LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Windstorm

Lise De La Salle - Piano

Adam Walker - Flute

Stephen Taylor - Oboe

David Shifrin - Clarinet

Marc Goldberg - Bassoon

David Holley - Horn

Reicha - Quintet in E-flat major for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Horn, Op. 88, No. 2 (1811-17)
Thuille - Sextet in B-flat major for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano, Op. 6 (1891)
Copland - “New England Countryside” from The City, arranged for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Horn (1939)
Mozart - Quintet in E-flat major for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, and Piano, K. 452 (1784)

"The sonic array of a wind instrument chamber music concert is unsurpassable. Although we revel in the thunder of the modern piano and the warmth of the violin, the soundscape of combined flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn—the classic wind quintet heard in this program—offers a rich tasting menu for the ear. Come hear CMS’s exceptional lineup of wind players tackle this demanding and rewarding repertoire."

Listen to this hear bliss...

"Even a momentary glance into the program biographies of Reicha and Thuille will reveal extraordinary relationships, experiences, and accomplishments that made both men, who lived a century apart, central figures in the musical landscapes of their eras. While Anton Reicha was a friend and colleague of Beethoven since their teenage years (they were both born in 1770), he managed to live a full musical life not in Beethoven’s shadow—an enormous credit to his creative energy. While Beethoven did compose 16 string quartets, Reicha composed 24 woodwind quintets, setting the standard for the genre for generations of composers to follow. And the looming presences of Wagner and Strauss did not stop Ludwig Thuille from composing his own six operas (one of which was performed by the Metropolitan Opera here in New York in 1911), as well as many songs, piano compositions, and orchestral works.

It is perhaps not as well known that Aaron Copland was a very successful composer for film (he shares this distinctive musical sideline activity with a host of famous figures such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Korngold). For the evocative miniature of Copland’s we hear tonight, we have a contemporary composer, Erik Morales, to thank for constructing this expert arrangement, in the tradition of countless great composers going all the way back to Haydn.

Need we say anything about Mozart? Perhaps it’s best to quote him on his quintet, from a letter to his father of April 10, 1784: “It had the greatest applause...I myself consider it to be the best thing I have written in my life.”

THEATER

Theater for a New Audience
The Prisoner

"A man sits alone outside a prison. Who is he? What is he doing there? Is he free? Or is he the prisoner?"


“Red earth of somewhere, not European…In The Prisoner, the stage has a look that has come to be associated with the work of Peter Brook…and when an elderly white man appears (an understated and slightly self-mocking Donald Sumpter), it is, indeed, to introduce a story that began for him long ago, during a journey in a distant land.

Outside a prison…a man sits, staring at its walls. Asked what he is doing, he says that he is there “to repair”…In this version of the story by Peter Brook and his collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne…the audience learns almost immediately what his story is and what crime he committed.

It is a peculiarly shocking one, committed under shocking circumstances…a story which actually implies a consensual sexual relationship between a 13-year-old girl and her father.

Yet for reasons that soon become clear, the man cannot believe in himself as a righteous avenger of the girl’s abuse; in Hiran Abeysekera’s beautiful central performance, we see him, over the years, feel his way towards a resolution, through his interactions – often random, but somehow meaningful – with local people, visitors, passers-by. And the whole show, at a brief 70 minutes, achieves a magnificent balance of stillness, relaxation and narrative tension; compelling us to pause, to breathe and to reflect, but also moving the story towards its end with the inevitability and energy of a natural force, harnessed by an absolute master.”
-The Scotsman (Edinburgh)

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2018/09/prisoner-national-theatre-peter-brook-review

The National Theatre’s The Prisoner is a moving example of Peter Brook’s “late style”

The playwright’s latest work nods most fondly to two classical texts he is connected with: Oedipus and Hamlet.

Two Peters – Brook and Hall – were the leading directors of English classical theatre after the Second World War. Their work went in radically different directions: Hall ran big buildings (the RSC and National) and encouraged new writers, while Brook retreated to Paris, working at a small customised playhouse on experimental, trans-cultural works, researched and rehearsed for years.

Yet though Brook was the elder of the two men, he has remarkably, at the age of 93, brought his latest work, The Prisoner, to London only a week after Hall’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey. The coincidence is poignant and instructive. Hall’s published Diaries, while agonising over some fight with the government, Arts Council or theatre unions, wander into envious reveries about Brook, who represented a servant of art in a country committed to culture. Just after celebrating Hall heroically getting his hands dirty in the engine room of theatre, we get to reflect on the fruits of Brook’s easier, cleaner career.

Artistic “late style”, Edward Said argued, tends towards a concentrated presentation of a career’s themes and techniques, often with a stubborn final attempt to resolve obsessive contradictions and obsessions. The Prisoner can, without insensitivity, be described as an extreme example of this.

A touching sequence in the play – co-directed by Brook’s frequent collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne – involves birdsong, echoing The Conference of the Birds, Brook’s fabled nomadic production based on a 12th-century Arabic text. The modern writer who most influenced him is Samuel Beckett, and the set that David Violi has created might easily double for a production of Waiting for Godot: a few rocks and branches stand on a stage dirtied with earth.

A narrator called the Visitor – played by Donald Sumpter, a presumably deliberate bald, beaky lookalike of Brook – glosses the setting as “a faraway country”, but the casting suggests Africa, setting for Brook-Estienne pieces including The Iks (about a Ugandan tribe), The Suit (from a book by Can Themba) and projects with South African theatre-makers Athol Fugard, Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon. The text, though, nods most fondly to two classical texts connected with Brook: Oedipus, which he directed at the National in 1968, and Hamlet, the Shakespeare play to which he has most often returned.

The Prisoner has an Oedipal protagonist, Mavuso, who has killed his father after finding him in an embrace with Nadia, Mavuso’s sister. This variation on Seneca/Sophocles seems to stray towards Elsinore when the father’s ghost appears to Mavuso, whose dilemma – is revenge killing ever justified? – is exactly that of the Prince of Denmark. Having responded in the affirmative, Mavuso is punished by an “ancient” rite that involves sitting opposite a prison and watching it until he achieves spiritual freedom.

That image – fabulist, obscurely beautiful – is late Brook at his best. As for the rest, my own preference is for him as a Shakespeare director: his Beckett-influenced King Lear with Paul Scofield (filmed in a version available for streaming) remains the best of the 20 or so attempts at that play I have seen.

Brook’s work with Estienne aims for a theatrical Esperanto, creating pictures, gestures and sounds that will resonate anywhere. But the cost of this is an ideological generality. And weirdly, despite the long rehearsal times that were a justification for Brook’s French retreat, the actors sometimes seemed to be ad-libbing, loosening and lengthening lines in the published text.

In late style, Said identified a refusal to admit defeat. In The Valley of Astonishment, a Brook-Estienne piece about synaesthesia at the Young Vic in 2014, a key moment was described, rather than shown, because it was not actable. In The Prisoner, one scene features a real fire but an imagined rat. It seems unwise to direct us to what the art form can’t do. It’s a pleasure to applaud Brook on his late lap of honour. But I harbour a fantasy in which he stayed in Britain and worked on Shakespeare at the National and RSC.

RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Chris Thile

Chris Thile, Mandolin and Vocals

Program to include:
Bach - Selected works
Chris Thile - New Work (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

"In two intimate Weill Recital Hall shows (one at 6:30 PM and the other at 9:30 PM), Chris Thile—this season’s holder of the Debs Composer’s Chair—performs a program that includes an original piece commissioned for the occasion by Carnegie Hall, as well as works by Bach and other selections sure to delight and excite."

An interview with Chris Thile...

MUSEUM

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Delacroix

"A glorious retrospective . . ." —New York Times (Critic's Pick)

"There's no lack of celebrated and ravishing paintings." —Wall Street Journal

"C'est magnifique!" —Daily News

". . . a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the painter anew." —Art & Antiques

". . . astounding in its scope . . . a tour de force of curatorial skill . . ." —Artforum

"No other museum catalogue text about this master—or many others—is so lucidly written, accessible, and fun to read." —Vulture

Website for exhibit with video...



"French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was one of the greatest creative figures of the nineteenth century. Coming of age after the fall of Napoleon, he reconnected the present to the past on his own terms. Delacroix produced an extraordinarily vibrant body of work, setting into motion a cascade of innovations that changed the course of art. This exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to this amazing artist ever held in North America.

The exhibition, a joint project with the Musée du Louvre, illuminates Delacroix's restless imagination through more than 150 paintings, drawings, prints, and manuscripts—many never before seen in the United States. It unfolds chronologically, encompassing the rich variety of themes that preoccupied the artist during his more than four decades of activity, including literature, history, religion, animals, and nature. Through rarely seen graphic art displayed alongside such iconic paintings as Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), The Battle of Nancy (1831), Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834), and Medea about to Kill Her Children(1838), this exhibition explores an artist whose protean genius set the bar for virtually all other French painters."

CONCERT

Merkin Hall
What Makes it Great?

Dvořák's American Quartet

"Listen to iconic masterpieces with new ears as NPR & PBS music commentator, conductor, composer, author and pianist Rob Kapilow shows you what you've been missing!

Featuring the Aeolus Quartet
Antonín Dvořák came to America in 1892 to head the newly-formed American Conservatory of Music, ushering in an extraordinarily fruitful period of creativity that included the triumphant New World Symphony and his Cello Concerto in B minor. In the idyllic surroundings of a small Iowa town, he wrote what would become one of chamber music’s most popular pieces in just 16 days: The String Quartet in F major, nicknamed the "American Quartet." Fascinated with African-American and Native-American music, Dvořák absorbed the spirit of America’s folk melodies into his work and advocated for an American composition school based on the country’s own indigenous music. Rob Kapilow and the Aeolus Quartet explore the difference between influence and imitation as they investigate what makes the American Quartet “American.”

Rob Kapilow reveals the origins of What Makes It Great?

RECITAL

Marble Collegiate Church
Monday Soul Break Concerts

Colin MacKnight finished his program with this piece.  It was wonderful.  At 12:10 after about 4 minutes of the fugue, the original theme thunders back in with the pedals while the fugue continues on with the hands.  It was a magic moment.

Phantasie über den Choral 'Hallelujah, Gott zu loben bleibe meine Seelenfreud'

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Beethoven - Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from Die Zauberflöte for Cello and Piano, WoO 46 (1801)
Schubert - Sonata in A minor for Viola and Piano, D. 821, “Arpeggione” (1824)
Bottesini - Gran duo concertante for Violin, Double Bass, and Piano (1880)
Schubert - Quintet in A major for Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass, D. 667, Op. 114, “Trout” (1819)

"While great music can be gripping, heart-wrenching, and profound, it is just as often exactly what’s needed to entertain, distract, and lift the spirits. In a program almost too pleasant for words, CMS offers musical diversions featuring opera melodies, an homage to an extinct instrument, an astounding display of double-bass virtuosity, and Schubert’s beloved masterpiece, composed for friends, based on a song about a fish."

Trailer for concert...

MUSEUM

The Whitney
Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again

A video on the exhibit...

"Few American artists are as ever-present and instantly recognizable as Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Through his carefully cultivated persona and willingness to experiment with non-traditional art-making techniques, Warhol understood the growing power of images in contemporary life and helped to expand the role of the artist in society. This exhibition—the first Warhol retrospective organized by a U.S. institution since 1989—reconsiders the work of one of the most inventive, influential, and important American artists. Building on a wealth of new materials, research and scholarship that has emerged since the artist’s untimely death in 1987, this exhibition reveals new complexities about the Warhol we think we know, and introduces a Warhol for the 21st century.

Explore the artworks below to learn more about the life and work of Andy Warhol."

The exhibition positions Warhol's career as a continuum, demonstrating that he didn't slow down after surviving the assassination attempt that nearly took his life in 1968, but entered into a period of intense experimentation. The show illuminates the breadth, depth, and interconnectedness of the artist’s production: from his beginnings as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, to his iconic Pop masterpieces of the early 1960s, to the experimental work in film and other mediums from the 1960s and 70s, to his innovative use of readymade abstraction and the painterly sublime in the 1980s. His repetitions, distortions, camouflaging, incongruous color, and recycling of his own imagery challenge our faith in images and the value of cultural icons, anticipating the profound effects and issues of the current digital age.

This is the largest monographic exhibition to date at the Whitney's new location, with more than 350 works of art, many assembled together for the first time."

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Artworks

By section

1

Warhol Before Warhol

One of Madison Avenue’s most in-demand illustrators

2

Hand-Painted Pop

Scrutinizing the signs and symbols of postwar America

3

Mechanical Reproduction

Discovering the heroism of everyday objects (over and over again)

4

Silver Screens

From screen to canvas, Warhol reflects on our obsession with celebrity

5

Death and Disaster

Exploring the dark side of American culture

6

Most Wanted Men

A controversial mural for the 1964 World's Fair in Queens

7

Flowers

Warhol perfects his systemic approach to art making

8

Filmmaking

Warhol, (super) star maker

9

Installations

Warhol announces his “retirement” from painting

10

Performance and Experimentation

After a near-death experience, Warhol gets back to work

11

Mao

Warhol’s take on the most widely reproduced portrait in the world

12

Time Capsules

Boxing (and unboxing) Warhol’s personal archives

13

Ladies and Gentlemen

A major series depicts members of New York’s drag and trans community

14

Still Lifes and Shadows

Questioning how images create meaning

15

Abstraction

A radical new approach to abstract art

16

Portraits

Warhol attempts to create a “portrait of society”

17

Andy Warhol Enterprises

The Factory expands its ventures in contemporary media

18

Collaborations

Warhol inspires—and is inspired by—a new generation of artists

19

The Last Supper

A meditation on militancy, spiritual sacrifice, and mourning