A Hard Nut to Crack

If you are looking for the perfect Christmas album, cue up (or queue up) The Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra. This 1960 version arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn adds new energy to old Pete Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic. When Ellington was in the studio, he explained to Columbia Records that “I thought Tchaikovsky to Strayhorn to Ellington might be a pretty good parlay.” Starting this week at The Joyce Theater, and running through January 5, the tap choreographer Michelle Dorrance continues the parlay with the premiere of her own Nutcracker set to Ellington’s recording, an album she says she has been listening to since childhood.

As America’s original dance form—and arguably its most profound—tap is the synthesis of history in movement, the sound of the melting pot of America boiling over. Its syncopated athleticism alone is thrilling. Just watch the Nicholas Brothers in 1943’s Stormy Weather—a routine shot in one take—to witness what Fred Astaire thought was the best dancing ever filmed.

A white jig reforged in the black diaspora, tap connects us to the antebellum South through minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Hollywood. This fraught past has more than once sent tap through cycles of death and revival. Its great practitioners have therefore been its great revivalists bringing the form to new audiences, from Master Juba to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Peg Leg Bates to Gregory Hines, and Savion Glover to, now, Michelle Dorrance.

While Glover bears the weight of history in his tap, Dorrance dances over its surface through satire. Her routines are Busby Berkeley channeled through Bugs Bunny. A certain ironic detachment may just be the only way a white woman, dancing with a mostly white company, can reach the soul, or sole, of tap.

For her opening week at the Joyce, Dorrance and her company, Dorrance Dance, paired the new Nutcracker with All Good Things Come to an End. This 2018 work set to the music of Fats Waller tells its own history of tap through vaudeville-like routines—all danced, the show lets us know, by the last four people on earth. After sweeping the theater in radioactive gear made of papier-mâché, the tappers perform a cane dance in “Cain and Abel” and shiver-tap down a river raft in “The Myth of the American Dream.” The dancer Josette Wiggan-Freud’s ingenious platform tap, in which a scarf becomes a noose, fuses the history of Jim Crow and Howard “Sandman” Sims together in one harrowing spectacle.

Dorrance approaches her Nutcracker with ironic remove. She riffs on Balanchine as much as Tchaikovsky. She also makes the most of Ellington’s swinging but short recording. The holiday party is transformed into a hopping Lindy. The “Waltz of the Snowflakes” becomes an evocative and silent sand dance. The Sugar Plum Fairy also becomes the Sugar Rum Cherry (as named in Ellington’s recording). Wiggan-Freud and her sequined Sugar Blossoms update the dance from a saccharine treat to an intoxicating tonic. Her brother and dance partner, Joseph Wiggan, fills out an extraordinary Cavalier. Their toe-tapping pas de deux would make Balanchine proud—ballet’s greatest choreographer, after all, once worked with the Nicholas Brothers on Broadway.

And yet, something here seems rushed, especially in the divertissements. Clara is played by one of the tallest men in the company. While the miscasting gets laughs, the satirical update strips the original ballet of its youthful innocence. If we can’t see the divertissements through the true eyes of childhood, the story arc is lost. The magical dances become mere punchlines, with little need for elaboration.

Michelle Dorrance is onto something with this inspired concept. I just hope she gets to retake the exam with more time on the test. A tap-dance Nutcracker continues the great synthetic potential of the form. Now, just further stretch out Ellington’s thirty-minute Suite and find a Shirley Temple to dance the Clara, and we’ll have a swinging sensation that’s still alcohol-free.

Silver and Gold

On a recent performance of New Work for Goldberg Variations by Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein.

For all of our talk of virtuosity, it can be easy to forget the role of the instrument itself in baroque and classical music. This is especially true for the keyboard, which has seen dramatic changes in technology over the centuries. While the astonishing works of J. S. Bach are still standard today, the keyboard instruments of Bach’s time generally are not, unless we are attending a specialized performance of “early music.”

We are now far more accustomed to hearing works for harpsichord performed on a modern piano than the instruments of Bach’s own period. Musicians, however, very well know the difference between the resonating dynamics of today’s concert grand and the gentle, plucking tones of the harpsichord of Bach’s day. The question is how to interpret these distinctions when transposing a famous composition from one instrument to another.

Pianoforte, from “soft” to “loud”—the modern piano has a far greater range than the harpsichord and can quickly overpower Bach’s intimate phrasing. The great twentieth-century performers of Bach—even Glenn Gould in his famous 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations—treated the piano like a brighter but still baroque instrument. The playing was fast and even, mechanical and at times maniacal yet ultimately restrained.

When the pianist Simone Dinnerstein went to record her own Goldberg a little more than a decade ago, she opened the well-known doors of Bach’s Wunderkammer to new light and air. She employed the piano’s dynamic range to add new color to Bach’s shimmering silver and gold. Her best-selling interpretation added both breath and breadth to the piece we thought we knew so well.

A few years ago, Dinnerstein reached out to the choreographer Pam Tanowitz to set Goldberg to dance. This would not be the first Goldbergian ballet—Jerome Robbins premiered his own famous version in 1971—but it was the first set to Dinnerstein’s romantic interpretation.

This week through Sunday the two are presenting their shared vision at The Joyce Theater, with Dinnerstein and the dancers of Pam Tanowitz Dance together on stage.Inspired by Merce Cunningham’s modern sense for shape and construction, Tanowitz set about undoing the baroque assumptions of choreographing Bach, which we see even in Robbins, and starting anew with Dinnerstein’s interpretation.

The result places not just the player, but also the piano, at the center of the action, with the dancers spinning around, sitting beside, and at times even crawling under the instrument. Tanowitz’s dance is not merely a visualization of the music. It is the embodiment of the pianist playing the music.

As Dinnerstein begins, the stage starts in darkness. Slowly her dancing fingers glow in spotlight. As the dancers enter the stage, bobbing in unison, they move like the knuckles of the hand, their bare feet patting the floor like fingertips on the keyboard.

A challenge of choreographing a complete Goldberg is to recast and renew its many “variations” for over an hour of performance time. Here Tanowitz manages to be inventive without too much distraction or cleverness. Her dancers work as hard and as long as Dinnerstein’s fingers do. Lindsey Jones must be singled out as an accomplished soloist in one particularly challenging section.

The great team of Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung should also be thanked for their simple chromatic costumes. As the lighting and visual designer, Davison Scandrett finally does more with light angles than I thought possible. These subtle effects complete the show Without changing the color of light, Scandrett signals the different temperatures of Bach’s variations by varying the light and shadow on the face and body.

Whether it be the overhead summer sun or an oblique light of winter, the music of Bach contains every time and every season. Through this kaleidoscope of sound and movement, Dinnerstein and Tanowitz together give new form to Bach’s astonishing composition and put it out there for us all to see, the piano and pianist front and center.

Music for young and old

THE NEW CRITERION, April 9, 2019

Music for young and old

On the Very Young People’s Concerts by the New York Philharmonic.

If you ever worry about the future of classical music, just attend a children’s concert. They are filled with eager audiences. And not just parents eager for student enrichment outside of the test-boxes formerly known as our schools. It’s the children who are most eager to be there as they commune through the ageless language of music, through sounds that are made without a battery in sight. As one youngster asked the bassoonist at a children’s concert I recently attended, “How do you turn it on and off?” The wondrous answer should be a tagline for orchestras everywhere: Classical music has no switch.

This sweet exchange occurred at a Very Young People’s Concert produced by the New York Philharmonic. Now in its fourteenth season, the series is pitched to children aged three through six. Very Young distinguishes these performances from the Philharmonic’s legendary Young People’s Concerts, made famous through Leonard Bernstein’s television appearances. I wrote about the phenomenon of those culture-changing performances, which are now available on dvd. In their seriousness of purpose and whimsy of presentation, Bernstein’s concerts continue to serve as touchstones for children’s music programming today.

It comes as welcome news that the Very Young People’s Concerts draw their inspiration from Bernstein’s legacy. It also explains why this series is so successful. The Philharmonic violist Rebecca Young hosts these performances. Born in New Jersey, Young grew up with Bernstein as her music teacher—through his children’s concerts. She attended her first Bernstein Young People’s Concert at age two and a half. She says it is her earliest musical memory. “I used to roll up the programs, put one under my chin, and use the other as a bow,” she recalls. “Not only did I always know I would be a musician—except for a short flirtation with the idea of medical school—I always knew I would be in the New York Philharmonic.”

She was right. Young not only joined the orchestra as its youngest member in 1986, but also became the host of her own children’s series. The Very Young People’s Concerts are very much about Young. She is a superb performer for children, with a comedic presence that fills the stage with her joy for music. She is joined by a quintet of Philharmonic musicians, several props, and an animated penguin named Philippe, who is occasionally projected on a screen, giving children another welcome object of focus.

The performances are made up of three half-hour sessions. The first gets the children in the door with small groups of musicians playing throughout the lobby and auditorium. Children sit on the floor or the performance stage as they acclimate to the hall. The second session is the concert itself, with the audience now well settled in their assigned seats (while also allowing for late arrivals). The third segment offers a chance for the children to see the musicians and instruments up close again in breakout groups.

The programs come with a lesson structured around musical vocabulary. The first concert this season was “Allegro and Adagio.” The terms “accelerando” and “ritardando” also made appearances here, along with homespun props in this concert about tempo, as the performers played Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda, selections from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and Rebecca Young’s very ably delivered rendition of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

The second concert in the series introduced “Forte and Piano,” again through “Dance of the Hours,” here followed by an interactive arrangement called “The Forte and Piano Song,” where the forte players get called out one by one, and ending with selections from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. In this concert about musical dynamics, “pizzicato” and “crescendo” were introduced, along with such mnemonic jingles as “Right near Lincoln Center, just behind the Apple Store, live a piano and a forte and the best musicians four.” As with the concert on allegro and adagio, the children were each given two cards with the thematic words—piano and forte—and encouraged to hold them up at the right times.

A small quibble: the color coding of these cards did not always align with the matching signs on the stage. In at least one case they were reversed. And in a concert called “allegro and adagio” or “forte and piano,” if the words appear onstage, they should be arranged in the same order, left to right. For an age group that in most cases cannot read, such visual alignments can be crucial.

The series’s venue, Merkin Hall, just a few blocks from the Philharmonic’s home at David Geffen Hall, also remains a detraction. With frayed carpet and peeling paint, this downtrodden auditorium does little to elevate young audiences or prepare them for the visual delights of a great music hall.

Thankfully, through the music of the Philharmonic and the dynamic presence of Rebecca Young, the young audience still rose to the occasion—and so did the older audience members. The New York Philharmonic Very Young People’s Concerts convey not only the joy of music but also the music of joy. The final concerts in the series, on “Treble and Bass,” will take place on June 2 and 3.