Wall Street Chamber Players

Lovely evening of unfamiliar works. One of the Players' better performances.

Beethoven, Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Cello in B-flat major, Op 11 (1798)
This jaunty trio rings with references to Mozartian opera.

Bartok, Selected Duets from 44 Duets for Two Violins (1931)

Brahms, Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in B minor, Op 115 (1892)
Devastating in its passionate nostalgia.

Kepler, Philip Glass

I'm always ambivalent about attending a live performance of any Glass music--and because Mike is a devotee, I get lots of opportunities to feel ambivalent. Granted, Glass can be luscious and deeply mesmerizing; his music can also become monotonous and sleep enducing.

Allan Kozinn's NYTimes review (see link above) helped place me in the right mindset for the Bruckner Orchestra Linz's performance of Kepler. Billed as an opera, the work is much closer to an oratorio. Rather than filling the stage with a dramatic narrative of love or war, the performance filled the stage with dramatic music and the drama of intellectual quest. (I suspect that a study of the score would reveal elliptical patterning.)

Besides baritone Martin Achrainer as Kepler, the only other singers are a six-member ensemble, who assume various roles, from planets to Kepler's enemies.

Recommend.

Pirate Radio, Richard Curtis

A fun rock-n-roll fairy tale set in the North Sea off the British coast, the film's energy derives primarily from its great soundtrack and its aura of rebellion against stuffy authority. Nothing brilliant, nothing surprising, but simply fun entertainment.

I take the bit about no brillance back: Emma Thompson makes a brief appearance as an aging but still sizzling temptress. Compare this to her role in An Education as the sexually repressed headmistress. Brillant.

Recommend.

Antichrist, Lars von Trier

Certainly the most difficult movie to sit through that I've seen this year, Antichrist features excellent performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as an unnamed married couple. The movie opens with the accidental death of their toddler son and thrusts them into the long period of grief and guilt that follow.
Much of the movie's difficulty is emotional, stemming from the movie's tight focus on the couple. Except for the brief appearances of that child, the film depicts no other characters but Dafoe's and Gainsbourg's. Other difficult elements are more physical and require us to anticipate and watch excrutiating acts of torture.
Von Trier explores the inherent evil in Nature, human and otherwise, asking us to consider if human evil is natural or a perversion. Though I was emotionally (and physically) drained after watching the film, I was fascinated by von Trier's efforts to combine a tale of anti-misogyny with those very misogynistic elements it would have us deplore.
We saw the film a 2nd time on 19 November; it holds up well.


Highly recommended--but with caveats.

An Education, Lone Scherfig

Though set in 1961 London, An Education depicts every 17-year-old girl's fantasy temptations without being a movie simply about every 17-year-old girl's fantasies. We're lured right along with her, just as willing as she to overlook inconsistencies in the older man's lines. Consequently, we're also just as horrified when we're no longer able to ignore his lies.

Carey Mulligan is excellent as Jenny; Emma Thompson provides needed ambivalence as the icy, distant headmistress of Jenny's school.

Highly recommend.

39 Steps

This long-running Broadway show is now on the road, and we saw it at New Haven's Shubert Theatre. The thriller-comedy reimagines Hitchcock's 1935 movie using only four actors. The laughs come from the multiple character/costume changes, and the thriller comes from a fairly thin mystery plot. It made for a fun, light-hearted evening.

Recommend.

Quartett, Heiner Muller

Director Robert Wilson and actress Isabelle Huppert were enough to entice us make the mad drive from New Haven to Brooklyn during late-afternoon traffic. I'm not convinced the evening was worth the effort.

The primary difficulty was my limited French. Yes, there were supertitles, but our excellent seats meant I couldn't see both the stage and read the text at the same time. And because Wilson's stylized production sought to divorce what the audience saw from what the audience heard (which I guess is what I experienced in the extreme), I had difficulty grabbing ahold of anything.

I feel so plebian, so philistine.

Recommend. Sorta. With Caveats.

A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen

A Serious Man peaks under the covers to reveal every young (and, if the truth be told, older) academic's nightmare: the undermining of a career for reasons that nothing to do with teaching or scholarship. In the process, we become companions with a twentieth-century American Job, whose very Jewish travails occurs where else but Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Carter Burwell's soundtrack deserves notice.

Highly recommended.

God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza

Just days before the cast changed, we took a quick, last-minute train trip to NYC for a matinee performance of God of Carnage with the play's Tony-winning cast: Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, and Marcia Gay Harden. And neither the play nor the performances disappointed. (As it happened, this performance was recorded for the archives at NYPublic Library of Performing Arts.)

Tightly written, the script has clearly drawn characters and wit woven throughout. Similarly, the acting was crisp and impeccable. That said, I must add that this play doesn't reach for much emotional depth.

Recommend highly.

And we caught a train that got us back home for dinner at home.

Whip It, Drew Barrymore

I remember as a young girl in Corpus Christi, Texas, watching Roller Derby on local television broadcasts. I never understood the rules; I just knew that participation was forbidden good girls.

And that's the premise of Barrymore's adaptation of Shauna Cross's novel. In this case, the good girl is a bored highschooler in small-town central Texas lured to Austin's roller derby circuit by the risk and the chance to be a bad girl.

Strong performances by Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Harden.

Recommend.