The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009 Posted by Claudia Roth Pierpont

December 7, 2009
The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009 Posted by Claudia Roth Pierpont

The ten best cultural events (that I managed to see, hear, or read) of 2009:

1. Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness": It is wonderful to live in a moment when Alice Munro publishes a new story collection; I wonder if this isn't the way kids felt about getting their hands on the next volume of Harry Potter. As ever, Munro's stories have the density, the complication, the sheer substantial reality (and surprise) of life, never mind of most novels. There is a teasing reference in one of these stories to a character's disappointment at finding that a book she has just purchased is a collection of short stories, rather than a novel: "It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside." Munro has thrown those gates wide open; the air is exhilarating out here.

2. Maile Meloy, "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It": Another bliss-making collection of short stories. Lighter than Munro, Meloy has a marvelous ear, characters who gain depth in just a few pages, and a haunting way with the American landscape.

3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy": An apparently modest and little-heralded show, by Met standards. One walked through rooms of majolica plates and cassone panels, fascinating if minor works that were carefully chosen to suggest a social ambience. And then, in the last room, one was confronted with two magnificent visiting Titians—"Venus with Cupid" from the Borghese and "Venus with An Organ Player" from the Prado—that formed a major exhibition in themselves. The Met, in its bounty, felt no need to hang a banner or otherwise advertise their presence. In the surprise and the quiet, it was possible to experience these overwhelming works as a kind of private discovery.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition "Beyond Babylon": A perfect demonstration of the Met's extraordinary match of intelligence and wealth, a borrowing of mostly unknown pieces from all over the world that filled out an educational master plan and made for intense historical excitement.

5. Sara Mearns in the first movement ("Tales of the Vienna Woods") of Balanchine's "Vienna Waltzes," with New York City Ballet: Joyous, exalted, flushed with youth and beauty and a thoroughly absorbing moment-by-moment care for detail.

6. Jeanette Delgado in Balanchine's "Square Dance," with Miami City Ballet, visiting at New York's City Center: A new vision of a beloved role, with ample technique fuelled by sheer delight.

7. Alexei Ratmansky's "On the Dnieper," at American Ballet Theater: In some ways a very literal ballet, with a libretto (set to Prokofiev's music) about a returning soldier, this new work was nonetheless remarkable for the way that Ratmansky brings metaphor to movement, a rare gift that allows his dances to touch deep imaginative chords and live on in the mind.

8. Ted van Griethuysen as Malvolio in the Washington-based Shakespeare Theater Company's "Twelfth Night," at Princeton's McCarter Theater: The capstone in an exceptional production (directed by Rebecca Taichman and far superior to Central Park's summer production). Van Griethuysen is the consummate character actor, and his Malvolio was both hysterically funny and genuinely sad.

9. Goldoni's "Trilogia della Villeggiatura" by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, performed at the Lincoln Center Festival: This visiting company, performing in Italian with English surtitles, gave a subtly bravura performance of a playwright—Venetian, eighteenth century—who is seldom (never?) performed in this country. Goldoni's play turned out to be both brilliantly comic and shockingly cynical, exposing a world both distant and very close. How one wishes for more!

10. The Metropolitan Opera's late-summer HD broadcast projections on the Met's façade at Lincoln Center: Populist heaven. In the dog days, with little else going on, the crowds gathered with their babies and their dogs and fell under the spell of one great opera after another. At the end of the evening, just after the big screen went dark, the Met's lights were switched on: the Chagalls and the chandeliers were suddenly, dazzlingly bright, and one had to marvel at how such a fundamentally ugly building can inspire so much love.
The Ten Best Cultural Events of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/the-ten-best-cultural-events-of-2009.html
http://snipurl.com/tv79m