Kaija Saariaho: "Love from Afar": Finnish opera opens the 21st Century

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Finnish National Opera on a Deutch Grammophon DVD of the 2000 opera from female Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, “L’amour de loin”, or Love from Afar. The libretto, in French, is by Amin Maalouf.

It’s easier to appreciate the work first in terms of its building blocks: the visuals and the sounds. The staging (directed by Peter Sellars) is mostly abstract, and seems other-worldly, suitable for science fiction. In the opening act, the longing lover Jaufre (Gerald Finley) sings on a metallic staircase that looks like a DNA helix. The colors start with blues but change later to oranges and reds. Then the boat itself is abstract, a white geometric form in a featureless sea, almost as if it were an object from “The Matrix.” The DVD itself opens with a waterside picture of the Helsinki opera house, complete with geometric angles.

The setting takes place in the 12th Century, in France and in Tripoli and at sea, but it seems to the viewer that it could just as well take place on Solaris, in another solar system.

The music to me sounds a bit like Ligeti, although the solo singing is loud. To me it sometimes sounds more like the atonality of Boulez than of the Viennese composers (although a couple of times it recedes to the mood of the ending of Wozzeck). Sometimes the music sounds declamatory.

The plot comes across as a schizoid fantasy, and perhaps a paradox, exploring “aesthetic realism”. A troubadour longs for real love, and yet clings to the notion that a perfect woman afar exists. The Pilgrim is the intermediary with the actual woman Clemence (Dawn Upshaw). The troubadour will fall into ill health out of his questionable search, leading to tragedy. Yet he sings “I want to live again” as the Pilgrim attempts CPR!

At the end, the performers wade on a stage covered in sea water for the applause.

The composer had been influenced by Messian’s opera “St. Francis of Assisi”.

The DVD offers several interviews. Sellars says that the opera shows the connections between East and West and counters the idea of a "culture war." Kaija Saariaho says that she came up with her own treatment of the story, originally with five characters, and had some difficulty determining what the music for some characters should be. Salonen talks about physical and tone color changing constantly and abou the "slowness" of the music.

I recall that when I was “coming out” in 1973, there was a gay bar called “The Troubadour” on the Upper East Side then. I don’t know what became of it.

A Capitol Fourth (Independence Day 233) on the Mall

On Saturday, July 4, 2009 PBS WETA broadcast the 233rd birthday party for the nation from the Mall in Washington, with a concert that started at 8 PM, under cloudy, cooler than usual skies. The Nationals had played in the afternoon and actually won, for a change. The website for the performance is here.

Jimmy Smits was the host. Aretha Franklin sang a rhapsodic Star Spangled Banner, and Barry Manilow came on with a medley, but he didn’t sing “Rhinestone Cowboy” (link) which I remember hearing so many times around 1976 when working the night shift at NBC.

The highlight of the concert, for me at least, was George Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue" (E Major) in a two piano version with dual soloists Michael Feinstein and Andrew von Oeven. The Steinways were put in symmetrical plush position. Both pianists used a lot of cross-hands and aggressive piano style, already mentioned in the May 14 review of the Andres concert. Erich Kunzel conducted the National Symphony.

Sesame Street came on with its Muppets (remember the “Five People in my Family” stuff from about 1970), as did the Cast of Jersey Boys.

Manilow did a reprise “Let Freedom Ring,” whence the fireworks from the Reflecting Pool area started, and then the orchestra played the last eight or so minutes (the recapitulation and coda) of Tchaikowsky’s “1812 Overture Solennel”. I think the piece works much better if played in its entirety. The Choral Arts Society of Washington joined in with a chorus that sounded like it came from “Reds”. I remember a similar choral passage from Prince Igor, the coronation scene (Mussorgsky), that played on a stereo back in the 1970s during a particular “first” for me.

The Military District of Washington bands and choruses performed afterward as the fireworks continued much longer than in past years.

I remember some other concerts in person, such as 1997 and 2000 particularly. In 2000, in fact, I flew back to Minneapolis early July 5 (diverted by storms to Duluth), only to find another “Fourth” concert in suburban Minneapolis on July 6!

Picture: local fireworks, Arlington VA

Update: July 5: ("The Fifth of July")

Today is just one of remembrance for the iconcolastic play named after this day (reviewed April 2007 on this blog).

Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart " and "The Destiny of Me" (from Grove Press, of course!)

I don’t find a DVD of any of Larry Kramer’s AIDS-related plays on Netflix, but Grove Press (of course!) offers a paperback volume of “The Normal Heart” and the sequel “The Destiny of Me”, ISBN 0-8021-3692-3. (Grove was right down 11th Street from the Cast Iron Building when I lived in that building from 1974-1978.)

“The Normal Heart” was performed first on April 21, 1985 at the Public Theater in New York City, as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival Production, and was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Brad Davis plays the main protagonist, Ned Weeks.

The actual play, in two acts. takes place from 1981-1984, runs 106 pages, and reads quickly. Ned Weeks, who is a protagonist surrogate of Larry Kramer himself, helps found “the organization: which is really the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, but is eventually expelled from his own organization. In the last scene he has a commitment ceremony (long before the gay marriage debate blossomed) with Felix, who then passes away.

The passages in the play describe the rapid progress of the epidemic in the early days, when the number of reported cases doubled every six months, with geometric spread. The play mentions The New York Native, the loud weekly newspaper edited by Charles Ortleb, which I subscribed to by mail even though I lived in Dallas. All the usual political debates occur, including the need to fend off the religious right. The seeming lack of sympathy from the Reagan administration and sometimes the mainstream press is well covered, as are some of the conspiracy theories that Ortleb often published in the Native. I thought Ortleb was a bit crazy, but his researcher friend John Beldakas said, “he has a right to be crazy.” I actually visited the premises of the Native in February 1986.

I also remember my experiences as an assistant “buddy” with the Oak Lawn Counseling Center in Dallas. The disease went through the Dallas community in 1985 and 1986 like a tornado. Men would come back from hospital stays for pneumocystis pneumonia, “robust enough” at first, but with their forearms shaved from wrist to elbow for multiple iv’s. Sometimes one saw the dark purple skin masses (often just under the skin) of Kaposi’s sarcoma – and this became much less common as the epidemic wore on. (Some early cases were quite brutal, as on Geraldo Rivera's May, 1983 ABC 20-20 report; at one point, a tabloid wrote "AIDS eats its victims." KS is also covered in the play. Of course, we know the story of the discovery of HTLV-III which would soon be called HIV-1, and the also correlating discover that KS was probably related to the activation of a specific herpes virus (HHV-6) which could become carcinogenic in an immunosuppressed person.

The second play, in three acts, runs in 1992, and actually opened in October 1992 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Ned picks up at that time, as he participates in research for a cure, where again all kinds of political and social objections surface. In this play, the values of the heterosexual world are expressed more directly, as in one scene where intercourse and procreation are explained to a child.

The printed version has a 25-page introduction (dating from 2000) by Tony Kushner (“Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”, a play which became an HBO television series and is available as 2 DVD’s; also an opera by Composer Peter Eötvös). Kushner bashes the gay right (whether it calls itself “conservative” like Gay Patriot or libertarian, like GLIL, or both, as in my DADT books – he think’s it’s neither – rather like the second reviewer of my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book on Amazon). He writes “with ‘personal responsibility’ as their battle cry, the gay and lesbian right seeks to remove homosexual enfranchisement from its place as a chapter in the book of liberation and paste it squarely in the book of the irresistible rise of entrepreneurial individualism.” He then goes on to compare the “gay right” notion of “personal responsibility” with Larry Kramer’s, which is still more a collective idea, comparable to a reaction to the Holocaust; Kramer says “we must save ourselves.” That’s an idea that Christianity (Rick Warren style) supposedly rejects, that anyone can save himself. Yet, at a deeper level, perhaps Judeo-Christian tradition demands it.

"By the way", my own first experience with New York theater was on a college weekend trip in 1964, when I went to the Circle in the Square when it was in Greenwich Village (those were the bad days, of the New York World’s Fair, when bars were closed down) and saw "The Trojan Women" (Euripides) as I best recall.

Emily Bear, 7, performs her own compositions on ABC GMA

Since I mention young composers here, I thought I would pass along that 7 year old Emily Bear performed on ABC “Good Morning America” today. She performed two of her own compositions, one of them called “Northern Lights” (somewhat Debusssy-like, reminding me of the famous Arabesque, which I learned in ninth grade), and another named after the show. Anchor Chris Cuomo introduced her.

She has a major website here. The CD is called "Once Upon a Wish."

The ABC story and video is not there yet, but I presume it will be posted some time on Monday June 15. Update (7 PM EDT): The video is there now under a general link here; look under "Recently on GMA" and use the frame scroll bar. I don't know if ABC will make it available permanently. However ABC has another video link called "Chat with a Piano Prodigy" (between Cuomo and Emily) here. Both videos require watching an ad (in one case, from the Cleveland Clinic!)

The name "Northern Lights" was used by Estonian composer Eduard Tubin, for his post-romantic to modern and rather dramatic Piano Sonata #2 (link) Actually, it should be #3 because the D Minor Beethoven-like "Sonatina" is really a full-blown Sonata itself. The works are available from Swedish record company BIS on CD 414-416 (3 set) with pianist Vardo Rumessen. I have to say that the last Tubin Sonata would make a perfect fit for the performance style of Timothy Andres (May 14 review here).

Pictures: Below: Moon (mine); Above: Aurora australis ("Southern Lights") taken by NASA, Wikipedia attribution link.

"Through a Glass, Darkly" presented by Gay Men's Chorus of Washington

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC performed its annual Pride Concert this weekend, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon (June 8 and 9, 2009) in Lisner Auditorium of the George Washington University.

The portion of the concert, called "Friends", before the intermission was brief (35 minutes). There were nine songs: “Friendship” (Richardson), “Will You?” (Frankel, Korie, Richardson), “I Will Never Be the Same” (Melissa Etheridge, with the Rock Creek Singers and soloist Michael Fratz0, “Trust the Wind” (David Friedman, with soloist Jeff Mace), “Look In My Eyes” (Carnelia), Sara Lee (Kander & Ebb, with Potomac Fever and Justin Zimmerman, with a nice marquee from the food company), “Help Is on the Way”, (Friedman), “Lifelong Friend” (Gaspard and Dawson with soloist Colin James) and “We Can Be Kind”, David Friedman with soloist Stuart Goldstone, with a peace and anti-war and free love message.

After the Intermission there followed the featured work, a 45 minute rock opera by Michael Shaieb, “Through a Glass, Darkly” special WGMC (website). Sebastian is played by Tim Tourbin, Billy by Peelee Clark, and Zack by Justin Bank, along with the full chorus.

The musical is about the misuse of crystal methamphetamines in the gay male community. The sixth (of thirteen) numbers is called “Making It” and features props like a huge bottle of Sudafed that show how crystal meth is made, and makes light of the idea that this activity is an entrepreneurial, home-based “business”.

The “anamorphic stage” with the chorus in the middle, and the two small apartments on each end create a split screen effect, but also the effect of a 3-D, full wide-screen movie. The characters interact with some intimacy in the apartments (more or less in PG-13 range).

It's well to remember that opera tends to deal with controversial issues of a time (for example, "Doctor Atomic" reviewed November 8 2008); sometimes the subject matter seems taboo to some audiences. That was true in earlier generations; for example, Richard Strauss's "Salome" and "Elektra" were sometimes considered immoral in their day.



Note: The Tony Awards are airing on CBS tonight, link here.

Local Arlington VA supermarket has jazz fest

A local independent Arlington VA supermarket on Washington Blvd, the Westover Market, hosted the Laissez Foure jazz quintet Friday June 5, 2009, with a wine tasting party. The quintet comprised a cello, trombone, mandolin, harmonica, and saxophone. The music sounded mainly like New Orleans and Dixie jazz.

The event attracted a fair crowd.

The website for the market is this.

Classical music on West Bank might help heal wounds

Daniel J. Wakin has an article about classical music on the West Bank in the June 1, 2009 “The Arts” section of the New York Times. The print version calls the article “Minuets, Sonatas and Politics on the West Bank” and the online version, somewhat different, is called “Amid West Bank’s Turmoil, the Pull of Strings,” link here. It may require registration to view.

The story talks about a young flutist, Dalia, and teacher and musician Emmanuel Pahud. The story also discusses a foundation by Daniel Barenboim, the Barenboim-Said Foundation, link here.