Summertime with the King of Instruments

Every summer, when many of Charlotte's musical operations go on vacation, the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists helps save us from a musical drought. 



From June through August, members of the group and  guests perform a free concert each Sunday night. This year's series begins Sunday with a recital by Kevin Neel, a Fort Mill native who graduated from Indiana University's School of Music. 


The series lets music lovers sample some of the most powerful musical instruments in the area, from the venerable ones at Covenant Presbyterian and Myers Park Baptist to the 2006  instrument at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church (photo by Diedra Laird). The instrument Neel will play Sunday, at Unity Presbyterian Church in Fort Mill, was built in 1936 by one of the most prestigious makers of the day, E.M. Skinner. Its original home was a church in Salisbury. 


A handful of guest musicians, including Charlotte Symphony members, will pitch in occasionally. There will also be an Anglican Evensong service and a choral concert. Here's the schedule: 


June 3: Kevin Neel. Unity Presbyterian Church, 303 Tom Hall St., Fort Mill. Neel, a Fort Mill native, is organist at First Christian Church in Bloomington, Ind. 


June 10: Patrick Pope with Hollis Ulaky, oboe; Laurel Talley, violin; Amy Orsinger Whitehead, Flute; and Tadd Hoffman, trumpet. Holy Comforter Episcopal Church, 2701 Park Road. Pope is the church's organist and director of music.  


June 17: Matthew Noonan. Central United Methodist Church, 801 S. Hayne St., Monroe. Music by J.S. Bach. 


June 24: Patrick Scott. Myers Park United Methodist Church, 1501 Queens Road. Scott is the church's organist. 


July 1: Audrey McConnell. South Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church, 8601 Bryant Farms Road, Charlotte. McConnell is the church's organist. 


July 8 at 4 p.m.: Royal School of Church Music Evensong. Myers Park Baptist Church, 1900 Queens Road. 


July 15: Student recital featuring winners of the Stigall Organ Scholarship. St. John's Baptist Church, 300 Hawthorne Lane. 


July 22: Timothy Belk. Convenant Presbyterian Church, 1000 E. Morehead St. Belk is the organist of First Presbyterian Church, Gastonia. Works by Guilmant, Elgar, Shearing and others. 


July 29: Timothy Smith. Purity Presbyterian Church, 135 Wylie St., Chester. Smith is parish musician at Christ Episcopal Church, Lancaster, S.C. 


Aug. 5: Nathaniel Gumbs. Myers Park Baptist Church. Gumbs is organist of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. 


Aug. 12: Adam Ward, with violist Martha Geisler. Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, 3400 Beatties Ford Road. Ward is organist of Providence United Methodist Church. 


Aug. 19: Lester Ackerman, organist. St. Mark's Lutheran Church, 1001 Queens Road. Ackerman is the church's organist. 


Aug. 26: Choirs of Covenant Presbyterian Church and Myers Park United Methodist Church, with organ, brass and percussion. Covenant Presbyterian Church. 

Spoleto: A weekend in the country with Coward

CHARLESTON -- Maybe all the world's a stage. But the Bliss family has all the theatrical arena it needs in its own home. 


The matriarch, Judith, has retired from her acting career, so now she has to content herself with strutting and fretting across the drawing room. Her drama-queen urges have seeped into the rest of the family: husband David, a novelist whose commercial success has installed them in a country manor; son Simon, a would-be artist whose idea of dressing for dinner involving donning a matador jacket; and daughter Sorel, a man-magnet who's clear-eyed enough to see that everyone they know thinks the family is bizarre. 


Noel Coward takes us for a weekend at their home in "Hay Fever," he sendup of the actors and bohemians he must've know by the boatloads during his decades as a globe-trotting playwright, actor and bon vivant. 


Another of Coward's comedies, "Present Laughter," had a sellout run at the Spoleto Festival in 2010, when the Gate Theatre -- a longtime favorite here -- came over from Ireland with it. Now the Gate is back with "Hay Fever," which is still wry and high-spirited nearly 90 years after its premiere. Ego, exaggeration and other foibles of the self-consciously artistic haven't disappeared in the meantime, have they? 


In "Present Laughter," Coward has his fun by letting the audience in on a matinee idol's life behind the scenes. "Hay Fever" is a collision between two worlds: the over-the-top Blisses versus a quartet of normal, or relatively normal, houseguests. 


When we meet the Blisses, they're at home by themselves, and they're chafing at it. Judith is even threatening to return to the stage -- because she's appalled that audiences are not clamoring for it. But such worries are forgotten when the Blisses discover that each of them, unbeknownst to the others, has invited a guest -- actually an admirer -- to come for the weekend. 


"Hay Fever" isn't exactly a play within a play. It's more of an interactive theater experience within a play, and the houseguests are on the receiving end. Coward first creates a series of social train wrecks as the visitors arrive and encounter the full-force family. Then he turns the Blisses and their hothouse personas loose on their startled, susceptible domestic audience. By Act 2, the results are even surprising the Blisses.


The Gate's cast carries off a neat trick: playing over-the-top characters while still keeping a light touch. 


Ingrid Craigie shows that Judith always has her creaky thespian skills at her fingertips. One of the most delicious moments is watching social challenged guest Richard -- who, as played by Mark O'Halloran, has all the easy affability of a paper clip -- fall under Judith's heavy-handed spell. 


Stephen Brennan, as the Bliss patriarch, lets you see the moment David switches on the charm with a female guests. When David lapses into second-rate-novelist lingo, Brennan relishes the floridness of telling the woman in his sights that she's "so tall, so magnificent, so (pause) tawny." 


The other tete-a-tetes are just as juicy. Director Patrick Mason and his cast also deliver some set-piece gems. When the shell-shocked houseguest find their way one at a time to the breakfast buffet, their states of mind emerge in the way they eat. And when one of them gets the hiccups, the ensuing scene is one that we've all played -- but never this well. 


Even with detours like that, the opening performance didn't sag. Mason made the first encounters just cringe-worthy enough that the antics could gain speed from there. The cast's gleefulness took care of the rest. 

Spoleto: At home with chamber music

CHARLESTON -- "Welcome to our living room here at the Dock Street Theatre," Geoff Nuttall said. 


He was speaking figuratively. As he introduced Saturday morning's concert, Nuttall -- director of the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival USA -- was onstage as usual. But onstage in the cozy, wood-paneled theater is the next best thing to a living room. That's one of the big reasons that the daily concerts are most always full: music, up close and personal. 


Nuttall, without getting up from his first-violin chair, chatted about and demonstrated high points of Haydn's "Quintet" Quartet before he and the rest of the St. Lawrence String Quartet plunged into it. After Tara Helen O'Connor played a sonic showpiece for flute -- a tone-painting of trains, believe it or not -- Nuttall brought her back to show how she created its sound effects. Switching to his extra-musical role of proud father, Nuttall came out at one point carrying his six-month-old baby. He admitted that it might've been a cheesy thing to do. But a chorus of oohs and ahs greeted him nonetheless. Can you get much homier than that? 


But the zesty performances -- in the first of this year's 11 chamber-music programs -- were what really made the setting count. Nuttall and company put over the drive and gusto of Haydn's quartet as readily as its airiness and lyricism. O'Connor pulled out the stops in Ian Clarke's "Great Train Race" -- spitting air through the flute to imitate the engines' first chugs, firing notes at machine-gun velocity as cruising speed arrived, letting fly with warning-whistle shrieks. Sometimes she even played harmony, which was one of the tricks she explained afterward (created by fingerings that would be wrong in ordinary music). 


The big finish was one of chamber music's fieriest works, Ernest Chausson's "Concert" for piano, violin and string quartet. It's sort of a mini-concerto: the violin and piano in the spotlight, the quartet subbing for the orchestra. If the size is scaled down, though, the drama sure isn't. 


The music is rich, bold and tempestuous, and everyone played it to the hilt.  Livia Sohn's violin solos were ardent, shapely and full. Inon Barnatan set loose cascades of sound from the piano. The quartet provided a sonorous foundation. In the one peaceful interlude -- the gently swinging second movement -- everyone eased up adroitly. And in the slow movement's quiet opening, the group's deep, smoldering sound suggested that more flareups were coming. And they sure did. 

He told stories through song

The deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb attracted most of the attention, so let's take a moment to remember a great classical singer who passed on within a couple of days of them.  


Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died May 18 at age 86, devoted nearly nearly a half-century to the concert hall, opera house and recording studio. The German baritone sang an almost crazily wide range of music, from Baroque cantatas to Verdi and Wagner operas to demanding contemporary works. There was one branch of music that he was identified with above all, though: the German art-song heritage epitomized by Franz Schubert. 


Listen to the young Fischer-Dieskau sing Schubert's "An Die Musik," a song about the joy and comfort that music provides: 








Last month I interviewed Twyla Tharp about "Come Fly Away," her Broadway musical based on recordings by Frank Sinatra. The show needs no dialogue, she said, because Sinatra is the storyteller. Not only was Sinatra "a consummate musician" and "a terrific singer," she said, but "he was a real actor, so when he delivers these lyrics, there's the emotion of a monologue." 


I don't want to push it too far, but she could've been describing Fischer-Dieskau.  Like Sinatra, he could be silky smooth when it suited the song, as you heard in "An die Musik." Especially in his earlier years, his voice's mellowness and luster could seduce the ear. 


But Fischer-Dieskau had a whole range of colors, energy levels and intensities at his command -- right up to a shout for the awful news in Hugo Wolf's "Der Feuerreiter," a song about a mill that's set ablaze by a supernatural horseman. This video doesn't show Fischer-Dieskau as he sings it, but it does supply a line-by-line translation of the spooky text: 








Only once did I hear Fischer-Dieskau in person. It was in 1989, only a few years before he retired from the stage. The program consisted of Schubert duets for baritone and mezzo-soprano, and most of it was unfamiliar to me. 


Because this was in Austria, the printed program didn't supply English translations, and my modest command of German wasn't enough to keep me well in touch with the words. But Fischer-Dieskau could sometimes put over a mood through a facial expression, stance or gesture as much as through the music. 


As an example of what I'm talking about, I'll leave you with a video of him from that same year, 1989, in Brahms' "A German Requiem." He's singing part of the 39th Psalm, talking about how our days are numbered.  He holds the score -- at least, I assume it's the score -- like a minister drawing strength from his Bible.  Even if you don't understand the words, I'll think you'll be able to sense that he's discussing matters of life and death.

Ailey leader on teachers, dance and 'Revelations'

Short of diving into the crowd like a politician on the stump, the leader of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater could hardly have been more outgoing at the company's opening night in Charlotte. Robert Battle even asked Tuesday's audience where to find good barbecue -- and was bombarded with more shouted-out names than he could handle. He let it go before any fights broke out. 


As part of his first season as Ailey's artistic director, Battle is going around with the company making acquaintance with the audiences in its tour cities -- in many of which, including Charlotte, it's a regular visitor. Since the company has a weekend of Knight Theater performances still to go, let's spend a little more time getting to know him. As a sequel to the Observer's advance story on Ailey's visit, here are a few more comments from a recent interview.  (Photo of Battle with his predecessor, Judith Jamison, by Paul Kolnik.) 


On his teachers in Miami schools: As a teenager in the 1980s, living in an inner-city area that was the scene of much-publicized riots, Battle studied dance in a public-school magnet program. He began to believe he had a future in dance because of "a couple of teachers who really took an interest in me and thought I had a gift for dancing. They gave me the courage and inspiration to go deeper. That's a big part of why I'm here -- some great teachers who went beyond the classroom to give me me all the tools I needed to move forward. They went so far as paying out of their own pockets for me to have outside classes and private lessons." 


On leading the Ailey company: Battle took over the company after more than a decade as a choreographer and head of his own group, Battleworks. As his first season as director is winding up, he enjoys travelling with the dancers, "especially to cities where the company has history -- going to see and hear and feel the response to some of the additions I've made to the company's repertoire and to dancers I've hired. To see those dancers experience the Ailey audiences for the first time, and have that reflected back from the audiences, is probably the most rewarding part of the job." 


On modern dance and Ailey's "Revelations": "One of the things I love about modern dance is the humanness of it. Even as we achieve joy onstage, or (embody) the idea of it, you're still rooted on the ground. Gravity is still a factor. There's something poetic about that. At the beginning of "Revelations," when the curtain comes up on the dancers with their arms stretched out and their hands and palms open, showing that vulnerable side, they're rooted on the ground. They're weighted. But their focus is up on the heavens. That creates the idea of hope. And hope isn't devoid of weight. Hope is in spite of it, right? I love that metaphor for dance in general." 

Moving up at N.C. Dance Theatre

Sasha Janes, whose ballet version of "Dangerous Liaisons" recently capped off N.C. Dance Theatre's season, is being bumped up to the rank of associate artistic director. 

Janes is "a future leader," said artistic director Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who made the decision.

Janes, who joined NCDT as a dancer, became the company's rehearsal director as he wound down his performing career. With Bonnefoux's encouragement, he also moved into choreography. While the 50-minute "Dangerous Liaisons" was Janes' largest-scale work to date, Bonnefoux decided to elevate Janes before that was completed, he said.  

In his new role, Janes won't gain any specific new duties, Bonnefoux said. While he'll still be involved the studio, Bonnefoux wants him to reach beyond that -- "to be a part of the whole organization and to see how the whole thing functions, and help me with that." 

"I've seen him in all sorts of situations," Bonnefoux said. "He does very well under pressure. He does very well when he's given a project. ... He knows what he wants to do, and he knows how to accomplish it." 

As associate artistic director, Janes will have the same title as Patricia McBride. Having two people at that same rank isn't new: Jeri Kumery and McBride shared the title for several years after Bonnefoux and McBride came to NCDT. 

  

Janes will choreograph two new works next season. NCDT will also bring back his "Rhapsodic Dances," which it will take to the Kennedy Center in Washington for a dance festival in summer 2013. 

"I really like the way he works with our dancers," Bonnefoux said. "He creates such a nice atmosphere in rehearsal that people give him their best." 

Photo: Melissa Melvin-Rodriguez 

  

Musical menu for this year's Summer Pops

The Charlotte Symphony is less than a month from kicking off its annual Summer Pops. In case your appetite for music under the stars depends on what you'll hear, here's a look at what's in store at SouthPark and the other locations. 


Amid the traditional mixture of light classics, Broadway favorites and Hollywood fare, a few items stand out. 


In the opening concert, Dmitri Shostakovich's arrangement  of "Tahiti Trot" -- better know as "Tea for Two" -- will show that even Shostakovich could have fun when he wasn't brooding about life under Soviet rule. In the second program, Aaron Copland's "Outdoor Overture" will let everyone get acquainted with some Copland beyond the beloved "Appalachian Spring." 


In a salute to France, the finale of Berlioz's "Fantastic Symphony" will let the orchestra go a little wild. And in a less manic mode, three members of the orchestra -- flutist Amy Orsinger Whitehead, clarinetist Eugene Kavadlo and concertmaster Calin Lupanu -- will take turns in the spotlight during the month.


Here are the specifics:  


June 10: "Symphony Park Serenade," Albert-George Schram conducting. Wagner's Prelude to "Die Meistersinger"; excerpts from de Falla's "The Three-Cornered Hat"; Offenbach's "La Vie Parisienne"; Sibelius' "Finlandia"; Alford's "Col. Bogey March"; Shostakovich's "Tahiti Trot" and "Galop"; Mancini's "Songs of Italy"; Wendel's "Fiesta Mexicana"; and  "Tribute to Irving Berlin." Also June 8 at Stumptown Park, Matthews. 


June 17: "Symphonic Passion," Jacomo Rafael Bairos conducting. Beethoven's "Fidelio" Overture; Copland's "Outdoor Overture"; Lecuona's "Malaguena"; de Falla's "Ritual Fire Dance"; excerpts from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet"; excerpts from "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Also June 22 at Duke Energy Explorium, Huntersville. 


June 24: "Vive la France," Schram conducting. 
Bizet's "Farandole"; Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" and "Tarantelle" (featuring flutist Amy Orsinger Whitehead and clarinetist Eugene Kavadlo); Chabrier's "Espana"; "March to the Scaffold" from Berlioz's "Fantastic Symphony"; Ballet Music from Gounod's "Faust"; Ravel's "Bolero." 


July 1: "Three Great American Composers," Schram conducting. Bernstein's overtures to "Candide" and "West Side Story"; selections from Rodgers' "Carousel" and "The Sound of Music"; Gershwin's "Cuban Overture," "An American in Paris" and selections from "Porgy and Bess." 


July 3: "Celebrate America," Schram conducting. Patriotic music such as Sousa marches and "Armed Forces Salute"; "Soul Bossa Nova" from Jones' "Shagadelic Suite"; Gardel's Tango (featuring violinist Calin Lupanu); Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture." Also June 28 at Belle Johnston Park, Pineville; June 29 at Village Park, Kannapolis; June 30 at Bailey Road Park, Cornelius.