The Winter's Tale

Back to Shakespeare and Company Friday evening, this time to see a Shakespeare play: The Winter's Tale.  The program described it as "not quite a comedy, not quite a tragedy."  That's fair, it certainly had comic (even slapstick) parts, and much tragedy in the first act.  The plot is as improbable as that of any opera, with suspicions of adultery instantly becoming murder plots, a foundling baby girl turning out to be a princess, even a human statue that comes to life to tie up all the loose ends.  Macbeth it isn't.

Still, it was good fun and I enjoyed it a lot.  I had what turned out to be an excellent seat, in the balcony along the left side.  These seats are like box seats, with movable chairs.  My "box" had no one else in the other two seats, so I was able to move my seat around so that I was sitting parallel to the edge, with a great view of all but a small part of the stage.  Shakespeare & Company's acting troupe is very talented, and I recognized many of them from previous performances.

I'll see Richard III at Shakespeare and Company just before I leave for home.

Chesterwood

Chesterwood was the Berkshire summer home and studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French, best known for the statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.  I've been to the house and studio before, so this time I just toured the grounds.

The studio is the smaller structure above, behind the large tree.  The studio faces to the rear, and has a formal garden.  The house itself has no real garden, just lawn and trees.

From the back lawn of the house there's an entrance through a wall to the path that separates the studio from the formal garden.  The second photo below is taken from the other end of the path.

This photo is taken from a covered seating area set into the retaining wall that establishes the level of the lawn; it's also a grape arbor.

I took some shots of the various flowers.  Since it's a garden at a private home, there are no identifying tags for the plants and I don't know what many of them are.

On the way out, I saw this butterfly on the flowers.

Hancock Shaker Village

I went to Hancock Shaker Village primarily to see if their garden had any flowers worth photographing. I also looked through the village and its buildings, but since I've been there many times before I didn't tour everything.

 I found this plant in the medicinal herb garden.  It's called Button Snakeroot, and was grown by the Shakers for treating kidney ailments.  All kinds of kidney ailments, apparently -- mosts of the plants in the garden are labeled in such a non-specific way.  There were lots of bees around, pollinating away.

The garden had foxglove, from which digitalis is derived (and the Latin name of the plant is also digitalis).  I didn't photograph the foxglove, since it had bloomed and withered.  The photo below shows Black Cohosh in the foreground, with the 1826 Round Barn in the background.  Black Cohosh was used to treat rheumatism, dropsy, epilepsy, and "spasmodic afflictions."

Inside the round barn.  This wall of what look like wall studs held the cows' heads still while they were being milked.  Some of the vertical pieces pivot, opening for the cow to insert its head and then closing around the cow's neck.

I stopped at the blacksmith's shop, where this old gentleman was working the forge.  He's a volunteer who does blacksmithing as a hobby and comes to the Village one day a week to demonstrate the trade.

In the next-to-last picture above, he's made a small hook in the end of the iron bar.  In the last one, he's bending the bar in the shape of a large hook, using the anvil.  The piece will end up being an S-shaped hook for hanging plants and the like.  The Shakers' blacksmithing operation was just to produce hardware for in-house use, such as door latches, hinges, and other domestic iron objects.

The Shakers' living quarters were in a large brick structure with dormitory rooms and a large communal dining room.  This is one of the dining tables, showing the simple furniture design and tableware.

The "Shaker pegs" that we've all seen were not just pegs for hanging clothing.  Chairs were hung on the wall when not in use, clearing the floor space.  They were Shakers, after all; they needed space for dancing.

As I was leaving, I noticed this building that has obviously settled over the decades.  The Shakers would never have put up a building in which the windows were arranged in a wavy line.

Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio

Yesterday was a long day: I drove down to the IBM Research lab in Westchester County, New York, for a meeting. It's about 95 miles each way. In the evening, I was a volunteer at a Tanglewood concert, and then I attended the concert. Lots of driving!

The concert was a performance of three piano trios (Haydn, Shostakovitch, Mendelssohn) by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio. Joseph Kalichstein plays piano, Jaime Laredo violin, and Sharon Robinson viola; Laredo and Robinson are married to one another.

I had a seat in the second row of the orchestra, right in the center. The perspective on the players is a bit odd, because the stage is only about two or three inches below eye level. Still, I was so close that it was almost as if I had invited the trio into my living room. Fascinating to watch and to hear. This group is justly very famous, and they were very well received by the audience in Ozawa Hall.

In parts of the Mendelssohn, he seemed to be quoting from The Doxology. I wonder what that was about.

Tonight (Friday) I'll see The Winter's Tale.

Mengelberg and Mahler

I attended an amazing performance this evening, not at Tanglewood but at Shakespeare and Company. It was a one-man, one-act play by Daniel Klein, acted by Robert Lohbauer, called Mengelberg and Mahler.

The play's character is Willem Mengelberg, the famous Dutch conductor who had been conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for decades when Germany invaded and occupied Holland in 1940. Mengelberg was the world's foremost promoter of the music of Gustav Mahler. Mengelberg was not Jewish, Mahler was (or had been; he died in 1911), and sixteen members of the orchestra were Jewish. The Nazis "purified" the orchestra, shipping its Jewish members off to "work camps" that turned out to be extermination camps. Three orchestra members died in the camps.

In the play, it's after the war and Mengelberg is trying to come to terms with the fact that he's been exiled to Switzerland by the Dutch Council for Honor in the Arts for collaborating with the Nazis during the war. He doesn't see his actions as collaboration, of course, and thinks he's been greatly wronged by the pigheaded Dutch committee. There's all sorts of ambiguity and unanswerable questions, such as: Did his actions rise to the level of collaboration? What about all the others in Holland who "went along" with the Nazis? Was Mengelberg punished by the Dutch because he was such a prominent figure and they were disgusted by their own wartime actions? Could anything he might have done have had any real effect? At one point, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar in Holland, asked Mengelberg if the sixteen Jewish orchestra members were indispensable. Mengelberg said no, and was given the chance to take anyone he wanted from the Rotterdam Philharmonic to fill their places. What if he had said yes, they're indispensable? Would anything have happened differently?

Mengelberg clearly thought the world of Mahler, but at one point his deeply-buried antisemitism comes through against Mahler. Like almost everyone, he's a very complicated person.

I was riveted by the play, which was performed in Shakespeare & Co's new, small theater. There are only five rows of seats, on three sides of the stage, so those in the audience are almost part of the action (I was on the front row). A fascinating evening.

I have tickets to two other plays, both Shakespeare: Richard III and The Winter's Tale. I've not seen either of them before.

Back to the Berkshire Botanical Garden

Today I went back to the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, and concentrated on their lily garden, which is about at its peak right now. Below are some of the better images.

A sign at the entrance to the daylily path says that the plants were brought over from Europe by the early colonists.  The plants are very hardy, and the orange daylilies that grow along rural roadsides "escaped" from the colonists' gardens.  After nearly 400 years, the now wild plants are still going strong.  The first few specimens in this garden are the naturally-occuring varieties; the rest have been hybridized by daylily fanciers.

The botanical garden knows what it is doing:  this path, edged on both sides by dozens of different varieties of daylily, is right next to the road where passers-by can see all the color and decide to stop in.

This is Siloam Virginia Henson.

Aquarius.

I missed getting the name of this one.

Chicago Heather.

Catherine Woodbery.  Note the pollen dusting everywhere.

A mix of several kinds.

The last daylily bed, looking toward the edge of the garden.

A tiny flower planted in a wooden barrel, along with a dozen or so other kinds of flowers.  It's perhaps 3/4 inch across.

More flowers in the barrel.

Attending Tanglewood concerts

No photos this post; I've been busy as a Tanglewood volunteer -- acting as an usher, distributing programs -- for three concerts, and then attending each of the concerts. Last Tuesday, it was the Emerson String Quartet in Ozawa Hall; Saturday night it was an all-Beethoven program with the Boston Symphony, and yesterday afternoon it was the BSO again with Mozart and Richard Strauss.

It's been extremely hot since I arrived here, although the temperature has dropped just a bit since Saturday. It makes the house a bit uncomfortable without air conditioning during the afternoon and early evening. Yesterday's temperatures were a bit better, although standing in the full sun as a volunteer at Tanglewood's Lions Gate from noon to 2:30 was a bit daunting.

Still, the music is great.