lies like truth

My life has been a bit of a blur between returning from working for the music division at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and preparing for the Public Radio Program Directors Conference in Las Vegas, where I head tomorrow morning.

Consequently, I haven’t been able to absorb as many San Francisco Fringe Festival shows as I’d have liked to. But here at least is one production I can recommend — Cantata #40 and Other Short Works:

Local playwright and actor Linda Ayres-Frederick’s trio of short plays about chance encounters of various kinds is both thoughtful and fun.

“The Avignon Affair,” the first drama, is the strongest of the three playlets and the mostly tightly performed by Heidi Wolf and Dennis McIntyre. It focuses on a chance encounter between a youngish Jewish American woman and an elderly French screenplay writer on a train heading to Avignon in France. The fluctuations of chemistry and coyness that pass between the two characters make for a compelling twenty minutes of theatre and by the end we want to know if the pair will meet again. The middle play, which takes

The middle play is “Cantata #40,” which follows the fortunes of a high school student’s choir trip to Germany where the ensemble performs J S Bach’s music with great aplomb. This solo piece is performed by the strong-featured Wolff, who inhabits the role of a teenage girl in Berlin Wall-era Germany deeply and is a wonderful storyteller. But at the same time the actress manages to give a rather self-conscious performance. The narrative is an intriguing one, though could perhaps do with some editing on the playwright’s part: Despite all the rules, the protagonist ends up going off alone with a couple of bossy German boys and at times we wonder if she’s going to make it through Checkpoint Charlie and back to the rest of her school party in one piece.

The third and final play in the triptych, “Bunny Beware,” left me rather baffled. Wolff does a great job of personifying a hard-bitten, pea-shucking, Southern farm gal. McIntyre is rather less convincing as an oversized Easter Bunny. I’m not sure what the relationship between the two characters is supposed to be, besides adversorial, but it struck me that maybe there were some line memorizing or blocking issues the afternoon I saw the show which prevented the play from making a whole lot of sense. Still, taken as a whole, and assuming the cast and director have ironed out the problems since the opening (which is when I experienced it), this fanciful trio of plays is definitely worth catching at the Fringe.

Additional performances are happening at Exit Stage Left on September 15 at 7.30 and September 16 at 4.30. Tickets cost $10. Go here for more information.

One of my final acts as a hired gun at the Library of Congress’s music division this summer was to help the concert office produce a podcast to advertise its upcoming season.

The challenge was to create a piece that was short and packed with information. Most significantly in terms of attempting to hook in listeners, I further made it my mission to create something that wasn’t simply a spoken press release.

With the help of my colleagues, I came up with a script that used a few season highlights as a prism through which to provide listeners with some “insider perspective” on how the Library of Congress’s concerts division operates.

Hence, in the podcast, which I hosted and which can be heard by clicking here, I asked Anne McLean, Loras Schissel and Nicholas Brown of the music division to answer questions about things like the Library’s eminent commissioning process, its methodology for working with artists and the way in which the institution often uses the gems in its archives as the basis for its live programming. The line of questioning was meant to reveal something of the inner workings of the Library while at the same time doing the job of letting people know about upcoming events.

I don’t know how successful this “advertorial” approach is, but it was definitely worth a try. I’d be interested in hearing feedback on it in any case.

It’s official: the classical music revolution has arrived.

I think there can be no greater sign of this than the advent of the upcoming music festival created by Classical Revolution, a grassroots collective of professional-level, mostly classically-trained instrumentalists across the country.

Up until a few months ago, I would have called Classical Rev an “underground” organization. Its presence has mostly revolved around scrappy classical music jams in cafes and other small venues in urban centers like San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

But things are definitely moving in an overground direction now.

Not only is the upcoming festival going on for several weeks, but it also involves some pretty big venues not traditionally associated with classical music.

Yoshi’s jazz club will host the Musical Art Quintet and Quartet San Francisco on September 9; on September 11, the Bay Area’s most prominent folk venue, the Freight and Salvage, is staging a concert featuring trumpeter Erik Jekabson and the Musical Art Quintet; plus — and this is perhaps the most surprising and gratifying news of all — two big rock music auditoriums, The Fillmore and The Great American Music Hall, will present performances featuring The Classical Revolution Orchestra and guests on September 26 and 27.

And here’s the kicker: The Bay Area’s classical radio station, KDFC, which is known primarily as a purveyor of famous works by big name, commercially successful classical artists and only occasionally delves into less well known repertoire and musicians, is sponsoring the festival.

All of the above augers well for the inventiveness and audience-building potential of classical music in these parts. I am excited for the event, which runs from September 7 to 27.

More information about the Classical Revolution Festival can be found here.

The Library of Congress’s Music Division looks like the archetypal government institution. The walls are beige. There’s little natural light. The staff cubicles and reader study desks are uniformly drab and quiet.

Yet I’m learning that this unremarkable-seeming place is a repository for all kinds of weird and wonderful things that belie the colorless aspect of the surroundings.

I’m not just talking about the panoply of fascinating and often priceless instruments, musical scores, photographs, letters and books that form the cornerstone of the Music Division’s 20 million item-strong archive.

There are in fact dozens of bizarre objects lying around that might, upon closer study, reveal interesting details about the people who donated these items to the collection.

Here are some of my favorite examples that fall into this category:

Danny Kaye’s parachute.

Niccolo Paganini’s ravioli recipe.

Francis Scala’s whiskers. (Scala was the leader of the marine band when Abraham Lincoln was in the White House).

Aaron Copeland’s Rolodex.

I had a conversation yesterday with a guy, Chris, who works in the department that processes the new collections upon arrival at the Library. Chris tells me that it’s not unusual for his team to find unlikely things in the boxes upon opening them. Apparently a shipment from the MacDowell Colony contained a bunch of leaves. And more than one container from a donor has featured human teeth.

 

Artists as diverse as John Gay and Bono have long used the stage as a pulpit from which to preach a political, religious or social message.

Al Green has come to realize the power of sharing his views on the Holy Ghost in front of a massive stadium audience quite late in the game.

The legendary soul singer turned preacher has no trouble filling his church in Memphis with legitimate worshippers and brown-nosing tourists on Sundays. But now that he’s once again returned his attentions at least part time to secular R&B, the Reverend Green is not holding back on sharing the word of God.

And there must have been a great deal of satisfaction for him in being able to share it with the more than 7,000 people that packed the Filene Center at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts on Friday night, where the performer gave a summer concert before an extremely diverse audience of fans.

As energetic and charismatic a performer as Green is and has always been, I couldn’t help wishing he had toned down the Jesus stuff during his fairly short Wolf Trap set. I guess I wouldn’t have minded as much but for the fact that the singer used snippets from very well known hits like “My Girl” to get people’s attention focused, before abruptly stopping mid-song to ramble on about God.

I ended up wishing that Taj Mahal, the wonderful, understated old bluesman who opened for the much flashier headline act, had been on stage with Green. I think he would have kept the preacher in check. Like the Reverend Green, Taj Mahal also has his roots in gospel music. But he doesn’t let religion rule his music.

There’s an interesting disconnect at the Library of Congress in the way it presents some of its concerts.

The Coolidge auditorium, where the venerable institution’s live music programming generally takes place, is a quintessentially old fashioned concert hall. Built in the 1920s, it is designed to suit passive audiences sitting in the dark watching virtuoso performers on stage and clapping politely when they’re done.

But the music that I’ve been experiencing there this summer couldn’t be less suited to these surroundings. They have all been part of the LOC’s annual, free, summer Homegrown Concert Series, which seeks to present, according to the American Folklife Center which runs them, “the very best of traditional music and dance from a variety of folk cultures thriving in the United States.”

So far while I’ve been here in DC, I’ve heard concerts from a diverse range of musical traditions. The offerings have included Flatpick Guitar and Fiddle Music from Kanawha County, West Virginia; French-Canadian Fiddle Music and Songs from New Hampshire; Traditional Croatian Singing from Washington State; and, just this afternoon, music from the African American Methodist Prayer Meetings and Camp Meetings of Delaware and Maryland (pictured above).

What’s striking to me is that while the lineup includes virtuoso performances, these folk musics are much more about participation than silent observation.

It was impossible to sit still in the frigid Coolidge Auditorium as fiddler Bobby Taylor and guitarists Robert Shafer and Robin Kessinger performed their kinetic songs from Kanawha County, West Virginia two weeks ago. I wanted to stamp my feet, clap my hands and kick down the stiff rows of tombstone-like concert chairs.

And today’s presentation by a devout group of elderly African American singers, “The Singing and Praying Bands of Delaware and Maryland,” couldn’t have been less like a traditional concert. Most of the performers sang with their backs to the audience (they stood in the configuration that they use during a typical church service) and they took a loose, improvisatory approach to the songs. Best of all, the chorus actually encouraged those of us sitting in the stalls to clap, stand up and dance, and join in with the singing, which many people did to varying degrees.

I can’t decide if I like the incongruity of experiencing this kind of programming in this kind of setting or whether it bothers me. Probably a bit of both.

I do wish that the space were more conducive to audience involvement though. As much as I’ve enjoyed most of the music this summer, I’ve mostly felt like I’ve been watching these concert at a distance through the bars of a cage. It’s been rather like staring at monkeys and elephants at the zoo.

 

Sharon Jones, the amazing soul-funk diva whose groovy version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” recently changed my life, performed with her band, The Dap Kings, in a free concert at Williamsburg Park in Brooklyn, NY on Saturday night.

The singer, who is in her 50s, has tremendous energy and a performance style that brings James Brown and Michael Jackson to mind. Thousands turned out to experience the performance, part of a summer series.

At one point, Jones, sporting an egg yellow strappy sun dress, did a colorful “medley” celebrating different old school dance forms from The Pony to The Twist. The performer jumped about the stage aping the dance steps, scatting and riffing as she described the development and feel of each dance form in song.

The setting was a little strange: I’m told that the festival usually takes part in the grassy part of the park. This year, however, owing to noise issues in the neighborhood or somesuch, the stage had been set up in what looked like an enormous paddling pool. The ground was either painted concrete or some kind of epoxy surface. Lounging was out of the question.

While a grassy floor would no doubt have been more atmospheric and comfortable on the toes, the painted surface helped with the acoustics. Jones sounded fantastic. I could hear all of the song lyrics really well. Every drum beat and trumpet blare came across cleanly. All of this is quite unusual for an outdoor music festival setting. If only outdoor music events could find a way to combine a more bucolic environment conducive to picnicking with better sound.

Oh, and on another note, I caught a matinee performance of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway yesterday. I went because I had heard good things and the show is closing in a month. Plus, I wanted to experience Audra McDonald’s performance as Bess.

Playwright Suzan Lori Parks’ editing of The Gershwins’ epic opera is a great way to introduce audiences to the seminal work in a snappy form. It’s “Porgy and Bess Lite.”

The trouble with Parks’ take is that the narrative moves so fast in this truncated form, that it feels schizophrenic. And the mixture of musical theatre and operatic voices, though an interesting combination for a work that has a history of performance on both the Broadway and opera stage, creates a bit of a distraction. Plus, although the lighting is gorgeous, there’s nothing exceptional about the choreography, costumes or set.

Audra McDonald delivers, of course. The scene in which she’s assaulted by Crown (a savagely impressive and profusely sweating Phillip Boykin) following a bucolic day out with the Catfish Row community, has to be one of the most intense and frightening scenes I’ve ever seen on the musical theatre stage.

The most pleasant discovery for me, however, was Norm Lewis’ Porgy. I was unfamiliar with the actor before seeing him in action yesterday afternoon. He gave a sensitive performance, and, oh, what a voice Lewis has. I could feel his low notes in the bass of my spine and his upper register was sweet and soulful. The chemistry between Lewis’ Porgy and McDonald’s Bess was subtle and strong.

It’s interesting to read in Forbes about Beck’s new album, which the indie pop star is releasing…wait for it…as a bunch of pieces of sheet music.

Forbes hails the singer-songwriter’s efforts as “a genius innovation that appeals to the user-generated generation.”

Beck is essentially imitating something that classical composers have been doing for hundreds of years. So to call his endeavors “innovative” is rather overstating things. He’s really just reinventing the wheel.

Beck’s reinvention, however, does provide great grist for the mill regarding a project that I’m currently working on under the auspices of VoiceBox, the weekly syndicated public radio series about the human voice which I host and produce.

VoiceBox has teamed up with Salon97, a very cool organization headed by violinist and classical music aficionado Cariwyl Hebert which creates listening parties, multimedia materials and other cool stuff for classical music fans in the Bay Area, to propose an exciting presentation all about composers and innovation for the South By South West Festival next Spring.

Our panel proposal, Bach to Business: Great Composers and Creativity, aims to explore how six great composers from diverse backgrounds approach the art of productivity and what we can learn from their habits. Beck isn’t Jean Sibelius or Henry Burleigh, but somehow I think he’ll figure into our discussion.


Please vote for our presentation topic by clicking on the “thumbs up” icon in the left nav of The SXSW Panel Picker Web Page. And feel free to share the link by hitting the Facebook and Twitter icon on the same page. If our proposal gets enough votes, it will make it onto the SXSW schedule. We need your help to make this happen. Thank you for taking the time to cast your vote!

Incongruity can be a powerful thing when it comes to creating memorable arts experiences.

The lively dissonance I experienced by chance over the weekend when a friend and I stumbled upon an outdoor contemporary dance performance at a vineyard which was serving pulled pork sandwiches and “Oreo cookie balls” alongside glasses of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc will stay with me for a long while.

Hats off to Pollak Vineyards for experimenting with this unusual format for the first time and to the dance company concorDance contemporary of Charlottesville, VA for boldly presenting a series of short works in a challenging if rather magical environment.

Dancing in on concrete is no fun, but the dancers acquitted themselves well in a program of diverse moods and styles which ranged from the lighthearted, jazz-inflected Dream Suite choreographed by Veronica Hart to music by Dave Brubeck, to Conversations on Olympus, a thoughtful-graceful series of studies by the San Diego-based choreographer Ryan Beck to music by Sigur Ros.

Oh, and the BBQ was fantastic too.

No sojourn in the Washington DC area can be considered complete without a visit to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, I’d heard on many occasions in the past.

The open air, wood-constructed auditorium located some 20 miles outside of the city is the main place to go around here in the summer to experience high profile acts from Wilco to the NSO at a relatively low price.

Picnicking on the lawn is the way to do things and tickets to spread out on the grass cost only $25, which is fantastic value, I think.

The only trouble with Wolf Trap this season (or perhaps this is the trouble every season) is that it’s quite hard to find programming that’s worthy of making the trek out to deepest darkest Virginia to experience. The economics of running a seasonal organization of this scale coupled with the longstanding tradition for arts organizations of offering light fare in the summer months necessitates a lot of crowd pleasing stuff, whether that’s Il Divo singing pop medleys or the sing-along Sound of Music.

That being said, Wolf Trap is a magical place to spend an evening with friends experiencing music in the open air. And the concert I saw last night by The Gypsy Kings was on the whole pretty terrific.

What struck me was the diversity of the audience attracted by the Latin beats of the band, which has been going since 1979. There were people of all ages, both genders and many ethnic backgrounds, all swaying and clapping in the packed auditorium. I haven’t seen the like since Lady Gaga’s gig at the Oakland Coliseum last spring.

The sound from the lawn wasn’t very good (I was standing right at the front of this area.) The guitars came over in a sort of indistinguishable mulch and I would have particularly liked to hear a cleaner audio quality during some of the lead guitarists ingenious, fast-fingered solo passages. But Tonino Baliardo’s pungently throaty and emotional singing managed to soar over the limitations of the sound system anyway.

By the end of the concert, which featured a combination of lesser known songs and crowd-pleasing hits like “Bamboleo”, “Djobi Djoba” and the Kings’ famous version of “My Way,” the entire house was on its feet. The atmosphere was sweaty and euphoric.

Oh, and one more thing I noticed for the first time about the Gypsy Kings at this concert: Regardless of the type of song that the band is playing, they pretty much perform at one tempo — a moderate salsa. Perhaps this partly explains the group’s popularity. You can move to their music, which is rhythmically dense and harmonically / melodically complex, without tripping over your feet. There’s an easy spaciousness about it that makes even the most two-left-footed listener feel comfortable about strutting their stuff.

I wonder, though, if salsa pros like it as much to dance to as lay people?

The Athenaeum must be one of the loveliest hidden delights of Boston.

I went there over the weekend while I was in town recording an episode of VoiceBox about street musicians with my friend, Sophia, who is a member. I doubt I would have even noticed the inconspicuous stone building wedged between other more imposing edifices in downtown Boston had I not been in the company of someone in the know. I’m so glad we went in.

The Boston Athenaeum is a membership library founded in 1807. With its tall, wooden shelves of old books, big windows and spacious tables and armchairs, it reminds me a bit a similar institution in San Francisco, The Mechanics Institute, which I used to call my “office” when I first started freelancing in The Bay Area back in the early 2000s.

One very visible advantage that The Athenaeum has over The Mechanics Institute is the art collection, which dates back to 1827. It’s both magnetic and rather eccentric.

For one thing, many of the paintings are hung on the very narrow, twisty-turny corridor walls of the library. So one is forced to view much of the collection from up close. This enables you to notice things you might not have noticed had you stood at the usual distance of several feet away.

For example, in “Trying on Furs,” one of my favorite oil paintings by the twentieth century artist Polly (Ethel) Thayer, a slovenly-looking woman sits droopy eyed with one hand on a knee and the other dangling loosely across the back of the chair. When you’re close to the picture, you’re more likely to notice a sliver of bare leg peaking out above the top of a brown stocking and the fact that the woman isn’t wearing a wedding ring. A whole narrative opens up before our eyes standing a few inches away from the canvas.

The other thing I love about the art collection at the Athenaeum is its sense of humor. Take “Going Going Gone,” the line of miniatures shown above by Alexander Brook, depicting a woman in various states of undress. The oil paintings tell a simple story in a tongue-in-cheek way. And they’re hung on a rich aubergine alcove in one of the nest-like reading rooms. What fun to sit there in an antique armchair reading some dusty, philosophical tome while the lady in the pictures above one’s head is busy getting out of her leggings!

 

As I wandered around The Phillips Collection‘s monthly evening “party”, it struck me, as it so often does at these things, that the formula is getting tired.

The milling around, the live band / DJ, the cash bar, the weeknight social hours, the food trucks…all draw hordes of people in. Last night’s event was sold out.

But at the end of the day, very little sets these museum shindigs apart from each other except the art. And therein lies the problem.

The events should be a way to draw in new people and get them hooked on the collections and special exhibitions. The Phillips Collection is extraordinary in this regard. Few small museums offer such a wealth of masters. Everywhere I looked, the walls were plastered with iconic Monets, Braques, Modiglianis, Calders and Degases.

But I walked around observing people, as I do when I go to similar events at the various museums in the Bay Area, New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere, I noticed that barely anyone was actually looking at the art.

There’s nothing wrong with museums being social spaces, of course. It’s just that people can socialize in any bar or club. It’s not everywhere that you can engage with artistic endeavor of the highest caliber. That’s what museums and galleries are for.

At some point in the not too distant future, I expect visitors will start to get a bit bored with the evening hours “party” formula that’s become part and parcel of nearly every urban art museum’s offerings for the past ten years or so in the States and Europe. Events like Phillips at 5 may cease to be sold out.

That might not be a bad thing. At least it’ll force the museums to become more creative about how to get people to actually engage with the art.