Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance
Although the three works, Rite of Spring, Company B and Piazzolla Caldera that made up the evening are very different in style and tone, they are equally compelling.
2015
Stephen Porter plays Debussy’s Preludes, Books I and II at SubCulture, New York
One can't say that performances of both books of Debussy's Preludes are absolutely unheard of, but they are sufficiently uncommon for Stephen Porter to deserve our admiration for his courage and enlightenment in offering them in the form he did. Not only did he perform both books in their entirety from memory, he prefaced each with a piece from Debussy's earlier Images, in order to prepare the audience, and included engaging discussions of the composer and the works, not only providing us with background, but preparing us to listen, to enter Debussy's particular world of sounds.
New York Un-Seen: A Gallery
When you walk the streets of New York, do you see strange things? Do the familiar signs, window displays, and doorways that structure reality for us because of our needs and desires disappear every now and then, …
Joanna Gabler’s New York
Joanna Gabler, after many years of working as a painter in oils—a medium she continues to explore—and in straight photography, first attempted to combine her different visions in digital photography in 2008. Using common editing tools in …
Comden and Green’s On The 20th Century Revived by the Roundabout, with Kristen Chenoweth, Peter Gallagher, and Andy Karl
A main curtain that challenges the Chrysler Building in Art Deco beauty. Four luggage-tossing, red-capped porters who tap dance and sing their way across the stage. Then the big reveal of the huge 20th Century Limited train itself—blue-gray metallic, slanted out toward the audience under the black iron and glass ceiling. Surely this set, which appears only once in the show, is the most magnificent Broadway has seen in years.
Christian Baldini conducts the San Francisco Symphony in John Luther Adams’s The Light that Fills the World; Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Schumann and Brahms, with Anne-Sophie Mutter
This week's program at Davies Hall had a split personality. Young contemporary music specialist Christian Baldini was onstage to lead the opening work, The Light That Fills the World, by Alaska composer J. L. Adams. Michael Tilson Thomas then conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the Brahms concerto and Schumann symphony.
Rattle leads the Berlin Philharmonic through Sibelius’s symphonies at the Barbican
The best part of a love affair, wrote Georges Clémenceau some hundred years ago, is the moment you are climbing the stairs. It was, one hopes, not a cynical remark but a commentary on the pleasures of anticipation. I thought of this last month as I negotiated stairs at London's Barbican Centre. A visit by the Berlin Philharmonic is always, if not a love affair, then certainly a thrill. But the otherwise admirable and much used Barbican is a windowless maze, and climbing the various levels can make for the seeming triumph of cluelessness over romance.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra at Davies Hall, San Francisco
In the first hundred years of our still budding love affair with Maurice Ravel, his orchestral works have come to us from many directions. But despite our familiarity, Ravel's music remains enigmatic beneath its surface appeal. There is something "film-noir" about it. We are in a mystery. The lady has shown up at the detective agency wearing a veil....and one suspects it might take a Frenchman to lift it without getting his face slapped.
