Sculpture in the Age of Donatello (Museum of Biblical Art)

The first time I walked past (and noticed) the Museum of  Biblical Art on Broadway in the Lincoln Center district, I paused and allowed myself to imagine what “art” such an institution would house and who would wander its galleries.  I imagined a refuge for the midwestern tourist overwhelmed by Times Square a few blocks south, filled with artwork somewhere between the creationist museum dioramas tossing Brontosauri and humans into the same line of vision and the Vatican’s never-ending galleries of nineteenth-century sentimental schlock

I broke with my long-held prejudices when I read about the museum’s current exhibit, Sculpture in the Age of Donatello.  This exhibit comprises not plaster copies of “Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral,” but the the marble statuary and reliefs removed in the nineteenth century from the Duomo in order to save them from the deteriorations of weather and pollution and preserved  in its museum. A century and a half later, they have been removed from the museum while it is renovated, and its only non-Italian venue during this period is the MoBiA.

While the exhibit fills only one, rather small, gallery, the artwork held our attention for over an hour.  The exhibit was predominately sculpture by Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Luca della Robbia, that was commissioned during the final years of the cathedral’s construction.  The most moving pieces were the monumental six—two that sat on either side of the front doors, and four that stood inside.  My favorite of these was Nanni di Banco's St. Luke, the contemplative, purposeful intellectual whose mien felt more reassuring than the near-mad ecstasy of the adjacent St. John.

It was odd to see in New York works that I did not see when I was in Florence in 2010.  It was odder to be allowed so close to them, to see how narrow front to back the imposing large pieces were.  The depth provided by the high relief of folded robes and muscular arms and torso belied the small piece of cathedral real estate granted the sculptors, speaking material terms to the  transformation they helped effect in art.  

Highly Recommended: show ends 14 June 2015, and the museum itself closes soon thereafter.

War Dreams (Yale Camerata and Yale Glee Club)

Wonderful performances of three significant pieces:
Zachary Wadsworth's War-Dreams
Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms
Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona nobis pacem

Highly recommended 

The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Gabriel Jackson)

Yale Institute of Sacred Music's Palm Sunday performance of Jackson's 2014 Passion was originally commissioned by Merton College at Oxford to celebrate its 750 anniversary. Its libretto weaves passages from all four Gospels as well as Latin hymn texts, Psalm 175, and lines from authors/poets associated with Merton College over the years.  As composed by Jackson, the soloists and the choir have equivalent roles, with the collective voices playing more than a supportive role for the individual, solo voices.

I would love to hear it again.

Highly recommended.

An Octoroon (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins)

An important exploration of race in the United States, this appropriation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon scandalous 19th-century play never lets the audience ease into high-minded superiority over our slave-owning ancestors (even if we don't have those ancestors).

Highly recommended.

Lives of the Saints (David Ives)

David Ives is one of our favorite playwrights, so it made perfect sense to head to Manhanttan for this series of short plays: "The Goodness of Your Heart," "Soap Opera," "Enigma Variations," "Life Signs," "It's All Good," and "Lives of the Saints." While these lighthearted and sweet comedies poke fun at human foibles, they also provoke our sympathies for characters much closer to us than might initially appear.

Highly recommended.

Forever (Dael Orlandersmith)

This solo work, written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith, provides an unrelenting encounter with the pains of abuse and the (surprisingly) redemptive power of rock n roll, especially the punk variety.  This power is surprising because Orlandersmith is an African-American women raised in Harlem where Jim Morrison and Patti Smith are white kids without the street cred of the neighborhood's soul brethren.  The narrative, however, revolves primarily around her relationship with her mother whose years of physically and verbally taunting her daughter culminate in her self-centered response to Dael's rape.

Recommend with caveats (because of graphic depictions of abuse and rape)

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum)

Our first film to see in 2015, The Imitation Game, was Morton Tyldum's highly fictionalized account of Alan Turing's contributions to deciphering Nazi code machine, Enigma.  Perhaps we were in the mood to view a somewhat sentimentalized account of misunderstood genius and were swept along with tripartite narrative, enough so that we didn't mind (too much) the obvious (even to us, the somewhat uninformed) historical inaccuracies (such as using correction fluid to change a typewritten document in 1951) or (even worse) Keira Knightley's presence in the film.  For useful accounts of the historical inaccuracies, see http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/ and www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/20/the-imitation-game-invents-new-slander-to-insult-alan-turing-reel-history.

Recommend with caveats.