Above: Katarina Karnéus singing Brangäne in a concert performance of Act II of Wagner’s TRISTAN UND ISOLDE by the Auckland Philharmonia, conducted by Giordano Bellincampi.
CAST:
Tristan – Simon O’Neill; Isolde – Ricarda Merbeth; Brangäne – Katarina Karnéus; Kurwenal – Johan Reuter; King Marke – Albert Dohmen; Melot – Jared Holtin
Watch and listen here.
Grigory Sokolov astounds with his playing of Rameau’s Les Cyclopes; watch and listen here.
Above: Anna Massey as Edith Hope in HOTEL DU LAC
HOTEL DU LAC is a 1986 jewel of a film which I watch once or twice every year. As far as I know, it’s never been released on DVD, but I have my old VHS copy. Though I have watched it at least a score of times, it still touches me, in part because it deals with romance/sex among people of a certain age.
The central character, Edith Hope, is a successful middle-aged writer of romance novels. After many years of leading a seemingly contented solitary life, she accepts a marriage proposal only to leave her prospective groom standing on the church steps when she has a sudden change of heart on her wedding day. Her friends are outraged, and she flees London for a bit of peace at an off-season hotel on Lake Lucerne: the Hotel Du Lac. Here she meets – and nearly marries – Philip Neville, a successful businessman who makes her a surprising offer.
The other guests at the hotel provide comic relief though all are, in their own way, sad and lonely people. Edith’s London set also provide for some interesting personality studies.
Two of my very favorite actors, Anna Massey and Denholm Elliott (above), are so perfectly cast as Edith and Philip. Both these remarkable thespians have since passed away; it makes me feel blue to think we’ll not be seeing their faces and hearing their memorable voices in future films. The rest of the cast are excellent.
And you know me: always an eye for the handsome face. A very young Jean-Marc Barr (above, photographed a few years further on) plays Alain, a waiter at the Hotel Du Lac who loses his job when blamed for something he didn’t do. Msser. Barr went on to appear in many films, including EUROPA, BREAKING THE WAVES, and DOGVILLE. As Alain, he’s deliciously naive and sincere.
Anna Massey, by the way, was the daughter of actor Raymond Massey. She passed away in 2011.
Pianist Polina Osetinskaya (above) plays my favorite piano concerto – the Prokofiev 1st – at a 2016 concert with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, conducted by Vladimir Altshuller.
Watch and listen here.
Egyptian-born soprano Amina Edris (above, photo by Capucine de Chocqueuse) sings “Dis-moi que je suis belle” from Massenet’s Thaïs at a concert in Prague with the Prague Philharmonia, conducted by Lukasz Borowicz.
Watch and listen here.
Ms. Edris will be making her Metropolitan Opera debut in April 2025 as Mimi in La Boheme.
A performance of Richard Wagner’s SIEGFRIED IDYLL by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian.
Watch and listen here.
Above: Samuel Pisar
~ Author: Oberon
Wednesday January 29th, 2025 – Carnegie Hall marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.” A setting of ‘A Dialogue with God’ by the late Samuel Pisar – who had himself been a survivor of Auschwitz – was spoken tonight by Pisar’s wife, Judith Pisar, and their daughter Leah Pisar, with James Conlon leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. The Bard Festival Chorus, directed by James Bagwell, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, led by Dianne Berkun Menaker, made the choral passages an integral part of the evening’s performance.
The reviews were quite harsh when the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Munch, premiered this symphony on January 10, 1964; it is dedicated to the memory of President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated on November 22, 1963.
Tonight was my first time hearing this work. In preparation, I read some articles and reviews of the piece; these seemed mostly to center on the narrative rather than on the musical setting. My idea was to focus on the music and let the narration flow, but that proved impossible: such is the power of Mr. Pisar’s writing.
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, stepson of Samuel Pisar, made an eloquent introductory speech in which he drew a connection between the substance of Bernstein’s Kaddish and the current situation here in the USA. This of course was surely weighing on the minds of most everyone in the audience.
Judith and Leah Pisar had taken their places next to the podium, and Maestro Conlon entered to a warm greeting. Most of my experiences with Mr. Conlon’s conducting have been at the Metropolitan Opera, where he debuted in 1976 and went on to preside over nearly 300 performances, the latest having been Shostakovich’s LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, more than ten years ago. I’d love to see him on the Met podium again.
Low humming from the chorus opens the Kaddish, and then Judith Pisar, a petite woman, began to speak. Her voice is deep and profound as she talks of the Age of Anxiety, which seems to be having its second dawning. Leah Pisar’s speaking voice has a sense of passion and urgency which contrasted with Mme. Pisar’s more solemn tones.
A high violin tone is sustained by concertmaster Krista Bennion Feeney until the xylophone sounds an alarm. A melancholy theme of unison celli turns anxious as the basses join. Following a resounding crash, the music gets wild and fast, with the crack of a horsewhip. The chorus’s rhythmic clapping gets a bit jazzy; their song is accented by the xylophone, and it moves to a big finish.
Over quiet percussion and choral humming, Judith Pisar speaks long…and movingly; the essence of the work now becomes evident: where was god when these horrible things were happening to his people? What wrongs had they committed to merit such torment and anguish? Was god angry or simply indifferent?
As questions are raised – “How did the Holocaust, the genocides, and the ethnic cleansings become acceptable?” – and as the spoken words become more haunting and horrifying, the actual music tends to feel less engrossing.
But then, soprano Diana Newman’s high, sweet voice floats over an accompanying harp: clear and reassuring. The female choristers join, and the music turns grand, only to fade with the xylophone sounding. Ms. Newman resumes, supported by high, spun-out sounds of the violins. Angelic voices hum, whilst scurrying music underscores Leah Pisar’s speaking of “incendiary demagogues”.
The music turns delicate; Mme. Pisar speaks until a crescendo obliterates her voice; her daughter speaks of “chaos on Earth”. Aching celli and basses play deep and rich; the music swells with both choruses joining. Stabbing accents turn into an oddly merry passage for clarinet, flute, and bassoon. The Youth Chorus sings; the spoken description of “the warm embrace of democracy” seems ironic now.
A postlude of strings and brass becomes a lament, with muted trumpet and oboe. The music hesitates; Leah Pisar speaks again, with Ms. Feeney’s violin as solo accompaniment. Now Mme. Pisar issues a plea for peace as horn and trumpet sound. There is a fast and jazzy chorus, which Ms. Newman joins. The finale feels a bit extended, but then a dramatic pause leads to a final Amen.
Throughout the work, the eternal question hovers overall: why does god allow these things to happen? And why did he abandon the faithful in their hour of direst need? Another such test seems to loom before us now. Perhaps there are no gods, and we’re simply going to have to make it on our own.
~ Oberon
Above: William Christie, photo by Richard Termine
~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Tuesday January 28th, 2025 – Tonight, Les Arts Florissants made what has become the rare appearance of an early music ensemble on a Carnegie Hall stage.
To celebrate the eightieth birthday of its founder and co-musical director William Christie, the group presented selections from the core of its repertory, including scenes from the operas of Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1632-1704), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Christie has been a champion of these composers since the 1970s and it was with a 1986-87 production of Lully’s Atys – an opera that had not been staged since 1753 and whose music was excerpted at Tuesday’s performance – that Les Arts Florissants made its first big break.
Seeing the thirteen players and six vocalists take the stage of Zankel Hall’s intimate in-the-round configuration, one might get the sense that Les Arts Florissants is simply a small group of musicians dedicated to the French Baroque. Back in France, however, this group is just one component of a multifaceted institution that includes early music performance, music pedagogy, professional development for young singers and instrumentalists, a historic country house with fanciful Baroque-style gardens (themselves home to many of the group’s activities), training for gardeners, and a garden studies research center. Christie himself (an American, mind you, who left the States as an objector to the Vietnam War) is the godfather of this musical-cultural web.
Tuesday’s performance was a testament to the group’s decades-long legacy of learning and teaching, its total grasp of this body of music, and the kinship of its members, who played and sang together like family.
The chosen excerpts reveal the dramatic directness and emotional turbulence of French Baroque opera. We heard none of the repetitive music of Italian da capo arias or strophic forms. Instead, we heard through-written works that interweave recitative dialogues and monologues with airs and duets. The transitions between air and recitative were at times fitful and at times seamless, but always served a clear dramatic function. That formal range and psychological charge were on display in the excerpts from Charpentier’s 1693 Médée, where a dialogue between Médée and her confidante Nérine is interrupted by outbursts of jealousy and vengefulness. This all culminated in the aria “Quel prix de mon amour”, sung by mezzo-soprano Rebecca Leggett, a lamentation undergirded by fleeting but searing dissonances in the orchestra.
Another characteristic of this music is its emphasis on French diction. Lully, the favorite composer of Louis XIV, explicitly sought to differentiate his music from the florid and opaque sounds of Italian opera of the time. In excerpts from the later acts of Atys of 1676, the tenor Bastien Rimondi sang with clarity and shapely elegance as he communicated his character’s yearning and anguish.
The highlight of the program was Rimondi’s “Règne, Amour” from Rameau’s Pigmalion (1748). Rameau’s opera music, which dominated the evening, was presented simultaneously as a development of Lully’s legacy as well as an innovation upon and a perversion of it. In the Pigmalion excerpts we hear varied instrumental colors, free-spirited use of the recorders and reeds, heavy basso continuo inversions that drive harmonic motion, and a Handelian rhythmic motor. Rimondi sang his part with pure joy. His exquisitely crisp diction permeated ornate passages and more straightforward melodic lines, never hindering a sweet, clear tone and blooming vibrato on sustained notes.
The program concluded with two scenes from Rameau’s 1735 Les Indes galantes, the flagrantly cancelable opera-ballet featuring unrelated tales of exotic places and their inhabitants. Both scenes were drawn from the act “Les sauvages” depicting North American landscapes and natives. One might think the inclusion of the “Forêts paisibles” chorus to be pandering to the New York audience, but this scene also includes the famous dance of the savages which serves as Les Arts Florissants’s frequent sendoff at the end of their concerts. They tossed off this music with swung beats and confident restraint.
As an encore, Christie and Les Arts Florissants offered the quartet “Tendre amour” from the third act of Les Indes galantes (which Rameau cut from the opera after its first performances). Christie described this music as “one of the most beautiful pieces of the eighteenth century” and indeed it was gorgeous and pastoral with vocal lines floating high in the air. It was a birthday gift from Christie to the audience.
Above: Maestro Christie greets Joyce DiDonato; photo by Richard Termine
But the ensemble members had something else up their sleeve. The star mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato emerged onto the stage and lavished praise on Christie, whom she met while rehearsing for his 2004 production of Handel’s English-language opera Hercules. In tribute to Christie, she and the ensemble presented “As with rosy steps the morn” from the oratorio Theodora (why didn’t they choose something from Hercules?). After a full program of Charpentier, Lully, and Rameau, DiDonato’s Handel seemed monumentally scaled, possessing a different species of substance and intensity. The strophic form of this piece (repeating sections of music with new verses of text) set an obvious contrast with the French music of the main program and put the French works’ organic, dramatic, and transparent value into focus.
The program was, after all, a didactic showcase of French Baroque music and its performance techniques. Among early music groups, Les Arts Florissants is a champion of craft, forgoing the temptations to produce the highly biting, peppery sound that is so en vogue these days. Surrounding the ensemble on all sides, it was as if we the audience could simply enjoy overhearing a reading of this music being shared among friends.
Performance photos by Richard Termine, courtesy of Carnegie Hall
~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Above: performance photo by Jennifer Taylor
~ Author: Lili Tobias
Saturday January 25th, 2025 – Tonight, I had the joy of hearing Roomful of Teeth and Tambuco Percussion Ensemble perform at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Between the two ensembles, I got to hear music by six different composers, from familiar favorites of mine like Caroline Shaw, to names that were completely new to me (but who I will certainly listen to again)
Both Caroline Shaw’s and William Brittelle’s pieces were exceptionally chaotic—which is completely on brand for Roomful of Teeth! The eight singers performed a vast variety of vocal techniques and styles, including but not limited to guttural croaking sounds, throat singing, really really high notes, muttering repeated syllables, low glissandos, and speaking normally. Shaw’s piece, The Isle, in which she set text from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, also contrasted the chaos at times with more homophonous singing—hearty choral triads and flowing solo melodies—which provided a good balance so we could still hear the words.
The text of Brittelle’s piece, Psychedelics, was very different. He explains in the program notes that the surreal collection of words in this music are “meant to form a swarm of images, not a literal, linear narrative.” And they certainly did just this! As I listened, I caught snippets of the words, such as “I watch for dogs,” and these fragments created a very joyful experience in their meaninglessness. Throughout this piece, I never knew what to expect in the best possible way!
The bridge between the vocal portion of the concert and the percussive potion was the composer Gabriela Ortiz. Ortiz is Carnegie Hall’s composer in residence this year, and both Roomful of Teeth and Tambuco Percussion Ensemble performed a piece of hers in this concert.
In Canta la Piedra-Tetluikan (of which this would have been a world premiere performance if not for the group of elementary school kids who got to sit in on a rehearsal), Ortiz set the words of poet Mardonio Carballo. And these words were in Nahuatl! Nahuatl is a language (sometimes considered a group of languages) spoken in Central Mexico, and I was very excited to hear it in a musical context. Ortiz’s setting of Carballo’s poem was joyously animated. The mesmerizing repetitions—“atl, atl, atl” (water, water, water), “tlitl, tlitl, tlitl” (fire, fire, fire), and more—and energetic (and very difficult!) rhythms grounded the music in the natural world.
I had been especially looking forward to hearing the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate (⟨tɬ⟩), since that sound is common in many variants of Nahuatl (and doesn’t appear whatsoever in English), but if the singers were singing it, the distinctly fricative sound didn’t come across prominently. Perhaps they were singing in a variety of this language that doesn’t include this consonant though, and no matter what, it was very exciting to hear music in Nahuatl!
Photo by Jennifer Taylor
After intermission, Tambuco Percussion Ensemble performed the movement “Liquid City,” from Ortiz’s 2014 piece, Liquid Borders. The four members of the ensemble played facing each other in a circle (the perfect set-up for the central stage!) and the blooms of sound radiated outwards into the hall. The diverse timbres of the instruments certainly reflected the diverse borders of urban and rural Mexico which Ortiz aimed to reflect in this music, the sounds mixing and shifting into unique and beautiful shapes.
Photo by Jennifer Taylor
The other three pieces on the program were very different in that they were far more homogenous in terms of the instrumental inventory: Jorge Camiruaga’s Cuarteto en chico for four drums, Leopoldo Novoa’s Sábe cómo e’? for four guacharacas (and briefly one marímbula), and Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet for two vibraphones and two marimbas. While these pieces were certainly reigned in the chaos compared to the first half of the program, they also proved that you could still create a wide variety of sounds and musical textures even among more similar instruments.
Above: Gabriela Ortiz, photo by Jennifer Taylor
It was especially fun to see how many of the composers on the program were in the concert hall enjoying the music alongside me and the rest of the audience! I enjoyed this concert so much, and I have a feeling they did too.
~ Lili Tobias
Above, composer/curator Gabriela Ortiz welcomes the crowd; photo by Chris Lee
~ Author: Oberon
Monday January 27th, 2025 – Ensemble Connect is a joint program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. In tonight’s Up Close presentation, curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz, the young artists of the Ensemble performed at the Hall’s Resnick Education Wing, an intimate venue which I’d never been aware of until Carnegie’s Meg Boyle gently twisted my arm into giving it a try.
Above: Chelsea Wang and Ryan Dresen playing Ortiz; photo by Chris Lee
The evening opened with the New York premiere by of Pigmentum by Ms. Ortiz, a four-movement work presented in collaboration with visual artist Martirene Alcántara that was performed by Ryan Dresen (horn) and Chelsea Wang (piano) whilst a film by Ms. Alcántara was shown on a hanging screen.
Each of the work’s four movements is named for a shade of blue, the first being Indigo. This music veered from dreamy to jazzy; some of the piano’s tones had been ‘prepared’, giving a quirky, off-kilter sound. Mr. Dresen’s playing has beauty and power throughout the range, and passages played with a mute were intriguing. Chime-like piano notes introduce Lapislazuli, with horn calls leading to a duet in the instruments’ lower ranges. The music gets wild, and a sudden ending takes us by surprise. The rippling delicacy of Ms. Wang’s playing in Cobalto is joined by the dusky sound of the horn. The music gets grand, then pensive. In the concluding Ultramar, Mr. Dresen’s horn rambles and stutters. There is a false ending, and then the enigmatic sound of toneless air being blown thru the horn.
Mexico’s Carlos Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez presented Luciérnagas (photo above Chris Lee) for which three alumni of the Ensemble – Yasmina Spiegelberg (clarinet), Joanne Kang (piano), and Mari Lee (violin) – joined percussionist de luxe Oliver Xu and cellist Frankie Carr, who introduced the piece. A chord introduces the insectuous music of a swarm of fireflies, whilst the cello vibrates. The clarinet trills, the sneaky piano intones, cello and clarinet sound in unison. The xylophone heralds an explosion causing the violin to go crazy. A rhythmic passage turns spacey, thunder rolls, the bass clarinet rumbles deeply whilst awesome percussion motifs sound. An intriguing marimba solo is interrupted by an urgent one-note motif from the violin, and then the xylophone goes off like a fire alarm; the insistent piano sounds urgently. Silence falls. This seemed like a perfect place to end, but no…we go on, savouring some rhapsodic playing from Ms. Kang at the piano. But then the music turns dark and scary; a cymbal crash leads to a total wipe-out. Somehow, thru all of this, it was the cellist who seemed the central figure, both thru his noble playing and his poetic face.
For “La Hamaca” from La Hamaca (NY Premiere) by the Venezuelan composer Ricardo Lorenz, the players were Chelsea Wang (piano), alumna Mari Lee, and cellist Thapelo Masita. The music opens softly with the piano joined by the violin; the cellist enters with a pinging motif before taking up a gorgeous theme wherein Mr. Masita’s tone was matched by the sweetness of the violin and magical sounds from the piano. The music turns passionate, then staccati introduce new themes, with rich playing from the cello. The staccati resume before Ms. Lee’s violin sings on high; dense harmonies emerge before an agitato outburst. A bouncy rhythm springs up…fabulous playing from the trio as the music wafts to heaven and then fades away.
Above, in a Chris Lee photo: Joanne Kang and Oliver Xu playing the Cuban composer Ileana Perez Velazquez’s Light echoes, having its New York premiere this evening. This piece gave us a virtuoso percussion display from Oliver Xu, who moved amidst his array of instruments with assured grace, as if in a choreographed solo. No less marvelous was Ms. Kang, who was back at the piano to make more magic. Bass drum rolls, bongo beats, and gong tones set off a jazzy piano theme. The swaying rhythm gets big as Mr. Xu moves swiftly from xylophone to ancient hanging bells to every type of drum. Ms. Kang commences a keyboard interlude, laced with various percussive comments. Suddenly, there’s a kind of cabaletta, fast and florid, before things quieten and the mysterious gong sounds; a rhythmic coda ensues. Brilliant playing from start to finish!
The Costa Rican composer Alejandro Cardona’s Axolotl (a US premiere) brought three wind players to prominence: Ms. Spiegelberg (clarinet), Anjali Shinde (flute), and Joseph Jordan (oboe) with Joanne Kang at the piano, Mr. Carr with his cello, and the lovely violinist Isabelle Ai Durrenberger (photo above by Chris Lee).
Above: Joseph Jordan and Anjali Shinde, photo by Chris Lee
The piece develops gradually clarinet and oboe are heard in sync, and the piano music is jazzy. Stillness, and then a haunting flute passage is heard over delicately sustained string tones creating a wonderful air of mystery. The clarinet gets jazzy as a sexy beat rises; more jazz from the violin, whilst the cello is strummed like a guitar. Wailing clarinet and oboe slowly sputter out, and a thoughtful flute solo ensues, with piano and cello commenting. Bass clarinet and flute converse over the deep cello and piano; these voices then make an incredible fade-away.
The concert ended with the world premiere of Gritos de fuego, patrias de papel by the Colombian composer Carolina Noguera (above, photo by Chris Lee). This work brought together the largest ensemble of the evening, with Leonardo Pineda conducting. Joining Mlles. Shinde, Spiegelberg, Wang, Ai Durrenberger, and Mssrs. Jordan, Dresen, Xu, and Masita were flautist Catherine Boyack, bassoonist Marty Tung, violist Ramon Carrero-Martinez, and bass-player Marguerite Cox.
Photo: the ensemble playing the Noguera, photo by Chris Lee
From an explosive start, announced by three massive strikes of the bass drum, eerie strings emerge; the flutes blow air as more thunder claps, wailing winds, and rumbling piano depict the storm, which gives way to the amazingly subtle and sustained violin supported by cello tremelos. A long flute trill sounds as the oboe blows air and a quiet sense of ecstasy settles overall. The piano and eerie shimmers from the violin bring on a repetitive 4-note rising motif from the violin. From a perpetual quietude, raindrop piano notes accompany a sweet and serene solo from Ms. Ai Durrenberger’s violin. The bassoon chimes in, the viola plays a repeated phrase. Big chords are repeated, and then the music vanishes into thin air as a sensationally sustained cello tone from Mr. Masita fades to silence.
Above: the composers take a bow; photo by Chris Lee
Audience members lingered to greet the artists and the composers; except for congratulating Mr. Masita, I was too shy to speak to anyone. But I did have a chance to meet and thank photographer Chris Lee, whose remarkable gift for capturing the essence of Carnegie Hall concerts I have been lucky enough to share on my blog these past few years.
Above, the finale: this, and all the performance photos, are by Chris Lee, courtesy of Carnegie Hall
~ Oberon
Oberon's Glade 
