The amazing Eötvös, the great Ligeti and perhaps greater Bartók

Among Opera lovers with IQs over sixteen (alas there aren't many of those) Peter Eötvös is best known for setting that quintessentially American Classic Play Angels in America as an opera (a quintessentially American Classic play is a "masterpiece" that will be forgotten and seen as self indulgent pompous camp after a while). The play by the astonishingly obnoxious and unbelievably self important Tony Kushner goes on approximately forever.


The opera, though, is musical comedy length, and indeed, some of it sounds like that ruinous fetish of the musical comedy genre, Stephen Sondheim. A good twenty years of American musical composers condemned themselves to irrelevance in an art form of shrinking importance in America by imitating the lyricist Sondheim, oh yes, he composes, too. He's an acrostical wordsmith with a tin ear.


The moronic 'critical establishment' of America, a grotesque bunch of stupid, uncultured vampires (they seem to live forever) anointed Sondheim as important based on his imperious arrogance, not on the gifts once not so unusual in musical comedy (one must call it Musical Theater today, doncha know) -- after all, Julie Styne could actually write a tune, and Cole Porter was a real composer (tunes instinct with a kind of theatrical wit mixed often with a rueful insight into what living is, witty harmonies -- he did study with Vincent D'Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris -- and all without even a smidgen of pretension). The classy alcoholic/sex addict, Dick Rodgers, was only correct when he averred in a rare introspective moment, "I piss melody".


Hard to know if allowing a bit of Sondheim in, Eötvös was trying for an "American" effect -- New York, pretension, phoniness. He has used indigenous music in many of his works. Angels, the opera, is very clever, and deserved to be heard more widely -- it was premiered in 2004. But the life of a new opera is usually brief. Musical comedies can still make a lot of money and last forever on Broadway, no matter how bad they are (I realize, dear reader, you can sing and dance to all the so called tunes in Legally Blond); but opera is pretty much dead, and new ones are like Bishop Berkeley's tree falling over in an empty forest.


Eötvös is an interesting figure. He began composing film scores at 18. He worked with those terrors Stockhausen and Boulez, becoming among other things, a computer whiz as well as a master of sonority and the use of various kinds of electrical enhancement and distortion in live performance -- instructions for "programming" such effects are all in his scores. Perhaps his most successful opera so far is Three Sisters (1998). Instead of Chekov's four acts, composer and librettist, Claus H. Henneberg, concentrate on one section shown from three perspectives. This prompts a vast array of sonorities and techniques from a simple accordion solo to start to sometimes amazing tonal clusters to dreamy clouds of sounds, wisps of tune. Oh yes, the three sisters are sung by counter-tenors! There are two orchestras: one of 16 players in the pit, a full orchestra behind the scenes. There is a DG recording and a video circulates but this is something I would adore to hear live. The so-so, inexplicably successful Kent Nagano (fired recently from Munich but cheered to the echo by the supposedly discerning audiences there), co-conducts with the composer. It's amazing to hear but I wonder how our beloved Met audience would react to such a work (one that is actually painfully beautiful at times).


Eötvös is also an accomplished and very versatile conductor and this new CD gives one a strong impression of what he can do. It contains three violin concertos, one by György Ligeti -- a major influence on Eötvös.


The violin concertos of György Ligeti and Bela Bartók are two of the greatest works of the 20th century, joined by Eötvös' own violin concerto (2003). As a programming “hook” Eötvös uses the Romanian region of Transylvania, associated with Dracula, but with its large Hungarian population the place where Bartók did his researches into folk music, and where Ligeti and Eötvös were born.


Ligeti’s amazing piece, finalized in 1992, is a compendium of all the styles he had worked in: grotesquerie, folk dance gestures, games with tuning, with glances backward to Medieval and Renaissance sources, and into his own ever-surprising dream world, with a new, almost “romantic” feel. There are five movements: the three slow movements have a soaring, almost rhapsodic quality, song-like at first but finally dissolving into despair; the fast movements are dizzyingly ferocious. It is a hypnotic, unforgettable work of remarkable although unique beauty.


The Ensemble Modern plays for Eötvös as though their lives depended on it. The orchestra accomplishes Ligeti’s extreme demands with sizzling intensity. Similarly, Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays the near-impossible solo part with a biting, unflinching incisiveness, unfazed by the sometimes bizarre effects called for, and etching her way through the soulful material with an aching lyrical intensity. Ligeti left the final cadenza up to the soloist and Kopatchinskaja uses material discarded from the first version of the piece in a very original, slightly crazy way. This performance alone is worth the price of the two CDs.

Bartók’s violin concerto (his second, the first is considered a love-besotted experiment) has become part of the repertory. Eötvös obviously feels it has been taken for granted. He points — some would say overpoints — all the remarkable details in the first movement in ways that risk segmenting the structure. Kopatchinskaja shifts color a great deal, inserts some unusual “gypsy” portamentos, and uses a folk-like freedom in rhythm while suppressing vibrato and adding a tough edge to her tone. There isn’t another performance like this.

The slow-movement variations are given a hard-edged treatment that perhaps too scrupulously avoids the romantic gestures Bartók was starting to use when he composed this work in 1938. When even Pierre Boulez (in his performance with Gil Shaham on DG) sounds glossy in comparison you realize that Eötvös has made quite a statement about the piece.

Speaking of Boulez, he conducted the world premiere of Eötvös’ concerto, which has the sub-title “Seven” (the number dominates the work, the number of movements and the way it is scored) and is dedicated to the seven astronauts who died in the Columbia disaster, who are named in the score, and each of whom is given a “cadenza”. The violinist is called on to execute extremely difficult lines in a declamatory, fierce style. Eötvös evokes the folk music of India and Israel to commemorate the nationalities of two of the astronauts. Occasionally, a more elegiac feel sneaks in, and eventually Eötvös evokes a dream landscape of uncanny timbres and musical lines.

Ligeti is given a great performance; Eötvös is worth knowing. Those coming to the Bartók for the first time may want to look to one of the more agreeable performances, but anyone who knows the piece well will find this an interesting and at times revelatory performance.

Complete idiocy from two morons

These are two Ancients of Daze on the grotesque Opera-Smell, enabled by the Little Librarian who could one, Bob Kosovksy. Tritter is an elderly shyster who once married a middling but very capable coloratura named Rita Shane. She divorced him. In my imagination, she is digging his grave in front of him as he watches helpless in his wheelchair. I fancy in moments of fury that the genital female slave he bought to replace her has sneaked up behind him to --- PUSH!!! Truly this is one of the most vicious and grotesquely stupid horrors on the Opera 'Net, which is not lacking in those. (And yes, dear reader, I have sometimes been described as vicious, sweet as I obviously am. But never stupid). The topic was Shakespeare in Opera, as though any of these cretins had ever thought about a play attributed to Shakespeare, or could really understand one. Daniel Tritter on Opera-L

bellini "i capuleti ed i montecchi" handel "giulio cesare" ades "the tempest" barber "anthony and cleopatra" reimann "lear" and for greatness in a brother art form: porter "kiss me, kate" bernstein "west side story" rodgers "the boys from syracuse"

(For the record, the Bellini is NOT based on Shakespeare, only a pretentious moron would think so, the Handel is not even remotely based on Shakespeare, only a death bound goon would even broach that.) A response was made by the reigning queen of Opera Smell, empowered by The Little Librarian that could. Rideout is a preposterous singer maven, who thinks because he's compiled chronologies of now forgotten singers, he is MAGNIFICENT. What he doesn't know about opera, music or anything other than the number of bowel movements Celestina Boninsegna had between acts of Aida would overflow The Atlantic Ocean. Bob Rideout:

Whatever Dan's examples are, or are not, one thing is certain, they are much closer to the spirit and the letter of Shakespeare than most of the Regie (aka Eurotrash) that passes for legitimate representation of "composers" "librettists" and "original sources" (aka Shakeseare, Belasco etc), at least in my limited experience with these celebrated innovations. In my not so humble opinion!

The opinion is neither humble nor intelligent and the statement above is simply erroneous and PHILISTINE. It takes a real opera queen of the old school (the reform school for the hopeless) to link William Shakespeare with David Belasco!!!! Can't they all starve to death in cardboard boxes during the rare blizzard? pix: the delightful Maria Callas

"Eurotrash", TV, a bit of art history and the survival of "opera"

I notice on the idiotic Opera Smell there is the refrain about how bad (or sometimes, good)Eurotrash productions are for opera. This term, a stupid cliche, means something one of the fools who still is fighting the Tebaldi vs. Callas vs. Milanov battles of FIFTY YEARS AGO, takes as a desecration doncha know of something they've seen, oh, I don't know, EIGHT THOUSAND times. You mean, they say, in so many words, some Pig wants me to have to THINK about an opera? No one has quoted Wieland Wagner: "Wagner literature written before 1950 should be burned," he once said, "together with the old Wagnerians. For living theater, there can only be one style - that of its own period."

"Living theater" is an important concept. Humans go to the theater to live, and to see life 'imitated' (mimesis). Yet there is reality in the imitation. The actors are living in front of you, drawing breath -- and can die right there (if you've gone to the theater enough, you have seen that happen). Even in the simplest production of the most restrained play, actors fall, injure themselves, faint, throw up, forget lines and on and on. Audiences instinctively know they are bearing witness to actual as well as fictional "life" in the theater.

"Living theater" also means the drive by individuals to participate in communal activity. In fact the origins of Western Theater were a public affirmation of community. Arthur Miller said, "the poor in the seats upstairs can look down on the rich enjoying themselves, and feel equal for a while." An audience is affirming that it belongs to a community and seeks to have a 'universal' experience. That is why it is said that performance art can change lives, exalt the public, inebriate a large group (there is nothing more intoxicating than an audience laughing riotously, spontaneously), profoundly move and haunt a large public.


It is the experience of the "real thing", the live thing, that draws people to see performances, to spend unwisely to see them, to go back, over and over, to what they have loved. Abraham Lincoln saw 100 plays a year. Lincoln most certainly didn't see "realism" or "naturalism" the 'barn burner' acting troops of the 19th century may have altered their bombast depending on the likely sophistication and experience of a given audience, but illustrations and descriptions suggest "theatricality" not "reality" in presentation. If a character said, "so, this is the Athens of Plato," then we were in the Athens of Plato regardless of how the sets looked or how he or she was dressed.


Shakespeare's plays have been invoked here. The performances at the Globe recently, carefully researched, show no sets, "contemporary" costumes (of Shakespeare's time), heightened sometimes and occasionally doctored to 'suggest' the garb of classical times. Further, men played women. The first Juliet was probably a 20 year old boy (it has been shown that the onset of puberty began much later then, that lad was probably not fully pubescent and could still manage an unforced, natural sounding high voice), the first nurse was probably a middle aged -- old man who specialized in comic parts. All the men playing women would have used conventionalized gestures to signal femininity but there's no evidence that they were drag performers.


An audience much less educated (?) and worldly than most members of this list could juggle in their heads two simultaneous realities. They were watching a girl suffer because her beloved was an enemy of her family, they wept at her "banished" speech, and they were perfectly aware that "she" was male.


Yes, these opera queens are so desensitized by the unreality of mechanized performance (TV, movie, "reality show") that they cannot make believe, as simple people have been able to make believe throughout Western history (Antigone was no doubt a middle aged man, Creon might have been any age, they both wore masks and conventionalized costumes, they probably used a 'heightened' intonation in delivering their lines, perhaps rising sometimes to song, yet according to Aristotle, audiences were overwhelmed with emotion by plays presented in that manner, able to understand that they were seeing a fiction presented in a highly conventionalized way, yet swept into the powerful emotional 'reality' of the plays.)


Moreover, the life long TV watcher has his/her experiences in isolation. Just as ratings systems show, TV audiences are not members of a community but separate and sometimes warring 'demographics'; the 'product' -- movie or TV or video game -- does not affirm a community living life 'together', and mystified by it, by the turns of fate, by the terrors in waiting, but instead, is aimed as a sales tool at people found by research, inundated by corporate culture who've been shown to buy more, understand more about pop culture, spend more time on line and so on. The "power" of a given opera has everything to do with the music (rarely discussed here), and the archetypal impact of the narrative as expressed by that music, and much less to do with scenic contrivances (or the seduction of a particular demographic).. In Traviata and Rigoletto the archetypal themes of betrayal, thwarted love, impulsive sacrifice and the cruelty of fate are far more powerfully expressed by the music than by any given setting. The audience must juggle a dual reality -- people don't wander through life singing everything accompanied by a fifty piece orchestra so it's not 'real' -- yet the music in these works if well realized, compels our emotions to the point that what is happening becomes very real indeed. To the TV watchers that dominate our culture even the "opera lovers" must be added the record collectors whose primary experience of the form has been onanistic; solitary, excited by their own fantasies, who it seems in so many cases listen to music as background noise, stopping only occasionally to listen to Zinka's or Leontyne's sharp, amplified high note.


So why should a bunch of fools be taken seriously (they certainly take themselves seriously!!!). No one sensible, as read by me, has ever attempted a TOTAL theory of ALL OPERA productions on the 'Net. Some productions are so bad that, yes, they're distracting, that is as true of literal presentations with tired, bored performers who don't know the style and uninspiring conductors -- and I'm going to stop there. Because I think those productions are far more typical in America than "innovative" production attempts, some of which, naturally, are better thought through and more persuasive than others.


One unspoken question runs through all this though: it's obvious that in the last seventy years there has not emerged a standard repertory of new operas. There are a few works that have survived, and then a large number of operas that have simply been forgotten after a few seasons. Yet in the seventy years between 1830-1900 ALL the Wagner and Verdi operas were written, as was most of the French and Russian rep that is important in the standard rep. Puccini had written Manon Lescaut, La Boheme and begun Tosca, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and Andrea Chenier had been written -- the verismo movement was in full swing -- Debussy was writing Pelleas, Richard Strauss had launched his career (Elektra came in 1906). But the most recently composed familiar operas are one hundred and more years old -- where is our life? Where are our terrors? Where are the threats that endanger us? How opera was produced varied, sometimes commercially as at the Met, where box office ruled (but Otto Kahn and other socialites were around just in case debt loomed), sometimes subsidized and often a mixture of subsidy and commerce. Without records to familiarize them with new music (La boheme was considered a 'tuneless sewer' by reviewers in New York) people went anyway and went back, learning to hear the tunes. In participating in any art form there is risk -- one may hate it. But the adventure pulls the true lover who may even be quickly bored by the over familiar, preferring to endure the suspense of off putting stories and hard to hear music on the chance that a thrilling surprise lay in wait, an unpredictable joy, even an ecstasy one didn't anticipate going in. Joy and ecstasy are part, the essential part, of an artistic experience -- and great art expands our sense of what those words connote.


This is another problem of TV culture; sitcoms are all predictable, the form was set up to be formulaic and palliative. All of our widely distributed popular entertainment is palliative, numbing, predictable -- Hansel and Gretel is a hit movie, the familiar fairy tale given the novel spin of being told in a horrifically violent way. Our most popular movies are sequels, remakes, imitations, bled of character and consciousness. The gamer knows that s/he will be safe and can simply pull the plug. But in the first audiences, who knew how Death of a Salesman, or Streetcar would end? Who felt at ease in Streetcar when the heroine who is so vulnerable and pathetic is revealed simultaneously to be a liar, a sometime prostitute who contributed to the death of her gay husband? There is something dangerous and risky in that play and it's view of sexuality -- but who today wants to feel those things? We want to know at the opera that the high notes will be there, the vocal volume will be loud and of course we know the music at least superficially, and can go home happy or not because somebody cracked or nailed an unwritten high note, never moved, disturbed, shocked, alarmed -- and without those risks, never truly ecstatic either. The biggest Not for Profits in this Country will go on of course, somehow -- but who will care? And those who are among the most valuable humans, the great living creators, will languish broke and die unknown. This list can rest in peace, the many wealthy morons here have won.



pix: Mascagni with his favorite Santuzza, the schizophrenic Lina Bruna Rasa, and my twin, Felia Litvinne.

MRS JOHN CLAGGART'S SAD LIFE

MRS JOHN CLAGGART'S SAD LIFE

OOPS The review didn't make it!!!! One test of genius in art is that one always finds something new. In the work of Leos Janacek, Karol Szymanowski and Wiltold Lutoslawski there is simply no end to discovery. All fought internal and external battles to get their music heard. Their intensity of feeling, sometimes disturbingly expressed, always moving and intellectually fascinating, marks them as three of the 20th century’s most enduring creators. Janacek’s violin sonata was written at the same time as the three “Myths” of Szymanowski – in 1914. The Moravian Janacek, was 60, the Szymanowski, a Pole, was 36. Janacek was obsessed with the First World War, the dreamy esthete Szymanowski, was living with his partner, the great violinist Paul Kochanski, escaping into a world of edgy soaring, erotic fantasies. Janacek finalized his sonata in 1921, achieving a tempestuous and tender work. Its violent first movement alternates lyric lines and angry outbursts, building to a surprisingly reassuring D flat major triad. The second movement, called “Ballade” is one of the most gorgeous melodies from this composer, breathtakingly spun out and sustained, despite a violent episode. The third movement, marked “Allegretto”, is a scherzo with some tough writing in a folk style (Janacek was a great collector of folk music) but the finale, Adagio, has a rhapsodic feel, alternating soaring melodies with violent eruptions and an ambiguous, tragic end. Szymanowski’s decision to ‘come out’ affected his career well before his death in 1937, and it is only in the past thirty years that more people have become aware of his utterly singular mind. He treats three ancient Myths as the basis for a phenomenal demonstration of musical imagination. With Kochanski there to help, he was able to make practical his incredible coloristic imagination. His violin writing is original, flamboyant, subtle, bizarre, gorgeous – he plays fearlessly with harmonics, demands a vast array of techniques and takes crazy risks. Szymanowski. a virtuoso pianist, writes equally daunting and inventive accompaniments. There is simply nothing like this -- haunting, shocking, gorgeous. Lutoslawski (1913 – 1994) was one of the greatest 20th century composers. But his life was often in danger from reactionary Polish elements, The Nazis and then The Soviets. He had to hide much of his music for fear of reprisal. Subito (1992) was his last completed work. Like so many of his contemporaries he had gone through an rebellious phase rejecting romantic gestures, but as he aged, he came to embrace the full range of techniques in Western Music. Subito starts as fragments that come together as a refrain which occurs four times. Each time the refrain is followed by an ‘episode’ that uses material from the first refrain in surprising ways. Technically, the work is complex, yet its effect is hypnotic. Partita (1982) is an encyclopedia of compositional techniques, from improvisations (the work has two “Ad Libitum” movements, aleatoric, which means that crucial decisions are left up to the players) to a phenomenally planned and dense final movement, which even has a short, very moving homage to Szymanowski. The central Largo is an incredible intellectual achievement, free of tonality, amazingly inventive in chords and the use of harmonics in the violin, yet utterly inevitable in effect, absorbing and deeply moving. Isabelle Faust takes a voluptuous, songful approach to these works but she is a true virtuosa. Her pianist, Ewa Kuplec, offers terrific support. Though there is formidable competition in Lutoslawski by Anne Sophie Mutter, his late muse, and Gideon Kremer and Martha Agerich offer a stinging account of the Janacek, Faust holds up very well and this is a wonderful program overall. This, I guess, is an opera oriented blog, so I am not going to put opera down. And yet this gave me more pleasure that any highlight recording I've ever known.

Can one really love opera?

Things got bass akward, the review is above. In looking around the opera 'net I am always shocked by how little the contributors know about music in general, how little they love music. On Opera-L for example there are few comments about the musical content of even the most familiar operas; and very few comments about the musical challenges singers must face even in the most beloved roles. How someone phrases, how they feel and use rhythm, how accurate they are in rendering what the composer wrote never seems to matter -- usually at all. Whether Milanov, for example, is really up to the grand phrases that are part of the middle Verdi style, phrases that start or end low in the voice and ascend to or descend from the heights do not figure in discussions of her -- according to them -- transcendent treatment of Leonora in Trovatore or Amelia in Ballo or Leonora in Forza. Of course perhaps it oughtn't to matter that her Italian is gobbledygook or that she is often very sharp. There is the same absence of understanding of whether Leontyne Price or Monserrat Caballe, heard most often by these people on glamorized studio recordings, can realize this musical rhetoric. Of course the use of dissonance as a device by singers to impart tension to the vocal line is never discussed. It is a commonplace that Maria Callas was "the greatest musician ever" so one after another of these people avers. But they are entirely ignorant or her compromises, they have no understanding of the musical challenges faced and solved by a truly remarkable musician-singer such as Jan De Gaetani, who often had to modify or invent a vocal technique to realize the immensely demanding new music she sang, or how Arleen Auger, delicately and sweetly, served the musical as well as the vocal demands of more conventional fare. One realizes that these 'opera experts' actually don't know anything. Their fetishes and fancies are triggered by non musical things from a timbre to received opinions by their equally ignorant friends to simple philistinism. Does Verdi have a chance against such insensitivity? No wonder he was regarded simply as an organ grinder composer. I've never seen anyone on these groups talk about how someone like Riccardo Muti shapes phrases into units of great beauty and tremendous effectiveness, even without star singers, and how the operas still work. Few of the tiny number of 'professional reviewers' still left are any better. I had a lot of training as a musician; that doesn't mean I was or am talented but at least I can hear. I understand how difficult it is to get it right, to really express powerfully within the music without the cheap tricks from omitted and simplified phrases but immense unwritten high notes to barking and screaming, always described as 'dramatic', though the faking singers have less good ideas expressively than the composer. I also like a lot of non vocal music; sometimes I find even chamber music more moving and involving than opera. I love the relief from words, stupid words often enough and silly carrying on. It was fun recently to write about music I love that had no voices, that needed close attention to work (the highlight LP was something that sooner or later reared its head when what seemed a small army of opera -- queens? -- volunteered the records they loved. The pop selections mattered to them; often the least interesting music in an opera. This is a review of an HM CD devoted to the violin/piano music of Janacek, Szymanowski and Lutoslawski.

GETTING STARTED

Doesn't EVERYONE blog??? Just think of the magnificent A.C Douglas, the most stupid, pretentious  preposterous self parody on the opera 'Net.... wait -- aren't there are a thousand others? That ignorant scum is on my mind today. This is an exchange that was censured by the Cato of Opera-L, a compendium of morons administered by the Rite Aid Medicated Wipe, one Robert Kosovosky, the Little Libraian who could (get on his belly and spread his spotty cheeks).

WC Douglas to me: <What you mean, of course, you bloviating, pompous little peacock, <" Meaning" long ago escaped with this scumbag's brains through his colostomy bag but this was my reply:

How  DARE you? I have never been called LITTLE in my life!!!!!!!!!!!!

As for the rest of your garbage, anybody who knows anything, knows you are a preposterous joke, the sort of foul smelling corpse that spouts dated, inaccurate cliches about your fetish, Mr. Wagner, who was less Wagnerian than you. You are like the other fools here whose onanism produces only matter best enclosed in an old Kleenex and flushed.

Your deaf, psychotic, inartistic excrement makes you an unfortunate sample of these kinds of lists. As is a huge roach that scatters when the lights come on, you're good to scare the squeamish and impress the peculiar; but worthless about anything else you touch on. Mr. Wagner was surely not a nice man, and liked worship, but the books about him in action at Bayreuth show a fine contempt for the tiny minds like yours, that worshiped with no understanding.

Back to Nibelheim, you noisy mental dwarf -- though as with Alberich and the Rhine Maidens -- it would be sad to miss the hideous comedy of your mental scrambling after beauties you've neither felt nor understood but somehow invested a meaningless life in, which you will never grasp.

As for the rest of your garbage, anybody who knows anything, knows you are a preposterous joke, the sort of foul smelling corpse that spouts dated, inaccurate cliches about your fetish, Mr. Wagner, who was less Wagnerian than you. You are like the other fools here whose onanism produces only matter best enclosed in an old Kleenex and flushed.

Your deaf, psychotic, inartistic excrement makes you an unfortunate sample of these kinds of lists. As is a huge roach that scatters when the lights come on, you're good to scare the squeamish and impress the peculiar; but worthless about anything else you touch on. Mr. Wagner was surely not a nice man, and liked worship, but the books about him in action at Bayreuth show a fine contempt for the tiny minds like yours, that worshiped with no understanding.

Back to Nibelheim, you noisy mental dwarf -- though as with Alberich and the Rhine Maidens -- it would be sad to miss the hideous comedy of your mental scrambling after beauties you've neither felt nor understood but somehow invested a meaningless life in, which you will never grasp.

The LARGE Bloviating Albert Innaurato (a pseudonym your sad Mrs. Claggart uses when in the mood.) 

Too much for Kosovksy, a delicate sensibility and so stupid that half the words above would escape him.

Oh, well, enough for one go through.

JC (Mrs)