Category: Reviews

eighth blackbird; Argento Chamber Ensemble; red fish blue fish; Steven Schick; and others at the Tune-In Music Festival at Park Avenue Armory on Friday, February 18.

The program was outside my comfort zone, which was exactly why I wanted to go. It’s so easy to fall into picking only the familiar works you know you love—or maybe less familiar works by composers you know you love—that every now and then you have to shake yourself and dive into something unknown. The dizzying program at the inaugural Tune-In Music Festival, committed to “enhancing opportunities for contemporary musicians and composers,” certainly qualified: two works by twentieth-century/contemporary composers I’d never heard of, one by a twentieth-century/contemporary composer I’ve never warmed to, and a rather free arrangement of a work by Bach, the composer who brings out my most rigid, purist inclinations about interpretation—definitely not in my comfort zone.

But the conceit of the program intrigued me. Its title, “powerLESS,” alludes to a notorious line from Igor Stravinsky’s autobiography: “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” (Another program in the festival is titled “powerFUL,” essentially taking the contrary position.) Stravinsky is being provocative, of course, but if you can get past the absolutism, it’s an interesting idea, demanding that we justify music for its own sake. Each work on this program seems to demand that kind of attitude. The music offers no narrative entry points, no extramusical suggestions to hold onto, no language at all. It’s music—sound—left to its own devices, and in that, it’s a fascinating assortment.

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, February 12.

The word operatic connotes grandeur and spectacle, usually to the point of extravagance, and under that narrow understanding of opera, eighteenth-century composer Christoph Gluck’s musical dramas scarcely qualify. They were, in fact, a reaction against Gluck’s perception of the genre as, well, operatic: a hollow celebration of virtuosic but meaningless fireworks with no connection to story or character.

Gluck’s own operas, by contrast, are defiantly stripped down to their core elements—no coloratura flamboyance, no shaggy humor, just simple, sincere storytelling and a constant flow of elegantly emotional music. The relative austerity of it can be strange. At Iphigénie en Tauride, Sean pointed out that Gluck’s operas might, in some ways, be better suited for the concert hall than the stage because there’s so little action of any kind to depict. I see his point—and I’m not too fond of this particular production—but I’m loath to give up the quiet but poignant drama of long-exiled Iphigénie finding her similarly exiled little brother. There might not be any histrionic vocal embellishments to mark the occasion, but when it reaches its high points, it’s stirring all the same.

The Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday, January 12.

The thing that mystifies me about opera—or, more precisely, opera audiences—is how conservative it is. Theater companies routinely tweak Shakespeare plays—Romeo and Juliet in modern times, The Merchant of Venice in pre-war Germany, Hamlet in a bare black box, part doubling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gender reversals in The Tempest, an all-male cast for The Comedy of Errors, and on and on and on—and although those interpretations aren’t always popular, they’re not shocking either. Broad interpretation is an accepted component of theater.

By contrast, any opera production that isn’t a traditional, realist sort of affair seems to be branded “controversial” out of hand. Having heard the “controversial” label applied to Willy Decker’s production of La Traviata (which premiered in Salzburg in 2005 and made its Metropolitan debut this season), I expected something truly avant garde and alienating. Instead, the only shock was how elegantly constructed the production is and how beautifully it dramatizes its sad tale of repression and mortality. I simply can’t understand how such a sensitive, thoughtful, passionate Traviata could ever be controversial.

The American Ballet Theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, December 30.

The Nutcracker has never been one of my favorite ballets. The Act I party scenes are dull, the Act II ethnic character dances are discomfiting, and the girl-and-her-nutcracker plot is so bizarre that I’ve never been able to make much emotional sense of it.

Yet despite my mixed feelings about The Nutcracker, I’ve seen it more than any other ballet. (In fact, I’ve already written about it two times here on this blog, which might help account for my pitiful sluggishness in finishing this post.) It’s a holiday standard, of course, but that doesn’t mean much to me. (Case in point: I have never seen one of those ubiquitous Rankin/Bass holiday specials—not even Rudolph.) Perversely enough, those mixed feelings are probably the reason for my repeated attendance at The Nutcracker. It’s such an insanely weird ballet that I’m always fascinated to see what the choreographers do with it. I’m usually disappointed or mildly repulsed, at least to some degree, but for some reason, that doesn’t stop me.

Alexei Ratmansky’s new production for the American Ballet Theatre works better than most. Most notably, the choreographer doubles the child Clara and child Nutcracker with an adult couple, their imagined grown-up selves—a conceit that works beautifully. It allows him to provide the main characters with virtuosic choreography, obviously, but it also gives the ballet a stronger dramatic arc, making this Nutcracker sweeter and more intimate than most. I only wish Ratmansky had extended that same thoughtfulness to some of the ballet’s other icky elements, but I suppose it wouldn’t be The Nutcracker if something wasn’t make me mildly queasy. And now I have something to bitch about. Tradition!