beyondwords Archive Macbeth at Lyric 10.6.10

Lyric's production of Verdi's Macbeth was not a total tragedy, managing to combine a tragic plot, rousing choruses, and circus aerials into a production worthy of half the audience standingly ovating.

For me, the performance induced cognitive dissonance. Verdi's opera, like Shakespeare's play, takes place in Scotland, though you wouldn't know it by the music, the language, the costumes, or the set. The only things Scottish were Macbeth's Braveheart locks, the hand-forearm shake, and the Macallan 12 I had at intermission. You know what they say about all things not Scottish.

In fact, nothing seemed to go together. The sets and the costumes seemed to be borrowed from a troupe of androids from the future trying to imagine medieval Scotland. Though Verdi broke ground by writing an opera that wasn't a love story, he neglected to change the music; Lady Macbeth's Act I aria about conjuring the demons of hell shouldn't sound like she's falling in love.

Singers:

Thomas Hampson (Macbeth) had a voice to suit the part: strong yet vulnerable, attractive yet not all that pretty. Nadja Michael (Lady Macbeth) drove her husband to kill and nearly did the same to me. Her first act arias proved her ability to sing "like a banshee" while slinking around and writhing like

Gozer, the destructor. She's one you either love or hate, and for me, unfortunately, I loathed having her on stage, flaunting her hot bod and wailing hysterically. [For her curtain call, nearly half the audience stood.] Perhaps it was just a matter of proximity: my seat was relatively close to the stage, whereas Ms. Michael was playing--not just to the back of the room--but to somewhere downstate. All that being said, her Act IV aria was bone-chillingly haunting; I finally felt sympathetic to her character, whom I had been killing off in my head since the beginning.

The supporting cast nearly eclipsed the leads. Stefan Kocán (Banquo) played one of the few likable characters, singing with a sound like a rich string bass. Leonardo Capalbo (Macduff) had a more traditional Italian tenor sound, like butter dripping off a hot biscuit.

The chorus and orchestra never cease to amaze me and were in their usual top form; Renato Palumbo coaxed out a very sensitive, lyrical overture from the pit and, conversely, rhythmic precision from the singers.

From the Galley

Macbeth dates from Verdi's "galley years", in which he toiled endlessly only to produce a few operas the public still hears. We here in Chicago were blessed last year with Ernani--and I do mean "blessed" (in the way a religious couple describes an unplanned pregnancy); this year, we get Macbeth, which reminded me of my vow to avoid the first half of Verdi's output. [I was much happier with Macbeth than Ernani but have labored enough in Verdi's galley.]

And, for the first time, I feel like the Lyric production misinterprets the score. While Shakespeare's work is dark and heavy, Verdi's is surprisingly light--inappropriately so, but so it is. There were moments in the libretto and the music that deserved more comedy but were played dramatically serious on stage, resulting in too many mixed messages with nothing to say.

beyondwords Archive MusicNOW: 10.4.10

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is an institution. And it always makes me happy when institutions get it right. Which they can only do when pressured by smaller, more nimble and agile organizations. And so the work by ensembles like eighth blackbird, Fulcrum Point, and dal niente has finally had a positive effect on the CSO, Chicago's most venerable Classical music institution, which presented its new music series, MusicNOW, on Monday at the Harris.

[Writing about Contemporary Music requires a great attention to capitalization.]

Unless you've been under Iraq, you've heard about Maestro Muti's coming and subsequent early withdrawal, but receiving a lot less press and fevered googling is the MusicNOW series which, quietly, unassumingly, and flawlessly opened Monday night at the Harris.

Nevertheless, the Harris was packed with more people than I've ever seen at a new music concert--all the usual suspects and many more.

The evening opened with Mason Bates and Anna Clyne, the composers in residence at the CSO, introducing the evening with their respective West coast and British mannerisms--Bates appropriately tan, Clyne predictably not.

Li Po

As a continuing celebration of Mexico's independence, the program included pieces by 2 Mexican composers, of which Li Po by Enrico Chapela opened the concert. Chapela based the music on a Mexican poem about the Chinese poet Li Po and so included projections of the poem--in hand-made caligraphy--onto a screen behind the performers. The piece for chamber symphony and tape fused the two media symbiotically, which, like a happy marriage, were sometimes independent, sometimes joined at the hip. About 50% of the sounds on the tape part sounded rich and lush, electronic but acoustic, on the Harris's sound system; the other 50% sounded cheaper and more digital. The form of the piece, based on the structure of the poem, was indecipherable, for the poem itself was enigmatic and was in Spanish with no subtitles. Even if I spoke flawless Spanish, each verse of the poem flashed on the screen for a mere 5 or 10 seconds, not long enough to engage the imagery. And even if I had more time, the music drew most of my attention with its polyrhythmic activity and spatialized tape part. Overall, a good piece--not amazing. It didn't piss me off or insult me (except for the "seagulls" in the violins) and had plenty going on to keep me from getting bored. (6.5 / 10)

Vision Mantra

After the Chapela was a piece for string trio, Vision Mantra, by local composer Marcos Balter--local in that he lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia College. The piece was repetitive, rhythmic, and slow to change: minimalist. But it was minimalist in a different way. Instead of trance-inducingly constant, it was broken up into short phrases, each of which being either a perfect copy or a slight modification. The pauses between each phrase allowed the audience to clearly hear each phrase with no distractive connective tissue. But after awhile, it got old. Instead of inducing a meditative calm with a heightened sensitivity to subtle changes, I started to get irritated by the regularity: each phrase was the same perceptual length.

It was during this piece that my attention was drawn to the amplification: each piece was amplified, and while for the pieces involving a tape part, this was absolutely necessary (and perfectly mixed), for the acoustic pieces it was less necessary. In this piece, the amplification caused the grating of the bow on the strings to be more prominent than if it were unamplified. And thus the subtle beauty of the piece was further disturbed.

Within the whole of the concert, the piece acted as a nice sorbet to the electronic-laden pieces around it. But on its own, it was a one-timer: (4.5 / 10)

steelworks

The Wednesday of the 5-piece concert was Anna Clyne's steelworks, which was the popular favorite. The piece was about the steel industry and was accompanied by a video by Luke DuBois. There were only three performers, but with the tape part and video, it was an all-encompassing experience. The trick, Clyne was clever enough to realize, was to keep the components simple to let the complexity build up. Her writing for each member of the trio--percussion (mostly marimba and bass drum), bass clarinet, and flute--was fairly simple with only brief moments of "look-at-me" attention-grabbing--tasteful and subdued. And the tape part cradled the instruments nicely, turning a mere trio into something that felt more chamber symphony. Clyne seems to succeed in the big picture even when working with somewhat mundane details. Worth another listen/viewing. (7.5 / 10)

Bhairav

After Anna Clyne's work filled our every mental orifice, it was a welcome break to have Ana Lara's Bhairav, a completely innocuous piece for string quartet that, much like Balter's string trio, functioned very well as a sort of aural sorbet. The first third of the piece used shimmering tremolos in the upper strings to accompany a very run-of-the-mill, elegiac chant in the cello. The tune moved up through the viola and then to each of the violins. This took all too long, proceeding slowly and predictably. Suddenly, and with no apparent reason, the second half took off with a driving rhythmic homage to either Shostakovich or Bartòk. Those with less experienced ears could call it a favorite; those with jaded and overtrained ears could hear the thieving and called it "embarrassing." And, there were no program notes, no explanation before the piece, so the meaning of the piece, something that might have distracted us from its simplicity, remained an enigma. I was content to hear it once--but just once--but kept wishing I were hearing one of Schnittke's string quartets. [Apparently, I missed a sixth of the piece somewhere: lost to the ether.] (3.5 / 10)

Digital Looms

My first reaction to Mason Bates' closing piece was against the title: using "digital" in a title sounds cheesy. And since the piece was for pipe organ (yes, like the one in the church, not a B3) it had an uphill battle to prove that it wasn't straight out of the Mars Cheese Castle. As soon as it started, though, my fears were allayed; the opening movement had nothing schmaltzy about it, instead playing it cool, like a DJ spinning at a cool underground-loft-art-gallery. This progressed and flowed into the second movement, Fanfare with Breaks, which was like spastic, Keith Emerson-esque, organ dogfighting against Amen breaking all over the place. Not quite cheesy but it had its moments. After the third movement, things get a little fuzzy for me (it's also been a couple days). I remember the 4th movement, Geraldine's Parlour, because of the vibrato, self-consciously feeding the audience one big cheese ball.

I felt engaged while watching it, but now I'm not so sure of its merits. If there's one thing that Bates is good at, it's the moments; if there's one thing he's still working on, it's tying it all together. Each moment is beautiful, interesting or some quizzical combination, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts--just the opposite of Anna Clyne's piece.

Also, judging by Bates' music that I've heard so far, and this piece in particular, I find that his stylistic palate for each piece is too glutinous. He presents enough styles for an entire concert, so when his work comes at the end of the concert, it feels like stylistic overload. Now that we can do anything, do we throw everything into each piece? I say: "Say no to say yes." Save some styles for future work and develop the ideas you have further.

That being said, I would hear his piece once or twice more. Not destined to be a classic, it's both attention-grabbing and holding--a journey through a land of many cultures . (6.75 / 10)

It looks like Bates' and Clyne's music got my highest marks, which brings up a good question: did Mason and Anna choose the other pieces to make their own look good or was it pure accident?

goings-on: chicago

Lots going on this weekend in Chicago:

• Friday night you could go to Chicago Opera Vanguard's (COV) fully-staged Winterreise
• Saturday night you could join me at Corey Dargel with ICE (or go to COV)
• Sunday you could join me at COV
• Monday you could join me at MusicNOW to see J. Luther Adams and Golijov
• Wednesday you could join me at ACM's Sound of Silent Film

I'm mostly posting to my ChicagoNOW blog, so be sure to bookmark it if you want to keep up with Classical music goings-on in Chicago. Not intended to be as critical, it's more about solid performances that would be accessible for new and seasoned audiences. So less Webern marathons and more Short Rides in Fast Machines.

John Luther Adams

etc. etc. etc.

It is what you call it. But call it how it is. A history to every word, a legacy of associations dredged up, subconscious understanding, a poem behind every word.

Knowledge through experience - layered, woven - makes a tapestry.

Every time you read it or say it, it makes another copy in your brain.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

Every time you read it or say it, it makes another copy in your brain.

"Donner la liberté au monde par la force est une étrange entreprise pleine de chances mauvaises. En la donnant, on la retire."

Every time you read it or say it, it makes another copy in your brain.

Cut through the associations; separate the wheat from the chaff; unweave the tapestry. Deconstruct. Call it how it is. Who decides?

Freiheit nur für die Anhänger der Regierung, nur für Mitglieder einer Partei - mögen sie noch so zahlreich sein - ist keine Freiheit.

We're in dialogue. I'm talking to you. You are understanding the words I am saying. Now you are speaking; I am listening. I hear words; I hear you. Now you are done talking, and I am dreaming.

opera: "a combination of music and drama wherein the music is not in place simply as background or mood setting, but is given an expressive and communicative platform at least equal to that of the text or stage action."

opera: "an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and musical score."

I didn't know who she was. I had no idea. I had so much to learn. She faded into and then emerged from the static of history like a ghost. Like the King of Siam. She died before I was born.

And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later

I wished I could save her in
some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies

We know who our enemies are
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are

...usw...

Wagner's Ring Digest

Last weekend, I saw a 6-hour version of Wagner's Ring cycle. It's not so hard to do if you reduce the singing to speaking, turning each opera into one of four acts of a play. Just like seeing one of the operas, there were two 10-minute intermissions and one 45-minute dinner break.

I would highly recommend checking it out at the Building Stage. It made the entirety of the story manageable, giving the audience a great introduction/refresher, a great preparation for seeing any one of the operas and knowing how it fits into the story.

The question that should be burning in your mind regards the music. How does one make use of the sixteen hours of Wagner's scores?


Before going to the play(s), I read that the ubiquitous composer Kevin O'Donnell had created a score that mimicked Wagner's harmonic changes. In principle, before seeing the play, I agreed with this idea, but in practice, after seeing the play, I found that the composer didn't quite quite hit his aim. That is, it was a good idea but poorly executed. Not simply in the details, the fault lay in some of the early choices.

The problem with the music starts with the chosen style. O'Donnell's score was minimalist rock with a hint of 50s lounge/surf guitar. Which could have been a good choice if the tone of the play was similarly campy. The play, however, treated the epic like an epic, almost highlighting the parallels between the Lord of the Rings saga still fresh in people's minds. There was nothing campy or ironic about the direction, making the music the misfit. The website of the Building Stage described the play as: "not an opera, a play that rocks." Perhaps the misguided decision was not made by Mr. O'Donnell but by the play's director who wanted the style of the play and the style of the music to be somewhat at odds, complementary perhaps.

Once the choice of the style and ensemble were made, O'Donnell was bound to the two guitars, two drum sets, bass, and glockenspiel. Nothing in the ensemble could mimic Wagner's heroic horns or swelling strings, nor did they try. The music was interstitial and necessarily minimalist. There were only a handful of different pieces, most of which referring to the famous and cliched Ride of the Valkyries, that recurred between scenes. Aside from the Valkyrie music, the other pieces referred to the Rhein music and "Curse" leitmotif of Wagner's score. Limiting the references to the score to a few seems both prudent and necessary. The audience, in this case, did not come to hear music in the form of a dictionary of leitmotifs. There are only so many themes a person can take in and remember in this abridged version.

One thing that this production didn't attempt, which I would have liked to see, was underscoring. Wagner's music doesn't just serve the plot, it serves to create an emotional contour, eliciting a connection and reaction. It would be difficult to do (correctly without being overtly cinematic), but subtly using Wagner's trove of music to underscore the more emotionally charged scenes would strengthen the productions coherence and message.

Overall, I was confused by the relationship between the stage and the pit. The acting seemed to be almost Shakespearean: a good balance of dramatic, sentimental, a touch of comedy, and an overall epic quality. The ingenuity with puppets, shadows, and props matched and enhanced that balance. The music seemed unsuited to the spirit of the play. In some cases, it undercut the drama of the scene; in others it was simply unconvincing - paling in comparison to the strength of the acting. Fortunately, this production, unlike a Wagner opera, does not lean so heavily on the music, so the music is merely an unsightly blemish on an otherwise heroic visage.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[After seeing the play, to learn and refresh my memory of Wagner's quadrilogy, I learned a lot from this website, explaining the plot and providing a catalog of the leitmotifs. I would have liked to know them better before seeing the play so as to judge even better old and new.]

unfolding the drama

In a recent discussion, I found myself defending Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle to accusations that it was predictable. In the opera, there are seven doors behind which seven horrible/astonishing mysteries await the Duke's new bride. An easy story to follow: door #1, music, door #2, music, etc etc. It sounds a lot like Let's Make a Deal, but the effect is exactly the opposite: the drama in Let's Make a Deal is in the opening of the doors; the drama in Duke Bluebeard is in the music. If you watch Let's Make a Deal expecting great music, you'll be disappointed; likewise if you go to Duke Bluebeard expecting her to open doors out of order--or maybe she should simply quit after opening the door with all the blood-soaked jewels.



The issue, then, is not a lack of drama but a different type of drama. I started by thinking that the problem with opera is that they are composed by musicians, not playwrights, who may or may not understand theater as well as they understand music. But the problem is probably even larger: music is not narrative (no matter how much people try) and so unfolds in a different way and at a different rate than theatrical drama.

The music underlying 19th century opera is an effort to speak the language of emotions, which seem to take longer to stimulate, foster, and bring to climax. Intellectually, we can understand the intricacies of a dramatic situation without our emotions getting initiated. And so there are redundancies in the plot so that it makes sense musically.

Also, music and language function in a fundamentally different way. Music, especially of the 19th century, thrives on repetition and variation; since there is no concrete information, repetition is not abhorred (except by those who use information theory to understand music, starting with Schoenberg.) Language is generally full of information and so can be much more linear, eschewing repetition.

This conflict of parallel languages telling the same story is the reason behind this parody:


Why is opera so boring?
It's a common concern among those of you who are not opera fans. There are a lot of answers to this question. I would bet that, for most people, they expect a compelling plot, one that rivals what we've seen in movies for the last 50 years. The plots in operas are ridiculous, redundant, and over-the-top. Fortunately, the plot is mostly a vehicle for the music, a guide for our emotions that, hopefully, get stirred by the composer's craft.

Maybe someone should write a mash-up of Let's Make a Deal with Duke Bluebeard. Maybe with some audience participation.


Wait, wait, there's more.
While writing the post, I discovered the following. Synchronicity.

The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c We Are at War - Philip Glass www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

A musing on recording and pornography

Humanity has had a libidinous fascination with mirrors since we first set eyes on ourselves in reflective pools of water. The pools allowed us to observe ourselves from the outside, leading to or furthering self-consciousness. But the pools weren't portable, so early humans invented a copy of the pool—the mirror. The mirror, then, is a copy of an object producing a facsimile.

Art
But we didn't stop with simply making the mirror; soon we were creating the images ourselves—all sorts of metaphorical mirrors. We invented artificial forms of representations of our reality (including aspects of our selves), shortening the word “artifice” to make art. Art, then, is a tool: a reflection of facets of the human experience in our never-ending quest to achieve self-awareness. We'll never achieve a reflection the entirety of what it means to be human, so each piece of art is a representation of a more-or-less manageable chunk, with which we can build, over a lifetime, a mental picture of who we are and where we fit in the universe.

Music
Two of the many competing theories surrounding music's origins are that it came either from humans imitating bird sounds or from imitating natural rhythms—heartbeats, footsteps, etc. Or maybe it grew out of speech as song. But somehow these various origins came together to form what we have today: a system that seems to imitate the various forms of human communication through artificially organizing sounds in time. [Or, thinking of Cage, artificially creating an environment in which a mass of people attentively listens to sounds in time.]

And, in the beginning and for many thousands of years after, all that we knew of this art of sound was through live performance. There must have been something communal and magical about the experience, judging by how much music gets entangled with religion. But those days have been going away for the last 100 years. These days, the primary way we interact with music is through recording.

Recording
In the mid-19th century, there were technological developments that allowed people to transmit and record sound waves. When Marcel Proust could no longer go to the opera, they set up a sort of telephone system by which he could listen over the wires—just one step removed from the performance. As the technology increased, we got more and more removed from the original. Soon we had the phonograph, which allowed people to reproduce live performances in their homes. Then, they were no longer “live” performances but done in the studio, allowing for multiple takes. Then, the advent of tape allowed performers to splice together parts of performances to create a more “perfect” recording—one that never existed in reality. At first, this meant that performers could simply polish their performances, but in the 1960s, this grew to mean that the recording could be something that never did or could exist in the real world—a simulacrum. (I'm thinking specifically of Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper's and such.) Perhaps it was the impossibility of living up to their unachievable perfection that led the Beatles to stop performing. Even if not, there is something symbolic in their retreat into the recording studio.

Recordings went from being a substitute to the definitive document. Somehow, the copy has trumped the original. This leads to performers feeling pressure to recreate their albums as perfectly in live performance, the pressure leading to lip-syncing and other such atrocities.

Pornography
In these days of the internet, there seems to be a parallel between recorded music and pornography. Humanity has long created images of a sexual nature, and those images, with technological advances, became so “realistic” that they were able to replace the original. It is easier to see the evil in pornography; the act starts as a sacred act of communion and becomes solitary act of debasement and objectification. I see the same problem in recording. With the majority of internet traffic being porn and recordings, the users of the internet are apparently addicted to the copies several generations removed from reality.

Performance
The issue that I have is with how these copies interfere with our “real” experiences. When I am at a concert, I don't want to compare what's happening live to the more “perfect” version I have on CD. I don't find value in automaton performers or, worse, fakery like lip-syncing. I want to see an authentic performance and experience it as such. I want it to be a unique experience, a communion between performer and audience. When the French go to a concert, they use the word “assister.” The experience exists because of the give and take to and from the stage. The audience is just as important as the performer. Otherwise, there would be no performance.

Maybe the Zen masters need to ask us: “If a performer performs to an empty hall, is it still a performance?” At least it's real.