William Kentridge’s banner for the façade of the Metropolitan Opera House. The black silhouette of the renegade Nose is at the top, astride a horse.
I love those rare moments when New York’s preeminent cultural institutions work together in scintillating synergy. Sometimes it occurs through sheer serendipity. But in the case of the William Kentridge retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and his production of Shostakovich‘s “The Nose” at the Metropolitan Opera, it was all gloriously intended. MoMA’s show includes a whole section related to “The Nose,” including samples of Kentridge’s fanciful animations that appear in the opera.
Music critic David Patrick Stearns said this about the simultaneity of the opera and the museum exhibition in his Philadelphia Inquirer review on Wednesday:
As one who has loved the opera for decades, I find this convergence almost too good to be true.
The synergy is cemented with this tie-in:
Ticket holders to “The Nose” receive 50% off tickets to the career retrospective “William Kentridge: Five Themes” at the Museum of Modern Art. This large-scale exhibition surveys nearly three decades of work by the artist, including works related to his staging and design of “The Nose.” Present your ticket to The Nose at MoMA through May 17, 2010 to receive 50% off admission.
Below is the only photo that I snapped at the Met, taken while I was settling into my seat for last Saturday’s matinee performance. (The Met’s publicity photos did not include this pre-performance shot.)
It had a familiar look to those of us who had just viewed, displayed under glass at MoMA, Kentridge’s interventions on book pages containing old-fashioned black-and-white images (including portraits). And Kentridge’s “curtain” put us on immediate notice that we were in for a very different experience than is ordinarily introduced by this:
While the orchestra was still tuning up, before we heard the first strains of Shostakovich conducted by the great Valery Gergiev, Kentridge enchanted us with an image of a rotating, abstract black sculpture that resolved itself into an image of the composer.
The trick was reprised later with more chilling results—an image of Stalin.
The simultaneous presence in New York of Gergiev and the equally masterful Riccardo Muti—now in the midst of a string of performances of Verdi‘s “Attila”—is another too-good-to-be-true New York cultural convergence. Muti is to the Italian repertoire what Gergiev is to the Russian. Both brought their star power to rarities, making convincing cases for these seldom performed works.
Muti, however, was much less fortunate than Gergiev in set design by architects Herzog & de Meuron and in exasperatingly static staging by Pierre Audi (who calls his stilted approach “stylized”).
Here are two “Attila” sets (which I had previously described as “clunky,” not only for their appearance but also for their functionality):
Rubble left by Attila’s marauders
A banquet scene. The blue background is a construction tarp (from a Herzog & de Meuron building site?) with metal grommets.
Hearing a loud boom during the very protracted scenery change before the banquet, I thought the tarp was an emergency response to a backstage mishap. But, as I later learned, it was intended as part of the set design.
On a lighter note, here are some “Nose” images. The bottom two are stills from films:
“Attila” and “Nose” photos by Ken Howard, Metropolitan Opera
Kentridge did not take the stage for a bow after the performance that I attended. But he reportedly received “the heartiest bravos” at the premiere—a relative rarity for new productions at the Met, which often affront traditionalists by violating nostalgic memories. I assume that offers to Kentridge from other opera houses will soon come pouring in. (His previous designs for a Mozart “Magic Flute” production received a mixed review from Bernard Holland of the NY Times.) This production’s acclaimed success may be a special case where the absurdist, modernist sensibilities of opera and designer were in perfect alignment. Time and future opera commissions will tell.
For the most part, I didn’t feel unduly distracted by the busy backdrop of changing images and animated drawings in an obscure opera for which I had no particular attachment or preconceived notions. But during a bravura orchestral interlude with no vocals, I would have preferred some relief from the frenetic (albeit entertaining) visuals, allowing complete focus on this orchestral tour de force.
Speaking of distractions, the acoustic engineering for MoMA’s installation didn’t quite come off as planned: With Kentridge’s hand-drawn animations and other films enticingly arrayed in a sequence of open, fully carpeted spaces, the sounds did sometimes jarringly bleed from one room to another, disrupting the melancholic, meditative mood of the pieces. Part of the problem may have been that many of the viewers (at least while I was there) chose to stand outside the open doorways, peering in, so there were not enough bodies to absorb the sound.
Also disconcerting to me was the motif of the stereotypically money-grubbing, exploitative Jew, embodied in a recurring Kentridge character, Soho Eckstein. This theme was plumbed to particularly shocking effect in the film, “Mine” (referring to both South African gold mines and Soho’s acquisitiveness). While Eckstein wields his adding machine, totting up his fortune, oppressed black miners are shown sleeping in hard-surfaced slots and taking group showers—images that, for me, immediately conjured up documentary photos of concentration-camp barracks and alluded to one of the deceptions employed by the Nazis to deliver death to the Jews—supposed “disinfecting showers” that instead delivered poison gas.
I’m not the only one who made that jarring connection. In his essay for the show’s catalogue, guest curator Mark Rosenthal fleetingly refers to the “uncomfortable Nazi-era associations” of the barracks and showers in “Mine.” If Kentridge weren’t himself Jewish, the word “uncomfortable” might be easily swapped for “unconscionable.”
The Kentridge exhibition, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art, remains at MoMA to May 17. You’ve got only two more chances to catch “The Nose” this season at the Met (only one of those conducted by the incomparable Gergiev).