Upcoming concert: BMV’s Living Statues

Going to be at BMV’s second concert of the season. Here’s the description from boston.com:

Boston Musica Viva: Living Statues
Friday, Oct 3 8:00p
at Tsai Performance Center at Boston University, Boston, MA

Boston Musica Viva performs three world premiere mini-operas inspired by Boston statues. Works by Aaron Copland, Steven Stucky, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich are also featured.

Here’s the link on Boston Musica Viva’s website where you can also order tickets. It seems that one of the mini-operas, the one about Mary Dyer, has been cancelled due to the composer not being able to complete it in time, but hopefully the other two, by Andy Vores and Theo Loevendie, will be interesting enough that it won’t be missed.

BMOP at the ICA

I went to the final concert of the ditson music festival at the ICA, which featured BMOP. According to BMOP’s website the festival is “The first in a series of biennial festivals of contemporary music initiated by the Alice M. Ditson Fund, which supports music by emerging American composers,” and Boston was certainly a great choice for the first city to showcase. Earlier in the week such cornerstones of the contemporary music scene in Boston as BMV and Collage made their appearance, and there’s no doubt the whole series was a great way to bring all of Boston’s different groups together.

As for the concert itself, in general I agreed with most of Matthew Guerrieri’s review in the Boston Globe. I quite enjoyed the Kirchner, and although I thought the last thing I needed to hear was another tone poem about the sea, Arthur Levering’s “Il Mare Dentro” was far from banal and was full of lovely moments.

I found the ICA’s theater to be less than ideal, however. Everyone agreed that the hall’s sound was too dry for the orchestral instruments, although there were differing opinions on the entirely glass walls which allowed the audience to watch the ships passing behind the orchestra. Personally I found the view of the water and the ships to be distracting. This would’ve been less of a problem to me if the ICA had put up some sort of barriers to prevent passersby from wandering around directly outside the stage and peering in at the concert so that the audience was forced to watch them as much as the orchestra. But despite the drawbacks of the location the concert was well executed and a nice close to a festival celebrating Boston’s contemporary classical music.

Dancing On The Charles

D’s boyfriend had gone to one of these “Dancing On The Charles” events before last year, and so I tagged along. Basically it’s a series of electronic dance nights outdoors by the Charles River held throughout the summer and organized by this Boston DJ duo called Soul Clap. They bring in various DJ’s so there’s a fair amount of variety throughout the evening (7 p.m. to 1 a.m.), and apparently the events have gotten pretty popular. More facts about the events can be found here.

So how was it? Deb and I met in Harvard Square and it takes a little less than 1/2 an hour to walk there from the T stop. We got there right at 9 so the cover was still $10, although apparently it was $20 after that. Deb got an Anna Taqueria-style beef burrito for $6 which was nothing special (they had tacos as well apparently) and a beer. When we first got there it was fairly empty, but by 10 there was a decent-sized crowd that was still getting bigger. By the time I left around 10:45 (because of a previous engagement, not because I was bored) the area had gotten pretty full. Not a lot of people were dancing even by then, although there were more than a few who had brought their trusty glow sticks. The music wasn’t particularly memorable overall, although the rotating DJ’s did provide variety. Personally I most enjoyed the music when we first got there, which was more funk-based. There was a rather too-long stretch of fairly generic, sparse techno, the type with dreary old sci-fi movie samples, and when I was leaving the music had changed again to more Latin-flavored electronica. Accompanying the music were two screens with the usual screensaver-like visuals, which were rather better assembled than many I’ve seen, although in general they didn’t seem to be very closely tied to the music.

It seems odd to think that the music at the event was actually the least memorable thing about it to me. Although it was a somewhat chilly evening I enjoyed hanging out under the stars just chatting, and it was definitely a nice alternative to the usual club scene. The crowd was generally fairly indie but not unfriendly, although someone else who went told me he was bothered by all the smokers which I hadn’t really noticed at all. Overall it wasn’t something I’m dying to check out again, but it would be a nice thing to check out on a warm summer night, so if someone I knew wanted to go next year I would definitely go. There was a photographer apparently from the Boston Globe there, but I haven’t seen anything on their site about it, although I did come across this this fairly uninformative entry on one of the Globe’s blogs about one of the events in August.

Update: Here’s the link to the pics the Globe took, accompanied by fairly generic captions.

The mission

To cut through the crap, think outside the box, and find out what’s really going on with the arts in this city. We’re Bostonians by choice, and even though we’ve been here a while there’s so much we still don’t know.