Kathleen O'Connell

At 18, both of my grandmothers were married women with children on the way and weren't at all unusual in this regard for their time and place. They were deemed to be grownups; getting married, starting your own home, and raising a family were what you did when you were grown up. One of the things I like about ballet is the fact that men and women in their late teens and early twenties are put before us as the grown ups that they are. I'm having a hard time thinking of a narrative ballet where growing up, making adult choices, and assuming adult responsibilities -- or failing to do so -- isn't more or less the point. And all of the women in Balanchine's ballets are grown ups, of course, with the exception of the young woman in La Valse and maybe the Sleepwalker. Nobody is more grown up than the lead couple in Diamonds. An aside: "Young" seems to be undergoing something akin to grade inflation. "Fifty is the new thirty" now appears to be more than an aging boomer's witticism: I heard someone describe Caroline Kennedy as "a young woman" on the radio the other day and nearly sprayed coffee all over my keyboard. She's my age, for crying out loud. She and I may be many wonderful things, but "a young woman" is not among them.

Thought experiment: let's pretend that it suddenly occurred to President-Elect Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid that some stimulus package dollars might profitably be directed towards arts infrastructure in addition to bridges and tunnels and that Chief of Staff Emmanuel (who got tapped for this project because he has had ballet training) and NEA Commissioner Gioia are going to call you tomorrow for some ideas on how to spend $1.0 billion on dance (a mere pittance these days it seems). What will you tell them? Note that the funds must be directed towards "infrastructure" in some way, shape or form -- so no commissions for new ballets, e.g. (that's what wealthy patrons are for ). These folks seem pretty detail-oriented and determined to jump out of the blocks quickly, so be specific -- something as gauzy as, say, "more arts education in our public schools" has probably already been doodled on a napkin by some earnest staffer or other, but they got stuck there and need some inspiration. The checkbook's at the ready -- what would you do?

(Slapping self on forehead) Rockefeller Center, of course! How could I forget that one -- I walk by it at least once a week. And Madison Park is just lovely, lovely, lovely -- especially now that it's been so lovingly renovated (it has its own conservancy organization, apparently). It's definitely a place to go and be serene. Union Square is where one goes to be jostled, buy produce, protest something, or hang with skateboarders. It was a blast on election night.

One problem (missed opportunity?) Lincoln Center has is that its theaters are among the very few non-skyscrapers that one can actually see from all sides in NYC. (The Flatiron Building is another example. Here's a recent image.) Most NYC buildings are crammed up against each other with only their facades readily visible, and, in the majority of cases, even the facades can't be taken in as a whole from the street. (Quick -- fill in the top half of the theater that we love to hate! Here it is in all its glory. And here.) Even Lever House, which has the whole end of a Park Avenue block to itself, can only be taken in from something akin to a three-quarter view. (here's a recent image ) NYST / Koch (I'm trying ...), Avery Fisher, and the Met might make a more satisfying impression if all one could see were their facades. But they're doomed to sit there exposed in all their blocky glory. The east elevation of NYST / Koch (still trying ...) is particularly bleak. NYC's very orderly street grid somehow got overlaid with a rather chaotic assemblage of buildings that rarely form a coherent vista in terms of size, style, building materials, etc. (For example, Here's the jumble around Union Square, looking north from the south end of the park. Union Square West wasn't any more pulled together 70 years ago than it is today. I can see this part of Union Square from my window, and it looks almost the same now as it did in that old shot, except that the 2nd and 3rd buildings from the right have been replaced with two even more incongruous low rise buildings, including a one-story MacDonalds, of all things. What you might not be able to pick up from the black and white photo is the fact that the bricks on the backs and / or the sides of the buildings in no way resemble the materials used on their facades, even though they too are visible. I imagine that the architects assumed that one day they wouldn't be.) Lincoln Center is again one of the few NYC multi-building sites sites that was intended to be "read" as a coherent whole. (There must be others, but I'm drawing a blank as to what they could be at the moment ...) So, yes, it's disappointing that we got something like this. ( Here's a more flattering view, but you have to have a helicopter ...) While I'm cutting and pasting, for those of you who haven't been inside NYST / Koch (in about 10 years I'll be able to omit the "NYST" while typing but will probably still be saying "Kotch er I mean Coke" ...) Here is the Nadelman on the west end of the Promenade. Here's the Promenade itself (looking west). And here is the auditorium with the big "auntie's brooch" chandelier and the matching rhinestone studs along the rings. And finally, go here for links to pics of other Philip Johnson buildings. Wow. Way, Way OT ...

Mo's gotta rethink his career choices -- Peter Sagal is never going to give him the opportunity to showcase those feet on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" I think he would have done even better in slippers rather than his socks ...

Papeetepatrick, I feel your City Center pain. I buy my tickets for performances there with gritted teeth; there are simply no really good seats, even if one is willing to spend top dollar. (Row A in the Grand Tier is too close for the height, in my opinion, and even some of those seats' sightlines are blocked by the railings.) However, I was pleased to learn from the Tishman website that "the partial reconstruction and complete renovation of the 2,750-seat New York City Center (NYCC)" will include "the relocation of the entry and the new build out of lobby-related amenities, the creation of a grand mezzanine lobby and new grand seating tier, improved auditorium seating and sightlines and the preservation of historic elements." (Emphasis mine.) I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a good result! Re NYST: I hadn't read rg and Mel Johnson's posts before I wrote mine -- I didn't realize that Philip Johnson had devised a different (and better) seating plan for the orchestra level. I suppose there is no way that the original plan could be reinstated now, alas ... I do remember what the auditorium looked like before the allegedly acoustic enhancing tubes and panels at the ends for the rings were added (and the doodad over the proscenium, right?) -- the design was indeed crisper. But still, I love the place -- we have worn around the edges together for many years now.

Oh, I LOVE Philip Johnson's NYST / Koch Theater -- from the inside at least, which is what counts. The sight lines are terrific. I adore the Promenade (and I especially like the Elie Nadelman statues at either end) and the balcony off of it looking out over the plaza fountain. Both are great spaces for mingling during intermission (or during a ballet you'd rather not endure again). The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ring galleries around the promenade are great for people watching and great for art installations, too (as long as it's something you don't need to stand back from to really see). It's the kind of space that the two theaters across the plaza really need and will probably never get because other things need to be fixed first. I even love the big, gaudy chandelier in the auditorium itself (and the beaded curtains hanging all the way down the Promenade windows) -- it reminds me of the kind of costume jewelery a beloved auntie used to wear. Yeah, there's a lot of 60's glitz in the place, but as that same auntie would say, "Well, dear, it's a look ..." I think it will all be quite fabulously retro once it's been refreshed. It's New York of a certain time and for me, at least, precious for that. Yes, the acoustics could be improved and the reluctance to put either a center aisle or two off-center aisles in the orchestra is just pig-headed (driven by either a foolish reverence for tradition or an unwillingness to boot top-dollar subscribers from their seats), but now that the ladies rooms have been expanded, the place is darn near perfect. The outside's big and blocky, but hey, they just don't make them like the Palais Garnier anymore ...

Exactly. I told my friend that Concerto Grosso looked like the last 10 minutes of Willie Berman's class at Steps. I actually think that that's a good thing from an audience-building perspective. I deleted what I'd written about The Fifth Season because it was just plain rude (shorter version: "does Tomasson have a tin ear or what") but actually thought Concerto Grosso might serve a useful purpose as a nice little glossary of virtuoso male ballet technique that never goes over-the-top in terms of pointless pyrotechnic display, but simply shows how good men can look doing actual ballet steps. (I must confess here that my heart leapt up when I saw that Tomasson had put a gargouillade, of all things, into The Fifth Season.) Every now and and then I want someone to pass Wheeldon a note that says "Putting men in the air isn't necessarily vulgar pandering to the audience. You might try it a time or two." (Which he of course did in Commedia. But it would have been criminal not to unleash Ribinald Pronk's jump if one had the opportunity to do so.) It's a rant for another day, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with choreographers who rely on ballet's more extreme effects to make shapes in space but who seem unwilling or unable to use its steps to move dancers through space.

Four Temperaments was one of the very first Balanchine ballets I saw and was long my favorite (right now my favorite is Agon). Since NYCB doesn't "rest" it for very long before bringing it back into the rep, I've had the good fortune to see it many times over the past thirty years. (Favorite Melancholics: Bart Cook and Jeffrey Edwards. Favorite Sanguinic: Jenny Somogyi. I hope to see Ellen Bar dance Choleric some day soon.) Speaking as a member of the audience with no dance expertise whatsoever, here's what I'd recommend: really, really pay attention to the three opening themes and then watch how the little "atoms" presented there get combined and re-combined in the rest of the ballet. Balanchine starts with something very small in the first theme -- flexed vs pointed feet -- and move on through vocabulary and gestures of increasing complexity and seems to cover everything from basics like pointed feet and turnout, moving in a straight line vs on the diagonal, being off center vs on, right on through to elements of partnering. Although in this last case, not much is presented straight up: one of the men (literally) spins his partner around while she's in a sort of bent-legged, half-sitting position and then proceeds to "promenade" her by moving her pelvis on and off her center. I'm making it sound more grotesque than it is. Alternatively, you could just sit back and enjoy it! My husband never tires of the big, scary grand battements the Melancholic corps women do and we both think the score is just terrific. The "Choreography by Balanchine" DVD with Ashley, Neary, Cook, Duell, and Luders will give you a good overall sense of what the ballet is about, even if some of the studio details are different from what you may see on stage. (It's not as radical a re-working as I remember the same series' Chaconne being.)

No! There are NO other ways. The 32 fouettes are lodged in my brain and I'm going to leave them there. Basically, I also feel that way about the balances, and want them . With all this new technique from gymnastic types 'ruining ballet', the least we can expect is new specimens who are 'good at the balances and radiance' in brand new brave-new-world wonderful ways! Maybe the problem is ballerinas not knowing how to do the 'seductive glitter PLUS the 32' and the 'radiance PLUS balances', because there is no dearth of athletic ballerinas able to execute the difficult technical feats. It's like in opera, Kathleen--there are NOT any Maria Callases anymore, and we ought to figure out why this is, not, say, why bel canto florid writing ought to be simplified. In other words, the problem is not a scarcity of fouette- and balance-doers, it is a scarcity of radiance- and seductive-glitter doers. More FIRE and passion, not less ridiculous technical demands! Now, I originally voted that I didn't care either way, but I have changed my mind, and think all Auroras must strive to do radiance PLUS all the balances. I realize this vote change causes a difficulty for Diebold Voting Machine vote-fixing and hanging chads, but there it is... Of course in the best of all possible worlds every ballerina who danced Aurora could execute perfect radiant balances with both arms above her head every time and dance a rapturous vision scene to boot! (And they should strive for that -- life is short and I for one get cranky when I have to squander time and money on slackers.) But we don't live in that world, and so I am happy to accept honest alternatives; the whole ballet doesn't (and shouldn't) ride on 60 seconds of choreography -- but sometimes it seems that that's what ends up happening with these iconic passages. In any event, I'm certainly not suggesting that the choreography be dumbed-down to accommodate declining technical standards. And yes, Maria Callas is indeed dead. Fortunately there are many excellent singers on our stages today who can do full justice to the bel canto rep, both in terms of technique and expressiveness -- more than there were when Callas was singing, I think -- so there's no need replace all the gruppetti with half notes just yet. Now if only we could unearth a few good Verdi baritones ...

I voted "no" for two reasons: 1) I gather I am the only person on the planet who feels this way, but I just don't care much for those balances as choreography and 2) I'd much rather see a ballerina who flubs the balances but can do full justice to the Vision Scene than the other way around. Like Odile's fouettés, Aurora's balances seem to me prone to devolve into a sort of graded exercise -- or worse, a circus trick -- where execution is more important than expressiveness and whole performances are reduced to whether or not they were held for the required number of seconds. (Let me hasten to add that none of the contributors to this thread are at all guilty of that -- the comments thus far have been uniformly thoughtful and enlightening.) I've only seen one performance in which the Aurora looked genuinely radiant executing her balances; since I find the radiance more important than the balances, I'd be perfectly happy to see them replaced with something more-or-less equivalent that the ballerina and her Cavaliers could execute radiantly. (By "more-or-less equivalent" I mean something that would have the same narrative and expressive effect, but that sn't a walk in the park either, of course.) Ditto for Odile's fouettés: Odile is all about seductive glitter and there are surely other ways to convey that than 32 fouettés. I am a total hypocrite when it comes to the fish dives in the wedding pas de deux, however -- leave those out, and I'm going to march right down to the box office and demand my money back!

Slate: 80 over 80 Slate Magazine takes a stab at naming the 80 "Most Powerful Octogenarians in America." Merce Cunningham comes in at #29. ( ) Who's missing that you would have included? Elliot Carter tops my list of inexplicable oversights; he turns 100 this year, and is still composing first-rate music. Paul Taylor should definitely be on 2010's list (and on next year's "79ers to Watch").

Now if only ABT could manage to get their hands on a decent theater. One of the (many) reasons I would have liked Ratmansky to sign on with NYCB is that we would be able to see his ballets performed in State Theater. (Oops! Pardon me, that's Koch "coke not kotch" Theater!) Neither the Met nor City Center is a particularly good venue for dance, and I've probably seen much less of ABT as a result. Does anyone know if the upcoming City Center renovations will address its lousy sight lines, or are they more along the lines of a fresh coat of paint and new carpeting?

I don't know how he did it, but Marc Haegeman has seen it already! No, wait, that's from a review of a London performance in March. The actual debut took place the week before at the Kennedy Center. Once in a while in Washington, we get lucky. Hmmm ... I saw the "*" for "First Time in Role" and thought it meant, you know, "Debut" ... Perhaps Taylor danced the Russian Girl in London and is moving on to Waltz Girl in Copenhagen?

*So* good to see that Ellen Bar is back in Agon! I saw her in this role (Hayden's) a couple of years ago, and thought she looked just terrific in it -- and Hall and Danchig-Waring will complement her perfectly. My Ellen Bar wish list: The Siren in Prodigal Son and Farrell's role in Davidsbündlertänze. (A Mearns, Bar, Taylor and A. Stafford line-up in that ballet would be hard to beat.) And speaking of Taylor, I'd love to see that Serenade debut!

I love (unabridged) audio books and have been an avid listener since the days of cassette tapes. (Now I do all my audio book listening on my iPod.) I will listen to just about anything -- ficition, non-fiction, long, short, jucy, dry, serious, frivilous -- they all work for me so long as the narrator is of professional quality. Since I live in Manhattan, and walk or take the subway just about everywhere, I can actually get more "read" by listening than I could if I had to rely on print only. War and Peace at three pages in bed per night is a year's-plus project, but it can be dispatched quite handily in audio book form between commuting and daily chores. (If I'm in the middle of a good book, I actually look forward to ironing!) The book that I got through because I could listen to it was Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. I loved it (he's on my top five list of living novelists) but I'm pretty sure I would have abandoned it if I had had to work my way through it a few pages a night. It's the kind of book that needs to be absorbed in largish chunks to have the right effect. At one point in my life I was pursuing a graduate degree in literature -- after a while I think the only ritual connected with reading was checking to see how many pages I had to race through in the book I was reading in order to get to the next one on the reading list in time for my orals. I came to the conclusion that nothing ruins a good book like studying it. (Well, not really, but sometimes it felt like that.) By the way, you can download well-done podcasts of short stories from a number of sources -- try The New Yorker and NPR's Selected Shorts. If you like science fiction (I do) there's quite a bit available that you can download legally and for free.

I think you all just redeemed August!

A beautiful dancer indeed -- and Seattle really is lucky to have PNB (makes up for the Mariners, no?), although I think Boal has probably made at least some of his luck. I still remember Postlewaite from a couple of SAB workshops (he was so musical even then). At the time I thought "Won't it be delightful to watch this career unfold." Alas, I didn't think I would have to change coasts for that to happen! Congratulations to all. Sigh ... I got more than a little wistful when I saw the pictures of Körbes and Weese on the Vail Dance Festival site.

It's a bit of a tangent, but I thought that this post from Greg Sandow's Arts Journal Daily blog was interesting in the context of attracting new audiences to "serious music": "What the New Audience Wants" A teaser: One of the people I've long thought ought to be invited to talk to the classical world is J.D. Considine, a veteran pop and jazz writer whom I've known for some years, and currently writes about jazz for the Toronto Globe and Mail. He likes classical music (we used to talk about Baltimore Symphony concerts when he was pop critic for the Baltimore Sun),.and just sent me an e-mail that everyone who wants to extend the reach of classical music should read. I'm reprinting it here with J.D.'s permission. Note two important things: the parts about the audience liking difficult music, and about the limited appeal for this audience ("limited" being an understatement) of musical beauty. These are things the classical world doesn't understand at all (beauty, after all, being one of its favorite selling points, just as J.D. says). Last week, I had the chance to hear (and cover) a performance of Cage's HPSCHD. It wasn't quite the "standard" performance, as it only ran only three hours and relied on just five actual amplified harpsichords (the other parts were covered by a Yamaha digital piano and a Hohner D6 Clavinet). The quality of the players was wonderful-- Eve Egoyan corralled the group -- and they did a great job with the pre-recorded electronics and the projected art. But the smartest thing they did was to stage it less like a concert than a happening, encouraging people to walk around the room, or even in and out, instead of sitting solemnly and stoically for three hours. (They stressed the freedom of movement in the pre-concert publicity, too.) And it was amazing. People wandered through the room, listening to the various harpsichords, occasionally chatted with the players, sipped wine or beer, and had a terrific time. The crowd was also mainly young boomers and older X-gens -- just the people symphony boards pray for -- as well as a smattering of seniors and 20- somethings. I swear, I even saw a kid wander through carrying a skateboard! Considine goes on to observe that what younger audiences want is "aurally challenging" and "emotionally powerful" music, and that "the thirst for adventure is there waiting to be exploited." Getting back to Qeenan: I think his piece was ultimately mostly a polemical riff on some (for him) disappointing concert-going experiences, and not really measured assessment of the current and future condition of "serious music," its performance, and its audience. Sandow is always interesting on these points (it's the focus of his blog) and worth checking out if you have any interest in the topic. Quiggin: Truly apt! Now I'll never look at Federer and Nadal in quite the same way again ...

My prediction: it will take a decade before people start routinely referring to it as "Koch Theater," it will be pronounced "kotch" not "coke," and everyone will think it's named after Mayor Koch ... After all, some folks are still trying to wrap their heads around "Avenue of the Americas," although it's starting to roll off of the tongue pretty easily now after what, 60 years?

He didn't knock them, he made a specific comparison which I think is undeniably accurate (and I'm a Stones fan). Nor did he say he wanted to cut ties with the proletariat to gain higher status or special privileges. The cultural elite he's referring to is one he says no longer exists, one that's "especially knowledgeable" about classical music. I'll leave it to more frequent concertgoers to gauge how accurate his assessment is, but we all know that we're not living in any golden age of artistic education. And papeetepatrick, he didn't say Lang Lang was suspect, he said he's a showboater. I think I have to respectfully disagree. I didn't mean to suggest that Queenan expected that special privileges or status in the most material sense would flow from his embrace of "serious music" (whatever that is*), but rather that he viewed it as a marker of having left his working class background behind. If the art is "mysterious and beautiful" and moves you, why does it matter who else listening? Had he simply said "it fired my imagination in a way that the Rolling Stones never did" or "made me all goose-bumpley in the way the Rollings Stones never did," I'd cheerfully acknowledge that he was making a value jugement based on his perception of artistic merit and that he had every right to do so, even if I didn't agree. But he seems to be saying that he valued "serious music" because it allowed him to hang with a better class of people, and that just rubs me the wrong way. Throughout the piece I kept getting the sense that at least part of his assessment of what's worthy and what's not is based on the audience for the thing, not the thing itself. *I'd have to know what Queenan means by "serious music" before I could entertain the proposition that it is unequivicallyand always more "mysterious and beautiful" than the Stones. Bach, sure. Some baroque shlockmeister's 86th sopranino recorder concerto? Third-tier 19th century ballet music? There's some pretty pedestrian stuff passing itself off as "serious music" out there. How about Strauss waltzes? They're wonderful, but are they "serious" in a way that the Stones aren't? Yes, saying that "serious music" is "mysterious and beautiful" in a way that the Stones are not might imply that the Stones are "mysterious and beautiful" in a different, but equally valid and estimable way, but given the context that doesn't seem to be what Queenan is saying. But that's for a different post -- my husband is calling me to dinner ...

Eh, typical Queenan. (See his notorious NY Times review of A. J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All for another sample of his work.) Queenan’s whole schtick is simultaneously mocking some presumed elite and sticking his finger in the eye of the comfortable middle class that constitutes his main audience. Here’s where I almost stopped reading: “Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public's lack of imagination.” Given that the music written over the last century is astonishingly diverse and that whole great swaths of it are really quite understandable and enjoyable (without being in the least “infantile”), I don’t think one needs to give his views any more serious consideration than he’s given to his ostensible subject matter. The whole point of the article is to let you know that Queenan’s taste is more discerning than the taste of those who enjoyed Lang Lang playing the Emperor Concerto AND the taste of those who enjoyed Britwistle’s Minotaur; more discerning than the taste of those who like Górecki, Pärt, Glass, and Adams AND those who like Berg, Varèse, Webern, Rihm, Schnittke, Adès, Wuorinen, Crumb, Carter, and Babbitt. Here’s the part I found most repellant: “I started listening to classical music when I entered college, aged 17. Because of my working-class background, ‘serious’ music was important to me - not only because it was mysterious and beautiful in a way the Rolling Stones were not, but because it confirmed that I had cut my ties with the proletariat and ‘arrived’. Over the years, this sense of membership of a cultural elite has evaporated.” What a warped way to look at art – as some sort of credential that grants you access to a special club reserved for a privileged few, much as “premier member” status in a frequent flyer program gets you into the lounge where the well-heeled businessmen, soft chairs and free drinks are. Only now everyone has enough miles to get in and they’re charging for the drinks anyway. And only a crank disses the Stones.

I’ve always been partial to Arlene Croce’s observation that she’d like to see Goldberg cut by fifteen minutes, but not the same fifteen minutes each time. I’m not a fan of slicing and dicing music that’s best understood as a whole, and really object to the current enthusiasm for re-assembling snippets of suites and concerti by different composers into the equivalent of a 20 minute set on MTV Baroque, but Balanchine and Robbins did some version of both themselves (e.g., Scotch Symphony, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Square Dance, Brandenburg), so I wouldn’t be inclined to take a genius to the mat over it. (I might be a bit more insistent when it comes to observing the repeats, however, since I think they’re structurally important to the excerpt itself.) And I do think that there are some works that editing won't hurt, and might even help. (Harliquenade - we don't really need every note of Drigo's score ...) Re The Goldberg Variations: the composition is certainly a conceptual whole, but I’m not sure that it is actually heard that way by most people (and Bach didn’t write it to be played in its entirety as concert music in any event). If you didn’t tell your average ballet-goer that TGV was one composition by a single composer, would they be able to work it out for themselves? Would presenting the audience with 45 minutes of excerpts instead of the whole thing represent some sort of wholesale violation of the work’s integrity, even if the audience couldn’t tell the difference? If so, is TGV the kind of composition that can generate a coherent ballet of an hour plus in duration – i.e., should a choreographer even try? I like Goldberg well enough and sit through it cheerfully whenever it pops up in my subscription (as Klavier has pointed out, the work is full of lovely, perceptive detail), but to me it’s two different ballets held together by a costume gimmick. I have a pretty decent foundation in music theory (for an amateur), practice almost every day, and spend a lot of time listening to music in a concert setting (i.e., actually paying attention to it without distractions) and yet I still can’t really take in TGV as a single composition in one sitting, even when I work hard to do so – nor does Robbins’ choreography help me hold the piece together in my mind over that long arc. Robbins may have allowed his reverence for TGV as composition to take precedence over what he could control as a choreographer and what his audience could really absorb. He apparently had no such reverence for the Brandenburg Concertos – but to me, chopping up a baroque concerto, which does have a well-defined structure and was meant to be heard as a whole, is a worse offense. So I guess what I’m saying is that if one insists that TGV is the kind of composition that must be heard in its entirety, than a ballet to TGV ought to reinforce the integrity of the whole and be perceived as a fully integrated whole itself – and for me at least Goldberg doesn’t quite get there. Trimming music that doesn't need to be heard in its entirety to get a ballet that works as a unified whole might have been the better course to follow. But I'm still glad we have Goldberg, anyway. I give Cameron Grant full marks for getting through the whole of TGV respectably at tempos that were likely not his choice, but the brass section at Saturday evening's performance of Brahms-Handel should have been taken out at dawn and shot as an example for the woodwinds.

I'm not particularly concerned about Brokeback's having been a movie before it becomes an opera; what I *am* concerned about is whether the original story will be turned into a good libretto. (I agree with Helene that the story effers real possibilities for arias, ensembles, set peices and the like.) Writing a good libretto is hard, exhibit number one being Toni Morrison's libretto for Margaret Garner. Margaret Garner's story *should* have generated something genuinely "operatic" in the best, theatrical sense of that word; in Morrison's hands (the hands of a Nobel laureate, no less), it didn't. It came off like something from the Hallmark channel -- this with a plot that contains sexual violation, a lynching, a mother murdering her children, and a trial. It should have been vastly more shattering than it was. (I think Morrison's libretto was more at fault than Danielpour's score.) Anyway, if Puccini could write a cowboy opera (The Girl of the Golden West) I'm not going to deny Wourinen his. Bolcom has certainly demonstrated the ability to evoke the effects of the relevant popular or folk genres in his operas (not to mention his magnificent oratorio, Songs of Innocence and Experience, which you can get at a bargain price from Naxos, and which I heartily recommend), so it's been done. (Bolcom and Wuorinen are admittedly very different composers in style and approach.) I don't remember Brokeback's soundtrack at all; what I do remember is the scenery -- and of course the lack of scenery and sheer dreariness of the protagonists' surroundings when they have to leave the mountain. I'll be curious to see how the set designer and director handle staging this thing.

I like Wourinen's instrumental music a lot, but I didn't think Haroun displayed much facility with the human voice or an ear for setting text (it struck me as pretty awkward at the time, but then I only heard it once). Haroun and Brokeback are both pretty sentimental in their way, despite the patina of exoticism and otherness of their setting and subject matter, so Wourinen wouldn't have been the first composer to come to mind for either. I vote for William Bolcom.