Latest news with #Faust
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
We've underestimated Francis Rossi
I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it's true that 'the Quo' have been underestimated and unjustly derided throughout their six-decade career, not least by themselves. The band has happily perpetuated their position as rock and roll neanderthals: a 2007 album is titled In Search Of The Fourth Chord. There was always a little more to it than that. Personally, I have always divined a terrible sadness at the heart of their music. Like most court jesters, Status Quo internalise great loneliness and despair. Consider the regretful pills-and-powder sentiments of songs such as 'Marguerita Time', 'Living On An Island', 'Down Down' and 'What You're Proposing', made all the more doleful by the bleached stoicism of Francis Rossi's pinched voice. Their prototypical heads-down Ur-boogie, meanwhile, is the cosmic hamster's wheel made sound, a pitch perfect aural representation of the existential treadmill. Inelegantly billed as 'An Evening of Francis Rossi's Songs from the Status Quo Songbook and More', this two-man touring show offers a corrective to the established Quo-text, though I very much doubt that is the intention. Having lost his brother in arms, Rick Parfitt, to a heart attack in 2016, Rossi is joined by second guitarist and backing vocalist Andy Brook. Supplied with nifty Fender Acoustasonic semi-acoustic guitars, the pair perch on a couple of red easy chairs, separated by a small table adorned with a green desk lamp.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A New Opera Gives Music to the Unsaid and Unsayable
Unsuk Chin's new opera conveys, with uncanny precision, the restless energies inside a person's head. Called 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' ('The Dark Side of the Moon'), the work premiered on Sunday at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany. It's a reinterpretation of the Faust myth, drawing loose inspiration from a famous series of letters between the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. This is Chin's second opera, following 'Alice in Wonderland,' which was first performed at the Bavarian State Opera in 2007. It was as kinetic as her new one, though sillier, more eclectic and ultimately more haunting. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' centers on a character called Dr. Kieron, sung by the baritone Thomas Lehman. He is an irascible yet brilliant scientist whose harsh perfectionism masks a fragmenting mental state. Searching for human connection and trying to slow the ferocious pace of his thoughts, he falls prey to a cynical, Nietzsche-quoting faith healer, Master Astaroth, performed by the baritone Bo Skovhus. At the start of the opera, Dr. Kieron's sung text shows a confident man with bristly charisma. He mocks his assistant, his students and his colleagues with laser wit; In response, they grudgingly praise his intellect. Later, in a seedy bar, he entertains the other patrons with ludicrous tall tales that they believe despite themselves. Dr. Kieron's behavior recalls Pauli, who dismissed bad science by saying it was 'not even wrong,' but also Chin's teacher, the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. 'Ligeti was the harshest critic you could ever imagine,' she has said, 'not only toward his students, but to his colleagues and himself.' Chin's music takes us into Dr. Kieron's psyche, and it's an exhausting place. Melodic fragments flare up and burst; orchestral registers and timbres shift constantly. The score shows a mind that can't stay still. No wonder Dr. Kieron searches for solace with Master Astaroth, whose therapy-speak pronouncements seem profound when accompanied by blessedly static, ethereal music. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' is a work of restless sonic invention. Dr. Kieron suffers because his mind can't linger, and neither can Chin's musical imagination. Between the two structural poles of crackling energy and eerie stillness, Chin finds more than enough fascinating sounds for the opera's three-and-a-half-hour running time (including intermission). In the bar scene, she writes exquisitely fragmented dance music, filtered as if through a hazy cloud of morning-after memories. A dream-world character called the Bright Girl (the soprano Narea Son) sings delicate pricks of notes. The perception makes them into melody, as it makes shapes out of groups of stars. Gently pulsing string harmonics make us mourn the loss of the Creature of Light (the tenor Andrew Dickinson), another dream figure whom Dr. Kieron treats like an old friend. The opera's premiere was staged by the theater collective Dead Centre, with a set that was austere but memorable, emphasizing the work's sense of cosmic isolation and the overlap between the pregnant symbols of physics and Jungian psychology. The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, under Kent Nagano, who also led Chin's 'Alice in Wonderland,' played her painstakingly orchestrated music with vigor and transparency. Singing the score was a monumental task, and while the cast contributed beautifully, they occasionally seemed overwhelmed. And at times, their voices were swallowed by the stage. Close-up video feeds showed the kind of operatic overacting that often results from insecurity. Lehman, present almost constantly, tackled his vast role gamely, but suffered the occasional memory lapse. That was understandable, given the sheer amount of text in the opera. The first hour or so of the work crackled with energy. As it progressed, though, the piece slowly collapsed under the weight of its leaden libretto. Those problems began in the fifth scene, a long dialogue between Dr. Kieron and Master Astaroth in which the rational scientist gradually gives in to the charlatan's charms. What should have felt like a seduction got bogged down in clunky exposition. 'I am so often considered, unfairly, a bad philosopher, a charlatan even,' Master Astaroth sings. 'So unfair! Of course I do not wish to be anything inferior.' Chin served as her own librettist, in collaboration with the writer and dramaturg Kerstin Schüssler-Bach. The German-language text has memorable moments, with wry jokes and light parody of Central European social mores. But it is largely overwrought, and there is also simply too much of it. By the end of the piece, the text, including an 'Oppenheimer'-style subplot about an 'ultimate bomb,' feels crammed into the shrinking musical space. (When a new opera contains lots of quick, half-spoken, half-sung prose, it's usually a sign that the deadline was approaching.) There are also numerous small text-setting mistakes, which became distracting as they accumulated on Sunday. Chin's vocal lines often emphasized the wrong syllable in the word. And the bloated writing felt especially jarring in the context of music that never lost its agility, subtlety and capacity to surprise. 'Die Dunkle Seite des Mondes' began remarkably attuned to the ferocious energy of the imperceptible, illustrating the physical and physic forces that lurk beneath the surface of the world. The music offered a vivid window into the unsaid and the unsayable. But by the end, the words had said so much they overwhelmed that music. 'When the full moon is out like tonight, I can't observe any stars anyway,' Dr. Kieron sings early in the opera. 'The full moon outshines all the stars in the night sky.'
New York Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A Game of Light and Shadow in Gounod's ‘Faust'
The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she's a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov. In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod's 'Faust' for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to 'Manuscripts don't burn,' the most famous line from Bulgakov's novel 'The Master and Margarita.' A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren's note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil's lines: 'What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.' This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren's take on 'Faust,' which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara. Before 'Faust' was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today. The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And 'Faust,' which isn't performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of 'Faust' in his film adaptation of 'The Age of Innocence.') Now, however, it's harder to come by. The Met hasn't even presented it in over a decade. Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I'm convinced she's the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of 'Faust,' particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou). But she doesn't stop there. Light and shadow, in her production, lead naturally to a vocabulary of cinematic Expressionism (in Zhou and Forest Entsminger's scenic design) and puppetry (by Nick Lehane and nimbly performed by Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman). Puppetry, though, gives way to a magic and artifice, an analogue of Mephistophelean manipulation and control that, winking and occasionally slapstick, undercut Holdren's poetry elsewhere. Either of those, light and shadow, magic and artifice, could make for an entire production. Here, they pile onto each other, saturated and impatient, with the added weight of other elements like queerness, feminism and, for just a moment, silent film. Individually, they all feel true to the opera; together, they make a mess of it. Mostly, the result is still the story of Gounod's opera, except the ending: Marguerite, instead of ascending to heaven, is liberated from Faust and Mephistopheles, free to have her baby and live on, idyllically, with Marthe and Siebel (here a female character rather than a trouser role). It's a fitting victory for this production, in which the women are also the strongest performers. As Marthe, the mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet had a characterful presence and a warmly robust sound. Her fellow mezzo AddieRose Brown was an agile, earnest Siebel, while the soprano Rachel Kobernick's Marguerite was equally captivating whether intimate, like singing 'Il était un Roi de Thulé' to herself, or ecstatic, towering over Faust and Mephistopheles in the opera's climax. Ashworth, one of Heartbeat's artistic directors, led a shape-shifting ensemble of eight from his violin (among other instruments). They heroically muscled through two straight hours of an arrangement, with quotes from Gounod's 'Ave Maria' and Mendelssohn's incidental music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' that transformed the opera's orchestra into the kind of enterprising, colorful chamber group you'd hear in the pit for a play or a silent film. At times the players were hammy partners to Mephistopheles, sung by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward with hearty friendliness and a jovial flamboyance. In smaller parts, Brandon Bell was a bumbling Wagner, and Alex DeSocio's Valentin had gorgeous brawn with the occasional hard edge. As Faust, the tenor Orson Van Gay II's tone was elegantly smooth but chewy through his imprecise French. Enunciation was less of a problem in the English-language spoken scenes, but those moments, too, were a challenge for the cast. Few opera singers are persuasive actors, and when 'Faust' was an opéra comique, dialogue was more declamatory and stylized compared with the post-Stanislavsky, realistic delivery that audiences have come to expect. Holdren's 'Faust' had an intriguing dramaturgical tension between casual dialogue and grandly melodic arias, but that requires a level of acting that these singers were never able to reach. And, in a production already teeming with aspiration and ideas, it may have been asking too much.
Chicago Tribune
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Nancy Faust's White Sox memories, from Harry Caray to ‘Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye'
It's been a big week for the Chicago White Sox, though it has nothing to do with what happened on the field. The team announced Monday that longtime organist Nancy Faust — who stepped away from The Rate (then known as U.S. Cellular Field) in 2010 after 41 seasons — will return Sunday, Mother's Day, in the first of six appearances at the ballpark this season. Then rumors spread Thursday that newly named Pope Leo XIV, who was born in Chicago, is a White Sox fan who attended a game during the 2005 World Series. His brother confirmed the fandom to the Tribune. So what would Faust play for the pontiff if he were at a White Sox game? 'My kind of Pope that Leo is,' she replied, to the tune of 'My Kind of Town' by Frank Sinatra. And if he were to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, well, there would be just too many options: 'You're the Inspiration' by Chicago; 'Like a Prayer' by Madonna; and 'Jesus is Just Alright' by the Doobie Brothers to name a few. 'It's amazing that in the last century the White Sox have been the team of choice for a U.S. president (Barack Obama) and now the pope,' she said. Faust had a front-row seat — er, bench — to some of the most iconic moments in the team's history. Below she shares her memories of them. As the Tribune wrote earlier this week, the catalyst for Faust's return is thanks to her 'Superstar' friend Dick Allen, who will be posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on July 27. Allen received 13 out of a possible 16 committee votes in December 2024, clearing the 75% threshold to earn enshrinement in the Class of 2025. He will be joined by Dave Parker, who received 14 votes. 'It's special for me because I've been championing for so long — since I started on Twitter — to get Dick Allen into the Hall of Fame,' she said. 'So it's a really exciting year that we get to go to Cooperstown. And then to get this call on top of it was like all the stars aligned.' Faust, who is credited with being the inspiration for today's walk-up music chosen by players, picked a special tune for Allen when he came up to bat: 'Jesus Christ Superstar Overture.' Here's why she chose it: 'Well, it just happened to be popular at the time and he was doing so well, it just popped in my head, I guess. It was fitting because he was creating such a stir and packing the park, and perhaps even helping to keep the franchise in Chicago. Ever since then, I would never consider playing it for anybody else because he owned the song.' North Siders might not recall that broadcaster Harry Caray belonged to the South Side first. And Faust, too, may have instead led the North Siders in singing 'root, root, root for the Cubbies.' When the Edgebrook native attended North Park University in 1967, Faust's then-boyfriend wrote to Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley, asking if he would hire her to play 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' Wrigley wrote back a week later to say, essentially, thanks but no thanks. The Cubs' loss was the White Sox's gain. Faust spent 41 seasons — more than 3,000 games — on the South Side, missing only a handful of games because of the birth of her son. (She might have missed another because of Eric's high school graduation, but that game was rained out.) She accompanied Caray's rendition of 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' and he introduced 'Nancy Faust Night' at Comiskey Park on May 1, 1979. Faust recalls it was Caray who suggested she be moved out of center field and closer to him and the fans. What she remembers: 'In the second year, Harry joined the team and he was, you know, the great promoter of every aspect of a game including the music, right? He just found anything he could say to get people to come out to the park — stuff he couldn't get away with these days. But one of the innocent things was the music. And so, in my third year, I think due to his saying, that's when I was brought in (behind home plate) and that's also when Dick Allen joined the team. That's also when they put my picture on the cover of Chicago Tribune Magazine.' Faust is widely recognized for incorporating popular music into ballpark repertoire and for choosing songs that relate to each player based on their name, number or even their home state. Ever chant 'Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye' when the opposing team pulls its pitcher? That's because Faust played it first. She debuted the Steam tune during a 1977 series against the Kansas City Royals. Almost 46,000 fans showed up to the July 29 game — the largest crowd at Comiskey Park in three seasons, the Tribune reported. (That was until more than 50,000 fans showed up to the July 31 doubleheader.) The 'rags-to-riches, blue-collar' Sox scored four times in the seventh inning to beat the second-place Royals 11-8 and forge a 4½-game lead in the American League West Division. 'It was the most exciting game in the history of baseball since yesterday at Wrigley Field,' Sox third baseman Eric Soderholm said. 'And the game wasn't even the whole show.' Though the Tribune didn't mention the tune by name, reporter Bob Verdi credited, 'an ongoing sing-a-long with Nancy Faust, a continuous burp-a-long with Harry Caray, and finally, you have Jim Spencer partaking in the final out, then throwing the baseball into the stands in right field' for the energy that night at Comiskey Park. 'Weirdest night I've ever spent at a ball park … and the greatest,' said the Sox's Richie Zisk. 'It's like the Christians and lions all over again. I don't know whether the crowd comes here to watch us or we come here to watch them. Whatever it is, it's beautiful.' Mercury Records, which re-released the song in response to the demand created by the 1977 White Sox, gave Faust a gold record in appreciation. What she remembers: 'When I (first) played it, everybody sang along. Then I walked through the Bard's Room (the dining area at The Rate) and someone from the press asked me, 'What was that?' And I said, 'Oh, it's a song called 'Sha-na-na.' That's how well I didn't know it. But I knew after hearing it on the radio and the word goodbye that it would be a good song if a player strikes out. So I probably jotted down C, E flat, B flat, C, just so I could remember the chords and not forget. … It just caught on and it became a theme song. And I remember management saying the next year, 'Well, could you come up with something else now?'' White Sox owner Bill Veeck (pronounced like 'wreck') was known for his infamous promotions. He introduced the first-ever exploding scoreboard and on Aug. 8, 1976, his players wore shorts, which were designed by his wife, Mary Frances Veeck. As Mary Frances would later say, in admiration, 'Bill introduced Bat Day, Jacket Day, Cap Day, a Music Day and many other things. He was criticized by other owners for innovations such as putting names on uniforms, but they didn't hesitate to copy the ones that worked.' Sports flashback: The story behind Bill Veeck's exploding scoreboardWhen no one claimed the prize — a donkey — of one of these Veeck promotions, Faust took it home. She named her Rosita. That was the first of many donkeys for Faust and her family. Mandy, her longtime donkey companion, died last year. While at her winter home in Arizona, Faust put out feelers to find a friend for her remaining mini donkey, Gigi. Now Jackpot — who was captured by the Bureau of Land Management — lives at Faust's north suburban home, too. 'It was rounded up, captured when it was quite young, so it doesn't display a lot of crazy tendencies,' Faust said of Jackpot. What was supposed to be a doubleheader between the Sox and Tigers turned into a debacle. The Sox lost the first game 4-1 but never got to the nightcap. Up to 50,000 people — admitted for just 98 cents and a disco record — showed up for a promotion in which radio personality Steve Dahl took to the field between games to blast thousands of dance-themed discs into oblivion. Disco Demolition at 40: 2 views of an explosive promotion that caught fire at Comiskey Park in 1979Shortly after the detonation, Dahl's fans flooded the field. Ninety minutes, 39 arrests for disorderly conduct and a half-dozen injuries later, the second game was called off. It was ruled a forfeit by the American League on Friday the 13th. Sox owner Bill Veeck didn't agree with the ruling, which was the first forfeit in the league in five years. 'This was a regrettable incident, but not sufficient grounds for forfeit,' he told reporters. 'But we won't go out of business because of it. It seems to me a Chicago paper ran a headline sayin' Dewey defeated Truman some years ago. Did they go out of business?' What she remembers: 'I was playing 'Disco sucks' along with people chanting it until it turned unruly. I was to play 'Do you think I'm disco' for Steve Dahl and he just started singing it without the intro or anything. So then I just fell into place with him. I remember Bill (Veeck) pleading with the fans and how pathetic that was. 'I realized this was kind of serious when I remember looking across the field and seeing flames in the stands. So I thought, 'Oh my goodness, this is serious.' But, I mean, I don't think I realized the full impact until I watched the videos more recently of it.' On this final day at old Comiskey Park, a crowd of 42,849 fans turned out on a glorious, sunny autumn afternoon to say farewell to what had been proclaimed the 'Baseball Palace of the World' when it opened July 1, 1910. Many fans were teary-eyed, realizing that the place where they had spent so many happy times would soon be turned into a parking lot for the new Comiskey Park, which was rising just to the south at 35th Street and Shields Avenue. 'Years from now,' the White Sox ads had said all season, 'you'll say you were there.' By the sixth inning, the Seattle Mariners were leading 1-0, but a triple by Lance Johnson, a single by Frank Thomas and a triple by Dan Pasqua put the Sox ahead 2-1. And that is how it stayed. When it was over, after the crowd had joined Faust for a final rendition of 'Na-Na Hey-Hey Goodbye' — the unofficial victory song of the Sox — veteran catcher Carlton Fisk looked out across the green grass and summed up the feelings of many others in the park. 'I don't know if I want to see it as it's being torn down,' he said. 'I think I'd rather see it now, when it's all up, and then not see it. That way, I've got it in my mind what it was and what it continues to be. I have a lot of things from this ballpark, right between my ears, and I'll keep them right there.' What she remembers: 'Of course, that will always be in my heart. That last game at the old park was the most memorable and all the emotions poured out. Also, I think the Sox were prepared for fans stealing a base or turf or whatever, but no — people just sat in the seats, shook their heads, cried and savored their last day at the ballpark. It was beautiful.' The White Sox won their first World Series since 1917 on Oct. 26, 2005, on the road at Minute Maid Field in Houston. Faust played the last home game in the series — Game 2 — three days earlier. But what stands out most to Faust is how the city celebrated the big win. What she remembers: 'I think what impressed me most was at the rally when everyone was downtown. It was so orderly. I think all of Chicago came out for it — even Cub fans —and I was just so proud to be a Chicagoan.' Did she ever expect to return? 'Probably not,' Faust said. 'I assumed that they would hire another organist, you know? And then the baton would be passed.' Since the age of 4, Faust has always learned to play songs by ear. In retirement, she set out to do something surprising — learn how to read sheet music. 'But, you know, as much as I try, no, it's just not my thing,' she told the Tribune. Faust has been dusting off her catalog. Someone on Twitter told her of their love for the way she played Michael Jackson's 'Man in the Mirror,' so she's boning up on that one. 'I forgot that I ever did it,' she said, 'so I had to learn it again.' Faust also plans to add songs Gen Z will recognize. After hearing Chappell Roan's 'Pink Pony Club' for the first time on Tuesday, she thinks she can have it ready for her Sunday debut. Faust has also taken suggestions, including the disco-themed Dua Lipa song 'Dance The Night' from the 2023 film 'Barbie.' Wait, a disco track embraced by a woman who was at old Comiskey Park on Disco Demolition Night? 'You can't help but love that beat,' she said. 'It gets into your soul.' Thanks for reading!
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Arts Calendar: Happenings for the Week of May 11
A horrifying trip to a new 'Final Destination,' collegiate self-reinvention in 'Overcompensating,' a new 'Faust,' and more.
