Sharpenicity

The world’s leading baritone, Simon Keenlyside not only made his Met role debut as Don Giovanni, in Mozart’s masterpiece, he had a few things to point out in the intermission about what many viewers might already had in their mind—how relevant the theme is to the modern media headlines. For a history refresher,  Don Giovanni opened in 1787, a few weeks before Delaware was the first state ratified the American Constitution,  and on the  eve of the French revolution.   It was years ahead of Darwin’s Origin of Species .   However he did not have to remind us that the news is filled with debates about what the US constitution (from Supreme Court to Presidential elections)  as well as filled with high profile stories of sexual allegations.   Keenlyside, a Cambridge graduate, could probably have talked about this for as long as the opera, but he had to go back on to Act II which shows Mozart’s solution to such flagrancy.   The...

Look!  That’s an interesting Diebenkorn. Oh, gee! it’s a Matisse. French Window at Collioure (1914) . That is not the only surprise at  the Baltimore Museum of Arts’ Matisse/ Diebenkorn (Jan. 29, 2017), where the works of the two artists are interspersed throughout. The first Matisse that Diebenkorn saw  was at a luncheon at the home of the Steins in California.  Matisse’s portrait Sarah Stein (1916), is the starting point for this exhibition. It was love at first sight, but the true connection developed later when Diebenkorn was stationed at Quantico and visited the Phillips Gallery, the National Gallery of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  The exhibit contains  36 paintings and drawings by Matisse and 56 by Diebenkorn, The journey follows the chronology of Diebenkorn’s career from representational paintings to abstract and then back to conceptual art.  It ends with his most celebrated Ocean Park series. The wo...

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE an opera about medieval lovers  for modern lovers of opera  Tristan und Isolde,   probably had more viewers then ever in a single performance on Met Simulcast on Oct 8 than in composer Richard Wagner’s life time. I have no concrete numbers to support that statement—but it is a likely possibility  as this is the way opera is viewed by the most people today. Wagner took a medieval legend, turned it into a story for 19th century  sensibilities.   The Met has gone further with a production with modern  technological touches.   I thought as I listened, how modern is this music, and perhaps it was  because I was seeing the scenes now set in a three level ship and then   in a warehouse and finally in   a hospital room. Perhaps it was because Wagner’s music has had such influence on what was written   after him.   But there was no doubt in my mind, that if Wagner had indeed just composed this...