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Thursday, June 5, 2008
ASO Premieres Ranjbaran Piano Concerto
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Symphony is more convincing than most major U.S. orchestras when it comes to contemporary music. They’ve made a big deal of new works by Osvaldo Golijov and John Adams and Jennifer Higdon — a spectrum of styles and influences — and the payoff has been huge, boosting its national reputation and creating local enthusiasm for its experiments.
Some have got to be more successful than others.
Behzad Ranjbaran’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was commissioned by the ASO for pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and given its world premiere Thursday in Symphony Hall. By design, it’s a concerto in the grand model, where a loud and resplendent orchestra sometimes supports, sometimes clashes with a heroic soloist. What actually came across was a 32-minute piece of music plump with intriguing details but that had trouble expressing itself beyond the stock gestures of late 19th century Romanticism.
Born in Iran in 1955 and now living in New York, Ranjbaran includes Persian imagery in the concerto, albeit filtered through a standard orchestral vocabulary. He uses his musical heritage not so much as spices in a meal as for the colorful serving dish that holds boiled meat and mashed potatoes.
It opens with a muscular horn call and thwacks on the drum before the piano roars in, commanding the full keyboard yet, curiously, not making much of a statement. The orchestral textures are generally clear, where instrumental sections don’t blot each other out. Occasionally, a perfumed, modal and ear-catching sound rises from the ensemble, and it’s a pity these never develop into meaningful expression.
The composer tailored the solo part to Thibaudet’s athletic and crystalline playing, yet the solo part comes off mostly as filigree. Lots of notes, all 10 fingers cascading down the keys at top speed, expressing no emotion. It’s a hollow part.
The nocturnal second movement, subtitled “Distant Dreams,” held more appeal and the promise of intimacy, with delicate, lovely dialogue between Thibaudet and harpist Elisabeth Remy Johnson. The third movement skips along, reprising bits heard earlier, revving up for a showy, explosive finale.
Still, these might be minority opinions: the audience gave the concerto a sustained standing O, and brought Thibaudet, conductor Robert Spano and the composer back to center stage at least three times.
The concerto, to my ears, evoked the romantic bombast of reheated Rachmaninoff. So it was a delight to hear the source in a major work of quirky imagination.
You’ve got to admire Spano’s conviction that all three of Rachmaninoff’s symphonies, which might best be described as “inspired but uneven,” are worth the effort and expense of playing and hearing. The first two were offered earlier this season. The Third, from 1936, closed the evening Thursday.
Spano has described himself with some enthusiasm as a “Rachmaninoff freak,” so we can believe that his evangelicalism for the cause is genuine. And at the start of this season, in an interview with me, Spano said of the symphony: “There’s a grit and acidity and classicism and cleanliness in the third. By the end, it’s Apollonian and lean.”
Spano is good on his word. Thursday he drained what little fat and voluptuousness thicken the score, especially in the long-limbed second movement. He didn’t conduct the Third as modernized Hollywood, as many interpreters do, but as a kin to Sibelius, brooding and organic and on the threshold of deep self-discovery. The ASO responded magnificently.
Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 2 — it was an ill-fitted program — opened the evening. It didn’t sound well rehearsed, although the quiet middle movement settled into pure serenity, with violinist Cecylia Arzewski, flutist Christina Smith and oboist Elizabeth Koch trading phrases of imperishable beauty.
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THEATER REVIEW: ‘Clean House’ can be a tad cluttered
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B
Two sisters and a maid. A woman who laughs herself to death. And a doctor who storms Alaska in pursuit of a cancer-curing tree.
Like hybrid creations from the case studies of Oliver Sacks and the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, such characters dance through the magical world of Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House” — a sweet, lovely surprise of a play at Horizon Theatre that meditates on the fickle chemistry of happiness and housekeeping, dust and desire, laughter and forgiveness.
Ruhl, lest you haven’t heard, is a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and all-around golden girl of contemporary drama. Starting out as a poet, she was coaxed from the garret by Brown University professor/playwright Paul Vogel, who insisted that the prodigious writer try her hand at drama. Vogel (“How I Learned to Drive”) claims the results— including the brand-new “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” and “Eurydice,” recently seen in an elegant Alliance Theatre production — are her greatest contribution to American theater.
When overworked medical doctor Lane (Carolyn Cook) hires the dreamy Brazilian joke writer Matilde (Suehyla El-Attar) to keep her house, she discovers that her tolerance for dust is about as short as her capacity for forgiveness.
Fortunately for Matilde, Lane’s sister Virginia (Jill Jane Clements) likes to clean, an obsession that seems to be a device for sublimating her desires and disappointments. Unfortunately for Lane, her surgeon-husband Charles (James Donadio) falls under the spell of one of his mastectomy patients, a free-spirited Argentinian woman named Ana (Mary Lynn Owen). (The scene involving their operatic, operating-table love-making is a stitch.)
As it turns out, Ana reminds Matilde of her mother, whose death by laughter was a giddy tribute to the joke-telling skills of Ana’s father. When we first spy Matilde, she is telling us a joke — in Portuguese.
Ruhl’s intricately laced ironies and touches of magic realism call for a delicate, almost languid approach. Though director Lisa Adler and company deliver a production that’s handsomely designed and performed, some subtleties of Ruhl’s dreamy, absurdist philosophy get lost in the broadly comic, overly choreographed staging.
As polar opposites on the behavioral spectrum, Cook’s uptight Lane and Owen’s delightfully quirky Ana are the heart and soul of this rich stew. Stuck in an atrocious long gray wig, Owen nonetheless manages to convey how Ana’s beauty comes from within. (Notice how this woman relishes a good apple, and a good joke.)
Donadio’s understated style is a nice foil to the gayety, but it would be interesting to see how another actor might exploit his character’s inventive nature. Clements manages to add yet more wrinkles to her endless supply of facial tics. But you wish that dialect coach Cynthia Barrett could evince a more authentic sounding accent from El-Attar, who has become a favorite go-to actress for playing big-hearted ethnic types.
Sound designer Chris Bartelski’s choice of Brazilian singers Joao Gilberto and Virginia Rodriques enhance the play’s notes of saudade, and Tamara McElhannon’s all-white interior is smartly realized and visually handsome.
This production may be a tad disappointing at times — the tone sometimes uses vacuum-cleaner aggressiveness where feather-duster gentleness might have sufficed — but it’s certainly not a mess. Let love and laughter into your soul, the playwright seems to be saying, and don’t worry so much about the dust and drek of outward appearances. Probably no one cares what’s under your rug — but you.
The 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays. 8:30 p.m. Saturdays. 5 p.m. Wednesdays. Through June 29. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Little Five Points. 404-584-7450, horizontheatre.com
Bottom line: A nice glimpse into the mind of a celebrated young playwright.
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Richard Engel’s Five Years in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Richard Engel has covered the war in Iraq since its beginning, for NBC and MSNBC.
His new book, “War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq” was praised by Publisher’s Weekly: “Engel’s fine, heartfelt but disabused account of this bewildering conflict renders the suffering in Iraq with understanding and compassion.”
Engel will discuss and sign “War Journal” at 7 tonight at the Jimmy Carter Center. You must buy the book from sponsor A Cappella Books at the event to have Engel sign it.
MSNBC published an excerpt on its website. Here’s an excerpt of that excerpt.
Ad-Dur, Iraq
December 15, 2003
No one was to come in or out.
Dozens of American soldiers formed a defensive circle around the palm grove, silently keeping watch. Gunners in the turrets of Humvees parked next to the troops turned hand cranks at their waists to pan .50 caliber machine guns left and right, training the long gun barrels on the dense trees around the edges of the grove.
“Got to keep your eyes moving.
“Got to look out for snipers.
“Got to protect the circle.
“Nothing can go wrong today,
“Not in front of all these reporters.”
It was a big day, and we all knew it. I was at the center of this defensive ring of American muscle and machines along with about a dozen other journalists. We probably looked ridiculous to the troops. They had their uniforms: khaki combat boots, M4 rifles, Kevlar helmets, and Wiley X ballistic sunglasses. We had our uniforms: brightly colored flak jackets (mine was sky blue), cameras, tripods, notebooks, khakis, and quick-dry synthetic shirts.
The army had choppered us into this clearing on two Black Hawks to see what didn’t look like much from the outside: a tiny cinder block farmhouse with a garden filled with sunflowers, oranges, and pomegranate trees. The fruit looked almost ripe on the cool bright December morning. But no one would be picking it. Not from this house. Not anymore.
“We have a cordon around the area, but it is still dangerous. Don’t wander off,” an army officer warned. My canvas hiking boots stuck in the soft black soil as I walked to the farmhouse and through its thatch gate.
But what I saw inside didn’t make any sense to me. Military officials said Saddam Hussein was captured hiding in a hole. I didn’t see any hole, but only a typical one-room Iraqi farmhouse with a cement patio in front where laundry and basterma (Arab pastrami) were drying on a line.
One of the biggest manhunts in history had led the U.S. military here: Saddam’s safe house where he slept and apparently cooked for himself. It seemed that he lived badly as a fugitive. My mother would have called the place, like my room growing up, “a pigsty.” There were broken eggs on the floor, a dirty frying pan atop a gas burner, and a half-eaten Mars bar and an open bottle of moisturizer on a wooden stand next to a single, unmade twin bed.
I imagined the dictator, who had lived in palaces with hundreds of servants, suddenly forced to fend for himself like a freshman in college who, no longer having his mother to pick up after him, eats junk food and doesn’t clean up. It must have been a tough adjustment for Saddam. One of his private chefs told me the Iraqi leader was a finicky eater, often struggling with his weight; he always made himself a bit thinner in his statues. He liked vegetables and mutton stews, and would fine the chef if he used too much oil. Saddam would tip him if meals were particularly tasty and light. He liked things just so.
One of Saddam’s palace maids — like many, a Christian woman (Saddam thought Iraqi Christians to be especially honest and clean) — told me Saddam was also so fastidious about hygiene that she was required to take off her shoes and walk barefoot across a mat soaked in disinfectant before entering his bedroom. Saddam couldn’t have liked living in this farmhouse, just three miles from his dusty home village, al-Ouja, which he hated for its poverty.
The poor street thug who intimidated and killed his rivals until he became “al-Rais,” Arabic for both head and president, had come full circle.
“But where’s the hole?” I asked the officer. “Didn’t you find Saddam in a hole?”
He led me back outside to the cement patio with the laundry line.
“At first we didn’t see it either. A soldier was standing right here and didn’t notice the hole until he kicked aside this mat,” the officer said, pulling back a plastic tarp on the ground. Underneath was a Styrofoam cork in the cement about the size of a big fishing tackle box.
“When the soldier removed this Styrofoam cover,” he said, “Saddam was inside. Saddam put his hands up and said, ‘I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am ready to negotiate.’ “
Saddam apparently lived in the farmhouse most of the time, and took refuge in the hole only when danger was close. Saddam also had a pistol, but didn’t use it, and traveled in a beat-up white and orange taxi discovered nearby.
The soldiers were relaxed and joking with journalists. It was a “good news” day and this was the military’s chance to play show-and-tell.
“And what did the soldiers say to Saddam?” one of us asked.
“President Bush sends his regards,” an officer said.
We all laughed.
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