| |
|
|
Romantique is a travesty
BY CAROLYN CLAY
|
Romantique
By Hershey Felder. Music by Frédéric Chopin. Directed by Andrew J. Robinson and Joel Zwick. Set by Yael Pardess. Costumes by Michael D. Hannah. Lighting by Michael T. Gilliam. With Stephanie Zimbalist, Anthony Crivello, and Hershey Felder. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through August 17.
|
|
|
|
CHOPIN, ROMANTIC AND REAL My introduction to Chopin came some 50 years ago via one of those Vox composer-biography 10-inch LPs for children (and some ’50s adults). With the stirring martial introduction to the E-minor Piano Concerto (Romantique’s exit music) as backdrop, the coach that’s conveying our hero to Paris stops at an inn, where he learns that Warsaw has fallen to the tsar. The compatriot with whom he’s traveling decides to return to Poland and fight, and Chopin wants to do the same, but the friend tells him that his mission is to go on to Paris and compose music that will tell the world about Poland, so Fryderyk (as he was then) sits down and whips off the " Revolutionary " Étude — which, in the Hollywood-movie version, would have inspired the Poles to retake Warsaw and drive the Russians from their fatherland. Actually, Hollywood had already done the Chopin story. In Charles Vidor’s 1945 A Song To Remember, Paul Muni is the fatherly Professor Elsner who accompanies his pupil Chopin (a handsome Cornel Wilde) to Paris (the real Professor Elsner remained in Warsaw), where he meets George Sand (the beautiful Merle Oberon) and seems destined for movie-bio bliss until he starts coughing blood all over the keyboard. Chopin also shows up in Hollywood’s version of Franz Liszt’s life, the George Cukor/Charles Vidor Song Without End (1960), where he’s played by Alexander Davion (Dirk Bogarde is Liszt). James Lapine’s 1991 Impromptu stars Judy Davis as Sand, Hugh Grant as Chopin, Ralph Brown as their friend Eugène Delacroix, Mandy Patinkin as Sand’s former lover Alfred de Musset, Julian Sands as Franz Liszt, and Bernadette Peters as Liszt’s mischief-making girlfriend, Marie d’Agoult; the Masterpiece Theatre equivalent of A Song To Remember, it has some winning moments (George under the piano listening to Chopin; the look on Marie’s face when she learns the Opus 25 Études have been dedicated to her) but is even less accurate. The real Chopin was a complex and enigmatic figure, probably manic-depressive, largely asexual (his tuberculosis and an early bout with gonorrhea didn’t help), a man of great sensitivity but not much evident heart. For a well-researched and evenhanded account of his relationship with George Sand, try Tad Szulc’s Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer (Da Capo), which reminds us that those sensational pornographic letters from Chopin to his vocal pupil Countess Delfina Potocka that surfaced after World War II turned out to be a colossal, masterful hoax whose exposure required the conjoined graphological expertise of Interpol and the Polish Communist government. Jeffrey Kallberg’s Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Harvard University Press) depicts an individual on the margin between male and female as well as French and Polish, and he asks whether the breakdown of gender boundary isn’t also a breakdown of musical-genre boundary; his trenchant example is the Opus 61 Polonaise-fantaisie, which from its opening bar explodes traditional modes. Recordings of Chopin’s music are legion, but not many challenge the conventional view of his compositions as sensitive, decorative, and tasteful — certainly not those of WCRB favorites Vladimir Ashkenazy and Murray Perahia. Although Perahia’s recent Grammy-winning traversal of the 24 Études shows more backbone than usual, it won’t satisfy anyone who heard the 10 that Dubravka Tomsic played with blinding speed and hurricane intensity at Symphony Hall this past April. Alas, you won’t easily find her work on CD, or that of old-timers Guiomar Novaes (the inner voices she discovered in the unison last movement of the B-flat-minor Sonata wowed the late Harold Schonberg), Stefan Askenase (when will Deutsche Grammophon issue his two piano concertos on CD?), and Tamás Vásáry (everything Perahia ought to be). Maurizio Pollini has recorded most of the Chopin repertoire, and his Deutsche Grammophon releases are readily available: he’s poised, patrician, and often poetic, and he clarifies the music’s deeper structure. But for playing that’s simultaneously heroic and imaginative and big in every way, you have to go to Czech pianist Ivan Moravec. His " whole-body " (one is tempted to say holistic) Chopin comes straight from the gut; whether he’s whispering or thundering, it remains round and rich. Originally issued by the Connoisseur Society in the late ’60s, his box of the Préludes, Ballades, and Nocturnes impressed the critics (the audacity of that coffee-break pause after the first phrase of the G-minor Ballade; the titanic, genre-busting scale of the C-minor Nocturne) if not the major labels. Now 73, Moravec continues to tour (will the FleetBoston Celebrity Series please take note?) and record, and though you won’t find many of his discs at Virgin or Tower, he has his own Web site (www.ivanmoravec.net), which will direct you to the appropriate on-line stores. — Jeffrey Gantz
|
Nothing in the popular if hardly brilliant George Gershwin Alone prepares you for the dreadfulness of Romantique, Hershey Felder’s new "imagination with music" centered on the more exalted composer Frédéric Chopin. Hey, you think, if Hugh Grant, more famous for Divine Brown than divine inspiration, can personate Chopin (as he did in the 1991 film Impromptu), anyone can. And unlike Grant, "actor, playwright, composer, and Steinway Concert Artist" Felder knows how to tickle the ivories. But Romantique, which is in its world-premiere production at the Loeb Drama Center, with Remington Steele star Stephanie Zimbalist as the writer (and Chopin’s maternal squeeze) George Sand and Tony winner Anthony Crivello as the painter Eugène Delacroix, is like a stilted parody of a Romantic melodrama, almost every line a cliché. Delacroix, hoping Chopin will play a little something, remarks conversationally on "the divine moment when God takes control of your fingers and I can float to the stars." Sand accuses Chopin of "pouncing on me with your vicious mouth." And Chopin, in a flashback to a troubled night in Mallorca, follows a fevered rendition of the D-flat "Raindrop" Prélude with the claim that there is no rain in his music, "just tears in heaven, dropping on the page." With heightened twaddle like that excreting from the mouths of the three stars of the Romantic period on which Romantique lingers, we are left with the play’s "fourth character," the beautiful piano repertoire of Chopin, in which Felder traffics at a richly draped Steinway but without particular insight. (If the play itself were not egregious, I’d vote for a drag production starring Dubravka Tomsic.) Felder’s Gershwin show, a runaway Cambridge hit last summer that the ART reprised before doing this one, is a novel, workmanlike biographical piece filled with the jazzy sounds of its subject (including Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety). Felder, who also sings, renders that material more aggressively and less buoyantly than Gershwin but with polish. And the show provides interesting glimpses into the composer’s musical idiom as well as into his short, egotistic life. Romantique, on the other hand, is just plain terrible. Set in 1846, it’s narrated by Delacroix (both Sand’s friend and Chopin’s; his unfinished portrait of the couple, bisected after the artist’s death, dominates Yael Pardess’s lavish set), and it takes place during what was to be Chopin’s last visit to Sand’s country estate at Nohant. Both a valentine to the artistic sensibility and an anticipation of the painful break between Chopin and Sand that was to occur a year later, the work is pretentious and, even at 90 minutes, laborious. And it’s not saved by Felder’s execution of Chopin’s piano music, ostensibly as the tubercular genius himself — though the author/actor/pianist, in a scene where Chopin is miffed, does whiz through the G-minor Prélude in impressive record time. In fact, Delacroix did spend two weeks in August 1846 at Nohant, where he enjoyed listening to Chopin play Beethoven. Here he’s more like Nick and Honey showing up at George and Martha’s in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? just in time to watch the host couple air their bruises. But there’s none of Albee’s corrosive passion on view in Romantique. Instead, amid Hallmark talk about Art, the argument between Sand and Chopin takes the stale form of a play-within-a-play, a dramatization of Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani. After Delacroix flunks an acting test, Sand and Chopin play out a scene from the work, which many — including Delacroix — believed to betray the ill, dependent composer in an unflattering light, though Chopin himself appeared not to identify with the character of Prince Karol, who is a "sycophant" rather than an "artist." It is impossible to evaluate the performances in such a lame piece of dramatic writing — the best part of which is Delacroix’s narrative summing up of the demise of the Chopin/Sand relationship, a sad coda played out against the Waltz in C-sharp minor. Crivello plays Delacroix, who’s troubled by the tension between his friends, with knitted brow and hand poised behind back. There is some emotional truth to Zimbalist’s striding Sand, primarily in her eyes, when she doesn’t have to speak Felder’s wooden, overdramatic dialogue (some of it lifted from Lucrezia Floriani). Felder is a sensitive, neurotic, if insufficiently ill Chopin. Maybe he’ll get sicker when he reads the reviews.
|
