Recently, in a conversation about beginning relationships with new communities, one of our new ArtsEngaged trainers, Anne Cushing-Reid, commented that, especially where there is negative history to be overcome, “There’s a lot of coffee in our future.”
Category: AJBlogs
Guest Columnist: Empty Room at the Top
Here is the latest piece by CultureCrash’s regular guest columnist, Lawrence Christon. Christopher O’Riley, of course, is best known to some of us for his classical-piano interpretations of Radiohead, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith.
On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — Take Two
It seems to me pretty obvious that nowadays it’s far easier to stage a successful Hamlet or Three Sisters than a successful Aida or Siegfried. And one reason is equally obvious: finding an actor to play Hamlet or Masha is no problem; finding a dramatic soprano for Aida or a Heldentenor for Siegfried is difficult to impossible
Superlative Numbers At the Met. But Crazy Ones Too
Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a press release saying it had welcomed its one-millionth visitor to its special Costume Institute exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Really? Truth is, we can’t be sure of that. Because of the complex installation, actual numbers are nearly impossible to compute.
Monday Recommendation: Luciana Souza
Luciana Souza, The Book Of Longing (Sunnyside)
Returning to recording, Luciana Souza is inspired by poetry. The Book Of Longing finds her drawing inspiration from poets of two centuries …
On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — A Landmark Book on Opera in Performance
Joe Horowitz on Conrad L. Osborne’s new Opera as Opera: The State of the Art — “the most important English-language treatment of opera in performance ever written.”
Wayne Shorter At 85
In honor of the day, Doug Ramsey offers some Shorter compositions from widely spaced periods of his career.
Headed Toward The Weekend And Still Catching Up
Fred Hersch Trio, Heartsongs (Sunnyside)
Sunnyside’s reissue of Hersch’s 1989 sessions reminds us how impressive the pianist was in his recording debut as a leader at the age of 34.
Yale’s Intriguing “Leonardo” Examination Gets a Grade of “Incomplete”: Few Leonardos, Many Photos
Since another Leonardo “discovery” has been much in the news of late (including this recent twist, questioning its authorship), the Yale Art Gallery’s summer exhibition, Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio, has more topicality than the museum’s chief curator Laurence Kanter might have imagined when he began planning it.
Recent Listening In Brief
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dreams And Daggers (Mack Avenue)
The two-CD collection has 23 songs, five of which have original lyrics by the singer. The other pieces are standards, some seldom heard, by Kurt Weil, Langston Hughes, Irving Berlin, Julie Styne, Bob Dorough, Noel Coward and Frank Loesser.