Music Interview: Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 10:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Isabel Bayrakdarian Is The Cunning Little Vixen
An opera by Leos Janacek
Directed by Doug Fitch
Performed by the New York Philharmonic
Conducted by Alan Gilbert

The New York Philharmonic finished its first season under music director Alan Gilbert last June with Doug Fitch’s stunning, multi-media staging of Gyorgy Ligeti’s fantastical modern opera, Le Grand Macabre, in its New York premiere.

In what may become an annual closing event, the Philharmonic has brought back Finch to stage Leos Janacek’s gorgeous opera about the cycles of life among the human and animal worlds. The Cunning Little Vixen has the full forces of the orchestra performing Janacek’s superlative, singular score with a top cast, which will be led by Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian as the foxy female protagonist herself.

No stranger to this role -- since understudying it in her hometown of Toronto for the Canadian Opera Company’s 1998 production -- she has performed it in the original Czech (these performances are in English), around the world.

Bayrakdarian discussed how she approaches this unique character while on a break from rehearsals at Avery Fisher Hall.

KF: How familiar are you with Janacek’s Vixen?

IB: In 1998 in Toronto, I was the cover for the Vixen. I didn’t sing in the production, but I did sing some of the rehearsals. I was a member of the COC [Canadian Opera Company] ensemble program for that season. 

There were a lot of tears the first time I learned to sing this opera because the Czech language is so difficult. But finally I realized that Janacek has written it with the idiom of his language in mind, and it’s wonderful to hear.

Now that we’re singing it in English, we have to take liberties within the framework of each bar and modify it so that English accents are highlighted instead of the Czech. We’re making modifications to the standard translation because it has to be singable and current, since some of the lingo needs to be updated.

Doing it in English takes a certain amount of changing gears in your mind, but I’ve done the most difficult part, which is the music. Structurally, it changes a little bit, you have to know just when to come in, so it’s a blessing that I’ve done the part many times.

It’s a very tricky score, it constantly changes from playful, animalistic lightness to lush long lines.

KF: Talk about your preparation to play a singing fox onstage.

IB: It’s a very difficult role: how do you prepare to be an animal? It takes a certain amount of stamina and physical fitness to run around literally on all fours and sing.

But it’s also strangely comforting, because you’re always close to the earth, and you gain strength from it: your center of gravity is as close to the ground as possible.

Janacek had a very good three-dimensional idea of who the vixen is. It’s not always written in very long lines, so that she must stand and sing all the time, and it’s not written in a chatty way to suggest that she’s always running around.

It’s a nice balance as she develops from a youngster to a teenager with opinionated ideals of equality and feminism to a woman falling in love and becoming a mother.

KF: It’s amazing what Janacek was able to do with essentially a comic strip when he turned it into an opera.

IB: This is one of the few operas that children would enjoy it, but the human world is painted very correctly.

And you know what? It doesn’t fare well when compared with the animal world, it’s so bleak and so real that you almost prefer to be in the animal world, as opposed to the human world where there are lots of regrets.

Animals don’t regret, they always look forward. Nowhere in the score does it look to the past, it’s always to the future. Whereas you see in the human world so many regrets about unexpressed emotions and bitterness. It’s true in many ways, it’s better to be an animal.

KF: What’s unique about this staging?

IB: For starters, there’s an extension into the audience up to row M, which means I’m in the middle of the auditorium, a most unusual place for a singer! But it’s an ingenious way of bridging the audience-performer gap, making the audience part of the action so sometimes they have to look back to see what’s going on.

It’s a good way to mirror what’s going on in the opera, where the human and animal worlds are intertwined and are changed by the actions in the other.

When I sing in the middle of the audience, the energy will be very different than when I sing in front of them.

There will also be lots of entrances and exits through the audience, which you can’t do in an opera house. It’s a very unique way of doing a very unique opera.

KF: Are you ready to sing more Janacek operas, most of which have central female characters [Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, The Makropulos Case]?

IB: I haven’t sung any other Janacek roles yet, but I started to become interested ever since I became a mom myself. I now want roles that are much more substantial, with a deeper dramatic scope that allows more exploration.

Also, now I can read Czech very easily, so it will be faster learning these roles than in the past. The Czech words and music are welded together in Janacek’s operas, which have a darkness that is particularly Czech.

The Cunning Little Vixen
June 22-25, 2011

Avery Fisher Hall
10 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY
212-721-6500
http://nyphil.org

Horse Whisperer Buck is Subject of Sundance Award-winning Doc

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 20 June 2011 02:55

Written by Brad Balfour

Raised in Montana and Idaho, the young Dan M. "Buck" Brannaman was a rodeo star as a child, but suffered such abuse from his dad that he and his brother landed in foster care. He responded to that experience of pain by developing a kind of empathetic state of mind that helps him with handling horses and his own personal survival.

The legendary horse whisperer considers himself lucky despite the hard life he endured as a kid. He found a calling that some might call mumbo jumbo, but to a vast number of horse owners, trainers and grooms, he expresses an uncanny skill at natural horsemanship.

That talent has made him the go-to guy for working with difficult horses, the inspiration for a feature film, The Horse Whisperer (directed and starring Robert Redford), and the subject of a Sundance Award winning documentary by first-time director Cindy Meehl (a former fashion designer) titled Buck, which came out this week.

In this exclusive interview, this unique individual explains to a degree both how he gets to that state of mind and how it can be applied to one's own life.

Q: You had a rough background in your youth.

BB: My childhood was pretty dark, and we touched on it some in the documentary. It goes a little bit more in depth in my book.

Q: Do you have different relationships with different kinds of horses or is it consistent throughout?

BB: As far as horses go, people will ask about one breed versus another. I have to tell you, I really don't have any prejudice one way or another. I treat every horse at face value, how he/she is as an individual.

That's the cool thing about horses -- they don't have prejudice. They don't care if you're tall or thin or if you're dark or if you're light, or if you're rich or you're poor, if you're handsome or not so handsome. They don't care about that. They care about how you make them feel, and if that's the only damn lesson that someone has learned from horses, they'd be way ahead of the game.

Q: Do different horses respond to different kinds of touch or tones?

BB: I often talk about presence. Some people who have worked stock dogs -- say, border collies -- say they will have a presence in working stock. There might be two dogs that are exactly the same size, but one dog will have quite a bit of presence. He'll walk into a pen of sheep and boy, they're all paying attention to him and honor him.

Then you might have a dog the same size without much presence that the sheep will chase him out of the pen. And that's true with horses and people as well, but the human theoretically is supposed to be the smart one.

Q: I doubt that.

BB: As a horseman you'd get a sense of what kind of presence you needed for the situation. You may have a horse that has been sort of spoiled and he's disrespectful, [so] that you may need to have the presence as if to appear to be 10 times your size. But then five minutes later, you might be dealing with a horse that's very timid and very fragile and very emotional that you might need to have the presence of being 1/10th your size.

It's for the human to be able to adjust that, and a lot of it is your posture and your body language and the way you move around the horse that gives him the message whether or not he should be threatened or not threatened by you.

Well, of course you're trying not to be threatening at all. But the way you present yourself on one, you might have to adjust it on another horse in order to be able to fit the situation.

My teachers used to tell me you need to learn to adjust to fit the situation. Don't just do what you've always done because it might not always work.

Q: That's true in the broadest sense, right?

BB: Yes, it is.

Q: That works when you have a conflict with people. Do you take a similar approach with horses?

BB: I do, particularly someone who might be difficult to be around. You'll get some people that sort of get caught up in a lifestyle, or they create conflict and they deal in conflict and they're making war with other people constantly.

Well then, they're sort of wired in a way that they set you up to kind of pull you in because they know how to deal with you in a real adversarial relationship. But I might think of it like this: I try to treat someone not how they are, but how I'd like them to be.

You've got to be careful not to get pulled into something and play the game they're always used to playing. So a lot of times you can sort of take them off their game by approaching them in a way that they're not used to.

Maybe they don't even deserved to be approached that way, but they might really appreciate it in the end that you maybe give them a little extra rope to work with.

Q: In making the film, were there moments where you applied your philosophy to the process of making the film?

BB; I have to say it really wasn't that difficult in the process with Cindy. Early on, I said, "The way we have to do this is, I'm not going to be your actor and I'm not going to stand on a mark for you to focus everything the way you want it, and I'm not going to rehearse it and I'm not going to do it over.

Because things happen in the moment in working with horses, and once that moment is passed, it's gone forever."

So I said, "You're going to have to be kind of clever and learn how to anticipate some of the cool things that happen with these horses so that you're in the right place at the right time."

It made it especially challenging, really, to be able to film something like that and have it work, because it's hard enough when you're doing a feature film and you can tell the actors exactly where they're supposed to stand and where they're supposed to do their business. She didn't have that luxury in doing this, and by golly, she did a good job.

Q: Especially when the horses aren't ones trained to perform, they're there to be themselves. So they're being themselves and that's what she's got to document, as opposed to when you do a movie like The Horse Whisperer.

BB: Exactly.

Q: Did you have to do anything to get the horses to stay or behave in a way that suited the camera situation?

BB: No. She just filmed life like it is for me. So other than having to pack an extra microphone on me, that was about the only inconvenience. I was glad to get that second microphone out of my pocket after two and a half years, but other than that, I didn't have anything different in my life, really.

I got used to those guys being around and got to be friends with them. So I missed them after they left, actually.

Q: How did you meet Cindy? Did she own the horses?

BB: I first met her years ago at a clinic here on the East Coast, and I don't even remember where. I want to say Pennsylvania.

Q: You go everywhere, don't you?

BB: Yeah. You name it, I go there. I didn't see her again for four or five years, and then she came to a clinic in Texas with her aunt, and there was kind of a little handful of ladies there and I knew the other ladies pretty well, so we spent a little bit of time together. We'd have dinner in the evenings after the clinic and they were kind of a pretty good bunch of gals, fun to be around, so we'd visit a little bit in the evenings.

And then she ended up going to a friend of mine's ranch in Montana -- McGuiness Meadows Ranch -- as a guest, and that's where she came up with the idea of doing this documentary.

To be honest with you, there were a few people over the years that asked me about doing a documentary, and I just said, "Fine, go ahead and do a documentary, but just leave me out of it."

As to why I said yes that day, I guess I just trusted her. We were friends by that point and I knew that she wouldn't do anything to disappoint me, that she really had a great intention.

Yet still it's a little risky letting someone tell the story of your life when you've devoted your life to trying to do something good. Someone could just tell the story wrong and wreck years of devotion. But thank goodness, she did me right.

Playwright Turns Blue Collar Roots Into Art

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 13 June 2011 22:04

Written by Brad Balfour

Though now a Brooklynite, Boston-born-and-bred playwright/screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire stays close to his working-class roots -- not only with his latest Tony-nominated play, Good People, but throughout the broad swath of his career. Mounted by his Rabbit Hole collaborator, director Daniel Sullivan, for the playwright's longtime artistic home, Manhattan Theatre Club, Good People closed recently after a highly touted run that started on March 3, 2011, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

The play garnered multiple award nominations, including Tonys for Best Play and Best Writer. And it garnered a , Best Actress Tony for its lead Frances McDormand.

Starring  McDormand and Tate Donovan, the tragi-comedy details a middle-aged woman, Margie, who remains trapped in her working-class South Boston neighborhood, and old lover, Mike, a doctor who has manage to escape. When they re-engage, various truths and dares come into play with comic but painful results.

From musicals such as High Fidelity to the Pulitzer Award-winning Rabbit Hole, the 41-year-old scribe captures real people in tangled situations, ones that often get further unraveled. And at a recent Tony press event,  Lindsay-Abaire spoke about his career and recent work, this acclaimed play and Rabbit Hole, among others.

Q: What truth was important to you to reveal here?

DL: I'm a Southie, from the neighborhood. Those are the people that I know and love, and respect and grew up with. I've been wanting to write about [them] for a long, long time, but I felt resistant to do it. I felt like I had to mature as a person, as a writer, and I felt like I needed to have a pretty clear point of view about the neighborhood and class.

I felt the economy was doing what it was doing, so if there was a time to write about the neighborhood and a time to write about the myth that anyone in America can accomplish anything if they just worked hard enough, it seemed like now is the time to write about that.

Q: This was gestating for a long time?

DL: Yeah. I also had heard over and over again about British playwrights writing about class. Where are the new American plays about class? Why don't American playwrights write about class?

Q: There's no such thing as class in America.

DL: I guess that's why.

Q: Then you must have loved The Town. It's a movie about class.

DL: Yes, right. I loved The Town. It's great entertainment. But The Town is about Charlestown, which is across the river from South Boston. It's also a bank robber movie, which is fantastic.

A lot of movies, in particular, have been writing about working class Boston and its environs, but they're often about drug addicts and crime bosses and bank robberies. I wanted to write a different kind of story about regular people struggling.

Q: Isn't it tough to make that interesting?

DL: It can be tough, [but] that's my job.

Q: You find a way to do that, to find words that aren't boring, while still dealing with people who are just people.

DL: That's a great compliment, thank you. Without resorting to a bank robbery? I hope the plots are interesting. But I hope I'm also writing about ideas that are engaging and people connect with. And bank robberies are good, too, but I haven't written about that yet.

Q: You have your dark moments in life; what is all this about?

DL: The darkness? Does nobody have darkness in their life? I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

Q: And Frances [McDormand] is fantastic in this. Did you write the role with her or anyone in mind?

DL: No, I wrote the role for all the ladies that I grew up with in the neighborhood; those were ladies that I knew. That said, I sent the draft to Dan Sullivan and he said, "Who are we going to cast?"

Frances McDormand came up, and neither of us could think of another actress that could do it. Honestly, she was so perfect. She's incredibly funny and soulful and charismatic, and she has this ability to play two things at once so you don't really know ever if that character is telling the truth or telling a lie, and she's impeccable at doing that.

Q: You worked with Frances and the character evolved from there, or what?

DL: Pretty much the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood, you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

Q: What's Dan Sullivan's secret that makes him such a great theater director?

DL: In addition to being a great director, he's the best dramaturge I've ever worked with. The man is like a laser. He knows what's going on in every single scene, what's at stake, what do the characters want, and he gets out of everybody's way. He nudges them toward what needs to happen, and he doesn't get all fancy and put weird visions on top of things.

Q: How different is that from a film director? What is it about him that make him different or special as a theater director versus a film director?

DL: Film is mostly a visual medium and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance.

For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, "Out you go," and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.

So you can shape a performance, but every performance in theater is different every night. You can say a line just slightly different, and if your fellow actor's open and in the moment they will respond differently. It's a live event that happens and it's incredibly different.

Q: It's also trust.

DL: Of course it's trust.

Q: But at the end of the day, you really have the last word.

DL: Well, the actors really have the last word.

Q: At least you got to adapt your own Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, for the screen.

DL: He said Pulitzer; I don't know if you heard that. I was going to wear [the medallion for this interview] but I thought it might be a little much.

I saw it as a challenge, of course, but also as a great opportunity because I had lived with these characters for so long. And what the play had in its back pocket that most plays don't is a fairly involved off-stage life. And so the things like Howie's potential affair is only hinted at in the play.

The play is just five people in a house. It's just the family members and the boy comes into their lives, and that's it. And so they talk about the support group, they talk about that scene in the supermarket, again, the affair is only hinted at.

We hear about the sister's bar fight; in the movie we actually get that call in the middle of the night and her sister has to go bail her out.

It was a great opportunity for me to go to all of those places that I know in my head and meet all of those people and find out who Gaby was and find out how that relationship starts to grow. That relationship became one of the backbones of the plot.

Again, it's not in the play, and so it was exciting to me to reinvent and revisit these characters and the story, and try and tell it in a completely different way without losing what I thought was important to the story.

Q: One thing about this movie was the idea that one can find comfort through faith and science -- did that idea really resonated with anybody?

DL: It certainly resonates with me. I probably share my main character's world view. I'm a bit cynical and pragmatic and I personally have difficulty finding comfort through organized religion.

For a character like Becca [played by Nicole Kidman], more than religion, she can't find solace in her family or in support groups or in psychology or in psychotherapy.

So in trying to figure out where is this character going to find any kind of comfort, science seemed literally the most logical place to find it. And I did want her to find comfort, because whether she says so or not, it's the thing that she's seeking. And yet, the thing that she finds in this scientific theory is a bit hippy-dippy and odd.

So I liked that it sort of had this ethereal quality to it as well, that you couldn't quite pin down and grasp. It still had qualities of something you might find in religion, even though it's based in science and fact.

Q: Are we going to see a big screen adaptation of Good People at some point?

DL: There is a possibility of a big screen adaptation, yes. We've talked about it. It will probably happen at some point.

Q: How do you balance your more commercial projects with these very personal ones? Is it something you consciously strive for or does it just happen that way?

DL: For me, it's not about commercial versus something that's less commercial. It's just about doing things that engage me, that challenge me. I love to do things that I've never done before. Shrek the Musical is certainly something I had never done before.

Before I wrote Rabbit Hole, I had never done a straightforward drama. I had written really absurdist farces. For Good People, I feel like the canvas has expanded a little bit and I'm writing more with a social mind and about current events.

So who knows what I'll do next? But I keep wanting to do different things.

Q: What are some of the obstacles one should look out for in writing their own stuff?

DL: It's the hardest thing you can ever do. I don't know what the source material is. For me the biggest challenge was overcoming people's expectations, and sometimes you just can't battle that.

For Shrek -- and I also worked on High Fidelity -- people walked in with an opinion, and some of it, for Shrek, was "Oh great, another animated movie being turned into a musical. Do we really need this?"

The other side of the coin was, "Oh it's going to be exactly like the movie. The kids are going to love it!" Neither of those expectations is good for the musical.

I want to write a musical that's like a play, where people don't know what it is when they walk in and the story is revealed to them. At the same time, more nuts and bolts, why is it a musical, what makes it sing?

Finding those events is very difficult. But oddly enough that was easier than people's perceptions and expectations.