I just got back from Steinway Hall, down the street from Carnegie Hall, where the pianist Lang Lang made a lunchtime appearance while in town for a free Central Park concert with the New York Philharmonic.
The ever-bouncy Lang Lang arrived in jeans, black-and-white jersey, and trademarked spiky hair about 20 minutes late, straight from a Philharmonic rehearsal. People crammed into the small main rotunda, with its beautiful Italian crystal and Greek marble, built in 1925 by the Warren and Wetmore firm, the same folks who built Grand Central Station. The rotunda holds about 300 people, many of whom were holding cell phones in the air to take Lang Lang’s photo as he entered. There were young students (many of them Asian) accompanied by their parents, plus the usual New Yorkers who show up at these sorts of things, which is to say veteran arts-lovers, office workers on lunch break, and music-industry people.
By the standards of the classical-music world, Lang Lang is a superstar. read more
I’ve touched on the importance of public art in a previous post, and the summer onslaught continues with the New York City Parks’ Dance Out! initiative, a series of site specific dance performances around the city (site specific dance around America will soon be finding it’s way to SundayArts in Great Performance’s Dance in America: Wolf Trap). This one combines two cool things: Free art that reaches people in their (common) backyard and site-specific performance. The parks’ series, copresented with the Joyce Theater, focuses on three dances, which will travel to the boroughs—and not just to flagships like Central Park or Prospect Park, but to less obvious spaces like St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx or Staten Island’s South Beach boardwalk. Of the three, Michael Schumacher’s Dans le jardin (in the garden) seems to make the most use of its environment, so the work should change slightly depending on where it’s performed.
And like every summer, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines series offers free site-specific dance and dance-theater in the financial district. I’m particularly looking forward to Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis in August (Move made his name with someone else’s when he recreated Martha Graham dances in full Martha drag realness). The program is described thus: “Feminine beauty is placed upon a pedestal (literally) in the midst of the male-dominated world of high finance, with stunningly costumed, Butoh-inspired female dancers occupying six different locations.” Yowsa! I’m sure I’ll get back to it next month. read more
The best moment of Darkness and Light, Basil Twist’s new collaboration with Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken for Pilobolus, comes right at the start. A number of people stand or crouch amid scattered machinery, pointedly staring at the audience. It’s long enough for a mental snapshot, but after a scrim lowers, concealing the scene, I rue my lack of photographic memory. Were they wearing caps and goggles, like long distance swimmers? Tights? They were bare-chested, right? And those were projectors, yes?
The piece unfortunately doesn’t go very far after that sly reveal, settling into mostly basic exercises in silhouette puppetry. A shadowy wedge grows into a figure’s waist. Creatures that appear like frothy doodles inhabit a sea blue scrim. A face morphs into a scary biting and licking machine. Nebula-like wisps dance across a starry field. Blobs consume other blobs and grow. The usual. In fact, the piece would be right at home in the repertory of Momix, founded by one of Pilobolus’ founders, Moses Pendleton. (Coincidentally, earlier this year Pendleton created a work for Diana Vishneva’s Beauty in Motion production that employed similar trompe l’oeuil exercises.) read more
Last night, my 11-year-old son and I went to opening night of Damn Yankees at City Center.
We went on a whim, opting to save money by grabbing a pair of $25 seats way up in the balcony. This is not a show that gets performed often nowadays—it’s not considered a brilliant work of music theater—but the Encores series, of which this show was a part, has a good track record, especially after last summer’s breakout success with Gypsy. Plus, there were some star names worth checking out: Sean Hayes (star of Will & Grace), Jane Krakowski (who plays Jenna Maroney on 30 Rock), and Cheyenne Jackson (currently starring in Xanadu).
This morning, I read a couple of reviews, including Charles Isherwood’s in the New York Times, which called it “a little pizzazz deficient.” The bulk of the critics seem to have concluded that Damn Yankees isn’t in the same league as Gypsy—no home run. And it’s probably not; it’s entertainment on the light side, though to my ears the score holds up remarkably well after more than 50 years.
I am often struck by the disconnect between audience response and critical response. read more
In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take note: Franch-Ballester is giving a recital (free!) on July 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The concert is part of the summer-long series of free events in lower Manhattan called the River to River Festival.
There’s absolutely nothing bad-boy about Franch-Ballester (pronounced FrAHnk Bai-yess-TAIR), who judging from my recent conversation with him is completely down to earth and rather endearingly modest, considering his accomplishments and talent. He only mentions in passing that at age 27 he is simultaneously on the roster of three of the most prestigious … read more
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
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