Red Hook

Continuing in my efforts to walk through most of New York, I went to the neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn.  Red Hook has a more complex streetscape  than many New York neighborhoods.   Surrounded by water on three sides, it was originally a port area (and still is, in part), and what residential community that was there was there for the people who worked in the port and the industry around the water.  It then became home to the Red Hook projects, one of the city's largest public housing projects, which eventually became a high crime area.   And now it has become home to both new artisanal industries like a winery, home to artists and other urban frontier types, and, of course, eventual gentrification.  It is far from any subway, though, which helps keep its character a little more distinct from other areas of the city.  So now you have scrapyards, polluted sites, wineries, artisanal gelato, empty lots with junk, an IKEA store, art galleries, abandoned buildings, etc.   It's all there.  Red Hook also took a big hit from Hurricane Sandy; the flood level was about six feet above the streets.  It all makes for fascinating walking.   Here are some things I saw:

I loved these bundles of scrunched up scrap metal:

 A typical view of a vacant lot with random debris:

Some of the industrial areas are painted bright colors, though:

This is an amazing enormous abandoned building, built as a grain terminal for barges coming down the Hudson River from the Erie Canal.   It was quickly made obsolete by the railroads, and has been empty ever since.  It's made of very solid concrete.

In front of this building are several ball-playing fields, except that they are now closed on account of too much pollution in the ground.

Detail of above:

Storage for those wire scaffoldings they use in concrete:

The main street of Red Hook is a curious combination of high-end bicycle shops, hip restaurants, and assorted abandoned lots like these.   Though they will clearly be gone in a few years.

And some odd store windows:

And some colorful piles of assorted stuff along the same street:

Eventually you get to some very active modern port facilities for container ships, etc.

But there are still the odd buildings overlooking the container port.   This one was isolated on a corner, and had views of the port.   Me too!

Don't know what this was about:

Or this:   (If I removed the green barrel, it would make an excellent red, yellow, blue picture.

And finally, home for the ice cream trucks:

There is a lot more that I didn't see, so I will be back for more.

More Orchestras: Philadelphia and New York

Well, we couldn't resist going back to Carnegie Hall for another concert because Yannick and his Phabulous Phillies were in town to play Bartok's opera "Bluebeard" in a concert version.  It was a remarkable performance; I liked it far better than the staged performance we heard last year at the Met.   In fact, I think "Bluebeard" is one of the operas where the orchestral part is so vivid and dramatic that any staging and scenery is superfluous.  I can't imagine a better orchestral performance; the moment of the opening of the fifth door, when the orchestra on stage along with the three trumpets and three trombones in the balcony and the organ play with a fearsome fortissimo was awesome in the real sense.  Throughout the piece, the orchestra created extraordinary sounds.   The two singers, (including Vancouver's John Relyea) were excellent to my ears, though with the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, the singers project more clearly to the orchestral seats, and less so up to the balcony where we were.  (The same is in general true of the strings.)  I was OK with that, Vera not so much.


The concert began with excerpts from Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".   I am not a fan of Tchaikovsky, and even less so of "Swan Lake".  (Not that I have ever seen the ballet or heard the music in concert before.)   But I seem to know all the tunes.   What the performance brought back to me was memories of watching late night movies on TV many, many years ago, when one of the staples of advertising was a company that offered LP's of something like "The World's Greatest Romantic Melodies".   And you would inevitably hear snippets of Tchaikovsky, because he wrote a lot of them.   And hearing Swan Lake performed made me realize what so many of contemporary classical music audiences want to hear is their favorite tunes, untrammeled by any musical complications.  Tchaikovsky does do some musically interesting things at times, but I don't really see the point of doing this work in a concert performance.  Let the ballet people have it.  The orchestra's performance was spirited and lively without any particular precision or detail.


Two nights later, it was Geffen Hall (no climbing to the balcony!) and American music's turn when we went to hear an all John Adams concert in honor of his 70th birthday, with Alan Gilbert and the NY Philharmonic.  There were two pieces on the program, "Harmonielehre" and "Absolute Jest".   Adams, who was there, said that both pieces were "atypical" for him.   "Absolute Jest" was absolutely confounding to my ears.  Which is a good thing, I think.   It is written for string quartet and large orchestra, and based on some fragments from Beethoven's string quartets.   Adams actually had the quartet play the Beethoven originals in his introduction.   The piece uses more than just these fragments, though; there are many other references to other Beethoven works.   The reason I say that the work is confounding is that it moves between Beethoven's musical language and Adam's musical language, sometimes doing both at the same time.  It's not a collage or pastiche.  Nothing is really "in quotes".   It is, to my ears, a sincere attempt to write in the style of both Beethoven and Adams at the same time.   So you really don't know what to make of what you are hearing.   It's kind of like hearing hearing someone speak in two different languages at the same time.  My sense is that once you get used to it, the piece would probably make a lot of sense.  Adams has said that he was very interested in counterpoint when he was writing this piece, and that he worked extremely hard on it. There was initially a lot of unfavorable critical, but it seems to be better received now.   I would happily hear it again.
Harmonielehre is a different story.  It was written in the 1980's and was Adam's big breakthrough in freeing himself from the influence of Schoenberg and the postwar avant-garde.  It's also kind of a mashup, in this case between minimalism and heavy-duty late 19th century romanticism.  A kind of exorcism, if you will.    I liked parts of the piece, but the middle movement is very slow, with long and beautifully shaped melodic lines, some interesting harmonic touches, but not much else.   I like the fast parts, though.   The audience was enthusiastic, and the performance was excellent.

I will certainly miss Alan Gilbert when he leaves the NY Philharmonic at the end of this season.  He has done some wonderful and adventurous things while being director, though I have a sense that the Philharmonic is struggling with audiences, with the eternal dilemma of trying to please their aging subscribers who want their Tchaikovsky and their soloist superstars while also at the same time trying to attract new audiences for new music.   It's a very difficult thing to pull off, and I am not sure that Gilbert had the ability to make it happen.

Concerts

After a bit of a fallow stretch, suddenly there were lots of concerts.    We began by hearing the Juilliard Jazz Big Band in a concert of the music of Oliver Nelson.  Our friend Michael from Vancouver was there, with his stepmother Shelley.   Nelson is most known for his 1961 album "Blues and the Abstract Truth" featuring people like Bill Evans and Eric Dolphy.   He saw himself primarily as a composer (he studied with Elliot Carter), and with opportunities for an African-American composer being what they were in the mid-century, he spent most of his career doing arranging, film scores and the like.   The Juilliard band played some of his compositions and arrangements; they were wonderful to hear.  There is nothing like hearing a big band live to hear the subtle voicing and timbres of a big band.  It was an enjoyable concert, and I was very impressed with with Nelson's music.

Two nights later, it was back to Juilliard, this tim to hear the orchestra in a concert featuring Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Mahler's 4th symphony.    The Schoenberg is virtually never performed by orchestras, and I give great credit to the people at Juilliard for performing it.    (The Mahler 4th, on the other hand, was being performed by two other orchestras at Lincoln Center in the following few days.)   The Schoenberg was amazing, brilliant and absolutely absorbing; I was totally immersed.   Schoenberg's reputation as a difficult composer to listen to is not entirely undeserved; his music demands very close attention, but when you do that it is extremely expressive.   While many people obsess about "twelve-tone music" being difficult, I think Schoenberg's rhythmic ideas are perhaps even more disconcerting for the average listener.   Schoenberg doesn't do regular patterns or pulses; there are many recognizable little rhythmic motives, but they are constantly shifting, like a kaleidoscope, and changing and evolving very quickly.
The performance by the orchestra and the conductor, Edward Gardner, was excellent.  But the highest praise had to be reserved for the Juilliard student Brian Wong who was the soloist.   He really was extraordinary, playing with impeccable technique and intense commitment.  It is a fearsomely difficult part, and he pulled it off.   If there is any justice in the world, he should have an amazing career in the future.

The Mahler 4 was a pleasure to hear.   (Though I could have gone home happy after the Schoenberg.)  One of the delights of hearing the Juilliard Orchestra is hearing them in Alice Tully Hall, a much smaller hall than New York's normal symphonic halls.  The sound is both clear and very rich and full, and all the wonderful details of Mahler's inventive permutations of his little themes were clearly heard.

The next day, I went to a rehearsal of the Vienna Philharmonic, mostly to hear Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin".  (The concert was sold out, except for a few tickets that required a mortgage to buy.)   I was not disappointed, though in the rehearsal, the conductor, Franz Welser-Most, was mostly fixing up problematic spots.  It's an interesting way to get some perspective on a piece, even though you don't get to hear the whole thing.

The next day, it was back to Carnegie Hall for an afternoon concert of Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht"  and Schubert's 9th symphony.    Vienna does Vienna.   The Schoenberg  is an early work, a hyper-romantic tone poem, originally written for string sextet, and here performed in Schoenberg's arrangement for string orchestra.   It has some astonishing passages of intense expression and beauty, but to be honest, I don't really go for that kind of music.  It has some interest as an early example of Schoenberg's musical thinking.   The Schubert 9th is a an epic length symphony, which Schmann called the first romantic symphony.  It's a kind of confounding piece which doesn't really fit in with any of our conceived notions about Schubert's music.   It has wonderful tunes, but, on the other hand, it can be extremely repetitious rhythmically, to the point where it sounds like some proto-minimalist piece.  The rhythms are extremely square, the beats overly insistent and regular.   It is however, extremely enjoyable.   The Vienna Philharmonic did a respectable job, but I didn't walk away from the concert thinking that they were a truly great orchestra.   Or maybe it was the musical "bonbon" that they played as an encore.   Perhaps they having been playing more Strauss waltzes than is good for their health.

Two days later, Vienna was gone, and it was back to Carnegie Hall for an all Russian concert by the Boston Symphony, conducted by Andris Nelsons.   The concert began with a new work by Sofia Gubaidulina, a triple concerto for violin, cello, and bayan (A Russian kind of accordion).  I have always liked Gubaidulina's music, and the new work was very interesting and exciting to hear.   She uses quite simple melodic ideas, but they are combined and juxtaposed in ways that are fascinating.   The concerto begins with a low sustained cluster on the bayan, which is soon joined by the tubas.   In fact the tubas play a big role in the piece, and owing to the acoustics of the Carnegie Hall balcony it felt like a concerto for tuba, too.  Gubaidulina shepherds her orchestral resources masterfully; I would happily hear the piece again soon, and hope to understand it better.
The same cannot be said for the other piece on the program, Shostakovich's 7th Symphony.  Readers of this blog will know of my relative ignorance of Shostakovich's music.   In this case, I really didn't like the piece at all; by the end of its endless eighty minutes, I had really had enough.   The piece is known and culturally defined by its history, having been written to commemorate the siege of Leningrad in World War 2.  The first movement features the famous "invasion theme", a march repeated twelve times over a very Bolero-like drum obstinato.   A "problem" emerges, though, when it was recently discovered that Shostakovich wrote the first movement before the Germans had even invaded Russia.   The problem here is what happens when a piece of music becomes very closely associated with the extra-musical circumstances surrounding its origins or purpose.  Thus to criticize the musical qualities is considered to besides the point, given the story of its creation and performance.  (Or, to put it bluntly, if you don't like it, you are against the heroism of the Russian people and implicitly for the Nazis.)   For me, there are various stunning moments in the piece, but there are also long, long tedious and repetitious passages where virtually nothing happens musically.  An editor would have been very useful!  There is a very funny and nasty review written by Virgil Thomson at the time (and often quoted), where, among other things, he says it has been written for eight year olds.   (There is also a very interesting article by Christopher Gibbs about the reception of the work in the US.)   In any case, the performance was certainly excellent, and I know now what the symphony is about.

Two nights later, it was back to Carnegie Hall for a second Boston Symphony concert.   (I don't think I need to ask anyone how to get to Carnegie Hall anymore; I practice going every other day.)   Vera skipped this one, opting instead for a show with Sanda Weigl.
The point of going for me was to hear a new work by George Benjamin, one of my favorite living composers.   It was wonderful.  It is written for countertenor, a small female choir, and a relatively small orchestra.    Benjamin uses 11th century Hebrew poetry from Andalusia, as well as some Garcia Lorca fragments.  Benjamin has such an ear for subtle orchestral textures and gradually shifting harmonies.  His music is both dramatic and very individual.   I think he must work very hard.
The rest of the program was French, Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" and the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Berlioz.    The Ravel reminded me of some contemporary French spectral music at times, with some busy and layered ostinati in different colors.   I haven't heard the Symphonie Fantastique since I taught it in a music appreciation class many, many years ago.   It was a knockout performance, and I came away with a renewed appreciation for the sheer imaginativeness of Berlioz's musical ideas.   When you hear it live, you realize how audacious Berlioz was.  Nothing is routine, and very little sounds like what came before him (or after him).  On the other hand, it does sound like music written by a desperately romantic drug imbibing young man.
The Boston Symphony was excellent in all these performances, and, despite the Shostakovich 7th, I though the programming was well conceived.  Andris Nelsons is at times annoying to watch, though; he has a habit of leaning with his left on on the podium bar behind him while conducting with his right hand.   Unless there is some physical disability I don't know about, I don't see why he can't stand upright on his own two feet.   He also does some rather exaggerated crouches, as well.   So I don't look at him...

The Museum of Non-Objective Art

There was a show at the Guggenheim Museum entitled "Visionaries".   The visionaries were the founders of the museum, Solomon Guggenheim, his artistic adviser Hilla Rebay, and other art world people who made major contributions to the collection.  The show was taken entirely from the Guggenheim's own collection.   Rebay and Guggenheim were passionate about "non-objective" art, that is, abstract art that had a spiritual dimension.  They felt that art could only reach a higher dimension of meaning by abandoning the notion of representation of the objective work, i.e things and people.   Kandinsky was the ideal exponent of this art.  And they gradually amassed a huge collection, which ultimately became the Guggenheim Museum, to be housed in the building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.   The building was designed as a "temple" for this art, with the notion of ascending the ramp evoking the notion of a spiritual ascension.
Those who have been going to the Guggenheim over the years will have noticed that the Guggenheim has entirely abandoned this notion of art, unless you think shows like the Armani one and the motorcycle one are leading you to a high spiritual plane.   But they still have most of the collection.  (Though they have sold some of it over the years to buy other stuff.)   So what you saw in the show was a fabulous collection of modern art, mostly exemplifying the classical paradigm as constructed by art historians of the twentieth century.   Cezanne to Kandinsky to Pollock, it is all there, some familiar, some not.  It was a pleasure to see, if not exactly earth-shaking.    For me, the most interesting part was seeing a few works by some relatively unknown artists, mostly Americans who were in the circles of Rebay and Guggenheim.   And it's always fascinating to see who became well known and who stayed obscure.   I was fascinated by the works of one "Penrod Centurion", who was listed as born around 1895, but with no death date.   Googling at home, it turns out he was a very mysterious figure who seems to have disappeared.   Penrod Centurion was a pseudonym  (Penny Cent!), and he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
Here are a few examples from the show:

Penrod Centurion:

An Albert Gleizes painting of the Brooklyn Bridge:

An outstanding Kandinsky, one of many:

Robert Delaunay in widescreen:

This small collage by Georges Valmier was made in 1920 and entitled "Fugue"

There were a number of works by Hilla Rebay, including this collage:

And this by Victor Brauner.   This was part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which was not so focused on non-objective art, and included a number of surrealists.

A stunning Pollock, owned by Peggy:

There was another show at a gallery in Chelsea of early works from the Museum of Objective Art.   There were more interesting examples that could have easily been in the Guggenheim show.

Penrod Centurion:

Irene Rice Pereira, a very interesting painter.  The painting has some very complex and interesting surface textures.

While at the Guggenheim I did get to experience a very famous piece of non-objective art, a worked entitled "America" by Maurizio Cattelan.   This is in fact a fully functional solid gold toilet, installed in one of the restrooms at the Guggenheim.   It is guarded by an attendant, and no chisels (or anything else) are allowed inside.  But you do get to use it as you would a normal toilet.  In the age of Drumpf, it seems more appropriate then ever.  Peeing on solid gold.     I took a picture. It looked spectacular as you flushed it.   Vera asked me why didn't I take a selfie while on the toilet.  I didn't.   I have my limits.

I went to some other galleries recently.   One show I saw was of recent work of Vija Celmins, an artist in her mid-eighties, originally from Latvia.   I really liked her work; it reminded me a bit of Agnes Martin in its subtlety.   A lot of the work in the show was what might be called starry sky paintings, which, at first glance, look like what you might produce if you tried to paint a night sky filled with stars.   But, like Martin's paintings, things start to happen after you look for a while.  Subtle colors begin to emerge, and what might look at first glance like stars in the random patterns of outer space start to become something else.   You can take pictures of these paintings, but they don't do justice at all to the experience.    This was about five feet square:

An inverted sky:

Another set of small sized paintings in the show was a series of variations on painting from the same photograph of the sea.   Again the subtlety of what Celmins is doing doesn't transfer in photographs.   They were truly fascinating.

On the opposite end of the subtlety spectrum, there was a show of the work of Katharina Grosse at the Gagosian Gallery.  Grosse works on extremely large canvases, about twelve feet tall in this first example, and works with a wide spectrum of colors.   She also uses spray painting as well.  (She has been known to spray paint entire buildings.)  With my weakness for color, I throughly enjoyed these paintings.  She does create an interesting sense of depth in her images, and seeing these large colorful canvases in the large and spacious white galleries at the Gagosian is striking.

But if you really want to understand the paintings, read this from the Gagosian website:

Grosse approaches painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity. With a spray gun, she disconnects the artistic act from the hand, stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark. The resulting pictures are distinct, but never predetermined. Spatial tensions rise through shifts in chromatic temperature. Challenging boundaries, she reintroduces her body as an active agent within a vision of contemporary existence that is at once physically isolated and densely networked.

Does she hold the spray gun in her hand?   How is it disconnected?

A detail from the above painting, which is about 20 feet long.

Finally, there was a interesting show by Jack Whitten.   His current work involves layering acrylic paint into very thick slabs, and then chopping them up and applying them to canvas.   Before I read about the paintings, I thought the thick slabs were some kind of ceramic material.    Viewing the paintings is a dynamic process; they look very differently from a distance than from close up.

From a distance...

Then a close up of the same painting:

I passed on the Armory Show and all the other art fairs happening in the first week of March.   Too many people!

Maspeth

Maspeth is in Queens and is almost entirely industrial; it might be, from one perspective, one of the most unpleasant areas to walk around in the entire city.   It is home to recycling facilities, scrap metal joints, garbage dumps, warehouses, sewage processing facilities, concrete factories, etc.   You can also find the sources of many things you see in the city, like places where the various food carts go home to sleep at night, places where they store the scaffolding you see everywhere on the streets, and things like that.   The traffic is mostly heavy trucks, and you rarely see any pedestrians.   And no restaurants, cafes, etc.  But I get a perverse sort pleasure walking around with my camera and finding interesting things to see.   I like these kinds of no man's lands, a few subway stops away from Manhattan.   Here are a few things that caught my eye:

At a certain point, there was an incredible amount of heavy smoke coming out of this facility.  My eyes were burning.  I have no idea what it was, but it certainly didn't seem legal.  I didn't want to get closer.

Decaying industrial buildings:

This was sitting on the street:

 This was a recycling facility for colored wires and tubes of some kind:

I walked under the Kosciuszko Bridge, which is falling apart and being replaced.   In fact, it is scheduled to be blown up this summer, as soon as the new bridge (seen behind it) is ready.

There are many warehouses that exist to supply merchandise to all the stores of New York. There was something appealing the facade of this one.

A cleaning brush:

Some of the paper waste of New York seems to end up here:

This place had something to do with gravel I guess, but it looked abandoned to me.

Color combinations:

A typical streetscape, flooded for some reason.

This place was active, it appeared to be crushing rocks or gravel.

A lot of old pieces of cars were stored here:

Recycling wires and metal:

A very rare tree against a nicely colored brick wall.

At a certain point my path was blocked by a very long train at a street level crossing.   I think these cars were filled with garbage.

Some of the warehouses seem to be filled to the brim with mysterious things

This was a steel works:

A furniture warehouse: