quelle surprise

Remember a few months ago when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Dems' resistance would be "vocal, not to say operatic"? Well, sorta. We might consider what opera Congressional Democrats are performing right now and what opera they should be performing right now. But meantime, the NYT's chief critic reports that the Operatic Resistance is a Thing. [That sound we just heard is every dead composer you ever heard of snerking from the grave].

night of the living dead

If the protest outside attracts a Who's Who of the Empire State's own Political Graveyard, then surely goings on inside must be worth checking out. And since the Met seems to have caved to censorship demands on the SiriusXM front as well as the HDcast, La Cieca has posted audio of the 1991 premiere of The Death of Klinghoffer. Check it out here, and the libretto here, if you are so inclined. Or don't, if you are not. Your choice.

*well, okay, David Paterson is now chair of the Democratic Machine Party in NY, but I'm not sure that's much of a status change.

appleseeds

I suppose every folkie in Greater Rens-wijk has a Pete story, and many more than one, since he and his wife Toshi made their home on the river for six decades. You'd have found those stories all over the web last week, along with the complete, lengthy cv typical of your average 94-year-old singing, songwriting, banjo-playing multi-issue activist repeated in every obituary.

Americanistanians who don't know "folk music" (for lack of a better term) from a hole in the ground probably know a lot of Pete's songs by heart, both ones he wrote and ones he just made famous, whether they associate them with him or not. Among those familiar with both his music and him, every generation had its own Pete -- the kids who grew up with the Arlo record, the kids who grew up with Rainbow Quest, the Weavers generation before that, the People's Songs generation before that. (I'm squarely of the Arlo Record generation, but my adult self is firmly of the opinion that the coolest Pete records are really the Songs of the Spanish Civil War sides he cut in the 1940's.)

Pete Seeger's career was so wide ranging, his figure looms so large on the cultural landscape of American music in the 20th century, that it's easy to miss that you're looking at a family portrait. For a discussion of his father, musicologist Charles Seeger, and step-mother, composer Ruth Crawford, see chapter 8 of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise. If the apples didn't fall far from that tree, the branches were spread wide, and if Pete's mission was at least partly to build bridges between rural musical traditions and the deradicated urban communities that needed them, it could be said that was a mission inherited. But it was also taken up by sundry of his siblings, chiefest among them Mike -- who was drawn south into Appalachia and started The New Lost City Ramblers, without whom that more rarified older sibling of Bluegrass known as Old Time would be very different, much less vibrant affair than it has become -- and Peggy, who went to the UK, formed a marriage and a musical partnership with Ewan MacColl that embraced both traditional song and political activism, and who continues to perform and advocate for both.

Then there's Anthony Seeger, nephew of Pete, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, who served as head of Smithsonian Folkways -- that label and institution -- for a little over a decade, from 1988 to 2002. It was from Dr. Seeger, in a panel discussion at the North American Folk Alliance, that we first understood the academic potential of an online application then in development that would enable people to buy single tracks for a nominal fee. If, per his example, a graduate student was doing thesis work on the song John Henry, they could go to the Smithsonian website and download each of the 24 versions of John Henry in the Smithsonian archive as a sound file, which could then be burned to a CD as supplemental material. It was pretty clear from Dr. Seeger's description that this revolutionary development in sound recording distribution would be an absolute game-changer for Ethnomusicology and Folklore graduate students everywhere. As it turned out, there was some additional ripple effect.

(Dr. Seeger also pointed out that, the advent of the mp3 notwithstanding, the most reliable archival medium for sound recordings was still the 78 rpm record. Perhaps we've come full circle on that one.)

Long story long, this was and remains a clan concerned with how we define past and present, utility and obsolescence, and how we document, maintain and extend cultural traditions organically and inclusively, rather than stuffing and mounting dead things for altars of worship. If in Pete's case that didn't quite reach as far as Dylan plugging in at Newport, well...[shrug] that's a blog post for another time.

A Pete story: At another Folk Alliance. It was the first night of the conference, in the lobby of the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, and an Irish seisiun had taken over the comfy chairs, led by voluble Irish box player John Whelan and involving members of Manitoba's Scruj MacDuhk and some major UK-based neoCeltic outfit I can't remember the name of right now. A bunch of musos blazing away like that is wont to draw a crowd, and somewhere in medias res I looked around, and standing to the left of me was the phenomenal English songwriter/guitar player Steve Tilston; standing to my right was Pete Seeger. No stars there, just people who knew they could make themselves heard but knew also when to hush up and listen. I thought I must be in the right place.

return to the wheelhouse

three weeks

preservation versus McMansion

An update from the Wall Street Journal here.

Redefining the Omelet: Don Giovanni @ OperaMall Millionplex 11.16.11

First allow me to disqualify myself from any valid opinions about Don Giovanni by confessing that I really liked Francisco Negrin's 2003 Glimmerglass production.  It was ugly and depressive.  The Catalogue Aria was a case study in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder illustrated by a tour through the Collected Underwear.  The revenant Commendatore was a ruse conceived by Don Ottavio to push a psychologically unstable Don Giovanni over the edge, and his manifestation in the penultimate scene was a marching, sign-waving, anti-Giovanni Occupy Seville.  As the orchestra ratcheted up the tension, our anti-hero, standing in a coffin, slashed his wrists in both defiance and despair. None of it was pretty.  Everybody hated it.

I was with an opera neophyte. I had a lot of explaining to do.

Last night, by chance, I was sitting next to another opera neophyte. I could tell she was new to all this, not just because she was telling her friend she'd never been to the opera, but because she spent the whole second act munching popcorn. People who have been to the opera, I find, generally skip the popcorn at the HDs.  Or at least they'll be likely to put it aside for the duration of Il mio tesoro. No such luck here, alas.  But she seemed nice, so while we were waiting at the end to exit our row, I turned to her and said "Did you enjoy the performance?"   "Oh yes!" she said, with genuine enthusiasm. "But are they all that long?" (Two for two! If someone says it again at Siegfried, I reserve the right to yell "Bingo!" in a crowded theater.)

Here is Michael Grandage's ideal audience member, as stated in what passes for his directorial manifesto vis a vis this production.  She's never seen it before. She had a good time. She didn't need anything explained. Win. On her right was her friend, from what I could gather also a neophyte. She also had a good time. She also didn't need anything explained. Win. On her left was some thirty years of opera experience. I've done a lot of explaining to neophytes. Here I didn't have to explain anything to anyone. Win.

 I've seen stagings that were luminous and performances that were brilliant.  I've seen workmanlike stagings and performances both.  I've seen things that were perplexing, and things that were wrong-headed and infuriating.  I've seen things that were openly disrespectful of the material they were supposed to be presenting (Mark Lamos, I'm talking to you). Like everyone else who's parked themselves in an opera house with any regularity, I've done a lot of armchair directing in my time.  Apart from a weak Commendatore -- and Commendatores are weak nine times out of ten -- and a Donna Anna who wasn't in nearly as much of a twist as she should have been, I didn't have the impulse to do any here. That was kind of refreshing. Win.

Michael Grandage hasn't, in Deborah Warner's parlance, smashed the Fabergé. That isn't what he does.  To the best of my knowledge, it has never been what he does.  Neither, in the fashion of Regietheater, has he taken the piece and used it to his own ends, plastering a concept onto it with complete disengagement from authorial intent.  As he has said elsewhere, "I'm not the kind of director who enjoys immediately looking at a time and a place set by a writer and then going 'Let's not do that.'... It's always been of interest to me to use their starting point as my starting point." Not the manifesto of a theatrical radical. Unless, of course, the scene is already full of theatrical radicals.

Grandage's modus operandi has tended to favor interiority. Not that he's only ever worked in tiny spaces but most of his work in the past ten years (Frost/Nixon, Red, Hamlet, King Lear, Luise Miller, et cetera) has been at London's Donmar Warehouse, the directorship of which he took over from Sam Mendes in 2002.  Unlike the Met's slightly-shy-of-4000-seat enormity, Donmar Warehouse is 250 seats. Its stage could fit comfortably inside the Rad Cave and still leave room for the bar.  Interiority is a luxury it can afford.  The Met, not so much.  So what's he doing there?

By now we've all read James Jorden's piece, here, where

a) he lauds Peter Gelb for innovations like the HD series, but then
b) takes him to task for enabling the dumbing down of productions by hiring directors for the sparkly shiny that the words Tony Award Winner attaches to their name.  Then he
c) gives Grandage a shelling for suggesting that there might be a preponderance of Met audience members who have never seen Don Giovanni. And of course Mr. Jorden is right...for the actual Met audience inside the actual Met building, that would be a rare demographic indeed.

But here's the thing, the same is not necessarily true of a 250 seat theater at the OperaMall Millionplex. Which brings us back to Neophyte A, and her having a really good time, and all she needed was lots of close-ups from cameras way closer to the singers than even the first row of the orchestra. Close enough to see that those were military oak leaves on the Commendatore's greatcoat, not his zombie-like exposed ribcage. Close enough to see the expressions on people's faces and the looks in their eyes and the minute gestures that will never read from the foie gras seats, let alone the chicken seats.

And this is really where Peter Gelb either is or is not a fucking genius, to use the tags of JJ's alter ego, because Grandage of the 250 seat theater plays great to 250 seat theaters full of opera neophytes, who get their opera on Hollywood terms, sung well-amplified by the thin and attractive, with popcorn and Twizzlers and half-gallon Cokes.  Who's the Met audience now?

Charles Ives wears combat boots*

In anticipation of Bottle Rocket Weekend in the present neighborhood, here are some appropriately (or dubiously) festive numbers from the old one:






*graffito of Danbury, c. 1987