Via Alex Ross and the Arnold Schönberg Center (which you can't miss the next time you're in Vienna -- OC went) are the Austrian composer's Photomaton images from the late 1920s.
Above, Schönberg and his second wife Gertrud Schoenberg in hats. Below, Gertrud and a schnauzer.
(Above: Schoenberg with his family, Los Angeles, 1948. Check out loads more photos here)
Bologna's Teatro Comunale soon opens The Schoenberg Experience with the Austrian composer as protagonist of a four day program dedicated to the coolest of the cool, Arnold Schoenberg, in collaboration with Vienna's Arnold Shoenberg Center (if you visit Vienna, it's mandatory, as well as a slice of Estherhazy torte at Demel and the deli counter at Meinl am Graben).
The Vienna-based foundation, led by president Nuria Schoenberg Nono, is behind Bologna's kick-off concert on December 2. On December 3, Nuria Schoenberg Nono leads a conference titled "Schoenberg in America: 1933-1951". On December 5, the concert hall is swapped for a movie theater where Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Moses und Aron will be shown, based on Schoenberg's challenging opera of the same name.
Sure, Schoenberg was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and changed the entire trajectory of classical music as we had known it, but when he put on his pants just like the rest of us, he made gold records. And crazy, hand-drawn bridge cards.
Wednesday night's coolest classical happening was at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, which opened its 2009/10 season with "The Blue Rider In Performance" in celebration of their 21st season. From the Metropolitan Opera opening just 48 hours prior, where the the glamour and decorum of New York's oldest, endowed legacies competed with the musty, family jewels bestowed on younger second wives (already on their second facelifts) and over to the modest Miller Theatre where the coolest classical nerds, Xenakis-worshiping art students in Nike Dunks and AA flocked to hear a modern, rawkingly avant-garde program -- hell, we even had cultural arts mainstay ambassador Austin Scarlett front and center (okay, to be fair, he was also at the Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Gala, except the paparazzi no longer want his photograph despite the fact that his hair looks *almost* as good as Martha Stewart's).
It's no coincidence that Miller Theatre's opening night alluded to the iconic hipster of modern abstraction (and we'll give him expressionism FTW), Vasily Kandinsky, who's also the headliner at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this month. The Miller Theatre's show -- a curious melange of music, dance, and visual arts -- was tied in directly with the current (self-titled) Vasily Kandinsky retrospective that opened a few days ago (September 18) and was co-produced with the august museum for their Works & Process performing arts series.
The Guggenheim, in curating the artworks of the Russian painter from the years 1909-1914, highlights Kandinsky's The Blue Rider group, a collection of visual artist and composers in and around Munich's 1910s cultural scene. The motley crew of Blue Riders boasted many of the original founders of 20th century modernism who explored new paths of creativity. It was here that Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and Kandinsky associated closely with each other -- so much that Kandinsky's painting, Impression III (concert) was inspired directly from a Schoenberg concert in Munich attended by the painter (of which the Miller Theater pulled their set-list for the opening night concert) . Kandinsky (and friend Franz Marc) apotheosis of their crew was The Blue Rider Almanac, a published synthesis of modern painting, art and music compositions, published in 1912. The modern, avant-garde zeitgeist spanned from Russia to Germany, and captured the incipient movement, only to be squashed by the outbreak of World War I.
The Miller Theatre set out to create an event tied in with a quote of Arnold Schoenberg which expounds on how a musician is challenged to most effectively express himself in the theatrical medium, "making music with the media of the stage," -- and this they did.
Click the link below to read the full review...
Hungary's Miskolci Nemzetközi Operafesztivál 2009 brings out the bewbs in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Click the link below for the NSFW, uncensored version.
Continue reading "Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" Bring the Bewbs" »
Once-glorious Philharmonia will give you a money-back guarantee on their Schoenberg if you just buy a ticket for Gurrelieder:
Esa-Pekka is the new Chef Tony!
One of Opera Chic's favorite pastimes in Vienna is to visit the Arnold Schönberg Center (they're so 1337 that they have a YouTube page full of videos and a fantastic MySpace page as well): Arnie, the greatest Austrian ever to move to California, gets lots of l0ve there from scholars, tourists tired of the usual visits to Schonbrunn and the Belvedere, and simple hangers-on (check out the library to see the cute very serious looking young aspiring composers who hang out there spying all those scores and wondering how they can make their stuff sound NOT like a wheezing washing machine).
There was a lovely exhibit re: young Arnie, with lots of memorabilia and manuscripts.
So here's Opera Chic's field trip report.
Arnie & BFF Alex Zemlinsky: beer and the destruction of tonality.
A humongous map of Arnie's Vienna.
L'homme du train.
The dorkiest revolutionary in history.
The New York Times, confused as always when confronted by new things, greets the exile with the not so flattering headline, "The Enigma Of Modern Music Arrives" -- like, beware of Jews carrying atonality.
The maestro's study on North Rockingham, a few houses down the street from the place where OJ Simpson's wife and a friend committed suicide in that most unusual of fashions in 1994, has been shipped off to Vienna after his passing and recreated in the center. We loved the fat pencils and the customized pencil cases.
This is the life I chose or rather the life that chose me
If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black
