Category: Music, Dance & Theater

Maude Maggart at the Algonquin Hotel on Saturday, January 27.

One of the many things that annoy me about American Idol (which I watch occasionally out of morbid curiosity) is the way the judges throw around the word cabaret like an insult. I understand that they’re looking for a pop star, not a chanteuse, but to dismiss an entire genre, a great tradition of American music, with such carelessness strikes me as unseemly.

I think part of the problem is the implicit assumption that cabaret is monotonous—invariably a low-voiced, cigarette smoker drearily husking her way through songs of the 1930s and ’40s—and that’s grossly unfair. Thirty-one-year-old Maude Maggart puts the lie to it immediately with her deliciously versatile voice. A skilled interpreter, she expressively modulates from rich and sultry to breezy and girlish or brassy and bold or warm and full to match the mood of each song she sings. The effect is hypnotic. On Saturday night my brother and I hung on her every note.

The New York Philharmonic on Thursday, January 11.

Is there a rule that since the legendary Jacqueline du Pré made Elgar’s Cello Concerto her signature piece, the work now belongs solely to young, photogenic female cellists? That was my first thought when twenty-four-year-old Alisa Weilerstein walked onstage Thursday night, but I’m being flip, of course, and dreadfully unfair. Weilerstein delivered a ravishing performance of the concerto with the New York Philharmonic, and perhaps the work lends itself to younger soloists. Although Edward Elgar composed it quite late in his career, the cello concerto’s passionate intensity can feel quite youthful.

The New York City Ballet on Thursday, January 4.

Could there be a more passive heroine than Princess Aurora, better known as Sleeping Beauty? She literally sleeps through most of the story, either as an infant or as the victim of a curse. That’s not her fault, of course, but neither does it make her a particularly compelling character.

The classic Tchaikovsky ballet, as choreographed by Peter Martins, drawing from the iconic work of Marius Pepita, remedies that by highlighting the Lilac Fairy as the story’s true heroine, even if she doesn’t get titular status. After evil Carabosse curses baby Aurora, the Lilac Fairy bravely counters the spell, downgrading spindle-induced death into a hundred-year slumber. When her spell takes effect, the good fairy safeguards the princess and her family by conjuring protective brambles around the castle. Then she finds a suitable prince, enchants him with a vision of the sleeping beauty, leads him to the castle, and helps cut away the thorny hedges. No wonder she takes center stage in the final tableau: the happy ending is entirely her doing.

The Metropolitan Opera on Friday, December 15.

A week or so ago, I commented on how strange and creepy the story of The Nutcracker is—and I stand by that—but I have to admit The Nutcracker has nothing on Die Zauberflöte. With its clandestine order of monks, irrepressible bird-people, supernatural children, numerous melodramatic suicide attempts, and wild allusions to Masonic secrets and Zoroastrian mysticism, Die Zauberflöte is kooky even by operatic standards.

As such, it is well-suited for Julie Taymor’s distinctive, over-the-top direction. Taymor echoes the libretto’s hodgepodge of plot devices and references with a symbol-smothered rotating stage and costumes inspired by everything from geishas to Kabbalah to hip-hop.

At times, the jumble of imagery and ornamentation annoyed me (particularly when the stage crew noisily shifted the set during one of Sarastro’s arias), but I couldn’t help but appreciate the way the kaleidoscopic dazzle of the production kept the mustiness of age away from Mozart’s gleefully un-elite singspiel. No one could ever relegate the opera to a museum piece while enormous bears straight out of The Lion King dance to the beat of the music. If Taymor’s production is busy and cluttered (and it is), then so is Die Zauberflöte itself, charmingly so.

The New York City Ballet on Tuesday, December 5.

Time and endless repetition might have dulled the creepy edge from the story of The Nutcracker, but it’s still there. Underneath all the sugarplums and snowflakes is the weird tale of little Marie (or Clara, depending on the storyteller), whose godfather manipulates her into dreaming of his young nephew saving her from a mutant rodent and then whisking her away to a magical kingdom of sugar and antiquated stereotypes. It’s like a child’s feverish sexual fantasy: she gets the boy and lots of candy! Hot! The Nutcracker has its odd charms, to be sure, but how did it become America’s favorite ballet, the crossover hit?

The Los Angeles Master Chorale at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, October 28.

I attended this concert a week ago, and I’m still fussing over my blog entry. Writing about music is so difficult that for a while, I was tempted not to post anything about it. Ultimately, my obsessive-compulsively tendencies won out, though, so here I am trying to bring shape to my thoughts about Steve Reich’s music.

The concert opened with Reich’s iconic 1972 composition Clapping Music, with the composer himself as one of the clappers. This is the sort of music I associate most with Reich: a highly rhythmic work that holds intellectual interest but, for me at least, little emotional appeal. I follow the lines as the two performers move out of and into phase with each other. That progression is interesting and certainly innovative for the time—Reich is considered one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century—but it only engages my head.

I admit I didn’t know much of Reich’s work beyond such early minimalism, so I had no idea that the two choral works on the program, Tehillim (1981) and You Are (Variations) (2004), were going to be so engrossing. More fluid, more expansive, and more passionate, they captured my imagination, not just my intellect.

The American Ballet Theatre at the New York City Center on Saturday, October 28.

When selecting which dance repertory programs to see, I usually pick based on strong interest in one particular piece. When I actually attend, however, that special piece is rarely my favorite and occasionally a disappointment. It’s a fun reminder that although I’ve studied music and film and theater, dance is still new to me, and I really don’t know what I’m doing when I make my choices.

The American Ballet Theatre at the New York City Center on Tuesday, October 24.

I will never forget the sold-out performance of Oroonoko I saw in a small black-box theater. It was a new play, based on Aphra Behn’s seventeenth-century novel and produced by a revered theater company, and I had been excited to see it. My excitement quickly died. The writing was hackneyed and shallow and simplistic—offensively so. Not one character was more than a stereotype, not one plot turn was organic, not one would-be tragic moment earned the emotion it tried to wrench from my tear ducts. I hated the play … and when it was over, everyone around me burst into wild applause and gave it a standing ovation. I have rarely felt so alone at a theatrical performance.

I experienced a similar feeling of alienation of the conclusion of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room Tuesday night. Set to Philip Glass’ relentless minimalism, the cluttered, graceless choreography bored and annoyed me. I was relieved when the work finally ended and mystified that seemingly everyone around me loved it.

The American Ballet Theatre at the New York City Center on Thursday, October 19.

I love going to the ballet, but I attend as much for the music as the dancing. When I choose my tickets for the season, I consider the composers as well as the choreographers, and my enjoyment of the performances depends a great deal on how well I think the movements interpret the music. I’m not sure that’s the best way to evaluate dance—it’s actually quite limited—but for one who majored in music in college, it’s probably unavoidable.

My focus on the relationship between movement and music led to enormous frustration with choreographer Jorma Elo’s new work, Glow - Stop, for the American Ballet Theatre. Elo has an extremely distinctive style: a sort of hyper-kineticism that turns the dancers into perpetual motion machines. The steps are intricate and physically demanding, and Elo seems to employ them indiscriminately, regardless of the style or contour of the music he is using.

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.”