The Park Avenue Armory has become an increasingly alluring venue for performances in the past few years, as the location for events such as Lincoln Center Festival’s Die Soldaten, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Ephémères, and now Brennan Gerard/Ryan Kelly’s Armory Show, co-presented by Moving Theater and the Park Avenue Armory. Performed last weekend, the company of dancers and actors, plus the musicians of ICE, inhabited the ornate side halls, capacious even though minute compared to the main Armory space, and bedecked with wrought-iron candelabras and sconces. The audience sat on risers watching the action performed in between two halls; we later followed the players into another room with a small Juliet balcony. Live, close circuit video was projected onto two screens overhead, so we were able to watch live the dancers as they gamboled in the hallways of the complex.
The dance segments shifted in vocabulary enough to defy categorization. read more
Today’s blog is the first installment of my 2010 resolution to cover only New York performances for $20 or less per ticket. Happily, this SundayArts column coincides with the opening of one of the most important parts of the revamped Lincoln Center: a discount-ticket booth, located in the same spot on Columbus Avenue/Broadway/63rd Street where a variety of other open public spaces previously failed miserably.
The ticket booth at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (as the space is officially known) opened on January 7 at noon, and offers same-day discounted tickets to live performances at Lincoln Center, much like TKTS does for theater tickets. To celebrate its opening, there’s a “$20 for 20 Days” deal going on from January 7 to 26. After the promotional period is over, the space will sell day-of tickets, as available, at a 25 percent or 50 percent discount to all Lincoln Center resident organizations. read more
I know, I know, the headline of this column sounds a bit like the spam clogging your e-mail inbox. Believe me, it is not. It’s my new year’s arts resolution for 2010.
The problem I am tackling: the custom of reviewing live performances, which seems especially out of balance during the extended economic downturn. Simply put, critics and arts writers experience live performances from a different vantage point than the general public—even while trying to maintain an objective stance, it is impossible not to be affected by the mathematics governing the intersection of how much you spent on a ticket and how good the performance was from where you sat. (Specifics on this below the jump.) So I’ve decided, as a new year’s resolution, to write at SundayArts exclusively about performances from the $20-or-less vantage point. read more
Like everything else during the Christmas season, many New York’s theaters also become a winter wonderland. A variety of holiday shows are currently running for both your naughty and nice sides this season.
The oldest, and most famous Christmas show is of course, The Nutcracker, seen every December at the New York City Ballet. The George Balanchine’s production turns 55-years old this Christmas season. Midway through its sixth decade, it remains a delight. Sure, it’s old fashioned and quaint—the mice look like stuffed bean bags, the Land of Sweets seems to be a pre-Technicolor, pre-saccharine candy store, and the only special effects employed are a giant, rising Tannenbaum and dazzling ballet technique—but if City Ballet’s Nutcracker (through Jan 3rd at Lincoln Center) is slow at parts, it’s relaxed pace draws us into its old world charms. By then end, the lack of bling allows us to focus on the dancing, which during its best moments is more dizzying than the flurry of fake snow at the end of Act I.
For those who don’t have the time or patience for a full Nutcracker, the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular has a mini-Nutcracker—complete with Toy Soldiers and Ballet Dancing Bears. read more
Every December I am struck by the overwhelming list of concertgoing options in the city, as seemingly every choral ensemble and orchestra comes out of the woodwork with offerings ranging from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah to John Adams’s El Niño and Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Sting just finished his two winter-themed concerts up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—which I covered in a recent SundayArts blog—groups like the Western Wind are here performing a mix of songs and carols relating to Christmas, Hannukah, and the winter season; and all kinds of cool seasonal stuff can be found up at the Cloisters. If it’s the purity of the sound of boys’ and men’s voices, you can’t do much better than the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, where seasonal offerings include works by Vaughan Williams, Pearsall, Richard Rodney Bennett, David Willcocks, and Mathias. And you can’t forget about The Bobs, the California-based a cappella group, none of whose names are Bob, who are in town performing their offbeat Christmas show at the Iridium on December 15. I like having all the options, even if I can’t make it to even a tenth of these concerts. read more
I’ve been obsessively listening to “The Hounds of Winter,” one of the tracks on If on a Winter’s Night, Sting’s latest CD, a winter-themed album. The song isn’t new—it first came out more than a decade ago on Sting’s Mercury Falling—but it’s a superb new arrangement that pulls several excellent instrumentalists into the mix, including people like classical cellist Vincent Ségal and jazz/world percussionist Cyro Baptista. On that track there’s also Kathryn Tickell, a traditional violinist from Sting’s hometown of Newcastle, England, whose wonderfully haunting repeating line of fourths and octaves against Julian Sutton’s moaning Melodeon sounds like the “lonesome, lonesome sound” of the hounds of the song’s lyrics. The album has a whole range of pieces that relate somehow to winter, including an arrangement of Schubert’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (from Winterreise), English carols like “Balulalow,” and an arrangement of a Bach melody from one of the cello suites, set to new words by Sting.
Serial obsessions are a hallmark of Sting’s career. Classical musicians and audiences took notice when Songs from the Labyrinth came out in 2006—here, Sting sang Dowland songs with lutenist Edin Karamazov. (Sting also took up the lute-playing for the project.) He’s nothing if not prolific, and lately he’s dipped into several projects, the first being a film whose subject is Robert and Clara Schumann, and the second being the Winter’s Night album. Just before his December appearances in New York in connection with both those projects, and the premiere of Great Performances’ Sting: A Winter’s Night broadcast premiere on Thanksgiving evening, he spoke to SundayArts blogger Jennifer Melick.
I’m curious to know about some of the musical choices you have made—there was Dowland several years back, who’s sometimes referred to as the melancholy madrigalist, and then Robert Schumann, who struggled with his own difficulties, his mental illness. And now, with “If on a Winter’s Night” you’ve got this new album with a winter theme—the coldest, darkest season. Does melancholy in general interest you? How did you put together this latest album? read more
Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice.
If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened to it on the recent recording, you may agree with the judges who awarded the 35-minute work the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It masterfully blends the simple tragedy of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl going door-to-door, barefoot, selling matches on the coldest night of the year, with a Bach-style passion structure of alternating narrated story passages and vocal commentary.
Lang has now rescored the work for chorus, and that is the version that about 100 of us heard last night, at WNYC’s Greene Space down on Varick Street, with the New York Virtuoso Singers led by Harold Rosenbaum. read more
I think it’s safe to say that George Steel and Peter Martins are probably two of the happiest men in New York today.
Last Thursday morning, Steel and Martins—the general director of New York City Opera and Ballet Master in Chief of the New York City Ballet—invited members of the press to a preview of the newly renovated David H. Koch Theater (a.k.a. the New York State Theater), which is finally set to re-open on November 5 with American Voices, a program of American music. The gala reopening will honor Koch, who gave a $100 million lead gift to the joint capital campaign of the two companies, which both perform at the theater. Also at this morning’s preview was New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin—the city of New York also donated $26.9 million toward the rebuilding project. Steel joked that the opening-night gala will be an opportunity to hear “ballet, opera-theater, and Rufus Wainwright—all at one low price.” Martins quipped that the theater’s 40-foot legroom space would be maintained, and the theater’s changes meant that Tchaikovsky could now be heard “as he was meant to be heard.” After the jump, you can see some pictures of the newly renovated space. read more
This morning I received a personal note from clarinetist José Franch-Ballester to let me know about his October 13 recital at Poisson Rouge with pianist/composer Adam Neiman. I first met José during the summer of 2008; you can read the text of our conversation for SundayArts here.
The Poisson Rouge concert mixes new and old music, but it’s of particular interest to me because it will feature two movements from Cookbook, a suite for clarinet and piano by the Brooklyn-based composer Kenji Bunch, who is also a violist. Both Neiman and Bunch are very active in the new-music scene, so if you’re free, this concert is worth checking out.
José, originally from Spain but now based in Philadelphia, sounded jazzed-up about the Poisson Rouge event—which includes works by Brahms, Poulenc, Chopin, Arturo Marquez, Neiman, and Bunch—and he e-chatted with me briefly about the music. read more
As I write this, it’s 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, and I’m listening to WNYC radio host Terrance McKnight count down the last 30 minutes before New York City’s all-classical WQXR becomes part of the WNYC public radio family. The change to a new radio frequency is being celebrated with a live broadcast of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concert, which features Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks,” Webern’s Fuga from Bach’s Musical Offering, the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Concerto with Echoes. In a few minutes I will move my Bose radio pre-sets so that there is a reserved spot at 105.9 instead of 96.3, and here’s hoping the signal makes it over the airwaves to where I live. The is the main worry that traditional radio listeners may have about the change, other than duplication of radio hosts and programs during the hours when both WNYC-FM and WQXR hosted all-classical programs. (You can view a WQXR program schedule at the WNYC website and a bunch of other FAQs about the switch can be found at here.)
Terrance McKnight sounds pretty happy and proud of the fact that an all-classical station has been preserved in any form in the city of New York. read more
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