Criticultura em Portugal

 I just returned from a musical journey in Germany and Austria, starting in Berlin and ending in Vienna, seeing three symphonic concerts and two operas over one week. I'll review the operas next week, but will start with the symphonies. My satisfaction with these concerts did not align with my a priori expectations. This is a good thing, and one reason why it is fun to see live music. Otherwise, you could just sit at home with your perfect digital performances.  First up was the Berlin Philharmonic playing in their home Philharmonie under guest conductor Andris Nelsons, the Latvian maestro who heads both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. The orchestra sounded as great as expected, with particularly delicious woodwind solos in the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. This is not a titanic piece, but Nelsons and the orchestra performed it with a nice mix of virtuosity and classical restraint. Less interesting were the Richard Strauss tone poem Don Juan  and the contemporar

Portugal's classical scene feature many typical holiday concerts, including those with too-familiar repertory (eg Sleighride, Nutcracker). Compared to the USA there are fewer Messiah s, but more Bach Christmas Oratorio s, as in most of Europe. Last weekend I saw two very non-typical holiday concerts that should have made a nice pair. The Austrian organist-composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) started neurotically laboring over his 10 published massive symphonies late in life (mostly after age 50) and was heavily influenced by his contemporaries Brahms and Wagner. In many ways his symphonies synthesize the music of both. So I looked forward to hearing two concerts the same day featuring these three composers.  First, the good. The Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) performed a free concert of the Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in E major in the gorgeous Basílica da Estrela (see below). It was exciting to see a Bruckner concert with people lined up outside in the rain one hour in advance

On a recent trip to New York City, I sampled some current theater, both on- and off-Broadway. Off-Broadway theater has been very slow to recover post-COVID, as attendance has dropped, key personnel left the city, and some companies lost their lease at small theaters. Historically, the New Group has been among the healthiest of these smaller companies, often featuring established stars performing in unusual, or self-written plays. On this visit I saw Sabbath’s Theater , a theatrical reworking of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, starring (and co-written by) John Turturro, film and stage star of Quiz Show, Severance, and Barton Fink . It’s centered on a horny 64-year-old ex-puppeteer who beds numerous women and has an existential crisis. I like Roth better when he does not obsess on the theme of oversexed middle aged men. While this is not one of my favorite Roth novels, I looked forward to seeing what a theatrical rewrite could do with it. Not much, it turns out. This play was unfa

 On my recent trip to NYC I caught a performance of Florencia en el Amazonas , a 1996 opera by Mexican composer Daniel Catán. This was the first Mexican opera performed at the Met, and was part of an admirable effort to go beyond the standard repertory (eg the recent Fire Shut Up My Bones  and The History of Malcolm X ). But they have to do better than this tepid rehash of Puccini. This composer clearly loves the postromantic style of the Italian, but lacks his gift for transcendent melody. So the opera came across as overly sweetened weak tea, as a  La Boheme  clone with mosquitos.  The opera focuses on Florencia Grimaldi, a soprano diva traveling up the Amazon river on the way to an operatic engagement at the opera house at Manaus, Brazil. On the way, Florencia (well sung by the soprano Ailyn Pérez) swoons and pines over he lost love, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal, who has vanished into the Amazon forest. From the first bars, it sounds like a B- version of  La Boheme, beginning wit

I recently enjoyed two recent concerts by Lisbon-area chamber orchestras, i.e. the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) and the Orquestra de Câmara de Cascais e Oeiras (OCCO). The repertoire of these concerts roughly spanned Beethoven’s lifespan, (the classical to early romantic eras), and provided an entertaining overview of how classical music developed between 1770 and 1830. OML’s concert in the large concert hall in Belém began with two early Classical works of Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805). The 26 th symphony (1788) was a peppy Italianate piece without much depth. His ninth cello concerto (ca 1770) showcased the excellent young Austrian cellist Julia Hagen. Boccherini was a cello virtuoso who expanded cello technique, especially extending the instrument’s range to very high notes, often in the range of the violin. This concerto featured that extended technique. It’s a bit old-fashioned compared to the contemporaneous mature concerti of Mozart, since the cello played exclusive

As I sat down for Sunday's excellent concert by the French ensemble Quatour B éla , I got nervous. T he audience of 500 or so contained lots of families, including kids under 12. Did they know what they were getting into? Two quartets by Geörgi Ligeti (1923-2006), plus another by his quirky US contemporary Conlon Nancarrow (1923-1997). My experience in the USA with kids attending “difficult” concerts has generally been poor, and I worried about squirming and chatter disrupting what I know would be some very soft dynamics. Not to worry! Behind me, a 12-year-old was chatting with his father, bilingually dropping the names Chomsky, Mahler, and Bartok. The audience was eerily quiet and raptly attentive throughout the 1 hour concert. Apparently, I had wandered into a big Lisbon intellectual family outing! We all saw a great concert by a quartet that has been together 17 years, specializing in contemporary music. They often collaborate with folk, pop, and ethnic musicians, rather like th

The Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra opened its season Sunday night with a high-quality performance featuring the little-played First Symphony (C minor, op. 11) of Mendelssohn (1809-1849), written when he was 15 years old. This was written just after he had written the 13 string symphonies, and one year before the masterful Octet for strings. This teenager had obviously been honing his craft amidst intense study of past composers, esp. Bach. The symphony is written for strings plus paired woodwinds, trumpets, and horns. The amazing thing about this early work is how complete and polished each of the four  movements are. Most romantic symphonies have at least one dull or filler movement. Not here. The finale may go on just a bit long, but Mendelssohn just had to insert two (not one) iterations of a fugue, reflecting the influence of Bach on the young composer. Conductor Pedro Neves, conducting without a baton,  drew forth a crisp, well articulated performance from the orchestra, never let

This season's first concert of Lisbon's Gulbenkian Orchestra was an odd but interesting choice for a season opener. It featured two "difficult" works, Mahler's Symphony No. 7 (1905) and Geörgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna for 16 part a cappella choir (1966), I liked the pairing. The opening Ligeti piece (familiar to many from its futuristic use in 2001 A Space Odyssey ) is short, quiet, and atmospheric, made of many overlapping dissonances. It's very hard to sing (I performed it 15 years ago in the US), as you often have to come in solo on a long, exposed, high note, exactly matching the pitch of another singer who came in on the same note a bit earlier. So any hesitancy or inaccuracy is obvious. The Gulbenkian choir performed it well, with only a few soprano and tenor high A's entering shakily. The piece was performed in front of a black curtain behind the orchestra, with the invisible orchestra in the dark. This staging effectively set a nocturnal, spooky m

The final faculty concert of the summer workshop  Ver ão Clássico was performed on 29 July in the resplendent Coach Museum in Belém. As in the last concert I saw there, the performance standards were very high, with spirited performances of varied pieces, some quite unfamiliar to me.  The opening Beethoven Piano Trio in E flat , Opus 1/1 was composed in 1795 when the composer was in his early 20's, and is among his earliest published works. During this period he was mostly known as a piano virtuoso, but was already studying composition with Haydn and Salieri. He was also avidly studying the works of Mozart, who had recently died. The piano trio reflects his studies, and sounds quite Mozartian, with charming melodies and a lighter more purely classical texture than Beethoven would develop in the coming years. There is not much of the later Beethoven to be heard, but the piano part is quite virtuosic, and was superbly played here by the Ukrainian pianist Milana Chernyavska.  The 1910

As part of the summer workshop for young musicians Ver ão Clássico, members of the international professional faculty present four concerts, this year all of them in the acoustically and visually beautiful Coach Museum Hall. The initial concert on July 18 apparently had to be reconfigured at the last moment because of the illness of the featured soprano soloist. Inserted instead were the early Mahler Piano Quartet and a Richard Strauss song for soprano Ana-Camelia Stefanescu. The benefit of this reconfiguration was ending the concert with the magnificent Schumann Piano Quintet , one of the best chamber pieces in the literature. Overall, the concert was beautifully performed and invigorating. The Mahler Piano Quartet is a rarity, composed when he was only 15-16 and still finding his way. There are bits of Brahms and Liszt audible, and a couple passages reminiscent of the later symphonies, but mostly some nice undifferentiated romantic music by an avid student studying the masters for i

The Sintra Festival is an annual two week event that hosts diverse concerts, many in historic venues around Lisbon and nearby Sintra. There is poetry, large and small ensembles, even an all Rachmaninoff accordion (!) concert.  I attended the opening concert featuring intriguing lesser-known baroque music from the early 18th C, performed by the Portuguese early music ensemble Ensemble Bonne Corde. The concert was held in the Throne Room of the National Palace at Queluz, northwest of Lisbon, and was entitled "Funchal in London: Concerti Grossi by Ant ónio Pereira da Costa". The main focus of the concert was performances of three concerti grossi by da Costa (1697-1770), kapellmeister of the Cathedral of Funchal on the island of Madeira. Apparently these are the only known Portuguese concerti grossi, a musical form very popular in Italy in the early 18th century. A concerto grosso alternates solos or small ensembles with tutti sections involving the whole orchestra...think of Bac

After moving to Portugal, I wondered what I would need to do to see English language theater, other than fly to London. Well, it turns out that there are at least a couple of good English language troops in Lisbon, mostly featuring Portuguese actors who are fluent in English. I saw one doing Sartre’s Huis Clos ( aka No Exit) last week. I vaguely remember reading this play in college, mostly as an example of existential philosophy. So I was expecting some tough, dense sledding. Not so! Done in an updated translation that included modern social references (social media, WiFi, etc), this was a very accessible play, not at all heavily philosophical. The crisp direction and three talented young actors created a lively evening that never lagged or became enmeshed in philosophic navel-gazing. The play, depicting three recent arrivals in hell, was performed in a dingy, deconstructed small classroom in the dark, gloomy National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon. You had to walk

Benjamin Britten's eerie chamber opera  The Turn of the Screw  (1954) is a ghostly,  underperformed opera by one of Britain's greatest composers.     The 27 May performance in  the small auditorium of the Belém Cultural center strongly communicated the creepy essence of the work. The opera is based on a Henry James 1898 Victorian-era novella about ghosts "influencing" (translate: sexually abusing) two children at a spooky English estate. Britten's opera is filled with ghostly effects like devilishly transformed versions of innocent childrens' songs, and remarkably explicit seductive behavior by Quint, a male ghost who still yearns for the the 10 year old boy he abused while he was alive and working at the estate. The libretto by Myfanwy Piper is very loyal to the James novella, yet is operatic in giving ample opportunities for the leads to shine, in particular the Governess who oversees the children and the menacing male ghost Quint who relentlessly pursues th

My review of Sunday's classical concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Cascais and Oeiras (occo.pt) will be colored by dryness...of the acoustics at the community auditorium in the Lisbon suburb of Carnaxide. It's hard to truly evaluate an orchestra when they play in such an acoustically dry venue. How dry, you ask? Think the Atacama desert, Lake Powell in the US, or the dark comedian Anthony Jeselnik. In this venue, a robust timpani strike at the end of a movement decayed in about 0.01 femtoseconds. There was no resonance. Why is this a problem? For the audience, we hear no bloom from the strings or piano, and any ensemble imperfections are clearly audible...amplified, really. For the performers this can be terrifying, since you often cannot hear yourself or other sections on stage, and there is little or no "feedback" acoustically on your performance. Scary.  This chamber orchestra (about 22 strings) seems technically accomplished and, like other Lisbon area ensembles,

My first impressions of the classical music scene in Lisbon are very positive. I have seen three concerts, including by two I'll discus today done by tow of the three (!) major symphony orchestras in Lisbon. Each concert was well played and invigorating, easily matching the quality I am used to in NYC.  The Gulbenkian Orchestra programs 25+ concerts per year, mostly orchestral standards, and often involving a resident chorus. They play in a beautifully set hall, with a glass wall behind the orchestra, providing a beautiful forest backdrop to the music.  The orchestra skews to young Portuguese players (as do the other groups I have seen), likely reflecting a robust music training program in Portugal. The orchestra's conductors have changed frequently (I'm not sure why). The current (and new) conductor is the Finn Hanna Lintu, conductor of the Finnish National Opera. This leadership bodes well, as Finns like Esa-Pekka Salonen have been recently dominating the classical conduc

Welcome to my culture blog. I enjoyed writing this when I lived in New York City (you can research my countless reviews in the archives). The abundant culture there gave me lots to think and write about. Sadly, Covid put a pause on that vibrant culture, at least for a while, and so ended my blog. But I am ready to return, now from the lovely beach town of Cascais Portugal. I moved here with Max the cat three weeks ago. Cascais is near Lisbon, which will provide an easy hub for me to report on the vibrant cultural scene there, but also throughout Europe. That's what I plan to do in this reboot of Criticulture , now called  Criticultura .   I will blog every 1-2 weeks. For those of you new to this blog format, the platform includes options for translation, as well as the option to subscribe using  a feed reader. The prior option to receive email reminders has, sadly, been terminated.  I hope you will be a regular reader, and offer comments as well. I tend to be opinionated, and may t