“We wanted to represent the broadest possible picture of what’s happening now by young composers and to find things that you don’t typically hear,” said MATA’s Executive Director David T. Little during an interview on Wednesday. “We’ve succeeded if people who know this music really well are finding new things that they didn’t know about, new composers they hadn’t known about.”
Bio: Claudia Carrera writes about music, arts, and culture and is a stage director for theater and opera.
“We wanted to represent the broadest possible picture of what’s happening now by young composers and to find things that you don’t typically hear,” said MATA’s Executive Director David T. Little during an interview on Wednesday. “We’ve succeeded if people who know this music really well are finding new things that they didn’t know about, new composers they hadn’t known about.” More
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on April 20th, 2012 9:57amTen years after its start, and its first performance of Il sogno di Scipione (currently being revived), Gotham Chamber Opera is not only still around; it’s thriving. The small company has consistently pulled in all-star collaborators and regularly mounted professional and innovative productions, and it is currently planning an expanded season for next year. Given the major shift in New York’s opera landscape caused by the recent decline of New York City Opera—a company brought low by courting Fortune, in various guises, over the past decade—Gotham has begun to attract attention as a potential inheritor of the title of New York’s “other” opera company. More
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on April 12th, 2012 3:26pmFor Shen Wei, embracing such chance elements represents a new direction. His work has always exhibited total control over every element on view. Undivided Divided, he said, had been a challenge, a “risky piece.” The risk pays off in at least one way: by allowing in chance elements and the intercession of the audience, the confrontation with the nature of individual and group movement is heightened, stressed. More
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on December 3rd, 2011 9:06amAt a few minutes after ten, gallery co-owner Roland Augustine lifted his arm up in the air, signaling for the excited runners to assemble. “On your mark, get set, go!” Augustine’s arm dropped, and the group eagerly set off on a thirty-mile route that would take them to composer Sergei Rachmaninov’s gravesite in Valhalla, NY. There they would lay their bouquets of chamomile—the national flower of Rachmaninov’s native Russia—by the expatriate composer’s grave. “I always thought it was kind of lonely just lying there in upstate New York,” artist Guido van der Werve said.
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on November 14th, 2011 4:31pmTwo 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.
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on November 3rd, 2011 1:40pmThe 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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on October 24th, 2011 10:48amRoom is part of an ongoing project of Calle's, called True Stories, which originally paired the autobiographical text vignettes with photographs of the related objects from her life, and later with the actual objects referenced. Room opened on Thursday night at midnight and will remain open until midnight Sunday; this is the first time the "stories" have been arranged in the setting of a hotel room. More
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on October 14th, 2011 6:19pm
