an extraordinary lack of perception.

Here is the way it starts:
“Five actors shoot three characters at point-blank range on a stage. Then the executioners break into a choreographed flamenco number immediately after, firing their guns to the beat of the music.

“You might think I’m describing some sort of variation on the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ sequence in Mel Brook’s The Producers, where we are supposed to laugh at the absurdly developed (on purpose, mind you) theatrical production about the Nazi regime.

“But you’d be wrong.

“Instead, the above execution scene is from Opera Philadelphia’s staging of Golijov’s Ainadamar: Fountain of Tears, which is, unfortunately, supposed to be taken seriously.
The opera, which runs a brief 80 minutes, is underwhelming at best, and downright incoherent and disconnected at worst.

“Of particular note is the fact that the main character in the opera, famed playwright and poet Federico García Lorca, is essentially lacking context, development, and ethos. Lorca, who was a gay man, is strangely hetero-sexualized in the production, infatuated with two women (minus one reference to him being a “faggot”); very little historical framework is provided in regards to Lorca as a great literary mind. Instead, we are rushed through a series of redundant, often cryptic scenes where director Luis de Tavira’s extremely stylized hand feels forced instead of organic. Unless you come to the opera with an extremely well-read background on Lorca, his work, and the context surrounding his death, the opera makes too many leaps without what every good undergraduate learns in fiction writing 101: You sort of need a plot.”

But then a proper critic, David Patrick Stearns, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, offered a lucid and understanding review.

“Ainadamar isn’t really an opera but a whirlwind – intoxicating, exciting, and ultimately troubling – whose 90 intermissionless minutes leaves viewers wondering what hit them.

“Osvaldo Golijov’s opera was imposing enough in a Curtis production in the Kimmel Center’s smallish-scale Perelman Theater in 2008. Now it has been brought back by Opera Philadelphia in a larger, imported-from-Spain co-production that has no trouble enveloping the Academy of Music, and is easily among the most stimulating theatrical events, operatic or not, so far this season.

“This meditation on the 1936 assassination of poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is recounted in flashbacks by the actress Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s soulmate, which means Ainadamar lacks a linear plot. The absence of chronological regimentation supports the production’s multi-layered theatricality, from modern computer animation to archival film footage of 1930s Spain to choreography devised by Stella Arauzo for the revered Compania Antonio Gades dancers that goes well beyond flamenco.

“Golijov’s effortlessly ethnic score, which initially feels like a warm bath, is actually a canny piece of operatic theater with well-calculated peaks and valleys and increasingly stark contrasts: When it hits a particularly congenial moment – Margarita persuading Lorca to come on tour with her to Cuba – it won’t be long before flamenco footfalls have a duet with the gunshots that kill him.

“So effectively does the music penetrate one’s consciousness that there’s little risk of visual distraction: The music seems to colour everything around it, intensifying the whole. One could argue that Ainadamar, and this production in particular, achieves Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art) more fluidly than Wagner.”

 

Fabulous and compelling evocation of times past

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“Lines from the Nile”

A Meeting of the “Port Nicholson Music Appreciation Society”

– held at 1 Essex Street, Aro Valley, Wellington

Mrs Garrett – Rowena Simpson (soprano)

Mr Hammersmith – Douglas Mews (Broadwood square pianoforte 1843)

Written and directed by Jacqueline Coats.

Venue: 1 Essex St., Aro Valley, Welllington

Saturday, 15th February, 2013

This show – an hour’s worth of stunningly-wrought, cheek-by-jowl evocation by just two performers, of an episode in Wellington’s musical, colonial and imperial history – is a “must see”.  Writer and director Jacqueline Coats has recreated a significant colonial musical event, one presented by the “Port Nicholson Music Appreciation Society” to mark the occasion in 1840 of Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

As befitted the relatively new and far-flung colony’s ties with the Mother Country, and its desire to celebrate the young Queen’s marriage, the Society’s presentation here positively reeked of jingoistic splendor.  Special emphasis was accorded the dominance of the high seas by the British Navy, with the exploits of luminaries such as Adam Viscount Duncan and Horatio Lord Nelson celebrated in both music and dramatic declamation.

The audience had a real part to play in the proceedings, issued as its members were with Union Jacks and invitations to wave the same at every appropriate opportunity, as well as joining in with the singing of various lusty choruses and well-known anthems such as “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia”.

Giving the show its name was a song “Lines from the Battle of the Nile” written by Josef Haydn in 1800, dedicated to Lady Hamilton in honour of Lord Nelson, here a tour de force of playing, recitation and singing from fortepianist Douglas Mews alias “Mr. Hammersmith”, and soprano Rowena Simpson alias “Mrs.Garrett” (could these names have been for real in the capital’s colonial past?). The work took its audience through a gamut of colourful evocation, part fantasia, part melodrama, part battle-hymn and victory paean – splendid stuff, and, as I’ve indicated, performed with tremendous élan and unswerving dedication by both pianist and singer.

From her first entry at the show’s beginning, soprano Rowena Simpson as the formidable “Mrs Garrett” by turns charmed, galvanized, electrified and captivated her audience, imbuing us all with the feeling by the end that if we weren’t well-born, true-blue and British to the core, then we jolly well ought to be! Douglas Mews’ portrayal of the less demonstrative and somewhat  phlegmatic “Mr Hammersmith” was the perfect foil for his Britannia-like partner, though he was energised in turn by the music he played throughout, never more so than during the various episodes of both the “Nile” and the “Allegorical Overture” melodrama-like presentations.

One recalls stories of audience members in Haydn’s day swooning during certain tempestuous parts of the composer’s “Military” Symphony – and Douglas Mews’ playing of the sturdily characterful 1843 Broadwood square piano had a similar tactile quality in the battle scenes throughout. I was particularly interested in Daniel Steibelt’s Allegorical Overture “Britannia” – the first music I’d ever encountered by a composer whose chief claim to fame in musical history is a musical drubbing he apparently received at the hands of Beethoven whom he had unwisely challenged in an improvisary piano-playing contest at a private soiree in Vienna in 1800.

I certainly thought on first hearing the work worthy to stand as a keyboard equivalent to the orchestral “Wellington’s Victory” by Steibelt’s more illustrious rival. In fact I thought some passages strangely reminiscent of Beethoven’s work, except that Steibelt got there first by a matter of sixteen years! Still, perhaps considering Beethoven’s low opinion of his own piece, any kind of comparison isn’t therefore much of a compliment to Steibelt – except that on this occasion, Messrs Hammersmith and Garrett made it work resoundingly! – it certainly made a fitting and festive conclusion to the concert.

Along the evening’s way, other pieces gave the presentation plenty of variety – a lovely “Haste to the Wedding” keyboard solo based on a traditional Irish tune in an anonymous arrangement made a nicely pastoral-like beginning to the proceedings, followed by two songs by Haydn, “With Verdure Clad” from “The Creation”, and a “Sailor’s Song”, both sung in English by Rowena Simpson, in glorious voice, by turns rapt and lyrical, and then pictorial and energetic. By way of assisting our recovery from the travails of conflict in “Lines from the Battle of the Nile” which followed, we were charmed by Douglas Mews’ characterful playing of perhaps the best-known of Haydn’s keyboard Sonatas, Hob.XVI:50 in C major, with its delicious dead-end harmonic venturings in the finale.

Later we heard another Haydn song, this one an arrangement of a Scottish traditional air, “Mary’s Dream, here delivered with such heartfelt splendor and depth of feeling as to transcend the words’ somewhat Victorian sentiments and present a powerful utterance. These sentiments managed to survive even a spoken interlude from the singer, equating the song’s story of love and loss with her own bereavement – “the unfortunate Mr Garrett”, whom we were solemnly and artlessly informed “was now at peace”……somewhat ungallantly, I confess to feeling exceedingly glad for him.

All in all, venue, presentation and theatrical and musical standards came together most beguilingly, to create something special and memorable. My advice? –  get to it if you can – it plays at 1 Essex St this week from Thursday 20th to Sunday 23rd February.

NZSO’s “Tall Tales and Tangos” musically resplendent but dramatically inert

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New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

Tall Tales and Tangos

Tchaikovsky:  Selections from The Nutcracker
David Farquhar: Suite from Ring Round the Moon
Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf

Tecwyn Evans, conductor
Anton Oliver, narrator
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sat.12th October 2013 

This was a matinee concert devised specifically for children, and it was great to see so many of them at this well attended event. Rugby legend and classical music enthusiast Anton Oliver introduced the programme, giving a particularly warm welcome to the under-tens with his assurance that ”this concert is for you”.

The orchestra comprised some fifty players, probably a bit of a squeeze in many theatre pits, but eminently suited to the larger Fowler Centre for the scale of works selected. Tecwyn Evans exploited the size of this ensemble to wonderful musical effect, and elicited clean, clear playing of great finesse and warmth.

The Nutcracker highlights opened with magical delicacy from the strings, where every note of the chattering rhythms was crystal clear. This precision and clarity typified the work, which Tecwyn Evans proceeded to build with wonderful control: there was an ethereal lightness of touch for the Sugar Plum Fairy; a colourful, galloping Trepak yet clean and never rambunctious; veiled evocative suggestiveness in the Arabian Dance; and lively, gracious waltz music that built to a surging conclusion while never being overplayed. It was a most satisfying musical experience which maximized the rich contrasts and masterful orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s writing.

For a watching youngster, however, hearing it perhaps for the first time, it represented a sadly lost opportunity. Nobody explained to the young listeners that this was music composed for a company of ballet dancers. The movements were not identified in the programme notes, to provide guidance about the characters and settings. And despite the enormous talent that Wellington boasts in the dance world, there was no glittering sugar plum fairy seen shimmering to the ethereal music, no fiery jack-booted Cossack leaping across the stage, no veiled dancer insinuating her hips through the Pasha’s chamber. This claimed to be a concert for children, yet no effort had been made to provide a minimal connection between the notes and their intentions. The NZSO has done many “semi-staged” performances, there was plenty of spare room on stage with the smaller orchestra, yet sorely absent was the little lateral thinking and coordination with the dance fraternity that could have lifted a child’s experience from bewilderment to enchantment.

David Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon suite is theatre music at its most beguiling, and it was a great choice for this programme. There is a freshness and transparency that permeates every dance and plants the epithet of “easy listening” firmly in the classical arena. Tecwyn Evans and the NZSO showed off the suite to great effect – they executed with wonderful clarity and drama the many tricky rhythms in Farquhar’s clever creation, and explored its wide range of dynamics and instrumental colour with vivacious enthusiasm. But again the music’s wonderful potential was hamstrung by the missing partner in the marriage – the dance – which could have brought its meaning and intentions so brilliantly to life. I could picture Sir Jon Trimmer and his dancer wife Jacqui stepping out with the suave Two Step, the steamy Tango, the seductive Waltzes to stunning effect at front-of-stage – but nobody had thought to invite them…………… another sadly lost opportunity for adults and youngsters alike.

Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is a wonderful choice to introduce children to the realm of dramatic music and orchestral colour, where surely the great C19-20th Russian orchestrators must remain unchallenged. Tecwyn Evans and the NZSO gave a wonderful reading of the score which maximized the drama and highlighted its key moments with great clarity and panache. The joy of the light tripping strings was almost palpable as Peter bounded out the gate into the sunlit meadow in search of adventure; so was the menacing warning of the horns as the wolf circled under the cat and bird in the tree above. As the duck was consumed the dread oboe call wailed out across the auditorium with hideous finality, and the ferocious horns blasted forth with their fantastic dissonances as the wolf tried to wrest his tail from Peter’s noose. The final victory march was all it could have been to swell a child’s heart with pride at the hero’s triumph against all odds, and it capped off a superb performance from instrumental soloists and orchestra alike.

Despite that however, this work fell well short as a dramatic production for children. The tunes belonging to each character in the story were played one by one at the start, but the wind and brass players should have been brought to the front where small children could get a clear view of their instruments. Also, Prokofiev clearly considered that the narrator’s role was key to the work, and he rejected another writer’s text in favour of his own, remarking that “the balance between words and music in a work like this is very delicate..”. Anton Oliver was put on the back foot from the opening sentence, having been provided with a lapel mike that could not produce adequate speech clarity even for listeners very familiar with the work, let alone youngsters coming to the story for the first time. What happened here to Public Address Systems 101 and the broadcaster’s obligatory voice test?? Also, the boy hero’s magical story calls for a lot more than a straightforward recital of the text – its drama was left crying out for the gestures, voice production and body language of a seasoned actor with the consummate artistry of someone like Wellington’s Tim Spite. While Oliver is doubtless a wonderful choice to pull in the reluctant Southern Man to NZSO concerts in Southland, he was placed in a most uncomfortable position for a children’s concert in the urban capital.

This was an audience liberally endowed with tiny tots in glittering tutus and sparkly shoes who deserved to be transported into that world where music, drama and dance make the magical connections that can capture a child’s loyalty for life. But the outstanding performance from Evans and the NZSO could not provide this experience unaided; it was up to the artistic management to create the other half of the equation.

 

The Big C from Circa Theatre

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Circa Theatre presents:
C – a musical

Lyrics and book by Paul Jenden
Music by Gareth Farr
Director Paul Jenden

Cast
Danny Mulheron   Me
Jackie Clarke       The Voice Inside My Head
Jane Waddell       Mum
Louis Solino         Carcinoma
Sue Alexander     Pianist

Performance reviewed  – Wednesday 24th July

 At Circa Theatre to 3rd August 2013

This remarkable production follows Paul Jenden’s own journey from his diagnosis with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia, through the rigours of treatment, and on to an eventual state of remission.

You might well wonder how such a subject could possibly be the stuff of a lively and entertaining stage show – doubts initially shared by Jenden himself, who writes in the programme: “When I was throwing up in a hospital bed I couldn’t have imagined that this group of amazing artists would join together to turn my illness into an inspiring show, let alone that Circa would get behind us and put it on stage. It’s a show for everyone, people with cancer, people who know people with cancer and especially those who just want a good night out.” And the musical was indeed a good night out, and an extraordinary way to explore such a subject, despite its threatening  backdrop from which none can feel immune.

Gareth Farr puts the work into “a nameless genre of ‘play with songs and poems’ ”, and says it has proved to be his favourite stage project to date, with music more akin to what he writes for classical ensembles, and particularly operatic voice and solo piano. The music is in the form of two simultaneous song cycles – the moody and dark journey to an imagined and metaphorical Venice, where he is most experimental with the musical language; and the ‘voice inside my head’ songs – which are a little closer to the fun bouncy music Paul Jenden and he have revelled in in the past.

The tuneful lyrics, so seductively presented by Jackie Clarke, punctuate a distinctly quirky script where Danny Mulheron plays the central anchorman, the cancer patient. This is no journey of  morbid introspection, yet it graphically explores the assault on the mind and self that such a disease hurls at the protagonist – much worse than the disease itself in his view.

The play is roughly chronological, and dramatically charts the surprises that confront the “victim” at every turn. The surprises of his own psychological reactions, self expectations, highs and lows, and those of friends, relatives and sundry bystanders who, of course, know best how he should tackle this monster. It is all filtered masterfully through a script that engages his earlier memories of watching Mum succumb slowly to C, and his astonishment at the courage and optimism he discovers in fellow patients.

Also winding through the music, poems and dialogue is the mute but incredibly expressive figure of Carcinoma aka Cassanova – a macabre Venetian figure who comes and goes in many different Carnival guises, shown in an astonishing array of costumes designed by Jenden himself. Sue Alexander’s masterful skills at the piano were a real asset to the production, but unfortunately the voices were over-amplified to the detriment of some scenes. A small adjustment there would be welcome.

Bouquets to the cast and production team for an excellent show, and particularly to Circa for taking this musical on board. It is a totally unexpected take on a subject that is largely taboo in the stage world, but it succeeds with flying colours. Make sure you see it.