Saturday Matinee

Takacs Quartet, image provided by the Mondavi Center

The Takacs Quartet graced the stage of the Mondavi Center in a warmly nuanced performance. I was struck by the transparency of the genre of string quartets, where balance and technique is magnified to the utmost, and even the smallest tilt in one direction is glaringly obvious. The Takacs Quartet however are proven experts, and their unity was in moments, breathtaking. In Haydn’s String Quartet in g Minor, “The Rider”, the quartet began with a few technical difficulties but melted comfortingly in the slow second movement, where the harmonies and beautiful melodies were savored to the last moment. The program took a different turn with Bartok’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, ruled atonal meanderings with a touch of fantasy and a lot of heart. The quartet personified music that was felt, not studied or analyzed.

Van Cliburn gold medalist Nobuyuki Tsujii joined the quartet for their final piece, Schumann’s Quintet for Piano and String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 44. I previously wrote about Tsujii and followed him closely throughout the Van Cliburn competition back in 2009, where Tsujii won the gold medal (along with pianist Haochen Zhang), being the first blind pianist to win the Van Cliburn competition. It was a thrilling experience to be able to see him live, playing the same piece that he played in one of the final rounds of the Van Cliburn competition.

Aside from the sheer impossibility of a blind pianist playing  chamber music (cueing through breaths and carefully memorized rests and perfect timing and lots of rehearsal no doubt), Tsujii plays with a heightened sensitivity and a keen intuition, a complete lack of self consciousness and courage but intelligence and heart. He began with brisk, bold strokes that quickly mellows into bittersweet wistful tones, catching you off guard with his phrasing that is simultaneously sudden and fearless. Tsujii’s playing is not perhaps as finessed as other pianists (including co-winner Haochen Zhang who excelled in this arena), but there is something so unique about his playing that is spectacular, heartbreaking, and so moving.

Tsujii’s playing matches well with the style of the Takacs Quartet, playing with a lot of heart and soul, and the collaboration brought out the best in both parties. Listening to this piece, it was difficult to remember the last time I heard Schumann so full of life, and so vibrant.

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Bach’s Mass in b Minor, BWV 232

San Francisco Symphony, image provided by the Mondavi Center

Yesterday, San Francisco Symphony came eastward for a second performance this year at the Mondavi Center, adding to the festivity of the occasion with the San Francisco Chorus in tow. The evening was dedicated to performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in b Minor conducted by Ragnar Bohlin.

First, a few words on the San Francisco Chorus (a group I’d only heard once before with the weird and tremendous Ligeti’s Requiem). The group was established in 1972 at the request of the symphony’s music director at the time, Seiji Ozawa. The 142 member chorus gives at least 26 performances each season, and is currently made up of 30 professionals and 112 volunteer singers (does this surprise anybody? I just assumed they were all professionals, but I was wrong).

Bach’s Mass in b Minor is considered a seminal piece in classical music, sacred music in particular. Lasting nearly two hours, it’s made up of different sections with a number of songs in each section. Bach first started writing parts of it in 1724 and finished writing the whole score in the late 1740s. Upon my first viewing of this piece, the different songs (gorgeous in itself) felt a little disjointed, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Bach had written sections of it in different times. It’s a study of contrasts, going from grandiose orchestral resonances with the full chorus to small chamber ensembles with a solo or duet voice. The piece is cloaked in somber tones but with wonderful swells of hope throughout. It’s a piece that I felt needed more of my time to experience and to absorb fully, but the combination of the music and the subject matter was awe-inspiring.

The performance of Bach’s Mass in b Minor was a wonderfully balanced performance. The symphony was a smaller ensemble for this performance with the appearance of several baroque instruments (including the keyboard instrument (anybody know the name?) and the oboe d’amore (thanks for the tip, Patty!)), playing with a pointed but a discriminating presence. The large choral singing was nuanced and expressive, and the vocal soloists were a particular highlight. Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor sang in warm, lush tones, tenor Nicholas Phan with a wistful quality wrapped in passion, and bass-baritone Shenyang with a unique elegance and precision that appearto be rare qualities in bass-baritone voices.  Soprano Ingela Bohlin’s voice didn’t appear to project very well to where I was sitting, but blended in lovely ways in her duet with mezzo-soprano Abigail Nims.

Some may find the length of the work to be difficult to sit through. But this baroque masterpiece is beautifully served by the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Chorus, a testament to the power of the sounds of beauty and faith to last through the centuries.

For clips of Bach’s Mass in b Minor, check out Patty’s blog entry, here. San Francisco Symphony and Chorus continue their performance of Bach’s Mass in b Minor this weekend at their home symphony hall at the Davies. Check it out on their website including a very cool podcast to learn more about the work.

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Are modern dancers getting better and better, or is it just the Paul Taylor Dance Company?

Five years ago, I fell for Paul Taylor’s choreography and his ability to use gestures in powerful ways. This time, it’s the dancing that caught my eye. The standards of modern dance appear to be changing to higher standards, as compared to being the “anti-ballet” as it has been seen historically. Bodies have become leaner – this has been attributed to the changes in training, and maybe due to the high crossover rate of dancers between modern dance and ballet. Details are crisper, the angles are sharper, and the movement is quicker, an explosive vehicle for conveying the emotions in Paul Taylor’s stories.

All of these qualities are seen in no one better than Paul Taylor dancer Michael Trusnovec. As the “A Man of the Cloth” in Taylor’s Speaking in Tongue, Trusnovec portrays the charismatic leader of a violent and hypocritical cult. In choreography that suggests arrogance and sarcasm, Trusnovec digs deep into a biting portrayal, and you understand the leader’s charisma. There is a guarded welcome to his parishioners in his arms beckoning wide, and strict violence in short, stuttering movements. Trusnovec was a bright light in a piece that that didn’t really say anything new about cults – it was a cult with a happy exterior, a hypocritical interior, and exclusivity of people not dressed in the same colors as the “in-crowd”, punctuated by shocking sexual violence.

The evening took a lighter turn with the second piece, Taylor’s Also Playing. A tribute to vaudeville, the stage opens on another stage in a series of short dance sketches with intruding stagehands, falling costumes, and general hilarity of the workings of a live performance. More than mere comedy, this piece conjured up a nostalgia for simpler times, when things weren’t so polished and there was an added element of excitement in the underrehearsed moment. Taylor ends the piece with a stagehand (danced longingly by Robert Kleinendorst) taking a turn on the stage after the performers have left, in a soaring monologue of a peek at a man’s dream beyond the normal humdrum life. This is what I love about Paul Taylor – his messages almost always contain a message of humanity that’s relateable even if it’s not so tangible.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company

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Photo by Lois Greenfield

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is an energetic company with genius management (under founder Bebe Schweppe and executive director Jean-Philippe Malaty) that distinguishes itself by capitalizing on showcasing today’s best modern ballet choreographers to new audiences. They also expose audiences to some of these big names’ lesser works, which is a huge draw for balletomanes such as myself. With a lineup of choreographers like Elo, Tharp, Forsythe, and Pendleton, an evening at the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet at the Mondavi Center was a program that had its finger on the heartbeat of today’s world of modern ballet. The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is a small company of 12 dancers, but it’s a talented company with a palpable energy of youthful vitality.

The program opened with Jorma Elo’s Red Sweet, which was commissioned by the company in 2008. It’s a visual wonder in movements a mix of precision and speed in Elo’s busy choreography that’s packed with a combination of balletic and robotic movement. With music by Vivaldi and Biber, this is the most musical piece of Elo’s that I’ve seen, with musical motifs that mirror choreographic structural motifs in a moment of mental clarity amidst a sea of random but pretty movements. But as with the other Elo works, I found that the novelty of his thrilling dance vocabulary wore off, and the piece would have benefited from a shorter presentation.

Twyla Tharp’s Sue’s Leg choreographed in 1975 gave us a glimpse of Tharp’s earlier works in a piece that’s rarely performed today. Set to the music of Thomas “Fats” Waller, it features a small group of dancers in plain clothes, swinging easily to the jazzy stylings of the music. The easy shoulders and floppy arms remind me of the caricature of Robin Williams doing Twyla Tharp in the movie Birdcage, which must have characterized her work early on in her career. The softly shifting formations ease in and out, and without solid conclusions, this piece captures a nostalgic mood and the beginnings of her storytelling ability that would define her later works.

William Forsythe’s Slingerland was a sleek and dramatic duet for Katherine Bolanos and Sam Chittenden. Choreographed in 2000 for Ballet Frankfurt, the dancers dive and reach and lunge in a backdrop of undulating musical lines. An alien echo of atonal singing lines with harmonics gave an eerie edge in Gavin Bryars’ stirring music. The evening ended with Moses Pendleton’s Noir Blanc, also commissioned by the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet in 2002, a curiously whimsical display of floating limbs flying through space lit with black light and a haze of stage magic.

This program was a versatile program of the little engine that could – a small but powerful dance company with the ambitious spirit packaged in a way that makes people want to buy tickets for. It was a program that showed both the dance world of present, past, and future in four living choreographers and their lesser known works which still highlight their style and substance. The spirit of this company is infectious, with a pleasing sleek and dynamic style, and an example of what a small dance company can do.

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Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company

When Christopher Wheeldon’s company Morphoses rolled into town for their first highly anticipated West Coast tour, I got to thinking about the music behind ballet. In its best scenarios, the music is everything – it is the basis for the movement choreographed to it. In other examples, the music disappears into the background – in Tudor’s Lilac Garden, I can’t remember the music or the composer of that piece for the life of me. I’ve also found that music can be the stumbling block for me to be able to enjoy certain pieces. The pieces set to undanceable pieces come to mind – such as Mark Morris’ Joyride set to the cacophanous music of John Adams. Wheeldon’s Continuum is another piece, and this piece opened the evening with Morphoses.

The momentum in Wheeldon’s Continuum is derived mostly from the sharply-cornered music by Gyorgy Ligeti. The most challenging piece of a very forward-thinking program, the angular choreography pieced together stark images of geometric angles, alternating flexed and pointed feet, insect-like images, and tension that always seem to result from movements in silence. (The audience seems to start breathing again once the music starts up again.) It’s colored by a bewildering sense of randomness to this piece. Momentum is built up between images from moment to moment, but its logic remains murky and elusive. However through movement, Wheeldon is able to point out the humanity and the dark humor in the music I never would have heard otherwise. Even in tension, an urgency and a driving energy challenges the audience to consider it, most of all. Gorgeous lighting by Natasha Katz (recredited by Mary Louise Geiger) offsets the clean angles and creates different worlds, from an austere world with black and bright white, or a warm glow of red.

The program also features choreography other than Wheeldon’s, which is an advantage in variety not only for its dancers but for the audience as well. Lightfoot Leon’s Softly As I Leave You featured a dramatic duet about loss between dancers Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk. Even entrapped in a box, the dancers struggle with angry intensity, yet an atmosphere of surrender and sadness pervades. Lush earthiness is backed by Bach’s sensuous, drawn out phases, and Jacoby and Pronk dance with a mercurial power that’s breathtaking.

Ratmansky was also featured on the program, with Bolero. Six dancers wearing numbers on their leotards dance to the familiar strains of Ravel’s Bolero in movements that mirror the repetitive motif with imperceptible yet building climax. It starts slowly, with a solo and a background chorus of softly shifting shapes. More people join as the music builds. There is a sense of competition (perhaps because of the numbers on their leotards?) yet a nonchalance and a haughty disregard for each other. Yet it’s always changing, as partners switch and different groups dance with each other. Ratmansky’s choreography emphasizes the complex detail in the music, with offbeats that are given as much attention as the onbeats. The irrepressible shifting and pointed movement slowly casts its spell as does the music, which only broke when an accidental skirt came loose and had to be tossed to the back. It was only at this point when I realized how much I had been emotionally caught up in the piece. The piece soldiers on, skirt or not, with the piece coming to an impressive crashing close.

The evening ended with Wheeldon’s Rhapsody Fantaisie, which was my favorite for the night. Highlighted with searing red costumes by Francisco Costa, from beginning to end, the piece was all seamless fluidity, seething with power and life. The dancers were like watching animals in the wild – a harnessed invincibility, an expansive confidence to fly.

With Morphoses’ West Coast tour, California audiences were privileged to be exposed to a company with such a cutting-edge sensibility and an amazing repertoire. Yet it was hard not to notice the empty seats that appeared after each of the two intermissions. Perhaps Wheeldon is ahead of his time with audiences not used to change – at the post performance Q&A, a woman admitted she had never seen such sensuality onstage before. I have to remember that this sort of dance is still new to a lot of people. Or perhaps he’s still trying to find a convincing voice with his lofty vision to challenge audiences as well as seek their favor and support. This favor is made more difficult by music like Ligeti’s. Yet Wheeldon is not afraid to take that risk, and everyone benefits as he searches for beauty, even in difficult places.

An adorable Christopher Wheeldon at the post-performance Q&A.

It’s nice to know that Shakespeare can still pack a house, even if it’s not in a park. It helps that the company is London-based Shakespeare’s Globe stage troupe to show us how it’s really done, bringing the comedic production of Love’s Labour Lost on a US national tour, with their stop at the Mondavi Center.

From the get go, it was a bit like going back into history. Shakespearean minstrels greeted the audience in the lobby, and actors mingled in the aisles before the show and during intermission, riffing with attendees and even serving hors d’oeuvres. It was enlightening to see how interactive theater was back then. Actors regularly ran up and down the aisles with some of the action going on amongst the audience (with one actor sitting in one poor (or lucky) lady’s lap and flipping through the program and hiding from the king). Shakespearean theater wasn’t some glorified, elevated art form that demands to be treated with kid gloves. It was entertainment for the commoners.

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole, this company brought first class comedy to the stage in a fresh production that brought Shakespeare to life. A bright, airy set (by Jonathan Fensom), nimble wordplay, and impeccable comedic timing made this production accessible to modern audiences. The king and his three friends swear to devote themselves to study and chastity and are confounded when the Princess of France and her three ladies visit the royal court. Hilarity ensues. Men in love are just so silly. And they pontificate. A lot. I guess that’s something that hasn’t changed since the Shakespearean times.

In a cast of stellar actors, a standout was Fergal McElherron as Costard, an unlikely swain who inhabited his character in every spirited moment.

It was refreshing to hear unmiked voices, as if the voices were talking directly to you with dynamic vocal projection. However, in addition to the Shakespearean language and a smattering of foreign accents, there were parts that were hard to catch. It’s a speed and speech that American audiences aren’t used to hearing, and I had difficulty in comprehending the unfamiliar script and convoluted story. It was no wonder the audience reacted more consistently to the physical comedy, and there were many chances to laugh.

I’ve forgotten how sophomoric Shakespeare can be, and this show reminded me at how phallic jokes never grow old. Despite its obscure moments, this production was first rate production that throughout history, audiences have always been entertained by both high intellectual comedy of witty wordplay, along with the low.

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Sometimes, the audience becomes an unwitting additional character in a show. At Patti Lupone’s one-woman show at the Mondavi Center on Saturday night titled “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda”, the show itself was amazing. Backed by pianist Joseph Talken playing with witty ease, Lupone was her larger-than-life self, showcasing her performing skills in a series of showtunes and personal anecdotes of her journey through career highs and lows – mass cattle calls (auditions with non unionized actors where hundreds of people show up to audition), her accidental entrance to Juilliard, or so she says, and through several Tony awards. She delivers with spot-on comedic timing and a flair for the dramatic. And that voice! Not the most refined, it’s not even her power to bring down the house that’s the most impressive, but her ability to hold your attention with breathless anticipation. This one-woman show is a perfect vehicle for her persona as the quintessential performer. 

I couldn’t help but to feel that it was a bit unfortunate that the audience was filled with people who didn’t seem to know a lot about Broadway. This show was put on in honor of Chancellor Larry and Rosalie Vanderhoef, who is retiring soon after an illustrious career. Chandellor Vanderhoef did a lot in promoting the arts in this community, even in just building the magnificent Mondavi Center which brings in a lot of art in itself. From our orchestra seats, the audience was packed with people who looked like administrators, many of them with nametags from a previous event, in what looked like in honor of the chancellor. Everyone in the audience seemed to know each other, and my friend and I were apparently in the middle of about 10 different conversations with people in front of us talking through us to speak to the people behind us. The only exception that I could see was the front row of starry-eyed young men hanging on her every word. 

With Lupone’s show, it was too bad that when she pointed the mike towards the audience to sing along, she was met with dead silence. Being a cabaret-style show that depends on casual audience interaction, this part sadly fell flat, through no fault of her own. But she geared up and utilized everything she had (including a perfeclty handled impromptu moment where she almost fell through a trap door in the wall) to whip up audience enthusiasm. She was able to get the audience palpably excited even if no one recognized the showtunes. And by the end with a rousing medley of Sondheim songs including the powerhouse “Being Alive”, it was obvious that she had a theater full of her newest fans.

A word on Chancellor Vanderhoef and the wonderful Mondavi Center. If he brought in the Mondavi Center, that alone is enough to convince me that he is a great man with an uncanny unique vision for the arts. As an example of the great programming here, I have seen Ballet Preljocaj, Yo-Yo Ma, the San Francisco Symphony with Mason Bates and Yuja Wang, and Patti Lupone in the span about a month. Next year, this center is bringing in the infamous and hilarious Ballet Trockadero and Morphoses, Christopher Wheeldon’s company. Even with the recession and an increase in more “conservative” financially dependable programs such as classical music concerts, how fabulous and risky is that programming? Love!

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Regarding the relationship between his music and dance, at around 42:30. (Thankfully, they cut me out of the video but Page repeats my question.) His answer became a multi-minute freeform association about dance, but it was fascinating to hear his stories about dancers and his admiration for the art and artists. He talks about his first forays into writing music for dance, and I can’t get the image of a 42 year old Philip Glass struggling with dance combinations out of my head. The entire conversation with music critic Tim Page was very good. He talks about minimalism in music, his recent performance in San Francisco with his Music in 12 Parts, his past and future projects, and more. My favorite part is that he’s a little bit of a geek. His candor was endearing and his thoughts, admirable. What’s not to love??

My initial writeup of this conversation, and a photo I snuck in, here.

Friday night at Ballet Preljocaj’s Les 4 Saisons… (The Four Seasons) reminded me that a performance is often not only what’s on stage, but the entire experience of being an audience member. Modern dance isn’t so popular so far outside the boundaries of the Bay Area, yet it still looked to be a surprisingly filled house for this one night only performance and I had luckily snagged seats close to the stage. I was seated next to a little girl who looked to be no older than four years old with her poor grandmother who probably thought that the word “ballet” in the title of “Ballet Preljocaj” led her to believe that she was in for an evening of Swan Lake or child-friendly Cinderella. The performance opened with two men in nude-colored G-strings dressed in a completely see-through clear inflatable bear suits, walking across in halting, posed movements in complete silence. I immediately became hyperaware of the little girl and the level of detail that we could see with such close proximity. The little girl had instantly stopped fidgeting and was watching with a newly-found riveted and rapt attention. It became worse when both male and female dancers came out wrapped in dark blankets and started swirling the blankets around to reveal that they were wearing absolutely nothing underneath. I blame the little girl for making me so keenly uncomfortable, as well as the American Pilgrims founding this country that made me feel like such an uptight, Puritannical American in the face of such bold French openness.

I hope it’s clear that I’m exaggerating my discomfort – after all, it must have been volumes worse for the grandmother. Preljocaj’s Les 4 Saisons is a lavishly ambitious production, set to the familiar music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The over-the-top cartoon-like sets and costumes by Fabrice Hyber provides a fulcrum for comparison for the choreography, serving either as stark contrast to the stark, disturbing images onstage, or as a neon highlighter, reinforcing the dizzying delirium.

There’s no doubting Preljocaj’s talent and genius establishes himself as a major choreographer of modern dance. His choreography falls both within audience expectations and outside of it, with a result of a hodgepodge of child-like joy, intense violence, and langorous haze. Loosely incorporating images of the four seasons, this takes the audience on a journey that ranges from joy, awkwardness, confusion, and at all times, intrigue.

Preljocaj constructs seamless movements with captivating logic that’s inventive. There’s an organic flow to sections of his choreography that’s easy to get swept up in. A gentle musicality finds new nuances in a piece of music known so well. In the rocking “Allegro” of Autumn (music in the youtube video below), Preljocaj uses the downbeat to have the dancers jumping rope as elementary school children do, with two people holding a huge rope with a dancer gleefully jumping with delight in response to the pulling downbeat. Some of my favorite moments were in the allegro movements that depicts joy. Lightning quick changes in direction in a group of dancers dressed in summer beach clothes frolicking in the sun is really fun to watch. Les 4 Saisons… also uses multiple props in inventive ways. I’d never seen better use of props in a dance performance both in its inventive use and in placing the props in service to the choreography rather than the other way around. A woman in high heels, two men, and a rocking staircase (shown in the photo above) becomes a lazy and langorous threesome.

Interspersed between joy, there are moments of disturbing images. A woman convulses on the floor and a man screams at her. Two women engage in a peculiar pas de deux where they pull and push each other aggressively by grabbing the skin of the face, the underside of the arm, or the torso in painful holds. The extremes in emotion is seat-squirmingly uncomfortable, and its purpose and transitions unclear.

Bottom line, there was still a feeling that there was just too much going on. Moments of confusion are common with me during modern dance, yet with the over-the-top sets, the ridiculously flamboyant recording of Vivaldi’s music, spoken word, and the use of props, it all added up to “too much” that ultimately failed to gel into a cohesive whole. This piece gives off the impression that it was trying to accomplish one too many goals. It may have benefited from Coco Chanel’s advice on accessorizing. “When accessorizing, always take off the last thing you put on.”

The dancers of Ballet Preljocaj were wonderful in this athletic choreography. Yang Wang was a powerhouse of buzzing energy, and Lorena O’Neill stood out for her curious blend of clean elegance and layered eroticism.

Still, Preljocaj convinces that there’s much to be learned (and to be talked about) in reinventing the classics, both in interpreting familiar musical classic and the institution of dance. I would even call this a “must-see”. It was an intriguing evening that was challenging as well as admirable in that it made me reflect on my expectations, my biases, and my reactions. And it made me extremely hopeful for the future of dance with choreographers like Preljocaj in this world.

Click here for more photos on the Ballet Preljocaj website. They’ll be performing Les 4 Saisons… in both Seattle and Santa Barbara later this month.

Links:

• danceviewtimes’ review

Ballet Preljocaj’s Les 4 Saisons

Ballet Preljocaj is stopping by California to present their Les 4 Saisons (The Four Seasons) choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj, set to the music of well known Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’m always wary of when I hear about choreography to really well known music, masterpieces in themselves really. Normally, this would really bother me, but I have a soft spot for this Vivaldi’s colorful piece, yet a certain amount of distance from it. I didn’t grow up with it like I did Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, for example. I was especially intrigued by what Preljocaj himself had to say about choreographing to such a well known piece. Taken from his website:

Can the music – so well known, so conventional, so gone astray – can it indeed still deliver more surprises, more gray zones, more secrets?

And so, we shall see. His words give me hope. I also have a fondness for Preljocaj’s choreography – his work was the first work I ever reviewed for my dance criticism class back in college, and one of the first modern pieces I really saw. His Annonciation was particularly lovely. The sets do cause me to worry, however – the Santa outfit? For winter? Really??

Ballet Preljocaj at the Mondavi Center on Friday, April 17. Click here for more information.

My full review here.