The New York Times
Bernard Holland chose
Diamanda's performance of Defixiones: Orders From The Dead as one
of the best live shows of 2005. The full article will appear here
in the near future.
December 25, 2005
Diamanda Galas, in "Defixiones: Orders
From the Dead" demonstrated she hadn't lost her conviction nor her
piercing primal wail. The sound may have been funereal, but the
downtown sensibility was very much alive.
photo by Richard Termine
Surprises
Good Music and Bad, and Good Bad Music
By BERNARD HOLLAND
1. Florence Foster
Jenkins - the intersection of private wealth, ambition and disastrous
optimism in New York's 1920's, 30's and 40's - lives again in Judy
Kaye's endearing portrayal in "Souvenir" at the Lyceum Theater. A
nice bouquet to leave at music's monument to bad singing. May we
cherish her always.
2. Hopes for brotherly
love and musical metaphors for the Olympic spirit don't necessarily
encourage interesting music. Philip Glass' department store of
ethnic styles in "Orion" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave
Festival in October made for bland shopping. Didgeridoos, pipas,
Celtic violins and nyanyars are nice in themselves but don't necessarily
get along.
3. Movie soundtracks can
dog the footsteps of passing visual images, or else they can - as in the
case of "Chaplin Operas," by Benedict Mason, at the Rose Theater in May
- create a fascinating parallel world by which eye and ear feed one off
the other. "Easy Street," "The Immigrant" and "The Adventurer"
were the subjects, treated with assortments of music, oration and sound
effects.
4. One way to insert the
values of rock music into classical sensibilities is simply to take the
instruments and styles into a concert hall. The British group
Icebreaker, at Rose Hall in July, reminded us of ethnic and populist
revolutionaries like Dvorak or Smetana in the 1800's, although
admittedly the music was a little different.
5.
It was good to hear Diamanda
Galas - queen of the primal scream, siren of the shriek and mistress of
the moan - venting her unhappinesses at Pace University in September.
Ms. Galas took violent and theatrical exception to the evils and
injustices of the world. In her, the downtown scene of the 1980's
survives, if just barely.
