The Nick of Time - Courtroom Concert

Just when the pandemic winter was beginning to get old, we took the drive to St. Paul to attend a noon Courtroom Concert sponsored by the Schubert Club. They had corralled one of the region's outstanding interpreters of art song, mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, to perform the world premier of four song cycles written by equally stellar local composers David Evan Thomas and Libby Larsen. As an added treat, the text of two of the four cycles drew upon poems by the late, great local poet, Louis Jenkins.

It's customary on such occasions to dwell on the international Kudos of the artists in question. For example, Clara was the first American prize winner at Thomas Quasthoff's International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany back in 2017. But these artists have been with us for a while, and the event, fuelled by host—and also distinguished composer—Abbie Betinis's irrepressible enthusiasm, had a distinctly joyous yet also a down-home feel, as if a bunch of kids, after spending hours cooped up in their rooms, had finally been given permission to go out and play.

Although I don't know any of these artists personally, I felt like I did. After all,  Libby Larsen was my T.A. for a music history class decades ago. And at one of Clara's recitals on the U campus, I said to the woman passing out brochures, who was concerned about the performer's immediate whereabouts, "You seem to know Clara quite well."

"I guess I do," she replied. "I'm her mother."

Clara added a new chapter to this sense of neighborhood familiarity, shallow though it may be, at the recital, when Abbie asked her to explain why a poem by an obscure poet, Henry Lorentzen, had been set to music.

"Libby asked me to choose a poem for her, and I picked that one. I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, and when I was nine I saw it framed on the kitchen wall of a neighbor's house one day. I copied it down, word for word, and have kept that sheet of paper ever since...And I have it right here!" She grinned as she held up an unlined sheet of coarse paper on which you could see, even from the tenth row of chairs, several uneven lines of child-like block letters, in pencil.

May I an Artist Be?

Master of the sky and earth,

May I an artist be;

That I may catch the spell of lands,

And of the billowed sea?

Guide my erring hand at times

If it does not present, the charm

Of youth or silver hair,

As truthful as is meant.

May I preserve upon the wall

The strong, the fleet, the meek.

Or flowered landscape with

A home - it is for this I seek.

Her dream has come true. The rich, dark, and often haunting timbre of Clara's voice  was a pleasure to listen to throughout. And the fresh and bracing mood of the recital was enhanced by the natural fluidity of the art song form itself, in which the vocal line is typically relieved somewhat from the constraints of harmonic integration, often weaving and bobbing to convey the meaning of a piece of text or the patterns of human speech, while the piano accompaniment not only maintains the "field" but also adds color and programmatic detail. For example, in the first song in Libby's North Shore cycle, delicate pianistic flourishes seemed to evoke the lines

Steam rises from our bodies

and forms high, thin clouds

that go racing past the moon over the lake

            

Before Clara performed his cycle "Children of the Night," David provided some details about the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote the poems involved. David also reminded us of what a niche form the art song is, and how rare and pleasing it was to have an artist of Clara's caliber actually perform it.

For me, the most shocking moment in the show was when Abby asked how many people in the audience were familiar with Louis Jenkins' work. Out of perhaps a hundred guests, no more than six or seven people raised their hands. That's a shame. Almost unbelievable. It's rare that I head north on vacation without throwing one or another of Louis's books into the book bag: The Winter Road, Sea Smoke, Just Above Water, North of the Cities, Before You Know It. Titles pulled off the shelf at random. A good place to begin exploring his work would be Where Your House is Now: New and Selected Poems, published by Nodin Press in 2019, the year he died.

Louis was a master of the prose poem, humorous and droll, fatigued and wonder-struck, likely to veer off from the subject at hand in a new direction following a logic both natural and obscure. But that dead-pan humor is lost when sung in a lovely, leaping female voice. I loved the music, but quit following the text, because I heard little of Louis's wise and weary humor in the sparkling leaps and bounds.  

Ten Matinees

 

After quite a few months of ignoring films, we got the bug recently and saw eight or nine of them. We streamed some and actually went to the theater several times. Here are brief descriptions of a few of the best.

Licorice Pizza

 The pace is steady, the setting is interesting, the characters are unusual, and so are the social dynamics in this romance/adventure/coming-of-age story. Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper show up in bit parts, but the two leads, both of them relative unknowns, hold the screen quite well on their own. Gary is a chubby, self-confident go-getter who seems to be starting a new business every five minutes, though he's only fifteen. He takes a fancy to Alana, a testy twenty-five-year-old working on the staff of the company taking pictures for Gary's high school annual. Her life is going nowhere, which may explain why she starts spending time with Gary, though she repeatedly makes it very clear that she is NOT his girl friend. Lots of unexpected developments, odd situations, and adventures ensue. Director Paul Thomas Anderson knows how to make things look "cool," even if it's a 1970s San Fernando Valley cool. And the soundtrack has got a good vibe, too.

Parallel Mothers

In recent years I had lost track of, or maybe lost interest in Pedro Almodóvar's films, so I'm in no position to call Parallel Mothers a return to form, but it's a nice piece of work, putting his singularly bright sense of color and soap opera-ish mise-en-scène to the service of a complex narrative, superbly acted by Penelope Cruz and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, who play unwed mothers-to-be, a generation apart in age, who meet in the maternity ward of a Madrid hospital and through a strange set of circumstances, eventually become friends. Almodóvar's youthful zaniness is entirely absent from the work, but a heightened political consciousness fills the gap, and the personal drama is riddled with subtle turns that the actors convey in numerous conversational close-ups. I especially liked the scene in which Cruz explains to the much younger Sánchez-Gijón how to make a tortilla—that is to say, the kind of potato-egg pie you see standing unrefrigerated on the counter in every working class bar in Madrid. Sánchez-Gijón comes from a well-off conservative family, and she's never seen it done.   

Being the Ricardos

Like last year's Hollywood dud Mank, this film is intricate and ambitious, but in the end, it doesn't quite satisfy. Javier Bardem doesn't look like Desi Arnez, and he doesn't seem to have Desi's good-humored and shallow flashiness. (He was better cast as the killer in No Country for Old Men.) Nicole Kidman fares better as Lucille Ball, but in the end, viewers may long for the on-stage Lucy rather than the talented and competent but somewhat humorless woman who played the part. Still, it's free on Netflix and it's a high-quality production.    

The Hand of God

Also free on Netflix, and perhaps the BEST movie I saw in recent months, this Neapolitan coming-of-age tale was directed by Paolo Sorrentino, whose film La Grande Bellezza won the Foreign Film Oscar a few years ago. I saw that film, which was set in Rome, and it struck me as dazzling in parts, but too long, and too decadent. Reviews had it that Sorrentino's subsequent effort, a sprawling work based on the life of notorious Italian prime minister Berlusconi, was worse. But The Hand of God has the dazzling, shimmering beauty of the Bay of Naples and the personal rootedness and feeling of an autobiographical tale. (Some of the best parts of La Grande Bellezza were the flashbacks to childhood.)

The story includes high-speed boat chases, practical jokes, family picnics and feuds, film sets and theater stages, mistresses and monks and soccer, filling the screen with color and life. But the thread holding it all together is the young son Fabietto, who has no idea what he's going to do with his life. His chief interests seem to be his gorgeous but mentally unstable aunt, and the fact the famous Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona has signed a contract to play for Naples.

At one point Fabietto's mother asks him what he plans to study at university. He answers, somewhat tentatively, "philosophy."

She looks down for a few seconds, then says cautiously, "What is that?"

After a pause, he replies, "I don't know."

There are quite a few odd characters in the film, and viewers may be reminded here and there of Fellini's nostalgic film Amarcord, but Sorrentino's work veers far less often into caricature and the grotesque. He emphasizes richness rather than crassness, and sustains a depth of feeling reminiscent not of Fellini but of such Italian directors as Francesco Rosi and Ettore Scola.

The Last Duel

Maybe they should have called it "The Last Gruel." Director Ridley Scott, whose well-known films run the gamut from Thelma and Louise and Bladerunner to Alien and Gladiator, here tried his hand at a medieval morality tale, but without the morality, or the moral. The tone is rough and wisps of pageantry are few and far between. The battle scenes steer clear of gratuitous gore, but this may simply be because everyone wears so much armor that the blood rarely leaks out.

We might describe the plot as a love triangle, except that there isn't much love in it. Early on in the action the paths of Jean de Carrouges and his friend Jacques Le Gris diverge as Carrouges "wins" the hand of Marguerite, the daughter of a nobleman who "backed the wrong horse" by defecting to the English side in recent conflict. Meanwhile, Le Gris makes use of his monastery education to be of service to the local nobleman who controls the fate of Carrouge's family estate. Carrouges isn't a bad man, but his strengths lie along the lines of combat and loyalty, rather than gentility and grace, and Matt Damon struggles to breathe life and interest into the character. The ladies at court, including Marguerite, find the supple tongue and dashing figure cut by Adam Driver as Le Gris more attractive. And when Ben Afleck, as the local lord, Pierre d'Alençon, transfers the Carrouge estate from the dour heir apparent, whom he dislikes, to the bon vivant Le Gris, with whom he shares some illicit tastes, the entire situation begins to go south.

Scott employs the "Rashoman" device of telling the tale three times over, each time from a new perspective, and this livens the film at several points. But there's really no one to root for here, and we may leave the theater mouthing the remark of Aristotle—or was it St. Augustine?—"There is no justice in this world."       

The Disciple

This quiet film follows the career of one Sharad Nerulka, who has devoted his life to studying classical Hindustani music under an obscure but semi-legendary vocalist while making ends meet by working for a friend who digitalizes LPs and tapes. His guru is elderly and frail, and Sharad has also taken on a few of the man's domestic responsibilities. The film develops placidly, almost blandly, with a few performances by the "master," some lessons, and conversations among friends who are following a similar path, including a young woman that Sharad has taken a liking to. (She doesn't return the interest.)

Sharad also draws inspiration from a set of tapes that he listens to while riding his motorcycle at night, on which an obscure (but evidently legendary) female vocalist from a previous era dispenses esoteric advice about dedication, selflessness, long years of sacrifice, and other quasi-Zenlike motivational notions. Sharad tries to absorb these teachings and put them to good use, but he finds it hard to shake the feeling that he's not very good, and isn't getting much better. The hollow, gloomy, countenance of first-time actor Aditya Modak in the title role tells the same story: selfless dedication isn't enough if you haven't got the talent. (Sharad's father wasn't much good at it, either.)           

Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane, who worked with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón on Roma, has lined up a diverse set of episodes to keep the story afloat. The film is shot in long takes with a static and often low-angle camera, in the manner of Ozu. The singing itself is a sort of melismatic improvisation, with plenty of quarter-tones involved, accompanied by some tapping on a bongo-like tabla and a sitar drone. The guru is pretty good at it. At the start of the film, I found it incomprehensible, if not exactly irritating; two hours later, I was wishing I could hear a little more.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky

"Whimsical" is a term often used to mask mediocrity, but this film from Georgia (the country, not the state) begins with a fable-like premise and then settles down, through a long string of plausible and occasionally enchanting episodes, to examine the consequences. It's a tale of star-crossed lovers at a bar in Tbilisi, and what we witness is what happens between people when that initial period of infatuation is removed from the equation. In fact, we soon lose sight of the initial issue as a series of new challenges present themselves. To call the film "low-key" would be an understatement. But it's also unpredictable, humorous, and touching.     

Don't Look Up

Leonardo diCaprio plays an astronomer, Jennifer Lawrence plays a grad student, Meryl Streep plays the president, Cate Blanchett plays a FoxNews host, and Ariana Grande plays a pop star. A meteor is about to strike Earth. What did you expect? It's a lot of fun, though it isn't as good as The Big Short. And it won't end the climate catastrophe. Then again, neither did Al Gore.