Classical pianist András Schiff is one of the best-known living interpreters of J.S. Bach and Robert Schumann. In a career dotted with many accolades, he already claims two Grammy awards: Best Classical Instrumental Soloist (without orchestra) with the Bach English Suites and Best Vocal recording for Schubert’s Schwanengesang with tenor Peter Schreier. When the 49th Annual Grammy Award nominees were announced last week, Schiff was on the list again in the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra) category for Beethoven: The Piano Sonatas, Vol. II.
In April, he’ll be performing at our Kaufmann Concert Hall with famed cellist Miklós Perényi for two nights, covering all of Beethoven’s music for cello and piano. If his sold out lecture-recitals in May at London’s Wigmore Hall are any indication, these shows should be just as electrifying. Need something to tie you over until April? Today, the Guardian posted the last installment in their seven-part András Schiff on Beethoven series with audio files from the Wigmore dates. All available recordings are conveniently located on one page for easy downloading.
Clockwise from top left: Y-Love, Jake Break (with dj handler), Pharaoh’s Daughter, Rashanim
The Sephardic Music Festival kicks off at Makor—its “source,” of course—this Saturday with some of the biggest (and diverse) names in the New York scene. If you know, you know. If you don’t, here are samples to help you get there.
Here’s the deal: Spend $75 on 92nd Street Y gift certificates (we’re sure you have friends and family interested in literature, music, philosophy, current events, drama, dance, art, fitness or anything else under the big Y tent) and we’ll give YOU an $18 gift certificate to spend any way you please at the Y. This is the kind of cyclical gift-giving where everybody wins. This special is only available by calling Y-Charge at 212.415.5500 or visiting our box office at Lexington at 92nd Street or the Steinhardt Building during our hours of operation.
Also, for a limited time, when you buy a Lyrics & Lyricists subscription, not only will you get the back story on Broadway’s classic lyrics with an expert artistic director as your guide, but we’re throwing in a $25 gift certificate! Feel free to use it for yourself or give to a friend who will no doubt sing your praises. The Lyrics & Lyricists season begins in January with a star-studded tribute to Rosemary Clooney. This offer is only available by calling Y-Charge at 212.415.5500 or visiting our box office.
Impress Your Parents When They Visit New York: Tip #92
The parental visit can be a stressful one. Where to go, what to see, and can they handle all the walking? What exactly would give them a truly “New York experience” without subjecting them to the smells of Central Park South? After you’ve done midtown, the museums and a monster pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Deli, we suggest escaping the crowds and heading to the Upper East Side. Beautician blogger Fannie Brice (not pictured) did just that and shares her special family time:
We also went to the 92nd Street Y and saw a rabbi who used to preside over a congregation that Rick attended in Boston, speak about the Kabbalah and read from his recent book on the topic. [She’s talking about Rabbi Lawrence Kushner and Kabbalah: A Love Story.] With Rick and his cousin (whose hair I now do) we took up a whole row, and I loved watching my parents soak up all the Jewishness and intellectual presence in the room. It’s an exhilarating feeling culturally to be around your own, regardless of religious commitment. They really enjoyed it and my dad asked some really salient question that impressed the rabbi and I remembered how I was always proud when I would get to hear my dad speak in public at school meetings and other stuff we went to, even when he took excessively long pauses which were embarrassing. I asked what he thought of the whole Madonna Kabbalah thing and the hipness factor. I wish I remembered exactly what he said but it was something to the effect that whatever brought people to it was fine with him. We stuck around afterward for Shabbat prayer, wine, some obscenely sweet and delicious meltaway babka and the best challah I’ve ever had. Usually challah is gross, I always eat a shred of it just for symbolism’s sake but this stuff was amazing. I’ve got to (not) find out where they got it.
Bonus Holiday Gift Idea: Give your parents an excuse to visit in April with a day pass to our Healthy, Wealthy & Wise: Life After 50 Symposium with Martha Stewart and a host of health professionals.
Michael Lutin, Vanity Fair‘s resident astrologer, has a special report in this month’s issue with a detailed reading of the United States of America’s horoscope using the July 4, 1776 birthday. (We’re a Cancer nation, go figure.) Doesn’t matter if you classify Pluto as a planet or not, as far as he’s concerned, its far away “transit” still has the power to plot the course of events here on Earth. An excerpt:
Something similar is happening again, 230 years later, as Pluto is coming around to the same spot. This time, however, it’s the American government that is putting the squeeze on the people. A Pluto-style transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and events that seem at first random and explosive don’t come out of nowhere. They have been brewing and simmering for years. While many people will probably be nervous wrecks during the two turbulent decades ahead, many old hippies will come joyfully out of retirement, thankful that the revolution they quit their jobs for 40 years ago may finally be happening. And their kids, born in the 60s and 70s, who grew up embarrassed by their hippie parents, may be shocked to see how right their parents were.
When Pluto goes direct in September of this year, the religious zeal, or madness, that has taken hold since it entered Sagittarius in 1994 will reach a crescendo, ushering in a period dominated by the sign of Capricorn. Our “dialogue” with radical Islam has only just begun. Over the next 19 years or so, America as a Cancer nation will have to deal with troubling confrontations and competition such as it has never known, as well as an internal political struggle, all of which will shake us to our very core.
Read the whole article, it’s fascinating stuff even if you consider yourself astro-agnostic. Even better, you can join Lutin tomorrow night at Makor for the launch of his new book SunShines: The Astrology of Being Happy. There will be cocktails, chat time and his lecture on “How To Be Happy in America in 2007.”
The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio with Michael Tree, viola: Two performances, Tuesday and Wednesday. Read reviews by the New York Sun and New York Timeshere.
Renaissance and Reformation: Learn about painting, sculpture and architecture from Giotto to Michelangelo, literature and music from Chaucer to Erasmus to Montaigne and from Guido d’Arezzo to Couperin with Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University professor of fine arts and theology
The Upper East Side Informer’s Girl About Town has a quick Q&A with our own David Jacobson, program associate at the Charles Simon Center for Adult Life & Learning but better known as our resident quizmaster and mastermind behind the Y’s popular singles get-togethers. They connected at the Gael Pub, Third Ave and 83rd Street, where David has been hosting raucous trivia nights.
The hot spot in 2007 for David’s TGI Mondays however will be the lower-key Auction House on East 89th Street, recently singled out by Time Out New York as a “cozy, intimate space that will make frat row seem distant.”
Today marks the official launch of the 92nd Street Y’s Winter/Spring season. Almost everything is for sale online and to showcase some of the great programming we are offering, we took a page from New York magazine’s Approval Matrix and created the 92nd Street Y Perusal Matrix. Of course, ours is based on a no-risk, high-yield, equal-distribution, non-hierarchical model that calculates all points at the same reward value. Make sense? In other words, it’s just a grid with headshots. But we do think it’s a good starting point to explore all of the provocative, stimulating, engaging and entertaining programs at the Y.
To maximize your returns ("the fun"), we’re running a contest and offering the opportunity to win one of five $25 92nd Street Y gift certificates to people who respond here with the names of all the faces (or most of them) on the 92nd Street Y Perusal Matrix. Only a list of the names is necessary, not their location on the matrix. Good luck!
No purchase necessary. All entries must be received by 12/15/06 and winners will be selected in a random drawing of correct entries on or around 12/18/06. Employees, agents and directors of the 92nd Street Y as well as immediate family of such persons are not eligible to win. Odds of winning depend on the total number of correct entries received. Entrants must be 18 years old at time of entry.
Sleep Success From Dr. Marc Weissbluth and Sally Tannen
In early November, Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, hosted two lectures at the Y for parents seeking sleep advice for their babies. We shared some of his tips on the blog before and it sparked an exchange between a parent and Sally Tannen, the director of the Y’s Parenting Center, which ended in sleep success.
Sara: I have a 10 week old, who was born 4 weeks early and I am a single parent and will soon go back to work. I have read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child over and over again. I am having trouble with him waking up fussy and crying after he goes down for his naps, after i get him he tends to sleep in my arm. He will sleep for 30-45 minutes then will cry and is very angry and fussy. He eats before he naps, so he can’t be hungry. Should I let him cry?
Also, he goes down at night around 7pm and wakes up crying every 3-3.5 hours, so I feed him. Is it too early to skip any of the night feedings? If not how do I go about it? HELP!
Sally Tannen: I’m the director of the Parenting Center and I am responding to Sara’s post.
Sara, you are asking many good questions. Your baby is still young enough so that if he is waking up to feed, then he is hungry and you should feed him. Talk to your pediatrician about when you can drop one of the night feedings. It will depend on how much he weighs now, but young babies have small stomachs and can only take in so much at once so it may be to soon.
Babies can be very fussy in the first few months. The only way he can communicate with you right now is to cry. I’m wondering how long he cries when he wakes up after a short time. If you left him alone for a few minutes, does he calm down, or does he get more upset? Some babies go from 0-60 in seconds, and others just make some crying sounds, but then can get back to sleep. If he gets more wound up, then you should definitely pick him up and help him at this point because he’s too young to be able to soothe himself back to sleep on his own.
Do you know about our New Parent Get Togethers on Wednesday mornings? If you are in NYC, you should come. They are every Wednesday at 10:30, and every week is a different topic. Next week is Your Baby’s Temperament, and the week after is SLEEP!
I hope to see you at the Y! Good luck.
Sara: Thank you Sally. I did like you suggested and left him alone once he started to cry for several minutes, sometimes longer than others, but never more than 5 minutes. (it seemed like hours!) You were right, he just went right back to sleep. He will cry a couple of small bouts now during his 2hour!! nap and i just wait and see. Yes he now will usually nap 2 hours!!!!! I just was not letting him before!! Thanks.
Anyone else have a question? Leave a comment and learn more about our Parenting Center and Wonderplay programs.
Wren Abbott, an editorial intern at New York magazine and freelance writer, reviewed last night’s Reading Series event for the 92Y Blog.
The challenge of creating book jacket art, suggested design legend Milton Glaser last night in a presentation at the 92nd Street Y, is in “taking something that exists only as an idea and making it real.” At this well-attended event, put on by the Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, jacket designer Chip Kidd and McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers joined Glaser to present their diverse techniques for translating word to image.
Like the ubiquitous “I heart New York” logo Glaser created, much of his work is iconic and familiar but not necessarily associated in most people’s minds with his name. Few outside the book design industry, for example, probably realize that Glaser created the Signet Classics Shakespeare paperbacks’ cover designs, modest white covers that feature a sparely-colored pen and ink illustration of each play. The statement in favor of balance and restraint Glaser made with these books is as striking and modern now as when they were first designed in the 1960’s.
By contrast, Chip Kidd’s slick and intuitive designs for Alfred A. Knopf, where he has been since 1986, feel much more of the moment, such as the jacket he immediately envisioned when he heard the title of client Augusten Burroughs’ book Possible Side Effects – a six-fingered child’s hand on a yellow background.
The tour of Kidd’s and Glaser’s comparatively modern and mainstream designs aptly set up the shock of Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s output: the magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the publishing house’s books are made to look deliberately old-fashioned and obscure. The youngest presenter of the evening, Eggers is apparently the most technology-averse, claiming he relies almost exclusively on the font Garamond because he can’t quite master the type feature in his circa-1999 version of QuarkXPress. Eggers’ resistance of new technology seems to be a way for him to hem in his restless creativity; in addition to his familiar roles as novelist, editor, publisher, and teacher at the writing workshop 826 Valencia, Eggers draws and paints much of the art used in his publications. Eggers’ detractors – people who accuse him of “selling out” or criticize the quirks of his writing style - might have to get used to the fact that Eggers is perhaps the single figure now striking out on his own innovative path in the manner Glaser began to do in the 1950’s (both men started their own magazines, Glaser at New York Magazine in 1968 and Eggers’ Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1998, among others). And as Eggers clicked through his chronologically-ordered slides, the sometimes gimmicky tendencies of his early McSweeney’s cover designs gave way to more deeply imagined pieces, such as the monochrome landscape on the cover of McSweeney’s Issue 15, a collection of Icelandic fiction. Like it or not, Eggers seems destined to loom large in the future of book design – though his publishing software will probably stay in the past.
Wren Abbott can be reached at wren.abbott @ nymag.com.
Two more reviews: Mel, Time magazine designer, on her Myspace blog and website builder/blogger Jason Kottke
On Alexis de Tocqueville: Joseph Epstein, America’s leading essayist according to The Wall Street Journal with an introduction by Richard Brookhiser, National Review senior editor and New York Observer columnist
Reel Pieces: Screening of Breaking and Entering starring Jude Law, Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn, followed by a discussion with writer/director Anthony Minghella
Jung Foundation Series: Individuation and the Gods of the Modern World with Katherine Olivetti, MSSW, NCPsyA, faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute and the Child Study Center at Yale University
The Global Warming Controversy with Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University
Here’s an excerpt from today’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, The Energy Wall (subscription required) by Thomas Friedman:
I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the big “clash of civilizations” now under way between the Muslim world and the West what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II. It’s Off Broadway to Broadway.
The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, was the theater where Great European powers tested out many weapons and tactics that were later deployed on a larger scale in World War II. Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the small theater where many weapons and tactics get tested out first and then go global. So if you study the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Off Broadway, you can learn a lot about how the larger war now playing out on Broadway, in Iraq and Afghanistan, might proceed.
For instance, airplane hijacking was perfected in the Israeli-Palestinian context, as a weapon of terrorism, and then was globalized. Suicide bombing was perfected there, and then was globalized. The Oslo peace process, which David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, calls an “attempt by Israel to empower a Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate,” was first tried there and then, in a different way, moved to the big stage with the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were a U.S. effort to create Arab and Afghan partners to push a progressive, democratic agenda in the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, Oslo failed Off Broadway, and now Iraq and even Afghanistan seem to be failing on Broadway. So what do we do next? Again, start by looking at what happened in the Israeli-Palestinian theater.
He goes on to suggest that the U.S. should copy Israel’s wall-building strategy by putting up a “virtual” barrier between the West and the Muslim world—in other words, end our oil addiction.
Classical pianist András Schiff is one of the best-known living interpreters of J.S. Bach and Robert Schumann. In a career dotted with many accolades, he already claims two Grammy awards: Best Classical Instrumental Soloist (without orchestra) with the Bach English Suites and Best Vocal recording for Schubert’s Schwanengesang with tenor Peter Schreier. When the 49th Annual Grammy Award nominees 
Here’s the deal: Spend $75 on 92nd Street Y gift certificates (we’re sure you have friends and family interested in literature, music, philosophy, current events, drama, dance, art, fitness or anything else 
The parental visit can be a stressful one. Where to go, what to see, and can they handle all the walking? What exactly would give them a truly “New York experience” without subjecting them to the smells of Central Park South? After you’ve done midtown, the museums and a monster pastrami sandwich at Katz’s Deli, we suggest escaping the crowds and heading to the Upper East Side. Beautician blogger Fannie Brice (not pictured) did just that and 
The New York Times just posted their annual list of the year’s 
