New York
Sarah Kent
I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.Sleeping on a platform in the workshop of an industrial designer on Broome Street, I felt the thrill of being in the right place at the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Follow that. It's the inevitable two-word mantra after a band has released a defining debut. The Strokes delivered their seminal statement of intent with Is This It in 2001, proving that a decent leather jacket, attitude and a rock riff will never let you down. Well, a decade on and with their fourth album out on Monday, there is much muttering of rock letting you down. Can Angles do anything to stop the rock rot?The simple answer is no. The more complex answer is maybe, if only the New York quintet would pull their fingers out and deliver something more cohesive. The opening track, “Machu Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This latest BCMG concert had its pleasures; and it had its irritations. Among the pleasures was a pair of works, one of them newly commissioned, by the under-performed Japanese composer Jo Kondo. The irritations were of the BBC variety: long pauses between short works while technicians in headphones faffed around with microphones and music stands, in sovereign disregard for the convenience of a large paying audience.Finally Oliver Knussen, who has himself always done difficult things without palaver, brought the players on for Birtwistle’s Silbury Air while the technos were still faffing. Read more ...
judith.flanders
The National Gallery has done it again: a small but perfectly formed exhibition in their little Room 1, now a by-word for intelligent show-making. Something new, something revelatory, something profoundly beautiful – what more can the gallery-goer ask? The Ashcan School is not widely known outside the USA, and I can think of no better introduction than this dozen-canvas-strong showing of some of the highlights (and, it must be admitted, a couple of low-lights as well).The highlights include The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) (pictured right, courtesy Milwaukee Art Museum, MACI Purchase Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hot on the heels of the Pet Shop Boys’ foray into ballet for Sadler’s Wells next month, it’s revealed that Sir Paul McCartney has composed a ballet for New York City Ballet, a love story called Ocean’s Kingdom.Scheduled to premiere on 22 September, the four-act ballet so far has 45 minutes of music, and a cast of around 40. The New York Times reports that the first act is having its first run-through next Thursday at the Lincoln Center, NYCB’s home stage.The world premiere will be half of a gala programme including George Balanchine’s Union Jack, as a compliment to Sir Paul’s Britishness. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
February is guitar month in New York City. Synchronicity rules at those two giants, the MoMA and the Met. At MoMA, Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 shows his austere guitar paintings, collages and drawings - often using newspaper, wallpaper and sand - as well as constructions of guitars made of cardboard and one of sheet metal and wire. “What is it? Painting or sculpture?” asked snooty visitors to his Paris studio. “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare,” Picasso, who didn’t play an instrument, is said to have replied.(Pictured right: Still life with Guitar, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string and painted wire Read more ...
theartsdesk
From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I didn't realise how much I liked dirt. Especially New York dirt. I was going to do a rant about boutique designer hotels, which seem ubiquitous in Manhattan. Major case in point: the Gramercy Park Hotel, where I used to stay in the Nineties and Noughties. It was independent, a bit scruffy, with a great bar full of artists and rock'n'roll types and other degenerates, a perfect location and cost about a hundred dollars a night. Last time I looked it had been ponced up – fish tank in the reception, a Buddha, fancy doorknobs and good-looking but no doubt useless staff. Clean as a whistle. This Read more ...
David Nice
Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time. What we celebrated last night was the way this hallucinatory musical meditation around 1972's East-meets- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the jewel in Sky Atlantic's crown is the award-guzzling Boardwalk Empire, great things are also expected of its new cop-opera Blue Bloods, judging by the number of trailers spattering the Sky networks. It's the Dynasty of law enforcement, chronicling the relationships and travails of the Reagan family of New York.Whether the family name was intended to convey any kind of political resonance is a matter for conjecture, though it serves well enough for a multi-generational family of Big Apple police officers of Irish descent. Actually, they're not quite all police officers – the various Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When the spotlight caught Teddy Thompson in profile last night it seemed to capture the physiology of an old-school country icon: tall and lean, his pale, angular face appeared all the more classically archetypal jutting out from his jet-black clothes. He certainly looked the part. By the end he had proved – to a degree far beyond any evidence presented on his recorded work - that he could sing it, too.This concert proved that if the son of Richard and Linda Thompson has inherited anything at all from his parents it is his father’s sense of crafted professionalism and his mother’s vocal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Don Kirshner on 17 January at age 76 is a reminder that although the age of the New York-based song factory seems to be long gone, pop is still about the backroom. Where would Lady Gaga be without a producer/songwriter like Red One? What Kirshner established with his music publishing company Aldon went way beyond getting songs to the performers. He set a template that still resonates through pop.Music publishers don’t have pop-star glamour or rock-star chic. Headline-grabbing bad behaviour is often confined to contractual wrangling. Back in the Fifties and Sixties – before The Read more ...