Criticultura em Portugal

My most recent journey to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany was eventful, mostly because of some challenges getting there and because of the innovative use of Enhanced Reality glasses in the Parsifal  production, which I will review in a later blog. I've done this pilgrimage three times now, with about 7 years between each visit. The experience remains atmospheric and oddly comforting, as I easily re-settled into traditions that have persisted since Richard Wagner founded the festival in 1876. Wagner, after initially trying to persuade Munich to build him a proper opera house for his spectacles (the Ring of the Niebelung was about to premiere), he gave up and instead built his new "shrine" in the sleepy town of Bayreuth, in the farmland north of Nürnberg in Bavaria. This was a good decision, as he could 1. have complete control over the construction, and 2. get festival goes away from the congested cities, so they could concentrate 100% on his music. Traveling ther...

I recently bopped over to Rome for 3 days to indulge in some culture and see some lesser-known sites, trying to avoid the hordes of people already doing the Spanish Steps, Colosseum, and Forum. I usually try to avoid European capitals in the summer, but here the motivation was a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit of paintings of Caravaggio, aka Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio (1571-1610), one of my top 5 artists. He was hugely influential in his short lifetime, revered by popes and the public alike, despite a tendency to drinking, whoring, consorting with gay criminals, and general criminal and sociopathic behavior. The exhibit united 25 paintings from all over the world, most never before seen together. When combined with his famous paintings in Roman churches and a couple I saw this spring in London, it allowed me to view about 75% of his work, a wonderful experience.  Born seven years after the death of Michelangelo, Caravaggio took painting to new heights of drama. He had a knack of ...

On my recent London trip, I experienced two visions of early twentieth century decadence: the musical Cabaret  and, on the way back, the Metropolitan Opera's live broadcast DVD version of Richard Strauss' Salome . Despite the efforts of the Cabaret production team to shock us with 21st century sexuality, the 1905 Strauss opera had the greater impact and shock value. This production of  Cabaret  has been playing for over a year in London, with an evolving cast. You enter the theater by descending a narrow, vaguely ominous stairway, and traverse several smoky corridors before emerging into a modified theater in which the ground floor is set up as a club, with small tables, people drinking cocktails, and entertainment by scantily clad musicians playing jazz on accordions, violins, and clarinets. This is a memorable intro to the portrayed decadence of 1930's Berlin, the setting of the play. I was seated in the "club" area, but other patrons were seated in traditional ...

 I recently spent three days in London, seeing four plays. Three were new, and one of these, Giant  by Mark Rosenblatt, was terrific--the best new play I have seen since the 2017's  The Ferryman by Jex Butterworth.  Giant won this year's Olivier Award for Best New Play, and dramatizes a true episode from late in the life of renowned British author Roald Dahl ( James and the Giant Peach) . In 1982 Dahl wrote a review of a book that documented the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In the review Dahl was harshly condemning of Israel, accusing the country of genocide (strong echoes of our current situation). He angered many readers by interchanging criticisms of "Israel" and "the Jews" in his review, receiving international condemnation. In this play a representative of Dahl's publisher flies to London to convince him to retract his statements, feeling that 1. they were wrong and 2. they would lead to catastrophic decreases of his book sales. Playwright...

A European choral tradition that I recently experienced for the first time was the annual performance of the JS Bach Passion According to St. Matthew  at the renowned Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. On the face of it, this seems unlikely as a family holiday event--this work often extends longer than three hours, even four in some traditional older performances. But not in Amsterdam! Families abounded, and there were in fact April Concertgebouw performances by two different orchestras, totaling nine (!) sold out performances. The Dutch like their Bach.  A sung Passion tells the story of the last hours of Jesus' life, including the crucifixion and entombment, stopping just before the resurrection. It is typically done in churches on Good Friday, two days before Easter Day. Bach wrote three versions, of which only the St. Matthew and St John survive intact. They would typically be done in two parts in Lutheran churches, with the congregants sitting in cold churches on hard woode...

 I think Madama Butterfly  is Puccini's greatest opera. It has a famed soprano lead, with perhaps the most famous aria of all time ("Un bel di"). Unlike La Boheme, a one act wonder (but what a first act!), Butterfly starts strong with a sublime Act 1 love duet and builds to a cataclysmic finish with Cio-Cio-San's suicide. Unlike  Turandot , it is complete. Unlike Tosca, it does not rely on gimmicky plot twists (eg a fake firing squad) but instead tells a down to earth human story (love, betrayal, cultural incompetence). The music is relentlessly gorgeous, exemplifying the strengths of post-romantic harmony pushing all the way up against its boundaries. The score is glorious from moment one, when a Bachian fugue set to "Asian" motifs emphasizes the recurring West vs. East theme of the opera. The orchestral dynamics are extreme and almost violent, pushing the romantic era to it's emotional apex. It is one of my favorite operas to listen to, just for the or...

 I just came back from a one week railroad blitz to central Europe, including four concerts in five days. Two of them featured symphonic concerts by prominent European orchestras.  First, I saw the renowned Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) under its principal conductor Kirill Petrenko, at the Baden Baden Easter Festival in southwest Germany. The town is charming but a bit sleepy, set up for spa visitors, Black Forest hikers, and intermittent classical musical fans. The 2500 seat theater, equipped for opera, is the largest in Germany and draws lots of big time performers including the BPO. They had a tiff with their longtime spring festival home in Salzburg a few years back (apparently Salzburg was resistant to innovative programming), so have since been residing in Baden Baden.  I saw their last concert at the 2025 Easter Festival before the orchestra returns to Salzburg next year (apparently Salzburg conceded to the BPO demands), so the audience was extra appreciative...

My first real exposure to high quality Renaissance music was via Tallis Scholars recordings, back in the 1980s when they were a relatively new group. Remarkably, the founder of the group, Peter Phillips, is still leading them over 50 years after their founding. Based on the performance I saw last week in Belém, there has been remarkably little change in the group's sonic or interpretive stance over that timespan. Depending on your perspective, that is either comforting or disappointing. Count me in the latter group (I know, what a surprise). Over recent decades, new groups performing the core Renaissance repertory have sprung up and have communicated new interpretive and sonic ideas. You would never know this from last week's performance. Phillips' interpretive view is seemingly etched in granite. High quality granite, to be sure, but still granite. Back in the 1970s and 80s, recordings of Renaissance music were unusual. Phillips started the Tallis Scholars in 1973, when he...

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...