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February 2017

Theater
Marie Mullen and Ailsing O'Sullivan in the Beauty Queen of Leenane by Druid at BAM.

Martin McDonagh at his Beginnings and Today: The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Druid at BAM and Hangmen Projected.

February 26, 2017Michael Miller

I only managed to get to The Beauty Queen of Leenane on its very last day at BAM, a Sunday matinee—in fact Super Bowl Sunday. This momentous annual event seemed to have little effect on McDonagh fans, and BAM's Harvey Theater was nearly full. The audience was of more than the usual interest, because, as the play took its course, many members of the audience seemed to know what was going to happen in advance. Only the special decorum of legitimate theater seemed to prevent some of them from calling out the lines ahead of the actors, as was the practice of denizens of the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square at the Study Period screenings of Casablanca. These people had seen the show at the BAM run at least once before, and in many cases, I'm sure, back in the late 1990s, when it catapulted its author Martin McDonagh to fame and fortune. On the other hand, the audience was alive to the affecting events in the story, gasping or ahhing at unpleasant turns of events, as they unfolded.
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Music
Anton Bruckner

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin in the First Complete Cycle of Bruckner’s Symphonies in the U.S., with Mozart Concertos for Piano, Winds, and Strings

February 23, 2017Michael Miller

We New Yorkers are fortunate in enjoying annual visits from the greatest European and American orchestras, and even more fortunate when these visitors offer a residency or at least what some people like to call a "curated" series of concerts. In most instances these take place in Carnegie Hall. Beyond the privilege of hearing different groups under different conductors in the same familiar acoustic—fortunately one of the highest order—a more extended and coherent journey through the classical repertoire justifies the effort and expense of the tour. The brilliant 2010 series built around Beethoven and the Second Viennese School, played by the Vienna Philharmonic, with the podium shared by Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim, stands out as a telling example.
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Theater
John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in A Doll's House. Photo Henry Grossman.

Ibsen, Strindberg and their Acolytes – a Retrospective

February 16, 2017Michael Miller

The double bill of early plays by Eugene O’Neill, brilliantly directed by Alex Roe, which recently closed at the Metropolitan Playhouse, appears as the answer to a question posed by another double bill (of sorts, one would have to say, since they are paired in repertory but not in a single performance) presented by the Theater for a New Audience of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and Strindberg’s The Father (1887), and it makes sense to discuss them all together. The question is, “What next?”
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Recordings
Alberto Ginastera with Cat

A Crop of Recordings XIII: Richard Strauss, Hans Rott, Alberto Ginastera, Robert Schumann, and Gabriel Fauré

February 15, 2017Steven Kruger

This is a groundbreaking recording—and a wonderful one! I first became aware of Elektra on an old Fritz Reiner/Inge Borkh LP of excerpts. The unusual violence of Strauss’s harmonies appealed to my teenage ears. Not long after, Georg Solti taped the complete opera, though without, I felt, the same crushing power from the podium as Reiner. But the sound of the orchestral score remained with me, and I always hoped someone would put together a suite. It’s taken 54 years in my case—but here it is!
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Opera
Émile Pierre Metzmacher. Portrait of Félicien David, 1858.

Félicien David’s Herculanum at the Wexford Festival: Opera Grand and Melodious

February 15, 2017Ralph P. Locke

Music festivals often pride themselves on reviving works that, for whatever combination of reasons, have fallen out of the repertory. One important French grand opera of 1859, Herculanum, by Félicien David, got its first recording two years ago and reached the opera stage—for the first time in nearly a century—at Wexford Festival Opera this past October. Reviewers of the recording, including New York Arts contributor Ralph P. Locke, were struck by the melodic richness of the music, the keenly characterized solo roles, and the imaginative use of orchestra and chorus. Reviewers of the Wexford production were more muted, though perhaps the low-budget and curiously updated production had something to do with that. Locke, who is a professor emeritus of musicology at the Eastman School of Music, contributed an essay to the WFO’s program book that gives a sense of this fascinating work. We reprint it here with the festival’s kind permission.
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Coming Up and Of Note
Manfred Honeck. Photo Felix Broede.

Manfred Honeck talks to Michael Miller about Mahler, Bruckner, and Conducting

February 14, 2017Michael Miller

Anyone who has heard Manfred Honeck conduct his own Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Heinz Hall or in their exemplary recordings on the Exton and Reference Recordings labels will know what a treasure he is for the world of music. This week he will conduct the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with Inon Barnatan and Mahler's First Symphony. He has made something of a speciality of this composer, a fellow Austrian. His recorded cycle with Pittsburgh now includes Symphonies No. 1, 3, and 5. Maestro Honeck also has special insight into the work of Anton Bruckner, another fellow Austrian. He has so far recorded Bruckner's Fourth Symphony and looks forward to recording the Ninth. In this interview you will learn something about the care and intelligence he puts into preparing his performances and his particular feeling for these great composers.
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Film
The Young Pope in the Sistine Chapel. Photo Gianni Fiorito.

The Young Pope HBO limited series. Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino.

February 9, 2017Huntley Dent

The Young Pope, widely greeted and at the same time widely dismissed as merely a visual spectacle, actually accomplishes something considerably deeper. It does for the papacy what Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) did for the decaying Ching dynasty and what Roberto Rossellini’s The Rise of Louis XIV (1966) did for the Sun King. In a lavish, slow-motion ritual where the protagonist is encased in a cocoon of surreal pomp and majesty, The Young Pope brings to bear the full panoply of cinema to ask how human existence created such a bizarrely inhuman situation.
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