Harawi, AMOC at Cal Performances

 

Julia Bullock, Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, and Connor Hanick

Messiaen's Harawi 

Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small, courtesy of Cal Performances

I reviewed the American Modern Opera Company's remarkable staging of Messiaen's Harawi, performed last week at Cal Performances, by the remarkable quartet of soprano Julia Bullock, dancer/choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, and pianist Conor Hanick, directed by Zack Winokur.

The performance was preceded by a panel discussion with Winokur and several American academics, all currently active in California. A major focus of the discussion was Messiaen's use of Andean harawi, a poetic/musical practice, when he did not have much understanding of it and at a time when it was poorly documented by non-Andean anthropologists and other academics. That is, the discussion was largely about appropriation. For some context, this type of appropriate extends to many modernists; Boulez was mentioned, though I can't recall the tradition(s) he relied on. One of the academics, Tamara Levitz, quoted an indigenous writer on the subject of appropriation, but there were no indigenous musicians or poets on the panel. I feel that the panel––which was otherwise excellent––would have been enhanced by the participation of indigenous practitioners.

I'll note that I have more notes on the panel than I have on the performance itself, in part because the lights were very, very low in Zellerbach and I couldn't see what I was writing. I should have brought my white-ink pens and the notebook with black pages; at least my terrible handwriting would have sprawled less.

I'd also like to take note of the difficulty of addressing dance in a musical context when your expertise is in music. I reviewed two programs this year that featured dance, and I wish my dance technical vocabulary were bigger. I hope that in both I managed to at least suggest what I saw on stage and how it related to the music.

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle, is marvelously eloquent about this performance (and note that there are two puns in the titles).
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV

Messiaen 100

By an entertaining and timely coincidence, it's also the 52nd birthday of future convicted felon Rod Blagojevich.

Playlist for a centenary:

• Vingt Regards, Yvonne Loriod
• Harawi, Rachel Yakar & Yvonne Loriod
• Turangalila-symphonie, Nagao/Berlin Philharmonic
• Des Canyon aux Etoiles, Chung
  

All except Des Canyon aux Etoiles are from the Warner Classics Messiaen Edition. I have strewn the CDs all over place, and don't have the Quatour pour la fin du temps with me.

Saint Francois d'Assise

Alex reports that Gerard Mortier plans to stage Messiaen's opera Saint Francois d'Assise. (Read the whole New York Sun interview here.)

I saw the American premiere of Saint Francois at San Francisco Opera five years ago. I caught only one performance, and note the following:

• I'm a Messiaen fan. I love Turangalila, Quator pour la fin du temps, and almost everything else I have heard by him.


• Saint Francois was the closest thing to torture I have ever experienced in the opera house or concert hall. I stumbled out of the second act thinking it had lasted three hours and was shocked to find it had only been 90 minutes.


• I was sufficiently traumatized by the "Sermon to the Birds" - and the preparatory discussion of the birds - that I flinched months later at the birdsong in Kata Kabanova.


• The night I saw St. Francois, I told a friend in instant messages that "St. Francois makes Parsifal look like Die Fledermaus."

Nonetheless, I will have to try again, as I have regretted for five years the fact that I only saw one performance. My working theory about my response is that I was suffering from the same problem some entrenched fans of Italian opera have when they see a Wagner opera for the first time: they are so used to the time scale of Verdi and Puccini that they are utterly defeated by the vast reaches of Wagner. I suspect that St. Francois is to Tristan as Tristan is to Il Trovatore.