Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Trouble in Tahiti/Quattro Liriche

Friday, May 9, 2014 @ 6:30 pm
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo at NYU
24 W. 12th St., NYC
$30 Tickets here.



"Trouble in Tahiti" by Leonard Bernstein
A staged performance about desire and disillusionment. 




"There is a garden. Come with me."
Kelli Butler and Mario Diaz-Moresco
in "Trouble in Tahiti."
Photo by Jonathan Slaff



Kelli Butler (Dinah)
Mario Diaz-Moresco (Sam)
Michelle Seipel, Miran Robarts and Radoslav Lesay (Trio). 
Saffron Chung, piano.










"Quattro Liriche" by Elsa Respighi
A work about the elusive nature of human relations.


"There was a veil through which I could not see."
Kelli Butler in "Quattro Liriche."
Photo by Jonathan Slaff.

Kelli Butler, soprano Chamber ensemble
Saffron Chung, piano
Premiere of arrangement by Henry Papale.










Directed by Gina Crusco.



This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. This program is also made possible in part with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.  Funding has been provided by Deutsche Bank, Venable Foundation and Puffin Foundation. Special thanks to Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo at NYU.




1 comment:

  1. Underworld Productions Opera presents Elsa Sangiacomo Respighi’s Quattro Liriche on texts from the Rubaiyat, in a new instrumentation by Henry Papale; and a staged piano/vocal version of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The two works are related by their forays into exoticism (Persia in one case; Tahiti in the other) and their depiction of the enigmatic nature of human relations.

    Trouble in Tahiti, with both libretto and music by Bernstein, employs humor and a light touch to unmask the emptiness haunting its central couple. Bernstein attracts the ear with propulsive rhythms, upbeat ensembles, and gorgeously simple songs, yet Trouble in Tahiti is “sleek only on the surface” (Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times, 1955). "Musically, as well as intellectually, Trouble in Tahiti is a sober, thoughtful look into life.” Warehoused in suburban comfort, Sam and Dinah are unable to give a name to their malaise. Their sniping and avoidance, and an ongoing regimen of opiates provided by the Trio, those aggressively cheerful purveyors of the American Dream, maintain the couple’s status quo.

    UPO commissioned Italian-American composer Henry Papale to orchestrate Elsa Respighi’s Quattro Liriche for this performance. Quattro Liriche is a cycle of four songs (Ogni giorno voi dite, Una sol cosa, V’era una porta, and Vieni, riempi il bicchier) setting an Italian translation, probably made in 1895 by Vittorio Rugarli, of poetry by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131). Mr. Papale’s arrangement for piano, flute, oboe and cello is full of atmospheric colorations.

    In the Rubaiyat’s poetry and Respighi’s setting, there is a kind of rebellion against the brute facts of life. Life may produce the lovely bounty of roses, but don’t those blooms fade and die? There may be a brief glimmer of you and me on this earth, but with our deaths that glimmer fades to black. Our only recourse, the cycle suggests, is the carpe diem-style abandon, for the bird of time already soars toward the horizon. Sam and Dinah find no such solution for their dysphoria; their spiritual yearning for meaning beyond material gratification brings only restlessness, never consolation.

    Quattro Liriche’s exoticism, the fact that its philosophy is spoken by an “other” from a different culture, makes its bitter pill more palatable. Exoticism serves a different function in the Bernstein; its existential angst comes directly from the mouths of red-blooded Americans and the exotic modes employed in “What a movie!” are slyly mocked and exposed as escapism.

    The Quattro Liriche speaker’s destiny seems to be escape in sensual pleasure. Sam and Dinah’s future together, at the close of the work, is enigmatic. (Despite the existence of the sequel “A Quiet Place” we will take Trouble in Tahiti on its own merits.) They once again find détente with a movie date, yet one can’t help feeling the heaviness of life on their shoulders. They simply have no answers.

    “Just as long as people care a damn about something finer in life than power and money and their imagined superiority over others there will always be Lenny…” (“My Brother Lenny” by Burton Bernstein © 2008-2013 The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.) At least there is this partial answer: Trouble in Tahiti reminds us that material acquisition is no salve.

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