Archives for May 2007

“The whole study and culture of criticism, as I see it, is to gain entrance to vastly different worlds of the imagination, and to learn how to behave oneself while there; then to be gifted enough in expression to be able to give a vivacious account of what one has felt and thought while in those different worlds, whether one has ‘liked’ them or not.”
Neville Cardus, Autobiography

• Mark Morris makes his Metropolitan Opera directing debut tomorrow night with a production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice starring David Daniels, Maija Kovalevska, and Heidi Grant Murphy. James Levine conducts. Only four performances will be given this season, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoon and on May 9 and 12 (the May 12 performance is a matinee). I’ll be there.
To read an interview with Morris and his design team, go here.
For more information, go here.
• “Magical Means: Milton Avery and Watercolor,” a show of forty works on paper, goes up Thursday at Knoedler & Company and will be on view through Aug. 10. The gallery is at 19 E. 70th Street. I haven’t seen the catalogue yet, but I’ll be very surprised if this exhibition doesn’t turn out to be…well, magical.
For more information, go here.
• The Fred Hersch Trio will be performing at the Village Vanguard next Tuesday-Sunday in support of its newly released CD, Night and the Music. The Vanguard is at 178 Seventh Avenue South (like you didn’t know!). Two shows nightly, at nine and eleven p.m.
I’ve had a lot of good things to say about Fred over the years, of which this quote, from a New York Times profile, is representative:

Hersch…improvises with the sharp conceptual clarity of a classical composer; instead of merely skimming atop the familiar chord changes of standard songs, he forges them into rigorously structured, wholly personal re-creations. “I like to play orchestrally–juggling several balls, having lots of layers of stuff going on,” he says. Yet even at its most complex, his playing never sounds premeditated: it is as though each song is being spontaneously composed, on the spot and in the moment.

For more information, go here.

“Every journalist is haunted by the spectre of Himself Repeated.”
Neville Cardus, Autobiography