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“Innovation Past and Present” Showcases Great Choreographers with The American Ballet Theater

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 25 October 2024 15:14; Written by Jack Angstreich

Scene from La Boutique. Photo: Kyle Froman.

At Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, on the evening of Thursday, October 17th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend American Ballet Theater’s marvelous program of three dance works by different choreographers entitled “Innovation Past and Present,” featured as part of its fall season.

The event began splendidly with the enchanting La Boutique, which received its world premiere with these performances and was choreographed by Gemma Bond and set to the wonderful music by Gioachino Rossini orchestrated by Ottorino Respighi for Sergei Diaghilev’s famous 1919 Ballets Russes production, La Boutique Fantasque, by Léonide Massine, to which the new work is very much an hommage. (Ormsby Wilkins—who conducted confidently—and Charles Barker contributed to rearranging the score.) The attractive stage and costume design is by Jean-Marc Puissant, with effective lighting by Clifton Taylor.

The excellent cast was headlined by principals Isabella Boylston—who was superb—and Thomas Forster, along with Chloe Misseldine, Michael De La Nuez, Breanne Granlund and Jake Roxander. Also, notable in secondary parts were Sierra Armstrong, Jose Sebastian, Remy Young and Jacob Clerico, with strong—if maybe slightly underehearsed—support from the stellar corps de ballet, which shone in all the pieces on view.

Another striking world premiere was Kyle Abraham’s compelling Mercurial Son, which also employed a classical vocabulary although to avant-garde, rather than nostalgic, ends. The unconventional score is by Grischa Lichtenberger, with costumes by Karen Young and lighting by Dan Scully. Another superior cast included Skylar Brandt—who was especially remarkable—Léa Fleytoux, Granlund and Roxander again, Kanon Kimura, Melvin Lawovi and Calvin Royal III.

The event closed stunningly with the magnificent realization of a seldom produced, underappreciated masterpiece of 20th-century classical ballet, Harald Lander’s Études from 1948, which is set to delightful music by Carl Czerny brilliantly adapted and orchestrated by Knudåge Riisager. The choreographer has said about it:

Études means so much to me, because this ballet is an expression of myself, and of my thoughts on dance. Dancing is not just delivering some steps to the audience. The purpose of ballet is, increasingly so, to combine spirit, dance, and music!

The amazing ballerina Devon Teuscher shone at the head of a dazzling slate of dancers that also included the indelible Jarod Curley and Andrew Robare.

Ballet Theater’s fall season runs through November 3rd.

New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center Perform "Neharot"

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 25 October 2024 14:35; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 13th, I had the pleasure of attending a memorable concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the confident direction of the celebrated composer and conductor, Matthias Pintscher.

The event began strongly with a powerful account of Pintscher’s own challenging, somewhat lugubrious, and impressively orchestrated neharot from 2020, a work which ends abruptly and which received its US premiere with these performances. The composer provided the following statement on the piece:

“neharot” means rivers in Hebrew, but also tears. It also describes the tears of lamentation. This music was written during the worst time of many daily deaths in spring 2020 and is a clear echo of the devastation and fear, but also of the hope for light, that so emotionally characterized this time of our lives. Since the music evokes the river as a sonic phenomenon, it is also inspired by the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, where several rivers cross exactly under the place where Chartres was built (and rebuilt after it was burned down, totally destroyed by fate and resurrected ... thus a symbol for the emotional content of the music). I wanted to paint long arcs of sound with the music — whereby the two harps are used extensively as the source of the sound spectrum of the dark sound world of neharot. The piece is a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish — for all the people we have lost in this unprecedented time.

The eminent soloist Gil Shaham then entered the stage for a sterling performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s brilliant Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, from 1844. James M. Keller, in his notes on the program, provided some useful background on it:

In March 1845 [Ferdinand] David played the premiere of Mendelssohn’s enduringly popular E- minor Violin Concerto, which the composer had contemplated writing as early as 1838. “I’d like to do a violin concerto for you for next winter,” he wrote to David on July 30 of that year. “One in E minor is running through my head, and the opening of it will not leave me in peace.” Curiously, ensuing sketches reveal that it was a piano concerto, rather than a violin concerto, that started taking form, one that matched the eventual violin concerto in both key and structure. By the time Mendelssohn focused definitively on the composition in 1844, it had evolved with certainty into a violin concerto. He consulted closely with his soloist as he composed it, mostly about technical issues but in some cases concerning more general matters of structure and balance [ . . . . ]

The initial movement, marked Allegro molto appassionato, begins Romantically, if not effusively, while the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven is discernible—Shaham played the composer’s own cadenza. The lyrical Andante that ensues—which has most of the loveliest music in the concerto—grows in intensity before reverting to a more meditative ethos. The opening of the finale has an almost pastoral character but the movement quickly acquires an ebullient momentum with march-like rhythms, projecting a triumphant sensibility. Enthusiastic applause elicited a rewarding encore from the soloist: the marvelous Gavotte en rondeau from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006.

The true highlight of the concert, however, was its second half: a forceful reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s striking, seldom played tone-poem, Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 5, a somewhat neo-Wagnerian work that also has affinities with the music of Gustav Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss. According to Keller, it evidently was Strauss that introduced Schoenberg to the eponymous Maurice Maeterlinck play that is the basis for the piece, “suggesting in 1902 that the emerging composer turn it into an opera.” He adds:

Maeterlinck, a Belgian, had emerged as a leading voice of symbolist aesthetics, and the premiere of his play Pelléas et Mélisande, in Paris in 1893, proved a watershed cultural moment. Claude Debussy quickly secured rights to set it as an opera, which he completed in 1902. Gabriel Fauré wrote incidental music for a production of the play in London in 1898, and Jean Sibelius did the same in 1905, when the play was given in Helsinki.

In a 1950 article, Schoenberg wrote:

It was around 1900 when Maurice Maeterlinck fascinated composers, stimulating them to create music to his dramatic poems. What attracted all was his art of dramatizing eternal problems of humanity in the form of fairy tales, lending them timelessness without adhering to imitation of ancient styles.

I look forward to the remainder of what appears to be an exciting season for the ensemble.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Celebrate Latin Culture with “Nuestros Sonidos”

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 24 October 2024 20:29; Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium—as part of its festival celebrating Latin culture in the United States, “Nuestros Sonidos”—on the night of Thursday, October 10th, I had the considerable fortune to attend a wonderful concert presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic—confidently conducted by the celebrated Gustavo Dudamel—along with the excellent Brooklyn Youth Chorus led by Artistic Director Dianne Berkun Menaker.

The event began splendidly with an engaging account of Roberto Sierra’s brisk, colorful, and propulsive Alegría, which was commissioned by the Houston Symphony and premiered by it in 1996. About the composer, program annotator John Henken usefully records the following:

Born in Puerto Rico in 1953, Roberto Sierra continued his education in England and Germany, and then worked with György Ligeti in Hamburg for three years. Sierra calls his fusion of European modernism and Latin American folk elements “tropicalization.”

Also pleasurable was a sterling rendition of Arturo Márquez’s rhythmic, dramatic Danzón No. 9 from 2017, which is dedicated to Dudamel and is even more populist in inspiration. Henken provides some valuable background on it:

Born in Mexico, Arturo Márquez spent his middle school and high school years in La Puente, California, where he began his musical training. After returning to Mexico, he studied at the National Conservatory of Music and the Institute of Fine Arts, followed by private study in Paris with Jacques Castérède and at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.

At that time, Márquez was interested in avant-garde techniques and processes, although his time at CalArts inspired him to add jazz and world-music elements to the mix. These ideas begin to play out in his first Danzón, composed in 1992. Essentially an electronic piece for tape and optional saxophone, it also includes minimalist aspects and references to the traditional danzón, an old salon dance from Cuba that became popular in Veracruz and then in Mexico City, where it still holds sway. (The composer later arranged the piece for ensemble, but still featuring the alto saxophone.)

This initial elaboration on the danzón proved crucial for Márquez, renewing his own musical language in a turn away from modernist impulses. His Danzón No. 2, one of the most popular “classical” music works of the last quarter-century, confirmed this new direction.

The first half of the evening closed superbly with an exciting realization of Gabriela Ortiz’s 2019 revision of her Antrópolis, written in 2018, which is another ebullient, dynamic work, also largely in a vernacular idiom. The composer provided the following note on it:

The word antro has its origin in the Latin antrum, meaning “grotto” or “cavern.” In Mexico, until the 1990s, the term referred to a bar or entertainment place of dubious reputation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub.

One time, while talking with flutist Alejandro Escuer, we imagined the title of a future work, one that would synthesize the music of Mexico’s legendary dance halls and bars: Antrópolis, a neologism, a precisely invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs. In 2017, conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto commissioned me to write a short work—brilliant and rather lightweight—to be premiered at Carnegie Hall at the conclusion of a concert by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra celebrating the 80th birthday of Philip Glass.

Given the parameters of the commission, I retrieved the title we had imagined, and thus Antrópolis came to life. It is a piece in which I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City that left a special sound imprint in my memory. These cabarets or dance halls— such as El Bombay, where it is said that Che Guevara would twirl, or the Salón Colonia, which seems to have come out of a dream sequence from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema—represent the nostalgia for rumberas and live dance orchestras. Who doesn’t remember the fun ballroom Los Infiernos, a perfect place for those who would leave their cubicles after a long day at work to go dancing, drink, and listen to music? Finally, the memory of the bar Tutti Frutti, where I first met the punk couple who own the antro and you could listen to experimental music from the 1980s, leaves an impression. Antrópolis is the sonic reflection of a city through its antros, including the accumulation of experiences that we bring and that form an essential part of our history in complex but fascinating Mexico City.

The second half of the evening was a marvel: it featured the extraordinary Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade who performed more than a dozen songs with the orchestra, including some with the chorus, plus another half-dozen with her band. Two of these latter were duets with Jon Baptiste, including the Beatles song “Blackbird” (written by Paul McCartney) and the famous Mexican song, “Cucurrucucú Paloma.”

October '24 Digital Week III

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 24 October 2024 01:42; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Release of the Week

Conclave

(Focus Features)

Based on Robert Harris’ page-turning thriller about the political and moral machinations among a group of cardinals coming together to elect a new pope after the incumbent dies mysteriously, Edward Berger’s adaptation is hampered by its structure—lots of voting and arguing in the Sistine Chapel or the cardinals’ private rooms for much of its two-hour length—but Harris’ wit and ability to enliven routine situations is much in evidence.

It helps, of course, when there’s a starry cast like this one: Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Stanley Tucci have enormous fun playing various liberal or conservative, pious or impious cardinals—it’s too bad Isabella Rossellini can’t do much with the lone female speaking role. Berger directs a little too close to the vest; a less literal director might have made this cracklingly good, not merely diverting.

4K/UHD Releases of the Week

Cheeky

(Cult Epics)

The latest UHD rescue of Italian director Tinto Brass’ not-quite-hardcore but titillating sex comedies is his 2000 entry, rating among Brass’ most enjoyable, again relying on a lovely young lass with refreshing screen presence to shoulder the load, so to speak.

He came up aces with Yuliya Mayarchuk, a Ukrainian model-actress who plays the uninhibited Carla, who’s trying to placate her jealous boyfriend about her many sexual adventures; although Brass pours on the heavyhanded sexual symbolism, whenever Mayarchuk is onscreen—either clothed or (most often) nude—her natural freshness is impossible to ignore. There’s a first-rate UHD transfer; a Blu-ray disc also includes the film, the lone 4K extra is a commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nathaniel Thompson, while the Blu-ray extras are the commentary, new interview with cinematographer Massimo Di Venanzo, isolated score by Pino Donaggio, and Backstage with Tinto Brass (2000).

Twisters

(Universal)

The original Twister was a silly but watchable disaster thriller that made tons of money—so it’s surprising that it took nearly three decades to come up with a sequel, which is basically the same story: tornado chasers vs. Mother Nature, with nature winning most of the time. Director Lee Isaac Chung follows the original’s Jan de Bont by combining lousy dialogue, cardboard characters and truly impressive—if overdone—special effects.

Of course, technology has improved since 1996, so these killer tornados are even more startling, but the acting of Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos can be charitably called competent. On UHD, the detailed images are quite eye-popping; extras include deleted scenes, gag reel, several featurettes and Chung’s commentary.

Streaming Release of the Week

Taboo—Family Secrets

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

Deborah Twiss wrote and directed this attempt at eroticism as stepmom Amanda and grown stepson Tyler can’t keep their hands off each other, all while her husband/his father Lukas has no interest in her and his younger sister Jillie (whom Amanda also raised) can spot their frolicking a mile away.

Twiss herself is a quite winning Amanda, but she saddled herself with a mediocre script, her own routine direction and a trio of inadequate performances by her costars, adding up to less than the sum of its parts.

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

About Dry Grasses

(Janus Contemporaries)

The monumental films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan—lengthy (often clocking in at over three hours) and verbose (consisting almost entirely of long conversations)—are serious, absorbing explorations of the human condition. His humane new film, novelistic in scope, centers on Samet (played with credible weariness by Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher at a small village elementary school hoping to land a better job in Istanbul; he and another teacher are accused of inappropriate behavior by two female students, including one Samet thought of as a protégé.

Ceylan and cinematographers Kürşat Üresin and Cevahir Şahin work marvels with expansive wintry exteriors and cramped interiors—when the film switches to spring at the end of the school year, the colors burst into vivid life as Samet ties up loose ends before leaving for the city, including a tentative truce with his accuser, who seems more mature in their final encounter than she was earlier. A transcendent image of the girl’s dark eyes staring into the camera, her hair dusted with snowflakes is a distillation of this remarkable film—deeply mysterious and ambiguous but exquisitely human. The Blu-ray image looks tremendously detailed; lone extra is a Ceylan interview.

Exhuma

(Well Go USA)

Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun’s unnerving horror film is a strangely compelling ghost story of a reawakened family curse that involves grave digging and exorcisms.

Although it’s way too long at 135 minutes—after the 90-minute mark, the repetition starts to become damaging to the plot—it’s been made with assurance and style, and it’s acted most convincingly by a large cast; it’s not surprising that this culturally-specific feature became one of the biggest box-office hits in South Korean film history. The hi-def transfer is transfixing; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

Pandora’s Box

(Criterion)

Louise Brooks became a legend of the silver screen in a trio of films, Miss Europe (1930), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Pandora’s Box (1928), the latter two by German director G.W. Pabst, who knew how to utilize Brooks’ unique Americanness—here, she plays Lulu, who leads men to their ruin before she faces her own moral and mortal downfall.

Pabst wisely keeps the focus on his actress, who is irresistible to the camera, which is what keeps this moralizing drama relevant. Criterion’s Blu-ray includes a vastly improved restored transfer and several extras: four musical scores, by Gillian Anderson, Dimitar Pentchev, Peer Raben, and Stéphan Oliva; commentary by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane; Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, a 1998 documentary by Hugh Munro Neely; Lulu in Berlin, a rare 1971 interview with actor Louise Brooks, by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll; and interviews with Leacock and Michael Pabst, the director’s son.

Veep—Complete Series

(Warner Bros/HBO)

Although Julia Louis-Dreyfus won several Emmy awards for best actress in a comedy series as Selina Meyer, the VP who becomes president over the course of the show’s seven seasons, she always was the weakest link of a sublime comedic cast who propped her up: everyone from Tony Hale, Anna Chlumsky and Reid Scott to Matt Walsh, Timothy Simons and Gary Cole are true perfection.

Created by Armando Iannucci, Veep has the same flavor of rancid ineptitude in our political systems as his brilliant British series The Thick of It All and the priceless film satires In the Loop and The Death of Stalin, but Veep spun its wheels too often and limped to the finish line. The show’s 65 episodes look pristine on Blu; extras include several featurettes and interviews.

DVD Release of the Week

The Gilded Age—Complete 2nd Season

(Warner Bros/HBO)

The second season of Julian Fellowes’ series about haves and have-nots in late 19th century Manhattan pretty much follows the script of the first, with the privileged upper crust trying to fend off a “take over” by upstart Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), whose husband George (Morgan Spector) is among the city’s newly minted robber barons.

This season’s 10 episodes are again dominated by alluring costumes and sets, and only Christine Baranaki, as the sarcastic Agnes, ultimate defender of the status quo, transcends by-the-numbers plotting and characterizations. Too bad that several able New York theater performers—in addition to Coon and Spector, there’s Debra Monk, Cynthia Nixon, Michael Cerveris, Donna Murphy, Kristine Nielsen and Kelli O’Hara—are underwhelming. Extras are on-set featurettes and interviews.

CD Release of the Week

Schnittke—Film Music, Vol. 6: Little Tragedies

(Capriccio)

Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (1934-98) was as eclectic as they come—he called it polystylism—and the latest release in Capriccio’s valuable series of his film scores shows his wide-ranging musical interests in spades. For Mikhail Schweitzer’s multipart television miniseries Little Tragedies (1979), based on tragic works by the beloved Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, Schnittke wrote music of varied, and expert, mimicry—from polkas to waltzes to Mozart.

These short pieces probably work more effectively alongside the series' episodes (although Jurowski has also recorded music that Schweitzer didn’t use); throughout, Schnittke is never less than original, even in his homages. This superb recording by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra led by Vladimir Jurowski includes vocal soloists Svetlana Mamresheva and Martha Jurowski in heartfelt songs from The Stone Guest and A Feast in Time of Plague, respectively, while piano soloist Elisaveta Blumina shines in numbers from Mozart and Salieri that allude to both of these composers.

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