The contemporary performing arts in New York have no better friend than GWEN DEELY. She’s as devoted and busy an audience member as they come.  (All the more so, since she’s got a day job and doesn’t get free tickets like us critics.) I visit her in Manhattan regularly and she always gives me a report of the great events she’s attended. This year she seemed to have had a lot of peak experiences, including her own performances as a chorister at the Guggenheim, BAM and Lincoln Center. A former staff member of the music publisher C.F. Peters and also Composers Recordings, Inc., Gwen wrote...

Everybody knows that gay men do up the best holiday decorations. But what about music for the season? Well, “The Nutcracker” and “The Messiah” are bigger and older hits than even “Rudolph” or “White Christmas,” at least in my book. And both were written by gay men, Tchaikovsky and Handel, respectively. There’s nothing quiet as inspired as “The Messiah,” at least the Christmas section, but performances of the full oratorio can be a slog, even if the choir is up to snuff.  ”The Nutcracker” is something else all together. My...

Last Tuesday night in New York I was the guest at a lovely little dinner party at the home of Denes Striny.  He’s a tenor and voice teacher and later that evening his most famous student, soprano Lauren Flanigan, would be starring in a revival of Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther” at the New York City Opera.  We’ve become friends because we are both former students of Michael Cordovana, a retired assistant conductor from the Dallas Opera and faculty member of Catholic University in Washington, DC.  Now getting on in years, Mike lives in Denes’ building and joined us for dinner. Gossip of the...

In the bio-pic “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,” Allen Ginsberg describes Russell as a poet who sings.  I like that because it puts a finger on why I’ve never connected well with Russell’s music. Lord knows I’ve tried many times, always hoping to sink into the numerous posthumous collections of his music that have come out in recent years.  His songs and instrumentals always feel like sketches to me. Brief passages will have intriguing ideas or pleasing textures but they’re often overworked and strung out over too long a time frame.  One or two numbers can be nice,...

Despite its name, “Lipsynch” is not a drag show.   It’s the latest large scale theater piece from the inventive Canadian writer and director Robert Lepage.  Best characterized as a play, the piece begins and ends with one character singing lengthy excerpts from Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” As much as I’ve loved that slow and lush music and its popular 1992 recording by Dawn Upshaw, I don’t remember ever checking out the words, which are sung in Polish. But supertitles provided translations during the performance of “Lipsynch,” seen on Sunday October...

Is Margaret Cho not getting it enough? Because she sure talks about it an awful lot. Sex that is. When she walked on stage of the Swyer Theatre in The Egg on Saturday night in Albany, she got down on her knees to discuss — and demonstrate — the difficulty of maintaining proper ergonomics when pleasing a man.  Intimate acts and private body parts continued to be the overarching theme of the night.  For an anatomy lesson a loose and drooping microphone cord became a prop. It was often hysterical, especially when her malleable face punctuated the one-liners. For the capacity crowd of...

COOPERSTOWN – When the Italian American composer Gian Carlo Menotti died in 2007 at age 94, Michael MacLeod of Glimmerglass Opera was amazed at how little notice was given to the passing of such an important figure in 20th century opera. He responded by programming for the 2009 season Menotti’s “The Consul,” which opened Saturday night. MacLeod chose well.  A dark and gripping piece dating from 1950, “The Consul” received the Pulitzer Prize for Music and provides a welcome antidote to Menotti’s sentimental if highly effective holiday favorite “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” As...

ALBANY – Words and Music, a vocal quartet based in Washington D.C., takes its bipartite name seriously. For a Sunday afternoon recital in Albany, where many of the singers have roots, the group performed a single work of nearly two-hours in length. Ned Rorem’s “Evidence of Things Not Seen” is comprised of 36 distinct songs for solo and ensemble, and can be considered both a model of quality, succinct art song and also a compendium of potent verse by some of the best English language writers, such as Whitman, Auden, Frost and Millay. Rorem has long maintained that you can’t have...

SCHENECTADY – Sometimes theatrical producing means simply investing money into a big ambitious venture, as Proctors Theatre has done a bit lately with Broadway musicals. But producing can also mean finding some dough and also putting together a team of artists to create something new. That was the case with a new hour-long multidisciplinary show that premiered Friday night in the GE Theatre. “From Within and Outside a Bright Room” was conceived by Peggy Gould, a dancer and actress, who performed with a team of four other women, each of whom displayed a strong stage presence and distinct...

TROY — The blazing technique of Stephen Hough can almost obscure his brilliant intelligence. But the British pianist’s ample gifts came together beautifully throughout his Sunday afternoon recital at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. It was Hough’s third appearance under the aegis of the Troy Chromatics. Besides an acclaimed virtuoso, Hough is something of a scholar, offering his own program notes and a well received pre-concert talk. He’s also an accomplished composer, though apparently a modest one, since he allowed his final encore, an original composition, to go unannounced. It was a storm...