Balanchine Lessons Not Learned
In a rare moment of openness about meaning in his ballets, New York City Ballet's founding visionary, George Balanchine, told John Clifford in 1969 that the revered second movement of his famously "abstract" black-and-white "Symphony in C" "was supposed to be dance of the moon." In "I Remember Balanchine," a collection of memoirs, Mr. Clifford notes that the remark left him speechless. For Mr. Clifford, then a dancer trying his hand at choreography, Balanchine's aesthetic was supposed to be cool, formal and all about the steps.
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His Music Rooted in Memphis's Soil
Luther Dickinson celebrated the arrival of May by releasing three albums in a single day, and none of them had anything to do with his band the North Mississippi Allstars, his duo side project with his brother Cody or his role as lead guitarist in the Black Crowes.
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A Midnight Rambler Back in the Big City
The members of the Allman Brothers Band are known for being Southern men, but the group has always had an intense relationship with New York City. Its greatest album, 1971's "At Fillmore East," documented a live performance at the fabled East Village theater. Since 1989, when it reformed for the second time, the band has conquered the Upper West Side almost every March with extended runs at the Beacon Theatre, selling out 211 consecutive shows.
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Lives Furnished With Detail
'Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940," at the Jewish Museum, begins with an atmospheric self-portrait with a tall friend, made in 1889, by the 21-year-old aspiring artist. Vuillard, with his high forehead and reddish hair and beard, looks determined and introspective. It's an accomplished, if unremarkable picture, distinguished by the awkward placement of the friend, by its misty light—an evocation of an old mirror, we realize—and by the telling placement of a few objects that establish the setting. Read More

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