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ASO Smothers Shakespeare with Love
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Friday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats 8 Saturday. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maybe the predictable, weary title — “Shakespeare in Love” — deflated the evening before it began.
Nicholas McGegan, a regular and usually inspiring guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, planned a show of words and music devoted to the Bard.
A great idea, in concept. Famous scenes from five popular plays filled the program. At the front of the stage, actors from Georgia Shakespeare offered the dialogue; three singers delivered arias and songs (by six composers) from music inspired by the plays. The orchestra offered accompaniment. But Friday in Symphony Hall it didn’t flow in performance.
The appeal to musicians is natural: the richest characters in Shakespeare, as in much abstract music, exhibit many ideas at once. The crystal turns, we see the three-dimensional shape, and yet never lose view of each facet.
What’s more, for composers since the 17th century, Shakespeare has been a vital source of some of our deepest tales. As the keeper of eternal truths and human contradictions, his sonnets and plays combine to make a kind of secular mythology. In Finland, they’ve got the “Kalevala,” the folk-religion national epic. The Germans have the “Nibelungenlied,” a dense narrative of gods and middle earth. We’ve got Shakespeare, whom American poet Robert Pinsky recently termed “the central imagination of the English language.”
In a program like this, one hoped to find an undercurrent of politics or culture or language or art — something, anything. Instead, McGegan’s selections yielded no insights into either the drama or the music. It felt pale and stitched together, the whole never making sense of its parts.
“Much Ado About Nothing” inspired Hector Berlioz’s opera “Beatrice et Benedict,” with Megan McFarland and Chris Kayser acting the part of the bickering couple, tumbling into love and years of marital counseling.
“Romeo and Juliet” accomplished little, with Chris Ensweiler and Melinda Helfrich playing the Balcony Scene without much dignity — following the signature style of Georgia Shakespeare productions, which tend to be superficial, campy and quick to histrionics. Sibelius’ 1925 “The Tempest” didn’t hang together as theater, although one of the side benefits of McGegan’s programming was the introduction of music to the ASO repertoire.
In this almost-pops format, its shouldn’t have been surprising that the most compelling exchanges came from a hit musical.
Cole Porter’s 1948 Broadway show “Kiss Me Kate,” a screwball comedy, concerns a troupe of Shakespeareans performing “Taming of the Shrew” on the road. Mezzo Stacey Rishoi snarled and spat and blew a gasket singing “I Hate Men,” her manner dour and mean as all get out, her tone dusky, plush, piercing. It’s a wonderful, fascinating voice.
Andrew Garland’s “Where is the Life that Late I Led?” was just as perfectly pitched, tender, faux-suave, a little campy and disarmingly sincere. Soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird’s pure, unblemished, “white” tone seemed just right for “So In Love.”
Here as elsewhere, the British-born McGegan could be seen on the podium mouthing the words to both the comedy and the songs. He smiled at the witty bits and chuckled at the slapsticky schtick and swooned affectionately toward the orchestra. The whole evening might be simply a case of a conductor who loves his material too much for its own good.
More traditional orchestral fare, Mendelssohn’s incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — here they played just the Wedding March and Finale — closed the evening. Back on safe turf, the ASO finally sounded like its old self, taut and robust and happy to be on stage.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Classical Music
Comments
By James O. Wells
May 24, 2008 7:28 AM | Link to this
Did you ever write a review of the Berlin concerts? Did I miss it? It is to be coming?
By Raver
May 24, 2008 10:41 AM | Link to this
Berlin? Besides a review from our own people, maybe someone could summarize some of the critical reviews (if any) from the German newspapers. Like the above, I never saw anything except the chorus member’s blog which, while delightful, shouldn’t be the only coverage.
By Mike Moore
May 24, 2008 12:59 PM | Link to this
To insult the “signature style” of the GSC is really over the top. Just because they chose to portray Juliet as a real 14 year old girl, instead of as a 30 year old who would say those lines with “dignity” doesn’t make them superficial et al. Chris has spent his life researching and producing truly alive and authentic productions of Shakespeare’s works, in the same style the Globe audiences would have enjoyed. A theatre critic should appreciate that there are multiple valid approaches to a play, no matter how old and famous. This same show would be a hit anywhere for what it is- a fun potpourri of Shakespeare in drama, music and song. It is unfortunate that this review is more about what this show “isn’t.”
By Peter Stelling
May 28, 2008 3:28 PM | Link to this
There is a review of the Berlioz performance from the TAGESSPIEGEL, Berlin, written by Sybill Mahlke, which can be read online. Enter the headline, “Atlanta voices triumph in Berlin” in your search window and click. This will bring up a local review that was aired on WABE, but there is a link to the Berlin review attached. If you can read the original German, you are in luck. The automatic Google translation renders the article comical with its computer-generated hash of fractured English.
By RPS
May 30, 2008 8:21 PM | Link to this
Mike Moore — As everyone knows from the theatre blogs, fans of Ga Shakes are the most thinned skinned. I don’t always agree wiht Mr. Ruhe, yet I found his comments accurate, inasmuch as the acting seemed shallow and all the male characters “gay” — not that anything’s wrong with that as a sexual preference. But everyone gets a gay reference, so what is ZChris’s historical accuracy to make Romeo and Prospero seem gay and the women ditzy? If that’s what Mr. Ruhe described as camp, he’s suggesting more than he’s letting on.