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deadpanwalking · 3 years

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“The problem with performances of Bach's Harpsichord Concertos is that the harpsichord tends to get drowned out by the rest of the ensemble, and as a result, the harpsichord line can become so faint & tinkly that it often gets lost within the instrumental mix (such as on Pieter-Jan Belder's Musica Amphion set, which I wouldn't recommend). Of course, losing the harpsichord is a big negative from the standpoint of hearing Bach's full score (nor is it what he intended, obviously).

Naturally, this isn't a problem with recordings made on a piano, since the piano is loud enough to be heard over the rest of the ensemble. However, that isn't the case with a harpsichord.

Musicians and sound engineers have attempted to find two ways around this problem:

I. They reduce the size of the ensemble to a small chamber group, putting only one player on a part: which is most likely how Bach himself performed these concertos, since the harpsichord is usually more clearly heard this way (though it depends on the size of the venue & the balances of the recording too).

(1) A prime example is the complete set of HCs played on 4 different antique harpsichords by Davit Moroney, Arthur Haas, Karen Flint, and others, on the Plectra label, where the performances work exceptionally well, IMO, and I'd strongly recommend them (though some allowances must be made for the fact that these are truly old harpsichords, even if they do sound beautiful, as there are some minor imperfections due to the age of the instruments--which didn't bother me at all).

There are several other excellent 'one player to a part' recordings too:

(2) from Melante Amsterdam, with harpsichordist Bob Van Asperen (& Gustav Leonhardt)

(3) two single CD recordings from Pierre Hantaï, Marc Hantaï (in the Triple Concerto), & François Fernandez, with Le Concert Français, and

(4) from Bertrand Cuiller & Stradivaria

(5) You might also sample Lars Ulrik Mortensen's fine Concerto Copenhagen set* too (in three volumes), since they have more recent sound engineering (2002), which you might prefer. Mortensen also uses a 'reduced' ensemble (though for some reason it doesn't always sound like it).

* vol. 1 and 2 unavailable on Spotify

(6) There is also a more expensive complete set from Café Zimmermann, which was initially spread out over many individual CDs, since the HCs came coupled with other concertos (on the original releases), or as part of the later box set

(7) Finally, there is also an older 'one instrument to a part' set from Gustav Leonhardt, with both the Leonhardt Consort and Concentus Musicus Wien (with harpsichordist Herbert Tachezi)*. But, as the Gramophone critic points out in the review linked below, even though Leonhardt mostly uses only one instrument to a part, the harpsichord still tends to get drowned out by the strings (due to 'faulty balances' produced by the poor recording)--so this is one you probably want to avoid.

* unavailable on Spotify

II. The second solution that ensembles and sound engineers have opted for is to place the microphones very close to the harpsichord, which amplifies the sound of the instrument, making it louder within a larger ensemble. This approach can work too, but of course it's not a natural sound, nor is it an organic blend with the other instruments, since the microphones have altered the sound of the harpsichord within the ensemble.

I call these performances 'big band' versions myself (even though they aren't exactly large ensembles either). The best performances I've heard among groups that take this approach are:

(1) Trevor Pinnock & The English Concert, and

(2) Ton Koopman and The Amsterdam Baroque Soloists.

Both sets are very good, though Koopman's Amsterdam set tends to be my first choice, as I think it's extra special. Unfortunately, Koopman's survey has never been released in a box set (to my knowledge), so if interested, you'll have to acquire it on individual CDs, which are now mostly out of print.

[...]

Among the complete sets that I've not heard, you might additionally sample from the following three recordings, which have all received strong reviews:

Bach - The Complete Harpsichord Concertos / Rousset, AAM, Hogwood

J. S. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos. Andreas Staier & Freiburger Barockorchester

Bach: Concerti à Cembalo concertato, Aapo Häkkinen

While I may purchase the Aapo Häkkinen Helsinki cycle myself at some point, over the years I've been most happy with my 'one player to a part' recordings from Davit Moroney & co. on Plectra, Pierre Hantai's single recording with Le concert Français, and Ton Koopman's Erato set with The Amsterdam Baroque Soloists.

Hope that helps.

P.S.--Given the problematic nature of recording a harpsichord, if you find you really love this music, you might also want to invest in one or two recordings on a piano, in order to hear all of Bach's ingenious part writing more clearly (as the piano never gets drowned out, and personally, I can find that more intellectually satisfying, even if it is 'sacrilege' to say, for an ardent period enthusiast like myself). With that in mind, I'd strongly recommend David Fray's brilliant recent recording.

Andre Gavrilov's complete set on EMI is also very good (as is Martin Stadtfeld's set on Sony too).”

#GOOD MORNING TO TALKCLASSICAL MEMBER JOSQUIN13 ONLY #johann sebastian bach #classical music #listening to the fray now and it whips ass

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fashionbooksmilano · 3 years

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Pattern, Crime & Decoration

Catalogue édité par Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim publié avec le soutien du Consortium Museum

Les presses du réel, Dijon 2020, 256 pages, color & b/w ill., 25,5x25,5 cm., hardcover, bilingual edition English/French, ISBN 9782378961275

euro 49,50

email if you want to buy :[email protected]

Published following the eponymous exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva, from October 10, 2018 to February 3, 2019, and Consortium Museum , Dijon, from May 16 to October 25, 2019.

Catalogue of the double exhibition devoted to the Pattern & Decoration movement, with numerous previously unpublished archives. Pattern, Crime & Decoration features the groundbreaking, artist-led American art movement Pattern & Decoration, which started in the mid-1970s and lasted until the mid-1980s. Often viewed as the last organized art movement of the 20th century, it chronologically straddles the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, through its rejection of the rigid tenets of formalism and its embrace of decorative motifs and non-Western visual forms. Strongly grounded in feminism it included many women artists and sought to highlight some kinds of arts and crafts often dismissed as belonging to the domestic or decorative sphere such as tapestry, quilting, wallpaper or embroidery. Against the purist, prescriptive background of the dominant art forms of their time such as Minimalism and Conceptualism, Pattern & Decoration signaled the end of the reductivist arc of formalist modernism and the beginning of a new era, by freely and subversively borrowing from the formal vocabulary of Islamic art, Mexican and Indian cultures, or Roman and Byzantine mosaics, diverting the rigidity of the minimalist grid to create repeated patterns that boldly emphasized figurative tropes, bright colors, flowering outlines and arabesques. The movement, gathered around the writings of art critic Amy Goldin (1926-1978), was supported by art dealers Holly Solomon in New York and Bruno Bischofberger in Switzerland. Although Pattern & Decoration was critically and commercially successful at its inception, it faded from view after the 1980s. In retrospect, it can now be viewed as a forerunner for many art currents that followed, with its use of deconstructed, loose shapes, interest in non-Western art, dazzling colors and mixed patterns used to reject the patriarchal, Eurocentric framework of modernism as embodied in Adolf Loos's 1910 essay Ornament and Crime. Here, artists from the Pattern & Decoration movement are presented alongside forerunners like George Sugarman (1912-1999), as well as American and European artists from the same era whose work shares similar formal concerns.Works by Lynda Benglis Cynthia Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Brad Davis, Noël Dolla , Sam Gilliam, Tina Girouard, Simon Hantaï , Valerie Jaudon, Richard Kalina, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Alvin Loving, Kim MacConnel, Rodney Ripps, Tony Robbin, Miriam Schapiro, Alan Shields, Ned Smyth, George Sugarman, Claude Viallat, Betty Woodman, George Woodman, Mario Yrissary, Robert Zakanitch, Joe Zucker.

03/11/21

orders to: [email protected]

ordini a: [email protected]

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#Pattern & Decoration #art exhibition catalogue #american art movement #MAMCO Geneva #Consortium Museum Dijon #Amy Goldin #fashionbooksmilano

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micaramel · 7 years

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Artist: Steven Parrino

Venue: The Power Station, Dallas

Exhibition Title: Dancing on Graves

Date: April 5 – June 16, 2017

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of The Power Station, Dallas

Press Release:

“I want to be profoundly touched by art, by life. I came to painting at the time of its death, not breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness. The necromancy of the pietà, Pollock’s One, timed with the birth of a synthetic star, 1958 BLACK PAINTINGS, DEATH & DISASTERS, modernism at its most powerful, before the point where circuses began. / The dust clears (just barely), and I stand in my own graveyard. I hear the constant din of BLACK NOISE.” – Steven Parrino

Dancing on Graves is five minutes of video shot by Steven Parrino (1958-2005) in 1999. He might describe it as a “sex and death painting thing.” But, before that, it’s grainy footage (handheld) of a woman dancing on a stacked platform of black-enameled aluminum. She looks into the lens, turns her body and bends over. Sits in a chair and opens her legs. Distortion blasts off-camera and the dancer’s body, suddenly all-vector, forms a “V.” It’s been suggested that Eros is a form and Thanatos a kind of entropy. And these two extremes seem to inform the dialectical friction one encounters in Parrino’s work. The video abruptly concludes with a cut to Parrino sawing into a black sheet of painted aluminum. A black screen. A loud silence.

Parrino comes to painting at the time of its death in the 1980s. He produces intensively reductive paintings. Black monochromes (painted with ‘one-shot’ sign-painters enamel) that he mishapes and distorts into bi-products of formed material. Canvas is unstapled, folded and restretched without a rigorous or declarative narrative. He intentionally avoids “melodramas” and “fantasy.” Instead, he reduces the structure of painting to the status of equipment (as per Heidegger, not just a specifc tool, but a system (Parrino would call it a “black system”) of tools that are collectively put to use), adhering to its materiality through a practice of applied distortion. Entropy endowed with form.

The paintings aren’t ‘pictures.’ Sometimes an inverted pyramid leaned against the wall (Untitled, 2004) or a kind of sensuous drapery (3 Units Aluminum Death Shifter, 1992).[1] But Parrino continues to unstretch, pull and contort the canvas to negotiate the literal boundaries of possible action while simultaneously limiting them. It’s his system. Disciplined and uncompromising. This isn’t formalism gone wrong, but formalism laid bare. A real thing. Fucked-up. And it gives Parrino the ability to un-ironically speak about the “reality” one finds in “abstract painting” because “reality” itself is incomplete and fucked-up. If the “the world is falling apart,” then painting should too. Like distortion (power chords and feedback), painting should “vibrate until it disjoins.”

The distortion “thing” is important. In conversation, Parrino would never not talk about noise. His sometimes collaborator Jutta Koether describes the vibe of Parrino’s group Blood Necklace in terms of his visual output: rigorous, stripped down, hard.[2] He listens for the constant din of black noise in the white static of Manhattan’s traffic and attempts to channel this into his work. He is as attracted to a New York Post cover (“A Murder Most Posh”) as to the Black Square of Malevich.[3]

In this sense, Parrino’s work is committedly realist. Not because it shows us a picture of reality, but because it participates in reality’s entropy. Even when real materials are historical or necrophied artifacts (the monochrome, the action paining or modernism) subjected to “theoretical distortion” (his words) or appropriation. Parrino directs attention to the structuring of painting’s “facts” through their destruction. And it’s through their mutual fragmentation and intercession (the gloss of black enamel or shine of crushed aluminum) that we get a glimpse of what’s at stake in painting’s entropic undoing. Adorno says “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass,” because distorted vision is the only way to confront something objectively. Like running into an object in the dark.

The selection of works on view at The Power Station adhere to Parrino’s elemental vocabulary: black, white and aluminum. Like Titian, Parrino begins his paintings with a fundamental contrast. Black. White. A positive.

A negative. Not to outline a form, but to establish matrices for possible action and intervention. Here, Parrino’s decision to limit painting to a narrow economy seems to amplify the works’ materialism and “heighten” their exteriority, context or “social feld.” The problem isn’t to stop paring away, but to produce paintings that destroy themselves in their making. Because “all creation hinges on destruction.” Because “all things destroy themselves or are destroyed.”

Steven Parrino was born in 1958 in New York, and died in 2005 in New York. He received his A.A.S. in 1979 from SUNY Farmingdale, New York, and his B.F.A. in 1982 from Parson’s School of Design, New York. Parrino’s work has been exhibited in major exhibitions around the world including the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2000); Ludwig Museum, Köln (2000); Contemporanea, Milan (2001); Nuremberg Museum, Germany (2002); The Swiss Institute, New York (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2003); Le Consortium, France (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt (2005); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2006). Recent solo shows include Massimo De Carlo Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2000); “Exit/Dark Matter,” FriArt, Switzerland (2002); “Steven Parrino Videos 1979-Present,” Circuit, Lausanne, Switzerland (2002); Massimo DeCarlo Arte Contemporanea, Milano Galerie Jean Brolly, Paris (2003); “A Retrospective (curated by Fabrice Stroun),” Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2005-07); Palais De Tokyo, France (2007) (curated by Fabrice Stroun and Marc-Olivier Wahler); “Born to Be Wild: Hommage an Steven Parrino,” Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2009); and “Steven Parrino: Armleder, Barré, Buren, Hantaï, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” Gagosian Gallery, Paris (2013).

The Power Station thanks the Parrino Family Estate and Gagosian Gallery for their assistance with the exhibition. – [i.] Bob Nickas. “Steven Parrino at Palais de Tokyo.” Artforum, September 2007. [ii.] Jutta Koether and Bob Nickas. “Dark Star, Bob Nickas and Jutta Koether on Steven Parrino.”Artforum , March 2005. [iii.] Artforum , September 2007. [iv.] Most quotations taken directly from Steven Parrino’s The No Texts, (1979-2003) (Abaton Book Company: New Jersey: 2003) – Screened on the third foor of The Power Station throughout the duration of the exhibition: Drew Heitzler and Amy Granat T.S.O.Y.W., 2007 Two channel projection, 16mm flm transferred to digital video TRT: 3 hours 18 minutes 21 seconds Edition of 5, 3AP Courtesy of the Artists and BLUM & POE

Filmmakers Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler collaborated to makeT.S.O.Y.W., a two-part flm based on Wolfgang von Goethes loosely autobiographic, tragic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Following the style of the American road movie Easy Rider (1969),T.S.O.Y.W. chronicles a dysfunctional love story between a man and his motorcycle while representing what the artists call Americas wartime malaise. Werther, portrayed by artist Skylar Haskard, steals a friends Harley-Davidson to cruise the desert, eventually arriving at art historical destinations including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Granat and Heitzler’s variations on the theme which they edited from 16-millmeter footage that they shot simultaneously on identical Bolex cameras are screened as dual projections.

Link: Steven Parrino at The Power Station

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2sj9VGL

#micaramel

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