When shall we three meet again?

The Actors' Shakespeare Project all-female Macbeth (now playing through November 18; review coming shortly) put me in mind of other memorable productions. Perhaps the best on film is Roman Polanski's 1971 version - distinguised, yes, by unfortunately flat acting, but also by superb mise en scène. The witches' opening appearance (above) sets the tone for the whole movie.

Our war crimes

All in a day's "enhanced interrogation" at Abu Ghraib.

Halloween's over, but the scary stuff is just beginning. The New York Times today has an intriguing analysis of the Attorney General nominee's tortured statements on torture: he's clearly angling to somehow absolve the Bush administration of its war crimes. But even if we Americans remain "Good Germans," as Frank Rich so aptly put it, the rest of the world probably won't follow suit. Already Donald Rumsfeld has been charged with torture in France. Similar actions against Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez and George Tenet are underway in Germany (of all places - that Jehovah dude, what an ironist!). The possibility exists that eventually, even President Bush will be charged.

Can David Hare's sequel to Stuff Happens - perhaps titled Shit Hits the Fan - be too far behind? And are we ready to play the villain's role in our own Judgment at Nuremberg?

And on the lighter side of the Iraq War . . .

This video of U.S. soldiers trying to train Iraqis gives you some idea of the challenges we face in "standing down" . . .

Of music, history, and music history

A violinist plays for Russian troops during WWII.

There's an inherent problem in assessing performance when experiencing works of genius for the first time - otherwise, I'd be doing handsprings over the recent BSO performances of Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto and Bruckner's Ninth under the baton of Marek Janowski. Local reaction to the concerts was somewhat muted, however, and this was my first exposure to either work live - so, contrary to my reputation, I'll be a little hesitant in my assessment, and simply say (here goes) that the concert was the most exciting I've seen from the BSO in a very long time. And in some ways whether it was the BSO and Janowski, or Shostakovich and Bruckner, that lit my fire is incidental to a deeper issue: the symphony's stance toward music that is engaged with history.

For as the Globe's Jeremy Eichler pointed out, James Levine has "steered clear" of Shostakovich and Bruckner, even though both are deeply embedded in the global saga of the last century or so. Bruckner, of course, played second fiddle only to Wagner on Hitler's hit list (that's the big guy himself paying his respects to the composer, at left), while Shostakovich served as both Stalin's darling and whipping boy - below he's on the cover of Time during WWII, goading the Russians on with radio addresses and the Leningrad Symphony.

Ever the apologist, Eichler merely comments, "More power to [Levine] for sticking to the works he believes in." I'm more intrigued, however, by what this omission in the maestro's taste might mean. As I've said before, Levine often strikes me as a kind of musical gourmand addicted to the succulence of technical difficulty; he sometimes seems to be picking out modernist challenges like candy from a tray. You can make an Apollonian case for this kind of thing, I suppose, but then when you encounter music that's not merely inwardly-facing but engaged with the world, the former style's brilliance can suddenly seem very hollow. It's hard for me, therefore, to imagine preferring the arcana of Schoenberg or Carter to the gripping sorrow of Shostakovich, and of course the concert world is slowly coming to the same conclusion: the great Russian has become a concert hall staple, and Bruckner is finally emerging from the shadow cast by you-know-who's admiration.

But while both may be great, Bruckner (left) is by far the weirder. Immense, yet truncated (the composer never finished its fourth movement), the Ninth Symphony pushes chromaticism way past its Wagnerian sources, and into uncharted harmonic space, before climaxing in one of the most famously dissonant "crashes" in the repertoire. Occasionally the development of one musical idea suddenly "stops," the symphony observes a moment of silence, and then resumes with an entirely new theme. Add to this the fact that the scherzo is slower than the trio, and that we never get back to our "home key," and you have a very strange musical beast indeed - yet one that is almost insistently compelling, and lit by sudden flashes of nearly ecstatic enlightenment. It's easy to see how the orgiast in Hitler would have responded to the pounding bacchanal in Bruckner, but somehow I managed to appreciate the composer's half-mad glory without leaping into a goose-step. And while the Globe faulted conductor Janowski for not "welding" the piece into a "structurally cohesive whole," to my mind the jagged architecture of the performance was instead an interpretation, a decision, not a failing. At any rate, if it was a mess, it was a thrilling one.

By way of contrast, the Shostakovich (the composer at left, at about the time of the Second Concerto), was all controlled melancholia - but with a sardonic, disorderly edge. Cellist Truls Mørk ably essayed the central melodic lines, but it was generally the orchestral accompaniment that proved most haunting. Here Shostakovich draws from folk song - he even includes a vulgar little ditty called "Come buy my pretzels" - but gives the material an almost savagely ironic spin. Heedlessly happy, and imbued with a lightly cruel energy, the tunes keep returning, even after repeated sighs from the cello, which is itself occasionally silenced by a sudden thwack from the timpani. It's hard to fight the impression that this amounts to a harrowing vision of a Russia gone mad, especially when Shostakovich recapitulates his themes with startling ferocity - in the final conflagration, the pretzel song has become overpowering, and dances this time to the crack of a whip. The concerto ends with a truly eerie effect: quietly, as if at a great distance, the percussion defiantly taps out its little tune - unstoppable, for better or worse.

In many hands all this would have been a meaningless sequence of exquisite effects - but somehow guest conductor Janowski imbued them with what amounted to metaphor. But what is this alchemy, precisely - how were Shostakovich and Janowski able to encapsulate a social comment (much less a whole critique) within a sound? Such effects suggest a sensibility that goes beyond the musical, and encompasses at least the literary and historical - and thus may almost by definition elude James Levine (hence, perhaps, his avoidance of these composers?). But something tells me the music of Shostakovich, hewn as it is from some of the darkest experiences of the twentieth century, will last much longer than the intellectual noodlings of the L.A.-era Schoenberg. If only the BSO had a conductor who could embrace it.

Happy Halloween

This 1931 trailer gives one a pretty good idea of the brilliance that was James Whale's original Frankenstein.

Just because Saturn is always cool

This "movie" is a composite of images taken by the Hubble telescope (at left) over a period of 9 1/2 hours on November 17, 1995. The white dots racing around the planet are four of its moons: Mimas, Enceladus, Dione, and Tethys; that thin line crossing the rings is the shadow of Enceladus . More images from the Hubble are available here.

My Mother, The Car

When Nicky Martin told me last winter that the Huntington would be premiering Ronan Noone's Brendan this fall, my first reaction was, "Really? Why?" And now, after seeing the smartly-mounted production currently on view at the Wimberley, I'm still wondering the same thing.

You see, I'd already caught Brendan, in a very credible BU student production last season (under the direction of Justin Waldman, who helmed the current show) - when it impressed me as a likeable, in some ways well-crafted but in other ways ungainly, and decidedly minor, addition to the Noone canon. It still impresses me pretty much the same way: not much of an advance for Noone and not much of a challenge for the Huntington - or its audience. (The fact that the Huntington just wrapped another minor Noone drama, The Atheist, while down the plaza a far tinier company mounted the seven-hour Kentucky Cycle, only throws the theatre's lowered-expectations problem into high relief.)

Of course what Brendan has going for it is that it pleases the audience rather than challenges it. Who can't root for Brendan, the shy-but-lovable Irish boy with a wee drinkin' problem (and who hasn't tipped a few too many, Paddy?) and a wee bit of girl trouble too (and who hasn't paid for it, Seamus?), who only longs to be a Real American (and what refugee wouldn't want that, Mr. Cheney?). Well, I suppose I can root for him if I have to, but really, it would be easier if Noone actually followed through on the deeper questions his shy young slip of a play raises. The playwright maintains a smart, satiric tone in half his script - the half which follows Brendan as he romances the girl downstairs while learning to drive (his teacher is his only real friend, the "working girl" he lost his virginity to) in an effort to both hang onto his job and his bid for citizenship. At his finish, Noone goes all sappy on the Land of the (Formerly) Free, but till then his take on what it means to be an American (i.e., a girlfriend and a car) is bracingly clear-eyed. And if we can practically write the ensuing plot for ourselves (it's only a matter of time before the working-girl and the girl-next-door cross paths), its predictability is largely offset by dialogue so taut you could practically bounce a quarter off it.

Alas, it's in the "other half" of Brendan that Noone (at right) falters: his hero's mother has just died - with the withholding of said news operating as her final, strange revenge on him; not to worry, though - like some Gaelic castmember of thartysomething, Ma's ghost pops up on stage, and in her son's subconscious, to henpeck him into achieving his goals. So far, so cute, I suppose - only Noone clearly doesn't know what to do with Ma once he's conjured her, so local star Nancy E. Carroll is left pitching wry punch lines and little else (even though there's dark talk of a past suicide attempt). I suppose half a play is better than noone, so to speak - but isn't this kind of problem precisely what "development" is for? You'd think if the Huntington were going to stage a new script (and stage quite sharply, in a shiny simulacrum of the Hancock Tower by Alexander Dodge), they'd make sure it was finished first. Still, the lack of closure doesn't slow down the cast, with Dashiell Eaves and Kelly McAndrew leading the pack as the sensitive Brendan and his hearty, pay-for-play paramour. Noone, of course, must sense his good fortune to be blessed with not one, but two, Huntington productions in a single season - indeed, I too can only chalk it up to the luck of the Irish.