#adam larsen

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Green Chimneys

Kimberly Thompson & Friends

Keyon Harrold – trumpet Adam Larsen – sax Lawrence Fields – piano Bob DeBoo – bass Kimberly Thompson – drums

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REVIEW: "A Quiet Place" at Tanglewood

REVIEW: “A Quiet Place” at Tanglewood

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by Fred Baumgarten

The best way to appreciate Leonard Bernstein’s 1983 opera, A Quiet Place, is through the music. At Tanglewood last week, this infrequently performed work was given a spirited defense by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and Vocal Fellows under the baton of Stefan Asbury, in a 2013 version with reduced orchestration. Legendary Bernstein protégé Michael Tilson Thomas was in the audience, a measure of the significance of the production.

Musically, the Tanglewood performance was a rousing success. The orchestra performed beautifully, and the singers were uniformly strong. Though often far less accessible than Bernstein’s beloved musical pieces such as West Side Story and Candide, the score to A Quiet Place reveals a composer at the height of mastery and maturity, a superb craftsman, confident in lyrical and dissonant styles alike. As theater, A Quiet Place is deeply problematic, and this Spartan production — a set consisting of some risers, chairs, and projection screens — did little to overcome its flaws.

The opera was written in collaboration with the young librettist Stephen Wadsworth, after a rather pronounced dry spell in the late seventies and early eighties, and thirty-two years after Bernstein’s successful Trouble in Tahiti, to which A Quiet Place is a kind of sequel. “Tahiti” is a spare and darkly humorous portrait of postwar consumerist America. An all-American, outwardly successful couple, Sam and Dinah, confront the emptiness of their lives and marriage, finding refuge in a fictional fantasy movie, called “Trouble in Tahiti.” Along the way, a number of characters are referred to but never seen, including a son, Junior, Dinah’s psychiatrist, and Sam’s business partners.

A Quiet Place joins Trouble in Tahiti’s Sam thirty years later, when Dinah has died in a horrific car accident (illustrated, as much in the production, by a desultory projection). At her funeral, we are introduced to Junior, a daughter, Dede, and her husband Francois, who is also Junior’s not-too-secret lover, along with the unseen minor characters from “Tahiti.”

The family is a rogue’s gallery of 1980s dysfunction, and Wadsworth, presumably with Bernstein’s blessing, layered the plot with intimations of madness, incest, homophobia, psychological intrigue and just plain dyspepsia. The libretto plods along with enigmatic pronouncements (“Cake and friends we choose with care”; “Lost time is never found”; etc.) and references to “Tahiti.” The title phrase, “a quiet place,” is from Dinah’s aria in the earlier work, where she dreams of an escape from her unhappy life. The dialogue is peppered with nonsense and Godot-like repetitions.

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Contrast this with Trouble in Tahiti’s lithe libretto and you begin to see the problem with A Quiet Place: It occupies an entirely different headspace from its predecessor, and the attempt to bridge the chasm feels forced. Small wonder that attempts were made to fold Trouble in Tahiti into A Quiet Place as a second-act flashback, in order to make more sense of the story, but those versions have largely been abandoned.

Despite the family machinations, as four alienated and disturbed people try to find a way forward, more visceral drama takes place in the Bernstein score – in his soul? – than in the opera. Essentially, how could Lenny not be Lenny? A man of deep passions and longing, self-doubt and grandiosity, Bernstein connected as a composer when he gave reign to his deepest feelings. It was difficult not to experience A Quiet Place as a struggle with himself.

The music is among the most difficult Bernstein ever wrote, frequently jagged and atonal, especially in the prologue and first act. As precise and technically brilliant as it is, it sounds like a million other composers of the last thirty-five years. One strains to hear a trace of Lenny.

Suddenly, as the opera progresses, the music loosens up and Bernstein reaches a sublime level of music-making. In particular, the orchestral interludes that close the second act and open the third are deeply affecting, while holding in check any excesses and retaining the contemporary musical vocabulary of the time. Several of the arias are haunting, too.

In the end, Lenny wins. A Quiet Place proves that authentic voice of Bernstein could not be held back, and it is what made the experience of hearing it special.

A Quiet Place, Opera in three acts. Music by Leonard Bernstein. Libretto by Stephen Wadsworth. 2013 adaptation with chamber orchestra. Reduced orchestration by Garth Edwin Sunderland. Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Stefan Asbury, conductor. Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows: Elaine Daiber, soprano (Dede), Daniel McGrew, tenor (Francois), Dominik Belavy, baritone (Junior), Ryne Cherry, baritone (Sam), Olivia Cosio, mezzo-soprano (Susie), Kelly Newberry, mezzo-soprano (Mrs. Doc), Eric Finbarr Carey, tenor (Funeral Director), Alex Longnecker, tenor (Analyst), Edward Vogel, baritone (Doc), Thomas West, baritone (Bill), Robin Steitz, soprano (Mourner), Rebecca Printz, mezzo-soprano (Mourner), Chance Jonas-O’Toole, tenor (Mourner), William Socolof, bass-baritone (Mourner). Peter Kazaras, stage director, Adam Larsen, video designer, Mary Lauve, costume designer, Melissa Tosto, assistant stage director and stage manager. Performed Aug. 9 at Florence Gould Auditorium, Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood Music Center, 297 West St., Lenox, MA. Tickets for the 2018 Tanglewood Music Festival, celebrating the Bernstein Centennial, are available at www.tanglewood.org or SymphonyCharge, [phone].

REVIEW: “A Quiet Place” at Tanglewood by Fred Baumgarten The best way to appreciate Leonard Bernstein’s 1983 opera, A Quiet Place, is through the music.

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SF Symphony Music for a Modern Age: Ives, Thomas, Harrison, Antheil

Today we look back at the San Francisco Symphony’s “Music for a Modern Age” concert that took place in late June. This wasn’t simply a concert or even a concert focused on American music of the last 100 years. It was a theatrical event, with video projection, staging, and more.

The evening began with two pieces by Charles Ives. First, there was the incantation-like From the Steeples and the Mountains with its interconnecting tones on chimes, followed The Unanswered Question. This was a more complex piece both musically and logistically, as it featured a small wind-and-string ensemble on stage and an offstage antiphonal string ensemble (conducted by Christian Rief). The two groups alternated in a call-and-response form. It isn’t necessarily one ensemble asking the questions and another answering, as the wind instruments are involved in both, but it added another dimension to nature of the piece, which was deliberately unsettling but also hauntingly beautiful. Both Ives pieces featured video by Adam Larsen and lighting design by Luke Kritzeck.

Michael Tilson Thomas. Photo by Spencer Lowell. Courtesy of San Francisco Symphony.

The segment featured a piece by conductor and music director Michael Wilson Thomas, Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind. It was an interesting format, with the orchestra alongside a standard jazz/rock bar band with horns, bass, guitar, keyboard, and drums, complex video and lighting (again by Larsen and Kritzeck, respectively) and singers in elegant dress. The music freely mixed modernist orchestral sounds with jazz and rock idioms as the moved through the text by Carl Sandburg. The subject matter was quite dark – with images of death and decay and ruins of a once-great city that overflowed with pride – ”We are the greatest city. Nothing like us ever was” – that is now left to rats and other wildlife. But it was also a very playful and fun piece, especially in the sections with singing and dancing by the three lead vocalists (Measha Brueggergosman, Mikaela Bennett and Kara Dugan) around the stage in a cabaret style to the rhythms of the jazz band. MTT stated that his influences for the vocal sections included Sarah Vaughan and James Brown, as well as classical influences Leontyne Price and Igor Stravinsky. It is safe to say that we really liked this piece and the performance. Even at a length 32 minutes, it kept our attention and enjoyment throughout.

Lou Harrison was a major force in American music, but is also considered one of California’s own, blending influences from the landscape and culture of the state and bridging them with his interests Asian music. This simultaneously local and world character was well represented in the selections from Suite for Violin and American Gamelan. The American Gamelan is a collection of instruments inspired by the materials, timbres and tunings of traditional Indonesian gamelan but new and different. Harrison often combined his Asian and invented instruments with more conventional western orchestral instruments, in this solo violin played by Nadya Tichman. The piece unfolded as a series of movements. The first, “Threnody” was a lamentation as the title would suggest, showcasing the violin, but all four movements had a distinctly Asian or abstract sound from the preponderance of sounds from the American gamelan.

The final piece of the evening was George Antheil’s Jazz Symphony. It is musically and sonically quite different from Antheil’s most famous piece Ballet méchanique in that it is less noisy, more tonal, and focuses on traditional orchestral and popular instruments. Think of it as a predecessor of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was in fact influenced by Jazz Symphony. Once again, however, this was not simply an orchestral performance. The lighting and video (this time by Clyde Scott created an enveloping environment reminiscent of a jazz-age cabaret or club. This was further enhanced by the dancers (directed by Patricia Birch) who wore 1920s-style costumes. The overall result of music, visuals, costuming and choreography was energetic, but also rather sexy – as our romanticized view of that era tends to be. There were a lot of fun and even comedic moments a the dancers attempted to distract and even “lead on” members of the orchestra (some of whom turned out to actually be dancers themselves who were soon replaced by the actual musicians).

Overall this was a very strong concert, and perhaps one of my favorites I have seen with the SF Symphony – and we have been going to quite a few in the past year or so. As the symphony often has intriguing programming outside the traditional catalog of 19th century classical works, we certainly expect to be back again soon. I do leave the experience pondering what it means to be “modern” or be in a “modern age”, however. Perhaps the span of time marked by these compositions is in some ways more “modern” than the period that is unfolding now, but that is a discussion for another time.

SF Symphony Music for a Modern Age: Ives, Thomas, Harrison, Antheil was originally published on CatSynth

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Breaking the Waves -- Opera Philadelphia at Perelman Theater

Breaking the Waves — Opera Philadelphia at Perelman Theater

The church-dominated north Scottish coastal town in which Bess McNeill resides in so strict and pinched, it looks askance at undevout foreigners and continues to refer to Bess as McNeill after her marriage to a Norwegian named Jan Nyman, who is skeptical about religion and earns the undisguised disapproval of Bess’s neighbors, including her mother. Life is Skye is difficult for women. Their men…

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A still from “Undersung” a new documentary by Adam Larsen. James Darrah and Adam Larsen are collaborating this season on a video installation for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as well as a new production of Handel’s “Semele” for the annual Chromatic residency with Opera Omaha.

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from “Caryatid” // Black Mountain {Re}Happening Collaboration, Adam Larsen and Janice Lancaster// photo by J. Smilanic, 2015

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