The Doctor with the Hero's Voice

One of the astonishing things about art is how you can discover it in the most unexpected places. This happened to me when I was 18-years-old, and my then-new-boyfriend Tom brought me to visit his home in Appalachia. There, one evening, I accompanied on the piano an excellent baritone who introduced me to the incredible songs of Franz Schubert.

This singer had been nicknamed “Crow” by his medical school classmates in Goettingen, Germany, because he sang “Die Kraehe” (“The Crow”) from Schubert’s great song cycle “Die Winterreise” so often. This singer had once auditioned for a European opera impresario, who declared that he could become a sensation, not only because of the quality of his voice, but because of his personality, which exudes the force and light of a solar system. Sig turned down the opportunity to develop a singing career because he believed his destiny was to “serve” (which, incidentally, was Beethoven’s philosophy about his own life.) To that end, my father-in-law spent over forty years working as a general internist in Appalachia, serving the rural population of Southeastern Ohio, where he and my mother-in-law live to this day.

Be that as it may, sometimes I cannot help but think how he would have benefited from the cultural riches we have here in Philadelphia. Last night I wished he could have heard the program Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchslager and pianist Warren Jones gave for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Rather than offer up familiar, tuneful songs, they chose to perform complex, rarely heard lieder of Brahms, Wolf and Hahn, and selections from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

How Sig would have enjoyed hearing Ms. Kirchschlager’s burnished, nuanced mezzo, and her penetrating interpretations. He would have been enchanted by her dramatic flair and the sometimes mischievous quality that make her appear a down-to-earth diva just inviting the family over to hear her sing.

My father-in-law would have admired, as I did, Mr. Jones’ gorgeous, virtuosic accompaniment that contained not one square edge.

Listening to this evening of lieder was especially poignant knowing that the following morning Sig, a doctor nearly all his adult life, would become a patient on an operating table in Columbus, Ohio, undergoing coronary bypass and replacement of an aortic valve that has been failing for some time.

Somehow the profundity of a great Lied, which deals with life or death as its subject matter, feels even more relevant when a procedure of this magnitude is facing someone you love.

Fortunately, all that singing has provided Sig with tremendous lung capacity, and as I write this, he has survived the operation and is recovering in the I.C.U. As soon as he makes it safely out of the hospital and into rehab, I will make sure he hears one of Angelika’s CD’s. I know he will appreciate it.

The moon rising above the Mann Music Center, Philadelphia

Growing up, my summer weekends were often spent listening to the Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom Music Center, their outdoor home. My friends and I would join a festive line of cars snaking down a wooded lane, directed by parking attendants with flares and brown vests, to the graveled parking lots. We’d arrive early and wait with the crowds until the cedar gates opened. People would spread out blankets and picnic dinners on the immense sloping lawn to the concert pavilion –- the aroma of pate, cold roast chicken, and Chardonnay would scent the air. Under the stars and in the deepening twilight, the music sounded especially sublime.

Here in Philly, our hometown orchestra is away for most of the summer, but we do have the Mann Center, in Fairmount Park, where they play concerts in June, and where another Pennsylvania orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, made a rare guest appearance this season. I’d been riveted by radio broadcasts of the Pittsburgh Symphony of late, so I got tickets and dragged my husband and friends along.

The Mann Center does not allow civilized noshing of one’s own gourmet items on the lawn – rather, one has to buy food purchased on the premises, like at a ballgame. So my friend Susan found a restaurant nearby which looked promising, though the surrounding neighborhood is rough. The Cochon Noir, we discovered, is a new jazz club which features ribs and Southern accompaniments. The owner, an elegant man in a three-piece suit, personally demonstrated how the properly cooked St. Louis-style barbecued rib should be chewy enough that one must “tug” the meat off the bone.  Susan’s husband Ulf declared with some disappointment that, in his opinion, the ribs were tough. They were also mammoth. We put most of the ribs in a to-go container and made our way to the concert.

Which was sublime. The Pittsburgh Symphony, directed by guest conductor Arild Remmereit, performed an all-Beethoven program, beginning with the Egmont Overture and ending with the Third Symphony. There is an intensity and energy at the core of Pittsburgh’s sound which is electrifying. Aside from some problems in the French horns (perhaps due to outdoor humidity) the winds produced a full, textured choir with gorgeous intonation.

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto featured teen pianist Teo Gheorghiu, a Swiss-Canadian of Romanian descent. Gheorghiu is an actor too, and played opposite Bruno Ganz in the movie Vitus, which is about, not surprisingly, a piano prodigy. Listening to him was like hearing a pianist of the old school with creamy tone, flawless phrasing and technique. His encore, Rachmaninoff’s transcription of Kreisler’s Liesbesleid, displayed an approach that was mature, without pretense, and beautiful.

At home the next day, we put the ribs in the slow cooker and let them bubble away for hours. They came out perfectly soft and edible, and at last, the food matched our satisfaction with the music.

The captivating art of Micah Chambers-Goldberg

When my daughters were little, we loved reading together. We read all sorts of books — about clueless Papa Bears, and skunks who learned to eat their dinners. Our favorite books were not just entertaining, but powerful works of art which Mom could appreciate, and didn’t mind reading over and over.

The same is true of music. Like a great children’s book, a great children’s concert has the power to move everyone in the audience, whether young or old. One such concert, which I urge you to see the next time it comes around, is called “Who Stole the Mona Lisa?”

Produced by Astral Artists as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, the April 9 show at the Perelman Theater featured several of Astral’s young musicians dressed in their own cheerful caps, T-shirts, and jeans. The stellar musical team included violinist Kristin Lee, cellist Clancy Newman, bassoonist Natalia Rose Vrbsky, trumpeter Stanford Thompson, clarinetist Benito Meza, and pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine.

During Martinu’s deftly played La Revue de Cuisine, a troupe of young actors/dancers, portraying pieces of cutlery and an art thief, cavorted alongside the musicians. For Poulenc’s The Story of Babar, the engaging storyteller Charlotte Blake Alston read aloud Jean deBrunhoff’s classic tale to the sensitive accompaniment of Poulenc’s incidental piano music, played by Alexandre Moutouzkine.

Everyone familiar with the story knows that Babar’s mother is killed by a “wicked hunter” early on in the book. As Ms. Alston intoned, “In the great forest a little elephant is born,” a 3-year-old in the audience, anticipating the worst, called out, “Uh-oh. UH-OH.” Talk about audience participation!

A young audience member, inspired to dance after the performance. (Photo, courtesy Steve Cohen.)

Conceived by Astral’s artistic director Julian Rodescu, and created by the visual artist Micah Chambers-Goldberg, this wordless animated film is set to Alexandre Moutouzkine’s transcription of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. The score was played live, with flawless timing and brilliance, by Moutouzkine himself. The film, a stylish fantasy reminiscent of Edward Gorey, contains moments of humor, whimsy, and wonder that are fresh and surprising. (The Cubist depiction of Picasso, with his nose to the left of his eyes, and one eye lower than the other, got plenty of laughs.) The story line loosely follows an actual historical incident, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, but, as in all good stories, returned home again.

I can’t remember an instance when music so enhanced a piece of visual art, and vice versa.

I think Astral Artists is on to something new that is both engaging and meaningful. The kid in me can’t wait to see and hear what they come up with next.

Playwright/actress/barrier-breaker Anna Deavere Smith

I knew that Ms. Smith had done a huge amount of research for this play, interviewing over three-hundred people from around the world, then distilling these interviews to just twenty to portray onstage. Accompanied by music, stylish lighting, occasional props (mostly food and drink,) moving from table to comfy couch, she conveys the essence of each real-life character, from theologian to writer, to celebrity athlete, politician, physician, and patient — even a bullrider, and a Buddhist monk.

Ms. Smith hilariously embodies former Texas governor Ann Richards, as she was fighting esophageal cancer, and explaining why she couldn’t keep as many apppointments and do as many meet-and-greets as she used to: “I’ve got to protect my chi.” Lance Armstrong’s fierce description of his triumph against testicular cancer is followed by the sportswriter Sally Jenkins’ astute observations of the behavior of top-level athletes – that they don’t conserve anything, they want to go all out, want to be all used up -– they are going to compete to win, whether it’s a bicycle race or a boxing match, or death. Ms. Smith’s depiction of Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, the physician stranded with her impoverished patients at the doomed Charity Hospital of New Orleans, made me cry, as did her portrayal of Trudy Howell, who cares for AIDS orphans in South Africa.

But most moving to me was the scene with Susan Youens, a musicologist from Notre Dame. To the strains of the Adagio from Schubert’s string quintet, Ms. Youens explains that Franz Schubert contracted syphilis at the age of 25, and knew he was going to die. All his compositions from that point forward are tinged, Ms. Youens says, with poignancy, with brief rages against death, with acceptance, and occasionally the sounding of funerary “passing bells.” By the time he died, before his 32nd birthday, Schubert had left the world with a thousand incredible songs, sonatas, and symphonies.

“If I met Schubert, would I like him?” Ms. Youens says. “No, I would not like Schubert.
I would love Schubert.”

“Let Me Down Easy” is not about the health care system. “Let Me Down Easy” is about mortality, and its counterpart, living life. “Let Me Down Easy” expresses one philosophy as memorably as Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town:” that each moment we have on earth is precious, and we should therefore live each moment as if it were a treasured gift.

Simone Dinnerstein playing J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations

Legends surround J.S. Bach’s legendary Aria with Thirty Variations, BWV 988. One well-known tale has Bach composing it at the request of Count von Keyserlingk in Dresden, who suffered from chronic insomnia. The idea was for Johann Goldberg, the count’s young harpsichordist (and a student of Bach’s) to play it at night, to help lull Kayerserlingk to sleep.

Although no firm historical evidence backs this story up, I can see why it became popular. The first time I heard the Goldberg Variations, I was a teenager, invited to hear a performance given by a harpsichordist at a museum. Sitting in the cavernous auditorium, I heard mainly an endless jangle of G major. I was too young to form an educated opinion at the time, but the piece did seem long and monotonous enough to put one to sleep.

A more modern legend comes in the form of a man, one of the most famous proponents of the Goldberg Variations, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Gould’s 1959 recording of the piece is revolutionary, brilliantly fast, and possesses the precision of a gorgeous machine. Gould possessed one of the most eccentric personalities in music, too -– painfully reclusive, he eventually gave up playing in public except through the medium of the L.P. recording. He became so unkempt that Leonard Bernstein’s wife had to wash his hair under the bathtub spigot when he came to visit. The eccentricities only added to the legend.

I wonder if the pianist who removes himself to the isolation of the recording studio is as deserving of ongoing legendary status as the pianist whose platform is the unadorned stage, with breathing, wide-awake human beings sitting in the audience, expecting magic.

A month ago, I heard a pianist who stepped into this most challenging arena with nothing but herself, a new Steinway concert grand, and a glass of water. No score, no do-overs, no editing help. Simone Dinnerstein, whose career ascended after her debut recording of the Goldberg Variations climbed to the top of Billboard’s Classical chart, gave a performance of the Goldberg Variations at the Church of the Holy Trinity at Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, for the benefit of Astral Artists, the non-profit organization which did much to nurture her career.

I sat in the keyboard-side balcony with Tom, girding patience –- I had found the deliberate slowness of much of Dinnerstein’s recording to require an almost meditative state of concentration.

Maybe her tempi were faster in live performance, but one thing was for sure –- she commanded my ear from first note to last. Yes, she did take every repeat of every variation, but the effect, while remaining largely introspective, was compelling. I might have wished for a bit more tonal variation in the brilliant, fast variations, and I would have welcomed a greater invention of ornamentation, but overall, I found her performance mesmerizing and masterful. She demonstrated the power of a quiet personality who persuades through the strength of her unsparing inquiry and understanding.

It is said that Anna Magdalena, Bach’s cherished second wife, a soprano, loved the Aria of the Goldberg Variations so much that she hand-copied it into her music notebook. This Notebook, started by Johann Sebastian so that Anna Magadelena could become proficient at keyboard instruments, remains, some 300 years later, a necessary part of every young pianist’s repertoire. This legend surrounding Anna Magdalena and her Aria is, like Ms. Dinnerstein’s performance, one I’m happy to believe.

Denyce Graves, John Conahan, and Laura Ward

If the devil knocked on my door and said, “I’ll turn you into a great singer, Deb, but you have to give me your little finger – on both hands,” I’d say “yes!” Nothing moves me more than great singing, maybe because my father has a beautiful tenor voice. Growing up, I often accompanied him at church. Despite the fact that his sense of rhythm is quite, shall we say, creative, accompanying singers remains one of my favorite things to do.

Two weeks ago, I had the unbelievable good fortune to fall under the spell of one of the truly great voices of this century, when I was invited by a friend to hear a private dress rehearsal given by the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. Ms. Graves was preparing for a lieder recital at the Strathmore Festival near Washington, D.C., and her Philadelphia-based pianist, Laura Ward, arranged a run-through at her church in center city Philadelphia.

It was a cool and drizzly day for June, and the massive doors of the church were locked. Laura herself answered the buzzer and let me into the building through a side entrance. I was uncharacteristically early, and took a front pew seat in the silent church. With all the exits shut, the air inside the sanctuary felt close and dusty. The light filtering through the stained glass windows was dim.

All dusty dimness vanished, however, when Denyce Graves stepped to the front of the church to sing. Though wearing a knee-length dress, she looked every bit the glamorous diva, and I was touched that even for this tiny, impromptu audience, she cared enough to create an imposing stage presence.

That care translated beautifully into her stunning recital, which began with songs by Purcell and Handel and continued with a remarkable interpretation of the Robert Schumann masterpiece, Frauenliebe und Leben. The burnished yet pure timbre of Ms. Graves’ voice soaring above Schumann’s singular, lush harmonies, transported me, and I couldn’t help but weep.

As mezzo-soprano Suzanne duPlantis, who was in the audience, told me later, “That was probably the best interpretation of that song cycle I’ve ever heard.”

On the second half of the program, Ms. Graves again created magic in her set of four standards from the American songbook, which were arranged in anything but a standard way by young Philadelphia-based singer, composer, and arranger John Conahan. Ms. Graves delivered Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and Grand and Boyd’s “Guess Who I Saw Today,” with piercing intelligence, perfect narrative timing, and devastating emotion. Again my tears flowed.

Of course, her great liberty to express was made possible by Laura Ward’s superb intuitive accompaniment. The women generously gave two encores, “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix,” from Samson et Delila by St. Saens, and a spiritual that Ms. Graves grew up hearing her mother sing, “Give Me Jesus.”

Gracious in person, Ms. Graves told me afterward she had been a little nervous because all these pieces were “new material.”

“Don’t change a thing,” I said.

Denyce Graves, through the hard work of honing an incredible gift of voice, embodies the power of woman. I’d wish for any group of oppressed women, anywhere in the world, to be able to hear her sing. They would understand immediately that within them, too, lies power.

Wading Girl by Marybeth Hughes

Would you rather be Chopin or Artur Rubinstein? Stravinsky or Maria Callas? Sofia Coppola or Scarlett Johansson?

Would you rather create art or re-create (perform and interpret) it?

My friend, the acclaimed short story writer and essayist Robin Black, believes that interpreting works of art is just as challenging and important as creating new work. (She’s well-acquainted with interpretive art — her brother is a harpsichordist.) As Robin eloquently puts it, “I think interpretive art is the equal of generative.” It’s a question I pondered the other day as I palled around with two friends who are visual artists and whose lives are consumed by creating something out of nothing but paint, canvas, and found objects.

The day was planned because my friend Ginny Fry, a thirty-year-old octogenarian, drove up from Annapolis at the invitation of my husband and me to hear a recital given by phenomenal young guitarist Lukasz Kuropazsewski at the Settlement School. Ginny has recently published her first book, BASKING SHARKS, a volume of original poetry. Facing each poem is a reproduction of one of her vivid abstract expressionist paintings –- the book is a brilliant generative double-whammy, if you will.

The day after the concert we met up with our friend Marybeth Hughes, who had just hung a show of her newest work at the Rosemont School of the Holy Child. The thirty or so paintings, small to moderately-large-sized oils, show Marybeth’s mastery of color, traditional landscape and human subjects, and plein-air painting. One oil, Divine Marta, indicates her movement toward more abstract and allegorical work.

Vortex by Marybeth Hughes

“Where did you get these great metal panels?” I asked her.
“Oh, in a pile of old stuff that I found in the basement when we moved into our house,” she said.
Something out of nothing.

Finally, we headed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is hosting an exhibition of the master Generator of the twentieth-century, Picasso. This large-scale show demonstrates how Picasso moved into and out of cubism, how he influenced and was influenced by his colleagues Georges Braque and Juan Gris, Brancusi, and many others. Viewing the juxtaposed pieces, one can immediately see that these artists were all trying to solve the problem of how to express point-of-view in a new way. It’s clear they had a lot of fun solving the puzzle while they were at it.

So is generative art greater than interpretive art? Perhaps the ideal answer can be found in those rare artists like Mozart or Rachmaninoff, who were touched by the creative spirit in the utmost way. These beings, more than human, wrote as divinely as they played.

Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso

Irish Pianist John O'Conor

Let me first say that Mr. O’Conor defied my visual expectations. The recording that I associate most with him, of John Field’s Nocturnes, demonstrates the utmost in delicacy and grace. Thus I expected a rather wispy person to float from the wings up to the piano. But no. Mr. O’Conor is a substantially built man with a jolly smile who looks like he could captain a rugby team or break up a brawl in South Philly.

The sound that he produces at the keyboard can be, not surprisingly, gargantuan. But what made this performance unique was the way it breathed with life. His interpretations of Haydn, of, yes, John Field, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 and the monumental late C minor Schubert Sonata were intensely personal, while clearly delineating the harmonic surprises and the melodic flourishes of each piece. Occasionally his rubati at the ends of phrases, especially in the Haydn and Beethoven, were a bit too prolonged for cohesion, and sometimes I wished for a more subtle gradation of his fortissimos, but these were minor points in an otherwise exhilarating performance.

A few guys in the audience wore full Irish regalia that evening: kilts, knee socks, and fur sporrans at their waists. Several women could not hold back their enthusiasm, and bobbed back and forth in time to the music. Mr. O’Conor rewarded the audience with two encores, both Nocturnes: the famous Chopin E-Flat, and a rarely-heard jewel of a piece, the Scriabin Nocturne in D-Flat for left hand. The Steinway onstage was lush and warm throughout the program, but especially in this last piece.

They say Koreans are the Irish of Asia. If that means I’m a wee bit like John O’Conor, I’ll raise a glass to that.

A sporran

A visual feast, but where's the meat?

Last year a friend gave me tickets to Opera Philadelphia’s performances of Fidelio and Gianni Schicchi. I loved both productions. In Fidelio, Beethoven’s sublime music was well-served by Christine Goerke’s tremendous soprano voice, and the story was given a fresh sensibility by Jun Kuneko’s whimsical video set design. In Gianni Schicchi, the cast’s superb comic timing had me laughing when I was not all choked up from the sheer gorgeousness of Puccini’s score.

Convinced, I decided to splurge and, for $100 a ticket, became a Philly Opera subscriber this season.

On Friday my husband and I headed to the Academy of Music for the second show of our series, the East Coast premiere of Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul. I’ll admit that the title of the opera sounded a bit static, but I was eager to see and hear the new work, and glad to go on a date with my husband. When we took our seats, we were enchanted by the beautiful stage set on view, an Asian mirror-like gold-leaf screen that formed the backdrop to a platform that gave the impression of a reflecting pool.

As the lights dimmed, an aged hag shuffled downstage with the rest of the cast and began swirling incense. She swirled and swirled, hunched over her bowl, and soon the hall began to smell like a church on a High Holy Day. Why this hag was significant was never made clear, as she delivers no important curse or prediction. However, she provides an interesting visual prop, as do the three young women with slender arms suspended on platforms above the stage, playing rhythms into clear basins of water. Also entertaining are the young women who glide down the center aisles, sliding lighted batons along electronic instruments that look like electric bug zappers.

Tea: A Mirror of Soul is a visually stunning production with fabulous costumes, and an imaginative, sumptuous set. My favorite set piece was the enormous cube with the Taoist symbol on front, that opens up to reveal a staircase and an outsize design of peonies.

The music does not offend or inspire – although there are no memorable vocal lines, Tan Dun makes effective use of rhythm and orchestral color, often evoking Asian-inspired harmonies and instrumentation. But to me the production would benefit from greater emotional plausibility and narrative drive, and a more poetic libretto. It feels less like a drama in music, and more an effective work of visual art, fit more for a museum than for a performing arts hall.

As several women in the ladies’ lounge complained, “But I want to know what’s the significance of the tea?“

I agreed. We wanted to be moved by whatever was supposed to be so mysterious and spiritual about tea, or at least enlightened about the subject. Though the visual and auditory effects of the opera are certainly spectacular, we needed to believe the story more to become convinced.

But who am I to complain about Tan Dun’s vision? As my mother would say, “He’s up there, Debbie-ya, and you’re not.”

Sigh. Maybe I’ll go drink a cup of tea.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

One of the joys of blogging is that I get to write about remarkable artists and cultural events that fly below the radar of mainstream media. However, on occasion, exceptions will be made, and there’s no better case for it than a concert played last night by Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented Hamelin at one of my favorite halls in Philadelphia, the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center, to a packed and enthusiastic crowd. Even though a review will no doubt appear in the Inquirer, I feel it’s my duty as a pianist to opine about one of the best concerts of the season, or of any season, for that matter.

Hamelin began with Alban Berg’s one-movement B minor Sonata, in an interpretation that was clean and transparent — more delicate angles than curves, more Capriccio than Salome. This was simply the warm-up act to an astonishing offering of the Liszt B minor Sonata. Hamelin’s speed, power and virtuosity gave this piece what it deserves and so rarely, by necessity, can get –- a breathtaking sense of direction that made one forget that bar lines had ever been invented. I have never heard the difficult parts of this piece played so convincingly and so fast. As a result, the scope of this long one-movement Sonata, one of the most important in the piano repertoire, was clear, fresh, and compelling.

The second half of the program began with four of the virtuosic Preludes from Debussy’s second volume. In these pieces, as well as those that ended the program, a selection of Hamelin’s own etudes, the pianist exploited the full range, color, and technical capacity of the Steinway at his command. His encore, the Haydn C Major Fantasy, was humorous and brilliant –- you’ve never heard Haydn like this, on the verge of full orchestral bombast yet winking with Charlie Chaplin-like pratfalls.

I take my hat off to Marc Andre-Hamelin. You’ve inspired me to give up blogging so I can practice more — almost!

The beautifully decorated Church of the Holy Trinity. Piano awaits.

Not many pianists would attempt to perform Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations at all, let alone right after Christmas, and especially not a few days after getting married! But Matthew Bengtson, just wed, tackled Beethoven’s monumental late composition fearlessly. I was one of the fortunate to hear his sensitive and virtuosic rendition on December 30, along with my daughter Alysa, home from Germany, and her friend Miriam, a recent graduate of Reed College. Both girls are accomplished musicians and gave the concert four thumbs’ up. I asked Miriam for a few thought about Matt’s program, which began with Schumann. This is what she had to say:

The triumphant pianist and happy bridegroom

“Matthew Bengtson’s interpretation of Schumann’s Nachtstücke, op. 23, four short pieces inspired by the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, transmitted the sense of the uncanny that links the Nachtstücke with Hoffmann’s writing. Speaking to the audience before he played, Bengtson explained that the final movement, Einfach (Simply,) is Schumann’s way of commenting on and summing up the rest of the piece. As in Hoffmann’s famous story “The Sandman,” the narrative voices of Einfach are convoluted and often overlap, and create a doubling that mimics the conflation of characters and their autonomy (or lack thereof).

“The Nachtstücke cast an interesting shadow over Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, as another example of the uncanny, or Das Unheimliche (literally the un-home-ly.) It shows how a composer is able to take something familiar and make it ‘strange.’ Beethoven wrote these variations in response to a competition held by Austrian music publisher Anton Diabelli, who composed a simple theme for thirty-two prominent composers of the day to embellish. The quality of ‘making-strange’ is inherent in any set of variations on a theme, but especially apparent in these variations. Beethoven moves Diabelli’s simple waltz through thirty-three variations, taking the music so far from its ‘Diabelli home’ that it becomes completely Beethoven. ”

Alysa said she was particularly moved by the later slow variations, whose spiritual nature were in keeping with the concert’s setting, the intimate Church of the Holy Trinity Church on Rittenhouse Square. Roses, trailing evergreen, cascading ribbons and white candles (rather than the typical poinsettias) and a full-sized nativity scene at the altar captured the Christmas spirit. The concert was part of the Brown Bag lunchtime series offered every Wednesday at 12:30. As the audience quietly ate their sandwiches and munched on cookies, their tummies were nourished as well as their souls. It was an uplifting way to finish the holiday season and begin a new year.

Alysa and Miriam discuss the program at home

A Sugarplum Fairy awaits young fans in the lobby

My older daughter has been living and working in Germany since August, and I’ve missed her so much that having her home for two weeks was what I wanted most for Christmas. When I asked her over Skype what she wanted for Christmas, she said without hesitation, “Can we see the Nutcracker?”

“Of course,” I said, although I have to admit that normally I would rather attend productions of works I’ve never seen before. However, The Nutcracker is close to her heart, since she danced several parts in the Columbus Youth Ballet production when she was a child. She’s been a Gingersnap, a Candycane, a Soldier, and a Party Guest, and she never tires of it. So I happily got tickets for the Pennsylvania Ballet’s evening performance, the day after Christmas.

Well, folks, it was spectacular. The dancers were in fine form, technically and artistically; the orchestra, under the direction of Beatrice Jona Affron, played expressively and at an almost fearless pace. The Academy of Music, in all its gilt, crystal, and red velvet splendor, is the perfect setting for a ballet that has substance and depth to its layers of confection.

The over-the-top retractable crystal chandelier in the Academy of Music

The Pennsylvania Ballet performs the famous version created in the ’50′s by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. Alastair Macauley explains Balanchine’s innovations, both artistic and psychological, in an article for the New York Times that’s fascinating to read. What strikes me watching this production are the wonderful touches of humor in the First Act (the energizer bunny drummer, the tipsy Grandma, the naughty, hyper little boys, the ammunition of Swiss cheese) and the magical transition of Marie’s Christmas Eve party into her dream world of the Land of Sweets. The big corps de ballet numbers, the Snowflake Dance and the Waltz of the Flowers, are, in their moving symmetry, deeply emotional, and remind me of the perfect form of J.S. Bach.

The score Tschaikowsky composed in 1892 still sounds fresh — tension builds in chromatic progressions as monumental as in his symphonies; color and melodic invention continually evolve. Who has ever heard created anything more hypnotic than the music for the Arabian Dance, for instance? I have no doubt that what makes this great ballet endure is Tschaikowsky’s music.

I’m sure it’s worth the expense to mount the fabulous sets (expanding Christmas trees and snowy landscapes,) and the elaborate costumery of tutus, satin, and lace. Most of all it’s well worth the added effort of involving a great number of talented children -– not just child dancers, but child singers as well. What a genius touch, actually, because the audience, even at night, was full of children. Booster seats were available for the tiniest of ballet watchers (and some of them were pretty tiny,) but I didn’t hear a single child cry, talk, or complain during the performance. The average age of those sitting in the seats was far lower than for the usual ballet, opera, or orchestra audience. I think that’s something to dance about.

Perhaps no one understands the Nutcracker better than a musician who’s performed it for 25 years, as has violinist Charles Parker. “If you have to play the same piece 25 to 30 times in a 3 week period, thank God it’s Nutcracker! ” he says. “Any other piece would truly drive me insane. And, any time that it starts to become boring, you hear a child in the audience laugh or say something like ‘Look at the mouse, Mommy!’ You feel privileged to be part of their new memory, and you play like it’s your first performance.”

I’ll applaud that.

More black, blond, and brunette heads than gray in this audience

Julia Alvarez (center right) with Haverford College students, and soprano Ida Faiella (far left), composer Heidi Jacob and Prof. Theresa Tensuan (far right)

On December 1, Bryn Mawr College hosted a cultural double bill called Julia Alvarez: Words and Music. Last week, I wrote about the first part of the evening, which showcased the four new songs Haverford music professor Heidi Jacob composed to poems of Julia Alvarez. Today I’ll talk about the second half of the show, in which Ms. Alvarez took the stage to read her poems and to speak about her life and unusual literary influences.

What radiates beyond both words and music is Ms. Alvarez’s irrepressible personality, a trait she deliberately tried to tone down when she moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States at the age of ten. At the time, she wanted more than anything to be an All-American girl (not realizing until later that she was already American.) Holding back her warm Latin side was a challenge, as the cultural differences puzzled her. For instance, when one of her teachers said, “Julia, I’m very disappointed in you,” she had a hard time believing the woman because the criticism was delivered in such a controlled, calm tone of voice.

My friend Ariadne, who was in the audience and who teaches advanced-level Spanish, told me later that she found herself thinking, “Yes! Sometimes I want to say to a student – you turned in such a bad paper, you can do so much better – I want to kill you! In Mexico City I would say that, but of course I can’t here.”

I suspect that Julia Alvarez’s irrepressible nature might have less to do with her cultural background, and more to do with who she is. As a child, she was “overly affectionate,” only allowed to fully express her love for her family members when she ironed their clothes. Ironing, she explained, was a privilege and a step up in the pecking order of domestic chores because “You could be trusted with something you could do damage to.” It’s beautifully shown in the poem she read called Ironing Their Clothes, where she is “forced to express my excess love on cloth.”

Domestic chores in general were the unlikely catalyst for her first collection of poems. She described how, as a young fellow at the MacDowell Colony, with the lofty canon of English literature in her ear (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and so on,) listening to the other fellows busily clacking away on their typewriters while she waited vainly for inspiration, she was suddenly freed by the sound of the vacuum cleaner in the hallway. She realized that her first training was in the household arts. She thought, “Why dismiss this?”

And so she produced her first collection of poems, Homecoming, as well as the poems in the following collection El Otro Lado about her muse, Gladys, a warm-hearted maid from her childhood who was always singing (and who, in the poems, abruptly stops singing whenever Ms. Alvarez’s formidable mother appears on the scene – perhaps a metaphor also for parental repression of Alvarez’s natural, exuberant impulses.)

Another of Ms. Alvarez’s muses was the old photographer who had the unenviable job of trying to capture all 24 of her father’s siblings and their offspring in the annual family photo. “You don’t know they are muses until you look back,” she said. Nor is it obvious at first what will become a departure point for writing -– an image as random as “men coming out of holes” (like manholes) has proved a recent whimsical influence for her lately.

The day following the concert and reading, Julia Alvarez spoke even more frankly about her work at an informal luncheon at the Women’s Center at Haverford College, when she spent time with students in Theresa Tensuan’s Contemporary Women Writers class. When Homecoming was published, Ms. Alvarez said, she wanted suddenly to silence herself, afraid of her family’s reaction. However, not a single person questioned her honest portrayal of family life; her aunts and mother even proudly displayed the book on their coffee tables. Since it was poetry, nobody actually read it! But when her first novel came out, exploring some of these events and observations in prose, her family was outraged, her mother especially.

“Why do you have to write about unhappy things?” her mother demanded.

Implied was the larger question, “Why read?” Ms. Alvarez described how, growing up in the outgoing Dominican culture, people told her, “If you read too much, you will get sick. If you read too much, nobody will want to marry you -–” a pointed reference to a bookish maiden aunt, who had given Julia and her sisters a much-loved copy of Scheherezade.

Ms. Alvarez said that as a child, she was not much of a reader; she did not like reading the censored material taught in the Dominican Republic, and she fidgeted in class (she thinks that nowadays she most likely would have been diagnosed with ADHD.) The stories she heard were not found on the printed page, but were told around the kitchen table.

Later, when she moved to the U.S., she discovered books. The kids on the playground were not particularly friendly to her, but in books, she was “welcome at the table” again. In the world of stories, she “could become anybody.” So although she came to reading late, she knew early on that this fellowship of writing, of story-telling, of words and literature, was where she wanted to be.

Julia Alvarez shared other insights into her creative life. Among the folders in her file cabinet, she keeps one called “Curiosities,” and another called “Letters Not Sent.” She writes, not to tell, but to find out about things. When asked why she did not write the screenplay for the movie version of her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, she quoted Chaucer: “Time is so short and the craft so long.”

A wise thing for all artists to remember.

Heidi Jacob, conductor and composer

Several years ago, my colleague Heidi Jacob took a sabbatical from conducting and teaching at Haverford College in order to study for her Ph.D. in composition. I was impressed; having earned two terminal degrees myself, I would not want to become a doctoral student again. Heidi was excited by the prospect, though; I could tell she couldn’t wait to plunge in.

She’s been back teaching for a couple of years, but I had yet to hear any of her compositions. So I was delighted to see a poster announcing that four of her songs based on poems of Julia Alvarez would be premiered on the Bryn Mawr College Creative Writing series, with Julia Alvarez herself in attendance.

“Tell me about this!” I said, when we saw each other in the hallway at the beginning of the semester.

With an enthusiasm she usually expresses for a particularly talented student we share, Heidi talked, eyes shining, not about herself, but about the great Dominican- American author’s work. “Gladys,” Heidi said. “Remember Gladys? The first song is about her.” We agreed we both loved How the Garcia Girls Got their Accents. And In the Time of the Butterflies. And Yo!

Accelerando to December 1, the evening of the premiere, which Bryn Mawr appropriately named “Words and Music.” When I arrived, a crowd had already gathered at Thomas Great Hall, on the majestically gothic Bryn Mawr campus.

Stepping into Thomas Hall is like stepping into a minor wing of the Houses of Parliament -– it is an enormous, rectangular space with a soaring ceiling, stone walls, and high mullioned windows. Acoustically it can be tricky, but the sound produced by L’Ensemble (the professional chamber group made up of Ida Faiella, soprano; Barry Finclair, violin, and Charles Abramovic, piano) was clear, focused, and full.

“Gladys sang as she worked

in her high, clear voice”

began Faiella, in her commanding, expressive soprano. Radiant, harplike colors produced by pianist Abramovic, and playful, sweet trills from violinist Finclair, gave Gladys Singing the compelling sound of tropical bird song.

However, nothing remains easy and amiable in this piece. At the end of Gladys Singing, the mother of the singer/narrator roars up the driveway in her powerful car, and in her high heels click-clacks up to the front door to enter the suddenly silent house. The birds stop singing, the music becomes static as a “tomb,” and the listener understands why Gladys, warm-hearted Gladys of the author’s childhood, became a muse and a symbol of life to her.

In the next song, Folding My Clothes, Heidi Jacob has changed the structure of Alvarez’s poem so that the bitter-sounding phrase composed to the final words

“until I put them on, breathing life back

into those abstract shapes of who I was

which she found so much easier to love”

is redeemed, musically, by the re-appearance of the rounded, berceuse-like first line, “Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again…”

“Are we all ill with acute loneliness” is the shortest song, yet terrifying in its bleak and deliberate use of pizzicato descending minor seconds (doubled by the piano) and the use of Sprechstimme to harshly speak the question, “and we are all well?”

The most dramatic song in the cycle is the final one, Beginning Again. In this complex piece, the listener is brought face-to-face with the immigrant girl’s sense of anxiety and loss, depicted by restless shifting meter and spiky dissonance. Gradually, the listener travels with the immigrant singer/narrator through reconciliation and hope, depicted by the use of an open-sounding descending modulation by thirds, an oasis of A major, a celestial-sounding B-flat major texture, and at the end, a sprightly and regular rhythmic pattern which brings us –- and are we not all immigrants, in our own way? — to the acceptance, and anticipation, of home.

With this last statement, Heidi Jacob achieves a satisfying symmetry for the cycle: the first and last songs are the longest, and, as the mood of the first song begins with comfort and ends with a sense of desolation, here, in the last song, the composer begins with unease and ends with hope.

Julia Alvarez address the audience in her musical voice

There was a pause following the enthusiastic applause as Julia Alvarez mounted the stage and took the microphone. With her high cheekbones and petite frame, she bears a resemblance to Bryn Mawr’s most famous alumna, Katherine Hepburn, though the glamour this night was endearingly softened by a green pencil stuck into her upswept bun. Clearly touched by the musical tribute, she looked straight into the audience and said, “Who needs a funeral?”

She then began to read her poems with the poise, timing, and phrasing of a fine musician.

It was ear-opening to hear the author read the same poem that Heidi had set to music with such different results, most notably in Folding my Clothes. The inflections were in different places, the cadence hypnotic. Occasionally I have found myself at poetry readings, brain straining, wishing I were at a concert instead, but not in this case. The pure words, as read in Alvarez’s musical voice, held the audience captive with phrasing as seductively compelling as a Chopin melody.

Her introductions to the poems she read and the pearls of wisdom she bestowed on young writers will be discussed in my next post.

After the reading, I asked Julia Alvarez what it was like to hear her words re-interpreted through music.

“Like I said, who needs a funeral?” she said, glowing. “Heidi was able to bring out the emotion inside the lines.”

I thought about that. Emotion is outlined, heightened and dramatized by music in a way that enhances the words. Music makes us listen in a different way, forces us to experience the words with greater intensity –- that is, when the words are good, and the music’s good. They certainly were that night.

Julia and Heidi, words and music