A Very Short Concert

We went to hear a concert at MOMA, staged in association with the exhibit "Inventing Abstraction" and curated by David Lang of Bang On a Can.   I went because I wanted to hear a very rare Schoenberg piece "Herzgewächse" which I have never heard performed. The piece is scored for soprano, harmonium, celesta, and harp.  Unfortunately, Lang's idea of an interesting concert to connect with this exhibit was to perform the 4 minute Schoenberg piece and a 50 minute Morton Feldman piece for solo voice and pre-recorded voice.   What a ridiculous choice!  (A piece by someone like Webern would have been far more appropriate.)  I like Feldman (see elsewhere in this blog..), but I don't have the patience to sit through a solo vocal piece of that length.   Since the concert was at MOMA, I went to the galleries, and popped into the concert to hear the Schoenberg, and then left.   The Schoenberg was a huge disappointment, because all the instruments and voice were AMPLIFIED!  This ruined all the delicate balances, as the harmonium was overamplified.   I was really annoyed. In addition, Lang's long spoken introduction was idiotic.   Institutions such as MOMA should learn to treat music with a little more respect.


Update:  Be sure to read David Lang's comment.  I do regret calling his talk idiotic, what I should have said was that the talk was pitched more at the level of a high school audience than at what one would presume to be an artistically oriented and sophisticated New York audience.

Crazy people in New York

Every day I take Maggie for a walk in the morning in Riverside Park, and we spend a fair amount of time stalking the squirrels.  People leave bird food at the base of trees, which also interests the squirrels, who are often torn between the desire to get some of the food and the need to evade Maggie.  Normally, they climb up the tree, and gradually start climbing down again, until they get to close to Maggie, and then they retreat.  The other day, there was what seemed to be a young squirrel, who was stuck in a very small tree, with no apparent method of escape.  I was resigned to dragging Maggie away, when I saw the squirrel climb to the highest branch of the tree, and begin to contemplate a flying leap to the nearest tree.  I cheered the squirrel on, and loudly voiced my congratulations when it made it to the tree.  I then turned around to see another dog walker standing close to me, who was probably wondering about this crazy person who was talking to squirrels.   So what's wrong with talking to squirrels?

Maggie and a squirrel contemplating each other:

Music from Canada

The other night I went to hear the Aventa Ensemble at Roulette in Brooklyn.   The Aventa Ensemble is an excellent new music group based in Victoria BC that frequently tours across Canada and Europe.  (Though for some reason, they never play in Vancouver.  Musical politics?)   And here they were in New York.   The best part of the program was a piece entitled something like Black Box by a young Danish composer.  This featured a live video on stage  of a camera that was inside a black box, with various objects being manipulated by a pair of hands, and a large ensemble spread around three sides of the room.  The music was percussive, lively, and inventive.  But the effect was eventually spoiled by mickey-mousing music that responded to the hand gestures in the video.   The two Canadian pieces on the program were both overly long, self-indulgent, and uninteresting.  

Gutai

I went with our friend Christopher to see the Gutai exhibition at the Guggenheim. This show is about a movement in postwar Japan, that like many postwar movements, sought to upend any traditional concepts of what art was supposed to be about, with an emphasis on the spirit of play and engagement with the materials.  I was expecting a series of conceptual and gestural statements; we got those, but there were also a large number of paintings.   They looked something like abstract expressionism, but without philosophy and psychology.  It was more about things like painting with feet, and with bodies (this before the famous body paintings of Yves Klein), and pouring buckets of paint here and there.  This painting was made by painting with a remote controlled little electric car with a paintbrush attached:

Some other paintings:

This one has a bear skin in it:

I liked the show; the exuberance of the art was exciting; there were also some interesting installation type things, and I learned about an art movement I had known nothing about.

A few more:

Parsifal

On Wednesday night, we went to hear the new production of Parsifal at the Met.  It was a long evening, starting with dinner in the Grand Tier restaurant at 4 PM and ending just before midnight.   Parsifal might be the ultimate Wagnerian opera; it is problematic, to say the least.  The plot could probably be described in a paragraph, and parts of it stretch time out to an extremely slow pace, and characters reflect endlessly on their situation.  The Wagnerian view of Christianity is confusing, and ultimately, I ended up not looking at the surtitles.  The last act, however, contains what is to me some of the most sublime music I have ever heard, and the orchestra and singing were nothing short of superb.  The production itself sets the opera in a kind of post-apoclyptic landscape; barren ground and barely any light.  Non-stop gloom, in fact.  The second act is set in a kind of cave, with the entire stage covered in a pool of blood.   When one of the characters sings about all the flowers around, there are none to be seen.   While the sets and video projections (including some 2001-like cosmic images) are stunning, the relentless gloom and darkness get to you after a while.   But ultimately, it is about the music, and to hear Wagner's music played and sung in a performance of such intensity is a thrilling experience.  Though not one I would want to repeat very often.

A few images

The pool of blood, and the flower maidens, in a very wide screen image:

The Mingus Orchestra

Last night we heard the Mingus Orchestra at the Jazz Standard, a club at 27th and Lexington which serves excellent food and has great music.   The Mingus Orchestra is a group of musicians, organized by Mingus's widow, Sue Mingus, that is devoted to playing the more esoteric music that Mingus composed. (There is also a Mingus Big Band.) The ensemble includes French Horn, Bassoon, Bass Clarinet, and Flute along with all the instruments one would normally expect in a big band; it's a kind of hybrid big band.   The music they played ranged from a film score to a vocal number written for Billie Holiday.  Mingus's music is always interesting; rather that the traditional tune followed by individual solos, we often hear the ensemble return in the middle of the solos with new material.   The ensemble itself plays with a kind of improvisatory informality which is exciting; someone may yell out in the middle of the tune to tell the musicians to do something.  Clearly a labor of love on the part of the musicians, (though they do get paid) it is wonderful to hear this music played live.  Mingus is one of my favorite composers.

Powder Her Face

Last night we heard a performance of Thomas Adès's opera "Powder Her Face" at BAM. This opera, written in 1994, is notorious for its fellatio scene; it chronicles the decline of a duchess, based on the true life story of the Duchess of Argyll.  The opera begins with a series of raucous, debauched episodes, with music that frequently alludes to popular styles, but transformed by Adès into something quite his own.   The famous fellatio scene was overstaged by the director, who has some 25 fully nude men emerge from various places in the Duchess's hotel room, so while she goes about her business of seducing a waiter, there are these 25 men crowding the stage, not doing very much.   Makes for great publicity, though.   The opera really comes in to its own in the second act, with the Duchess's downfall, and her very moving aria, which resembles that of Berg's Lulu.  Indeed, the whole second act echoes Berg's Lulu, both character-wise and musically, with a haunting, elegiac quality which clearly shows Adès's empathy with his main character. The staging, which emphasizes the sort of tawdry, sordid celebrity-driven aspects of the story, detracts from the music here, which I think is profound and moving.

Wandering the neighborhood with a dog

For the last week, I have had a terrible cold, and have only been out to walk Maggie, which is four times a day.  After doing this for a while, I am getting a more detailed sense of the neighborhood than I have ever had before.  We either go to Riverside Park, with its abundant and bold squirrel population, or to Broadway, with all the stores and everpresent crowds of people.   Maggie likes both of them, and so do I.  I enjoy looking at the sculpted contours of Riverside Park, and the curved fronts of the apartment buildings that border it.  Between Riverside Park and Broadway there are both apartment buildings of varying degrees of pomposity and some charming old townhouses, including some nicely detailed old brownstones.   All the buildings date from the 1920's or before, and all feature some kind of ornamental decoration.  (Ornamentation will be the subject of a future post, once I get the right pictures)   Broadway itself has all kinds of stores, and including our 24-hour supermarket, which features brightly lit piles of fruits and veggies outside;  quite a vision on a frigid, windy night.

Today, when I took Maggie on for a walk on Broadway, she stopped in front of a shoe store that had floor to ceiling windows.  She gives me her look that says. "I want to go in here."    I say "No, Maggie, that's a shoe store!".   Maggie then sits, and gives me that very determined look "I really, really want to go in here!"   I pull on the leash, and she won't budge.   She really wants to go in there.  I explain that there is a sign that says "No pets, please".    Finally, I get her to move, and we go on to the next store, which is a pet store, which is what I think she had in mind in the first place.  (The one with a parrot inside that says  "hello" constantly, which gets Maggie very curious.)  We had only been in that store once before, but I am wondering if she actually had a sense of where it was and was just off by one store.  Or else she really did want a pair of shoes....


One other thing I have noticed that I hadn't really thought about before is that New York's system of garbage collection involves all the apartment buildings putting their garbage out on the street in plastic bags the night before.  And with the recent blizzard, garbage collection got behind.   For me, that means that Maggie wants to sniff every garbage bag there is, especially the ones that might have been chewed a bit by rats.  There has to be a better way.  (Though in Tokyo, they do it exactly the same way, and the Japanese have most urban things figured out..)

Art in different places

I did another round of Chelsea art galleries last week, and also did a MOMA visit.   One of the interesting things about going to art galleries is that what you see is guided by the instincts of the people that run the galleries; instincts that run back and forth between the need to sell art and the need to support artistic quality.  (The name of one gallery I checked out was "Guided By Invoices")   Which means that, unlike a museum, where all the works have received some sort of curatorial stamp of approval (whatever that is worth), visiting galleries can sometimes mean that you are seeing stuff that is really about making money; except that how do you actually really know?  What is the difference between a big name artist like Damien Hirst, who markets to high-end collectors, and someone who sells tacky paintings of flowers to make money?   So it is fun to wander into a space and think about what it is that you are seeing.

At MOMA I did the 1940-1980's galleries, that are organized around the official MOMA approved categories; a room for pop art, a room for abstract expressionists, etc.   I saw the newly installed Rauschenberg combine "Canyon", which includes a stuffed bald eagle sticking out of the canvas.  The eagle makes the work unsellable in America, so the family that recently inherited it was forced to donate it to MOMA.  A crazy, wonderful painting.  (My own family inherited a considerable amount of junkyard taxidermy ((a stuffed ibex, etc.)) from my father, which the IRS valued highly, but which we ended up sending to the junkyard because it could not be sold.)

Another pleasure was a room curated by the artist Trisha Donnelly, where she upends the MOMA curatorial rules.  This room featured a number of exceedingly large diagrams of microprocessor chips in vivid color and detail (donated by Texas Instruments, HP, etc. in the 1990's).  These were juxtaposed with an odd assortment of photographs, a wheelchair from the design department, an art nouveau table, etc.   Made you think...

I also revisited the abstraction show; it has wonderful stuff in it, but still seems to broad for my taste.  Including people like Georgia O'Keefe and Marcel Duchamp as part of inventing abstraction seems spurious to me.  They very well may have made art that was abstract in some sense, but that what not really what either of them was about...

Sofia Gubaidulina

On Saturday night we went to another of the Miller Theater's composer portraits, this one of the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina.  I have heard Gubaidulina's music when she came to Vancouver a while ago (back in the days when people played notated contemporary music there).   She was born in 1931, and has lived through tumultuous times in Russian life and music.  My previous impression of her was as a Christian and somewhat mystical composer through works like "Offertorium". This concert, however, showed a more modernistic composer; one work written in the early 1970's, was serial sounding, and full of dissonant sound effects characteristic of the period.   The highlight, though, was a concerto for bassoon, with an orchestra of 4 cellos and 3 basses.   Low strings!   This proved to be extremely original and quirky, often frequently upending conventional notions of the relationship between soloist and ensemble.  Full of striking ensemble effects, it received a wonderful performance from the soloist.  Another piece, for harpsichord and string quintet, was based on a Bach chorale, and was also intriguing to hear.

When we go to these new music concerts, we are also looking carefully at the audience, to see if we find people that we might have known 25 years ago (which involves trying to imagine what they might look like 25 years later...)   We were delighted to find at this concert our old friend Leo Treitler  (who we last saw a year ago..)   So we went for a drink, and caught up.    

The Night Across the Street

Last night, we went to see the last film of one of my favorite directors, the Chilean Raoul Ruiz.  The film, "The Night Across the Street" was the last film he made before he died recently, and has just been released.   It was a snowy and stormy night, this month's "Storm of the Century", and the Mayor told everyone to stay home.   So we went; the subways were practically empty, but running smoothly.  There were two other people in the theater.   Ruiz's films have a unique quality which is almost impossible to describe; a kind of shaggy-dog, poetic surrealism which can be at times breathtakingly beautiful, inscrutable, and bizarrely funny.  "The Night Across the Street" is a non-narrative cinematic poem which centers around an aging poet and his earlier childhood self.   As a child, he freely converses with his heroes, Beethoven and Long John Silver.  At one point, he takes Beethoven to the movies.  The movie floats freely backwards and forwards in time.  The music is truly wonderful; Ruiz's frequent musical collaborator, Jorge Arriada, is a master of orchestral textures and sounds.   While the film has its slow points, I have a strong feeling that it is some kind of cinema/poem/musical masterpiece.

When we got out of our dream state experience, there was New York, transformed into a glorious blizzard state, with lights and blowing snow and the distinct quiet that emerges in New York during the snow.

A seance, with Long John Silver on the left, and Beethoven on the right.

A Concert for Ralph

We heard a concert the other night that was dedicated to the memory of the late Ralph Kaminsky, a noted patron of new music.  What was novel about the concert was that it presented a tasting menu of new music groups of New York City; each ensemble played a piece. Strikingly, all the pieces were by European composers (perhaps that reflected his taste).  Highlights were two pieces for chamber orchestra.  One, by Olga Neuwirth, entitled "Hooloomooloo", was a very lively stereophonic piece, featuring two almost identical large ensembles on stage left and right, with a piano in the middle.  Lots of very striking back and forth effects between the two orchestras, and a lot of dissonant energy. The other large piece, "Fantasies" for cello solo and chamber orchestra by Dalbavie, was equally lively, featuring an extremely virtuosic (in the traditional sense) cello solo; lots of scale figures, and a kind of post-Debussy accessible spectralism.  The cello was surrounded by string instruments that acted as a kind of extended version of the soloist.
The concert concluded on a disappointing note with an embarrassingly bad  Arvo Part piece, nothing but scales and three note arpeggios that a child of five could have written  (Groucho would have said, "bring me a child of five")
One thing that struck this veteran of new music concerts who has long been absent from new music in New York was the age of the members of the ensembles.  Virtually all of them appeared to be under the age of thirty; I am so used to seeing the aging new music advocates of my generation on stage.  (Or am I getting so old that everyone looks young???).   Also worth noting was that the place was packed; over 300 people.

Patricia Barber

We heard the Patricia Barber Quartet at the Jazz Standard last Friday.  She is a singer/songwriter/pianist, and played with drummer, guitarist, and bassist.  She is a truly unique artist, and you never know quite what to expect next.  In performance, it is immediately evident that she is totally immersed in what she is doing; there is never anything routine or slick.   (She is notably averse to performing, apparently.) Pieces range from jazz classics to her own compositions.  In one piece, she put a few menus into the piano, and suddenly we were in a Cageian prepared piano mode.  But all grounded in the jazz traditions.  Her original lyrics are both witty and obscure, and she delivers them in a way that seems as if they are coming to her on the spur of the moment.
We have heard her in concert performances before, but never in the more intimate space of a small club like the Jazz Standard, where you can hear her ask for some more (brandy, scotch?) in the middle of the show.  It was a great pleasure to hear.

L'Elisir d'Amore

Last night we went to hear Donizetti's opera "L'Elisir d'Amore", having been invited by my stepmother.   I have to admit that, although I have heard Berg's "Wozzeck" countless times, I have never heard an opera by Donizetti.  Now I have.   What is striking to me is how remarkably efficient Donizetti is at his craft.  The music is extremely effective, and the point is the voices.   There are several wonderful ensemble moments that follow in Mozart's footsteps, and the whole thing is exceedingly entertaining, especially when sung and played by the Met Orchestra and brand-name singers.  Vera has heard and taught many of these operas, and gets annoyed by the boiler-plate music that gets used in every opera; for someone as ignorant as I am, it is all charming.   The production itself was extremely well done, and acted with great energy and evident pleasure by the cast.

January in New York

It has been very cold in New York this week, which has its advantages and disadvantages.   Because I am now walking Maggie all the time, that means going out to Riverside Park at midnight, when the temperature is 15 degrees F., and the wind is blowing at 30 mph off the Hudson River, and I am trying to pick up poop while juggling the leash, my gloves, etc.   You could say the the wind at that temperature is certainly invigorating, but even Maggie hustles home at high speed to retreat to our warm apartment.
Speaking of poop, I bought some doggie poop bags at a local pet store, and when I looked at them more carefully when I got home discovered that they were "scented".  For someone who is allergic to perfume, this is doubly appalling.   (For those in need of confirmation of the Decline of Western Civilization, a visit to your local pet store is all that is needed.   I think I saw dog nail polish the other day.)

I experienced the advantages of January in New York today when I went to the Metropolitan Museum.   It was relatively empty (18 degrees temperature and snow in the forecast!), and I got involved in all the 19th century French galleries, the back rooms of which I had never explored before.
Here is the main Cezanne room, which I had all to myself for a long time (except for Madame Cezanne).  I have never seen it this empty.

Degas is also a highlight, including this rather strange pastel, which up close has an extraordinary variety of textures and colors.

I also saw an exhibit of the American painter George Bellows, who is known mostly for his paintings of boxing, especially this one, which is always reproduced when someone is talking about American painting of that period.

It was an interesting show, since I knew nothing about him.  Most exciting were the paintings of New York at that period, including one of Riverside Park at night  (see above!).  Bellows was talented, and his career followed a number of promising trajectories, but I didn't come away thinking I had seen the works of a great painter.  Interesting, though,  in that he was around at a time of great ferment (he was involved in the famous Armory show of 1913), and that a lot of his work reflected the tendencies in art at the time.

Home?

We arrived back in New York this week after a 3 week vacation in Vancouver, seeing friends and spending time with Ada and Andrew.   Which means everything is reversed.  Normally, we might go to New York for a vacation, and then return to work in Vancouver.  Now it's the opposite.  So now that time in January when you settle back into normal working life is happening in New York.   So where is home, exactly?

When we arrived in Vancouver after being away so long, everything felt strange.  All the automatic things you do in a home as a matter of reflex had been forgotten.   I couldn't remember where things were.  (Where are the sharp knives?)  In some cases, though, Ada had moved them as she readjusted the family home to suit her routines.  But very quickly everything becomes normal again.

The biggest change in New York now for us is that we have brought our dog, Maggie.  She couldn't fly with us because of Air Canada's byzantine sets of regulations, so she flew on her own on Cathay Pacific.   I went to JFK airport at 6 AM this morning to pick her up.  I needed to rent a car, because the process involved going back and forth between several destinations in JFK's enormous cargo area, which looks like the kind of place where bodies can be disposed of.   I encountered very slow and laconic paper pushers in the cargo office, but the highlight was an extended conversation with a US Customs official who had received extensive training in the the Kafka and Monty Python divisions of bureaucratic studies.   I wish I could reproduce the exactly sequence of bizarre and insinuating questions and comments that ensued (between long pauses while computer screens were contemplated and documents stamped).  When I told him that we were bringing Maggie here for 2 and a half months, and then she would go back to Vancouver, he said "Do you really expect me to believe that?"  It may have been a joke, or maybe not. He also said that my dog would never be the same again and that he didn't know that they let mixed breeds into the country (I think that was a joke).   Even the process of getting to see someone was bizarre.  I was told by a friendly bystander to stand at a specific spot in the middle of a large room, and wait until some arrived to help me.

But at last, I got Maggie, and we drove off to the Upper West Side.   Maggie seems very excited to be here, and did her first big poop on Broadway.  So now we are dog owners in New York, and have reason to go to some of the infinite number of pet stores on the Upper West Side.

Culture awaits!

Olga Neuwirth

We heard a concert of the music of the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth at Columbia's Miller Theater, as part of their composer portrait series.  Neuwirth is an interesting composer, known for her opera "Lost Highway", based on the David Lynch film, and her recent "American Lulu" in which she re-orchestrated the first two acts Berg's opera for jazz ensemble, and wrote a new third act.   Which is to say that she does not lack for audacity.    The concert itself featured two contrasting works.  The first, a sort of piano concerto, was very rhythmic, but with a sonic palette that resembles a beefed up Lachenmann, including an electric piano tuned a quarter tone apart from the regular piano.  In seven relatively short and fast moving movements, it was intriguing.  The second piece was more problematic; an hour long piece for recorded spoken voice (with texts and voice of Paul Auster), live electronics, live ensemble, and several recorded Weill-like vocal  numbers.  The spoken text is not dramatic, and as a result, it it simply existed as another element in the fabric.  Neuwirth warned us that it was not an easy piece to listen to.  It simply drifts from one thing to another, as we shift our listening gears to follow.  There was the requisite intellectual underpinnings to go along with it (required of every European composer), but the end experience was not that interesting.

Inventing Abstraction

I saw a big new show at MOMA entitled "Inventing Abstraction", which covers the eponymous activities of artists in the period 1910-1925.   Being a big fan of abstract art, I was pleased to see this.   The exhibition covers a lot of ground and is organized by country.  Thus we get the Constructivists, the Futurists, the Vorticists, the French (Delaunays, etc), Mondrian and the Dutch, the Americans, etc. (and even Polish in one corner..)  On the one hand, this is interesting, to see the extent to which the movement towards abstraction quickly spread internationally, and to see how each different school evolved.  On the other hand, this makes for a very diffuse exhibit, with a room or two for each country, and lacks interesting and more focused detail on any one of these countries, each which could be an exhibit in itself.   There are also token nods towards parallel movements in music and dance; the exhibit opens with some early Kandinsky, and some Schoenberg manuscripts.  Though I am not sure I buy the parallel between the move towards atonality and the move towards abstraction in painting, despite Kandinsky's excitement.  There is also a listening room with very poor sound at the end of the exhibit, playing a loop of predictable choices of music from the period.


Guess who did this drawing..

Nijinsky, the dancer....

An abstraction from Popova:

A very large work by Morgan Russell:

My Grandparents

When I was growing up, my family eventually moved out of New York and into the suburbs.   I used to visit my maternal grandparents in New York; I would stay for the weekend, and my grandmother would take me to the NY Philharmonic.  They lived in an apartment at 9 East 10th Street, just north of Washington Square.   They were party types.  There are rarely any pictures of them without a drink in their hands; I think they lived a life of partying and going to the theater, and they had a whole circle of eccentric friends.  My grandfather was a Yale educated lawyer and worked for the family law firm in Brooklyn, and my grandmother was a great beauty who had lived in Paris before WWI, and who most likely had numerous affairs.

Here they are:

(No, I have no idea what the hookah is about, I think they were just goofing around..)

A number of years ago, I started to read the great novels of the American writer Dawn Powell, who wrote in the 1930's and 40's.  One of the things I enjoyed about the novels was that most of them take place in the Greenwich Village milieu, featuring characters that could (I imagine) have been found in my grandparent's living room.   What later astonished me was that I later found out that Dawn Powell had actually lived in my grandparent's building, which was not a large one.  I don't know if they actually overlapped in time, but it is an amazing coincidence.

The building itself is still there, and has a remarkable facade, with decorations in carved  teak.  The neighboring building, built by a teak dealer, has an even more elaborate facade.


Pictures:

The neighboring window:

Seeing unexpected architectural flourishes like the above window is one of the things I love about walking around New York; you never know what you might see.

Les Troyens

This week we went to hear Berlioz's opera, "Les Troyens" at the Met.   This is a truly extraordinary opera, in a grand style, lasting five and a half hours, with intermissions.  The Met production was superb, both visually stunning, and with many scenes of large choral groups on stage, and even 24 dancers.  The choreography, by Doug Varone, involves not only the specified ballet numbers, but some of the major crowd scenes as well.  Berlioz's music is magnificently strange; it really seems to originate from Planet Berlioz, and nowhere else.   The music moves harmonically in totally unpredictable directions, and there are sonorities both beautiful and strange.   There are far fewer solo vocal parts than normal; the chorus has a huge role, and there are important dramatic moments where there is no singing at all, and the orchestra conveys the entire narrative.

It was a great privilege to hear this performed live by Met Orchestra in such an elaborate production.

A few pictures:

The above background appears as a reference to Italy, i.e. the Pantheon...

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!