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Moses in Egypt
With the parting of the red curtain last week at City Center, The New York City Opera returned home from its long exile to Lincoln Center and other venues. The music to Rossini’s MOSES IN EGYPT is lovely, and among the performers Sian Davies as Elcia and Wayne Tiggs as Pharoah made a particularly strong…
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Jazz and Sushi
The Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet is an important band, and it should not come as a surprise that no smallish house in which they perform will be unpacked. It has doubtless happened before, but Saturday’s concert – of two separately vended sets – was the first time I have seen a full house at the…
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Alder
Somewhere betwixt curating a sculpture garden worthy display of pigs-in-a-blanket and an artful arrangement of black bass with a nori salsa verde, celebrity chef Wiley Defresne paused in the kitchen of Alder, not to rest from his travails, but – to wipe the counter. Alder is this long-haired, pixie-eyed artist’s second venture; his first, wd~50,…
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Eurydice’s Dream
EURYDICE’S DREAM is an apt title for the show by Blessed Unrest currently playing at The Interart Theatre. It signals the sort of reality that will be experienced if you immerse yourself in the play, but is never used as an excuse for incoherence or obscurantism. This collectively developed piece has a recognizable theme that…
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Blancanieves
Black-and-white filmmaking can be ravishingly beautiful, and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES had me from start-to-finish by virtue of its images alone. The title is Spanish for “Snow White,” the story on which the film is based, but also evokes the silvery light out of which it is composed. It caught me in a kind of spell,…
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Todos tenemos un plan
There is an implicit moral cynicism in the title of this engrossing film from Argentina, which in Spanish is called TODOS TENEMOS UN PLAN. We all have a plan, a game to play, a scam, perhaps, things we want and a way to get them. In this film, there are those who want love, money,…
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Sara Serpa
I’ve heard good report of the Portuguese vocalist Sara Serpa for a while now, and I finally heard her live on Friday night. Her genre is jazz, but do not expect to hear the standards from her, at least not in their usual form. Serpa is an experimentalist, and an intellectual, and her repertory includes…
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Two Pianists
I had the occasion this month to attend two classical piano recitals, one by a world-class artist at Carnegie Hall, and the other by a knowledgeable and evidently skilled specialist in the Spanish repertory at the Village redoubt that calls itself (le) poussin rouge. It would be presumptuous to comment on the finer points of…
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Ana Moura
The title of Ana Moura’s new collection is DESFADO, and I take that to mean, without knowing Portuguese, that it is fado, but not, or fado but at an angle, askew; or perhaps it means to be taken by fado, touched by it as by madness, kidnapped by its pirate lilt and stirred by its…
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Stoker
STOKER is creepy. The images are put together in such a way as to make it seem that the full picture is perpetually out of reach. There is always something out of frame, or out of order, or seen only in outline, or out of focus. The truth is out there, but how do we…