Film & Arts - Film Festival Traveler

the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.

Connect with us:

You are here: Home

Film & Arts

Reviews

Waltzing with the MET Orchestra

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 20 June 2022 13:56; Written by Jack Angstreich

Christine Goerke performs with the MET Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall, on Wednesday, June 15th, I was privileged to attend the first of two extraordinary concerts on consecutive evenings featuring the outstanding musicians of the MET Orchestra under the exhilarating direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, one of the most engaging conductors working today.

The program opened brilliantly with an exuberant rendition of Richard Strauss’s amazing Don Juan, inspired by a work by the great German Romantic poet, Nikolaus Lenau. The program note adds that the composer “refrained from providing a dramatic key to his tone poem, though he did preface the score with extracts from Lenau’s verse play.” There’s a satirical—and thereby comic—thrust to much of the score but as important is a sensuous lyricism as well as an evocation of nobility. The music becomes turbulent, dramatic, and suspenseful, ending on an enigmatic, if pessimistic, note.

Nézet-Séguin briefly addressed the audience, expressing his happiness about returning to public performance after the COVID disruption, before leading the musicians in a marvelous realization of contemporary composer Missy Mazzoli’s enjoyable, surprisingly accessible, and beautifully orchestrated Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) from 2014, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and which received its Carnegie Hall premiere with this performance. Intriguingly, the piece is additionally scored for piano, synthesizer, and harmonicas. The composer’s own description of the work is worth quoting—she said that Sinfoniais:

music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.

Mazzoli entered the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

The second half of the evening was arguably the highlight of the concert, a magnificent account of the first act of Richard Wagner’s major opera, Die Walküre, with soprano Christine Goerke as Sieglinde, tenor Brandon Jovanovich as Siegmund, and bass-baritone Eric Owens as Hunding. The music began thrillingly and built to an overwhelming conclusion; the singers were all excellent while Goerke--one of the most gifted sopranos working today—was exceptional. The artists were rewarded with a standing ovation.

The following night’s performance—devoted to the music of Hector Berlioz—was equally enthralling, opening with an exquisite version of the Le corsaire Overture, which has a stirring beginning, succeeded by a slower, more introspective theme, and then quickens excitingly, eventually attaining a stunning climax. Joyce DiDonato—one of the finest contemporary mezzo-sopranos—then joined the musicians to fabulously sing two glorious arias—with theirreçitativeintroductions—from the towering opera, Les Troyens, after Virgil’s Aeneid: “Chers Tyriens” and "Adieu, fière cité.” In between the two arias, the orchestra played a gorgeous, at times tempestuous, instrumental interlude from the opera, "Chasse royale et orage,” about which Carnegie Hall’s program note informatively says:

Dido’s fateful dalliance with the Trojan hero Aeneas is depicted in the orchestral interlude “Chasse royale et orage” (“Royal Hunt and Storm”). In pantomimed action that Berlioz annotates in the score, the lovers seek refuge from a torrential squall in a woodland cave, where they consummate their passion wordlessly and unseen. (This erotic tableau was cut after the first performance at the Opéra-Comique, ostensibly because the elaborate set change took too long.)

DiDonato garnered a deservedly enthusiastic ovation.

The second part of the event was also stupendous: a magisterial interpretation of Berlioz’s early, pathbreaking masterpiece, the Symphonie Fantastique. A haunting introduction precedes the ebullient, sometimes agitated, Allegro, which unexpectedly contains some of the composer’s mostavant-gardemusic. After this, “A Ball,” is fittingly a splendid waltz movement which builds to a dynamic close. The next movement, “Scene in the Country,” opens quietly and is evocatively pastoral; it becomes more forceful and ends portentously. The ensuing “March to the Scaffold” is mesmerizing and astonishingly intense while the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” is comprised of the most ominous and propulsive music yet—it is too an epitome of the grotesque—indeed, the most breathtaking of all. Rapturous applause drew DiDonato back to the stage for an incredible encore: an unutterably lovely performance of Strauss’s incomparablelied,“Morgen!”

I look forward to the return of these terrific musicians to Carnegie Hall next season.

June '22 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 16 June 2022 20:09; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week

Lost Illusions

(Music Box Films)

French director Xavier Giannoli—whose masterly 2003 debut, Eager Bodies, remains criminally unseen in this country—now turns his considerable talents to costume epics in the form of 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, 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.

After Blue

(Altered Innocence)

French director Bertrand Mandico’s sci-fi adventure, set on the title planet populated entirely by women, follows the journey of Roxy and her mother Zora, who stumble upon a villain named, inexplicably, Kate Bush. (There are no allusions to the real Kate Bush or her music; it’s a coincidence that her newfound fame thanks to Stranger Things happened at the same time.)

Mandico creates several dazzling set pieces, his visual imagination running riot throughout, but after awhile, the endless parade of surrealistic visuals and situations becomes numbing, and the film simply peters out after two-plus hours. Under the circumstances, that Paula Luna (Roxy) and Elina Löwensohn (Zora) make any impression at all is something of a triumph.

Watcher

(IFC Midnight)

Despite the winning presence of Maika Monroe, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about a young woman who begins to suspect that a nosy neighbor might have malign intent is pretty much rote and uninteresting.

Okuno and writer Zack Ford’s film is set in Bucharest, and Monroe plays Julia, the American girlfriend of Francis, a Romanian-American man who has a new job that’s brought them to Romania, and there is a certain tension in her inability to understand or comprehend not only the language but also the customs of her new locale, but the mystery itself isn’t very compelling, and the denouement dropped in after 90 minutes is faintly ridiculous.

We Are the Thousand

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

In 2015, an Italian musician named Fabio decided to lure his favorite group, the Foo Fighters, to perform in his hometown of Cesena by bringing together the “Rockin’ 1000”—one thousand drummers, guitarists, bass players and singers all performing the Foos’ hit “Learn to Fly”—and hoping the video goes viral. It did, of course: and Anita Rivaroli’s wonderful documentary shows how dreams can come true through sheer perseverance.

There’s a great cameo by Foos headman Dave Grohl, who surprises Fabio and his cohorts when he responds to their plea in Italian, and of course, the band does perform for delirious fans. The film goes on too long as it’s hoped lightning strikes twice by putting together a full set of “Rockin’ 1000” performances, which dilutes the original idea somewhat.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

I Capuleti e i Montecchi

(Naxos)

Staged in 2015 in the same Venice opera house where it premiered in 1830, Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—which always rises or falls on the female singers who portray the star-crossed lovers—has a pair of sublime singing actresses: Australian soprano Jessica Pratt (Giulietta) and Italian mezzo Sonia Ganassi (Romeo).

Arnaud Bernard’s direction keeps the focus on the tragic love story, while Omer Weir Wellber conducts a forceful reading of Bellini’s melodious score. There’s first-rate hi-def audio and video.

The Clock

(Warner Archive)

The first of three Judy Garland vehicles this weeks—see the musicals For Me and My Gal and Ziegfeld Girl, below—is this schlocky 1945 romance with Garland and Robert Walker, who meet cute in Manhattan (he’s a milkfed soldier on 48-hour leave) and proceed to improbably fall in love while having more improbable NYC adventures.

Directed spiffily by Vincente Minnelli and enacted ingratiatingly by the two stars, the film still comes across as cloying, despite some charming moments. The B&W images look superb on Blu; extras are classic short and cartoon as well as a radio adaptation with Garland and John Hodiak.

Eraser—Reborn

(Warner Bros)

I doubt the original Eraser (with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams) is so fondly remembered that we needed a reboot 26 years later, but here we are: a U.S. marshal specializing in “erasing” high-profile witnesses (moving them into a witness protection program) takes the case of a crime lord’s beautiful wife who wears a wire for the FBI. The pair are soon on the run to Cape Town, South Africa, of all places.

John Pogue has directed a derivative chase movie from Michael Weiss’ turgid script, with a dull Dominic Sherwood as our hero; only Jacky Lai, as the heroine, provides needed liveliness. The Blu-ray transfer looks fine; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

For Me and My Gal

(Warner Archive)

Busby Berkeley directed this charming 1942 musical romance with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly (in his film debut) as vaudevillians who decide to work together and get married after they get their big break onstage in New York, but Kelly is drafted after the U.S. enters World War I.

Although there are several splashy song-and-dance numbers, the underlying tone is melancholic, and even if we don’t quite get a true downer of an ending, its sobering finale fits with the fact that we just started fighting World War II when this was released. It looks superb—and in sparkling B&W—on Blu-ray; extras include an audio commentary, two vintage musical shorts, two deleted musical numbers, radio adaptation with Garland and Kelly, and a radio promo for the film.

Nerone

(C Major)

Although better known as a librettist for Verdi’s masterly final operas (Otello and Falstaff), Arrigo Boito also composed operas: Mefistofele was his lone success, but Nerone—about the infamous Roman emperor Nero—has drama and sweep to spare, along with unsavory yet fascinating characters. Only Boito’s music is a bit of a miscalculation.

Olivier Tambosi’s 2021 staging at the Italian summer festival in Bregenz is populated with first-rate performers who persuasively embody these people, led by Mexican tenor Rafael Rojas’ Nerone. (Sadly, Rojas died earlier this year.) Dirk Kaftan leads the Vienna Philharmonic and Prague Philharmonic Choir in a fine reading of Boito’s uneven score. There are superb hi-def audio and video.

9 Bullets

(Screen Media)

Writer-director Gigi Gaston’s crime drama follows a stripper, Gypsy, with a heart of gold who protects a young boy who saw his family murdered in cold blood by goons hired by a mob boss she fools around with.

Notwithstanding Lena Headey’s always watchable presence—even if Gypsy has as many contradictions as Headey has tattoos on a body she unapologetically shows throughout—this vacuous flick wastes a couple of ‘70s holdovers (Barbara Hershey and Colleen Camp) and foregoes plausibility in the characters and their relationships. It’s fairly risible stuff, even for Headey fans.

Vive L’amour

(Film Movement Classics)

One of the key films of the Taiwanese New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang’s 1994 drama follows a trio of alienated young people who are part of an at times enervating but mostly absorbing love triangle of sorts.

Setting his film primarily in a vacant apartment where a man and woman meet for anonymous trysts (while another man watches), Ming-liang eschews conventional narrative—there’s scant motivation and occasional dialogue, all recorded by long takes—to visually mirror his protagonists’ isolation in sleek, soulless Taipei, culminating in the final extended shot of actress Yang Kuei-mei in tears. Ming-liang’s images look spectacular in hi-def; lone extra is a new director interview.

Ziegfeld Girl

(Warner Archive)

This overlong 1941 musical, directed efficiently by Robert Z. Leonard, has its characteristic Busby Berkeley dance set pieces, but the busy plot—three young women take differing routes to showgirl stardom—was old-hat even then. Still, it’s worth watching three of Hollywood’s greats at the top of their game as the main trio: Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr.

The restored B&W hi-def image looks sumptuous; extras include an intro by Garland biographer John Fricke, Our Gang short, vintage short We Must Have Music, with a segment of the missing original finale of the film, and two audio-only outtakes.

CD Releases of the Week

Dora Pejačević—Piano Concerto/Symphony

(Chandos)

Dora Pejačević (1885-1923), from Croatia, is another in a long line of female composers finally getting their due, as this excellent disc comprising two of her signature works—Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Symphony for Large Orchestra—shows.

Pejačević’s Romantic style is in evidence in these accomplished works, notably the first concerto and symphony by a Croatian composer: the performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Sakari Oramo, and a superlative soloist in the piano concerto (Peter Donohoe) make her music a most welcome find. Here’s hoping we hear more from a composer performed regularly during her lifetime but whose career was tragically cut short when she died at 38, mere weeks after giving birth.

Jacques Offenbach—Le Voyage dans la Lune

(Bru Zane)

The king of French operetta, Jacques Offenbach (1819-80), effortlessly churned out entertaining music spectacles that held stages throughout Europe for decades, and this one—based on Jules Verne’s story, The Voyage to the Moon—has diverting ensembles and solos as well as beguiling dance and instrumental interludes. All that’s missing is the video component, since when originally staged, this comic extrava

ganza needed about 20 different sets to visualize Verne’s epic story of space travel. This world premiere recording of the complete work is well-performed by the Chœur and Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie under conductor Pierre Dumoussaud and has a fine singing cast. But what makes this release is the impressive packaging, like an oversize book, which houses the two discs and more than 200 pages of notes, essays, bios, a synopsis and a libretto.

"Forward Into Light": Songs of Freedom & Suffrage at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 15 June 2022 14:31; Written by Jack Angstreich

Hilary Hahn with the New York Philharmonic

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, June 10th, I had the great pleasure to attend a terrific concert featuring the New York Philharmonic—playing at their near finest—under the unusually effective direction of Jaap van Zweden.

The program began promisingly with the remarkable, marvelously performed world premiere of a new commission by the ensemble, the beautifully orchestratedForward Into Lightby the American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. To describe the work, I can do no better than to quote her note on it:

Forward Into Light is a meditation on perseverance, bravery, and alliance. The piece was inspired by the American women suffragists—Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkála-Šá, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, to name but a few—who devoted their lives to the belief that women were human beings and therefore entitled to equal rights and protections under the law of the United States of America.

I wrote the music thinking about what it means to believe in something so deeply that one is willing to endure harassment, deprivation, assault, incarceration, hunger, force-feedings, death threats, and life endangerment in order to fight for it.

Formally, the piece was inspired by the idea of synergistic interpersonal partnerships, which lay at the heart of the American women’s suffrage movement. The best-documented example of this was the alchemical relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” Stanton said of Anthony. “We did better work together than either could alone … and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of 30 long years; arguments that no man has answered.”

Forward Into Light opens with three motivic ideas: a pair of ascending sixth intervals in the violins, an undulating quintuplet figure in the harp, and a lyrical line in close canon led by the violas. The trio of ideas coax each other forward, tentatively at first, and then more urgently, as tremors of adversity intensify the stakes. New voices join the conversation, challenging and subverting the original ideas to explore new collaborative solutions, united in the search for a strength that only a defined, mutual purpose can yield.

Forward Into Light features a musical quote fromMarch of the Women, composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, with words by Cicely Hamilton. The anthem of the women’s suffrage movement,March of the Womenwas sung in homes and halls, on streets and farms, and on the steps of the United States Capitol. It’s briefly alluded to by the oboes in close canon following each of the narrative’s first two arcs, and then precedes the ending as a recorded sample, performed here by Werca’s Folk, a women’s choir based in Northumberland, England, under the direction of Sandra Kerr (used here with permission).

The title of the piece derives from a suffrage slogan made famous by the banner that suffragist Inez Milholland carried while riding a white horse to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, DC:

“Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light!”

The very attractive Snider, who wore a striking black and emerald green dress, joined the musicians onstage to graciously receive the audience’s acclaim.

The splendid virtuoso Hilary Hahn then emerged as soloist for an impressive account of the fabulous Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber, one of the most exquisite examples of the genre. The composer said the following about the piece:

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was completed in July 1940, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania, and is Mr. Barber’s most recent work for orchestra. It is lyric and rather intimate in character, and a moderate-sized orchestra is used: eight woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings.

The first movement—Allegro molto moderato—begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement—Andante sostenuto—is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.

The program note adds:

Barber contributed this comment to The Philadelphia Orchestra’s program for the premiere of his Violin Concerto. Written in the third person, it refers to tempo markings that Barber would later simplify.

The opening Allegro is gorgeously expressive, but at times dramatic, while the ensuing Andante is more inward, but also lovely, infused with a passionate Romanticism that pervades many of the composer’s works. The finale is lighter in tone—indeed often comic—and commensurately dazzling in its way. A standing ovation elicited an extraordinary encore: Johann Sebastian Bach’s sublime Sarabande from his Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004.

Even more rewarding was the second half of the concert: an utterly persuasive realization of Gustav Mahler’s magisterial Symphony No. 1. A mysterious, anticipatory introduction precedes the the truly enchanted main body of the first movement, which has a pastoral quality but acquires a more suspenseful and triumphant character, building to a joyous conclusion. The second movement, with the rhythms of a Ländler, is celebratory as well. The third movement—which opens uncannily with the primary melody played in a high register by the first double-bassist—is a brilliantly sardonic funeral march—based on Frère Jacques—not without genuine melancholy, periodically interrupted by a pastiche of popular Viennese band music—this epitomizes what may be described as the “dialectical” nature of the composer’s aesthetic sensibility. (A lyrical middle section is especially haunting.) The finale begins tumultuously, but rapidly moves to a thrilling, propulsive tempo arrested by slower, more introspective—indeed celestial—passages; the music increases in intensity, closing exuberantly. The artists received rousing applause, ending an unexpectedly memorable evening.

Off-Broadway Play Review—“Fat Ham” at the Public Theater

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 08 June 2022 23:19; Written by Kevin Filipski

Marcel Spears (Juicy) and Adrianna Mitchell (Opal) in Fat Ham (photo: Joan Marcus)

Fat Ham

Written by James Ijames

Directed by Saheem Ali

Performances through July 3, 2022

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NY

publictheater.org

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Fat Ham, James Ijames’ brash riff on Hamlet, is set at a backyard barbecue at a middle-class Black home in North Carolina. The protagonist is Juicy, a young queer Black man mourning the recent death of his murderous father, Pap, as well as dealing with his confusion over the quick wedding of his mother, Tedra, and his uncle (and Pap’s brother), Rev.

So far, so familiar for anyone remotely versed in Shakespeare, but Ijames makes enough changes to well-worn plotlines and characters—Ophelia is no longer in love with the eponymous hero but instead is Opal, a lesbian friend of Juicy’s—to move his play onto its own dramatic path. So it’s strangely distancing that Fat Ham dances around Hamlet’s heavy emotional baggage instead of becoming something more compellingly, completely original.

For every witty bit repurposed from Shakespeare—like the amusing appearance of Juicy’s father’s ghost, imploring his son to avenge his death—there are moments echoing Saturday Night Live sketches, as when Rev says about his marinated smoked pork that “The secret’s in the rub” and Juicy turns to the audience to respond (wink wink, nudge nudge), “Aye, there’s the rub.” It’s too bad that such scattered “soliloquies” owe more to the extraneous horseplay of Central Park Shakespeare stagings than to the genius of Hamlet itself.

Also, there’s not really much sense of an aching loss, which gives Juicy’s plight even less urgency. Ijames’ updates include a showstopping karaoke scene of Tedra singing Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love” with Juicy, who then sings (no surprise) “Creep” by Radiohead, and a drag show finale of straitlaced soldier Larry (a kind of Laertes), who’s secretly in love with and outed by Juicy, and who finally is able to express his own truth. For all their audience pleasing, however, such moments come across as rather desperate instead of flowing naturally from the relationships onstage.

Saving Fat Ham is the verve with which it’s been staged by director Saheem Ali, its 90 minutes flying by quickly so that, whenever something is too on the nose, off we move onto something else. There’s also the uniformly fine cast led by the terrific Nikki Crawford as a funny, sexy Tedra and the excellent Marcel Spears, who assumes the mantle of both Shakespeare and Ijames to make Juicy more than a mere takeoff but a believably sympathetic traumatized son.

The real (if non-fatal) flaw of Fat Ham—much like the Danish prince himself—stems from its author not making up his mind to go in a daring new direction with his Hamlet reinterpretation.

Reviews

Waltzing with the MET Orchestra

June '22 Digital Week II

"Forward Into Light": Songs of Freedom & Suffrage at Carnegie Hall

Off-Broadway Play Review—“Fat Ham” at the Public Theater

More Articles...

Newsletter Sign Up

Upcoming Events

Tweets!