Vincent Persichetti Remembered

Vincent Persichetti Revealed

The Vincent Persichetti concert at Bruno Walter Auditorium, featuring "Infanta Marina" for viola and piano and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” for soprano and piano was performed by violist David Wallace and mezzo-soprano D’Anna Fortunato with pianist/composer Larry Thomas Bell. Bell, a student of Persichetti, and musicologist Andrea Olmstead are from Boston and they spoke about the composer’s music, teaching, and influence, and they spoke and spoke and spoke and spoke. Just as a faint glimmer of hope of the actual performance was raised with the violist’s bow and the singer’s chin, they spoke again. And again. Then they began to play, but stopped to speak once more. And so it went on. They were drunk with pleasure at being able to talk about their great, late mentor, and the audience just wished it was drunk. Some were.

Read more about Vincent Persichetti

Lou Reed's Sound Archive

Lou Reed's Soundscape at the Celeste Bartos Forum

Lou Reed’s soundscape, Drones (in honor of his birthday), at the Celeste Bartos Forum, was attended mostly by the thirty somethings of the early 1990s, once handsomely confident, dressed in black. Some showed a hint of medicated mania until the droning began in a dark room with two mirror balls and bean bags. A violinist followed me as I prowled the room, a skeptical scowl on my face. But then I felt slightly intoxicated, then euphoric. As the droning began to sound like the Ride of the Valkyries, I heard ancestral voices and mocking laughter and I was joined as one with the darkness and the mirror ball lights. Everyone was flat on the floor by then except for an elderly rocker who drew a face on a blackboard, wrote “Judy was here” across it and then scribbled, violently, all over it. I think this is the sort of thing that used to be called a Happening.

Read more about the acquisition of Lou Reed's sound archive by the New York Public Library

Chelsea Symphony

The Chelsea Symphony Performs New Work

 

It’s a bit confronting to listen to a new viola concerto and a new symphony each of which was written by someone born after 1986 but that is the experience the Chelsea Symphony provides fairly often. The acoustics of the church in West 23rd Street which serves as its home are pitch perfect but they hardly matter because the Chelsea Symphony performs a repertoire of monumentally ambitious works that are of the deafening rather than the chamber variety. After making light of the two new works, which were composed by members of the orchestra as though this was something one just does, they gave each of them a bunch of flowers and then swept through Dvorak’s New World Symphony as if it was an encore, which it sort of was.

Photo by Wai Ng

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La Traviata

La Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera

Ken Howard © 2010 The Metropolitan Opera.

I wondered what would be made of this (2010) Metropolitan Opera production of La Traviata by anyone who did not know its usual belle époque staging. Violetta enters during the prelude and walks through a brain shaped purgatory towards an oversized clock over which God presides. This is fine for the prelude but as the rest of the opera is set in the utterly superficial realm of society, there is only so much that the psycho/purgatorial setting can do for it before the dramatic tension of the plot makes it seem desperate for relevance. But the singing was superb, starring Sonya Yoncheva and Michael Fabianao, who are part of the new push for young and pretty opera stars to replace some fabulous singers of yore who have been given the boot because they don’t look good on cinema simulcasts. 

Watch Sonya Yoncheva and Michael Fabiano in an excerpt from La Traviata:
 

Laura Linney

Laura Linney Addresses the League of Professional Theatre Women

 

Laura Linney addressed The League of Professional Theatre Women meeting today so I went along. The room looked like a gathering of elderly men in high drag but Laura Linney was incredibly poised and beautiful. She revealed that she took three acting degrees before she even began auditions and that almost all young female actors ask her what should they do about having children. Just as she was discussing the roles she is alternating with Cynthia Nixon in The Little Foxes in April a Professional Theatre Woman yelled that she had a question. Then commenced a deluge of the most fatuous questions about Movie Land as the Professional Theatre Women turned into a mob of shrieking fans. Laura Linney handled it all perfectly but she looked relieved when she was allowed to go.

Watch Laura Linney on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Central Park

Sebastian, www.westsiderag.com, February 9 2017

A Proposal on Bow Bridge

I was just stomping across Bow Bridge in Central Park, carting home my groceries from Fairway, when the man in front of me went down on one knee and proposed to the woman he was with. He presented a ring, and everything. At least they did this in private, I thought, not like doing it on TV at the basketball. But then I realized I had been the only witness of this incident and as I did so their expectant stares landed with full force on my unsuspecting consciousness. I stomped on, ignoring them, refusing to be an involuntary extra in their B grade movie.