A Movable Faust
Monday night I found myself in the Lower East Side's Bowery Ballroom watching a guy who calls himself Panda Bear sing and twirl knobs on an electronic console amid an attentive but subdued crowd. Panda Bear (AKA Noah Lennox) is the Animal Collective member behind my favorite song of the year. "Bros" is a dreamy and endlessly exhilarating quarter-hour plea for emotional space that any Pet Sounds fan could love. It's available on his challenging new solo album, Person Pitch, and you can hear a few minutes of it out on his MySpace page. Panda doesn't romanticize the sixties by any means; his beats and electronics can be dark and disturbing, not unlike Brian Wilson's own breakdown. He also seemed a little fragile alone onstage, his voice wavering uncertainly among the complicated beats and textures emerging from his rig as kaleidoscopic imagery swirled on a screen behind him. It's not easy being a one-man band.
I might not have mentioned Panda's minimalist thing if I hadn't been so struck by the contrast in performances while enjoying the heck out of Charles Gounod's Faust, which the Metropolitan Opera performed last night in the middle of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, my virtual backyard. Enjoying the opera with a few thousand families picnicking in front of a large outdoor stageful of musicians and full chorus was really no less intimate in its way than Panda's vulnerable performance in front of 500 self-conscious New York hipsters.
The Met's facility with Faust may have something to do with the fact that it was the company's first opera; they debuted it in 1883. The music was certainly ambitious and truly modern, in its way. Gounod's score is full of subtle digressions: two or three measures of, say, isolated flutes would convey enormous swaths of feeling. Tenor Fernando de la Mora, terrific as Faust, sang as though he were improvising the words on the spot, like those other great tenors Coltrane and Rollins. And you just can't beat hearing great music performed by top-notch musicians augmented by an incredibly clear sound system on a slightly chilly spring night. If you're around, the Met concludes its free park series with New Jersey performances of Faust and La Boheme this weekend.
Comments
Joe Skunca says:
Hey Richard,
As I've said before- you are and have always been my favorite writer. This blog is really fantastic. I read it all the time.
I have been listening to Person Pitch for the last several weeks in my car and digging it more and more each time. Its really dense and quite beautiful.
Let me know if me responding on your posts is annoying or inappropriate because I've noticed that not alot of people do. Regardless I'll keep reading of course- You are truly an inspirational and intelligent chronicler of this wonderful world. Thanks
Joe Skunca
06/21/07 02:00 PM