This week: Mozart, The Painting Center, Baroque piano, architectural terminology & more.
Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces, by Patrick Mackie (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): The subtitle of Patrick Mackie’s new Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces reflects the book’s organization: each of twenty-five chapters takes up a single work and the circumstances surrounding its composition, from sonatas and quartets to masses and operas. But the phrase “in pieces” also hints at the deeper, abiding theme that makes this book so delightfully instructive. Mackie’s approach is to situate the composer as an avatar of modernism, facing a fragmented high culture—caught between dry, ritualized forms of courtly music and the “hedonistic levity” betokened by Enlightenment individualism. By laying such tensions bare, Mackie achieves for Mozart what Mozart himself did for music, time and time again: to make the old new, and intelligible as such. —RE
Dana Gordon, Robin Feld & Patti Samper, at The Painting Center (through June 17): Celebrating its thirtieth year, The Painting Center remains as advertised: a center for serious painting. Now located in the heart of Chelsea, the non-profit gallery hosts an impressive rotation of member artists as well as guest exhibitions and lectures that center painting, both abstract and realistic, in the contemporary spotlight. This month the founding member Dana Gordon is in the project room with a suite of new work that distills his lifelong investigation of abstract form into a dynamic concentration of playful brush marks on white ground. Next door Robin Feld spreads expressionistic fields over gridded structure, while Patti Samper stirs layers of color into orphic abstraction. —JP
“Baroque Masterpieces from Epic Films,” featuring the pianist Polina Osetinskaya, at the 92nd Street Y (June 10): For many former Soviet citizens, Bach is synonymous with the poignant films of the dissident director Andrei Tarkovsky, who featured the composer’s music in the majority of his work throughout the 1970s and 80s. Certainly this was a means of heightening the religious subtext of his cinema, which could only speak obliquely of Christian faith under the threat of government censorship. It seems consonant that the pianist Polina Osetinskaya will play Bach’s Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, the prominent theme from Solaris (1972), in a concert of Baroque film music at Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y this Saturday. This is her first American tour following the cancellation of her performances in Russia for her opposition to the war in Ukraine. —IS
Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon, by Owen Hopkins (Laurence King Publishing): Who hasn’t spotted an intriguing architectural feature on some building and been at an utter loss for its name, thereby prevented from further learning? The technical terms of architecture can be abstruse, and translating a visual impression of this or that feature into words is no easy task: without the element’s name, both traditional dictionaries and internet image searches are more or less useless. So it is a delight to discover Owen Hopkins’s Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon, recently published in its second edition. Covering the entire history of architecture and its myriad styles, and written in clear prose with diagrammatic illustrations throughout, this book is essential for those wishing to distinguish between a tympanum (“in medieval architecture, the often decorated infilled space above the imposts of an arch supported by two smaller arches”) and a trumeau (“the central mullion in an arched window or doorway, supporting a tympanum above two smaller arches”)—as well as those just curious what the dormer windows in spires are called (those would be lucarnes). —BR
For our Circle members:
“Peter Thiel receives The New Criterion’s 2023 Edmund Burke Award.” A special offering for our Circle of Supporters: watch Peter Thiel give remarks on “The diversity myth” at The New Criterion’s annual gala.
From the Archives:
“Valhalla by the Bay,” by David Mermelstein (September 1999). On Wagner’s Ring at the San Francisco Opera.
Dispatch:
“Looking for a sign,” by Kyle Smith. On the new revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.