
Sydney Opera House, Utzon Room: 30 October 2011
Darius Milhaud
La Cheminée du Roi René
Claude-Paul Taffanel
Wind Quintet in G minor
Daniel McCallum
The Omega Quintet
Carl Reinecke
Wind Octet, opus 216
The Sydney Omega Ensemble
David Rowden - clarinet
Emma Sholl - flute
Shefali Pryor - oboe
Ben Hoadley - bassoon
Euan Harvey - horn
Rowena Watts - clarinet
Robert Llewellyn - bassoon
Francesco Lo Sordo - horn
In the interstices of the Sydney Opera House, between the Opera Theatre, the famous steps up to the podium and the stage door loading dock, is the Utzon Room looking out to the east over Sydney Harbour. Jørn Utzon redesigned the former "reception room" with a mind for its use for chamber music and recitals (he also redesigned the Western Colonnade to welcome theatre goers into the playhouse theater, though unfortunately not the Opera Theatre itself). The Utzon Room magically feels at once like a natural sandstone cave and a modernist version of an English drawing room. It is cozy, long relative to its depth and ceiling height (though not at all cramped being about 3 meters high) with plate glass windows about the height of a person stretching the length of the room facing east, looking across Wahganmuggalee (Farm Cove) with the Botanic Gardens, the sandstone ledges by Mrs Macquarie's Chair and the industrial iron architecture of Garden Island navy base behind. Opposite the windows, along the other length stretches Jørn Utzon's tapestry Tribute to CPE Bach, its islands of clear and vivid secondary colors complement the pale gray cement ceiling beams which hold up the Opera House above. These beams run the length of the roof, sloping at the end right to the floor, supporting the outside steps, gradually tapering and changing shape as they do from decahedral to rectangular. The musicians stand in front of the window, facing the tapestry which no doubt has a strong favorable effect on the acoustics. Thus the room, also seeming, like a sandstone cave, much older than it really is, has more than its fair share of atmosphere and gravitas, especially for a Sydney concert hall, and could risk overshadowing its musicians in a way, for example, the City Recital Hall at Angel Place could not. The acoustics are very clean and balanced across the spectrum, contributing to the clean, lucid, rounded sound of the ensemble and although the view of the Harbour shows constant maritime activity, no noise gets through the windows, even when an enormous cruise ship floated by (albeit under tug) or one of the hooning speedboats which give joy rides to tourists.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!
The winner of the inaugural AJ Writing Prize in association with architecture practice Berman Guedes Stretton has been announced, and New York Arts / Berkshire Review editor Alan Miller has won the prize over six finalists who were chosen from 91 entries to the contest which was launched in June to find the best up-and-coming architecture critic aged under 35.
The piano music of Franz Liszt makes performing the central issue, a fundamental structural presence. Twentieth-century Werktreue just isn't enough for these pieces. Many of Liszt's pieces are keyboard performances of other composers' music heard with Liszt's ears. We call them arrangements or transcriptions, but what they are is a way of hearing. What always surprises me about a number of these transcriptions is their reticence. Liszt's arrangement of the Schubert "Ave Maria" is almost demure, as befits the subject. His famous Isolde's Verklärung is surprisingly faithful, and to my ears only sounds pianistic in the rattling chords underneath the climax of the piece. Pianists always say that these transcriptions are like actual piano pieces, not copies of anything. They make us hear what piano playing is to Liszt.
Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement
Royal Academy of Arts, London
September 17 – December 11th
Curated by Richard Kendall, Curator at Large, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA; Jill DeVonyar, independent curator;
and Ann Dumas, Exhibition Curator, Royal Academy of Arts
Can anything new be said about Degas and the dance? Those beautiful pastels and oils of rehearsal studios, those figures framed by stage flats, the three-dimensional sculptures have all passed into the canon of art history, and they are as inseparably linked to Edgar Degas as are the subtexts of voyeurism and misogyny. But the Royal Academy’s current exhibition, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, aims for something new as its subtitle suggests. Of course, there is plenty to delight the eye with a spread of some eighty-five works by one of the most idiosyncratic of Impressionist artists, and the range of major loans—especially from private collections—is staggering as is the quality of the selection. This bounty is not surprising, given that Richard Kendall, probably the doyen of Degas specialists, is the chief curator; yet what makes this exhibition stand out among the generality of shows on Degas is that it contrives to mount two exhibitions at once: one on the artist’s obsession with the ballet and ballerinas, the other about the nineteenth-century’s obsession with deciphering locomotion.
The two themes crisscross and run parallel through the stately galleries of the Royal Academy, which are large enough to accommodate crowds without completely undermining the intimacy of most of the works displayed. The effect is aided by the low level of lighting required for drawings and pastels, which create a penumbra-like effect in most of the rooms. The main challenge faced by the organizers was how to break down a seemingly restricted theme, but it has been credibly met by topics that move chronologically across the painter’s career while focusing on issues such as mobile viewing, Degas as a photographer, or color and dynamism. Degas and the Ballet establishes connections between the newly established medium of photography and the painter’s oeuvre: one of his early paintings of dancers was tellingly characterized by a critic as “a photograph;” the innovative photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey in the 1880s were known to Degas; and he himself became an enthusiastic photographer in the last decade of his career. While the extent to which scientific studies of movement played a role in Degas’s art may be moot, the exhibition does make a strongly convincing case that the photography of animal locomotion was not only “in the air,” but also a central preoccupation of many artists and theoreticians
City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney: 22 October 2011
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata Quasi una Fantasia, no. 14 in C sharp minor, opus 27 no. 2
Stephen Hough
Sonata for Piano (broken branches)
Alexander Scriabin
Sonata no. 4 in F sharp major
Sonata no. 5 in F sharp major
Franz Liszt
Sonata in B minor, S178
Stephen Hough - piano
Stephen Hough says that he chose this program to be one of strange sonatas, which is altogether fitting for Liszt's 200th birthday. The program, consisting entirely of sonatas — no préludes, études or the like (not counting the three encore pieces) — might theoretically have been stranger with, say, one of Pierre Boulez's sonatas, but Hough seems to have been after a more subtle variety of strangeness. A sense of mystery and a very personal quality, very expressive of the internal world marry these pieces under Hough's playing. The honesty and faithfulness to the Truth in his playing brought the music close to poetry. Though making music and poems are not the same or even parallel activities, the word 'sonata' shares an etymology with 'sonnet', the stem son- having to do with sound, and, as Stephen Hough points out in the program note, a sonata is sounded rather than sung, the piano having to make do on its own without words. Hough also pointed out in his short speech in-between the Beethoven and his own piece (usually I'd be against spiels in amongst the music, but Hough is a very good public speaker, thoughtful an interesting, with the voice of a 1930's radio presenter), that Liszt, whose birthday fell on the very day of this recital, invented the concept and the word 'recital' as a sort of pure recitation of music of a single musician. Thus, though sounded and not sung there is the similar expectation in the audience, the similar solitude of the performer as in a poetry recitation, far from a mere reading, but an honest expression of the sonata as if it were naturally being created then and there, as Hough says 'as if the notes were still wet on the page.' Mozart wrote something similar once, that the height of piano playing is to play as if you had composed the music yourself.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!
On the day following her amazing recital with Katherine Chi at Jordan Hall, Paula Robison and I met at the house she shares with her husband, Scott Nikrenz, with its bird's eye view of Frederick Law Olmsted's house and garden. In the hour or so we talked we covered a lot of ground: the concert, her preparations for it, and some of the music she played...we talked about Sidney Lanier, the poet, linguist, and self-taught flute virtuoso, who died at 39 of tuberculosis contracted as a Confederate prisoner of war, and Charles T. Griffes, who died at 35 of the same disease, leaving behind a remarkable body of exploratory compositions, Paul Taffanel, the founder of modern flute playing and the teacher of Ms. Robison's teacher, the great Marcel Moyse. We talked about Isabella Stewart Gardner and her museum, Bernard and Mary Berenson, her brother Logan Pearsall Smith, Marlboro, Marcel Moyse, Rudolf Serkin, and Pablo Casals. We also talked about spirituality, Christianity and Judaism, and the CDs she has made in collaboration with Berkshire artist Jim Schantz, Places of the Spirit, featuring the Berkshires in one album and the Israel in another. And then there was the Tannery Pond Concerts and their knowledgeable audience, the heritage of her progressively-minded parents...and driving in Boston!
Berlioz, Béatrice et Bénédict
Opera Boston
October 21, 2011
Sean Panikkar - Bénédict
Julie Boulianne - Béatrice
Heather Buck - Héro
Kelley O'Connor - Ursule
Robert Honeysucker - Don Pedro
David McFerrin - Claudio
Andrew Funk - Somarone
Phil Thompson - Leonato
Conducted by Gil Rose
Directed by David Kneuss
Scenic and Costume design by Robert Perdziola
Lighting design by Christopher Ostrom
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing centers on Hero and Claudio, two young lovers who are thrown into disarray by a villain who leads Claudio to believe that Hero has betrayed him. There is a lot of marvelous business with the local constable, Dogberry, and his friends, who disrupt the villain and save the day. And then there is a parallel lovers’ story involving Beatrice and Benedict, two highly clever people who like to spar with each other, seeming to hate each other, and yet are eventually brought to realize that they like each other tremendously and wish to be together.
The University at Albany Department of Music is pleased to present Mosaic-Arts in Don Giovanni as part of the Bel Canto series at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus. Performances will be held in the Studio Theatre on Friday and Saturday, October 21 & 22, 2011 at 7pm.