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| (Just for example and copyright, too) |
The Metropolitan Opera (together with Lyon and, I think it was, Marseille) mounted a new production last March of the young Shostakovich's opera based on Gogol, The Nose. No new DVD is yet available of it, though there's a good Russian CD of the opera. But I am very eager to see more than the dozen or so snippets that YouTube provides, and I want to see what Paulo Szot does with it, too. Most of all, though, I am interested in the re-creation (not imitation) by William Kentridge of the wonderful intersection of Dada, Suprematist, Futurist, leftover late Cubism that prevailed in what we might regard as mixed media in the late 1920s, whether in Diaghilev's ballets with modern artists (Picasso, Leger) and subjects, such as in Jeux, or in the staging of early Hindemith operas (for example, all those where Ideas strode on stage as political demonstration placards and the like—I think even Mahagonny had some such usage).
Now, in my opinion William Kentridge, who designed The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera, has a wonderful grasp and temperamental insight into this world of pre-Stalinist (but not solely Russian) graphics.
So, great as the Mariinsky production CD is of the opera, I believe that the Dada-Suprematist treatment must be perfect for this early Shostakovich masterpiece. Kentridge's "Anything is Possible" was broadcast a fortnight ago on public television in the USA, and at least a third of the hour is devoted to mounting the Metropolitan Opera production, bringing the poster style and every animation technology from more than a whole century now together to bear on Gogol and Shostakovich.
Though Gogol would have to get used to even the earliest video techniques, I think that the music and libretto themselves suggest that the composer would rejoice in this production, and I can hardly wait to get a full length dvd of it (one is grateful for YouTube, but visually it is quite distressing). Actually, on an iPad, the PBS film should look pretty good.
But I'm quite in awe of their bringing this style successfully to the huge stage of the Met! The experimental operas of the late 1920s were in rather small venues.
Amazon does list a 1979 DVD conducted by Rozhdestvensky but the new 2010 Mariinsky audio recording looks more tempting.
ReplyDeleteAfter 1929 composers such as Rachmaninov and Stravinsky resided in the USA and greatly influenced American music, in particular film music. Shostakovich himself was a silent cinema accompanist and the influence of the cinema can be heard in his music, especially in the programmatic symphonies nos. 7 and 11.
The cross-fertilization I actually had in mind at the moment of writing was the impact in Europe of Black performers who followed Josephine Baker to France and of American Jazz as a whole, and, in turn, the effect on, e.g. George Gershwin (and right in 1927) of the European incorporation of early Jazz into classical music. That exposure was important to the conception of Porgy & Bess, for instance. What was also fruitful was European nonchalance in using Minstrel Show idions and Jazz idioms indiscriminately. That was important to Kurt Weill. And then he came here, in turn, and absorbed mainstream Broadway, as, for example, in One Touch of Venus. I don't think that at the time anyone understood the importance of Klezmer music from eastern Europe (brought here mostly by Jews) to the birth of non-Minstrel jazz and to Swing. The USA was actually slower, on the whole, to realize the potential of musical miscegenation, though later in his career Virgil Thomson in "Four Saints in Three Acts" sort of catches up.
ReplyDeleteYes, both Shostakovich and Prokofiev used catchy pop motifs and Salvation Army kinds of music. I love what I have called miscegenation in 20th century modernism.
Really interesting observations of yours from quite a different perspective.
ReplyDeleteThe more curious example must surely be Delius, born in Bradford, raised on a Florida plantation where he heard Negro spirituals, jazz-influenced can be heard in his music, and although hardly ever stepping foot into Britain in his life-time, his music remains quintessential pastoral English in flavour.
By the way take a look at the coincidence of our last two comments were posted, we seem to be synchronized precisely 12 hours apart in time!