Lucca

We took a day trip to the town of Lucca.   While Lucca doesn't have the same overload of artistic treasures as Florence, it is a town which has its relatively intact medieval walls and something resembling its original streetscapes.  We enjoyed wandering around the town, and there were three wonderful old churches, all dating back to the 13th century.  One of the churches was even partially constructed with stones from a Roman amphitheater (Lucca was a Roman town, as well, and still features the original Roman street layout.)
Here is one church, with a peculiarly asymmetric facade:

Inside, a very decorative ceiling

And a tomb which spoke to me:

Another church:

And one with a mosaic facade:

We also wandered into the garden of a palazzo, where I got entranced by some bamboo.

Finally, on our return, I was able to admire the beautiful 1930's architecture of the train station, one of the few (only?) modern things in Florence.

Florence Part 3

We visited the Brancacci Chapel and the Uffizi museum.   The Brancacci Chapel, about 100 meters from our apartment, features frescoes done by Masaccio and others in the early 15th century.  It is truly amazing to see these frescoes in the place where the have been for the last 600 years or so!   The most famous part of the frescoes is the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

And a general view of the chapel:

We also went to the Uffizi Gallery.   While we saw some wonderful paintings there, especially the medieval ones, the experience in general was a nightmare.  Hordes of tour groups filled some of the rooms, completely blocking access to some paintings.   The Botticelli room was totally filled with selfie-stick wielding mobs; we didn't even venture in.    Given that more and more people in the world want to see these very famous images, you have to ask how can a museum deal with this trend.  (Call it the Mona Lisa syndrome.)  I have no good answers, but I do find it a very strange phenomenon.   The Uffizi is in the process of renovation and reorganization, so perhaps some of these problems can be alleviated.  And I suppose if you time your visit well, you can avoid some of the crowds.  

There was this angelic keyboard player:

And  I really love the color of the robes:

In general, I found the most satisfying experiences in Florence were in churches, where you see both the architecture and the paintings and frescoes as they were conceived.

Speaking of which, we visited the Duomo and the Baptistry, two of the other famous churches in Florence.  I love the gothic colored stones of the exterior, so different from the Northern Gothic.

and Giotto's campanile:

The interior is less decorated:

The Baptistry, next door, has an amazing ceiling of mosaics:

With some Bosch-like details:

I start to understand what the Stendhal Syndrome is all about...

From Wikipedia:

When he visited the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Galileo Galilei are buried, he saw Giotto's frescoes for the first time and was overcome with emotion. He wrote:

I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.^[2]

Although psychiatrists have long debated whether it really exists, its effects on some sufferers are serious enough for them to require treatment in hospital and even antidepressants.^[3] The staff at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to dealing with tourists suffering from dizzy spells and disorientation after admiring the statue of David, the masterpieces of the Uffizi Gallery and other treasures of the Tuscan city.^[4]

Even though there are many descriptions of people becoming dizzy and fainting while taking in Florentine art, especially at the aforementioned Uffizi in Florence, dating from the early 19th century on, the syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence. There is no scientific evidence to define the Stendhal syndrome as a specific psychiatric disorder; on the other hand there is evidence that the same cerebral areas involved in emotional reactions are activated during the exposure to artworks.^[5]

Florence, Food

But enough about art, you really just want to know about the food.  Well, actually, it's not that easy to eat really well in Florence, because of the high percentage of foreigners.   Example:  I saw a sign outside a restaurant:  "Slow Food - Hamburgers - Cheeseburgers - Hot Dogs".  Talk about covering all your bases.   But still, it is the beginning of mushroom season in Florence, and I had the most delicious grilled Porcini mushrooms I have ever had.  And lots of Chianti.   When I was younger, Italian wine was Chianti, and it came in those straw wrapped bottles, which you turned into candle holders, and the wax would drip down on them.   It was the height of an imagined "Greenwich Village" (or hippie?) type of coolness.  Since that period, I have assiduously avoided any wine that came in straw bottles, and Chianti has suffered the consequences.   Except now, in Florence, I have discovered I really like it.

I also had a delicious salad with thinly slice raw artichokes, parmesan cheese, and a bit of summer truffles...    

Florence Part 2

Next the Medici chapels is the San Lorenzo church.  Interestingly, they never got around to doing the facade, so the front looks like this:

Inside, it is more of the modest and severe Renaissance architecture (except for the painted dome):

But the altar doesn't stint on the decorative stones:

There are also a number of auxiliary chapels, with beautiful designs:

We also visited the Church of Santa Maria Novella.   This church has a more Italian Gothic style, with ornamentation inside and out:

Light from stained glass windows:

A side chapel with frescoes:

Part of the frescoes:

The ceiling of another part:

Frescoes on a part of the church off the cloisters:

There is something very moving about seeing all this art in the context for which it was actually created; it's very different than seeing art in a museum on gallery walls.

Florence Part 1

We are in Florence; the last time we were here was some thirty years ago.  Florence is, of course, a tourist mecca, and because so much of its treasures are in the compact center, it becomes more of an international zone than true Italian city.  We are renting an apartment outside the immediate center, access the river in the Oltrarno district, where some of the character of the city is more in evidence.   The city itself is not charming; indeed much of the heavy dark stone architecture and narrow streets can be oppressive at times.  But we are here for the art, and there is nothing really like it for the incredible concentration of churches and museums of the Renaissance period and earlier.  Yesterday we saw the Medici Chapel, the San Lorenzo church, and the Santa Maria Novella church among our wanderings.  The Medici chapel is in two highly contrasting rooms.  The large chapel is decorated to the hilt with every possible rare marble and stone; conspicuous consumption at its finest.  The colors and patterns of the stones are a visual feast.   The second chapel, by contrast is the austere and small one in grey and white, designed by Michelangelo and featuring several of his most enticing sculptures; a welcome antidote to the visual excesses of the first.  (All of this art was, of course,  made possible through extraordinary wealth of the Medicis, who were part of the invention of modern banking.  Hedge fund types, if you will.)

In color:

And in monochrome, the Michelangelo version.

The Mingus Big Band

One of the wonderful things about being in New York is the opportunity to hear the Mingus Big Band perform every Monday night at the Jazz Standard.   Mingus is truly one of the great American composers, and the Mingus Big Band is dedicated to preserving and performing his work.  I am reminded of the way in which the New York City Ballet keeps the work of Balanchine alive.   We have heard the Mingus Big Band a number of times, and every time I go I hear something I haven't heard before which astonishes me.  The ensemble this most recent time included 5 saxophones, 3 trombones and 3 trumpets, plus piano, bass and drums.   They did one Mingus tune called "Bird Calls"  (bird as in Charlie Parker) that featured the 5 saxes, ending in a wild and crazy fashion with all saxes soloing at once.   (One of the things I love about some of Mingus's compositions is the way things are constantly drifting in and out of chaos.) Another tune we heard, "GG Train", was about the GG train (now the G train) which as New Yorkers know, is the only subway line that doesn't go through Manhattan, and is a neglected and poorly functioning part of the system.  The tune is constantly shifting tempo; abrupt slowdowns mimic the subway train's halting progress.   And we heard the opening segments from the album "Let My Children Hear Music", one of my favorites (the original arranger, Sy Johnson, was in the audience), and a number from the epic composition "Epitaph".   Both of these are Mingus at his most "classical" and composed.  What a treat!

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:

Sultans of Deccan India

I saw a wonderful exhibit at the Metropolitan entitled "The Sultans of Deccan India".   It was about the art created in the Muslim ruled Deccan region of India between 1500 and 1700.   It was a prosperous region with a highly developed artistic culture.   The main area of interest for me was the miniature paintings, whose style derived from the Persian artists.  In particular I loved the marbling effects used in some of the paintings, and the very stylized renditions of hunting scenes and other outdoor activities.   The marbled sky in this one was amazing:

Other examples of marbling that intrigued me:

Another exuberantly decorated painting:

It was also interesting to reflect on the art of an entirely different Muslim culture at the other end of the Muslim world from the art we saw in Andalusia.   Very different indeed!  

One other intriguing object was a single cotton scroll, about 9 feet long, which contained the entire text of the Koran, written in the tiniest script imaginable.

The whole thing:

detail:

Even more detail:

After viewing the show, I sat down and took a break with a cup of coffee and browsed through the catalogue.   As always, the printed reproductions, no matter how good they look one the page, cannot compare with the vividness of the originals.

And then I went to indulge my self in one of the great pleasures of being at the Met, which is to go look at European art after saturating yourself in art from a completely different culture. Things you take for granted are somehow questioned, and everything looks and feels differently.  

Stravinsky Festival

I recently heard a wonderful mini-festival played by the New York Philharmonic, focusing on works by Stravinsky.   I heard his Violin Concerto, Symphony in Three Movements, Agon, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, and Apollo, among others, and the works were complemented by performances of four orchestral works by Webern, along with works by Bach, Ravel, and others.   The festival was timed to coincide with the Met's performance of "The Rake's Progress", Stravinsky's only opera.

Well, actually, that's not really true, though I wish it were. The New York Philharmonic did no such thing.   Besides the Met's performance, all of the other works were performed by the orchestra of the New York City Ballet, as part of their series "Balanchine Black and White".   I sometimes think that if it weren't for George Balanchine, we wouldn't hear any Stravinsky besides the big three early ballets.   (I exaggerate, of course.)   For a composer who has been at times labelled "the greatest 20th century composer" (forget whatever that means), this is an appalling circumstance.  What I think it comes down to is that the audience (and the concert programmers who need them) love the early Dionysian Stravinsky, and have little interest in the decidedly more Apollonian Stravinsky of the 1920's and onwards.   This holds true as much for the 1920's neoclassical works such as the "Concerto for Piano"  as well as the later, more austere serial works of the 1950's and 1960's.  Nobody seems to want to hear or play them, which is very unfortunate.  All they want is more Petrushkas.

What is also wonderful about the New York City Ballet is the respect shown for the music.  A recent performance of Balanchine's delightful "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" began with an introduction to the music.   The orchestra played through a number of excerpts from the piece, with no dancers present, and the conductor discussed the work in intelligent and accessible ways.   The audience seemed to love it (and so did I).  And the subsequent performance of the ballet was certainly enriched by our heightened sensitivity to the music.  (To say nothing of the importance of the music being played live!)
It still amazes me how many reviewers of dance can write a long review of a dance performance and sometimes not even mention the music, as if the piece was danced in silence.  (Though most of the professional critics in the New York Times are quite conscientious about this.)   Of course I am obviously prejudiced towards dance in which the music plays a significant role; but I fear these days that choreographers and dancers are less knowledgable about all kinds of music, and lack a good understanding of classical music especially.  

Schoenberg Septet

I heard a wonderful afternoon concert at the Graduate Center of CUNY.  The main reason I went was to hear the Schoenberg Suite Op. 29 for piano, three strings, and 3 clarinets (E-flat, B-flat, and bass).   This is an absolutely fascinating work, one of my favorites by Schoenberg, and virtually never performed.   It moves at a mercurial pace, with an incredible density of ideas and textures, and features the very quirky, disjunct "dance" rhythms from Schoenberg's middle "neoclassical"  period.  Schoenberg makes a lot out of contrasting the group of three strings with the group of three clarinets; the stage was set up with the two groups facing each other (and the piano behind them). The performers were a nice mix of distinguished new music veterans (Ursula Oppens, Fred Sherry, and Charles Nedich) and some young new music virtuosos.  I think it would probably take a hundred rehearsals to properly balance every detail and nuance in this very dense score, but the players played with convincing musicality and commitment, and a lot of it came through.
Fred Sherry's introductory talks were great fun; he started off by simply saying "Arnold Schoenberg" in such a way as to introduce a spontaneous round of applause from the audience; that's not the usual audience reaction to his name, to say the least.
The concert began with a quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet by Hindemith, dating from 1938.   I usually find Hindemith from that period to be somewhat generic and bland, but this piece has some interesting moments, and my ears were more attuned to Hindemith, having heard his "Four Temperaments" from the same period two nights before.
It's not every afternoon that you get to hear Schoenberg's Septet!   Many thanks to my friend Richard who alerted me to the concert.   It's worth noting that it becomes increasingly more difficult to find out what's going on in the classical musical world in New York.   Time Out magazine used to list almost everything; then, a little while back, they trimmed the list to selected events.   As of this week, the classical music listings are gone, except for a few selected highlights.   Many other possible sources in print  are highly selective, like the NY Times and the New Yorker.  No one wants to waste precious print space on being inclusive, and no one on line that I can find seems to be picking up the slack in a reliable way, though the website "New York Classical Review" does a pretty good job.

It makes me nostalgic for the good old days when I would receive my monthly New York New Music calendar, with all the events conveniently listed on one big page.