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Boston Symphony Orchestra Play Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 31 January 2024 14:08; Written by Jack Angstreich

Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons, Music Director and Conductor with Seong-Jin Cho, Piano. Photo by Chris Lee

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on the evening of Monday, January 29th, I had the pleasure of attending an excellent performance—the first of two on consecutive nights—of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, admirably conducted by Andris Nelsons. The second concert was a presentation of Dmitri Shostakovich’s remarkable opera after a famous story by Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. (The same narrative was later memorably filmed in Yugoslavia as Siberian Lady Macbeth—released in 1962—by the great Polish director, Andrzej Wajda.)

The program opened promisingly with a marvelous realization of Tania León’s challenging but rewarding Stride from 2019—according to the program note by Robert Kirzinger, it was “composed on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, premiered in 2020, and won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music”—which is notable especially for its compelling orchestration. The composer’s statement on it is worth quoting in full:

When the New York Philharmonic reached out to me about writing for this project celebrating the 19th Amendment, I confess I only knew about it generally. I started doing research, reading Susan B. Anthony’s biography, her statements. It was tremendous to see the inner force that she had. Then I started looking for a title before starting the piece—not the way I usually do it. The word “stride” reflected how I imagined her way of not taking “no” for an answer. She kept pushing and pushing and moving forward, walking with firm steps until she got the whole thing done. That is precisely what I mean by Stride. Stride has some of what, to me, are American musical influences, or at least American musical connotations. For example, there is a section where you can hear the horns with the wa-wa plunger, reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, getting that growl. It doesn’t have to be indicative of any particular skin tone; it has to do with the American spirit. When I discovered American music, Louis Armstrong actually was the first sound that struck me. When I moved here, the only composers I knew anything about were Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin. The night I arrived at Kennedy Airport, I was picked up by a Cuban couple from the Bronx, who allowed me to stay on their sofa. I looked at the stairs outside of their building, and I started crying “Maria!” They were confused, and I explained that in Cuba I’d heard the song by Leonard Bernstein. I later worked with Bernstein, and we were very close in his later years. When I first arrived here I couldn’t speak English … but I knew how to say “Maria.”

The composer, who attended the event, afterward ascended to the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

An amazing soloist, Korean virtuoso Seong-Jin Cho, then joined the musicians for a brilliant rendition of Maurice Ravel’s awesome Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. In a discussion with critic and musicologist M. D. Calvocoressi, the composer affirmed that: “In a work of this sort, it is essential to avoid the impression of insufficient weight in the sound-texture, as compared to a solo part for two hands. So I have used a style that is more in keeping with the consciously imposing style of the traditional concerto.” The piece begins ominously and builds to an apotheosis; the piano then enters dramatically with a cadenza that quickly becomes characteristically Impressionistic in style, a passage that Ravel described as “like an improvisation.” The orchestral interludes in this Lento section attain a considerable grandeur. At its outset, the Allegro that comprises the balance of the work has a quasi-martial ethos reminiscent of music in the early scores of Igor Stravinsky, although before long it is abundantly inflected with jazzy elements with some playful measures. The composer commented that, “Only gradually is one aware that the jazz episode is actually built up from the themes of the first section.” The concerto concludes powerfully, if abruptly. An enthusiastic ovation elicited a dazzling encore which was one of the highlights of the program: Franz Liszt’s exquisite Consolation No. 3 in D-flat Major.

The second half of the evening was comparable in strength, consisting of an accomplished reading of Stravinsky’s magnificent The Rite of Spring, Pictures from Pagan Russia. The first part, The Adoration of the Earth, has a stunning and sudden climax, while the second, The Sacrifice, also closes exhilaratingly. The artists were ardently applauded.

January '24 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 25 January 2024 03:33; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

I.S.S.

(Bleecker Street)

This thin sci-fi flick starts with an obvious setup—3 Russians and 3 Americans on the orbiting international space station are told by their handlers to take over the vessel in the name of their country once war breaks out on earth—and spends its remaining 90 minutes letting the six of them act alternately smartly and stupidly in the name of either humanity or patriotism. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite never fully takes advantage of the claustrophobic setting, and the capable actors can’t do much more than maneuver themselves into ever-dwindling spaces, with the result neither an epic fiasco nor a nail-biting thriller.

Apolonia, Apolonia

(HBOMax)

Parisian artist Apolonia Sokol is the focus of this documentary by Danish filmmaker Lea Glob, who several years ago began recording Apolonia’s long and winding road from obscurity to acclaim, in addition to presenting intimate scenes of the artist’s personal life. There are moments that are quite shattering—notably Apolonia’s response to hearing that her close friend, the Ukrainian activist Oksana Shachko, committed suicide—amid the insights and colorful glimpses at the modern-art world that show how this young woman has become such an artistic force with her original canvases as well as her friendship with Glob herself.

Fallen Leaves

(Mubi)

Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki’s latest deadpan comic portrait plays like desperate self-parody; if I didn’t know he had made it, I’d have sworn some no-talent had lazily aped what gave Kaurismaki his international reputation. But where in his better films like Le Vie de bohème and Drifting Clouds the humor and melancholy felt organically entwined, here it’s the opposite: the characters are caricatures, the humor is puerile, the romantic relationship is risible, and the attempts at bittersweetness are eye-rolling. Shockingly, this has gotten Kaurismaki’s best reviews in decades.

4K Release of the Week

Trolls Band Together

(Universal/Dreamworks)

The return of the kids’ cartoon favorites following 2016’s Trolls and 2020’s Trolls World Tour includes several animated sequences that are amusing nods to classics of the genre like Fantasia and Yellow Submarine, and there are funny voice performances by Anna Kendrick, Eric André, Andrew Rannells, Amy Schumer and Kenan Thompson. But the storyline, which features boy bands not unlike NSYNC—and including vocal appearances by the likes of Justin Timberlake and Lance Bass—makes it all much ado about not much. Still, the UHD transfer for this “Sing-Along Edition” looks superb—the extras include a Trolls short, It Takes Three; deleted scenes; cast-filmmaker interviews; and featurettes.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

The Childe

(Well Go USA)

When Marco, a Korean-Filipino boxer whose beloved mother needs expensive surgery, goes to look for his estranged father, he stumbles into getting mixed up with vicious underworld characters, including a particularly ruthless assassin and a rich heir who has eyes on his father’s fortune. Park Hoon-jung’s high-octane but overlong thriller spins its wheels after an impressive first hour, with skillfully done action sequences combining gunplay and physical dexterity. The film looks excellent in hi-def.

Special Ops—Lioness

(Paramount)

This high-tension series stars Zoe Saldana, who’s surprisingly effective as the leader of a shadowy special-ops group that initiates a new recruit, Cruz, for a dangerous mission that involves her infiltrating the personal life of a known terrorist’s daughter. Over eight fast-moving episodes, there’s an intriguing balance of the quotidian alongside the scheming among government agents. Zaldana’s career-best performance is equaled by one by Laysla de Oliveira, who shines in a physically demanding role as Cruz. The hi-def image looks terrific; extras include making-of featurettes and interviews.

Your Lucky Day

(Well Go USA)

What begins in the most contrived way possible—what occurs in the deli after a $156 million lottery ticket is sold is unbelievable in the extreme—soon settles into a diverting crime drama for about an hour or so, until it devolves into something that’s less clever than it thinks, with a particularly anticlimactic windup. Writer-director Daniel Brown cranks up the intensity—and also, for no particular reason, revels in ratcheting up the violence—and gets a rock-solid central performance by Jessica Garza as a pregnant deli customer who makes the most of a bad situation, but his social commentary is a bit too on the nose. There’s a fine Blu-ray transfer.

CD Release of the Week

Miklós Rózsa—Orchestral Works

(Capriccio)

Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa (1907-95) is best known for some of the most memorable movie scores to ever come out of Hollywood, written for such classics as Double Indemnity, Spellbound, Lust for Life and Ben Hur, but he also made equally good “serious” concert music, as this first-rate disc shows. The trio of works included here—Overture to a Symphony Concert and Hungarian Serenade (both from 1956, when his film career was in full swing) as well as 1972’s Tripartita—includes the boisterous writing for orchestra that marked his best scores, well performed by the German State Orchestra (Rhineland-Pfalz) under conductor Gregor Bühl.

January '24 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 18 January 2024 02:32; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Maestro

(Netflix)

That Bradley Cooper’s biopic about conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein is a labor of love is not in doubt; details are right, from Cooper’s looking amazingly like Bernstein to his time spent on the podium, particularly an excerpt from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony that was shot in Ely Cathedral in England, where it was actually performed.

But concentrating on such minutiae sucks the life out of Maestro, since Cooper seems to be giving a Saturday Night Live impression of Lenny, and his film plays like a greatest-hits list of scenes only about his musical career and volatile marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre. That the film’s Lenny and Felicia are apolitical is inexcusable whitewashing; even a brief scene would have gone a long way toward making this portrait more honest. Still, Carey Mulligan gives another of her effortlessly spellbinding performances as Felicia, keeping the film on course whenever Cooper the director goes off the rails, visually and narratively.

Household Saints

(Kino Lorber)

As long as she sticks to a realistic portrait of two immigrant families in New York’s Little Italy from the 1940 to the ’60s, Nancy Savoca’s 1993 film is richly illuminating. But when she attempts to get fancy after the main plot kicks in—the daughter, Teresa, of the main couple, Joseph Santangelo and Catherine, wants to devote the rest of her life to Jesus Christ—Savoca is unsure whether to play it straight or for laughs.

She ends up trying to do both, but the combination makes for an uneasy and bumpy couple of hours. Fortunately, Savoca’s marvelous cast, headed by Tracey Ullmann (Catherine), Vincent d’Onofrio (Joseph) and particularly Lily Taylor (Teresa), rescues the movie from becoming too maudlin.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

The Devil’s Partner

(Film Masters)

Another in a series of restored and rediscovered lost “classics” comprises two fun genre exercises, starting with Charles R. Rondeau’s The Devil’s Partner, a truly weird attempt at supernatural thriller about an old man whose pact with the devil allows him to return as a malevolent young man.

There’s also another 1960 “gem,” Roger Corman’s Creature From the Haunted Sea, about a monster of the deep preying on divers and adventure seekers. Both films are cheaply made but entertaining in spite of their obvious shortcomings. They both look fine in hi-def; extras include the theatrical and TV versions of both films, commentaries on both films, an interview with Corman and the third episode in a series about Corman and his cohort, Hollywood Intruders: The Filmgroup Story.

DVD Release of the Week

Neil Diamond—The Thank You Australia Concert, Live 1976

(Mercury)

Neil Diamond ended his 1976 Australian tour with an outdoor concert for tens of thousands of his fans that was televised on Australian TV; this DVD re-release of the nearly two-hour performance presents it mostly uncut (unlike its recent, much shorter showing on PBS). Many of Diamond’s most enduring songs are featured in energetic performances, including “Holly Holy,” “I Am I Said,” “Crackling Rosie,” and “Sweet Caroline”—the latter happily long before it was ruined by fans as a mindless singalong.

The only dull moments come courtesy a suite of tunes from the Jonathan Livingston Seagull soundtrack, but that doesn’t dim the luster of an otherwise terrific concert. Video and audio are acceptable but unremarkable; extras are footage of Diamond performing the song “Morningside”; a substantial interview with Diamond for Australian TV; an intro by David Frost; and amusing on-stage commercials by Diamond during the show.

CD Release of the Week

Ruby Hughes—End of My Days

(BIS)

Welsh soprano Ruby Hughes returns with another beautifully curated collection of songs, following her strong recital disc Echo from 2022. This time, she and the members of the Manchester Collective (a shape-shifting ensemble) created this program during the first round of COVID lockdowns in hopes of performing it to uplift audiences.

The songs, beginning with Errollyn Wallen’s mournful but sturdy “End of My Days,” are both reticent and hopeful, perfectly mirroring the conflicting emotions of that time. Composers as varied as John Dowland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are heard from, all brilliantly played by the collective and sung with her usual expressiveness by Hughes, especially on the benediction of a finale, Deborah Pritchard’s “Peace.”

New York Philharmonic Plays Modern Classics

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 15 January 2024 16:09; Written by Jack Angstreich

Jakub Hrůša conducts the New York Philharmonic

At Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on Friday, January 12th, I had the privilege of attending a splendid concert—continuing a superb season—presented by the New York Philharmonic, here under the exciting direction of the impressive Czech guest conductor, Jakub Hrůša.

The event began brilliantly with a sterling rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s marvelous Ballade for Orchestra. The celebrated soloist Hilary Hahn then entered the stage for a dazzling performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s extraordinary Violin Concerto No. 1, which is the basis for Jerome Robbins’s memorable ballet, Opus 19 / The Dreamer and was one of the only works by the composer admired by his eminent contemporary, Igor Stravinsky. In his useful note for the program, James M. Keller records that:

This concerto traces its origins to a Concertino for Violin that Prokofiev had begun in 1915 but left incomplete. Some material for that earlier work ended up in his first Violin Concerto, which in any case adheres to modest proportions. (It retained its deceptively “early” opus number from the projected Concertino.)

In his “Short Autobiography” of 1941, Prokofiev commented on five dimensions of his style, including the fourth, the lyrical strain in his œuvre, of which he characterized this concerto as representative:

The fourth line is lyrical: it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood, not always associated with melody, or at any rate with long melody (“Fairy Tale” in the Four Pieces for Piano Op. 3, Dreams, Autumnal, the songs Op. 9, the “Legend” Op. 12), sometimes partly contained in long melody (the two Balmont choruses, the beginning of the First Violin Concerto, the songs to Akhmatova's poems, Grandmother's Tales). This line was not noticed until much later. For a long time I was given no credit for any lyrical gift whatever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more attention to this aspect of my work.

The largely meditative and quirky initial movement has an uncharacteristic prettiness but also a certain solemnity. About the arresting, even more eccentric second movement, the former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator Michael Steinberg, in his book The Concerto, wrote:

a scherzo marked vivacissimo represented the “savage” element as against the generally more lyrical first and third movements. The music, full of contrast, is by turns amusing, naughty, for a while even malevolent, athletic, and always violinistically ingenious and brilliant. It seems to be over in a moment.

The movement is virtuosic, propulsive, fittingly playful, but with abrasive elements. The finale is the most beautiful and song-like of the movements—but with passages of contrasting urgency, although some parts have an almost pastoral or even celestial character—and it ends quietly. Hahn returned to play an exquisite encore: the amazing Andante from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003, a work which she has recorded.

The second half of the concert was at least equally admirable, consisting of a terrific version of Béla Bartók’s incomparable Concerto for Orchestra. The composer provided the following remarks upon it:

The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat single orchestral instruments in a concertante or soloistic manner. The “virtuoso” treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments), or in the perpetuum mobile–like passage of the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and especially in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages.

He also said:

The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third to the life-assertion of the last one.

The introductory movement begins gravely, even ominously, becoming unexpectedly dramatic but with some mysterious interludes and, like the other movements, finishes abruptly. The more unusual second movement—titled Game of Couples—is ludic, even at times jocose, but with some serious elements, closing softly. The suspenseful Elegia that ensues is more uncanny in atmosphere, preceding the enchanting fourth movement which has humorous, almost cartoonish, interruptions. The energetic, ebullient Finale has great forward momentum but with some more subdued interludes; as it approaches its end, the music acquires a ghostly character, then concludes stunningly. The artists deservedly received a very enthusiastic ovation.

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