Music
Less Talk, More Rock
Neikrug’s New Concerto at the Philharmonic On a Friday afternoon, the New York Philharmonic began a concert with the Corsair overture of Berlioz. Then it was time for a new work, a concerto for orchestra by Marc Neikrug. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did not stride to the podium to conduct. He and the composer ambled...
The Price of Jazz
Jazz Gallery’s Legacy and Ledger Latest music organization to enter the tight local real estate market: the Jazz Gallery, which lost the lease on its loft at Hudson and Spring streets after 17 years. Moving an ongoing venture at any time is painful, but seldom worse than right now in Manhattan, where the Gallery wants...
Classical Music / Galleries/Gallery Beat / Jazz, Popular and Other / Museums / Music / Theater / Visual Art
Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
Remembering Adam Yauch and Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Directed by Adam Yauch Midway through 2008, something surprising has happened: two films with human dimension and artful expression–Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness–have flushed the toilet of summer movies. Neither is a special effects extravaganza but they stir emotion by emphasizing the human scale...
Planet Waves
Why “Free Radio” Rocks “Once upon a time” began Bob Dylan in June, 1965 and his 10-20 page “rhythm thing” became the six minute rock phenomenon “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song hit the radio waves a month later and the “be bright, be brief” juke box format of radio programming changed forever. At CUE...
Yuja on Fire
And a visit by a venerable quartet For several years, we have called Yuja Wang a wunderkind, a phenom, a sensation. For how long can we keep talking that way? She’s 25 now. I figure we can continue for a couple more years. Most recently in New York, she played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3...
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...
Soulful Realism and Romance
Womack Shows Steve Harvey How to Think Ben Kessler takes a critical look at Think Like A Man Act Like A Woman, the Steve Harvey-based bestseller and box-office phenomenon that stole the spotlight from The Hunger Games blockbuster and contrasts its musical recording version with the soul music legacy. As demonstrated in The Nutty Professor...
On the Record
Reviewing New Jazz Now The organizing principle behind this batch of records: They’re recent releases by NYC-based talents, recommended for originality and freshness. They’re all worth hearing more than once, and constitute discoveries. You don’t need to be told you’ll like Keith Jarrett’s solo Rio, right? Roots Before Branches, by drummer Henry Cole and the...
Imelda’s Dancing Shoes
David Byrne mythifies Marcos in ‘Here Lies Love’ The ambivalence provoked by women who wield power is reflected in the current photo-manipulation meme “Texts From Hillary,” in which a half-scowling secretary of state, peering dismissively down at her BlackBerry through sunglasses, fires scathing bits of digital wit at supplicants including Joe Biden, Mark Zuckerberg and...
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,...
Movie Star Music
Barber and Michael Hersch Make Lasting Magnificence A recent movie, The Deep Blue Sea, has a musical star, and by rights it should be “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” the hit song from 1932 (music by Harold Arlen, words by Ted Koehler). The movie takes its name from this song. So does...
CityArts Partner: The Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo Celebrates the Centennial of Japan’s Gift of the Cherry Blossom Trees with a Four-City U.S. Tour
As the first cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom in New York, the musicians of the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo are preparing for their first visit to the U.S. to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Japan’s gift of the cherry blossom trees to the United States. As part of this tour, the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo, one...
Pinnacle Pianists
Bronfman and Perahia in Recital In the space of three days, New York heard two recitals by two major pianists: Yefim Bronfman and Murray Perahia. The former was born in Tashkent and became a New Yorker. The latter was born in New York and became a Londoner. Go figure. Bronfman played in Carnegie Hall, and...
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...
Drawlin’ from Nawlins
Dr. John goes BAM Dr. John’s nine-concert, three-week residency featuring three different programs at Brooklyn Academy of Music started last Thursday night with a classic example of New Orleans’ lackadasicality meeting institutional overkill. To have a good time in the Crescent City, you do your thing and rely on what’s always worked. To fill the...
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,...
Expanding Yard
Miss Lilly Brings A Jamaican Cultural Hub to New York The clusters of tiny enterprises—let’s say a ramshackle recording studio nestled behind a patty shop and sided by an ice cream vendor—that dot Kingston, Jamaica’s downtown urbanscape are known as “yards,” one-stop destinations catering to the island’s basic needs for food and music and testifying...
Musiquarium
SFJAZZ Collective Plays Stevie Wonder Stevie Wonder might not seem an obvious composer for the SFJAZZ Collective’s focus, given its past performances have been inspired by the music of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk. But the brilliant R&B and soul artist more than fulfilled its criteria for a composer who produces...
Coalminer’s Canary
Springsteen Plays Politics For Armond White’s “Not-So Brilliant Disguise” article, click here. Bruce Springsteen recently told ABC News, “I genuinely believe an artist [is] supposed to be the canary in the coal mine, and you’re better off with a certain distance from the seat of power.” He has criticized several aspects of the president’s handling...
