Kathleen O'Connell

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.

Yes! I have two new favorites: Lauren King and Rachel Piskin -- they are like rays of pure sunshine. I just love to watch them dance.

Wednesday evening, May 14 DRB – I too almost left before Les Noces! I had an early meeting the next morning and thought “Well, I don’t really need to see this again” – and then at the last minute it occurred to me that I might not get another opportunity to hear it again, so I decided to stay. Andantino – Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz Agreeable Robbins filler. I can’t say that I’m particularly hankering to see it again, but I certainly enjoyed it while it was happening. I’m trying to enjoy De Luz – if for no other reason than the fact that he so frequently partners Megan Fairchild, whom I enjoy very much – but I can’t work up the full complement of enthusiasm that he probably deserves. To my eye, he doesn’t so much dance as dart from one pyrotechnic display to the next; for this reason I prefer Millepied or Hendrickson in the same roles even thought they don’t have his technical chops. Here’s an example of what’s bugging me: his performance of the long and difficult male solo in Le Baiser de la Fée a couple of seasons ago was notable for his getting through it with out the least appearance of strain, but I also found it notably inexpressive. Baiser is a weird little ballet: it starts out like it’s going to be Donizetti Variations but morphs into something odder and darker well before the end – but none of that really came through in De Luz’ performance. (Whereas I think Baiser is the standout best thing M. Fairchild has done yet; as far as I’m concerned she owns the role.) He treated the connecting material between the solo’s virtuoso episodes as little more than a mechanism to transport him from one launching pad to the next – as if it had no theatrical or expressive possibilities of its own or as if dancing comprised only the jumping and turning bits. (As Hübbe demonstrated in Watermill, it comprises the standing stone still in one place for five minutes entirely enveloped in a cloak bits, too.) I do believe that De Luz’ emphasis on the fireworks arises from a genuine desire to please his audience and not from the need to prove something to it – he’s generous in that regard and the audience responds warmly to him; I’m definitely in the minority. And for the record, there are roles in which I find him immensely likeable, too. I thought he was terrific in Fancy Free: he brought a sunny winsomeness to a role that can turn disagreeably brittle in the hands of someone determined to prove that he can jump higher faster than anyone else. I liked him as Pierrot in Harlequinade, too. But. Even though Andantino (finally, back to the program!) doesn’t present any of Baiser’s interpretive challenges, it certainly does have changes of mood and this is not something I see captured in De Luz’ dancing yet. I don’t find him to be successful as a partner, either; he’s just not big enough to frame Fairchild or Bouder (the two ballerinas I’ve seen him partner) in the way the choreography demands in the particular ballets they’ve been cast in. I can imagine De Luz being entirely successful in something Bournonville-ish, in which the man and woman move together exuberantly and at speed with closely paired steps, say. (De Luz had a less-than-lucky draw in being paired with Bouder in the Fall section of The Four Seasons, where she’s at her brassiest and most prone to dance at her partner rather than with him. To date, I think J. Stafford has been the most successful of Bouder’s partners; his physical size relative to hers and his apparent alertness to the theatrical possibilities of partnering tether her to the proceedings more effectively than attempts to match her in sheer prowess or vividness, I think. But I digress ...) While it’s not a great ballet, Andantino is nonetheless the kind of ballet that showcases M. Fairchild’s supple and subtle musicality – reminiscent of Miranda Weese’s – and the lovely, unmannered harmoniousness of her upper and lower body. Like Weese, Fairchild dances through a phrase, not inside it; and while she doesn’t have Weese’s uncanny ability to shapeshift from one moment of diamond clarity to another (and who does?) she can – with unforced delicacy – catch your eye with something that might otherwise flash by unnoticed. She doesn’t appear hell-bent on clubbing you over the head with bold effects, and that’s fine by me. Well, I see that if I keep moving at this pace, we’ll be well into the winter season before I wrap up 5/14/08 – especially if I keep going off on tangents – and I haven’t even gotten to the evening’s highlight, which was Gonzalo Garcia and Wendy Whelan in Opus 19 – totally unexpected and out of nowhere! More tomorrow, I hope …

OK, I’ll bite since I saw the same program on Wednesday evening, May 14: I thought that Les Noces sounded great - it just blew me away! I’d never had a ready opportunity to hear the work live before and was very pleased with the both performance and (for once) with NYST acoustics; because the chorus, soloists, four pianos, and percussion were all on stage (with the chorus and soloists on steeply raked risers right in front of the backdrop) the sound carried out into the hall with more immediacy than it usually does there. And the piece is just terrific anyway. (I studied the score in a course on 20th century music; it struck me as being the kind of thing that is much harder to do than it sounds, so kudos to all the musicians involved.) I’d seen Les Noces during NYCB’s 1997(?) revival, done to a recording by a Russian folk music group, and thought it (Robbins’ ballet) was only OK. I liked the raw sound of the singers just fine, but it was perhaps a bit too “authentic” to be paired with Robbins’ choreography and the whole didn’t really do justice to Stravinsky’s score, IMO. Furthermore, the stage picture wasn’t really full enough without the musicians. (I don’t remember if the 97 revival used the current backdrop, which is very striking. Since it looks as if it was designed to fill in the space above the chorus, it might not have been usable without them.) I still don’t think Robbins’ Les Noces is a masterwork in and of itself, but the whole package on Wednesday evening was a pretty decent piece of theater. One of its (to me) significant drawbacks is that it’s difficult to figure out who’s who just from the stage action or from the steps the dancers have been given, which in turn makes it hard to sort out what’s going on, which in turn undercuts some of the emotional impact the ritual scenes might have. (And maybe this is as Robbins intended: he might have been aiming for a more removed, more distanced experience of the proceedings. But it felt a bit like “Postcards of a Painting of a Gathering.”). I knew who the matchmakers were, for instance, because I know what Scheller and Veyette look like, but I’m not sure if someone unfamiliar with the dancers could have sorted out the matchmakers and the bride and groom’s respective parents. Of the dancers, I thought Ana-Sophie Scheller was the most effective – just fierce, fierce, fierce in a role that’s more in the Gina Pazcougin line (who I think would be wonderful in it, by the way). Austin Laurent threw himself at the floor with rather alarming ferocity in one of the group dances for the men; I like him a lot, and while I appreciate the enthusiasm, I would prefer that he not actually break anything. Jonathan Stafford and Rebecca Krohn are lovely, elegant dancers, and I’m always happy to see their names on the program, but can we just say “least likely Russian peasants ever”? (Stafford is my current Prince Ivan of choice, however.) Anyway, I’d go again just to hear this terrific performance of Stravinsky's terrific music, but Robbins’ choreography at the very least “does no harm” and does have some genuinely effective moments. I'm in the process of typing up some thoughts about the rest of the program and will try to post them later.

Balanchine's Mourka (Balanchine's cat) or Nick (Jerome Robbins' dog)

Chris d'Amboise Kathleen or Margaret Tracey?

I hope canbelto will correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we supposed to choose from the last pair? Otherwise some pairings may end up ignored, which really isn't fair to s/he who posted. If you want to enter a This-ir-That but the last choice is not in your experience, you can either wait until we get something you can answer honestly, or just pick one arbitrarily! Looks to me like the last choice, from printscess, is Patricia McBride or Kay Mazzo. Please resume . . . Patricia McBride Diaghilev or Kerstein?

If anything, the lines are straighter and the wrists are less broken than they were 30 years ago! I've always assumed that if Balanchine had wanted straight lines, he would have gotten them. NYCB was the company that I first started watching with any real attention and intensity, and its the one I've seen the most over the past 30 years. I thought that that was what ballet was supposed to look like until the mid 90s or something like that. Several years ago I got a DVD of the Royal Ballet doing Swan Lake (the one with Makarova and Dowell) and at first thought that the disk HAD to be defective because it appeared that the music track was (ever so slightly) out of sync with the video -- until Makarova started dancing -- and then I realized, AHA! it's a style difference. I'm still not used to it, really.

I didn't see the opening night performance, but the Varese pieces were Integrales, Density 21.5, and Octandre. In 1986 Mr. Taylor rearranged the dance so that the original (1984) first section went to last, the second to first, and the third to middle. I wonder what the order is this season... You can still find the complete Anna Kisselgoff Times reviews for both versions by using Search at the NYTimes website, or, I'm sure, via Google. Many thanks!

A plea to anyone who attended on opening night: I appear to have misplaced my program -- can someone who did attend and still has their program supply the names of the Varese pieces used for Byzantium? I liked Byzantium a lot more than I remember liking it when it was new ...

And the vibe was kind of weird, too -- no sense of opening night buzz or enthusiasm. Granted the gala was a couple of nights later, but still ... there was a NY premiere on the program and the return of a genuinely intriguing work (Byzantium) after a too, too long absence. The audience finally woke up for Arden Court.

Whew! Last week, I shoehorned in an extra program that I otherwise couldn't have cared less about just to see Russian Seasons one more time (my fifth since the premiere). I mean, I love Russian Seasons, but I'm gonna need some fresh Ratmansky in the rotation soon. Middle Duet is fine, of course, but tearing open a season brochure to find just Middle Duet for the Ratmansky offering would be like finding just one sip of champagne left in the bottle.

When I first started attending regularly in the mid-to-late 70’s, NYCB definitely seemed like a company of glamazons at every rank. The principal women do currently trend short, although some – such as Somogyi (and the much-missed Weese, sigh) – punch above their weight, so to speak. (I never realized Somogyi wasn’t tall until I saw her standing next to Peter Boal. My jaw dropped when I saw Weese comfortably partnered by De Luz in the “Voices of Spring” section of Vienna Waltzes a season or two ago. I had always thought of her as at least a “medium.” I agree with Leigh's point about Ballo looking different when she danced it, but I somehow never chalked that difference up to height so much as to the special sparkling-crystal-on-lustrous-silk quality of her way of moving.) But there are a greater proportion of taller women amongst the soloists – Bar, Lowery, and Mearns for instance, and some up-and-coming taller men to partner them as well. Garnetta (fka Coco) Gonzalez seems a genuine throwback to the glamazon era -- I hope we see more of her soon. (I was lucky enough to catch her SAB workshop performance in Union Jack. Most. Glamorous. Wren. Ever.) And if K. Gilliland isnt' tall, her long, willowy limbs (and her nicely deployed rubato) certainly create the impression that she is.

* http://www.observer.com/2007/bloggerina Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that Kristin Sloan won't be coming back! I missed her. The last time I saw her was in Songs of the Auvergne a couple of seasons ago -- her dancing was lovely and luminous and I very much hoped to see more of her. But I am very glad that NYCB had the smarts to give her a media gig. IMO, her R+J webisodes were more engaging than the actual ballet. They need her.