Leonid Goldin | Far from the noise of the city

Every religion and every nation has a tradition of regular pilgrimage to holy, sacred, and historical places. There are places of worship that date back thousands of years, and there are new ones that have gained widespread public interest and recognition.

Man does not live by bread alone

Religious pilgrimages attract the largest crowds. For Catholics, it is the Cathedral of St. James in Spain; in Hinduism, ritual ablutions in the sacred waters of the Ganges; in Islam, the Hajj to Mecca; in Buddhism, a temple on the island of Shikoku; in Orthodox Christianity, a procession to the Seraphim-Diveyevo Monastery; in Judaism, it is a pilgrimage to Mount Meron in Israel to honor the memory of the founder of Kabbalah, Rabbi Bar Yochai. Even today, during the war between Russia and Ukraine, with serious anti-Semitic threats, tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews from Bratslav come to Uman to visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman.

There are also world-famous cultural centers that attract and unite people in their quest for spiritual enrichment. The most famous examples are the cult pilgrimage to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, the Salzburg Festival in Mozart’s homeland, music festivals in Verbier, Switzerland, Edinburgh, Scotland, the Eurovision Song Contest, the theater festival in Avignon and the film festival in Cannes in France, and the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. There are many other cultural centers with devoted fans.

Some cultural centers have acquired a unique cult status. Tickets for the Wagner Festival cost thousands of dollars and are not always available even ten years in advance. Classical music is not the only genre with passionate fans. For example, there are places of worship dedicated to The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson, and Nashville is the center of country music.

Most cultural pilgrimage centers avoid politics and ideology, but there are also clearly politicized ones, such as Eurovision. The Supernova music festival in Israel was attacked by Palestinian terrorists. The barbaric act of Islamists led to the war in Gaza, currently the most complex and dangerous event in world politics, exposing its flaws and inconsistencies.

In America, the New Orleans Jazz Festival, the Miami Art Fair, and classical music festivals in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, Marlboro, Vermont, Aspen, Colorado, and Grand Park in Chicago have gained widespread popularity.

The influence of ritual pilgrimage on social attitudes is contradictory. On the one hand, spiritual values and internal ties within individual social groups are strengthened, but on the other hand, there is a separation from those with different beliefs and interests. Universal values and aspirations of humanity exist more in utopias and fantasies than in real life, and the new era has added cultural wars to religious wars.

In the forests of Massachusetts

The most famous and largest music festival in America is held in Tanglewood, a wooded area in the state of Massachusetts. Ten thousand people can attend a concert here at the same time. The festival has been held annually in July and August since 1934. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the world’s finest musical ensembles, plays a leading role in the organization and programming of the festival; composers and conductors Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg, Seiji Ozawa, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, James Levine, and Andris Nelsons. In addition to musicians from the academic genres, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald have also performed here.

Besides classical music, the festival programs include jazz, rock, pop, folk, country, and other genres, but I am not familiar with any of them. Once, out of ignorance, believing a girl at the information center who said it wasn’t too loud or aggressive, I ended up at a rock concert, but left after the first deafening sound waves. I will never understand how anyone can listen to that of their own free will.

Tangwood’s true popularity and recognition comes from classical music, primarily the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Andris Nelsons, Leonidas Kavakos, Yefim Bronfman, Joshua Bell, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, Daniil Trifonov, Igor Levit, and Dima Slobodianyk.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1881 and is one of the “Big Five” orchestras in America. The orchestra has gained worldwide recognition for its unified sound and ensemble playing. Almost all of the orchestra’s conductors were not born in America, and each of them has contributed their own unique style and enriched its creative potential. Critics say that the orchestra has a special “French style and sound,” elegance, precision, and impressionistic color—a legacy of the French school of orchestral performance.

This season, as in several previous ones, the spotlight is on the chamber ensemble featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, and Leonidas Kavakos. Together with Anthony Tamestit, they performed the overture to “Leonora,” the Trio, and an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony.

Yo-Yo Ma is one of the most famous musicians in the world today. His performances are said to be a “gift to the listener,” and he is considered a citizen-artist who strives to unite people and affirm humanistic values. His musical technique is flawless, but it serves not to demonstrate virtuosity, but to reveal the content of the work in all its depth. His repertoire is not limited to the classical canon and includes Latin American, Chinese, American folk, and jazz. Among his partners has been a Kazakh rock band. He has 130 albums to his credit and is the recipient of nineteen Grammy Awards and numerous other prestigious awards.

Yo-Yo Ma is also known for his social activism; he is a UN Ambassador for Peace, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council, founder of the Silk Road Global Music Initiative, and a member of the leadership of organizations supporting youth movements and the rights of ethnic minorities.

Emmanuel Ax was born into a Jewish family in Lviv, Ukraine, and educated in Canada and the United States. He has performed in solo, chamber, and orchestral programs with the world’s finest orchestras and conductors. Critics note the depth of his interpretations, his ability to combine the emotional and the rational, to convey passion, warmth, and sincerity; he is equally at home with Haydn, Mozart, Schumann, Chopin, and Hindemith, Schoenberg, Adams, and Penderecki.

Together with Yo-Yo Ma and Kovakos, he has performed all of Beethoven’s trios and symphonies arranged for trio. A brilliant musician, he is also a talented entertainer who wins over audiences with his wit and humor.

I first heard Leonidas Kavakos in 1994 at the Sakharov Festival in Greece, which was chaired by Mstislav Rostropovich and organized by Vladimir Panchenko, president of the State Concert Hall, and Agnia Arvanitis, a renowned Greek scholar and public figure. It was my project, at a time of great hopes and achievements, when everything that contributed to understanding and rapprochement was met with enthusiasm in Russia and abroad. In the current international atmosphere, such a project would be impossible.

At that time, Kavakos was just beginning his career, and today he is one of the most famous violinists in the world. His analytical approach to the work and technical virtuosity are subordinated not to self-expression, but to the composer’s intention. His mastery is most fully revealed in his performances of works by Bach and Beethoven.

In addition to chamber music programs, Kovacos performed Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The concerto is well known to connoisseurs in the performance of Jascha Heifetz, but little known to the general public. Performing it for an audience of thousands will help popularize this magnificent work.

The second half featured Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. Premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg by the composer himself, the symphony gained worldwide recognition. In Tanglewood, it was conducted by Elim Chan. Today, she is widely known for her contemporary approach to interpretation and the expressiveness of her style. Critics note the crystal-clear precision of every nuance and gesture.

I was surprised to encounter several opinions in print that the Tanglewood Festival has an elitist reputation. In my opinion, it is a very democratic event, with a repertoire that is mostly familiar to the public, the musicians do not complicate their interpretation of the classics and strive to make it accessible to a wide audience, the atmosphere is warm and friendly, and although tickets are expensive, there are also quite affordable options, and you can buy a season ticket for the whole summer and listen to every concert on the lawn surrounding the concert hall. Shorts, T-shirts, sneakers, pizza.

True, if there is ethnic diversity on stage, then almost everyone in the audience is white, with a few Chinese people, but it is obvious that other citizens have different tastes and preferences. But when there is choice, and everyone gets what they deserve, that is democracy.

Shakespeare and Company

Next door to Tanglewood is the Shakespeare and Company theater center. In addition to the Great Bard, the repertoire includes contemporary authors.

In my opinion, attempts to bring the classics closer to contemporary works are often a necessary sacrifice to time. This is most evident in music, when Bach and Beethoven find themselves in the same program with composers who meet the requirements of diversification and inclusivity.

In contemporary theater, political correctness plays an even greater role, with overt ideology sometimes appearing on stage, and no artistic merit to speak of, but at least it is not in the same program with classics and does not invite comparative analysis by critics or audiences.

As the great Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom wrote, “No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespeare.” The Bard remains beyond comparison. And not only because of his unique genius. Shakespeare’s theater blurs the boundaries between the universal and the national, the high and the low, the noble and the vulgar, genres and canons, the rational and the emotional; the characters and circumstances are often extreme and grotesque. The profound realism of Shakespeare’s images did not imply adequate realistic embodiment on stage in his time. And the Bard himself was not very concerned with historical accuracy.

By now, Shakespeare is familiar from school, dissected into quotations, there are thousands of studies and interpretations, and the author is regarded as a demiurge, his heroes and antiheroes as biblical characters. If you want to learn more and understand better, you are more likely to turn to commentaries than to the original. The theater will not say what Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Creation of Man, 770 pages of phenomenal erudition and philosophical and psychological analysis.

Mikhail Bakhtin showed the connection between Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and carnival; in the theater of his time, actors did not attend Stanislavsky’s school. In the theater of our time, there are many attempts to create realistic images of Shakespearean dramaturgy, but even today, this is more often a frank carnival, grotesque, conventional, and illusory images. Creating and revealing the full richness of Shakespeare’s real images on stage is an extremely difficult task for any actor or director, but the carnival genre simplifies the task, as there are no norms or prohibitions.

In all the Shakespeare productions I have seen in America, there is a lot of excitement, noise, shouting, acrobatics, running around, broad gestures, actors coming out into the auditorium and beyond… This season, Shakespeare and Company is staging Shakespeare’s Cabaret, performed by a rock orchestra, which brings the house down and blows the brain away. Another new addition is Circus and Bard, a circus performance featuring Shakespeare characters.

We missed these innovative finds, but we did see the new production of Romeo and Juliet. This is not the first time that the role of Romeo has been entrusted to a woman. She is dynamic, trained in martial arts, runs quickly across the stage and around the set, and expresses her feelings loudly, but no attempt was made to portray her as a romantic young boy in love.

Shakespeare did not clarify the reason for the feud between the Montagues and Capulets families, and critics believe that this was intentional: hatred for any reason, under any circumstances, is destructive. Such ambiguity leaves room for speculation; in modern times, a cross-dresser could give the impression that the problem lies in alternative views on same-sex relationships.

One of the innovative features of the performance is the presence of dogs of different breeds and sizes in the auditorium. A Labrador sat in front of us, and next to us a poodle. The animals behaved impeccably; their good manners were astonishing. Sometimes the dogs barked, but in the general noise and commotion, this seemed appropriate to the intent of the play’s creators and the development of the events.

Audiences come to see Shakespeare with preconceived ideas and expectations. They are usually aware of contemporary writers in advance, thanks to the press, the internet, the reviews and friends. But August Wilson, to whom Shakespeare and Company pays a lot of attention, was a discovery for me. I had heard of him before as an African-American playwright who portrayed the difficult life of his community, but today this theme is so widely and one-sidedly presented that it is not necessary to go to the theater to become acquainted with the subject.

Wilson’s Fences shattered all my preconceptions. A brilliant writer, the best play I’ve seen in America, and “ranney”, who plays the central role, is the best actor I’ve seen in America. This is not just my impression. I don’t remember when, after the end of a performance, there was such a long silence before the explosion of applause. Many people cried, not hiding their tears.

I asked “ranney” about the origin of his unusual name, and he explained that it was in memory of his father’s friend who died in Vietnam. The name is written in lowercase letters and in quotation marks so as not to think too highly of oneself, to remember the complex and difficult aspects of life. He said that theaters often show “Wilson’s mill” — a series of stereotypical African-American characters and circumstances — “We don’t do that.”

This season, we saw “The Piano Lesson.” It’s a play from Wilson’s “American Century” cycle, set in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression. However, the social and economic problems of the crisis, which particularly affected the black community, are not at the center of the action. As always with Wilson, the events unfold around a family drama: a conflict between a brother and sister over a family heirloom, a piano. The brother wants to sell it to buy the land where their slave ancestors worked. The sister disagrees; the piano is dear to her, as portraits of family members are carved into it. Other characters become involved in the conflict, passions run high—real, not theatrical—and, as always and everywhere, everyone has their own truth, their own arguments, their own concept of honor and justice. There can be no winners here.

The audience waits with bated breath for the dénouement. As the play progresses, new conflicts arise, and no matter how you look at it, there are no easy answers, and moralists and psychologists have no place here; no one will listen to them. Otherworldly forces intervene to resolve the dilemmas and problems, but Wilson’s ghosts are quite realistic and convincing.

Director Christopher Edwards says, “Wilson knows how to take an episode from black life and transform it into poetry, music, and something magical.” It should be added that, despite the authenticity of the characters, places, and time, the events on stage are perceived not as episodes or ethnic folklore, but as biblical testimony about man and his relationships with people, the world, and himself.

Harold Bloom writes that in literature we seek a mind more original than our own. Wilson is one of the most striking examples of this. The actors in Wilson’s plays do not act; they truly live on stage, remaining themselves, without the need for stage tricks, effects, or techniques, and the audience does not feel like alienated observers; here, the universal experience and values of humanity are not empty phrases.

We came to see “ranney”, but I don’t want to single anyone out; they are all brilliant. It is worth noting that all the men are at the height of emotional intensity, while Bernice (sister, Jade Guerra) is extremely restrained and laconic in all her manifestations, but no less convincing and attractive. Stanislavsky would say “I believe!” about all of them. In music, there is the concept of perfect pitch, and in singing, there is natural voice production. There is also natural, untaught dramatic talent.

We had the opportunity to talk with the actors, and the next day we watched Romeo and Juliet together, then talked for a long time. They are genuinely modest, sincere, simple, and natural in their appearance and behavior, with no signs of stardom. They don’t need woke, diversity, inclusivity, or alternative actions. They have proven themselves through their talent and loyal service to the theater. I cannot understand why icons, stars, idols, and celebrities are Broadway and Hollywood entertainers, hip-hop kings, but not the actors I saw in Wilson’s plays.

Credit BSO
Credit Shakespeare & Company