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Yuja Wang, daredevil pianist, takes on a musical Everest
PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Star pianist Yuja Wang, fresh out of rehearsal Tuesday with the Philadelphia Orchestra, threw her arms into the air and let out a nervous laugh. “We survived,” she said inside a dressing room stocked with dark chocolate, granola bars, a bear-shaped bottle of honey and a bag of lemons. Wang, 35, was a few days from one of the most herculean concerts of her career: a 3 1/2-hour marathon of Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” at Carnegie Hall in New York on Saturday, a virtually unheard-of undertaking. She was excited but also a bit anxious as she imagined what was coming — the rushed rehearsals, the mammoth program and playing before an audience that will include some of her closest friends and mentors. “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” she said. “I’m also having the same feeling as everyone else ... More

For a Pioneering Artist, the Joy of Having Done the Work His Way
NEW YORK, NY.- If you keep a musician friend for over 50 years, as the experimental director Ping Chong has done with Meredith Monk, just maybe at your retirement celebration, that friend will sing you a song. And so on Wednesday night at the performance space Chelsea Factory, a luminous Monk sat down at a keyboard, reminisced about Chong when she first knew him — as a ponytailed student in her dance class, wearing bell-bottom jeans — and played “Gotham Lullaby.” At the front of the crowd, Chong stood listening, transported to his earliest days in theater, when he was a member of Monk’s company. At 76, he has long since become a force in his own right in downtown theater. As a documentary film crew glided through the room, emissaries from La MaMa and the Wooster Group were among the more than 250 guests toasting his nearly half century ... More

In Chicago, 'opera can be hip-hop, and hip-hop can be opera'
CHICAGO, IL.- The baritone Will Liverman was singing in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” about five years ago when he watched a documentary about Jonathan Larson and his musical “Rent.” “It talked about how ‘Rent’ came to be, and how this guy had the idea of taking ‘La Bohème’ and updating it,” Liverman said in an interview this month. “I was wondering why more classics aren’t updated — taking them for ourselves and spinning a new narrative that reclaims the story and tells something that’s meaningful for us.” Then he visited a Black barbershop, and an idea hit him: This could be the setting for a new take on the Rossini, like “La Bohème,” one of the most beloved operas in the repertory. “The thing is,” Liverman said, “I didn’t really take agency over writing anything because of feeling like I was just a singer. I was like, man, someone should do this.” The years since have proven ... More

'Without You' review: Anthony Rapp's seasons of love, and loss
NEW YORK, NY.- Anthony Rapp’s show “Without You” is, in part, about the genesis of “Rent.” It is opening off-Broadway on a symbolic date: exactly 27 years after both that hit musical’s first public performance at New York Theater Workshop and the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson. That’s 14,201,280 minutes gone by, 14 million moments so dear. As Rentheads will know, this number riffs on a famous lyric from “Seasons of Love,” the runaway anthem from “Rent” and now from “Without You.” That song pops up a few times over the course of the new show, and it still has the power to spur a Pavlovian lacrimal reaction, especially in the context in which Rapp (who originated the role of aspiring filmmaker Mark) employs it here. Some of the moments he reminisces about are not so dear, because “Without You” is largely about death — brutally unexpected for Larson and gruelingly ... More

At Rennie Harris' hip-hop university, teaching the teachers
NEW YORK, NY.- On a Friday morning in December the hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris was in Boulder, Colorado, teaching a master class. Rather than taking a post at the front of the studio and staying there, Harris moved among the students, weaving his way through the room and dancing along with them. He offered a few critiques, but more often he paused to share stories and historical tidbits, illuminating the lineage and theory behind the movements he was teaching. But this was more than just a master class. It was one of the final sessions in a yearlong program to train and certify hip-hop and street dance teachers. A few days later, most of these students became members of the first graduating class at the newly minted Rennie Harris University. Over the course of his decadeslong career, Harris, who turns 59 this week, has been a guiding force, ushering hip-hop and street dance ... More

'Luzene Hill: Revelate'opens at the Asheville Art Museum
ASHEVILLE, NC.- An enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Luzene Hill advocates for Indigenous sovereignty—linguistically, culturally, and individually. Revelate builds upon Hill’s investigation of pre-contact cultures. This has led Hill to incorporate the idea of Ollin, the Nahuatl word for the natural rhythms of the universe, in Aztec cosmology in her work. Before Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous societies were predominantly matrilineal. Women were considered sacred, involved in the decision-making process, and thrived within communities holding a worldview based on equilibrium. Ollin emphasizes that we are in constant state of motion and discovery. Adopted as an educational framework, particularly in social justice and ethnic studies, Ollin guides individuals through a process of reflection, action, reconciliation, and transformation. This exhibition combines Hill’s use of mylar safety blankets alongside recent drawings. Capes constructed of mylar burs ... More

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive mounts survey of rarely seen paintings by Frank Moore
BERKELEY, CALIF.- The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) opened the first museum exhibition of work by Frank Moore, the late Berkeley artist who was an important figure in the Bay Area’s counterculture movement during the 1970s. The exhibition, that started on January 24th, features nearly thirty of Moore’s paintings, an underexamined aspect of the artist’s prodigious career—which also encompassed poetry, music, performance art, filmmaking, shamanic rituals, and public access television over five decades of creative output. The latest installment in the museum’s MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, Frank Moore / MATRIX 280: Theater of Human Melting highlights the acquisition by BAMPFA of two paintings by Moore, including his iconic portrait of the musician Patti Smith. Born with a disability that affected his speech and movement ... More

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams & Thomas Jefferson, Fine Autographs and Artifacts for auction
BOSTON.- RR Auction's February Fine Autographs and Artifacts auction boasts over 850 rare and remarkable items and celebrates Presidents' Day with a special section featuring incredible presidential autographs, artifacts, and memorabilia. Among these is a letter signed by Gen. George Washington four days before the Treaty of Paris. The Revolutionary War-dated one-page letter dated August 29, 1783. Letter to Lt. Col. Marinus Willett, sent from Rocky Hill (near Princeton), just before the signing of the Treaty of Paris, marked the formal end of the American Revolution. In it, Washington responds to the British refusal to surrender their Western posts. (Estimate: $50,000) A handwritten letter by Mary Todd Lincoln implicating Andrew Johnson ... More

University Museum of Contemporary Art Director Loretta Yarlow to retire after 18 years
AMHERST, MASS.- Loretta Yarlow will leave her position as director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst June 30. Yarlow will have served 18 years as leader of the museum. The UMass Fine Arts Center will appoint an interim director and launch a search for Yarlow’s successor in the coming months. Yarlow has overseen a period of exceptional growth and transformation in her time at UMCA. This includes the adoption in 2010 of the UMCA name by the institution previously known as the University Gallery, a reflection of its evolution under Yarlow’s leadership. The museum tripled its operating budget through Yarlow’s successful fundraising and donor cultivation. Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said Yarlow leaves an impressive legacy after nearly two decades as a leader in the region’s arts community. He said, “Under Loretta Yarlow’s direction ... More

Graham Budd Auctions to sell single owner collection of football ephemera & programmes spanning 120 years
LONDON.- An impressive single owner collection of Football Ephemera & Programmes that includes items from the majority of football teams in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales as well as the World Cup; Internationals and the Olympics will be offered by Graham Budd Auctions’ on Tuesday, February 7, 2023. Viewing will be by appointment only and the sale will be conducted online. As David Convery, Head of Sporting Memorabilia/Collectables, Graham Budd Auctions, commented: “This outstanding single owner collection has been amassed over the past 60 years and spans 120 years of footballing history. It includes 460 lots of autographs, annuals, ceramics and programmes with estimates ranging from £20 upto £5,000 and everything is to be sold ... More

François Ghebaly opens an exhibition of works by Gabriel Madan
NEW YORK, NY.- By some lights, the best pages of Marcel Proust’s serpentine seven-volume meditation on memory, love, lust, art and other things are the very first, when the protagonist reminisces about Combray, the fictional French seaside town of his youth, revisits his evenings at home, his pining for his mother’s kiss, the drama of being shattered every time said kiss doesn’t come. These delicious and “confused gusts of memory” offer up an amuse-bouche for the sensual adventures to come. Place and childhood function in equally powerful ways in Severance, Gabriel Madan’s new suite of paintings. The Cuban-American Miami of the artist’s youth, and by extension, its seaside, are his omphalos, his own Combray, suggestive settings which inflect and inform his adamantly affecting art. There are several primal scenes to speak of. One features Elián González: back in 1999 ... More