It’s Good To Be Roi

JABU
The Flea

Alfred Jarry’s first transgressive act was the elevation of a schoolboy satire into a stage-hogging clown. Pere Ubu, a bloated, scatologically minded regicide, is best known for his starring vehicle, “Ubu Roi,” which scandalized Paris with its frequent obscenity and juvenile humor. Back at the turn of the 20th century, theater still provoked public comment and outrage, and Jarry’s delight lay in driving his audience into fits. Hilariously (and probably against his creator’s intention), Ubu belched his way into the canon. Now you can’t shake a stuffed owl at a modern director who hasn’t tackled him.

Jarry heralded the 20th century with another innovation: the conflation of the artist and his creation. Starting a trend of those who would make their actual lives into performance art, Jarry transformed himself into Ubu. Plastering his dark hair down, losing his slender figure, and speaking of himself and Ubu in the royal “we,” Jarry let his rebellious attitudes teeter on the edge of madness.

This blend of Jarry and Ubu – Jabu – should have provided juicy fodder for Elizabeth Swados’s new musical. Ms. Swados has won a passel of awards for the odd way she mixes musical theater songs and a do-it-yourself recitative that wanders aimlessly around the scale. But her “Jabu,” written relatively conventionally with a narrator and two intertwining plots, doesn’t match her inspiration.

All the appropriate notes are struck (although, if you’re familiar with Ms. Swados’s work, you know right notes and wrong notes are hardly the point.) There is a debraining machine, Rousseau gets a song, and the young of New York try madly to stand in for the young of Paris. But you can’t ape rebellion, you can only rebel. With a sweet tempered ensemble and disappointingly polite staging, this Ubu falls asleep on his feet.

Using puppetry and video designed by Sue Rees, the cast tells the story of young Jarry’s rise and fall. Simultaneously, a production of “Ubu Roi” tries to hijack the stage: Pa Ubu (Kevin T. Moore) and his witchy wife Ma Ubu (Nicola Barber) scheme for the crown of Poland, go to war with Russia, and hold forth contemporary politics. Instead of letting anarchy have its way, a narrator spoils everyone’s fun: Madame de Rachilde (a tidy Danielle Levanas), a friend and admirer of Jarry’s, walks us through his downward spiral. Jarry himself (Matt Wilson), however, fails to give us any hint of the spiral – he’s as nuts in the first scene as he is in the last and never particularly charismatic.

Ms. Swados, who often writes her music collaboratively with her singers, has clearly put them at their ease. Dressed in Melissa Schlachtmeyer’s cut-away jackets, tweed hotpants, and occasional faux-hawk, they make a bouncy group. At their best, they do a nice job of sending up self-conscious artistes – particularly adorable is their “We are rays of Light!” chorus while they introduce the “Banquet Years,” or a leather-clad duo who interrupt the proceedings to explain “pataphysics.”

Despite the abuse from Ma Ubu, the band works beautifully under musical director Kris Kukul, playing everything from a toy piano to an electric guitar. Some of the singers are in fine voice – Emily Mattheson as Jarry’s mother was a particular delight. But Ms. Swados, though she tries to showcase every one of the 18 cast members, doesn’t leave room for the real Jarry. A piece about the greatest, sloppiest, angriest, ugliest, strangest, most seductively hilarious clown ever should, at some point, be really funny.

– Helen Shaw

Until April 2 (41 White Street, between Church Street and Broadway, 212-352-3101).

Celebrating A Nonentity

PACIFICA QUARTET
Miller Theater

Nikolai Roslavets disappeared in 1944. It wasn’t just that he died – he did in fact expire, but that was only the beginning of his troubles: His name was erased from all Soviet texts and documents in a retributive purge. Roslavets dared to be a modernist, a thorn in the paw of the Stalinist lion with no Androcles to engineer his extrication. He organized his own system of mathematical note distribution along the lines of Schonberg’s dodecaphonism (it is interesting to note that Schonberg, fleeing from Nazi Germany, thought seriously about emigrating to Russia, finally choosing the United States not because of the political climate but rather the weather). A Ukrainian who served his musical exile in Uzbekistan, Roslavets ended his mortal journey as a card-carrying member of that uniquely 20th-century Russian class, the non-person.

At the always innovative Miller Theater, a group of intrepid explorers offered a good amount of his legacy on Friday evening. The program opened with three piano pieces performed by Margaret Kampmeier: “Prelude,” from 1915, was adrift in the gouache of the French-Russian school; “Etude No. 3,” a series of scatter-shot broken arpeggios; and the Fifth Sonata followed strict form but was filled with outbursts reminiscent of Scriabin, in particular his “Black Masque” Sonata. All three were well executed, Ms. Kampmeier being able to handle the dense amount of notes per measure with only an occasional finger slip.

After intermission, she accompanied Elizabeth Farnum in a traversal of seven songs. These were decidedly folk-inspired, even though their intervallic relationships will remain forever unheard on the taiga. Ms. Farnum was nimble enough to navigate these Charybdian waters, but was either remarkably restrained or frustratingly dispassionate. It doesn’t seem likely that Mr. Roslavets would have desired so little emotion in these miniatures.

Best in show were the Pacifica Quartet – Simin Ganatra, Sibbi Bernhardsson, Masumi Per Rostad, and Brandon Vamos. It is the nature of Roslavets scholarship that the complete string quartets consist only of nos. 1, 3, and 5. The enumerated journey takes us from the smoldering late Romantic of 1913 through the darkly driven paranoiac of 1941.The group was masterful in its interpretations and vibrantly luxuriant in its sound. Celebrating their 10th anniversary, their expert blending defined the term “on the same page.” Predictions are notoriously dangerous, but we will be hearing much more from these talented players in the future.

Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin in 1953. By governmental decree, no flowers could be placed on any graves other than that of the fallen dictator. So the composer was interred without adornment, but at least has been remembered. Roslavets, according to one historical synthesis, never even existed.

– Fred Kirshnit

Thinned-Out Mozart

GUARNERI QUARTET
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Saturday evening’s concert by the Guarneri Quartet was a mixed affair. If there is one individual piece that best unites the three great composers of the Classical era, it is the String Quartet No. 18 in A Major of Mozart. One of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn, when Haydn heard it he immediately told Leopold Mozart that Wolfgang was the best composer alive. This same work fascinated Beethoven, who copied out by hand the entire last movement in all of its parts in order to experience the intellectual and tactile feel of the complex polyphony of interwoven fragments.

This reading was rather disappointing, dry and lifeless compared to the Guarneri of old. Part of the problem may simply be the general erosion of passion in performance of music from the 18th century, caused by the ubiquity of the period-instrument crowd. Over time, many full-blooded ensembles have significantly toned down the vibrato in Mozart without per se espousing the more ascetic style of the authenticators. The resulting hybrid can be somewhat occluded, soporific, and – in this case, with the bland tone of first violinist Arnold Steinhardt also being a tad flat – downright sour of sound.

Once the group jettisoned their penchant for periodicity, their performance became more satisfying. The Mendelssohn E Flat quartet was much brighter and considerably livelier. The foursome captured just the right soft touch of ephemera and handled the notoriously tricky pizzicato allegretto with apparent ease.

After intermission they were joined by violist Steven Tenenbom for an unusual version of the Viola Quartet of Antonin Dvorak. The normally infectiously joyous Allegro non tanto could have used quite a bit more bounce, and the final Allegro giusto was also a bit tedious. It seemed particularly inopportune to suck the lifeblood out of such a positive work from such a generous spirit as that of Dvorak in his halcyon American period, but there it was. Having said this, however, I must report that the achingly beautiful Larghetto was given a glowing reading. Regular violist Michael Tree, not always steady the rest of the evening, blended exquisitely with the special guest.

With only one personnel change – cellist Peter Wiley taking over for David Soyer in 2001 – this group has been a rock. But their residency at the Metropolitan Museum gives me pause. If classical music is to survive as more than just a museum piece, its practitioners must continuously infuse the secrets of new life into its very fiber. In the case of the Guarneri, only time, its staunchest ally or its most powerful foe, will tell.

– Fred Kirshnit

All Aboard

LINCOLN CENTER JAZZ ORCHESTRA
Rose Hall

When Wynton Marsalis plays Duke Ellington, I always notice the different deportment of the two bandleaders. Mr. Marsalis comes off as unassuming and as down-home as possible, whereas Ellington crafted an elaborate veneer of faux-sophistication, including his audiences in on the joke. Ellington generally introduced his musicians formally (“Albert George Hibbler” as opposed to “Al”), and I can’t imagine him addressing his sidemen as “Pigmeat” or “Big Money” as Mr. Marsalis does.

“Full Steam Ahead,” presented by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra last weekend, was a full evening of jazz compositions inspired by trains, most of them by Ellington. In the latter part of his career, Ellington himself usually traveled in a car driven by his dependable lieutenant and baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, but he spent his formative decades getting from gig to gig on trains, and they formed a crucial part of his musical vocabulary.

Ellington wrote train pieces throughout the five decades of his career, from his most famous, “Daybreak Express” (1933), to the obscure, later “Loco Madi” (1972). While each has a distinct melody, they all have certain things in common, starting with what scholar Albert Murray describes as “locomotive onomatopoeia,” meaning orchestral devices that sonically simulate the sounds of a locomotive in motion. Ellington was very specific in his instructions – a train whistle does not sound like a steamboat whistle.

Ellington’s train pieces tend to use more counterpoint and Fletcher Henderson-style call-and-response than most of his other works. “Daybreak Express,” is a variation on “Tiger Rag,” a tune that in prewar jazz was typically a vehicle for exchanges among the players. They also almost always feature saxophones: The first soloist is usually the alto, tenor, or clarinet, and there’s usually a marvelous soli passage for the five reeds.

The opener, “Happy Go Lucky Local” (the melody that later became the R &B hit “Night Train”) had the band rocking as hard as I’ve heard them in Rose Hall. “Loco Madi,” from the “Uwis Suite,” featured Wes Anderson’s alto in a spot originally for Norris Turney. “Across the Track Blues” opened with Victor Goines’s Barney Bigard-style clarinet, and then spotlighted the moaning of guest trombonist Wycliffe Gordon. On “Track 360,” drummer Herlin Riley depicted the sound of two trains passing.

The only non-Ellington pieces in the first half were “Union Pacific Big Boy,” a Dukish movement from Mr. Marsalis’s own “Big Train,” and Thelonious Monk’s “Little Rootie Tootie,” a quartet piece imaginatively translated into orchestral terms. The second half was almost all original music, starting with Mr. Gordon’s “West End Choo Choo.” Trumpeter Marcus Printup and 19-year-old blues singer Jennifer Sanon (who received the biggest ovation of the evening) played the roles of Louis Armstrong and Trixie Smith on “Railroad Blues.”

Mr. Marsalis also presented an earlier piece, from “Six Syncopated Movements,” and two new works, “Due South,” for a smaller edition of the ensemble that included two brass (himself and Mr. Gordon), three saxes, two basses, and Doug Wamble, who plays blues guitar in the authentic Mississippi Delta style. I was disappointed that Mr. Wamble didn’t sing – he’s a fine blues singer – but his metal string, hollow body guitar did all the vocalizing that was required.

The show concluded with “The Caboose,” Mr. Marsalis’s rousing finale to “Big Train”- still the most successful of his long-form compositions.

– Will Friedwald