Home > ATLarts > Archives > 2008 > May > 18
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Fringe Finishes its Debut Season
CONCERT REVIEW Fringe Atlanta. Saturday at Church of the Redeemer. www.fringeatlanta.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s hard to decide what Fringe Atlanta does best. Is it the committed, sometimes superb, chamber-music performances — or the presentation of those concerts?
The Fringe paradigm might be this: classical music, if well played, remains vibrant and engrossing, but the formality and ceremony of most classical concerts turns off audiences in our modern a go-go world.
So across its four-concert inaugural season, which ended Saturday night, Fringe retained what works and shucked what doesn’t. It has proved a savvy strategy: loosen audience inhibitions and heighten anticipation for the actual music-making. It’s irreverent only for people who revere rituals over music.
The cause of classical music’s increased marginalization in America has led to much hand-wringing among its devotees. With a predominantly under-40 audience and a sold-out house Saturday — and more than 80% of capacity across four concerts — it’s impossible to imagine that aspects of the Fringe model won’t soon be copied by classical groups everywhere.
Notably, in the program Mozart’s G minor Viola Quintet and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 received equal billing with the evening’s other artists.
Nashville photographer Jeremy Cowart’s stylized, plasticized portraits of rural Africans hung on the lobby walls. Jennifer Mitchell, a local composer who moonlights under the club moniker DJ Little Jen, spun ambient sounds during the breaks. Her opening set sounded libidinous and skrunky — is that a word? — riding on a thumping sex-and-sweat bassline.
“Jeu” and “The Man Without a Shadow,” two wordless, short films by Georges Schwizgebel, an award-winning Swiss-Canadian animator, told fables of urban life and its ennui using bright Henri Matisse colors.
Then came slick, shabby-chic infomercial-style musician interviews. These aren’t deep conversations but designed to pique the first-time listener’s attention, touching on the performers’ lives and what to expect from the music. Israeli cellist Roy Harran, for example, revealed that his cello, which is too fragile to check with luggage and requires an airline seat, has its own frequent-flier miles.
Yet when Mozart and Shostakovich finally arrived, they weren’t an afterthought.
Violinist and music director Fia Mancini Durrett, like her colleagues a prominent local freelancer, recruited strong players. In the Mozart, with violists Tania Maxwell Clements and Virginia Respess singing the soulful middle voices, the group found the quintet’s melancholy joy and other powerful yet vaguely defined emotional states.
In the Shostakovich — played by Durrett, violinist Helen Kim, Clements and Harran — they held tight to the composer’s inner torments which shadow the quartet. But in the brief, wrenching, all-consuming firestorm that’s the work’s most unforgettable episide, the players couldn’t dig deep enough, couldn’t find an edge lethal enough to communicate a lifetime of regrets and a (Soviet) culture that devoured its own.
Still, Fringe is on a path to reinventing the classical concert — not by updating the repertoire with contemporary music, but by how the old classics are offered once the lights go down.
The most radical shift in all this is how Fringe empowers its audience. People applauded after every movement of a work, no one shushed the occasional whisperer, beer and wine helped take the edge off, and no one gave bathroom visits during the performance a second thought. Also, the music was available for free download the next morning.
In recent decades, when concert rites ossified and the repertoire rarely included music composed after the early 20th century, the performers, by default, held a dominant position. Among other complications, this led to passive audiences who sat quietly, applauded at prescribed times and knew their role as a paying support group for the folks up on stage. This is a bit of a generalization, but I think not so far off the mark.
Fringe’s casual scene means that it is incumbent on the musicians, moment by moment, to earn your rapt attention. Their plan might not work with the subtlest pieces of music, or with works that yield its secrets only with very focused attention. They’ve offered a few recent works across their debut season, but little of it left an impact. No, what Fringe does well — repackage the old classics for a new audience — it does very well.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Classical Music
