Francesca Zambello: Theater for Social Change

From the Fairly Recent Past Dept.: This interview with Glimmerglass Festival Artistic Director Francesa Zambello was written before the start of the 2012 season, when she still was fairly new in town; since then, she has made the place and its productions better and better. This summer, Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” will be featured, along with Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Verdi’s “Thieving Magpie,” and Robert Ward’s “The Crucible.” More info here.
                                                                                             

SHE HAD WHAT COULD BE ARGUED was the best possible Metropolitan Opera directorial debut, with her 1992 production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” getting all but booed off the stage. Not only did Francesca Zambello’s stock as a director shoot way up, bringing a series of international engagements that has yet to slacken, but she also was invited back to the Met a decade later to helm what became a much-lauded production of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” – which she’s repeating at that opera house this fall.

Francesca Zambello | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Last summer, she took over artistic and general direction of Cooperstown’s Glimmerglass Opera and immediately dropped from its moniker the O-word. It’s now the Glimmerglass Festival, and part of it mission is to present a season that mixes all manner of musical theater, from outsized opera to vintage Broadway, while adhering to Zambello’s vision of the Festival’s mission.

“This season is about ideas for social change,” says Zambello. “I chose works that could inspire discussion about those issues, and we’ve scheduled events beyond the productions themselves that allow us further exploration of those themes.”

Although Meredith Willson’s perennial “The Music Man” might seem to resist such a theme, “It has a message about music and community and Main Street USA,” says Zambello. “Which we are. And Marcia Dodge, who is directing it, has updated it to World War Two to give more of a social message and a sense that it doesn’t feel locked in a particular time period.

Fats Waller: A Memoir

Guest Blogger Dept.: Joey Nash was a singer with Richard Himber’s Ritz-Carlton Orchestra during the mid 1930s, but he also was a skilled an effective writer, as this tribute to his buddy Fats Waller well proves. It appeared in the gatefold of a 1975 two-record set that began an attempt to issue all of Waller’s recordings, a project that eventually saw fruition in six multi-CD sets on the JSP label.

                                                                                            

THE MILK TRAIN LEAVING WASHINGTON enroute to New York was jammed. The locked windows and the conglomerate odors of muscatel wine, unwashed bodies and garlic infested sandwiches made breathing a horrific experience. During the mad rush for a seat I became separated from the rest of the guys in the band and wandered through car after car looking for a place to park my body. Finally I found an empty space, threw my sax case on the rack above me and flopped down.

I was exhausted. I had just finished a college gig with the Vincent Lopez band. It had been a rugged day—and night—what with the ride to Washington, a miserable dinner of an overcooked hamburger, heartburn coffee and seven hours of non-stop playing. I hated the music business and fervently wished I was a ditchdigger. My crumpled tuxedo, starched dress shirt and collar felt grafted to my sweaty skin.

The Simple Act of Bending

The simple act of bending isn’t simple any more.
When something falls, I leave it on my very cluttered floor.
My eyes refuse to focus and my lower back is sore:
The simple act of bending isn’t simple any more.

The simple act of reading always sends me in a rage.
The tiny little letters swirl and dance upon the page.
I’m sure I’m missing nothing in this semi-literate age,
Yet the simple act of reading always sends me in a rage.

The simple act of dining now they tell me is a sin.
Don’t eat red meat! Don’t eat those carbs! 
     Don’t eat that chicken skin!
It isn’t worth the time it takes to get my dentures in:
The simple act of dining now they tell me is a sin.

The simple act of darkness, as the sex act once was known,
Was always over-rated, over-long, and over-blown.
The seeds of love I’m sowing are now seeds already sown,
So if you want my loving, keep in mind: you’re on your own.

Capitalistic Boss

A delightful ditty from 1937, dedicated to all political candidates, office-holders, Super-PAC donors, and anyone portrayed in "The Big Short." And that's just for starters.

PDQ in NYC: AOK!

THE MUSIC OF PDQ BACH RETURNED, with orchestra, to a New York concert hall just after Christmas for two performances; I attended the first of them and, as expected, it was a joyful and nostalgic event.

Photo by Peter Schaaf

Although usually scrupulous in his writing, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross previewed the concerts with the assertion that Prof. Peter Schickele would be making his dilatory entrance “swinging from a rope.” This is a lesson in the power of tradition. Prof. Schickele has made many memorable entrances over the years. He has raced down an aisle and belly-flopped on the stage; he has been discovered asleep behind the onstage podium; he has even strolled in on the arm of a pneumatic blonde who giggled at each mention of the word “organ” until she was hurried offstage. The only rope-based entrance I’ve seen involved a knotted length dropped from a balcony, down which the Professor descended.

But legend quickly dominates significant events. We who grew up attending the Christmastime PDQ Bach concerts have described them enthusiastically enough over the years to romanticize that entrance into the full Errol Flynn: thus Mr. Ross’s understandable assertion.

Prof. Schickele, now 80, prefers not to trust his unsteady legs while performing, and so made his entrance in a wheelchair. It got a laugh. And he was on time, too, so that he could receive an award from the American Musicological Junta, a group that has supported the world of PDQ Bach over the years with neither web presence or phone number to sully the purity of its mission.

Another Classical Year

CLASSICAL MUSIC, OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT, retrenches and redefines itself with impressive alacrity, trying again to do what it did before it was pushed out of sight: absorb the sounds that please the ears of the many, even as it clings to the big orchestral sound that continues to price it out of existence.

Put simply, there are far bigger profits to be made from music that’s less demanding. The corporate hand grabbing money from your pocketbook is impatient, and has taught us to be impatient, too. But new recordings soldier on, impressively redefining the old and discovering younger works.

Thus, a couple of composers unfamiliar to me lead my list of the year’s favorites. New York City-born Mohammed Fairouz, a wildly successful 30-year-old (he’s been on Morning Joe!) weaves the textures of his Middle Eastern roots into his engaging music, and the album Follow, Poet (DGG) adds poetry both in an emotionally affecting setting and in spoken texts by Auden and Heaney, with a paean to poetry by John F. Kennedy to kick things off.

The poetry of José Santos Chocano inspired the work “América Salvaje” (“Wild Americas”), the compelling concluding work on a Harmonia Mundi collection of the music of Peruvian composer Jimmy López. It’s also different enough from the other three orchestral works on the CD to show how easily López can summon the texture he needs, even while embracing indigenous aspects of the music he grew up with — especially as demonstrated in “Perú Negro,” as excitingly danceable as a Ginastera ballet.

Finally: Food

From the Digipages of Metroland Dept.: A bunch of us put the paper to rest with an online-only final edition, to which I contributed this worthy parable for my last-ever Metroland food column.

                                                                                              

HE WORKED IN THE KITCHEN of a red-sauce restaurant during the last half of high school, and parlayed that experience into a front-of-house job when college began. College was a disaster, at least from the point of view of the college and his parents. The friendships he sought, the parties, the romance–these he found in the restaurant.

Gathering what money he could muster, he switched schools. Although Hyde Park’s Culinary Institute sprawled like a hotel complex, it demanded a far more grueling work and study schedule than the college he’d been about to fail. This time, however, he was motivated.

He was too shy to strut and brag like the handful of classmates clearly destined for restaurant-business fame. But he felt confident of achieving more success than the ones who aspired to no more than a line-cook job at a backwoods Marriott. He studied hard. He aced his labs. His knife skills grew instinctive. His externships taught him how to talk to people: bosses, suppliers, customers.

Even before he graduated, one of his instructors recommended him to a prestigious Manhattan chef, and his trajectory of success became spectacular. The drugs didn’t hurt him. Nor did the affairs. He could see the destructive evidence of such pursuits on the face of an older sous-chef who clearly would rise to nothing greater, but he himself wasn’t persuaded to jam on the brakes until one of the affairs got pregnant and insisted on keeping the child. It was her first, and she was leaving her husband anyway, and he guessed he loved her and he married her and discovered that he actually did.

Mediterranean Holiday

THE GUT-WRENCHING CRY of “Respondemos” – melismatic, nasal, featuring more flatted tones than any five Billie Holiday records – set a stark beginning against which Boston Camerata’s traditional entrance seemed all the more mysterious. Over a hurdy-gurdy drone, the voices behind us, which at another concert might have sounded the likes of “Watchman of Zion,” sang “Madre de Dios,” a Castillian carol from at least the 13th century.

Boston Camerata and Sharq Ensemble

This was the 26th Boston Camerata holiday appearance as part of the Union College concert series, and every year the ensemble is all the more desperately welcome. While it’s easy (and necessary) to note how awful is the season’s commercialism, there’s no more revolting aspect than bad holiday music, which thrives on the unfortunate fact that any song can be made memorable by relentlessly hammering it into your ears.

It’s doubtful that you’d encounter any part of any Boston Camerata Christmas program in the aural assault of the end of the year. It’s certain that no aspect of this year’s program, “A Mediterranean Christmas,” will be so sounded. Especially this year, when we’ve demonized so much of that region. “We need this program more than ever,” said artistic director Anne Azéma.

On a Ravioli Roll

CRUSHING YOUR CONCOCTION into pillows of pasta is the fun part, the payoff for the work you’ve been through to get there. For the many years that I’ve made ravioli by hand, I accepted that forming the pockets was tedious and the result – under my stewardship, at least – was irregular. But now that I’ve been introduced to the simplest of gadgets, one that checkerboards the pasta for you, I’m a total convert. Even better: It’s a handsome device that demands a place on an obvious shelf.

The Fonde Ravioli Rolling Pin from Repast Supply Co. is a 17-inch, all-hardwood marvel of simplicity that produces 2 1/4-inch pasta squares with enough of a border to prevent leaking. You can see product videos here, but let me assure you that you’re not going to achieve such perfection right out of the gate. Let me take you through my own ravioli-making process.

You need to nail the pasta recipe. I looked at a variety of them for the egg-based version, which only worked when I increased the amount of eggs in the mix. A food.com contributor gives a ratio of 3 cups flour to 2 eggs, which ends up as a stiff lump. The classic Silver Spoon cookbook offers a more realistic 1 3/4 cups flour to 2 eggs, but that’s still too not pliable enough for our purpose.

The Argerich File

MARTHA ARGERICH IS A PIANIST for whom no music seems too technically challenging, but one with strong repertory preferences. Like Horowitz, she has burrowed herself into a not-terribly-large group of pieces, and to which she brings a bravura interpretive style filled with risk-taking that results only in excitement.

Most of her official recordings have been for EMI or Deutsche Grammophon, and the latter, now under the aegis of Universal, which includes her recordings for Philips, have just been collected into a 48-CD box set as tempestuous and unpredictable as the pianist herself.

Her debut album was recorded in 1960 and comprised an impressive program of works by Chopin, Brahms, and Liszt, with Prokofiev’s “Toccata” as a harbinger of fiery works to come. You can feel the powers-that-be at work in choosing repertory here, and they’re probably behind the (nevertheless excellent) all-Chopin disc that followed seven years later.

But that same year also saw the release of a benchmark recording, on which she and a young Claudio Abbado collaborated, giving us Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 and Ravel’s Concerto in G. They are two works she would continue to champion but which sound as splendid here as they ever would.

Pianist and conductor seemed to incite one another. Abbado’s robust dynamics and keen orchestral textures are like a trampoline for the pianist, lofting her to magnificent moments. You expect this (or hope for it) in the Prokofiev; in the Ravel concerto it’s more of a surprise, but a welcome one.

1986: Year of the Diva

From the Metroland Vault Dept.: We used to offer an end-of-year roundup of classical-music concerts, hoping that would seem important, and I tried to get to every damn one of them back then. Here’s my appraisal of the Albany area’s 1986.

                                                                                       

IT WAS THE YEAR OF THE DIVA in area halls as the one area of classical music guaranteed to attracted the fewest and most fervent got a great celebration.

Aprile Millo

Newcomers and the established – it didn’t matter. The programs were traditional, the programs were varied. And the stars were all sopranos.

Oh, there was some swell fiddlin’ going on, and orchestras and chamber groups galore came through the area. And I’m usually very partial to a crackerjack instrumental concert, figuring a good reading of a Beethoven string quartet is worth a dozen song recitals.

Not this year. Starting back in February, when Marilyn Horne took the stage at Proctor’s with pianist Martin Katz. There is a soprano repertory that gets sung to death, but Horne presented a program that skirted the canon even as it made the most of her voice. We went through the usual Baroque-era openers of Vivaldi and Handel into a delightful, moody realm of German and Spanish songs; a tribute to Samuel Barber opened the second half with six songs that really deserve to be in the “greatest hits” repertory. Horne took the program to New York City and elsewhere, so she may be accomplishing that.

By Strauss

Metroland in Memoriam Dept.: I’m raiding the more obscure corners of my contributions to the now-stilled Metroland Magazine, but it looks pretty much like what I’ve been posting here all along. Here’s some opera.

                                                                                          

Soprano Brenda Harris

IT’S NOT FREQUENTLY laugh-out-loud funny, but that’s not Richard Strauss’s style. Still, it’s an extremely funny and moving work, performed with appropriate gusto as the opener of the Lake George Opera’s summer season at SPAC. “Ariadne auf Naxos” was intended as a half-hour divertissement to be performed within a production of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme that had been translated by Strauss’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Then it grew, losing the play but gaining a prologue that sets up in a few strokes much of what the play intended: A nouveau-riche nobleman has planned an evening’s entertainment that will include an original opera, improvised commedia dell’arte sketches and fireworks. So that the fireworks may begin precisely at 9, the nobleman has decreed that the opera and the comedians should perform simultaneously.

This throws the assemblage into chaos: how dare one type of entertainment sully the other! The prologue gives us a young, idealistic composer (a pants role sung by mezzo Mary Ann McCormick) who agonizes over the cuts that are required – even while succumbing to the charm of comedienne Zerbinetta (soprano Robin Blitch Wiper), whose hedonistic way of life is drenched in sensuality. Amidst a flurry of hasty assignations deftly staged in the background, the Composer and Zerbinetta end up face-to-face on opposite sides of a ladder, a nice piece of business from stage director Marc Verzatt, who also took on the speaking role of the Major-Domo, which he performed with an Olivier-like flourish.

Travels with Sam

Metroland Retrospective Dept.: Where did I dine two decades ago? At Sam Zoleo’s newest restaurant. He ran Sam’s Place in Saratoga before opening 95 Ferry in Troy, but took that name with him when he returned to Saratoga. He would go back to Troy with a couple of different ventures before leaving the business, as far as I can tell, in 2008, although I see he recently has offered cooking classes at the Troy Arts Center.

                                                                                              

SAM IS A PLEASANT MAN who gets very serious when the subject is food. “I use what’s fresh,” he says. “That’s why menu is written the way it is. There’s no swordfish on it, no tuna. How can you put things like that on a menu without having to bring them in frozen?”

Nothing to do with Sam's, but it's pretty

Fish, in fact, is a special obsession. Having worked for several years in New York’s Fulton Fish Market, Sam knows fish. “I get in a box of fish from someone I never bought fish from before, first thing I do is turn is upside-down. Open it from the bottom. Then I see what kind of fish they’re really putting in there.”

So the talapia I sampled the other night was fresh. In fact, I got the last order for the night. It’s a sturdy but slightly sweet salt-water fish, reminiscent of scrod. And everything assembled around it was fresh – the onions, the parsley, the basil. The black olives came out of a jar, but they need a little curing.

Sam used to run 95 Ferry Street in Troy, and Sam’s Diner on Route 9 just south of Saratoga before that. Now he’s back in Saratoga, but downtown, in a building that also houses a steakhouse and a sushi bar.

A Taste of Immigration

Our twenty-fifth Thanksgiving dinner at Jollity Farm. While we can't help but salute the melting pot that is the greater culinary world each time we lift a skillet, we thought it fitting to pay extra attention to some of those making the news of late.

The Sloth

A preview of my Jan. 24 show at Saratoga's Caffe Lena. Somehow it ties in with Thanksgiving.

Smitten on the Keys

MASTERY OF PROKOFIEV’S PIANO MUSIC requires complete mastery of the piano: the composer wrote for (and possessed) a blistering, ambitious technique, and the required skill usually is demonstrated with later works such as the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas. But pianist Yefim Bronfman reminded us that the same challenges await among the lower numbers by performing Prokofiev’s first four sonatas at Union College in Schenectady last Wednesday. And, in a wonderful programming choice, he slipped a bit of Schumann in there as well.

Yefim Bronfman

This allowed us to hear Prokofiev’s progress. The journey from his first sonata, from 1909 when he was 18, to the second, published three years later, is a trip whereon he discovers the voice that remained recognizably his. And the Schumann pieces reinforced Prokofiev’s essentially romantic nature.

No nonsense when Bronfman begins! He strides to the piano, takes a cursory bow, and is playing the opening work almost before he’s seated, it seems. Prokofiev’s First Sonata is a one-movement work, cut down by the composer from its original three, written while he was a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It immediately asserts the romantic sensibility that never would leave the composer’s voice, but it’s free of the crunch and angularity that very soon would appear. Still, I’m not sure I’d want to meet this piece in a dark alley without warning.

Towards a More Perfect Union

From the Metroland Vault Dept.: Meeting larger-than-life actor George DiCenzo in 1987 meant dining with him as well, and we ended up sharing a typically excellent meal at Schenectady’s Appian Way restaurant, livened by DiCenzo’s animated storytelling. He went on to appear in the films 18 Again!, Sing and The Exorcist III, as well as such TV shows as Murder, She Wrote, NYPD Blue, Equal Justice, and Joe's Life. He appeared on Broadway in a revival of On Borrowed Time, directed by his friend George C. Scott. DiCenzo died in 2010.

                                                                                             

GEORGE DICENZO WOULD LIKE TO SEE A NEW THEATRE at Union College. But that’s not the reason he sepnt a week there shooting a promotional video for the college.

George DiCenzo in Dynasty.

“I love this place,” he says. “I’m just happy to do it.” DiCenzo graduated from Union in 1962 with the intent to practice law. But he had done enough acting with the college Mountebanks to suggest that he try that somewhat less reliable career – which he has pursued with enough success that he now can choose his own movie roles.

Recent appearances in Back to the Future and About Last Night have made him a recognizable fellow, so when Union alumni watch this new video, they’ll see his burly, bearded figure strolling the grounds of the campus, visiting classrooms, suggesting that the old alma mater is a desirable place to check in with now and then.

Greek to Me

From the Metroland Vault Dept.: Saluting my too-many years as Metroland’s restaurant reviewer, here’s another from the early days. In fact, it’s the last one I wrote before taking a hiatus for two years, returning in 1990 after a succession of other writers discovered that it wasn’t as simple a task as it seemed. The Chariot is long gone, its space currently occupied by an Indian eatery.

                                                                                            

EVER HAVE ONE OF THOSE DAYS when you can't think of anything good to eat? When there's nothing in the house, you don't want to send out for another pizza, you've been to the local Chinese place a dozen times in the last month, you don't want to see another piece of steak and you know if you don't think of something soon you're going to end up in the frozen food aisle of Price Chopper choosing yet another crappy microwave pseudo-gourmet dinner?

The Chariot's building, as pictured during
one of its on-the-market moments.

Al “To Hell with Hallowe’en” Quaglieri and I were supposed to get together for dinner and couldn’t think of a damn thing we wanted to tuck into. Until someone suggested a Greek restaurant down in the west end of Guilderland. An idea so refreshing that we were joined by significant others in a meal that was as delightful as it was different.

The Chariot was erected in a time when dining rooms were big places, happy hotel-like spreads unrelieved by varying levels and dividers of plants. It’s attractive in that context, with a warm bar off to one side of the room and a small selection of salads promising that no guest will stay hungry for long.

Bucket Listing

Remembering Metroland Dept.: While I don’t think the body has stopped breathing, while Metroland remains in its coda, I’m exhuming some of my vintage pieces for the redoubtable alt-weekly. Here’s a preview-review combo from 1987, when I covered dance. Garth Fagan is still holding strong at 75, and his company will perform at Proctors in Schenectady on Jan. 29, 2016.

                                                                                                   

GARTH FAGAN HAD A STRAIGHTFORWARD AMBITION: Invent a new kind of dance. It meant ignoring the conservative critics; it meant developing a company free of the preconceptions of the worlds of modern and ballet. So he went to the bottom of the bucket, as he whimsically put it, created a company out of dancers her trained himself – and now, after almost 20 years at it, he’s seeing that goal get nearer.

Garth Fagan

As Anne Marie Welsh, writing in the San Diego Union after Fagan’s Bucket Dance Theater’s very recent appearance there, put it, “The genealogy of modern dance now includes Garth Fagan, the newest choreographer to add a new branch to the modern tree.”

“I like that,” says Fagan. His Jamaican heritage is very much in his voice, a voice that has the fat sound of a chalumeau clarinet. “The company is in such wonderful condition after five weeks in California that we’re ready to burn in Albany.”

They’ll be appearing at the Egg Sunday afternoon at 2 in a program that comprises “Prelude,” “Oatka Trail,” “Touring Jubilee 1924 (Professional),” “Never Top 40 (Juke Box)” and “Mask Mix Masque.”

Prokofiev, with a Fist

From the Vault Dept.: Pianist Yuja Wang has out a new album sporting Ravel’s two concertos and the Ballade by Fauré, and its cover photo inspired a snotty lede from David Hurwitz in his ClassicsToday review. To remorsefully self-aggrandize for a moment, one of my own earliest concert reviews included a similarly snotty crack about a performer’s outfit; my comment about his dressing up earned me a deserved dressing down, and I’ve since tried to focus on the performance itself, as in the review below.

                                                                                                 

DURING A FRENZIED MOMENT in the opening of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6, the manuscript is marked, over a dense chord, “col pugno.” When she reached it, pianist Yuja Wang curled her fingers into a fist and skillfully smacked the keys, the percussive surprise of the moment executed with an inspiring combination of precision and charm

Yuja Wang

We’re so accustomed to the proficiency level of the top-flight pianists who live in or pass through this area that when an exceptional talent like this one appears, it takes a moment to register that something even more extraordinary than usual is happening on stage.

Yuja Wang is a 24-year-old enjoying a phenomenal career, having already appeared with many major orchestras, in many cases as a last-minute replacement. She made a splash three years ago in concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Saturday’s solo recital at Albany’s Massry Center should only add to her legend.

The big piece was Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, a four-movement but nonstop work that opens with some ominous octaves that, in Wang’s hands, suggested the sweep with which Horowitz took on the piece. But what most energizes her approach is a control over the dynamics that shades the textures with a more colorful palette than I’m used to hearing.