It sounds like a perfectly impossible bit of drollery, one that would have Manhattan’s old guard turning in their graves: Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall. Like something created from the Twitterverse ether (remember Radiohead at Zuccotti Park?), this incredible if unlikely pairing has had HOV fans abuzz for months.
The intimate concerts will benefit Jay-Z’s charity, Read More
“We’re a very democratic place,” Eric Latzky, the vice president of communications at the New York Philharmonic, said over the phone last week. “I think there was a healthy expression of ideas from a lot of people.”
When it comes to creating a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it seems that everyone has an opinion. This Saturday, the night before the anniversary, the Philharmonic will play what it is calling “A Concert for New York.” The program is simple: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the uplifting “Resurrection,” with two excellent soloists: soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.
But the process of choosing the piece was more complicated. What tone do you want to set at an event like this? You don’t want to be too mournful, or too triumphant. Not too explicitly tied to 9/11, but not too general. Read More
Long before any musician took the stage, there was a row of conspicuously young looking girls lining the area around the speakers at last night’s Sounds Like Paper concert, hosted by Paper Magazine in an old warehouse converted into a skate park in Greenpoint. The event was 21 and up. Joe Jonas was playing. You Read More
Over here at The Observer, we were pretty excited about the news that Bush would be playing Bowery Ballroom on July 28 because yes, we are that desperate for a nostalgia fix. Though we don’t have the highest of hopes for their new album, Sea of Memories (speaking of nostalgia…), which will be released in Read More
Yesterday, The Observer was in the unfamiliar territory of the Walt Whitman Housing projects of Greene County, Brooklyn, where a Nü Revolution was taking place in the form of a musical performance by Les Nubians, a band led by the French-born Afropean sisters Célia and Hélène Faussart.
As The Observer walked through the neighborhood to Read More
On Friday, The Observer traveled back in time, somewhere around 1982, to Sugarhill Supper Club, an old bar and disco in Bed Stuy that is virtually unchanged since the heyday of Donna Summer. Crystal Ark, the electro-orchestra of Gavin Russom (a long-time fixture of James Murphy’s DFA Records), was playing.
“Sugarhill Supper Club? Is Read More
MoMA PS1 announced the line-up for its summer Warm Up 2011 parties yesterday and, despite our fairly strong aversion to live music in museums being well-documented, it’s actually pretty good!
The series runs July 2 through September 3 and will include performances by Four Tet, Black Dice, Juan Maclean, Read More
When it comes to the world’s most oppressed peoples, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. That seems to be the thinking of Robert Thurman, cofounder and president of the cultural-preservation charity Tibet House, which is holding its annual benefit concert at Carnegie Hall tomorrow night. (Interested parties may buy tickets by appearing Read More
Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball Tour is being transmitted to the masses. HBO’s announced that they’re taping a concert special over the course of her February 21 and 22 Madison Square Garden shows, and that she’s “creating unique new elements” for the TV special. Reached by the Observer, an HBO rep refused to describe the new Read More
