Reality check: The Tony Awards aren’t about theater in New York—they are about a certain kind of theater in New York, namely the expensive, mainstream one found on Broadway. Which is fine, but let’s not forget that there’s a lot more to the stage than the Great White Way. For instance, you’d have no way of knowing it by looking at the list of nominees, but one of the most inventive musicals of the season is The Adding Machine, and it is still playing—Off Broadway.
That said, I might as well admit that the Tonys sure are fun! In fact if you follow Broadway, the level of excitment is unbearable—it’s like the World Series, a presidential election and the grand finale of Project Runway rolled into one. read more
On May 13, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the four recipients of its first-ever NEA Opera Honors: soprano Leontyne Price; composer Carlisle Floyd; opera administrator Richard Gaddes; and maestro James Levine. The four will receive the awards and be celebrated in Washington, D.C., on October 31 at a special awards ceremony and concert, with performances by Washington National Opera and members of that company’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program. The recipient names revealed no shockers—Price, Floyd, Gaddes, and Levine have reached the very top of their professions and have each had a huge impact on opera in this country.
I sat in at the May 13 press conference announcing the awards at Lincoln Center’s New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and I am as thrilled as any opera-lover about these awards (more on which in a moment), but … can we talk? read more
Yes, tenor Juan Diego Flórez hit his high Cs again at yesterday’s performance of La Fille du Régiment, all 18 of them—because as he did at the premiere back in April, he immediately encored his aria. This was clearly anticipated by the crowd since Flórez had done it at the premiere, but wouldn’t it have been better to just go on with the show and let us savor with the uniqueness of the moment? Besides, isn’t this kind of behavior predictable, which isn’t meant to be a good thing in the live arts? read more
Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work The Little Match Girl Passion (click here to hear the work on Carnegie Hall’s website), a heartbreakingly humble “opera” scored for just four voices and percussion. Lang sat down for an chat about the inception of the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired piece shortly after the Pulitzer announcement.
Download the interview as a podcast here, or listen to it as streaming audio after the jump. read more
What’s the opposite of a golden age? Whatever it’s called, it’s the age we’re living in when it comes to soundtracks—particularly from Hollywood movies. Trying to find a score that makes for decent home listening shorn of its accompanying images is a daunting task these days. Roughly speaking, your choices are either collections of pop songs (more or less inspired, cf. Juno) or formulaic scores that (1) tend to repeat a couple of themes ad nauseam and (2) are utterly predictable in their arrangements and melodic approaches. An ongoing film series at the Museum of Modern Art, “Jazz Score,” not only puts this dire situation in perspective, but shows us the birth of a specifically American approach to scoring. read more
The word “ethereal” is perhaps the adjective that comes to mind quickest when describing the voice of Maude Maggart, the 32-year-old who is a fast-rising singer of the Great American Songbook. But however you choose to characterize it, it’s the kind of voice that has critics from the New York Times to Time Out New York struggling to convey its particular beauty in words. From April 1 through May, she performs her latest cabaret show, “Speaking of Dreams,” in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.
Maggart’s renditions of 1920s-era songs like “Love for Sale” or “Love Me or Leave Me” uncannily evoke an earlier time, with their melancholy, yearning high notes, laced with a wispy, fast vibrato that makes her voice recognizable in an instant. She takes many standards at slower tempos—even “Happy Days Are Here Again,” recorded on her 2005 CD Look for the Silver Lining, often taken at march-like clip, is taken leisurely, as if from the wistful perspective of someone already looking back on happy days. Posted after the jump, you can hear her singing “Love Me or Leave Me” with John Boswell on piano from Look For The Silver Lining.
Maggart is the granddaughter of Millicent Greene, who performed in George White’s “Scandals” in the 1920s, and she is the daughter of musical theater performers Brandon Maggart and Diane McAfee. Her little sister is the singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Just before one of her shows at the Oak Room, I spoke with Maggart about why she loves cabaret, her career, and her family.
On how she got started as a cabaret singer: I first heard Andrea Marcovicci when I was 16. My dad took me to the Gardenia [in California]. My life changed. read more
How many opera-lovers have already heard the nine high Cs Juan Diego Flórez sang recently in “Ah, mes amis (Pour mon âme)” from La Fille Du Régiment at the Metropolitan Opera? Impossible to say, other than: a lot (most of them via YouTube). And as you’ve likely also heard by now, a week ago on Monday the Met lifted the traditional house ban on encores, Flórez actually sang eighteen high Cs after the second go-round. (At La Scala, they broke the ban for Flórez in the same opera, too.)
Obviously, there’s more to singing opera than high notes. But there’s no denying the thrill of hearing them done so well: the gladiator aspect of opera. After all, here’s a guy singing with complete abandon, seemingly popping out high notes like they’re nothing. Anyone who’s been at the opera at a night with a tenor having a hideously bad night knows those high notes are not easy. read more
Poor Manon Lescaut: She just can’t get a break in Puccini’s opera of the same name. Fine, so she does not-so-clever things like waffling about getting her jewels when she should be rushing out to escape, but does it really warrant deportation to Louisiana with a bunch of harlots for company? And what about that endless walk in some kind of desert? Or the fact that Manon (SPOILER ALERT!) dies at the end. Ah, opera, so kind and yet so cruel to your women… And so inspirational?
This week’s broadcast embodies my idea of a perfect weekend: You can both see Manon Lescaut and hear about the exciting exhibition “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” (which you can visit until May 12 if you happen to live in New York City). Manon Lescaut and “WACK!” balance each other perfectly, the peanut-butter-and-jelly combo of cultural snacks. read more
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
It’s spring in New York, and Philip Glass is bursting out all over.
The biggest event is his Satyagraha, which is in the middle of its first-ever run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Naxos has just released a four-CD boxed set of previously recorded works called Of Beauty and Light: The Music of Philip Glass, which contains his second, third, and fourth symphonies, plus The Light, Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten, Violin Concerto, and Company, for string orchestra. At the IFC Center, they’re showing Scott Hicks’s 2007 film documentary of the composer, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Glass even managed to get in last week’s New York magazine after he stated at an April 9 Brooklyn Academy of Music gala that he thinks the United States should pull out of the Beijing Olympics because of China’s record on human rights.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Glass is how his place in the classical-music universe has changed over time. read more
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