For Rosella Biscotti Bryon Gysin was a painter who after a decade in Morocco running a night-club called the “Thousand and One Nights” discovered the “cut-up” while cutting something on top of a pile of magazines in his room in a cheap hotel on the left bank of Paris in 1959. The . . .
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Letitzia Galloni as Carmen (Mats Ek) at the Opéra National de Paris, Palais Garnier, May 2022. Photo by Ann Ray. With kind permission from the Paris Opera. In May 2022, the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Paris presented an enticing triple bill of dance works by the eminent Swedish choreographer, Mats Ek. . . .
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Excerpt from Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home. Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, 233 pp., November 2022. With kind permission from the University of Chicago Press. Through the gleam of brass the lettering was hard to read: “Bartók’s Retreat.” Out of habit I hung a “Do Not Disturb” cushion . . .
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Photo: Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley in George Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations. Photographer: Erin Baiano. Courtesy of the New York City Ballet. Slowly surfacing from the social and emotional depths of the COVID nightmare to perceive a tenuous normalcy around me, I experience New York City Ballet performances as a welcome afterlife—in which . . .
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I think I should have retired at least ten years ago. My older sister Lucy announced her plans to retire, effective immediately, on the second anniversary of her husband’s death from dementia. She said it gave her the boost she desperately needed after her shock and grief refused to lift. As a . . .
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When your mind throws an idea at you, how often do you pause to track its source? How often do you know its source immediately? No matter which or how often, I invariably find the pondering process provocative. Invited by the Mass Review’s editors to trace the origin of my short-story, Cordelia . . .
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I think I’m waking up. One moment I was having a hard time accepting my father’s gifts to my husband and me, and the next my dad was screaming that he wanted never to set eyes on me again. It’s the kind of switchback that happens to you in a dream, when . . .
Read MorePhoto: Sterling Hyltin and Joseph Gordon in George Balanchine’s Orpheus. Photographer: Erin Baiano. Courtesy of New York City Ballet. The 2022 Stravinsky Festival began with an orchestral performance of Fireworks, one of Stravinsky’s early successes, which according to musicologist Charles M. Joseph in his book Stravinsky’s Ballets first drew Diaghilev’s attention to . . .
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Photo: Maria Kowroski and Amar Ramasar in Agon. Photo: Paul Kolnik. Courtesy of NYCB. Ever since last September, the return to a normal performance schedule at New York City Ballet has brought with it a fervor visible not only in a renewed energy, resolve, and an evident joy in dancing after a . . .
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This Saturday, April 23, at Carnegie Hall, the Kronos Quartet will be again performing composer Jonathan Berger’s powerful Vietnam War suite, My Lai (2015). In May, the CD will be released. Professor Berger wrote this riveting essay about My Lai on the eve of the opera’s premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in . . .
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