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Women in Music
There were two highlights for me in WOMEN IN MUSIC, billed as “a musical conversation between the United States and Spain” by way of Shakespeare and Cervantes inspired works composed and performed by women, one of solo piano, the other a suite of vocals. The first was Consuelo Díez’s Ser y tiempo (2011), a piano…
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Tania Stavreva
My first sight and sound of Tania Stavreva was at a tribute to the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera in his centennial year. The Bulgarian-born pianist opened the concert, to great effect, with two Ginastera pieces and one, “Bulgarian Prelude” (2016), that she had written in his honor. I noticed afterward, following her career, that she…
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Pablo Estigarribia
The Argentine pianist Pablo Estigarribia balanced his concert last week, at Mezzrow in New York, on a tripod of genres. Trained, at first, in classical, he came, at age twenty or so, to tango, a course that he has followed for the past decade. He has studied and played with top tango figures and found…
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Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916, and it was a hundred years later, on April 11, 2016, that the Spectrum Symphony presented a centennial commemoration of the Argentine composer at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The wide-ranging and innovative concert wasn’t limited to works and performances by Ginastera or other artists with…
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The Tango Fado Project
Manhattan Camerata will deliver again, this time with flowers, THE TANGO FADO PROJECT to (le) poisson rouge for, albeit a day late (on Presidents Day), a “Valentine’s Concert.” This is not a gimmick: the heart of the camerata is, in its own words, “a couple in love who were invited to participate by another couple…
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Lulu
In William Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg’s LULU at the Metropolitan Opera, consciousness comes, hesitantly, into being, fragments, reconfigures itself, then shatters again, and is still, hours later, in uncertain consonance with the exterior world. It’s a completely realized work of Expressionist theater, the fin de siècle form that portrayed an individual perspective at odds…
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From the Earth to the Moon
He was, when I was growing up, a boy in a normative Middle American family, essential reading, along with Conan Doyle, Tolkien, and a few others. But I have the sense, hoping that I am wrong, that Jules Verne is not, at least in this country, so much read anymore. Part of this is simply…
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Cinderella
There was, I thought as I listened to Valery Gergiev conduct Prokofiev’s music to the ballet of CINDERELLA, something radical about it. It seems actively to resist Romanticism, despite the fairy tale it depicts, and to veer full scale into the abstraction and self-consciousness of Modernism. It is only at the moments of literal romance…
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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” –…
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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…