Controversy surrounds the Metropolitan Opera's debut of "The Death of Klinghoffer"; Del Casher's lasting mark on the sound of rock 'n' roll; and a photographer reinvents himself by turning a huge van into a rolling camera.
'Klinghoffer' show goes on, despite protests
In 1985, members of the Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked an Italian cruise ship and killed one of the passengers, a Jewish-American man from New York City named Leon Klinghoffer. A few years later, the acclaimed composer John Adams was commissioned to write an opera based on the incident. The opera premiered in Brussels in 1991, but several other planned productions were canceled.
Among the cancellations was a planned production by the L.A. Opera — one of the companies that commissioned the work. At the time, the local company said the cancellation was for financial reasons. L.A. Opera has never produced the work and a company spokesman said Monday there are no plans to mount the production. (Long Beach Opera produced the work earlier this year.)
Monday night, however, “The Death of Klinghoffer” had its Metropolitan Opera premiere, despite protests from some Jewish groups that the work glamorizes terrorism. To accommodate some of those critics, the Met canceled a planned theatrical simulcast of the show to theaters around the world. But the show itself did go on.
The Frame spoke with Naomi Lewin, an afternoon host at WQXR, the classical station in New York City. She attended Monday night’s performance.
Interview Highlights
On the scene outside Lincoln Center:
When you come up out of the subway, usually you can go straight underground to Lincoln Center, but they had that gated off so everyone was forced to go upstairs to the outside [entrance]. There were bunches of policemen and barricades and people shouting. In Dante Park, which is the triangle directly across Columbus Avenue, is where all the major protesters had been positioned. There were hundreds of them. And then there were maybe half a dozen protesters protesting the protest. There was a lot of shouting of "Shame, shame, shame!" and a lot of heckling of people who were going in to the opera.
On security inside the hall:
This is the first time I've ever seen police inside the Metropolitan Opera. The show started 15 minutes late because there was so much trouble getting everyone in. And then when the conductor, David Robertson, came out, there was wild applause for him, plus a few boos. After the very first chorus, which is "The Chorus of Exiled Palestinians," there was a smattering of boos. And then after the scene when the hijackers actually appear and take over the ship, a man in the audience started shouting, "The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgiven!" And he shouted that [repeatedly] until he was removed from the audience. I asked the cops at intermission and they said he had been given a summons for disorderly conduct.
On whether the performance was disrupted:
It was clear that [opera officials] were expecting to have to deal with something. [The performers] just held in place and the conductor held, waiting for it and the audience just sat there. It was all very calm. Once the man was taken away, [the performance] just started up again. There were various other points at which something happened. Apparently right before intermission, somebody called for people to say Kaddish — the Jewish prayer for the dead — for Leon Klinghoffer. And there was another point during the second act when a woman shouted, "This is a piece of [excrement]."
On whether the performance changed any minds about the legitimacy of the opera:
I was sitting next to a woman who was reviewing it for an Israeli journal. Her problem with the opera is that it dealt with politics, because she didn't know if art and politics were a good mixture. But afterwards, she said, "Everybody should see this." And I kind of felt the same way. I thought it was a gorgeous production. Everyone should see it and then make up their mind about the mixture of art and politics.
A photographer who uses his van as a rolling camera
Still cameras are getting smaller and smaller. And, at the same time, the computer software designed to manipulate photographic images grows more powerful. Photographer Ian Ruhter sees his artwork moving in the opposite direction: He wants his pictures to be bigger… and messier.
Ruhter has built an enormous, rolling camera. The back of a large van houses his giant lens, and inside the vehicle are two foot-by-three foot aluminum plates that he uses to immediately develop his pictures in the field. "At first, it was a big obstacle," Ruhter says. "But because it's such a large format you can see the world in a completely different way."
Ruhter built his traveling camera in 2010 in hopes of capturing nature and people how they truly are — imperfections and all. His pictures take on an unpredictable, ghostly look —as if they could have been taken in the 1800s.
His instrument is similar to a camera obscura — as the light comes into the lens, the images are projected upside down and backwards. This is not only how the camera sees the world, but how Ruhter sees it, in part because he was born dyslexic.
"I slowly started to learn that I could communicate through these images and I could express how I was feeling," he says. Once he learned that, Ruhter says photography became something far greater than just a craft.
His photos have a flawed quality, unlike the digital-photoshopped look that is now dominant in commercial photography. Ruhter uses a technique known as the wet plate collodian process. Collodion, which is a flammable syrup solution in alcohol, acts as a base and is mixed with chemicals to develop film.
Ruhter uses the back of his van as a darkroom and develops his film by hand. The borders of the frame turn out frayed and they gradually change from dark to light. The liquid marks are visible on the photo and the colors range from sepia-tone to black-and-white.
He prefers this process to digital because he had a problem with manipulating life and nature and "wanted something that was real," but adds, "Like digital, you get that instant gratification."
Ruhter’s first show in Los Angeles called, "Silver & Light," is on exhibit at the Fahey/Klein Gallery until November 29.