Saga of an Incredibly Busy Weekend

This was one of those incredibly busy weekends, mixing culture and work, that left me with no time to blog about events individually, so here's a quick summary:

Friday night, I attended a concert at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, presented as part of the Guitar Plus series organized by guitarist-composer David Leisner.  The title of the program was "Bach, Shakespeare and Elephants."  I had been drawn to attend by the participation of baritone Thomas Meglioranza, one of my favorite singers, anticipating that he would be featured through-out the program.  In the event, however, in terms of time proportion of the program he sang in about half of the event.  The program was framed with purely instrumental music: an arrangement for guitar and string trio of Joseph Haydn's String Quartet in D, Op. 2, No. 2, as the opener, and Luigi Boccherini's famous fandango quintet, for guitar and string quartet, G. 448, as the closer.  (Mr. Meglioranza made an unbilled guest appearance for the fandango finale, playing percussion instruments).  Mr. Leisner was joined by members of the ENSO String Quartet for these pieces.

The centerpiece of the program was the world premiere of Mr. Leisner's composition for baritone and string quartet, "A Timeless Procession," setting a lengthy narrative poem by Rosemary Thomas about the parade of elephants past Carngie Hall when the circus came to town.  This provided a nice balance of drama and humor, with the kind of text that Meglioranza is expert at animating for an audience.  Before performing this number, Meglioranza and some ENSO quartet members joined Leisner in his arrangement of a selection from Bach's St. John Passion, "Betrachte, meine Seel."

After intermission, Meglioranza and Leisner performed several songs based on Shakespeare texts: one each by Elliott Carter, Daniel Pinkham, and Jean Sibelius, and a three-song cycle by Peter Sculthorpe.  Leisner's notes said that the Carter, Pinkham and Sibelius songs were originally set for guitar, while Leisner arranged the Sculthorpe set with the composer's permission from the original piano accompaniments.  This was a very effective sequence, and I was disappointed in my subsequent on-line search to find that the Sculthorpe songs are not currently available on recordings. 

Altogether it was a most entertaining evening.

On Saturday morning, I participated as a judge in the first round of a negotiation competition at New York Law School (in-house), a different sort of experience.  Then I headed to midtown - City Center - for the Encores Series' presentation of "Where's Charley?", an early musical by Frank Loesser.  This had earned a rave review from the Times, which I thought was only partly merited.  The show itself is a weak vessel, providing a hackneyed mistaken identity plot set at the time of an English college graduation in 1892.  The humor inheres in one of the leading male characters impersonating his aunt to provide a missing chaperone for a meeting between the male leads and their girlfriends, with complications ensuing (not least in the problem that Charley and his aunt can't be simultaneously in the same place at the same time).  It was all stuff and nonsense, but the performers were truly excellent, Rob Berman conducted the fine orchestra enthusiastically, and the production team did a great job of mounting this semi-staged brief revival of a show that in its first Broadway incarnation did not even enjoy a cast recording. 

Perhaps somehere the money could be found to generate a cast recording from these performances to make up for the loss?  There are certainly some fine songs here, well rendered by a talented cast led by Rob McClure and Sebastian Arcelus as college chums Charley and Jack, Jill Paice and Lauren Worsham as their beaus Kitty and Amy, and "adult" leads Howard McGillin (as Jack's father), Dakin Matthews (as the uncle and ward of the two girls), and Rebecca Luker (as the real aunt).

For the evening, I ventured to Carnegie Hall for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert.  For the first time, I felt rather strongly that Orpheus could have benefited from a conductor, at least for some of the program.  The menu was heavy with Mozart (Piano Concerto No. 20 with Rudolf Buchbinder; Symphony No. 39), each half prefaced by a contrasting modern work (Albert Roussel's Concerto for Small Orchestra to open the program, Fred Lerdahl's "Waves" to open the second half).

For me, the big discovery of the night was "Waves," which Orpheus jointly commissioned back in the 1980s with two other chamber orchestras, presented in its 1989 concert season, and subsequently recorded for a DG album of several "modern" pieces.  As the composer explained in the program book, "Waves" followed his epiphany about writing listener-friendly music, and it is certainly listener-friendly, presenting a perpetuum mobile of 16th notes churning through the orchestra for a quarter hour with all kinds of contrasting material presented above and below.  The churning notes surge like waves of energy, thus the title (which the composer said in a brief on-stage interview after the intermission was affixed after the piece was composed to reflect is character, rather than the germinating idea for writing it).  I thought this was really swell, and upon returning home discovered that I had that old recording (heard and catalogued at the time, but not since), so it quickly went on the ipod and I've enjoyed listening to it again.

The Roussel seemed an apt complement, as it is also characterized - at least in the outer fast movements - by lots of churning.  This was a first performance of the piece by Orpheus, and I don't think they've fully discovered the music in the piece yet.  It seemed like lots of pointless activity to me.  Roussel was not a great melodist most of the time, and this piece could have used the kind of shaping that an imaginative conductor could have provided.  Left to their own devices, the core group produced a rather neutral sounding reading, polished to a high gloss of technique but not particularly engaging.

On to the Mozart - I've heard Buchbinder before.  He strikes me as a very middle-of-the-road interpreter of Mozart in the modern style - no attempts to simulate the fortepiano, everything very smoothed out and technically impeccable.  The result was a performance that I thought lacked some of the drama that Mozart wrote into this music.  Orpheus is a great collaborator with soloists, but the soloist has to provide more of an individual spark than this to make a piece really sing.  Again, perhaps a conductor would have improved matters.  As to the 39th Symphony, this kind of piece is central to Orpheus's repertory - they play the final Mozart symphonies with some regularity, and have a good corporate sense of how these pieces should go.  On this occasion I found the last two movements the strongest.  The slow movement of K. 543 can be a bit of a trudge, with considerable repetition, and here I again felt the lack of a conductor.

Usually, the Orpheus approach of true chamber music - a group of highly accomplished musicians forming their group interpretation through discussion and rehearsal - works well for me.  This time, it worked a bit less well.  But I counted the overall program a plus due to the rediscovery of the Lerdahl piece.  I'll certainly seek out more of his works.

[PS - Added after the NY Times review of the concert appeared in the 3/22 paper - Zachary Woolf and I seemed to agree about much of the Orpheus concert.  His review reminded me that they performed Fauré's Pavane prior to the programmed music as a statement of solidarity with the people of Japan in light of the earthquake and tsunami of last week.]

 

On Sunday we had the final round of the Robert F. Wagner, Sr., National Labor and Employment Law Moot Court Competition at the law school.  Teams from 50 schools competed this year, and we had a really stellar final round bench, headed by the Chair of the National Labor Relations Board, with two federal circuit judges, an administrative agency commissioner, and a former general counsel of the Labor Board joining our dean on the bench.  The finalist schools were Northern Kentucky University and Mississippi College, with NKU emerging the winner after a grueling final round with a very "hot" bench.  As usual, the NYLS Moot Court Association handled the logistically complicated event with panache, and the fact-pattern co-authors came up with an interesting problem involving a company's Electronic Communications Policy (and the privacy concerns its enforcement raises) and a company successorship issue.

Finally, I ended my weekend attending Part II "Perestroika" of Tony Kushner's epic "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," having attended Part I "Millenium Approaches" last Sunday (but deciding not to write about this production, staged by Signature Theatre Company, until I had seen both parts).  Director Michael Greif did a magnificent job of taking a large-scale (6+ hours) theatrical event originally conceived for a large stage -- I saw the original production in a large Broadway house -- and reducing it to a "chamber piece" in the intimate environs of the off-Broadway Signature theater space way out west on 42nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.  But it was not just the production that engaged attention, so did the very fine cast.  For me the biggest standout performance was Michael Urie as Prior Walter, the AIDS-afflicted central character, who surmounted the challenge of playing all of Part II in pajamas while maintaining his dignity!  Adam Driver played the challenging part of Louis Ironson.  I found his performance somewhat less effective at times, being a bit "wooden" for much of Part I but improving tremendously for Part II.  Frank Wood presented an unforgettable performance as Roy Cohn, the arch-conservative morally-elusive lawyer whose death scene presents a major emotional catharsis in Part II.  As Joe Pitt, Cohn's protege, Bill Heck triumphed in a role that can be very unsympathetic, given his complicated relationship with his wife - ably portrayed by Keira Keeley - his mother - played by Lynne McCollough - Cohn, and Ironson.  Of course, Angels in America needs an angel, and Sofia Jean Gomez flew thrillingly (maybe Greif's tech people should consult with the Spiderman crew) and blazed forth with her millenial dialogue in high style.  Billy Porter gave another indelible performance as Belize, the male nurse who ministers to various of the characters and shows up in Harper Pitt's dreams as the wackiest travel agent you'll ever encounter.

But it all boils down to the genius of Tony Kushner, from whose fevered imagination all of this emerged several decades ago.  The key question is answered with a "yes" - the show remains timely, effective, moving, absorbing, and worth the big time investment demanded of its audience.  I'm certainly glad I got to see the entire thing -- with lingering regret that my theater-going companion and I did not move quickly enough to see the entire thing with the first cast when the run began last fall.  I would have been interested in seeing how Zachary Quinto handled the role of Louis Ironson, a very difficult role to pull off.  (And I hope I get to see Adam Driver in more and varied work....)

The end of the weekend.... whew!

 

Comments

[Esther]

I saw both parts of Angels in America last Sunday and I haven't been able to stop thinking or talking about it since. I'd read the play, seen the HBO version, so I thought I knew what to expect. But seeing it live, in a small theatre, was incredible. And I thought Michael Urie was perfect. In fact, I was so affected by his performance that when I saw him in the lobby after Millennium Approaches, collecting for Broadway Cares, I burst into tears. I managed to give him my donation, tell him how wonderful he was and that I'd be back for Part 2 in the evening.

[Art Leonard]

I agree. I had tears in my eyes at the end of both parts, and Michael Urie was SPECTACULAR!