Gunning for You

The Long Walk, Opera Saratoga

AS BRIAN CASTNER and three of his fellow Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialists are driving back to base from yet another mission while deployed in Iraq, the tension of the moment is jolted by a pigeon. It lands on their Humvee. Over the orchestra’s rumbles and squeals, the quartet sings in beautiful close harmony about the nature of their relationship. This is, says one, the place where he belongs.

Daniel Belcher and
Heather Johnson

Back home in Buffalo, Castner still perceives danger, and the first act of The Long Walk ends with the image of him sitting at the top of the stairs of his house, cradling his AK-47, guarding his children from—what?

Adapted from a memoir by Castner, the opera—receiving its world premiere with these Opera Saratoga performances—is a shattering, very moving portrait of mental imbalance, right up there with Wozzeck in its use of music and lyrics and the tools of theater to explore the contrasting, contradictory facets of a war-damaged soldier.

Like Wozzeck, it’s episodic and makes intelligent use of musical form. But where you might expect again an atonal approach, The Long Walk is surprisingly lyrical, with solo moments suggestive of late Strauss.

Baritone Daniel Belcher, in the role of a lifetime, is Castner, a pleasant-looking average Joe who is running as we meet him, running, he explains, through the is to escape the was. Not that there’s any escape.

Al Together

From the Vault Dept.: Al Gallodoro was nearly 90 when I saw the concert reviewed below. His amazing career included stints in the orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Arturo Toscanini. He recorded with the Dutch ensemble The Beau Hunks. He appeared as a street performer in “The Godfather, Part II.” And at Caffè Lena, he still wielded his sax like the master he was.

                                                                                       

YOU EXPECT, WHEN HEARING A JAZZ SAXOPHONIST TODAY, to hear some trace of the Big Influences. At the very least, there will be Coltrane and some Lester Young. There are exceptions: Scott Hamilton bypasses Trane in a sound that channels Ben Webster. And Al Gallodoro goes back even farther, with a sound that’s squarely in the Jimmy Dorsey-Frank Trumbauer camp.

Al Gallodoro

Like Trumbauer, Gallodoro fashions solos that extend the harmonic range of the tune in question without taking you far from its melodic center. Performing last Saturday at Caffè Lena, he and pianist JoAnn Chmielowski ran through a batch of standards and surprises that thoroughly delighted the far-from-capacity crowd. An added bonus was the two numbers in which they were joined by Addie Boyle, of Addie & Olin fame.

Gallodoro opened with a romping “All of Me” that set the pattern for many of the tunes to follow: a fairly straightforward but swinging statement on sax for 32 bars, then a hot chorus in which Gallodoro let loose a torrent of notes that played with the outer reaches of the harmony of the changes. Unlike many post-bop players, he’s not reharmonizing the tunes but rather finding the fun and tension in exploring 11ths and 13ths and such. Next a solo chorus by Chmielowski with a fluid, often single-line left hand and chord blocks in the right, followed by another piano solo in which she syncopated the left-hand rhythm into something approaching a habanera. And finally Gallodoro wrapped it up with another hot chorus that went stratospheric, typically and improbably ending on a high concert E-flat.

Woods So Wild

The Magic Flute, Glimmerglass Opera, July 10

The Magic Flute is a mess of an opera that defies narrative convention, keeps you guessing at who’s the good guy, and lets the wrong person rescue the ingenue, among many other weirdnesses. None of which has curbed the insane popularity of the piece. It has great tunes, but you expect that from Mozart.

Sean Panikkar as Tamino
Photo by Karli Cadel

Re-setting its time and place is so irresistible to opera directors that it’s become a potentially embarrassing fetish, but the production that opened the Glimmerglass Festival’s current season takes us to a forest with Native American overtones, on a glorious set by Troy Hourie, whose impressive artwork also can be found on the Festival grounds.

Director Madeline Sayet didn’t stage the overture until its very end, for which I’m grateful, and even then it was a necessary device to show Tamino’s transition from the fury of the modern business world into the forest where the magic would occur. Sean Panikkar sang splendidly in that role, maintaining a wide-eyed innocence even as he takes on the challenge of rescuing a maiden whose portrait causes him instantly to fall in love.

He meets Papageno, originally a birdcatcher, now a hunter, incongruously costumed in camo and blaze orange. Ben Edquist, who was Jigger in last season’s Carousel, has a dynamic, acrobatic presence and a voice to match. This is the role that Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, wrote for himself, giving himself two great solos and an endearing duet, among other numbers. Edquist was more than up to the task – literally more, slipping into the tendency to telegraph the jokes in the texts.

Hamburger Heaven and Hell

From the Vault Dept.: An unpublished piece that was replaced, that particular issue of Metroland, by one of my restaurant reviews. Yet the need for burgers will never abate, the quest for good ones never end . . .

                                                                                

BIG MACS HIT IN 1968; within four years, my high school friends and I were so addicted that we’d risk detention by skipping an afternoon class, piling into somebody’s car and gorging on the tasty, greasy burgers. And it wasn’t even the meat itself that tasted good – the negligible portion of cheap chopped beef was tricked up with cheese and pickle slices, Russian dressing and a dab of pale mustard. Lots of bread, too, in that double-decker package, and the things were cheap. Cheap enough for a high school-kid budget.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

As teen-aged rebels, we were aligning ourselves with the Tartars of old, who wrenched their dinner meat from tough Asian cattle, shredded it and cooked it over their shields. By the 14th century, this practice had been introduced into Germany, where it was eaten raw or cooked by the poor folk. It picked up its moniker in Hamburg, but it was known, with a touch of irony, as a Hamburg steak.

From there it made 19th-century trips to England and America. In England it became the pet of wacky food doc J.H. Salisbury (yup, the Salisbury steak guy), who insisted that all food be shredded and who wanted you to eat beef three times a day. In America, it arrived with German immigrants, and its name shortened from Hamburger steak to hamburger. Its companion bread bun also appeared around this time, and the two were firmly connected by the time of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where the sandwich was called, simply, “hamburg.”

This Year's Crop of Kisses

10 July 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Piecing out Imperfections

IT’S ALMOST INSULTING to our received images of warfare, this Battle of Agincourt, with a handful of black-clad actors suffering slo-mo agonies while the stage is littered with drapes of red. Since scenes of actual carnage are now denied us by television news, we thrill to Hollywood’s relentless re-creations. This chamber-music version of battle highlighted only its emotional content–the uncomfortable part–and the subsequent actions of the politicians of the time.

David Joseph, Ryan Winkles, and Caroline Calkins.
Photo by John Dolan.

Because it’s the 15th century, the politicians are royalty, and Shakespeare’s enduring saga of Henry V shows us a youthful king facing both internal insurrection and war with France. He’s fresh from the playwright’s pair of Henry IVs, which portray him as a rakehell palling around with the dissolute Falstaff. As played by Ryan Winkles, in his 10th season with this company, the young king tempers his sense of duty with a sense of humanity. There’s enough ambiguity in the script to challenge the actor, as a comparison of filmed performances will show, but Winkles makes a good choice–particularly in this bare-bones version—to show us Henry’s emotional accessibility.

He still makes the most of the big speeches, which take on a more compelling flavor when they’re not uttered as Olivier-ish pieces of bombast, and he’s very at home in the wooing of French princess Catherine, played with steely coquettishness (and a convincing accent) by Caroline Calkins.

Water Main

From the Back of the Fridge Dept.: Where did I dine 15 years ago? is not a question typically asked in my household, but the exigencies of exhuming old stories provoke such queries. And here’s the answer: The Main Street Grill, on Williamstown’s Water Street, an eatery that traveled from Vermont and brought with it its name. It has long since closed – it’s now a restaurant called Hops and Vines – and chef Drew Nicastro moved around the Berkshires, eventually settling in at the Richmond Grille in North Adams.

                                                                                                        

WITH THE VILLAGE CENTER dominated by the gorgeous old buildings that house the college and the theater, Williamstown looks like a hand-colored postcard. Even with a thunderstorm brewing, it makes an oily, overcast sky look attractive. So the first challenge for a fine-dining restaurant is to look good, which the Main Street Café accomplishes with the simplicity of a restored old brick building and the well-tended garden that graces the front.

Downtown Williamstown

We’re there well before the storm breaks, with bits of sun still struggling through. Inside the restaurant, the late afternoon light falls nicely on the windowside tables, throwing long mullioned shadows across the floor. We’re led from the bar, which also sports a few cozy tables, down a bright hall to a large dining room with French doors at one end, leading to a few outdoor tables. We take a table near an inside wall, next to the bright pastels of a Saul Steinberg drawing. Skylights in the high ceiling brighten the room, with a grid of pin spots poised to take over once darkness arrives.

Dharma Bumming

From the Fields Dept.: Much has changed for the Van Amburgh family since I wrote this piece. They moved to a larger farm in Schoharie County soon after, and became the subject of Rudd Simmons’s excellent documentary The First Season, chronicling the family’s sobering trip through a year as novice dairy farmers. They’ve come a long way since then, as a look at their website will tell you. But here’s where they were in 2006.

                                                                                            

EXCEPT FOR THE OCCASIONAL BELLOW of an amorous boar, the farm seems oddly quiet. But we’ve driven through so much farmland, so much countryside to get here, the car windows down on this hot, muggy day, that we’ve grown accustomed to the rural clamor. In fact, blackbirds and robins are constantly shrilling, a flock of hens cackles in the distance, roosters crow and every now and then a 800-pound sow named Grumpy lets loose with a basso sigh.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

She’s a Gloucestershire Old Spot, a heritage breed so old it predates such record-keeping, and one that’s known for its particularly delicious ham and bacon. And that’s why she’s here, dining on organic grains and vegetables, sampling the best-quality hay, living in a style of comfort as different as can be imagined from the way your last ham-supplying pig was raised.

And that’s the purpose of this pig. She may weigh in as the most obvious occupant of the pastures of this farm called dharma lea, but she’s just one element in a harmony of husbandry that includes a way of human life as well.

French philosopher Rene Guenon defines “dharma” as “the essential nature of a being, comprising the sum of its particular qualities or characteristics, and determining, by virtue of the tendencies or dispositions it implies, the manner in which this being will conduct itself, either in a general way or in relation to each particular circumstance.” “Lea” is an Old English term for a meadow or garden.

Go to Hell

La favola d’Orfeo
Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Great Barrington, Mass., June 21

THE GREATEST TRIBUTE to the power of Claudio Monteverdi’s music (and the damn fine story it set) occurred during the second half of Orfeo, as the title character made his way out of the underworld, his late wife behind him, she silently imploring him not to turn and look, he doubting the authenticity of the interdiction. The inevitable moment arrived. He turned. And a good portion of the audience gasped in dismay.

Mireille Asselin

Monteverdi’s Orfeo premiered in 1607 in what’s believed to be a fairly small room; compared to that, the Mahaiwe Theater would seem cavernous, but the 690-seat house proved to be a perfect size for this piece. The orchestra was seated onstage, with a brass ensemble upstage on risers for the opening fanfare.

These were true-to-the-period instruments, which typically don’t produce as large a sound as do modern ones, and there were fewer than 20 players, but the blend and the volume were perfect in the hall.

Music directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs each wielded a long-necked chitarrone; with harpist Maxine Eilander, they created a shimmering texture of strummed strings behind the vocals, enhanced when Avi Stein turned from organ to harpsichord.

The setting was simple: a blue cyc lightened into a summer sky for the first half of the piece. The ensemble of nine singers and a dancer entered as strolling players, drawing masks and costume pieces from a cart before launching into the action.

I Know Where I'm Going

12 June 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Good Grief

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Directed and designed by John Sowle, Bridge Street Theatre, Catskill, June 20

BEFORE GOD, THERE WAS GILGAMESH. His story is one of the oldest known narratives, with many of its elements echoed in later sacred and secular epics. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of the friendship between the title character, a demi-god king who has been oppressing his subjects, and the half-wild man created to reign in the monarch’s excesses.

Photo by John Sowle

As dramatized by John Sowle, at its heart is the experience of grief. As performed by Steven Patterson, it’s the grief we all have shared and will continue to share, his own manifestation of it so searing that to witness it is to feel again every sense of loss you thought you’d gotten past.

This Epic of Gilgamesh is a solo show for Patterson, and he inhabits the story with a commitment that makes every fantastic element seem real and of the moment.

Based on a verse translation by Herbert Mason, the poetry of the text is beautifully rendered by Patterson, in such a way as to make the moments he describes all the more memorable—which is where poetry and skilled acting are (but aren’t often enough) at their most magical.

We discover the actor in a sajdah position, facing a small flame. He is dressed in a white cotton kurta and pants. He is barefoot. “It’s an old story, but one that can still be told,” he tells us, so charmingly that we’re drawn into his confidence right away.

Double Fantasy Life

From the Bookshelf Dept.: And while we’re on the topic of books, here’s a revisit of my 2003 review of Bob Rosen’s Nowhere Man, a fascinating look at what became the last weeks of John Lennon’s life. It began life as an unpublished novel titled Rockjesus, had an unpublished incarnation in which diary entries were quoted – and settled into this entirely satisfactory form.

                                                                                      

NOT LONG AGO, the Beatles put out a CD of their number-one hits and once again owned the Billboard list. Thanks to recently rediscovered tapes, more CDs are on the way. It’s safe to assume that they, too, will crown the charts.

Interest in the foursome never wanes, collectively and individually, and among the individuals, John Lennon proved to be the most complex, enigmatic and, ultimately, tragic.

You have to decide for yourself whether Robert Rosen’s book accurately reproduces material from John Lennon’s diaries. Famous for their post-mortem peregrinations, the diaries were swiped by one of Lennon’s assistants and stashed in Rosen’s apartment. According to Rosen, he worked 16 hours a day, every day for over a month, “fueled by coffee and amphetamines,” to transcribe those diary entries. “I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel what seemed to be like Lennon’s energy flowing through me.”

The listings were extensive – “every detail, every dream, every conversation, every morsel of food he put in his mouth ... and it was all an enormous contradiction. Here was a man who aspired to be like Jesus and Gandhi as much as he craved money and carnal pleasures.”

Staying in Tune

From the Bookshelf Dept.: Another journey back a quarter-century, for my review of a book that itself saluted the nautical traditions of an earlier day.

                                                                                            

HARVEY OXENHORN TRAVELLED TO GREENLAND aboard a refurbished tall ship. Throughout his journey he was stymied by the challenge to “go aloft,” the frightening process of “climbing the shrouds and then slithering out along the yardarms to tend sails.”

It’s a nautical tightrope act, and it parallels the literary tightrope act of the book Oxenhorn wrote recounting his travels. A poet who was previously familiar with sailing only through the literature he taught, he has given us a well-thought-out, nicely detailed narrative that gives an unselfconscious account of his own growth throughout the tense trip.

On the face of it, it was an expedition to study humpback whales and other animal life in the arctic; for Oxenhorn, it was an escape into adventure. Although there’s a feeling that he was fleeing more than he reveals to us, it’s enough to understand that he had to get away. Then, showing what Leslie Fiedler identifies in literature as the “home as hell” syndrome, he sets out, Huck-like, on a raft on the river.

Only in this case it’s a vintage barkentine touring the Atlantic Ocean and the Labrador Sea.

Lord, What a Miracle!

The Cistern | 13 June 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

What’s Brewing?

WE’RE NEVER FAR from a cup of coffee, be it an overpriced Starbucks concoction or a cup of diner joe. We do unspeakable things to our coffee, lacing it with flavorings and sweeteners and even smothering it in whipped cream. We’re known internationally for our lousy preferences: A barista in Florence, Italy, told me that “coffee” in his country has long referred to espresso, but even the standard brew is strong enough that tourists have earned their own beverage sobriquet: “We call it ‘American’ coffee. That means it’s as weak as water.”

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

But the worst thing we’ve done, in the unholy name of convenience, is stock our shelves and landfills with K-cups, the pods that have taken over a substantial portion of the household coffee market. I’m sure you’ve long been grinding fresh beans for your morning cup, but you can do Dad a Father’s Day favor and wean him away from that single-serve monstrosity.

Or, even worse, a percolator. I know this from experience. I grew up in a percolator household. My father, up at the crack of every morning’s dawn, had the urn a-bubbling even before his eyes were fully opened, but it produced a burnt-tasting brew that put me off the stuff for years. With the early-’70s introduction of drip-brew machines, coffee became palatable, and I’m happy to say that my dad is among those who made the switch.

The legacy of that percolator carries on in the moka pot, originated 80 years ago by Bialetti and now available in a variety of sizes and styles, from many manufacturers. The so-called six-cup model has become my standby. It purports to make espresso, but without the pressure that true espresso requires, you get something better regarded as strong coffee.

Something Fishy

From the Food Vault Dept.: I had to start somewhere, I guess, but the ignorance the review below reveals is staggering. And as noble as was my intent, the review didn’t help, and Sugi closed shortly after it ran – but reopened in Albany as Arita, on N. Allen St., in a space now occupied these past fifteen years by Pepper Jack’s. The chef of Arita went on to run Miki in Saratoga Springs for a few years; that, too, has closed.

                                                                                        

“IS THIS YOUR FIRST TIME to order shabu shabu?” the waitress asked.

Yes, I told her.

“Oh. Many people who are not used to shabu shabu don't like beef in seafood broth.”

You can't intimidate me that way. Not even in a Japanese restaurant. Octopus, for example, looks gross on a plate. But sit me down beside someone who says yuck and you can bet I'll be smacking my lips over octopus.

The place: Sugi, a busy little restaurant the Schenectady side of the intersection of Route 7 and State Street. The time: a recent Saturday, early evening.

Dining rooms don’t get much less assuming. This is your basic paneling-with-drop-ceiling joint, but dressed with charming Japanese screens and fans to mask the plainness.

And there’s a sushi bar at the far end of the room to capture the eye, with a handful of chairs for the dedicated eaters of the raw fish delicacies.

Protean Pianism

CLASSICAL MUSIC LOVES SPECIALISTS, or, to put it a better way, is most comfortable with performers who are easy to pigeonhole. Pianist Marc-André Hamelin has made a career of resisting such definition, and underscores this with two new Hyperion recordings.

He’s only in one of the two Shostakovich pieces recorded by the Takács Quartet, but they, too, are showing their versatility, introducing this composer to a catalogue of CDs that includes works by Bartók, Brahms, Schubert and (of course) Beethoven.

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 dates from 1944 and reveals more of the personality that would inform the 13 quartets to come. It’s melodic, yes, but it’s a piece of contrasts and melancholy. The no-nonsense approach typical of this ensemble sits very well with Shostakovich, and you can hear its success in the work’s finale, which takes a series of surprising turns that, thanks to this interpretation, accumulates a logic.

Hamelin joins them for the Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57, a five-movement work that dates from 1940. It’s a little breezier, with an opening prelude and fugue that presages the astonishing cycle of 24 that would follow. The pianist displays his interpretive skill at the start, setting a compelling mood with his first few notes; by the time he enters as one of the fugal voices, his presence has turned ominous. It’s an uncomfortably passionate sound.

Easy Come, Easy Go

For no other reason than the melacholy joy of the arrangement and Wiley's smokey voice. Recorded 17 March 1934 with Johnny Green and His Orchestra, featuring Green on piano, Manny Klein on trumpet, and Benny Goodman on clarinet.

Package Store

12 June 2015 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

So Many Sopranos

From the Vault Dept.: Here’s my Schenectady Gazette review – from a quarter-century ago – of a double-bill of fascinating contemporary operas, the kind of programming that’s far more elusive today.

                                                                                                 

Tom Johnson

ALL WORKS OF ART come with built-in appreciation devices. In theatrical pieces, we recognize the invitations to chuckle at the obviously amusing or to weep at tragedy, but some of those devices are less obvious. Satire, for example, requires that we and the artist hold some specific attitudes in common.

Tom Johnson’s chamber opera “Sopranos Only” dispenses with the common devices of plot and tension and finds instead a dramatic continuity in its own self-consciousness. It received its American premiere Monday night at the Goodrich Theater on the campus of Oneonta State University, in a double bill with Carleton Clay’s “Howcum, Oklahoma?”

Six sopranos complement one another and compete in exploring a haunting vocalise, sung to the spare accompaniment of flute, violin, cello and harp. At first sung wordlessly in a sort of round robin by successive sopranos, the theme is taken through a variety of texts and languages, usually with some kind of wordplay involved, and combined into choral sequences (with the attendant phase-shifting that so many soprano overtones will provoke) before ebbing to a quiet finish.