Lucy MacGillis: “Casa” – New Paintings from Italy, at the Hoadley Gallery, Lenox, July 7 – August 2, by Michael Miller


Lucy MacGillis, Per Terra, oil on canvas, 2010-11

Lucy MacGillis' July exhibition at the Hoadley Gallery, ongoing since 2003, has become almost a Berkshires institution by now. There is always a good deal of anticipation, warm-hearted enjoyment of her latest work, and the paintings sell fast. Each year there is impressive growth in the subtlety of her vision and in the emotional power of here work.

Lucy grew up not far from Melville’s famous prospect of Mt. Greylock, surrounded by the rolling expanses, hills, and wooded slopes of the Berkshires. Since 2000 she has lived and worked in a small Umbrian town, Monte Castello di Vibio, not far from Todi, painting landscapes and familiar objects around her studio and the simple house where she lives. The distant views and the rooms of the house alike are filled with the clear, warm light of Umbria. As she explained to me, showing me photographs as illustrations, her point of departure is this all-encompassing light and its subtle changes through the course of the day and the seasons. Wherever she goes from there, she is guided by her eye. This visual experience, she says, slows down her painting, reflecting the slow, tranquil life in the town.

Read the full notice on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







(download)

Mid-Century American Musical Negotiations: TMC Orchestra plays Barber, Copland, and Bernstein, by Larry Wallach

The Cast of "Billy the Kid." Featuring Erick Hawkins, Eugene Loring, and Lew Christensen, center, 1938. Photo George Platt Lynes. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concert of American Music, July 6, 2011

Samuel Barber, Second Essay for Orchestra (1942)
Ken-David Masur conducting

Aaron Copland, Billy the Kid ballet suite (1938)
Robert Treviño conducting

Leonard Bernstein, Symphony no. 2, “The Age of Anxiety” (1948)
Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting, Nolan Pearson piano

Tanglewood mounts a big spectacular every year on July 4th, with James Taylor, the Boston Pops, and fireworks. An equally appropriate, and perhaps more nuanced, way to acknowledge the role music plays in our national consciousness is to offer a program such as the one which occurred two days later in Ozawa Hall. While each work on this program counts as a classic, and the first two have undoubtedly been played in more than one pops concert, the conjunction of the three offers a thoughtful way to experience and appraise the work of three defining figures of 20th century American music.

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







(download)

Heavenly lengths…yeah! Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs discuss Steffani’s Niobe with Michael Miller (PODCAST)


Paul O'Ddette and Stephen Stubbs, Artistic Directors of the Boston Early Music Festival

There is a lot of talk about long operas these days, in the light of the Boston Early Music Festival's triumphant production of Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe, which, as cut by the directors, lasted about 3 hours 45 minutes; and now an important revival of Rossini's Guillaume Tell is coming up, which also promises to be a long evening, potentially as long a five hours. Huntley Dent has just reviewed Henrik Ibsen's early rarity, Emperor and Galilean,presented by the National Theatre, London, with the play's two parts of four hours each reduced to a single evening of three and a half hours. It seems this goes against the modern grain, although blockbuster movies tend to be long and certain genres of popular novels very long. Yet Francesca Zambello, in her interview with Seth Lachterman for New York Arts, pointed out her concern to keep the Glimmerglass production of Carmen within temporal bounds that would be acceptable to a wide audience (in actuality 2 hours, 50 minutes, with intermissions, which is pretty well standard), and length is usually the first thing an operatic neophyte complains about. 

Read the full article and listen to the podcast on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







(download)

Success or Excess? The Boston Early Music Festival 2011, by Larry Wallach


Johann Christoph Bach (`642 – 1703)

1. Frances Fitch - French claveçin music (Clérambault, Le Roux, Rameau, Jacquet de la Guerre)

2. David Hyun-su Kim - Beethoven and Schumann on the Fortepiano (Goethe House)

3. Boston Camerata (Anne Azéma, Joel Cohen) - Roman de Fauvel

4. William Porter - Leipzig Chorale Preludes

5. Jordi Savall - Irish Music

6. BEMF Orchestra (Robert Mealy) - Bach, Corelli, Handel

7. Keyboard Festival: Harpsichord Concerts

a. Peter Sykes
b. Luca Guglielmi

8. Keyboard Festival: Fortepiano concerts

a. Christoph Hammer - Beck, Clementi
b. Kristian Bezuidenhout - Mozart Sonatas

9. Michael Sponsellor, et al. - J. Chr. Bach: “Meine Freundin, du bist schön”
10. Kristian Bezuidenhout et al. - Mozart: Fantasy, Piano Quartets

Part I

The number, variety, and quality range of the BEMF musical events is so vast that it induces a kind of giddiness or vertigo over the course of the week that can be taken as either the frenzy of enthusiasm or the disorientation of overload. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Going to concerts is always a social event, and attending a series of them along with numbers of articulate, knowledgeable people (including the total stranger who might be wearing an “Earlier than Thou” T-shirt) with whom you can share information and compare responses is stimulating—at the very worst—at best highly enlightening.

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







(download)

Boston Early Music Festival 2011, by Michael Miller

Waiting for Michael Tsalka in the Auditorium of the First Church Boston. Photo © 2011 Michael Miller.

1. Ensemble Lucidarium directed by Avery Gosfield & Francis Biggi: Ninfale—Ovid, poetry, and music in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages,

2. Fringe: Concert-symposium on Schubert and the piano: Stephen Porter, piano

3. Organ Mini-Festival, William Porter plays Bach’s Leipzig Chorales

4. Jordi Savall, The Celtic Viol

5. BEMF Orchestra, Robert Mealy, leader, "The Orchestra at Play."

6. Paul O’Dette plays Marco dall'Aquila

7. Fortepiano section of the Keyboard Mini-Festival: Christoph Hammer and Kristian Bezuidenhout

8. Clavichord section: Michael Tsalka

9. Fringe: Christoph Hammer Trio at the Church of the Covenant in 18th and 19th century music

10. Trio Settecento: The Alchemical Violin

11. Tallis Scholars: Choral Music of Victoria

12. Kristian Bezuidenhout and soloists from Freiburg Chamber Orchestra: Mozart Fantasie and Piano Quartets

13. Tragicomedia: Steffani, Handel, etc.

14. Mezzaluna and Paul O’Dette: Ottaviano Petrucci: music for Recorder ensemble and lute

A contemporary art dealer I know once exclaimed, as I was taking him around an old master drawings show I had organized, "this stuff has a lot of history. There's a lot of history here..." as if history were a tangible quality that was somehow imparted to an object, whether by the artist, or by the physical touch of time, or by the many people who had successively owned it, or perhaps by something else...history! Every two years in June, history pours into the already deeply historical city of Boston in the form of historically-informed instrumentalists and singers, musicologists, historical instruments, historical instrument builders, historical editions, and manuscripts. Only a few of the historical folk—locals, most likely—knew that history was being made all around them, while some were immersed in the Roman de Fauvel and others were enraptured by Steffani's Niobe, Regina di Tebe, as I was. As I sat down for the performance, I noticed a few more empty seat than I might have expected, and during the first intermission, I ventured out on Tremont Street for a few minutes. The Niobe audience crowded along the pavement, as if it were a riverbank, some absorbed in lively conversation about what they had just seen and heard, others, mostly neatly suited males, who were  perhaps there because of their position in the business or philanthropic worlds, or accompanying their wives, gazed longingly across the street at the Irish bars, where the flat screens blazed and roars of excitement escaped into the street. Some almost began to make a move, but they were stopped, either by the public gaze or a wifely hand, and contented themselves with a furtive look at their smartphones. "I think we're winning," one distinguished gentleman said under his breath. Not a soul was ready to indulge in the traditional—unquotable—hockey cheer. While Queen Niobe's mental condition deteriorated so shockingly on stage, the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup from the Vancouver Canucks, the first time they have possessed it since 1971-72.

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







(download)

A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 34: Early Listening


Philippe Jaroussky as Anfione in Agostino Steffani's NIobe. Photo André Costantini.

Maybe the best thing about the early music movement is the way it has gotten main-stream artists, as they used to be called, to take music written before 1750 seriously. Handel's operas are now staged across a range that extends from historical reconstruction to the most advanced stagings. Operas that used to be radically cut, rearranged, transposed, or just ignored, are now afforded textual validity and theatrical viability. On the performance side we now have the finest young singers and players involved.

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







(download)

Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance at the Almeida Theatre, London, Review by Huntley Dent

Screen_shot_2011-07-05_at_6

A Delicate Balance
Written by Edward Albee

Directed by James Macdonald
Almeida Theatre, London

Shaken and stirred. The mid-century denizens in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance must have seemed immortal at the time, 1966, when the play was premiered. They are Dorothy Parker's gin-soaked contemporaries, morphing into Stephen Sondheim's ladies who lunch. Along with their Wall Street-country club husbands, they prowled the veldt from Westchester to the Upper East Side, confident that they were at the top of the food chain, putting down stakes at a private table at "21" and needing only a five-to-one martini in their canteens, seven-to-one if the terrain got rocky. Brought back as the cast of the hit retro TV series, Mad Men, this New York City type arouses nostalgia, but Albee experienced the real thing—and his reaction was pitiless.

Press here for the full article by Huntley Dent.

Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre by Huntley Dent

Emperor-and-galilean-national-

Grand mal Caesar. As an example of a mountain bringing forth a mouse, nothing is more perfect than reviewing an exhaustingly long, exhaustively serious drama. When the reader hears that the subject is the foibles of organized religion, the boat has sunk before the first torpedo is fired. Nevertheless.

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

Andrew Miller

Gardenia at Sadler’s Wells, by Huntley Dent


Gardenia
Les ballets C de la B

Sadler's Wells
June 30, 2011

Gardenia-007
Gardenia at Sadler's Wells | Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Gaga ladies. Unless you are a devotee of drag icons from yesteryear, those who populate the stage at Sadler's Wells might be a head trip. There are eight, although one is billed as a "real" woman—a transsexual actress named Vanessa Van Durme—and what they do seems at first completely trite. Here are Liza, Marlene, Carol, and Gloria, treated as blow-up effigies of femininity. Last names are discretionary in a demi monde where your impersonation is your whole identity. The usual business was afoot: ultra glam costumes, dirty jokes ("How do you get four queers to sit on one dining room chair? Turn it upside down."), rouge thick enough for a baboon's bottom, and lip synching to "Somehwere Over the Rainbow." So far as content goes, Gardenia had almost none that wasn't as worn out as a drag queen's ________ (insert your own body part).

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







Wp-socializer-sprite-mask-16px

Gardenia at Sadler's Wells

Gaga ladies. Unless you are a devotee of drag icons from yesteryear, those who populate the stage at Sadler's Wells might be a head trip. There are eight, although one is billed as a "real" woman—a transsexual actress named Vanessa Van Durme—and what they do seems at first completely trite. Here are Liza, Marlene, Carol, and Gloria, treated as blow-up effigies of femininity. Last names are discretionary in a demi monde where your impersonation is your whole identity. The usual business was afoot: ultra glam costumes, dirty jokes ("How do you get four queers to sit on one dining room chair? Turn it upside down."), rouge thick enough for a baboon's bottom, and lip synching to "Somehwere Over the Rainbow." So far as content goes, Gardenia had almost none that wasn't as worn out as a drag queen's ________ (insert your own body part).