Philippe Cossard and Cedric Pescia - Piano Mozart - Sonata in F Major, K. 497 Debussy - Epigraphes Antiques Brahms - Ten Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52 Schubert - Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940 A pleasant Sunday afternoon at The Frick.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
THEATER
New Ohio Theater
New York Animals
Author - Steven Sater
Director - Eric Tucker
We love following Eric Tucker! He's creative and interesting. ‘New York Animals’ (in previews; opens on Sunday) Bedlam Theater made its name with its stripped-down, amped-up versions of the classics, with too few actors somehow managing too many roles. This time Bedlam is taking on a new play by Steven Sater, though still with its signature mini cast. Mr. Sater’s script follows 21 New Yorkers over the course of a rainy afternoon, with new songs by Burt Bacharach. "Set in present-day Manhattan, this Bedlam world premiere is by two-time Tony Award-winner Steven Sater, best known for “Spring Awakening,” with songs by Mr. Sater and multi Grammy Award-winning songwriter Burt Bacharach. Artistic Director Eric Tucker is at the helm. His young and prolific company has been winning abundant acclaim in recent years, particularly for their smart and spare adaptations of “Hamlet,” “Saint Joan” and “Sense & Sensibility,” which will be reprised in the spring." BEDLAM will open their 2015/2016 season with the world premiere of NEW YORK ANIMALS, a new play by two-time Tony Award winner Steven Sater (Spring Awakening) with songs by six-time Grammy Award winner and three-time Academy Award winner Burt Bacharach and Steven Sater, and directed by Eric Tucker.
NEW YORK ANIMALS will begin previews tonight, November 14, 2015, at 8pm, at New Ohio Theater (154 Christopher Street), open Sunday, November 29, 2015, and end a strictly limited engagement on Sunday, December 20, 2015.
From an East Village diner to a Park Avenue penthouse -- four actors -- twenty-one characters -- love, sex, money, impossible relationships -- just another rainy day in New York City, played to a live new soundtrack by Bacharach and Steven Sater.
A workshop production of NEW YORK ANIMALS directed by John Flynn played Los Angeles' Rogue Machine Theatre in the summer of 2010.
Tickets range from $30 to $49 and are available at www.newohiotheatre.org or www.theatrebedlam.org. NEW YORK ANIMALS plays Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7pm, Fridays and Saturday at 8pm, Saturdays at 2pm, and Sundays at 3pm. Please note there will be no performance Thursday, December 17.
Committed to the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience BEDLAM creates theatre in a flexible, raw space and is interested in contemporary reappraisals of the classics, new writing and small-scale musical theatre. The theatre we make always includes the audience. Storytelling is paramount to us. We believe that innovative use of space can collapse aesthetic distance and bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life. For more information, visit www.TheatreBedlam.org or follow on Twitter @TheatreBedlam, Facebook: www.Facebook.com/Bedlam, or Instagram @theatrebedlam.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
THEATER
The Pearl Theater
The Great Divorce - C. S. Lewis
"Based on C.S. Lewis’ classic theological fantasy about Heaven and Hell, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorcetakes you to the outskirts of Heaven where the decision to stay or return to the familiar “Grey Town” below proves to be harder than imagined. Now making its New York debut, three brilliant actors bring this mesmerizing adaptation to life in an exciting theatrical experience."
Stage Adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce to Make New York Debut
Fellowship for Performing Arts will present a theatrical adaptation of C.S. Lewis' celebrated theological fantasy book, "The Great Divorce."
Helmed by Bill Castellino, performances of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce will run Nov. 13-Jan. 3, 2016, at The Pearl Theatre. The Off-Broadway engagement features a cast made up of Christa Scott-Reed, Joel Rainwater and Michael Frederic.
Ludovic Morlot - Conductor
Daniil Trifonov - Piano
Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 3
Rachmaninoff - Symphonic Dances
"A pianist ahead of his time" (The Washington Post), Daniil Trifonov tackles Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto — considered one of the most virtuosic works of its kind. As emotionally expansive as it is electrifying, the concerto is central to the Oscar-winning film Shine. Then the Orchestra brings Rachmaninoff: A Philharmonic Festival to a close with the beloved Symphonic Dances, a virtuosic tour-de-force. This young pianist is 24 years of age! The breathe and scope of what he has performed in the past two weeks is astonishing. We've heard him play 3 of the 4 Rachmaninoff piano concertos with 3 different conductors. And through it all, his technique and mastery has been at the very highest level.
We attended one of the rehearsals and watched him work with the conductor. He was able to stop, tell of a police of concern for the orchestra, describe it to the conductor, and then start at any chosen place in the piece. He had mastered the Rachmaninoff. He wasn't just barely getting through it.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Daniil Trifonov - Piano
Neeme Jarvi - Conductor
Rachmaninoff:A Philharmonic Festival continues with the dramatic First Symphony and the Russian master’s take on jazz through his Fourth Piano Concerto, composed mostly in New York. Daniil Trifonov — “a superpianist, one of those rare performers for whom no technical hurdle is too difficult, and who can tease captivating music out of the densest jumble of notes” (Musical Toronto) — is the soloist. Rachmaninoff - Russian Song, Op. 11, No. 3 Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 4 Rachmaninoff - Symphony No. 1 This 24 year old pianist is in complete control and has technique that dazzles. He is amazingly different from all the rest.
Järvi, Trifonov and Philharmonic make first-rate case for Rachmaninoff rarities
Neeme Järvi conducted the New York Philharmonic in music of Rachmaninoff Thursday night.
In the New York Philharmonic’s three-week fling with Rachmaninoff, the second series, which had its first hearing on Thursday night, is a strange exception. The first and third weeks are packed with a lineup of greatest hits: last week featured the celebrated Second Piano Concerto and the beloved Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Next Friday we’ll hear the Symphonic Dances and the Third Piano Concerto, the piece that vaulted Van Cliburn to stardom and won Geoffrey Rush an Oscar.
The two anchors of this week’s program have long been orphans in Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre, and the opening item was an orchestral transcription receiving its New York Philharmonic premiere. All three seemed thoroughly deserving of further consideration, buoyed by first-rate playing under the baton of the veteran Neeme Järvi.
The “Russian Theme,” originally from the Op. 11 set of six pieces for four hands, is a simple, sighing folk melody, and Arkady Leytush’s 2011 orchestration beautifully fleshes out the subject into a sonorous mass while retaining its essential wistfulness. One might have wished for Järvi to differentiate a little more clearly to bring more interest to repeated gestures, but on the whole, this was a nuanced reading, full of color.
Daniil Trifonov is joining the Philharmonic as star soloist for all three Rachmaninoff programs, and on Thursday he played the Piano Concerto No. 4, a sort of forgotten sibling in the composer’s most celebrated genre. Disappointed by the piece’s cold initial reception, Rachmaninoff revised it substantially in response to criticism that it strayed too far from the successes of the earlier concerti; nonetheless, it remains markedly different from its predecessors in its final form.
The first three bars, with their open progression and clean orchestration, could nearly be mistaken for Mendelssohn, but Rachmaninoff quickly makes his voice heard through a combination of tart chromaticism and spacious writing for the piano. Trifonov displayed superb technique, tossing off the passagework with ease. His touch is precise, and he is able to vary it in order to facilitate his subtle colorations and gorgeous, breathing phrases.
He plays rather quietly, which frequently makes it difficult to hear him over the orchestra at climactic moments. This did not hurt him so much in the Largo, where he showed a keen dramatic sense in some of the stormier passages, but in the finale it was hard to discern the direction of the piece, even as he spun silk in some of his gossamer arpeggios. The music itself is admittedly a bit of a mystery: when hearing a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, one expects to walk home with fistfuls of melodies, but this final movement employs jagged rhythms and never quite catches the listener with a sympathetic theme.
The Symphony No. 1, too, has historically been an ugly duckling, its disastrous premiere causing a major hiccup in the young composer’s career. Had that performance been as strong as the one Järvi led on Thursday, the symphony might well have had a very different reputation.
Järvi brought fresh, moving energy to the first movement. His baton technique at this stage is slightly awkward, a stiff, full-arm motion that nonetheless seems to communicate his intentions clearly. He brought cinematic size and richly colored playing out of the Philharmonic, who showed more than usual precision, giving a tight, shimmering account of the fugato section. In the bubbling, lively second movement, Järvi seemed to know precisely what he wanted to pull from each section of the orchestra, and executed his plan impeccably, as though pressing buttons.
The Philharmonic showed its warmest playing of the night in the lovely, dreaming Larghetto, featuring a sorrowful oboe solo, and fading out with mesmerizing coos from the clarinets. The exploding militaristic bombast could not have been any more Russian, conjuring up shades of Tchaikovsky with its crashing cymbals and hissing snares. This was the New York Philharmonic at their most focused and forceful, straight through the closing bars, which, crawling though they were, just about defined “majestic.”
Thursday, November 19, 2015
RECITAL
Marble Collegiate Church
Lunchtime Organ Series
Claudia Dumschat - Organ
Schober - Veni Emmanuel
Vierne - Symphony #3
We rushed from symphony rehearsal to Marble Collegiate to hear the lunchtime organ recital.
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Neeme Jarvi - Conductor
Daniil Trifonov - Piano
Rehearsal "All Open Rehearsals are “working” rehearsals and therefore the program may not be played in its entirety. Additionally, we cannot guarantee the appearance of any soloist at an Open Rehearsal." Rachmaninoff - Russian Song, Op. 11, No. 3 Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 4 Rachmaninoff - Symphony No. 1
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
RECITAL
Morgan Library
Angel Romero and the Aeolus Quartet Vivaldi - Concerto in D Major; RV 93 Boccherini - Quintet No. 9 in C Major G. 453 "La Retirata di Madrid" Celedonio Romero - Malagueñas Caledonia Romero - Fantasia from Suite Andaluza Boccherini - Quintet No. 4 in D Major G. 448 "Fandango"
An evening featuring works for solo guitar and guitar with string quartet arrangements is performed by the renowned Angel Romero and compelling Aeolus Quartet. Cosponsored by the New York City Classical Guitar Society.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
PERFORMANCE
Merkin Concert Hall
An die Musik
An uncommon combo.
Mark Peskanov, violin Nicholas Mann, viola Edward Arron, cello Daniel Rothmuller, cello Robert Ingliss, oboe Constance Emmerich, piano Jeewon Park, piano Lucy Mann, narrator
Works by Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn and Robert Mann's musicalization of "How the Rhinocerous Got His Skin" with narrator Lucy Mann.
Don't mis this Grammy-nominated ensemble in their 39th season! An die Musik has inspired audiences with their ardent impetuosity, musical integrity and fiery instrumental brilliance (New York TImes), attaining a place in the foremost rank of world-class chamber music ensembles today.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Cristian Măcelaru - Conductor
Daniil Trifonov - Piano
Rachmaninoff - The Isle of the Dead
Rachmaninoff - Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No. 2
This is a much sought after ticket. Both of these artists are young superstars at the top of their game. Trifonov, age 24 years, is remarkably different from all the rest. He's spectacular.
Review: Daniil Trifonov Brings Subtlety to Rachmaninoff
For three weeks, on behalf of Rachmaninoff, the New York Philharmonic is putting itself at the disposal of the dazzling 24-year-old Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov. On Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall, Mr. Trifonov was a brilliant, uncommonly poetic soloist in that composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Piano Concerto No. 2. Given the familiarity of these pieces, you might wonder why a Rachmaninoff festival was called for.
But this one does have Mr. Trifonov, who is playing three of the four concertos, as well as the Rhapsody, with three different conductors. There are also two substantial orchestra works in store, including the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff’s final composition. Wednesday’s first installment offered the impressive Romanian-born conductor Cristian Macelaru in an auspicious Philharmonic debut, beginning the program with a weighty, surging account of the 1909 tone poem “The Isle of the Dead.”
Yet the festival is built around the slender, mop-haired Mr. Trifonov, whose career has been zooming since 2011, when he took first prize in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv, then weeks later won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
Though he brought astounding technique to his performance here, Mr. Trifonov favored subtlety and clarity over sensationalism. In the Rhapsody, when the pianist has a first go at the Paganini theme that Rachmaninoff puts through endlessly inventive variations, Mr. Trifonov played with subdued sound and seductive mystery. Even when the music broke into intricate passagework and brilliant flourishes, Mr. Trifonov demonstrated crisp brio and an ear for detail, though there was plenty of fiery virtuosity as well.
His account of the Second Concerto was also unusual for its transparency and sensitivity. There was not one bombastic moment, hard to avoid in this piece, which is at times dense with repeated chords and bursts of octaves. In passage after passage, Mr. Trifonov seemed swept up in the moment, even if it meant slowing down considerably to explore some wondrous touch in the music. The result was a performance that lacked some measure of overall structure. Still, Mr. Trifonov took us on a bracing walk through the work, and it was a joy to pause with him as he pondered something beautiful.
To his credit, Mr. Trifonov will not just play orchestral programs but will also take part in a Rachmaninoff chamber music concert on Nov. 22 presented by the Philharmonic and the 92nd Street Y. And to kick off this Rachmaninoff festival, on Tuesday night at Merkin Concert Hall, the New York Festival of Song presented “From Russia to Riverside Drive,” a program mostly devoted to his songs. The pianists Steven Blier and Michael Barrett accompanied two fine singers — the soprano Dina Kuznetsova and the baritone Shea Owens — in both classics and rarities.
Mr. Trifonov’s one miscalculation, so far, was his solo encore on Wednesday. After playing such admirably tasteful Rachmaninoff, he offered his own shamelessly flashy arrangement of Strauss’s Overture to “Die Fledermaus.” Why not a Rachmaninoff prelude or étude?
RACHMANINOFF: A PHILHARMONIC FESTIVAL, Featuring Daniil Trifonov, Begins Tonight
Daniil Trifonov made his Philharmonic debut in the 2012-13 season performing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, led by Alan Gilbert. He returned in the 2014-15 season to perform Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1, led by Juanjo Mena. The New York Times wrote of that performance: "His sound bright and lean at the start, he brought out the work's focus, even as he gave the impression of flexibility. In the first movement, confidently varying the pulse, he wove his lines around the orchestra's. The great solo melody near the start of the slow second movement had a wandering if attentive feel, as if it were an impromptu, and Mr. Trifonov's sound took on a calm lucidity but without a hint of chill. In the finale, he gave his tone silky diaphanousness, keeping a quality of roundedness even in Rachmaninoff's most pounding runs."
"Daniil Trifonov plays with a technical ability that is jaw-dropping: he can do anything he wants, and his playing can be mysterious and captivating," said Music Director Alan Gilbert. "He wraps you around his finger and brings you along on a wild, fantastic, and sometimes terrifying journey. Exploring Rachmaninoff's breathtakingly difficult but beautifully expressive repertoire through Daniil's performances is sure to be an adventure."
"My Philharmonic debut was a special experience and a great honor. I was captivated by the energy, and it was really enjoyable music-making," said Daniil Trifonov. "The Rachmaninoff cycle will be an exciting adventure. Each of his concertos has a particular atmosphere: in the Second Concerto, his suffering gave birth to amazing music; the first movement of the Third Concerto is one of the most substantial works he ever wrote; the harmonic courage of the Fourth Concerto, where he searches for a new language, is captivating; and in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini there is a sense of something lost and a sense of perfection."
Rachmaninoff himself appeared as a soloist with either the New York Philharmonic or the New York Symphony (the two orchestras that merged in 1928 to form the modern Philharmonic) in 41 performances between 1909 and 1942, including numerous performances of his concertos.
In the festival's opening orchestral program, Daniil Trifonov is spotlighted in both Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Orchestra performs The Isle of the Dead, conducted by Cristian Macelaru in his Philharmonic debut. Rachmaninoff was soloist with the Philharmonic for the New York Premiere of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934. The composer was also the soloist for the 1901 World Premiere, in Moscow, of his Piano Concerto No. 2.
Artists
Combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity, Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov has made a spectacular ascent to classical stardom. Since taking First Prize at both the Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein competitions in 2011 at the age of 20, he has appeared with most of the world's foremost orchestras and given solo recitals at many of its most prestigious venues. Following the release of Rachmaninov Variations, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon with The Philadelphia Orchestra, in the 2015-16 season Mr. Trifonov is spotlighted in both the New York Philharmonic's Rachmaninoff: A Philharmonic Festival and the Philharmonia Orchestra's Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Cycle. He also plays Rachmaninoff concertos in debuts with the Berlin Staatskapelle, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (where he anchors the Nobel Prize Concert), Philadelphia Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, and Orchestre National de Lyon, and on the Czech Philharmonic's tour of Asia. He is performing Prokofiev in his Montreal Symphony debut and returns to the Orchestre National de France and London Symphony Orchestra, and Chopin with the San Francisco Symphony, Tchaikovsky with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, and Liszt with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at home and on a North European tour. An accomplished composer, Mr. Trifonov reprises his own acclaimed piano concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony. In addition to making his Los Angeles recital debut, he undertakes a European recital tour and residencies in Lugano and at London's Wigmore Hall. Last season saw the release of Trifonov: The Carnegie Recital, the pianist's first recording as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, which scored a Grammy nomination and an ECHO Klassik Award. His discography also features a Chopin album for Decca and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, Daniil Trifonov studied at Moscow's Gnessin School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 2013 he won Italy's Franco Abbiati Prize for Best Instrumental Soloist. Daniil Trifonov made his New York Philharmonic debut in September 2012 performing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, led by Music Director Alan Gilbert. During the 2014-15 season he returned to perform Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Philharmonic, led by Juanjo Mena.
Winner of the 2014 Solti Conducting Award, Cristian Ma?celaru is conductor-in-residence of The Philadelphia Orchestra, with which he made his unexpected subscription debut in April 2013. He has since conducted four of its subscription programs, and leads another in the 2015- 16 season. Other season highlights include his Lincoln Center debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival, as well as this New York Philharmonic debut. He returns to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and National Symphony Orchestra. Internationally, he makes debuts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Scottish National, Dublin's RTE National Symphony, and Tokyo's Metropolitan Symphony orchestras. In North America, his debuts include the Atlanta, Cincinnati, New World, and San Diego symphony orchestras, Minnesota Orchestra, and National Arts Centre Orchestra. Cristian Ma?celaru made his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2012, leading a work alongside Valery Gergiev in a Georg Solti Centennial Celebration, and in 2015 he made his full Carnegie debut leading the Danish National Symphony Orchestra with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. In June 2015 he made his Cincinnati Opera debut in highly acclaimed performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore. An accomplished violinist from an early age, Christian Ma?celaru was the youngest concertmaster in the history of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, and played in the first violin section of the Houston Symphony for two seasons. After participating in the conducting programs of the Tanglewood Music Center and the Aspen Music Festival and School, he received the Sir Georg Solti Emerging Conductor Award in 2012. He completed undergraduate studies in violin performance at the University of Miami and subsequently studied with Larry Rachleff at Rice University, where he received master's degrees in conducting and violin performance.
Repertoire, November 14
Rachmaninoff composed The Isle of the Dead in 1909, inspired by Arnold Bocklin's famous symbolist painting of the same name. The painting depicts a mysterious, dreamlike island with high rock cliffs containing burial chambers, where a boat navigated by a black-clad helmsman is conveying an enshrouded passenger to the shore. Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem creates a similarly ominous atmosphere. The score is built on a slowly rocking motif that suggests the quiet lapping of the water and the inexorable progression of the boat. The composer also quotes the somber motivic theme of the Dies irae, the melody used in the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. The New York Philharmonic first performed the work in January 1919, led by Joseph Stransky; it was most recently performed in June 2011, conducted by David Robertson.
In 1934 Rachmaninoff used the last of Niccolo Paganini's notoriously difficult 24 Caprices for Solo Violin (1805) as the basis for his 24 variations for piano and orchestra, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Rachmaninoff premiered the work with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski shortly after its completion, and it became his signature piece, which he performed often and to great acclaim. A pianist known for his long, slender fingers and formidable hand span (which reached a 13-note interval), even he admitted this work was a challenge: "The composition is very difficult, and I should start practicing it." The 24 variations fall into roughly three movement-like groups: Variations 1-11, 12-18, and the final 19-24. Highlights include the 7th, with its echoes of the medieval chant Dies irae (Day of Wrath); the ultra-romantic 18th, which is Paganini's theme turned upside down; and the conclusion, which wraps up a bombastic finale with a sly, soft "curlicue." Rachmaninoff himself was the soloist for the Philharmonic's first performance of the Rhapsody for its 1934 New York Premiere, led by Bruno Walter. Most recently, Bramwell Tovey conducted the work with the Philharmonic featuring Anne-Marie McDermott as soloist in July 2015 during the Orchestra's annual Bravo! Vail summer residency.
After the dismal reception received by his Symphony No. 1 in 1897, Rachmaninoff (still in his early 20s) began to give more emphasis to his career as a concert pianist and conductor. For a few years we would attempt a return to composition, but with mixed results. Then, in 1901, he finally produced the Piano Concerto No. 2, which has become one of the most celebrated piano concertos of the 20th century. Asked about this sudden reversal of fortune, the composer said he had undergone hypnotherapy. The work was the first in a string of triumphs that continued with the Symphony No. 2 and the Piano Concerto No. 3. The Piano Concerto No. 2 was first performed by the New York Symphony (which would merge with the New York Philharmonic in 1928 to form today's New York Philharmonic) in December 1914, led by Walter Damrosch, with Ossip Gabrilowitsch as soloist; the Philharmonic most recently performed it in December 2012, led by Juraj Valc?uha and featuring Andre? Watts as soloist.
Daniil Trifonov, the 24-Year-Old Wunderkind, Comes to the New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic is devoting the last half of November to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), and the star chosen for this special festival isDaniil Trifonov,the 24-year-old, mop-headed Russian pianist-composer who sprang to international recognition in 2011, when he won both the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow, and first prize at the Rubinstein Competition, in Tel Aviv. Since then, he has been a guest artist with most of the leading orchestras in America and Europe; the Deutsche Grammophon recording of his 2014 Carnegie Hall recital was nominated for a Grammy; and his virtuosic technique has been compared routinely with that of Vladimir Horowitz and Franz Liszt.
Between November 11 and 28, Trifonov will give multiple performances of Rachmaninoff’s second, third, and fourth piano concertos as well as his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for Piano and Orchestra.” (He played the first piano concerto last year with the Philharmonic.) He will also present a program of chamber music by the composer with members of the orchestra at the 92nd Street Y. The day before the festival began, at the WQXR Greene Space in Hudson Square, Trifonov played Rachmaninoff’s “Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos” with Sergei Babayan, his teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where Trifonov has spent the last seven years earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Trifonov concluded that program with a composition of his own called “Rachmaniana.” In the past year he has performed all four Rachmaninoff concertos in London, and he is now in the process of recording them for Deutsche Grammophon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, following their release, in August, of Rachmaninov Variations.
Trifonov talked informally with me at the Gramercy Tavern the day before his first concert with the Philharmonic. He started performing professionally when he was 8, and at 17 he left Moscow, at the suggestion of his teacher there, to study with Babayan in Cleveland. Up to then he had never played the music of Rachmaninoff, but Babayan considered him perfect for it. Rachmaninoff left Russia after the 1917 revolution, and he lived for many years in the United States, where he developed a close friendship with Horowitz. The composer was also a virtuoso pianist, and his recordings from as early as 1924 are still available. Trifonov described Rachmaninoff’s keyboard artistry as being extremely focused on finding the dramatic center of a piece. Trifonov’s technical mastery of such difficult composers as Liszt, for example, is well known. He explained that playing Rachmaninoff requires a certain emotional preparation from deep inside. Liszt is about the hands and fingers, he said. But for Rachmanifoff he has to feel the energy come all the way from the spine, through the shoulders. “I can almost compare it to swimming,” he said.
How about stage fright? Questioned on the subject at WQXR, Babayon said that every performer has it before every performance: the fear of forgetting, of going blank. I asked Trifonov if he ever uses scores in performance. “Only with chamber music,” he said.
Does he ever relax? “I like hiking, wherever I am,” he said. He also apparently likes movies. He said that he and his girlfriend, who is also a pianist, were going that evening—the evening before his first performance—to see Spectre.
Combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity, Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov has made a spectacular ascent to classical stardom. Since taking First Prize at both the Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein competitions in 2011 at the age of 20, he has appeared with most of the world’s foremost orchestras and given solo recitals at many of its most prestigious venues.
Following the release of Rachmaninov Variations, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon with The Philadelphia Orchestra, in the 2015–16 season Mr. Trifonov is spotlighted in both the New York Philharmonic’s Rachmaninoff: A Philharmonic Festival and the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Cycle. He also plays Rachmaninoff concertos in debuts with the Berlin Staatskapelle, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (where he anchors the Nobel Prize Concert), Philadelphia Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, and Orchestre National de Lyon, and on the Czech Philharmonic’s tour of Asia. He is performing Prokofiev in his Montreal Symphony debut and returns to the Orchestre National de France and London Symphony Orchestra, and Chopin with the San Francisco Symphony, Tchaikovsky with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, and Liszt with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at home and on a North European tour. An accomplished composer, Mr. Trifonov reprises his own acclaimed piano concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony. In addition to making his Los Angeles recital debut, he undertakes a European recital tour and residencies in Lugano and at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Last season saw the release of Trifonov: The Carnegie Recital, the pianist’s first recording as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, which scored a Grammy nomination and an ECHO Klassik Award. His discography also features a Chopin album for Decca and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1991, Daniil Trifonov studied at Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music and the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 2013 he won Italy’s Franco Abbiati Prize for Best Instrumental Soloist.
Winner of the 2014 Solti Conducting Award, Cristian Măcelaru is conductor-in-residence of The Philadelphia Orchestra, with which he made his unexpected subscription debut in April 2013. He has since conducted four of its subscription programs, and leads another in the 2015–16 season. Other season highlights include his Lincoln Center debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival, as well as this New York Philharmonic debut. He returns to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and National Symphony Orchestra. Internationally, he makes debuts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Scottish National, Dublin’s RTE National Symphony, and Tokyo’s Metropolitan Symphony orchestras. In North America, his debuts include the Atlanta, Cincinnati, New World, and San Diego symphony orchestras, Minnesota Orchestra, and National Arts Centre Orchestra.
Cristian Măcelaru made his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2012, leading a work alongside Valery Gergiev in a Georg Solti Centennial Celebration, and in 2015 he made his full Carnegie debut leading the Danish National Symphony Orchestra with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. In June 2015 he made his Cincinnati Opera debut in highly acclaimed performances of Verdi’s Il Trovatore.
An accomplished violinist from an early age, Christian Măcelaru was the youngest concertmaster in the history of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, and played in the first violin section of the Houston Symphony for two seasons. After participating in the conducting programs of the Tanglewood Music Center and the Aspen Music Festival and School, he received the Sir Georg Solti Emerging Conductor Award in 2012. He completed undergraduate studies in violin performance at the University of Miami and subsequently studied with Larry Rachleff at Rice University, where he received master’s degrees in conducting and violin performance.
Friday, November 13, 2015
MUSEUM
Whitney Museum of American Art
Frank Stella: A Retrospective
Twice this week we've walked the full extent of the Highline from the northern terminus at 34th Street to the southern terminus at 13th Street. The full day of walking with a taxi ride home is about 4 miles.
The Museum will present a career retrospective of Frank Stella (b. 1936), one of the most important living American artists. This survey will be the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date, showcasing his prolific output from the mid-1950s to the present through approximately 120 works, including paintings, reliefs, maquettes, sculptures, and drawings. Co-organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Whitney, this exhibition will feature Stella’s best-known works alongside rarely seen examples drawn from collections around the world. Accompanied by a scholarly publication, the exhibition will fill the Whitney's entire fifth floor, an 18,000-square-foot gallery that is the Museum’s largest space for temporary exhibitions.
The Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney Museum will likely provoke varied opinions, on a scale from great to god-awful. The crowded installation of huge abstract paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and painting-sculpture hybrids, augmented by works on paper, tracks the New York artist’s fifty-seven-year career. At the start is the deathly glamour of Stella’s Black Paintings—bands in matte enamel, separated by fuzzy pinstripes of nearly bare canvas—which shocked everyone with their dour simplicity when they appeared in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1959. Those works, which Stella began making when he was a senior at Princeton, amounted to tombstones for Abstract Expressionism and heralds of minimalism. The new show ends with one crazy-looking mode after another, mostly in the form of wall-hung constructions, created since the early nineteen-seventies. In between are too few of the swaggering compositions—of target-like concentric stripes, designs based on compasses and protractors, and shaped canvases that echo the shapes painted on them—that made Stella a god of the sixties art world, exalting tastes for reductive form, daunting scale, and florid artificial color. His impact on abstract art was something like Dylan’s on music and Warhol’s on more or less everything.
Nothing that Stella has made since exercises such authority. His last works to cause much critical stir, dating from the early seventies, extend the lexicon of his shaped canvases to reliefs of angled planes, made from wood and covered with colored paper, corrugated cardboard, and felt. The surfaces are seductive, seen close up, and the configurations are majestic, all but flying across the wall, when beheld from a distance. The works suggest a racy rebirth of Cubism, but trends in post-minimalism and conceptualism were taking center stage in the art world at that time, and Stella’s ripostes were strained. In the mid-seventies, he opened up his painting to actual space by fragmenting it into floating cutout metal shapes that he slathered with paint and sometimes glitter: disco modernism, you could call the work, but it’s more strenuous than ecstatic. There followed ever more aggressive free-form assemblies of jutting planes, twisted pipes, cones and cylinders, and hectic brushwork, the effect of which was like very loud music that has neither tune nor tone.
In “Working Space,” a book derived from a series of lectures that Stella delivered at Harvard in the early eighties, he framed his new work as an answer to a crisis in abstract painting. He saw a precedent in Caravaggio’s invention, in around 1600, of Baroque spatial illusion, in which the space in a picture appears continuous with the space outside it. But Stella’s theory proved more gripping than his practice. Caravaggio, in service to the militant piety of the Counter-Reformation, devoted his dramatic style to fervently envisioned religious content, such as the appearance of the risen Christ at Emmaus. The story told and the manner of its telling conjoin in Caravaggio’s work. Stella’s fealty to abstract art as a cause and an ideal—the only content that his art allows—can seem remarkably frail by comparison. It led him into willful eccentricities that may raise unkind questions about the cogency of his early triumphs.
Stella was precocious and exceedingly well schooled, qualities that are now the norm but which were rare among earlier generations of American modern artists, whose routes to fame tended to be serpentine. He was born in 1936 and grew up in Malden, Massachusetts. His father was a gynecologist, his mother a housewife who had attended design school. They both liked to paint. Stella graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, where his classmates included Carl Andre, whose sculpture later came to define minimalism. Stella immersed himself in art history and was inspired by sophisticated elders, including Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr., a painter who was the director of the nearby Addison Gallery of American Art. Hayes promoted the art of two German-American painters who were also pedagogues: the proto-Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, who had his own school in New York, and the Bauhaus-nurtured color theorist Josef Albers, at Yale. Stella absorbed a bias for painting as a systematic and even calculated enterprise. His good fortune in mentors followed him to Princeton, where he was encouraged by Stephen Greene, a minor painter and legendary teacher. A visit to New York in 1958 introduced him to Jasper Johns’s sensationally phlegmatic paintings of flags and targets, a model that he tentatively adapted to large-scale abstraction. Then came the Black Paintings, which, besides rocketing him to fame, promulgated a new idea of what art can do and, more to the point, what it can do without.
The idea—of painting limited to its essential means—was powerfully espoused by the critic Clement Greenberg, and was further refined by Michael Fried, an art historian and critic who was Stella’s classmate at Princeton. Fried championed Stella and other artists, notably Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, who hewed to Greenberg’s doctrine of modernist painting as progressive art for art’s sake. “Frank Stella’s new paintings investigate the viability of shape as such,” Fried wrote in an influential essay, “Shape as Form,” in 1966. Such thumping rhetoric, here with a faintly bizarre metaphor of paintings performing like a team of detectives, typifies the confidence of what came to be called “formalist” art and thought. The issues involved, which led Fried to attack the bluntness of most minimalist art as vulgarly “theatrical,” were esoteric but, for those in the know, galvanizing. In those days, serious critics could still at least seem to exert real worldly power. Leo Castelli, whose Olympian gallery Stella joined in 1959, took careful note of their tendencies, even as he began to eclipse them as the pilot of a soaring art market that didn’t trouble itself with theoretical distinctions.
Stella’s cynosure then, and perhaps his problem now, was a coolness beyond cool. In a telling passage from “Working Space,” he recounts a youthful misgiving about the grand masters of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whom he revered. He writes, “I sensed a hesitancy, a doubt of some vague dimension which made their work touching, but to me somehow too vulnerable.” The older artists had established New York as the imperial court of artistic innovation. It was time for their heirs to start behaving with an impunity befitting emperors. The stars of Pop and minimal art did so, though in most cases with some degree of irony. Warhol’s Factory poked fun at itself as a cottage-industry miniature of commercial mass culture. Minimal art related itself to new forms of public space—corporate lobbies and plazas, airports, malls, and freeways, synopsized in white-box galleries—which seemed to render obsolete the contemplation of discrete pictures and sculptures. But Stella wanted to maintain the grandeur of post-Renaissance Western painting, updated through the elimination of the muss and fuss of religion, politics, psychology, and other all-too-human weaknesses.
I don’t know what to make of Stella’s later works. His most famous apothegm—“What you see is what you see”—is no help, if seeing is supposed to imply comprehending. Looking is futile except as an inspection of the wizardly ways in which Stella made the works, with welds, flanges, castings, and, increasingly, computer-generated patterns. Always, there are self-consciously poetic titles, a habit of Stella’s since he gave the Black Paintings names like “Die Fahne Hoch!” (“The Flag on High!,” from a Nazi anthem) and “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II.” In the eighties and nineties, he made works referencing the hundred and thirty-five chapters of “Moby-Dick.” The titles function as apostrophes of meaning. Meaning exists. It’s just not “what you see,” except through tortuous efforts of association.
Stella made a permanent difference in art history. He is extraordinarily intelligent and extravagantly skilled. But his example is cautionary. Even groundbreaking ideas have life spans, and Stella’s belief in inherent values of abstract art has long since ceased to be shared by younger artists. His ambition rolls on, unalloyed with self-questioning or humor. The most effective installations of Stella’s later works that I have seen are in corporate settings, where they can seem to function as symbols of team spirit. Rather than savoring his work now, you endorse it, or not. ♦
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
RECITAL
Carnegie Hall
Jean-Yves Thibaudet - Piano
Schumann - Kinderszenen
Schumann - Piano Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp Minor
Ravel - Pavane pour une infante défunte
Ravel - Miroirs
Schumann’s Romanticism and the iridescent colors of Ravel’s piano music are at the heart of this recital by Jean-Yves Thibaudet, praised by The New York Times for the “sophistication and suavity” of his playing. Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) are a set of melodic miniatures—reflections on childhood that include the touching "Träumerai" (“Day Dreams”). Ravel’s Miroirs is a five-movement suite painted with adventurous harmonies and glowing with shimmering colors. Its most famous movement is "Alborada del gracioso," where Spanish rhythms enliven a morning song to wake lovers.
ROBERT SCHUMANN Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Op. 15
Like Debussy, Schumann had a gift for seeing the world through the eyes of children. But the 13 pieces that make up his Kinderszenenoffer more than fanciful visions of sugar plums. Schumann composed these deceptively uncomplicated miniatures in part as a love letter to his future wife, Clara Wieck. Although he called them “as light as a bubble,” Clara saw clearly that he had invested these “scenes of touching simplicity” with the emotional turmoil of his own inner life.
ROBERT SCHUMANN Piano Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 11
In the first of his three piano sonatas, Schumann paid homage to 16-year-old Clara by quoting from her own fandango-like piano piece Dance of the Phantoms. The score features an early appearance of Schumann’s fictitious alter egos, the dreamy Eusebius and the impulsive Florestan.
MAURICE RAVEL Pavane pour une infante défunte
From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy as the poet laureate of French music. The two men shared a poetic sensibility and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures, but at heart, Ravel was a classicist. One of his most popular works, the Pavane pour une infante défunte exudes a mood of ceremonial solemnity.
MAURICE RAVEL Miroirs
Roughly contemporary with Debussy’s Images, Ravel’s Miroirs are similarly adventurous in their approach to harmony, form, and keyboard technique. Although the titles of the pieces evoke pictorial imagery, Ravel is less concerned with traditional tone painting than with capturing the flickering reflections of pianistic sonorities and textures in his musical “mirror.”
Friday, November 6, 2015
PERFORMANCE
The Morgan Library
Juilliard PianoScope
Following Mozart: Piano Concertos led from the Keyboard Mozart - Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 449 Mozart - Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 414 Mozart - Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 271
"Nine Juilliard pianists perform and conduct individual movements from Mozart’s beloved and acrobatic concertos with chamber orchestra, hosted by renowned pianist and Mozart scholar, Robert Levin." We hear the best the world has to offer. Tonight was all young students of Juilliard and it was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying evenings we've had here. Great fun!
TOUR
New York Federal Reserve Bank
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building at 33 Liberty Street and occupying the full block between Liberty, William and Nassau Streets and Maiden Lane in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City is the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It is where the monetary policy of the United States is executed by trading dollars and United States Treasury securities. It reportedly holds 25% of the world's existing gold reserves, making it the largest known treasury in the world. The vault rests on Manhattan's bedrock, 80 feet (24 m) below street level and 50 feet (15 m) below sea level. The weight of the vault and the gold inside would exceed the weight limits of almost any other foundation. By 1927, the vault contained 10% of the world's official gold reserves. Currently, it is reputedly the largest goldrepository in the world and holds approximately 7,000 tonnes (7,700 short tons) of gold bullion ($415 billion as of October 2011), more than Fort Knox. Nearly 98% of the gold at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is owned by the central banks of 36 foreign nations.[The rest is owned by the United States and international organizations such as the IMF. The Federal Reserve Bank does not own the gold but serves as guardian of the precious metal, which it stores at no charge to the owners, but charging a $1.75 fee (in 2008) per bar to move the gold. There are elaborate procedures for the handling of the gold, with three different teams monitoring every transaction. Moving the bars requires special footwear for the staff, to protect their feet in case they drop one of the gold bars weighing 28 pounds (13 kg). The vault is open to tourists.
