Charpentier’s La Couronne de Fleurs and La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers by the Boston Early Music Society, by Charles Warren


Aaron Sheehan, Orphée. with Musical Directors Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. Photo André Costantini.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier Double Bill
La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers
La Couronne de fleurs

Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 8pm
Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 3pm
New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall, Boston

Paul O’Dette & Stephen Stubbs, Musical Directors
Gilbert Blin, Stage Director
Anna Watkins, Costume Designer
Melinda Sullivan, Choreographer

Pre-concert talks an hour before the performances by John S. Powell, Professor of Music, The University of Tulsa.

BEMF Vocal Ensemble
Aaron Sheehan, Orphée
Mireille Asselin, Carrie Henneman Shaw, Michael Kelly,
Olivier Laquerre, Thea Lobo, Jason McStoots,
Megan Stapleton, Brenna Wells, Douglas Williams

BEMF Chamber Ensemble
Robert Mealy, concertmaster
Cynthia Roberts, violin
Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba
Christel Thielmann, viola da gamba
Beiliang Zhu, viola da gamba
Gonzalo X. Ruiz, oboe & recorder
Kathryn Montoya, oboe & recorder
Avi Stein, harpsichord
Paul O’Dette, Baroque guitar and theorbo
Stephen Stubbs, Baroque guitar and theorbo

BEMF Dance Ensemble
Carlos Fittante, Olsi Gjeci, Caitlin Klinger, Alexis Silver

Boston Early Music Festival’s presentation of two Marc-Antoine Charpentier chamber operas took us from the playful, elegant, high baroque world of the court of Louis XIV, into something more serious and grave, and then back out again. First we were given most of La Couronne de Fleurs, a Pastoral probably not meant for full staging, where Flore, goddess of spring—well sung, and acted with spirit, by soprano Mireille Asselin—summons up the season and then proposes to shepherds and shepherdesses a contest to praise Louis XIV’s military triumphs, the winner to receive the crown of flowers of the title. After the conventional tributes are made, the production turns to the short opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, presenting it as a further entry in the poetic contest, though this is done a bit awkwardly, since the piece does not refer to Louis. The Orpheus opera seems not to have been finished by Charpentier, having only two acts instead of the usual three, and stopping with the beginning of Orpheus’s ascent from the Underworld with his lover Euridice rescued from death. We do not get the familiar incident of his prohibited looking back at her and thus permanent loss of her. BEMF cleverly handled this truncated ending by coming back to the last part of La Couronne, where the god Pan interrupts the poetic/musical contest, putting a stop to it, saying nothing can come up to Louis’s exploits.

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








Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937, by Michael Miller


Steichen_black
Edward Steichen, Black: Model Margaret Horan in a black dress by Jay-Thorpe. 1935, Courtesy Condé Nast Archive © 1935 Condé Nast Publications

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937

Organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and the Musée de Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: May 30-September 13, 2009

Current and upcoming venues:

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: September 26, 2009-January 3, 2010

Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: February 28, 2010-April 11, 2010

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri: May 15 - July 25, 2010

Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography, curated by John Stomberg, Chief Curator, The Williams College Museum of Art (at WCMA only)

This important exhibition of Edward Steichen's fashion and celebrity photography for Condé Nast, which will close soon in Toronto and continue on to Fort Lauderdale and Kansas City, emerged from an earlier, ambitious survey of his entire career, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography, also organized by Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and the Musée de Élysée. While researching that exhibition, the curators, William Ewing and Todd Brandow, discovered two thousand vintage prints from Steichen's years at Vogue and Vanity Fair in the Condé Nast Archive, where they were catalogued and preserved to museum standards. These had never been exhibited before and presented an opportunity not to be missed. Hence Ewing and Brandow, together with Carol Squiers of the International Center of Photography, and Natalie Herschdorfer of the Musée de Élysée, set to work on this companion exhibition with some excitement. In the catalogue the sumptuous plates are interspersed with four essays from different points of view. William Ewing provides an acutely perceptive general account of the place of this work in Steichen's career. Carol Squiers discusses Steichen's position at Condé Nast and how he worked within the house system, not always with the brilliant results we see in the exhibition. She also makes the important point that he only moved entirely away from his Pictorialist roots after the arrival in 1928 of a new art director, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, and his make-over of Vogue in favor of a simple, clear modernist taste. Tobia Bezzola places Steichen within the artistic currents of the time and investigates his aesthetic as a merger between his high Pictorialist ideals and commercialism. Steichen surprised his colleagues by actually taking pride in his work, insisting on putting his name to it. Natalie Herschdorfer fills in the background on the fashions of the time and the social currents which influenced them. The whole brings to life a bygone world of elegance and ambition, rehabilitates an underestimated period of Steichen's career, and shows Steichen's contribution to photography during this phase of his activity to be no less significant than what came before or after.

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

Picasso at the Art Gallery of New South Wales by Alan Miller

Course

Amidst recent debate over whether the “blockbuster” art show is dead, alive, dying, waning or mutating, it takes a blockbuster to appreciate the value of a blockbuster. This is especially so in Australia, whose several fine museums all started collecting way too late to acumulate many of the great masters. As Edmund Capon said in a recent interview, the quirky array of names along the sandstone frieze of the Art Gallery of New South Wales — Raphael, Michael Angelo (sic), Bellini, Titian — are aspirational, a list of all the artists whose works “we don’t have.” He didn’t add that we never will have them, but there is a poignance to that list of names in bronze, a reminder of one “tyranny of distance” which was untraversable at the time of the gallery’s construction and remains so. Whether or not one of Australia’s mining billionaires ever finds the taste and generosity to buy one of our public galleries some minor Titian, Capon, retiring after thirty very successful years as director of the Gallery, can now justifiably brag that he leaves it “full of Picassos.”

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Mahler’s Second Symphony: Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony Complete Their Mahler Cycle

Rodins-mahler-bronze
Rodin's bronze of Gustav Mahler.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall: 23 November 2011
repeats and broadcasted live on ABC Classic FM on Monday 28 November

Mahler - Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Resurrection

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy - conductor

Emma Matthews - soprano
Michelle DeYoung - mezzo-soprano

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Brett Weymark - chorusmaster

If a person did come to understand the true nature of reality and the universe, why we exist and die and how we exist after, if they could answer in one the curious person's every "why?" in the endless chain, could that thought even be solidified into words? or even rarefied into music? If it could these words would at best be the ultimate "inarticulacy of the new"; or if this person glanced off some truth tangentially and put it into words they would sound like a madman or a prophet or at best a poet. Is music any more articulate than words here? Music is more articulate perhaps in its being more akin to the primary "image" of a thought before it is put into words — prose words anyway — it need not commit itself to one of the set of concrete objects or abstract concepts allowed by language. Then again I don't want to do language a disservice since it can deal in these images, especially in poetry, and anyway music is like language in that there is a certain grammar of sounds which make musical sense; an infinite freedom amongst all the audible sounds would lead to infinite chaos, or at least just bad music. This is not how music evolved in any case, but instruments can say things outside of words' ken (and vice versa).

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

Il primato dei Toscani nelle ‘Vite’ del Vasari. Basilica inferiore di San Francesco (Arezzo). Until 9 January 2012, by Daniel B. Gallagher


Vasari-360
Giorgio Vasari

Il primato dei Toscani nelle ‘Vite’ del Vasari. Basilica inferiore di San Francesco (Arezzo). Until 9 January 2012.

Vasari’s partiality toward Tuscan artists may have been for good reason. Classicism had become the standard, and nobody did classicism better than the Tuscans. By the time Vasari wrote the Lives, the Tuscans, unlike the Venetians and Flemish, were already showing signs of a “school” rather than merely a distinct “style.” Of all the major art centers in Europe, Florence was the most international, combining the best techniques available from north to south. Having perfected the art of representation, they only needed someone to put its rules into some kind of order.

Giorgio Vasari was just the man for the job. Thoroughly trained in the studia humanitatis by great teachers like Pollastra and Pierio Valeriano, he was convinced t hat the only hope of salvation for artists were writers. This clearly emerges from his encomium to poetry and history at the beginning of the Lives. Without writers the names of artists, like their works, were destined for oblivion. Vasari wanted to immortalize both with his pen. But in doing so, he also wanted to show the affinity between the plastic and literary arts. He constantly returned to a single, driving principle that each art inherently resembles the others, notwithstanding the different instruments they use to achieve their proper ends. Vasari hoped that by writing about artists he might also enhance their collaboration with scientists, by whose expertise they were greatly enriched.

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


A Letter from the Editor and Publisher, Michael Miller


To our readers:

I'll break all the rules of marketing and confess that I have written this letter with mixed feelings.

It has been a terrific pleasure, since the launch of the Berkshire Review on September 24, 2007, to provide you with a steady flow of commentary on all the arts all around the world, wherever one of our writers happens to be, without concern for the financial underpinnings of the initiative. I have been supporting our ongoing work with my own funds, and our contributors write as volunteers. It has been a pleasure to watch our readership grow—in the immediate way only online stats can provide—to receive your words of appreciation, and to discover talented, expert writers of all ages, sometimes among friends and colleagues I have known for years and sometimes in unexpected, even somewhat surreal, ways. I hope you have enjoyed the Berkshire Review and its sister publication,New York Arts as much as I have enjoyed making them.

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








The Australian Ballet Dances a Renovated Merry Widow

Merry-widow-act-3-natasha-kuse
Natasha Kusen, Adam Bull and Amy Harris as guests at Chez Maxime in Act III of The Merry Widow. Photo: Jeff Busby.

The Merry Widow
a ballet in three acts
Sydney Opera House, Opera Theatre: 16 November 2011, 1.30 pm
continues in Sydney until 28 November

Choreography - Ronald Hynd
Scenario - Robert Helpmann
based on the operetta by Victor Léon and Leo Stein
Music - Franz Lehár, arranged and orchestrated by John Lanchbery
Décors - Desmond Heeley
Lighting design - Francis Croese

Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra
Conductor - Nicolette Fraillon

Hanna - Rachel Rawlins
Danilo - Robert Curran
Valencienne - Madeleine Eastoe
Camille - Andrew Killian
Baron Mirko Zeta the Pontevedrian Ambassador - Colin Peasley
Njegus - Matthew Donnelly
Kromow - Ben Davis
Pritschitsch - Andrew Wright
Maitre d' - Garry Stocks
Pontevedrian Dancer - Chengwu Gu
Ball Guests, Pontevedrian Dancers, Can-Can Girls, Chez Maxime Diners - Artists of the Australian Ballet

The Merry Widow as a ballet was invented by the Australian Ballet and it has their spirit written all over it: irreverence without sarcasm or cynicism, joie de vivre and any feelings of desperation generally surmountable. It was Robert Helpmann's brainchild, the Australian actor and dancer who got his launch in the 1930's in Ninette de Valois' Sadler's Wells company becoming a very fine dancer especially in the character and demi-character rôles and a legendary Shakespearean actor too. The idea to make the famous operetta into a ballet came in 1975 when Helpmann was the Artistic Director and the Australian Ballet was only 13 years old and in a bit of a financial pickle. The Merry Widow on the one hand was created to be popular and bring in some money from the box office and succeeded in this, but it was really a very ambitious and visionary idea for it was the company's first new full length ballet, a genre Ninette de Valois, speaking from experience, emphasized as very important for a growing company to undertake — in the full 'three act' ballet in the imperial Russian and earlier French tradition a company must tell a single story over an entire evening. The way Hynd, Heeley and Lanchbery went about putting the idea on the stage goes far beyond mere populism which they knew wouldn't have helped the young company at all.

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

Joanna Gabler’s Transcapes at the Milne Public Library, Williamstown, until early December


Joanna Gabler will be exhibiting her most recent works in the David and Joyce Milne Public Library in Williamstownduring the month of November.

Joanna Gabler is a painter, photographer and digital artist who has lived and worked in Williamstown over the past 9 years and exhibits online as well as locally, in New York, and in Warsaw, including her most recent exhibition of Orchid Mandalas in Warsaw University Botanical Garden this past September.

As an avid walker and photographer she became totally immersed in the beauty and splendor of the Nature in Berkshires and spends many happy hours walking in the woods and taking pictures. The result comes as a several thousands of photographs in her archive and a new way of working on her art, which she developed.

She describes it as painting with photography and calls her images “transcapes,” or transfigured landscapes.

Starting in 2006 with the exhibition of flower painting, Gabler exhibits in Milne Public Library every year, with the most recent show in September and October 2010 called “Gateways and Passages” dedicated to memory of her friend Carol Cain, who lost her battle with cancer in August that year.

Joanna works represent variety of subject, many of which related to her travels in Europe. This exhibit is totally focused on the beauty of the Nature in Berkshires and will be on display in Milne Library through the month of November.

For the full list of Joanna Gabler exhibits as well as more detailed information about the artist, please check her website:www.naturetransfigured.com.

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








John Cheek and Larry Wallach to Perform Schubert’s Der Winterreise at Simon’s Rock, Sunday, 12/4 at 3 pm; Lecture by Wallach at Lenox Library, Sun. 11/20 at 4 pm


Over the next three weeks I will be involved in two events relating to Schubert's supreme song-cycle "Die Winterreise."  On Sunday, November 20, at 4 pm, I will present a lecture at the Lenox Library as part of their "Distinguished Lecture Series" entitled "Schubert's Winterreise:  Ultimate Destinations."  Although free-standing, it can also serve as a pre-concert talk to a performance that will take place two weeks later at Kellogg Music Center on the Simon's Rock campus, which will feature Metropolitan Opera bass-baritone John Cheek, with myself at the piano.  If you are familiar with the song literature, this work needs no recommendation from me--it is generally acknowledged as the greatest song-cycle ever composed.  If you are not familiar with it, or the literature, the talk seeks to position this gripping work not so much in the history of music as in the history of Western philosophical thought:  as a precursor of the philosophy of Existentialism which has been one of the most powerful and characteristic trends in modern thought.
Either way, there is no question that the performance to be offered on Dec. 4 will be a revelation.  John Cheek has sung this cycle many times, including performances in New York accompanied by James Levine; he has the music and words in his bones, and puts all the power of his great voice behind the dramatic narrative that Schubert has threaded through these twenty-four songs.  I have also performed this work many times in the past, and can assure you that John's interpretation sheds upon it an original and intense light that is sure to make for a memorable musical and dramatic experience.
So these are the events:
1.  Lecture at the Lenox Library, Sunday November 20 at 4 pm
2.  Concert at Kellogg Music Center, Simon's Rock, Sunday December 4 at 3 pm
Hope to see you at both!
Best,
Larry

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








Live in HD? Donizetti’s Anna Bolena from the Met in Pixels, by Michael Miller


A tortured Smeaton (Tamara Mumford) confesses all to Anna Bolena (Anna Netrebko)

Anna Bolena
Gaetano Donizetti
Felice Romani, libretto
Metropolitan Opera House: 10/15/2011
HD Transmission

The audience poured out of the auditorium, through the lobby, and out into the parking lots with such a happy general purring that it seemed villainous to criticize the brave new entertainment Peter Gelb has brought the world. For almost five years now we have been able to watch High Definition video projections of performances at the Metropolitan Opera in movie theaters and auditoriums like the one at the Clark Art Institute, which I had just vacated. HD Live, as it’s called, has become a hit in most places, I hear—certainly in Great Barrington and Williamstown, where I've seen them, mingling with a dense, enthusiastic, mostly mature crowd. It's often harder to get a ticket to one of these projections than it is to get a seat at Met itself.

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