Criticultura em Portugal

Tuesday’s amazing performance by Concerto Italiano of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1643) at Carnegie Hall reminded me that 17 th century genius was not limited to Galileo, Newton, Caravaggio, and Shakespeare. Monteverdi is often credited with moving music from the Renaissance to the Baroque period, and if not the inventor of opera, he certainly popularized and refined it as a new art form. But of the great geniuses of music, Monteverdi often seems the most unfamiliar to modern audiences. His madrigals, rich in Italian language and nuanced phrasing, are too difficult for amateurs and school madrigal groups; only 3 of his 18 operas survive, and these do poorly in large, conventional opera houses. So sadly, Monteverdi performances are usually limited to niche early music festivals and societies. It was wonderful to see his last piece superbly performed before a large and appreciative Carnegie Hall audience, even if the venue was just a bit too large and re...

I attended a nice performance of Shakespeare's As You Like It  (ca. 1559) last week while on a business trip to Washington DC. The streets were eerily quiet, as the play coincided with the beginning of the Super Bowl, reminding me of a past trip to Paris in which it appeared the population had transiently vanished during a match of the French national soccer team. It seems that only sports get that kind of unifying hold on the general population these days. The Folger Shakespeare Library is one of the world's great repositories of Shakespeare documents, and hosts a well established theater company to boot. Performances are held in a smallish theater constructed in the style of the Old Globe, i.e. big central space (here with seats, not standing patrons), and surrounding wrap-around balconies. At the Folger the effect is rather too dark, as all the surfaces are from a dark polished wood, making the interior a bit rich for what Shakespeare would have expected for his crowd-plea...

La La Land   is making a big run at the Oscar for Best Picture this year, remarkable for a film musical, a genre that mostly expired long ago ( Hairspray and the unlikely  Björk /Lars von Trier Dancing in the Dark  are exceptions). I think this movie does a nice job of updating this form. It did not inspire me in the end, but I thought there were some truly excellent elements of it that give some hope to those of us who like singing and dancing to accompany acting.   The strongest aspect of the film is its visual look. The very opening shows us how vibrant color will be a dominant feature. Director Damien Chazelle puts his cards right out on the table by daringly beginning with a jazzy introductory production number excitingly executed on top of gridlocked, vibrantly multicolored dancers and cars framed against a grey backdrop of freeways and brown hills so familiar to those of us who grew up in LA.   When composers start us right off with an uptempo choru...

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have become enamored of the works of the great 20th century choreographer George Balanchine, who began his career in the famed Ballets Russes in the early part of the century, and ended it in New York city founding what is now NY City Ballet in the 1940’s. Balanchine's work is a perfect bridge between the classical and modern styles (rather like Mahler in music), using each to great expressive purpose. He truly honors the music he chooses with close attention to its inner rhythms and meaning, and usually picks great music to set his ballets to, not hippity-hop ballet composers like Adolph Adam ( Giselle ), Minkus ( La Bayad è re ),  and Delibes ( Copp é lia ). Friday’s program at NYCB featured three short ballets, but not with the normal Balanchine abstraction. Each told a story. La Somnambula, set to “themes” from Bellini’s opera, distilled the convoluted opera into a simple romance, in which the man in a couple is tempte...

Before the audience is seated at anatomy theater , a new opera by David Lang (b. 1957), a "harlot" in chains is led by an executioner through the folks gathered in the lobby. When we then scramble to our seats, we face a gallows. Stern percussion introduces a plaintive a capella recitative by the condemned, and she is hanged. Thus begins this most inventive and stimulating opera. The "plot" is her subsequent onstage dissection by an 18th century anatomist in order to find the scientific origin of her evil (she killed her husband and children). Spoiler--no such anatomic seat of sin is found, much to the disappointment of the scholar. The audience is addressed as "gentlemen" medical students who view the autopsy (women are asked to leave, but did not, at least at the performance I saw). Along the way we are treated to ensemble pieces about the 15 instruments used to dissect (lots of triple and pentad rhythms) and about each organ as it is removed, complete ...