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Matthew Gurewitsch's Blog

Soul of Salzburg: A Milestone for Riccardo Muti

Riccardo Muti's concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic invariably stand out as red-letter dates on the calendar of the Salzburg Festival, so in a sense his epic performance of Sergei Prokofiev's film score for Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible on August 17 was merely business as usual. But as his 200th Salzburg appearance, the occasion called for more than bouquets, cheers, and the obligatory standing ovation. Sure enough, the festival brass trooped onstage en bloc to join the massed forces of the orchestra and the Chorus of the Vienna State Opera in the applause. The deluxe roster of soloists—the Russian opera singers Olga Borodina and Ildar Abdrazakov as well as the French superstar Gérard Depardieu, appropriately larger than life in declaiming the speeches of the ferocious hero—likewise joined the general adulation. And for a touch of pageantry, a banner scrolled down from the flies, inscribed with a text that began "Thank you, Riccardo." The "signatories" included not only the institutions represented by personnel on the stage but also every composer whose music he has conducted in Salzburg, from Haydn to Varèse and beyond.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sat, August 21, 2010 3:00 PM  |  Permalink

A Star Is Born: In the Wings with David Afkham, winner of the first Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award

His demeanor is unassuming, but his hands are Mephistophelean: long, gaunt, electric. His frame is lithe, like a dancer's, and the elasticity of his movements shows gracefully in the long Nehru coat he chose for his 11 a.m. debut concert at the Salzburg Festival yesterday. On the podium he seems far taller than he is.

David Afkham, 27, is the first winner of the purportedly noncompetitive Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award, open to applicants from 21 to 35 years of age. By the November 2010 deadline, no fewer than 81 rising maestros had been heard from, among them 16 women. Skeptical as I was and remain about the agenda and the selection process,there is no denying that this first time out the blue-ribbon jury has done an exemplary job.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sun, August 15, 2010 5:00 AM  |  Permalink

Deep Waters in Salzburg: First Impressions of Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos

Ideally, one would attend the world premiere of a demanding new opera in a state of clairvoyant attention, but acts of Gods take their toll—we are speaking of weather delays, and the domino effect of subsequent missed connections—and allowances must be made. At that, Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos, subtitled Scenes and Dithyrambs, and categorized by the composer as an "opera fantasy" may have fared better under suboptimal receptive conditions than a conventionally narrative work might have done. The material as gleaned from the libretto left plenty of room for bewilderment under the best of circumstances.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Tue, July 27, 2010 7:00 PM  |  Permalink

Fear of Flying: Amelia Takes Wing in Seattle

An American pilot is lost in action in Vietnam. Thirty years later his daughter, still unstrung with grief, is expecting her first child. Close to term, she dreams gloomy dreams of Icarus, the boy who perished because he flew too close to the sun. Overhead, unseen by the distraught mother-to-be, hovers an indomitable spirit coyly called the Flier, patently none other than the legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Our pilot's daughter—Earhart's namesake—is married to an engineer who develops top-secret aircraft, probably bombers.

Does this sound more like a piece of installation art than the blueprint for thrilling drama? Yes, I thought so. Daron Aric Hagen's studied, achingly sincere Amelia, commissioned by the Seattle Opera, is written two acts, each about one hour in length, each in three scenes. Act 1 is nonlinear with a vengeance. Locations, moments in time, and levels of reality collide in vintage Cubist fashion. Many good, decent people emote in a broad flow of rueful sentiment. Stoicism and compassion are the order of the day. In addition to the adult Amelia, we see her dewy-eyed childhood self, Young Amelia. Shortly before intermission, a flashback to her father's capture and interrogation at the hands of the North Vietnamese jolts events briefly to life. For the rest, the first act unfolds like a church service, in a single, solemn largo that inspires a dutiful attention, if little excitement.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Mon, May 24, 2010 10:45 AM  |  Permalink

Thar She Blows! The Dallas Opera Wins With Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick

You are watching a brand-new opera for the first time, in its first run, thoroughly taken by the piece, the performers, the production. And at the same time, you see, as through a mist, the outlines of possible future realizations by different artists, proceeding on other assumptions. How often does this happen?

In a word, never. Sad but true. In circumstances like these, one's first impression is apt to be one's last word. Not so with Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick, written to a libretto by Gene Scheer after the novel by Herman Melville, at the Dallas Opera in its inaugural season at the new Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Tue, May 18, 2010 11:00 AM  |  Permalink

One Hundred Ways of Listening to Poetry: On the Line with Glen Roven

Having conducted four presidential inaugurations, the Gala Millennium concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, evenings at the Hollywood Bowl and his own violin concerto at Carnegie Hall, the composer-lyricist-conductor-producer Glen Roven has finally come up with something a little less ephemeral: the three-CD album Poetic License: 100 Poems, 100 Performers. Most of the readers are actors, but not all. A handful are seriously famous, but not many. A few poets—Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost, Emily Dickinson, Shel Silverstein ("the poet laureate of kids verse," says Roven) are heard from more than once. Shakespeare is represented both by sonnets and verse from the plays. A very few of the selections are translations. Apart from a few fleeting piano interludes (by Roven), the only music is that of the spoken word.

A quixotic venture, and no mistake. Yet an early audience of unlikely listeners—the sound engineers—pronounced themselves swept away. Released on April 2 to coincide with National Poetry Month, the collection sold 25,000 downloads by May, as well as receiving airplay on some 150 jazz, classical, and arts stations.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Wed, May 12, 2010 11:15 AM  |  Permalink

Now You See It…: Tino Sehgal's Art of the Chance Encounter

Is it too late to weigh in with a post mortem on the recent doings of that marketing genius Tino Sehgal, who sells nothing concrete and calls it art? His "show" at the Manhattan mothership of Guggenheim Museum system closed March 10, but surely we have not seen the last of him. And at the risk of seeming both humorless and clueless, may I say that the checklist of "work" on view—two people necking at the entrance (Kiss) and a detail of conversationalists attaching themselves to visitors as they ascended Frank Lloyd Wright's grand helix (This Progress)—gives fresh meaning to the Emperor's new clothes. But enough already with the scare quotes. The price of admission was eighteen dollars.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sat, May 8, 2010 3:00 PM  |  Permalink

Big Bang, Big Crunch

Man wakes up physically transformed. Then what?

Kafka answers, in "The Metamorphosis," that his universe starts shrinking, then vanishes. (R.I.P., Gregor Samsa.) Gogol's, in "The Nose," is that it explodes, then settles back to normal. (Gesundheit, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyev!)

Shakespearean grandeur. Mozartean grace. Proustian memories. A Freudian slip. How come some culture heroes rate an adjective, while some do not? Really, there is no answer. Sometimes a proper adjective points to a quality that is pervasive, vague, and diffuse (Dickensian squalor), sometimes to a detail that is specific but hardly all-defining (Homeric epithets). Rarely, though, do opposing world views mirror each other so exactly. The Kafkaesque, the Gogolesque: two sides of a single coin. The grotesque.

By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Wed, April 28, 2010 12:30 AM  |  Permalink

Of Sondheim and A-flat: In the Wings with Elaine Stritch

I don't need a lot
Only what I got
Plus a tube of greasepaint
And a follow-spot!

National treasure, living legend, take your pick. Broadway babies beyond number have sung Stephen Sondheim's anthem of a stage-struck innocent, none with more grit and authority than the crusty Elaine Stritch. Naturally, not every line in the song still matches her personal circumstances. At! My tiny flat! There's just my cat! A bed and a chair! No, not really. At 85 (or is it 84? sources differ), the lady hangs her hat at the Carlyle, that landmark of timeless cosmopolitan privilege on upper Madison Avenue.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Fri, April 16, 2010 8:00 PM  |  Permalink

Fanfare for the Common (?) Man: In the Wings with Bill Heck, of The Orphans' Home Cycle

What a difference an apostrophe makes. The web page for the off-Broadway Signature Theatre Company's current Horton Foote marathon (nine plays condensed into three full-length helpings of drama requiring three separate admissions) gives the title alternately as The Orphan's Home Cycle and correctly as The Orphans' Home Cycle. The phrase originates with Marianne Moore's poem "In Distrust of Merits," which dates to 1944, as World War II was raging. "The world's an orphans' home," Moore writes in a moment of bleak epiphany, and there can be little doubt that despite his sense of humor and compassion, Foote, too, saw the orphaned state as a universal condition.

Still, there is one partly metaphorical orphan Foote cared about more than the others in his novelistic stage epic, and that is the impeccably dressed shopkeeper Horace Robedaux, patterned on his father. Horace's father dies young, a hopeless drunkard abandoned by a young wife who remarries with what some regard as unseemly haste. But although her new husband is smitten by Horace's petulant, self-deluding sister, there is no place in the new home for young Horace, who learns to fend for himself under sometimes Gothic circumstances.

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By Matthew Gurewitsch  |  Sun, March 14, 2010 12:43 PM  |  Permalink