Music Interview: Composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 26 November 2011 15:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Quintet (New York premiere)
November 29, 2011
Zankel hall, 57th Street & 7th Avenue
http://carnegiehall.org

Among America’s foremost composers, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich has one of the most enviable track records of anyone in classical music today: she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1983 for her First Symphony, has her works recorded regularly (most recently, Naxos released a CD containing three of her compositions: Millennium Fantasy for piano and orchestra, Images for two pianos and orchestra and “Peanuts” Gallery for piano and orchestra) and regularly composes works commissioned by eager musicians and ensembles.

Most recently, her mesmerizing Fifth Symphony premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2008 and her Septet for Piano Trio and String Quartet has had a dozen performances since its 2009 premiere. Her latest commission has its New York premiere on November 29 at Zankel Hall: a Quintet written expressly for the musicians who will perform it: the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson (KLR) Trio, violist Michael Tree and double bass player Harold Robinson.

The new Quintet--which has the same instrumentation as Schubert’s great ‘Trout’ Quintet--was among many topics the 72-years-young composer discussed in a recent telephone interview, along with other new works, her feelings on the so-called ‘death’ of classical music and music’s place in a technology-obsessed 21st century.
 
Q: Can you describe composing works for musicians like the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio?
A: The trio and I go back quite a long ways, and it has been the most wonderful personal and musical relationship for me. I just love to write for them. You can’t do better than composing for these artists. It's inspiring for me. What it means for me to be writing for them is not that things are tailored specifically in the piece, but it just makes me very turned on to think of them on the stage waiting for the new music that I've composed to be put on the stand so they can perform it.

Q: How did the instrumentation for your new Quintet come about?
A: If you program Schubert's 'Trout' Quintet, there’s almost nothing else you can put on with it, since it uses a double bass. So the trio was looking for a companion to the 'Trout' and I loved that idea. And I just couldn’t resist taking a little bitty snippet of the 'Moody Trout' section from Schubert and incorporating that into my piece. Happily, modern performers are capable of doing any style you ask of them.

For instance, in my Septet (from 2009), there was a movement where the strings and piano replicated a kind of baroque style of performance. There are all these wonderful players that specialize in this kind of playing. There’s a certain concept of the 'Moody Trout'--the notion that the personality of the trout has its good and bad moods--so I suggested a sort of a blues kind of thing in that section.

Q: What other works are coming up?
A: I just got back from New Orleans where the Louisiana Philharmonic, pianist Jeffrey Biegel and conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto premiered a new piece called Shadows for piano and orchestra. I also have a brand new piece that will be done in May for violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and her chamber orchestra in San Francisco. 

Q: What do you think of the continued predictions of the demise of classical music?
A: When they invented the player piano, then when they invented recordings, that was also supposed to be the end of music. Everything new only opens the field more broadly, and it’s the same with the digital revolution. Music’s a hard thing to kill off when you come right down to it. I don’t think it’s a good prediction at all. I think it’s a really interesting time as far as musical outreach and what’s available to people worldwide. Although we’ve dropped the ball completely on music education in schools, there is now--if anybody looks for it--the availability of any kind of music you could want. The worldwide availability is amazing to me.

Q: Do you take exception to compartmentalizing different kinds of music?
A: I actually played jazz when I was younger, so if those sounds come out of me it’s because it’s already there, not because I’m "crossing over," which I think is a very misleading term. There’s been so much talk, especially in the late 20th century, about elements of music that have to do with mathematics or whatever. But to me the wonderful thing about music and why I’m still excited to do this is that it incorporates everything about us: our personal experiences, our heads, our hearts, what we’re attracted to. It's one huge ball of wax: everything in my music is native to me, including the European classical tradition like the 'Trout' and blues and jazz.

Theater Roundup: Rickman On Broadway, Friel Off

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 25 November 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Seminar
Written by Theresa Rebeck
Directed by Sam Gold
Starring Hamish Linklater, Jerry O’Connell, Hettienne Park, Lily Rabe, Alan Rickman

Dancing at Lughnasa
Written by Brian Friel
Directed by Charlotte Moore
Starring Orlagh Cassidy, Kevin Collins, Michael Countryman, Annabel Hagg, Jo Kinsella, Aedin Moloney, Ciaran O’Reilly, Rachel Pickup

The difference between a great playwright and a merely decent one is demonstrated by two current New York productions: the off-Broadway Irish Rep’s revival of Brian Friel’s 1990 masterpiece Dancing at Lughnasa, and the world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s new Broadway play, Seminar, starring everyone’s favorite die-hard villain -- and accomplished stage actor -- Alan Rickman.

Friel’s play comprises flesh and blood characters and a poignant sense of life as it’s really lived, in its joys and heartbreaks, hopes and disappointments.

Rebeck, in contrast, has written an immensely clever and polished comedy populated by caricatures whose relationships are so sketchily drawn that even plentiful -- and often funny -- one-liners can’t mask the entertaining work’s essential hollowness.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a luminous memory play narrated by Michael, who thinks back to an Irish summer in the fictional town of Ballybeg of 1936 and the five Mundy sisters, all spinsters ranging in age from 26 to 40, one of whom -- Christine, the youngest -- is Michael’s unwed mother.

The women, resigned to their lot in life, look forward to the annual Lughnasa harvest festival. This becomes clear as they listen to their new wireless radio and start dancing in their small kitchen. Such unbridled ecstasy is one of the most joyous scenes I’ve ever seen in any play.

Friel’s wistful yet unsentimental drama has a hard-edged poetry not only in its beautifully carved musical dialogue, but also in the very souls of its lovingly rendered characters, whom we end up caring about deeply.

What was a moving, humane drama in its 1991 Broadway incarnation doesn’t quite strike the same touching note in Charlotte Moore’s small-scale staging, although the cast (except the usually reliable Michael Countryman, whose lack of Irish authenticity as the sisters’ sickly older brother Father Jake is a serious misstep) is solid. Rachel Pickup is much more than that: her radiant portrayal of middle sister Agnes would have fit in snugly with the original exemplary cast.

Seminar introduces Leonard, a bitter, burnt-out writer reduced to giving private, exclusive lessons to a select few students looking for tips to get published, who is teaching a motley quartet of dull Douglas, sexy Izzy, geeky Martin and thin-skinned Kate, whose family‘s gorgeous rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment is the setting for these weekly meetings.

There’s a lot here that’s simply unbelievable: that three students (Kate excepted) could afford the $5000 class fee; that the two women enter into sexual liaisons with Leonard (both of them) and Martin (Izzy only), seemingly for mere purposes of dramatic -- or, more precisely, comedic -- irony when they are found out; and that Leonard would be jetting around the world to visit places like Somalia in his current state. He’s currently a journeyman editor and, apparently, out of favor in the business because of long-ago plagiarism (which Martin gleefully brings up after Leonard once too often destroys one of their writing efforts).

But if Rebeck is dishonest with her quintet, she can always rely on her zippy dialogue. If these characters are too smart and clever, in the way of so many TV shows, movies and plays nowadays, at least Rebeck keeps the talk lively and pointed.

It’s also too bad that Seminar doesn’t end after Leonard’s big monologue in which he admits to creative and moral bankruptcy. By tacking on a final scene to provide a happy ending of sorts, Rebeck has closure, however unearned, and at the expense of a certain plausible messiness in her characters’ lives before the tidy wrap-up.

Sam Gold adroitly stages Seminar on David Zinn’s terrifically detailed set, and the five actors blend into a true cohesive ensemble.

Rickman sputters with drippingly nasty corrosive sarcasm, even if Leonard remains a cipher. Lily Rabe (Kate), Hamish Linklater (Martin), Hetienne Park (Izzy) and Jerry O’Connell (Charles) manage to keep up with Rickman, making Seminar amusingly endurable but, at bottom, unmemorable.

Seminar
Golden Theatre
252 W. 45th Street
New York, NY
http://seminaronbroadway.com

Previews began October 27, 2011; opened November 20 (open run)

Dancing at Lughnasa
Irish Repertory Theatre
132 W. 22nd Street
New York, NY
http://irishrep.org

Opened October 30; closes January 15, 2012

Theater Roundup: Four Off-Broadway Shows

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

All-American
Written by Julia Brownell; directed by Evan Cabnet

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays
Written by Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Jeffrey Hatcher, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, José Rivera, Paul Rudnick and Doug Wright; directed by Stuart Ross

The Atmosphere of Memory
Written by David Bar Katz; directed by Pam MacKinnon

Burmese Days
Written and directed by Ryan Kiggell; adapted from George Orwell’s novel

In All-American, Julia Brownell takes an implausible situation--wispy Katie is the starting quarterback on a powerhouse high school football team, her sights on a college and pro career--and uses it as a study of a family in crisis: father Mike, a retired pro QB, now lives vicariously through Katie’s talent; mother Beth, now selling expensive homes, feels her real-estate job finally provides the self-confidence and self-respect lacking as a mere football wife; and twin brother Aaron, as lanky as Katie but brainy, not athletic.

Brownell conjures many dramatic situations, like Mike’s insistence that Katie will break the NFL’s glass ceiling; Beth shutting her husband and children out of her current situation; Aaron’s social awkwardness until he meets another high school outcast, Natasha; or Katie wanting to stop playing football.

That’s too much for a 90-minute play to chew on, and Brownell nods toward complexity without ever achieving it. She writes for HBO’s clever but glib Hung, and All-American resembles a slick TV sitcom with every character improbably clever, always barking out snappy dialogue. Cramming so much into so slender a frame causes more than a few fumbles.

Under Evan Cabnet’s well-paced direction, an exemplary cast creates a plausible family dynamic, led by Meredith Forlenza’s appealing Katie and Harry Zittel’s Aaron, who raises teenage awkwardness to an art form.
       
Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays, an amiable collection of mostly comic one-acts celebrating gay relationships, looks to recreate the off-Broadway success of Love, Loss and What I Wore with revolving celebrity casts giving essentially staged readings under Stuart Ross’s steady direction.

The difference, say Ceremony’s producers, is that the stories will revolve along with the casts. For now, the nine one-acts include two typically wacky Paul Rudnick farces, one typical Neil LaBute shocker (appropriately titled Strange Fruit) and an affecting Moises Kaufman monologue.

These and five other sketches are endearingly enacted by Harriet Harris, Beth Leavel, Polly Draper, Mark Consuelos, Craig Bierko and Richard Thomas; Thomas handles Kaufman’s London Mosquitoes with a touching effortlessness that earns commiseration and tears and makes the show’s frivolous wedding finale anti-climactic.
   
In The Atmosphere of Memory, David Bar Katz’s self-reflexive portrait of a playwright whose messy memories give him difficulties with his new work and with his own family, has good ideas so inadequately executed that the result is flippant wrongheadedness.

Katz presents large chunks of his protagonist Jon’s play-within-the-play as deliberately crude, vulgar and heavy-handed: unfortunately, much of Katz’s real play is equally absurd (one assumes not deliberately). The choppy, episodic structure swallows the characters whole, making them mere puppets moved around by both playwrights to suit their whims, precludes any revealing behavior or a shred of psychological insight.

Instead, Katz borrows emotional catharsis from another artist: John Lennon, whose powerfully personal song “Mother” is co-opted for his finale, ringing false in this context. It’s also unfortunate that Katz’s dialogue is riddled with mistakes like “hone in” for “home in,” “lay” for “lie” and misusing “comprise.”

Pam MacKinnon’s direction can’t coalesce disjunctive parts into anything resembling a whole, even as her cast tries rising above Katz’s stick figures. Ellen Burstyn retains her dignity as Claire, Jon’s actress mother, while the invaluable John Glover’s deadbeat dad Murray dominates whenever he’s onstage. This actor’s naturally gregarious personality makes the play(s) lopsided in ways that Katz and his protagonist surely never meant.
       
George Orwell’s novel, the picturesque Burmese Days, is a poor choice for a stage adaptation, especially in the bare-bones production that the Aya Theatre Company imported from England for an opening salvo in this year’s Brits Off Broadway Festival.

The talented cast of four men and two women swaps accents to enact over a dozen Brits and Burmese in Orwell’s absorbing story of imperialism and casual racism. The performers also double on visual and sound effects (impersonating a water buffalo or a leopard, making bird noises), but no one creates any compelling characters while busying themselves with the cleverness of Ryan Kiggell’s adaptation (Kiggell’s one of the actors).

Orwell’s racy writing survives in some narrated passages, but his story--playing out on gorgeous locations with colorful characters both human and animal--begs for widescreen epic film treatment a la David Lean, rather than this stripped-down staging.

All-American
Previews began October 24, 2011; opened November 7; closes November 19
The Duke on 42nd Street, 229 West 42nd Street, New York, NY
http://lct.org

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays
Previews began November 7, 2011; opened November 13
Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane, New York, NY
http://standingonceremony.net

The Atmosphere of Memory
Previews began October 15, 2011; opened October 30; closes November 20
Bank Street Theatre, 155 Bank Street, New York, NY

http://labtheater.org/

Burmese Days
Previews began November 9, 2011; opened November 16; closes December 4
Brits Off-Broadway at 59 E 59
59 East 59th Street, New York NY
http://59e59.org