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With an illustrious acting career that includes roles in Men in Black, Seinfeld, and Fever Pitch, Siobhan Fallon Hogan has taken a turn towards independent filmmaking. Having made its rounds in the film festival circuit, Shelter in Solitude, her sophomore effort, is a more leisurely-paced character piece than Rushed, her producing/writing debut, which came out in 2021.
The film centers on a down-on-her luck bar owner, Val (Fallon Hogan), bonding with a death row inmate (Peter Macon, The Orville) in his last week of life. Fallon Hogan has written for herself a juicy role to dig her teeth into. Few films have opted to be set during the pandemic even though the event had such a cataclysmic societal effect. In Shelter in Solitude, the pandemic is sewn into the plot’s infrastructure. The characters exist in a vague sector of the Rust Belt whose decline is highlighted and exacerbated by the shutdown. Val is hit with debts and loneliness as a bar owner who has to close her business due to Covid-19. She’s also haunted by her failed career as a country singer. Though set in the South, the film was shot in Fallon-Hogan’s hometown of Syracuse. A testament to her location scouting, Fallon shot the film in Syracuse’s defunct Main Street Prison, a setting that seems authentically depressing. The film is, in fact, inspired by the prison in Fallon-Hogan’s hometown of Cazenovia (a Syracuse suburb). Her father was an attorney who would often talk about his cases during dinner and the young actor’s fascination was sparked when her father discussed a prison guard. She also had cousins who lived in a prison nearby — the Jamesville Correctional Facility — which was used for exterior shots.
Just as the real Fallon Hogan has a family connection to the lives of prisoners, Val’s brother Dwayne (Robert Patrick) is a stoic prison warden. The two exhibit a comfortable relationship despite having clashing personalities which spices up some of the film’s slower-moving moments. When the prison guard catches Covid, Val takes over the management of death row and its sole prisoner, Jackson (Macon). This is where the film displays its most awkward moments. Val loses her jaded edge and suddenly morphs into a pollyanna chatterbox as if she’s being neutralized by a high school crush. Fallon Hogan is doing strong enough character work here, that the scenes are strong enough to drive through any inconsistencies. Over the last week of Jackson’s life, the two develop a rapport that drives the second half of the film.
The comic instincts of Fallon Hogan also serve her well in some of the film’s more light-hearted moments. The film is largely held together by the strong character work that Fallon Hogan (it helps that she’s the screenwriter as well) put in creating Val in all her contradictions. She’s defiant against anyone who tries to restrict her, yet unable to be completely self-reliant. It’s the quintessential tale of the perpetual screw-up but the story gives her a little more leeway to have a chance at redemption.
A graduate of Catholic University, Fallon Hogan has navigated a career based on her Christian values. In both Saturday Night Live and her films, she has turned down movie roles that conflicted with her values. As such, religious themes make her way into her work. Like the actress, her character here is unapologetically Christian even if she’s not a paragon of Christian virtues at all times.
Compared to Fallon Hogan’s debut, this film doesn’t have the tension or as much of an edge when it comes to saying something about society. However, the sense of place and character work make this film worth a watch as well.
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts New York Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee.
At Lincoln Center’s wonderful new David Geffen Hall on the night of Saturday, October 14th, I had the great pleasure to attend an outstanding concert—the second subscription program of the current season—presented by the excellent musicians of the New York Philharmonic under the remarkable direction of the young Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in her debut with this ensemble.
The event began impressively with a lucid account of the striking, intense and solemn De profundis for string orchestra from 1998 by the contemporary Lithuanian composer, Raminta Šerkšnytė. (The work is strangely reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s magnificent score for the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, Psycho.) I here reproduce Šerkšnytė’s interesting note on the piece:
This dramatic music, full of contrasts, reflects a certain worldview of a young person (this is my first orchestral composition, which was written as the bachelor’s graduation work). At a young age life is perceived in an extreme, “severe” way, where euphoria quickly changes to disappointment. One searches for the extraordinary, transcendental experience both in life as well as in art, believing in the profound power of the art sacredness. Therefore the opus was named “from the depths” (Latin — “de profundis”), though making no reckoning of the historical “De profundis” tradition.
The composer, who was in the audience, entered the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.
The brilliant soloist, Daniil Trifonov, then joined the artists for a magisterial rendition of Robert Schumann’s admirable, archetypally Romantic Piano Concerto. The opening Allegro affettuoso movement is surprisingly meditative and lyrical but with grand and virtuosic—even turbulent—passages. The more classicizing Intermezzo, marked Andante grazioso,recalls the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven and is somewhat lighter in mood, while the Allegro vivace finale is highly spirited, even effervescent. Ardent applause elicited a fabulous encore: the pianist’s own exquisite transcription—which he has recorded—of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s immensely popularVocalise.
Even more memorable, however, was the second half of the evening: a splendorous realization of three selections from the marvelous Lemminkäinen Suite of Jean Sibelius. The almost inexplicably too seldom performed Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island was captivating and stirring and the haunting and mysterious The Swan of Tuonela is one of the composer’s finest achievements—it featured a superb Ryan Roberts on the English horn. The program concluded dynamically with the more suspenseful and celebratory Lemminkäinen’s Return.
I look forward with considerable excitement to the following week’s subscription concert with early music by György Ligeti and the first Serenade of Johannes Brahms.
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, photo by Todd Rosenberg
At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Thursday, October 5th, I had the enormous privilege to attend a magnificent concert—the second of two on consecutive nights and a brilliant inauguration of the new season at this venue—of music with an Italian theme, presented by the stellar artists of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the magisterial direction of Riccardo Muti, probably the most revered living conductor.
The program began beautifully with an impeccable account of Philip Glass’s remarkableThe Triumph of the Octagon, commissioned by this ensemble and here receiving its New York premiere; below I quote in its entirety the note on it by the composer (who was in attendance and stood to receive the audience’s acclaim):
In February 2022, I traveled to Chicago for performances of my Symphony No. 11. It was a thrill to hear this great orchestra and conductor in the hall where I would visit as a student in the early 1950s. After those performances, we began conversations about writing a new piece specifically for this orchestra with the initial idea to create an “Adagio for Muti.” The final title of the work came from a suggestion from Maestro Riccardo Muti about Castel del Monte, a 13th-century castle in southeastern Italy.
The mystery of this ancient place and the uniqueness of its geometric proportions, specifically its eight octagonal towers, was an interesting catalyst; while I have written music about people, places, events, and cultures, I cannot recall ever composing a piece about a building. What became clear was that I was not writing a piece about Castel del Monte per se, but rather about one’s imagination when we consider such a place.
I dedicate this work to Maestro Muti, in honor of his many successes as conductor of the CSO and important contributions to the world of music.
Even more impressive was a sterling rendition—indeed the finest I have ever encountered—of Felix Mendelssohn’s marvelous “Italian” Symphony. The initial Allegro vivace movement was fittingly effervescent and sparkling but not without depths of feeling and even quasi-mystical passages. (One could discern Schubertian echoes here and elsewhere in the work.) The ensuing Andante con moto sustained a kind of spiritual solemnity while the third movement—marked Con moto moderato—has a stately quality despite a certain levity and even more so in the weightier Trio section. The engaging Saltarello finale was turbulent and dynamic.
The second half of the event was comparably memorable with its stunning realization of Richard Strauss’s early, extraordinaryAus Italien.The opening movement—entitled “In the Country”—was evocative and both grand and lyrical and, like the piece as a whole, is more full-blown in its Romanticism than the classicizing Mendelssohn symphony is. The following movement—“Amid the Ruins of Rome”—was more intense and dramatic; the enchanting “On the Shores of Sorrento,” surprisingly has a pastoral character and the concluding “Neapolitan Folk Life” was ebullient. Enthusiastic applause was rewarded with a delightful encore: Giuseppe Verdi’s splendid Overture to his early opera,Giovanna d'Arco.