Editor's Desk

K. T. Sullivan and Karen Kohler rolled the dice and won: they presented their smartly conceived cabaret show Vienna to Weimar on February 24 — Oscar night — at the Triad on West Seventy-second Street. By a few minutes into the program, it was doubtful that anyone in the audience worried about missing Seth MacFarlane's opening monologue. 

Vienna to Weimar begins reassuringly, with Sullivan offering Rudolf Sieczynski's "Wien, Wien nur du allein," English words by Kim Gannon. (Gannon is one of my favorite trivia subjects: he wrote the words for some awfully good popular songs, including Max Steiner's "It Can't Be Wrong," taken from the 1942 Bette Davis film Now, Voyager, and the Christmas classic "I'll Be Home for Christmas." He deserves to be mentioned oftener than he is.) Then Sullivan lit into a delightful version of Fledermaus's "Mein Herr Marquis" (including the English words by Howard Dietz), hitting all her comic marks with ease and grace; she has a wonderful self-mocking quality that lands consistently with the audience. With Kohler, Sullivan also dusted off "Wenn die beste Freundin" (When the Special Girlfriend) and "Maskulinum-Femininum," both by Mischa Spoliansky and Marcellus Schiffer, revealing them as the sophisticated, subversive gems that they are. It fell to Kohler to cover the Weimar section of the waterfront and convey most of the spoken history lesson to the audience, which contrasted effectively with Sullivan's lighter approach. And although Sullivan didn't get near the chilling fury that an artist such as Nina Simone can bring to the Brecht–Weill "Pirate Jenny," she did manage to make that song uniquely her own. After spinning through a fine group of Friedrich Hollaender numbers, including the choice "Illusions," both women brought the evening to a memorable close with Leonard Cohen's "Take This Waltz," from 1967, and Franz Lehár's "Merry Widow Waltz." Jed Distler was the evening's excellent musical director. 

As New York's cabaret scene continues its quiet erosion, K. T. Sullivan is one of its enduring delights.  

BRIAN KELLOW

It's probably fair to say that the ever-broadening scope of song recitals in Manhattan owes a great deal to the New York Festival of Song. Under the guidance of artistic director Steven Blier and associate artistic director Michael Barrett, NYFOS has, over the years, built an intensely loyal audience with an imaginatively programmed series of concerts that at their best are both pithy and enormous fun. Blier, the series pianist and host, has a real knack for turning the group's performing space — most often Merkin Concert Hall on West Sixty-Seventh Street — into something with an intime nightclub feel. But it's a very in-the-know nightclub: Blier loves the thrill of musical discovery, loves to share his cleverly designed programs with his audience, which responds by hanging on every word of his savvy blend of erudition and plainspoken cool. 

On Tuesday, February 19, NYFOS presented a deeply satisfying program of French popular song, Jacques Brel & Charles Trénet: Fire and Fantasy. The ensemble was wonderful — Blier at the keyboard, plus guitarist Greg Utzig (who was sometimes a bit loud, throwing off the balance) and the marvelous accordionist Bill Schimmel. In addition to playing superbly (with no music in front of him all night long), Schimmel looked the part, as if Central Casting had come up with the ideal character actor to play a French accordionist in a Truffaut film. Tenor Philippe Pierce got things off to a stunning start with Brel's ever-accelerating "La Valse à Mille Temps." Pierce has a fine voice and sure rhythmic command, but in some of the evening's more soulful works he came up a bit short, lacking the French "lived-in" quality for a powerful song such as Brel's achingly poignant "Chanson des vieux amants."

In the second half, Brel gave way to Trénet. "Maybe if Irving Berlin and Mary Martin had had a baby they might have come out with Charles Trénet," said Blier, "but I doubt it." Here, Pierce's teammate, mezzo Marie Lenormand, gave what for me was one of the standout individual performances of the season, making magic out of "L'âme des poètes" (I won't soon forget the sublime way she landed on the word "artiste") and the famous "La mer," while showing great comic verve in her big finale with Pierce, "Grand-maman, c'est New York." 

At the end, Blier announced that the evening was something of a landmark — the fortieth anniversary of his first public performance.  

BRIAN KELLOW

Why is it so difficult for some singers simply to be themselves onstage? It's fascinating how quickly we can pick up on a singer's discomfort. A poorly chosen program, a determination to stand back from the emotional content of the music, a tendency to joke around too much onstage, can all become a kind of distracting armor that prevents performers from fully showing themselves to us. Throughout her performing career, and in the many master classes she has taught around the country, Barbara Cook has advocated throwing off that armor. On October 18, when Carnegie Hall presented her in an eighty-fifth birthday concert, she demonstrated a lifetime of lessons learned. Her music director/pianists were Ted Rosenthal and Lee Musiker, and the show was scripted by David Thompson, produced by Jeff Berger and directed by Daniel Kutner. 

Cook has made many appearances at Carnegie over the years — the first being in 1961, with Leonard Bernstein. "Here I am again," she said when she padded onstage. "Blinked my eye — and eighty-five!" She then launched into a highly satisfying program, skipping some of her famous theater hits ("Vanilla Ice Cream," from She Loves Me, "They Were You," from The Fantasticks, "It's Not Where You Start," from Seesaw) in favor of a well-chosen collection of pop and jazz standards. In places, Cook's voice sounded drier than it has on past occasions, and now and then, from her seated position, she couldn't quite muster the support for an isolated high note, so that her vibrato widened in ways we aren't used to hearing. But for the most part she was in excellent voice, nailing stunning high notes in "Georgia on My Mind" and "When Sunny Gets Blue" and making a heartrending lament out of "Bye Bye Blackbird." There were a few miscalculations: Dan Hicks's country-flavored "list" song, "I Don't Want Love," is better suited to a performer who uses bolder, cruder strokes, and Musiker's arrangement of "I've Got You Under My Skin" undulated so much that the song itself got lost. But the almost-forgotten '30s ballad "If I Love Again" was pure, heartfelt magic, and "The Nearness of You" and "Makin' Whoopee" were all but flawless. At the concert's end, some surprise guest stars — John Pizzarelli, Jessica Molaskey, Sheldon Harnick, Susan Graham and Josh Groban — showed up to boost the birthday celebration by each doing a turn; the high point was Groban's cleanly sung performance of Stephen Sondheim's "Not While I'm Around." 

But it wasn't as much an evening about music-making or vocalizing as it was about honesty. Clearly, it took Cook many years to reach the point of exhibiting such ease onstage, so we shouldn't insult her by describing her art as "effortless." But it is a rare pleasure to listen to an artist who never forgets that her biggest job up there onstage is just letting us know who she is.  

Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb took the modest-sized stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge in the West Village on Friday, October 26, as the crowd settled in and started placing their drink orders. Referring to the program as "our downtown adventure," he added, to much audience laughter, "Our presence here tonight is not the result of our getting off at the wrong subway station."

While individual Met artists such as Danielle de Niese and Joseph Calleja have been booking LPR for one-off events, Friday night's concert reflected the Met's maiden voyage to the Bleecker Street cabaret bar. The evening's program — presented first at 6:30 PM, then repeated at 9 PM — was curated by composer Thomas Adès, whose opera The Tempest is currently playing at the Met, and who put together an hour's worth of Tempest-related material spanning three centuries of music. (A second event in the Met–LPR collaboration, this time an evening with composer Nico Muhly, is slated for May 14.)

As he explained his selections at the top of the program, Adès displayed a quiet magnetism. Right from the start, the intimate setting seemed to inspire a different kind of interaction between the artists and their audience: it felt warm, informal and personal. In a nice little bit of serendipity, Adès's program included five different settings by five different composers of Ariel's timeless verse "Full fathom five," from Act I of Shakespeare's play. 

Countertenor Iestyn Davies sang two of them, first Purcell's, in Adès's arrangement, and later in the program, Michael Tippett's. (Adès played piano all evening.) The piano accompaniment for the Purcell still possessed a Baroque stateliness, but Adès stripped away the formality of the original and forged a more direct emotional connection — at least by modern standards — to the words. Davies's sprite-like timbre was a lovely fit, but for Tippett's gorgeous, unabashedly tonal, just-sentimental-enough setting from 1962, I wanted something more soulful and tender from the vocalist. 

Kate Lindsey also received a pair of "Full fathom five" assignments. First, she braved Stravinsky's serialist setting from 1953, sitting alongside the flutist, clarinetist and violist as if she were just one more instrument in the quartet. Her delivery of Ives's "A Sea Dirge" was so devastated (and devastating), embodying the narrative voice so completely, that Adès could not suppress a smile from his seat at the piano. (Afterwards, my companion leaned over to me and said, "She's the Amanda Peet of opera. I'm completely obsessed with her.") 

Laure Meloy, who is covering the role of Ariel in The Tempest at the Met — which I saw the following night; my favorite evening at the opera so far this season — sang the version from Adès's opera. (The lyric was reworked as "Five fathoms deeps" by librettist Meredith Oakes, who couldn't help but keep most of Shakespeare's unforgettable language.) She delivered the high siren calls with much success though not without what seemed like fear. In such a small venue, with such a dry, unflattering acoustic, the mercilessness of Adès's sky-high vocal writing was all too apparent. 

But when you have a singer like Simon Keenlyside, there's no need to quibble about acoustics. His voice could probably reverberate in a vacuum. His ninety seconds onstage, singing Prospero's "Our revels are ended" from Adès's opera, were magnificent in every way. He somehow scaled his performance to the venue but didn't at all. He was big and impressive but connected to every person in the room, holding his hands up just so, keeping you in his grasp. All I can say is, to hear an artist of Keenlyside's stature booming from the stage not twenty feet away like some kind of secular, seductive operatic god is well worth the two-drink minimum.  

OUSSAMA ZAHR

Derek Jacobi as Lear in Michael Grandage's production, currently at BAM © Johan Persson

Perhaps the best way to preview Michael Grandage's new production of Don Giovanni, due at the Met this fall, is to see his staging of King Lear, playing at BAM until June 5. The works have some things in common — the necessity of vivid, meaningful ensemble work; a descent into wildness as night falls halfway through the show; and a seminal place in each artist's oeuvre in competition with a sometimes more widely esteemed work (Le Nozze di Figaro, Hamlet). Of course, both protagonists spend a good deal of time with their shirts unbuttoned, too, though for admittedly different reasons.

Don Giovanni and King Lear share a common pitfall, too: they can both fall victim to pageantry. Grandage strips the stage naked for his Lear, leaving rows of planks upon which the action unfolds. The play benefits from quick, seamless transitions between scenes, thanks to the unit set, which puts a burning emphasis on the interaction between characters.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the Don Giovanni will go without eye-popping designs. The Donmar Warehouse, where Grandage is artistic director, has shown another way to humanize a classical work. For its sizzling Broadway production of Mary Stuart from 2009, the battling queens were sumptuously attired in period fashions — a visual feast against a spare background that threw into relief both the costumes and Schiller's ornate language.

Either way, if Grandage brings this kind of depth and humanity to Mozart, Met-goers are in for a real treat.  

OUSSAMA ZAHR

The statue of Christopher Columbus that towers over Columbus Circle is well known, but I suspect fewer residents and visitors to the Big Apple realize that just a few blocks north of there, the composer who towered over the opera scene in Italy for most of the nineteenth century is honored with a statue of his own. It stands in a triangular island, on Broadway between 72^nd and 73^rd Streets, known as Verdi Square. 

I had been vaguely aware of the presence of the statue since its restoration in 1996, but I hadn't paid close attention until yesterday, when the afternoon sunshine of a perfect spring day, glinting off the figure of Verdi, caught my attention from across the Great White Way. Wandering over to take a look at my favorite composer rising up out of his bed of tulips, I noticed for the first time the four figures surrounding the lower part of the monument. I recognized only one of them right off, but it was clear that they were all characters from the operas, and a helpful sign on the wrought-iron fence confirmed my guesses about the other three. (You can find that information on the Parks Dept. website as well.) With the warm weather having finally arrived and the Met season still going, I highly recommend that any Metgoers who have a few minutes to kill before a performance take a walk up to Verdi Square and see for themselves.

Meanwhile, I leave you with the following description of the dedication of Verdi's statue back in 1906, from the aforementioned website:

"The sculptures were unveiled by Barsotti's grandchild, who pulled a string that released a helium balloon, lifting the monument's red, white and green shroud (the colors of the Italian flag). As it peeled away, a dozen doves — concealed in its folds — were released into the air, and flowers cascaded from the veil upon the participants." 

Oh to have been a New Yorker in the good old days!  

LOUISE T. GUINTHER