Playing On The Brain Composers had always known that some keys and combinations of notes can manipulate an audience. But now researchers are actively studying how that manipulation works. Take the key of a piece of music, for example. "One chunk of the brain was responding when the melody was in G major or E minor and another part of the circuit was responding when it was in E major." BBC 12/13/02

The Rodney Dangerfield Of Opera Composers If there are two undeniable truths in the world of opera, they are: 1) Audiences can never get enough Puccini; and 2) Musicologists have had just about enough of him. Even as scholars began to (finally) embrace other Italian opera composers like Verdi and Donizetti a few decades back, Puccini was left behind, an afterthought in the study of "serious" opera. Now, a new study of the man and his work may finally drag the musicological community into line with the people who pack opera houses for the latest production of Tosca. The New York Times 12/15/02

What Went Wrong With 'Sophie'? Nicholas Maw's much-hyped new opera based on the Holocaust novel Sophie's Choice is one of the hottest tickets on the London scene, but critical reaction has been less than stellar. "Sophie's Choice ultimately... founders on gaping disparities between subject, score and production. It raises issues that take us into territory where music and theatre struggle to cope." The Guardian (UK) 12/14/02

It's Not One Thing, It's Everything So what exactly is wrong with Nicholas Maw's adaptation of Sophie's Choice? What isn't? "The opera's novel-like narrative plays badly onstage. None of the three main characters - the refugee Sophie, her charismatic but mentally ill Brooklyn boyfriend Nathan, and the bystanding narrator Stingo - has a strong entrance. Character expositions are antitheatrical, dispersed rather than concentrated. The first two acts don't end so much as they stop. Scene after scene lacks a context that might infuse the mundane hi-how-are-you moments in the libretto with significance." Philadelphia Inquirer 12/15/02

For Whom The Cell Tolls This week, as conductor Sakari Oramo, in his New York Philharmonic debut, was wowing a Lincoln Center crowd with Nielsen's 4th Symphony, a cell phone went off in the balcony, breaking the breathless silence that follows the second movement. Such an event is, of course, all too common these days, but Oramo's reaction was not: he refused to continue the performance until silence had been fully restored. Justin Davidson wishes more conductors were possessed of such temerity. Newsday (Long Island, NY) 12/14/02

Music Go Boom? John Adams has been commissioned by the San Francisco Opera to write an opera about the deveopment of the atom bomb. "It involves what I call American mythology. That was what drew me to the `Nixon in China' story as well. I grew up in the late 1950s and '60s, the worst part of the cold war, and these images are planted in my consciousness."
backstage 12/12/02

Radiohead Fanatic Pianist Christopher O'Riley has a passion for the guitar band Radiohead. He's been arranging about a dozen of the band's songs and performing them in his otherwise classical concerts and playing them during the intermission of "From the Top," his public radio music show. "Both classical musicians and Radiohead enthusiasts have taken note of O'Riley's obsession; his work is drawing notice from concert promoters and it's won him a following via the Internet among rock fans who normally would never set foot in a recital hall." Andante 12/11/02

Koko The Musical Gorilla Koko, the 31-year-old talking gorilla, knows 1000 words in sign language. Koko's also got musical taste, say her friends, and they've recorded a 9-song cd based on her language. "Koko's opinion was weighed in the final selection of reggae, rap, blues, rock and Celtic tunes..." Toronto Star 12/12/02

More On Baz's Boheme "Given his bad-boy reputation and hipness quotient, one might expect Baz Luhrmann's late 1950s-set "La Boheme" to, in effect, go nuts. It doesn't. Based on his 1990 Australian Opera production, it's a surprisingly straightforward, generously entertaining, ravishingly designed accomplishment. Few will find it truly moving." Chicago Tribune 12/09/02
 

Catherine Malfitano and Kim Josephsen in A View from the Bridge.

William Bolcom's Bridge Not Quite Far Enough

by Jerry Bowles

Sometime late in the first act of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge at the Metropolitan Opera house last week, a subversive thought attacked my brain like a bout of agita on the heels of a pepperoni binge.  This would make a terrific play if it weren’t for all the distracting singing. Sure, get James Gandolfini, the guy who plays Tony Soprano, to play Eddie, the brutish dock worker whose misguided love for his niece, leads to his doom.  Come to think of it, Edie Falco would be good as Beatrice, the long-suffering wife who sees the disaster coming and can do nothing about it.  Hell, get the whole Sopranos cast. 

By the time, I came to my senses and remembered that A View from the Bridge was a 1955 play by a pretty good playwright named Arthur Miller, poor Bolcom had lost me completely. This is a pity because Bolcom is a decent—if old-fashioned--composer and View is certainly far superior to Andre Previn's D.O.A. version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and John Harbison's memorable-for-all-the -wrong-reasons rendering of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. 

Set in Red Hook, Brooklyn in the 1950s in a neighborhood of Italian-American dockworkers, Arnold Weinstein’s libretto has everything you could ask for in terms of an operatic hagis–sexual obsession, paranoia, envy, latent homosexuality, betrayal and violence. 

The plot involves Eddie Carbone, a tough longshoreman, his unhappy wife, Beatrice, and their 17- year old niece, Catherine, whom they have raised since her own mother died. Eddie has the hots for Catherine and when Bea’s Sicilian illegal immigrant cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, show up and the young, blonde Rodolpho and Catherine fall in love, the repressed Eddie goes bananas. He rats on the cousins to immigration and in so doing he loses the respect of the neighborhood. Once out of jail, Marco fights with Eddie, who pulls a knife; in the scuffle Eddie stabs himself and dies. The story is told in flashback by Alfieri, a lawyer from the neighborhood, with the neighbors acting as a Greek chorus. 

Bolcom is especially clever at combining elements of jazz, Doo Wop and other early rock and roll, and at capturing street sounds.  Sometimes the rhythms suggest more of a Hispanic latin feel than Italian but that’s a quibble. There is one schmaltzy aria called “New York Lights” sung by Rodolpho that makes you wonder for a moment what Barry Manilow is up to these days. Generally, however, Bolcom’s musical environment is effective although you wonder which parts are Bolcom, the musical dandy, who knows styles and how to quote them, and which part is Bolcom, the original composer. View breaks no new ground musically; the opera could have been written by Carlyle Floyd in 1950 but, then, composers whose work is too “modern” don’t get the big commissions.

Bolcom composed two new arias for this production that are so crucial you wonder how the original staging could have worked with out them. Beatrice's "When am I going to be a wife again?" explains the decline of her sexual relationship with Eddie, and Eddie's "Because I made a promise," chronicles the origins of his love for Catherine.

Baritone Kim Josephson, who created Eddie at the Lyric Theater in Chicago in 1999, is fine although he (like me) has been watching the Sopranos a little too much,  Catherine Malfitano, the soprano, is a superb actress and her performance as Beatrice is the soul of the production.  Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian is a suitably young and naïve Catherine and Dennis Russell Davies does his usual masterful job keeping the trains running on time. 

The weakest part of the opera--and the part that makes it not as satisfying as it should be--is the recitative. While the background music is often interesting and the drama is gripping most of the time, Bolcom has chosen to have his characters “speak” in a naturalist, verismo sing-talk that makes everyone sound like everyone else and ultimately becomes boring. Why do an opera that sounds like a play with music? 

View has been handsomely mounted and staged, the acting is splendid, the story is first rate and yet the parts add up to more than the whole.  Makes you wonder about the critics who trashed Dead Man Walking and liked this one.
 

Previous Articles/
Busoni The Visionary
The Composer of the Moment:  Mark-Anthony Turnage
Electronic Music
Voices: Henze at 75
Henze Meets Emenim
On Finding Kurtag
Charles Ruggles:  When Men Were Men
Ballet Mécanique
The Adams Chronicles