Met "Otello" Netcast

I just was listening to the Met's season premiere of Otello on Sirius and quite enjoyed it. Johan Botha did not have the forza of del Monaco, or the dramatic intensity of Vickers, or the heroic plangency of Domingo. But he sang beautifully and, what's more, sensitively--not a quality one usually associates with this role. He excelled in the lyric passages, particularly the love duet; when he tried to push his voice the tone coarsened, although that effect did add to his characterization of the role.

Renee Fleming was in great voice. Ravishing, creamy tone from top to bottom, evocative use of chest voice, never a shriek or a croon.

Best of all was Semyon Bychkov's conducting. The orchestra had proper Verdian crispness, but it also sounded "voiced" somewhat differently--deeper, somehow, with the center of gravity a little lower than we're used to, giving the score a kind of ballast. Bychkov's tempi seemed completely spot-on to me: brisk and unfussy, but flexible enough to follow the voices. He kept the tension from first note to last in the fourth act, not an easy trick. And the Met Orchestra played beautifully for him. Good for the Met for engaging him!

Osmo-sis

Osmo Vanska is getting a lot of attention these days for his revitalization of the Minnesota Orchestra. And why not? His performances are generating excitement, he's brought them into the recording studio, and he's a hockey fan (occasionally seen at Minnesota Wild games).

His Beethoven cycle, on the Bis label, with the Minnesotans has been celebrated, so I took the opportunity the other night to check out the Eroica. There's no doubt that he has worked wonders with the orchestra: they sound marvelous. As for Vanska's reading, he went for clarity and balance. From an architectonic point of view, it was impeccable. He essentially grouped the movements into three sections of roughly equal length (the scherzo and finale having the weight of a single unit, even if not performed that way).

That sense of proportion was evident within each movement as well; nothing was distended or distorted. But Vanska didn't apply a straitjacket to the rhythm either.

I thought, though, that the recording was a disappointment. Balance and proportion are nice in Mendelsohn. But this is Beethoven. There was too little edginess; the catharsis of the last movement failed to come off. I didn't hear any creative risks--or, for that matter, anything so new or unique as to justify yet another recording of this familiar music.

Bruges in the News

Isn't it odd how you don't think about or hear about something or someone or some place, and then, all of a sudden, that's all you're hearing about?

Opera lovers know the Belgian city of Bruges as the setting of Korngold's opera Die Tote Stadt. And on the day that the film In Bruges, a crime caper starring Colin Farrell, opens, I come across this story in Le Monde about this dead, and otherwise unremarked-upon, city.

According to the news account, an American man, Jewish, an Auschwitz survivor, was refused service at a Bruges establishment because he was wearing a yarmulke. His attempts to find redress were rebuffed at several turns. After finally being reported in a Dutch magazine, the incident is now being investigated by Bruges' tourist office.

If Korngold's opera hadn't turned me off to the possibility of visiting Bruges, this story certainly does.

Nico Muhly: Correction

A kind reader emails me that The New Yorker did indeed post Rebecca Mead's Nico Muhly article on their website--it's just not accessible from their contents page. Here is the link. My apologies to The New Yorker for my snarky comment.

The reader who let me know of my error has her own blog. It reports on new music and shows how far is the reach of Nico Muhly's "ecumenical" (Mead's word) appeal. She has some fun Muhly stuff as well.

Nico Muhly

The New Yorker's web site still feels there is something to be gained by withholding content, so Rebecca Mead's beautifully written profile of the young New York-based composer Nico Muhly can only be found in the print version. Seek it out; it's worth reading, not just for its introduction to the work of this prodigy, but for Mead's masterly (one is tempted to say Rossian) descriptions of just how his music sounds. (She speaks of one of the techniques employed in Muhly's concerto for orchestra and electrified violin as "bouncing the bow across the strings to create an aural ricochet.")

Muhly is part of that current--I don't think it's quite right to call it a movement, as its practitioners would no doubt object to such a term--that locates in the space otherwise known as "classical" an aesthetic that encompasses influences and associations from across a wide musical spectrum. (One could place Schlimé in that space as well.)

The New Yorker web site does at least post a generous selection of Muhly's works. The aforementioned violin concerto, complete with those "aural ricochets," is featured. It's a languid piece that always seems about to veer into sheer prettiness but manages not to. It is clear that Muhly truly is an inheritor of both minimalism and the American eclectic tradition, but those tendencies are so deeply assimilated that the music never sounds derivative or recherché.

Muhly also has a web site, where he muses in an engagingly overstimulated way. And there's a MySpace page, which I leave you to find for yourselves.

My Birth Opera

La Cieca has a great idea: check out what the Met was performing on the day you were born (assuming you were born during the Met season), using the indispensable Met archive. It turns out my birth opera is Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, one that has always held a place in my heart. The cast includes one famous debut:

Metropolitan Opera House
October 13, 1964
DER ROSENKAVALIER {191}
R. Strauss-Hofmannsthal
Octavian.....................Lisa Della Casa
Princess von Werdenberg......Elisabeth Schwarzkopf [Debut]
Baron Ochs...................Otto Edelmann
Sophie.......................Anneliese Rothenberger
Faninal......................Norman Mittelmann
Annina.......................Mignon Dunn
Valzacchi....................Andrea Velis
Italian Singer...............Sándor Kónya
[snip]
Conductor....................Thomas Schippers

It just so happens that I own a recorded excerpt from the Met broadcast of that run (December 19, same year), with Schwarzkopf in all her mannered glory.

Interestingly, Cieca's birth opera, Don Giovanni, shares with mine some notable cast members.

Growth Spurt

G&T is growing! The chart, from StatCounter, shows steady growth--helped along immeasurably in January by Gert's link to the Domingo post. Thank you devoted readers!

A Happy Sports Day in New York

So yesterday everyone in this great city was cheerful and excited. They were all talking about Sunday's game. And what a game! Down 3-0, the Rangers came back with five--count 'em, five--unanswered goals against le Tricouleur. And ...

Wait, what's that? Oh, there was a football game, too.

Francesco Tristano Schlimé at Weill Recital Hall, February 1, 2008

As promised, I attended Francesco Tristano Schlimé’s New York debut last night. He’s the real deal, although I’m not sure if he is going to be to everyone’s taste.

For the record, let me state that my preference in piano playing is for personality, even if it risks eccentricity. Technical mastery is all well and good, but I prefer touch, expression, sensibility. Schlimé is technically assured (although I wouldn’t want to account for the clarity of all of his passagework). More importantly, though, he brings a forceful presence to every piece he plays, an acute point of view that gives his readings uniqueness and power.

He started the program with Cinque variazioni, an early piece by Luciano Berio, and which he played from memory (not always a given with modern music). Schlimé is superb at bringing out contrasts, and this music, in which a lyrical tendency fights with percussive attacks, was tailor-made for him. In Schlimé’s hands it flowed with mesmerizing beauty.

In a provocative move, Schlimé launched into his next set of pieces, three toccatas by Frescobaldi, without a break. The effect was startling, but not in an ugly way; I was more impressed by how apposite the pairing was. Schlimé may have angered some purists by using some heavy pedal effects in these ancient pieces; to my ear, the pedal gave the music spaciousness and heft. The last of the three, in F major, from Frescobaldi’s second book of toccatas, is a contrapuntal tour-de-force that seems to have held no terrors for the young pianist.

The program continued with Bach’s French Suite No. 4 (BWV 815); Schlimé gave the dance-like rhythms real point and, in the final, hair-raising Gigue, once again showed off his technical flair. I did not detect his using the pedal in these pieces, but I could be wrong.

The first half finished with a remarkable piece, Technology, a realization (by Schlimé) of an electronic work by the techno-music composer Carl Craig, whom I am too ignorant in these matters to have heard of before. It started with a series of chime-like figures; this was followed by a transitional passage in which a repeated bass note was punctuated by some manipulation of the piano string by the pianist: Schlimé reached into the piano and produced a rising scale of eerie overtones by plucking the string, all the while sounding that bass note. By keeping his foot on the pedal, the resonance created an aural background, like the swooshing of traffic in the rain. This led to a jazzy ostinato in the bass that eventually grounded the triumphant return of the chime-like music of the opening.

The second half of the program opened with a work by a young composer, Justin Messina, called NYTectonics: 4 City Bridges. (The bridges are the Verrazano, the Queensborough, the Triboro, and the Brooklyn.) The four components do not need be played in any particular order, and the codas and introductory measures of each are meant to played in an overlapping way. I can’t say whether the bridges were being musically described, or whether they were simply used as evocative points of inspiration. Verrazano was characterized by a continuous drone of seconds; Queensborough was jazzy, with syncopated rhythms and blue notes. It was music by a promising young composer who managed to incorporate disparate elements without sounding easily eclectic.

It made me think, also, of Hart Crane. His bridge, like Schlimé’s piano (and aesthetic), is a living link between epochs, genres, cultures. There is a welcome idealism in this kind of time-and-space-bending enterprise.

Schlimé then performed Haydn’s sonata in C (Hob. XVI:48), a two-movement work that opens with a theme and variations marked “andante con espressione,” here played in a manner that I imagine many would consider all wrong—heavy and dramatic, rather than light of touch and “objective,” as is the custom these days with this kind of music. I liked his approach, though. How else to convey the chromatic richness of the variations, if not investing it with layers of feeling? He took the presto finale fiercely, ending with an exciting flourish.

Schlimé is also a composer, and he finished the scheduled program with a short, tonic work by Berio, Wasserklavier, and an improvisation on the same, in which, upon Berio’s harmonic platform, he built a veritable skyscraper, shimmering in intensity.

As though this wasn’t impressive enough, Schlimé gave as an encore a composition of his own, a short piece called Melody (I think), which rarely moved above middle C, and featured an insistent, tango-like ostinato in the bass.

Afterward, there was a complimentary reception, with an abundance of food and wine, at which Schlimé met with the audience. I overcame my habitual shyness and managed to shake his hand and utter some words of congratulation. (He also told me what the encore was, as he did not announce it from the stage.) He addressed his well wishers in several languages, and he seemed polite and not at all touched by the kind of pretentiousness that one might expect.

It’s rare to hear the piano played so expertly and intelligently, imbued with both grandeur and a keen intellect. They don’t always go together. It was also, musically, one of the most satisfying recitals I have heard, mixing music from different eras and avoiding overplayed concert staples. Let us hope for a speedy return of Francesco Tristano Schlimé to New York.

Music Keeps You Young

These two stories were side by side in the print edition of today's Times: Tony Martin still singing at 95 (and still married to the great Cyd Charisse), and Elliot Carter, still going at 100.