Tim Keyes’ day job is that of Pastoral Assistant of Music and Liturgy at the Catholic Church of St. Charles Borromeo in Skillman, NJ. But he’s also a prolific composer of oratorios, symphonies, concertos, film scores, chamber music, instrumental works, and choral pieces. His most recent work, “The Pool,” completes a triptych of sacred oratorios inspired by episodes from the Gospel of John. With its first performance at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium this Saturday at 8 p.m., the group of musicians Keyes directs, the Tim Keyes’ Consort, will celebrate 30 years.
The orchestra and chorus are made up of professional and amateur musicians. Mentorship is central to the Consort’s mission. Saturday’s concert will open with a work by Rutgers Mason Gross student Amelia Cunningham, “Irish Overture,” and Ithaca graduate Kathryn Dauer will return to conduct Keyes’ “Adagio.” Read more about it in my article in the Princeton weekly U.S. 1, out today.
At the conclusion of Sunday’s marathon performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” by the Philadelphia Orchestra, after having been stretched on the rack for five hours, the elastic finally snapped. Spine and scalp were atingle with the thrilling Romantic sublimity of it all, as Isolde clears that final, hysterical hurdle to ecstasy and death with the Liebestod.
But that’s the magic of “Tristan,” surely the most extreme example of deferred gratification in the repertoire. And by the time that gratification is achieved, most everyone is dead. And the audience is not spared. It’s classical music’s equivalent of making love to a praying mantis. No matter how flippant I can be about “Tristan,” it exists on a very high plain, perhaps the highest. The greatest works of art can tear a hole in the fabric of the world and reveal the emotional truth of existence. They tap into something primal and irrational and leave you shaken to the core. On Sunday, the work hit me with three times its usual power. And I live to tell the tale.
Of course, there was Wagner’s music, achieving apotheosis and release at the end of five glorious hours of portentous woodwinds and passionate, seething strings, and superhuman voices cresting terrifying waves of sound.
Then there was the audience reaction, which could only be described as ecstatic. All three acts were greeted with volcanic applause, but the final curtain was received most rapturously, with the lava flowing long and lovingly, and deservedly so.
Either one of those in themselves would have been enough to wreck me, but the performance also marked Nina Stemme’s farewell to the role of Isolde, a part she sang to great acclaim for a very long time, and she was visibly moved, wiping away tears at the end. I’m getting choked up now, nearly two days later, just thinking about it. There’s something to be said about going out on top, but Stemme, at 62, was so powerful and secure, with perhaps only two or three times where she might have landed a tad sharp on a high note (I do not have perfect pitch), but she kept her toes near the chalk and sang with adamantine strength. I was totally in love with her.
Her partner, Stuart Skelton near-matched her in power as Tristan (though perhaps not quite), and he was in good voice throughout, but I feared for his stamina. Skelton is a big man, to put it mildly. He was the elephant in the room, both figuratively and near-literally. Later, I found an interview with him on YouTube, in which he speaks of how every part of the body serves a function in terms of creating a singer’s unique resonance, but there’s got to be a compromise so that those of us in the audience don’t worry about witnessing someone’s imminent collapse. But perhaps my concern was misplaced, as over three hours in, he still had plenty of power in reserve for Tristan’s mercurial highs and lows in Act III. Wagner must be the one branch of opera wherein the old stereotype of the gargantuan singer endures. At least in a staged production, they could have thrown some furs on the guy, or given him a winged helmet. Kurnewal’s remark about having carried him ashore brought a moment of unintended comedy (for me), only to be surpassed, when in supposed death, Skelton reached into his vest pocket and popped a lozenge or perhaps a nitroglycerin pill. All respect to your artistry, sir, but for godsake, do take care of yourself!
The orchestra’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, ever stylin’, conducted in what looked like a synthetic t-shirt, long-sleeved with a kind of Nehru collar and French cuffs, that had been tossed in the wash with some black towels. And of course, he wouldn’t be caught dead without his Louboutins. Yannick gonna be Yannick. Sartorial choices aside, he conducted with muscle and vigor throughout. I guess his workout routine in the tongue-in-cheek video used to market these performances really paid-off.
It took a few minutes for the Prelude to start weaving its magic as it should, but it wasn’t long before I was in the music’s thrall. Regardless of what you may think about the depth of this guy’s performances, he is a magnetic conductor.
The orchestra musicians themselves played with great commitment, some really throwing themselves into it. Principal double bass Joseph Conyers was right in my sightline, and he really dug in and played with exuberance and zest. Wagner gives his musicians plenty to enjoy, whether it’s to claw at your heart, reach for the ineffable, or imitate burbling fountains.
“Tristan und Isolde” is like a narcotic. Is there any other piece of music that can so alter one’s consciousness? It both depresses and inflames the listener. It’s like spider venom. But what ecstasy! I’m sure I’m not the first to observe, it can’t be good for you.
Moreover, the whole Romantic fascination with love-death is so deeply unhealthy, but in my abnormally-prolonged youth I embraced it to the hilt. How I ever made it to my 50s is anyone’s guess. Act II made me remember every love affair I ever had – ardent, reckless, and doomed.
The stage performance lacked sword fights and poisoned chalices, but Skelton and Stemme held hands and touched foreheads during the love scenes. For the most part, the singers were positioned on a scaffold behind the orchestra, accessible from the stairs of the “Conductor’s Circle” (seating near the organ loft at the back of the stage), but occasionally they popped up unexpectedly on other tiers. I was enraptured being so close to Karen Cargill, her Brangäne keeping watch over the lovers in Act II, as she sang, hypnotically, only yards from my box. I jotted down one word: BLISS! Likewise, members of the orchestra were sent around the hall and backstage to achieve certain spatial effects. English hornist Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia had a plum part, doubling for a shepherd’s pipe and sharing the scaffold with Tristan and his wingman, Kurwenal.
Cargill was a standout among the supporting cast. Brian Mulligan, as Kurwenal, was another. But the singer who perhaps best inhabited his role, in terms of balancing the demands of voice and action, was Tareq Nazmi as King Marke, whose embodiment of the part transcended the requirements of a concert performance. His rounded portrayal drew real sympathy for the character, who is not only king, but Tristan’s uncle, come to regard the younger man as his son. Nazmi sold the realism of a betrayed, baffled, and ultimately beneficent king. If anything, it made the Friar Laurence moment of his too-late-arrival all the more poignant. Then again, no one told Tristan he had to tear off his bandages.
The opera spanned close to five hours, with two 25-minute intermissions. For the first of those I hurried down the elevator and weaved across the lobby like a running back, bypassing the concessions crowds with a dash across Broad Street to the Good Karma Cafe, adjacent to the Wilma Theater, for a medium coffee. This I supplemented with doughnut holes from a tiny Tupperware I’d smuggled from home. Once during the first act I caught myself nodding and I was afraid I might tumble right over the railing. During the second intermission, I kept my energy up by eating a banana.
Before the start of the performance (at 2:00), I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I glanced down the rows of seats in what pass for boxes in Philadelphia. The Third Tier is the Lonely Guy tier. Predominately bachelors and social misfits. Always like this wherever I go, come to think of it, with whatever I happen to enjoy. What does that say about me, I wonder? The guy in the box in front of me showed up in shorts carrying a hardbound copy of the score, which he followed most assiduously, seldom looking up for most of the first act. He disappeared for the rest of the opera. I hope it was to find a better seat. The guy behind me slipped out during the third act. I turned around, and he was gone well before the Liebestod. Did he lack the stamina, or was he hoping to avoid the traffic? I never understand people who go to a concert and then dash off before the end to beat the crowd to the garage. Kind of defeats the purpose of even attending.
One thing that impressed me was – an unfortunate, unmuffled cough at the beginning of the Prelude aside – the audience was unusually and blessedly quiet throughout. Yes, there were coughs, very occasionally, but none of those annoyingly ostentatious gotta-cough-for-the-sake-of-coughing coughs. And no cell phones! Wagnerites are a different breed. Don’t attempt to desecrate their temple.
I would have loved to have seen this “Tristan” staged, but in making it a concert performance, at least the audience was spared the Regietheater excesses that mar so many Wagner productions these days. Here, the music was allowed to speak without any sideshow distractions. I will remember Stemme’s Isolde for a long time. Were there moments when she was lost in the wash of sound? Believe me, they were few. I know I’m mixing my Wagner music dramas, but she had the vocal power of a Valkyrie. I count myself very fortunate to have experienced her instrument live.
It was instructive to attend this performance two days after having heard Richard Strauss’ “Guntram” at Carnegie Hall on Friday. I’m hoping to write that up tomorrow for Strauss’ birthday.
In the meantime: bravo, The Philadelphia Orchestra! Truly, this was a transformative event.
Like “The Ugly Duckling” of his compatriot, Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Nielsen emerged from humble beginnings to blossom into Denmark’s national composer. Internationally, Nielsen has flitted in and out of the seemingly inescapable shadow of Finnish master Jean Sibelius. Both men were born in 1865. In fact, Nielsen was six months older. But it is an unfair comparison, not so much apples and oranges; more like kipper and pickled herring.
The very fact that Nielsen is not referred to reductively as “The Sibelius of Denmark” is attributable to an unusually strong individual voice. His music is modern, yet traditional; Scandinavian, yet Germanic. Most important, it is full of personality, freshness and vitality.
Nielsen’s Wind Quintet of 1922 reflects the composer’s optimism and good humor. These he retained despite great personal, professional, and global turmoil. Each part of the quintet was tailored to the personality of the individual performer for which it was written (all members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet). There is also something of the outdoors about the piece. Nielsen was always fascinated by nature, and there are ample suggestions of bird song woven into the texture of the work’s pastoral neoclassicism.
Even so, I find something appealing about musicians standing and playing the piece indoors, especially if it happens to be inside a tastefully-appointed, classically-proportioned art gallery. Here it is, performed by the ensemble CARION (nothing to do with dead animals, presumably) at the Carlsberg Museum in Copenhagen.
I would have preferred that the filmmaker’s cuts had been handled a little more sensitively. Maybe I’m a little sensitive myself (I have been known to verge on the irritable), but if the edits aren’t “musical,” they give me tiny, disruptive jolts. The tendency now is to shake things in front of everybody’s eyeballs like they’re little babies that need to be distracted.
I venture to guess everyone’s here to listen to the music, right? Just play it, CARION, because you do so beautifully!
But video is their thing, and they’ve won prizes for it, so what do I know? It was mainly the jumps in the first few minutes that were making me cranky. I don’t care so much about the panning, but after a while it does start to get a little silly. Panning is a technique, not a prop. It should be used as such and not diluted.
Anyway, here’s their website, if you’d like more of the same.
Here, from 1935, Krazy Kat is seduced by the Devil into claiming ownership of Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei.”
The stage is set from the beginning, as we witness various anthropomorphized Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, desperate for a hit, ruthlessly plagiarizing from one another. Krazy, however, has higher standards. Clearly he’s a fan of the classics, as a bust of Schumann is seen perched on a cabinet in the background. His superior attitude makes him a perfect mark for Mephisto. Frustration builds, as he paces a hole in the floor, racking his brain for inspiration.
“Good artists borrow, great ones steal” is a maxim often attributed to Igor Stravinsky (who would have stolen it from Picasso). Who needs inspiration, when the Devil gets the best tunes? The Deceiver tempts Krazy to pilfer from his idol. To this end, he corrupts “Träumerei” into “The Hot Cha Melody.”
Schumann’s spirit becomes so indignant that it returns like Mozart’s Commendatore, only to discover a veritable Pottersville, garish and decadent, in which the Devil’s appropriation has become the number one hit of the day. Schumanngeist determines to exact his revenge on Krazy.
This Krazy Kat is not anything like the George Herriman creation I remember. However, there are some fun caricatures of popular singers of the time.
If the cartoon theme music sounds familiar, it too was cribbed – from the aria “M’appari” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera “Martha!”
Watch here:
You’ll find a more detailed analysis on this blog page:
Sir William Walton, beloved for his coronation marches and film scores, also wrote operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music and choral works. As is often the case, posterity has been astonishingly reductive.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear two long-out-of-print recordings of works composed more than three decades apart.
At the time of the premiere of his Symphony No. 2, in 1957, Walton was perceived as a musical throwback. Indeed, despite the fact that it is more tightly argued, the piece has always been regarded as a poor stepsister of the Symphony No. 1, composed in 1935, a work full of grand gestures, written under the spell of Sibelius.
What apparently escaped critics of the day was the subtlety of its craftsmanship. The finale, in particular, is a set of variations based on a twelve-note row, a technique not unlike that employed in the kind of serial composition so much in vogue at the time.
George Szell gave the American premiere of the symphony, with the Cleveland Orchestra, in December of 1960. A few months later, they made the first recording.
Walton was viewed as an enfant terrible, when, more than three decades earlier, he set Edith Sitwell’s poetry as an entertainment, titled “Façade.” The work was first performed publicly in 1923. The premiere was a succès de scandale, with Sitwell herself speaking her poems into a megaphone protruding from the mouth of a painted face by John Piper, Walton conducting an ensemble of six instruments.
The displeasure of performers, audience and critics was evident, with Noel Coward ostentatiously marching out. However, the work quickly caught on, even becoming downright popular in a variety of arrangements. Within a decade, a purely orchestral version was choreographed by Frederick Ashton.
We’re going to be listening to selections from a treasured recording, unavailable in this country for many years, featuring Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield as the reciters. Both were noted Shakespearean actors, who did much of their best work on stage. Ashcroft received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1985, for her part in David Lean’s final film, “A Passage to India,” and Scofield was honored with an Academy Award for Best Actor two decades earlier, in 1966, for his performance in “A Man for All Seasons.”
I hope you’ll join me for “Will’s Wonders Never Cease” – rarely heard recordings of the works of William Walton – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
