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| Music |
Opening Night at Tanglewood:
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens
Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, Conductor
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Berlioz, Les Troyens, Part 1 (The Capture of Troy)
Saturday, July 5, 8:30 pm
Marcus Haddock, Tenor (Aeneas)
Anna Caterina Antonacci, Soprano (Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Chorebus)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Pantheus)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Jane Bunnell, Mezzo-Soprano (Hecuba)
Ronald Naldi, Tenor (Helenus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (Trojan Soldier)
Gustav Andreassen, Bass (Ghost Of Hector)
Kirk Eichelberger, Bass (Greek Captain)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, Conductor |
Berlioz, Les Troyens, Part 2
(The Trojans at Carthage)
Sunday, July 6, 3 pm
Marcus Haddock, Tenor (Aeneas)
Anne Sofie Von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano (Dido)
Kristinn Sigmundsson, Bass (Narbal)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Christin-Marie Hill, Mezzo-Soprano (Anna)
Matthew Plenk, tenor (Iopas)
Philippe Castagner, Tenor (Hylas)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Pantheus)
Anna Caterina Antonacci, Soprano
(Ghost Of Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Ghost Of Chorebus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (Trojan Sentry 1)
Gustav Andreassen, Bass (Ghost Of Hector
And The God Mercury)
Kirk Eichelberger, Bass (Trojan Sentry 2)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus,
John Oliver, Conductor |
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| Michael Miller |
July 7, 2008 |
An hour before Part I of Les Troyens was to begin, I found myself wandering peacefully and somewhat aimlessly among the trees. The grounds were still unpopulated and quiet, providing an exceptionally favorable atmosphere for music. The first two acts of Berlioz’ epic masterpiece which awaited us are hardly what one would call contemplative music, but a contemplative mood seemed the right preparation for the violent, burning sweep of Berlioz’ romantic tableaux of the fall of Troy. It gave me an hour of so to forget whatever baggage I had brought with me, which amounted to some scepticism as to whether a Tanglewood reprise of the massive, impressive, but flawed effort of late April and early May would make much of a difference.
Les Troyens may still remain something of a connoisseur’s opera, but there are plenty of people who are fascinated with it—Hector Berlioz’ forgotten masterpiece, a vast stage work which only found any real currency with Hugh Macdonald’s publication of a scholarly edition of the score in 1969.  |
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| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
That Face
at the Duke of York's Theatre
by Polly Stenham
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Design: Mike Britton
with Lindsay Duncan, Hannah Murray, Matt Smith, Catherine Steadman, Julian Wadham |
| Huntley Dent |
July 7, 2008 |
| Tube riders litter the train with newspapers, which other riders pick up to alleviate their boredom. Coming home last night I saw a grisly headline on one of these throwaways, “Sixth Stab Murder in Week of Death.” In London? The first sentence of the story was horrifying. “A schoolboy has been stabbed to death with a foot-long knife by a gang of thugs in south London.” It was within memory that a single shooting death made national news. Compared to America, the UK is still a kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb. Verbal and psychological violence are another matter. |
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| Dance: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
The English National Ballet
at the Southbank Centre, London |
| Huntley Dent |
July 6, 2008 |
| Walking across the Charing Cross footbridge, wishing the Thames didn’t look muddy no matter how blue the sky, I spied what looked like a Safeway supermarket attempting liftoff from the opposite shore. Actually, it was Royal Festival Hall. The building consists of a multi-storied cube topped with a plain barrel vault. You’d never suspect the interior was devoted to music and dance – it could easily be a widget factory. But gratitude is due the city planners, who plunked RFH down in 1951 when the South Bank was littered with little else but closed factories and depressing detritus from the war. This year the hall reopened after expensive refurbishment, with public promises that its bad acoustics had been remedied.
I can’t report on the acoustics because I went there yesterday for the English National Ballet, in town for a limited run -- they usually tour the land wherever railroads can take them (think Swan Lake in Bradford and Hull). |
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| Theater/Cinema |
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Two of a Kind: Ronan Noone’s The Atheist and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Directed by Justin Waldman, with Campbell Scott/
DVD Criterion Collection |
| Lucas Miller |
July 7, 2008 |
| It is hardly surprising that Justin Waldman’s production of Ronan Noone’s The Atheist is already being hailed as the best play of the Williamstown Theatre Festival so early in the season. In form, it is a dramatic monologue. The audience listens to the stereotypically amoral and inconsiderate American journalist Augustine Early talk about his rise to disreputable fame, after tainting the lives of so many (though, ironically, he seems to have an unfortunate case of the Midas Touch, making his victims more famous than himself). |
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| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Relocated
at the Royal Court Theatre
written and directed by Anthony Neilson
with Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson, and Nicola Walker |
| Huntley Dent |
July 7, 2008 |
| Clouds over Sloane Square, and the posh and spicy girls known as Sloane Rangers weren’t tramping around with a slew of shopping bags over their arms. Or not that I could see two days ago. A wag has renamed them the trustafarians, which seems to be sticking. I had a drink with a new friend named Warwick and told him that he and I were the only two people in the bar named after castles. “Presumably,” he said. We had met while waiting to troop into the tiny, dark, primitively ventilated Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre to be assaulted by Relocated, a stage provocation that has divided the critics while scaring off the public. |
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| Places |
| The United Buddy Bears from UNESCO visit Warsaw: Photo Gallery |
| Joanna Gabler |
July 5, 2008 |
| When I visited my native city Warsaw, earlier this summer, there was a nice surprise waiting for me in one of my favorite places, the Castle Square (Plac Zamkowy). Crowds of Warsowians and tourists were towered by rows of the tall (6.56' each) and colorful bears shining in the afternoon sun.
The centrally placed information table explained it all. United Buddy Bears visited Warsaw on their tour around the world. Project conceived in 2002 by two Berlin artists, gained life of its own. The bears visited many cities on four continents, including Berlin, Hong-Kong, Istanbul, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Vienna and Cairo.To Warsaw, they came from Jerusalem, now, they are enlivening Stuttgart before going to Paris. What travelers the bears are! |
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| Art & Architecture |
| Rockwell Kent and the Cape Cinema Mural |
| Lucy Vivante |
July 5, 2008 |
| Part of the Cape Cinema’s appeal comes from the high contrast between outside and in. The church-like exterior is patterned after the nearby town of Centerville's Congregational Church. The murals you might expect inside–of a Puritan religious gathering or colonists working–are instead of exuberant figures dancing across the ceiling. Within the space of a few feet, just by crossing the lobby, we travel from stern New England to lush Art Deco. |
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| Theater |
| Rowing to America, a Play |
| Kitty Chen |
July 4, 2008 |
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Scene 1: The stage is bare. The sky is midnight blue, with a crescent moon and a few stars, the sound of waves slapping the side of a boat. GIRL sits on a box or bench, rowing with oars. She is weary. SISTER is in shadow. In GIRL’s first speech, SISTER may speak some of the lines simultaneously or alone.
GIRL
I'm rowing to America. The only thing I brought with me is a picture of a smile. Here in my head. Strong and radiant like the sun. The smile of my sister. "When we grow up and go to America, everything will be all right," she would say to me. She told me all sorts of things about America. Have you heard them too? She said the streets are paved with gold lamé. A dollar a day keeps the doctor away. Apple pie and huckleberry finn for breakfast. Milk and honey flow down the avenue Fifth Avenue. A chicken in every pot-pie. Where the sun never stops shining, and spacious skies are blue, and amber grains are always waving at you. . . When we get there, we will wave back. Look, Sister—they have come to greet us! Hello! Hello! We are here—we have come to America! |
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| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm
Almeida Theatre, Islington
July 4,2008
Paul Hilton - Johannes Rosmer
Helen McCrory - Rebecca West
Paul Moriarty - Ulrik Brendel
Veronica Quilligan - Mrs Helseth
Malcolm Sinclair - Doctor Kroll
Peter Sullivan - Peder Mortensgaard |
| Huntley Dent |
July 4, 2008 |
| Far from celebrating our independence day, the British are probably trying to forget America and the whole era when Tony Blair was Bush’s poodle. After a miserably cold, damp spring, there was a national scare over strawberries – specifically, that the crop would go moldy and rot in the fields. Strawberries and cream are de rigeur for finals at Wimbledon. Now it’s finals weekend and the berries came through. But there’s a smell of black mold seeping out under the doors of the tiny Almeida Theatre in Islington. Ibsen is afoot, and the fate of souls is being tossed around on stage like a medicine ball. A very heavy medicine ball. |
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| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
All-Sibelius Program
London Symphony Orchestra
The Barbican, July 3, 2008
Sir Colin Davis conductor
Nikolaj Znaider violin
Jan Sibelius
Les Océanides
Violin Concerto
Symphony No 4 |
| Huntley Dent |
July 4, 2008 |
| Ugliness, thy name is Barbican. No other great orchestra has been miserably consigned to a concrete mausoleum of art except the London Symphony. I went to hear them last night in an all-Sibelius program under Sir Colin Davis. One approaches the Barbican by trudging through an underpass with four lanes of traffic two feet from your elbow and banks of jaundice-colored sodium vapour lamps overhead. The building itself looks like something airlifted intact from East Berlin. The architectural style is a spawn of Brutalism, a masochistic favourite with the British in the post-war era, but without being quite as punitive. |
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| Music: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
Richard Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, July 2, 2008
Conductor- Mark Elder
Director - Christof Loy
Revival Director - Andrew Sinclair Primadonna (Ariadne) - Deborah Voigt
Composer - Kristine Jepson
Music Master - Thomas Allen
Dancing Master - Alan Oke
Wigmaker - Jacques Imbrailo
Lackey - Dean Robinson
Tenor (Bacchus) - Robert Dean Smith, Richard Margison
Zerbinetta - Gillian Keith |
| Huntley Dent |
July 4, 2008 |
| What better way to anticipate the Fourth of July than spending time with Richard Strauss, who fiddled while the Nazis burned Europe? He languished in apparent dotage as the Yanks stormed the beach at Normandy. Suddenly the first oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra showed up at Strauss’s mountain retreat in Bavaria. Then a uniformed GI, the oboist commissioned a concerto from the snowy-haired, stork-like composer, and a minor masterpiece was born.
Strauss’s arch comic opera Ariadne auf Naxos appeared in 1912, in the delusional twilight that masked Verdun (714,000 casualties), the Munich putsch, and every satanic horror to come. Blissfully unaware, Strauss also had the nutty idea of preceding his operatic confection by a complete performance of Moliere’s play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, but the premiere, a flop, stretched the audience’s attention span, not to mention their Sitzfleisch, beyond human capacity. What we are left with is caviar, Strauss’s most sophisticated stage work and a bubbling treasure of melody unmatched by anything outside Die Fledermaus. And like Fledermaus, Ariadne dreams of a heaven where the triumph of love is the same as the triumph of humor. |
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| Theater: Huntley Dent's "A London Summer" |
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
National Theatre, London, July 1, 2008
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Snobby Price : Paul Anderson
Charles Lomax : Tom Andrews
Barbara Undershaft : Hayley Atwell
Bill Walker : Ian Burfield
Jenny Hill : Katharine Burford
Bilton : Martin Chamberlain |
| Huntley Dent |
July 4, 2008 |
| The long nights are already on the wane, but one leaves the theatre with a glow on the horizon, and a newspaper can be read outdoors well after nine o’clock. Fresh off the plane (i.e., as grungy as five-day-old socks) I tried not to go groggy at the National Theatre’s production of Shaw’s Major Barbara. Putting on a play by Shaw is like sticking your head out of a foxhole to see who shoots. Nobody could be more fusty and out of favour (perhaps the two Barries, James and Philip), but the London critics were mostly happy and none were snarky. |
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| Music |
| A Ghostly Concert at Tannery Pond
June 20, 2008
David Finckel, cello
Da-Hong Seetoo, violin
Wu Han, piano
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Piano Trio Op.1, No. 1
Piano Trio Op.70, No. 1, “Ghost” Piano Trio Op. 97, “Archduke” |
| Michael Miller |
July 2, 2008 |
| The Tannery Pond Concerts, founded in 1991 by the renowned photographer and musician, Christian Steiner, is still in its youth, compared to its elders in Norfolk, Music Mountain and Marlboro, but it is true to the mold, such as it exists, and shows no signs of diffidence. Beginning in the 1960’s, Mr. Steiner’s position as the preeminent portraitist of musicians has given him a unique knowledge of the musical world. He is as much in contact with young, emerging artists as with the most established figures in the field, who have included Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. As director of Tannery Pond, he is especially proud of the debuts or early appearances he has sponsored of musicians who have since risen to the top of the profession. Another feature of Tannery Pond is the beautiful old tannery, built in 1834, now the chapel of The Darrow School, which occupies the site of the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. Its acoustics are remarkably present and intimate, and, since it seats only 290, its atmosphere is equally intimate. The audience, on the whole, appears to be composed of keen and educated music-lovers who have been attending loyally for some years. Many appear to know each other, and this enhances the family-like atmosphere of the concerts. |
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| Theater |
| George Bernard Shaw, Candida
Berkshire Theatre Festival, June 30, 2008
Anders Cato, director
Jayne Atkinson - Candida
Michel Gill - the Reverend James Morell
David Schramm - Mr. Burgess
Finn Wittrock - Eugene Marchbanks
Samantha Soule - Proserpine Garnett. Jeremiah Wiggins - the Reverend Alexander Mill |
| Michael Miller |
July 1, 2008 |
| I sincerely hope that nothing I say will encourage the Berkshire Theatre Festival to lower the standards for their season openers. The wonderful Unicorn production of Pinter’s The Caretaker raised my expectations so high that I find it impossible to rationalize the shortcomings of the season’s mainstage production of Shaw’s Candida, which was consistently awful, often painfully so. The production brought back an age when it was not quite proper for summer theater to be any better than third rate and even worse for anyone to be dissatisfied with it. One would have thought that this age had never passed over the distinguished Berkshire Theatre Festival, now celebrating its eightieth anniversary with this revival of a play that was part of its first season. Fortunately, Shaw built his play, first performed in 1897, like one of the Majestic battleships of the time, and his wit and human understanding are stronger than rivets and steel. If the BTF production proved that, it is at least something.
In fact Candida is a play in which we should find a mirror, with all the forced purposefulness of our own times and its attendant trust in “values.” |
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| Music |
| Our American Cousin
An Opera in three acts by Eric Sawyer
Librettist: John Shoptaw
Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Conductor, Gil Rose
Stage Director: Carol Charnow Academy of Music, Northampton, June 20, 2008 |
| Heidi Holder |
June 29, 2008 |
| A young man, having outsmarted a haughty woman seeking a wealthy husband for her daughter, crows in triumph: “I guess you found your hymnal page, you sock-dologizing ole man-trap!” Hard as it may be for us to imagine, this line brought the house down every time in Tom Taylor’s 1858 hit play Our American Cousin. And appropriately so: a “sockdologer” (a corruption of “doxology”), was in American slang a decisive or knockout blow. The line might be lost to all but theater historians were it not for the fact that Taylor’s play was performed at Ford’s Theatre the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and that John Wilkes Booth used the famous line as a cue for his own decisive blow. Eric Sawyer and John Shoptaw’s new opera, Our American Cousin revisits that night and charts the intersection of real life and that of the theater. The opera offers us a play within an opera: a recreation of the performance Lincoln was attending at Ford’s Theatre the night of his assassination. Taylor’s play was a popular and cleverly-made comedy/melodrama about a distant--and rich--relative from America who appears suddenly at the estate of his titled but financially troubled English relations. The plot and characters of this largely forgotten play turn out to matter in unexpected ways, and point towards the thematic heart of the work. |
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| Dance |
| Of Dreams and Waking: The American Ballet Theater Offers The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadére |
| Renée Dumouchel |
June 29, 2008 |
| Have you ever forgotten something existed until, in a single, unexpected moment, you are reminded of it in a burst of splendor? Your senses rushed and awakened, a lightning bolt of recognition blazing from top to tail, urging you to store this moment in the recesses of your heart and the interstitial space beneath your skin, begging to not be so easily forgotten a second time.
And the object of such anticipation? The Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadére, recently performed by the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. |
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| Photography |
| Eloquent Nude - The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, a film by Ian McCluskey
A deluxe edition DVD is available directly from the producer for $25 plus $5 shipping and handling. [Click here to order.] It includes a "Making of Eloquent Nude" documentary, which includes much fascinating and essential supplementary material, as well as further interviews, as well as unpublished photography and journal entries. |
| Michael Miller |
June 21, 2008 |
| When I was still quite young, my father gave me, along with the use of his old Leica, a copy of an illustrated history of photography. I was fascinated by the book, but above all by the chapter on Weston and the famous photograph of Charis lying on the sand dune, the simplest of them. I thought it the best photograph in the book and returned to it over and over again. I don’t remember the year exactly, but I was probably of an age when no hint of sex would have gone unnoticed. I remember distinctly that I saw no such associations in the image. It struck me as essentially chaste—an example of the formalism which I thought was the essence of great photography. I was inspired in this view, of course, by that very image, as well as the peppers, which seemed to me to be more overtly sensual than the nudes. It was only later that I learned that the subject was Weston’s wife, and still later that I learned something about what their relationship was like. I still think that the photograph is severe and formalistic to the point of the visionary. Weston’s work was one thing and his life another. |
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| Cinema |
| The Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2008 |
| Lucas Miller |
June 24, 2008, updated June 29, 2008 |
| Cinema is without doubt the most popular art of our modern world. Museums are visited primarily by duty-plagued tourists; popular music is but a clamourous ruckus; books are an entertainment sadly lost on many and fine theatre is a luxury, which cannot be easily reached by the provincial. Film is entertaining, cheap, and easily accessed by folk of both urban and rural habitations. It is an art of swift movement which appeals to our poor attention spans. Most contemporary films are trivial and pointless, but others may contain great profundity and meaning. Cinema is the pinnacle of modern popular culture.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival has now reached its 62nd year. In past years the festival it corresponded in time with the hectic August Fringe. This year, however, it is to be run from 18-29 June to allow movie-goers to focus their energies on film alone. It is the last true festival around. All the others, to quote the hit King of Ping Pong (showing at the festival) are about “money, politics, and drugs.” It is the last “egalitarian” festival. The others (including Tribeca, Sundance and Cannes) have been mauled by Hollywood.
Reviewed to date (more to come!):
Before the Rains, directed by Santosh Sivan
Elegy, directed by Isabel Coixet
Married Life, directed by Ira Sachs
Helen, directed by Sandra Nettelbeck
The Edge of Love, directed by John Maybury
A Film with Me in It, directed by Ian Fitzgibbon, written by Mark Doherty
Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris
---
The Award Winners! |
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| Dance |
| Momix, Lunar Sea: The Decadence of Illusion |
| Renée Dumouchel |
June 6, 2008 |
| Shifting positions, much less pre-conceptions (or misconceptions) are never easy. Minds, like bodies, are hard to change, and most would rather play an authoritative Queen of Hearts than an imaginative, forgiving, but much less in-control Alice.
Creating its own kind of Wonderland, Momix calls for all manner of shifts—both physical and mental. Ninety minutes of shape shifting to amorphous music and distorted nature images could be a recipe for disaster. Luckily, the closest Momix comes to a resounding “off with its head” is over-saturation, thanks to the extreme technical prowess of the dancers and the whimsicality of each set of movements.
At times, the fluid, sensual, often humorous movements get lost amid a sea of recurring if not repetitive circles, parallelograms and Kabuki-like “puppetry.”
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| Theater |
| Williamstown Theater Festival, Nikos Stage
Beyond Therapy
by Christopher Durang
Directed by Alex Timbers
Charlotte - Kate Burton
Prudence - Katie Finneran
Bruce - Darren Goldstein
Stuart - Darrell Hammond
Bob - Matt McGrath Andrew - Bryce Pinkham |
| Michael Miller |
|
| The Williamstown Theatre Festival got off to a comfortable start with quite an entertaining offering by WTF familiars. Playwright-Actor Christopher Durang has appeared in Williamstown in both capacities. Katie Finneran is beginning her second WTF season as Prudence. Director Alex Timbers and Matt McGrath are both in their fourth season, and Kate Burton, of course, is a fixture, now in her 18th season. Beyond that, there is also an element of nostalgia in Beyond Therapy, which was first produced off Broadway in 1981 and on Broadway in a revised version in 1982. Not everybody will realize what a different place the world was back then. Hence the program notes attempt to explain this through a comparison with Sex and the City, which is steeped in the values of the turn of the century, when it started. Even that is beginning to recede into the past. |
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| Music |
| Music Mountain, Falls Village, Connecticut, Sunday June 15, 3 PM
Special Benefit Concert for the Operating Fund
St. Petersburg String Quartet
Alla Aranovskaya, first violin
Alla Krolevich, second violin
Boris Vayner, viola
Leonid Shukayev, cello
Daniel Epstein, piano, replacing Charles Rosen
Debussy: String Quartet in G Minor, Opus 10 (1893)
Shostakovich: String Quartet #12 in D Flat Major, Opus 133 (1968)
Schumann: Piano Quintet in E Flat Major, Opus 44 (1842) |
| Michael Miller |
June 19, 2008 |
| Music Mountain has offered extraordinary chamber music since 1930, when it was founded as a summer home for the Gordon String Quartet. Audiences loyally drive up the winding country road to enjoy the beauty of the grounds and its surroundings, its long, narrow hall with its superb acoustics, and the major chamber groups who play there. Jazz is also a major component of the season, and there is also choral music. On the lawn which spreads out down the hillside from Gordon Hall, you will also find a tent with books for sale, a snack bar, wooden benches under the trees, as well as some rather funky abstract sculptures. There had been a violent storm the week before, which snapped the trunks of several large trees surrounding the lawn. The season, called “Borrowed Melody” this year, because works with themes borrowed from outside sources or the composer’s own works will be worked into most of the programs, got off to a strong start with a special benefit concert featuring the great St. Petersburg String Quartet. Charles Rosen was to have joined them for the Schumann Piano Quintet. He was unfortunately unable to play, but Daniel Epstein filled the gap with intelligence and sensitivity. |
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| Theater |
| August: Osage County
by Tracy Letts
Steppenwolf at the Music Box Theater, New York
directed by Anna D. Shapiro
Ian Barford - Little Charles
Deanna Dunagan - Violet Weston (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008)
Kimberly Guerrero - Johnna Monevata
Francis Guinan - Charlie Aiken (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008)
Brian Kerwin - Steve Heidebrecht
Michael McGuire - Beverly Weston
Madeleine Martin - Jean Fordham
Mariann Mayberry - Karen Weston
Amy Morton - Barbara Fordham
Sally Murphy - Ivy Weston
Jeff Perry - Bill Fordham
Rondi Reed - Mattie Fae Aiken (Oct 30, 2007-Jun 15, 2008) Troy West - Sheriff Deon Gilbeau |
| Michael Miller |
June 17, 2008 |
| As I mulled over the play I had just seen, the much-acclaimed August: Osage County, over some bad, overpriced feijoada, I found myself probing around for just what had been lacking in the evening. I left the Music Box Theater thinking that it was perhaps not that strong a play. I liked its length (or perhaps out on the Plains people would conceive it as breadth) and its rambling quality. Most of its dozen characters were unattractive in one way or another, but I’d grown fond of them over the past three hours. On the other hand, I perhaps felt mildly frustrated that I didn’t know more about the characters, that too much was left open. (I won’t retell the story here. If you can’t quite follow the following streamof dysfunctional relatives, you should see the play or read it. You won’t regret it.) I found myself wondering what brought Bev together with Violet in the the first place. There must have been something, before the pills and the alcohol took over. Then it takes more than Mattie Fae’s word to convince me about what brought her together with Bev, presumably his frustration with Violet. Is the result of this adultery with his sister-in-law really enough to put the man into such a depression that he kills himself years later? On the other hand, it’s more than enough that he has come to the realization that “life is very long,” and the “the world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be anymore.” Bev is—or was—a poet, but his years of inactivity had been so long that it’s hard to imagine that it still bothered him. All he had to do was to stay drunk. Now Barbara, his daughter, followed in Beverly’s footsteps and became an academic. She and her husband left home for Colorado—a tragic abandonment of her parents in the eyes of some, because they could both find jobs there, but we never find out what her academic interests were, what her work life was like. As least we know that it didn’t offer her the same sexual temptations it proferred her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Bill. Weren’t these trivial questions? Perhaps, but I believe that fact that they kept appearing suggested that something was thin in the background to let them through. |
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| Theater |
| Harold Pinter, The Caretaker
Berkshire Theater Company, Stockbridge
Jonathan Epstein – Davies
James Barry – Mick
Tommy Schrider – Aston
Eric Hill, director Jonathan Wentz, set design |
| Michael Miller |
June 16, 2008 |
| Harold Pinter is still very much alive, a potent and welcome presence in the world because of his political work, but when The Caretaker, or any other of the plays from the height of his fame in the theater, is produced, most of us take it as a classic from the past. After all Pinter’s announcement in 2005 of his retirement from the stage marked a significant break, and the world has changed significantly since the sixties. His powerful Nobel Prize lecture, Art, Truth, and Politics, meticulously prepared and taped by BBC 4, shows his current way of reaching his audience in a time when indifference, commercialism in the media, and unofficial censorship make it virtually impossible to get salutary and unpleasant messages across to anyone who is not already convinced. We deal with people who disagree with us by marginalizing them. When he wrote The Caretaker in 1959, his first commercial success, he established himself as the quintessential all-round man of the theater. |
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| Photography |
| Don’t Smile for the Camera, at the Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield.
The exhibition will be on view daily from 11 am to 5 pm through November 2, 2008. At the Old Deerfield Summer Craft Fair on June 21 and 22, tintype photographer John Bernaski will demonstrate his craft for the public. Admission to the nineteen exhibition rooms on art, history, and culture in Memorial Hall Museum, 8 Memorial Street, Deerfield, MA, is $6 for adults, and $3 for youth and students 6-21. For more information call 413-774-3768 x 10 or visit the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s website. Click here for a gallery of highlights from the exhibition. |
| Michael Miller |
June 13, 2008 |
| In this day and age, when the good life revolves around a McMansion in a gated community and the destination of a family outing is more likely to be Six Flags than Old Sturbridge Village or
Old Deerfield, few remember what these museum towns actually mean. The range of artistic and social movements associated with such places over the years give one an idea of the various facets of human interest they appealed to: preservationism, the Colonial revival, Arts and Crafts, historical pageantry and so on. At one time the opinions and designs of John Ruskin and William Morris or, later, the writings and the photographs of Wallace Nutting reached broad popular audiences through a variety of books and magazines. A housewife would not think of decorating her home without consulting them, or even paying a visit to a place like Deerfield, where she might even expect to purchase examples of traditional crafts from local artisans, as well as photographic records of the exhibits or reenactments she had seen on the spot. These she could take home for inspiration, either for practical decorative ends or simply to recreate the mood of times gone by. |
 Charles & Ellen Leissing
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| Theater |
| I Am My Own Wife
by Doug Wright
starring Vince Gatton, directed by Andrew Volkoff Barrington Stage Company, Stage II |
| Michael Miller |
June 10, 2008 |
| As a teenager under the Third Reich and son of an enthusiastic and rising party member of brutal ways, Lothar Berfelde found himself maturing into an especially difficult situation. From a very early age, he had felt himself to be a girl in a boy’s body. Disgusted by Lothar’s precocious effeminacy, his father had forced him to join the Hitler Youth, but eventually a Lesbian aunt enlightened him about cross-dressing and gave him an authoritative book on the subject, Magnus Hirschfeld’s book, Die Transvestiten (1910), which became his Bible, as it reminded him that he was not alone in the world. He killed his father with a rolling pin, as Väterchen threatened to kill his mother and the entire family. After psychiatric examination he was judged sane and sentenced to four years in juvenile prison. East German society was no more tolerant of homosexuals, but Lothar was able to pursue his inclinations, changing his name to “Lottchen,” formally Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the Berlin suburb in which he had grown up, and where he continued to live, obsessively collecting furniture and other objects from the Gründerzeit, that is, the age of Bismarck, a period of growing national wealth and security, the “world of assurance” (viz. Am. “insurance”), as Stefan Zweig called it, which was to collapse with the First World War. |
|
| Art & Architecture |
| Pollock Matters, edited by Ellen G. Landau & Claude Cernuschi; Chestnut Hill, MA; McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2007. |
| Michael Miller |
June 9, 2008 |
| This is the second part of my review of the exhibition Pollock Matters [click here to read Part I], which I promised back in December of last year as a separate discussion of the catalogue. If the flow of events has not permitted me to fulfill my promise until now, I shan’t apologize too abjectly, because the catalogue is of permanent value—as much to art historians as to the scientists of art—and during the intervening period our appreciation of Pollock has since been enriched by an added dimension. His drips and spatters have made their entry into the fashion world, paraded on the most fashionable sidewalks on garments of all kinds for both sexes: shirts, tank tops, dresses, and shoes. While Pollock’s drip paintings were made as the most quintessentially unique of unique artworks, characteristic motifs are now made into the most quintessentially multiple of multiples, mass-produced designer clothes: the distinguishing criterion of these articles is not the quality of workmanship or quality of design applied to an individual, bespoke example, but the uniformly recognizable distinction of a brand name. The purchaser, in wearing them, surrenders a certain portion of his or her individuality in order to assume, by being branded in this way, an extra-personal distinction, not the mark of Pollock, the artist who “invented” the design, but that of the late Yves St. Laurent and others, who borrowed it. In this the borrowing is a more potent gesture than creation. Some fashion-conscious people, either through thrift or through mischievousness, have gone a step further, dripping their own patterns on to blank garments, co-opting the brand distinction by re-borrowing it and restoring some of their individuality and some of the hand-made craft of art—which is apparently legal, since these drip motifs cannot or have not been copyrighted. Doesn’t the Pollock-Krasner Foundation have anything to say about this? |
|
| Music |
| In Praise of Herbert von Karajan, with a Selective Critical Discography |
| Huntley Dent |
May 31, 2008 |
| My immediate reaction to Michael Miller's commentary on the Karajan centenary [Oh no! He’s not back again, is he? - May 2, 2008] was rather choleric, but I've settled down a bit since then and can write this from a relatively balanced perspective.
I bought those 1962-63 Beethoven symphonies, too, which by the way are in such bad sound that three remasterings later, including the most recent in SACD, they remain boomy and muddy. I'm not sure where you heard them praised. But Karajan's quasi-hypnotizing style didn't appeal to me back then. I dropped out until the mid-80s. Since then -- don't be shocked -- I've bought his entire EMI output from 1947 until the early Eighties, all his Decca recordings (which are relatively few), a huge chunk of his DG catalogue, and many highlights from the historical archives. As a result, I incline toward his English biographer, Richard Osborne, in believing that Karajan was among the greatest conductors of the century. And not just in the Fifties, that canard notwithstanding. |
|
| Music |
| Concerts at Tannery Pond. Season Opening.
Sunday May 25, 2008, 3pm
Edward Arron, Cello
Pedja Mužijević, Piano
Soovin Kim, Violin
Nicholas Phan, Tenor
Franz Joseph Haydn, Piano Trio In C-Major, Hob. 15:27
Gabriel Fauré. La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61
Benjamin Britten, Folk Songs Robert Schumann, Piano Trio No.1 In D-Minor, Op. 63 |
| Michael Miller |
May 28, 2008 |
| The summer season began for this concertgoer Sunday afternoon on a very high level in a very good place, Tannery Pond, on the Darrow School campus, which occupies part of the Shaker community at New Lebanon, New York. A bright, warm Sunday afternoon arrived on cue to inaugurate this season of a distinguished chamber music series which began in 1991. There is no more comely place to gather for music; the acoustics are intimate, clear, and warm in this converted tannery, originally built by the Shakers in 1834; and its founder-director, Christian Steiner, a distinguished pianist and photographer, provides a uniquely enthusiastic “one-man-show,” introducing the program, arranging chairs, recording and photographing the concert, turning pages, and picking up overturned flower pots, as was necessary this afternoon. |
|
| Music |
Berlioz, Les Troyens, a Concert Performance and a Symposium
Boston Symphony Orchestra Symphony Hall, Boston,
James Levine, conductor
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens, Part 1 (The Capture of Troy)
Sunday, May 4, 2008, 3pm
Marcello Giordani, Tenor (Aeneas)
Yvonne Naef, Mezzo-Soprano (Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Chorebus)
Julien Robbins, Bass-Baritone (Priam)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Panthus)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Jane Bunnell, Mezzo-Soprano (Hecuba)
Ronald Naldi, Tenor (Helenus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (Trojan Soldier)
James Courtney, Bass-Baritone (Greek Captain)
Eric Owens, Bass (Ghost of Hector)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
John Oliver, conductor |
Les Troyens, Part 2 (The Trojans at Carthage)
Sunday, May 4, 2008, 6.30 pm
Marcello Giordani, Tenor (Aeneas)
Anne Sofie Von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano (Dido)
Kwangchul Youn, Bass (Narbal)
Christin-Marie Hill, Mezzo-Soprano (Anna)
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano (Ascanius)
Eric Cutler, Tenor (Iopas)
Philippe Castagner, Tenor (Hylas)
Clayton Brainerd, Bass-Baritone (Panthus)
David Kravitz, Baritone (First Trojan Sentry)
James Courtney, Bass-Baritone (Second Trojan Sentry)
Yvonne Naef, Mezzo-Soprano (Ghost of Cassandra)
Dwayne Croft, Baritone (Ghost of Chorebus)
Julien Robbins, Bass-Baritone (Ghost of Priam)
Eric Owens, Bass (Mercury; Ghost of Hector)
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
John Oliver, conductor
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| Michael Miller |
May 16, 2008 |
Les Troyens is so widely accepted as Berlioz’s greatest work, that the progress of the Berlioz Renaissance is punctuated by performances of it in the opera house and in concert, beginning, arguably, with Sir Thomas Beecham’s moderately abridged 1947 BBC broadcast. Now Boston music-lovers may consider the Berlioz Renaissance to be something of a noble fiction, since his music has had its own secure place in the Boston Symphony repertoire for many years, maturing with Charles Munch’s arrival in 1949. During his tenure he and the BSO performed and recorded several of Berlioz’s most important works, and the recordings  are still considered among the best. Later, both Jean Martinon and Seiji Ozawa continued the tradition most capably, and Berlioz has been one of James Levine’s great enthusiasms since early in his career. Expertise in Berlioz seems to be a prerequisite for the job. Yet, this is the first complete performance of Les Troyens by the foremost Berlioz orchestra in America, which in the past has only played brief excerpts, above all the “Royal Hunt and Storm” from Act IV. Hence these concert performances of Parts I and II on following weeks, culminating in a complete performance on Sunday May 4, are in fact landmarks. |
|
| Dance |
Akram Khan: Between Baggage and Nihility
New York City Center |
| Renée Dumouchel |
May 6, 2008 |
| Tackling questions of being and knowing is a bit like a circus act. Like tightrope walkers, choreographers must be prepared to wobble, bend, contort and above all, have an indelible sense of balance and purpose, lest they plummet to their demise through a net of trite observations and half-truths.
Akram Khan, a choreographer whose vision is both grounded and deliciously stratospheric, engages this challenge head on, face forward, toes poised to the next tine of an already thin rope in each of his two evening-length pieces, Bahok and Zero Degrees, recently performed at New York’s City Center.
Set in a fictitious transportation hub whose information board cycles through symbols and a series of frustrating edicts and subtitled translations, Bahok weaves Khan’s quietly violent movement and exquisitely abstracted score (composed by Nitin Sawhney) with his keen eye for the delicate intricacies of human behavior, speech and rhythm. Zero Degrees takes a more minimalist but no less effect approach, chronicling the struggles and discovery of two dancers experimenting with their relationship to each other, space and themselves. |
|
| Food & Drink |
| Gala Restaurant and Bar at the Orchards Hotel
222 Adams Road, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 01267
Tel: 413.458.9611; 800.225.1517
Fax: 413.458.3273
E-mail: reservations@orchardshotel.com
Rating: 4/5; Price: moderate; main courses $23-$39. Open seven days a week: breakfast served in the Dining Room from 7:00AM to 10:15AM daily; Sunday Brunch from 11:00 AM to 2:15 PM; Lunch 11:30AM to 2:15PM (entrees $6-15); Dinner from 5:30PM to 10:00PM (entrees $16-28); Lighter fare in the Bar from 5:30PM. |
| Michael Miller |
May 21, 2008 |
| As summer visitors converge on Williamstown, beginning with the Williams commencement and continuing on through the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which will conintue through late August, it will hardly occur to many that a refuge is available from whatever mild stresses the largely depopulated college town may offer. The Orchards Hotel, with its recently reinvented and renamed restaurant, Gala (formerly Yasmin’s), has stood on Main Street (Route 2) for some twenty-five years, just at the point where the town proper begins. Hotel, restaurant, parking, and their attractive landscaping are surrounded by a massive wall, which shields the buildings from traffic noise most effectively, but has in the past encouraged among locals a sense of exclusivity—borne out in the past by Yasmin’s ambitious and pricey menu. With new owners and the arrival of Chef Peter Belmonte, a Berkshire native, all that has changed. The new menu, which changes regularly, maintains a neat balance of the familiarity and innovation, and prices are refreshingly accessible. Festival regulars will also be pleased to learn that the popular Cabaret, absent from the Orchards for several years, will return in July and early August. |
|
| Art |
| Hoosac River Lights, April 26, 2008 |
| Photo Gallery by Joanna Gabler and Michael Miller |
May 22, 2008 |
| Ralph Brill, of the Brill Gallery, initiated the Hoosac River Lights - an outdoor artistic lighting project that drew crowds of thousands to its Inaugural Event on the evening of April 26, 2008. The Hoosac River Lights Project celebrated the Hoosac River and brought it back into people's consciousness. Over time it might become an annual City of North Adams Event lasting several days. Once a dynamic river that powered the old textile and shoe mills in the region the Hoosac was placed in a concrete channel in the 1950s to prevent costly flood damages. Today, the Hoosac River remains largely unnoticed as it winds its way through the center of North Adams. |
|
| Music |
| Daniel Lessner, piano
Williams College Bösendorfer Recital
Chapin Hall, April 26, 2008, 8 pm
J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations Robert Schumann, Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13 |
| Michael Miller |
May 9, 2008 |
| Once again, the Williams Bösendorfer Recital program has given us the opportunity of hearing a gifted younger musician display his musicianship with the singular obstacles of a mismatched instrument in an unpleasant acoustic. A portable acoustical shell has been introduced to remedy Chapin’s muffled sound. I heard a favorable judgement of this innovation at the New England Baroque Orchestra concert, which I unfortunately missed, but it was of little help with a solo piano: the music, instead of sounding as if it were being played in another room with the door partially open, sounded as if it were being played in a tunnel, or perhaps a swimming pool. The Williams Bösendorfer has never been a credit to its justly famed manufacturer, partly, it could be, because of the Berkshire climate and partly because it is too much instrument for the hall. The instrument is extremely loud, and so was the pianist, painfully so, occasionally giving me the feeling of being in close quarters with a mad rhino. |
|
| Music |
| Boston Symphony Orchestra, James Levine conducting
Symphony Hall, Friday, April 18, 8 pm
John Harbison, Symphony No. 5 (2008), on texts of Czesław Miłosz,
Louise Glück, and Rainer Maria Rilke
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano
Nathan Gunn, Baritone
Gustav Mahler, Das Lied Von Der Erde
(after Hans Bethge’s “The Chinese Flute”)
Anne Sofie Von Otter, Mezzo-Soprano Ben Heppner, tenor, replacing Johan Botha, who was ill. |
| Michael Miller |
May 5, 2008 |
| [N.B. The Boston Chamber Music Society will offer a performance of a Das Lied von der Erde in Schoenberg’s arrangement for chamber ensemble, Sunday, May 17, 7.30 p.m. at Sanders Theater in Cambridge.]
As in November, James Levine has chosen to pair a work of Mahler with the premiere of a commissioned work, this time, not Elliot Carter’s brief, dense, but deceptively limpid Horn Concerto, but an ambitious symphony for mezzo-soprano, baritone and massive orchestra by John Harbison. It was only after Harbison had begun to make sketches that Maestro Levine, exercising his substantial gifts as a patron of new music, suggested that voices would be a welcome addition. The composer responded by taking up works by three poets who have been particularly highly regarded in recent years, the late Czesław Miłosz, Louise Glück, and, as the classic guest, Rainer Maria Rilke. These texts extend throughout the four movements like wall-to-wall carpeting, and one might get the impression that they had come to dominate the symphony, if its orchestral foundations and symphonic structure were not as strong as they are. The result is a work which attempts to do justice to two objectives: the expressive setting of narrative and lyrical verse and a fully-realized symphonic work. One might think that such a duality might prove a recipe for disaster, but in Harbison’s intelligent and experienced hands, the result is a double, if still somewhat divided, success. |
|
| Theater |
Black Watch
from the Natonal Theatre of Scotland
Written by Gregory Burke
Director - John Tiffany |
| Lucas Miller |
April 19, 2008 |
|
The Iraq War is an infuriating abomination and I am more than happy to see anything that attacks it. I am also, as it happens, not against seeing fine theatre. Therefore, I was delighted to see two birds killed with one stone at the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Edinburgh Festival hit Black Watch at the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) in Glasgow, as the play continues its tour through the UK, and then on to North America. [Since its first performance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 in an unused drill shed, Black Watch has played before sold out audiences and won numerous awards, not only the Fringe First, but South Bank Show Award for Theatre, the Critics’ Circle Awards (to John Tiffany as Best Director) and others. It played to sold-out audiences at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn in October-November 2007, and will return there in October 2008. - ed.] The production is unique in its dynamic approach to theatre and accessibility. Because it is “building-free,” it travels well, each time creating a different experience for a different audience. The primary objective, as always it should be, is to entertain. This is achieved through an interesting integration of acting, singing, dancing, and technical effects. At the SECC, the theatre was set up in a peculiar way, with the stage nestled between two large bleachers running parallel to one another. |
|
| Music |
| Benjamin Moser plays, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Holliger, Tchaikovsky, and Skryabin at the Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield, March 27, 2008 |
| Michael Miller |
April 4, 2008 |
| This was an important event, not only because of the superb playing of a young musician I hope to hear many times again, but also because it showed what the Colonial Theatre can really do for classical music in our community. I have already commented enthusiastically about the acoustics in the hall, which remind me somewhat of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford and are excellent for small string ensembles, chamber music, and piano, if the piano is of the right sort, that is, smaller than a full sized concert grand. The Colonial has acquired a splendid rare instrument in an 1894 Hamburg Steinway, a nine foot Model D, which in a modern instrument would be too powerful for the hall. |
|
| Music |
| Biava Quartet
Austin Hartman and Hyunsu Ko violin, Mary Persin viola, and Jason Calloway cello
Clark Art Institute
Sunday, April 6, 2008, 3 pm.
Haydn, String Quartet in C Major, Op. 54, no. 2
Kodály, String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1916–18) Mendelssohn, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 |
| Michael Miller |
April 9, 2008 |
| It is perhaps not entirely accurate to call the Biava Quartet (named after the distinguished Philadelphia violinist and conductor Luis Biava.) a “young” quartet, since it is already ten years old. During that time they have collected an impressive array of prizes, including the Naumberg Chamber Music Prize and a first at the London International competition. Today they hold the Lisa Arnhold Quartet Residency at the Juilliard School, serving as graduate quartet in residence and teaching assistants to the Juilliard Quartet. This Juilliard connection is not without significance, since, as cellist Jason Calloway mentioned while introducing the Kodály, the Juilliard Quartet were their mentors. During the Biava’s Sunday afternoon concert, the relationship was constantly apparent, not only in their tight ensemble and disciplined rhtyhm, but in their sound, which recalls not so much the mellowed timbre of the Juilliard Quartet today, but the brilliance and bite of their earlier years. On the other hand, the Biava Quartet’s approach to ensemble textures is quite different. |
|
| Theater |
| William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Chichester Festival 2007 Production, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2/12-3/24/08; now at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway
Rupert Goold - Director; Patrick Stewart - Macbeth; Kate Fleetwood - Lady Macbeth
|
| Michael Miller |
March 28, 2008 |
| If the first performance of Macbeth (most likely some time in 1606 or 1607) was a historic event, it would have been that chiefly because it was the first time that a Scotsman was ever presented on a London stage as anything other than an object of ridicule and contempt. This obviously had much to do with King James’ Scottish origins, not one of his more popular traits, but surely to be respected, at least in public. But that is not Shakespeare’s only effort to please the monarch. James set great store by his descendence from Banquo, a major theme in the play. There is also a good deal about the nature of kingship and political legitimacy. Witchcraft, a favorite topic of James’, on which he wrote a learned treatise, is close to its core and ubiquitous, even amplified by interpolations which provided an opportunity to make the witch scenes even more vivid through music, spectacle, and dance. |
|
| Music |
| Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes
Montagu Slater, libretto
Metropolitan Opera House, March 15, 2008, 1.30 pm (transmitted “live” in HD, March 29)
Donald Runnicles, conductor
Peter Grimes – Anthony Dean Griffey
Ellen Orford – Patricia Racette
Captain Balstrode – Anthony Michaels-Moore
Mrs. Sedley – Felicity Palmer
Auntie – Jill Grove
Niece – Leah Partridge
Niece – Erin Morley
Hobson – Dean Peterson
Swallow – John Del Carlo
Bob Boles – Greg Fedderly |
Rev. Horace Adams – Bernard Fitch
Ned Keene – Teddy Tahu Rhodes
John – Logan William Erickson
Production – John Doyle
Set Designer – Scott Pask
Costume Designer – Ann Hould-Ward
Lighting Designer – Peter Mumford
TV Director – Gary Halvorson |
|
| Michael Miller |
April 2, 2008 |
| Peter Grimes' first performance in 1945 was a triumph, and the opera has settled into a secure place in the repertory—accessible to a broad audience, as its creators intended, but commanding respect among critics as a serious and important effort, considered by some to be Benjamin Britten’s masterpiece. The composer and his librettist, as well as his companion, Peter Pears, who premiered the role of Grimes and consulted during its composition, achieved a rare success in combining a leftist program of popular appeal, social criticism, and authentic tragedy—a feat many have attempted, but few have brought off. Inspired by the atmosphere of his native region around Aldeburgh, where he grew up and lived most of his life, as well as formative influences like Berg’s Wozzeck, which left its mark almost everywhere in the opera, Britten took a section (Letter XXII) from The Borough by George Crabbe, the Aldeburgh-born poet and coleopterist, and, with the indispensible assistance of the left-wing writer Montagu Slater, transformed it from a black morality tale into the tragedy of an outcast who was hounded to his destruction by the hostile community into which he was born. |
|
| Music |
| New Morning for the World
a concert by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Joseph Schwantner, with speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. performed by Omar Sangare; The Williams Symphonic Winds conducted by Stephen Dennis Bodner; Filmed live by Berta Jottar [link1/link2], Sunday, February 3, 2008, produced by Sandra Burton and Stalwart Originality. |
| Michael Miller |
March 29, 2008 |
| When Americans celebrate their more significant secular holidays with art, they notoriously reach for hackneyed expressions which are at best well-intentioned and at worst, totally empty. Williams College, however, produced a notable exception to this in New Morning for The World, a concert piece for winds, percussion, and piano, with recitation, by the distinguished American composer Joseph Schwantner. Regrettably I missed the performance, but I recently came upon a video of the event, filmed by the Mexican video artist and activist Berta Jottar, who is a member of the Williams faculty, along with Omar Sangare, who recited the texts by Martin Luther King, Jr. to the accompaniment of Schwantner’s music. The music and the selection from Dr. King’s speeches was work of a high order, powerful in its effect, as was Dr. Sangare’s recitation and the performance of the Williams Symphonic Winds under their director, Stephen Dennis Bodner, who has been responsible for a series of ambitious, original programs over this academic year and before. |
|
| Dance |
| Jonah Bokaer: The Invention of Minus One |
| Renee Dumouchel |
March 21, 2008 |
| How do you talk about a piece that is simultaneously disturbing and thought-provoking, poignant yet devoid of discernible emotion? Jonah Bokaer’s The Invention of Minus One, presented at the Abrons Art Center in New York, whether intentionally or not, stirs up provocations of perception and misperception, voyeurism, dehumanization, digital and organic interaction, form, function and functionality.
Moving among and between a set depicting an active photo studio, complete with tripods, reflective umbrellas, video screens and costume racks, a trio of dancers (Holley Farmer, Rashaun Mitchell and Banu Ogan, like Mr. Bokaer, formerly of the Merce Cunnigham Dance Company) sporting sequins and nautical-inspired dinner jackets designed by Isaac Mizrahi, and moving to punctuating music that almost sounds like the inner workings of a photo development machine, interact in near perfect disillusionment that there is anyone else on the stage but them. It is not so much narcissism as a complete lack of emotional interaction between counterparts that leave the piece feeling cold and unconnected. |
|
| Music |
| Eastman Studies in Music from The University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer publish their 50th volume and then some. |
| From the music-book blog From Beyond the Stave edited by Michael Miller |
March 25, 2008 |
| In February the University of Rochester Press published the 50th volume in its acclaimed series, Eastman Studies in Music: Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, and Transformations (edited by Jack Douthett, Martha M. Hyde, and Charles J. Smith). "When we began, I didn't dare dream that this could happen," says Ralph Locke (pictured right in front of the URP offices), a professor at the Eastman School of Music for more than 30 years and series editor since 1994. "We started producing two books a year, and now we are up to seven and growing, which means we can publish books on a range of topics and reach a wider spectrum of the reading public."
Reviews of some volumes from the series will be appearing in The Berkshire Review for the Arts over the next weeks and months: The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music, by Paul Griffiths; Bach's Changing World: Voices in the Community, Edited by Carol K. Baron; and others. |
|
| Dance |
| Paul Taylor Dance Company at the City Center—Food for Thought: Byzantium, De Sueños and Arden Court |
| Renee Dumouchel |
March 20, 2008 |
| There are enough people who are Paul Taylor supporters that I don’t feel I need to throw myself into the ring just for the sake of safety in numbers. I can fully appreciate his dancer’s pristine technique, his keen eye for flawless presentation and seamless transitions, his undeniable innovation and daring and the obvious thought and care that he so painstakingly infuses into each of his works. The disconnect, for me, then, is not one of execution, but of personal taste—and as we all know, taste varies.
In the past works that I have seen, there is nothing that stirs in me that visceral internal furnace that signals the ignition of something explosive—something that resonates with the core of my being and awakens the dormant morsels of past experience. My eyes have feasted, but I am left feeling hollow. While his work has great substance, his particular flavors haven’t excited my palate and nourished my hunger in a way that has felt satisfying…until now. |
|
| Food & Drink |
| Café des Artistes
One West 67th Street
New York, New York 10023
(212) 877-3500
Rating 4/5. Moderate to expensive: main courses $23-$39. Prix fixe $35 (Restaurant Week All-Year Round), Open seven days a week, lunch 11 to 3 pm and dinner 5 to 11pm. Jacket recommended but not required. |
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