Aida at the Met

I felt quite privileged on Wednesday night to go to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. I was the guest of a friend (who for his own political reasons wishes to remain unidentified), who had been given amazing Grand Tier tickets for free. We went to see Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, which had its premiere in Cairo on December 24, 1871. The opera was fantastic. I had seen Aida in the past on television, but this was the first time I had seen it live. Although I'm not an active opera buff, I do enjoy going when I can, and Italian operas are of course the best (yes, I'm biased). I've seen live both Tosca (my favorite libretto) and La Traviata (possibly my favorite musical score) a number of times. Aida is the story of the pseudonymous Ethiopian princess enslaved to the Egyptian princess Amneris, both of whom are in love with the Egyptian general Radamès, although he is in love only with Aida. Of course there love is doomed and there's a tragic ending. For our performance, Aida was performed by soprano Liudmyla Monasyrska, and she did a truly magnificent job. She sang beautifully, and I was entranced by two of her arias. The other performers were quite good, although none of them stood out for me as well as the soprano. The orchestra was aptly conducted by Fabio Luisi, but I found the tuba player a bit too loud at times, to the point that he overpowered the singers. The famous triumphal march scene was spectacular, however, and the ballet sequences well choreographed. I realized that the triumphal march was scored by Verdi so that it could be repeated again and again to accommodate the size of the actual parade on stage. In some performances, an entire retinue of animals including elephants and giraffes have been included, extending the musical sequence a great deal, but in this performance they kept it to a minimum. It's a shame actually because it is such beautiful music, and believe me when I tell you that you know this music and love it as well. (Here's a YouTube video of the scene as performed in the past at the Met Opera.) I did find it strange to realize afterwards that all the main singers in the performance were from former Soviet countries (Ukraine, Russia, Georgia), which I think says much about the globalism of the arts in the new millennium.

On a personal note, it was interesting to go back to the Met Opera the other night (image at right was the view from our seats!), because I had not been to that theater since my very first live opera experience...30 years ago! Zio PL had gotten free tickets, and since Zia FL couldn't go, he took me. I remember my parents driving me into the City where we met him at Lincoln Center. We saw Rigoletto from one of the tiers...and I actually sat next to Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (they left during intermission). It was an amazing experience overall, but one I could hardly share with classmates the next day as they all thought it was weird that I would even want to go to an opera. In retrospect, it was definitely one of those rewarding experiences that I have cherished my whole life. I just hope it's not another 30 years before I go back there again!

MOMIX Botanica

Last night, AR and I went to the Joyce Theater to see the dance performance Botanica by MOMIX. I don't want to call this post a review, because I'm not qualified to review dance. I don't in fact go to many dance productions, but after last night I realize that I need to make a point of going more often because I enjoy them. This show in particular was excellent, the choreography superb. The MOMIX website states: “Known internationally for presenting work of exceptional inventiveness and physical beauty, MOMIX is a company of dancer-illusionists under the direction of Moses Pendleton. For 20 years, MOMIX has been celebrated for its ability to conjure up a world of surrealistic images using props, light, shadow, humor and the human body.” Last night’s show, Botanica, combined modern interpretive dance with props and costumes in a dreamlike paean to evolution and nature's cyclical existence, moving through all four seasons. Parts of it were humorous (even silly at times), but other parts were emotional (also in part because of the music), and all of it was charged with heightened eroticism (half-naked, very fit, beautiful people always helps). The Centaurs, where dancers made up the horse-half of the humanoid dancers, were amazing in their animalistic choreography. In some ways, the performance was like dance meets Julie Taymor meets Cirque du Soleil—a fascinating combination to say the least. The image above is from the opening sequence associated with winter (image: Broadwayworld.com). Shockingly, we paid only $59 for the tickets and had excellent seats in the orchestra section. Less expensive seats were available too. To pay so little to see a great show in NYC is almost unheard of, so it made the experience even more enjoyable. The YouTube video below shows you highlights of the performance, but if you want to see more, there is another longer YouTube video that gives you a sense of the entire show. If you get a chance to see MOMIX on tour, do so. You may find it a little odd at times, but you won’t be disappointed.

Week of the Arts in NYC

You would think that after passing my Oral Exam in art history I might want to avoid art-related things this week, but as it turns out, I've had a great week for doing artsy things that one can only experience in NYC.

Last Friday, for instance, I went with JHC to see the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm not into performance art all that much (requires patience!) and I really don't like video art (I get migraines!), but I decided to go because we wanted to see the naked people. Yes, in this retrospective, the Yugoslavian-born Abramovic has men and women--clothed and unclothed--reenacting her performance pieces from the 1970s to the present, including one in which a nude man and woman face one another and visitors are invited to walk between them (and not touch them as they have become works of art, but a few people can't resist copping a feel). As you can tell from what I've already written, I loved the exhibition. It was so much more interesting because it was arranged in one exhibition space. Most performance pieces are individual works in isolation; to see them in one group like this as an unfolding of a life's artistic career with archival film footage and live demonstrations made it more thought-provoking. Abramovic successfully uses the fourth dimension of time/temporality to make sculpture (i.e. the body) come to life. Her current live performance in The Artist Is Present, in which visitors are invited to sit across a table from her and gaze at one another in silence, seemed at first dry and boring, but the more you watched them the more you found yourself feeling the discomfort and tranquility of non-verbal communication. My favorite performance piece was Nude with a Skeleton, in which a naked man lies on a table with a human skeleton on top of him. As he breathes, the skeleton rises and falls along with his chest. It makes for a fascinating presentation of the memento mori, juxtaposing issues of life and death, and by framing it with a sexy nude Abramovic encourages us to challenge our ideas about what is sexual, erotic, and fetishistic.

On Wednesday evening, I invited RL to join me at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for a special talk given by the Director, Thomas P. Campbell: "Discovering History: The Met and the Ancient World." The presentation was about the Met's long history and interest in participating in archaeological digs, preserving artifacts, and educating people through publications and exhibitions on ancient cultures such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. In part the talk served to offer an alternative perspective from the current trend of blaming museums of illegal acquisitions of ancient works. The talk was very interesting from a historical point of view, as Campbell used numerous historical photographs and a film showcasing this early part of the museum's history. The talk also was related to the exhibition Tutankhamun's Funeral that recently opened. (This, of course, has nothing to do with the highly-touted traveling exhibition of the treasures of King Tut from Cairo. Critics have been panning the blockbuster exhibition for focusing more on the spectacle of the pharaoh rather than presenting an accurate, scholarly exhibition to educate people, even though National Geographic is apparently a major sponsor of the show. Opening near Times Square with tickets selling for $28.50 each, I have no doubt that the exhibition is going to rake in a small fortune.)

Then on Thursday night I went with DC to the opening for the Hungarian Modernism show at the Shepherd & Derom Gallery on the Upper East Side. There weren't too many works on display that I liked all that much, but it was fascinating to see how early 20th-century movements like Cubism and Der Blaue Reiter influenced artists who may not have been in Paris or Munich at that time.

Last but not least, for my birthday PR & AM got me a ticket to go see with them the revival of La Cage aux Folles. We went last night. This new version opened a few weeks ago and stars Kelsey Grammer as Georges and Douglas Hodge as Albin. When it began, I felt like it was a bit campy (okay, aside from the obvious fact that it was about a drag queen night club), with lots of overacting and heightened melodrama. It also seemed outdated somehow, as if we'd heard all this before. But as the show continued, it got better and better. The music became more engaging, the acting improved, and the dance numbers with the "Cagelles" (see the image above) were fabulous. In fact, one of the great strengths of the musical was that the chorus of drag queens were all very muscular male dancers whose ability to do flips and twirls in heels and corsets made the whole performance even more amazing. Grammer was fine as Georges (sometimes his singing was off-key), but Hodge absolutely stole the show as his partner Albin (aka Zaza!). It's amazing to think this is Hodge's Broadway premiere. By the time the first act ended and he sang in full drag the song "I Am What I Am" you want to cry because of the intolerance that we know still exists in our world today. In that sense the show turned out to be more relevant today than ever before. To top it off, Georges and Albin share a big smooch at the end that makes you stand up and applaud for them. All in all, it was a fabulous way to end a week of great art-related events. What can I say: it's great to live in NYC.

UPDATE 5/2/10, 7:45am: As I was writing this post last evening, in particular about having been in Times Square to see a Broadway musical, someone was parking an SUV loaded with a bomb on the corner of 7th Avenue and 45th Street. NYC was saved from another potential terrorist attack because of the vigilance of a t-shirt vendor who noticed smoke coming from the car and smelled gunpowder. The entire area was evacuated last night. This morning, things are slowly getting back to normal. NYC is still an incredible place to live, especially for its arts scene, but it is worth remembering that 9/11 was only 8 & 1/2 years ago and we need to be aware.

Susan Boyle

There's nothing like an underdog who manages to come out on top. Susan Boyle (left) auditioned for Britain's Got Talent, a reality television program that has everyday people perform for judges who include the infamously acerbic Simon Cowell. Needless to say, this 47-year-old single, "never-been-kissed," unemployed woman from the village of Blackburn, Scotland blew everyone away, including Cowell. She sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical Les Miserables. She is simply amazing! The video on YouTube has been watched nearly 19 million times as of this morning. If you haven't seen it, do so immediately by clicking here and watching it (the embedding for the video clip has been disabled so I can't link to it from here). This woman will touch your heart. She proves that one should never judge a book by its cover, and that everyone has a little something inside of them that is bursting to come out. All you have to do is have a dream, take a risk, and try. We've got our fingers crossed for Ms. Boyle as she moves into the competition part of the show.

Review: Jerome Robbins

Of all the performing arts, ballet is one of the few that I don't seem to engage with as much as, say, symphonic performances, operas, and musical theater. It isn't that I'm not interested in it, because I am. The more I've observed dance, though, I've wondered if my hesitation has been from a lack of understanding about dance as an art form. Its abstraction and temporality on stage make it seem so fleeting and thus difficult to understand. I also believe that when it comes to dance, I prefer to be one of the dancers rather than an observer. Dance for me is more of a participatory act, and not one of interest simply to watch. I'm not suddenly planning to take ballet lessons, but I think this in part explains my ongoing desire to go dancing in clubs, as well as my earlier dance experiences doing Italian folk dancing (yes, in costume!) and being a Shark in my high school production of West Side Story (which, alas, I had to give up halfway through rehearsals). My aunt in Italy also was a successful ballerina after World War II, so there is no doubt that dance courses through my family's blood. Of course, the reality of dance is that it is not mere abstraction. Choreography is an intricate art form that involves harmonics, balance, scoring, and lots of practice. Its association with music ties it intricately to another art form, and that in some ways both complicates it and enhances its beauty.

In the spirit of dance then, I had a pleasant surprise at 3am this morning (see, insomnia isn't always a bad thing) when I caught a new PBS special from the American Masters series entitled Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. This was a 90-minute biographical tribute to Robbins, the supreme choreographer and director who has given us some of the greatest Broadway musicals of the 20th century. If that wasn't enough, he also choreographed and produced many exquisite ballets. I knew little about Robbins himself before watching this segment. Of course, I was more familiar with his work on Broadway, which I suspect is how most people know him. The special involves interviews with numerous people who knew and worked with Robbins, from the composer Stephen Sondheim to the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Still photographs, video sequences, and movie excerpts are interwoven with the interviews to highlight aspects of his long career.

Robbins was born into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of New York in 1918. He died in 1998 after nearly 60 years in the world of the performing arts. He never married and was bisexual. The greatest blight on his career came during the era of McCarthyism, when he succumbed to pressure out of fear of being outed and thus named names of friends and colleagues. The PBS special highlights at the end that this was one of the great guilts he carried with him until his death. According to critic Clive Barnes, Jerome Robbins "was an extremely demanding man, not always popular with his dancers, although always respected. He was a perfectionist who sometimes, very quietly, reached perfection." Looking at the segments for West Side Story, you realize in retrospect how shockingly modern and innovative Robbins' choreography was for the time, something I had not realized until watching this.

The picture you see here is by Jesse Gerstein and comes from the website for The Jerome Robbins Foundation and Robbins Rights Trust. The Foundation provides grants related to dance and the performing arts, and the Trust licenses Robbins' works. That website also has two essays on Robbins' life worth reading. For a gay/bisexual perspective, see this biographical account on glbtq.com, an online gay/lesbian encyclopedia of the arts (for which I have written a few articles). But without a doubt, check out the website for the PBS American Masters series on Robbins. There are links to videos from the special itself. I heartily recommend it for anyone interested in dance. Below, though, I found on YouTube an early video of "Cool" from a performance of West Side Story that I think really gives you a sense of the modernity of the choreography. It's fun to see it as part of a live performance too, even though the image quality isn't the greatest. As you watch it, notice the high level of athletic ballet steps integrated into what is essentially a pop tune musical. Fascinating stuff. (If you can't see the video, click here.)

Review: Inaugural Arts Performances

During the inauguration on Tuesday, there were three events related to the arts: Aretha Franklin (pictured above) singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," a quartet performing "Air and Simple Gifts," and Elizabeth Alexander reciting her poem "Praise Song for the Day." Overall, they were successful, but I'm not convinced they were all performed to their best. Few could argue that Aretha is one of the queens of soul music. We all love Aretha, and her performance of the American patriotic standard we all sang in grammar school was excellent. Her command over the piece was most evident in the third verse where she used her voice to repeat in every imaginable melodic way the words "let freedom ring," recitative-style as in Baroque opera. But what will we remember best about her performance? That amazing hat that she wore, carrying herself in the tradition of Southern black women wearing their best hats to church (The New York Times called it "an outsized, glamorized church-lady hat"). Word has come out in the news that both Franklin's performance and that of the quartet were partly prerecorded. Franklin sang, but the music and background chorus was prerecorded (well, that was a bit obvious, since a chorus was nowhere in sight). The quartet's performance of John Williams's "Air and Simple Gifts" was quite beautiful, even if the Obama children were getting a bit restless. Williams is best known to people for his instrumental scores to blockbuster movies like Star Wars. Apparently the version of "Air and Simple Gifts" we heard was prerecorded as well. The quartet (Itzhak Perlman on violin, Yo-Yo Ma on cello, Gabriella Montero on piano, and Anthony McGill on clarinet) did actually perform live, but their sound was not amplified, so only those in the immediate vicinity could hear them. To be honest, I was shocked that they were doing it live because it was so cold. Having played piano for many years, I can attest to the near impossibility of performing any instrument with cold hands. Your limbs need to be limber (interesting word play there) in order to maximize musical output. So I'm not disturbed that it was prerecorded. I still have to download the piece though, because I do think it had some wonderful parts, although my memory tells me the clarinet was lost in the recording. Of course, the whole thing would have been better had Joshua Bell (one of my fantasy boyfriends) had been performing on the violin, but that's just my opinion. As for Elizabeth Alexander's poem, I admit I was disappointed by her delivery of it. She spoke clearly, articulating each word, but I felt that by doing that she ruined the overall tone of the poem itself. You're better off reading the poem on your own. It has more meaning that way. It follows in the Walt Whitman tradition of American patriotism and the middle/working classes. I don't think it's a great poem. Maya Angelou's inaugural poem for President Clinton in 1992 still gives me chills with its opening words, "A rock, a river, a tree." But Alexander's poem does still speak loudly about the idea of America, and how love and patriotism work hand-in-hand to help define an America we dream will come. The webpages for MSNBC have articles on each of the performances with video clips, so if you want to read/see more, click here for the quartet and click here for Alexander's poem and her reading. Below is the video of Aretha Franklin's performance (or click here to see it on MSNBC).

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Streisand & Kennedy Center Honors

In the center of the photo above is Barbra Streisand, who was among the six people honored this past weekend with awards from the Kennedy Center Honors. The awards recognize lifetime achievement in the performing arts and are named in honor of President John F. Kennedy. The award winners were Streisand, Morgan Freeman, Twyla Tharp, George Jones, and Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who (which is a strange mix of people, if you ask me). Apparently performers like Beyonce and Queen Latifah performed Streisand numbers in her honor. The event was taped and will be shown on CBS on December 30th. Here's a news byte about the awards from The New York Times. However, I think another news byte is even funnier, because it focuses on the fact that Streisand and President Bush kissed one another in greeting and congratulations. It's well known how much she dislikes him, and he's no fan of hers either. Afterwards she said she wished she had been given the award next year by President Obama, but that she was at least pleased that he was going to be the next President. For more on that funny news byte from the AP, click here.