I thought the playing was gracious and sensitive and wonderful, so I thoroughly enjoyed the music. Shaham is a masterful performer, and his violin resounded with exquisite beauty and grace under the roof of the Hill Auditorium.

However, I thought the visuals were tasteless, to say the least. It is displeasing to see the world class classical musicians acquiescing to such shallow, kitschy “translations” of their art. The visuals were banal, meaningless, nothing to do with Bach, and not unlike your regular, over-saturated, slow-mo imagery in food commercials and the like. Ugly.

The playing was world class, so let me end on that note. Stellar (if routine) performance of the six solos. Long, demanding, and rewarding all the way through. Awesome.

Good advertising and the hype will keep the audiences clapping for 4 nights in a row, but this is a rather underwhelming performance, if you ask me. Far flung in its distortion of the spirit of the tragedy and blithely comfortable with its ignorance of it, it offered neither a challenging modernization of the piece, nor a sensitive rendition in a classical vein. Stale, slow paced, and predictable, this piece is made for the people who go to theater because of the social prestige associated with it, not because they can recognize and demand artistic excellence. Classics seem boring and trivial, great heroes come off as pusillanimous stock characters, and the catharsis is debased to sentimental pap for the retirees and self-conscious professors. Creon’s character is completely trivialized (and he looks like Hitman!), depriving the performance of one pole of dramatic tension (without which there is no tragedy proper), and turning it into a sleazy, good girl vs bad guy “narrative”, which, of course, “Antigone” is not. Less advertising and better quality next time, s’il vous plait.

Good, very good, as was to be expected, but not more than that. Solid, polished delivery of two classic works. Quite pleasing.