Broadway at Symphony Space

Ensemble Singing on Broadway

The incessant celebration of Broadway continued at Symphony Space on Thursday with a recital focused entirely on Broadway duets, trios, quartets and their links to the traditions of grand opera and Viennese operetta. There was something capriciously wonderful about watching ten giants of Broadway (Musical Director Grant Wanus and performers Nickki Renee Daniels, Jessica Fontana, Santino Fontana, Jeff Kready, Rebecca Luker, Michael McCorry Rose, Kyle Scatliffe and Elizabeth Stanley and Sally Wilfert), all Tony and Drama Desk nominees, demonstrating their core skills on a week night, i.e. being available.  On the way out I made a critical comment about an item from "Bridges of Madison County", which I didn't enjoy, and was set upon by a woman with a face like a boiled potato who stood in front of me and lectured me about what I did not know about Broadway. “It’s OPERA!” she bellowed, “It’s meant to be DIFFICULT.”

Photo: Maryann Lopinto

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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.

Broadway's Future: A Call For Hope

Broadway's Future

Today I attended a seminar at Lincoln Centre named "Broadway's Future; A Call for Hope", which showcased 15 new musicals written by lyrics/composer duos, each under 30. All had been writing musicals since they were children and the quality was as astounding as the subject matter. One toe tapping show focused on mortality in its various forms and was called "One Death at a Time." An ode to narcissisim was called “I Love You, Me.” “Under A Different Sun” imagined the complexities of a black family who looked white. “Be The Dust” was the story of Adam and Eve's early divorce and “The State of Hockey, The Musical” was a three act treatment of the crisis caused by the Minnesota hockey team being sold to New Mexico. This is just a sample. There were ten more, just as good.

Stephin Merritt

Stephin Merritt, www.stereogum.com

Stephin Merritt and the Naked American Songbook

This evening I finally got to be in a radio audience. The Naked American Songbook is a radio show produced by The Jonathan Channel, WNYC and WQXR and it is broadcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There were cards saying "applaud" and "laugh" and "silence" and a man in a red hat warmed us up before the guest came on. He was Stephin Merritt and he created some interest because he did not say very much, which made a radio show a little complicated. But he did say that for many years he spent Christmas with Rosemary Clooney. She used to spend Christmas with Ethel Merman in a mid town hotel suite with its own Christmas Tree. When Ethel Merman died Rosemary Clooney took over the suite, and the Christmas Tree, and spent every Christmas there, with Stephin Merrit, until she died in 2002. So that was unexpected.

Jane Glover

An Afternoon with Jane Glover

Jane Glover is the world’s most accomplished conductor of Mozart and has done everything, everywhere. Spending an afternoon with her and 12 students at the Manhattan School of Music is just another of those things people seem to expect in New York. She was very funny, telling the brilliant Shaina Martinez that relearning her breathing would “take three weeks - or eighteen years, one or the other,” warning Christian Thurston to lose his New Zealand accent if he was going to sing Mozart correctly, pointing out to Hayan Kim that her inability to pronounce “crudele” made it “your personal C word,” and transforming the finale trio of Le Nozze di Figaro after convincing each singer, one by one, that it was all about domestic violence. After four hours, Jane Glover went off to rehearse the MSM Chamber Sinfonia and I went to Vine Sushi [alas, since closed] across the street and had the red curry.
  
Jane Glover talks about conducting Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro:

I Puritani

Ken Howard, Metropolitan Opera

I Puritani at the Metropolitan Opera

The rotten New York Times review of I Puritani at the Metropolitan opera meant the house was pretty empty last night but the audience could still interrupt the performance with enthusiasm as tradition demands. Reviewers always say that this opera is a marsh of muddy music rescued by its principals. What rot. It is like “Don Carlo” poured through a hair sieve and left to set, so enchanting are its four hours of choruses interspersed with terrific arias that only the world’s best singers can approach. Last night’s singers were not only musically enchanting but also gorgeous to look at while the masses of Puritani, in their poke bonnets and aprons, sang perfectly and gave good, Puritan stare. Being there was like spending Eternity in the Rijksmuseum surrounded by Vermeer portraits, with divine music. That’s my idea of heaven but it seems to be the NYT’s idea of hell.

Juilliard Faculty Recital

Henry Grossman

Juilliard School Faculty Recital at Paul Hall

 

Catherine Cho (violin), Hsin-Yun Huang (viola), Natasha Brofsky (cello) and Robert McDonald (piano) hardly ever appear together, not because they are too busy on the concert circuit, but because they are too busy teaching or in the recording studio and rarely perform in public at all. So their virtuosic perfectionism last night at the Juilliard School with incredibly difficult pieces by Haydn, Stucky and Brahms seemed to amaze the audience as much as it quite evidently delighted their students. I went home wondering if maybe the best performers in the world are not those we always see on the stage but those lurking in the college halls and studio rehearsal rooms.

Pedro Almodova

Julietta, a film by Almodovar, at Lincoln Cinema Plaza

 

© Gtresonline, www.revistavanityfair.es

This film’s a joke, right? It’s The Iliad done as an Iberian melodrama like those on TV at 3 am in  Mexico City. A mother gives her daughter freedom, so she ignores her. She forgets to tell her that her father has died while she was at summer camp. The daughter moves to a huge apartment in Madrid (aged 11). Then she goes into a three month mountain retreat (aged 15). After twenty years the mother notices the daughter is missing and throws a fit. “She was lost to anti-depressants for 20 years,” murmurs a woman in a crowd. “I drank too much for a decade,” writes the mother in her diary. Rossy de Palma appears (as the Charybdis). The mother drives backwards into an unknown past which probably explains everything. Credits roll. Almodovar slaps me across the face with a wet dish rag. But he didn’t. It’s a joke. Isn’t it? 

Watch the trailer: 

James Kim and Jinhee Park

Juilliard's 188th Sonatenabend at Paul Hall

 

Last night it was impossible not to attend the Juilliard’s 188th Sonatenabend. After Poulenc’s sonata for clarinet and piano, a vaudeville of cello sonatas commenced, with one immaculate performance following another: Beethoven’s cello variations on Mozart, Prokofiev’s sonata in C major and Schuman’s crazy “Pieces in Folk Style.” The unexpected finale was the Chopin Polonaise Brillante for cello and piano which was played by the prodigiously talented young cellist James Jeonghwan Kim and the equally brilliant pianist Jinhee Park. As usual with those two, their performance was followed by a stunned silence before the audience went wild, screaming, stamping, whistling and howling. The performers themselves seemed quite pleased to have driven the crowd mad, so we all went home happy.

Watch James Jeonghwan Kim play Rostropovich's Humoresque Op. 5, with Ji Won Ahn (piano):

Mark Rothko

www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/12835/dark-palett

Dark Palette, Mark Rothko at Pace Gallery

 

I have often wondered what it would be like to be surrounded by Rothkos. In theory, I could have had the experience at the Four Seasons Restaurant and now it is too late, Pace Gallery's exhibition of Rothko’s Dark Palette works gave me all that and more. What it is like is, like walking into a Lenticular world, in permanent motion, where everything is not as it seems. Any gesture, mental or physical, towards or away from an object produces a shift in reality, so you end up standing still and staring because that is all you can do without falling over. Eventually hypnosis takes control and you succumb to Rothko’s determination to take you into the mind’s eye, and thus to the troubled soul and it is anyone’s guess as to how to emerge from this state.