The Best and Worst of Sydney Urbanism, 2011 by Alan Miller

Sydney-opera-house-sunset

Unlike movies or the performing arts, architecture is not seasonal. There is no year end rush in which all the Gehrys and Koolhaases are “released,” no popcorn summer in which the Barangaroos and Ground Zeros of this world try to blow out our eye sockets with their empty spectacle. Cities just go on and on; one must make an effort to pick a moment and look back if we are ever to figure out just what on earth is going on.

Read the whole list on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Berkshire Review’s Holiday Gift List: Books and Classical Recordings, by Michael Miller

I should most likely not distract you from giving a subscription to The Berkshire Review as a holiday gift. We need subscriptions to carry on our work, but there are a few items that have come in for review that I can warmly suggest as excellent gifts. These are not systematic, and they are not always serious, but we do recommend them. Some of them will be reviewed in detail over the following weeks.

Books

Modern Flash Dictionary by George Kent (1835). The British Library Board.

David Crystal, Evolving English - One Language, Many Voices - An Illustrated History of the English Language, The British Library, 2010. (Distributed in the U. S. by the University of Chicago Press)

This on the whole spectacularly realized picture book was produced as a catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at the British Library that closed earlier this year.

The English language and its history have attracted more enthusiasts than any other, it seems, not only because so many people use it, either as a mother tongue or a second language, and its spelling and grammar unleash so many irrational demons at the poor people who try to learn it, but the particular distribution of the linguistic streams which flowed together to create it have left easily identifiable signs of their separate identities: the Germanic, the Celtic, the Latin, Danish, French, Dutch, Indian, etc. English is by no means unique in this respect, but it wears the most colorful plumage. English speakers have also created a particularly fascinating body of physical artifacts and images relating to the language. The British Library is particularly rich in these holdings, and this exhibition was pretty much the last word—or display—on the subject, although some important and impressive objects, like the Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum (the sumptuous handle of a pointer King Alfred gave his bishops to encourage them to learn to read), were necessarily not included, since there were no loans. In the book you will find every object superbly illustrated, although some illustrations are too small to read. On the other hand, everything is transcribed, both as written and in modern English. You will find Runic inscriptions, the Franks casket, the MS of Beowulf, Bibles of Wycliffe, Tyndale, King James, et. al., the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, the usual Shakespearean materials, various grammars, dictionaries, and language aids (including the now quaint BBC pronunciation guide for radio announcers of 1928), medieval and Renaissance letters and diaries, cookery books, guides to slang, hornbooks, broadsides, advertisements, children's books, instructive and entertaining, novels, and of course Alice in Wonderland.

Read the full review
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








The New York Philharmonic: Peter Schreier conducts Handel’s Messiah, by Michael Miller


George Frideric Handel

Peter Schreier conducts Handel'sMessiah
New York Philharmonic
Avery Fisher Hall

Wednesday, December 14, 2011, 7:30 pm

Peter Schreier, conductor
Ute Selbig, soprano
Nathalie Stutzmann, contralto
Steve Davislim, tenor
Peter Rose, bass
Westminster Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, director

Handel - Messiah (1741 Version)

There is nothing remarkable, I suppose, in the complex associations that surrounded my visit to Avery Fisher Hall to hear, once again, Handel's Messiah. I love the work as much as anyone with absolutely no admixture of peevishness—except for a bad performance—but I certainly can't take it every year. This time, although the name of Peter Schreier and his distinguished soloists should be enough to attract anyone, I was drawn by my fascination with singers as conductors following the outstanding—and profoundly vocal—performance of Bach's B Minor Mass at Emmanuel Church in Boston a few months ago, conducted by Emmanuel Music's new Music Director, Ryan Turner. Susan Davenny Wyner, for example, is another singer—a great one—who has made an especially valuable contribution as a conductor. In this respect this performance of Messiah was exactly what I expected it to be.

Read the full review in New York Arts

Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque 2004, by Geraldine Ramer

Belle-epoque
Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque 2004

“see how it quivers and whispers in the glass”
—George Farquhar

Those clever English playwrights of the 1600s were, apparently, keenly attuned to the allures of champagne in all of its aspects. Movement and sound, after all, add sensory dimensions to champagne that other wines don’t have, another reason for our fascination with it. That these remarks appear on the stage centuries ago highlights champagne’s ageless appeal.

These observations are prompted by a tasting I attended earlier this season of the luxury cuvée of Perrier-Jouët, the Belle Époque 2004, just recently released. And having begun with a quote from an Englishman, I’ll cite a Frenchman, Voltaire, on the subject of luxury: “le superflu, chose si nécessaire.”

The first thing I’d like to say about Perrier-Jouët is that, yes, you do pronounce the t. Having gotten that rather mundane detail out of the way, we can now proceed to something closer to the sublime, the Belle Époque itself. Vintage champagnes are produced only when there is a vintage of exceptional quality, which is the case with 2004, bottle aged in the unique chalk cellars of the region, and then released after seven years or so.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


A Christmas Australis with Real Music with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Choir, by Andrew Miller

2011-abo-noel-noel-full-stage1
The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Choir. Photo by Steven Godbee.

Noël! Noël!

City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney: 14 December 2011

plays in Wollongong on 17 December, Cremorne 18 December, Newtown 19 December

broadcast on ABC classic FM on 21 December, 8 pm

Henry John Gauntlett - Once, in royal David’s city
Giovanni Gabrieli - Jubilate Deo
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Assumpta est Maria in caelum
Maurizio Cazzati - Passacaglia and Ciaccona
Anonymous - Falalán, Villancico catalan, and Bastião
Tomaso Albinoni - Adagio from concerto in D minor for oboe, opus 9 no. 2
Antonio Vivaldi - Trio sonata in D minor, opus 1 no. 12 “La Follia”, RV 63
Traditional arr. Tristan Coelho - O come, O come, Emmanuel and the Coventry Carol
Morten Lauridsen - “La Rose Complète” and “Dirait-on” (arr. Coelho) from Les Chansons des Roses
Katherine K. Davis arr. Tristan Coelho - The Little Drummer Boy
Felix Gruber - Stille Nacht
Anon. arr. David Wilcocks - O come all ye faithful

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Australian Brandenburg Choir
Paul Dyer - artistic director, conductor, harpsichord, chorusmaster

Christina Leonard - saxophone

Having grown up in the northern hemisphere, the winter Christmas is ingrained in me, but the event is fundamentally connected to mid-winter. The pagan winter solstice festival with its strong connection to nature, namely the Sun, a celebration of the days starting to lengthen and a new year beginning, is tied to Christmas as the scriptural imagery is compatible with the older ritual’s. Zeus, Dionysus, Apollo, and Mithras are all also alleged to have been born on the (northern) winter solstice and St. Chrysostom said in the 4th Century of the timing of the Nativity ‘while the heathen were busied with their profane rites the Christians might perform their holy ones without disturbance’ but also thought it a suitable birthday for the ‘Sun of Righteousness.’[1] In that sense it naturally and intuitively doesn't feel like the right festival for the southern hemisphere's summer solstice. So unique traditions evolve here and the more appealing ones are strongly connected to nature — spending all your time outside enjoying the long daylight while it lasts, roses blooming, surfing, eating seafood, fresh fruit, especially cherries, etc. —, but still are colored by the northern traditions. With his Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Sydney's main squeeze for Baroque music and period instrument lovers, Paul Dyer provides the best music for this austral summer solstice Christmas, music which makes natural and festive sense. It is very serious, 'scholarly' music, but with the artistic spirit of the Baroque steeping it, it has a bright festive sunny quality too, especially in the style of their playing. Dyer has assembled a varied program of traditional carols played very thoughtfully, Spanish popular music from the 16th Century, late Baroque instrumental music and early Baroque motets and more recently composed pieces. Somehow Dyer's enthusiasm, sense of occasion and serious-festive-art approach to music allows all this to hang together comfortably.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Ludovic Morlot conducts the BSO in Harbison, Ravel, and Mahler at Davies Hall, San Francisco, by Steven Kruger

Morlot-bso-sf-2
Ludovic Morlot conducts the BSO at Davies Hall, San Francisco

Davies Hall, San Francisco
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Harbison - Symphony No. 4
Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2
Mahler - Symphony No. 1 in D major.

It had been a while since I heard a Wednesday-night concert at Davies Hall. Generally I am to be found there on Saturdays, when a week's program has had a chance to settle in with the musicians, and where you can read in the players' foot-shuffling and stand-tapping the tea-leaves of approval for a conductor. But judging from the audience, this recent Boston Symphony program took place more in an "opening night" spirit of gravitas. The extra formality seemed to befit the orchestra's demeanor and reputation.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


Osmo Vänskä and Alisa Weilerstein Collaborate with the Sydney Symphony — Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Beethoven, by Andrew Miller

Osmo-vanska-credit-greg-helges

Osmo Vänskä. Photo by Greg Helgeson.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall: 10 December 2011

Tchaikovsky - Voyevoda - Symphonic Ballad, opus 78
Prokofiev - Sinfonia Concertante for cello and orchestra, opus 125
Beethoven - Symphony no. 3 in E flat, opus 55

Osmo Vänskä - conductor
Alisa Weilerstein - cello
Sydney Symphony Orchestra

Inviting guest musicians Osmo Vänskä and Alisa Weilerstein to the Sydney Symphony makes an artistic match the muses approved of, not to mention the heavens. They only came for three performances in Sydney, and how they found time to rehearse this dense program thoroughly is a mystery to me, though a shared musical spirit and understanding seemed to be on their side in this performance. It was a rare conjunction of various uncontrollable elements. The program too is very interesting.  The Sydney Symphony has found a 'new' Tchaikovsky piece, apparently never having played Voyevoda before, and has not played the Prokofiev sinfonia concertante for 40 years. Beethoven is always interesting (at the very least), but here we have a unique interpreter of his symphonies in Vänskä, who seemed even to find in Beethoven hitherto unheard connections to Prokofiev.

ZERO SUM Greylock Arts, Adams, Massachusetts, autumn, 2011: A Word from the Artist, Richard Harrington

Sculpture by Richard Harrington. Photo © 2011 Kay Canavino.

Adapting the themes of this exhibition to the space at Greylock Arts has been a joy. My goal was to be minimally intrusive to the stunning integrity of the materials of the gallery space which are almost all original to when the building was made in the 1920’s. The ornamental high tin ceiling, period cabinetry, hardwood floor, original deep jamb windows, ornamental light fixtures, and clear uncluttered walls make artwork shine. In short, its magnificence is quite a bit more than a clean well-lighted space.

I'm also inclined to believe that the less you try to do the better. This “bias” has come from many encounters where trying to do “more” has always resulted in disaster. So there is also an inclination on my part to use less light, rather than more.

I hope I won't put the reader off by using so many technical words, but they're a vital part of what has been an important exploration for me, and the words have specific and clear meanings. The terminology is appropriate, because it is the language of geometry—and is more widely used than ever, so it ought to not be a threat—and it is the means that I've chosen to build the sculptures in ZERO SUM.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


“Gratta da Vinci” – Scratch and Win…a “da Vinci”! the Battle over the Battle of Anghiari, by Michel Miller

 December 11, 2011 •

The Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

When Daniel Gallagher began his 500th birthday tribute to Giorgio Vasari in late September with an article on the Salone del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, he had little idea that the investigation into the survival and location of the remains of a lost wall painting by Leonardo da Vinci, about which he wrote so benignly, would lead to the sudden storm of protest which has now brought the work to a halt.

Monsignor Gallagher chose to begin his series there, because the decoration of the Salone del Cinquecento, the largest state room in the world at the time, marked a high point in his career, as his work for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici reached its grandest scale. This included six monumental frescoes, groups of three on the east and west walls, illustrating the military victories of Florence which led to its rule of all of Tuscany. Today thousands of exhausted tourists slog through the Salone, where heads of state used to approach the government of Florence and the Medici Dukes, most probably with little notion of why their guides have led them there or of what is to be made of the huge frescoes, which most likely impress them as particularly hideous. Hardly a one bothers to raise his or her point-and-shoot aloft to view the frescoes on their illuminated screens—which now seems to be the only way to look at art, at least abroad. While Giorgio Vasari was a man of an extraordinarily broad range of powerful capabilities, ranging from drawing to management and politics, the individual manifestations of his talent still appeal to a rather small group of enthusiasts and scholars, beginning with a renaissance of Vasarian studies in the 1960s. To my mind his greatest achievements are in his drawings, the Uffizi Palace, and the splendid designs he created to decorate his collection of drawings. From this core, I have learned to appreciate his panel paintings and frescoes. Still, it is hard to overcome the wish that S. Croce and Sta. Maria Novella still looked as they did in...say...1530, before Vasari's renovations. The splendid exhibitions you have read about on the Review, thanks to Dan Gallagher, have done much to counteract the attitude I have just described, and I only wish I could have been there myself to see them. There is no doubt that in this year, Giorgio is recovering much of the luster his achievement deserves.

Read the full essay on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!


Graeme Murphy Choreographs a New Romeo and Juliet for the Australian Ballet, by Andrew Miller

Ab-adam-bull-and-lana-jones-ro
Adam Bull as Romeo and Lana Jones as Juliet in Graeme Murphy's Romeo & Juliet. Photo by Jeff Busby.

Romeo & Juliet
Sydney Opera House, Opera Theatre: 7 December 2011, 1.30 pm
continues in Sydney until 21 December

Choreography - Graeme Murphy
Creative associate - Janet Vernon
Music - Sergei Prokofiev
Costume design - Akira Isogawa
Set design - Gerard Manion
Lighting design - Damien Cooper
Projection design - Jason Lam

Conductor - Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo
The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra

Juliet - Leanne Stojmenov
Romeo - Daniel Gaudiello
Mercutio - Yosvani Ramos
Tybalt - Chengwu Guo
Benvolio - Calvin Hannaford
Lord Capulet - Damien Welch
Lady Capulet - Rachel Rawlins
Lord Montague - John-Paul Idaszak
Lady Montague - Alice Topp
Prince of Darkness - Andrew Wright
Prince of Peace - Garry Stocks
Nurse - Elizabeth Hill
Paris - Ben Davis
Holy Man - Jarryd Madden

William Shakespeare, though he did not of course invent all his stories, rather drawing them from history or myth, makes them seem like his in his vivid tellings. His characters gain real personalities by virtue of the dense poetry but also from their actions and behavior in the plays and the strong linkages of cause, motivation, effect, imagery and expressive action from foot to foot, line to line, scene to scene and act to act give the plays strong coherence through the internal logics, whether ‘real’, poetical, linguistic or dramatic. In a phrase, he had a sense of theater, he magically created real worlds, not just existing in his private imagination, but in seemingly solid words and acting which create in the theater believable atmospheres of battle, or forest serene or sinister, or anything else from any part of the world. Perhaps most of all the stories we grant Shakespeare possession of that of Romeo and Juliet. Ballet has a history of borrowing Shakespeare’s pieces, though it may seem self-defeating to leave the Bard’s words and take only the story, many are successful as theater in their own right, perhaps because they avoid a direct translation into mime and movement rather taking across the essence of their drama and characters. Of the plays, Romeo and Juliet is maybe the most often transferred to the ballet, with such a myriad of versions in the 20th Century, starting with the 1926 Diaghilev-Kochno version with choreography by Nijinska, music by Constant Lambert, featuring Karsavina and Lifar, then the 1940 Prokofiev-Lavrovsky Kirov version with Galina Ulanova, which was revived and reinterpreted after the war, brought to the West, filmed and performed many times. Frederick Ashton choreographed his own version with the Prokofiev score in 1955, as did John Cranko in 1958, Kenneth Macmillan in 1965, Rudi von Dantzig in Amsterdam in 1967, Birgit Cullberg in Stockholm in 1969, Oleg Vinogradov in Leningrad in 1973, Nureyev in 1977, and many more since then. Antony Tudor choreographed a one act version to music by Delius in New York in 1943 and Maurice Béjart choreographed a version to Berlioz’ music in 1966, which is said to be pacifist in spirit and sympathetic to the attitude of the soon-to-be 1968 protests.[1] Is it any wonder the balletic Romeo and Juliet is a phenomenon of the 20th (and 21st) Century, following on each of the bloodiest wars? Not enough seem to be listening and we certainly are overdue for some pacifism now. With that impressive list of famous 20th Century choreographers, it has come to the point that it is the ballet all choreographers seem to have to attempt, as the role of Giselle is to ballerinas, and given all that plus the memory of Shakespeare’s poetry, expectations are extremely high.

Read the full review of the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!