Author: Mary Beth

The New York Philharmonic on Friday, October 6.

Sneering at melody is one of the classic postures of the music snob. To describe a composer as a “mere melodist” is to condemn his or her work as shallow crowd-pleasing: pretty tunes with nothing of substance underneath them. I usually dismiss that sort of criticism. It underestimates how difficult it is to write a truly memorably melody, and it often overlooks the other qualities of the music in question.

But in the case of Camille Saint-Saëns’ third symphony, well, I think it’s the sort of work that gives melody a bad name in critical circles. I enjoy much of the composer’s other music, but listening to the so-called Organ Symphony, I recall Claude Debussy’s great put-down: “I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget its name is Saint-Saëns.”

The Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, October 5.

The articles I read made a big deal about the puppet. Director Anthony Minghella chose to use a life-sized, Bunraku-style puppet to represent Butterfly’s young son, and apparently some people found the expressive little figure distracting.

I didn’t. The puppet, manipulated onstage by the two members of Blind Summit Theatre, delivers a much stronger performance than a toddler could have done, and besides, it fits the production’s spare, East-meets-West aesthetic. Both the puppetry performance and Minghella’s Madama Butterfly as a whole are gorgeous, passionate, and memorable—everything one could want from a night at the opera.

Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Joyce Theater on Sunday, October 1.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring nearly started a riot. The savage, inelegant steps shocked the audience, but how else could Nijinsky have interpreted Stravinsky’s gloriously primitive work? With its driving yet uneven rhythms and crushingly dissonant harmonies, Rite of Spring doesn’t lend itself to dainty arabesques and pirouettes.

Sadly, Nijinsky’s notorious choreography has been lost to history, but contemporary choreographer Shen Wei captures Stravinsky’s brutal work beautifully. For the dancing is beautiful—not graceful, certainly, but energetic and athletic and invigorating.

The New York Philharmonic on Thursday, September 28.

Like many orchestras, the New York Philharmonic performed a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth. The program notes focused on the debate about Shostakovich’s relationship to the Soviet government, and that, too, was probably fairly universal from orchestra to orchestra. The story of Shostakovich’s rocky musical career is too dramatic for any writer to resist.

Twice denounced by Stalin—the first time at the onset of the Great Terror—Shostakovich nonetheless survived to write numerous symphonies, string quartets, concertos, operas, and other works that entered the canon not only in his homeland but in America and Western Europe, too. The Soviet regime used much of his music as propaganda—and Shostakovich accepted and even encouraged that—but later musicians and historians have argued that some of his compositions were actually subversive, satirizing rather than celebrating Soviet aesthetic ideals and burying coded anti-government messages into his music.

The debate is fascinating, but I think it distracts from Shostakovich’s music. That’s unfortunate because, as the Philharmonic demonstrated Thursday night, Shostakovich’s music is thrilling—essentially romantic but enlivened by a vivid use of repetitive motives and a delicious crunch of chromatics. The Philharmonic’s selections—the cello concerto and the fifth symphony—are a joy to experience whether they contain subversive messages or not.