Category: AJBlogs

Mark-Anthony Turnage redefined British opera with Greek. But that was in a different world: 1988. When the piece arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month, I imagined it like some seriously aging hipster whose many once-edgy tattoos are turning to mud. I was throughly, and ecstatically, wrong. — David Patrick Stearns

Laura Dickinson 17: Auld Lang Syne (Music & Mirror Records)
David Ian: Vintage Christmas (Prescott Records)
Jake Ehrenreich, with the Roger Kellaway Trio,
     A Treausury of Jewish Christmas Songs (Ehrenreich)
               — Doug Ramsey

It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Jürgen Ploog’s Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. — Jan Herman

Here’s an updated version — call it 2.0 — of last year’s chart outlining the two main ways (the wrong one and the right one) of approaching the means by which arts organizations connect with the public. — Doug Borwick

When museum trustees set out to hire a new director, they tend to seek someone very different from the current one, a prominent art museum director once told me. They want change. — Lee Rosenbaum

Kristin Korb, That Time Of Year (Storyville)
Winter holiday albums began showing up in the Rifftides mailbox well before Thanksgiving. They’re still coming. It’s time to call some of them to your attention. — Doug Ramsey

“We are rewarded with an hour of their music that until now has been all but unknown.” – Doug Ramsey

“Why not acknowledge the MLFs, masochists, rapists, sadists, animal fuckers, and fisting fetishists, among other artisans of debauchery, with one helluva good read.”  – Jan Herman

Colleges and professional orchestras both seem to be declining in relevance and power, but if they work together, much is possible. – Joe Horowitz

Lucky Cleveland! Since Nov. 18, residents and visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art have been able to see six tapestries, woven in the mid 1570s, that have been under wraps, locked away, almost ever since then. For some 100 years, at least, they’ve been in the store rooms of the Uffizi Galery and before that in the Palazzo Vecchio Medici store rooms.