With Sotheby’s Sale, Minnesota Museum Reunites Martin Johnson Heade Paintings

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Martin Johnson Heade's “The Great Florida Sunset” (1887).Credit Sotheby’s

There was a silver lining to Wednesday’s otherwise disappointing Sotheby’s auction of American art from the Alfred A. Taubman collection: The sale led to a reunion of siblings.

The Great Florida Sunset,” an 1887 landscape by Martin Johnson Heade, sold for $5.9 million — more than double the previous record for him, though less than the expected $7 million to $10 million. It was acquired by the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, where it will be reunited with its pendant painting, “View From Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica.”

“They were intended to complement each other,” said John Driscoll, who advises the museum on its collection. “You have the kind of the yin and the yang of Heade’s career in these two paintings. They were the biggest paintings of his life.”

Located a little more than 100 miles southeast of Minneapolis — in the 27,000-person town of Winona, Minn. — the museum prides itself on its growing collection from the Hudson River School, a movement sometimes attached to Heade’s work.

The two paintings, which were commissioned by the Standard Oil founder Henry Morrison Flagler for his Hotel Ponce de León in Florida, have been separated for decades. They were on display together in the upper rotunda of the hotel (later Flagler College) until the 1950s, when “View From Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica” was moved to a private collection in California. Mr. Taubman bought “The Great Florida Sunset” in 1988.

The Minnesota museum acquired “View From Fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica” in 2013. Mr. Driscoll said he never expected to buy its partner. “I knew that Mr. Taubman owned it, and I knew he was not disposed to sell it,” he said. The chance to buy “The Great Florida Sunset,” he added, “was very exciting. These pictures belong together.”

David Bowie Debuts Dark 10-Minute ‘Blackstar’ Video

For David Bowie, even a jazz-influenced new album is best set in a futuristic hellscape featuring a bejeweled skull inside an astronaut helmet and human scarecrows in crucifixion poses.

On Thursday, Mr. Bowie debuted the 10-minute video for “Blackstar,” the first single and title track for his 28th studio album, due out Jan. 8, which also happens to be the singer’s 69th birthday. (The title is styled minimally on the album cover as a single character: a black star.)

“On the day of execution/Only women kneel and smile,” Mr. Bowie sings in the doomsday video for the foreboding track, which also scores the title sequence for the T.V. series “The Last Panthers.” Johan Renck, who directed the show, returned the favor for Mr. Bowie by making a short film for the song’s music video.

“They say don’t meet your heroes but when it comes to Bowie, he truly is the most brilliant person I’ve ever met,” Mr. Renck said in an interview with N.M.E. “I haven’t done a music video in a long time, but when Bowie asks, you’d jump at it.”

“Blackstar” (Iso/Columbia) follows Mr. Bowie’s album from 2013, “The Next Day.” Tony Visconti, a longtime producer for the singer, said in an interview with the British music magazine Mojo that the new album “came from a different space.”

“’The Next Day’ started out trying to do something new, but something old kept creeping in,” he said. “Not this album.”

Mr. Bowie recruited jazz musicians including the saxophonist Donny McCaslin, the guitarist Ben Monder and the pianist Jason Lindner for recording sessions earlier this year.

“If we’d used David’s former musicians they would be rock people playing jazz,” Mr. Visconti said. “Having jazz guys play rock music turns it upside down.”

The album isn’t Mr. Bowie’s only fresh project: His Off Broadway show “Lazarus,” a spiritual sequel to “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in which Mr. Bowie starred in 1976, started previews this week at the New York Theater Workshop. “Lazarus,” which features new and reworked songs by Mr. Bowie, opens on Dec. 7.

Classical Playlist: Villegas, Praetorius, and Boulez’s Mozart

‘Americano’
Pablo Villegas, guitar
(Harmonia Mundi)
This charismatic Spanish guitarist offers repertory from the Americas, including works by Villa-Lobos, Augustín Lara, John Williams, Bernstein (excerpts from “West Side Story”) and lesser-known composers including Luiz Bonfá. Throughout, Mr. Villegas’s virtuosic playing is characterized by its vividly shaded colors and his irresistible exuberance, contrasted with the intimacy he conveys in the more introverted sections. The disc concludes with some foot-tapping bluegrass selections, performed with the guitarist James Chirillo. (Vivien Schweitzer)

‘Luys i Luso’
Tigran Hamasyan, piano; Yerevan State Chamber Choir; Harutyun Topikyan, conductor
(ECM)
Fifteen centuries of Armenian sacred music are sublimated into one dreamlike sequence of free-floating hymns, cantos and other liturgical forms in these gorgeous arrangements by the pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan. His own delicate, jazz-tinged piano improvisations weave in and out of the choral tapestry, adding a contemporary, personal voice to this entrancing ancient music. (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)

BACH: Inventions and Sinfonias
Zhu Xiao-Mei, piano
(Accentus Music)
Bach composed his two-voice Inventions and three-voice Sinfonias to teach students how to play polyphonic music cleanly and expressively. Following her superb release of Bach’s monumental “Art of Fugue,” the pianist Zhu Xiao-Mei turns her attention to these smaller-scale pieces, finding the drama in each miniature and rendering the set with myriad nuances. She follows Bach’s instructions to perform in a “cantabile” style, the melodic lines always emerging with crystalline clarity over the counterpoint. (Vivien Schweitzer)

MOZART, BERG: ‘13’
Christian Tetzlaff, violin; Mitsuko Uchida, piano; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Pierre Boulez, conductor
(Decca)
Two weeks ago I heard Mozart at the New York Philharmonic and Berg at the Met: How better to prepare than with this completely unexpected release from 2008? Pierre Boulez’s Berg is a known quality, and his “Chamber Concerto” is here clear, composed and almost Classicist. But his Mozart? Ravishingly demure. The conductor’s talent for lightness and his immaculate balancing makes the Ensemble Intercontemporain sound less like a chamber ensemble than a single instrument, from the solo lines of the oboe and clarinet to the gloriously audible bassoons. (David Allen)

‘Christmas Vespers: Music of Michael Praetorius’
Apollo’s Fire; Jeannette Sorrell, conductor
(Avie)
Delectable may seem an odd word to describe the music of religious services, but Praetorius is like that, a composer virtually made to herald the joy of the Christmas season. The two sets of his music here – “Awaiting the Messiah: A Lutheran Advent Service” and “A Vespers Service for Christmas Day” – make no attempt to reconstruct actual services. Rather, Jeannette Sorrell culls highlights in an attempt, she says, “to create a vivid and compelling concert experience.” In that she succeeds admirably, in this re-release of a 2005 recording. Directing from the harpsichord, Ms. Sorrell supplements Apollo’s Fire, her Cleveland-based period-instrument band, with seemingly half of the city: Apollo’s Singers, the treble choir Apollo’s Musettes, the children of the Oberlin Choristers and the Children’s Choirs of St. Paul’s Church. Sheer delight. (James R. Oestreich)

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Tracks from the recordings discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)

Clive Barnes Award Nominees Are Named

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Katie Boeck, left, as the voice of Wendla and Sandra Mae Frank as Wendla in the musical "Spring Awakening."Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Nominees have been announced for the 2015 Clive Barnes Award, which honors young artists in theater in dance.

Winners will be named at a ceremony on Jan. 11 at Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. The Broadway actress Annaleigh Ashford (“Sylvia”) and Blakeley White-McGuire, of the Martha Graham Dance Company, will present the awards.

Three of the five actor nominees are from Deaf West Theater’s Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening,” in which many roles are cast with both hearing and deaf actors. For example, Sandra Mae Frank and Katie Boeck both play the female lead, Wendla Bergman. They are nominated together for this award, along with the male lead, Austin McKenzie. Also on the list of nominees are Jack DiFalco (“Mercury Fur”) and Dave Thomas Brown (“The Legend of Georgia McBride”).

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Jacqueline GreenCredit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Among the dance nominees are two members the American Ballet Theater corps, Catherine Hurlin and Gabe Stone Shayer. Joseph Gordon, who is soon to appear in New York City Ballet’s run of Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker,” was also nominated, along with Jacqueline Green of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Mr. Barnes was a longtime dance and theater critic for The New York Times and New York Post who died in 2008. A foundation in his name manages the award, whose selection committee includes journalists and performance stalwarts like the TV host Frank DiLella and the dance pioneer Arthur Mitchell.

Baryshnikov to Perform at His Arts Center for First Time Since 2010

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has performed all over the world during the last four years, will appear at his own Baryshnikov Arts Center for the first time since 2010, from March 9 to 19. He will perform in the United States premiere of “Brodsky/Baryshnikov,” a previously announced work that is part of the center’s spring season, which was announced on Thursday.

“Brodsky/Baryshnikov” is based on poems by the Russian writer Joseph Brodsky and directed by Alvis Hermanis. The work had its premiere Oct. 15 in Riga, Latvia, where Mr. Baryshnikov and Mr. Hermanis were born, and will tour to Tel Aviv before coming to New York. Mr. Baryshnikov and Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, were close friends until his death in 1996. When the project was announced Mr. Baryshnikov said that the show would not be biographical and would focus on Mr. Brodsky’s poetry, which will be performed in Russian with supertitles.

The spring season, which runs Jan. 12 to April 30, also includes “Morphia Series” by the Australian choreographer and performer Helen Herbertson and the designer Ben Cobham; the Corn Exchange, an Irish theater company; a performance series by the composer Daniel Wohl; and a collaboration between the 12-member string band Acronym and the voice ensemble Les Canards Chantants.

‘Miss Saigon’ Returning to Broadway

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Eva Noblezada in the London production of "Miss Saigon."Credit Michael Le Poer Trench

“Miss Saigon” is helicoptering back to Broadway.

Cameron Mackintosh, the storied British producer best known for bringing the megahits “Cats,” “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera” to New York, said on Thursday that he planned to present a revival of “Miss Saigon” on Broadway in the spring of 2017.

“History has caught up with ‘Miss Saigon’ — the story is more relevant than it was when it first came out 26 years ago,” Mr. Mackintosh said in an interview. “Since then, the kind of wars that happened there have spread around the world, and the whole ethos of what can happen when two innocent people get caught up in tragic circumstances is something we see every day.”

The production, which began in London last year with revisions to the original book, a new song and a new look, is directed by Laurence Connor, who is now represented on Broadway as the director of a “Les Misérables” revival and the new musical “School of Rock,” which is currently in previews.

The London production of “Miss Saigon” is closing in February, and the show’s two stars will come to New York: Eva Noblezada, a 19-year-old from North Carolina as Kim (the role that won Lea Salonga a Tony in 1991); and Jon Jon Briones, who lives in Los Angeles, as the engineer (the role that won Jonathan Pryce a Tony).

Ms. Noblezada, the daughter of a Filipino father and a Mexican-American mother, was discovered by a casting director at a high school awards ceremony; Mr. Briones was born and raised in the Philippines. Their heritage is significant because the original production faced controversy in the United States over the use of white actors in some key roles.

“Miss Saigon” is a love story between an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman set largely in American-occupied Saigon in 1975. Mr. Mackintosh said that he was proud of the opportunities that the show had provided Asian actors over the years.

“The irony is that the cause célèbre that happened was less about ‘Miss Saigon’ than the plight of Asian actors, and it happened over the show which has given more work, and more opportunities, to Asian performers than any show in history, as has been proven by the last 25 years of ‘Miss Saigon’ all over the world,” he said. “It’s given incredible opportunities to people, and created several careers, and I’m very proud of that, and now in New York you’ve got ‘Allegiance’ and ‘The King and I’ — more shows for Asian performers to do, and ‘Miss Saigon’ can hold its head up high.”

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The Times’s Reviews of National Book Award Winners

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Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Johnson were two of the big winners at Wednesday night’s National Book Awards ceremony. Mr. Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” one of the year’s top-selling and most-discussed books, won the award for nonfiction.

In The New York Times Book Review, Michelle Alexander wrestled at length with her reaction to Mr. Coates’s book and its emphasis on “the apparent permanence of racial injustice in America” and the “foolishness” in trying to change things. “I will confess that after the first reading of ‘Between the World and Me’ I was disappointed,” Ms. Alexander wrote. “Initially I was enthralled by Coates’s characteristic brilliance and insight, as well as the poetic manner in which he addresses his son. . . . But by the end, I was exasperated.” On a second reading, she said, “my frustration diminished. I came to believe that the problem, to the extent there is one, is that Coates’s book is unfinished. He raises numerous critically important questions that are left unanswered.”

In The Times, Michiko Kakutani called the book “powerful and passionate,” a “searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.” She also wrote of the “Manichaean tone to some of the passages in this book, and at times, a hazardous tendency to generalize.”

Jennifer Schuessler spoke to Mr. Coates in July, and the author wrote about his influences and reading habits in By the Book.

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Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Mr. Johnson won the National Book Award for fiction for “Fortune Smiles,” a collection of short stories. (His novel “The Orphan Master’s Son” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.) In The Times, Ms. Kakutani wrote that the best stories in “Fortune Smiles” “straddle the worlds of realism and fable, and attest to Mr. Johnson’s elastic and idiosyncratic voice: his ability to write with both tenderness and satiric verve, and his electro-magnetic feel for the absurdities of life and the human costs they represent.”

In the Book Review, Lauren Groff (whose novel “Fates and Furies” was one of the finalists beaten out by Mr. Johnson) said that reading the stories one right after the other, it can feel like Mr. Johnson is “holding the reader at arm’s length.” She concluded that the stories “may be best appreciated when taken out into the sunshine one by one, each allowed to exist as an individual text and left to resonate until the reader forgets the previous story enough to allow the next to speak its piece in full. Adam Johnson’s stories certainly deserve this kind of slow and loving attention. As a writer, he is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader.”

The award for Young People’s Literature went to Neal Shusterman’s “Challenger Deep,” and the award for poetry was given to Robin Coste Lewis for “Voyage of the Sable Venus.”

Taubman Sales Sag Again

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Milton Avery, “Female Gamester” (1944).Credit 2015 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Alfred A. Taubman collection again brought disappointing results for Sotheby’s, which guaranteed the sales for $515 million.

Thursday night’s sale of 31 works from the American art collection of its former chairman, Alfred A. Taubman, totaled $13.04 million (including the buyer’s premium), below the low estimate of $15.1 million. Eight lots failed to sell.

Sotheby’s did better with its regular sale of American art Thursday night, which brought $26.6 million; all but 10 of the 56 lots sold.

The auction house raised $420 million from its previous two Taubman sales, leaving it some distance to go before making back the guarantee. (The total stands at $433 million). The next and last Taubman sale is of old masters on Jan. 27. And Sotheby’s may be able to sell the unsold Taubman works privately.

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Martin Johnson Heade's “The Great Florida Sunset” (1887).Credit Sotheby’s

Thursday night’s Taubman sale did have one big winner — Martin Johnson Heade, a  Luminist often referred to as “the Vermeer of American painting.”   His  “Great Florida Sunset” sold for $5.9 million, more than double the previous auction record for the artist — but less than the estimate of $7 million to $10 million.

Short Films to Celebrate Shakespeare’s Plays

LONDON — Thirty-seven short films based on Shakespeare’s plays will screen this spring as part of Shakespeare’s Globe’s commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death, the company announced Thursday.

The 10-minute movies will include new material shot in areas including Elsinore, Denmark (a “Hamlet” reference); and near the pyramids in Egypt ( “Cleopatra”). They will include new footage being filmed this year and next, mixed with images from Globe productions, archival clips from early film adaptations of Shakespeare, and animations. Casting has yet to be announced.

“Shakespeare spent half his life in London, wrote all his plays there, and presented them all beside the Thames,” The Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, said in a statement. “We think it is suitable and fitting that the huge range of his work should be celebrated 400 years after his death in a big free public event, utilizing the very latest technology, along a public walkway beside the same dirty old river, so rich with history.”

The project, called “The Complete Walk,” will take place from April 24 to 26 and will show on a public thoroughfare that runs along the Thames from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge. On those same dates, the Globe’s “Hamlet” world tour, a production that aims to tour to every country in the world, will return to London for four final performances at the Globe. (The two-year touring show has so far visited almost 150 countries.)

“What I wanted to do first, which was insane, was to film the whole play in every particular place on that afternoon, and then feed them all into a livestream,” Mr. Dromgoole said in a phone interview on Thursday. But he said that the costs of production made the idea impossible. He retained the idea of filming bits of the movies on location as a way of exploring a new angle on Shakespeare’s work. “Shakespeare didn’t travel much. He hardly got outside of England,” he added. “We just wanted to sort of place the language against the landscape and see what happened.”

Some of the plays raise tricky questions about location.

“Twelfth Night” for example, “is set in an Illyria that is on the coast, and Illyria at the time had no coast at all,” Mr. Dromgoole said. “You’re dealing with someone whose sense of geography was deeply faulty, and more, sort of magical than it was literal.” For that production, the company will likely film in London’s Middle Temple Hall, where the play was first presented. “We might make a quick dash to the coast of Croatia and just do the ending scene there,” he added.

Mr. Dromgoole, who co-directed the “Hamlet” world tour and conceived the film project, will end his tenure this spring, after a decade in the role. Emma Rice, of the theater company Kneehigh in Cornwall, England, will take up his role.

Lea Salonga To Star in ‘Fun Home’ in the Philippines

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Lea Salonga and Michael K. Lee in "Allegiance."Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lea Salonga, the Tony Award-winning actress who is now starring on Broadway in “Allegiance,” will return to her native Philippines next year to star in the first international production of “Fun Home.”

Ms. Salonga, who won a Tony Award in 1991 for “Miss Saigon,” announced her plan in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. She said she would play the role of Helen Bechdel, who is the mother of the show’s protagonist, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel.

The move was confirmed by the producers of “Fun Home,” which won this year’s Tony Award for best new musical. The licensed production in Manila is scheduled to begin late next year.

“We’re thrilled to have the first international production of ‘Fun Home’ confirmed for the Philippines, and how exciting to have Lea Salonga, one of Broadway’s most beloved stars, leading the company,” the producers said in a statement.

“Fun Home,” which is still running at Circle in the Square Theater, is also planning a national tour during the 2016-17 season; it is scheduled to run in Chicago in November, and other cities and dates will be announced later.

Ms. Salonga is now starring in “Allegiance” as Kei Kimura, a Japanese-American woman who has a falling out with her brother over how to respond to the U.S. government’s internment camps during World War II. The show opened Nov. 8; Ms. Salonga is contracted to be with the show through June, and a spokesman said the “Allegiance” producers had been aware that she intended to return to Manila at that point.

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