Category: Arts & Humanities

What scares Stuart Gordon?

You get the sense that supernatural horror doesn’t faze him, given that the Chicago-born director has made so many gleefully gruesome cult films, from “Re-Animator” to “From Beyond.”

And authority certain doesn’t unnerve him. When Gordon was a student at the UW-Madison in the 1960s, he notoriously put on a 1968 production of “Peter Pan” that featured nude dancers and an LSD trip. It was shut down by university officials after one infamous show, and Gordon was charged by the Dane Count district attorney with promoting lewd conduct.

But what seems to get under Gordon’s skin these days is the evil that ordinary men do when they think nobody’s looking.

If you traveled by air over spring break from the Dane County Regional Airport, chances are good you saw some memorable glass art that is on display through May 4.

That’s because “A Touch of Glass,” an exhibition of selected glass works from the Racine Art Museum, is on view at the Art Court at the airport. The Madison-based Tandem Press organized the exhibition, and Bruce Pepich, the director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum, curated the show.

It has been a very memorable semester for piano fans, due in largest part to UW pianist Christopher Taylor’s momentous traversal of all 32 piano sonatas by Beethoven, which will finish up in three weeks with three final concerts on April 16, 17 and 18.

Yet this week might just be the peak of the piano semester, given what’s in store.

Some major changes are in store for the new season of classical music at the Wisconsin Union Theater.

For one, the theater is returning to a classical-only series option for subscribers as well as a mix-and-match, seven-concert series that allows customers to choose from the classical, jazz, dance and world music series.

In addition, because of new rules from the UW Transportation and Parking Department, only season subscribers will be allowed to buy reserved parking for $5.

The cult of celebrity and the commercialization of art are not unique to the West. In 19th-century Japan kabuki actors and high-priced geishas were idolized by commoners, and the sale of colorful woodcut prints portraying them became a big, competitive business.

Looking at Japanese prints today, you might not realize what a rough-and-tumble commercial world they came out of. Their formal elegance, poetic beauty and technical refinement suggest a more serene, creative environment. So â??Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770-1900,â? an exhibition of many splendid prints at the Brooklyn Museum, offers a useful and informative corrective.

Organized by Laura Mueller, a doctoral candidate in Japanese art history and a curatorial intern at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the show presents 73 woodblock prints from the Van Vleck collection, a renowned repository of more than 4,000 Japanese prints owned by the Chazen. With 22 more prints from the Brooklyn Museumâ??s collection, the exhibition tells the story of a group of artists that dominated the ukiyo-e print business for much of the 19th century.

Spring break next week will be a good time to go down on campus, find parking and check out the extensive show of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty art at the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave.

I’d be interested in knowing what your favorite art work is and why?

Just as uniquely female sass can in the real world, the impudent, sexy chorus in University Theatre’s opening night performance of “The Bluest Eye” made the misery, irresponsibility and corruption of the world exposed by Toni Morrison’s words tolerable.

In his contribution to “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me,” UW-Madison alum Ben Karlin writes about his old girlfriend, Jill, whom he fell hard and fast for “in the waning light of life in a college town after you’re done with college.”

He reminisces about how they “walked hand in hand through the farmers’ market, envious of no one, living in the goddamn now.”

One question slowly built in his mind, he writes: “What if this is the person I never run out of falling in love with?”

Still, it’s not a happy tale, and he hints about this early on.

Opera entered Madison like a lion over the weekend, and locals pounced on the rare opportunity.

Madison Opera again sold out all its performances, but those who didn’t get in, or those who did but still want more, have another chance.

University Opera’s weekend production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” directed by William Farlow, runs through Tuesday and offers an opportunity to see some fresh talent and likely future stars.

Last Sunday, the Academy Award for the best documentary feature went to a movie called “Taxi to the Dark Side”. And, this could not have happened without the work of a U-W Madison professor.

“It is a brilliant film. It justifiably won the Oscar,” said U-W Madison Madison Professor Alfred McCoy. “There is no question about it. It is a superb piece of craft.”

In January of 2006 McCoy released his book “A Question of Torture.” He got the idea after the pictures of Abu Ghraib first surfaced in April of 2004. He didn’t see the soldiers in those pictures as simply a bunch of bad apples. He saw sophisticated CIA interrogation methods including sensory deprivation and self inflicted pain

Just in case you haven’t had enough of winter yet, here comes the new art poster from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission that you can mount on a wall. The image on the poster, “Frozen-up, Sugar River,” is taken from a dramatic natural landscape oil-on-board painting by Belleville artist Jonathan Wilde.

…Wilde — yes, he is the son of the famous Wisconsin surrealist John Wilde — has been painting full time since May 1970, when he finished four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a zoology major. His subject matter has consistently been the birds and landscapes of southern Wisconsin, where his roots and passion lie. Wilde’s style is representational.

Sometimes these things just seem to fall into place.

Right now, there is a big revival of “bel canto” singing. Witness the new productions in opera houses around the world and critically acclaimed new recordings by mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli and tenor Juan Diego Florez.

n May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.

In May the Madison Opera will stage one of the biggest and best known of bel canto operas, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” based on the Gothic novel by Sir Walter Scott and featuring a famous mad scene of soaring arias.

Keeping in that spirit, this week UW Opera will stage Donizetti’s last comic opera, “Don Pasquale.”

In her graduate student apartment on the UW-Madison campus, Sheri Williams Pannell â?? a woman with a knack for knowing what’s good for people â?? pours out a steaming cup of tea for her guest.

It’s been a long time since Tom Wopat appeared on the Wisconsin Union Theater’s stage.

“I think it’s been 40 years since I’ve performed there, ” says Wopat, who will star in the Four Seasons Theatre Company’s production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies” next weekend at the UW venue.

It’s a busy week over at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where more than Beethoven is happening.

It’s a busy week over at the University of Wisconsin School of Music, where more than Beethoven is happening.

Maybe this semester should be called Beethoven time.
This week, UW pianist Christopher Taylor started his marathon cycle of 10 concerts of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas with three stunning performances, one last night and two more this weekend.

Ludwig van Beethoven used the keyboard as his “personal laboratory, ” a place to experiment with the lyricism and power that fed his monumental works for orchestra.

Starting 7:30 tonight in Mills Hall, UW-Madison associate professor of piano Christopher Taylor begins a two-month, marathon performance of all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas. In a feat rarely achieved, Taylor — whose reputation as a brilliant performer reaches from some of New York ‘s premier concert halls to West Coast academia — will play the sonatas from memory in a 10-concert series.

Snow-packed highways or not, Sarah McShane and three fellow students from central Illinois ‘ Millikin University piled into a car this week and headed to Memorial Union with hopes of singing and dancing their ways to a summer job.

“It ‘s a good experience. I love auditioning, ” said McShane, 18, one of about 60 people from across the Midwest who participated in workshops Friday in preparation for today ‘s Wisconsin Theatre Auditions and Technical Interviews, a wide-ranging talent search for summer theater jobs and beyond.

In the small second-floor Mayer Gallery at the Chazen Museum of Art, the five strikingly contemporary digital inkjet portraits by Dennis Miller that depict human sensory organs hang on a wall only a few feet across from a dozen of Leslee Nelson’s old-fashioned embroidered linens.

Figuratively, you can situate most the rest of the huge show of new art by faculty members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in between those two extremes.

Variety in both technique and subject matter is what once again recommends this extensive survey show, which has taken place every four years or so since 1974. Visitors are sure to find things they love, like, dislike and hate.

That is as it should be in the experimental environment of a world-class public teaching institution that was ranked last year as 13th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. An art school, after all, encourages the faculty to learn from the students, and each other, as much as it encourages the students to learn from the faculty.

Pianist Christopher Taylor learned his first sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven when he was 9, his latest one last year at age 37. In between came the other 30 sonatas, in just about as many years.

And from Feb. 13 through April 18, the prize-winning and critically acclaimed virtuoso, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will perform all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in a series of 10 concerts.

This is one of those weeks when you begin to wonder just how much classical music Madison can take — and still leave fans time to work, eat and sleep.

Any one of the following concerts is so outstanding, it could easily be the lead item of this column. But somehow chronological order seems the clearest, fairest and easiest way to keep track of it all.

They are possibly our most beloved and best-known icons. They’re also, perhaps, our least appreciated works of public art.

They are the murals inside Der Rathskeller of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union. This year marks the 80th anniversary of their creation. It’s also the 30th anniversary of the murals in the adjacent Stiftskeller.

During the conflict and chaos that took over the UW-Madison campus during the Vietnam War, one student found a strikingly simple way to preserve a piece of history.

Jim Huberty just collected everything he could get his hands on during the tumultuous time — posters, leaflets, brochures, broadsides, newspapers, photographs — and while most others would dismiss these snapshots of history as pieces of paper and toss them away, he kept them.

On Friday at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall, UW cellist Parry Karp, with his pianist dad and pianist mom, Howard and Frances Karp, will open the UW School of Music’s spring season after its winter break.

….On Saturday at 8 p.m. in Mills Hall, various UW faculty members will continue this year’s three-concert “European Capitals” mini-series with music and readings with the theme “Vienna, City of Contradictions.”

Is there a show biz role that Olympia Dukakis hasn ‘t had?

She won an Oscar for 1987 ‘s “Moonstruck.” Her one-woman show “Rose,” commissioned to welcome in the 21st century at London’s National Theatre, also spent three months on Broadway. In all, she’s played 88 TV and film roles, ranging from “The Simpsons” to the recent indie film hit “Away From Her.”

It’s hard to think of two film directors more unlike than John Ford and Michael Haneke, except to say that both their films need to be seen on the big screen.

Ford’s movies, especially westerns like “The Searchers” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” need to be seen in a theater to fully appreciate the widescreen splendor of their visuals. Haneke’s films need to be seen in the theater, on the other hand, because they’re so disturbing that if you were watching at home, you might turn them off.

Bringing a venerated classic American director and a controversial modern German director together is business as usual for the UW-Cinematheque program, the free on-campus film series that features foreign, classic and independent films. Even in the age of Netflix, many of the films that Cinematheque shows simply aren’t available on DVD.

The big art event this week — and I mean big in so many ways — is the opening of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Faculty Art Show at the Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave., which runs through March 30.

Every four years or so, a mammoth view of what is happening in the art department, which enjoys a fine reputation nationally, goes on view at the Chazen.

As in previous years, this year’s exhibit will be expansive (displayed in all the Brittingham Galleries and the cavernous Paige Court) and very varied.

Almost three dozen current and retired UW art professors are featured among the artists. Also showing are affiliated artists who work with the Tandem Press and related departments.

Piano fans have a lot, maybe even too much, to look forward to this semester.

First and foremost, they have University of Wisconsin pianist Christopher Taylor’s 10-concert cycle of Beethoven sonatas in February, March and April to attend.