Sheila Jordan – Birdland Stream Passes at fly.live/birdland Click here for tickets Sheila Jordan is 94 years old, an American jazz singer and songwriter who is still performing and recording all over the world. This week she and her Trio are touching down at Birdland Theater in Manhattan and their performance will be livestreamed on Friday at 9.30pm ET. The indefatiguable Sheila Jordan has recorded as a session musician with an array of critically acclaimed artists in addition to recording her own albums. In the 1950s she pioneered a bebop and scat jazz singing style with an upright bass as the only accompaniment. Jordan's music has earned praise from many critics, particularly for her ability to improvise lyrics; The American jazz historian Scott Yanow describes her as "one of the most consistently creative of all jazz singers." Charlie Parker often introduced Jordan as "the lady with the million dollar ears." Her discography as leader is, as you would imagine from someone of her age, huge. In 2012, she received the Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is one of the true jazz legends and any chance to see her perform shouldn’t be missed. Other livestreams from Birdland this week include Tuesday 22 @ 9:30pm: The Ken Peplowski Quartet "Hidden Treasures: Ken's American Songbook." Tuessday 22 @ 8.30pm: Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks Wednesday 23 @ 8:30pm: Frank Vignola's Guitar Night with Pianist Bill Charlap. Tamara Rojo – English National Ballet Click here to watch The ballerina Tamara Rojo has now been Artistic Director of the English National Ballet for ten years. When she took over the job the critics pointed out that the Spanish dancer had no experience at running a ballet company, or anything else, and expressed dire predictions that her inexperience in the business and fund-raising worlds could well run the company into oblivion. That didn’t happen. In this admittedly self-serving video, Rojo talks about her 10 years at the head of ENB with a justifiable pride in the company’s accomplishments under her leadership, and the recitation of her achievements is indeed impressive. The company is now on a firm financial footing, has new premises, and is once again touring internationally. Now she’s leaving to join the San Francisco Ballet to be Artistic Director there. She has announced that she will no longer dance. To remind us all of what we shall be missing, here she is with Alban Lendorf and the Royal Ballet as Odile in the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake. This was the role for which she was most celebrated. Here’s why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmKVIrSi-h8&t=59s Royal Opera House subscriptions https://www.roh.org.uk/stream/offer Click here to subscribe Since the pandemic, many arts organisations have opened their video libraries to the public. The National Theatre (ntathome.com), Shakespeare’s Globe (Globe Player), the Metropolitan Opera (metopera.org), and many first-class orchestras, are now accessible on subscription. Some prefer the livestream model of video presentation but others, knowing there is a large audience out here for the arts, have dipped their toes into the subscription model and are finding it profitable, making their presentations available to a wider, worldwide, audience that didn’t previously exist. Some presenters worried that showing their wares on video would discourage the audience from going to live performances. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the opposite is nearly always the case. Indeed, most viewers who may be initially nervous about spending the high ticket price to see a performance they may not enjoy, will watch it at home on their own screens and then go on to buy tickets for the live experience. The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden has come late to the table but they’ve now arrived. For what seems to me a reasonable monthly or annual fee (9.99 a month, 99.99 a year) we now have unlimited access to the Royal Opera House’s library of more than 45 ballets and operas. Among them you will find performances by some of the world’s greatest artists, along with behind-the-scenes features, interviews with the artists and creative insights from the directors and choreographers. The Opera House promises that new titles will be added every month. This ability to watch extraordinary performances from wherever we are in the world, in our own homes, is one of the few gifts the pandemic gave us. Before this, if you wanted to see an opera from the Royal Opera you had to go to Covent Garden. These online productions have opened the world for us. PERFORMANCES TO KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF No Man's Land - National Theatre Click here for tickets Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart lead the cast in this glorious revival of Harold Pinter’s 1974 comic classic. One summer's evening, two ageing writers, Hirst and Spooner, meet in a Hampstead pub and continue their drinking into the night at Hirst's stately house nearby. As the pair become increasingly inebriated, and their stories increasingly unbelievable, the lively conversations turn into a revealing power game, further complicated by the return home of two sinister younger men. Watching this revival production from 2016, which triumphed on Broadway, in the West End and on television, one gets the strong sense that these two actors are having a wonderful time playing these typically Pinteresque oblique characters. You have to be a big fan of the game of cricket – Pinter was – to realise that all four of the play’s characters are named for famous cricketers, in one of Pinter’s more obscure jokes. The Museum of Broadway Click here to watch Look what just opened in my New York neighbourhood – not a new play or musical, although that too – but a new museum. With all the art galleries and museums already here, you’d wonder why we’d need another. But CBS Sunday Morning has the answer. There wasn't one celebrating Broadway. And now there is.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
April 2024
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