Christmas came early as the St. Thomas Man-Boy Choir strikes again this morning at The Times!

This is getting creepy. Click here for past coverage…

Being a resident of Brooklyn, I’m quite familiar with sinking-gut reaction that comes with spotting the plywood barriers and angular iron beams rising up from the open pit of the latest luxury condo tower site (in case you aren’t up to speed, check out the website for Downtown Brooklyn Partnership to see what Flatbush Avenue will look like by 2012).

I’ve always thought I reacted that way because at heart I’m a proletarian, and also I probably distrust just how luxury all these complexes can be given the speed of their proliferation and construction, and, maybe, I’m also a bit nostalgic about the parts of New York that look old timey. I also don’t want my rent to quadruple just because one luxury complex decides to park its giant ass in my back yard.

But The Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff offers an interesting argument in favor of a tower plan designed by Norman Foster that got nixed by the Upper East Side’s community board and is set to be replaced by a new Foster design that seems aimed to appease the opposition. Ourourssoff seems to believe in the optimism of the new, or, at least favors it to the political wrangling that can impede progress; he accuses some of the opposition of using landmark protectivity really just to protect their own luxury views. By the end he seems to say that the tall glass tower would be more beneficial to those of us down on the street than the short, inconspicuous bronze box.

I’m not so sure I agree. Towers cast shadows. Even my reaction to seeing these renderings side by side was one of relief as I got to the new rendering. The tower frenzy that’s taking place in Brooklyn is visually exhausting. You can actually notice when a new shadow appears ten or so blocks away from where the tower sits. In less towerous areas, the new towers seem to loom rather than rise. They catch your vision at odd angles and by surprise from around the cornice of a more modest building relatively far away from the spire. Maybe I see them more as threatening because they promote exclusion and–at least in Brooklyn–tend to have leveled some affordable housing to make room for themselves.

I don’t want to oversimplify the situation. Perhaps there are merits to the proliferation of luxury towers I don’t fully see. I know they are a great alternative to urban sprawl, but lack of affordability and the promise of an impermeably luxurious lifestyle sully the social optimism they intend to purport.

The tower also just looks out of place.

Honda robot conducts Detroit Symphony to warm response

Not to be confused with AWESOM-O…

Hey, y’all! (a la Brit)

So, I know some of you think I ain’t been writin’ recently. But t’aint true! I just been writin’ somewheres else.

Check these dance reviews over at The Brooklyn Rail:

First, Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver queer it up at The New Museum…

Whether we’re post-gay, post-AIDS, post-Will & Grace, or blindly drifting in the marketing-driven scam of metrosexuality (which, by definition, is a male heterosexual mannerism), queer male identity is certainly due for an overhaul. Luckily, there appears to be a trend in queer performance to boldly, and with intelligence, break out of, or at least seriously bend, the tropes of camp and drag in an effort to present queerness in all its rich, contemporary complexity. In early April, on a shared bill at the new New Museum curiously titled Extreme Behavior, performing artists Neal Medlyn and Jack Ferver offered wildly different projects, each evoking various dimensions of queer identity–whether intentionally or not–and with results that exhibit a common reluctance to be placed. Read the rest…

Then, Laura Peterson gets tangled in some foam insulation… (Funny. I saw Peterson at the Medlyn/Ferver affair. Oh, the wangled teb we weave…)

Electrolux: The word may sound like some generic term for the latest tranny party doomed to a four-week lifespan before dying out in a fizzle of A.D.D. and urban ennui, but it’s actually the name of one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. When dance artist Laura Peterson gave her latest creation the same name, she was probably counting on the obscurity of the Swedish company to leave the allure of the word in tact, but, in effect, it’s kind of like naming your dance “Pfizer,” or “McDonald’s.” This kind of genericism pervades Electrolux, although bursts of originality and sheer visceral action save the piece from falling into disrepair. Read the rest…

And don’t forget to check out the article (not by me) on Greenbelt, the future home of John Jasperse and Jonah Bokaer’s Center for Performance Research!

…C.C. caught the penultimate performance of Philip Glass’s pacificst epic “Satyagraha.” [Full review to come...]

Umm, so, aside from the gentleman two seats away from me who puked in the aisle right before the curtain for Act II went up, and the couple next to me who wouldn’t stop whispering through the quietest moments of the music, and catching a glimpse of Rufus Wainwright looking well and enjoying the Grand Tier during first intermission, I was mostly able to pay attention to the opera.

Except for when, mid-way through the second act–with the faint odor of a stranger’s vomit occasionally wafting by–I heard a dark, mysterious, and familiar descending melodic line coming from the orchestra. Then suddenly it hit me: THIS MUSIC IS FROM “THE HOURS!”

[UPDATE: FoM has a sound clip.] Read more…

On Sunday Saturday afternoon, we checked out the HD simulcast of The Met’s“La Fille du Regiment” at the Walter Reade Theater. And much to our dismay, we caught a glimpse of high-C-flaunting Juan Diego Florez coming out of the Juilliard School’s Meredith Wilson Residence Hall with fiance wife Julia Trappe in tow at around, oh, 1pm. That’s like 30 minutes before curtain! He was dressed in a nice suit, and she in a gold and pink sleeveless opera gown. They were ducking into an elevator, trying to avoid being recognized by the 30 or so people waiting in the standby line at the box office.

It makes sense that JDF would be strolling into the theater in the nick of time, since, during the post-Act I interview with Renee Flemming, he told her he didn’t warm up his high Cs. He just goes out there and does them. That’s also consistent with various accounts–and our own observation–that the notes for him are oddly effortless. Read more…

I thought I’d send y’all out into the weekend with a thought about the debate that’s been simmering on these two posts. Some of the comments concern this idea that atonality is unnatural, and therefore, illegitimate in some way. Bernard Holland’s recent comment that serialism is “made up” represent this notion that there is something essentially plastic about twelve-tone composition.

First of all, it’s important to recognize that all methods of composition are made up. If Holland understood what it took to learn the skill of writing 4-part harmony with “correct” voice leading, he would know that the music of Mozart and Brahms adheres to a rather strict complex of rules that, while lovely and truly a marvel in terms of human aesthetic achievement–have not always been the rule. It’s a relatively recent notion that parallel fifths are incorrect. In fact, western polyphony began by simply doubling a single melodic line with the higher fifth. It was a hot new technique that was all the rage at the time. But now, when you enter a conservatory program in composition, you learn quickly that parallel fifth are a big no-no.

Yet parallel fifths still remain very natural to the ear. That’s why most young composers have to have parallel fifths beaten out of them before they can return to them with a more complex approach. Perhaps, one could say, parallel fifths are too natural to the ear (after all, it is the second partial in the harmonic series and the second most important degree in the hierarchy of diatonic harmony). Read more…

So, Alastair Macaulay makes the case for adding James Kudelka’s “The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful” to C.C.’s Know When To Say When list; and then some. He writes:

“The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful” (to music by César Franck soupily arranged for orchestra by Rodney Sharman) lasts no more than 30 minutes, but only by clock time. While you watch, you begin to feel that Bill Clinton probably eloped with Michelle Obama long ago, that the problems of Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan must have all been sorted by now, that whole generations of human life have passed and aliens have surely taken over the planet and then departed, all while you are stuck there in the theater trying to find the least interest in watching the same tepid floozies doing the same limp steps. With its women so evidently “fallen” and its frock-coated men so pallid and ghoulish, I can see why a friend called it “The Best Little Whorehouse in Transylvania.” Even in Transylvania, though, aren’t most whorehouses livelier and more frolicsome than this dirge?

OMG, this is hot. Although, I’ve never been to an actual whorehouse. Unless art galleries count. And in that case, they’re actually pretty mellow.

It’s a classical music day!

So, e’rbody knows about Juan Diego Florez’s 18 high C’s at The Met last night. C.C.’s gonna check out the simulcast on Saturday. Interrupting a piece of theater so a performer can take a bow–or in this case, re-sing the entire aria–is like one of those divisive election-year issues that is bound to stir up emotions. As are Mortier’s modern-dress updates of classic operas.

I’m not sure NYC knowns how lucky it is going to be when you have Gelb at The Met programming hard-core Bel Canto seasons, and Mortier rocking crazy-ass contemporary works at the City Opera. They seem to represent emphatic polar opposites in at least a few regards. If all goes well, and things don’t get too mud-slingy, New Yorkers should be privy to witness an energetic and world class conversation about opera in the 21st century by two of the most well-known opera houses in the world.

Hot.

[BTW: The applause in the audio excerpt last about 1:30, which is about about 60% of the time the actual cabaletta lasts; about 2:30. That should give you an idea about why some opera fans disapprove of placing so much emphasis on virtuosity (as Bel Canto operas generally did). This also includes the audience applauding before an aria has even ended, which you do hear as Florez finishes the encore.]