Hello. Apologies for the delay I’ve been busy. Since the last time we spoke, I:
Went to Dirt’s launch at McNally Jackson for its limited-edition book, Notes.
Saw New York City Ballet’s Swan Lake with Sara Mearns as Odette/Odile and Tyler Angle as Siegfried. Right before the performance they announced that soloist Gilbert Bolden III would be dancing in the show as well, and I turned to my friend and said, “He’s going to be promoted soon”—a premonition I had when I saw him dance with Ashley Bouder in Firebird a few weeks ago—and after the show I opened my phone to see that he literalllllly got promoted to principal dancer right before the show. So I’m going to start making my predictions public.
Saw American Liberty Ballet’s The Dying of Swan Lake (big Swan Lake weekend).
Had the best time at Bar Florine’s women painters + women winemakers event featuring a mini lecture with Met Museum curator Dr. Adam Eaker!!!
Now, the news!
If you feel like you’ve been hearing about Ravel a lot lately that is because later this week, March 7, marks the composer’s 150th birthday. You may also recall that over the summer, the French court officially declared that he was the sole composer of “Boléro,” making it available in the public domain. Anyway, there are a lot of Ravel concerts going on all over the world right now—likely even more than last year, when the French-born composer was the ninth most popular composer performed in classical music concerts globally, according to Bachtrack; that publication noted that we do tend to see spikes in performances of composers in accordance to big anniversaries. Last year, for instance, was a big year for Puccini, as it was the centenary of his death.
Fave-of-the-newsletter Gustavo Dudamel will be conducting the NY Phil—for the first time this season, before joining as music and artistic director next year—as it plays both of Ravel’s piano concertos next week, with soloist Yuja Wang (another fave), in four sold-out shows. Pianist Seong-Jin Cho performed an all-Ravel recital with the LA Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall last month, and while New York City Ballet has wrapped its winter season, you can catch an all Ravel program with six show dates in May, marking the 50th anniversary of City Ballet’s Ravel Festival.
If you’re listening at home, but aren’t sure where to begin, I am quite partial to the aforementioned “Boléro”—listen to Dudamel conduct the illustrious Wiener Philharmoniker here—and Call Me By Your Name stans will recognize the third movement of “Miroirs,” “Une barque sur l'océan.” You may also enjoy Dudamel conducting the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela playing Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2.”
Staying on the topic of classical music, a lot of people were taken aback by the use of Mozart’s “Requiem - Lacrimosa” in the “in memoriam” section of the Oscars. I played the role in my group chat as identifying the song not as the Succession theme song but rather, Mozart’s final work.
Not all were pleased with the choice, with one Redditor writing, “Such an evil sounding song bruh, whoever chose that has to lose their job it sounded like they were trying to imply their lives were a sacrifice or something,” and another responding, “It literally means ‘tearful.’ What else do you want?” One added, “The vibe was more ‘you could be next,’” while another contested, “‘Why did they play a wedding song at a wedding? Get 'em fired!’”
Mozart, who died at just 35, never actually finished his “Requiem.” While it was commissioned by a then-anonymous wealthy patron in remembrance of his late wife, Mozart came to believe, in his final days, that he was writing his own funeral song, his widow Constanze claimed. Anyway, it is the most famous requiem in the world and therefore befitting for an in memoriam—but perhaps the song’s usage throughout TV and film has cast it in a bit of a nefarious light in the collective consciousness.
Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, the country is reconsidering the culture it represents and that it rejects. We’ve previously spoken about how the war has led some ballet companies to abandon Russian classics, such as The Nutcracker, but Le Monde reports that the country is contending with figures such as the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, who was exiled to Odesa in 1823 and now stands as a “symbol of an imperialist and colonialist Russia,” as well as writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This is not “just” a culture war, writes Rémy Ourdan:
The battlefield is also a cultural one, as Russia seeks to destroy a culture and re-establish its domination. The figure of Pushkin is never far behind the tanks. In occupied territories, museums are looted. In libraries, Ukrainian books are destroyed and replaced by Russian ones. Since February 24, 2022, 149 figures from Ukraine's cultural scene have been killed, according to Kyiv, and 476 cultural sites destroyed or damaged, according to the United Nations.
As such, Ukrainians are pushing for their own culture to be preserved amid this erasure. A military unit in the Ukrainian army, whose name translates to “Cultural Forces,” is comprised of poets and musicians who teach soldiers about traditional Ukrainian culture; it is important to remember that this is a country which does have a number of Russian-speakers, even if they may be in the minority compared to Ukrainian-speakers. The Ukrainian Institute also plans to publish a “decolonization guide” for museums this year.
It is a complicated issue, and one with added complexities due to the history of the region. While Tchaikovsky is largely banned, for instance, some, like Igor Shavruk, conductor of the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra, suggest that move isn’t quite right: Tchaikovsky was Ukrainian on his father’s side. “He is the most Ukrainian of all Russian composers,” Shavruk says. “On the contrary, we should make him our own. He used a lot of Ukrainian melodies in his music.” But anything that could be read as Russian, he assents, should not be imposed on a Ukrainian audience.
Meanwhile in the U.S., artists are boycotting us! I do not blame them!!! Renowned German violinist Christian Tetzlaff told the New York Times he was canceling his U.S. tour that had been scheduled for this year and has no plans to return to the country unless the political situation changes. He cited Trump’s anti-trans policies, coziness with Russia, and diminishment of the federal workforce as reasons for his disturbance. “I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts,” he said.
An exhibit in Paris’s Musée Picasso partially recreates—or at least evokes—a 1937 exhibit of “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art), which Hitler and his chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels ordered to be put on in Munich; it featured 700 works from around 100 then-contemporary artists and was designed to decry and ridicule those works. The current exhibit, which opened in February, of course, does the opposite, showing about 60 pieces in their full glory. While the Nazi regime burned more than 5,000 artworks, Le Monde reports, many of the works from this exhibition were saved all because those loyal to the party wanted to make money by selling the works to international collectors. The exhibit runs through May 25.
More than 1,000 British musical artists including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, and Jamiroquai released a 12-track, silent album titled, Is This What We Want? to protest the U.K. government’s move to loosen its 300-year-old copyright laws in order to make it easier for AI companies to operate in the country. The tracks read: “The / British / Government / Must / Not / Legalise / Music / Theft / To / Benefit / AI / Companies.” Proceeds from streams will go to the charity Help Musicians; several other U.K. artists, such as author Kazuo Ishiguro, sent a letter to The Times decrying the government’s proposal.
PEN America’s latest analysis of book bans shows that 36 percent of all banned titles featured characters or people of color and a quarter included LGBTQ+ people or characters in the 2023-2024 school year. There were more than 10,000 instances of book bans in public schools, impacting more than 4,000 titles.
I can’t believe we haven’t spoken about this yet but the Met Opera’s production of Moby Dick, which opens this week, is absolutely the cultural event of the season. I say this based on vibes alone, but also because I already have tickets. The New York Times, at least, seems convinced, saying that Gene Scheer’s libretto “hits the book’s main conflicts without losing track of the action” and Jake Heggie’s score is “graceful and propulsive.” The show runs through March 29, and tickets start at $35.
Let’s end on some good news. The National Ballet of Canada’s sold-out upcoming production of Swan Lake is different for one seemingly small, but actually massive reason: the dancers aren’t wearing tights. That is because pink tights—the “traditional” uniform for ballet class and most classical ballets—became the standard due to…you guessed it…white supremacy. The purpose of pink tights and pink pointe shoes is to extend the line of the dancer—but that only works if a dancer is white.
Over the past few years, many ballet companies have been abandoning this tradition (I have noticed that, in recent years, dancers of color in both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet seem to wear tights and shoes that match their skin tone more often than not; that is, unless a costume calls for a more specific, unnatural hue for aesthetic reasons—like the yellow tights and shoes of the marzipans of NYCB’s Nutcracker). This is also the reason why Misty Copeland has been campaigning for Apple to offer more color options for the pointe shoe emoji.
A lack of tights altogether takes this movement a step farther, though it doesn’t come without some challenges (tights do absorb sweat, which is why the Odettes/Odiles—the lead role—in this production have been allowed to wear their own flesh-toned tights). Still, it’s encouraging to see this kind of movement in an art form that has for so long prized homogeneity, to its detriment. “I think it’s beautiful,” corps de ballet dancer Erica Lall told the New York Times. “Swans are aggressive, they’re strong, so it makes sense that you can see the muscularity in our legs and all that definition.” ▲