‘Pastoral' Review: Sampling Beethoven at Bard

New York Times

14 hours ago

The experience of attending a performance at Bard SummerScape in the Hudson Valley is not confined to the theater. For someone traveling from New York City, as I did on Saturday, there's an entire preshow of escape into the country: the car or train ride along the blue stripe of the Hudson River, the calming effect of dense green forests.
This is partly the subject of 'Pastoral,' the latest work by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Partly, because the pastoral in art is not a return to nature but an idealized view of it, a substitute following a separation.
This 'Pastoral,' which ran Friday through Sunday afternoon, is very much in conversation with the past. The décor by the painter Sarah Crowner — green floral shapes as clean-edged as Matisse cutouts — invokes swathes of Western art history, as do the group tableaus in Tanowitz's choreography, as if taken from scenes in paintings by Nicolas Poussin. Caroline Shaw's score samples from and playfully remixes Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the one called 'Pastoral.'
These elements — along with Reid Bartelme's gauzy costumes in a sherbet color palette and Davison Scandrett's subtly imaginative and color-sensitive lighting — combine in such fresh and delightfully unpredictable ways that it's distorting to discuss them separately. Nevertheless, let's start with the music.
Shaw switches among a live woodwind trio and several recordings of the Beethoven, both recent and more than a century old, wax cylinders with the scratchy sound of the distant past. The recordings fade in and out, sometimes eddying in stuck-record loops that toy with the tension and release of classical musical grammar. The live musicians behave like samplers, too: erasing bits of Beethoven, stretching, slowing, accelerating the tempo.
The woodwinds are all reeds, among the most pastoral of instruments, and on the low end of the section. The bassoonist Dana Jessen croaks like a frog and extends duck calls into song. Alongside these mimetic games, Shaw adds real field recordings of frogs and crickets but also of trains and traffic, the urban environment that creates the pastoral perspective. One of Shaw's wittiest touches is to bring out the similarity between a bouncing triplet figure in the Beethoven and a car horn.
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