Word: handel
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...Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note, featuring his trio's nuanced performances of jazz standards. His "classical" repertoire, moreover, encompasses music from Bach to Bartok; last summer he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Boston Symphony, and he has just released a disc of suites for keyboard by Handel. Always a difficult composer to pigeonhole--he is scornful of minimalism, which his music sometimes resembles, and calls New Age music, which some profess to hear adumbrated in his solo improvisations, "Jell-O"--the protean Jarrett seems not only more successful but also more elusive than ever...
...glorious strains of Handel filled the opera house on a recent July evening, an aroma of farm manure wafted through the ventilation. Talk about opera in the boondocks. At the annual Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York, productions are staged in a barnlike structure that overlooks Otsego Lake, which is scarcely less spoiled now than it was nearly 200 years ago, when it provided a setting for James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (in which the lake was called Glimmerglass). In the nearby village is the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Stretching in all directions is rolling farmland, Grant...
Neither do the operagoers. As usual at Glimmerglass, they were riveted by what was happening onstage. The Handel opera was Tamerlano, a 1724 rarity about a Saddam-like emperor in the 15th century. It's been fashionable to update obscure Baroque works by putting them into contemporary settings, the more incongruous the better (or worse). At Glimmerglass, British director Jonathan Miller and set designer John Conklin play it sumptuously straight. On a richly lighted stage dominated by an enormous sliding screen of gold, extravagantly costumed singers enact the intrigues of the despot's court with the stylized poise and dignity...
...County courthouse. It is the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's sensational new production of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, currently on view at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion a couple of blocks away. In a season distinguished by compelling, innovative stagings of Strauss's Elektra and Handel's Xerxes, the new Pelleas offers yet more proof that for consistent excellence the still fledgling company is already the equal of its older and more established American rivals...
...this scatological elaboration and royal competition takes place on a simple yet beautifully filmed backdrop of British ambiance. George in short nightshirt alternates scenes with George as the ultimate redcoat, palace rooms give way to country hills ("Farmer" George admires the breeding of pigs), and Handel's Water Music evokes the century's mood...