Archives for 2007

I was going to write at length about Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice, but Tony Tommasini has already said most of what I wanted to say. Read what he wrote and you’ll get a good sense of what Morris’ melding of opera and modern dance looked and sounded like. The only thing I want to add is that I found it enthralling but not especially moving, and I think I know why.

It strikes me that this Orfeo is best understood as an ingenious attempt to solve an insoluble problem: how do you make sense of a small-scale opera in a large-scale opera house? As I wrote about the Met in a 1995 essay published in Commentary:

The present-day Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966 as part of Lincoln Center, has 3,788 seats and a 54-foot-square stage opening. Because of the size of the stage and the depth of the hall, every one of the Met’s productions is by definition “spectacular.” The only variable is the style.

A spectacular production of a three-singer opera is a contradiction in terms, and I felt that contradiction operating throughout Orfeo, the same way I do whenever I see an opera at the Met that calls for anything remotely approaching dramatic intimacy. Even nineteenth-century story ballets have a way of getting lost in the Met, whose mammoth proscenium arch swallows up dance instead of setting it off. Modern dance, whose vectors point down, not up, has an even harder time registering in so fundamentally hostile an environment. To be sure, Morris and his designers did a brilliant job of filling the space, and their Orfeo is an absorbing visual experience–but I never got close enough to it, emotionally speaking, to feel anything but admiration.

Now that I’ve spent four years on the aisle as a theater critic, attending two or three performances each week in houses that rarely hold more than a thousand or so people, I find the monstrous scale of the Met to be even more problematic than I did when I was a working critic of music and dance. No doubt that’s one of the reasons why I no longer go there very often. For me, opera is drama or it’s nothing. Its purely musical values can be experienced just as well at home. Yes, I’ve seen some Met productions that made dramatic sense. John Dexter’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Mark Lamos’ Wozzeck, and Elijah Moshinsky’s Queen of Spades all rank high on my list of unforgettable nights at the theater. But they’re exceptions to a rule that I find increasingly antipathetical.

As for Mark Morris’ Orfeo, it’s…well, spectacular. Which is fine in its way: I like a super-sensational spectacle as much as the next guy. I only wish this one had been accompanied by a more suitable soundtrack.

It’s been way too long since I trolled the Web for cool stuff, so here goes:
• The inimitable Mr. Think Denk nails House in one:

I propose that House is really “about” irony and sarcasm; it asks the question…what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?

• Eddie Muller, author of a smart and funny book about film noir, offers a list of “25 noir films that will stand the test of time.” Go here to read it. I agree, mostly.
• I’d been wondering what became of Miranda July, the writer-director-star of Me and You and Everyone We Know, one of my favorite indie movies of the past few years. Well, here’s the answer–and it’s got me very excited.
• Something I wrote not long ago inspired this lovely reflection on the nature of music:

This is one of the bittersweet things about our art: a beautiful moment is gone as soon as it appears, living only in our memory of it, no matter how heated that memory is. This creates a special kind of conflict in the directionally-oriented structures of Western music. The music tells us we’re going forward towards something, but our minds may get stuck in particular moments that have already passed….

Read the whole thing, please, and after you do, consider this fugitive observation by Samuel Langford, the greatest music critic you’ve (probably) never heard of:

Everything passing is but a symbol, says the wise Goethe, and music, in one sense the most swiftly passing and intangible of all mortal things, is in another the essence of the imperishable.

Yes.
• My favorite blogger has been on a roll lately. Here’s an especially good example:

I feel like I “put up” with music when I eat out, although I’m surprisingly capable of tuning it out when I dine solo. But dining not-solo is another matter. Maybe the best soundtrack to a superlative dining experience is nothing more than conversation–and I’m not fussy about the topic; it could be a brilliant counterpoint about the food and wine, your laundry, and that sensational young pianist who just performed with the symphony. But music? It distracts…from the food and wine (if that’s what I want to pay attention to) and from the conversation (if that’s what I want to pay attention to) and makes me wonder: does this dining experience merit the challenge of this aural distraction?…

Yes, yes, a gazillion times yes.
• Here are two inimitable voices from the past: Kurt Weill singing excerpts from two of his songs…
• …and Vladimir Nabokov reading an excerpt from Lolita. (Scroll down for the link.)
• On a lighter but no less serious note, here’s the only surviving film of Clifford Brown in performance. It’s from a kinescope of a 1956 TV show hosted by–believe it or not–Soupy Sales.
• Speaking of jazz, a blogger-author recently posted the complete text of one of Donald Barthelme’s wittiest and most knowing short stories, King of Jazz. It’s brief and brilliant, and I commend it to your attention.
• This video has been bouncing around cyberspace in recent days. It’s John Cage’s 1960 appearance on I’ve Got a Secret, one of the most popular prime-time TV game shows of my childhood, and nothing I could possibly say about it comes anywhere near the experience of viewing it. Please do so at once…
• …and after you’re through, spend a couple of minutes looking at this excerpt from a 1964 TV broadcast of Septet, one of the very few Merce Cunningham dances accompanied not by the avant-garde soundscapes of Cage or David Tudor but by a bonafide piece of honest-to-God music, Erik Satie’s Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear.
As I wrote in an essay on Cunningham reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader:

To see it is to see the Merce that might have been–a conventional Cunningham. Though the body language of Septet is as idiosyncratic as anything the Cunningham company dances today, the tone of the dance is startlingly “normal.” It isn’t just that Septet derives its structure (and counts) from a piece of music…It’s the style, the cheery atmosphere of accessibility, that startles.

Ponder at will.
• Here’s the best Wikipedia entry I’ve read so far this year…
• …and here’s the most poignant news story I’ve read in I don’t know how long.
• Finally, here’s a great game for the literary-minded. I got a passing score–barely.

“It is something to belong to the same race of beings as Beethoven.”
Samuel Langford, Musical Criticisms

…why I haven’t been answering my e-mail lately, it’s not just the spring rush. My mother was in a serious car accident a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been a bit distracted as a result.
The good news is that (A) she’s fine and (B) I’m starting to catch up. You should be hearing from me fairly soon. Meanwhile, hang in there!

The pre-Tony rush is on, and so I’ve reviewed three Broadway openings in this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Legally Blonde, LoveMusik, and Coram Boy:

Sure things are rare on Broadway, but absolutely everyone in the business is predicting an endless run for “Legally Blonde: The Musical,” the stage version of Reese Witherspoon’s 2001 screen comedy about a pink-clad, puppy-toting Malibu sorority girl who follows Mr. Wrong to Harvard Law School, where she finds true love and becomes a successful criminal lawyer. Who am I to disagree? I know a megahit when I see one, and “Legally Blonde” has cash written all over it. What’s more, it’s fairly inoffensive as commercial commodities go, so if your tweenage daughter begs you to take her–and she will–give in gracefully. You won’t be bored….
Tune? You want tunes? Go see “LoveMusik,” a jukebox musical about the open marriage of Kurt Weill (Michael Cerveris) and Lotte Lenya (Donna Murphy). Weill was one of the greatest theater composers of the 20th century, and “LoveMusik” contains two dozen of his best songs, some familiar (“Speak Low”) and some not (“I Don’t Love You”). You won’t hear better music on Broadway–or anywhere else, for that matter….
As for Ms. Murphy’s eerily exact impersonation of Lenya, it’s a tour de force comparable in quality to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote. Not only does she get all the surface details right, but she inhabits them so completely that you forget she’s pretending to be someone else–and not even Lenya herself sang “Surabaya Johnny” so well….
If you’ve been hungering for a three-hour-long dose of pretentious silliness, I give you “Coram Boy,” a creepily mawkish tale of two 18th-century orphans that plays like a cross between “Oliver Twist” and “Pride and Prejudice” rewritten by Thomas Harris and accompanied by the music of Handel….

No free link this week. I therefore invite you to go buy a Journal (it’s for sale!), or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the drama column, plus lots of additional art-related coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
P.S. For an alternate view of LoveMusik, go here.

• Read A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker and wrote a six-hundred-word notice for my Contentions book column.
• Lunched at Good Enough to Eat, whose waitresses are as nice as pie.
• Came home to find eight parcels from publicists, one of which contained six gorgeous-looking finished copies of New York Review Books’ new edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, featuring an introduction by me. (It’ll be out June 5–order now!)
• Listened to Leos Janacek’s Concertino, a weird and wonderfully prickly 1925 piece for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, horn, and bassoon.
• Walked across Central Park (first time this year!) to Knoedler & Company, where I saw and reveled in a newly opened show of watercolors by Milton Avery.
• Took a pre-theater nap.
• Went to a Broadway press preview of Terrence McNally’s Deuce.

“There is no more pitiful human illusion than that you can catch up on lost reading in old age. Old age is the busiest of them all. Things you used to do effortlessly take you forever, provided you can do them at all.”
S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary