William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s Globe (London) on tour, by Heidi Holder

Left to right: Jack Farthing (Dumaine), William Mannering (Longaville), Philip Cumbus (Ferdinand) and Trystan Gravelle, (Berowne) in Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's Globe on Tour. Photo John Haynes.

Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts at The War Memorial Auditorium, Holyoke, MA

December 3rd, 2009

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole
Designed by Jonathan Fensom

Music Composed by Claire van Kampen

Cast
Jade Anouka – Maria
Philip Cumbus – Ferdinand
Seroca Davis – Moth
Jack Farthing – Dumaine
Patrick Godfrey – Sir Nathaniel
Christopher Godwin – Holofernes
Trystan Gravelle – Berowne
William Mannering – Longaville
Fergal McElherron – Costard
Rhiannon Oliver – Jacquenetta
Thomasin Rand – Rosaline
Paul Ready Don – Armado
Siân Robins-Grace – Katherine
Tom Stuart – Boyet
Michelle Terry – Princess of France
Andrew Vincent – Dull

Musicians Nick Perry, George Bartle, David Hatcher, Arngeir Hauksson, Claire McIntyre, Benjamin Narvey

 

Love's Labour's Lost, one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, has been considered by critics particularly suitable for a courtly audience; indeed, it was once staged for Queen Elizabeth as a Christmas entertainment. With its depiction of verbal sparring among the nobility and its emphasis on notions of rank and wit, this comedy is designed to delight (and flatter) a refined and educated audience. Such a courtly audience vanished, of course, long ago, and director Dominic Dromgoole is left with us, motley contemporaries ranging from academics through theaterphiles to puzzled high school students. And he has decided to please contemporary tastes by underscoring all the play’s silliness—in the process making Shakespeare’s nobles decidedly less elevated creatures than they appear in the text. The distance between the King of Navarre and the Princess of France on the one hand, and the rustic Costard and braggart Don Adriano on the other, is certainly shorter.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review for the Arts

 

Peter Serkin plays Schoenberg, Debussy, Kurtág, Wuorinen and Chopin at Carnegie Hall, by Michael Miller

Peter Serkin
Peter Serkin

 

Peter Serkin, Piano
Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, December 10, 2009

Schoenberg – Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11
Debussy – 6 épigraphes antiques
György Kurtág – Selections from Játékok
–Pen Drawing, Valediction to Erzsébet Schaár
–(…and round and round it goes...)
–Portrait
–The mind will have its freedom...
Charles Wuorinen, Scherzo
Chopin, Polonaise in C Minor, Op. 40, No. 2
Chopin, Impromptu in A-flat Major, Op. 29
Chopin, Etude in A-flat Major from Trois nouvelles études
Chopin, Nocturne in E Major, Op. 62, No. 2
Schoenberg, Suite for Piano, Op. 25

Encores:
Bach, Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 866
Chopin, Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 25, No. 9, "Butterfly"
Chopin, Nocturne in F-sharp Major, Op. 15, No. 2

Peter Serkin is indisputably one of Tanglewood's great draws. His Music Shed performances with the BSO always sure to bring a a close to capacity crowd, and, in decent weather, to populate the lawn quite amply. Nonetheless I'm far more impressed by his ability to attract a little over 500 avid admirers to leave only a few empty seats in Carnegie's Zankel Hall to hear a somewhat esoteric program. In fact it was a brilliant program, and, as much as I admire Peter Serkin in general, this typically Serkinesque program was what made this recital impossible to resist. It began with early atonal Schoenberg and ended with one of his serial pieces. Second on the program was the piano solo version (1914/15) of Debussy's Six épigraphes antiques, which is quite a rarity. When the work is performed it is usually in its primary version for piano four hands. It is Debussy at his most spare and intense, and it is perhaps not hard to understand why it is not among his more popular works. Following on this, came even more concentrated music, four excerpts from the great György Kurtág's Játékok, his own version of a didactic cycle in the spirit of Bartók's Mikrokosmos. The first half closed with Charles Wuorinen's Scherzo, written in 2007 specifically for Peter Serkin. Most of the second half was occupied by an interesting Chopin set, in which Serkin mostly eschewed the war horses, except for the much-beloved E Major Nocturne. Then, as I mentioned the official program ended with Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1921-23), the composer's own hommage to the Baroque.

Read the rest on the Berkshire Review for the Arts

 

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937

 

Steichen_black
Edward Steichen, Black: Model Margaret Horan in a black dress by Jay-Thorpe. 1935, Courtesy Condé Nast Archive © 1935 Condé Nast Publications

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937

by Michael Miller

Organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and the Musée de Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: May 30-September 13, 2009

Current and upcoming venues:
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: September 26, 2009-January 3, 2010
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: February 28, 2010-April 11, 2010
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri: May 15 - July 25, 2010

Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography, curated by John Stomberg, Chief Curator, The Williams College Museum of Art (at WCMA only)

This important exhibition of Edward Steichen's fashion and celebrity photography for Condé Nast, which will close soon in Toronto and continue on to Fort Lauderdale and Kansas City, emerged from an earlier, ambitious survey of his entire career, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography, also organized by Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and the Musée de Élysée. While researching that exhibition, the curators, William Ewing and Todd Brandow, discovered two thousand vintage prints from Steichen's years at Vogue and Vanity Fair in the Condé Nast Archive, where they were catalogued and preserved to museum standards. These had never been exhibited before and presented an opportunity not to be missed. Hence Ewing and Brandow, together with Carol Squiers of the International Center of Photography, and Natalie Herschdorfer of the Musée de Élysée, set to work on this companion exhibition with some excitement. In the catalogue the sumptuous plates are interspersed with four essays from different points of view. William Ewing provides an acutely perceptive general account of the place of this work in Steichen's career. Carol Squiers discusses Steichen's position at Condé Nast and how he worked within the house system, not always with the brilliant results we see in the exhibition. She also make the important point that he only moved entirely away from his Pictorialist roots after the arrival in 1928 of a new art director, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, and his make-over of Vogue in favor of a simple, clear modernist taste. Tobia Bezzola places Steichen within the artistic currents of the time and investigates his aesthetic as a merger between his high Pictorialist ideals and commercialism. Steichen surprised his colleagues by actually taking pride in his work, insisting on putting his name to it. Natalie Herschdorfer fills in the background on the fashions of the time and the social currents which influenced them. The whole brings to life a bygone world of elegance and ambition, rehabilitates an underestimated period of Steichen's career, and shows Steichen's contribution to photography during this phase of his activity to be no less significant than what came before or after.

Edward Steichen, Design for Stehli Silks, 1926. Permission Joanna T. Steichen.

At the Williams College Museum of Art the show was accompanied by an impressive support exhibition,Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography, curated by John Stomberg, which provided a context for the photographer's work at Condé Nast with especially distinguished examples, beginning with a vintage print of his famous portrait of Richard Strauss. Most astonishing is a pattern of matchsticks and matchboxes he photographed as a study for a fabric design. (His work as a designer appears in his Condé Nast work in the form of a piano of his own design he favored as a prop.) From later in life his illustrations for Thoreau's Walden are deeply absorbing in their contemplative simplicity. In this fine show, I'd only question the several oversize posthumous prints, which seem cold and ostentatious as artefacts of the early days of photography collecting in the 1960's and 70's.

Steichen_1063
Edward Steichen, Self-Portrait with Photographic Paraphernalia, New York. 1929. Courtesy Condé Nast Archive © 1929 Condé Nast Publications.

 

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