Opera Archives – Riot Material

Elektra, An Opera In One Act

April 6, 2018 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Pity the legendary royal families of ancient Greece. Their stories, so incredibly complex, rarely end well. Blood feuds abound, and seldom are they fully resolved. Richard Strauss’ and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera, Elektra, debuted in Dresden in 1909, bringing Sophocles’ account of the Argive house of Agamemnon to a modern iteration. In ancient Athens, everyone would have known the story of Electra before they’d even seen Sophocles’ telling of it. [Read more…]

The Exterminating Angel

November 21, 2017 By Donald Lindeman Leave a Comment

An Opera In Three Acts
at Metropolitan Opera, New York City
Reviewed by Donald Lindeman

Hailing from Salzburg and London, Thomas Adès’ opera The Exterminating Angel made its much anticipated New York debut on October 26th at the Metropolitan Opera. Adès himself conducted, and the opening night audience greeted him, the opera, and its superlative vocalists with considerable enthusiasm. The opera is based on the 1962 surrealist film by Luis Buñuel of the same name, featuring an elegant after-opera dinner party attended by upper-crust denizens of Francisco Franco’s Spain. It should be noted that Adès and director Tom Cairns eschew the deeply ironic and grim conclusion found in Luis Buñuel’s film in their opera. Instead they opt for a more ambiguous outcome and fate for their characters. This marks a significant alteration to the filmic source, and it invites alternative interpretations to the original tale. [Read more…]

Ron Baron’s Ode to a Void

at Studio 10, Brooklyn Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban In his ghostly installation, Ode to a Void, at Studio10, Brooklyn, artist Ron Baron has channeled a literally granular level of grief. Particles of pearlite, salt, sand and broken glass are sprinkled on the gallery floor in the pattern of a room-sized spiral resembling a cosmic corona. […]

Jordan Wolfson: Art and Objecthood

at the Broad, Los Angeles (Through January 20, 2019) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch “I was mostly just interested in the physicality of what I’d seen in the animatronic field, and I was also interested in making a sculpture that had the potential to be chronological or structural in the same way a video is. My […]

The New Blackface

Or The De Facto Proxy Of Non American Blacks In Black American/DACS Roles By Seren Sensei There’s been a quiet hostility simmering within the Black diaspora. It is most apparent when discussing media representation. It tensed when veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson wondered what a Black American — what I call the descendants of […]

Twilight of the Idol: Orson Welles’s Long Lost The Other Side of the Wind

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo What beautiful fragments the gods leave from their unfinished visions. Orson Welles was cursed with having entered the arena of the cinema by immediately reaching its peak. In 1941 he made Citizen Kane, that grand work of cinematic biography- taking the story of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and transforming it […]

Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore

Reviewed by John Biscello Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami Knopf, 704 pp., $19.49 “But at three o’ clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in […]

Expansive New Work From The Necks: Body

on Northern Spy Records Reviewed by John Payne How to better classify an improvisational unit such as the Necks? Since the Australian trio perform their music on instruments associated with jazz — acoustic piano, double bass and drums — they tease us with whether or not they ought to be aligned with the severely rule-bound […]

John Biscello’s Nocturne Variations

Reviewed by Kindra M. Austin Nocturne Variations by John Biscello Unsolicited Press, 324 pp., $18.00 Nocturne Variations is a twenty-first century presentation of avant-garde literature. Super. But what is avant-garde? Avant-garde is a French term that means advance guard — people and ideas that are ahead of their time. It’s a concept that refers to artists, composers, […]

Humor and Horror: A Tale of Two Satirists

IndigNATION: Political Drawings by Jim Carrey, 2016-2018, Maccarone, Los Angeles (through December 1, 2018) Robbie Conal: Cabinet of Horrors, Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 10, 2018) Reviewed By Lorraine Heitzman There are two political shows capturing the attention of Angelenos now, besides, of course, the very real drama playing out in Washington. IndigNATION: Political […]

Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes

at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC (through November 3) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The Village Voice is, sadly, now a hallowed memory of the past, but many of its iconic images live vividly on through the work of Fred W. McDarrah, the publication’s first picture editor and its sole staff photographer for decades. McDarrah, who died in […]

The Horror Of Our Seed: Revisiting David Lynch’s The Grandmother

By Alci Rengifo If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans […]

Adrian Piper: Concepts And Intuitions, 1965-2016

at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Through January 6, 2019) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Societal stereotypes and divisions are unfortunately ubiquitous in our culture. Which begs the question, how should we go about demolishing them? With the nearly 300 photographs, paintings, drawings, videos, and installations currently comprising her blockbuster Hammer Museum retrospective, Adrian Piper: Concepts […]

You’re Not Prepared For The Genre-Bending Romance In Border

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko You might think yourself a savvy cinephile. Perhaps you’ve heard that Border won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and is Sweden’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film for the upcoming Academy Awards. So you hear the premise of a customs officer who forms an unexpected bond with a stranger she […]

Dear Evan Hansen Delivers Formula But Little Else

Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman The Tony-award winning musical from the composer/lyricist team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, which is playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, continues the trend towards darker and more internal stories in contemporary musical theater. Pasek and Paul, who wrote the music for the film La-La Land and the Broadway […]

A Time of Monsters: An Updated Suspiria For Our Dark Age

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo There are several ways of remembering a nightmare. Interpreting a classic work always requires a true sense of daring. When literature has become canon or a film a cultural staple, updating a story for a new age will bring with it the baggage of decades. For our new era of ghouls […]

One Day At A Time: Manny Farber And Termite Art

at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Through March 11, 2019) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Life is messy. Art should be, too. In One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, a sweeping group exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), curator Helen Molesworth, assembles Arizona-born carpenter, film critic, and […]

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite Is Ferociously Funny And Delightfully Subversive

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko With The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, director Yorgos Lanthimos has chiseled out a reputation for crafting comedies out of the darkest corners of human experience. Loneliness, jealousy, betrayal and death are his pathways to startling hilarity. Thus, the laughs he earns burst forth as shocked guffaws and obscene […]

Ai Weiwei’s Fraught And Folkloric Life Cycle

at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through March 3, 2019) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch “Nationality is a Western concept. It was an invention of Western European scholars, who ever since have struggled to explain it.” — Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, 1927 How do we hold on to hope and humanity in times of upheaval […]

Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, NYC Reviewed by Angelica Villa The Met’s Heavenly Bodies is a dramatic turn in the museum’s history, a scene where fashion’s indulgence and religious gravity meet in resemblance. In the Costume Institute’s largest exhibition, set in three locations across the museum’s medieval wing, the Anna Wintour Costume Center and […]