Concert Reviews (2011–2017)
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Concert Reviews (2011–2017) From 2011 through 2017 I occasionally reviewed concerts for the online Boston Musical Intelligencer, imagining that by offering commentary on local performances I might provide information about the music for listeners and helpful suggestions for performers and presenters. But of course this was quixotic, not to say presumptuous, and on the rare occasions when my reviews solicited comments these were usually to complain about their length or my criticisms of anachronistic performance practices and inaccurate claims in program notes. I discovered, too, that as a performer myself, and one who knew and has worked with and even taught some of those I found myself reviewing, it could be difficult to preserve my objectivity or to avoid offending people. An additional frustration was that many of my reviews appeared with editorial changes that introduced not only grammatical errors and misspellings but sometimes misstatements of fact, even altering the views I had expressed. I know that few things are as stale as old reviews, but for the record I include below all these reviews as I wrote them, arranged by date of publication from the most recent to the earliest. At some point I learned that it was preferable to invent a cute-sounding headline than to have one foisted on my review, and where I did this I’ve included it together with my byline. A few of these are accompanied by my photos, although the only one of these that ran originally was the one of the Resistance protest in Copley Square in January 2017. David Schulenberg December 19, 2017 American Modern Opera Company (December 17, 2017) A Night Out With AMOC David Schulenberg The new American Modern Opera Company was unveiled this week in a series of three events billed as the AMOC! Festival, sponsored by the American Repertory Theater. The company is a collaboration between composers, dancers, and performing musicians, with the composer-conductor Matthew Aucoin and choreographer-dancer Zack Winokur listed as artistic directors. I attended the second event, entitled “Cage Match,” Saturday night at the Oberon Theater in Cambridge. The aim of this venture seems to be to rethink performance as well as opera. Making the most of their acronym, their website is called runningamoc.org, and they declare in the program booklet that “we define opera as the medium in which multiple art forms collide and transform each other.” Opera in the traditional sense was barely present in the performance Saturday night, which consisted of six mostly short sets or selections whose origins ran from the early Baroque to earlier this year. Each involved two performers—hence the event title, which referred to a variety of professional wrestling (a theatrical genre of which few of the sold-out crowd of mostly middle-aged Cantabrigians are likely to be fans). In fact the allusion to fake pugilism proved somewhat misleading, and I’m not sure whether the roughly forty-five minutes of actual music and dance added up to much that was really new. I confess that my own interest in the evening was largely to see what the prodigiously talented Aucoin, whose opera Crossing was premiered two years ago by A.R.T., was up to. Two two-piano pieces by himself and John Adams, which he performed together with Conor Hanick, proved the most substantial portion of the evening, bookending a series of briefer works. These included duets by Telemann, Bartók, and the twentieth-century Italian composer Franco Donatoni, all played by violinists Miranda Cuckson and Keir GoGwilt. The penultimate item was an adaptation of a scene from Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea involving countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and dancer Winokur. Following a trend that treats classical music as no different from any form of commercial entertainment, the evening’s musical selections were preceded by raucous introductions in the manner of a pro wrestling event, with “hosts” Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith respectively yelling into a microphone and sauntering about in various more or less tasteful outfits. This was in keeping with the night’s official theme and perhaps with its venue: the Oberon is essentially a black-box theater with a bar, and those attending were seated at tables and invited to buy drinks before and after the performance. Loudly piped-in rap music greeted this reviewer on entrance, and together with the silly staging this might have desensitized ears for careful listening. But this was forgotten once the program began, although “Bobbi and Or” (as they were identified in the program) continued to make appearances between selections. One product of this approach is to upstage the music itself. Theatrical lighting (spotlights on the performers, disco lights revolving during the concluding John Adams piece) meant that the printed programs were unreadable, and as composers’ names were never mentioned in the introductions, anyone curious about the music, as opposed to the performances, would have had a hard time knowing exactly what they were hearing. The cleverness of the famous “Gulliver’s Travels” suite by Telemann, with its musical references to Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, could not have been evident to many listeners, and without a text or translation the Italian of the Monteverdi scene must have been incomprehensible to most. Uncertainty as to when to applaud was another result, as few could tell whether a pause marked the end of a set or merely of a movement. A brief program note by Aucoin described his new Finery Forge as “music of brute force, a series of pounding G-sharp-minor chords that slowly begins to ‘melt’ and to shoot sparks off in every direction.” The title, with its reference to an old industrial process for refining iron, did not seem entirely reflected in the music, perhaps because it was played with greater discretion, if not exactly delicacy, than the composer’s own description led one to expect. The piece nevertheless seemed a spin-off of 1970s minimalism, dominated by the familiar motoric pulsation and treating the two pianos as a single instrument to produce occasionally novel sonorities. One must listen to a composition like this more than once to be sure, but on first hearing it did not live up to the program-note hype. John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction of 1998, with which the program ended, is a longer and more varied example of the same idiom, rendered interesting by a more rapid rate of change in both sonority and rhythm and by the occasional presence of short solos for one pianist or the other. Minimalism is actually a misnomer for this type of piece, for in its use of time it is maximal, taking ten or fifteen minutes to say what another composer might do in a space one tenth as long. By contrast, the three sets of violin duets, despite their diverse styles, were united by their composers’ refusal to carry on longer than necessary. The first comprised a single piece, Donatoni’s Duetto II, written five years before the composer’s death in 2000 (the composer’s first Duetto of 1975 is for harpsichord). This was a series of short, quiet vignettes, each highlighting one or two new-music sorts of violin sound: wispy arabesques, chirpy trills, and the like. As in the piano pieces, the two instruments tend to work as one to produce otherwise unobtainable sonorities, but again there was not much combat or even playful back- and-forth between the two performers. The situation changed in the Bartók: five selections from his 44 Duos of 1931 (nos. 32, 38, 40, 41, and 43). Within the program these stood out for their lack of pretension and the composer’s economy of means, and despite their pedagogic character they struck this listener as real gems. Within their confined dimensions they also reveal genuine counterpoint and contrast between the two parts. It did not hurt that Cuckson and GoGwilt here demonstrated especially fine duo-violin playing, with beautifully matched bowing and phrasing and near-perfect intonation. Much the same could be said of the playing in the five little movements of the Telemann suite. Here, however, the composer’s musical humor was obscured by the players’ not very convincing pretense of being angry at one another, and by their dropping the pages of music on the floor rather than turning them—unnecessary concessions to the theme of the evening. The Monteverdi scene might have been the one truly innovative performance of the evening, but it was problematic for this viewer. The scene occurs early in the opera at dawn as the emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea take leave of one another. Aucoin, in his program note, asserts that the original scoring (for male and female sopranos) “strongly suggests same-sex desire, or at least a bending of gender roles”—well, maybe to a modern viewer, although the same has been argued more convincingly of a later scene in the opera between Nero and the poet Lucan. Acting on the view expressed by Aucoin, the company staged this as a sort of duet in which countertenor Costanzo sang both Nero’s and Poppea’s lines while dancer Winokur intertwined with him, set him on the floor and spun him about, and (during one of the more aria-like passages) danced an expressive solo. Evidently the identities of the two characters, and of the performers, were supposed to merge, and as an abstract representation of that idea the staging was perhaps a success. But the absence of Monteverdi’s instrumental accompaniment—Costanzo sang the long scene as a solo—left the music incomplete, obscuring the alternation between recitative and aria, which is essential to the scene as usually performed.