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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Mark Morris has said that he likes music better than dance. The mere fact that the Mark Morris Dance Group always performs to live music is remarkable. (Almost all modern-dance companies now use tape.) Then there is the matter of quality. If, of an evening in New York, you want to hear some good music, go to a Mark Morris show. Yo-Yo Ma has played for the Morris dancers. Deborah Voigt and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson have sung for them. The first time I saw Morris's "Bedtime," I missed much of the dancing because I couldn't take my eyes off Lieberson, who was declaiming Schubert's "Erlkonig" as if it were a national emergency.
For the company's recent season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, there was music by Monteverdi, Schumann, and Bach, and it was played -- the Schumann in particular -- with a snap and vigor that had spectators levitating in their seats. Also for this season Morris revived two little solos, "Bijoux" and "I Love You Dearly," that he had made when he was in his twenties. The great tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, direct from Paris, sang the Satie songs to which "Bijoux" is set. Marisena Teicu Zamfir, direct from Bucharest, and with a flower in her hair, sang the Romanian folk songs for "I Love You Dearly." The Morris company is not rich; no American dance troupe is. "Jesu, Meine Freude," a 1993 ensemble piece, to Bach, is still being performed in the nylon nighties that the company's executive director, Nancy Umanoff, bought off the rack at Filene's two weeks before the premiere. Meanwhile, the musicians and singers who accompanied "Jesu" this season cost ten thousand dollars a night.
Morris's concern with music has resulted...
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