World of Music

The Glorious sound of Christmas

 Dec. 18, Verizon Hall With the Philadelphia Orchestra, conductor Rossen Milanov tries to make occasion concerts spirited fun. He’s game to put on costumes at Halloween and he doesn’t just phone it in on his New Year’s Eve performance. This year Milanov built his holiday programming around the orchestra’s famous 1964 recording Glorious Sound of Christmas. For this restoration the band is paired with the mighty Mendelssohn Club (& choir director Alan Harler) to reflect the musical traditions, if not the epochal sound, of the Fabulous Philadelphian.

Two centerpiece carol medleys displayed this choir’s full, warm and serene sound. The classical vocal highlight was a sneak preview of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. The chorale warming up for their full version with the orchestra the next day.

Milanov ignited holiday symphonic fare, highlighted by the Fab Phils sonority in the strings during Gustav Holst’s ’Christmas Day’ orchestral familiar holiday themes riding in. The exuberance in the Prelude to Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck is an example of Milanov’s fine detailing.

This maestro is also a veteran ballet conductor and it is interesting to hear his accents, sans dancers, on the Nutcracker Suite. The first thing you notice is the quicker, more assertive tempo. Next is the character instrumentals which are telling the story without visuals. Mis en scenes with the oboes and strings conjuring the mystery of the very sensual dance of the Arabian (Coffee) dance and David Bigler’s stellar horn on the Spanish (Chocolate) dance a charging Tarantella and the Russian Cossack dance a swirling orchestral blizzard.

There was a extra fab Phil for the holiday when Tom McCartney, the voice of the Phillies, came on to narrate ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’ And Santa took over the podium at one point turning a Hollywood pastiche into a Basie-band swing out on Sleigh Ride.

Milanov’s musical gifts

Elements

‘Pointed piece’  by Jan Carroll

DanceMetros

Vladik Miagkostoupov, 26 year-old Ukrainian-American juggler extraordinaire, flew in from Montreal to work the lunch crowd in Philly’s Reading Terminal Market with a live preview of Cirque Du Soleil’s revamped Dralion. Vladik was in full Cirque make-up and donning a shredded maroon sequined singlet that was attention grabbing in the Terminal, which on any given day has the most diverse mix of Philadelphians in one place.

Without fanfare, Miagkostoupov sprung onto a makeshift dance board that was far from safe and much too small. The virtuoso juggler tossed off eye-popping tricks with leaps, pirouettes and flips, smiling the whole way through it as he competed with people barking lunch orders.

Vladik’s juggling is a perfect match to the acrobatic dance style of Cirque.

Later, he had a vague memory of be in Philly before. “I have a feeling I was. I’ll have to check with my parents. We were all over the East Coast when I was little,” Vladik recalled. His parents were performers in the Moscow circus and Vladik started in ballet and dance classes early. The family eventually moved to the U.S. and did their act in Las Vegas where he grew up.

“I started dance when I was four, with ballet and jazz. At six I started to juggle. When we came to America when went to Las Vegas, more cabaret style show and changed their act. My parents thought whatever I did in the circus I should be able to move well onstage. So I started training four and five hours a day.”

His artistry has made him into a juggling virtuoso. “I did many shows professionally since I was nine. Not much in actual circuses, but more theatrical, I did Lido in Paris for a year. Originally I worked with a choreographer and my dad, but I started doing my own moves.”

He joined Cirque in 2003 as a performer in Solstrom and has been on tour with Dralion for four years. He’s ’modified’ his act, he says, but always keeps attempting new things. “I can do more difficult tricks, but it’s too much for the shows.”

As for any difficulties in the low-tech Reading Terminal appearance, Vladik admitted to having to make fast adjustments in the physics of his movements, he couldn’t throw his nine balls as high as he normally does. But he had no problem catching them with different parts of his body.. He did have pull in his leg extensions on the leaps.

“I immediately was making adjustments,” he said. “When I have more space I do more extensions. So I tried to keep the line, but pulled it in. Normally in my act I throw a lot higher.”

He also did several knee drops and when I asked him if it was scary on that dicey platform he just pulled his pant leg up and said his knees were used to the abuse in one for or another. “My knees and feet are so used to it, I can do it anywhere,” he said a very Cirquey grin.

booksbooksbooks

HIDE/SEEK Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
Smithsonian Books

HIDE/SEEK is the exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery which became a political cause celeb over a short film by David Wojnarowicz that depicts ants swarming a crucifix. It has been deemed anti-religious by right-wing politicos, who also claim, falsely, that a gay exhibit is funded with public money. Even more shocking than the censoring is that the National caved-in and removed the purportedly offending work. (See Robert Nesti’s EDGE commentary) A stinging reminder that homophobia thrives and Jesse Helms gay art bashing equals state-sanctioned censorship.

The film has been removed from the exhibition, but is being shown, in protest, at other galleries and is getting a lot of hits on YouTube. The benefit of censorship is that more people want to judge for themselves. For its part, The National asserts that they weren’t buckling under political pressure, but that they don’t want the totality of the exhibit to be lost in the debate (or further maligned).

You couldn’t blame anyone for boycotting over the censorship, but if it doesn’t matter to you the book of the exhibit is a must see and read for art lovers and anyone interested in GLBTQ cultural history. It displays an unprecedented collection of over 100 years of art by and for GLBT viewers. In addition to sterling plate transfers of the art and photography, the book has invaluable commentary by gay historian Jonathan Katz and curator David Ward. It fills in so many missing figures and creative motives, indeed, gay aesthetic of the history of American art. And as Katz and Ward illustrate a visual language before there was a legal vocabulary of gay life.

Of course, some of the most famous gay icons appear- Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara , Walt Whitman, Lincoln Kirstein, Allen Ginsberg- works from

Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, George Platt Lynes, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Annie Lebowitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. But just as interesting are the dozens of other lesser know figures pushing the bar at a pivotal time in gay culture.

 

Bravery is an accumulated theme of the book from nudes from the 1900s that document secret lives, to the boldness of Demuth and Brooks in the 20s depicting explicit gay subcultures, to the uncompromising courage of the artists in the 80s with confrontational art about AIDS and homophobia as they were witnessing the decimation of their colleagues to a mostly indifferent public perception.

Katz and Ward’s study and annotation of the art work is in your face art and artist history, elegant and extravagant commentary that doesn’t back away from the sexual lives of the artists that was fueling their work. It is provocatively revisionist. Katz’s style is both succinct and stream of consciousness- This isn’t beach reading or a cover table decoration.

 

World of Music

Curtis Chamber Orchestra
Perelman Theater, Philadelphia
Dec. 5, 2010

Stravinsky’s 1920 ballet score “Pulcinella” resurfaces in concert halls eventually as an orchestral suite. It has an easy-access Igor feel, even a stateliness to it. It is almost always done sans the vocal sections, maybe because of the unconventional structure, which basically completely castrates a masterwork. Conductor Joel Smirnoff and the musicians of the Curtis Chamber Orchestra performed the full work for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society last week with singers.

Soprano Kirsten MacKinnon, bass-baritone Julian Arsenault and tenor Christopher Tiesi made this a vibrant reconstruction. The singers scaled the work for its intimacy, the effect drawing you past the stately surface. Curtis strings are often the best outfit in town for their sonic power, and they also detailed quieter baroque qualities of the work as well as being the rhythm drive in this percussionless piece. They are even as sparkling on “Pulcinella”’s flash prestos. Standouts included the silky reed streams of Wenmin Zhang’s bassoon and Samuel Nemec’s oboe, along with first violin Libby Fayette in a simmering string dialogue with violist Amanda Verner.

Midway through Frank Martin’s “Ballade for Flute,” it dawns on you that soloist Jeffrey Khaner never seems to be drawing a breath. Khaner, principal flutist at Philadelphia Orchestra, reminded me of Lee Morgan, the great jazz trumpeter who also could go on forever. This piece has the feel of a jazz riff, with Khaner diving in and out of the orchestral waves. It has a subtle melancholia, expressive in slight tremolos, belying the flute’s sprightliness, all accented masterfully by Khaner. Khaner’s second solo, Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ “Poem for Flute” was flashier, but less compelling.

Darius Milhaud’s “Le Boeuf sur le toit” was written after the composer visited Argentina and his musical heritage. It is fusion French-Latin. The scenario of the ox on the roof, or more the alternate title, “The Nothing Doing Bar,” is taken from a Jean Cocteau cabaret tableaux. Its musical characters–the Boxer, the socialite, the drag king and the cop—make up the oblique narrative. It plays out in repeats and pretty fast. The French pastorale backdrop is shaken up by a salsa rhythm. The band missed that dodgy big-band swing out and didn’t spring the “it” character of the piece past the lovely resolves. Time for a Basie session.

booksbooksbooks

Ann Beattie | The New Yorker Stories

Ann Beattie started publishing her short stories in the New Yorker in the 70s and since has become iconic within those pages, now Scribner’s has released Ann Beattie | The New Yorker Stories. You inevitably take note of changes in the 48 stories in this collection that Beattie’s style over 30 years has changed, but this is a sterling retrospective of a master short-storyteller.

Beattie’s turf is not the rocky terrain of disaffecting urban- turned- suburbanites that dominated The New Yorker literary salon of Cheever and Updike. In Beattie’s world Tammy Wynette is as much a national treasure as Terry Gross, warm beer is just as vital and the perfectly chilled white burgundy. And not everyone has money to organize their lives, but wealthy or not, everyone seems to be in some permanent state of displacement, relationships are crumbled or cryptic and self-realization is dodgy pursuit. Beattie’s characters may be down on their luck but they valiantly try to make sense of their busted up American Dreams.

There is a little less allegorical fancy in the later work, more wry magic realism, to split literary hairs. She doesn’t rely on her own previously successful literary devises like many fiction writers. Mostly, you see a deepening of craft. Always foremost are Beattie’s inimitable characters and situations full of survival twists and turns. These are people you want and need to understand and believe in.

The upendedness of the family in Snake Shoes (1975) has them suspended in tintype time with their fate only implied and an overall dread of several possible outcomes. In contrast to say Find and Replace (2001) 30 a widow informs her visiting daughter she is getting married again to an old friend of her husband’s. The daughter is a freelance nonfiction writer and her imagination kicks in about what a disaster this would be, but is in for her gentle awakening.

In Second Question (1991) Ned is taking care of his ex-lover Richard who is in the final throes of AIDS, they are both being looked after by the female narrator. This has such poetic veracity, that its quiet impact when it was published at the height of the second wave of AIDS deaths, is just heartbreaking.

Sometimes Beattie can tell an overreaching hairy dog story with too many threads to keep track of. Take in Women of the World (2000) which starts out as a darkly comic dinner feast of emotional suppression and displaced anger that eventually turning into a gruesome Stephen King tale with too many things to keep track of. And, it must be said, that she can go off on a tangent (with scary OCD surgical precision) that can mar the flow of her storytelling. Cynthia the heroine of Wolf Dream (1974), who has a job reading books on the radio, feels this way. ’She didn’t mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it.’ However oblique the situation, though, Beattie writes of truths, motives and the battered heart of the matter which might have everything to do with the American psyche. Or not.



Not bitter

‘Not B & W’ by Jan Carroll

Classical Philly

Curtis Chamber Orchestra
Perelman Theater, Philadelphia
Dec. 5
Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score Pulchinella resurfaces in the concert hall every few years in its Suite form. The composer truncated it himself for orchestra and it has a stately and easy access Igor vigor. It is rarely done with the original score’s vocal sections and is thereby completely castrated.

The full score is actually a Stravinsky masterwork (the ballet produced by Diagalev, with costumes by Picasso). It is sublimely restored by conductor Joel Smirnoff and the musicians of the Curtis Chamber Orchestra for a Sunday concert at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Those mighty Curtis’ strings are often the best outfit in town as far as sonic power, but for Pulchinella they also scaled down building the work’s baroque quality. But it is the unconventionally structured vocal interplay with orchestra, probably one reason why just the orchestral version is done, that just reasserts this as a major ballet-vocal score sung with intimacy and conviction by three soloists. Hearing Kirten Mackinnon silvery soprano, Julian Arsenault’s unfussy bass baritone and Christopher Tiesi’s mercury tenor, you don’t want to hear just the Suite again. Other standouts were Wenmin Zhang’s Bassoon and Samuel Nemic Oboe whose wending reed lines were clarion Stravinsky.

World AIDS Day could be different next year

Still no magic bullets against HIV-AIDS, but…

World AIDS Day is the annual rallying cry for awareness of HIV-AIDS and to refocus efforts to combat the disease. Now, recent statistics and new treatments strategies have the potential to change the course of the disease.

UNAIDS reported last week that new HIV cases are down significantly worldwide. “We can say with confidence and conviction that we have broken the trajectory of the AIDS pandemic,” said Executive Director Michel Sidibe in Geneva.

Also, a surprise pronouncement from the pope, who writes in his new book that that condoms used to prevent disease transmission is better than having unprotected sex. A far cry from sensible advocacy of safe-sex, but a less rigid edict for Catholics nonetheless. The pope needs to get a clue and also recommend the vaginal microbicide gel containing tenofovir used before and after sex to be 39% effective in preventing new HIV infections in women. But hey, he has control issues to protect.

But, the biggest news concerning HIV-AIDS is a report about a study among gay men that shows that a new combination of two already available drugs protect against individuals from being infected. Short of a vaccine, this may be more effective in disease prevention than both safe-sex and abstinence programs combined. It is the most promising news since the development and refinement of antiretroviral drugs

President Obama said the new treatment study (dubbed PreP) “could mark the beginning of a new era in HIV prevention.”. Mitchell Warren, head of AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, told AP this week. “I don’t know of a day where so many pieces are beginning to align for HIV prevention and treatment, and frankly with a view to ending the epidemic,” adding “This is an incredibly opportune moment and we have to be sure we seize it.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the forefront of strategies to combat the disease since the 80s and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases calls the drug study “an exciting finding,” but cautions “it is only one study in one specific study population,” The three-year global study found that patients who took the pill cut the risk of infection by from 44, its efficacy increased when patients increased daily usage. It was also part of a study of healthy gay and bisexual men when given with condoms, counseling and other prevention services.

AIDS doctors are not calling the new drug protocol the chemical equivalent of a condom, but Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of The World Health Organization said “The trial opens exciting new prospects. It shows that oral pre-exposure prophylaxis can reduce the risk of HIV infection in men who have sex with men. We look forward to further examining these data to consider how we can best use this tool to enhance HIV prevention.”

The down side in this is the cost- in the US, at $8,000 to $12,000 a year; the generic equivalent to be made available for export around $140. A price that will be manageable for many people with some level of insurance, enrolled in HIV-AIDS service organizations or both. The sad reality is that unless the global networking of AIDS drugs bypasses corporate profits and AIDS politics to deliver the medication at a much lower cost, people in poor countries will continue to suffer the ravages of HIV-AIDS. Another problem is that gay men are criminalized in some 80 countries and in many regions have little or no access to HIV prevention programs and treatment.

The CDC already has recommendations on the drug for gay and bisexual men as a strategy of testing and treatment for HIV, counseling and condom use. The success of this should immediately be a launch pad for a wider outreach to all at-risk groups, primary among them oppressed sexual minority around the world.

The CDC, UNAIDS and all AIDS service organizations should mobilize to ensure that these new advances in treatment are known and available to all who seek them, not only in the US, but as part of the global initiative to eradicate HIV-AIDS. With leadership, this December 1 could be the beginning of the end for the need for World AIDS Day.

DanceMetros

  

David Parsons brought his troupe back to his many Philly fans with his very commercially viable Remember Me a dance rock opera devised with East Village Opera Company that strings together 13 famous arias ala Bohemian Rhapsody. It is very slick and can horrify puriest of both art forms, but within the surface gloss Parsons is choreographically still taking risks and has fantastic phrasing going on. Of course, Parsons dancers are full-throttle in their athleticism and passion.

Parsons most famous piece, the mind alterting Caught, a solo first danced by David Parsons himself, which opened the Philly performances. Caught, set to electopychedelic music by Robert Fripp, manipulates strobe lighting to make it appear that the dancer never touches the ground, in fact, the performer appears to be frozen or traversing mid-air.  It looks like the dancer is being punched through another dimension. It has never been executed with more precision than by Miquel Quinones in this performance.  So Zen is Miquel that he wasn’t even breathing heavy when he finally drops out of all the invisible vaults.