Barangaroo: Not so Fast? by Alan Miller

Barangaroo-from-pyrmont

The saga of Sydney’s Barangaroo has finally reached the point where its twists and turns are no longer predictable. The developer Lend Lease and its resolutely faux design, once paced to a seemingly unassailable lead by a compliant government and a shameless PR operation, has punctured a tire. Without a spare tube or pump, they wait by the side of the road for a team car which itself has been totaled. Meanwhile “sandal-wearing, muesli-chewing, bike-riding pedestrians” are gaining fast. No one knows how many kilometres there are to go. Consider recent events:

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

Alan Miller

Tannery Pond Concert Series Opens on May 28th Amerigo trio and Alon Goldstein playing Dohnányi, Debussy, and Brahms

Christian Steiner, director of the Tannery Pond Concerts, with Nikolai

Tannery Pond Concert Series Opens on May 28th Amerigo trio and Alon Goldstein playing Dohnányi, Debussy, and Brahms

TICKETS NOW ON SALE

For several years now, I’ve been writing about the Tannery Pond Concert Series with special enthusiasm. No other other summer festival offers the same mix of established musicians of the highest level of accomplishment together with an equally exciting pool of emerging talent. these are young soloists and chamber musicians who have been playing independently long enough to have developed a fully-formed interpretation...and, I may as well say it...stage presence. The Director, Christian Steiner, as the foremost photographer of musicians (and also an outstanding pianist), is in daily contact with musicians at all stages of their careers, and this gives him a unique knowledge of the field. Beyond that, he is constantly travelling between Europe and the West Coast, attending concerts and fine-tuning his perceptions of young talent. I know of no concert organizer who has quite the combination of energy, determination to find the best for his program, knowledge, and taste.

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






The Young Russian Pianist, Gleb Ivanov, triumphs in Haydn, Chopin, and Prokofiev at a Tannery Pond benefit, by Michael Miller

Gleb_ivanov
Gleb Ivanov

Gleb Ivanov
Tannery Pond Concerts Benefit
May 7, 2011

Haydn, Sonata in C, Hob.XVI:48
Chopin, Four Mazurkas, Op. 41
Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 1, in G Minor
Nocturne, Op. 55, No. 1, in F Minor
Prokofiev, Sonata No. 6 in A Major, Op. 82

Another most impressive discovery of Christian Steiner’s, pianist Gleb Ivanov, a twenty-eight-year-old M.A. from the Manhattan School of Music, played a stirring program of Haydn, Chopin, and Prokofiev at a private benefit concert for Mr. Steiner's Tannery Pond Concerts. Here was a pianist of impeccable—really formidable—technique, powerful intelligence, and marked individuality, playing with a concentration that made the audience hang on every note, putting across his point of view with full conviction. And this point of view was most definitely worth hearing—and that is an understatement. Any musician who can play with such polish, grandeur, and intelligence has my deep respect.

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






The Boston Early Music Festival: a Preview with Concert Schedules, and a few Reminiscences of 2009, by Michael Miller

The Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, with Artistic Co-Directors Stephen Stubbs and Paul O'Dette right of center

A PRACTICAL NOTE:
Here are three different guides to BEMF. All should be easily readable on mobile devices.
1.See below for a listing by type of event.
2. Click here for a full schedule by date and time.
3. Click here for a full listing of the Fringe concerts.

There are only a handful of festivals that have a real focus—one powerful enough to generate excitement among the musicians and the audience alike. The Boston Early Music Festival, now in tis 16th year is one of the supreme examples. Early music, which can extend from Ars Antiqua through Beethoven, is notorious among people who haven't taken the plunge as a dry, scholarly variety of music-making, in which the thin, scrapy sounds of out-of-tune, obsolete instruments appeal mightily to a narrow clique of elderly males with unkempt long hair and beards, and perhaps beads and Birkenstocks, and their unprepossessing consorts. I find it amazing that some people can cling to this notion so far into the maturity of the movement. On the contrary, at the Boston Early Music Festival, you will find enthusiastic musicians and listeners of all ages, some of whom migrated from rock and folk backgrounds, who flock to Boston to learn the latest discovery about a score or an instrument, and to enjoy the sensual pleasure and intellectual stimulation of hearing great music played by the most accomplished players in the field. What festival could justify itself more compellingly that that? All you have to do is go to a concert or two, listen, and observe.

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






The New Opera to present a concert of music from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” at 8 pm on Friday, May 27th in Chapin Hall at Williams College

Dobbs-shotwell
Mezzo-Soprano Vivien Shotwell and Soprano Charlotte Dobbs

The New Opera will present a concert of music from Handel's greatest opera, "Giulio Cesare", at 8:00 pm on Friday May 27th, in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus. Soprano Charlotte Dobbs, a Juilliard and Curtis Institute of Music graduate who has performed frequently at the Marlboro Music Festival, and mezzo-soprano Vivien Shotwell, twice a Metropolitan Opera regional finalist, will sing the roles of Cleopatra and Caesar. They will be accompanied by a baroque instrumental ensemble. Conductor Dan Foster will lead from the harpsichord.

Tickets are $15 for adults, available at the door. Students are admitted free. For more information, call (413) 458-2684, or visit: www.thenewopera.org

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






Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler’s 9th, by Steven Kruger

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Egon Schiele, Tod und Mann II, 1911, oil on canvas, Leopold Museum, Vienna

The San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor

Davies Hall, San Francisco
Thursday, May 5, 2011

Mahler - Symphony No. 9 in D major (1910)

Mahler's Ninth Symphony stood alone last Thursday at Davies Hall, as the San Francisco Symphony prepared for its European tour. It has become normal practice to schedule this work with a long, rather liquid "intermission" preceding it, instead of any music. And audiences intuitively understand why. They have signed on for an emotional catharsis.

The Mahler Ninth is a "Death" Symphony in deadly earnest, similar to the Shostakovich 15th. There is nothing cute about the miseries it contains, like the hanging of "Till Eulenspiegel,” or merely theatrical, such as the rifle-shots in Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory.” Mahler had recently been diagnosed with the heart infection which would ultimately kill him, and this work is his "Death and Transfiguration" in purely orchestral terms. One of two, really, if one leaves out Das Lied von der Erde. It seems that having completed it, the dying man felt so energized he decided to give death another whirl with the Tenth Symphony! And there is no reason to suppose it would have been any less successful than the Ninth, if Mahler had only lived to work out the kinks of orchestration. As it stands, the Tenth Symphony remains a blanker tombstone than Mahler might have desired, since musicologists disagree wildly about how deeply to chisel and what to inscribe, but both works travel the road of misery from yearning to acceptance and at the end find themselves six feet under.

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






British Liaisons: The Australian Ballet Flowers From Its British Roots, by Andrew Miller


The Australian Ballet dances Ninette de Valois' Checkmate: The Black Queen (Miwako Kubota, front centre) cuts past the knights to the Red King (Colin Peasley, back centre). Photo: Jess Bialek.

British Liaisons
Sydney Opera House, Opera Theatre: 7 May 2011
continues in Sydney until 21 May, in Melbourne from 25 August - 3 September 2011

The Australian Ballet
The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra
conductor - Michael Lloyd

Ballet is very much an international art form, its artists often experience wanderlust. It was Catherine de Medici who brought Renaissance Italian balletto from Florence to Henri II's court and encouraged theatrical dance there. In the following centuries, Louis XIV defined the French national ballet style a gave it a permanent home. Then over four generations, four french choreographers, Didelot (Pushkin was a fan), Perrot (Giselle), Saint-Léon (Coppélia) and Petipa (Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake with Lev Ivanov, and Nutcracker), each left France after completing their training, for St. Petersburg to do wonderful things for the Imperial Ballet. In the 20th Century, to finish a satisfying historical palindrome (see Margot Fonteyn's book The Magic of Dance), four Russian dancers and choreographers immigrated to the west: Fokine, Massine, Nijinksy and Balanchine, all thanks in part to Serge Diaghilev. They, and other Russians traveled beyond Europe; Pavlova indefatigably spread her art over the globe, reaching Australia. This sloshing back and forth of Europe's creative ballet talent kept the national styles fresh when they tended toward artificiality without destroying or making uniform their unique characters, often by sharing foreign folk dancing and inspiring a rediscovery of the local vernacular.

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






British Liaisons: The Australian Ballet Flowers From Its British Roots by Andrew Miller

Australian-ballet-miwako-kubot
Ballet is very much an international art form, its artists often experience wanderlust. It was Catherine de Medici who brought Renaissance Italian balletto from Florence to Henri II's court and encouraged theatrical dance there. In the following centuries, Louis XIV defined the French national ballet style a gave it a permanent home. Then over four generations, four french choreographers, Didelot (Pushkin was a fan), Perrot (Giselle), Saint-Léon (Coppélia) and Petipa (Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake with Lev Ivanov, and Nutcracker), each left France after completing their training, for St. Petersburg to do wonderful things for the Imperial Ballet. In the 20th Century, to finish a satisfying historical palindrome (see Margot Fonteyn's book The Magic of Dance), four Russian dancers and choreographers immigrated to the west: Fokine, Massine, Nijinksy and Balanchine, all thanks in part to Serge Diaghilev. They, and other Russians traveled beyond Europe; Pavlova indefatigably spread her art over the globe, reaching Australia. This sloshing back and forth of Europe's creative ballet talent kept the national styles fresh when they tended toward artificiality without destroying or making uniform their unique characters, often by sharing foreign folk dancing and inspiring a rediscovery of the local vernacular.

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

Alan Miller

Williamstown Artist Joanna Gabler contributes images to Victoria Gibson's multimedia work "Rise Up, Fallen Angel" at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn

Joanna Gabler, Red Angel

Williamstown Artist Joanna Gabler contributes images to Victoria Gibson's multimedia work "Rise Up, Fallen Angel" at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn.

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






10 x 25 at the Atlantic Theater Company, featuring John Guare's "Erased" with Glenn Fitzgerald and Omar Sangare

Atlantic Theater Company is thrilled to present 10 X 25, a festival of ten-minute plays by twenty-five playwrights who have been produced by the Atlantic over the past twenty-five years. The lineup of playwrights includes John Guare, Ethan Coen, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Annie Baker, and many other well-established dramatists. All pieces will be presented in three separate two-week runs at Atlantic Stage 2. John Guare wrote Erased as a tribute to Elzbieta Czyzewska, with a special role for Omar Sangare. The play, directed by Neil Pepe and starring Glenn Fitzgerald and Omar Sangare, will be performed in Series A running:

10x25 at the Atlantic Theater Company
Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30 PM
Thursday, May 19 at 7:30 PM
Friday, May 20 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, May 21 at 2:30 PM
Saturday, May 21 at 7:30 PM
Sunday, May 22 at 2:30 PM
Sunday, May 22 at 7:30 PM

Tuesday, May 24 at 7:30 PM
Wednesday, May 25 at 7:00 PM
Thursday, May 26 at 7:30 PM
Friday, May 27 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, May 28 at 2:30 PM
Saturday, May 28 at 7:30 PM
Sunday, May 29 at 2:30 PM

---

SERIES A: May 18 - 29
Bodies under the floorboards.  An artistic national treasure shamefully forgotten.  Words of wisdom from acting master Cassiopeia O’Hara.
The Redeemers by Ethan Coen
With Michael Chernus, Tim Blake Nelson, Greg StuhrPosh Pill by Kia Corthron
With Lisa Gorlitsky, Kristin Griffith, Michelle Hurst, Peter Maloney, Christa Scott-Reed 


A Linguistics Class by David Mamet
With Zackary Grady, Jordan Lage

Master Class with Cassiopeia O’Hara by Kate Moira Ryan
With Kristen Johnston

Erased by John Guare
With Glenn Fitzgerald and Omar Sangare

Various Rigors by Stephen Belber
With Michael Chernus and Mary McCann

Marriage by Lucy Thurber
With Mikaela Feely-Lehmann, Kristin Griffith, Peter Maloney, Ben McKenzie

Untitled by David Pittu
With Aaron Farenback-Brateman, David Pittu

SERIES B: June 1 - 12 (Cast and titles announced soon)
Music, art, meditation, politics…and opening night!  10 minute plays by playwrights:
LESLIE AYVAZIAN
ANNIE BAKER
JEZ BUTTERWORTH
TINA HOWE
CRAIG LUCAS
KEITH REDDIN
EDWIN SANCHEZ
BILL WRUBEL

SERIES C: June 15 - 26 (Cast and titles announced soon)
Sex and parenting.  Bidding for souls.  Shakespeare in an alley.  An artistic director dangerously on the brink.  10 minute plays by playwrights:
DAVID AUBURN
BEKAH BRUNSTETTER
MOIRA BUFFINI
TOM DONAGHY
KEVIN HEELAN
PETER PARNELL
KATE ROBIN
SAM SHEPARD
JEFF WHITTY

SHOWTIMES

MON TUES WED THURS FRI SAT SUN
7:30
7:30
7:30
2:30
7:30
2:30
7:30
7:30
7:30
7:30
7:30
2:30
7:30
2:30

Each series runs two weeks. Wednesday-Sunday at 7:30 the first week and Tuesday-Saturday at 7:30 the second week, plus Saturday and Sunday matinees each week at 2:30.

All performances will take place at Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street.

Read the preview in New York Arts and the Berkshire Review