Music on Mondays

This series of world-class performances by renowned artists is presented on the big screen in Connie Brown Hall at the Tribby Arts Center on Mondays at 1 p.m., and broadcast on SPTV Channel 12 at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.

BOITO’S MEFISTOFELE

Monday, March 13

Presented at Baden-Baden’s Pentecost Festival, this production of Boito’s Mefistofele captured the hearts of both audiences and critics—a rare feat! The success was unmistakably due in great part to the presence of Erwin Schrott—already celebrated for his performance as a seductive, witty, and diabolical Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust. The masterfully subtle Charles Castronovo incarnates the disillusioned philosopher Faust, who makes a deal with the devil. Philipp Himmelmann’s staging combines simple elements (a stage curtain made of silvery filaments and a giant protean skull) to incredible effect to tell the story of Goethe’s Faust.

Centered around the antagonistic character of Mephistopheles, this Italian opera alternates between the lyricism of Verdi—for whom Boito wrote the librettos of Othello and Falstaff—and the ambitious “gesamtkunstwerk” of Wagner in which the composer is his own librettist. The only completed opera that the Italian composer ever wrote, Mefistofele was celebrated by critics and received standing ovations from its audiences. Going toe to toe with Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust (1846) and Gounod’s Faust (1859), Boito’s Mefistofele was an artistic breath of fresh air in a century when, between Verdi and Wagner, everything seemed to have already been done.

LA PASTORALE, MALANDAIN BALLET BIARRITZ, MUSIC BY BEETHOVEN

Monday, March 27

“Superbly inventive, [Malandain’s] writing outlines a very human story, full of tension and contrasts,” says Agnès Santi (La Terrasse), “that unfolds between the desire for beauty and the pain of living, between the dream of a harmonious world and the reality of a life without horizons.”

Executed with the trademark mastery of the Malandain Ballet Biarritz, Malandain’s neat and precise choreography navigates the emotions and themes so acutely expressed by Beethoven in his “Pastoral” Symphony and two lesser-known works: incidental music from The Ruins of Athens, and the Op. 112 cantata Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt (“Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage”). The 22 members of the celebrated corps de ballet give kinetic shape to Beethoven’s evocative imagery, matching the music’s spirit of serene harmony and idyllic idealism beat for beat and step for step.

LORIN MAAZEL AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC: THE PYONGYANG CONCERT

Works by Wagner, Dvořák, Gershwin, Bizet, Bernstein

Monday, April 10

The historic concert of New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Who would have thought it? An American orchestra performing in North Korea! Hundreds of millions watched this historic New York Philharmonic concert on television in February 2008, and for a few hours the Cold War hostilities seemed to be forgotten.

Music became diplomacy when conductor Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic, the USA’s most eminent orchestra, opened the concert in the East Pyongyang Grand Theatre with both the American and the North Korean national anthems. The entertaining program included music by Wagner, Dvořák, Gershwin, Bizet and Bernstein and prompted the North Korean audience to standing ovations. This courageous musical project also united Korean and American musicians, who, together, produced a technically brilliant performance. The musicians barely spoke to one another, communicating in exchanged glances and body language, and when Lorin Maazel raised his baton at the end of the concert and the orchestra embarked on Arirang, a lilting folk song emblematic of the North and South Korean people, the audience was obviously touched.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN, THE CRYSTAL LITURGY

A Film by Olivier Mille

Monday, April 24

The Crystal Liturgy, from the name of the first movement of the Quartet for the End of Time, is the ideal introduction to the world of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), whose original work is like a singular planet rotating around nature and faith, its stars. The film uses rare documents: we see Messiaen giving lessons at the Conservatoire de Paris with generous simplicity; we follow him down the paths of nature as he writes down the songs the birds teach him; we admire Yvonne Loriod, his wife, student and accomplice, who plays the works of her teacher. He is also interviewed at length, at different ages, which enables us to understand the particularity of his creative process and to understand the mysteries of a vocation: how could an eight-year-old boy, living alone with a mother who wasn’t a musician, in a family where there were no musicians, know beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was a musician?