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.
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