|
|
|
BSO Music Director James Levine must cancel his Tanglewood appearances due to an emergency operation. Our revised season schedule is now complete. (Click here.) Sir Andrew Davis will conduct Eugene Onegin.
A statement has just been released by the BSO: "Boston Symphony Orchestra Managing Director, Mark Volpe, reported today that its Music Director, James Levine, was released from the hospital this past weekend. According to Mr. Volpe, Maestro Levine was hospitalized on Tuesday, July 15, for surgery to remove a growth in his kidney. Tom Levine, James Levine's brother, reported to Mr. Volpe that doctors "found the growth to be malignant, but it was very small and confined to the central area of his right kidney, which was then removed. Fortunately, as the growth was discovered early enough, it had not spread to the surrounding tissues, blood vessels, or lymph nodes. Doctors reported the surgery was completely curative and no further treatment is necessary." Tom Levine also stated that his brother was very relieved by the doctors' report, is in very good spirits recuperating at home, and looks forward to conducting the opening events of the 2008/2009 seasons of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera in September. Maestro Levine is Music Director of both institutions."
We extend our sympathies to Mr. Levine and wish him an easy and full recovery.
|
| Huntley Dent's "A London Summer." We are delighted to offer Huntley Dent's ongoing reviews from his summer in London. They appear below with the others in chronological order and on each individual subject page. |
| The Berkshire-born painter, Lucy MacGillis, now resident in Umbria, will present her annual show at the Hoadley Gallery in Lenox this month, closing August 4th. I praised her work enthusiastically last year and see growth in this year's. Click here for more information. |
|
On progress and the future, from Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters:
VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence. (Pause.)
And it's interesting, at the moment we have no means of knowing what especially will be considered elevated or important, or what will be pitiful and ridiculous. Is it possible that the discoveries of Copernicus, or, shall we say, Columbus, appeared in the first instance unnecessary and laughable, while some empty waffle written by a freak seemed to be true. And it could happen that our present day life, which we accept so unquestioningly, will in time appear strange, awkward, stupid, somewhat unclean, perhaps even warped and sinful…
TUZENBACH. Who knows? Perhaps our life now will be called sublime and people will mention it with reverence. For nowadays there is no torture, no capital punishment, no violent invasions, but at the same time, how much suffering there is.
SOLYONY. (In a shrill voice.) Cheep, cheep, cheep… Don't feed the baron with buckwheat, just give him a chance to philosophise.
|
|
| Elliott Carter |
|
|
| |
| Search The Berkshire Review for the Arts |
|
|
| New on the Berkshire Artsblog: On The Lord of the Rings, The Musical! |
| Huntley Dent |
July 17, 2008 |
| [Ed’s note. J. R. R. Tolkien detested the movies, and he didn’t know what pop culture was, beyond perhaps Ivor Novello and the music hall. He would have been perfectly aghast to learn that he and his Lord of the Rings trilogy would become the most extreme sort of Hollywood epic and that he himself was destined to become a not only a pop culture icon, but a New Age guru as well. Even when I first learned about Lord of the Rings back in the 1960’s, it was as an esoteric highbrow indulgence. Today Huntley Dent is able to rank him securely among the pop heroes, contrasting him with Eliot. Thinking of Cats, one could say that Tom Eliot beat him to it, but somehow he did not retain the same authorial aura over the show with nine lives.]
A sense of an ending. I didn’t go to the Drury Lane production of The Lord of the Rings solely to be the oldest person on the premises besides Gandalf the Grey. I went to revisit a certain wistfulness that Tolkien felt and imparted to his readers. The blockbuster movie trilogy missed it, and sadly, so does this hypertrophic, noisy musical, which expressed about as much elegiac regret as P. Diddy. I read the books on an extended spiritual retreat twenty years ago. (In between chapters I vacuumed floors, washed pots, and meditated for hours.) Anyone with a smidgeon of English lit recognizes the fingers of Dickens and Shakespeare on Tolkien’s pages, the hobbits being furry children of Sam Weller and the Pickwick Club, while Gandalf abjures his magic with Prospero cueing him from the wings.
The trilogy is infused with regret over the passing of pastoral England -- the arch villain Sauron might as well be the owner of Blake’s dark satanic mills. The author came legitimately to his sense of a lost Anglo-Eden. With forebears who emigrated from Saxony in the 18th century, and who “quickly and intensely became English,” according to a biographical sketch, Tolkien himself was a Victorian until the age of nine and lived into the era of Nixon, Vietnam, and the moon landing. Not that Victoria’s was a pastoral age, but Tolkien saw the world from a dreaming Oxford tower where he procured a professorship in Anglo-Saxon, and like D.H. Lawrence, who once declared that he could see tragedy in the side of a cow, the Ring master saw it in rampant modernization and two world wars, with immeasurably greater reason.
For years those of us who grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb viewed TV newsreels of every WW II battle in the Pacific and Europe. It was like having a back-row seat to universal catastrophe. We were also the ones who took up Tolkien en masse, sharing his wistful doom scenario, which was comforting in its gentleness. Shorn of only a finger after he hurls the ring into the cauldron of evil, Frodo sails off to a mythic green land in the postlude, leaving Middle Earth to the new race of humans who have no need for magic. Tolkien was never acknowledged by his peers as a serious writer and was finally awarded an O.B.E. just a year before he died (in certain circles it’s not done to write the most widely read book of the twentieth century).
The West End show hasn’t had a kind fate. The reviews appreciated its stupendous stage machinations, depicting Orcs, Mount Doom, Ents, and other memorable artefacts from the novels. A great many short actors inhabited the shire. The young audience loved everything, but the production somehow lost its lease and will disappear this week, perhaps to be reincarnated on a smaller scale in the fall. As it stands, most of what goes on is past tense already. The singing recalls the shrieking, vibrato-less style of Evita, tinged with Celtic and (oddly) Moroccan flavors. The kinetic stage takes the battle scenes from Les Mis and injects them with performance enhancing drugs. As you’d imagine, in the midst of volley and thunder the performances were diminished instead. Even the hobbits were leather-lunged. Yet for sheer visual ingenuity, this LOTR deserves an award – we even got Cirque du Soleil acrobats hanging from jungle vines and a Gollum who writhed in a twisty semi-epileptic manner that only a modern dancer could have mastered (he entered climbing down the stage curtain from the flies). The music was minimal, however. My seat mate said it was like a Christmas panto, only with giant spiders.
But I’m not here to mock. Tolkien thought he was nearing the end of the world, but he was only a marker on the road. The world went on its zigzag way. To his generation, I would be an ignoramus because my Latin is sketchy and my Greek nil. To me, this generation seems like ignoramuses because more people recognize Joe Camel than Joseph Stalin, much less Conrad. That’s not the point. The two world wars did mark a seismic shift that I might typify this way: Newton said that he stood on the shoulder of giants (a phrase borrowed from Bernard of Chartres), but we seem to stand on the rubble of giants. The Lord of the Rings is to pop culture what The Wasteland is to educated culture.
|
|
|
|
Creative Suite 3 Design Premium. Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design! Order Now!
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
| Theater |
All’s Well That Ends Well
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare & Company
Founders’ Theatre
June 20 - August 31
Directed by Tina Packer
Cast:
Nigel Gore - Lavache
Elizabeth Ingram - Countess of Rossillion
Jason Asprey - Bertram, Count of Rossillion
Dennis Krausnick - Lafew
Kristin Villanueva - Helena
Kevin O’Donnell - Parolles
Douglas Seldin - A Drummer Boy
Timothy Douglas - King of France
Peter Davenport - Amor Dumaine
Alexander Sovronsky - Dumaine Soldat
Ginya Ness - Reynalda/and Widow Capilet, mother of Diana
Rondrell McCormick - Duke of Florence
Morganne Davies - Mariana
Brittany Morgan - Diana
Grace Trull - Violenta
Mike Allen Moreno - First Soldier
Andy Talen - Second Soldier
|
| Michael Miller |
July 23, 2008 |
This production is so full of life and so intuitively likeable that I find it difficult to criticize anything in it. Of course its not perfect, but Tina Packer and her cast got the spirit of Shakespeare performance just right—on their own terms, and even the scratchy singing and the less assured among the actors served their purpose. To get the bad out of the way at the beginning. The fine actor Nigel Gore will be the first to admit, I hope, that he is not a Roger Daltrey. Tina Packer did not intend for him and the other actors who opened their mouths to sing to turn All’s Well That Ends Well into a rock opera—well, not quite. But Gore and some of his companions excelled at the world-weary rasp, or croak, or gasp of the life-worn child of the sixties, who has seen love and desire come and go many times over. Their fuzzy diction, the limitations of the sound system, and my ears (I’ve always been challenged by picking out the words in rock music.) also served the benevolent purpose of postponing my coming to terms with the elaborate lyrics Tina Packer has concocted from medieval troubadour songs and Shakespeare himself...  |
|
| Theater |
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare
Hampshire Shakespeare Company
Director: Chris Rohmann
Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, July 19, 2008
|
| Heidi Holder |
July 23, 2008 |
| For nearly twenty years, the Hampshire Shakespeare Company has provided theater-goers in the Pioneer Valley with their requisite summer fix of outdoor Shakespeare. Their latest offering, a fast-paced production of As You Like It, staged on the lawn (and patio, and fire escape) of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at U. Mass., shows what can be done, lean and mean, with a well-directed company and a good setting. (On other nights the show is staged at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley.) Of course, this work in particular benefits from an outdoor setting. One of Shakespeare’s “green world” comedies, As You Like It features shenanigans in the woods, with disguised lovers, amorous shepherds, exiled courtiers, and a wayward fool all crossing paths. But the play has, from the start, other, darker elements. |
|
| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
The Rake's Progress
by Igor Stravinsky
Libretto by W. H. Auden
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Thomas Adès, conductor
Robert Lepage, director
Anne Trulove - Sally Matthews
Tom Rakewell - Charles Castronovo
Nick Shadow - John Relyea
Mother Goose - Kathleen Wilkinson
Baba the Turk - Patricia Bardon
Trulovep Darren Jeffery
Sellem - Peter Bronder
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 24, 2008 |
| Dashed expectations...
At The Rake’s Progress last night I was taken aback when my seat mate growled “terrible libretto” at the intermission. I practically know the Augustan pastiche cobbled together by W.H. Auden by heart. Its witty gilded poetry meshes perfectly with the score’s witty plays on Handel. Auden generously included the name of his unruly lover Chester Kallman on the libretto, but I have my doubts. Stravinsky’s opera has long been a pet of mine – I even own a dim radio air check of the premiere from Venice in 1951. That first night was a shambles. The composer couldn’t keep the ragtag orchestra together, and ruin quickly followed. The Rake pleases music lovers but rarely audiences – Rudolf Bing staged it at the old Met, one of his few gestures toward modernism, and he later claimed that infuriated patrons spat on the box office. The more fools they.
|
|
| Food & Drink: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
| Set Lunches about London |
| Huntley Dent |
July 21, 2008 |
| Lucullus goes to lunch...
In an earlier entry on cheap eats in London I made passing reference to the institution of the set lunch. They are great theatre at their best, when someone with a Sears Roebuck upbringing (raise your hands with me) can mutter French phrases off the menu to someone else who is pretending to be your servant for an hour. Traditionally, the grandest London restaurants were a required stop-off for Parisian waiters, who spent a year here to complete their technique serving proper gentlemen and ladies. Or so I was told a decade ago. Now we’re lucky if the waiters, still mostly French, don’t spit in the soup the way fancy waiters did in Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris.
|
|
| Theater |
Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
Translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Michael Greif
Williamstown Theatre Festival, July 19, 2008
Natasha - Cassie Beck
Irina - Aya Cash
Chebutykin - Michael Cristofer
Vershinin - Stevie Ray Dallimore
Masha - Rosemarie DeWitt
Fedotik - Cary Donaldson
Andrei - Manoel Felciano
Kulygin - Jonathan Fried
Olga - Jessica Hecht
Solyony - Stephen Kunken
Ferapont - Peter Maloney
Anfisa - Roberta Maxwell
Baron Tuzenbach- Keith Nobbs
Rohde - Joe Tippett
|
| Michael Miller |
July 22, 2008 |
| Life is good: two Chekhovs in one week! And the first one, Erica Schmidt’s Uncle Vanya at Bard, was so very satisfying! However, in real life just as in Chekhov’s world, the convenient fiancée gets killed, the attractive officer gets transferred, and somehow we never get to Moscow, at least in the present emergency, Michael Greif’s obnoxiously slick and clumsily executed production of Three Sisters at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is unfortunate, since it is the only classical play in their season, which has been impressively successful so far. |
|
| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
BBC Proms, July 20, 2008
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Concert Orchestra
Paul Daniel conductor
Andrew Kennedy tenor
Nigel Kennedy violin
Bax, The Garden of Fand
Finzi, Intimations of Immortality
Elgar, Violin Concerto
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 20, 2008 |
| Trailing clouds of glory. From the American side of the Atlantic, it’s hard to see how Nigel Kennedy pulls it off. To be a bad boy at 41, affect a working-class accent and ghetto handshake, wear a Chinese smock and fringed chemise onstage, and publicly denigrate the formal trappings of classical music – for all this Kennedy has earned the love of the wider British public, regular blokes who ogle the bare breasts on Page Three. He’s a pop hero in a Mohawk as much as a violin virtuoso. I went last night to hear Kennedy play his signature piece, the meandering Elgar Violin Concerto. Not exactly showboat material. You wouldn’t have known it form the swooning crowd, however. Royal Albert Hall (the Wembley Stadium of classical music, with benign Prince Albert sitting in gilded splendor across the road like a Victorian gentlemen strapped in for takeoff in a Gothic rocket) was packed, the crowd cheering when Kennedy pulled a little trick but hushed when he played [at his first Proms appearance in 21 years.- ed.] |
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
The Revenger's Tragedy
by Thomas Middleton
at the National Theatre
Director: Melly Still
Designers: Ti Green and Melly Still
Cast:
Duchess : Adjoa Andoh
Ambitioso : Tom Andrews
Duke : Ken Bones
Spurio : Billy Carter
Lussurioso : Elliot Cowan
Gratiana : Barbara Flynn
Supervacuo : John Heffernan
Piero : Peter Hinton
Vindice : Rory Kinnear
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 17, 2008 |
| Shockeroo playhouse...
I was walking past the Embankment last night when three girls ran by wearing plastic devil’s horns that lit up red in the dark. They whirled away, dancing to a nearby reggae street band. A fitting epilogue to Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, just letting out at the National Theatre. The doings onstage were pretend Satanism, too. The National exists to keep classic plays alive, but Middleton’s carnival of gore, which piles up eight bodies in the last scene alone, leaving not one named character alive, made the audience laugh – not what the playwright intended. What began as shock value turned into a bloody Feydeau farce by intermission, and the last half played like Monty Python awaiting Eric Idle to prance out with an executioner’s axe. Calling Nankipoo. The actors weren’t winking at us, but there’s only so much oozing crimson you can take.
|
|
| Music |
Tanglewood: The Haitink Weekend
Friday, July 11, 8:30 p.m., Shed
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, conductor
Jonathan Biss, piano
Julia Fischer, violin
Daniel Müller-Schott, cello
All-Beethoven Program
Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello, Op. 56
Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” Op. 68
Saturday, July 12, 8:30 p.m., Shed
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, conductor
Heidi Grant Murphy, soprano
Christianne Stotijn, mezzo-soprano
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, conductor
Mahler, Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”
|
| Michael Miller |
July 20, 2008 |
| It is worth remembering that Bernard Haitink became the chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the most prestigious positions in the musical world, in 1961 at the incredibly young age of thirty-two. Since even before then, up to the present day, he has continued to grow as a musician in his own discreet way, always maintaining a traceable thread back to the values of his early work—clarity, balance, and restraint—qualities, which in the end often proved much more affecting than the excesses of more histrionic conductors. He also showed a particular knack for long, complex symphonic works, working wonders in clarifying their texture and form. His performances of Bruckner’s symphonies on tour and on record made them accessible to a much broader audience outside Austria and Germany. Leonard Bernstein may have popularized Mahler with his intense but sometimes unbearably showy performances, but it was Haitink who made their best qualities more accessible by focussing on coherence in structure and in orchestral sound—a very handsome sound, which has often been described as the “burnished” Concertgebouw sound. It is really Haitink’s sound. None of his successors or predecessors have cultivated it to quite the same extent, and this burnished sound is what he brings to the BSO, especially in their present, improved condition. I still have a vivid recollection of his magnificent Eroica which closed the 2006-07 season in Symphony Hall. The BSO was able to produce that rich, homogeneous sound to perfection. With a full complement of strings there was both mass and fine detail: nothing was lost. The loudest tutti were as clear as the extraordinary pianissimi Haitink can extract from the orchestra. |
|
| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano)
Isabelle van Keulen (viola)
Joseph Breinl (piano)
at Wigmore Hall, Monday, July 14, 2008
Tchaikovsky, The Sun has Set Op. 73 No. 4; It was in the early spring Op. 38 No. 2; The mild stars shone for us Op. 60 No. 12; If only I had known Op. 47 No. 1
Duparc, L'invitation au voyage; Chanson triste; Extase
Brahms, Gestillte Sehnsucht,Op. 91 No. 1; Geistliches Wiegenlied, Op. 91 No. 2
Fant de Kanter, 3 Songs on poems by Ingrid Jonker
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 20, 2008 |
| I just came from a vocal recital at Wigmore Hall that featured the rising Dutch mezzo, Christianne Stotijn, who is tall and has flowing pre-Raphaelite hair down her back (the last syllable of her name rhymes with ‘fine’) except to offer that Stotijn is young, vibrant, and emotionally generous with her voice. After thinking so much about Death, it’s a relief to encounter a maiden. I first heard Stotijn on a CD of early Mahler songs and felt a connection. Live, in an intimate setting, she made the same connection with several hundred Wiggies. They greeted her opening set of Tchaikovsky songs warmly and grew steadily more enthusiastic, until by the end they showered her with bravos. Stirring up listeners with Tchaikovsky and Duparc is no mean trick, especially when Stotijn’s voice was in full sail and swashed her French pronunciation overboard. At moments one heard echoes of a beloved mezzo who was a Wigmore favourite, the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (the CD of one of her recitals from here can be found online – it’s at once heartbreaking and a treasure). |
|
| Music: Recordings |
Schubert Songs
Thomas Meglioranza, baritone
Reiko Uchida, Piano (Pleyel, “Palatial” Grand Piano, ca. 1907, courtesy Klavierhaus, New York)
recorded in early June 2007 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City; Judith Sherman producer and engineer; available through Thomas Meglioranza's Web site and CD Baby (CD $15. Mp3 download $9.99) or Amazon.com.
|
| Michael Miller |
July 16, 2008 |
| I’ve wanted to write about this wonderful recording for some time now, but one thing or another got in the way. Recordings, for better or worse, are not as fugitive as a concert performance. Now, however, the time is more than ripe, since the outstanding young baritone featured in this recording is about to appear at Tanglewood in Harbison’s Fifth Symphony, replacing Nathan Gunn, who sang at the Boston premiere only a few months ago. Thomas Meglioranza’s approach should be quite different, so anyone who heard the premiere will want to come back for another point of view on Harbison’s rich and dramatic setting of Milosz’ bizarre retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. |
|
| Theater |
| Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Bard Summerscape
Fisher Center for the Arts, Theatre 2
July 16, continues through July 20
translated by Paul Schmidt
Directed by Erica Schmidt
Mark Wendland, set designer
Michelle R. Phillips, costume designer
David Weiner, lighting designer
Cast:
Peter Dinklage - Vanya
Ritchie Coster - Astrov
Lynn Cohen - Marina
Robert Hogan - Professor Alexander Serebriakov
Taylor Schilling - Yelena
Mandy Siegfried - Sonya
Kate Skinner - Maria Vasilyeva
Robert Langdon Lloyd - Telegin (“Waffles”)
|
| Michael Miller |
July 18, 2008 |
| The core of Erica Schmidt’s brilliant production of Uncle Vanya is in fact its shell. On the impressively broad and deep stage of the Fisher Center’s Theatre 2, set designer Mark Wendland made an enormous room with a low ceiling, which was both desolate and claustrophobic. Most of the wall space is covered with peeling wall paper decorated with an endless forest of birch trees in autumn...
Erica Schmidt exploits the set’s expanse and the characters’ awkwardness, confusion, or drunkenness to introduce long pauses or to draw out a simple action to extreme length. This is not the ambiguous, multivalent pause of Harold Pinter and Jonathan Miller; it rather expresses the characters’ rooted despair and the futility of their situations.
|
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
The Year of Magical Thinking
a play by Joan Didion
based on her memoir
directed by David Hare
with Vanessa Redgrave
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 16, 2008 |
Death and the maiden...
I avoided Joan Didion’s bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking, for two reasons. One, I practice magical thinking, which crops up among primitive tribes and schizophrenics as the belief that your thoughts can change reality. I don’t mind being in the company of schizophrenics because the greatest spiritual teachers share the same belief. How else could faith move mountains? Didion views magical thinking as akin to delusion, a desperate tactic that the mind resorts to when reason fails. If my first excuse seems eccentric, it’s backed up by an uneasy sense that Didion had done something creepy and narcissistic with grief. Now that The Year of Magical Thinking has been transformed into a one-woman show for the iconic Vanessa Redgrave, I had a chance at the National Theatre last night to prove or dispel my trepidations. |
|
| Theater |
Broke-ology
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Nikos Stage July 9-20
Written by Nathan Louis Jackson
Directed by Thomas Kail
Set designer Donyale Werle
Ennis - Francois Battiste
Malcolm - Gaius Charles
William - Wendell Pierce
Sonia - April Yvette Thompson
|
| Lucas Miller |
July 17, 2008 |
| Seldom have I witnessed such riotous laughter as at the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production Broke-ology, now enjoying its world premier under the direction of Thomas Kail. It is not only a story of economic hardship and the family problems that result from it (as the title suggests) but one which explores the importance of pursuing one’s dreams. |
|
| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Mozart, Così Fan Tutte
The Garsington Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Steuart Bedford conductor
Barbican Hall, Mostly Mozart, July 11, 2008
Erica Eloff - Fiordiligi
Anna Stéphany - Dorabella
Ashley Catling - Ferrando
D'Arcy Bleiker - Guglielmo
Riccardo Novaro - Don Alfonso
Teuta Koço - Despina |
| Huntley Dent |
July 17, 2008 |
| Smiles of a summer night...
Few at home know about the Garsington Opera, an outdoor company that sounds like an idyll. Situated outside Oxford, their productions are tailored to balmy evenings in a c garden attached to a Jacobean manor. One imagines white lawn dresses draped on willowy ladies redolent of heliotrope. (On second thought, idyllic doesn’t begin to describe it.) Or is this an abreaction, a word invented by Freud for an episode of strong emotional release or catharsis? I needed a release after attending the Garsington’s Cosi fan tutte, which moved indoors to the unbalmy clime of the Barbican in north London. Mozart in a concrete bunker more or less defines cognitive dissonance, but we’ll let that be.
|
|
| Food & Drink: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
| Cheap Eats in London: Huntley's Recommendations |
| Huntley Dent |
July 16, 2008 |
| Cheap eats is still good eats. A petite English woman sitting next to me at the ballet looked like Miss Marple and spoke so softly I needed an ear trumpet. . She remarked that London was the dearest city in Europe. She wasn’t being affectionate – she meant the prices. This is a metropolis of perpetual sticker shock. A movie ticket is $21, a can of Coke one dollar each in the grocery store, and a sandwich with orange drink $24 at the Royal Opera’s splendiferous, glass-canopied Floral Hall. I grit my teeth and pay, but the urban strategist in me has outwitted the gouge.
If you want to eat cheap but also feel that you are eating well, the following are tried and true. I’m not giving reviews, just tips, and am leaving location and hours to the reader who is willing to consult Square Meal, the best online restaurant guide to London.
|
|
| Dance |
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare
Bard Summerscape, Saturday, July 5, 2008, 3 pm
Mark Morris Dance Group
American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Music by Sergey Prokofiev
Scenario by Sergey Prokofiev and Sergey Radlov |
| Renée Dumouchel |
July 15, 2008 |
| In the game of love, first impressions are key. Whether by design or destiny, choreographer Mark Morris’s Romeo & Juliet, On motifs of Shakespeare begins with a slow walk toward The Richard B. Fischer Center for the Performing Arts, designed by architect Frank Gehry. A fluid building thrusting out of the tranquil grass, Gehry’s silken steel is at once sensual and imposing, welcoming and slightly ill at ease in its natural surroundings—eliciting a feeling not unlike the thrill and trepidation of a first meeting. A stroll among stone benches and errant trees soothes the heart and the eye, so by the moment of first entry, there is nothing left but calm, purposeful exhilaration. An auspicious beginning, to be sure. |
|
| Music |
| Imogen Cooper, Piano, All-Schubert Program
Tanglewood, Seiji Ozawa Hall, July 10, 2008, 8:00 PM
Franz Schubert
Sonata in C, D.840, Reliquie
Four Impromptus, D.935 (Opus Posthumous 142)
Sonata in A, D.959
|
| Michael Miller |
July 15, 2008 |
| Imogen Cooper has played Mozart and Beethoven (No. 1, No. 3) concerti with the BSO on several occasions over the past few years, both at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood—always with outstanding success. She balanced a strong comprehension of the formal and harmonic structures underlying the compositions with a great range of touch and color, as well as a sensitivity to shifting moods with a certain authoritative detachment—all fine qualities. I wish I could say that her all-Schubert recital last week in Ozawa Hall achieved the same satisfying completeness. Although the evening was full of brilliant ideas and exquisite moments, Ms. Cooper failed to grasp the organic framework of the works, above all the late sonatas, in which it is such a crucial element. This was surprising, since one of her teachers, Alfred Brendel, excels at this aspect of interpretation, and her concerto performances showed her to be an apt pupil. |
|
| Music |
| Tannery Pond, Saturday, July 12, 8 pm: Soojin Anjou, Piano
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata In E-Major, K.332
Maurice Ravel, Sonatine
Johann Strauss Jr. / Leopold Godowsky, Concert Paraphrase "Die Fledermaus"
Olivier Messiaen, La Colombe
Isaac Albéniz, Triana
Maurice Ravel, Le Tombeau De Couperin
|
| Michael Miller |
July 11, 2008 |
|
I don't intend to offer a review of a private concert preview, but I would like to express my most enthusiastic recommmendation of the upcoming Tannery Pond recital by the young pianist Soojin Anjou, a native Korean who now resides in Berlin. This afternoon I had the great pleasure of hearing her play in a home setting. Her program shows extraordinary sensitivity to subtle relationships among the works, which emerge only cumulatively as the listener absorbs them in succession—beginning with one of Mozart's most popular sonatas, which laid the groundwork for Ravel's Sonatine. There followed a striking contrast in Godowsky's moody and whimsical paraphrase of tunes from Die Fledermaus. Messaien's otherwordly short piece, La Colombe, Albéniz exotic Triana, and finally one of Ravel's finest works, Le Tombeau de Couperin—all played with impressive technique, insight and nuance by this extraordinary young woman at the beginning of her career. Her performance of Le Tombeau de Couperin showed the highest mastery, revealing aspects of the work I never knew existed. With Soojin Anjou's sharply etched technique the more delicate passages never lost their strength and rigor, and she did full justice to the grander passages, never compromising the basic lucidity of her playing. This is an event not to be missed.
I should add that this private preview was presented in connection with The Tannery Pond Concerts. Its organizer, Christian Steiner, was present, but he ceded his usual role of host to his Sealyham Terrier, Nikolai, who fulfilled this duty with a graciousness worthy of his master, scuffling enthusiastically around the piano before each piece, and barking once discreetly to support the applause. Nikolai is obviously a seasoned concert-goer, and many Tanglewood visitors would do well to take a page from his etiquette book.
|
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Fat Pig
at the Trafalgar Studios, London
Written and directed by Neil LaBute
with Kris Marshall, Joanna Page, Ella Smith, Robert Webb |
| Huntley Dent |
July 11, 2008 |
| “A man’s a man for a’ that.” Few careers have begun as aptly as Neil Labute’s. First noticed for a cruelly ironic indie film, “In the Company of Men,” he has remained true to its theme of men who cannot love taking it out on women who try to love them. The slug line for the movie still brings chills of revulsion: “Two business executives--one an avowed misogynist, the other emotionally wounded by his girlfriend--set out to exact revenge on the female gender by seeking out the most innocent, uncorrupted girl they can find and ruining her life.” The fact that the girl happens to be deaf went so over the top that someone should have sniffed out Labute’s Swiftian slyness. Few did. Feminist nerves were rubbed raw, and in all the commotion his name was made. |
|
| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No 8
St Paul's Cathedral, 10 Jul 2008 8:00 PM
London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev conductor
Victoria Yastrebova soprano
Ailish Tynan soprano
Liudmilla Dudinova soprano
Lili Paasikivi mezzo soprano
Zlata Bulycheva mezzo soprano
Sergey Semishkur tenor
Alexey Markov baritone
Evgeny Nitikin bass
The Choir of Eltham College
London Symphony Chorus
The Choral Arts Society of Washington
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 10, 2008 |
| Back from Elysium. St. Paul’s cathedral is a dicey venue for classical music, but even when the gold-banded dome is swallowing up the sound of the chorus like the yawning gulf in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, the church itself overawes. Music turns into a paean to architecture. God looks in through the clear, unstained windows (This is Protestantism.), cherubs comport with English admirals and generals on the periphery, some of whose statues are jauntily posed, and the white-and-black checkerboard floor reminds one of a plain Dutch parish church magnified in excelsis. |
|
| Music |
Dame Felicity Lott (soprano)
Graham Johnson (piano)
Wagner, Wesendonck Lieder
Berlioz, Villanelle; Le spectre de la rose
Duparc, Lamento; Au pays où se fait la guerre
Hahn, Infidélité
Chausson, Les papillons
Falla, Trois Mélodies
---
Sir Thomas Allen (baritone)
Malcolm Martineau (piano)
Members of the Aurora Orchestra
Poulenc and Courtly Love
Debussy, Trois ballades de Villon
Poulenc, Songs from Poèmes de Ronsard
Duparc, L'invitation au voyage; Soupir; Le manoir de Rosemonde
Ravel, Don Quichotte a Dulcinée
Poulenc, Le bestiaire; Le bal masqué
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 8, 2008 |
| Hooray for Wigmore Hall. To American ears the name sounds funny, and some of the bag-toting habitués who come for a concert every day may qualify as wiggy. But no other venue offers more great music in an intimate setting than here. As crowds devour the summer sale at Selfridge’s around the corner on Oxford Street, a few hundred listeners repose in the beauty of chamber music and song inside the jewel-box Wigmore. Dappled sun peeks in through the skylights – or the tap-tap of rain – while for half the price of tea at the Ritz some of the best performers in the world play for your pleasure. |
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
| New Connections, a season of short new plays created by established writers and performed by young people. For more details, click here.
High-profile writers including Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery have written plays for this year’s festival.
The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking.
It Snows, by Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assem, performed by Sandbach School, Cheshire
Burying Your Brother in the Pavement, by Jack Thorne, performed by RSAMD Youth Works, Glasgow
3 – 8 July Olivier, Lyttelton & Cottesloe Theatres
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 9, 2008 |
I hope the British never shut up. Riding across town to Oxford Circus, a harried woman got on my bus with her daughter in tow. The little girl was a constant chatterbox. Her mother (and the rest of us) suffered in silence until the following exchange occurred:
Mother: Don’t you ever get bored with yourself?
Little Girl: You’re mental.
I tucked this away in my mental file along with the drunk who got on my bus last year and said to the driver, “I have no money. Would you accept a poem?”
Precocious kids came to mind at the National Theatre last night. I bought tickets, I thought, to two experimental plays on the big Olivier stage, but the music booming before the curtain went up was Euro techno hip hop, and the mostly young audience started performing The Wave (as fans do at Wembley and the Super Bowl). I discovered that I was at a festival of youth theatre companies, finalists who won the right to strut their stuff at the National after competing in fifteen regional semi-finals. The temptation was to bolt for the outdoors, but the first play, It Snows, turned out to be a musical slash happening of jaw-dropping skill.
|
|
| Art: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
| A Visit to the Tate |
| Huntley Dent |
July 9, 2008 |
| Oh, that this rain would end! I dried my socks by stepping into the Tate Britain this afternoon. The museum collection is divided into three parts – the glorious, the dull, and the querulous. The glorious, all those luminescent Turner paintings, went on tour this year, so the mobs aren’t in attendance. The management left a few strays lingering in various galleries (like the sublimely bucolic Golden Bough and a Venetian water scene where only an outlined gondola betrays that Turner wasn’t painting a celestial city), and these left-behinds glow like yellow sapphires. The dull part of the Tate consists of traditional British paintings, large rooms hung double-decker style with portraits of horse-faced lords and their pale, powdered ladies. I have to squint to read the labels, so it’s work to separate the Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, and Van Dycks from the acreage of peerage that surrounds them. If I sound captious, it’s because the third portion of the Tate Britain, devoted to modern art, exasperated me. |
|
| Music |
Opening Night at Tanglewood:
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens
Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Conductor
|
Berlioz, Les Troyens, Part 1 (The Capture of Troy)
Saturday, July 5, 8:30 pm
Marcus Haddock, Tenor (Aeneas)
Anna Caterina Antonacci, Soprano (Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Chorebus)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Pantheus)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Jane Bunnell, Mezzo-Soprano (Hecuba)
Ronald Naldi, Tenor (Helenus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (Trojan Soldier)
Gustav Andreassen, Bass (Ghost Of Hector)
Kirk Eichelberger, Bass (Greek Captain)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, Conductor |
Berlioz, Les Troyens, Part 2
(The Trojans at Carthage)
Sunday, July 6, 3 pm
Marcus Haddock, Tenor (Aeneas)
Anne Sofie Von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano (Dido)
Kristinn Sigmundsson, Bass (Narbal)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Christin-Marie Hill, Mezzo-Soprano (Anna)
Matthew Plenk, tenor (Iopas)
Philippe Castagner, Tenor (Hylas)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Pantheus)
Anna Caterina Antonacci, Soprano
(Ghost Of Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Ghost Of Chorebus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (Trojan Sentry 1)
Gustav Andreassen, Bass (Ghost Of Hector
And The God Mercury)
Kirk Eichelberger, Bass (Trojan Sentry 2)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, Conductor |
|
| Michael Miller |
July 7, 2008 |
An hour before Part I of Les Troyens was to begin, I found myself wandering peacefully and somewhat aimlessly among the trees. The grounds were still unpopulated and quiet, providing an exceptionally favorable atmosphere for music. The first two acts of Berlioz’ epic masterpiece which awaited us are hardly what one would call contemplative music, but a contemplative mood seemed the right preparation for the violent, burning sweep of Berlioz’ romantic tableaux of the fall of Troy. It gave me an hour of so to forget whatever baggage I had brought with me, which amounted to some scepticism as to whether a Tanglewood reprise of the massive, impressive, but flawed effort of late April and early May would make much of a difference.
Les Troyens may still remain something of a connoisseur’s opera, but there are plenty of people who are fascinated with it—Hector Berlioz’ forgotten masterpiece, a vast stage work which only found any real currency with Hugh Macdonald’s publication of a scholarly edition of the score in 1969.
|
|
| Theater |
| TR Warszawa: Macbeth 2008
Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse, Susan Feldman, artistic director; in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. At the Tobacco Warehouse, Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, Dumbo, Brooklyn. Performed in Polish with English supertitles.
Adapted from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna; sets and costumes by Stephanie Nelson and Agnieszka Zawadowska; music by Abel Korzeniowski, Jacek Grudzien and Piotr Dominski; lighting by Jacqueline Sobiszewski; video design by Bartek Macias; special effects designed by Waldo Warshaw.
Cast:
Cezary Kosinski - Macbeth
Aleksandra Konieczna - Lady Macbeth
Tomasz Tyndyk - Banquo
Michal Zurawski - Macduff
Danuta Stenka - Hecate
Miroslaw Zbrojewicz - Duncan
Jacek Poniedzalek - Lenox
Jan Dravnel - Seyton
|
| Michael Miller |
July 9, 2008 |
| In preparing this review—more in that than in actually witnessing the performance—I had to remind myself that this is not the play which has come down to us as Shakespeare’s Scottish Play with some conspicuous additions by Thomas Middleton, as well as some other cuts and adjustments. It is rather Macbeth 2008, Gzregorz Jarzyna’s adaptation of the play. What made this hard was that it resembled Shakespeare’s play in so many ways that I couldn’t help thinking about it and making comparisons. Jarzyna’s spectacle even includes several excerpts from the best-known speeches in the play, inserted into the crude, obscenity-ridden dialogue that Jarzyna has created in the style of contemporary Hollywood film, especially the work of his hero, Ridley Scott. If I had been able to attend the lecture Jarzyna gave at the Polish Cultural Center about a month before the much-publicized opening of his show, I’d have been better prepared, and perhaps more resistant to comparisons with the Jacobean play, so admirably presented by a company from the Chichester Festival barely a mile distant from its venue in the armpit of the Brooklyn Bridge. All Mr. Jarzyna’a lights, noise, and bodily fluids amounted to pretty feeble stuff in comparison with the all-too-familiar words of the old play. His purpose is to present the story of Macbeth as a nightmare, as if the play were not nightmarish enough in itself. |
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
That Face
at the Duke of York's Theatre
by Polly Stenham
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Design: Mike Britton
with Lindsay Duncan, Hannah Murray, Matt Smith, Catherine Steadman, Julian Wadham
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 7, 2008 |
| Tube riders litter the train with newspapers, which other riders pick up to alleviate their boredom. Coming home last night I saw a grisly headline on one of these throwaways, “Sixth Stab Murder in Week of Death.” In London? The first sentence of the story was horrifying. “A schoolboy has been stabbed to death with a foot-long knife by a gang of thugs in south London.” It was within memory that a single shooting death made national news. Compared to America, the UK is still a kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb. Verbal and psychological violence are another matter. |
|
| Dance: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
The English National Ballet
at the Southbank Centre, London
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 6, 2008 |
| Walking across the Charing Cross footbridge, wishing the Thames didn’t look muddy no matter how blue the sky, I spied what looked like a Safeway supermarket attempting liftoff from the opposite shore. Actually, it was Royal Festival Hall. The building consists of a multi-storied cube topped with a plain barrel vault. You’d never suspect the interior was devoted to music and dance – it could easily be a widget factory. But gratitude is due the city planners, who plunked RFH down in 1951 when the South Bank was littered with little else but closed factories and depressing detritus from the war. This year the hall reopened after expensive refurbishment, with public promises that its bad acoustics had been remedied.
I can’t report on the acoustics because I went there yesterday for the English National Ballet, in town for a limited run -- they usually tour the land wherever railroads can take them (think Swan Lake in Bradford and Hull).
|
|
| Theater/Cinema |
|
Two of a Kind: Ronan Noone’s The Atheist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Directed by Justin Waldman, with Campbell Scott/
DVD Criterion Collection
|
| Lucas Miller |
July 7, 2008 |
| It is hardly surprising that Justin Waldman’s production of Ronan Noone’s The Atheist is already being hailed as the best play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival so early in the season. In form, it is a dramatic monologue. The audience listens to the stereotypically amoral and inconsiderate American journalist Augustine Early talk about his rise to disreputable fame, after tainting the lives of so many (though, ironically, he seems to have an unfortunate case of the Midas Touch, making his victims more famous than himself). |
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Relocated
at the Royal Court Theatre
written and directed by Anthony Neilson
with Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson, and Nicola Walker
|
| Huntley Dent |
July 7, 2008 |
| Clouds over Sloane Square, and the posh and spicy girls known as Sloane Rangers weren’t tramping around with a slew of shopping bags over their arms. Or not that I could see two days ago. A wag has renamed them the trustafarians, which seems to be sticking. I had a drink with a new friend named Warwick and told him that he and I were the only two people in the bar named after castles. “Presumably,” he said. We had met while waiting to troop into the tiny, dark, primitively ventilated Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre to be assaulted by Relocated, a stage provocation that has divided the critics while scaring off the public. |
|
| Places |
| The United Buddy Bears from UNESCO visit Warsaw: Photo Gallery |
| Joanna Gabler |
July 5, 2008 |
| When I visited my native city Warsaw, earlier this summer, there was a nice surprise waiting for me in one of my favorite places, the Castle Square (Plac Zamkowy). Crowds of Warsowians and tourists were towered by rows of the tall (6.56' each) and colorful bears shining in the afternoon sun.
The centrally placed information table explained it all. United Buddy Bears visited Warsaw on their tour around the world. Project conceived in 2002 by two Berlin artists, gained life of its own. The bears visited many cities on four continents, including Berlin, Hong-Kong, Istanbul, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Vienna and Cairo.To Warsaw, they came from Jerusalem, now, they are enlivening Stuttgart before going to Paris. What travelers the bears are!
|
|
| Art & Architecture |
| Rockwell Kent and the Cape Cinema Mural |
| Lucy Vivante |
July 5, 2008 |
| Part of the Cape Cinema’s appeal comes from the high contrast between outside and in. The church-like exterior is patterned after the nearby town of Centerville's Congregational Church. The murals you might expect inside–of a Puritan religious gathering or colonists working–are instead of exuberant figures dancing across the ceiling. Within the space of a few feet, just by crossing the lobby, we travel from stern New England to lush Art Deco. |
|
| Theater |
| Rowing to America, a Play |
| Kitty Chen |
July 4, 2008 |
|
Scene 1: The stage is bare. The sky is midnight blue, with a crescent moon and a few stars, the sound of waves slapping the side of a boat. GIRL sits on a box or bench, rowing with oars. She is weary. SISTER is in shadow. In GIRL’s first speech, SISTER may speak some of the lines simultaneously or alone.
GIRL
I'm rowing to America. The only thing I brought with me is a picture of a smile. Here in my head. Strong and radiant like the sun. The smile of my sister.
"When we grow up and go to America, everything will be all right," she would say to me. She told me all sorts of things about America. Have you heard them too? She said the streets are paved with gold lamé. A dollar a day keeps the doctor away. Apple pie and huckleberry finn for breakfast. Milk and honey flow down the avenue Fifth Avenue. A chicken in every pot-pie. Where the sun never stops shining, and spacious skies are blue, and amber grains are always waving at you. . . When we get there, we will wave back. Look, Sister—they have come to greet us! Hello! Hello! We are here—we have come to America!
|
|
| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
| | | |
