vip in the city

Music for mating

At Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater for “A Modern Person’s Guide to Hooking Up and Breaking Up,” a vocal concert, presented as part of the 20th Anniversary season of the New York Festival of Song.

Steven Blier, NYFOS’s artistic director, and Michael Barrett, associate artistic director, in collaboration with the students of The Juilliard School’s Vocal Arts Department, and artists from the Juilliard Opera Center, put together this evening of song, which culminates the third annual installment of NYFOS@Juillard.

For this year’s program, Blier and Barrett decided upon a theme that their cast of singers knew about firsthand: “mating, dating, betrayal, sexual urges of many stripes, and true love,” somewhat lighter fare than last year’s theme: “Songs of Peace and War.” The song selections were culled from sources ranging from musical theater, to German cabaret, to pop and rock.

The performance opened with a reading of “may i feel said he” by e e cummings. The ensemble (tenor Paul Appleby, baritone Paul LaRosa, mezzo-soprano Rebecca Jo Loeb, soprano Meredith Lustig, tenor Alex Mansoori, baritone David McFerrin, mezzo Renée L. Tatum, bass Marc Webster and soprano Jennifer Zetlan) alternated delivering lines on a darkened stage, which served as an apt introduction to the sometimes quite literal battle between the sexes. (“let’s go said he / not too far said she / what’s too far said he / where you are said she”)

The night’s sung selections were divided into themed segments: Drawing the Lines, Desire, Mars. vs. Venus, Variations and Working it Out, and ranged from the innocently flirty (Frank Loesser’s “Standing on the Corner” from The Most Happy Fella) to the somewhat less so (Kurt Weill’s “Ballad of Sexual Slavery” from Die Dreigroschenoper and songwriter-satirist Tom Lehrer’s “The Masochism Tango.”) There was a highbrow piece with the poetry of W.B. Yeats set to music by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Moravec, a not-so-cryptic — and hilarious — ode to self love (A Chorus Line lyricist Ed Kleban’s “Do It Yourself“) and a rousing rendition of The Boss’s “Ain’t Got You” by ensemble member Appleby who, before marketing himself as a Rossini and Mozart tenor, sang lead in a Springsteen cover band. One of the quirkiest and most recent selections of the night was the 2006 piece “Neurotic and Lonely,” from the eight-song cycle Craigslistlieder, in which McFerrin sang words lifted directly from a Craigslist personal ad, set to music by none other than Brooklyn composer and performer Gabriel Kahane — MP’s talented young cousin, whom I met over one of our dinners at Public. “Must enjoy video games, must own a video game system: my parents refuse to buy one for me!!!! NO UGG BOOTS, NO LONG ISLAND!”

The program was punctuated with interstitial quotations by a variety of “love experts,” ranging from Lord Byron to Miss Piggy, Oscar Wilde to St. Augustine (”Lord, make me chaste — but not yet.“)

For the finale, the entire group joined in a song and dance production of The Beatles’ “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” with a saucy encore by Lehrer whose tune “I Got It From Agnes” ended things on a humorous note with the joys and pitfalls of spreading the … er, love.

Tags: Juilliard, NYFOS, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, singers

Gothamist holiday

At Ideya in SoHo for the Gothamist holiday party.

Did I really use the term “slow circling of the drain” while chatting with Editor and Co-founder Jen Chung?  Good grief, talk about too much information.

At least the cubanos were tasty, and the mojitos strong.  Perhaps too strong.

New Museum opening

Technically, the first snow of the season arrived on November 19, but that ephemeral dusting was so slight as to hardly register. The snowfall on Sunday morning December 2 was more substantial, and seemed to inaugurate the true start of winter.

Since its founding by the late Marcia Tucker in 1977, The New Museum has demonstrated a commitment to showing visionary, daring work by living artists. Over the next three decades, the museum would be housed in a series of roving spaces: a staff of three began with an office in the TriBeCa Fine Arts Building on Hudson Street, hosting exhibitions offsite at donated galleries at the New School, later working out of spaces on Broadway, and more recently occupying temporary quarters at the Chelsea Art Museum.

For its first permanent home, the museum commissioned a building with a relatively modest budget of $50 million by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based firm SANAA (an acronym for Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates). Prior to their hiring in 2002, SANAA had not yet built outside of Japan, which made the firm an unusual choice in this era of starchitects.

The results have been well-received: a seven-story stack of shimmering two-ply silvery grey boxes each teetering slightly off center, with three floors of exhibition space, levels for educational and administrative purposes, and a top floor offering open, spectacular views of downtown.

To commemorate the grand reopening of the New Museum, beginning at midnight on December 1, the museum was open to the public for 30 consecutive hours. We registered for tickets on Sunday morning, and at 10:00AM, we made our way through the falling snow to the Bowery to tour the new space.

The museum’s inaugural exhibition concentrates on works that are purposefully Unmonumental, the kick-off to a three part, five month long exhibition that explores sculpture, audio, and collage by some of the most prolific and relevant international artists today. Not particularly my taste: sculptures made from a bundled pillar of old clothes and stuffed animals (“Bale Variant Number 001”) by New Yorker Shinique Smith, a plywood box through which was threaded flea market belts (”Split Endz (wig mix)“) by Glasgow-based Jim Lambie, an arched sculptural stack of broken wooden chairs (“Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)”) by Marc André Robinson… well, actually I did think that last one pretty cool, if precarious-looking.

The stark white galleries, hallways, skylights, and hidden stairways were a destination unto themselves, though: a marvel to be contained within the museum’s 71’ by 112’ footprint.

The view out through the metal mesh:

New Museum staircase:

For those who missed the grand opening in December (and who wish to bypass the usual $12 admission fee), the New Museum still offers free hours on Thursdays from 7:00-10:00PM.

Tags: museums, New Museum, snow