Saturday Matinee

I finally got around to watching my most recent precious acquisition, a copy of the recent Live from Lincoln Center broadcast Mozart Dances, which unfortunately was not broadcast in Southern California. Jolene reviewed the PBS broadcast here, and we both have similar thoughts so I’ll try not to be too redundant.

I was lucky enough to have experienced the World Premiere of this piece last year at the Mostly Mozart festival at the New York State Theater. It is one of my favorite Mark Morris pieces, an understated piece of work. I wouldn’t say it’s a signature Mark Morris piece, it lacks campy humor (the butt slapping in L’allegro comes to mind), which is greatly loved by Mark Morris audiences, and while I enjoy the humor, the beauty of Mark Morris is the way the dance is inspired by the music, not the other way around. Emmanuel Ax (the pianist) said it so wonderfully, when he said if Mark Morris wasn’t a dancer, he’d be a conductor, he is that musical. What a compliment!

I won’t even try to review the whole piece, it’s so complicated and too much to remember. A few details come to mind:

• The marching motif totally made me laugh. It’s like Mozart’s music; he has parts where the left hand does a marching beat, and after a while, the right hand takes over in a running river-like melody. This is reflected in the dance, where abruptly, the dancer will shift from flowing movements to a solid march. To the audience eye, it looks a bit unexpected, but if you follow the music, this is reflected perfectly as the music dictates. The dancers did it in such a way, as if they were saying, “I’m in the middle of something but I feel like taking a bathroom break” or something to go offstage. And sometimes, when it looked like a dancer was exiting, he/she would turn back as an afterthought, with a hand raised, “Wait“. How many times have we done that, saying “bye” on the telephone then realizing a really long but juicy story to relate, last minute? Brilliant.
• Loved Eleven, the four hand sonata…the slow movement was beautiful, and the piece, up to this certain point, was simply male dancers on stage. What struck me is when the women entered in the middle of the piece…it was the exact moment when the melody changed to a minor tone. Whoa. It was so fitting because a minor tone comes with a little bit of drama, melancholy, and romance…coinciding with the exact moment women make their entrance, with romantic long flowing skirts.
• Emmanuel Ax is a piano genius. Mozart is such a tricky thing to play, my piano teacher used to tell me it’s so much easier to pound out a Rach concerto than to perform a delicate Mozart piece with perfect evenness (the scale-like runs are killer) and nuance…very very difficult.
• There’s been lots of discussion about the filming of the piece, but I really enjoyed it. Perhaps its’ because I’d seen it in its entirety on stage in the theater, but I enjoyed the closeups of the musicians and conductor, which as an audience member, is very very limited. Closeups of the dancers were great too, and while I did notice that perhaps we may have lost some glimpses of action on stage, I have a feeling we didn’t miss that much.