On Tuesday night, my parents and Joshua and I went to Saint Paul to hear pianist Andre Watts in recital at the Ordway Center. Watts’s Twin Cities appearance, sponsored by The Schubert Club, was devoted to the music of Franz Liszt. The program Watts offered local audiences was identical to the all-Liszt program he has been playing throughout the country since the beginning of the year.
Watts is a natural pianist, with a beautiful and refined technique. His hands and arms are “placed” naturally and gracefully at all times; his upper body remains erect and relaxed while he is at the keyboard; his finger work is superb. Watts was clearly the beneficiary of excellent basic instruction when he was a child. It was a pleasure to observe him in action, because one may no longer assume that pianists possess classic technique, as we observed only a few nights ago when we saw and heard Jeremy Denk come to grief in the music of Beethoven in the very same hall.
While Watts is a commanding pianist, I am not confident that Watts is a commanding musician. He is a fine but perhaps not considerable interpreter of mainstream piano literature. In a career nearing the half-century mark, Watts has never asserted unique authority in the music of any particular composer or period (although he has devoted much time and attention to Schubert and Liszt in the last two decades). Watts plays a broad range of repertory, and he plays it well—but he plays none of it memorably.
The music of Liszt is not important to me. I very seldom listen to Liszt, although I happen to like and admire the tone poems for orchestra—remaining fully aware that they are, by and large, problematic works. I even enjoy the tone poem, Festklänge (a work Robert Craft has singled out as one of the worst compositions ever penned by a major composer), although I realize that the piece is free of content.
The piano music of Liszt is another matter. On the whole, I am indifferent, although some of the late pieces are, admittedly, fascinating. The merits and demerits of Liszt’s piano compositions have been debated endlessly for well over a century, and I am familiar with all the arguments—and I remain largely uninterested in the arguments, and largely uninterested in the music.
One fact I have always found odd: Pierre Boulez, of all persons, performed a great deal of Liszt in his early years as a conductor. In the early 1970s, Boulez even devoted an entire season at the New York Philharmonic to an exploration of Liszt (Boulez has since dropped Liszt from his repertory).
Contrary to my expectations, I enjoyed Watts’s recital. Watts tended to overplay, and he did a bit of showboating, but I enjoyed the recital because I enjoyed the music.
Watts began with the familiar Concert Etude No. 3 (“Un Suspiro”), a warm-up both for the pianist and for the audience. Watts continued with an excerpt from Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, the beautiful Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este.
The Sonata In B Minor concluded the first half of the program. Watts held my full attention in this much-performed work, something I did not anticipate—and which I held in high regard.
The second half of the recital was even better. Watts began with five late pieces, all gems—Bagatelle Ohne Tonart; Nuages Gris; En Rêve; La Lugubre Gondola II (which American composer John Adams has arranged for orchestra); and Schlaflos! Frage Und Antwort—and concluded with three show-stoppers: the Etude No. 2 from Six Grand Etudes After Paganini; the Transcendental Etude No. 10; and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13. All were handsomely if not quite brilliantly played, and I can imagine only half a dozen living pianists that might be superior in this repertory (starting with Pollini and Kissin).
I was not bored for one minute all night, either with Liszt or with Watts.
That renders the concert a great success in my eyes.
(My parents and Josh, however, were less impressed than I. Perhaps I experienced an odd night on which I was somehow susceptible to succumbing to Liszt.)
In the days before the concert, we had been prepared for a cancellation. Watts has cancelled several recitals this year on short notice, including one recital only a week or two prior to his appearance in Saint Paul. On Tuesday afternoon, my mother confirmed that the recital would proceed as scheduled—and my father confirmed that Watts, indeed, was in town.
Without such confirmations, we would not have left home.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Good . . . And The Bad And The Ugly
The University Of Minnesota Marching Band (“The Pride Of Minnesota”) in its fixed pre-game presentation, a complicated set of maneuvers based on variations of the letter “M” that has been performed for what must be generations. No matter how many times I see it, it always gives me chills. It may be the best block-formation routine ever created, and is 100 times more sophisticated than the silly spelling routine for which the Ohio State Marching Band is renowned.
The faintly ridiculous if not borderline grotesque Jeremy Denk, mooning for the audience at a recent New York recital.
Dink Thenk
Last night, after a full day of playing with the kids (and the dog) as well as having a go at the mountains of food left over from Thanksgiving, my parents and Joshua and I went to Saint Paul to hear a concert by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. It was the first Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra concert of the season for all of us.
It was the music that drew us to Ordway Center, not the guest artists. British conductor Douglas Boyd, a very minor talent who has worked with the SPCO on and off for years, was on the podium. Pianist Jeremy Denk, an even more insignificant figure, was guest soloist.
The concert featured one modern work: Australian composer Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, a one-movement quarter-hour work for chamber orchestra. Written in 2000 and premiered in 2001, the Pastoral Symphony incorporates taped sounds: birdsong “dramatically contrasted with industrial and mechanical sounds of environmental degradation”, i.e., the sounds of chainsaws chopping down trees.
The work is as deadly earnest and dreadfully clichéd as the composer’s program notes suggest. Quiet birdsong begins the piece, after which volume mounts until what is supposed to be a climax is reached—this is where the chain saws come in—after which the piece ends in what is, I believe, supposed to be an elegy. Any competent composer could write a devastating parody of the piece without altering a single gesture.
In comparison to the sheer silliness and utter ineptitude of Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, George Antheil’s feeble Ballet Mecanique and Einojuhani Rautavaara’s even-more-feeble Cantus Arcticus—two unsuccessful compositions that bear some surface programmatic similarities to Dean’s effort—become incomparable masterpieces.
Dean, a violist as well as composer, writes well for violin and viola—at least from a technical standpoint. Practitioners of those instruments relate that Dean knows how to write idiomatically and gratefully for solo violin and solo viola. Violinists Midori and Frank Peter Zimmermann, among others, have taken up various Dean compositions for violin.
Dean’s orchestral music, however, is another matter. Dean’s orchestral music is unimaginative and unoriginal. It lacks ideas, it lacks profile, it lacks personality, it lacks character. In fact, Dean does not even write competently for orchestra: his orchestral music does not “sound”. In all of these respects, Dean strikes me as Australia’s answer to American composer Stephen Hartke, whose bland, faceless music shares the same attributes.
Indeed, Dean’s Pastoral Symphony has numerous—and eerie—parallels with Hartke’s 1988 composition, Pacific Rim: both works strive so hard to be trendy, using every popular device of the moment, that both were incongruously—and gruesomely—outdated even before final drafts were sent to copyists.
Dean is not very talented. His composition ideas are thin—if they can be called ideas—and he does not know how to work them out. Dean’s music does not develop, it does not attain climaxes, it does not resolve, it does not cohere. It’s thin, tonal stuff, without rhythmic interest, without complexity, without strong organizing principles, and might as well have been written in 1890 for all the interest in modernism it displays. (Dean does, however, know how to write a satisfactory chromatic harmonic progression, about the only thing he does well.)
Simon Rattle is the single conductor of note who has taken up Dean’s music—Dean for years played in the viola section of Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic—and Rattle’s advocacy is not particularly meaningful, since Rattle has never shown himself to be a good judge of contemporary composition. No other high-profile conductor has ever touched Dean’s work-list.
Boyd and the SPCO gave a clean performance of the Pastoral Symphony, cleaner than the Swedish Chamber Orchestra performance recorded for the BIS label and issued a few years back. However, the SPCO musicians revealed no surprises and no unexpected depths in the score.
Programming Dean’s Pastoral Symphony was a waste of the orchestra’s and the audience’s time. In a concert otherwise devoted to music of Beethoven and Brahms, the orchestra should have programmed a fifteen-minute piece by Luciano Berio instead of Dean. Berio’s music can stand up to Beethoven and Brahms; Dean’s music cannot.
The Serenade No. 2 of Brahms opened the program. It was the highlight of the evening.
Scored for violas, cellos, double basses, two flutes (with one flautist doubling as piccolo in the final movement), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns, the Serenade No. 2 has a dark, solemn coloration, seemingly not in keeping with the serenade form. Brilliance is not allowed. High strings are omitted from the instrumentation, as are high brass and percussion.
And yet the work is charming, ear-beguiling and radiant, surely standards by which a serenade may be judged. Brahms enlarged and deepened the serenades of Mozart, but he did not abandon the requirement that serenades, above all, be pleasurable.
Two years ago, Orrin Howard captured the essence of this early five-movement work of Brahms in program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic:
The lilt, the warmth, the gracious melodies, and the enlivening cross rhythms [are what] give distinction to a work that ESSENTIALLY fits the definition of a serenade.
A solemn and extended sonata-form Allegro begins the serenade; a brilliant and extended Rondo concludes it. At its center lies a profound and extended Adagio, framed by a brief Scherzo and a brief Minuet. The Adagio has the gravity and simplicity of Bach, and is the heart of the Serenade No. 2.
Boyd and the SPCO offered a plain, surface performance of Serenade No. 2, missing opportunities to revel in luxuriousness of sound and ignoring undercurrents of melancholy that permeate the work.
Nevertheless, I am always happy to hear the Brahms Serenade No. 2—the work is not often programmed—and I was happy to hear it last night.
Oddly, the Minnesota Orchestra will play the Brahms Serenade No. 2 in the third week of January, less than two months from now. I doubt that the Serenade No. 2 has ever previously been programmed by both local ensembles in the same season.
The Brahms should have been played last on the SPCO program, but the SPCO placed the Brahms before intermission, offering Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as the concluding work of the evening.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 is a very easy piece to play—it is easy for the orchestra, easy for the conductor, easy for the pianist—but it is also one of the most appealing of Beethoven’s early works. The Concerto No. 1, buoyantly infectious, brims with energy and high spirits and good humor. One need simply play the notes on the printed page, and the full effect of the work comes across. It was not until his Concerto No. 3 that Beethoven wrote a piano concerto in which the notes themselves are merely the starting point.
Alas, few of the attractions of the Piano Concerto No. 1 registered last night because the pianist was inadequate.
No one claims Denk to be a virtuoso—he does not possess even a satisfactory technique—but his playing last night was shockingly poor. Any competent pianist can toss off the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 while sleeping, but Denk was operating at the outer reaches of his technical capacity in the most rudimentary passagework. Even simple scales were not delivered cleanly and evenly.
The first movement of the concerto was singularly lacking in drama, weight and forward propulsion. There was a choppy, start-and-stop quality to Denk’s playing, and no interplay with conductor and orchestra. Denk had trouble finding and keeping a basic pulse, and demonstrated a pronounced tendency to rush things whenever a moderately demanding passage approached.
Denk made absolutely nothing of the slow movement. It was interminable in his hands—shapeless, wandering, expressionless—and lacked tension and lyricism.
The final movement had no rhythmic bite, no sense of momentum, no suggestion of having reached a resolution at its conclusion.
One of Denk’s technical problems is that he places his bench too far from his keyboard. This unsuitable placement affects his shoulders, upper arms and lower arms, none of which are relaxed enough to produce a pleasing sound from his instrument and none of which are in the proper placement for producing power without strain. I could not help but notice that Denk frequently turned his upper body from side to side whenever he had to address the far ends of his keyboard—a pedagogical issue that should have been addressed before he was ten years old—and I could not help but notice that Denk had to stretch and contort his entire body (Denk has very short legs) in order to reach his instrument’s pedals. The latter absurdity produced several delicious moments of comedy during Denk’s performance—moments that were, according to my father, well worth the price of admission.
I had not seen Denk since February 2008, when I had heard him in joint recital with Joshua Bell in the same hall in Saint Paul. Denk, not a handsome man, has put on weight in the last forty-five months, and is starting to develop an alarming if not frightening facial resemblance to James Levine.
On our way back to Edina after the concert, my father said, “Well, I suppose we’ll have to put on the Kempff/Van Kempen the very minute we get home to get this disaster out of our minds. Otherwise, we’ll be prone to nightmares.” My father was referring to the celebrated early-1950s Wilhelm Kempff/Paul Van Kempen/Berlin Philharmonic mono recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, perhaps my father’s favorite recorded account of the work.
When we arrived home, however, we did not bother to cleanse our minds and souls with Kempff/Van Kempen—it was getting late, and the dog wanted some attention, and we were ready to eat more Thanksgiving food (cold turkey and cold Brussels sprouts) before turning in.
Today is the final game of the season for the Golden Gophers. Minnesota will host Illinois this afternoon, and the game will be played in the Twin Cities.
My brothers will attend the game, but my father has decided to skip the game and to stay home and to play with his grandchildren.
In my father’s place, my sister-in-law will attend her very first American college football game. She has no interest in sports, and she knows next-to-nothing about American college football, but she decided on Friday that she would like to go to one college football game to see what all the excitement was about. My brothers will take good care of her.
I predict she will enjoy the pre-game ceremonies and festivities, and the halftime show.
After all, The University Of Minnesota Marching Band (“The Pride Of Minnesota”), marching since 1892 and performing block-formation halftime shows since 1910, is very, very good.
I doubt, however, that my sister-in-law will be impressed with blocking and tackling, passing and punting, or first downs and field goals.
It was the music that drew us to Ordway Center, not the guest artists. British conductor Douglas Boyd, a very minor talent who has worked with the SPCO on and off for years, was on the podium. Pianist Jeremy Denk, an even more insignificant figure, was guest soloist.
The concert featured one modern work: Australian composer Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, a one-movement quarter-hour work for chamber orchestra. Written in 2000 and premiered in 2001, the Pastoral Symphony incorporates taped sounds: birdsong “dramatically contrasted with industrial and mechanical sounds of environmental degradation”, i.e., the sounds of chainsaws chopping down trees.
The work is as deadly earnest and dreadfully clichéd as the composer’s program notes suggest. Quiet birdsong begins the piece, after which volume mounts until what is supposed to be a climax is reached—this is where the chain saws come in—after which the piece ends in what is, I believe, supposed to be an elegy. Any competent composer could write a devastating parody of the piece without altering a single gesture.
In comparison to the sheer silliness and utter ineptitude of Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, George Antheil’s feeble Ballet Mecanique and Einojuhani Rautavaara’s even-more-feeble Cantus Arcticus—two unsuccessful compositions that bear some surface programmatic similarities to Dean’s effort—become incomparable masterpieces.
Dean, a violist as well as composer, writes well for violin and viola—at least from a technical standpoint. Practitioners of those instruments relate that Dean knows how to write idiomatically and gratefully for solo violin and solo viola. Violinists Midori and Frank Peter Zimmermann, among others, have taken up various Dean compositions for violin.
Dean’s orchestral music, however, is another matter. Dean’s orchestral music is unimaginative and unoriginal. It lacks ideas, it lacks profile, it lacks personality, it lacks character. In fact, Dean does not even write competently for orchestra: his orchestral music does not “sound”. In all of these respects, Dean strikes me as Australia’s answer to American composer Stephen Hartke, whose bland, faceless music shares the same attributes.
Indeed, Dean’s Pastoral Symphony has numerous—and eerie—parallels with Hartke’s 1988 composition, Pacific Rim: both works strive so hard to be trendy, using every popular device of the moment, that both were incongruously—and gruesomely—outdated even before final drafts were sent to copyists.
Dean is not very talented. His composition ideas are thin—if they can be called ideas—and he does not know how to work them out. Dean’s music does not develop, it does not attain climaxes, it does not resolve, it does not cohere. It’s thin, tonal stuff, without rhythmic interest, without complexity, without strong organizing principles, and might as well have been written in 1890 for all the interest in modernism it displays. (Dean does, however, know how to write a satisfactory chromatic harmonic progression, about the only thing he does well.)
Simon Rattle is the single conductor of note who has taken up Dean’s music—Dean for years played in the viola section of Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic—and Rattle’s advocacy is not particularly meaningful, since Rattle has never shown himself to be a good judge of contemporary composition. No other high-profile conductor has ever touched Dean’s work-list.
Boyd and the SPCO gave a clean performance of the Pastoral Symphony, cleaner than the Swedish Chamber Orchestra performance recorded for the BIS label and issued a few years back. However, the SPCO musicians revealed no surprises and no unexpected depths in the score.
Programming Dean’s Pastoral Symphony was a waste of the orchestra’s and the audience’s time. In a concert otherwise devoted to music of Beethoven and Brahms, the orchestra should have programmed a fifteen-minute piece by Luciano Berio instead of Dean. Berio’s music can stand up to Beethoven and Brahms; Dean’s music cannot.
The Serenade No. 2 of Brahms opened the program. It was the highlight of the evening.
Scored for violas, cellos, double basses, two flutes (with one flautist doubling as piccolo in the final movement), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns, the Serenade No. 2 has a dark, solemn coloration, seemingly not in keeping with the serenade form. Brilliance is not allowed. High strings are omitted from the instrumentation, as are high brass and percussion.
And yet the work is charming, ear-beguiling and radiant, surely standards by which a serenade may be judged. Brahms enlarged and deepened the serenades of Mozart, but he did not abandon the requirement that serenades, above all, be pleasurable.
Two years ago, Orrin Howard captured the essence of this early five-movement work of Brahms in program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic:
The lilt, the warmth, the gracious melodies, and the enlivening cross rhythms [are what] give distinction to a work that ESSENTIALLY fits the definition of a serenade.
A solemn and extended sonata-form Allegro begins the serenade; a brilliant and extended Rondo concludes it. At its center lies a profound and extended Adagio, framed by a brief Scherzo and a brief Minuet. The Adagio has the gravity and simplicity of Bach, and is the heart of the Serenade No. 2.
Boyd and the SPCO offered a plain, surface performance of Serenade No. 2, missing opportunities to revel in luxuriousness of sound and ignoring undercurrents of melancholy that permeate the work.
Nevertheless, I am always happy to hear the Brahms Serenade No. 2—the work is not often programmed—and I was happy to hear it last night.
Oddly, the Minnesota Orchestra will play the Brahms Serenade No. 2 in the third week of January, less than two months from now. I doubt that the Serenade No. 2 has ever previously been programmed by both local ensembles in the same season.
The Brahms should have been played last on the SPCO program, but the SPCO placed the Brahms before intermission, offering Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as the concluding work of the evening.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 is a very easy piece to play—it is easy for the orchestra, easy for the conductor, easy for the pianist—but it is also one of the most appealing of Beethoven’s early works. The Concerto No. 1, buoyantly infectious, brims with energy and high spirits and good humor. One need simply play the notes on the printed page, and the full effect of the work comes across. It was not until his Concerto No. 3 that Beethoven wrote a piano concerto in which the notes themselves are merely the starting point.
Alas, few of the attractions of the Piano Concerto No. 1 registered last night because the pianist was inadequate.
No one claims Denk to be a virtuoso—he does not possess even a satisfactory technique—but his playing last night was shockingly poor. Any competent pianist can toss off the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 while sleeping, but Denk was operating at the outer reaches of his technical capacity in the most rudimentary passagework. Even simple scales were not delivered cleanly and evenly.
The first movement of the concerto was singularly lacking in drama, weight and forward propulsion. There was a choppy, start-and-stop quality to Denk’s playing, and no interplay with conductor and orchestra. Denk had trouble finding and keeping a basic pulse, and demonstrated a pronounced tendency to rush things whenever a moderately demanding passage approached.
Denk made absolutely nothing of the slow movement. It was interminable in his hands—shapeless, wandering, expressionless—and lacked tension and lyricism.
The final movement had no rhythmic bite, no sense of momentum, no suggestion of having reached a resolution at its conclusion.
One of Denk’s technical problems is that he places his bench too far from his keyboard. This unsuitable placement affects his shoulders, upper arms and lower arms, none of which are relaxed enough to produce a pleasing sound from his instrument and none of which are in the proper placement for producing power without strain. I could not help but notice that Denk frequently turned his upper body from side to side whenever he had to address the far ends of his keyboard—a pedagogical issue that should have been addressed before he was ten years old—and I could not help but notice that Denk had to stretch and contort his entire body (Denk has very short legs) in order to reach his instrument’s pedals. The latter absurdity produced several delicious moments of comedy during Denk’s performance—moments that were, according to my father, well worth the price of admission.
I had not seen Denk since February 2008, when I had heard him in joint recital with Joshua Bell in the same hall in Saint Paul. Denk, not a handsome man, has put on weight in the last forty-five months, and is starting to develop an alarming if not frightening facial resemblance to James Levine.
On our way back to Edina after the concert, my father said, “Well, I suppose we’ll have to put on the Kempff/Van Kempen the very minute we get home to get this disaster out of our minds. Otherwise, we’ll be prone to nightmares.” My father was referring to the celebrated early-1950s Wilhelm Kempff/Paul Van Kempen/Berlin Philharmonic mono recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, perhaps my father’s favorite recorded account of the work.
When we arrived home, however, we did not bother to cleanse our minds and souls with Kempff/Van Kempen—it was getting late, and the dog wanted some attention, and we were ready to eat more Thanksgiving food (cold turkey and cold Brussels sprouts) before turning in.
Today is the final game of the season for the Golden Gophers. Minnesota will host Illinois this afternoon, and the game will be played in the Twin Cities.
My brothers will attend the game, but my father has decided to skip the game and to stay home and to play with his grandchildren.
In my father’s place, my sister-in-law will attend her very first American college football game. She has no interest in sports, and she knows next-to-nothing about American college football, but she decided on Friday that she would like to go to one college football game to see what all the excitement was about. My brothers will take good care of her.
I predict she will enjoy the pre-game ceremonies and festivities, and the halftime show.
After all, The University Of Minnesota Marching Band (“The Pride Of Minnesota”), marching since 1892 and performing block-formation halftime shows since 1910, is very, very good.
I doubt, however, that my sister-in-law will be impressed with blocking and tackling, passing and punting, or first downs and field goals.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Eager To Keep Going
We sat down to eat Thanksgiving Dinner at 5:30 p.m.
My mother (with help from numerous hands) had prepared:
Everyone ate only a tablespoon of everything. Nevertheless, when it came time for dessert, everyone had already had enough to eat. As a consequence, everyone ate one tiny sliver of pie, and called it a day.
Leftovers (including leftover Dutch Chowder, which we had for lunch) will carry us through the rest of the weekend.
When we eat Thanksgiving leftovers, we reheat nothing. We eat everything cold. As a general rule, cooked food tastes better chilled than reheated, and is not as prone to dry out.
The kids enjoyed their Thanksgiving Dinner.
The dog enjoyed his Thanksgiving Dinner.
And we enjoyed ours, too.
(Of course, the dog was cheated out of turkey, as dogs cannot be fed turkey. He was, nonetheless, quite happy with his chicken and ham—and he was the only one in the household eager to keep going when it came time for dessert.)
My mother (with help from numerous hands) had prepared:
- A honey-glazed baked ham
- A giant-sized roast turkey with herb stuffing
- Two large-sized roast chickens with herb stuffing
- Oyster-herb stuffing, baked separately
- Homemade butter noodles
- Mashed potatoes
- Candied sweet potatoes
- Whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple
- Fresh green beans, with almonds
- Shoepeg white corn
- Fresh baby carrots
- Fresh parsnips
- Brussels sprouts
- Red cabbage baked in cream and butter
- Fresh cranberries in light syrup
- Cranberry-orange relish
- Cranberry-tangerine-cream cheese-nut salad
- Homemade dinner rolls
- A relish tray of Amish pickles
- Pumpkin pie
- Pumpkin-custard pie
- Pecan pie
- Cranberry-walnut pie
- Sour cream-raisin-brandy pie
Everyone ate only a tablespoon of everything. Nevertheless, when it came time for dessert, everyone had already had enough to eat. As a consequence, everyone ate one tiny sliver of pie, and called it a day.
Leftovers (including leftover Dutch Chowder, which we had for lunch) will carry us through the rest of the weekend.
When we eat Thanksgiving leftovers, we reheat nothing. We eat everything cold. As a general rule, cooked food tastes better chilled than reheated, and is not as prone to dry out.
The kids enjoyed their Thanksgiving Dinner.
The dog enjoyed his Thanksgiving Dinner.
And we enjoyed ours, too.
(Of course, the dog was cheated out of turkey, as dogs cannot be fed turkey. He was, nonetheless, quite happy with his chicken and ham—and he was the only one in the household eager to keep going when it came time for dessert.)
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Fast And Furious
On Friday evening, Joshua and I and my middle brother remained downtown after work and attended a performance of Doug Wright’s play, “I Am My Own Wife”, at Jungle Theater.
For Josh and me, it was our second encounter with this one-actor play about an East German transvestite who survived both the Nazi and Communist regimes—but at a price: by serving as an informant for the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police. Josh and I had attended a performance of “I Am My Own Wife” in February 2010 at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.
The Signature Theatre production had not been good. The actor in the Arlington production had proven himself inadequate to the assignment; he was simply unable to carry the show (although we saw the same actor portray a more than creditable Frank in “Educating Rita” thirteen months later in Boston). In Arlington, the entire production had reeked of a small-college drama project.
The Jungle Theater production of “I Am My Own Wife” has received much acclaim, and has set the Twin Cities theater community abuzz (not always a good sign). Because word-of-mouth has been so positive, Josh and I decided to see the play again—and my brother decided he wanted to see the play, too.
Although the same actor and same director had been involved in an earlier Jungle Theater presentation of “I Am My Own Wife”, both have claimed in recent press interviews that the “new” Jungle Theater production is not a revival of that earlier production but a fresh examination of the same material.
Whether revival or new production, the current “I Am My Own Wife” at Jungle Theater is very fine, and vastly superior to the Signature Theatre production we attended twenty-one months ago. The actor onstage at Jungle Theater was seamless in moving from character to character (he is called upon to portray almost forty different characters). As a result, the pace of the show was much quicker at Jungle Theater than at Signature Theatre. The stage design, lighting design and sound design were much better in Minneapolis, too; all conspired to assist the single actor in portraying numerous roles and in holding the audience’s attention for two hours.
The same actor had portrayed Claudius in Jungle Theater’s recent production of “Hamlet”, which Josh and I had seen last month. An undistinguished if not unsatisfactory Claudius, the actor was a joy to watch in “I Am My Own Wife”.
Before the performance, we ate dinner at a nondescript Chinese restaurant. We ordered egg rolls and General Tso’s Chicken.
On Saturday, Joshua’s birthday, Josh and I stayed in, doing work around the house.
My grandmother has been fussing of late at the care facility, and my mother has been spending a good portion of recent days at her mother’s side. On Saturday, both my mother and my father spent most of the day with my grandmother at the care facility.
My older brother’s family stayed home Saturday, too, as did my middle brother. It was a day for everyone to stay home and catch up on household chores.
My parents came home from the care facility at 5:00 p.m.—and, as soon as I saw my mother’s face, I knew it was impossible to contemplate attending that evening’s performance of Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” at University Opera Theatre, for which we had tickets.
“Let’s 86 the opera and go out to dinner” were my first words to my parents.
My father slowly shook his head and, after a pause, said, “I think your mother wants to stay in.”
So we stayed in Saturday night, and had a very quiet evening. I made a light supper of salmon-sour cream-onion omelets, and an hour after the omelets I made crepes, which we ate with strawberry jam.
Sunday had been set aside for birthday celebrations: Josh’s (who turned 28 on Saturday) and mine (I shall be 31 on Tuesday).
After Sunday service, everyone in the family went to Edina Grill to eat pumpkin pancakes with praline butter and whipped cream.
We spent the rest of the day at home.
Josh picked the menu for Sunday night’s birthday celebration. We had a garden salad, followed by baked steak, baked potatoes, steamed broccoli and corn. My mother made a white birthday cake with raspberry filling between layers, and we ate the cake with homemade ice cream.
In another three weeks, we have more birthday celebrations in store: the birthdays of my niece (who shall turn three) and my older brother (who shall turn 37).
Next weekend: Thanksgiving, with my parents’ 38th wedding anniversary two days later.
Celebrations are coming fast and furious.
For Josh and me, it was our second encounter with this one-actor play about an East German transvestite who survived both the Nazi and Communist regimes—but at a price: by serving as an informant for the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police. Josh and I had attended a performance of “I Am My Own Wife” in February 2010 at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.
The Signature Theatre production had not been good. The actor in the Arlington production had proven himself inadequate to the assignment; he was simply unable to carry the show (although we saw the same actor portray a more than creditable Frank in “Educating Rita” thirteen months later in Boston). In Arlington, the entire production had reeked of a small-college drama project.
The Jungle Theater production of “I Am My Own Wife” has received much acclaim, and has set the Twin Cities theater community abuzz (not always a good sign). Because word-of-mouth has been so positive, Josh and I decided to see the play again—and my brother decided he wanted to see the play, too.
Although the same actor and same director had been involved in an earlier Jungle Theater presentation of “I Am My Own Wife”, both have claimed in recent press interviews that the “new” Jungle Theater production is not a revival of that earlier production but a fresh examination of the same material.
Whether revival or new production, the current “I Am My Own Wife” at Jungle Theater is very fine, and vastly superior to the Signature Theatre production we attended twenty-one months ago. The actor onstage at Jungle Theater was seamless in moving from character to character (he is called upon to portray almost forty different characters). As a result, the pace of the show was much quicker at Jungle Theater than at Signature Theatre. The stage design, lighting design and sound design were much better in Minneapolis, too; all conspired to assist the single actor in portraying numerous roles and in holding the audience’s attention for two hours.
The same actor had portrayed Claudius in Jungle Theater’s recent production of “Hamlet”, which Josh and I had seen last month. An undistinguished if not unsatisfactory Claudius, the actor was a joy to watch in “I Am My Own Wife”.
Before the performance, we ate dinner at a nondescript Chinese restaurant. We ordered egg rolls and General Tso’s Chicken.
On Saturday, Joshua’s birthday, Josh and I stayed in, doing work around the house.
My grandmother has been fussing of late at the care facility, and my mother has been spending a good portion of recent days at her mother’s side. On Saturday, both my mother and my father spent most of the day with my grandmother at the care facility.
My older brother’s family stayed home Saturday, too, as did my middle brother. It was a day for everyone to stay home and catch up on household chores.
My parents came home from the care facility at 5:00 p.m.—and, as soon as I saw my mother’s face, I knew it was impossible to contemplate attending that evening’s performance of Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” at University Opera Theatre, for which we had tickets.
“Let’s 86 the opera and go out to dinner” were my first words to my parents.
My father slowly shook his head and, after a pause, said, “I think your mother wants to stay in.”
So we stayed in Saturday night, and had a very quiet evening. I made a light supper of salmon-sour cream-onion omelets, and an hour after the omelets I made crepes, which we ate with strawberry jam.
Sunday had been set aside for birthday celebrations: Josh’s (who turned 28 on Saturday) and mine (I shall be 31 on Tuesday).
After Sunday service, everyone in the family went to Edina Grill to eat pumpkin pancakes with praline butter and whipped cream.
We spent the rest of the day at home.
Josh picked the menu for Sunday night’s birthday celebration. We had a garden salad, followed by baked steak, baked potatoes, steamed broccoli and corn. My mother made a white birthday cake with raspberry filling between layers, and we ate the cake with homemade ice cream.
In another three weeks, we have more birthday celebrations in store: the birthdays of my niece (who shall turn three) and my older brother (who shall turn 37).
Next weekend: Thanksgiving, with my parents’ 38th wedding anniversary two days later.
Celebrations are coming fast and furious.
Riefenstahl On Trial
Leni Riefenstahl in 1948, at one of her de-Nazification proceedings (there were to be four).
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Winifred On Trial
Winifred Wagner in 1947, at one of her de-Nazification proceedings (there were to be two).
