Philip Glass continues his eightieth birthday celebration with a series of special events in New York City
PHILIP GLASS 80th BIRTHDAY CONCERT SEASON
Multiple venues
February- April
philipglass.com
Composer and pianist extraordinaire Philip Glass, master of “music with repetitive structures,” turned eighty on January 31, and he is celebrating the milestone with a series of special performances in his longtime hometown of New York City. At National Sawdust in Brooklyn, “Philip @ 80” will feature the Complete Piano Etudes by Maki Namekawa on February 24 ($35-$40, 7:00); Bridging the Gap III, consisting of works by Paola Prestini, John Zorn, and Glass performed by cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, bassist Trevor Dunn, percussionist Ches Smith, and Yale School of Music students on March 5 ($29-$34, 7:00), with panel discussions moderated by Steve Smith; and Glass teaming up with Foday Musa Suso and Ziegler on March 12 ($50-$60, 7:00). On March 16 at Carnegie Hall ($35-$200), artistic director Glass will be the focus at the thirtieth annual Tibet House U.S. Benefit Concert, with performances by Laurie Anderson, Ben Harper, Iggy Pop, Alabama Shakes, Sufjan Stevens, Patti Smith and Her Band, the Scorchio Quartet, Tenzin Choegyal and Jesse Paris Smith, and New Order’s Bernard Sumner, Tom Chapman, and Phil Cunningham. And on April 20, the Tribeca Film Festival will host a screening of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête with Glass’s live score performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble. In addition, Glass has been selected to hold the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2017–18 season, which will feature many classics and premieres.
Metrograph is getting ready for the Academy Awards by screening some of its favorite Best Picture champs, beginning February 18 with Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, followed February 19 by Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Based on embedded journalist Mark Boal’s experiences in Iraq, The Hurt Locker follows a three-member Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit as they are called in to defuse a series of dangerous situations involving various kinds of bombs, including IEDs and other life-threatening explosive devices. Team leader Will James (Jeremy Renner) is an expert bomb defuser and maverick who doesn’t follow protocol and likes to live on the edge. Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a greenhorn who just wants to survive the last forty days of their rotation. And Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) likes to go by the book and take no unnecessary chances, which puts him in constant conflict with the unpredictable James. Recalling the second half of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket, The Hurt Locker unfolds in a series of harrowing set pieces in which the EOD unit is called in to either safely detonate or defuse explosive devices while under the eyes of local Iraqis, any of whom could potentially be the bomber or a sniper.
“When you create a story about yourself that’s based on a lie about who you are and who your family is, sooner or later it’s bound to be revealed,” political journalist Anne Applebaum says at the beginning of Joseph Martin and Sam Blair’s engrossing documentary, Keep Quiet. “Who are we really?” In 2012, Csanád Szegedi was a terrifying young star in Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, one of the founders of the paramilitary, pro-Nazi, nationalist Hungarian Guard, rising to election to the European Parliament on the strength of a resurgent, virulent anti-Semitism. “I wanted everyone to believe in the world as I saw it,” he says in the film. “Anti-Semitism and discrimination of Jews was a powerful motivation.” But it all came crumbling down when the public heard an audio recording of the young leader’s phone conversation with disgruntled Jobbik party member Zoltán Ambrus, who tells Szegedi that his family is actually Jewish. At first Szegedi refuses to believe it, but soon his maternal grandmother is admitting to him that she is indeed a Holocaust survivor, with a number tattooed on her arm and memories of the camps.
With protests continuing around the country, and the world, against Donald Trump and his administration, IFC Center is honoring Presidents Day with the special evening “Surviving and Resisting: A Presidents Day Event.” The centerpiece is a screening of the gripping 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. For his directorial debut, longtime journalist David France, one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s, scoured through more than seven hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen archival footage and home movies of protests, meetings, public actions, and other elements of the concerted effort to get politicians and the pharmaceutical industry to recognize the growing health epidemic and do something as the death toll quickly rose into the millions. Focusing on radical groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), France follows such activist leaders as Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Larry Kramer, Bob Rafsky, and Dr. Iris Long as they attack the policies of President George H. W. Bush, famously heckle presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and battle to get drug companies to create affordable, effective AIDS medicine, all while continuing to bury loved ones in both public and private ceremonies. France includes new interviews with many key activists who reveal surprising details about the movement, providing a sort of fight-the-power primer about how to get things done. The film also shines a light on lesser-known heroes, several filled with anger and rage, others much calmer, who fought through tremendous adversity to make a difference and ultimately save millions of lives. How to Survive a Plague is screening at 7:30 on February 20, along with three new short documentaries, Jem Cohen’s Birth of a Nation and two works from Laura Poitras’s 
