Criticultura em Portugal

On Monday night I saw Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde  at the the Metropolitan Opera. It was perhaps the fourth time I have seen it live, and I have listened to it countless times. Once again the live performance exerted a very unique affect on me, one that I do not experience in other operas or in just listening to it at home on recordings. While this production had its ups and downs, there is something about a live performance of Tristan  that suspends time for me in a most peculiar and intoxicating way. I first experienced this in the 1980's at the San Francisco Opera, when I went into my first live experience at 6 pm, emerged at 11:30, yet experienced it as if about one hour had passed. I wondered then: how does Wagner achieve this time warp? The Met production Monday featured Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton as the ill fated pair. Both sang well, without the overwhelming vocal heft of the great past singers like Flagstad, Melchoir, and Nilsson, but with great sensitiv...

I just returned from four days in Paris, my first trip there in over twenty five years. This grand city is more immune to change than any other large metropolis, largely due to the exclusion of most highrise buildings from outside the traditional city walls area. So where New York is a city in constant flux, Paris is not. I had a couple of musical experiences there. Opera: Antonio Salieri Les Horaces (1786) at the Royal Opera, Versailles Seeing a classical opera in a hall where Louis XVI would have seen similar fare in 1786, just before the revolution, was intriguing. The first violins fiddled while Rome burned, if you will. The small opera house is dazzling in architecture and ornamentation, but converts music listening to an activity of elite privilege (well, I guess it still is at the Met in NYC!). Salieri (1750-1826) was born about the same time as Mozart, but outlived him by 35 years. He was perhaps the most renowned composer of his time, the favorite of courts from Italy...

Two concerts this week showed me how far advanced has become the use of electronic instruments in traditional classical/orchestral music. The Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela opened the Carnegie Hall series under conductor Gustavo Dudamel (also conductor of the LA Philharmonic). Dudamel has rapidly advanced in the conductor hierarchy, e.g. conducting the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics in prestigious events. This orchestra is young, oddly male-dominated, and unique in being largely composed of graduates of El Sistema, an ambitious decades-old program to train Venezuelan children from poor economic backgrounds to play instruments. Dudamel himself arose from this program. However, given the current turmoil and social implosion/explosion in Venezuela, Dudamel is now accused of being disconnected to political reality, with a laser-like (myopic?) focus only on music (see this interesting but snippily odd NY Times review of the first of three Carnegie Hall concerts, which devotes only o...

Satan and Mother Teresa are sitting on a park bench in Central Park. Joggers in dayglo synthetic fabrics pass in the background.  Theresa warmly greets Satan: Teresa: I've been to the zoo! Satan: How lovely, Theresa. Say hi to the marmosets. I've been sitting here catching up on "the great late 20th century novels", and was stoked to finally read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian . What a masterpiece! Teresa ( blanching) : Isn't that Western novel just a nonstop gore-fest without a single redeemable character? Who could possibly like that? Satan: Me, for one! The violence is cleansing, purging the towering western landscape of the flawed humans and hapless bison, leaving only the stunning, desolate landscape of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. Its an even darker version than those 1960-70's Clint Eastwood Westerns like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and High Plains Drifter. None of these have traditional western white hat heroes either, and pretty m...