We are progressing step by inexorable step through City Ballet’s current Diamond Project season—seven new ballets by seven choreographers. The first step, an Eliot Feld evening featuring a particularly feeble new solo, was a low point from which things had to improve, and they did. Next up was In Vento by Mauro Bigonzetti, whose work Read More
Spring has already begun, with Paul Taylor just starting his annual season at the City Center. There are two new works—Spring Rounds and Banquet of Vultures (guess which is the light-hearted one)—and a wealth of old favorites, plus revivals of his groundbreaking From Sea to Shining Sea and the deeply disturbing Speaking in Tongues. Esplanade, Read More
A.B.T. has just given us a wonderful season, so spirits (at least my spirits) have been high. But you can’t win them all. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s 78-minute solo performance at the Joyce, Once, and yet another New Wavelet at B.A.M., Aterballetto’s all-Stravinsky evening, have reminded me of a basic truth: All too much of Read More
Few professionals in the art world, whether they’re artists, critics, historians or museum curators, can be said to command as comprehensive an understanding of the art of sculpture as William Tucker, the British-born artist who’s been working in this country since 1978 and is now an American citizen. Not only is Mr. Tucker a highly Read More
Every year, it seems, when the Paul Taylor Dance Company steps out at the City Center, at least one work from the past reasserts itself as especially masterly. Last year it was the pastoral Images . This year it’s Mercuric Tidings , Taylor’s glorious outburst of kinetic excitement to excerpts from Schubert’s first and second Read More
A few Sundays ago outside Avery Fisher Hall, a man who was hoping to get into a performance of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust carried a sign reading “Seeking ‘Damnation’ tickets. Willing to sell soul for the right offer.” What brought a smile to my face was not only the man’s wit, but his eagerness Read More
If classical music is an endangered species, then the principal reason may not be the abandonment of musical education in public schools, the kudzu-like ubiquity of pop music or the indifference of the mass media, but something far more pernicious: the boorishness of concertgoers. We are coming to the end of an extraordinarily robust musical Read More
Except for the Norwegians in Carnegie Hall the other night, I doubt whether there were more than a dozen people in the audience who had ever said the name Leif Ove Andsnes out loud. And yet there we were, several thousand strong, drawn to the Carnegie debut of a highly touted but little-heard Norwegian pianist Read More
Many artists have regarded music as the greatest visual medium because of its uncanny ability to make the listener see in ways that no painting or sculpture, tapestry or fresco, possibly can. Because it springs so directly from the imagination, without dependence on such external objects as a paintbrush or a welding torch, and because Read More
” The Rake’s Progress is simple to perform musically, but difficult to realize on the stage,” Igor Stravinsky once commented. This shrewd appraisal of the composer’s one full-length excursion into musical theater pinpoints the challenge of producing a work that remains, more than 40 years after its premiere, the most exhilarating yet fragile of modern Read More
