J. S. Bach - Cello suite no. 1, BWV 1007
Sperger - Sonata in B minor
Franck - Sonata in A major
X. Foley - Irish Fantasy
The Falling Seagull
"Hailing from Marietta, Georgia, double bassist Xavier Foley has captivated audiences “with superbly executed performances… playing fluidly and passionately” (Splash Magazine). Mr. Foley has appeared as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, Nashville Symphony, the Brevard Concert Orchestra in Florida, the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra and with the Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie Hall and recently debuted with Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as on tour around the United States. As a winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he will make his New York and Washington, DC debuts as only the second double bassist in YCA’s history next season at Merkin Concert Hall, supported by The Sander Buchman Prize, and at the Kennedy Center. Mr. Foley captured First Prize at the 2014 Sphinx Competition and at the International Society of Bassists Competition in 2011. He was the winner of Astral’s 2014 National Auditions."
Monday, February 26, 2018
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
A Conversation with Jaap
The director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra interviewed the new Musical Director, Jaap Van Zweden. The orchestra's brass quintet played before and after the discussion.
RECITAL
Marble Collegiate Church
Monday Noon Organ Recitals
Bryan Dunnewald - Organ
Sunday, February 25, 2018
CONCERT
Carnegie Hall
International Festival of Orchestras
"Amere 20 years separate the composition of these two symphonies, yet their musical journeys take us in completely opposite directions. After a Beethoven-like struggle with Fate, Tchaikovsky’s symphony banishes all doubts with a thrilling, no-holds-barred coda that sets the heart racing. Ives startles us with glimpses of American folk and band music, concluding with what can only be likened to a short, tart Bronx cheer."
Saturday, February 24, 2018
LINCOLN CENTER
David Koch Theater
New York City Ballet
Stravinsky & Balanchine
Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée
Agon
Duo Concertanti
Symphony in Three Movements
"Throughout his prolific career, Balanchine’s affinity for Stravinsky’s compositions remained constant, making him one of the choreographer’s favorite collaborators. This program opens with an abstraction of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale set to sprightly harmonies, followed by three stunning Black & White ballets known for their striking power."
Very interesting descriptions of the dances with videos and pictures...
Dave Douglas: Dizzy Atmosphere
Dizzy Gillespie at Zero Gravity
"Trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas returns to The Appel Room with another one-of-a-kind program. In Dizzy Atmosphere, Douglas will use Gillespie repertoire as a starting point for improvisation and exploration. Gillespie's music has the necessary depth for it to be carried in many different directions — as demonstrated by a vast and varied history of incredible interpretations — and Douglas always finds a delightfully unexpected path towards interesting musical fusions.
Joining him is a powerhouse group of improvisers and composers known for their thoughtful and exciting contributions to practically any musical context. Making his Jazz at Lincoln Center debut is trumpeter and Thelonious Monk Competition winner Ambrose Akinmusire. On piano is Gerald Clayton, a rising star with professional experience far beyond his years. On bass is the extraordinary performer and composer Linda May Han Oh, who recently joined Pat Metheny’s touring band. On drums is the inimitable Joey Baron, who has performed with a broad range of jazz artists including Gillespie himself. Finally, the genre-defying guitarist Bill Frisell joins as special guest, performing with Douglas for the first time since their outstanding 2004 recording, Strange Liberation.
With a sense of open-ended possibility, this new group is sure to present a soulful and creative vision of Gillespie and his music. Join us for a truly unique celebration of Dizzy Gillespie."
Thursday, February 22, 2018
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Joshua Gersen - Conductor
Barber - Adagio for Strings
Bernstein - Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Copland - Symphony No. 3
"This all-American celebration at the Philharmonic has a distinctly red-white-and blue vibe — big-hearted, vital, idealistic — and features some of the best-loved, best-known music by three iconic composers: Barber’s luminous Adagio, Bernstein’s brilliant Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Copland’s Third Symphony, with its stirring Fanfare for the Common Man. Uplifting and inspirational."
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
RECITAL
Morgan Library
Young Concert Artists
Rémi Geniet - Piano
J.S. Bach/Busoni - Chaconne in D minor
Beethoven - Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, Op. 110
Stravinsky - 3 Movements from Petrushka*
The young French pianist is an instinctive and profoundly cultivated musician. —Pianist Magazine
From the Morgan’s collection: Autograph manuscript of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Robert Owen Lehman Collection, on Deposit will be available for viewing.
Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Through the Great War
Dohnányi - Quintet No. 2 in E-flat minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 26 (1914)
Ravel - Le tombeau de Couperin for Wind Quintet (1914-17)
Elgar - Quintet in A minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 84 (1918-19)
Artists of all genres responded to World War One with works of unprecedented depth, intensity, and beauty. The deeply felt perspectives of Hungarian, French, and English composers merge in a unified, transnational condemnation of war and a yearning for peace.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Jaap van Zweden - Conductor
Heidi Melton - Soprano
Simon O'Neill - Tenor
John Relyea - Bass
John Luther Adams - Dark Waves (New York Premiere)
Wagner - Act I of Die Walküre (in concert)
"Music Director Designate Jaap van Zweden leads immense orchestral forces and world-class singers in Act I of Die Walküre, part of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle. Burning passion seizes a god’s two children, climaxing in a love duet whose emotional impact will stay with you. Plus Pulitzer Prize winner John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves. Though responding to the “ominous events of our times,” Adams reminds us that “we find ourselves immersed in the mysterious beauty of this world.”
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
PERFORMANCE
Carnegie Hall
Standard Time with Michael Feinstein
"The charismatic and honey-voiced Michael Feinstein pays tribute to beloved songs from classic MGM musicals. With great guests and a swinging piano trio, Feinstein makes Valentine’s Day a time for celebrating the glorious Hollywood musical."
Saturday, February 10, 2018
THEATER
Theater for a New Audience
He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box - Adrienne Kennedy
Directed by Evan Yionoulis
WORLD PREMIERE
"Set in Georgia and New York City in 1941 this heartbreaking memory tale of segregation and doomed love braids together Jim Crow, sexual hypocrisy, and the lingering shadow of a terrible crime. The world premiere of her first new play in a decade is directed by Evan Yionoulis who staged the award-winning TFANA production of Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders."
“He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box. Now there’s an evocative title for you, conjuring dread, romance and a tragic surrealism all at once. Such is the distinctively poetic and terrifying universe of Adrienne Kennedy.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 5 Shows to See if You’re in New York in January
“[He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is] the first new play in ten years by the great Adrienne Kennedy, a formative voice in modern African-American drama and the playwright of Funnyhouse of a Negro. Evan Yionoulis directs the new piece, an expansive, heartbreaking memory play set in Georgia and New York in 1941, stretching from Jim Crow to Christopher Marlowe in its exploration of segregation, doomed love, hypocrisy, and desire.” – Sarah Holdren, NY Mag/Vulture, 23 Exciting Productions Taking the Stage in 2018
“Ms. Kennedy is one of the American theater’s greatest and least compromising experimentalists. Her dramas are sites of living history, where personal stories of racism’s unhealed wounds mingle with dark tales thieved from the Brothers Grimm and 1940s Hollywood.” – Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
“Adrienne Kennedy brought to life the depths of black female interiority and the aching humanity of black womanhood.” – Daphne Brooks, Professor of Theater and African-American studies at Yale University as quoted in New York Times
Review: ‘He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,’ Adrienne Kennedy’s Beautiful Nightmare
HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX
NYT Critic’s Pick
Off Broadway, Play, Drama
Closing Date: February 11, 2018
Polonsky Shakespeare Center,262 Ashland Pl.
866-811-4111
Photo
Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka in “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” a new play by Adrienne Kennedy at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
They are at their exquisite peak, this boy and girl stepping through the shadows. They are far enough from childhood to be fully formed but not yet coarsened by adulthood, as delicate of limb and feature as mantelpiece figurines. Only the slight differences in the shades of their perfect skins suggest they are not a matched set.
If you’re thinking that anyone this fine and fragile is destined to be shattered, you are right. You need only listen to what they’re saying, in hypnotic Southern accents to realize that whatever exists between them, it doesn’t have a chance of survival in the early 1940s.
Such is the world that is conjured so unsettlingly in Adrienne Kennedy’s “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” her first new work in nearly a decade, which opened on Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Because it has been created by Ms. Kennedy, this landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful, its filigree shaped from barbed wire.
Since she first baffled and electrified New York audiences in the early 1960s with “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” a guided tour of one writer’s enduring nightmare, Ms. Kennedy has been cultivating her own fertile plot in the crowded field of memory plays. Only Tennessee Williams, an early influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust.
Like Williams’s characters, those who inhabit Ms. Kennedy’s plays are both products of, and misfits in, a circumscribed society. Unlike the typical Williams protagonist, Ms. Kennedy’s leading ladies (as they tend to be) are African-American. Not that any label, ethnic or otherwise, comes close to pinning down identities that are always, dangerously, in flux.
Works like her “Funnyhouse,” “A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White” and “June and Jean in Concert” seem to take place inside their creator’s mind, at the point where conscious anxiety bleeds into troubling dreams. “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” which has been directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis for Theater for a New Audience, offers a historical, wider-lens view of the same terrain. Occupying a mere 45 minutes of stage time (Ms. Kennedy’s favorite dramatic form is the short fugue), it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend through generations of conflict.
This is not to suggest that Ms. Kennedy, at 86, has made new concessions to narrative conventions or expository clarity. True, a bare description of her latest subject — a romance between a girl of mixed race and the white scion of the family that rules the town in Georgia where they live — brings to mind a century’s worth of purplish novels about forbidden love.
Ms. Kennedy is susceptible to the pulpy appeal of such fare, and equally contemptuous of it. And as the play’s two characters, Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Chris (Tom Pecinka), tell their respective, overlapping stories, they seem steeped in a sentimental twilight.
Yet often what they say is unyieldingly hard, or else feverish and fragmentary in the way of half-remembered nightmares. In detailed descriptions delivered with perfect, paradoxically languid urgency by Ms. Canfield and Mr. Pecinka, they map the town where they grew up. We learn about its best houses, its streets, its schools and the racially divided town plan, devised by Chris’s father.
Photo
Ms. Canfield (as Kay) and Mr. Pecinka (as Chris) were the only two actors on stage, though a cadaverous dummy, at right, stood in for Chris’s father.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
We also hear accounts, firsthand and distortingly recycled, of their family histories. And while Chris’s is cushioned in an affluence that Kay has never known, they both carry a legacy of racially mixed sexual relationships. Kay’s father was white, and her mother, who is black, died not long after giving birth to her at 15 — possibly a suicide, possibly a murder victim.
Chris’s father, Harrison Aherne, is both an architect of segregation and a man with black mistresses, by whom he has had several children. He has lovingly overseen the creation of the graveyard in which these women and their families can be buried.
Kay and Chris grew up watching each other from a fascinated distance. T he play follows their tentative courtship, from the eve of Chris’s departure to New York City (he hopes to become an actor) to the moment of America’s entry into World War II. Human and historic events turn out to be intertwined in unexpected ways.
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It is important to note that while “Box” is a two-character play (three, if you count Chris’s father, who is represented onstage by a cadaverous dummy), it is not really a dialogue. As Chris and Kay relate the facts and myths of their genealogies, it seems as if they are not connecting through shared history but pushing themselves into ever greater isolation.
As in most of Ms. Kennedy’s work, the narrative is delivered in a kaleidoscope of shards. These take the form of letters, recollections of conflicting tales told by family members, itemized descriptions of a train station, a savage moment from the Brothers Grimm (which gives the play its title), wistful period songs and lines from two very different shows — Noël Coward’s operetta “Bitter Sweet” and Christopher Marlowe’s lurid revenge tragedy “The Massacre at Paris.”
Only Ms. Kennedy, perhaps, could gracefully balance such disparate works as mood-defining reference points of equal weight. And while the implicit connections between Chris’s father and Nazi Germany might feel overly contrived in a more traditional play, here they become natural echoes in a nightmare that enwraps the whole world.
The physical production may be the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy dreamscape has ever been given, starting with Christopher Barreca’s weathered wooden set, a synecdoche for the miniature model of the town the audience passes on the way to its seats.
Donald Holder’s lighting both anchors this place with projected words and blueprints (Austin Switser is the video designer) and sets it swirling into giddy decomposition. Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes and Justin Ellington’s subliminal music and sound design match and extend the same sensibility.
The stage, by the way, is divided by a long staircase. It looks both solid and spectral, daunting in the way a child might perceive a steep flight of steps. It whispers of both the fantasy of escape and the reality of captivity.
Even in stark retrospect, these conflicting elements do not rule out each other. In setting up camp in their intersection, Ms. Kennedy remains one the harshest — and most invaluable — of the American theater’s conflicted sentimentalists.
I met my white grandfather a few times.
of course he lived on the white side of town.
he sent his chauffeur who was black and his name was Austin
in a black car to
my grandmother’s house to get us.
my mother wanted my brother, herself, and me to walk
but he insisted.
we went to his house.
his white wife wanted us to go in the back
door,
but he insisted we come into the front.
full of contradictions,
he sent my mother and her half-sister to college,
bought them beautiful things
but still maintained the distance. they called him
by his surname and he never shared a meal with them.
we sat in his parlor twice.
he was slightly fascinated by my brother and me.
he said something like you all have northern accents.
he was interested in our schooling in Cleveland.
he was interested in the fact that people
said I was smart.
at that time the thirties and before the WAR
he owned a lot of the town
and had three children by black women.
my mother’s mother was fifteen, worked in the peach orchards.
like the South itself, he was an unfathomable.
mixture of complexities,
these are two generations of white men
removed
who went all the way to Africa to get SLAVES,
quite mad.
I was lucky enough to spend a day and evening in his
and his family’s house. built about 1860
where he was born . . . his father was the town’s first bank owner.
the house, white, wooden in weeping willow trees
down a long archway.
by 1940, when I visited, the house had one usable
room, the rest all boarded up
and was lived in by black COUSINS
of his Negro family.
despite her Atlanta Univ education and marrying a Morehouse man
and making a nice life in Cleveland,
my mother found it impossible to say her mother’s name.
and impossible to call her father by anything but his
surname.
she used to say to me when I was a child,
Adrienne, when I went to town to get the
mail, they would always say
here comes that little yellow bastard.
Friday, February 9, 2018
CONCERT
Carnegie Hall
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Stravinsky - Scherzo fantastique
Jennifer Higdon - Low Brass Concerto (NY Premiere)
Chausson - Poème de l' amour et de la mer
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
"There’s passion and power in Chausson’s and Britten’s sea music. Chausson set Symbolist poetry in his Poème de l’amour et de la mer, a two-song collection with orchestral interlude that is rich with metaphor and infused with steamy Wagnerian harmonies. There’s nothing metaphorical about Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; the sun’s glimmering light on the water, the sound of church bells, waking birds, and a savage storm are portrayed with gripping realism."
IGOR STRAVINSKY Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3
The Scherzo fantastique is the first music by Stravinsky that impresario Sergei Diaghilev heard, and, on the basis of this work as well as the orchestral Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), Diaghilev offered the Russian composer a job, and together they made history. Although Stravinsky’s utterly original voice is not always consistently recognizable here, the Scherzo fantastique is like an early painting in a retrospective exhibition that paves the way for the great, revolutionary canvases of later years.
JENNIFER HIGDON Low Brass Concerto
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition that same year, Jennifer Higdon’s hold on audiences began much earlier. Her first opera, Cold Mountain (based on Charles Frazier’s bestselling novel), sold out its entire run of six performances at the Santa Fe Opera. Higdon has written extensively for orchestra over the years, and her newest concerto casts its spotlight on the “low brass” that is a subset of sorts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s long-acclaimed brass section.
ERNEST CHAUSSON Poème de l’amour et de la mer
Chausson’s career as a composer lasted barely 15 years, and work on the Poème de l’amour et de la mer occupied him for 10 of those. He set two of his friend Maurice Bouchor’s poems about lost love as large pieces for voice and orchestra, separating them by a short, pensive orchestral interlude. The work is unique in form—it’s neither a loose collection of songs nor a narrative song cycle—but with his exquisite, expressive music, Chausson turns Bouchor’s unremarkable poems into a great, probing monologue.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a
Britten set Peter Grimes, his first major opera, in a small fishing village that could easily be the seaside town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, which he helped to make famous. The orchestral interludes that divide the scenes of Peter Grimes are distinct from the rest of the opera (they are to be played with the curtain down), yet they’re indispensable to its meaning and impact. After the triumphant premiere of Peter Grimes in 1945, Britten realized that the interludes could stand alone as evocative sea pictures, and he selected four to be played as a suite.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
LINCOLN CENTER
David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic
Antonio Pappano - Conductor
Leif Ove Andsnes - Piano
Kent Tritle - Organ
Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Britten - Piano Concerto (1945 version)
Saint-Saëns - Symphony No. 3, Organ
"The king of instruments — in all its power and majesty — is saved for the final movement of Saint-Saëns’s grand, Romantic symphony when, in a blaze of C-major glory, Philharmonic organist Kent Tritle pulls out all the stops. Also, Leif Ove Andsnes (“a pianist of magisterial elegance, power, and insight” — The New York Times) explores the piano’s many personalities in Britten’s high-spirited concerto."
