When Gustavo Dudamel’s in town, you go. So on Saturday night, I caught the opening concert of the Israel Philharmonic’s U.S. tour with Dudamel at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, just prior to his two Carnegie Hall concerts on November 16 and 17.
I asked my 14-year-old daughter to come along, and I didn’t even have to twist her arm. Here’s the rare A-league conductor who’s not even twice her age, and he jumps around on the podium pretty much like kids her age. On a more serious level, my daughter also gets that Dudamel is considered in the same league artistically as Leonard Bernstein, and that this makes his concerts potentially historic. She has friends who are envious she got to go, friends who know that this “Dude” isn’t the same as the “Later, dude” dude. read more
“If Michael Barrett and I were to create our own musical Mount Rushmore, we would have to start with sixty-foot sculptures of Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom,” writes Steven Blier in his program note to A Bernstein/Bolcom Celebration, a New York Festival of Song program that takes place this week on Tuesday and Thursday at Merkin Concert Hall.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Bernstein—whose 90th birthday would have been this October—is being feted in performances all across New York this fall. On Wednesday, Carnegie Hall welcomes the San Francisco Symphony in a gala all-Bernstein concert, to be telecast on PBS’s Great Performances on October 29. Meanwhile, NYFOS—as New York Festival Song is commonly known—is having a double birthday celebration by devoting a program to Bernstein and composer William Bolcom, who turned 70 in May. Though Blier contrasts Bernstein’s “extravagant, sweaty theatrics” with Bolcom’s “essence of cool,” both have been enormously important to Blier’s idea of what a song program should be.
Blier, NYFOS’s artistic director, has been creating inventive programs for more than 20 years now, together with associate artistic director Michael Barrett. The first program, on October 10, 1988 at the Greenwich House Music School, was entitled “Lyrics by Shakespeare” and featured soprano Brenda Harris, bass-baritone Braden Harris, narrator Blythe Danner, with Blier on piano; one of the rarities that night was Kabalevsky’s Shakespeare Sonnets sung in Russian. (Bernstein’s and Bolcom’s music appeared on the second-ever program, on October 23, 1988, along with music of Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Virgil Thomson, and John Musto.)
I chatted with Blier this weekend about Bernstein and Bolcom—and NYFOS, a labor of love he terms his “Magnificent Obsession.”
SundayArts: The phrase that often comes up when describing New York Festival of Song is from a New Yorker review saying it “reinvented the song recital.” Twenty years ago, what was wrong with the song recital? Did it need reinventing? read more
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