The title, which I don’t much like, strikes me as one of those clever mixing of ideas and media that doesn’t yield anything meaningful. But the film Visual Acoustics is great fun for people who love architecture, especially those who already know the huge role that photographer Julius Shulman played in promoting the mid-century modern architecture that defined an era and an ethos. I reviewed it in Friday’s Post.
November 3, 2009
Richard Moe retires
Richard Moe, for 17 years the head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, announced his plans for retirement today. He’s had some stunning victories since he came to the Trust in 1992-93, including a famous battle against the Walt Disney Company’s plans to build a theme park near some of the most historically hallowed ground on the East Coast. Moe also helped build the Trust into a more powerful, more flexible, more nationally connected organization. I’ve had lunch with him twice, and it was immediately clear that he is endowed with the kind of intelligence and charisma that makes Washington (sometimes) a fabulous place to do power. Here’s my story (with a dramatic recap of the Battle Against the Mouse), which I endeavored to not sound like an obit.
November 2, 2009
Parking is the problem
For some reason, it’s impossible to hide parking. Even when cities do it right and create mixed-used developments with street-level retail and parking hidden above or behind more pedestrian friendly spaces, you always know it’s there. Something about the scale of the building, and the cheap cladding that covers so many garages always gives them away. I spent some time recently thinking about parking, inspired not only by a new show at the National Building Museum, but by the National Parking Association’s annual meeting, held last month near D.C. The results are here.
October 27, 2009
Lang Lang and chamber music
There’s a plant on my shelf that sits in a metal pot and for some reason (sympathetic vibrations) it rattles when certain tones are played loudly on the stereo speakers nearby. I first noticed this while listening to a recording by Lang Lang, the 27-year-old piano phenomenon. In fact, most of Lang Lang’s recordings at some point make this poor plant buzz in its pot. All plants deserve names, so naturally I call this one Lang Lang.
Poor Lang Lang (the plant) has had quite a work out after an afternoon spent listening to a new Deutsche Grammophon recording of Lang Lang (the pianist) performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor (with cellist Mischa Maisky and violinist Vadim Repin). It’s a big boned piece, almost a piano concerto with chamber accompaniment, and I’m afraid that if there are concerns out there about Lang Lang’s tendency to big-boned and somewhat unrefined playing, this new disk won’t allay them.
And if there are concerns about the tendency of all-star chamber music ensembles—the kind that come together for a one-off performance or recording—to sound not particularly cohesive, this disk won’t allay them either. The Tchaikovsky trio is a famously over-scaled piece, orchestral in its basic thinking and not well adapted in its gestures and accompaniment figures to the chamber music sensibility. Tchaikovsky can be terribly blunt, and he needs an orchestra to carry the weight of the ideas he explores in this chamber work.
We have Tchaikovsky’s busy correspondent Madame von Meck to thank, in part, for the score. She spent the summer of 1880 near Florence, and hired a trio of musicians to entertain her. Among them was an 18-year-old pianist she called Bussy, who was none other than Debussy. The French musician’s time there inspired him to compose an early piano trio (long lost, but discovered and returned to the repertoire in the 1980s). And it seems to have inspired Madame von Meck to pressure her epistolary friend to write his own trio, which he did in 1882.
Even Tchaikovsky recognized that he had merely “arranged music of a symphonic character as a trio, instead of writing directly for my instruments.” But the piece still works, if the players throw themselves into it with emotional abandon and the dramatic sensibility a film by Douglas Sirk. So perhaps this is perfect Lang Lang material.
Except that one would like to hear him tackle a piece that wasn’t quite so much up his natural allies, especially in his first chamber music recording. “Chamber music is like you’re playing in midfield, passing the ball everywhere,” he told Gramophone magazine a few months ago. “It’s about teamwork.”
Indeed. But it’s also about scale and balance and textural clarity, and while there are patches throughout the recording that suggest ample teamwork, there are many passages that make one wish Lang Lang had chosen something by Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn. One feels compelled to listen because this is his first chamber music recording, and in the end, you get very little chamber music. And a whole lot of Lang Lang.
It is possible to pull three famous musicians who don’t work together into the same room and get a respectable, even thrilling performance of the Tchaikovsky trio. I still cherish a silly album memorializing an 85th anniversary concert held at Carnegie Hall in 1976, including a magnificent reading of the trio by Vladimir Horowitz, Isaac Stern and Mstislav Rostropovich. Teamwork is precisely the wrong word for the performance. It’s more like a collective hallucination, which we’re allowed to watch from the outside.
But Lang Lang and his mates don’t get there. It is strangely fussy, this album, filled with misguided attempts to patch over the all too apparent seams of the music, strange tempo fluctuations, heightened dynamic extremes, and sustained fortissimo playing that loses character and impact. I keep thinking of that word, teamwork, and I wonder if it’s become a pernicious term in the way people think about chamber music, a mindless reflection of the status “teams” have taken on in corporate culture.
Lang Lang has a very good team here. Maisky is fantastic throughout, and Repin, though he can be coarse, manages to project the violin line with enough force and presence that it isn’t lost in the piano thickets. But I suspect that most people will buy this recording because they’re Lang Lang fans, or interested in his development. And they won’t be surprised to learn that even when taking new steps, Lang Lang hasn’t strayed far from the comfort zone.
I can’t say that for poor Lang Lang the vine, addled all day, and wishing, I’m sure, for something a little lighter, softer, and more delicate. Perhaps Bussy’s first piano trio will do the trick.
October 25, 2009
Ariadne auf Naxos at the Washington National Opera
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who once lamented that overturning a law criminalizing homosexuality might lead to the invalidation of laws criminalizing masturbation, adultery and fornication, received a little lap dance on Saturday night. Location: The Washington National Opera. The purpose: To further the performance of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”
Scalia was on stage at the Kennedy Center Opera House as a VIP supernumerary, along with his colleague Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Washington’s delegate to the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton. They were part of the onstage “audience” which watches an opera—Ariadne auf Naxos—performed during the second half of this weirdly post-modern tale of backstage drama and on-stage romance. For just a few seconds, the flirtatious and resolutely promiscuous Zerbinetta—dazzlingly sung by the evening’s star, soprano Lyubov Petrova—gave Scalia his own little show during one of her robustly sexual solos. The justice looked pleased. He was, of course, merely doing his duty as a celebrity wallflower on opening night of this new-to-Washington production.
It was one of those odd, only-inside-the-Beltway moments, and the audience howled. But the WNO’s Ariadne auf Naxos is thoroughly entertaining and this production meets its fundamental challenge: How do you stitch together Ariadne’s polar absurdities, its mix of crowd-pleasing silliness and High Art? How do you make us care about a mythological romance between abandoned Ariadne and the young god Bacchus, when we have already met them, in the piece’s lengthy prologue, as a temperamental diva and sneering tenor, both straight from opera central casting?
Strauss and his mandarin librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, conceived Ariadne as an enactment of the tensions within the creative process of making opera. A young, idealistic composer, the sort of lad who has read his Sorrows of Young Werther and spent long winter nights with Jean Christophe, is about to premiere his new opus, Ariadne auf Naxos, which celebrates with Kierkegaardian extremity the purity of erotic and existential longing. But at the very moment his magnum opus is about to begin, a cruelly indifferent Major Domo announces that the rich patron of the spectacle has decreed that Ariadne auf Naxos will be presently concurrently with a commedia del arte farce improvised by Zerbinetta and her troupe. High Art and Escapism must coexist.
The composer is crushed, but he isn’t immune to the charms of the irrepressibly sexual Zerbinetta. And thus begins a philosophical, musical and theatrical interpenetration of ideas: Pure love and fleeting desire, grand art and entertainment, music and narrative. Behind the scenes, Strauss is orchestrating everything and much of the pleasure of the piece is listening to the music’s suggestion of metaphysical affinities and opposites. It’s an odd and difficult confection to pull off, not least because it is also a major test of just about every voice type a composer can throw on stage.
First seen at the Seattle Opera in 2004, this production (by Chris Alexander) has a solid conceit: Instead of a “great noble” and “the richest man in Vienna” throwing a party (as in the original libretto), we have a capricious contemporary art patron hosting a gala, complete with champagne, a sit-down meal and fireworks to begin promptly at 9 p.m. The prologue (essentially the first act) is played out back-stage at the gallery, a blandly institutional space with cinder block walls and exposed pipes and restrooms serving as dressing rooms for the evening’s stars, while the opera-within-the-opera takes place in the gallery itself, with a domineering Richard Serra sculpture serving as Ariadne’s cave.
Updating is usually reflexive, an excuse for not thinking about the mechanics of the drama. But this updating is inspired. The art world is one of the few places where one can actually see Philistinism in practice today. Everywhere else, we’re all Philistines, or at least required to pretend that we’re Philistines. Even the rich. But the art world still takes itself seriously enough to believe in taste.
I first saw Ariadne at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with Kathleen Battle as Zerbinetta and Jessye Norman as Ariadne. It was luxury casting, but with a downside: Almost everyone else got lost in the vocal glamour. Not so with the Washington Opera, where many of the best bits come from singers in smaller roles, including Ariadne’s trio of winsome nymphs (Jennifer Lynn Waters, Cynthia Hanna, Emily Albrink) and Zerbinetta’s comedians (Nathan Herfindahl, Jason Karn, Greg Fedderly and Grigory Soloviov). Gidon Saks had all the right dramatic moves as the Music Teacher, rumpled, wise and addled.
Petrova, as Zerbinetta, dominated among the major roles. Her coloratura is not some flute-like register unnaturally attached to a normal soprano sound. It has edge and power throughout the range, and this combined to make her Zerbinetta more than the usual brainless flirt. She was arguing her world view—take your pleasures and move on, no worries—and her vocal pyrotechnics made her a powerful philosophical force rather than a mere distraction.
Kristine Jepson’s Composer was also more than the usual petulant teenager one so often sees in this role. Vocally, there are moments of astonishing sweetness and beauty in her tone. When she pushes it, that sweetness is lost, but the more powerful tone isn’t ugly, just less interesting. As Ariadne, Irene Theorin seemed trapped in vocal middle ground, not quite sure if this is a Strauss soprano in the Daphne mold, or one of his more Wagnerian-sized heroines. She too had moments of pure loveliness—and a lot of growl in her “totenreich” at the beginning of her soliloquy. But I left perplexed, never quite comfortable that she was comfortable in this role. As Bacchus and the Tenor, Corey Evan Rotz was replacing the announced singer. He began well, and the voice has an appealing, light but forceful tone. He stumbled at one point and that seemed to shake him but I’d like to hear him again.
Andreas Delfs, making his WNO debut, conducted the orchestra. Delfs moved things along briskly, perhaps too briskly, especially in the opening of Ariadne’s big number. Strauss’s often very light scoring in this quasi-chamber opera exposed the orchestra, sometimes for the worse, especially with the upper string sound. But this is to quibble unnecessarily. The show works well enough from top to bottom that you can forget any of these musical trifles, and simply immerse yourself in one of Strauss’s oddest, wildest and most daring inventions.
Lyubov Petrova as Zerbinetta; image by Karin Cooper for the Washington National Opera
October 23, 2009
Adjaye tweaks his design
A few weeks ago, I wrote about architect David Adjaye and his designs for two new libraries in the District, plus his plans for the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture. The story included discussion of the controversy Adjaye faces with his proposal for the Washington Highlands library. Local residents felt it doesn’t fit into their neighborhood, that it would be discordant with the brick homes and residential scale, and that it includes spaces for teens and children that would be hard to monitor and patrol. The Library has just announced that Adjaye has revised his plans for that branch, and they’ve sent out an image that gives a sense of what Adjaye is now thinking.
Image Courtesy DC Public Library
October 23, 2009
They must love migraines
News flash: The Chicago and Shanghai offices of the architecture giant Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, have been chosen to design a major expansion of the business district in Beijing. And it comes with all the environmental trimmings. Plans call for pedestrian and bicycle friendly streets, a street car system to link the nodal points of the expanded district, and buildings that are “high performance,” meaning they will be more earth friendly in their design and systems. All good news. Except now SOM has to actually make all of this happen, which as anyone who watched the experience of landscape design firm Sasaki at the Olympic site can attest, isn’t going to be easy.
The original plan for the Olympic park was better than this — more organic, more green, more diverse in its breakdown of space. But the Chinese have a strange way of soliciting plans and then messing them up. The Boston-based urban planning firm Sasaki Partners did much of the overall design concept for the Olympic Green. But the company is at pains to let the world know that “Sasaki had no involvement in the design and final implementation of the landscape for the Beijing Olympics,” according to its Web site.
Good luck, SOM.
Image courtesy of SOM.
October 17, 2009
New York, I Love You
Which I do, but this is also the title of a new film, and a very starry one. I’ll be curious to see how it does with its large and beautiful cast, given that it’s not conventional Hollywood fare. Rather, it’s part of a project looking at love and desire in cities around the world (beginning in Paris three years ago). Different directors lead little vignettes, which are then woven together into a feature-length film. Some, obviously, are better than others. I reviewed it for the Post.
October 15, 2009
Debating Arts Education
The Seattle Opera website has taken up discussion of an Opera News article I wrote about opera education. They take issue with my arguments, and they take issue in smart, reasoned and interesting ways. Here’s a link.
