Urban Planning: A Manifesto by Alan Miller

The people of New South Wales have been anticipating the upcoming state election almost since the last election four years ago, never a good situation. As regular readers of our dispatches from Sydney know, the soon to be defeated Labor Government has for the past sixteen years, with its inimitably bland, shiny-suited glee, trashed poor old Sydney. A place which with the slightest effort could be the most beautiful city in the world has instead deteriorated into a kind of Los Angeles without a Raymond Chandler, a Melbourne without intricacy, a Singapore without ambition.

Read the full manifesto on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts.

Alan Miller

Emanuel Ax plays Schubert, Mostly Late, at Tully Scope

Emanuel Ax and Franz Schubert

Emanuel Ax plays Schubert
Tully Scope Festival
Alice Tully Hall, Saturday, February 26, at 7:30 pm

All-Schubert program
Four Impromptus, D.935
Sonata in A major, D.664
Sonata in B-flat major, D.960

The first evening of Tully Scope devoted to the classical music of the past was no less adventurous than the first two concerts, which revolved around the work of Morton Feldman, who was one of the great musical adventurers of his generation. Emanuel Ax, a fastidious piano virtuoso who combines impeccable taste and restraint with a deep respect for the classics, is fairly new to late Schubert, as I understand. The late piano sonatas in particular, works of grand scope, rich harmony, and deep feeling, offer little in the way of purely pianistic attractions to show off Mr. Ax's fluent technique. I almost feared that his mastery of the keyboard might even get in the way of Schubert's music. These moving performances, on the contrary, went beyond mere elegance and delved deeply into the heart of Schubert's writing. Emanuel Ax did indeed approach the music as a pianist, but, as always for him, the music came first, and that led him in new directions, which he navigated in a way entirely his own.

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

Michael Miller




Zubie Baby! Reputation and Reality: Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic at Davies Hall, by Steven Kruger

Zubin_mehta
Zubin Mehta

Davies Hall, San Francisco
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
Zubin Mehta, Music Director and Conductor

Sunday, February 27, 2011
Haydn -  Symphony No. 96, "The Miracle"
Mahler - Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor

Monday, February 28, 2011
Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 3, Opus 72a
Webern - Passacaglia, Opus 1
Webern - Six Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6
Schubert -  Symphony in C major, D.944, "The Great"

Last week Zubin Mehta led the Israel Philharmonic in two all-orchestral evenings, spoon to spoon at Davies Hall, and the performances were revelatory on many levels. One had the feeling that Mehta, now 75, has deepened his musicianship and only conducts music he profoundly loves. Indeed, the two extremely Viennese programs lacked only Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben to round out a sense of this conductor's signature repertory.


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

Michael Miller




Caravaggio: More than a “Moment” (Review of Michael Fried's The Moment of Caravaggio) by Daniel B. Gallagher

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, oil on canvas, Galleria nazionale di arte antica, Roma


Caravaggio: More than a “Moment”
Review of The Moment of Caravaggio by Michael Fried.
Princeton University Press, 2010. Cloth. 328 pp. $49.50.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14701-7

Everyone agrees that Caravaggio was a revolutionary painter, but the reasons we give often tend toward the superficial: he was a realist, he was provocative, he was theatrical, and so on. The fact is that there were many realist, provocative, theatrical artists before Caravaggio, and many endowed with these qualities after him were influenced by someone else. So what makes Caravaggio so special?

Michael Fried claims it was the extraordinary presence of “absorption” and “distancing” in his work. Although Caravaggio was not the first to explore these themes (cf. Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls in the Sistine Chapel), Fried argues that the Lombard genius was the first to bring them to the fore. He also believes that the (not necessarily chronological) moments of absorption/immersion and distancing/specularity tell us something about the philosophical milieu in which Caravaggio worked. Skepticism challenged the certainty that other minds exist, and Caravaggio responded with a psychological realism more powerful and sophisticated than any philosophical argument.

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

Michael Miller




Axiom, Juilliard's Contemporary Music Group, play Feldman and Kurtág at Tully Scope, by Michael Miller

Kurtag_old
György Kurtág

For Morton Feldman
Alice Tully Hall, Thursday, February 24 at 7:30 pm

Axiom
Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor
The Clarion Choir
Steven Fox, artistic director
Lauren Snouffer, Soprano

György Kurtág: Hommage à R. Sch., Op. 15d for viola, clarinet, and piano

I. (merkwürdige Pirouetten des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler)
II. (E.*: der begrenzte Kreis … )
III. ( … und wieder zuckt es schmerzlich F.* um die Lippen … )
IV. (Felho valek, mar sut a nap … )
VI. Abschied (Meister Raro entdeckt Guillaume de Machaut)

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel
Feldman: Bass Clarinet and Percussion
Kurtág: Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova, Op. 17


The second concert in Lincoln Center's wonderful Tully Scope Festival like the opening night revolved around the music of Morton Feldman, and, although it was entitled "For Morton Feldman," it was actually dedicated to quite a different composer, György Kurtág, who is still very much alive, celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday on February 19th — only a month younger than Feldman would have been if he had not died prematurely at the age of sixty-one in 1987. The program consists entirely of some of their best-known works, played by Axiom, the contemporary music group of the Juilliard School under the direction of Jeffrey Milarsky and the Clarion Choir under music director Steven Fox. The instrumentalists and the soprano soloist were all students or recent graduates of Juilliard, who acquitted themselves most impressively.

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

Michael Miller




Vladamir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony Play Mahler’s Sixth; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto by Andrew Miller

Rodins-mahler-marble
In a way it is pointless to try to write words on music like this, but here goes anyway. It doesn't really help to read glib selective quotations from even the composer describing the music, sometimes in a single word, "tragic," "fate," "Heldenmord" fail to do justice while missweighing one idea, like a greedy fruit grocer. The Mahlers deep and checkered feelings about his Sixth Symphony are clearer from this quotation from Alma Mahler's memoirs, even if it does sound ambiguous or contradictory at one level:

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

Alan Miller

Richard Wagner, The Valkyrie (sung in German), Virginia Opera, by Bruce Ambler Boucher

Soprano Kelly Cae Hogan as Brünnhilde in Virginia Opera’s production of Wagner’s “The Valkyrie”. Photo David A. Beloff.

Richard Wagner, The Valkyrie (sung in German)
Virginia Opera
Center Stage, Richmond February 27, 2011

Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Conductor - Joseph Rescigno

Virginia Opera has built a reputation for solid productions of opera, featuring young voices under the baton of distinguished conductors like Joseph Rescigno. Its new production of The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner is no exception to that rule. Rescigno, who studied under Erich Leinsdorf, has a strong affinity for the sound and architecture of Wagnerian motifs and produced remarkably fine tones and ensemble playing from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. The orchestral component became increasingly dominant for Wagner in the Ring and Parsifal, and it was good to have such a fine standard of strings in this production. The singers, too, gave vocal performances of a uniformly high quality in a production by Lillian Groag that did not impose too much of a “thesis” on Wagner’s mythopeic creation, allowing visual tableaux and lighting to point the story. The Richmond venue was the old Carpenter Theatre, a 1920s, Alhambra-style cinematic confection; wide and shallow, it conveyed a sense of intimacy despite its 1800-seat capacity. The production was a fast-paced event, which at three hours (including a 25-minute intermission) was shorter than Gone with the Wind! And what could be wrong with that? My only caveat is that this was not Wagner’s Die Walküre, which unfolds leisurely over more than four hours, but rather a radically reduced fumet of the original. While that may be a plus for many modern opera-goers, it is manifestly not what the composer intended. 

 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts

Sisters in Song: Kara Cornell and Kala Maxym in concert March 20th at UAlbany Recital Hall

Kara Cornell and Kala Maxym in concert March 20th

Sisters in Song
Sunday, March 20 at 4pm
Recital Hall - $8 / $4 students, faculty-staff & seniors


The University at Albany Department of Music is pleased to present soprano Kala Maxym and mezzo-soprano Kara Cornell as featured performers in the Bel Canto series spotlighting Capital Region vocal artists at the UAlbany Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.


The two will perform a concert entitled “Sisters in Song” on Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 4pm.  They will be accompanied by pianist Joshua Tanis. The program will celebrate friendship and sisterhood with a lively and varied selection of duets, arias and songs ranging from baroque lament to spicy Zarzuela. The pair will also participate in The Singer’s Life, an informal talk conducted in an “Inside the Actors Studio” inspired format, on Friday, March 18, 2011 at 4pm. UAlbany’s voice coach Frances Wittmann will host the interview which will focus on the young singers’ lives, achievements and career goals.  Both events will take place in the Recital Hall.

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

Michael Miller




The End of the Levine Years: James Levine to step down Sept.1, withdraws from his remaining BSO concerts of the 2010-11 season

Boston Symphony Orchestra in Symphony Hall. Photo Constantine Manos.

The following news has just been released in two instalments by the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe announced today that as of September 1, 2011, James Levine will step down from his current role as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held since 2004. Discussions between the BSO and Maestro Levine are underway to define an ongoing new role for Mr. Levine. Mr. Volpe has also announced that the BSO will immediately form a search committee to begin the process of appointing the next Boston Symphony Music Director.

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

Michael Miller




Roma e l’antico: Realtà e visione nel ‘700. Palazzo Sciarra (Rome) until March 6, by Daniel B. Gallagher

Minerva d’Orsay. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Roma e l’antico: Realtà e visione nel ‘700. Palazzo Sciarra (Rome) until March 6. Curated by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi

Draped in rich onyx and agate, the Minerva d’Orsay perhaps best represents the hybrid aesthetic the Fondazione Roma wants to showcase in this its first exhibition in a newly dedicated space at the Palazzo Sciarra. Originally dating from the Hadrianic Era (117-138 C.E.), the Minerva d’Orsay was meticulously reconstructed according to the refined sensibilities of English and French tourists in Rome. She exemplifies the unique blend of purity and sumptuousness that was the standard of eighteenth-century aristocratic taste. The developing science of archeology helped saturate a market of ruins-turned-domestic-treasures that artisans in turn viewed as much an opportunity for creativity as restoration. A large vase of Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778) composed of fragments dating from various periods is a fine example of the pastiche approach to restoration. It is not entirely clear if Piranesi passed these items off as originals or reproductions, but they brought in a pretty penny just the same.

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

Michael Miller