Leonard Link

Broke-ology at Lincoln Center Theater

I attended a matinee performance of Nathan Louis Jackson's play, "Broke-ology", at Lincoln Center Theater this afternoon.  I enjoyed this tremendously. 

The play tells the story of an African-American family in Kansas City, Kansas, with a brief foreshadowing scene set in 1982 and then the rest played out in current times, 2009.  A father and wife are excitedly expecting the birth of their first child in the first scene; thereafter, it is 27 years later, the father, now a widower suffering serious illness, and his two grown-up sons, the older a restaurant worker in the neighborhood, the younger an educated man with two college degrees, a summer job at the Environmental Protection Agency, and the prospects of returning to academia to teach at University of Connecticut and pursue an advanced career in environmental science with his faculty mentor.  The tension - father can no longer take care of himself, and older brother is putting pressure on younger brother to defer his educational/career dreams and remain in Kansas City at the EPA while helping to take care of their father, as older son's wife has just given birth to their first child. 

That's as far as I'll go on the plot, since to say more would be to spoil it for new audience members.  But I will say that the dialogue is terrific, and the four actors - Wendell Pierce as the father, Francois Battiste and Alano Miller as the sons, and Crystal A. Dickinson as the wife -- are all terrific under the capable direction of Thomas Kail, and I found Jackson's play to be continuously involving, well-paced, and nicely thought out.  In the nature of things a Lincoln Center Theater run is limited, but I hope there would be enough support for this play to transfer it to an off-Broadway house for a longer run.  It has the scale of off-Broadway, an intimacy of a family story that I think would have difficulties in a larger house, but it works nicely in the small-scale Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

City Opera Revives Weisgall's "Esther"

I attended the world premiere production of Hugo Weisgall's opera, Esther, written for the New York City Opera, back in 1993.  They didn't have much faith in new operas back then.  Esther was one of a handful of new operas commissioned by City Opera and put on during that season, receiving only two performances each.  Esther received rave reviews, and I bet they wish they had scheduled more performances.  Surprisingly, given the excited reception from the audiences and the critics, they did not reprise the production in subsequent seasons, and only now, a decade and a half later, has the City Opera remounted Esther. 

I was really excited by that 1993 performance.  I found the opera involving, even though the musical idiom was rather forbidding - atonal and lacking in contrast as the music unfolded.  This time around, I found it less involving.  Saturday's performance actually marked the return of City Opera after a year's hiatus.  They did a concert a few nights ago to show off the hall, but this first performance of four that will be offered of Esther was the first fully-staged opera they have mounted since the end of the 2007-2008 season.  It was unclear to me whether this was a totally new production, or whether they reused sets and costumes from that long-ago premiere.  In any event, the production was comprised of projections and scrims, not actual built-up sets, with colorful costumes meant to invoke ancient Persia where the story of Esther (from the Megilla, a Jewish sacred text) supposedly took place.  The opera's libretto is relatively faithful to the ancient scripture, fleshing out characters a bit but following the old story line.

The problem for me, I guess, is that the music remains mostly forbidding and grey, due to a lack of melody and a lack of contrast.  It seems to be continuously shouting at one, with little in the way of tenderness.  I did find that the second and third acts, especially the third, seemed more listener-friendly, and perhaps it was the spectacle of the final movements, with semi-clad exotic dancers and the colorful garb of the courtiers, that softened the music a bit.  Or perhaps one becomes more accepting of the idiom as the evening wears on.  In any event, I found the opera a bit static and, lacking memorable themes, a bit difficult to maintain focus upon.  I found my mind wandering....  It may also be that George Manahan, City Opera's music director, had more difficulty finding the "music" in the "notes" than his predecessor from that long ago season.  Lauren Flanigan reprised her role as Queen Esther, and made the most of it.  James Maddalena is Mordecai was excellent.  Stephen Kechulius as Xerxes, King of Persia (Ahasueras in the ancient Hebrew text), was OK without being really commanding - one never really understood his professed love for Esther.  Most effective for me were Roy Cornelius Smith as Haman, the evil prime minister who plots the murder of the Jews, and Margaret Thompson as Zeresh, Haman's wife and co-conspirator.  Maybe it's just that the folks who sing the roles of villians can be more easily memorable.

The audience gave a great ovation at the end, but it's hard to judge anything by that.  Certainly this was an honorable effort by all involved, and given the great reception the opera had on its first performance it should have been revived before now, but I would count this revival as only moderately successful, for which more blame accrues to Weisgall, since deceased, than anybody connected with the current production.

As to the theater - this was my first time back since the renovations that largely closed down the company last year.  I was in the third ring center, front row, from where the sound was pretty good.  The new seats are firm but comfortable -- the old seats REALLY needed replacing, as you could feel the springs in the seats, the covers were worn so thin over time -- but their design precludes stuffing one's coat under the seat, due to the presence of a large metal bar.  The lobby has been brightened up with better lighting and an illuminated wall for the ticket windows, but the fat ladies still dominate the orchestra-level lobby!  It will take more listening to judge whether the renovation was an accoustical success.  There are new aisles in the orchestra to ease getting to and from seats, but since I wasn't sitting down there I have little basis to judge that experiment.  The opera pit is bigger, so they are less crowded and can expand the orchestra for the big romantic operas.  That will be interesting to hear.

Welcome back, NYC Opera!

Missing in Action at the "Meet Market"

I hvaen't posted anything for a few days since I've been otherwise occupied.  As co-chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee for NY Law School, I have been attending the Annual Faculty Recruitment Conference sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools in Washington, D.C.  Aspiring law teachers and recruitment teams from law schools take over a big Washington convention hotel for a few days to facilitate an efficient process of interviewing large numbers of people in a short period of time.

As part of the NYLS team, I participated in interviews beginning early Thursday afternoon, continuing into the evening, all day yesterday, and continuing this morning until midday.  Then I hope onto the Amtrak ACELA back to NYC, in time -- I hope -- to attend the opening of the New York City Opera's revivial of Hugo Weisgal's opera "Esther."  So I will be back to substantive posting soon.

I haven't posted anything about the election and LGBT rights.  On Tuesday we were 2 for 3. 

There has been a lot of whining and moaning about the loss in Maine, where a "voter's veto" repealed the same-sex marriage law passed earlier this year.  There are a few things to remember about this vote.  Unfortunate as it was, it was NOT the enactment of a constitutional amendment or a statute banning same-sex marriage.  It has no substantive effect going forward.  All it does is to repeal the marriage law passed earlier this year.  It does not preclude the legislature from revisiting the issue, either with an interim civil union measure or another attempt at marriage.  There is a history of this in Maine.  It took several tries to get a law banning sexual orientation discrimination solidly on the books, but after several legislative actions and a few referenda, we finally got the law.  So although it was discouraging that the measure was repealed, the margin of the voting gives room for hope.  (After all, just a few short years ago national polling tended to show public opposition to same-sex marriage at 2/3 or higher, but the margin of defeat on this measure was substantially lower than that, although not much different form the measure by with California Prop 8 passed last year.

On the other hand, we had wins in Washington State -- where the public voted affirmatively to ratify the legislature's action earlier this year in expanding the domestic partnership law to be the legal equivalent of the DP laws in neighboring Oregon and California.  So registered domestic partners in Washington State will have almost all of the same legal rights and responsibilities under state law that married couples have.  The rate of approval was not as high as one would have liked, but it was high enough to be decisive - no recounts needed.  And, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, voters overwhelming supported the action by local legislators earlier this year to pass a law banning discrimination, so we can count that one a major victory, albeit solely local.

So it was not all gloom and doom on election day.  Could we have won Maine with a stronger campaign?  Perhaps, but it was no certainty, and indeed a win would have been historic, since I don't think there is anywhere in the world where a general public ballot has affirmatively enacted same-sex marriage.  It is a defeat, but determination to go back and win it is the appropriate response, not recriminations and nitpicking over this or that commercial.

Beethoven and the Boston Massacre

While James Levine is recovering from surgery, the Boston Symphony has lined up a bunch of guest conductors to take over his concert dates.  Last night at Carnegie Hall, Lorin Maazel led the orchestra through readings of two Beethoven Symphonies, Nos. 6 (Pastoral) and 7.

This is about the most unimaginative concert programming possible.  Two Beethoven symphonies.  Nothing else.  Perhaps Levine expected to produce an extraordinary effect with probing, insightful readings, but we didn't get Levine. We got Maazel.  My verdict on him, after his years at the NY Philharmonic, is that every year he seemed more bored with the standard repertory works he was recycling (under Maazel, the NYP spent most of its time playing music it had recently played, over and over and over again....), and boredom can lead a super-technician like Maazel to do crazy things.  I think Beethoven is the greatest composer for orchestra who ever lived, as I wrote on Saturday about the NYP's performance (led by Alan Gilbert) of the Egmont Overture and 3rd Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax.  And I guess each Beethoven Symphony is its own creative world, so you can make a good concert out of two of them.  But still, this is programming that lacks imagination, and to make it worth while you have to do a really good job of it.

Last night, an inert Pastoral Symphony was followed by a 7th that seemed to present all the wrong interpretive choices, strange tempo fluctuations, wierd balances (Maazel defied Richard Strauss's dictum not to look at the trumpets because it only encourages them; he visibly cued them to blare out their high notes and distort the balances), an allegretto that sacrificed all the drama and mystery of its opening with too loud, too thick sound from the low strings, and, in the finale, a mad dash through to the end that got the audience hysterically excited but slaughtered poor Beethoven.  It was as if Maazel had heard the recent recording by Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and decided, anything he can do I can do faster.  Dudamel's 7th finale is about as fast as it can be played while still articulating the notes.  Maazel took it faster than the notes can be articulated, a real mad dash that bludgeoned the music and removed all the drama, transforming it into a carnival of speed.  No, Maazel, you are not "the Dude"....

I came away from the performance of the 7th quite disgusted, but the 6th merely bored me.

The "New" Juilliard Quartet at Peoples' Symphony Concerts

Peoples' Symphony Concerts presented the second program in the "Mann Series" (named for their long-time former manager, Joseph Mann) last night at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.  The Juilliard Quartet performed, as they have continuously since they were first founded, with something new: Nick Eanet was sitting in the first violin chair for the first time at Peoples' Symphony.  And perhaps he provided the extra spark, because this did seem like a "new," rejuvenated Juilliard Quartet.

The program was a bit on the long side.  Schubert's A minor Quartet, D. 804, known as the Rosamunde because one movement uses a theme from the composer's incidental music to the play of that name, is one of the long quartets from his last period of composition.  This was followed by Bela Bartok's Quartet No. 2, also long compared to his other early quartets.  After intermission we had Beethoven's final work in the genre, Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 135.  The program, which began at 8, stretched far beyond 10 pm.  But that didn't deter the Juilliard from playing an encore in response to the rapturous response they got from the audience: the minuet movement from Felix Mendelssohn's Quartet #3 in D, a bit of loveliness to send us off into the night.

What distinguished the Juilliard's playing last night for me was the full, luscious tone they produced in the quieter moments throughout the program, and their ability to make the occasionally abstract-sounding Bartok acquire rather more emotional resonance than one usually hears.  By contrast, the second movement of the Bartok and the second and final movements of the Beethoven sometimes had a coarse-sounding quality, but that seemed appropriate in light of the interpretations.  The middle movement of the Bartok is clearly intended by the composer to be rough-hewn, racous at times, and so it was played here.  Beethoven's scherzo also has a sort of rough, burly humor, well caught by the Juilliards.

I was only let down a bit by the Schubert, and it was not the fault of the musicians.  Schubert's "late" quartets ("late" only in the sense that they were composed in his final years - Schubert did not live long enough [1797-1828] to have a "late" period) are just too long.  I suppose they are not too long in the sense that they are made up of gorgeous music and all of the structural implications are worked to their full extent, but they are too long in the sense that things begin to feel repetitious and overextended.  My theory is that Schubert, not being taken up quickly into the repertory of public performance in Vienna during his lifetime, suffered a bit from the problem of not getting to hear his works performed before large concert audiences, and thus not getting that crucial feedback necessary to revise his work.  If he had that opportunity, perhaps he would have been inspired to do some judicious editing of his work before it was published.  But since the publications of his "late" works were posthumous, they are complete, since who would dare tinker by making cuts?  And the tradition has been to play Schubert's late quartets and sonatas complete, treating every note as sacred.  I think Schubert needs a good editor....

On this occasion, the venue of Washington Irving High School was less than ideal.  The place has great acoustics, but in bad weather can be less than salubrious due to noise.  Heavy rain burst out several times during the concert, and could be clearly, even a bit obtrusively, heard pounding on the roof of the old school building.  Things were not helped by the unseasonably warm night, since the doors to the auditorium had to be kept open for ventilation and it sounded like the janitorial staff was busy making some sort of repairs that require hammering somewhere in the distance during the final movement of the Beethoven....  (On Saturday night??)