Criticultura em Portugal

Recently, I saw the forces of the São Carlos Opera perform the rarely-done  Scenes from Goethe's Faust  by Robert Schumann. I got oddly nostalgic. It was good to finally hear this work, since I remember discussing it in my term paper for an Opera course in college (my discussion was rather abstract, since Pomona college had no recording of the work). My paper addressed Romantic treatments of Goethe's famed  Faust , probably the most revered and influential play of the era. It's a strange rambling play, rarely seen outside of Germany. Alongside the familiar story of Faust selling his soul to the devil, there are spirits, demons,  a charming and intelligent devil (Mephistopheles), and an uber-victimized woman (Gretchen) who strangles her illegitimate child, but is redeemed in the end. The big theme of Faust's rejecting traditional religion, falling into depravity, then being resurrected via his curiosity and creative spirit resonated with the romantics, for whom "...

Last week I had the rare opportunity to see Benjamin Britten's War Requiem  (1961) done by the orchestra and chorus of the Lisbon São Carlos Opera. It is a fine piece, and is not done often because of the large forces required: big orchestra, chorus, chamber orchestra (12-13 players), children's chorus with organ, and 3 vocal soloists. The São Carlos musicians are doing very big complex pieces this year at various sites around the country, since they are unable to use their under-renovation opera house. As a result Lisbon music lovers are reaping the benefits in hearing some big rare pieces like this one and a well-played Mahler Eighth Symphony last fall. This performance was well conducted by Graeme Jenkins, with Portuguese soloists Silvia Sequeira, Marco Alves dos Santos, and André Baleiro, all of whom sang with excellent English diction. The company provided an excellent program book with full texts and translations (into Portuguese), along with projected Portuguese supratit...

In Portugal holiday music is not necessarily linked to the English-German-US canon of Messiah  and caroling. Most professional performing organizations do a big concert, but the pieces performed are usually not from a uniform playbook related to Christmas. Of course, local community choirs are heard around town performing Portuguese (and other) Christmas songs, and caroling occurs, if not as much as in the US and UK.  Over the recent holiday period I heard two choral and one orchestral concert around Lisbon. The best of these was the New Year's Eve concert of the Gulbenkian Choir, founded in 1964 and usually considered the best professional chorus in the area. This year's concert was entertaining and well performed, and was held in the wonderfully ornate Church of São Roque, the earliest extant Jesuit church in Portugal (late 17th century). This is one of the few churches to survive the massive 1755 earthquake and pairs a gaudy Baroque interior with a plain rectangular archite...

 I recently saw a play ( Our Town  on Broadway) and a film ( Challengers ) that made me think about how narrative sequence plays into dramatic urgency and character development.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town  won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938, along with wide admiration for its stripped-down, innovative "modern" structure (e.g. Edward Albee called it the greatest American play). I mostly know it as a vehicle for high school and community theater, perhaps because of its immediacy, simple prose, and many characters, offering community troupes lots of participation. Oddly, this lauded Broadway production was my first exposure to it. The play depicts the life (from childhood to death) of members of the town of Grover's Corners New Hampshire. His three acts (Daily Life, Lover and  Marriage, Death and Eternity) do not mess with time sequence, and lay out a very linear chronology, mostly following on the young couple Emily and George. We see a series of snapshots ...

 I was in NYC for a few days at Thanksgiving. The highlight was playing some excellent chamber music with some friends, but I also attended some interesting music events.  The outstanding Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra played in Carnegie Hall under its new 28-year-old Finnish wunderkind conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He has been the subject of much dishy scrutiny and discussion in the classical music world: for his nascent music directorships of three of the world's best orchestras (Amsterdam, Chicago, Paris), his svelte good looks, and for his dating the charismatic and hot pianist Yuja Wang.  I hand not heard him before. Is the hype warranted? Based on this high-profile concert, yes and no. His greatest virtue was a strong sense of sonority, color and timbre. He drew lush sounds out of the strings for Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). .  This piece of post-romanticism (or pre modernism) was originally for string sextet, but is often done, ...