Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury): The peak of Babeldom was probably realized during the Neolithic Age, “the moment in the human story,” as Laura Spinney notes in her new book Proto, “when more languages were spoken than at any other”—when a worldwide population in the tens of millions talked in as many as fifteen thousand different tongues. At present, eight billion speakers get by with around seven thousand languages, but roughly half of humanity is fluent in a language from a single family, Indo-European. Spinney sets out to explain how so-called Proto-Indo-European, whose speakers “might only have numbered a few dozen to begin with,” has reverberated around the globe over millennia. Look forward to a full review in our pages from Joshua T. Katz this fall. —RE
“Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years” at 125 Newbury, New York (through July 25): “Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years” will come as a revelation. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko first came together in the 1920s. Mentored by Milton Avery and influenced by a similar constellation of interests, the friends followed a shared trajectory. For two painters so identified with post-war New York abstraction, there may be the temptation to dismiss earlier styles as inchoate. With thirty works on canvas and paper from the 1920s and 1930s, “Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years” will challenge that assumption. As presented at 125 Newbury, the Tribeca project space of Pace’s Arne Glimcher, the two artists’ accomplished early work proves to be a reflection of its time, rather than merely a style in want of evolution. —JP
Vanessa Bell: Modern Living, by Rosalind McKever (Thames & Hudson): “To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of the fine arts . . . . Today the arts exist in isolation,” lamented Walter Gropius in 1919. You would never know it, though, flipping through Vanessa Bell: Modern Living, a new volume that draws upon the Victoria and Albert’s extensive collection of the painter and designer’s work. By 1913, Bell had already begun co-directing the Omega Workshops, a company that sought to bring Post-Impressionism into the home. This charmingly colorful volume displays Bell’s painting interspersed with her designs for textiles, china, book jackets for her sister Virginia Woolf, and more. —SM
Richard Strauss’s Guntram, performed by the American Symphony Orchestra, at Carnegie Hall (June 6): J. S. Bach was known to finish his manuscripts by writing Soli Deo Gloria, “to God alone be the glory.” But the young Richard Strauss had another star in his firmament: “Thanks be to God,” he inscribed at the top of his first opera, Guntram—“and holy Wagner.” From the opening strains of its lengthy overture to its drama of salvation and its medieval setting, the opera is indeed heavily in the shadow of the Old Sorcerer, so much so that one cellist, prodded by Strauss during a rehearsal, quipped, “but Maestro, we never get this passage right in Tristan either.” Quickly forgotten but ripe for reevaluation, Guntram will be dusted off for its first performance in New York of the twenty-first century this Friday at Carnegie Hall. Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra, together with the soprano Angela Meade, the tenor John Matthew Myers, and the baritone Alexander Birch Elliott in the lead roles. —IS
“A License to Quill,” at the Rynwood Estate, benefiting Raynham Hall Museum (June 7): A countryside spy ring; a civil war; a visionary leader behind it all. No, we’re not in the realm of twentieth-century espionage novels. We’re in the late 1770s, when the Culper Spy Ring operated in and around New York, aiding the upstart Patriots against a better-funded Loyalist enemy. Oyster Bay’s Raynham Hall, now a museum telling the story of the quiet spy Robert Townsend and his family who lived there, will host its annual benefit this Saturday at the Rynwood Estate in Old Brookville, honoring the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who cowrote the best-selling 2013 book on the Culper ring, George Washington’s Secret Six (Sentinel). Tickets are still available for what promises to be a stimulating evening. —BR
Dispatch:
“Sonya & Co.,” by Jay Nordlinger. On The Queen of Spades, by Tchaikovsky, at the Metropolitan Opera.
By the Editors:
“Prize & Prejudice”
Isaac Sligh, Literary Review
From the Archives:
“The ‘Ring,’ the Metropolitan Opera, and James Levine,” by Samuel Lipman (October 1990). On the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera.
