“It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs. ”
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs. ”
–Wallace Stevens
Weather Words
Beautiful Music: Mompou
The Catalan composer Federico Mompou has sometimes been termed a sort of Iberian Satie, but that doesn’t do either of them justice. He had an idiosyncratic way with the piano, modern and antique at the same time–and often very haunting.
Here’s the marvelous Jenny Lin playing “Secreto,” one of his “Intimate Impressions:”
Review: Polenzani & Drake at the Terrace Theater: Easeful Glory
I went to tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Julius Drake’s recital last night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, and as I said to a friend as I left–concerts like that make you believe in art song again. One in the series presented by Vocal Arts DC (full disclosure: for whom I write and volunteer) comes on the heels of fine performances by this season’s previous singers–including an adventuresome concert focused on music of WWI in December.
Sometimes things click at a level that goes beyond fine performance, however, and a recital becomes a complete experience through some alchemy of musicianship, vocal and instrumental polish, nuanced understanding of great repertoire and that x-factor, call it charisma that connects performers and listeners. What ever the mix of these and other ineffable factors, they were aligned last night and the result was the most artistically satisfying recital the series has presented in years (maybe ever), and I’ve been going since its inception in the early 90s.
It helps that Polenzani has a gorgeous voice and Drake a golden piano tone (yes, I am of the view that individual pianists can summon distinct colors, whatever the instrument–I realize that’s a controversial position). But they both have even more gorgeous artistry. This came out in countless ways, the gentle and unfussy approach to Liszt’s rich piano textures (the note per measure coefficient to this music is a big number and the results are often thick and showy, but not in Drake’s hands). And for Polenzani: one remarkable thing after another–two picked among many would be the ease with which he spun out soft lines, and his ability to unfolded and refold a perfectly calibrated mesa di voce, where the voice gathers outwards and then inwards getting louder and softer with no loss of beauty or richness. It takes breath control, plus superb technique, and many singers learn to do it more or less, but it’s not something I have heard used with this kind of meaning and expressiveness on the recital stage in a very long time.
And finally, words…a song recital is a species of poetry reading: the sounds and meanings of the words are realized in music and illuminate an idea. (That’s true in opera too, but there is so much falderal going on and the words are so often risible that you end up not really noticing them unless they are by DaPonte ). There wasn’t one unimportant word last night–nothing fluffed, forgotten or missed, in a program that was sung from memory. In particular, the French selections, Liszt, Ravel, and Satie, were a wonder. “Oh! Quand je dors,” a Hugo setting with arching ardor and quiet embraces seemed to stop time–and for once was a conversation, not some over emotional greeting card. The Satie songs, which personified a bronze frog and the Mad Hatter, and told the quirky tale of a tree with sorrowing birds were a little like zen stand up comedy. Barber’s “Hermit Songs” closed the program, and they too were like being let in on a set of subtle secrets, pulling you in to a private world where things are said to the wind, or the cat.
Performances like this happen when you pay attention to the details, are not afraid to sing and play softly, drop your worry about presenting “the voice” or “bringing off the big moments” and just open the palm of your hand and make music–your audience gets to stop worrying about listening for “the voice” as well. You don’t miss anything, as you are present and inside listening for something that is being said this way, just this once.
The first of three encores, “La barcheta” of Hahn embodied this inwardness to an almost giddy degree. Every moment was subtle, sung with long tapered breaths that curled around the seductive lines with ease, and conjured a lingering dream of Venice on a cold DC night. Bravo!
Arthur R. Smith is a mostly recovered music critic who still relapses occasionally. He is also a program annotator for Vocal Arts DC.
Fact Checking Words: Doing it Diligently
In the 24-hour 360-degree news cycle that is the Web, fact checking seems to be a lost art, but I encountered this interview with an editor at a small Virginia paper that suggests otherwise:
From the American Press Institute site:
Fact checking a sensitive story: 6 good questions with News Leader editor William Ramsey.
I was particularly struck by these bits:
Q: Can you describe how the fact checking was conducted for this series? Did you use a checklist? A spreadsheet? A particular process?
A: We had a multi-pronged approach. We generated a list of every factual statement (not actual copy) from the main stories and sent it to state officials, who used investigators and PIOs to verify the information. This was critical since a portion of our reporting featured narratives rebuilt from disjointed case records. We also sampled a percentage of our hand-built database and determined an error rate, which was really low. We made those error fixes, and re-sampled another portion, which held up. For accuracy in [Borns’] writing, we extracted facts from her project’s main story and made a Google spreadsheet for the team, using it to log verification of each fact, the source, the person checking and a note when a change was made to the draft.
Q: In the fact checking of this series, were there any lessons learned that will be used at the News Leader in the future, or could be replicated at other news organizations?
A: I hope so. We tried two new ideas I liked: war room Fridays and a black hat review.
For the Friday sessions, we took over a conference room and brought in reporters not connected to the project. On one Friday, for example, our government reporter spent the day checking story drafts against state records.
For the “black hat” review, borrowed from the software development industry, we took turns playing a critic’s role, peppering ourselves in a hostile interview about process, sources and conclusions. It gave us actionable information to improve the content before it published.
There is so much yammer about computational journalism (much of it hype to my old-school ears), but this example of using both old-fashioned and computer approaches to fact check the work of journalism seems to me a lot more valid that trawling the data for “news” and then reporting it even if specious or trivial. I particularly like the image of “black hat” fact checkers. In cybersecurity, it seems you call (at least some of) these Pen Testers.
Musical Words: Luca Pisaroni
Nice profile by Fred Cohn of bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni in the Feb. 2015 Opera News.
The paragraph on the unique nature of the solo vocal recital caught my attention:
In recent years, Pisaroni has embarked on a series of recital tours, concentrating on German lieder — a rare choice for an Italian singer. “We don’t have a song culture, and the few that we have, the song helps showcase the voice,” he says. “The thing that fascinates me about the lieder repertoire is the dialogue between the voice and the piano. That’s the thing I love about the collaboration [with his pianist, Wolfram Rieger]. I have a phrase and give it to him, then he completes it and hands it back. To learn a recital program is the most difficult task ever, but it’s the most rewarding thing I do. There is nothing that gives you pleasure more than ending a song and feeling the audience has not taken a breath. It feels like time is standing still. There is no opera in the world that gives you that feeling.”
When he was in DC he sang German lieder by Liszt (German was in fact Liszt’s mother tongue), and had us all rapt, particularly in Die Lorelei, the arch-Romantic legend set by the arch-Romantic composer.
His is not on YouTube, but here’s a nice rendition by Kiri Te Kanawa (of the peaches and cream voice).
and another great recitalist in lieder, Ian Bostridge, in Schubert:
The Met in HD and Regional Opera
If you haven’t heard of the Met in HD, it is a successful effort by the media savvy general manager of the Met, Peter Gelb, to get the Met to a wider audience. On selected Saturday afternoons, 12 this season, the opera is also transmitted live to movie theaters, in a way that is both screen friendly, that is, with hosts and interviews, but also manages to relay some of the vibe of attending the real thing. All this happens for the price of a $20-30 ticket. There are also repeat showings, and the videos are made available online via a subscription service, on DVD, now on Amazon Prime, and even once in a blue moon on PBS, which is pretty allergic to opera these days.
I’ve caught a bunch of the Met HD performances and am looking forward to The Merry Widow next weekend (even though the reviews are not particularly glowing). In DC where they show at a couple of theaters it’s sometimes so packed you have to get there way early—at least in Bethesda, and the behavior of the crowd has some of the pleasures and plagues of the actual Met Opera attendees. Dressing in evening clothes for a Saturday movie is one odd vestige. Looking back over the five or six I’ve attended, the only place where I really saw a mostly young crowd was State College, PA, a university town.
The Dilemma
But in any case, people are going, and in droves. This has raised a question: is the Met in HD, for all the theatrical pleasures it offers and its democratizing spirit, eroding the audience for regional opera companies in the U.S. and abroad? It’s a hard question to answer with complete confidence–by some measures live performing arts audiences across multiple, although not all, categories are declining, and opera audiences–although we are loud and ardent–are not all that substantial a percentage in the first place.
Even if, definitely linking the advent of the MetHD simulcasts to audience decline is probably not possible, you certainly hear anecdotes to this effect. The Telegraph music writer Rupert Christensen has noted this phenomena and I heard about a town in Canada that used to organize bus trips to a larger city for people who wanted to attend live opera, but once the small town got the Met in HD nobody signed up.
If you grant the premise, that the MetHD (and the reality that we have more content at the push of a button than ever before a non-stop 24/7 amount of classical programming from Sirius/XM and Medici) is killing off at least some regional opera, I think that may be okay.
That’s apostasy, I realize, and my argument goes back a bit for context: In the 19th century, opera–like other performing arts events–was mostly available in the U.S., if at all, through touring companies that traveled from venue to venue. Big stars and companies were the ones traveling from town to town (or in some cases across oceans see Fellini’s magical “And the Ship Sailed On” for a taste of this) and venues in each town formed a network of presenters. It really was the venue that formed the main nodes in the network.
These mostly weren’t opera companies in the modern sense. Although, the Met the oldest company in the U.S. dates from 1883, and there was some activity in New Orleans before that, the notion of home-grown regional production of opera (or regional theater for that matter) is a 20th century phenomena, one that grew vibrantly in the middle part of the century. In part this is thanks to the business model of the subscription season which provided enough money to plan ahead. (The subscription was invented in Chicago by an enterprising publicist named Danny Newman, for many years associated with Lyric Opera of Chicago, which was and is a very successful example of a regional opera company.) Organizations with a subscriber base, a venue, and some year around artistic and administrative staff became the norm.
The narrative about these local opera companies is heart-warming: “look, we’ve got opera in [fill in the blank with a mid-size city] and singer [blank] started here and still returns.” But, and this is said with deep respect for what a difficult and expensive art form this is to present, the results were widely uneven. If, as Placido Domingo has quipped, opera is like vocal Olympics, and it is, small companies were tasked with putting on the Olympics three or four times a year for a few days, providing jobs and entertainment it must be granted. (That the Met, Vienna Opera, Covent Garden and Paris Opera have to do it every night for 8 months is too crazy making to think about.)
The productions these regional opera companies gave were local franchises of a national brand called “opera.” They drew often, not invariably, from the same pool of singers (that is good singers but who were affordable, plus the occasionally higher tier star or two, supplemented by young artists on their way up), they did the same operas, generally pulling from the top 20 most popular, and relied on the artistic staff and materials–be that directors, sets, costumes, etc. that were shared and rented to and fro. (When I was going to a lot of regional opera for work, you could see the same set pop up in city after city. It happened last year with WNO’s Elixir, a set I saw first a decade and a half ago in San Diego.)
This “franchise” approach wasn’t characteristic of every company, and what regional companies provided was far from uniformly bad. But bad or good, it has been deeply disrupted by technology and digital distribution—as surely as Amazon has disrupted the book business. The Met in HD is only the most obvious sign of this disruption, but it’s not the only one and it’s not going away, any more than Amazon is.
The Amazon analogy has its weaknesses—if you ordered Dublinesque from Amazon or if you bought it from Borders, you do after all get the same book. Whereas if you want a live experience, the movie theater is only sort of live, whereas the in-person opera house performance is. But the question is complicated by cost—Merry Window is going to be $24, and isn’t otherwise on this season in DC or Boston, the places I work and live, and if it were, it’s not likely to include the participation of Renée Fleming, Nathan Gunn, and Susan Strohman. Instead, it might well have a cast that comes together relatively quickly to put on a show at a professional but not a distinctive standard and then scatters to travel to the next gig.
Regional opera is stuck with this dilemma, not every company or every production, but enough to ask whether it’s reasonable to expect their audience to come to productions of operas on the HD schedule. If the heart of your artistic product is something that is available down the street—in a similar enough experience–at significantly cheaper cost and at higher quality level, why should people go? A new network provides multiple ways to get a good, if people exploit that network instead of remaining loyal to your version, it seems to me useless to go “bad network!” and gnash teeth. That’s what tech innovation often does, it disrupts! More profitable is to ask: what need could we fill now? and what does this mean for the future?
The first question seems to me the easier one to answer, and some opera companies are doing so–that is, offering something that the Met, and more generally, the digital network isn’t going to do, and do it with some a locally-responsive (locavore opera, if you will) artistic and administrative approach. In some cases, these are things opera companies have often offered, but doing them conceptualized in a new way–premieres that relate to local stories, engagement with young artists, community outreach that is two-way–where the community influences the company and vice-versa. But it does require two things: putting to rest the last vestiges of a long-lost touring tradition, where big stars blow through town, do their party piece and leave. “Pearls to the provinces” has to go.
The other thing that has to go is the implicit and related “it’s all about the big shows” mentality. That means, to put it crassly, if your education and outreach is ultimately about building audience for your main stage “franchise” productions, you are doing it wrong way around. Your education goals—and community goals—should drive your main stage activity. This probably means that a company will be organized around something other than “the national franchise” no “top 20 operas” focus, but rather take an alternate path. Opera Layfayette in Washington and NYC has done this by mining true rarities. (And we’re not talking Rossini’s “La Donna Del Lago,” here, but rather Félicien David’s “Lalla Roukh”.) There are other ways I’m sure are being cooked up in opera—it is an artform remarkable for reinventing itself. Some of those ways probably involve digital learning, after all Peter Gelb isn’t the only one allowed to be technically innovative!
It may be that for some companies, it’s just finding graceful ways to wind down, and to accept that at least in the present form that are not needed. But I honestly think shifts–and the preservation of jobs–are very possible, maybe even likely. I would point to bookstores like Politics and Prose or Brookline Booksmith that have responded to destruction of one aspect of the bookstore eco-system by Amazon by becoming part of a new eco-system of bookstore as community organization.
The other, and to me more challenging question is what this does to “place.” In essence, the MetHD does embody that horrid phrase “the world is flat.” The Met is all over the place now, and as digital networks further infiltrate everybody’s life and choice of what they do with their time, the one-time status of having a venue (and its corollary the subscription series) is not long for this world. Something that is no doubt being tossed around at this weekend’s Arts Presenters conference. Sipping loose of venues is already occurring in arts presentation—in DC we’ve got classical things, which some critics sniff at, in a synagogue cum community center. In Boston, there’s an enterprising group doing house concerts with string quartets and the like. And in a very real sense, the “venue” now often means digital space, fed by a digital product, be that a movie theater, the iPad, the phone, Google Glass, god knows what’s next. That may excite you or freak you out–or just make you tired, but to pretend that it doesn’t exist seems ridiculous. Given enough computer savvy and willingness to pay for subscriptions—not insignificant issues, I grant—you can get as much opera as you ever could in the history of the world. That world may not yet have arrived at your doorstep as an arts professional or an arts goer, but it will, so might as well embrace it, and turn to some–however wary–embrace, rather than resistance.
Unreasonable Gizmos: Robot Kitchen?
With so much grim news, for relief I caught up with the festival of excess that is CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Among many things which could charitably called solutions in search of a problem, I encountered “Sereneti,” which is a robotic gizmo that cooks dinner for you. Here is their amusing promo video.
Sereneti Kitchen Showcase from Sereneti Kitchen on Vimeo.
Now I realize that I am not the target demographic for this–I’m well past my instant Ramen noodle phase, and in fact have become a decent home cook. Accordingly, I enjoy the tasks that Sereneti aims to eliminate–including shopping for food, finding recipes, determining just how to prepare it. It’s a pleasantly analogue task for somebody who makes his living looking at digital rectangles all day.
All that said, I avidly await the Food Network Robot Wars “risotto vs. ganache” episode with tricked out Serenetis armed with spoons and spatula.
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(Courtesy of RadioFan from Wikimedia Commons)
Cathedral Sights and Sounds
Trying to learn how to work with my new wide-angle lens…and used Washington Cathedral as a model on a bright winter day.
And a bit a of seasonal music that the place evokes for me, the harp solo from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols.
Happy New Year!
A Few Reasonable Words 