Word: pianos
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Baritone Olaf Baer joined the orchestra to sing seven Schubert songs. This is the 200th anniversary of Schubert's death, and everyone is programming his music. Cleveland tried to pick seven crowd-pleasers, but the lied, an intimate genre for solo voice and piano, does not always survive orchestration. The two songs that Brahms transcribed, "Memnon" and "An Schwager Kronos," not surprisingly, were very successful. But Kurt Gillman's "Du Bist Die Ruh" and Felix Mottl's "Standchen" invited exuberance and high volume where restraint and calm would have better served the lilting melodies...
...original "Du Bist Die Ruh," the piano keeps repeating a gently undulating phrase that is the ideal accompaniment for the song's simple melody. It is not a phrase for a harp to pluck--this "Ruh" was more irritating than peaceful. Baer seemed uncomfortable with the music being made around him, yet the strength of his voice did not waver. Like most people, he probably regretted Gillman's decision to end the song with a drum roll...
...fast. It made the song's tenderness debonair. But the last song, "An Schwager Kronos," was perfect. Baer kept close to the text, and the orchestra's playing was wonderfully subdued, until the triumphant final fanfare, which sounded better in the horns than it ever could on a piano. The music was so, compelling that it more than made up for the few previous disappointments. Baer got the loud and abundant applause he deserved...
...this is straight from the original text, but there are definite Campionesque touches that separate the film from more traditional Merchant-Ivory or "Sense and Sensibility"-style approaches. Hauntingly ethereal music of reed flutes, reminiscent of "The Piano" though written by a different composer, runs throughout the movie. Wildly tilted shots of staircases and courtyards sporadically break up the Renaissance symmetry of Florence. The lush beauty and color of balls and beautiful Italian gardens are interspersed with visually spare scenes enveloped in bluish shadows. The symbolic medium of a glass case or prisonlike bars distorts our view of the characters...
...easy to see why Isabel would attract Campion (The Piano), who is drawn to women trying to assert themselves against the social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction...