The Standing Room

Schlumpf: Anna Russell (1911-2006)

Adieu, Du gepitzigen Schnitz.

props to manprano for spreading the news

Ornette Coleman on Singing

MR. COLEMAN’S first request was something by Josef Rosenblatt, the Ukrainian-born cantor who moved to New York in 1911 and became one of the city’s most popular entertainers — as well as a symbol for not selling out your convictions. [...] I brought some recordings from 1916 and we listened to Tikanto Shabbos, a song from Sabbath services. Rosenblatt’s voice came booming out, strong and clear at the bottom, with miraculous coloratura runs at the top.

“I was once in Chicago, about 20-some years ago,” Mr. Coleman said. “A young man said, ‘I’d like you to come by so I can play something for you.’ I went down to his basement and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing and praying, all in the same breath. I said, wait a minute. You can’t find those notes. Those are not ‘notes.’ They don’t exist.” [...]

“I think he’s singing pure spiritual,” he said. “He’s making the sound of what he’s experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, and what he’s singing to is what he’s singing about. We hear it as ‘how he’s singing.’ But he’s singing about something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad.”

I wonder how much of it is really improvised, I said. Which up-and-down melodic shapes, and in which orders, were well practiced, and which weren’t.

“Mm-hmm,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going up and down; it sounds like it’s going out. Which means it’s coming from his soul.”

—from Listening With Ornette Coleman: Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music by Ben Ratliff

L'shana tova, belatedly

He Looks Straight Ahead (Not at Me)

Tall and pale and young and lovely
The Lord of Corcovado stands watching
And as He watches
Each bass he watches goes,
"Mache dich mein Herze rein"

~~~~~~

Score: check
Cuff links: check
Small bathing suit: check
Havaianas: check
Cachaça: buy immediately upon arrival

Back in September

Tonight (tonight)

Tip for future Sing-along West Side Story attendees: Speaking from personal experience, it's not really possible to sing all the parts in the Quintet by yourself.

~~~~~~

Best Line, a Castro Theatre Audience Favorite Award
Maria, to Tony: When you come, use the backdoor.

Hampson on Schumann

Before I developed any interest in opera, I was kind of a Lieder nut. Lieder folks are a peculiar bunch, I admit—sort of like the math nerds of the classical music community. Strangely, the Lieder fascination began before I knew a lick of German (well, I suppose I figured out Das Kind war... tot! on my own), and a primary impetus for studying the Awful German Language was so that I Lieder better understanden could.

Dichterliebe was the first German song cycle to resonate with me. In my early 20s, the eponymous poet seemed like a homie: crazy impetuous in love, easily infatuated, quickly (and quickly!) wounded, melodramatically overreactive, and above all totally self-absorbed. Osmin the Seraglio buffoon I had a hard time identifying with; this guy, not so much.

Earlier this week, SF Performances brought Thomas Hampson to Herbst to perform Dichterliebe—or, more accurately, the 20 Lieder und Gesänge aus dem Lyrischen Intermezzo. To grossly oversimplify a major research project that has occupied him since at least the early '90s, in exploring the significant discrepancies between the manuscript version and the first printed edition Hampson has come to believe that the manuscript version is worthy of championing in its own right. The most easily noticeable difference is that there are four additional songs in the manuscript version, but as he emphatically stated during his 15-minute (!) talk at the start of the concert, his motives for performing this version do not stem simply from the desire to sing some extra tunes.

What emerged out of his performance was a Poet I never imagined in all the years I've been listening to and singing these songs. We toss around the word "revelatory" a lot, but that night Thomas Hampson revealed something new to me about Heine's poetry and Schumann's setting of that poetry. His poet was no youth in love, but a old man trapped in his loneliness and his memories, on a sure path towards madness. There was a timeworn bitterness that came through his portrayal which felt completely different from the petulant anger that usually colors performances of these songs; likewise, the brighter pieces leaned away from exuberance in favor of either mania or nostalgia.

And it was convincing. On a macro level, the additional songs brought out the dramatic arc in a way I had never experienced before. The new juxtapositions set up familiar music in unfamiliar ways, and the drama benefited. On a micro level, numerous phrases were illuminated anew, most memorably the end of "Aus alten Märchen," where the Poet's memory of a joyful time is dispatched like empty foam: I've never felt such sadness in the way Hampson and Wolfram Rieger (at the piano) did "Zerfliesst's wie eitel Schaum" and the short postlude where we hear the memory (delusion?) dissipating.

The amazing thing is, they achieved this on a night when Hampson honestly sounded pretty terrible. Before going into his 15-minute (!) talk at the start of the show, he announced that he was suffering from some serious allergies that had left him parched, and laughingly but seriously offered to refund people's money because he was shortening the program by eliminating some Schubert from the first half to save his voice. And it was true, some of the sounds were not good sounds. Some of the sounds didn't even succeed at becoming sounds—he literally did not phonate the lowest notes at the beginning of "Allnächtlich in Traume," and his voice just cut out before the phrase "du trauriger, blaser Mann" was ready to end. The quiet, high-lying lines had none of his trademark softness and ease, and the transitions to louder dynamics were often not smooth.

In the end, it mattered not a whit. Of course I would love to hear him do this program again in hale voice. But what he and Rieger gave on Monday night was so committed and so well-considered, I feel I have been given plenty to think about. Rieger particularly deserves a shout-out for the extraordinary job he did, filling each song's canvas with such fine-brushed detail.

So a humble thank you to both Messrs Hampson and Rieger for going through with Monday's performance in spite of the trying circumstances. Hampson mentioned during his 15-minute (!) talk that a printed edition of the 20 Lieder will be published soon and that they are going to re-record the cycle, implying through a joke that probably no one but his most devoted fans (i.e., the Crazies) had the first EMI recording. If I didn't think it would be distracting, I would have held up the CD booklet that was in my jacket pocket.

A Window into the Poet's Room

Once upon a time there was a melancholy knight,
With haggard, snow-white cheeks;
He staggered and stumbled and lumbered around,
Obsessed by gloomy visions.
He was so wooden, so clumsy, so awkward
The flowers and maidens giggled
Whenever he lumbered by them.

Often he sat in the darkest corner of his house;
He had broken with the world of men.
He stretched out his arms with a yearning glance,
Yet he never uttered a word.
But as soon as midnight tolled,
A strange singing and ringing began,
He heard a knock on the door.

Then in glides his beloved
In shimmering, sea foam robes,
She was as radiant as a rosebud,
Her veil gleams with gems.
Golden tresses frame her slim form,
Her little eyes entice him with sweet power—
They fall into each other's arms.

The knight holds her in fast embrace,
Once wooden, he now burns with desire,
Once pale, he now blushes;
Once a dreamer, he now awakes,
Once shy, he grows bolder and bolder.
But she—she teases coquettishly,
She lightly winds her jeweled white veil
Around his head.

To a crystal palace beneath the sea
The knight is carried in thrall.
He stares, and he is nearly blinded
By the radiance and dazzle.
Then the nymph embraces him passionately,
The knight is bridegroom; the nymph is bride.
Her maidens play on the zither.

They play and they sing—so sweetly they sing—
They kick up their heels in dance;
The knight feels he is losing his senses,
And closer he clasps the sweet vision—
Then all of a sudden the lights go out,
And the knight finds himself once more
Alone at home in his gloomy little poet's room.

—Heinrich Heine

From the Prologue to Robert Schumann's 20 Lieder und Gesänge aus dem Lyrischen Intermezzo (aka Dichterliebe), via Thomas Hampson

Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag, Herr Schumann

NY Report: *

This week's Time Out NY is particularly * Recommended. Follow their advice, for they know whereof they speak.

NY Report: Confidential

This is really just for people who already know what's going on.

Three Ways of Looking at a Cabaret Singer

On Barbara Cook's master class earlier this month at Juilliard:

One.

Radiating charm and confidence, [Ms. Wyatt] began to sing. [...] Ms. Cook clearly wanted to find the woman behind the poise. She tried the same techniques she'd used on the others, but still Ms. [W-] seemed intent on delivering a perfectly manicured performance that was just what Ms. Cook didn't want to hear.

As frustration mounted on both sides, Ms. Cook finally turned to face her student and said, with real sincerity: "You are a beautiful young woman. You have a beautiful voice. You don't have to prove it to anyone." Ms. Wyatt nodded, and a couple of tears ran down her cheeks.

I'm afraid those words are paraphrased. The pen stopped moving when the heart stood still. Although it was not part of a performance, the moment may well linger as one of the most moving things I've witnessed in a theater. Ms. Cook dabbed the tears away, then watched a little dumbstruck as her student insisted on leaving the stage for a moment to gather herself. "This is a first," she said a little sheepishly.

—Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Two.

Do not [...] fake it. When Student No. 5 flashed a smile in Ira and George Gershwin's obscure, Ravel-scented "In the Mandarin's Orchid Garden" (from "Ming Toy"), Ms. Cook let her have it. "What was that smile for? it was supposed to show that you're charming. It's phony! You're already beautiful and charming. Don't try to act beautiful and charming! It's redundant. Why gild the lily? It works against you. We see you playing us, and we don't like it."

For the first time in a Barbara Cook master class, there were tears, and No. 5 quickly excused herself to find a Kleenex backstage. But she returned in a heartbeat, without coaxing, and tried her song again in the same tones of pure crystal as before, tinged this time with a haunting fragility.

—Matthew Gurewitsch, Wall Street Journal

Three.

Barbara waits for a moment and then says, “Honestly, I don’t know where to start. You don’t know how to use language, you sing it like 'Nessun dorma,' and…who wrote this song anyway?" [...]

Cook really tipped her hand when she went to get the repertoire notebook Juilliard had prepared for her a month before. It was clear she hadn't opened the book at all—the music was still clipped together, and she seemed completely unable to remove the paper clips. We all could see that she hadn't felt it necessary to prepare for the class in any way, though she seemed very maladroit coaching material she didn't know. So she rips the first song out and says, "All right. Your lyrics say, 'Take the moment, make it happen, hold moment, make it last...'" Embarrassed silence. "Um, no, Miss Cook. Those are the lyrics to the other song I brought." It made us wonder: had she even listened to Alex before she went into her pre-packaged rap? [...]

It's not that the advice given wasn't true—it was simply banal. It’s very condescending to assume that these students are not interested in expression because they’re opera singers.

We should never put our students in a position where they are made to feel ashamed of their gifts.

--Steven Blier, via Wolftrap Opera 2006

~~~~~~

I love Barbara Cook as a performer. The one-woman show I saw at the Vivian Beaumont a couple years ago was honest, touching, and truly impressive... which only amplifies my disillusionment and disappointment in reading these reports. I encountered them in the order presented above.

I've always felt that one learns much more from being an audience member at a master class than a participant; the nature of the event forces the student into the role of a marionette being moved at the whim of a Master. But in the right hands, it can be such an inspiration to hear someone at the top of his or her game articulate in a detailed way how they approach their work. This, however, sounds like it was just humiliating for everyone involved.

(-: / :-(

That Janus, he truly is a two-faced god. On the one of the hands,

:-)

(Confidential to Mlle S-: I appreciated the call very, very much, and laughed very, very heartily. Now we just need to get you a camera phone.)

And on the other of the hands,

:-(

My appeal was rejected. Such is the Force of Destiny.