randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
I wrote recently about discovering that the composer Daniel Catán had died over a year ago. Catán, who was born in Mexico but eventually became an American citizen, was best known for his operas. I've long been a huge fan of Florencia en el Amazonas and Rappaccini's Daughter, and since learning of his death I've been slowly absorbing the last opera he completed, Il Postino.

I've also been digging into the intertubes to try to find out more about him, and the deeper I dig the more I run into people who are at least mildly disdainful of his music. You can see the nature of the beast in a memorial article by LA Times music critic Mark Swed, "An Appreciation: Daniel Catán, caring composer":

He had a sterling music education and received a PhD in music composition from Princeton University, where he studied with the ultra-Modernist master of complexity and taskmaster Milton Babbitt. Soon after, Catán returned to his hometown of Mexico City for a while and it looked as though that he might become a kind of Mexican post-Modernist. That certainly seemed the case in 1991 with his rhapsodic "Rappaccini's Daughter," his first opera. Based on the writing of the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, it heralded what many of us had hoped would be a much-needed new voice in Latin opera.


You can probably already see where this is going:

Catán had moved to the Los Angeles area by the time of his second opera, "Florencia en el Amazonas," written for Houston Grand Opera. After the 1996 premiere, a German colleague who had flown in from Frankfurt to cover it joined me for a drink in a Houston hotel. He was distraught. How, he bewailed, was he going to explain to his editor that he had spent all this money to come to Texas for what he called in English "Puccini soup."


There are a couple of things about this that strike me as hilarious. First, "Puccini soup' is a great phrase. But beyond that, and beyond the petty pathos of the betrayed avant gardist, when I look at the Seattle Opera's upcoming season, what do I see? Three works by Puccini. And so Swed goes on to remark:

Catán had changed. But despite a Magic Realist-manqué librettist and too much pretty music, this proved attractive and effective opera, fresh in its lack of cynicism, that resonated with audiences for a reason. Still, I figured "Amazonas" would be a slight detour demanded by Houston. Catán, after all, was a Princeton progressive with Milton Babbitt's stamp of approval. But what Catán later told me was that what Babbitt taught him was to be himself. With "Amazonas," Catán had achieved the courage of his convictions.


"Too much pretty music." Heaven forfend! But there's another interesting aspect of this to me as well. Catán is compared to Puccini probably more than to any other artist, but to my relatively uneducated ear there's also a lot of Debussy in his music. This mostly has to do with the chromaticism and the swelling, upwelling dynamic structures, but I was reminded of something else when another critic said he wished Catán were in fact more like Puccini and less like Debussy. His complaint was that the arias, while extremely lyrical, are not something you can pull out as a single great song. Thus they are more like Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande where there isn't any recitative, but where there aren't really any arias either. Every vocal line is melodic, but never in a songlike, verse-chorus-verse structure.

Which I think exhausts my knowledge on this subject for the present moment. So far I'm not as keen on Il Postino as the other two Catán operas I've heard, but I'm still digesting it. The best parts (particularly the finale) are just as wonderful, and I'm fascinated by it as a work of adaptation as well.
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
1) Ten Essentials for Hiking: After my excellent (and overly anxious) recent hiking expedition on the Olympic Peninsula, I made a list (in a phone app called Evernote) of items to acquire before I try something like that again: 1) Rain gear; 2) Multi tool; 3) Flashlight; 4) Walking stick; and 5) First aid kit. So I started doing some internet research on rain gear for hiking and was amused to immediately stumble upon the page linked above, which lists these ten essentials for hiking: 1) Map; 2) Compass; 3) Water; 4) Extra food; 5) Rain Gear and Extra Clothing; 6) Firestarter and Matches; 7) First Aid Kit; 8) Knife or Multi-Purpose Tool; 9) Flashlight and Extra Batteries; 10) Sun screen and sun glasses.

I had #s 3, 4, and 10 with me on my long hike, as well as Extra Clothing from #5. I'd also thought of matches but failed to put them on my own list. I'd also cursed myself for not having a map. So a compass was really the only thing that hadn't occurred to me in just thinking about what would be useful. They don't mention a walking stick, even in the ancillary items at the bottom of the list, but I still think I want one.

2) I was very sorry to learn yesterday of the death of the Mexican composer Daniel Catán. He is best known as a composer of operas, and I saw his Florencia en el Amazonas at the Seattle Opera in April 1998. It's based on the work of Gabriel García Márquez, particularly Love in the Time of Cholera, which is a book I loved. I eventually acquired a recording of the opera, and some time after that I acquired a recording of his first opera, Rapaccinni's Daughter, which is based on Octavio Paz's play adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's somewhat science fictional short story. I loved it just as much as Florencia, although it is a much darker, more brooding piece of music.

Over the years I've kept an eye out for recordings of a third opera, Salsipuedes, and thus became aware that he had recently completed a fourth opera, Il Postino, which was based on the film about Pablo Neruda. Yesterday I thought to check again for recordings of either of those operas, which is when I discovered that he had died in April 2011, after attending a rehearsal for Il Postino in Houston. He was 62.

Turns out there's a DVD of a performance of Il Postino, and I've ordered that. He didn't compose a lot of music in his lifetime. I have a partial recording of Obsidian Butterfly, for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, also based on the work of Octavio Paz. I've loved everything I've heard by him. I was saddened by the news of his death, and so I note it here.

3) I've been blogging about films at Dreamland Cafe for over a year and a half, and I think I've only gotten at most a half dozen comments from people who don't know me personally. However, I've also gotten email from two people inquiring about screencaps they'd found on my site. One was from an American poet who wanted to use an image from Maurice Tourneur's The Wishing Ring (1914) to illustrate a website with an audio album of poetry. Another, just received yesterday, was from a British writer of military history, who is writing about the Siege of Fort William Henry and was interested in the screencaps from Maurice Tourneur's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) for possible use as illustrations.

I'm delighted that anyone is finding the screencaps possibly useful, even if only in an ornamental sense, but I'm downright thrilled that in both cases the screencaps are from the films of Maurice Tourneur, who is still relatively obscure in the annals of film history. He (like his better-known son, Jacques) was a great pictorialist, so perhaps it's fitting that even stills taken from his films are considered striking. As an obscure blogger in the annals of film history, I'm pleased that I'm playing a small part in disseminating knowledge of (or at least exposure to) Maurice Tourneur to the non-cinephile world.

ETA: 4) Don't look now, but Mitt Romney's share of the popular vote is shrinking toward 47% as more ballots are counted. This was an outcome I hoped for as soon as his infamous comments were publicized.
randy_byers: (Default)
Speaking of opera, last night I listened to the recording of Florencia en el Amazonas that [livejournal.com profile] ron_drummond gave me for the New Year. I saw a production of the opera several years ago at the Seattle Opera House and was deeply impressed. It's loosely based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and takes the form of a trip up the Amazon -- which becomes, as river trips always do, a spiritual journey.

The opera was written in 1996 by the Mexican composer, Daniel Catán, with a libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain. The music is very beautiful and lyrical, with very little dissonance. It reminds me in places of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and in other places of Sibelius. (Did Sibelius write any operas?) In many ways this continues my exploration of modern classical music that began when [livejournal.com profile] calimac recommended some music that was like Sibelius' Seventh Symphony. Ron also gave me a DVD of Aulis Sallinen's opera, The Palace (1993), and Sallinen was someone that [livejournal.com profile] calimac had recommended.

I still haven't delved too far into the libretto of Florencia, and I don't remember what all happens in the opera. I seem to recall that a woman turns into a butterfly along the way, and that this was a rather spectacular moment on stage. I also remember loving how the river was suggested in the performance by dancers flowing across the stage with long gossamer blue and green scarves trailing behind them.

Did I mention that the music is gorgeous? It flows and ripples and swirls like a river. You can drown in it.

Update: "Although Catán studied under Babbitt, his own compositional voice is radically different, and his works incorporate the twelve-tone system only as occasional structural devices. Catán's music is composed for the heart and ear, and has been frequently labeled neo-Romantic or neo-Impressionist. Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, and Ravel are all names that frequently appear when people describe Catán's music; and though these are certainly apt comparisons, they should not detract from what is a very original and expressive voice. His melodies are rich and expansive, and often take some intriguing turns; drifting along like spun gold or rising into unforced and often blissful crescendos. His command of the orchestral palette is masterful, and his music fairly shimmers with delightful phrases and painterly surprises."

Unforced and blissful crescendos, yes, which is probably what reminds me of Sibelius at times. An ecstatic, yearning quality suddenly upwelling out of the flow.

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