CONCERT REVIEW A Weekend with The Bad Plus
What better way to spend my 21st birthday weekend than with my favorite band, The Bad Plus. The time-shifting, genre-bending trio celebrated songs from their new release, <i>For All I Care</i>, as well as old tunes (and some new, but unreleased ones as well) at Berklee Performance Center on Friday, April 3rd, and at Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton on Saturday April 4th. The trio, consisting of Reid Anderson (bass), Ethan Iverson (piano), and David King (drums), have been playing the majority of their shows with vocalist Wendy Lewis, who joined the band on <i>For All I Care</i>. On both shows this weekend, they began with a traditional trio set, and then brought Lewis out for the second half.
CONCERT REVIEW Sturm und Drang, but Insightful Too
Who <i>hasn’t</i> played Murray Perahia’s March 28th program? Or at least tried; all of the works performed by Murray Perahia on Sunday afternoon’s Celebrity Series concert are somewhere gathering dust on my piano, multiple recordings litter my CD collection. It’s music that we’ve studied to understand what Western music is, music we’ve scrutinized to hear what Western music is supposed to sound like, and perhaps that’s what was so fundamentally difficult about Sunday’s performance. What can there possibly be to say about music that’s been spoken about for so long?
THEATER REVIEW MIT Shakespeare Ensemble Performs ‘Pericles’
Drama is tough. It takes a lot time, a lot of money, and a lot of otherwise unemployed people willing to sacrifice both soul and social life for the glory of a few good performances. Unlike some of the other arts, which are often solitary, drama is always about other people: the audience, the cast, the director. No production is “pure” in that sense, but rather the amalgam of a host of other people’s opinions and decisions.
CD REVIEW BoA Enters the American Pop Scene
Although the three-letter name BoA may not currently strike a chord of familiarity in the US, the R&B pop princess is staking her claims in our neighborhood. The pop star who took Korea by storm and rode on top of the <i>hallyu</i>, the popular culture movement in Korea, recently released her first full-length (and self-titled) English album.
CONCERT REVIEW Moz: ‘To Be Human Is to Be Loved’
Former Smiths frontman Morrissey stopped by Boston on Sunday, March 29th as part of his Tour of Refusal, in support of his latest studio record <i>Years of Refusal</i>. A crowd waited in line hours before doors opened in order to get a great spot at the House of Blues. The general admission floor area filled up quickly with eager fans awaiting a chance to touch the singer himself, as he is known to generously offer his hand to those in the first few rows.
CONCERT FEATURE What’s the Buzz?
Kicking off this Sunday is the Beeline Festival at the Broad Institute. The festival hopes to introduce MIT and the surrounding community to new and exciting music, as well some exciting culinary treats. Co-coordinators Christine N. Southworth ’01 and MIT professor Evan Ziporyn, both musicians themselves in Gamelan Galak Tika, have organized six outstanding performances every weekend in April. The opening concert this Sunday will feature The Calder Quartet, as well as a reception where guests can taste honey and pastries made by local beekeepers and chefs. After the reception is a second set with Gutbucket.
RESTAURANT REVIEW Top of the Hub: Restaurant Week
In many major cities, Restaurant Week serves as an annual or a biannual tradition. Two or three course meals at acclaimed restaurants in the city go for relatively inexpensive prices. I took advantage of this event by taking my girlfriend to the Top of the Hub, located on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Tower.
CD REVIEW An Irish Band Releases Another Album
To be honest, I wasn’t going to pick up U2’s most recent effort, <i>No Line on the Horizon</i>. When I was looking at Billboard release listings for the month of March, U2’s name didn’t even stick out. Yet, their album cover did. I saw it in a magazine, but recognized it as something else: <i>Boden Sea, Uttwil</i>, or a time-lapse photograph of Lake Constance taken by my favorite photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto. I wasn’t sure how the use of the photograph could have anything to do with the content of the music, so I delved a little deeper.
CONCERT REVIEW A Romantic Journey
Time seems to get distorted in musical history. Somehow, the past two hundred years of music are still very much with us in many different ways. At the very basic, instrumental level, Mozart’s piano is different from the one we play today, Haydn’s horn is much more curmudgeonly and Bach took on the challenge of writing six suites for the curious new cello. But Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and even Beethoven were writing during the very beginning of the industrial revolution, at the very inception of a period of novel metallurgy and mass-produced instruments. And all of this changed the way instruments were made. The standards provided by the technologies of the industrial revolution made it possible to write for a body of instruments that extends almost through today.
CONCERT REVIEW French Fare and All That Jazz
One of these days, when the bipolar weather gods deem Boston worthy of some warmth and sun, take a stroll across the Charles and meander your way to Kenmore Square’s Petit Robert Bistro, where customers munch on tasty French bistro fare at relatively affordable prices. PRB recently started its live jazz Sundays with the arrival of the spring season. On a recent sunshine-filled weekend, a friend and I decided to check this out and came away with both stomachs and ears satisfied.
CONCERT REVIEW A Fraction of Wilco
Northampton’s Calvin Theatre transformed into a dark, intimate living room as Jeff Tweedy took the stage last Friday. In a characteristically happy mood, though more talkative than usual, Tweedy sounded up close and personal, his voice naked with only a guitar behind it. Bringing an arsenal of guitars with him (arced around him on stage), he smoothly switched between different guitars, evoking a soothing palette of sounds for his meticulous set list selections. Early in the set he mentioned that he looked through his archives to see what he played the last time he was at Calvin Theatre just to make sure he didn’t play the same song twice.
INTERVIEW The Masterminds Of ‘The Rock-afire Explosion’ Speak Out
T<i>he Tech</i> caught up with the writer and director of <i>The Rock-afire Explosion</i>, getting a closer glimpse of the duo’s documentary and the madness behind those crazy robotic animals.
CONCERT REVIEW Manami Morita Earns Encore, Delivers Beautifully
Manami Morita, a fresh graduate from the Berklee College of Music, celebrated the release of her CD <i>Colors </i>last week at Sculler’s. A young girl from Japan, Morita made her way to Berklee by impressing enough important people with her piano skills — and earning a full scholarship to get her degree in composition. Her short stature says nothing about her sound — when she sat down at the keys she pounded out song after song, flattening the audience with her speed and smooth directions towards her band members.
MOVIE REVIEW ★★★★ / 4 ‘Duplicity’ Reveres Spy Films of the PastJulia Roberts Makes Espionage Sexy
I predict <i>Duplicity</i> to be another blockbuster hit. It boasts a stellar cast, the director of the <i>Bourne</i> series and <i>Michael Clayton</i> and, on top of all that, is an espionage movie. If well-known stars like Julia Roberts and Clive Owens weren’t enough, the film exploits the age-old affections towards spy movies.
CONCERT REVIEW Collegium Musicum Performs Moravec Without Heart, Martin without Soul
Harvard-Radcliffe <i>Collegium Musicum</i>, under the leadership of Jameson Marvin in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, provided an extremely challenging program at Friday night’s concert, rightly entitled “A Concert of Reverence & Reflection.” The evening’s performance began with Frank Martin’s <i>Messe für zwei vierstimmige Chöre</i>, and concluded with two newer works after the intermission: Michael Schachter’s (‘09) <i>Oseh Shalom Bimromav</i> and Paul Moravec’s (‘80) <i>Songs of Love and War</i>.
RECITAL REVIEW Elisabeth Hon Hunt G Delivers Terrific Performance
Elisabeth Hon Hunt G performed a recital of works largely from the early twentieth century <i>fin de siècle</i> as part of MIT’s Emerson Fellowship Recital Series on March 13, 2009. Her performance was virtuosic in both technique and musical understanding. The recital began with a piano reduction of Richard Strauss’s <i>Grossmächtige Prinzessin...Noch glaub’ ich dem einen ganz mich gehörend</i> (Pei-Shan Lee, piano), a thrilling dramatic aria from <i>Ariadne auf Naxos</i>. Although a bit tentative at first, Hunt’s performance warmed into nothing less than the acrobatic bravura music offers, gracefully careening through Strauss’s hair-raising feats with sparkling tone and devastating ease.
MOVIE REVIEW ★★★★ / 4 Reviving the Rock-afire Explosion
Do you remember the Rock-afire Explosion? Think back to Showbiz Pizza Club or Chuck-E-Cheese. They’re the animatronic band behind the curtain in the big room where you ate crappy pizza. You sat spellbound, soaking up the noise and music, all the while trying to scheme up ways to extract more tokens from mom and dad. On stage, the really scary life-sized gorilla played the keys and the one-toothed bear sang kid songs.
News Briefs
Tomorrow, MIT Resonance hosts the ICCA Northeast Semifinal tournament at Kresge Auditorium, 8 p.m. The MIT Chorallaries will compete against seven of the best a cappella groups in the country! Tickets can be purchased online at www.varsityvocals.com.
CONCERT REVIEW Video Game Orchestra
Video game music is familiar. It’s even more familiar when a dark screen flashes the large bulky letters at the same time, or when it’s associated with its mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog. But instead of sitting in front of a television watching an pixelated blue hedgehog in snazzy red sneakers run into gold rings, I’m sitting in a dark concert hall watching a 40-piece orchestra, a rock band, and a chamber choir perform music from not only <i>Sonic the Hedgehog</i>, but also <i>Donkey Kong</i>, <i>Silent Hill</i>, <i>Myst</i>, <i>Metal Gear Solid</i>, and <i>Final Fantasy</i>, just to name a few.
MOVIE REVIEW ★★ ½ / 4 Watchmen Simplifies, Distorts Original Novel
There is a scene in <i>Watchmen</i>, directed by Zack Snyder (<i>Dawn of the Dead</i>, <i>300</i>), when Laurie Jupiter, the crime-fighting heroine of the story, pounds against an ornate glass structure in anguish at a horrific revelation, screaming “No!” with each impact. I too exclaimed “No!” in my mind while putting my face into my palms several times during the course of the 2 hour, 43 minute film.