Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Vittorio Grigolo and Matthew Polenzani take turns playing the tortured poet and unwitting adventurer, Hoffmann. The roles of the three heroines are shared by an impressive lineup of singing actresses, including Hibla Gerzmava, Susanna Phillips, Erin Morley, Audrey Luna, Christine Rice, and Elena Maximova. Thomas Hampson sings the Four Villains, and James Levine and Yves Abel conduct Offenbach’s sparkling score.  Today, the e elegant mezzo Kate Lindsey was Hoffmann's friend "Nicklausse", her voice silvery with a hint of cream..." Conductor Yves Abel "led a graceful, agile orchestral performance."  Listened to "Tales of Hoffman " broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, NYC.   Who is here,  in Berkeley, but Matthew Polenzani, with Julius Drake on piano.  Fortunately I had gotten a ticket early on...Matthew Polenzani  sang all songs written to poems, including Beethoven's "Adelaide" (text: Frederich von Matthisson),which celebrates na...

Read review of GONE GIRL  NYRB and I are very congruent.  Zoe Heller critiques the film's cliches...which was my overall impression.  She concludes her review:   “ The problem with Amy is not that she acts in vicious and reprehensible ways, or even that her behavior lends credence to certain misogynist fantasies.   The problem is that she isn’t really a character, but rather an animation   of a not very interesting idea about the female capacity for nastiness...the main theme of their (feminists and other women)allegations(complaints) has been that Amy's character endorses a host of antifeminist myths including the calumny that women are wont to maliciously invent rape charges.  (this is a particularily irresponsible misrepresentation, it's been claimed , because statistics show the incidence of false rape accusations to be very rare ."  This is where I turned off the film, which I had downloaded...as a start to catch up with nominations for the...

Brilliant theater.  Really enjoyable.  I missed this last fall when it was revisited last fall in New York City at Roundabout Theater company, now brought to SF in this production.  The story of a poet, Flora Crewe, and the painter, Nirad Das, who paints Flora's portait while she is writing her poetry which served as the crux of the play for Tom Stoppard.  He and Carey Perloff pruned the play to make it relevant to an American audience, and revised the ending.  They decided to keep the essence of the romance rather than deal with the politics of the Raj.   Stoppard is "aware of the whole context of a production, how changes in world view might affect an audience' perception of a play, and how the benefit of time can reveal better ways to tell a story, says Perloff.."  Stoppard is famous for revising bits of his plays according to venue.  He and I talked once at a benefit brunch held in Philadelphia; I had returned from Russia and he was writing a...

HUGHIES LONG JOURNEY TO  TAO HOUSE Enjoyed this short play(one hour) one of the last plays Eugene O'Neill wrote while at Tao House and in his life.   I could see how Sam Shepherd and David Ware are indebted to the new ground he broke.  He represents the American male very well.  This play is about a "gambler" and a monologue, occasionally responded to, by the night clerk...with incisive humor at the delusions and illusions of the "gambler", played as counterpoint to the resignation of the night clerk.  A fascinating preoccupation with background "noise" in the city, keeps the clerk going; these are fascinating, on one level, allusions which are the only inspiration for the night clerk's own transcendence of his boring situation, with imagination about the sounds.   The insistent self agrandizement and simultaneous degradation of his persistence in picking up "Folies" blondes and winning and losing money, is played against the "cro...

A friend gave me this Noble Prize winning author's book, which contains three novellas for Christmas. In our post Christmas New Year's conversation, she told me she and her mother had read the last of the novellas over the Christmas holiday.  So I commenced to join them and found the words hypnotic, requiring me to continue reading these 3 and 5 page chapters, nearly finishing, or perhaps finishing in one day's reading.  Modiani's novella has to be read slowly, savoring phrases that linger in the mind.  He is concerned, in a dream like manner, with loss, with lost people, with people who have lost their identities, or have hidden themselves, or assumed other identities.  In other words, with characters who are different than they seem.   I felt he was preoccupied with collaborists with the Nazis when Germany occupied France, and that had probably earned him the Noble Prize as it is not a part of history treated often.  I might have surmised that he was Jew...

"The Legacy of the Bartrams" with Carol Woodin, ASBA(American Society of Botanical Art)   Exhibitions Director,    A very well presented lecture. The first exhibition to be presented in the newly moved Girtin Hall to the site of the Botanical Garden and very well received to find these works of art, in a work of art.   143 artists submitted works, ascribed to selected works by Bartram, which they were to reinterpret, and 43 were chosen.  The show has been at Bartrams Garden in Philadelphia, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and in Florida,among its venues. The show and the lecture brought back many memories of the happy hours I spent in Bartram's garden and of the lecture I presented there for the anniversary celebration and how Bartram led me to following Linnaeus in Sweden and learning how many specimens from North America are in the Kew Gardens, due to the correspondence. . Mention was made of Elizabeth Gilbert's recent book, THE SIGNATURE  OF ALL T...