Managed to take in a preview of a new show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring the photography of Dorothea Lange. She was a photographer who shot scenes all over the country but especially in down-and-out places during the Depression in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl and other similar locales. Her work reminded me of Walker Evans and some of her photos are just as famous--one in particular called Migrant Mother was featured in the New York Times.
The show has been put together very deftly. Different walls are devoted to different phases of her career. As usual, problems in seeing the photos are significant--even at a members' preview, the crowd was making getting close to many items difficult. And it's always hard to read the descriptive panels. But enough griping. It is a terrific exhibit and if you get to MOMA, you should definitely take the time to see it. I suspect it's one of those exhibits that if you go starting in its second week, it may be far easier to get close to everything.
The reinstalled permanent collection at the museum is magnificent, as one would expect. The first room has versions of Munch's The Scream, Van Gogh's Starry Night, several Cezannes, and work by Gauguin, Mondrian, Henri Rousseau, and Vuillard. Many pictures are placed with others that may come from a different style and time, but the contrasts are fascinating. I happen to get a charge out of seeing the Italian Futurists, of whose work MOMA has a good sampling. I even spotted a Severini out in the hall as you come off the escalator and a familiar (from previous visits) golden Boccioni sculpture beckoned from across a gallery.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
'The Mother of Us All'
There aren't too many opportunities to get to see a production of the three operas by composer Virgil Thomson, who was also a highly-regarded critic in an age when such conflicts of interest were not regarded as problems. So this past Saturday, an unusual combination of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, and the Julliard School of Music presented a semi-staged version of Thomson's 1947 opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, in the Engelhard court which is located in front of the old Subtreasury building facade that once stood at Wall and Broad, but now fronts the American Wing of the Met.
The space was set up with a raised stage that stood amid three banks of folding wooden chairs for viewers. Surtitles were flashed on a well-suited space in the colonade around the court and pictures were flashed with major points on the front of the Subtreasury facade. Felicia Moore was the excellent soloist who portrayed Susan B. Anthony, and the many other parts, ranging from John Adams to Ulysses S. Grant were filled by Julliard students. A half-dozen Philharmonic musicians, dominated by the trumpeter, provided the orchestral component.
Thomson's music was most enjoyable. He used techniques that Charles Ives was employing--drawing on American patriotic songs, folk music, and marches among many other influences. The plot, if it can be called that, was hard to follow because it was disjointed and mixed real and fictional characters. (Images of many of the characters were flashed up on the facade and identified as appropriate "Real" or "Fictional".) But what would you have expected from the famed avant-gardist who wrote it, Gertrude Stein?
She also had provided the libretto for Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which had been written twenty years earlier in 1927-28. The Mother of Us All did win praise from many--an example comes from Opera News in 2013, regarding a Manhattan School of Music production:
"The opera remains riveting, too, in the lightness and wit of its approach to serious themes such as the struggle for women's suffrage. Preaching would soon pall, but Stein's playfulness, surprises and absurdities, like the Mozartean clockwork of so much of Virgil Thomson's all-American music, have a tonic effect, especially in their ability to keep the listener off guard."
The opera was originally produced at Columbia University, but later was presented (in this century) by the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera.
It did not drag and I found myself wanting to know more about the long life and career of Susan B. Anthony, who lived to be 86 and died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the vote went into effect.
The space was set up with a raised stage that stood amid three banks of folding wooden chairs for viewers. Surtitles were flashed on a well-suited space in the colonade around the court and pictures were flashed with major points on the front of the Subtreasury facade. Felicia Moore was the excellent soloist who portrayed Susan B. Anthony, and the many other parts, ranging from John Adams to Ulysses S. Grant were filled by Julliard students. A half-dozen Philharmonic musicians, dominated by the trumpeter, provided the orchestral component.
Thomson's music was most enjoyable. He used techniques that Charles Ives was employing--drawing on American patriotic songs, folk music, and marches among many other influences. The plot, if it can be called that, was hard to follow because it was disjointed and mixed real and fictional characters. (Images of many of the characters were flashed up on the facade and identified as appropriate "Real" or "Fictional".) But what would you have expected from the famed avant-gardist who wrote it, Gertrude Stein?
She also had provided the libretto for Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which had been written twenty years earlier in 1927-28. The Mother of Us All did win praise from many--an example comes from Opera News in 2013, regarding a Manhattan School of Music production:
"The opera remains riveting, too, in the lightness and wit of its approach to serious themes such as the struggle for women's suffrage. Preaching would soon pall, but Stein's playfulness, surprises and absurdities, like the Mozartean clockwork of so much of Virgil Thomson's all-American music, have a tonic effect, especially in their ability to keep the listener off guard."
The opera was originally produced at Columbia University, but later was presented (in this century) by the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera.
It did not drag and I found myself wanting to know more about the long life and career of Susan B. Anthony, who lived to be 86 and died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the vote went into effect.
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