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Film and the Arts
Mark Rivera Interview: From Billy Joel to Ringo
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 11 July 2012 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
After decades of playing saxophone for the biggest names in music, both onstage and in the studio—Billy Jo
el, Foreigner, Peter Gabriel, Elton John—ace instrumentalist Mark Rivera has finally got himself a regular gig: as musical director of Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band.
Since joining Ringo in the mid-‘90s, Rivera has performed in All-Starr Bands comprising legendary rockers like Billy Squier, Joe Walsh, Edgar Winter, Billy Preston, Greg Lake and Paul Carrack. This summer, Ringo and Rivera are joined by Steve Lukather (Toto), Gregg Rolie (Journey, Santana), Richard Page (Mr. Mister) and Todd Rundgren. In addition to Ringo’s Beatles and solo hits (“Yellow Submarine,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “It Don’t Come Easy,” “Photograph”), the band plays the other guys’ hits, from Toto’s “Rosanna” and “Africa” and Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” to Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” and Santana’s “Evil Ways.”
Before the tour—which began in June in Niagara Falls and ends July 21 in Los Angeles—began, Rivera (whose forthcoming debut solo album, Common Bond, featuring as guests both Ringo and Billy Joel, includes the recently released single “Turn Me Loose”) spoke about playing with Ringo for all these years.
Kevin Filipski: How is it being the Musical Director for a Beatle?
Mark Rivera: I love it! I play a lot of stuff for Ringo: sax, flute, keyboard, guitar, percussion and vocals. Whatever he wants me to do, I do! It’s going on 17 years that I’m in the band, so I am the eldest statesman aside from Richard….we call him Richard, Rick or Ringo, depending on what mood he’s in. If he gets testy, we’ll say, “Now Richard…!” We speak to him pretty candidly, and he’s very approachable, very sweet and a joy to work with. I love playing the Beatles’ songs and Ringo’s hits, and I get to play greatest hits of different bands every night. I’ve gotten to play with members of Cream and Procol Harum, and now there’s Steve Lukather from Toto and Todd Rundgren. Every tour is a who’s who of rock’n’roll. Ringo jumps on a thoroughbred and lets it ride.
KF: How do you figure out what hits to play for the different stars in the band?
MR: Each time we do this, each band has its own flavor, so there’s a slightly different twist on it: everybody’s got his own specialty. We always try to keep it as close as possible to the original songs because people want to hear that—as does Ringo. But even though he wants to hear the hits, I’ll make suggestions: when Greg Lake was in the band, Ringo wanted only Emerson Lake and Palmer songs, and when I suggested King Crimson, Ringo asked, “who remembers that?” So we started the set with “In the Court of the Crimson King” and the audience went crazy!
KF: You’ve toured with Foreigner and Elton John, and have been in Billy Joel’s band for nearly 30 years. How is touring with Ringo unique?
MR: It’s amazing who we see in the audience every night: Ringo draws everyone from 16 to 60, sometimes a lot older and a lot younger. In South America, there were kids in the audience who were four or five years old who were dressed in “Sgt Pepper” outfits, which was awesome!
KF: You’ve played with some of the biggest stars in music, you have your first solo album coming out and you tour regularly with a Beatle. Just how much fun are you having?
MR: I keep pinching yourself and thinking about how lucky I am to be in this business. I have a wife and two sons, I’ve been married for 29 years and my family gives me the grounding I need. If you buy into the hype that you’re great, then you have to believe it when they say you suck, and that’s tough for people to deal with. But for me, with Ringo there—the most levelheaded, laidback person in the business—it’s fantastic. I’ve had a great run, and I’m still running!
Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band on Tour
Through July 21, 2012
Off-Broadway: Pierce's "Slowgirl," Maltby/Shire's "Closer Than Ever"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 09 July 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Slowgirl
Written by Greg Pierce
directed by Anne Kauffman
Starring Željkko Ivanek, Sarah Steele
Closer Than Ever
Music by David Shire; lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr.
Choreographed by Kurt Stamm
directed by Richard Maltby, Jr.
Starring Jenn Colella, George Dvorsky, Christiane Noll, Sal Viviano
First, the good news: the new, intimately-scaled Claire Tow Theater is a worthy addition to Lincoln Center Theater's spaces, a terrific place to watch new plays by up-and-coming playwrights, the LCT3 program's mandate.
Now, the not-so-good news: Slowgirl, the Claire Tow's inaugural production, is a workmanlike, repetitious two-hander by Greg Pierce whose glimmers of interest are buried by tedious exposition and colorless characterization. Set in the village of Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Slowgirl concerns Becky, a 17-year-old who spends a week with her Uncle Sterling far from the scene of a teenage party gone horrifically wrong back home in Massachusetts.
Pierce's script shows a knack for recreating the rhythms of everyday speech of two people who haven't seen each other in years and are sizing each other up. (Although Becky's endless — if plausible — use of the interjection "like" quickly annoys.) But the characters are given histories that too neatly coincide: when we discover why Sterling is so far from home and what he ran away from, the parallels between uncle and niece are too convenient and pat.
Anne Kauffman's simple staging exposes the crude mechanics of Pierce's drama, such as the patently obvious symbolism of Becky and Sterling walking in circles on the stone paths of a labyrinth Sterling made years earlier. Even though Željkko Ivanek (Sterling) and Sarah Steele (Becky) enact this uncompelling character study persuasively enough, they can't hide the defects in Pierce's writing.
Richard Maltby's and David Shire's 1989 off-Broadway show Closer Than Ever isn't a musical but rather a plotless revue whose 24 songs are performed by a singing quartet.
Some of those songs are very good, even if a few — like the opening and closing numbers, "Doors" and "Closer Than Ever" — are infected with Sondheim-itis, in which our greatest musical theater creator is echoed too closely for comfort, and to composer Shire and lyricist Maltby's detriment.
The further from Sondheim they get, the better off they are. "Miss Byrd" playfully upends conventions in its tale of a mousy office worker. "There" poignantly chronicles a failed marriage, and "Fathers of Fathers" works through variously emotional paternal relations.
Superbly accompanied by pianist/musical director Andrew Gerle and a bass player, our singers affectingly perform both individually and together, led by sexy Jenn Colella. Too often icy and distant, here she warms to the songs beautifully, especially "Miss Byrd" and "There." And with Christiane Noll, Sal Viviano and George Dvorsky appealingly rounding out the talented foursome, Closer Than Ever makes for a diverting couple hours.
Slowgirl
Previews began June 4, 2012
opened June 18; closes July 29
Claire Tow Theater
Lincoln Center
150 West 65th Street
New York, NY
http://lct3.org
Closer Than Ever
Previews began June 5, 2012
opened June 20; closes July 14
York Theatre Company
619 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY
http://yorktheatre.org
July '12 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Sunday, 08 July 2012 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Welcome to Rockwell
(Masterpieces)
In 2009, a collection of British musical legends and current stars joined together for a concert benefiting the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy. The best are Robert Plant with strikingly rearranged versions of old Zep chestnuts “Black Dog” and “Whole Lotta Love” and Joss Stone with her charged bluesy tunes “Free Me” and “Super Duper.”
Evita: New Broadway Cast Recording
(Masterworks Broadway)
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Tim Rice’s musical about Juan and Eva Peron is famous for the lovely lament “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” whose memorable melody is overused as a pseudo-Wagnerian leitmotif that weaves in and around other tunes during the show. The problem is that, when we finally hear it properly, its emotive power has been diluted.
The New York Philharmonic's Spectacular Finale(s)
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 04 July 2012 10:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
After its final subscription concerts the previous week, the New York Philharmonic played two additional programs that were a godsend to those of us having to wade through the usual Bach/Mozart/Beethoven.
The all-Henri Dutilleux concert at Avery Fisher Hall (65 St. Columbus Ave) on June 26, 2012, was grand enough; what followed at the Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Ave) on June 29-30 was a bombastic climax.
Philharmonic 360 was as intoxicating as the previous seasons’ ends of the Alan Gilbert era: Gyorgy Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Leos Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.
The Dutilleux concert, in honor of the great French composer receiving the orchestra’s first Marie-Josee Kravis Prize for New Music -- which the 96-year-old master is selflessly sharing with three composers, Peter Eötvös, Anthony Cheung and Franck Krawczyk -- was the first time the orchestra performed a concert consisting entirely of his music, and it seems bets were hedged by enlisting Yo-Yo Ma to play Tout un monde lontain, the gorgeous cello concerto Dutilleux composed in 1970 and revised in 1988, in order to woo the crowds.
One could quibble with the selections: the orchestral coloring of Métaboles, while beautiful and mysterious, has already been heard recently at the Philharmonic, and Dutilleux’s String Quartet, Ainsi la nuit, while performed formidably by the Miro Quartet, had its intricacies swallowed up by the large hall.
Gilbert probably chose these works to use less rehearsal time: since the players are familiar with Métaboles (performed twice in the past five seasons), presumably only the Cello Concerto would need substantive rehearsal time, allowing more work on the 360 concert.
Even so, Dutilleux’s elegant, refined, astringent but not atonal music sounded amazing—and enduring. Too bad the audience was profoundly uncivilized: coughing, unwrapping, cell phone ringing and program rustling continued throughout the evening. I hope they’re not typical Yo-Yo Ma fans.
The better behaved Armory audience during Philharmonic 360 was obviously riveted by the dramatic presentation of odd orchestral configurations in music conceived for not only sound but space.
Aside from the Act I finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni—which shed no light on the opera, and Michael Counts’s staging seemed a desperate attempt to use as much of the Armory’s magnificent Drill Hall as possible—the music was well-chosen for this particular space.
Difficult scores by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen were the program’s lynchpins, and if their music is usually better seen than heard, here seeing and hearing it were one and the same.
The various instrumental groupings for Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna and Stockhausen’s Gruppen were as much fun to watch as to listen to the sounds swirling around the Armory from all angles. Ending the concert was Charles Ives’ majestic The Unanswered Question, with its ecstatic trumpet part soaring above the audience.
Gilbert, who conducted superbly, was greatly assisted by Matthias Pintscher and Magnus Lindberg for the complexities of Gruppen. No one will probably ever hear (or see) these works again, so the Armory concert was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and a perfect ending to the Philharmonic season (that's not counting this week’s Summertime Classics and next week’s Concerts in the Parks).
To learn more, go to: http://nyphil.org
Avery Fisher Hall
65 St. Columbus Ave
New York, NY 10024
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065
