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Thursday, January 27, 2005
Rare Jewish Cantata by Emory Early Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concert Review
Emory Early Music Ensemble. Thursday at Emory University’s Cannon Chapel. www.arts.emory.edu.
What’s not to love when serious scholarship meets spirited performance?
The Emory Early Music Ensemble devoted half its concert to an extreme rarity, a sacred Jewish cantata from 1733 called “Lift Up Your Voices, Sing and Rejoice.”
How rare? The manuscript had been buried in a Moscow library, rediscovered only in 1964.
Emory artist-in-residence Matthew Peaceman, an oboist who lives in Germany and who edited the score, knows of no previous American performances, although in modern times it’s been heard in Israel and Germany. (The run-through Wednesday night at The Temple, in Midtown, might have been the U.S. premiere.)
The 55-minute cantata was originally intended as part of a long night vigil on the eve of Hosha’na Rabbath, an extension of the Yom Kippur day of atonement. The venue was the synagogue in the Piedmont town of Casale Monferrato, in Northern Italy.
The cantata retains its mystery. The libretto, by S. H. Jarash, concerns Judgment Day. The music was likely cobbled together from various pre-existing sources; most of its composers remain unidentified.
In Peaceman’s introductory words to the large audience at Emory’s Cannon Chapel, he was a little too severe. He warned us that the music isn’t first-rate, and that it is audibly similar to contemporaries Bach, Handel and Telemann — the international Baroque style — and lacking unique character. Still, it’s a work from a culturally enlightened era, where Jews and gentiles could collaborate in open artistic exchange. And cultural politics aside, it’s another window into the perennially fascinating Baroque world, an indicator of the extent (and uses for) the common musical vocabulary.
The cantata, sung in Hebrew, is in 16 sections. Three vocal soloists — countertenor (here it was Khaemille Parham), tenor (Brent Runnels) and bass (Yosuke Normura) — sing recitatives, arias and duets. The numbers are connected by a spoken narration. A big chorus brings it to a close.
The Emory players — mostly students with a few local professionals, all led by Peaceman — were scrappy but kept the music moving. Who knows? It might have been a lot worse at the 1733 premiere.
The concert started with music by Antonio Vivaldi. For a G Major Sinfonia (RV 149), the student string ensemble deployed a mostly “historically informed” performance style, with lean bow strokes and no vibrato. That the style often sounded similar to the lean, edgy modernist ideals suggests it is impossible to go back in history and know how it sounded to Vivaldi’s audience.
For Vivaldi’s Concerto in C (RV 87), Peaceman was oboe soloist and Jody Miller played recorder. Backed by five musicians, they soared and glided through the saltatory solo lines, with energy and virtuosity in abundance.
Just before intermission, a student recorder quintet played four instrumental pieces by Salomon Rossi, who was born about 1570, almost a century before Vivaldi. These were exquisitely crafted, brightly appealing, and brief.
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
‘Brass Birds Don’t Sing’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: ”Brass Birds Don’t Sing.”
What’s eating Janet and Anna Withers? The dysfunctional sisters at the center of Samm-Art Williams’ ”Brass Birds Don’t Sing” behave as if they are criminals in hiding. But as the play unspools, we discover that they are the victims.
They lost their parents in the Holocaust and were recruited for one of the more bizarre experiments of the Nazi regime. Nearly 20 years later in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, their attempt to pass as ”good old red-blooded American girls from Maryland” becomes a nightmare of false accusations, persecution and violence.
At its core, this world premiere co-production by Jewish Theatre of the South and True Colors Theatre is about the kind of ignorance and paranoia that fueled Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts. It’s set in 1964 —- that skittish time when the Cold War was at its height and the terror of JFK’s assassination was fresh.
Hounded by a washed-up, cigar-puffing reporter (Jon Kohler) who suspects them of collaborating with the Nazis, Anna (Mira Hirsch) and Janet (Courtney Patterson) are harassed and raped, burglarized and spied upon. Williams, a deft comic writer (”The Dance on Widow’s Row”) who was nominated for a Tony Award for his 1979 hit ”Home,” here appears to be writing under the influence of film noir and Tennessee Williams.
Frigid and fragile, yet nagging, Anna is combination of Laura and Amanda Wingfield, while loose and boozy Janet echoes Blanche and Maggie. There’s even a gentleman caller in the person of next-door neighbor Pete (Jeff Portell).
Aided by an excellent cast, directors Kenny Leon and Amy Feinberg make the most of this troubling, and troubled, drama. A suspenseful potboiler spiked with the kind of bitchy repartee that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford made famous, ”Brass Birds” feels like a sophomoric effort and often defies logic.
For instance; We are led to believe that Anna and Janet, in their desperate attempt to assimilate, have erased their Polish accents. That certainly makes things easier on the actors. But, come on, not a trace?
By contemporary standards, these sisters exist in a world where xenophobia was rampant, premarital sex was taboo and support groups were nonexistent. But in fabricating their identities and denying their past, their lives become much more complicated than necessary. New York, circa 1964, was a safe haven for refugees of all kinds, so you wonder why Anna and Janet don’t just tell the truth and seek out the sympathy they deserve.
Hirsch, founding artistic director of Jewish Theatre of the South, hasn’t performed publicly since 1996. Easily the best thing about this show, she finds great pathos in the damaged, heartbreakingly romantic Anna. We’d like to see her onstage more often.
Portell (who played the lead in Actor’s Express’ ”Killer Joe”) is a sweetly awkward Pete, taking grape sodas and chocolates to his love interest, exploding in rage when he learns he’s been deceived by his best friend, Lenny (Christopher Ekholm).
Flawed but fascinating, ”Brass Birds” never sings, but it does end on a note of tentative hope. In the end, Jewish Theatre of the South and True Colors deserve credit for turning a horrific Holocaust footnote into drama.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays. Through Feb. 13. $18-$26. ; discounts for students and senior citizens. Jewish Theatre of the South, 5342 Tilly Mill Road, Dunwoody. 770-395-2654, www.atlantajcc.org.
The verdict: A fascinating failure.
Permalink | | Categories: Theater
Aurora’s ‘Waving Goodbye’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: ”Waving Goodbye.”
Jamie Pachino’s ”Waving Goodbye” examines age-old questions about art’s permanence and life’s fragility, yet each moment crackles with originality.
The intimate, coming-of-age drama’s regional premiere at the Aurora Theatre in Duluth achieves rare theatrical elegance. Past and present commingle without a loss of clarity in the production directed by Freddie Ashley, literary associate at the Alliance Theatre.
First produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, ”Waving Goodbye” is a throwback to the classic American dramas of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The characters define themselves in complex, well-developed language recalling that era. The play is funny —- especially when it skewers artists’ pretensions —- as well as heartbreaking.
Meredith Woolard, a recent Florida State University graduate, portrays 17-year-old emerging photographer Lily Blue with all of the aching, questioning, vulnerable tenderness of a sensitive child on the shore of adulthood. Lily is haunted by the ghost of her mountain-adventurer father, who has recently died in an accident, and vexed by the return of her mother, Amanda, a once-brilliant sculptor who abandoned her years earlier.
Lily loves the leaking, deteriorating New York loft that is her childhood home. But Amanda wants to sell the junk-cluttered place. In teen uniform of jeans and T-shirt, her lovely face flushed with emotion, Lily wails, ”Girl in the middle of a catastrophe, that’s who I’ll be, for always.”
As Amanda, Joan Croker shows the essence of the self-absorbed, irresponsible artist who’s turned against her work. Amanda’s unclear about what she wants and zigzags across the stage in what is her coming-of-age story as much as her daughter’s.
Lily enters into an awkward, tentative relationship with Boggy, another abandoned late adolescent. A brilliant, artistic sprite, Boggy copes by telling brilliant riddles, and Chris Moses invests him with maturity and sensitivity.
As the only adult character in the play who willingly accepts responsibility, Patricia French gives a rich, nuanced performance as the cynical, hard-bitten but inwardly vulnerable Perry, the owner of an art gallery.
Portraying the ghost of a man haunting his family, Allen Hagler defines father Jonathan as the modern male who never quite grows up.
Designed by Tommy Cox, the set brilliantly shapes ”Waving Goodbye’s” themes of loss, growth, love and regret. The need to frame art is a recurring motif, and two wooden pieces at the back of the stage resemble the familiar, grooved pieces of a picture frame. The structure also serves as the loft’s roof and, in Amanda’s imagination, a mountain.
Early in the play, Amanda exclaims, ”The way up is easy, it’s the way down that’s impossible.”’ ”Waving Goodbye” makes the return journey of healing just as thrilling.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through Feb. 13. $18-$22 Aurora Theatre, 3087-B Main St., Duluth. 770-476-7926, www.auroratheatre.com.
The verdict: A sensitive coming-of-age drama full of theatrical power.
Permalink | | Categories: Theater
The Arcade Fire plays Variety Playhouse
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The opening act Wednesday at Variety Playhouse was a good-natured singer/violinist who performed under the name Final Fantasy. Near the end of his set, he thanked the crowd for showing up in time to hear him since they had all really come to see headliners The Arcade Fire.
“We’re here for you,” someone in the audience shouted, in a showing of moral support.
“Well,” Mr. Fantasy said, “you guys are stupid or something. Have you heard The Arcade Fire? Are you aware of what they sound like?”
Oh yes. We were aware.
The Arcade Fire only has one full-length album, 2004’s wildly acclaimed “Funeral,” but the band’s momentum is serious enough that Wednesday’s show was sold-out well in advance.
It deserved to be. With seven people on stage, the Montreal post-punk collective summoned a jagged roar that sounded at once like a circus attraction and a symphony.
This was a band untroubled by ego or convention. The members swapped instruments and stage positions througout the night, trading lead vocalists, alternating between English and French lyrics, and occasionally yelling in a wonderfully ragged seven-part harmony.
It seemed childlike but not childish, the work of a young band that clearly still appreciates the thrill of creation.
One member, a reedy and bespectacled redhead named Richard Reed Parry, played so many instruments it was hard to keep track. The list included the electric bass, keyboard, accordion, a single drum and a tambourine. Late in the set, he used a drumstick to beat a motorcycle helmet.
The band’s material ranged from an ethereal ballad about riding in the backseat of a car to a knockout rocker about losing power in an ice storm.
After awhile, it became clear that The Arcade Fire’s biggest asset is its dimension. Some perfectly good bands — like, say, The Strokes — get by doing one thing well. But with its wild instrumentation, its distinct singers and its odd songforms, The Arcade Fire has the unusual capacity to surprise and stimulate the listener in a more complete way. This band tickles the entire ear.
Near the end of the show, during the ice storm song “Power Out,” the two onstage violinists (including Final Fantasy) made a sound like a jet engine taking off. The noise worked in context with the song’s surging melody, and it also seemed like an apt metaphor for the trajectory of this strange and wonderful new band.
Check out photos from The Arcade Fire sold out performance.
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