Criticultura em Portugal

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have become enamored of the works of the great 20th century choreographer George Balanchine, who began his career in the famed Ballets Russes in the early part of the century, and ended it in New York city founding what is now NY City Ballet in the 1940’s. Balanchine's work is a perfect bridge between the classical and modern styles (rather like Mahler in music), using each to great expressive purpose. He truly honors the music he chooses with close attention to its inner rhythms and meaning, and usually picks great music to set his ballets to, not hippity-hop ballet composers like Adolph Adam ( Giselle ), Minkus ( La Bayad è re ),  and Delibes ( Copp é lia ). Friday’s program at NYCB featured three short ballets, but not with the normal Balanchine abstraction. Each told a story. La Somnambula, set to “themes” from Bellini’s opera, distilled the convoluted opera into a simple romance, in which the man in a couple is tempte...

Before the audience is seated at anatomy theater , a new opera by David Lang (b. 1957), a "harlot" in chains is led by an executioner through the folks gathered in the lobby. When we then scramble to our seats, we face a gallows. Stern percussion introduces a plaintive a capella recitative by the condemned, and she is hanged. Thus begins this most inventive and stimulating opera. The "plot" is her subsequent onstage dissection by an 18th century anatomist in order to find the scientific origin of her evil (she killed her husband and children). Spoiler--no such anatomic seat of sin is found, much to the disappointment of the scholar. The audience is addressed as "gentlemen" medical students who view the autopsy (women are asked to leave, but did not, at least at the performance I saw). Along the way we are treated to ensemble pieces about the 15 instruments used to dissect (lots of triple and pentad rhythms) and about each organ as it is removed, complete ...

Great opera rarely stems from great plays, novels, or movies. It is difficult to take a classic, add some music (and dance) and not either trivialize it ( Macbeth by Verdi) or drown it in worshipful solemnity ( A Streetcar Named Desire by Andre Previn, Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber). Except for Verdi's Otello and  Falstaff , I cannot think of any great literary works adapted into great operas, which more often arise from pulp fiction. Richard Wagner knew this, and thus wrote his own libretti. Therefore, it was with trepidation that I attended a new American opera in Washington Square this week, Beneath the Waves  by Missy Mazzoli, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek. It is based closely on the fantastic (in all uses of the word) 1996 film by Dane Lars von Trier, who combines Ingmar Bergman's incisive (and often devastating) critiques of human behavior with an offbeat sense of whimsy and fantasy. The film version is on my list of top 10 films of the past 35 years (not...

The Encounter  on Broadway is a one man monologue portraying the encounter of a western photographer with an isolated Amazon tribe. The single actor, Simon McBurney, is well known in the UK for his innovative theater producing, acting, and directing. The story told is a mostly familiar one of westerners in the jungle, akin to  Heart of Darkness  or the recent film  Embrace of the Serpent ( see my review here ), with episodes and commentary on deforestation, hallucinigenic plants, cultural and language misunderstandings, etc. While well written and energetically acted, the unique thing about The Encounter  is seen on arriving to your seat, where you see a headphone (600+ of them in the theater) and receive instructions on making sure it works and that you have left-right orientation correct. The following theatrical production, after an odd chatty start with McBurney talking about his family and random incidents of his day, immerses you in a 2 hour audio landscap...

After some years in which Spike Lee's realism-comedies were about the only mainstream films by black directors, there has been a recent bounty of such films, all with thoughtful, individual takes: Precious  (2009), Straight Outta Compton (2015), and now work by two young (37 year old) directors: Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation  and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight . In very different ways, these films join Toni Morrisons's novel Beloved  as helping me to have a window into our persistent troubles with race in this country, and the seeming futility of solutions offered by both the political right and left. The Birth of a Nation's excellent title gives a hint of Parker's intent--he sees Nat Turner's failed 1831 slave rebellion as a metaphorical beginning of an American black consciousness, just as D.W. Griffith saw the Klan as the driver of a new Christian white triumphant South in 1915. Much more than the safer Twelve Years a Slave , this new film immerses you ...