Clarence Clemons (1942-2011) by Alan Miller

Born-to-run-cover

It is painful to think that Clarence Clemons’ sax will never be heard again. I only saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play once, on the 22nd of March 2003 at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The experience was simultaneously unforgettable and disappointing, both for the audience and, I would imagine, the band, who have not ventured so far south since. The best efforts of Springsteen, Clemons and the rest were thwarted by the SCG’s horrific acoustics and a sound system which, whether due to interference from eastern suburbs cell phones or gremlins, repeatedly conked out entirely. The silver lining was a very special treat, a big, shaggy rendition of “Rosalita,” the only time it was played on the Australian part of their tour. During the sudden intervals of silence when the machinery broke down, the band kept playing, either in the hope that the malfunction would be brief, or because the huge E Street sound, like a locomotive, takes some time to come to a complete stop. Clemons, of course, who needed no amplifier, was so intrinsic to that sound that you anticipated his roaring solos even when he wasn’t playing.

Read the full tribute on The Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts.

Alan Miller

A New Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: Sign the Petition Calling for an Open Competition by Alan Miller

Giardini
The good news is that the Australia Council for the Arts has announced plans to build a new Australian pavilion in Venice, the bad news is that it plans to choose a design based on an invited competition. This is an invitation to mediocrity, which is coming out of our ears at the moment. A new biennale pavilion would seem to be the ideal excuse for a big public competition, which in my opinion should be open to artists as well as architects. As a brief, a biennale pavilion is not exactly the Large Hadron Collider. Australia was lucky to score one of the last sites left in the Giardini, and what gets built there ought to be be surprising, delightful and provocative. Australians love their sheds, and an open competition would be an opportunity to build the Ur-Shed, the mother shed, as it were. If you agree, then please sign the petition set up by OpenHAUS.

Read about the petition on the Berkshire Review, an international Journal for the Arts

Alan Miller

Figure, Memorie, Spazio: disegni da Fra’Angelico a Leonardo, by Daniel B. Gallagher

Figure, Memorie, Spazio: disegni da Fra’Angelico a Leonardo (Sala delle Reali Poste, Galleria degli Uffizi) and La Grafica del Quattrocento: appunti di teoria, conoscenza e gusto (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi), Florence. Closed June 12th.

Leonardo da Vinci, Adorazione dei Magi, oil on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze.

The first step towards understanding Renaissance drawing is to take stock of the plethora of reasons for its existence, ranging from doodles to elaborate studies in human anatomy. What started as a design for sculpture may well have evolved into a preparatory sketch for painting. Drawing was the artist’s way of jotting down an idea before losing it and before knowing precisely what, if anything, it might develop into later. Artists are even more likely than composers and writers to be driven to insanity without a sketchbook nearby. Precisely because drawing was considered an indispensable daily discipline, it became the privileged means of unlocking the cognitive processes that led masters to produce their greatest work. Whereas we tend to approach sketchbooks as modern-day detectives, at the time they were produced, budding apprentices knew full well that they were the most reliable entryway into the minds of their teachers. In the fifteenth century, they were also considered the most convenient way of experimenting with new styles and recording the results of studies of the human figure, nature, and the art of the ancients.

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







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A Few Words on the Edinburgh International Film Festival. by Caroline Bottger

Eva Green and Ewan McGregor in David Mackenzie's Perfect Sense

Though the weather has hardly been Cannes-like in Edinburgh for the past month, the Edinburgh International Film Festival has been screening films which show that it can be just as cutting-edge as Cannes.

Setting makes a film festival, and Scotland does not do glamorous (although the word itself is of Scottish orgin—ed.). It’s not that it’s shabby, it’s just not something that appeals to the Scottish people. The phrase “down to earth” is only a starting point in describing life here. The utter lack of pretension is staggering at times, and walking around here, you have to struggle to remember that a few nights ago, Ewan McGregor was at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre promoting his latest film, Perfect Sense, directed by David Mackenzie.

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






Jan Swafford, Chamber Music at the Boston Conservatory: listen to "They That Mourn", by Charles Warren

Composer Jan Swafford

On Palm Sunday there was a remarkable Boston Conservatory concert of music by Jan Swafford. Swafford is widely known for his books on Charles Ives and Brahms, and The Vintage Guide to Classical Music. He is known locally also for many fine program notes and pre-concert talks for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Swafford has been writing music going back to the 1970s and has had performances in many places and won awards for this work. The recent concert centered around the cello, magnificently played—even heroically, considering the amount and intensity of the material—by Emmanuel Feldman, who was joined variously by his excellent colleagues in the Omega Trio, violinist Eva Gruesser and pianist George Sebastian Lopez.

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







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Looking Back at the Boston Winter and Spring Music Season, 2010-11, by Charles Warren

The New England Conservatory, Boston, in a vintage postcard

Part I—Symphony

The winter music season in Boston made a strong beginning with James Levine leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in what turned out to be his last set of concerts with the orchestra for the year—and perhaps forever. Levine’s spring BSO concerts were cancelled for health reasons, and, of course he has resigned as Music Director.The January program consisted of two short operas, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (the latter was originally intended for staging as an opera but became an “oratorio” due to production constraints—over the years the work has been fully staged many times). Levine has led Bluebeard here before, and he has a way with it.

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







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Women of Will, the Complete Journey , by Tina Packer , with Tina Packer and Nigel Gore, Shakespeare & Company, Bernstein Theater, Lenox, by Deborah Brown

Womenofwillsco11kspra_036
Tina Packer and Nigel Gore in Women of Will, 2011. Photo Kevin Sprague.

Women of Will, The Complete Journey
, by Tina Packer
, with Tina Packer and Nigel Gore
Shakespeare & Company, Bernstein Theater, Lenox, Massachusetts
Through July 10, 2011

For lovers of Shakespeare and those new to or fearful of the bard, Tina Packer’s “Women of Will, The Complete Journey,” aka “WOW,” playing in Parts I-V on five evenings and matinees through July 10 at Shakespeare & Co’s Bernstein theater, is more than a wow—it is a tour de force for acting, conception, and for what theater was for the Elizabethans and what it can be now, but often is self-consciously not. These performances hold to the Elizabethan venue with imagination leading the way. The five parts illustrate a different theme, repeating in a sense the five-act dramatic structure of Shakespeare’s plays.

For theater: this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can’t stop thinking about what I saw, what I heard, what I learned. The cumulative experience, by the end, felt as if we all made appearance on the stage, and that the characters had been set spinning, not tightly wrapped, ready to be wholly identified and embraced again.

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






Métro insolite by Clive Lamming (English translation) by Alan Miller

Bande--parte-mtro

There is a type of city, familiar but seductive, which resists writers even as its charms produce no shortage of readers. Paris, of course, is the number one suspect in the line-up. Overwhelmed by the city and its stories, writers run the perilous risk of being reduced to that style which is simultaneously vague and soppy (The American Society for the Promotion of Bad Writing About Venice was founded to celebrate such writing). Paris is too much, always too much, an excess which perhaps demands a microscope rather than an Imax camera. This was George Perec's approach in his famous Tentative d’Epuisement d’un lieu Parisien, a book as list of all that happens in one little corner of the city. Métro insolite is much more practical, but it too is an attempt to exhaust the inexhaustible.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts.

Alan Miller

Métro insolite de Clive Lamming par Alan Miller

Bande--parte-mtro

Il y a une espèce de ville, familière mais séduisante, qui résiste aux écrivains lorsque ses charmes ne produisent aucun manque des lecteurs. Paris, bien sûr, est suspect numéro un dans cette parade d’identification. La risque pour les écrivains, périlleux, est d'être bouleversé par la ville et ses histoires, réduit à un discours à la fois vague et, souvent, gnangnan(La Société Américaine de la Mauvaise Ecriture de Venise existe à célébrer ce vaste genre de littérature). Paris est trop, toujours trop, et c’est peut-être cet excès qui exige un microscope au lieu d’un appareil Imax. C’était l’idée de Georges Perec dans son fameux Tentative d’Epuisement d’un lieu Parisien, un livre comme liste de tous ce qui se passait dans un petit coin de la ville. Métro insolite est beaucoup plus pratique, mais c’est aussi une espèce d'épuisement de l'inépuisable.

Lisez le reste au Berkshire Review, un journal international des arts

Alan Miller

The Pollini Project – Stockhausen, Schumann, Chopin, Royal Festival Hall May 25, 2011, by Gabriel Kellett

Maurizio-pollini
Maurizio Pollini

The Pollini Project – Stockhausen, Schumann, Chopin
Royal Festival Hall
May 25, 2011

Maurizio Pollini, piano

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Klavierstück VII
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Klavierstück IX
Robert Schumann: Concert sans orchestre (First version of Piano Sonata in F minor, Op.14)
Fryderyk Chopin: Prélude in C sharp minor, Op.45
Fryderyk Chopin: Barcarolle in F sharp, Op.60
Fryderyk Chopin: Ballade No.4 in F minor, Op.52
Fryderyk Chopin: Berceuse in D flat, Op.57
Fryderyk Chopin: Scherzo No.2 in B flat minor, Op.31

More years ago than I care to remember (OK, about ten), Edward Moore, my piano teacher at university, told me he used to be a great fan of Maurizio Pollini, but had grown disenchanted with him because he thought his playing had become completely dry, overly safe and devoid of emotion. Perhaps because he was by far the best teacher I'd ever had, I took this opinion seriously and allowed it to influence my perception of Pollini ever after, remaining a devout sceptic despite his evidently immense popularity. Even when I was working at the Royal Festival Hall, struggling to cope with the amount of CD sales generated by a signing after one of his concerts, I remained unmoved. Now, in the middle of the 'Pollini Project' (i.e. a series of five concerts spread over a period of as many months, rather than his usual one per year), it seems a good time finally to attempt to form my own opinion of him as he is today, perhaps eventually investigating his back catalogue and attempting to uncover any discernible process of change in his playing.

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