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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 7, 2013

WHY PIANO COMPETITIONS WILL NEVER YIELD A SUPERSTAR

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“Why are music competitions so bad at singling out potentially major artists? Because the winners are chosen by juries. A jury is at bottom a committee–and a committee, as John le Carré famously said in ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,’ is ‘an animal with four back legs.’ They exist to generate and perpetuate consensus views. They can’t make great art, and it’s all but impossible for them to agree on great artists…”

CATALOGUE

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Karen Wilkin, Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective. The extraordinarily fine catalogue of a Wilkin-curated 2003 show at Florida’s Naples Museum of Art, this is a near-ideal introduction to the work of a abstract-expressionist master who was also an immensely accomplished and significant art teacher. Wilkin really ought to give us a full-length Hofmann biography, but until then, this volume will do quite nicely (TT).

BIOGRAPHY

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Brian Priestley, Chasin’ the Bird: The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker. By far the best single volume published to date about the life and work of the second most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century. Priestley succeeds in separating fact from gossip, simultaneously shedding much light on Parker’s formidable artistic achievement. Concise, intelligent, and accessible to non-musicians (TT).

CD

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Giant (Ghostlight, two CDs). The original-cast album of the Public Theater’s 2012 production of the Michael John LaChiusa-Sybille Pearson stage version of Edna Ferber’s novel. I praised it in The Wall Street Journal as “the most important new musical to come along since The Light in the Piazza….Giant tells an all-American tale in a way that is well suited to the present moment. It’s a myth, but an honest one, enacted with high seriousness and great beauty” (TT).

CD

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Jim Hall Live! Vol. 2-4 (ArtistShare, three CDs). Previously unreleased recordings made in 1975 by Jim Hall, Don Thompson, and Terry Clarke at the same Toronto gig that produced Jim Hall Live! The latter is by common consent Hall’s best album–a judgment in which I concur–and this set is of identical quality, a priceless cache of wholly involving performances by the greatest living jazz guitarist (TT).

PLAY

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

A Picture of Autumn (Mint Theater, 311 W. 43, closes July 27). An ultra-rare American production of N.C. Hunter’s poignant 1951 play about a cash-strapped aristocratic family saddled with an unaffordable country house, beautifully staged by Gus Kaikkonen and acted by a letter-perfect cast. No, you’ve never heard of Hunter, but trust me on this one–he’s in urgent need of revival and revaluation (TT).

BOOK

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Philip Lambert, Alec Wilder (University of Illinois Press, $29.95). An important, impressively readable new monograph about a composer-songwriter who straddled the worlds of popular and classical music with unprecedented aplomb. The emphasis is on the music, but proper attention is paid to Wilder’s life as well (TT).

GALLERY

July 7, 2013 by Terry Teachout

Wolf Kahn (Ameringer McEnery Yohe, 525 W. 22, up through July 26). New paintings by a criminally underappreciated, philosophically minded modern master, a Hans Hofmann pupil who passes his memories of the visible world through the transforming prism of abstraction (TT).

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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