Review of an ASO concert

This past weekend, I attended another concert at the Allentown Symphony Orchestra. You can read another writer's review on the music blog of The Morning Call. This was a fascinating "lecture recital" style event, part music history lesson, part symphony concert. The conductor, Diane Wittry, prefaced each piece with a brief talk about its composition history, instrumentation, form, and notable musical moments. She did this for several reasons. First, as you can read in her interview, she is an active educator of her audience, young people, and the wider public. Second, because the audience for Classical music is aging, and music directors (and others) need to find new ways to make their concerts more exciting and interesting to young people. Third, because there were complicated stage changes for each piece, so Diane talked to help cover the time the stage crew needed to reset the instrumentation!

What I found most educational in the overall arrangement of this concert, as well as in Ms. Wittry's comments, was the visual presentation of the evolution of the orchestra. With the exception of Doug Oven's fanfare (see below), the pieces were presented in chronological order, so we got to watch the orchestra grow from just strings (and soloists) for the Bach piece, through the addition of brass, winds, and finally percussion. What a *dynamic* way to experience music history! There were other interesting, unconventional aspects to this concert that illustrate Ms. Wittry's innovative approach to programming classical music. The audience, for instance, clapped between many of the movements -- and why not? If we are moved by the music, why restrain our appreciative response?

The first piece was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, a lovely and profound work with a clear contrapuntal texture. The soloists, as for several other pieces on the program, were members of the orchestra. The piece got off to a rather rough start; the violist had to be much more vigorous in getting the ensemble off the ground than a conductor or more experienced soloist would. Indeed, the evening was something of a commentary on the difference between highly experienced soloists -- whose talent, training, and personalities enable them to dominate the stage, elucidate the piece, and share deep passions with the audience -- and ensemble members playing solos -- who usually get the right notes out, but often do little more, hampered as they are by shyness, odd mannerisms, and a diffidence not suited to front-and-center. So it was here: the performance was a little plodding, but the interaction among the soloists was lively and interesting. A quite tolerable performance on the whole.

Three of the six works on this program really stood out and lifted the concert above the mediocre. Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, with 2010 Schadt Competition Winner Jacqueline Choi as soloist, was truly amazing. This is a gorgeous piece that plays with a range of emotions across an almost Gothic gamut. And Ms. Choi is stunning. She stood out in sharp contrast to the amateur solos in the other pieces: she controlled the performance by face, gesture, head. Her playing was virtuosic, flashy, dramatic, and expressive. Her technique is marvelous -- and this is a piece to show off all the strengths of a cellist, or to expose any weaknesses. It exploits the instrument's range, timbres, and tones to their extremes, and Ms. Choi mastered them all, playing with our emotional response as surely as with her instrument.

After intermission, the program began again with a world premiere: A fanfare entitled "Endless Possibilities" by local composer Doug Ovens. This rich, lush, exciting piece sounded just like a sci-fi film score: I kept waiting for the scenes to start and the hero to enter. It was very vivid and even visual in nature, full of suspense and tension, suggesting dramatic episodes and death-defying adventures. As Doug mentioned in our interview, he likes to write for each instrument so that the players enjoy the lines he gives them, and he did that here. He used each instrument well and fully, sometimes employing musical cliches (the most common techniques, gestures, etc) for each. I really loved this piece and think it will be taken up by other orchestras and played frequently.

The next piece on the program is yet another example of Ms. Wittry's brave, creative programming: the gorgeous but under-performed "Swan of Tuonela" by Sibelius. This piece is a "tone poem," meaning that its particular beauty is not in virtuosity, not in story-telling, not even in narrative-style musical development, but in long, sustained, gorgeous shimmery layers of sound. This was very well played indeed! The orchestra held the sound at just the right level, sustained, deliberate, and softly intense. The solo instrument here is the mis-named English horn, which may just have the single most beautiful sound of all wind instruments: it is rich, mellow, mysterious, dark, and gorgeous: perfectly matched with the rest of this piece of musical fantasy. The soloist, Nancy Gaspari from the orchestra, played well, but again, did not have the stage presence or personal dynamism for really a memorable solo performance.

Now, the last two piece made a kind of set and also were yet another little music history lesson. First, there was a tiny little trio that may or may not be by Pergolesi -- and then Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, which is a set of variations on the "Pergolesi" tune. The trio was cute, and the Stravinsky was ambitious. While this piece is fun and varied, I thought it was a little too much at the end of such a widely diverse program. It seemed that the orchestra and audience were both losing energy and focus by this point in the evening, as if we had tried to cover too much ground in a short time. But if this is the case, it is a valuable and even "successful failure" -- because those who do not reach far will never fall short. And Ms. Wittry and her orchestra reach very far indeed.

My biggest concern is not with the fact that this concert was somewhat non-traditional -- I think that is brave and admirable -- but that the current climate requires conductors to try out various gimmicks just to attempt to bring in the audience. There is nothing wrong with clapping, talking, and otherwise engaging performers with audience between pieces and between movements, but it's unfortunate that it should be necessary. The music should speak for itself, and does to a culture that is educated and attentive enough to listen. It's too bad that Ms. Wittry has to turn somersaults to get people to pay attention, but as long as she has to, she's doing a great job of it.

The Four Gospels

Artist Makoto Fujimura has recently finished what may very well be the masterpiece of his lifetime: illuminations of the Four Gospels. This project was commissioned by Crossway Books in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Version Bible. Fujimura painted five large canvases (one for each gospel and one for the frontispiece), more than eighty illuminations of first-chapter letters, and more than one hundred and forty pages of illuminations.

This is a stunning project. The works of art are, of course, magnificent. They are also non-figurative, that is, abstract. It is revolutionary to combine abstract art with the Biblical text; it is also pretty much just revolutionary to illuminate the Bible at all in this century!

The original works are on tour; see if you can catch a show!

Fujimura is blogging about his thought process here.

You can purchase a copy of the book from Crossway or (less expensively) on amazon.

Interview with Alissa Wilkinson

This is the forty-second interview in the “Where are we now?” series. Please take a moment to peruse the INTRODUCTION AND INDEX to this series.

Notice some of the themes of integration, context, and cross-disciplinary work that are becoming common in this series.


Interview with Alissa Wilkinson
Via email
Feb 21, 2011




IA: It’s a little hard to know where to start asking you questions, because your work covers such a wealth of categories, and you have always been an amazingly interdisciplinary person (I might mention your two degrees, a B. S. in Information Technology and Communications from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then an M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University) You are (at least!) a teacher, writer, and editor. You’re also the only person I know who has ever said “zeitgeisty,” which alone qualifies you for a star-studded role in this interview series. Let’s start with your teaching, then we’ll move to writing, then we’ll talk about larger observations you have been able to make in your many spheres.

You now teach at The King’s College, which has been occupying space in the Empire State Building since 1999. This school is distinctive in its approach to core classes and to interdisciplinary majors—it seems like a perfect fit for you. What courses have you taught there? How do these classes differ from their counterparts in other schools? Do you think King’s unique vision is making a difference in academia, in the Christian subculture, and in the world at large? If so, how?


AW: Currently I teach in the college writing sequence, which begins with learning to write a coherent sentence (surprisingly lacking among today's high school graduates), then a variety of essays – personal, persuasive, expository, and analytical. In the second semester, we teach research writing. These courses are unusual in that they are extremely demanding (our first-year students write an essay each week in the first semester) and have a high standard of excellence; very few students earn an A, and earning a grade below C means repeating the course (earning a grade below C twice in the same course means dismissal from the college). We do that because nearly every class at King's is writing-intensive, so we're not doing a student any favors if we allow him or her to pass without basic competency in writing.

Each writing professor – there are five of us on the full-time faculty who teach writing at present – is given the freedom within the classroom to use the methods and subjects we're interested in to teach the class. So my research writing students right now are also learning about and writing about film. It's fun for me and them. I'll also be teaching classes on cultural criticism and the humanities in the future.

King's is unique among Christian colleges in many ways, so I'll just mention two. First, its curriculum is extremely rigorous, with an expansive core curriculum in politics, philosophy, and economics for students in every major. The students are reading and discussing (and arguing about) the foundational documents of our civilization very early in their education, supplemented by instruction in writing, formal logic, and other subjects that help them learn to think well. I find that they quickly gain the ability to reason and think for themselves – which I believe is part of a good education.

Second, King's is situated in the Empire State Building, which means the students are able to take advantage of all the learning opportunities and cultural experiences available in New York City. This is the best sort of college town, for those who can learn to navigate it, and they will most certainly not be isolated. They're therefore shaped by the city and by their education to be thinkers.



IA: You are also teaching "History of Christianity in the Visual Arts" at New York Center for Art & Media Studies. How far does that course go—i.e., does it include what is going on in the arts right now? Can you give us the tiniest snapshot of the history of Christianity in the visual arts in the last decade or two?


AW: The course focuses particularly on how Christian theology shaped and continues to shape the arts, so the content might surprise some people. The very, very brief arc of the narrative is this: from Christendom onward, Christianity (in various permutations) was the understood fabric of life. It was difficult to imagine not being “a Christian” - whatever that meant. Belief was default. Modernity eradicated that and now it's not impossible to imagine having all sorts of ways to view the world. But because art is shaped by its cultural context, it was shaped by ideas from Christian theology. And because artists are always working under the weight of history and tradition, today's artists cannot help but also be shaped by the traditions that were shaped by Christianity.

So the first half of the course focuses on a very, very broad look at the arts from the early church to today's secular age; the second half deals with how themes from art in the past pop up today. So, for instance, we'll talk about the theology of the icon, and then we'll talk about Bill Viola.

In the last decade or so, I think the Western Protestant church has been coming to terms with art and artists in its own way; other denominations have already had the theology in place to be comfortable with art.



IA: Now, you are also a writer, and your writing comments on contemporary culture through a variety of topics (Tara Donovan at the Met Museum, plays on Broadway, music at Southpaw, MOBIA, American history, NYC apartment kitchens, postmodernism, tiny magazines, politics…), but what they all seem to have in common is that you are open-eyed in the realms of contemporary American culture. What is our zeitgeist?



AW: People tend to be down on postmodernism, whatever that is – I tend to be fairly positive about what postmodernity has done for culture. A generation of intentional exclusion of religion from the public square (in its various forms) has left a vacuum, I think – not a wall. So the pluralism postmodernity makes possible coupled with that vacuum means that artists and culture-makers of various sorts have the opportunity to re-enter the public square, provided they do it with a spirit of humility and the desire to seek the common good, not as a way to “get a voice” or “make a place” for themselves. When people of faith are hoping to say something useful in their various disciplines, it will serve them well to think more of how the religious sense will benefit their discipline than of trying to “be heard.” Love must motivate.

In a broader sense, I think there's a genuine love of play in culture today. Tara Donovan's a good example; her work is obviously serious art with something to say to or about culture (or she wouldn't be in the Met), but it's also just genuinely fun. The sense of wonder is back.



IA: What ‘schools’ or ‘movements’ can you identify in contemporary literature, visual arts, theater, or film?



AW: I'm not an expert here. But there is one thing that strikes me in particular: the love of storytelling that's erupting everywhere – personal stories, especially. I'm thinking here of NPR's shows such as This American Life and The Moth, that bring the first-person perspective back into journalism and let us be entertained, enraptured, and delighted by non-professional storytellers. First-person narrative has also snuck back into pockets of mainstream journalism. We want to be reminded that people are behind stories.

I think this may go back once again to the sense of play. It's also just a reminder that human beings love stories. They love telling them, and they love hearing them. And though films and books and music and theatre all tell stores, there's something really fun about listening to someone tell their own story. That's why stand-up comedy continues to endure despite the relatively high rate of unfunny comedians. We just love rooting for someone standing on stage telling their own stories.

It's also a way of reminding ourselves – as machines take over more and more (I'm looking at you, Watson) – that we as humans are unique among beings, because things happen to us that we turn into narratives. Memoirs help us remember this as well, which may help explain why they've become so popular.

This also helps account for the re-emergence of radio as an art form. It's going through a real renaissance. I hope it continues.


IA: How do you think the arts (your own or others’) are responding to present and potential world-movements, such as postmodernism, the looming “post-human” phase, and the possible artistic effects of the Eastward orientation of economics and Christianity? (readers: Alissa has an written important article on this topic entitled: “As Far as Postmodernism Goes: Navigating Postmodern Theory”).


AW: Artists are always very good at responding to, and often anticipating, world movements. As I mentioned above, I think the turn to story is evidence of this, and something we see in many art forms.

That said, we have to be reminded that we're human in ways other than hearing and appreciating others' stories (or even identifying with them). Though I am by no means an expert on this, I know that some philosophers like Heidegger postulate that what makes us human is the intentionality of our consciousness – that everything we do is directed toward something in the world, and that our selves interacts with that thing. Being able to recognize and ponder this fact is what makes us human.

And so I think it's important for us to also continue to create and interact with art that demands that we, the viewers, put something of our own selves, our own stories, into it in order to form a full object. Plenty of seemingly esoteric or standoffish contemporary art demands this of us. People shy away from looking at this sort of work because it requires an investment of time and mental energy to even understand. But good art rewards us richly for that investment.

I'm quite hopeful about the future of culture-making and the arts. I don't know if we're on the cusp of something new, or if we're seeing the fulfillment of some older idea, but I see much to celebrate and enjoy in art of all kinds these days. And if we can learn to take delight in it, I think we're learning how to interact with the built stuff of the world in ways that honor our Creator – who, after all, made us, made our story, and then didn't just walk away, but continued to invest Himself into us, entering our time and going so far as to literally join His story with ours.

Art in the White House

My newest bi-monthly piece in Curator magazine is available here. I would love your thoughts!

Quick little recommendation

Here is Kevin Sprague giving a fascinating talk about Creativity as a Muscle. I highly recommend it!

Five-Minute Begbie

Here's another "five-minute book review"; I have piles of books I'm supposed to review on this blog, but very little time in which to do it. So, I'll just write my first thoughts about the book really fast now and then and share them with you. I’m especially planning to read and review several of the staple works on the Arts & Faith, and then maybe at some point a few of the many books that are sent me in my capacity as Book Review Editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal. I’ll plan on reading and reviewing Andy Crouch’s Culture Making next.

Enjoy!

“Five-minute” review

Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts edited by Jeremy Begbie


I must say, I was a little bit disappointed with this book. It is brilliant, but maybe a bit too much so. It was hard to really get anything out of it that I could hang on to, think about, and (especially) apply. It was, honestly, a little over my head. I expected amazing, world-rocking, paradigm-shifting essays like Dr. Begbie’s talk at Biblical Theological Seminary last year. Well, I didn’t get any of that until the very last essay in the book—and lo and behold! –it’s the text of that very same talk. So just that one essay is worth the price of the book, and then there’s also the excellent introduction, and then there’s the concept as a whole, which is fantastic.

The concept is pretty well encapsulated in the title. The original idea is to see what the various art form can teach us about the doctrine of the Word become flesh. That’s pretty awesome, right there. And the book is set up with the maximum interest and scope for fabulous work: each chapter is Through… one of the art forms, with an explanatory subtitle. So we have (just a sampling) “Through Literature: Christ and the Redemption of Language” by Malcom Guite, “Through Dance: Fully Human, Fully Alive” by Sara B. Savage, as well as through poetry, icons, sculpture, popular music, and then Begbie’s own chapter on music.

I think one problem is that only Begbie himself really gets what this book was supposed to be all about. Only he has the wide enough vision, deep enough theology, and professional enough expertise in his field (he’s a concert pianist) to really know what he’s talking about. And he’s a top-notch communicator. The others had one or two of those qualifications, but lacked the full arsenal. Some lacked the ability to make their ideas clear and memorable. Some are not practitioners of the art they were discussing. Some just had wacky perspectives and used bizarre examples (especially in the poetry and sculpture essays).

Also, the volume is intentionally wide-ranging theologically. The authors represent the gamut of Christianity: Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and a few flavors of Protestant. However, this left the book feeling a little loose around the seams. There are different denominations because (among other reasons, many of which are historical rather than religious) we take our doctrines seriously; we have some sharp differences, and we hold our positions tightly. Putting them all together in a book on what may very well be the most important doctrine of Christianity—the incarnation—is bound (pun intended) to sacrifice either unity (as a book) for truth (of doctrine) or truth for unity. Or both. I think there’s a little of each.

However, let me reiterate that Dr. Begbie’s essay on music is more than worth the price of the book. I am thrilled to have the text of that fantastic presentation. And I think that there really is a whole lot more wealth for me to glean from the rest of the essays, but that they are just dense enough, and their concepts foreign enough to me, that I will have to read the book several times in order to absorb them. But for now, I think I’ll move on to Andy Crouch. More later.

Review of the ASO's Carmen

[addendum on 19 April 2011: I attended a meeting of the Lehigh Valley Arts Council Last week (report to follow), and I met several artsy people there, including the photographer Marco Calderon. It turns out that he was commissioned to take pictures of ASO's Carmen! So here are some pictures on his website and here is a lovely slideshow of his photos on vimeo.]






This past Sunday I had a fantastic time at Allentown Symphony Hall, where I got to see and hear Larry Lipkis’s fanfare “Maestranza,” and an abbreviated Carmen. My seat was dreadful: right behind the projector in a tiny, horrifically steep balcony that’s basically stapled to the top rear corner of the building where the ceiling meets the back wall, approximately a mile higher than and away from the stage. But that hardly mattered, because the acoustics (I thought) were great, and the concert was enhanced by a multi-media, multi-planar visual experience. More on that in a moment.

“Maestranza” by Larry Lipkis

Indeed, for the fanfare my seat added some interest, because I was located up behind the brass players (see my interview with Lipkis for an explanation of the spatial arrangement of his fanfare). This did spoil the ring effect for me (I was outside the ring, and the piece was really designed to have the audience inside it), but I could still follow the waves and arches worked into the piece. The piece was framed by nice opening and closing percussion work that set up the rhythmic interest and lively, celebratory mood of the piece consistent with its function as a fanfare. I thought there was good rhythmic consistency throughout the piece, in spite of what Lipkis told me about his propensity for shifting in and out of odd meters. The harmonic language was mostly straightforward tonality, with a few crunchier moments of interesting dissonance. There was nice formal structure, although I can’t reproduce it here exactly, having heard the piece only once (well, twice, if you count the time I heard it played by MIDI). The “arches” in the harp were lovely. Altogether, it was a spirited, enjoyable piece. The performance was almost spoiled by one trumpeter, who nearly blew it (well, did blow it, if you know what I mean!) by shrieking his way through the wrong notes up to the right ones just at the dramatic climax. That was too bad, but the piece was very nice and worked well as the start of the concert and as a prelude to Carmen, which was just what it was supposed to do.


Carmen

This was a semi-staged, abridged version (I believe conductor and music director Diane Wittry made the abridgement herself) with a narrator (I don’t know if Diane also wrote the narration?), chorus, and dancers. The three soloists—Cristina Nassif (Carmen), Viktor Antipenko (Don José), and Eric Dubin (Escamillo)—were superb. I really thought they were, all three, just top-notch young singers. They were also excellent actors who used the stage and their physical presence to full advantage. And if I could tell this, sitting glued to the ceiling as I was, it must have been really great! Nassif has a rather rough mezzo, or maybe the roughness was somewhat assumed for the role, but her voice is very powerful and dramatic. She’s a great actress, too, making everybody on stage and off fall in love with her, and breaking all our hearts with “Là-bas, là-bas dans la montagne.” I remember that song as one of the highlights of my sister Nadine’s performance as Carmen; when she sang that song, she gave my huge shivers of Sehnsucht! Nassif didn’t exactly do that; but she did make me weep, at least intside. She is also extraordinarily beautiful!
I loved both the Don José and the Escamillo; Eric Dubin’s voice especially seemed extremely fluid, mellow, and powerful, all at once. And Viktor Antipenko handled all those killer arias gorgeously across their range, through their sustained notes, and with their emotional fervor.

One of my favorite moments was Escamillo and José’s fight duet. I had never heard it before, since all the versions I’ve ever seen or heard were also abridgements of various kinds, and left it out. How they could leave out that gorgeous song is beyond me. I love tenor-baritone duets anyway, and the one in Bizet’s Pearl Fishers is one of my favorites. This one is stunning, and Dubin and Antipenko sang it beautifully. It was one of the weaker moments in the blocking (Don José ran off stage in the opposite direction from Escamillo just after they had been fighting for their lives, which made no sense), but the beauty of the music helped me to get over that.

The narration was useful to help guide newcomers in the audience through the plot, since so much was left out, but was written in an entirely different tone from the text of the opera, so it didn’t blend. Because this was abridged, it was almost just a chain of arias and duets, one after the other, in a heart-wrenchingly beautiful chain of melodies. I think it was the perfect introduction to opera for any newbies in the crowd. A bunch of teenagers sitting behind me, talking about how this was their first opera, seemed to be amazed and overpowered by it, in the best ways. There were a few moments when the abridgement didn’t quite seem to work; when moments in the story didn’t make sense due to what had been skipped. For instance, José does not flee with Carmen at the end of “Non, tu ne m'aimes pas,” but returns to his barracks. So then his talk of “our past” later doesn’t make any sense, since they haven’t had any past. And I wasn’t sure if there were cuts taken internally in some of the orchestral parts? Micaela was left out entirely, as was (so sad!) the whole card-reading scene. This is another of my strongest memories from Nadine’s performance: she played it with extreme depth and pathos so that we understood Carmen and didn’t see her as just a two-dimensional seductress. Instead, we saw into her heart and into her past, recognizing the pain that made her into what she was: a wild country creature trapped in a city and in a confining political situation, using her body, and using men, to try to get out. In the card song, “En vain pour éviter les réponses amères,” we see that she has given up hope but has not given up longing. At least, that’s what Nadine put into it! I wonder what Cristina Nassif would have made of it—not that I would have been able to tell from where I was sitting.

Now, this was a semi-staged version, and so was Nadine’s, and I realize I’ve never seen it fully staged! So I don’t have a fully-staged version to compare to it, which is probably fine. I love the staging. It was really powerful. It did a lot with a little: Carmen peeling an orange while singing the “Habanera”; Don José tying her up with a long rope, then being reeled in along the rope himself during the seguidilla; good use of chairs, including Escamillo demonstrating the bull’s ferocity with the legs of a chair; and some cute if amateurish dancing by members of the Ballet Guild of the Lehigh Valley. Altogether, it was an engaging performance.

Finally, there was some interesting use of visual media. There was an enormous screen behind the orchestra on which images were projected throughout the show. They were in black and white and were minimal: a picture of a tree, the clouds, a castle, the bullring, festive lights in Lillas Pastia's, a gloomy lantern in the prison, etc. They were intended to serve instead of sets, to give a sense of time and place. They worked for provide that, but we are so used to colored, moving images that they seemed quaintly old-fashioned. At least they were not riveting our attention away from the stage action, which I suppose was the point. I think, then, that the visuals worked well together with the action and the music. This whole arrangement made for a difficult set-up for the musicians, however; the orchestra was on a slightly higher stage behind the action, which meant Ms. Wittry had her back to the singers at all times. I did not notice any musical discrepancies due to this, however, so I guess it worked! Overall, a remarkably strong performance of Carmen from a local symphony!


You can read the Morning Call’s review here.