Latest

June 2014

Opera
Klinghoffer Speaks

More on Klinghoffer, Gelb, and the Met at Sea

June 30, 2014Michael Miller

In the affair over John Adams' opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, the participants have succeeded in making themselves look very bad indeed, above all Abe Foxman of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and whatever kindred organizations which have not been specified in the reports—with Peter Gelb straggling obsequiously behind them. It is appalling that a special interest group can dictate what a major arts institution can present to the public, and that the chief officer of the institution should accept it so easily. Peter Gelb stated that the cancellation of the HD transmission was necessary to save the production itself at the Metropolitan Opera—which implies that the revered old house operates under the external control of groups like the ADL, which likes to consort with governments on a quasi-equal footing, but which exercises no legal power equivalent to that of a national government, certainly not that of the United States or Israel.
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Dance

Savion Glover’s OM, at the Joyce Theater

June 29, 2014Mari S. Gold

Savion Glover's newest production, OM, is as much a mystical experience as a dancing one. The performance, which spans about seventy minutes with no intermission, begins with a lengthy jazz recording of what I think is Calling by Kenny Garrett, very improvy -sounding and full of saxophone. During this pre-performance period, the audience views the front of the stage lined with small bulbs that seem to flicker in the half-light with a head of Buddha on one side. Finally the curtain is raised, revealing the stage set with hundreds of candles of all sizes, and photos of Glover's spiritual mentors, some dance figures like Gregory Hines and others more spiritual like Gandhi. I'm not sure where Michael Jackson fits in. Glover, minus his trademark dreads, stood on a small platform in the center where he remained for the entire performance.
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Theater
Sylvia Milo as Nannerl Mozart

The Other Mozart, written and acted by Sylvia Milo – at the HERE Arts Center, NYC, June 22 – July 12, and the Monomaffia Festival in Estonia

June 25, 2014Michael Miller

One of the most remarkable theatrical presentations I saw in 2013, continuing on at various theaters in the United States and Europe, is Sylvia Milo's The Other Mozart, a rich one-woman play she has conceived, written, and plays in, about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's sister Anna Maria, or Nannerl, as she was known in the family. Today it is easiest to identify her as "Mozart's sister," since even specialists know her mainly as one of the composer's closest confidantes and correspondents. They shared parents, provincial Salzburg, travels, musical gifts, and scatological humor. While "Wolfi," as she calls him, went to Vienna to seek his fortune in the odd limbo between musical servant, entrepreneur, and stable employment, at least in a preliminary form—which is what was available to him at the time, she accepted the conventional prescriptions of her father. A child prodigy at the keyboard, her musical scope became severely limited once she reached marriageable age. Music became an ornament rather than a profession for her; she had to learn housekeeping—all to attract a husband. At the late age of thirty-three, she was finally married to a husband chosen for her by father Leopold and lost whatever was left of her continually diminishing self-determination.
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New York Arts in Italy

Leonard Freed, The Italians – exhibition now at The Leica Gallery, New York, until August 9, 2014

June 25, 2014The Editor

Leonard Freed, The Italians, Quantuck Lane Press, 2011, exhibition now at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere through May 27, 2012. The great documentary art photographer's warm-hearted, but sharply observed takes on Italian life between 1956 and 2005 appear in 190 superb duotone illustrations. With an introductory essay in English and Italian by Berkshire Review/New York Arts editor, Michael Miller. The selection of images in the book and in the exhibition was made by Freed's widow, Brigitte and James Mairs, editor at the Quantuck Lane Press. The Italian edition, which is also bilingual and virtually identical, is distributed by the local organizer, Admira.
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Commentary
The Death of Klinghoffer

The Klinghoffer Question

June 21, 2014Lloyd Schwartz

The most recent piece of bad news in the opera world is that the Metropolitan Opera has succumbed to pressure from several Jewish organizations and cancelled the international Live in HD telecast and radio broadcast of its new production of John Adams’s complex and controversial 1991 opera/oratorio The Death of Klinghoffer—which is about the Palestinian terrorist attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. And because Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, and stage director Peter Sellars had the chutzpah to dramatize the points of view of the terrorists as well as the victims, some people, including Leon Klinghoffer’s two daughters, felt the opera was anti-Semitic.
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An Arts Press Event
Stephen Porter, pianist

Stephen Porter played late works by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Debussy at the House of the Redeemer in Manhattan, Thursday May 1, at 7.30 pm—a presentation of New York Arts

June 7, 2014Michael Miller

We were extremely proud to present, as our single concert of this season, a piano recital by Stephen Porter, a musician of supreme intelligence, sensitivity, and learning. His pianism is equally developed on the fortepiano as on the modern fortepiano, and we are fortunate that his curious ear for historical instruments has drawn him to the unique qualities of the House of the Redeemer's Grotrian-Steinweg grand in the intimate acoustics of its Library.

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Literature
Seneca, from double herm of Socrates and Seneca. Antikensammlung Berlin.

Seneca Rides Again! James Romm, Dying Every Day – Seneca at the Court of Nero

June 6, 2014Michael Miller

I was seduced into reviewing this book by a very upbeat and encouraging event at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street—an institution from which little encouraging has emerged in recent years. (Opponents of the obscene plan to gut the stacks and set up an Internet café in their place should remain on the watch!) Following an afternoon of research, during which I learned that in mid-nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island purveyors of "healthy, hungry leeches" and tamed performing grizzly bears had more visibility in the marketplace than calligraphers, I felt drawn to a conversation between James Shapiro, the Columbia Shakespearean, who has written numerous well-received books on and around WS, and James Romm of Bard College, the author of a new book about Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, Dying Every Day - Seneca at the Court of Nero. Both have been fellows of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, Shapiro wrote his splendid Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, surely the best treatment of the topic ever, while a Fellow, and Romm now follows him with his contribution to the "Seneca Problem."
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