Arts around the Lisbon Area

 In the past week I sampled some interesting and varied cultural fare in the area during the lead up to the Carnaval season here. Here are some quick impressions. 

Theater: The best English language theater company in town is the Lisbon Players. Their most recent effort was Pussycat: in Memory of Darkness, a 70 minute monologue by Ukrainian playwright Neda Nezhdana (seen below), written to show the perspective of residents of eastern Ukraine during the devastating 2014 Russian invasion. This play was performed last year in London, and the Lisbon players imported the solo performer Kristen Milward for these shows. This playwright is seeing her plays performed around the world as companies seek to present the Ukrainian perspective of the ongoing war against Russia. This play was harrowing, and unrelievedly angry. Ms. Milward ably held the stage with a range of intense emotions, with text derived from interviews from real victims of the invasion. Unfortunately I eventually grew weary of the unrelieved howls and tears. A good play needs some contrast, and this one was lacking in that, so eventually I tuned out. This reminded me of my response to some 1990's gay theater in San Francisco, in which anger (there, against the society allowing AIDS to progress untreated) was the only driver for the plays. In such "anger plays" it's easy to feel preached-at after a while, and that was my feeling here. A worthy topic for today, but not a very good play, I'm afraid. 

Classical Music: The Orquestra de Câmara de Cascais e Oeiras (OCCO)'s most recent program was entitled "German Romantic Spirit", but was mostly not that. The exception was the Schumann Piano Concerto, well played by pianist João Casimiro Almeida. This is one of the less-played romantic piano concerti, perhaps because it lacks some of the formidable show-off virtuosity of, say, Brahms or Rachmaninoff. It does demonstrate Schumann's trademark rhythmic punch, and the quirky juxtapositions of lyric and percussive music which is one reason I like this composer. The pianist and conductor Nikolay Lalov did well with the punchiness, choosing quick tempi, but did not play with much legato and lyricism in the contrasting sections, somewhat spoiling Schumann's style. This occurred from the very opening, in which the pianist's dotted rhythms in forte chords is followed by a lovely legato melody in woodwinds, here unfortunately broken up into shorter bits. 

The remaining pieces were not very Romantic. The opening Mozart Overture to Don Giovanni perhaps looks forward from the classical period a bit, but here received a brisk, very classical performance without much drama. The ending Beethoven Symphony #8 in F major is, like his Fourth, a return to the classical style after pathbreaking symphonic innovation. For Beethoven it was a bit of a classical amuse-bouche between the rich entrees of the Seventh and Ninth symphonies, so there is not much Romantic about it. Blissfully, conductor Lalov took brisk tempos and did not make it sound like late Beethoven, a trap some conductors fall into. But he missed the Haydn-like humor (yes, Beethoven could sometimes do humor) seen in the odd pauses and idiosyncrasies, esp. in the last movement. 

Fado: I had a chance to go with some Portuguese friends to an evening of dinner and Fado, the characteristic Portuguese melancholy music that features sad songs about longing and lost love. The often-mournful songs are accompanied by highly-decorated guitar riffs with occasional rhythmic bass patterns that sound like Johnny Cash's music. I liked the contrast of the earthy singing (the women often sing in a robust "chest voice" to portray maximum emotion) and virtuosic guitars, rather similar to Flamenco. It is cool to see a style that arose on the Lisbon docks in the 1800s still popular among the locals. Fado is not just a tourist thing in Lisbon, but is a regular night out for many Portuguese, and provides a living for some great musicians. Excelente!