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…]

Streaming Strange Consciousness, And Glorious Cataclysms, In Blake Williams’s Prototype

By Alci Rengifo One cannot simply write a review of Blake Williams’s immersive, hypnotic experimental film Prototype. It is more appropriate to comment on this film as the description of an experience. Whether taken in as a 3D experience or as a standard, 2D film, Protoype attempts to create an environment with the very idea of cinema […]

The Bawdy Colette Is Provocative And Fun

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Her novels were a cultural sensation that sold out printing after printing, spurred sprawling merchandise and plays, and inspired a generation of young women to boldness. But Colette (formerly known as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was long regarded the muse of the Claudine novels, while her husband Henry Gauthier-Villars was celebrated as their […]

Jack Whitten: Self Portrait with Satellites

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles Reviewed by Genie Davis That the late Jack Whitten was an artist of great depth and perception is a given. But the truly fascinating thing, the haunting, resonant thing about the man’s work is its sense of timelessness and immortality. His mastery may not have been fully recognized in […]

I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History

at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (Through September 28, 2018) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Realism is best suited to convey the frightening idiosyncrasies of our time. — Duane Hanson What is reality and how should an artist explore this concept in his or her work? Rejecting art history’s long-standing predilection for idealism, the five hyperrealistic photographers […]

Abazar Hamid, aka “The Beatles of Sudan”

By Ray Mwareya Abazar Hamid’s soft-molded voice offers little about a man whose 200 songs has earned him brutal expulsion from the oil-rich African state of Sudan when his lyrics angered Mr. Omar Al Bashir, the world’s first sitting president to be indicted for genocide.

Swaggering Portraits Of American Masculinity In The Sisters Brothers

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko The fantasy of the cowboy is one of liberty and power that is distinctly American. We imagine him riding high on a saddle, the Wild West his to explore and dominate. His hat makes for a striking silhouette as his hips swing with a masculine swagger. His gun outstretched to bend […]

Forgotten Roots: How Los Angeles Shaped Robert Rauschenberg

At LACMA (Through February 10, 2019) Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch Revealing the divine in the forsaken and the sublime in the mundane, beloved late Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) pens his love letter to Los Angeles in LACMA’s current retrospective Rauschenberg: In And About L.A. Although typically associated with the New York art scene of the […]

Freaks Is A Sly Sci-Fi Alive With Surprise And Sentiment

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Her shirt. It snagged my eye as strange, but I couldn’t immediately identify why. It doesn’t suit a seven-year-old somehow. Then I saw the snaps dangling just below her belly, and noticed the details on the shoulder. It’s a onesie, the kind that fastens snuggly around infants. At first, it’s a […]

Forcella Reigns: The Men Who Play Cards

at ZJU Theater, North Hollywood (through 9 September) Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman Neapolitian painter and set designer Francesca Bifulco and her collaborator, musician and sound designer Alex Schetter, have recreated a virtual Naples streetscape that focuses on the timeless ritual of men playing cards. The title of the installation, Forcella Reigns, refers to the rundown neighborhood in […]

David Lynch’s Room To Dream, A Bio-Memoir

Reviewed by John Biscello Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna Random House, 592 pp., $32.00 All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. — Edgar Allan Poe For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a […]

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World

Reviewed by Martin Filler Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World by Dale Allen Gyure Yale University Press, 283 pp., $65.00 Courtesy of The New York Review of Books Now that I’m about to turn seventy I finally feel able to reveal a shameful secret: I was a teenage Yamasaki addict. I have no […]

In Paris: 1,2,3 Data Group Show; Suter’s Radial Grammar; and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains

Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx 1,2,3 Data group show, Batia Suter’s Radial Grammar, and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains are three exhibitions of contemporary art taking place in Paris this season. While they vary greatly in form and content, they all use found materials as the source for their art and address the relationship of humans to […]

Federico García Lorca’s Poet in Spain

Reviewed by Colm Tóibín Poet in Spain by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio Knopf, 517 pp., $35.00 Courtesy of The New York Review of Books In his late teens, Federico García Lorca’s main interest was music and song. He was steeped not only in the Andalusian folk tradition but also […]

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

at the Morgan Library and Museum, NYC Reviewed by Jed Perl Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joel Smith Fundación MAPFRE/Aperture, 246 pp., $50.00 Courtesy of The New York Review of Books This is what the great photographer Brassaï, who spent a lifetime recording the merry-go-round of twentieth-century Paris, had to say about his work: […]

Jess: Secret Compartments

Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 7, 2018) A lifetime-spanning survey of works by Jess (1923-2004) is bound to be a bit meta — because the work that Jess produced across his long career was itself always already a survey of his own life and times. From his earliest paintings […]

Detouring Through Art, History & Language In Cosmic Traffic Jam

Reviewed Ellen C. Caldwell Given the current political climate in the U.S., it is no surprise that many artists here are choosing to overtly and directly address politics in their work. At Zevitas Marcus in Culver City, their summer group show Cosmic Traffic Jam does just that, welcoming a wide array of artists of color to use […]