Category: Music

Doctor Atomic

So what do you get for your $23 ticket to The Met: Live in HD? Well, the food court at Tysons Corner Center doesn’t have the cachet of the plaza at Lincoln Center. Twenty-three bucks doesn’t get you a reserved seat in this almost-full medium-sized auditorium in the AMC Tysons Corner 16, and the program is a simple one-sheet affair. The subtitles are onscreen, not in the chair backs, and the AMC’s technical execution was only serviceable, not flawless (the image was not framed properly for a few minutes; sound and lights came up and down with peculiar timing). But you do get the opportunity to munch popcorn in your seat (a few of us indulged). And the proceedings are framed by backstage patter: it’s awful darn cool to get to hear the SM pass the “maestro to the pit, please” call.

What you do get is a good taste of something like the live experience, and in the case of this electrifying production about the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, under the scientific direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that’s something special.

Julian Crouch’s set makes the first impact. Projected on a scrim is the periodic table of the elements known at that time, quaintly missing Francium and Technetium and stopping at Plutonium. The scrim is pulled to reveal a three-level set for the chorus: the effect is of pigeonholes in a rolltop desk, or a warren of office cubicles. The stage is abuzz with activity as preparations for the bomb test are being made.

In the second scene, Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer sings a lush, intimate “Am I in your light?” to her husband Robert. The act closes with a powerful “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” from Oppenheimer, sung by Gerald Finley of the piercing, haunted blue eyes.

John Adams is known for his choruses, and the second-act “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous” is a stunner, as the atomic energy workers react to a vision of Vishnu in the skies. The put-upon meteorologist Frank Hubbard (Earle Patriarco) reports that weather conditions have finally cleared, and the test is on. The penultimate moments of the opera, as the atomic explosion ignites an era, perhaps carry more effect in the actual theater.

Generally, the multi-camera work is unobtrusive (the Met has been televising live performances effectively for years, of course) and follows the action, mixing long shots (a four-shot of Oppenheimer, Kitty, her shadow, and his gigantic one is well-framed) and extreme closeups—pans, zooms, and tilts up from the vantage point of the pit. Once in a while the lighting and exposure levels for Ms. Cooke wash her out.

Which leads me to the following question: do Met performers adjust their makeup when they’re being televised? What I saw looked natural in closeup, so I wonder how it plays in the upper reaches of the balconies.

And where can we score some of those great prop cigarettes? Oppenheimer and Kitty were rarely without one, and the cool thing about the prop is that you can take a drag from it and get a little puff of smoke.

  • Doctor Atomic, composed by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars, conducted by Alan Gilbert, directed by Penny Woolcock, Metropolitan Opera, New York/HD Live

Counter melodies

Susan Elliott gives recognition to another unsung contributor to the musical theater: the orchestrator. Orchestrators are needed even for revivals, perhaps moreso.

Downsizing is the norm these days, mostly because of space and economics. “We’re being asked to write for smaller and smaller bands all the time,” [Michael] Starobin [orchestrator of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins] said. “Everybody’s oohing and aahing about South Pacific, but nobody’s saying: ‘Hey! Let’s use big orchestras again.’ Producers don’t want to put money into the music; they’d rather spend $3 million on the scenery.”

An aha moment

From David Remnick’s profile of jazz expert Phil Schaap, DJ for Columbia University’s WKCR:

“…I was out on a Hundred and Fourteenth Street and I could hear [“Scrapple from the Apple”] playing from the buildings, from the open windows. That was a turning point in the station’s history. The insight was that Charlie Parker was at least tolerable to all people who liked jazz. If you idolized King Oliver, you could tolerate Charlie Parker, and if you think jazz begins with John Coltrane playing ‘Ascension’ you can still listen to Bird, too.”

Upcoming: 10

My favorite band of the late 90s, Portishead, has reformed and has a CD to be released later this month. Jon Pareles gives a preview:

Third is more polymorphous, more extreme, more propulsive and often harsher than previous Portishead albums. Instead of mellowing with age or returning to a signature sound, the band has fractured and splintered that sound, plunging even deeper into loneliness and anxiety.

And lest you think this note betokens any particular musical sophistication on my part, let it be known that I finally tracked down a bit of high school era power-pop that’s been rattling in my head for months. It turns out to be “Go All the Way,” by Raspberries, an early 70s band from Cleveland fronted by Eric Carmen.

Tell me another

Via ArtsJournal: Laurie Anderson talks to John O’Mahony about her new piece, Homeland:

[Anderson] insists there couldn’t be a better time to be a storyteller. “We have an extremely story-savvy government here,” she says. “Take the way George Bush recently retold his Iraq story about the evil dictator and weapons of mass destruction. It went over just fine because it really doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a true story. It matters whether it’s a good story, with evil people and a plot. And then, with Hillary and Barack Obama, you have another wonderful story. It doesn’t matter who wins, because kids and young people have gotten interested in the story and they will be different as a result. And, given that it’s an election year and Bush will be leaving, we’ll soon move on to an entirely new story. America is a good place for stories”.

Adaptation

… a cult of religious veneration for the wishes of the composer now rules the musical roost. [Richard] Wagner himself played a big part in promoting this by putting out a lot of self-serving propaganda about art being pretty well the sole purpose of life and the wickedness of tampering with the work of an artist, especially a great artist such as himself. To be authentic, to do exactly what the scholars say Scarlatti, Schubert or Monteverdi would want you to do, if necessary going to the length of building a sixteenth-century ophicleide—this today is pretty well the holy grail. Never mind that the piece would sound much better played another way or that modern acoustics are different, that pitch has gone up, musical taste changed, musical marathons don’t fit into our culture—never mind anything at all, just stick a harpsichord into the Albert Hall and not on any account a Steinway. If you can’t hear it at least you know what you’re not hearing is authentic. The real obstacle to producing a sensibly revised version of The Ring is not the chorus of outrage that would go up, but the difficuly of finding a musician of genius to do it.

—Sir Denis Forman, A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide…, p. 555

How much easier we have it in theater! No one would demand seeing Shakespeare only according to 16th-century performance practices, played by men only, en plein air (though it is certainly fun to see a simulacrum of this at the Blackfriars in Staunton), with Elizabethan pronunciation. The moment the first line is read at the first read-through, something of the playwright’s original intention has been betrayed. This betrayal might be an essential quality of theater.

Does this mean that ensemble pieces like The Laramie Project or An Experiment with an Air Pump could be played with no doubling? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: the film version of Laramie worked. Or that Arthur Miller can be reset in outer space? Well…

Egregious muzak: 1

It’s been a while since I heard something piped in that made me say, “Aww, why did they have to do that to that song?” But there I was, walking into the Reston Chick-Fil-A this evening, and as I stood in line, I thought, “that sounds like… is that… yeah, it is…” The mooshy mix made it hard to tell whether the solo instrument was strings, or an organ, or a reed instrument, but the languid, swoopy intervals were unmistakeable: “Naima,” by John Coltrane, originally recorded on the Giant Steps album.

Cool, not cool

Paul Conley (thanks, J Luc!) has produced a fine profile for NPR of the wistful alto, the “swinging introvert,” saxophonist Paul Desmond. Desmond wrote “Take Five,” which appeared on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s phenomenally popular Time Out, the jazz record that broke out of the 4/4 groove. Brubeck and Desmond, with their laid-back West Coast sound, were my gateway into jazz in college (the only thing I heard at home was a little Cal Tjader), but lately I’ve listened more to their bebop and post-bop contemporaries. Maybe it’s time to go back and give another listen.