Before I head out of town for Thanksgiving, I wanted to express just how grateful I am to you, my readers, who stop by day after day, week after week, to read what I’ve got to say. It sounds terribly hokey, I know, but the fact is that I wouldn’t keep doing this if it weren’t for your sustained interest and support.
And so to you, wherever you are, I say THANKS! Have a great rest of the week and I’ll see you back here some time on Sunday.
For those of you still trying to figure out what to get the opera lover/musicologist in your life who has everything, I offer up this cool gift idea, courtesy of the California-based Packard Humanities Institute.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, my birthday is in late January.)
Great news for Korngold fans - Violanta, the composer’s rarely-staged 1916 romantic tragedy set in 15th-century Venice, will receive a pair of double bill productions in 2010: at the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari (April 21 – May 2), where it’s been paired with Delius’ Fennimore and Gerda), and at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (October 12-19), alongside Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie. Details to follow as they become available.
(h/t Brendan G. Carroll, President of the Korngold Society, for alerting me to the Buenos Aires run)
Violanta, Op.8: Vorspiel, with Matthias Bamert leading the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (Chandos 10434)
The Associated Press reports that Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström died this morning in Stockholm of complications from a stroke. She was 82.
In this 1986 clip, she performs “Song to the Moon” (“Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém”) from Dvořák’s Rusalka, with James Levine and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.
A few of the books that are teetering precariously on the bedside nightstand:
I somehow managed to get derailed from my Year of Taruskin, so I’ll also be picking that up where I left off. (Believe me – the fourteenth century is a fascinating period to delve into, but it’s a dark, lonely, and inhospitable place for an opera lover.)
Following up on Wednesday’s Orphée post, I want to direct you all over to bravissimi!, where my friend Jess Crawford has a terrific new blog entry up in which she talks about the process of discovery she went through in getting to know the opera. “[S]ometimes appreciation comes in a flash,” she writes,
“but other times it’s a long, meandering, and occasionally exhausting road. It might seem like a stupid thing to say, but liking the things we already like is easy. Liking the things that don’t automatically strike us is much harder.”
From fast food to 1-click ordering, convenience plays a huge part in our culture. We’ve grown so accustomed to the appeal of getting what we want when we want it that we often lose sight of the fact that some things in life take time and effort. This is especially true in art, where outcomes and responses are often quite open-ended and connections don’t always happen right away. But as Jess rightly observes, perseverance can yield rich and unexpected dividends.
(Photo courtesy Portland Opera/Cory Weaver)
It’s taken a couple of days, but I’m finally ready to let go of Orphée. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the chance to meet Philip Glass, the opera had a very deep and powerful impact on me. Based on the comments I heard both during the intermission and after the curtain went down, audience reaction was generally quite favorable. Of course, not everyone liked it–on closing night, I sat behind a couple who spent the entire first act looking for an opportune moment to head for the lobby–but even among those who expressed initial misgivings about Glass’ music, many found that the show resonated with them on some level.
Here’s your chance to sound off. Let me – us – know what you thought. Positive and negative comments are welcome, so post away!
Here’s the second part of my recent interview with conductor Anne Manson. Our focus at this point shifted to a discussion of Orphée and to some of the various musical aspects of Glass’ score.
BK: It seems to me that once you get into opera and works for the stage, it’s possible to make a stronger connection to our own experiences. We can relate to something there in a way that we can’t in Verdi or Puccini, where the music there often feeds our emotional responses. In a piece like Orphée, the music doesn’t do that.
AM: [Orphée] is first and foremost a piece of theater, and that’s part of the success of Philip Glass’ music when he writes for the stage. He understands something about theater, and I think that this opera connects with us because it’s a very, very strong piece of theater. Also, in a very strong production.
BK: In thinking about the sound world of the opera, there is an evocation of French music…
AM: Absolutely.
BK: …which at times reminds me of Poulenc or Milhaud, but I’d be hard pressed to pin that down.
AM: I heard that he wrote this piece, or he wrote a lot of it, when he was living in France for a year. I don’t know if that’s true or not. There’s definitely a French kind of harmonic world – I think more of a kind of Satie-like world—and he uses that more in the voices than in the [accompaniment, which is] fairly diatonic. A lot of the extended harmonies – the major 7ths and minor 9ths and so forth – are in the voices, but I do think that it gives what sounds to our ear a very French color. And it’s not just that. The way he sets the language, he’s trying to set the language in a naturalistic way. He’s not setting it in a chanting, Satyagraha, way. He’s trying to write a through-composed piece, so the orchestration, what we play in the orchestra, does not sound like what you’d get in a through-composed piece, but the voices are written that way.
BK: At times the vocal line seems to be closely tied to the harmonic content, and at other times the connection is just barely there.
AM: Yes. And it’s quite difficult to pitch.
BK: It’s a very interesting effect, and it seems to imply that the two are operating on different planes. You have the accompaniment and you have the vocal line, which is almost like spoken dialogue in a film. They’re not necessarily pitched together.
AM: In working through the piece and hearing them sing it and watching them act it and sing it at the same time, I do wonder whether [Glass] uses those dissonant moments to show some degree of strangeness, or a step removed, something that’s a little out of reality. And a lot of the piece is, you’re not sure what reality is.
BK: One of the other thing I’ve noticed is the unusual phrase structure. There’ll often be large sections within a scene where we get four- bar and five-bar phrases.
AM: Yes.
BK: And within the same scene, [Glass] also has a nested section written just in four-bar phrases. The analyst in me wants to see some connection between this and the drama. But I also wonder if that’s related in any way to Glass’ involvement in writing film music, where a scene will have its own internal rhythm that the music has to match. Maybe it’s a way of notating that flexibility.
AM: I don’t know about that. I saw the film [Orphée] when I was preparing the opera the first time and it’s been several years since I’ve seen it. I don’t know whether, within the actual pacing of an individual scene, he’s trying to capture the timing of the film.
BK: That irregular phrase structure really stood out when I played through the piece. And in the scene in the second act after Orphée, Eurydice, and Heurtebise return from the underworld, it helps to reinforce the off-kilter situation they find themselves in. At other times, it’s not immediately obvious and might be entirely subconscious.
AM: In that scene with the three of them – you mean the scene that’s really hard [laughs] – I think [Glass] is shooting for a little bit of a French farce feeling, so it’s all moving kind of fast and funny.
BK: And with the alternating meters, everything is just a bit off its axis at that point.
AM: Right, right.
BK: We should probably address a few of the perceptions – or misperceptions – some people have about Glass’ music. I’m coming to realize that Orphée has an especially rich score, and I suspect that audiences may find some of their assumptions thrown into question when they experience it.
AM: One of the things that happened when I was preparing this piece was that I spoke to a composer I know who knows Philip’s music and knows Philip, and also who has a friend who plays in his ensemble, and he said that one of things people don’t always realize about Philip is that when he plays his own music, it’s quite free. He takes time, he expands. I saw him do [a concert version of] Einstein on the Beach at Carnegie Hall just a year or a year a half so ago, and my friend was absolutely right. It doesn’t have a rigid quality that I think people sometimes associate with this music. And I’ve tried very hard to do that with this opera, to choose points where it can be free and let it be free. I’ve talked to the orchestra a lot about listening to the stage and following the stage, so that we’re not putting the singers in a strait jacket. There are certain scenes, like the one you were just describing, where it goes and they just have to stay with us, but there’s a fair amount of flexibility. I feel the more you take advantage of that flexibility, the richer the piece gets.
BK: And he notates some of that flexibility. In Act One, the very end of the scene between Eurydice and Heurtebise…
AM: Exactly.
BK: The shifts in meter seem to suggest again the flexible rhythms of a film scene.
AM: But I also think it suggests a very effective use of theater. [Glass has] got a sense of the stage and of what’s happening between the two of them and he leaves a kind of breath there, a kind of pregnant breath, and if you take advantages of these moments, the piece really starts to breathe. It gets richer and it gets warmer. There’s a lot of room in this piece for warm, cantabile playing. Not rigid, clean playing, but changes of color in how you approach different sections, and I think that also gives the piece depth. I don’t know exactly how it works or why it works, but I can tell you it works. And at the end you can tell as a performer whether you feel you’ve made a satisfying journey or not. And even though the ending is unresolved, you feel it’s been an incredibly satisfying journey, and that’s partly because the music has variation in color and form and rhythm, and possibilities for expanding and possibilities for warmth, and also sometimes rhythmic drive that forces the action forward. I think there’s a fairly broad palette here that we can take advantage of, and that’s part of what makes it successful.
BK: You mentioned the lack of resolution. Another very effective device is that last chord [juxtaposing C minor and C major], a kind of musical and dramatic question mark…
AM: Exactly! The final chord! Sometimes I put that chord down and I wonder, will people know…
BK: It’s very different from the ending of Cocteau’s film, where the music is, in a strange way, more triumphant.
AM: I think the film gives more of an impression of a happy ending between Orphée and Eurydice. Certainly in this case, in this production, the ending is very open.
BK: The fact that things aren’t wrapped up at the end certainly gets us thinking about what’s happened and about the relationships that exist between these characters.
AM: It’s important to point out that it is a piece of theater and it will make you think, but you don’t have to think. It’s not something that’s going to be a huge challenge when you walk in, because what goes on is kind of entrancing, you get taken up by it. So it’s not a piece where you have to think, “Alright, here we go. We’re going to improve ourselves.” It’s very easy to watch and get caught up in this world and yet it also stimulates you. At Glimmerglass, people go out and have a box lunch or box supper at the interval, and you’d hear people asking [as soon as they left], “What does the Princess mean?”, “What does Orphée mean?”, everybody talking to each other…and it was really rewarding to hear that…a real level of engaged involvement on the part of the audience.
BK: Just one more question before we wrap up. What is it like to come back to this piece after a couple of years away from it?
AM: It’s really nice. It’s really nice. We worked very hard on it, not just to get the notes right, but to develop it as a work, to see where it took us, and it feels like a real luxury to come back to it again.
I interviewed Anne Manson, the conductor of Portland Opera’s current production of Orphée, two weeks ago today, but because of lingering problems with my recording software, I’ve only just been able to piece the audio portion of our session together in order to transcribe it for posting. My sincerest apologies to Anne for this unexpected technical delay.
Here is the first part of our conversation, in which I asked her to talk about her musical background and her interest in contemporary and 20th-century music.
BK: Did you grow up in a musical household?
AM: My sister and I always played instruments from a young age, so we were always playing together, duets and so on. And later when we got older, we got friends together to do Brandenburgs and that kind of thing. So there was a lot of music in our house. My father is not a musician, neither of my parents are musicians. But my father is English and grew up during the war in England and he went regularly to concerts and that what basically got him through the war I think. [Laughs] So he just loves music. He had lots of recordings and he played them a lot and he loved to listen to us play, even it was probably a horrible sound in the early stages. [Laughs] So it was a household that was really full of music.
BK: Was there a defining musical moment for you early on?
AM: Well, the defining musical moment for me was the one summer I got to go to Tanglewood in the Young Musicians program. And that was a bit of a turning point for me, because I had always done a lot of music and enjoyed music, but that was an intense immersion in music. And my teachers were musicians but we didn’t know a lot of musicians, and I wasn’t exposed to musicians or what musical life might be. So it was the first time I was in that context with a lot of people who had music as their life.
BK: How old were you?
AM: I was fifteen.
BK: You enrolled at Harvard as a premed student. How long were you in that program?
AM: Well, it isn’t a program. You just do the courses that you need. I started out majoring in a combined degree called history and literature, and after a year or so I switched and majored in music, and then I did science classes as well. I didn’t major in biology or chemistry or anything like that.
BK: We tend to think of the sciences and the arts as compartmentalized activities, but I’d say there are some strong connections.
AM: There are some very strong connections. Most of the people I played with or sang with in college were majoring in math or physics. I actually think that science and math are very creative. They both have the intensely creative, imaginative side, and they have the side which is a lot of repetitive work. And we have the same.
BK: How did you end up in London?
AM: [In the fall of 1983], I started at the Royal College of Music, and then after I was there for several years – I had a scholarship to study there – they took me on as a fellow at the Royal Northern College of Music and I spent two years in Manchester. The fellows there do a lot of conducting and are almost members of staff, kind of a cross between a student and a member of staff. You run the contemporary music ensemble—that was when I started to get very interested in contemporary music—and then you also conduct orchestral concerts sometimes. You have supervisors who give you advice.
BK: That was around the same time as Mecklenbergh Opera.
AM: What happened was that I did a production of Figaro with an English director—theater director, really, not so much an opera director—and after we did it he suggested that we start an opera company together and we did, and that was Mecklenburgh Opera. And out first production was in 1988.
BK: How long did the company last?
AM: I was with Mecklenburgh Opera until 1996.
BK: Did Mecklenbergh program only contemporary music?
AM: No, no. It was 20th-century. Initially we wanted to do operas that were being done in Europe, a lot of them were from Central and Eastern Europe that were simply not being seen in Britain or in Western Europe. So that’s what we started out doing, and then we started doing a broader range of 20th-century chamber opera and also commissioning new operas ourselves from British composers.
BK: I’m interested in how performers gravitate towards certain repertoire. Is there something about 20th-century or contemporary music that connects with you?
AM: I don’t know if I can define that. I’ve always done contemporary music and I’ve always loved 20th-century music, and even early 20th-century music – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and so forth. But to me, nothing is more sublime than a Mozart opera. And in orchestral repertoire, I do a lot of Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms – central classical repertoire. There’s no question that there are works I connect to and works I don’t connect to, at least not as a conductor. I do not connect to the Tchaikovsky symphonies as a conductor, but there’s a huge range of music that I do connect with. I find it very rewarding to work on pieces by living composers and to have contact with living composers. I truly believe that it enriches audiences’ experiences to listen to that music. I really think we can’t just listen to the music of dead people, even though that’s some of the greatest music and it would be a pretty poor life without it. We need to broaden ourselves, and that also enriches our experience when we listen to a Mahler symphony or a Puccini opera. I wouldn’t say that I’m more drawn to contemporary music than a Brahms symphony, but one of the great things about being a conductor is that you have this incredibly broad, rich repertoire, and I feel incredibly lucky that we have it.
