8.27.2003
Bard/Tanglewood report
[Posted 4:01 PM by James Panero]
New Criterion music critic Patrick J. Smith writes in with two reviews from farther afield:
The Bard Festival, located on the campus of Bard College in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, concentrates each August on
one composer �and his world.� This year the composer was
Leos Janacek, and the Festival led off with his early (1904)
opera OSUD (Fate), performed in the new Frank Gehry-designed
Richard B. Fisher Center (I saw it August 1). The piece is a
youthful work about the obsession of love intermixed with
artistic creation, and it clearly shows the struggles of the
composer Janacek with mastering the operatic form (which he
mastered triumphantly in his next work, Jenufa). JoAnne
Akalaitis, the director, made some sense of the lumpish plot
by treating it choreographically and gesturally, and by
filling the stage with people; Leon Botstein, the conductor,
kept the performance moving forward for its eighty-minute
length, though the accumulated weight of the monologues of
the composer (sung by Michael Hendrick) and his inamorata
(sung by Christine Abraham) threatened to sink the
enterprise.
The bulk of the Festival lay in the two weeks of chamber
music and orchestral concerts, and the discussion panels, of
which I heard one day�s worth (August 9). The chamber music
performances (in Olin Hall) are usually the most successful:
here, the impassioned playing of the Claremont Trio enlivened
the lovely G-minor piano trio of Smetana, while the Bard
Festival Chorale gave strong performances of some Janacek
pieces. The evening concert, with Botstein leading the
American Symphony Orchestra, was again in the Fisher Center
(one of Gehry�s less-inspired creations) and included pieces
by Janacek, Smetana, Fibich, and Dvorak. The acoustics of the
900-seat hall are excellent for opera and, I would assume,
for chamber music, but the full orchestra at full volume
produces a very loud aural presence (minuscule, of course, by
rock standards) that, though warm in ambiance, overwhelms the
listener, especially given Botstein�s unsubtle readings. And
something must be done about the feeble electric organ. Next
year: Shostakovich, which should guarantee noise and
fireworks on various levels.
***
The two one-act operas presented by the Tanglewood Music
Center in the under-used Theater on the grounds
centered on love and death–surefire operatic material. The
two world premieres (I saw them August 10) included a new
work (Ainadamar–Fountain of Tears) by the much-acclaimed
Osvaldo Golijov, to the libretto by the playwright David
Henry Hwang. The subject matter was, broadly, Federico
Garcia Lorca, a play of his (Mariana Pineda), and the woman
who believed in him and it (Margarita Xirgu), but the work is
in fact a long threnody on Lorca, his execution by the
Falangists and his resurrection through the person of
Margarita. At the end, however, the specificity of subject
is broadened by the librettist to encompass a hymn to
personal liberty, in somewhat of the Fidelio mode, with Lorca
triumphing over the squalidness of his end. This ending,
which goes on for inordinate length, sacrifices most of the
emotional punch of the earlier scenes, and was not helped by
director Chay Yew�s inability to enliven it with meaningful
stage movement..
The work�s strengths, however, lie not in the story as much
as in Golijov�s music, here exploring the Spanish musical
idiom with a thoroughness that, in his earlier Saint Mark Passion, he explored Caribbean and South American musics.
His craft and sense of theater and orchestration are fully
mature, and it is the music that validates the rather lame
words of the libretto–given magisterial shape by
Golijov�s �house conductor� Robert Spano.
I would have preferred a more dusky, �Spanish� soprano sound
than the pure liquidity of Dawn Upshaw as Margarita; Amanda
Forsythe made a lovely-sounding �young� Margarita. Golijov
chose to portray Lorca vocally a la Cherubino: it was almost
perfectly cast in Kelley O�Connor�s slim figure and voice.
The opening opera, Rage d’Amour, by the Dutch composer Robert
Zuidam, was a dreary affaikr, another shy at the Juana la
Loca theme beloved of opera composers, and better set by Gian
Carlo Menotti. The work is librettistically and musically
static (Zuidam wrote both), with glutinous outbursts from the
orchestra punctuating the difficult tessitura of three Juanas
(principally Lucy Shelton) and her obsession-lover-husband
Philip the Fair (Eric Shaw). Stefan Asbury conducted.