Tristan Project

Last night to Fisher Hall for The Tristan Project.  Still recovering.  Elsewhere in the blogosphere, articulate civilians are both negative and positive.  Should be interesting to see where the local professionals land.

My own take (somewhat fragmentary) -- first and foremost, am glad they did this.  Whether you like the interpretation or not, it's nice to see serious artists seriously grappling with a big piece and treating it as though it might actually mean something (as opposed to its being, oh, I don't know, an expensive, luxuriously padded tourist attraction -- sorry, a bit of symptom-formation there that suggests that maybe I've spend too much time hanging around big New York arts institutions...)  As to the particular results, am not sure whether it worked or not.  I'm basically sympathetic to Buddhist takes on Wagner, and to Bill Viola, so on principle I liked the general direction.  Some images worked better than others.  By the end the whole seemed to add up to more than the sum of its parts, but Wagner tends to do that -- either because after five hours you're having huge revelations, or because after five hours you're exhausted and delirious, not sure which (could be the same thing, now that I think of it).  The imagery did have me hearing different things in the score (more details -- the way particular chords and phrases worked -- which is all to the good). 

Good program notes by Viola and Peter Sellars (no, I don't think Marke and Tristan had a gay relationship either but putting that aside)... Sellars gets at the heart of things in a way the average plot synopsis doesn't.  I never thought of Brangane as Buddha, but there you go... unless it's just that she tells them to awaken because, you know, sleeping would probably be dangerous. Then again, Buddha probably meant that, too.

Great stuff on the musical side thanks to Salonen.  All clarity.  Worked for me.

A FEW MINUTES LATER... the professionals are chiming in.  AC Douglas quotes Martin Bernheimer's (apparently negative) review in the FT.  To me, a bit harsh, but again, I'm operating here at a more basic level -- first, am just glad that somebody tried to grapple with Tristan.  After that I'll think about the particular form that the grappling took, and come to an opinion about it, probably over time.  This suggests -- accurately -- that I'm not a classical music professional.  Am rather a person who's spent a lot of time around classical music, but who is in the main just struggling with life-stuff, and who happened to come in off the street and find all this Wagner and Viola and Buddha going on.

In other words, I'm the audience.

One practical note -- on a purely physical basis I found the whole production a bit difficult to watch.  Was in Row W of the orchestra, right side, which meant that the video screen was up there, and the titles were way up there, and the orchestra was right there, and those singers in the first-tier balcony were right over my head...  all of which made it difficult to get a unified impression.  Maybe that's the way it was supposed to work but I found myself wondering whether a DVD consisting of nothing but the video might have made the point better.  For now, just one more in a series of questions without answers...

AND STILL MORE PIECES COME TOGETHER... a little more web-searching turned up a review that Alex Ross wrote in 2005, re: the Tristan Project Paris edition.  Seems we shared a couple of impressions...

Indelible images appear throughout: Tristan walks through a wall of fire, and afterward embers glow on his shirt like stars; Isolde lights a vast array of candles, one by one; the sun rises in real time through the branches of a solitary tree; the dead Tristan is raised in the air by a swell of water. And there are many other stunning congruences of sight and sound. The sunrise sequence unfolds during King Mark’s lament for Tristan’s betrayal, and the sun first glimmers over the horizon when the English horn lingers dejectedly on the note A. (At each performance, an editor adjusts the pace of the video in accordance with the tempos of the night.)       

Some operagoers in Paris complained that Viola’s work distracted from the efforts of the singers and players. I didn’t have that problem, although it took me a quarter hour or two to grow accustomed to the overlapping of onscreen and onstage action. Because the images move so slowly, they don’t impose a competing montage rhythm. Instead, they are subsumed by the flow of Wagner’s music. I found myself listening with heightened alertness, as if the film were bringing Wagner into sharper focus.

All of which makes me think, even more, that a DVD seen in a dark room might be the way to go with this...

THE DAY AFTER: Allan Kozinn, who's largely positive, adds this...

The “Tristan Project” in New York might have been more modest than its Los Angeles counterpart, but it was an innovative conception of a core work, and we’ll take what we can get. The New York Philharmonic’s nearest efforts have been frothy musical-theater evenings, like “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” That getting a production like this into Avery Fisher Hall requires importing it from across the continent is truly outrageous. But that’s the state of things, and it’s emblematic of the difference between these two orchestras.

Uh... what he said.