Music
CITYARTS ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Not-So Brilliant Disguise
Following this week’s CityArts cover theme, Bruce Springsteen’s ballyhooed new album Wrecking Ball is considered by Editor Armond White and critic Ben Kessler who examine the contradictions when artists pursue the personal in the political. Read it here, only at CityArts. Springsteen’s New Album Wrecks Faith “Why does he sing like that, he’s from...
Something from Nowhere
The Ting Tings’ Pet ‘Sounds’ From the name on down, The Ting Tings’ second album, Sounds from Nowheresville, shows that remarkably little has changed for the pop duo since their platinum-selling debut, We Started Nothing (2008). It took four years for Katie White and Jules de Martino to shake off their success and return to...
A New Day Dawns
Why Doris Day matters By Dennis Delrogh Long before Beyoncé covered “At Last” in homage to Etta James, Doris Day in 1964 did the same and disclosed that she had always wished she could sing with James’ abandon. Day has become the surviving member of her big band generation of superstar singers, who include Frank...
Nonstop Herbie
Charting Hancock’s musical voyages Who is this particular Herbie Hancock appearing at Jazz at Lincoln Center March 9 and 10? Not the keyboardist who enlisted Dave Matthews, The Chieftains, India.Arie, Los Lobos et al. as guest stars on his latest album, The Imagine Project, or who won by surprise the Grammy for Record of the...
Orchestral Rankings
Philadelphia and BERLIN Philharmonics Compete Carnegie Hall has hosted several orchestras lately, including one from a short train ride away and one from a longish plane ride away. The first was the Philadelphia Orchestra, the second the Berlin Philharmonic. The Philadelphians have gone through hard times in recent years, including bankruptcy. But they sounded their...
A Sea of Sound
Tallying New York’s philharmonic excess By Joseph Smith Is it just me or is it too loud in here? Often, when I attend symphonic concerts, I find myself disconcerted by the noisiness of the programming. It seems to me that concerts now tend to be too unrelievedly composed of works from periods that favor dense,...
Preview: Gerald Finley In Concert
Darkness and light resume their eternal dance in bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s recital Feb. 27 at Alice Tully, part of Lincoln Center’s “Art of the Song” series. Finley’s recital at Zankel Hall two years ago was a knockout. Now he’s returning to the New York recital stage with an entirely different program of 19th-, 20th- and...
A Tale of Two Operas
Agility, power, wit and heft at the Met In the classic cartoons, opera singers are fat and often wear horns. You will see that in real life, too. But opera singers, like other people, come in all shapes and sizes, and so do operas. In consecutive performances, the Met staged operas on opposite ends of...
Listening to People: How the Swiss keep jazz Intakt
With no background of blues, gospel or swing, what does “jazz” sound like? A two-week festival March 1–15 at The Stone of the Zurich-based musicians who record for the Swiss record label Intakt offers intriguing examples. Pianist Irene Schweizer will perform powerful, blocky improvisations. Pierre Favre, her frequent accompanist and one of Europe’s busiest drummers,...
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...
The Whitney Houston Dream: Broadway Lessons from a Pop Diva
Among Broadway’s young theater gypsies, Whitney Houston’s 1994 performance at the American Music Awards has been circulating as a unique theatrical tribute. Houston never appeared in a Broadway show, but her AMA medley of “I Loves You Porgy” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—preserved in a 10-minute YouTube clip—connects to the current...
Through the Eye of the Camp: Parsing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Old Ideas’
Leonard Cohen bookends his new album Old Ideas with a song about mortality (“Going Home”) and a song about the divided culture (“Different Sides”). Throughout, Cohen refines the use of gospel-impulse female singers who added vitality to his own special, deep-toned gravity on the great 1992 The Future (remember the title track’s exhortations to “Repent!”)....
Rihanna’s True Confession: A Pop Star’s Music Video Rebellion
“Trust the tale, not the teller,” D.H. Lawrence’s essential dictum, applies to Rihanna’s recent music video “We Found Love.” Transparently autobiographical in its reference to the 2009 assault incident involving Rihanna and Chris Brown, “We Found Love” answers back to those tellers—in this case gossip-mongers and pundits—whose pontifications reduced Rihanna and Brown to domestic-abuse stereotypes....
Dancing With Myself
Solo videos go viral Too often, music videos exist solely to maximize a performer’s impact on consumer culture, a branding exercise. But there’s a small subgenre of solo dance performance videos—typified by the recent viral hits “Lonely Boy” and “Call Your Girlfriend”—that inverts consumerist logic, expressing instead the impact of popular culture upon the individual...
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...
It’s Clarinet Month
Williamson, McGill, Meyer and Shifrin blow up Say what you will about piano playing, conducting, violin playing and, especially, composing: This is a very good age for clarinet playing, even a great one. We have Alessandro Carbonare, Martin Fröst, Kari Kriikku and Julian Bliss, among others. Four of those others played in New York during...
Lone Wolf Compositions
Tim Berne presents ‘Snakeoil’ Tim Berne is the saxophonist as lone wolf—a rangy and determinedly individualistic composer/improviser who has for 30-plus years lived far from the jazz mainstream and skirted the edges of the avant-garde. He’s been a presence in aficionado venues in New York, North America and beyond, and has just embarked on an...
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...
Song of the Year
Saluting Stevie Nicks’ “Soldier’s Angel” Years from now, 2011 may be remembered as the year postfeminism produced poster girls for the status quo. Female-fronted hits such as the movie Bridesmaids and the TV show New Girl were hailed as breakthroughs, despite their unremarkable content. (Bridesmaids even showed up on some confused critics’ year-end best lists.)...
Best Album and Best Gallery Exhibition of 2011
‘Watch the Throne,’ Kanye West & Jay-Z; ‘Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou’ Call Larry Gagosian You belong in museums —Jay-Z, “That’s My B**ch” Jay-Z dreams of collapsing the class and race divisions reflected in high art and pop art hierarchies. Reverse the title of Kanye West & Jay-Z’s love song from their Watch the Throne...
