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calimacA local performance of Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time, which I'd be ready to defend as, like, the greatest choral-orchestral work of the last century, attracted my attention from the beginning, but I wasn't sure if we were going to go until my editors asked me to review it. Various logistics made it impossible for B. and me to get to the Saturday evening performance in Santa Cruz, so we opted for the Sunday matinee in Watsonville.
Watsonville. A farming and packing town way out in the dusty Pajaro Valley. (Ever read Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle? That's the Pajaro Valley.) Watsonville, which only makes the news when the crops are contaminated, or one of the packing plants closes down, both of which happen frequently.
Watsonville sounds way and the hell out to gone, but it's actually no further from us than San Francisco is in the opposite direction. I've been there before, but not often and never for a concert. But we presented ourselves at the grandly-named Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts, which proved to be an alias for the Watsonville High School auditorium. Not a bad venue by high school auditorium standards, even with the little girl kicking my seat from behind all through the first part of the concert, but a review of the rest rooms would have come with a large "INADEQUATE".
The performance was quite well-shaped and artistically effective, and in aspects - particularly the solo singers - quite impressive technically, though not flawless. But I wrote all about that in the review. This time fate allowed me to spend the first half of the review describing the music and only the second half on the performance, which is about the balance that I like, when it works out that way.
And I mentioned the slide show of local high-school art inspired by the piece. I guess the schools must have incorporated the upcoming performance into their lesson plans. Some of the pieces seemed appropriate, some not, and they were all high-school art, after all. But one student had taken the pungent lesson when you program a work inspired by the horror of Kristallnacht - a week before the concert was Yom ha-Shoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day], so yet more resonance there - given nonspecific and (one hopes) universal application by the composer who also adds hope for a brighter future, and performed in a mostly Latino farming town - this student drew a picture of the barricade wall at the Mexican-U.S. border (you can tell which wall it is by the languages on its sign). Read Tippett's narration:
Now in each nation there were some cast out by authority and tormented, made to suffer for the general wrong. Pogroms in the east, lynching in the west; Europe brooding on a war of starvation. And a great cry went up from the people.
That's the only place where Tippett is even close to specific. But the cry against immigrants today and the arrogant "What part of 'illegal' don't they understand?" from people who have probably jaywalked at least once in their lives makes the first line still relevant. As is history. I looked in the deep black face of bass Derrick Parker as he sang "lynching in the west." He knew.
Watsonville. A farming and packing town way out in the dusty Pajaro Valley. (Ever read Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle? That's the Pajaro Valley.) Watsonville, which only makes the news when the crops are contaminated, or one of the packing plants closes down, both of which happen frequently.
Watsonville sounds way and the hell out to gone, but it's actually no further from us than San Francisco is in the opposite direction. I've been there before, but not often and never for a concert. But we presented ourselves at the grandly-named Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts, which proved to be an alias for the Watsonville High School auditorium. Not a bad venue by high school auditorium standards, even with the little girl kicking my seat from behind all through the first part of the concert, but a review of the rest rooms would have come with a large "INADEQUATE".
The performance was quite well-shaped and artistically effective, and in aspects - particularly the solo singers - quite impressive technically, though not flawless. But I wrote all about that in the review. This time fate allowed me to spend the first half of the review describing the music and only the second half on the performance, which is about the balance that I like, when it works out that way.
And I mentioned the slide show of local high-school art inspired by the piece. I guess the schools must have incorporated the upcoming performance into their lesson plans. Some of the pieces seemed appropriate, some not, and they were all high-school art, after all. But one student had taken the pungent lesson when you program a work inspired by the horror of Kristallnacht - a week before the concert was Yom ha-Shoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day], so yet more resonance there - given nonspecific and (one hopes) universal application by the composer who also adds hope for a brighter future, and performed in a mostly Latino farming town - this student drew a picture of the barricade wall at the Mexican-U.S. border (you can tell which wall it is by the languages on its sign). Read Tippett's narration:
Now in each nation there were some cast out by authority and tormented, made to suffer for the general wrong. Pogroms in the east, lynching in the west; Europe brooding on a war of starvation. And a great cry went up from the people.
That's the only place where Tippett is even close to specific. But the cry against immigrants today and the arrogant "What part of 'illegal' don't they understand?" from people who have probably jaywalked at least once in their lives makes the first line still relevant. As is history. I looked in the deep black face of bass Derrick Parker as he sang "lynching in the west." He knew.
