Lobenthal.com

For those who braved the snow to show up at New York City Ballet last night for the season opening, a treat was in store: the two ballerinas danced Concerto Barocco as if they knew that those reference performances are about to appear on DVD and so they’d better have their sh– together.

And of course, extensions and turnout are generally much more developed than in the old days, and when used with integrity, as these two women did, add their own unique fillip.

Porteur Tyler Angle was a dynamic presence: Kowroski’s sequence of supported pirouettes across the front of the stage was exciting.

Particularly in New York in the months of February and March.

What with Borodin’s Prince Igor being revived at the Met after a century’s absence (I last saw it when the Kirov brought it to the Met during their 1998 season), and Juilliard performing Stravinsky’s one-act Mavra, led by James Levine.

If these don’t shake the Manhattan ballet/opera crossovers out of the winter doldrums, I don’t know what can!

. . . is the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Dean Baker at his Beat the Press blog [via Alternet.org] tells us how.

On Wednesday the 22nd, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing at the Walter Reade Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, sound-tracked by Prokofiev–to be followed by a panel discussion including Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison.

Paul Buchheit at alternet.org reports that the amount of investment return enjoyed by 13 Americans last year is more than the entire SNAP budget,  thus making even more filthy the avidity of Republicans to make draconic cuts to SNAP, as well as the craven acquiescence signaled by the Democrats, provided that the cuts are a bit less draconic.

Given the poverty in this country, of course, any cut to SNAP is draconic; like Social Security, benefits should be increased.

Can you believe that while Finley and Drake are in Zankel, in the Isaac Stern main hall at Carnegie, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic is playing that same night?? I’ll never forget attending a chamber concert at the Philharmonic’s home theater in St. P, once the Hall of Nobles–a great space.

He’s not singing at the Met this season (was his Count last season something simply too good to be surpassed?), but he’ll be at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall February 13 to sing Schubert’s Winterreise, accompanied by Julius Drake, with whom he’s worked hand-in-glove on so many concerts and recordings.

When I interviewed Finley for City Arts in 2012, there was room to publish only a fraction of the interview, so maybe I’ll post some more in time for the concert!

I always underline in pencil as I’m reading a book. When you underline you can always easily get back to the parts that you felt were most important.  I recently picked up a book w/fabulous words and pictures that I’d read several years ago.

Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession                                                by Margaret M. McGowan [Yale U Press, 2008]

And one of the bits underlined was this inspiring passage, something for dancers and writers about dance to keep in mind.

“Sixteenth-century poets believed that dance had the power to change the way in which we view the world. According to them, a simple and detailed description of dancers on the move (either individually or in a group) lifted the observer on to another plane of being, transferring him to a marvelous and transfigured realm.”

If you’ve got any lingering belief that, as a class, our  “mainstream” media “news reporters” are honest actors, Eric Boehlert at Media Matters will put it to rest with his dissection of the way that Christie was sold to the public by “mainstream” shills: To wit “How The Media Marketed Chris Christie’s Straight Shooter Charade.”

It’s funny: whenever there is any attempt in our government to make our society function for anybody else than the one-percent, the right wing throws the word “socialism” around as a bugaboo that is supposed to arouse a Pavlovian (I don’t mean the divine Anna) reflex of fear and loathing.

And yet what the United States has actually devolved into is a country governed by a grotesquely exaggerated distortion of socialism that supports only the rich, who get cradle-to-grave cosseting that is, to put it mildly, extreme.