Archives for 2018

“One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world’s problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive—it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.”

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• 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)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Conflict (drama, PG-13, closes July 21, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, alternating in repertory, closes July 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:
• The Royal Family of Broadway (musical, G, closes July 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.”

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about a newly released box set that sheds light on an insufficiently appreciated aspect of the phenomenal talent of Leonard Bernstein. Here’s an excerpt.

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Everybody knows that Leonard Bernstein, who was born a century ago this August, was a man of spectacularly varied gifts. Not only was he a great conductor, but he composed hit shows for Broadway and memorable scores for the concert hall, and he also had a knack for talking about music that he used to unforgettable advantage in his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Because of all this, it’s easy to forget that Bernstein also played piano on the side—well enough to have had a full-time solo career had he wished it.

If you think I’m stretching the truth, let me point you in the direction of “Leonard Bernstein: The Pianist,” a budget-priced 11-CD box set just out from Sony Classical, which contains all of the commercial recordings that Bernstein made as a pianist between 1947 and 1974 for Columbia and RCA Victor. In addition to playing on his own, he can also be heard performing with the New York Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, London’s Philharmonia Orchesra and the Juilliard String Quartet and accompanying Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christa Ludwig and Jennie Tourel, three of the most celebrated classical singers of the postwar era. The contents include piano concertos by Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel and Shostakovich, each one led from the keyboard by Bernstein; chamber music and songs by Brahms, Mahler, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Poulenc and Schumann; an assortment of Bernstein’s own songs and solo pieces; and two American masterworks, Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the latter a signature piece with which he was closely identified….

Most orchestral conductors, of course, can play at least a little piano, and some, like André Previn and George Szell, have been far more than good enough to perform in concert and make noteworthy recordings. But Bernstein, while he seems never to have wanted to be a concert pianist, studied the instrument as seriously as any budding virtuoso….

Not all of Bernstein’s recorded interpretations are equally convincing—his 1959 version of Rhapsody in Blue, for example, is exaggerated to the point of garishness—but his playing is unfailingly crisp and characterful, if occasionally brash. The brashness is, however, the defect of a virtue, for he was incapable of giving a routine performance…

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Read the whole thing here.

Leonard Bernstein plays the first movement of Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata in 1947:

The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra plays Jerome Richardson’s “The Groove Merchant” on European TV in 1968:

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

“Nothing so concentrates the mind as having to write. In my own case, I frequently do not know what I really think about a writer, a general subject, an event, a person, until I set out my thoughts on the page.”

Joseph Epstein, Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

From 2003:

If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation—I feel it myself—but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you’re pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose….

Read the whole thing here.

“These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, “Montaigne”