Concert Review: Put Them Together, and What Have You Got?

The American Modern Ensemble plays SubCulture.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Samples of an electrocardiogram (pictured) were used in the New York premiere of
Robert Paterson's I See You at SubCulture.

The Chamber Music of America conference is in town and New York is thrumming to the sound of scraped, plucked, bowed and strummed fiddles of all shapes and sizes. On Thursday night in the subterranean depths of SubCulture, that fabulous concert venue tucked neatly under Bleecker Street, the American Modern Ensemble hosted a concert dubbed String Theory: a marathon showcase of modern chamber music, featuring three other chamber ensembles and a stack of world premieres.

Concert Review: A Globe Girdled in Silk

The Silk Road Project celebrates 15 years at Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Members of the Silk Road Project in concert. (l.-r. Sandeep Das, Yo-Yo Ma,  Johnny Gandelsman,
Mike Block. Center-foreground: Wu Tong.) Photo by Todd Rosenberg © 2012 The Silk Road Project.

The hallowed stage of Carnegie Hall resounded on Wednesday night with the bold sonic explorations of the Silk Road Project, founded and led by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The group, a melting pot of musicians and musical styles from around the globe, marked 15 years of musical journeys with this program of six works, featuring three New York premieres. This was opening night of the Project's current North American tour.

Opera Review: Three Faces of the Void

City Opera experiments with Monodramas.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Soprano Anu Komsi in La Machine d'etre.
Photo by Carol Rosegg ©2011 New York City Opera

On Friday night, the City Opera unveiled Monodramas, a triptych of modern operas, each with a single female protagonist. Though two of the works lacked anything resembling a plot, it was a fascinating evening of experimental opera--a bold gesture from a company that nearly went dark two years ago.

La Machine d'etre, ("The Machine of Existence") led off, the first opera by downtown jazz-rebel John Zorn. This was the world premiere of Mr. Zorn's piece, and served as the City Opera debut of soprano Anu Komsi. She was slowly unwrapped, appearing like a Wagner heroine to sing wordless melismas against Mr. Zorn's jagged rhythms and shifting tonal palette.

The plotless work, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, opened with a memorable image: the City Opera company concealed and rendered genderless by gray burkhas. The performance featured Mr. Artaud's illustrations, animated above the stage on two "flying" cartoon word-balloons. Beneath them, Ms. Komsi displayed an impressive vocal technique. It would be pleasing to learn how this Finnish soprano sounds when she has words to sing.

Kara Shay Thomson, lost in the woods in Erwartung.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is the only familiar opera on this program. Written in 1909, it is the story of a nameless woman (Kara Shay Thomson, in her company debut) lost in a forest at night. Veering on the edge of madness, she encounters the dead body of her lover. Schoenberg's expressionist score captures the madness and torment of the woman. Ms. Thomson's performance was that of a promising dramatic soprano, navigating her big voice through the tricky, and often exposed passages of the half-hour work.

George Manahan emphasized the rich, melodic content of Schoenberg's score, and the City Opera orchestra was in top form. As with the first work, Ms. Thomson was slowly revealed from beneath her burkha. She was surrounded by a small group of silent, female doppelgangers, all wearing identical white dresses, a memorable image. The most mind-blowing moment of Erwartung arrived in the closing bars: an imaginative, superbly executed time-reversal effect that stopped the opera in its tracks.

Cynthia Sieden (left) and the mirrored boxes of neither.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

neither is an apt title for the final work on the program, a lengthy excursion into form and function by American minimalist Morton Feldman. Feldman is an expert at writing stretched-out textures on an enormous canvas. (His String Quartet No. 2 lasts six hours if you play all the repeats.) neither is a setting of a text by Samuel Beckett, and true to this composer's style, each word is stretched out to its breaking point over a series of repeated figures in the orchestra.

Cynthia Sieden did a commendable job of singing the work, a formidable task since she had to hit the same pitch again and again for the first half with absolutely no melodic or harmonic development. The words are stretched distorted to the point where not even the supertitles help with comprehension.

The stage action featured skilled physical movement, at a glacial pace that recalled the productions of Robert Wilson. The action, such as it was, took place inside an iridescent, shimmering cube, adorned with colored lights and 66 (I counted) mysterious mirrored boxes that raised and lowered slowly from the ceiling, hanging in mid-air like miniature avatars of the 2001 monolith. It looked really cool. And it was all very mysterious.

City Opera Spring 2011 Preview: Pump Boys and Psychics

The New York City Opera is scheduled to open its spring season on March 22, with a slate of three productions.

Belcore (David Kempster) in a scene from the ENO L'Elisir d'Amore.
Photo © 2009 English National Opera

In the interests of artistic cooperation (and cost-saving), the City Opera will offer one revival, (L'Elisir d'Amore), and one import (Séance on a Wet Afternoon) The third is a tryptich of three Monodramas, one-act operas performed by one singer each. The three operas are by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman.

L'Elisir d'Amore opens on March 22. This production of Donizetti's bubbling romantic comedy is a collaboration with the English National Opera.

Jonathan Miller's production, first seen at City Opera in 2006, updates the action to the era immediately following World War II. Nemorino is a hapless pump boy, working next to Adina's Diner, somewhere in the American West. Belcore is an aggressive recruiter for Uncle Sam. Dr. Dulcamara's "elixir" is reimagined as Coca-Cola. But the music is still Donizetti, with one of his most imaginative and richly comic scores.

The Monodramas arrive on March 25. These three works include John Zorn's La Machine d'etre, a new work inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud; Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg; and the U.S. stage premiere of Neither by American composer Morton Feldman. The last is based on the writings of Samuel Beckett.

The three works feature (respectively) sopranos Anu Komsi, Kara Shay Thompson and Cyndia Sieden.

Lauren Flanigan goes beyond the infinite in Séance on a Wet Afternoon.
Photo by David Bazemann © 2009 The Santa Barbara Independent

The season wraps up with the April 19 New York premiere of Stephen Schwartz' Séance on a Wet Afternoon. The opera stars City Opera mainstay Lauren Flanigan as psychic Myra Foster. Ms. Flanigan sang the premiere of this work (in Santa Barbara, 2009) and has been with the opera ever since the piece was in its workshop stage.

The production stars City Opera mainstay diva Lauren Flanigan. Ms. Flanigan will bring the same level of intensity and laser-like soprano that is all to familiar to attendees  of past City Opera triumphs, including Intermezzo, Lizzie Borden and last season's revival of Esther. Myra is a psychic who resorts to kidnapping and fraud in a last-ditch effort to legitimize her gifts and social standing. We predict... that the opera will have a tragic ending.

Stephen Schwartz rose to fame as a Broadway composer. Among his credits include the scores for Godspell, Pippin, and the biggest show on Broadway at the moment: Wicked. This is his first opera.