cityArts April 18, 2012 by CityArts NYC

April 18, 2012 • Volume 4, Issue 6

Francesca Woodman by Mario Naves Page 4 Samuel Barber at the movies Page 10 New York’s Review of Culture • CityArtsNYC.com

Also inside: The Ulitmate Guide to Bike Month NYC

BOSS LADIES WOMEN IN POLITICAL ART WHITE P.9 SOLMAN P.14 KESSLER P.11

INSIDE GALLERIES / MUSEUMS Nerdrum at Forum Gallery and Woodman at MoMA P. 4 Alex Prager at Yancey Ricardson P. 5 Diego Rivera at MoMA P. 6 Max Ferguson at Hebrew Union College P. 7 DANCE Sylvie Guillem stretches out P. 8

Storytelling tours in Jackson Heights

THEATER Evita on Broadway P. 9

Apr 14–15, 21–22, 28–29, and May 5–6 How does one find calm and inner peace in the city? Experience four readings of newly commissioned works in spaces selected by the architects at Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL).

P.4

Tickets at stillspotting.guggenheim.org

CLASSICAL Samuel Barber and Pro Musicis P. 10 POP David Byrne and Here Lies Love P. 11 BOOKS James Brown bio The One P. 12 ON GAMING I Am Alive haunts expectations P. 13 AUCTIONS Upcoming events P. 13

Support is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation NYC Opportunities Fund and a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant. This project is also supported by the Leadership Committee for stillspotting nyc and the National Endowment for the Arts.

FILM Besson’s The Lady P. 14

P.15

INTERvIEW Limor Tomer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art P. 15

EDITOR Armond White awhite@manhattanmedia.com

PUBLISHER Kate Walsh kwalsh@manhattanmedia.com

SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC Jay Nordlinger

ACCOUNT ExECUTIvES Ceil Ainsworth, Mike Suscavage

SENIOR DANCE CRITIC Joel Lobenthal CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Caroline Birenbaum, John Demetry, Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Steve Haske, Ben Kessler, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Gregory Solman, Melissa Stern, Nicholas Wells

DESIGN/PRODUCTION

MANHATTAN MEDIA PRESIDENT/CEO Tom Allon tallon@manhattanmedia.com CFO/COO Joanne Harras jharras@manhattanmedia.com GROUP PUBLISHER Alex Schweitzer aschweitzer@manhattanmedia.com

PRODUCTION/CREATIvE DIRECTOR Ed Johnson ejohnson@manhattanmedia.com

NEWSPAPER GROUP PUBLISHER Gerry Gavin ggavin@manhattanmedia.com

ADvERTISING DESIGN Quarn Corley

ACCOUNTS MANAGER Kathy Pollyea

CONTROLLER Shawn Scott

WWW.CITYARTSNYC.COM Send all press releases to cityarts@manhattanmedia.com CityArts is a division of Manhattan Media, publishers of New York Family magazine, AVENUE magazine, Our Town, West Side Spirit, Our Town Downtown, City Hall, Chelsea Clinton News, The Westsider and The Blackboard Awards. © 2012 Manhattan Media, LLC | 79 Madison Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY 10016 212.268.8600 | FAX: 212.268.0577 | www.manhattanmedia.com

2 CityArts | April 18, 2012

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LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE Evita on Broadway, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo by Richard Termine

Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair April 20-23, 2012 Park Avenue Armory

ct 1 of Evita features a song entitled “The Art of the Possible.” That’s how composers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice define politics, but it also explains CityArts’ attitude toward New York’s abundant cultural offerings every week. The new Broadway revival of Evita is but one of the current works constructed around the artful way women enter the political realm and, more profoundly, the way they are appreciated as political figures—or, the most respectful term, Boss Ladies. Don’t mistake this as CityArts’ Women’s Issue—all creative groups matter to our cultural vision in every issue—but the coincidence is too exciting to overlook. From Joel Lobenthal’s admiration for Sylvie Guillem to Howard Mandel’s exchange with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Limor Tomer for The CityArts Interview. Mario Naves surveys the art of the late Francesca Woodman and Marsha McCreadie goes beyond the sexism she feels in Diego Rivera to revisit his political art. Further sexual equality appears in John Lingan’s review of R.J. Smith’s biography of musical titan James Brown, aptly titled The One. Read Lingan and find out why. Evita first appeared in the mid-’70s, the same time James Brown was getting on the good foot. The show’s lasting appeal goes beyond its entertaining Webber-Rice song score and has much to do with how that

show predicts the political significance of the female cultural presence. Webber and Rice premiered Evita in the mid-1970s, but its analysis of female celebrity and mass popularity can helpfully explain every major female figure since—not just the lionized Eva Peron, but those who came after her (and after the show): Nancy Reagan, Princess Diana, Hillary Clinton and others. The enigma of their public image can be found in Evita’s signature aria “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” This iron-fist-ina-velvet-glove song doesn’t portray demagogic madness—only the orchestra goes mad. But it’s more than a torch song. That delicate flute just before the big crescendo plays out our susceptibility to all political suasion. That’s what “artfulness” can do; that’s what bringing thinking back to the arts can expose. About the cover: Shepard Fairey’s poster for Luc Besson’s The Lady represents our Boss Ladies theme. It also introduces Gregory Solman’s insightful, demanding analysis of Besson’s film, a chic biopic about Burma’s Nobel Prize-winning politician, Aung San Suu Kyi. Fairey’s poster is a clever example of political pop being distilled to a purely cultural purpose. It takes homiletic slogans and uses them—plus actress Michelle Yeoh’s irresistible smile—to sell the promise of politically engaged movies. We’ll vote for that.

Philipp Aduatz, Wexler Gallery

Opening Night Preview, Thursday, April 19

Produced by The Art Fair Company, Inc.

April 18, 2012 | CityArts 3

MUSEUMS & GALLERIES

CRItICS PICKS

how odd is odd—and Francesca? FRESH VIEWS OF NERDRUM AND WOODMAN

or 30-some years, Cindy Sherman has played dress-up in front of the camera in pursuit of “mortification of the self” and “the exploration of identity.” The photographer Francesca Woodman (19581981), who died by her own hand at the age of 22, took a lot of self-portraits as well, and for related reasons: “female subjectivity” and “photography’s relationship to both literature and performance.” That the Guggenheim overview of Woodman’s oeuvre is running concurrently with MoMA’s Sher-

4 CityArts | April 18, 2012

Promising Mozart: Lisa Batiashvili, a violinist born in Soviet Georgia, is a pure and noble soul. She will play the Mozart Concerto No. 3 with the New York Philharmonic. April 26-28, Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, lincolncenter.org; $31+. [Jay Nordlinger] Opera Reinvented: Robert Ashley, droll avant-gardist of common language, premieres “The Old Man Lives in Concrete,” a narrative for solo singers (himself included) about aging, accomplishments and memory. April 25–28, Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave., 917-267-0363, roulette.org; 8 p.m., $20. [Howard Mandel]

By MARIo NAvES nagging question surrounding the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, on display at Forum Gallery, is: Can you still paint like that? “Like that,” as if the past 400 years of Western art hadn’t transpired; to put brush to canvas, without irony or affectation, in the style of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. To create images without a hint of pop culture, mass media, Cézanne, Picasso and Pollock. Intimations of a post-industrial apocalypse betray some cognizance of contemporary life. Otherwise, Nerdrum’s paintings are suffused in golden light, soupy washes of umber and mythological portent. They’re Old Masterish. For those skeptical of modernism and the excesses it set in motion, Nerdrum’s quixotic achievement would seem to answer a need for a return to principles. It’s hard not to be impressed with the operatic scope of his ambition and the dexterity of his touch. Nerdrum’s consistency as an imagist, with those barren landscapes, ritualistic narratives, theatrical flourishes and supple passages of skin and bone, betokens a sense that sheer force of will can right a culture overtaken by trivial diversions. But Nerdrum’s nightmarish scenarios are redolent of Frank Frazetta, the fantasy artist who specialized in pulpy depictions of otherworldly vistas, towering monsters, nubile maidens and Conan the Barbarian. Nerdrum is a more serious figure—more reactionary, too. At least Frazetta wasn’t pretentious. In the end, Nerdrum’s peculiar kind of hokum isn’t all that different, better suited as cover illustrations for heavy metal CDs than for inclusion in The Grand Manner.

CLASSICAL

Two for the Price of One: Matthias Goerne, a leading singer, teams with Leif Ove Andsnes, a leading pianist, for a recital of Mahler and Shostakovich. May 1, Carnegie Hall, carnegiehall.org; 8 p.m., $15+. [JN] JAzz Bang Every Which Way: Han Bennink, the Dutch drummer who swings freely, turns 70 with a rare U.S. concert featuring equally free improvising friends. April 21, The Italian Academy of Columbia University, 1161 Amsterdam Ave., cuarts.com; 7:30 p.m., $25. [HM] Strikingly Different: Drummer Tomas Fujiwara and The Hook Up, a rambunctious quintet, celebrates release of its second album, “The Air is Different.” April 27, Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St., 212-989-9319, corneliastreetcafe. com; 9 & 10:30 p.m., $25. [HM] GALLERIES

Francesca Woodman, “Polka Dots,” 1976, Gelatin silver print. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

man retrospective is a fortuitous opportunity to compare and contrast. To Sherman’s detriment, you can’t help but conclude. True, Woodman was no less prone to theatricality and adolescent notions of self-expression (taking into account, of course, that Woodman barely lived past adolescence). Depending on one’s taste for melodrama, her weakness for the picturesque—dilapidated buildings served as backdrop for many of the photos—and pat religious allusions are likely to strike one as precocious rather than earned. The work’s eroticism is part and parcel of an overweening narcissism and is less appealing because of it. But Woodman knew how to take photographs—photographs that are rich with texture, isolated blurs of movement, ghostly sweeps of light and rare moments of washed-out period color. Sherman? She doesn’t know a photograph from a deconstructionist hole in the ground.

An early, tragic death is an all but insurmountable hurdle for aesthetic contemplation. Anyone who has seen The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis’ devastating documentary of a family rendered dysfunctional by art, knows how inextricably Woodman’s vision is tied to biographical particulars. We do the artist no favors by overinflating (or romanticizing) a flawed but diverting achievement. The Guggenheim, to its credit, does right by Woodman in setting out the work with jewel-like sobriety. Any serious artist would welcome such an approach. Viewers should welcome it, too.

Odd Nerdrum Through May 5, Forum Gallery, 730 Fifth Ave., 212-3554545, www.forumgallery.com. Francesca Woodman Through June 13, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., 212-423-3500, www.guggenheim.org/new-york.

Passage to India: British artist John Beech presents collage and painted work inspired by materials found on the street throughout India. One man’s trash is another man’s art. Included are painted works inspired by Indian calligraphy and iconography. Through May 25, Peter Blum Gallery Soho, 99 Wooster St., 212-343-0441, peterblumgallery.com. [Melissa Stern] Punk Shots: A cute show features some not-so-cute but very revealing photos of Kurt Cobain, photographed by Jesse Frohman. Through April 22, The Morrison Hotel Gallery, 124 Prince St., 212-941-8770, morrisonhotelgallery.com. [Marsha McCreadie] thEAtER Yo, Stella! Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker head the starry black cast in the dazzling revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” directed by Emily Mann. Opens April 22, Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St., 212-239-6200, streetcaronbroadway.com. [Valerie Gladstone] PoP One More for La Rue: Widely regarded as the “French Frank Sinatra,” Charles Aznavour is without a doubt the most famous French singer who has ever lived. April 26-28, City Center, nycitycenter.org. [VG]

Noir Universe Alex PrAger PAints PulP fiction By Melissa sterN

f you like your art and cinema on the pulp side, I highly recommend you cakewalk over to Yancey Richardson Gallery to see the latest Technicolor noir dreams of Alex Prager. This exhibition marks the debut of her newest film, La Petite Mort, and an accompanying exhibition of photographs entitled Compulsion. Prager’s Technicolor world gives a wink and a nod to the films of Douglas Sirk and the stories of Jim Thompson; plus a little touch of a Cindy Sherman influence as well. There’s always a dame in trouble, though in Prager’s universe, the man who put her there is unseen and unnamed. Trembling, fragile and on the verge of tears, the women who inhabit these films and photos are dreamlike throwbacks to a fantasy of an earlier age. They are not anti-

second smaller, accompanying photo that is a close-up of an eye. They are hugely disquieting, but somehow alluring to look at. A woman has fallen and is dangling off the side of an electrical tower that dwarfs her lifeless body. Another woman clings desperately to a car bumper as it flies through the air. The photographs are printed in the

same lurid colors as the films. They draw us in and then wham—that giant eye reminds us that we are the voyeur, staring at a grisly scene. Then that tug of the beauty of the first image pulls us closer again. This is a tremendously exciting and sophisticated show. Prager, a self-taught photographer, is hooked into a visual sensi-

bility that is both compelling and provocative. And she shoots a swell-looking bunch of dames to boot.

Alex Prager: Compulsion through May 19, Yancey richardson gallery. 535 W. 22nd st., 3rd fl., 646-230-9610, www.yanceyrichardson.com.

Prager has created a Perfectly logical UNiverse iNhaBited By BeaUtifUl daMes aNd Broads aNd a sUPPortiNg cast of iMPressively BrUtish extras. feminist as much as they are oblivious to a world with any other possibilities. This is precisely what makes these works so fabulous and, yes, even moving; there is not a hint of irony in them. Prager has created a perfectly logical universe inhabited by beautiful dames and broads and a supporting cast of impressively brutish extras. Because Prager’s women are the tremulous center of her universe, it is part of the logic that everyone else is a much a caricature as the heroine. They are as universally unattractive as she is universally ravishing. The film La Petite Mort was shot by acclaimed cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Black Swan). It takes place in the split second between life and death...or does it? The production values, costumes, effects and music are those of a big-budget film and they perfectly complement the six-minute roller coaster ride. The second part of the exhibition, Compulsion, is a series of photographic diptychs. They are large photographs, each portraying a scene of terrible human disaster with a

PLAY HOOKY FOR A DAY! Join us May 22 for a 24-hour cruise from NYC to Boston with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Embark at 3pm from Chelsea Piers on May 22, and travel to the tip of Manhattan, up the East River, through the Long Island Sound, Block Island Sound (Rhode Island), the Cape Cod Canal, and along the coast of Massachusetts to Gloucester. Disembark at 3pm for transfers to Logan Airport or Amtrak’s South Station. (Please allow for possible late arrival and traffic en route to Boston when making your return trip plans.)

• Two chamber music performances aboard ship • Dinner, Breakfast, Lunch • Complimentary wine with Dinner and Lunch; cash bar also available • Complimentary Transfers to Amtrak or Logan Airport (Return travel to NYC is on your own)

PRICING STARTS AS LOW AS $350 For more details visit www.chambermusicsociety.org/cruise All but $100 of your booking fee is a tax-deductible gift to the Chamber Music Society

CALL 212-875-5782 TO RESERVE YOUR SPACE CMSINS2179_CityArts_2nd.indd 1

4/6/12 10:30 AM

April 18, 2012 | CityArts 5

· J A Z Z AT L I N C O L N C E N T E R ·

— Essentially Ellington — May 6, 7:3 0 pm

What’s Left of Diego Rivera? A revisionist look At A politicAl pAinter

the hangar of the Municipal Pier. On the bottom level, people from the moneyed classes wait to check out their valuables in a vault. Some say the elderly By MaRsha MccReaDie gentleman resembles John D. Rockefeller rt is nothing if not revisionist in that Jr. Both strata support, in one way or it demands that we look, and then another, the top layer: the Chrysler, Empire look again. That’s a fancy way of say- State, McGraw-Hill and Daily News building there’s a new fat man in my aesthetic ings, with 30 Rockefeller Center dominatlife I had dismissed—not so much for his ing all. “Frozen Assets” has the impact of great girth as for his perceived misogyny. I am not talking about Alfred Hitch- medieval art, but it’s contemporary in its cock and his love-hate relationship with sociopolitical message, hitting us emotionblondes, but the famed Mexican muralist ally as well as allegorically. This non-oneDiego Rivera, who had been supplanted in percenter would give her non-assets to see my and many others’ minds by the more what Rivera would make of the haves and original-seeming work of his collagist/ have-nots of New York society today. Yet in its own way, it’s painter wife, a formal piece: a Frida Kahlo, static construca more than tion, holding out deserving femisymbols the way nist rediscovery. virgins held out This was orbs in medieval before I caught art. the current Just as represhow of Rivera’s sentative of the murals, drawcity—this time ings and other of its manic artifacts. More energy—are than a repeat, it’s some wonderan expansion of fully hyperkihis DepressionDiego Rivera, “Indian Warrior,” 1931, fresco on netic, clearly era exhibit of reinforced cement in a metal framework. i m p r o m ptu the early 1930s Courtesy Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. sketches (ink, for which he had been commissioned by Abby Rockefeller charcoal, water color, 1931-32) of construc(of all ironies) to make an on-site installa- tion workers in the middle of their day, not tion. This show, on the ass end of our very necessarily part of Rivera’s job description own Great Recession, reunites five of the but which obviously caught his attention. To eight freestanding frescos Rivera and crew the left of “Frozen Assets,” they would be easy stayed up day and night to get in place, to overlook. Don’t. Also not to missed—you can’t really, it’s including some new city-inspired work. It was a very successful exhibit, timed so larger-than-life—is “Pneumatic Drilljust right for the by now familiar to all New ing” (1931), a charcoal that hugely shows Yorkers white-suited peasant revolutionary Rivera’s fascination with the urban work leader Emiliano Zapata wielding his scythe tools and scene around him, with excerptor the jaguar mask of a triumphant Aztec ed wall text from Rivera declaring he “plans warrior with its toothy grotesque grin, to paint the rhythms of American workers.” It’s all very different from his Mexican which always seemed to have a comic book quality. Today, what appears the most excit- vistas and sensibility—case in point: the ing are the then-new creations inspired by giant flora that opens this show, “Flower the frenetic ongoing construction, Depres- Festival: Feast of Santa Anita” (1931). Shockingly yellow, aggressive pistils prosion notwithstanding, in the city. The standout is “Frozen Assets,” a huge trude from giant white petals, telling us one-dimensional mural divided into three that Rivera never forgot his agrarian roots. distinct thematic layers. It has its witty title, Even Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers aren’t this of course (pop and “found object” artist violent. title creators take note), a play on money as well as its second tier—bodies sleep- Diego Rivera: Murals for ing under a guard’s watch; the destitute, the Museum of Modern Art the out-of work packed end to end like so through May 14, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. many fish in a place identified elsewhere as 53rd st., 212-748-9400, www.moma.org.

J A Z Z A T L I N C O L N O R C H E S T R A with

WYNTON MARSALIS

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and top-placing high school jazz ba nds AVE RY FI SHE R HALL / T I CKE T S $20-2 5

JALC BOX OFFICE Broadway at 60th

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CENTERCHARGE 212-721-6500

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Two One-Act Operas by

Bruce Saylor

My Kinsman, Major Molineux World Premiere of Revised Version

The Image Maker World Premiere

Maurice Peress

Music Director/Conductor

Lorca Peress

Stage Director

The Goldstein Theatre Preview: May 3, 7:30 pm May 4 & 5, 7:30 pm May 6, 2:30 pm Presented by Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music and Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance

For tickets, call 718-793-8080

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4/13/12 2:44 PM

ER NT CE N OL NC LI AT ZZ JA

Max Ferguson, “My Father At Mt. Sinai,” 2011, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library

Father Issues Max Ferguson Honors His elder

By ValerIe Gladstone

ax Ferguson has spent his life painting scenes of New York, particularly older areas of the city like Coney Island and the disappearing momand-pop shops. Largely autobiographical, his works usually depict himself or his father. In his evocative exhibition Painting New York—From Jerusalem, he shows 30 paintings that he has done of his father over the past 30 years, commemorating what would have been his 100th birthday. They are to some degree the story of a life set against the background of a vanishing urban environment; part homage, part diary, finally a richly rewarding experience of a simple man at a particular time in history. (The “From Jerusalem” in the show’s title refers to the fact that Ferguson splits his time between that city and New York.) Ferguson shows him in various situations, for instance, in the painting “My Father in the Empire State Building,” he is dapper and dressed for work, standing in front of an art deco elevator, the clean lines of his suit mirroring the clean design of the lobby and the tiled floor. Using a golden brown palette, he imbues the scene with radiance, making an everyday occurrence resonate with implications beyond the moment. He shows another side of him as he stands, dressed in casual jacket, cap and sneakers,

on the corner of Lexington Avenue, reading the Jewish publication The Forward. Across the street, there’s a sign reading “Rejoice O Ye Young.” By now, we sense his father is a thoughtful man who went about his business in a straightforward and interested manner. This means that even his simple act of standing at a post office desk in “JAF Building” becomes part of well-considered life. In dark overcoat and cap, he leans on the brass counter, brass lighting fixtures seen in the background, in the old-fashioned, elegant building. The furnishings complement his style—it’s as if the period and the people who lived through it were all of a piece, which in a sense, human beings always are, the background and foreground connected on the deepest level. This one of Ferguson’s loveliest gifts to his viewers: He shows us what was attractive in the past without romanticizing it. I particularly liked “My Father with a Tennis Racket.” He paints him in yellow T-shirt and pale blue shorts holding a tennis racket, dark glasses covering his eyes, his legs, arms and neck lined with wrinkles and veins. He’s ready to hit the ball and dressed just right to play a good match. He must have been quite a father to inspire so much painterly care in his son.

Max Ferguson: Painting New York — From Jerusalem Through June 29, The Hebrew union CollegeJewish institute of religion Museum, 1 W. 4th st., 212-824-2298, www.huc.edu/museums/ny.

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April 18, 2012 | CityArts 7

Juilliard Joseph W. Polisi, President

T O N I G H T ! • Wed, April 18 at 8 Avery Fisher Hall

Emmanuel Villaume conducts the

Juilliard Orchestra

WAGNER, BERLIOZ, STRAUSS Tickets $15, $30 online at lincolncenter.org or CenterCharge (212) 721-6500 FREE student & senior tickets, TDF, only at the Avery Fisher Hall Box Office

Sun, April 22 at 4 Corpus Christi Church 529 W. 121st St.

The Glories of Venice

Juilliard Baroque & Juilliard415 MONICA HUGGETT, Leader/Violin CYNTHIA ROBERTS, Violin ROBERT MEALY, Violin/Viola PHOEBE CARRAI, Cello ROBERT NAIRN, Double Bass SANDRA MILLER, Flute GONZALO RUIZ, Oboe KENNETH WEISS, Harpsichord Vivaldi Concertos Presented by Music Before 1800 in partnership with Juilliard Historical Performance Tickets $27.50-$45 at mb1800.org or call (212) 666-9266

Mon, April 23 at 8 Alice Tully Hall

Michael Brown

Wed, April 25; Fri, April 27 at 8 Sun, April 29 at 2 Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Juilliard

MOZART

GARY THOR WEDOW, Conductor STEPHEN WADSWORTH, Director JUILLIARD OPERA SINGERS and the JUILLIARD ORCHESTRA JEANNE SLATER, Choreographer CHARLIE CORCORAN, Sets CAMILLE ASSAF, Costumes DAVID LANDER, Lighting Tickets $30, online at Juilliard.edu/onlinesales call CenterCharge (212) 721-6500 or at the box office. Student & senior 1/2-price tickets, TDF, only at Juilliard Box Office.

Sat, April 28 at 8 Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium 417 E. 61st St.

Juilliard Baroque

ROBERT MEALY, Violin GONZALO RUIZ, Oboe DOMINIC TERESI, Bassoon KENNETH WEISS, Harpsichord TELEMANN, CPE BACH, ZELENKA, HANDEL Presented by Salon/Sanctuary Concerts and Juilliard Historical Performance Tickets $25 ($15 senior/student), online at salonsanctuaryconcerts.org call (212) 866-0468 or e-mail to orders @ gemsny.org

Mon, April 30 at 7:30 St. Bartholomew’s Church 325 Park Ave at 51st St.

Piano

Winner of the William Petschek Recital Award

ALBÉNIZ Evocación and El Puerto from Iberia: Book 1 M. BROWN Constellations and Toccata (2012) DEBUSSY Études: Book 2 SCHUBERT Sonata in D Major, D.850, “Gasteiner” Tickets $30, $15, online at lincolncenter.org CenterCharge (212) 721- 6500 or at the box office Student & senior 1/2-price tickets, TDF, only at the Alice Tully Hall Box Office.

HAYDN

The Creation Masaaki Suzuki

conducts Yale Schola Cantorum, Juilliard415, Yale Baroque Ensemble HAYDN The Creation, Hob XXI:2 Information at stbarts.org FREE; no tickets required

J U I L L I A R D 155 W. 65th St. • Box Office M-F, 11AM-6PM • (212) 769-7406

events.juilliard.edu 8 CityArts | April 18, 2012

DANCE

Life-Long Extensions Sylvie Guillem StretcheS out By JoEL LoBENthAL

ven Sylvie Guillem’s not doing it anymore, so ballerinas everywhere can just put their legs down (a bit)—can’t they? That was one takeaway from Guillem’s concert at the Koch theater early this month, presented by the Joyce Theater Foundation. Now 47, Guillem put her pointe shoes back on last year to dance Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon once more at La Scala. But her current program, entitled 6,000 Miles Away, is a sampling of the modern repertory she’s pursued in recent years. In New York, Guillem was charismatic and authoritative. And whether because of diminished athletic capacity—which I doubt—or simply due to artistic strategy, she was eschewing her notoriously overworked extensions. Guillem switched to ballet from gymnastics at age 11, and it’s perhaps her background that propelled her, as the teenaged darling of then-Paris Opera Ballet artistic director Rudolf Nureyev, to define herself by a signature stunt. She raised her legs so high that they grazed her head, causing untold havoc to the equilibrium of classical alignment. What should have been seen for what it was, one very young dancer’s assertion of individuality and rebellion against protocol, instead became something of a global gospel. Ballerinas around the world have ever since been similarly contorting themselves and the classical aesthetic in the process. At the Koch, however, Guillem’s own extensions remained smooth, high and beautiful, but no longer transgressive or stunt-like. The program opened with Rearray, a Guillem commission from William For-

sythe, for whom she is the perfect instrument/collaborator. His deconstruction and collagist reimagining of classical imagery resonates with her own kinetic instincts and provides an appropriate context for them. Here, she hooked up with La Scala’s odd and interesting Massimo Murru, with whom New York saw her dance Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand as guests with London’s Royal Ballet during its 2004 season at the Met. In the Forsythe, they passed through and past positions that are usually explicitly punctuated in classical syntax. There were moments of wit as well as selfparody, in which Guillem’s physique suddenly turned hand-cranked. Guillem closed with Mats Ek’s Bye, another tailor-made piece in which she made common cause with a doorway filled with fiber-optic simulated companions. But Guillem herself was alone onstage, a kooky coquine who intermittently took off in spurts of aerial exuberance. In between Guillem’s two numbers came a mildly amusing excerpt from Jirí Kylían’s 27’52”, in which Aurélie Cayla got half-naked and became a human hammock in the arms of Lukas Timulak. I remember early in my dance writing career, former Ballet Russe star Irina Baronova, one of the “baby ballerinas” sponsored by Balanchine in 1931, telling me at age 62 how much more she could now bring to the roles she left behind after an early retirement—provided that she was still physically capable of doing them. Guillem, of course, is considerably younger and unquestionably capable of doing what she now does. More than two decades after I first saw her dance, I wished I’d seen her Manon. I’m curious to see what she’ll do next.

ShE rAiSED hEr LEgS So high thAt thEy grAzED hEr hEAD, CAuSiNg uNtoLD hAvoC to thE EquiLiBrium of CLASSiCAL ALigNmENt.

Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com

THEATER Evita on Broadway, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo by Richard Termine

Stephanie L. Franks: Locked into Place by Line, Form and Color Paintings, collages, and drawings

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The Prophecy of Evita WEBBER AND RICE’S CELEBRITY EXPOSÉ BY ARMOND WHITE

vita is back—and at the right time, too. Celebrity worship wasn’t like it is now when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice debuted Evita in 1975 as a concept album featuring Julie Covington of Rock Follies fame. There was no irony in their original idea of exploring the dubious sanctity of Argentine dictator Juan Peron’s fashion-plate wife Eva; they created Evita as their second exploration into the cult of personality that they began with Jesus Christ Superstar. In the current Broadway Evita, directed by Michael Grandage, Ricky Martin portrays Che (Eva’s foil), now understood as a common skeptic rather than a demioracle. Che’s failed revolutionary principles, crumbled like communism after the Berlin Wall, increase the spotlight on Eva Peron, who now stands as a perfect precursor to the celebrityhood of our time. That’s why casting Madonna in Alan Parker’s disastrous 1996 movie version was merely redundant, since Madonna had already achieved dictatorial status in the pop universe. Madonna could not accomplish Webber and Rice’s coup de théâtre “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” the nonpareil statement of celebrity and showbiz hubris. It’s a Cinderella moment when the lowerclass climber reaches the peak of Buenos Aires power and shrewdly lords it over the people. The song is breathtakingly touching, devious and (knowingly) hollow, a command for attention that glories in the spectacle of self. Line by line, Eva appeals to the admiration and envy of the servile throng (“All you can see is the girl you once knew/Although she’s

dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you”). She dissolves her difference from them as a matter of happenstance. Eva’s craftiness is stunning when she downplays fortune and fame as “Illusions”—a word easy to coo that floats on one long breath, smooth as a drug dealer’s promise. Her admonition “They’re not the solutions they promise to be” is the slickest, clearest demagoguery until Oprah Winfrey came along a decade later. And, like Oprah, Eva unctuously bleats “I love you and hope you love me.” There’s no bombast in this great theatrical moment, yet it’s as modest as Princess Diana’s wedding and coronation. Eva’s ball gown and new blonde beehive as she steps onto the balcony for her state address contrast the lullaby’s deceptively low pressure; it’s the orchestration that surges, swaying along with the mob who are dazzled by the pretense of a public figure seeming to dismiss the power they dream of sharing. In this way, Evita gets at the truth of political manipulation and explicates its essence as show business. That this particular song has entered the diva repertoire proves a tendency to avoid political consciousness. Using it as a showcase simply for vanity and talent seems aberrant to our current sense of political enlightenment, but it also demonstrates the genius of Webber and Rice’s timely and timeless meditation on feminist power, predicting its discontents and its deviousness. Argentinian actress Elena Roger is physically slight but wiry, and with a strong voice; more Eva Peron than Patti LuPone. If she spoils the Broadway illusion, she also happens to bring the show—and the historical fact of female political behavior—a certain ethnic realism it’s never had before.

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CLASSICAL

Movie Star Music BARBER AND MICHAEL HERSCH MAKE LASTING MAGNIFICENCE

Concerto is wistful, yearning, tumultuous. It is, in part, a heart-on-the-sleeve song from a superb song composer. British characters, such as those in the film, BY JAY NORDLINGER are famous for reticence. An economy recent movie, The Deep Blue Sea, has of words and a suppression of emotions. a musical star, and by rights it should Does the director use Barber’s music to be “Between the Devil and the Deep express the inexpressible, to convey what’s Blue Sea,” the hit song from 1932 (music by going on inside his main character, a Harold Arlen, words by Ted Koehler). The woman named Hester? It would seem so. For decades, Barber was pooh-poohed movie takes its name from this song. So does the work on which the movie is based: as a neo-Romantic, a man out of place, a sap-meister. A very different composer, Terence Rattigan’s play of 1952. But the star of the show, musically, is Elliott Carter, said in an interview with me three years ago, “Some Samuel Barber’s Violin of us felt that the kind Concerto, written in 1939. THE ANDANTE of music Sam wrote had The director, another TerFROM THE already been done, only ence, Davies, makes heavy BARBER VIOLIN done better than anybody use of the second movecould do it now. Therefore ment, marked Andante. CONCERTO there was no reason to do it Barber has starred in movIS WISTFUL, now.” With a grin, he added, ies before—most promiYEARNING, “What Sam did was deplornently Platoon (1986), able,” although his music which featured his Adagio TUMULTUOUS. “is rather good.” for Strings. That piece was IT IS, IN PART, A It is rather magnificent. famous before; it was more And the appearance of the famous after. HEART-ON-THEconcerto in The Deep Blue Movies have done that SLEEVE SONG Sea is a reminder of that. to other works, too. AlbiFROM A SUPERB An audience in Weill noni’s Adagio in G minor got huge play in Gallipoli SONG COMPOSER. Recital Hall had a reminder of the extraordinary talent (1981). Pachelbel’s Canon was virtually made by Ordinary People of Michael Hersch. He is an American com(1980). Some people still refer to Mozart’s poser born in 1971. He has written a new Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, K. 467, as the string quartet on commission from the music “Elvira Madigan Concerto,” thanks to its school at Vanderbilt University. The piece was played by the school’s Blair String Quartet. use in a 1967 Swedish film. The Andante from the Barber Violin Called Images from a Closed Ward, the piece

For All Mankind PRO MUSICIS SHARES AND EVOKES BY JUDY GELMAN MYERS

ometimes a concert is more than a concert. Celebrating its 46th season, Pro Musicis (“For Musicians”) presented pianists Andrew Staupe and Alexandria Le at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall April 11 for an evening of Mendelssohn, Debussy and Mussorgsky, as well as a

10 CityArts | April 18, 2012

trio of world premieres by Karl Blench, Ryan Carter and the (deservedly) muchcommissioned Christopher Walczak, whose Dark Blue Etude sang with lucid and unexpected harmonies. Pro Musicis was founded with a double mission: to not only nurture exceptional young musicians but to share their gifts with those in need of spiritual healing. Pro Musicis artists are selected by competition, adjudicated by piano legend Byron Janis and composer/educator

Samuel Barber. His Violin Concerto powers Terence Davies’ film The Deep Blue Sea. takes some inspiration from art by the late Michael Mazur. His etchings and lithographs looked into hellish existence. Hersch’s string quartet is in 13 (brief) movements. As usual with him, the materials are spare, and not a note is wasted. Every note or phrase has its purpose. The first movement seems to me a bleak trudge. The second one is sharp and ferocious. The third is almost a song. A later movement is wrenching in its despair. In the end, it’s as though a clock runs out, leaving nothing but nothing—a void. Once, in Carnegie Hall, I attended a per-

Gunther Schuller. Competition winners are awarded a concert in a famed concert hall in a major city. In return, they commit to at least two public service concerts in venues such as prisons, homes for the aged or shelters for the homeless. “In the process,” read the concert notes, “Pro Musicis artists alter their relationship to their gift; beyond aiming for a successful career, they become committed to a lifetime of sharing music.” This commitment to sharing was palpable throughout the evening. Staupe in particular communicated a personal voice nevertheless rooted in a profound

formance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 14, that death-soaked piece. Between movements, people streamed out of the hall. Later, a critic commented to me, “That piece scares the hell out of old people.” Hersch’s quartet has some of the same nature. One of his markings is “haunted; stricken.” If anyone knows the trick of expressing agony in music, he does. And his command of craft, overall, is something rare. Often at his premieres, we say, “We have heard something important. We have heard music that will last.” I felt just this way about Images from a Closed Ward.

understanding of the material he played. His broad musical interests—from medieval to chamber to new works—lent depth to his phrasing, while his voicing underscored the emotional structure of the music as a natural expression of its compositional structure. In addition, his ability to draw tonal color from the piano lent authentic variety to his interpretations of composers as different as Scarlatti, Mendelssohn and Debussy. Le was especially effective in her interpretation of Ryan Carter’s Competing Demands, evoking images of tiny figures scampering to evade great pistons plunging down from above.

POP

Imelda’s Dancing Shoes DaviD Byrne mythifies marcos in ‘here Lies Love’ By Ben KeSSler

he ambivalence provoked by women who wield power is reflected in the current photo-manipulation meme “Texts From Hillary,” in which a halfscowling secretary of state, peering dismissively down at her BlackBerry through sunglasses, fires scathing bits of digital wit at supplicants including Joe Biden, Mark Zuckerberg and President Obama himself. The catchiness of the meme is largely due to the fun of imagining Madame Secretary as an amalgam of bitch, badass and Internet joker; Hillary Clinton becomes the Nerf cudgel we use to vent our frustration at the ridiculousness of celebrity culture. Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s 2010 concept album/pop musical about Imelda Marcos, the infamous

former first lady of the Philippines, could have been titled “Texts From Imelda.” The music evokes the ’70s disco Marcos is said to have loved, while the lyrics were largely drawn from and inspired by statements she made in interviews. In high postmodern style, avant-pop superstar Byrne uses these elements as texts in an attempt to explicate the Marcos myth. To interpret the texts, co-producers Byrne and Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook) call upon more than 20 vocalists, all but two of whom are women, to perform story-songs recounting Marcos’ struggles, from childhood through her exile from the Philippines after a popular uprising. Byrne’s stated goal was to blur the line between dance music and show tunes, a savvy and compassionate strategy given the subject matter. “Don’t You Agree?” (sung by Roisin Murphy), for example, reveals Marcos’ character like a Broadway diva’s aria but employs down-to-earth

The Here Lies Love album was released in April 2010, almost at the precise moment when the pop charts began to be dominated by female artists performing clublounge-disco funkiness to nudge us a step ready dance music. You could view this or two down a slippery slope: “Sometimes record as Byrne and Cook’s ready-made you need a strong man/With things out of answer to the Lady Gaga problem. Here Lies Love’s only major flaw is the lack of at least control/Don’t you agree?” Here Lies Love’s pomo play with disco may one genuine pop star among its phalanx of seem mighty abstract to some, especially respectable alterna-divas. Without a tinge considering the grave crimes Ferdinand of the good kind of vulgarity, a cerebral claustrophobia tends and Imelda Marcos to creep into Byrne’s were accused of, but yOu cOulD vIew it’s actually the source ThIS recOrD aS Byrne experiments. This error could be of much of the work’s anD cOOK’S reaDyrectified with creative substance and contemmaDe anSwer TO The casting when Here Lies porary relevance. Byrne aligns Marcos’ fate with laDy GaGa PrOBlem. Love is performed as a musical at The Public that of disco, the most maligned of pop music genres, cautioning Theater next year. It promises to be a pop us against stingy-hearted, racist reactions event like none other since 1981, when that have impeded understanding of both The Public put up Fresh Fruit in Foreign in recent history. Here Lies Love audaciously Places, Kid Creole’s musical adaptation attempts to prompt an empathetic reinves- of The Odyssey. Byrne’s approach may be tigation of history, as in the song “Why Don’t ’80s-derived, but the Here Lies Love album You Love Me?”: “Just look at Nixon/They tore proves his spirit and instincts are contemporary and necessary. him apart/How could you be so hard?”

Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater presents

A BENEFIT

FOR THE JAZZ FOUNDATION OF AMERICA

THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES By JOHN CORIGLIANO Libretto by WILLIAM M. HOFFMAN

IN MEMORY OF DENNIS IRWIN

Steven Osgood, Conductor Jay Lesenger, Director

PERFORMANCES TUESDAY, APRIL 24 / 7:30PM–9:30PM

Greenfield Hall

APR 25 & 27 / WED & FRI / 7:30 PM APR 29 / SUN / 2:30 PM

APR 25 / WED / 6 PM

$20 ADULTS | $12 SENIORS & STUDENTS

with JOHN SCOFIELD JOE LOVANO AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE

RAVI COLTRANE FLEURINE BRAD MEHLDAU

LEWIS NASH JOHN PATITUCCI PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS

All proceeds beneﬁt the Jazz Musicians Emergency Fund. The price of each admission, minus $25, is tax–deductible.

reservations & info 212-258-9595 / 9795 jalc.org/dccc

admission $125 Includes complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres

OPERA PREVIEW

Borden Auditorium

With John Corigliano and William M. Hoffman Gordon Ostrowski, Moderator

FREE This production is underwritten, in part, by the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation.

122ND & BROADWAY | 917 493 4428 | WWW.MSMNYC.EDU © 2012 MSM. Program and artists subject to change. Marie-Antoinette by M.P. after Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun’s Marie Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France (1783).

Manhattan School of Music

Dona D. Vaughn, Artistic Director

April 18, 2012 | CityArts 11

BOOKS

Radical Discipline J.B. BIO GETS ON THE ONE BY JOHN LINGAN

f course James Brown’s 1986 autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, begins outrageously: “I wasn’t supposed to be alive...I was a stillborn kid.” It’s a contradiction and a medical impossibility, but no bother. When Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, aged 73, he’d played more than 80 shows in the preceding year, many of them in Europe. He’d been a PCP addict for over two decades and still performed acrobatically enough that he required post-show painkillers. In other words: Don’t talk to James Brown about medical impossibilities. His whole life was one long affront to his potential limitations. The stillborn anecdote might seem like typical self-mythologizing bluster, but the biggest takeaway from R.J. Smith’s new biography, The One (Gotham, 2012), is that Brown’s weapons-grade ego was the product of profound emotional scars. Smith doesn’t dwell on this fact, but it lurks behind his every page and quote. Brown was abandoned by his mother and abused by his dad and was dancing for strangers’ money before he hit puberty. He literally knew how to hustle before he knew how to love. “Communicating basic emotional information to human beings was something [Brown] only learned later, after he found a way to make people care,” Smith writes. “The one place he did get emotionally heard, and fed, was on stage.” Offstage, the Star Time aura faded fast. Brown routinely exploited even his most devoted band members, most of whom eventually quit in anger. He had no meaningful artistic collaborations with other artists during his prime and barely ever

co-wrote a song (though he often included others, including his own children, in the songwriting credits to ease his tax burden). In one confidant’s telling, he was incapable of anything other than sexual relationships with women and he had no one, male or female, that he’d consider a friend. He was ceaselessly creative, but creativity was just another way of asserting himself and proving his domination over others. The key irony of Brown’s life, and the thing that has made him such a rich muse for generations of writers, is that his very pathological selfishness made him an ideal civil rights idol. By merely following his natural, surely unhealthy need to be the alpha dog, he communicated that such a desire was even possible for a black American. His assertiveness was revelatory for a community in desperate need of selfrespect. But he always reminded them who came first: When Brown taught his audience how to “do the James Brown” during his late-1960s performances of “There Was a Time,” he showed black Americans how to be themselves by acting more like him. Brown’s relationship and importance to the Civil Rights Movement is complex enough to warrant the kind of multivolume biography that Robert A. Caro and Taylor Branch have afforded other icons of the era. The One isn’t nearly so ambitious, though Smith’s research is often stunning and his critical treatment of Brown’s music and performances is always insightful. He neglects to mention what year Brown was born and makes no significant mention of the man’s nine kids, for example, but he situates Brown’s career within a larger African-American cultural context stretching from the plantation field to Afrika Bambaataa. He also deserves credit for his book’s title, which emphasizes the rhythmic structure of Brown’s work

BY LAYING HEAVILY INTO THE DOWNBEAT, BROWN ANCHORED HIS HUGE BANDS AS THEY CHOPPED THE REST OF THE BAR UP INTO JAGGED, STACCATO SYNCOPATIONS.

12 CityArts | April 18, 2012

over his many fawning nicknames. By laying heavily into the downbeat, Brown anchored his huge bands as they chopped the rest of the bar up into jagged, staccato syncopations. The one was his organizing principle, the fundamental ingredient to his visionary style that, in Smith’s words, “created a new kind of space” in pop music.

n retrospect, it seems significant that “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” supplanted Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” on the Billboard R&B chart in June 1965. Pickett’s song, brilliant though it is, thrives on anticipation and privacy. From “Papa’s” onward, Brown’s music occupied what Smith calls “an enduring, dominant present.” The band’s pulsing repetition and the hook’s cool, swinging restraint are the perfect complement to Brown’s boastful, frank lyrics. No need to wait till midnight—Brown’s hour was always now, now, now. Three years later, New York Times critic Albert Goldman wrote that Brown’s “whole vast success...is based less on talents and skills than it is on a unique faculty for sizing up the black public and making himself the embodiment of its desires.” While it’s insane to denigrate Brown’s superhuman “talents and skills” as a dancer, arranger and performer, Goldman nevertheless correctly gauges the subtext of black fans’ reverence for the man. Smith quotes dance historian Mura Dehn, who saw Brown at Madison Square Garden in 1966 and said he spent the set creating “a tremendous scream for something that he wants more and more of— and gets—and is ready to give his life in order to retain it forever.” It’s no surprise that Brown inspired people with this display, though it’s also under-

standable that he had a standoffish attitude toward the civil rights cause throughout his life. In the thick of the bus boycotts and Freedom Rides, Brown and his band were ruthlessly single-minded. “They had a job to do,” Smith writes, “and a protest, let alone a bloody melee, was an obstacle to fulfilling a contract.” He adopted an Afro reluctantly, after years of styling his hair in the exact conk that Malcolm X begged black people to abandon in his Autobiography. Later on, Brown publicly revered Reagan and Strom Thurmond; he sympathized with the Republicans’ purported doctrine of self-responsibility because he himself had risen from nothing. It’s clear that Smith has spent years thinking about his subject’s still-futuristic 1967-1971 work, where the rhythms roll and tumble like an ever-cresting tidal wave. “What the Brown bands of the late 1960s and onward do is make a paradoxically freedom-drenched art out of radical acts of discipline,” Smith writes, summarizing decades of James Brown scholarship. Perhaps if you believe you were born dead, paradox and freedom are your only natural states.

ON GAMING

Staying Alive NEW GAME HAUNTS EXPECTATIONS BY STEVE HASKE

Am Alive is in debt to Cormac McCarthy. A man, Adam, has lived through a cataclysmic event that has assumedly all but wiped out humanity. His purpose is to find his wife and daughter, although this is as overshadowed in the game by the mechanics of human need as it is by the oppressive, dust-choked ruins of Adam’s hometown. The will to survive drives I Am Alive, bleakly painted in a suffocating palette of muted color, ash gray and film grain. Enemies you find are ordinary people driven to violence out of desperation and panic. Supplies are extremely scarce; one or two handgun bullets are all you’ll be able to find at any given time. And unlike most game heroes, making impossible leaps or

even running will drain Adam’s limited stamina at an alarming rate. Deception, or at least a subversion of gamified expectations, is common. Power, video games’ drug of choice, is stripped from you as it has been from Adam. You may be forced to pull your gun on someone, bluffing whether you have ammo, or just get the drop on a foe with a quick slash to the jugular when they think you’re unarmed. One of my favorite moments of I Am Alive comes relatively early—while investigating the cries of a young woman, I found her alone, restrained on a park bench on top of an adjacent building. Intent on assistance, I was suddenly rushed by group of punks (For whatever reason, I Am Alive’s thugs suggest a Mad Maxish-sensibility) with machetes. When they lay dead at my feet, the woman looked upset. “I’m sorry. They made me do it,” she confessed. Perhaps bleak times cannot judge actions. Whether Adam loses his humanity

Going, Going Auctions BY CAROLINE BIRENBAUM Doyle presents over 700 lots of Photographs, Books, Autographs and Prints April 23. The book section is built around the collection of the late Dr. M. Michael Eisenberg, who favored avant-garde illustrated books such as “Facile,” inscribed by both Man Ray and Paul Éluard, and his wife, the late Barbara Yetka Eisenberg, who focused in depth on Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. The selection of autographs includes women of achievement from the collection of Paige Rense Noland, longtime editor of Architectural Digest. May 9, Doyle’s wide-ranging auction of European, American, Modern & Contemporary Art features “White and Pink (The Palace),” circa 1879, a vivid Whistler pastel of a Venetian scene that was passed down in the Havemeyer family, and works from the collection of Joanne Melniker Stern, including Vuillard’s “The Black Belt,” oil on paper mounted on panel, circa 1895; an early untitled painting by Zao WouKi, 1951; and Alma Thomas’s “Carnival of Autumn Leaves,” oil on canvas, 1973. Doyle, April 23, 10 a.m. Previews April

20-22. May 9, 11 a.m. Previews May 5-8. www.doylenewyork.com. Rembrandt and Whistler master prints galore are highlights of Swann’s April 25 sale of Old Master Through Modern Prints. Other star items include a scarce unrecorded working proof of George Stubbs’s “Lion Devouring a Horse,” 1780s; Renoir’s large color lithograph of girls playing ball, 1898-1900; and such modern American classics as Hopper’s etching, “East Side Interior,” 1922, and Bellows’ lithograph “Dempsey and Firpo,” 192324, from a well-chosen private collection. Swann, April 25, 10:30 a.m. & 1:30 p.m. Previews April 20-21 & 23-24. www. swanngalleries.com. Phillips de Pury emphasizes modern and contemporary multiples in their April 25 sale entitled Evening Editions, starting with 32 lots of Picasso ceramics followed by eye-catching prints ranging from a complete set of Matisse’s “Jazz” pochoirs, 1947, to engraved and reliefprinted etchings by Frank Stella from the 1980s. Phillips de Pury, April 25, 6 p.m. Previews April 18-25. www.phillipsdepury.com.

I Am Alive, for Xbox 360 and PS3. is somewhat relative. With what remains of society ravaged, rampant cannibalism has bred. Sex dens are incidentally adorned with the skinless torsos of unfortunate victims. The horror lies in a primal fear of one’s own mortality. And that deception? It works both ways. I won’t get into specifics, but through the rhythm of combat, you’re trained to eliminate enemies with guns first. In one

instance, I snuck up on some hoods, killing one before he could me. Only when I tried to collect any remaining ammo did I learn my assailant’s pistol was empty. The fallout haunted me the rest of the game. I Am Alive is available now on PS3 (PSN) and Xbox 360 (XBLA).

As the annual spring art frenzy unfolds, here is a brief overview of the stellar works to be seen at New York auction previews. Christie’s holds sales of 19th Century European Paintings April 23, highlighted by Bougeureau’s paean to young parenthood, “Idylle: Famille antique,” which has been in a private collection since the 1950s, and three sessions of Prints and Multiples April 24 and 25, including a scarce artist’s proof of Andy Warhol’s “Liz” on a white background, 1964; prints by Barnett Newman, Brice Marden and Agnes Martin and a Keith Haring multiple. The fireworks are saved for the May 1 evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art, whose star lot is a watercolor study by Cézanne of the seated figure who appears at the right in all five of his oil paintings of card players, which resurfaced from a private American collection after having been off the radar for some 60 years. Works on paper and additional paintings and sculptures follow in daytime sessions May 2, including a charming Bonnard beach scene from the estate of Paul Mellon, textile designs by Henry Moore from the Ascher family collection, four early drawings by Léger being sold by the

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to benefit acquisitions and sculptures by Rodin, Hepworth and Diego Giacometti. Christie’s, April 23, 2 p.m., previews April 19-22. April 24, 2 p.m. & April 25, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Previews April 20-23. May 1, 7 p.m. & May 2, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Previews April 27-May 1. www.christies.com.

Steve Haske is a Portland, Ore.-based journalist. Follow him on Twitter @afraidtomerge.

Sotheby’s responds to the Impressionist and Modern Art challenge on the evening of May 2, when the only remaining version of Munch’s “The Scream” in private hands goes on the block. The 1895 pastel on board, in the original frame, has descended in the Norwegian family of the artist’s friend and patron Thomas Olsen. Also featured is “Prométhée,” a gleaming sculpture by Brancusi. Additional sessions of Impressionist and Modern Art, with many works from museum and private collections during the day on May 3, and spectacular examples of 19th Century European Art such as Tissot’s “The Morning Ride” and Boldini’s portrait of Mrs. Howard Johnston on May 4, complete the series of auctions. Sotheby’s, May 2, 7 p.m. & May 3, 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Refer to website for previews. May 4, 10 a.m. Previews April 27-May 3. www. sothebys.com. April 18, 2012 | CityArts 13

FILM

Buddhist, Political or Patronizing? BESSON’S THE LADY VANISHES BY GREGORY SOLMAN

ung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh) writhes in emotional pain on the floor of her family home beneath the glowering portrait of her Burmese revolutionist father, having learned that her husband Michael Aris (David Thewlis) has died of cancer following a period of prolonged separation after Suu Kyi’s anguished choice of the political over the personal. Director Luc Besson sets up The Lady’s only marginally persuasive scene as if in a conscious recapitulation of Lina’s anxiety pinned beneath the painting of her military-clad father in Hitchcock’s Suspicion. But unlike many of the masters he emulates, Besson’s absent-father symbolism overdetermines rather than undergirds the shallow psychology of this fluid and handsome but bloodless and surfacemired biography. Besson returns to his Messenger mode of heroine archetypes who come off as determined but diluted. Neither he nor TV writer Rebecca Frayn seem willing to grapple with the Electra complex and pro patria impulse the movie suggests in fits and starts. The film simply takes for granted the unbreakable bonds between Suu Kyi and the country she never lived in and the father she hardly knew, making little effort to examine it by a quirk of personality, religious duty or internal ambivalence, as one suspects it would in a gender-role reversal. In short, Besson glorifies, sanctifies and ossifies Suu Kyi as his The Messenger did Joan of Arc—who was at least a war hero and actual saint, in contrast to our lady of perpetual waiting. The filmmakers show more sympathy for Suu Kyi’s guilt over abandoning her family than for her family’s suffering. The story leaves out, as if to expunge, the irreparable political rift between Suu Kyi and her own brother, always choosing the path of black-and-white simplification. Besson permits her stock generalissimo foe Than Shwe (Agga Poechit) to break from thug stereotype only for bouts of oracle-consulting superstition. Ironically, that has the merit of making him a sweaty

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Michelle Yeoh as Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady. little pseudo-Shakespearean villain. A potentially poignant but finally impenetrable moment is lost in the seminal lacuna of the father/daughter connection—Suu Kyi’s unfathomable fealty to Aung San, the founder of Burma’s Communist Party, nationalist foe of British colonial rule and intermittent, expedient Japanese and Chinese Communist collaborator in the World War II era, when he was as slippery as Santa Ana. A married woman living in England, Suu Kyi returns to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother (an ex-ambassador who is otherwise disregarded by Suu Kyi, wither feminist pretensions). She sees her father Aung San’s image burnished on the country’s currency and reacts, well, inscrutably. But having only been shown Aung San’s assassination out of context, viewers might be equally ambivalent. Why Aung San was murdered—whether he was revered by Suu Kyi’s adoring professoriate as the nation’s George Washington

or its Che Guevara—seems irrelevant to the filmmakers. It’s impossible to parse why the Communist military junta would murder Aung San only to have the Chinese satraps choose him as the face of the kyat, and to determine exactly what of her father’s political philosophy, if any, Suu Kyi embraces. The filmmakers evidently decided that they can’t tell Suu Kyi’s story without his—and that they can’t tell his. Obviously, a biopic on Suu Kyi couldn’t be more opportune—after decades of on and off house arrest, she won election to Myanmar’s government just weeks ago—or more premature. Despite the reflexive “free Tibet”-type hyperbole that has attended her cause, including one of those Nobel Peace prizes intended to send a message in lieu of awarding accomplishment, Suu Kyi appears to have achieved little beyond fearlessly facing down guns with flowers in her hair—a not inconsiderable feat, but not as rare as all that. As if recognizing the tediousness of a

script that moves dutifully and without penetrating insight from incident to crisis to event, Besson truncates Suu Kyi’s speech before a massive rally at the Shwedagon Pagoda to the point of anticlimactically cutting when she takes the dais, suggesting a sanitizing of her political thought or perhaps the banality of her words. Does she bandy the word “democracy” as crypto-communists commonly do? During years of house arrest in a dilapidated tropical Tara, Suu Kyi writes out nonviolent resistance bromides from Gandhi and Martin Luther King and posts them for motivation, rather than penning her own Letter from a Birmingham Jail or deepening her own Buddhist faith. What exactly does she stand for? As talented as he is in other genres, Besson isn’t much of an inaction director. Finally, the story of Suu Kyi—in dramatic contrast to her cameo characterization in John Boorman’s bracing Beyond Rangoon—is spiritually forsaken.

THE CITYARTS INTERVIEW

Limor Tomer

imor Tomer became a curator of performance—the role she took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last July—after a crisis of confidence. She had studied piano as a child raised in Israel, come to New York City with her family at age 13 and studied at Juilliard and the classics professionally for 10 years. But in 1984, she saw the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach at The Brooklyn Academy of Music and “I couldn’t remember why I was practicing Chopin études. Within a few years, I’d turned my life around, quit playing piano, went to work with Harvey Lichtenstein at BAM and put myself on a trajectory that had to do with living artists and contemporary work.” Since then, Tomer has produced performance across and beyond genres in venues throughout the city, for radio at WNYC and WQXR and at the Whitney Museum. Last July, at age 48, with an 8-year-old daughter and inexhaustible curiosity (the result, she says, of having as a teenager attended Brooklyn Philharmonic concerts directed by Lukas Foss), she took over a $3 million Met Museum budget that covers 60 to 70 lectures and some 50 concerts per year. She started with a symphony for tabla players on the Met’s steps, a free-withadmission flash mob concert by the Asphalt Orchestra walking from the Great Hall to the American sculpture garden and gallery tours led by choreographers. Bright and excited about the Museum’s new leadership “turning this tanker around,” Tomer is in the right place at the right time to energize—or revitalize—an institution. Her programming for 20122013 has been announced as “Met Museum Presents.” [Howard Mandel] Tell me about your job. It’s awesome. When I was offered it, I was very conflicted, so I took a piece of paper and did a list of pros and cons. And there was only one item on each side: It’s the Met, and it’s the Met. Classical music has been put on at the Met for a long time. Will performance have a bigger, different role now? Tom Campbell, the Met’s director since 2009, knows it doesn’t make sense for the

Met to be another New York City concert hall. He wants it to be an integral part of the museum. So what’s your approach? I’ve developed four organizing principles that I think will guide me for a long time. The first I call “Only at the Met.” What can we do that’s unique to the Met, that can only happen there and not anywhere else? Performances in galleries, performances that resonate with exhibitions or that initiate exhibitions or iconic moments in the history of the city. For instance, this is a big Philip Glass anniversary year, with orchestra performances and concerts all over. But we get to present the only concert Philip himself is playing, with violinist Tim Fain, in the Temple of Dendur. “The Artists’ Voice”: What happens if we introduce performing artists into the mix? All last summer, I invited my artist friends to come and walk with me through the museum to see what sparks. John Zorn, it turns out, comes to the Museum once a week, every week. He took me through period rooms in the American wing you can’t even find, and he knows every object. For Peter Sellars, it was Asian objects. Mark Morris led a tour of the new American wing’s painting galleries. We’re in a gallery with John Singer Sargent’s Madame X but what interests him is a small bronze object, because of its gesture. We’ll do more of those. I did a walkthrough with DJ Spooky. In the Oceanic Gallery he talked about his experience in Vanuatu, his work with Oceanic instruments, and in the Asian gallery, his work with Asian film. We realized we could create an artist’s residency. DJ Spooky will have the first-ever [residency] at the Met. He’ll do performances that connect with galleries, collections or particular objects. He’ll do panel discussions and work with constituencies that come to the museum, like the city’s public school teachers. He’ll create audio guides. He’ll infiltrate a lot of different areas. That’s two. My third principle is more straightforward: How do we work with what’s going on in the museum? I brainstorm with curators who have shows coming up to design suites of programming—performances, straight lectures, panels, conversations,

Limor Tomer. Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

film screenings. That is the heart and soul of this job: to work with the curators. My fourth principle is how we deal with classics and masterpieces. The Met does Rembrandt show after Rembrandt show, but every one of them moves the scholarship forward because it comes from a different angle. I thought, what’s a great body of work that commands that kind of constant revisiting? We’ve just had a Beethoven Quartet cycle; let’s have another one. But instead of six concerts over the course of a season, we’ll do it as a two-weekend marathon; total immersion with the Endellion Quartet, famous in Europe but unknown here. I’m working with the curators of European paintings on lectures about Beethoven at the nexus of the death of neo-classicism, the launch of the genius myth and romanticism. You can go to the lecture or panel, to the concert and go look at the Davids. How you keep up with all the performances going on in New York City? By going out a lot. I go wherever the thing is I have to hear. The only place it’s hard for me to get to is Williamsburg, because of the trains.

Do you remember your first visit to the Met? In my life? I walked through the park, I was 13, I had just gotten to New York that summer. I was with my uncle who was visiting from Israel. We went through the Egyptian wing, through the old Greek and Roman rooms. I think the Temple of Dendur had just opened. Then we went upstairs and looked at the European painting galleries. I was exhausted, and we walked home. You can’t do the Met in one day. I can’t even go upstairs. I’ll get lost. I confine myself to the ground floor. Are you thinking about where you go from here? I’m totally into what I’m doing now, and the Met thinks in decades. In terms of impact, developing programs and building something, I’m thinking long-term, definitely.

The Met Museum Presents schedule can be found at www.metmuseum.org/tickets. For more of this interview, see Howard Mandel’s blog at www.artsjournal.com/ jazzbeyondjazz. April 18, 2012 | CityArts 15

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