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.

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."

Watch and interview with the artist...

RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
The Annual Isaac Stern Memorial Concert

Joshua Bell - Violin
Jeremy Denk - Piano


Mozart - Violin Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 454
R. Strauss -  Violin Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 18
Janáček - Violin Sonata
Schubert - Fantasy in C Major, D. 934

"Joshua Bell is “fundamentally incapable of making an unpleasant sound,” wrote The New York Times. The violinist’s silken tone has been called “a thing of beauty” (Boston Herald), but he is a player who also has remarkable rhythmic acuity and unsurpassed refinement. Jeremy Denk, “a pianist you want to hear, no matter what he performs” (The New York Times) joins Bell for an unforgettable evening of music."

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Violin Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 454

Written for Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi, this high-spirited work is concerto-like in the technical demands it makes of the violinist. Unlike Mozart’s earlier violin sonatas that shone the spotlight on the keyboard, K. 454 presents the two players as equal partners. According to legend, the composer performed his part from memory at the premiere.


RICHARD STRAUSS Violin Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 18

Written in 1887 when Strauss was just 23 years old, the Sonata in E-flat Major contains the seeds of the musical genius that would shortly bear fruit in his pathbreaking symphonic tone poems and operas. Op. 18 was his last piece of abstract chamber music; virtually all of his later instrumental works would be inspired by literary or philosophical programs.


LEOŠ JANÁČEK Sonata for Violin and Piano

A restless, searching spirit suffuses this powerful work, which was started before and completed after World War I. In it, we hear the profound transformation that Janáček’s musical language underwent during this period; the resulting sound world anticipates his opera The Cunning Little Vixen.


FRANZ SCHUBERT Fantasy in C Major, D. 934

Schubert’s richly melodious Fantasy is recognized as a masterpiece today, but it received mixed reviews at its premiere in 1828. One newspaper tartly observed that the lengthy piece “occupied rather too much of the time a Viennese is prepared to devote to pleasures of the mind.”

RECITAL

Morgan Library & Museum
Young Concert Artists

Olivier Stankiewicz - Oboe
Jonathan Ware - Piano

Saint-Saëns - Sonata in D Major, Op. 166
Antal Doráti - Duo Concertante for oboe and piano
Pierre Sancan - Sonatine for oboe and piano
Poulenc - Sonata for oboe and piano

"A brilliant oboist, he is in perfect control of his sound, revealing the marvelous poetic layers of music." —ConcertClassic.com

See and hear the artist...

RECITAL

Merkin Concert Hall
Tuesday Matinees

Xuesha Xu - Piano

Beethoven – "Appassionata Sonata" Op. 57 in F minor
Barber – Sonata in E flat minor, Op. 26
Mendelssohn – "Scottish Fantasy" Op. 26 in F sharp minor
Liszt – Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata

"Pianist Xuesha Hu was the top prize-winner at the 2017 Bösendorfer and Yamaha USASU International Piano Competition, the 2016 Young Texas Artists Competition, the 53rd Jefferson International Concerto Competition, the 2013 Lennox International Piano Competition, as well as the 2010 Steinway & Sons China National Piano Competition.

Originally from Ganzhou City, China, Hu has performed throughout the United States, China, Austria, Germany and Brazil. Xuesha has appeared with various orchestras as a soloist, including the Fort Worth Symphony, Jefferson Symphony Orchestra, Richardson Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, Allen Symphony Orchestra, Texas Christian University Symphony Orchestra, and Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra."

  Watch Xuesha Hu perform.

THEATER

Classic Stage Company
Fire and Air

"This world premiere by Tony Award winner Terrence McNally explores the rich history of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev’s itinerant Russian ballet company. Surrounded by great talents of art, design, and music, the tempestuous relationship between Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky revolutionizes dance forever."

THE LEGACY OF THE BALLETS RUSSES BY FIRE AND AIR ASSISTANT DIRECTOR SOPHIE ANDREASSI

Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes existed for a mere twenty years, and yet it is difficult to overstate the company’s influence on dance, art, music, and design in Western Europe and beyond. From its inception in 1909 to Diaghilev’s death and its dissolution in 1929, the company drew throngs of spectators, eager to witness the product of Diaghilev’s latest, carefully-orchestrated collaborations among promising artists of different disciplines. The itinerant company’s experiments galvanized the art world in their time, and forever altered the trajectory of art and culture in the 21st century.

Diaghilev capitalized on a vibrant Paris arts scene and engaged his talented circle of Russian émigrés. Artists who secured Diaghilev’s approval were poised to take on a near-cult following. Visual artists and designers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalì, Coco Chanel, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Natalia Goncharova, André Derain, Léon Bakst and Georges Braque enjoyed the exposure afforded them by creating works for the company’s stages. The company’s composers included Claude Debussy, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Richard Strauss. If not already prominent in their field, these and other composers achieved legendary status, especially after the creation of such enduring works as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune.

Diaghilev’s choreographic protégés, including Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, Serge Lifar, and a young George Balanchine, tested the viability of currents within modernism at the level of the body while exploring the limits of the classical ballet vocabulary. Significantly, the Ballets Russes challenged the centrality of the idealized female body to ballet. It was the male body was of special importance to Diaghilev’s aesthetic.

Following Diaghilev’s death, offshoots of the company formed to continue to tour the company’s existing repertoire internationally. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, national companies on both sides of the Atlantic grew in prominence, often under the purview of Ballets Russes disciples. On the American side, Fokine, Massine, and Nijinska were some of the first choreographers to be engaged by the newly-formed Ballet Theater, now known as American Ballet Theater, in New York in 1939. Balanchine, too, moved to the States and, with Lincoln Kirstein, created the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the New York City Ballet in 1948.

In the 1970s, Robert Joffrey, director of the Joffrey Ballet, began a project of reconstructing select pieces from the Ballets Russes canon, inviting Massine to oversee some of his and Fokine’s ballets. Later, Joffrey set about the ambitious project of reviving works by Nijinsky, including Rite of Spring, relying on extensive research by dance historians to attempt to capture the spirit of the piece in the absence of any films.

Under Diaghilev’s ingenious, if heavy-handed, supervision, the Ballets Russes reimagined ballet as the fusion of movement, art, and music. The product of these experiments was a rich legacy of innovation and an addicting history that continued to inspire artists, scholars, and the popular imagination through to the present day.

Photo: Alexandra Danilova and Serge Lifar in the Ballets Russes’ Apollo (originally Apollon musagète) in 1928.

‘Fire and Air’ Review: Flat-Footed Portrait of a Dance Icon

Terrence McNally’s new play about Sergei Diaghilev is a fact-heavy stumbler. 

Marsha Mason, John Glover, Douglas Hodge and Marin Mazzie. PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS

By 

Terry Teachout

Feb. 8, 2018 3:15 p.m. ET

1 COMMENTS

New York

Within the small world of ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, who died in 1929, was and is a giant. Outside it, though, he is less well remembered, if only because there is no simple way to explain what he did and why it still matters. The founder of the Ballets Russes, the most influential company in the history of dance, Diaghilev on paper was nothing more than an impresario—a producer, if you like. He couldn’t dance a step, much less choreograph a ballet. Yet it was because of him that “The Rite of Spring” came into being and Igor Stravinsky, then an obscure young Russian composer, emerged as a central figure in 20th-century music. Diaghilev made Vaslav Nijinsky a star dancer and George Balanchine a major choreographer; commissioned sets from Picasso and Matisse and musical scores from Debussy, Prokofiev and Ravel ; and did more than anyone else to introduce European audiences to the modern movement in art.

Fire and Air

Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.
$50-$125, 866-811-4111, extended through March 2

Such a man could scarcely have been anything other than interesting in private life, and Diaghilev’s more-or-less open homosexuality and fabulously flamboyant personality made him a journalist’s dream. Not surprisingly, several attempts have been made to put him on stage and screen, the latest of which, Terrence McNally’s “Fire and Air,” in which Douglas Hodge plays Diaghilev, is the work of a playwright who has previously written on numerous occasions about the equally extravagant world of grand opera. Having given us a successful play about Maria Callas, Mr. McNally would seem as likely as anyone to be able to make theatrical sense out of Diaghilev. Yet “Fire and Air,” despite the strong staging of John Doyle and a spare but visually effective production by his Classic Stage Company, is brought low by most of the usual mistakes to which biographical plays are heir. Fact-heavy and stodgily undramatic, it feels for the most part more like a well-meaning TV documentary than a full-fledged play, on top of which it suffers from a devastating piece of miscasting.

“Fire and Air” is the kind of history play in which most of the dialogue conveys factual information instead of illuminating personality or propelling the rudimentary plot. James Agee famously complained in his review of “Casablanca” that the characters kept saying things to each other like “Oh, Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight!” I thought of Agee’s review as I listened to Mr. McNally’s characters spouting such eye-rollingly on-the-nose lines as “This is the beginning of the 20th century and there is a new god of the dance.” Real artists don’t talk like that, and Mr. McNally knows they don’t, as he proved in “Golden Age,” his cunningly wrought 2012 comedy about the opening night of Bellini’s “I Puritani.” The only expository line in “Fire and Air” that lands with memorable force is the one in which Diaghilev sums himself up brutally, if not quite accurately: “I have no talent. My artists are my talent.” (All too characteristically, another character says the same thing again at play’s end, calling him “a man whose only talent was other people.”) Nor is there any exciting dramatic conflict driving the play. Instead, Mr. McNally has given us a shapeless, wandering pageant in which event follows event for no clear reason other than that they happened.

James Cusati-Moyer PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS

Mr. Hodge is best known in New York for having played Albin in the 2010 Broadway revival of “La Cage aux Folles.” That will give you some idea of his approach to the role, which seems to be based on the assumption that Sergei Diaghilev was a dead ringer for Nathan Lane. His Diaghilev is small, whiny and about as Slavic as Russian dressing, and it is impossible to believe in him as a man possessed of the ruthlessness necessary to conceive of a venture like the Ballets Russes, much less to have kept it running for two hectic decades. James Cusati-Moyer and Jay Armstrong Johnson play Nijinsky and Léonide Massine, Diaghilev’s dancers-protégés-lovers, as a matched set of blank-faced pretty boys, which may or may not be true to life—Nijinsky’s offstage personality was unusually opaque—but fails to convince within the context of the play. The other actors, John Glover, Marsha Mason and Marin Mazzie, don’t make much of a splash, but that’s Mr. McNally’s fault: Their roles are underdeveloped.

Douglas Hodge and James Cusati-Moyer PHOTO: JOAN MARCUS

Mr. Doyle has staged and designed the set for “Fire and Air” in his well-known minimalist style, restricting himself to a half-dozen gilded chairs and two rehearsal-room mirrors. That’s all he needs to move us efficiently and convincingly from place to place and scene to scene. It’s just possible that the script might have profited from greater specificity of design, but I doubt it: The trouble with “Fire and Air” is fundamental, not superficial.

—Mr. Teachout is the Journal’s drama critic. His play “Satchmo at the Waldorf” begins previews at Houston’s Alley Theatre on Feb. 24. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

THEATER

Cherry Lane Theater
A Walk with Mr. Heifetz

"The new play by James Inverne will bring to life the true story of violinist Jascha Heifetz, to be played by Adam Green.

Adam GreenAdam Green (Venus) is set to star as famed Russian violinist Jascha Heifetz in the world premiere of James Inverne’s A Walk With Mr. Heifetz Off-Broadway. The Primary Stages production is scheduled to begin performances January 31, 2018, at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

Completing the cast are Yuval Boim (Two Thousand Years) and Erik Lochtefeld (Small Mouth Sounds). Acclaimed violinist Mariella Haubs will join them onstage performing live music.

Opening night is set for February 20 for a limited run through March 4, 2018.

A Walk With Mr. Heifetz will be directed by Primary Stages’ artistic director Andrew Leynse. The previously announced director for the production, Benjamin Kamine (Washer/Dryer), has had to withdraw due to a family illness.

The new play imagines the moment after Jascha Heifetz performed a concert in pre-Israel Palestine in 1925. Legend has it that the world-renowned Russian violinist had a conversation with Yehuda Sharett, composer and brother of future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, which would inform an important conversation with the leader 20 years later."

"In this inspiring new play by award-winning Gramophone and Time Magazine journalist James Inverne, discover how music helped Israel find its cultural identity during its formative years. In 1926, an unforgettable event occurred when Jascha Heifetz, the most celebrated violinist in the world, played a concert in pre-Israel Palestine. People flocked from all over the globe to see this performance, including Yehuda Sharett, composer and brother of future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Legend has it that after the performance, Heifetz and Yehuda walked together and shared a remarkable conversation that resonated twenty years later when, in 1945, Moshe echoed Heifetz’s experience with his brother in a similar exchange that changed the world as we know it."