Opera director Mary Zimmerman and her creative team were recently booed by a Met audience for their new production of Bellini’s La Somnambula. The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout provides an audio recording of the curtain calls, and muses on why boos are rare in New York, while common in Italy and sometimes elsewhere (google “Roberto Alagna La Scala,” or “Chereau ring brawl” for some celebrated examples).
The wonderful piano music of Martinů
The tourist brochure in Policka, Moravia (Bohuslav Martinů’s home town), is called “Sunlight on the Marble.” The marble being, the marble on Martinů’s tombstone.
This phrase is peculiarly apt for describing the markedly sunny (yet substantial) style of Martinů.
John GibbonsThis is what you do:
- Be angry, because a piece is too hard for you.
- Be annoyed, because a piece reminds you of Stravisnky (and you’ve decided You’re Just Not That Into Stravinsky).
- Listen to a much better piece immediately before the piece you’re going to criticize.
- Drink some fine Belgian beers, immediately before making criticisms.
- Associate the musical “isms” in the piece with political “isms” that followed in the next decade, creating the Second World War.
- Focus on irrelevant aspects of a piece’s structure.
- Be preparing equally accomplished, and more charming, Martinu piano concertos for that very week’s classes.
The measurably superior First Concerto is an astounding amalgam of Liszt, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss and Slavic and most probably quasi-Slavic folk motifs. The wholly original second movement stands with Stravinsky’s “Les Noces” as a uniquely extended timbral mosaic. The mediation between percussion and string sonority in the piano writing reveals a profound understanding of the piano’s unique multiple role as a rhythmic, melodic and percussion instrument. Bartok’s piano is a virtuoso piano, inherited from Liszt but informed by modernity.On this date in 1917, Alexander Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy) was premiered in Stuttgart. It is the first of two operas that Zemlinsky (1871-1942) based upon the works of Oscar Wilde. Der Zwerk (The Dwarf) followed in 1922.
This post was supposed to be a discussion of the John Williams Inauguration composition Air and Simple Gifts. But the piece itself just wasn’t that interesting! So how about some brief comments and links, and have some more Marian Anderson?
Whatever your political persuasion in the 2008 election, it’s beyond dispute that the inauguration of an American president of African descent is historic. Given that Obama has lived so long in, and represented, the Land of Lincoln, it was inevitable that he’d tap into the Lincoln mythology with gestures such as his train trip into DC and his taking of the oath of office using the same bible that Lincoln used in 1861.
A piece of symbolism missed by the TV commentators, not to mention me at the time, was the backstory of Aretha Franklin’s performance of “My Country Tis of Thee.” As a lover of true contralto voices and a history buff, I’m a little sheepish that it took a belated visit to The Rest is Noise to remind me that Marian Anderson sang the same song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Anderson, an internationally successful opera singer, had been denied permission to perform to an integrated audience in venues owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution and a local white public school.