The Fall Music Season

When the days get dark, we head inside for entertainment, though when I look back at the events we’ve attended recently, most of them took place in the afternoon!

We attended an afternoon concert of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra recently. We were struck, a few years ago, by the magic that Eunice Kim summoned  to a performance of Mendelsohn’s Violin Concerto, and she worked her magic again on Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3. She retains the knack for bringing out the heavily romantic aspects of the music fully, yet selflessly. 

The orchestra’s woodwind “dectet” (is that a word?) had primed us by opening the “set” with a crisp, frothy appetizer by Jean Françaix, “Seven Dances after the Ballet Les malheurs de Sophie,” in the vein of Poulenc or Stravinsky in his pesky neo-classical phase.  

We left at intermission, fearing that even the most charming of Beethoven’s symphonies—his first—would have sounded lead-footed in comparison to Saint-Saëns’s richer offering. But we picked up a bit of a heavier Central European vibe while having lunch at Moscow on the Hill.

A few days later, we spent the better part of an afternoon in the Ordway’s bigger theater listening to the Minnesota Opera perform Mozart’s delightful Cosi Fan Tutti. I first heard this opera performed by the same company back in 1976 when it was in its infancy. It was a snowy night; my mom had driven into town to see the opera with us, and she spent the night on the couch in our tiny apartment.

I liked the opera then, and I liked it even more a half-century later, the second time around.

Cosi Fan Tutti once had a spotty or questionable reputation, on the order of: “not quite up to Mozart’s best, somewhat trashy, but after all, it is Mozart.” Some found the plot to be “immoral,” though it strikes me that Don Giovanni is hardly a model citizen. In any case, I loved the entire performance, and I was pleased to read later than some experts share that view.  “The most perfect ensemble opera ever written,” Matthew Boyden writes glowingly in The Rough Guide to Opera. And scholar Arthur Hutchen’s confesses, in his biography of Mozart, “For reasons I cannot explain and do not think worth discovering, despite the glories of other Mozart operas, I personally derive the greatest pleasure from Cosi fan Tutti…”

The big issue, when attending a classic opera these days, is whether the “updated” production will add something to the experience, or simply muck up the thing. In this case, the opera took place in a modern office setting, seemingly furnished by IKEA. In the first scene the two male protagonists—or perhaps I should call them “bros”—are drinking beer and playing video games. You get the idea.

The producers added a final twist to the show, giving viewers the opportunity to vote for a given outcome: do the two pairs of lovers remain together, or switch partners, or break up? The tally would determine how the cast wrapped up the “drama.”

It sounds dumb, but I was interested to read in an essay by Florence Badol-Bertrand that Mozart seemed “barely interested” in how the opera turned out. “At the end of the opera,’ she writes, “contrary to the conventions of the period, we are not exactly sure about how the couples are ‘redistributed.’”

We were sitting in the last row of the balcony, under the overhang of the second balcony, and from that distance I couldn’t tell for sure what happened at the end, either. Nor was it easy to discern, during the love scenes, the extent to which the two couples were playing a “part” in the grand ruse and the degree to which they were getting carried away by genuine emotion in an amorous situation. The ambiguity, or complexity, of the narrative made it possible to sit back, relax, enjoy the hijinks, and more especially, enjoy the music.

A few days later we met some friends down at the Dakota for tenor giant Joshua Redman’s eight o’clock show. The club’s habit of cramming the tables into long tight rows doesn’t sit well with me, but we’d reserve one that’s nestled up against the wall in front of the bar. It had the added virtue of obscuring our view of the huge TV sets on the wall behind the bandstand.

It was a pleasant scene, and the performance was decently long. But the band focused its attention on high-energy tunes from Redman’s most recent album, Words Fall Short. With all due respect, the music fell a little short, too. The tunes themselves weren’t that distinctive, and their somewhat arbitrary modal progressions seemed to thwart Redman’s attempts to stretch out lyrically. Pianist Paul Cornish went wild on several numbers, bashing away in a post-Don Pullen mode, and Redman gave it his fiery best, but the most engaging solos were provided by bassist Paul Norris. Hmmm. (The last time we heard Redman live he was exploring standards with Brad Mehldau. It was a musical feast.)

The following week we paid a visit one afternoon to an obscure (to us, not to God) church in St. Paul to hear a recently resurrected Mass by baroque composer Domenico Belli. What? You’ve never heard of him? Neither had we. But Consortium Carissimi always puts on a good show, and in this case they were featuring two quartets of vocalists, one of which included local star Clara Osowski. It was a lovely forty-minute Mass, although the experience was marred somewhat for Hilary by the fact that she was following the text in the program.

The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me.

And so on. Relentlessly. Heavy stuff. Then again, the piece was a funeral elegy. Officium DEFUNCTORUM. We’d been warned.

When it was over, the musicians headed to the basement while Garrick Comeaux, the group’s founder and artistic director, came forward to apologize for the brevity of the performance. He’d discovered the manuscript in an archive in Brescia, not far from Milan.

“I never know how long a piece is going to be until I have it worked up,” he told us. “Do you want us to do part of it again?”

A man in the front row suggested the final aria. Comeaux sent someone down to summon the musicians from the basement, and we were treated to a reprise of the concert’s last twenty minutes, during which all eight of the vocalists have a part to play.  

A Wild Week for Music

It wasn’t really that wild. I’m just trying to get your attention. But music arrives in many forms, and last week Hilary and I had the pleasure of listening to good deal of it.

It all started on Friday night. The moon was out, tinted by smoke from the forest fires raging in Manitoba. We were out, too, listening to rock-and-roll on the rooftop terrace of Brookview Community Center in Golden Valley. The event was a repeat of the Hopkins Class Reunion we attended last year, but for a different class. Hilary’s brother, David, was playing in the band again, and he’d gotten us complimentary tickets. 

Lively and distinguished?

The venue was classier, the food was slightly better, and the attendees seemed less frenzied, perhaps because of the larger venue and the more ample tables.

Most of the guests stayed inside, where the air was cleaner and it was easier to talk, but we sat out under the stars (only one of which was visible) listening to the music and chatting with spouses and friends of the band members. The band seemed slightly mellower, but also inspired by two new female vocalists. It was a memorable evening all around.

A few nights later Hilary’s other two brothers stopped over for “jazz night.” We’ve been doing this on a roughly monthly basis for at least twenty years. Everyone brings a few cuts, we take turns playing them, listening politely, commenting occasionally. It’s a great way to socialize and also to learn about new artists and forms of music.

Every month we wrap up the evening with pie. Hilary makes them, following in the footsteps of her mother, who made the pies and attended faithfully to the end, though she didn’t much like jazz. “I like the commentary,” she told us. She died a year ago at 97.

We keep track of the pieces we’re playing, and I type up a list later and send it around, sometimes manufacturing a “theme” after the fact. As you can see from our most recent gathering, our devotion to jazz is sincere but not exclusive:

July 2025: Jazz beyond borders

 Jeff / “Tin Roof Blues” / Herb Ellis (guitar) Roy Eldridge (trumpet), Getz (tenor) in straight-ahead 1957 performance

 John /  “Remember”  / Hank Mobley (tenor)  in1959 update of often recorded 1925 Irving Berlin tune, corny and sweet. To wit:

"Remember we found a lonely spot

And after I learned to care a lot;

You promised that you’d forget me not

 

But you forgot to remember"

 Hilary / “Fly with the Wind” (1964) mellow Lucky Thompson (tenor) with nice Hank Jones piano solo

 Paul / “Fuzzy” / Laura Jurd (Scotish composer / trumpet) in an upbeat, party-like New Orleans work w accordion & guitar             

 Jeff  /  “Seattle” Avishnu Cohen / young Jewish pianist in trio piece from album “Gently Disturbed”

 John / “Ka Ju Mot” / Albanian “folk” vocalist Elina Duli in slow, haunting piece with Colin Vollan (Swiss pianist) on ECM

 Hilary / “Reminiscence”/ a quieter side of Lucky Thompson from album “Lucky Strikes”

 Paul / “Little Opener” /Laura Jurd,  fun explosive arrangement with guitar and button accordion                       

 Jeff / “Ashé” /  Aaron Parks (piano)   Lyric and emotive jazz

 John / “After You’re Gone”/ rich modern harmonies and cookin’ solos on Nicolas Payton ensemble remake of 1915 tune

 Hilary / ”Siboney” / Cuban crooner/ballad from Los Super Seven album “Canto”

 Paul  / “Bonito Y Sabroso” / Cuban pianist Harold Lopez Nossa in live performance

A few days later we drove down to the West End theaters to see a matinee “encore” screening of the Met’s controversial production of Donizetti’s “Lucia de Lammermoor,” set in a nameless American Rust Belt slum rather than a 17^th century Scottish court. Donizetti’s music is very fine, but it didn’t jibe very well with the garish, seedy milieu, and several important elements in the plot were all but obliterated in the process of modernizing the story.

I didn’t like it … until I started to like it. The performance was lively, and slightly “cool,” all the ugly tattoos notwithstanding, and the singers were outstanding. Soprano Nadine Serra was spectacular in the title role, even with a bucket of blood splashed across her wedding dress. (She’d just murdered her newly wed husband with a fire extinguisher in a motel room.)

The next morning we headed downtown to see an exhibit of graphic art by Many Sully, a Sioux artist whose work dates mostly from the 30s and 40s. I’m including it in the lineup here because all art is in some sense musical, and because Sully’s work in particular draws upon repeated colors, patterns, and rhythms to achieve it effects. 

It’s a small exhibit, tucked into a room at the far end of MIA, but I’m glad we saw it. Most of the pieces consist of three-tiered panels with which Sully “depicted” famous personalities of her era and transformed them into native symbols.

Sully was raised in an aristocratic Sioux family, and she spent much of her adult life in New York City. I was interested to learn that she was related to the scholar Vine deLoria, Jr. When we got home I downloaded deLoria’s book, Spirit and Reason, in which he ridicules the Western philosophical establishment, pokes fun at his publisher, and tries to draw parallels between the Messiah and the Trickster figure who plays such a prominent role in Native American folklore. I can’t say that I fully caught the drift, but it’s definitely a subject worth investigating.

The next afternoon we returned downtown to attend a recital given by the vocal students at the annual Source Song Festival. The young performers had drawn their pieces from the standard romantic repertoire—Schubert, Wolf, Rachmaninov, Debussy, etc.­—and I shouldn’t have been surprised to see how many of the lyrics were of the “twittering birds,” “forest glen,” “lost love” variety.

No doubt, the pianists were as skilled as the singers. And if the lyrics sometimes teetering on the edge of schmaltz, one of the baritones redressed the balance by shaking the hall with a boisterous rendition of Charles Ives' "General William Booth Enters into Heaven."  

I'll spare you a blow-by-blow of the documentary we watched the next night, devoted to the career of eighteenth-century French composer Jean-Phillippe Rameau. Suffice it to say that music is often in the air-- 

or on the wall-- 

Or on the dining room table!

The Blaze of Summer

The key to enjoying the hot summer months is to get out early in the day. The bristling sunlight and the cool shadows make a delightful mix, summoning a spirit of exhilaration that seems almost heaven sent. We’ve had more than our share of rain this summer, but it’s been good for the plants, and there have been plenty of fresh, sparking days, too. Days of heart-rending beauty.

One morning Hilary and I drove south down West River Road with our bikes to Minnehaha Falls and took a trip up the creek to Lake Harriet. Bright, cool and spectacular. The trails were uncrowded, the gardens by the Longfellow House were stunning; and the pickleballers at Lake Nokomis—trim and athletic—were having a blast.

By the time we got back to the falls the Minnehaha Art Fair was in full swing. (Before setting out we’d seen the rows of square tents lined up under the trees like an Arabian bazaar, but had no idea what was going on.) The line at Sea Salt was already long, so we gave up on the dream of a calamari lunch and took the plunge down the first aisle.

It struck me almost immediately that the quality of the work was high, though many of the objects for sale inhabited that broad but vague realm between fine art and gift shop merchandise.

Halfway down the first row I was drawn to the linoleum block prints of Matt Otero.

Across the aisle, at a tent devoted exclusively to long, narrow bowls carved out of mid-sized pieces of birch with the bark left on, I was struck by the seeming incongruity of the sign: Erv Berglund – Fridley. Erv was standing right there, and he looked Scandinavian, as did the art, so I took a chance and said: “You look like someone who should live in Scandia or Lindstrom.”

Erv nodded and said, “I used to do some hunting out that way. I grew up in South Minneapolis. There was a Dane down the street, and another Swede on the next block.” My God. He had an accent!

We made our way down the aisles, past jewelers and silk-screeners, potters and weavers. I tried to convince one soap-maker to look into the possibility of linden soap. “Is that an essential oil?” she asked. How would I know? She looked it up in a book that was sitting on a table nearby. “Hmm. Yes, it is.”

During our stroll Hilary was on the lookout for the woman who made her purse. She loves that purse, but she needs a new one.

We have several friends who have made a good living selling things at events like these. But after two or three aisles everything starts to look slightly superfluous and vaguely meretricious. (I blame it on the heat.) Having failed to locate the food trucks (if there were any) we returned to our bikes and cycled the remaining quarter mile to our car, which was parked near the entrance to the lock and dam. A stunning morning, well spent.

A few days later we headed west early to the Landscape Arboretum and took a stroll around the grounds. The day lilies were singing, the herbs were fragrant, and the bedding plants were spectacular. Even the orangish shades were appealing in the long shadows of mid-morning. We cut behind the Snyder Building on our way back to the car and met up with a young man selling coffee on the terrace. Hilary commented on the book by the Buddhist monk Pema Chodron that was sitting on the counter of his cart. She’s a fan.

"I’ve read all of her books,” he said. “They’re pretty similar. But she’s helped me through some tough times.” I asked him what he did when he wasn’t baking in the summer sun on the Arboretum terrace selling coffee. “I’m a yoga instructor at LifeTime Fitness,” he said.

I couldn’t quite picture it. “You mean, like poses and mediation and stuff?”

“I think you’ve got the general idea,” he said, smiling good-naturedly.

A woman was watering plants with a sprayer hose a few feet away. As we passed her she said hi, and I said, “If it gets too hot, you can just spray yourself.”

“I do. I do,” she said. “I just spray up into the air and down it comes.”

“Would you spray me?” I said.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

So she shot a shower up into the air in my direction. That was refreshing. Unfortunately, as she brought the nozzle of the hose back down she inadvertently “let me have it” with a direct hit to the chest.

“Oh, I sprayed you too much,” she said with a sheepish giggle. “Well, don’t worry. You’ll be dry in half an hour!”

Though the afternoons have been almost unbearably hot, we hosted my cousin Rich and his wife Sarah for lunch on the deck one day at noon. 

And a few days ago we met some friends for a late afternoon performance at the Theodore Wirth Trailhead given by the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company. They were doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, an early “opera seria” that’s sometimes referred to as his first masterpiece, though it’s seldom performed.

Mercifully, the troupe had decided to move the performance into the cool and capacious confines of the Trailhead building itself, rather than out on the grass behind the building. And the show was an utter blast.

The group takes its opera seriously, in so far as the voices are strong and the singing heart-felt. But they ham up the drama as if it were a SNL skit. The orchestra has been replaced by a cabaret quartet consisting of cello, violin, accordion, and guitar. And by editing out two thirds of the material and adding a few pop tunes and jivey dances here and there, they succeed in keeping the audience amused—even those who might not like opera much. We loved it.

You can hear a snatch of the music here:

 

Film Fest Overview

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film festival has largely run its course, for the 44^th time, and the Best of the Fest line-up has been announced. These are films that will be aired again because they were deemed the best by viewers, though I sometimes wonder if they’re simply the ones that are currently available to be shown again before moving on to festivals in Keokuk and Elephant Butte.

Hilary and I saw twelve films and we liked them all. Would we recommend them to friends? Maybe not.

Part of the buzz comes from showing up day after day at the theater, which sits across the river from downtown Minneapolis. It’s a vibrant scene, and it’s not uncommon for us to run into longtime friends, casual acquaintances, and film buffs with whom we’ve chatted at some festival years ago without ever learning their names. That adds to the fun.

The five-screen theater complex is only fifteen minutes from our house, and we adopted a new parking strategy this year that made the approach even easier. Rather the wasting time scouring the neighborhood for an open spot on the street and worrying about the two-hour time limit, we took to parking on Marshall Avenue, where there was always a spot available, and setting off on the ten-minute walk to the theater.

Among the films we saw, several were expertly made and one was actually gripping. These films might do well in a normal first-run setting. Others were classic “film-fest” movies: slow to develop, set in exotic locales, giving you the time to soak up the atmosphere and listen to the crickets chirp. And then there were the bio-pics and documentaries.

In the first category I would place a Czech film, Waves. It depicts a few episodes during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the struggles of the employees of the “official” radio station to broadcast honest news under the scrutiny of government officials who are always asking themselves, “What will Moscow think about this?” I won’t be giving away any secrets if I remind you that five Warsaw Pact countries under Russian leadership invaded Czechoslovakia in the fall of that year. The film captures the décor of the era, and also the Western music that had become so popular—for example, the Shirelles “Be My Baby.” There are plot twists and Russian tanks, heroism and loyalty and defeat on the streets of Prague. It’s a great mix.

When we got home, we pulled out a copy of A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century,  by Richard Vinen, to fill in the details, but the focus wasn’t quite right. Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting offered fewer historical details but was much better suited to the mood and complexity of the film. And after all, Kundera was there.

In Meet the Barbarians, a French comedy/drama directed by Julie Delpy, a small town in Brittany that’s expecting to welcome a refugee Ukrainian family is surprised to discover that in fact the family that’s arriving from Syria. It’s a strangely light-hearted film, considering the context, but it works none the less. I couldn't help thinking of darker films like Green Border and The Old Oak here and there along the way.

A third film in the “polished and ready for prime time” category, Mistura, was less effective. Here the daughter of the French ambassador to Peru is humiliated when her husband runs off with a beauty queen. Facing disgrace and financial ruin, she vents her emotions on the only people still close at hand—her devoted servants. In the course of the film she recovers her self-esteem, if not her social status, by means of the one thing she loved to do before her marriage: cooking. She opens a restaurant with the help of her father’s former chef (Asian), her trusted chauffeur (black), and a maid (Latino) who’s served the family for decades.

It's a food movie, among other thing, and the close-ups are appetizing. It’s also a fairy tale of ethnic sharing and cooperation, which is fine by me. But I didn’t get the sense that our protagonist had really changed all that much by the end of the film. She had cut back on the stylish clothes and the heavy make-up, but she was still the boss, and they were the servants.

We'd run into an old friend while waiting in line, and in the lobby after the film she told us, "I lived in Peru for three months when I was in college back in the 70s. It was really like that! Everyone was thinking all the time about what they wore, and what so-and-so would say if they did this or that. You can do this; you can't do that or be seen there."

One thing the chauffeur and the ambassador's daughter have in common is that they can both quote the poet Cesar Vallejo by heart. When we got home I pulled Trilce off the shelf and was soon fast asleep.

The Property follows an elderly woman and her granddaughter as they travel from Israel to Poland in hope of regaining ownership of an apartment that was confiscated during the war. Hidden at the root of this simple endeavor is a pre-war love affair between Jew and goy that everyone in the family knows about but no one talks about. The film consists of various appointments in Warsaw and also random meetings with strangers, some of whom become friends.

Grandmother and granddaughter are pursuing different strategies and are seldom in the same place at the same time, and their local cantor, who has ostensibly accompanied them to attend a conference, also figures in the plot. Several enigmatic elements come together nicely by the time we’re through. Do they get the apartment? I’m not telling.

The Last Journey details a son’s efforts to rekindle the spark in his aged father, who has somehow lost his “pep,” by taking him on a road trip from central Sweden to the French Riviera, where the family enjoyed some memorable holidays decades earlier. The father seems very feeble, but the son is bursting with energy and he recruits an old friend to help him make the trip memorable. Both of the younger men are highly skilled directors and producers in real life—a fact I only learned after seeing the film. That might explain how they succeed in cobbling together the funniest and most touching trip—and film—you can imagine, considering that the old man can hardly walk.

The other engaging comedy we saw, Fun Raiser, is set half a world way from the Riviera in the depressed mining town of Chisolm, Minnesota. Crafted by local filmmakers Wyatt McDill (director) and Megan Huber (producer) and almost obeying Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action, it takes place in a single afternoon and evening during which an odd collection of small-town folk attempt to host a fund-raising event to keep their fledging art school afloat. A media star with local roots will be arriving from L.A. for the event, but the money to rent the hall and pay the caterers has fallen through. If these hapless educators did succeed in holding the event, and they did raise some money, everything might turn out differently, of course. The result is a madcap succession of frenzied conversations as we get the know the characters, none of whom seems to be sure what anyone else is doing. It’s a rocky start, but (spoiler alert) once the event is moved to a dilapidated warehouse nearby and the wealthy guests start arriving, the film reaches what chemists call “activation energy” and (with the help of a gummy bear or two) it starts to hum with an accelerating rhythm of absurd gags, hilarious pratfalls, and touching testimonials to the importance of arts education and its power to unite and inspire even the most down-at-heal community.

Among the “third-world” films we saw, Regretfully at Dawn stands out. Set in rural Thailand, it tells the simple story of a girl who’s being raised by her grandfather on a farm of some sort. They enjoy being together and get along well. But she’s very bright, and her teacher at the local school is convinced she should continue her education abroad. Her grandfather, meanwhile, is ailing a bit, and seems to be enmeshed in memories of the time he spent in combat years ago—memories that he cherishes. It’s a gentle film, slow-moving, full of rural expanses, but also punctuated here and there by sudden explosions.

The most unusual film we saw, I think, was Grand Tour. The story-line isn’t much: British functionary stationed in Burma (or somewhere) flees fiancée; woman follows. The fleeing man says almost nothing and has virtually no distinguishing characteristics. He’s less than a cypher; he’s merely a prop. He serves the purpose of providing a narrative thread with which Portuguese director Miguel Gomes can string together exotic footage of the Far East taken at various times during the twentieth century along with footage he shot himself, much of it in black and white.

The fiancée shows up halfway through the film, and she’s much more dynamic. She gives the film a lift. But the entire work carries the flavor of an old silent film, where the fascinating imagery trumps the odd and sometimes arbitrary way it’s juxtaposed, like the phrases in a good surrealist poem. It reminded me of the recent Gods of Mexico, and also a black-and-white film from Russia that I saw years ago, Bag of Bones. Similarly odd, yet strangely refreshing.

There are times when a film fest comes to an end, and you find that you’ve seen three or four films about farming, or arctic exploration, for no particular reason. This year, we happened to see three biopics. All good.

I have never read anything by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, but Hilary recently read The Country Girls, and friends told us Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story was well put together. It is. O’Brien comes across as sharp, honest, playful, curious. The men she associated with less so. Her two bright and articulate sons add a lot to the story. The petty and scathing remarks her husband wrote in her journal expose a narcissistic tyrant. In the course of the film we get to know her, and it’s fun to catch a few newsreel glimpses of the London party scene, but the film’s richness derives even more from the atmospheric home movies shot in Ireland.    

Flicka, a portrait of the opera singer Frederica von Stade, is hardly less appealing, and her life followed a similar trajectory, up to a point. She achieved surprising success at an early age, never took herself too seriously, and was capable of doing things for the sheer fun of it. The film takes us beyond the obvious talent and success to probe Flicka's irrepressible thoughtfulness and humanity.

Ai Wei Wei’s Turandot gave me a clearer idea of who this Chinese dissident is. It jumps back and forth from China, where Ai was imprisoned for his outspoken views, to Rome, where he’s been put in charge of designing a new production of Puccini’s opera Turandot. Wei envisions the work as a statement about free speech and repression, and there is undoubtedly an authoritarian element to the plot. Ai is in his element fashioning costumes of strange creatures to fill out the scenes, though he's never designed an opera before and admits that he doesn't really like opera. But I’m sure some viewers were eager to hear a bit more of the music. I know I was.    

Bulgar and Brahms

Home alone on a cold gray morning—Hilary is bringing some vegetable soup over to her mom's apartment—I convince myself that it's time to make the salad I've had on my mind ever since I bought that bag of Bob's Red Mill bulgar a week ago. I can see through the plastic container that the fresh mint I bought for that purpose is growing less fresh by the hour. I put a CD of Brahms' second and third symphonies on the stereo—melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic by turns, like a shifting sea at sunset. Those symphonies remind me of my college years, when Brahms was one of my favorite composers. (I'm not saying that my college years were melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic, though that's not far off the mark either.)

But a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens from the same era suddenly surfaces:

A little less returned for him each spring.

Brahms, his old familiar, often walked alone.

At the time those lines worried me a little. Is this what aging does? I asked myself. Reduces one's ardor, one's affection for things? I haven't found that to be the case. I simply quit listening to Brahms somewhere along the line, except for his late, poignant piano intermezzos. He began to sound slightly turgid and overwrought in comparison to the more haunting and evasive sounds of Faure, for example. And at a certain point the lyric and dramatic genius of Brahms' near contemporary Verdi came into play, along with other competing interests.

In short, I found that my experience broadened rather than fading; my tastes expanded. Yet there's also a subtle joy to be felt  in circling back to those memories, and tastes, of forty or fifty years ago. I found myself whistling along to the symphonies—I internalized them long ago and know them all by heart—while following the recipe for bulgar salad in a food-spattered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook from the same era. This isn't nostalgia—a pining for something that's lost. It's probing the mystery of time and relishing the deep overlay of memories that have returned to life in the here and now.

Hilary and I drove down to campus on a sunny morning a few weeks ago to see an exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum. We parked on the street a few blocks away--it happened to be spring break, though we didn't know it at the time--and strolled down East River Road to the gallery. After viewing the show we returned via the mall to Northrup Auditorium, trying to remember what each of the buildings used to be. Scott Hall was Music, Morall Hall was where you registered for classes. Anthropology was in Murphy Hall, but so was the University Film Society. Or was that Fraser Hall?

 Beyond Northrup we came to Folwell Hall, where I once studied Classical Greek, and sometimes climbed out on the roof through the dormer windows after class to enjoy the spring breezes.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Dinkytown. The Podium Guitar Shop across the street is long gone, and so is the Tokyo Café, where you could get a bowl of tendon for $3.50. (In those days the tempura was out of my price range.) Gordon's Bakery, where the banana donuts were so good? Long gone. Vescio's? Not a chance. But there were shops selling Gopher paraphernalia, which would have been unheard of  during the hip and turbulent Seventies.

After lunch we went upstairs to browse a used book store that's changed hands several times over the years. Alas, for me that particular activity has lost most of its charm. I've got quite a few books lying around the house, and I seldom see a new one that doesn't immediately remind me of others I already own. For example, I was intrigued by a book containing eyewitness accounts of Verdi's life and habits by those who actually knew him or passed him on the streets of Busseto or Parma. Sounds interesting. But what about the thick Phillips-Matz biography of Verdi sitting on the shelf back home, unread? And George Martin's Aspects of Verdi?  Charles Osborne's The Complete Operas of Verdi? Or my favorite, William Berger's Verdi with a Vengence? No. I don't need another book about Verdi right now.

But I've made a mental note of it, and if I happen to be in the neighborhood again sometime ... 

I was happy to see that Verdi's Nabucco had been included among the Met Opera Theater Simulcasts last fall. I'd never seen it, and the only piece I knew was the famous "Va Pensiero." The opera was Verdi's first youthful success, a Biblical epic heavy on the choruses, and I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be tremendous--stirring, romantic, ridiculous, and profound--and the effect was enhanced by the fact that the theater sound had been turned up a little too loud.

We wanted to sustain the mood, so when we got home I scoured our CDs and came up with a complete recording of La Forza del Destino, an opera sometimes referred to as Verdi's "black sheep" that we hadn't heard in years. In this sprawling four-hour drama the hero, Alvaro, kills his girl-friend Leonora's father by an unlikely accident, and spends the rest of the opera being hunted down by her brother Carlo. In the third act Alvaro (incognito, of course) saves Carlo's life in a back-alley rumble, and they become best friends. (You get the feeling it's not going to last.) By the end of the opera both Leonora and Alvaro have withdrawn from the world to monasteries, but plenty of blood gets spilled just the same. In operaland, how could it be otherwise?

Listening to CDs, we had no idea what was going on, of course, but the music was a delight. 

And just our luck, a few weeks ago the Met brought La Forza del Destino to town on a Saturday Theater Simulcast. The production was terrible...but the music, as usual, was sublime.

Midsummer Voices

 

We caught a bit of opera and razzmatazz down at the Trailhead on a Saturday afternoon on the invitation of some friends who have been following the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company for several years. The drama was familiar—Romeo and Juliet. The performance took place on the grass behind the building, with young women and men on mountain bikes speeding up and down the hill in the distance. And the zany acting style, which I enjoy only to a degree, was counter-balanced by the inclusion of arias from Bellini's 1830 opera The Capulets and the Montagues. Shakespeare was nowhere to be seen, or heard, which I also consider a plus, and it made sense, considering Bellini based his opera not of the Bard's rendering but on a far older Italian novella.

The troupe seemed to be a little short on props. At one point in their update of the original tale, the two lovers drive away on a motorcycle. They didn't have one, however, so we watch Romeo and Juliet tear across the field in front of the stage in the back of a pick-up truck holding a cardboard image of a motorcycle on a stick.

At another point a duel takes place between two rivals making use of Venetian blinds!

It was all great fun, and the singing was very fine. So were the contributions from the pit band, which consisted of a cello, a violin, and an electric piano. The director wisely dispensed with anything resembling a recitative, replacing those passages with spoken dialog or a song by Fleetwood Mac, the Pixies, or the Fugees. A line dance here and there also livened the show.

Some viewers might have taken the casting of women in both the title roles as a gender-bending update. I did. Looking it up later I learned that Bellini wrote it that way. 

It was a brilliant but blistering afternoon, and many in the audience were more than happy to have their program mounted on a stick.

Our enthusiasm for opera revitalized, a few days later we attended a Metropolitan Opera "encore" performance of Il Travatore at a nearby multiplex. The production was lavish, the singers top-flight, as one might expect, considering the source. In fact, we saw this very performance a few years ago when it was originally released in theaters.

The plot is an odd one, and I'd forgotten the last few wrinkles. Though there were only ten people in the audience, I was reminded how noisy elderly viewers can be, chatting in a normal tone of voice as if they were sitting at home in their living room. But all things considered, it was a fine evening.

 A few days later we headed downtown after supper to listen in on an evening of art songs presented as part of the Source Song Festival that takes place every year in early August. We used to attend regularly during the fest's early years, when concerts were held near the river at Antonello Hall. Parking was easy to find, the concerts were free, they started early, and we could grab a bite to eat a block away before the show at Zen Box Izakaya's happy hour.  When the festival expanded and moved uptown to Westminster Church we lost touch.

The organization is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The performance we attended featured rising opera star Tamara Wilson and renowned baritone Anthony Dean Griffey, and it was a great pleasure to be there. We even enjoyed the drive downtown, which took us through a traffic jam near Target Stadium along with thousands of people who were there to hear a concert by Pink. (Who?)

Once we got past the parking ramps near the stadium the traffic thinned out considerably, and we enjoyed watching people hurrying on foot down Hennepin Avenue to one of the theaters carrying a touring Broadway show.

Once we got past Nicollet Mall, the traffic disappeared.

Yes, our own little event was well-attended. Eighty people? A hundred and twenty? It was so low-key that no one was scanning tickets. (In fact, I think several of the organizers smiled at me warmly because I was the first person they'd seen that night whom they didn't know.) Conversation from row to row and from aisle to aisle before the performance was widespread; we might have been the only couple there who knew NO ONE else in the audience.

To my untrained ear, Tamara Wilson's voice was, above all else, strong, but I think I'd rather hear her doing the title role of Aida (which she sang at the Met recently) than the cute song cycle based on a book of childish magic spells with which she opened the evening. The warmth of Griffey's handling of two brief Ned Rorem songs came as a welcome contrast, and he also breathed more than a touch of sincerity and life into a few selections from Copland's somewhat hackneyed Old American Songs.

But Tamara really hit her stride after intermission. Her voice was perfect for Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder, sung in German with all due intensity and weight.

It was a fine evening from start to finished, and we even enjoyed wandering the church library at intermission looking at black-and-white photos of the many distinguished women and men who have been guest speakers at the Westminster Town Hall Forum over the years.

But something essential was missing, and I was pleased when Hilary noticed in the program that another concert was scheduled for the following night, during which the young artists who had participated in the week-long series of workshops that the festival is mostly "about" would display the fruits of their efforts on stage. This would be an even more interesting show, so I thought, with ten performers instead of two, and new compositions from start to finish.

And so it proved to be.

The following evening the traffic downtown was thinner. The voices on stage were more varied and no less pleasing. And the compositions were, if anything, more delightful, though they weren't all new. Each performer had chosen a famous song, and then had gone to work with their collaborating composer, spinning a new creation in light of that chosen classic. That's why songs by Wolf and Debussy, Schumann and Schönberg, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, showed up on the program alongside the compositions of the largely unknown women and men who had been the festival "fellows" during the week.

The words were largely incidental. The explanations for the words that the composers offered before each performance were sometimes revealing, sometimes insightful, occasionally misguided. They exposed each young composer's brilliance, youth, character, and  naiveté. The melodies and the singers, all of them sopranos, carried us along. No intermission. A giddy sense of excitement filled the room, as if we were witnesses to an event at which the participants had began to discover for themselves or reaffirm how good they really were.