Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Masterworks Broadway, two CDs). A complete performance of Edward Albee’s now-classic 1964 play, performed by the entire original cast: Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon. Originally produced for Columbia by Goddard Lieberson and taped four months after the Broadway premiere, this astonishing historical document has never been reissued in any format since its original release. Must listening for anyone who cares about American theater (TT).
CD
MUSEUM
Matisse as Printmaker (Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Fla., up through Mar. 16). Sixty-three aquatints, color prints, etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and monotypes by the greatest visual artist of the twentieth century. An exquisite single-gallery show that repays close attention and multiple visits (TT).
PLAY
Port Authority (Writers Theatre, Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Ave., Glencoe, Ill., extended through Mar. 2). A breathtakingly intense and intimate Chicagoland revival of Conor McPherson’s 2001 trio of interlocking monologues by a group of desperately disappointed, deceptively ordinary-looking Irishmen, infallibly staged by William Brown (TT).
CD
Toscanini at the Queen’s Hall: The June 1935 BBC Symphony Concerts (West Hill Radio Archives, four CDs). A newly remastered and immensely significant collection of live performances recorded when the greatest conductor of the twentieth century was at the peak of his incomparable powers. The BBC Symphony was also an extraordinarily fine ensemble in 1935, and Toscanini’s leadership galvanized its superlative players and goaded them to new heights of excellence. The fare includes Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, Debussy’s La Mer, Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, and Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony. Excellent notes by Christopher Dyment (TT).
GALLERY
Yvonne Jacquette: The High Life (DC Moore, 535 W. 22, up through Feb. 8). Cityscapes and landscapes seen from a bird’s-eye point of view, rendered by a painter whose precisionist inclinations occasionally recall Charles Sheeler but whose feel for color and sense of fantasy are all her own (TT).
GALLERY
John Marin: The Breakthrough Years (Meredith Ward Fine Art, 44 E. 74th St., up through Jan. 11). Subtitled “From Paris to the Armory Show,” this exhibition of twenty-eight watercolors painted between 1904 and 1914 by the pioneering American modernist shows with breathtaking clarity how he broke free from received ideas about representation, assimilated the language of European cubism, and forged his own distinctively American style. Once again, a Manhattan gallery does what one of New York’s art museums should have done–and gets it exactly right (TT).
BOOK
The Leonard Bernstein Letters (Yale, $38). A collection of 650 letters to and (mostly) from the conductor-composer. The list of correspondents is spectacularly wide-ranging–it includes everyone from Aaron Copland to Harpo Marx–and the contents shine an unsparingly bright light on Bernstein’s ever-complex interior life. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in American music in the twentieth century (TT).
CD
Passion (PS Classics, two CDs). The original-cast album of John Doyle’s 2013 small-scale Classic Stage Company revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, featuring a piercingly poignant star turn by Judy Kuhn and rescored for a nine-piece chamber ensemble by Jonathan Tunick. Would that the production had been taped for telecast, but this complete recording is far more than a mere souvenir of an unforgettable night at the theater. To quote my Wall Street Journal review, “It will be a long time before we see another staging…that speaks so eloquently of the black mysteries of the human heart” (TT).