New York Arts

John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby in Boston

editor@newyorkarts.net (Michael Miller) — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:45:53 +0000

“So we beat on, boats against the currents, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway’s concluding insight in The Great Gatsby is one of the great closing sentences in literature, and one of the great images of our human helplessness to escape the past. It’s also the line that ends John Harbison’s Gatsby opera, which—13 years after its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera—just had its first complete Boston performance, in a concert version produced by Emmanuel Music (the musical organization Harbison co-founded in 1970 with Craig Smith at Boston’s Emmanuel Church, mainly to play all of Bach’s cantatas as part of every Sunday’s liturgy). Harbison is now Principal Guest Conductor at Emmanuel, which has long been associated with his music, including the very first public performance, in 1997, of the first two scenes from The Great Gatsby.

Vladimir Jurowski Conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Prokofiev and Shostakovich

editor@newyorkarts.net (Michael Miller) — Mon, 20 May 2013 06:58:25 +0000

Crossing the color line. In the twentieth century Russian music became a standoff between revolution and counter-revolution, the irony being that the White Russian composers who fled the Bolsheviks were the true revolutionaries while the Reds who stayed to endure Soviet rule were forced to toe the line of backward-looking conservatism. But the music isn't easily color-coded. Vladimir Jurowski led a concert of neoclassical Stravinsky and romantic Prokofiev that betrayed almost no revolutionary instincts, ending with the painful wail of the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony, whose Soviet credentials were never pure enough to satisfy the apparatchiks of the Composers Union.

Yeats’s Ireland – New York Arts and Anthroposophy NYC present a musical reading by Lloyd Schwartz, with James Cleveland, Fiddle, and Dorien Staljanssens, Flute – Saturday, June 1, 7pm

editor@newyorkarts.net (Michael Miller) — Sun, 19 May 2013 02:22:21 +0000

On Saturday, June 1, 2013, at 7pm, in connection with Michael Miller’s exhibition of photographs, Ireland, and Joanna Gabler’s exhibition of her “transcapes,” Nature and her Essence, the acclaimed poet, Lloyd Schwartz, Senior Classical Music Editor of New York Arts, will read poems by W. B. Yeats and other Irish poets. The reading will be [...]

Shostakovich’s Rediscovered Opera ‘Orango’ and the Fourth Symphony in London

editor@newyorkarts.net (Michael Miller) — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:57:10 +0000

By the skin of his teeth. As a bizarre offshoot of the workers' paradise, Soviet ideology boasted of creating a New Man, with possible help from the apes — before DNA was discovered, crackpot experiments that involved interbreeding humans with lower primates were conceived. The only success was fictitious, a creature named Orango who began life as a French journalist before being injected with chimpanzee serum. He is the sullen, furry anti-hero of a satirical opera begun by Shostakovich in 1932, and although the weirdness of the libretto may have been a stumbling block, another was probably political: Orango spoofed the decadent West (the creature uses his intelligence to become a stock market manipulator but retains a King Kong-like appetite for blondes). Did Orango's brutish manners shave a bit too close to Stalin? Or did he dangerously mock the promise of a New Man?

BSO Appoints Andris Nelsons as its New Music Director

editor@newyorkarts.net (Michael Miller) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:08:51 +0000

Given some of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished elder statesmen music directors—Karl Muck, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine—it’s probably surprising that they have appointed 34-year-old Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons to succeed James Levine as the BSO’s 15th music director since 1881. Still, it’s useful to remember that the BSO also [...]