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This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface,” which is aimed not at the History Channel crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history — perhaps justifiably.
The trap awaiting anybody attempting to review Ivo Pogorelich's Sunday night piano recital at the George Mason University Center for the Arts is the risk of making the playing sound more interesting than it was.
Nobody can deny that it was, shall we say, an unusual occasion. Pogorelich, his head neatly shaven, performed in a pitch-black hall, illumined only by a spotlight aimed directly at the piano, which made him look like a bleached, hulking silhouette. There was minimal contact with the audience: His bows were perfunctory and it was hard to make out his face amid the glare and shadow. Pogorelich could hardly have drawn more attention to his exaggerated strangeness had he scrawled "I am a cult figure!" across his face in lipstick.
And then there was the playing -- a rendition of Chopin's Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, that lasted at least twice as long as any I've heard, or even thought I could imagine. Indeed, the second movement was so elongated and pulled out of shape that all sense of melody and propulsion was lost. It was as though we had entered a time warp.
my friend joe went to see pogorelich last night* in nyc with his 8yo kid darcy they had an interesting time and he sent the link.
*IVO POGORELICH (Thursday) This iconoclastic Croatian pianist has struck some listeners as brilliantly original, and others as purely perverse, but in any case, his interpretations of the great 19th-century keyboard works are unlike anyone else’s. He appears here this week with a hefty program that includes sonatas by Chopin (No. 3), Rachmaninoff (No. 2) and Scriabin (No. 4). At 8 p.m., Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212) 570-3949, metmuseum.org; $60. (Kozinn)
from the foam desk: foam house
via justin fab prefab msg board