By: Edna Landau
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
I am frequently asked how musicians can be expected to handle the various artistic, administrative, financial, and performance related responsibilities they must regularly juggle and still not have their performances suffer in quality. I actually wrote about this in an earlier column entitled Time out for Time Management (June 30, 2011). The question resurfaced when I was sitting in the audience at a recent Musica Sacra concert of some of my favorite choral music and spent part of the intermission reading the program, specifically music director Kent Tritle’s bio. I was so astonished by the number of positions he holds concurrently that I went backstage after the very wonderful concert to ask if he would be willing to meet for coffee and shed some light on how this is humanly possible. Fortunately, he agreed, and I am happy to share what I learned.
In addition to being Music Director of Musica Sacra, Kent Tritle is Director of Cathedral Music and organist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Music Director of the Oratorio Society of New York, Director of Choral Activities at the Manhattan School of Music, a member of the graduate faculty of the Juilliard School, organist of the New York Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra, and host of a weekly radio show The Choral Mix on WQXR. My first question to Mr. Tritle was whether he had assistants in all of these places (except his organ jobs) and the answer was yes. However, some deeper probing revealed that the assistance he has had over the years didn’t materialize overnight. He worked hard to earn it. When he began his 22-year tenure at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City in 1989, part-time help was organized on an hourly basis as needed. When he conceived of the idea of a concert series that would open the doors to a larger community and received enthusiastic endorsement from the pastor, he personally sent out letters to potential supporters and met with considerable success. Subsequently,the staff grew to five full-time employees. At the Manhattan School of Music, his only initial assistance was from a graduate student, but he now works closely with the esteemed Associate Director of choral activities, Ronald Oliver. He still gets additional assistance from graduate students who, in turn, get “podium time” conducting sectional rehearsals. Mr. Tritle’s weekly radio show would not be possible without the excellent help of Production Associate, Daniel Scarozza, whose passion for choral music mirrors his own. The selections are drawn from Mr. Tritle’s massive collection of recordings,which number in the thousands.
To keep all of the above in balance, Kent Tritle employs a personal assistant for 12-20 hours a week. However, he credits his Franklin Planner with helping him maintain his equilibrium. It has led him to spend fifteen minutes at the beginning of every day looking at the monthly, weekly and daily picture. He calls this time P & S (planning and solitude). It helps him get a sense of the overall flow of his responsibilities – what can wait, and what really must happen right away. He also orders his daily priorities by A, B and C, with A generally consisting of score study, practice, and exercise. These may not happen at the same time each day but they do happen. In recognition of the fact that there are so many elements of a performer’s life that are unpredictable, he stressed to me the importance of taking responsibility on a daily basis for the things one can manage so as to remain flexible for everything else that might come up.
In looking at Mr. Tritle’s performance schedule, what is impressive, and even touching, is how he brings together individuals from the various institutions for whom he works, affording them enriching opportunities that they might not otherwise have. In the fall of 2011, the Manhattan School of Music Symphonic Chorus performed Walton’s Henry V with the New York Philharmonic, and the chamber choir joined the Philharmonic for a Young People’s concert. The New York Philharmonic’s final concert of the 2011-12 season, Philharmonic 360—Spatial Music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Stockhausen’s Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory, featured the Oratorio Society of New York and the MSM Chamber Choir, performing in the finale of Act I of Don Giovanni. In April 2013, Mr. Tritle will lead the MSM Symphonic Chorus in organist David Brigg’s transcription of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 for organ, chorus, and soloists at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. How exciting for all of the participants in these programs! This cross-pollination seems to be a very natural reflection of Kent Tritle’s humility, dedication, and excitement over every project he undertakes. If he has access to multiple venues and organizations, why not involve as many of the people he regularly works with as much as possible? It must be nice to see familiar faces on stage, and it undoubtedly facilitates communication when rehearsal times are at a premium.
There is one final fact that should perhaps not be overlooked in discussing Mr. Tritle’s ease with multitasking. He has not had a television in his home since 1994.
To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.
© Edna Landau 2012
Widmann’s Opera Babylon
Friday, November 23rd, 2012By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 23, 2012
MUNICH — Scorpion-Man prowls the rubble of an unnamed flattened city at the start of Babylon, Jörg Widmann’s new opera, wailing as he moves. We should care.
Seven scenes, a Hanging Garden interlude, and three costly theater hours later, he is back, doing his thing over the same debris, also multiplying himself, and alas we have not cared or even learned what he represents. Perhaps he is us sad cityites, predatory and detached from our souls.
Widmann’s librettist for this Bavarian State Opera commission (heard and seen Oct. 31) is the post-humanist philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose worries, intra-urban and intra-galactic, drive Babylon in one big circle against the backdrop of the 6th-century-BC Jewish exile.
Sloterdijk’s narrative feebly pivots on a love-interest, in the persons of exile Tammu and local priestess Inanna. The character Soul is catalyst in a progression of these two that ends, before the circle has closed, in a concordance of Heaven and Earth (cue sweet music).
Along the way, Tammu gets drugged, laid, sacrificed, resurrected, and flown away with his gal in a spaceship. After administering the drug and enjoying her man, Inanna’s one job is to descend post-sacrifice into the Underworld and retrieve him, being sure not to lose sight of him as they make their way out together.
If this suggests a too-rich stew of Isolde or Norma and Euridice with Tamino, it is. But we are in Babylon, and your bowl arrives as the Euphrates overflows, the New Year rings in at the Tower of Babel, and Ezekiel dictates the Word of God, not to list the antics of seven Sloterdijk planets and fourteen Poulenc-ish sex organs.
Born here in 1973 and locally esteemed, Widmann as composer is much identified with Wolfgang Rihm, one among several teachers and influences. He is, besides, a bold and expressive clarinetist: a 2012 Salzburg Festival performance of Bartók’s Contrasts with Alexander Janiczek and András Schiff all but vaulted off the Mozarteum’s platform, and a 2011 Munich partnership with the Arcanto Quartet found rare vigor as well as cozy plushness in Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet.
The Nabucco-era subject had taken the composer’s fancy long ago. Ideas sprouted. A raucous Bavarian-Babylonian March emerged as orchestral fruit last year, bridging the millennia if not exactly the cultures. At some point came the link with Sloterdijk and the decision to plough forth with an opera, Widmann’s sixth piece for music-theater.
Undaunted by the librettist’s loony layers, Widmann supplies for Babylon music of chips and shards and sporadic mini-blocks. 160 minutes of it.
He savors direct quotes, splintered just past the point of identifiability. These he takes from jazz, operetta, lute song, Baroque dance, cabaret, Hollywood, symphonies, band repertory. He crafts brief, pleasingly original blocks of sound in various forms — brass swells, percussive glitter, choral refrains, woodwind banter — deploying them to varying effect. He is a gifted colorist, writing with virtuosity for all sections of the orchestra, in this case a large one, heavy on low winds and percussion.
Vocally the writing is less fluent, less confident. Abrupt ascents are a peculiarity. The tessitura of all three principal roles — Inanna, the Soul and Tammu — lies coincidentally high for each of the voice types (two sopranos and a tenor). Vocal lines are often aborted, mid-flight, again producing small blocks.
Widmann’s chipboard elements are arrayed in rapid indigestible sequences some of the time (Scene III’s orgy). Elsewhere, thin writing overstays its welcome or fails to develop in sync with the cosmic-Biblical scheme (Scene V) — the “prolix musical treatment” George Loomis noted in his review.
Enter Carlus Padrissa, the busy Spaniard known for constant stage movement. Hired to define and motivate the opera’s characters and unite the threads in text and score, Padrissa delivers, well, movement.
The gloomy arthropod’s rubble swiftly morphs into moveable letterpress type: Cuneiform, Katakana, Cyrillic, Hebrew — ah, Babel, the universal translator — to be piled up by mummers, piled down, carried off, brought on. Nearly incessantly. Flown and raised platforms support and transport sundry participants, some of them needed. Projected screen-saver lines depict the restless Waters of Babylon. Moving photographic images reveal holy verse, hell fire, a meteor (or ICBM) crashing to Earth. There is always plenty to watch.
Still, two problems dog Padrissa’s circus-like approach to opera, evident in his 2007–9 Valencia Ring and 2011 Munich Turandot: movement everywhere deprives the action of focus; and physical space required for upstage activities (open wings, as in ballet) deprives the singers of sound boards (in the form of sets) to reflect and project their voices. So it is with Babylon.
In the Turandot — due by chance for Internet streaming in its revival on Sunday (Nov. 25), here, and significant for the textual decision to end where Puccini ended — the voice-projection problem is addressed by having much of the principal singing occur drably near the stage apron.
In Babylon it is addressed with amplification*, subtly on the whole, though on Oct. 31 individual vocal lines resounded unnaturally at several moments.
Generalmusikdirektor Kent Nagano brought to the new opera his dual virtues of judicious tempos and attention to balances. The orchestra played compliantly, David Schultheiß working as poised and able concertmaster. Anna Prohaska and Claron McFadden coped deftly with the vocal stratosphere as Inanna and the Soul. Gabriele Schnaut brought rolling majesty to the Euphrates personified. Countertenor Kai Wessel exuded glum fortitude as Scorpion-Man. Jussi Myllys, the Tammu, relished having more to do than in his numerous recent Jaquinos, serving Widmann’s music earnestly. Willard White, as Priest-King and as Death, growled and boomed with his customary expertise.
When final blackness came, the polite Bavarian audience registered its ennui not with boos but with the barest, most ephemeral applause. Reconciling Heaven and Earth had proven easier than reaching across the proscenium.
[*Bavarian State Opera in a Nov. 26 message noted that “amplification was used for some parts” of the opera and that Widmann “actually marked the use of amplification for the scenes with heavy orchestral instrumentation in the score.”]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:András Schiff, Anna Prohaska, Arcanto Quartet, Babylon, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian-Babylonian March, Bayerische Staatsoper, Carlus Padrissa, Claron McFadden, Commentary, David Schultheiß, Gabriele Schnaut, Jörg Widmann, Jussi Myllys, Kai Wessel, Kent Nagano, München, Munich, Peter Sloterdijk, Review, Rihm, Willard White
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