7/4

April 17, 2008 Music Review Painting Outside Those Usual Lines By BEN RATLIFF, NYT From left, Jenny Scheinman, Eyvind Kang, Bill Frisell and Hank Roberts at Village Vanguard. Bill Frisell wrote some string quartet music for a CD to accompany a book of Gerhard Richter paintings in 2002. The paintings were all called “858,” so Mr. Frisell used the same title for his eight pieces and for the band itself. These works — played by Mr. Frisell on electric guitar, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Eyvind Kang on viola and Hank Roberts on cello — weren’t tunes so much as gestures: slow or frenetic, based on short figures. Looking at the wide, heavy paint-slicks on the canvases and thinking of music, he tried for something more sublime, dense and basically classical than what he’s associated with. The group outlived the project. Mr. Frisell has cultivated it onstage a bit since then, and the 858 Quartet has grown out of its original purpose into something else. At the Village Vanguard on Tuesday, the band played a wickedly beautiful first set of the week. It wasn’t like the old record: it was more in line with Mr. Frisell’s other music, with its mild sense of humor and its reflexive embrace of blues, bop and country languages. But unlike some of Mr. Frisell’s other music, it didn’t feel micromanaged or built as a reflection of his sonic image or beholden to his frequent improvising tics. The players’ individual personalities came out and infiltrated the songs. What songs they were, too. After a beginning of long, slow chords, with Mr. Frisell electronically setting up guitar loops — it sounded like a small slice from the Richter project — some blues harmony emerged, and Mr. Frisell improvised, while the other three played a basic blues progression around him. Suddenly a riff began, and out of that grew a song, or something longer and bramblier than a song. It was, note for note, played in unison, Charlie Christian’s 30-second guitar solo from “Benny’s Bugle,” a piece Christian recorded with Benny Goodman in 1940, with big interval jumps, bent notes and a yanking swing feeling. The transcription of an eminent old solo, reused as written material and arranged for a band, has a little subhistory in jazz. But this isn’t a group you would have expected to try it. The four musicians played with the song’s closing riff for a while longer, and 40 minutes after the set began, the group took its first pause. More classical music led into Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” with Mr. Roberts adapting the vocal part, expanding it with improvisation. And then the group did again what it had done with Charlie Christian, but this time with Lee Konitz’s tricky solo from “Subconscious-Lee,” based on the chords of “What Is This Thing Called Love”; toward the end of it Mr. Frisell, who can find endless backing chords to anything, accompanied, while the other three played the solo in unison around him. Finally, for 15 minutes or so the quartet exercised themselves on the curling riff from “Baba Drame,” by the Malian guitarist Boubacar Traore, with Mr. Kang playing long lines, like an Indian classical musician, while Mr. Frisell and Mr. Roberts played variations on a rockabilly rhythm — boom-chicka-boom. They finished by charging through Thelonious Monk’s “Skippy.” In about 80 minutes they’d taken a long side road off an essentially European high-art concept, jumping between continents, regions and styles. Not being even slightly formalist about it, they showed how undivided music can be.

Wouldn't this be a bit more at home in the Hammond Zone folder?

Well, the backing keys were arranged by the band themselves (just two guys at this point - a drummer and a guitarist with some keyboard experience). The solos in question however are all played by one guy! I know...just solos. I'll listen again later.

Sounds like it could be two people... .

David Liebman was in Ten Wheel Drive.

Bassist David Izenzon, who played with Ornette Coleman... ...died young, What from? ...discography. .

Jazz Something Else Ornette Coleman at Town Hall. by Gary Giddins April 14, 2008 Ornette Coleman in his apartment in New York City, March, 2008. Photograph by Platon. Avid expectation invariably precedes a concert by Ornette Coleman, the revolutionary alto saxophonist, composer, and sometime trumpeter and violinist. But the revivalist fervor that accompanied his appearance at Town Hall on a recent Friday evening was something else. This was Coleman’s first New York appearance since a flurry of institutional crownings last year: the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award, and, from his native state, the Texas Medal of Arts. Most remarkably, he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his self-produced album “Sound Grammar,” his first recording in a decade; it’s the only time the award has ever been given for a commercial record. Broadway-scale ticket prices magnified the homecoming—Coleman has lived in New York for nearly half a century—with an aura of exclusivity, and, in an eighty-minute performance, he did not disappoint. The audience emerged awed by his undiminished vigor and capacity to surprise. As my wife and I pulled ourselves away from the Forty-third Street afterglow, she said, “Explain to me again why he was so controversial.” No musician has ever roiled the jazz establishment quite as much as Coleman. Musical history is filled with jeering audiences and critics, but not many musicians have inspired personal violence. In Louisiana, in 1949, Coleman was summoned from a bandstand and beaten bloody by a mob which also destroyed his saxophone. A decade later, when he arrived in New York to play at the Five Spot, in Cooper Square, the drummer Max Roach came to listen and, as Coleman tells it, ended up punching him in the mouth. But musicians with a grounding in the classical avant-garde were more encouraging: Leonard Bernstein declared him a genius, Gunther Schuller wrote a concerto with him in mind, and John Lewis, the pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, touted him as the most important jazz figure since Charlie Parker. The object of this furor is a preternaturally gentle man who speaks, with a modest lisp, in visionary metaphors and bold assertions. Those assertions came initially, between 1958 and 1960, in a series of provocative album titles: “Something Else!!!!”; “The Shape of Jazz to Come”; “Change of the Century.” His double-quartet album, “Free Jazz,” ornamented with cover art by Jackson Pollock, made him, along with Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, the most radical and divisive member of a movement that set aside fixed meters, harmonies, and structures. His phrase “free jazz” became the war cry of an entire generation. Although Coleman performs to packed stadiums at European festivals, he remains unknown to most Americans. Perhaps the chief impediment to greater popularity is the very quality that centers his achievement: the raw, rugged, vocalized, weirdly pitched sound of his alto saxophone. Considered uniquely, radiantly beautiful by fans, it is like no other sound in or out of jazz. Within the space of a few notes—a crying glissando, say, or a chortling squeak—Coleman’s sound is as unmistakable as the voice of a loved one. Even now, in a far noisier and more dissonant world than 1959, listening to Coleman can be a bracing experience for the uninitiated. Coleman’s attitude toward intonation is unconventional. The classical composer Hale Smith once spoke to me of Coleman’s “quarter-tone pitch,” by which he meant that Coleman plays between the semitones of an ordinary chromatic scale. The core of Coleman’s genius, Smith felt, is that, however sharp or flat he is from accepted pitch, he is consistent from note to note. Coleman hears so acutely that even when he is out of tune with the rest of the musical world he is always in tune with himself. Much of Coleman’s career has been dedicated to creating ensembles that complement this sound. He has usually avoided instruments with fixed pitch, like the piano, and instead has sought bassists and guitarists who, through special tunings or sheer empathy, can harmoniously balance his timbre and intonation. This search has led him to explore a wider range of contexts than any other jazz composer. He has written for symphony orchestra (most successfully, the 1972 magnum opus “Skies of America”), woodwind quintet, string quartet, and jazz trios, quartets, and a variety of other chamber-size ensembles. As early as the sixties, he was drawn to the possibilities of electric bands, a line of inquiry that led to his own version of jazz-rock fusion, which he called “harmolodic.” This neologism, contracted from “harmony,” “movement,” and “melodic,” gives some idea of a music in which harmonies freed from their tonal centers and rhythms freed from regular meters function as an integral, continuously modulating whole. At Town Hall, a few weeks after his seventy-eighth birthday, and after touring Croatia, Spain, Canada, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, Coleman introduced his new quartet, made up of long-term allies—Tony Falanga on bass, Al MacDowell on bass guitar, and Coleman’s son Denardo on drums. Coleman has long worked at a reconsideration of the relationship between the front and rear lines of the jazz ensemble. Jazz typically involves soloists improvising over a beat and bass line provided by a rhythm section, but, as jazz developed in the postwar era, rhythm instruments began to play increasingly active, liberated roles. Coleman always demanded greater involvement on the part of his bassists and drummers, even if the over-all shape of his performances remained tied to the idea of a soloist supported by rhythm. However, his preferred instrumentation in recent years, involving drums and two basses, as heard on “Sound Grammar,” has enabled him to retain the central role of his improvisations while increasing the prominence of the other musicians to the point where the ensemble displays the organic unity of a string quartet. Coleman’s latest lineup took that idea to a new level. His plaintive alto centered the music, but it never flew beyond the gravity of the ensemble, and the quartet functioned as one. On bass, Falanga brought cello-like purity of sound, a sense of European classicism especially evident in pieces derived from that tradition: “Sleep Talking,” a piece that Coleman has been developing since 1979, echoes the opening of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and “Bach” begins with the opening of the first cello suite, before reordering itself with a funky backbeat. MacDowell’s electric bass, with its twangy sound and rhythm-guitar-like sliding chords, suggested at times a “harmolodic” frisson of contrary keys, realigning the harmonies. His contribution was consistently assertive, and, in the dark meditation of “9/11” (apparently a new piece) and the twelve-bar blues “Turnaround,” a version of Coleman’s 1959 classic “Turnabout,” it became a defining presence. Denardo Coleman, meanwhile, has survived a peculiarly difficult and humiliating apprenticeship, having débuted, at the age of ten, on Coleman’s 1966 album, “The Empty Foxhole.” Coleman’s decision to feature his son in a role previously occupied by some of the finest drummers of the era was interpreted as yet another provocation, and the criticism was deadly. But Denardo continued to develop his skills in public, and somewhere along the way he became an essential member of the group. Now in his fifties, he plays with fierce drive, lacking the intricacy and subtlety of his predecessors but compensating with lightning reflexes that allow him to navigate between backbeats, shuffles, and machine-gun fills. As for Coleman himself, the Town Hall concert was a reminder that, for all the innovation and the putative gauntlets hurled at musical conventions, the dominant mode of his music is lyrical. Coleman’s pieces still cross generic borders, but they do so more cheerfully than aggressively, suggesting an oddly universal equation that partakes of classical music, rock, blues, and country melodies. Coleman may, indeed, be the last great melodist—trafficking in the sphere of irresistibly hummable tunes, alternately happy and sad, that strike us in those unprotected areas of naïve pleasure that survive childhood. No better example exists than his standard encore and most celebrated ballad, the 1959 “Lonely Woman,” performed at Town Hall in a slightly abbreviated arrangement that underscored the deliciously yearning main melody, which haunts the mind long after the final notes have faded, like the memory of a wonderful idea. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musi...u_music_giddins

April 14, 2008 NBC Tests Family Hour Boundaries By EDWARD WYATT, NYT LOS ANGELES — It was almost as if the NBC comedy writers had decided to test the limits of prime time taste just as the network unveiled a family-friendly philosophy of scheduling. Thursday’s episodes of “30 Rock” and “The Office,” the first new installments to be broadcast since the end of the writers’ strike, each included coy references to a vulgarity: in one case it was bleeped out; in the other it was winked at in an acronym. While not unprecedented, the occurrences in the back-to-back prime-time shows were jarring. They also raise questions about the placement of “30 Rock” as an anchor of what an NBC executive, Ben Silverman, has designated the “family hour.” In the case of “30 Rock,” the reference came in the form of an acronym — part of the title of a make-believe “Survivor”-like show — referring to a teenager’s crude designation of someone’s sexy mother. In “The Office,” besides the bleeping, the character’s lips were even pixilated to prevent lip reading. But it was not difficult for many viewers instantly to realize what was said. Mitch Metcalf, NBC’s executive vice president for program scheduling, said in an interview on Friday that the shows were not breaking new ground: comedies on NBC and other networks have used the vulgarity before, he said, and cited a 1993 episode of “Seinfeld.” Mr. Metcalf also noted that both of Thursday’s shows carried a TV-14 rating. That rating warns parents that they might find some of the content unsuitable for children under 14. The general content of the “30 Rock” episode, however, appears to work against NBC’s positioning of the show in its family hour, the 8 to 9 p.m. block of programming that Mr. Silverman said would consist of shows a family could watch together. The contestants on the island-based reality-show-within-a-show on “30 Rock” are described as 20 “holy hot mamas,” who are accompanied by 50 eighth-grade boys as they compete at tasks like “eating bugs to earn tampons.” They square off in “Erection Cove,” with the loser having to remove her bikini top and burn it in the fire. Mr. Metcalf said that the family-hour designation should be seen as offering “direction for program development,” not “black-and-white expectations” for the audience. “It was not to be construed as a return to a strictly defined family hour,” he said, featuring wholesome shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” a hit on NBC in the late 1970s and early ’80s. “Those days and those audience expectations are gone,” Mr. Metcalf said. He further differentiated NBC’s Thursday-night comedy block from the family shows planned for other nights at 8. “Our tradition is one of adult, edgy, sophisticated comedies” on Thursday nights, he said. When appropriate, the shows would get a TV-14 warning, he said, and “30 Rock,” though scheduled at 8:30 p.m. (or 7:30 Central time) “meets the expectations for that night.” “There are not going to be hard and fast rules” for the family hour, Mr. Metcalf added. Mr. Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, seemed less nuanced in his descriptions of the family hour during a conference call with reporters earlier this month. Asked about the Thursday-night comedies, Mr. Silverman said “30 Rock” was a show that would appeal to families because its star, Tina Fey, is “about to become a cultural icon.” Ms. Fey, who has recently appeared on the covers of magazines as diverse as Parade and Vanity Fair, is starring in the coming film “Baby Mama.” Mr. Silverman said that role could give her the wide appeal that Jason Lee, the star of NBC’s “My Name Is Earl,” received after starring in “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” which earned a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award.

April 15, 2008 Essay Gauging a Collider’s Odds of Creating a Black Hole By DENNIS OVERBYE In Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins,” the protagonist, a doctor and an inventor, recites what he calls the scientist’s prayer. It goes like this: “Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. “Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. “Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.” Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we trust to do them? That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident. Nevertheless, some experts say too much hype and not enough candor on the part of scientists about the promises and perils of what they do could boomerang into a public relations disaster for science, opening the door for charlatans and demagogues. In a paper published in 2000 with the title “Might a Laboratory Experiment Destroy Planet Earth?” Francesco Calogero, a nuclear physicist at the University of Rome and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Pugwash conferences on arms control, deplored a tendency among his colleagues to promulgate a “leave it to the experts” attitude. “Many, indeed most, of them,” he wrote, “seem to me to be more concerned with the public relations impact of what they, or others, say and write, than in making sure that the facts are presented with complete scientific objectivity.” One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than “informed betting odds,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal and the author of “Our Final Hour.” Adrian Kent, also of Cambridge, said in a paper in 2003 reviewing scientists’ failure to calculate adequately and characterize accurately risks to the public, that even the most basic question, “ ‘How improbable does a catastrophe have to be to justify proceeding with an experiment?’ seems never to have been seriously examined.” Dr. Calogero commented, as did Dr. Kent, in 2000 after a very public battle on the safety of another accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Dr. Calogero said he hoped to apply a gentle pressure on Cern to treat these issues with seriousness. “A crusade against it is a danger,” he said of the new collider. “It would not be based on rational argument.” Fears about the Brookhaven collider first centered on black holes but soon shifted to the danger posed by weird hypothetical particles, strangelets, that critics said could transform the Earth almost instantly into a dead, dense lump. Ultimately, independent studies by two groups of physicists calculated that the chances of this catastrophe were negligible, based on astronomical evidence and assumptions about the physics of the strangelets. One report put the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots. Dr. Kent, in a 2003 paper, used the standard insurance company method to calculate expected losses to explore how stringent this bound on danger was. He multiplied the disaster probability times the cost, in this case the loss of the global population, six billion. A result was that, in actuarial terms, the Rhic collider could kill up to 120 people in a decade of operation. “Put this way, the bound seems far from adequately reassuring,” Dr. Kent wrote. Alvaro de Rujula of Cern, who was involved in writing a safety report, said extending the insurance formula that way violated common sense. “Applied to all imaginable catastrophes, it would result in World Paralysis,” he wrote. Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons. Doomsday from particle physics is part of the culture. Next year will see the release of the film version of “Angels and Demons,” the prequel to Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code,” in which the bad guys use a Cern accelerator to gather antimatter for a bomb to blow up the Vatican, and it includes scenes at Cern. In Douglas Preston’s “Blasphemy,” a best seller last winter, the operators of a giant particle collider in New Mexico find themselves talking to an entity that sounds like God before religious fanatics descend on the lab and destroy it. Some physicists, who have been waiting 14 years for the new collider, have proclaimed in papers and press releases increasingly ambitious and unlikely hopes, including proving a long-shot version of string theory by producing microscopic black holes. Inevitably, these black holes have taken center stage in the latest round of doomsday alarms. Most theorists will say the version of their theory that predicts black holes is extremely unlikely — though not impossible. But the chance that such a black hole would not instantly evaporate according to a theory famously propounded by Stephen Hawking in 1974 is even more weirdly unlikely, the theorists say. Cern’s most recent safety report, in 2003, focused mostly on refuting the strangelet threat in the hadron collider and devoted just three pages to black holes, saying they “do not present a conceivable risk.” It gave no odds. An anonymous Cern committee is working on a final, more comprehensive report. Neither Dr. Calogero nor Dr. Rees say they are losing sleep over the collider. Some risk is acceptable, even inevitable, in the pursuit of knowledge, they say, and they trust the physicists who have built it. But it would be more reassuring in the long run, as Dr. Kent noted, if everybody agreed beforehand how much risk is acceptable, before spending billions of dollars and major political capital. One popular option to determine acceptable risk is to demand that the chance of a man-made disaster be kept below the chance of a natural disaster like being obliterated by an asteroid. Astronomers estimate that chance as one in 50 million in any given year. Of course, thanks to those pesky quantum laws, disaster could come anytime. Or not. It could happen that the scientist’s prayer will be answered and your discovery will indeed lead to knowledge, human happiness and a new killer ap for iPhones. “As in all explorations of uncharted domains, there may be a risk,” Dr. Rees wrote, “but there is a hidden cost of saying no.”

Yep. Just fold that Rhodes under yer arm and it's off to the gig. .

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/sports/o...s/14rocket.html The planes the league will use are based on a small jet sold by Velocity Aircraft, a league-owned company in Florida. April 14, 2008 Look! In the Sky. It’s a Rocket Racer. By JOHN SCHWARTZ The racers may finally be reaching the starting line. The Rocket Racing League, a long-promised attempt to create a kind of Nascar of the skies, will hold its first exhibition races this year, its founders said. The races are promised as a kind of living video game — but louder — with a virtual raceway laid out in the sky that will be visible on projection screens at the site of each event. Racers in rocket-powered aircraft will fly four laps around a five-mile “track” at anywhere from 150 feet to 1,500 feet above the ground. The planes, designed to fly at 340 miles an hour, will start side by side, two at a time. The pilots include professional test pilots who received their training in the military and a former astronaut. As pilots follow the course, spectators will be able to see alternate views from remote cameras and the cockpits. The league has signed up six teams so far. “We’re taking the business of auto racing and the business of air shows and we’re combining them,” said Granger Whitelaw, the league’s chief executive and a partner in professional auto racing teams. The races will consist of four heats, each of which will take about 15 minutes, he said. The announcements are to be made at a news conference planned for Monday at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan. The planes the league will use are based on a small jet sold by Velocity Aircraft, a league-owned company in Florida. The planes will be modified to handle a rocket engine that burns liquid oxygen and kerosene. The engines should be loud enough to satisfy the decibel-hungry fans of racing and air shows, Whitelaw said, and produce a bright 10-to-15-foot flame. The engines will come from two companies, Whitelaw said: Xcor Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., and Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Tex. Armadillo was founded by John Carmack, a high-tech businessman who created successful video games, including Doom and Quake. The first public taste of rocket racing will take place Aug. 1 and Aug. 2 in Oshkosh, Wis., Whitelaw said, at the annual Experimental Aircraft Association air show. It will involve two of the sleek aircraft developed for the league. The racers will also perform at air shows in Nevada and New Mexico. (More information is available at rocketracingleague.com.) Competition should begin in 2009, the founders said. That is quite a bit later than the league planned. Rocket Racing was announced in 2005, and the company released animations showing what a race might look like, with plenty of swooping and blazing rockets. The founders said then that the first races would be held in 2006. The league’s plans have faltered in the interim. A video game based on the races that the founders said would be produced has not emerged, and one of its original teams, Leading Edge Rocket Racing, dropped out last year, issuing a statement that suggested the league was in disarray. “Some of the things took longer than we had anticipated,” Whitelaw said. He added, “We’re 15 months behind where I thought we would be, which is not too shabby.” The league’s co-founder, Peter Diamandis, served as chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which awarded the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first privately financed human flight to space. Diamandis said in an e-mail interview that “most pioneers who enter this business are, typically, optimists, and tend to believe things can be accomplished faster than it really takes.” The league, he said, fits into a broader goal of “making space a firsthand experience” for people, and driving down the cost of getting to space through commercial ventures. Whitelaw stressed that the league was a business. It will patent technological innovations on its racers, like safety features, in hopes of making money off them should they make their way into general aviation, and it will try to build profits out of television and merchandising rights. The company will also sell conventional jet-engine versions of the Velocity racer, he said. Diamandis said, “If we do our job right, many of these new technologies will end up in both space-related hardware and general aviation — just like technologies pioneered in Formula and Indy Racing end up in the cars we drive.” He acknowledged that flying rockets involved the risk of accidents and death, an issue that has raised questions about the viability of space tourism. Racing, however, is a different arena, with a higher level of accepted risk, he said.

And then there's the fact that it's an opera...ah, opera. That bloated art form. I wouldn't have a problem, if they didn't sing like that. I think I just want to see the theater without the singing. .

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.

The Metropolitan takes Philip Glass' work on Gandhi to exalted levels. By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic April 14, 2008 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.

'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.

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."

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.

I wouldn't mind checking out a Glass opera, but...no funds right now and wouldn't it be horrible to spend a fortune on tickets, only not to be in the mood for Glass that day.

April 14, 2008 Music Review | 'Satyagraha' Fanciful Visions on the Mahatma’s Road to Truth and Simplicity By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT 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.

Yeah, those trombones really send the wrong message. What will people think? .

Yep. After hundreds of photos, Someone* flipped out over a woman in underware, called the photo obscene and the thread was deleted. * mysteriously enough, that someone was a man. We think. He throws a lot of hysterical temper tantrums.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creed_Bratton

That's dedication! I bought my new April 2001.

I might as well forget about starting that Mila Kunis tribute thread. .

That's the date on my box. .