Eileen Reynolds
By Eileen Reynolds
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Shofars, Environmentalism, and Oversexed Cicadas
It goes without saying that Meira Warshauer’s “Tekeeyah (a call)” — a concerto for shofar — centers on religious themes. At the heart of the work is the pulsating call to repentance traditionally trumpeted through a ram’s horn on the High Holy Days. What’s less obvious is that Warshauer’s first symphony, the other major orchestral…
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The Schmooze Moving From the Gut at La MaMa Israeli Dance Week
‘Quiet’ by Arkadi Zaides, featuring Rabie Khoury and Ofir Yudilevich. Photo by Gadi Dagon. In his welcoming remarks on the opening night of the the La MaMa Moves! Festival’s Contemporary Israeli Dance Week (June 8-12), Edo Ceder, of the New York-based YelleB Dance Ensemble, talked about “dancing from the gut.” That evocative phrase could have…
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The Schmooze $1 Million For a Bar Mitzvah? No Way, Kanye
Former NBC CEO Jeff Zucker threw his son Andrew a lavish bar mitzvah at the Four Seasons this weekend — complete with sushi, a celebrity guest list that included Katie Couric and customized Converse sneakers handed out to Andrew’s pals as party favors. But if there was one thing missing from the bash, it was…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Let’s Talk About Love
Is there a grouch in the world who can maintain a proper scowl while listening to French swing? There is something about the sound of this music (is it the sweet, kaleidoscopic chord changes, or the bouncy, peripatetic bass lines?) that seems to rob even the devout pessimist of any meaningful sense of gloom. Wistfulness…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Dancing Between the Rockets
“Rockets on the Balcony,” Omer Klein’s fourth album and his Tzadik Records debut, is also his first self-consciously Jewish record. In the liner notes, Klein explains that when John Zorn first approached him about the project, he was reluctant to make “calculated evaluations as to what counts as Jewish music and what doesn’t.” But over…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: Behind the Scenes of ‘Jewish Arena Rock’
“The Klezmatics are the Jewish equivalent of arena rock,” ethnomusicologist Bob Cohen deadpans early in Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.” “They’re not heavy metal; they’re heavy Yiddish.” It’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek analysis calculated to make us chuckle (picture these mild-mannered, middle-aged folks head-banging in eyeliner and platform heels!) — and…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Contemporary Concertos Go Baroque
One might be forgiven, upon first listening to the NAXOS recording of Avner Dorman’s concertos performed by Andrew Cyr’s Metropolis Ensemble, for not feeling immediately convinced that these are, in fact, concertos in any traditional sense. There are no buoyant Mozartian introductions here, no grand orchestral pauses to launch soloists into rapturously virtuosic cadenzas before…
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Culture Moses: The Video Opera
To say that Yoav Gal’s “Mosheh,” playing in New York City’s HERE through February 5, is an opera about the life of Moses is to understate the exhilarating complexity of the work. Those expecting a simple linear retelling of the biblical story won’t find it here: Gal uses Exodus less as a plot blueprint than…
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