Archives for 2017

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about a delightful souvenir of the popular side of a great American classical pianist. Here’s an excerpt.

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Byron Janis, who turns 89 this week, was one of what Gary Graffman, his colleague and contemporary, called the OYAPs—the great generation of “Outstanding Young American Pianists,” as they were customarily described by journalists, who crowded the concert halls of the world in the years immediately following World War II. Mr. Janis, Vladimir Horowitz’ first pupil, ranked high among the OYAPs, and to hear the stupendous recordings of Franz Liszt’s “Totentanz” and Richard Strauss’ “Burleske” that he made in the ’50s with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony (both of which are still available on CD) is to be left in no possible doubt of his immense talent….

Mr. Janis’s musical interests have long ranged beyond the classics. “Byron Janis Live: On Tour,” a soon-to-be-released collection of previously unissued live performances of pieces by Chopin, Haydn and Liszt that were recorded between 1979 and 1999, also includes solo-piano arrangements of several of Mr. Janis’ songs, thus reminding us that he is also a highly accomplished popular songwriter who, among other surprising things, has written the score for a musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”…

The biggest surprise, however, is the encore, a piano duet called “By and Cy—More Paganini Variations.” On this track, Mr. Janis and Cy Coleman, a classically trained Broadway composer who wrote the score for “Sweet Charity” but started out as a jazz pianist of note, join forces to improvise on Paganini’s A Minor Caprice, the familiar solo-violin piece on which Brahms and Rachmaninoff produced their own sets of variations. Mr. Janis was a celebrated exponent of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and he also made an impressively idiomatic recording of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1953. But to hear him and Coleman blend the two pieces together (so to speak) into what Mr. Janis calls “clazz” is something else again. Taped in 1978 before an audibly delighted audience, “By and Cy” is by turns witty, bluesy, wickedly clever and staggeringly virtuosic….

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Read the whole thing here.

Byron Janis peforms Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Louis de Froment and the Orchestre Philharmonique de l’ORTF in 1968:

Cy Coleman sings and plays his “Why Try to Change Me Now” on an 1957 episode of Art Ford’s Greenwich Village Party:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Price (drama, G, too long and serious for children, virtually all shows sold out last week, extended through May 14, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes June 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Born Yesterday (comedy, PG-13, closes April 15, reviewed here)

“I hate dubbing. I even believe that in a period of high civilisation, like the twelfth century, if people had done dubbing in films they would have been burned in the public square for pretending that man may have one body and two souls.”

Jean Renoir, interviewed by Rui Noguiera and François Truchaud (Sight and Sound, Spring 1968)

New York drama critics are forced to attend so many Broadway openings in March and April that they don’t have time to do much of anything else. Needless to say, I love theater, but I’m not monomaniacal about it, so I figured I’d better indulge a couple of my other artistic interests while I still could. To that much-needed end, I went to the press view of the Metropolitan Museum’s Marsden Hartley exhibition on Monday morning, and I went with a friend to Lincoln Center last night to see what is now, I gather, called Paul Taylor American Modern Dance.

No, the Paul Taylor Dance Company hasn’t gone out of business, but it’s changed its ways slightly. Here’s the official explanation:

Through a new initiative at Lincoln Center—Paul Taylor American Modern Dance—great modern works of the past and outstanding works by today’s leading choreographers are presented alongside Mr. Taylor’s own vast and growing repertoire. And Taylor Company Commissions enables the next generation of dance makers to work with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, thereby helping to ensure the future of the art form. As an integral part of Mr. Taylor’s vision, these dances are accompanied at Lincoln Center by live music whenever so intended by the choreographer.

I’m for all of this, so long as Taylor’s own supremely great dances don’t get lost, so to speak, in the shuffle. Fortunately, Tuesday’s program was a jackpot for anyone who loves modern dance. Not only did the Taylor company perform his Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) and Esplanade, but six dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet performed Summerspace, a Merce Cunningham masterpiece made in 1958. As mixed bills go, that one is pretty hard to top.

Esplanade is, of course, Taylor’s signature piece, a joyous collage of “found” movement—running, jumping, hopping, skipping, sliding—set to the music of Bach. It was first seen in 1975 and hasn’t dated in the slightest since then. Esplanade is one of the dances I love best, but I don’t get to many dance performances these days, and though I went to see it last year for the first time in God only knows how long, I was more than glad to see so festive a piece for two years running, especially on the first day of spring.

As for The Rite of Spring (The Rehearsal), a surreal blend of dance rehearsal and gangster movie that is accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s piano-duet arrangement of the greatest ballet score of the twentieth century, it doesn’t get done nearly as often as it should, nor can it be viewed on home video. It was premiered in 1980 and I last saw it danced in 2000, the same year that I watched Taylor rehearse his company and wrote about the experience. It’s one of the works by Taylor that I had in mind when I teasingly asked, “How dare a modernist be so much fun?” Yes, Sacre is more than merely fun—the climactic sequence is wrenchingly emotional—but the juxtaposition of frivolity and utter seriousness is an important part of what makes Taylor Taylor, and in no other dance is it so fully on display.

It’s been even longer since I last saw a performance of Summerspace, which is a somewhat tougher nut to crack, set as it is to a wispy, elusively abstract composition by Morton Feldman called Ixion. But Cunningham’s airy choreography and Robert Rauschenberg’s décor, a pointillistic backdrop into which the dancers, who wear similarly colored unitards, all but dissolve, turn out to be unexpectedly easy to like, and if you’ve never seen anything by Cunningham, Summerspace is a good way to get started.

My friend, a singer-songwriter who knew nothing going in about Taylor, Cunningham, or Rauschenberg, was thrilled by everything she saw and heard. Me, too. Dance on Broadway can be and often is wonderful in its own way, but it rarely aspires to the richness and subtlety that are constantly on display whenever you spend an evening looking at the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and it’s been far too long since I challenged my eye and elevated my spirits by doing just that. Better still to be able to share so wonderful an experience with a good friend. I went home feeling both happy and generous—a soul-satisfying combination.

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Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson play the two-piano version of Morton Feldman’s Ixion:

The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs the second movement of Esplanade, set to the slow movement of Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto, on PBS in 1978. The dancers are Carolyn Adams, Ruth Andrien, Elie Chaib, Bettie de Jong, Nicholas Gunn, Robert Kahn, Linda Kent, Monica Morris, and Lila York:

Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909 at Stormfield, Twain’s Connecticut home. This is the only known film footage of Twain:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The taxi we took had a postcard of a Picasso stuck in the dashboard: inevitably, in Renoir’s company, it seemed. He instantly leaned forward and started to talk about it. The driver, who chatted with hair-raising responsiveness in the Paris traffic, turned out to be a spare-time painter. ‘Only to amuse myself, you understand,’ he said.

“‘Why not?’ said Renoir. ‘Everything interesting is only to amuse yourself.’”

Penelope Gilliatt, “The Ruler of the Game: A Conversation with Jean Renoir”

From 2007:

In 1908 Percy Grainger persuaded the Gramophone Company to record Joseph Taylor in the studio. It was the first time that the voice of a “Genuine Peasant Folksinger” (as the label described Taylor in its promotional material) had ever been commercially recorded for posterity. Taylor didn’t much care for the process, claiming that singing into an acoustical horn was “lahk singin’ with a muzzle on,” but that didn’t stop him from doing his best. He cut a dozen songs, of which nine were released….

Read the whole thing here.

“I believe that a production should be based on feeling—again, on the idea of communion. I mean a communion among the artist, the actors, the audience, and the wider world. After all, when you listen to great music—let’s say a piece by Mozart—it’s a direct conversation that you’re having with him. Mozart is sitting there in a chair, you’re sitting next to him, and you proceed to have a talk—in a musical language that is pleasant and even moving. And I believe that the less Mozart or any artist talks about himself, the more, finally, he gives of himself in communal terms.”

Jean Renoir, interviewed by Gideon Bachmann (Contact, June 1960)