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Reviews
American Classical Orchestra Opens Season at Lincoln Center
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 27 September 2016 21:30
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by William Neumann Photography
The fine musicians of the American Classical Orchestra inaugurated their 32nd season with a rewarding opening night concert at the wonderful Alice Tully Hall on September 22nd. The program was devoted to music of the early Romantic era, unusual in the period-instrument repertory, all of it new to this ensemble. (This orchestra specializes in music of the Classical period along with some works of the High Baroque.)
The estimable and appealing Thomas Crawford who led (and founded) this orchestra remarked in an enjoyable pre-concert talk that he was confident that the first work on this program—the excellent, little-known Symphony No. 10 by the rarely encountered Cipriani Potter—was receiving its New York premiere and would never be heard by the audience again. The influence of Ludwig van Beethoven was keenly felt here while the piece was admired by—as well as conducted by—Richard Wagner. The strengths of this ensemble were at their most evident in this performance, especially with respect to the conductor's splendid command over tempo.
Crawford described the next work—the resplendent set of songs, Les nuits d'été, by the visionary Hector Berlioz—as one that he cannot understand and that sounds almost random, calling it "enigmatic, inexplicable and rapturous"—he added that despite his incomprehension, he intended to program more by this composer because the texture is so different from other music they play. The superb performance was most remarkable for the stunning presence of the lovely and amazing soloist, Juilliard student Avery Amereau, whom I've been privileged to hear sing several times and whom Crawford noted with astonishment was that most uncommon creature, a contralto—indeed, on this account she was recently profiled by the New York Times.
The second half of the concert was devoted to a compelling rendition of the great Felix Mendelssohn's magisterial "Scottish" Symphony. (This was a fitting counterpart to the composer's lesser-known "Reformation" Symphony heard at Carnegie Hall the previous day, played by the Senior Concert Orchestra of New York.)
I look forward to attending the other performances by the American Classical Orchestra being presented this season.
September '16 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 06 September 2016 12:30
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
A Boy Named Charlie Brown
Snoopy Come Home
(CBS)
At the height of his comic strip’s popularity—which became even more celebrated with TV specials like the classic perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas—Charles Schultz and company brought the Peanuts gang to the big screen with, for the most part, memorable results.
1969’s low-key Boy is like a charming—if occasionally rambling and overlong—TV episode, while 1972’s Snoopy shows off the strip’s beloved beagle in an often bittersweet narrative. The films look good enough on Blu-ray, at least.
(Warner Archive)
Long before the bloated and overwrought (but, sadly, Oscar-winning) The Revenant, an earlier era of “survival” films featured Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (1972) starring Robert Redford and this atmospheric 1971 entry starring Richard Harris as the physically and emotionally wounded protagonist.
Although there’s not much action by today’s standards, Harris gives as intense a performance as Leonardo DiCaprio as the protagonist left for dead by his fellow explorers, and director Richard C. Sarafian keeps the drama understated and naturalistic, even with an attacking bear (you didn’t think The Revenant was in any way original, did you?) that further wounds Harris. There’s a solid hi-def transfer, with muted colors and sharp imagery.
The Ones Below
(Magnet)
This standard-issue Rosemary’s Baby rip-off is afflicted with the usual problem of this kind of would-be thriller: its characters act so stupidly that one can’t have much sympathy when bad things begin happening.
It’s stylishly directed by David Farr (who also wrote the flimsily-motivated script), and Clemence Poesy is disturbingly effective as a new mother gone off the rails by her neighbors, but by its end—which is nonsensical—the movie prefers cheap twists over psychologically plausibility. There’s a first-rate hi-def transfer; extras comprise several featurettes.
(Eagle Rock)
It’s difficult to say whom this release is for: are hardcore Styx fans pining for an eight-song performance, barely lasting 50 minutes, interspersed with a half-hour’s worth of alternately entertaining and self-serving interviews with band members and crew?
The band sounds as tight as ever—and Tommy Shaw’s voice hasn’t aged a bit on tunes like “Crystal Ball”—but why, in 2016, are rock fans still getting chopped-up and heavily-edited, instead of full-length, concert films? The hi-def video and audio are rocking; extras are interviews.
What Happened, Miss Simone?
(Eagle Rock)
Nina Simone was a true original—her singing style and stage presence were unquestionably unique—but the details of her career and her life as an icon and a civil-rights activist is at the center of Liz Garbus’s always fascinating documentary.
The footage of her performing is electrifying—especially glimpses of her during her “eclipse” in Europe—but it’s only one aspect of her legacy, as the many interviews with family, colleagues and admirers shows. The film has a solid Blu-ray transfer; extras comprise additional interviews.
CSI: Cyber—Complete 2nd (Final) Season
Limitless—Complete 1st Season
Lucifer—Complete 1st Season
(CBS)
CSI: Cyber never caught on with viewers—the rare CSI franchise to fail—despite what producers thought would be sure-fire casting of Oscar winner Patricia Arquette and Emmy winner Ted Danson: the final season is watchable but underwhelming.
The first seasons of new dramas Limitless and Lucifer had trouble keeping their balance with offbeat plots butting heads with the strictures of hour-long network TV drama series, the former’s pill making its protagonist the world’s smartest man, while the latter transplants the devil from Hades to Los Angeles—the City of Angels, get it? CSI and Lucifer extras include featurettes, a gag reel and deleted scenes.
Moby Dick
(Warner Archive)
Clocking in at only 78 minutes, it’s obvious that this 1930 version of “the great white whale” tale has little to do with Herman Melville’s massive novel: furthermore, John Barrymore’s Ahab, lovesick over a young woman in New Bedford, Mass., returns to the sea to kill the giant leviathan who bit off his leg before returning to land and his woman, has nothing on Melville’s great antagonist.
To cement things, there isn’t even any character named Ishmael in the movie, which makes this for Barrymore completists only.
(Warner Bros)
As if they hadn’t fought enough demons, specters, werewolves and other creatures of the night over the previous ten seasons, Dean and Sam Winchester—brothers and hunters ofSupernatural—have not encountered an enemy like the one that arrives to confront them in their 11th season: The Darkness.
It’s a clever ploy to reboot a show that was on its way to becoming stale and repetitive, and the 23 episodes gain dramatic traction from it. Extras are five featurettes, deleted scenes, gag reel and commentaries.
Wrapping Up the Mostly Mozart Festival
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 01 September 2016 15:02
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Mark Morris and dance troupe, photo by Stephanie Berger
The third week of this year's Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center featured some excellent music at David Geffen Hall on the evening of Wednesday, August 10th, repeating the program of the night before.
Baritone Thomas Meglioranza, accompanied by Reiko Uchida on piano, presented a worthwhile pre-concert recital of selections from Hugo Wolf's Mörike-Lieder, which are set to texts by the great 19th-century German poet, Eduard Mörike, who, it is interesting to note, wrote an esteemed book about Mozart. The singer was at his most rewarding in his upper register.
The concert proper was an all-Mozart program given by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra under the confident baton of the festival director, Louis Langrée, opening with a superb account of the rarely played Symphony No. 1, written, astonishingly, when the composer was eight years old. The wonderful soloist, Richard Goode, then took the stage for a splendid performance of the delightful Piano Concerto No. 12, playing Mozart's cadenza.
The evening achieved a satisfying closure with the magnificent Symphony No. 41, the "Jupiter" — Mozart's final opus in that genre. Langrée and the musicians delivered many especially beautiful moments throughout their realization of the work, especially coming into their own in the amazing last movement. Evidently the composer completed the work on August 10th, 1788, and to celebrate that fact, the conductor graciously led the orchestra in a repetition of the coda from the work, after a warm ovation.
More fine music could be heard at the same location on the evening of Friday the 12th, with the program repeated the following night. An enjoyable pre-concert recital featured the young musicians comprising the Lysander Piano Trio performing the lovely Piano Trio in F-sharp minor by Franz Joseph Haydn followed by Franz Liszt's exhilarating Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9, "Le carnaval de Pesth".
The concert proper consisted of three major Mozart piano concertos sensitively rendered by the Festival Orchestra, accompanying the brilliant Jeffrey Kahane, who played his own cadenzas and, amazingly, conducted from the piano. The enduringly popular No. 21 in C major — made famous for the use of the Andante on the soundtrack of the outstanding 1960s film, Elvira Madigan, directed by the late Bo Widerberg — opened the program — the glorious second movement was especially strong. Even more impressive was the reading of the somber No. 24 in C minor that ensued while Kahane and the musicians capped a memorable evening with a sterling account of the exquisite No. 22 in E-flat major.
The middle of the fourth week of the festival featured the enormously popular violinist Joshua Bell as conductor and soloist with the Festival Orchestra and, on the weekend, a closing pair of performances by the same ensemble, here led by Langrée, and expanded by the estimable Concert Chorale of New York under the solid direction of James Bagwell. The programs were devoted to two towering, unfinished choral masterpieces by Mozart, the Mass in C minor and the Requiem, the composer's swan song. The Mass was heard in an effective version completed by Langrée while the Requiem was realized in a satisfying completion by Mozart's pupils, Franz Xaver Süssmayr and Joseph Eybler, along with Langrée.
On the evening of Saturday, August 20th, both pieces were presented powerfully with an admirable slate of singers: soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Cecelia Hall, the handsome tenor Alek Shrader, and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this festival, the enthusiastic Langrée generously led the ensemble in a repeat of the opening of the Requiem's Lacrimosa, the last notes Mozart ever composed.
The final week of this season featured a revival at the David Koch Theater of the often lovely Mozart Dances, by the gifted choreographer Mark Morris, who has had an enduring association with the festival. This 2006 work was commissioned by Lincoln Center to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth.
An entertaining, occasionally hilarious, pre-performance discussion between the choreographer and Ara Guzelimian took place at the David Rubinstein Atrium on the evening of Friday, August 26th. Here Morris stressed that he choreographs and rehearses to live music and that he "plays slow movements slow" while emphasizing the musicality of the dancers in his company. He also praised the René Jacobs recording of Così fan tutte.
Mozart Dances is set to music written during the composer's extraordinary decade in Vienna: his underrated Piano Concerto No. 11, the wonderful Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, and the magisterial, final Piano Concerto, the 27th, all beautifully performed by the outstanding Garrick Ohlsson, assisted in the Sonata by the accomplished Inon Barnatan. (The Festival Orchestra under the expert direction of Langrée sounded marvelous in the concerti.)
The dancers in this company are striking for how different their physical type is from that of New York City Ballet, whom are usually seen in this venue. They engagingly inhabited the choreographer's vision the hallmark of which is wit — or what is called "esprit" in French — surely also a nearly ubiquitous element in Mozart's music, thus rendering the pairing an inspired one. Here as elsewhere the ethos was strongly reminiscent of the remarkable Paul Taylor who, with his postmodern sensibility, seems to be what the literary critic Harold Bloom would call the "authentic precursor" of Morris. Seeing this was a satisfying conclusion to a well-executed festival.
August '16 Digital Week V
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 30 August 2016 02:47
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Blu-rays of the Week
Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail
Poliuto
(Opus Arte)
Two recent productions from Glyndebourne—England’s premier summer opera festival—are 200-year-old works that are used to comment on today’s fraught political climate. In Mozart’s Serail, set in a Turkish harem, director David McVicar presents a positive Muslim role model (Franck Saurel gives a gutsy non-singing portrayal), and there are wonderful vocal performances by Sally Matthews and Tobias Kehrer.
Director Mariame Clement places Gaetano Donizetti’s Poliuto in a war-fractured state reminiscent of the 1990s Balkans, which is fine; but it’s the musical side, led by singers Michael Fabiano and Ana Maria Martinez, which makes it work. Both discs have first-rate hi-def video and audio; extras are featurettes and interviews.
(Magnet)
Based on a novel by J. G. Ballard—best known for his books Empire of the Sun and Crash—High-Rise reeks of literal and figurative crumminess as it chronicles a dystopian world in microcosm: an apartment building whose failing infrastructure mirrors the class warfare that breaks out.
Despite the presence of Tom Hiddleston and Sienna Miller, director Ben Wheatley cripples his already obvious metaphor for a crumbling civilization with copious amounts of blood, sex, and a crudity that undermines the material, despite its high gloss. The hi-def transfer is immaculate; extras are a commentary and several featurettes.
Kiss Rocks Vegas
(Eagle Rock)
For its 2014 Las Vegas residency, the current incarnation of Kiss—sans original members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, which automatically drops the group several rungs on the rock’n’roll ladder—plows through a 90-minute set of mostly old material, trying to prop up saggy new songs that are outshined by classics “Black Diamond” and “Love Gun.”
Guitarist Tommy Thayer, accomplished as he is, certainly is no Ace. The hi-def visuals and audio are excellent, but there are far too many shots of adoring audience members. Extras comprise a 30-minute acoustic set, sans makeup—including gritty takes on “Christine Sixteen” and “Hard Luck Woman”—and an audio CD of the main live set.
Me Before You
(Warner Bros)
From Jojo Moyes’ novel, this soapy tale follows a paraplegic young man who wants to end his life despite the earnest and eventually loving attempts by his perky caretaker to show him it’s worth living even in his wheelchair-bound state.
Despite Herculean efforts by Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin as the pair (they are so well-matched that, with their chemistry, they deserve a real romantic comedy of their own), the movie comes off as a sentimental tragedy that makes its well-worn and single-minded way toward a foregone conclusion. The Blu-ray transfer is excellent; extras comprise deleted and extended scenes, outtakes and a making-of featurette.
Tatiana
Admeto
(C Major)
Hamburg Ballet auteur John Neumeier’s full-length Tatiana—the eponymous heroine comes from Alexander Pushkin’s prose-poem Eugene Onegin—is an absorbing three-acter that’s shown in its 2014 premiere with ballerina extraordinaire Helene Bouchet’s mesmerizing lead performance and composer Lera Auerbach’s appropriately dramatic and romantic music.
I’m no particular fan of Handel (or baroque opera in general), but this 2009 Gottingen, Germany, performance of Admeto is a novel and engrossing three hours thanks to the stately music and director Doris Dorrie’s delightful Japan-set production, whose samurai aspects work handily. The hi-def discs have good video and audio; extras are interviews and featurettes.
Boris Godunov
(Dynamic)
Modest Mussorgsky’s classic opus about the infamous 17th century Russian tsar, one of a handful of historical operas that works both dramatically and musically, is given a strong 2014 production in Sofia, Bulgaria, by director/designer Plamen Kartaloff, whose conceit is to stage it in front of Sofia’s great Russian cathedral: it’s not historically accurate but it provides atmosphere and dramatic coherence.
Bulgarian bass Martin Tsonev is a most forceful and tragic Boris, while conductor Konstantin Chudovski leads an intelligent, even inspired reading of Mussorgsky’s splendid and colorful score.
Deep Purple—Live at the NEC
(Eagle Rock)
In 2008, hard-rock legends Deep Purple got together for a concert to pay tribute to its original keyboardist Jon Lord—who appears more than halfway through with the ominous chords of “Perfect Strangers”—and this hard-charging performance showcases a band at the top of its game with or without Lord, who died in 2012. (Don Airey also plays keys during the show.)
Steve Morse is a blistering guitarist and Ian Gillan still shreds on vocals, and the whole band blasts through the climactic “Smoke on the Water,” “Hush” and “Highway Star” like it’s the early ‘70s all over again. Extras comprise interviews.
Criminal Minds—Complete 11th Season
Elementary—Complete 4th Season
(CBS)
Crime-solving procedurals have become big business again on network television, especially on CBS, where one of its signature series has beenNCIS and all its permutations: the seventh NCIS—Los Angeles season provides welcome diversion thanks to a top cast including LL Cool J, Chris O’Donnell and Daniela Ruah. Criminal Minds completed its 11th entertaining season with stars Joe Mantegna, Aisha Tyler and Thomas Gibson—the latter of whom has, if you haven’t heard, been let go due to an on-set altercation.
Then there’s the almost too cleverly updated Elementary, whose fourth season succeeds through the chemistry between Lucy Liu’s Watson and Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes. Extras include featurettes, deleted/extended scenes, and a gag reel (on Elementary) and commentaries (on Minds).
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