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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.)
Home > Music
Thursday, 11 June 2009
 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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