At An Exhibition: The Burning Red

My visit to the works and world of Lucio Fontana.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
(Yes, this is not a music review, but the first installment in a new series about visual art, called At an Exhibition.)

No way out: the claustrophobic, unsettling work of Lucio Fontana.
Photo taken at the Met Breuer by the author, who is still feeling the retinal effect.

Writing about the visual arts is not something that this blog is particularly known for. And yet, one of the perks of doing this blog is being able to accept an occasional invitation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to experience the opening of a new exhibit. This morning, your faithful correspondent put on two layers of clothes and sallied forth to see Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold, the new exhibit celebration work of the 20th century artist.

Concert Review: Yes, She Has No Bananas

Julia Bullock embodies Joséphine Baker in Perle Noire.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Julia Bullock (center) and composer-percussionist Tyshawn Sorey recreate the world of Joséphine Baker in Perle Noir
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Stephanie Berger © 2019 Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is no stranger to being used as a performance space. Operas, concerts and galas have been mounted in its galleries, atria and wide open spaces. However, Wednesday night's New York premiere of Tyshawn Sorey's Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine used an even more unusual location:  the Grand Staircase that leads upward from the entrance hall to the upper galleries of European art.  It starred the museum's current artist in residence, the powerhouse soprano Julia Bullock in a work that was part monodrama, part song cycle.

Concert Review: We Lost the Skyline

Arvo Pärt's 80th Birthday: Sept. 11, 2015.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

(My apologies to you the reader for the relative lateness of this post. It proved very difficult to write. Normal service will resume shortly.)

The Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo © 2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When you live in New York City, (and when you're from here like I am) September 11th is an inevitability. The permanently altered skyline, the terror brought by a bright, blue sky in late summer, the yearly beams of light shot above the city, the reading of the names of the victims of the terrorist attack: all can be overwhelming for those of us who've lived here all our lives and who survived the events of that lonesome day.

Opera Review: The Globe Beneath the Orb

Gotham Chamber Opera offers The Tempest Songbook.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Thomas Richards (seated) and Jennifer Zetlan (standing) in a scene from Gotham Chamber Opera's
production of The Tempest Songbook. Photo by Richard Termine for Gotham Chamber Opera.

Putting together the works of multiple composers can often have mixed results. When the composers in question are both living and dead, the finished product can lack dramatic cohesion or fail to work as a piece of fully furnished art. With The Tempest Songbook, Gotham Chamber Opera have ended their season with a work that manages this unlikely fusion, bringing together the music of Henry Purcell and Kaija Saariaho in a brief but searing meditation on Shakespeare's final play.

Opera Review: The Rules of Engagement

The Gotham Chamber Opera offers a twin bill at the Met.
(The other Met.)
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Arms and Armor Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, setting for last week's
performance by the Gotham Chamber Opera.
Photo © 2014 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Gotham Chamber Opera has a reputation for staging opera in obscure, even impractical locales. From the planetarium dome of the American Museum of Natural History (Il Mondo della Luna) to the cramped burlesque club The Box (last season's Eliogablio), this company has come to embody a new aesthetic of opera, freed from the confines of an opera house or theater. Last week, the company came up with an innovative way to mount two works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Monteverdi's I combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and the world premiere performances of I Have No Stories To Tell You, by Gotham's very own composer-in-residence Lembert Beecher.

At the Bust of Gustav Mahler

A brief encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gustav Mahler by A. Rodin.
Photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art site.

It happened in front of the bust of Gustav Mahler. 

I was in the Modern Art wing of the Metropolitan Museum, spending an afternoon (following today's noontime press conference announcing the Met's concert and lecture  schedule for 2012) traipsing around the museum. I visited my usual suspects: Musical Instruments, Arms and Armor, the Greek and Roman wing and the new Islamic Art exhibit.

I had stopped in front of Auguste Rodin's bust of Gustav Mahler, a bronze cast of the composer's head without his trademark pince-nez.

I turned to the tall, broad-shouldered fellow standing next to me, looking at the sculpture, a frozen bronze of the composer's famous head, capturing the swept-up hair, the finely formed cheekbones, the vulpine lower jaw. 

I said, "You know, there are two of them."

He said, "Oh yes?"

I burbled on. "Yes, there are two busts. One is in Lincoln Center at the Philharmonic. Whenever I take my friends to the Philharmonic I tell them 'Meet me at Mahler.' 

(I later found out that Rodin cast a number of Mahler busts, but that's not important right now.)

"He's my favorite composer," the other man said.

I said: "Really. Which symphony is your favorite?" by way of continuing the conversation.

He thought a minute. "The Second...and the Fifth."

I nodded and silently held up seven fingers. He smiled. "The Seventh. I like that one too. Actually," he added, "I'm a conductor."

"Oh," I said, trying to hide my surprise. "Where do you conduct?" 

"I am from Tashkent," he said. "My name is Aziz." 

Aziz Shokhamikov. Photo provided by Jonathan Wentworth and Associates.

A later Google search revealed my new friend to be Aziz Shohkamikov, an up-and coming Uzbekistani conductor. In 2010, he placed second in the International Mahler Conducting Competition, a springboard to a budding international career. But here, we were just two guys talking Mahler. 

I introduced myself, handing him my card and explaining about my blog and what it is that I do. That accomplished, we went back to talking about Mahler.

"Who is your favorite interpreter of Mahler?" Aziz asked. 

"I like Boulez," I said. "Boulez and Sinopoli, because they're so different from each other."

"Sinopoli? Is that with the Dresden Staatskapelle?"

"Only one of them," I said. "Only Das Lied von der Erde which he recorded before he died. The symphonies are all with the Philharmonia."

"I conducted the Dresden Staatskapelle last year," he said. "At the Semperoper."

"I saw them once, with Sinopoli," I returned. "He conducted an all-Strauss program at Carnegie Hall. I saw them last year,with Daniel Harding conducting." 

And so it went. We talked "shop" for a few more minutes, exchanged a few more words about Mahler, and went on our way. In reflection, our chance meeting says something profound and marvelous about the artistic importance of this museum, and of this city of mine. Only here, on a sunny Spring day in this city, would it happen to be that the one fellow I get into a conversation with was an up-and-coming conductor.

Concert Review: Right Songs, Wrong Space

Thomas Hampson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The smooth Thomas Hampson.
Photo from ThomasHampson.com.

"You're all applauding at the wrong time."

That's what baritone Thomas Hampson said, halfway through his engaging performance of Song for America a carefully curated cycle of American art songs drawn from a wide variety of composers. The concert was also being filmed for future release.

Mr. Hampson gave the recital in the giant glass foyer of the New American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This vast chamber of stone and glass suffers from an echo-y acoustic that reflects sound from a number of hard, bright surfaces. But those technical problems did not faze the singer, who pushed on through the program despite the near-unmanageable acoustic.

The concert opened with songs by Francis Hopkinson and Stephen Foster, before jumping forward to settings by Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. The Ives songs, particularly "Circus Train" engaged Mr. Hampson fully, and featured some exceptional accompaniment from pianist Vlad Iftinca.

"When they asked me to do this here, I jumped at the chance," he told his audience, a rapt band of Met donors, music lovers and members of the press. Mr. Hampson ended the first set with "Tyger! Tyger!" by Virgil Thomson, one of the few settings of a British poet on the program. After a short pause, he delved into art songs by Samuel Barber, and the journey resumed.

Mr. Hampsons' aural journey took a turn into the darkness, with "Night Wanderers" by Samuel Barber, an account of hobo life, and the grim "Lonely People," a setting of Langston Hughes by Jean Berger. He captured the bleak despair of the protagonists in both songs, mining the same vein of angst that he regularly brings to the operatic stage.

The official program ended with two short song cycles. The first: Blue Mountain Ballads featured settings of rural folk poety by composer Paul Bowles. These songs, based on texts by Tennessee Williams evoke the pain and suffering of America's rapidly shrinking frontiers. The second (originally titled "Mavericks") features folksy characters who each meet a grim end. 

Mr. Hampson gave his most impressive vocal light and shading to  Richard Cory, the story of a man about town who finally chooses suicide. He created the air of religious fervor and hypocrisy for General William Booth with the repeated refrain: "Are ye washed in the blood of the lamb." And he opened up the full power of his resonant instrument for the set closer, "Danny Deever." And it resonated: making the walls of the New American Wing ring with this tale of a solder's death by hanging.

Those notes were still ringing when Mr. Hampson came back for a pair of songs about rivers: Shenandoah and Aaron Copland's arrangement of "De Boatmen's Dance." As his voice steered the audience smoothly downstream, one wondered if a shipwreck awaited the sound engineer who had to record the performance in this beautiful, but ill-suited space.