Archives for 2007

“It is perhaps the unique capacity of art that its most monumental achievements manage to embrace and resolve polarities which, in other areas of life–including philosophy–seem hopelessly unbridgeable: positive and void, the boundary between subjective and objective worlds. Where such resolution fails, or is not even attempted, art degenerates into decoration, on one hand, or illustration–the vast gap between object and idea that plagues so much contemporary art. Where it succeeds, we approach perhaps as near as we can come to grasping the way of things.”
Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists

Our Girl in Chicago, my dear friend and co-blogger, has been experiencing some technical difficulties that have kept her out of cyberspace for the past few weeks. Now a death in the family has forced her to leave town unexpectedly. She e-mailed me this morning, asking me to let you know that she’ll be back and blogging as soon as possible.

Here’s more of what I’ve been up to since returning from Chicago last week:

• On Saturday morning I took the Acela Express to Washington, D.C., where I visited the new Smithsonian American Art Museum. I hadn’t been to SAAM since it closed several years ago for remodeling. Mr. Modern Art Notes catalogued the museum’s shortcomings when it reopened last July, and he got it right on the nose: SAAM’s permanent collection is handsomely installed but embarrassingly spotty, though it houses more than enough first-class canvases to make it worth a visit. (Some of my favorites are George Inness’ Niagara, John Singer Sargent’s Pomegranates, Majorca, Stuart Davis’ Memo, Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning, Hans Hofmann’s Fermented Soil, and Joan Mitchell’s Marlin.) In addition, SAAM has two must-see exhibitions on display this summer, “Saul Steinberg: Illuminations” (up through June 24) and “Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry” (up through July 8). You should definitely stop by if you’re in town–but don’t expect any revelations.

• From there I made my way to the Kennedy Center, where Eve Tushnet and I saw Washington National Opera’s new production of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa (I’m scouting singers for The Letter). It was, as Carl Van Vechten said of the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts, a knockout and a wow.
Patricia Racette, who sings the title role, is an artist I’ve admired ever since I reviewed her first Metropolitan Opera Traviata for the New York Daily News a decade ago:

Heads up, opera buffs: there’s a new star in town. Patricia Racette was faced with the unenviable task of replacing the much-loved Renee Fleming as Violetta, the doomed courtesan, in Franco Zeffirelli’s expensive new production of La Traviata, which opened Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. A lesser singer might have clutched under the pressure. Instead, Racette swung for the fences–and smashed the ball out of the park.

Racette is no airheaded coloratura canary, but an outstandingly gifted singing actress who uses her bright, vibrant voice as an instrument of high drama. She caught the hectic desperation just below the surface of the forced gaiety of “Sempre libera,” and moved boldly from the black despair of “Addio del passato” to the heart-tearing false hope of the death scene. The wild cheering at evening’s end was fully deserved: rarely has an American soprano made so much of so great an opportunity.

If anything, Racette is even better now–I could easily imagine her doing a non-singing stage role–and Jenufa, a bracingly astringent piece of Central European verismo, gives her no shortage of opportunities to show her stuff. The production? Three words: Hookers. Spandex. Motorcycles. But Racette and her supporting cast soared above the Eurotrashy décor, giving a performance I expect to remember for a very long time to come.

Jenufa closes on Thursday. You’d better go.

• I saw two plays on Sunday, one of them in the company of Ms. Asymmetrical Information. The first was Olney Theatre Center’s production of Georges Feydeau’s 13 Rue de l’Amour, the second Studio Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (I’m doing Stoppard plays this summer.) Watch my Wall Street Journal drama column for details–I’ll be reviewing 13 Rue de l’Amour on Friday and R & G a couple of weeks after that.

• Today I’m en route to New Haven to review a new English-language adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at Long Wharf Theater. Later in the week I’ll be driving up to Boston to see Noël Coward’s Present Laughter and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in Boston. Insofar as possible, I’ll blog in the interstices of my travels.

Tomorrow I report on my recent visits to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse.

Later.

Yesterday’s new piece of music was Edgard Varèse’s Poème èlectronique, a piece of musique concrète created by Varèse on four-track magnetic tape and played through the more than four hundred loudspeakers installed inside the Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Yannis Xenakis for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. The original master tape was digitally remastered, mixed down to two tracks, and transferred to CD in 1998. (To look at the “score” of Poème èlectronique, go here and scroll down.)

“The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness–drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die.”
David Solway, interview, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 9, 2007 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Here’s part of what I’ve been up to since returning from Chicago last week:

• On Thursday Apollinaire Scherr and I paid a visit to New York City Ballet, where we saw an all-Tchaikovsky program consisting of two masterpieces (George Balanchine’s Mozartiana and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, also known as Ballet Imperial) and an agreeable second-tier work (Jerome Robbins’ Piano Pieces). The dancing was only just good enough–I hear that the company put in so much time rehearsing Peter Martins’ new Romeo and Juliet ballet that the rest of the spring repertory was more or less ignored–and the orchestra sounded frightful. To be sure, one can never waste time looking at Ballet Imperial, or talking to Apollinaire about dance, but beyond that it was an unmemorable evening.

• On Friday I watched Alain Resnais’ film version of Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, a play about which I raved in The Wall Street Journal when it was first performed in America in the summer of 2005:

Mr. Ayckbourn’s entry in the “Brits Off Broadway” festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can’t come any closer to describing the effect of “Private Fears in Public Places” than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness, and when it’s over you won’t quite know how you feel, other than thoroughly entertained….

I can see how a superficial viewer might mistake it for a piece of commercial work. Don’t be deceived by the shiny surface of “Private Fears in Public Places,” though: it’s as serious as a broken heart.

Resnais’ film–whose French title, as it happens, is Coeurs–follows Ayckbourn’s play very closely, a fact that escaped the attention of most of its reviewers. (It’s surprising how few film critics are familiar with the literary sources of the films about which they write.) I don’t speak French and so can’t tell you how faithfully the dialogue has been translated, but the scene-by-scene structure of the film is more or less identical to that of the play. The big difference between the two is that Coeurs, unlike Private Fears, isn’t funny, and apparently wasn’t meant to be.

The most distinctive thing about Ayckbourn’s plays, as I observed in my Wall Street Journal review of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2005 revival of Absurd Person Singular, is the unsettling way in which they mix laughter and sorrow:

Ayckbourn is not infrequently mistaken for a commercial playwright. In fact, he’s a kind of poet, a craftsman of genius (he even wrote a book called “The Crafty Art of Playmaking”) whose riotously funny studies of the English middle class are streaked with melancholy and regret. In “Absurd Person Singular,” set in the kitchens of three different homes on three consecutive Christmases, you can see his method at its purest. Each act depicts a different phase in the lives of three newly acquainted married couples whose relationships are in flux. At the beginning of the evening, Jane and Sidney are trying desperately to impress their new friends, and at the end they’ve become the top dogs. In between is two hours’ worth of furious farce arising from the varied sorrows of the six characters. In the zaniest scene, Eva tries repeatedly but unsuccessfully to kill herself. You can’t help but laugh at her increasingly preposterous attempts–but you don’t forget for a moment that she’s not kidding.

Not so Coeurs. Perhaps it might seem funnier to a French-speaking viewer, but somehow I doubt it: Mark Snow’s score is unabashedly bittersweet, and the overall tone of the film is elegiac to a fault. It is, however, wholly convincing on its own dark terms, and I strongly recommend that you seek it out. (It’s currently playing on IFC’s on-demand channel in New York and will be released on DVD later this summer.)

• I also watched a kinescope of the original 1953 telecast of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Videotape was still in the cradle back in the Fifties, and all three networks ran weekly drama anthology series broadcast live from New York. Most of the scripts were mediocre and are rightly forgotten, but a few of the better teleplays of the period, among them N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, Rod Serling’s Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, and Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, were later adapted for Broadway and/or Hollywood and thus are still remembered.

Marty was filmed in 1955. It was the first low-budget indie flick to take Hollywood by surprise, winning the best-picture Oscar and grossing $5 million (it cost $340,000 to make). Alas, the film version, which starred Ernest Borgnine, wasn’t very good. Borgnine’s acting is likable but ordinary, while Chayefsky’s screenplay, to which he added a half-hour’s worth of additional scenes in order to make it long enough for theatrical release, is flabby. The original hour-long TV version, by contrast, is lean, direct, and characterful, and Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, who play a pair of painfully plain New Yorkers looking for love, are so natural and unaffected that they scarcely seem to be acting at all. It’s easy to see why Marty, though it only aired once on network TV, made a deep and long-lasting impression on all who saw it.

If you go in for trivia, by the way, you probably already know that a half-century after appearing in the best-remembered live TV drama of the Fifties, Marchand made a similarly powerful impression on postmodern viewers when she played Tony Soprano’s mother. I have decidedly mixed feelings about the so-called Golden Age of Television, but some of it was and is worth celebrating, and it’s nice to know that one of its most talented actors lived long enough to do equally unforgettable work in the true Golden Age of series TV.

To be continued….

I’m listening to unfamiliar music again after a travel-related hiatus. On Friday I listened to Frank Martin’s Ballade for Piano and Orchestra, composed in 1939 and recorded for Chandos by Roderick Elms, Matthias Bamert and the London Philharmonic in 1994.

“My appetite for power, and for money, was undeniable, as was the craving for glory (to give that beautiful and impassioned name to what is merely our itch to hear ourselves spoken of).”
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian