Cantalina's Sunday afternoon concert "Northern Lights"

Cantilena (a women's chorale) in a "Northern Lights" concert of Scandinavian choral music (Hovland, Grieg, Heiller, Sallinen, and others), Sunday, December 6, 2009.

It was a likable concert last Sunday afternoon. Their new director Allegra Martin looks like a teenager. We loved the Elgar, and the Sallinen Songs from the Sea. We thought the instrumental musicians were excellent, adding some tonal variety to the concert. The pieces they did with the choir were very effective. The Rautavaara pieces based on Lorca's poetry filled the place with an eerie, dissonant unease.

I can't say that I'd want to listen to an all women's chorus frequnently, but we enjoyed it. A surprisingly good crowd, probably more than 120 people.

An interesting note in the program book: the Scandinavian countries have a higher rate of participation in choral groups than any other nations. Perhaps 10% of Sweden's population sings in a choir.

Brookline Chorus's concert British Cathedral Sacred Works

We performed this concert last Saturday night (November 21). There were a number of short pieces, including John Tavener's acapella Village Wedding and The Lamb (the latter for which I sang as part of the chamber choir), and Hubert Parry's I Was Glad. The highlight was the Britten cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb. I came to love the Britten piece for its melody lines and evocation of music and the creation of music as an expression of the will to know God. The text (from a poem by Christopher Smart) sings that every creature with "the breath of life" searches in its own way to know God.

This was a well constructed program by our conductor, Lisa Graham. The shorter, more traditionally pious pieces contrasted nicely with the modern abstractly religious Britten cantata. In The Lamb, the young shepherd sings, "I a child and thou a lamb, we are called by His name" and the association is on a very personal, intimate scene. Later, in the Britten piece, we sing, "Rejoice in God O ye tongues, give the glory to God and the Lamb...." A much bigger focus on a panoply of lives and creatures.

The Huntington's earnest, instructive, and odd Civil War Christmas

The Huntington Theater's Civil War Christmas, a play by Paula Vogel.

A very earnest play. There are good bits of singing (bits only -- we don't hear the entire songs, which annoyed me). A procession of characters, many of them black, enter and exit the stage, acting out separate vignettes and narratives around Christmas Eve of 1864, around Washington D.C. It all seemed well-intentioned and instructive. Vogel and the cast did somehow make all the narratives intersect, and this is a respectable theatrical feat.

But the characters, aside from sergeant Bronson (the angry former slave, now a soldier, who vows to "take no prisoners" of the Confederates) are thin. There are so many stories going on, we just can't get to know them very well. It didn't add up to much of a theater experience for me.

I can't call such an earnest, heartfelt play a bad play -- we do care about the lost little girl and her mother in Washington searching for each other, we do care about the foolish young man who desperately wants to join up with the rebels to "serve my country", we do care about president Lincoln avoiding his kidnappers. The sentiments are certainly there (a little too much at times), and many of the scenes are skillfully constructed. I just wish Vogel had edited out some of the narratives and given us a more focused play.

Ernest Hemingway's awful yet lovable "Across the River and Into the Trees"

Across the River and Into the Woods, by Ernest Hemingway. Listened to on CD as I drove to and from work.

Harry, 50+ army colonel a few years after WW II, takes a holiday in Venice to shoot ducks, drink, eat, sleep with his 19 year old Venetian girlfriend (she's from Venetian noble family), talk nonsense with Italian war comrades who adore him for leading them in battle during WW I, drink some more, punch out a couple of sailors, squeeze the girlfriend, drink again, reminisce about Rommel and Patton, eat some venison and cheese...well, that all doesn't sound so bad, does it?

What kept my attention was that Harry is such a created character, a literary construction. Every conceivable aspect of the macho, world weary, hard bitten soldier is here in one man. It's absorbing and ghastly at the same time. The couple's relationship is at times howlingly funny (the language Hemingway used to describe their sexual groping in the gondola nearly killed me -- I shouldn't have been driving 65 mph on the turnpike).

But...it's still Hemingway. The torment described, and the will to move forward is still there, and still worth reading.

I read that E.B. White wrote a parody in the New Yorker, called Across the Street and Into the Grill. A good title. Hemingway deserved it. But I still liked the book.

Thea Halo's suprisingly gritty and intimate "Not Even My Name"

Not Even My Name, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000)

Thea Halo surprised me. I expected a sad, sentimental biography of her mother, Sano Halo, and a sad, horrific re-telling of what her mother suffered in the death marches forced on Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman empire, just before the final expulsion of the Christian populations from Turkey in 1922. Instead, Thea presents the characters of her family as she saw, heard, and experienced them, as both loving and hurtful, generous and petty. The book is full of scenes of intimate family dramas.

Sano Halo's girlhood in the Pontic Greek village of Iondone in Asia Minor glows in her memory like a kind of Eden. I've heard many old Greeks describe their villages in the same way.

The death march that Sano, her family, and the Greeks of her village endured under the whips and guns of Turkish soldiers is agonizing to read. How could people do such things to other people?

Thea Halo, the daughter who wrote the book, is a capable and intelligent writer. She knows her mother well, has heard and researched her life's story, and produced a readable and gripping book about a young girl's loss of her family. As the book's title says, even her name was lost, as she was placed as a ten year old with an Arab family in a desperate attempt to save her life and escape the fate of the rest of her family. Her eventual marriage to a harsh Lebanese-American man, Abraham, and their life together in America, made for surprisingly good reading in the tradition of becoming-an-American novels.

Sano's recalled narrative forms the center of the book. The beginning and end involve mother Sano and daughter Thea on a late 1990s trip to Turkey to find Iondone. The village had largely disappeared. All that's left were a few ruined foundations. Not unlike the empty villages you see in Greece, the remaining inhabitants old people, the young having left for the cities. Or America, or Australia.

The book is valuable if only for its many insights into village life in the Pontic Greek world, circa 1900. We read about how the villagers work, how the farms and animals are maintained, how the family grew their own food, how they cooked, how they subsisted on bare essentials -- and it's all fascinating. Sano's narrative describes clear-eyed depictions of family quarrels, village disputes, petty n, andeighbors, and the presence of threatening forces at the edges of their lives. (Sano refers to oddly dressed strangers, unexplained outsiders, who appear and lurk in the shadows of trees and rocks in the months leading up to the expulsion from the village by Turkish soldiers.)

I don't doubt the details of the death march, though they are written from a memory long past. They are too vivid and distinct not to have been lived.

The main story (from the village, to the death march, to life in America) is ostensibly told by Sano herself. Yet, I was aware of Thea, the creator of the book, with her literary gifts, taking on Sano's voice for her. The book might have been stronger had Sano been allowed more of her own speech, with her own inflections and vocabulary.

Abraham, Sano's husband (whom she married by an arrangement), can be a hard man to love, yet he seems noble and loving in his own befuddled way. Sano and Thea love him. I think there is a perspective here that illuminates the old immigrants from that generation-- rather than rejecting him for his obtuseness, his roughness, his obstinacy, for better or worse Sano and Thea love and protect him.

King Lear: more sinned against, but still quite a sinner

King Lear, by William Shakespeare.

I listened to the exceptional recorded CD set produced by Arkangel Shakespeare, and supplemented the performance with the Everyman Shakespeare edition of the play.

I loved the play and the production. I hope to listen or see it performed again soon.

There are lots of oddities and logical lapses, however, none of which prevented me from the loving the thing.

In the play's opening, when Cordelia fails to express her filial love for Lear in the exaggerated fulsome terms used by Goneril and Regan, Lear throws himself into a rage. He disowns her. Yet, isn't she his favorite daugher? She is. So he must already know how she feels about him. Dramatic foreshortening and all that aside, it's an odd premise that he decides to demand this kind of vocal fealty from the daughters. I suppose this establishes our view of him as an aged arrogant fool.

And Cordelia -- I don't quite understand her coldness. "Nothing" is her reply. We understand that she sees through the oily praise of her sisters, but isn't her reply needlessly cold? If she's the favorite and most loving daughter, wouldn't she express that love a bit more warmly?

So Goneril puts up Lear and his one hundred rowdy camp followers. They like to party. She can't take it any more. Well, who could? Put up a hundred fun-loving knights indefinitely? After three days the fish stinks, the Mediterranean saying goes. Hard to blame Goneril for clamping down on the old blowhard. It's hardly abusing him!

Of course, he does eventually understand what an arrogant bastard he's been, in those sad scenes out in the storm, in the open, and finally with the dead Cordelia in his arms.

The Huntington's Fences: what's great about August Wilson, and what isn't

In the first act of Fences, the main character Troy Maxson (in a big performance by John Beasley) radiates everything that is great in August Wilson's plays. He's enraged at the white world that denied him his chance to play baseball professionally. He's a dictatorial father who demeans and brutalizes his son Cory who dreams of playing pro football -- Troy doesn't want his son dreaming of anything other than a steady job. Troy himself is a steady wage earner (a trash collector in Pittsburgh) who loves his wife (or seems to). I felt as if Wilson had put everything he had into this man.

The second act crumbles into an odd melodrama. Troy reveals to his wife that another woman is about to bear his child. And he's not sorry. He demands that she and the rest of the world accept this fact, and him, and still love him. He throws Cory out of the house -- Cory can't take it any more.

I wanted the flawed hero of the first act to show us in the second act, to prove to us, why we should love him, why he really is heroic. He didn't do that. Instead, Troy makes a complete mess of his life and his family's. Troy dies near the end of the play, and I suppose that's supposed to absolve him. But all it does is prevent us from blaming him, which is what we want to do.

For a substantial and interesting review of Fences and August Wilson, read Thomas Garvey's article at Hub Review.

The Boston Globe's review (Doc Aucoin) was admiring but thin.

Loved Jame's Joyce's "Dubliners," even with its mundane passages

On my sometimes long drives to and from my new work location (Marlborough, thirty miles each way), I have started to listen to books-on-CD. The CDs come from the Watertown Public Library. The first book I listened to was James Joyce's Dubliners (published in 1914). I last read these short stories in college.

This was a a Caedmon CD. The stories are clearly and artfully read by a variety of Irish actors and actresses.

I was moved by many of the stories (I didn't get to The Dead, deciding that would be better read in a book than listened to). The small domestic dramas kept me listening, and imagining scenes from my life. They're pretty good listening for driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Here are the last lines from Eveline, in which a young woman, after much agony, has decided to go with her lover to Argentina to start a new life. Her life in Dublin is miserable, stifling, and yet she finds herself held by it. Here they are, at the station to take a steamer and begin their trip. He calls to her:

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

I played the scene over and over in my head for days -- Eveline gripping the iron railing. The better Dubliner stories have that power.

Yet, I was surprised by how pedestrian some of the stories were, and how bland and drab some of the writing was. Some of it is cliched. Here is some text from After the Race:

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth...Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy's excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals...The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle lamps....

A cargo of hilarious youth -- these are cliches. You find them here, and sprinkled around some of the other better stories. It's sort or reassuring in a way -- even James Joyce occasionally passed off the mediocre as finished work.

What is missing from "Peeling the Onion," by Gunter Grass

Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass (Harcourt, 2007).

There is one scene in particular in this memoir that has stuck in my mind. In a village behind Russian lines in 1945, Grass is an 18 year old member of the Waffen SS, trapped in a basement with five or six other German soldiers. Grass writes that he does not remember how he got there. Russian troops are firing at them. Across the square are German troops. The sergeant orders the men in the basement to each grab a bicycle (it is apparently the basement of a bicycle repair shop), and get ready to escape. "Now or never!" Grass informs him that he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle, so the sergeant tells him to stay and cover their escape with a machine gun, assuring him they'd return later for him. Grass takes his position at a window.

"I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles -- including girls' bicycles -- and all, than they were mown down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere, that is, from one side of the street or other, or both."

Grass watches as the pile of men wriggle and move for a short bit, and then all is still except for the spinning of a bicycle wheel. He has not fired a shot. He turns and makes his escape from the basement, running in the opposite direction taken by the men.

We have to take Grass's word for what happened in the basement, of course. He is the only survivor. His behavior throughout, at least as he describes it, is of a scared young man trying to stay alive amidst the collapse of the German army facing the advancing Russians.

I was struck by the sudden change of perspective in referring to himself -- "the doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire" instead of "I never had a chance to fire". It's an affect that Grass uses suddenly and repeatedly, as if he wants to express an objective point of view that cannot be assailed.

Apparently, Grass wanted to write this memoir to disclose his involvement in the SS as the involvement of a naive teenager, more interested in adventure, heroism, and escaping his stifling family life, and less interested in killing Russians, Jews, and all the other enemies of the Fatherland.

There are many enthralling passages. I don't think of Grass as a likable man. An air of comfortable self-importance emanates from the book, with frequent references to "Oscar," the first name of the main character of The Tin Drum, his most famous novel, and to other characters and scenes from his writing, as if the reader would naturally be familiar with them all. (It's true, this is his memoir -- why would you be reading it if you weren't at least somewhat familiar with his writing?)

I found him believable. I didn't sense strategic silences on details, such as to what really happened in that basement, before or after. What he is silent about is what he was taught about the Jews. The Poles. Or all the other populations who deserved extinction, according to Hitler. As a young man who read constantly, and as an SS recruit, he must have known the propoganda. Perhaps Grass handles those subjects elsewhere. If so, I haven't read them. He doesn't handle those subjects here, there is barely a word about them, and that seems like a strange and unsatisfying omission.

Publication news

Some good news: the Greek-American newspaper The Hellenic Voice has published my short story, How You Catch A Cold. It appears in the August 12-19 issue of the paper. I'm thrilled to see the story in print, and hope it reaches a few readers.

If you don't have a subscription to the paper, you can read the story by clicking the link in the right-hand column of this blog page, under one of my "short story" headings.

Aurelia's Oratorio, at the A.R.T.

We saw Aurelia's Oratorio with friends at the American Repertory Theater on Saturday night, August 1. Aurelia is Aurielia Theriee Chaplain, the daughter of Victoria Theriee Chaplain (the creator and director of the show) and a granddaughter of Charley Chaplain. Jaime Martinez is the other lead performer in the show.

We saw imaginative circus acts, mime, puppetry, acrobatics, dancing, illusion, and magic. I was mesmerized. Aurelia and Jaime perform acrobatic stories, sometimes together, but mostly as individuals. In the opening sequence, she appears and disappears from inside a chest of drawers. A little later, she struggles with a scarf, the scarf grows and becomes as long as one of those vines that Tarzan used to swing through the jungle with, and she lifts herself into the air, ten or twenty feet above the stage, twirling, tying and untying, play-acting at creating a hammock and falling asleep, struggling to stay aloft as the entire set shakes as if it was hit by an earthquake.

Any slip and she could fall to her death.

Aurelia is beautiful. She races around with a kind of breathless energy, as if she cannot ever rest, or ever get enough satisfaction out of life. She seemed to be less about grace than about furious activity.

Jaime is graceful and powerful. He danced and moved like a ballet dancer, even when performing those improbable stunts, like walking up a wall as if it were level ground.

What was it all about, the skits, the little comic reversals and pratfalls? I found myself a little annoyed in the early part of the 70 minute show, wondering whether there was an overall story. Were they lovers in an elaborate apache dance? Were they people constantly struggling against absurdity?

I didn't care after a while. We just enjoyed the show, and the pleasure of watching the circus.

Louise Kennedy gave the show a good review in The Boston Globe, and I can't disagree with her.

Running and living a small lifetime in a 10K

I ran in the Newton 10K race on Sunday morning, June 7. Although it had been a cool, chilly spring up to then, that morning was very hot for a race -- at least 70 degrees in the shade, and much hotter in the direct sun. I am not a good hot weather runner.

It was the first 10K (6.2 miles) I had run since 2001, when I ran in the James Joyce Ramble in Dedham. In that race, I finished in 49:37, finally finishing a 10K in less than 50 minutes, after several years of trying. That was nine years ago, and I was now 54 years old when I lined up in the crowd of other racers at the Horace Mann School in Newton. Most of them were much younger runners.

We were a couple hundred people, probably none of us professional athletes. Most of us would not receive a prize. Certainly I knew I would not. Yet, we were willing to strain to our limits for 6.2 miles.

I suffered in this race. The first few miles were steadily uphill. I was gasping hard. My time at mile 2 was over 17 minutes. With the sweat blurring my eyes, I knew I was not going to make it under 50 minutes that morning.

A race is a kind of theater, a ceremony. It offers a stage on which a small lifetime is completed. Along the way, you experience running in tight spaces, nearly tripping, running too fast, too slow, pacing yourself according to somebody else's pace, privation, exhaustion, not enough water, pain, early disappointment, irritating runners. In the end, there's the finish line, and small bits of joy at seeing your wife there. With a bottle of water.

I suffered through this race. My time was a disappointing 54:25. I was 9th out of 18 other geezers in my 50-59 age range. I felt sick (nausea and stomach aches) for most of the day, and sat in my comfortable chair with my head laid back.

These races are strange cultural events. A little lifetime for each runner. I am thinking of running another one in the late fall, when the temperature won't be so high. I want to do it under 50 minutes again, the way I did eight years ago.