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April 14, 2008

Music Review | 'Satyagraha'

Fanciful Visions on the Mahatma’s Road to Truth and Simplicity

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT

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Richard Croft, in white, at the Met as Mohandas K. Gandhi in

the Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha," which depicts Gandhi’s path to

spirituality and political activism in South Africa.

This is a fitting time to revisit Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha,” a landmark work of Minimalism. I take Mr. Glass at his word that when “Satyagraha” was introduced, in Rotterdam in 1980, he was following his own voice and vision, not firing a broadside against the complex, cerebral modernist composers who claimed the intellectual high ground while alienating mainstream classical music audiences. Happily, that divisive period is finally past.

Metropolitan Opera patrons, mostly bound by tradition, might not seem a likely source of Glass fans. But when Mr. Glass appeared onstage after the Met’s first performance of “Satyagraha,” on Friday night, the audience erupted in a deafening ovation.

“Satyagraha” (a Sanskrit term that means truth force) is more a musical ritual than a traditional opera. Impressionistic and out of sequence, it relates the story of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s fight for the civil rights of the Indian minority in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The staging — created by Phelim McDermott, director, and Julian Crouch, associate director and set designer, for the Met and the English National Opera, where it was seen last year — makes inventive use of fanciful imagery, aerialists, gargantuan puppets and theatrical spectacle to convey the essence of a self-consciously spiritual work.

Without knowing the events of Gandhi’s struggles in South Africa you would have little idea what is going on, starting from the opening scene. Gandhi, portrayed by the sweet-voiced tenor Richard Croft in a heroic performance, lies on the ground in a rumpled suit, his suitcase nearby. The moment depicts an incident when Gandhi, as a young lawyer en route to Pretoria and holding a proper first-class ticket, was ordered to take his place with the Indians on board and, when he resisted, was pushed from the train onto the platform.

But this abstract production takes its cues from Mr. Glass, who was not interested in fashioning a cogent narrative. What continues to make the opera seem radical comes less from the music, with its lulling repetitions of defiantly simple riffs, motifs and scale patterns, than from the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is.

The libretto, assembled by the novelist Constance DeJong, consists of philosophical sayings from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu epic poem. Mr. Glass honors the text by keeping it in the original Sanskrit and setting every syllable clearly. This production dispenses with Met Titles on the theory that the audience would actually be distracted by paying attention to the words, which at best serve as commentary. Instead key phrases in English are projected on a semicircular corrugated wall that forms the backdrop of the production’s gritty and elemental set.

“Satyagraha” invites you to turn off the part of your brain that looks for linear narrative and literal meaning in a musical drama and enter a contemplative state — not hard to do during the most mesmerizing parts of the opera, especially in this sensitive performance. For example, in the hauntingly mystical opening scene when Gandhi reflects on a battle between two royal families depicted in the Bhagavad-Gita, Mr. Croft, in his plaintive voice, sang the closest the score comes to a wistful folk song while undulant riffs wound through the lower strings.

That the impressive young conductor Dante Anzolini, in his Met debut, kept the tempos on the slow side lent weight and power to the repetitive patterns. At times, though, during stretches in the opera when Mr. Glass pushes the repetitions to extremes, as in the wild conclusion to the final choral scene in Act I, the music became a gloriously frenzied din of spiraling woodwind and organ riffs.

Even in this breakthrough work Mr. Glass does not come across as a composer who sweats over details. He tends to rely on default repetitions of formulaic patterns, the only question being how often to repeat a phrase. Sometimes the daring simplicity just sounds simplistic. When he does work harder, fracturing the rhythmic flow or injecting some pungent dissonance into his harmonies, I am more drawn in.

In this regard Mr. Glass is different from another founding father of Minimalism, Steve Reich, whose music is just as repetitious as Mr. Glass’s. But Mr. Reich has always had an ear for ingenious, striking and intricate detail.

Sometimes, with its aerial feats and puppetry, the Met production relies too much on stage activity. Still, it’s quite a show. Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch have assembled a group of acrobats and aerialists called the Skills Ensemble, who produce magical effects. In once scene they form a huge puppet queen clothed in newspaper who goes to battle against a hulking puppet warrior assembled from wicker baskets. The use of simple materials is meant as homage to the poor, oppressed minorities for whom Gandhi gave his life.

Because Gandhi relied on the news media of his day to support his agitation for human rights and published his own journal, Indian Opinion, newspapers are a running image in the production. Actors fashion pages into symbolic barriers for protests. At one point, in despair, Gandhi disappears into a slithering mass of people and paper.

The cast entered into the ritualistic wonder of the work and the production despite solo and choral parts that are often formidably hard. It’s almost cruel to ask male choristers to sing foursquare, monotone repetitions of “ha, ha, ha, ha” for nearly 10 minutes, as Mr. Glass does. Yet the chorus sang with stamina and conviction.

Besides Mr. Croft, other standouts in the excellent cast included the soprano Rachelle Durkin as Gandhi’s secretary, Miss Schlesen; the mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak as his wife; the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji, a co-worker; and the baritone Earle Patriarco as Mr. Kallenbach, a European co-worker and ally. You are not likely to hear the long, ethereal sextet in the last act sung with more calm intensity and vocal grace than it was here.

Ultimately, despite its formulaic elements, “Satyagraha” emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity. In the final soliloquy, timeless and blithely simple, Gandhi hauntingly sings an ascending scale pattern in the Phrygian mode 30 times. To some degree the ovation at the end, after a 3-hour-45-minute evening, was necessary. The audience had to let loose after all that contemplation.

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Gandhi at the Met, Glass in transition

By Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe Staff | April 14, 2008

NEW YORK - The chugging, burbling music of Philip Glass is so ubiquitous today that it takes some effort to picture him in his rough-and-tumble artistic youth, a time when his compositions, now the stuff of Hollywood film scores, were truly radical in the boldness of their simplicity. Glass's breakout work for musical theater was the audacious, prism-shifting "Einstein on the Beach," but even after its sensational success at home and abroad in 1976, he still returned to driving a taxi in New York City to pay the bills. As the story goes, one day, a well-heeled passenger entered his cab and spotted his driver identification. "Young man," she asked, "do you realize you have the same name as a very famous composer?"

"Einstein" had announced Glass's arrival, but it was the next work, "Satyagraha," about Gandhi's formative years in South Africa, that confirmed his achievement, and proved his ability to make this simple repetitive music into the lifeblood of a new meditative brand of opera. In reflecting on the birth and spiritual dimensions of Gandhi's political ideal of nonviolent resistance, Glass created a score of subdued grace, sensual richness, and hypnotic power.

These days, "Satyagraha" is taken as canonical early Glass, a body of work that enjoys a critical acceptance never granted to much of the later music, even as Glass's celebrity grew. Still, the opera is referenced far more often than it is staged, and so there was a sense of anticipation on Friday night when the Metropolitan Opera unveiled a new production, shared with the English National Opera. Gandhi's grandson was in the audience, as were several Tibetan monks. What they witnessed was a vividly imagined staging full of striking images that do cumulative if not complete justice to this haunting score.

"Satyagraha," like "Einstein," is a so-called portrait opera that evokes its subject through a series of suspended glimpses of key moments during the period in South Africa (1893-1914) when Gandhi was mobilizing that country's oppressed Indian minority and developing his own brand of transformational politics embodied by the opera's title, which can be translated as "truth force."

The scenes take the form of stylized tableaux, poetic meditations on historical moments rather than anything that might hint at documentary realism. Emphasizing this distance, Constance DeJong's libretto - in Sanskrit - consists entirely of passages taken from the "Bhagavad-Gita." The opera's first scene is set in the mythic landscape of this ancient text and the other scenes are inspired by actual events in Gandhi's life. They are grouped into three acts with each one supervised by the spirit of a historical figure connected to the past, present, and future of Gandhi's political thought: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr., respectively.

But the key element is of course the music. Conceived and written in the late 1970s, it manages to maintain the early integrity of the composer's signature style while annexing the sumptuous vocal and instrumental textures of traditional opera. It is full of supple writing for solo voice, for small ensemble, and often for full chorus. In a sense, it represents an elusive way station in Glass's overarching journey, a moment of perfect equipoise between his past as an austere minimalist pioneer and his future as a neo-Romantic populist. He never again achieved this precise balance.

Directed by Phelim McDermott with sets by Julian Crouch, the new production is one of the more visually inventive stagings seen at the Met in a long time, especially in the way it seeks to build from the humblest of materials. The action is framed by a curved backdrop of corrugated iron onto which translated excerpts from the libretto are projected. Enormous papier-mache gods and politicians wander in and out of the action. There are times when the doings on stage seem to distract by working against the elegant simplicity of the music - as with the alligator made of baskets, and all that tape - but on other occasions they underscore these very qualities. Paper is used virtuosically as a stage element, and with particular beauty in the middle scene of Act II, devoted to Indian Opinion, the weekly newspaper that proved an essential tool in Gandhi's emerging movement.

Still, none of McDermott and Crouch's inventive stagecraft will turn Glass skeptics into Glass appreciators. To a large degree, one's response to this opera is predetermined by one's openness to Glass's basic idiom. As always, those who hear in this music only melodically impoverished, mind-numbing repetition - and this large group includes plenty of critics - will want to crawl out of their skin before the first act is over. Those open to a meditative listening experience that obeys its own laws of glacial pacing will find a visually rich presentation of a landmark Glass score, one that flows by with a moving and serene grandeur unique among his oeuvre.

Richard Croft sang Gandhi with a mellifluous and lyrical tenor that seemed at once to convey the strength of the historical subject and the sublime sadness of this music. Mary Phillips and Maria Zifchak were among the fine ensemble cast. The score is packed with involved choral writing that the Met chorus handled with its customary precision and flair. In the pit, Dante Anzolini kept things mostly on track - no small task here - though there were times when one wished for more presence and boldness from the orchestra.

The most enchanting moments of "Satyagraha" come in its final pages, as Gandhi is alone on stage with only the presiding spirit of MLK looming above him, preaching to an invisible crowd. Over a churning orchestral theme plucked from "Einstein on the Beach," Gandhi sings a simple ascending line. It is nothing more than a scale but - with the wise ancient text that here seems to view the world from above - this passage seems somehow freighted with both the tragedy and the utopian promise buried in the history that inspired this opera. As is Glass's way, Gandhi repeats this scale again and again until it burrows deep into one's memory. And then it is gone. So is the opera.

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Puppets enliven Metropolitan production of opera 'Satyagraha'

By Daniel J. Wakin, The International Herald Tribune

Monday, April 14, 2008

NEW YORK: As the orchestra emitted repeated Glassian ripples, huge puppets - some more than 20 feet tall - staggered onto the Metropolitan Opera stage during a rehearsal last week.

The grotesque, hulking creatures lurched through an ominous cityscape, their heads bobbing like doddering old men. They resembled the figures of the German Expressionist artists Otto Dix and George Grosz, come to life.

While lasting only a few minutes, the scene stands as perhaps the most striking moment in the Met's production of "Satyagraha," Philip Glass's 1979 opera about Mohandas K. Gandhi's years in South Africa. It sharply illustrates the central design idea behind this production: how the elaborate use of simple materials can create a musical-theatrical world. Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, the artistic directors of the Improbable theater company in London, are the director and the designer of the opera, which had its Met debut on Friday and runs through May 1. The tottering puppets are created from newspaper, fiberglass kite poles, light cotton cloth and lots of latex glue. The sets are made largely of corrugated metal. Wicker baskets and brooms become a crocodile. Chairs held over faces become symbolic barriers.

"We decided we wanted to use very humble materials in the making of the opera," Crouch said. "We wanted similarly to take these materials, maybe associated with poverty, and see if we could do a kind of alchemy with that, turn them into something beautiful."

The dominant medium is newsprint. Coated newspapers paper the stage floor. Balled-up pages represent stones thrown at Gandhi. Text is projected on newspaper sheets held up by actors. News pages are manipulated into a Hindu goddess. Long strips of attached pages ribbon across the stage, representing a printing press. "It's an ordinary object that, when transformed, becomes magical," McDermott said. "Ordinary simple actions, when done with commitment, become something powerful," he said, a quality of Gandhi's idea of "satyagraha," a Sanskrit term that can be translated as "truth-force" and stands for Gandhi's principle of nonviolent resistance.

More literally, the newspaper reflects Indian Opinion, the paper that Gandhi founded as a vital part of the struggle for the rights of Indians taken to South Africa as indentured servants by the British.

The focus is on the period from 1893 to 1914, the years Gandhi spent in South Africa. Tolstoy, the poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. each figure in an act representing witnesses from Gandhi's past, present and future.

"Satyagraha" is the middle work in Glass's trilogy of operatic portraits, sandwiched between "Einstein on the Beach" and "Akhnaten." The libretto is drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text, and bears little direct relation to the action, which plays out in a series of tableaus that crisscross time. There are no subtitles, only projections of sentences from the text and references to scenes and dates.

The tenor Richard Croft, who shaved his head and lost 10 pounds, or 4.5 kilograms, for the role, plays Gandhi; other cast members include Rachelle Durkin, Earle Patriarco and Alfred Walker. Dante Anzolini, the Italian-Argentine conductor, is making his Met debut.

"It's the story of the seed of what we know about the big story of Gandhi," McDermott said. "It's also the story of the idea of that movement having repercussions throughout history."

The staging was designed to match the idea of people working together, "like satyagraha," he said. "So a lot of the images are created by ensembles of people."

McDermott called the scenes meditations on key moments in Gandhi's South African story. The trancelike music, he said, demands a different sort of attention of audiences. "By the third act some people just love it, or others say, 'I can't bear it.' "

"Satyagraha" is a co-production with the English National Opera, where it played last year and received strong praise from the London critics. With little opera experience, McDermott and Crouch "created a masterwork of theatrical intensity and integrity," the reviewer for The Times of London wrote.

For "Satyagraha," the directors convened an ad-hoc group of aerialists, puppeteers, actors and one errant academic who wandered by one day to do research and was absorbed into the company. The group, called the Skills Ensemble, operate the puppets and provide much of the activity onstage during the meditative lines of Glass's score.

The word puppet does little justice to the fearsome large human figures and ragged, yet delicate, newspaper creatures in "Satyagraha." They are part of an increasing puppet presence in contemporary opera productions.

The giant-puppet scene in "Satyagraha" takes place early in Act II. The figures represent the vulgar forces of urban society - corrupt politicians, rapacious businessmen - who are bewildered and angered by Gandhi's denunciations of injustice to European newspapers, the directors said.

"Gandhi's ideas are bigger than life," said Glass, who watched the recent rehearsal intently from the audience, occasionally glancing at the score. "These huge figures reflect that."

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'Satyagraha': Simplicity & Splendor in the Glass

By Anne Midgette

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, April 14, 2008; C01

NEW YORK -- The first impression is of simple beauty: a tenor voice, cushioned by the ebb and flow of repeating cadences from the orchestra. The stage, enclosed in a curving wall of corrugated metal, evokes a prison: We will be trapped for hours in a world in which nothing happens. But as the music morphs from one pattern to another, the stage picture reveals new vignettes. Piles of wastepaper rise up rustling from the chorus as giant homunculi. A bird walks past on stilt legs. And the corrugated wall opens to admit the towering pale figures of giant puppets, doughy men gathering briefly, like monsters or magi, around the central figure of the singer before departing again as if they had never been, in an evening that moves forward like a dream.

The Improbable theater company's production of Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art.

Not that this should be the Met's only fare, and it is certainly not for everybody. To some lovers of traditional opera, "Satyagraha," with its repeating musical patterns as steady and unremarkable as the passage of time itself, might resemble "Chinese water torture" (as one audience member said on Friday). But if the work has a hope of reaching those listeners, it is through the high musical standards of this production. Rather than putting the piece in a new-music ghetto, the Met has cast it with some fine singers -- Richard Croft, Earle Patriarco and especially Maria Zifchak -- and placed it in the capable hands of the conductor Dante Anzolini, who made a memorable Met debut. Orchestras usually hate playing Glass, whose music is difficult (the rhythms have small tricky variants that require constant attention) and physically demanding (all those repetitions are grueling). The Met orchestra sometimes sounded as if it were fighting Anzolini, but he prevailed by keeping the lyricism and finding the line in the music.

"Satyagraha" is a watershed piece in Glass's oeuvre. Written in 1980, it represents the first time the composer stepped beyond the bounds of his own ensemble and took on the conventional forces of classical music. The score still retains exhilaration of an artist presented with a new set of tools. After Glass found this voice, he sometimes set it on autopilot; many of his later works lack the consistent level of inspiration of this one.

Glass's music also accords beautifully with the theme of the opera. "Satyagraha" is about the years in which Mohandas K. Gandhi, then living in South Africa, developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. The topic is epic enough for opera, but it is depicted with the musical equivalent of nonviolence: a quiet constancy without overt climax. The orchestra consists only of strings and winds, stripped of the bombast of brass and percussion. It gently worries at ideas, subtle but insistent, coalescing into entirely new thoughts without the listener always being cognizant of how it got there: an eloquent echo of Gandhi's own process. Many new operas involve simply applying some kind of musical language to a story; one of the refreshing things about "Satyagraha" is that the music actually means something.

Music is, in fact, a major vehicle of meaning in a work that has only tenuous links to the conventional idea of a story. Anyone who wants to understand the Gandhi part of the narrative has to do some extra reading in the intermissions. The libretto is drawn entirely from the ancient Bhagavad-Gita, and sung in Sanskrit, and its words, meditative and philosophical, do not add up to anything as prosaic as a plotline.

It is perhaps an extra challenge for the singers that they are given little conventional sense of character to work with. Glass's vocal writing adds another challenge, requiring long, sustained passages of singing and, for the soprano, high writing that sits in awkward parts of the voice (a Glass hallmark). Rachelle Durkin did her best as Miss Schlesen, Gandhi's secretary; Alfred Walker was disappointingly pale in his first long solo passage; and Patriarco was a stout pillar in the beautiful vocal ensembles that were some of the work's highlights. Zifchak and Ellie Dehn (in her Met debut) twined dark mezzo and high soprano voices in a moving musical arch around the final act. And Croft gave himself utterly to Gandhi, investing the role with a fitting, radiant simplicity.

It is left to the directors to figure out how to bring the story across to the audience. The beauty of the Improbable production, conceived by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (and already premiered last season at English National Opera), is that its imagery is so greatly bound up with the music. The chorus comes together to form larger entities -- monsters, animals, surfaces for slide projections -- then drifts apart, like Glass's notes. In the final act, singers crossed the stage with rolls of packing tape, unrolling them at all different heights, until the whole space was filled with dozens of shimmering bands, vibrating like the music around them; this whole construct was eventually crumpled into a small ball, showing visuals as ephemeral the passing notes.

The whole evening was a towering work of non-event: to some, boring; to many, including this listener, it was a profound and beautiful work of theater. The final act is a masterpiece of the power of simplicity. At the very end, while Croft embarked on a pure, ascending line, sung over and over, and the figure of Martin Luther King Jr., taking up Gandhi's ideas, mimed his own great speech behind him, the back of the stage was filled with a pure blue sky, then clouded with an image of angels, marring the moment with an image of kitsch, presenting the hope of redemption as sugary illusion. Was this new beginning only a deception? Not on Friday, when the production was greeted with rapturous and genuine applause.

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The Metropolitan takes Philip Glass' work on Gandhi to exalted levels.

By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic

April 14, 2008

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SATYAGRAHA: Richard Bernstein stars as Lord Krishna in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Philip Glass' work.

NEW YORK -- The production of Philip Glass’ "Satyagraha" that opened Friday night, the first at the Metropolitan Opera, is more than opera. This epic new vision of a Minimalist masterpiece revolving around the events in South Africa that inspired Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence is also more opera than I have ever witnessed at the Met or learned about in the annals of the storied company.

To sit in the large, tasteless house in Lincoln Center and, after hours of, say, Wagner, fall under the spell of a soprano or bass as the midnight hour approaches is, for many of us, the definition of opera. Orchestra, conductor, singers and great music conspire to transport us to some mythical place that inevitably transcends a banal production or a composer's rotten soul or a physically clumsy singer with a cold. If opera is transcendental art, you need something to transcend.

Or do you? Everything that reached the ear and eye Friday was on the same exalted level. Gandhi's goodness and his political impact are not, I hope, in dispute. And at a long evening's end, when the American tenor Richard Croft cast a neo-Wagnerian spell, he did so to offer guidance for enriching the wayward world that we were about to reenter. That is the way in which this was more than opera and was, I'm quite sure, a first for the Metropolitan Opera.

Premiered in Holland in 1980, "Satyagraha" is the second of Glass' many operas and the first written for the resources of a standard opera company. Four years earlier, the composer and director-designer Robert Wilson had broken the operatic mold with "Einstein on the Beach," music theater of images created for the composer's own ensemble and with no sung libretto.

"Satyagraha" began Glass' entry into a more traditional musical world. But although he wrote for classically trained singers and a standard orchestra, he did not leave his experimental roots behind. The era of high Minimalism, begun some 15 years earlier, was ending but not over. "Satyagraha" has all the repetition in the orchestra anyone could hope for, and the Met orchestra, conducted by Dante Anzolini, an Argentine making his Met debut, let the arpeggios luxuriate. The sound was gorgeous.

Gandhi's 20 years in South Africa are treated as ritual in historical scenes that take place between 1896 and 1913. The ingenious libretto, which Glass devised with Constance DeJong, is taken from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text to which Gandhi was devoted.

In it, the Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna to put pain and pleasure aside, that action is a moral duty: Be unconcerned with consequences, with victory or defeat, but act with the world's welfare as your intention. Krishna's words fit eerily well with the opera's well-known events, which include Gandhi's protest movements and the publication of the newspaper Indian Opinion.

The extraordinary new production, originated by English National Opera, is the improbable work of Britain's Improbable theater company. Run by director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch, Improbable was the force behind the popular Victorian ghoul show of a few years back, "Shockheaded Peter."

Following Gandhian principles of self-sufficiency, Crouch creates unforgettable sets before the audience's eyes with newspapers, tape and other "humble materials." The backdrop is a curved wall of corrugated iron, which just happens to have excellent acoustical properties.

The production is a work of genius that ranges from the very simple to the fantastically ambitious, looking at times as if all of the Whitney Biennial has found its way onto a miraculous Met stage. There are aerialists and huge, amazing puppets. A sense of playful fantasy somehow suits the meditative mood of the music and the serious needs of the religious and political subject matter.

Each of the opera's three acts has a patron saint (and each act in this slow, luminous performance lasts in the neighborhood of an hour). Tolstoy and then the Indian poet Tagore look on from cutouts in the backdrop.

Throughout the last act -- which is taken up with the New Castle March, when Gandhi led thousands of protesting indentured workers -- Martin Luther King Jr. stands at his podium. Eventually he dominates the background against a cloud-spotted sky as Gandhi sings of eternity in the foreground. The effect, exactly one week after the 40th anniversary of King's assassination, was, I thought, unbelievably moving.

The singing, from soloist and chorus, was uniformly wonderful. Croft's Verdian rapture and Mozartian purity were just the beginnings of his creation of an imagined character. I couldn't have been happier with the voices of the women in Gandhi's life -- Rachelle Durkin, Ellie Dehn, Maria Zifchak and Mary Phillips. Richard Bernstein was Krishna and Bradley Garvin Arjuna in the mythical opening scene, when Gandhi gets his spiritual bearings.

If "Satyagraha" is general director Peter Gelb's new Met, then there really is a new Met. The opera so resonates with the moment that a month's worth of Gandhi symposiums and events are taking place around Manhattan. Tibetan monks involved in their own nonviolent demonstrations right now were in the audience, as was a Gandhi grandson. Glass received a hero's welcome at his curtain call.

But Gelb left out one important thing: "Satyagraha" is not among this season's high-definition broadcasts of Met productions at movie theaters. Someone who knows the ways of the company told me that adding it to the schedule could cost a million dollars.

They should find a million dollars.

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In Gandhi and Glass, Leaders by Example

Classical Music

BY JAY NORDLINGER

April 14, 2008

On Friday night, "Satyagraha" came to the Metropolitan Opera. This is the work by Philip Glass composed in the late 1970s. The title is Sanskrit, and it can be translated as "The Firmness of Truth." In fact, the libretto itself is in Sanskrit drawn from the "Bhagavad Gita." The opera has a subtitle, too: "M.K. Gandhi in South Africa." The opera is meant to depict the political, philosophical, and spiritual development of this extraordinary figure, Gandhi.

Mr. Glass's score is a perfect example of minimalism. And you know this style, its strengths and weaknesses. At its best, minimalism is lulling, hypnotic, transporting. At its worst, it is maddeningly dull. The listener hopes to surrender to a minimalist score. If he can, he is happy — even "blissed out." If he cannot, he is miserable and trapped. The musical drug has to take effect. If it does not, woe to the listener.

In my view, "Satyagraha" reflects minimalism both high and low — but mainly high. For me, the drug really takes effect in the second of the three acts. Mr. Glass's music is inspired, skillful, and surpassingly beautiful. But — again, for me — the drug wears off in the third act, which succumbs to tedium. There is no complaining about the ending, however: Here we get an aria, or type of aria, sung by the tenor portraying Gandhi. It is a simple thing in C major; the tenor sings a simple ascending scale, E to E. Mr. Glass hit on something very nice here.

Is "Satyagraha" really an opera? Or is it more like an oratorio or cantata, with a production around it? There is certainly a sense of ceremony about this work. It has an air of churchliness, dare I say. (Templeness?) And a cynic may find it culty and naïve, not to mention pretentious. But there is a less cynical, and better, view.

Mr. Glass is certainly fortunate in this current production, and in his performers. The Met shares the production with the English National Opera. It is the handiwork of Phelim McDermott, director, and Julian Crouch, associate director and set designer. Like the score, the production contains considerable beauty and wisdom. When it is really succeeding, it is weird and wondrous. Otherwise, it is perhaps just weird.

Toward the back of the stage is a semicircular wall. Sometimes people peek out of windows in this wall. This peekaboo effect is used in opera productions all around the world. Onto Mr. Crouch's wall, translations of the text are projected. There is no need for the Met's nifty "seatback" titles, in this show. In any case, the words are few and repeated, in conformity with the notes.

Often, the meaning of what is happening onstage is unclear. But the stage is almost always interesting and pleasant to look at. An army of hangers descends from the sky; then up it goes, bearing clothes. Some people fly through the air, too. And other people are on stilts. When the production was at its silliest, I inevitably thought of the phrase "nonsense on stilts."

Puppets appear: huge, grotesque, and engrossing. There is lots of playing around with newsprint — rolls and rolls of newsprint. (Gandhi is spreading the word.) There are rolls and rolls of clear packing tape, too. They are unspooled by people walking slowly across the stage. One person got stuck in this sticky stuff — a peril of the production.

The third act is titled "King" — a reference to Martin Luther King Jr., a disciple, of course, of Gandhi. We see video clips of American civil-rights protests. And a silent actor plays King, orating with his back to us (as in a famous photo from the Lincoln Memorial). The director may slightly overplay this theme: There is a line between due admiration and unseemly glorification.

Heading the cast is Richard Croft, singing Gandhi. He is one of the finest lyric tenors of our time. He is also strangely unsung (except by aficionados). His brother Dwayne, a fine baritone, is better known at the Metropolitan Opera. But Richard has had a steady and globetrotting career. He is pretty much unbeatable in Handel and Mozart. And he may be modest by nature (although not modestly talented). Faced with wild applause on Friday night, he would barely bow, eager to join his castmates in the line.

The part of Gandhi tests the middle and lower registers of a tenor's range, and Mr. Croft's were not found wanting. And his higher notes were exemplary. In addition, Mr. Croft has the ability to sing in a fashion both lyrical and clarion. That is a rare and valuable trick.

Across the board, the Met's cast was capable and confident. Rachelle Durkin, a soprano, sang in bold, rich, and soaring lines. A mezzo-soprano, Mary Phillips, was slightly tremulous, but enjoyably potent.

And the conductor did a competent, professional job. It is a special challenge to conduct two and a half hours of minimalism. Our maestro was an Argentinian with a beautiful Italian name: Dante Anzolini. He kept the proceedings essentially together, and showed true commitment. For an orchestra, minimalism is an invitation to carpal tunnel — sustained repetition is a bear. But the Met's orchestra sailed through. And its chorus sang with discipline.

We owe this to the minimalists, if nothing else: At a time when beauty in music was under attack — vilified as a bourgeois indulgence — they stood up for it.

And our debt to Gandhi is obvious. His example continues to inspire. Right now, there is a brave man, Oscar Biscet, in a Cuban dungeon. He is an Afro-Cuban physician and a democracy leader. He is a disciple of Gandhi and King. For years, he has been tortured and isolated. But, last year, President Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Perhaps Dr. Biscet will one day be free to accept it in person.

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That would be a boatload of badass if they could get some giant puppets for the Atlanta Akhnaten performance. They don't even have to fit the performance. Just some giant puppets towering over the stage while the orchestra plays major arpeggio/minor arpeggio/major arpeggio/etc...

The Center for Puppetry Arts has some Muppets in residence. Maybe Statler and Waldorf could drop by for the performance...

250px-StatlerAndWaldorf.jpg

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June 7, 2008

Music Review

Modern Pieces, Classically Performed

By STEVE SMITH, NYT

Few pianists approach Philip Glass’s music with the level of devotion and insight that Bruce Brubaker brings to it, precisely the reason he gets so much expressivity out of it. On Wednesday night at the Stone, a small experimental-music space on the Lower East Side, Mr. Brubaker performed two of Mr. Glass’s major piano works as well as compositions by William Duckworth and Alvin Curran.

In an introduction from the stage, Mr. Brubaker said that Mr. Glass’s “Mad Rush,” from 1979, conveys the perception of two speeds at once while driving, by alternating between forward and sidelong views. That observation works well enough for a piece in which blocks of slow and fast activity simply repeat in alternation. Mr. Brubaker played with a beautiful, even tone and shaped phrases with subtlety.

Mr. Glass’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” from 1988, was inspired by a 1966 Allen Ginsberg poem of the same name about railroad trains crossing the Midwest, bearing missiles bound for Vietnam. The opening sequence is as plain-spoken as a gospel hymn. What follows, though technically as flat and objective as “Mad Rush,” suggests by turns Ginsberg’s “cushioned load of metal doom” and a train chugging along under a clear Kansas sky big as eternity.

Mr. Duckworth’s “Time Curve Preludes,” composed in 1978 and 1979, have been cited as the starting point for post-Minimalism: music that takes its lead from the diatonic tonality and repetitive rhythms of Minimalism but deviates in matters of duration and style. What unites these 24 succinct pieces are the harmonic drones that ring and ripple quietly throughout each, created by placing metal weights on bass keys.

But each prelude has its own profile. The five that Mr. Brubaker played — Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 11, all from Book 1 — suggested the coruscating spirals of gamelan, Debussy’s luminous mystery, Ligeti’s prickly intensity and more. That this collection isn’t more widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s major piano works is puzzling; perhaps Mr. Brubaker’s assured advocacy will help redress that slight.

Mr. Brubaker’s hands were a blur as he drummed chords in rapid alternation during Mr. Curran’s “Hope Street Tunnel Blues III” (1983), with one or another finger occasionally popping out to spear a note. To borrow Mr. Brubaker’s earlier automotive reference, this was like driving fast with the windows down, listening to the sound change according to the road’s surface and the proximity of other objects.

After taking a moment to recover, Mr. Brubaker provided an encore: from 1988, Mr. Glass’s tranquil “Metamorphosis Two.”

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I saw piece on Glass in Spin magazine of all places; mention was made of a ten-disc anthology of his music coming out on Nonesuch records later this year. [This follows in the path of their Reich and John Adams boxes, i suppose.] It will contain Music in 12 parts, for sure. Not sure what else will be in it.

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Details on the box are out now. Looks like almost everything will be exceprts. :rmad::mellow:

Glass Box:

Disc 1:

Music in Contrary Motion

Music With Changing Parts

Music in Similar Motion

Disc 2:

Music in Twelve Parts, Parts VII-X

Disc 3:

Einstein on the Beach, 9 Selections

Disc 4:

Glassworks/Analog:

Orange Mountain Music Archive

Étoile Polaire

Dressed Like an Egg

Mad Rush for Organ

Disc 5:

Satyagraha, Act 1-III, Scene 1

Disc 6:

Koyaanisqatsi, 6 Selections

Powaqqatsi, 8 Selections

Disc 7:

String Quartets Nos. 2, 4, 5

Études for Piano Nos. 2, 3, 5, 9

Disc 8:

Selections from the CIVIL warS, Symphony No. 5, Akhnaten, and Hydrogen Jukebox

Disc 9:

Symphonies Nos. 3 & 8

Disc 10:

Filmworks, selections from: Mishima, The Secret Agent, Kundun, Anima Mundi, La Belle et la Bête, The Thin Blue Line, Dracula, The Fog of War, Candyman, The Truman Show, The Hours

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