A Better Barangaroo

Barangaroo, still a chance to get it right. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller
The Barangaroo site: still a chance to get it right. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller

In this town called Sydney there is this crazy idea that wrecking a beautiful city in the name of economic growth somehow makes the city big time, that slippery oxymoron, a 'global' city. Instead of building places which promotes beauty, sustainability and public participation we get the kind of 'built profit' which is too witless to even be kitsch. It's the Australian Ugliness on steroids, everywhere, as charmless and unimaginative as it is profitable. Even the greediest New York developer would never expect to build a forty five storey hotel in the East River, let alone the Hudson, and yet exactly such a monstrosity has been approved for construction in Sydney Harbour, at Barangaroo, the ne plus ultra of Sydney urban planning disasters. Now a group of over fifty eminent Sydney architects, planners and academics has produced an alternative design for the site. Their scheme, A Better Barangaroo, is a serious contribution because it visualizes an alternative: less greedy, less wasteful, more logical with more public space, smaller buildings, more sunshine and just as much profit as the notorious Lend Lease scheme. The best argument against bad architecture is good architecture, not just a good argument. A Better Barangaroo is not magic, one could quibble that it is too conservative, too accepting of a flawed premise and yet that part of the point — the fact that this is what is possible following true blue tried and true urban design principles demonstrates how bad the official plan is, and how stupendous a really visionary design could be. Any number of architects, planners, students or architecturally-trained chimpanzees could produce any number of alternative Barangaroos better than the official Barangaroo, which is more of an advertising campaign than a neighbourhood. The alternative is here for all to see. We can still get this right. Many smart people have made every conceivable argument against the unfolding travesty of Barangaroo. They have been wilfully mischaracterised at every turn. Is anyone with any power even listening anymore?


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

Michael Miller




Bach, the Organist, A Trumpet and Organ Concert, Berkshire Bach Society, Allen Dean trumpet and Walter Hilse, Organ, by Michael Miller

Jsbach
J. S. Bach


Trumpet and Organ Concert
Berkshire Bach Society

Bach, the Organist
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 4pm
St. Stephen's Church in Pittsfield
Walter Hilse, organ; Allan Dean, trumpet; String ensemble


The Berkshire Bach Society pursued its lively and varied work of furthering the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach in our region with a program focused on Bach the organist. This year’s programs have concentrated on different aspects, some rather unusual, of Bach’s multifarious activities and output. The first explored gypsy dances and improvisations and their influence on the music of Bach, Telemann, and others — of course of a secular nature. The second was a choral concert devoted to Bach’s music for the Thomanerschule in Leipzig. Of course the Brandenburgs didn’t fail to appear at New Year’s. Last week’s program, although it involved a well-known aspect of Bach’s work, his genius as a virtuoso and composer for the organ, brought out some elements we often tend to ignore: the zest, even mischief in his arrangements of Vivaldi concerti, and his sense of humor. One got more of an impression of Bach’s personality than one can find often in his best-known masterpieces.

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

Michael Miller




A Better Barangaroo by Alan Miller

Barangaroo-site
In this town called Sydney there is this crazy idea that wrecking a beautiful city in the name of economic growth somehow makes the city big time, that slippery oxymoron, a 'global' city. Instead of building places which promotes beauty, sustainability and public participation we get the kind of 'built profit' which is too witless to even be kitsch. It's the Australian Ugliness on steroids, everywhere, as charmless and unimaginative as it is profitable. Even the greediest New York developer would never expect to build a forty five storey hotel in the East River, let alone the Hudson, and yet exactly such a monstrosity has been approved for construction in Sydney Harbour, at Barangaroo, the ne plus ultra of Sydney urban planning disasters. Now a group of over fifty eminent Sydney architects, planners and academics has produced an alternative design for the site. Their scheme, A Better Barangaroo, is a serious contribution because it visualizes an alternative: less greedy, less wasteful, more logical with more public space, smaller buildings, more sunshine and just as much profit as the notorious Lend Lease scheme. The best argument against bad architecture is good architecture, not just a good argument. A Better Barangaroo is not magic, one could quibble that it is too conservative, too accepting of a flawed premise and yet that part of the point — the fact that this is what is possible following true blue tried and true urban design principles demonstrates how bad the official plan is, and how stupendous a really visionary design could be. Any number of architects, planners, students or architecturally-trained chimpanzees could produce any number of alternative Barangaroos better than the official Barangaroo, which is more of an advertising campaign than a neighbourhood. The alternative is here for all to see. We can still get this right. Many smart people have made every conceivable argument against the unfolding travesty of Barangaroo. They have been wilfully mischaracterised at every turn. Is anyone with any power even listening anymore? 

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal of the Arts

Alan Miller

Williamstown Theatre Festival announces three Mainstage productions for 2011.


George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart

Our beloved Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced its Mainstage productions for the 2011 season, which will extend from July 1 to August 28. (Information about the Nikos Stage Season, as well as additional details about the Main Stage Season, will be announced at a later date.) This will be the first season under the festival's new Artistic Director, Jenny Gersten, whose appointment was announced last spring. She is the third Artistic Director of the WTF within the past seven years, but no matter: she, like her predecessors, has had a long involvement with the Festival, as associate producer from 1996 to 2004, the years when Michael Ritchie ran it as Producer 1996-2004. He was succeeded by Roger Rees, who only lasted from 2004 to 2007 as Artistic Director. Nicholas Martin then took over. Mr. Martin suffered a stroke only a year into his tenure. After a period of recovery, the stroke seemed to impair his creative work very little, but it did force him to make choices — to Broadway's benefit. All of these people have had strong connections with Broadway, as well as the non-profit theatres of New York. Hence there has been a solid continuity at the Festival in spite of this rapid succession of quick changes.

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

Michael Miller




Robert Schumann at Simon’s Rock, Sun., Feb. 27 at 3:00 pm: Hilda Banks Shapiro, pianist, Jack Brown, baritone, performing Kinderszenen, Arabesque, and selections from Liederkreis and Dichterliebe

Robert Schumann at Simon’s Rock, Sun., Feb. 27 at 3:00 p.m.: Hilda Banks Shapiro, pianist, Jack Brown, baritone, performing Kinderszenen, Arabesque, and selections from Liederkreis and Dichterliebe
Robert Schumann at Simon’s Rock, Sun., Feb. 27 at 3:00 p.m.: Hilda Banks Shapiro, pianist, Jack Brown, baritone, performing Kinderszenen, Arabesque, and selections from Liederkreis and Dichterliebe


Michael Miller
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Mozart and Britten by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, by Andrew Miller

Lam-andrea
Pianist Andrea Lam

City Recital Hall, Angel Place
3 February 2011
to be broadcast on ABC Classic FM 92.9 sometime after February

Sydney Symphony Orchestra

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto in D for piano and violin, K. 315f
reconstructed by Philip Wilby from fragment K. Anhang 56 and violin sonata in D K. 306
Andrea Lam, piano
Dene Olding, violin-director

Benjamin Britten
Sinfonietta, Op. 1

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony in D (from the serenade in D ("Posthorn") K. 320)

Frank Bridge
3 Idylls
No. 2 Allegretto poco lento

I have heard it lamented "O, if only Mozart had written 25 violin concertos in the 1780s and only 5 piano concertos." Notwithstanding the alternate universe where Mozart lived to 89 and wrote many of each, the D major concerto for piano and violin, as Philip Wilby reconstructed it in 1985, goes some way to consoling the lamenting violinist. Mozart began composing the fragment (which W. J. Turner in his 20th century biography, disappointed not to have more of it, called a "remarkably fine work") sometime during his month-long stay in Mannheim in 1778 on the way back to Salzburg from Paris. Whereas Mozart wrote the 5 violin concertos for himself to play, this concerto he intended for another violinist, Ignatz Franzl, probably intending to perform the piano part himself; he wrote to his father just before leaving Paris that he wanted to give up playing the violin. This was at a weighty juncture, or at least a phase change, in Mozart's life often implicitly or explicitly considered the fulcrum between "early Mozart" and "late Mozart." Indeed the double concerto shows some of the Mozartish profundity and ecstasy of the later piano concertos while still having much of the humor, play and levity of the young Mozart. Mr Wilby completed the concerto using music from a later violin sonata (in D, KV 306, a lovely recording of which with Corey Cerovsek and Jeremy Denk from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum can be heard on the Petrucci Music Library) into which it seems Mozart recycled his ideas for the double concerto. The sonata does have, at least in retrospect, an unusual singing and independent-minded piano accompaniment, a cadenza, part of which the piano gets to play, and a general feeling of greatness and expansiveness which is an odd attitude for a sonata to be wearing. Thus the reconstructed concerto gives a fascinating foreshadowing of the advancements Mozart gave his art, and his beloved genre the piano concerto in particular. but far from merely a thing of academic interest, the piece is beautiful and touching on a human level and well worth performing.

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

Michael Miller




Ray Chen, Peter Oundjian and the Sydney Symphony, by Andrew Miller

Oundjian-peter
Conductor Peter Oundjian.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall: 10 February 2011
to be repeated and broadcasted on ABC Classic FM 92.9 on 14 February 2011

Hector Berlioz

Béatrice et Bénédict: Overture

Johannes Brahms

Violin Concerto
Ray Chen - violin

Piotr Tchaikovsky

Symphony No.5

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Peter Oundjian - conductor

It can sometimes seem like a scalping to play an opera overture as a concert piece, but Maestro Oundjian's apparent delight in Berlioz' music overcame any such qualms. They played the piece as if it were self-contained with a closer-than-usual study and without the anticipation or apprehension of the visual elements of theatre. It can be nice to hear an overture without the distraction of a rising curtain. It also served nicely as a relatively lighter prelude to the Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The precise stops and timing of the silences were very satisfying (and provided an interesting test of the hall's acoustical decay time — the sound taking about 3 seconds to decay but fairly evenly across the pitches). The Sydney Symphony brought across the vivid orchestration as effortlessly as singing.

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

Michael Miller




Leonard Freed, Worldview, at the Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium, by Silvia Magna

Leonard Freed, From Black in White America.


Leonard Freed, 

Worldview
Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium
curated by William Ewing and Nathalie Herschdorfer, Musée de L’Elysée, Lausanne.
Book with essays by William Ewing, Wim van Sinderen, and Nathalie Herschdorfer. Lausanne: Steidl/Musée de L'Elysée, 2007.

Worldview,

 one of the most important exhibitions devoted to Leonard Freed, has reached Belgium, hosted by the Museum of Photography at Charleroi. Visitors will find many surprises in store for them.
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Best of 2010: Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera Production, by Michael Miller

Carrie Henneman Shaw and Brenna Wells in the Boston Early Music Festival production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Photo André Costantini.

Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas
Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera Production
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 8pm
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 3pm
New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall, Boston

Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, Musical Directors
Gilbert Blin, Stage Director
Anna Watkins, Costume Designer
Melinda Sullivan, Choreographer

Laura Pudwell, Dido
Douglas Williams, Aeneas
Yulia Van Doren, Belinda
Caroline Copeland and Carlos Fittante, Featured Baroque Dancers

This is the third year of BEMF's wonderful new institution of annual chamber opera performances. These not only help us get through the alternate years, when there is no main festival in June, nor any full opera production, they set a standard for authenticity and for the imaginative recreation of centuries-old practices and aesthetics in such a way that an audience of cultivated non-experts can enjoy the performance and walk away exhilarated. This was certainly the mood in late November last year, when BEMF turned to Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. None of the other chamber operas produced so far is particularly obscure — not John Blow'sVenus and Adonis, nor Charpentier's Actéon, nor Handel's Acis and Galatea. On the contrary, they are central to the history of the genre, and they are performed, although not very often. This year's offering, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, is the most popular pre-Mozart opera of all. It fills the needs of conservatories, young sopranos or mezzos, as well as ageing divas, who wish to apply their wisdom to the tragic Queen of Carthage. We have reviewed a number of modest, but very successful productions in the Review over the past year or so.

 

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

Michael Miller


The Glimmerglass Festival Announces Season Schedule for 2011

Four New Productions, Including a World Premiere and Professional Premiere,
Headline the 37th Festival.

Festival Artists Include Anne Bogart, Rod Gilfry, Nathan Gunn,
Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally,John Musto, David Pittsinger,
Jeanine Tesori and Deborah Voigt


Francescazambello-cmcadams-066
Glimmerglass General & Artistic Director, Francesca Zambello (Photo: Clair McAdams)

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

Michael Miller