Swan Lake: Makarova and Perm Tchaikovsky: Get Going!

Makarova's Swan Lake in Chicago was a wonderful dance experience missed by a lot of people, judging from the sparse attendance at yesterday's performance in the Auditorium Theater. But who knew? There wasn't a lot of prepublicity, nor anyone tooting the horn ahead of this gem of a troupe. Plenty of horn blowing in the ballet, though. So much of the showmanship of the original was captured here: the drama of the story, the individual starry characterizations, the plush ensembles and even a pit orchestra with energy and full-blooded Russian style. A little rough around the edges, to be sure, but so true to the heart of this piece.

Only two performances left! So get out there, Chicago!

Jonas Kaufmann: The Whole Package?

Jonas Kaufmann: Romantic Arias (Decca)

Here's a voice we'll be hearing for a while. The brief back story of this handsome young German tenor is interesting: he was trained as a light tenor, and by good fortune was allowed to liberate the drama of the lower and richer tones which he says were what he used " in the shower or the elevator."

So his career is a product of a very personal drive which he reveals in his choice of repertoire and his intensely dramatic presentation The arias on his calling-card disc are a mixture of the usual and the slightly less so.

He opens with a full-throated run-through of "Che gelida manina" from La Boheme, and then he takes an abrupt left turn into French opera: Bizet, very idiomatic, with a minor but gorgeously-sung aria from Carmen, turning at last to his home tongue with the show-stopper and only hit from Flotow's Martha -- which he nails as well as Siegfried Jerusalem did in the recent past.

So we get him as eclectic, fluent in various languages and styles -- dare we say Post Modern? An artist who brings as much sensibility and style to Wagner as he does to Massenet. His lyric gifts also enhance an affinity with Italian Opera. Verdi is in his soul, and he did begin his debut disc with an emotive Puccini.

Highlights of this disc include an aria from Don Carlos, the 5 minutes of glorious Wagner, and especially a Berlioz aria from The Damnation of Faust, sung with Wagnerian greatness of soul.

The proof is in the Opera House performance, of course. So we will have to see him. Is he the real thing or the product of the electronics of the recording medium? I suspect he's the whole package, relying on field reviews of his performances. Can't wait to see him in person!

Although the disc is nothing but a collection of snippets, there is something to enjoy in most of these performances, not least the conducting of Marco Armiliano, whose accompaniment matches Kaufmann's eclecticity with stylish performances in a variety of styles. The two artists seem to be on the same wavelength, and the result is a very satisfying CD. It's ipod ready since almost every cut is a keeper: just rip and burn!

Max Reger

Peter Grimes

URBAN OPERA
Peter Grimes at the multiplex


Well, I wanted the experience of the Live from the Met hookup which brings Grand Opera to a cine near you in HD. I’d heard such great things about the experience. So when Bryant suggested we attend the showing of Peter Grimes today, I gladly went along.

But, although it was definitely worth going, I don’t think I’ll be doing it very often in the future. Really, there’s just too much annoyance added in (city driving and parking) and too much energy sucked out, to make it a vital need for me.

Opera live is best really live, and not second-hand through a distancing medium like a movie theater representation. Yes, some of the frisson of the immediate with its potential for the unexpected is there at first, but the absolute control of the technical elements soon takes off that edge. The only spontaneous things that I saw were in the clumsy but endearing interview segments with an uncomfortable Natalie Dessay doing her darndest not to sound scripted.

Best unexpected interchange: Natalie trying to prompt tenor Dean Griffey for his own personal take on the guilt or innocence of Peter Grimes (he wouldn’t be pushed). I’ve always wondered how these artists can take this kind of intrusion into the flow of their performances.

Griffey in particular seemed to be so identifying with Grimes, that I wondered if he wasn’t tempted to smack Ms Dessay around a little. Patricia Racette was herself quite the Ellen Orford, with her very idealistic interpretations and her almost pedantic descriptions of the technical aspects of the music. Both of them give great performances, by the way – quite stellar.

Maybe it was just this production, but I really didn’t see Grimes as just an “outsider” being unfairly tarred and feathered by the moral righteousness of his community. I actually was agreeing that Ellen was quite wrongheaded to set Grimes up with another young boy to abuse, honorable as her reasons were. I was thinking that she was sending this scared kid to his doom. And so it was.

I wonder what it is about this opera that makes it one of the most celebrated of the last 50 years. Certainly the music is quite wonderful; Britten is such a genius of orchestral color and emotiveness. But the libretto is so bookish, so prosaic. There are great vocal parts for many of the characters, and there are such rich characters for good performers to get their teeth into, but the whole thing is rather like a musical version of a Victorian novel. Sweeney Todd comes to mind – there’s even a bit of twisted humor now and then.

And then there is the inventive use of the chorus, who are collectively one of the most important characters in the drama. And the moral ambiguity of the story is quite absorbing, no easy answers here.

But it’s all so unremittingly down, so clearly spiraling to a painful end, that I left before the last act, which I knew was just going to be more and worse tragedy, however gorgeous. The “issues” were of the time and in the psyche of the original artists. Britten, obsessed with young boys, reveals perhaps his struggle with the monstrous side of his fascination, and paints a deeply disturbing picture of an almost erotic intensity.

Liberals of the time (and surely Britten and Pears were socially liberal) had much to say about the power of the ignorant majority, the “other- directed” as opposed to the more heroic “inner-directed”, as Riesman’s Lonely Crowd called them. (Ellen vs. The Borough). It’s a gripping morality play we are watching here, and although it’s got lots of great musical moments, and displays great inner conflicts, I can’t help feeling that moral ideas are not best served by the medium of Opera.

Maybe I was scared to be sucked into the whirlpool of the inevitable denouement – I’ve heard the recordings and I listened to it on my car radio as I retreated, and it’s implacably intense, even masterfully so. But I had had enough reminders of my own inner conflicts, and my love-hate with the Fifties, which haunted my childhood. I wanted out, and Bryant wanted to go as well, for his own reasons – he said he was bored with some of it (great admission, Bryant!) .

Hvorostovsky In Chicago: Eugene Onegin

A Woman’s Triumph

This great melodrama Tchaikovsky hatched in 1879 from Pushkin is one of the best tickets in town. The plush, but modern, staging is brought off in style and with great imagination. There is not a weak link in the singing, and the acting is at the highest level as well. The cast, including Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Dina Kuznetsova and Frank Lopardo, is joined by an acting chorus that forges a collective characterization that enlivens every scene they’re in.

Of course the opera has its problems. For one thing, people don’t do much. They just stand around picturesquely, read books and sit at writing tables. And the music is not always top flight Tchaikovsky. It has flashes of greatness everywhere, but much of it is boilerplate, standard issue accompaniment to the high-tone soap opera which unfolds at a leisurely pace.

Every Russian brings his own feelings to this unhappy love story and that prior engagement with the story probably helps to fill in the gaps in the episodic structure of the opera. For first-timers the great set pieces might seem disconnected. But that said, it would be wrong to dwell on the opera’s weaknesses, when there are so many things to savor in the Lyric production (which dates from 1997). In fact, the set pieces, led by Tatyana’s letter scene, are outstanding here.

A special word about Dina Kuznetsova: her very real character has depth and breadth, and she makes the writing of an effusive love letter an epic rollercoaster ride. Add in a rich and flexible voice, and we have a truly memorable Tatyana both as child and mature woman.

The successful performance of the letter scene determines how we judge Onegin’s patronizing rejection of her. If we identify with the girl’s ardent longing, then we will see Onegin as a cad, which he does seem to be in this defining interpretation by Hvorostovsky. This artist is at the peak of his craft now, so we need only sit and be seduced. His stage presence is magnetic, his movements are leonine and always on key. It does seem as if the Siberian tiger is overworked of late (he backed out of half the run this year), but Onegin’s principal emotion is ennui, and he isn’t on stage all that much, so the baritone could almost phone in his performance.

He’s got to be ready to take command of the last scenes, however, and Hvorostovsky does so with power and economy. There is an almost verismo climax as Tatyana turns and runs out of Onegin’s life forever, and he is confronted with his great bereavement and stands abashed and alone at curtain’s fall.

This high strung psychological drama would seem to be perfect for the music of Tchaikovsky, but his score doesn’t always plumb the depths as deeply as his purely orchestral music. Maybe the addition of words made the passions too concrete for him, so closeted, to put his soul out plain to see, with so much sexual ardor attached to his most revealing musical effusions. Maybe the constraints and conventions of Russian opera of the time put a rein on his creativity. His personal life was undergoing its greatest upheavals at the time, with his panic-driven marriage, and his admission of his homosexuality, so that has to be figured in.

But his understanding of the emotional center of Tatyana, from her repressed early years to her strong and ultimately triumphant later self, is at the root of this opera’s success. His own personal struggles shed light on his portrayal of her, Lensky , and Onegin’s rich and affecting stories.

Alfred Brendel's goodbye to Chicago

The pianist Alfred Brendel would never, but never, inject any sentimentality into his patrician interpretations of the classics, but one wonders if he experienced a slight catch in his throat at the loving response his audience of long time fans gave to his farewell appearance at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

He offered a kind of microcosm of his career, great gobs of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert with smaller dollops of Bach and Liszt. It's not a broad range he covers, but he goes deep and his technique is still near flawless. He's seemingly slowed down a bit -- this was most noticeable in the Mozart Sonata -- but he fills the spaces he creates with such inight and precision, that it all seems right.

Never showy, he still fights the tics which show how intensely he is concentrating on the musical challenges he boldly tosses off.

His program was thoughtfully chosen, as much for the substance of the pieces as for the respect shown to the intelligence of his audience. Nothing commonplace, but music at the heart of the composers' work. Who programs the other Beethoven Sonata "Quasi una fantasia" instead of the Moonlight Sonata? Who would be likely to open a program with a complex series of variations which ends in an anticlimax as does the exquisite Haydn work? And the encores, spotlighting the lesser-known Brendel: the second movement, so romantic, from Bach's Italian Concerto, and some almost impressionistic Liszt.

The second half of the program was devoted to Schubert's last Sonata, and it too was a deeply considered choice -- a valedictory piece to begin with done with a profound understanding of the sequential nature of the structure, it's emotional rather than logical structure.

I was really moved to see this humble yet somehow grand artist walking slowly out of my life...

PROTEUS