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
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
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
In the singing biz, they talk about money notes—the notes a singer hits that make your spine tingle, the ones that often get a singer hired in the first place. Are the first “money notes” you think of high notes? They’re pretty hard to ignore—this season at the Met, Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez have been wowing audiences with their high-note pyrotechnics. For me, the first money notes I think of are probably from “Sempre libera” (soprano high E-flat) and “Nessun dorma” (tenor high B).
But let’s talk for a moment about rich, juicy, resonant low notes—these are the money notes for basses and contraltos (and the occasional mezzo or baritone). read more
Kander & Ebb may have set Cabaret in Weimar Berlin, but quoting from the show’s title song could not be more appropriate as we bid farewell to the long-running New York eatery Florent. Now, why should we mention the closing of a restaurant in this arts-focused blog? First, Florent always was a haven for creative nightowls; the chi-chi uptown crowd may have had Elaine’s and the likes, but the downtown people would get their steak-frites in a much more egalitarian setting. In addition, the departure of this beloved 24/7 institution, forced out by rising rents, is only the tip of the iceberg that is the gentrification of New York—or rather, it’s the latest ship to slam into that iceberg. And that of course is something with repercussions on how the city and its cultural scene interact. read more
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
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
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
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