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January 22, 2007
TT: Words to the wise
I planned to post something long and thoughtful today, but it turns out that I’m severely overpressed with multiple deadlines, so instead I’ll stall for time by pointing you in the direction of a few things worth seeing and/or hearing:• Turner Classic Movies is showing two rarely seen Fifties films that I strongly commend to your attention. Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, will air on Monday at four p.m. EST. Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (also known as The Big Carnival), starring Kirk Douglas, will air on Thursday at 2:30 a.m. EST. Both films take an extremely dark view of human nature, so brace yourself before tuning in.
• Erin McKeown, the singer-songwriter whom Our Girl and I praise as often as we think we can get away with it, is playing a two-nighter this Tuesday (at 7) and Wednesday (at 9:30) at Joe’s Pub. She’s touring in support of Sing You Sinners, her new album of pre-rock standards, though she’ll also be singing some of her own songs. For more information, go here.
• Amy Burton, one of my very favorite classical singers, is performing the voice-and-piano version of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan this Thursday at 7:30 at Symphony Space. Here’s what Corigliano wrote about the song cycle when it was premiered in 2000:
I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts, and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard—and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music.
I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art—crossover in the opposite direction, one might say….
For more details about the performance, go here.
• The off-Broadway revival of Room Service that I praised lavishly in The Wall Street Journal three weeks ago has been extended through March 25. For more information, look immediately to your right at the first item in the Top Five module.
• Music & Arts has just released Artur Schnabel Plays Mozart, a budget-priced five-CD box set that contains all of Schnabel’s commercial Mozart recordings, made between 1934 and 1948, plus live performances of two additional concertos (K. 482 and 488) and sonatas (K. 333 and 533/494). To order, go here.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work! See you tomorrow, maybe....
Posted January 22, 2007 12:00 PM
