The Rake's Progress

The highlight of my Stravinsky week was hearing Stravinsky's opera "The Rake's Progress" performed at the Met, with James Levine conducting.  It was a revelation; I had last heard this opera performed at New York City Opera in the 1980's in what was probably not a very good performance; mostly I remember the David Hockney sets.
I love how Stravinsky sets the English text;  maybe because he was not a native English speaker, he was extremely fastidious in his settings.   The opera is a musical delight from beginning to end.   And what begins as an old fashioned number opera with a fair amount of humor eventually catches you unaware; the penultimate scene, with Tom in the insane asylum, is one of the most moving I have ever encountered in an opera.   Though Stravinsky and Auden undermine it somewhat by adding an epilogue when the characters all remind you that what you heard was a story...
Levine's conducting of the Met Orchestra was superb (as always), with wonderful clarity detailing Stravinsky's orchestrations and plenty of energy when needed.   I don't really understand why this opera is not more of a staple of the repertory;  the Met itself did it in the early 1950's (directed by George Balanchine!), and then not again until 1997, 2003, and the present performances (only 3) in 2015.  And no HD broadcasts.   But who am I to fathom the tastes of opera programmers and their audience?

Storytelling Pictures

I saw a wonderful show at MOMA of the paintings by Jacob Lawrence, featuring the series entitled "The Great Migration".   This series consists of 60 small size paintings created by Lawrence in the early 1940's telling the story of the great migration of African-Americans from the South to the Northern cities.    The sixty paintings, small in size, are meant to be viewed as a unified exhibit.  Each painting is accompanied by a  declarative sentence or two, describing one aspect of the migration, and the painting illustrates the sentence.   There was something about the stark and straightforward sentences and the pictures which I found very moving; in addition, seeing all 60 pictures in the same room, you see an overall visual scheme which resonates.  In some ways, the series works like a graphic novel in which the narrative works primarily through images.   While I am not ordinarily partial to any kind of text with images, in this case, it works.   In the examples below you can get some idea of how the pictures share colors and shapes.  The exhibit was accompanied by a nice selection of photographs and other artifacts of African-American culture of the period which added more historical background to the works.   Bravo MOMA for a well curated exhibit.   My only problem was with the crowds of school groups; this being a natural choice for arts educators in New York City schools.

Some examples:

By coincidence, the next day I went to indulge myself in my latest passion, Persian miniatures, at the Met.   I was immediately struck by a similarity with the Lawrence; many of the Persian paintings are narrative, though often in this case the text is embedded in the the painting itself.  Many of the Persian paintings are from book length narratives, where each page illustrates an aspect of the story.  The disadvantage for me is that I can't read Arabic script.  

Here is one entitled "Laila and Majnun in School", depicting the first meeting of two Romeo and Juliet type lovers

Here is another entitled  "The Angel Surush Rescues Khusrau Oarviz from a Cul-de-sac"

I also discovered a genre of Persian painting called composites, as in this "Composite Camel"

Or this composite elephant from India: