Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater


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Thursday, 21 January 2010

Television: The Audition

NOTE: In the New York area, The Audition will repeat on WNET Channel 13 at 2.30am on Friday 22 January and at 12noon on Sunday 7 February, and on WLIW Channel 21 at 3.00pm on Sunday 7 February. Set your DVRs accordingly.


The Audition, a two-hour film by Susan Froemke, follows the day-to-day lives of several opera singers in their twenties as they prepare for the Metropolitan Opera's National Council Auditions. Those who win have the opportunity to launch their careers, and even those who do not have the opportunity to sing from the Metropolitan Opera stage, accompanied by the Met Opera orchestra (perhaps the greatest in the world today), to a paying public.

The young singers demonstrate that opera singing, as an art form, remains in brilliant health, even as a more philistine, barbaric cultural life may relegate opera to the wayside as an elite unnecessary luxury. Of course, it is not — the human voice, as a musical instrument capable of extraordinary and sublime expression of the extremes of passion, comedy, suffering and desire, is irreplacable, as indeed are the works that offer that expression a disciplined outlet. And discipline, as well as devotion to the art and the repertoire, is at the center of the audition process. Perhaps the most memorable sections of the documentary are those which take place during coaching sessions. Those who have seen Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's fictionalized account of the premiere of The Mikado, will recognize the extraordinary attention to detail and tentative hope (as well as profound self-criticism) that engages those within the rehearsal room. These men and women at work (and certainly singing for these auditioners is a profession, not a career) make the populist dreams of American Idol look like a high-school talent show. While all of the singers are influenced by the tradition of opera singing (they are unmiked and take from the history of the form bits and pieces of performance tradition), nonetheless their art is highly personal, as several of the coaches take pains to point out. The best of them indeed reveal themselves through their singing, an intimate revelation that demonstrates the ability of discipline and craft to release what can finally be called an aesthetic expression of some genius; this comes out most clearly in those moments when the singers perform unaccompanied, with the bare voice. Viewers are also privy to the judging process: an uncompromising, unsparing discussion of the virtues and vices of the individual competitors.

Except for the to-camera interviews, The Audition utilizes hand-held cameras and the fly-on-the-wall techniques of a Frederick Wiseman documentary, but these are shined and edited to a very high gloss indeed (and, as a documentary made with the support of the Met Opera itself, serves perhaps inevitably as a two-hour commercial for the Met). The film, however, is immediately engaging; it doesn't take long before favorites emerge, and you do root for your own. More than anything else, this is testimony that opera continues to be a living art form, the human voice raised to a high pitch of discipline and craft as well as spirit an irreplacable instrument. And it does have its poignant conclusion, communicated in a brief title card at the very end of the film.

The Audition premiered nationwide on the PBS Great Performances series last night, and as usual with PBS programs, it will be rerun at various times on PBS stations over the next few weeks. A trailer for the film is below.

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Wednesday, 18 November 2009

The Four Seasons (After Cy Twombly)

Pianist Marilyn Nonken played two movements of Australian composer Liza Lim's The Four Seasons (After Cy Twombly), a new work written for her, on Houston Public Radio's The Front Row today. Catherine Lu also interviewed Marilyn about Lim's music, the Twombly paintings that inspired this particular work, and the role of the virtuoso in the performance of contemporary music. (Marilyn neglects to mention that the fourth movement, "Summer," is dedicated to our daughter, Goldie Celeste, who turns all of one year old tomorrow.)

The performance and full interview are here. (Yes, that's violin music you hear before the interview, but you're in the right place – the interview starts momentarily.)

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Thursday, 11 June 2009

Upcoming: Olivier Messiaen

Tickets will be available next week for Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken's 24 June performance of Olivier Messiaen's majestic 1943 work for two pianos, Visions de l'Amen, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. On the origin and structure of the nearly one-hour piece, Paul Griffiths writes:

Released from prisoner-of-war camp in 1941, Messiaen was slow to get going again as a composer in occupied Paris. The stimulus he needed came from Yvonne Loriod, who arrived as one of his students and was to become his second wife; almost at once, he wrote Visions de l'Amen (1943) for the two of them to play. Her part, according to his note in the published music, has "the rhythmic difficulties, the bunches of chords, everything concerned with speed, allure, and quality of sound"; while to himself, at the second piano, he allotted "the principal melody, the thematic elements, everything demanding emotion and power." The two pianos together become a percussion orchestra, akin to the gamelans of Indonesia, to which the music seems to look also in its frequent moments of pentatonic character. Its principal key, A major, was for Messiaen the tonality of luminous blue, of the sky, of Paradise.

The performance is free, but reservations must be made beginning 17 June at Ticket Central. More information at the Baryshnikov Arts Center Web page for the event.

More information about Visions de l'Amen is in Paul Griffiths' notes on the piece. If you miss it (and you shouldn't), despair not; Sarah and Marilyn have recorded the work for release on Bridge Records later this year.

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