Musical Short Cuts: Terezin, Lang Lang, Aimee Mann, Wagner

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 21 January 2012 20:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Will to Create, Will to Live: The Music of Terezin
January 9-February 16, 2012
92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, New York, NY
http://92y.org

In Will to Create, Will to Live: The Music of Terezin, the multi-disciplinary series at the 92nd Street Y, the many talented composers murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps following their internment at Terezin in the former Czechoslovakia are represented by their woefully underrated music, which has unfortunately been ghettoized and not heard as often as it deserves. (There have been various recordings, notably Decca’s valuable “Entartete Musik” series from the 1990s, but rarely is this music heard in concerts.)

And the centerpiece of the series--which features a film, a symposium and other events--is a quartet of chamber music recitals featuring baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the enterprising Nash Ensemble, whose members perform on these programs music by (for starters), Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa and Erwin Schulhoff, whose intensely personal works are played alongside music by Smetana and Janacek, two Czech composers held in high esteem by these men and often performed by them while at Terezin.

During the January 19th concert, Holzmair powerfully sang songs by Krasa and Ullmann, while the Nash members played Ullmann’s expressive String Quartet No. 3 and the endearing suite from Krasa’s children’s opera Bundibar, famously played dozens of times by the camp inmates. The series’ final concert on January 23 features Mahler songs, Debussy piano music and Holzmair and pianist Shai Wosner performing Ullmann’s brilliant musicalization of Rilke’s famous The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, for speaker and piano.

New York Philharmonic: Lang Lang, Bartok and Prokofiev
January 18-21, 2012
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
http://nyphil.org

One of the best New York Philharmonic concerts in recent memory, the pairing of rock star pianist Lang Lang and Bartok’s scintillating Piano Concerto No. 2 gave Avery Fisher Hall an excited vibe it rarely has during most classical concerts. Lang Lang played with a fiery aliveness, hitting all of the notes (well, most of them--one infamous passage in the second movement need three hands to be played correctly) and meshing beautifully with conductor Alan Gilbert to create a dazzling interpretation of Bartok’s masterly concerto.

The concert began with Feria, a forgettable curtain-raiser by Magnus Lindberg, which at least had the distinction of allowing the entire orchestra to show off. But a far better platform for the orchestra’s brilliance was the evening’s final work, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, the Russian master’s longest, most thematically compact and musically diverse symphonic work, which Gilbert and his charges brilliantly built up, layer by layer, until the inevitable and volatile climax.

Aimee Mann
January 28, 2012
Zankel Hall, Seventh Avenue between 56th & 57th Streets, New York, NY
http://carnegiehall.org

One of our most literate pop songwriters for more than a quarter-century (was “Voices Carry” really that long ago?), Aimee Mann graduated from the slick mid-80s hit machine ‘Til Tuesday to the brave new singer-songwriter world, which began in 1993 with her superb Whatever. She followed up with I’m with Stupid, Bachelor No. 2 (which includes tunes from the film Magnolia like the Oscar-nominated “Save Me”) and other solid discs.

Before her latest CD Charmer is released this summer, Mann is doing solo gigs that include her appearance at Zankel Hall on January 28. Mann has a always had an offbeat charm in a live setting, so be prepared for top-notch musicianship, impeccably crafted songs--she probably won’t admit it, but she’s definitely been influenced by the pinpoint melodic precision of Paul McCartney’s composing--and an off-the-cuff, slightly ditzy onstage personality.

Opera Orchestra of New York
Wagner’s Rienzi
January 29, 2012
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
http://operaorchestrany.org

One of the city’s musical treasures, the Opera Orchestra of New York has returned from the ashes this season. Founder Eve Queler, at age 80, takes to the podium for a concert performance of Wagner’s first successful grand opera, Rienzi, at Avery Fisher Hall January 29.

My first time hearing Queler and OONY was at Carnegie Hall 15 years ago for a wonderfully paced account of Wagner’s glorious Tristan und Isolde. Does Queler still have the stamina to lead her orchestra in another lengthy Wagner opera? That’s why I’ll be there to find out. Singing the leading roles are tenor Ian Storey, soprano Elisabete Matos and mezzo Geraldine Chauvet.

Theater Review: Spacey's Shakespeare

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Richard III
Starring Kevin Spacey
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Sam Mendes

In Sam Mendes’ distressingly uneven production of Richard III, featuring Shakespeare’s most charismatic and evil villain, Kevin Spacey portrays the self-hating murderer with flamboyant verbal and physical tics that telegraph the Duke of Gloucester’s horrible behavior--he woos and weds a new widow, kills or turns the machinery that kills various other candidates in line to become king, among other dastardly deeds--as repulsive and attractive to the audience, just as Shakespeare wanted.

Richard’s opening soliloquy--“Now is the winter of our discontent”--is accompanied by so many winks and nods to remind the audience that it’s complicit in his connivance that it could just as well be the “Bard for Dummies” approach seen in Central Park each summer.

The talented Spacey overplays Richard’s “performing” throughout, looking to the audience conspiratorially or breaking character to comment--usually by gesture or eyebrow-raising, but once even imitating Groucho Marx--on his superiority to the others onstage. Some of this works, as we are supposed to go along for the ride against our will, but Spacey goes too far, and ends up beating to death Richard’s grotesquely roguish charm until it means nothing.

The volatility extends to the physical aspect of Spacey’s characterization. With a brace on his left leg, he walks with such a pronounced limp and twisted, even contorted movement that it’s painful to watch him stalk the stage. His tendency to bellow many of his lines (I’d say 75% of his dialogue is shouted) lessens the dramatic impact of his speeches, notably the final “My kingdom for a horse” speech, uttered so loudly he might as well be talking about how hoarse he is after a performance.

Spacey enunciates Shakespeare’s language so that it’s intelligible; his perfect diction helps in our being seduced by Richard’s words, especially in that amazing scene that only Shakespeare could pull off: Richard  proceeds to beat down Lady Anne’s defenses and successfully woo her while her dead husband’s still-warm corpse is in the room. Annabel Scholey impressively keeps up with Spacey’s breakneck pace, even while demonstrating that not shouting can make Shakespeare’s poetry equally compelling.

Sam Mendes’ direction, swinging from the bravura to the mundane, never finds a proper tone or pace for a nearly 3-½ hour long evening. The two-hour long first act bounces around erratically, and even the second act’s swiftness doesn’t exonerate Mendes, who switches gears arbitrarily from realism to expressionism to surrealism in the final sequences with little forward thrust toward the inevitable catharsis. Even such gimmicks as Richard watching a grainy B&W movie at the beginning--he uses a remote to pause it before launching into his opening speech--or Richard on a giant video screen accepting the crown are never integrated into this modern-dress staging, but instead are left dangling on their own, like the desperate stratagem of projecting titles (“Elizabeth,“ “Richmond”) to help the audience keep characters straight.

Aside from Scholey’s Lady Anne, the forgettable supporting cast includes Haydn Gwynne’s nicely understated (but not underplayed) Queen Elizabeth. And Mark Bennett’s music--mostly drumming by ghostly cast members, with two side musicians doing double duty on more percussion--pounds away pointlessly, except maybe to drown out Spacey’s shouting.

Richard III
Previews began January 10, 2012; opened January 18; closes March 4
BAM Harvey Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
http://bam.org

Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast: Beauty and the Beast

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 16 January 2012 15:31

Written by Daniel Persons

Does Disney's Beauty and the Beast need to undergo digital conversion to the 3D format in order to lure audiences back into the theater? It shouldn't, not really. Beauty is a certified classic, the first animated film to net a "Best Picture" Oscar nom and the one that re-energized the Disney animation division. To think that it has to go through a "It's the film you've known and loved, back on the big screen where it belongs... now with candy," process in order to get butts into seats says more about the current theories of film marketing than it does about what was lacking in the movie itself.

Nevertheless, Beauty and the Beast is back, and Cinefantastique Online's Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons have strapped on the 3D goggles to determine whether the film prospers or suffers from the tweaking, as well as discussing how the film maintains its stature some twenty years later, and examining how the contributions of the songwriting team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken permanently transformed animated storytelling.

Plus: Steve delivers his capsule judgement on the apocalyptic thriller The Divide, and the CFQ team discuss their reactions to the animated short Tangled Ever After. Plus: What's coming in theaters.

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