Lobenthal.com

In 1972-73  I saw some of Resnik’s final performances at the Met, as the Marquise in Daughter of the Regiment, Dame Quickly, Herodias.

(A decade later, she came back for a few Marquises which I didn’t attend.)

By the time I caught her, Resnik had gone deep into mezzo profunda territory, pushing her voice every which way in these character roles for maximum comic and macabre effect.

She was always a great singing actress, and indeed one of her most famous roles was the nearly silent Baroness in Barber’s Vanessa.

By the time I experienced her, Resnik was even accentuating, exploiting the register break that had set into her voice—or was it that fearless acting had precipitated the register break?

Anyway, she was unforgettable.

And of course, as a younger singer more dulcet.  I was telling my brother, with whom I saw some of these performances, about listening to her sing Berlioz’s Dido at Carnegie Hall in 1960.  [Available on VAI.]

Could she really sing that, he asked?  Well yes, in 1960 she certainly could.

Did you know that the Berg Companion to Fashion contains a reprint of the article on Hippie Style that I wrote in 2004 for the Scribner’s Library of Daily Life Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion?

The middle class tuned out. . .

Liberals confined themselves to genteel whimpering. . .

And we became a nation where Bradley Manning gets 35 years in jail!!

P.S.  And people have the audacity to condemn Snowdown for staying out of the U.S. ?

Who says ballet doesn’t bring people together??!!

An ex-dancer was going to Wood’s Hole with her daughter.

I extolled the glories of North Truro, where I spent August of 1970-73 with my family, in a house rented from two artists perched on the shoreline of Cape Cod Bay.

I’ve never gotten over those sunsets!!

Another family rented the house during July, and they eventually bought it.   I haven’t been there in 21 years. . . But the owners are lovely people.  When my sister, myself and a friend went whale watching in Provincetown in 1992, we showed up on Marie’s doorstep unannounced, and she couldn’t have been more gracious!

So from Wood’s Hole my friend said she would go to Truro.  And I called chatelaine Marie, who it turns out is a ballet admirer, and had seen her dance in years past.  Just that day, in fact, Marie was reading Roslyn Sulcas’s review of the Bolshoi’s Jewels in the Times.

So today, on this perfect hot weather day, they’re all visiting by the Bay!

August 28 is the 100th anniversary of Richard Tucker’s birth.

The Mayor has designated it Richard Tucker Day, and there will be commemorative events all through the day and into the evening, among them, at 4:o0 p.m. at Juilliard, a panel on Tucker’s legacy.

From the opera house stage, we have panelists Renée Fleming, and Neil Shicoff.  And from the Supreme Court bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Turns out that Ginsburg, according to a press release sent out by the admirable advocates  at 21C Media Group,  is “an ardent, life-long fan of opera.”

For more info on the events, go to the Tucker Foundation’s website.

A critic told me that when her husband starts quaking at alarming predictions of global warming’s ravagement she now asks him point blank–what is he doing about it?  Her tolerance of passive panic has come to an end.   I feel the same way.  I found myself almost barking, “I don’t want to talk about Obama!” to a brilliant intellectual and musician.  Because that’s, unfortunately, as far as it goes with him.  Like so many liberals, he cannot seem to bring himself to imagine that any participation in the governing process beyond voting every two years is not only an option, but an imperative.

I’m looking forward to Nancy Buirski’s upcoming documentary on Le Clercq.  Last fall Buirski got in touch with me and we talked about her.  At that time, the director wasn’t sure whether the documentary, which is now in post-production, would treat Le Clercq’s personal life or focus more exclusively on her career.  I don’t know what the distribution is, but the documentary is going to included on WNET’s American Masters series.

Like movie stars, ballerinas always used to get dressed up when they went out.

That point is driven home in an amazing montage of still photos of Tanaquil Le Clercq posted at youtube by a human who calls him/herself “Tamara Toumanova.”  (The real Toumanova, of course left us in 1996.)

I’ve gone through a lot of Le Clercq photos in my time, and there are quite a few here that I’d never even seen before.

It’s been years since we could think of ballerinas, as a vocational class, as possessing chic.  With those figures, they should, but somehow they rarely seem very stylish in real life.  Of course, today, the popular entertainment stars can also seem all too clueless. . .

However, Le Clercq’s chic is impressive not only in the stage photos published here but in a shot of her eating with then-husband George Balanchine.  Yes, she was the Grace Kelly/Audrey Hepburn of ballet.  (An ex-colleague, however, found her most redolent of Carole Lombard.)   And of course she was frequently asked to model clothes in photo shoots as well.

“She knew what to do with herself,” another ex-colleague recalled to me about the way Le Clercq put herself together.  “She just was very knowing, and so bright.”

Nature or nurture, who knows?  Her mother was also elegant, and liked to sew.  When I interviewed Edith Le Clercq all those many years ago, she told me that as a girl Tanaquil would often sit and watch.

Fashion, ballet, the movies — each creates its own beauty, imagery, iconography.  In ballet the fine-tuned muscular refinement is used to encompass, to represent that extra dimension beyond wordliness and actuality.  Those weird, elongated lines and shapes can seem so familiar, so true, so meaningful, and yet they are so far from a literal representation of anything.

I remember reading how Balanchine at the end of his life in his New Yorker interviews with W. McNeil Lowry said something to the effect that Le Clercq “could dance like she was far away.”   Undoubtedly, that’s why he was reportedly at one point entertaining the idea of staging Giselle for Le Clercq, even tall (for that era) as she was.

Sensational freshly-made guacamole is available nearly every day at the moment at the Integral Yoga Institute health food store on West 13th Street.  “Wendy,” who makes it, is to be congratulated.  That’s her creative identity, but her name really is Wendy btw.

It’s worth a trip crosstown.  It’s worth a trip downtown.  It’s worth a trip uptown.   It’s worth buying some to stock in the freezer if you don’t live nearby.

La Fenice has a tribute to Resnik on its home page.  Go to my blogroll.