Dave Read

Carmina Burana at Tanglewood

July 15, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

Wheel of Fortune, Carmina Burana manuscript

Everybody was a big winner when The Wheel of Fortune was presented in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, with Rafael Frubeck Du Burgos standing in for Pat Sajak, even if Vanna White was nowhere to be seen.

Of course we’re referring to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver conducting, PALS Children’s Chorus, Alyson Kegel, director, plus soprano Laura Claycomb, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and baritone Markus Werba.

Carmina Burana, Latin for “Songs from Beuern,” is a collection of 254 poems and dramatic texts written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Goliards, clerics and students, in expression of their satirical view of the Church. The collection was found in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern, Bavaria.

Orff, who had a parallel career teaching music to children, intended Carmina Burana to reveal the elemental power of music so that the audience could experience music as an overwhelming, primitive force. It’s global popularity, despite Orff’s failure in opposing Nazism, proves that he acheived his goal.

He selected 24 poems about the wheel of fortune from the manuscript and arranged them into “bawdy songs for soloists and chorus, accompanied by instruments and magic images.” In this performance, the magical images were left to the imagination, which didn’t need to work hard to conjure a delightful tableau.

The lyrics were streamed in English on a large LED screen above the chorus, drawing a variety of audible reactions from the audience. The Roast Swan movement from the In the Tavern scene was like a Vaudeville bit. It is silly enough on the page:

“Now I lie on a plate
and cannot fly anymore;
I see bared teeth.

Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely.”

but drew nervous chuckles because it was sung by the African-American tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

Whereas the text was the genesis of the work, it certainly is of minor importance in the experience of it. Being able to read something of a simultaneous English translation of an ancient medieval text can add a layer of nuance, but can just as easily prove a distraction from a more purely visceral reception of the performance.

Perhaps it would be better to scan the text ahead of time, or even to read it after, ideally while mulling the performance with friends.

The program began with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in D (Classical), played by a small configuration of the BSO. It seems like it could stand for the symphonic template, at least to this un-schooled auditor, feeling like a coherent series of melody and rhythm that arouses the attention right away and keeps it through to the conclusion.

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Doug Varone and Dancers at Jacob’s Pillow

August 12, 2009 performance reviewed by Jocelyn McGrath

Doug Varone and Dancers in “Castles;” photo Christopher Duggan

A pure, silver moon slowly rises up the center of the backdrop. One dancer starts moving on stage, but soon he is joined by another dancer, and another, until the moon is hanging over a scene filled with bodies whirling and leaping into sight, then receding back into the wings like crashing waves. Like a real moon ascending, its motion is incremental, but one notices every now and then how it has risen higher. 2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links

As the dancers ebb and flow, their over-the-top energy and constant motion seem unstoppable. Eventually, the group surges onstage, but leaves behind the first soloist, standing alone like a solitary rock. The piece is Lux, the third in a series of work by Choreographer and Artistic director Doug Varone. Through the evening, we are like the moon, watching as time passes, subtly but inexorably shifting as the experience unfolds.

Doug Varone and Dancers – Aug. 12, 2009 – Jacob’s Pillow

Castles (2004) Waltz Suite, Opus 110, Sergei Prokofiev

Short Story (2001) Prelude in C, Sergei Rachmaninoff

Lux (2006) The Light, Philip Glass

Running time: Approx 1 ½ hours with intermission

Loose, organic, easy—from the delicate wiggling of the toes, to the gentle hands-on spiraling tip of a head—the group moves as a total organism. Clasping and unclasping hands, winding in and around each other, they rise and fall with a collective breath. They search out and explore each other’s interior spaces, with plenty of diving and skidding or backing through legs—or as in one duet, when the woman repeatedly slithers through the low angle under the man’s bent knee, as if emerging from a secret passage. Connective gestures abound: rearranging limbs, bumping chests, group hugs, grabbing a hand to fling it away, dizzily falling toward each other. Often one motion seems to leap from one person to another, as if an electric tracing of energy is made visible, traveling through the group.

The middle piece, Short Story, is exactly that, a concentrated vignette of a troubled relationship. In this dance, the layers of casual gesture, emotional resonance, rapid hands-on lifting and partnering culminate in the evening’s most electrified moment of stillness, perhaps the only moment of true stillness. This is the most self-conscious moment of all of the pieces. Otherwise, this choreography resists resting places for the mind to make a decision about what is happening. The pace of the movement is constant and flowing—a visual and sensory stream of consciousness.

Costuming for choreography that dissolves the boundaries between performance movement and pedestrian movement is challenging. Most successful were the simple and playful costumes in Castle, with the flaring short skirts and circus-like red accents. Sometimes the point is to deemphasize the body, as in the dark blue and black slacks and shirts worn by the two dancers in Short Story. Here, the clothes were more like anti-costumes, contributing only to the dark mood via colors like that of a bruise. On the other hand, the variously shaped, flowy costumes in Lux—mostly black, with white inset pieces or large flapping slits—were distracting, and neither augmented the wild kinetic sweep of the dancers’ movement, nor did they have the graphic simplicity of the lunar theme.

The wide variety of body types in this company is striking, and Varone creates fresh experiences with this palette. Very tall Julia Burre’s legs are amazing pinwheeling across the sky in Lux. In the striking same-size duet between Daniel Charon and Alex Springer in Castles, the intimate weight sharing and lifts between equals seem to create a whole new vocabulary.

These dancers have mastered the spooky skill of moving like us, like non-dancer civilians, and then in the next instant seamlessly becoming “dancerly.” The walking, jogging, touching that happens on stage looks like it could be happening anywhere. This begs the question: When does a movement become dance, and when does it stop? Does it ever stop? Varone doesn’t answer these questions, he simply puts daily motion in a continuum of communicative gesture and artistically trained movement; he lets the ambiguity speak for itself.

review: Les Grand Ballet Canadiens – July 29, 2009
review: Ballet Maribor in Radio and Juliet – July 1, 2009
archives: Merce Cunningham at MASS MoCA – Oct. 28, 2000
archives: Merce Cunningham’s gift (reminiscence)
JacobsPillow.org
Free exhibits and archives at Jacob’s Pillow

A Streetcar Named Desire at Barrington Stage Company

Aug. 12, 2009 matinee performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Christopher Innvar (Stanley Kowalski), Kim Stauffer (Stella Kowalski), and Marin Mazzie (Blanche DuBois)

Director Julianne Boyd’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Barrington Stage Company is a masterful, dynamic, sensitive and deeply moving revival of the Tennessee Williams masterpiece.
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Tanglewood schedule August 14-23, 2009

The Tanglewood schedule for August 14-20, 2009, week seven of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2009 Tanglewood season, features Michael Tilson Thomas, Andre Previn, and Kurt Masur, three guest conductors with significant ties to Tanglewood.

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Tanglewood Music Center alumnus Michael Tilson Thomas, who was a protege of Leonard Bernstein, returns to the Tanglewood festival for the first time since 1988. His first program, August 14, initiates a weekend highlighted by three great Romantic piano concertos, as he conducts Rachmaninoff’s tempestuous Piano Concerto No. 3, performed by Yefim Bronfman, on a program with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

Tilson Thomas’ second program is a project especially dear to his heart. The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theatre is a musical homage to his grandparents, who were leading performers in Yiddish theater in the ’20s and ’30s (Aug. 19 and 20). This lively Ozawa Hall program is scripted and narrated by Tilson Thomas, who also plays piano and conducts. It features the original performers who helped with the show’s creation in 2005: Judy Blazer, Neal Benari, Ronit Widmann-Levy, and Eugene Brancoveanu, all making their Tanglewood debuts. Pat Birch directs.

Frequent Tanglewood guest Andre Previn returns August 15 to collaborate with one of his favorite soloists, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in Liszt’s poetic Piano Concerto No. 2, on a program with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 and Ravel’s La Valse. Previn goes back to his early jazz piano roots with a special evening of standards in Ozawa Hall on August 16 in a concert with longtime collaborator bassist David Finck.

Kurt Masur takes the podium Sunday afternoon August 16 to lead the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in an all-Brahms program focusing on music that is at the very heart of his repertoire: the Brahms Symphony No. 2 and the Piano Concerto No. 2, with Garrick Ohlsson as soloist.

August 21-23, 2009 Tanglewood schedule

The schedule for the final week of the 2009 Tanglewood season will include Kurt Masur on August 21 conducting the BSO on a program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 and the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, with pianist David Fray, making his BSO debut.

The following night features Masur leading Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, Italian, The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave) Overture, and the Violin Concerto, with violinist Gil Shaham.

The final program of the BSO’s 2009 Tanglewood season will be the annual performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with conductor and Tanglewood Music Center alumnus Michael Tilson Thomas, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, soprano Erin Wall and mezzo-soprano Kendall Gladen in their BSO debuts, tenor Stuart Skelton in his Tanglewood debut, and bass-baritone Raymond Aceto on Aug. 23. The program begins with a movement from Charles Ives’s Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day, for chorus and orchestra (from his Holiday Symphony).

James Galway at Tanglewood

August 1, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

Sir James Galway performs at Tanglewood during 2009 season;photo Paul Cox

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of Sir James Galway’s 70th birthday was way more than an ordinary Saturday night at Tanglewood; it was a mini-festival of flute-centric music with an international flair.

The program opened with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Leonard Slatkin conducting the B.S.O., Elizabeth Rowe, flute solo. Debussy originally planned a larger work as a score of incidental music to accompany a reading or staged dramatization of Stephen Malarme’s eclogue, Afternoon of a Faun, but didn’t complete more than the Prelude.

This is one of those pieces of music where your enjoyment of the performance can scarcely be embellished by knowing much of the story behind its composition; better to affect a tabla rasa state and allow the conjuring of fresh images. Slatkin, Rowe, and the orchestra (for this piece, with a 3rd flute and Englsih horn, but without trumpets, trombones, and timpani) produced a lush, intriguing soundscape, on a moonlit night of perfect summer weather.

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Ballet for Martha, followed, a stunning work written for his friend Martha Graham, with the title of a Hart Crane poem. Copland is a quintessentially American composer, and this piece features the Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts, which serves as the ballet’s unifying theme. The performance readily cast us into a reverie of spring in the Northeast, with the recurring Simple Gifts motif evoking feelings of delight and surprise. This invitation to consider the wonders of Spring, in the midst of a summer of miserable weather, was especially welcome, and beneficial.

After intermission, the Galway celebration got underway with the world premiere performance of Swing Song, composed by Derek Bermel and commissioned by the B.S.O. for this occassion. Bermel said the short piece (five minutes) “is inspired by the cavorting of small monkeys through the trees of Bahai (Brazil)….The harmonica and rhythm is based on a fusion of Bulgarian and Latin dance forms.”

And why wouldn’t that be the basis for a work written in honor of Ireland’s preeminent musician and at-large musical ambassador! Celtic/Irish music is provincial only at inception and Galway, too has found musical homes far away from his native island. Witness his recent collaboration with Tiempo Libre, the Cuban-trained Latin jazz band who were his special guests tonight, along with contrymen Anthony Kearns, piano, and Michael McHale, tenor, and wife Lady Jeanne Galway.

In between the Bermel piece and the guest spots was the celebrant’s glistening performance of Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 with the B.S.O. and Slatkin.

It was quite a party, carrying on past 11:30, including an American jazzified version of Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) by Kearns, plus an Emerald Isle version from the Galways, and ended with the 10,000+ audience singing Happy Birthday.

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Sleuth at Barrington Stage Co.

July 26, 2009 performance reviewed by Ed McDonnell

Andrew Wyke, central character in Sleuth, loves games, and that’s good. He makes a living as a mystery writer and his enormous enthusiasm has paid off. His pride in his English manor house, all the nice things in it and his efforts to live in a gentlemanly style, as he interprets it, are evident with the curtain’s rise. The busy set at Barrington Stage Company (David Barber) is as promising and evocative as a campfire for a story such as this, is in fact the first character we see.

Wyke’s zeal not only sustains itself in his career, it has spilled over into his private life. Wyke (Charles Shaughnessy) has invited his wife’s lover, Milo (Jeremy Bobb), over to have a bit of a chat. The talents of Bobb and Shaughnessy being more than adequate for the verbal match that follows, and their dead-on rhythms working together make for a natural, well-paced and witty exchange, such that even the sound of the play is a thorough pleasure.

This, though, is the foundation for much more: a string of schemes and daring notions, revelations of razor-edged contempt and resentment, and the staging of an audacious crime in disguise, so hilarious as to almost derail one’s concentration (thank you Clint Ramos for this subtle stroke). Not only playwright Anthony Shaffer and the players but director Jesse Berger should be recognized for balancing this daunting production.

Its unevenness is a good thing, essential to its brightness, but it IS uneven. Berger appreciates that and manages it, and exploits the good circus-act fun therein. He avoids numerous moments that could be tedious in lesser hands. By intermission the plot has been put together, heated up, thickened and overturned onto the floor.

The atmosphere is dense with malice, glee, and danger; the police inspector’s visit hints a note of actual menace, and within minutes we are dragged in another direction. A new color is added when an entire police team descends on the house. Doppler, Taurant, and Higgs, played respectively by Sean McNulty, Robert E. Lawson, and Vincent Marks, in a casting coup, establish the “command presence” of the law officer so well known to all of us.

Theater can inspire, and instruct, and much more. We are fortunate to have it all in this part of the country, all year round. Theater that entertains is as valuable and essential, at times more so, than the other kinds. A show like Sleuth is valuable indeed.

Dave Read

Doug Varone and Dancers at Jacob’s Pillow

A Streetcar Named Desire at Barrington Stage Company

August 21-23, 2009 Tanglewood schedule

2009 Barrington Stage Co. reviews and schedule: