Night After Night

Key associations.

Bruce Levingston at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, April 16, 2008

Kicking Puccini.

The Opera Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, April 15, 2008

Voice of reason.

I try to stay away from discussing my politics here*, but occasionally I'll break that personal guideline in order to point out something worthwhile. Did you know that former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a blog? Today's post digs into the cynical media and political spins of the current "Bittergate" imbroglio. Reading backward, earlier posts offer plainspoken analysis of the slippery slope on which our economy is currently poised. (Per Daily Kos)

* It's not that I'm afraid to talk about politics or defend my positions; it just doesn't seem germane to what this blog was established for -- and I'm also wary of attracting the lunatic fringe to disrupt the proceedings. That said, it becomes increasingly difficult not to speak up in light of a $3 trillion war, an economy in peril and the shocking malfeasance and ineptitude of elected officials on both sides of the aisle. I fear that the sense of hope I felt after voting in the primary has been eroding ever since. Emptying the contents of my bank accounts into envelopes headed for the federal and state coffers probably didn't help that mood.

Bite my lip and keep fiddling? Or speak my mind and risk alienating readers who came for the tunes? Your thoughts on the matter are invited.

Postscript: Jodru at ANAblog has another take on "Bittergate" and Reich.

Match game.

Hilary Hahn and Josh Ritter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The New York Times, April 14, 2008

Feast of Music has the scoop on Hahn and Ritter's after-party at Drom. (Thanks to ACB for the tip.)

Satyagraha.

Bloggers will no doubt be posting their thoughts on the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha any minute now, and the official reviews will surely follow close behind -- there was a lot of press in the house tonight, including critics from Boston, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

In a new development for Time Out New York, I'll actually be filing a short formal review on Monday, which will go up on the magazine's website immediately and in the print edition a week later. I can't say that it's the first time TONY has run a review of a currently running opera, but it's the first time it's happened since I became the classical-music editor almost seven years ago. (Giving credit where credit is due, I should mention that Marc Geelhoed did this for the entirety of his tenure at Time Out Chicago -- in New York, it didn't seem to be of much interest to higher-ups until the new, improved website was launched, allowing for greater immediacy.)

Since there is a formal review on the way, I can't go into any detail here for the moment. But there's one thing I'm absolutely burning to say: This is, without question, the most achingly beautiful thing to hit the Met stage since Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly (with which it has this in common, of course). More than an effective production, it was an exalting experience. It also earned as huge an ovation as I've ever heard at the Met, with the biggest burst of approval saved for Glass himself.

I also learned something interesting about Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed tonight: Not only has he now seen all three productions to date of Satyagraha, but he's surely among the very small number of people who have seen all of the Glass operas. Not such a surprise given who we're talking about, but impressive all the same. (Yes, I'm jealous.)

Finally, I take great personal pride in sharing with you a Satyagraha-related item: "A Peacemaker's Puppets," an audio feature conceived and delivered by the famous Dr. LP (a.k.a. my better half), which was broadcast on WNYC-FM Thursday afternoon. This smartly produced story provides some excellent insight into how the new production was imagined and executed. And I had absolutely nothing at all to do with it! Brava.

Get your Fille.

(Posted this afternoon on the TONY Blog)

You know that the Metropolitan Opera has a major hit on its hands when the entire run of a new show sells out before opening night. And that's the case with director Laurent Pelly's new staging of La Fille de Régiment, a dizzy, tuneful bel canto comedy by Donizetti. The production, which features two of the most charismatic performers on the Met roster, soprano Natalie Dessay and tenor Juan Diego Flórez, did boffo box office during its previous runs in London and Vienna, creating huge anticipation and demand here.

But before you go selling plasma (or other precious bodily fluids) in the vain hope of scoring a ticket on the plaza, consider attending the final dress rehearsal on Friday, April 18, at 11am. It's part of a free open house the Met will host from 10am to 4pm, with an onstage Q&A session following the complete morning run-through. Tickets for the event are available this Sunday, April 13, at noon; you can make reservations by calling 212-362-6000 or by visiting the Met's website. You'll then need to pick up your tickets (limited to two per customer) at the Met box office by Wednesday, April 16, at 5pm.

Gold standard.

Marc-André Hamelin with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
The New York Times, April 10, 2008

Shine on.

David Helfgott at the Blue Note
The New York Times, April 9, 2008

Perfect Match.

(Posted this afternoon to the TONY Blog)

Congratulations are in order for David Lang, who has just won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his vocal piece, The Little Match Girl Passion. Lang is best known as a member of the visionary collective Bang on a Can.

Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Little Match Girl Passion was first performed at Zankel Hall on October 27, 2007, by sopranos Mirian Andersén and Bente Vist, tenor Christopher Watson and bass-baritone Jakob Bloch Jespersen. And it just so happens that the piece is one of those commissions that Carnegie Hall recently made available for streaming on its website -- making the frustration of going for years without being able to hear a Pulitzer winner a thing of the past.

So here's to David Lang... and for that matter, to Carnegie Hall. Go here to read more about Lang's piece, and to listen to it, as well.

Warm congratulations also go to to Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, whose marvelous and much-lauded book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist in the General Nonfiction category. Here is a fine profile of Ross by Time Out New York music writer Hank Shteamer, which ran when the book appeared last October.

Rock soldier.

The voice at the other end of the phone had a familiar Bronx honk.

"Hey Steve, this is Ace Frehley calling."

I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

"You've got to know how completely surreal that sounds to me."

He didn't. All the former Kiss guitarist knew was that he was supposed to call me for a telephone interview for Time Out New York to promote his current concert tour, which arrived at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square on Friday night.

There was no way he could have known that his work in a garish, hard-working upstart rock group from New York City had been the catalyst for pretty much the entire trajectory of my life for more than three decades.

I mean that in a very real way. Before I was introduced to Kiss, I was not an especially musical kid. Music was not something that my family was involved in. My earliest musical interest was Donny Osmond and the Osmond Brothers. After that came Barry Manilow.

Tommy Douglas, a.k.a. the bad kid down the street who I was not supposed to hang out with, introduced me to a lot of music during my later elementary-school years: Aerosmith (Toys in the Attic), Thin Lizzy (Jailbreak), Van Halen (the first one, which sounded like it was from another planet at the time), Rush (2112). I enjoyed it all.

But Kiss was different. Tommy played Destroyer and Rock and Roll Over for me, and I was hooked. I begged my mom for a copy of the newly issued Alive II for Christmas that year. Within two weeks, thanks to holiday cash from relatives, I had a complete collection.

Kiss was loud and lurid, a comic-book fantasy come to life. It was a band my mother hated: playing Kiss records loud, and papering my walls and half the ceiling with pin-ups, was arguably my earliest act of rebellion.

In a word, Kiss was liberation.

But me being the strangely literal-minded kid that I was, Kiss was also my gateway to serious music. I idolized Kiss drummer Peter Criss; therefore, it stood to reason that if I ever wanted to be as great a musician as he was, I needed to start taking drum lessons right away. Mom tried to persuade me to take up the oboe or French horn instead, but I wasn't having it. With my grandmother's help, I prevailed. I got my snare drum and glockenspiel, and commenced with what would ultimately be 11 years of formal percussion training and playing in school bands, orchestras, jazz ensembles and so on.

Being in school bands and orchestras exposed me to the classical repertoire; dirt-cheap Seraphim and Odyssey cassettes did the rest. But there was more: Peter Criss claimed to have taken lessons with swing-era drum titan Gene Krupa, so I required Gene Krupa records. Gene Krupa records being nearly impossible to find in League City at the time, I settled temporarily for Louis Bellson, whose LP Thunderbird retains an undying spot in my heart for precisely that reason, apart from being a great record in its own right.

Ironically, I never saw Kiss during its original glory days; I was too young and had no beneficent older relative to take me. I first saw the band on its tenth-anniversary tour, supporting the Creatures of the Night album. Eric Carr had replaced Criss some years before, and on this tour, Vinnie Vincent replaced Frehley. It was great, but it just wasn't the same. I caught the same band, sans makeup, on the Lick It Up tour, and some years later caught the Hot in the Shade tour with Bruce Kulick in the lead guitar slot.

The Kiss lineup with Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Kulick and Carr (and later, after Carr's premature death, Eric Singer) was unquestionably a more polished and proficient band than the original lineup had been. Still, for all intents and purposes I didn't actually see Kiss until 1996, when the reunion tour with Frehley and Criss came to Madison Square Garden. It sounds silly to liken something like that to a religious experience, but I will definitely state for the record that finally seeing my childhood heroes all together in action gave me a thrill like few I can describe.

Obviously Frehley didn't know any of that when he phoned me for our interview, and I didn't burden him with any of it. We talked about his newfound sobriety and its effects on his life and work; about his upcoming album due in late May, none of which he's playing on the current tour for fear of piracy and YouTube leaks; and about his feelings regarding the currently ongoing Kiss 35th-anniversary tour, in which Stanley and Simmons are touring with hired hands playing the roles of Frehley's Space Ace and Criss's Catman. (We also talked about the Dunkin' Donuts television commercial in which Frehley appeared last year, directed by actor Zach Braff, but that bit of the conversation didn't make the final cut.)

On Friday night, I took Dr. LP, more or less a Kiss neophyte, and our friend Josh, a fellow Frehley fan, to Nokia for Frehley's concert. His bandmates -- rhythm guitarist Derrek Hawkins, bassist Anthony Esposito and drummer Scot Coogan -- likely hadn't been born when Kiss got started. But they filled their roles with serious style and charisma. Coogan in particular was the type of big-rock drummer I love most: like the aforementioned Eric Singer, he's a hard-hitting player, technically accomplished but unflashy, and someone who positively glows with a palpable love of simply playing in a rock band. He was also a capable singer, taking parts in Kiss songs that would originally have been sung by Stanley.

The set list was a Frehley fan's dream: a strong sampling of classic Kiss songs, including practically every song Frehley wrote for the band as well as a pair of relative obscurities ("Strange Ways," "Love Her All I Can"), plus a handful of his stronger post-Kiss tracks. Frehley pulled out some of his old stage tricks: the Les Paul with the running lights inside, and the one with the smoke bomb and flash pot in the top pickup. His solos were, unsurprisingly, note-for-note recreations of the ones he played on the original records. (Think of them as cadenzas.) He played each one better than I'd ever heard it played before, live, on record or on video.

But the solo he played in "Strange Ways" was something more, a driven, titanic improvisation that fairly exploded with the joy Frehley must have felt in facing a huge, fanatical home-town crowd -- and knowing that he'd actually remember it the next day.

Set list: Rip It Out / Hard Times / Parasite / Snowblind - I Want You (tag) / Rock Soldiers / Breakout / Into the Void / Strange Ways / Medley: Torpedo Girl, Speeding Back to My Baby, Five Card Stud, Trouble Walkin' / Stranger in a Strange Land / New York Groove / 2000 Man / Shock Me / Rocket Ride // Encore: Deuce / Love Her All I Can / Love Gun / Cold Gin - Black Diamond (outro)

Playlist:

Los Horóscopos de Durango - Ayer, Hoy y Siempre (Univision)

Giya Kancheli - Night Prayers; Symphony No. 5 - State Symphony Orchestra of Russia/Mark Gorenstein (Taco)

Arnold Schoenberg - Violin Concerto; Jean Sibelius - Violin Concerto - Hilary Hahn, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Deutsche Grammophon)

John Adams - Harmonielehre - St. Louis Symphony Orchestra/David Robertson (Arch Media download)

Anders Hillborg - ...lontana in sonno...; Laci Boldemann - 4 Epitaphs; Hans Gefors - Lydias sånger - Anne Sofie von Otter, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Kent Nagano (Deutsche Grammophon download)

Philip Glass - Waiting for the Barbarians - Elvira Soukop, Richard Salter, Eugene Perry, Michael Tews, Opernchor des Theaters Erfurt, Philharmonisches Orchester Erfurt/Dennis Russell Davies (Orange Mountain Music, forthcoming)

Jacob Garchik Trio - Romance (Yestereve)

Napalm Death - Scum (Earache)

Kiss - Alive! (Mercury)

Burning Spear - Creation Rebel (Heartbeat)

Guapo - Elixirs (Neurot)