A Trip to LA

I visited LA the other week, to see Sibelius's incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest at the LA Phil, and to see Philip Glass's Satyagraha at the LA Opera. I also ate a fair amount of excellent Korean food and saw friends, sometimes at the same time.

So, worst first: somebody made some bad decisions about The Tempest. I see what they had in mind, a theatrical and musical extravaganza, but they didn't get the best of either side of the production. The orchestra, led by the wonderful Susanna Mälkki, played the incidental music in its entirety, while a troupe of actors from San Diego's Old Globe Theater performed excerpts from the play.

Bad decision no. 1: amplifying the actors. There they were, in possibly the greatest concert hall in the country, where you can hear unamplified footsteps 50 yards away, as I recall from seeing Esa-Pekka Salonen's Wing on Wing at WDCH in 2007, but nobody trusted that the actors would project enough to be heard. Therefore, the actors were amplified to the extent that if they were speaking when the orchestra was playing, the actors - or actor - were louder than the 70-piece orchestra behind them.

This not only completely distorted the balances, but it was mighty tiring for the listeners, who had to adjust their ears about every three minutes, depending on whether the music was allowed to come to the fore or not. It was just awful.

Bad decision no. 2: cutting the play to ribbons. I don't know this play well, although I have seen two operas based on it. I know, I should have read it before my trip! But I didn't. The play was trimmed badly enough that it was nearly impossible to follow; see, also, the difficult of seeing a play where the voices are too damn loud and the sound comes from speakers; this really kills the sense of live theater with actors moving on a stage.

Bad decision no. 3: doing this at all. Of the three friends I spoke to about the show, two were disappointed with the acting and one more or less liked it. I'm somewhere in between; I thought the acting pretty good and the production utterly misguided. Yeah, the visuals were...mostly pretty nice. One friend thought the conception and acting of Ariel the best he had seen.

All of us were unhappy about how the orchestra was pushed to the background. I think it would have been so much better if the incidental music had been the first half of a program whose second half was, I don't know, a Sibelius or Nielsen or Aho or Rautavaara symphony.

(Alex Ross mentions the production in his New Yorker article about the LA Phil at 100. He's more measured than I am.)

Meanwhile, there was splendor to burn across the street at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the opera presented Phelim McDermott's ENO/Met production of Satyagraha. SF Opera performed the opera back in the 1989-90 season, during my operatic hiatus. However, back when I was on the Glass beat at SFCV, I picked up the original cast recording, which I liked a lot. So I was curious to see the piece live.

Satyagraha is an idiosyncratic work; its libretto is in Sanskrit, about 900 lines from the Bhagavad Gita, and it does not relate directly to the stage action. This production, which is quite beautiful (link is to a Google Image search), doesn't supertitle the entire text, either, just suggestive excerpts. I can't imagine how the singers learn the text -- wait, actually, I can, by rote -- and it must be disconcerting to sing in a language that, let me guess, they don't understand.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter. The music is gorgeous, perhaps my favorite Glass score; it's brilliant and exciting and energetic. And it got a really fine performance all around, though I had moments of wanting to goose conductor Grant Gershon a bit in Act I, which I thought moved a little slowly.

Perhaps that was deliberate, in keeping with the production. There isn't that much incident in the opera, and as is typical of Glass, there's a lot of repetition. The singers' movements tend to be slow and ritualistic. Occasionally, the production calls unnecessary attention to itself, as when giant bands of tape are stretched slowly across the stage....for no apparent reason, to be removed by five (!) extras and performers. Other than that, I can't fault much. The final image in the production is also marvelous and very moving, with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi facing each other.

The performers were all excellent, lead by a great performance from tenor Sean Panikkar as Gandhi. If you live in the Bay Area, you might remember him from the Adler program. Well, since then, his voice has gotten bigger, darker, and more burnished; a friend who'd seen him then and now said something about an "exponential" growth in size. Maybe! I certainly took notice when he opened his mouth the first time. (He has also been working out a lot. I doubt Gandhi had pecs like that.) He sang beautifully throughout, finishing with an astonishing string of repetitions of the same phrase. He earned that standing ovation.

The rest of the cast was excellent, including So Young Park as Miss Schlesen, Erica Petrocelli as Mrs. Naidoo, J'Nai Bridges as Kasturbai, Niru Liu as Mrs. Alexander, Theo Hoffman as Mr. Kallenbach, Patrick Blackwell as Krishna, and Morris Robinson as Parsi Rustomji. A special bow of respect to the LA Opera Chorus, which had some extremely difficult music to sing and was terrific. I'm just sorry that I couldn't time this trip to see Satyagraha twice.