Ives.

For the past two nights, guests arriving at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall have found two harps and five extra music stands occupying part of the second balcony next to the stage. They sat unoccupied for the first part of the program on Wednesday and Thursday evening, as the New York Philharmonic debuted composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse's fearsome and taut 10-minute Prospero's Rooms (2012) and as Joshua Bell maneuvered his violin nimbly, delicately through Leonard Bernstein's Serenade (1953–54), offering an almost jaunty feel in the piece’s jazzy closing moments.

But after the intermission, two harpists and five violinists finally took up those positions to help perform Charles Ives's richly complex Symphony No. 4 (ca. 1912–18/1921–25). They were joined by scores of singers from the New York Choral Consortium, a Theremin, three pianos—one outfitted to play quarter tones—and a large retinue of other instruments. In the lobby during the break, some guests lingered in front of television screens showing the stage, eagerly watching the preparations. It has been nearly 10 years since the Philharmonic mounted the piece.

"There is nothing objectionable about a modern conductor choosing to divide the labors," the liner notes advised, and so yes, an additional conductor, Case Scaglione, came on stage with Alan Gilbert, for the Ives, sitting himself just a few feet to the left of the maestro. (Some conductors use two supporters.) Together they ably guided the orchestra through the piece’s most difficult sections, when multiple sets of instrumentalists play at different tempos and time signatures to make a collage of overlapping marching bands and Protestant hymns, an all-American cacophony. Though he was always admirably restrained, never a distraction, Mr. Scaglione lent some drama to the action, turning to various groups and up to the balcony, even sidling up alongside Mr. Gilbert in one particularly thorny section, reminding everyone of just how delicate and nuanced this music is, and how miraculous it is when musicians nail it, as happened on Thursday night, when I attended.

“It’s a piece that has to be experienced live,” Mr. Gilbert told The Times last week, and while that may be true of most music, I have never felt it as profoundly as with the Fourth, watching that little corps in the balcony float down ghostly melodies in the first movement, joined by the chorus with snippets of the hymn “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night”; or, in the second, watching two violinists at the far end of the stage as they danced quietly, almost unnoticed, with the piano. Mr. Gilbert rendered that wild second movement, the Allegretto, with an exacting viciousness, the brass turning violent by the end, as melodies pile on top of melodies to form a whole crashing wall of sound, in which no single theme is decipherable, just a glorious tangle of ideas.

Describing the program of the Fourth, Ives said that its maestoso Prelude asks "the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life"—the sort of questions Americans have been asking a lot this week—and that the following three movements are "the diverse answers in which existence replies." Those answers are complicated and fragmentary, hard to understand, which seems appropriate for the present moment. On Wednesday evening, The Times reported, the Philharmonic had played Elgar's "Nimrod" from his Enigma Variations (1898–99) as a memorial to composer Colin Davis and those injured and killed in Boston.

On Thursday, there was no Elgar, just Ives, but that was enough: his assorted ensembles formed and re-formed, often humming away at their own pace but uniting in brief moments of extreme beauty, as in the final, fourth movement, which the orchestra delivered with a crystalline clarity. The piece slowly grew, as a rumbling bass then woodwinds and piano entered. A Theremin sang through most of the movement, a spectral voice met only by the chorus at the very end, with a brief, always painfully too-short fragment of the melody for the hymn Bethany. The gentle patter of drums and cymbal clanked away thoughout the movement, ever-present and mysterious.

The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall.

“Oh no,” someone groaned. People began shooting photos and videos.
Read More

Davoli in Pasolini's 'The Canterbury Tales' (1972).

A veteran New York art dealer recently complained to the Transom that the city’s art world has become much less fun over the past few years, citing as evidence the fact that no one drinks at business lunches anymore. We’d heard this complaint from other art types before. But could there finally be a change on the horizon?

Bottles of Chianti Classico had been uncorked and were steadily being emptied at the new M. Wells Dinette restaurant at MoMA PS1 around 10 a.m. last Wednesday, along with formidable helpings of blood pudding and eggs Florentine, buttery croissants and hearty maple donuts.

“We have all these pleasures—wine in the morning, this great food,” the museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, told the standing-room-only crowd, which, judging by the conversation, was filled with Italians. “So stay in the mood, and go across and have a look at Teorema and Medea and Salò,” the three films he’s installed at the museum as part of MoMA’s retrospective of Italian 1960s and ’70s filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It takes a brave curator to pair blood pudding with the often-censored Salò, but never mind.

The show had been a long time coming, Mr. Biesenbach revealed. When he started at MoMA years ago, he proposed two exhibitions. “Both of them were voted down,” he said. The first was an exhibition of the 16th-century painter Caravaggio. “They said, ‘You started at the MoMA, not at the Met,’” he recalled. The second was a show devoted to the films of Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pasolini. “They said, ‘No, you can’t do this.’”

“In the meantime,” he continued, “We have done Warhol, we have done Fassbinder.” And now the Pasolini show has arrived, which includes a full slate of his films at MoMA, the film installations at PS1, and a variety of performances and readings of Pasolini’s writing.

Pasolini’s work had a role in forging Mr. Biesenbach’s long and fruitful friendship with the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose blockbuster MoMA retrospective he curated in 2010. “Twenty years ago, as a young curator in Berlin, I met Marina Abramovic, and she is a great artist.” Mr. Biesenbach said. “She was literally seducing everybody. She walks into a room, she flirts with everybody. She would flirt with the chair.” The room erupted in laughter.

“That’s how we became such close friends,” he continued. “I said, ‘Marina, you are like Terence Stamp in Teorema.’” In the 1968 film, a young Mr. Stamp has trysts with every member of an Italian family—husband and wife, son and daughter and, yes, the maid. “She was like, ‘Oh, great!’” (For a while, they thought about doing a project on the film, but it never came together.)

Roberto Cicutto, the CEO of Italy’s Luce Cinecittà film archive, which helped organize the retrospective, disagreed with Mr. Biesenbach. “Klaus Biesenbach looks very much like Terence Stamp,” he told everyone. “Marina Abramovic looks like Laura Betti,” the maid in the film. More laughter, making this one of the most joyful press events in recent memory.

Later on, the actor Ninetto Davoli, a red scarf hanging from his neck, took to the podium to talk about working with Pasolini. Except for the fact that his curly mop of hair is now white, he looks just about how he did in those movies 40 years ago. He spoke in quick, energetic Italian and gesticulated grandly, as a translator behind him gamely tried to scribble down his speech.

The Transom, sadly, does not know the language, but at least one part needed no translation, when Mr. Davoli looked heavenward and declared, “Bello e bello e bello!” to much applause. “It’s very emotional to be here today,” the translator said on behalf of Mr. Davoli. “We made 10 films together, and we worked for many years together.” Though Pasolini was derided in many places of the world, the actor said, New York accepted him, and he loved the city. “You can’t believe how happy it makes me,” he said. “Finally the world is starting to appreciate him.”

The New York Observer‘s

FROM THE EDITORS
Fall for Art
By Sarah Douglas and Andrew Russeth

ART
A Call to Arms
Dan Duray on celebrating a century of arms and armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

BOOKS
Close Reading
Michael H. Miller on Marco Roth and his upcoming memoir, The Scientists

FILM
Leading Men
Daniel D'Addario on the fall's presidential films, Lincoln and Hyde Park on Hudson

THEATER
Loose-Cannon Shannon
Harry Haun on Grace, at the Cort Theater

TOP 10s
Top 10 Museum Exhibitions
By Dan Duray

Top 10 Gallery Shows
By Andrew Russeth

Top 10 Books
By The Editors

Top 10 Films
By Daniel D'Addario

Top 10 New Plays
By Daniel D'Addario

Top 10 Classical Music & Opera
By Carl Gaines