Walker Evans and Soundings at MOMA

I went to MOMA to see their take on "sound art", and a 75th anniversary commemorative show of Walker Evan's "American Photographs".    The sound art show was mostly inconsequential and annoyingly simplistic.   For example, one artist had taken a copy of a Xenakis score, and drawn lines from each note to the center point of the paper.   That's it....   If you want to extrapolate artistic meaning from that exercise, feel free to...   Others continued along the same lines, mixing contemporary art cliches with abandon...   I did like one work, consisting of 1,500 small sized speakers arranged on a wall, with varying frequencies of pink noise that changed as you moved around.

On the other hand, the Walker Evans show was wonderful.  I know many of the photographs form the original catalog, "American Photographs".  What I was not prepared for was the richness of the silver gelatin prints.   The show (one large room) had a copy of the catalog at hand; comparing the prints directly with the reproductions in the catalog showed that the reproduced images were  feeble, pale imitations of the originals.   I tend to think of Walker Evans as a "documentary" style photographer, inheriting the tradition of Atget in taking photographs of the ordinary.   These prints showed Evans as a sensual and subtle visual artist as well, working in the medium of black and white photography.

A pale imitation:

I like the show so much, I went back to see it again a few days later.

Stravinsky at Bard

After a few months in Vancouver, it was time for a visit to New York to recharge our cultural batteries.   Not that there is nothing happening in Vancouver (more on that in another post).   

Our first major event was the opening night of the Stravinsky and His World festival at Bard College.   We drove up with our friend Tina to the campus (about 2 hours north of New York).  The concert took place at Bard's Gehry-designed concert hall.   

For the most part, I have become tired of Gehry's signature wavy surfaces.  I hate his new high-rise condo building in downtown NY.   But this building, situated in a lush green environment, is beautiful to see.   And, more importantly, beautiful to hear.  The concert hall seats about 900 people in a nicely shaped wooden space, with a stage that can hold a full orchestra and chorus with ease.  The program was a truly inspired cross-section of Stravinsky's career;  Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Symphony of Psalms, the late and rarely performed "Abraham and Isaac" for baritone and orchestra, Concerto for Two Pianos, Les Noces, and a mini song retrospective.   Whew!   It made for compelling listening, as I heard musical ideas ricochet between Stravinky's stylistically contrasted works.  Symphony of Psalms was vivid and clear in the smallish space, and the very energetic performance of Les Noces brought the house down, with two very idiomatic performances from Russian singers brought in for the occasion.   

       The Bard Festival is a truly first class enterprise, with programs designed to create maximal musical interest, with scholars giving pre-concert talks, and even a book which is published on the opening day of the festival.  Not to mention an after concert party tent, with a bar, live band, and dance floor!   I wish we could have stayed for the whole thing!