JANUARY 18-24,2018
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The Spirit|Westsider westsidespirit.com
AN A CAPPELLA LOVE LETTER TO NYC MUSIC The King’s Singers from England will celebrate their 50th anniversary with a concert at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola BY MARC B. BOUCAI
In the middle of a worldwide tour celebrating their 50th anniversary, The King’s Singers, England’s original a cappella superstars, will arrive on the UES on Sunday, February, 21st for a very special one-timeonly concert at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Part of the church’s “Sacred Music in a Sacred Space” series, the King’s Singers will perform a program that reflects the group’s Christian roots and how these sacred values manifest today. The concert will honor St. Ignatius Church and is a also a love letter to the city of New York. Established in 1968 by a group of six graduates from King’s College Cambridge, the King’s Singers gained attention not only for the clarity of their
sound and the complexity of their vocal arrangements, but also for the diversity of their repertoire. The Singers record and arrange everything from religious music from the Middle Ages to Renaissance-era madrigals to contemporary classical and pop music. This diversity of material has kept the group relevant for five decades. Though not always credited, the consistent popularity of the King’s Singers was one of the factors that kept a cappella so popular across American college campuses and helped give birth to the current a cappella boom. From “Glee” to the Pentatonix to the nearly $100 million gross of “Pitch Perfect 3,” a cappella is truly having a moment in popular culture. One could even think of the King’s Singers as the original boy-band, pairing dashing good looks with perfect harmonies and a deep sense of musical history. Our Town got the chance to chat about the ensemble with the King’s Singers only bass, Johnny Howard. In 2009, Howard was a recent graduate of New College at Oxford with
a degree in classics, living in London and working in advertising when he was approached by his predecessor in the group to audition. Since then, Howard says, his life has gone in unexpected directions, bringing him to New York over a dozen times, and allowing him to learn a ton of music, both sacred and secular. Epitomizing this bridging of the modern with the classical, of England with America, is “To Stand in This House,” an original piece commissioned for the King’s Singers by the New York-based contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly, whose opera “Two Boys” premiered at the Met Opera in 2013. The new piece fuses classical texts from medieval England with contemporary texts about modern life by famous alumni of King’s College, including Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. Howard even quoted Smith, from her essay “On Optimism and Despair,” describing the overarching question of the concert as, “how do we as a society strive to be better and make the world a better place?”
RESTAURANT INSPECTION RATINGS JAN 2 - 9, 2017 The following listings were collected from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s website and include the most recent inspection and grade reports listed. We have included every restaurant listed during this time within the zip codes of our neighborhoods. Some reports list numbers with their explanations; these are the number of violation points a restaurant has received. To see more information on restaurant grades, visit www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/services/restaurant-inspection.shtml. Starbucks
2690 Broadway
A
Ben & Jerry’s
2720 Broadway
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Gabriela’s Restaurante
688 Columbus Ave
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Marlow Bistro
1018 Amsterdam Ave
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Lenwich
2567 Broadway
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2Beans
461 Amsterdam Ave
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Kureiji
506 Amsterdam Ave
Not Yet Graded (85) Hot food item not held at or above 140º F. Food from unapproved or unknown source or home canned. Reduced oxygen packaged (ROP) fish not frozen before processing; or ROP foods prepared on premises transported to another site. Evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or non-food areas. Insufficient or no refrigerated or hot holding equipment to keep potentially hazardous foods at required temperatures. No facilities available to wash, rinse and sanitize utensils and/or equipment.
Firehouse
522 Columbus Ave
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Starbucks
540 Columbus Ave
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George Keeley
485 Amsterdam Ave
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Bagel Talk
368 Amsterdam Ave
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Howard calls Muhly’s piece “a marriage of optimism from the past and reality in the present” and says that it “marries our sacred beginnings and our reality of the present.” When asked about the process of working with a living composer on an original work, Howard said that the Singers were interested in knowing how their group of six voices could help a composer to bring his ideas to life. Howard’s journeys around the world have shown him that people of any country or culture want to sing together w ithout accompaniment, because they “love singing regardless of religion — irrespective of personal faith.” The magic of the King’s Singers lies
HISTORY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 antique dealer’s Park Avenue apartment, and, in early January, a number of Greek and Roman artifacts seized from the Fifth Avenue residence of hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt. Looted artworks have even turned up in the city’s most prestigious cultural institutions. In July 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art surrendered a marble bull’s head dated to 360 B.C. that was on loan to the museum from Steinhardt’s personal collection. According to prosecutors, the bull’s head was excavated from the Temple of Eshmun in Sidon, Lebanon, in 1967, but was subsequently stolen in 1981 by a paramilitary group during the Lebanese Civil War. The artifact was illegally exported from Lebanon at an unknown date and eventually ended up in the hands of private collectors in Colorado who prosecutors say had scant documentation regarding the piece’s prior ownership. Steinhardt, a prominent patron of the Met for whom an ancient Greek gallery in the museum is named, purchased the piece from the Coloradobased collectors in 2010 for $700,000 and loaned it to the museum. Soon after, Met officials alerted the Lebanese government that they had come to believe that the bull’s head was looted from the
The King’s Singers mid-song, getting ready for their 50th anniversary tour. Photo: Marco Borggreve in their ability to transcend the sacred and the secular, the classical and the new. Despite a touring schedule that brings them to all corners of the globe, Howard insists that NYC holds a special place in the group’s hearts. This will be reflected in their concert at St. Ignatius Loyola, where the Singers will highlight the
best of New York’s composers, including works by Michael Richie Benner, Howard Arlen and Paul Simon, among others. Howard ended our chat with a shoutout to New York audiences for being filled with people who “really think and engage and say what they feel” and who “want to be challenged.”
Temple of Eshmun site, starting a process that culminated in a ceremony last month marking the repatriation to Lebanon of the bull’s head and two other statues from the same site valued at over $5 million total. “These pieces followed the same path that many pieces follow,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos said at the ceremony. “They leave a war-torn area or an area that is undergoing civil war or civil strife, they get in the hands of dealers who are less than scrupulous in determining its origin, and then they make their way through auction houses and other dealers to New York.” Bogdanos, a classics expert who is a key figure in the office’s antiquities enforcement efforts, gained first-hand knowledge of the opportunities conflicts present to traffickers as a colonel in the Marine Corps during the Iraq War, when he worked to recover artifacts looted from the country’s national museum in Baghdad during the 2003 U.S. invasion. Though there have been no criminal charges filed against Steinhardt, and Bogdanos noted that no one suggests the Met acted improperly, prosecutors have criticized behavior on the part of collectors that amounts to willful ignorance of some objects’ hazy provenance. “No longer may those who deal in antiquities — whether they are dealers, collectors,
museums, or auction houses — turn a blind eye to the rampant looting of the world’s cultural heritage,” Bogdanos wrote in one recent court filing. “In New York, at least, they are legally required to engage in a reasonable inquiry into the true ownership history and provenance of antiquities.” The Manhattan District Attorney’s office says it has recovered thousands of illicit antiquities with a market value exceeding $150 million since 2012, many of which have since been returned to the countries in which they were unearthed. In December, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced the formation of a dedicated antiquities trafficking unit that will work with federal prosecutors and specialized teams within the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to recover illicit antiquities. “The volume and pace of our work in this area has increased to the point where we actually need a unit fully staffed with investigators, analysts and lawyers to make sure that when we understand that trafficked, looted and stolen items are in our jurisdiction we can bring all of the resources of this office to bear to make sure that they can be returned,” Vance said. Michael Garofalo: reporter@ strausnews.com