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
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
So here’s a press release that jumped out at me recently about a work to be performed on June 7 by “8 synchronized Yamaha Disklavier player pianos plus an automated ensemble of 2 xylophones, 4 bass drums, tamtam, siren, 7 bells and 3 airplane propellers.”
Think you know what it is? If you’re thinking this is a composition perhaps written last week or earlier this year, you’re in the wrong century entirely. It’s Ballet Mécanique, George Antheil’s most famous work, a film-with-music written in 1924. For this weekend’s performance at the 3LD Art & Technology Center on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, an automated orchestra created by the Brooklyn-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) will perform the score, to a screening of the restored Fernand Léger film. Somewhere along the way—perhaps when a strip of leather from one of the airplane propellers reportedly flew into the audience at the 1926 performance in Paris—Antheil became known as the “bad boy of music,” which is how he is invariably described and is the title of his famous 1945 autobiography. read more
Television commercials are probably as good an indicator of a society’s cultural health as any. And anyone looking for proof of the cachet that opera once maintained in American life would do well to consider these commercials, which Rice Krispies ran in the 1960s. To a certain generation of opera goers, these hilarious vignettes probably imparted a degree of prestige and brand loyalty that companies — Texaco, for one particularly painful example — used to consider incomparably positive P.R.
I’d never seen these clips until someone passed them along as YouTube fodder a few weeks ago; but I’ve come to love the bizarre combination of high and low culture that seems plainly an anachronism compared to the current world of advertising. 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
For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
During the past year, one of the upbeat stories in the classical-music business has been the proliferation of opera in movie theaters.
The Metropolitan Opera, under its new general manager, Peter Gelb, jump-started this trend last season with its high-definition simulcasts, which have proved so successful that now other opera houses—including Royal Opera, Covent Garden; La Scala; San Francisco Opera—are jumping on the bandwagon.
Hearts in operaworld are aflutter. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the wonder and beauty of opera, by the simple virtue of its increased accessibility—and the $22 ticket price, far lower than a seat in most opera theaters. The reality, as reported in a Sunday 3/23 front-page article in The New York Times is a bit different. Cinema chains, looking for ways to stay profitable, have discovered that opera is a reliable modest source of income because opera-lovers will still pay money to go to the opera, even when theaters’ main source of revenue from moviegoers is dipping. If I had to guess, I’d say most of the people going to the cinema to hear opera not newcomers to our art form: they are the same people you see at the Metropolitan Opera or Lyric Opera of Chicago or San Francisco Opera. read more
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