The Sistine Chapel!

No, we are not in Rome, but back in New York for a bit.

The Oculus, New York's multi-billion dollar station/shopping mall, was featuring a show of large size reproductions of the paintings from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.   I was curious to see what these reproductions would look like in the context of Calatrava's large white space.   When I arrived, I discovered that you had to pay $20 to look at them.   So the proprietors of the multi-billion dollar mall want you to pay?  Forget it.   So I wandered around the perimeter, and became fascinated by watching the viewers who paid.   So I ended up with a lot of photographs.   

The Oculus has become a major tourist attraction, though I don't know if all those tourists will be buying things at all the stores in the mall.  There are lots of people milling around, many, of course, gazing at their cell phones.   I was intrigued by both the juxtaposition of Michelangelo's figures with their viewers, and the juxtapositions that occurred in the way these images were arranged in the hall.  

Oh, and are we now getting trigger warnings for "subject matter of a religious nature" along with nudity?   

I suppose readers of this blog should be warned, as well, though perhaps I could add a warning to watch out for people clutching cell phones.

The Amazing Helen Sung

We went with our friends Michael and Pam to hear the Helen Sung Quartet play at Frankie's Jazz Club in Vancouver.  Sung, who we have heard many times with the Mingus Big Band, is an extraordinary pianist, and we were excited to hear her for the first time with her own quartet.  It was simply one of the best jazz performances I have heard in years.  Not only is Sung an amazing pianist, but her fellow ensemble members were also excellent, and the resulting music was very stimulating.   I sometimes get tired of the standard jazz small group standard form; the ensemble plays the tune, then various ensemble members play solos while the rest of the ensemble dutifully plays the changes, and then we get back to the tune again.   Sung and her quartet frequently upended this form at times, especially when they did a version of "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing), which turned into an almost Webernesque deconstruction of the tune, which we in fact never heard in its entirety.   Her quartet included the great Boris Kosolov on bass, who usually plays with the Mingus Big Band, and drummer Terreon Gully and John Ellis on saxophones.   Gully in particular was infinitely creative in his drumming, responding to what Sung was doing on the piano, and always shifting the accents in surprising ways.   They did quite a bit of Thelonious Monk, including one tune where they completely reconfigured the meter.   Sung herself is an extremely virtuosic soloist, bringing what would seem to be her classical training and technique into her solos without it sounding incongruous.   Her rhythmic punctuations during the others solos were consistently lively and inventive.   Sung is also a composer, with a tendency (at least in the works performed at this show) towards the lyrical.
 
I should also mention that Frankie's Jazz Club in curated and run by Coastal Jazz and Blues, and that Corey Weeds gave wonderful introductions to the band, including very clear instructions as to why people should not talk (and offering to escort anyone who wished to talk to any of the numerous other bars in town.)   The result was a great listening environment.

Turner, Pape, and the Biennial

There was an excellent small show at the Frick of paintings of ports by Turner.  The Frick itself owns two very large ones, and the show complemented those with several other smaller ones, as well as some watercolors, prints, etc.   The most striking thing in the show, though, was an unfinished version of one of the very large port scenes.   It looked like a very blurred version; apparently Turner painted the big washes of color on the canvas first, and then gradually added the detail that we see in the finished paintings.  In this case, he never got around to it.

A finished port scene (these are all very large paintings):

 The unfinished port scene:

Other "port" scenes:

The curators tried to make a point about the meaning of the port scenes in current times, but I am happy to look at Turner any time.   Looking at the large scale paintings close up and seeing what he did with color is amazing.

There was a retrospective at the Met Breuer of the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, who began with fairly severe geometrical art in the 1950's and ended up following a number of ideas both in the realm of political and conceptual art, as well as investigating indigenous Brazilian culture.   She is not to be confused with another Lygia, Lygia Clark, who had her own retrospective at MOMA a while ago, and whose career followed a very similar trajectory.)   The early geometric work was a bit to severe for my taste; but her later, more liberated works were excellent.   Here are some:

A huge wall of red, yellow and blue:

 Detail:

Similar, in black and white:

There was an extraordinary installation in a room that featured very thin golden threads strung from ceiling to floor.   As you moved around, the only threads that were visible were those that were illuminated.   Hard to photograph!

Wall sculpture:

She was also interested in indigenous Brazilian art; there were numerous videos of her work in documenting her country's traditions.
There were also some small screen videos of performances of her two "concrete ballets".   You could watch and listen with headphones.   They consisted of abstract shapes moving around the stage, animated by the dancers within.   There was some interesting sounding early electronic music for one of them.  But the wall credits did not mention who did the music!
Could be a rant coming...
I did some research on the web, and found out who did the music for one of the ballets. but not who did the electronic music (or possibly it was added to the video reconstruction?)

Some info from Pape herself from the web:

The artist gave us an illuminating explanation about the Neo-Concrete Ballet: 
It was created in 1958, in the Special Presentation of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Rio de Janeiro. It was staged alongside Reynaldo Jardim, and produced by Gilberto Mota, who was a dancer. The work was structured around Reynaldo Jardim's poem Olho/Alvo, which consists of two words arranged in space into a choreography. For the word "eye" I created four cylinders, 2-meters tall and 70 cm in diameter each; for the word "white", four parallelograms painted with minium (lead tetroxide), all in wood and with rollers at their base, which gave the movements a sense of beauty and synchronicity. We used professional dances from the Municipal Theatre. And something interesting happened: our greatest difficulty was to convince them to do the show while hidden inside those objects, because our intent was to capture the motility of the body, its potential to dislocate through space, freed from the presence of the human figure; this is to say, to capture the movement that the body is capable of executing.  The music for the show was created by Gabriel Artusi, a heteronym of Reynaldo Jardim, and it was two tones, a kind of percussion on piano, all very rhythmic. 





I also took a look at the exhibit of Marsden Hartley's painting on the floor below.   The exhibit was about Hartley's return to his native state of Maine, and his subsequent desire to become a "Maine" painter.   I didn't find the paintings that inspiring; perhaps because of what I had seen upstairs, and perhaps because of my preference for his work from the period around WW I when he was headed in the direction of abstract art.




I went to see the Whitney Biennial, the first in its new location.   I usually emerge from the Biennials in a state of extreme disgruntlement; this year, there was certainly plenty to be annoyed by, but there was also quite a bit that I liked.  Including rooms full of paintings!   What is the world coming to?   While almost everything still tends to push the correct buttons, this year craft and technical skill seemingly were allowed.

But it's somehow still a strange phenomenon to me; sometimes I feel like I am at some sort of circus/variety show/funhouse kind of event; you look at something or a group of things and you are intrigued or annoyed or indifferent, and then you go on to another group of things, with another set of possible reactions.   Even when there is a room full of the artist's work, you don't really get a complete feel for what she or he is about, because you suddenly eye something else in the next room or area and are attracted or repelled by that.
But anyway, here are some things I enjoyed looking at.

Leftover furniture, covered in polyurethane of some kind, and painted:

A mishmash of all kinds of junk, encased in clear resin:

Furniture after my own heart:

The most spectacular work was a site specific installation entitled "The Meatgrinder's Iron Clothes" by Samara Golden

It was a huge construction of mirrors, furnished rooms both right side up and upside down that took over most of the western wall of the Whitney.  It was in fact vertigo inducing; leaning over the railing, you could not tell what was right side up and what was upside down, or what was a reflection or not.  The installation seemed to go infinitely up and down in space; I could not look down.  (Museum goers were in fact encouraged not to lean against the railing, as it was apparently not that sturdy!)  The rooms featured various upscale and downscale interiors, along with melanges of hospitals and prisons, etc.  Well, you know what it's about.

Painting!:

Stained glass covering one of the big windows (actually plastic)

Red Glass, outdoors:≥

And at the end, an installation of trees, another site-specific art work designed to help you recover (chill?) from what you've seen.   One of them was dead already.

I was surprised to see a work by the jazz world's current hero, Kamasi Washington, as one of the chosen works in the exhibition.   It's a 37 minute recording of a suite entitled "Harmony of Difference".  The sound was quite dim, coming out of very small speakers.   A very small part of the music was accompanied by a rudimentary video.  I was very happy to see a jazz work represented in the Biennial, but I don't really understand how it is, with all the music being created in America, this somehow is the only musical work chosen, and that is so poorly exhibited.

One Last Concert

I went to an afternoon concert on our last day in New York for a while.  (It was also the first warm day after a very cold March and beginning of April.)   It was performed by the Argento Ensemble (yet another New York new music group).  It was in the St. Peters Church at Citicorp Center, a beautiful modern church, but a terrible place for a concert, as there was some kind of machine making noises on and off during the concert.  The ostensible theme of the concert was "Conjugal Music", though the first piece was entitled "Sterbetourismus", referring to the phenomenon of people coming to Switzerland to die because of the liberal euthanasia laws there.   Conjugal?   Well, whatever.
The reason I went was that there were two recent pieces for ensemble by Georg Haas.   It was disconcerting, though, when the ensemble started to play the third piece on the program listed as a piece by Haas, what began was Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll".   At first I though Haas had gone all conceptual on us (I have always wondered why some conceptualist composer hasn't pulled a Sherrie Levine, and appropriated something like a Beethoven symphony as her or his own work. I guess the music world is less avant-garde than the visual arts world.)   But it turns out that the program order had been shuffled, and although the conductor had made some introductory remarks, he had neglected to tell the audience of the program change.  I wonder what the guy in front of me who was taking cell phone videos the entire time thought.
In any case, the two Haas works were finally played; both were written to celebrate his recent marriage.  (The nature of his relationship to his spouse was covered on the front page of the NY Times arts section, I won't go in to it here.)   The works were not as interesting as others I have heard of his; both were more concerned with melody than sonority, and I found both to be repetitious.  They were also almost entirely for strings; I like Haas often for his diverse instrumental colors, which were lacking here.  The second piece, a "wedding march" was one consistent acceleration of some rather basic almost Bartokian ideas.  But when I realized that that was what was happening, and that was all that was happening, I became impatient for something unexpected or contrasted.  It didn't happen.   I did like the first piece on the program, by Ryan Beppel, which employed two conductors and created a dense and ever-changing sound world.  Though I don't know what it had to do with death tourism.

More Merce!

We went to hear French dance company CNDC Angers in a program of all Cunningham.  We saw them last year doing a Cunningham "Event", a mixture of different Cunningham pieces.  This year, they did three distinct pieces.  The first, "Inlets 2", was set to a score by John Cage, which featured three people doing things with different size conch shells and water.   They performed with the original shells from Cage's performance, courtesy of the John Cage trust.

The piece was a "nature" inspired piece.  I was fascinated by the rhythms that emerge from dancers who move without reference to a musical score.  It's hard to explain how it feels; it's just that the rhythms of body movement are somehow fundamentally different from the rhythms of music, and I find it so compelling when the dancers are moving together to their own, unheard rhythms.

The highlight of the program was the next piece, "Places", created in 1966, and set to recorded score by Gordon Mumma for bandoneon and computer.  The piece was last performed in 1971 until its very recent reconstruction by CNDC Angers artistic director Robert Swinston.   It was very dramatic (for Cunningham) and I was mesmerized by the performance of the dancers.   Mumma's score was not dramatic, of course; it was a series of drawn out sonorities.   Which which worked perfectly for the piece.

The last piece was set to readings from John Cage's stories, with two live readers who sometimes overlapped with each other.  The choreography was in a lighter, humorous vein.   I initially found it somewhat disconcerting to be listening to a verbal narrative; I found it hard to focus on the movement when I was listening to a story.   But eventually I got to a place where it started to work, and once again Cunningham had expanded my perceptual abilities.  
The evening reinforced the notion that Cunningham is truly one of the greatest choreographers; and that I need to see much, much more of his work.  I can't praise the CNDC Angers enough for keeping this work alive; I wish more small dance companies over the world would do his work.   It does need to be stated, however, that Cunningham is not audience friendly in the way today's world thinks that art should be, especially in the realm of music.  Audiences are easily turned off by music that sounds really strange.



The choreographer Trisha Brown died recently.  In summing up her career, several people noted that in the beginning of her career she used no music.  Eventually she did start using music, and when she was asked why, she only half facetiously said, "I got tired of the coughing".  


One of the highlights of last fall was the performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's "Vortex Temporis" set to Grisey's  piece of the same name.  Recently  MOMA announced that an "installation" version of the piece, lasting some eight hours, would be performed in the atrium during museum hours.   Apparently Keersmaeker has created this version of the  piece and it has been performed before; the work has somehow been deconstructed and reconfigured to be performed in an open gallery space over an extended period of time.   I was curious to see and hear what this would be; but, on the other hand, I was pretty sure that I would dislike it, and that I would not be happy hearing Grisey performed in the noisy, cavernous space of MOMA's atrium.   So I didn't go.   I should have, I suppose.   But I was very amused to read of the review of the piece in the New York Times, when the reviewer mentioned the pleasure of hearing Grisey's avant-garde music echoing through the halls of MOMA.   For, as the reviewer put it, MOMA is really not "comfortable" with avant-garde music.   It's too modern for them.  They like Bjork better.

Idomeneo and Fidelio

The only Mozart operas I have ever heard have been the three DaPonte operas and the Magic Flute.   Since Vera wanted to go to hear Mozart's "Idomeneo", I decided to go.   "Idomeneo" is a opera seria; that is what Mozart was commissioned to write.  For those not familiar with the genre, it was a kind of opera that focused on serious dramatic subjects (usually the ancient Greeks), with a fairly rigid form, mostly a series of solo arias with virtuoso displays of singing.  Solo singing took preference over dramatic necessity.  Handel's operas are the most famous opera seria.
Not surprisingly, Mozart transformed opera seria into something Mozartian.   The opera was superb, featuring some of the best Mozart music I have ever heard.  There are people who sometimes claim that "Idomeno" is his best opera.   I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly has extraordinary moments.   One very interesting thing Mozart does is to write orchestral recitative, where the sung dialog is accompanied by very expressive short bits of orchestral music.  On the whole, though, the opera is not nearly as tight as the DaPonte operas; some of the arias go on for too long, and the libretto has its unwieldy moments, and the whole thing was over just barely before midnight.   The singers were all excellent in their very demanding roles, and the orchestra under James Levine was superb.   I had thought that Levine was near the end of his conducting career a year ago, but he seems to have regained physical control, and few people know more about conducting Mozart than he does.  There were some moments of imprecision, but that did not diminish the overall effectiveness of the performance.

A week later, we went to hear Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio", which is not often done.   Beethoven was not an opera composer and his opera was the result of a long and arduous struggle.   It's not really a successful opera in the conventional sense; it's really a curious hybrid of Beethoven's instrumental style of composing and the conventions of opera.   And you end up listening to it in that way, which is nevertheless very interesting.   The singers were mostly excellent, but for once I found the performance of the Met orchestra to be substandard.  There was very little in the way of dynamic nuance, and the orchestra seemed to be operating mostly in a fortissimo mode.  
The last scene of the opera is very special; a heroic ode to liberty and freedom with soloists, choir and orchestra.  And yes, it sounds very much like the last movement of the 9th symphony.   With the newly liberated prisoners and the villagers celebrating on stage, it was certainly music to cheer for.