music
From Patti, with love: The Church of Smith gathers at the Met to honor O'Keeffe and Stieglitz
Smith even managed to amp up the feeling of the generally laid-back evening, a foot on her monitor, and the spirit rolled her into "Gloria." I attempted to send a text message and got snapped at by the woman next to me for sinning in the church of Patti. (The audience was, atypically for any rock show, more than half women.) Still, such fervor said something about Smith's own idolatry. More
A Capital anticipation list: Finite and Flammable, Maurizio Cattelan, Black Star, bowling, P.S. Eliot
Each week, Capital's editors and writers will offer a list of the events, activities, releases and personal obsessions that we are looking forward to during the next week. Here is a list of our anticipations. More
Kander and Ebb seek their 'period' piece in an old German classic, but can't get it to Broadway
If this show’s time has come, and it belatedly makes it to Broadway in a full production, The Visit could become Kander and Ebb’s swan song, their final premiere, even if it wasn’t the last show the legendary duo worked on before lyricist Ebb died in 2004. (That honor would go to The Scottsboro Boys, an ambitious show about racism that had a too-brief Broadway run last fall.)
It would be a period at the end of a very long and impressive sentence: Their career stretches back almost a half century, including nearly 20 shows, among them such classics as Cabaret and Zorba—as well as Chicago, the longest-running revival in Broadway history (15 years and counting). But it wouldn't be the right one. More
Will Hermes on how he uncovered a history of musical foment in a crumbling New York
"The triumph of rhythm is really the story that connects all these genres," Hermes told Capital. "Punk was simplifying rock to very basic rhythms. The minimalists were taking 12-tone compositions and reducing them to a pulse. Disco was all about rhythm, obviously, hip-hop, salsa, and the loft jazz scene to an extent." His book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, chronicles how five years of music in New York City changed American music forever. More
Jeffrey Lewis, antifolk hero, finds a way to please his fans and pay the rent
A tour alongside British band Cornershop had him playing to venues of thousands of fans, but also paying for expensive touring apparatus. And not being able to come up with the rent.
"There was money to be made if I could figure out a way to tour where I wasn't spending that money, without things that I didn't need," he said. "Like, I know how to drive a car. Everybody in my band knows how to drive. You know, we're totally happy staying at friends' houses, and we don't need amplifiers. We toured for years without amplifiers. We can play completely awesome plugged into whatever. The songs are great, that's the important thing." More
Big-band disco acts Escort, Midnight Magic channel 'off-kilter, New York' retro vibe, when they can afford to
The David Byrne story goes like this: Balis and Cho were working on something recently and discussing Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club in relation to it. Then they went to dinner at a nearby restaurant, where they spotted Byrne with Cindy Sherman.
“We go back to the studio to get the C.D., go up to David Byrne, and we interrupt him,” said Cho. “He’s talking to the guy who played the chef on'The Sopranos.'”
“He looked really annoyed that the chef from 'The Sopranos' was talking to him,” said Balis. “He’s like, ‘I want to talk to my girlfriend-slash-life partner.’”
Balis and Cho handed Byrne the C.D., explaining who they were. “We give him the spiel,” said Balis. “‘We’re huge fans. We’d love you to listen to this. We’re a 17-piece band.’ And he says, ‘A 17-piece band? How do you make any money?’” They laughed again. “The answer is, of course, you don’t.”
(1)Composer George Lewis rages with the machines in rare Miller Theater presentation of his work
“In my kind of doing electronic music, there is always an upfront notion of the machine's subjectivity,” he said. “You can't turn it off, you can't have it do exactly what you want. But it's obvious that it's listening, though it doesn't always imitate what you do. … It also contributes things that are nice that you want to deal with. That's a very difficult thing for some people to accept, because they're used to the encounter with machines as one in which there's a strict hierarchy, where humans are at the top. That gets smashed in my work, where basically there’s a subject relationship. More
The Opera Orchestra of New York pulls itself out of a funk with diva-driven B-movie opera 'Adriana Lecouvreur,' starring Angela Gheorghiu
The Opera Orchestra of New York is returning to its star-driven roots, opening its season last night at Carnegie Hall with superstars Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann in Cilea’s sentimental diva vehicle Adriana Lecouvreur. The you have to be there quotient was boosted to the roof by the fact that this performance would be Gheorghiu’s only New York appearance of the season since she chose not to participate in the Met’s new production of Gounod’s Faust. (It’s in rehearsal now, with Kaufmann in the title role.)
Adriana is a sort of B-movie opera, with one of those plots that it’s more fun to retell than to sit through in the first place. More
(4)The queen of theater lighting, Jennifer Tipton, gets a spotlight for herself in two New York performances
Two performances in the White Light festival put Tipton's 50-year career as a lighting designer and artist center stage, for audiences that may not have understood or appreciated before the role lighting can have on their experience of a performance.
For example, a performer lit with bright front lights—which black out the audience to the performer—will feel a particularly pronounced ”fourth wall”; a performer lit with back lights, on the other hand, will see an audience clearly even as he is almost fully blacked out from the audience’s view. The way a lighting cue feels to an actor or dancer can subtly shape his performance, Tipton realized, and should thus be taken into account.
“That changed the way I worked with actors, with dancers—forever, shall I say,” Tipton said.
(2)Nico Muhly, classical music wunderkind, on early success and ignoring his 'flight map'
"Back when I used to read a ton of blogs, I was always really flattered when people were like: 'It's the future of classical music!' But that's just as bad as: This faggot is dead in the water already. So stopping reading blogs was a really key thing, not just because of haters, but also because then you start thinking, yeah, I am doing this amazing thing, when you're like no, I have to get from A to this B-flat by way of this E-flat. It really distracts you from the craft of the thing, when you focus on these gigantic brush strokes, to be constantly looking at like the flight map of your career, to be like: Well girl, we're over Greenland now, so I should probably take the Ambien." More
Marilyn Horne, who ruled American opera in the 1970s, trains a new generation for a very different art
She worries about the emphasis on singers’ appearance in the era of HD broadcasts. One summer Horne herself lost 50 pounds—the right way, with good eating and exercise—and she is convinced her middle register promptly went flat and her voice got a size smaller.
But she recognizes that singers now have to be thin, or at least thinnish, to be hired; and that not all singers who are overweight can slim down and keep their voices beautiful. She is preparing singers for careers, and she is a realist.
“We do take people who are overweight,” she said of the academy. “But I have to warn them, and ask them, ‘How badly do you really want this?’" More
(5)Wesley Stace, a k a John Wesley Harding, on 'not being a dick', the Cabinet of Wonders and Walter Benjamin
“Sometimes I intersect with the marketplace better than other times,” Stace offered by way of an explanation for the vicissitudes of his success over the past two and a half decades that he’s been making music and, more recently, writing novels. “Before I made this album I hoped it was good and went in with the heart wide open. When I finished the album I thought, It’s probably the best record I could possibly make right now.” More
Can Richard Dare save the Brooklyn Philharmonic?
At 47, Dare comes across a lot like Alec Baldwin’s husky Jack Donaghy from "30 Rock": The businessman with no experience in art who suddenly parachutes in from corporate America into a once proud 154-year-old franchise that has fallen hard. Very hard. He quite literally is the guy in the suit (“It’s the only clothes I own,” he says by way of explanation) amongst a staff that commonly takes off its shoes entirely at work, even with a reporter present.
Dare was explaining how he's going to get the Phil "out of the hole," to use a term he repeats often. Other terms he uses while describing his plan, and what he sees as the future of the ailing nonprofit arts scene: Strategic partnerships. Value. Strangest of all, profitability. More
(6)Brooklyn Philharmonic, in a pre-season concert to commemorate the Holocaust, shows its nimbleness and talent
The two short opening pieces—Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, arranged for orchestra, and Mendelssohn’s Capriccio Brilliante—showcased the lush tone and gorgeous blending of the orchestra, which reverberated warmly throughout the cathedral. The lilting, melancholy melody of the Vocalise, softly and seamlessly spun out by one instrument after another, set a reflective tone for the evening, while the epic journey of the Capriccio’s virtuosic piano part, played with warmth and gusto by the dynamic Russian-Israeli David Goldberg, felt like a tribute to perseverance fitting for Holocaust narratives of survival. While at times in these two pieces the strings lagged slightly behind the other sections or behind the piano, as a whole the orchestra played with precision, following Maestro Leytush’s energetic, nuanced, and deeply-felt conducting to stirring climaxes. More
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