It’s hard to find a more fitting act to open Lincoln Center’s annual Midnight Summer Swing series than Nellie McKay. Now, Lincoln Center isn’t new territory for McKay, who appeared in that institution’s Great American Songbook in March 2005, but the interesting development this time around is that she’ll be fronting a band called the Aristocrats, featuring musicians pulled from the Swingin’ Hot Shots. It may look like an idiosyncratic move for a singer-songwriter who usually backs herself on the piano live, but then McKay specializes in odd moves. And even when they don’t quite pan out, the results are never boring. Let’s not shy away from hyperbole here: McKay is possibly the most interesting artist to emerge out of New York in the past decade. read more
Well, death is easy in the arts. And it sure gives you a built-in advantage when it comes to critical consideration. Comedy, on the other hand, is not only hard to do, it’s hard to get cred for.
Let’s pretend, for instance, that the Oscars have any kind of relevance in terms of actual quality and wonder: When was the last time they rewarded a comedic role? I’d argue that Steve Carell is as good if not better in The 40-Year Old Virgin as Daniel Day-Lewis is in There Will Be Blood, but one actor has a statuette and the other doesn’t. (Actually DDD has two, having already scored with an eminently predetermined Oscarable part in My Left Foot.) And Hilary Swank, a two-time winner, could never dream of offering a performance as nuanced and unpredictable as Molly Shannon’s in last year’s tragically underrated Year of the Dog.
This train of thought was prompted by the prospect of this weekend’s broadcast: Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, a funny opera staged in a funny manner by Laurent Pelly, with funny performances by an ultra-game cast. Of course, many in New York found the production too broad, too over the top. read more
It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before America’s decorous lid got blown off with rock ‘n’ roll, be-ins, the Vietnam War, and all the rest. Zimmermann’s opera tried to blow the lid off of opera; his goal was “opera as total opera theater! In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combined to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. In my Soldaten, I have attempted to take decisive steps in this direction.”
Die Soldaten was first performed in 1965 in Cologne, Germany, in a scaled-down production because it was considered “unperformable” the way Zimmermann had … read more
The talk in art circles may be about China these days, but the northern European scene isn’t doing too bad for itself either. Just this summer in New York, there’s “From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art” at Scandinavia House, “Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland” at P.S.1, and of course Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson is staging the huge New York City Waterfalls. Sweden and Norway don’t seem to be as strongly represented in visual arts, at least here, at least right this minute, but of course they boast remarkably inventive avant, jazz and pop music scenes that constantly send up a stream of high-quality sounds our way. If you bring up the relatively low population of Scandinavian countries (including, for the purpose of this discussion, Finland and Iceland), you realize that they wield a completely disproportionate influence in artistic matters. read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. read more
In his new autobiography, Put on a Happy Face, composer Charles Strouse at one point writes, “If you speak of musical failures, to most people, it’s as boring as hearing about ‘the four hours I spent waiting for a plane at the Buffalo airport.’”
Most people—except for musical-theater fans, that is! America is said to be obsessed with success, but Broadway has a singularly obsessive relationship with failure; no wonder one of the most beloved books about theater, Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie, is subtitled “Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.” It’s not surprising, then, that the most interesting parts of Strouse’s books concern his misfires. read more
Pity the Rodolfo and Mimì pouring out their hearts this July in La Scala’s La Bohème. It’s possible that more people will be craning their necks to see 27-year-old Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel in the pit, than either the Mimì (Italian soprano Carmela Remigio) or Rodolfo (American tenor James Valenti, who sang a televised Pinkerton this season at New York City Opera). Neither Valenti nor Remigio is a big name like Angela Gheorghiu, the Met’s Mimì this season, or Jonas Kaufmann, who sang Rodolfo in a Bohème conducted by Dudamel in February. But at least Remigio has lived through Dudamania before: she sang Donna Anna in a 2006 Don Giovanni he led in Milan.
Yes, Dudamania is in full swing. In Los Angeles, where Dudamel begins as the L.A. Philharmonic’s new music director in 2009-10, the orchestra welcomed its curly-haired superstar this spring with a lunch catered by none other than Pink’s hot dog stand, creating for the occasion a special “Dude dog”—guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapenos, tortilla chips. (Dudamel is said to be fond of hot dogs.) read more
Sam Buntrock’s staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George is nominated for several Tonys and has received a lot of praise, especially for its ingenious use of animated projections. The actors interact with these moving images (a small dog is particularly popular) and the device is not only creative, but it doesn’t feel like an artificial graft—it fits the theme of the show.
The first observation is that the two most inventive musical revivals of the past few years on Broadway (George and John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd) have come from England, which says something about the state of American directing. The second is how startled some critics seemed to be by Buntrock’s use of technology to make the painting so integral to the show come to life; it’s as if they had never seen that type of stuff before. For some reason effects are fine in movies but to many theater fans, technology still feels like a new gimmick. read more
If you doubt the importance of YouTube in how music gets heard and performed these days, consider a recent case: the Cistercian Abbey Stift Heiligenkreuz, in Austria.
This is a twelfth-century church where about 80 monks sing Gregorian chant every day; the Gothic/Romanesque/baroque church is a popular attraction that draws about 170,000 tourists a year, according to its website.
So, the story goes, this past February, the church’s press spokesman, Karl Wallner, received an e-mail with the subject line “Quick, quick Karl.” It came from a friend in London telling him that the Universal record label was conducting a competition for singers of Gregorian chant but that the deadline was the next day. Father Wallner emailed Universal a link to the Abbey website’s sound clips, then uploaded a video to YouTube, which can be viewed at the link here or after the jump (147,431 views and counting). The result is that seventeen monks from the monastery were signed by Universal to record an album, released in May, called Chant: Music For Paradise. On the U.K. pop charts, it’s been as high as number 9 and is outselling Amy Winehouse. read more
There’s a lot of talk about public art these days. The term now seems to commonly refer to free projects that take over part of a city—and sometimes a large part, if you remember the CowParade that started in Chicago in 1999, invaded New York’s sidewalks in 2000, and has since traveled to cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Manchester, Stockholm, Istanbul and, er, West Hartford. Many other projects aim for higher artistic worth (sorry to drag such elitist concepts in this discussion): For several years, the Creative Time organization set up wildly diverse music and art shows in the Brooklyn Bridge’s Anchorage, until post-9/11 security measures closed off the space; New Yorkers also remember Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) in Central Park.
In New York, the Public Art Fund is responsible for this summer’s headline-grabbing installation, Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls, in which four gigantic man-made waterfalls will dot the East River; meanwhile, the aforementioned Creative Time is bringing a project helmed by David Byrne, Playing the Building, in which visitors will be able to “play” the Battery Maritime Building via a jerry rigged organ.
But the bottom line for most such endeavors is just that: the displays may be free, but public art now means big revenues for the participating cities (sorry to drag such crass concepts in this discussion). Canny mayors are finally catching up to the fact that healthy cultural scenes are often linked to healthy economic returns. (The fact that this blog is hosted by a publicly funded entity is not coincidental either; after all, you could argue that aspects of PBS are a form of public art.) read more
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