Category: Music, Dance & Theater

The New York City Ballet on Saturday, October 1.

Atonal music is easier to appreciate than to love—and it's not particularly easy to appreciate. In college, I performed one of Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke on recital, but that selection stemmed mainly from a perverse impulse to be off-putting and inscrutable. Despite the hours I spent studying the work's spiky lines and stream-of-consciousness form, it never truly coalesced for me the way Bach and Brahms and Prokofiev did. I can't imagine that I played the piece particularly well.

But what I failed to learn of atonality from my own dogged study, I've learned easily from George Balanchine. Since I started attending the ballet upon moving to New York, Balanchine's iconic "black and white" works—stark, stripped-down pieces, usually set to music by Stravinsky at his most esoteric—have consistently snuck up on me, somehow surprising me again and again and again with how much I prefer them to much of the floaty, romantic rep. Balanchine's choreography shows me the music in the atonal—the shape of the lines, the rhythmic motives, the elegance in the severity—that I glimpsed but never truly grasped on my own. It's finally dawned on me that I should stop being surprised. Balanchine is the best ambassador for modernist, twentieth-century music I've ever encountered.

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Sunday, August 7, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

All the best parts of Julius Caesar happen before intermission, which generally falls after Mark Antony's rabble-rousing public address. The conspiracy, the assassination, the dueling eulogies—that's all over and done with, leaving only the frenzied descriptions of off-stage battles and the inevitable suicides. It is, I suppose, a tribute to director Lucy Bailey that the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the play retains some energy through what sometimes feels like a very extended denouement. I can never muster much sympathy for Brutus, but this time I at least felt some of the drama.

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, August 6, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Shakespeare's go-to plot device of women passing themselves off as men always requires some suspension of disbelief, but As You Like It, which features the strangest example of the ruse, requires more suspension than most. Not only does Orlando, who met and became infatuated with Rosalind when she was a lady of the court, not recognize her when she's presenting herself as a boy named Ganymede, he also accepts Ganymede's eccentric suggestion that he woo Ganymede as if the boy were Rosalind to prove his love for her. To be fair, Orlando is supposed to be naïve and uneducated (that is, in fact, why Rosalind is interested in correcting some of his sillier ideas about love under her guise as Ganymede), but honestly, is he blind too?

Of course this is a comedy, not naturalistic drama, and the Royal Shakespeare Company makes Rosalind's subterfuge—and by extension her relationship with Orlando—more compelling than in any other production I've seen. The performances are lovely, for starters, but beyond that, the production as a whole creates a magical, increasingly optimistic mood—like sunlight slowly breaking through clouds. Under that spell, accepting the absurd premise doesn't seem so hard, and besides, it's worth the leap.

The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory on Friday, August 5, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Romeo and Juliet can be a dreamy, romantic play, but it doesn’t have to be. That is, in fact, one of the things that makes the play so fascinating, so rewatchable: the lovers, their relationship, and the world around them shifts with every actor, every director.

Personally, I like a coolly clear-eyed interpretation, never glorifying the lovestruck teenagers for their heedlessness, perhaps going so far as to subvert the very idea of “love at first sight,” but even I found director Rupert Goold’s Romeo and Juliet a bit harsh: still tragic but also deeply cynical, in a way that undermines the drama of the play. I enjoyed the production immensely, and the staging was spectacular, but his star-crossed lovers didn’t capture my imagination the way others have.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on Sunday, July 24.

Jazz rhythms and inflections often sound out of place in “classical” music, like words of a foreign language thrown into conversation with great ostentation but imperfect understanding. Yet somehow, unlikely though it might seem, Maurice Ravel, a reserved, cerebral Frenchman, managed to draw beautifully on American jazz. His piano concertos, in particular, gracefully weave jazz idioms into an otherwise neoclassic sensibility. Entwining with breezy ease, the bluesy bent pitches and syncopated rhythms don’t feel gimmicky; they’re part of the texture, part of Ravel’s personal vocabulary, which is all the richer for it.

The incongruity of that has always delighted me, but in a way, perhaps it’s not surprising. Ravel had the ability to transcend gimmicks, taking a composition from a contrived starting point to a higher plane through impeccable craftsmanship and sheer beauty. Nothing he wrote sounds tossed off, so nothing sounds cheap, and—as performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet—everything is enormously compelling.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on Saturday, July 23.

The alchemy by which an old piece of music becomes inextricably linked to a new movie has always fascinated me. I’ve never even seen Platoon, but I can’t hear Barber’s Adagio for Strings without thinking of it. Strauss might as well have composed Also spach Zarathustra for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shawshank Redemption turned a simple, plot-advancing duet from Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro into the very embodiment of transcendent art.

So will the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, the Allegretto, be forever identified with The King’s Speech? At Tanglewood, when the piece began and afterward as people left, I must have overheard half a dozen questions and confirmations that, yes, that’s what plays at the movie’s climax, when the king delivers the titular speech—the association is definitely there. I suspect it will fade, mainly because I don’t expect any kind of immortality from the movie itself, but if I’m wrong on the latter count, who knows? That climactic scene is perfectly choreographed, using Beethoven’s grand dramatic arc to give tremendous dignity and resonance to what otherwise would have been a perfunctory (if beautifully shot) montage. The music makes the scene, and it’s impossible to think about that scene without recalling the music.

It also helps that Symphony No. 7 is a stunning musical work, period. (It’s a tribute to just how brilliant Beethoven was that even his relatively lesser-known symphonies—those that aren’t the instantly recognizable fifth, or the ninth with the “Ode to Joy,” or the Eroica or the Pastoral—are still masterworks.) The rhythmic motives give everything a driving momentum, from the stately Allegretto to the spritely Presto. The symphony fairly brims over with life, and that’s how the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed it, vivacious and energetic and thrilling.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood on Friday, July 22.

My college piano professor once told me that modern recordings give us a distorted picture of how music can and should be performed. Artists can record take after take, and technicians can splice together the best parts, and what we hear is both perfect and unreal. Aspiring to that kind of perfection means chasing a virtually impossible standard, but worse, the pursuit fosters a kind of safe, controlled presentation—note-perfect but so carefully collected as to be inert. That, my professor said, is a tragedy. In scratchy old recordings of live performances, the musicians—even the best musicians—hit their share of wrong notes. Some of their runs fly on the edge of control. There are noticeable flaws. And yet there’s a kind of beautiful, crazed passion to those performances that we often lack today. Paradoxically, to achieve genuine greatness, you have to be willing to sacrifice superficial perfection.

Listening to mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, I couldn’t help but think of my piano professor and grin: I suspect he would have adored her performance. Graham has a gorgeous voice, a wonderful sense of phrasing, and an obvious commitment to conveying the meaning of what she sings—all of which were on abundant display Friday night—but her performance of the Handel arias from Ariodante and Alcina wasn’t completely clean. Her elaborate ornamentation came across as more manic than disciplined, and amid all the pyrotechnics, her intonation sometimes sounded slightly fuzzy. And yet, as much as I have enjoyed Graham in the past, I’ve never felt quite so exhilarated by her before. The vibrant energy, the fiery emotion—something intangible gave the music a radiance I hadn’t expected. Graham’s vast technique was still undergirding the lines but it wasn’t binding them; the very wildness of it all was thrilling.

Blue Note Jazz Festival at the Blue Note on Monday, June 27.

My brother once told me that he learned about the history of jazz by reading the current weekly listings in The New Yorker. Nostalgia is such a powerful force that many of the greats of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s are still performing, and the “Goings On About Town” section dutifully encapsulates the upcoming gigs, briefly explaining why the artists matter and what their big hits were. The past is constantly made present.

Of course, the past is often past its prime, as well, so if you’re not nostalgic yourself, if it’s all new to you, those concerts can be a bit awkward. You can’t very well expect a ninety-year-old man to perform with the stamina and vigor of a forty-year-old, but going too far along that train of thought can begin to feel condescending. Live performance is undoubtedly special, but sometimes you have to wonder if you’d be better off just listening to the classic recordings.

I have to admit these thoughts were running through my head as I listened to acclaimed, award-winning vocalists Jon Hendricks (eighty-nine years old) and Annie Ross (eighty-one). I suspect their breath support wasn’t always somewhat erratic, their tone wasn’t always so gravelly, but hey, a singer’s body is his instrument, and Hendricks and Ross are in their eighties. It might sound condescending, but they are amazing for their age.

The American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday, June 7.

Lady of the Camellias might be one of the most elegantly conceived ballets I’ve ever seen—a flawless marriage of music and movement, beautiful use of dance as dramatization—which made the experience of seeing it for the first time not only delightful but also humbling because, beforehand, I considered it woefully misbegotten. Instead of using a single unified musical work, ideally composed particularly for the ballet, Camellias pulls together a diverse assortment of works by a single composer, an approach that often feels disjointed, with music and story never quite coming together. And instead of dramatizing a simple, elemental story, one that won’t require much in the way of exposition and plot work, Camellias takes a complicated narrative and, instead of stripping it to its foundations, embraces the complications, using a frame around the main story as well as a recurring ballet-within-the-ballet, an approach that easily could have resulted in a muddled, overweighted slog. No doubt these elements did impose challenges for choreographer John Neumeier, but Camellias, which premiered in 1978, overcomes those challenges with stunning artistry. What seemed to me like madness turns out to be genius.