Bach

Lady5 @ Savion Glover’s BaRoQUE’BLaK TaP CaFé

July 9, 2019

Whatever Glover discussed in the opening – about identity and wearing masks – may have been relevant, but the program could be seen simply as a revue. A wide variety of recorded music was played. The first music sounded like something you’d hear in a French café, and in fact was recorded by a group called French Café Ensemble. Other musical styles included classical (Bach), jazz, pop, salsa, Trinidadian, hip hop, and more, performed by Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Bjork, and others. The dancing paralleled the music. Special mention must go to Brandon Stirling Baker whose lighting design created the changes in atmosphere, subtly separating the numbers. [more]

Tosca Opdam

June 15, 2018

Opdam’s de Raaff playing, in contrast, was marvelous. The composer took his inspiration from Willem de Kooning’s 1977 painting, "North Atlantic Light." De Raaff and Opdam both captured the drama and movement of both white spaces and high-energy brush strokes in de Kooning’s painting. The inclusion of a tossed-about boat in the center of the painting evokes a sense of floating in simultaneous, coexisting, sea-and-sky pairings; in the middle of de Raaff’s 14-minute piece, a gentle central section of quasi-contemplative calm summoned up the feel of the boat’s suspension. [more]

RIOULT Dance New York 2016

June 30, 2016

The New York City premiere of “Polymorphous” to Bach was a coolly elegant work that featured ever shifting black and white projections (by Brian Clifford Beasley) matched by the witty leotards by Karen Young which were white in front and black on the back. The video also featured reverse shadow images surreally mirroring the dancers as they plied the light jumps, gentle partnering and beautifully arching steps. The most balletic work on the program, “Polymorphous” used one of Rioult’s frequently used technique of working one pair of dancers in contrast to the other. In this case, the four dancers—Brian Flynn, Ms. Haines, Jere Hunt and Sara Elizabeth Seger—created two different pools of emotions—one quietly amorous, the other darker. “Polymorphous,” with its careful, quiet craftsmanship, was a kind of choreographic palate cleanser between the heated “Dream Suite” and the four “Duets Sacred & Profane” which followed. [more]

The Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys with Concert Royal: Music of Bach and Handel

May 31, 2016

Such feast days deserve magnificent music; Bach and Handel created it. And the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys, the first rate period-instruments Concert Royal, and five marvelous soloists gave splendid performances of two Bach cantatas and a Handel psalm-setting that did both the feast days and the music proud. The first-rate concert was a particularly fine accomplishment for St. Thomas Church: rocked by the sudden death last summer of John Scott, choral director and organist, the school and the church had to both manage a top-knotch concert season without their director and perform the “director-less” concerts as suitable memorials to Scott. [more]

Twyla Tharp 50th Anniversary Tour

November 24, 2015

Twyla Tharp is a choreographer who can infuriate and charm audiences in equal measure. (Paul Taylor also comes to mind.) Her choreography is clearly the result of an intensely fertile mind, but her very personal, quirky movement style often seems arbitrary and unmusical. Her program at the David H. Koch Theater, marking the end of her 50th Anniversary Tour, was filled with her quirky idiosyncratic, non-stop movements, beautifully danced, but finally becoming an onslaught of just too many ideas—some corny, some brilliant—flung at the music and the audience. [more]

New York Choral Society and Orchestra: Felix Mendelssohn’s “St. Paul”

February 3, 2015

Led by David Hayes, Music Director, the New York Choral Society and Orchestra, together with first rate soloists and the Princeton Girlchoir, presented a magnificent performance of Felix Mendelssohn's magisterial 1836 oratorio "St. Paul" on January 25, 2015 in Carnegie Hall. Mendelssohn's oratorio is a huge work; on this afternoon, the work's sweeping monumentality was fully realized without any loss of musical subtlety, nuance or detail. From beginning to end, chorus and orchestra alike presented the music they cleared loved with unflagging energy and endlessly renewed, fresh passion. [more]