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Monday, January 24, 2005
Joyful ‘early music’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MUSIC REVIEW: Atlanta Baroque Orchestra
‘Into the High Woods: the Song of the Oboe’
The ‘authentic performance practice’ revival that began in the 1960s — with some widely disseminated recordings by conductor Nicholas Harnoncourt and keyboardist Gustav Leonhardt, among others — reached its peak in the 1980s.
Vibrato-less playing, gut strings, reduced orchestral forces, and occasionally whiz-bang tempos were, if not exactly commonplace, certainly in vogue on international stages, as applied to works of the Baroque and early Classical Periods.
These days the movement has lost its cache among general audiences, but the hard-core soldier lives on. According to the Boston Early Music Group, there are over 1000 ‘early music’ ensembles in North American alone. The Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, founded in 1997, has come late to the party, but is nonetheless well-qualified to join in the festive jousting.
Centering Saturday night’s program at Oglethorpe University (repeated Sunday afternoon at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church) was Germany-based oboist Matthew Peaceman, in the dual role of soloist and guest conductor of a program airily titled ‘Into the High Woods: the Song of the Oboe.’ (The word ‘oboe’ derives from the French ‘hautbois,’ meaning, literally, high wood.)
Peaceman, an American musician who has earned his reputation primarily abroad, showed himself the consummate craftsman, on both the baroque oboe and its slightly lower cousin, the oboe d’amore – both of which require exquisite breath control and solid technical facility.
Most notable were the long, sinuous curlicues he wrapped sweetly around Judith Overcash’s soprano in J. S. Bach’s ‘Wedding Cantata,’ and the tidy, crisp, well-tuned duets with fellow oboist George Riordan in Tommaso Albinoni’s ‘Concerto a Cinque.’
But it seemed that the evening lost momentum as it progressed. Tuning, so crucial on these highly temperamental instruments, seemed to slip, as did crispness of execution.
That said, there persisted an attractive esprit de corps among these 20 or so musicians, comprising strings, flutes, oboes, bassoon, harpsichord and percussion. Harmonic suspensions were stretched with heartfelt intensity; call-and-response dialog between sections was mutually, wonderfully sensitive. It’s unfortunate that only a tiny audience shared in what was clearly ABO’s own joy in intimate, Baroque music-making.
WHERE: Oglethorpe University, Conant Performing Arts Center, Saturday Jan. 22 at 8 p.m.
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A comic alchemy blends medieval and modern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: ‘Incorruptible’
Times are bad at the monastery of Priseaux, France, in about 1250 A.D. The chapter house’s relics of St. Foy no longer produce miracles, and the revenue-generating pilgrims have stopped coming.
To compete against a rival church that suddenly emerges as the hot spot for saintly bones, the good brothers desperately turn to a one-eyed minstrel’s gruesome and fraudulent scheme that’s soon earning big bucks.
In Michael Hollinger’s farcical ‘Incorruptible,’ now playing at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, the medieval Catholic world of miracles, veneration of saints and the selling of indulgences mixes with the contemporary ethics of the global economy. Enron-style morality and religious hucksterism draw laughs along with Catholic jokes that were likely threadbare 1,000 years ago. But their comic power remains.
Plays of this type depend on transportation of modern idiom to ancient times, and ‘Incorruptible’ handles this deftly. Some may find the play sacrilegious, but the satire in the end renders a few glancing blows rather than deep cuts.
Billed as a farce, the play, dirrected by August Staub, turns on a few humorous gags concerning the need for an ‘Incorruptible,’ the body of someone so holy that it doesn’t decay after death. Yet the play fails to achieve the full comic absurdity of classics of the genre.
The strongest element of the production is Hugh Adams’ antic performance as the one-eyed minstrel Jack. With his mobile, leering features and loony, slow-talking baritone, Adams cavorts across the stage grandly, then throttles down to quiet introspection, playing this Jack like the king of the tribe, the esteemed Mr. Nicholson.
The rest of the cast can’t match Adams’ range. As Brother Charles, the sad-sack head of the monastery, David Milford slouches around the stage in monk’s robes and worn sandals, but fails to register the full range of Charles’ journey from disillusion to renewed faith.
Portraying the Machivellian Brother Martin, Troy Willis displays the right mixture of creepiness and dogmatic correctness.
Jenn Duran as Marie, Jack’s love interest, radiates energy as the modern liberated woman cast back into that most unliberated of eras for women. Her slapstick routines with Adams display virtuoso timing, and she gets one of the evening’s best laughs with a joke about the rhythm method.
Karen Howell as the Mother Superior of the Priseau monastery’s rival order delivers a needed comic jolt in the last act. Resplendent and gorgeous in her old-fashioned sister’s getup, she with her display of total confidence and moral relativism takes her character beyond the well-worn stereotypical nun. She and Charles engage in an amusing exchange of Latin insults (scholars will understand their vulgarity), and she zings him with the observation “you should know by now that miracles make saints, not the other way around.â€?
Moving from a passive, almost mentally feeble character in the first act to a dominant one by the end, Bryan Mercer as Brother Felix lacks Adams’ versatility, but he exudes a quiet authority as the one character who remains true to his ideals.
After satirizing human venality and greed throughout the evening, the play ends in a rousing affirmation of human good more in the spirit of a Baptist hymn than medieval Catholicism. Adams, Milford and Willis reach their highest chemistry in making the transformation believable and moving, sending the audience home with a warm feeling that softens the comic bite.
Where: Theatre in the Square, Marietta, through Feb. 27
Times: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays (no 7 p.m. show Feb. 27; a 2:30 p.m. matinee Feb. 24.)
Tickets: $18-$32
Verdict: A comic alchemy of medieval society and modern Enron ethics.
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