'Winterreise'
The "In" Series mounted a production of Schubert's "Winterreise" ("Winter Journey") on Sunday that was a captivating spin on an old theme.
Composed a year before Schubert's death at 31, this song cycle based on poems by Wilhelm Mueller is as provocative and painful to digest as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a universal tale of darkness, misery and isolation. Though usually performed in a concert hall by a singer and pianist, "Winterreise" is subtly open-ended, offering space for reinterpretation and experiment.
Janos Starker's enduring mastery of the cello dazzled at the Hungarian Embassy on Sunday.
(Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center)
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Staged and directed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts by Joe Banno, this "Winterreise" transforms Schubert's symbolic cycle into a potent, realistic drama, a narrative that moves with a distinguishable beginning and end. Through telling gestures, baritone Charles Williams captured the pathos of a wanderer rejected by a lover, minimizing the fact that his voice is in the twilight of artistry. Performance artist Laura Schandelmeier added a novel dimension to the story, portraying a loving doppelganger, at first keeping her distance and gradually merging intimately with the subject.
Ruth V. Ward created a backdrop of collage projections -- overlaying excerpts from poems with images of icy Austrian Alps (where Schubert often wandered himself) and views of the performers. This visual aspect reinforced a production that was cast as an obsessive fantasy of dreams and memories. Not least was the deep tone-color and keyboard fluency of pianist Carla Huebner, artistic director and founder of the series. The show will be repeated tomorrow.
-- Cecelia Porter
Janos Starker
After seven decades on the concert stage, cellist Janos Starker, 80, says he's winding down his performance career but still maintains an active teaching schedule at Indiana University. At a short recital at the Hungarian Embassy on Sunday, Starker remarked, "I used to be a concert artist. Now I'm known for being a teacher."
Since his debut in his native Budapest at age 11, Starker has graced stages in Hungary and around the world, immigrating to the United States in 1948 where he was principal cellist with the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner. Over the years he's produced more than 100 recordings with some of the foremost artists of the 20th century.
Starker and his assistant and one-time student, Emilio Colon, performed Luigi Boccherini's Sonata in C for Two Cellos, and one couldn't help but be reminded of a teacher and a pupil playing duets during a lesson. Starker's mastery of the instrument was apparent in his smooth, rich tone and his sensitivity to his partner, with perfectly synchronized entrances. His straightforward interpretation was serenely unsentimental.
-- Gail Wein
Choir of New College Oxford
Edward Higginbottom and the men and boys of the Choir of New College Oxford know how to perform in large cathedrals. They perform music whose textures do not emphasize overlapping melodic lines, and they pace their singing to accommodate the reverberation. They brought a program of 19th- and 20th-century anthems, canticles and motets to the Washington National Cathedral on Sunday that was beautifully structured, beautifully paced and beautifully sung.
Musically, the most interesting pieces on the program were those that began the first and second halves, a Magnificat setting by Giles Swayne and a setting by Jonathan Dove of the text "Ecce Beatam Lucem." Swayne chopped up the Magnificat text into little bits and scattered them among the voice parts. (Medieval composers did this to intensify excitement -- they called it "hocket.") His piece is angular and rhythmic, and the choir sang it with energy and a compelling sense of conviction. Dove's textures are laid down in overlapping layers, and the intensity of the performance waxed and waned in waves and rang, gloriously, about the cathedral's reverberant spaces.
Also on the program were pieces by Stanford, Wesley, Rutter and Tippit, Grieg, Bruckner, Hindemith, Rachmaninoff and Gorecki and organ pieces by Hindemith, Mozart, Jehan Alain and Durufle (played by two splendid New College organ scholars). They followed each other with only the barest break, the tonality of each leading comfortably into the next, giving the whole program a feeling of coherence and momentum. The singing was secure and as convincing in the tough and aggressive passages of Wesley's "Ascribe Unto the Lord" as it was comforting in Gorecki's "Totus Tuus."
-- Joan Reinthaler
