The six singers each won $10,000 awards. Past winners include Joyce DiDonato and Renée Fleming.
- http://bit.ly/1AIpZPU
sâmbătă, 28 februarie 2015
ArtsBeat: Six Singers Win the George London Awards
- http://bit.ly/1AIpZPU
Review: Sleater-Kinney at Terminal 5
Sleater-Kinney has made sure that its first tour since the band dissolved in 2006 is a resumption, not merely a reunion. At Terminal 5 in New York on Thursday night, opening a sold-out two-night stand, there wasn’t a hint of self-congratulation or nostalgia: just the same joyfully adamant spirit, odd-angled indie-rock, headlong momentum, banshee intensity and sense of purpose. The three-woman band — Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein on lead vocals and guitars, Janet Weiss on drums and backup vocals — was still thinking as hard as it was slamming out its songs.
From its debut album in 1995, Sleater-Kinney was always a bundle of idealistic ambitions. Those grew out of the punk-rock feminism of the riot-grrrl movement and, more privately, the distinctive musical partnership of Ms. Tucker and Ms. Brownstein, with their wrangling, jittery, endlessly fertile guitar tandems and lyrics that addressed the personal and the sociopolitical in forthright but never simplistic ways. Ms. Weiss, who took over the drums on the band’s 1997 album “Dig Me Out,” drove the band harder and brought out its quirks.
Before making its public reappearance this year, Sleater-Kinney wrote and recorded a new album, “No Cities to Love” (Sub Pop): a matter of both artistic determination, to say something immediate; and of conscience, so as not to be an oldies act. At Terminal 5, the band played nearly all of the newer songs, along with older material that had some audience members shouting their recognition within the first notes of a guitar riff.
The new songs are as gnarled and brazen as the rest of Sleater-Kinney’s catalog. They also reflect how 10 years have passed between Sleater-Kinney albums, as lyrics take on current economic insecurities (“Bury Our Friends” declares, “We live on dread in our own gilded age”) and ponder the band’s own future. “No one here is taking notice/No outline will ever hold us,” the band vows in “A New Wave.” During Sleater-Kinney’s absence, Ms. Brownstein found a new audience as a writer and star in the comedy series “Portlandia,” but Sleater-Kinney doesn’t play for laughs.
Onstage, the band was all sinew and heart. Ms. Tucker’s voice wailed and broke as the music demanded. The tempos in songs like “Words and Guitar” and “A New Wave” raced, gathered themselves and raced again, the way people in a team get excited. Sleater-Kinney’s songs know their influences, from the girl-group harmonies of “Oh!” to the minimalist cycles of “One Beat” to power-trio frenzy (with Ms. Tucker using her guitar like a bass, while Ms. Brownstein wailed lead lines). But no matter where it drew from, Sleater-Kinney pushed further. “Entertain,” from the 2005 album “The Woods,” was one ambivalent manifesto: “We’re not here ’cause we want to entertain/Go away, don’t go away.”
A guest musician, Katie Harkin, appeared intermittently to add a keyboard line or a guitar part. She freed Ms. Tucker to leave her guitar behind and be a complete singer and frontwoman: wailing, flipping her hair, claiming the stage. “Gimme respect! Gimme equality! Gimme love!” Ms. Tucker demanded on the way to introducing her own “Gimme Love.” Sleater-Kinney was a band awash in self-consciousness, fully aware of who it has been and who it is now, ready to make every wail and twin-guitar line and backbeat register with fans — and also to advance its story.
- http://bit.ly/1E5Jrsd
William Thomas McKinley, Jazz-Loving Composer, Dies at 76
William Thomas McKinley, a prolific American composer whose music was infused with the jazz he had performed since childhood, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Reading, Mass. He was 76.
He died in his sleep, his son Elliott said.
Writing in a style he called neo-tonal, Mr. McKinley produced hundreds of orchestral, chamber and vocal works that were known for their lyricism, rhythmic propulsion and accessibility. His music, which could recall not only jazz and blues but also Bach, Debussy, Ravel and Vaughan Williams, was performed on major stages, including those of Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls in New York.
Among the well-known musicians who played Mr. McKinley’s work are the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, with whom he had a long association; the pianist Peter Serkin; the violist Walter Trampler; the cellist Colin Carr; and the conductor Gerard Schwarz, who performed his compositions — including one of his best known, the 1982 tone poem “The Mountain” — with the Seattle Symphony.
A hallmark of Mr. McKinley’s music was his acute sensitivity to the tonal possibilities of each instrument: the come-hither voice of the clarinet, as in his many collaborations with Mr. Stoltzman; the tumbling rumble of the marimba, for which he wrote a number of pieces, including a concerto; and the lush, songlike sonorities of a string ensemble, as in his haunting “Elegy for Strings,” from 2006.
So attuned was Mr. McKinley to an instrument’s range of colors that his scores often contained admonitions to the performer like “Play with a vivid red tone” or “with silver intensity.” (One piece also included the somewhat more nebulous directive to play “as if dangling in space.”)
As a jazz pianist, Mr. McKinley performed or recorded with eminences including the saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz.
A distant cousin of the doomed 25th president of the United States, William Thomas McKinley, known as Tom, was born in New Kensington, Pa., near Pittsburgh, on Dec. 9, 1938. He began playing the piano by ear as a boy, and before he was out of short pants he was performing in local jazz clubs. He joined the American Federation of Musicians at 12, becoming, in all likelihood, the union’s youngest card-carrying member.
After being accepted into the music program of the Carnegie Institute of Technology — now Carnegie Mellon University — Mr. McKinley received a bachelor’s degree in composition there in 1960. (Auditioning for the program, he had performed a spontaneous composition of his own on the piano, telling the admissions jury that he was playing a piece by Ravel.)
He went on to earn master of music and master of fine arts degrees from Yale. At Tanglewood, Mr. McKinley worked with Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller, who became a lifelong champion.
The winner of a Naumburg Foundation award for chamber music, Mr. McKinley was also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. A longtime faculty member of the New England Conservatory, he had previously taught at the University of Chicago.
In the early 1990s, Mr. McKinley founded a record label, MMC (for Master Musicians Collective), which recorded primarily the work of modern American composers.
His other compositions include a tango for violin and orchestra, the orchestral work “Flyin’ Home” and vocal settings of poems by Pablo Neruda.
Besides his son Elliott, who is also a composer, Mr. McKinley’s survivors include his wife, the former Marlene Mildner; a sister, Karen Lee Ranson; four other sons, Joseph, Derrick, Jory and Gregory; and 12 grandchildren.
In a sideline not traditionally associated with composers of concert music, Mr. McKinley was a knuckleball pitcher of no little skill. In 1975, by invitation, he gave what was almost certainly the most unusual public performance of his career, pitching batting practice for a Boston Red Sox home game.
- http://bit.ly/1DnNFWW
Tupperware’s Sweet Spot Shifts to Indonesia
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The party had the feel of 1960s America, almost. A group of women, thrilled to get a break from the daily routine of hanging laundry and shuttling their children to and from school, sat in a circle, listening to a friend hawk plastic storage bowls in a dizzying array of pastels.
Some shushed babies on their laps; others occasionally leaned in for juicy pieces of news.
The women were, in fact, at a modern-day Tupperware party in the company’s biggest market. The twist? That market is halfway around the world from the product’s Massachusetts birthplace — in Indonesia.
Once a fixture in middle-class American kitchens, Tupperware has become a bit of an afterthought in its home country even as its popularity has risen abroad. (Germany was the top marketplace until Indonesia slid past it two years ago.)
Indonesia is, in many ways, in Tupperware’s sweet spot. As the economy has taken off in recent years, an expanding middle class now has more disposable income for containers of all shapes and sizes that are sturdier than those found in local markets. And, as in 1960s America, many women stay at home to keep house and raise their children, creating a captive audience for parties run by saleswomen who have begun to sidle past conservative social mores and into the work force.
“There are tens of millions of Indonesian women currently not in the work force who are potential targets to not only buy Tupperware, but also sell it,” said Emma Allen, an economist in Jakarta.
The company — whose business model is built on tapping into social networks — has also piggybacked on an Indonesian tradition, called an arisan, or “gathering,” in which women regularly meet with a set group of friends to catch up on family news, the latest recipes and neighborhood scuttlebutt.
Sellers use some of the gatherings not only to push their products, but also to recruit new agents, who can repeat the pattern among other groups of friends. An added bonus in Indonesia: the arisan often serve as informal banks, with women pooling their money and giving the pot to one participant per gathering.
Tupperware saleswomen say that can often help customers buy more expensive sets, some of which can run into the hundreds of dollars.
At the party in Villa Mutiara, a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, the differences from midcentury America were clear. Many of the potential buyers had arrived on scooters, not station wagons, and, unlike their American counterparts from last century, their hair was tucked away under Muslim jilbabs rather than teased into a bouffant.
But their concerns about the Tupperware they were considering buying would not be alien to American women, past and present, whose jobs include stretching the family budget, while buying products that will last.
Proof of longevity was enough of a priority at the Indonesian gathering that the bubbly sales agent, Rosa Amelia, took the unusual step of slamming a pink cookie container into the white-tiled floor in answer to the question, “Are you sure they’re indestructible?”
The women were shocked enough to temporarily cease their background talk about cooking and the challenges of storing food in Indonesia’s tropical heat. Then they burst out laughing, satisfied that the relatively expensive plastic containers were worth the price.
Tupperware’s Indonesian sales force, now about 250,000-strong, racked up sales of more than $200 million last year, according to the company.
For some women who choose to join the salesteam, the company has provided a way out of poverty — about half the population lives on less than $2 a day — and prescribed social roles.
Although women are increasingly joining the work force, the Indonesian government and religious groups have for decades pushed traditional values in which the primary roles of women are as wives and mothers. The country’s 1974 Marriage Law states that the husband is the head of the family and the wife is the caretaker.
As it has done in other emerging markets, Tupperware encouraged women to move past any insecurities about taking on a new role. The company has a campaign called “Chain of Confidence,” in which it posts video interviews of saleswomen talking about how their lives have changed for the better. The company also has a inspirational campaign for Indonesia, “Tupperware She Can,” that also posts aspirational videos.
“Everyone talks about how the dynamism of Asia is the emerging middle class, and the emerging middle class is driven by women who previously didn’t have the opportunity,” said Rick Goings, global chairman and chief executive of Tupperware Brands Corporation. “I’m not saying men didn’t work hard, but there’s a new opportunity for women in Asia.”
Upi Hariwati is one of the Indonesian women who has seized the opportunity. Four years ago, the 39-year-old wife and mother of a young son began looking for solutions after growing tired of her family’s living paycheck to paycheck from her husband’s job.
In a testimonial for “Chain of Confidence,” Ms. Upi said that when she started out as a Tupperware saleswoman, she had to deliver products to customers using public transportation minivans. But within two years, she says, she was earning enough that she bought a new car and a house. “I became more confident, knowledgeable and disciplined,” she said.
Ms. Amelia, the saleswoman at the Villa Mutiara party, had a similar tale. Six years ago, she was trying to keep afloat a restaurant that she ran in South Jakarta with her husband. Then she was invited to a Tupperware party that she said changed her life.
After being recruited as a saleswoman and struggling to get her husband to agree to let her take the job, she started off selling part-time, squeezing the parties in between her duties at the restaurant. Today she is a regional manager, running about 20 parties a month in and around Jakarta. Ms. Amelia, 41, earns the equivalent of about $2,400 a month — six-times her monthly profits from the restaurant, which they have sold.
“Initially, my husband refused to let me sell Tupperware even part-time because he thought it might affect the restaurant,” Ms. Amelia said. “Now he works for me.”
- http://bit.ly/1DEKIno
App City: Clocking Your Train
Tic Toc Transit, introduced in August, fulfills one very simple purpose: It tells you when your subway train is coming. It does so with an eye-pleasing countdown to the next two train arrivals on any line, at any station. As long as you tell it before heading out which station you plan to depart from, it works underground.
I was glad to have downloaded Tic Toc Transit when I did. Since it has been so cold in New York recently, anything that allowed me to minimize the time between leaving my house and entering the warmth of a subway car had to be considered a lucky find.
The app was born of transit experience: Miles Fitzgerald, one of its creators, moved to New York from France about five years ago and became a regular rider of the F train. Mr. Fitzgerald was tormented by his wait on the platform every morning.
“The F train, I call it like an old horse,” he said. “It always works, but it’s just slow.”
He said he wished that he could look at a display that would tell him when his train was coming, something like the countdown clocks that, for the moment, exist only on some lines. So he decided to make a digital version based on the set train schedule.
Transit apps like HopStop also include the train schedules. But because Tic Toc Transit presents the information with a ticking clock counting down the seconds, using it is more satisfying than looking at a flat schedule.
With its lovely minimalist design and single function, the app is a good example of a software type that has become fashionable with developers in the last couple of years: Many have been breaking down multifunction services — like Facebook, for instance — into the constituent parts of the services they provide.
There are obvious disadvantages to taking this approach with Tic Toc Transit. The app does not give you directions or a subway map, and it does not provide any handy extras, like allowing you to plug in more than one starting station. Let’s say you are set to get on the F line at East Broadway and are planning to transfer at West Fourth Street. You can’t set up the app to tell you when the next A train is due.
Then there is the obvious catch of using a schedule: The app is not updated with live information, so it’s accurate only when the trains are running on time. The F was quite punctual for me last week, so the app was a godsend. On Saturday, though, it was snowy and my Q train was delayed.
At first, I continued to enjoy using Tic Toc Transit, as a means of holding the tardy train accountable for the damage it was doing to me. Indeed, the app would be a great way to measure when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is not performing as it should.
But as my phone counted down arrival after supposed arrival with no train pulling in, I started to lose my trust and eventually slid my phone into my pocket. Tic Toc Transit can provide a soothing illusion of order. But the app that can hasten the arrival of a late train has yet to be invented.
- http://bit.ly/1G55i3U
Nearly Beaten in Sierra Leone, Ebola Makes a Comeback by Sea
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — It seemed as if the Ebola crisis was abating.
New cases were plummeting. The president lifted travel restrictions, and schools were to reopen. A local politician announced on the radio that two 21-day incubation cycles had passed with no new infections in his Freetown neighborhood. The country, many health officials said, was “on the road to zero.”
Then Ebola washed in from the sea.
Sick fishermen came ashore in early February to the packed wharf-side slums that surround the country’s fanciest hotels, which were filled with public health workers. Volunteers fanned out to contain the outbreak, but the virus jumped quarantine lines and cascaded into the countryside, bringing dozens of new infections and deaths.
“We worked so hard,” said Emmanuel Conteh, an Ebola response coordinator in a rural district. “It is a shame to all of us.”
Public health experts preparing for an international conference on Ebola on Tuesday seem to have no doubt that the disease can be vanquished in the West African countries ravaged by it in the last year. But the steep downward trajectory of new cases late last year and into January did not lead to the end of the epidemic.
In Sierra Leone, the hardest hit of the countries, the decline leveled off in late January, and the country has reported 60 to 80 new cases weekly since then. Guinea has experienced months of lower-level spread. Even in Liberia, where only a handful of treatment beds remain occupied, responders lament that a health care worker who recently became ill might have exposed dozens of colleagues and patients, and that a knife fight had exposed gang members to the blood of a man who tested positive for Ebola.
“I doubt it will stop just suddenly,” said Dr. Pierre Rollin, an infectious disease expert with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s always bumpy, and the bigger the outbreak, the more chance you have a bumpy thing.”
As large epidemics taper off, it is common to find new complications in the effort to reach zero cases. “Oftentimes we find surprises when we get to a low level that were hidden by the epidemic itself early on,” said Dr. William Foege, a former director of the C.D.C. and a leading figure in the eradication of smallpox.
For example, health officials managed to reduce measles drastically in the United States in the 1970s, but it took some time before experts realized that a few travelers per week arriving from other countries were developing the illness, continuing its spread. Importation of measles is again a problem today, and it is suspected as a factor in the current outbreak linked to Disneyland.
Then there is polio, which experts had resolved to eliminate globally by 2000, before wars and unexpected resistance disrupted the plan.
“I don’t think we ever foresaw a time when people would shoot and kill polio vaccinators,” Dr. Foege said, referring to incidents in Pakistan and Nigeria that interrupted inoculation campaigns.
Eliminating smallpox about 35 years ago required a deep understanding of the communities in which it hid. During its last stand, in Somalia, people obscured cases, partly out of embarrassment.
“I think Ebola will turn out to be the same thing,” Dr. Foege said. “The surprises will not be so much scientific as cultural: the ability to hide cases; the desire not to be identified as having Ebola or being in contact with Ebola. Those are the things we have to find out how to overcome.”
That challenge is apparent now in Sierra Leone, where the arrival of infected mariners — combined with a recent easing of anti-Ebola measures, persistent community resistance to containment measures and misunderstanding — has contributed to the surge in the capital. Vice President Samuel Sam-Sumana said Saturday that he had placed himself under quarantine after one of his security officers died of Ebola on Tuesday.
Two wooden boats carrying three sick fishermen arrived at a small wharf in Freetown in early February, cutting short a two-week trip. “The captain was vomiting,” said Mohamed Bangura, 23, a crew member of one boat.
The wharf, Tamba Kula, is an informal settlement where hundreds of people live in shanties made of reclaimed wood and corrugated metal roofs. At the slum’s entrance, a towering sign displays an image of the Statue of Liberty, an advertisement for daily British Airways flights with connections to the United States that were canceled when the Ebola outbreak was declared.
Now, commerce in Tamba Kula is also restricted. Those who contracted Ebola there and nearby — two dozen people since early February — include fishermen, boat cleaners and two women who sold fish.
There are various theories about how the seamen might have been infected and how they spread Ebola to others. Some fishermen delayed reporting their illnesses, stopping instead at an island for treatment with native herbs before coming home to the capital. A few wharf residents who later fell ill thought they had come into contact with contaminated bodily fluids at a shared toilet block that was recently built in Tamba Kula by the aid group Oxfam.
When the cluster erupted at the wharf area — part of a large neighborhood known as Aberdeen, with about 9,000 residents — some Ebola prevention workers were taken by surprise because they had been continuing surveillance efforts. Officials imposed a quarantine, prompting many fishermen to take to the sea to avoid it. The authorities sent out word for them to return.
On a recent afternoon, James Bangura, an official leading the Ebola response in the capital, chastised the deputy harbor master of Tamba Kula for failing to keep arriving fisherman on their boats to be evaluated.
“Once they’re lost and nobody accounts for them, we can’t get to zero,” Mr. Bangura told the man.
“They scatter,” the deputy harbor master responded, but he checked the men from the next boat that arrived.
Outreach teams in recent days made their way over twisting dirt paths filled with garbage, fish bones and shells along seaside settlements in Aberdeen, where narrow passages made it impossible to avoid physical contact with others. The volunteers stopped at dozens of residences. “Nobody sick?” they asked in the Krio language. “You aren’t hiding anybody?”
One night at 11:30, Foday Kamara, a community monitor, walked breathlessly up the road from Tamba Kula. He said he had spent two hours with soldiers chasing down a dozen or so residents who had tried to escape quarantine in the dark. They said that they felt cooped up and that food did not always arrive.
“Ebola work is not easy,” Mr. Kamara said. “I feel like these people, they aren’t ready to end Ebola yet.”
The hard work — by teams of student volunteers, with national and international public health experts — was rewarded, as new cases in Tamba Kula declined.
“I feel like our response was rapid, it was strong, and it appears to have helped,” Dr. John T. Redd, an epidemiologist with the C.D.C., said at the district’s command center in Freetown 10 days ago. On a white board, he had drawn two smiley faces next to the number zero for the previous day’s positive cases.
But the problem was not over. It had moved.
In early February, Abass Koroma, who ran a food grinding shop in Tamba Kula, left there with the help of his wife. His sister had recently died, and he was sick.
Mr. Koroma’s mother, Fatmata Kalokoh, a rice farmer who had traveled to Freetown after her daughter’s death, said her son’s wife had paid a taxi driver about $40 for the three-hour journey back to the family’s village, Rosanda, east of the capital. Her son had refused to go to the hospital in Freetown out of fear, she said. When he arrived in Rosanda, she took him to a traditional healer, who prepared an herbal medicine to help him sleep. Mr. Koroma drank it and began vomiting blood. The next day, he died en route to another village to see another traditional healer.
His death was reported to teams in charge of safe burials, but some villagers said they had touched his body in mourning before it was picked up, thinking that something like a curse had killed him and not Ebola. Mr. Koroma has been linked to the subsequent infections of 43 people in the community, some of whom have died, according to Ebola response officials in the district.
“His wife caused all this,” Ms. Kalokoh said. Now a patient at an International Medical Corps treatment center, she gestured to a treatment tent where her daughter-in-law lay. A survivor working at the center shushed Ms. Kalokoh, saying that it was in God’s hands and that she should not blame anyone.
Every day last week, ambulances bumped over dusty roads, going to Rosanda to carry villagers 45 minutes to the medical center. Two mothers walked weakly to the open doors of an ambulance as their young sons watched, shoulders heaving with sobs. A young girl was taken last Sunday as her mother stood helpless behind candy-striped quarantine tape. The girl, Marie Kamara, died on Friday.
As cases mounted, Dr. Conteh, the district’s Ebola response coordinator, summoned about 125 traditional healers, tribal chiefs and other local leaders. He called for a suspension of traditional practices and warned that criminal summonses were being issued to anyone accused of hiding the sick. Experts fear that such threats will lead more people to go underground.
“The war is still on,” Dr. Conteh told colleagues the next day. “We’re at a critical stage. We can either make or break.”
- http://bit.ly/1zOJiD7
William Thomas McKinley, Jazz-Loving Composer, Dies at 76
William Thomas McKinley, a prolific American composer whose music was infused with the jazz he had performed since childhood, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Reading, Mass. He was 76.
He died in his sleep, his son Elliott said.
Writing in a style he called neo-tonal, Mr. McKinley produced hundreds of orchestral, chamber and vocal works that were known for their lyricism, rhythmic propulsion and accessibility. His music, which could recall not only jazz and blues but also Bach, Debussy, Ravel and Vaughan Williams, was performed on major stages, including those of Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls in New York.
Among the well-known musicians who played Mr. McKinley’s work are the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, with whom he had a long association; the pianist Peter Serkin; the violist Walter Trampler; the cellist Colin Carr; and the conductor Gerard Schwarz, who performed his compositions — including one of his best known, the 1982 tone poem “The Mountain” — with the Seattle Symphony.
A hallmark of Mr. McKinley’s music was his acute sensitivity to the tonal possibilities of each instrument: the come-hither voice of the clarinet, as in his many collaborations with Mr. Stoltzman; the tumbling rumble of the marimba, for which he wrote a number of pieces, including a concerto; and the lush, songlike sonorities of a string ensemble, as in his haunting “Elegy for Strings,” from 2006.
So attuned was Mr. McKinley to an instrument’s range of colors that his scores often contained admonitions to the performer like “Play with a vivid red tone” or “with silver intensity.” (One piece also included the somewhat more nebulous directive to play “as if dangling in space.”)
As a jazz pianist, Mr. McKinley performed or recorded with eminences including the saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz.
A distant cousin of the doomed 25th president of the United States, William Thomas McKinley, known as Tom, was born in New Kensington, Pa., near Pittsburgh, on Dec. 9, 1938. He began playing the piano by ear as a boy, and before he was out of short pants he was performing in local jazz clubs. He joined the American Federation of Musicians at 12, becoming, in all likelihood, the union’s youngest card-carrying member.
After being accepted into the music program of the Carnegie Institute of Technology — now Carnegie Mellon University — Mr. McKinley received a bachelor’s degree in composition there in 1960. (Auditioning for the program, he had performed a spontaneous composition of his own on the piano, telling the admissions jury that he was playing a piece by Ravel.)
He went on to earn master of music and master of fine arts degrees from Yale. At Tanglewood, Mr. McKinley worked with Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller, who became a lifelong champion.
The winner of a Naumburg Foundation award for chamber music, Mr. McKinley was also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. A longtime faculty member of the New England Conservatory, he had previously taught at the University of Chicago.
In the early 1990s, Mr. McKinley founded a record label, MMC (for Master Musicians Collective), which recorded primarily the work of modern American composers.
His other compositions include a tango for violin and orchestra, the orchestral work “Flyin’ Home” and vocal settings of poems by Pablo Neruda.
Besides his son Elliott, who is also a composer, Mr. McKinley’s survivors include his wife, the former Marlene Mildner; a sister, Karen Lee Ranson; four other sons, Joseph, Derrick, Jory and Gregory; and 12 grandchildren.
In a sideline not traditionally associated with composers of concert music, Mr. McKinley was a knuckleball pitcher of no little skill. In 1975, by invitation, he gave what was almost certainly the most unusual public performance of his career, pitching batting practice for a Boston Red Sox home game.
- http://bit.ly/1N4alDJ
Character Study: Like a Rolling Stone
“They call me the Keith-iest Keith,” said Kevin Gleeson, 55, referring to his resemblance, both visually and musically, to the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
Standing in the bathroom of his Astoria, Queens, apartment last weekend, Mr. Gleeson was really beginning to resemble Mr. Richards, as he applied makeup to achieve something of a wasted pallor.
He grabbed a pair of leopard-print spandex pants, a flowing shirt and a pink head scarf, and pulled on a pair of worn-out snakeskin boots that he said had logged more than 500 gigs with him as Mr. Richards over the years.
The gig this night was a barroom performance with the Stony Rollers, a local Stones tribute band. Mr. Gleeson has been performing the music of Keith Richards for more than 40 years — early on with his various blues and rock cover bands, and for the past 20 years with tribute bands like Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers.
Mr. Gleeson has a day job that might make the real Keith Richards choke on his dangling cigarette: He works for the New York Police Department.
During the week, he can be found at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan, wearing a sport jacket and tie and working as a graphic artist in the Management Analysis and Planning unit of Commissioner William J. Bratton’s office.
Mr. Gleeson designs banners and other materials for news conferences, high-level meetings and other uses.
Sometimes his rocker side clashes with the button-down demeanor of 1 Police Plaza, like the time he was unexpectedly called into the commissioner’s office while wearing a pair of pink pants with his long hair unbound from its usual ponytail.
Walking from floor to floor on Tuesday, he seemed to know everyone from the top chiefs to the building staff, and many of them asked about his coming shows.
Mr. Gleeson said he grew up in Woodside, Queens, in a strict Catholic family of “cops and nurses.” At holiday gatherings, off-duty weapons were placed on top of the refrigerator.
He began playing guitar when he was 12, after hearing the riffs in “Brown Sugar” on a neighbor’s turntable. He took lessons on a borrowed guitar at St. Sebastian’s, the local Catholic school, and learned how to play rock and blues from his neighbor Nicky Martin, leader of the band Street Punk, who let him apprentice.
But it was Mr. Richards who was his musical idol and father figure. He went to Rolling Stones concerts, bought all the records and studied the guitar parts to figure out Mr. Richards’s unique tunings.
He also followed the famous rocker’s decadent path into drinking and drugs for much of his teenage years and his 20s, until becoming clean and sober even before auditioning for his first tribute band, Beggars Banquet, in 1995.
To keep up appearances onstage, he would mix coffee and Pepsi in a glass so that it would foam up and resemble a pint of Guinness.
“I always get a kick out of being sober 28 years and playing the guy people call the most wasted guy on Earth,” he said. “But I consider it a rite of passage in order to play Keith properly. It’s hard to imitate the guy if you haven’t walked a mile in his shoes.”
When he joined Sticky Fingers in 2005, he said, “I became their 24th Keith,” and he toured the country and Europe, from bars to frat parties to concert arenas.
“I was a kid from Queens who knew three chords, traveling the world playing in front of 11,000 people in Europe,” Mr. Gleeson said, sitting next to his coffee table, where his civilian Police Department shield rested next to a pile of guitar picks and a recent issue of Spring 3100, the department’s long-running magazine, which included a photo of him performing shirtless.
“As far as I know, it’s the only bare-chested Keith in the N.Y.P.D.’s in-house magazine,” he said. On that night last weekend, Mr. Gleeson was, finally, with the assistance of his wife, Jen Haus, a psychotherapist, in full Richards regalia. He grabbed a 55-year-old amplifier and a “Sticky Fingers”-stenciled guitar case containing two Telecasters rigged with the five-string tunings that Mr. Richards uses.
He headed to Mickey Malone’s pub in Floral Park, just over the Queens border with Long Island, to join the Stony Rollers, who include two retired New York police officers: Joe Zogbie, also on guitar, and Ken Brown as Mick Jagger.
Mr. Gleeson said his life is less Keith-like now, but he is not ready to give up living like a Rolling Stone.
“I just really want to keep a foot in it,” he said before launching into those raunchy riffs on “Honky Tonk Woman” and rocking the bar.
- http://bit.ly/1wy7zld
Art World Rediscovers Kazuo Shiraga
LONDON — Kazuo Shiraga is the art world’s rediscovery of the moment.
A member of Japan’s Gutai group of avant-garde artists, Shiraga (1924-2008) developed during his six-decade career the singular technique of painting suspended from a rope, using his feet to make violently abstract, thickly impasted canvases. It has only been since the artist’s death, however, that the conceptual originality and visual power of these “foot paintings” have been recognized by Western curators and collectors, particularly in the United States.
Shiraga was one of the central figures in a 2013 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York devoted to the Gutai collective. Now, he and a fellow Gutai member, Sadamasa Motonaga, are the focus of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art to July 19.
There are also two shows that combine loaned and for-sale Shiraga works at the New York galleries Mnuchin and Dominique Lévy. And starting April 30, the New York dealer Fergus McCaffrey, who represents the artist’s estate, will be exhibiting works by Shiraga and his wife, Fujiko Uemura.
Shiraga has also been popular on the auction market. In December, Ketterer Kunst in Munich sold Shiraga’s prime-period 1961 abstract, “Chijikusei Gotenrai,” for 3.25 million euros, about $3.7 million. The seller was the widow of a doctor who had bought the painting for 25,000 Deutsche marks, about $17,000, from Galerie Georg Nothelfer in Berlin in 1992.
“I told my collectors it would be good for their collections if they had a Shiraga,” said the gallery’s founder, Georg Nothelfer, 77, who, with Rodolphe Stadler in Paris and David Juda in London, was one of the few European dealers who exhibited Shiraga in his lifetime. “I used to charge between 20,000 marks and 40,000 marks for them.”
The Japanese artist was virtually unknown in the United States for most of the second half of the 20th century.
Shiraga’s resurgence is helped by the vogue for so-called process-based abstraction, and a revival of interest in performance art. Shown by the Belgian dealer Axel Vervoordt next to European postwar abstracts by Luciano Fontana and Zero group artists at the Venice Biennale beginning in 2007, his paintings were a revelation to American tastemakers like the Dallas collector and philanthropist Howard Rachofsky and Ms. Lévy, the New York gallerist.
“When you saw it in context with Fontana, there was a degree of interaction; it was a quick and easy leap,” said Mr. Rachofsky, a former hedge fund manager who has a private museum and is one of the world’s most prominent collectors of American minimalism and Italian postwar art. “There’s a lot of spirit in these paintings.”
In recent years, Mr. Rachofsky, with his adviser, Allan Schwartzman, and Mr. McCaffrey, has regularly traveled to Japan, quietly amassing a collection of about 40 works by Shiraga and other Japanese conceptually minded artists that complemented his holdings of American and European art.
Mr. McCaffrey said in an email that they had made “four or five trips” to Japan. “The whole gallery system is broken down in Japan,” he wrote, “and no one was representing these important artists or their estates, so literally we would go to artists’ homes, old warehouses and museum vaults, as there were no galleries that showed this work.”
Six pieces from the Rachofsky Collection have been included in the Dallas Museum’s current Shiraga and Motonaga show.
Since the art market crash of 2009, many wealthy collectors have become reluctant to pay six-figure prices for works by young artists, believing that there is better value and quality to be found among the neglected talent of the 20th century. The challenge is timing, though. As Mr. Rachofsky put it, “If you’re not there at the nanosecond of rediscovery, you can find yourself queuing up to pay $250,000.”
Shiraga has now been rediscovered, prompting some collectors to explore more rarefied and affordable areas of the Japanese avant-garde, such as the Mono-ha and Hi-Red Center movements. Robert Mnuchin and Ms. Lévy — who from 2005 to 2012 were partners in the New York gallery L & M Arts — have both priced their few available Shiraga paintings at about $2 million to $6 million, slightly above the auction high of $5.3 million for the artist. Both dealers said they had made sales, but did not identify the individual works or prices.
“He was an artist’s artist,” said Ms. Lévy, who has collaborated with Mr. Vervoordt on a 300-page monograph on Shiraga to coincide with her exhibition. “Books by him were found in Pollock’s studio, and Tàpies owned a work by Shiraga and said it was his favorite painting.”
Although she and Mr. Mnuchin are convinced of Shiraga’s originality and importance, both dealers are uncertain whether the momentum in his market — his auction high has increased almost five-fold since 2008 — can be maintained.
“The increase in interest in the United States has been extraordinary,” Mr. Mnuchin said, “but in two years I’m not sure you’ll be seeing a Shiraga in every auction as you are now.”
When the prices for rediscovered artists approach the levels of those in the museum-ratified “canon,” collectors and museums are faced with the same question they confront when asked to pay $200,000 for a painting by a 25-year-old: Is the reputation of the artist — and by extension, the investment — going to last?
This was the question posed when a 1967 multilayered white canvas by the recently “rediscovered” Italian artist Paolo Scheggi (1940-1971) sold for an auction record of 1.2 million pounds, about $1.8 million, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary sale in London on Feb. 11. In October 2013, eyebrows were raised when another monochrome by this all-but-forgotten contemporary of Fontana and Piero Manzoni sold for £218,500 at auction, but prices have since soared as more works have come on the market.
Is something similar going to happen to the more cerebral and political art of Fabio Mauri (1926-2009)? Beginning Thursday, the New York branch of the Hauser & Wirth gallery will be showing about 50 works from the estate of this Italian multidisciplinary avant-garde artist, who explored the totalitarian ideologies that overshadowed his youth. These include the 1970 canvas “Schermo The End,” a recreation of the screen that concluded Italian Fascist movie documentaries in the 1930s. Prices will range from $50,000 to $1 million. To date, no work by Mauri has sold for more than $100,000 at auction.
“There are opportunities for collectors,” Mr. Rachofsky said. “People gravitate to areas and artists that haven’t been explored. But not all of them are as interesting as people think. There was a reason that some artists fell into obscurity.”
- http://bit.ly/17GwtDs
Review: ‘Social Security,’ the Heroic Poetry of Solitude
She enters muttering, as if speaking without pause were as necessary as breathing. All subjects are given the same weight in June’s rushing river of words: the death of her husband, chocolate peanut butter Easter eggs, her most recent surgery, the virtues of Lysol and the dubious hygiene of the people next door.
Played with unconquerable garrulousness by Elizabeth Dement in Christina Masciotti’s “Social Security,” at the Bushwick Starr, June is one of those souls who has nothing to say and never stops saying it. No matter that this newly widowed, retired pretzel factory worker is almost entirely deaf and lives alone. The conversation must go on.
You probably know someone like June, quite possibly within your own family. And you have probably determined that the best way to survive time in this person’s company is to tune out as completely as possible. But Ms. Masciotti would like you to keep your ears open, for once. This dramatist’s implicit thesis is that if you listen closely enough, there’s significant artistry in insignificant talk.
As in her earlier plays, “Vision Disturbance” and “Adult,” Ms. Masciotti mines the banalities of everyday chatter for heroic poetry. Set largely in working-class Pennsylvania, in towns forgotten by time, her uneventful dramas seem to be composed of what might be called “found conversation,” of words taken directly from life, with only minor cosmetic alteration.
This may sound like your idea of hell. But there’s a determined empathy in Ms. Masciotti’s work that enlivens the senses, making you realize that nothing and no one is boring — once you’re forced to pay close attention.
Directed by Paul Lazar with a cast rounded out by the avant-garde theater veterans Cynthia Hopkins and T. Ryder Smith, “Social Security” is both more conventional and experimental than Ms. Masciotti’s previous work. Its plot — and it has more of one than this writer usually provides — vaguely recalls a multitude of stories in which a vulnerable old woman is fleeced by a younger predator.
The wolf, in this case, is June’s landlord, Wayne (an enjoyably spasmodic Mr. Smith), a disgraced and self-medicating former podiatrist, who makes nice with his tenant while skimming from her Social Security payments. Another neighbor, the kindly Sissy (a warm and weary Ms. Hopkins), a Greek-born masseuse, tries to keep a lookout for threats to June’s well-being.
What suspense the story has comes from their half-formed battle of wills over an old woman’s destiny. June doesn’t seem to make moral distinctions between them. As far as she’s concerned, each is a set of ears of equal value, receptacles for her contentedly oblivious monologues.
The play’s story and speech may be naturalistic, but its staging is not. Sara C. Walsh’s set is divided into three stark, blank sections of beige carpet, well-worn linoleum and tiled fake wood, suggesting an anonymous wasteland of cheap housing.
The cast members move in ritualized, sometimes synchronized steps that evoke a sense of life as an instinctive and repetitive dance. Objects under discussion — like frozen TV dinners, bunches of bananas and a lone credit card — materialize on cue from the vertical louvers at the back of the stage. And there’s a gnatlike buzz of ambient noise (by the great sound designer Ben Williams), a blurry aural backdrop to all the talk.
Some of these theatrical elements are more distracting than illuminating. (It’s never a good sign when you realize you’re furrowing your brow over choices in staging.) But to my surprise, I remained absorbed by Ms. Masciotti’s logorrheic characters, especially June, whom Ms. Dement endows with a rapt self-involvement that is improbably free of narcissism.
June is not unlike that eternal chatterbox Winnie, buried up to her neck in sand in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” a person for whom there’s life as long there’s talk. June is, in her less symbolic way, as immobilized as Winnie is. And as her tongue keeps flapping, she, too, becomes an existential heroine of sorts, a life force that persists even as it shrinks into nothingness.
- http://bit.ly/17GwiYK
U.S. Seeks to Deport Bosnians Over War Crimes
WASHINGTON — Immigration officials are moving to deport at least 150 Bosnians living in the United States who they believe took part in war crimes and “ethnic cleansing” during the bitter conflict that raged in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
In all, officials have identified about 300 immigrants who they believe concealed their involvement in wartime atrocities when they came to the United States as part of a wave of Bosnian war refugees fleeing the violence there. With more records from Bosnia becoming available, the officials said the number of suspects could eventually top 600.
“The more we dig, the more documents we find,” said Michael MacQueen, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement historian who has led many investigations in the agency’s war crimes section. The accused immigrants, many of them former soldiers from Bosnia, include a soccer coach in Virginia, a metal worker in Ohio and four hotel casino workers in Las Vegas.
The effort to identify suspects included an appeal broadcast to Bosnians around the world in February, urging witnesses to come forward with any information about war crimes. Bosnians should be confident that “justice can be served in the United States despite the fact that many years have gone by and that the conduct occurred overseas, far away,” Kathleen O’Connor, a human rights prosecutor at the Justice Department, said in a message translated into Bosnian on the government-financed Voice of America network.
Evidence developed by immigration officials indicates that perhaps as many as half of the 300 Bosnian suspects in the United States may have played a part in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II: the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces executed some 8,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men.
“The idea that the people who did all this damage in Bosnia should have a free pass and a new shot at life is just obscene to me,” said Mr. MacQueen, who investigated Nazi suspects in the United States before turning his focus to the Bosnian war.
But the investigations have proven enormously complicated, sometimes dogged by years of delays and legal battles. Funding for the war crimes center at the immigration agency has been cut, officials said, and with just $65,000 last fiscal year for expenses like travel and translating, Mr. MacQueen routinely borrows a friend’s apartment when he travels to the Balkans to interview witnesses, he said. Officials say they do not have enough funding to chase every lead.
“The money absolutely makes a difference,” said Mark Furtado, a senior official at the agency.
Lawyers for some suspects fighting war crimes charges say federal officials have gone too far in linking longtime residents of the United States, some of them now American citizens, to crimes committed two decades ago in a foreign war zone.
“It’s guilt by association,” said Thomas M. Hoidal, a lawyer in Phoenix who represented two of a group of 12 Bosnian Serbs in Arizona now facing deportation over charges of war crimes.
Since the immigration agency opened its war crimes section in 2008, it has investigated immigrants linked to atrocities in conflicts in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda and other global hot spots. But no conflict has generated as much attention from American investigators as the Bosnian war, which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced two million others from 1992 to 1995 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Amid widespread lawlessness, all of the warring factions that fought in Bosnia — Serbs, Croats and Muslims — carried out brutal, ethnic-fueled attacks on civilians. But the Bosnian Serb forces, backed and supplied by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, were implicated in far more bloodletting than any other group as they sought a Serb-dominated Bosnian state.
In 2004, the United Nations declared the slaughter at Srebrenica, near an enclave protected by the United Nations, an official act of genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has convicted nearly 80 people, with verdicts upheld in January against five Bosnian Serb military officials.
But many offenders were able to get away.
When more than 120,000 Bosnian refugees began applying for American visas in the mid-1990s, they were required to disclose military service or other allegiances that might have suggested involvement in war crimes. But the system relied largely on the honesty of the applicants, and there was little effort to verify their statements.
The effort to identify Bosnian war crimes suspects arose almost by happenstance.
It began with an arrest in Boston more than a decade ago. A series of tips, along with a book by a Boston Globe reporter, led federal agents in Massachusetts in 2004 to a construction worker named Marko Boskic, a Bosnian Serb accused of carrying out executions in the Srebrenica region. He was convicted of concealing his army service, then sent back to Bosnia and sentenced to 10 years in prison for crimes against humanity.
Immigration officials said the case showed that former soldiers and mercenaries implicated in Bosnian war crimes had been living openly, with little scrutiny or fear of exposure.
“All of these people really came into the United States under the radar,” said Lara J. Nettelfield, a scholar at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has written extensively on Bosnian war crimes. “There really wasn’t much attention given to this problem for years.”
For Bosnian Muslims, in particular, it has been painful to see suspected offenders living side by side with war refugees in the United States, said Hamdija Custovic, a Bosnian immigrant who leads the Congress of North American Bosniaks.
“There’s been a lot of covering up of what happened in Bosnia, and a lot of these people who were involved are still walking around,” Mr. Custovic said. “Whatever has been done to find these people is not enough. It’s tragic.”
Relying on a trove of Bosnian war crimes files and military rosters, federal officials have built cases against immigrants from New York to Oregon. In Kentucky, Azra Basic, a Croatian woman who was a guard at a military detention center, has been jailed and faces extradition on charges that she tortured some Serb prisoners and made them drink gasoline and human blood. And in Vermont, a Bosnian Muslim named Edin Sakoc was found guilty by a federal jury in January of lying to immigration officials about his role in a rape, two murders and an arson targeting Bosnian Serbs in 1992.
The efforts to deport most of the suspects have come in over 100 immigration proceedings that have not been made public.
In a case in eastern Ohio, a federal grand jury in December indicted an Akron foundry worker named Slobodan Mutic, a Bosnian Serb, on what appeared to be a run-of-the-mill charge of being in the United States on fraudulent immigration papers. The indictment did not mention that Mr. Mutic was the subject of a lengthy war crimes investigation.
In fact, Mr. Mutic was among nine Bosnian immigrants to the United States identified by Croatian officials as a suspect in war crimes committed in what is now Croatia, according to a classified 2008 State Department memo made public by WikiLeaks. Federal investigators are examining Mr. Mutic’s ties to the killings of a Croatian couple and other ethnic-driven violence during the Bosnian conflict, people with knowledge of the case said. His lawyer declined to comment on the case.
With a stepped-up focus on Bosnia since the arrest of Mr. Boskic in Boston, immigration officials say a total of 64 Balkan immigrants with ties to war crimes have left the United States after being expelled through legal proceedings or fleeing while under investigation. While most of the cases involve Bosnian Serbs, officials have also taken action against Bosnian Muslims and Croats who they believe participated in attacks against Serbs — a reflection, officials say, of their willingness to pursue Bosnian offenders of all types.
But building enough evidence to deport someone suspected of war crimes is not easy.
Bosnian military records, for example, indicate that Milan Trisic, a North Carolina truck driver, served in a Bosnian Serb military unit that was at Srebrenica at the time of the killings and in a unit implicated in a campaign of ethnic-targeted killings three years earlier.
In a phone interview, Mr. Trisic said the F.B.I. had approached him several years ago and that, along with his son Sladjan, he had agreed to meet with an agent to explain that he had not been involved in any atrocities. He said he had driven a truck in the war, not served in the military.
“It’s just talk,” his son said. “There’s no proof. They’re trying to blame him for something in the war. He wasn’t involved in any of that.”
Mr. Trisic has not been charged, but the investigation appears to be continuing. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Nowhere are the difficulties more apparent than in Phoenix, which has a large Bosnian population and more war crimes investigations than anywhere else.
Twelve Bosnian Serbs who live in the area face deportation over war crimes, some at Srebrenica, in a long-running investigation. In a series of orders in 2013 that were not made public, an Arizona immigration judge found enough evidence to make the men eligible for deportation because they had concealed their service in the Bosnian Serb army, according to Christopher Brelje, a lawyer who represented them.
But because of backlogs in immigration courts, a second phase needed to determine whether they will actually be deported is not scheduled until 2019.
For the dozen Bosnians, the delay means a reprieve in confronting crimes they insist they did not commit.
“These aren’t war criminals,” said Mr. Brelje, who also represents four Bosnian Serbs in Las Vegas facing deportation.
Mr. Brelje said that while some of his Phoenix clients had been stationed with Serb forces in towns not far from Srebrenica, they had been “grunts in the trenches” securing perimeter positions, not executing Muslims.
Immigration officials “are painting too broad a brush,” he said. “They got excited and said, ‘Bad things happened over there; let’s punish some people.’ But these guys didn’t do anything wrong.”
- http://bit.ly/1E3aMd0
Pining for Handel’s ‘Alcina’ Sorceress, Coming to Lincoln Center on Film
Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi.” Mozart’s “La Finta Giardiniera.” Berlioz’s “Béatrice et Bénédict.” Rossini’s “Otello.” Verdi’s “I Due Foscari” and “Giovanna d’Arco,” not to mention his “Don Carlos” and “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” in their original French versions. Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre.” Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten.” Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten.” Meredith Monk’s “Atlas.”
We all have our lists of great works that, for one reason or another, haven’t been performed — yet — by the mighty Metropolitan Opera. Perhaps first on mine is Handel’s magnificent “Alcina,” an extended excerpt from which will be screened on Wednesday as part of Lincoln Center’s annual Great Voices on Film series.
Few operas have an emotional range that stretches as wide as this one’s. An unsparing, funny, poignant anatomy of love, “Alcina” takes place on the magic island inhabited by its title character, a sorceress who seduces men and then transforms them into the rocks, trees and animals that dot her lair.
She has taken captive a knight named Ruggiero (originally written for the great castrato Giovanni Carestini and now usually sung by a mezzo-soprano), and the opera begins with the arrival on the island of Bradamante, Ruggiero’s fiancée, who has come to rescue him. Bradamante is disguised as her brother, Ricciardo, attracting the attentions of Alcina’s lovesick sister, Morgana.
The plot has its convolutions. There’s Oronte, Alcina’s general, who’s in love with Morgana, and there’s Oberto, a boy searching for his father, who’s been transformed by Alcina. Bradamante’s guardian, Melisso, who lands on the island with her, appears to Ruggiero at one point pretending to be his old tutor, Atlante.
Deceptions and disguises crowd the opera, the theme of which is the imaginative lengths to which we’ll go for love. It is only at the end, once Alcina’s magic has abandoned her and she flees with Morgana, that illusions are dispelled and the island’s transformed men return to human form. But as in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” even a peaceful resolution is tinged with the bitter memories of what came before it.
The libretto, based on Ariosto’s epic poem “Orlando Furioso,” drew from Handel one of his finest scores, energetic and yet with daringly extended passages of serenity and melancholy. Bradamante is given heroic coloratura; Morgana sometimes pines and sometimes bubbles; Ruggiero’s slow arias are exquisite. Act II ends with a wrenching series of minor-key arias for Alcina — “Ah! mio cor,” “Ombre pallide” and “Mi restano le lagrime” — as she confronts the loss of her powers.
New York audiences have been lucky enough to spend an unusually large amount of time with “Alcina” this season. In September, a group of young singers led by the director R. B. Schlather staged the opera in the intimate gallery space of the Whitebox Art Center on the Lower East Side. It was an experiment in openness: The production’s two weeks of rehearsals were free to the public, and the performances were streamed live on the Internet as well as broadcast on a television in the gallery’s front window.
But the live experience in the hot, crowded gallery was distinctive. The concentrated rehearsal process had drawn out of the talented singers performances of fearsome focus and nerve. The set was abstract and spare — the space’s white box was decorated with little more than a smudge of lipstick on one wall and a snarling boar’s head mounted on another — but it contained within it enough ingenious holes and passages to conjure some of the necessary magical atmosphere.
A month later, the mezzo Joyce DiDonato sang Alcina in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall, the latest in a series of Handel operas at the hall featuring the English Concert, led by Harry Bicket. This version of the score was even more complete than the one at Whitebox, and the singers far more experienced, with Ms. DiDonato in particularly fine, fiery form. Rather than being “Alcina” overkill, seeing the opera multiple times in quick succession whetted my appetite for more.
The production being screened at the Walter Reade Theater by Lincoln Center was directed by Adrian Noble at the Vienna State Opera in 2010. The basic visual idea — a bright garden seen through a large opening at the back of the set — is reminiscent of Robert Carsen’s celebrated “Alcina” at the Paris Opera in 1999, an ideal vehicle for Renée Fleming, Natalie Dessay and Susan Graham in their primes.
Mr. Noble placed the opera a few decades after Handel composed it, in the Neoclassical-style London home of the seductive Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. The idea is that the opera is being both observed and, occasionally, enacted by a group of 18th-century aristocrats. It’s a clever notion, and allows for both an overall aura of formality and disruptive bursts of emotion, with a second half — Handel’s three acts have been divided into two parts — conceived as a moody nocturne.
The performance may be most intriguing, particularly to American opera lovers, for the soprano Anja Harteros, superb in the title role. A major star in Europe, her voice powerful and flexible and capable of carrying intense feeling, she has made only very limited appearances in this country. Anything she does is worth seeing and hearing, but particularly this Alcina: While in demand for her Verdi and Wagner, Ms. Harteros has not been widely known as a Handelian. But her style is impeccable, her coloratura clear and easy and her negotiation of the character’s fall from grace passionate and moving.
Her co-star as Ruggiero, Vesselina Kasarova, is another singer who appears too rarely in New York. But her work here is inconsistent, her energy marred by turbulent, unsettled tone. Kristina Hammarström brings an earthy yet sensitive voice to Bradamante, and Veronica Cangemi is a bright Morgana.
Besides Ms. Harteros, the production’s main draw is its conductor, Marc Minkowski, an early-music specialist. Because the Vienna Philharmonic, whose members are drawn from the State Opera orchestra, was on tour at the time, Mr. Minkowski was able to bring in the period-instrument group he founded, Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble, one of the finest in the world.
Lincoln Center originally intended to screen Peter Sellars’s version of Handel’s “Theodora,” from the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival, starring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, on Monday as a companion to “Alcina.” But a recent change in rights made that impossible — it is available on DVD for home viewing — and a production of the work from the 2009 Salzburg Festival in Austria has been substituted.
Directed by Christof Loy, this agonized oratorio about an early Christian martyr is imagined as a kind of installation. The vast stage of the Salzburg Festspielhaus is set as a gloomy church interior and the production unfolds as a kind of rehearsal for a performance of “Theodora.” (Mr. Loy tried a similar tack at Salzburg for Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” in 2011.) Ivor Bolton conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and a strong cast that includes Bernarda Fink as Irene and Christine Schäfer as Theodora.
Unlike last year’s Great Voices on Film presentations, which included some difficult-to-find lieder performances, much of what’s being screened this week, and in two programs of Kurt Weill on April 1, is available on DVD. This makes the series slightly less than essential, but still valuable: When it comes to opera, the bigger the screen and more sophisticated the sound system, the better.
The rarest thing being screened is “September Songs,” Larry Weinstein’s documentary-style film from 1994 that recorded performances of Weill’s work from singers like Teresa Stratas, Elvis Costello and Lou Reed in an abandoned warehouse.
While it was released on video, a copy isn’t easy to come by, and the program on the evening of April 1 will be appropriately rounded out with footage of Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, singing his songs.
An excellent recent production of Weill and Brecht’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” starts things off just before “September Songs,” directed by the Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus and filmed at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Piles of trash and hordes of dancers and extras fill the stage for an ominously contemporary vision of a hyper-capitalist dystopia, with an impressive cast led by Measha Brueggergosman, Michael König, Jane Henschel and Willard White.
As far as New York performances go, the Manhattan School of Music gave a solid run of this scathing work in 2013, but the Met hasn’t put it on since 1995. (“Mahagonny” was apparently one of the projects Peter Gelb discussed with the Broadway star Kelli O’Hara, who ended up making her debut in Lehar’s “The Merry Widow” on New Year’s Eve.)
It deserves to return to the house, but the Met’s programming priority should really be “Alcina.” Recent, successful productions of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” and “Rodelinda” have debunked the notion that Baroque opera doesn’t work in the vast space, and the scenic possibilities of “Alcina” make it, if anything, an even better fit than those masterpieces.
So let me make this a public plea to Mr. Gelb, and to Ms. DiDonato, the most likely star: Make it happen!
- http://bit.ly/1AULJqn
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