Category: Arts

The Berlin Philharmonic is coming to Ann Arbor in a little over a week, and it’s time to get excited.

The world-class orchestra is returning to Ann Arbor for the first time since 2009, as a part of their final US tour under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, presenting two stellar concert programs on November 11th and 12th in Hill Auditorium.

This event is so big that all 1,400 student tickets set aside for these two performances have already sold out. If you’re fortunate enough to have tickets, UMS has suggested that students visit The League Ticket Office to pick them up in advance, in order to avoid lines at Will Call before the performance. If you don’t have student tickets, there are still some full-price tickets available (which, if you think about it, are still a fraction of the cost of a plane ticket to Berlin). If you have tickets, but find that you can’t make it to the performance for any reason, it is your moral obligation to make sure that they do not go to waste.

Once you have your tickets, you can start getting excited about the program. On Saturday night, the concert will open with a tribute to the recently departed, great conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, with a performance of his piece for fifteen musicians, Éclat. This virtuosic, modern work explores the reverberations of the variety of instruments it uses, from piano to mandolin to vibraphone. The second half features the rarely-performed, monumental Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, a dramatic journey of a work that lasts nearly an hour and a half and includes unconventional instruments such as the mandolin, cowbell, and guitar in the orchestration. That’s right. Even Mahler needed more cowbell.

Sunday afternoon’s concert showcases some of Vienna’s finest composers, including Brahms’ Second Symphony as well as works by 20th century composers Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg. It is particularly notable that the orchestra is playing so much music that was written in the last century, as this difficult repertoire is not often performed on the concert stage.

It’s time to get excited. If you don’t have much experience with going to orchestra concerts, you might want to consider listening to the concert program, especially the more modern works, online in advance, so that you have an idea of what to expect (I’ve included links to the pieces above). However, some people prefer to experience unfamiliar pieces for the first time live, without knowing what to expect. However you choose to prepare yourself beforehand, be sure to arrive to the concerts early, healthy, alert, and ready to hear some of the greatest music the world has to offer!

The UMMA has features captivating artists in their special exhibits, but from June 11 to November 6 of this year, the museum has brought a member of the University of Michigan to the spotlight: Catie Newell.

After briefly reading a synopsis of the artist and her work, I enter the room. My presence is immediately acknowledged by two rows of prints, who beckon me to their attention. I answer their call and inspect them: images of dark city nights radiate tones of mystery, but in each scene, light illuminates a fragment of old buildings or tall trees. I’m captivated by the metallic sheen of these prints, animating the light within the images so that the scene that sits before my eyes interacts with me rather than standing isolated.

The prints, however, are derived of their attention once I notice an array of aluminum wire that hangs from the center of the room. Usually enlightened at night, I gaze at the structure, attempting to translate Newell’s perspective of darkness and urban landscape into coherent sentences. Perplexed at the subject of the gallery, dissatisfaction festers within me when my visit to the gallery is cut short.  

A Detroit-based architect and assistant professor at the U-M Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, Catie Newell is entranced by light and its relationship to architecture; the two seem to interact in a situational fashion, rather than separate entities. Newell encompasses this relationship by the two pieces showcased at the UMMA. Nightly, which is the collection of prints I mentioned earlier, uses the streetlights of Detroit as its subject. With this project, Newell investigated the two dimensions of the city: one that is clear at daylight, and one that thrives in the shadows of twilight. Overnight, the three-dimensional piece, works in collaboration with the gallery’s exposure to light in order to serve as a living entity of how architecture behaves in light and dark.

Catie Newell’s Overnight exhibit sparked a fascination of the elusive behavior of light in me that I did not know I would have. This exhibit will be open until November 6 from 8:00am to 5:00pm, so please do come out to see Newell’s work!