Lincoln Center - White Light Festival - Antony and the Johnsons -10/30/2010

I went to see the performance of Antony and the Johnsons at the inaugural White Light Festival at Lincoln Center on Saturday.  I have got to say that the redone Alice Tully Hall is awesome.

The very theme of the festival is one that I have been pontificating on at generous length recently.  It is about the spirituality of music along with the theme that our lives are being overtaken by digital overload.  It is meant as a kind of escape from that.  I see parallels in my own life as well as the lives of others.
[“We actually have been entering what I consider an era of distraction,” she said. “People are searching for greater meaning that all the text messages in the world can’t provide.” At a concert, she added, “you’re outside the concerns of your own ego, and there’s some larger universe inside yourself where you enter.”
“I actually feel an enormous responsibility in my job and, needless to say, in my life to learn how to wear my heart on my sleeve every day,” she said. -NYTIMES excerpt from interview with Jane S. Moss (vice president of programming)]

Antony and the Johnsons was a perfect choice for the festival.  He has been exploring many themes in his two latest albums on the role of man in our environment or the very destruction of our environment.  They are sad topics.... and Antony's angelic voice in many ways adds an otherworldiness to the concepts... but they also are very beautiful.  


Antony's concerts are not meant to be the same run of the mill touring stuff done by many other artists these days.  They are a cross between the orchestral (Orchestra of St. Lukes in this case along with Rob Moose) and the artistic (Chiaki Nagano's Film "Mr. O's Book of the Dead" which features Kazuo Ohno - famed butoh dancer and cover picture of Antony's "The Crying Light" album).  This was a one shot performance that is not going on tour and I was thoroughly enthralled.


Of course the song selections focused on many of the new from "Swanlights".  But the really outstanding.. perhaps because of their familiarity were "Hope There's Someone", "I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy", "River of Sorrow", "Her Eyes are Underneath the Ground" and "Another World".


Can't wait to see him again.