Brain food

Lincoln Center Festival 96: Thomson, Cunningham, Machover

by Lloyd Schwartz

Remember the old PR slogan "New York Is a Summer Festival"? For the past three weeks, New York has finally come through with a genuine festival of international stature, including performances of Ocean, the last joint effort in the 50 years of collaboration between the late guru of chance music, John Cage, and the perhaps greater guru of modern dance, Merce Cunningham; Robert Wilson's production of one of the legendary works of modernism, Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts (which ran six weeks on Broadway after its 1934 Hartford premiere but never in an actual New York opera house); the world premiere of MIT electronic-music pioneer Tod Machover's ambitious new Brain Opera; Dublin's Gate Theatre in all 19 stage works of Samuel Beckett, performed together for the first time in America; the American debut of John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique; the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus; the Lyon Opera Ballet's controversial modern-dress Coppélia; a Vietnamese water-puppet theater; a Japanese gagaku ensemble; the Kronos Quartet in a tribute to the late Morton Feldman; an all-star tribute (including Allen Ginsberg) to the very much alive Yehudi Menuhin; and even more -- all part of an $8.5 million enterprise called Lincoln Center Festival 96, organized and supervised by former New York Times music critic John Rockwell. Meanwhile Boston can't raise a fraction of that amount to repair its only opera house.

Opportunities to see Four Saints in Three Acts are rare enough, and nothing could keep me from seeing my first production of what I think is the Great American Opera. So I spent last weekend in the arts capital of the world and caught three of the festival's major events. The Beckett plays were already sold out, Cunningham was packed, and tickets disappeared quickly for all but the first two of the 84 free performances of Brain Opera. The excitement was everywhere. You could overhear people walking down Broadway arguing over Gertrude Stein.

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Ocean began at 9:30, just after dark, and lasted exactly 90 minutes: you could read out the seconds on monitors surrounding the circular stage in Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park. The stage was surrounded by four "erector-set" lighting towers ("At the round earth's imagined corners"), which were in turn surrounded by specially built bleachers for the audience, at the top of which, surrounding the audience, were perched 112 musicians playing Andrew Culver's realization of Cage's complexly layered but delicate score (five sets of 19 "compositions," each performed by a separate player without a conductor), along with David Tudor's electronic score "performed" live near the stage. Behind all this were the lights of New York, and overhead, a threatening but co-operative sky. It was like a version of what young Stephen Dedalus wrote after his name in his geography book: Class of the Elements/Clongowes Wood College/Sallins/County Kildare/Ireland/Europe/The World/The Universe.

Cunningham's particular element here was, of course, water. Ocean was inspired by the theory that James Joyce's next work after Finnegans Wake would have been about the sea. Marsha Skinner says her wine-dark sea of unitards and waves of light were inspired by Moby Dick. But Cunningham's endlessly hypnotic dance is more like a 90-minute gloss on Ariel's song from The Tempest: "Of his bones are coral made . . . Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange."

Fifteen beautiful dancers -- mostly in dark blues, greens, and purples, but with some startlingly brilliant corals later on -- dash on; first one, then two, then small groups (all 15 finally appear together close to the end). They are buffeted by waves and tides. They bob and weave. They lunge and sway. They support each other in some of Cunningham's most poignant poses. No choreographer ever had a more dramatic sense of sudden contrasts between speed and slow motion. It's all a metaphor, of course. When the 77-year-old master hobbled onto the stage for his final ovation, it was as if the entire dance had taken place in his head.

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Tod Machover's Brain Opera plays with MIT Media Lab professor Marvin Minsky's philosophical speculations about music as a multi-layered mental process. At this two-hour event, 125 spectator-participants enter a "Mind Forest" -- a dark room crowded with sculpted devices, equipment, toys: Singing, Speaking, and Rhythm Trees; Gesture Walls; Melody Easels. Two people can sit inside the "Harmonic Driving" machine (a cross between a bumper car and a video driving game, complete with joy sticks). You sing a note and listen to how it's altered electronically. You wave your arms before a shower curtain or press your fingers around a glass screen or speak back to Minsky's probing but sometimes jejune questions: What is music? Do you hear something different each time you hear the same piece? What do you think when you listen? And so on. Then you go into a concert hall where three MIT students "conduct" an electronic performance, which includes some interactive live Internet participants.

In fact, waiting in line to use the toys was as frustrating as waiting for any amusement-park ride, and I found the electronic sampling confusing -- sometimes it was hard to tell exactly what effect my movements were making. You were misled, too, to think that what you said, sang, tapped out, or waved around in the lobby would actually be part of the performance (it wasn't). Machover is the best composer of electronic music I know (I'm sorry I missed the evening that included his three marvelous "hyper-instrument" concertos), and a slow sequence that included such gloriously familiar pre-recorded voices as those of Lorraine Hunt, Sanford Sylvan, Karol Bennett, and Anne Azema was gorgeous in the best Machover fashion. But clocking in at 45 minutes, Brain Opera was mostly a little tedious and too familiar. Maybe this time Machover fell into the very trap I'd always admired him for avoiding, letting the electronic apparatus become more interesting than the music he was composing for it.

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I was expecting Four Saints to be the highlight of the weekend, but I left the New York State Theatre disappointed and irritated. I've never seen a Robert Wilson production I've liked, though I missed the original Einstein on the Beach, which I take on faith was a triumph. I'd hoped that Wilson's vivid stage imagery might really mesh with Stein's playful no-nonsense nonsense, or at least with the American hymn tunes and spirituals and social dances (etc.) with which Thomson filled his radiant score.

But all but a couple of minutes of Four Saints seems a betrayal of this heavenly work. Thomson and Stein and a group called the Friends and Enemies of New Music were attacking not only the melodrama and sentimentality of traditional opera but also the pretentiousness of the avant-garde. But what Wilson lacks in sentimentality (partly because there's no genuine feeling) he makes up for in pretension. And coyness. Because he never connects with either the words or the tunes or even most of the rhythms. People leave the theater thinking that this slyly subtle work about heavenly domesticity and simplicity, sainthood and martyrdom and playfulness, is really about nothing. Wilson visualizes St. Ignatius's great moment of revelation, "Pigeons on the grass alas" (has he just seen the Holy Spirit?), with a Puck-like figure walking across a balance beam. No wonder the audience was confused.

Thomson's friend Maurice Grosser created an ex-post-facto scenario that Thomson and Stein approved of. It's even printed in the program. The open-endedness of Four Saints doesn't demand that directors stick to that scenario. But a staging of Four Saints needs to lead the audience into and through its verbal and musical mazes. Instead, Wilson sets up barriers, walls, his own opaque visual maze. Although when the seemingly empty stage becomes mysteriously filled with a herd of flat sheep cutouts (lifted to visibility by strings from above, then lifted right off the stage into the rafters), Wilson captures some of the opera's peculiar insouciance. His chorus of male and female saints in white hoop skirts follows the solemn procession of the two St. Theresas and St. Ignatius to their martyrdom with just the right mixture of solemnity and silliness. A cutout of a house suddenly ignites at the end. And yet, I didn't notice and can't remember which music was playing or what people were singing when these memorable events took place.

Wilson wasn't helped by the decision to use supertitles. Of course, it's hard to sing and harder to understand English clearly. Still, one doesn't want to look away from a Wilson production, like it or not. But if you did need to check a word or phrase, either it was gone before you could read it or it wasn't there to begin with. This was sheer technical ineptitude.

On the other hand, singers like Sanford Sylvan (St. Ignatius) and tenor Gran Wilson (St. Chavez) didn't need titles -- you could hear and follow every word. In my book, Sylvan was the star of this show, singing with the profoundest eloquence, simplicity, and sincerity -- singing as if he understood every syllable (so it didn't matter whether or not you did). Saints Theresa I and II, soprano Ashley Putnam and mezzo Suzanna Guzman, were far harder to understand (and Putnam's upper register has not warmed up since Sarah Caldwell's 1981 Rigoletto). I liked mezzo Marietta Simpson's warmth and wit but didn't care for bass Wilbur Pauley's archness and grainy vocalism as Commère and Compère (the equivalents of minstrel-show endmen). Dennis Russell Davies conducted the New York City Opera Chorus and the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra (the production premiered in Houston) with delicacy and spunk and built Thomson's glorious ensembles to ecstatic climaxes.

At one point near the end, Wilson has six cutout giraffes stick their necks out from both stage wings (I found out later they're supposed to be llamas). A friend commented afterward, "Giraffes up my ass -- alas." I think we were all being shafted by this production -- not least of all Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.

Would I have missed it? Not on your life.