Last evening’s world premiere of André Previn’s powerful setting of John Caird’s perfect libretto based on the haunting David Lean movie, Brief Encounter, was in turn based on a one-act play of Noel Coward, Still Life. Even with a lineage like that, a success is not guaranteed. In this instance, however, the success was entire.
There is no point in transferring a story from one medium to another unless something is thereby gained. It would be foolish to insist that an effective work of art like the Coward play or the Lean film needs to be supplemented via other means. But when — as in this case — values are magnified, new relationships of word and emotion are brought into relief, new emotional recollections are evoked, and new pleasures bestowed, the contributions of the new medium are not only commendable but to be celebrated. And I have been celebrating in the hours since I was overwhelmed by this opera.
I will give two instances of reverberant devices that only opera can add to a drama like this one. When Laura, the woman who is suffering the pangs of a love that doesn’t fit in with the rest of her life, is with other people who are prattling on with gossip or with crossword clues, her own agonized thoughts are sung in expressive duet with the quotidian banality of the other character’s utterances. This technique is utterly artificial and completely like the experience of real life at the same time. And only opera can re-present this.
Also, at the catastrophe of the final goodbye between Laura and her temporary lover Alec, we experience Alec’s expressive singing of his feelings for her and their permanence while, downstage in his accustomed easy chair, Laura’s quietly longsuffering husband Fred is singing with him the very same words. In both cases they are dramatically and psychologically true, but with completely distinct implications for the universe that all three inhabit. Again, only opera can portray all this at once. And rivetingly.
It was fitting that, the night before the premiere, a smaller, less formal event honored the 80th anniversary of the birth of André Previn. I sat immediately behind him and Anne-Sophie Mutter during this musical evening and was profoundly touched to see a physically feeble man of great mental and creative vitality react to the highly apposite musical performances that were devised to celebrate his life. Even though, from my teenage years, Previn’s work — particularly as a performer — has had a profound effect on my own life, I determined I would not be one of the people running to him afterwards to tell him how wonderful he is. For one thing, what does one say to increase the satisfaction a person must feel after he has received four Oscars (from eight nominations), a knighthood, and practically every honor the music world affords? But when we stood at the end, there he was: facing me directly. I stammered, “Maestro, I want to tell you that I heard you play Mozart piano sonatas thirty years ago in Pittsburgh, and I consider you the best Mozart pianist I have ever heard.” Whereupon he looked at me with an evident pleasure that could not have been feigned and told me that nothing I could have said would have made him happier. Every once in a while, one does the right thing.
______________________________
LATE UPDATE: After posting the above from the Houston airport, I found myself at Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog. In one of those gratifying instances of synchronicity, I find that he has today blogged about the experience, as a repressed, lonely, lovelorn teenager in England, of “memorizing Brief Encounter.” While I hope new generations of conflicted, teenaged romanticists experience Coward and Lean, I trust that Previn also will lead them to new manifestations of the cathartic emotions of this powerful story. Surely a CD (and, preferably, a DVD) is in the offing.
Crispy on the Outside
May 2, 2009
At a professional conference this week, I’ve tried a different, wired approach to the exchange of business cards. When people handed me their often handsome cards made from trees, with their permission I immediately used the handy Evernote program to enter their e-mail address into my iPhone. I then easily e-mailed them a cyber-card with all my information given in a way that is easy for them to employ in their own electronic media — which, after all, is how they will interact with me in the overwhelming majority of instances.
There is, however, a contrary possibility, Meatcards.
Confusion of Media
May 1, 2009
I had the incomparable privilege of being present this evening at the world premiere of a new opera by André Previn. That it knocked my socks off, musically and dramatically, was not in the least overshadowed by something that I nevertheless feel compelled to comment on.
After an amplified announcement from a disembodied General Director (the estimable Anthony Freud) welcomed us and implored us to turn off our digital noisemakers (this grating exercise being prevalent even in such venerable venues as the Liceu of Barcelona), we were treated to what a colleague assured me was a full two minutes of scrolled credits acknowledging sponsors of various kinds and degrees on the supertitle screen. It was exactly like the introduction to a television show, except for the fact that it occurred in silence.
While generous donors are always worthy of gratitude, this really, really seemed to go too far. The word vulgar doesn’t cover it. To say, “Oh, well, what do you expect in Houston?” would be equally facile and inadequate. This is, after all, the opera company that has given us a musical and theatrical flowering of the late efforts of one of the most remarkable and versatile musicians of our time on the occasion of his 80th birthday celebrations. So they cannot be blithely dismissed. But, oh …
Excelsior!
April 30, 2009
I wrote here last summer about the thrill of hearing a whole bunch of talented teenage pianists who mastered a terrific new (and pretty terrifically difficult) work for piano. The same piece, John Musto‘s “Improvisation and Fugue,” is one of the four finalists in another kind of competition, detailed by Anne Midgette here.
A Modern-Day Easter Miracle
April 13, 2009
The unending mystery of musical talent.
For the most touching link you’ll click today, give this one a try.
Enough
April 2, 2009
There is a basic terminological malaproprism in wide use that really must stop. When it appeared in today’s Paper of Record, I decided to raise my voice in protest.
Since the Middle Ages, there has been a distinction between two kinds of organs: the portative and the positive. The portative was made to be carried with one hand and played with the other, for use in processions:
The positive was, and is, fixed and played (like a piano or harpsichord) in one place, with both hands:
The positive might be either an independent, small instrument (as above, seen used in an orchestra) or part of a larger instrument — often hung on the gallery rail, behind the player, as with the German Rückpositiv, the French positif de dos, Spanish positivo de dos, or the English chair (or choir) organ:
To call a positive organ, just because it can be carried around by three or four members of the Stagehands Union, a “portative organ” is to overthrow a basic distinction of many centuries’ standing. And when the most venerable music critic of the Times — with all its influence over common usage — allows himself to confuse portative with the merely portable, something must be said.
So it might as well be said here.
Coming Attraction: The King of Oratorios
March 30, 2009
More than a year ago, we saw that the Metropolitan Opera’s outreach into cinematic venues was having an effect on other presenters. But who thought the trend would extend so quickly to sacred choral music?
To see where the King’s Messiah is showing nearest you, go to this site.
And what does it say that Tennessee has four theaters showing the performance live and New York has none?
Seek and Ye Shall Find
March 24, 2009
From Kim Witman’s fine blog, I got the idea of sharing with you the kinds of search terms that lead people to this site. Many of them are an endless source of puzzlement to me. Today (a relatively slow day) these terms led people here:
goldberg parahia
shh
watching television
roger evans,piano
“chicago symphony orchestra” overrated
tchaikovsky symphony 1
pauline viardot
shh silence
maria malibran garcia
roger evans venture capitalist
RogerEvansOnline.com 