The Dressing

Paul's Case: Intersection of Minimalism and Baroque

2013-04-23T14:03:33Z

Hurry, while there are still a few performances of composer Gregory Spear's new opera Paul's Case scheduled in the outstanding world premiere production by UrbanArias at the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia. Everything about this 90-minute chamber opera organized in two acts and five scenes works.

The music, with a Minimalist through line, perhaps a little less insistent than Philip Glass' style but not less exuberant, surprises with various kinds of quotation or influence including the sounds of an oncoming train, Benjamin Britten, Vienna waltz, and the polyphony of Monteverdi and Cavalli (per Gregory Spears). Spears, in a short email interview April 21-22, 2013, with the Dresser, said his "more modern influences included David Lang, Michael Nyman, and yes, definitely Britten. I'm also influenced by the operas of John Adams, Robert Ashley and Philip Glass."

Part of the musical soundscape is humming and whistling, which to the Dresser's mind adds an edgy and primitive response of the characters to their situation and each other. When asked about how these sounds entered the composition, Spears replied, "The humming and whistling were part of the piece from the beginning. I thought of the humming like a sort of sonic equivalent of thinking or pondering. Humming can also be a very mysterious and strange sound to hear onstage. And then I knew I wanted Paul's response to the teacher to be whistling. It seemed both irreverent and enigmatic--he doesn't really have anything to say to them. (In the story he whistles Faust at one point.)"

The libretto, written by Gregory Spears and Kathryn Walat and based on a much anthologized story of the same title by Willa Cather, deftly pares down to essential phrases like "something of a dandy" (his teachers' accusation against Paul's arrogance) and "I did not mean to be polite or impolite" (Paul's response to his teachers who do not understand his behavior).

The story set in 1906 is about a high school boy who is kicked out of school for his impertinence. His father decrees that Paul must become a cash boy and work in his firm. He tells Paul he is no longer going to be allowed to work as an usher at the Carnegie Music Hall, the only activity in the town of Pittsburgh that the young man loves to do. So, Paul steals money from his father's business and runs away to New York City where he books a room at the Waldorf Astoria. He has a drunken night on the town with a college student from Yale and awakes to hear that his theft has been publicized in the Pittsburgh newspaper and that his father is on his way to collect him. Paul decides he cannot go back and in desperation steps in front of an oncoming train.

Commenting about how the libretto with Kathryn Walat was written, Spears said, "I absolutely love her approach to playwriting and dialogue, so I knew her style would be perfect. I decided on the overall structure of scenes and then she wrote about 2/3 and I wrote about a 1/3 of the first draft. After we had a draft, she helped craft the scenes I wrote, and I would ask permission to layer, interweave, or fracture certain lines in her scenes. She was very gracious and open minded about letting me experiment with creating various ensemble moments. She also helped revise and tweak the piece and its structure throughout the development process."

The performance by tenor Jonathan Blalock was tenderly executed. Playing Paul is a challenge because Paul is a complicated young man who is a throwback in time. He is courtly but without affectation. Blalock is able to portray this emotional complexity without overdoing Paul's youthful defiance. The Dresser was deeply moved by the duet between Blalock and tenor Michael Slattery who played the Yale student. The exuberance of these two young men out painting the town of New York red was palpable.

Predominantly, the singing is ensemble, creating a good deal of syncopated texture. The supporting cast baritones Keith Phares (Paul's father) and James Shaffran (the high school principal and Astoria bell boy), mezzo-soprano Amanda Crider (Paul's English teacher and Astoria Maid #3), and sopranos Melissa Wimbish and Erin Sanzero contribute satisfyingly to a rich vocal score.

Costumes of turn-of-the-century styles lend professional authority to the production, which is spare on sets but rich in lighting technique. Notable is movement technique used by Paul as he enters the runway style stage and later this same stylized movement is mirrored in the swagger of the Yale student. When asked how the stylized movement came about, Spears answered, "The opening of the opera foreshadows the final moments of the opera musically, but it was [Director] Kevin Newbury's idea to stage that slow motion walk and have it return. As a director, he was very sensitive to big structural moments in the music and the symmetry of the piece's design. He really knows how to take musical structures and make theater out of them."

The chamber ensemble includes two violins, viola, cello, bass, two clarinets (one base), harp, and piano. Robert Wood conducted masterfully.

In James Arthur's poem "Aspirations," the reader encounters a voice that the Dresser suggests could be Paul's. The end lines reference Prospero (same character from Shakespeare's The Tempest) but these lines were written by W.H. Auden in his long poem "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

ASPIRATIONS
........... after W.H. Auden

to address mystery
without being mysterious,
never expecting anyone
to know, speaking only for yourself

..... but not being self-centered,
conducting yourself
as if your work matters, knowing nothing

makes nothing happen, never naming
what you love, believing in truth--
as who doesn't--and not selling
something, not contenting yourself

with saying nothing, to bow down
and obey, to hate nothing
and to ask nothing for its love

James Arthur
from Charms Against Lightning

Photo credit: C. Stanley Photography

Estelle Glaser Laughlin's Way out of Darkness

2013-02-01T18:47:37Z

"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."
Anne Frank

If Anne Frank, the young Jewish diarist of World War II had survived the Holocaust, what would she have been like as an adult?

The Dresser suggests that Estelle Glaser Laughlin's Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey out of the Holocaust might provide a glimpse at that question. Laughlin, along with her mother and sister Fredka, survived the Warsaw Ghetto extermination and uprising, several concentration and labor camps, extreme starvation and deprivation that continued as she and her family made their way out of a liberated prison camp into a still hostile Europe to make their way to family established in the United States who had no understanding of what she, her sister, and their mother had suffered. Yet those years of horror are not reflected in the adult voice or visage. Furthermore, Estelle Laughlin is no Pollyanna, giving wide berth to bad people.

KILLING AND BEING KILLED IN MAKE-BELIEVE PLAY

What the Dresser particularly liked was the honesty of this well-crafted testimonial that often reads like poetry.

"I took turns killing and being killed in make-believe play with friends. But I was too young to comprehend the finality that death really is. As a matter of fact, death did not terrify me as much as the possibility of being separated from my parents. I desperately wanted for us to live. But if we had to die, I wanted my parents to assure me that we would all meet death holding on to each other--like a joint transfer to the unimaginable." (Chapter 4 Deportation, p. 24)

Laughlin has vivid memories of growing up in Warsaw and living in the Warsaw Ghetto. The street where she lived became part of that ghetto which was lucky for her family since 400,000 displaced Jews, representing 30% of Warsaw's population, were forced into that walled off neighborhood of 1.3 square miles without the comforts of their former homes and possessions. Because Laughlin was only thirteen when deportations from the Ghetto began, her mother cut off her pigtails to make her look older. The Germans considered children useless to their forced labor plan. Her parents asked Laughlin and her sister to go to a convent but they were a close-knit family and neither girl would consider leaving their parents.

36 RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE

"I am sure that the humble old woman in Kielce was one of the Zaddikim. Mirrored in her humanity, I now see the beacons of my other heroes who kept my soul from dying. I see my father whose kindness and courage remain immortal. I see Dr. Janush Korczak who joined the starving orphans to be delivered to the ovens of Treblinka. I see Raul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, individual resistance fighters, and all the ordinary people who paid the supreme price to live by their values.

"The Lamed Vav Zaddikim may be only legend, but what if they are not? What if our fate depends on there being enough righteous people?" (Chapter 14 The Old Woman in Kielce, p. 94)

Laughlin's family were not particularly religious but her reference to the Jewish legend of the 36 righteous people, the Lamed Vav Zaddikim, was poignant in the way she related this story to heroic people she saw around her including her father and Dr. Janush Korczak, who was caring for a band of starving orphans.

THE GOOD NEWS INSIDE

"The struggle to hold on to my humanity had been a concern for me ever since Nazi boots stepped on our streets and began to trample on our lives. How do you keep your faith in love and trust when your people are being shoved, by your fellow men, into gas chambers and crematoria? With bitter hatred, I often vowed to wreak vengeance upon the barbarians." (Chapter 24 Hof, p. 169)

How does a teenager survive death camps and an escape afterward wearing only a burlap caftan and wooden clogs in the frigid cold of winter with little to eat? People often asked Laughlin why didn't she and others around her rise up and beat back the Germans and the Poles who supported such barbaric behavior? She reports seeing dead bodies on her street in the Warsaw Ghetto as well as the bloodied pregnant neighbor whose fetus was slashed from her womb.

Certainly a large part of why the author of Transcending Darkness survived was the constant contact and encouragement of her mother who had herself as a girl survived pogroms in her native Belarus. In the United States, Laughlin flourished going on to have a family of three sons with another survivor of WWII and managing to achieve undergraduate and graduate college degrees in education despite having arrived in America with only three years of formal educational training.

Anne Frank wrote, "Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!" Estelle Glaser Laughlin managed to realize her life beyond the Warsaw Ghetto and carry forward, despite immeasurable grief, anger and frustration a life worthy of universal memory.

Revisiting the past, especially one as difficult as Estelle Laughlin's, can be difficult for the memorist but illuminating for her audience. In her poem "How the Past Comes Back," Natasha Trethewey tackles the burden of memory showing both its dark and light aspects.

HOW THE PAST COMES BACK

Like shadow across a stone,
.......gradually--
.............. the name it darkens:

as one enters the world
.............. through language--
....... like a child learning to speak
..............then naming
everything; as flower,

the neglected hydrangea
..............endlessly blossoming--
.....................year after year
....... each bloom a blue refrain; as

the syllables of birdcall
....... coalescing in the trees,
..............repeating
a single word:
..............forgets;

as the dead bird's bright signature--
..............days after you buried it--
....... a single red feather
..............on the window glass

in the middle of your reflection.

Natasha Trethewey from Thrall

Strolling with the Folger Consort & Trio EOS

2012-12-22T16:57:51Z

After partaking of "Florence: Christmas Music of the Trecento" played by the Folger Consort with animated singing by Trio EOS, the Dresser was filled and remains full of the peaceful joy that comes with the exuberant delivery of a program of praise songs (more formally known as laude) and dances. The two-hour program with one intermission offered a range of 14th century, mostly polyphonic compositions. Folger Consort artistic director Robert Eisenstein on medieval fiddle, recorder, and lute played with guest artists Christa Patton (harp, recorder, bagpipe), Mark Rimple (lute, psaltery, medieval fiddle), and Mary Springfels (medieval fiddle, citole).

Most of the program was done in sets of three to four pieces alternating between voice and instrumental performance. The opening composition "Altissima luce col grande splendore" established the role of sopranos Jessica Beebe and Michele Kennedy and mezzosoprano Maren Mantalbano. Mantalbano in this ethereal and joyful opening number stood out with her engaging stage presence that continued throughout the concert.

Bagpipes were employed in several compositions including the first "Salterello" (two were played) where the bagpipe's drone gave a special texture to a vigorous dance tune.

At the intermission, the musicians stayed on stage to talk one-on-one with audience members curious about the medieval instruments. Mary Springfels answered questions about the citole, which she said was particularly shaped for the strolling troubadour. Further enhancement of the evening included an intricate piece of precepe folk craft from Naples, Italy. Look for this display in an out of the way alcove at the back of the theatre. Precepe craft began in the 1200's in Italy when St. Francis of Assisi asked Giovanni Vellita from the village of Greccio to create a manger scene.

The central part of Italy seems to inspire happiness and creativity. Hilary Tham in her poem "In Tuscany" expresses the joy she felt in painting the Tuscan landscape, a landscape where olive trees are cut back to regenerate beyond their normal life span. Because music of the medieval period was rarely set down on paper much of it was lost. How lucky the audiences of the Folger Consort are to have their interpretations of this beautiful music.

IN TUSCANY (an excerpt)

...

I am happy painting light, the cultivated peace
of olive trees, their gnarled and strange shapes
as they are cut back again and again to regenerate
and bear fruit beyond the natural span
of uncut trees. Once, I bit into a ripe olive,
had to spit it out. The fresh olive is acrid,
it cannot be eaten until soaked in brine.

"I am a sculptor of marble," Michelangelo said,
cursing his fate that made the pope demand
he paint pictures on a chapel ceiling.
Strange how forcing nature achieves great yields.

by Hilary Tham  
from Reality Check & Other Travel Poems & Art

Faust: Looking for a Second Chance

2012-12-19T20:27:20Z

The human condition at the end of life is how the Icelandic Vesturport Theatre and Reykjavik City Theatre frame Faust: A Love Story, an entry in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. The Dresser saw the December 13, 2012, performance of Faust's six-performance run, a United States premiere.

The script, co-written by Vesturport Theatre members Nina Dögg Filippusdottir, Gísli Örn Gardarsson, Carl Grose, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, and Vikingur Kristjansson with music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is drawn from Faust plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Christopher Marlowe with modern day commentary attempting to weave the old poetic lines together. Once the Dresser accepted that the Faust story, despite the play's title, was not the critical emphasis, she found the tale of an old actor abandoned in a nursing home at Christmas time, looking for a second chance with life and love, a poignantly sad and moving experience.

The way Johann, the old actor, (played movingly by Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) gets his second chance is through acting the Faust story. All nursing home residents, attendants, and visitors become part of his production. Vesturport Theatre director Gísli Örn Gardarsson literally cast a net over the central portion of the orchestra seating such that the players who claimed in a talkback session that they were not acrobats tumble and saunter drunkenly in space that is normally stirred only by dust motes. The Vesturport group, which premiered their Faust play in January 2010, specializes in physical theater, much like what the American Chicago-based troupe 500 Clown does and to certain degree Arlington, Virginia's Synetic Theater.

The Dresser supposes that if she had not seen productions by 500 Clown (500 Clown Macbeth in 2006) or Synetic Theater (The Master and Margarita in 2010), she would be more wowed by the old man in a wheelchair (Magnus Jonsson) who tears open his face to become the evil Mephisto, who throws a noisy firecracker on stage, who steals and moves the soul of Johann to Asmodeus (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), one of Mephisto's devils by holding their hands and letting their respective body electricity swap. The play is a mash-up where the circus arts, except for the old lady who transforms into a contortionist, do not come close to the skills of Cirque du Soleil performers as one was led to believe by the advanced advertising. The play is a mash-up of two classic works in conflict with each other where the tragedy of Goethe is mixed with the comic relief of Marlowe's morality play. The Icelandic play is a mash-up of old classical verse versus modern day lingo.

The Dresser tips her hat to Nina Dögg Filippusdottir who plays the devilish Lilith (yes, Adam's first wife). Filippusdottir in her gauzy slip, red gloves, and red boots is quite the seductress. Her scene atop an upright piano as she runs her gloved fingers across the keyboard is scintillating and much more so than when nurse Greta (Unnur Osp Stefansdottir) as Faust's lover pulls off her bodice revealing her naked breasts.

Stories about aged performers locked into old-age institutions, such as Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut film Quartet, are now accruing a large following in the United States as Baby Boomers have reached their senior years. In Grace Cavalieri's book-length poem Pinecrest Rest Haven, an elderly lady called Mrs. P deals with the drama of growing old. Her twin, unlike Johann's, is anchored in a formative friendship something Johann was not able to achieve during his life.

............................Waking up under water,
Mrs. P thought of Jan because Jan remembered
the flowers Mrs. P had in her backyard, pink and white peonies,
Queen Anne's lace by the tracks, lily of the valley. Pulled up
through the medicine of dreams, people kept waking her up to tell her
to get some rest. Thinking she was young, she woke one day to find herself
old. The shock nearly killed her. The doctor's legs were the first thing
she recognized. One leg looked bigger than the other. She saw that
the day he wore khaki shorts. Who died?! she shouted.
Did somebody die? She lay back down, exhausted.
She'd never wear high heels again. Now she knew. Mockingbirds
outside make the same sound three times. Come to dinner, come to dinner, come.
At camp Jan and she were five years old and they both tried out for the part
of fairy princess. As they were best friends, the Director made the role
for twin fairies, so they said their lines together, held identical
wands, bowed exactly the same time, wet their pants together after.

by Grace Cavalieri  
from Pinecrest Rest Haven

Birthing New Opera in the Nation's Capital

2012-11-23T19:39:04Z

Where can you experience new American opera? With any regularity, the only place has been New York and most significantly New York City Opera's VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab.

But maybe occurrence of this kind of risky programming (the producers of opera fear no one will show up and fill their seats) is changing. On November 19, 2012, Washington National Opera launched its American Opera Initiative, a public workshop for encouraging new American opera in small bytes. The program--a concert-style world premier--featured three 20-minute operas: Part of the Act by Liam Wade and John Grimmett, Charon by Scott Perkins and Nat Cassidy, and A Game of Hearts by Douglas Pew and Dara Weinberg. Sheparding this new program into life with promise of more was Christina Scheppelmann, the out-going WNO Director of Artistic Operations. Mentoring this set of three mini operas was conductor Anne Manson, composer Jake Heggie, and librettist Mark Campbell.

The Dresser, who has often enjoyed the opera excerpts presented in the NYCO VOX showcase, could only think of the WNO mini operas in this context. Twenty-minutes does not an opera make. Of the three presented, only one stood out and that was Charon. The libretto about the weary boatman ferrying newly deceased to Hades and the richly textured percussive music made the entire evening worth dashing from DC's Union Station after a trip that day to partake in the historic closing event of Coursera's Modern Poetry course. Bass-baritone Solomon Howard as Charon was a standout.

Overall mezzo-soprano Julia Mintzer gave notable performances. Although the Dresser was not impressed with Part of the Act's collage of music that quoted everything from stripper bump and grind to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Mintzer gave a memorable performance in terms of vocal range and acting. The story of Part of the Act concerns a Vaudevillian actress having an affair with a man whose wife (played by Julia Mintzer) comes gunning for them. This initial introduction to Mintzer made the Dresser pay attention with favorable pleasure to the mezzo's performances in the other two pieces. Mintzer was the only singer partaking in all three operas.

While Douglas Pew, A Game of Hearts' composer, took the trouble of writing for a variety of voices: soprano (Shantell Przybylo), mezzo-soprano (Julia Mintzer), light lyric soprano María Eugenia Antúnez), lyric tenor (Mauricio Miranda), and lyric bass-baritione (Norman Garrett), the lyrical music was not remarkable and neither was the libretto, whose story was set in a nursing home and focused on several widows and their losses.

The Dresser looks forward to attending the next program in WNO's American Opera Initiative. Jun. 8 - 9, 2013, will be The Tao of Muhammad Ali (A Ghost Story) by composer/guitarist D. J. Sparr.

Merrill Leffler's poem "Performance" not only captures story elements from Part of the Act, Charon, and A Game of Hearts, but it also speaks to the emotional state of collaborating artists premiering brand new work.

PERFORMANCE

Do you think the I standing before you
doesn't want to seduce your attention
and hold you close to the erratic beating
of its heart? Do you think the I here is not performing
for your applause and approbation,
that' it's not needy or demanding
and doesn't want more than it knows it's entitled to,
that it won't pull from its hat every possible trick--
its brooding soulfulness, its comic shtick--
whatever it takes?
..............................Friend, look in the mirror.
Show me we are not a marriage of grief and joy,
of lust, desire, ambition, fear, of every need
that has clung since we are first thrust into this dark
and resplendent world, that all our stunting
our juggling, our masks, all our art and philosophy
want nothing from each other and are not in performance.
Friend, mon frère, ma soeur, astonish us.

by Merrill Leffler  
from Mark the Music

Photo Credit: Scott Suchman

Conference of the Birds--An Oasis from the Hubbub

2012-11-13T15:57:08Z

If you love myth and storytelling embellished with music, dance, stylized movement, a dash of acrobatics, and costumes with imaginative flair, the Dresser recommends you take the entire family to see The Folger Theatre's production of The Conference of the Birds playing through November 25, 2012, at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

The work by Jean-Claude Carrière and Peter Brook and based on the 12th century Persian fable of the same name by Farid Uddi Attar is much like The Ramayana and The Green Bird that were produced by the Constellation Theatre Company in the last several years. All three involve arduous quests. And all three have featured the percussion performance of Tom Teasley who is a virtuosic player of exotic instruments and also a singer who scats. In the Folger production, he is seen working away on his drums and melodika on the top balcony above the players.

What the Dresser particularly enjoyed was how comically modern the English translation is.

Hoopoe "Listen, feather brains! I'm speaking of our true king. He lives behind the mountain called Kaf. His name is Simorgh. He's the King of birds. He is close to us but we are far from him. The way to him is unknown and only a man with a lion's heart dare take it. ..."

Heron, "Are we sure the Simorgh exists?"

Hoopoe, "Yes. One his feather fell on China in the middle of the night and his reputation filled the world."

Under the leadership of the Hoopoe bird, the birds fearfully set out to find their leader. As the group travels, they move in ways reminiscent of the wide-stance, arm-gesturing African dance. Nightingale (Annapurna Sriram) plays a ukulele while singing sweet ballads that sound like Janis Ian or Nellie Mckay. The cast enacts plays within the larger play.

The Conference of the Birds creates an oasis from the hubbub of the current day, demanding nothing of the audience. Director Aaron Posner has choreographed a piece that moves along like a well-behaved camel caravan. Even when a slave looses his head or gets pierced by an arrow while standing with an apple on his head, the serenity of the scene is not disturbed. Nothing is presented that will scare the children or offend a senior member of the family.

Greg McBride in his poem "Tight Waist" creates a surreal landscape in this athletic action that alters the reality of his opponent in much the same way that the Hoopoe bird controls the belief system of the conference of birds. If the birds have their eyes open, they would see what the end result will be relative to their journey but they do not. Like the losing wrestler, the birds have to move through the whole process.

TIGHT WAIST

Like preening cocks crouched grim, we circle--
he white with red piping, I red and blue.

We hand jive the close space. I'm intrigued
by his strength, his two-step swagger.

His right heel barely rises, rolling weight
onto the ball of the foot where the slightest

lift begins the transfer from right to left,
the way a vaulter shifts from foot to planted pole.

He repeats this move a dozen times.
I'm alert to the possibilities,

observe his pattern, his cadence.
I paw the mat, ready my sugar-foot thigh.

Now his center describes a shallow arc
to an apex that barely arrives, from which

he's suspended, between two havens.
And I strike, lunging past his defenses.

I don't hear his suck of shock.
Or anything else. Not the squeak

of weightless Tigers toeing the Resilite.
Not the rising roar of ten thousand.

He sees me coming, as in a dream,
and wills a landing safe on the left,

but gravity will not be hurried, and
I'm there, behind, savoring his sweat,

clamping a tight waist. "Takedown!"
the ref cries.

by Greg McBride  from Porthole

Poetry Taken to Other Levels

2012-11-03T22:00:00Z

After attending Washington, DC's Marine Corps Marathon to watch her New Jersey shore daughter-in-law finish in four hours and two minutes, the Dresser has a new appreciation of what marathon means to anyone who persists in any kind of endurance course. And especially after the news last night that the good Mayor Michael Bloomberg has bowed to the outrage of conducting the New York City Marathon when so many of his constituents are suffering after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

OF MARATHONS & MOOC MANIA

The word marathon derives from a Greek village and plain northeast of Athens where the Athenians were victorious over the Persians in 490 B.C. The village name--Marathon--took on new meaning when a messenger from Marathon ran more than 20 miles to Athens to deliver the news of the victory.

For the Dresser, and perhaps for many of her dear readers, the world has changed recently in ways that will not allow return to what was. Moreover the scale of change is enormous. For the Dresser, who has been running a marathon of poetry this fall by participating in MOOC mania--more on this mind-expanding 21st century be in shortly--the refuge for all this unsettling change is poetry. On the weekend leading to the supersized storm Sandy, the Dresser attended two exceptional poetry events--a by-invitation-only symposium on Gertrude Stein and a performing arts center poetry reading to a large general audience. Both events seem to be a barometer of our time, measuring pressure experienced from accumulated conditions not entirely understood.

In September 2012 as a beta test, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) through a company calling itself Coursera began offering Internet readership a without-tuition-cost opportunity to take University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis' ten-week Modern Poetry course. The Dresser signed up immediately last spring (the course will remain open for registration probably until the next offering begins in September 2013) but had no idea how groundbreaking this educational opportunity would be. She had no concept of attending a class with 35,000 classmates, some of whom make themselves known in the discussion forums of Filreis' ModPo, as the class has come to be known. She had no concept how one teacher could make a class of this size seem intimate.

The technology has been remarkably dependable, even during Hurricane Sandy for those who still had power to partake. Yes, Filreis has teaching assistants whom the ModPo devotees know by face, name, and literary preferences as each week the professor rolls out videos where he and his TA's push back their sleeves and do "deep reading" discussions of selected poems. On designated weeks, live web session take place where students from all over the world can call in, tweet, or write into the discussion forum set up for this ModPoLive session. Furthermore, students are invited to the University of Pennsylvania campus and the Kelly Writer's House to participate in the live session. The TA's are as agile as the professor in making the live sessions work. The student body defies expectations and is amazingly active whether late at night or early in the day. Time worldwide has not gotten in the way of students coming together to share this experience.

ON MEETING DJ SPOOKY & GERTRUDE STEIN AT YALE

On October 26, 2012, the Dresser attended "A Symposium on the Work of Gertrude Stein" organized by the Gertrude Stein Society with the collaboration and support of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut. The informative program addressed the corrected edition of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation recently published by the Yale Beinecke, approaches for teaching Stein, and Stein's writings on war. The small gathering of about 60 people was a mix of academics (teachers and students) and independents (scholars and fans). In the world of Stein study, the range of subject matter was timely and perfect for engaging any participant of any current day proceedings on Gertrude Stein and her work.

Now, Dear Reader, step into this picture with the Dresser to get the full effect. At this high-tech library where live cameras watch researchers use original resource documents from such writers as Gertrude Stein and researchers are told to make copies of what they are looking at with their cellphones and do their documenting with their laptops--no pens allowed (If you must handwrite, bring loose sheets of paper and pencils), a low-tech symposium takes place. Most of the presenters choose to stand behind a podium and read their papers word by word. An occasional presenter managed to get a text-heavy slide projected and one of the educators talking about teaching Stein wowed the assembled--he was praised as a "rock star"--with a recording of DJ Spooky's remix of Stein's "Portrait of Picasso."

POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE

On October 28, 2012 (same day as the Marine Corps Marathon), the Dresser attended a poetry performance by former United States Poet Laureate (2004) Billy Collins and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mary Oliver at the Music Center at Strathmore Marriott Concert Stage in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a full house (not every seat taken but certainly well attended) where the tickets sold for $45-$75. While the Dresser believes that some significant portion of the house was occupied by people who had been given the seats at no cost, the fact that people were there late in the afternoon while storm warnings were blaring from the media says something positive about the state the poetry.

Because the Dresser is unlikely to write about the Collins-Oliver reading again, she offers these details about this popular culture, poetry-the-for-people event. First, the Dresser will say quietly that most academics are not fans of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. Second, the Dresser who always runs into other poets at poetry readings did not see anyone she knew and this is not to say there were no poets of note in the audience but more to say the audience was not the usual audience for poetry. Third, the person introducing this program asked the audience to "welcome these icons of the poetry world" as if they were not living, breathing, working writers.

]]> If the Dresser were pressed to the wall and asked to give a sound byte for the media she might say this reading was Jon Stewart meets Grandma Moses. Billy Collins can hold his own with any standup comic. In introducing himself, he said he was so pleased Mary Oliver asked him to open for her. Then he immediately launched into his poem "You, Reader."

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you,

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
...

This was followed by dog poems that he said would cut straight to the chase since he knew Mary Oliver would also be reading her dog poems. His "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House," "A Dog on His Master," and "The Revenant" created waves of deep belly laughs, giggles and guffaws. Should the Dresser mention that "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" has been sung, granted recitative fashion, but definitely in the operatic style of singing. Here are the opening irreverent lines from "The Revenant."

I am the dog you put to sleep, 
as you like to call the needle of oblivion, 
come back to tell you this simple thing: 
I never liked you--not one bit.

However, "A Dog on His Master," which ends "if only I were not her [the dog's] god," created a sigh in the audience for which Collins expressed satisfaction while at the same time letting the audience know he expected this reaction and somewhat distained it at the same time. Despite Collins' clowning, his craft of poetry always shows through (full disclosure: the Dresser has heard Collins perform many times) as he can agilely wield polyptoton and parataxis, form--old and new--holding his own with poets writing today. Critics will be quick to say he lacks depth and staying power, but he knows his audience and what folks listening can understand. After delivering his poem "Forgetfulness"

...
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
...

he remarked about the risk he was taking with this poem, that is, who would know the name of that Greek mythological river in Hades (Lethe) but he could hear this audience was with him.

Quite frankly, the Dresser has less to say about Mary Oliver. The pairing with Billy Collins in the Dresser's mind was unfortunate. Collins set the tone and Oliver's nature-infused folk wisdom did not stand up to the antics of irony and perversity that Collins can turned on dime with both inside and outside of his poetry. She should have gone first. However, the audience at Strathmore was unfazed. They were noisily appreciative when she read her poem "Wild Geese,"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

chuckled over her poems about her dog Percy especially when he ate her copy of the Bhagavad Gita and sympathized when she read her take on Christopher Smart's "For I will consider my cat Jeffrey" (substitute "my dog Percy").

...
For he was made small but brave of heart.

For if he met another dog he would kiss her in kindness.
...
For he came to me impaired and therefore certain of
.......short life, yet thoroughly rejoiced in each day..."
...
For he was a mixture of gravity and waggery.

Perhaps the Dresser is jaded (how could anyone not love this loving poetry of Mary Oliver?) or the Dresser loves more Edward Hirsch's poem "Wild Gratitude" that makes reference to Christopher Smart's love for his pet Jeffrey while meditating on the human condition via his cat Zooey. More interesting to the Dresser was hearing Mary Oliver speak in the talkback session after the performance ended. Her humanity appeals and certainly the Dresser will read Oliver's poetry from the page in a quiet place during a quieter period.

However for now, the Dresser will move back to the remaining syllabus of ModPo where the focus is on L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, chance, conceptual and unoriginality poetry. The Dresser hopes to run the rest of this course without interference of weather and without falling down.

The Power of Anna Bolena

2012-09-19T12:32:41Z

If Gaetano Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena was a story about a mother deprived of seeing her daughter grow up because her husband wants a new wife, the libretto would have been written by a woman. It should be noted that the non-speaking/non-singing role of Henry and Anne's daughter Elizabeth who would become Elizabeth I, Queen of England, was added by Stephen Lawless who conceived and directs this production. The Dresser applauds the interpretation but it did raise a flag about who wrote the libretto. Felice Romani's libretto, a tragedy about a woman with enormous political ambition--she wanted to be Queen of England as the second wife of Henry the VIII--deeply impressed the Dresser. In today's world, one thinks about Hillary Clinton, a woman who put up with a philandering husband possibly to further her ambition to be president of the United States. Clinton's story is yet unfinished and may very well not be a subject of tragedy as Anne Boleyn's story was.

On September 18, 2012, the Dresser saw Washington National Opera's offering of Anna Bolena. This production with impressive sets comes from The Dallas Opera.

Soprano Sonia Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena (Anne Boleyn) is a force against which no man of ordinary station should compete. Her powerful singing filled the Kennedy Center opera house in what seemed to be an effortless performance.

Bass baritone Oren Gradus as Enrico VIII (Henry the VIII) was a worthy match to Radvanovsky both in voice and acting. However, Shalva Mukeria as Riccardo (Lord Richard Percy)--the man set up by Henry to cause Anne's demise and who is shockingly Anne's legal husband by an earlier marriage never annulled---has a strange quality to his voice that doesn't meet standards set by Radvanovsky and Gradus.

Mezzo-soprano Sonia Ganassi with a less powerful voice is a beautiful complement to Radvanovsky. This was especially heard in the scene where Jane asks Anne for forgiveness after revealing that she (Jane) is the woman Henry will marry next and the reason why Henry wants Anne out of his way.

One other singer of particular note, though in general the casting was excellent, was contralto Claudia Huckle in the pants role of Smeton, the page who loves Anne but who is tricked into denouncing her because he is told this will save her life. Huckle's singing and acting is particularly animated when he visits her vacant bed chamber to return a locket of hers that he had stolen as a love token. In an opera that lacks movement and seemed exceptionally static in this production, Huckle's performance was a breath of fresh air.

While the beautiful music was played with exuberance and presented as one would expect, the Dresser often found Donizetti's cheerful compositions incompatible with the tragedy unfolding. Moreover, the Dresser found Lawless' interpretation of the story strangely comic at inappropriate points. For example, during the long overture that begins this opera, the the silent presentation of Henry's marital history with text projections and appearances of Gradus with first a non-speaking/non-singing walk-on who plays his first wife Catherine of Aragon and then with Radvanovsky as Anne Boleyn made not only the Dresser chuckle but also others in the audience.

In Moshe Dor's poem "I Ran," we meet a man much like Henry the VIII. Unlike the historic king who was moving from wife to wife seeking a male heir, Donizetti's Henry is running ragged trying to find perfect love. The problem is the women Henry picks in this opera all have political ambition.

I RAN

Man, why did you run away?
Jerzy Andrzievsky, "The Diamond and the Ashes"

I ran because what I craved proved to be
a mirage, I ran because in the wilderness
my body burst into flames, I ran because
when the last wadi flooded, my soul
also was washed away, I ran because I'm human
and was afraid the bullet would hit my back
but instead it struck the bull's eye of my heart.

by Moshe Dor as translated by Barbara Goldberg
from Scorched by the Sun

Photo credit: Scott Suchman

Mad over Wolf Trap's The Rake's Progress

2012-08-05T17:21:24Z

Call the Dresser a naïf or supreme sucker, as you will, Dear Reader, since her discoveries about modern opera persist. On August 3, 2012 in Vienna, Virginia, she heard and saw with rapt delight Wolf Trap Opera's new production of The Rake's Progress with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by W. H. Auden.

While the Dresser would not say this work, which originally premiered in 1951, is an easy opera to love--you won't walk away humming any tunes--it is supremely grand for its neoclassical music that evokes Mozart and for its rich poetic text. And yet the story is a fairy tale complete with the granting of three wishes and a devil character named Nick Shadow who brings the protagonist down, so far down he ends up in London's Bedlam madhouse. What is easy to love if you are an opera aficionado is the talent brought to this production. Tenor Eric Barry as Tom Rakewell has that Pavarotti je-ne-sais-quoi flair in voice, acting ability, and physique. He captivates as he shows us what a rogue he is in such lines as:

Since it is not by merit
We rise or we fall,
But the favour of Fortune
That governs us all,
Why should I labour?
For what in the end
She will give me for nothing
If she be my friend?
While if she be not, why,
The wealth I might gain
For a time by my toil would
At last be in vain.
Till I die, then of fever
Or by lightning am struck,
Let me live by my wits
And trust to my luck.
My life lies before me,
The world is so wide:
Come, wishes, be horses;
This beggar shall ride.

Soprano Corinne Winters as Anne Trulove easily masters the challenging Stravinsky score and seems both wise and innocently ignorant at the same time. What she writes on the Wolf Trap Blog captures what she is able to enact on stage with her voice and body language.

"For me, the big lush romantic operas are too relentlessly emotional. Yes, I know that Mimi and Gilda die, and when they do, it touches me. But Rake's music is clean, thoughtful, matter-of-fact, and yes, a bit detached when it needs to be. So that when it dives under that surface to communicate an emotional truth, it touches my heart in a way Puccini doesn't. ... When Anne's hesitation turns to action and her brooding b minor opens up to a rhythmically irresistible C major, I want to cheer out loud: Yes, for God's sake, go to him! ... And when Tom, lost in his own mind, is given the brief gift of a lucid moment to make music with Anne the way he always wanted to, I can't stand it."

What's deliciously rich about the singers chosen for the Wolf Trap Opera production is the emphasis on the bass baritone voice. Father Trulove (Aaron Sorensen) and the Keeper of the Madhouse (Anthony Michael Reed) are bass baritones as prescribed by Stravinsky's scoring but not Nick Shadow who Stravinsky scored as a baritone. Yet what character among the men better suits that darker range than Shadow? Without knowing about Stravinsky's intention, the Dresser noticed how well Craig Colclough as Shadow handled the upper and lower notes . Colclough's voice is just right for such recitative as:

"I was never saner. Come, master, observe the host of mankind. How are they? Wretched. Why? Because they are not free. Why? Because the giddy multitude are driven by the unpredictable, must of their pleasures and the sober few are bound by the inflexible ought of their duty, between which slaveries there is nothing to choose. Would you be happy? Then learn to act freely. Would you act freely? Then learn to ignore those twin tyrants of appetite and conscience. Therefore I counsel you, Masterrake -take Baba the Turk to wife. Consider her picture once more and as you do so reflect upon my words."

Mezzo-soprano Margaret Gawrysiak as Baba the Turk is glorious as the bearded lady. Her voice is beautifully agile for Stravinsky's challenging music and she is convincing as a woman who both attracts and repulses.

Tenor James Kryshak as Sellem, the auctioneer is hysterically apt to play to the auction crowd which director Tara Faircloth mixes up with crossed dressed performers. When Tom Rakewell loses his fortune, his world seems to go mad with him.

Put the singing-acting talent together with scenic design by Erhard Rom (another suitable raked stage as in Wolf Trap's premiere of John Musto's Volpone) and the lush costumes of Rooth Varland (the scene in the whore house was an explosion of hot colors) and the formula for success exceeds any applause meter.

Photo credit: Carol Pratt

Michael Oberhauser's Fallen Angels

2012-07-27T20:30:11Z

What a pleasure to see young composers taking their operatic work to the stage as Michael Oberhauser has done in the Capital Fringe Festival. On July 26, 2012, the Dresser saw Oberhauser's Fallen Angels, three vignettes based on Biblical tales but updated to contemporary time. Oberhauser has brought together talented young singers and musicians in combination with minimal props to create an interesting 60-minute song-cycle production.

The three sections--Lilith, Temptation, and The Name on the Door--use poems and Bible verses loosely threaded together with connecting text. The composer wrote the libretti for the first and third sections and Shannon Berry wrote the Temptation section. For the Dresser, the individual words of the text receded into the background in favor of hearing the music and seeing the singers act.

The Lilith story gave a modern telling of Adam and Eve being visited by Lilith who is angered to learn Adam has married Eve. This is a seduction story where Lilith tries to win Adam back. But not because Lilith loves Adam, it's more about her vanity and that Eve is a younger woman. Lilith also seduces Eve with a brownie because Adam has forbidden Eve to eat chocolate. It's a comic take on the snake offering Eve the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. The acting of singers Courtney Kalbacker (Lilith), Joseph Pleuss (Adam), and Shelby Claire (Eve) served the story well.

The Name on the Door story is about betrayal and abject vanity. Jezebel, played by Annie Gill, is a singer managed by Eli, played by Bennett Umhau. Jezebel loves Eli but he primps in front of her with a hand mirror. He is chasing a younger singer--Josephine, played by Zoe Kanter.

Both the Lilith and Name on the Door stories seemed similar in textual theme and musical selection, which was more dissonant than tonal. The Temptation section concerned an aging business executive who was looking forward to being reunited sexually with a younger male colleague. This part of the opera as sung by baritone Andrew Sauvageau as Stephen Carlisle, tenor Benjamin Taylor as Joshua Clark, and mezzo-soprano Francesca Aguado as Veronica James offered the most interesting music as these voices tonally complimented each other. Oberhauser's setting of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Break, Break, Break" was reminiscent of the John Adams setting of John Donne's poem "Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God" in Doctor Atomic. The emotional intensity that Sauvageau brought to this aria helped to cement the association with this prominent Adams' aria.

In Mark Smith-Soto's poem "Café of Mirrors," the narrator addresses the questions of beauty and vanity--his and that of strangers--in a generous playing field that allows for tenderness despite knowledge that tenderness may not be justifiable. The stories of Fallen Angels verge into the human condition that Smith-Soto describes with its comic and emotional energy.

CAFÉ OF MIRRORS

Here it is again, one those moments
when human beings seem beautiful to me,
even their flaws touching, a mouth too large
on that woman, a bald spot on a boy

named Roberto, my perceiving renders
them tender, I know that they are not so,
but a knowledge within that knowledge
argues for them, gauzes each dot or blot

with a kind of love, and I myself am bettered
by this flare of neon from my head,
lighting the mirror so that I am flattered
into a grin, though I catch at the next table

a man just staring around, his goatee
diving off his chin into the rest of our lives.

by Mark Smith-Soto
from Our Lives Are Rivers

Andrew Simpson's Outcasts, an Opera

2012-07-23T01:50:32Z

Fringe Festivals are typically over the top, bawdy, and raw--as in unfinished and more like a workshop than a polished production. On July 21, 2012, at the Mount Vernon United Methodist Church auditorium, the Dresser had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Andrew E. Simpson's "operatic entertainment" (as noted in the program handout) The Outcasts of Poker Flat, based loosely on a short story of the same name by Bret Harte. While not a full-blown stage production relative to instrumentation, sets, and lighting, Simpson's production (he is composer, librettist and music director) is mightily polished for a Capital Fringe Festival entry.

Over the top as in exceeding normal bounds? Yes, this is what the operatic form aims for in terms of charged emotional stories and, in this case, Outcasts lets the melodramatic rule and that's not a negative. Bawdy, as in humorously coarse and vulgar? Short of nudity, Outcasts sports its share of swearing, drunkenness, and off-color humor.

The story involves a group of men and women kicked out of the town Poker Flats. The women--Cassie and Lorelei (Lori)--are whores. John Oakhurst is a gambler. Uncle Billy is a drunkard who makes the plight of the other three hopeless when he steals their horses and leaves them stranded as they wake to a major snowstorm. Just before Billy's thieving departure, the lives of the three remaining outcasts are forever altered by the appearance of a young couple on their way to get married in Poker Flats. The young man Tom has encountered Oakhurst before. Tom lost all his money to the gambler, but Oakhurst handed every cent back to the boy. Tom and his bride Piney insist that they will camp with the outcasts and then move on the next morning to Poker Flats. Oakhurst urges them to proceed to Poker Flats, but Tom and Piney have some food that they want to share. This is a story of sacrifice and redemption.

Andrew Simpson, who is a Catholic University of America professor heading the department of music theory and composition with an emphasis on stage music, practices what he teaches. His personal website lays out clearly that he is a "composer who explores how music interacts with other arts, in concert and on stage" and a "performer who specializes in silent film accompaniment and new chamber music." Simpson, as The Professor, arrived on stage first dressed in a bowler hat, white shirt, and dark trousers, looking very much the part of the piano player for a silent film.

The music for Outcasts is a stream of complex contemporary classical with accents of a folk sound intimating the pentatonic scales of Appalachian tunes. The opening number that included Cassie (soprano Rachel Evangeline Barham), Lori (mezzo-soprano Jessi Baden-Campbell), Oakhurst (baritone James Rogers), and Uncle Billy (base-baritone Mike Baden-Campbell) was an ambitious weave of four competing song lines in a mostly atonal mode. The number sets the bar high for the music that followed. Except for the closing duet, which ended abruptly and may be more a problem of stage and musical direction, the Dresser was impressed with what Simpson offered through his highly talented singers. A particular favorite song was a duet between Tom (tenor Noah Mlotek) and Piney (soprano Deborah Sternberg) about songbirds and in the style of the Appalachian folk tune. Jessi Baden-Campbell stands out not only for her singing in pieces like "The Wings of a Dove," but also for her acting. The Dresser could easily see Baden-Campbell in the role of Polly Peachum in Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. In fact, all three women in Outcasts gave admirable performances and Simpson seemed to feature them together and alone. This is a show worth hearing more than once.

In Adam Vines' poem "The Motel Room," the narrator's mother is depicted as an outsider who crosses the line of acceptable good girl behavior, but she is learning classical literature. The poem glances off the characters of The Outcasts of Poker Flat who huddle together in a rustic cabin telling each other stories as a snowstorm strands them. Tom tries to tell the group about the Iliad but falls flat, while Cassie ventures into a version of her life as she sings about the Golden Cock Saloon. Poem and opera alike constantly skirt questions of propriety and moral behavior.

THE MOTEL ROOM

My mother had taken off the shirt-waist dress
she had to wear to classes and slipped on bellbottoms
to walk from the Baptist college to town.
It could've been the ride he offered her to the drugstore

in his shark-finned '58 Impala. It could've been the date
he claimed to have later that night with a woman
whose black hair fell to her waist, or it could've been
the stiff cowboy hat she'd seen only on television.

It was the Fourth of July in Alabama, and most of the students
had gone home. It could've been because he didn't know
about Ovid's "Echo and Narcissus,"
or because he didn't go on his date with the racy woman;

it could've been because he waited instead on his porch
until after dark she passed again with a sailor.
It couldn't be because two days later he took her
with a six-pack to a motel room for their first date,

or because her stepmother sent her down from Chicago
to Birmingham for her step-grandparents' wedding anniversary,
or because, while there, she had secretly enrolled in college,
or because she had no one left but my father to please.

by Adam Vines
from The Coal Life

Photo credit: Allison Fuentes

Turn on New Lights: Bach Opens for Moravec

2012-06-29T20:52:59Z

As a college student who intended to be a creative writer, the Dresser dreamed about getting beyond words. This dream evolved later as she became aware of the writing philosophies Gertrude Stein and the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets but, essentially for the Dresser, getting beyond words seemed best accomplished through the nonverbal medium of dance. What brings up these thoughts was experiencing New Lights, an annual concert presented by the National Orchestral Institute and Festival at the University of Maryland Clarice Smith Center for the Arts June 28, 2012.

The idea of this annual concert is for students to experiment with ways to connect audiences to classical music. The premise is that not enough people in the general population appreciate classical music and therefore, finding new ways to communicate this art form need to be developed. Therefore these young and accomplished musicians decided they wanted to present Paul Moravec's Brandenburg Gate, a three-movement piece that probably few listeners, even those familiar with contemporary classical music have heard.

What was important to these enthusiastic musicians was to immediately engage the audience and change the dynamic from passive to active. Without spoken introduction and relying on a handout that provided background on what this concert would entail, some of the members of the orchestra, forming a "flash mob" entered the Gildenhorn Recital Hall clapping a rhythmic pattern that the handout explained was represented in the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2. Then immediately and without any conductor appearing to lead the orchestra, the seated musicians and those standing and singled out for solo parts began playing Bach's familiar Brandenburg Concerto #2 in F Major. What was unusual about this performance was that a vibraphone substituted for the trumpet solo. The Dresser was immediately mesmerized by the confidence and flair of these performers.

Mind you, Dear Reader, these were the first steps toward introducing Moravec's Brandenburg Gate, which Moravec modeled after Bach. Step 3 came without pause and slid gracefully from Bach into John Cage's String Quartet in 4 Parts, a celebration of the four seasons (I. Quietly Flowing Along--Summer, II. Slowly Rocking--Autumn, III. Nearly Stationary--Winter, IV. Quodlibet--Spring) in which Cage wanted to create a work that would praise silence without being silent. During this part of the concert, live violins played from an upper balcony behind the Dresser's seat, making her wonder where these musicians were.

Seamlessly Step 4 moved to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel ("Mirror(s) in the Mirror") in which it was much clearer that musicians were playing from various balconies flanking the main audience seating. The handout explained that the orchestra was creating for the audience facing mirrors with this on- and offstage performance. Pärt took his inspiration from Renaissance chant music and while this composition has sung element, it is lyrical and suggests song lyrics could easily be added.

Step 5 brought the NOI performers and audience together in improvised vocalization. The handout "strongly encouraged" audience members to select any tone and sing it until the breath runs out and then repeating but picking another tone until four minutes pass.

Step 6 brought Moravec's Brandenburg Gate. The Dresser was impressed not only in the grand sweeping style of Moravec's music which seemed inter-galactic (an audience member insisted there was a connection to Gyorgy Ligeti's sound track for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) but also how the orchestra got to this rhythmic, regal composition in one seamless flow through a chronology of unexpected sound. Moravec who came on stage for a talkback after the performance was tremendously pleased. While noting that Bach stands with Dante and Shakespeare in their timelessness as artistic greats, he said, this concert had Bach opening for Moravec.

In Anne Pierson Wiese's poem "The Distance," the poet tackles the communication issue of art relative to what an artistic work like a poem (or a musical composition) must say to reach across the distance between people (think: performer and audience) to be successful. This is what the Dresser as a student struggled with but could only articulate the issue in terms of getting beyond words and the structure words represent. The 2012 New Lights concert altered its usual playing field by proceeding without the structure of a conductor, mingling players with audience, and asking for audience participation in a nontraditional way, making for a satisfying and engaging experience.

THE DISTANCE

My mother read me poems before memory,
so maybe that's when it began,
the certainty that seemed already in
place at the time of my first memory--

or at least the two coincided exactly:
the earnest sound of her voice reading
fell like rain on the unmoving
earth of my conviction that poetry

was the highest object of humanity.
It was shocking how she allowed spaces to fall
between the living words--spaces that started small
but lengthened to such silent immensity

that a poem became the distance
between what we must say and what we can.

by Anne Pierson Wiese
from Floating City

The Black & White of Memphis

2012-06-15T22:44:06Z

The Dresser will make this short but she wants to go on the record to say how much she enjoyed Memphis, the 2010 Tony Award-winning musical that is currently working on a four city tour: Washington, DC (June 12-July 1), Kansas City, MO (July 10-July 15), Las Vegas, NV (July 17-22), and San Diego, CA (July 24-29). She attended the opening night performance (June 12, 2012) at DC's Kennedy Center.

While she doesn't think David Bryan's music has the catchy tunes of say, Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, which is currently playing at DC's Arena Stage, the singing performances of Felicia Boswell as the black nightclub singer Felicia and Julie Johnson as Huey's Mama were standouts. Johnson's powerhouse rendition of "Change Don't Come Easy" caused this critic who rarely stands at the end of a show to rise energetically when this singer with a huge voice made her bow.

Bryan Fenkart as Huey puts on his best performance as an actor. The character Huey is a very funky white country bumpkin who makes folks turn up their radios. He is hilarious but also rather stupid about how the world really behaves. The character Huey is a strange counterpoint to Felicia, a classy black woman with tremendous talent and little opportunity to succeed in a backwater place like Memphis in the 1950s where white and black mixing is forbidden. Needless to say he falls in love with her but why she reciprocates is hard to fathom. In the end, she succeeds and moves to New York while he stays tied to the apron strings of Memphis.

What the Dresser loved best was the dancing. Such numbers as "Everybody Wants to Be Black on a Saturday Night" put the lyrics and beat into visceral context for anyone who is a fan of social dancing. Most of Sergio Trujillo's choreography mixes jitterbug and Lindy Hop with hip-hop, break dancing, and odd gestures similar to what Twyla Tharp does with her choreography.

The Dresser also finds Memphis an interesting story to contemplate as the literary community in the Nation's Capital prepares to welcome Natasha Trethewey, our 19th Poet Laureate and the youngest person to hold this office. Trethewey's ghazal outlines the kinds of problems black and white couples from the south experienced well beyond the 1950s.

MISCEGENATION

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name 
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong - mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same 
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name 
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. 
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It's your Jesus year - you're the same 
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name - 
though I'm not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

by Natasha Trethewey
from Native Guard

Joan Miró: Art in the Service of Mankind

2012-05-30T20:35:31Z

Right now what interests me is the calligraphy of a tree or a rooftop, leaf by leaf, twig by twig, blade of grass by blade of grass, tile by tile. Joan Miró (1918)

Joan Miró (1893-1983) was and remains an artist who worked with a poetic muse. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from May 6 through August 12, 2012, hosts Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape. The DC exhibition concludes a tour that began at London's Tate Modern (April 14-September 11, 2011) and progressed to Barcelona's Fundació Joan Miró (October 13, 2011-March 25, 2012) before bringing the 120 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture to two floors of the National Gallery's East Building.

LOOKING FOR ROCKET POEMS

The quote that introduces this discussion (and the exhibition as well) cued the Dresser to look for aspects of Miró's poetry. Certainly his attention to imaginative language is often experienced in the titles of his work--"Woman Stabbed by the Sun Reciting Rocket Poems In The Geometrical Shapes Of The Musical Bat Spittle Fight Of The Sea," 1939; "Une etoilé caresse le sein d'une négress," 1938 ("A Star Caresses the Breast of a Black Woman"); and "The Escape Ladder," 1939.

However poetry pervades his colorful paintings rendered in flat perspectives such as his Hieronymus Bosch-like "The Farm" (1921-1922) with its complex symbols: a dog barking at the moon, dry red earth contrasted with a woman (her back to the viewer) washing something in or retrieving water from a cistern, and a rooster on a ladder pedestal versus the simpler unattached symbols of a dove, snail, and fish. Ernest Hemingway, who in 1924 met Miró through Gertrude Stein, fell in love with this painting saying, "It has in it all you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there." Hemingway who had very little money at that time had to compete with his friend poet Evan Shipman (they rolled dice to decide the matter) to get the high-priced painting ($5,000) from Miró's dealer and then negotiate an installment plan for paying. After he bought this work, Hemingway eventually hung it in the dining room of his Havana home and would neither lend it for exhibitions nor show it to visitors. Twenty-six years after Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, his widow Mary Hemingway donated the painting to the National Gallery of Art.

Miró said, "Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself." The statement reveals the level of passion and commitment that Miró brought to his art, but to fully understand where this painter found his well of supercharged emotion, one needs to know about Miró's origins. Born in Barcelona, Miró was a Catalan patriot intent on bringing separate recognition, if not independence, from Spanish rule, especially during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

ART IN THE SERVICE OF MANKIND

Miró believed the role of the artist was "to be someone, who amidst the silence of others, uses his voice to say something...that is of service to mankind." One detail that the Dresser particularly noticed was a fragment of newspaper with the words, "El Poeta Llull" in one of Miró's Metamorphosis collages that were created in 1935-1936. Ramon Llull (1232-1315), a Majorcan writer and philosopher, wrote the first major work of Catalan literature. As a philosopher and logician, Llull also influenced Gottfried Leibniz.

Here the Dresser's mind muses over the inspiration of Miró's striking painting "Two Philosophers," 1936, which effect menacing poses in their red stick figures with oversized penises and strange claw feet. Could these figures represent the opposing forces of the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936 or some earlier more primitive time that might include the working time of Ramon Llull who was intent on converting Jews and Arabs to Christianity? And thinking of the numerous paintings with ladders thrust skyward, could Miró be thinking of some celestial or spiritual escape for mankind?

Miró, whose work shows the influence of Surrealism, Cubism, Fauvism, and medieval painters like Bosch, read Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire as well as Surrealist writers like Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. Here's an excerpt from "The Artist, the Art," a long poem by Lilah Hegnauer that muses on beauty that has come with a terrible human cost. This poem comes from Hegnauer's poetry collection Dark under Kiganda Stars in which she chronicles her humanitarian work in Uganda.

THE ARTIST, THE ART (an excerpt)

II. The Artist

How do I justify the artist? I'm so far
from the words of suffering that they've
become colloquial: slum, ghetto, thin,
sick, starving. Does the scale boy know
that his starving face makes his eyes so big
they glisten with beauty and makes his
hip bones stick out like tails of fish, blunt
above his drooping trousers; the heads of the fish
are the two bony clusters above either side
of his tailbone. How do I justify the artist?

Sometimes I don't wash my hair, sometimes
I watch and mimic a sooty chat with my
shoulders hunched around my ears and my chin
tucked into my chest with what I'd like to think
might be humility. As if all this wasn't also art
or play at beauty. As if it gets me farther from myself.

by Lilah Hegnauer
from Dark under Kiganda Stars

Argento Retrospective: The Singing that Fills

2012-04-24T17:41:41Z

Do you have to go to New York City to see high-quality productions of contemporary opera? The Maryland Opera Studio at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center under the direction of Leon Major puts that question to rest by offering a remarkable retrospective of the work of Dominick Argento. The Dresser attended the impressive opening nights of Argento's operas Postcard from Morocco (April 20, 2012) and Miss Havisham's Fire (April 21, 2012).

Postcard from Morocco, a one-act opera of 90 minutes that premiered in 1971, is based on a libretto by John Donahue and liberally rearranged by the composer. In his musical memoir Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir, Argento said that initially the "utterly surreal" libretto about strangers waiting in a train station with unassigned dialogue baffled him. So what the composer did was, "cut each page [of the libretto] into fifteen or twenty horizontal strips and taped the sentences together again in a different order." He used the libretto he said as a "blueprint" and assigned the lines to "any character I fancied since I knew exactly who the singers would be." From Argento's words alone and without ever attending a performance, one can fully appreciate why this popular chamber opera has repeatedly been compared to Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts and Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach. However, the Dresser walked out of the Clarice Smith's Kay Theatre saying to her seatmate, didn't you hear the Benjamin Britten, the Peter Grimes, in this piece--that part when characters sing about boats? The next day, the Dresser asked Argento about this and what he said is that his admiration for Britten is top of his list.

In the April 21 "Talk with Dominick Argento," the composer said that Postcard from Morocco is sympathetic to the human condition and he cautioned that the worse thing one could do is to ask a person, "What do you do?" The Dresser believes that by extension, the operagoer should not ask what Postcard from Morocco is about. The odd thing about the characters in Postcard is that they are identified not by name but by the things they carry. And yes, the things these seven characters carry around the train station tell the audience a lot about them but these items also show us what these characters do and how they behave.

As to production itself, the singing was exhilarating--the trio about the hatbox that included Mandy Brown (Lady with a Hand Mirror), Ashley Briggs (Lady with a Cake Box), and Ilene Pabon (Lady with a Hat Box) nearly levitated the Dresser from her seat but every singer made significant contribution to this performance. Cleverly choreographed were the four mimes, who mostly operated from a red-curtained stage at one edge of the railroad station. Sweep of the hat to Izumi Ashizawa, the Movement Consultant. Kudos to the Director Pat Diamond, the Scenic Designer James Kronzer, and Costume Designer David O. Roberts.

Argento in his April 21 talk paid high compliments to the exceptional work that was coming out of Leon Major's opera studio and how welcomed he felt at the University of Maryland. He also quipped that it wasn't always the case that he could enjoy Postcard from Morocco, because "half of the productions I didn't hear very well because of slamming exit doors." To this the Dresser says to hurry to see this production. It's exceptionally engaging in all aspects.

Miss Havisham's Fire has quite a complex backstory about its creation. Argento was commissioned in 1977 by New York City Opera to write an opera for Beverly Sills. She had an idea she floated about an opera on the Empress Carlotta of Mexico. So Charles Nolte set to work writing a libretto he titled The Phantom Empress. However, Sills paid a visit to Argento in Minnesota where he is based and asked if he had any other ideas and he suggested a possible expansion of a monodrama called Miss Havisham's Wedding Night (drawn from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations) by John Olon-Scrymgeour. Sills said she loved the idea of working with a character that was a folle d'amour.

In Catalogue Raisonné, Argento said he was somewhat disappointed not to work on the Carlotta opera because he had already been thinking about several scenes. Then there was the sticky problem of delivering the bad news to Charles Nolte. And the crowning blow was that after Argento wrote what he considered the best music he had ever written, the New York Times critic in 1977 thoroughly panned Miss Havisham's Fire. Was it because it was overly long? Was it because the role of Ms. Havisham was written for the astounding abilities of Beverly Sills who withdrew because she had a recurrence of cancer? Was the squeaky platform where the inquest scene the cause of such a harsh review? Whatever the reason, the criticism hit Argento hard and he revised the opera and had a second premier in 1979.

]]> Miss Havisham's Fire is a two-act opera that runs two hours and thirty minutes including a twenty-minute intermission. The set is built on a courtroom setting that allows for flashbacks to Miss Havisham's rooms and garden. The story revolves around the jilted bride (Linda Mabbs playing the old Miss Havisham & Emily Kate Naydeck playing the young Miss Havisham); Estella (Older: Ilene Pabon & younger: Carolyn Brent), the girl she adopts and trains to sadistically manipulate male suitors; and Pip (Older Philip (Pip) Pirrip: Alex DeSocio & younger: Teresa Ferarra), a boy the old lady invites in ostensibly to play with Estella but actually so Estella can practice the art of manipulation. The inquest scene adds various people: the corner (Andrew Adelsberger), Miss Havisham's lawyer Jaggers (Jarrod Lee) and a group of women, who hope to be the heir of Miss Havisham's estate.

The evening belonged to soprano professor Linda Mabbs. Fire is a difficult role and even with the revisions Argento made that included breaking apart the older and younger Miss Havisham, the Dresser sees how this piece was written for Beverly Sills. Linda Mabbs did a reasonably good job sustaining the vocal and dramatic intensity and articulating this insanely calculating woman that Miss Havisham became. Leon Major, who, by the way, is retiring after this semester, left nothing to chance with this opera because he directed it himself and that means the details were carefully considered. Clearly, the audience walked away with a heavy load to process. Did they like this opera? The Dresser is not sure. She liked Postcard from Morocco best but was glad to get a bigger view of Dominick Argento's work.

Ingrid Wendt's "On the Nature of Bach's B Minor Mass" easily develops the attention to the human condition that Dominick Argento and his collaborators create in Postcard from Morocco and Miss Havisham's Fire.

ON THE NATURE OF BACH'S B MINOR MASS

Next to the last performance and Nancy,
crying, can't help it: how can anything
ever be this big again. Trish, too,
who until this morning has never
forgotten to fix breakfast, her husband
saying this singing must fill her right up.

Stranger than fiction, my mother would say.
Last week a soprano whose name I still don't know
looked right through me at Sears
Auto Parts store and tonight you'd think we were old
friends, kept from each other by seating
arrangements no one thought about changing any

more than notes in a score: faces closed
tight as zero, such concentration, no one
knew anyone's name, where in the world
we'd later show up: Observer Graphics, rummage
sales, the meter maid wagon, outside of your own
kid's school a father whose kid goes there too.

Last night Nathan surprised me, went on about Noah,
newborn, named because in one look he saw a son
strong enough to live up to a name and Noah is
a name to live up to: opening
strangers up to each other--on sidewalks,
in stores--stopping because of a baby who knows

nothing except love, love, a word so total
to question it is absurd. Turning our heads,
this music tonight against all we ever have learned
of decorum (Sanctus! Gloria!), Bach's postulation
of such absolute form tonight again releasing us,
binding us, this magnificent counterpoint of control.

Ingrid Wendt 
from Evensong

Photos: Cory Weaver