Are You Now or Have You Ever?

MY FATHER, who was born in 1928, extolled the 1950s as the last decade during which “the United States made sense.” As a conservative white male military vet, his opinion wasn’t surprising: he believed he’d earned part ownership of this country. Marx would have defined that ownership as exclusionary but, to my father, Marx represented communism and communism was evil.

Joseph Lattanzi and Laura Santamaria-Mendez 
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival

And communists were being systematically revealed and removed from their jobs, both in Hollywood and in Congress. Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel “Fellow Travelers” is set during that era, but takes the persecution further by placing at its center two men who become lovers while working in Washington, D.C. as the spectre of being outed – and thus career-ruined – draws closer and grows more ominous.

Although the story is better known as a TV mini-series (taking the story well beyond the bounds of the book), the opera packs a greater emotional punch, because that’s what good opera does. The shrewd melding of music and words bypasses that part of the brain we use to decode novels and goes straight to our emotional nerve centers. TV writing, no matter how critically lauded, is too formulaic to allow for emotional depths. Even if ads aren’t part of your streaming service, TV writing is structured to accommodate ads.

And That’s the Way It Is

SOME YEARS AGO, The Onion, a satirical periodical, sported a headline proclaiming
“Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play in Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.” The ensuing story suggested that a community-theater director would actually set “The Merchant of Venice” in 16th-century Venice.

Gregory Feldmann, Kevin Burdette, 
and Travon D. Walker | Photo Credit: 
Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

It was a welcome jab at those who shoehorn classic theater pieces into supposedly innovative environs, and nowhere is this more apparent, in my experience, than in the world of opera. The practice seems to me to be more a creative-team indulgence than some manner of bold choice, so I was dismayed to learn that the Glimmerglass Festival’s new production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” would be set on a 20th-century college campus rather than 18th-century Naples. 

I’m here to eat crow. Two helpings, in fact. In the past, I have roundly criticized in-house dramaturg Kelly Rourke’s translations. I’m a stickler for correct rhyming when the original is written rhyming verse, and line endings that don’t match as intended hurt my ears. But it turns out that Rourke’s new libretto for old “Così” (title has been truncated) is a festival of witty jokes and glorious rhymes.

One Fine Evening

WHY DO WE ENJOY “Madame Butterfly”? It has great tunes that invite amazing performances. It tells a story that, despite its exotic trappings, comes from the abandoned-wife mode of melodrama that was so popular at the time, and is at heart a story of social class. We believe all over again the promises of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Pinkerton as he insincerely woos his Japanese child-bride, yet we know it’ll be a three-handkerchief finish.

Eric Taylor(left) and Randy Ho (right)
Photo: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival has brought back a “Butterfly” most recently staged there in 2014, and my main question is, Where has it been? This is the essence of opera. If political-correctness concern have delayed it – well, read on. But first let’s have some quick shouts of praise for a top-notch cast and creative team, whom we’ll return to in a moment.

Before mass-media – before much of any media, really – we learned about exotic foreign cultures through spoken and written accounts, and sketches and paintings. And it certainly could seem exotic viewed from within one’s cultural cocoon. But it also invited cultural imperialism as a country’s self-perceived exceptionalism justified all manner of exploitation.

By 1904, when Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” debuted, Japan was only a half-century beyond its 250 years of isolationism, broken when US Commodore Matthew Perry forced the island nation to trade with the West. A fascination with “all things Japanese” followed, per Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Patience” and especially with “The Mikado” – although the latter borrowed and caricatured Japanese characteristics to drive home a satire about the British. 

You’re Doing Fine

THE OVERTURE BEGINS, in time-honored fashion, with a trill – the sound of two next-door notes alternating rapidly, giving a sense of uncertainty. It’s a great device that makes the sonority of the ensuing music all the more comforting. In other words, it’s a foretaste of the tension and release that informs all aspects of the drama to come. Even with a so-familiar musical like “Oklahoma!,” we’re encouraged by such devices to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in what’s ultimately an entertaining, inspiring show.

Jaelynn Ricks, Jude Emperado, Peter Murphy, 
Jordan Spena, and E. A. Hobbs. 
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

With the U.S. celebrating 250 years since its declaration of independence, during a year in which the country’s much-vaunted freedom is so much under attack, the Glimmerglass Festival season opener of “Oklahoma!” whisked us away from those concerns to a time – 1906 – when a number of the rural inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory were faced with their own issues of anger and reconciliation. It’s a brilliant production, marshalling all the talent and resources Glimmerglass uniquely has to offer: Great cast, great singing, great staging, great set. A great orchestra, led by a masterful conductor. And one of the finest directors in the business.

The musical premiered in 1943, during wartime, and ran for five years, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. It was based on a 1931 play by Oklahoman Lynn Riggs, which book-and-lyrics writer Oscar Hammerstein crafted in a sweeping but efficient two acts that, along with Richard Rodgers’s unforgettable music, gave the public a thoughtful story with plenty of fun, even while further changing the conventions of musical theater. 

Fresh Rhodora in the Woods

THE PROGRAM LOOKED more audience-challenging than I’d expect in a place like North Creek, NY, with string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Bela Bartók, and George Walker on the program. I’d felt like an outsider all day while relaxing in this charmingly rural community, because I wasn’t clad in the standard uniform of the male habitués: ball cap, tee shirt, shorts, and sneakers (or sandals or flip-flops). But at the Tannery Pond Community Center that evening, July 2, I felt more sartorially at home in my conservative shirt and slacks.

Rhodora Quartet

The handsome, energy-efficient building, erected in 2002, features an art gallery and large multi-use room that serves as an auditorium when so arranged. Tannery Pond Concerts, however, go back to 1991 when photographer Christian Steiner inaugurated the series, and the same high quality of artists and concerts he oversaw is clearly maintained.

 
The ear-filling sound of an SATB chorus fits nicely into the voicing of a string quartet. There are enough voices available to reinforce harmonic identity, and enough to further play with that identity, dipping into dissonance, affirming and thwarting rhythmic expectations.

Tell It to the Marines

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Some of my old stories pop up and inspire no recollection at all of writing it. I interviewed people, I put together quotes, I cranked out 1300 words. And I don’t remember a damn thing about it. Reading it today, I’m impressed – as I am with so many of my elderly tech pieces – at how obsolete everything in the story has become. The magazine itself, VARBusiness, I do remember mostly because I so enjoyed working with editor Beth Adelman. But we lost touch not long after this as other magazines lured me with more money. Until the whole computer-magazine empire collapsed. VARBusiness retooled its website in 2005, but has now been absorbed into CRN, “a media brand of The Channel Company.” Anyway, here’s how the Marines stored data 34 years ago.

                                                                          

YOU KNOW THE FRUSTRATION of accumulating page after page of information that needs to be filed? Documents that you may not need right now, but you know they’re going to come in handy. And they sit in rows of cabinets, hogging valuable office space.

Tell it to the Marines.

Millions of documents are stored in the Installation & Logistics operation at U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Material ranges from accounting data to troop lists, and keeping the paperwork up to date forced a heavy workload on the staff of 700. And even at its most efficient, the system only allowed one person access to a document at a time. 

Thanks to what’s billed as the world’s largest document image processing (DIP) system, filing cabinets and attendant frustration were replaced last June by a PC-based scanning system.

The Gieseking Story on Disc and Page

THE MOZART RECORDINGS grabbed my ear with their delicacy of touch and overall ethereal sound. This was late-night radio listening for me, a teenager in thrall to the many discoveries I was making in world of classical music. An eccentric radio host named Bill Watson purveyed the Mozart, calling particular attention to the fact that these sonatas and other keyboard works had been recorded by Walter Gieseking. 

I’d been amassing piano records by Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, but I sprang for the low-priced Seraphim-label reissue of Gieseking’s Mozart, and I have not been without it, in some form or another, in the half-century since. 

Gieseking was a unique phenomenon in the crowded world of piano virtuosos. From all accounts, his technique was impeccable, his six-feet-four body hunched close to the keyboard, the fingers seeming to move hardly at all. In his early years, his repertory was quite large, but it contracted as concert promoters grew increasingly wary of new works – a category Gieseking championed. He could sight-read anything with no mistakes, and he learned scores by studying them as an actor would study a script.