THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS JUNE 2, 4, 8 & 10 WITH ALL ...
DEADLY SINS
JUNE 2, 4, 8 & 10
WITH ALL THE grumbling that goes on about how the audience for "serious art" in America isn't young enough, I'm surprised more hasn't been made on the marketing side for this week's Carnegie Hall premiere of The Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe you have to have been raised Catholic, but there's something darkly attractive and exciting inherent in the topic-the bad things people are universally forbidden to do but do anyway.
The Seven Deadly Sins is a Carnegie commission, and the concept behind it is intriguing. The commission was split up by sin and went to a list of composers and lyricists that includes Jeff Blumenkrantz, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jake Heggie, Michael John LaChiusa, Steve Marzullo and Mark Campbell, and John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey. The whole cycle will be premiered by no less than Tony Award-winning Audra McDonald-seven pieces for soprano and quintet.
In case you've forgotten your catechism (and blocked the movie out of your mind), the sins are vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. Each composer/lyricist team created a one- to five-minute work that fit their "sin," largely self-assigned, according to music director Ted Sperling. (Up on the Carnegie website now is a short q&a with the various participants, if you want the background.)
I get a lot of press materials from Carnegie Hall, not much of which attracts my attention, considering the music I tend to cover here. But one line describing the song cycle stood out-"it seemed like a fun idea"-and I was completely hooked. A fun idea? Blame it on the war or this age of irony or the influence of a postmodern education, but I like my art, even the most serious of it, to be at least in part connected to an amusing concept.
The event is billed as the concluding event in the opening-year celebration of Zankel Hall, the fashionable flex-venue that was converted from a commercial cinema beneath the historic Isaac Stern Auditorium on 57th St. If you haven't yet experienced the interior acoustics and blond basket-weave decor, now could be the time. I have to acknowledge appreciation for a famed and moneyed institution such as Carnegie Hall opening its doors and graciously inviting new folk in, all without compromising themselves and their own values in the least. I hope they find the rewards well worth the risk.
Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, 154 W. 57th St. (7th Ave.), 212-247-7800, 8:30, $48-$62.