New York
Peter Culshaw
I was promised a night of free jazz. This was more a threat than a promise, having spent some of the worst nights of my life listening to the stuff - the strange thing about this most liberating sounding form is how everyone sounds more or less the same. Anyway, this wasn’t a night of wibbly-wobbly squeaky-gate music, but a fully realised, if sometimes chilly, vision. It was spontaneous architecture and interesting structures and lyricism. It was original without being self-conscious about it.You can tell a lot about a jazzer by what they call the tunes. With no vocals there’s a lot of scope Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. His Tosca opened the season at the Met, a more grounded, less opulent replacement for one of the opera house’s many much loved productions by Franco Zeffirelli. As Bondy walked onstage to take his directorial bow, a chorus of boos crescendoed from the audience. They do that all the time in Milan, now and then in Paris, both cities where Bondy's work is known and accepted. But New York?Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. Read more ...
David Nice
New York's Metropolitan Opera House firmly believes it's the centre of the universe. From a London perspective, it's not, but it does boast most of the big stars, and supremo Peter Gelb seems to be modernising a creaking rep, phasing out a number of well-loved productions to groans from diehard traditionalists and making sure the new shows reach a large audience by virtue of the hugely popular HD live screenings.So in cinemas all round the world, you'll be able to catch the start of visual genius Robert Lepage's Wagner Ring cycle, ushering out the hideous old Otto Schenk production with a new Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a shock that will deeply upset US and UK ballet, leading young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has abandoned his own company, Morphoses, which he set up in the US less than three years ago as a rare example of a choreographer-led ballet troupe. His former executive director has pledged to continue the company under a series of annual guest curators from different artistic disciplines.The New York Times reports that Royal Ballet-trained Wheeldon resigned on 18 February after continuing rows between him and his executive director Lourdes Lopez. Lopez claimed Wheeldon could not Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death at the weekend of Doug Fieger, the co-founder of The Knack, meant that melodic US pop had lost a fine exponent. But more than 30 years on from the eternal über-hit "My Sharona" the appeal of infectious hook-lined music lives on in the work of preppy foursome Vampire Weekend, who have made their name by mixing new wave revivalism with African beats, dubbing their style “Upper West Side Soweto”.Contra, the quartet's January follow-up to their 2008 eponymous debut, received mixed reviews. theartsdesk came down particularly hard on the band's derivative style, which frequently owed a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Over the past couple of years, maverick photographer Gavin Bond has built up a contacts book that would be the envy of Rankin or Annie Leibovitz. He’s been shooting everyone who is anyone: subjects range from godfathers of rock such as Bono and AC/DC, through familiar acts like The Killers and Gwen Stefani, to fresh faces and emerging starts like Katy Perry and Vampire Weekend. Borrowing a vocabulary from the highly imagined and stylised world of the pop video, Bond’s photography largely concentrates on the impact of the artists as performers. However, "behind-the-scenes" shots of bands on Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Tuesday Mikhail Baryshnikov, just turned 62, will dance again, an evergreen superstar as well as philanthropist. The occasion will be the opening of the Jerome Robbins Theater, his latest project in his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. In this second collection of conversations with him - read part 1 here - edited from interview transcripts from 1993, 1996, 1999 and 2004, Baryshnikov talks about his devotion to George Balanchine, global celebrity with ABT and beyond, and the voyage he took into modern dance, using his fame and fortune (and TV's Sex and the City) to give back as much as Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Nico Muhly didn't have to work much to puncture any atmosphere of classical recital formality at the Roundhouse: he only needed to be himself. Young, slightly dorky and very camp, wearing a black garment that blurred the boundaries between cardigan and bathrobe, and bantering lightly with the audience, the Vermont-born New York-based composer gave the impression that he couldn't take himself too seriously if he tried.His performance began with lightness of touch, too, with a recital of the solo piano piece “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass, for whom Muhly often conducts, arranges and plays piano. It Read more ...
sheila.johnston
John Guare's brittle satire, first produced in New York in 1990, was propelled by two phenomena. The first was a certain David Hampton, a con man who persuaded a suite of gullible Manhattan socialites that he was Sidney Poitier's son (and who, when Guare's play became a hit, pestered the playwright for a cut of the profits). The second was the theory, developed by various writers and social psychologists and vastly popularised by Guare, that "everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people". Since then, though, the planet has changed beyond recognition. How does Six Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell. A cellist, singer, songwriter, producer, composer and electronic artist, Russell existed both within and without disco and many other scenes in a period of cultural ferment in New York when many of the sounds that form the fabric of popular culture were being first created.Russell Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...