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Joseph Pereira
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic “Green Umbrella” new(ish) music series wrapped up its run for the season with percussion and Luciano Berio’s love for Cathy Berberian. The program was to have been conducted by L.A. Phil music director Gustavo Dudamel who withdrew from the concert just last week due to what was described as his need for more time to prepare for the world premiere of John Adams’ new evening length opera/oratorio The Passion According to the Other Mary just over three weeks from now. So while the maestro was apparently holed up somewhere diligently committing the new score to memory or whatever else it might be that he does to prepare, conductor Jeffrey Milarsky got down to the actual business of music making and performing some challenging new pieces including a commission and world premiere from one of the L.A. Phil's own.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the evening was that world premiere of a new percussion concerto written by composer and L.A. Philharmonic principal timpanist Joseph Pereira. The L.A. Phil has a tradition of composer/timpanists, most notably William Kraft, who achieved similar success with the orchestra not so long ago. (Interestingly, Pereira has performed Kraft’s own Percussion Concerto No. 1 with the orchestra in 2009.) For Pereira’s own piece, he recruited the talents of Colin Currie who was seen recently in Orange County playing the Higdon Percussion Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony. The piece is scored for both strings and winds that are separated into small groups at either side of the stage. There are also two additional percussionists, one for each set of players who accompanied Currie with a wide array of sounds. The idea, as Pereira pointed out in his own remarks, was to have the soloist work from a more restricted range of instruments and allow the back-up percussionists a broader palette in the supporting role. Percussion concertos often allow soloists time with everything but the kitchen sink. Take for example Sofia Gubaidulina's recent Glorious Percussion that calls for an entire group of "soloists" to cover all the instrumentation she calls for. In Pereira's work, the goal was to focus on only a couple of instruments and explore the contrast between "unpitched" drums in the first movement and "pitched" marimba and vibraphone in the balance. The music and its development with the small orchestra plays with the notion of each group being "pitched" or not, and Pereira specifically asks each collection to express itself in the language of the other. For example, in the opening of the second movement the marimba part is restricted to only a couple of tones relying instead on other "unpitched" qualities of the sound for expression. Of course, none of this stayed stable for long, and Pereira played with the tension, passing material back and around with constant commentary from the cornucopia of other percussion instruments in the hands of the orchestra players. The work adhered to a traditional concerto structure which early on moved from bursts of dance rhythms to more esoteric forms and the piece mostly began to cook as it entered its final stretches.

In the first half of the program, Pereira's concerto was paired with Andy Akiho’s Alloy for the 12-member Foundry Steel Pan Ensemble. The work is scored for eleven steel pan players and a drum set. Additionally, the players each had bits and pieces of scrap metal that they would also play. The work cleverly played with the Carribean musical heritage associated with these instruments in an indirect fashion. It bounced along in a regular repeating way reminiscent of something straight out of Stomp that was a crowd-pleaser. Despite its ambitions for something greater, though, it came off as more of a trinket than a part of the crown jewels.

The balance of the evening moved away from percussion and towards more vocal fireworks even if they were still of an unconventional variety. The concert closed with Luciano Berio’s Recital (for Cathy), a 40-minute fever dream inside the mind of a soprano during the course of a recital performance. Written for Berio’s muse Cathy Berberian, the work demands as much acting as singing and playfully quotes a wide variety of composers and musical idioms in a dizzying succesion. Soprano Kiera Duffy was the protagonist and picked up and dropped Purcell, Rossini, Wagner and many more almost as quickly as she found them. Berio's own music from prior works is mixed in as well, and even when the music is immediately familiar, the substituted multi-lingual text, sometimes spoken, sometimes sung, is nonsense. Or at least it's meaning is largely subconscious filled with the musings and wayward madness of the recitalist character. There's a doppelganger that appears to repeatedly try to pull her offstage and even the soprano's own accompanist, in this case a role played by L.A. Phil keyboardist Joanne Pearce Martin, lunges onto the scene half way through. Meanwhile, conductor Milarsky leads his small band of strings and winds like some Greek chorus commenting on the action and egging it on. It was lots of fun to watch, and Duffy gave a very physical and engaged performance. Still, the part plays with this notion of the mind of the diva and its wayward subconscious tributaries which calls for a certain grandeur to give the thing another layer of comic irony that Duffy didn't quite tap into. The performance, which was directed by James Darrah, reminded me of the San Francisco Symphony's recent huge success with John Cage's Song Books and the nuanced insanity from experienced vocalists such as Jessye Norman and Meredith Monk who were able to trade on their own histories and images for another level of meaning in Cage's theatrical insanity. The L.A. Phil needed a little more of that on Tuesday in what was otherwise a solid show.
1 year ago | |
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From Anne LeBaron's Crescent City Photo: Dana Ross 2012
Four operas will dominate L.A.’s performance landscape over the next month, each as wildly different in its inception as the next. If you have any interest in opera, or think you should have one, there is absolutely something that will likely turn your head this month. Let’s start with perhaps the most traditional offering, Puccini’s La Bohème which will return to L.A. Opera for the 6th revival of Herbert Ross' production starting May 12 with a bevy of young stars including Stephen Costello, Ailyn Perez, and Janai Brugger. Meanwhile across the street, the L.A. Philharmonic will present Mozart’s Don Giovanni under Music Director Gustavo Dudamel, who will continue his ongoing onstage education about the most standard of operas. Mariusz Kwiecien will take the title role for all four performances starting May 18. On the less conventional side, Long Beach Opera will take their undoubtedly different stab at Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar for two performances on the 20th and 26th. But perhaps the most unexpected and anticipated opera event will be the hugely ambitious staging of Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City by the start up company, The Industry LA at Atwater Crossing on the 10th, which you can read more about in my preview of the show.

The other big event this month will be the world premiere of the new oratorio/opera from John Adams, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, which will again take place under Gustavo Dudamel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It looks to be an immensely challenging piece in that the company announced late last week that the preparations are such a concern to Dudamel that he won’t be able to participate in the “Green Umbrella” New Music program the orchestra is presenting a full 23 days before on May 9 that includes a world premiere percussion concerto by L.A. Phil principal timpanist Joseph Pereira. Dudamel will also lead a smattering of two different mostly Mozart programs in the interim.

Alsan Gilbert conducts the New York Philharmonic Photo: Chris Lee
There is plenty of other music to hear. On top of that pile would be the next program for L.A.’s adventurous wildUp chamber orchestra, which will consider themes military and otherwise on the 12th at the Pasadena Armory. The Formalist Quartet will give a concert celebrating their 5th anniversary on Feb 26 as part of the continuing music series at Beyond Baroque in Venice. For some more established new(ish) music, the place to be will be Santa Monica where Jacaranda will wrap up there current season with a California-based program including works of Terry Riley and Lou Harrison on the 20th. The Southwest Chamber Music 25th Anniversary season will wrap up this month as well with four performances as part of what they're billing as their first L.A. International New Music Festival, which takes place on the 9th, 12th, 24th and 26th at Zipper Concert Hall with programs that take "new" as some time within the last seventy years and composers who may well be international, though only rarely from L.A. The newfound Los Angeles Trombone Collective will give a concert of new works specifically for their unique corner of the musical world at the wulf on the 19th. Pianist Mark Robson will revisit works for the left hand at a recital at Boston Court in Pasadena on the 18th. Camerata Pacifica will wrap up their season as well with Beethoven, Heggie and Mozart in L.A. County on the 10th and the 16th. The always-interesting Brad Mehldau Trio will be at The Broad Stage on May 21. And lest I forget there are two very big musical out of town guests to remember this month. The New York Philharmonic and their music director Alan Gilbert will bring Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto for Yefim Bronfman to the Walt Disney Concert Hall on the 9th after performances of a different program with Beethoven and Debussy on offer in Orange County with the Philharmonic Society on the 8th. And the legendary Elaine Stritch will bring her one woman Sondheim show to L.A. on the 19th.


Elaine Paige in Follies Photo: Craig Schwartz/CTG 2012
Theater-wise, I should first remind you that you absolutely must see the Tony-nominated production of Sondheim’s Follies, which is now running at the Ahmanson Theater if you do nothing else this month. Center Theater Group will also open a world-premiere musical from Michael John LaChiusa at the Mark Taper Forum on the 23rd entitle Los Otros. In San Diego, the Old Globe currently is offering Kander and Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys while just a hop away the La Jolla Playhouse will soon open the world premiere musical Hands on a Hardbody (which is currently in previews) with a book by Doug Wright. Pasadena’s Theater at Boston Court will open with a world premiere play The Children by Michael Elyanow on the 3rd. Meanwhile, South Coast Repertory will go with the more tested Jitney by August Wilson starting on the 11th. REDCAT will be offering a number of interesting programs this month including Cold Dream Color, a new dance work from Arcan Collective on the 16th. And with all of this, you won’t want to miss the exclamation mark on American culture, Sandra Bernhard, who’ll bring her new show Sandrology to REDCAT starting on the 30th. And by that point June will be on the horizon including the 2012 edition of the Ojai Music Festival which will be led by Leif Ove Andsnes this year and will kick off on June 7th with the West Coast Premier of John Luther Adams Inuksuit. Stay tuned for a full preview.
1 year ago | |
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Ron Raines and the cast of Follies Photo: Joan Marcus
Not able to get out to New York during this Tony Awards season? Well for once, if you want to sample a bit of what might garner an award on June 10 this year, you need go no further than the Ahmanson Theater downtown where James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies have been imported almost perfectly intact following its recent Broadway run. (And for those of you old enough to remember, this may seem familiar in that almost the exact same circumstances followed the Broadway production of the original production which subsequently ran mostly untouched in L.A. in 1972.) In addition to being nominated for best revival of a musical, the show has (count them) four of this year's nominees in the cast, Jan Maxwell, Ron Raines, Danny Burstein, and Jane Houdyshell. Oddly enough the most marketable star from the show’s Broadway run, Bernadette Peters, is the about the only one who didn't make it out to L.A., leaving the role of Sally Durant Plummer to another Broadway star and prior Tony winner, Victoria Clark. Peters was one of my major caveats to liking the show when I saw it in New York last year, and Clark fits much more naturally into the role of dowdy Sally who may well be losing her mind in her pursuit to rekindle a three decades old adolescent fling.

Often when Center Theater Group imports shows from New York, which sadly represents the majority of their production output these days, the shows often come out watered down or decidedly less focused and smaller in scale. Not so this time around. This production of Follies, which originated at Washington’s Kennedy Center is brasher, tighter and much more ferocious than before. Everyone of those Tony nominees is a winner. Jan Maxwell’s Phyllis is graceful, lean, and worldly. She delivers a scorching version of "The Story of Lucy and Jessie" complete with all the male dancers one could ask for for the heavy lifting. Your heart breaks for her almost as much as it does for Burstein’s Buddy who’ll never fulfill the dreams of the wife he desperately loves. He's vocally warm and provides an excellent complement to Raines performance as Ben, which seemed more comfortable and certain here than I remember. The smaller roles abound with treasures. Soprano and opera star Carol Neblett has joined the cast here in L.A. in the role of Heidi. Elaine Paige still delivers a show-stopping rendition of “I’m Still Here." I'd say it's a unique moment, but it isn't. This show is filled with numbers that elicit tons of enthusiastic time stretching applause. It's loaded with Sondheim's best music sung unforgettably well by a first rate cast.

That Follies arrives amid an Ahmanson season of musicals and plays targeted at people who watch teen movies or music videos is reassuring. The show is an old-fashioned one with its many musical tributes to a bygone era of the theater. Each is a gem with a melancholy heart that gets worn more or less on the sleeve of each performer. The central conceit of the show with its many ghost-like show girls wandering among the living characters underscores the pervasive passing of time that all of the characters are singing and talking about in the show at the most basic level. It's an adult entertainment and admittedly may not be your cup of tea if your idea of a musical demands teen cheerleaders or brooding young rock stars. It's about a generation coming to grips with the passing decades and the choices they've made to get where they are. My advice—see it early, because you'll likely want to go more than once.
1 year ago | |
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Sir Simon Rattle
I flew back from New York a little earlier than I would normally on Saturday for one reason and one reason only - a rare appearance from conductor Simon Rattle on the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It wasn’t always this way. Rattle, perhaps one of the most highly regarded conductors in the world, made his first appearance with the L.A. Phil in 1979 and was Principal Guest Conductor here during the 1980s and early 90s. But in case you hadn’t noticed, those days are long gone and despite a close relationship with our local orchestra in the past, Rattle hasn’t performed with the orchestra now in over a decade and has only performed in Walt Disney Concert Hall on one prior occasion since it opened, with the Berlin Philharmonic during the inaugural season.

Whether or not the L.A. Phil audience still feels a connection to Rattle is unclear. But there is no doubt that these performances were much anticipated regardless given his reputation and a serious, well-chosen program. It turned out to be among the two or three best shows they’ve given all season. The evening started with an unusual pairing, that wound up making lots of sense. Ligeti’s Atmospheres and its rising discordant tones segued into the prelude for Act I of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Wagner’s music always sounds surprisingly contemporary especially when paired with later 20th-century works, and the relationship here in terms of color and sound that seems to coalesce out of thin air from a distance, taking shape as something much greater, was consistent through both pieces, played here without intermission.

Immediately after this, Rattle and the orchestra added voice to the mix in the form of mezzo Magdalena Kožená, Rattle’s wife. She often performs alongside him, and her appearance was a welcomed bonus. She performed Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, and, having just heard some of these same songs performed by Matthias Goerne and Leif Ove Andsnes last week, I was taken by the difference. Goerne’s rich warmth gave the songs, and particularly “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” a painfully melancholy feel. Kožená's voice, of course, is quite different, and her penetrating and exacting dark sound gave off a very different air making the protagonists of the song sound almost maniacal in their perceived separation from the rest of existence via love. Kožená is a great artist and she gave Mahler’s song the grand scale they deserved with rich, textured support from the orchestra.

But now came time for the orchestra to shine with Bruckner’s unfinished Symphony No. 9. It’s a big, sometimes brutal piece that can be both dark and even angry at times. There’s been a fair amount of late Bruckner on offer here in L.A. in recent seasons. The 9th was last performed here in 2009 by a touring Vienna Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. Rattle managed an emphatic but well controlled performance from the orchestra. The winds in particular contributed great things throughout these brooding, sometimes troubled movements. While many of the players may have been new faces for Rattle, he was clearly connecting with them in some of the loveliest playing they’ve delivered all spring. As to whether what follows from here lives up to this level will need to be seen, but hopefully Rattle’s face will once more be a familiar one around these parts. It would be great to get to know him once again.

1 year ago | |
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James Morris and Nathan Gunn Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2012
Remember all those things I said about the Metropolitan Opera’s new Robert Lepage-directed Ring Cycle yesterday? Well now I’m having second thoughts. Not so much about the overall quality of the production itself, but how it fits into the greater scheme of things. After seeing the premiere of the company’s final production of the 2011/2012 season, Britten’s Billy Budd on Friday, I’m reminded of of some of what Met Opera General Director Peter Gelb was faced with when taking over the company in 2006 – a roster of dozens of decrepit, ugly, outdated productions that had more or less left the company sidelined artistically and contributed to a slow but steady slippage financially as well. The new Ring may be boring, but at least its an effort to replace a production that should have been gone long ago. The Met’s current production of Billy Budd, originally directed by John Dexter entered the world in 1978, making it older than several of the performers currently appearing in it. It is the only production of the opera that the Met has ever presented and it hasn't been seen here since 1997. And now it has been wheeled out again largely as a vehicle for star baritone Nathan Gunn to perform one of his signature roles for three performances only at the very tail end of the current season.

Dexter’s vision may have been exciting over three decades ago, but now the claustrophobic, dark set looks quizzical despite its many levels which expand and contract when needed to make room for the chorus. All this movement isn’t as noisy as Lepage’s machine set for the Ring, but it’s just as bland. Oddly everything outside of the boat is in pitch-black darkness suggesting all of the depicted events transpire in the middle of a starless night. Maybe so, but how the boat gets around without even the suggestions of masts is something that nags in the back of the mind for the whole show. Ropes are pulled during the first chorus number, but the main activity depicted there isn’t raising the mast as much as scrubbing the deck, which more or less sets the tone for the rest of the evening. Probably the highlight of the whole evening comes at the start of Act II when the chorus appears ready for an attack on a nearby French ship, spreading themselves out on the set like some giant wedding cake and firing cannons. But none of this is particularly satisfying dramatically.

The musical performance on opening night fared only marginally better. As mentioned the show was an excuse to have Gunn perform one of his signature roles, and while that is a great idea, Dexter’s production often sidelines the character. It’s also a performance almost every other opera house offered up over a decade ago. The out-of-date production may have been an issue in hesitating to revive the production for Gunn, and at this point he isn't enough to save it. He is handsome and honey-voiced, and, wig aside, he embodies this role. But there's a lot more to Britten's operas than star turns and musically not everything else fared so well. Again the orchestra and even more concerning, the chorus, sounded decidedly under-rehearsed. Conductor David Robertson elected to take strangely slow tempi throughout making the show feel more like Pelléas et Mélisande than Melville’s tale of morality and duty at sea.

The cast featured another throwback to 1978 as well with James Morris and Claggert, a role he performed in that opening season as well opposite Peter Pears as Vere. Morris has worn a bit better than the production overall and he does project evil well, but the lower range of his voice has thinned considerably since his heyday. The biggest ovation went to John Daszak who dominated most of the evening with a nuanced and detailed performance as Captain Vere. There are a lot of other familiar faces in the cast who were fun to see such as Kyle Ketelsen, Keith Miller, Ryan McKinny, Eliot Madore, among others, but the pleasure in any of these brief solo turns couldn't tip the balance toward a cohesive performance. But sometimes things can improve with a few performances, so if you've missed this show from your childhood, it's back as it always was before with two more performances next Thursday and Saturday.
1 year ago | |
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Katarina Dalayman lights it up at the end of Götterdämmerung Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2012
It’s been done in so many places by so many people that even the New York Times has had to dig a little to find someone on staff who’ll say much good about it at this point. It feel like shooting fish in a barrel. But reality is hard to escape, and I admit after seeing the entire cycle over the last ten days at The Metropolitan Opera with Götterdämmerung wrapping things up last night, that this week has felt pretty hollow and dispiriting as far as opera goes. It’s difficult even to be snarky or witty about the production given how uninspiring this whole show is, defying even the possibility of camp. Lepage offers no insight into the events of Wagner’s lengthy work. He doesn’t even rehash somebody else's. It makes Francesca Zambello’s recent production in San Francisco feel like it came straight out of Berlin with all of its “ideas” and “thought.” Instead, Lepage treats his audiences to days of characters just entering and exiting from the wings directly onto the front skirt of the stage where they stand for hours and sing. Meanwhile opera's noisiest and most expensive backdrop clacks and hisses along during the scene changes before coming to rest in yet another high tech pose it will hold until politely invited to move again. Occasionally the tedium is broken up by the distant shouts of stagehands (as it was Thursday briefly) trying to keep the whole contraption on course, like deckmates on some latter-day Titanic.

The wreck here is only artistic, though. Götterdämmerung is perhaps the worst staging of the four operas in the cycle. The special effects are rarely special and almost always cliché from the crumbling statues of the gods in the finale to the blood washed from Gunther’s hands after Siegfried’s murder which soon stains all of the video-projected Rhine. The biggest and most dramatic moments in the score are largely ignored and instead accompanied by lengthy exits and entrances of various characters as if nobody knew what to do with all that pesky music. Characters pace back and forth on the stage as if waiting for the orchestra to get to their entrance. Sadly, some of this may have rubbed off on conductor Fabio Luisi who gave a polished but oddly unengaged interpretation of the score for most all of the performances. It was the kind of Ring where nobody is pushing anyone towards anything, which may well be the worst kind. Even the drab, quasi-mythological costumes seemed mostly to work to stay out of the way of something bigger that never arrived.

Most of the vocal performances over the four days were not so instantly forgettable. Cancellations for illness abounded as I noted previously, and on Thursday, Eric Owens too, was announced sick and unable to perform Alberich for his brief scene in Act II. Richard Paul Fink, who will sing the role throughout the final cycle this year, covered the part and seemed like a breath of fresh air wandering in wearing a contemporary dark suit. There were heroes. Jay Hunter Morris continued to use his good will and lovely voice to great effect right through the end. Hans-Peter König who had done lots of duty in this show as Fafner, Hunding, and finally Hagen was easily the most assured and beautiful singing of the Ring’s final installment. Even Katarina Dalayman, who sang Brünnhilde, powered down for the cycle’s final opera and was steely and powerful without so much outright shouting as in Siegfried. Owens has becomes a first rate opera star out of these performances as Alberich as he should be. Bryn Terfel seemed best when Wotan became more sentimental and nostalgic as the cycle went on. His performances in Act II of Die Walküre and all of Siegfried were touchingly, beautifully sung. But his characterization of Wotan isn't comprehensively as great given that the god's more stentorian moments come off as blasé.

What the future hold’s for this turkey of a production is anybody’s guess. It certainly will live on next season and for some after that I imagine. It will certainly live on in video and everyone around the world will get another chance to see the entire previously screened four operas as part of the The Met Opera's Live in HD series over the course of the next two weeks. Don't believe all the Chicken Little harping you may have read about the drawbacks of the movie theater presentations. Having seen both versions, the theater presentations are notably preferable not only for their cost, but also because the most stupefyingly dull excesses of Lepage's non-production are improved upon by video editing and the qualities of a multi-camera video production. Any loss in image quality from seeing it live is a small price to pay to liven things up.

It’s been popular to take this Ring’s artistic failure as some sort of bigger indication of the company’s leadership under Peter Gelb, but I’m less inclined towards this sort of overly dramatic interpolation. Everyone is allowed their failures, even the Met under Gelb and I would still argue there have been plenty of success under his tenure so far as well. But I would wager that selling tickets for next year’s planned cycles at the Met aren’t going to go as easily as they did this year, much less compared to how they’ve gone in the past. Much was made over the availability of individual tickets for individual operas during these cycles, a situation not typical of seasons past, and I can tell you that from where I sat in the heart of center orchestra, a zone you’d suspect would have been pretty popular the first time around, the changing faces from night to night far outnumbered those who sat through all four operas. There weren’t tons of empty seats, but certainly lots of people had made relatively last minute plans for the shows I would guess. With less starry casts and cycles that continue to be spread out over 8 to 10 days, I know I for one don’t have a lot of incentive to sit through this one again any time soon. There is one cycle left that starts Saturday night, and there are tickets still available for all the shows, or you can see for yourself what's going on in a local theater starting next week.
1 year ago | |
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May will be a big month for opera in Los Angeles. And perhaps the most exciting operatic event in town will also be the most unexpected. It’s a wildly ambitious world premiere staging of an opera, Anne LeBaron’s Crescent City, that involves dozens of musical and visual artists coming together to create a performance that isn’t your everyday operatic experience. All of this work is the brainchild of director Yuval Sharon and his producing partner Laura Kay Swanson. Together they’ve formed their own, independent opera production company right here in Los Angeles under the moniker The Industry LA. The pair knows a thing or two about opera with Swanson having trained and worked as a professional singer and Sharon working with some of the biggest and best opera directors throughout Europe and the U.S. Sharon may be best known to local audiences for his work as right-hand man and assistant director to artist Achim Freyer throughout Los Angeles Opera’s multi-year Ring Cycle project which came to fruition in 2010. Sharon told me during a recent interview that his time in Los Angeles impressed him greatly even after having lived in both Berlin and New York. He claims he felt an openness here and a willingness to accept artistic experimentation here that wasn’t the case in other places he’d worked. Soon the idea of coming to L.A. as a home base settled in and the idea for a new kind of opera company sprang to life.

Sharon may have worked on numerous standard repertory operas, but he’s no stranger to contemporary music. His recent staging of John Cage's Song Books for the San Francisco Symphony was hailed across the country on the orchestra's recent tour. During his four years as Project Director for New York City Opera’s VOX new opera development program, Sharon was exposed to a large variety of composers and was the place he first came across some of the work of Anne LeBaron. Her newest work, Crescent City first came to Sharon’s attention not long after a prior incarnation of the work entitled Wet had its world premiere at REDCAT in 2005. And after a change in librettist and major reworking, portions of the piece received some smaller scale concert performances through VOX as recently as 2009. The story and music continued to occupy Sharon and Swanson who soon settled on it as a perfect fit for The Industry LA and began working towards the full-scale staged performances that will begin next week on May 10 at Los Angeles’ Atwater Crossing, a converted warehouse-cum-arts center north and east of downtown Los Angeles.

Sharon relates that there is much about the development and staging of Crescent City that may surprise viewers. The work, now with a libretto by Douglas Kearney, concerns an unspecified seaside southern city facing the tragedy of a second catastrophic hurricane and flood. LeBaron and her collaborators refer to the work as a “Hyperopera,” which Sharon describes as an interactive development process that is much more integrated than the typical approach to producing a new opera. Instead of starting with a completed fixed score and text with a single director and set design team, the Industry LA has brought in dozens of visual and musical artists as well as acrobats and other performers to be involved in the development process. The massive six-scene set has been constructed in the center of the warehouse space which each section designed by a different group of artists. The cast will move between various areas in the set from a hospital, to a shack, to a dive bar that will feature live performances from local art-rock collective Timur and the Dime Museum as part of the performance. Audience members will be able to either be seated in a stationary space or to walk around the perimeter of the set following performers as they move from place to place. Multiple monitors are placed around the outskirts of the set as well to allow more stationary audience members to catch any bits they might be missing via the live video feed generated during the performance. Some lucky audience members will even be able to sit in the dive bar portion of the expansive set or watch all the proceedings from a "skybox" above. As the rehearsal process has progressed, visual artists, vocalists, and others have all contributed ideas to LeBaron and Kearney who have made multiple large revisions of the score during the process in an act of collaboration with other artists as part of this site specific work. Sharon notes that while collaboration between artists has always been a hallmark of opera production, the level and integration of different artistic interests as part of the process for The Industry LA's production of Crescent City is unusual.

Lebaron and Sharon have assembled an exciting cast of 18 singers and an 16-member chamber orchestra that will perform under Marc Lowenstein in an elevated pit space above the set. The cast is mostly drawn from local artists including familiar faces such as Cedric Berry, although one exciting addition is Chicago-based contralto Gwendolyn Brown who’ll sing the starring role of a resurrected “Voodoo Queen” Marie Leveau. What’s more, The Industry LA is planning eleven performances of Crescent City starting on the 10th through the 27th of May with a capacity for several hundred viewers at each performance. It’s undoubtedly a big event, and support that Sharon and his Industry LA colleagues have been able to generate leading up to this presentation is making people take notice. What the company has put together so far is already drawing attention from press as far away as New York. But don’t take my word for it, you can check out all the photos on the “Building Crescent City Blog” Sharon has been keeping throughout the rehearsal process. This is a show a lot of people will be talking about so don’t miss out while tickets are still available.
1 year ago | |
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Janai Brugger
How do you freshen up Puccini’s La Bohème? Well one way is to bring in new fresh faces in the starring roles—a quantity that Los Angeles Opera has in no short supply these days. And one of the freshest and most exciting of those faces will be appearing as Musetta when LAO’s revival kicks of next weekend on the 12th—soprano Janai Brugger. She’s one of the current Domingo-Thornton Young Artists with the company whose profile got a big boost recently when she was a winner at this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in the spring. This should serve as notice to everyone involved with Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition where she’ll also compete later this year. A Chicago native, she studied in Michigan under Shirley Verrett among others and has been busy booking upcoming appearances around the country in a number of roles from Mozart to Gounod. So even if you don’t recognize her name now, you’ll have no trouble remembering it after you hear her sing. Best of all, she was kind enough to take some time to answer the OWA 10 Questions, prior to her appearances next week.
  1. What role would you most like to perform but haven't yet?
    I would love to sing the role of Mimi in the near future.
  2. What role would you never want to perform even if you could?
    The Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute. She scares me.
  3. You’ve already worked with some of the greatest artists in the opera world at this point in your career. Whom have you not had a chance to work with yet, that you would most like to?
    That list is endless. I would love to be onstage with Anna Netrebko, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming. As for conductors, I would love to sing for Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, James Levine, Gustavo Dudamel…
  1. Your iPod is destroyed by a vengeful mezzo. Which lost tracks would you miss most?
    Definitely my Motown music!
  2. You’ve sung many roles already in your time with L.A. Opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artists Program and starting May 10 will be performing Musetta, one of opera’s biggest flirts, in the company’s revival of La Bohème. What’s the biggest challenge for you in this part?
    The biggest challenge is to find all of the layers to Musetta and to reveal as much of them as possible within the arc of the opera, which isn’t very long. There is so much more to her than this flirty personality. She’s complicated, and that makes her fun and challenging to play.
  3. You were one of the winners at this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. How has winning this audition, known for its many now-legendary previous winners, changed things for you?
    The amount of exposure that I've received has been a huge change for me. I have had some amazing opportunities open up for me due to this competition. I'm looking forward to the future and getting my career started.
  4. What music most inspired you to sing opera?
    I heard Kathleen Battle sing a recital when I was nine years old. There was something about her presence, her amazing gown and, of course, her incredible voice that just drew me in to her. I can't remember the songs she sang, but I knew, after hearing her and from the effect that she had on me, that I wanted to be able to do that one day and make people feel that way with my own voice.


Janai Brugger as Juliette Photo: LAO

  1. Which other vocalists have served as the biggest inspiration for you?
    Shirley Verrett, Leontyne Price, Renée Fleming, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland.
  2. With which of your operatic roles do you have the most in common?
    It would probably be Juliette. She has so many characteristics that I identify with.
  3. What’s your current obsession?
    “Downton Abbey,” an amazing show!
1 year ago | |
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Jay Hunter Morris and Gerhard Siegel Photo: Ken Howard/Met 2012
I hadn’t decided whether or not to blog separately about Monday night’s performance of Siegfried at The Metropolitan Opera or not. I’ve written about it before and didn’t have a whole lot of startlingly new things to say about it. The billed cast all showed up for the first time in Cycle 2. Robert Lepage’s machine set, continually underwhelming in a myriad of new and different ways, malfunctioned in Act II, leaving an rebellious Plank 24 (or Plank 1 depending on your perspective) at the far right side of the stage fully extended toward the audience throughout the whole act with an apparent case of Wagnerian priapism. Even in the strongest Act of the whole cycle so far, Act II, one wonders why there’s so often so little to look at. Bryn Terfel, the Wanderer, sounded better and better. Jay Hunter Morris in the title role was wonderful vocally and acting wise even when he began to lose steam at the end. Patricia Bardon’s Erda still had on that blinding mirror paneled dress. Eric Owens (Alberich) and Gerhard Siegel (Mime) were both superstars. Katarina Dalayman’s Brünnhilde abrasively shrieked her way through the final act over Fabio Luisi’s surprisingly light touch with the score.

None of this seemed compelling enough for a post, though, until the story broke yesterday in the New York Times when Daniel Wakin reported that local classical radio station WQXR removed a blog post from their site critical of the Met’s new production of the Ring at the specific request of Met Opera general director Peter Gelb. Clucking has ensued over this subject all over the intertubes. Assuming that what is stated in the report is factual, I can’t say I would much blame Mr. Gelb for making such a request if he did so. As head of the company he has an interest in maintaining a positive image for his company’s product, especially with other organizations that the company has sponsorship and other financial arrangements with. Such a request certainly makes business sense. Whether or not such a request should be honored by an independent media organization is an entirely different matter, however, and here the charges of censorship certainly make sense.

What this got me thinking about, though, was about the role of bloggers like myself overall in the media equation these days. It was a large media organization that reportedly removed the piece to begin with. It was another large new organization that discovered what had happened and reported it. And it was one of the Internet’s largest opera bloggers, James Jordan, who subsequently again made the original piece widely available for everyone to read online in much greater numbers than they would have originally.

What’s the meaning of all this? Well if you ask Lisa Hirsch, and you should because she knows an awful lot of things, the incident supports an argument about why a robust independent blogosphere is important for the arts, allowing varied and independent voices to have their say. And I agree she has a point. In the above alleged scenario, one major media organization caved under pressure to one of the largest arts organizations in the country over something that said organization didn’t like. It’s something to think about. There’s been a lot of moaning about what’s been lost with the shrinking ranks of arts journalists along with the declining fortunes of print media in the last several years. And while I won’t disagree that something has been lost with this change, one of those things is not necessarily a free and independent perspective unbridled by the influence of the organizations that this same media covers. No speech is free, nor has it ever been. Small independent bloggers are often accused of being easily bought and sold by the interests that they write about. And while that’s true, don’t believe for a minute that arts journalists for major media organizations aren’t subject to a plethora of political and ethical pressures often from the largest and most powerful organizations they are asked to cover on a regular basis. If the above scenario doesn’t convince you, there are plenty of others, and I’ve heard critics for major papers bitch regularly about things like where their free seats are in the auditorium or what a tragedy it would be if their organization actually had to pay for the tickets for the very programming they are writing about. And this from those with the journalistic morals most beyond reproach.

This is also not to say that big media journalists are somehow more susceptible to influence than small independent voices on line and elsewhere. Of course, the same sorts of political pressures can be brought to bear on smaller voices just as easily, and powerful arts organizations have in many circumstances targeted independent bloggers just as easily as big media organizations. It’s also true that large media organizations sport resources that may help ensure what independence its journalists have against corrupting influences. The point here is that having both types of voices may actually proved some benefit. Part of the reason I started Out West Arts six years ago was because I wanted more critical voices in my local arts scene, not less. I’m not trying to outdo the larger media voices that existed at the time I started and still do. I would never be able to do that for a variety of reasons anyway. But I’m with Lisa in that it's the very fact that there are more voices—and ones that speak from a variety of points of view, expertise, and political perspectives—that an arts scene becomes stronger. With a variety of smaller voices added to the media mix, the diverse plethora of thinking and opinions hopefully can allow for ideas and opinions less encumbered by forces that may want to censor or unduly influence what gets written. Silencing one or two voices is one thing, silencing a great many is much harder.

So I am writing about Siegfried even though I’ve had more to say about other topics, because I think it is important that I do so. Sure you can read about it elsewhere and hear about all kinds of issues regarding the show that I might not even think about bringing up. Still I think what I write here matters if only because it’s one voice among many, and more voices in and of itself is an important thing.
1 year ago | |
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Matthias Goerne Photo: Marco Borggreve
After his appearances two weeks ago with Christoph Eschenbach and the Los Angeles Philhamronic, my hopes were quite high for Matthias Goerne’s continued tour of America, which ended up at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday. I was particularly interested to hear Goerne again so soon because he was working this time both with a different collaborator, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, and with different material. Gone was Schubert’s brand of lush, melancholic Romanticism in favor of something even darker yet. The program on Tuesday was rather ambitious overall combining a mixture of songs from Gustav Mahler with those from the very latest part of the career of Dmitri Shostakovich. And while these are not names that always travel side-by-side, Goerne and Andsnes made the parallels clear. The pair hand picked songs from many sources including Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Rückert-Lieder, and Kindertotenlieder and integrated them with thematically parallel songs from the 20th-century Russian giant's late songs, all setting of the poems of Michelangelo Buonarroti. The songs were arranged by theme with Mahler and Shostakovich trading off one song to the next as opposed to more traditional blocks for each composer.

Of course this set up an alternate meta-narrative for the evening that went from somber to downright wrist-slittingly morbid. Death was in the air for these songs. But what started out in a similar vein to that Schubert melancholy with works like Mahler’s “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” and Shostakovich’s “Separation”, turned slowly but surely to some of each composer’s most brutal and even angry works that minced no words about the bleak brutality of death from Shostakovich’s “Death” to Mahler’s “Revelge” and “Der Tamboursg’sell,” two late additions to his Das Knaben Wunderhorn. These rhythmic, militaristic sounding songs about dying soldiers and a drummer boy on his way to the gallows provided a different challenge for Goerne and Andsnes that was more about drama and less about beautiful finesse.

Certainly the intensity of all this was quite high. Goerne is a master Lieder performer and all the beautiful tone and superb phrasing and breath control on display before was there again. Granted, the Shostakovich selections, although well sung, paled in comparison to Goerne’s mastery of the German Lieder. And Andsnes had no trouble accessing the sardonic jocularity of the Russian works. But the Shostakovich pieces seemed more deliberate and planned in contrast. And given that they traded off with the Mahler songs sometimes the line of the show could be lost. Of course, the performers seemed to have some notion of the tough ending of this program and offered Beethoven's “An die Hoffnung” as a hopeful postscript in the encore. It was a nice gesture from Andsnes and Goerne following a recital that left no question about their artistry or ability to put together an interesting and thoughtful program. Even if, thematically, it could be a little tough going and wasn’t the feel good hit of the season.
1 year ago | |
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