There’s a lot of talk about public art these days. The term now seems to commonly refer to free projects that take over part of a city—and sometimes a large part, if you remember the CowParade that started in Chicago in 1999, invaded New York’s sidewalks in 2000, and has since traveled to cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Manchester, Stockholm, Istanbul and, er, West Hartford. Many other projects aim for higher artistic worth (sorry to drag such elitist concepts in this discussion): For several years, the Creative Time organization set up wildly diverse music and art shows in the Brooklyn Bridge’s Anchorage, until post-9/11 security measures closed off the space; New Yorkers also remember Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates (2005) in Central Park.
In New York, the Public Art Fund is responsible for this summer’s headline-grabbing installation, Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls, in which four gigantic man-made waterfalls will dot the East River; meanwhile, the aforementioned Creative Time is bringing a project helmed by David Byrne, Playing the Building, in which visitors will be able to “play” the Battery Maritime Building via a jerry rigged organ.
But the bottom line for most such endeavors is just that: the displays may be free, but public art now means big revenues for the participating cities (sorry to drag such crass concepts in this discussion). Canny mayors are finally catching up to the fact that healthy cultural scenes are often linked to healthy economic returns. (The fact that this blog is hosted by a publicly funded entity is not coincidental either; after all, you could argue that aspects of PBS are a form of public art.) 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
My introduction to Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Sunday, June 8, on Thirteen) came from watching Rabbit of Seville, a 1950 Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, when I was a kid. Musical director Carl Stalling slightly tweaked Rossini’s overture to back up Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd’s frantic chases, and the juxtaposition couldn’t have felt more natural. It’s as if Rossini had scored the cartoon, instead of the cartoon having been set to preexisting music. Seven years later, Jones went back to the trough with What’s Opera, Doc?, in which he and arranger Milt Franklyn deconstructed the entire Wagner canon in under seven minutes. It’s hard to underestimate the influence this pair of cartoons had on at least a couple of generations of budding music lovers, as Richard Freedman wrote in an article for Andante. But this casual referencing of “high art” in a so-called low medium feels alien now, when film, TV and YouTube tend to refer other pop-cultural artifacts. Judging by its lack of pop spoofing, high art doesn’t exist anymore in America. read more
Warning, this post is on the long side, but I promise it’ll be fun to anybody with a passing interest in the live arts. And if you follow opera, it’ll be doubleplusgood, with copious hissing and dissing, but also words that should bring hope to those who yearn for a democratic and provocative culture.
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an interview with Gérard Mortier (also previously profiled on here on SundayArts), the Belgian-born incoming manager of City Opera—the house entwined in a long-running sibling rivalry with the richer, glitzier Met, sitting across the Lincoln Center plaza. As interesting as the Times’ piece was, it either didn’t ask the right questions or Mortier opted for diplomacy. 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
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
There are quite a few good reasons to see the new revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. One is Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot, a transfuge from the opera world who emits a veritable glow of old-fashioned virility as plantation owner Emile de Becque. Another is hearing Richard Rodgers’s score and Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations delivered by a 30-piece orchestra. With producers saving costs by scrimping on musicians nowadays, this size has become very rare in contemporary theater, and so we’ve progressively forgotten how spectacularly lush American musicals can sound.
In the current production of South Pacific, the players are in a pit under the movable stage; during the overture, said stage retracts so the audience can see them. It’s an exhilarating moment, confirmed by the orchestra taking a bow at the end of the overture. read more
One of my favorite places in New York is the New Victory Theater, located on West 42nd Street, smack in the middle of what has to be the gaudiest block in the entire city. I’m glad to see it included in this Sunday’s show, because the New Vic is one of the few institutions to actually regularly fulfill its mission statement’s goals: “We seek out sophisticated, thought-provoking, professional productions that are as artistically rich as they are stimulating and entertaining.” And yet the New Vic doesn’t get enough recognition—for you see, it also is “New York’s first and only theater for kids and families.” But don’t let that fool you: It’s introduced more daring shows that many institutions presenting supposedly adult fare. read more
A little more than a month after the riveting new animated short film Peter and the Wolf won an Academy Award® in the best animated short category, it airs on PBS during a month that Hugh Welchman, one the film’s producers, has called a “victory parade.”
Actually, the dates on Great Performances were booked before the film received the award. But as part of the heady follow-up from receiving the Oscar®, Welchman and his Oscar® statue have been in great demand, and are making the rounds—as well as occasionally setting off security alarms at the airport.
What’s it like to be the subject of this sudden notoriety? I spoke to Welchman on Monday from his London studio, Breakthru Films, where he described his whirlwind tour during the last month. He also talked about how he and Philharmonia Orchestra conductor Mark Stephenson came up with the idea for a modern interpretation of this Prokofiev piece that has served as an introduction to the orchestra for so many children; how he thinks videocassettes changed children’s listening habits; how director Suzie Templeton got arrested by the F.S.B. (the renamed K.G.B.) in Russia while researching the film; and upcoming plans for a Chopin film.
Jennifer Melick: So what has it been like for you since winning the Oscar® for Peter and the Wolf on February 24?
Hugh Welchman: It’s been completely crazy—lots of things to do. I had 3,000 e-mails to start with [laughs]. I had to go through all of those. Then obviously a lot of people connected with the project suddenly got in touch with me, and I had to do things like go over to Poland and go meet the minister of culture, because we made the film in Poland, and so had to do a kind of victory tour. Then off to Russia. Yeah, it’s been pretty crazy. read more
One of the most exciting things about the arts is experimentation—and that includes the occasional brave failure. I realize this is America, where some consider failure to be akin to some kind of moral deficiency, but bear with me for a second and please read on! You see, experimentation means boldly going where blah blah blah. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t, but what’s interesting about the arts—and, come to think of it, about life—is seeing someone try to make sense of the unknown. Not to mention that something imperfect can leave more of a mark than a glossy, fully-rounded production. It’s the problem that may stay with you, waiting to be solved. read more
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