Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Alondra de la Parra

    Alondra de la Parra

    I had no sense, before seeing her, of the impact Alondra de la Parra would make when she conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas in a Dia de los muertos (Day of the Dead) concert at the Town Hall. There is an expression I heard once from a professional dancer – “making air” –…

  • Karina Beorlegui

    Karina Beorlegui

    When Karina Beorlegui alternates between tango and fado, she discerns a unity deeper than the obvious affinities and plays with something more than complementarity or contrast. Going from one to the other feels more like rounding a bend in the lane than switching to a parallel road. She gives voice to the shared historical drama…

  • Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala is, at age 43, a distinctive tango vocalist who just might be generationally defining. She advances a view of time that has little, if anything, to do with nostalgia. This distinguishes her, by way of comparison, from two of the innovative female vocalists who came before her. Adriana Varela, two decades older, is…

  • Adriana Varela

    Adriana Varela

    Last night, at Teatro Metropolitano in Medellín, Colombia, I heard Adriana Varela sing tango. This was no small matter. There are those who say she is the best living tango singer (among those still active), and although she recorded her first tangos in 1991, she carries the patina of an earlier era. She commands the…

  • Gisela João

    Gisela João

    To hear and see Gisela João is to be reminded of fado in its familiar glories, but also to be divested of its stereotypes. We remember, or learn, that fado can be cheerful as well as sad, that the feet can move as well as the body sway; that the deep emotion is restrained before…

  • MalPaso Dance Company

    MalPaso Dance Company

    I had certain impressions of the MalPaso Dance Company of Cuba at the Joyce, but none was stronger than that the dancers had not been trained into their bodies but in them. They are so present in their physical selves that they must surely have been there always; they would need to be trained out…

  • Blues for Dixie

    Blues for Dixie

    It should not have surprised me that Allison Moorer singing about the South brought tears to my eyes. Indiana, where I was born, and St. Louis, where I went to fourth grade, are more Southern than is obvious from the map. A strain of my ancestry runs through Virginia and Kentucky, and the nursery years…

  • Bésame mucho

    Bésame mucho

    BÉSAME MUCHO, which bears the subtitle “Latinas Sing Latinas,” and the further tagline, “Una antología musical de las más grandes compositoras latinoamericanas,” is substantial, even educational, in content, yet light and emotionally buoyant. Structurally it resembles Voces del tango, which I saw late last year from the same writer and conceiver, Pablo Zinger: four singers…

  • Emilio Teubal Ensemble

    Emilio Teubal Ensemble

    I have known Emilio Teubal, who is Argentinian, mainly for his appearances as a pianist in tango bands. But what he is, principally, is a jazz artist who both composes for and leads an ensemble. I finally saw him in that capacity at the relatively new, and very nice, venue called SubCulture on Monday night.…

  • Sílvia Pérez Cruz

    Sílvia Pérez Cruz

    I had planned, upon hearing Sílvia Pérez Cruz sing at Joe’s Pub, to make my way to another event involving music. But the idea of altering the state in which she, and the guitarist Raül Fernández Miró, had left me was practically unthinkable; the tenor of the experience deserved, as the profoundest of our aesthetic…