jueves, 3 de febrero de 2011

At City Ballet, a New Work Looks to Ellington for ‘That Swing’

DANCE REVIEW

At City Ballet, a New Work Looks to Ellington for ‘That Swing’

Published: January 30, 2011

Determinedly jolly, Susan Stroman’s new ballet, “For the Love of Duke,” is trite on purpose. Its premiere took place on Friday night, but nothing about it felt new. It peddles clichés.

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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Jared Angle and Maria Kowroski in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia.”More Photos »

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New York City Ballet: Tiler Peck and Amar Ramasar in the premiere of “For the Love of Duke” by Susan Stroman.More Photos »

As the title indicates, Ms. Stroman selected music from Duke Ellingtonfor this work. The second of its two parts, “Blossom Got Kissed,” is a little nothing that Ms. Stroman first created for City Ballet in 1999. Poor, hefty, maladroit Blossom (Savannah Lowery) ain’t got that swing, so she ain’t got a thing — unlike all the other utterly lookalike gals with their lookalike boyfriends.

But Robert Fairchild as the Musician has nothing better to do, so he kisses her hand anyway. Transformation! Blossom, irradiated by the transcendent glory of this kiss, promptly peels off her blue tutu and becomes just another floozy in scarlet. Such are the transforming wonders of love in Stromanland. And they don’t stop there. Now Blossom too can swing!

The first half, “Frankie and Johnny ... and Rose,” unveiled on Friday, feels every bit as stale, and it indicates a diminution rather than a growth of artistry for Ms. Stroman. Johnny (Amar Ramasar) is keeping his gal Rose (Tiler Peck) happy until his other gal, Frankie (Sara Mearns), turns up. For a little while Johnny’s case could be summed up by what the hero of “The Beggar’s Opera” once expressed as “How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear charmer away,” but there’s only so many times Johnny can keep dropping t’other dear charmer behind a bench, and soon enough Rose discovers Frankie. I forget who chases whom.

Were there any freshness to the characterizations or the steps, this little entertainment might have its sweetness. But no, we’re in the world of pastiche here. If only Rose and Frankie would dump the double-timing bastard and go off with each other or run for office or take up painting restoration. Don’t get kissed, Blossom! Get the hell out of this world of predictability and convention! Alas, Blossom wants nothing better than to be just another high kicker; and Frankie and Rose will be ready fodder for the next adulterous creep who comes along.

A ballet like this may make you cry out for originality. As a caution against this, however, City Ballet revived Wayne McGregor’s “Outlier” on Saturday afternoon. New last year, “Outlier”manages to be awash with originality while proving every bit as forgettable as “For the Love of Duke.”

Mr. McGregor’s characters are not stuck on ballet’s treadmill of relentless heterosexuality; the movements are often surprising, the dancers are not predictably attired; and the décor and music (Thomas Adès’s 2005 Violin concerto “Concentric Paths”) are all impeccably modern. But Mr. McGregor’s glacial conception of humanity seems even smaller than Ms. Stroman’s. His nine dancers — with their isolations of body-parts and their hyperextensions — might belong to an alien species, and he coldly examines the individual quirks of each (Just look how horridly weird this one is! And this!) before moving on. He never makes human energies interesting or dramatic. Dancers are pawns in his game, and he uses music like a movie soundtrack.

Fortunately the program on Friday night and both of Saturday’s performances also included better fare. Though I have repeatedly praised Alexei Ratmansky’s “Concerto DSCH,” Friday night’s performance — with Ryan McAdams conducting Shostakovich’s score, and Elaine Chelton at the piano — was especially fine.

In the lead role Wendy Whelan pointed every detail with perfect eloquence. When Tyler Angle (whose skills as a partner have been growing apace this season) lifts her high in the second movement, back to the audience, one leg extended sideways, her arms strike a beautiful halo above her head in wonderful conjunction with the piano melody. Everything about her body language captures the lunar nocturne of this scene. (The low and mid-height lifts, full of feeling and intimacy, are just as telling.) Among the many moments of comedy in the outer movements, my favorite is the little farce episode, when she walks in on her flat feet and stops dead to confront Mr. Angle, who happens to have Ashley Bouder in his arms at the moment.

Amid a largely new cast in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” — whose impact comes partly from the strange blend of freedom and exactitude with which it answers its Ligeti piano score — Lauren Lovette delivered a solo with a quiet grace that had many in the audience turning to the program to make sure they knew her name. This performance reminded me that the ardent fullness that Christian Tworzyanski generously brings to every movement across the repertory is a consistent pleasure. The personable Taylor Stanley registered with the same new force that he has brought to other roles this season.

Maria Kowroski — superbly partnered by Jared Angle — was dancing the role with the first and final pas de deux. Her mildly voluptuous charm has an immediate appeal here that I welcome while also missing the greater power and decisiveness of Ms. Whelan (the role’s originator, seen earlier in the week). I also welcomed it on Saturday night in George Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet.” If only she could find more bite and sweep to round off the loveliness of her dancing. Grand by gifts of physique, she’s only occasionally grand in dance delivery.

On Saturday afternoon the soloist Ana Sophia Scheller made her debut in the ballerina role of Balanchine’s “Cortège Hongrois.” She has the technique, the timing, the precision; but this role calls for immense authority and a bold range of pure-dance dramatic color that aren’t hers. There are other ballerina roles that would suit her better (she has danced a pleasing Sugar Plum Fairy for some seasons), and surely there are others who would better suit this role.

Better casting came on Saturday evening when Janie Taylor made her debut in the central role of Balanchine’s “Symphony in Three Movements.” Ms. Taylor is almost the complete opposite of Ms. Scheller: she’s far less brilliant or precise, and yet there’s an intensity in her very nervous system that can radiate right through to her hands and feet. In the right role — this was one — these gifts register as both power and delicacy.

Too many of the older ballets this season have duller lighting — by Mark Stanley — than ever before. (A tableau for the nine goons in Thursday night’s “Prodigal Son” was nearly invisible.) You can see that each work has its own definite lighting scheme, but not that there is any particular concern to make the dancers shine.

The New York City Ballet season runs through Feb. 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 870-5570, nycballet.com.

A version of this review appeared in print on January 31, 2011, on page C7 of the New York edition.

miércoles, 2 de febrero de 2011

Los españoles vuelven a emigrar a Alemania...

Solo son monos asquerosamente endiosados

Si nuestra generación....

manual_adicciones_medicos_especialistas_formacion.pdf

Un tema de actualidad, para bajar el documento completo, pincha el siguente enlace:

http://ifile.it/lvs5p7y

Pepperoni: On Top

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Pizza at Mario Batali’s Otto, which cures its own pepperoni.

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: February 1, 2011

REPRINTS

ACROSS the United States, artisanal pizza joints are opening faster than Natalie Portman movies. But inside those imported ovens, pepperoni — by far America’s most popular pizza topping — is as rare as a black swan.

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Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times

Torrisi Italian Specialties buys several types of pepperoni for different dishes.

In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta. But pepperoni pizza? Geddoutahere!

What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.

Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.

Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

But some of the most respected meatheads in the country are beginning to take pepperoni seriously.

“I can’t make salami fast enough as it is, and now the pizza chefs are begging me for pepperoni,” said Paul Bertolli, founder and self-proclaimed “curemaster” of Fra’ Mani, the salumi specialist in Oakland. Mr. Bertolli is in a research-and-development phase on a pepperoni, because of demand from expert pizzaiolos like Chris Bianco of Bianco in Phoenix and Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco. “There’s nothing quite like that spicy, smoky taste with pizza,” he said.

Mr. Bertolli believes that pepperoni’s smokiness, beef content and fine grind are more characteristic of German sausages like Thüringer, suggesting a possible Midwestern connection. “I’ve never seen a smoked sausage anywhere in Italy,” he said.

Normally, Mr. Bertolli confines himself to products and processes that are almost painfully traditional, and a nose-to-tail ethos that he applies to the pasture-raised, antibiotic-free pigs he buys. (Except the ears; Mr. Bertolli says they have too much crunch even to be used in headcheese.) For Mr. Bertolli’s pepperoni, he will avoid the nitrites used by commercial producers in favor of celery juice, an effective and natural preservative, though it does not produce the same appetizing color in the finished product as the chemical versions.

No one is claiming that pepperoni is difficult to find. Large producers like Volpi, Patrick Cudahy (makers of the No-Char line used by many pizzerias in the Northeast), Columbus and Ezzo are considered top-of-the-line among pizzeria owners. Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza.

But a pepperoni that lives up to the handmade, high-quality standards of the artisanal-food movement and also replicates the soft, chewy, smoky-hot-sweetness of the commercial product? That’s the grail.

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Caleb Ferguson for The New York Times

Mario Carbone, at Torrisi Italian Specialties, grates a frozen pepperoni to make “snow” atop Peconic Bay scallops with lime and cilantro.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Pepperoni at Otto.

Otto, the Greenwich Village pizzeria opened by Mario Batali in 2003, cures its own pepperoni, in a small subterranean chamber now overseen by Dan Drohan, the restaurant’s chef. In 2007, following a crackdown on illicit cured meats by the New York City Health Department, Otto became the first restaurant in the city to receive formal permission to air-cure its own meats, a process that must take place within a specific range of humidity and temperature in order to be safe and effective.

Pepperoni is the most popular topping at Otto, said Mr. Drohan, and the restaurant goes through more than 100 pounds a week of red-wine-colored pepperoni, made from Berkshire pork shoulder and flavored with fennel pollen (rather than the usual fennel seed), paprika and cayenne.

Outside the pizza universe, it’s rare to see pepperoni in a restaurant kitchen. Chorizo is everywhere; soppressata, with its pearly grains of fat, all the rage. But only at Torrisi Italian Specialties, the small Mulberry Street restaurant dedicated to upgrading Italian-American flavors, is there evidence of true pepperoni creativity. It serves pepperoni vinaigrette, pepperoni snow, and minced pepperoni mixed into warm crushed potatoes with oregano and vinegar to make the potato salad of dreams.

“We buy three different kinds for different culinary purposes,” said Mario Carbone, a co-owner and chef. Alps brand is good for cooking, he said, “Pepperoni just wants to give out that wonderful orange grease.” Salumeria Biellese is best for slices, he added, and a super-salty-smoky version from Vermont Smoke and Cure makes an intensely flavorful garnish for raw seafood. For the snow, Mr. Carbone briefly freezes the whole sausage, then grates it on a Microplane into feathery shreds that melt when they come to rest atop a hot soup, like potato or bean.

A block farther along Mulberry Street, on a stretch that is suddenly reclaiming its Italian-American culinary heritage, is a pizzeria called Rubirosa that opened in November. There’s no more noble lineage in American pizza than Rubirosa’s: the chef and co-owner Angelo Pappalardo (always called A. J.) grew up on Staten Island working in his father Giuseppe’s pizzeria, Joe and Pat’s, where the crusts are thin, ethereal and legendary.

The pizzas at Rubirosa are almost identical, with sauce spread almost all the way to the edge and a sauce lightly balanced between tangy and sweet. The pepperoni pieces, no bigger than a nickel, are sliced each day (many pizzerias now buy pre-cut pepperoni, which toughens quickly).

When Albert Di Meglio, a born-and-raised Staten Islander, came on board at Rubirosa as co-chef, he said he had big plans for the pepperoni pie. “I thought we’d do some kind of local salumi, something from Little Italy down the street.” He was wrong. Although Mr. Pappalardo has cooked at high-end Italian restaurants like Esca and Osteria da Circo, and all the pasta at Rubirosa is made by hand, the pepperoni is Hormel. Its familiar texture and taste, Mr. Di Meglio said, won out.

“A. J. said ‘Give the people what they want,’ ” Mr. Di Meglio said. “And he was right.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 2, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition.

Ready for the Next Argentine Invasion?

WINES OF THE TIMES

Ready for the Next Argentine Invasion?

By ERIC ASIMOV

Published: February 1, 2011

REPRINTS

TORRONTÉS has been touted as the hottest thing to arrive from Argentina since the tango. Or at least since malbec. It’s a grape, and a white wine, and some say it will be as popular in the United States as pinot grigio.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The panel tasted 20 bottles of torrontés from Argentina.

1.MICHEL TORINO CUMA
Cafayate Valley Torrontés 2009***
$15
Fresh and lively with depth, presence and flavors of orange and cantaloupe.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Importer: Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York
- E-MAIL THIS WINE
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2.CATENA ALAMOS
3.CRIOS DE SUSANA BALBO
4.TOMÁS ACHÁVAL NÓMADE
5.NORTON LO TENGO
6.GOULART
7.COLOMÉ CALCHAQUÍ VALLEY
8.LA YUNTA FAMATINA VALLEY
9.SAN TELMO ESENCIA
10.TERRAZAS DE LOS ANDES

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Tasting Coordinator: Bernard Kirsch

Best Value

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Pairings: Warm Calamari With Winter Vegetables (February 2, 2011)

Well, one day, perhaps. But first things first. Have you even heard of torrontés? The grape is grown pretty much nowhere else in the world but Argentina. Yes, Spain also has a grape called torrontés, but the two grapes are apparently unrelated. The Argentine grape has been shown genetically to be a hybrid of the muscat of Alexandria and the criolla, or mission, as it’s known in English.

The ancestry of the torrontés is interesting only in that it most definitely bears more than a passing resemblance to the gloriously fragrant muscat. The best torrontés are highly aromatic, exuberantly floral with a rich, hothouse citrus scent as well. Dip your nose into a glass, and you don’t know whether it ought to be sold as a wine or a perfume.

Argentina has a talent for obscure grapes. It took the malbec, a red grape that is forgotten in Bordeaux, overlooked in Cahors and known as côt in the Loire Valley, and turned it into a juicy, fruity, money-generating phenomenon identified purely with Argentina. Can torrontés become malbec’s white counterpart?

Indeed, in 2010, Argentina exported more than 231,000 cases of torrontés to the United States, according to Wines of Argentina, a trade group. That figure may seem minuscule next to the 3.15 million cases of Argentine malbec the United States received that year. But compared with the mere 29,333 cases of torrontés exported to the United States in 2004, the growth has been remarkable.

Given the rate of the torrontés onslaught, the wine panel felt compelled recently to taste through 20 bottles. We could easily have done 50, given the sheer amount of wine out there. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Brett Feore, the beverage director at Apiary in the East Village, and Carla Rzeszewski, the wine director at the Breslin and the John Dory Oyster Bar on West 29th Street.

It was clear right away that torrontés has issues of identity. These wines were all over the stylistic map. Some were indeed dry, light-bodied and crisp, like pinot grigios. Others were broad, heavy and rich, like ultra-ripe California chardonnays.

This may be a problem. All genres of wine have their stylistic deviations, but consumers can often read the cues. Chablis is a chardonnay that one can reasonably assume will be lean and minerally, without oak flavors. One would likewise expect a California chardonnay to be richer, and oaky flavors would not surprise. Of course, exceptions exist, often from labels that have been around long enough to establish an identity of their own. But torrontés has no clear identity, not yet at least, and the unpredictable nature of what’s in the bottles will not help.

Wherever the wines landed on the spectrum, we found that their level of quality depended on one crucial component: acidity. Whether light or heavy, if the wines had enough acidity they came across as lively and vivacious. The rest landed with a thud, flaccid, unctuous and unpleasant.

Florence had other issues with the wines. “Some were concentrated, but finished with a kind of watery emptiness,” she said. “And often, the nose and the palate were not on speaking terms.” That is to say, the aromas often did not signal clearly how the wines would taste.

So, what did we like? Those beautiful aromas — or as Brett put it, “floral, mandarin, muscat, nice!” Carla found a touch of bitterness in some wines, which she very much appreciated.

Just to make torrontés a little more complicated, it turns out the grape in Argentina has three sub-varieties: the torrontés Riojano, the best and most aromatic, which comes from the northern province of La Rioja and Salta; the less aromatic torrontés Sanjuanino, from the San Juan province south of La Rioja; and the much-less aromatic torrontés Mendocino, from the Mendoza area, which — fasten your seat belts — may not be related to the other two at all.

While I would never want to assume which sub-variety was used, we did find a geographical correlation. Of the 20 bottles in the tasting, 11 were from Salta and other northern provinces. Eight were from Mendoza, and one was from San Juan. But of our top 10, seven were from the north, including our top four. Only three were from Mendoza, and they tended to be more subdued aromatically

Our No. 1 wine, and our best value at $15, was the 2009 Cuma from Michel Torino, from the Cafayate Valley in Salta. With plenty of acidity, the Cuma was fresh and lively, which made its aromas of mandarin and cantaloupe vibrant rather than heavy. Likewise, our No. 2, the 2009 Alamos from Catena, also from Salta, was thoroughly refreshing with aromas of orange blossoms.

The story was similar for Nos. 3 and 4, both from Salta, too. The 2010 Crios de Susana Balbo was fragrant with melon and citrus, and well balanced, as was the 2009 Tomás Achával Nómade, which had an added herbal touch. By contrast the No. 5 Norton Lo Tengo and the No. 6 Goulart, both from Mendoza, were far more reticent aromatically though pleasing and balanced enough.

At this stage in the evolution of torrontés quite a bit of experimentation is still going on. Some wines are clearly made in steel tanks, which accentuates the fresh, lively aromas. Others may have been briefly aged in oak barrels, adding depth and texture to the wines. Thankfully, we found very little evidence of new oak in our tasting.

For my part, I was encouraged by the wines we liked best, particularly our top five. Their aromatic exuberance is singular and pleasing, with the caution that the wines ought to be consumed while young. As for comparisons to pinot grigio, they seem both premature and misleading. The big-selling pinot grigios are so indistinct that they offend no one but those seeking distinctive wines. Torrontés, on the other hand, are quite unusual, which confers on them the power to offend. In wine, that’s often a good thing.

Tasting Report

BEST VALUE
Michel Torino Cuma, $15, ***
Cafayate Valley Torrontés 2009
Fresh and lively with depth, presence and flavors of orange and cantaloupe. (Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York)

Catena Alamos, $14, ***
Salta Torrontés 2009
Fragrant and refreshing with aromas of flowers and citrus. (Alamos U.S.A., Hayward, Calif.)

Crios de Susana Balbo, $13, ** ½
Salta Torrontés 2010
Well balanced with lingering flavors of mandarin and honeydew. (Vine Connections, Sausalito, Calif.)

Tomás Achával Nómade, $17, ** ½
Cafayate Valley Torrontés 2009
Light-bodied and balanced with floral aromas and orange and herbal flavors. (Domaine Select Wine Estates, New York)

Norton Lo Tengo, $11, ** ½
Mendoza Torrontés 2009
Full-bodied but fresh and balanced with flavors of citrus and tropical fruit. (Tgic Importers, Woodland Hills, Calif.)

Goulart, $14, **
Mendoza Torrontés 2009
Subtle and restrained with flavors of minerals, melon and herbs. (Southern Starz, Huntington Beach, Calif.)

Colomé Calchaquí Valley, $12, **
Torrontés 2009
Balanced and pleasing with flavors of peaches, flowers and citrus. (The Hess Wine Collection, Napa, Calif.)

La Yunta Famatina Valley, $10, **
La Rioja Torrontés 2010
Straightforward with orange and herbal flavors. (SWG Imports, Bend, Ore.)

San Telmo Esencia, $15, **
Mendoza Torrontés 2009
Flavors of melon and citrus but a bit heavy. (Diageo Chateau & Estate Wines, Napa, Calif.)

Terrazas de los Andes, $21, **
Reserva Salta Torrontés 2008
Aromas of ripe oranges and flowers but a touch hot. (Moët-Hennessy, New York)