PERFORMANCE

Morgan Library & Museum
The George London Foundation Awards Competition Finals

Boy, This was a Blow-Back Hoot!

These young singers could sing.

The venue was around 300, we sat appropriately close (right in front of the judges), well-centered, and had a great time.

The Diva Soprano, Joyce Di Donato, we've seen perform in Cinderella and Lady of the Lake by Rossini was a winner several years ago of the George London Competition.  We also attend the finals of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions in about a month from now.  The point being, these competitions have the best of the new and upcoming singers.

The performance space at the Morgan is a pretty, well designed space in which all the seats are good.

This afternoon's performance is easily sold out, again.

LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
La Donna del Lago - Gioachino Rossini

A video by the director telling of the opera...

A bit of the singing...

We thoroughly enjoyed the opera.  But, here's a critic who had other thoughts.

A not so sterling review...

The story...

The big finish!

"Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez join forces for this Rossini showcase of bel canto virtuosity, set in the medieval Scottish highlands. DiDonato is the “lady of the lake” of the title, and Flórez is the king who relentlessly pursues her, with their vocal fireworks embellishing the tragic plot. This Met premiere production is directed by Paul Curran and conducted by Michele Mariotti." 

"Joyce DiDonato emerges triumphant. It doesn't take much courage to tell the listening public that DiDonato is among the world's greatest singing actors of any voice type; on Monday she was beyond perfect... a performance that may ultimately stand as a high point in her already lofty career... her tone was pure honey, her coloratura effortlessly fluttering, her ornamentation fearless." (NY Classical Review)

"The wondrous Ms. DiDonato and Mr. Mariotti, the fast-rising young Italian conductor, seemed almost in competition to see who could make music with more delicacy. Ms. DiDonato sang Rossini's beguiling phrases with soft yet penetrating richness, subtly folding ornaments and runs into the long melodic arcs. And Mr. Mariotti drew hushed gentle and transparent playing from the inspired Met orchestra." (New York Times)

"Joyce DiDonato surpass[es] herself in the technical triathlon that is the role of Elena... The Paul Curran production creates highly atmospheric environment with moody twilight skies and an expansive platform in which a variety of dramatic situations are able to unfold." (WQXR)

Juan Diego Flórez "was energetic and passionate as ever in his portrayal of the masquerading young warrior-king. His molten-gold voice was in excellent form." (NY Classical Review)

"Mr. Flórez makes a youthful, charming and impassioned king. Vocally he was at his best... He tossed off runs and roulades effortlessly and dispatched exciting high notes." (New York Times)

Daniela Barcellona brought "noble, mellow-toned and ardent singing" to the role of Malcolm... John Osborn as Rodrigo "sang fearlessly, with big, bright sound, and fully conveyed the feistiness of this character." 

Conductor Michele Mariotti, "who excels in the bel canto repertory, demonstrated how to breathe with singers while maintaining the shape and impetus of the music." (New York Times)

PERFORMANCE

Carnegie Hall
In Search of Chopin

As contributors to Carnegie Hall we are given the opportunity to attend this screening.  It will actually be held at the Bennack Theater in the Paley Center for Media.  The Bennack is Frank Bennack from San Antonio.

In Search of Chopin | The Paley Center for Media

Congratulations! Your RSVP for the exclusive screening of Phil Grabsky’s newly released documentary In Search of Chopin at The Paley Center for Media on Tuesday, February 24 at 6:30 PM has been accepted. This subscriber-only event will include a Q&A session with Mr. Grabsky and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, moderated by Jeremy Geffen, Carnegie Hall’s director of artistic planning.

PERFORMANCE

Merkin Hall
What Makes it Great? - Mendelssohn's Octet

This series has really been a pleasure.  Our previous performances included Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata. In each case, the music is broken down and then performed by concert artists.

"Who was the greatest child prodigy in the history of Western music? Most people think of Mozart, but the greatest compositional wunderkind in the history of Western music was actually Mendelssohn. He wrote his spectacular, virtuosic Octet for Strings when he was only 16 years old. Rob Kapilow explores the mystery and mastery behind Mendelssohn's stunningly precocious teenage masterpiece."

LINCOLN CENTER

Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

• Romeo & Juliet
• 
  
• Music - Sergei Prokofiev
• Choreography - Peter Martins
• 
  
• 
  

"The Bard’s immortal tale of tragic love translates into a powerfully moving full-length ballet, captivating neophytes and balletomanes alike, with a famed climax that never fails to affect audiences.

Featuring Prokofiev’s masterful score and dressed in designs by contemporary artist Per Kirkeby, the crushing forces of familial feud confront the unyielding passion of predestined love, making this the most famous romantic tragedy of all time."

LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Fanfare for Gaita, Suona, and Brass - Cristina Pato and Wu Tong
The Silk Road - Various Artists
Selections from Sacred Signs: Concerto for 13 Musicians - Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky
Death and Transfiguration - Richard Strauss
Rose of the Winds - Osvaldo Golijov

Alan Gilbert - Conducto
YoYo Ma - Cellist


Listen to Alan Gilbert talk about YoYo Ma and this concert

All three of these performances are sold out.  It was exciting to see the full force of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra combined with the "new" sounds of Silk Road.

Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration was a treat.

A trailer for the Silk Road Ensemble...

A review of the performance by the NYTs...

LINCOLN CENTER

Rose Theater
Visionary Voices - Dianne Reeves

"Grandeur with refinement," The New York Times wrote, describing the impact of Dianne Reeves' February 2012 performance in Rose Theater. On her return to Jazz at Lincoln Center for Valentine's Day, the four-time GRAMMY® Award winner will demonstrate that no singer is better equipped to captivate and seduce you with songs of love and romance. Her astonishing instrument is a given, but even more impressive is her refusal to hide behind it — with nuanced restraint and dynamics, she unfailingly inhabits every story she spins into song. Reeves is joined by Peter Martin and Raymond Angry on keyboards, Peter Sprague on guitar, Sean Jones on trumpet, Tia Fuller on saxophone, Reginald Veal on bass, Terreon Gully on drums, and Nadia Washington and Brianna Thomas on vocals."

Here's a video of Dianne Reeves...

MUSEUM

JP Morgan Library and Museum
Lincoln Speaks: Words that Transformed a Nation

The Lincoln Exhibit can be seen at this website.

This exhibition focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s mastery of language and how his words changed the course of history. Today, nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, he remains an exemplar of exalted leadership in a time of great crisis, and people the world over continue to look to him as a standard-bearer for principled governance. The exhibition explores Lincoln as a writer and public speaker whose eloquence shaped the nation and the world in his own time and still reverberates in ours.

Lincoln Speaks is presented thematically and chronologically. It was organized in conjunction with scholars at the Gilder Lehrman Institute and draws heavily on its renowned collection of American historical documents. With additional contributions from the Shapell Foundation, Harvard College Library, the Library of Congress, and the Morgan’s collection of Lincoln manuscripts and letters, the exhibition includes photographic portraits and books owned and used by Lincoln. It highlights the range of his rhetorical powers from the elevated style of his proclamations and great speeches to the forceful, incisive language of his military memos and the intimate prose of personal letters to family and friends. Lincoln drew upon his powers as a writer and orator to sustain the country during its greatest crisis and to inspire Americans to embrace the end of slavery. The show coincides with the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination and assesses the scale of Lincoln’s achievement as well as his national and global legacy through an examination of of his powerful words.

LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
Don Giovanni

Alan Gilbert, Musical Director of the New York Philharmonic, is conducting this performance.

A Rogue by Any Other Name

‘Don Giovanni’ at the Met Opera and in Two Other Stagings

FEB. 6, 2015

Lately, the news has been filled with reports of privileged men, from star athletes to venerated comedians, using their power, in some cases their physical power, to seduce and control women. So, by comparison, the sex-fiend side of the charming Don Giovanni, the title character of Mozart’s most complex opera, can seem not so threatening.

Giovanni’s licentiousness can get lost amid opera’s conventions, especially this work’s opera buffa trappings.

That is especially the case with the British director Michael Grandage’s 2011 production for the Metropolitan Opera, which returned on Wednesday night, featuring the dynamic baritone Peter Mattei in the title role, and Alan Gilbert conducting. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who has staked his reputation on bringing contemporary theatrical thinking to the company, has delivered some fresh and compelling new productions. Mr. Grandage’s tame “Don Giovanni,” with its period costumes and static, sliding three-tiered set, is not one of them.

But two modern, some would say radical, productions slip “Don Giovanni” into grim contemporary contexts: one by the Austrian film director Michael Haneke for the Paris National Opera, which I saw last month; the other by the ingenious Russian theater director Dmitri Tcherniakov for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, which I saw last week. Though very different, these productions compel you to think about how society flounders over dealing with consequential men who menace women.

Mr. Grandage’s staging is fluid and clear. There are some striking visual effects: Giovanni is dispatched to hell amid a near-inferno of shooting flames. And the cast was impressive overall. Mr. Gilbert, who, it was just announced, will step aside as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the summer of 2017, drew a richly detailed and shapely performance from the great Met orchestra. Still, if Mr. Grandage had anything new to say about this Mozart masterpiece, it did not come through in his essentially traditional production.

Five nights earlier, I had attended the Canadian Opera Company’s “Don Giovanni,” the North American premiere run of Mr. Tcherniakov’s staging, a coproduction with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Teatro Real in Madrid and Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Mr. Tcherniakov, who also designed the set and (with Elena Zaytseva) the costumes, presents “Don Giovanni” as the contemporary story of a rich, extended family living amid the baronial splendor of the Commendatore’s house. All of the action takes place in the wood-paneled sitting room of the mansion, its walls lined with books, and vases of flowers everywhere.

In a reading of the opera that some traditionalists may find a concept-driven distortion, Mr. Tcherniakov invents familial links between some of the characters, relationships made explicit in the program. In the libretto, Donna Elvira thinks herself Giovanni’s wife, asserting that he had “declared” her as such, only to abandon her cruelly. In this staging, Elvira is definitely his wife, an embittered woman who, while still obsessed with Giovanni, sees right through him.

And Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, who fights off the lecherous Giovanni in the opening scene, is here made Elvira’s cousin. Zerlina is no mere country lass, but Donna Anna’s impressionable daughter from a previous marriage, hence the Commendatore’s granddaughter. Donna Anna’s new fiancé, Don Ottavio, seems unsure of his place in this dysfunctional family. And Leporello? He’s a young relative of the Commendatore’s, living in the house, which lends ambiguity to his relationship with Giovanni, his supposed boss.

In this production (running through Feb. 21), the muscular-voiced Canadian baritone Russell Braun plays Giovanni as middle-aged and wasted, someone trying to convince himself that by luring women into sex, he will liberate them from absurd codes of proper behavior and protocols of entitlement.

The current Paris National Opera production (through next Saturday), first presented there in 2006, also tries to make the power relationships and sexual intrigue in the opera more immediate by placing the story in the sleek headquarters of a corporate enterprise. All the action occurs on one floor of the building, with a row of offices opposite a curved wall of picture windows offering spectacular city views. Giovanni, sung by the dynamic bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, is the company’s self-made, rapacious chief executive; the Commendatore, its clueless patron. Mr. Tcherniakov, who triumphed at the Met last season with his production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor,” may go to extremes in his interpretation of “Giovanni.” Yet every element is based on what seems like an acute reading of the libretto and the music. He almost eliminates the opera’s supernatural strands. Giovanni is subject to chest pains. And he is not consumed by hellish furies, but frightened to near-death by family members, who summon him to a kind of intervention. It would appear that they have hired someone to portray the dead Commendatore and terrify Giovanni, who winds up reeling on the floor.

Mr. Tcherniakov elicits nuanced performances from a compelling cast, especially the bright-voiced soprano Jane Archibald as a restless, conflicted Donna Anna, and the veteran tenor Michael Schade as an intriguingly aloof Don Ottavio. The conductor Michael Hofstetter led a grave, ominous account of the score.

Though the Met’s production is timid, this performance was, overall, the best sung, conducted and played of the three. Mr. Mattei is a commanding Giovanni: tall, impetuous and charged with sexuality: He can bend a phrase with seductive legato.

Mr. Mattei is well matched with the Leporello of the vibrant bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. He conveys the character’s bungling awkwardness. Yet Mr. Pisaroni’s natural charm comes through, lending Leporello a touch of swagger. Elza van den Heever, following her outstanding Met debut in 2012 as Elizabeth in Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda,” is back as a vocally splendid and poignantly confused Donna Anna. Her singing is agile and focused, yet luminous and penetrating.

Making his Met debut, the Russian tenor Dmitry Korchak brings a warm and ardent though periodically insecure voice to Ottavio. It took me some time to warm up to the soprano Emma Bell as Donna Elvira. Now and then, she scooped up to high notes and sounded hard-edged. Still, she has a sizable voice and sang the demanding role fearlessly. The appealing Kate Lindsey as Zerlina, the husky-voiced Adam Plachetka (another Met debut) as Masetto, and the veteran James Morris as the Commendatore all did strong work.

For Mr. Gilbert, this Mozart run follows his impressive house debut in 2008 conducting John Adams’s “Atomic.” He conveyed the arc of Mozart’s score. Tempos were sometimes reined in, sometimes prodded. Yet an organic entity emerged: The orchestra played superbly.

THEATER

The Duke on 42nd Street
Lives of the Saints

We saw "All in the Timing" over a year ago.  It was clever, creative, and fun.

This is the same playwright.

Lives of the Saints, a new series of short plays by David Ives, will have its world premiere at The Duke on 42nd Street from February 3-March 27 in a Primary Stages production. John Rando directs the work, after helming Ives' All in the Timing in 2013.

"Lives of the Saints marks our seventh production of David Ives' work," says Primary Stages Artistic Director Andrew Leynse. "This collection of short plays, including three new pieces, is a mixture of humor, intellect, and farce and is a transformative step in Mr. Ives' mastery of the one-act form. We are thrilled to be working again with David and his long-time collaborator, director John Rando."

Lives of the Saints will include Arnie Burton (Peter and the Starcatcher), Carson Elrod (All in the Timing), Rick Holmes (The Threepenny Opera), Kelly Hutchinson (Desire Under the Elms), and Liv Rooth (All in the Timing).

The minute "Enigma Variations" - the first short one-act play in Lives of the Saints - begins, you know you're in David Ives country.

Bebe Doppelgangler (Nancy Opel) has come to Dr. William Williams (Arnie Burton) complaining of an eerie sensation that everything in her life is doubled. As she and the doctor speak, a second set of actors, dressed exactly like them, shadow their every gesture. After the session is over, the characters and their shadows switch places, and the new Bebe complains to the new doctor of the eerie sensation that everything in her life is happening twice. "So," the doctor nods, "your recurring problem is a repeating problem."

This play, and many of the others that comprise Lives of the Saints, has everything you've learned to expect from David Ives if you've seen All in the Timing: verbal brilliance, split-second timing, lightning-fast wordplay and theatrical imagery that takes mere intellectual gimmickry and explodes it into metaphysics. And the actors in John Rando's world-premiere production (read: out-of-town tryout) at the Philadelphia Theatre Company execute the playwright's verbal acrobatics with bravura, turning linguistic pirouettes, leaping from one theatrical trapeze to another without a net.

Once you see that you're in Ives country, you'll be prepared for the oddities that spring up in the landscape. You won't be surprised by the ten minutes of laundry detergent puns in "Soap Opera," the saga of an appliance repairman (Danton Stone) and his love affair with his washing machine (Opel); you'll be as prepared as you'll ever be for the spies and counterspies in "The School of Natural Philosophy" and the way their mutual interrogations about espionage slip into philosophical questions about truth, love and fear; you'll be ready for the complaining workmen building the tower of Babel in "Babel's in Arms," trying to deal with the challenge of schlepping an infinite number of stones to reach an infinitely remote God, and the no-smaller challenge of finding the right words for things before many words have been invented; you'll even be ready for the extended conversation between Saint Francis (Bradford Cover) and the vultures eating his liver (Burton and Anne O'Sullivan) in "Saint Francis Talks to the Birds."

But you won't be prepared for the oddest and deepest and most extraordinary play of the evening, "Lives of the Saints, or Polish Joke." This play, at first sight, doesn't seem to be about anything: its theatrical gimmick, its pun system, its metaphysical tease cannot, unlike the other plays, be summarized in a single sentence. And it's the only play in the evening that has any real acting in it, rather than merely inspired clowning.

Two plainly dressed women (Opel and O'Sullivan) putter around a church basement preparing a funeral breakfast for the mourners of a friend's husband. As they prepare the Jell-O molds and pierogies and cakes, they talk about food and funerals. All of the pots and pans and cabinets in their world are invisible, and yet we hear over the loudspeakers the sounds of cans being opened, of whipped cream being whipped, of oven doors being opened and shut. As they progress, the wall of Russell Metheny's set opens horizontally, and we see two of the other actors working as sound-effects technicians, frantically trying to match the precisely orchestrated sounds to the ladies' mime.

This, too, is a theatrical gimmick. But - without spoiling any more surprises than I've spoiled already - it sets up a quiet moment at the playlet's conclusion in which our perceptions are miraculously transformed, and, in a moment of serene beatitude, these simple women achieve a quiet sainthood of their own.

When the sheer brilliance and non-stop hilarity of the other pieces begin to wear off, and when the puns begin to fade from your memory, these two women and their Jell-O molds will, I predict, continue to float above ground in your imagination.

LINCOLN CENTER

Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

ALL BACH

HEAR THE DANCE: GERMANY

Concerto Barocco

The Goldberg Variations

Renowned for his impressively prolific Baroque compositions, two prominent Bach scores provide the setting for two of NYCB’s most prominent ballets.

Concerto Barocco 

Music by: Johann Sebastian Bach

Choreography by: George Balanchine

Principal Casting: 

One of Balanchine’s greatest masterpieces, Concerto Barocco is music made visible as two elegant yet dynamic lead ballerinas each depict one of the instrumental soloists in a virtuosic double violin concerto.

The Goldberg Variations 

Music by: Johann Sebastian Bach

Choreography by: Jerome Robbins

A testament to Robbins’ unceasing invention, The Goldberg Variations is a choreographic tour de force that pays homage to Bach’s epic score by unifying the traditions of classical and modern movements in one monumental ballet.