Casualty of war
Youssou N’Dour, the acclaimed Senegalese singer and bandleader and UNICEF ambassador, has announced the cancellation of his seven-week tour of North America, which was scheduled from March 26 to May 15 and included an April 11 appearance with Angélique Kidjo at the Orpheum under the auspices of World Music. In a statement released from Dakar, N’Dour said, "It is my strong conviction that the responsibility for disarming Iraq should rest with the United Nations. As a matter of conscience, I question the United States government's apparent intention to commence war in Iraq. I believe that coming to America at this time would be perceived in many parts of the world — rightly or wrongly — as support for this policy, and that, as a consequence, it is inappropriate to perform in the US at this juncture.
"I regret the difficulties this causes those who were to present my concerts in North America and those who were looking forward to seeing me and my band. This tour was over a year and a half in the planning and was the greatest commitment I had ever made to performing in the US. It is my fervent wish to return to the US in better times. But I find it impossible to imagine playing concerts in America when such grave issues are confronting all the peoples of the world."
Angélique Kidjo is still scheduled to perform on April 11. For more information, call World Music at (617) 876-4275.
Boston Ballet’s 2003-2004 season
Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen has released details on the company’s 40th season, and as earlier reports had indicated, it’s a departure from the way Boston Ballet has done business over the past couple of decades. The norm has been five subscription productions — generally three full-length story ballets and two rep programs — running two weekends and 12 performances each. That’s 60 performances a year, and we’re not counting The Nutcracker, which adds another 40 or so. Compare Boston Lyric Opera, which does four productions a year with seven performances each (up from six a few years ago, by popular demand), for a total of 28. What’s more, Boston Ballet has the 3600-seat Wang Theatre to try to fill, as opposed to BLO with the 1600-seat Shubert. And comparable North American ballet companies, as BB executive director Valerie Wilder has pointed out (see our interview on last week’s Arts News page), have seasons that are a lot closer to BLO’s in size.
So perhaps the announcement that Boston Ballet’s 2003-2004 subscription season (The Nutcracker will remain unaffected) will be reduced to 40 performances should be seen as a sensible adjustment rather than as a retrenchment. The company will open October 16 with a weekend (Thursday through Sunday) of Don Quixote, in the Rudolf Nureyev version that the company has not performed since 1986. That’ll be followed, starting October 23, with a weekend of repertory: George Balanchine’s 1958 Stars and Stripes and 1981 Mozartiana (the company did the latter in 1994, as part of its Tchaikovsky centennial) and David Dawson’s The Grey Area. Then Don Quixote will return for the third weekend, October 30 through November 2. The Nutcracker will open as usual the day after Thanksgiving, November 28, and run through December 30. The same story-rep-story pattern will repeat in the spring: Val Caniparolli’s Lady of the Camellias (based on the tale by Alexandre Dumas, to music by Chopin) March 18 through 21; a rep program — Mark Morris’s 1988 ABT-commissioned Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (to Virgil Thomson), Balanchine’s 1972 Duo Concertant (Stravinsky), and a world premiere by Caniparolli — March 25 through 28; and then Lady of the Camellias again April 1 through 4. The season will conclude May 6 through 16 with Swan Lake.
What all this means is that there will be just 10 performances instead of 12 of each story ballet (Tuesday and Wednesday performances having been eliminated) and just five instead of 12 of each rep program (these are running one weekend instead of two). On the positive side, there’ll still be five productions. Swan Lake needs neither introduction nor explanation; Don Quixote is being done partly to pay tribute to Nureyev, for his contribution to Boston Ballet (he toured with the company in 1982), and in recognition of the tenth anniversary of his death. Lady of the Camellias is the new (to Boston) story ballet; certainly Dumas’s tale — which is also the source of Verdi’s La traviata — has dance potential.
Of the six rep pieces, only Mozartiana has been done here before. Balanchine’s work is always welcome, but it remains to be seen whether Wilder and Nissinen can build an audience for all the fine non-full-length non-story pieces Boston Ballet has in its repertoire. Also up in the air is the composition of the company for next season. Promotions for Sarah Lamb (from soloist to principal) and Jared Redick and Romi Beppu (from the corps to soloist) have been announced, but there’s been no word on when or whether injured new principal Roman Rykine will return, or how the company will replace the abruptly departed principal Gaël Lambiotte and soloist Sabine Chaland. Larissa Ponomarenko’s absence from La Fille Mal Gardée was due to injury, but principals April Ball and especially Jennifer Gelfand (surely the dancer who was such a winsome Cowgirl in last season’s Rodeo would have been equally moving as Lise) were simply absent, and one wonders about their future status.
Lincoln Center Festival 2003
Okay, so October is a ways off. How about July? Lincoln Center has announced its eighth international arts festival, with nearly 100 performances (20 of them premieres and debuts) running July 8 through 27. Highlights include the Kirov Opera (Prokofiev’s Semyon Kotko, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin, Verdi’s Macbeth); Sicilian-born composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s Macbeth; Heiner Goebbels’s Eislermaterial, a homage to the German Jewish composer Hanns Eisler; a Prokofiev chamber-music marathon; Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project, from the director of the Fiona Shaw Medea; the Itim Theatre Ensemble’s Mythos, a reimagining of Aeschylus’s Oresteia; appearances by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company; and a Brazilian Music Festival featuring Carlinhos Brown. For a festival brochure, call (212) 875-5456 or visit www.lincolncenter.org. Tickets for two or more events will go on sale April 18 via Internet, CenterCharge (212-721-6500), mail order, and fax order; tickets for single events will go on sale June 2 at the individual box offices.
Laurel Canyon
This year’s Boston International Festival of Women’s Cinema will run April 3 through 6 at the Coolidge Corner and the Brattle, but what’s expected to be one of the festival highlights, Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon, is getting a sneak-preview screening at 7:30 p.m. Thursday March 27 at the Coolidge Corner. Jane (Frances McDormand) is a pot-smoking LA record producer with a British rock-star boyfriend (Alessandro Nivola); when her straitlaced Harvard Medical School grad son, Sam (Christian Bale), and his fiancée, Alex (Kate Beckinsale), who’s also a HMS grad, move back to LA so Sam can finish his residency, they move into mom’s Hollywood Hills mansion while looking for an apartment, and the two worlds collide.
This is just Cholodenko’s second feature; her first, 1998’s High Art, showed off the talents of Ally Sheedy. Tickets, to benefit the festival, are $10 and include a special pre-screening reception at 7 p.m. Call TicketWeb at (866) 468-7619, or visit www.beaconcinema.com/womfest, or drop by the Coolidge box office.
Happy birthday, Steinway!
Steinway Piano turns 150 this year, so if you’re fortunate enough to have one of the company’s fine instruments, you might want to uncork some bubbly and make a toast. If not, think about heading down to Symphony Hall this Saturday for the "Steinway at 150: Steinway Artists Celebrate" concert, where you can hear a line-up of area Steinway artists including Anthony di Bonaventura, Gabriel Chodos, Hershey Felder, Sarah Grunstein, Tong-Il Han, Veronika Jochum, Max Levinson, Michael Lewin, Joe Parillo, Andrew Rangell, Janice Weber, and Bob Winter, playing Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Gershwin (did we mention that Hershey Felder is on the bill?), and jazz selections for two pianos; the evening will culminate with several works for multiple pianos. Tickets are $30 to $50, with proceeds benefitting the BSO’s youth and education programs (the BSO, in case you were wondering, isn’t performing at Symphony Hall this weekend because it’s making its annual March pilgrimage to the Big Apple). VIP seats at $100, include a post-concert reception; there will also be a limited number of student tickets at $10. Call SymphonyCharge at (617) 266-1200, or visit www.bso.org, or drop by the Symphony Hall box office.
More ceramics
Two weeks ago, Christopher Millis ("Smoking Pots," February 28) argued that we need to pay serious attention to the ceramic art of living artists and not merely to museums’ Ming vases. And indeed, there are plenty more hard-glazed beauties in area galleries and museums. Moving into its final days at the Fitchburg Arts Museum (Merriam Parkway in Fitchburg; call 978-345-4207) is "From the Kilns of Denmark: Contemporary Danish Ceramics," an exhibition developed in association with the FAM that received rave reviews at its only other American appearance, at New York City’s American Crafts Museum. The artists represented range in their work from traditional vessel shapes to the more abstract to the uncategorizable, like Barbo Aberg’s Ship of Change. The show will run through March 22; on closing day, beginning at 2 p.m., curators Wendy Tarlow Kaplan and Hope Barkan will offer a gallery tour, coffee, and discussion. Call (978) 345-4207.
A little closer to home, there’s the Lacoste Gallery (25 Main Street in Concord; 978-369-0278), where through March 20 you can see "After Palissy," which collects more than 20 contemporary ceramicists inspired by 16th-century French innovator Bernard Palissy, who specialized in brightly glazed high-relief depictions of nature and myth. And in town, through April 9, the ever-reliable Pucker Gallery (171 Newbury Street through April 9; 617-267-9473) is showing the work of Fance Franck, an American-born artist whose vases and bowls in both stoneware and porcelain explore a variety shapes as well as a remarkable range of glazes and imagery, from the abstract to the representational.
