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 Back to business
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Looking towards one of Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls installations from Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo: JH. 2:45 PM. |
Very muggy in New York, overcast as if to promise relief from some rainfall. Alas, no rainfall.
Nevertheless, holiday over, back to business. Last night I went down to the Park Avenue Armory for an evening of the Lincoln Center Festival '08: a dinner and a special performance of the opera Die Soldaten, the only opera written by German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann and first performed in 1965 in Cologne.
The philanthropists and cultural supporters of the town were out in force (although the Armory seating can hold no more than 1000). The dress was summer casual – some suits and ties, some open neck and short sleeve shirts; women in cotton silks and linens -- The Newhouses – Susan and Donald, Si and Victoria; Leon and Debra Black, Jim Zirin and Marlene Hess, Randy Bourscheidt of the Alliance for the Arts, and Joe Astienza, Mary Sharp Cronson, George Steel, conductor and director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Marina Rosenfeld, the composer who is also the Armory’s first Artist-in-Residence; also, Wendy Vanderbilt, Peter Wolf, Elihu and Susan Rose, Janet Ross, Zibby Tozer, Kent Barwick, Wade and Angela Thompson, Arie and Coco Kopelman; their daughter and son-in-law, Jill and Harry Kargman, Adam and Olivia Flatto, Kirk Henckels and Fernanda Kellogg, Dan and Estrelita Brodsky, Harvey and Phyllis Lichtenstein, Stephen Lash, Councilman of District 4 (14th to 97th Street on the East Side of Manhattan) Daniel Garodnick. |
| Dress rehearsal for Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. Photos by James Ewing. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory. |
The opera had already got a lot of press. Not being an opera buff I didn’t know what to expect although last week at Swifty’s I ran into Brooke Hayward Duchin and Jane Gullong (who is Executive Director of the New York City Opera). They had just come from a dress rehearsal, and both women -- who are very big opera aficionados (and easily unimpressed) -- said it was brilliant and brilliantly staged.
They piqued my curiosity with their description, albeit primitive, how the audience gets “moved” during the performance. You see, there are these tracks, like train tracks, and you go back and forth. That’s what it sounded like anyway.
Well, yes; but it’s more than that.
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A few years ago there was a decision among the powers that be – and I’m not sure who those powers are, although I know that Elihu Root, the New York real estate investor and a businessman named Wade Thompson (CEO and Chairman of Thor Industries) got very involved in the project – there was a decision made to do something about the old Armory.
It’s a grand pile of 19th century architectural splendor. The Seventh Regiment was the first militia to respond to Lincoln’s call for volunteers in 1861. Among the armory’s designers and builders were Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, the Herter Brothers. Its interiors are the single most important collection of 19th century interiors to survive intact in one building. It’s been, since it first opened in 1881, home to scores of art and antique shows and in its early days, a venue for popular entertainment. Brooke Astor celebrated her 90th birthday at a large dinner there. |
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A model of the Park Avenue Armory (with a rooftop made of shellacked autumn leaves), gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Silverman. |
Stephen Schwarzman celebrated his 60th there last year. The Municipal Arts Society is only one of many philanthropic organizations that hosts large dinners there, and this past year, they honored Mr. Rose and Mr. Thompson for their work in refurbishing and restoring the Armory.
It’s also been (and still is) a shelter on its upper floors for homeless men and women who are encouraged by the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House to put up there every night (rather than out on the pavement or the doorways of the city). It’s a vital organ of the community, and not just the neighborhood surrounding.
It was a very civilized looking crowd although many were dressed for the torpid mugginess outside. Mainly they were anxious to see and experience Die Soldaten. Because they knew about the specialness of this opera (rare and complex). They’d heard and read about the staging, which is nothing short of spectacular.
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Wendy Vanderbilt |
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Councilman Daniel Garodnick |
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Wade Thompson |
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George Steel and Marina Rosenfeld |
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The space is vast. The arched ceiling of what is now called the Wade Thompson Drill Room is 80 feet high at its peak and the floor dimensions of 200 by 300 feet. It had been set up with metal stadium-like bleachers (with comfortable fold-up seats instead of benches), and a long runway dividing it in two, running the length of the room, forming a T with a platform at the end. On either side of the runway platform, on the floor, were three sets of tracks. Like railroad tracks.
When we entered last night, it was still light outside. Taking our seat, in these “bleachers,” we were looking out out on a darkish, grey-dimmed cavernous space --like a European railroad station waiting for the trains to arrive -- complete with the steam swirling up near the window at the end of the room.
It was very cool. No other word for it.
Audience seated, lights dimmed, a huge orchestra of 100 set up on a long platform running along the north wall of the room, and the music began.
From the center rear stage now lighted, men in World War I German soldiers’ uniforms appeared single file, and slowly marched down the runway as the audience began moving, almost drifting forward toward the rear platform of the stage. |
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The audience taking their seats before last night's performance. |
I am a camera; that was the effect. The entire seating area, both sides, holding hundreds, moved almost imperceptibly, as smoothly as a boat drifting away from shore. Within minutes, several scenes with various performers played out along these platforms, and the stage, like a camera dolly on tracks, moved along to catch the action in that spot.
It could almost seem like the moving audience was the gimmick. However, Herr Zimmermann, in his original concept intended to be innovative to create the optimal impact of his music on the story of war and barbarism, the degradation of women – and ultimately, of men. Moving the audience integrated all of the elements including his music borne out of the Germanic 12-tone operatic heritage. (He personally never realized this “full-integration”: he committed suicide at age 52, seven years after it was first performed in a conventional theater where the “movement” was not possible.)
I was thinking while watching this hauntingly powerful and fascinating production last night, how if Herr Zimmermann had lived, he’d be 88 and nothing short of a deity in the world of opera and contemporary art. That power tapped into the audience at the Armory last night, however briefly, however fleeting. |
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