Cafe Aman

Hoping today isn't indicative of the year to come.

Wishes for the sweetest of years to you all.

Show your support, and hear some good music.

Jazz for Obama

Awards.

Over in London, my Gramophone editors and colleagues have announced the winners of the 2008 awards: you can read more here.

Bernstein: Mambos, Tahiti, and feathers.

I (barely) made it to Carnegie Hall's opening night last night, which also served as the first installment of their massive Bernstein bash to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary year of his birth. (By the way, if you're curious to know what occupied much of my summer, check out the Gramophone special issue that we've put together to coincide with this festival--the issue will be available starting this very evening, including at Carnegie and Avery Fisher halls.)

A gala is a gala, and last night's was complete with goofy audience participation and a couple of brief singing (!) turns by Michael Tilson Thomas,--but the conductor, the San Francisco Symphony, and a roster of special guests that included Dawn Upshaw, Thomas Hampson, and Yo-Yo Ma certainly entertained the usual opening-night crowd. (There weren't any evening dresses that I saw that were worthy of the Fug girls, but I did notice one society lady's befeathered gown had decided to molt right then and there in the Carnegie aisle, leaving a trail of little black feathers in the woman's wake.)

A few snapshots of the music: In the West Side Story variations, the brass section blew as hot as anyone in Machito's band--good on them. So many orchestras, even American ones, are so obviously uncomfortable playing Bernstein.

I was speaking with MTT just a few weeks ago for the Gramophone special issue, and he mentioned to me that a problem in Bernstein's scores is that he assumes that the musicians have a working knowledge of all the idioms he calls upon, and so not everything is necessarily explicitly spelled out on the page. This can lead to a lot of trouble both for  classically trained and pop/other musicians who play his music. (We've all heard those performances, right? Especially the ones in which orchestral players are clearly embarrassed and struggling.) Last night's horns sounded just as they should, and the results were brilliant.

I'm sorry to say that Christine Ebersole completely phoned in her solo turn in "I Can Cook, Too," (from On the Town)--the growls on nearly every  note came cheap. Not so with Upshaw, who turned "What a Movie" from Trouble in Tahiti into a perfect miniature portrait. Yo-Yo Ma was, well, Yo-Yo Ma, in all his charm and professional graciousness; Thomas Hampson was moving in "To What You Said" from Songfest (hard not to be, in the material he had to work with); and the kids drawn from Juilliard for "Gee, Officer Krupke" were nimble and good-humored, despite their unenviable task of trying to really dance and move on a tiny sliver of the stage, in front of the first violins and MTT's podium.

Dancing. (And singing.)

Finally, finally...

Just home from seeing Karita Mattila (and some others too, I suppose, though they all receded in KM's long shadow) in Strauss' Salome at the Met. I was quite remiss in seeing her do this four years ago. Second chances don't come around all that often, and so I leapt at the opportunity to not miss the opening performance this time.

I wish I'd been able to hear more of the delicious--and deliciously odd--score, with all its fleeting moments of high detail that contain narrative universes all of their own. Unfortunately for me, near seatmates decided that any moments of a non-vocal nature were an invitation to discuss all the goings-on and recent developments onstage: Who's Herodia? Wait, that's the blonde's mother? The John guy is way too big for the part--didn't the words just call him "wasted"? And of course: Wow, was she really naked just now?
(I might have added one smaller query of my own: In the midst of the vaguely colonialist set and costumes, with Herod as an old Palestine hand of sorts, how come the angels of death were turned out as Tamashek camel traders, albeit with pristine white wings?)

Mattila's vocal transcedence in such an unyielding and exacting score is indeed a marvel, and she delivers an entirely believable take on the title character as a bored young socialite who, by dint of her familial dysfunction, morphs into a maybe craven, maybe crazed monster who then is transformed yet again, this time into a lost soul to be pitied. But what fascinated me perhaps even more was her dancing: not necessarily the choreography, which is heavily invested in a Marlene Dietrich-y dyad of gender roleplay, but instead the quality of Mattila's movement.

The soprano dances Salome with a certain coarseness that I think is very much intended. In Mattila's body, Salome is less the smooth and experienced seductrice than the teenager trying on a sexual identity for the first time. Sure, she may be able to plunge fearlessly into a split and wrap a scarf around her stepfather's neck seductively,  but you get the feeling that Salome is still young enough somewhere deep down that even though she tries out a few hip shimmies and thigh caresses here and there, the movements aren't quite yet second nature to her--and never will be.