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Sondra Radvanovsky Dazzles at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 23 November 2022 15:04; Written by Jack Angstreich

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Wednesday, November 16th, I had the pleasure of attending a marvelous recital—entitled “From Loss to Love”—by the superb, Canadian, operatic soprano, Sondra Radvanovsky, excellently accompanied by pianist Anthony Manoli.

The singer, whose voice was in powerful form, appeared in a fabulous black gown, opening the event with one of the greatest works in the program: Henry Purcell’s "When I am laid" from Dido and Aeneas. She followed this with Georg Friedrich Händel’s “E pur così in un giorno … Piangerò la sorte Mia" from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, which program annotator Janet E. Bedell describes as the composer’s “most popular opera.” Henri Duparc was represented by three songs, the first two set to texts by the Symbolist poet Jean Lahor: "Chanson triste" and “Extase.” The third, “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” originally titled “Absence,” from a poem by the eminent Théophile Gautier, was written for an unfinished opera. Three songs by Sergei Rachmaninoff—which Radvanovsky dedicated to the late, impossibly dashing baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky—were also featured. The first, “Sing not to me, beautiful maiden,” from a text by Alexander Pushkin, is from his Opus 4 of 1893, his first set of songs to be published. This was followed by “How fair this spot” from 1902 and “I wait for you” from 1894, written when the composer was twenty-one. The first half of the event concluded with Franz Liszt’s Three Petrarch Sonnets—written for tenor voice—which demonstrated the singer’s special affinity for the Italianate repertory of the Romantic movement. She sang the earliest version of this work, “first sketched in 1838 or 1839,” according to Bedell.

The second half of the program—for which the soprano wore a stunning, deep blue gown—was truly remarkable, however, beginning with four songs by Richard Strauss. Her performance of the first, “Allerseelen”—which closes his first set of published songs, his Opus 10 of 1885, when the composer was twenty-one—was one of the supreme moments of the evening and the song was one of its very finest. After “Befreit” from 1898—set to a text by the eminent German poet, Richard Dehmel—Radvanovsky reached the other peak in the recital, with the astonishing “Morgen!” from 1894. After “Heimliche Aufforderung,” the singer came into her own too with most of the Italian repertory that dominated the remainder of the evening, starting with Giuseppe Verdi’s “In solitaria stanza” from his Sei romanze of 1838, which was another highlight along with Stefano Donaudy’s “O del mio amato ben” from 1918 that immediately followed. After Verdi’s “Stornello”of 1869, the soprano concluded the program with two of her best renditions: the world premiere of contemporary American composer Jake Heggie’s “If I Had Known” to a text by Radvanovsky herself and Umberto Giordano’s aria “La mamma morta” from his celebrated opera, André Chenier. She equalled these with two encores: Francesco Cilea’s "Ecco: respiro appena... Io son l’umile ancella" from his opera Adriana Lecouvreur and what she said was her favorite aria, Giacomo Puccini’s "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca. She ended the evening with Harold Arlen’s immortal, glorious “Over the Rainbow,” set to lyrics by Yip Harburg.

Off-Broadway Play Review—Bess Wohl’s “Camp Siegfried”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2022 21:56; Written by Kevin Filipski

Camp Siegfried

Written by Bess Wohl

Directed by David Cromer

Through December 4, 2022

Second Stage Theater/Tony Kiser Theater

305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Johnny Berchtold and Lily McInenery in Bess Wohl's Camp Siegfried
(photo: Emilio Madrid)

In plays like Make Believe and Grand Horizons, Bess Wohl has shown a talent for witty observational humor and an ability to dissect intriguingly off-kilter relationships, both of which are on display in her latest play, Camp Siegfried—but there’s more at stake as well, which Wohl doesn’t make entirely convincing.

Set in 1938 on Long Island, Camp Siegfried introduces two characters at its eponymous locale, as German Americans indoctrinate their children into the ethos of fascism. (The camp was real, welcoming its guests from 1936 to 1941, when the America finally entered World War II against the Axis powers.) “He” is 17, all blustery confidence, while “She” is 16, seemingly naïve and initially bemused about why she is there.

For 85 minutes, Wohl follows the pair through their days and nights at the camp, as they meet cute, become friends then lovers, and engage in menial but intensely physical work (the two performers actually build a podium from wood onstage) to meet the qualifications for being part of the Aryan master race.

Wohl’s dialogue is at its best when He and She talk about what others are telling them: what their parents and other adults, like the married teacher She had an affair with, almost offhandedly say, loaded with meaning. She recounts that a local doctor she visits said to her, “Anyone can be seduced,” which could serve as the play’s subtitle. But Wohl takes the easy way out by not dramatizing effectively enough how the drift toward fascist, racist ideology can be done so casually, offhandedly.

This is underscored by the heavily pregnant final lines of dialogue, which bluntly state what the play has been understated about all along. As in Make Believe, the relatively short running time is both a plus and a minus: although it gets Wohl’s points across economically, there’s also a sense of something missing, that the play’s 11 scenes are mere sketches for a more penetrating and resonant psychological study yet to be written.

David Cromer directs economically on Brett J. Banakis’ beautifully appointed outdoor set, complete with a hillside, gravel path and even trees, cannily lit by Tyler Micoleau. Both actors, making their New York debuts, are commanding in their teenage awkwardness: Johnny Berchtold adroitly catches He’s balancing act of a kid trying to become a man in difficult circumstances.

Even better is Lily McInerny, who gives a tremendous performance as She, an initially shy wallflower who becomes a snarling, screaming defender of “America/Germany First” lunacy at the play’s climax. Her transformation from teenager to woman in front of our and (He’s) eyes is a scarily perfect portrayal of how ideology can lead to violence that’s the most unforgettable piece of acting on a New York stage right now.

The Sounds of the Berlin Philharmonic Beomes Unstuck In Time

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2022 21:00; Written by Jack Angstreich

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall, amidst an extremely strong season of orchestral music, on the evenings of Thursday and Friday, November 10th and 11th, I had the exceptional privilege to attend two superb concerts featuring the stellar musicians of the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic under the expert direction of its Chief Conductor, Kirill Petrenko.

The outstanding first program was devoted to a finally stunning account of Gustav Mahler’s monumental, challenging and extraordinary Seventh Symphony. Program annotator Jack Sullivan comments that the composer thought this was his “best work” but adds that “it is his least performed and understood.” The first movement begins with a solemn if fraught Adagio that is soon overtaken by a turbulent Allegro; the opening funeral march periodically recurs, leading to a very brief, beautiful, song-like interlude and then a return to the gloomier musical world that preceded it. The ensuing, ingenious “Nachtmusik I” starts more playfully and acquires a more propulsive character which then becomes dance-like, and reverts to the music at the movement’s outset. The Scherzo that follows is also in a somewhat populist vein, although livelier to a degree on the whole, even joyful at times. The second “Nachtmusik” movement is unexpectedly charming—if eccentric—with a few mysterious moments. And the Rondo-Finale, the most cheerful of the movements, is initially exciting—even sometimes tumultuous—and builds to a glorious, affirmative conclusion. The artists deservedly received a very enthusiastic ovation.

Also terrific was the second concert which began with the Carnegie Hall premiere of contemporary American composer Andrew Norman’s arresting, brilliantly orchestrated Unstuck. I reproduce his note on the work as follows:

I have never been more stuck than I was in the winter of 2008. My writing came to a grinding halt in January, and for a long time this piece languished on my desk—a mess of musical fragments that refused to cohere. It was not until the following May, when I saw a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and remembered one of its iconic sentences, that I had a breakthrough realization. The sentence was this: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” and the realization was that the lack of coherence in my ideas was to be embraced and explored, not overcome.

I realized that my musical materials lent themselves to a narrative arc that, like Vonnegut’s character, comes “unstuck” in time. Bits and pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of the music crop up in the wrong places like the flashbacks and flashforwards that define the structure and style of Slaughterhouse-Five.

I also realized that the word unstuck had resonances with the way that a few of the piece’s musical ideas get caught in repetitive loops. The orchestra, perhaps in some way dramatizing my own frustration with composing, spends a considerable amount of time and energy trying to free itself from these moments of stuckness.

Norman ascended to the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

The admirable virtuoso, Noah Bendix-Balgley, then joined the musicians for a marvelous performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s exquisite, almost Baroque, less commonly heard Violin Concerto No. 1. The opening Allegro moderato, for all its ebullience, is surprisingly serious, while the subsequent, even more remarkable Adagio is elevated, graceful and lyrical, and the brisk finale is vivacious and delightful. Abundant applause for the musicians was rewarded with a wonderful encore from the soloist: two traditional klezmer pieces—"Yismechu" and "Ot Azoy"—a genre in which Bendix-Balgley specializes.

Especially interesting, however, was the second half of the evening: a supremely confident rendition of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s striking, seldom played Symphony in F-sharp, Op. 40. The work opens very dramatically with a tension that pervades the entire movement, although there are serene passages. The Scherzo that ensues is sprightlier, if not free from agitation, with elements of grandeur, and features a more somber trio section. More Romantic is the often impassioned, but also introspective, Adagio. The finale is strange and unpredictable, with some haunting episodes, closing triumphantly. The audience responded with intense appreciation.

I look forward to the return of these tremendous artists.

November '22 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 18 November 2022 14:23; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Lost Illusions

(Music Box Films)

French director Xavier Giannoli—whose masterly 2003 debut, Eager Bodies, remains criminally unseen in the U.S.—turns his considerable talents to this sumptuous adaptation of a Balzac novel about a provincial young man, Lucien, in 1820s France whose affair with an older, married noblewoman, Louise, changes his life in ways he couldn’t dream of. Lucien eventually becomes one of Paris’ most popular (and feared) newspaper writers—and Giannoli perceptively shows the seductive parallels between yesterday’s yellow journalism and today’s “fake news.”

A superior cast led by Benjamin Voisin, Cecile de France, Jeanne Balibar and Gerard Depardieu, stunning photography by Christophe Beaucarne, and expert editing, costumes and sets, are harnessed by Giannoli on a large social, political and personal canvas that fills every one of his film’s 150 minutes with intelligent and grandly entertaining storytelling. The film’s luminous images look stunning on Blu-ray; too bad the only extras are brief interviews with Voisin, de France, and other cast members along with a superfluous short featurette showing off the cinematography.

Daisies

(Criterion)

Czech director Vera Chytilova—who went on to make several good, and a few great, films in a distinguished career before her death in 2014 at age 85—is best known for her 1966 debut feature, an unfortunately dated piece of empty surrealism and experimentalism, flashing its admittedly inventive colors, costumes, photography and editing at the service of a heavyhanded satire of materialism and feminist stereotypes.

That she got the poseurishness out of her system is the best takeaway from this clever but shallow film. There’s a stunning-looking hi-def transfer; extras comprise two early Chytilova shorts; an audio commentary; interview with programmer Irena Kovarova; featurette about Chytilova’s collaboration with her Daisies cinematographer and screenwriter; and a 2002 documentary about Chytilova.

Earth Girls Are Easy

(Vestron)

Julien Temple’s fizzy 1988 musical is a colorful piece of lunacy about aliens coming to California and falling in with the manicurist (Geena Davis) whose pool they land in. Davis is as adorable as she’s ever been, Julie Brown provides the movie’s funniest lines and best music segments as her coworker and friend, and the aliens are amusingly portrayed by Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans.

The movie is mainly forgotten after it ends, but it has share of bright, loopy moments. There’s a terrific hi-def transfer; extras include new and archival interviews with Temple, Brown, Rocket and crew members, along with a commentary and deleted scenes.

Starstruck

(Opus Arte)

Gene Kelly created the ballet Pas de Dieux for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1960, and now it’s been beautifully resurrected by the Scottish Ballet, which premiered its own version last fall in Edinburgh and newly choreographed by Christopher Hampson, which has been filmed for posterity.

This story of Greek gods has been set to the music of Gershwin’s Concerto in F and Chopin’s Les Sylphides, and the dancing is as physical and athletic as it is in such Kelly films as Singin’ in the Rain. The spectacular dancers are led by Sophie Martin and Christopher Harrison. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

(Warner Bros)

From a short story by A.S. Byatt about an intellectually rigorous but emotionally distant scholar whose encounter with a Djinn gets her three wishes in exchange for his freedom, director George Miller’s adaptation is, as usual, visually splendid and imaginatively conceived, but it remains as remote as its protagonist initially is.

Although the movie extols the virtues of storytelling through the Djinn’s many extravagant tales, it ends up dramatically inert, despite the best efforts of Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton in the leads. Of course, it all looks fantastic on Blu; no extras.

Streaming/In-Theater Releases of the Week

Black Notebooks—Ronit

(Panorama Films)

Ronit Elkabetz, a remarkable Israeli actress and filmmaker who made several provocative works with her brother Shlomi, died of cancer in 2016 at age 51—a shocking and sad loss for the world of cinema.

Luckily, we can still savor her many multilayered performances, and we can also be grateful that Shlomi created this emotionally shattering love letter to his sister that shows them working on their last film together, Gett, along with promoting it around the world while knowing that her sickness was in the process of slowing her down.

The Estate

(Capstone)

It’s the most familiar of comic setups—family members battle among themselves to get on the good side of their dying wealthy old aunt—and if writer-director Dean Craig doesn’t go anywhere new with his clichéd, stereotyped characters, his cast is attuned enough to make it entertaining and even occasionally hilarious.

Kathleen Turner is a hoot as the bedbound rich aunt, Toni Colette and Anna Faris are first-rate as the scheming sisters, David Duchovny amusingly slimy as a desperate cousin, with Rosemarie DeWitt and Ron Livingston rounding out the droll ensemble—it’s recycled black comedy, no doubt, but it has moments of inspired hilarity.

Paul Taylor—Creative Domain

(First Run)

One of the true giants of modern dance, Paul Taylor (who died in 2018) was a choreographer nonpareil, and Kate Geis’ 2014 documentary was the last time anyone would record how Taylor created his singular works from the ground up.

It’s a fascinating look at how art is brought to life, showing how Taylor painstakingly built a single dance through not only movement but also his observational genius, something that’s been dynamically filmed by Geis and renowned dance cinematographer Tom Hurwit.

Peaceful

(Distrib Films US)

French actress Emmanuelle Bercot has also written and directed interesting films that closely study fraught relationships, including her latest, in which she chronicles the last months of Benjamin, an acting teacher with terminal cancer and how he deals with his illness, his students, his doctor and his domineering mother.

Although she goes full-blown sentimental—especially in an egregious subplot about a son Benjamin didn’t know he had—Bercot’s instincts are always unerring when it comes to casting: Benoît Magimel is phenomenal as Benjamin, and Catherine Deneuve (mom), Gabriel Sara (a real-life doctor playing Benjamin’s doctor) and Cecile de France (his loyal nurse) are as real and vital as he is.

See How They Run

(Searchlight)

In this harmlessly lighthearted whodunit that riffs on the popularity of recent Agatha Christie adaptations, Sam Rockwell and Saiorse Ronan play mismatched investigators of a murder onstage at Christie’s long-running mystery play, The Mousetrap, with no shortage of suspects.

Director Tom George and writer Mark Chappell are not as clever as they think they are, so the movie just ambles along to its preordained denouement, but it’s helped along by Rockwell, Ronan and a capable supporting cast including Ruth Wilson, Adrien Brody and David Oyelowo.

CD Release of the Week

Tchaikovsky/Rimsky-Korsakov—Orchestral Works

(LSO)

Both Russian composers on this recording were brilliant orchestral colorists, as these splendid performances by the London Symphony Orchestra under conductor Gianandrea Noseda so excitingly demonstrate. Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony was his obvious masterpiece, and so the fifth symphony always suffers by comparison; still, it’s an attractive, absorbing and ultimately substantial work in its own right.

Meanwhile, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov is best known for his fantastical operas whose music is usually more memorable than the mythical stories they tell. While his magnum opus, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, is filled with beautiful melodies and exquisite orchestral tone painting, the four-movement suite included here distills three hours of Rimsky’s aural poetry into 21 exquisitely crafted minutes.

Reviews

Sondra Radvanovsky Dazzles at Carnegie Hall

Off-Broadway Play Review—Bess Wohl’s “Camp Siegfried”

The Sounds of the Berlin Philharmonic Beomes Unstuck In Time

November '22 Digital Week II

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