March 2011 Archives

Those who love Bach are always looking to win him new followers.Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations"  has been my gift of choice when people ask. I now pair it with a recent DVD film by Michael Lawrence called "Bach & Friends," which captures the insights of a novel cross-section of Bach interpreters. 

The participants in this project include an A-list of musicians who extend well beyond classical music's usual suspects. We have -- in addition to composer Philip Glass, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and violinist Joshua Bell -- top artists of the banjo, mandolin and glass harp (with its water-filled crystal goblets). That's ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro, at right. We also hear from other brilliant people who specialize in computer infrastructure, video game design, brain chemistry and fractal theory. Bach lovers all.

The DVD project was a labor of love for film-maker Michael Lawrence, a classical guitarist and composer by training, with a healthy quotient of bluegrass and jazz in his mix. Lawrence's career veered early into the world of documentary film-making, where he composed film scores and mastered the other aspects of the trade. Now in his 60s, Lawrence has taken the path back around to the subject of music. Rightly determining that most Bach documentaries are dreadful, he decided to have a go at a Bach film himself.

You can't beat this DVD set if you're seeking a way into Bach's music. Assembled in Lawrence's Baltimore production studio, a former bedroom, on a shoestring budget, it was envisioned from the beginning to be accessible to the general audience. All manner of musicians volunteered their time. I instantly took to the cherub-faced organist Felix Hell, a sizzling virtuoso with feet as fleet as Savion Glover's, as he tore through the Fugue in D major (BWV 532) on a tidy three-manual Holtkamp. Here's an excerpt that the film-maker posted on YouTube, including some great interview footage that didn't make the film's final cut:

I was struck as well by the the boundary-crossing banjo player Béla Fleck who, after lingering over the Presto from Bach's Violin Sonata No. 1, confessed that this composer's music is "the way we all wish we improvised."  These players generally speak without the customary academic inflection, and the connections they make may come as a revelation to classical musicians, such as these remarks by Fleck on Bach and the legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane:

Lawrence said he couldn't believe his luck at first. "I'd started making cold calls to the best people I could think of and one after another said yes," he told me by telephone. "Why were they doing this?" Continue ...

Anybody who has ever attended the Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center or just about any music performance in the BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater knows who Pedja Muzijevic is.  A Bosnian-born, Juilliard-educated concert pianist, he is officially called the "Artistic Administrator" of the BAC (a role assigned to him by the far-seeing and generous spirit of the place, Mikhail Baryshnikov).  Unofficially, he is the man behind many of the most exciting and unusual events that take place there.  Roundly admired as an artist yet resolutely unpretentious, beloved by many of the music world's best performers, he is able to draw on friendships and professional connections to create performance magic over and over again.

Pedja has what I would call a literary sensibility (but a painter would probably call it a sense of form, and a dancer would call it a choreographic sensibility) -- that is, he is able to perceive connections between different parts of a whole, which allows him to imagine and then create a narrative arc in a performance.  The things he puts on at the BAC are not just concerts:  they have a point and a shapeliness that make you feel an intelligence behind them.  Sometimes it is the intelligence of the artists themselves (as it was in last fall's galvanizing concert by the St. Lawrence Quartet); sometimes it is Pedja's; most often it is both.

Last night's double concert at the Jerome Robbins Theatre was a Pedja event, for sure.  It consisted of two one-hour concerts (separated by an hour in which you could grab a meal at a nearby bar), each ending with Czerny's 1830 "Quatour Concertant," a weird, amusing, rather wonderful piece for four pianos.  Prior to this ending, each concert featured two of the four pianists in solo works.  In the first hour, Pedja himself played Liszt plus two twentieth-century composers (Feldman and Knussen); then a talented young woman named Natasha Paremski played a new piece by Gabriel Kahane.  In the second hour, the brilliant Inon Barnatan played Scarlatti plus a recent piece by Currier that echoed Scarlatti, and the always-terrific Anne-Marie McDermott undertook Wuorinen's massive and challenging Fourth Piano Sonata.  In other words, the opening pieces were all serious. 

The Czerny was something else.  Written for four of Czerny's female students, it was lively, charming, and -- in the hands of these four masters -- marvelously invigorating.  You could see how fun it was for pianists to be playing in a quartet with other pianists, for a change, as they nodded at each other over their pianos and smiled in response to each other's cadenzas and flourishes.  And you could also see how this work and the much more recent ones that had preceded it were connected in a strange way, despite the obvious differences of tone.  It was a lesson about listening and observing, timing and time, precedence and succession, but it didn't feel like a lesson at all:  it felt like a romp.  In each concert, before they played the final piece, Pedja introduced each of the players by the part he or she was to play, which was the name of the original performer -- Countess This, Countess That -- until he reached himself:  "And I am the only non-noble lady playing this evening:  your hostess, Mrs. Albrecht."  What a very good hostess he is, indeed!

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on the acting of Elizabeth Taylor (The New Yorker)
Hilton Als on James M. Cain and "Mildred Pierce" (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead on the future of the BSO (WGBH-FM, Boston)
Alicia Anstead on an adaptation of "A Doll's House" (WGBH-FM, Boston)
Robert Campbell reviews Diller Scofidio + Renfro's arts center (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau on the Drive-By Truckers (Barnes & Noble Review)
Robert Christgau on the Drive-By Truckers and Ned Sublette (Expert Witness)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews F. Murray Abraham (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes reviews Alexander Yates' "Moondogs'' (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" (GreenCine Daily)
Steve Dollar rounds up some of the best films of SXSW 2011 (GreenCine Daily)
Michael Feingold reviews the Broadway revival of "Arcadia" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" (The Village Voice)
Ann Hornaday interviews director Tom McCarthy (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews Tom McCarthy's "Win Win" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the Boston Symphony sans James Levine (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on a new opera residency for composers (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon reviews Beady Eye's "Different Gear, Still Speeding" (NPR)
Ann Powers on the musical meaning of South by Southwest 2011 (NPR)
Mark Rozzo on Hamburg, rock and roll, and sleaze (T Magazine)
Mark Rozzo on new watches that try to be old (The Wall Street Journal)
Craig Seligman reviews Bradford Martin's "The Other Eighties" (Bloomberg News)
Marcia B. Siegel on celebrating the Ballets Russes in London (The Hudson Review)
Laura Sydell asks whether South by Southwest is worth it for musicians (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the evolution of Netflix (NPR)

How many Broadway shows got stories about them in the New York Times this week? Several, of course. But none got more than "Spider-Man", which had no fewer than nine stories in the Times this week, capped by two today. Not bad for a show that hasn't even officially opened. 

Maybe it's true of all botched vacations: There can be a silver lining. To paraphrase Dorothy, sometimes when you're looking for your heart's desire, you may not have to go any further than your own backyard. Which is a good thing because that's how far I got when I had to abandon plans to spend spring break in Chile visiting my brother and reporting on the arts. I ended up staying in the Boston area where the arts chops are pretty sharp these days. And yeah, it's true: I didn't have to go more than four T stops to find my heart's desire.

1. Prometheus Bound directed by Diane Paulus at American Repertory Theater's Club Oberon in Cambridge.

Do you like your revolutions Greek style? Diane Paulus does. Her decision to focus American Repertory Theater's season on classics - as in Aeschylus and Sophocles (add her touring Broadway revival of Hair which, coincidentally, stops in Boston this month) - has turned out to be prescient given the headlines in Africa and the Middle East. Prometheus is another example of Paulus' gift for musical spectacle with gender-social-political-choreographic (did I leave anything out?) commentary glinting from a disco ball. For a show in which the protagonist is chained to a rock for most of the story, there's a lot going on here. There's no escaping the action whether you're with the groundlings - the throngs of fist-pumping youths on the center floor - or seated off to the side in a banquette where a trio of hauntingly pale chorus angels in combat boots might nudge you aside to use your table for a scene. Paulus had a dream team in script and lyrics writer Steven Sater (Spring Awakening) and composer Serj Tankian (System of a Down). The storyline may feel Greek to our ears because of the volume, but the production is rousing - and features the usual lineup of hyper talented performers who seem to give their souls to Paulus' vision of Outsiders Are Powerful. Thank you, Prometheus, for the bright ideas. We have some people in Wisconsin who would have found you very inspiring.

2. The Sun Also Rises by Elevator Repair Service at Arts Emerson's Paramount Theater.

After last year's Gatz, which ranks in the Top Ten Performances I've seen in three decades of theater going, I hoped Elevator Repair Service wasn't going to be a one-trick pony. It isn't. Director John Collins has three important talents: He understands pacing - and isn't afraid to take it slow. He understands humor - and isn't afraid to combine the nuance of the aforementioned pacing with the nonsense of stagecraft. And he loves literature enough to know that a book is one thing and a stage play is quite another and that the two are related but not pathologically. If anything, Collins is a master of the remix. Purists may have walked away saying, "This isn't Hemingway!" Fine. That is fine. But I walked away wondering if I got the cultural wink in the Ferrante & Teicher poster on the wall - and not caring much for the answer because, well, it seemed very Hemingway not to overwork a symbol. In the end - and Collins crafts one of the

"What's it like to be reviewed, after slinging so many opinions yourself?"
I've been getting that question a lot lately. Since the January release of a CD of my original music, Into the Ojala, I've had occasion to see arts journalism from a slightly different perspective - as a subject.

Google recently changed its search algorithm to try to tamp down some of the pages generated by so-called content farms and make them appear lower in search results. Content farms are so-named because they produce great volumes of "articles" based on analysis of search terms and calculated to pop up high in results. Such gaming of the system is called search engine optimization and SEO is currently considered the highest of the voodoo internet arts. 

Why should you care?

In traditional journalism, publications lure readers to articles with pithy headlines and imaginative ledes. Even just a few years ago, provocative headlines ruled online. Clever word plays, catchy phrasing, any kind of sexual reference - these were sure-fire clicks. 

Then came the age of the headline feed, and it turned out that readers couldn't be tempted with enigmatic headlines; they needed to be sure what awaited them at the other end of a hyperlink before they would click (although mentions of sex still worked). 

In response, headlines became more specific and informational, more utilitarian. Duller, even?

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on the Strokes at South by Southwest (Spin)
Charles Aaron on the Mess With Texas festival in East Austin (Spin)
Martin Bernheimer on "Para América Mágica" at Symphony Space (Financial Times)
Robert Christgau on Peter Stampfel, Lucinda Williams, Tom Zé et al (MSN Music)
Robert Christgau weighs in on a Lucinda Williams concert (MSN Music)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews Peter Brook (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Diane Paulus and "Hair" (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on SXSW buzz flick "Bellflower" (GreenCine Daily)
John Horn on drawing Chinese Americans to the movies (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on a guilty plea complicating a film's happy ending (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Jane Eyre" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews the green-tech doc "Windfall" (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on German politics' plagiarism scandal (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein on "The Immortalization Commission" (Obit Magazine)
Glenn Lovell on Mel Gibson's "little (furry) friend" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on the NSO's "Lyric Symphony" program (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on his return to professional music-making (The New York Times)
Ann Powers on doing South by Southwest right (NPR)
Ann Powers on a joyful new dawn breaking at South by Southwest (NPR)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Charles Aaron on 10 important post-dubstep artists (Spin)
Martin Bernheimer on Tyondai Braxton et al at Alice Tully Hall (Financial Times)
Robert Campbell reviews Dana-Farber's beautiful new building (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on the many faces of "Jane Eyre" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Elevator Repair Service and "The Select" (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews "That Championship Season" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews David Lindsay-Abaire's "Good People" (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on art outside its architectural context (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Kids Grow Up" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the ethics of home videography (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (The New York Times)
Michael Kimmelman on opposition to a Sarkozy museum (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein interviews Susan Jacoby about "Never Say Die" (AARP.org)
Julia M. Klein on Simone de Beauvoir (Obit Magazine)
Glenn Lovell on "Reeling from Disaster" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell's review of "Battle: Los Angeles" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on dull programming at the Kennedy Center (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews "Jane Eyre" director Cary Fukunaga (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the music-video-layering project "In B Flat" (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the potential for profit in online music services (NPR)
Jerome Weeks on a multi-city, multi-theater Foote retrospective (KERA, Dallas)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer reviews "Roméo et Juliette" at the Met Opera (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer reviews Lepage's "The Nightingale" at BAM (Financial Times)
Laura Collins-Hughes does a Q&A with director Maria Aitken (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar talks with Elliott Sharp about his 60th birthday (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on "The Adjustment Bureau" and Philip K. Dick (GreenCine Daily)
Michael Feingold reviews the Wooster Group's "Vieux Carré" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold on Tennessee Williams' "Small Craft Warnings" (The Village Voice)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Adjustment Bureau" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Rango" (The Washington Post)
Glenn Lovell on Schwarzenegger's next movie (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "The Adjustment Bureau" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on "Carmen in 3D" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on Tate Britain's "Watercolour" (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon reviews Tristen Gaspadarek's "Charlatans at the Garden Gate" (NPR)
Peter Plagens on Pulse and the Armory Show (Artnet)
Craig Seligman on "Blood, Bones and Butter" & "Life, on the Line" (Bloomberg News)
Craig Seligman reviews "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" (Bloomberg News)

Recently the accomplished pianist Jenny Lin gave a terrific concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  It consisted of five of Bach's preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier, each sandwiched between two of Shostakovich's compositions from 24 Preludes & Fugues--a work that was itself inspired by Bach's Clavier. In other hands than Lin's, this plan might have gone astray, but her arrangement was never wearyingly mechanical: the pieces were not simply matched up by sequence number or key, but instead were paired in whatever way made the most musical sense, so that we could actually hear echoes of style and pacing between the Bach works and the Shostakovich ones.  And, surprisingly, Shostakovich held up to the comparison.  It is not that he is as good as Bach (no one is), but that his inventiveness, his complex simplicity, his feeling for the solo keyboard instrument, and his ability to convert pattern into emotion are worthy of being matched with Bach's in a concert of this sort.  There was no terrible sense of letdown or disjunction when we went from the Leipzig master to the Moscow student: simply a change in voices.

And Jenny Lin's performance was perfect.  Neither self-dramatizing nor overbearing, her playing was precise, strong, and beautiful--just what was needed to let the musical pieces speak for themselves. Brava!

Birthdays are a dime a dozen, and decade-turners aren't really that big a big deal. Or they shouldn't be. But waking up one recent morning to discover that I had officially entered eminence-grisehood (O.K., maybe just grisehood), gave me a bit of a start. This is a guy who (I was told by an old high-school flame at a reunion) was known among the cute girls as "The Brat." Indeed, my stock-in-trade as an art critic has always been a kind of brattiness, a glib, smart-aleck, colloquial approach to contemporary art, which was, back in the mid-1960s when I started writing about it in Artforum magazine ("the house organ for Minimalism," a lot of people called it), pretty academicized and dense. After the publication moved to Manhattan from Los Angeles, and its roster of writers grew thick with heavy-duty New York intellectuals, I became comic relief from the West Coast. When I moved to New York myself and, a couple of years later, happened into the Newsweek job, my vernacular approach to art criticism turned out to be a nice fit. (My rhetorical style is much a product of my limitations--I'm not and never have been a intellectual, a theorist, a scholar--as a conscious choice. I like readable writing and have always thought that good art criticism could be delivered in fairly plain English.)

Just back from this year's EMP Pop Conference, held for the first time at UCLA rather than the Experience Music Project in Seattle--next year, it'll be NYU, and then it is hoped back to Seattle on what may turn into a three-year rotation only who knows. The university setting proved a little harder to negotiate due mostly to food and coffee issues, both of which were easier to come by in Seattle and both of which are essential if one is to attend panels from nine in the morning until 6 or even further into night. I left on Saturday to have dinner and missed the 8-to-9:30 artist summit featuring Moby and Raphael Saadiq, and next time I may bring a thermos--I can go without food, but not coffee, especially if I'm presenting or moderating.

Of course, it's a credit to EMP that one never wants to skip a session--and that quite often there are two things you really want to hear going on at once. Not only did I miss Jonathan Lethem on Talking Heads because we both presented in the same slot, I missed David Sanjek on academic agoraphobia because he was up against Greil Marcus's "Music About Money" panel, both the reportedly and as I'd figured hilarious Scott Seward about the vinyl trade and J. D. Considine on the death of hi-fi because I wanted my wife to see David Ritz on Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, and money and also because I wanted to see Ritz myself. Like that. It's the world's greatest concentration of pop music speculation and scholarship and has been for a decade now--this was its 10th year.