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Reviews
Guitarist Gary Lucas Explores Virtuosity at The Loft In City Winery
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 21 June 2023 13:43
- Written by Brad Balfour
Gary Lucas with Feifei Yang
Sunday, May 28th 2023
The Loft at City Winery25 11th Ave. (at 15th St.)
After critically acclaimed guitarist Gary Lucas sent out a notice of a gig in The Loft at City Winery — “From Captain Beefheart to Buckley and Beyond” — I perked up. When it comes to the notion of a virtuoso, Lucas fits that idea perfectly. He can do slide guitar immaculately, play around with foot pedals or knobs to create a desired effect and he has incredibly facile fingering skills. He applies all his technical skills to a broad range of styles, yet doesn’t make it seem like three different guitarists at work.
With his intuitive skills finely honed and at peak performance, Lucas makes all the various styles in his wheelhouse mesh seamlessly. So I promptly arranged to go to the show. What an evening it turned out to be. It began with the screening of rare clips and the video for “Ice Cream for Crow.” Then Lucas ruminated about various touch points in his career, launching into “Lady of Shalott”— a lush piece combining acoustic guitar and voice.
Combining moments of kinetics and contemplation, Lucas defies labels and expectations — and so does his show. While some of the music he makes could be described as Americana — depending on the guitar he slings on — other tunes range from bluesy (his dark original “Dance of Destiny”) to avant garde. Of course, having worked with such a boundary-busting band leader as Captain Beefheart, Lucas stands apart from most musicians. No one has tested accompanists like the late master of undefinable sounds. As Lucas described, Beefheart would put his musicians through rigors that no other band leader ever did. For all of the other complicated things on which Lucas has dibs — such as composing music for film and television, scoring classic silent films like “The Golem” and playing with various avant-garde artists — his stage performance alternates between dramatic and contemplative. These seamless shifts are evident in his covers of Nino Rota’s Theme from Fellini’s “La Strada” and Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s “God Only Knows.”
After his term as Beefheart’s guitarist and manager, Lucas turned to forming his remarkable band, Gods and Monsters. Along the way, the late singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley became a part of the timeline, further demonstrating Lucas’ elasticity as both player and performer. In fact, as Gary described on stage, he was introduced to Jeff when Lucas was asked by late concept producer Hal Willner to work on a Tim Buckley tribute.
Tim, dad to Jeff, died way too young (at 28) but established a remarkable catalog. Lucas did a song and got a relationship with Jeff as part of the bargain. That turned into a collaboration which prompted a great song like “Grace” (co-composed with Lucas) and a moment when Buckley fronted Lucas’ band. Though that didn’t last long enough, it added a unique turn to Gary’s musical efforts.
All this combined to make for an evening rich in music ranging across all kinds of creative panoramas. Joined by singer/erhu player Feifei Yang, this evening’s show included versions out of Buckley’s catalog — “Grace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Added to those were two Beefheart compositions, an original song or two from across Lucas’ landscape, and a Chinese pop tune from the ‘30s (as sung in Mandarin by Yang).
Ever clad in his signature fedora, Lucas shouldered most of the evening solo. But when Yang accompanied him, the tone changed and offered a joyful touch to an intimate and engaging evening. Hopefully there will be another occasion soon to be surprised by the veteran performer’s song choices and stylizations.
Broadway Musical Review—“Camelot” Revival
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Friday, 16 June 2023 18:57
- Written by Kevin Filipski
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| Phillipa Soo in Camelot (photo: Joan Marcus) |
June '23 Digital Week I
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 07 June 2023 22:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Renée Fleming Performs at Carnegie Hall
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 06 June 2023 13:59
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Renée Fleming (R) with Evgeny Kissin at the piano. Photo by Chris Lee
At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Wednesday, May 31st, I had the exceptional privilege to attend a marvelous recital featuring the extraordinary, renowned soprano Renée Fleming, superbly accompanied by the celebrated pianist, Evgeny Kissin.
Fleming wore a fabulous burgundy gown and the event opened strongly with four excellentliederby Franz Schubert set to verse by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—he was the composer’s favorite poet, setting seventy songs to his works—or related figures. In her informative notes for the program, Janet E. Bedell provides useful background on the first of the night’s songs:
The poem for “Suleika I” was long attributed to Goethe, since it is to be found in his compilationWest-östlicher Divan, inspired by his fascination with the work of 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz (Suleika is one of Hafiz’s characters). We now know it was written by Marianne von Willemer, an Austrian actress who had a brief but intense relationship with Goethe.
Next was the brief “Die Vögel” of 1820 which is by the illustrious Friedrich von Schlegel, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in Germany for which Goethe was the most important precursor. Bedell comments instructively on the song that followed:
Poems from Goethe’s classic bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—the chronicle of a young German’s educational wanderings in which, among other episodes, he meets a mysterious and winsome young girl, Mignon, who has been abducted from her Italian homeland and impressed into a band of traveling circus performers—inspired many Schubert lieder. Composed in 1826, the most famous of these “Lied der Mignon” is “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (“Only one who knows longing”), the last of six versions Schubert created for this haunting poem.
Finally, Fleming sung the 1821 revision of “Rastlose Liebe” (“Restless Love”) after Goethe’s poem.
The imposing balance of the first half of the program was devoted to outstanding music by Franz Liszt, beginning with two pieces for solo piano expertly played by Kissin. Of the first, Bedell writes:
Published in 1858, “Sposalizio” (“Marriage”) comes from Années de pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie and was inspired by Raphael’s painting “The Marriage of the Virgin.”
And about the second she says, “The Valse oubliée No. 1 (Forgotten Waltz) is the most famous of four with that title composed in 1881.” About the composer’s songs, she explains:
He seemed to regard them as his personal responses to the poetry he loved and never promoted them heavily. Nevertheless, he composed more than 80 songs in five different languages between 1839 and his death in 1886. Though most are in German, this most cosmopolitan of artists also set poetry in French, Italian, English, and Hungarian.
Songwriting came naturally to Liszt, who counted many of Europe’s leading poets and novelists among his friends. His particular musical inspirations were Schubert (Liszt made many transcriptions of Schubert lieder) and Robert Schumann, whom he knew personally.
Liszt was a painstaking and highly innovative craftsman, who sometimes produced as many as three different versions of a song before he was satisfied. When he settled in Weimar in the 1850s, he found fault with many of his songs of the 1840s, saying: “My earlier songs are mostly inflatedly sentimental and frequently crammed too full in the accompaniment.” He revised most of them extensively, ruthlessly stripping them of excess, and even pruning his own piano parts so they were less virtuosic and more supportive handmaidens of the verse.
Fleming then admirably performed two more Goethe settings: “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (“Joyful and Sorrowful”) of 1844 and “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’” (“Over every mountaintop is peace”) of 1860, from a poem also set by Schubert. She concluded magnificently with “Im Rhein, im schönen Ströme” (“In the Rhine, in the fair stream”), with a lyric by Heinrich Heine which, according to Bedell, “portrays Cologne Cathedral and a beautiful sacred painting it contains.”
Comparable in intensity was the second half of the program—for which Fleming wore a spectacular, shimmering, orange-copper gown—which began with five works by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Kissin began by masterfully playing the transcription for piano of the exquisite “Lilacs” (from the composer’s Opus 21 of 1902) which was followed by the soprano performing the original song. Also bewitching was her version of “A Dream”—with a lyric by the esteemed Fyodor Sologub—from the Opus 38, Rachmaninoff’s last set of songs, from six texts by Russian symbolist poets.
Kissin then played two of the Morceaux de fantaisie: the Sérénade in B-flat minor and the Mélodie in E Major. Bedell provides some valuable background on these:
Written in 1892 when the composer was only 19 and just finishing his studies at the Moscow Conservatory, the five Morceaux de fantaisie were Rachmaninoff’s first published pieces for solo piano. He began the set with the dramatic Prélude in C-sharp minor, which was to become one of his most popular pieces, constantly demanded as an encore at his piano concerts. Needing more works for an upcoming concert, he rapidly added four companions. The last, the Sérénade in B-flat minor, was created as an expression of joy upon reading an article by Tchaikovsky in which the older composer praised him as one of Russia’s most outstanding young composers.
For the rest of his life, Rachmaninoff prized these little masterpieces, which he performed regularly and eventually recorded. In 1940, three years before his death, he chose to revise both the Mélodie in E Major and the Sérénade into the definitive versions performed today.
Fleming returned to the stage for two more superlative Liszt songs, both Victor Hugo settings. About the first, Bedell remarks:
Liszt created two versions of “S’il est un charmant gazon” (“If there is a charming lawn”), one around 1844 and the other in 1859; it is the first version performed on this program, which—typical for earlier Liszt songs—is longer and more elaborate in its vocal and piano parts, and adds an expansive coda.
Her rendition of the second, the famous “Oh! Quand je dors,” was maybe the apotheosis of the evening. She concluded the program enchantingly with two wonderful Henri Duparc songs: “Extase” and “Le manoir de Rosemonde,” the latter set to a lyric by the composer’s friend, Robert de Bonnières. Enthusiastic applause was rewarded with a thrilling encore: Schubert’s unforgettable “Ave Maria.”
