Steve Smith
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Among the many things that New York City Opera has proved it can do rather well, comedy ranks high on the list. The company has a real knack for finding fresh, talented performers with genuine stage presence — star-level singers and aspirants alike — capable of projecting good humor to the back rows of the…
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Loads of online chatter has erupted since Miles Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month. While the honor itself strikes me as a painfully dubious bid for credibility on the part of the Hall monitors, the discussion it kicked up has by-and-large been lively and valuable. This is especially…
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While my manic nocturnal ramblings of late may have suggested otherwise, I’ve actually been battling rather fiercely with some kind of nasty bronchial bug over the past week-and-a-half or so. It knocked me out of commission today, but the good news is that when I finally saw my doctor this afternoon, she suggested that I’ve…
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Back at the Iridium tonight for the final set of Anthony Braxton's Manhattan residency with his 12(+1)tet, Composition No. 358 filled the room with the sounds of surprise. During the course of an extended run by just about any band, you might anticipate a sense of routine to creep in by the end. Not so…
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Following two straight nights of seriously cerebral contemplation, I was due for a bit of a nostalgic wallow. That’s not to downplay the place of John Wetton in my personal pantheon: As singer and bassist for the progressive-rock band King Crimson from late 1972 to 1974, Wetton was in part responsible for some of my…
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A funny thing happens when a bassist plays one of Braxton’s basic eighth-note Ghost Trance Music (GTM) patterns at a fastish clip and lets the notes ring out, rather than clipping them off in a dry staccato: The result is effectively the kind of walking bass line that’s animated jazz performances since time immemorial. The…
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Anthony Braxton settled into the Iridium tonight for the first evening of a four-night run, and even after a day of general malfunction at the office, I made a point of catching this ever-challenging artist’s second set. I’ve followed Braxton’s career and collected his recordings, sometimes fairly obsessively, for just about two decades now (and…
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Cate Blanchett as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, caught tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and here enshrined in the spirit of ACD’s recent tribute to Gillian Anderson’s Lady Dedlock. Playlist: Peter Maxwell Davies – Naxos Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 – Maggini Quartet (Naxos) Harrison Birtwistle – The Axe Manual*; Oockooing Bird; Sad Song; Berceuse…
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Say what you will about the Second and Third, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth; for me, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 is the composer’s most willfully peculiar public statement. Never mind the superstitious weight of matching Beethoven’s magickal terminus; this was supposed to be a triumphal celebration. The Good Guys won. Instead, Shostakovich turns in a lithe,…
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One of my most highly anticipated musical offerings of the calendar year got underway this afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall, as Valery Gergiev led the Kirov Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in the opening salvo of a complete Shostakovich symphony cycle. The series continues on Monday night with the same orchestra, resumes on April 9…
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It was only a matter of time before the nasty cold going around these past few weeks paid me a visit, and as it happened, this was the week. All things considered, I’m pleasantly surprised at how little it actually curtailed my plans: only one day of work missed, that being Wednesday. As a result,…
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Due to the shoulder injury sustained in an onstage fall last week, James Levine has officially withdrawn from his Carnegie Hall concert on Monday, March 6, as well as his first tour with the orchestra. Marek Janowski will step in for the Carnegie program, which includes Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No.…
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Despite my silence after last weekend’s burst, I’ve not been idle these past few days; far from it, in fact. The sheer intensity of the week’s workload precluded posting for a bit. Really, can you imagine interviewing Mark Adamo, the Emerson Quartet’s Philip Setzer and Celtic Frost’s Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain within…
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As I stood tonight in Fat Cat, a seedy West Village jazz club that might be described as a Dazed and Confused den of slack with postmillennial Village Vanguard aspirations, I wondered if, 13 years ago, I might have been one of those 20-somethings who sprawled on couches and lounge chairs, feeling vaguely contemptuous toward…
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At the end of Darkling — a new opera-cum-multimedia music-theater work previewed in full for the first time by American Opera Projects on Sunday afternoon — baritone Marcus DeLoach climbs to the rafters of a small, black-box in full Victorian kit, there to sing Lee Hoiby’s richly chromatic setting of the Thomas Hardy poem, "The…
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I’d been planning for some time now to add a blogroll devoted to my favorite pop-music writers; honestly, the only thing that held me up was that pesky matter of categorization. Obviously, it wouldn’t really help anyone if I lumped popblogs in with the current list of (mostly) classical blogs — too hard to know…
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The hardy Brooklyn Philharmonic, long an invaluable part of the New York City music scene, ushered in a new era on Saturday night with its inaugural concert under the direction of its recently appointed music director, the fresh-faced Michael Christie. Something of an antithesis to the New York Philharmonic — where tonight, former BP music…
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The New York Philharmonic gave John Harbison’s Milosz Songs a second airing tonight, following Thursday night’s world premiere. That event was well supported by The New York Times — both with a nicely turned review by Tony Tommasini and a strong Anne Midgette think-piece on Dawn Upshaw, the longtime Harbison collaborator for whom these songs…
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Lincoln’s Center’s "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov" festival — one of the altogether more admirable productions Lincoln Center has mounted in recent years — came to a rousing conclusion this evening with a second performance of the composer’s La Pasión según San Marcos. Premiered in 2000, the work is well traveled enough now that I…
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You might well expect to hear all manner of unsavory words employed to describe the performance of this or that singer in a Verdi opera, but when’s the last time you heard a profanity aimed at the composer himself? For me, it was tonight at the Metropolitan Opera, when during the second intermission a well…
Night After Night 