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Martignon Brings Jazz to Parrish on Friday Night

Martignon Brings Jazz to Parrish on Friday Night

At the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill
By
Star Staff

Hector Martignon, a two-time Grammy-nominated composer, producer, orchestrator, and pianist, will return to the Friday Night Jazz series at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with his Foreign Affair quartet tomorrow at 6 p.m. The evening of Afro-Cuban and South American jazz will be performed in a candlelight cabaret setting with table service of drinks and light refreshments available for purchase from the Golden Pear Cafe.

Colombian-born and based in New York, Mr. Martignon, in addition to performing at jazz clubs in New York, festivals in Europe and Colombia, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, has worked extensively in film, theater, and television and played with such jazz icons as Ray Barretto, Gato Barbieri, Don Byron, Mongo Santamaria, and Tito Puente.

Tickets are $25, $10 for members. The museum has suggested advance reservations.

Bridgehampton's Chamber Music Renewal

Bridgehampton's Chamber Music Renewal

Marya Martin, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival’s founder and director, will play flute in the first concert of the spring series on Saturday.
Marya Martin, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival’s founder and director, will play flute in the first concert of the spring series on Saturday.
Michael Lawrence
The first concert, on Saturday, features the world premiere of Fantasie for Flute and Piano by Eric Ewazen
By
Thomas Bohlert

The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival’s spring series is back for a third season. It appears that this springtime addition to the festival’s longstanding summer series has earned itself a permanent place on the East End’s classical music scene, increasing from two concerts originally to three last year, and this year adding a premiere performance to the lineup. And, no surprise, it looks like an exciting and harmonious mix of the new and well known in both repertoire and performers.

The first concert, on Saturday, features the world premiere of Fantasie for Flute and Piano by Eric Ewazen, a prolific composer who teaches at Juilliard and has been highlighted in the festival’s programs before. Although the festival regularly has premieres in its summer programs, this is a first for the spring series.

Marya Martin, the festival’s founder and artistic director, will be the flutist — in fact, she was the inspiration for the work — and will be joined by Orion Weiss on piano.

“He is such an optimistic and positive person, and he writes this music that’s not completely in keeping with modern-day sounds,” Ms. Martin said recently of Mr. Ewazen. “He has his own voice. He is a master craftsman. The voicing for the instrument is so beautiful, so it enables you to be very creative in your own playing; he allows us to dig deep. Very few composers write the way he does. It’s always such a pleasure to play because I can just let go — and it works.”

Another Ewazen composition, “Ballade, Pastorale, and Dance for Flute, Horn, and Piano‚“ from 1993, will also be heard, with Stewart Rose on horn. These two works will be framed on one side by the Trio for Flute, Violin, and Piano in C minor by the German Baroque composer Johann Joachim Quantz, and on the other by Brahms’s Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano in E flat, a work with calm beauty that was inspired by the Black Forest and the death of his mother.

Paul Huang, a violinist who is appearing with the Bridgehampton festival for the first time, along with a roster of veterans, will be onstage. Mr. Huang, a Taiwanese-American, was the winner of the 2011 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and in 2015 was the recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Mr. Huang’s recent and upcoming engagements include debuts with the Houston, Pacific, and Omaha Symphonies and the Seoul Philharmonic, as well as return engagements with the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa in Spain and the National Symphony Orchestras of Mexico and Taiwan.

The Brentano Quartet has been invited as the guest ensemble for the April 1 concert. Marking its 25th anniversary this year, the quartet has appeared around the world to great critical acclaim. In the fall of 2014, it was named the quartet in residence at the Yale School of Music, succeeding the Tokyo Quartet. It has recently presented Bach’s monumental “Art of the Fugue” in concert, and for this program will perform selections from it, along with Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E minor, which shows the flowering of his original style, and Beethoven’s Quartet in F major, written around the time of his Symphony No. 3 and marking him as one of the greatest musical pioneers.

By the way, the Brentano Quartet is named after Antonie Brentano, an arts patron and philanthropist who is believed to be the unidentified “immortal beloved” to whom Beethoven addressed a mysterious love letter.

Many chamber music aficionados think that the string sextet is an ideal medium for fullness, balance, and color. For the third and final concert of the series, on May 6, sextets by Dvorak and Brahms will be heard.

It is interesting to note in today’s political climate of cutting funding for the arts that Dvorak received a three-year grant from the government of Bohemia that was intended to help young creative artists. This enabled him to give all his attention to composing, and his sextet was one of the results.

Another up-and-coming artist who is joining the Bridgehampton roster for the first time and appearing in this third concert is the violist Che-Yen Chen. He is a founding member of the Formosa Quartet and at the 10th London International String Quartet Competition received first prize and the Amadeus Prize. Mr. Chen has served for eight years as the principal violist of the San Diego Symphony and is the principal violist of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.

“We have invited him several times for the summer festival, but he always had conflicts in scheduling,” Ms. Martin said of Mr. Chen. “We were finally able to nab him for this concert.”

Returning and joining Mr. Chen will be Ani Kavafian, violin, Amy Schwartz Moretti, violin, Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu, viola, Nicholas Canellakis, cello, and Peter Wiley, cello.

All three concerts will be on Saturdays at 6 p.m. at the festival’s main venue, the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $40 to $50, or $100 to $125 for a subscription. More information can be had at bcmf.org or 212-741-9403. The festival’s 34th summer season, which will take place in July and August, will be announced in May.

‘Chicken Fried’ Tribute

‘Chicken Fried’ Tribute

At the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor
By
Star Staff

Feeling a little bit country? A little bit rock ’n’ roll? There’s no need to feel mixed-up: The Zac Brown Tribute Band understands. Honoring a Grammy Award-winning group with 12 number-one singles on the country charts, the band plays both Zac Brown hits (“Chicken Fried,” anyone?) and more mainstream classic rock offerings like “Comfortably Numb.” 

The Bay Street Theater will present the band on Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 in advance online, $35 on the day of the concert.

Extreme Screenings

Extreme Screenings

At Guild Hall
By
Star Staff

Guild Hall’s weekend will include two screenings of substantial film and theater offerings. It begins tomorrow with the Hamptons International Film Festival’s 25th anniversary screening of “I Am Not Your Negro,” from October’s festival. The film is a meditation on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript “Remember This House,” which explored the lives and murders of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Raoul Peck takes Baldwin’s words and melds them into archival material, connecting the past to the present and showing that there is still much left to be done to fulfill the legacy of the civil rights movement. 

The film will screen at 6 p.m. Tickets are $15, $13 for members.

On Saturday, the National Theatre’s London production of “Amadeus” will be shown at 7 p.m. The theater and film classic tells the tale of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his rival Salieri in 18th-century Vienna. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

Nimbus’s ‘Steady Rain’

Nimbus’s ‘Steady Rain’

Edward Kassar, left, and Joe Pallister star in "A Steady Rain."
Edward Kassar, left, and Joe Pallister star in "A Steady Rain."
At Guild Hall
By
Star Staff

Nimbus Productions will present “A Steady Rain,” a play starring Edward Kassar and Joe Pallister, beginning next Thursday and running through March 19 at Guild Hall. Jenna Mate is directing.

The plot centers on two Chicago cops who are lifelong friends and support systems for each other. But when the unthinkable happens and they bear the responsibility, their friendship is torn.

With a plot involving all the usual suspects on the mean streets of a violent city, and an even darker undercurrent of serial killings and even cannibalism, the play is told from each friend’s perspective and then drawn out in intense dialogues.

Produced on Broadway in 2009 with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig starring, “Steady Rain” was praised by Time magazine for its “tough-minded script, which takes potentially clichéd material . . . and makes it fresh and compelling.”

Showtimes are Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets, $28, are available online through brownpapertickets.com.

'Promises, Promises,' a 'Mad Men' Era Musical in Southampton

'Promises, Promises,' a 'Mad Men' Era Musical in Southampton

Lon Shomer, Darren Ottati, Richard Adler, and Dane DuPuis in "Promises, Promises"
Lon Shomer, Darren Ottati, Richard Adler, and Dane DuPuis in "Promises, Promises"
Dane Dupuis
At the Southampton Cultural Center
By
Star Staff

“Promises, Promises,” a 1968 musical based on “The Apartment,” a 1960 film about a company man whose pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side is a love shack for his bosses, will open at the Southampton Cultural Center next Thursday and run through March 26. It will be staged as a concert.

The musical features a score by Burt Bacharach, with lyrics by Hal David and book by Neil Simon. Michael Disher directs; Amanda Jones is the musical director, and Darren Ottati and Shannon Dupuis star, with support by Richard Alder, Toni-Jo Birk, Julie Crowley, Bethany Dellapolla, Dane DuPuis, Sheila Engh, Brianna Kinnier, Geoffrey Milton, Tom Rosante, Jack Seabury, Lon Shomer, Christina Stankewicz, Josephine Wallace, and Edna Winston.

Tickets are $28 for adults and $15 for students. There are special overnight hotel rates and dinner and theater packages available at the cultural center’s website.

Music at St. Luke’s

Music at St. Luke’s

At St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton
By
Star Staff

The faculty musicians of International Music Sessions, a bicoastal music education program that encourages multicultural interaction through the arts, will have a concert at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m.

The program will consist of compositions by Schumann, Beethoven, Druckman, and Akiho. Admission is $20 at the door and free for students under 18.

Loving the Winter and the East End

Loving the Winter and the East End

"Kristen in a Cynthia Rowley Wetsuit, Bridgehampton, 2011"
"Kristen in a Cynthia Rowley Wetsuit, Bridgehampton, 2011"
Robin Rice
This pop-up gallery looks more like a well-designed Montauk bungalow than a space where works can actually be purchased
By
Jennifer Landes

It has certainly been a busy winter. Those looking for things to do have had a wealth of options almost every day of the week. Although some art galleries have closed or cut back hours, others are popping up like expensive boutiques in the summer.

One recent addition is the pop-up overseen by Sixtina Friedrich, Amy Pilkington, and Robin Rice in Bridgehampton’s Kathryn Markel gallery. The space is pretty and light-filled under any circumstances, but has been transformed in their presentation “What We Love About the East End.”

Initially a show of the trio’s multifaceted interests and practices, it will be expanded to include more artists and speakers this month, before it departs on April 2. The three women envision themselves as an artists’ collective that will encompass those who are like-minded and enjoy their aesthetic.

“We’re all friends,” Ms. Pilkington said recently. “We sit around and talk about things. We were sitting around, probably having some wine, and we agreed that this winter we didn’t want to hibernate if we weren’t going into the city.”

Given how crowded and overprogrammed the high season has become on both the North and South Fork, they agreed that they now prefer wintertime. “I love walking on the beach when it’s snowing. It’s so unexpected,” Ms. Pilkington said. “Now is the time to get to know people and spend time together. Some of my best friends, I don’t see all summer.”

Ms. Friedrich, who incorporates crystals into her jewelry and installations, said she loved the idea of a salon, “to bring artists together to bounce out ideas. . . . The East End has more and more interesting people living here, lots of artists. There has been an explosion of creativity.”

So the three have formed the East End Winter Salon, which will host a series of talks while it is open, beginning Sunday with Esra Ozcan, who will discuss “Turkish Coffee Fortune-Telling.”

Creating a cozy atmosphere, Ms. Pilkington has brought in furniture and throw pillows embellished with her fabric designs on bleached linen, lamps with shades using her fiber art, and a floor lamp with a tall shade composed of a rolled-up paper drawing. There are sculptural pieces of driftwood, glass receptacles for deep gray carved stones, mounted fabric paintings, and racks of her hand-dyed fiber art, made by folding, wrapping, binding, and dying fabric to achieve different patterns, some of which she then paints and stretches to resemble painted canvases.

Ms. Pilkington brought in the case in which Ms. Friedrich’s crystals are displayed, and created a tableau in the window featuring one of her crystal creations against a background of driftwood. Ms. Rice’s photographs are hung in groupings throughout the space and are also available unframed in the back of the gallery. She has chosen photographs taken on the South Fork, sometimes whimsical; among them figures in riding clothes, a nude woman on a bicycle, and swimmers.

Everything fits so seamlessly together that this pop-up gallery looks more like a well-designed Montauk bungalow than a space where works can actually be purchased. Art is infused with design and design is embellished with art, and all of it is accented with nature. It’s a subtle yet stimulating experience, and it underscores what is possible, sometimes with the most basic of materials.

Other salon events will include a talk by Carlton Schade on March 13 and a drawing workshop on March 19 with Eva Iacono.

An Ambitious Architecture Series Begins at the Parrish

An Ambitious Architecture Series Begins at the Parrish

The Parrish Art Museum will kick off its new architecture series tomorrow with Preston Scott Cohen discussing the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where Mr. Cohen designed a new building.
The Parrish Art Museum will kick off its new architecture series tomorrow with Preston Scott Cohen discussing the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where Mr. Cohen designed a new building.
Amit Geron
Design and building issues in a global context but with a focus on the East End
By
Christopher Walsh

“Inter-Sections: The Architect in Conversation,” a new series exploring architecture in multiple contexts, will launch tomorrow at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with “The Art of Architecture,” featuring Preston Scott Cohen in conversation with Terrie Sultan, the museum’s director. 

The 6 p.m. discussion will consider design and building issues in a global context but with a focus on the East End. Mr. Cohen and Ms. Sultan will discuss the ramifications and considerations that come into play when building specifically for art, such as cultural context and tensions, audiences and collections, the new roles of museums, and unconventional approaches to presenting art.

Mr. Cohen will sign his new book, “Lightfall: Genealogy of a Museum: Paul and Herta Amir Building, Tel Aviv Museum of Art,” after the talk. The chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Architecture and the university’s Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture, he won a competition to design the Amir Building. 

“I’m very interested in cross-disciplinary programs and projects,” said Corinne Erni, the Parrish’s curator of special projects, who developed Inter-Sections. “I feel that architects tend to talk to each other, but not so much with practitioners from other disciplines or the actual people who will be living with their structures.” 

Having architects speak with people from other disciplines, particularly artists, takes them out of the structured thought processes to which they may be accustomed, Ms. Erni said. “When you put people of different disciplines together and try to focus on a specific issue, you can get really amazing results.” 

Ms. Erni, who joined the Parrish in September, has deep experience in such cross-disciplinary efforts. At the New Museum in Manhattan, she produced the biennial Ideas City program, which she said included site-specific and collaborative art projects around the museum’s Lower East Side neighborhood, as well as a conference and street fair. “I was looking at issues of how art can play a role in the urban space from very different vantage points: bottom-up, top-down,” she said. “Bringing in new ideas from artists, looking at the city from very different angles, and exploring ideas and collaborations on how art can influence the cityscape. I took a lot of that with me when I came here.” 

Several Inter-Sections programs will be held each year, and they are expected to include discussions, panels, symposia, workshops, think tanks, and projects that foster dialog between architects and professionals in art, landscape design, technology, science, new media, academia, government, and public policy. 

The series will continue on April 30 at 2 p.m. with a screening of “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City,” a documentary chronicling the activist Jane Jacobs’s struggle in the 1960s to save historic New York City neighborhoods from Robert Moses’s redevelopment plans. That event will take place in collaboration with the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival. 

On June 9, the series will resume, this time in conjunction with “Landscape Pleasures,” the Parrish’s annual garden symposium. Architects and landscape designers will address topics including how landscape design can weave together human activity, natural forces, and the built environment.

“I think it’s very interesting to look at how architects and landscape designers can work together to integrate buildings and their surroundings,” Ms. Erni said. “Not landscape design as a value-added or just a backdrop to buildings, but thinking more holistically, how these two practitioners can work together to create something more cohesive.” 

A symposium on water and climate change, in conjunction with the exhibition “Platform: Clifford Ross Light | Waves,” is set for Sept. 22. Artists, architects, designers, policymakers, farmers, fishermen, technologists, and scientists will explore water as an artistic inspiration as well as a resource threatened by climate change. 

Admission to “The Architect in Conversation” is $12, free for members, children, and students.

Bach and Beyond

Bach and Beyond

At The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor
By
Star Staff

The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will host ACCORD, a professional women’s choir from New York, as part of its Bach, Before, and Beyond series on Sunday at 3 p.m.

The concert will weave connections between Medieval European monasteries through the Baroque period and on to folk music and spirituals. 

Tickets are $20 at the door and can  be purchased at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor.