Steve Smith
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I have to admit, the question crossed my mind pretty much immediately when I heard that Peter Gelb was to be the next chief of the Metropolitan Opera. I’d actually pondered it as recently as this afternoon, for no particular reason. And apparently, I’m not the only one who’s been wondering, because it was the…
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It’s a gloomy, wet, steel-gray evening in Manhattan. For some reason, that made it a perfect day to listen to La Cieca’s wonderful Birgit Nilsson podcasts, as well as the searing renditions of Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Dvorak and Shostakovich violin concerti found in a Brilliant Classics box set of radio recordings by David Oistrakh. (I picked…
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In the latest issue of TONY — the one with President Eisenhower’s placid mug on the cover — you’ll find a pithy little one-page feature by yours truly about the Osvaldo Golijov festival that opens in Lincoln Center on Sunday, January 22. The piece in question isn’t deep and probing, nor was it meant to…
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Everybody else is doing has already done it. Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Floor cleaner; busboy; classical radio DJ; publicist. Four movies you could watch over and over: Casablanca; Gigi; Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid; any James Bond film. Four places you’ve lived: Jacksonville, FL; Houston, TX; San Antonio, TX; New York, NY.…
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Composer, lyricist and vocalist Corey Dargel, whose praises I’ve already sung in an earlier post, offered a glimpse of a new music-theater piece on Monday night at HERE, a currently homely (due to renovation) but always cozy arts workshop in the un-nicknamed hinterlands between the West Village and TriBeCa. Presented under the auspices of an…
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The holidays were a long stretch with little consumption of live music — though not a total void, thanks to baritone saxophonist Claire Daly‘s congenially swinging quartet at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and Cassandra Wilson‘s idiosyncratic intimacies at the Blue Note. But for this observer, musical 2006 finally roared, thumped and pogoed to life last night…
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Dan Warburton — fine improvising musician, exceptional writer about musicians who improvise, and editor-in-chief of the outstanding new-music journal Paris Transatlantic — has gently clarified that while Derek Bailey spent his final years in Barcelona, he actually passed from this life in London.
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I can’t remember the first time I heard British guitarist Derek Bailey, but I do remember being utterly perplexed at the arid, unsettling chaos his music seemed to present. A pioneer in the European free-improvisation scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Bailey was among the foremost proponents of a… style? genre? Okay, a…
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Sorry about the longer-than-usual absence. Chalk it up to a general lack of live performances over the last few weeks, the transit strike, my girlfriend’s return from Virginia and the year-end crush at the magazine. Speaking of which, the December 29 issue of TONY — which went to print three weeks ago — is hitting…
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On the street and the subway this evening, as I left the office and headed to the Met, I listened to Rolando Villazón’s recording of arias by Massenet and Gounod — a fine disc, and one that easily claims a spot on my list of "Top Ten Recordings That Didn’t End Up on My TONY…
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I rarely get down to the Knitting Factory these days — a strange and slightly sad condition, given that the scene that developed around this club in the ’80s was my foremost incentive to move to New York in the first place. (By the time I got here in 1993, said scene had already begun…
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Cellist Charles Curtis, a longtime New York fixture and La Monte Young associate now based in San Diego, is back in town this month in a big, big way, presenting a series of concerts under the collective rubric "Waking States." So far, the residency has included a performance of Young’s Just Charles and Cello in…
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Tonight, Christoph Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the local premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto at Carnegie Hall. I’ll not mince words: Hidgon is one of my absolute favorite young composers. (I almost wrote "up-and-coming," but her dance card, overstuffed with major commissions like this one, asserts that she’s already arrived.) She wrote her…
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Once again, I’ve learned the folly of typing for hours directly into my blog’s text window. Did you know that if you absentmindedly hold down the shift key in Windows for more than eight seconds, it changes your keyboard settings? And that it’s nearly impossible to change them back easily? What’s more, once the keyboard…
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When you’re sitting in a concert hall and someone nearby starts snoring, what do you do? More to the point, what can you do? I’m only asking because my enjoyment of Emanuel Ax’s excellent all-ballades recital at Carnegie Hall this afternoon was twice impeded by the sound of an elderly gentleman dozing off in the…
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America has yet to get to know the real Janine Jansen, and I’m not convinced that I helped as much as I’d meant to with the piece I wrote for this week’s TONY. (The article is here — free of charge, but you have to register.) In that story, I mainly dealt with the single…
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It took some serious wrangling, this being my usual Thursday-night dead zone, but I actually did manage to make it over to the Cutting Room tonight for the latest edition of Thru the Walls, ASCAP’s nightclub series showcasing composer-performers whose works occupy the interzone between "art music" and "pop culture." I’ve long wished to catch…
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Standing in a crowded lobby waiting for a concert to start earlier this evening, my right arm was gently nudged. I turned to see who had brushed past me, turned away — and then turned around again, just to be sure that it had really been Mikhail Baryshnikov. Yup. No matter how long I’ve been…
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Ideally, this is where I’d be sounding off about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last night… that is, before some fast-acting stomach bug put paid to that notion. Lieberson happily turned up; unhappily, I did not. A quick scan for feedback finds Alex Ross at a loss for…
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While I did threaten to freeze this blog and auction off screen shots if Rick Moody were to drop by, once it happened I decided against that course of action. However, this will in fact be my last post for a while, since I’m meeting up with my significant other in the Atlanta airport tomorrow…
Night After Night 