Category: Music, Dance & Theater

The Swedish Radio Choir at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Wednesday, August 8.

Russian choral music has a wonderfully distinct sound. Anchored by unusually rich, low bass voices, the music feels grounded and earthy yet, at its best, mystical as well, as if the music were spanning the spectrum of sound, all-encompassing, all-embracing. It’s glorious.

The Swedish Radio Choir never quite attained that glory when they performed selections from Rachmaninoff’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom Wednesday night. Maybe the not-particularly-live hall dulled the basso profondo sound and muffled the overtones. Maybe a man must have grown up in the Russian Orthodox Church to truly exemplify its musical traditions. Maybe the choir members simply haven’t lived and breathed the work, let it soak into their pores, into their consciousness and unconsciousness, the way you must to bring that music to life inside you. Whatever the reason, the Liturgy never took flight. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t transport me. I felt marooned in my seat.

The New York Philharmonic (not the Robin Williams movie, god forbid) on Thursday, July 5.

Programming a relatively casual concert entirely with music by Russian composers is sort of brilliant because much of the Russian canon is quite accessible to a lay audience. Memorable folk-like melodies, dazzling orchestration, and an infectious sense of vigor permeate the catalog. But thinking about that too hard always makes me sort of queasy.

Sure, you see the roots of that open, of-the-people quality in the nineteenth century, when Russian composers, led by Mily Balakirev, championed an essentially “Russian” style that embraced traditional Slavic musical elements. The influence of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a truly gifted orchestrator, also helped Russian music capture large audiences. But in the twentieth century, musical style became a state matter, with Stalin condemning composers to the gulag for the crime of “formalism.” So when I listen to some of the more crowd-pleasing works of Khachaturian or Shostakovich or Prokofiev, I always wonder, Is this what he would have written if a charge of elitism didn’t carry the threat of death? And if I enjoy it, does that put me in an aesthetic camp with Stalin? I know that’s incredibly silly and simplistic, but it bothers me nonetheless, and it saddens me that Stalin’s shadow still lingers over Russian music, even years after the fall of Communism.

Of course, such self-indulgent, over-serious ruminations are not at all the point of the Philharmonic’s “Moscow on the Hudson” program, part of its Summertime Classics series. That’s just me. And once I got over freaking out over a new bit of trivia (Did you know that the original text for Peter and the Wolf identified Peter as a Communist Pioneer?), I had a good time. It’s hard not to enjoy classical Russian music.

Shakespeare in the Park, presented by the Public Theater, on Saturday, June 30.

The tagline for this season’s Shakespeare in the Park is “Free Love.” You see those words plastered on buses and in subway stations, and it strikes me as ironic because Oscar Isaac and Lauren Ambrose, playing the parts of Romeo and Juliet, interpreted their roles with the least amount of romanticism I’ve even seen in a production of the play. In their hands, real love barely figured into the tragedy.

I don’t mean that as criticism. Despite the Prince’s final speech—with its facile “feuds are bad” moral and canonization of the poor foolish teenagers—I’ve always felt that Romeo and Juliet is ultimately about the dangers of rash decision-making, and not just on the part of the title characters. Mercutio’s heedless push to crash the Capulets’ party, Tybalt’s pugnacious insistence of dueling, and Lord Capulet’s impulsive decision to marry off his daughter (despite his earlier vow that he would only do so with her assent)—to name just three examples—all play into the disastrous chain of events that leave not two but, lest we forget, six people dead.

I’m not sure whether director Michael Grief intended his production to be read this way, but in my eyes, Isaac’s Romeo never matured from impetuous to passionate, and Ambrose’s Juliet did so only fleetingly. Partly because of that and partly because of the great use of humor in the earlier acts, Romeo and Juliet became less sentimental, less about love and more about the folly of youth.

The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, June 27.

Swan Lake is my favorite ballet—kind of pedestrian of me, I guess, but it’s perfect, and as much as I enjoy Giselle and Cinderella, they can’t compare to the perfection of Swan Lake.

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, June 17.

Oscar Wilde was a paragon of dry, satiric wit, so I tend to forget that his writing could be a bit maudlin, too. Some scenes in An Ideal Husband, for example, become downright cloying if not handled with what I ever so humbly consider to be the proper arch tone. As for Wilde’s story “The Nightingale and the Rose,” it tilts dangerously toward bathos—which perhaps makes it well suited for ballet. Ballet, as a medium, can transform the mawkishly sentimental into something beautiful and affecting.

But I have mixed feelings about Christopher Wheeldon’s new short ballet based on Wilde’s short story. Wendy Whelan danced the role of the Nightingale with lovely, avian delicacy, and Bright Sheng’s score, commissioned for this work, had some striking, exquisite passages, particularly during the Nightingale’s death. The ballet has lingered in my memory, yet the tearjerking sensibility, mixed with unsettling imagery and staggering cynicism, left me uncertain about the work as a whole.

The New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, June 5.

The traditional Latin text for a requiem mass is a prayer for the dead, repeatedly asking God to grant the departed eternal rest. Brahms’ requiem is different. Instead of using the Latin liturgy, he patched together texts from the Bible, both Old Testament and New. The result is a prayer not so much for the dead but for the living: those who grieve and will someday die themselves.

Ein deutsches Requiem is nothing less than the most powerful, eloquent contemplation of mortality I’ve ever encountered. Grand yet intimate, it first assures you that you will find peace someday (Brahms opens with one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”), and then it plunges into a harrowing study of the transience of human life. (“For all flesh is as grass…”) After that grim truth, the reassurances of the final movements, with promises of life after death from the Epistles and Revelation, are truly heavenly. The requiem is an emotionally exhausting work but an extraordinary one.

The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, May 22.

Watching Lar Lubovitch’s adaptation of the story of Othello, you can tell that he has choreographed for ice skaters as well as dancers. On several occasions, a male dancer spins in place, the centripetal force of his motion levitating the body of his partner. (Is that centripetal force? I never took physics in high school, and I just wasted several minutes trying in vain to decipher the explanations on the internet. I feel quite ignorant.) You see that effect all the time on a skating rink, but on stage, without the momentum of cutting across the ice, it looks oddly out of place.

More effective, in my eyes, are Lubovitch’s intricate lifts. I love the graceful, seamless way they blend into the pair’s steps, but here, they also amplified the emotions of the story. At the ballet’s outset, Othello and Desdemona moved together as a loving unit, Othello guiding gently and Desdemona arcing her body in innocent bliss. In their final dance, by contrast, those lifts that once looked gentle became domineering, with Desdemona at the mercy of her angry husband.

The American Ballet Theatre at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, May 15.

La Bayadère is as evocative of India as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado is of Japan, which is to say: hardly at all. The Mikado is a thoroughly British operetta, and La Bayadère is a thoroughly Russian ballet—complete with a chorus of ballerinas in white tutus—but in both cases, the occasional goofy exotic flourishes are kind of endearing, even if they are anachronistic.

The Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, May 9.

Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice is an odd little opera. For one thing, Euridice ends up alive, even after Orfeo disobeys the gods and turns to look at her as he leads her out of the underworld. As one reared on Greek myths, I find that happy ending kind of appalling, but according to the Met’s program notes, Gluck did, too (“I was forced to alter the climax,” he lamented), so I feel a bit more forgiving on that score—especially considering how gorgeous the music is.

And damn, is it ever gorgeous. Gluck avoids vocal pyrotechnics in favor of a refreshingly unshowy aesthetic: simple and poignant. Even the narrative structure is pared down. With only three solo parts (Orfeo, Euridice, and Amor), the opera’s straightforward, subplot-free storytelling makes the already archetypal tale feel positively elemental. Nothing distracts from the beauty of the music.

Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, April 26.

When I bought tickets to this concert some nine months ago, I had no idea what the program would be, and I didn’t care. I would listen to Chanticleer sing anything—nursery rhymes, 1980s power ballads, “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas—anything at all. The choir’s flawless tone, impeccable precision, and ravishing musicality make virtually anything worth listening to, and the ensemble has the dramatically varied repertory—everything from Renaissance music to gospel music to challenging new music—to prove it.

As it turns out, Chanticleer debuted a new work: a mass with each of the five movements created by a different contemporary composer from a different cultural background. American composer Douglas Cuomo wrote the Kyrie; Turkish-American Kamran Ince wrote the Gloria using a Sufi text; Israeli-born Shulamit Ran wrote the Credo using a Hebrew text; Ivan Moody wrote the Sanctus in the Greek-Orthodox tradition; and the Irish Michael McGlynn wrote the Agnus Dei infused with folk elements.

Each movement was sung a capella, but beyond that they differed considerably, yet paradoxically they still hung together rather well as a unified mass. I’m sure it helped that the choir sung short sixteenth-century works by Gabrieli and Gesualdo between the mass’ main movements—lending it some continuity—but beyond that, all the movements possessed a sense of sincerity, of spiritual longing. Each provenance was different, but they seemed to be trying to reach the same place.