Travel Journal: The Berkshires, Part 2
Aug. 16th, 2009 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariYesterday was fairly mellow. Other Kenjari and I slept in, partook of the hotel's free breakfast, then relaxed in our room for a bit. We went and wandered around downtown Lenox, checking out the side streets and wandering through a little craft fair. We grabbed some sandwiches and headed out to Tanglewood early so that we would have plenty of time to walk around the grounds before the afternoon performance.
Despite the cloudy and damp weather, our walk around the Tanglewood grounds was quite nice. The historical information on display at the Tappan House was really interesting. We also walked by a building where there was some sort of class or rehearsal going on. Matthew and shared a brownie on a bench near Seiji Ozawa Hall. An old man walked by me and gave me a really odd look - it was Yehudi Wyner!
The concert was wonderful. But how could it be otherwise, with Yo Yo Ma playing Shostakovich's Cello concerto No. 1? I wasn't much impressed with Perle's Sinfonietta II, which opened the program. It had a couple of nice moments, most notably the use of muted trombone to play the main melody in the second movement. I'm just not that into the mid-20th century atonal/serialist aesthetic. no matter how well done.
Faure's Elegy for Cello and Orchestra was gorgeous. It's lush, heartfelt, and passionately melancholy. Yo Yo Ma's playing brought out all of these things with perfect timing and beauty. It was a wonderful example of late romanticism at its best. The Bizet symphony that closed the program was pleasant and well-performed, if not overly remarkable.
What can I say about the Shostakovich? It was amaxing, and I would have been happy if it had been 8 movements long. Shostakovich is so dark and intense, and Yo Yo Ma's performance was so rich and deep. There was an amazing duet between the cello and celesta in the second movement. The combination of high, singing harmonics on the cello with the celesta's ching timbre was lovely, and surprisingly ethereal for Shostakovich. Ma and the celesta player were completely together, making ikt a true duet and not just a soloist with backup. The cadenza was also incredible - it built in intensity and included some terrific pizzicato double-stops. This was one of those edge-of-your-seat performances, utterly absorbing and wholly involving.
Today, we visited art museums, driving out to North Adams and Williamstown to see Mass MoCA and The Clark Museum. The weather was pretty good and the fact that it's Monday kept the crowds away.
Mass MoCA was awesome. The space itself is quite neat - it's in an connected complex of 19th century mill buildings. The old yet industrial setting is ideal for contemporary art.
I was not terribly interested in Guy Ben-Nur's video pieces, but it generally takes a lot to draw me into video art. I found This Is Killing Me, an exhibit of pieces dealing with the anxieties and exhilaration of the creative process, much more intriguing. There was a fair amount of humor and surrealism that appealed to me. Plus, as a composer, I can relate to the issues that the pieces were confronting.
The first big draw for me was the Anselm Kiefer exhibit. It was small but good. I've always liked his paintings - dark, desolate, and abstracted landscapes that evoke the bleakness and destruction of war. The centerpiece was a sculpture of concrete and rebar that took almost the entire length of a long gallery. Undulating slabs of concrete were laid and stacked in a long strip. It evoked the rubble and aftermath of disaster but was beautiful nonetheless, a balance of artifact and art. The second highlight was These Days: Elegies for Modern Times, a series of poetic and haunting pieces by various artists. My favorite was a group of dioramas by Robert Taplin, inspired by Dante. They used verses from Dante as jumping-off points for modern scenes of great detail, ranging from tableaus of poignant interactions to scenes of war and ominous portents. The exhibit also contained an affecting animated video piece by Chris Doyle that showed a scene of destruction and disaster. There were several people in it, each repeating an action of despair or struggle. The colors were bright and saturated, there was a great deal of detail, and it had a haunting soundtrack. It was compelling and unsettling.
The high point of Mass MoCA was the three-floor retrospective of Sol LeWitt wall drawings. They were great - the detail and the gestalt. His sense of space and color were fascinating. I was also amazed at the way a relatively small set of artistic issues provided him with such a wealth of creative output. It's all about texture, color, and the division of space. LeWitt found so much variety and richness through exploring just these few things. There's also something beautifully minimalist in his art, and minimalism is something I find attractive.
We finished out day at The Clark in Williamstown. It's a small but good collection of European and American painting, sculpture, metalwork, and porcelain from the late Renaissance through the early 20th century. They were also having a special exhibit on the artistic relationship between Georgia O'Keefe and Arthur Dove. It was very interesting. There were some intriguing similarities and convergences between the two. There were some obviously similar pictures and a lot of shared subject matter. I generally preferred O'Keefe. I found many of Dove's paintings blobby and unattractive. Keefe's work had more precision and clarity, as well as a better sense of form and color.
Our day concluded with an excellent dinner at Spice Root, an Indian restaurant in Williamstown.
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Date: 2009-08-16 10:39 pm (UTC)Do they still have the "making-of" video about it, and did you notice the music?
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Date: 2009-08-16 11:48 pm (UTC)when I was at Wesleyan, he came and did one of the wall drawings in the Zilkha gallery. He came in and talked to Alvin Lucier's class (which I was in) about it. He seemed like a really sweet, interesting guy.
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Date: 2009-08-17 03:21 am (UTC)LeWitt did sculpture? AWESOME.
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Date: 2009-08-17 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-16 11:51 pm (UTC)Have you ever seen his sculpture? The Nelson-Atkins in KC has one, and it was one of the high points of my visit to that museum.