JEFFREY GANTZ

Men from Mars(eille)

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:55:08 GMT

Lo Còr de la Plana invade Boston
“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.”

LO CÒR DE LA PLANA: Rigaudon, bourrée, rondeau — meet techno-groove and ragamuffin.

“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.” That might have been just a sporting-goods-company promotion, but two million Marseillais (out of a total population of 1.5 million!) take it to heart. Founded in 600 BC by Greeks from Asia Minor and subsequently dominated by Romans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Saracens, Franks, Aragonese, Angevins, and, now, Parisians (just remember, the national anthem is not called “La Parisienne”!), France’s second-largest city is a Mediterranean melting pot of people from Italy, North Africa, Spain, Greece, Corsica, Turkey, Armenia, Vietnam, and China, for starters. Marseille already speaks Europe, and much more, but these days, the city’s music is turning to the Occitan language of the South of France, the language of the mediæval troubadours, and finding inspiration, as well as a cultural identity, in its dense, intricate poetry. Massilia Sound System opened the door in the ’80s with their trobamuffin hip-hop, singing in both Occitan and French. Now another Marseille group, Lo Còr de la Plana, have grabbed the baton, and they’ll be bringing it to the Somerville Theatre this Friday, October 3.

Like Italian, French, and Spanish, Occitan developed from Latin, but its true sibling is Catalan, as spoken in Barcelona and Valencia. (What to call this language is a very hot potato.) In the Middle Ages, it was the lingua franca of the Western Mediterranean, the preferred language of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart. Dante gave some thought to writing his Commedia in Occitan, the better to be understood outside Tuscany. (Had he done so, the history of Occitan, and of Italian literature, would have been quite different.) He settled for a brief hommage (albeit in Purgatorio) to the 12th-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, whom he called “il miglior fabbro” — “the best craftsman.” (Seven centuries later, Ezra Pound called Arnaut, who’s credited with the invention of the sestina, the best poet who ever lived.)

The South shall rise . . .

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:44:28 GMT

France's Occitan New Wave
The singing groups of the South of France draw on everything from mediæval pilgrimage chants and troubadour poetry to contemporary rap and ragga.

Suburban Mozart that swings

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:01:14 GMT

Lexington Symphony at Cary Hall, Lexington, MA, September 13, 2008
It’s a tribute to the quality of Boston’s classical-music scene that a suburban orchestra like the Lexington Symphony is capable of a performance to attract the attention of those who live closer to Symphony Hall.

It’s a tribute to the quality of Boston’s classical-music scene that a suburban orchestra like the Lexington Symphony is capable of a performance to attract the attention of those who live closer to Symphony Hall. Even if the BSO season were in full swing, last Saturday’s program would have been worth the trip. Cary Hall’s clear-eyed acoustics are a plus, and then there’s the Lexington’s music director, the in-demand Jonathan McPhee (he also leads the Boston Ballet Orchestra, the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, and the Nashua Symphony Orchestra), and one of his typically thoughtful programs: Witold Lutoslawski’s Dance Preludes and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis preceding Mozart’s familiar (but how often do you hear it live?) Requiem, for which he had Holly Krafta’s stellar New World Chorale.

Lutoslawski completed the original version of his Dance Preludes, for clarinet and piano, in 1954, but McPhee presented the 1955 revision for clarinet, harp, piano, percussion, and strings. Replete with Polish folk rhythms, the five sections alternate fast with slow, with a waltzy, moody second part, a spare and mysterious fourth, and a finale with a tune suggestive of the one Tchaikovsky used in the finale of his Fourth Symphony. Local clarinettist William Kirkley was forthright in tone and sure-footed in rhythm.

The Fantasia, which Vaughan Williams composed in 1910 (he continued to work on it till 1919), calls for three ensembles: a string orchestra, a double string quartet with bass, and a string quartet, all playing off one another like the choirs in a Venetian church. Tallis’s theme, in Phrygian mode, turns into something Bruckner might have come up with. The piece is a staple of easy-listening classical-music radio stations (though I don’t recall hearing it lately on WCRB), usually in high-calorie interpretations that swathe it in creamy comfort. This reading, with poignant solos from concertmistress Elizabeth Whitfield and principal violist Lisa Kempskie, was reverent in an English-folk-song way, a country-church rather than a cathedral, full-throated, a little unshaded (or was that the bright acoustic?), aching rather than pompous in its beauty.

Julie Fowlis

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:53:50 GMT

Cuilidh | Spit + Polish
The back-up is fine, but it’s Fowlis’s soughing voice, all wind and water and machair and peewit, that’s Cuilidh ’s treasure.

The Gates

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:45:08 GMT

Public art, food for the soul
This documentary from Antonio Ferrera, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Matthew Prinzing details the tortuous journey by which “The Gates” came into being.

Lukewarm

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:34:21 GMT

Trey McIntyre at the Pillow
Are we in the midst of a dance boom?

SURRENDER: The idea was plausible; the execution was not.

Are we in the midst of a dance boom? You’d have to think so from the way hot-shot choreographers are going out and forming their own companies. The latest is 38-year-old Trey McIntyre, who debuted his Trey McIntyre Project, a summer endeavor with pick-up dancers, at Jacob’s Pillow in 2005. Now the Trey McIntyre Project is going full-time, with a year-round complement of 10 dancers (among them former Boston Ballet soloist Lia Cirio and former Boston Ballet II member Sam Shapiro) and a permanent base in Boise, Idaho. After a White Oak residency in Florida last month, McIntyre brought his Project back to the Pillow for a Northeast debut that offered two world premieres, Surrender and Leatherwing Bat, alongside his 2003 piece The Reassuring Effects (Of Form and Poetry). I wish I could say I found the form and the poetry of this new company reassuring.

Surrender’s is an obvious but workable opposites-attract conceit, with Chanel DaSilva as the girl in the cerise and black party dress and Jason Hartley as the guy in the blue wrestling singlet with white trim and red helmet and kneepads (USA!? USA!?). She starts gyrating to Grand Funk Railroad’s version of “The Loco-Motion”; he enters and lunges awkwardly at her; she doesn’t even look surprised. There are all the expected advances and retreats, flingings and swingings; she keeps pulling her hand away. The music shifts into the “Dance of the Mirlitons” from act two of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — cute, but neither dancer tries to do anything balletic, or silly. Then — surprise! — she kicks off her heels and he doffs his helmet and we get, without apparent irony, Regina Spektor singing John Lennon’s “Real Love.” At the end, they stand side by side; you just know she’s going to extend her hand and he’s going to take it.

Leatherwing Bat is set to songs from the 1969 children’s album Peter, Paul and Mommy, and its focus is a loner played by Brett Perry who hovers on the outskirts as the other dancers — John Michael Schert, Virginia Pilgrim, Annali Rose, Dylan G-Bowley, and Lia Cirio — create duos and trios to the lullaby likes of “I Have a Song To Song, O!” and “Day Is Done.” “Going to the Zoo” sees the ensemble cradling Perry for a moment before exploding into the “Mommy’s takin’ us to the zoo tomorrow!” finale. In “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” Perry finds a friend (Schert), but we all know how that ends. There’s some humor involving a recurrent paper airplane, and some imitating of zoo animals; to make the Peter, Paul and Mary selections seem anything but sappy, however, the dancers would have to act like real kids, mischievous and playful and heartless. Instead, McIntyre gives us heart-on-sleeve earnest.

Funny bones

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:41:11 GMT

Stockholm 59° North at the Pillow
It was the darkly comic offerings of Mats Ek in the middle, and the personable interpretations that gave the evening its distinction.

CICADA: Was Nadja Sellrup supposed to be molting?

A sense of humor is as essential to the soul as dance is to the body. That’s not a truism, and perhaps it’s not even true, but it applies to the program that Stockholm 59° North brought to Jacob’s Pillow two weeks back. The company, which is made up of principals and soloists from the Royal Swedish Ballet, bookended its bill with two serious pieces, Cristina Caprioli’s Cicada (in its world premiere) and Nacho Duato’s Castrati, but it was the darkly comic offerings of Mats Ek in the middle — a pas de deux from Apartment and Pas de Danse — and the personable interpretations that gave the evening its distinction.

In Apartment, a young woman (Marie Lindqvist Friday night) in a simple, almost folky blouse and full skirt appears and knocks at the lighted stage-left door that’s the set’s only feature. A man in a sleeveless shirt (Andrey Leonovich) comes out and they engage in a goofy duet with hints of violence, like Punch and Judy, or Raggedy Ann and Andy playing hopscotch and other children’s games. He disappears behind the door, she follows, the music (Swedish band Fläskkvartetten’s “Innocence”) screams, and, behind the door, we see him ride her off stage.

Pas de Danse finds a man in a white jacket and pants (company director Jens Rosén) alone in the vast interior of a barn or hangar. He hunches his shoulders, looks apprehensive, slaps his face, takes out a large white handkerchief and blows his nose. A woman in a blue dress with a flowing skirt (Jeannette Diaz-Barboza) comes on and tries, with limited success, to get his attention. More nose blowing. An identically attired couple (Oscar Salomonsson and Kristina Oom), except with the colors reversed, run on and it’s party time, as everybody dances up a storm to the accordion-laced strains of Abba member Benny Andersson’s birthday waltz for his second wife, Mona. The man and woman in blue run off together. The man in white reverts. The woman in white sighs and strolls off in the opposite direction. The handkerchief comes out again.

Cicada is summed up by its music: Kevin Volans’s two-piano work of the same name, which in variety and textural interest was dwarfed by the singing of actual dog-day cicadas outside. Nadja Sellrup led off, in a black coat and a chartreuse jumper with a barrel skirt and pockets, walking, posing, balancing, stretching. She was joined by Diaz-Barboza, Oom, Hugo Therkelson, and Pascal Jansson, in similar outfits, black and yellow and gray, the ladies in pointe shoes, all in various combinations of movement, some in canon, incorporating ballet steps like penchée arabesque. It looked generic even before Ek’s two pieces were presented, and more so after. Perhaps the dancers in their jumpers were meant to suggest cicadas molting from their skins.

Words, words, words

JEFFREY GANTZ — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:26:59 GMT

Ammon Shea reads them all for you
Who would do such a thing?

CHRESTOMATHIC That is, Shea is “devoted to the learning of useful matters.”

Can you judge a book by its title? You can if it’s Ammon Shea’s Reading theOED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. What that title doesn’t answer is the question “Who would do such a thing?” Ammon Shea, it turns out, is not some dictionary dilettante hoping to read his way into the Guinness Book of World Records. Although he’s worked as a street musician in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego, and a furniture mover in New York City, his real business is words, and to that end he owns “about a thousand volumes of dictionaries, thesauri, and assorted glossaries.” Those would include seven different copies of the Oxford English Dictionary. No question he’s the man for the job.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages | By Ammon Shea | Perigee | 240 pages | $21.95

Reading the OED is laid out in 26 chapters, A to Z, with an “Exordium (Introduction)” and an “Excursus (Bibliography).” Shea begins each chapter with five or so pages describing his progress through the dictionary; that’s followed by anywhere from 10 to 30 words drawn from the OED and starting with the appropriate letter, for which he supplies, in the manner of Samuel Johnson, his own pungent commentary. For example:

Fard (v.) To paint the face with cosmetics, so as to hide blemishes. I suspect there is a reason no one ever gets up from the table and says, “Excuse me while I go to the ladies’ room and fard.” It seems to be very difficult to make a four-letter word that begins with f sound like an activity that is polite to discuss at the dinner table.

Shea’s selections are fun and edifying, but I was more engaged by his account of his own reading. The decision to dispense with modern technology (no reading on-line, or via overhead projector) and just sit down with the 20 volumes, for eight to 10 hours a day. The headaches, the grayed-out vision, the endless cups of espresso. The explanation of how the OED differs from other dictionaries. The distractions at home (car alarms, neighbors dancing and cooking salt cod) and the subsequent retreat to Hunter College Library. The attempt to introduce some fresh air into the project, which takes him to Central Park and then Hoboken and finally back to his HCL basement corner. His impromptu decision to attend the “biannual” (biennial?) convention of the Dictionary Society of North America, in Chicago. His musings on the word “set,” which alone takes up 25 OED pages. The observation that the OED “does not explain how to pronounce words that have not been in common use for hundreds of years for the simple and very good reason that the editors do not know how the words are pronounced.” (Does this mean that eventually we’ll all be text-messaging instead of talking?)

Brideshead reinterpreted

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:25:22 GMT

The 2008 version goes its own way
“Excuse me, Mr. Waugh, did you see the new movie version of Brideshead Revisited ?”

VIDEO: The trailer for Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Brideshead Revisited | Directed by Julian Jarrold | Written by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh | With Matthew Goode, Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Patrick Malahide, Ed Stoppard, Felicity Jones, Jonathan Cake, Anna Madeley, Joseph Beattie, and Tom Wlaschiha | Miramax | 135 minutes

Bridesheads revisited: The novel and the Granada TV adaptation. By Jeffrey Gantz.

“Excuse me, Mr. Waugh, did you see the new movie version of Brideshead Revisited?”

(Editor’s note: the following exchange took place in an undisclosed location, presumably celestial.)

“New movie? What was wrong with the old one?”

"I believe they’ve updated your book. New and improved is how they like to describe these things.”

“Improved?”

“Well, sir, you still have Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) as a poor — ”

“Poor? Charles? Do they think I wrote The Talented Mr. Ryder?”

“ — student who goes to Oxford and falls in love with Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) and his sister Lady Julia (Hayley Atwell) and their Wiltshire manor, Brideshead (Castle Howard in Yorkshire), and he and Sebastian drink too much, and then the Flytes’ pious mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), takes Charles under his wing. The three young people go to Venice — ”

“Julia goes to Venice with Sebastian and Charles?”

“ — to visit the Flytes’ father, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), who went off to the Great War and stayed on the Continent and took a mistress (Greta Scacchi), and there’s some kind of Carnival — ”

“In Venice in the summer?”

“ — where Charles kisses Julia and Sebastian sees it and gets upset.”

“I didn’t write that.”

“It’s in the script, sir. And Lady Marchmain gets upset too because the Flytes are Anglo-Catholics — ”

“They’re Roman Catholics. As was I.”

“Anglo-Catholics is what it says on the jacket of the new Everyman edition, sir. And Charles can’t marry Julia because she has to marry a Catholic.”

“Lady Marchmain appears to know more about Catholicism than I do.”

“So she gives a ball at Brideshead and announces Lady Julia’s engagement to Rex Mottram (Jonathan Cake).”

“But Lady Marchmain detests Mr. Mottram.”

Big Brown and the Triple Crown

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:30:25 GMT

Business as usual?
Horses may not talk, but money does.

Big Brown’s Top 10 excuses for not winning the Belmont
10 | Weather sucked.
9 | Track was too deep.
8 | Didn’t get my meds.
7 | Jockey wasn’t allowed to wear Hooters logo on pants.
6 | And he wouldn’t let me run when I wanted to.
5 | UPS van was supposed to pick me up on backstretch and give me a breather.
4 | Was just following trainer’s instructions — he said I could lope around the track and still beat this bunch, so I did.
3 | Didn’t want to end up like Eight Belles.
2 | Saving myself for $50 million breeding deal — how many mares is that?

And Big Brown’s #1 excuse for not winning the Belmont:

1 | Uh, what was in it for me?

I had my first dust-up with the Triple Crown racing gods 50 years ago. Tim Tam seemed to be their darling. He was the first three-year-old in 10 years to win both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and the Belmont looked to be at his mercy. He had a snappy name, just like Big Brown, the kind of name that befits a Triple Crown champion. He was owned by Calumet Farm, at that time the New York Yankees of racing stables. His competition was so middling that Lincoln Road, who’d finished second in the Derby and the Preakness, was still eligible for “non-winners of two other than maiden or claiming” races. And of the 11 horses who’d already won the first two legs of the Triple Crown, eight had added the third. Only one had actually lost: Pensive in 1944, collared by the aptly named Bounding Home and beaten a half-length. Neither Burgoo King (1932) nor Bold Venture (1936) made the Belmont, each falling victim to injury after the Preakness.

The sole cloud on Tim Tam’s horizon was Cavan, winner of the major Belmont prep race, the Peter Pan. The bettors couldn’t see it: Tim Tam went off at 3-20. And, like Big Brown, he seemed poised to make the winning move as they headed for Belmont’s far turn. Then, before a disbelieving crowd of 44,000, he limped home, six lengths behind Cavan. He had cracked a sesamoid bone in his right foreleg; he never raced again.

Altar and ego

JEFFREY GANTZ — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:16:40 GMT

Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas

MIRROR IMAGES? Amber Darragh and Craig Biesecker are at their best when they’re dancing with each other.

Boston saw the second-ever set of performances of Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas, in June 1989 (it had premiered in Brussels in March), but apart from a one-afternoon stand in September 1995, the work hasn’t been back. It’s one of his most celebrated pieces: Anna Kisselgoff gave it a mostly favorable review in the New York Times; Thea Singer and Lloyd Schwartz were both enchanted in their 1989 side-by-side Phoenix reviews of the Mark Morris group’s dancing and Emmanuel Music’s performance of Henry Purcell’s circa 1689 opera (with, opening night, no less than the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Dido); and even Laura Jacobs in her New Criterion essay “Bubble Boy” — which takes Mark to task for his more recent efforts — admits to liking the work. I don’t recall whether I saw Dido in 1989 or 1995 or both, but I do remember that I thought it a clunky, tedious, heavy-breathing embodiment of Purcell that exacerbated Baroque opera’s tendency to preen and posture — not to mention moralize. Or was it meant to be camp? At least a decade later, and perhaps a little wiser, I visited the Image Entertainment DVD (which was shot in 1995) in the hope of an more enlightened reaction. All I got was a flashback to James Wolcott’s infamous 2007 Vanity Fair blog “Joanie Loves Chunky,” in which he talks of watching the New Yorker’s “Joan Acocella skipping with Mark Morris across the verdant green with a rose between her teeth as he popped himself open another can of beer.”

Dido and Aeneas is back this week for five performances (three of them remaining: tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm) at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, and Morris, who had always danced two of the work’s lead roles, Dido and the Sorceress, has moved from the stage into the pit, where he’s conducting Emmanuel Music. (These performances are dedicated to Emmanuel Music founder Craig Smith, who died last year; he had led the Brussels premiere and the subsequent Boston dates.) For a time Morris was dividing his former roles: Amber Darragh would do Dido and Bradon McDonald the Sorceress one evening, and then they’d reverse the casting the next night. Now he again has one dancer doing both roles in the same performance, the way a single ballerina does Odette and Odile in SwanLake. Darragh danced Wednesday and last night; McDonald will do the weekend performances.

Sex and the City: The Movie

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:34:54 GMT

Can the hit-and-run half-hour TV format manage to stretch out to 135 minutes without resorting to obvious lessons about love and forgiveness?
What can I tell you about this eagerly awaited film sequel to the 1998–2004 HBO hit that doesn’t involve giving away the story?

Russian revel?

JEFFREY GANTZ — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:11:31 GMT

Looking ahead to Ballets Russes 2009
The Russians are coming!

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO A stand-up entertainer in cuffs that would have pleased Alexandre Benois.

The Russians are coming! Or at least, the Ballets Russes. Next year, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Serge Diaghilev’s creation, Ballets Russes 2009 will bring to Boston a week-long festival — May 16-23 — that will include an academic conference at BU, film screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, lectures at the French Library and Cultural Center, a New England Conservatory performance of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a Boston Pops program of Ballets Russes music, and a Boston Ballet program of Ballets Russes works: Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Fokine’s Le Pavillon d’Armide and Le Spectre de la Rose, and Jorma Elo’s new version of Le Sacre du Printemps. To raise money for, and awareness of, the event, the Ballets Russes 2009 folks staged a “Russian Revel” last night at the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Ballets Russes. Conceived in the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905, when both the Conservatory of Music and the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg went on strike, and born in Paris in 1909, it was the matrix of 20th-century ballet. Its creations included Les Sylphides, Schéhérazade, Firebird, Petrouchka, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Apollon Musagète, and Prodigal Son. Among its stars: choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, and George Balanchine; dancers Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Nijinsky, Serge Lifar, and Alexandra Danilova; set and costume designers Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois; artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braques, Maurice Utrillo, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and Georges Rouault; composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. Diaghilev also presented opera, introducing Paris to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina and Borodin’s Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible (The Maid of Pskov). Indeed, the ethos of the Ballets Russes was an artistic synthesis that had its roots in Diaghilev’s St. Petersburg journal Mir iskusstva (“The World of Art”), which he edited from 1898 to 1904, and his productions were as noted for their sets and costumes as for their choreography and the performances. After his death, in 1929, two touring companies carried on, one (under Serge Denham) as Ballet Russe, the other (under Colonel Vassily de Basil) as the Original Ballet Russe. Their descendants include the Royal Ballet in England and American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet in America.

Mastering the masterpieces

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:46:45 GMT

Boston Ballet takes on Balanchine, Tudor, and Tharp
It’s not exactly a trip down Memory Lane, but this weekend Boston Ballet is revisiting some pieces and choreographers it hasn’t performed in the Mikko Nissinen era.

DARK ELEGIES A simple grace, here performed with simple grace.

Boston Ballet closed its 2007–2008 by revisiting some pieces and choreographers it hasn’t performed in the Mikko Nissinen era: George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, which it last did in 1988; Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies, which it’s never done (the company’s last Tudor work was Jardin aux lilas, in 1990); and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, which it’s had on three programs, most recently in 1995. Memory can play tricks: I “recall” In the Upper Room as being a Big Bang of a dance, but I see that the two mid-1990s reviews I wrote expressed reservations about its ontology. Concerto Barocco, on the other hand, looks simpler and deeper every time I see it, and these performances — I caught all six — were tighter than the ones from 1988. Whether Boston Ballet’s Tudor style has improved I wouldn’t venture to say, but Dark Elegies was a tearjerking effort from a company that hasn’t done him in 18 years.

Concerto Barocco was conceived in New York but first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro, as an American Ballet Caravan presentation in 1941, on the same tour that birthed Ballet Imperial (now Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2). It was part of the very first New York City Ballet evening, on October 11, 1948, but it wasn’t till 1951 that the original fantastical costumes were dropped in favor of practice clothes, and only in the 1960s, as Nancy Goldner reminds us in Balanchine Variations (just out from the University Press of Florida), did the women exchange their black tunics for white. Now it’s hard to imagine the work any other way.

The music, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, is so elemental, so obvious, it seems to be writing itself. So does Balanchine’s choreography. In the first-movement Vivace, two groups of four women each form the backdrop for two solo women who move in unison, in mirror image, in canon. It has the look of submission to the goddess — Diana rather than Venus. The Largo — an infinity of human feeling in just 50 bars — has hardly begun before one woman runs off and a man runs on to dance with the other in Balanchine’s alphabet of arabesques; they twine through the bridesmaid eight as if playing “In and Out the Window” and form a daisy chain like the dancers in the slow movement of Ballet Imperial. Toward the end of the movement, the second woman slides on, diagonally, the man runs off, the two women confer briefly (a warning?) in the same position with which the Largo started, and it begins again, the second woman leaving and the man coming back on. The concluding Allegro brings the backdrop forward, the two soloists growing dueling-passé competitive — over the man? — as well as complementary. Of the man we see nothing further.

Balancing act

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:11:35 GMT

Interview: Mikko Nissinen and Boston Ballet
It’s been quite a year for Boston Ballet.

Mikko Nissinen

It’s been quite a year for Boston Ballet. The company downsized — temporarily, it hopes — by nine dancers. Executive director Valerie Wilder left in March and turned up as director of the Australian Ballet in April. And then the decision was made to move — starting in 2009 — from the Wang Theatre to the Opera House. On the eve of its season-ending “Three Masterpieces” — George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco (set to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto), Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies (set to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder), and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (set to Philip Glass) — BB artistic director Mikko Nissinen reflects on that program and on the company’s status as a big fish trying to survive in a relatively small pond.

How would react if the Boston Ballet board asked you to be the company’s executive director as well as its artistic director?
They’ve already done it. But I think that for the best interests of this organization, we need an excellent executive director. I could do a very good job. But there’s not enough hours in the day to do the artistic director’s job. I’m responsible for the largest school in North America. I have 50 trustees, all 50 overseers, fundraising — I never get to everything I should get to in a single day as an AD. The ED plate is equally impossible. So the answer would be a double madness. I have been pulled already way too much away from the studio over the past several years, and I want to return to the studio and work with the dancers. Lots of dancers came here to work with the repertoire and work with me, and I feel that we’ve had turbulent times and I want to go and help the organization as much as possible when it was most needed. I do start to see the sun rise, and this is the time to return to my original duties. I feel like the first circle has been completed. We’ve started to change the company, and we’ve completed the circle. Now it’s time for round two. While we’re taking one step back, it is with the intention that it is two to three steps forward. So now I will create the next phase of the company. And in the last three months we’ve had tremendous success with fundraising, up and above any of our annual lines, as of today we have over $5 million that will help us with our cash-flow issues, pay down some of the debt, will help us to move to the Opera House, including the renovation of the orchestra pit. This is just in the last three short months. And I want to keep this initiative alive much longer to take care of many things, and then start looking at the company’s 50th anniversary, in 2013. And most likely continue building the fiscal structure. If you have foundation that can support a two-story house and my dream is to build a skyscraper, it would be irresponsible to do it on a foundation that can’t support it. So right now I have been trying to work on the infrastructure, and we will work to create the right financial platform to fulfill our need and do what we intend to do.

Oscar winner?

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:52:15 GMT

The Lyric’s Importance of Being Earnest
The Lyric offers some sly, Wildean touches in a discreetly pruned, generally creditable production.

WHO’S WHO?: In one of the play’s many instances of mistaken identity, Jack tries to embrace Miss
Prism as his long-lost mother.

In his program note for Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest (up through June 7), producing artistic director Spiro Veloudos calls Oscar Wilde’s play “arguably the greatest comedy ever written.” I would argue the point — a few Shakespeare plays come to mind, and that’s just in English — but Earnest alone would justify Veloudos’s continuation that “we should never think of Wilde as simply a manipulator of language; he was, indeed, one of the great social commentators of his time.” Of course, language in Wilde is social commentary. It’s too bad you ever have to see the title of this play: when you hear Algernon pronounce its famous final line, you can’t tell whether he’s discovered the importance of being earnest or Ernest.

By any name, E(a)rnest is about honesty and identity and our blithe disregard for the meaning of the words we speak. Algernon Montcrief and John (goes by Jack) Worthing would like to be earnest, but that’s generally beyond them. Both would also like to be Ernest, because the woman each loves — Jack’s ward Cecily and Algernon’s cousin Gwendolen — has determined, independently, that she could never marry a man who isn’t named Ernest. It’s as if Cecily and Gwendolen had decided that if they can’t have earnest (and in Wilde’s world that’s never likely), they can at least have Ernest — a conclusion that has both Jack and Algernon posing as Jack’s (non-existent) younger brother, Ernest. That’s just the start; the play takes on overtones of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte as you wonder why Algernon is so eager to keep Jack away from Gwendolen and Jack likewise to keep Algernon away from Cecily. And we haven’t touched on Jack and Algernon’s feelings for each other. It’s a play about honesty and identities — how we’re all more than one person. At the end, Jack discovers that he has two names: Ernest John.

The Shakespeare mystery

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:02:57 GMT

Everything (almost) you wanted to know about Cardenio but were afraid to ask
What Shakespeare wrote and what he didn’t — even without bringing the Earl of Oxford into it — is one of literature’s most enduring and enjoyable mysteries.

What Shakespeare wrote and what he didn’t — even without bringing the Earl of Oxford into it — is one of literature’s most enduring and enjoyable mysteries, and this week it’s front and center as the American Repertory Theatre opens Cardenio, a work by playwright Charles Mee and Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt that’s inspired by “Shakespeare’s Cardenio.” That’s quite a feat, of course, since we don’t possess Shakespeare’s Cardenio. We have plays in the First Folio that others are thought to have had a hand in: Titus Andronicus, the Henry VI trio, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII. We have plays not in the First Folio that Shakespeare is thought to have had a hand in — notably Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen. We have plays — lots of them — that were later attributed to Shakespeare but no one believes he wrote, like The Birth of Merlin and Sir John Oldcastle. And we have plays attributed to Shakespeare that haven’t survived. No one knows whether Love’s Labour’s Won is a lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost or an alternate name for another play (say, Much Ado About Nothing). And then there’s Cardenio, about which we know only that the subject matter would have come from a story in part one of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and that the King’s Men — Shakespeare’s company — presented the play at court in 1613. Here’s everything you didn’t know you wanted to know about Cardenio. . .

What does Cardenio do in Don Quixote?
He tries to wed the beautiful Luscinda, but before he can get his father to ask her father for her hand, his father sends him off to be the companion of Don Fernando, the second son of Duke Ricardo. When Cardenio tells Don Fernando of his love for Luscinda, Don Fernando undertakes to ask her father’s consent on Cardenio’s behalf, but in fact he obtains it on his own behalf. When Cardenio learns what’s happened, he goes mad and runs away, eventually stumbling on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and telling his story. They then come upon a peasant youth who turns out to be a beautiful village girl, Dorotea, whom Don Fernando has seduced. Everyone proceeds to an inn, where Don Quixote does battle with some feisty red-wine skins, and in due course Don Fernando and Luscinda turn up, not quite married — she fainted at the ceremony, he fled, she took refuge in a monastery, he abducted her from it. Cardenio and Luscinda are reunited and Don Fernando is prevailed upon to abandon his claim to Luscinda and honor the promise he made to marry Dorotea.

Big pond, little pond

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:23:43 GMT

Swan Lake in Boston and Providence
Swan Lake is ballet’s prima ballerina because, 131 years after its Moscow premiere, it’s still poised on pointe.

NASCENT SWAN: Vilia Putrius was emotionally and technically nervous but didn’t let the side down.

Swan Lake is ballet’s prima ballerina because, 131 years after its Moscow premiere, it’s still poised on pointe. You have a woman who’s the object of two men (though Rothbart as Odette’s lover always get short shrift) and a man who pledges his troth to two women (played by the same ballerina). You wonder what Siegfried is thinking when, as he’s about to be auctioned off to his mother’s choice of princess bride, Rothbart runs on with Odile — does he think she’s Odette in a sexy black negligee? It’s a ballet that anticipates Tchaikovsky’s own life: the year after Siegfried first said no to conventional marriage, the homosexual composer made the mistake of saying yes to Antonina Milyukova. It’s a ballet with two endings: there’s the traditional one, where Siegfried and Odette throw themselves into the lake (since he can no longer break her spell) and free the other swans from Rothbart’s magic, and the Soviet happy one, where Siegfried, never mind his philandering, beats up Rothbart in a fair fight, frees everyone, and lives happily ever after with Odette in the palace rather than in some misty swan heaven. From the first note you’re not sure where you are: the oboe’s F-sharp could belong to B minor or B major. When it’s over, you’re not sure where you’ve been, whether it’s all Siegfried’s dream or yours.

Swan Lake is also the ballet to end your season with, and this season that’s what both Festival Ballet Providence and Boston Ballet are doing. (Boston Ballet is appending a “Three Masterpieces” coda, but the Swan Lake feels like the big finish.) FBP gave three performances April 25-27, with choreography by artistic director Mihailo Djuric and ballet mistress Milica Bijelic (after Ivanov and Petipa, of course), a set (from Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre) that looked very much like the one Boston Ballet used to have, and an Odette/Odile (in the performance I saw Sunday), Vilia Putrius, who used to be a member of the Boston Ballet corps. You might wonder how Putrius could go from not being offered a new contract in Boston to dancing ballet’s prima ballerina role in Providence, and what that says about the two companies. (Providence makes do with Boston corps leftovers? Boston overlooks rising star?) Putrius gave a creditable performance that was emotionally nervous and technically unstable; she didn’t let the side down, but it wouldn’t pass muster in Boston.

Oppositions

JEFFREY GANTZ — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:54:04 GMT

The Kirov's Balanchine at City Center
The end of a three-week, thousands-of-miles-from-home season is never the right time to assess a dance company.

SERENADE: Glorious Kirov, glorious Balanchine — until the ladies didn’t let their hair down.

NEW YORK — The end of a three-week, thousands-of-miles-from-home season is never the right time to assess a dance company, and that’s multiply true of the Kirov Ballet’s engagement at New York City Center, which ended this past Sunday. The usuals — injuries; tired, jaded dancers; audience-demoralizing last-minute substitutions — were just the beginning. Having found no room at the Metropolitan Opera House, where it had performed La Bayadère, Don Quixote, Swan Lake, and George Balanchine’s Jewels at the 2002 summer Lincoln Center Festival, the company had to settle for the theater that Balanchine and New York City Ballet abandoned in 1964 for the new and more capacious New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. (One apparent casualty of the smaller space was the “Kingdom of the Shades” entrance from the third act of La Bayadère, which was performed without the zigzag ramp.) Back home in St. Petersburg, meanwhile — well, that was the problem: the Kirov’s director, Makhar Vaziev, was back home, having failed to make the trip, amid rumors that he’s about to retire. Vaziev and Valery Gergiev, the general director of the Mariinsky Theatre (where the Kirov is based), do not see eye to eye these days; Gergiev — who, depending on who you talk to, does or doesn’t know jack about ballet — has criticized Vaziev in everything from choreography to casting and training. At home, the company is again known as the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (both the theater and the troupe were named for Maria Aleksandrovna, wife of Tsar Aleksandr II), but it still tours under the familiar — to Westerners — name of the Leningrad Communist Party leader, Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in 1934. Peter the Great had no brand-name guarantees when he built St. Petersburg in a swamp; perhaps this company should imitate him and go forward under the appellation it prefers.

The last time the Kirov appeared in Boston, in November 2006, it was to perform Swan Lake, at the Wang Theatre. There were no evening-length ballets at the City Center, only programs of Petipa (excerpts from Paquita, Raymonda, and La Bayadère) and Fokine (Chopiniana, Le spectre de la rose, The Dying Swan, Sheherazade) and William Forsythe (Steptext, Approximate Sonata, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated), with the odd Vaganova (the Diana and Acteon pas de deux) and Harald Lander (Études) thrown in. Reviewing the opening Petipa program, Alastair Macaulay in the New York Times fired the first critical shot: “The Kirov is one of those ballet companies that too often present show-off steps as if the art lay nakedly in nothing but excellence of technical execution.” Freelancing for the Village Voice (the Paper That Used To Have a Dance Critic), Deborah Jowitt seemed to have had a better time: “The women sparkle like perfectly cut diamonds. You may occasionally fault their phrasing or their lack of emotional nuance, but never their technique.” Everybody noticed principal Uliana Lopatkina’s chin pointed defiantly at the upper balcony.

Opera superstar 101

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:44:27 GMT

At 67, Plácido Dominingo makes his Boston concert Debut
Domingo put his arm around Martínez and whirled her around the stage, asking the audience to sing in their stead.

GIVE THEM ZARZUELA: The best of the duets with Ana María Martínez was the one from Manuel Penella’s El gato montés.

The last time I saw Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo — well, the last time I saw him was at a press conference this past Friday evening at the Taj Hotel, where he charmed a contingent of some 30 journalists with his modesty and good humor. But the last — and in fact the only — time I had seen him on stage was at the Met in February 2000, where he sang Danilo to Frederica von Stade’s Hanna in the Met’s first ever production, in English, of Franz Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow). It was a stolid, unengaging affair: Domingo and Stade couldn’t even manage to waltz with conviction. (John Simon’s New York magazine review was headlined, “Some Like It Tepid.”) He did better — waltzing, at least — with Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez at the Wang Theatre, where last Monday his current “Around the World” tour made its first American stop.

The tour itself is a puzzle: a press release described Boston as “one of only three U.S. performances,” but the other two have yet to be identified, and it seems that “Around the World” is really just whatever turns up on Domingo’s worldwide concert schedule. He had been scheduled to make his “first-ever full concert appearance in Boston” last September 28, at the TD Banknorth Garden, but the date was scrubbed after the death, on September 6, of fellow superstar Luciano Pavarotti. Some wondered whether soft ticket sales could have encouraged the cancellation. In the event, the concert was rescheduled for the smaller Wang Theatre, even though the Garden seems to have been available Monday night. Top price was $250, and the orchestra, at least, was pretty well filled, amid reports of people outside begging for tickets. Domingo was joined by his protégée Martínez (she won his Operalia Competition in 1995) plus veteran conductor Eugene Kohn leading a full-sized (I counted 40 strings) local pick-up ensemble — “Symphony Orchestra, Boston” — among whose members one could spot many familiar Boston Ballet Orchestra faces.