THEATER

Lyceum
Oh, Hello

Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland are outrageously opinionated, 70-something, native New Yorkers that Nick Kroll and John Mulaney first began performing on the alternative comedy stages in NYC. Honed for over a decade, the fictional duo garnered a cult following and found their way onto a Comedy Central special, viral videos and late night couches everywhere. Oh Hello, on Broadway is Gil and George’s “memoir for the stage”—a laugh-a-minute two-man tour-de-force that’s part scripted, part spontaneous comedy, and totally unprecedented.

MUSEUM

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jerusalem 110 - 1400: Every People Under Heaven

We got to see actual documents written and signed in Maimonides own hand!

Here's the site for the exhibit...

"Beginning around the year 1000, Jerusalem attained unprecedented significance as a location, destination, and symbol to people of diverse faiths from Iceland to India. Multiple competitive and complementary religious traditions, fueled by an almost universal preoccupation with the city, gave rise to one of the most creative periods in its history.

This landmark exhibition demonstrates the key role that the Holy City played in shaping the art of the period from 1000 to 1400. In these centuries, Jerusalem was home to more cultures, religions, and languages than ever before. Through times of peace as well as war, Jerusalem remained a constant source of inspiration that resulted in art of great beauty and fascinating complexity.

This exhibition is the first to unravel the various cultural traditions and aesthetic strands that enriched and enlivened the medieval city. It features some 200 works of art from 60 lenders worldwide. More than four dozen key loans come from Jerusalem's diverse religious communities, some of which have never before shared their treasures outside their walls."

THEATER

Beckett Theater
A Day by the Sea - N. C. Hunter

"A DAY BY THE SEA is a warm, human and often humorous depiction of the “crisis” of middle age. Julian Anson, a once-promising Foreign Service employee, confronts professional disappointment and personal failure while picnicking along the English seaside. Jolted into the realization that maybe it’s not too late—he seizes an opportunity to correct his past mistakes and start fresh—but will the results be any different?"

“A FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE, ACTED BY THE BEST ENSEMBLE CAST I’VE SEEN IN RECENT SEASONS.” – TERRY TEACHOUT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"A DAY BY THE SEA opened on the West End in 1953 and ran for 386 performances in a production that starred Dame Sybil Thorndike, Irene Worth, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. In New York, the play opened in 1955 with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn headlining the cast; Hunter’s only Broadway production.

A DAY BY THE SEA is a New York Times Critic’s Pick. “There’s so much to like about the Mint Theater Company’s revisiting of A DAY BY THE SEA that it’s hard to know what to single out,” wrote Neil Genzlinger, calling the play “a beautiful study in conversations never had, or had too late.”

MUSEUM

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Valentin de Boulogne - Beyond Caravaggio

We love Caravaggio and have seen his paintings hanging in Rome and an exhibition in London at the National Portrait Gallery.  This exhibit of Valentin de Boulogne's work was spectacular in painting qualities and in numbers of paintings.
"The greatest French follower of Caravaggio (1571–1610), Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632) was also one of the outstanding artists in 17th-century Europe. In the years following Caravaggio's death, he emerged as one of the most original protagonists of the new, naturalistic painting.

This is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Valentin, who is little known because his career was short-lived—he died at age 41—and his works are so rare. Around 60 paintings by Valentin survive, and this exhibition brings together 45 of them, with works coming from Rome, Vienna, Munich, Madrid, London, and Paris. Exceptionally, the Musée du Louvre, which possesses the most important and extensive body of Valentin's works, is lending all of its paintings by the artist.

Although he is not well known to the general public, Valentin has long been admired by those with a passion for Caravaggesque painting. His work was a reference point for the great realists of the 19th century, from Courbet to Manet, and his startlingly vibrant staging of dramatic events and the deep humanity of his figures, who seem touched by a pervasive melancholy, make his work unforgettable."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/valentin-de-boulogne-beyond-caravaggio-review-intensity-and-intricacy-1477427900

‘Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio’ Review: Intensity and Intricacy

A heightened sense of the individual set his work apart from that of the Italian master

Karen Wilkin •Oct. 25, 2016 4:38 p.m. ET

At the beginning of the 17th century, Rome was full of painters from elsewhere, most of them enthralled by the radically new, pitiless realism of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Just as countless hopeful abstract painters in 1950s New York emulated Willem de Kooning’s gestural, wet-into-wet approach, many of Rome’s international community of aspiring artists in the early 1600s adopted Caravaggio’s way of filling canvases with large figures in theatrically lighted, indeterminate space, painted directly from models without preparatory drawings. Caravaggio fled Rome in the spring of 1606 and died, without returning, four years later, yet the influence of his potent, startling work persisted.

One exceptionally gifted French-born painter’s response to the allure and challenge of Caravaggio is the focus of “ Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a brilliant, compelling exhibition organized by Keith Christiansen, the Met’s chairman of the Department of European Paintings, and the French art historian Annick Lemoine. (Since the last survey of French followers of Caravaggio was seen in 1973, the current show was so eagerly awaited that the Louvre lent all six of its important Valentins, including those never made available.) Little is known about Valentin’s early years (born in Coulommiers, France, in 1591, he died in Rome in 1632), although he is documented as being in Rome in May 1614 and may have arrived as early as 1609, when he was 18. The young Frenchman’s earliest paintings clearly reflect the vanguard aesthetic of the time of his arrival in the Eternal City: dramatically lighted martyrdoms enacted by bald-headed, bearded old men; cinematic close-ups of saints stripped to the waist; groups of equivocal cardsharps; biblical stories featuring downstage violence. These are Caravaggio’s motifs, largely discovered at one remove by Valentin in the work of his own contemporaries, notably the Italian Bartolomeo Manfredi or Jusepe de Ribera, known as Lo Spagnoletto—the little Spanish guy.

But as the show’s subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” attests, Valentin was no mere follower. A bare-chested, mustachioed St. John the Baptist, with an inquisitive lamb (probably a self-portrait painted c. 1613-14) at once acknowledges its sources and demonstrates a new angular intricacy of composition and a heightened sense of the individual. The young painter fully announces his gifts in an uncanny “David With the Head of Goliath” (c. 1615-16), in which the distinctly troubled boy-hero leans toward us, across the huge, monstrous head of his victim. The staging and lighting are effective, but it’s the immediacy and psychological intensity of the image that capture us—hallmarks, we discover, along with a ravishing touch, of Valentin’s most unforgettable works.

In his canvases made between the later teens and the mid-1620s, the angled limbs of musicians, fortune-tellers, cheats and biblical characters, arranged in complex groups, articulate rhythmic paths through fictive space, with the implied three-dimensionality of structure heightened by the play of light on crumpled linen, shiny armor and flesh against infinite darkness. In the astonishing “Christ and the Adulteress” (c. 1618-22), Jesus crouches before the accused woman sentenced to be stoned to death, his gaze fixed on her pale, spotlighted décolletage; it’s as if Christ has implicated himself in his pronouncement “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Every work on view offers fresh excitement and new revelations about this superb painter. Groups of strangely serious musicians, seated around tables or chunks of Roman spoil, allow us to savor Valentin’s ability to convincingly conjure up everything from carpets to silk to carved stone while still celebrating the character of paint. The delectable, thinly painted surfaces of his later works have been read as evidence of an interest in Titian, yet the fierce naturalism of the result is quite different, just as the psychological dramas of Valentin’s strongest works differ from Caravaggio’s meticulous, eloquently still prototypes. Yet, as we move through the show, we recognize Valentin’s habitual models, a revelation of artifice that turns his deeply felt narratives into staged fictions, without, however, diminishing their impact. Like his accomplished touch, this quality explains why Valentin was admired by Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, painters acutely attuned to both nuances of paint-handling and dispassionate presentation.

This dazzling exhibition ends, crescendo, by bringing together both of Valentin’s largest and most important commissions, “Allegory of Italy” (1628-29), with its muscular river gods and gorgeous red drapery, and “Martyrdom of Sts. Processus and Martinian” (1629-30), with its tangle of bare limbs. The latter, commissioned for St. Peter’s, departs from Caravaggio’s magnificent “Martyrdom of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) in Rome’s San Luigi dei Francesi. Valentin pays homage to his predecessor but creates an innovative composition of stunning spatial complexity, powerful emotion, and heart-rending realism. The dramatically lighted scene, crowded with torturers and victims, is horrifying but confusing. Something terrible is happening, but we’re not entirely sure what. We shudder and then are seduced by the picture’s formal strengths. Beyond Caravaggio, indeed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/arts/design/review-valentin-de-boulogne-bright-star-in-caravaggios-orbit.html?_r=0

‘Valentin de Boulogne,’ Bright Star in Caravaggio’s Orbit

By JASON FARAGO•OCT. 6, 2016

“The Concert With Eight Figures” (circa 1629-30), in “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Musée du Louvre, Paris 

A canon is not a static list of dead white men. It’s an assertion of who from the past can speak to the present, and its shape is always up for negotiation. “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” a big Baroque blast of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity. It is also, quite explicitly, an application for canon membership, a full-throated bid to place Valentin (1591-1632) alongside Jusepe de Ribera and Georges de La Tour as a pioneer of the early 17th century.

Valentin de Boulogne’s “Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30). Vatican Museums, Vatican City 

With 45 of his 60 extant works, including a whopper of an altarpiece from the Vatican and every single one of his works in the Louvre’s holdings, you have the evidence before you, and you may, especially if Baroque drama is not your thing, find him a mere follower of an earlier genius. Or, like me, you may be overcome by Valentin, and find in his dark vision truths about our own lives, our pleasures and our shortcomings.

A Valentin show has been a longtime dream of Keith Christiansen, who leads the Met’s European paintings department and who has organized this exhibition with the French art historian Annick Lemoine. Its subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” may be a marketer’s necessity to win attention for a less famous artist, though it sets the exhibition’s stakes. There is nothing by Caravaggio in this exhibition, but his influence and example permeate the Frenchman’s art, and you’ll need to know something about him and his devotees to fully adjudge Valentin’s invention. (Next week, the National Gallery in London is opening its own show, “Beyond Caravaggio,” which places Valentin among a trans-European tradition of Baroque naturalism.)

“Cardsharps” (circa 1614-15), a genre scene painted by Valentin in Rome. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 

Caravaggio was the leading painter in Rome at the turn of the 17th century. His two grand paintings of St. Matthew, done in 1600 for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, shocked an older generation but made younger artists swoon. When he bailed town in 1606 — he went on the run after murdering a pimp — he left behind a generation of young painters who emulated his tight cropping, bold light and taste for flesh. Three paintings by other Caravaggisti, as his followers were called, open this show, and the best is a scene by Bartolomeo Manfredi (circa 1582-1622), in which Christ wields a cat-o’-nine-tails on slack-mouthed merchants.

Valentin spent his whole career in Rome. He got there from France no later than 1614, and his early paintings display a Caravaggesque taste for low life in the holy city. Soldiers play dice, cheat at cards. Young men play music while getting drunk and eyeing up Gypsies. A young military man offers his palm to a fortune teller while robbers ply him with wine. The figures’ buttery flesh and midaction positioning make these genre scenes uncannily lifelike, and Valentin’s religious pictures, too, relinquish sacred precision for the realities of the flesh. In “Christ and the Adulteress” (circa 1618-22), Pharisees in contemporary armor look every which way as the accused woman’s bodice droops down, and Jesus kneels in the dirt. A painting of John the Baptist, half-naked beneath a flowing red mantle, is probably a self-portrait of Valentin: young, mustachioed, beautiful and on the make.

Valentin’s “Judith and Holofernes” (circa 1626) tells a biblical story. National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta 

Like Caravaggio, Valentin lived fast and died young, succumbing at 41 to fever after a night of binge drinking that ended in a fountain. He belonged to a hell-raising confraternity of artists known as the Bentvueghels — “birds of a feather” in Dutch — whose motto celebrated the pleasures of “Bacco, tabacco e Venere”: drinking, smoking and sex. Like Caravaggio, too, he refused to make preparatory drawings, relying instead on the innovative practice of painting from live models. You’ll see favorites recur as you work through this show. A man cast as a pensive Joseph in a 1624-26 painting re-emerges later in a grand allegory, sporting a longer beard and a rug of chest hair.

The difference from his paragon, especially in the paintings after 1620, is in the darkness. For Caravaggio, chiaroscuro — the contrast of light and dark — was principally a painterly conceit, a means of bringing drama to altarpieces like “The Calling of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) or “Seven Acts of Mercy” (1607). The darkness in Valentin’s mature painting, by moving contrast, is pervaded with a melancholy absent in Caravaggio, a haze of lost love and the certainty of death. At the Met, a single, heart-stopping gallery contains six large paintings with musical motifs, and in all of them the parties ache with a worldly regret. Sitting at tables or castoff blocks of Roman marble, soldiers stare into space as musicians strum lutes or beat tambourines. Two paintings featured depressive violists who look down as they aimlessly bow their instruments. Valentin’s nights out in Rome may have been dissolute, but the nights he painted are suffused with pain.

Valentin’s “Judith With the Head of Holofernes” (circa 1626-27). Musée des Augustins, Toulouse 

Rome in the early 17th century was no honeymoon destination. It was a fetid, debauched, wildly unequal metropolis where starving artists hustled for commissions — Valentin got one of his largest from a diamond thief who used art to launder money — and where painterly disputes were settled with rapiers. In this show’s catalog, the art historian Patrizia Cavazzini provides a bulging register of artists brawling in taverns, and even, after Caravaggio’s example, indulging in a little light murder. Valentin’s own roommate, a sculptor, was stabbed to death in 1626. This was not a place suited to the lofty perfection of the High Renaissance, nor even to the moralizing of contemporary Dutch genre painting. Death was everywhere, and that put life on canvas into a more plangent key.

Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. He painted a barnstorming composition of the martyrdom of the saints Processus and Martinian, whose nude bodies, splayed on the rack, bisect a deluge of torturers, mourners and angels. Its vertical collision of saints and seraphim strongly echoes Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy,” and here, too, the high drama of holy suffering is tinged with the violence of the Roman street. At the time, Valentin’s altarpiece was contrasted unfavorably with one by Poussin, another Frenchman in Rome, whose cleaner finishes and bows to antiquity had come into fashion. The rest is canon formation: Valentin became a mere follower, when he was so much more.

The altarpiece is a wildly accomplished work of art, but to modern eyes the most immediate pictures in this momentous exhibition are those melancholy musical paintings, and one in particular. An allegory of the four ages of man, painted around 1628, depicts in a diamond arrangement a boy with a bird cage, a youth with a lute, a grown man with a book, and an elder with a drink. They’re all downcast, reflective, awash in sad thoughts. The man with the book seems skeptical of learning, the boy fiddling with the cage wonders about the meaning of freedom. The mustachioed lutenist plays despite his sorrows, and he looks a lot like John the Baptist in the earlier painting: a lot, that is, like Valentin himself. This world is vanity, but he plays all the same.

THEATER

Pearl Theater
Public Enemy - Henrik Ibsen

“When a local doctor discovers that the water in his small town’s mineral baths is contaminated, it sets off a cataclysmic showdown between a corrupt government that doesn’t want to be blamed, an angry community that doesn’t want their economy ruined, and a single man’s determination to tell the truth—no matter the cost to family, town, or self.

The play offers a story of political corruption (a poisoned water supply and the conspiracy to cover it up) and one man’s almost self-destructive need to reveal the truth. This adaptation offers a 90 minute compression of the Ibsen original that streamlines the action of the story, but sticks closely to his style. The setting and costumes have been updated to reflect 2016, and, although it doesn’t draw a one-to-one comparison with Flint, MI (the play doesn’t entirely allow it), that narrative is very much in our minds. It’s an incredibly timely piece, with a great cast.”

WHY PUBLIC ENEMY?

“When I read Harrower’s lean adaptation, I was stunned. His writing allows Stockmann to go for the jugular, to confront the hypocrisies of his town, and root out the corruption inherent in its local politics. Ultimately, my approach is to show that there is a price for excessive adherence to principle – and there’s a greater price for society in ignoring one’s truer ideals.”
From Hal Brooks, Director and Artistic Director

“Henrik Ibsen pulled off one of theater’s great hairpin turns…” –The New York Times

“instead the audience is faced with a real live polemic, sitting at the edge of their seats…listening to a man truly asking questions about the corrupt and false nature of leaders…and asking us to confront the evils majorities let happen, and how willful ignorance will lead us to the brink of disaster”
–New York Theatre Review

“The incandescent timely core of the play shines through…when push comes to shove, self-interest can so thoroughly dominate otherwise decent people that the general good gets subverted…it is a message as timely today as when Ibsen first wrote it.”
–Plays to See

"Ibsen’s parable of the collision of truth and politics in the public sphere takes on new immediacy in this punchy and raw adaptation from the playwright behind Broadway’s Blackbird. When Dr. Stockmann finds that the town’s tourist-friendly baths contain lethal levels of toxins, he sets out to clear the air and quickly finds his friends and neighbors poisoned against him."

Review: In ‘Public Enemy,’ a Noble Whistle-Blower Turns Fanatic

By ELISABETH VINCENTELLIOCT. 25, 2016


Jimonn Cole, foreground, in “Public Enemy,” David Harrower’s adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”

Henrik Ibsen pulled off one of theater’s great hairpin turns in “An Enemy of the People.” That play’s titular character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, starts off as a noble whistle-blower, only to turn into a fanatical crusader who delivers a proto-Ayn Randian aria of elitist contempt for the masses.

The play is admittedly a bit of a slog, so in 2013, David Harrower (the esteemed Scottish author of “Blackbird”) retitled it “Public Enemy,” spruced up the translation and shaved the five acts to a 90-minute sprint — which the Pearl Theater is now presenting in a satisfyingly sturdy staging.

Thanks to its subject’s evergreen qualities, this Ibsen work from 1882 is revived fairly often. It was last seen on Broadway in 2012, and the next year the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a feisty Thomas Ostermeier production that incorporated audience interaction and David Bowie music.

There is nothing nearly as provocative here, but Hal Brooks’s modern-dress production does well by the story. Harry Feiner’s ash-gray wooden set looks lifted from a Scandinavian design magazine, its clean lines contrasting with the messy acrimony between Stockmann (Jimonn Cole) and pretty much everybody else.

The doctor sets the conflict in motion when he realizes that the town’s lucrative spa baths have been contaminated by industrial runoff, and he recommends that they be closed for a lengthy cleanup. The mayor (Guiesseppe Jones) objects to that costly idea and turns the townspeople against Stockmann, his brother.

On the doctor’s side are his wife (the excellent Nilaja Sun, who has earned praised for her solo shows “No Child …” and “Pike St.”) and the sea captain Horster (Carol Schultz, in a role written for a man).WRITE A COMMENT

It’s easy to sympathize with the embattled Stockmann when he fights for public health; less so when he delivers a fiery rant against the tyranny of an ignorant majority over an educated minority. Mr. Cole fully comes into his own as Stockmann turns his last stand into a grandstand about the “majority getting what it wants.” For him, that amounts to the “gang rape” of democracy.

Being ostracized only reinforces the doctor’s messiah complex. In this society, you can be corrupt or you can be a zealot. What bleak options this thought-provoking show offers.

PERFORMANCE

Carnegie Hall
Mahmoud Ahmed

Give this a listen...

Mahmoud Ahmed’s rapturous voice dances across octaves and floats over hypnotic beats that are punctuated by bluesy brass and funky guitar lines. Of his singing, The New York Times cited his “passion that needs no translation.” Experience it all when the winner of the prestigious BBC World Music Award and star of the legendary Éthiopiques series of recordings dazzles with his ecstatic blend of pulsing rhythm and blues, jazz, and sizzling Ethiopian soul music.

For more than 40 years, Mahmoud Ahmed has deftly combined the traditional music of Ethiopia (essentially a five-note scale that features jazz-style singing offset by complex circular rhythm patterns that give the music a distinct oriental feel) with pop and jazz, yielding some of the most adventurous, passionate, and often surreal sounds heard in free jazz today.

Ahmed was at the forefront of Ethiopian music's "golden era" in the 1960s and '70s, and is still one the country's most eminent musicians. His body of work--including landmark recordings Almaz, Alèmyé, Ere Mela Mela, and Tezeta re-released as part of the Éthiopiques series--have become an essential benchmark of Ethiopia's musical history and cultural heritage, earning Ahmed the prestigious BBC World Music Award in 2007.

Ahmed has been a star in Ethiopia since the day he began performing. His swooping vocals with his multi-octave voice, complemented by the freewheeling jazz of Ibex (the band with whom he recorded his masterpiece, Ere Mela Mela), are very different from what is normally lumped into the broad category of Afro-pop. The rhythms are repetitive and intense, similar to those of Fela Kuti. But Ahmed's voice--swirling high notes that sound as if they're chasing one another, impeccable tone and phrasing--is the distinguishing element. By singing in this style, he has attempted to fuse the past and the present. Ahmed is not an elitist when it comes to singing older Ethiopian music, but he hears the similarities in Ethiopian pop that have thrived over time and is keen to bring them together.

LECTURE

One Day University
Symphony Space

A Semester of Ideas (all in one day) - NYC

"Join One Day University as we present our fall full-day event on October 22nd. Spend a fascinating day with 4 award-winning professors. You'll experience all four thought-provoking talks and countless engaging ideas - all in one day. And don't worry, there are no tests, no grades and no homework. Just the pure joy of lifelong learning!

Students will have a 1 hour and 15 minute lunch break. You may bring your own or purchase it at a nearby restaurant."




9:30 AM - 10:45 AM

Four Trials That Changed the World

Austin Sarat / Amherst College

Even if we know little about the law, most of us know something about one of law's great rituals, the trial. We are regularly fascinated when this or that legal case is played out in a courtroom and proclaimed in the media to be "the trial of the century." Courtroom contests pit good versus evil, right versus wrong. But, in addition to their dramatic quality, they also are educational moments, occasions on which some of our most important political and social issues get played out before judge and jury. In this lecture we will consider four trials that changed American history during the twentieth century.

We will start by examining the so called "Scopes Monkey Trial." In this 1925 case, a high school teacher was accused of violating a state law that made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. Next we take up the Nuremberg trials, held by Allied forces after World War II to prosecute the leaders of Nazi Germany. Our third trial occurred in 1995 when the state of California prosecuted O.J. Simpson for the murder of his wife. The final of the four trials that changed America occurred four year later when the United States Senate took up the impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton arising out of his conduct during and after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Each of these trials crystallized crucial issues of the day. And, the decisions reached in each of them had a profound impact well beyond the boundaries of the courtroom. If you are interested in such pressing issues as freedom of speech and religion, the responsibilities of perpetrators of war crimes, the legal treatment of celebrities, and the private lives of public figures, or if you just want to have the fun of revisiting some of the most riveting moments in recent American history, this lecture will give you considerable food for thought.



Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written, co-written, or edited more than ninety books in the fields of law and political science. Professor Sarat has received the the Stan Wheeler Award for his excellence as a teacher and mentor, awarded by the Law and Society Association.

11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

The Science of Sleep: How it Impacts Memory, Creativity, and the Ability to Process New Ideas

Jessica Payne / University of Notre Dame

What's going on in your head while you sleep? The research of Notre Dame Professor Jessica Payne shows that the non-waking hours are incredibly valuable for your day-to-day life, especially for helping to commit information to memory and for problem solving. If you ever thought sleep was just downtime between one task and the next, think again.The fact is, your brain pulls an all-nighter when you hit the hay. Many regions of the brain - especially those involved in learning, processing information, and emotion - are actually more active during sleep than when you're awake. These regions are working together while you sleep, helping you process and sort information you've taken in during the course of the day. Professor Payne's research has focused on what types of information are submitted to memory, and has been instrumental in better understanding how the brain stores the information.

Sound interesting? It is. And useful too, as Professor Payne will outline all sorts of practical information on how to control your sleep habits to insure maximum productivity.

Jessica Payne is the Nancy O'Neill Collegiate Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab. Her course, The Sleeping Brain, routinely sports a waitlist because of its immense popularity among Notre Dame students. In 2012, Professor Payne received the Frank O'Malley Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is also a two-time recipient of the Distinction in Teaching Award, and won the Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard University's Derek Bok Center.

12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Lunch Break




1:30 PM - 2:45 PM

Rights in America: A Brief (250 Year) History

John McCaskey / Columbia University

Rights to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." The Founding Fathers took these as self-evident, but we've been fighting about them ever since. What exactly are rights? Who has them? Are there different kinds? Are rights natural and inborn or artificial and granted by governments? Can rights come into conflict? If so, what should we do when that happens?

In this lecture, Professor John McCaskey will trace how Americans have answered these questions—from the country's founding, through the Civil War, the woman suffrage movement, the Progressive revolution, Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent battles over gay marriage and health care. Whatever your political persuasion, Professor McCaskey will give you a framework that you can use to analyze—and argue with others about—any question involving rights.

 

John McCaskey is an internationally recognized authority in the history of philosophy and has taught history, philosophy, and social ethics programs at Columbia University, Stanford University, and Brown University.

3:00 PM - 4:15 PM

Music and the Brain: What We Know (And What We Don't)

Jessica Grahn / Western University

Babies come into the world with musical preferences. They begin to respond to music while still in the womb. At the age of 4 months, dissonant notes at the end of a melody will cause them to squirm and turn away. If they like a tune, they may smile and let you know. Scientists cite such responses as evidence that certain rules for music may be wired into the brain.

This class will discuss how humans (and even animals) react to music, and how the brain's movement centers light up in response to music and rhythm, even when we aren't moving a muscle. To illustrate some of the effects music has on the brain, we will turn to research with people of all ages, from 1 to 100! We will also cover the exciting potential held by some musical therapies for helping those with degenerative neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease.

Jessica Grahn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Western University in Ontario. She has established herself as an emerging leader in the field of the neuroscience of music which combines her unique background as a classically trained concert pianist and her training as a neuroscientist. Professor Grahn's research studies how the brain responds to musical rhythm and how it may be processed in the brains of those who have brain dysfunction, such as those with Parkinson's disease. She has been awarded countless grants and honors for her work in neuroscience.

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

The Emerson at Forty

Beethoven - Quartet in F minor for Strings, Op. 95, "Series" (1810-11)
Bartok - Quartet No. 4 for Strings, BB 95 (1928)
Mendelssohn - Octet in E-flat major for Strings, Op 20 (1825)

"An ensemble so polished it can leave audiences with their jaws agape..."

-The Post-Standard

"Certainly a pair of destination events, CMS’s double-concert tribute to the incomparable Emerson String Quartet, on the occasion of the ensemble’s 40th anniversary season, will live long in the memories of listeners. The Emerson celebrates with a selection of repertoire that has earned the quartet its unrivalled nine Grammy Awards, delighted quartet aficionados the world over, and cemented its reputation as one of the greatest chamber ensembles of all time."

Watch, wonder, and enjoy...

PERFORMANCE

Morgan Concert Series
Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble

Mozart - Quintet in E flat Major for Horn & Strings, K. 407
Strauss - Till Eulenspiegel-einmal anders, Op. 28, “Arranged as a Frolic” by Franz Hasenöhrl

Dvořák - String Quintet in G Major, Op. 77

The Academy Chamber Ensemble was created in 1967 to perform the larger chamber works with players who customarily worked together, instead of the usual string quartet with additional guests. Drawn from the principal players of the orchestra and play-directed by Academy Leader Tomo Keller, the Chamber Ensemble performs in all shapes and sizes, from string quintets to octets, and in various other configurations featuring winds. Its touring commitments are extensive and include regular tours of Europe and North America, whilst recording contracts with Philips Classics, Hyperion, and Chandos have led to the release of over thirty CDs.

This is Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings. We've heard this before and it, too, is not a part of the program for this performance.

Here is the Chamber Ensemble playing another piece that is not a part of this concert...

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
Chamber Music Society

Travels with Mendelssohn

"CMS’s season welcome offers a sampling of the rich cultural journey that enthralled the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. The humor of Haydn which delighted Londoners, the unforgettable lyricism of the “Prince of Song” Schubert, and the mystical piety of the Italian Renaissance composer Palestrina, all culminate in the exotic colors of France, fashioned into hypnotic music by master composer Maurice Ravel."

Haydn - Symphony in G major for Piano, Flute, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Hob. I:94, "Surprise" (1791)
Mendelssohn - Selected Songs for Soprano and Piano, Opp. 34 and 57 (1835-41)
Schubert - "Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" for Soprano, Clarinet, and Piano, D. 965, Op. 129 (1828)
Palestrina - Adoramus Te Christe for Five Voices (1584)
Ravel - Trio in A minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1914)

Symphony No. 94 in G major for Piano, Flute, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Hob. I:94, “Surprise”

Joseph Haydn

Born March 31, 1732 in Rohrau, Lower Austria. Died May 31, 1809 in Vienna.
Arranged by Johann Peter Salomon
Baptized February 20, 1745 in Bonn, Germany. Died November 28, 1815 in London.

Composed in 1791.
Premiered on March 23, 1792 in London, under the composer’s supervision.

Imitation, according to the old saying, is the sincerest form of flattery. As evidenced by the recent spate of Roman-numeral movie sequels and television spin-offs, it can also be profitable, a financial strategy already well known in Haydn’s day. When the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon snatched Haydn away from Vienna at the end of 1790 to star in his London winter programs, even he could not foresee the enormous success that marked their initial series of concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms. The composer, with his personal charm, his broken English and his delightful music, was the sensation of the season. Salomon’s chief rival, the so-called “Professional Concerts,” saw the value of imported talent, and engaged Ignaz Pleyel, a student of Haydn and one of the day’s most popular musicians (Mozart thought he might be good enough to some day supplant his teacher), for their concerts of 1792. (A bit of knife-twisting also inspired the Professional Concerts’ move, since Haydn had consistently refused their regular invitations between 1782 and 1788 to visit London, though he was so busy and so tightly contracted to the Esterházy family in Hungary at the time that he could hardly send his music abroad, much less himself.) Pleyel promised to present a new piece at each of his concerts, so to keep up with the competition, Haydn determined to offer a similar attraction.




Haydn won many important friends and admirers during his time in London, including no less a personage than the Prince of Wales — later George IV — and he spent the summer of 1791 visiting their country houses. August found him at Roxford, the estate of the banker Nathaniel Brassey near Hertingfordbury in Hertfordshire, “amid the loveliest scenery,” Haydn reported in a letter to Maria Anna von Genzinger, wife of the physician at Esterházy Castle. “I work hard, and when in the early mornings I walk in the woods alone, with my English grammar book, I think of my Creator, my family and all the friends I have left behind.” Among his projects at Roxford were the Symphonies Nos. 94 and 95 for Solomon’s upcoming season, both largely completed by the time he returned to London in mid-September. (The Symphonies Nos. 97 and 98 and the splendid Sinfonia Concertante in B-flat were finished in London early the next year.) Plans for the competing series presented by Salomon and the Professional Concerts proceeded during the fall, and the local press readied itself for a tasty guerre des musiciens. When Pleyel arrived in December, however, he deflated the journalists’ plans by immediately paying his respects to Haydn and informing them that the first piece on his first concert would be one of his (Haydn’s) symphonies. Haydn returned the compliment by insisting that Salomon program some music of Pleyel.

Though gentle and generous, Haydn had no intention of allowing Pleyel to beat him at his own game. He again took up one of the Roxford symphonies, the G major, and crossed out the original opening of its slow movement, an ingratiating melody used as the theme for a set of variations. He reorchestrated the tune, and punctuated its mid-point with a crashing chord that would have the impact of an unexpected cannon- shot after the delicate measures for strings preceding it. “It was my wish,” Haydn later told his biographer Georg August Griesinger, “to surprise the public with something new, and to make a debut in a brilliant manner in order not to be outdone by my pupil Pleyel ... [whose] concert series had begun eight days before mine.” Haydn’s tactic worked. Whereas in many of his earlier symphonies the Andantes had created a success, this new one created a sensation. Its first performance, on March 23, 1792, inspired the reviewer for the Oracle to a flight of Arcadian prose: “The second movement was equal to the happiest of this great Master’s conceptions. The surprise might not be unaptly likened to the situation of a beautiful Shepherdess, who, lulled to slumber by the murmur of a distant Waterfall, starts alarmed by the unexpected firing of a fowling piece.” The Morning Herald noted that “critical applause was fervid and abundant,” and Woodfall’s Register allowed that the new Symphony was “simple, profound and sublime. The Andante movement was particularly admired.” Haydn told Griesinger that “the first Allegro was received with countless bravos, but the enthusiasm reached its highest point in the Andante with the kettledrum stroke. Ancora, ancora! sounded from every throat, and even Pleyel [who attended all of Haydn’s concerts] complimented me on my idea.” The work was soon dubbed “Surprise” by the English public (in German it is known as Mit dem Paukenschlag — “With the Timpani Stroke”), and proved to be Haydn’s most popular instrumental work. In his later years, Haydn, who loved good jokes in both his music and his conversation, was quoted as saying that “the chord” was meant “to make the ladies cry out.” The embellishments on this probably apocryphal explanation included one concerning Haydn’s desire to rouse the somnolent gentlemen of the audience from the dinner-induced stupor of their evening’s nap, and another that he wanted to startle one particular elderly subscriber who always fell asleep at the concert’s earliest opportunity. These tales are refuted by the concert order itself, since Haydn placed the Symphony immediately after the intermission, when the crowd would hardly have yet had time to doze off before his surprise was unveiled. Word of this extraordinary new work raced through musical circles, and Salomon himself arranged the complete Symphony for piano trio as well as for the ingenious combination of string quartet, flute and piano ad libitum to meet the enormous amateur demand for its availability. (So financially successful was the London venture that he paid Haydn the then- enormous sum of £300 for writing the six symphonies of 1791-1792 and an additional £200 for their copyright.) With its easily remembered sobriquet, the “Surprise” Symphony retained its popularity, and was one of the tiny handful of Haydn’s works played with any regularity in the century-and-a-half that followed (Louis Antoine Jullien’s orchestra gave the piece during its 1853-1854 Boston season with what William Foster Apthorp believed to be “the largest bass drum ever seen in this country up to that time”) before the re-evaluation of his music in the 1950s.

Salomon’s arrangement retains the complete musical substance of the “Surprise” Symphony while translating the work into chamber instrumentation. His transcription is skillfully done: the string parts are kept largely intact (though the viola is sometimes assigned the bassoon line); the flute takes over the most prominent wind solos; and the keyboard part gives a likeness of the manner in which Haydn himself would have presided over the London performance from the piano. As do all the other of the London symphonies save one (No. 95), the “Surprise” opens with a slow introduction. These preludial gestures exhibit some of the most advanced harmonic techniques of the day, and almost invariably contain measures whose bittersweet expression was influenced by Mozart’s recent music. (News of his friend’s death on December 5, 1791 in Vienna reached Haydn in London ten days after the tragedy, just as preparations were being completed for the concerts at which this Symphony was premiered. Mozart was 35; Haydn was 59, and lived for another eighteen years.) The sonata structure that follows unfolds with an ease and seeming inevitability that belie its closely reasoned and tightly controlled extrapolation from its opening motives.

The (in)famous Andante is, aside from the Austrian national hymn, Haydn’s most famous music. According to the composer’s biographer H.E. Jacob, its theme (which in our litigious age could well be hauled into court for copyright infringement of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) replicates the German folk ditty Gassle naus und nunter, hangen schwarze kirschen runter (“Going my way down the street, I saw the black cherries dangling”). The eminent British musicologist Sir Donald Tovey wrote that the tune “has an anserine [stupid or foolish, from the Latin word for ‘goose’] solemnity, which undoubtedly enhances the indecorum of the famous Paukenschlag [‘timpani stroke,’ the sobriquet by which the composition is known in Germany].” The joke spent, the ensuing variations offer several ingenious permutations of the theme (including the obligatory minor-tonality stanza) that provide a superb example of the manner in which Haydn effortlessly blended popular elements with the highest musical craft in order to please listeners at all levels of sophistication. To wit, on his second trip to London, in 1794, Haydn stopped en route at an inn in Wiesbaden. He heard the theme from this movement being played in some distant room, and discovered a group of Prussian officers gathered around the piano. He introduced himself as the music’s author, but the soldiers refused to believe him until he produced a letter and a diamond ring from King Frederick Wilhelm II. Convinced, the Prussian gentlemen ordered champagne in Haydn’s honor. The Minuet and sonata-rondo Finale which round out the Symphony No. 94 are further evidence that Haydn’s is perhaps the healthiest and most emotionally stable music that anyone has ever written. “A lack of appreciation for Haydn,” according to Bernard Jacobson, “is a species of the inability to enjoy the good things in life.”

Three Songs for Soprano and Piano

Felix Mendelssohn
Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg. Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig.

Mendelssohn wrote songs throughout his life, some 120 of them, that reflect the elegance, polish, craftsmanship and emotional reserve that characterized both his personality and his other compositions. He was introduced to the form by his rigorous but conservative teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, director of the Berlin Singakademie, who advocated the traditional late-18th-century form of the German Lied, with its strophic structure, subservient piano accompaniment and restrained expression, over the newer, emotionally penetrating and formally adventuresome songs of Schubert. Mendelssohn’s songs were well suited to the intimate parlor gatherings that played such an important role in 19th-century musical life, though they were elevated above the customary Biedermeier salon fare by their finesse, harmonic subtlety and graceful lyricism. So well do Mendelssohn’s songs embody essential elements of his creative personality that Wilfred Blunt chose one — On Wings of Song — as the title of his 1974 biography of the composer.

Wanderlied (“Wandering Song,” 1843, Op. 57, No. 6) is based on Joseph von Eichendorff’s Frische Fahrt (“Brisk Journey”) of 1810, in which the poet gives himself over to the alluring pleasures of spring without heed for the unknown outcome of the journey.

Lilting piano arpeggios suggest the dreamy Orientalism of Heinrich Heine’s Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (“On Wings of Song,” Op. 34, No. 2; 1835). Mendelssohn deemed that its sensuous text and subtle lyricism made the song an appropriate musical missive for dedication to Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a minister at the French Reformed Church in Frankfurt, whom he was to marry two years later.

Suleika (1843, Op. 57, No. 3) draws on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, though in a roundabout way. In July 1814, Goethe set out from his home in Weimar on a trip through the Rhineland that was intended to stir his creativity for a collection of poems titled West-östlicher Divan, inspired by a similarly named set by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz. Goethe’s poems, according to the renowned German interpreter of Schubert’s songs Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, were intended to “combine ideas of universal love, wisdom and polarity of East and West in one work.” In Wiesbaden, Goethe met Marianne Jung-Willemer, a “half- Gypsy,” who greatly impressed him. Back in Weimar, he began a correspondence with Marianne, whom he called by the exotic name Suleika, and he included her lyrical poem-letters in his Divan. In 1843, Mendelssohn set Marianne’s poem Was bedeutet die Bewegung? (“What can this excitement mean?”) under the title Suleika.

Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (“The Shepherd on the Rock”) for Soprano, Clarinet and Piano, D. 965, Op. 129

Franz Schubert
Born January 31, 1797 in Vienna. Died November 19, 1828 in Vienna.

Composed in 1828.

Anna Milder-Hauptmann, one of the leading German sopranos of her day, was born in 1785 in Constantinople, where her father was serving as ambassador for the Austrian government. Upon arriving in Vienna at the turn of the century, she attracted the attention of Emanuel Schickaneder, the theatrical impresario who had collaborated with Mozart on The Magic Flute in 1791, and he recommended her as a student to Salieri and Tomaselli. She made her operatic debut in Vienna in 1803 with such good effect that she was soon added to the roster of the Court Opera. Beethoven wrote the role of Leonora in Fidelio for Milder-Hauptmann in 1805, and she spread her reputation through northern Europe with highly acclaimed tours during the following years. Her greatest Viennese triumphs came with her roles in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Alcestis and Armida in 1812; three years later she became prima donna assoluta at the Berlin Court Opera. In 1829, she participated in Mendelssohn’s epochal revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. She left Berlin in 1831, but continued to perform in Russia, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia for several years, giving her farewell appearance in Vienna in 1836. Anna Milder-Hauptmann died in Berlin in 1838.

Schubert’s earliest exposure to Milder-Hauptmann’s artistry came in 1812, while he was still a music student at the imperial choir school, with her appearance in Iphigénie en Tauride at the Kärntnertor Theater. So moved was he by her singing that he almost came to blows with a university professor who expressed an opposing view in a café after the performance. Sometime before she left for Berlin, she and Schubert became friends, and they occasionally corresponded during the following years. Early in 1825, she asked him if he had any operas that he would like her to propose for production in Berlin. Schubert, ever hopeful of breaking into the musical theater, promptly sent her the score for Alfonso und Estrella, and, in appreciation of her interest, dedicated to her his new song Suleika II. After she had performed Suleika and the Erlkönig on a Berlin recital, she replied, “Suleika’s Second Song is heavenly and moves me to tears.... However many songs you may want to dedicate to me, this can only be most agreeable and flattering to me.” Her report concerning Alfonso und Estrella was less encouraging, however: “I am very sorry to say that its libretto does not accord with local taste. Alfonso und Estrella could not possibly make its fortune here.”

In 1828, Anna requested from Schubert a bravura concert piece for her recitals. Out of regard for her encouragement and her artistry and with the hope that she might help get his gestating opera, Der Graf von Gleichen, onto the stage, he created for her the delightful song Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (“The Shepherd on the Rock”). The text (which Anna may have suggested) is a conflation of verses by Wilhelm Müller (poet of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise) and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (who is best known for his biographies, including an 1823 volume on Goethe) which concerns the longing of a shepherd boy for his lady love and the welcome arrival of spring. To partner the soprano, Schubert included a part for clarinet, giving this song something of the quality of a vest-pocket operatic scena in which the agility and limpid sonority of the instrument serve as foil and collegial challenge for the voice. Schubert finished Der Hirt auf dem Felsen in October 1828, but Milder-Hauptmann did not receive a copy of the song until the following September. She premiered the work at Riga in March 1830, and thereafter included it frequently on her recitals. Tobias Haslinger of Vienna published the score in June as Schubert’s Op. 129. The composer, however, was never to hear it performed: Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, elegant, brilliant, touching and bursting with melody, was the last of Schubert’s more than 600 songs. On November 19th, a month after writing it, he died.

"Sanctus" from Missa Aeterna Christi Munera

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Born 1525 or 1526 in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. Died February 2, 1594 in Rome.

Published in 1590.

“The very first musician in the world ... the prince and father of music ... the celebrated light of music” he was called, the “savior of church music” and the “real king of sacred music.” Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina enjoys a reputation almost unmatched in the history of music. Born in 1525 or 1526 in the hill town of Palestrina, east of Rome (by whose name he became universally known), he was trained in music and sang as a choirboy at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, and returned home to Palestrina in 1544 to play the organ at the cathedral and teach music. He married a local girl, fathered three musically talented sons, and began to compose before being taken back to Rome by the Bishop of Palestrina, who was elected Pope Julius III in 1550. Despite being married, Palestrina was appointed by Julius first as choirmaster of the Cappella Giulia and later of the Cappella Sistina, the most important components of the musical establishment at St. Peter’s. In 1555, Julius died and Palestrina lost his patron. The rules on celibacy were thereafter more strictly enforced, and Palestrina was dismissed from Papal service. For the next sixteen years, he held posts in Rome at St. John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore while establishing himself as the leading composer of sacred music of his day — the publications of his works were prized throughout the Roman Catholic world. So great was his renown by 1571 that he was welcomed back to the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter’s, a post he held until his death in 1594. Palestrina’s vast output — 104 Masses (i.e., the same precisely prescribed text set in 104 different ways!), nearly 300 motets, 68 offertories, 65 hymns, 35 Magnificats, Lamentations, litanies, Psalms and more than 140 early madrigals (for whose secularism Palestrina apologized late in his life) — was held to be the most perfect musical embodiment of the purity, spirituality and universality of the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, his Pope Marcellus Mass of 1567, with its elevated style and clear enunciation of the sacred texts, is said to have prevented the Council of Trent from prohibiting the use of polyphonic music in the Church’s services. His compositional language, codified and streamlined by later theorists, has served for more than four centuries as the model for both the most pure of all sacred musical styles and for the study of Renaissance counterpoint.

Palestrina’s Missa Aeterna Christi Munera, published in Rome in 1590 in his Fifth Book of Masses, is among the vast treasury of Renaissance sacred works that incorporate a cantus firmus — a “fixed” (i.e., “existing”) song. (The idea of precedent, of borrowing from an existing source, was fundamental to the mindset of the early Christian Church, which believed that all things ultimately flowed from God.) The hymn upon which Palestrina based his Missa Aeterna Christi Munera (Masses are generally known by their cantus firmus) is attributed to the 4th-century St. Ambrose, who wrote it for the feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists; in the traditional liturgy, it is sung at the dawn services of Matins that celebrate those early followers of Jesus — The eternal gifts of Christ the King, The Apostles’ glorious deeds, we sing; And while due hymns of praise we pay, Our thankful hearts cast grief away (in the 1851 translation by Anglican priest and hymn writer John Mason Neale). Ambrose’s text is not used in Palestrina’s Mass, which, like all works of its kind, had to be set to the same liturgically prescribed verses, but each of its movements is based on the hymn’s opening phrases in a seemingly effortless display of virtuosic creative ingenuity. The Sanctus — Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory — exhibits the pristine counterpoint, harmonic richness and otherworldly calm that characterize Palestrina’s most masterful works.

Trio in A minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello

Maurice Ravel
Born March 3, 1875 in Ciboure, France. Died December 28, 1937 in Paris.

Composed in 1914.
Premiered on January 28, 1915 in Paris by pianist Alfredo Casella, violinist Gabriele Willaume and cellist Louis Teuillard.

Ravel first mentioned that he was planning a trio for piano, violin and cello in a letter of 1908, in which he also announced his intentions to compose a symphony and some still amorphous work on the subject of St. Francis of Assisi. Nothing ever came of the symphony (though he did subtitle his opulent ballet Daphnis et Chloé of 1912, “Choreographic Symphony in Three Parts”), and the few sketches that he made for the St. Francis project ended up in Mother Goose, according to his friend and colleague the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, but plans for the trio remained in his thoughts and conversations. When his pupil Maurice Delage once asked about the long-gestating piece, Ravel replied, “Oh, my Trio is finished. I only need the themes for it.” He finally jotted down some ideas for the Trio in 1913 at his summer retreat in the seaside town of St. Jean-de-Luz in the southern Basque region (not far from his birthplace), but serious work on the piece did not begin until the following year, when he returned to St. Jean in April. He spent the next three months dabbling leisurely with the score and sketching out some ideas for a suite that was to become Le Tombeau de Couperin and a piano concerto based on Basque themes (ultimately abandoned), balancing his labors with long explorations of the surrounding countryside and abundant socializing.

This pleasant schedule was ruined when the Guns of August unleashed their fearsome roar across the Continent to start World War I in 1914. Ravel pledged to aid France’s war effort, but first he determined to finish the Trio. On August 3rd, he wrote to Cypa Godebski, “Heaven only knows, old chap, if this will reach you. I hope it will, for it seems to make it easier if I can write to a friend. Since the day before yesterday this sounding of alarms, these weeping women, and, above all, this terrible enthusiasm of the young people and of all the friends who have had to go and of whom I have no news. I cannot bear it any longer. The nightmare is too horrible. I think that at any moment I shall go mad or lose my mind. I have never worked so hard, with such insane, heroic rage. Yes, old man, you cannot imagine how badly I need this kind of heroism in order to combat the other, which is probably the more instinctive feeling. Just think, old man, of the horror of this conflict. It never stops for an instant. What good will it all do? ... I just keep working so as not to hear anything. Yes, I am working with the persistence and concentration of a fool. But suddenly the hypocrisy of this conduct overwhelms me and I begin to sob over my notepaper. When I go downstairs and my mother sees me, naturally I have to show a serene and, if possible, a smiling face. Shall I be able to keep this up? It has lasted four days already since the alarm gongs began.” Ravel applied himself unsparingly to the Trio for the next week, and then reported to the garrison at Bayonne to apply for military service. His constitution was frail, however, and his height and weight below the minimum standard, so he was refused entry into the army, and instead worked as an orderly in a military hospital, an exercise in patriotism that impaired his health for the rest of his life. The premiere of the Trio was given on January 28, 1915 at a Société Indépendente concert in the Salle Gaveau in Paris by pianist Alfredo Casella (the Italian composer living in Paris since the 1890s, and one of Ravel’s closest friends), violinist Gabriele Willaume and cellist Louis Teuillard, but, in a country absorbed with war, the event drew little notice. More peaceful consideration of the work has since recognized it as one of Ravel’s consummate creations.

The first movement of the Piano Trio, written in an irregular but easily flowing meter (8/8) derived from Basque folk music, follows traditional sonata form. The main theme, begun by the piano and taken over by the strings, is a close-interval melody in sensuous, tightly packed parallel harmonies which rises to a peak of intensity before subsiding for the presentation of the subsidiary subject, a lovely, wide-ranging theme that arches through much of the violin’s compass. The development section is concerned exclusively with the principal theme and so leads seamlessly into the recapitulation, where shortened versions of the main and second subjects provide balance and formal closure. A specter of the main theme hovers above the quiescent coda.

The second movement, titled Pantoum, serves as the Trio’s scherzo. The pantun is a Malaysian poetic form in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third of the next. Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and other French 19th-century writers adapted the pantun for some of their works, and Ravel here made an ingenious musical analogue of the technique by inserting music from the scherzo into the central trio. The outer sections of the movement are based on an evanescent triple-meter strain that requires unassuming but quite amazing feats of ensemble virtuosity. The trio section uses a broad chordal piano theme, four beats to the bar, upon which the strings try to impose the skittering music of the scherzo. No compromise is reached, however, and the roles of strings and piano are reversed, though this, too, proves an impossible thematic misalliance, which the players remedy by once again taking up the scherzo music tout l’ensemble.

The third movement is a passacaglia, the old Baroque form in which a melody is repeated intact several times (eight in this Trio) and glossed on each recurrence by different counterpoint and harmonies. The theme of this Passacaille is a pensive melody that first unwinds in the deep bass notes of the piano before migrating to other instrumental territories. A climax is reached at the mid-point, after which the music quiets and returns to the lowest reaches of the keyboard to fulfill the large, arching shape of the movement’s structure.

The finale is music of enormous tensile strength whose feverish, pent-up emotion is held precisely in check by the clarity of its melodic and contrapuntal lines and the integrity of its sonata-rondo form. Ravel’s friend and biographer Roland-Manuel noted this masterful interplay of heated emotion and cool structural logic when he observed that “[this music’s] austerity is both passionate and chaste.”

Norman Demuth wrote of Ravel’s Trio, “This is a monumental work. Not only are the themes broad but the whole is conceived on a big scale. The resources of all the instruments are exploited to the fullest degree. Every string device is explored and used.... There is no gainsaying the greatness of the work and its consummate workmanship. We see the complete expression of Ravel’s genius, the sum total of his musicality. The Trio bears comparison with the greatest. It is big without being grandiloquent or portentous. There is not one note too many. Many composers talk so much and say so little. Ravel talks a lot in this work and every word is of moment. It is not music for the amateur. A real performance can be given only by players with a vast musical experience.”

LINCOLN CENTER

David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet

Dances at a Gathering

• Music by: Frédéric Chopin
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• Choreography by: Jerome Robbins
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The quintessential piano ballet,Dances at a Gathering distills the spectrum of human interaction into the most natural of movements, a landmark for its invention, virtuosity, and constantly shifting emotions.

Firebird

• Music by: Igor Stravinsky
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• Choreography by: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins 
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Dressed in Chagall’s exquisite sets and costumes, Firebird illustrates an enchanting Russian fairytale and the fantastical creatures of its strange world.

PERFORMANCE

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller

I wasn't going to include this evening on the blog because it was a movie of a play.  The theatrical performance was by the National Theater's Young Vic Productions from London.

I'm including it because the performance was magnificent!

The trailers below do not give full credit for the power of the play.  The movie we saw of the play was gripping and very well done.  It had everything to make the audience a bit uncomfortable; incest, homosexuality, illegal immigration for just a few things.  At the beginning we are told that it is fate that isn't going to end well.  We watched it happen and it didn't end well.




"The great Arthur Miller confronts the American dream in this dark and passionate tale. In Brooklyn, longshoreman Eddie Carbone welcomes his Sicilian cousins to the land of freedom. But when one of them falls for his beautiful niece, they discover that freedom comes at a price. Eddie’s jealous mistrust exposes a deep, unspeakable secret – one that drives him to commit the ultimate betrayal."

The trailer for the movie of the play...

A second trailer...

The lead actor being interviewed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_View_from_the_Bridge

A View from the Bridge

A View from the Bridge is a play by American playwright Arthur Miller, first staged on September 29, 1955, as a one-act verse drama with A Memory of Two Mondays at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway. The play was unsuccessful and Miller subsequently revised the play to contain two acts; this version is the one with which audiences are most familiar today. The two-act version premiered in the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End under the direction of Peter Brook on October 11, 1956.

The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love of, and almost obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice's orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice's cousin Rodolfo. Miller's interest in writing about the world of the New York docks originated with an unproduced screenplay that he developed with Elia Kazan in the early 1950s (entitled The Hook) that addressed corruption on the Brooklyn docks. Kazan later directed On the Waterfront, which dealt with the same subject. Miller said that he heard the basic account that developed into the plot of A View from the Bridge from a lawyer who worked with longshoremen, who related it to him as a true story.

Synopsis

The action is narrated by Alfieri who, being raised in 1900s Italy but now working as an American lawyer, represents the "Bridge" between the two cultures.

Act 1 – In the opening speech Alfieri describes the violent history of the small Brooklyn community of Red Hook and tells us that the second-generation Sicilians are now more civilized, more American, and are prepared to "settle for half" (half measures) and let the law handle their disputes. But there are exceptions, and he then begins to narrate the story of Eddie Carbone, an Italian American longshoreman who lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine.

Eddie is a good man who, although ostensibly protective and fatherly towards Catherine, harbours a growing passion for her as she approaches her 18th birthday. We learn that he has not had sex with his wife for nearly three months. Catherine is studying to become a stenographer and Eddie objects to her taking a job she has been offered until she finishes her coursework, expressing a dislike for the way she dresses and the interest she is beginning to show in men. Beatrice is more supportive of Catherine's ventures and persuades Eddie to let her take the job.

Eddie returns home one afternoon with the news that Beatrice's two cousins, brothers Marco and Rodolpho, have safely arrived in New York as illegal immigrants. He has agreed to house them saying that he is honoured to be able to help family. Marco is quiet and thoughtful, possessing a remarkable strength, whereas Rodolpho is more unconventional, with plans to make a career singing in America. Marco has a family starving in Italy and plans to return after working illegally for several years, whereas Rodolpho intends to stay. Although Eddie, Beatrice, and Catherine are at first excellent hosts, cracks appear when Rodolpho and Catherine begin dating.

Eddie convinces himself that Rodolpho is homosexual and is only expressing interest in Catherine so he can marry her and gain status as a legal citizen. He confronts Catherine with his beliefs and she turns to Beatrice for advice. Beatrice, starting to realize Eddie's true feelings, tells her that she should marry Rodolpho and move out. In the meantime, Eddie turns to Alfieri, hoping for help from the law. However, Alfieri tells him that the only recourse he has is to report Rodolpho and Marco as illegal immigrants. Seeing no solution to his problem, Eddie becomes increasingly desperate and takes his anger out on Rodolpho and, in teaching him to box, 'accidentally' injures him. Marco reacts by quietly threatening Eddie, showing his strength by holding a heavy chair above Eddie's head with one hand.

Act 2 – A few months have passed and Eddie reaches a breaking point when he discovers that Catherine and Rodolpho have slept together and are intent on marrying. Drunk, he kisses Catherine and then attempts to prove that Rodolpho is gay by suddenly and passionately kissing him also. After a violent confrontation, Eddie orders Rodolpho to leave the apartment.

Eddie visits Alfieri and insists that the kiss has proved Rodolpho is gay and that he is only marrying Catherine for citizenship, but once again Alfieri says the law cannot help. Out of desperation, Eddie phones immigration services but in the meantime Beatrice has arranged for Marco and Rodolpho to move in with two other illegals in the flat above. When immigration officials arrive and arrest Marco, Rodolpho, and the two other immigrants, Eddie pretends that the arrest comes as a complete surprise to him, but Beatrice and Marco see through this. Marco spits in Eddie's face in front of everyone and accuses Eddie of killing his starving children. Eddie tries to convince the neighborhood of his innocence but they turn away from him.

Alfieri visits Marco and Rodolpho in custody, obtaining their release on bail until their hearing comes up. Alfieri explains that Rodolpho will be able to stay once he has married Catherine but warns Marco that he will have to return to Italy. Vengeful, Marco confronts Eddie publicly on his release, and Eddie turns on him with a knife, demanding that he take back his accusations and restore his honour. In the ensuing scuffle, Eddie is stabbed with his own knife and dies, as his stunned family and neighbours stand around.

When he witnesses Eddie's death, Alfieri trembles, because he realises that, even though it was wrong, something "perversely pure" calls to him and he is filled with admiration. But, he tells the audience, settling for half-measures is better, it must be, and so he mourns Eddie with a sense of alarm at his own feelings.

In 2014, Belgian director Ivo van Hove and lead actors Mark Strong (as Eddie), Phoebe Fox (Catherine), and Nicola Walker (Beatrice) revived the play to huge success at the Young Vic. This revival won three Laurence Olivier Awards in April 2015, for Best Actor (Mark Strong), Best Revival and Best Director (Ivo van Hove). The Young Vic production later moved to Broadway with its British cast intact.