The Metropolitan Opera
National Council Auditions Grand Finals Concert
"Some of today’s greatest singers got their start in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions including Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Thomas Hampson, Stephanie Blythe, Eric Owens, Lawrence Brownlee, Michael Fabiano, Angela Meade, Jamie Barton and Nadine Sierra."
Baritone Thomas Glass is a second-year studio artist at Houston Grand Opera, where he sings Marcello in Puccini's La Bohème and Álvaro in Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas. Last season at HGO, he performed Baron Douphol in Verdi's La Traviata, Fiorello in Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Officer Krupke in Bernstein'sWest Side Story, and outdoor performances of Figaro in Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia. He was previously a Filene young artist at Wolf Trap Opera, giving his debuts as Mercutio in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette and as the baritone soloist in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra. He was also a participant in the Merola Opera Program, where he was featured in the Schwabacher Summer Concert.Miles Mykkanen debuts this season as Lt. Sprink in Kevin Puts's Silent Night at Opera Saratoga, Flute in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Opera Philadelphia, and Brighella in fully-staged performances of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos with the Cleveland Orchestra. He joins the roster of the Bavarian State Opera, covering the role of Admète in Gluck's Alceste. He has been heard at Tanglewood, Canadian Opera Company, Ravinia Music Festival, the New York Philharmonic, Arizona Opera, Bard Music Festival, Palm Beach Opera, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Mostly Mozart Festival, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Marlboro Festival.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
CONCERT
Carnegie Hall
Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration
"Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran draw upon their own family lore and the historical record of the Great Migration to explore a continuum of music, shining a light on the epic event that changed the sound of America forever. Words and music come together as The New York Times best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns) joins outstanding performers for this powerful and deeply moving event."
Performers
Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, Producers
Jason Moran, Piano
Alicia Hall Moran, Mezzo-Soprano
featuring Isabel Wilkerson, Author
Lawrence Brownlee, Tenor
Pastor Smokie Norful, Vocals
Toshi Reagon, Guitar and Vocals
Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., Speaker
Hilda Harris, Speaker
with
Rebecca L. Hargrove, Soprano
Steven Herring, Baritone
Harriet Tubman: The Band
·· Brandon Ross, Guitar
·· Melvin Gibbs, Bass
·· JT Lewis, Drums
Imani Winds
·· Brandon Patrick George, Flute
·· Toyin Spellman-Diaz, Oboe
·· Mark Dover, Clarinet
·· Jeff Scott, French Horn
·· Monica Ellis, Bassoon
James Carter, Saxophone
Marcus Printup, Trumpet
Thomas Flippin, Guitar
Joseph Joubert, Piano
The Harlem Chamber Players
Tania León, Conductor
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
RECITAL
Merkin Concert Hall
Young Concert Artists
Bella Hristova - Violin
Messiaen - Theme and Variations
Zwilich - Fantasy for solo violin
J.S. Bach - Partita no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004
Schönberg - Phantasy for violin and piano, Op. 47
Brahms - Sonata no. 3 in D minor, Op. 108
"Internationally acclaimed violinist Bella Hristova is known for her passionate and powerful performances, beautiful sound, and compelling command of her instrument. Her numerous prizes include a 2013 Avery Fisher Career Grant, First Prize in the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and First Prize in the Michael Hill International Violin Competition. She has performed extensively as a soloist with orchestras including the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the New York String Orchestra, and the Kansas City and Milwaukee Symphonies. She has performed recitals at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum, and regularly appears with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 2017, she toured New Zealand performing the complete Beethoven Sonatas for Piano and Violin with renowned pianist Michael Houstoun.
Performances with orchestra during the 2018-19 season include Vivaldi with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Sibelius with the Wheeling Symphony and the Brevard Philharmonic, Barber with the Hawaii Symphony and National Philharmonic Orchestra, and Mendelssohn with the Winnipeg Symphony and Naples Philharmonic, where she stepped in to perform a cancellation on short notice.
“Bella Unaccompanied,” Ms. Hristova’s recording on A.W. Tonegold Records, features works by Corigliano, Kevin Puts, Piazzolla, Milstein, and Bach. A committed proponent of new music, she commissioned iconic American composer Joan Tower to write “Second String Force,” which she premiered and performed in recitals throughout the United States and abroad. She further collaborated with her husband David Ludwig on a violin concerto written for her through a consortium of eight major orchestras across the country.
Bella Hristova began violin studies at the age of six in her native Bulgaria. She then studied with Ida Kavafian at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and received her Artist Diploma with Jaime Laredo at Indiana University. Ms. Hristova plays a 1655 Nicolò Amati violin, once owned by the violinist Louis Krasner."
Monday, March 25, 2019
PERFORMANCE
Merkin Hall
What Makes It Great?
Jazz on the Tracks
Listen to iconic masterpieces with new ears as NPR & PBS music commentator, conductor, composer, author and pianist Rob Kapilow shows you what you've been missing!
JAZZ ON THE TRACKS: THE TRAIN IN CLASSIC JAZZ FROM MILLER TO MARSALIS
Featuring the big band The Kyle Athayde Dance Party
From Glenn Miller and Count Basie, to Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis, the everyday ordinary sounds of trains have inspired some of the greatest jazz composers and compositions of the 20th century. Railroads were a constant in American culture and deeply connected to the world of working musicians criss-crossing the country. Rob Kapilow and The Kyle Athayde Dance Party will unravel and explore trains as both sonic and cultural themes in a whistle-stop tour through some of the 20th century’s greatest big-band masterpieces. From Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" to Marsalis's "Big Train," the everyday sounds of trains have been an inspiration to some of the greatest jazz composers in history.
MUSEUM
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East
"For over three centuries, the territories and trading networks of the Middle East were contested between the Roman and Parthian Empires (ca. 100 B.C.–A.D. 250), yet across the region life was not defined by these two superpowers alone. Local cultural and religious traditions flourished, and sculptures, wall paintings, jewelry, and other objects reveal how ancient identities were expressed through art. Featuring 190 works from museums in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, this exhibition follows a journey along the great incense and silk routes that connected cities in southwestern Arabia, Nabataea, Judaea, Syria, and Mesopotamia, making the region a center of global trade. Several of the archaeological sites featured, including Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and Hatra, have been damaged in recent years by deliberate destruction and looting, and the exhibition also examines these events and responses to them."
‘The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East’ Review: A Creative Explosion Where Superpowers Collide
An exhibition at the Met features some 190 spectacular objects made in important, and often contested, cities along ancient trading routes.
The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East
The Met Fifth Avenue Through June 23
The area in question goes from present day Yemen to Syria and Iraq, covering ancient trade routes that carried frankincense and myrrh northward, ultimately out to the wider classical world and even China. On the way, the camel caravans enriched pivotal (and iconic) oasis cities such as Petra in Jordan, Palmyra and Dura-Europos in Syria, Hatra and storied Mesopotamian centers in Iraq. Wealth of commerce inevitably made them strategically desirable, coveted, oft-times prone to conflict. Some of the locations have succumbed again to their intermittently tragic cycle, and the show devotes sections to several, not least Palmyra and Iraqi sites attacked by Islamic State.
The curators, Blair Fowlkes-Childs and Michael Seymour, both from the Met, are asking us throughout to view the objects against that background, often explicitly on wall panels. There’s a 12-minute video where three experts on the region’s sites discuss the destruction of recent years. Obliteration of history amounts to an attack on memory and identity, in effect “a form of genocide” says one. And there’s the room devoted to the Judean Bar Kokhba rebellion that was brutally suppressed by Roman legions. Domestic tools, mirrors and ewers, found in a cave where Jewish refugees hid, remind us of genocides long past and recent.
Stele of a Goddess (‘Goddess of Hayyan’) (first-second centuryPhoto: Department of Antiquities of Jordan
Yet the show’s overall drift is chiefly about prosperity, pluralism and synthesis across 11 sections under such titles as “Southwestern Arabia,” “Nabataea,” “Judaea,” “Palmyra,” “Mesopotamia.” The statuette of a nude goddess in alabaster confronts you upon entry, her gold jewelry as well as tiny rubies for eyes and navel all intact. A cheerfully defiant survivor of the millennia virtually in mint condition, she could be Roman or Mesopotamian. She’s both. That her rubies likely originated from Myanmar makes her also a product of far-flung trade influences, her composite identity shared with the region’s adaptable population. The neighboring display of a Palmyrene woman’s limestone funerary statue—her garment folds aesthetically Greco-Roman, her facial expression local—tells the same story. Next comes a roughly carved incense burner from South Arabia sporting a man on a camel. Crude initiator of the region’s affluence, physically and geographically he bears the frankincense and myrrh that he burns as incense atop his vessel.
Incense Burner With Scene of Man Riding Camel (third century)Photo: Trustees of the British Museum
In that first section, “The Middle East between Rome and Parthia,” we see the greatest number and variety of objects, introducing the show’s broad themes and dazzling the eye. Ornate vessels and lushly hued glassware illustrate a standard of luxury comparable with the imperial centers. Textile fragments with dyes still vibrant reveal patterns and weaving techniques that originate on the Silk Road. A lustrous display of 18 coins chronicles the confusing pageant of Roman and Parthian emperors who came and went, ruling from afar. A man-sized legionnaire’s shield, originally discovered in fragments, speaks of beauty imposed by power.
Statuette of Standing Nude Goddess (first century B.C.-first century A.D.)Photo: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York
As always from a close-up view of the ancients, we catch angular glimpses of our own times. In the “Southwestern Arabia” section, we note cubist, abstract objects born of austere desert conditions that evoke our early modernists’ love of pure and elemental lines. Beside them, we see realist or decorative animal bronzes that show clear influence from Rome and Parthia—and link to Western pre-modernist aesthetics. Then there’s the stele from Timna: ovoid eyes, oblong nose, dash mouth. Potentially inspiring to Picasso and Brancusi; emoji-like to us. We see something similar in the “Nabataea” section, a stele of a goddess with cartoonish lips and eyebrows from a temple in Petra. Such highly simplified faces were found on idols inside houses whose facades displayed more Hellenistic deities. Was it a matter of hypocrisy or perhaps subterfuge, public gods outside and the real ones hidden inside? We don’t know.
Shield (Scutum) (mid-third century)Photo: Yale University Art Gallery
What we do know is that in religion, as in art and identity, the region mixed and matched freely, tolerated, integrated and got on with the business of surviving to affluence. Nowhere was this more evident than at Dura-Europos, famous for its house-church where Christians worshiped when churches were forbidden and the elaborately decorated synagogue, all cheek-by-jowl with polytheistic temples. Luckily, many of its treasures were removed to museums in Syria and the West years ago. The site recently suffered virtual erasure by lawless wartime looting. Here we see household objects, narrative murals and colored ceiling tiles, and suddenly the city’s gift of courteous humility comes clear through to us. As with Palmyra’s glorious sculptures and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from Iraq, we are haunted by what we see and what was lost, thankful for the show’s bounty, and thankful in particular for the funerary bust of Bat’a from Palmyra, her character and beauty so distinct, staring quizzically into our conscience across the centuries.
—Mr. Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
THEATER
Theater for a New Audience
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
"With superb acoustics and less than 300 seats, the Scripps Mainstage at Polonsky Shakespeare Center is one of New York’s finest, intimate homes for modern classical theatre. Hear, see, and feel Shakespeare’s urgent political thriller blaze with life. An early incarnation of Ms. Cooper’s staging electrified audiences at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in 2017.
Now in 2019 for TFANA, in her Off-Broadway debut, Ms. Cooper re-imagines Julius Caesar.
When Julius Caesar conquers Gaul and expands Rome’s domain to Britain, the Senate, fearful of Caesar’s power, demands he give up his forces and return to Rome. But Caesar illegally marches his army across the Rubicon into Roman territory and civil war erupts. Caesar is victorious and the citizens offer him a crown which would make Caesar king with unrivaled political power for life. Cassius persuades Brutus, one of Caesar’s closest friends, to join a group of Conspirators and on the Ides of March, they assassinate Caesar, crying “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!”
Shakespeare presents multiple perspectives on whether the Conspirators were patriotic defenders or criminals. Rather than saving the Republic, the assassination plunges Rome into another civil war. Mark Antony joins forces with Octavius Caesar and Lepidus, and conquers the Conspirators. The Roman Republic is replaced by the Roman Empire and power is consolidated under Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Lepidus.
Shakespeare’s play is named The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. But who is the tragic character? Caesar, Brutus or, perhaps, the Republic of Rome?
With mesmerizing energy, Shana Cooper’s production explores what happens when violence is used to govern, and theatricalizes a mythic cycle that combines the political, psychological, and phantasmagorical… a cycle that has happened before and will happen again. Initially, the violence is rhetorical, but it then becomes a disease, a contagion, and a conflagration destroying what is loved the most."
Friday, March 22, 2019
THEATER
Jacob's Theater
The Ferryman
"Northern Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor.
Following unanimous, five-star critical acclaim and a thrice-extended, year-long run in London, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman finally debuts on Broadway this October. This “fiercely gripping play” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times) is directed by Academy® and Tony Award® winner Sam Mendes and has won three Olivier Awards, including Best New Play and Best Director; three Evening Standard Theatre Awards, including Best Play and Best Director; and was named the Best New Play at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards."
Review: A Thrilling ‘Ferryman’ Serves Up a Glorious Harvest Feast
Critic’s Pick
Paddy Considine, as Quinn Carney, presiding over a family gathering shadowed by tragedy in Jez Butterworth’s sprawling play.
Paddy Considine, as Quinn Carney, presiding over a family gathering shadowed by tragedy in Jez Butterworth’s sprawling play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
No matter what sort of spread you’ve planned for your Thanksgiving dinner, it won’t be a patch on the glorious feast that has been laid out at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. That’s where Jez Butterworth’s thrilling new play “The Ferryman” opened on Sunday night, with a generosity of substance and spirit rarely seen on the stage anymore.
There is, for the record, a whopping celebratory meal at the center of this endlessly vibrant work, directed with sweeping passion and meticulous care by Sam Mendes. Its main course is a goose, which has figured as a living creature in earlier scenes, and the repast appears to be more than enough to feed the 17 revelers gathered at an overladen table in rural Northern Ireland in 1981.
But the real sustenance provided here comes from the sheer abundance within a work that picked up most of the awards on offer during its London run last year. This is theater as charged and cluttered and expansive as life itself. And the three and a quarter hours and 21 speaking parts required to tell its story — which is at once a shivery suspenser, a hearthside family portrait, a political tragedy and a journey across mythic seas — barely seem long enough to contain all it has to give us.
The last time a new drama with this breadth of scope and ambition appeared on Broadway was seven years ago. That was Mr. Butterworth’s “Jerusalem,” in which a small-time, middle-aged country drug dealer (played by a monumental Mark Rylance) became a majestic emblem of an ancient, heroic England.
With “The Ferryman,” Mr. Butterworth is again assessing the chokehold of a nation’s past on its present. But now it is Northern Ireland at the height of the politically fraught period known as the Troubles. (We hear radio reports of the dying Irish Republican hunger strikers in the Maze prison.) And he mines the folksy clichés of Irish archetypes — as garrulous, drink-loving, pugilistic souls — to find the crueler patterns of a centuries-old cycle of violence and vengeance.
If this sounds forbidding, rest assured that “The Ferryman,” which stars the magnetic Paddy Considine as the head of a ginormous family, never feels remotely polemical. Even more than “Jerusalem,” it revels in the addictive power of artfully unfolded narratives. And I mean all kinds of narratives: classical epics and homey fairy tales, barroom ballads and chronicles of hopeless love, multigenerational family sagas and ghost stories with a body count.
Mr. Considine with Genevieve O’Reilly as his troubled wife, the mother of seven children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Considine with Genevieve O’Reilly as his troubled wife, the mother of seven children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Most of the action may be confined to a room in a farmhouse, which — as rendered in Rob Howell’s splendid set, with eloquent lighting (Peter Mumford) and sound (Nick Powell) — exhales an air of hard-won comfort under siege. Yet, like a James Joyce short story in which the everyday and the eternal live cheek by jowl, “The Ferryman” seems to sprawl over an entire, divided country.
We are specifically in the overflowing home of Quinn Carney (Mr. Considine, in a superb, anchoring performance), whose domain improbably accommodates his seven children (ages 9 months to 16), his invalid wife, Mary (Genevieve O’Reilly), and his misanthropic, staunchly Irish republican aunt and Virgil-quoting uncle, both of whom are called Pat (pricelessly portrayed by Dearbhla Molloy and Mark Lambert).
Living under the same roof are his sister-in-law, Caitlin (Laura Donnelly, in a heart-stopping performance that won her the Olivier Award), and her understandably broody adolescent son, Oisin (Rob Malone). Then there’s Quinn’s overgrown, childlike (and English-born) handyman, Tom Kettle (Justin Edwards). And because it is harvest day, their ranks are swelled by three young strapping male relatives, the Corcoran boys.
But wait! I haven’t mentioned the unwelcome visitors who show up at nightfall, casting dark shadows on the glowing Carney homestead: a craven priest, Father Horrigan (Charles Dale), and the courtly, sinister Irish republican kingpin Mr. Muldoon (Stuart Graham) and his henchmen (Dean Ashton and Glenn Speers), whom we have already met in the play’s ominous prologue, set in a graffiti-sprayed back alley in the nearby city of Derry.
As unlikely as it seems, you’ll have no trouble keeping these characters apart. Each bristles with vivid specificity, even those in nonspeaking parts, like the infant Bobby, a feral rabbit and the aforementioned goose. Mr. Butterworth has taken pains to define every one of them, and the cast repays him with performances that blaze unconditionally in the moment.
Of equal importance, this being a play about the Irish, are the living dead, the absent souls who exist not only as scrupulously maintained memories but as catalysts in an increasingly eventful plot. Among them are the late family patriarch, whose black-and-white portrait looms as a benediction and a curse, and his romantically remembered brother, who was killed by British troops during the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916.
But of most immediate importance is Caitlin’s missing husband, Seamus, whose eerily well-preserved, 10-years-dead body is discovered in a bog shortly before the play begins. The news will shatter the cozy, vigilantly guarded order of the Carney household and drag shadowy deceptions into the harsh light.
Tom Glynn-Carney, foreground center, as one of three brothers who help the Carney family with the annual harvest and later blow off steam dancing to “Teenage Kicks.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Tom Glynn-Carney, foreground center, as one of three brothers who help the Carney family with the annual harvest and later blow off steam dancing to “Teenage Kicks.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
This process is achieved through a propulsive plot that never stops churning forward even as it keeps looking backward, conjuring a cyclical nightmare of history from which no one escapes. Yet the story also embraces a multitude of exuberantly full individual scenes, of a number and richness rarely seen outside of Shakespeare.
Mr. Mendes, who has become world famous as the director of James Bond blockbusters (and brilliantly staged the New York-bound “The Lehman Trilogy”), here endows these vignettes with a master craftsman’s artisanal detail. There is, for instance, that astonishing scene that introduces us to Quinn and Caitlin, alone in the early hours of the harvest day, dancing to “Street Fighting Man” with such exhilarated abandon that a lampshade catches fire.
Or the very different arias of histories ancient and living delivered by Uncle and Aunt Pat. Or any of the moments when the usually senescent Aunt Maggie Far Away (Fionnula Flanagan) swerves into focus, with visions of those baleful spirits, the banshees, that feel all too real.
I can’t shake the memory of the cinematic image that concludes the first act, in which a solemn young man creeps in from the shadows to stare at the suspended carcass of a slaughtered goose, as if in mortal kinship. And I must mention the five excellent young actors — Fra Fee, Niall Wright, Tom Glynn-Carney, Conor MacNeill and Michael Quinton McArthur — who bring such force to a fraternal drinking session that it turns into an anatomy of a civil war.
And yes, there is indeed one of those rousing, classically Irish scenes of celebratory song and dance. It occurs amid the great harvest dinner, and it has three distinct phases.
It begins with sprightly Celtic fiddle music and show-off knees-up and step-dancing moves. Then the music is changed, brusquely, to contemporary rock (“Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones), and the mood turns frantically, dangerously sensual. Finally, there is an a cappella performance of the Irish song of rebellion “A Row in the Town,” and it is performed with an anger that wakens the senses as it freezes the blood.
The warring feelings embodied by these three, very different numbers are, you realize, all genetically encoded in every one of the characters here. By the end of this magnificent drama, Mr. Butterworth has connected the contradictions with a skill that takes the breath away.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
CONCERT
Carnegie Hall
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons - Conductor
Renée Fleming - Soprano
ALL-R. STRAUSS PROGRAM
Sextet, Moonlight Music, and Final Scene from Capriccio
Also sprach Zarathustra
"This all-Strauss program of vocal splendor and orchestral thrills will leave you breathless. The tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra will be familiar to most for its opening “Sunrise,” the iconic passage used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey—but that’s only one episode in a mysterious and marvelous work. From later in his career is Capriccio, his final opera, which opens with a passionate string sextet instead of a traditional overture and culminates in a rapturous monologue that ranks as one of Strauss’s finest soprano showpieces."
"Richard Strauss’s final opera, Capriccio, and his tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra date from opposite ends of his long career, with some 45 years separating them. Capriccio was completed in 1941 and first performed in 1942. Such was Strauss’s status as a composer that he was able to produce an opera in Munich in the heart of wartime. Capriccio contemplates the question of the primacy of music vs. words in opera, symbolically represented by the heroine’s need to choose between two suitors—poet or composer. The 10-minute Sextet, which takes the place of an overture, is revealed when the curtain rises as music being played within the opera in a performance attended by the characters. Like an overture, it foreshadows the opera’s tone. The Moonlight Music, from near the end, sets the stage for the final scene, in which the Countess Madeleine contemplates the difficulty of choosing between her two suitors.
Although the opening moments of Strauss’s 1896 tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra are recognizably one of the most famous passages in music—even predating its fame as part of the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—the complete work is less frequently played than Don Juan or Till Eulenspiegel. Its origin as Strauss’s musical response to an important but mystical and controversial philosophical treatise by Friedrich Nietzsche makes its concept perhaps less immediate than the rest of the six great tone poems Strauss wrote between 1888 and 1898, but its musical features are just as dramatic and brilliant. Following the famous “Sunrise” passage, its episodes evoke sections from Nietzsche’s big poem, including “Of Pleasures and Passions,” “Of Science and Learning,” “The Convalescent,” and several others. Strauss makes his points in a purely musical way, using the opening fanfare as a motivic touchstone through the emotionally far-ranging narrative."
