Bits about Boston

After starting life as something of a flop, Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, won a Pulitzer Prize. How often does that happen, I wonder: something that's different (and it's certainly different to some of Wilder's other plays) fails to make the grade initially, yet ultimately outsmarts all its critics and indifferent audiences, and becomes a classic.

It's estimated that Our Town is playing somewhere in the world every night of the year, including Boston - the place where it was first a flop. (So if you're an actor looking for work in the Boston job search site, it's probably not a good idea to apply for a performance of this particular play. Just kidding!)

I've got the script of the play here at home, included in a book with a couple of other Wilder plays (The Matchmaker is one) but I've only ever seen the play performed once - back in the early sixties, when it was done here in Dunedin. (Obviously Dunedin is another place where it's not regarded highly enough to be performed regularly). It's a play, as I recall, that manages to be both universal and local, of its time and timeless.

Talking of scripts, I find it somewhat curious that what one director and his actors will do with a script can be entirely different to what another director and his cast will do with it. Yet broach such an idea to the musical world and they'll throw up their hands in horror. The composer's intentions must be honoured to the last staccato dot.

Yet a piece of music is really no different to a play script. Both are scripts, in fact, and orchestra A will actually play the thing differently to orchestra B, though the difference may not be entirely discernable to most people's ears. Interpreting the composer's intentions is a major work of art in itself, and while most decent musicians will do their best, they will produce something different to other musicians, and will even produce a different performance of the piece themselves from night to night.

Take myself as an example of both a composer and a musician 'interpreting' my own work. I never play any of my pieces the same way twice. In fact, I probably can't. So to be horrified that this musician or that isn't fulfilling the composer's intentions is, I think, on a par with insisting that an opera must be performed in the original language when sung before an audience who, for the most part, doesn't understand the language.

Yes, there's a certain beauty in the original sounds and the way they fit the music, but there's a certain dulling of the experience for people who don't understand what's being sung. I heard a radio broadcast of The Daughter of the Regiment on the weekend. Though the composer, Donizetti, was Italian, this piece was written in Paris, and has a French libretto.

The audience at the Met - that most snobbish of opera houses - listened politely to the rantings and ravings of the spoken dialogue with barely a titter. The cast (which included Kiri te Kanawa in a small non-singing role) did their utmost to give life to the French dialogue, but it was all wasted on the audience, who only laughed when there was some visual comedy. (Which was lost on us listeners!)

How much more successful would the piece have been if it had been sung and spoken in English, especially since French isn't the most attractive language to sing anyway. The photo to the left, (by Silver Jade Deutch) by the way, is from a production by the Boston Lyric Opera - and was performed in English. Good old Boston - you get some things right!

HitTail provides the material for a surreal kind of dream

While watching movies on Korean Airways, sitting in my distressed oatmeal trousers, I mused and became distracted and thought about how I could extend Heaven into Hell, the reverse of what some characters in C S Lewis’ The Great Divorce attempt.
Kiri te Kanawa, seated behind me, was meanwhile wisely telling her manager that she refused to sing any compositions by John Cage, while another John, John Grey the philosopher (he was three seats back) was spouting forth to the New Zealand artist, Karl Maugham. Karl, I note, is now doing screen prints, as I saw one in the Milford Gallery the other day. I prefer his original paintings, because the colours are so rich, but his subject matter – abundant gardens – continues to appeal. A young man in the gallery was telling me that Maugham has hundreds of photos of gardens that he works from.
Further back in the plane there’s now some dispute about Alfred Hitchcock being regarded as an auteur, since the very word itself has gone skewhiff. At least Hitchcock never made a movie, someone else shouts, in which a horse climbs a ladder, as one does in Bandidas. Or supposedly does. I think Hitchcock would have included a ladder-climbing horse if he'd found the right place for one.
A couple of foreigners have just walked down the aisle, chatting. Mr Vanderlught and Benigno Aquino, neither of whom I have ever met, even though their names have appeared previously in this blog. tend, with their serious demeanours, to make the plane feel like Bleak House, or Miss Havisham’s home in Great Expectations, that book that Lloyd Jones’ writes so fondly of in his own story, Mr Pip.
The plane takes a sudden dip and we all think we’re headed for a shorter life than we expected, rather like the young man who sailed down Baldwin St in a wheelie bin.
As the plane flattens out again, I suddenly realise my namesake, Mike Crowl, from Conroe High School, is sitting across the aisle from me. He holds a full video card, because he has been taking endless photos of the actress sitting next to him, Alice Brockway. She is proclaiming forth that Yes, you can put lemon peel in a compost.
The last I see of her is when she rides away from the airport to the Penny Factory, on a pennyfarthing, which the proprietor of the aforesaid Penny Factory will no doubt turn into a piece of enamelled jewellery, such as a pendant, or a stud.

Kiri and her fans

I came across an oddity today while doing a search on Kiri te Kanawa and her fans. Not the kind of fans you hold in your hand and wave, or the ones you install above your head – ceiling fans – but the kind that admire an artist.

The search took me to music.yahoo.com, a site I’d never encountered before, and there it lists Kiri’s name and underneath her name, the word, Fans. Clicking on this brings up a page of some twenty member names, people or ‘radio stations’ that play her music. Well, that’s what they say, but when you look at the info about them, you’d be hard pressed to know where Kiri would fit into some of the stations’ programmes.

I presume these ‘stations’ are a form of streaming radio. Are they legit or what? Perhaps someone out there can inform me. (I tried to play one of them and a message told me that Firefox is not supported at this time. Dear me. Kiri would not be impressed.)

The School Year

Here in England my great-nieces and nephews go back to school in early September. In New Zealand, where things are much more organised, they go back closer to the beginning of the year, around February.
When I applied to come to the London Opera Centre back in the mid-sixties (where I met the now-famous Kiri te Kanawa - excuse the name-dropping!) I thought I’d have several months to get some money together before the start of the new academic year, which I assumed would be in February. It was a bit of a shock to discover that the English start school in September, and that I was going to have to arrange a flight, accommodation, pay my fees, get myself some money together (I lived on £500 that first year) and finish up doing what I was doing in Dunedin all within a much shorter time.
When you assume that everyone else in the world does things the way you do it can be quite a culture shock to find out that your bit of the world is so different.

When Google pulls ideas together...

Someone did a search on Google the other day for Kiri te Kanawa tattoos. It was surprising how many results came up that had both Kiri and tattoos together. However, when you checked them out (including the one that came up with my blog) you found that New Zealand opera singer Kiri te Kanawa was in general keeping a good distance between herself and tattoos. Mostly the two ideas appeared on the same blog page, for instance, but days apart.
The same thing happened with Garrick Tremain, the New Zealand cartoonist, and the word, smoking cartoon. To my knowledge, Tremain has never done a ‘smoking cartoon’ but from the Google results you might think he had.
I find this blog is now appearing on German Google search results. Of course it helps if they go looking for Löffelkippzylinder, which you’ll all remember means ‘bucket crowd ram’.

On the coattails of fame

My wife pointed out to me an interesting fact a few months back when Kiri te Kanawa, Ana James, and Anna Leese sang together at Twickenham.
Here’s the paragraph that appeared in the newsletter of the Kiri te Kanawa Foundation.
Jonah Lomu's recent return to rugby, following his kidney transplant, was marked by a charity match at Twickenham in honour of former English Captain Martin Johnson. The match was televised throughout the world. Jonah asked Dame Kiri to sing at the opening ceremony and she in turn requested that two of the young singers she had been working with, sing with her. Ana James (first recipient of a Foundation grant) and Anna Leese joined Dame Kiri for an unforgettable experience which also gave them both invaluable experience – and exposure.
What my wife pointed out was that at various points in time I’d accompanied all three of these singers. Nothing like swinging on the coattails of fame!
Kiri te Kanawa was in her second year of study at the London Opera Centre when I went there (for one year) to do the Repetiteur’s course. This was back in 1967/8. I worked with her as a repetiteur a number of times, because that’s what the singers and repetiteurs did, but on one occasion also accompanied her at a very unmemorable concert in the depths of Surrey – or somewhere! It was one of those concerts put on for a select group (a rather wealthy select group, I seem to remember) and they were probably as interested in music as I am in making money on shares – that is, marginally. Kiri drove me down to the concert and home again, a longish journey, and I have no idea what we talked about.
I accompanied Ana James quite often when she was in her early singing stages. She was always a wonderfully focused young singer, and had a voice that was a gift. We performed at local concerts and competitions (where she usually won). And then suddenly, she was moving into the big time, and no doubt has a long career ahead of her.
Anna Leese and I had much less to do with each other. We had one practice together for a concert put on, I think, by the Dunedin Opera Company at the Mayfair – one of their perennial Sunday afternoon concerts, if I recall. I seem to remember there was a pianist of some note there too, who played souped-up versions of popular classics. Anna knew her song without any help from me, and all I did was keep up with her. She was also another very focused young singer with a remarkable gift of a voice, and is proving that by the way she’s forged ahead so early in her career.
Photos from The Newsletter of the Kiri te Kanawa Foundation