Concert Review: Existential Park

Philip Glass and the New York Philharmonic play Koyaanisqatsi

Welcome to Vega$. An image from Koyaanisqatsi.

The year 2011 marks the 75th birthday of composer Philip Glass. As part of the celebrations, Wednesday night's New York Philharmonic concert at Avery Fisher Hall featured a complete performance of Mr. Glass' 1982 score for Koyanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, the powerful film by Godfrey Reggio. The performance featured the celebrated orchestra, the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Collegiate Chorale.

Koyaanisqatsi is a meditation on the imbalances of modern life. It is assembled footage, dating from just before its 1982 release to documentary footage and stock imagery dating all the way back to a NASA film from 1962. Although it is only 86 minutes long, time speeds, slows and bends in upon itself as the images fly by. The images range widely: staring pedestrians shot on the street, cars and televisions being assembled, and the most famous, iconic shots: clouds racing across mirror-front skyscrapers.

At the Wednesday night performance, Avery Fisher Hall was darkened. The film was shown above the black-clad orchestra in its entirety. Below, Philip Glass Ensemble director Michael Riesman conducted from a laptop, which displayed the sheet music and a running data-stream of the film footage in the background.

The accompanying score opens with a Bach-like figure played repeatedly, accompanying a bass voice chanting the title over and over. This gives way to surging chorales of horns and human voices singing prophecies in the Hopi language. The effect is hypnotic, and more powerful when combined with Mr. Reggio's potent film. Early images featured the demolition of an abandoned St. Louis housing project. You could almost feel the unease from a New York audience trying not to think of the fate of the World Trade Center.

Like other composers who prefer a place deep in the harmony over taking the lead, Mr. Glass played the second keyboard part. The Philharmonic lent power and depth to the score, creating resonant sonic pictures that worked perfectly with the film. Impressive playing came from the brass and low strings, particularly the cellos led by Carter Brey.

Koyaanisqatsi seems amorphous on its first approach, but this performance revealed a definite structure of the film in a series of acts. The most powerful passage was the high-speed footage of cars hurtling at night through the streets of Los Angeles and New York. This was contrasted with the slow images of pedestrians, staring men and women, and even a man shaving with a disposable razor.

Although the point of this work is serious, much of the sonic trickery and visual jazz of this film is light in nature. Perhaps that is because the stock footage from Koyaanisqatsi has been referenced over 20+ years of The Simpsons: the rising moon, the racing cars, even the shots of hot dogs and Hostess Twinkies being manufactured.

Players and film were at their most serious for Mr. Glass' final crescendo, labeled "Prophecies" on the album. This music accompanied footage of a failed 1962 NASA test flight. The shots of the exploding Atlas rocket  ended the evening in a dramatic, powerful crescendo, showing the folly and insignificance of man's existence before the credits rolled.

Mechanical Resonance

Metropolitan Opera Unveils Latest Hi-Tech Robot Initiative.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Introducing the Met's new concertmaster, Toyota's Cyrex-5.

The Metropolitan Opera continues to push new technological boundaries with its new staging of Wagner's Ring. Its latest investment: robot musicians.

Kerplunk!

Machine malfunction mars Met Siegfried.

Grounded: Deborah Voigt (left) and Jay Hunter Morris in the final scene of Siegfried.
Photo by Ken Howard © 2011 The Metropolitan Opera.

Siegfried didn't get up the mountain on Tuesday night.

According to a report on parterre box, the Metropolitan Opera's multi-million dollar "Machine" Set, the centerpiece of the company's new Robert Lepage production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen malfunctioned in the third act of Siegfried. Singers Deborah Voigt (Brunnhilde) and Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried) performed the finale from the lip of the stage. No one was injured. 

The malfunction occurred in the third and final act of the five-and-a-half hour opera. The Machine was executing a complicated series of gyrations, transforming itself into the Valkyrie Rock, the fiery sleeping-berth of the heroine Brunnhilde. Siegfried was supposed to climb across the top of the set and wake the Valkyrie Brunnhilde. But it didn't work that way. 

According to the parterre report, the set stopped moving, most likely due to a triggered safety interlock. Ms. Voigt entered from the wings and lay down on the acting surface below the Machine. The two singers sang their 37-minute duet downstage as the empty, stalled Machine loomed above them. As they sang, the "magic fire" effect (computer-generated flames) remained, projected onto the stalled set.

Designed by longtime  Lepage collaborator Carl Fillion, the Machine consists of twenty-four matching metal planks mounted on a horizontal axis between two large towers. A high-tech computer-controlled system allows the planks to be spun, moved and reconfigured to meet the complicated scenic needs of Wagner's myth-based dramas.  In the course of the Ring, this unit set forms everything from the bed of the Rhine River to high mountain peaks, forests, and even a great hall in the last opera Götterdämmerung.

A similar problem happened at last Thursday's prima of Siegfried. In the middle of the same Act III contortion, the Machine paused in mid-movement, jamming visibly and emitting an ugly, audible "thunk." It was later reported (by Daniel J. Wakin in the New York Times) that first malfunction happened when one of the planks hit a not-fully-retracted stage-lift.  Conductor Fabio Luisi slowed the orchestra to a crawl, and the device righted itself. But no such relief came tonight.

This is the latest in a series of technical malfunctions that have plagued this new production of the Ring, a premium event in the Met's calendar that carries a whopping $45 million price tag. The first took place at the Sept. 26, 2010 premiere of Das Rheingold. With just minutes to go in the opera, the multi-ton set stopped dead when a safety interlock was accidentally triggered. The contraption would not configure itself into the castle of Valhalla, which Wagner's Germanic gods move into at the end of that opera.

At the April 22 opening night of Die Walküre, Ms. Voigt slipped while climbing one of the planks at her Act II entrance. The diva slid a few feet and landed on the narrow acting surface, singing her "Hojotohos" from downstage. A more serious problem happened six nights later. On April 28, soprano Eve Gigliotti was playing one of Brunnhilde's fellow Valkyries, who ride the Machine planks like hobby-horses in the famous "Ride of the Valkyries." Ms. Gigliotti fell and hit her head while sliding off her plank and down to the stage. She returned to the stage and finished her performance. 

Siegfried is the third installment in the Ring and one of the most challenging operas in the repertory to stage and sing. The production will be seen in a live Met in HD broadcast on Saturday, Nov. 5. Later this season, the Lepage Ring will conclude with Götterdämmerung, which premieres on Jan. 27, 2012.

Concert Review: Attack of the Killer B's

András Schiff at Carnegie Hall

Marathon man: András Schiff played Bach, Bartók and Beethoven at Carnegie Hall.
Photo © 2010 ECM Classics.

In New York City, Halloween is a night when kids put on silly costumes and parade door-to-door under careful parental supervision. Older kids hide in the bushes and "bomb" each other with eggs and shaving cream. Overgrown kids gather on Sixth Avenue and parade down it in a big, gaudy Halloween parade through Greenwich Village.

The Hungarian pianist András Schiff did none of those things last night. But he did offer a carefully planned program of Bach, Bartók and Beethoven as part of his Carnegie Hall Perspectives series. The marathon recital was designed to demonstrate the musicological connections between these three composers.

The concert opened with Bach's Three-Part Inventions, exercises for the keyboard meant to teach Bach's pupils (including his children) the art of writing fugues. These pieces move in a tonal cycle, exploring different aspects of the various keys. Mr. Schiff displayed a gentle, smooth touch, playing the complex phrases with very little pedal.

The pianist unleashed his full fury on the Piano Sonata by Bela Bartók. Mr. Schiff's countryman is at the center of the Perspectives series this season, and this performance presented a good argument for his lone Sonata. Echoes of modern Russian music can be heard here as well, the unforgiving rhythms of The Rite of Spring and the steely pianism of Serge Prokofiev.  

Mr. Schiff dug into the difficult opening movement, playing the staccato figures with tenacity and guts. The second movement was more eloquent, almost singing as it moved through its slow passage. The third was a manic dance of fingers upon the keys, a stirring example of the composer's characteristic folk-inspired rhythms. 

The presence of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations on a recital program is an anachronism. This set of 33 variations on a waltz by an Italian publisher was not conceived as "recital music." Beethoven, asked in 1819 to write one simple variation, pounded out 33, finishing them in 1823. Why? It wasn't to give them in recital. At this point, Beethoven was too deaf to play in public, and the solo piano recital (as we know it) would not be invented (by Liszt) until 1839. 

Never mind. Beethoven summed up everything he knew about piano playing in these pages, barely changing keys as he . Almost all of the first 28 are in C major, from the stately Andante to a galloping Allegro. He tips the hat to Bach (No. 24 and 32) and Mozart, (No. 22) when the reconfigured waltz transforms into a version of "Notte e giorno faticar" from Don Giovanni.  The last four movements shift keys to the minor, leading to a heaven-storming fugue. 

Mr. Schiff approached most of the variations as individual pieces, although he did let certain ones flow into each other when it seemed fitting. Listening to a record of any pianist  play this cycle straight through forces the listener to exercise both patience and concentration. Seeing the Diabelli Variations played live, by an artist of Mr. Schiff's caliber, is nothing short of a miracle.

For his encore, Mr. Schiff treated the audience to another major work: Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30. One of the composer's last, it is itself equipped with a mighty set of variations in the final movement. With exquisite playing, Mr. Schiff held the audience rapt.