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Trombone & Jazz Influences With The New York Philharmonic

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 31 May 2023 14:23; Written by Jack Angstreich

Marin Alsop conducts the New York Philharmonic with Joseph Alessi on trombone. Photo by Chris Lee

At David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, on Saturday evening, May 27th, I had the privilege to attend an excellent concert featuring the New York Philharmonic, under the outstanding direction of guest conductor Marin Alsop.

The program began very promisingly with a marvelous account of Samuel Barber’s striking, too seldom heard Symphony No. 1 (in One Movement) which, if not quite of the artistic stature of such extraordinary and celebrated works as his Violin Concerto, Adagio for Strings, or Knoxville: Summer of 1915, nonetheless proved rewarding. The composer’s program note for the New York premiere—performed by this ensemble in 1937—is worth quoting:

The form of my Symphony in One Movement is a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony. It is based on three themes of the initial Allegro non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character. The Allegro opens with the usual exposition of a main theme, a more lyrical second theme, and a closing theme. After a brief development of the three themes, instead of the customary recapitulation, the first theme, in diminution, forms the basis of ascherzosection(Vivace).The second theme (oboe over muted strings) then appears in augmentation, in an extendedAndante tranquillo.An intense crescendo introduces the finale, which is a shortpassacagliabased on the first theme (introduced by the violoncelli and contrabassi), over which, together with figures from other themes, the closing theme is woven, thus serving as a recapitulation for the entire symphony.

The impressive Joseph Alessi, the principal trombonist for the Philharmonic, then entered the stage as soloist for the admirably performed US premiere of the enjoyable Trombone Concerto by the late, renowned jazz pianist and composer, Chick Corea, orchestrated by John Dickson. Alessi, who originally had asked Corea to write the concerto which was co-commissioned by this ensemble with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, and the Orquestra sinfônica do estado de São Paulo, provided the following summary:

The composition begins with a substantial introduction titled A Stroll Opening that includes free improvisation for the trombone followed by an interplay with harp, percussion, and piano. After the dialogue,A Strollbegins, inspired by Chick’s time living in New York City, walking uptown and downtown while taking in the sights and sounds of the Big Apple.

The second movement is titled Waltse for Joe. Chick was keen on exploring the very lyrical side of the trombone, and this part was composed to do just that. Beginning with an extended, beautiful string interlude, thiswaltseis reminiscent of the music of Erik Satie.

Hysteria was composed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this title was chosen to stress the chaos enveloping the world. The music is menacingly chromatic, apropos of the movement’s title, but it is at the same time lighthearted. The movement finishes with a harp and percussion vamp overlaid with an improvised trombone solo.

The fourth movement, Joe’s Tango, starts boldly with a strings-and-percussion vamp over a solo that is both agreeable and contrary, and then a cadenza that Chick composed. The melody then becomes very lyrical, riding on a vamp with a Latin flavor. The tempo slows and eventually ceases entirely. Finally, a new, faster vamp creates a flourish of activity to finish the concerto. The first version of Joe’s Tango ended peacefully, similar to the previous movements. I had to summon the courage to ask Chick if he might consider rewriting the ending. After I explained to him that his composition suggested to me the idea of two strangers, reluctant to really engage, dancing an increasingly impassioned tango and finally surrendering in the embrace of one another, Chick agreed and created a bold ending.

In the opening movement, one at times can detect the influence of Aaron Copland. The second movement is brief but not without enchantments while the third is also charming, and thefinaleis especially inventive. Enthusiastic applause elicited a wonderful encore played by the trombonist with Dickson—who also composed it—at the piano: Danza Eterna.

It was the second half of the event, however, that was especially memorable: a sterling realization of a selection—by Alsop—from Sergei Prokofiev’s three Suites drawn from his glorious score for the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, some of the greatest music ever composed in this genre.

May '23 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 30 May 2023 22:23; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-ray Releases of the Week

Petite Maman

(Criterion)

The best film at the 2021 New York Film Festival was, unsurprisingly, French director Celine Sciamma’s emotionally precise and ingenious follow-up to her brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the best film at the 2019 festival. In this understated but shattering chamber piece, an eight-year-old girl whose beloved grandmother has just died accompanies her parents to clean out the grandmother’s house, where she meets and befriends a familiar-looking young girl.

Sciamma, probably the most accomplished and confident filmmaker working today, has created a movie that’s almost impossible to describe: The Twilight Zone meets Ponette gives a broad outline, but Sciamma works on such a fragile, delicate canvas that the effect is of a master miniaturist working at the very height of her powers, like a Vermeer or a Fauré, one with insights into the thinking of children of all ages—as well as their parents.

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge

(Film Movement Classics)

Shohei Imamura’s documentary-like portraits of the underbelly of Japanese society are filled with underdogs who are allowed to display their genuine humanity. His last feature, made in 2001 (Imamura died five years later, at age 80), is of a piece with his other films: shot through with sardonic humor and humane observation, it follows a middle-aged Tokyo office worker who goes to a small village, where he meets and has a sexual relationship with a woman who shoots out a geyser of water during lovemaking—whenever she’s “full,” as she tells him.

Simultaneously realistic and symbolic—which the title wittily alludes to—what in lesser hands might have been contrived or stilted becomes a wonderfully offbeat romantic comedy of manners, carried along by Shin’ichirō Ikebe’s inventively boisterous score. The film looks muted but sharply detailed on Blu-ray; the lone extra is a short video essay.

In-Theater Releases of the Week

Close to Vermeer

(Kino Lorber)

“What makes a Vermeer a Vermeer?” is the question that opens Suzanne Raes’ meticulously observed documentary, which examines the enigmatic painter on the eve of the largest Vermeer exhibition ever mounted (now at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum through June 4). Curators Gregor Weder and Pieter Roelofs hope to acquire as many Vermeers as they can, and Raes follows them through Europe and the U.S. as they visit other museums. Raes also documents the grunt work behind the scenes, as personnel prepares the galleries for the upcoming show and closely analyze certain works that have come into possession with the high-powered tools available to them.

But for all its painstaking depiction of the legwork needed to put together the exhibit, the film shows the esteem, even love, that art experts feel for Vermeer. There are touching reminiscences by Weder and painter/Vermeer expert Jonathan Janson about the first (Weder) and most recent (Janson) times they saw a new Vermeer painting. Both men get so emotional that they must stop speaking and compose themselves, since the memories still have a powerful hold on them. And that’s what Vermeer’s art still does to viewers.

White Balls on Walls

(Icarus Films)

The changing landscape of the art world—which has been white male-focused for centuries, as the film’s cheeky title, sardonically intoned by museum curator Charl Landvreugd, underscores—is illuminatingly chronicled in Sarah Vos’ documentary about behind-the-scenes workings at Amsterdam’s modern-art Stedelijk Museum, as its leaders try and adjust their focus.

Questions and worries abound on whatever is decided—adding more non-white and female artists to enter the collection while jettisoning problematic masters like Picasso might seem like merely filling quotas to some—and Vos records Zoom and in-person meetings where curators and administrators hash out the difficulties of walking a thin line that may subject them to criticism no matter what they decide.

4K Release of the Week

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

(Warner Bros)

This overlong, clunky sequel to 2019’s Shazam! follows the heavy-handed blueprint of so many recent superhero movies: drawn-out, haphazardly thought-out subplots with ludicrous villains and improbable allies that ultimately save the day.

Even with Helen Mirren and Lucy Lui as the dastardly gods—and a game Rachel Zegler as their wavering comrade—director David F. Sandberg is unable to shake the torpor off, although his appealing “good guys/gals” cast (led by Zachary Levi, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey and Meagan Good) makes it at least watchable. The whole thing has a high-style gloss in 4K; extras include featurettes, Sandberg’s commentary and a half-hour of deleted scenes.

CD Release of the Week

Beethoven—Complete Piano Concertos

(Reference Recordings)

Just a few months ago, in a crowded pool of complete Beethoven piano concerto recordings, young Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang made an impressive splash; now veteran keyboard master Garrick Ohlsson takes the latest stab at traversing one of the most imposing concerto cycles in the entire repertoire.

Another accomplished Beethoven interpreter, Sir Donald Runnicles, sensitively leads the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, and these recordings—made during last summer’s music festival—find Ohlsson in top form, playing these five imposing works with control and finesse. In fact, the towering fifth concerto (the “Emperor”) may approach the summit of Ohlsson’s six decades of Beethoven performing.

Broadway Play Review—David Auburn’s “Summer, 1976” with Laura Linney

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 24 May 2023 19:38; Written by Kevin Filipski

Summer, 1976

Written by David Auburn; directed by Daniel Sullivan

Performances through June 18, 2023

Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

manhattantheatreclub.com

Jessica Hecht and Laura Linney in David Auburn's Summer, 1976 (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

David Auburn’s best play, the Tony-winning Proof, showed he can handle intimate subject matter with finesse and sensitivity; his new two-hander, Summer, 1976, about a short friendship that lingers long after, is further proof, so to speak, of his ability.

Diana and Alice, who live in Columbus, Ohio, meet through their five-year-old daughters: single mom Diana is the mother of Gretchen, and married Alice is Holly’s mother. As the daughters start to play together, the women tentatively begin to hang out: they talk, drink iced tea, smoke a joint and, eventually, become quite close, through the ups and downs of their other relationships—until the summer of our nation’s bicentennial ends.

Auburn has cogently written an “opposites attract” situation, with Diana a smug college art teacher and artist and Alice a stay-at-home wife and mother. Diana mocks Alice’s choice of reading material (James Clavell’s Shogun, of all things, which Diana calls a “depressingly middlebrow novel”), while Alice is put off by Diana’s airs: “I’d already had to look at her art since four or five of her pieces were scattered around on the porch—she said she worked out there sometimes—and get a mini-lecture about each one, except strike the ‘mini’ part,” she sardonically relates about her first visit to Diana's home.

The play primarily comprises two monologues that occasionally intrude upon each other; for much of the time, the actresses speak to the audience and rarely acknowledge or reply to the other. Only in the final scene, set nearly three decades later, do they truly interact.

Although there are easy motherhood jokes (Diana sneers, “I hate the name Holly,” referring to Alice’s daughter, but Diana named hers Gretchen) and subplots about emotionally unavailable men (Diana finds Alice’s handyman attractive but it turns out—surprise—that he and Alice’s husband are carrying on a secret affair) that are straight out of Playwriting 101, Summer, 1976 eloquently comes alive onstage.

That adroit director Daniel Sullivan—already attuned to the rhythms of Auburn’s language (he also won a Tony for directing Proof)—subtly moves the actresses around John Lee Beatty’s simple but evocative set of a couple of chairs and a table, with an assist from Japhy Weideman’s expressive lighting that recalls Paul Klee, whose art is mentioned in the dialogue and is part of the reason the women run into each other in 2003, in the poignant final scene.

As Diana, Laura Linney gives another of her astute and captivating portrayals, being intense or ironical, exasperating or exasperated in turn. Linney’s always formidable presence seems to have rubbed off on the usually mannered Jessica Hecht, whose Alice is only occasionally afflicted with the affectations and tricks Hecht usually conjures.

She still has her share of irritating moments, but for the most part Hecht nearly keeps up with Linney. Though how Hecht got a Tony nomination and Linney did not is mystifying: did the nominators actually see Summer, 1976?

Champion Pianist Bruce Liu Performs at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 24 May 2023 13:41; Written by Jack Angstreich

Bruce Liu at the piano. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, May 19th, I had the pleasure of attending the memorable New York recital debut of pianist Bruce Liu, the winner of the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition.

The program began charmingly and promisingly with an admirable account of Frédéric Chopin’s sparkling Rondo à la mazur in F Major, Op. 5, one of the composer’s earliest works—written when he was just sixteen—but one not without Romantic depths. Robert Schumann praised it, saying that “whoever does not yet know Chopin would be well advised to begin with this piece.”

A more histrionic strand of Chopin was then presented with an accomplished rendition of one of his ballades—it was the No. 2 in F Major, Op. 38—a genre that the composer invented. The first half of the program concluded impressively with the at times dazzling Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, written when Chopin was only seventeen. (The composer was one of Chopin’s favorites, along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Vincenzo Bellini.) Schumann’s review of the piece included the line: “Hats off, gentlemen—a genius.”

The second part of the recital was even more remarkable beginning with a beautiful realization of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 35—indeed the famous Funeral March movement was one of the highlights of the evening. Schumann’s description of the work is worth quoting: “That he should have called it a ‘sonata’ suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.”

Also notable was an exquisite version of the Trois nouvelles etudes, Op. Posthumous. The program proper ended with an astonishing performance of Franz Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan. In 1841, the composer told Marie d’Agoult that he was “working like a madman at some tremendous fantasies. Norma, La sonnambula, Freischütz, Maometto, Moïse, and Don Juan will be ready in five or six days. It is a new vein I have found and want to exploit. The effect these latest productions make is vastly superior to my previous things.” The audience’s response to Liu’s playing was incredibly enthusiastic, eliciting an amazing seven encores!: Jean-Philippe Rameau’s marvelous "Les tendres plaintes" from Suite in D Major from Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin; Chopin’s Écossaise in D-flat Major from Three Écossaises, Op. posth. 72, No. 3; Erik Satie’s superb Gnossienne No. 1; Liszt’s excellent "La campanella" in G-sharp Major fromGrandes Études de Paganini;Isaac Albéniz’s "El Puerto" fromIberia,Book I; Chopin’s Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5, "Black Keys"; and Nikolai Kapustin’s jazzy Variations for Piano, Op. 41.

Reviews

Trombone & Jazz Influences With The New York Philharmonic

May '23 Digital Week IV

Broadway Play Review—David Auburn’s “Summer, 1976” with Laura Linney

Champion Pianist Bruce Liu Performs at Carnegie Hall

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