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November 2015

Music
Yan Pascal Tortelier

Yan Pascal Tortelier leads the San Francisco Symphony in a French Program: Bizet, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano, and Jonathan Dimmock, organ

November 28, 2015Steven Kruger

Yan Pascal Tortelier was levitating with exuberance last Friday. Every good conductor shows passion, of course, even those untempted by choreography. But audiences love the ones who take to the air and defy gravity—most famously Leonard Bernstein, who did so wildly and erotically—but also the occasional anomaly. I once witnessed long-gone Swedish conductor Sixten Ehrling, famously reserved, conduct Respighi's Roman Festivals in his seventies, leaping about the Carnegie Hall stage like a red devil from Hades. Only the trident was missing.
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Art
Donatello, Spiritello, wood, Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. Photo Maggie Nimkin, New York.

Donatello in Motion – A Spiritello Rediscovered, at the Moretti Williams Gallery, 24 East 80th Street, New York City, CLOSING November 25

November 20, 2015Michael Miller

In an art world teeming with crass nouveaux riches grabbing trophies at auction for insane prices, once prominent dealers in prison, ArtBasel Miami, and the "Da Vinci" industry, it is deeply comforting to find an enterprise like Andrew Butterfield's refreshingly sober, but gorgeous and energizing exhibition of a single work of art: a spiritello (more commonly called by its 16th century name, "putto") which he found, eventually purchased, and now presents to the public with a carefully researched, modestly proposed attribution to Donatello (Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, Florence, 1386 or 1387 to 1466), the greatest of Italian sculptors of the Renaissance—I have always preferred his work to Michelangelo's. As a teenager I made my way around the David in the Bargello with my father, and we both agreed it was superior to Michelangelo's, and, as much as I've admired Michelangelo's sculpture, and written about it, I still consider Donatello to the greater of the two. If Dr. Butterfield's exhibition achieves nothing else, it pinpoints the reasons why Donatello is in fact the greatest and most influential sculptor of the Italian Renaissance.
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Art
Dennis Carr discusses the portrait of Maria de los Dolores Juliana Rita Nunez de Villavicencio. Photo Virginia Raguin.

“Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia” August 18-February 15 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

November 17, 2015Virginia Raguin

There have been a number of excellent reviews of this exhibit, especially Holland Cotter's early piece of August 27 in The New York Times. We still have several months to profit from “Made in the Americas.” My comments are prompted by my deep gratitude as a non-specialist for an exhibition that reinforces a new paradigm of art historical and critical thinking, even as it continues a tradition of a major museum able to bring an eye-popping collection of exquisite works heretofore not seen together. Dennis Carr has formed an intellectually rich exploration of global communication vital to the early modern era. Via a wide display of different media—textiles, furniture, metalwork, painting, ceramics, and inlay—we explore the relationship among the cultures of the Americas as the crossroads of Europe and Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Uncategorized
Samantha Hoefer as Nannerl Mozart in Syliva Milo's The Other Mozart.

Sylvia Milo’s The Other Mozart returns to New York, with Ms. Milo alternating with Samantha Hoefer as Nannerl Mozart

November 5, 2015Michael Miller

October 14, 2015 - January 18, 2016 The Players Theatre 115 MacDougal Street, NYC (Third floor - no elevator) Tickets: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/943472 $45, $50. Student Rush tickets $15, at the door. After a successful series of runs in London, Estonia, Munich, Salzburg, and New Orleans, writer-actress Sylvia Milo's brilliant portrayal of Wolfgang Amédée Mozart's Sister Nannerl is back in New York. If you missed in the summer of 2014, here is your chance! Click here for Michael Miller's review.
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Dance
Misty Copeland in "Company B." Photo © Gene Schiavone.

The American Ballet Theater’s 75th Anniversary Performances

November 4, 2015Mari S. Gold

The centerpiece of the evening was Monotones I and II, set to music by Eric Satie with choreography by Frederick Ashton. Each Monotone is a pas de trois; one for two women and a man; the other for two men and a woman with II made first. Both pieces look very simple but they aren't, as each contains a lot of arabesques and attitudes as well as other moves requiring hard-to-sustain balances. The dancers stand out from the background lit by Michael Korsch—the first group in yellowish-green from neck to toes; the second in white, both with what look like squashed bathing caps adorned with jewels on their heads. (Originally, the head coverings were different and, apparently, more stylish.) The piece is classic and remote; at times the dancers made me feel they were under the sea, moving their arms and legs against the weight of water.
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