MIT performers, writers and composers have received the following year-end accolades:
The Boston Phoenix 's Jeffrey Gantz included MIT's world premiere performance of "ShadowBang" (October 2001) by Professor of Music Evan Ziporyn in his list of "Moving Performances: The Year in Dance." The collaborative performance by the New York-based Bang on a Can All-Stars and Balinese puppet-master I Wayan Wija "offered us the chance to laugh without irony or guilt for the first time in many weeks," wrote Gantz. In addition, two new Bang on a Can recordings, on which Ziporyn performs and produces, made it onto "top 10" lists compiled by music critics at The New York Times and The Washington Post .
Professor John Harbison's name also appeared on year-end "best" lists. New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini included a recording of Harbison's "The Rewaking," with soprano Dominique Labelle and the Lydian String Quartet, in his "The Year in Classical Music: The Critics' Choices" column of favorite recordings. The Boston Phoenix list of best classical music of the year included a category just for "Best Harbison Premieres," citing the world premiere of "Six American Painters" performed by oboist Peggy Pearson's Winsor Music, and a New England Conservatory faculty recital of his new Elizabeth Bishop cycle, "North and South."
Rajesh Mehta (S.B. 1986) and Paul Lovens' program at MIT in April earned a year-end kudo from The Boston Globe 's Bob Blumenthal, who wrote, "The good news of 2001 in the jazz world was that the center held while the borders expanded." Blumenthal praised the MIT program "for jazz-as-we-know-it excellence," extolling the Mehta-Lovens duo's "iconoclastic transformations ... on trumpet and drums."
The List Visual Arts Center's "YES Yoko Ono" exhibition, which came to the List Visual Arts Center as part of a six-city tour of the United States, won the 2000-01 International Association of Art Critics/USA Awards for best museum show originating in New York City. The show, which closed at MIT on Jan. 6, also made the Boston Phoenix 's year's best list--one of six Boston-area visual arts events cited in a category titled "Ladies' Days."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 9, 2002.
