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Staatskapelle Berlin Plays Classics of Mozart at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 23 January 2017 15:52; Written by Jack Angstreich

Daniel Barenboim

One of the most imposing highlights of the current season at Carnegie Hall is a complete cycle of the nine symphonies of Anton Bruckner performed by the august Staatskapelle Berlin under the direction of the renowned pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim. Almost all of the symphonies are paired with a concert work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, mostly piano concerti played by Barenboim, conducting from the piano. (Bruckner also completed two early symphonies before his No. 1, a study symphony and the Symphony No. 0; regrettably, neither will be presented in this cycle.)

The series opened auspiciously on the evening of Thursday, January 19th, with a sterling reading of the popular Piano Concerto No. 27, the composer's final work in the genre. The seldom heard, remarkable Symphony No. 1 made an even stronger impression—played here in the original , "Linz" version —and both halves of the concert were rewarded with avid applause.

The music of the following evening began even more arrestingly with a gripping account of the dramatic Piano Concerto No. 20, in one of the most satisfying renditions in recent memory. Also exhilarating was the rarely played Symphony No. 2—presented in the 1877 version edited by Leopold Nowak —surpassing the accomplishment of the previous night. An ardent ovation was a prelude to a noteworthy announcement — that this date marked the sixtieth anniversary of Barenboim's first appearance on the Carnegie Hall stage when he performed at age fourteen with the legendary Leopold Stokowski. The conductor, after recounting an amusing anecdote about the genesis of that event, movingly delivered some impassioned remarks about the necessity to preserve music and the arts in these troubled times— statements which were received with great warmth by the enthusiastic audience.

Barenboim and these musicians were impressively able to match the intensity of that night at the ensuing concert on the following evening, this time with a magnificent reading of the ambitious Piano Concerto No. 24. The program closed triumphantly with an engrossing account of the formidable, stirring, 1878 version of Symphony No. 3, with the passionate applause bringing an exciting weekend to a pleasing conclusion.

Theater Review—“The Beauty Queen of Leenane” at BAM

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 20 January 2017 22:42; Written by Kevin Filipski

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Written by Martin McDonagh; directed by Garry Hynes

Performances through February 5, 2017

Marie Mullen, Aisling O'Sullivan and Aaron Monaghan (photo: Stepehen Cummiskey)

The world of playwright Martin McDonagh is more sardonic than malevolent, and his Tony-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is also the most notable: he introduces characters who put one another through physical and emotional wringers, often nonsensically, sometimes amusingly: but, in the end, we don’t give a “feck” (to use his favorite epithet) about them.

Maureen, a 40-year-old spinster living with her aging mum Mag in their barebones home in the small Irish village of Leenane, rues wasting her prime years taking care of Mag instead of having her own life. One evening, she returns from a party with Pato, himself home from doing construction work in England; he spends the night, to Mag’s shock. Maureen pretends that they had great sex and are now a couple; but before Pato leaves for Boston, his letter imploring her to join him—which he has his younger brother Ray deliver to her—ends up in Mag’s hands, and Maureen’s plans for the future are again thwarted.

McDonagh writes lively dialogue, but he also likes a rigged game. These people have wit and clever retorts but are also underbrained: we are asked to swallow more improbabilities than we can keep track of. How have Maureen and Pato never gotten together in the decades before the party? Why is Ray so imbecile that he wouldn’t wait to track down Maureen to give her Pato’s letter instead of leaving it for Mag to open? Why would Mag dump a pot of her urine into the kitchen sink every morning without cleaning anything afterwards? And does Maureen’s long-ago mental breakdown have anything to do with the play’s sleight-of-hand ending, which suggests that some—if not all—of the preceding two-plus hours are her own imaginings?

Obviously all this is so that McDonagh can make a black comedy unconstrained by rules of logic: Ray, who earlier complained to Mag that Maureen kept his swingball that got into her yard when he was a child years ago, happens to find it on a shelf near the door when he visits Maureen at play’s end. The power plays and emotional blackmail the women perform on each other become enervating after awhile, which McDonagh himself senses: the sudden eruption of violence is the next step, however implausibly it’s dramatized.

Still, while watching it certainly holds interest, and that’s due to director Garry Hynes, sensitive to McDonagh’s rhythms, and her cast, which makes these shenanigans for the most part entertaining. Marty Rea (Pato) and Aaron Monaghan (Ray) are never believable as brothers but they have McDonagh’s rap down pat, especially Rea in Pato’s monologue that opens act two.

Marie Mullen—who won a Tony as Maureen in 1996—plays Mag with knowing derisiveness, even if she is a shade too broad in her portrayal. Best is Aisling O’Sullivan as a simply stunning Maureen: she makes this self-contradictory virgin/sadist plausibly vulnerable and even sympathetic. What she does with Maureen’s barking insults and moments of defeated silence is create a fatally wounded woman who far surpasses what McDonagh himself dreamed up on the page.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

BAM Harvey Theatre,651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY

bam.org

Broadway Review—“The Present” with Cate Blanchett

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 19 January 2017 03:07; Written by Kevin Filipski

The Present

Adapted by Andrew Upton after Chekhov’s Platonov

Directed by John Crowley

Performances through March 19, 2017

Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh in The Present (photo: Joan Marcus)

A teenaged Anton Chekhov wrote an unwieldy, untitled play that was never produced during his lifetime. It resurfaced after his death and has been adapted by fine British writers like Michael Frayn and David Hare under the titles Wild Honey and Platonov, the latter the drama’s eponymous protagonist. Chekhov’s original runs over five hours in performance, and that we are spared an extra two hours of one of the few reasons to be thankful for Andrew Upton’s adaptation, pointlessly titled The Present, starring Upton’s wife, Cate Blanchett and a host of hard-working Australian performers from the Sydney Theater Company.

Still, that means that, for three hours, we are harangued by a fatiguing group of Russians gathering for a weekend in the country to celebrate widow Anna’s 40^th birthday, including her stepson Sergei and his wife Sophia; Mikhail Platonov and his wife Sasha, and Nikolai and his girlfriend Maria. Mikhail, Sergei and Nikolai are lifelong friends, and Anna has been close to all of them: but she is closest to Mikhail, who also had a fling with Sophia years ago—a dalliance which seems about ready to continue—is looking to seduce Maria and (why not?) Anna herself.

Although it has the usual Chekhovian ingredients—including one of the most important, a loaded gun—the messy stew that is The Present isn’t entirely the original playwright’s fault, for his humanity occasionally peeks through the mishmash. Instead it’s Upton’s: the adaptation (which at least whittles the head count down to a more manageable baker’s dozen) is scuttled by an inability to make any sense of the many narrative and emotional layers the young Chekhov piled on. And updating the setting to late 1980s glasnost-era Russia, whose oligarchs have their own set of complications, doesn’t make things any clearer.

Director John Crowley does Upton no favors by ratcheting up the performances to the point where even an A-1 scenery chewer like Blanchett seems downright dour as Anna, perking up only when she holds a gun or flails around lewdly to the dance hit “What Is Love?” in a ridiculously pointless scene. Other music choices are also suspect: there are Clash songs blaring at the beginning and end of scenes, but why would these Russians listen to the Clash? Just because Mikhail hands Anna a cassette of the group’s London Calling album doesn’t justify the aural intrusions.

The opening moments, after the first-act curtain rises, are lively and amusing as these people wander onstage after they arrive for the weekend celebration. But it all quickly palls for the audience as endless discussions of life, love, betrayal—and even a certain American movie Mikhail saw—are indistinguishable and anything but illuminating.

In a solid cast of thirteen, Jacqueline McKenzie (Sophia) and Anna Bamford (Maria) score best as they nearly create full-blooded characterizations, while Blanchett and costar Richard Roxburgh—our erstwhile stars—give workmanlike but uninspired performances in roles they are too old for, especially Roxburgh, whose middle-aged Mikhail is never a convincingly irresistible 27-year-old heartthrob.

The Present

Barrymore Theatre,243 West 47th Street, New York, NY

thepresentbroadway.com

January '17 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 17 January 2017 13:28; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

Dog Eat Dog
(RLJ)

Paul Schrader has always been a humorless filmmaker, and his new flick’s attempts to be funny are so witless and ham-fisted that every single moment feels forced, false and amateurish.

Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe are reduced to doing little more than striking inept crook poses, so they can’t be blamed for Schrader’s failure to mine blackly comic gold out of the killings of various innocent people (hardy har har). The film looks great on Blu-ray; extras comprise a Schrader commentary, Cage introduction and Cage/Schrader Q&A.

Fox and His Friends
(Criterion)

Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s 1975 melodrama about a working-class homosexual and how his lottery win affects his already lopsided relationship with his new middle-class lover (whose arrogant friends also take advantage of him) is, as usual with this prolific but painfully uneven director, a mishmash of well-observed moments and mediocre filler, not helped by indifferent acting.

Criterion’s hi-def transfer is excellent; extras include interviews both archival (Fassbinder and composer Peer Raben) and new (actor Harry Baer and an appreciation from filmmaker Ira Sachs).

New Orleans—Music in Exile
(MVD)

Because of Hurricane Katrina, one of New Orleans’ biggest industries—its wide-ranging and vital music scene—took a massive hit, as so many musicians and the places they played were displaced by the raging waters.

That its music scene rose anew (even as it temporarily relocated to other towns) is what director Robert Mugge’s entertaining and hopeful documentary is about, through interviews with and performances by local luminaries as Dr. John, Cyril Neville, Marcia Ball and Theresa Andersson. There’s a decent hi-def transfer; extras include featurettes and additional performances.

DVDs of the Week

Command and Control
(PBS)

In this gripping American Experience documentary, director Robert Kenner adroitly visualizes Eric Schlosser’s massive book recounting a near-disastrous nuclear accident in Arkansas in 1980, including interviews with many of the principals and nice use of a mixture of archival footage and re-enactments.

The DVD comprises two versions of the film: the two-hour version shown on PBS, and a 90-minute edit shown in theaters. Either way—though more so in its longer version—Command and Control is an unmissable (and scary) experience.

Dancer

(Sundance Selects)

Steve Cantor’s engaging portrait of Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin introduces us to one of the youngest stars of The Royal Ballet, a celebrity who now has millions of fans worldwide thanks to YouTube videos showing off his dexterous technique and astonishing agility.

Although a little thin at 80 minutes, it does delve into his difficult childhood (his parents are divorced) and how his decision to leave Ukraine to dance affected his extended family. Extras include 15 minutes of deleted scenes.

CD of the Week

Spheres—Claremont Trio

(AMR)

Performing the chamber music of American composer Robert Paterson—whose work I was heretofore unfamiliar with—the Claremont Trio displays unflagging energy and tastefulness.

His two trios, 1995’s Sun and its 2015 follow-up, Moon, are wistful yet muscular works with a surfeit of melodic and harmonic ideas enchantingly realized by the Claremont’s members (Sun was recorded with its original pianist Donna Kwong; Moon with its new pianist Andrea Lam). Sisters Emily and Julia Bruskin play violin and cello, respectively, with exquisite sensitivity, and Julia teams with Lam and fellow cellist Karen Ouzounian for Paterson’s pinpoint Elegy.

Reviews

Staatskapelle Berlin Plays Classics of Mozart at Carnegie Hall

Theater Review—“The Beauty Queen of Leenane” at BAM

Broadway Review—“The Present” with Cate Blanchett

January '17 Digital Week III

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