A Distasteful Choice of Song

Wednesday night, the opening symphony performance in CAMA's season was the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leon Botstein. The program included Sternberg's Twelve Tribes of Israel, Bernstein's Serenade, and Copland's Symphony No. 3. The soloist for the Bernstein piece was Robert McDuffie. Whatever merit the performance of these pieces might have had was overshadowed by the choice of an additional opening piece.

The orchestra began the concert by standing and playing the American national anthem. What person in his or her right mind could possibly think that now is a good time for the public performance of a nationalist, military march? Apparently, I'm in the minority because the audience went all gooey. By the way, they also played it badly, sort of like the prom queen singing it at the start of a football game. They followed this piece with a performance of the Israeli national anthem, which at least, was played with some emotion.

I left at the interval.

Anderszewski at CAMA: A Little Bit of Tureck and a Whole Lotta Hair

Keyboard phenom, Piotr Anderszewski, opened the season for the Community Music Arts Association in Santa Barbara, Thursday evening, October 16. The program was a thrill for me as it included two Bach partitas (1 and 2), Mozart's sonata in C minor (no. 14), and Beethoven's sonata in A-flat (no. 31). The program thus gave us a history lesson, and one really saw how the sonata form developed over time.

Anderszewski was one of the most unusual pianists that I have ever heard. When he begins a piece, a lopes out on stage like he is trying to catch a bus and then starts to play before his behind makes it onto the bench. His playing has the same interesting dynamic range. He played the Bach slow movements with a delicacy reminiscent of Rosalyn Tureck. The bright, soft notes of these movements gave them tenderness without a maudlin sweetness. The same was true of the slow movements in the Mozart and Beethoven. At the same time, Anderszewski played the faster, forte movements with vigor but always coloring the bass line with dark tones and overlaying it with a bright melody line that seemed to lurch forward rather than sweetly float over the top as one might have expected. I enjoyed the concert, but I also felt it had a strange schizophrenic quality.

Anderszewski's exits from the stage were as unique as his entrances. He rocketed off the bench and bolted at the end of a piece and came back as quickly for a couple of short, staccato bows. He is now wearing his hair long and combed over his forehead and down his eyes. He was overdressed for the perennially hot Lobero Theater, but he never perspired. At times, I felt that I was eavesdropping and that he might be more content to play without an audience, or perhaps, he didn't notice us at all.

Melodrama Is Women's Work

Yesterday, I saw Madame Butterfly at the LA Opera with Liping Zhang singing the title role ably despite being indisposed. She was a little difficult to hear when she sang upstage, but when she let it rip in the big numbers, her voice soared. Since she obviously had power and clarity of tone, I hesitate to attribute the softness of her singing simply to being farther away and ill. Instead, it may have been due to the little girl voice with which many sing the 15-year old, Cio-Cio San.

Cio-Cio San's story left me questioning my usual assumptions about tragedy. We generally think that tragedies are those narratives in which a superior human (not a super human) is subjected to divine or human law. In this process, the free life is limited, and the hero must leave behind some delusion or false consciousness (see Northrop Frye). Traditionalists do not regard Cio-Cio San's story as a tragedy. Critics and musicians alike will dismissively refer to it as a "melodrama." But why should this be the case? Cio-Cio San is subjected to human law, the custom that made it possible for male imperialists to exploit the women of non-Western lands. She does, in the end, throw off her false faith in Pinkerton's love. One might argue that she does not throw off her false view of herself as the faithful woman in love. One could say that because she does not, there is no significant revelation of the kind required by a tragic resolution.

If this is not the case, however, we must look further. Does Puccini treat her as a tragic figure? No, he does not. The music while often beautiful is sweet and lyrical. Puccini does not allow us to see the ugly emotions of false consciousness. So, at least, he probably didn't think he was writing a tragedy. The story, however, is or could have been just as tragic as Otello. Instead, it is put by Puccini and modern audiences in the same category as Dallas, One Life to Live, and celebrity gossip magazine copy. I think it is because we are loathe to universalize a woman's life and see it as a revelatory tragedy that may speak to every man. How many tragedies do we know that bring a female character low or use a typical woman's experience as the material of transcendence?