Author Archive
Not Standing Still
Dance Doc Highlights Jacob’s Pillow A documentary filmmaker has two responsibilities. The first is to make an interesting subject even more interesting. The second is to make a good film. Director Ron Honsa hits both marks with Never Stand Still, an intimate look at dance that will galvanize anyone who’s ever moved his body to...
A Heartbreaking Rigoletto
Verdi’s Triumph On Screen In 1832, French authorities shut down Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi S’amuse—a portrait of absolute power gone dissolutely amok, set in the court of Francis I—the day after it opened. Composer Giuseppe Verdi, however, was so taken with the work that he used it as the basis for a libretto. Venetian...
For All Mankind
Pro Musicis shares and evokes Sometimes a concert is more than a concert. Celebrating its 46th season, Pro Musicis (“For Musicians”) presented pianists Andrew Staupe and Alexandria Le at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall April 11 for an evening of Mendelssohn, Debussy and Mussorgsky, as well as a trio of world premieres by Karl Blench,...
Tarab! Allah! Sonia!
Sonia M’Barek’s All-Worlds Music For 500 years, Jews, Muslims and Christians created an immensely rich multicultural society in Andalusia, bursting with fresh ideas in math, science and the arts. This cultural fusion is epitomized in the music of the time, a unique form blending court music from Baghdad, medieval chant, synagogue hymns and local Iberian...
In Leslie’s Light
R&H’s ‘Pipe Dream’ Revived The stated aim of City Center’s Encores! series is to present rarely heard works from America’s most important composers and lyricists, begging the cynical question: If these composers are so famous, why are these works rarely heard—could it be they’re just lousy? After all, every composer has off moments, and who...
Tarab! Allah!, Sonia!
M’Barek’s All-Worlds Music For five hundred years, Jews, Muslims, and Christians created an immensely rich, multicultural society in Andalusia, bursting with fresh ideas in math, science, and the arts. This cultural fusion is epitomized in the music of the time, a unique form blending court music from Baghdad, medieval chant, synagogue hymns, and local Iberian...
Highbrow Hybrid
Making La Boheme More More Vivid Emerging Pictures’ Opera in Cinema series might well have set a new bar for cinematic transmission of live opera with their March 13 rebroadcast of Puccini’s La Bohème, performed and recorded on March 7 at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, with Fiorenza Cedolins as Mimi, Ramon Vargas as Rodolfo,...
Transcending the Self
Manuela Carrasco’s Flamenco Wows This year’s City Center flamenco festival (March 1-4) celebrated four of the genre’s leading ladies—Manuela Carrasco, Carmen Cortés, Rafaela Carrasco, and Olga Pericet. Each had her own show, save Cortés, who performed two unmemorable spots at the gala. This opening event was so lackluster that it immediately brought the film Billy...
Musical Images: North/South Consonance Finds Modernity
What Film Forum is to cinema, North/South Consonance is to modern classical music—an independent nonprofit bringing New York City deserving works overlooked by big-ticket distributors and mainstream media. North/South continued its 32 season of free concerts Feb. 19 with “Midwinter Sounds,” music for chamber orchestra by composers from Cuba, Italy, and the U.S., at Christ...
Merrily Miranda: Weak Sondheim Doesn’t Deserve Encore
The cost of mounting a live production, Broadway, operatic or otherwise, is so enormous that much glorious music goes unheard simply because it was written for a work that’s rarely produced. Of course you can buy recordings, but there’s nothing like the thrilling immediacy of a live performance. Anyone who’s spent the night on the...
Platinum Premiere
Jubilee concert honors Glass and Pärt Carnegie Hall hosted the best birthday party ever as the American Composers Orchestra presented the Philip Glass 75th Birthday Concert in the Isaac Stern Auditorium Jan. 31. Thousands of composers, musicians and music lovers broke into a roar when Glass was introduced, giving him no less than four curtain...
Flying Colors
Horne and Fleming Instruct A Master Class Better than watching a master do what she does best is watching a master teach what she does best. Twin master classes led by divas Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming under Carnegie Hall’s “The Song Continues…” series illuminated the potential that is unleashed when knowledge is given with...
Heaven Sent Flamenca: Noche Flamenca’s profound singing/dancing
Thank God for Noche Flamenca. Or rather thank Martin Santangelo, Noche’s artistic director, and Soledad Barrio, the company’s leading lady, who have been conferring a yearly miracle on New York since 1998: an exceptional flamenco ensemble that blends traditional material with a contemporary gestalt and profound mastery of the form. The company’s six-day run at...
Don Giovanni Lives
Mozart live from La Scala For $25, low-heeled New Yorkers got to attend the opening night of La Scala’s 2011–12 season, with its new production of Don Giovanni (Anna Netrebko as Donna Anna, Peter Mattei as the Don, Bryn Terfel as Leporello, Daniel Barenboim conducting). Emerging Pictures, distributor of “alternative” (read “non-Hollywood”) content like opera,...
Familiarizing Great Music
The Philharmonic’s survival programs Out of apathy, fear or intransigence, we barricade ourselves from things we don’t know—people, places, music. Symphonic music is often thrust behind these barricades, so the New York Philharmonic has created an education department to help bring it out front where it belongs. Why does it belong out front? Director of...
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Jerome Robbins’ moving synthesis Jerome Robbins was fired halfway through shooting West Side Story, but he still won two Academy Awards for his work on the film—one for directing, which he shared with Robert Wise, and an honorary award “for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Robbins (like many others) thought...
Choirs Plus Ultra: Sacred harmonies draw cheers
Blue Heron and Ensemble Plus Ultra—two out-of-the-box choirs from out of town—met in New York City last week to present a concert of 16th-century music so rousing that it was met by a standing ovation; the stunning stained glass at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church rattled to cheers associated more with Don Giovanni than sacred...
