NY Film Festival: About Time

It seems rare, and even out of place, for the New York Film Festival to present a romantic comedy like Richard Curtis's About Time. Since its inception, and especially in the last twenty-five years or so, the festival has been known for presenting an austere lineup of international films featuring mostly dramatic, serious works. Even when the festival presented Ed Wood in 1994, that film had a serious backbone, and it was, of course, referential to the world of cult cinema.

The new film by Mr. Curtis focuses on the kind of left-of-center, eccentric British family where the mother, played by Lindsay Duncan, has developed her sense of fashion according to the tastes of the Queen, and a simple minded uncle (Richard Cordery) is always dressed to the nines every day of the year. But when it comes to strange, the best part of the family is left to the father (Bill Nighy). He reveals to his son Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), when he reaches his twenty-first birthday, the family secret: that the men in the family have always been able to travel through time. They can't change history, but they are able to change what happens, and what has happened in their own life. And all of this without a TARDIS! All that's needed is a dark room, a tightening of the fists, and off they go to whatever part of their personal past they want to re-live. Needless to say, that famous British icon, the Time Lord from Gallifrey, is curiously never mentioned or alluded to.

When Tim finds out about his special power, he uses it to fix himself up with a girlfriend. When he does, he makes sure that he revisits certain scenes of his recent past often, especially when it comes to a first night of hot sex with Mary (Rachel McAdams) the American girl with whom he marries and raises a family. Their first date improves each time that Tim chooses to relive their time in bed.

Watching a scene again and again, with different outcomes, is cinematic. It puts us on the level of a Hitchcockian Rear Window voyeur watching rushes of an unfinished film, or re-watching a favorite movie where we always find something new each time we delve into it. In many ways, About Time is a bit like many of Mr. Curtis's previous films: a family dramedy filled with memorable characters forming a wider family. We follow their lives through the years, in scenes of celebration and sorrow. Somehow, we have seen it all before in his screenplay of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary. This is certainly not a criticism of the film, but an observation that his latest work is meta cinematic. and any resemblance to any of his previous films is actually not incidental. This might just be the most interesting part of the film for cinema buffs. On the other hand, if you just surrender to the story and the engaging performances by Mr. Nighy, Ms. McAdams, and especially Mr. Gleeson, whose ability with comic timing reminds us of the young Hugh Grant, you will be more than pleased by this film.

NY Film Festival: The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated film, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) tells the story of the formative years of fictional character Jiro Horikoshi, who develops the airplane that would become key to the Japanese war effort in World War II. In one of the film's many dreams, in which Horikoshi converses with his mentor, the Italian flying pioneer Giovanni Caproni, the Japanese engineer bewails the fact that "none of the planes ever came back." Indeed! Horikoshi's sleek, powerful invention was used by Imperial Japan during the last years of the war for the infamous Kamizake suicide attacks on Allied vessels in the Pacific.  The Italian aviation giant had, in a previous dream, reminded Horikoshi that "airplanes are beautiful dreams" and had warned him against their use in warfare. Caproni's warning together with Jiro's sad realization is one of the great, poignant moments in this amazing film.

In what might be his last anime (Mr. Miyazaki has announced that he is retiring from film), the director has hit a political vein in his country. He has publicly opposed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's current plan to rebuild his country's military, and when the film opens in the United States, it is certain to strike a vein in our collective view of the role Japan played in the war before its final defeat in 1945.

Japan churns out computer animated anime by the hundreds each year, but a film by Miyazaki has always been the product of traditional animation. Even though he used digital paint in Princess Mononoke (1997), the computer animated department of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio he founded in 1985, was dissolved in 2008. The art work in The Wind Rises, with its gentle, soft images and hand-drawn characters is like fine calligraphy, and represents another great milestone in the career of one of Japan's great filmmakers.

Watch the new Meistersinger from The Salzburg Festival

The charming and imaginative new Stefan Herheim production of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted by Daniele Gatti, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival last Friday, and which is coming in the future to the Metropolitan Opera is currently streaming on 3sat.com. If you have problem viewing it, change the Format (found below the image) to Mpg4/h264.

Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine

It is good news to see Woody Allen at the top of his game once again with his latest film Blue Jasmine. This weekend, it was very rewarding to see lines around the corner in Manhattan, and theaters filled with intelligent audiences. Not to see the latest summer blockbuster, where a non-human soars through the skies, cities get needlessly destroyed, and dialogue consists of expletives and monosyllabic words. These are audiences that remember Allen's golden age, which started in 1977 with the release of Annie Hall, and continued with a string of hits that included Manhattan and Broadway Danny Rose.

Blue Jasmine creates a summertime cinematic world where superheroes are superfluous, if not downright ridiculous. The film reminds us that the human heart has enough emotion and action, as well as the ability to commit violent and treacherous acts. Who needs a damaged alien with a tight-fitting suit, who can't stay still, and who doesn't shed a tear when thousands perish as buildings topple? Isn't it more cinematic to explore the damaged souls of real human beings?

Elitist cinema? You bet! As elitist as Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, or Ingmar Bergman, to name a few of the master filmmakers that Mr. Allen adores. Besides, there has always been a strong streak of elitism about Mr. Allen (and the audiences that flock to his films!) once he discovered the WASPs and Jews of the Upper East Side, Elaine's (the now closed legendary restaurant where New York's literati hung out, and where Woody always had table 8, close to William Styron at table 4), and once he moved from Brooklyn to his new home on Fifth Avenue. His films have always been a clear mirror image of his life, and Blue Jasmine finds him once again in his very familiar territory where he can dissect the problems of modern social class.

To enter into detail about this film is to rob the viewer of the element of discovery. Suffice it to disclose that in a screenplay that riffs on Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, a wondrous Cate Blanchett, bound for a Best Leading Actress nomination and Oscar for sure, plays Jasmine, a modern day Blanche DuBois, the former Park Avenue wife of Wall Street player Hal (Alec Baldwin) who, like Bernie Madoff, has gone to jail for one too many crooked deals. Like the Southern belle in Williams's drama, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco, broke, and carrying the only possessions she has left: expensive couture clothing inside her Louis Vuitton luggage set. She has gone to her sister's house to start all over again. Ginger (played by the amazing Sally Hawkins) is a single mom with two kids by her former husband (a surprisingly effective Andrew Dice Clay) and is now in a relationship with a Stanley Kowalski type (a memorable Bobby Cannavale). Jasmine, once accustomed to summering in the Hamptons, and who has now hit the skids immediately falls into conflict with the lower middle class characters she meets through her sister Ginger. Her only escape is to down xanax with vodka chasers, and her only hope is Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard) an up-and-coming yuppie she meets at a party who works in the State Department, and who has ambitions of entering California politics.

It is a wondrous film, beautifully written and directed, and shot on film by Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, the brilliant D.P. who provided the creepy images in the Spanish horror film The Others, and who previously worked with Mr. Allen on Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In this film, he shoots the flashback New York interior scenes of wealthy spaces with warm, radiant hues, while the vistas and indoors of San Francisco get a freer, more European approach.

Finally, the title of the film reminds us of the "blue piano" that Tennessee Williams mentions multiple times in the stage directions of his play. The film moves along to the tune of Mr. Allen's favorite jazz recordings. Classic performances by Lizzie Miles, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong are heard alongside contemporary jazz artists like Conal Fowkes.

Don't miss what will end up being one of the most important films of 2013.

A 10 minute Bayreuth "Boovation" for Frank Castorf and his Production Team

Here are only mere seconds of the 10 minute Bayreuth "standing boovation" that greeted Frank Castorf and his production team after the conclusion of Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, on Wednesday afternoon at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. According to published reports (and as you can see in the video) Castorf, his hands folded, refused to leave the stage and allow conductor Kirill Petrenko and the entire Bayreuth Orchestra to take their collective bow. Since Castorf and company were not leaving the stage, they opened the curtain behind them, revealing a sea of musicians carrying their instruments. This is a Bayreuth tradition, and the only way that an appreciative audience can applaud the orchestra. At Bayreuth the musicians and the conductor are out of sight, inside a pit, under the stage. When the members of the audience saw the musicians onstage they burst into applause. It was reported that Frank Castorf, like a leach, remained onstage taking in the ovation as if it was directed towards him.

Herheim's Meistersinger

With all the controversy going on in Bayreuth over Frank Castorf's bicentennial staging of The Ring of the Nibelung, the Salzburg Festival, which is going on at the moment, has taken a back seat. Now that Bayreuth has premiered the tetralogy in its totality, and Mr. Castorf has received the loudest and fiercest boos I have ever heard at the Green Hill (worse even than when the late Christoph Schlingensief faced the crowd during the run of his Parsifal) one of the most anticipated Salzburg events is due to premiere: Stefan Herheim's new production of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. You may remember that Bayreuth's current production of Parsifal was directed by Mr. Herheim back in 2008, and there is a lot of anticipation as to what he is going to do with Wagner's glorious comedy.

Well, I know! He is going to stage the entire opera inside of Hans Sach's cobbler shop. From the pictures published by Intermezzo, it seems as if the characters are Lilliput sized creatures that will be roaming around a set featuring gigantic sized objects, such as shoes.

The opening night, this Friday, will be broadcast with a short delay on Unitel Classica, beginning at 20.15 CET (7:15pm UK time).

This staging sounds like a fun and imaginative way to stage Wagner's work. It is perfect for the Salzburg Festival. However, I don't like that I'm hearing that the Metropolitan Opera is interested in this staging as well. Already, New York has inherited its current La Traviata staging from Salzburg. That's one production that should have never gone into repertory at a house like the MET! It was great as a summer vehicle for Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón back in 2005. But Salzburg has moved on, and the MET is now saddled with a vision of a meat-and-potatoes work that after a few seasons already looks tired. I fear the same will occur with this Meistersinger if it comes to New York. Salzburg summer productions should never become repertory productions at the MET, especially not when it comes to Meistersinger. The current MET production is a sumptuous Otto Schenk creation that is as revered as his Ring Cycle that was replaced recently by the infamous "Machine."

I can already hear the boos on opening night. If New York wanted a Herheim production, then they should have picked up his current Bayreuth staging of Parsifal. I don't think it would please everybody in New York either, but at least I find it more interesting than the current François Girard staging that premiered at the MET this past season.

Invasion of the Mini Wagners

As part of the Richard Wagner year that is being celebrated all over the world, Bayreuth has commissioned 500 statues of the composer, each measuring one meter in height, in a standing conductor's pose, in all kinds of wild, crazy colors. The statues have been placed around town as well as on the lawns of the Festspielhaus. They are the work of artist Ottmar Hörl, who in the past has also made similar installations, such as multiple mini statues of Karl Marx, and a more controversial one featuring garden gnomes giving a "Sieg Heil" Nazi salute.

The Wagner statues are under 24-hour guard, in case some devious tourist wants to take one home. At the end of the festival, it is likely that the statues will be up for sale, as has been the custom with this artist's work. Expect the statues to go for €300-700.

First picture of Bayreuth's New Ring

It's opening night at the Bayreuth Festival, and Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong will not be in attendance. That's because they have been placed on Mount Rushmore as part of the scenery for the new production of Richard Wagner's Siegfried, which will premiere on July 27 at the Festspielhaus. Under the direction of avant-garde director Frank Castorf, this new Ring of the Nibelung promises to be an epic production of greed, capitalism, and socialism during the 20th Century.

Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

The maximalism of Baz Luhrmann can easily put you off. He doesn't so much adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as he hits you over the head with the book. Thank goodness that it is not that big a novel, otherwise he'd knock us right out completely. In his hands this morality play of the Jazz Age leaves us breathless at times, as if he didn't trust that the source material can yield a worthy adaptation without including everything including the proverbial kitchen sink. The result is a very long, overblown film where the very personal story of three little rich people and one confused narrator oftentimes gets lost in the excessive glitz of a world that outdoes any of the scenes of debaucheries of Scott and Zelda, or the novel itself.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby with a smattering of a fading English accent that betrays his past. His accent sounds as mysterious as the man that he portrays. In his Long Island mansion, a Xanadu castle fit for three kings, he throws lavish weekend parties where the cream of society is entertained by anachronistic musical acts that may be grounded in the Charleston, but that ultimately turn into a modern hip-hop rave. Nobody is invited to these affairs, people just attend. All except his next door neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who receives a personal invitation, and who in the middle of the frenzy gets to meet the secretive host. They immediately strike a friendship that becomes the crux of this classic story. Of course, right across the bay from the Gatsby estate we have Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and her husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), who was Nick's classmate at Yale. These are the other members of this amorous rectangle, doomed to end in tragedy.

The director comes up with an entertaining film, but certainly not the definitive adaptation of this novel, a literary work that because of its internal narrative, and subtle plot might not be adaptable to the film medium, and if it is, certainly not by such a Cecil B. DeMille-style talent like Mr. Luhrmann. There is a silent film adaptation that is now lost, made just a few short years after the novel was published. Perhaps that film, released at the height of the Jazz Age, got it right.

What Mr. Luhrmann does get right is the visual look of the film. It is a stunningly beautiful creation. Photographed by Simon Duggan, the film has a great Technicolor warm look that easily puts you into the period. Likewise, the scenic design by Catherine Martin makes her Art Deco sets come to life. Come award time, I am sure that the visual production aspect of this film will be remembered. So far this year, it is the most visually impressive film I have seen.

Richard Wagner at 200

Today, May 22, we celebrate the birth of Richard Wagner.  The composer was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1813, 200 years ago today.  But how do we celebrate the birth of such an important person in history? And why does today not feel any different? It seems to me that audiences have not stopped celebrating him, his incredible life, and his amazing artistic legacy. It has been a celebration that has lasted for 200 years, and fortunately promises to continue for 200 more.

I read somewhere that Richard Wagner is the most discussed historical person after Jesus Christ. This might be so. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of books have been written about his life, his controversial views, and his love affairs. Of course, there are also his thirteen operas. More books have been written about them. From among all the music that he wrote, in a lifetime of composing, these are the works that placed him in the pantheon of the immortals; and out of these, normally only ten are performed. Not a very good record when we compare his output to that of the other composer with whom he shares the same year of birth -- Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian master was prodigious in his writing, often finishing a work in a matter of weeks during his early and middle periods. Wagner often took years to finish a project. The Ring of the Nibelung took more than twenty. It's hard to be a fast worker when you are modernizing and revolutionizing 19th century theater. Of Verdi's thirty completed operas, more than half are in the repertory of most opera houses. For their 2013-2014 season, the Metropolitan Opera will perform two works by Verdi (surprisingly few) and not a one by Wagner -- not surprising and understandable. It seems that no opera house can survive a season without mounting at least one work by Verdi, but Wagner is a little more problematic. His music dramas are a little more expensive to put on, and a little harder to cast. Perhaps this is why a performance of a Wagner work is such a special event. It takes a little extra effort to set it up and get through it. But, in return, what amazing things it gives you back.

I suppose that the best way to celebrate his work, his life, and his legacy is to continue celebrating him the way we have all these years. My wishes on this bicentennial are the following: May Bayreuth always continue to mount his works, and may all the other opera houses in the world follow suit. May the powers-that-be nurture the kind of voices needed to fill the great roles that he created. And may producers, and anyone responsible for Wagner productions around the world, always remember that his music and words are sacrosanct, and that they should be treated with respect.

Happy Birthday, Maestro! Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag!

Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie Hall

In the twilight of his years Maurizio Pollini continues to amaze with the aristocratic virtuosity and technical dexterity that has garnered him world-wide acclaim since he won the Chopin International Competition at the age of 18.  This afternoon at Carnegie Hall he performed some of the great treasures of piano literature with an all-Beethoven sonata program that included the "Pathétique" for starters and the "Appassionata" as a concluding piece. Rounding out the program, Mr. Pollini also played number 22 as well as number 23, the "Waldstein."

Mr. Pollini might show his age in his walking stride to his piano, but once he sits in front of his instrument he is a young man once again, in many ways an unassuming presence at the keyboard who tends to disappear inside the music he is playing. Perhaps this is why he is one of the greats.  A Maurizio Pollini recital is not about him, it's all about the music. He delved into the C minor "Pathétique" Op. 13, the earliest piece in the group, with clean attacks, superb musicianship and youthful exuberance. The well-known second movement Adagio cantabile floated on air at a tempo slightly faster than usual, and it concluded with a vigorous reading of the Rondo that whet the audience's appetite for the rest of the program to follow.

The "Waldstein" Op. 53, a piece composed between 1803 and 1804, ended the first part of the program.  The opening movement Allegro was exciting and crisp, the Adagio majestic and pensive, and the concluding Rondo movement with its Prestissimo finale caused some of the audience members to rise to their feet, while shouts of "bravo," the first of many more to come, began to be heard throughout the house.

The second part of the program began with a change. Mr. Pollini chose to play sonata number 22 Op. 54 instead of number 24 as listed on the program. This work, composed in 1804, is one of the seven bipartite works of the 32 sonatas that Beethoven wrote.  The first movement is a romantic minuet steeped in the classical tradition, and the second a superb allegro vivace. By making this change, the entire afternoon program was played chronologically in the order the pieces were composed thus giving us a rare glimpse at the musical development of the composer.

Mr. Pollini concluded the concert with a remarkable reading of the Opus 57 "Appassionata," one of the most difficult pieces in the entire piano repertory. Starting with its quiet, ominous theme, through its second movement Andante variations and concluding with a Presto coda that returns the piece to F minor, Mr. Pollini was on fire. Needless to say, the audience rose to its feet at the end in thunderous applause. He was brought back by the tremendous ovation, and played two encores, one of which was Beethoven's "Bagatelle" in B flat minor.

Mr. Pollini has been quoted as saying that "in music, the complexity makes the intensity," and in his special unassuming way he treated today's New York audience to an intense afternoon of wondrous music.

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.