Opera Chic

Can You Tell Me How to Get, How to Get to Lincoln Center?

Lincoln Center patrons, please stay calm. Those nappy, rainbow-colored puppets are not the hallucinatory vapors of a 72-hour Adderall/Red Bull bender. They're kindergarten eye candy, the cast of Sesame Street's "People in Your Neighborhood", tearing through Lincoln Center's backstage. Through April, PBS's beloved puppets will teach preschoolers all about NYC performance art -- hanging with NYCB ballerinas for excerpts of Swan Lake (teaser below), playing Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik with students from The Juilliard School/Alan Gilbert and singing clips from Rossini's Barbiere with mezzo Isabel Leonard.

Cooties in the LC!

Dude. OC will gladly take the commies, the pollution, the Dantean bureaucracy, and the lack of clothes dryers (i.e. "very crunchy jeans") any day over this. 

 

Lincoln Center Spotting!

Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil Blog posted images from a photoshoot which was shot around the slick streets of NYC for the upcoming 2010 edition of Fashion Night Out. Seven models converged in the middle of Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Opera House made the cut.

Lincoln Center to Become Even More ~Fabulous~

Fashion week in NYC is synonymous with ~The Tents~, those expansive, white temporary venues erected over NYC's midtown Bryant Park to hold the quick & dirty runway shows, Spring and Fall.

This year for NYC's Fall Fashion Week, the models, stylists, buyers, press, and fashion editors are moving uptown (and further west) as Fashion Week sponsor Mercedes-Benz has just announced that the September 9-16 events will be held at Lincoln Center. More specifically, Damrosch Park.  

Citing Lincoln Center's recent renovations, a rep called the new campus as "aesthetically spectacular as well as extremely accessible", which is good for attendees (an estimated 232K of them), and is able to meet the demands of the techno-savvy fashionistas. Even Diane Von Furstenberg and Anna Wintour attended the meeting to show their support.
 
But NYC's opera patrons don't have to worry, as timing is perfect: Fashion Week falls two weeks before the opening of the Lincoln Center's season heavy hitters (The Metropolitan, NYCO, NY Philharmonic, Carnegie, New York City Ballet, etc...) so you don't have to fret about finding room among the fashion crowds for pre-theater drinks at Bar Boulud or Jean-Georges.

 

Bernard Haitink & the LSO Make Mahler's Ninth Transcendent. Funny Things Went Down In Our Yamamoto Panties

Good things? They come in threes a lot -- The Oresteia, triple plays in baseball, three pairs of Dries Van Noten stilettos for the price of two during sale season in Antwerp, orgasms ("How do you call three orgasms?". "A good beginning" -- from the Elizabeth I - William Shakespeare correspondence: naughty, naughty Judi Dench).

Great trilogies? Godfather (Sofia and Mascagni @ Teatro Massimo and intergalactic cannoli make N. 3 worth your while), Indiana Jones, Mozart/DaPonte, the original Star Wars, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, Alexander Tcherepnin's three operas, and yeah, we'll throw in Il Trittico, nominally. And so Opera Chic peered into the ranks of great trilogies with Lincoln Center's Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra triptych, all of which OC attended this past week as part of their Symphonic Masters series. (Part I review here and Part II review here.)

Sunday afternoon's idyllic sunshine lured the uninitiated into Avery Fisher Hall, unaware that Haitink would gift us with one of the most brilliant and resonant performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony ever, since the day poor tired transfigurated Gustav first put pencil to paper up there in Toblach where the grass is green and the cows are mean ("In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night,..."). Cue Star Wars opening crawl: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." An old Jedi master and his light saber baton etched out a symphony worthy of restoring freedom to the galaxy. Now OC loves her Giulini Ninth almost as much as her Sinopoli (or as much as her Barbirolli, and Claudione Abbado will always take your hand, warming it up, gently), but Haitink's superseded anything Opera Chic has ever heard.

So it began two years before Mahler's own death, his final works in the gorgeous and equally unforgiving Dolomites -- where OC has vacationed many seasons herself among the placid cows chomping on chamomile flowers, the desolate and crumbling barns, the pristine waterfalls and deep-blue lakes, and the unbelievably fresh dairy where one can taste said cow-digested-chamomile -- written by that cranky, born-old, clumsy, introspective man who was such a schlump that he was sometimes mistaken for Alma's dad. Pounded-out by Mahler in four summer months of 1909 in a shack in those Dolomite mountains, manuscripts toiled over among such clarifying, fresh air and frigid nights, so crystalline and clean -- also churning out Das Lied von der Erde and the fragment of his Tenth those last three summers of his life. Opera Chic visited Toblach three times, to try to unlock the secret, to try and understand what happened up there, that turned a composer of great, uneven, nakedly sentimental talent into a genius of Beethoven-like stature with the Ninth and Das Lied Von Der Erde -- did he glimpse another world already, knowing he was about to take leave of this one? What turned the brash, if interesting, vulgarian who wrote the Titan into the pure spirit who penned the Ninth, soaring above our world? And yes Opera Chic really likes the Eighth, the obsessive, touching, creepily stalkerish, hypnotic work Lloyd Dobler would have written had he been a composer (Alma -- and the world -- his Ione Skye), but still. The Ninth, Das Lied, what's left of the Tenth. Compare them with the rest of his output and it's the difference between Derek Jeter and Melky Cabrera (and we like Melky).

The first public performance, as we know, came posthumously after Mahler's death from young assistant Bruno Walter (funny how your assistant, however talented, can get you less than, say Krazy Otto Klemperer or Big Willy Mengelberg), good ole Bruno (no umlaut) who also handled the world premiere of Das Lied von der Erde after Mahler's death in 1911 (a year later, the 9th). And how much do we love this quote from Almschi's biography of her great Gustl? So much we're going to share it again (since it's paraphrased and reworded in every single Mahler's 9th program notes in the world):

Mahler's achievement by this time was prodigious: the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, the three "Kindertotenlieder," all his later songs and the sketches for Das Lied von der Erde, the numeration of which he wished to dodge in his dread of a ninth Symphony, as neither Beethoven nor Bruckner had reached a tenth. Beethoven died after his Ninth Symphony and Bruckner before finishing his Ninth; hence it was a superstition of Mahler's that no great writer of symphonies got beyond his ninth. At first he wrote Das Lied von der Erde as the ninth, but then crossed the number out. When later he was writing his next Symphonyn which he called teh Ninth, he said to me: "Actually of course it's the Tenth, because Das Lied von der Erde was really the Ninth." Finally when he was composing the Tenth he said: "Now the danger is past." And yet he did not live to see the Ninth performed or to finish the Tenth.

Haitink himself glimpsed something exceedingly Mahler-like in his preparations, balancing the precision of Mahler's score with Zen concentration and clarity, and a deeply lyric and musical dialog that pervaded the entire score.

Andante started as a mellow, penitent, pensive meditation. Haitink's undying love of Mahler's Ninth was transparent as he caressed and shaped touching and stirring passages. Faint motifs were given as much space and air as they needed from the patient maestro, and as the melody built towards the thundering cymbals, the sound churned and stunned. A perfectly controlled chaos of sound. Imploring, vengeful, with moments of great meditation and reflection.

Im Tempo featured witty and joyous woodwinds, and tightly-woven themes. Haitink took his time to add weight and depth, but without the static, turgid rhythms that sometime drag down slower tempi. He perfected a delicate, light touch in the midst of such loneliness, solitude and pain.

Rondo Burleske featured a rousing snap of brass, big trombones amidst a gorgeous, sweeping crispness. Haitink was able to take such big Mahlerian themes of neediness and unrequited love and turn them into heaven-bound trifles, unmarked with the clingy demands or manipulation that, at times, insist upon the listener.

It's the Adagio, and sadness is laid bare. The richness of the strings gave way to insightful swelling and ebbing, a huge wall of sound turned into a force, and enchantment that took the listener on a journey. Deep and tender, completely controlled, and undeniably transcendent. Death has marked the score, but music is alive. In the Adagio, the greatest maestri explain their vision of -- well, everything, through Mahler's notes. Carlo Maria Giulini warmed your heart in those final moments, explaining calmly to you his faith in a better world beyond our own; Sergiu Celibidache, that mean Zen master, dared us to look deeply into Nothingness instead. Bernard Haitink, calm and unsmiling and frail and serene, illuminated for us, in that big room, simply, the Sublime.

And for this we can only be eternally grateful to the Dutch Master and the Englishmen in New York.

Haitink Holds it Down: The Second Lincoln Center Concert

 

Continuing the Dutch Master's London Symphony Orchestra triptych at Lincoln Center, Bernard Haitink went on to the second performance of the Symphonic Masters 3 series: Schubert's 8th Symphony and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

 

Friday night's audience boasted an audibly-noticeable contingent of Haitink fans, many of which called out "bravo" as the conductor took the stage -- the classical music version of soccer hooligans, and we were all better off for that.

Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the Eighth, was given from a Zen master who just smoked a Dutch Master and was blissing out between a few glasses of Sancerre. Mellowness marked the two movements with a rich, soft dynamic, and smoldering notes. Haitink expressed perfect control coupled with an effortless intensity. Allegro kept sadness at bay with powerful crescendi, never muscled or brash. Andante was deliberately slow, but boasted a breathlessness that allowed the orchestra room to breathe. All in all, an unexciting but highly musical reading from a luscious baton.

 

*~click to read more~*

Slow and Low that is the Tempo: Haitink and the LSO at Lincoln Center

 

Opera Chic wouldn't say that she delayed her return to Milan to catch great Dutch Master Bernard Haitink's Lincoln Center Mahler and Schubert concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, but if that's what it takes for a Milan-bound deferment, so be it. So Milan's gray skies and cashmere will have to wait, while OC lingers in NYC to take in Lincoln Center's Symphonic Masters 3 series, which Bernard Haitink has just inaugurated. In a series of three concerts, Haitink and the LSO tackle five works of Schubert & Mahler, culminating with Mahler's Ninth. For those outside of of the USA (and many European countries where Haitink doesn't tarry), the 80-year-old Dutch maestro created a bit of a frenzy among OC's Italian, symphony-loving friends who begged her to stay in NYC and witness Haitink do his thing.

The Dutch maestro holds court as Principal Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, rounding out a line-up of heavy hitters before him (Kubelik, Solti & Barenboim) and laying the groundwork for Riccardo Muti's tenure beginning for the 2010/11 season, the tasty filling between the Barenboim & Muti sandwich. His almost thirty years of experience as MD of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw adequately shaped his trademark spacious breaths, laden with relaxed paces and pensive reflection, all of which OC heard last night between the precise baton strokes of the maestro.

In all this Mahler Madness, let's not omit the Schubert Symphony No. 5 appetizer. It's a humble, restrained work, written more for Schubert's compendium than for a public venue, and scored without the tones of clarinets, trumpets, or timpani.

Allegro was an elegant, flexible Mozartian exercise that Haitink controlled with a legato-marked restraint, beat in an intimate and unhurried pace. Andante was more rigid, marked with delicate and sustained notes -- slow and thoughtful, a pastoral of reflection. The Menuetto was dramatic, but fell flat against the beauty of the prior movements. The final Allegro boasted a nice, polished snap that flourished mainly in the final measures. 

Mahler's Fourth was written while the composer was MD for the Vienna Court Opera -- and by the way, memo to Karajan haters out there, it was Herbie who, for all his human and musical shortcomings, insisted on performing operas in the oroginal language: before Herbie, even giants like Mahler conducted operas translated into German -- and the quaint city left its mark on the composition with a delicate beauty, quaint and unabashedly Viennese. Nor did it detract from the humble work (amazingly pragmatic for such exuberance) to be sketched on holiday in an Austrian spa, which aided in fleshing-out the blooming, idyllic passages. Completed in 1900, within his oeuvre of great symphonies, the fourth is relatively economic (stripped of trombones) and uses a smaller orchestra, where the language alludes directly to the Viennese sensibilities of Haydn and Schubert.

 

The Fourth breathes an atmosphere of well-being and relaxation wrapped under a blue sky, which Mahler explained as "divinely gay and deeply sad." It's overall leisure, with moments of sadness that seep into the landscape. From the first movement's spasm of sleigh bells, Haitink set his paces, calm and pastoral, but with an earthy weight. Accelerations in tempo gave birth to blossoms of color. Pensive and patient -- Haitink takes his sweet time, because you know he always has one trick up his sleeve to surprise you -- the second movement was equally languid and labored with gorgeous woodwinds hearkening rustic landscapes. The third movement in Haitink's wise reading was an experiment in sustainment, profound and serene -- very Beethovenian.

The stunning, E major coda gave way to the fourth movement's "Das himmlische Leben" (The Heavenly Life), sung by Swedish soprano Miah Persson. Blond & bubbly in a pink & lavender frothy princess gown -- every inch Sophie from her current appearance across the plaza in the MET's Rosenkavalier, even if Opera Chic loved her the most as the aggressive, brash, kicka$$ Susanna in Pappano's and McVicar's Nozze di Figaro, ROH, 2006 -- she sang with a joyful and enthusiastic freshness. A big brava to the soprano for gracing Mahler's 4th on her evening off from the MET stage.

Judged as lighter than the rest of Mahler's oeuvre of symphonic work, his Fourth Symphony is paradoxically complex: Haitink gave a noble, introspective reading of Mahler's work, a tribute to the traumatic life of the composer, marked with death and disappointment, ridicule and misunderstanding and appalling episodes of ejaculatio praecox (not exactly the stuff that Alma's dreams were made of), a Dutch master willing to delve deep into the scary pathos of Mahler. Haitink led the London Symphony Orchestra in a reliable, prudent, vision of Mahler, no one surprised, no one disappointed. But then, since Opera Chic is on the record here as being convinced that Mahler's Ninth and Das Lied Von Der Erde and what remains of the Tenth are so much superior to the rest of Mahler's works that they might as well have been written by someone else, Opera Chic is waiting for the rest of the Haitink world series -- and especially his Ninth and Das Lied.