William Kentridge Takes New York

William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour

Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)

October 23, 2015

Alban Berg’s Lulu

Metropolitan Opera

November 14, 2015

The professor is in. William Kentridge holds forth in Refuse the Hour
Photo Credit: BAM

William Kentridge is not only a monster of energy; he is an inexhaustible fount of ideas. Refuse the Hour, his experimental opera for spoken voice that was featured in this year’s Next Wave Festival at BAM, is so bursting with ideas that it was almost difficult to keep up with its highly conceptual barrage of visual inventiveness and playful intelligence. The dynamic production starred the artist himself reading a text that at times waxed poetic, at others told a story, other times preached, others still lectured, and featured dancers, singers, actors, mimes, an unconventionally orchestrated live band as well as a number of other Duchamp-inspired contraptions, including an automaton mechanized percussion section that dangled decoratively from the ceiling. Not to mention the ever-changing projections that were full of familiar Kentridge touches. 

Language and its vicissitudes take center stage.
Photo Credit: BAM

Onto three proscenium-sized screens were projected a visual collage of video, drawings, charcoal sketches and animations. The projections employed his signature charcoal sketches and animations predominantly drawn onto pages from a dictionary. And here the dictionary trope was very tightly thematically linked to the work as a whole. Many of the vignettes were about language. One particularly memorable vignette dramatized the concept of entropy through the enact of speech acts falling apart, disintegrating over time and then slowly recomposing themselves through the thought experiment of reversing time.

Lulu living in a supersaturated world.
Photo Credit: Ken Howard / Met

Kentridge does something similar in his production of Alban Berg’s Lulu, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Dressing her in a boxy canvas-white smock, she is quite literally a canvas onto which the men around her can project their desires for a good portion of the show. Like the words in the dictionary pages or in the entropy vignette in Refuse the Hour, her beauty is deconstructed, broken down into its constituent parts, quite literally represented by abstractions of her body parts. Only this time rather than playing exclusively with language, Kentridge takes up the challenging musical landscape that Lulu inhabits and seems to in part recast elements of her feminine charms into the symbols of musical notation. For example, the breast that she wears pinned onto his canvas-like smock like a tail pinned onto a donkey at a child’s birthday party is quite simply an inverted fermata sign borrowed from the musical lexicon.

Lulu deconstructed.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

And of course, Berg’s score is notoriously challenging, for the orchestra and singers as well as for the audience. There is nothing straightforward about the singspiel-esque vibe of the whole piece. Unlike Wozzeck, which eschews the limitations of his mentor Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique, Lulu is Berg’s great dodecaphonic masterpiece. The development of each of its characters as well as the sequence in which they appear and disappear in the score is all determined by charts organized around a predetermined sequence of twelve tones. Where Berg deconstructs his characters musically, Kentridge deconstructs them visually though the signs and symbols of the music, at least in certain details, like the abstraction of his heroine’s body parts.

Lulu's charms are irresistible.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

After seeing her in other video recordings of the opera, Marlis Petersen is on the top of her game as Lulu. In fact, I can hardly picture her being played by any of the other world class sopranos that I know. Petersen just has all the right moves. Her stage presence is magnetic, she embodies the innate Germanness of the character, she is playful, youthful, sexy, strong and yet vulnerable, out of control and riding the wave, controlling and yet acting impetuously, nonchalant and uncaring yet needy, desperate for affirmation, attention, affection, appreciation. However, I also can't help but thinking at almost every minute she is on stage that her talent isn't being somehow also at the same time wasted. She sang such a transcendent Susanna in last year’s gala production of Le nozze di Figaro that it seems like a shame not to have her embodying musically richer tapestries of sounds rather than all this cacophony.

Like a blank canvas, she's everything you want her to be.
Photo credit: Metropolitan Opera

Who is this Lulu? She is a broken girl. Only on the verge of womanhood. She is an object of desire. She is a blank canvas onto which men of all ages, walks of life, shapes, and sizes project their fantasies. She is a commodity. At one point, she is even traded like a stock on the stock market. Shares of an entity or publicly traded company called Jungenfrau (literally Youngwoman in English) are booming in the beginning of Act III, though the Kentridge production never plays it up the way other productions do. (Since she isn’t even on stage during the buying and selling of this hot property, the link between the shares and the physical person of Lulu is only left abstract.) She is a seductress and a murderess and a lover and a muse and an infatuation and a sex kitten. But is she really a femme fatale? Not particularly. When she finds herself making fatal decisions she hardly does so maliciously of her own volition.

Dr. Schön gets worked up.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Everything falls apart for her after she loses/murders the only man whom she really loves. Does that make it some kind of cautionary tale? Violence is not the solution. Like everything else she does she seems to pull the trigger even innocently. Not aware of the consequences of such a decisive decision. The same seems to happen with the way she toys with all the men in her life. Sex is virtually meaningless to her. But she thrives on all the attention and affection she gets from them, as though she is still an unformed person, not sure of herself, incapable of loving herself first. Towards the end Schilogen says that she is trying to make a living through love, but love is her life. Just minutes later, however, we see her desperately groping for sustained attention from a father looking or at least a man old enough to be her father. "Will you come back to see me again," she says in desperation. Without Dr. Schön she is truly missing the only father figure, lover, partner, spouse she ever really had. He was her everything. There was hardly a role he didn’t play for her. Since she never had anyone else to fill those roles, without him she is truly an empty vessel – the famous blank canvas onto which men project their desires freely. Lulu herself also demands to be painted on and projected upon. She can be anything they want because she is nothing without their desires.

An assassin is born.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

At the same time however Lulu is equally incapable of returning the affection of those who really do love her. The rejected lesbian countess then ponders suicide. She is in the throes of the disease she contracted on Lulu’s behalf and is hurt that Lulu won't ever love her back. “Her heart is cold as ice,” she says but in a hopeful turn abandons the plan to take her own life and instead resolves to make one last attempt, one last plea at her heart.

Lulu with her precious portraits.
Photo credit: Ken Howard 

In a stroke of signature Kentridge genius, after Jack the Ripper stabs both Lulu and the Countess he frantically searches for a rag to wipe the blood off his blade. When he finds nothing better, he picks up one of Lulu’s portraits and wipes her blood off on it like nothing more than a mere rag. This is the fate of all commodities in this consumerist world. Art like stocks like all human capital can be worth millions one moment, reduced to scrap paper the next.

And so perhaps it's a parable about the commodification of art in the first half of the twentieth century – an opera about commodification of women who is a musical abstraction in her own right, set to the music of atonality, which was conceived as a reaction to the traditional bourgeois commodification of music. Remember the opera opens with a circus master hawking admission to his spectacle starring a woman whom he has configured as the most horrific of serpents, a sight you just can't take your eyes off, a veritable box of Pandora.

Sad but true and Lulu amounts to little more than this: a beautiful flash in the pan, a scrap of paper to be taken up and then discarded.

And the world rages on.

– Lui & Lei

The Fall Opera Season beyond the Met

The new opera season will start soon and, while we are excited about the Met’s program (and bought tickets for 15 shows so far), the NYC’s opera scene goes way beyond it. Here’s an overview of the non-Met performances we’ll be looking forward to this fall:

Wilson meets Shakespeare meets Wainwright
Photo credit: Lesley Leslie-Spinks

BAM’s Next Wave Festival offers a collaboration between director Robert Wilson and composer Rufus Wainwright to transpose 25 Shakespeare Sonnets into music, set to “everything from medieval German Minnesang to cabaret rock”. While not strictly operatic, we enjoyed Wilson’s work in Einstein on the Beach and The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, so this one, too, may be an interesting experiment. Berliner Ensemble will perform. October 7-12 at BAM Opera House.

We’re always ready to discover a new Donizetti and are thankful to Amore Opera for showing his rarely performed opera semiseria La Zingara. Good old L'Elisir D’Amore is also a sure pleasure. Both operas are scheduled for dates in October TBA at the Connelly Theater.

Gioacchino Rossini

And speaking of non-mainstream bel canto, we’re in for a Rossini treat, with performances of L’Italiana in Algeri (by Utopia Opera) and Il Turco in Italia (by Juilliard). It will be interesting to catch these two in the same month as the 22-year-old Rossini composed Il Turco only a year after the successful premiere of L’Italiana. This second work stirred so much animosity that the 1814 Milan public accused the composer of cheating them, given the similarity between the two works. Let’s see what the NYC public thinks this November. Utopia Opera:  November 14-15 at the Lang Recital Hall (Hunter College) – Juilliard: November 19, 21 and 23 in Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

The first one of the two-fold Rossini bill this November

Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival proposes innovative and often experimental takes on traditional works. Of particular interest this year we flag two sacred music performances and one Romantic song cycle. Peter Sellars will stage Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion at the always-exciting Park Avenue Armory space. The performance will eliminate the separation between artist and audience, with “musicians and singers moving amongst each other.” Music by the Berliner Philharmoniker, with notable singers such as Eric Owens, Mark Padmore and Christian Gerhaher. October 7-8 at Park Avenue Armory.

Image credit: Park Avenue Armory

Another oratorio-ish White Light Festival experience will be How like an angel, where six acrobats will be soaring over the audience to the overtones of sacred song in a collaboration between Australian avant-garde circus troupe Circa and early-music choir I Fagiolini. Music will range from Renaissance motets, medieval monody, South African gospel, to contemporary music. Everything will be set in a church, of course. October 22-24 at the James Memorial Chapel, Union Theological Seminar.

Circus acrobats and sacred music
Photo credit: Chris Taylor

After being blown away by William Kentridge’s hypnotic animations for Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met, we cannot but run to get our tickets for the South African artist’s new work of mixed-media landscapes for Schubert’s Romantic song cycle Winterreise. Baritone Matthias Goerne (who got many accolades last year for his last minute Wozzeck) will perform. November 11 at Alice Tully Hall.

Schubert meets Kentridge
Photo credit: Lukas Beck

Regina Opera’s Rigoletto was one of our great discoveries this year. Who knew such great Verdian talent was hiding in a church theater in Sunset Park. They will be doing another Verdi (Un Ballo in Maschera) in November. We’ll be there, ready to weep. November 22-23 and 29-30 at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help School (OLPH) Auditorium.

And of course one cannot go wrong with the always wonderful Joyce Di Donato. The mezzo soprano will be in charge of a “Perspectives” series at Carnegie Hall and she’ll be uncovering rarely performed baroque works such as Handel’s Alcina with an opera in concert on October 26 and Vivaldi/Rossini/Hahn arias in a recital evocatively named “A journey through Venice” on November 4.

Diva Di Donato
Photo credit: Yankee Diva website

Image credit: One World Symphony

One World Symphony caught our eye with their pop culture flavoring of operatic recitals. Their marketing is catchy and cleverly aims at making classical themes universal and contemporary . An example of their “operasodes” (operatic episodes?) is “New Girls,” inspired by an apparently popular TV series - though we confess we are not familiar with it so perhaps we're not the targeted audience here. Regardless of the funky packaging, the show promises to deliver “some of opera’s most vivacious divas in their own life and love endeavors: feisty females like Adele (Die Fledermaus) or Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro), starlit scene stealers like Musetta (La Bohème), heart-melting heroines like Mimi (La Bohème) or Contessa (Figaro), or the ultimate new girl like The Merry Widow.” We’re all for sexing up opera to spread it to the wider younger crowds and we’ll be curious to see if the level of the performance will be up to the marketing one. October 26-27 at Holy Apostles (296 Ninth Avenue at West 28th Street, Manhattan).

We bid Natalie Dessay’s adieu to the operatic stage a year ago, and cannot be more excited that she’s apparently taking a break from her new jazz career to perform Le Concert d’Astrée, an all Handel program (including her dazzling Cleopatra from Giulio Cesare) at Alice Tully Hall. It’s a concert setting so probably no Bollywood dancing as in David McVicar’s production but still it should be grand. November 30 at Alice Tully Hall.

Our favorite Cleopatra
Photo credit: Marty Sohl / The Metropolitan Opera

- Lui & Lei

A Nose on the Run!

Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Met – October 8, 2013

All photo/image credits: Met

Lui: Originally written between 1835 and 1836, Nikolai Gogol's short story The Nose is an absurdist whodunit fantasia, part bureaucratic thriller, part social satire, set in the same St. Petersburg as Pushkin's 1833 Eugene Onegin. Scouring the streets of the imperial Russian capital in search of his missing nose, Gogol's noseless protagonist Kovalyov could very well have crossed paths with Pushkin's cast of aristocratic characters, if it weren't for their difference in class. For, Kovalyov is hyper-aware of the hierarchies of Petersburg society.

William Kentridge's signature 2010 Met production of Shostakovich's 1930 operatic adaptation moves the action of the story to the St. Petersburg of the Soviet futurists in the early twentieth century. His staging features a profusion of paroliberismo, animation and live action video projected onto mobile set pieces, scrims, screens and curtains. The stage at the Met is a whirling frenzy of activity for virtually all of the swift hour and forty-five minutes of the modernist composer's fleet-footed score.

Lei: The terrific music was definitely the main character for me. The Met orchestra sounded more alive and electrified than ever under Gergiev’s lead, rendering Shostakovich’s score a pure and super-kinetic delight. I was so taken with the orchestra that I would have been content just with the music and Kentridge’s dada-futurist animations. These projections worked very well with the musical tempo and served both as part of the set and as narrative tool. The sequences where the human-size nose goes out and about, engaging in all sort of activities (from running and ballet dancing to typing and horseback riding) were just hilarious and conveyed perfectly the absurdity of the plot.

Lui: I tend to feel the same way. I could watch Kentridge's imagination riff on this material for a long time. It is so incredibly pleasurable. Still, the man at the center of the show is collegiate assessor Kovalyov (but you can call him "Major"), who is dramatically aware that the mysterious and absurd loss of his nose will doom his much desired escalation of the social ladder. In his adventures with and without his olfactory organ, Kovalyov measures himself up to everyone he encounters. He constantly scrutinizes the buttons on their uniforms, their noses, even their whiskers. When it turns out that his nose is on the loose and has somehow sprouted legs of its own and become as big as a man with a higher title than his, Kovalyov is suddenly unsure of how to address his superior. Perplexed before his nose – now State Councilor! – the Major comically struggles to convince it to resize and go back to where it belongs, on Kovalyov's face.

Lei: This production chose to display the confrontation between Kovalyov and his Nose as an exchange between two men, with a wobbly shadow of a nose projected onto the wall behind the higher ranked character. Rather, this should have been a confrontation between a man and his absurd overgrown nose. To me, this directorial choice missed the point entirely, especially since the big papier-mâché nose was always so effective throughout the rest of the opera. This is after all one of the key moments in the story that brings Kovalyov's complex to the fore. In the context of his bureaucratic and social insecurities, if he's talking to his nose we want to see a big nose, not a little man who sounds gracious, all too soft spoken and elegant. Also, tenor Alexander Lewis was not a convincing Nose, since he sounded too delicately high-pitched to the point of almost coming across as melancholic. I found this rendering to be at complete odds with the Nose’s character – a snob and brisk State Councilor who does not want to have anything to do with the lower-ranked Kovalyov.

 

Lui: Once his nose slips through his clutches, our dutiful civil servant then humorously weighs his bureaucratic options for seeking assistance in his plight – whether to file an appeal with the Board of Discipline, where the Nose now works, to take an ad out in the local newspaper or turn to the police. We are immersed in the world of protocol and arcane hierarchies. It is a satire of the corrupt inefficiencies of the bureaucratic chain of command, and it's outrageously surreal.

Lei: The staging conveys very vividly the dwarfing of man by the bureaucratic and social machine. In all the interior scenes (such as the barber shop, Kovalyov's apartment and the newspaper office) the action takes place in shoebox-like sets that occupy only a very small portion of the stage. The rest of the space is filled with projections of magnified newspaper articles and fast clips bursting with of all sorts of social choral situations, from crowds marching to clerks typing and audiences watching phantom shows of their own, with a terrific set-within-the-set effect.

Lui: It's rare to find an opera that so fully represents the social sphere in all its dynamic, overlapping layers. Shostakovich's score is bristling with frenetic energy and Kentridge brought it all to life. He gives us the crowds in the square, in the cathedral, in the park, at the newspaper office and in the police headquarters. Even poor Kovalyov's modest apartment is seething with social life as it is where scenes unfold with everyone from his live-in lackey, to the police commissioner, to a doctor living in the building who bursts in to make a house call. There is no privacy for our poor civil servant.

Another scene that really worked for me was the duet between Kovalyov and the mother of his some time love interest. The Major blames her for the loss of his nose and accuses her of witchcraft. The mother disregards the absurdity of the nonsensical accusation and reiterates the offer of her daughter's hand in marriage, should he still be so inclined. They exchange correspondence and sing the contents of their respective letters, one superimposed directly onto the other. Rather than achieving communicative clarity, the effect is a confusing hodgepodge of two people talking at and over one another. It is a piece of virtuosic genius the solution the composer comes up with to represent the social economy of their epistolary-marital commerce. Rather than give us the direct courting of the love interest through a seductive aria or a lovey-dovey duet, Shostakovich gives us a pushy mediator and turns the pseudo-love story into yet another negotiation straight from the sphere of the social.

Lei: The opera has lot of Russian recitatif, which was often quite funny given the absurdity of the story and the wittiness of the libretto; also, the subtitles were projected onto the set, sometimes even as part of the animations, which made the business of following the Russian fun and easy. Even so, after a while all the talking got a bit tiresome and I just craved some melody.

When it came to real singing, baritone Paulo Szot did a good job as Major Kovalyov, sounding powerful enough and displaying the comic vein required of the role. I also liked the musicality of Sergey Skorokhodov as the Major’s servant Ivan, who provided a rare moment of palpable emotion when he cozied up with a balalaika singing a simple folk ditty, showing the musical eclecticism of the visionary breadth of this opera. Barbara Dever as Mme. Podtochina and Ying Fang as her daughter brought some (at least for me) much-needed female melody to the piece, it was a relief to hear some soprano trilling after the prevailing manly Russian declamations. I was not particularly impressed by the rest of the singers, who many times were just so dwarfed by the music that it was just hard to hear them.

Lui: As one of the most experimental stagings that I've seen at the Met, it made me nostalgic for the kinds of cutting-edge productions NYC Opera has brought is over the last couple of years. Seeing The Nose made more poignant the imminent loss of the institution that brought us, for example, that visionary Moses in Egypt last year that won't soon be forgotten. Along with Satyagraha, The Nose ranks up there with the most unique operatic spectacles that I have experienced at the Met.

Lei: I am not sure The Nose it’s my piece of operatic cake, however I enjoyed it as an entertaining absurd futurist piece. And I very much look forward to seeing more Kentridge-like productions around.