The Masterworks Chorale's concert, Sunday March 15

Because we know Steve, the director, and Sandy, one of the singers and have attended so many of Masterworks' concerts, these afternoon concerts really have taken on a friendly, relaxed feeling to them, as if we were spending time with friends.

The music was friendly as well. Selections from Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Mendelssohn's Six Songs to be Sung in the Open Air, and Mendelssohn's opera Son and Stranger.

I knew the Brahm a little because the Brookline Chorus had included some of the songs in one of our concerts last year. They're wonderful pieces, and the Chorale sang them well, particularly the one that was sopranos only (though I forget the name of that one).

For the Six Songs, I imagined a German family picnic, in which the townsfolk formed up in choirs and sang. Did they do that?

The opera was the highlight of the concert, of course. It's a rarely played opera. I could really sense how deeply the singers were invested in their roles. I found it a bit hard to follow the story. Yet, there was enough acting to pretty much demonstrate what was happening. And it was in English, after all. All the singers were wonderful, especially Sumner Thompson, the baritone as Kaus. He's got a big, hall-filling voice, and he showed the right sense of comic timing and acting skill to make the role come alive. It's a light opera, not dramatic, and it doesn't have big, defining moments.

Recent events I haven't blogged about

I'm going to quickly catch up on a few events we attended recently, but which I failed to blog about.

The Huntington's production of Two Men of Florence, March 7

This is a recent play by Richard Goodwin (who happens to be the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin). A very earnest play. It's excellent that large issues of God and Reason are explicitly argued in front of us, here with Pope Urban and Galileo acting as spokesmen for the respective sides (though here, the pope appears to be the man of Reason, and Galileo is the more religious). I felt as if I were watching a very well acted historical re-enactment not unlike what we see on PBS. And that I've seen this same show several times. I found a lot to like in the characters, and the performances, but the play is short on drama and overly talky, like a slightly senile professor.


The New Repertory Theater's Exits and Entrances, a play by Athol Fugard, March 5

Really wonderful performances by Ross MacDonald as the young playwright, and especially Will Lyman as the grisled veteran actor. Some touching scenes as Lyman recalls his past in the theater. But very little drama. A little too earnest. The younger man-older veteran story is a good one, but there's not much story here. I kept wondering if there was a sexual component here that Fugard never explored. It seemed like a possible undercurrent, but too far under.


The Brookline Chorus concert Songs of Freedom, February 28

(I sing in the bass section with the Chorus). A very short concert. I think the centerpiece of the concert was the Kirk Mechem songs from his opera, John Brown. I enjoyed singing them. Overall, the theme of "Freedom" is too diffuse. Going from Horizon (a tragic South African song by Peter Van Dijk about a Bushmen tribe that includes claps, hisses, finger snaps), to John Brown, to the Greg Bartholomew piece The 21st Century: A Girl Born in Afghanistan (set to excerpts from Koffi Anann's Nobel Peace Prize lecture), didn't quite hang together for me. I didn't feel the thread that held it all together, though Lisa Graham, our director, tried mightily to make it work musically and thematically.


Chameleon Arts Ensemble recital, A Tale that's Told in Ancient Song, February 15

Not easy for us to get to, down on Beacon Street, at the Goethe Institute. But we enjoyed it. Especially the Manel de Falla songs sung by Sabrina Learman. Liked the Smetana Trio in G Minor too.


Lexington Symphony concert, February 7

A wonderful orchestra and concert. I especially wanted to hear Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, a nostalgic piece. It was sung beautifully by Janna Baty. It's haunting and scary, even as the singer describes a protected and beloved childhood. "After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." So the song ends.

Jonathan McPhee seems like a wonderful conductor.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Militon

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Milton (2008)

The title Paradise Lost works as a pun on two levels. The British writer Giles Milton is the author (no relation, I assume, to the classical poet John Milton). "Paradise" was the name of the Smyrna neighborhood of wealthy British and other European merchant families that had made Smyrna their home for several generations. This neighborhood was certainly "lost" to those families, as Smyrna was lost to the Christian population that had lived there for nearly two thousand years. But since the events described in the book amount to a horrifying tragedy in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed, the punning should have been avoided.

The title aside, this is a terrific book. It recounts the history leading up to the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, and the expulsions of their populations in 1922. The Greek army's ill-conceived occupation of the city following WWI, and its nearly insane expedition to defeat the nationalist Turkish forces that followed, along with the atrocities by both sides, and the ultimate defeat of the Greek army, are all dramatically recounted.

I found it hard to put down, and the last few chapters, which narrate day by day the terrible weeks of September 1922, kept me up at night reading. Milton does the right thing by telling his story from the point of view of members of these wealthy clans. It's a fresh perspective on the Smyrna tragedy, and one that most modern day readers will be better able to understand. These family members, with their middle class British sensibilities, probably seem familiar to most modern American readers, more so than the village Greeks, Armenians and Turks of that era.

For American readers unfamiliar with those events, this is a great book to read. The awful scenes in the streets of Smyrna and on the Smyrna quay were created by great power politics combined with the constantly-stoked frenzy for ethnic revenge. This is foreign to most Americans -- no foreign country has ever manipulated armies and politics and resources here, nor pitted one ethnic or racial group against another. We have the racial and class divide, and memories of slights and injustice, but nothing on this scale. We don't know what it's like.

And what can you say about Asa Jennings? I haven't read his story before, but if we're to believe this account, Jennings was the American YMCA director who took it on himself to cajole and con the demoralized Greek Navy and the reluctant navies of the major powers into rescuing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees desperately waiting on the quay for days. There should be statues of him and streets named after Asa Jennings all over Greece.