May 22, 2023

 

A friend offered me a ticket for the final performance yesterday of Pittsburgh Opera's final show of the year, We Shall Not Be Moved. I was interested in seeing it because it had a captivating story line that incorporated a 1985 incident in Philly I remembered from when I was in college, and because it was being performed at the August Wilson Cultural Center, which I'd been wanting to go to for a while. (And "free" was an added incentive, natch.) The show felt a bit overlong in the second part, but was otherwise a haunting and often very moving hybrid piece: operatic vocals with a score that mixed modern classical and popular genres (jazz and funk mainly), augmented by spoken word, dance, and striking visual and staging effects. The latter really stood out at the end: an escalating fire projected on the stage's white flats with actors dressed as ancestral spirits standing or posing silently in stoical witness -- WOW.

And since I was there, I visited the adjacent museum afterwards, which featured photos and artifacts from or relating to Wilson's ten-play cycle on African-American life through the last century, all but one of which are set in Pgh's Hill District, where Wilson grew up. The beautiful piano pictured in this post is one of the pieces there. I've only read one of his plays to date (Fences), and have never seen one performed. I need to rectify that dearth.

 

May 19, 2023

My final PSO program of the season was a doozy: Grieg's A minor piano concerto and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The Grieg concerto I'd never heard before, though I instantly recognized its opening measures, which are one of those musical snippets that like the opening of Beethoven's fifth symphony have entered the DNA of our culture. I found the entirety of the first movement gripping, and the soloist, Alice Sara Ott, just spellbinding. Watching her vacillate effortlessly between lightning runs, her left hand sometimes hovering a foot over the keys as if summoning the very ghost of the instrument to show itself, and percussive attacks that she threw her whole diminutive body into, was breathtaking, literally -- towards the end of a long cadenza late in the movement, I literally caught myself not breathing, as if her hovering left hand had stolen the spiritus/air from me. And a sparse, soft encore after an extended standing ovation left me in tears. (The gal next to me, who had opera glasses, confirmed for me that Ott performed barefoot, which made me love the whole piece even more.) The Rite of Spring is one of my favorite pieces, and hearing it performed live again, I was reminded of how percussive so much of it is, like the throb of a wild, wild heart, and how prominent a role the woodwinds play (as a former first clarinet in my high school band, I'm kinda biased). I wanted the climactic sonic barrage to be even more fortissimo -- fffffff v. merely ffff -- but the journey there was magical nonetheless. What a wonder of a piece. (NB: The photo is of the orchestral set up for Rite, viz. the 603 kettle drums in the back.)

 

P.S. When I arrived at Heinz Hall last night, I realized that the sole of my right shoe had come partly detached. And I had a long walk back to the garage after the concert. I wound up parking in the convention center garage, which is technically four blocks (6th to 10th Street), but the distance between 9th and 10th streets is closer to three blocks. The situation deteriorated over the course of the return walk: by the time I'd walked maybe a block, I had to lift my right leg, push it forward, and try to drop it so that the sole landed squarely under my foot, which it did maybe 50% of the time. I'm sure I looked like I was rehearsing some weird mime routine. When I arrived home, I took off both shoes the second I entered my apartment building and walked barefoot up the three flights of stairs, and poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey as soon as I closed my apartment door.

 

May 13, 2023

It's 9:45 on Saturday morning and I'm craving a grilled hot dog on a grilled bun with dijon mustard and chopped onions. I'm sure psychology has a specific term for this very specific feeling.

May 9, 2023

If you're opera-curious but opera normally isn't your bag (baby), Pgh Opera's current show, Denis & Katya, might be just the thing for you. I attended the opening night performance last Saturday, and loved it. This contemporary (2019) piece is about a standoff between Russian special forces and a couple of disaffected teens in a post-industrial backwater in 2016, an incident that was livestreamed and went viral internationally for a day or two. The opera skips rapidly, at times dizzyingly, among the accounts of several different characters, and contemporaneous social media posts and a subsequent text exchange between the opera's creators about the incident, projected on a large screen at the back of the stage, add additional layers to an already complex story. The opera's stripped down production aesthetic -- just two singers and a couple of folding chairs with a cello quartet on an empty stage -- keep our focus on the unfolding events. The combination of live music and the electronic sounds punctuating the projected posts and texts serves as an analogue for our experience of the incident, simultaneously a human tragedy and an internet phenomenon. In a similar vein, the libretto's mixing of speech and singing suggests how the incident portrayed might live for us as both a bit of mundane sensationalism and something deeper. If all this sounds interesting, I highly recommend checking Denis & Katya out. Remaining shows: May 9 (tonight), 12, 14, and 18 at Pgh Opera's headquarters in the Strip (not at the Benedum).

 

May 6, 2023

If you're into hen's teeth, here's one for you: a good selfie.