Criticulture à Paris

I recently saw, in the lovely port city of Setúbal Portugal, one of  the first performances of a new opera Eu So Alma (I am Alma), with music by João Malha, libretto by Diogo Faro, and staging/sets/lighting by Maria Madalena and Iolanda Rodrigues. I have a bit of a conflict of interest here, as Mr. Malha is also the conductor of the medical orchestra in which I play in Lisbon.  The opera was an uncompromising, passionate indictment of the Israeli occupation and violence in Gaza, proclaiming its anti-war stance openly. For example, the words "murder" and "genocide" came up often; this would be difficult to perform in the US or some other western countries, where censorship has become more common than in Portugal. Performed in Portuguese, this one-act opera was a powerful, raw experience with an excellent musical score.  The opera is the telling of how a Palestinian family is destroyed by Israeli bombing in Gaza. There is a brief opening scene showing domestic life. I...

It’s been months since I wrote a review, which makes sense since it’s been a while since I attended a concert meriting a review. But I am back! I recently gorged on pianists, or at least piano performances, seeing four within 3 weeks. Since piano was my first instrument, I always feel a bit thrilled, a bit nostalgic, and a bit anxious when I attend these, since they evoke nerve-wracking moments when I was 11, waiting in my teacher’s bedroom to go out into her living room to play for the discerning audience of parents. There was one standout among these four performances, that of the 80 year-old Georgian-Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja. I have not heard a better recital in decades.  She was unknown to me, but should not be. Her recital was a gripping, old-school demonstration of classic Russian piano technique and musicianship, and was the best concert I have been to for several years. I loved her programming. In the first half she alternated bracing, dance-like Mozart with ...

Over Thanksgiving, I spent a few days in NYC, enjoying two films and four plays. More on the films in a later review, but here is an overview of the plays I saw, going from least to most compelling.  Ragtime  is a well known musical, especially among musical theater fans. It is based on the excellent 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, chronicling the lives of several characters from the early 1900s, both imagined and real (e.g. Harry Houdini, JP Morgan, the anarchist Emma Goldman). The creative thing about the novel is the way it seamlessly interweaves the famous characters with the invented ones. The book centers around a famed white socialite who bears a child with a black jazz entertainer, Coalhouse Walker, leading to numerous societal, sometimes violent consequences in a racist society. I really enjoyed the book when I read it years ago, as it had a creative mix of sex, history, drama, and intrigue. The acclaimed novel gave rise to a so-so movie in 1981, then a musical in 1996. ...

The second opera I saw this year in Bayreuth was a technologically innovative new "enhanced" production of Richard Wagner's  Parsifal (1882) , staged by the director Jay Scheib, and conducted by the Spaniard Pablo Heras Casado. I almost always enjoy this opera, and have probably seen five productions around the world. Musically, Wagner pushes the use of chromatic harmony to extremes, and achieves a ritual timelessness with the recurring themes. Plotwise, not much happens. A group of knights is charged with protecting the Holy Grail, Jesus's cup from the last supper. They do this by ritualistically revealing it daily in a ceremony. However, the knights now seem to be aging and declining, and their leader Amfortas has been wounded with a spear; his wound is agonizing and unhealing. A new boy Parsifal arrives, clueless (he is a tenor) and ignorant of the rituals. He sacrilegiously kills a swan. He undergoes an odyssey/initiation, repelling the seduction attempts of the v...