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Film and the Arts
"Don Quixote" & "Of Love and Rage": Kings & Windmills Take to the Stage
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 27 June 2022 13:56
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Hee Seo and Joo Won Ahn in Don Quixote. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.
At the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, on the evening of Friday, June 17th, I had the enormous pleasure of attending an exquisite performance of the classic ballet, Don Quixote, presented by the wonderful American Ballet Theater, auspiciously inaugurating their spring season.
An epitome of comic escapism, much of the work is a fantasy—even utopian—vision of Spain, and thus an opportunity for brilliant pastiches of Spanish styles in dance, music, and costume—with dresses that evoke flamenco and soldiers dressed in elegant uniforms. (In the second act there is a reversion to an equally familiar genre with a dream-scene of ethereal nymphs, while the third act is a prototypical set of divertissements celebrating the wedding of the central couple.) The presiding genius here is the legendary Marius Petipa whose choreographic wizardry—restaged by Alexander Gorsky and in a production from 1995 by Kevin McKenzie (who retires as Artistic Director this year) and Susan Jones—delights from beginning to end. His enterprise is immeasurably aided by the tuneful Romantic score—here excellently conducted by the reliable Ormsby Wilkins—by Ludwig Minkus who, along with Ceasre Pugni and Riccardo Drigo, enlivened the Imperial Russian Ballet for decades with bewitching music. The charming scenery and costumes are by the eminent Santo Loquasto, whose remarkable versatility is seemingly proven by the fact that I can discern no connection between his work for the ballet and his distinguished art direction for innumerable films by Woody Allen.
The program featured a magnificent cast led by the superb Hee Seo—a shining star of the company—as Kitri, terrifically partnered by the ascendant Joo Won Ahn. (My greatest memory of this production was that with Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev.) The secondary cast was also outstanding: Luciana Paris as Mercedes, a street dancer, splendidly complemented by Andrii Ishchuk as Espada, the matador; Katherine Williams and Paulina Waski, enchanting as the Flower Girls; Betsy McBride and Garegin Pogossian as the Gypsy Couple; and above all, the dazzling Zhong-Jing Fang as the Queen of the Dryads, along with the remarkable Erica Lall as Amour. The deft character actors included Roman Zhurbin in the title role, Luis Ribagorda as Sancho Panza, and Duncan Lyle as Gamache, the rich nobleman betrothed to Kitri. The fabulous corps de ballet danced at their near best.
On the evening of Tuesday, June 21st, I was able to experience what will probably be the most momentous event of the current season: Of Love and Rage from 2020, the twenty-first full-length ballet—which receives its local premiere with these performances—by the Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, arguably the most important choreographer working today. The work was inspired by the artist’s vacation in Siracusa, Sicily, in the summer of 2018, a city which was a jewel of the ancient Greek world—and in which some extraordinary ruins from that period survive. The source for the ballet’s scenario is the first century Hellenistic romance, Chaereas and Callirhoë, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as “probably the earliest fully extant romantic novel in Western literature.”
In the beautiful scenography and costume designs of Jean-Marc Puissant, one can detect the influence of the classicizing productions of the Ballets Russes, such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë—itself based upon a Hellenestic romance—as well as Art Deco, especially in the first section of the ballet which is set in ancient Syracuse. (In the dream-scene in the second act—as well as at the end—one encounters what inevitably recalls one of the giant marble heads of the astounding Valley of Temples of Sicily’s ancient Agrigentum.) The art director commented:
We start in Siracusa with a more Greek look. But once the story goes to Miletus and the court of Dionysius, the costumes become much more early-20th century, more Ottoman. Then, with Mithridates, the style is much more Cossack, more Armenian—that’s artistic license, but it comes from the music.
The music in question—elegantly conducted here by David LaMarche—is Aram Khatchaturian’s fabulous score for his ballet, Gayné, which has many of the striking sonorities found in Soviet ballets by composers such as Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Asafyev, and Rodion Shchedrin.
There are many lovely dances here that will be counted among the choreographer’s most amazing accomplishments and subsequent viewings will allow one to determine the true stature of the work as a whole. Petipa does seem to be an artistic precursor for Ratmansky with this ballet, but channeled through George Balanchine. (The latter’s formalism intersects interestingly and seamlessly with Ratmansky’s “postmodernism.”) The fine cast was led by the incandescent Christine Shevchenko as Callirhoe, effectively partnered by matinee idol Thomas Forster as Chaereas. The main participants also included Blaine Hoven as Dionysius, Jarod Curley as Mithridates, Zhurbin again as the King of Babylon (and as Hermocrates), and Chloe Misseldine as the Queen of Babylon. The secondary cast featured Zimmi Coker as Callirhoe’s Maid, Eric Tamm as Polycharmus, Fang again as Plangon, and Lyle again as Ariston.
June '22 Digital Week III
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 22 June 2022 10:24
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Waltzing with the MET Orchestra
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- 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
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 16 June 2022 20:09
- Written by Kevin Filipski
