Criticultura em Portugal

 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, ...

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...

 Sintra is a delightful hill town west of Lisbon and a few miles north of my home in Cascais. It's home to many fancy palaces, where the royals and wealthy of Lisbon went in the past to escape summer heat.  Now Sintra is a suburban community that hosts lots of tourists, as well as an annual summer music festival. I recently saw two VERY different concerts there. The renowned pianist Andras Schiff is a Hungarian-born British pianist, now in his 70s, who these days specializes in Bach.  His Sintra recital featured Bach in the first half, and Mozart pieces mostly influenced by Bach in the second half. The recital was superb. Schiff uses very clean articulation and minimal pedal. While he cannot make the piano sound like a harpsichord, he accomplishes the clarity of its inner voices really well. There was no  printed program, and Schiff introduced each piece verbally (in English) in an engaging and intimate way, complete with little examples to explain what we were about...

Tableaux vivantes (living pictures) are an art form that dates to the middle ages. In these, live humans (often amateurs) would depict a famous scene from the Bible or or from a famous painting, complete with sets and dramatic lighting. They were usually static (a snapshot before the era of cameras). They became popular in the Victorian USA and UK, as amateurs could show their pious nature by depicting Jesus and the disciples, the Virgin Mary, the Last Supper, etc. A less pious advantage was that 19th century law in both the USA and UK allowed public nudity on the stage as long as the actors remained motionless--so tableaux vivantes was also an early version of legal porn.  Tableaux vivantes have mostly died out, but returned in a few movies like Derik Jarman's erotic Caravaggio  (1986), in which the famed Baroque painter's violent life is intertwined with tableaux vivantes of some of his famed paintings. Intriguingly, this device was recently brought to the live stage in L...

For some reason, Portugal’s only opera house doesn’t get much attention among classical music discussions here. That’s a shame, since the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos is an architectural gem from the 18 th century and, based on the Verdi Falstaff that I heard on May 13, the musical quality there can be very high. The opera house opened in 1793, replacing a structure destroyed in the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. It’s had a checkered history, ranging from an uber-famous performance of Verdi's La Traviata  in 1958 starting Maria Callas (the “Lisbon Traviata” of recording fame) to its being shuttered for much of the Salazar dictatorship in the mid-20 th century. Now the company performs about 7-8 productions each season. There is international leadership--the principal conductor is Italian Antonio Pirolli, and the artistic director is the Dutch Ivo von Kalmthout. The house’s baroque façade was recently restored..the opera house is hidden away on an enclosed square in do...

Oddly, I had never before been to a Metropolitan Opera Live in HD performance until this month. This is mainly because I could see them live when I lived in the USA. I finally corrected this lapse, snagging the last remaining seat (!) in the 1200 seat Gulbenkian Auditorium for Verdi's  La Forza del Destino , the first new Met production in over 30 years, and only their 10th performance this century. More on that in a minute. First I will share my experience of seeing the Met live, but at a distance.  As you arrive in the auditorium the screen is showing slides of upcoming Met performances, rather like at a movie theater.    What you hear is the buzz of arriving guests at the Metropolitan Opera house in NYC, which is kind of a cool way of building excitement. The Gulbenkian auditorium filled, largely with older Portuguese people (seats cost about 20 euros) dressed as they would for any concert. You then see the orchestra arrive into the pit, and hear some interviews b...

 The Oscars have come and gone, with a predictable blockbuster winning best picture. Hollywood seemed excited to have finally put COVID limitations aside, and was thrilled to have the summer hit "Barbenheimer" surgically-joined twins that got people into theaters (these twins need to be forevermore separated). But was it a good year for film, really? I don't think so. Of the 10 films nominated for best picture, I only really want to see a few again, and one excellent film didn't even get nominated. So here are my thoughts, with the 10 nominees grouped into clusters. At the end I will list these in my order of preference. What's your order? Ponderous, "Important" Movies: Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon Guys, I like many long movies. I was gripped by long movies as different as Lanzmann's  Shoah   (7+hours), Scarface ( 3 hours), and Titanic ( 2 hours, 40 minutes), and by the operas of Wagner, often clocking in at over 3 1/2 hours. The issue is...

 Two recent concerts gave me mixed feelings about our premier local professional orchestra, the Gulbenkian. I continue to be impressed with the excellent ensemble and sonority, especially in the brass section. But one thing I am noticing is that unlike, say, the Vienna Philharmonic, this orchestra is not immune to conductor quality, and can be made to play in a meh or even shaky way when the conductor is deficient. So on the good nights, they are fantastic, and can equal my experience listening to world class orchestras. On bad nights, not so much.  This week's performance of the Mahler Symphony #1   in D major (1888) and the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor  (1866) was a good example. There are some idiosyncrasies of the Gulbenkian Auditorium and the Orchestra that many conductors manage to overcome. For example, the woodwinds and brass commonly overpower the strings, or a soloist. In the lovely Bruch concerto, the excellent soloist Karen Goymo, who plays regu...

 In the past week I sampled some interesting and varied cultural fare in the area during the lead up to the Carnaval season here. Here are some quick impressions.  Theater: The best English language theater company in town is the Lisbon Players. Their most recent effort was Pussycat: in Memory of Darkness , a 70 minute monologue by Ukrainian playwright Neda Nezhdana (seen below), written to show the perspective of residents of eastern Ukraine during the devastating 2014 Russian invasion. This play was performed last year in London, and the Lisbon players imported the solo performer Kristen Milward for these shows. This playwright is seeing her plays performed around the world as companies seek to present the Ukrainian perspective of the ongoing war against Russia. This play was harrowing, and unrelievedly angry. Ms. Milward ably held the stage with a range of intense emotions, with text derived from interviews from real victims of the invasion. Unfortunately I eventually grew ...

Last week I saw the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 ( Vespro della Beata Vergine) , done in an exciting performance at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon. I got to know this piece well when I performed it in the 1990s with the San Francisco Bach Choir. It was a thrilling experience then and now.  Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) needs to be better known and more performed in the general classical world. Among other things, this innovative genius wrote the first opera still in active performance ( L'Orfeo, 1607), is credited with transitioning music from the Renaissance to Baroque periods, and was the most important composer to establish through bass (basso continuo) as the basis of subsequent musical harmony and composition, replacing renaissance polyphony. His music wasn't performed much after his death (at least until its 20th century resurrection), but his influence continued in Italy, culminating a century later with Corelli and Vivaldi, and also in Germany, from Heinrich Schütz all the way...

 Last week I survived a marathon listening experience, hearing six different ensembles play string quartets at the Gulbenkian String Quartet Festival over two afternoons. The quality was high, the hall full (mostly), and the price low (about 6 euros per concert). My brain was a bit scrambled by the end of concert #6, but I really enjoyed the playing overall, and heard some new pieces. I won't summarize each concert  in detail, but will instead try to group my impressions.  Who Played? In order of seniority, I  heard Minguett Quartet (Germany/Austria) founded 1988, 33 recordings Danel Quartet (Manchester), founded 1991, 23 recordings Jerusalem Quartet (Israel), founded 1993, 20 recordings Belcea Quartet (London), founded 1994, 14 recordings Simply Quartet (Vienna), founded 2010, no recordings Van Kuijk Quartet (Paris), founded 2012, 7 recordings Nicely, there was a range of ages and international presence. Most quartets had members from multiple countries, often with...