Quiggin
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3 hours ago, volcanohunter said:
It would have been helpful if the world of classical music had taken the initiative and changed the title of Ravel's piece, but as of June 2022 it was still being performed as Tzigane.
Liszt called his faux-Romani borrowings Hungarian Rhapsodies. Ravel borrowed from this and also from the Romani musical arrangements he heard the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Aranyi play. There are dozens of opera and classical music pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries with variations of Zingara, Zigeuner, alla Zingarese (Brahms) in the title. Ravel's seem to be the last of the line.
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Balanchine's Schubert L'Errante/Errante is often referred to in ballet literature, most recently in Lynn Garafola's La Nijinska. Croce, for instance, says that the veil between earth and underworld in Orpheus is derived from Tchelitchev's decor in Errante (see NinaFan's V&A link above).
Ballets 1933, the program in which Errante appeared, was an important way station on Balanchine's choreographic journey. Changing Tzigane to Errante messes with the history.
(Am currently reading Grigoriev's Ballets Russes memoir and see that Diaghilev changed Chopiniana, which he didn't like, to Les Sylphides over Fokine's objections. Later in a kind of reversal, he changed Le Astuzie Femminili to Cimarosiana after its composer.)
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Another master gone. Someone whose work strikes a strong note that helps guide you.
Serra was part of a group that came on the scene in the mid sixties that included Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, Joan Jonas, and Philip Glass.
His prop / leaning pieces were inspired by Judson Church dance works of Yvonne Ranier, Trisha Brown and Simone Forti – especially Brown's "Leaning Duet," with its "applied equilibrium."
QuoteThey'd do a lot of holds where one performer would fall and another would catch her, or one would be off balance and another would stabilize her ... They were trying to produce dance in a way that heretofore hadn't been conceived of as dance, using found movement and material. The dancers at that time – Yvonne, Trisha, Simone, and others – were also performing in non-art spaces: on rooftops, streets, anywhere and everywhere. In terms of what I was looking at – painters, sculptors, musicians, or whoever – they were the avant-garde, truly ahead of everything else that was being done.
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I once heard Maurizio Pollini do a crazy program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles – the Diabelli Variations of Beethoven, an intense world of their own, and Stockhausen's Klavierstück X, for which Pollini came out in shirtsleeves, which allowed him to play at times with arms and fists. A few people left for the second half but there was lots of pretty passionate applause at the end, enough that he played Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces for an encore. Pollini's father, Gino Pollini, was an architect and member of the Italian Rationalists – a great, slightly underappreciated modernist movement which had a kind of Diabelli-like rigor to it. All part of a disappearing world.
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The musicians of the San Francisco Symphony have issued a statement asking the Board of Governors to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as conductor and restore programs such as the popular SoundBox series.
Quote“We are deeply saddened by the news that Esa-Pekka Salonen will not be returning as Music Director as a result of the Board of Governors’ lack of investment in the future of the Symphony. The decision to cut innovative programming and cancel touring, as well as the failure to competitively invest in the Symphony’s musicians, has led to the departure of a world-class Maestro and raises serious questions about the future of the Symphony.”
Quote“The goal here is to try to increase public awareness of the problem, and to put some pressure on the administration,” Andy Lynch, a spokesperson for the Symphony musicians, told the Chronicle. “Their concern is that if these matters aren’t addressed, then the orchestra may be facing a doom spiral that would threaten its standing.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/sf-symphony-salonen-19265363.php
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6 hours ago, abatt said:
The New York Phil is also doing a lot of film score programs ...
Yes, but in San Francisco, the serious stuff seems a bit out of balance with film nights. (An odd sort of concert hall music experience since film music is designed to cue the viewer as what they should feel about what's on the screen. In themselves, they're a little like "music-minus-one" albums.)
The Los Angeles Philharmonic, ironically, seems to feel less obligated to program film score evenings:
https://www.laphil.com/events/performances?Venue=LA+Phil&Season=null
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I was saddened to learn that Esa-Pekka Salonen is leaving San Francisco next year, in part because I haven't regularly attended performances of SFS in the past couple of years. I really liked his Debussy and Stravinsky performances which had such great clarity and detail.
Salonen is leaving due to disagreements about allocation of resources. Also maybe (my speculation) because of the way the calendar is padded out with lots of film score programs: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Gladiator.
QuoteSalonen, who is from Finland, arrived in San Francisco on a mission to shake up the ensemble, saying at one point that there was “potential for something powerfully transformative to take place here.”
He fed off the creative energy of Silicon Valley, bringing in experts in robotics and artificial intelligence to help reimagine the concert experience. And when he was hired, he recruited eight artists including Nico Muhly, Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding to serve as collaborative partners.
He also chose to do programs like the one coming up on June 13:
Cello Concerto No. 1
Dmitri ShostakovichFairytale Poem
[First San Francisco Symphony Performances]
Sofia GubaidulinaFrancesca da Rimini
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovskyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/arts/music/esa-pekka-salonen-leaving-san-francisco-symphony.html
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Alexey Brodovitch perhaps owes the command "Astonish Me" to Diaghilev, for whom he worked at set painting for a while, but so many photographers owe their film sense to Brodovitch himself. Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Lillian Bassman, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Leon Levenstein, Louis Fauer, and Hiro all worked with Brodovitch or took intense* classes from him. Harper's Bazaar in its 15 September 1940 issue describes him thus: "Alexey Brodovitch, the Bazaar’s art director, is Russian, and a man of iron shyness, with a gift like the Cheshire cat’s of fading in and out of this office of madly leaping females."
From what I've seen of the catalogue, it looks as if Gary Winogrand's insightful 1950s photos of first night Met opera goers are included in the Barnes show, as most likely are Brodovitch's own long-shutter speed photographs of ballet performances of the late thirties, such as Balanchine's Cotillon and Massine's Seventh Symphony.
https://www.barnesfoundation.org/brodovitch-astonish-me
https://lapetitemelancolie.net/2015/08/05/alexey-brodovitch-ballet-1935-37/
* "exacting and ruthless": Bazaar in 1954
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Yes, as I remember it, it was Jackie Kennedy who helped with the Chanel revival, at least in the US.
Incidentally, Christian Bérard, who influenced and guided Dior through the initial stages of the New Look, also provided the look for the original versions of Balanchine's La Valse and Mozartiana – traces of which still linger in the choreography.
Cocteau interestingly in Harper's: "the fashions created by Mademoiselle Chanel have never been extravagant ... In a way that is uniquely her own she imposes the invisible. In the midst of the social uproar, the nobility of a silence."
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Thanks Drew. Interesting reading your thoughts on the Coco Chanel ballet and the ebbs and flows of its narrative. Wonder if a "shadow" Onegin – or shadow Pushkin character – would help bring that ballet closer to the original novel/poem.
I'm wondering about the Chanel dream of ripping up Dior's dresses. Looking through the images in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar of the forties and fifties online, it doesn't seem as if Chanel's designs would hold up very well against Christian Dior's brilliant work, especially the sleek designs of his 1947 and 1951 collections. In fact Chanel seems to completely disappear from the scene until 1955 when Jean Cocteau of all people tries to rehabilitate her in a 1955 Bazaar article, and she doesn't seem to be much of a player even after that.
Also Dior, always described as a shy and self-effacing man, seems an odd nemesis to have been picked for Chanel. Dior quietly continued to design during the war, while his sister Catherine worked for the Resistance out of their apartment and was later captured and tortured by the Gestapo. The comparison with Dior only seems to point up Chanel's dubious behavior during those years.
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4 hours ago, BalanchineFan said:
I’m really not following your point. It seems to me that if there are two people, then you have two oppositional forces.
We’ve seen the duet in TTAR as male/female, male/male and non-binary/nonbinary. It’s still two people doing the steps, doing their best to dance together. How do dialectics and binaries come into it?It may not have been the intention, but it looked non-binary/male to me. But I should have said more directly that I didn't think the casting worked.
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14 hours ago, balletsoiree said:
For one thing, while Stanley may consider himself non-binary but to my knowledge he has only danced male roles at NYCB.
I think the "he" is the part Stanley is dancing in "Racing" and as accommodating as Stanley is, the two of them seem to be in different ballets. Unfortunately, art depends on dialectics and binaries where two different ideas impact each other. it doesn't have to be male and female but it has to be two oppositional forces and those don't seem to have been worked out here.
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I'm just finishing "The Magician" after reading "The Master" – the kind of titling "Maestro" may have been trying to follow. In both books Colm Tóibín handles complex gay/straight, family/out of bounds relationships with great tact – so it's not impossible to do.
What the movie does is lock Leonard Bernstein into a certain set of restricted ideas, very comfortable ones, that will be associated with him from now on. And clips of Bradley Cooper's Bernstein will likely supersede the real thing.
Sidebar: In "the Magician" – about the Thomas Mann family – there are some very funny scenes that kind of criss-cross "Maestro." One is about Alma Mahler trying to sell the original copy of the Bruckner Third to Adolf Hitler and another alludes to Erika Mann's affair with Bruno Walter, who is insufferably boastful. Plus there's a great impersonation of Virginia Woolf by W H Auden. Am looking forward to the Schoenberg/"Dr Faustus" pages.
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6 hours ago, abatt said:
seeing Taras Dimitro of SFB do this role at City Center many years ago.
Saw his Melancholic several times in San Francisco. The best – beautifully sustained, completely in character of a kind of stripped down non-character.
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Mark Swed in the LA Times has some good notes on the movie, the first echoing abatt's reservations about the depiction of Bernstein's conducting style:
QuoteCopying Bernstein’s conducting is even more problematic. Cooper impressively mimics Bernstein’s movements in a performance of the apotheosis of Mahler’s Second Symphony at the Ely Cathedral in London, which Bernstein filmed. But you can’t mimic essence. “Don’t copy me,” Bernstein regularly told student conductors.
Worse, though, is the soundtrack, bits and pieces of Bernstein’s music mainly with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The recorded sound is bombastic; instrumental balances, grotesque; the conducting, bland. Had “Maestro” explored Bernstein as musician and shaman more thoroughly, it would have had to show that this soundtrack, which needs to be the heart of the film, goes against everything Bernstein stood for.And on the significance of Thomas Cothran in Bernstein's life:
QuoteBisexual, Bernstein began an affair in 1971 with a dazzlingly brilliant young man from Pasadena, Thomas Cothran, which, when discovered by Felicia, led to a breakup of the Bernsteins’ marriage. Tom happened to be a classmate of mine at Pasadena High School and we became good friends. He’s Tommy in “Maestro” (he never would have put up with that from anyone other than Bernstein) and dismissed in the film as little more than a casual attraction.
Tom and Lenny lived together for a predictably incompatible year. Tom had little patience for Lenny’s late-night bouts of insecurity and, by his telling, was able to trim some of the excesses from Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures, “The Unanswered Question,” at Harvard University.
Here's Swed's whole Los Angeles Times piece about the "missing essence" of the Netflix pic:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-12-22/netflix-maestro-movie-leonard-bernstein
And his link to a longer account of the Bernstein/Cothran relationship by Peter Napolitano in the Huffington Post:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leonard-bernstein-maestro-tommy-cothran_n_65776e50e4b09724b4352994
Yes, a multi-season series might be the thing, but with all the material available, musical and biographical, it could well be an unlimited one. A whole season could be devoted to the making of Candide, with Lilian Hellman, Richard Wilbur, Barbara Cook, Voltaire, etc !
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Henri Cartier-Bresson, who took the series of pictures, famously did not allow his photos to be cropped (except for Alexei Brodovitch, editor of Harper's Bazaar, to whom he allowed the privilege). He believed in catching the whole thing in one throw. H C-B:
QuoteIf it’s not correct, it’s not by cropping in the darkroom and making all sorts of tricks that you improve it. If a picture is mediocre, well it remains mediocre. The thing is done, once for all.
Lincoln Kirstein:
QuoteEditing and manipulation is in the choice of the Moment itself; the press, the click. Cartier-Bresson knows and accepts these limitation not as strictures but as possibilities. Liberty for him ... is a discrete frame, in which there are infinite variations and chances."
HIs approach was a huge influence on post war Amercian photographers such as Gary Winogrand, William Eggleston and Nan Goldin.
No, the picture should not have been cropped.
Added: I'll have to amend my comment to say that I'm not sure if the Arthur Mitchell photo was part of the series taken by Cartier-Bresson (there's no vignetting at corners of frame from the particular Leica lens H C-B used), though his ideas of cropping could still apply.
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Not all of the archive at NYRB seems to be in public access though you can register for one (or two) free looks. Public libraries, such as San Francisco's, may have online subscriptions through Flipster, but only to 2014.
I enjoyed reading Joan Acocella's reviews, though there seemed to me to be some sadness along with the sharpness. Here's a clip from a 1995 article on another critic, Robert Garis:
QuoteGaris was part of a particular group of well-read, articulate people, many of them artists and writers, who gathered around Balanchine’s enterprise in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, and he tells us something about this crowd: how they conducted their friendships at the ballet, how they huddled together at intermission, comparing their responses and arguing over the respective merits of this and that ballerina. My one complaint about the book is that it doesn’t offer more of this material. Garis gives us only glancing portraits, often uncomplimentary, of a few of the principals: the much-revered dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, whom he portrays as an oblique and calculating man; Haggin, with his dogmatism and his bullying. He also touches on Kirstein, whom he seems to have regarded as little more than the company’s PR man ...
But Garis’s brevity on the subject of the goings-on around the company is part of his empiricism, his determination to tell us only what he himself experienced, and in sticking to that subject, he has given us something invaluable.
For a large portion of the audience, it was not just a ballet company; it was a central event in their lives. Garis was one of those people, and though the inwardness of his book is unique in writings on Balanchine—indeed, on ballet—it is nevertheless representative of the effect the company had. Under Balanchine, NYCB was a mental adventure of the profoundest kind. The adventure is over now, but Garis testifies to the happiness it gave.
The New York Times obit mentions that a collection of AC's writings on literature, “The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays,” will be published later in the year.
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Really enjoyed it the second time, after a quick run through. So many Tchaikovsky overtures and fantasies, like pie fillings without the crust, one after another, often dark and dense – a bit overwhelming. I especially liked the Elegy at the beginning where the corps seem to be describing the dancer's thoughts (Shane Wagman?). Nice that Romeo & Juliet began with the ending first, freeing up the rest of the ballet.
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The "Funeral march" is ironic and has some dances in it and odd changes of tempi, so it would seem to give Ratmansky some room to play in. The Adagietto is what people who don't like Mahler like, and I never look forward to it. Klaus Tennstedt said something like it was a bit too sweet perhaps, but it gives the audience a moment to "elax" a bit. But as main fare?
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2 hours ago, Helene said:
Villella's in the Third Movement, in which Davide Dato showed the beautiful, springy jumps in the solo.
They were amazing, especially in the asymmetrically crossed-leg figures that you can also see Villella making.
50 minutes ago, volcanohunter said:and I similarly avoid Mozartiana
Mozartiana!
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This is very sad. Patrick was a lively participant on this forum in the early days of long arts discussions that went on for pages of posts and counterposts – along with Carly, Simon G, Bart, etc – all of us keeping Helene very much on the "alert." In general life here and everywhere is much more subdued, people are more cautious and we tend to discuss fine points of performances rather than indulge in loud, overarching theories of the art as before. Bits of Patrick's posts from 2008 & 2010:
"When I first started seeing NYCB regularly in the late 70s, the dancers did seem very adult -- but then they were all older than me, or at least my age. Now that they're all young enough to be my children and then some, they look like kids. It's that simple ... But NYCB is not 'like kids' when dancers like Sara Mearns are at work. And I say that even about the her dancing in roles I don't think she fully succeeds at. She is always 'adult', in the sense of either being fully serious or trying to be, as in 'swan lake'. She is just one example of a dancer who is always serious about what she is doing, so that even seeing her do something in which she is not fully convincing is still along the lines of what I used to see Farrell or McBride or Villella doing."
"My problem with Sondheim is that, although he's written more successful shows than Bernstein, Jule Styne and Harold Arlen, I don't think he is nearly the great composer that they are, with some exceptions of individual songs here and there. The music often whines and gets smarmy and neurotic, and is not muscular that way the above three are. I think his greater gift is usually that of the lyricist for composers with a greater musical gift ... I was interested that Sondheim 'adored Lee Remick' and was devastated by her death. I also recall finding it totally shocking and unexpected, and I was pretty crazy about her too."
"That's probably the main thing we don't agree with, and it might have to do with knowing Colette's work better than I do. I like all that luxuriant decadence, all the sense of a confection and lots of fripperies (aided and abetted by Ms. Kathy Bates). When I think of it, I believe I've taken out 'Cheri' and 'Gigi' several times, and never read past the first couple of pages. I'm not sure why, because I like the whole idea of COLETTE. It's not like anybody else has ever BEEN Colette! Okay, I think I ought to read it, that's what this discussion has convinced me of."
"I am simply dumbstruck that I missed this due to various activities last week. Stockhausen was one of the great composers of the 20th century, and while not as 'lovable' perhaps as the recent great performer deaths in classical music--Rostropovich, Sills, Pavarotti--was more important in the musical-adventurer domain. Boulez, who became extremely jealous of him during his ascent into great fame, nevertheless always spoke of him as having been greatly influential on him (although Boulez is a few years older). I've liked some of the piano music, the 'Klavierstucke--I-IV,' and orchestral music a great deal, and remember a rehearsal of 'Jubilee' at the New York Philharmonic in about 1981, which was marvelous."
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Here's Alexandra Danilova's charming SPF, done at Jacobs Pillow in 1952. Malissa Hayden's version, which may have been coached by Danilova, seems a bit looser and slightly disaffected in comparison.
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As Drew says, the title "Maestro" is where the problem begins. The title is about a conductor, the movie is about a love affair.
Regarding Mahler and Maestros, I had forgotten the fact that Mahler had briefly been director of the New York Philharmonic. And after Mahler's death it was Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, quite different in conducting style, who championed his work. This despite years of dismissive, John Martin-like reviews from Olin Downes and Howard Taubman in the Times. Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leonard Bernstein's mentor – there's perhaps an "Anxiety" story there – premiered the Sixth in New York in the late 40s and conducted Mahler after that whenever he could. Leonard Bernstein was then interested in Strauss ("Don Quixote"), Stravinsky and Shostakovitch, which do seem like influences for "Candide."
It was only after the series of nine commemorative Mahler concerts in 1959, with Mitropoulos, Bernstein, and Walter taking turns, that Bernstein seemed to get religion. (My own favorite New York Philharmonic Mahler conductor was Klaus Tennstedt who was able to tone down the orchestra's rambunctiousness, especially in transitions to the slow movements.)
Regarding Bernstein's sexuality, he does seem to have been genuinely gay, not bisexual and truly devoted to his family (Felicia Montealegre letter: “you are a homosexual and may never change [. . .] I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar"). Maybe he was an actor who was not always convinced of his own acting.
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It looks intriguing and seductive from the clips, but I'm also put off by the marker of artistic success being a work's verisimilitude, impersonation here being so upfront and so much the focus that you're always saying, "that's so just like Lenny."
Zachary Woolfe has a piece in today's Times about what's been left out of the movie, Bernstein's actually life as a gay man (I remember Lillian Hellman fussily chastising him on Dick Cavett one night for this) and his and Felicia's involvement in social issues. But also left out, more importantly, are LB struggles to be accepted as a composer, rather than a conductor or writer of musicals, judgments that dogged him all his life. Important biographical points get deleted or rounded off and Bernstein ends up in the public imagination as a kind of celebrity caricature, full of ticks and actors' tricks.
NYCB 2024-25
in New York City Ballet
Posted · Edited by Quiggin
Interesting how the standard curtain time has drifted over the years. Up until the seventies it was 8:30 (Noel Coward has a play titled "Tonight at 8:30"). And a 1926 issue of Drama Calendar lists varying curtain times of 8:15, 8:35, 8:45,& 9:00 for theater events (apparently there were no stand-alone ballet performances then). I'm always running late, so when i lived in New York – at Bowery & Houston, a whole world away from NY State Theater – I really appreciated the 8:00 curtain .