lundi 14 décembre 2015

Evgeny Kissin Will Indulge His Love of Yiddish Poetry at Carnegie Hall

Describing his affinity for Yiddish verse recently, the pianist Evgeny Kissinclosed his eyes, bowed his head slightly and in a mellifluous, expressive baritone began to recite a poem from memory.
“Many people sing in the shower,” he said earlier in an interview on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “I recite in the shower.”
Mr. Kissin, a dominant presence in music since he emerged as a teenage prodigy in the 1980s, will highlight this lesser-known talent in a concert devoted to Jewish composers on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall.
In addition to playing works by Alexander Krein, Ernest Bloch and Alexander Veprik, he will read texts by Yitzhak Leybush Peretz, whose words he recited during the interview. This year is the centennial of Peretz’s death, and Mr. Kissin, 44, has recorded some of this Yiddish writer’s poems about love and nature.
It is the fourth concert in Mr. Kissin’s Perspectives series at Carnegie this season, which comes as this still-boyish virtuoso continues his transition to midcareer master. For his fifth and final Perspectives concert next May, Mr. Kissin will play Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 with James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; it will be his final appearance in the United States for at least a year after that as he takes a sabbatical.
Mr. Kissin, who holds British, Russian and Israeli citizenship, will give only a handful of concerts during his sabbatical, including one next December to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Israel Philharmonic. He will otherwise use the yearlong break to rest, travel and learn new repertory. He said that he needed some private time after an “intense” period.
A brilliant and insightful interpreter of Russian composers, Beethoven and Chopin, Mr. Kissin meshes an impressive technique with a broad coloristic palette. He is eager to delve into composers he has yet to perform publicly, like Bach and Debussy, as well as concertos by Bartok and Liszt. When he returns, he also plans to play more chamber music, performing with the Emerson String Quartet, for example.
He will travel, as he does invariably, with his mother, Emilia Kissin, a former piano teacher; his sister, Alla Kissin, a professional collaborative pianist 10 years his senior; and Anna Pavlovna Kantor, 92, the only teacher he has ever had. (His father, Igor Kissin, an engineer, died in 2012.) The four live together in the Ansonia apartment building on the Upper West Side; Ms. Kantor, who still holds court backstage at Mr. Kissin’s concerts, has been a fixture of the family since the Kissins moved from Moscow to New York in 1991, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolution.
By that time, Mr. Kissin was already an established name. He gave his first solo recital at age 11 in the House of Composers in Moscow. So many attended that the organizers added seats onstage, creating an intimate ambience he said helped him perform better; since then his concerts have often included seats onstage.
He achieved international recognition with a recording of the two Chopin piano concertos at age 12 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. He made his American debut in 1990 in concerts with the New York Philharmonic and at a recital in Carnegie Hall, where last month he became the first pianist since Vladimir Horowitz in 1979 to repeat a solo program within a single week.
When performing, Mr. Kissin, a tall man with a shock of dark hair who is more halting in conversation than he is when he recites poetry, acknowledges audiences with stiff bows and a wide smile, a gesture missing earlier in his career when an industry professional urged him: “Smile onstage once in a while. Please smile.” He also offers many encores, though he said he no longer had the stamina for his previous encore marathons. “I have already outlived Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Pushkin, Lermontov and Keats,” he said, referring to his age.
Some musicians, like Jordi Savall and Daniel Barenboim, use music as a tool to initiate intercultural dialogue, but Mr. Kissin refuses to play in countries whose policies he says he disagrees with, including China and Cuba.
“I’m not friends with dictators,” he said. “Communist ones in particular. I lived in a Communist country for the first 20 years of my life, and that was more than enough.”
Asked later by email for his opinion on the leadership of Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s authoritarian president, Mr. Kissin skated around the issue, writing that he preferred not to discuss Russian politics for “personal reasons.” He has not performed in Russia since 2009 but is scheduled to give concerts there in 2017.
In the interview, Mr. Kissin also said that he would not perform in Turkey until its government acknowledges that the mass murder of Armenians in 1915 was a genocide.
“I personally believe that if people in such countries learn that some musicians refuse to play there because they are dismayed by what their rulers do, that will make intelligent-thinking people more aware,” he said. He hastened to add that he does “not judge or condemn colleagues who perform in totalitarian countries. — it’s a personal choice.”
Growing up in Moscow, Mr. Kissin learned Yiddish from his maternal grandparents. He had pneumonia frequently as a child and would stay in bed writing music, invariably dedicating the pieces “to my dear and beloved teacher, Anna Pavlovna Kantor.”
He recently composed a cycle of four short piano pieces that he has shown to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who gave him advice and encouragement. One of Mr. Kissin’s fan sites whose content he supervises, features poems of his own written in Yiddish, as well as translations of Russian works he admires that are not well known in the West. The site also features a short novel he wrote about a young composer called Venya who has an affair with a prostitute.
Asked whether he might someday perform his compositions in public, Mr. Kissin replied: “We’ll see what the future brings. I don’t want to do anything that is not worthy of people’s attention. But never say never.”
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vendredi 11 décembre 2015

Four Rewarding Shows in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA — Rarely is it a better time than now for a trip to Philadelphia, where four of the city’s major art institutions are presenting exceptionally rewarding shows, each distinctively its own thing. ThePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Artsoffers a comprehensive retrospective of the career of Norman Lewis, the first such exhibition to be devoted to this African-American Modernist painter and one that invites viewers to consider Mr. Lewis’s place in the history of the country’s art. Dazzling the eyes and intriguing the mind, thePhiladelphia Museum of Art presents two centuries’ worth of American still-life paintings and sculptures, from John James Audubon’s images of birds and mammals to Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. The Barnes Foundation has an astounding presentation of extravagantly ornamental antique works of wrought iron from a French museum, including door knockers with demonic faces and coffee grinders that look as if dreamed up by a steampunk artist. And the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania has a solo show of delightfully offbeat works by the self-taught New York artist Christopher Knowles.
“Part Vision” by Norman Lewis.Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Collection of Raymond J. McGuire, New York, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

In 1971, Norman Lewis (1909–1979) created a painting called “Part Vision” that in many ways sums up his distinguished career. Made entirely in shades of blue on a canvas a little over seven feet wide, it pictures in the lower half a jumble of silhouetted semi-abstract shapes suggesting a crowd of demonstrators carrying placards. Hovering centrally above in an expansive, pale blue, mottled space is a mysterious form resembling a disembodied mouth, from which might issue a transcendental speech resolving all the conflicts represented by the agitated figures below.
Billed as the first comprehensive retrospective of Mr. Lewis’s work, “Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis” surveys the career of an African-American artist who believed in the power of spiritualized aesthetics — rather than didactic or propagandistic imagery — to elevate, expand and transform collective human consciousness.

Black Artists and the March Into the Museum

The exhibition shows Mr. Lewis starting out as a Social Realist in the 1930s, but in that decade he already revealed a serious interest in abstraction with a painting called “Fantasy” (1936), which looks remarkably like an early work by Kandinsky. From the mid-1940s on, Mr. Lewis largely expunged from his work representational imagery. Drawing on Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealist automatism, he created suavely improvisational works that play with line and gestural brush marks in luminous, atmospheric spaces.
Outside the studio Mr. Lewis was acutely concerned with and actively involved in the politics of his time, especially as they pertained to the lives of American blacks. As a painter, however, he resisted pressure to produce overtly political art, an attitude he shared with the mostly white vanguard abstractionists in the post-World War II era.
“American Totem” (1960).Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
In the 1960s, however, he produced some paintings alluding to racism in the American South, and they are among the exhibition’s most imposing works. “American Totem” (1960) has white masklike images compressed into a columnar form coming to a conical top at the center of a black field. Evoking the Ku Klux Klan, it has a powerfully mythic resonance. In a painting from 1961, clouds of staccato red marks on a broad white field don’t configure into a recognizable image, but its title makes a clear statement: It’s called “Redneck Birth.” But such direct references are the exception rather than the rule in Mr. Lewis’s art. He sought reconciliation and salvation through mystical abstraction.
Norman Lewis’s “Redneck Birth” (1961).Estate of Norman W. Lewis; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
It’s debatable whether Mr. Lewis’s oeuvre, viewed from the perspective strictly of 20th century painting, ranks with those of the most celebrated artists of his generation, like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. He mixed and matched familiar conventions of Modernist painting with sophisticated lyricism but wasn’t a stylistic groundbreaker.
Considered in terms of the social history of American art, however, he’s an important figure, because, as the art historian David Driskell writes in the exhibition catalog, he was “among a small number of African-American painters in the nation working abstractly at the time, and he was among the few artists of color who were represented by a mainstream gallery in New York.” By most standards he had a successful career, one that many artists of his time — and of today — might envy. He exhibited regularly at the prestigious Willard Gallery in New York from 1949 to 1965, and he was included in numerous museum exhibitions during his lifetime, among them the “Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting” (now called the “Carnegie “International”) in 1955, and received the Popularity Prize for a 1953 painting called “Migrating Birds.” In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1976 the Graduate School and University Center, City College, New York mounted a retrospective exhibition.
Would he have been more successful had he not been black? Maybe. On the other hand, had he been white, he might have been as easily forgotten posthumously as most white artists of the post-WWII era have been. Withthe push for recognizing heretofore undervalued black artists animating museums these days, this exhibition — organized by Ruth Fine, a former curator at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington — offers an excellent occasion not only to assess the significance of Mr. Lewis and his art. It also could occasion conversation about the possibly contradictory dual roles of museums: As democratic institutions representing the broad spectrum of the American population, on the one hand, and as selective judges of what is worth saving and exhibiting on the other.
“Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis” runs through April 6 at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 Broad Street, Philadelphia, (215) 972-7600, pafa.org.
“Venus Rising from the Sea — A Deception” by Raphaelle Peale.Raphaelle Peale, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The first item you encounter in “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of the American Still Life” is “Venus Rising from the Sea — A Deception,” made by the Philadelphian Raphaelle Peale about 1822. It depicts a square of white fabric hanging in folds in front of a painting of a presumably nude goddess. The cloth appears so realistic you feel as if you could lift it up and reveal the deity it chastely obscures. A sly tease of a picture, it’s an instructive introduction to an enthralling show of 130 paintings and sculptures representing more or less ordinary objects dating from the turn of the 19th century to 1974. For what is a still-life if not the visible surface of material reality’s invisible, unfathomable depths?
Organized by Mark D. Mitchell, a curator at the Yale University Art Gallery, the exhibition somewhat stretches the usual definition of the genre. In another context, you probably wouldn’t see as a still-life John James Audubon’s “Pennant’s Marten” (1814), an extraordinarily lively image of a fierce, growling, furry quadruped rendered with exquisite refinement in watercolor, pen and ink and pencil. But since Audubon worked from observing dead animals arranged in lifelike poses, it is in a literal sense a still-life: an image of life stilled.
Near the tail end of this chronologically arranged show, you come upon “Fountain,” Marcel Duchamp’s famous upside-down urinal (in this case a 1950 replica of the 1917 original). Here you might wonder what sense it makes to see this conceptual prank as a still-life. On the other hand it’s interesting to consider three Brillo boxes from 1964 by Andy Warhol as a kind of still-life, since those sculptures haven’t usually been seen in that category. They’re not products of perceptual observation, but they certainly are objects that shed light on modern life.
The bulk of the show is given over to paintings from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th that try to represent immediate visual experience and do so often with amazing technical proficiency. Along with a surfeit of fruit and flower pictures, there are many terrific works by well-known artists, from the 19th century trompe l’oeil masters William Michael Harnett and John Frederick Peto to Modernists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Gerald Murphy, whose monumental-scale “Watch” (1924–25) represents the inner works of a pocket watch in a flattened, proto-Pop style.
“Fishbowl Fantasy“ from 1867 by Edward A. Goodes.Private Collection
Some of the most striking pieces are by less famous figures, the most intriguing of whom is Edward Ashton Goodes, creator of “Fishbowl Fantasy” (1867), a painting of hallucinogenic intensity. With preternatural lucidity, it depicts a pair of big fat goldfish in a spherical glass bowl whose surface reflects in miniature an outdoor street scene. A voluptuous pile of flowers spills over the top of the fishbowl, and the marble tabletop on which it stands bears a scattering of a woman’s accouterments, including lavender gloves, a fan and a jewel box topped by carved birds posed as if kissing. This is the stuff of a Victorian novel, a supercharged slice of life.
“Audubon to Warhol: The Art of the American Still Life” runs through Jan. 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.
Ellen Harvey, “Metal Painting” (2015), at the Barnes Foundation.Rick Echelmeyer/The Barnes Foundation

The Barnes Foundation

As visitors to the Barnes Foundation know, the institution’s founder, Albert C. Barnes, collected simple, flat, wrought iron objects and displayed them among the works of Modernist painting he collected. So it’s eminently appropriate that the Barnes should present in its temporary exhibition gallery this fascinating selection of objects from the Musée le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen, an institution dedicated to collecting and displaying European wrought iron works. This show of 145 pieces of astounding craftsmanship and often florid imagination includes keys, locks, shop signs, candle snifters, door knockers, window grilles, decorative plaques and jewelry dating mainly from the 15th century through the 19th century. Museumgoers may be accustomed to these sorts of things made in shiny gold and silver. To see them in metallic blacks and grays and rendered in a material not known for its malleability or luxury is a revelation.

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jeudi 10 décembre 2015

Review: ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ From Irish Repertory Theater

A caroling session sprinkled with occasional reminiscences, Irish Repertory Theater’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” adapts theDylan Thomas prose poem into a play with plenty of hymns.
Five actors, clad in red and green, and an accompanist are crammed onto a cozy stage with presents, wreaths, a roaring hearth and a half-dozen Christmas trees. (How they found room for the piano is anyone’s guess.) Chief among the players, attired in a grandfatherly cardigan, is John Cullum, who holds an oversized book in his lap and occasionally seems to be checking his place. No matter. This sweet and modest show conjures plenty of good will toward men, Mr. Cullum very much included.
Thomas’s work is a cavalcade of imagery and sensation — the snowy sights, smells and sounds that marked the Christmases of his boyhood. “All the Christmases roll down the hill towards the Welsh-speaking sea, like a snowball whiter and bigger and rounder, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street,” Mr. Cullum recites. The actors take the prose parts in turn, though Ashley Robinson (a sweetly likable actor, though overly fond of hair gel) most often plays Thomas as a boy. This is a change from last year’s “A Christmas Memory,”in which Mr. Robinson played the adult version of the narrator of that Truman Capote story.
The descriptions of treats and toys are evocative, the carols appealingly sung, the cast charming. No one attempts the Welsh accent with which Thomas read his own work, but two of the songs are sung in Welsh: a version of “Silent Night” and the hymn “Calon Lân.” A few of the tunes are by the show’s director, Charlotte Moore, who adapted Thomas’s poem for the stage. Her tone is occasionally a little treacly, but then again, so is Christmas. Figgy pudding for all!
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mercredi 9 décembre 2015

The 10 Best Books of 2015

The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
  1. Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
    FICTION
    The Door
    By Magda Szabo. Translated by Len Rix.
    In Szabo’s haunting novel, a writer’s intense relationship with her servant — an older woman who veers from aloof indifference to inexplicable generosity to fervent, implacable rage — teaches her more about people and the world than her long days spent alone, in front of her typewriter. Szabo, who died in 2007, first published her novel in 1987, in the last years of Communist rule; this supple translation shows how a story about two women in 20th-century Hungary can resonate in a very different time and place. With a mix of dark humor and an almost uncanny sense of the absurd, she traces the treacherous course of a country’s history, and the tragic course of a life.
    New York Review Books. ­Paper, $16.95.
  2. Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
    A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
    By Lucia Berlin. Edited by Stephen Emerson.
    Berlin, who died in 2004, left behind a substantial but ­little-known trove of stories that in her lifetime appeared mostly in literary journals and small-press books. This revelatory collectiongathers 43 of them, introducing her to a wider audience as an uncompromising and largehearted observer of life whose sympathies favor smart, mouthy women struggling to get by much as Berlin herself — an alcoholic who raised four sons on her own — frequently did. With their maximalist emotions and sparse, unadorned language, Berlin’s stories are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot. 
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
  3. James Nieves/The New York Times
    Outline
    By Rachel Cusk
    Cusk’s subtle, unconventional and lethally intelligent novel, “Outline,” her eighth, is a string of one-sided conversations. A divorced woman traveling in Greece, our narrator, talks — or rather listens — to the people she meets, absorbing their stories of love and loss, deception, pride and folly. Well-worn subjects — adultery, divorce, ennui — become freshly menacing under Cusk’s gaze, and her mental clarity can seem so penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
  4. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    The Sellout
    By Paul Beatty
    This year’s most cheerfully outrageous satire takes as its subject a young black man’s desire to segregate his local school and to reinstate slavery in his home — before careening off to consider almost 400 years of black survival in America, puncturing every available piety. Sharp-minded and fabulously profane, Beatty’s novel is a fearless, metaphorical multicultural pot almost too hot to touch.
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
  5. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    The Story of the Lost Child: Book 4, The Neapolitan Novels: “Maturity, Old Age”
    By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
    Like the three books that precede it in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, this brilliant conclusion offers a clamorous, headlong exploration of female friendship set against a backdrop of poverty, ambition, violence and political struggle. As Elena and Lila, the girlhood rivals whose relationship spans the series, enter the middle terrain of marriage and motherhood, Ferrante’s preoccupations remain with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity — especially, and strikingly, with the struggles of the female artist against her biological and social destiny.
    Europa Editions. Paper, $18
  6. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    NONFICTION
    Between the World and Me
    By Ta-Nehisi Coates
    Forget, for a moment, the ubiquitous comparisons to James Baldwin: Though fitting in many ways, they can distract us from how original Coates’s book truly is. Structured as a letter to his teenage son, this slender, urgent volume — a searching exploration of what it is to grow up black in a country built on slave labor and “the destruction of black bodies” — rejects fanciful abstractions in favor of the irreducible and particular. Coates writes to his son with a cleareyed realism about the beautiful and terrible struggle that inheres in flesh and bone.
    Spiegel & Grau. $24.
  7. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    Empire of Cotton: A Global History
    By Sven Beckert
    If sugar was the defining commodity of the 18th century and oil of the 20th, then surely cotton was king in the 19th century. In this sweeping, ambitious and disturbing survey, Beckert takes us through every phase of a global industry that has relied on millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and millworkers to turn out its product. The industrialization of cotton rested on violence, Beckert tells us, and its story is that of the development of the modern world itself. Even today, he reports, an industry that is always looking for cheaper labor is engaged in a “giant race to the bottom.”
    Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
  8. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    H Is for Hawk
    By Helen Macdonald
    Macdonald, a poet, historian and falconer, renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — in thisbreathtaking memoir. Unmoored after the death of her father, she retreats from the world, deciding to raise and train a young goshawk, a brutal predator, in solitude. The hawk accompanies her into the wildest reaches of grief and her own nature, a place of darkness and surprising light, evoked in prose that mingles poetry and science, conjuring and evidence.
    Grove Press. $26.
  9. Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
    The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
    By Andrea Wulf
    Alexander von Humboldt may have been the pre-eminent scientist of his era, second in fame only to Napoleon, but outside his native Germany his reputation has faded. Wulf does much to revive our appreciation of this ecological visionary through her lively, impressively researched account of his travels and exploits, reminding us of the lasting influence of his primary insight: that the Earth is a single, interconnected organism, one that can be catastrophically damaged by our own destructive actions.
    Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
  10. Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
    One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
    By Asne Seierstad. Translated by Sarah Death.
    In this masterpiece of reportage, Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist, explores the dark side of Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, as a protest against women’s rights, cultural diversity and the growing influence of Islam. As she weaves the stories of the teenagers with the central narrative about Breivik and his disturbing, alienated childhood, the book attains an almost unbearable weight. This tragedy isn’t literary and symbolic; it’s the real thing.
    Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
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