Criticultura em Portugal

It's been since late summer that I blogged, mainly because of lots of travel.  Let's catch up a bit.  While on a summer hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies and the Galapagos, I had a chance to spend a few days in Quito, the high-elevation (9000 foot) capital of Ecuador. It's well worth a visit for its fascinating mixed cultures of Spain and  indigina  peoples, as well as the steeply sloped and well-preserved colonial heart of the city. Quito is replete with fantastically baroque gilded churches put up by the Jesuits and others, unfortunately at the expense of the locals that they conquered.  In early November I ventured to northern England to play in concerts of the European Doctors' Orchestra, an engaging and talented group of amateurs. We played music of Ravel, Gershwin, and Copland in the uber-modern Newcastle Glasshouse International Centre for Music, perched like spaceship above the River Tyne.  Newcastle is a nice example of how declining industrial c...

 A benefit of living in Europe is being able to duck in on a variety of big musical events when I go sightseeing. In the past couple months two such experiences proved particularly memorable.  In London I saw Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden. As one would expect from this august company, the solo and corps dancing was superb and expressive. The sets were a bit musty and dowdy-appearing, even though designed during this century. The true star, though, was Tchaikovsky's dazzling ballet score. If Mozart was at heart a great opera composer, Tchaikovsky was at the core a top dance composer. It's in his ballet scores, esp. Swan Lake and  Nutcracker, that we can best hear his varied orchestration and relentless forward motion and pulse, essential in the dance. In this Swan Lake  the two principal soloists, Fumi Kaneko as Odette/Odile and Vadim Muntagirov as Prince Siegfried, acted and danced beautifully. They even made the confusing ending of the ballet work. ...

The highlight of my Marvão Festival weekend was the semi-staged version (acting, minimal sets) of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio , an overall musical and dramatic delight. I've always found Mozart to be a compelling opera composer, especially when his works are performed with lightness of touch and a bit of vulgar wackiness. He perhaps used humor to reveal human emotion and behavior better than any composer. This opera, composed in 1782 when Mozart was 26, is a lot of fun. The plot is more lucid than many from this era, involving the efforts of two young men to abduct their girlfriends who have been captured by the Turks and then imprisoned in the Pasha's seraglio (harem). The Turks were always on the minds of the Viennese, especially since the 1529 Siege of Vienna, in which the Viennese repulsed the Turks' efforts to capture the city (and western Europe). The siege remains as a prominent bit of European history, as you can see in museums throughout Austria and so...

This is the time for summer music festivals, a ubiquitous and often-entertaining tradition that keeps European musicians employed in the off-season. Portugal has several, and last weekend I had the chance to sample the festival at Marvão, a small citadel town near the Spanish border. The festival is set in a scenic old fortress town with only 90-100 regular inhabitants. But the town's population swells due to tourists, especially during the two week July Music Festival, when concerts are held in various baroque churches, and large concerts in an open-air space in the castle, seen at the tip of the hill below.  I saw four concerts, all very affordable at 25 euros per ticket. Least memorable were the two chamber concerts held in churches. The "Concerto Barocco" by the Portuguese early instruments ensemble Os Musicos do Tejo featured pieces for instrumental ensemble and voices, mostly by Portuguese composers who were contemporaries of JS Bach (early 18th century). It's g...

On a recent trip to London I got caught up on some well-reviewed English language theater, infrequently available here in Portugal. At the Donmar in London, Anton Chekhov's  The Cherry Orchard , directed by Benedict Andrews, used judicious language updates to make the 1903 play more topical for today. There were allusions to Brexit, anti-immigrant bias, and income inequality. All were appropriate in a play that deals with a decaying aristocracy in the face of middle class opportunism. The plot deals with the threatened conversion of an estate's beloved cherry orchard into subdivided homes. Chekhov creates tension between the generational differences between the older aristocrats and the younger go-getters, and often shines a negative light on both groups. The play was set in an audience-surround style, with bright orange tribal-looking sets that appeared like something out of the Nijinsky Rite of Spring, and the characters dressed as aging hippies. I am not sure about the poin...