LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Brandenburg Concertos

"A New York Holiday staple." -The New York Times

A New York holiday season without CMS’s beloved Brandenburg Concertos has become unimaginable. Don’t miss the performance which is now the essential year-end musical tradition for thousands of music lovers.

THEATER

Classice Stage Company
Twelfth Night, or What You Will - William Shakespeare

"Shipwrecked on the island of Illyria, Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are separated, each fearing the other lost to the sea. Viola disguises herself as a boy and wades into a complex romantic triangle with Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia. New York’s innovative Fiasco Theater brings their hallmark style and expansive imagination to one of Shakespeare’s funniest and poetic comedies."

Review: Finding Serenity in a Tempest-Tossed ‘Twelfth Night’

By BEN BRANTLEYDEC. 14, 2017

Fiasco Theater — whose affable “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” opened on Thursday night at the Classic Stage Company — is to the thickets of Shakespeare what your favorite high school math teacher was to the complexities of calculus. I’m talking about those easygoing, enthusiastic guides who take you by the hand and show you that what you thought was impenetrable not only makes sense, but might also be improbably pleasurable.

This company first won my heart in 2011 with a production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” in which a cast of six (assisted by a bedsheet and a trunk) brought light and sparkle to a plot-congested romance. Its streamlined “Measure for Measure,” one of Shakespeare’s most notorious “problem plays,” was such a forthright and forgiving portrait of people’s paradoxical natures that you left it asking, “So what was the problem?”

Fiasco also coaxed an effervescent, youthful sweetness from the sour inconstancy of the lovers in “The Two Gentleman of Verona,” an early comedy. And, taking a vacation from the canon, it turned the dense Sondheim-Lapine musical “Into the Woods” into a blithe celebration of storytelling that crossed the Atlantic for a warmly received London run.

Fiasco’s “Twelfth Night,” directed by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, is full of the troupe’s signature traits. These include minimal scenery and costumes, spirited musical interludes (with cast members doubling as musicians) and a winningly prosaic way of delivering thickly poetic dialogue, as if that were the way everybody talked these days.

As usual, the performers let the story tell itself, without excessive interpretive psychology. And they never pander or patronize with the big annotative gestures or frenzied slapstick common to the “Shakespeare is fun” school of acting. The show is steeped in a daylight lucidity, making it an ideal introduction to “Twelfth Night” for theatergoers unacquainted with this play.

For the rest of us, this production offers a perfectly agreeable two-and-a-half hours of stage time. But the electricity I associate with Fiasco is oddly lacking, as is the sense of unexpected revelation. The show as a whole feels like a clean-lined sketch for a fuller work to come.

Featuring a nautically themed wooden set by John Doyle, the artistic director at Classic Stage and a dab hand at eloquent minimalism himself, this “Twelfth Night” begins promisingly with a sea storm worthy of “The Tempest.” This particular raging squall, evoked by swaying, chantey-singing performers, is the one that separates the look-alike brother and sister Viola (Emily Young) and Sebastian (Javier Ignacio) and sets into motion a tale of confused identities.PhotoIt’s a well-chosen entry point into a comic universe in which sea imagery, and the sense of an ordering oceanic force, abounds. And because the cast members speak with such clarity and naturalness, you may find yourself newly aware of references to a threatening but ultimately providential water-hemmed world in which “tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love.”

As always with Fiasco, you never doubt that everyone involved understands the play from the inside out and is working as a team to convey that shared appreciation. Monologues are often addressed directly to the audience, with a chummy air that stops short of condescending jokiness. The generous suggestion here is that we — the theatergoers — are a crucial part of creating the fantasy before us.

But “Twelfth Night” is one of the most frequently performed works in the canon. I have seen at least five versions during the past five years, including the glorious Shakespeare’s Globe production out of London that starred Mark Rylance as the Countess Olivia. So I approach each new production of it with particularly high standards, hoping to see a beloved kaleidoscopic work (and my favorite Shakespeare comedy) from yet another freshly arranged perspective.

Fiasco’s house acting style might be described as one of instructive transparency, in which flamboyant performances never get in the way of the textual meaning. This works beautifully with a thorny enigma like “Measure for Measure,” where concentrating too much on the characters’ warped psychology can strand you in a Freudian wilderness.

“Twelfth Night,” though, cries out for more layered and intricate portraiture. It is, above all, about people living in disguise — not only to others, but also to themselves — and gradually uncovering their essential natures. And no matter what the title character of “Hamlet” famously advised to the traveling players in that tragedy, simply speaking the speech doesn’t tap into the emotional riches on offer in “Twelfth Night.”

The production’s leading ladies, who wear their feelings closest to the surface, are easiest to identify with here. Ms. Young is an earnest and honest Viola, who dresses as a page named Cesario to navigate the unknown kingdom of Illyria; and Jessie Austrian is a commanding and clever Olivia, the countess who unwittingly falls in love with this lass in lad’s clothing.

On the other hand, where is the bereavement that colors the lives of these women, each of whom believes she has lost a brother? For the play’s gloriously symmetrical happy ending to have full impact, you need to feel the anxiety of characters who hardly trusted in such a denouement ever arriving.

The directors double as actors here, with Mr. Brody as the self-infatuated Count Orsino and Mr. Steinfeld as an especially tuneful Feste, a clown in Olivia’s court, who delivers his melancholy ballads in the style of a James Taylor-esque troubadour. Paul L. Coffey is the puritanical Malvolio, Olivia’s steward; Andy Grotelueschen is her hedonistic cousin, Sir Toby Belch; and Paco Tolson is his dimwitted companion in revelry, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, with Tina Chilip as Toby’s girlfriend (and fellow conniver in Malvolio-baiting), Maria.

You may note that I didn’t characterize these cast members beyond, well, the characters they portray. That’s because the performances match those basic descriptions without adding much to them. Viola speaks often of not being what she appears to be. But in this “Twelfth Night” what you see is more or less what you get, even when people are pretending to be what they are not.

PERFORMANCE

Merkin Hall
What Makes It Great?

Beethoven - String Quartet No. 16, Op. 135

"The F-major Quartet was Beethoven's last completed work, finished only five months before his death. On the manuscript of the last movement, he writes, “The very difficult question” and then above the movement's 6 key notes, “Must it be?” and “It must be.” The meaning of these words as well as the quartet's unique mixture of the serious and the playful, the cosmic and the comic, have made the work one of Beethoven's most enigmatic masterpieces. Join Rob Kapilow and the Harlem Quartet as they explore the mysteries of Beethoven's final work."

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Weber - Oberon Overture
Mozart - Sinfonia concertante for Winds
Beethoven - Symphony No. 5

Alan Gilbert - Conductor
Liang Wang - Oboe
Anthony McGill - Clarinet
Judith LeClair - Bassoon
Richard Deane - Horn

175th Birthday Concert

"Celebrate the Philharmonic’s 175th birthday with Alan Gilbert conducting Beethoven’s immortal Fifth Symphony. Rising from the unmistakable four-note opening, it transports us from tragedy to triumph, from darkness into the light. Featuring a virtuoso quartet of Philharmonic wind principals, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante is guaranteed to delight with its entrancing melodies, elegance, and vibrancy."

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Baroque Collection

Handel - Concerto Grosso in D major for Two Violins, Cello, Strings, and Continue, Op. 6, No. 5 (1739)
Couperin - Concert Royal No. 4 in E minor for Oboe d'Amore and Continuo (1722)
Bach - Concerto in A minor for Violin, Strings, and Continuo, BWV 1041 (c. 1730)
Vitali - Ciaccona from Varie partite del passeremo, ciaccona, capricci, e passagalii for Two Violins and Continuo, Op. 7 (1682)
Telemann - Concerto in G major for Viola, Strings, and Continuo (c. 1716-21)
Vivaldi - Concerto in F major for Three Violins, Strings, and Continuo, RV 551 (1711)

"French elegance, Italian vitality, and German tradition combine for a concert of Baroque fireworks. The first “age of virtuosity” is brought to life by a roster of truly virtuoso artists."

THEATER

Cherry Lane Theater
Pride and Prejudice

 

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Written by and featuring Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Amanda Dehnert

Presented in a co-production with The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival

This fall, acclaimed writer and actress Kate Hamill (Bedlam’s Sense and Sensibility) will debut her playful new adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic romance, Pride and Prejudice. The outspoken Elizabeth Bennet faces mounting pressure from her status-conscious mother to secure a suitable marriage. But is marriage suitable for a woman of Elizabeth’s intelligence and independence? Especially when the irritating, aloof, self-involved… tall, vaguely handsome, mildly amusing, and impossibly aristocratic Mr. Darcy keeps popping up at every turn?! What? Why are you looking at us like that? Literature’s greatest tale of latent love has never felt so theatrical, or so full of life than it does in this effervescent new adaptation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/theater/a-madcap-pride-prejudice-alfresco-in-the-hudson-valley.html

Outdoor Stages: A Madcap ‘Pride & Prejudice’ in the Hudson Valley

 John Tufts, center, as Mr. Bingley in Kate Hamill’s adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice” at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y. Ms. Hamill is second from left. Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times 

Lizzy Bennet lives with Mr. Darcy in Queens.

This summer, however, the prickliest pair in fiction can be found most nights in their own D.I.Y. Pemberley, a tent in Garrison, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson River — and reminding audiences that the finest china in their beloved Jane Austen is as likely to be a chamber pot as a teacup.

Lizzy is Kate Hamill. Her stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” had its premiere last Saturday at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival there, where it will play in repertory until September before shifting to Primary Stages Off Broadway in November. And yes, Ms. Hamill acts opposite her nonfictional boyfriend, Jason O’Connell. It’s a first for the couple, although he played the future brother-in-law, Edward, to her Marianne Dashwood in Ms. Hamill’s previous Austen adaptation, “Sense & Sensibility,” a rollicking muslins-on-wheels affair (by the appropriately named theater company Bedlam) that had an acclaimed run Off Broadway last year.

Ms. Hamill, 33, says she plans to adapt all six Austen novels for the stage — probably in the order of their writing, the better to chart her own progress against Austen’s. “Northanger Abbey” may be next. (“There’s something I love about teenage vernacular,” she said in an interview last week.) Starting with “Sense & Sensibility” was perhaps wise: She could gauge the appetite for yet another Austen adaptation before adapting the most adapted — and cherished — of them all, “Pride & Prejudice.” “It’s the one everyone knows,” she said. “People have a serious attachment to it.”

“Sense” was such a hit that even a committed Janeite’s attachment might well withstand an irreverent “Pride.”

 

Jason O’Connell and Kate Hamill, center, in “Pride & Prejudice” at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times 

And it is irreverent. Think men cast as Mary, the plain and prudish Bennet sister, and as the snobbish Miss Bingley. A lot of “intentional water spillage.” Mr. Bingley as near to being a puppy as a man can be without being on all fours.

“People might feel I have desecrated their idols, but, you know, at least I’ve tried to do something interesting,” she said, noting that she had not put zombies in it, and that “I haven’t set it on Mars.” She has discovered, however, that “Janeites” — and she counts herself as one — “are pretty open-minded people; they’re exceptionally generous. Because sometimes I’m taking liberties.”

Ms. Hamill doesn’t see the purpose in adapting a classic unless there is a clear point of view. She found hers for “Pride & Prejudice” in the exaggerated notion of courtship and marriage as a game with winners, losers, referees and exceptionally bad coaches. She applied her own “historical ambivalence about marriage” just as she was arriving at the age when her friends were pairing off around her. She concluded that matches happen between people “whose weirdnesses fit together.”

She looked to the Shakespeare canon for a model. “It’s a romantic comedy, and I was thinking, what romantic comedies do I not hate?” The answer was “Much Ado About Nothing.”

“I thought the big challenge going into it was, everyone knows who gets together,” she said. “I wanted to make a certain story uncertain. How do you make a ‘Much Ado’ where you’re really not sure if Benedick and Beatrice get together?”

She was not afraid to go broad and go silly. There are games galore in her production. (In researching games of the period, she said, she discovered one in which participants simply slap one another in the face. It’s not in her production.)

 

Kate Hamill in her Elizabeth Bennet best for “Pride & Prejudice.” Nicole Fara Silver for The New York Times 

Bells ring throughout her play: wedding bells; alarm bells; the kind of bells that signal rounds in a prizefight; a chime that sounds, if only in your head, when you connect with your imperfect perfect match. (“It kind of annoys me when both Lizzy and Darcy are supermodels,” she said.)

The clanging insistence of bells became a critical device to her retelling of this classic story about the game of games: the marriage game.

Ms. Hamill grew up in a farmhouse in rural Lansing, N.Y., the fifth of six siblings. She knows how to milk a cow and collect eggs from hens, but she spent much of her time reading (“My parents didn’t believe in TV”), and she joined the theater program in her very small high school. That’s where she gained some sage advice. She was studying to be an actress, but the drama teacher told the girls that if they wanted work, they had to create it.

When she moved to New York, one of her jobs involved writing copy for catalogs. Hundreds of descriptions of jewelry. “You start to just amuse yourself: What else can I say about this pendant?” Early on, she said, “in my mind a serious writer was someone different from me,” and she remained committed to acting. But she wearied of auditions for “silent suffering girlfriend” and “girl in bikini.” That’s when she recalled her old instructor’s counsel. Three-quarters of all plays are written by men, and an overwhelming majority of parts are for men, she said, reeling off statistics she seemed to have learned the hard way. She began to think about creating “new classics.”

In addition to the two Austen novels, she has adapted Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and is at work on Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and — why not? — “The Odyssey,” for which she wrote a scene, she said, featuring a Cyclops singing to his sheep.

In the meantime, she is vastly amused to be doing a show with Mr. O’Connell in which they get to “bicker and hate each other for hours” — and nightly he must recite a proposal that was written by her.

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Ax, Mozart and Brahms

Edo de Waart - Conductor
Emanueal Ax - Piano

Bent Sørensen - Evening Land (World Premiere–New York Philharmonic Commission)
Mozart - Piano Concerto No. 20
Brahms - Symphony No. 2

"Edo de Waart leads Brahms’s genial Second Symphony. Magnificent horn calls open the work, cascading melodies delight throughout, and the finale drives home with brass ablaze. Emanuel Ax is the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, dramatic, reflective, and lyrical. And the Orchestra premieres music by Bent Sørensen — just awarded the distinguished Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition — whose twinkling sound world offers a new listening experience."

Bent Sørensen has won the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and this week New York audiences can discover why.

On November 30–December 2 the New York Philharmonic gives the World Premiere of his Evening Land, a work commissioned by the Orchestra through the generous support of The Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.

The Graweveyer Award — which is also awarded in political science, psychology, education, and religion — is given annually “to help make the world a better place. … Music has the ability to inspire, to bring joy to those who hear it and those who create it. It can convey great emotion in just a few powerful notes. There is, perhaps, no greater expression of the human spirit. For this reason, the Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition honors those who bring beauty and inspiration into the world.” The work so honored is L’Isola della Citta, Sørensen’s 2015 concerto for violin, cello, and piano.

Of Evening Land the Danish composer said:

“A picture, a vision: I am six or seven years old. I am standing in my childhood home in a small town on the island of Zealand in Denmark. I am looking out of the window, and there is a very special evening light over the fields. … It is as if the world is infinite. … The vision returned many years later, as I was looking out over New York from a high balcony. The vision from more than 50 years ago — the vision of quiet — was mixed with the new vision of flashes of light and bustling activity. Those two visions led me to the title Evening Land and the music came out of that title.”

Congratulations, and we look forward to the concerts!

RECITAL

Merkin Concert Hall
Tuesday Matinée

Stephen Waarts - Violin
Chelsea Wang, piano

Robert Schumann – Sonata No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 105
Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck
Allegretto
Lebhaft

Franz Schubert – Sonata in A Major (" Grand Duo"), D. 574
Allegro moderato
Scherzo & Trio. Presto
Andantino
Allegro vivace

Maurice Ravel – Sonata No. 1 in A Minor ("Posthumous”)

Igor Stravindky (Arr. Samuel Dushkin) – Divertimento from “Le baiser de la Fée”
Sinfonia
Danses suisses
Scherzo
Pas de deux. Adagio — Variation — Coda

Waarts showed an uncommon, preternatural sense of tonal color and lyrical beauty on the instrument.”
— Washington Post


Winner of the 2017 Avery Fisher Career Grant, violinist Stephen Waarts has been praised for playing “with technical command and a totally natural sense of musical drama” (Strings Magazine). He has already garnered worldwide recognition, having captured the Audience Prize at the 2015 Queen Elisabeth Competition; First Prize at the 2014 Menuhin Competition; and Second Prize and the Audience Prize in the 2013 Montreal International Competition. As Winner of the 2013 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he made recital debuts last season at the Kennedy Center and Merkin Concert Hall, to rave reviews. Watch Stephen Waarts perform.

PERFORMANCE

Carnegie Hall
Mariinsky Orchestra

Mariinsky Orchestra
Valery Gergiev - Music Director and Conductor
Daniil Trifonov - Piano

R. Strauss - Don Juan
Daniil Trifonov - Piano Concerto (NY Premiere)
Prokofiev - Symphony No. 6

"Daniil Trifonov made his Carnegie Hall debut in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. He reunites with them for another composer’s first concerto—his own. Trifonov’s Piano Concerto has pianistic flash, but also introspection and great tenderness. Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 looks inward too—especially in the anguished central Largo—but also excites with powerful outer movements. Strauss’s Don Juan is pure excitement: Sumptuously scored, brilliantly melodic, it’s the tone poem that propelled him to the front rank of composers."

RICHARD STRAUSS
Don Juan, Op. 20

A Sunset Mistaken for a Sunrise

One of the earliest observers to see the Wagner revolution in perspective was Debussy, who declared that Wagner was a "beautiful sunset who has been mistaken for a sunrise." The truth of this striking assessment is most tellingly apparent in the Wagnerian tone poems of Richard Strauss, which were considered "modern" when they first appeared, but became old-fashioned soon after in the face of newer revolutions wrought by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Debussy himself. A disciple of Wagner—in whom he declared "music reached its greatest capacity for expression"—Strauss pushed Wagnerian lushness and chromaticism to a glorious extreme that became a cul de sac. By the early 20th century, the "modern" school of Wagner was as dated as the "conservative" school of Brahms.

A New Form for Every Subject

It is certainly hard to see how anyone—except Strauss himself in Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben—could outdo the Wagnerian fireworks of Don Juan, the first of Strauss's tone poems to be performed. The fantasia structure of this seductive work (a freewheeling rondo stretched to the breaking point) looks back to the tone poems of Liszt, but as far as Strauss was concerned, the real inspiration was late Beethoven. In an 1888 letter to his mentor Hans von Bülow (a year before Strauss conducted the premiere of Don Juan), Strauss referred to Beethoven as an example of a revolutionary who "for a new content" had to "devise a new form." His own goal was also, he wrote, "to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject."

The forms of the tone poems do indeed demonstrate tremendous variety and appropriateness to their content: The transfiguration section of Death and Transfiguration has an expansiveness that seems to stretch into infinity; the penultimate section of Ein Heldenleben, which looks back over the hero's achievements, spins out an elaborate pastiche of motifs from earlier Strauss works (like Wagner, Strauss was not especially modest). The structure of Don Juan is tighter, more compact, than either of these: The passionate energy of Don Juan erupts, conquers, then quickly burns itself out.

The Roguish Versus the Tragic

Yet it is surely gratuitous to attempt, as some program-obsessed critics have done, to read a specific incident from the story of Don Juan into every phrase of Strauss's music. By titling every theme, commentators have reduced the music to a labeling game. Even Strauss, whom Mahler once judged to be too tied to his programs, was not
that literal.

Indeed, Strauss stated that the music followed only the "emotional phases" of the legendary lover as they are suggested in excerpts (appended to the score) from a 19th-century poem by Nikolaus Lenau. To Lenau, Don Juan was less a "hot-blooded man eternally pursuing women" than an idealist searching for an unattainable Ideal Woman and eventually suffering disillusionment, despair, and a suicidal death. (Lenau himself suffered a grim death in a lunatic asylum shortly after composing this poem.) In keeping with this concept, Strauss's tone poem has the requisite roguish sensuality, but also a heroic, decidedly serious thrust, with a genuinely tragic sense of catastrophe at the end.

A Closer Listen

The work is densely packed with ideas, beginning with a brilliant, almost screaming introduction followed by a gallant theme (suggestive of Don Juan) that gallops over brass and woodwinds. These are less melodies than pungent Wagnerian motifs, which reappear and dissipate throughout the piece, often combined contrapuntally or crushed into even smaller cells-a fragmentation that surely signals the impending breakup of the whole magnificent Wagnerian machine.

In contrast with these slashes of melody are three languorous love episodes that allow the strings and the solo oboe and clarinet to show off in the most elegant way imaginable. (It is no accident that Strauss was falling in love with Pauline de Ahna, the love of his life, as he was composing Don Juan.) Following the third episode, the horns blare out a new, more exalted Don Juan theme, signaling a wild carnival scene and leading to a wonderfully sustained blast from the orchestra that shuts off into sudden silence. The coda is a bleak winding down in A minor darkened further by a dissonant note from the trumpet. A final, morbid thump from the trombones ends the work.

—Jack Sullivan

DANIIL TRIFONOV
Piano Concerto in E-flat Minor

Taking after his father, a composer, Daniil Trifonov began crafting his own music at the age of five—even before he began studying piano. His introduction to the world stage as a virtuoso pianist came in 2011, when the 20-year-old took first prize at both the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Trifonov balanced his burgeoning international career with studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, an environment that nurtured his creativity both as a composer and as an interpreter of existing music.

The school commissioned Trifonov's Piano Concerto, and its president, Joel Smirnoff, conducted the first performance in 2014 with the composer as soloist. Trifonov has since performed his own concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra in St. Petersburg, and also with the Kansas City Symphony. This tour with the Mariinsky Orchestra brings the concerto to the East and West coasts of the US for the first time.

With his Piano Concerto in E-flat Minor, Trifonov revives the grand tradition of the virtuoso composer-performer that only faded in the latter part of the 20th century. From Mozart and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, top composers understood the dazzling power of keyboard concertos written with their own hands in mind. And for Trifonov, whose hands are capable of feats that few humans (living or dead) could match, the concerto functions as a magnifying lens for his own musicianship in all its technical wizardry and tender emotion.

Like most effective music written by 23-year-olds, Trifonov's concerto owns its influences unabashedly. From Rachmaninoff's concertos, it borrows a late-Romantic approach to tonality, a penchant for singing melodies, and a knack for interweaving keyboard and orchestral textures, ranging from delicate interludes to thunderous climaxes. Other passages hint at the kaleidoscopic chromaticism of another Russian icon, Alexander Scriabin. During a marching passage in the first movement, and again in sassy violin solos during the finale, traces arise of Prokofiev and his winking humor.

The form follows a traditional three-movement arc, its continuity supported by subtle thematic links and a direct connection into the finale from the second movement (which Trifonov describes as an "intermezzo"). The mischievous finale, with its syncopated dance themes and its gleeful arrival in the major key, makes a dashing impression. We can only hope that a sequel will require us to relabel this work as Trifonov's First Piano Concerto before too long.

—Aaron Grad

SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Symphony No. 6 in E-flat Minor, Op. 111

A Hard Road Toward Acceptance

Because of its complexity and emotional ambiguity, Prokofiev's Sixth was for many years regarded as a "problem" symphony, the most "difficult" work from the composer's Soviet period. Only recently has it come into its own. Yet its quirky mood swings and refusal to provide easy closure are problematic only when set against the grandeur of the popular Fifth and the childlike tunefulness of the Seventh. Relentlessly prodded by Soviet censors, Prokofiev had allegedly mellowed and become less "modern" in his late period, so the neo-modernist Sixth was a shock, even though it is by no means as biting and sardonic as early revolutionary works like They Are Seven, The Love for Three Oranges, and the Scythian Suite. Coming after the Fifth, Prokofiev's greatest triumph and an enduring template for the inspirational wartime symphony, the Sixth had too much to live up to. The Soviets wanted "music of the people," and denounced the symphony not only for what it was, but for what it could have been.

Ironically, there was no war to write inspirational music for even if Prokofiev had wanted to. He began the Sixth while completing the Fifth, but had to postpone completing it for two years because of a collapse down a flight of stairs that landed him in a hospital and greatly slowed down his normally rapid pace of composition (he had dashed off the Fifth in less than a month).

A Sober Reassessment

Prokofiev called the Fifth a "hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit." The Sixth is a sober re-assessment, not just in the music, but in what Prokofiev said about it: "Now we are rejoicing in our great victory, but each of us has wounds that cannot be healed. One man's loved ones have perished, another has lost his health. This must not be forgotten." Eschewing patriotic tub-thumping, the elegiac Sixth was Prokofiev's way of ensuring that the wounds of war "would not be forgotten."

The Two Prokofievs

The Soviet authorities were not impressed. After the premiere in 1947 (which enjoyed a respectful if not enthusiastic reception), one of Stalin's henchmen accused Prokofiev of believing in "'innovation for innovation's sake.' He has an artistic snobbishness, a false fear of being commonplace and ordinary. It is curious to observe the struggle of the two Prokofievs in a work like his Sixth Symphony. Here the melodious, harmonious Prokofiev is often attacked, without provocation, by the other, storming Prokofiev."

In a perverse way, the criticism is correct. "Innovation for innovation's sake" is probably a badge Prokofiev would be proud to wear in a period when the heady experimentation and quick inspiration of his early period had dissipated. And there actually is a struggle between "two Prokofievs" in the Sixth, not unlike the battle between two Mahlers in his later symphonies. That tension is precisely what gives the symphony its fascination and power.

The attacks only got worse. In early 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused Prokofiev of "formalist perversions and antidemocratic tendencies alien to the Soviet people and to their aesthetic requirements." The "aesthetic requirements" of the American people were apparently different. The Sixth vanished from the Soviet repertory, but the New York Philharmonic played the work in 1949, followed by performances with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (Eugene Ormandy's sonorous 1950 recording with Philadelphia is a landmark LP.) Later, Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky recorded the Sixth in Russia, and it is currently championed by Valery Gergiev.

About the Music

This is a symphony full of violent contrasts. The audacious, spitting brasses that open the symphony support the Soviets' "formalist perversions" charge, as do the brassy, maniacal marches—the "storming Prokofiev"—that clamor through the middle of the movement. The "wounds that won't heal" are starkly apparent in the winding, haunting main tune.

Opening the second movement is an anguished outburst that seems a follow-up to the desolate fade-out in the opening movement, but soon the music blossoms into the songful style that made Prokofiev such a popular composer with Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, and belying the work's fearsome reputation. Particularly beguiling is a tune for strings that keeps unwinding new beauties in the kind of long, languid paragraph Prokofiev favored late in life. No one knows where these melodies will end, and no one wants them to.

This welcome lyricism is brashly interrupted by ominous drums and fanfares, a pattern of disruption that recurs throughout the symphony. The exuberant Vivace finale'—with its twirling woodwinds, silvery strings, and Prokofiev-style wit—is also undermined by shadowy apparitions of music from the first movement, first desolately quiet, then screamingly anguished. The shattering coda blows all this away without really resolving the tensions the work sets loose. It's visceral and exciting, one of Prokofiev's blowout endings, but we're left with a haunted residue. The wounds are not healed.

—Jack Sullivan

CONCERT

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Essential String Trios

Beethoven - Trio in G major for Violin, Viola, and Cella, Op. 9, No. 1 (1797-98)
Penderecki - Trio for Violin, Viola, and Cello (1990-91)
Mozart - Divertimento in E-flat major for Violin, V Iola, and Cello, K. 563 (1788)

"The string trio—violin, viola, and cello—is the chamber music connoisseur’s delight. In the hands of master composers (and virtuoso performers) the string trio offers a peak listening adventure of stunning variety, engrossing dialogue, and transparent beauty."

MUSEUM

The Guggenheim
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World

“One could almost say that the 20th century was summed up a little early, in 1989, even as history since has proceeded apace.”

—Wang Hui, Historian

"Art and China after 1989 presents work by 71 key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms. Bracketed by the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it surveys the culture of artistic experimentation during a time characterized by the onset of globalization and the rise of a newly powerful China on the world stage. The exhibition’s subtitle, Theater of the World, comes from an installation by the Xiamen-born, Paris-based artist Huang Yong Ping: a cage-like structure housing live reptiles and insects that coexist in a natural cycle of life, an apt spectacle of globalization’s symbiosis and raw contest.

For art and China, the year 1989 was both an end and a beginning. The June Fourth Tiananmen Incident signaled the end of a decade of relatively open political, intellectual, and artistic exploration. It also marked the start of reforms that would launch a new era of accelerated development, international connectedness, and individual possibility, albeit under authoritarian conditions. Artists were at once catalysts and skeptics of the massive changes unfolding around them. Using the critical stance and open-ended forms of international Conceptual art, they created performances, paintings, photography, installations, and video art, and initiated activist projects to engage directly with society. Their emergence during the 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the moment the Western art world began to look beyond its traditional centers, as the phenomenon of global contemporary art started to take shape. Chinese artists were crucial agents in this evolution.

Art and China after 1989 is organized in six chronological, thematic sections throughout the rotunda and on Tower Levels 5 and 7. For all the diversity the exhibition encompasses, the artists here have all sought to think beyond China’s political fray and simple East-West dogmas. This freedom of a “third space” has allowed for a vital distance, and a particular insight, as they contend with the legacies of Chinese history, international modernism, and global neoliberalism of the 1990s. Their rambunctious creativity can expand our ever-widening view of contemporary art and inspire new thinking at a moment when the questions they have faced—of identity, equality, ideology, and control—have pressing relevance."

MUSEUM

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer

Video of Exhibit...

"Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), a towering genius in the history of Western art, is the subject of this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. During his long life, Michelangelo was celebrated for the excellence of his disegno, the power of drawing and invention that provided the foundation for all the arts. For his mastery of drawing, design, sculpture, painting, and architecture, he was called Il Divino ("the divine one") by his contemporaries. His powerful imagery and dazzling technical virtuosity transported viewers and imbued all of his works with a staggering force that continues to enthrall us today.

This exhibition presents a stunning range and number of works by the artist: 133 of his drawings, three of his marble sculptures, his earliest painting, his wood architectural model for a chapel vault, as well as a substantial body of complementary works by other artists for comparison and context. Among the extraordinary international loans are the complete series of masterpiece drawings he created for his friend Tommaso de' Cavalieri and a monumental cartoon for his last fresco in the Vatican Palace. Selected from 50 public and private collections in the United States and Europe, the exhibition examines Michelangelo's rich legacy as a supreme draftsman and designer."

THEATER

Garage 33 Theater
The B-Side: "Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons"

"THE B-SIDE is based on the 1965 LP “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” which features work songs, blues, spirituals, preaching, and toasts from inmates in Texas’ then-segregated agricultural prison farms. The album was brought to The Wooster Group by performer Eric Berryman after he saw the Group’s previous record album interpretation EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS. In THE B-SIDE, Berryman plays the album and transmits the material live, by channeling, via an in-ear receiver, the voices of the men on the record. Accompanying him are Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore. Berryman also provides context from the book Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues by Bruce Jackson, the folklorist who recorded the album at the prison in 1964 and is now a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo."

THEATER

Review: ‘The B-Side’ Is an Extraordinary Masterclass in Listening
THE B-SIDE: "NEGRO FOLKLORE FROM TEXAS STATE PRISONS" A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION

NYT Critic’s Pick
Off Off Broadway, Play, Experimental/Perf. Art, Special Event
Closing Date: November 19, 2017
Performing Garage, 33 Wooster St.
212-966-3651


By BEN BRANTLEYOCT. 31, 2017



Philip Moore, Eric Berryman and Jasper McGruder sing along with a historical recording in “The B-Side: Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons” at the Performing Garage.

Music seldom sounds more exciting than when you’re introduced to it through the ears of a passionate fan. Surely, you’ve had a friend who sat you down and asked you to lend full attention to what was about to be played for you — a Schubert sonata performed by Radu Lupu, perhaps, or Jimi Hendrix doing “All Along the Watchtower.”

You may have even been told, with unconditional sincerity, “This song will change your life.” And if it didn’t quite do that, the focus of an aficionado’s enthusiasm and expertise made you hear layers and meanings that you would never have inferred had you come across the same work by chance on the radio or as background music at a party.

That’s the experience, heightened to the point of transcendence, that’s on offer in the Wooster Group’s extraordinary “The B-Side: ‘Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons,’” which runs through Nov. 19 at the Performing Garage in SoHo. Like this troupe’s marvelous “Early Shaker Spirituals,” staged in New York in 2014 and scheduled for revival in December, “The B-Side” is quaintly subtitled “A Record Album Interpretation.”

Yes, the focal point here is a vinyl disc that is removed from an attractively illustrated jacket and placed on a turntable. An actor, Eric Berryman, lowers the record player’s arm, a piece of anatomy that may be new to younger audience members. Sound flows as the disc circles. And the act of listening somehow becomes a process that extends to and heightens all the senses.

The charismatic Mr. Berryman was not recruited to this project by a director or casting agent. He is a man with a long and serious relationship with the album at the center of this show, a 1965 compilation of work songs, spirituals, blues and toasts, performed by African-American convicts in rural Texas and compiled by the folklorist Bruce Jackson.Continue reading the main story
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Before he sets needle to vinyl, Mr. Berryman gives us a bit of matter-of-fact introduction to what we are about to hear and how this performance came into being. Several years ago, he had seen “Early Shaker Spirituals.” While working in a Chinese tea shop as a waiter, he met that show’s director, the Wooster stalwart Kate Valk, and told her he had an idea for her.

And so Ms. Valk wound up staging “The B-Side.” It is a task to which she — and a design team overseen by Elizabeth LeCompte, the Wooster Group’s artistic director, with lighting by Ryan Seelig and sound by Eric Sluyter — have brought a rigorous elegance and clarity.

Mr. Berryman’s prefatory remarks are delivered with the smooth, Everyman diction you associate with actors doing voice-overs or pitching their résumés at auditions. It is not a tone that prepares you for the voice — no, make that voices — that subsequently emanate from Mr. Berryman and his two fellow performers, Philip Moore and Jasper McGruder.

For what these men do is something you have probably done when alone at home. They sing along with the record, their voices layering and merging with, in this case, those of convicts doing hard labor a half-century ago. Perhaps unlike you, Mr. Berryman and company do so with a concentration, lucidity and visceral force that suggest profound and old acquaintance with the music.

I mean, really, really old — as in centuries old. Not that any of these performers are geriatric. But they become conduits for the songs of prisoners who were themselves conduits for an oral tradition that stretches back to at least the early days of slavery in this country. This is music that feels viral not in the technological sense of current usage, but in the sense of residing in the bloodstream.

Mr. Berryman occasionally annotates the separate numbers (there are 14 in total) with readings of passages from Mr. Jackson’s book of oral history, “Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues.” As in Mr. Berryman’s introduction to the show, none of these descriptions is politically or emotionally shaded. They’re neutral, so as not to block our view of the main event here.

That’s the music, of course, and the recorded spoken-word toasts. Performed a cappella, the songs spin tales of mythologically mean prison guards, and loves and lives lost, and the backbreaking purgatory of unendingly repetitive physical tasks.

The actors do not try to re-create the wood-hacking and hoeing that was the daily lot of the men they are channeling. Mostly, they are uncommonly still, conflating the acts of singing and listening. Gestures and movements are severely rationed, so that each one reads incisively.

Only once does Mr. Berryman fully cut loose, to deliver a parody of an evangelical spiel, which releases him from the aural backdrop of the record and has him sprinting into the audience as an animated cartoon of a money-collecting preacher. Entitled “Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” it is the penultimate piece in the show.

For the final number, the work song “Forty-Four Hammers,” Mr. Berryman falls silent to become the quintessential listener again. He takes a chair and watches old grainy film showing an unbroken line of chain-gang members chopping wood in unison. (Robert Wuss is the video designer.)

That found footage is projected against images, on a sleek monitor, of Mr. Berryman’s apartment in Harlem, where his vinyl record collection fills shelves. His home could be said to have always been the setting for this show — or rather any place where you feel safe developing an intense and intimate relationship with the art of others.

THEATER

Theater for a New Audience
DOUBLE BILL: A PAIR OF COMIC ONE-ACTS

MARCEL  - Created by and Featuring Jos Houben and Marcello Magni

"From Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Parisian home of Peter Brook, comes a poignant two-hander about the collision of clowning and mortality. Jos Houben and Marcello Magni, who starred in Samuel Beckett’s Fragments at TFANA, are comic masters and original members of the famed Complicité. In Marcel, which they co-created, they play an aging physical comedian and an inscrutable, clipboard-wielding nemesis mysteriously enjoined to test him with a battery of absurd tasks. Slapstick meets the limits of age and “all ages laugh and recognize their own absurdity in the comic antics.” – The Guardian


THE ART OF LAUGHTER - Created by and Featuring Jos Houben

"A comedy about comedy about what makes audiences laugh. Performing in English, Jos Houben dissects everyday life – a baby’s first steps, a man falling in a restaurant, the essence of various cheeses – revealing why laughter is at the core of our humanity. The Guardian calls it a show about “how a body can make people laugh.”
—

★★★★

“Marcello Magni and Jos Houben are two of contemporary theatre’s greatest clowns…

funny, heartbreaking.” – The Guardian review of MARCEL

★★★★

“Jos Houben is so pinpoint accurate with his body, you might imagine

laughter dying from dissection.” – The Guardian review of THE ART OF LAUGHTER

★★★★

“Poignant, Powerful…Recalls Chaplin, The Marx Brothers…Silent comedy that speaks volumes.” – The Evening Standard review of MARCEL

“An hour of inspired silliness endowed with a poignant core. Houben and Magni, wonderfully relaxed yet alive to the moment and the audience, keep us in a state of pleasurable suspense wondering what they’ll do next. Although there are neat sprinklings of verbal wit, the root of the laughs this highly skilled pair generate is slapstick. Clever yet elementally funny and marked by a knowing innocence about life and death, Marcel is resonant entertainment.” – The Times review of MARCEL

“A pianist practices day after day for the muscles that guide his fingers to become so flexible that we can begin to speak of the art of piano playing. Actors do exercises to develop their bodies but this has no meaning until they go beyond their muscles.
Both Jos Houben and Marcello Magni spent years in the rigorous schooling of Jacques Lecoq, and then the demands on each performer in the Théâtre de Complicité, to develop their thoughts, bodies, and feelings to the point where making theatre can truly become an art.
It is a work of high theatricality that the two – Marcello and Jos – create together as one performing body when they bring to us MARCEL. In THE ART OF LAUGHTER, Jos goes way beyond what he can explain in words, it is in every inch of his finely tuned instrument where a smile and answer take their real place, which leads us into the great unknown. This art is THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Marcello has similarly developed his craft through many living experiences.” – Peter Brook

“Jos Houben is Belgian. Marcello is from Bergamo. Like the great cuisines of their respective countries, they are utterly different, but exquisitely mouthwatering. Age old comic recipes combine in the hands of masters render the familiar un-recognisable, and the piquantly absurd, irresistible. Their bodies, tall and long, short and bald, contradict, interweave, commingle and coalesce producing a feast of absurd hilarity and irrational delirium. They are a rare and extraordinary delight.” – Simon McBurney