Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
Spring is vaguely approaching New York – there are still few buds on the trees, and the temperatures are only slowly creeping upward – but there's still business to attend to, and in the thick of it. Light posting is the order of the day, especially after rolling in at 1.00am on a school night yesterday.
More to come. But: yes, by all means drop on down to the Flea Theatre to check out Ken Urban's The Happy Sad, running through 7 April. Compared to Ken's work with his own Committee Theatre Company, it's something of a trifle, but the Bats, the Flea's resident company of young performers, are game and winning.
Deborah Voigt, it turns out, was indisposed and absent from last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, but it was her loss. Janice Baird made a fine Isolde, and held her own against the brilliant Ben Heppner as Tristan and Matti Salminen's deeply affecting King Marke. Best of all was James Levine and the performance of the Met orchestra; the Met arguably boasts the finest orchestral ensemble in New York (which makes it one of the best in the world), and their rendering of one of the greatest achievements of Western music and drama was stunning and, as it should be, exhausting. More to come on Dieter Dorn's production, a marriage of Beckett and Appia, this weekend.
Many years after his notorious break with Wagner (well-examined in Bryan Magee's indispensable The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy), Friedrich Nietzsche said of the opera, "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art." Only a fool would argue with Nietzsche. Radio and HD-cinema performances of this production of Tristan seem to have run their time in the U.S. this season, but my European and Australian readers may still be in luck, with performances running in April.
Posted at 8.43 am in /Miscellaneous
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