by Sedgwick Clark The Juilliard String Quartet has always seemed to me the quintessential American quartet––lean, intense, adventurous in repertoire, living on the edge performance-wise. So it was nice to see that it had received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in February, along with fellow honorees Julie Andrews and Dolly Parton, among [...]
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By Edna Landau To ask a question, please write Ask Edna. This week, I am deviating slightly from my usual format and answering the one question I have been asked repeatedly throughout my career: How can you tell if someone has the potential to be great? Although there is no response that fits all situations, [...]
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By Rachel Straus March 29 – April 9 Eiko & Koma The Japanese avant-garde artists, whose home has been the U.S. since 1976, present the New York premiere of Naked at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. They will be intermittently naked, but what will stand out are their glacially slow movement tableaus that change one’s perception [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Esa-Pekka Salonen’s three-week Hungarian Echoes “festival” of works by Haydn, Ligeti, and Bartók with the New York Philharmonic has become one of the season’s highlights. On Tuesday I heard the second program again, the one with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. To hear this emotionally devastating score played, sung, and conducted so extraordinarily well, [...]
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by Edna Landau To ask a question please write Ask Edna. Dear Edna: So wonderful of you to take questions! I run an ensemble called “Ljova and the Kontraband” which primarily performs its own original music. Its sound is informed by the classical, folk, jazz and world music traditions. Whenever I hear an artist speak [...]
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By Rachel Straus The mot du moment in the New York dance scene is “curate.” Dances are usually presented, but museums—From the Whitney to the Museum of Arts & Design—are getting in on the fun. Museums, however, don’t present. And so the fifth “Works & Process” program at the Guggenheim Museum was called “Watermill Quintet—Robert Wilson [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 and died in 1911, allowing New Yorkers to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth and the centennial of his death with a pair of symphony cycles just two seasons apart. Neither satisfied. Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez shared the first cycle, leading the Berlin Staatskapelle [...]
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By Cathy Barbash Nixon in China has come and gone from the Met, but its interpolated excerpt of The Red Detachment of Women brought back memories of a previous attempt to tour the entire work in the U.S., and made me wonder whether in fact Americans know it only in this mediated form. First staged [...]
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by Keith Clarke As music awards go, you can’t get much more glitzy than the $1m Birgit Nilsson Prize that Riccardo Muti has just picked up. Well, he doesn’t actually pick it up until October, at a ceremony in the Stockholm Royal Opera in the presence of H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf and H.M. Queen [...]
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by Edna Landau Dear Edna: I am a violinist in an Artist Diploma program at a conservatory and am currently preparing for some recitals, including my first in my home town. This includes thinking about what I am going to wear. I notice a trend among female violinists to wear strapless gowns and have heard [...]
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