Contemporaneous performs Brian Petuch’s Portrait and a Dream

Jackson Pollack, Portrait and a Dream (1953)

Contemporaneous is in top form, the singers are stupendous, and Petuch’s opera is outstanding, with his text choices as brilliant as his compositional approach. Watching this made my day, and I hope it may do the same for you.

“Portrait and a Dream [is] an opera about Jackson Pollock told through the lens of Lee Krasner and archival recordings of the people who surrounded his life.” [cite]

Contemporaneous performs Sunshowers, by Yasmin Williams

“Sunshowers (2021) – Yasmin Williams, arr. Zachary Ritter (world premiere arrangement), rehearsal footage from After the Storm 2021. Yasmin Williams is an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist who has invented her own way of playing, which NPR Music says ‘transcends the standard idea of what a guitarist should do,’ and whose most recent album reached #1 on iTunes’ Folk Music chart.” [cite]

At the Met Museum

From what I can discern, it appears the last time I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art was in June 2019. What drew me back, booster in hand and case numbers down, was Susan Tallman’s review in the New York Review of Books, and in particular her observation that “[o]ne century’s wavering is another’s experimentalism.” [cite]

In The Galleries: Philip Guston and Gilbert & George

Philip Guston, Sleeping (1977)

Philip Guston 1969-1979 is on view at Hauser & Wirth through October 30, 2021.

Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks

Viktor Hartmann’s sketch of unhatched canary chicks for a ballet called Trilby or The Demon of the Heath made its way, in musical form, into Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). While written originally for piano, I suspect many of us were introduced to the work through Ravel’s orchestration. From that perspective, listening to the original piano version offers several orders of revelation.