Go back and look at Theater on 3/28/2015.

I've added a video.

I want to show how small the theater was for a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

It's unbelievably small!

RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Murray Perahia

• Bach - French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817
• Haydn - Sonata in A-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 46
• Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, "Les Adieux"
• Franck - Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Op. 21
• Chopin - Scherzo No. 1

"In the more than 40 years he has been performing, pianist Murray Perahia has left audiences around the world breathless. “You've never heard a pianist who considers each note with such deep care. No phrase is left unconsidered; every line of the score has been probed to make it as musical as possible,” proclaimed The Seattle Times."

"This evening’s program begins with Johann Sebastian Bach’s French Suite No. 6 in E Major, which is perhaps the most brilliantly entertaining and tuneful of all the French Suites. César Franck, who made a reputation for himself as one of France’s greatest organists, was endlessly fascinated by Bach’s music. It is not surprising that this naturalized Frenchman, who much preferred the Germanic musical tradition, should adopt three of Bach’s favorite forms and use them to create his Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue, Op. 21, which is arguably one of the finest late-Romantic keyboard masterpieces. Franck was also strongly influenced by Ludwig van Beethoven, as was Frédéric Chopin, who transformed Beethoven’s development of the scherzo as a replacement movement for the minuet into his four independent scherzos for piano, of which we hear the first on tonight’s program. Beethoven was a student of Joseph Haydn, and Haydn’s formal and emotional intensification of the piano sonata, on display in his Sonata in A-flat Major, paved the way for Beethoven’s programmatic “Les adieux” Sonata."

Watch a taste of Murray...

Review: Murray Perahia at Carnegie Hall

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

APRIL 3, 2015

The beloved American pianist Murray Perahia turns 68 this month, an age at which you might expect him to be mellowing as an artist and reaching new realms of profundity.

Actually, Mr. Perahia has been playing with increasing boldness in recent years. On Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, during a much-anticipated recital, he sometimes sounded like an impetuous youth, especially during the last movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in E flat (Op. 81a).

Beethoven composed this piece as an expression of loss when Archduke Rudolf of Austria, his supporter and friend, had to leave Vienna with his family to escape Napoleon’s artillery barrage in 1809. Beethoven gave programmatic titles (in German) to the three movements: “The Farewell,” “Absence” and “The Reunion.” That finale, which begins with a spiraling flourish that leads to a joyous theme, usually comes across as almost giddy in its exuberance.

Mr. Perahia dove into the movement at a breakneck tempo and never let up. Given his renown as a pianist of scrupulous musicianship and elegance, he still managed to bring textural details and structural clarity to the music. But he certainly cut loose here. In repeated passages, he would play a thumping low octave with his left hand, then sweep up the keyboard in a burst of dizzying arpeggios, landing on a crackling high note. It was actually fun to see Mr. Perahia, who can seem very serious-minded, going a little wild in a Beethoven finale.

True to his conservative orientation, Mr. Perahia offered a program of classics, including a stately, perhaps too much so, account of Haydn’s Sonata in A flat (Hob. XVI: 46). He began with Bach’s French Suite No. 6 in E. He drew maximum lyricism from the flowing, undulant Allemande and rendered the Courante at a fleet tempo, with limpid touch, so that the music’s racing lines sounded like whirlwinds of sixteenth notes. He revealed the bittersweet inner life of the stately Polonaise and infused the final Gigue with hearty, bouncing happiness.

In Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, Mr. Perahia was at his most rhapsodic, especially in the Prelude section, which came across like an improvisation in which a sighing motif inspires explorations of wandering chromatic harmony. He ended with Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor. While taking a hellbent tempo in the first section, he managed to dispatch Chopin’s teeming bursts with crispness and fire. His poetic, tender playing of the middle section was especially beautiful.

The enthusiastic audience wanted encores and got them. First a Chopin nocturne and then Schumann’s “Traumes Wirren” (“Dream’s Confusions”) from the Fantasy Pieces, a work Mr. Perahia recorded in 1973, at the beginning of a continuing relationship with Sony. His performance on Wednesday was riskier, more headstrong, than on that classic recording.

So much for mellowing in your late 60s.

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Mozart, Mendelssohn & Brahms

Mozart - Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, K. 526 (1787)
Mendelssohn - Quartet in C minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 1 (1822)
Brahms - Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major for two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos, Op. 18 (1859-60)

Listen to this for a preview of the performance...

We love Alice Tully Hall.  Listening to chamber music allows us to focus not only on the music but also on the performers.  In chamber music, the musicians are not buried and lost in the middle of a large orchestra.

THEATER

Dorothy Strelsin Theater
Twelfth Night or What You Will - Bedlam

Bedlam Theater is a small and very creative theater group that presents shows off Broadway.  Ben Brantley, critic for the New York Times, considers them the premier theater group in New York City.  We will not miss a production by Bedlam.

Today was another surprise and another venue.  The venue, stage, seating, and all, was about the size of a double garage.  Honestly!

The performance space...

There were 5 actors who shared and played all the parts of a major Shakespeare play.  They identified their characters by hats, aprons, and eye wear.

NOW, HERE'S THE KICKER!

We went back tonight to watch the same 5 actors perform the same play with each of the actors playing different parts with the play having an entirely different interpretation.

So, after watching a period version of Twelfth Night at 2:00 PM we returned this evening for a 1920s version of the same play.

The same 5 actors performed the play the second time but they didn't play the same roles as they did in the first performance.  The actors did a great job but the words carried the play.

THEATER REVIEW

Theater Review: Two Stagings, ‘Twelfth Night’

Two versions of a Shakespeare favorite prove that Bedlam Theatre Company is one of the most innovative troupes at work today

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Updated April 2, 2015 10:22 p.m. ET

New York

Bedlam Theatre Company, which specializes in small-scale, no-budget classical revivals that are both radically innovative and winningly playful, has scored yet another success with its double-barreled “Twelfth Night.” Catchily billed as “One Play, Two Ways,” Bedlam’s production of “Twelfth Night; or, What You Will” (to give Shakespeare’s ever-popular comedy its unabridged title) consists of two different versions of the same play, both of them staged by the same director, Eric Tucker, and performed by the same five-person cast, whose members share between them all 12 parts.

Twelfth Night (or What You Will)
What You Will (or Twelfth Night)

Bedlam Theatre Company, Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex,
312 W. 36th St. ($30-$49), 866-811-4111, closes May 2

Two stagings of the same play, performed in rotating repertory. Both versions can be seen in a single day on Saturdays

If this sounds like a gimmick, fear not: Mr. Tucker, who doubles as director and cast member, has come up with a pair of shows whose differences underline the protean essence of Shakespeare’s genius. Version No. 1, “Twelfth Night,” performed in street clothes, is a drunken debauch that strips away much of the laughter—Edmund Lewis plays the preposterous Malvolio totally, terrifyingly straight—while Version No. 2, “What You Will,” is a bright-young-things revel in which the costumes of the white-clad actors are spattered from time to time with what we come to understand is their own hearts’ blood.

Both versions are performed in a grubby 46-seat black-box garment-district theater whose stage (if you want to call it that) is no bigger than the living room of a dirt-cheap New York apartment. That puts you face to face with Andrus Nichols, Susannah Millonzi, Tom O’Keefe and Messrs. Lewis and Tucker, who leap from role to role with exhilarating abandon. I especially like the moment in Version No. 1 when they change characters by flinging their hats at one another. Ms. Millonzi, who caught my eye in Shakespeare & Company’s 2011 “Romeo and Juliet” and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s 2014 “Othello,” is, if possible, even more impressive this time around. She’s one of the most exciting young actors I’ve seen in recent seasons. Everybody in the cast is up to scratch, though, and Mr. Lewis’s two Malvolios—the other one is goofy and effete—couldn’t be more unpredictably unlike one another.

In the end, of course, these are Mr. Tucker’s shows, and here as in all of Bedlam’s previous ventures, he proves that he ranks high on the list of America’s most engaging and imaginative stage directors. To present two completely dissimilar stagings of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays in rotating repertory is the kind of “obvious” idea that only the most daring of artists would try. A single precedent comes to mind: Paul Taylor’s “Polaris,” in which the same choreography is danced twice in a row, accompanied by two different and sharply contrasting pieces of music. Such trickery would be mere stuntwork in the hands of lesser artists, but when the likes of Mr. Taylor and Mr. Tucker essay it, the results are as irresistible as they are challenging.

THEATER

Two Versions of ‘Twelfth Night’ Coming From Bedlam Theater Troupe

By PATRICK HEALY date published FEBRUARY 4, 2015 9:26 AM date updated

February 4, 2015 9:26 am

“Twelfth Night, Or what you will” is the full name of the dark comedy by Shakespeare that is simply called “Twelfth Night” in most productions, like the hit revival on Broadway last season. And that four-word subtitle will be put to inventive use this spring by Bedlam, the critically acclaimed Off Broadway troupe that recently mounted innovative stagings of “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Seagull.”

Bedlam announced Wednesday that it would present two versions of “Twelfth Night” in repertory. The original Shakespeare script will be used, and both plays will feature the same five actors in the many roles, but the versions will have different thematic emphases, aesthetics, and approaches by the performers to their characters.

“The version we’re calling, ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’ centers around the theme that love can be difficult and extremely hard, but in the end also very magical and rewarding,” wrote Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, in an email. “Our other version, which we’re calling ‘What You Will, or Twelfth Night’ centers around the theme that love is absolutely maddening and doesn’t always turn out ok in the end but it’s a wild ride.”

"Off-Broadway theater company Bedlam will present Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in rotating repertory with itself: Twelfth Night (or What You Will) and What You Will (or Twelfth Night). The productions, which are described as, "one play, two completely different ways," will be presented at the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre beginning March 11. Both productions officially open on March 22.

The casts of both plays will include Edmund Lewis, Andrus Nichols, Eric Tucker, Tom O'Keefe, Susannah Millonzi. The productions will feature costumes by Valerie Bart and lighting design by Les Dickert.

Bedlam is a company committed to the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience. Bedlam creates theater in a flexible, raw space, presenting new writing, contemporary reappraisals of the classics, and small-scale musical theater. Their productions always include the audience. The company believes "that innovative use of space can collapse aesthetic distance and bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life—inciting laughter and chaos, provoking thought and recreating the thrill of live experience."

Bedlam Presents One Play, Two Ways with TWELFTH NIGHT and WHAT YOU WILL,

The off-Broadway theatre company, BEDLAM, which received critical acclaim and multiple award nominations for its recent productions of Saint Joan and Hamlet, and The Seagull and Sense & Sensibility is presenting Shakespeare's classic comedy Twelfth Night in rotating repertory with itself: Twelfth Night (or What You Will) and What You Will (or Twelfth Night). One play, two completely different ways, with the same five actors, at the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre (312 W 36th Street, NYC) for 8 weeks only. Now in performances, Twelfth Night opens today, March 28 at 2pm, and What You Will opens Sunday, March 29 at 2pm.

"The version we're calling, Twelfth Night (or What You Will) centers around the theme that love can be difficult and extremely hard, but in the end also very magical and rewarding. Our other version, which we're calling What You Will (or Twelfth Night) centers around the theme that love is absolutely maddening and doesn't always turn out ok in the end but it's a wild ride," said Artistic Director Eric Tucker.

The casts feature the original Saint Joan and Hamlet cast of Edmund Lewis, Andrus Nichols, Eric Tucker, Tom O'Keefe, plus Susannah Millonzi.

Twelfth Night (or What You Will) and What You Will (or Twelfth Night) features costumes by Valerie Bart and lighting design by Les Dickert.

Bedlam is a company committed to the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience. With large ideas and modest budgets, Bedlam creates theatre in a flexible, raw space, presenting new writing, contemporary reappraisals of the classics and small-scale musical theatre. Their productions always include the audience. Storytelling is paramount. Bedlam believes that innovative use of space can collapse aesthetic distance and bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life--inciting laughter and chaos, provoking thought and recreating the thrill of live experience.

LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Rehearsal

Rehearsals are much like performances.  Ushers are there and programs are handed out.  The only ones we've attended were conducted by Alan Gilbert.  So, we know his style but not others.

The rehearsal starts promptly at 10:00 AM.  Avery Fisher Hall is about 2/3s full.  There is little talking between Gilbert and the musicians before playing.  They play completely through the piece with no interruptions.  At the end of the piece there is about 5 minutes of discussion and a few minor "play-throughs" of a few areas.

On the way home we rode the subway.  Our car had a school class of young people taking a field trip.  No buses, no cars.  They herd 20+ kids on and off a subway.

PERFORMANCE

J. P. Morgan Library and Museum
Handel's Resurrection Oratorio - Helicon Ensemble

"Perhaps the most dazzling portion of Handel’s output comes from the three formative years he spent in Italy while in his early twenties. These youthful pieces are marked by bold experimentation and delight in virtuosity, and chief amongst these is “La resurrezione.” Written at a time when opera was banned in Rome, it treats sacred themes in a mythical fashion to create a spectacular drama that rivals his greatest staged works."

"Born the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti, Handel is regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, with works such as Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks and Messiah remaining steadfastly popular.^[6] One of his four Coronation Anthems, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II of Great Britain, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation, traditionally during the sovereign's anointing. Handel composed more than forty operas in over thirty years, and since the late 1960s, with the revival of baroque music and historically informed musical performance, interest in Handel's operas has grown."

A musical adventure since we know very little of this work.  Great venue for a small ensemble.

LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
Lucia di Lammermoor - Gaetano Donizetti

Start this post by listening to the sextet in Act II...

"New coloratura talent Albina Shagimuratova sings bel canto’s unhinged bride, delivering opera’s most thrilling mad scene. Joseph Calleja is her tragic lover. Mary Zimmerman’s production evokes the moors and castles of Scotland for Donizetti’s melodic journey of love and deception, conducted by Maurizio Benini."

A video promoting the opera...

The famous "mad scene"...

Met Opera: Shagimuratova Goes Brilliantly Mad In 'Lucia di Lammermoor'

Posted: 03/17/2015 12:16 pm EDT Updated: 03/17/2015 2:59 pm EDT

Donizetti may be one of the best things to happen to Sir Walter Scott. And with the return of Lucia di Lammermoor to the Met Opera stage last night, Albina Shagimuratova is one of the best things now going for Donizetti. 

The Russian soprano captivated a first night audience with her bravura performance as the doomed Scottish lass, culminating in a heart-stopping Mad Scene that can take its place among those of the storied singers who have made the role a signature of their virtuosity. 

Donizetti wrote his opera in 1835, with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano based on Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor, and it became an instant success with the character of Lucia Ashton becoming the personification of a woman thwarted in love by a father who demands she marry another against her will in an effort to save the family's fortunes.

The plot is a simple one. Lucia has fallen in love with Edgardo di Ravenswood, who is the mortal enemy of her father, Enrico Ashton di Lammermoor. Lucia and Edgardo plight their secret troth, but Enrico forges a letter from Edgardo saying he has fallen in love with somebody else, and Lucia reluctantly agrees to marry Arturo, her father's choice. This turn of events drives Lucia to a complete mental meltdown and it all ends in bloody murder, death and suicide.

The opera, with some of the most beautiful and dramatic music of the Romantic era, became so familiar to 19th-century Europe that several novelists alluded to it in their work. Flaubert has Emma Bovary attend a performance of Lucia in Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy wrote a description of a performance in Anna Karenina.

The roster of sopranos who have sung Lucia to stake their claim to bel canto credentials is long -- Pons, Melba, Callas and Sutherland to name just a few from the past, and more recently at the Met, Natalie Dessay, Diana Damrau and Anna Netrebko.

Shagimuratova can join the list. She is apprehensive in her opening aria "Regnava nel silenzio" as she recounts seeing the ghost of a woman who was murdered near the fountain where she waits to meet Edgardo. Then when her thoughts turn to Edgardo, she beams and sings like a woman in love, full of joy and with silvery runs in "Quando, rapito in estasi.”

The role is a demanding one, especially in the Mad Scene, a long passage of vocal dexterity that is one of the most liltingly lovely yet desperate pieces of music in all opera. Shagimuratova, singing in only her second role at the Met, hits every note squarely with ringing brilliance, and with only a solo flute for accompaniment, exquisitely played by Stefan Ragnar Hoskuldsson, evokes all the pathos of a deranged mind struggling with an ill-fated love.

The Met has assembled an excellent all-round cast for this round of performances of Lucia, which will be repeated seven more times this season. The tenor Joseph Calleja carried on in the role of Edgardo, though an announcement at the beginning said he had been suffering from the flu. There was indeed some strain in Calleja's opening act duet with Shagimuratova ("Ah! Verranno a te sull'aure") but he became vocally stronger as the evening went on.

By the third act, Calleja's voice had regained its brightness and the back-to-back arias in the final scene -- "Tombe degli avi miei" and "Fra poco a me ricovero" -- were wonderfully moving and tragic.

The Italian baritone Luca Salsi, also in only his second Met appearance, was splendid as Enrico. From the opening "Cruda, funesta smania" his rich powerful voice conveyed a man enraged yet one used to commanding and having his way. When he and Calleja face off at the end of Act 2, they circle each other like snarling dogs in their rousing duet. And the English basso Alastair Miles was excellent as Raimondo, the Lammermoor chaplain and Lucia's tutor.

Maurizio Benini conducted the Met Orchestra in a well-paced reading of the score. If the overture began with a certain deliberateness of foreboding, Benini proceeded at almost a gallop as the manhunt of the opening scene gets under way and the tempo throughout remained in step with the action onstage.

Mary Zimmerman's 2007 production, which moves the story to the 19th century, still conjures the bleakness of the wild and barren Scottish countryside, though there's not a kilt in sight. She actually brings the ghost in Lucia's story onstage, slowly wandering around the set before disappearing in the fountain, a theatrical addition that can be distracting to audience and soprano alike. But the grand staircase with a minstrel in the final act gives Lucia a spectacularly dramatic entrance for the Mad Scene.