World of Music

This is the first of two articles on the inaugural appearances by Philadelphia Orchestra’s new conductor designate.
Previously on As the Philadelphia Orchestra Turns — strife with Christoph, administrative meltdowns, dwindling attendance, shabby contracts and of course, the dodgy maestro search — the drama was drowning out the music. That was all so yesterday.

On October 29, in Verizon Hall there was there was subdued enthusiasm that this night could be a most auspicious beginning for a new era for The Philadelphia Orchestra with the official debut since he was named chief-conductor designate of Montreal’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The promisingly diverse generational crowd was Radio-Canada’s Sylvia L’Ècuyer who has covered his career since he started in Canada 15 years ago said “what I find interesting is the way he is presenting himself here. He likes to be called Yannick, not Maestro. I arrived on the train this morning, went to the tourist office and the man who was volunteering there asked us why we were in Philadelphia and I told him to see the orchestra and he responded, ‘Yannick! Yes, he’s the buzz of the town.’”

After two years of tumult, this eager audience was ready for proof that this is indeed The One.

He came onstage so relaxed and told the audience he has “We are starting to consume…our love for the music (drawing laughs because he left off the mate in consummate). “we are just now embarking tonight on this wonderful journey, together, artistically. We are offering the alpha and omega of symphonies.” He drew attention to the key trumpet solo in both works and Mahler‘s homage to Haydn. The smart programming displays the technical assets of this orchestra that this conductor is keen on igniting.

Stately and spirited on the surface, Nézet-Séguin unlocked the intriguing foundations of Haydn’s Military Symphony tapping the rhythmic streams in the music. You notice immediately how well he equalizes and spikes the sound in this acoustically volatile hall. In the denser symphonic sections, the orchestra seem to illuminate what Mozart may have given to Haydn and what Haydn gave to Beethoven. Standouts among the players included Jeffrey Kahner’s flute that swooped and swirled inside the orchestral drive.

David Bilger’s trumpet herald and the gathering tempest thundered in on Mahler‘s 5th, promising to be majestic. The follow through with Jennifer Montone’s French horn brimming with revelation. There was ever so slight tentativeness in the scherzo and a little sloshing around the symphonic soup, it was momentary. Mostly all parts were detailed, a squirrelly matrix around those lurching waltz fade ins.

The allegretto was so hushed that any sound in the 2500-seat hall would have completely destroyed. Remarkably there was total silence except for the ethereally clarity of Elizabeth Hainen’s harp and the clean striations in the strings. By the third repeat, the players floated Mahler’s most cathartic waters.

The crescendo in the rondo finale levitated Yannick off the stand, his body oscillating in the sonic power of the music. The dramatic thrust of this orchestra is fully revealed. Yannick’s presence electric- he might not have Muti‘s maestro-divo hair, he makes up for in in his physicality. He bobs and weaves like Ali, dances and emotes like Lenny and obviously is at one with the music and the musicians.

The audience was completely seduced and at the end, the livid applause sounded more like the Met than Verizon Hall. Yannick self mockingly flexed his biceps as people shouted their approval and there seemed to be agreement that at least on this most auspicious night that the Fabulous Philadelphians are back with Yannick out front. Stay-tuned.

Poem

Snoozette
‘a trace memory to nothing’ (Paul Monette, Borrowed Time)

Diatonic shards
Play in swirl dust
The evening unheard
On a different frequency
Overlapping voices
door was slammed
(03.milisecond duration)
Chunks of music from
a shorted player
maybe Shostakovich
Peek at pantomime movements
absorbing the ice clinking
Every few moments the
distill greetings
No one is coming upstairs
No one has come down
Voices hover
At some point musicians were
Summoned and just as the
Conversation seemed to reach
High volume warmth the
Raw heart search
Dizzy in the brain anyway
dropped off at
Some point; dreamt
I got up and kissed all of the pictures

Light&Shadow

‘Barn door’  by Jan Carroll

continuo

from Gyroscopes 12.20.10

Comma clusters
thousands of galaxy
Along the
Spiral
quantum
conjuring
Refractions
That told of the
shattered
cobalt promontory

Away from the
Millionth heaven
Bloom to appear on a ping
of that frequency
after burn

Went by without comment
But was received in a cellular
recall by noon

Everyone was
Moving around the wave
or so they thought
Took over the rest of the day

Undreamt by that night
during the solstice eclipse
after a time
come around as
depicted previously
In an Icart silvery watercolor
with the same power

To erase illusion over
coal clouds
Of shadow memory
in shadow in shadow
to shroud her
executing the dances of Isadora

for Jan

In memorium

It is with sadness that I tell you that Jan Carroll, my longtime close friend and blogger partner died December 22 after battling lung cancer for many months. Not only did Jan grace these pages with her remarkable photographs, she was, as she dubbed herself, my EB on the blog- for editor bitch. Among her many talents, she knew spelling and grammar & would catch anything dodgey or suspect. But mostly, and in general, she knew style.

Needless to say I relied on her. Truth be told though, her photographs kept me going with AT2 more than anything else. We started two years ago and I didn’t know what I was doing really, but Jan, I found out, knew all things blogisphere.

Even though she downplayed the artistry of her photographs, everyone who saw the blog loved them. Her eye speaks for itself. My brother Rob, a visual artist, said Jan had what they used to call in art school, the extra dimension. That unexplainable element of composition, color, subject. A singular point of view. The composition, the angle, the otherwise unseen. My friend Lesley Valdes said that even though she never met Jan, there seems to be so much of her in her photographs. I bugged her many times to consider a book of her photographs, trying to convince her it was unique that she actually nurtured the flora and fauna before she photographed it.

And really that was Jan in so many ways. There was so much of her in everything she did. If you were lucky enough to be her friend you basked in the hugeness of her art, heart and of her mind. Looking back, I can say with certainty that Jan altered the way I thought about the world, natural and otherwise.

I can’t even begin to remember all of things that she and her husband Steve have done for me over the years. But the biggest gift of all has been their friendship and love. Unwavering and sincere.

The other thing you could only envy was Jan’s remarkable wit and her ability to laugh at herself. She laughed at others as well, but if were her friend, she never would be cruel. Honest, perhaps, but never a cheap shot. It is the compassion that she showed for others and other species is something that will always be with us in spirit.

This photo of Jan with beloved Frieda, her frenzied wired-haired fox terrier who we all came to love in the 70s. This was taken around the time I used to hang out with her at her parents’ pool in Springfield- we used to practice dives. I would try the fancier stuff and she would tell me where I was off. Jan always did the same launch –a pretty flawless arrowpoint dive.

Goodnight dear, dear friend, you taught me so much more about true hearts, minds and dives.

Boyle&Palin Schticking Points

In vaudeville, everyone got a chance, even an untested act. Course that is one of the reasons vaudeville died, but everyone loves that backstage story. If someone is a big success and get too big, they have to be knocked down. Everybody loves that story too, but it doesn’t always play out like that, which brings me to the meteoric careers of Sarah Palin and Susan Boyle.

Boyle burst on the scene belting out ’I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Miz which went viral on the internet overnight and propelled her to international stardom. Unused to instant success and pressured to repeat it, she instantly suffered a backlash from overexposure and her voice started cracking, and her make-over looked draggy from the kleiglights.

Boyle did the only thing a diva in training should do at that point– she had a public nervous breakdown and used the time to become media savvy enough to make such a comeback that it made her star shine even brighter. The fact that she sings everything the same way, with dodgy range to boot is beside the point. People love her story.

More improbable than Boyle’s international success is the iconic political status Sarah Palin achieved in one election cycle. She was a cynical VP pick by a desperate John McCain who cared about nothing but winning and when he saw that was impossible, deflected the attention to someone who would recharge his campaign. McCain was jaded enough to know that she would become an instant media star, however untested. Maybe the only credential she could show as a future Veep.

After the election Palin didn’t shrink back to Alaska after the election. She proved transformational enough to broker big money and influence in back of her for staying power no matter how vaporous her politics. People loved her story and she was able to walk on all of the political quicksand that was engulfing Republicans and Democrats alike. She cast herself as the antiObama and saw an opening for his job. She stalked away from her governorship to lay the groundwork for the presidency.

Her premature retirement may have been the first real ripple in the tide turning against her. Even people who thought Katie Couric was ’out to get her’ because she pressed Palin on what magazines she read, didn’t like it when Palin walked away from an elected position. Still, she endured as the economy got worse. People didn’t seem bothered that she made up facts to attack the Obama presidency. They hung on her every word.

They weren’t disturbed by her incendiary creative rhetoric or that the only death panel was the one in her head. They listened to her vaporous speeches and didn’t demand that she articulate what she was advocating. She never gave policy speeches. Her calling card was to attack, ridicule and tear anyone on the left apart.

People also didn’t seem bothered that when there was a pushback, even in the form of a policy rebuttal Fox News would report that Palin was being attacked. Her ‘you betchas’ and ‘lame-stream media’ shtick stuck.

But earlier this year there started to be reports of fickle fans tired of her same old record and the fact that she was being paid big bucks to lip-sync it all over the US. She didn’t offer any solutions, just hits and runs against Obama and homilies about taking back the ‘real America.’

Her Tea Party picks did very well and just weeks ago Palin studiously told Barbara Walters that she would run for president if the people wanted her. If there were a void. She filled that void for two years as the voice of the conservative movement. Her conclusion to Walters was that she could beat Obama.

That was so two weeks ago. That was before the American public saw the Congress and the Senate actually working. In the year end polls, Palin’s backlash is starting to take hold. Of the most compressive CNN and PPP end year polls tracking her chances for a 2012 Presidential bid, she clocked only a 33 percent approval in her home state Alaska. She would be the loser, by large margins, in every state. So you have to wonder if the public is thinking that Palin just sings the same old song. Is her reality show being canceled or optioned? In politics one never knows, do one.

My prediction is that Palin will end up on American Idol in 2012. Boyle should be a judge by then. Maybe Susan can lend her the sheet music.

Ballet Internationale

Black Swan is the dance movie of the year (kudos to those PABallet dancers in the cast) but there was actually another that was just as interesting called Dancing Across Borders. It is the inspiring documentary about Sy Sar who became the first Cambodian male to dance professionally in a classical ballet company in the West. His journey from a farming life in Cambodia to the International Ballet stage is as improbable as Russian dancers defecting from the USSR in the 60s.

Director Anne Bass spotted him in a small community dance troupe while she was visiting Angkor Wat. Sar had such a luminous stage presence and natural facility, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Bass had a background in dance and connections at New York City Ballet.

Bass arranged for his training at New York City Ballet’s School of American Dance Olga Kostritzky master Russian classical coach. Sy didn’t know English or ballet vocabulary and also had to adjust to the culture shock living in New York. Many of his tutors never really believing he could make up for all of the lost time to be a professional ballet dancer. He proved them wrong and was hired at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle under Boal‘s guidance.

Bass captures the arresting beauty of Cambodia and she also make the dance studio visually interesting. Moving interviews with Sar’s parents, classmates and teachers and equally stirring stories of Cambodia’s reclaiming its cultural history from the ravages of life after the repressive Khmer Rouge. This film is an inspiring portrait of the power of art and a young man’s determination to change his life.