Insite

During the first weekend of February, the Alexander Kasser Theater was testing ground for two acts of musical fusion. On Saturday, February 6th and Sunday, February 7th, both Miguel Zenón’s band and Kronos Quartet brought similar recipes to the table—mixing established forms with fresh musical styles. Or, for Kronos, a diversity of styles—and the perils of amplifying a bastion of acoustic beauty, but we’ll get to that. 

Miguel Zenón’s path as an instrumentalist runs deep, with stints in the Mingus Big Band and with bass maven Charlie Haden. He’s an alto player possessed with astounding technique and quicksilver inventiveness. Breathtaking runs were limber at Saturday night’s performance, not agitated. Then in a late solo he briefly burnished his line with a bending Arabian tonality—intriguing, not obtrusive, like a deft, magical tweak. 

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What happens when a cast aims for your funny bone, takes up a tale teasing the preservation instinct’s strange ways, and does onstage gender changes—er, costume changes—to a brash klezmer score? Shlemiel the First, if you can get to the Kasser Theater by January 24 for this rambunctious revival by Peak Performances and the National Yiddish Theatre–Folksbiene.

Shlemiel sports an evening’s worth of pleasures and a lively raft of theatrical wiles. The brainchild of Robert Brustein, the theater Hall-of-Famer who founded Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater, the piece has an astonishing pedigree: adaptation by Brustein from a play by Isaac Bashevis Singer; music by Hankus Netsky, who’s done klezmer with Itzhak Perlman and runs the New England Conservatory’s improv department; lyrics by Arnold Weinstein, librettist for operas including William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge; and music direction by Zalmen Mlotek, Folksbiene’s artistic director. And with director/choreographer David Gordon at the helm, Shlemiel brims with chutzpah and every other effusive tagline in the book.

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Valda Setterfield (as Bertolt Brecht) and Gina Leishman (as Hanns Eisler) in UNCIVIL WARS (photo: Andrew Eccles)

Rolling screens trundled by on the Alexander Kasser Theater stage, pushed and pulled by actors of the Pick Up Performance Co(S.). As director/choreographer David Gordon patrolled the fluid set of his UNCIVIL WARS, mobile lamps darted past. So did low, wheeled tables that would serve as opposing farmers’ plots and as the long desk of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

With rehearsals underway for this weekend’s performances, Gordon had already given the community/MSU chorus a test run, snaking them through their rows of black metal folding chairs. A socket wrench fixed a stage light as performance artist John Kelly limbered up, hands twined behind his back (the Obie and Bessie award winner swaps roles as Mother Superior and a brothel’s Madame). Gordon, repositioning one table, offered a non-question: “OK, are we going to go from the top now.”

Gordon’s seasoned crew was ready, having premiered UNCIVIL WARS earlier this year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The players and their roles were introduced with exact, bemused introductions. Chunks of text loomed onto a stage monitor near music director Gina Leishman’s upright piano. Then, as UNCIVIL WARS is based on the work of that master of canny political stagecraft Bertolt Brecht, Scene One repeated itself before charging deeper into the tale of community leaders engendering war to keep the people from discontent.

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Marino Formenti performs Kurtág's Ghosts.

At his concert at the Alexander Kasser Theater this Saturday, October 3, pianist Marino Formenti will introduce much of the audience to the music of György Kurtág.  And he’ll draw generous connections between the contemporary Hungarian composer and much of classical music history.  By programming Kurtág’s pieces—densely resonant, often brief in an extreme—with works from the modernist Messiaen, Beethoven, and the Baroque, Formenti delves with passionate, commanding appreciation into Kurtág’s own rich cultural concerns. 

A special figure among the late twentieth century’s powerful composers, Kurtág was raised in the part of Europe most savaged by war yet capable of the finest musical artistry.  Although his reticence in public is renowned, he’s drawn devotion from other superb musicians: On withdrawing from a piano recital at Carnegie Hall in 2000, his replacements included violist Kim Kashkashian, clarinetist Charles Neidich, and soprano Susan Narucki, who sang his Kafka Fragments (which Dawn Upshaw also performs). 

One admirer of Kurtág’s music, and of Formenti’s program, is Paul Hostetter, director of orchestral studies at MSU’s Cali School of Music.  On the phone, Hostetter called the solo piano pieces “technically challenging while being feasible and emotional.  Kurtág’s voice is organic, based in the natural law of sound.”  He said that Formenti has worked with the composer, learning which earlier masters inspire and move him.  Formenti then plunged into those artistic ramifications.  “There’s a Scarlatti sonata in the middle of the program,” Hostetter said, “and Marino’s probably read five hundred Scarlatti sonatas to choose the right one, rhythmically, melodically, formally.” Read more »

Throughout their program at the Alexander Kasser Theater on September 12, the Shanghai Quartet displayed compelling evidence of their skills and intriguing links to the riches of their Montclair State residency thus far and to come.  The program of late Beethoven (no. 11, op. 95), Dvorák’s rambunctious twelfth quartet (“The American”), and Brahms’s Sextet in G major, while not a radical opening to the Shanghai’s eighth season on campus, held a sly sheen while showing off the classical strong suits of a group attuned to their home house and their ardent home crowd. 

For revelatory content, it would’ve been tough to surpass the U.S. premier of Krzysztof Penderecki’s String Quartet no. 3 this past February, a commission from the renowned Polish composer by Peak Performances and Montclair State University.  Yet Beethoven’s “Serioso” quartet leapt in on full alert, delving into startling sonic terrain then folding abruptly into gentle phrases.  A canny program change put the aggressive Beethoven quartet before the spirited Dvorák, as giddy at times as a Wild West score.  Shanghai’s Dvorák, resplendent with fiddle themes of the composer’s Czech heritage and refracted through his passion for African American music, pointed directly to their spring concert, when double bassist and jazz maven Christian McBride joins them for Dvorák’s String Quintet in G major. Read more »