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




A Singer's Notes by Keith Kibler 29: The Power of Music

Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Dr. Johnson was much exercised by John Dryden’s ending his Cecilia's Day Ode with the line: "Music shall untune the sky." Ridiculous, said he. How can music untune something? Dryden meant the word to describe music as an apocalyptic agent, but as Johnson's infallible ear heard clearly enough, the word "untuned" jars. Like many good things, music seems weak in any practical sense. Sometimes the idea of music becomes more interesting to us than the music itself. The idea of Glenn Gould has overtaken the performing of Glenn Gould. Maybe he even did this to himself. We must put music to the ultimate test — a yes or no test — no gray area. This is what happens at the end of Don Giovanni. Mozart constructs his greatest scene on stage out of no music, out of the destruction of music. The secret is, even the no music makes us hear music. The negative capability of it makes us know something immense that is not there but is imminent.

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

Michael Miller




How to Become a Word: Shelley Jackson’s Novel SKIN, reviewed with photographs by Kate Hagerman

food. Photo © 2011 Kate Hagerman.

Since I am not a word, but am curious about the experience of being a word, I asked author Shelley Jackson if I could photograph some of her words from the novel SKIN. She agreed and gave me the email addresses for the following words:

the internal food table,
lungs lineaments law,
across mouthpiece.
Remember?

The novel SKIN exists in tattoos. In order to read the novel, one has to participate in the text by applying to become a word, and if you get chosen, the word must be inked on your skin in book font. Once the author receives a photograph proving the word is tattooed on your skin along with the signed disclaimer stating that you will never share the story with anyone else who is not a word, only then can you read the coveted story.

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

Michael Miller




Tully Scope Festival Opening Night: For Morton Feldman, with Webern, Xenakis, and Cage…and a prelude by Nathan Davis, by Michael Miller


Tully Scope Opening Event: Nathan David, Bells, in the Grand Foyer of Alice Tully Hall. Photo © 2011 Michael Miller.

Tully Scope Festival Opening Night

For Morton Feldman: Chance Encounters
Tuesday, February 22 at 7:30 pm
International Contemporary Ensemble
Steven Schick, conductor and percussion

Feldman: The King of Denmark, for solo percussion
Webern: Concerto for nine instruments
Xenakis: Jalons, for 15 instruments
Cage: Imaginary Landscape No. 4, for 12 radios
Feldman: For Samuel Beckett

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about how habits...maybe it’s better to say methods of listening change over time. Perhaps it's because of my anticipation of Tully Scope, or perhaps the Sibelius festival at Bard, music festivals in general, or perhaps Markand Thaker's intriguing and important book, Looking for the "Harp" Quartet, an Investigation into Musical Beauty, which I'm currently reading...In any case, the unique sound of the new Alice Tully Hall, the character of the opening, and the plan of the festival as a whole drove home to me that we are in a simmering period of change, right now, as new work comes into the repertoire and new environments for listening to music appear on the scene. "Methods of listening" may all boil down to our direct experience of music, sitting quietly, maybe not so passively in our seats, but it involves a lot else besides: the architecture and atmosphere of the hall, who we go with or see there, how we behave at the concert, and before and after — that is, how we engage socially and respect our fellow participants’ enjoyment. An event like Tully Scope opening night reminds us that we are all participants, even the most visibly passive of us. Nathan Davis' Bells — without seeming precious or gimmicky at all — established a participatory precedent, which we shall most likely take with us when we come back for Schubert, Liszt, Tyondai Braxton, and all the rest.

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

Michael Miller




Norfolk Chamber Music Festival/Yale School of Music - Summer Concert Schedule 2011

Old Postcard of the Music Shed at Norfolk

The Norfolk Music Festival emerged in the 1890's from the interest of two generations of the Battells, a wealthy Norfolk family, in Yale University, which brought about both the founding of the Yale School of Music and the Litchfield County Choral Union. Choral and chamber music concerts were originally held in the Battell mansion, and later in the Music Shed, which opened in 1906. Special trains from New York were arranged for the distinguished musicians and the society audience. Ellen Battell Stoeckel, wife of the son of the first professor at Yale Music School, announced her intention to donate her estate to Yale as a music school, and the first classes were held there in 1937. This distinguished summer school and festival continues to flourish today.

The rest needs little explanation beyond this listing of the Friday and Saturday evening concerts.

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

Michael Miller




Lapidary Discourse: A Sound Play with Superstarchitect Jefe Anglesdottir and Colin Dribbles, by Alan Miller

Danish superstarchitect Jefe Anglesdottir. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller.


When I was in Venice last year for the Biennale of Architecture, I was very fortunate to have the following conversation with Danish “superstarchitect” Jefe Anglesdottir (JA) and public intellectual Colin Dribbles (CD), secretary emeritus of the British Society for the Promotion of Bad Writing about Venice (BSPBWV). A generous grant from that august society paid for three Camparis (one without soda, as explained below) and an afternoon’s shoe leather and conversation.

Read and hear the full play on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




London Sinfonietta play Reich and Adès, Royal Festival Hall, by Gabriel Kellett

Ades-piano
Thomas AdèsLondon Sinfonietta play Reich and Adès, Royal Festival Hall

Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
February 18, 2011

Steve Reich
Tehillim

Thomas Adès
In Seven Days

Thomas Adès, conductor
Synergy Vocals, singers
Nicolas Hodges, piano

This is the first of a series of London Sinfonietta concerts to be guest conducted by Adès over the next month, including touring performances outside London where his piano concerto In Seven Days is coupled with a different Reich piece, Music for 18 Musicians. It was less than 18 months ago that the Sinfonietta performed that work at the Southbank Centre with a live relay open to all in the foyer, which proved very popular; rather than have to match that performance, I think they have made a canny programming choice by enticing some of the potential new audience gained by that concert with a less famous piece by the same composer. The combination of two Biblically-inspired pieces in this concert is also arguably a more interesting and appropriate pairing.

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

Michael Miller




Bard Music Festival 2011, “Sibelius and His World” - Program Details

Sibelius
Jean Sibelius

Bard Music Festival, “Sibelius and His World”

The numerous offerings that make up the comprehensive 22nd annual Bard Music Festival, “Sibelius and His World,” take place during SummerScape’s two final weekends: August 12- 14 and August 19-21.  Through the prism of Sibelius’s life and career, this year’s festival will explore the music of Scandinavia and examine the challenges faced by those who continued working within a tonal framework after the revolutions of musical modernism.  Sibelius’s orchestral mastery was exceptional; his compositional output includes one of the most revered and beloved symphonic cycles since Beethoven’s and the most frequently recorded violin concerto of the 20th century, besides such favorites as Finlandia, Valse triste, and Tapiola.

 The twelve musical programs, built thematically and spaced over the two weekends, range from “Jean Sibelius: National Symbol, International Iconoclast” to “Silence and Influence.”  As well as music by his contemporaries, a broad sampling of Sibelius’s own compositions will be presented, from canonical works like the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies to such comparative rarities as his choral symphony, Kullervo. Two panel discussions and a symposium will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks before each performance that illuminate the concert’s themes and are free to ticket holders.
Read the full preview on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Bard SummerScape 2011 Explores the Life and Times of Jean Sibelius with a Seven-Week Arts Festival in New York’s Hudson Valley, July 7 – August 21, 2011

The Fisher Center, Bard College, Summer, 2009. Photo © 2009 Michael Miller.


Bard SummerScape 2011 Explores the

 Life and Times of Jean Sibelius with a Seven-Week Arts Festival in New York’s Hudson Valley, July 7 – August 21, 2011

Includes 22nd Bard Music Festival, “Sibelius and His World”, and New York’s First Staged Production of Richard Strauss’s Opera Die Liebe der Danae

Scandinavia’s rich cultural heritage, and the question of artistic conservatism in the modernist age, will be explored at the eighth annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again features a sumptuous tapestry of musicoperatheaterdancefilm, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 22nd annual Bard Music Festival.  Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 7 with the first of four performances by Finland’sTero Saarinen Company, and closes on August 21 with a party in Bard’s beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. This year’s Bard Music Festival explores Sibelius and His World, and some of the great Finnish symphonist’s most fascinating contemporaries provide other SummerScape highlights, including New York’s first fully-staged production ofRichard Strauss’s 1940 opera Die Liebe der DanaeNoël Coward’s chamber opera, Bitter Sweet (1929); Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama The Wild Duck (1884); and a film festival, “Before and After Bergman: The Best of Nordic Film.”

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

Michael Miller




State of Siege, a New Documentary on Sydney’s Destruction, by Andrew Miller

A mural in Woolloomoolloo commemorating the green bans.

State of Siege
a documentary by Dennis Grosvenor
Roseville cinema charity screening benefiting WIRES: 16 February 2011 (preview here)

Having spent the afternoon before this one-off screening at the Nicholson Museum of ancient art, in their new re-presentation of their Egyptian collection through the eyes of Herodotus, I came across this quotation:

Cheops brought the country into all sorts of misery. He closed all the temples, then, not content with excluding his subjects from the practice of their religion, compelled them without exception to labour as slaves for his own advantage. Some were forced to drag blocks of stone from the quarries in the Arabian hills to the Nile, where they were ferried across and taken by others, who hauled them to the Libyan hills. The work went on in three-monthly shifts, a hundred thousand men in a shift. It took ten years of this oppressive slave-labour to build the track along which the blocks were hauled — a work, in my opinion, of hardly less magnitude than the pyramid itself.

The Egyptians can hardly bring themselves to mention the names of Cheops and Chephren [his successor], so great is their hatred of them; They call the pyramids after Philitis, a shepherd who at that time fed his flocks in the neighbourhood.1

Will we still despise the New South Wales government in 2000 years? It doesn't seem so very far fetched. At least Cheops had a sort of vision, the pyramids have a certain stark beauty of their own and they draw many wealthy tourists. The eagerness to destroy and thugishness of the current NSW government is extreme and is it really so much worse to steal people's labor than their homes? For that's what we witness in this new documentary. As the environmentalist, bushwalker and businessman Dick Smith points out in his interview, rezoning a person's land is tantamount to stealing it because they will have no choice but to sell to the developer who puts up two ugly apartment blocks on either side of them. After food and water (and nowadays we are forced to add) clean air, shelter is the most basic human need. Interfering with people's homes thus pokes even deeper into the human psyche than the layer where Freud put his conception of the libido. The lower levels of government (state, province, local) affect our lives directly in a way the feds cannot. The wonder is that many in NSW aren't angrier.

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

Michael Miller