Quartet for the end of time

A promotional video for the Artemis String Quartet: Eckart Runge (cello), Natalia Prischepenko and Gregor Sigl (violins), and Fredemann Weigle (viola).

In a word, "Wow." Or in a few more words, "Wonderful, but . . ." and then "Oh hell, wow!"

Although actually, does "wow" really cover the small miracle the Artemis String Quartet made of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 (Opus 132) last Friday in their Celebrity Series debut? Somehow "wow" doesn't seem profound enough.

For what this youngish quartet from Berlin tapped into wasn't mere dazzle, although they have plenty of that at their command. Dazzle doesn't bring tears to your eyes. It doesn't make you reconsider your life and every mistake you ever made. It doesn't remind you of the fact that No. 15 is the quartet that inspired Eliot's Four Quartets, and their haunting obsession with how, precisely, artistic experience transcends time.

No, "dazzle" is what came earlier in the program, when the Artemisians (the Artemii?) essayed the early Quartet No. 2 in G Major (Opus 18), which is one of the most delightful pieces Beethoven ever produced. It's known as the "Compliments" Quartet, and as you might guess from that moniker, it's a sweetly diverting valentine to Haydn and (especially) Mozart. And in their all-around refinement and casually classicist technique - led by the calmly brilliant Natalia Prischepenko on first violin - the Artemis seemed to own it from its opening bars.

There's not, perhaps, too much meat on the bones of this delicious confection, however, and when the Artemis leapt forward in time (and Beethoven's development) to Quartet No. 11 (the "Serioso"), suddenly their very facility began to sound a little too light and self-satisfied. The last quartet before Beethoven's transcendent final phase (and written while Napoleon was attacking Vienna, the composer's home at the time) the "Serioso" is a compact, muscular-yet-almost-fragmented experiment full of hairpin turns and unexpected outbursts; listening to it, you feel you're overhearing some sort of private, impassioned argument, and Beethoven himself was quoted as saying it was not meant for public performance. Yet the Artemis seemed to imagine it could conjure the work's furies from the same impeccable craft it had brought to the "Compliments" Quartet. The results were, indeed, impeccable, but strangely empty. Thus my first impression of them ("Wonderful!") began to be tinged with caveats (as in "Wonderful, but . . . ").

No. 15, however, proved to be a revelation. Then again, it always is in great hands. Its famous central movement, subtitled "“A Sacred Song of Thanks from One Made Well, to the Divine” refers to the composer's (brief) return to health in 1825 after a bout of abdominal maladies (the great man would, however, pass away only two years later). It wouldn't be incorrect to term this movement a hymn, and one that might be the most poignant thing Beethoven ever wrote. Here what felt like misguided artfulness in the Artemis version of No. 11 seemed to re-coalesce as a transcendent sense of balance. The piece seemed to not merely resound with a profound sense of gratitude, but also prefigure the composer's awareness that death, inevitably, awaited him (as it does us all). And was it too much to hear in the strange, free lyricism of its last movements the sense that something lies beyond that, too, that death itself can somehow be transcended? If I had the talent of T.S. Eliot, I might have left Jordan Hall and begun writing my own Four (or Five) Quartets, I suppose. As it was, I had to content myself with a sacred song of thanks to the Artemis String Quartet.

The North Shore announces its season

The revived North Shore Music Theatre has announced its first slate of shows - Gypsy (July 6-25), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Aug. 3-22), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Sept. 21-Oct. 10), and A Chorus Line (Nov. 2-21). The theatre will also revive A Christmas Carol over the holiday season. The productions will not be shared, as many expected, with Rhode Island's Theatre by the Sea, which is also owned by William Hanney, who purchased the NSMT property this winter. The new Artistic Director of the operation is Evans Haile, of the Cape Playhouse (who it seems will carry on in both jobs). On the downside, the North Shore won't be offering nearly as many people full-time employment as it once did; in an article in today's Globe, Haile even mentions a skeleton permanent crew of as few as 6-8, backed by a far-larger corps of temporary workers. Still, it's good to have the North Shore back in any way, shape or form. More information on the season is available here.

This weekend . . .

. . . is going to be a musical one, with visits from the Artemis String Quartet (above) and the great Itzhak Perlman at Celebrity Series. Artemis will be playing Beethoven, while Perlman will join pianist Rohan De Silva in sonatas by Mozart, Franck and Debussy. I'll also be catching the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's "Strings Attached" concert on Saturday, featuring the widely-praised Neharót Neharót by Israeli composer Betty Olivero. I'll also try to squeeze in a viewing of The Ghost Writer, the new film directed by Roman Polanski (and edited while under house arrest). You'll get to hear what I thought about everything next week.

Chronicle of a death re-told

The composer's grave outside Vienna.

It's been awhile since I've listened to Mahler's Ninth - the last time, in fact, was a performance by James Levine and the BSO that I felt slid from the sublime to the ridiculous. The trouble with the BSO version was that Levine's hyper-refined aesthetic doesn't really map to Mahler's, and so the Ninth, famously the composer's last completed symphony, and famously obsessed with the spectre of death, became in Levine's hands so lingeringly attenuated that it began to sound self-pitying.

But of course Mahler, even dying Mahler, is anything but self-pitying. The Ninth may not even be quite sorrowful, if you ask me. I'm not even sure it's only about death - although it's almost certainly about defeat. It's also definitely about struggle, and about something in that struggle going mad, and then something else surviving that struggle before slowly dying away in acceptance of its failure. If it does "die away," that is; the final, softly persistent theme does end, it's true, but only because the work itself must end; it's somehow more resigned than tragic. But a romantic idea has become attached to the Ninth that we're not merely attending an artistic statement but also a metaphoric funeral for the composer (who requested that he be buried in silence), and maybe a funeral for the symphonic form itself. For no one has really taken up Mahler's mantle, or the challenge of his expansion of the symphony into titanic new forms that, though thrilling, never actually led to the triumphant synthesis he was after.

So as you may be able to guess, the Ninth is in a way about Mahler going meta, and turning his post-Romantic temperament onto the very means of Romantic music itself. This makes him an ideal subject for Benjamin Zander, who is at his best in colossal musical rhetoric, and sure enough, his interpretation of the Ninth last weekend with Boston Philharmonic at Sanders Theatre did not disappoint. One wishes that the Philharmonic could command Symphony Hall for these huge endeavours - over and over again, Zander conducts great reckonings in small rooms, it seems, and as usual, the Ninth felt extremely loud and incredibly close at Sanders. And the demands of this challenging work pushed the Philharmonic's technical resources to their limit, and maybe (here and there) a bit beyond, at least in the winds (though not the horns). Also, Zander has separated his first and second violins, for reasons which remained unclear at least at this concert, and this may have contributed to a few problems of balance.

Then again, a certain lack of balance isn't exactly the wrong idea for the Ninth, and in general Zander's sense of the design of the work held together brilliantly even when the orchestra nearly didn't. Both he and his players were at their best in the complex opening movement, which is where the piece is most openly about drama, always a Zander specialty. The oddly jaunty second movement, a Viennese folk dance (the ländler) that seems to lose its bearings and work itself into a frenzy, also came off with exciting and precise attack. Things got a little rough in the third movement, but in the famous fourth, with its oh-so-slowly-dying fall, the Philharmonic recovered, and achieved a sense of haunting equipoise. The orchestra couldn't quite pull off the one coup the BSO brilliantly managed - which is to have the movement's final notes trail off so imperceptibly into silence that we can't be sure when they have, in fact, actually ended. Zander compensated by holding the following silence for several long beats, as I suppose we were to imagine Mahler's spirit passing. And truth be told, I'm sure many of us were.

Why did I ever bother with these people . . .

I did check out a few other theatre-blog posts this morning.

And then wondered why I bothered. Once you have some distance on these people, it's hard to get re-excited about them.

Don Hall, for instance, was spanking his monkey, as usual (no, I'm not going to link to his cage), and throwing his poop in my general direction. I realize that Don's lonely, and that he thinks of junior-high insults as some kind of siren call, or maybe something more like "won't you come out and play?' But no, asshat, I won't come out and play. Just deal.

Elsewhere, the blogosphere remains its self-serving self. Scott Walters floated a rather penetrating critique of the academic style of playwriting (and the overrated Naomi Wallace in particular) here. But the blogosphere was not going to have any of that! (They paid good money for that degree!) Matt Freeman replied with a non sequitur here; his argument is essentially "Criticism is just wrong. The end." Uh-huh. But oddly enough, utterly chastened, the easily-confused Walters agrees here! Of course, he says; if I don't like the style that's being supported by the academic programs, I should just write my own play! And if I don't like the way the U.S. is being run, I should go found my own country! Criticism is wrong! D.I.Y.!

Zzzzz.

It's the end of the world as we know it

Scott Sweatt proposes, and Karen MacDonald disposes, in boom.

We all fall down and go "boom" in boom (now at the New Rep through March 13). As in all of us. Everybody. Yep, it's the end of the world as we know it, but playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb still feels fine. Because in the larger scheme of things - as in the very large, geological-age scheme of things - life goes on. Just maybe not our version of it.

Or at least that's the amusing message of this latest work from the Millennial School of Quirk. In Nachtrieb's end-of-the-worldview, even the apocalypse should be set in lower case (like his title) because there's always another world out there to replace this one. So just chill out and get over yourself, mankind! It's all going to be ok, or at least meta-ok.

Because the meaning of everything depends on how you frame it. That's why the set of boom is strangely bifurcated: half the stage is occupied by a fall-out shelter built by nervous, nerdy Jules (Scott Sweatt), the other half by a funny control booth in which aging-hippie Barbara (Karen MacDonald) either pulls levers like some addled Wizard of Oz or just bangs a gong like the ghost of Keith Moon.

We slowly gather that Barbara is a kind of docent in bifocals, and that Jules isn't the "real" Jules at all, but rather a simulation of Jules in a high-tech diorama in some Museum of the Future. The "play" as it exists is just the future's best guess at what actually transpired when poor Jules realized that a comet was about to go rogue and fry the Earth, and tricked bitter, lonely Jo (Zofia Gozynska) into joining him in his bachelor pad/fallout shelter for "sex that will change the world." Or maybe save it.

Actually, make that a big "maybe." For as the world is reduced to a cinder outside the shelter's doors, we discover that fussy Jules is gay and damaged Jo hates babies. So the world has thrown a wrench - or maybe a boomerang - into this New Age Noah's desperate plan to save it, and a form of bleak hilarity ensues. For the most part.

But then again, nothing is really as it seems in Nachtrieb's existential diorama. The "past" is utterly unstable (the diorama stops and starts in fits), so what does that mean about the present - or the future? Indeed, even the seemingly omnipotent Barbara - who bangs away at her drum kit to emphasize what she thinks are the important parts of the story - is framed by another, unseen level of authority, and at times her exhibit seems to almost have a mind of its own. "Reality," the playwright tells us (maybe once too often) is a slippery concept. And since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

So somebody once said, who also felt that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. That seems to be Nachtrieb's point, too, even if he's a good deal more upbeat about it than a certain great Dane was. For as we realize at the last moment, (spoiler alert!) the hapless Jules really is a hero, and really did save life on earth. Then again, maybe Jo did. At any rate, the moral consequences of our actions indeed are profound; we just can't be sure what they're going to be. So while Jo wails at one point that she's "looking for a story of hope," she might pause to consider whether she's actually in one.

In Bridget Kathleen O'Leary's solid production at the New Rep, most of these witty ideas come over - although not, apparently, to many of the major critics, who in general seem to have missed the point of the play (no, for once I'm not going to name names, but you know who you are). The production is anchored by the wonderful Karen MacDonald, who turns Barbara into a hilariously ditzy boomer who seems to have been teleported into the distant future direct from San Francisco, complete with hair extensions and a blouse emblazoned with a big bloom (for "flower child"). (Actually, MacDonald's characterization doesn't line up with what we eventually learn of Barbara's true identity, but it's so sweetly observed we don't really care.) Scott Sweatt meanwhile makes of Jules an appealingly goofy, if utterly determined, micro-manager, and if Zofia Gozynska doesn't get as far with the punky, potty-mouthed Jo, then it must be admitted that Nachtrieb seems to have left her with at least one too many bizarre thematic points to cover. The big gap at the New Rep, I'm afraid, is Jarrod Bray's set, which simply isn't stylish or clever enough to put over the play's concept or air-quote tone (it doesn't even look much like a diorama). Somehow this seems to throw the show's occasional longeurs into higher relief. But then again, it's not the end of the world.

The Olympics may be over . . .

Photo by Chris Helgren.

. . . but "The Big Picture" has a spectacular wrap-up here. A reminder that the aesthetic of the old Life magazine is far from dead.