Steve Smith
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Composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote up a detailed account of what appears to have been a fairly electrifying concert by Alarm Will Sound at Zankel Hall. Argue is insightful, evocative, entertaining and not uncritical when it seems to have been warranted. Don’t miss it. Maury D’annato, of My Favorite Intermissions fame, offers another welcome perspective,…
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Saxophonist Bill McHenry is an utter mystery to me, in the best possible sense. He’s a young jazz musician attempting to carve out a distinct identity for himself in a city that boasts innumerable fine players, and in a music that prizes individual identity, yet arguably has few stones left to overturn — or so…
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There are mad scenes, and then there are mad scenes. Joyce DiDonato’s third-act portrayal of Dejanira — wife of the titular hero in Handel’s Hercules, which opened tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — is a performance that crawls up under your clothing and itches relentlessly. She starts out the act ghoulish, shrunken, griefstruck…
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Friend and colleague David Shengold e-mailed this morning to report that the Gotham Chamber Opera performance of Albert Herring was still scheduled to go on this afternoon — as of about 10am, anyway. Since I’ve just spent the last three hours shoveling snow, however, someone will have to tell me how it went. Sadly, I…
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From the moment he stepped out onto the tiny Joe’s Pub stage tonight, Wade Schuman wasted no time in asserting his credentials as a musician to be reckoned with. Pulling out a harmonica, Schuman played an unaccompanied solo of stunning imagination and skill. He made the tiny instrument sing and growl; he blew multiphonic lines…
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The artist whose performance I attended on Friday night studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the ’60s, and collaborated not long after with Steve Reich to create music for a San Francisco experimental mime troupe’s happening. Said artist attended the second performance of Berio’s opera Un re in ascolto, took in a Ring…
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Despite years of training as a percussionist, this has revealed that — like M. C—, Alex and Lisa — I, too, am an oboe. Which is what my mother really wanted, until my grandmother made her cave in. Playlist: Carl Maguire – Floriculture (Between the Lines) Eyes of Fire – Prisons (Century Media) Andy Middleton…
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Since moving from Houston to New York in 1993, I’d gone out to hear Cecil Taylor an even dozen times before tonight. Had I figured that out in advance, I might perhaps have arrived at the Blue Note with superstitiously lowered expectations. Were I ever to claim that I’d seen a dud Taylor performance, tonight’s…
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Arrived at last in the house that Zeffirelli built for her, Angela Gheorghiu did what she does: namely, she gave a performance of Violetta in tonight’s Traviata aware of and alive to every broad stroke and gentle nuance Verdi wrote into the character. Yes, Gheorghiu’s voice is small for the cavernous house, and was sometimes…
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A friendly note from baritone Tim Krol, who sang the role of Owen Hart in the highlights from Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at Trinity Church last Tuesday night, led to a rather delightful discovery. Mindful of all the television cameras in place that night, I knew that the performance was being streamed on the…
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The three years in which Michael Gordon has been composer-in-residence at Merkin Concert Hall have seen a marked increase in the amount of downtown music to be found north of 14th Street and south of Columbia University — not a wholesale incursion by any means, but certainly a steady trickle. Located just north of Lincoln…
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It’s my own fault, and I know it. The last two times I had a post disappear due to browser-interface anxieties, I swore it would never happen again. "I’ll be smarter next time, you’ll see." (I even sketched notes in longhand during intermissions at the Met’s Rigoletto tonight.) But, having eagerly spent more than three…
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Per Alex Ross (who heard about it from Lev Zhurbin), I urge you to take a moment to see and hear the new Honda Civic commercial that’s soon to be storming up the charts in the UK. Composer Steve Sidwell was given the task of creating the sounds of — and, presumably, expressing the excitement…
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January 27, as you are inescapably aware, was the Big Day for the Mozart year. But after hearing two concerts by John Eliot Gardiner, a knockout Così and a handful of good-to-great new Mozart CDs this week, I didn’t feel especially compelled to hear more. I wasn’t the only one, but while Alex Ross’s abstention…
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Everyone remember Anne Midgette’s nifty December 4, 2005 Times article about Met cover artists? I sure do… and even if I didn’t, I was reminded of it this afternoon, when a publicist sent me a press release that pertained to one of the artists Anne profiled. From Anne’s piece: Jeff Mattsey, a baritone, has had…
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Being Osvaldo Golijov probably isn’t as easy or fun as we might think. To be annointed as some kind of savior of contemporary composition is bound to be a thankless task: You’ve got to live up to seemingly impossible standards, while also dodging skepticism of various slants. In conversation, Golijov is unfailingly humble — and…
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Good grief, don’t know how exactly I forgot to mention it, but Justin Davidson, guest hosting The Rest Is Noise for a spell, wittily describes the mighty, throbbing incursion of noise during John Eliot Gardiner’s performance of the Mozart C-minor Mass on Sunday afternoon. It was a major nuisance, to be sure. But there was…
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According to Pinchas Zukerman, I wasted my time tonight, and yesterday afternoon as well. In a fairly rabid interview that appeared in the Orange County Register last week, Zukerman unloaded both barrels at the period-instruments movement… or "historically informed performance" (HIP), in the current nomenclature. "I disagree with everything they do," Zukerman said. "From the…
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I don’t normally spend all that much time here trumpeting the efforts of the magazine for which I work, but there are a handful of fun things in this week’s issue that I’d like to bring to your attention. First, in a cover story about 25 up-and-coming New York creative types, there’s a brief shout-out…
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A quiet night, in which I rejected the call to keep working after hours (on my "official" daytime work, anyway) and instead finally got around to updating the blogroll here. Any blog is a work in progress, but by this point it was verging on obscene that I hadn’t yet provided handy links to such…
Night After Night 