Book Review: Said On Opera by Edward Said

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

In a gratifying instance of musical synchronicity, I was listening to Les Troyens when I encountered The New York Times’ August 6 feature about Hector Berlioz. The opera is the subject of an essay in Said on Opera. The recently published collection of the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said‘s opera commentary compelled me to investigate a work I hadn’t previously heard.

As Said and the author of The New York Times piece suggest, Les Troyens has always been denigrated partly because it’s decidedly odd. Their insights make navigating the peculiarities of Berlioz less troublesome.

Said on Opera also includes considerations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte (Alfonso is underappreciated) Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (initial drafts are superior to the final version) and Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. (his antisemitism isn’t disqualifying). Reading the excellent Said on Opera is almost as engrossing as listening to the works.

Concert Review: Chamber Music Northwest’s “Incandescence: Blazing Works by Joan Tower, Bartók & the ‘Kreutzer’” at Lincoln Performance Hall

Original image of Joan Tower, Soovin Kim and Sandbox Percussion by There Stands the Glass.

I worked up a lather in a hurried thirty-minute walk to Lincoln Performance Hall in ninety-degree heat on Sunday, July 14. Not having time to rinse myself off in a bathroom, I left a trail of perspiration as I made my way to my $30 seat at the back of the venue on the campus of Portland State University.

Given the fiery theme of the concert presented in Chamber Music Northwest’s 2024 Summer Festival series, my prodigious sweating was apropos. Performances of three works were accurately billed as blazing.

Joan Tower introduced the world premiere of her “Sing or Dance” with a few humble words. Much of the challenging piece rendered by violinist Soovin Kim and Sandbox Percussion resembled free improvisation. I liked it, but many in the audience of approximately 400 squirmed.

The duo of Kim and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, dueted on the program’s two additional pieces, Béla Bartók’s “Violin Sonata No. 2” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata. Kim Chien- the festival’s artistic directors- tore through the famously difficult pieces. Kim’s astounding feat of endurance kept me sweating in sympathetic allegiance.

Talk About the Passion

Original image of Anne-Marie McDermott monitoring a student’s performance at White Recital Hall by There Stands the Glass.

Music lovers within my demographic- white, male, middle-aged and Midwestern- recently commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s Murmur with rhapsodic social media posts.  I also loved Murmur.  Paying $1.02 to attend an R.E.M. concert at the Uptown Theater on May 30, 1983, still seems like the deal of a lifetime.

That said, it’s been more than 25 years since I’ve listened to Murmur.  Having fully absorbed the music in the 1980s, I’ve felt no need to revisit the album.  Expanding the horizons of my knowledge has always excited me far more than wallowing in the familiar.  Chamber music- a form that until recently was entirely foreign to me- has provided many of my kicks of late.  

Watching Anne-Marie McDermott alternately encourage and scold three young pianists at Grant Recital Hall yesterday blew my mind.  Almost everything the famed musician said in response to their performances of compositions by Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethover and Camille Saint-Saens acted as an enlightening "Catapult".

Album Review: Mitsuko Uchida- Beethoven: Diabelli Variations

Was Ludwig van Beethoven a prophetic visionary anticipating the clamorous mechanization of the 21st century as he composed the Diabelli Variations? Or is Mitsuko Uchida heretically imposing contemporary sensibilities on the solo piano cycle on her new album Beethoven: Diabelli Variations? Uchida’s attack is jarringly percussive. The clamorous recording is as serene as a front row seat at a Nine Inch Nails concert. Since encountering Uchida’s interpretation I’ve listened to a pair of celebrated older versions of the 200-year-old work. One is anemic while the second possesses much of Uchida’s diabolical fervor. The fundamental difference between the latter interpretation and Uchida’s attack is the immediacy of the sound field enabled by today’s recording technology. Roll over, Chuck Berry, and tell Carl Perkins the news.

Concert Review: Brentano Quartet at Lincoln Recital Hall

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

Brentano Quartet wasn’t my first choice on Friday night in Portland on December 4.  I’d been looking forward to finally catching Thievery Corporation. My hopes were dashed when the band’s concert at Roseland Theater sold out.  I made new plans when I learned that the program for Brentano Quartet’s recital at Lincoln Hall would begin with "Quietly Flowing Along" from John Cage’s Quartet in Four Parts.  The weirder the better for me.

Sure enough, a distinguished matron near the front row seat I claimed amid an audience of about 125 responded in horror to an interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s discordant Concertino for String Quartet that followed the opening salvo of Cage.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing to Dmitri Shostakovich’s devious "Polka". And Barbara Sukowa’s recorded recitations of Amy Lowell’s Stravinsky-inspired poems were enlightening.

I felt as if a light had been turned on in an unevolved chamber of my brain.  Experiencing the cheeky noise being created just eight feet away seemed to transport me into the consciousnesses of the late composers.  Unfortunately, the Carlo Gesualdo and Ludwig van Beethoven pieces that followed an intermission extinguished my metaphysical reveries.  I started thinking about Thievery Corporation just five minutes into an uninspiring version of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16.

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

Grunting and Snorting

Photo of pages 221-222 of John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding by There Stands the Glass.

John Culshaw writes about the incidental noise issued by conductor Hans Knappertsbusch in Ring Resounding.  Sure enough, Knappertsbusch’s “grunts and snorts” are clearly audible at the opening of a 1951 recording of Parsifal.

Studying the book is part of an ongoing investigation of Wagner corresponding with my burgeoning interest in classical music.  Culshaw’s detailed account of the first complete recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen is filled with delectable gossip and substantive musings.

Discovering that the disruptive ambient noise accompanying many of the classical concerts I’ve attended isn’t an aberration came as a shock.  Ill-timed coughs and the creaking of seats are also part and parcel of live recordings.  The non-musical sounds created by artists further altered my connection with the so-called fine art.

For instance, a pivotal moment of Deutsche Grammophon’s otherwise wonderful new recording of Krystian Zimerman’s Beethoven: Complete Piano Concertos is marred when members of the London Symphony Orchestra clamorously adjust their sheet music.  And the breathing of pianist Behzod Abduraimov is clearly audible on one of my favorite albums of 2021.

When I put on headphones and queue up Beethoven, Debussy or Wagner, I’m no longer surprised when the ostensibly pristine and often ethereal sounds are accompanied by grunts, snorts, murmurs and heavy breathing.  The humanizing revelation is one more indication classical music and opera aren’t nearly as arrogantly inhospitable and formidably precious as they initially appear.

The art of opera has nothing to do with obscene galas. Culshaw hoped his landmark recordings would make the form more equitable: “The sickness of opera has been, and is, that it is a very expensive and exclusive closed shop… Richard Wagner abhorred this attitude a hundred years ago, and we are only now beginning to make the slightest progress towards a change.”

Concert Review: The Kansas City Symphony’s Mobile Music Box at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

Several hours after news broke that an instrument of evil died in prison seven years after murdering two people at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City as part of a hateful rampage, a life-affirming concert was held on the grounds of the same site on Tuesday, May 4.

Limited to an audience of 100, the free outdoor concert by three young musicians from the Kansas City Symphony provided a vastly superior experience to my initial foray into live music in the post-quarantine era.  Given the glorious weather and tranquil atmosphere, I wasn’t surprised to see a robin refuse to abandon a tree planted in a parking lot median even though a pair of loudspeakers were placed directly under its nest.

The amplification of the 45-minute performance on the symphony’s mobile stage added an unavoidably metallic but not unpleasant edge to works by the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach and Zoltán Kodály.  Tears of joy soon dripped into my facemask.  In spite of the disconcerting coughs and sneezes of a couple seated nearby, I was overcome with gratitude for merely being alive to savor the immortal flare of a Ludwig van Beethoven string trio.

A yellow finch joined the steadfast robin during a lively reading of an arrangement of a gospel-inspired piece by Adolphus Hailstork.  The transitory symbol of a harmonious world signaled that good repeatedly triumphs over evil, beauty is more powerful than ugliness and the resilience of a loving community is capable of overcoming unimaginable horror.

Jump In, The Opera’s Fine

Screenshot of Toni Blankenheim in Wozzeck.

A friend recently expressed profound bewilderment about my ongoing daily opera initiative.  The count currently stands at 228.  When I urged him to dip a toe into the operatic waters, he insisted he didn’t know where to begin.  That’s lame.  Like many needlessly wary people, my friend is hindered by classist assumptions and cultural constraints.  Doesn’t he realize those arbitrary rules no longer apply?  With the financial and social barriers of purchasing expensive tickets and wearing ostensibly appropriate clothing removed, there’s no real excuse for open-minded music lovers not to give opera a chance.  Links to four wildly disparate murder-themed operas I watched in October are below.  The free YouTube streams are listed in order of accessibility.

1. 1982 film version of Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto"

Recommended if you like: starpower, Italy, familiar arias

My take: Wanna hear hits? “Rigoletto” has ‘em.  Love celebrities?  They don’t get much bigger than Luciano Pavarotti.

2. Birmingham Opera Company's 2002 production of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Fidelio"

Recommended if you like: revolution; red Solo cups; musical heresy 

My take: Community opera productions resembling immersive performance art may be the most welcome discovery of my opera immersion.  This unruly production takes extreme liberties with Beethoven’s only opera.

3. 1972 film version of Alban Berg’s "Wozzeck"

Recommended if you like: atonality; agrarian Germany; madness

My take: Although it premiered in Berlin in 1925, “Wozzeck” sounds as if it was written yesterday.  The freakily absurdist “Wozzeck” is a personal favorite.

4. Fisher Center at Bard College’s 2013 production of Sergey Taneyev’s “Oresteia”

Recommended if you like: gore; Greek mythology; conventional productions with a stage, audience and orchestra

My take: The obscure 125-year-old Russian opera performed by a secondary company is excellently rendered as a three-hour bloodbath.

Album Review: Metz- Atlas Vending

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

As an impressionable teen during the punk revolution, I bought into rigid credos I now know are hogwash.  The Canadian band Metz breaks a few of the bogus rules on the opening track of its new album Atlas Vending.  "Pulse" overlays what could be the catchiest riff from Led Zeppelin’s sinuous “Dancing Days” over bleak Gang of Four-style scaffolding.  True punks know that’s against the rules!  Metz’s willful disregard of the dilapidated form’s restrictive codes is invigorating.  Unrelenting rage and artistic abandon makes Metz one of the relatively few purveyors of guitar-based rock that doesn’t sound ridiculous in 2020.

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I continue to aggravate Kansas City jazz pollyannas at Plastic Sax.

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Opera update: Although necessity dictated I slightly expand my parameters, the streak is still alive.  I recommend the remarkable treatment Staatsoper Hannover gives to Handel's gorgeous “oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno.”  The drab production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” I began watching during lunch today will be #207 in 207 days.