The Outsized Influence of De La Soul

Continuing its study of Mahler, the Philadelphia Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall with the Ninth Symphony, the composer’s last completed. Written soon after the death of Mahler’s daughter and soon before his own, the symphony is a sombre, reflective, and reverberant adieu, brewing such melancholy that Leonard Bernstein theorized that Mahler was foretelling his own end. But perhaps even more devastation lies within the other work on the program, “Songs for Murdered Sisters.” This eight-piece song cycle was written in response to the true story of the brutal killings of three women by the same ex-boyfriend, on the same day. The piece was composed by Jake Heggie, in collaboration with the author—and here, lyricist—Margaret Atwood. Its soloist—and its progenitor—is the baritone Joshua Hopkins, whose sister was one of the victims.—Jane Bua (Carnegie Hall; Jan. 15.)
Movies
Since the nineteen-seventies, Jonathan Rosenbaum has been among the most influential and authoritative of film critics. To celebrate the publication of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a teeming and vital volume of his previously uncollected writings from 1964 to 2023, Metrograph is hosting a two-film program curated by Rosenbaum, featuring the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev’s defiantly sexual essay-film “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” (which led to the filmmaker’s prosecution and exile) and Yasuzō Masumura’s exuberant satire “Giants and Toys,” a scathing comedy of celebrity as corporate manipulation. Rosenbaum will be on hand Jan. 18 for post-screening discussions. (For those who can’t be there, “WR” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, “Giants and Toys” is on such services as Amazon and Kanopy, and Rosenbaum has a superb Web site, jonathanrosenbaum.net.)—Richard Brody (Metrograph; Jan. 18-19.)
Off Broadway
Amir Reza Koohestani’s Farsi-language “Blind Runner” (part of Under the Radar) is a study in grays, both in its design (by Éric Soyer) and in its metamorphosing, twilit narrative. At first, we’re watching a husband and wife (Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh and Ainaz Azarhoush) meeting in surveilled visitations, after the wife has been jailed in Tehran. Then Azarhoush—simply by closing her eyes—becomes a different Iranian woman, one blinded by official forces, who hires the first woman’s husband as her sighted running guide. Meaning melts: is this a romance, a protest, a dream? Koohestani hates the way that governments discriminate between “types” of refugee, and so the show, which often uses video projections to superimpose the actors’ faces, encourages us to perceive the way one person’s suffering may as well be another’s.—H.S. (St. Ann’s Warehouse; through Jan. 24.)
Pick Three
Helen Shaw on the best of the fests beyond Under the Radar.
Illustration by Marco Quadri
1. Live Artery, at New York Live Arts, has many thrilling offerings, but I’m most excited to see the choreographer and theorist Miguel Gutierrez’s piece “Super Nothing” (Jan. 12-18), a quartet about interdependence as a response to grief. Gutierrez’s deeply thoughtful, often righteously furious practice has grown to encompass many forms, including the educational podcast “Are You for Sale?” Any new Gutierrez performance is a cause for celebration—and, often, action.
2. The Exponential Festival makes aesthetic mayhem at the Brick Theatre and its satellites. I’ve been waiting impatiently for “Emphasis Mine” (Jan. 26), a new play by Spencer Thomas Campbell, who wrote my favorite ever Exponential show, “Chroma Key,” from 2017, a hilariously absurdist neo-noir about crime in a multiverse. This reading from the company Title:Point includes performances by Deep Fringe superstars—Peter Mills Weiss, Jessica Jelliffe—guaranteeing a certain level of bizarre combustibility.
3. Prototype, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Arts Center, will be polished by comparison, but I’m interested in their messiest offering: David T. Little and Anne Waldman’s goth-rock opera “Black Lodge” (Jan. 11-15), which scrambles our senses between live performances by Timur and the Dime Museum and a projected film by Michael Joseph McQuilken. The visuals, full of scary hospitals and a “Mad Max”-style desert, look creepy, but it’s the juxtaposition between industrial noise rock and Timur’s rasping, operatic tenor that raises the hair on my neck.
P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: