Italics are mine

Favorite Painting at the Corcoran Museum

(Photo credit: Corcoran Museum) To the left is my favorite painting in all of the Corcoran Museum. Every time I see it, it seems more and more obvious to me that its title should be Unbowed (because of the focus on the leading male figure, standing and looking up at the North Star), but since it was painted in the 1930s by an African-American artist, it is not surprising it found its way into museum collections with a very different name: Into Bondage.

Its author, Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. He is well known for his murals as well as his long career as a dedicated teacher at Fisk University, and his modernist style is instantly recognizable. You can see some examples of his work on this website of a 2007 exhibition at the University of Kansas, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. The exhibition booklet is also very informative. My only regret is not to have been aware of it in the summer of 2008 when the exhibition found its way to the Smithsonian in DC.

Just look at the painting - at the Corcoran if possible, because the size of the panel does make a difference - and play Mahler's Fifth Symphony, especially the version recorded by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela - kids who've had their own challenges to overcome - while you're taking in the details. Tell me after that if there is any other name that comes to your mind than: Unbowed.

La Traviata at Wolf Trap

Wolf Trap Opera Company- La Traviata Rehearsal Teaser from Wolf Trap Opera Company on Vimeo.

In July I went to Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA - performing arts' summer home in the Greater DC area. I'd never been but it is among "the" things to do when you love performing arts and find yourself in DC in the summer, so I braved Friday evening's Beltway traffic to attend a performance of La Traviata by the Wolf Trap Opera Company, a young artists' program for tomorrow's stars.

The one-night-only performance was held in the main hall, Filene Center (instead of the smaller Barns), which has seating indoors as well as an lawn outside from which people can enjoy a picnic while listening to great music, and yes you can bring wine too. To my initial surprise, the singers were miked, which I guess is understandable since they are still developing their voice.

Both the orchestra and the singers shared the stage in a "semi-staging", with the orchestra in the background and the singers in a rather narrow stretch of the stage in front. The production made the most of the space available, with each scene being mostly held on one half of the stage on some sort of raised platform, but some of the color choices for Paris in the 1920s were a bit garish for my taste and some of the acting choices were more successful than others.

What made this a great evening for me was the obvious talent and enthusiasm with which the cast - all young singers in their twenties or very early thirties - sang their roles, and they were visibly moved by the well-deserved thundering applause they received during the curtain calls.

Perhaps because of my profession (teacher), giving their chance to young people who are trying to "make it" in their chosen career path always resonates with me, while I couldn't care less about seeing Renee Fleming or Anna Netrebko. For the young cast the evening must have been as memorable as it was for us, and while you can never tell who will succeed and who will fail in that line of work, they are among the most promising singers of their age group.

Here is Anne Midgette's review in the Washington Post. I still question her judgment after she dissed Norma at the Washington National Opera (except for the part where the druidic princesses make their entrance in an Egyptian-like dance, which indeed made no sense at all) - but I fully agree with her kind words on Academy of Vocal Arts graduate Corinne Winters, who sang the title role. In addition to appearances with the Virginia Opera and the Washington National Opera, Winters will make her debut at the Santa Fe Opera next season. If you care about opera, you will have plenty of opportunities to hear a rising star soon enough.

Music Mavericks (Not)

Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker in May about maestro James Levine's return to the pulpit after a two-year hiatus for health reasons ("Return Engagement", June 10 & 17, 2013). There is no doubt that the concert the Met Orchestra gave under his leadership - to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Wagner's birth, no less - was a significant moment of the season, but of course Levine's return was made all the more moving by the daunting medical issues he has faced over the past few years. I remember attending a Met performance where a singer walked him to the edge of the stage for the curtain calls, and he could so barely shuffle his feet that I thought he had not much longer to live. He has made extraordinary contributions to the Met in his forty years there, and I'm very glad he made it through these trying times and appears to be conducting just as well as before.

In the article, Ross raises the question of whether Levine should resume the full duties of a music director, even if he physically can. He points out that Levine has not, in his opinion, shown himself very open to new work, "nor has he led the way in cultivating imaginative theatrical visions." While Opera Philadelphia produced recent Pulitzer-Prize winner Silent Night this past season (about German and French troops in World War 1 who declare a momentary truce for Christmas 1914) and will show Ainadamar (a work not quite ten years old, about the execution of poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the Spanish Civil War) this coming one, the Met doesn't strike by its willingness to depict opera as a vibrant, living art form - instead of a dusty one dominated again and again works by Verdi or Mozart or other long-dead composers, as good as they are.

This echoes what Ross had written back in March in "Illuminated", a New Yorker article about "George Benjamin's long-awaited masterpiece", where he pointed out, among other things, that music amateurs now saw that sort of vanguard, modern operas at Covent Garden in London (which had lowered ticked prices for the run of Benjamin's piece, attracting more diverse crowds, and has announced commissions from a long list of composers) but not in New York. "Against all odds, London's plush old house has established itself as a global center for new opera. In comparison, the Met, for all its technological pizzazz, looks archaic." (I actually loved the Met's recent tech-savvy production of Wagner's Ring, but I agree that it isn't pulling its weight when it comes to supporting current composers, who may be this century's Verdi or Wagner, and fostering new works (the new Traviata? or Barber of Seville?). Thus it has lost an important opportunity to get younger people and people of more modest means than the average Met opera-goer excited about opera.)

In the "Return Engagement" piece, Ross puts in sharp contrast Levine's Met and Alan Gilbert's New York Philharmonic. While the most fervent music mavericks remain staunchly on the West Coast (San Francisco Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas comes to mind), thanks to Gilbert "the New York Philharmonic has lost its veneer of dull prestige." In April it capped an All-American program with Ives's fourth symphony, to great acclaim, and next season its new-music series Contact! will expand to four episodes a year. "At the moment," Ross writes mercilessly (for Levine) but perhaps not inaccurately, "Gilbert is the music director the city needs." 

War/Photography at the Corcoran

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath from Corcoran Gallery of Art on Vimeo.

 

If you only see one exhibition this year, make it War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath at the Corcoran in DC (until September 29). To say that the show is stunning is an understatement - NPR calls it "genre-defining". It is also, at times, profoundly disturbing (the exhibition includes, for instance, the large-scale face shot of a Vietnamese man completely disfigured by napalm during the Vietnam War), but it does not attempt to shock for the sake of shocking - instead, the curators examine the topic of war in a very dispassionate way. Simply, they do not shy from showing us images of conflict far from the aseptised version that we watch on TV. Seeing the exhibition then becomes a matter of, I dare say, public duty. If we're going to let politicians who supposedly represent us vote for war, we might as well get informed on what war really looks like. And that's probably why the galleries were packed when I saw the exhibition, while other rooms of the Corcoran were left empty.

The exhibition covers a lot of ground, so I'll only mention a few works that particularly caught my attention. (I took notes about many, many more, but if you don't see the pictures yourselves there is little point in my sharing my comments on them.) Great photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson captured the stare of on-lookers in remarkable manner. Capa's photograph, taken in Chartres on August 1944, shows us a Frenchwoman whose head has been shaved (the punishment for women accused of sleeping with the enemy at the Liberation), holding her baby while the crowd surrounds her and jeers at her. The stares are even more breathtaking in the picture by Cartier-Bresson, and you have to read the caption to understand why: "In a deportee camp, a Gestapo informer is recognized by a woman she has denounced."

Iconic pictures such as the photograph by Eddie Adams showing Commander Loan killing Viet Cong Van Lem were also included in the show, but the explanations next to the pictures managed to make well-known images such as that one seem fresh and new - did you know that Loan had been well-admired by his peers and subordinates until the incident, and then reviled until the end of his life for it? Similar incidents had taken place throughout Vietnam, but his murder was the one that Adams had photographed.

A remarkable piece of art was the very-large-scale high school class photograph of Marcelo Brodsky and his classmates, taken in 1967, on which Brodsky scribbled in various colors in the mid-1990s what his peers had become, and in particular what had happened to them during Argentina's "Dirty War". My one complaint about the show is that Brodsky's writings, in Spanish, were not translated. Thankfully my French helped me decipher most of the notes. The contrast between the fresh faces of these youthful, smiling kids and what life would soon throw at them was just striking.

I also recognized some of the pictures, such as "Flying military class" by Damon Winter and "Body of an American paratrooper killed in action" by Henri Huet, that I had seen in a photo gallery of the Washington Post - that article had motivated me to go and see the show in the first place. My jaw dropped when I saw "Dresden after Allied raids", by Richard Peter. What enormous, complete destruction.

I was struck by the number of photographs from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where the exhibition premiered in November of last year before traveling to Los Angeles and DC (followed by the Brooklyn Museum this coming November until early February 2014). I'd be curious to read the story of how so many remarkable war photographs ended up in Houston. Perhaps war photography is a special interest of Texan oil magnates turned art collectors, who then donate their holdings to the museum? At any rate, the MFAH should be proud of having such treasures in its collections.

To be honest, the exhibition made me wonder about the future of painting. Of course, painting will remain a decorative art. I personally enjoy painting, and for a while I painted mostly abstract art, but when you come out of a show like War/Photography, you have a new awareness of how a two-dimensional work can change your perspective on the world - and I wish painting attempted to stir similar emotions. (I saw the Braque exhibition at the Phillips Collection the next day. The show was good, I like Braque's work and I love the Phillips, but after War/Photography, I couldn't find any spark in the paintings I saw.) But it is perhaps too much to ask to view painting today as a tool for activism and social change. Photography, after all, shows us the world like it is. Painting, even the best-intentioned representational art, will always be a retranscription of it.

Interested in seeing the exhibition? Admission to the Corcoran is free every Saturday until the end of August. Whether you see War/Photography at the Corcoran this summer or later at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, do not miss this show.