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November 2007
REVIEW: ASO Scores with Familar, Stumbles on
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s program this weekend comes in two jarringly dissimilar parts. The first is a sort of vast cosmic meditation that tries to link lush romanticism with atonal modernism and, in the process, finds sonic similarities at every turn.
The second part, much better played Thursday evening in Symphony Hall, felt in comparison like an old fashioned pops program. Where the first was fussy and came off as pedantic rather than enlightening, the second was all pleasure and familiar expressions. It thus triggered familiar reactions, from musicians and audience.
Guest conductor Roberto Minczuk, a middle-aged Brazilian steadily building an international reputation, opened the evening with Richard Wagner’s Prelude to his final opera, “Parsifal,” from 1882. Without pause, he then slipped into Gyorgy Ligeti’s sound-sculpture “Lontano,” from 1967.
A brilliant match, at least on paper. The possibilities were infinite: two spectral, radiant, all-but-static pieces that, by design, have escaped their earthly confines and deal instead with higher concerns, of pure sunlight and shadow and deep philosophy. The “Parsifal” prelude starts breaking loose of the traditions of harmony and rhythm.
“Lontano” has no rhythm and no audible harmony. It’s more sonic vapor than musical narrative. In a good performance, it’s breathtakingly majestic, a reference to the “distant” of the title. Its visceral emotions invade your subconscious. There’s actually a long thread of melody in the music, sewn into the fabric, which helps explain what’s supposed to be the sensuousness and organic cohesion within the abstraction.
Minczuk, however, couldn’t keep the orchestra ideally together (or get the musicians to sound involved with the performance) in either piece, so the lesson was lost. It ended up as little more than an intellectual exercise.
Audiences, even the supposedly conservative ones in Symphony Hall, will generally listen to almost anything if a) it’s played well and with conviction and b) if it fits within the frame of the evening. (ASO music director Robert Spano is especially convincing at these old/new, high/low, profound/hollow arguments; Minczuk and the orchestra’s handling of these two pieces may well improve in the repeat performances.)
On to part two. Pianist Dejan Lazic, a young Croatian building an international career, made his ASO debut Thursday with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” a spectacle of keyboard pyrotechnics and heart-on-sleeve emotion.
He nailed every inch of it. His virtuosity is crisp, bright and pounded hard, with no soft spots. And he even added a certain dashing, movie star glitz to the music, which, coming after the mind-numbing Wagner-Ligeti showing, felt liberating, personable, humane.
All that preceded intermission. Afterwards came seven scenes from Sergei Prokofiev’s blue-collar ballet “Romeo and Juliet.” In a fascinating moment of what could have been, the opening of the “Montagues and Capulets” dance sounds like a lot like “Lontano,” of piercing violin shimmers against rumbling bass lines. Clearly, the conductor had a thoughtful agenda in mind, although it failed to gel.
The ASO knows the Prokofiev as second nature, and played it with admirable abandon.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Classical Music
You might enjoy…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Larry Walker skillfully evokes the look and mood of urban grit in his collaged tableaux, on view at Mason Murer Fine Art. But there’s also a suggestion of a personal meaning encoded in the graffitoed posters and such that cover the neighborhood walls.
Perhaps the Atlanta artist will reveal his secrets in his talk on Sunday at 2 p.m.
The good work done by the Aga Khan Development Network is one of the good-news stories to come out of the Middle East.
Its efforts to restore and revitalize cities in the Islamic world, including projects in Cairo, Delhi and Zanzibar, is the subject of a program beginning at 9:15 a.m. at the Atlanta Botanical Garden on Saturday and an exhibit on view there through Sunday.
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More Money for the Arts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Local government spending on the arts reached an all-time high this year, an estimated $817 million, according to the advocacy group Americans for the Arts.
Atlanta, however, is not among the most generous cities in arts funding. Mayor Shirley Franklin has said she wants to change that, although she hasn’t set a deadline to implement her plan to distribute $10 million a year to arts organizations and artists. Currently, Atlanta grants about $600,000 a year (a portion of the hotel-motel tax) to artists and arts & culture nonprofits.
Most arts nonprofits don’t come close to covering their expenses with earned income (ticket sales, gift shop sales and the like.) Donations from private individuals and organizations and governments make up the difference.
The goal of Franklin’s plan is to make the arts available to more people, and help make Atlanta a “world-class” city, she says. She’s right about that. How can you have a truly great city without strong public support for the arts?
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Buying Local for the Holidays
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta’s bricks-and-mortar merchants want you to buy local instead of online. But have you considered buying truly local goods, such as jewelry by Atlanta artisans, artworks by local artists or ceramics made by hand right here? (The Freestripe Bud Vases pictured above were designed and handmade by Atlanta’s Cara Gilbert and range from $30 to $50 at Beehive Co-Op in Midtown.)
Spruill Art Gallery in Dunwoody has a holiday artist market that runs until December 24 and promises handcrafted gifts for all pocketbooks. ShopSCAD Atlanta, the retail outlet for students, faculty, alumni and staff of the Savannah College of Art & Design in Atlanta, has its annual “Small Works” art sale featuring small paintings, photographs, collages and other works priced at $500 and under. Of course, you can always buy local art in galleries or in some cases from the artists themselves. One of my most treasured possessions is a tiny 4x6-inch “commission” by an artist friend — it was what we could afford at the time.
Do you plan to buy local this year? If so, where will you shop?
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More on Ponce Park
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FYI, Emory Morsberger, the developer behind Ponce Park (see Nov. 26 entry) reads this blog. If you have constructive suggestions for his Medici Center, this is a way to make them known.
Yes, there are other studio communities in town. Cooperatives like, say, The B Complex, say.
Or subsidized spaces like The Contemporary. But The Contemporary has studios for about a dozen artists, and, as one of you observed, it’s work space only, not living space.
Surely, there is room in the city for more such havens, and different ways of nurturing art communities.
Ponce Park: An Arts Haven?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Developer Emory Morsberger has big plans for Ponce Park, his future redo of City Hall East. Which is good because the structure is 2.1 million square-feet and overlooks the future BeltLine.
He envisions Ponce Park as home to an interdisciplinary think tank called The Medici Center that would take advantage of local universities, tech businesses and so on.
And he wants to make it a magnet for the arts. To that end, Morsberger gathered 80 folks —architects, designers, artists, curators, academics, foundation executives, etc. — a week ago to brainstorm on what that could be.
There were lots of good ideas. One example: affordable live/work spaces for artists —an incubator of sorts — that included studios with production equipment (printing press, sculpture tools) and flexible exhibit/performance space as well as communal gathering spots like cafés whre residents, artista and the public could mingle.
Though sometimes surprised by the out-of-the-box thinking, Morsberger was definitely open to it. He doesn’t get possession of the building until 2009, so there’s time to think it through.
Stay tuned.
Dead Flowers Live as Art
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pandra Williams made 11,000 lbs of adobe bricks and gathered native plants from hither and yon for “Tumulus,” her six-foot-tall, sheltering structure in the back corner of eyedrum.
Her piece is the cozy comfort station in “Dead Flowers,” which is otherwise devoted to thoughts of ephemerality and death. But, like the brilliant colors of autumn leaves, which signal their imminent demise, the artists put on a lively show.
Stan Woodard’s “Passage” — a bower made of kudu vines—was green and fragrant when the show opened. Now the leaves are graying and stiff. On one hand, it’s an unintended riff on the drought. On the other, it’s reassuring to discover that kudzu is not immortal.
The show closes Saturday.
A Day Without Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Did you know today is “No Music Day”? Thousands of people have pledged on this website to turn off all music, and BBC Radio Scotland will play no music today. The annual 24-hour event was the idea of former British rock star and conceptual artist Bill Drummond.
Drummond was in the early ’90s band KLF, which stopped playing at the peak of its success, deleted its entire back catalog and burned its last £1 million (now more than $2 million) in earnings. Visual artists may recall the band’s K Foundation, which in 1994 awarded a prize to Britain’s worst artist of the year, who also happened to be that year’s winner of the prestigious Turner Prize.
The idea behind No Music Day is that our ears are assaulted by elevator music, ring tones, advertising jingles and other types of music to the point that it has become little more than white noise. As Drummond says in this story, he began to wonder what life would be like without music.
Would you like to have a day without music? What kind of music bothers you the most?
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Kara Walker
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ten years into her still-rocketing career, Kara Walker continues to hit nerves with her biting meditations on race, gender, power and their interrelationships.
Her willingness to implicate blacks as well as whites in the culture of racism offends many, who feel that the work itself is a form of racism.
Others suspect the High Museum’s lack of interest to date in collecting her work bespeaks the Atlanta Way, i.e., we’re the city to busy to hate, so let’s not bring it up.
Remember how the board of the Atlanta History Center reacted to the prospect of showing Jimmy Allen’s lynching photos? NIMBY at its best.
Or when black and white leaders quashed René Stout’s shack sculpture intended for Woodruff Park in 1996? Not the right tone for the Olympics.
I hope that the future Civil Rights museum will be brave enough to show Walker’s work. Racism isn’t pretty.
Pictured above, a detail of the 50-foot mural, “Gone….” by Kara Walker
‘Keep Music Evil’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The links on the left side of this page include a blog run by and for Atlanta area composers. It’s a chance to eavesdrop on the music makers as they talk amongst themselves. It’s also a great place to find out what’s being performed when and where.
Our lovable composers, you see, are often hapless when it comes to promoting their shows. (The newspaper can help on this front, sometimes a lot.)
But reading their site, you also come away with what’s been the defining attitude among modern-music composers for most of the 20th and now 21st centuries. It’s a mild sense of Who Cares If You Listen? It’s the sense that music’s theoretical value trumps its popular or populist appeal. It’s what a new-music crazed listener might call the soft bigotry of low expectations. The sense that a composer would invite his colleagues to his or her concert, and that’s good enough. (Perhaps that’s why so few Atlanta composers have jumped clear of the new-music corral.)
Still, there’s abundant talent on the scene and plenty of charm, even as they take a proud stance in pushing away their potential public.
Composer Adam Scott Neal has created a line of t-shirts with this cheeky message. One says “Keep Music Evil.” (If you have to be explained the joke, the t-shirt is probably not for you.)
Another says: “RIP Tonality 1682-1911.”
Then again, in a culture where everything is a niche product, can modern classical composers win fans by emphasizing their outsider status? Is the true path to success in America not composing abstact, atonal music but in the commerce associated with composing abstract, atonal music? If so, Mr. Neal’s got a winner. (I’ll pick up an XL.)
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Whitney Biennial Shuts out Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Whitney Museum of American Art has released the roster for its 2008 Biennial. Surprise, surprise. All but a handful of the 81 artists reside in California or New York.
Miami scored three slots. Chicago, one. There’s some strays from Texas, Arizona, Oregon. The lone Southeast artist is a filmmaker from Virginia. (Former Atlantan Roe Etheridge did make the cut.)
Given that ambitious artists tend to cluster in art centers, one would expect New York and California to dominate. But, as far as I can ascertain, none of the curators even bothered with Atlanta. (I will check this further.)
It’s one thing to look and reject, but to totally ignore is less than responsible. Stuart Horodner, the Contemporary’s curator, agrees. “It’s not about being rah-rah, he says. “But there are a number of artists on that list who are hardly miles above the artists we have here.”
Say what you will. That kind of outside validation matters—to collectors, to artists who would like to build a national career but stay here.
Do Rowdy Audiences Ruin Opera?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We took the plunge and it worked as well as hoped. Thursday at 10 a.m., I took my daughter to her first opera, the hour-long matinee of Atlanta Opera’s “Hansel and Gretel.”
The main floor and lower balcony of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre were packed with students (and their chaperons). I had the uncanny feeling that I’d been transported back a century or two, to before those “golden rules of audience etiquette” helped shackle people’s behavior of live performances.
The kids at the opera, mine included, fidgeted and gabbed during the uneventful parts, gasped at the startling turn of events — the Witch strutting out of her candy house — and let loose unfettered cheers for their favorites. All this is the historical norm for opera, except there were no food vendors hawking snacks up and down the aisles during the performance.
What’s clear at a children’s matinee is that the performers are working for the audience, whereas at too many typical concerts you get the feeling the audience is there to support the musicians on stage as much for purely hedonistic reasons. Me, I’m with the hedonists.
The show also got me to recall my own first opera — “Carmen” — and, a few months later, a mind-blowing school field trip to the concert hall, where “Ride of the Walkyries” was taken apart and reassembled. First the conductor had the strings gallop through their hoofs-in-the-mist figures, then the hefty brass bellowed the main tune, then they put it back together. It was an electrifying moment for me then, and remains a sort of touchstone for the indescribable power of classical music to grab one impressionable listener and never let go.
How many kids Thursday walked out of the theater at 11 a.m. with a glimpse of a different world? How many will be hooked?
What, and where, was your first concert? Was it a chore, a joy, an intriguing event?
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What To Do With The Castle?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation has come out with its 2008 list of “places in peril” and it includes The Castle on 15th Street across from Symphony Hall and the Woodruff Arts Center. The building is privately owned but has not been used in decades. Roof tiles are missing and the interior has suffered water damage. The Midtown Alliance is forming a task force to help stabilize the structure and encourage its revitalization.
Greg Paxton, the outgoing president and CEO of the Trust, reports that there’s a possible buyer for The Castle. The asking price is $4 million. The question is, what could you do with it? The lack of parking, the relatively small size for Midtown and the difficulty in adapting it to contemporary laws (meeting the standards of the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example) have all been stumbling blocks for previous buyers. Considering the building’s place in Atlanta’s arts district, what would you like to see it become?
Permalink | Comments (53) | Categories: Architecture
Conservatives, Liberals and the Arts
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Classical music is one of the few things conservatives and liberals can agree on, according to a new poll by the Norman Lear Center and Zogby International. Classical music nudged slightly ahead of rock music as the most popular genre overall.
You can read more about the poll here. Much of the commentary deals with TV watching, but pollsters also asked about music, live theater, galleries and museums.
The poll found that liberals are “much more likely” than others to visit museums and galleries and attend live theater. One possible reason: liberals have more wide-ranging tastes. The poll found that conservatives prefer to avoid entertainment programming they feel is in bad taste or doesn’t reflect their values (bad news for many contemporary art galleries and theaters). Meanwhile, over 80% of liberals admit they are entertained by material that’s in bad taste. Liberals also are more likely to enjoy programming that runs counter to their political beliefs.
What do you think? Do you avoid art that runs counter to your beliefs or do you seek it out? Can you really tell how a person will vote based on their entertainment preferences?
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Play House
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A propos of my story about an architect-designed tree house on Friday, artist Evan Levy sent in some pics of a wonderful Bauhaus playhouse he designed for a benefit auction for his son’s school.
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Terrific New Art Salon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you’ve been pining for an art salon, or you miss those elementary-school days of Show And Tell (I do) you are in luck. Atlanta Pecha Kucha (that’s Japanese for “a little conversation”) debuted last night at Octane, and it rocked.
Following a format of the original Pecha Kucha (founded by British architects living in Tokyo, it now takes place in 80 cities around the world), the evening format allows each speaker to present and talk about 20 slides for 20 seconds each.
The key, of course, is who the speakers are. The organizers, Sabir Khan, Mark Cottle and Alfredo Aponte, decided to take it beyond “pointy-headed” (Sabir’s words) architects, and invited a broad spectrum of creative people. An architect turned cupcake-maker. An art historian who talked about male bling and its relationship to colonialism in India. A Tech grad in a web animation start-up.
Other topics: biologically inspired design, like the what’s it climbing the window (below), which makes use of the sticky foot hairs of a gekko and may lead to the development of non-toxic glue.
Stencil graffiti in Barcelona
It was a very energizing experience to see — and in some cases, discover - all that creative mojo in Atlanta. I’m hooked.
The website has links to all of the speakers and information on future Pecha Kuchas. The next one is Dec. 9 at Octane.
REVIEW: ‘Hansel and Gretel’ at the Opera
OPERA REVIEW Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel." Atlanta Opera. Saturday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. Performances continue Nov. 13, 16 and 18. www.atlantaopera.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As promised, the most spectacular character to appear in Atlanta Opera history strutted out of her candy house, swiveled her hips, heaved her ample bosom and made “Hansel and Gretel” the must-see-to-believe event of the season.
That the Witch in Basil Twist’s unique production, which opened Saturday night at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, is a sultry femme fatale — and fairy-tale pedophile who sexualizes the devouring of boys — makes the show all the more unforgettable and eye-popping.
Did she really do what I think she just did?
The Witch is a 14-foot tall puppet, operated by three puppeteers hidden under her dress, with mezzo-soprano Jessie Raven singing up top. Her size plays delightful tricks with our sense of scale. The childlike wonder induced by a great big puppet also lets Twist get away subversive, R-rated opera.
Innocence/danger juxtapositions are a basic element of Brothers Grimm tales, of course, with a “happy ending” that will keep Hansel and Gretel in therapy for the rest of their lives. That teetering balance of cute and disturbing is made still more unstable by composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s lush orchestra, harnessing a Wagner-sized sound, rich in psychological undercurrents. (Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, too, is a kind of fairytale.)
Yet thanks to often glorious singing, Twist’s storybook concept — including a mischievous cat, menacing trees and a flapping cuckoo — neatly complements, rather than overshadows, the music.
Soprano Jennifer Aylmer, as Gretel, sings with a fetching, fluttery, radiant voice. Her theatrical timing is sharp, her diction ideal (in Cori Ellison’s modern-American translation). As Hansel, mezzo Kirstin Chavez’s tone is at once dusky and sweet. Their evening prayer duet, at the end of act two, touches on sublime singing, just right.
In Twist’s imagination, the Dream Pantomime scene involves 14 white-robed angels swarming magically around the children, who sleep on the forest floor. Although the New York-based puppeteer didn’t offer many insights into the plot, his spectacles are of the highest order, never to be forgotten.
Where the hungry siblings run around the stage barefoot in ragged clothes, the parents are also giants, with puppet heads and enormous arms. Phillip Addis sings the Father with a sturdy, lyrical baritone. Cheryl Evans’ Mother is hard to hear but offers lovely tones.
Kristen Brannan’s small voice was sometimes drowned out by the orchestra. She walked on stage in a black dress (as both the Sandman and the Dew Fairy) while hovering puppets acted out the supernatural roles. The children’s chorus, prepared by Jennifer Langley, sang in pitch-perfect style as they romped about in gingerbread cookie costumes.
The idea for Basil Twist’s human and puppet production origin with Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, who commissioned sketches from the celebrated puppeteer. When Atlanta couldn’t afford the production, the Houston Grand Opera picked it up and gave the world premiere in 2005.
This production is also notable for the return of conductor Yoel Levi to an Atlanta podium. His disciplined baton technique and precise ear gives the orchestra — a band of contracted freelancers — some of the luster of, ahem, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which Levi led from 1988 through 2000.
Yet where Levi is a superb craftsman, conducting from memory, tuning and polishing the opera orchestra, there is little art in his interpretation. The entire evening drags at what feel like one middling tempo, with few contrasts and almost no dramatic tension — the biggest letdown in an otherwise superlative show.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Categories: Classical Music
Introducing Kids to Classical Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This weekend and next, the Atlanta Opera is putting on “Hansel and Gretel” at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center. Giant puppets capture the most attention — and next week there are one-hour children matinees.
First, a recommendation. There’s an excellent new CD of “Hansel & Gretel,” sung in perfect-diction English and with local roots. Marietta native Jennifer Larmore sings the boy lead, with Rebecca Evans as his sister and a snarly-wonderful Jane Henschel as the Witch. Charles Mackerras conducts, and it’s on the Chandos label. (I’ve not seen it in stores; I had to order mine, used, off the amazon.com site.)
No one should be surprised that at my house we listen mostly to a range of classical music. My two young ones still prefer the H&G set they’ve come to adore: The old Georg Solti/Vienna Philharmonic CD, with the adorable voices of Brigitte Fassbaender and Lucia Popp as Hansel and Gretel (Decca budget).
And now the question: What music do you play your kids? Is there a difference between “educational” music and the “fun” stuff? If the parents listen to rock and roots and rap, what’s the rationale for playing classical for the kids?
I’m working on a story on this topic — playing music at home and taking them to kiddy concerts — and would love to hear what other people think and know from experience.
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REVIEW: ASO Plays Funny German Music
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You see your kid everyday and don’t quite register the changes. Grandma visits every few months and, first thing, exclaims, “How he’s grown!”
It’s the same with conductors. Donald Runnicles, as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor, visits Symphony Hall about four times a year — we hear his artistic development not as a smooth progression but in substantial jumps.
Granny’s words were appropriate Thursday evening for the Scottish maestro’s first ASO appearance of the season. His concert offered a pleasant theme: the playful side of the Austro-German tradition.
They opened with Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, music of svelte, feline charm. There’s nothing heroic or self-consciously “important” about the Fourth, which further enhances its greatness.
Under Runnicles’ baton, it sounded relaxed, thoughtfully prepared, properly rehearsed, beautifully executed and, above all, playful. The Menuetto movement was as boisterous as a kitten swatting repeatedly at a ball of yarn.
Their reading wasn’t note perfect — with a few mishaps of coordination and bassoonist Carl Nitchie blurring a prominent solo passage — but in spirit the symphony soared, a joy to experience.
In Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3, Taiwanese-American violinist Cho-Liang Lin — “Jimmy” to his friends — played the modest and dapper super-virtuoso. His tone was powerful and sweet, his every phrase ideally turned, his restraint a sure sign of a (musically) noble pedigree.
Conductor and orchestra were of like mind and supported the violinist with a light, supple touch. The whole thing seemed to float on a cushion of air.
Richard Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” from 1895, tells the tale, in graphic musical imagery, of the Medieval German folk legend, a sort of nasty Robin Hood with a chip on his shoulder. In this case, humor is no laughing matter.
Runnicles is expert in this music, he clearly adores it and treats it like a pinnacle of the orchestral literature. For a while he had the rest of us believing it, too.
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Public Art We Love to Hate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I took the official tour of Atlanta’s Beltline project last week, something I highly recommend. It’s a great way to grasp the sheer ambition of the Beltline, which will combine greenspace, trails, transit and new development along 22 miles of abandoned railway in Atlanta’s urban core. The plan also calls for sculptures, murals and other forms of public art to be placed along the Beltline.
Intriguingly, our guide chose to discuss the public art aspect of the Beltline as we passed Sol LeWitt’s much-maligned “54 Columns” at the corner of Glen Iris Drive and Highland Avenue in the old Fourth Ward neighborhood. The unpainted cinderblock towers, intended to evoke Atlanta’s skyline, have been hailed by some in the art world. But more often they been described as looking like an unfinished construction site. Over the years, the piece has been the object of beautification efforts. Dogwoods were planted among the towers, only to be ordered removed by the Fulton County Arts Council. A couple of years ago, someone painted one of the towers Pepto-Bismol pink.
If public art is placed along the Beltline — and if the City of Atlanta steps up its efforts to fund public art in general, as many artists are pushing for — there surely will be a few more controversial and even despised public artworks in our future. But as the artist Richard Serra — no stranger to controversy when it came to his public artwork — once said: “I don’t think it’s the function of art to be pleasing.”
What do you think? Is “54 Columns” brilliant or awful? Are there other public art pieces you love to hate?
Permalink | Comments (68) | Categories: Visual arts
Cutting Edge in College Park
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s a simple, inexpensive way to bring art to more people — and breathe life into a struggling downtown retail district: put art in vacant storefronts. That’s what the fledgling College Park Arts Council has done in their historic community near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The program costs virtually nothing, promotes the work of local artists, beautifies the street, and draws attention to the fact that retail space is available.
Most of the artists live in College Park, says Don Shomaker, who heads the arts council. Many — like Mandy Sussey, whose work is shown in the photo above — have never had a gallery show. “It’s been great,” Sussey told me. “I’ve sold a couple of pieces.”
This isn’t an entirely new idea. Los Angeles has a very successful “phantom gallery” program that places paintings, sculpture, installations and even performance art in storefronts. You can read more about it here. But it’s not done very often in metro Atlanta. Think of the possibilities for dusty downtowns, empty stores in malls, and even unoccupied ground-level retail in new condo towers.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Visual arts
Robert Spano, Conductor of the Year
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robert Spano, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s music director since 2001, has been named conductor of the year by Musical America, a performing arts directory and subscription-based news/reviews Website.
The award will be presented Dec. 13 at New York’s Lincoln Center. The announcement reads:
CONDUCTOR OF THE YEAR: Known for his richly inventive programming, Robert Spano possesses all the right qualities to bring an American orchestra success: solid musicianship, intellectual curiosity, and a palpable enthusiasm that is contagious on both sides of the footlights. Under his leadership, the Atlanta Symphony has flourished, commissioning countless new works and exploring unusual concert formats.
Musical America’s gold medal award, Musician of the Year, will go to Anna Netrebko, a charismatic Russian soprano who is the current darling of the opera world.
The other awards will go to composer of the year Kaija Saariaho, from Finland; instrumentalist of the year Charles Rosen, an 80-year-old American pianist-scholar; and ensemble of the year Chanticleer, a San Francisco-based a capella choir.
In the past, many of the heavy-weight conductors with a significant U.S. career have won Musician of the Year awards, including Michael Tilson Thomas (1971), Eugene Ormandy (1975), James Levine (1984), Georg Solti (1988), Robert Shaw (1992, former ASO music director), Kurt Masur (1993), Seiji Ozawa (1998), Simon Rattle (2002) and Bernard Haitink (2007).
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Classical Music
Public Art in Motion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thanks to a partnership between the Bureau of Cultural Affairs and MARTA, artwork by five Atlanta artists — Sheila Pree Bright, Kathryn Kolb, Mario Petrirena, Michael Reese and Larry Walker — five from each — are moving through the city on the side panels of MARTA buses through Nov. 23.
For a stationary viewing, go to City Gallery East, where the pieces are also on view.
If you’ve seen any, please give us a report.
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The Art of Lost Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A few years ago, as Robert Spano was preparing to conduct the world premiere of a concerto in a far away city — it might have been with the Boston Symphony — I asked him what seemed like the obvious question: “Is the music any good? Will it have ‘legs’?”
I was all ears: What I had hoped to hear was a contextualized assessment of the new piece, maybe with asides on what brash young composers are up to today, in terms of recent, sobering trends, in terms of the long arc of music history. (And since I wouldn’t be there to review, there was no performer-critic biases at stake.)
Spano’s answer? “All I can tell you is whether I like it or not. I can’t tell you how good it is, and we’re the only ones who can’t. No one who hears [next month’s premiere] can predict how future listeners will respond. My job is to give it the best send-off possible.”
After that premiere, in other words, the concerto will have to fend for itself — and future generations will decide what pieces from the early 21st century are the winners.
That exchange came to mind Saturday evening when New Trinity Baroque, an Atlanta period-instrument and choral ensemble, performed nine madrigals by an obscure Renaissance composer named Francesco Portinaro. (Here’s a preview article about the concert, from Saturday’s AJC. It was a terrific show, too, beautifully sung and played.)
Portinaro’s madrigals hadn’t been performed in 450 years — making them modern-day premieres, albeit born in an era where, to us, history’s “winners” have already been decided.
The two-foldedness of the evening heaped a staggering weight on the audience. Isn’t a good piece of music just a good piece of music? Isn’t there always another spot at the music-master table?
Yes and no. To pick up on Spano’s observations, a brand new piece of music fits within just two dimensions — the past and present — whereas a rediscovered old work is like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We know, or think we know, its boundaries. New Trinity helped in this regard, interspersing Portinaro with madrigals by established masters who surrounded him: Palestrina, Monteverdi, d’India and others.
Our perception and expectation and appreciation is twisted in ways overt and subtle. Since Palestrina created and perfectly fits the “Palestrina” niche, for example, another composer who’s too similar would get fewer points for style. Few composers in history have as much bold personality as Monteverdi — with an immediately identifiable sound world — so an unfamiliar composer is likely to seem meek in comparison.
Where did Portinaro fit into this? Judging from Saturday’s introduction of just nine madrigals, he’s a skilled composer capable of greatness, even if it’s in the one-hit-wonder category.
His seven-voice madrigal “Occhi piangete,” to Petrarch’s poem “Weep now, my eyes” was fantastically memorable, engaging and emotional, a delight to savor.
Still, we have no way of knowing of if his music has legs. On New Trinity’s program, biased to highlight Portinaro, he held his own.
Question is, does he have the elbows to force his way into an already packed late Renaissance-early Baroque canon? That’s for future generations to decide.
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REVIEW: ASO sings Brahms ‘German Requiem’
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Along with great barbecue, abundant trees, a booming cultural scene, suburban sprawl and no water, we’re living in Brahms Requiem country.
Johannes Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem,” an 1869 concert-hall mass for the dead, places “German” as the adjective although the composer famously said he’d just soon have named it “A Human Requiem.” It’s a piece that many listeners find to be the most extreme — the most spiritual and humane, outwardly hardened yet soul-soothing, world-weary yet optimistic, contemplative and “deep” — in the entire classical repertoire.
And it was especially close to the late Robert Shaw, whose Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performances drew international acclaim. They last performed it together in 1997, celebrating the centennial of the composer’s death. You still hear Atlantans and New Yorkers talk about those Symphony Hall and Carnegie Hall shows, which felt like profoundly spiritual events.
That legacy spurred the Telarc label — which recorded Shaw and the ASO’s interpretation in 1984 — to re-record it this weekend under current music director Robert Spano.
That Brahms created his Requiem more as a comfort to the living than as a mourning for the dead allows a conductor to tailor it to his own conceptions of death (and also life). Spano’s reading Thursday might be labeled “objective” — emotionally neutral, ferociously precise, never indulgent to the needs of the heart, the psyche or the soul.
Most of the gravitas that plunged this music down to near its charted depths came from the ASO Chorus — Shaw’s hand-burnished instrument, now directed by his acolyte, Norman Mackenzie — which seems to retain a sort of institutional artistry. An ASO Chorus performance of this Requiem will always be a big deal.
Still, Spano sparked moments of hair-raising intensity throughout, and these accumulated as the work progressed. The martial strokes of the second movement, so rhythmically taut, suggested an otherworldly hand was guiding the proceedings. By the penultimate movement (of seven) the collective power of orchestra and chorus made it feel like the greatest place on the planet to be at a concert.
The two vocal soloists added immeasurably. Mariusz Kwiecien (sounds like “creation”), from Poland, is a once-in-a-generation baritone. With a gorgeous voice, he sang in lyrical, liquid tones that caressed a phrase, and also with the stone-tablet authority of an Old Testament prophet.
Soprano Twyla Robinson, too, is a major catch. With perfect diction, crisply articulated consonants and a warm, wide vibrato, she purred and comforted — finding the child in the mother, and vice versa, for the line “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” Bliss. (Robinson is making Atlanta a regular destination: she’ll be back in the spring to sing the Countess in Atlanta Opera’s “Marriage of Figaro.”)
The evening opened with Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music,” five minutes of ceremonial sounds that are better than any mortal, even an elevated freemason, could deserve.
Spano also programmed Jennifer Higdon’s “river sings song to trees” — note the lower case — which was initially the middle movement of her triptych depicting Atlanta, “CityScape.” It was commissioned by the ASO, which premiered and recorded it in 2002.
It’s remarkable as a stand-alone work. There are episodes that conjure a birds-eye view of sprawling Atlanta (as seen from an airplane flying into Hartsfield-Jackson, perhaps), of a velvety, verdant landscape. These give way to a sort of Buckhead pastorale — where Higdon grew up — of backyard forests and twittering birds, interrupted by the bustle of the city (or at least of Lenox Square mall.)
The images aren’t quite that precise, to be honest, but Higdon manages to charmingly evoke her own semi-urban domain without sinking into hoary cliches of city and nature. The composer now lives in Philadelphia but she bounded on stage to take a bow, another unexpected moment in a concert of surprises.
It Pays to Be Audience-Friendly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
These are boom times for big arts & culture organizations, according to the latest issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Private giving to major arts & culture institutions rose 51 percent last year — the biggest gain for any group among the nation’s 400 largest philanthropic institutions. Overall giving to large charities rose 4.3 percent, according to this story.
Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center — the eighth biggest private fundraiser among arts & culture institutions — saw a modest 1.4 percent increase in private support last year, the report said.
One of the most stunning fundraising successes was at the San Francisco Symphony, which saw an 80 percent increase in private giving last year, to $63.5 million. The symphony attracted major gifts with a $24-million project called Keeping Score, which introduces new audiences to classical music via television, radio and an engaging, audience-friendly website.
“Using philanthropy to support something that’s innovative, that could support the art form, has real traction with our donors,” Robert W. Lasher, the symphony’s director of development, told the Chronicle.
What are the best audience-friendly initiatives you’ve seen? A great family program? A cool website? What makes you want to give to the arts?
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