Wagner's Siegfried at the MET

The Metropolitan Opera is in the middle of presenting three Ring Cycles this spring, and this afternoon was the premiere of Siegfried, the third part of Richard Wagner's monumental tetralogy. It is the second year that the Robert Lepage production is seen in its entirety at the house.  This season comes with a few key changes in the cast from the first initial years when the operas debuted. The "machine," the twenty four planks that make up the unit set for the four operas, is still very much with us, and continues to be the source of much controversy, and the topic of most of the audience conversation at intermissions. When the contraption works, it offers a 21st century staging that at times can be arresting as it is maddening. When it malfunctions it is an engineering nightmare that leaves audiences wishing that the MET had kept the previous Otto Schenk staging alone.

Having seen the entire music drama at the house as well as on Blu-Ray DVD I've concluded that this staging is best enjoyed on a 16x9 flat screen monitor at home, or in an HD presentation in the theater. The "machine" robs the staging of depth with much of the action taking place near the apron of the stage. This is perfect for the two dimensional presentation on a theater or home screen. Some audience members have even complained that, depending on what part of the house one sits, the "machine" steals away some of the sound. With money coming in hand over fist from the worldwide HD presentations MET management could probably care less what goes on at the house these days.

Among the artists returning to the roles they created in this production are Gerhard Siegel as Mime and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried.  These days Mr. Siegel owns the role of Mime.  He is a brilliant actor with a strong heldentenorish voice to match.  Mr. Morris is very strong in the acting department, but his voice, compared to that of Mr. Siegel, is lighter, making the MET's Ring possibly the only production of this work where the Siegfried could sing Mime and vice-versa.  I would love for them to switch roles in a recording of this opera and examine the results.  Likewise, basso-profundo Hans-Peter König was a thunderous Fafner, a voice that harks back to the Golden Age of Wagnerian singers.  Eric Owens, as Alberich, continues to be a phenomenal stage presence, but this afternoon his low notes sounded a bit dry.   Deborah Voigt has become the house Brünnhilde, and this afternoon she sounded strong and radiant, the best I have seen her in quite a while.  Mark Delavan, taking on the role of Wotan for the first time this year, sounded strong and assured.

The Metropolitan Opera orchestra, under Fabio Luisi played flawlessly as usual this very difficult score.  We are so lucky to have such an incredibly fine ensemble playing every night in New York City.

Music meets Technology at the American Composers Orchestra

The American Composers Orchestra concert on Friday evening at Carnegie's Zankel auditorium, under the direction of George Manahan, explored the possibilities of music and technology under the banner of "Playing it UNsafe."  Composer Raymond J. Lustig's "Latency Canons" does just that. It is a transatlantic twelve minute orchestra work that balances the musicians in New York with the Gildas Quartet playing, in "real" time from Manchester, England, and over the Internet.  The unreliable aspect of cyberspace, together with the delay that oftentimes happens in our current computer communication is the backbone of this work.  In Richard Wagner's Parsifal when the character Gurnemanz mysteriously states that in the realm of the Grail "time becomes space" he could very well be talking about Mr. Lustig's canons.  His mostly tonal piece culminates in a dizzying fugue punctuated by massive chords on the brass section.  That the Internet has become more reliable and less twitchy than when perhaps the idea first occurred to Mr. Lustig is not the point.  The very fact that the composer embraces unreliability in performance as the piece's raison d'être continues to make the essence of "Latency Canons" wonderfully experimental.

For more information about Raymond Lustig and his music, visit his website: RaymondLustig.com.

Blancanieves, A Silent Snow White Set in Spain

If you are a Spanish filmmaker and you are going to update Snow White and the Seven Dwarves you might as well pull all the stops and set the classic fairy tale in 1920s pre Civil War Andalucia.  That's where director Pablo Berger takes us in his film Blancanieves, transporting us right to the middle of sun-drenched Seville amid the heat of the bullfight and the clamor of flamenco. And to make it even more timeless, he reaches back to the early days of cinema and presents the story as a silent film, in beautiful black-and-white.

Under Berger's direction, Snow White becomes a grotesque tale of the sword and the cape set to the driving rhythms of the earthy but elegant gypsy music that gives Southern Spain its soul and passion.  Snow White, here called Carmen is the daughter of famous torero Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and a flamenco singer from Seville's Triana neighborhood.  On a sunny day in the bullring, the matador ably disposes of the first five bulls, but the last one, named Lucifer, savagely gores him, leaving him incapacitated for life.  His pregnant wife gives birth to Carmen prematurely, and dies in the process.  Thus the little orphan is left to be raised by the grandmother (Angela Molina) who teaches young Carmen the ways of the gypsy dance, and thus maintains the spirit of her mother alive.  Meanwhile, the bullfighter's gold digging nurse Encarna (Maribel Verdú) marries him and keeps him a virtual prisoner in his own house as she transforms herself into the evil lady of the manor -- a scarier Evil Queen I have not seen!  When the grandmother dies in the middle of a flamenco dance on the day of Carmen's first communion, Encarna sends for the little girl and, like every twisted fairy tale stepmother, drives Carmen into a Cinderella-like slave existence.

Eventually, director Berger remembers that this is Snow White, so the little girl grows up to be the fairest of them all: Macarena García.  The evil stepmother sends her henchman to kill her, but she survives the attack only to be revived by a troupe of midget bullfighters: an inspired idea that mixes Buñuelian imagery with Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks.  Eventually, under the tutelage of her little friends, Carmen becomes a lady matador, gains notoriety by performing in small dusty towns, and eventually gets a big contract to come back to Seville, the mecca of bullfighting, where her father almost lost his life.

From here on, it's a short road to a poisoned apple, a glass coffin, and the kind of ending that draws from the original fairy tale while deviating from it in a most melodramatic way.  Mr. Berger's final shot, offers an unexpected touch of the poet that may not be totally in keeping with the rest of the film.  It is the kind of conclusion that leaves audiences with a veil of satisfaction that hides the disturbing darkness beneath.

New York Times Article about Peter Gelb

The New York Times Sunday magazine has a very interesting, in-depth article on Peter Gelb's tenure as the Metropolitan Opera's current general manager.  While the Times keeps it available online, you can read it by going here.

Las Vegas Rigoletto at the MET

 Wieland Wagner ushered in the era of the director in opera with the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951.  His historic production of Parsifal was a personal statement assuring the world that the Green Hill would never go back to the German mythological productions that had been connected with his country’s Nazi past.  The second part of the 20^th century proved to be a breeding ground for directors trying their hand at Richard Wagner’s works.  With their mythic settings and abstract ideas these operas and music dramas lent themselves easily to experimentation in a way that other composers did not.  Case and point, the majority of works by Giuseppe Verdi, whose operas seem to be rooted in a specific time and place, remained more or less in their original setting for the longest time.  No more!  Verdian Regietheater has arrived with full force this year at the MET with the new production of the 1851 classic Rigoletto, the tragedy of a jester in Renaissance Mantua now transformed by director Michael Mayer as the story of a shtick funny man in 1960s Rat Pack Las Vegas.

The concept is not entirely new.  In 1982, at the English National Opera, Dr. Jonathan Miller set this work in New York’s mob-controlled Little Italy in the 1950s.  Director Mayer took this idea and ran away with it, all the way to the boozy era of Frankie, Dean, Sammy, and Joey, and he has brought back to life their loud tuxedos, the all-night drinking bouts, and the neon-lit Sands and Flamingo atmosphere of the rough joints that the Mafia set up in the Vegas Strip in the post World War II years.

What makes this production work, and work very well is the commitment of the entire cast to this new concept.  Everyone is perfectly cast in the ensemble, and all look comfortable in the updated setting.  The Duke, who is now a cross between Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, is played with flair and abandon by Piotr Beczala who makes one of the most dashing cads we have seen on the MET stage in a long time.  His "La Donna è Mobile" ends with him swinging around a pole where a topless dancer gyrated only minutes before in front of the assassin Sparafucile, memorably played by Slovakian bass Stefan Kocán, a dangerous figure with a deep dark bass voice, and massive deep notes.  His initial encounter with Rigoletto (Željko Lučić), in an after hours bar, drew bravos from the crowd, especially the last note of the duet: Kocán's beautifully placed low F. 

At the heart of this opera there is the relationship between father and daughter, and this production has a winning pair of singers in these roles.  Mr. Lučić was perfectly cast as the jester with the acid tongue and a highly personal family secret.  In this production, while all the men are wearing loud period tuxes, he wears sweaters, giving the impression of being a hunchback Joey Bishop.  His voice is perfectly suited for this role: a round baritone that's not afraid of resorting to a growl or two.  In the 1940s and 1950s Leonard Warren was famous for a similar approach to this character, and Lučić's reading of the score reminded me of Warren's sound.  Diana Damrau made a beautiful, virginal Gilda.  She was able to convey the character's sweetness, and naivete, while she sailed through Verdi's difficult music.  Her "Caro Nome" was brilliant, with clear trills that made the receptive audience burst out in applause and well-deserved bravos. Kudos also to Michele Mariotti who conducted this well-known score with assured aplomb making the ensemble reach both massive controlled tuttis as well as very tender moments.

Updating this work is a directorial decision that is still considered a big risk in this city.  Experimentation is the norm across international opera houses, but it has also become the trademark of the Peter Gelb tenure at the MET, something that a faction of the New York opera public is deeply lamenting.  Year after year innovative productions of the bread and butter works are replacing the conservative Joseph Volpe productions that stood the test of time and pleased the tastes of the majority of New York's opera audience.  This production manages to hit the right notes, offering a risky, potentially silly, but successful re-imagining of a much-beloved work in the canon.  When the elements fit, as they do here, then the result is a memorable and satisfying piece of theater.

New Parsifal at the MET

 When I heard Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, I wrote on this blog that the experience was like listening to the work for the first time.  The new Metropolitan Opera production of this work premiered on Friday, and the event also felt like a first of sorts.  The new staging by François Girard removes the work from the confines of MET traditional staging where it has always been since the opera company produced the work in 1903 against the wishes of the composer that this "stage consecrating festival play" be performed only at the Green Hill.  It is the MET's first non-traditional production of this work, and the opening night crowd received it with the customary applause and cheers for the performers, and some very loud boos aimed at the production team.

In Girard's vision of Richard Wagner's last work the gathering MET audience itself becomes part of the drama as a reflecting black curtain welcomes us, and puts us right on the stage even before the initial downbeat.  This idea of a mirror is hardly new, having been used, coincidentally, at Bayreuth this summer during the concluding moments of the current production.  Here at the MET, the Grail Knights are a group of men in white shirt sleeves and black pants looking more like an American Quaker or Shaker congregation.  In Michael Levine's minimalist set the chorus of men sit in a circle on one side, right from the start of the opera, while their wives, veiled women in black, are segregated on the other side of the stage, separated by a crack through which water flows, and sometimes blood.  At the end of the first act the chasm opens to reveal what appears to be burning lava beneath: perhaps a foreshadowing of nastier things to come.  In the second act the playing area of Klingsor's realm is a forest of spears in a pool of blood where everyone gets their feet wet.  In the final act, the Grail Knights are in a complete disarray.  The stage is now a makeshift graveyard, and a sense of doom hangs in the air.  Luckily, Parsifal comes to the rescue, bringing back the stolen spear.  He inserts the lance into the mouth of the Grail cup -- an obvious sexual metaphor that makes Kundry swoon.  And now that male (spear) and female (grail) are back together again the men and women dare to walk across the crack, and gather together, crossing the barrier that originally had kept them apart.

Girard's production steers away from controversy and presents us with a middle of the road "regietheatre lite" that's very European, but ultimately benign, and ultimately quite traditional.  No Apocalyptic, cannibalistic Parsifal here as in Calixto Bieito's Staatsoper Stuttgart production, and certainly no Stefan Herheim's Bayreuth production where Wagner's opera intertwines with the history of Germany and Bayreuth itself.  Girard follows the path set down by the composer, but the production also steers away from the traditional trappings of previous MET stagings, and this is enough cause for conservative New York opera lovers to raise a clamor, and long for the days when Cecil B. De Mille-sized sets rolled on during the Grail transformation scene.  The grandeur is still there: listen to it!  It's all in the music!

Daniele Gatti led the orchestra in a slow, majestic reading filled with magnificent details and soft nuances.  Italianate to the core, this was a Parsifal that sang, and he conducted without a score -- an impressive Herculean feat.  Onstage the chorus was simply marvelous once again.  This ensemble should not envy the famed Bayreuth chorus.  Both groups are first rate musicians, and last night proved that the MET chorus is one of the most important assets of this company.  In the leading roles René Pape presented a younger than usual Gurnemanz, vocally strong, with perfect diction and great stage presence.  Katarina Dalayman started vocally weak in the role of Kundry but warmed up by the time her big moments came in Act II.  Jonas Kaufmann was his usual excellent self throughout the evening.  His dark tenor filling the house, and at times resorting to his famous pianissimo in order to portray the youthfulness of the character.  The most impressive singer of the evening was Peter Mattei who was heartbreaking as the king who cannot bear to raise the grail once more.  His Amfortas was a wounded soul, bleeding profusely out of his right side, unable to walk without assistance, and totally damaged psychologically by his very human past failings.  His baritone rang true, with strength and pathos throughout his performance.  Finally, it was great to see Evgeny Nikitin sing.  He was banned from the Bayreuth Festival last summer when it was discovered that at one point in his youth he had a swastika tattooed on his chest.  His reading of Klingsor was vocally solid, although at times he resorted to an unnecessary Bayreuth bark in order to portray the evil intentions of the character.

This is an interesting production of Parsifal with a valid and familiar take on the story.  Certainly I do not think that it is a production that audiences will want to see for twenty years (as in the Joseph Volpe years), and I hope that in due time we get to experience another reincarnation of this timeless work.

Argo: a film directed by Ben Affleck

When militants stormed the United States embassy in Tehran in 1979 in retaliation for the U.S. sheltering the deposed Shah of Iran, more than 50 members of the embassy staff were taken hostage.  Six of them, however, escaped and hid at the home of the Canadian ambassador.  Back in the U.S., CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) dreams up a wacky, improbable plan to rescue the six while watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes on TV with his son.  The six Americans are going to pass as Canadian filmmakers scouting exotic desert locations for an imaginary Star Wars ripoff called Argo.

Labeled by Mendez's CIA supervisor Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston) as "the best bad idea we have" the powers that be nevertheless sign off on it, and Mendez begins an eye-opening  journey of discovery in Hollywood-Babylon where he finds out that even an imaginary film requires a ton of pre-production.  He meets with John Chambers (John Goodman) a makeup expert who in the past did disguise work for the agency.  He welcomes Mendez to Tinsel Town by telling him "So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot without actually doing anything? ... You'll fit right in."

The fake project begins to take shape when Mendez meets with producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) who helps Mendez to set up a phony film studio and successfully establish the pretense that this movie has been green lit and will be entering principal photography soon. A memorable, but frightening montage sequence juxtaposes the first reading of the Argo script by actors wearing ridiculous alien costumes with a televised news conference where the very real demands of the embassy militants are being read in English by an angry spokeswoman wearing a veil. Fun and games, and lies and truths merge in a pivotal but indecisive moment of history.

Eventually Mendez manages to sneak inside Tehran, meet the six, and instruct them in record time on the customs, mores, politics and pitfalls of Canadian English.  Time is of the essence, for back at the embassy the militants have realized that six Americans are missing, and armed posses are looking for them.  The film's finale at the airport is a nail biting sequence expertly handled by director Affleck.

The fact that Mr. Affleck was passed over as director when the Academy Awards nominations came out raised a lot of eyebrows.  The Golden Globes, last weekend, honored him with its version of the best director prize.  In addition, this year's Oscar host Seth MacFarlane believes that Ben Affleck got robbed in the Best Director Oscar category.  It should prove to be an interesting Oscar ceremony on February 24.

Django Unchained: New Tarantino Film

When Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) learns that the slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is married to a woman named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the German bounty hunter posing as a dentist mountebank can't help but recount the myth of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde and how she deceived her father Wotan: a story best told through Richard Wagner's epic cycle of operas The Ring of the Nibelung, and Fritz Lang's silent epic Die Nibelungen.  But Christoph Waltz's character only gets us started on the tale.  It's up to the real storyteller here, Quentin Tarantino, to take us to its shattering, fiery conclusion: an ending rivaling Götterdämmerung, the end of the Wagnerian cycle.  And he does, in his new film Django Unchained.

Once again, Tarantino is on his post-modern road trip, barreling through his favorite movie genres.  This time he has picked on the Western -- but not the John Ford, Howard Hawks studio product of Hollywood's Golden Age, and not even the dark psychological films of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher.  It's the spaghetti westerns that emerged in the 1960s that's getting the Tarantino treatment here: films such as Sergio Leone's "Dollars trilogy," a lesser western all'italiana titled Django by director Sergio Corbucci, and the countless grindhouse schlock that came out as the genre started to exhaust itself by the mid 1970s.  These neo-westerns were rougher, earthier beasts, and Tarantino is a master at capturing the good, the bad and the very ugly stylistic stereotypes of the genre with ease: the hungry zoom lens racing to focus on an immense closeup of a craggy European actor playing an American desperado, the uneven sound synchronization of dialogue due to Italy's tradition of post-dubbing, and the memorable music by Ennio Morricone and countless lesser imitators who gave the spaghetti westerns their funky but memorable edge.

But that same edginess unfortunately seems to follow Tarantino right into the structure and theme of this film, which quickly puts away its western trappings and suddenly turns into a period blaxploitation flick.  We leave behind the dusty western towns and snowy vista landscapes, and suddenly we are in a Southern antebellum plantation where a young patrician named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his strongest slave specimens, one against the other, in a historical fictitious gladiatorial practice he calls "Mandingo fighting."  He brings to mind, of course, the film Mandingo, the Dino De Laurentiis 1975 stinker that's reportedly one of Tarantino's favorite films, and which has my favorite tagline of all time: "He is more than man, he is Mandingo."  They just don't write them like that anymore.

For the fiery finale, Django and Dr. Schultz attempt to rescue Broomhilda, who just happens to be one of the rebellious house slaves at Mr. Candie's plantation, aptly called Candie Land.  Here, Tarantino aims to recreate the massacre at the end of The Wild Bunch, a seminal western that is itself a hybrid of the old and the new. But Jamie Foxx lacks the gravitas of William Holden, drunk on violence, ripping Mexicans apart at the helm of a machine gun.  The results are less Sam Peckinpah and more John Wood, which is not a bad thing.

Before all of this, though, we meet Stephen, a cantankerous ancient house slave that has been keeping the status-quo at Candie Land for decades. Stephen is a truly perverse creation, and Samuel L. Jackson is in top form as he embodies this larger than life monster.  At times, Tarantino's dialogue in this film feels stilted, as if period and genre bind him to a set of rules he doesn't want to follow.  But when it comes to Mr. Jackson, the gloves are off, and the dialogue comes alive, even when half of what comes out of his mouth is contemporary ghetto street more worthy of an L.A. rapper than a house slave in the Old South.

The late American and spaghetti westerns had one thing in common: they were mostly about the end of an era.  They portrayed the end of the West where both lawman and outlaw were running out of dusty trails to roam as civilization was slowly creeping in.  Django Unchained like Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is about the beginning of something: the future of America as a land free of slavery.  Django Unchained may not be the perfect homage to the spaghetti western genre, but nevertheless it is an entertaining journey through Tarantino's movie-fueled imagination.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

Lincoln begins with a chaotic battle from the middle of the Civil War: brother against brother in hand-to hand butchery.  A scene that reminds us that war is hell, but justified when the cause is just.  Like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg is not afraid to dig deep into the viscera of combat, making the conflict between North and South comparable to the good fight in the first half of the twentieth century that saved democracy but killed so many young men on the beaches of Normandy.

Lincoln dramatizes the final years of the Civil War in which the president is trying to pass an amendment to the Constitution that would emancipate the slaves.  At the same time, he realizes that the South could surrender and come back to the table and stop the amendment before it can become law.  The president is torn between the fact that an early peace could save thousands of lives in the battlefield, and the ideological moral stance that slavery must end in the United States, and it must end as quickly as possible. Juggling all of these themes, Steven Spielberg has fashioned a mighty film, full of bold strokes, that never gets lost in its own weighty story. Clearly, one of his best works.

Daniel Day-Lewis gives a remarkable performance in the title role.  His interpretation of our sixteenth president is a personal achievement in his career, and one of the most beautifully crafted performances in the history of cinema.  He embodies the spirit of Lincoln without channeling Henry Fonda (Young Mr. Lincoln), Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois) or, God forbid, Benjamin Walker in this year's hilariously absurd Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  He does it largely by inventing a new voice for himself: a reedy homespun tenor that from now on we will always associate as the voice of Abraham Lincoln.  Also helping him give a great performance are an army of makeup artists (rarely does contemporary makeup succeed in aging an actor correctly.  This time they nailed it!), the great costumes of Joanna Johnston, and the memorable cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, who with his images manages to transport us back a century and a half. (I can only imagine what the film would have been like if it were shot in Black & White: Matthew Brady photographs and daguerreotypes come to life!)

The rest of the impressive cast includes Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, who plays the president's wife as if she had a thorn buried deep inside her heart.  David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, memorable as the puppet master of backroom politics, and Tommy Lee Jones absolutely brilliant as Senator Thaddeus Stevens: an old fashioned abolitionist Washington politico with a secret that has not managed to leak.

Tony Kushner deserves special praise.  The Pulitzer prize winning author of Angels in America has written a literate, intelligent screenplay that resonates with our current political crises, and reminds us that any successful democratic political system is filled with messy compromise.  It's "sausage-making," in the words of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

In mid November President Barack Obama hosted a screening of the film at the White House with the cast and crew of the film present.  It might not be a bad idea to follow the Executive Mansion showing with a secondary one in the halls of Congress.  It might just remind or teach a few of our present lawmakers and representatives what politics are really all about.

The Philarmonia Orchestra presents Wozzeck

The Philarmonia Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen visited New York City earlier this week and presented two performances at Avery Fischer Hall.  The first was Gustav Mahler's transcendent Ninth Symphony on Sunday, and the second was a semi-staged performance of Alban Berg's first opera Wozzeck a day later.  Monday's performance of this atonal seminal 20th century work was a memorably exciting experience headed by Simon Keenlyside in the title role (two days after finishing his run of The Tempest at the MET) and Angela Denoke as his wife Marie.  Even though this was billed as an opera in concert none of the soloists used a score, and each of the fifteen scenes that make up this work was acted out as if the work were being performed at the opera house.  What little room was left on the Avery Fischer stage (Berg's orchestration is huge) was used by the cast economically and effectively.  Not for a moment did the evening feel like a stiff concert performance.

Simon Keenlyside had much to do with this.  The moment he appeared on stage, in the first scene, following Peter Hoare's finely acted Captain, Mr. Keenlyside was immersed in his character: a Wozzeck full of ticks, with stooped shoulders, a resigned face and the nervous habit of using one foot to scratch the other.   One has to be totally heartless not to feel sorry for this poor soul.  These days Mr. Keenlyside might just be the best actor working on an operatic stage.

Mr. Salonen conducted the work with his usual attention to detail.  Being a composer himself whose work bares the stamp of modernism, he chose to highlight the atonal aspects of the score.  He whipped the Philarmonia Orchestra into a frenzy achieving very exciting near ear-splitting climaxes.  Particularly memorable -- as well as frightening -- was the D minor interlude that leads to the final scene of the opera.  The players of the Philarmonia, in particular the string section, seemed possessed, giving it their all, and producing a prodigious unforgettable sound.

It's always interesting to see how many people leave a performance of Wozzeck before the work has concluded.  Clearly, these people had no idea what they were getting themselves into.  For the uninitiated twelve tone music can be as alien as the sounds from the dark side of the moon.  However, listen carefully and repeatedly to the work and you will begin to hear the spirit of old Vienna.  Study the score and you will decipher how Berg fashioned a scene between Wozzeck and a quack doctor who is doing experiments on him from one of J.S. Bach's favorite musical forms: the passacaglia.  If you go and do your homework, Wozzeck is not as strange as it first might sound.

Thomas Adès's The Tempest at the MET

When The Tempest, Thomas Adès's opera based on Shakespeare's play of the same name, premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2004 it did so with the kind of success that recalled the 1945 triumph of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.  The critical and popular success of the work made it clear that British classical music was back on the map. Britten's work was hailed as the most important musical British work for the stage since Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas  and The Tempest has been hailed by today's critics as the greatest British opera since Britten.  It has gone on to have a very early active shelf life with a revival in London as well as productions in Strasbourg, Copenhagen, and Santa Fe.  This year the opera made its Metropolitan Opera debut with a new production staged by Robert Lapage.  Baritone Simon Keenlyside sang the role of Prospero, which he created at the London premiere.

In Lapage's grand production, Prospero has been banished from Milan to a remote island, and with the aid of magic, as well, I imagine, with a lot of elbow grease he has recreated the La Scala opera house in the middle of his remote exile.  This enchanted isle is also home to Ariel, a supernatural creature who, in the composer's hands, almost never sings below high C.  The result is an ethereal, if at time unnatural sound: a kind of Queen of the Night run amok who refuses to lower herself to dwelling within the staff.  The MET is lucky to have Audrey Luna singing this role: a coloratura soprano who ably manages to reach the stratospheric tessitura called for.  Caliban is the other non-human being living on Prospero's new kingdom, and by the logic that made Ariel's vocal line seem audible, at times, only to canines, you would think that the composer would make Caliban the lowest of the lowest basso profundo.  Instead, Adès writes the part for a stentorian tenor, and gives him the last words of the opera.  In the role of this monster, who ends up inheriting Prospero's island, Alan Oke is memorable and quite wonderful in the part.  It is Prospero, however, who casts the longest shadow in this work, and Simon Keenlyside will own this role for many years.  He sang with conviction and expressive beauty of tone.

Adès's music is complex and subtle, mostly tonal with some ravishing forays into the kind of atonality that does not send audiences screaming out to the lobby.  Still, the music very much smacks of the contemporary conservatory; meaning that in our current post-minimalist period the score creates an intellectual, lush sound scape reminiscent of the best work by the best post-post romantics. The storm that begins the work is a memorable symphonic prelude, clearly comparable with Verdi's Otello and Wagner's  Die Walküre, two other works that begin with a musical depiction of the powers of nature at their wildest.  In general, my biggest complaint with this work is the libretto by Meredith Oakes.  Instead of using Shakespeare's words, she adapts the narrative into a series of rhymed couplets.  Her choice of this poetic scheme gets tiresome quite fast and it ultimately makes for a substandard libretto.  For instance, a few years ago when I saw Phèdre at the National Theatre in London with Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper, Jean Racine's alexandrine play was translated into free verse, and it saved us from an evening of constant rhyme.  Its libretto robs The Tempest of a place among the truly great modern English language operas.  Say what you will about John Adams's Nixon in China, but if in the large scheme of things 1980s minimalism turns out to be only a blip in the history of music, Alice Goodman's amazing, poetic, revelatory libretto will be remembered and studied as an example of what a contemporary modern opera libretto should be like.

The fact that we saw The Tempest with Adès himself conducting his work continues a tradition at the MET of presenting an operatic work lead by its creator.  From Italo Montemezzi leading his L'Amore dei tre re in the 1920s to John Adams leading Nixon in China a few years ago, this is a fine creative tradition that the MET should continue.  

New York Film Festival: Flight

In Robert Zemeckis's excellent new film Flight, Denzel Washington portrays Captain Whip Whitaker, an airline pilot whose experienced skills at the helm of an airliner are only second to his ability to party hard the night before, and then sit in the pilot's seat, high as a kite on liquor and cocaine, and get himself ready to roll.  On a routine flight from Orlando to Atlanta, he steers his plane through a hellish storm and into clear skies in a way that only a zonked-out buckaroo could.  Near their destination, the aircraft inexplicably malfunctions and enters into an out of control tailspin. In a feat of unprecedented skill, and in one of the film's inspired images, Captain Whitaker succeeds in turning the jet upside down, thus averting a crash, and lands the plane in a patch of country field, thus saving himself and all but six of the souls on board. Although the media hails him as a hero, the NTSB has questions about the crash, and as an investigation begins Captain Whitaker's alcoholism and drug dependency surfaces as he confronts his private demons.  The title of Zemeckis's film refers to the plane trip as well as the examination of how the crash sends Captain Whitaker into a personal journey -- a flight that ultimately makes him discover his true grace.

Along the way, Kelly Reilly as a down-on-her-luck substance abuser enters Whip's crowded orbit.  Already there are John Goodman as Whip's whimsical rock-androll dealer, Don Cheadle as his defense lawyer, and Bruce Greenwood as Whip's best friend and fellow pilot.

The screenplay by John Gatins is excellent when it comes to going places we least expect.  This was a script that took the writer twelve years to complete, and after such a long gestation process it is surprising that it has turned out so good.

The entire film revolves around Denzel Washington's character, and the actor gives a truly superb performance, one that I suspect has been carefully crafted by Mr. Zemeckis with a Best Actor Oscar very much in mind. But awards aside, Mr. Washington is really impressive in this role, adding yet another memorable character to his long list of superb characterizations. 

New York Film Festival: Fellini-Satyricon

I've begun to dread the words "a brilliant new restoration," or "a brilliant new 35 millimeter print," when it comes as part of the presentation from Richard Peña, the outgoing head of the selection committee at the New York Film Festival.  Usually, the results are dreadful.  It happened a few years ago when with these usual accolades he introduced a dreadful print of Josef von Sternberg's Underworld, and last night was another disappointment as the N.Y. Film Festival chef himself announced another Peña special: a "brilliant new restoration" of the 1971 classic Fellini-Satyricon, Federico Fellini's imaginative, daring, surprising and exasperating adaption of the ancient Roman classic by Petronius.  I imagine that next to the crumbling negative from which the Italian restorers worked, this presentation is indeed brilliant.  But comparing it to other results that are being achieved around the world in an effort to save our film history, this restoration leaves a lot to be desired.

Overall, as with this year's 8K Lawrence of Arabia restoration, the film looked dark in many key places.  The first reel, in particular, that introduces the Encolpio, Ascilto, Gitone love triangle, and takes place at night, looked dreary, as did the scene with the clown Vernacchio.  In addition, very little restoration was done on the sound.  It would have been helpful if the restorers would have expanded the audio spectrum.  Instead, the film sounded monaural, with the voices sounding particularly flat.  Nino Rota's moonscape music, which is a mixture of modern and ancient sounds, suffers the most as a result of the inadequate soundtrack.

Petronius's book survives only in fragments, and Fellini's episodic approach, one of the director's trademarks, echoes this brilliantly.  Ultimately, the greatest aspect of this work is the director's uncanny ability to create an ancient world that never quite existed the way he shows it to us.

Lawrence of Arabia: New Blu-Ray Disc

I'm watching the UK release of the latest restoration of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia on Blu-Ray, and I have to report that I'm seeing the same surprising results as I saw last week at the New York Film Festival presentation. This restoration presents a reduced color spectrum, much more limited than the one I remember from the 1988 restoration and DVD release. This has to be the palest, most anemic restoration of Lawrence yet. The scene above, for example, struck me as needlessly monochromatic.  Although the film looks stunningly sharp and incredibly clean, the colors are very muted, and several of the night and dusk scenes look so dark that the viewer is unable to discern any facial features. I don't believe that this is what Lean and his cinematographer Freddie Young intended when the film premiered back in 1962.

The previous restoration was done with the participation and assistance of David Lean. Now that he is gone, something tells me that he would not be pleased with the results achieved here.   It's almost as if the colorist had decided that the film needs a more contemporary look.  Lawrence is anything but a contemporary film: it is a gigantic production the likes of which, proverbially, they don't make anymore, and it belongs to a group of epic films (Ben-Hur, El Cid, The Vikings) whose color spectrum was designed to dazzle and impress audiences.

I certainly hope that in a future release the color is corrected, taking the lead from the results achieved back in 1988.  Lawrence of Arabia is a great film, and it deserves better treatment.

New York Film Festival: Lawrence of Arabia

Last year the New York Film Festival presented a stunning restoration of 1959's Ben Hur.  Watching it on the screen for the second time in my life, it made me remember how impressed I was when I first saw it as an 11 year old on a re-release in the early 70s.  This year, the Festival presented the new 4K restoration of Lawrence of Arabia, and I'm afraid to report that I was not impressed.  Throughout the four hour run of the film scenes appeared to be dark, and the color somehow was not as I remembered it.  Of course, I'm basing myself on the 1988 restoration of the film which was a restoration hallmark, and to my eye visually faultless.  Robert A. Harris, who was responsible for that restoration, introduced this showing praising Grover Crisp, Sony's executive vice president of film restoration for not taking any short cuts on this project.

Harris said that the restoration presented in 1988 used a process called "wet-gate printing," which hides about 90 percent of the imperfections in the film. Harris went on to say that "When Grover started scanning this at 8K [resolution], he opened a Pandora's box and he's been dealing with that for over two years now. The film is scratched, it has nicks, it has tears. There is actually heat damage from the desert. He was able to bring in a software company to create a methodology to help with that."

After so much work on this digital restoration, the NY Film Festival showing might have just suffered from a projection problem.  I remember well the 50th anniversary showing of Gone with the Wind at Radio City Music Hall.  The entire film looked dark.  Therefore, the new Blue-Ray release of the film on November 13 will hopefully reveal the real results of the work that has been done on this classic film.

Below is a trailer that was made for this new restoration of Lawrence of Arabia.

New York Film Festival: Beyond the Hills

Beyond the Hills (După Dealuri), Christian Mungiu's outstanding new film dramatizes real life events that occurred less than a decade ago in a remote monastery in rural Romania. Alina (Cristina Flutur), a young girl who grew up in a loving, affectionate relationship in an orphanage with one of the novice nuns, comes to visit her friend in an effort to get her to leave the monastic life and go to live with her in Germany. The young novice, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), has found peace in her new life.  She has traded her love of Alina for the love of God, and is reticent to return to the real world.  Soon enough, this case of thwarted love turns ugly as Alina's temper explodes into a sacrilegious rage that turns her into an out of control violent jealous creature. The austere priest (Valeriu Andriuta) and the Mother Superior (Dana Tapalaga), known as Papa and Mama to the nuns, become convinced that the girl is possessed by the Evil One and, together with the rest of the nuns, they conduct an ill-fated exorcism with dire catastrophic results for everyone involved.

Shot on film, with a stunning crisp luminosity which must have taken a long time in post-production, by cinematographer Oleg Mutu, the movie is composed of long sequence shots that according to director Mungiu better shows the natural flow of time and reduces the director to an almost invisible entity. At the risk of making it sound as if this is a current auteur fad, this is the third film that I see at this year's festival which employs this technique.  The other two are Michael Haneke's Amour and Antonio Méndez Esparza's Aquí y Allá. Although Beyond the Hills runs 150 minutes, the carefully choreographed long sequences not only echo the orderly life of the monastery, but surprisingly also anchor the chaotic sequences that make up the exorcism.  Thus, the film flows along and actually gives the appearance to be shorter.  As the director commented before Sunday's showing: "This is a long film where a lot of things happen, not a long film where nothing happens." It is really eye-opening to discover, though, how the directorial decision to shoot long takes works perfectly in all the various dramatic situations of this film.

Ms. Flutur and Ms. Stratan who play Alina and Voichita respectively, and who are both newcomers to film, give impressive outstanding performances that are well deserved of the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize that they shared earlier this year.  I was especially taken by Ms. Stratan who is able to convey brilliantly in her scenes with Ms. Flutur a mixture of pious belief and deep personal doubt.  In the trailer below you can see a scene between these two fine performers.


Ultimately, the finest accolades must go to Mr. Mungiu who has crafted a deeply entertaining, and thought provoking film, and who has managed to avoid taking sides in this thorny issue.  As he explained in the question and answer period following the film, he does not blame the members of this religious community for wanting to help Alina through the use of Christian Orthodox dogma.  They at least did something, even if that something ended up being the wrong decision.  Instead, the director adds that the people who are the most guilty: are not shown; they are those who abandon children in an orphanage in the first place.  At Cannes, the director called this "the sin of indifference" and in his mind it is the main theme of his film.

For more comments by the director, in the video below you can watch the New York Film Festival press conference that Mr. Mungiu gave via Skype one week ago.

New York Film Festival: Amour

While Life of Pi takes pleasure in showing us the toll of the sea on a shipwrecked boy, Amour, the winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, allows us to explore the toll that life takes on us when we dare to love.  Michael Hanake's film is an austere and ascetic miniature, but the force of emotions displayed are nothing short than titanic.  This story of an elderly couple, whose wife suffers a stroke leaving the husband to take care of a partner who rapidly spirals into a miserable decline, is reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman.  In fact, it is hard while watching the film not to think of the director's great Cries and Whispers, a film that also deals with death and despair inhabiting the great interior of a country mansion.  Amour haunts a big Parisian apartment, filled with books, bric-a-brac, and a warm lifetime of living.  The great Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji lights this impressive set with a fading light that oftentimes seems to turn the apartment itself into a character.  The movie is shot with long takes, languidly taking their time, allowing the viewer to enter inside the couple's endgame.

In a stroke (absolutely no pun intended) of casting genius, playing the elderly couple Anne and Georges, two aging music teachers, are Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, the stars of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, the 1959 breakthrough film by Alain Resnais.  Their performances in this new film are nothing short of stunning, and the chemistry that they had back in the days of the fledgling French New Wave is readily visible here.  It is heartbreaking to experience the decline of Anne as portrayed by Ms. Riva.  The way she twists her face, seemingly sucking the very life out of it, together with her cries of pain and unintelligent attempts at speech, embodies a performance of Academy Award caliber.  Likewise, Mr. Trintignant is very impressive as her patient husband.  During the course of the film Anne calls him a "monster," but Georges is almost never given to hysterics during his wife's long ordeal, although, just underneath the surface, anyone can see that he is ready to explode with unspeakable violence.

Michael Haneke has crafted a film that reminds us that the way of all flesh is at times unbearable and unjust.  In his previous film The White Ribbon (2009), he dared to show the genesis of evil -- the beginning of Nazi ideology as seen from the point of view of a small northern German village.  Now, the Austrian director, working in French, attempts to come to terms with life and its ultimate end, a landscape perhaps more complex, even more mysterious, and arguably richer than that of the birth of political ideologies.  The success of Amour lies in the fact that Mr. Haneke does not hold back.  As with his previous film it is a work that is often hard to look at, but never strikes a false note.

New York Film Festival: Life of Pi

The 50th New York Film Festival began with Ang Lee's new film Life of Pi, based on the bestselling novel by Yann Martel.  The film, shot in 3D begins by showing scenes from a zoo that's owned by the main character's father. This title sequence has a childhood charm as the animals mug for the 3D camera.  Selected letters from the various names of the movie's titles swing freely, as if hanging off an invisible branch of an unseen tree.  Even before the film proper begins a sense of fantasy and make believe has been injected into the narrative, a subtle foreshadowing of the incredible story that the director has prepared for us.

Life of Pi, essentially a film about the art of storytelling, reveals its narrative like concentric circles.  The older Pi Patel, played by Irrfan Khan reveals to a writer, played by Rafe Spall, the chapters of his unusual life.  We learn that as a young Indian boy Pi's inquisitive mind and restless imagination lead him, as he grew up, to adopt Christianity and Islam together with the Hindu tradition into which he was born.  The ever inquisitive, Pi, whose name is short for piscine (he was named for a pool in Paris) also wants to manually feed the zoo's most dangerous animal: a Bengal tiger curiously named Richard Parker.

When Pi's father decides to close the zoo, sell the animals and move to Canada, the family packs their belongings and all their animals, and board a Japanese freighter.  During a tremendous storm the ship sinks, and the only survivors on a small lifeboat are Pi, a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and the Bengal tiger.  In the aftermath of the furious storm a bloody Darwinian struggle of the species occurs in the lifeboat leaving alive only the tiger and Pi to fight for mastery of the small vessel.  Soon enough Pi realizes that in order to avoid being eaten by the ferocious cat, he must learn to feed Richard Parker as well as himself.  As the story progresses, Pi also realizes that he must maintain the tiger alive if only to fend off the horror of the interminable loneliness of being stranded in the middle of the sea.  The two characters enter into a codependent relationship as their strengths begin to fail after two hundred days adrift. Eventually Pi is rescued on the coasts of Mexico, but the tiger is nowhere to be found.  When two officials of the Japanese Maritime Department question Pi as to why the ship sank they fail to believe Pi's story of his survival with the animals.  When pushed further, Pi offers a totally different account of the shipwreck and his rescue -- a realistic and brutal tale devoid of any of the magical-realist events that we have seen.

Late in the structure of the film, the narrative suddenly veers into this unexpected Rashomon territory.  Is the story we have seen a fantasy?  Is the new story that Pi tells the Japanese officials the real way that the events occurred?  How accurately can the older Pi remember events that happened so long ago?  Is he lying?  Is he telling the truth?  What is truth?

Even though this is the most interesting aspect of the entire narrative, it seems that Ang Lee wants to avoid the whole Rashomon comparison.  He does not dramatize the alternate story, deciding to stage it as a monologue for Suraj Sharma, the fine actor who plays the teenage Pi.  What takes one third of the novel to be revealed is compressed into mere minutes that are clumsily tagged on to the end of the film.  The result is that we are made to believe the magical story that we have seen, and like the two Japanese officials we reject the more realistic account of the events.  The magic of truth at 24 frames-per-second wins again. 

At the film's premiere last weekend director Ang Lee revealed that he is still tweaking the film, which currently runs 120 minutes.  It would be interesting to compare the film when it opens in November of this year to this work in progress that the New York Film Festival presented as its opening night selection.

New York Film Festival: The Dinosaur and the Baby

The Dinosaur and the Baby is a documentary film by André S. Labarthe from 1964 that paired the legendary Austrian film director Fritz Lang in conversation with the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard.  Lang was a revered idol in the pantheon of the "auteurs," ensconced there by Godard and his colleagues during their formative years when they were film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.  By 1963 Godard had already established himself as the true modernist of the "French New Wave," and had convinced Lang to play a mirror image of himself in his film Le Mépris. This documentary reunites the two directors in a discussion that ranges from camera placement to the use of improvisation.  Their conversation is interspersed with scenes from Godard's film as well as sequences from M, Lang's 1931 masterpiece about the manhunt for a child murderer. The film is being shown as part of the New York Film Festival.  The entire film is posted on YouTube, so if you are unable to attend the festival showing of this interesting documentary, you can watch it right here.

The Master: A New Film by Paul Thomas Anderson

The title of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film The Master, a thinly disguised examination of the career of L. Ron Hubbard, the author of Dianetics and creator of the Church of Scientology, might lead you to believe that the film is a biopic centered around one man.  Instead, its narrative revolves around the relationship between the Hubbard character, here called Lancaster Dodd, and Freddie Quell his wayward protégée. Dodd, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman is the rosy-cheeked guru of a new cult, and Joaquin Phoenix is a shell-shocked, scrawny World War II veteran whose chance encounter with Dodd while he is taking his formal portrait at a department store where he has landed a job after leaving the V.A. hospital leads to a relationship filled with tension, love, regret and pain for both. When they first meet, their picture session ends in a fight, and their last encounter in the film produces a tearful, angst-ridden version of the song "On a Slow Boat to China,” which Mr. Hoffman sings to Freddie with a sad grandeur that recalls Orson Welles at his imposing best.  It is a singular, unforgettable moment in the film that crystallizes the thwarted love between these two very different men. Dodd is an intellectual mountebank who seems to be convincing himself of his new creed the more he lectures to his converts about it. Freddie is a walking contradiction ruled by an uncontrollable id. At times he is grateful that Dodd has taken him under his wing, but he does not know how to become the perfect acolyte of this new religion. When someone doubts the word of the Master he is quick to let his fists fly and punish any doubter or unbeliever. The film is a brilliant study of the relationship between master and servant; and at times both characters cross the line to become their polar opposites before changing back to their primary archetypal roles.

In addition to the volcanic performances of the two leading men, Amy Adams shines in the role of Lancaster Dodd's ever-pregnant wife, Peggy.  Her performance is unforgettable for its simplicity.  While Hoffman and Phoenix spend the film re-writing the rules of Method acting, Ms. Adams creates a character as rooted as the Earth Mother figure that she portrays.  We remember her intensity but also her clean, non-mannered approach to the role.  A lesser actor would be erased when put side by side with Hoffman and Phoenix.  Ms. Adams is very much in the driver's seat in her scenes, and the result is that her performance is on the par with her male leads.

By now, Paul Thomas Anderson's style is well-known.  As America's true auteur, he creates films that pose questions that may not have answers.  Time after time, his films hide more than they reveal.  In his world there is a sizable unknown component at the heart of his stories that keeps us from getting close to his characters -- and that's exactly where Anderson wants us.  His scripts are often challenging collages that we are allowed to contemplate but not totally comprehend.  His affinity for Magic Realism and Surrealism is always given free rein.  His predilection for the American West, whether geographical, as a state of mind, or as an archetypal component of American cinema is ever present in his films.  In The Master, shot in gorgeous 70mm by the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr., it serves as a metaphor for the unattainable, as in a key scene where both Hoffman and Phoenix take turns riding a motorcycle in the desert at full speed out to an infinitesimal abstract point in space.

It is that point in space that Paul Thomas Anderson's films often want to reach, and in his best work he succeeds in taking us along for the ride even though we may not always reach our destination.