Category: Music, Dance & Theater

At Birdland on Friday, February 26.

Of all musical genres, jazz is perhaps the farthest out of my comfort zone, the one that leaves me feeling most adrift—which is why it’s great that Sean and I have friends who expand my horizons, getting me to attend concerts I wouldn’t otherwise. Friday night’s performance at Birdland was particularly good for me because it motivated me to drag my winter-weary butt out of the apartment this past weekend, something that otherwise might not have happened. (Please, o weather gods, enough with the goddamn snow! The novelty has worn off. I am done.)

Anyway, now I’m stuck writing about jazz—always a daunting challenge. The problem, I think, is that jazz is near enough to musical styles that I do know well to make it easy for me to listen to it and understand it through that prism, yet far enough away to make that prism a problematic one. I definitely have my opinion, but I’m uncharacteristically insecure about it, which is a lousy position to write from. But this is my blog, and no one cares, so enough hedging: I didn’t like the use of the organ in Lou Donaldson’s Organ Quartet. So there.

Voices of Ascension at St. James’ Church, Madison Avenue, on Thursday, February 4.

“Signature pieces” are crowd-pleasers, almost by definition: if it’s not the kind of thing that absolutely everyone loves, you probably won’t be performing it often enough for it to become a signature. I don’t begrudge Voices of Ascension putting together a program of such favorites—this is the choir’s twentieth anniversary, after all—but it did result in striking homogeneity. People love the Romantic period, and that’s what the program comprised: some early, some late, some French, such Russian, some Protestant, some Orthodox, but all Romantic, lushly expressive, sweetly melodic, chromatics yielding ultimately to tonality.

I don’t mean that as criticism, exactly—I love Mendelssohn and Bruckner and Rachmaninoff as much as anyone—but I would have enjoyed some Bach and Palestrina, too, or maybe Pärt or Britten or Chen. Under Dennis Keene’s baton, the choir has recorded works from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, so I’m puzzled why they limited themselves to just over a century of repertory here.

The first half of the program breezed through ten short works by assorted composers, and after an intermission, the choir performed Fauré’s heavenly Requiem—a cornerstore of Western choral literature for a reason. And even if I wearied a bit of all the pretty, pretty Romanticism, I never tired of the choir’s warmth. The voices blended together exquisitely, filling the sanctuary with glorious sound.

The Gotham Chamber Opera at the Hayden Planetarium on Wednesday, January 10.

Il mondo della luna—both the opera in general and this production in particular—is like one of Shakespeare’s fluffier comedies, the ones with identical twins and widespread cross-dressing and absurd misunderstandings. They’re interchangeable nonsense, as far as I’m concerned, so if you sit down to watch As You Like the Two Gentlemen of Errors expecting something dignified and august, the utter lunacy is disconcerting, even off-putting. But if you just go with it, embrace the mayhem, it’s endearing—not a masterpiece of Western civilization but sharper than you might expect. Plus, there’s something somehow comforting in the realization that people—even properly bewigged historical people—have always gotten a kick out of so-called low-brow pleasures we’re supposed to feel all high-brow guilty about.

Composer Franz Joseph Haydn came around about a century and half after Shakespeare, and Il mondo della luna doesn’t feature identical cross-dressing twins separated at birth (which is sad because who doesn’t love that plot device?), but the silly story of a con man who tricks a wealthy, overprotective father into believing he and his daughters have traveled to the moon is the kind of thing the Bard would have loved: broad farce with an improbable but adorable happy ending. As for the music, Haydn will always pale to his contemporary Mozart (as unfair a standard as there ever was), but at his best, he produced some of the greatest music of the Classical period, and for this production, the Gotham Chamber Opera have shamelessly trimmed more than three hours down to an hour and half of his best.

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, January 16.

One thing I’ve come to love about opera is that the female characters generally are players in the action, to a far greater extent than many contemporary works in different media. I suspect the desire to show off the female voice superseded the inclination to shuffle all the women to the background as passive wives and mothers and girlfriends. True, the storylines opera provides those female characters are often ludicrous, even offensive, but at least they are storylines. I’ll take them.

Consider Carmen, Bizet’s masterpiece, first performed in 1875. The gypsy antihero not only drives the action; she’s the titular character—something of a sociopath and a parodic warning against the dangers of unbridled female sexuality but nonetheless an infinitely stronger, more compelling character than José, her pathetic boy toy, or Micaëla, the virgin to her whore. One can’t help but relish Carmen’s vivacity even as one recoils from her cruelty, which is, after all, returned in equal measure by many of those around her.

It’s a great role—iconic for a reason—and in the Met’s new production, Elina Garanca brings Carmen to fresh life. She’s impetuous but self-possessed, seductive but guarded, tenacious but fatalistic, and director Richard Eyre showcases her beautifully in his wonderfully dramatic, gritty-edged new production. Sweeping away caricature, Garanca and Eyre have created a fierce, raw Carmen to remember.

The Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, December 8.

I believe Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is commonly considered the most accessible of Mozart’s operas. Because it’s technically not opera but singspiel, its between-aria dialogue is not sung but spoken. Ingmar Bergman adapted it for screen, and the Metropolitan Opera has been putting it on every December for the past few years in a bid to make it a tradition in holiday family entertainment. But for me, the utter insanity (and misogyny) of Flute sets it well below another beloved Mozart opera, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), which, to my ears and eyes, is far more accessible and charming and beautiful than Flute can ever be. True, Figaro is all about sex and infidelity, so it’s not a great candidate for holiday family entertainment, but for an adult audience, Figaro is dazzling.

Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, December 3.

After listening for years to my hyperbolic cooing over Chanticleer’s annual Christmas concert, my parents decided to come to New York this season, with my brother in tow, to experience it for themselves. I was thrilled, of course, and then terrified, as I always am when people act on my implicit recommendations. Feeling responsible for someone else’s disappointment is devastating.

I needn’t have worried, of course. The program was as stunning as always. And what’s more, experiencing it with them made it feel fresh as well as familiar. Mom’s delight with the Neapolitan Baroque crèche in the medieval hall made me see its charm with new eyes, and knowing that Franz Biebl’s lovely “Ave Maria” was new to them made it shimmer with a special warmth.

Now playing at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway.

The ambition of Ragtime is astonishing. It’s one thing to create a musical from a simple, straightforward movie, an animated comedy or some such, but to use E. L. Doctorow’s sprawling, provocative epic novel as source material is something else entirely. So much do I admire the creators of Ragtime for setting their sights so high that I’m usually willing to forgive the moments when they fall short—and they do. Ragtime has considerable flaws: often bombastic orchestration, awkward pacing in the second act, an overly rosy ending. But these are worth setting aside in appreciation of the musical’s strengths: incisive writing; gorgeous, meaningful songs; heartbreaking drama deftly leavened with humor and irony. It’s not perfect, but it’s eloquent and memorable—something special.

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, November 4, as part of the Ancient Paths, Modern Voices festival.

The program’s concept is fascinating: two works by major Western composers drawing on an exotic, imagined China and two works by major contemporary Chinese composers tying together Western and Eastern musical traditions. Together, the pieces get at the way China appears in the Western musical canon and how that’s changing now that the “Western musical canon” isn’t so monolithic. Perhaps that sounds academic, but the concert was anything but. Vibrant and intricate, the music was enormously beguiling and beautifully performed—a fitting entry in Carnegie Hall’s festival celebrating Chinese culture.

The London Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center on Friday, October 23.

Schubert and Mahler both can be classified as Romantic composers, but their careers fell at opposite ends of the period. Schubert came early, helping bridge the gap between Classic and Romantic, and Mahler came late, transitioning from Romantic to Modernist twentieth-century styles. Pairing the two composers underlines just how drastically composition changed over the nineteenth century. Both are lyrical and expressive, but the evolution of harmony and form and orchestrational technique is impossible to miss.

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, October 17.

On Saturday night, no one booed at Tosca.

Normally, that would go without saying, but this new production famously received an ugly audience response at its gala debut a few weeks ago. After more than two decades with Franco Zeffirelli’s extravagantly detailed production, which painstakingly recreated the real-life Roman settings, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new production, by Swiss director Luc Bondy, that gleefully rejects that kind of spectacular approach in favor of a cold, stripped-down aesthetic, which displeased many opera aficionados, to put it mildly.

For the record, I never saw the Zeffirelli Tosca, so I can’t work myself into a fury about Bondy supposedly desecrating the beloved Puccini opera, but I do think this new production is muddled, at best. The looming, overlarge sets swallow the performers. The costumes and sets comprise a motley, unmatched assemblage. (Just what time period are we supposed to be in?) And the Act II silliness with the prostitutes feels condescending and superfluous and therefore rather pathetic. The whole gesamtkunstwerk concept notwithstanding, though, opera is ultimately about the music, and musically, this Tosca was worth enduring those flaws.