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TONIGHT I am looking forward to going to Disney Hall to see an odd pairing: the songs of Franz Schubert interspersed with the short plays of Samuel Beckett. The recital, put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, features several singers and actors including Irish actor Barry McGovern and soprano Julia Bullock. The whole thing springs from the twisted genius Yuval Sharon, best known for the site-specific avant operas “Invisible Cities” and “Hopscotch.”
In any case, here’s how I lead my LA Times piece:
The first was a composer, the second a playwright. One was Austrian, the other an itinerant Paris-dwelling Irishman. And their lives never quite overlapped: The first died a year after Beethoven passed, the second around the time Ice Cube left N.W.A and Madonna divorced Sean Penn. One became famous for sweet, hummable melodies and darkly resonant chamber music, the other for plays defined by their haunting silences.
So Franz Schubert and Samuel Beckett don’t immediately appear to have all that much in common. But “Night and Dreams,” a recital Tuesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, seeks to frame them as brothers under the skin — two artists whose work has all kinds of stylistic and emotional affinities.
Here’s the whole story. Hope to see you there.
I spent seven years setting seven works of Beckett to music. In the mid 80s I talked for an hour with him in a cafe in Paris. Among other things, we spoke about the relationships between music and his work. I wrote about my visit with him on another AJ blog which is here:
http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2013/05/unbuttoned-samuel-beckett-meets-william-osborne.html
Cool — eager to read