Ring Rang Rung - xpost

I shall not write of a concept - the Ring as the story of the Creature
from the Black Lagoon - which could only be taken seriously by a
nation which believed twenty years ago that Dialectical Materialism
was Queen of the Sciences, or a set, and production values, which
bespeak a lack of awareness, or perhaps resources, to create a quality
which which not be seen on large college campuses today. I will ignore
the singers, who in only three instances rose to the level of
international mediocrity and an orchestra which, under this conductor
and in this repertoire and tonight, stands so far back that it can't
see the front of line and sounds as if its members cannot hear each
other - soft playing has no tone quality whatsoever, it genuinely
seems as if the players cannot hear each other, and there is simply no
sense of euphony in this orchstrally beautifully written score.

Instead, I shall make two points about the conducting, which is surely
fraudulent. First, Mr.Gergiev has no sense of how to build or taper
dynamics. He never overwhelmed the singers, true, but there was no
capacity to build a crescendo - fatal for the first measures of the
opera, and completely anticlimactic for the ending, and even as he hit
and maintained a 'steady' loudness in the last pages of the work, in
each bar the brass would be sometimes louder, sometimes (slightly)
softer, so that there was no cumulative impact even there. Furtwangler
once said of Toscanini that he had only one forte and one piano, but
whether true or the product of professional jealousy, Toscanini had a
consistent forte and piano. Gergiev has no sense of dynamic nuance at
all, and it creates a sense of sameness in so much of the music that
it is ultimately numbing to the listener.

Secondly, and more seriously, he has no sense of the underlying time
relationships in the music. His conducting proceeds measure to
measure, as it were - this is not a matter of bad phrasing, but of the
absolute inability to convey a sense of the basic unit of 'pulse' to
the music, which is not the bar line, but groups of four, eight, and
twenty-four and more measures, all of which together make 'one'
measure. The supposedly magical Eb had no impact, much less any
'meaning' and seemed interminable - a prefiguring of the entire
evening - and in proceeding measure to measure in music which does not
often have the guidelines of recognizable 'melody', the movemement
from bar to bar was sometimes perceptibly rushed or lagged in
seemingly arbitrary and incoherent ways, and the impact was not
timelessness, but rather a prison for an indeterminate sentence.

The audience gave respectful applause, but not the enthusiasm I've
seen many times at the end of Rheingold, where the audience can feel
that it's begun a very special journey along with the performers. And
this is precisely why 'opera queens' and others who care about
performance need not simply to be anchored in the today's newspaper
with whoever is 'selling tickets' at the moment, but listeners who can
tell the counterfeit from the real by reference to prior performances
and the standards they establish.

Screw this. Tommorrow night I'm going up to Caramoor and hear Ewa
Podles tear away at Azucena.

"REG" <Richergar.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:469844ca$0$16544$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
> by a nation which believed twenty years ago that Dialectical Materialism
> was Queen of the Sciences, <

A science . . . . ? For foreign consumption only.
Was maybe a theory, was maybe a method, like historiography fer
instance, was maybe even philosophy ( of a sort ) but leave already the
Russians alone with this Dialectical Materialism business, please.
They already got enough tsouris with Siberia & all that melting tundra.
Have rachmones, their great-grandfathers could have killed your
great-grandfathers in any number of pogroms, ideological or otherwise. You
think they liked it? Somebody hadda do it. Otherwise The Lower East Side
would still be Irish.
Kind regards
Lev Bronstein's Ghost

We old socialists will be on a cruise for several days starting Sunday. ( an
ideological vacation to rebuild our political imagination)