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Home > Music
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
 A new recording of Olivier
Messiaen's two-piano masterpiece Visions de l'Amen (1944) is just out from
Bridge Records, performed by Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg. Paul Griffith writes about the work:
From the mystical writer Ernest Hello came the four
meanings of Amen, which again are outlined in Messiaen's preface: the Amen
uttered by the Creator in creating, the Amen of obedience to the divine
will, the Amen of longing for union with God, and the Amen of the eternal
consummation of everything in Paradise. These meanings can be associated
in turn with the first, third, fourth and last movements, but the
fundamental sense of Amen, as a gesture of assent, can be felt throughout
the work, for the most obvious musical image of assent is the cadence, and
the whole cycle is founded on a theme of Creation, which is an enlargement
of a pentatonic cadence.
The CD is now available from the Superfluities Redux
store at Amazon.com here.
Home > Music
Thursday, 21 January 2010
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.
Home > Music
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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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