Think about Public Art

Instead of the cows, etc, the Royal Parks Foundation has commissioned paintings or prints on the drooping canvas of a classic deck chair. The Foundations states: Deckchairs have become a very British icon since the design was patented by Macclesfield businessman, John Moore in 1886. The Titanic boasted 600 deckchairs - only six of them survived the sinking and one of these, believed to have been used as a makeshift life-raft, was sold at auction in 2001 for £35,000.

The "Celebrity Artists" did a fine job. One of the artists, Jonathan Yeo, was withdrawn from public display for a clever pun of falling leaves (oak, but think fig) with images of formerly covered genitalia. The Foundation is displaying and selling the Yeo chair at its website. See the Guardian. Bid now on online or attend the auction on June 3 in London

360 Degree Room of All Colours turns color into music. The circular space changes its pastel colors in slow repetition. The light level is PERFECT for the human eye in that pupil is fully open without the need to squint. If you stare into the fabric walls from 10 inches, your entire field of vision fills with one color. Only on a sail-less boat in the sea with a low sun, can you stare at the dome of the sky with a similar full view of blue. I loved it, but this is not the surprising part. If you sit of floor and a stare, the color change from washed out to very intensive pastel. My body started to feel the motion of the colors in ways that can only be compared to music. The chemical levels in my body shot up with the swelling of the color intensity.

Since architecture school, I had been told of psychological power of color, but never the physiological. Still part science, but like other chemicals in the body, I am hooked and looking for my next dose.

MOMA and PS1 prepare the public for the "Watersfalls" later this month in NYC. The the scaffolding has been constructed under the Brooklyn bridge. Photo taken on May 26.

From the Bay Area and Boston emerge artworks that are mainly science projects overlaid with pretty colors so they can be called "art". The interaction is fun for ten minutes and we like to take new visitors as they will marvel. We fake enthusiasm based on a memory our our first time so that we can truly enjoy their reaction. But the work fails to provide any personal thrill again. And for all the statements by the artists and curators, no significant thought comes to mind at all - except the terror of the possible future.



Olafur Eliasson moves between public science project and public art. Many are science tricks directed toward internal artworld reflections. A moving colorfield painting in light, the live black&white 3-D movie or the invisible white gallery box inside the white gallery box. Some are little silly like the reverse cascading waterfall where he sprays the water up from one pool to the next.



The genius of Eliasson emits from his stubborn battle with the photographic record: still or moving. He seeks to make works that can only be completely appreciated through "being-in" the artwork. (I have written about "being-in" regarding the architecture in the northwest USA - a place grounded in Scandinavian culture like Eliasson). Yet, many of Eliasson's best installations "The Weather Project" at the Tate Modern in London and the 360 Degree Room of All Colours at MOMA generate "artistic" amateur photos in the same way as Gromley's work. His is a battle, not a rejection.

ElliasonTatel.jpg

Anything claiming to be art requires the in-person experience to be fully appreciated. If you see a documentary picture or video of an artwork and think the artwork will be the same in person, then in my book you have a problem. (Of course the LCD monitor or paper magazine can be the intended home of the art.) The amateur photographs of The Weather Project make me want to be there. Through the photos, I have a sense, true or not, that the experience would be romantic and enveloping. Gromley's work makes me want to compete in the undeclared photo taking contest, not necessarily to be in the space. Eliasson's photos make me dream of the visit.


Two of the works at MOMA are brilliant and the "Take Your Time" room at PS1 exceeds any carnival fun-house of mirror rooms and tricks. Completely ignored by nearly all visitors, beige moss - of a type used for architectural models - densely covers each inch of the large gallery wall. Moss Wall is a visual trip over the Amazon Rain forest. Only by viewing the work from 6-10 inches can it unfold. As that visual range, the human eye and brain together imagine "depth of field" and a complete 3D visual experience that become physical. The human brain feels the tiny changes in elevation as you move your head and eyes like an airplane plane. But at 200 or 300 feet above a real forest, the eyes and brain do not feel any 3D effect. Eliasson discovered that multidimensional physical reactions can be sparked in the body.

Finally, Take Your Time at PS1. A huge disc cover red in reflective mylar rotates very slow on the ceiling. Immediately, everyone dives to floor and looks up. Your brain tells you that all the people - including yourself - are not lying on the floor, but suspended magically on a vertical wall with less effort that Spiderman. That is the fun house trick. The questions is - why do you want to lay there for minutes and minutes? People don't want to leave.

The mirror is tilted about 3%. Patience and 3% is the genius of the work. The angle causes the reflection of the visitors and the walls of the room to change very, very slightly in a loop. Again, somehow and for some reason, the brain knows that the view is changing and therefore remains alerts and interested. Unless you move the very edge of the disk, you can get yourself to consciously recognise the change. Like the colors in the 360 Degree Room, you body responds - in this case the brain - without consciousness.

Perhaps Eliasson has invented the first of science of art since gestalt.

I don't know how other creative people can utilize Eliasson's operational observations, but the work drives home the memory of special sunsets and hours napping adjacent to a waterfall in the forest. He proves that humans can make the spaces that facilitate these calm and happy moments. Thank you Mr. Eliasson.

How to Think about Public Art

How to think about public art? Do you just keep doing the same thing? Big art? Architectural intimacy? Site-specific narrative? Locally responsive?

Internationally, public art has been institutionalized as the founder's dreamed in the 1960 and 1970s. Big - intimate - narrative - responsive. Most importantly, appreciated by a small, but growing group, and accepted by most. Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" would NEVER be removed today.

What was not anticipated was 1.) public art as a defined field separate from museum art and 2.) global uniformity. They could not have imagined 1.) daily Internet access to any public artwork and 2.) participation in public art through cell phones and Internet.

What has not materialized in the USA is 1.) respect for the individual artistic career and 2.) pride (or tolerance) in a culture that sponsors artworks of political and social content. Respect continues to expand for artists in the corporate or spectacular arts - movies, music videos, concerts, advertising, fireworks, theme parks, architecture (and some urban space or landscapes). For time being, the Internet provides the public venue for creative public works in politics and social observation.

Perhaps, the Internet removes the psychological need for public political expression in physical public art (except when used as a method to gain access to broader media channels and new audiences). At a recent dialogue at the New Museum in NYC with street artists selected by the Wooster Collective, politics had almost no role in the content of the art. These street artists personalized the generic elements of urban places such as billboards, light poles and road markings. Individualizing and manipulating the institutional forms has a political dimension as an act where acts by individuals are prohibited, but abandons public space as a canvas for unique commentary on culture.

As I try to come back to discourse - a mental activity removed from professional public art administration - I have been reading about "Relational Aesthetics". Although this theory that has inspired many public works of interaction among particular publics, Relational Aesthetics confirms the tiny, insignificant role of visual art by removing any cultural objectives beyond a knitting function for different groups and ideas. Any goals of global transformation are abandoned as 20^th century failures. The dreams expressed as utopia have no value. Just make the best of the circumstances.

In general, theory is mainly the emphasis of one part of the same reality. "Making the best of circumstances" was an important element of any revolutionary act. In the 20^th century, the objectives reigned supreme. Now the circumstances have the public relations edge, but art is still a singular act to make something that will change or reinforce human knowledge, values and future acts.

Revolution is a communal act in which art was a symbol and an example - not the motivation. A minority of artists - open to change and desiring notoriety - were frequently with the vanguard. In this world without hope in communal acts, Relational Aesthetics and contemporary public art practice makes sense as the symbol and an example. Make the best of circumstances with a clever mind, sensitive heart and functional results. Leave the best of all possible worlds to another generation.

Well that did not answer anything about public art. Except to say that the best public art in our time would be big, intimate, narrative and responsive with a functional justification and produced by an artist(s) with a clever mind and sensitive heart.

A lot of examination of public art this week (Sept 7-Sept 14, 2008). Get online or a subway car.

1. Giant mechanical spider roams the streets of Liverpool, UK. Produced by Royal de Luxe, Artichoke and/or La Machine that produced the "Sultan's Elephant" in London in 2006.
2. Dozens of small scale, site-specific interventions through out New York City via the Conflux Festival
3. Blast Theory's new virtual/real space game can be played on-line in the morning on Friday, Saturday or Sunday (EST) (Click here to play) or at Royal Opera House in London for the Deloitte Ignite festival.
4. Bronx Museum of the Arts opens the "Street Art" exhibition documenting a selection of performance or action driven outdoor artworks since the 1950s. Street festival on Sunday afternoon.

In two weeks, Creative Time's Democracy Project opens in NYC and by its existence, tests the old definitions of artist actions in today's world.

Mobile Art: Chanel and Curved

In May 2008, two Mobile Art projects were displayed in Tokyo, Japan and Madison, Wisconsin, USA. The blog is composed of stolen images from Chanel Art Mobile website and the Curved Collective Flickr site and text from Art Daily press release and an email from Jennifer Anne in Wisconsin. The Chanel Art Mobile will be in Central Park between October 20 and November 9, 2008. Perhaps, the Curved Collective will join them in New York.

My comparison is completely respectful of both projects. They both responded to their economic abilities. Curved spent $29.95 for the U-haul truck and volunteers set-up the mobile gallery at three locations on one day. Chanel has not revealed the cost of Zaha Hahid's pavilion for the 50-year anniversary of the Coco Chanel's design of the 2.55 handbag.

Comparing the public art events did spark a kind of checklist for public art project promotion.

1. Reinforce the brand (Know what your brand is.)
2. Produce a real event (What is wrong with celebrities?)
3. Secure great photography, not good documentation.
4. Partner with others that might benefit - but be in control yourself.
5. Plan all events a long way in advance.
6. Replace the word dedication with party.
7. Always have great (big) signage.

Why not Chanel quality photographers for Curved?

Entrances to Chanel and Curved Mobile Art Pavilions

Chanel really thought out the signage.

Perhaps one small critique. Hadid clearly ignored Chanel's request to respond to the 2.55 handbag, yet all the PR celebrates the conceptual relationship. This blind hype is what gives fashion a bad rap in the artworld.

Jennifer Anne from Curved Collective

The mobile art truck on my Flickr page was a roving gallery, rather than an interactive public art project like the ones on your blog/web page. Our artist group, the Curved Collective, had participated in Madison's biannual gallery nights in 'traditional' gallery spaces (four walls, a roof and a door) and wanted to do something different. Our Art Truck was a U-Haul in which we displayed our art at 3 different locations over the course of the Gallery Night evening. Some work was hung inside the truck; there was a site-specific installation on the ceiling of the truck; and 2 people had pieces on wheels that they displayed outside the truck at each location. At our second location we were rousted by the cops, who'd been called by the owners of the storefront adjacent to our (completely legit) parking space.

Art Daily Chanel Press Release

Mobile Art was commissioned by CHANEL and conceived by the company's renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. It was originally imagined as a means to mark the first appearance fifty years ago of the iconic CHANEL "2.55" quilted stitched-leather handbag. Designed by Coco Chanel, the 2.55 has evolved over the decades into one of the most enduring examples of 20thcentury fashion - a kind of cultural totem collected by museums and coveted by consumers in countries around the world. That bag and the traditions of the factory in France, where it is still made today, were presented to Zaha Hadid and the participating artists as jumping off points for their contributions to Mobile Art. The resulting exhibition is a multi-dimensional meditation on fashion as a powerful, exciting, sometimes perverse and occasionally poignant conductor of fantasy, identity, culture and self-expression.

Zaha Hadid's response to Lagerfeld's Mobile Art concept was to create a pavilion that, like a handbag, is a completely portable and functional container with vast symbolic potential. Made of highly engineered, gleaming white arched fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, the architect's enigmatic itinerant building is a sculpture in its own right. It is comprised of 700 components that, once assembled, appear to be a very distant abstraction the famous quilted CHANEL handbag. "There is a touch of quilting in the geometrical structure of the art Container," added Karl Lagerfeld.

For Mobile Art, CHANEL assembled a roster of leading contemporary artists with the assistance of Fabrice Bousteau, curator and editor of the art magazine Beaux Arts, and invited each to empty his or her proverbial bag in a singular way. Representing different generations, diverse nationalities and wide-ranging points of view, this group of artists has engaged in an exploration of the handbag as a way to examine an array of experiences, ideas and issues suggested by the intersection of art, fashion and architecture.

Mobile Art launched its two-year worldwide tour in Hong Kong in February 2008, before traveling to Tokyo, where it has been on view at the National Yoyogi Stadium Olympic Plaza. Following its presentation in New York City, Mobile Art will travel to London and Moscow, concluding its tour in Paris in 2010.

How about ignoring Norrington?

Come on, folks, let's get serious! A to-do about Sir Roger's anti-vibrato movement (or lack of movement, as the case may be)? Don't we have anything better to talk about? Or is it a question of arts journalists frantically searching for copy in August?

Anyone who has read Styra Avins's informed and informative writings on the use of vibrato by Joachim and other string players in the second half of the nineteenth century will know that Norrington's latest campaign is largely baseless or part of an ongoing PR parade -- if not both -- just as anyone who has delved into Beethoven's conversation books will know that the way Norrington straight-armed his way through the recitatives in his recording of the finale of the Ninth Symphony went against the composer's instructions.

Among "authenticists" and "non-authenticists" alike, there are musical and unmusical performers: neither camp has a corner on the sensitivity market. Sir Roger can huff and puff all he likes about this or that offense on the part of the non-authenticists, but, to my ears, he belongs squarely (an appropriate adverb if ever there was one) among the unmusical authenticists.

Time out

The long hiatus in this blog is a result of a lot of other work, intense heat in my fifth-floor, under-the-roof walk-up Manhattan apartment, and sheer lethargy.

I've gradually been looking back over some of the performances that I attended during the 2007-08 New York musical season, but I'm taking time out to talk about a few CDs that have recently come to my attention. I'm prompted in part by Tony Tommasini's evocative New York Times article (June 8) about the wonderful American pianist William Kapell, who died in a plane crash in 1953, at the age of 31. And Tommasini's article was prompted, in turn, by RCA Red Seal's new two-CD album, "William Kapell Rediscovered." The recordings heard on these discs were made during live concerts in Australia that took place during the months immediately preceding this amazing artist's death.

I am ashamed to admit that I had paid very little attention to Kapell's recordings until 1998, when RCA issued a nine-CD set devoted to nearly all of the pianist's recordings known at that time, but once I had made his musical acquaintance, I was hooked. Rare are the performing musicians who make you feel not only that they have thoroughly understood the works they are interpreting, but also that they are "speaking" them directly, creating them before your very ears. Maybe you don't agree with this or that detail, or even an entire interpretation; nevertheless, you are swept along by the conviction, honesty, and communicative mastery that have gone into what you are hearing. This is the feeling I have when I listen to Kapell. Take, for instance, Chopin's Barcarolle and E-flat Major Nocturne, Op. 55 No. 2, in this new album -- which I would urge every young pianist to acquire: you feel at every moment that this music is in Kapell's bloodstream, as if Chopin had told him what to do with every nuance in tempo and dynamics, every accent, the shape of every phrase. Afterward, you may ask yourself why Kapell didn't make more of a certain climax, why he slowed down at a certain point -- and these issues do count, for anyone who cares deeply about musical interpretation. But you remain awestruck by the fanatical care with which every detail has been worked out, in itself and in relation to every other detail, and by the apparent spontaneity of the result. So also the performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev in this remarkable valedictory album.

An exceptionally fine recent CD is a Harmonia Mundi release containing the Jerusalem Quartet's interpretations of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" and Quartettsatz. This is ensemble playing of the highest order: tremendous intensity combined with great interpretive intelligence and unity of intent, not to mention the striking virtuosity of each player (Alexander Pavlovsky and Segei Bresler, violins; Amichai Grosz, viola; and Kyril Zlotnikov, cello). There is a tendency toward exaggerated dynamic contrasts -- even more superfluous in this highly dramatic performance than they would be in blander versions; nevertheless, this is a CD that everyone who loves these astonishing works should have.

Two other string ensembles that I've listened to with pleasure lately are the Moscow and American string quartets, performing music by the American composer Curt Cacioppo on the somewhat out-of-the-way MSR Classics label (easily available through amazon.com, however -- as are several other recordings of the same composer's music). The two-CD album also contains performances by the Friends Chamber Group and by Cacioppo himself at the piano. I've known Cacioppo since we were kids studying with the same piano teacher, back in the mid-1960s. He went on to study with Leon Kirchner and other masters, and he has taught for many years at Haverford College, where his interest in Native American music spurred him to establish a Native American Fund and a related social justice course. His works have been performed by the Emerson Quartet and other eminent musicians. This new recording is made up of viscerally and intellectually stimulating compositions influenced in subtle ways by Navajo, Hopi, and other Native American music. Cacioppo has a unique creative voice that deserves to be heard.

I note that "Roger," commenting on an earlier blog entry, protested my description of the "constantly shouting" Joseph Calleja as Macduff in a Met performance of Verdi's Macbeth this past spring and attributed my words to "ignorance," rather than allowing for a difference of opinion. A musician who attended all the Macbeth rehearsals and performances wrote to me privately that he found Calleja "'promising' but green and monochrome, and does he think he always has the melody?" And yet another musician, who was sitting next to me at the performance I attended, had a more negative opinion than mine of Calleja. So that makes at least three ignoramuses. I have no idea whether or not "Roger" is ignorant or knowledgeable, but he must have learned about democracy by reading Mein Kampf.

A few performances to remember - 2

The first installment of my backward glance at the just-ending New York musical season was all about the Met. This time I'm thinking about some of the events that I attended at Carnegie Hall in 2007-08 -- first and foremost, Andras Schiff's four magnificent recitals (two in October, two in April) that covered, more or less chronologically, the first 17 of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas.

Schiff often does "bulk programming" of composers -- cycles of works by Bach, Schubert, Bartok, and others. Although I am sure that he has been familiar with the Beethoven sonatas since student days, he waited until he was about 50 (he was born in 1953) to consider and then perform these monuments of the keyboard repertoire as a single corpus.

Which is not to say that he places these monuments on pedestals. On the contrary: his interpretations are characterized above all by enlivening freshness -- a freshness that can be achieved only by artists who are willing to contemplate a work from every angle and, for each detail, to discard one solution after another until they hit upon the one that seems to fit most naturally into the whole concept. Intellectual rigor, emotional intensity, and musical imagination abounded in all of these performances, which were conveyed with the tremendous conviction and technical security that are part of this great artist's basic equipment. I am already looking forward to the remaining four recitals next season.

Among other fine piano recitals at Carnegie this season, Radu Lupu's January appearance was memorable for a brilliant performance of Book I of Debussy's Preludes. The following month Alfred Brendel movingly performed a mixed program (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert) as part of his final American tour; he will retire completely from the concert circuit next January. In March, Emanuel Ax, whose artistic growth in recent years has been practically exponential, gave outstanding performances of two Beethoven sonatas (Op. 2, No. 2, and the "Appassionata") and Schumann's Humoreske and Papillons. And in April, Leif Ove Andsnes presented a mixed program of which the highlight, as in Radu Lupu's recital, was a series of luminous interpretations of Debussy's Preludes -- in this case, a selection of eleven pieces from Books I and II. Far less successful, to my way of thinking, were recitals, in Carnegie's beautiful, mid-sized Zankel Hall, by Stephen Hough, who played on the surface of Mendelssohn's Variations serieuses and Beethoven's Sonata Op. 111, and Till Fellner, whom I had heard play beautifully in Switzerland a few years ago but who now, in a strange potpourri of a program (Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Holliger, Ravel) seemed intent on demonstrating that he isn't "merely" a serious, Central European pianist but also a brilliant virtuoso. Virtuosity and depth ought to be mutually beneficial, but in this case the former often seemed to have been achieved at the expense of the latter.

I apologize if I'm boring you, but my enthusiasm for James Levine's work in the Met's pit this past season was carried over to his Carnegie concert appearances. Particularly noteworthy was a program in October by the MET Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall: the first half consisted of amazingly accomplished performances of complex works by three living American masters -- Elliott Carter (nearly 99 at the time), Milton Babbitt (91), and John Harbison (a babe of 69), all of them present at the event -- and in the second half the same three composers became Soldier, Devil, and Narrator, respectively, in an exhilarating interpretation of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale; the narration, rewritten for the occasion, was witty enough that it would surely have won the composer's approval. I confess that I still can't get the hang of Babbitt's works, but the soprano Judith Bettina deserved a medal, at the very least, for her virtuosic and virtually non-stop traversal of his densely packed, 22-minute The Head of the Bed. In January, the same ensemble, again under Levine, played six Second Viennese School works, including Berg's Chamber Concerto, with pianist Yefim Bronfman and violinist Gil Shaham, and Schoenberg's Pierrot luanire, with soprano Anja Silja, with polish and conviction. The following month, Levine and the whole Met Orchestra gave a shattering performance of Webern's Six Pieces, Op. 6, at the start of a memorable concert that also comprised Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491, with Brendel (a few days before the aforementioned recital); Berg's Three Pieces, Op. 6, and the final scene from Salome, with Deborah Voigt in top form.

Also in February, two concerts by the Chicago Symphony under Pierre Boulez included the New York premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Osiris, which I found hard to fathom (the limitation is mine, of course), and music by Bartok (the Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida, in a performance that began too preciously but intensified from movement to movement), Debussy (all three of the Images), Berio, Berlioz (Les Nuits d'ete, beautifully interpreted by Susan Graham), and Stravinsky (the 1911 version of Petrouchka). I doubt that I will ever hear clearer, more luminous, or more brilliantly executed performances of the Debussy or the Stravinsky, and yet both suffered from that lack of forward movement that afflicts Boulez's interpretations when he seems to be concentrating more on bar-by-bar sound than on a work's overall architecture: you can't see the forest for the trees. It was like listening to a brilliantly analytical rehearsal rather than to a completely communicative performance.

In November Zankel Hall was the site of a fine performance by the Zehetmair String Quartet (Mozart, Hindemith, Schumann), but the most remarkable event that I witnessed there this season was the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble's performance, in January, of Boulez's Le Marteau sans maitre and sur Incises under the composer's direction, and with a pre-performance conversation between Boulez and Ara Guzeliminian, Carnegie's former artistic administrator. To my taste, sur Incises is a much more attractive work than Le Marteau, which has become a classic of the 20th century's avant-garde; in any case, both were played with apparent ease by these virtuosic young musicians from all over the world, under the nearly 83-year-old master's guidance.

For me, the Carnegie/Zankel season ended pleasantly on May 11 with a concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Douglas Boyd and with Dawn Upshaw as the fine soloist in some Stravinsky songs (Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont and Three Japanese Lyrics), Ravel's Three Poems of Stephane Mallarme, and Osvaldo Golijov's not terribly effective arrangements of four Schubert lieder. (Why has there been a resurgence of interest in old and new orchestrations of Schubert's songs? No matter how skillful the arranger, the pieces simply don't sound as good with orchestral accompaniment as they do in the original voice-and-piano blend created by the composer.) The other works on this program were Dvorak's Serenade for Winds and Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite (1949 revision), deftly and arrestingly executed by this fine Minnesota ensemble.

A few performances to remember - 1

i have been remiss in updating this blog because I was participating in a seminar on "The Musician as Listener" at the Orpheus Institute in beautiful Ghent, Belgium. I discovered that in addition to van Eyck's celebrated altarpiece in the cathedral, Ghent has a lovely art museum that contains first-rate works by Bosch, Brueghel, van der Weyden, van Dyck, Rubens, Hals, Gericault (one of the extraordinary portraits of mad people that he was working on when he died), Corot, Courbet, Rodin, Redon, Ensor, Kokoschka, Magritte, and many others. And of course I had to devote a great deal of concentration to the task of stuffing myself with Belgian chocolates.

But back to musical matters. As New York's 2007-08 musical season draws to a close, I would like to take a backward glance at some of the performances I attended this year. In this blog entry, I'll limit myself to a few of the 14 or 15 Met productions that I observed.

Two new productions -- Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth -- were memorable above all for the conducting of James Levine. This statement may cause some surprise, because the Donizetti work in particular and to some extent also Verdi's earliest Shakespearean foray are considered primarily "singers' operas" rather than "conductors' operas," and most of the critics' attention in both cases was understandably focused on the singing and the new productions. Certainly Natalie Dessay was remarkable as both singer and actress in Lucia (as also in Donizetti's La Fille du regiment toward the end of the season), but her voice is not a huge one. Levine not only balanced the orchestra to match the soprano's capabilities -- a relatively easy task for any competent opera conductor: he actually adapted the dynamic levels of the entire opera to Dessay's resources, so that the orchestra wasn't suddenly playing noticeably softer for her. That, my friends, requires large quantities of experience and intelligence. And it means that one of the golden rules for singers -- The Softer You Sing, The More Clearly You Must Enunciate -- was also being obeyed by Levine and his magnificent orchestra. The Lucia production, directed by Mary Zimmerman and designed by Daniel Ostling, had its beauties (the wintry first act, for instance), but it was marred by numerous absurdities, of which the most noteworthy was the photo op for Lucia, her family, and the wedding guests, who mugged calmly while singing the grandiose, emotionally charged sextet in Act II. This error of judgement made me think of the Italian director Giorgio Strehler's statement to the effect that you can stage a great work as arbitrarily as you like, but please remember that your miserable ideas will look very, very small next to the work itself. The production's other principal cast members (Marcello Giordani as Edgardo, Mariusz Kwiecien as Enrico, and John Relyea as Raimondo) did not match Dessay's technical level, but all were well prepared

Strehler created a brilliant production of Verdi's Macbeth at La Scala in 1975; the setting was medieval but highly stylized, and every movement the singers made had a reason for existing, By contrast, Adrian Noble's new Met production, set in modern times, teemed with visual effects that, to this audience member, seemed largely gratuitous. With the exception of the young tenor Dimitri Pittas (Macduff), the principal singers (Zeljko Lucic and Maria Guleghina as Macbeth and his lady, respectively, and John Relyea as Banquo) were unexceptional; once again it was Levine's handling of the orchestra and the entire ensemble (including the chorus, excellently prepared by Donald Palumbo) that made these performances worth hearing -- truly dramatic, and with none of the heavy-handedness of Claudio Abbado's conducting of that way-back-when Scala production. A later run of Macbeth performances had a less worn-out-sounding Macbeth (Carlos Alvarez), a dramatically intense but vocally rough Lady (Hasmik Papian), a magnificent Banquo (Rene Pape), and a constantly shouting Macduff (Joseph Calleja), but the ensemble was, if anything, even more dramatically convincing than in the fall.

More specific highlights of the Met season, for this listener, were the singing of Susan Graham and Placido Domingo in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride and of Anthony Dean Griffey and most of the other cast members in Britten's Peter Grimes. A serious disappointment, on the other hand, was Karita Mattila (an artist I greatly admire) in the title role of Puccini's Manon Lescaut -- a role that simply does not lie right for her voice. And I confess that I would rather spend a week in jail (if I could have writing materials with me) than listen to another performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. I tried -- I really did -- but I found it a crashing bore. For me, however, the season ended wonderfully with Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, splendidly sung by the amazing Susan Graham and the rest of the cast (Ramon Vargas, Tamar Iveri, Heidi Grant Murphy, Anke Vondung, and Oren Gradus), incisively conducted by Harry Bicket, and still beautiful to watch in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1984 production.

Mutatis mutandis: Muti goes to Chicago

I've looked up a note I wrote to myself on June 22, 1976, after having observed Riccardo Muti (who was then not quite 35) rehearse the orchestra of La Scala. Bear in mind as you read the following excerpts from those hastily jotted-down pages, that I myself was active as a conductor at the time, although at very modest levels, and that I had previously followed the rehearsals of George Szell, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Karel Ancerl, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Karl Boehm, Carlos Kleiber, Georges Pretre and many other conductors.

"I had heard many good things about him [...] and was prepared to shake my head and wonder what all the fuss was about - as is usually the case. I am delighted that the reverse is true: I feel that he has not been praised highly enough.

"[...] He knows exactly what sound he wants and he knows exactly how to get it - and this not only in regard to the general, overall picture (which he never loses sight of) but in regard to every detail. His mastery of the score is complete, his ear absolutely first-rate, and his way of dealing with the orchestra just right - firm, always demanding the best they can give, but totally unauthoritarian. His attitude in front of the orchestra is unegocentric - it is that of working towards a common goal, and he never loses sight of that. He has the ability and self-possession of a Szell or a Boulez, but far greater naturalness and humanity than the former and a sense of conviction that the latter seems to be lacking in a considerable chunk of the repertoire. [...] And as much as I admired Carlos Kleiber's work here earlier this season, I must say that I think Muti's natural gifts, certainly insofar as balance, intonation, and sheer memorization of detail are concerned, are greater than Kleiber's. They both communicate enthusiasm to the orchestra very well, but in completely different ways. Kleiber is more 'personal,' one has more of a sense of his own psychological make-up [...], whereas with Muti what radiates is more a sense of drama [...]. Muti seems more a phenomenon of nature."

During the intervening 32 years, I have had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of opportunities to observe Muti at work in Milan and elsewhere, in the opera house and concert hall, and my initial impression of his complete seriousness, competence, and musicality has remained unchanged. Do I always, automatically, agree with his repertoire choices or interpretations? Of course not. But what is most important in conductor-orchestra relationships is the feeling on the part of individual musicians that the person in charge is guiding them expertly and with conviction - that that person can be trusted completely to do the job in an outstanding way and can therefore communicate the need to do likewise to the people who are playing the instruments. Over the last three years, watching and listening to Muti work with the grateful and enthusiastic Orchestra Cherubini (a youth ensemble) in the small town of Piacenza, Italy, was an absolute delight, and then observing him electrify the New York Philharmonic - which, like most other first-rate professional orchestras, can often be ungrateful and unenthusiastic, usually with good reason - was simply amazing.

As a New York resident - and despite my esteem for Alan Gilbert and high hopes for his forthcoming tenure with the Philharmonic - I am sorry that Muti will be diminishing his appearances with the local band, but at least we will be able to look forward to frequent visits by him with the magnificent Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Feast of Music

Watch What You Wish For

Don't get me wrong: I'm excited to be flying down to Austin next week to attend the Austin City Limits Music Festival for the fifth time. And, I'm sincerely grateful to festival organizers, who've gifted me with a press pass to the whole shebang, along with a list of PR contacts for all the participating musicians. Apparently, though, it's a two-way street, as my Gmail has been flooded this week with interview offers I don't want, party invites I can't accept, and other desiderata that would try the patience of a librarian. Still, if I get that interview with Fogerty, I suppose it'll be worth it.

One of my primary joys - usually indulged while traveling, or on occasional free weekends here - is to put on headphones and walk around some quiet area, preferably near some water, maybe a few trees. Everything takes on an added resonance, amplified by the music.

Composer Betsey Biggs has developed that ambulatory pastime with her new piece, "Eleven Dreams In Red Hook." On any given Saturday this month, you can find Biggs sitting at a folding table outside the new Brooklyn Ikea, filled with CDs, tapes and a Mac ProBook. You give her your license, and she hands you an iPod shuffle and a map to the eleven neighborhood locations that inspired her soundscapes. She overlays audio samples with digital effects that are occasionally soothing, often stark and jarring. The net effect is a heart-heavy journey through a neighborhood in transition, but one where ghosts lurk around every corner.

I'm usually drawn to Red Hook by the eerie quiet of its remote confines. Biggs gives us a reason to visit that is anything but quiet but nothing short of enticing. Stop by one of these Saturdays and see/hear for yourself.

Over the past year-and-a-half, I've had the good fortune to meet - and become friendly with - a fair number of musicians in and around New York. Some of these musicians you've probably heard of; others may be more obscure. All are contributing invaluable threads to the fabric of what is becoming known as 21st century music.

Many of them, I've discovered, also like to drink. As do I.

So, today begins a new feature where I invite one of these musical acquaintances to sit and chat over a cocktail or two. For my first C.C., I caught up with composer Nico Muhly last night in the back room of Temple Bar on Lafayette, near the studio where he works. Nico was in between trips to Paris, where his ballet Triade is receiving it's world premiere performances at the Palais Garnier. Just last week, he was at Le Poisson Rouge, supporting singer-songwriter Ólöf Arnalds on piano. And, over the summer, he completed his 802 Tour with fellow Vermont-natives (and frequent co-conspirators) Sam Amidon and Tom "Doveman" Bartlett.

Following is some of what transpired. (I'm doing this from memory, so much of this is paraphrased. Next time, I'll try to remember the recorder):

On Food: "I'm of French heritage, so I was brought up to take cooking very seriously. The French are meticulous in how they prepare food: everything is arranged on the plate is a very precise way, in specific portions. In other words: their food is composed."

On Money: "My only source of income is writing and performing music. I never had any desire to get my D.Mus. and teach. That model never made sense to me."

On Musicians: "You can usually tell from someone's personality what instrument they play. The only ones I can never tell are straight male violinists."

On Musician Friends: "Nadia (Sirota) knows exactly how I'd want something to be played, without me having to tell her. That sort of knowledge makes such a difference. She's developed a certain way of playing, which she now uses to play other people's music. That just blows my mind."

On Travel: "I think it's important to be there in person when someone's playing my piece, especially as a young composer, since there's this perception that I'm of the MySpace generation that never does anything face-to-face. Even if I just say one or two things, I think it makes a differnce."

On Classical Music: "People have this perception that classical music institutions are like Mordor. When you get right down to it, the Chicago Symphony is, like 2 women. The Met is, like, 20 people, but it's really just Peter Gelb. All that history is important, but it only means something to a relatively select number of people. It's actually tiny compared to popular music."

On the New York Philharmonic: "I can't even remember the last time I was there. Would I accept a commission from them? Of course!"

On Indie Rock: "Sure, I go to shows all the time. Usually I go to Bowery, since it's, like, five minutes from my house. I'll go see anything. If someone recommends something to me, I'll go."

On Iceland: "I was playing with Björk when I met her engineer, Valgeir (Sigurðsson.) He listened to some of the demos I put out when I was at Juilliard and told me, 'These sound like total shit! You need to come to Iceland right now so I can record you.' And I said: 'Ok!' And I've been going back four or five times a year ever since...The musicians there are amazing. They play everything: classical, jazz, folk, indie rock. To them, it's all the same thing. I think they've become such great musicians because noone there is afraid to fail. There's no stigma about failure there the way there is in this country."

On Text Messages: "Good Lord. I can't even tell you how many I get each day."

I caught the U.S. premiere of Iannis Xenakis' Oresteia last night up at the Miller Theatre, in a performance by the International Contemporary Ensemble and a mixed chorus of men and women and children. A group of six dancers provided visual stimuli, as did a slowly morphing projection of a bloodshot eye.

The Oresteia - a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus in the Fifth century B.C. - is the archetypal Greek drama, a bloody mixture of adultery, murder and vengeance. Xenakis' dissonant, disturbing score is dominated by heavy percussion (supplied here by David Schotzko) and a bass singing falsetto (Wilbur Pauley), mirroring the horror of the story. The final scene, in the Temple at Delphi, had the cast singing and blowing whistles that rose to a piercing, shrieking climax unlike anything I've ever heard.

I can't say I exactly enjoyed Oresteia, but I'm glad I heard it with my own ears.

Lovecat

Among the many absurd and badly paying jobs I've had--ghostwriting a mail-in Ph.D. on economics, wrapping holiday Crate and Barrel purchases in enough paper to have kept little Jesus warm, translating Richard III into easy English--one I recall without shuddering is as an all-purpose office assistant to some all-purpose Israeli émigrés in the Bay Area. Their various schemes included buying rundown apartment buildings, renovating them for cheap, and then renting the units at a steep markup. This being only a few years after the quake of '89, another project was to retrofit houses to withstand the next big quake. (Retrofitting, said my sister, a structural engineer, is pure construction quackery.)

The Ashkenazis owned the apartments and fomented the plans, while the Sephardis did the dirty work, as they always had, they said--these swarthy, stocky, beautiful men whose families arrived in Israel from Egypt and Morocco or merely stayed put in what they had known as Palestine. Up until the late '60s, the Sephardis were called blacks--after the American situation--and were kept down.

They taught me modern Hebrew parables--there are hundreds, as you might expect, redolent of desert, with abundant stone and bird. In exchange, I vetted their theories on American women. Their main evidence was an advertising executive who lived in one of the renovated apartments. She had slept with one of them, and quickly got tired of him. He was outraged: How could a person treat sex so casually? How could it mean so little?

Which somehow led to cats--what was wrong with them. Cats, as opposed to dogs (read Israeli women?), would never do anything for you: no fetching of slippers, no ingratiating wagging of tail. The arrogant bastards lived entirely for themselves.

I am not a "cat person," as people like to put it, any more than I'm a "people person," so I knew what the man meant. I have witnessed many a cat get what she wants while remaining largely impervious to the person giving it.

But not Noodles, not Lump-Lumps--not Alfredo Fettuccine Scherr, who died on July 17 after a run of sixteen years.

WHENEVER WE WENT TO THE VET, I'd exclaim, "Isn't he beautiful!?" and the doctor would say yes--what choice did she have? But she also said, unprompted, "What a good cat. What a sweet cat."

Isn't he beautiful?!

Alfredo was impressionable. He was responsive. He ventured into territory he would never entirely understand simply because it was where I was.

For example, there was the dance. It began 12 years ago, with him meeting me at the front door and racing through our railroad apartment to the bedroom in the back, where he executed quasi-Aikido rolls that finished with his bunny feet flopping up into the air as he landed heavily on his side. He did this one move until he calmed down enough to let me rub his belly. Within a month I could summon the belly-rub desire with, "Do the Dance, Alfredo. Do the Dance." In the weeks before he died, when he hardly had a belly to rub or much to feel pleasure about, he was still falling to his side to await my giant hand.

Unlike his human, Alfredo was taciturn most of his life. Other than squawking at the birds when we lived in an apartment level with a wild garden (Did he mistake himself for a bird or hope to trick them?), he mainly communicated by the distances he kept, plopping himself down just out of reach or way out of reach. He wanted attention, but not so much as to be pounced on. Once he hit middle age, though, and his bones began to creak, he came closer and learned to rant. Stationed next to my desk so I wouldn't miss a word, he'd start off mildly but soon be overtaken by a juggernaut enthusiasm that rolled on for whole minutes: a cat rendition of me.

He also learned late along to wonder about the Great Beyond--or at least the hallway. No matter how much I might try to disguise it, he must have sensed that I didn't always leave the apartment reluctantly. Sometimes when he was at loose ends--when the je ne sais quoi of contentment had escaped him--he'd remember the bolted door and make a dash for it, impatient to wander under the flickery florescent lights and sniff. (Watching him down the hall, I was struck again by how big he was: softer than a fox and not so high, yet at least as long. At night in bed, though, his size was never in doubt, especially when there were three of us. Spread out stiffly wherever you were hoping to put your arms, your legs, your feet, or head, he became unrearrangeable: a lunk.)

Two and a half years ago Alfredo developed chronic renal failure. This progressive kidney disease is nearly synonymous with old age in cats, so many of them die of it. But in the meantime (anywhere from six months to a few years), the cat feels pretty good as long as he's eating and drinking. The problem is, he experiences hunger as nausea and doesn't want to eat. Alfredo, once an avid diner ("He chomps like a dinosaur," complained a friend), would hardly touch food or water on his own.

So after trying all sorts of fussy-cat foods, I fed him myself. I'd snatch him off the bed, where he assumed a defensive crouch as soon as he saw me coming (when I waited too long, he'd take the position unprovoked), and carry him into the bathroom. Wrapped in a towel and held between my legs, he'd down droppers of imitation fish-milk with smacks and gulps and grunts and sighs. We reminded my mother of the Madonna and Child. I thought Fern and Wilbur from Charlotte's Web was more like it, but it did feel special.

IN THE LAST MONTHS on the way to the bathroom, he fell into flamenco deep song, where the keening descending chords expire in an exhalation of despair. If he was silent, I'd start us off--and Alfredo, king of suffering, would sing louder and longer to drown me out.

My life revolved around twenty-seven droppers a day, five to seven at a shot, timed as well as my work would allow to keep his nausea at bay. I had a job away from home now that often held me late; on the subway back to Queens, I scrawled my schedule on the backs of envelopes:

feed alfredo
pet alfredo
do stretches
feed alfredo
dinner
feed alfredo
bed

It was the job I resented, not the feedings. After a meal Alfredo sat sphinxlike on our mattress, his eyes half-closed in pleasure. I lay face down with my nose pressed against his side and wreathed my arms around him; he draped a paw over the closest arm, as if to say, You are mine.

It is possible that a person trapped in such close quarters with me for sixteen years would also eventually have shown he felt my love, that I mattered, that I had touched him: proof that I am not alone. But it probably wouldn't have been so clear. Person-to-person love can seem awfully like self-duplication or self-betrayal--and vice versa. With Alfredo, there was no danger of getting mired in a hall of mirrors: however many of my habits he took on, I would never mistake him for me. It's a wonderful paradox that, in being so alien, an animal allows you the same unself-consciousness he glories in. You can tell you've touched him, but you don't worry about the you or the him. And he lets you find yourself in him without you even knowing it's you.

Alfredo changed me--the ideas I live by. More and more, I imagined the luxurious fruitlessness of lying all day on bed or carpet, in soft holes in backyards, on piles of dirty clothes in closets that reeked of cat at his mustiest, with nothing much to think about or worry over. My wretched food would be provided for, and the special lady's enormous face would rub against my whiskers. Shaded in melancholy, Alfredo proved the perfect source for daydream: I wouldn't have to relinquish my muddy mix of feeling to be in his place.

But he couldn't have said how he felt, like I can. It's an old question, what humans gain from our keen consciousness. And for me it's had a particular New York cast to it for the last ten years. I moved across the country, to a room with a view of pigeon-shitted brick, because I didn't want to be an office assistant for scheming Israelis forever. I wanted work that mattered.

Now that I'm older and more defeated (that's a New York state of mind, too), I'm not sure any work could matter as much as a big, soft hole.

The month Alfredo died, I added another absurd job to the roster. The week at the office ends with the usual ritual questions about what you're doing this weekend. People understand that those two leftover days may say more about you than anything over the last five. When, a few Fridays ago, a colleague asked me, I said, "I'm going to lie around with my kitty."

Books and flowers

Wood engraving by Raoul Dufy from my namesake's bestiary poems, subtitled "Procession of Orpheus" (1911)

Notes on ballet events long past

William Forsythe's "Impressing the Czar," performed by the Royal Ballet of Flanders at the Lincoln Center Festival in the company's U.S. debut, late July. I was particularly struck by the choreographer's deftness at fomenting spectacle. The guy's a theater animal! a genius showman!--whatever his avant-garde ambitions. Why does no one talk about this?


The royal court, an Olympian, and bongo teen spirit mashed together in "Impressing the Czar"


Europeans and Europhiles tend to focus on Forsythe's deep meanings--his subversions of ballet convention, of theatrical convention, of narrative, of capitalism, of what have you-- and applaud him for his wisdom. Not finding much wisdom, his fellow Americans (the guy's from Manhasset) deem him a fake. (His ponderous program notes don't help.) They especially take issue with his torquing of the ballet torso, contending that it's not an evolution of classical symmetries so much as their destruction.

But with the slippery, smooth Royal Flanders dancers, you can see his love of ballet--of its flight, in particular. The Belgians' arms extend from their backs like wings, evoking the infinity lines of tiled Eastern arabesques.
And the way Forsythe keeps the action moving--his masterful, cinematic capacity to get us to follow the frames of action he has envisioned, no matter how much action is transpiring at once--is exciting throughout.

Act 1 (pictured above) recalls Balanchine's "Nutcracker" party scene--our gaze somehow lured first to the naughty boys, then to the docile girls, then to the serving maids and the grandparents, even though he has none of the focusing advantage of a camera, only a magician's knack for attracting the eye or letting it wander--except Forsythe's configurations are more unruly and the clans more motley.

In dancey Act 2, titled "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" and regularly presented by American troupes as a stand-alone piece, dancers on the stage's shadowy margins evoke the action at centerstage like an echo fading into silence recalls the instigating shout. The eerie effect is to soften the proscenium's hard edges so you imagine feathery versions of this beautiful, hypermute dance floating out into the city like deja-vus.

The final scene effectively takes the piss out of Nijinsky-Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," with men and women--dressed alike as dumb, disobedient Catholic school girls--doing a funky circle dance (aptly dubbed Bongo Bongo Nageela) around the prone figure of one mythical Greek figure you probably haven't heard of, Mr. Pnut.

Of course, the program notes make huge claims for Forsythe--that he's resurrecting and simultaneously dismantling the history of Western dance. But for me, "Impressing the Czar" doesn't stand up under much analysis. Except for "In the Middle," the evening's piece de resistance, in which the effulgent stream of movement hides vortexes of invisibility (just as in Thom Willems's Sound of Noisey score there are moments when the sound gets sucked into a vacuum), the main virtue of the evening-length work is how fun it is: no mean feat.



Veronika Part in "La Bayadere," American Ballet Theatre, Monday June 23. I'll get in trouble for this--especially after ballet fans praised Part so highly--but when someone (a colleague I am friendly with, Laura Jacobs) puts out the critic's equivalent of a fatwa --"Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her," from a New Criterion essay excerpted here on husband James Wolcott's Vanity Fair blog -- how can I resist?

I think I understand why critics are so divided, with Jacobs and Joel Lobenthal of the New York Sun loving Part, Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times and Robert Gottlieb of the New York Observer despising her, and many of us somewhere in between. It's because she is being divided. She's a lyrical, non-actorly dancer in a company that specializes in story ballets.

She's got one texture, one setting--a very lovely legato--whether she's playing a doomed temple dancer or a teenage princess. Part is always more herself than she is a vessel for the role. That's not a fault in itself--Nureyev was like that too--but I do think it's why critics object to her. (People objected to him too, and he was greater.)

You could divide people--and among them, critics--into those who are impressed with artists who make us conscious of their style and those who are not: those who love the verbal acrobatics of a Nabokov and those who prefer the self-effacements of a Willa Cather.

Me, I'm probably closer to the Cather side--convinced that personality and style per se (it probably never is per se, but people speak of it as if it were) are overrated, in art as in everything else. Still, Part has impressed me in lyrical roles, where no acting is required. Though she dances Balanchine's "Symphonie Concertante" and "Mozartiana" slowly, she's musical enough to justify the tempo, and the texture this leisurely pace enables is delicious.



American Ballet Theatre's "Giselle," Monday July 7 at the Metropolitan Opera House, with Nina Ananiashvili as Giselle, Angel Corella as Albrecht, and Gillian Murphy as chief Wili, Myrta. I've seen "Giselle"--and especially ABT's stirring version--many times, but only on this sultry summer night did it occur to me that Giselle is making a double sacrifice when she rescues Albrecht from the clutches of the Wilis--the tribe of once jilted maidens, now spirits, who dance to death any man wandering into their woods after dark. (How does Giselle save him? She gets him to dance with her until dawn.)


The choreography for the corps is so strong and was so well delivered July 7 (led by Melissa Thomas and an astounding Zhong-Jing Fang, whose arching back created a maelstrom of conflicting feelings with every arabesque) that they became a sisterhood: a positive thing in itself, whatever its purpose. Once she's finished saving her lover, Giselle won't ever belong. For a ghostly eternity, she will be a pariah to the women and apart from the man. That she will always be in his heart hardly matters since it won't be within reach.

The sisterhood, with deputies Melissa Thomas and Zhong-Jing Fang in front

As lead Wili Myrta, Gillian Murphy underscored how much these women had lost. In her opening solo, she introduced the tribe with a steely chill: after bourreeing in and out of view like the wraith she is, she stopped dead in a perfect 90 degree arabesque, sharp and fine like a sword. But the bourrees, and the arms she wreathed around her torso, were so soft and sensual that you heard the music's pathos. Murphy brought into focus how Myrta's lethal resolve arises out of great disappointment. (This is what an actor-dancer can do: illuminate the story.)

I was also struck by the symmetry of Giselle and Albrecht's romanceful dancing in Act I. It's rare that a ballerina and her cavalier perform the same steps. He's usually consigned to the heavy lifting that allows her to float, plus some big jumps and turns. But in this 1841 ballet they leap and hop together. It's such a nice Romantic touch, that despite the unevenness of their stations (he a prince, she a peasant), in love they dance alike. Forward to the Revolution!

Even in the tag-team endurance test that makes up most of Act II, Albrecht and Giselle do versions (inversions, really) of each other's steps: her ghostly two-footed hops (up and up and up and up!) and backward-moving ronde de jamb hops echo his cabriole beats and forward slides into assemble-entrechats. In the final moments, when they have come full circle, they return to mirroring each other. They once played together without a shadow of doubt. Now again there are no doubts, but many shadows.

Nina Ananiashvili came into her own in the second act. She was bright, soft, determined, and a bit frightened by her own ghostly shell. Angel Corella has always been spectacular in the final scenes, but it was hard not to giggle when he'd throw himself recklessly into a turn and still manage a kabillion revolutions before the bar of music was out. You weren't watching Albrecht, desperate for his life. You were watching cocksure Corella. Now when he's closing in on dawn, he doesn't look like he could get up and run through the whole trial again. And when Giselle leaves him to make his way back to life, it's not a moment of triumph or defeat but of acquiescence: he's alive, but the woman he's finally convinced he loves is gone. As the curtain falls, Corella looks out at us without relief or hope and walks with a steady, slow gait toward the lip of the stage.

American Ballet Theatre should do "Giselle" every summer. Though surely the ballet has survived because it is better than most from the Romantic era, it makes me want to see some others, even ones in at least irregular rotation, such as "La Fille Mal Gardee" (how is the version by Nijinska, that latter-day revolutionary?) and "La Sylphide" (which I've never seen ABT do, though know they have not long ago. Perhaps if their latest version isn't up to snuff, they could work out some sort of exchange with Nikolaj Hubbe, new Royal Danish Ballet head: you can have our best Fokine --"Petrushka" and "Les Sylphides"--for your "La Sylphide.")

I'm grateful for how much dance matters to the "Giselle" libretto and how the ballet spares us the divertissements of the late 19th century that neither advance the story nor its themes, as well as the rickety remains of imperial thinking, such as those balletified folk numbers that invite us to play kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses and imagine the world as our precious oyster. However much "Giselle" is a fairytale, the core of the drama is real--not just that an aristocratic cad takes advantage of a woman and a peasant, but also that desire isn't predictable, that he thought she wouldn't matter but she did; that he thought he knew what joy was, but he didn't, not until she showed up.

And it complements the other emancipations that Romantics wrote about, rallied for, or at least sympathized with: the idea of elective affinities--a wonder about the phenomenology of desire; the notion that feeling is inherently uncapturable and even unabatable, like the Sylphide whose dancing her lover James can't control without destroying her; the terror and triumph of the mob, the clan, the folk, the nation (a new idea, nationhood); the yearnings for nature, for natural man, for exchanging places with creatures (nightingales, sylphs, women and peasants [oops!]) who have no idea about this "I think, therefore I am" credo of the Enlightenment (without which there would have been no Rights of Man, sure, and the Romantics knew it): the Romantics believed in extending dignity even to those who didn't think, or at least not like them.

Granted, Petipa-Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," from the late 19th century, has all the supernatural elements of "La Sylphide" or "Giselle." There's a swan-woman, fickle royalty, the unpredictability of love. But this lady swan is a queen from the start. She's like Cinderella, who may look like a char girl but at heart is an aristocrat, while her wicked stepsisters are hopelessly bourgeois--gauche because striving. Odette the swan queen's evil double, Odile, is also ambitious. She has no idea how to be demure: she is a brazen hussy. Plus, those ballroom interludes of ethnic dances had long lost whatever sense they once had of celebrating nations budding out of fragmented former empires and became a memento to a Czarist audience who were voyeurs of the world.

I don't think it's an accident that you can trace the most glorious moments of the late 19th century ballets back to Romantic precedent: the morbid Kingdom of the Shades in Petipa's "La Bayadere," where the fickle warrior Solor dreams of an infinite peace far outside any kingdom's grasp (like Keats' anguished poet, De Quincey's opium eater, and the dejected Coleridge, seeing in the moon a "cloudless, starless lake of blue," Solor is half in love with death); or Lev Ivanov's chorus of swans in "Swan Lake" or snowflakes in "Nutcracker," who embody the grace where swan and dancer meet, where nature and culture merge; or the fairy solos at the birthday party in Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty," in which each fairy bestows on baby Aurora her own unique gift--as unique as each of our pursuits of happiness. Together the fairies' gifts make up a whole that is greater, even, than the sum of its marvelously idiosyncratic parts.


For your viewing pleasure, here are the final moments of ABT's 1977 "Giselle," with Baryshnikov as Albrecht, Natalia Makarova as Giselle, and Martine Van Hamel (who performs character roles with the company these days--and she's terrific) as Myrta. Baryshnikov interprets the ending very differently than Corella. He piles petals in his arms only to shed them like tears: life and happiness don't last is the tragic fact he can't get out from under as the ballet comes to a close.

Here's a minute of the audience going crazy at the July 7 curtain calls.

MORE on Foot: For more on the "terror and triumph of the mob," see Paul Parish's incredible post from spring 2007, in which he discusses ballets by Eugene Loring, Bournonville, Forsythe, and several other choreographers. Related is a multipart discussion between Paul, Brian Seibert, and me on the corps in Balanchine's "Serenade" (and the effect of the ensemble size in his "Liebeslieder Walzer")