One-hit wonders

Don Hogan Charles for @NYTimes

Today is Robert Indiana's birthday; the great artist, who died earlier this year, was born on September 13, 1928. I tweeted this quote from former Dallas Museum of Art Director Maxwell Anderson:

He was an artist of consequence who gets mistaken for a one-hit wonder.

Indiana's "one-hit" was, of course, his LOVE sculpture, which the artist himself called "the 20th century's most plagiarized work of art." When Indiana died in May 2018 many of us took the opportunity to see what a great body of work he had produced beyond the one work we all knew.

I'm sure everyone knows where I'm going with this! I happened this morning upon this ICA Classics disc which was released in April 2018, a very fine disc with two superb live recordings never before released on CD:

Both the Schumann and Dvorak cello concertos are quite outstanding, but what really interested me was the bonus piece, a live recording of the Aria from Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5, from the Edinburgh Festival on August 23, 1962. Galina Vishnevskaya sings, and Mstislav Rostropovich leads 7 cellos from the London Symphony Orchestra, in a very special performance.

In my Villa-Lobos life, the "one-hit wonder" part is obvious; promoting the "artist of consequence" part is how I spend much of my time every day.