Composer | Author | Producer
Off to the ballet – my first for the KC Ballet! And I think it’s going to be a good one.
The show is George Balanchine’s Jewels. I’m no ballet genius but I do know and love the composers whose works make up the score. We will be hearing Fauré, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky. Since I could be happy just listening to a KC Symphony performance of those composers, disappointment with the event is almost an impossibility.
The capper to the KC Lyric Opera’s 2023-2024 season is the home-grown project, Journey to Valhalla. This KCLO exclusive is a compendium or Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung adapted by music director Michael Christie. In this arrangement each of the four individual Ring operas distilled down to one act apiece, each act running around 45 minutes.
I have always loved the idea of Karlheinz Stockhausen. That there was such a person. Someone who challenged assumptions about what 20th Century music could be, and masterminded intriguing concepts of performance and presentation.
The grind of listening to Stockhausen’s music or watching his performances is another thing altogether, and that thing is something I usually do not love.
In this season’s KC Lyric Opera catalog, there was an entry that looked unique and interesting – a youth opera called The Haberdasher Prince. I like the fact that the Lyric puts on special programs for young people and in a setting that is casual and unintimidating.
With a son that desperately needed to get away from his maddeningly persistent gaming, the family set out for a Saturday at the opera!
I just installed a TV in my upstairs man cave lair today. And what better way to break it in than to frantically search for my user/pass combo to gain entry into The Metropolitan Opera’s streaming app and watch some real he-man programming: Jazz composer Terence Blanchard’s boxing themed opus – his second opera, Champion.
After chronicling many operas on streaming and other media through the Covid era, I finally finally go to the opera for real to see the KC Lyric Opera‘s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Kauffman Center in downtown Kansas City. For my sacrifices in the service of high musical culture, I actually got awarded a press pass to attend and write about it. We’re getting posh here.
Today I clicked on the little heart that bought up my wish list on The Metropolitan Opera’s streaming app, and decided it was time to experience the John Adams opera Nixon in China.
When I became aware of this work many years ago, my first thought was: What kind of person would pay to sit through an opera about Richard Nixon?
As we settle into the holiday season, I thought it would be nice to immerse myself into the Kevin Puts / Mark Campbell opera Silent Night. The opera is based on Christian Carion’s screenplay for the 2005 French war film Joyeux Noël, and concerns an actual incident that occurred in the first year of World War I where soldiers of the opposing sides of the conflict declared a temporary truce in order to celebrate Christmas together.
Up in the wee hours this morning to screen a new-ish opera that sounded intriguing. From the mind of Croatian composer Ivo Josipović comes Lennon – a surrealist fantasy about 20th Century pop icon John Lennon that focuses on his post-assassination travel through purgatory.
These wacky 21st Century composers. They’re always up to some devilment or other!
After indulging in the curious activity writing about opera for the last year or so I finally get to review my own. Excited to announce the release of a project that’s been my labor of love for the last 2+ years – a modern opera called Candyce.
Checking out The Metropolitan Opera’s east-west crossover opera, The First Emperor. Composed by Tan Dun, the film composer for landmark Chinese films of historical fantasy such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, those special effects-laden martial arts epics featuring actors jumping 12 feet in the air to kick someone in the face before disappearing over rooftops with long ribbons flying artfully after.
As a big fan of Kevin Puts’ symphonic works I was looking forward to seeing this presentation from The Met of his 2022 opera, The Hours. The compositional mind of Puts can’t fail to please, so I’m happy to see me some streaming opera while not risking subjugation to some modern barbarian of a composer laying out rope after rope of barbed wire tone rows which will make a ruin of my patience and nervous system.
On the enthusiastic instruction of my viola teacher, I checked in with the Psappha Ensemble’s video of the UK premiere of Penelope by Sarah Kirkland Snider (music) and Ellen McLaughlin (lyrics). My viola guru wanted me to see this piece to give me a clue about others like myself who are composing in crossover pop/classical forms.
In February Devin Sarno and I collaborated on an ambient music project in his Sound Study series. The latest release, Sound Study #14 on Sarno’s Perceived Sound label, is #14 in the series. The results highlight the contrasts between our two styles – Devin on P-bass and my quartet of analog synthesizers.
Kenneth Anger died earlier this month at the fine old age of 96. Flipping the script on my usual soundtrack review concept of highlighting film composers, Anger was not a musician but a short film director who filmed his projects without live sound or dialogue, then completed them by adding in recorded music.
Retro time at The Met again! This time it’s sistas going wild during France’s reign of terror in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. I have to say that for me, dramatic properties built around religious figures are usually box office poison. But this production defied my expectations.
Looking in on The Metropolitan Opera’s Marnie today. With music by Nico Muhly and libretto by Nicholas Wright, the production is from 2018, following on the heels of the world premiere of the work in 2017 by the English National Opera. It is Muhly’s second opera, his first effort being 2005’s ‘Two Boys’.
It was San Francisco about 25 years ago. I was in town for the weekend and had a line on tickets for the San Francisco Opera’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that a friend of a friend was trying to find a buyer for at the 11th hour. It was to be the high point of a fine weekend escape from Los Angeles.
This week I paid Jeff Bezos $5.99 to stream Tár, a film about a pushy classical conductor/composer with a career track record in the realm of classical music such as has never been seen upon this earth.
Another one from the archives – more Puccini, this time from 2009. A light remembrance of a night at the State Opera House in Budapest.
Puccini’s Turandot, staged by the Hungarian State Opera at one of the world’s most beautiful venues for opera. Yes. With seats in the 11th row going for approximately $60 each, it was too good to pass up.
Today I spent the afternoon with The Metropolitan Opera’s production of Brett Dean’s Hamlet cued up on their streaming app. Three hours of big big big big opera based on the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays in a contemporary setting.
This cultural excursion did not go well. I’ll try to tell you why with as much brevity as I can muster because I want to spend as little time as possible reliving it. Here are the lowlights…
Going retro this afternoon with The Metropolitan Opera’s 1982 Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a two-hour plus affair taken from Walter Scott’s novel of madness and tragedy among the Scottish nobility. I have it on good authority that this is one of the finest renditions of this opera documented on video, mostly because of a legendary performance by Joan Sutherland who was said to have made this role her own.
The final selection of my Night People series, Nocturne #5 (G.E.), attempts to channel the improvisatory talents of my pal from the LA music scene, G. E. Stinson, an avant-jazz guitarist.
The thing that has intrigued me about G. E. is his restless musical spirit, wide open mind, and the challenging musical trails he has blazed.
Nocturne #4 (Michael) is inspired by Michael Whitmore, an avant-jazz guitarist, singer and songwriter.
I met Michael Whitmore in Los Angeles when he was working as sound engineer and occasional booker at the hottest club in town at that time, Spaceland. I liked the music acts he brought in, they were always a little off-beat from the more trendy acts that played there and his contributions helped to burnish the reputation of the place.
Nocturne #3 (Marnie), the third piece in my ‘Night People’ project, is inspired by Marnie Weber – a multimedia artist who specializes in synthesizer and electric bass.
Marnie is primarily a visual artist who has also on occasion taken her vision into the realm of music, with album releases that seem to emerge like magic mushrooms randomly popping from the soil of a surreal forest glade in one of her bucolic art exhibits.
Last minute tickets for Tosca at the Prague State Opera. I’m so there.
I loved my experience seeing Madama Butterfly in Budapest, so I couldn’t resist going to the box office when I heard there were a few good seats left. Didn’t get the catbird seat this time but got one on the main floor with good sight lines.
Of the five musicians I tribute with Night People, I think Ms. Fennelly’s uniqueness as a musician is the hardest to define in words. So I offer this fact into evidence: Among the thousands of musicians that I have known in my life – many of whom have gotten a fair bit of fame and money out of the game – Gere is the only one out of all of them that has supported herself exclusively on music. Quelle devotion!
Nocturne #1 (Devin), the piece that kicks off my ‘Night People’ project, pays tribute to Devin Sarno, an experimental electric bassist from Los Angeles.
Devin’s musical experience usually starts off very quietly before building into a crescendo of multi-layered, often feedback-driven music characterized by unknowable overtones and harmonics. It might be meditative. It might be inscrutable. It might be terrifying. One never knows in advance!
As the opening credits roll, a woman’s eye fills the screen. A stark tympani begins to pound away aimlessly accompanied by a vague distant electric drone. As the camera slowly zooms out the percussion gives way to a melody played on solo flute. The mood is hard to nail down – is it… reflective? Plaintive? Resigned? Just depressing?
So begins Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve with music rendered by Chico Hamilton Quintet.
After becoming fed up with scrounging around YouTube looking for modern operas, I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to The Metropolitan Opera’s TV app. Now I have lots of crazy excruciating performances to thrill to and pen saucy observations about. And the first on my list is one that I’ve been wanting to see for some time now, as it’s atop the lists of many critics’ “greatest 21st century operas” lists: Thomas Adés’ The Exterminating Angel.
Checking out the documentary of the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Company’ today, when my wife came into the room to ask what I was watching.
When the words “Broadway musical” hit her ears there was a beat or two of pause before her eyes glazed over.
“Oh. Musical.”
I spent Halloween this year watching Kuroneko, a supernatural tale of revenge and honor from 1964 directed by Kaneto Shindo. It was time well spent, as I discovered the musical genius of composer Hikaru Hiyashi who scored this memorable film.
In this nutty, overcrowded world, do you ever have an urge for real solitude? Somewhere so remote the world will leave you in peace?
I have found such a place. It’s right here in my studio. Listening to The Bell Tower, the 1957 one-act opera by Austrian composer Ernst Krenek. While experiencing it I was overcome with the realization that I was the only person on earth listening to it.
Think of it. THE… ONLY… PERSON… ON… EARTH!
If you know anything about the work of Dmitri Shostakovich there are some adjectives that will come to mind to describe his canon, and probably none of them are these:
Ebullient.
Sparkling.
Lighthearted.
Fun.
This is why I am fascinated by his foray into scoring for musical theater called Cheryomushki (“Cherry Town”).
There have been many “rock operas” produced for major label release, but there is none that come close to Quadrophenia in design, complexity, and brilliance of execution. And no other music group or crew of session players charged with producing a rock opera project had three of the most dynamic musicians of their generation – Keith Moon, John Entwistle, and Roger Daltrey – at their disposal to assist in fusing the vision of multi-instrumentalist author/composer Townshend to tracks so exploding with kinetic energy that the music threatens to come off the rails at any moment.
On the face of it, as opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is an overly geeked-out concept. But it really is a grand story. A tale of the massive power of computing and communications put in the hands of all humanity, of technological transformation and behavioral shift that has no precedent in human civilization.
So why was I digging in my heels at the thought of actually sitting through this goddamn thing?
I’ve been having an avid correspondence with an old friend. Discussing a wide array of topics. Recently the conversation has turned to my latest operatic music project. And she replied with: “So – what made you want to write an opera anyway?”
And my reply was that I’ve created an opera because I think opera is an amazing art form and I wanted to make one that isn’t all of the things so many find so repellent about the medium.
The music created by Toru Takemitsu for the 1964 Masahiro Shinoda film ‘Pale Flower’ has as much invention in the art of writing for film as any I’ve ever encountered. Like most good soundtracks, the cues are fairly sparse. But when they accompany the action it’s for a good reason and they have an impact, and the effect is unique in that brass and string arrangements may be supplemented by percussion like bin-sasara or hyoshigi, as Takemitsu was a giant in Japanese film for being one of the first to score using native Japanese instruments.
Today I was listening to the one-act opera Lord Byron’s Love Letter by Raffaello de Banfield and libretto by Tennessee Williams. Reader, have you heard of this creation? I didn’t think so.
I only have a copy myself because one fine afternoon ages ago I found myself scrounging among the used bins in Amoeba Hollywood looking for something strange with a brand new Visa card in my wallet. So I will tell you about this little operatic oddity.
There are four film composers who stand high above all others in musical brilliance, command of the craft of scoring for action, and originality. They are Krzysztof Komeda, Toru Takemitsu, Ennio Morricone, and Bernard Herrmann. And I think Komeda may be the favorite of my favorites. Like most of the […]
