2024: concerts of the year

Another “normal” year — until November at least — but let’s get into it.

thinkdance/Jill Sigman – Re-Seeding @ Gibney

Thinkdance, or at least this iteration of it, is Jill Sigman, my friend dan Cole, Donna Costello, J’nae Simmons, Amala’ika Rinyire and Stacy Lynn Smith (names from the program, apologies for errors!)

This piece had a lot going on, but I want to talk about the actual thing itself: it was something like a hour of improv dance, with 4-6 bits for the dancers to hit, and all the rest being free movement between themselves and the props. Three moents stood out for me: first, how shockingly hard it is to do anything improvised for an hour and have it be remotely coherent. Second, a moment where all the dancers were doing a lap of the room, with their footfalls were sliding in and pout of time with the music. And finally, an ending filled with ambiguity in dance, but with a near-perfect resolution by the musicians (Kristin Norderval , Gustavo Aguilar and Miguel Frasconi in peak Downtown contemporary mode) who did a New Music Fadeout just after the traffic drone from the open window stopped — astonishing.

John Luther Adams – Darkness & Scattered Light @ BAM

This was at Long Play, the Bang On A Can festival, and there’s even a youtube link, and it was beautiful — Luther Adams wrote the piece for Robert Black, who recorded the canonical version and died in 2023. The album is worth your time, as is this performance.

Gyorgy Ligeti – String Quartets I and II @ BAM

Again from Long Play, the Ligeti Quartet — yes yes, you get the joke — did amazing runs through these very difficult, very arch, and very heavy-metal quartets. Getting good pictures of classical musicians is impossible due to reasons of class, so the above images is from the performance of a different piece … but it captures the what-is-going-on dynamicism of their playing pretty well.

Dmitri Shostakovich – Violin Concerto No. 1 @ Carnegie Hall

With the London Philharmonic and the magical/magickal Patricia Kopatchinskaja on violin! Kopatchinskaja is so stupefyingly intense that she goes past “oh, she’s a good player”, past “oh, she’s a bit weird”, past “she does her own thing”, and past it all again to be actually, totally sui generis. In the Shostakovich, especially in the quiet parts of the first movement, with the subway rumbling under the hall, she managed to cover all of the tragedy and wonder of Russian-ness in something like 9 minutes. (The image, again, is from another performance, but begins to capture her).

Honorable mentions to Music For 18 Musicians at Long Play, which was gorgeous; to my friend Annie Wu’s album release party; and to going to a Real Madrid game in Madrid, and hearing 50,000 both whistling an Osasuna player, and hearing 50,000 people cheering a Jude Bellingham goal.