MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

August 11, 2018 • 10:44 am Comments Off on Wolf Kahn: Reaching Up and Bearing Down

Wolf Kahn: Reaching Up and Bearing Down

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Pines Against Evening Sky (1996), oil on canvas: From the Wolf Kahn retrospective Reaching Up and Bearing Down at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.

This especially unusual exhibition features a never-before-seen group of 21 large-format pastels from various periods of his art-making career, as well as oil on canvas paintings—breathtaking, classic Kahn artworks that thrive in the liminal space between representation and abstraction.

These works reveal Kahn’s exquisite ability to express the beauty of nature and the land. Kahn calls pastel his “determining medium” and considers it to be foundational to all his work. This striking group of pastels demonstrates the artist’s fluency with a medium that he describes as one of “immediacy,” allowing him to make the most direct recordation of his experience of being in nature.

Online catalogue here.

Filed under: art

August 10, 2018 • 12:36 pm Comments Off on Daniele Gatti Replacements at Lucerne Summer Festival

Daniele Gatti Replacements at Lucerne Summer Festival

The replacement conductors for the two programs that the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had originally scheduled at the 2018 Summer Festival in Lucerne with their former, now-ousted music director Daniele Gatti have been announced.

Manfred Honeck takes the reins for the 5 September concert; the very interesting lineup of Wagner, Berg, and Bruckner’s Third Symphony remains unchanged.

And on the evening after that, Bernard Haitink will replace Mahler’s Seventh (which was to have been paired with Webern with the Ninth Symphony. Given the reception of his Mahler Ninth last year in London, this should be one for the ages:

Other conductors extract more pathos (or self-pity, depending on one’s view of Mahler and the conductor involved) from the final Adagio, but few usher it towards its faltering close with more care and gentle humanity than Haitink did here. If the Ninth is the work through which Mahler confronted his mortality and came to terms with it, then in this performance it was expressed unswervingly.

Filed under: Lucerne Festival, Mahler, music news

August 8, 2018 • 8:35 am Comments Off on Santa Fe Opera 2018: Ariadne, L’italiana, and Butterfly

Santa Fe Opera 2018: Ariadne, L’italiana, and Butterfly

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ANA MARÍA MARTÍNEZ (MADAME BUTTERFLY) AND JOSHUA GUERRERO (F.B. PINKERTON). PHOTO CREDIT: KEN HOWARD FOR SANTA FE OPERA, 2018

Here’s my report on the rest of the 2018 summer season at Santa Fe Opera* for Musical America. I write about Ariadne auf Naxos, L’italiana in Algeri, and Madama Butterfly. My review of the company’s new production of Doctor Atomic is here.

Santa Fe, NM—-During the long reign of founder John Crosby, Santa Fe Opera cultivated its reputation as a “Strauss house.” Yet only three of the composer’s operas had been presented under the company’s third general director, Charles MacKay, before he decided to include a brand-new production of Ariadne auf Naxos as a key attraction of his farewell season.

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[PDF here: Santa Fe 2018 MA reviews]
*Apart from Candide, the one production I had to miss.

Filed under: Musical America, Puccini, review, Rossini, Santa Fe Opera, Strauss

August 6, 2018 • 1:56 pm 1

A New Doctor Atomic at Santa Fe Opera

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JULIA BULLOCK (KITTY OPPENHEIMER). PHOTO CREDIT: KEN HOWARD FOR SANTA FE OPERA, 2018

Here’s my review for Musical America of the new production of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, which Peter Sellars directed for Santa Fe Opera:

SANTA FE, NM—As with any classic tragedy, from the outset we already know the denouement of Doctor Atomic: The world’s first atomic bomb will be successfully detonated in the New Mexican desert at dawn on July 16, 1945—a prelude to the atrocities of its use less than a month later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Review here:
Doctor Atomic-Musical America-review

Filed under: John Adams, Musical America, Peter Sellars, review, Santa Fe Opera

August 4, 2018 • 11:03 am Comments Off on Sante Fe Storm

Sante Fe Storm

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The day after Doctor Atomic and its storm….

Filed under: photography

August 1, 2018 • 12:49 pm Comments Off on Ariadne auf Santa Fe

Ariadne auf Santa Fe

Getting ready for Santa Fe Opera’s new production of one of my favorite Strauss operas.

The biographer Michael Kennedy on the rapport between composer and librettist:

We do composer and librettist an injustice if we judge the creation of Ariadne only through their published correspondence, which has misled some writers to assume that Hofmannsthal was Strauss’s intellectual superior and that this was a partnership between a Viennese man-of-letters and a Bavarian musician baffled by his collaborator’s metaphysical flights of fancy. Strauss certainly acted as a brake on these, but he understood totally what Hofmannsthal was aiming for, even if he sometimes thought it unnecessarily obscure.

Hofmannsthal’s libretto here.

Filed under: Santa Fe Opera, Strauss

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